The Spatial and Temporal Diffusion of Museums in New York City, 1910-2010
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The spatial and temporal diffusion of museums in New York City, 1910-2010 Jennifer Mari Kondo Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2013 © 2013 Jennifer Mari Kondo All rights reserved ABSTRACT The spatial and temporal diffusion of museums in New York City, 1910-2010 Jennifer Mari Kondo The aim of this dissertation is to understand and analyze the museum location decision, defined as where museum founders choose to establish or relocate their institution. The empirical case is the museum population of New York City from 1910-2010. In three substantive chapters, I explore this complex decision process from the organizational-level, the population-level, and the audience-level. In the first chapter, I argue that the museum location decision has evolved over the past century, and has experienced three major paradigm shifts. Out of each era, a new model of the museum location decision has taken hold, resulting in the current organizational landscape. I demonstrate how these eras emerged through historical, comparative case studies of two New York museums, the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art. In second chapter, I show that the location decisions illustrated through the histories of the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Modern Art are representative of New York’s museum population overall. Using a dataset of all museums that have existed in New York City (and all of those museums’ relocations), I chronicle the aggregated movements of the museum population between 1910 and 2010. I argue that the three eras of the museum location decision interacted with key demographic changes to create the unique distribution we observe today. The insights from these findings indicate that the spatial diffusion of museums in New York is systematically patterned in relation to demographic changes. The final substantive chapter is devoted to exploring the possibility that institutional location impacts audience composition. I argue that proximity to museums and other kinds of arts institutions is a significant, yet understudied determinant of attendance. The introduced concept of institutional exposure suggests that local access to arts institutions has cognitive, behavioral, and interactional consequences. Although directly testing the effect of institutional exposure is beyond the parameters of this dissertation, I show that there is a strong correlation between exposure and attendance. I illustrate the increasingly unequal access to arts between white and African American New Yorkers, which correlates highly with still-unexplained low attendance rates of African Americans. The observed evolution of the museum location decision explains when and how New York institutions adopted and then abandoned each institutionalized practice of museum location. In the Conclusion, I highlight several implications of this work, both of sociological theory and on current cultural policy. Table of Contents Introduction 1 Chapter 1 -- The Museum Location Decision 24 Chapter 2 -- New Yorkers and their Museums 70 Chapter 3 -- The Consequences of the Museum Location Decision 126 Conclusion 158 Bibliography 169 i List of Figures Figure 1 -- Number of museum foundings in New York City Figure 2. -- Number of museum relocations in New York City Figure 3. -- Museum locations in 1900, 1950, and 2010 Figure 2.1. -- Elite neighborhoods in Manhattan’s history Figure 2.2. -- 1910 United States Census Figure 2.3. -- Museums in 1900 Figure 2.4. -- Museum foundings, 1930-1939 Figure 2.5. -- Upper East Side museums and their founding dates Figure 2.6. -- Museums that relocated to the Upper East Side, 1940-1980 Figure 2.7. -- Crown Heights African American population in 1910, 1930, 1950, and 1970 Figure 2.8. -- Museums in Washington Heights and Inwood Figure 2.9. -- Museums added to the Cultural Institutions Group, 1940-1980 Figure 2.10. -- Museum founding events by neighborhood during the era of homogenization and cultural branding Figure 2.11. -- Relocations of the Whitney, MoMA, New Museum, and SculptureCenter during the era of cultural branding Figure 2.12. -- Likelihood of museum founding given varying levels of proportion black Figure 2.13. -- Likelihood of museum founding given varying levels of proportion white Figure 2.14. -- Likelihood of museum founding given varying levels of clustering Figure 3.1. -- Average rates of museum exposure, 1910-2010 Figure 3.2. -- Museum exposure and African American neighborhoods in 1910, 1950, and 2010 ii Figure 3.3. -- New York City Arts Institutions in 2008 Figure 3.4. -- Ratio of white to African American exposure, by institution type Figure 3.5. -- Odds ratios of high versus low institutional exposure Figure 3.6. -- Odds ratios of high versus low exposure for high income white tracts Figure 3.7. -- Odds ratios of high versus low institutional exposure for census tracts with a high proportion of white and African American college graduates List of Tables Table 1.1. -- Three eras of the museum population in New York City Table 1.2. -- Timeline of the three eras of the museum location decision Table 2.1. -- Characteristics of three eras of the museum location decisions Table 2.2. -- Model of Museum Founding, 1910-2010 Table 3.1. -- Percentage of US black and white adult population visiting art museums and galleries Table 3.2. -- 2008 New York City Arts Institutions iii This dissertation was a collective effort. I could not have conceptualized, executed, or completed this research without a fantastic group of of colleagues, friends, and family. I would like to thank my committee members for their guidance and support throughout my graduate studies. Peter Bearman, Shamus Khan, Debra Minkoff, Diane Vaughan, and Philip Kasinitz all rose to the occasion; at different moments throughout this process, each offered their time and energies to pull me through. Shamus was a constant source of encouragement and friendship, mixed with just the right amount of tough love. Peter made it possible for me to get this degree at all. My family offered a steady stream of affection and laughter during the peaks and valleys of my studies. My sincere gratitude and unconditional love to my father, Christopher Kondo, my mother, Lori Kondo, and my sister, Marina Livingston. Best family ever. Heartfelt thanks to the Evil Triangle, composed of Natacha Stevanovic-Fenn and Danielle Lindemann, for their steady supply of commiseration, friendship, and red wine. Finally, I would like to thank Hrag Balian. The best part of my time at Columbia was that I got to meet and fall in love with him. iv To my husband v 1 Introduction In 2000, Queens-based artist Jimbo Blachly was open to inspiration. Deep in the halls of the New-York Historical Society, he found it in the form of a century-old topology report. James Reuel Smith wrote the report, Springs and Wells of Manhattan and the Bronx: New York City at the End of the Nineteenth Century, a near-obsessive survey of the remaining natural water sources in an increasingly urbanized metropolis. The New-York Historical Society published the work in 1938, and it sat in their library for almost seventy years without incident. Blachly’s art often involves themes of nature and the passage of time, and he was taken by how Smith uncovered the natural world underneath New York’s buildings and sidewalks. Blachly set about to do the same thing. Retracing Smith’s footsteps, he photographed the now unrecognizable natural springs sites, and recreated an alternate future for them through installation sculpture. The final work presents a complete picture of New York at many different points in its trajectory towards urbanization - and conjures images of natural and manmade structures that have been long forgotten. The historical, nostalgic piece was a fitting selection as the inaugural exhibit in the SculptureCenter’s massive new building in Long Island City, Queens. The SculptureCenter is a New York mainstay; it is the first nonprofit institution solely dedicated to sculpture. It has supported and promoted notable twentieth century sculptors, including Alexander Calder and Isamu Noguchi. The institution’s new Queens location is its fourth building spanning three 2 boroughs over seventy-four years. If Blachly had used the past sites of the SculptureCenter as his inspiration, he still would have a long, meandering history to follow. The story of the SculptureCenter begins with another artist. In the mid-1920s, Dorothea Denslow was a young, energetic sculptor teaching adults and children in her local neighborhood of Crown Heights. She drew such a loyal clientele that her students would often follow her back home to her studio (Donahue 1946). As she welcomed more and more students to her home more frequently, she converted her private studio into the “Clay Club”. Denslow’s fans quickly multiplied, and by 1930 they needed more space - in a different location. Denslow moved the Clay Club to a converted stable house, “an odd little brick structure” (Knox 1950, accessed online), on the corner of Fifth Avenue and Eighth Street in Greenwich Village, Manhattan. The area, once lined with the mansions of antebellum elites, was now being taken over and chopped up into studios and apartments by the city’s bohemian community. Amidst artists of all kinds and next door to the Whitney Museum of American Art, Denslow felt that the Clay Club would be right at home in a small, converted stable house. The Club continued to expand its mission and audience; the first floor was an open-to- the-public exhibition space, and the upper floors housed amateur and professional classes. Here, the organization found its niche as a nonprofit educational center focused on supporting emerging sculptors. In 1948, the Clay Club moved uptown, to another converted carriage house, this time at 167 East 69th Street.