THE WAY WE WERE: NEW YORK PANORAMA

Ships in harbor

New York Volumes

¶ New York State Guide

¶ New York City Guide

¶ New York Panorama

The New York Panorama was intended as a volume intended to offer a more detailed scene of the lives of New Yorkers than the city or state guides offered. Perhaps it could be seen as a sort of "insider's guide." Keeping with the themes of the city guide, the Panorama details the conditions of the poor and working class in comparison to those of wealth and privilige.

Harlem street scene

There are socialist undertones in the text, which may be why the Dies Committee was so interested in New York's project:

"There are those who consider that it is impossible to find any unity in the chaotic pattern of New York; or that, romantically enough, the emergence of unity would cancel its major charm. But the uneconomic and anti-social nature of the city's living ways demand a clear reorientation. The potential unity necessary to such reorientation already exists in the New Yorkers's own concept of his city."

To an outsider looking for communist and socialist thoughts, it would not take much of a leap to read that the writers are advocating the tearing down of the gates at Grammercy Park. Could the "unity" described here mean the redistribution of wealth and adherence to socialist conventions? Or, does it mean, innocently, that all New Yorkers must pull together, regardless of theor stripes and lift their city out of the depths of the Depression?

This volume is available as a free online e-book, downloadable from the Internet Archive: View the e-book here.

New York Panorama: A Comprehensive View of the Metropolis, Presented in a Series of Articles Prepared by the Federal Writer's Project of the Works Progress Administration in New York City
F.128.5.F38 - First published 1938