Symbolic Representation and the Urban Milieu

Author(s): R. Richard Wohl and Anselm L. Strauss

Source: American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 63, No. 5 (Mar., 1958), pp. 523-532
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
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 SYMBOLIC REPRESENTATION AND THE URBAN MILIEU
R. RICHARD WOHL AND ANSELM L. STRAUSS

ABSTRACT
The complexity of the city calls for symbolic management. Its complicated spatial features require rep-
resentation in the form of devices for simplifying and for evoking images and sentiment. Verbal represen-
tation of cities has a formal nature. The available devices are popularly, frequently, and flexibly used.
They are collective, as well as personal, representations.

If, as Robert Park suggested, the city
is "a state of mind,"' then city people must
respond psychologically to their urban en-
vironment; they must, to some extent, at-
tempt to grasp the meaning of its com-
plexity imaginatively and symbolically as
well as literally. For many persons those
very psychological demands make city life
difficult to understand in emotionally satis-
fying terms. It is to this phenomenon that
we addressourselves.We shall be concerned
here with the manner and means whereby
city people achieve social perspective on
urban life and urban communities: how
they learn to manage their impressions so
as to symbolize whole cities; how they treat
entire cities as evocative and expressive
artifacts.
In analyzing these processes we shall be
making them appear far more deliberate
1 The City (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1925), p. 1. The passage in which this phrase is im-
bedded reads: "The city . . . is something more
than a congeries of individual men and of social
conveniences-streets, buildings, electric lights,
tramways, and telephones, etc.; something more,
also, than a mere constellation of institutions and
administrative devices. . . . The city is, rather, a
state of mind, a body of customs and traditions,
and of the organized attitudes and sentiments that
inhere in these customs and are transmitted with
this tradition." Park, in 1925, was echoing in socio-
logical phraseology, and in almost the same words,
the more religious but equally psychological per-
spective of earlier generations. The Reverend
Edwin Chapin preached to his congregation in
1853 that "the city is something more than an as-
semblage of buildings or a multitude of people;
something more than a market or a dwelling-place
. . . deeper than all, it has a moral significance . . ."
(Moral Aspects of City Life [New York: Henry
Lyon, 1853], p. 12).
523
and orderly than, in fact, they usually are.
Ordinarily, the identifying characterization
of a particular city, and the symbolic im-
plications of that characterization for the
quality of life it represents, are picked up,
more or less incidentally, by the city-dweller
as he works out his personal "life-style" in
a particular community. The city is pri-
marily problematical for him in limited,
rather private terms. He must make a liv-
ing in it, make friends, find a home for
himself and his family, and work out a
suitable daily round. In dealing with these
tasks he senses some of the special qualities
which seem to mark the city as a whole.
Riding or walking about the city, reading
its local newspapers, talking with people
about it, he is exposed to a persuasiveprop-
aganda about its distinctive attributes. He
builds up a set of associations which pre-
pare him to accept and appreciate a short-
hand symbolic characterizationof the place.
I
Not only does the city-dweller develop a
sentiment of place gradually, but it is ex-
tremely difficult for him even to visualize
the physical organization of his city, and,
even more, to make sense of its cross-cur-
rents of activity. Apparently an invariable
characteristic of city life is that certain
stylized and symbolic means must be re-
sorted to in order to "see" the city. The
most common recourse in getting a spatial
image of the city is to look at an aerial
photograph in which the whole city-or a
considerable portion of it-is seen from a
great height. Such a view seems to encom-
pass the city, psychologically as well as

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 524 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
physically.2 Actually, an aerial photograph
is, for the layman, not only a rather vague
but an extremely distorted image of the
city: it cannot be read directly, since an
exact interpretation calls for great special-
ized skill. Such a picture really serves to
reduce the image of the city to a suggestive
expression of density and mass. Further-
more, it simplifies the city by blurringgreat
masses of detail and fixing the observer's
attention on selected landmarksthat emerge
out of the relatively undifferentiatedback-
ground.
Attempts to encompass the city at a
glance preceded the airplane of course.
"Bird's-eye" drawings, for instance, those
pictures taken from the tops of tall build-
ings or from nearby hills and mountains,
also attempted a view from a great height.3
2An English visitor, writing of Midwest Amer-
ica, has very graphically described the complex and
coherent image offered by such a glimpse of a whole
city. "The most impressive sight of the New World
is when you sail into New York harbor-if it is
on a clear day. But the most impressive first sight
of the Midwest is when you fly into Chicago at
night from the East, descending over the blackness
of the prairie to the great, ruddy blast furnaces
and steel mills, catching the first winkings of the
Lindbergh beacon from the Palmolive Building
away on the starboard bow, and watching the bril-
liant rectangles formed by a thousand square miles
of straight streets and buildings. Huge sprawling
city of swamp and prairie; one community of many
communities, communitas conmnunitatum" (Gra-
ham Hutton, Midwest at Noon [Chicago: Univer-
sity of Chicago Press, 1946], p. 140).
3Some incidental remarks by a visitor to St.
Louis in 1884 illustrate how common a practice
it was to ascend to a high point in order to see and
try to comprehend a whole city. In some cities,
however, vision, hence comprehension, was im-
peded, with the result that the urban community
was hidden from the interested observer. "But now
for the city itself. Let us assume that we have
entered it. . . . Whither first? Up into some high
point, as the dome of the Courthouse, for a general
view of the whole? Ah, except on some extremely
rare occasion, that is useless to expect. The pho-
tographers take their pictures on Sundays when
the chimneys have stopped streaming for the time
being, and then some partial prospects are to be
had; but, as a rule, St. Louis is as invisible as
London.. .. No, St. Louis has got to be explored
in detail" (Anonymous, "St. Louis," Harper's,
LXVIII [1884], 498).
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The same purpose has been served as well
by a different manipulation of distance, by
capturing a city from below. Some of the
older delineations of Kansas City, for in-
stance, are drawn from the Missouri River
and mark out the profile of the city as it
perches on the bluffs. Sometimes a hori-
zontal vantage point may be used-as in
drawings and photographs of a city across
a river or a bay.
An alternative option for achieving the
same kind of psychological distance is to
manipulate the city rather than the point
of observation. Traditionally, this has been
accomplished through the use of models.
Thus, in 1849, when New York was grow-
ing at an enormous rate, a group of crafts-
men created an exact miniature replica of
the city. The observer towered above the
model, achieving much of the same effect
that we now get from aerial photographs.
Of course, a man who inspected such a
model could probably see as little detail as
we now see in a picture taken from an air-
plane. Hence the promoters of this par-
ticular miniature significantly emphasized
that every detail of the city's houses and
streets had been precisely reproduced, al-
though no one could get close enough to
the model actually to perceive this meticu-
lous fidelity to the originals.4
These methods of portraying the city
space are expressive declarations of its
literal incomprehensibility. The city, as a
whole, is inaccessible to the imagination
unless it can be reduced and simplified.
Even the oldest resident, and the best-in-
formed citizen, can scarcely hope to know
even a fair-sized city in all its rich and
subtle detail. We can, here, take a cue from
Robert Redfield's discussion of small com-
I
Ezekiel P. Belden, New York-as Is (New
York: John P. Prall, 1849). This pamphlet includes
excerpts from the local newspapers. The New York
Sun, March 18, 1846, comments, apropos the ma-
nipulation of the city rather than the observer:
"The whole expanse of streets, lanes and houses,
will lie stretched out before the visitor, as it would
appear to a person visiting it from a balloon-with
this advantage-that he will be spared the nerv-
ous feeling incidental to an aeronautic expedition"
(p. 16).
 SYMBOLIC REPRESENTATION AND URBAN MILIEU
munities.5He points out that small commu-
nities can be regarded from various points
of view-their ecological and physical di-
mensions, their social structure, or their
biographies. If we consider large commu-
nities in these same ways, it is apparent
that the complexity of physical layout and
structure is immense; that social structure
is so complicated that even research teams
of sociologists can do little more than grasp
the outlines of significant groups and their
interrelationships.And who, ordinarily, can
hope to know or appreciate the whole social
history of a city?
Is it surprising,therefore,that people will
literally step back and away from the city to
gain perspective on it?6 Distance clears the
field of vision, even if it means losing some
of the rich detail. In New York, for ex-
ample, the observatory on the top of the
Empire State Building serves as a classic
vantage point for those who want to seize
quickly an image of New York City. Ap-
proximately 850,000 people visit the ob-
servatory each year, and on most days
slightly more than 2,000 come to look at
the city. And even on those days when the
city is invisible from a height because over-
cast with rain, fog, or snow, some still make
the journey upwards to feed their imagina-
tions with a view that they cannot actually
see. From the top of the building the city is
laid out like a diagram, pinpointed here
I The Little Community: Viewpoints for the
Study of a Human Whole (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1955).
6 Jacques Barzun underscores this point when he
writes: "New York is a skyline, the most stupen-
dous, unbelievable, man made spectacle since the
hanging gardens of Babylon. Significantly, you
have to be outside the city-on a bridge or on the
Jersey Turnpike-to enjoy it." His remarks make
clear also how difficult he himself finds it to repre-
sent the city conceptually without such distant
physical perceiving. "Still one cannot enjoy it as
the spectacle of grandeur it undoubtedly is. Not
from the inside . . . none of these [buildings] is
New York proper, which remains strictly invisible,
a concept. . . . [Many of the buildings are archi-
tecturally bad,] yet together, what a sublime, un-
surpassable skyline" (God's Country and Mine
[Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1954], pp. 240 and
252).
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525
and there by landmarks. The panorama is
divided off for viewers by visibility markers
which bound imaginary concentric circles
of vision at three, five, seven, ten, and up
to twenty-five miles distant. From this
height, the guides point out, anything with-
in a mile radius constitutes "limited" visi-
bility. What visitors grasp when they look
out over the city is suggested by the artless
eloquence of one of them: "The sun and
the stars," she remarked "are the suburbs
of New York."7The principalpsychological
satisfaction, of course, is to perceive, some-
how, the unity and the order that underlies
the apparent hurtling disarray of the city8
-to grasp it as a whole.9
But even an aerial view is for some pur-
poses too large and too various to symbol-
ize the city. Briefer, more condensed sym-
bols are available which are often even
more evocative, for all their conciseness.
Thus the delicate and majestic sweep of
the Golden Gate Bridge stands for San
I This information is taken from two sources:
the New Yorker, XXVII (July 28, 1951), 13-14;
and Reader's Digest, LXI (August, 1952), 135-38.
The quotation can be found on page 138 of the
latter article.
"To the reader, the casual visitor, New York
City must appear to lack the unity, the cohesion
of older world cities.... Yet beneath the diversity
of myriads of contrasts and conflicting evidences
lies unity. If you look down from the vertical
height of the Empire State building upon the city,
congested here, splayed out there over marsh and
plain and hillside, you observe the physical unity
of the phenomenon, called New York" (Mary F.
Parton, Metropolis: A Study of New York [New
York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1939], p. 183).
9In describing the truly tremendous sweep of
New York that can be viewed from the Brooklyn
Bridge, Alfred Kazin shows us how the visual rep-
resentation of a city can embody both what is seen
and the site from which it is seen: "[It] alone en-
joys the full sweep of the harbor and the cities
around it. . . . And the bridge that rises above it
all ... is from one point of view only the great idol
to which all these streets are subjected. But from
another it transcends them.. .. Brooklyn Bridge is
beautiful-as a complex piece of machinery, as a
work of architecture, and as the symbol and con-
necting tissue of the human history around it"
("Brooklyn Bridge," in Alexander Klein [ed.], The
Empire City: A Treasury of New York [New
York: Rinehart & Co., 1955], pp. 153-55 and 149).
 526 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
Francisco, a brief close-up of the French
Quarter identifies New Orleans, and, most
commonly of all, a view of the New York
skyline from the Battery is the standing
equivalent for that city. (So well under-
stood is this symbol that a movie can es-
tablish its locale by doing no more than
flashing a picture of these skyscrapers on
the screen for a moment and then directing
the camera into the opening episodes of the
film. This coded, shorthandexpression is at
once understood by the audience.) This fa-
miliar expression of the city's "essential"
nature is as much accepted by native New
Yorkers as it is by outsiders. Yet it is ex-
ceptionally difficult-and even unusual-
for a New Yorker ever to see this part of
the city. This sight is ordinarily available
only for those who come into New York
harbor from the sea. It is occasionally visi-
ble from an airplane, but if native New
Yorkers wish to see this part of their city,
they must take a ferry into the bay-per-
haps to Bedloe's Island-in order to inspect
the skyline.
For the purposes served by the symbol,
however, it is not really necessary for any-
one literally to see the view itself-the im-
portant thing is to be able to understand
what it represents. The massed buildings,
the solidity and density of the agglomer-
ation, the gleaming roofs, the specious neat-
ness and order that a far view lends the
scene, seem to reflect all the energy, the
crowdedness,the opulence and magnificence
of the city. The skyline represents,in effect,
the essence of New York, the great metrop-
olis; New York, as the "greatest" and
"richest" city in the world. Indeed, the
imaginative impact of that skyline is some-
times so conclusive, so overwhelming,that
to see the city in normal perspective, and
in detail, may be anticlimactic. Thus, Rom
Landau describes his disappointment at
actually seeing New York after he had vis-
ualized it from its skyline. "New York's
sea-front," he recalls,
shootingheavenwardslike torches,is possibly
the most excitingin the world.But the city it-
self mightbe describedas a merechessboardof
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straight canyons imprisonedwithin gigantic
walls, throbbingwith a restless life, dynamic,
stirring,yes-but beautiful. . . ?10
These symbols provide another type of
reductionism which makes it possible to
encompass a city's wide expanse. Unlike
the views from a distance, which distort,
blur, and flatten a city's image, these pano-
ramic views serve as masks. They achieve
the simplifications and impose the limita-
tions which come from looking at a facade.
They blot out what lies behind, or invite
the viewer to disregard it, in favor of the
interpretation presented by the facade it-
self. Each large city contains a number of
such facades-not all favorable. In Chicago
the downtownskyline symbolizes one set of
images, the Loop offers others, and Michi-
gan Avenue or a South Side slum tenders
still other partial vantage points.11None of
them manages to perform as well as it
promises. A large city is infinitely greater
than its parts and certainly greater than its
partial views, which mitigate but do not re-
move the pressures felt by an individual
trying to understand imaginatively his ur-
ban milieu.
To a more limited degree than either
device discussed so far, the spatial com-
plexity and social diversity of a city, as
a unit, is sometimes integrated by the use
of sentimental history in selecting land-
marks. Such history hardly ever follows the
orthodox chronologyof the city's actual de-
velopment. Particular landmarks commem-
orate a symbolic past phrased around par-
ticular dramatic episodes of urban history.
"0Among the Americans (London: Robert Hale,
1953), p. 60.
" The editors of Fortune in their special issue on
New York City make explicit for us this symbolic
feature of fagades. They offer their readers a view
along Park Avenue, which they title "Metropoli-
tanite Symbol." Under this caption they comment:
"Park Avenue is more a state of mind than a must
address, since side streets are smarter, East River
district pleasanter. This beautiful street . . . is the
spine of residential metropolitanism. Along it, rich
and nearly rich playboys and kept ladies. Within
the symbol, the whole sleek East Side" (Fortune,
XX [July, 1939], 84).
 SYMBOLIC REPRESENTATION AND URBAN MILIEU
The Water Tower in Chicago, for example, there was a point of view, say that of divine
is such a site; so is Telegraph Hill in San omniscience and fairness, in which Chicago
Francisco.12
II
Looking at the city, even if it be with
an imaginative stare, is only the beginning
of the search for the meaning and quality
of urban life. What is seen, literally or in
the mind's eye, must be expressed and in-
terpreted. The crisis of awareness perhaps
comes when one realizes that the welter of
impressions will need conscious reflection.
Such a moment has been caught for us by
Charles Dudley Warner, who probably re-
corded it-as most of us would not-be-
cause he was a journalist making his way
across the country to write a series of arti-
cles on western cities. "It is everything in
getting a point of view," he decided.
Last summera lady of New Orleanswho had
never been out of her native Frenchcity ...
visited Chicagoand New York. "Whichcity
did you like best?"I asked,withouttakingmy-
self seriouslyin the question.To my surprise
she hesitated.This hesitationwas fatal to all
my preconceivednotions.It matterednot there-
after which she preferred:she had hesitated.
. . . "Well,"she said, not seeing the humorof
my remark,"Chicagoseemsto me to havefiner
buildingsandresidences,to be the morebeauti-
ful city; but of course there is more in New
York; it is a greatercity; and I shouldprefer
to live there for what I want."This naive ob-
servationset me to thinking,and I wonderedif
12 The very rapidity of change in many American
cities destroys the value of certain landmarks for
symbolizing civic history. Here is John Gunther
standing amazed before this transiency of land-
marks: "No city changes so quickly as New York;
none has so short a memory or is so heartless to
itself; it has an inhuman quality. Very few New
Yorkers pay the slightest attention to the histori-
cal monuments that fill the city. . . How many
ever recall that Theodore Roosevelt was born at
26 East 20th Street, or that the oldest building in
the city is on Peck Slip, or even that a three-
million-dollar treasure ship is supposed to be lying
in the East River near 53rd Street? My publisher
lives in the east 30's. I had been in his delightful
house fifty times before I learned that James Mon-
roe had once lived in it" (Inside U.S.A. [New York:
Harper & Bros., 1947], p. 557).
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527
would appear as one of the great cities of the
world, in fact a metropolis, by-and-by to rival
in population and wealth any city of the world.13
The city, then, sets problems of meaning.
The streets, the people, the buildings, and
the changing scenes do not come already
labeled. They require explanation and in-
terpretation. When it is argued in socio-
logical literature or in the literature of city
planning that cities are basically anomic
and disorganizing or that cities represent
optimal conditions for creative living, it is
apparent that such remarks are simultane-
ously characterizations,judgments, and in-
terpretations. The city can be variously
conceived, by its citizens as well as its stu-
dents: as a place in which to get ahead; a
place where anonymity cloaks opportunities
for fun, excitement, and freedom; perhaps
as a place which undermines health and
happiness but whose resources are usable
from a safe suburban distance.
It is impossible, however, for the citizens
of any city to comprehendit in its totality.
But any individual citizen, by virtue of his
particular choices of alternatives for action
and experience, will need a vocabulary to
express what he imagines the entire city
to be.
Speaking about cities, in consequence,
involves the speaker in a continual quest
for the essence of his urban experience and
for ways to express it. The language used,
however, is a formal one. A fairly limited
range of linguistic conventions has come
into use whose formality is shaped by the
fact that the form of the rhetorical devices
employed does not depend on their content;
their set phrasing is hospitable to any and
all substantive statements about a city's
qualities.
The urban environment is so obviously
many-sided that one of the simplest and
most obvious ways of giving it an under-
lying unity is simply to assume it and thus
13 "Studies of the Great West, III: Chicago,"
Harper's, LXXVI (1888), 870.
 528 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
to speak of the city adjectivally.14 The
speaker pretends that the noun modified-
the place name-is fully expressed and
completely explained by the sum of its
modifiers. It is therefore possible to say of
a city that it is brawny, lusty, cosmopoli-
tan, smug, serene, bustling, progressive,
brutal, sentimental, etc.15 For some, this is
a permanently adequate method; they are
content to feel that the quality of their own
experience and the mood inspired by their
own dimly sensed implications provide the
cement that binds these attributes together.
The list of attributes may, however, grow
so long and so quickly that confidence in
the initial supposition that these qualities
summarizethemselves is undermined.Most
obviously this occurs when contradictory
attributes are assigned to a city, and these
apparently conflicting interpretations seem
to call for further explanation. Even so, it
is still possible to shrug off the difficulty by
claiming that the synthetic principle which
reconciles these opposites is that the city
in question is essentially paradoxical. Thus
one writer comfortably concludes about
Fort Worth that it "is paradoxicallya met-
ropolitan town.""6
" Cf. many of the selections, particularly those
written after 1890, quoted in Bessie L. Pierce (ed.),
As Others See Chicago: Impressions of Visitors,
1673-1933 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1933).
'6 "Call Chicago mighty, monstrous, multifari-
ous, vital, lusty, stupendous, indomitable, intense,
unnatural, aspiring, puissant, preposterous, tran-
scendent-call it what you like-throw the dic-
tionary at it!" This frequently quoted character-
ization by Julian Street can be found in Bessie L.
Pierce, op. cit., p. 442.
16 Oliver Knight, Fort Worth (Norman: Univer-
sity of Oklahoma Press, 1953), p. viii. George S.
Perry makes quite explicit this utilization of para-
dox to handle urban complexity: "A large part of
the fun of making the acquaintance of Baltimore
lies in trying to unravel its endless contradictions.
Almost any sweeping statement you make about
its character will be wrong. Most of its 101 con-
sistencies are not simple, direct paradoxes, but
oblique, chain-stitched contradictions which in the
end lead one not merely around but over and under
Robin Hood's barn" (Cities of America [New
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Both the attribution of unity and the as-
signment of particular qualities can be or-
ganized around another, almost equally
obvious, principle. The entire complex of
urban life can be thought of as a person
rather than as a distinctive place, and the
city may be endowed with a personality-
or, to use common parlance-a character
of its own.17 Like a person, the city then
acquires a biography and a reputation.18
Personifiedcities can be describedwith per-
sonal pronouns and, through the use of ap-
propriate verbs, conceived of as having
capacities for action and possession. And,
following this fashion of speaking, we make
the same allowances for and judgments of
cities that we are ordinarily inclined to
make for people.19
York: Whittlesey House, McGraw-Hill Book Co.,
1946], pp. 45-46).
Paradox can also be suggested implicitly, as when
Alvin F. Harlow titles his introductory chapter on
Cincinnati "Dynamic Serenity" (The Serene Cin-
cinnatians [New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1950],
p. 9). Likewise, in writing of New York City, Paul
Crowell and A. H. Raskin literally deny the possi-
bility of depicting adequately that city's great
complexity, and merely remark: "New York is not
a city. It is a thousand cities, each with its own
life and spirit, all jampacked into an area of two
hundred ninety-nine square miles. It is Broadway
and the Bowery; Wall Street and Union Square;
Park Avenue and the lower East Side; Coney
Island and the Stork Club" ("New York: 'Greatest
City in the World,'" published in Robert S. Allen
[ed.], Our Fair City [New York: Vanguard Press,
Inc., 1947], p. 37).
'7 Struthers Burt in his popular history of Phila-
delphia remarks: "This book . . . is a sort of civic
biography, one of those novelist biographies where
you treat the hero as a human being and try to
find out what he is and how he got that way. There
will even be occasional psychoanalysis, for cities
are individuals" (Philadelphia: Holy Experiment
[Garden City: Doubleday, Doran & Co., 1945],
p. 14). Instances of the attribution of personality
to cities are easy to find; indeed, it is difficult to
avoid finding them.
18 Cf. Lloyd Lewis and Henry Justin
Smith, Chi-
cago: The History of Its Reputation (New York:
Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1929).
'9 "When this sense of the community emerges,
Los Angeles will begin its maturity. Now it is ado-
lescent, with the glandular imbalance of a young-
 SYMBOLIC REPRESENTATION AND URBAN MILIEU
Urban complexity, which forces us to
think in terms of unity or many-sidedness
and personification, also leads us to con-
ceive of cities as "really" or "essentially"
like something else, something we already
know and understand. In a word, complex-
ity forces us to analogize. The analogy may
be relatively implicit, for example, "Chi-
cago is a city which must be dominated, as
if it were a magnificent and severe animal
that plunges and rears,"20or, one may use
an explicit metaphor (e.g., "New York,
city with a heart of nylon").21 The city
may be termed or comparedwith a factory,
a madhouse, a frontier, a woman.22In all
ster who has grown too rapidly and wants glamour
more than wisdom or enduring strength." These
are the concluding lines of an article on Los Ange-
les by Maury Maverick and Robert Harris in
Robert S. Allen (ed.), op. cit., p. 387.
On occasion, cities will even be addressed as
persons. Dorosha B. Hayes closes her popular his-
tory of Chicago with a frankly mystical mode of
address: "Chicago. . . . You have grown big with
an almost terrible American splendor-and in so
short a time! Yes, short; until men christened you
a town and pitched in to go to work on the idea
in earnest, your spirit slept. Yet the first white man
to come upon you and record the fact forsaw your
future" (Chicago: Crossroads of American Enter-
prise [New York: Julian Messner, Inc., 1944], p.
302).
20 See Bessie L. Pierce, op. cit., p. 468. The quo-
tation is by Walter L. George.
21 Paul Morand, "Rues et visages de New-York,"
Les ouvres libres, LXII (September, 1950), 97.
' "Consider dear Old Lady Thrift. That is, the
plump and smiling city of Milwaukee, which sits
in complacent shabbiness on the west shore of Lake
Michigan like a wealthy old lady in black alpaca
taking her ease on the beach. All her slips are
showing, but she doesn't mind a bit.... Old Lady
Thrift is quite content to be recognized as the most
safe and solvent city in America. On her hundredth
anniversary she not only was out of debt, but had
many millions in the bank.
"Tight and prosperous, yes, but the old girl has
her contradictions. When her heart is touched, she
will dig into her bulging reticule and give gener-
ously. But for the most part she is anything but
soft. If city funds are the subject, she habitually
puts on a flinty and defiant look. . . . She's an
honest, good-humored, loveable old girl, but an
odd one and no mistake" (Richard S. Davis, "Mil-
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529
such phrasing the speaker draws upon the
emotional and non-specificresourcesof lan-
guage to make clear-in terms of some-
thing else with which we are already fa-
miliar-what seems to him to be the
underlying meaning of an apparently con-
fused and confusing urban world. Sand-
burg's Chicago as "hog butcher to the
world" captures in poetic capsule for many
people-to judge from frequent quotation
-a salient quality of that city's life and
air. Not a few descriptions of our cities
have a poetic quality and a significant am-
biguity which compose themselves into
hymns of revulsion as well as into paeans
of praise or devotion.23
Analogies of cities, personifications of
them, or mere lists of their attributes in a
succession of adjectives-all these represent
conscious efforts to establish those distinc-
tive qualities which help explain or ration-
alize the swarming impressions that crowd
in on the observer. These unique qualities,
once established, can be elaborated in de-
tail by an apparatus of illustration and
pointed anecdote aimed at showing how
these qualities lie behind and shine through
typical events and institutions. This is not
a language of mere illustration alone but of
exemplification as well. For many years
visitors to Chicago wrote about and saw
the city expressed by its hotels, its crowds,
waukee: Old Lady Thrift," in Robert S. Allen
[ed.], op. cit., pp. 189-90).
'An example is Waldo Frank's conception of
Chicago, "Hog Butcher for the World," published
not long after Sandburg's poem: "On the one side,
trains pour in the cattle and the hogs. On the other,
trains pour in the men and the women. Cattle and
hogs from the West. Women and men from the
East. Between, stockaded off by the dripping walls,
the slaughter houses stand mysterious, and throb
to their ceaseless profit. . . . The spirit of the place
-perhaps its soul: an indescribable stench. It is
composed of mangled meat, crushed bones, blood
soaking the floors, corroding the steel, and sweat.
A stench that is warm and thick, and that is stub-
born. A stench somehow sorrowful and pregnant,
as if the seat of men joined with the guts of beasts
and brought forth a new drear life" (see Bessie L.
Pierce, op. cit., p. 481).
530 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
its huge department stores, and its stock-
yards.24 Kipling's famous assessment of
that city contains a particularly brutal and
effective description of the stockyards, as
the archetypical symbol of the city, which
concludes with:
And then the same mercifulProvidencethat
has showeredgood thingsin my path through-
out sent me an embodimentof the City of
Chicago,so that I mightrememberit for ever.
Womencome sometimesto see the slaughter,
as theywouldcometo see the slaughterof men.
And there enteredthat vermillionhall a young
woman of large mold, with brilliantlyscarlet
lips, and heavy eyebrows,and dark hair that
camein a "widow'speak"on the forehead.She
was well and healthy and alive, and she was
dressedin flamingred and black,and her feet
... were cased in red leathershoes. She stood
in a patch of sunlight,the red bloodunderher
shoes,the vivid carcassestackedaroundher, a
bullockbleedingits life not six feet away from
her, and the death factory roaringall around
her. She lookedcuriously,with hard,cold eyes,
and was not ashamed,
Then said I: "Thisis a specialSending.I've
seen the City of Chicago!"And I went awayto
get peace and rest.25
It is possible to extend the notion of dis-
tinctiveness until the city's qualities-at
least in combination-are thought to be
unique. It is not only the booster who
claims that there is no other city like his
own; the ordinary citizen may feel this too,
regardless of whether he approves of his
city or not. The city's exceptional character
can be declared openly as when it is as-
serted that "only in San Francisco" or by
some such query as "where else can you
find?" some particular institution, experi-
ence, or kind of person.26The same distinc-
24 See Bessie L. Pierce, op. cit.
25Ibid., p. 261.
26 This kind of rhetorical query, couched so as to
highlight a city's individuality, is used by Alvin F.
Harlow, in The Serene Cincinnatians: "For a cen-
tury and more it has been doing things in its own
whimsical way. Where else will you find grand
opera with full Metropolitan casts presented in
summer in a zoblogical park? . . . Where else will
you find a thing comparable to the Good Friday
pilgrimage of prayer by thousands of devout Cath-
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tion can be claimed by stating categorically
that everyone in a particular city acts in
certain typical ways: All Baltimore is
proud; all Boston is proper; all San Fran-
cisco is fun-loving.Y Essence and unique-
ness can be asserted most subtly, perhaps,
by claiming that essence is masked by ap-
pearance or that appearance can be mis-
taken for essence. A visitor to St. Louis
some years ago warned that
St. Louis is the only large Western city in
whicha man fromourEasterncitieswouldfeel
at onceat home.... Andyet todaySt. Louisis
new-born,and her appearanceof age and of
similarityto the Easterncities belies her. She
is not in the least what she looks.28
Common speech expresses the essence-ap-
pearance inversion more directly than this
oblique statement. We often say to visitors
or newcomersthat they must live a while in
our city before they can see it as it really
is. But making contrasts between cities does
not automatically distinguish the peculiar
atmosphereand quality of life in a particu-
lar city. We may, indeed, consider that dis-
tance does in fact lend enchantment, that
when people visit other cities they return
to their own with a sharper appreciation of
the individuality of their native place, how-
ever discrepant these appreciationsmay be.
olics up a two-blocks-lonig stairway climbing the
uppermost reaches of that near-Alp, Mount Adams
... to a church on its brow . . . ?" (p. 14).
' For many examples see the volumes in the "So-
ciety in America Series," published by Dutton &
Co. (for instance, Cleveland Amory, The Proper
Bostonians; Alvin F. Harlow, The Serene Cincin-
natians; and Robert Tallent, The Romantic New
Orleanians). Almost any popular urban history is
likely to use this kind of phraseology.
28 Julian Ralph, "The New Growth of St. Louis,"
Harper's, LXXXV (1892), 920. Edward Hunger-
ford, in his volume The Personality of American
Cities (New York: McBride, Nast & Co., 1913),
concludes his comments on Chicago with a similar
phraseology: "There, then, is your Chicago spirit,
the dominating inspiration that rises above the
housetops of rows of monotonous, dun-colored
houses and surveys the sprawling, disorderly town,
and proclaims it triumphant over its outer self"
(p. 211).
 SYMBOLIC REPRESENTATION AND URBAN MILIEU
Thus far we have been looking at cities
as they are characterizedby an indigenous
symbolism, or distinguished by comparison
with other cities. It is possible, however, to
evaluate a city and its meaning in terms of
certainassumed fundamentalcharacteristics
of American culture. New York City, for
example, is said not to be really an Ameri-
can city at all.29 Chicago, on the other
hand, has been described as the very em-
bodiment of the "American spirit," as the
heart of America.30 And, more recently,
Kansas City has been declared to be "the
typical American city."'31The echo of this
mode of characterizationcan be seen in the
' For some representative statements, pro and
con, see the following: Mark Sullivan, "Why the
West Dislikes New York: The Eternal Conflict
between City and Country," World's Work, LXI
(1926), 406-11; "New York City," Fortune, XX
(July, 1939), esp. 73-75 and 85; Charles Merz,
"The Attack on New York," Harper's, CLXIII
(1926), 81-87; Earl Sparling, "Is New York Amer-
ican?" Scribner's, LXXX (1931), 165-73; Lillian
Symes, "Our Last Frontier," Harper's, CLXIX
(1929), 636-45.
'l In 1891, the astute French observer Paul de
Rousiers characterized Chicago as "the most active,
the boldest, the most American, of the cities of the
Union. . . . It is here, indeed, that the American
'go ahead,' the idea of going always forward with-
out useless regrets and recriminations, with an eye
to the future, fearless and calm-it is here that it
attains its maximum intensity.... This confidence
has a double origin, the personal energy of the
Americans and their accustomedness to success.
This is why it is strongest where success has been
particularly brilliant; stronger in the meat-towns
of the Western than in the Eastern centres, which
are already old; strongest of all in Chicago"
(American Life [New York and Paris: Firmin-
Didot & Co.], pp. 73-74). Fifty-three years later,
we find John Gunther writing: "About Chicago
itself there is so much to be said that the task of
compression becomes hopeless. This is the greatest
and most typically American of all cities. New
York is bigger and more spectacular and can out-
match it in other superlatives, but it is a 'world'
city, more European in some respects than Ameri-
can. Chicago has, as a matter of fact, just as many
foreign-born as New York, but its impact is over-
whelmingly that of the United States, and it gives
above all the sense that America and the Middle
West are beating upon it from all sides" (op. cit.,
pp. 369-70).
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531
work of popular historians of such cities as
Cincinnati and Philadelphia, openly defen-
sive because their cities do not seem to be
marked by the progressive, bustling, and
booster spirit of certain other American
communities.32Cities therefore can be con-
ceived as being symbolic-or carrying the
values-of entities larger than themselves.
From the very nature of symbolism, as Al-
fred Whitehead points out, such a process
of extension is well-nigh inevitable; for the
growth of symbolism is luxuriant.33 It
knows neither historical nor spatial bounds.
And, if speculation continues in quest of a
truly American city, the time may come
when Los Angeles will openly claim to rep-
resent most adequatelywhat Americastands
for in the twentieth century.
It seems safe to say that without the
resources of rhetoric the city-dweller could
have no verbal representations of his own
or any other city. Characterization of the
city, and of the life lived in it, is indispen-
sable for organizing the inevitably ambigu-
ous mass of impressionsand experiences to
which every inhabitant is exposed, and
which he must collate and assess, not only
for peace of mind but to carry on daily
3 Cf. Ralph S. Perry, who, reporting upon Amer-
ica's cities for the Saturday Evening Post, recently
awarded the crown to Kansas City on the following
grounds: "Kansas City is a kind of interior Ameri-
can crossroads and melting pot where the South-
erner, the Northerner, the Easterner and the West-
erner meet and become plain John American, with
America unfolding, to use one old-timer's rapt ex-
pression, 'in oceans of glory' in every direction. It
got its start on the riches of Boston banks and
Western lands and Northern furs. It is not only
America's approximate geographical heart, but the
center of gravity for her taste and emotion. The
soap opera, movie or national magazine that doesn't
'take' in Kansas City won't live long in the nation."
See also Henry Haskell and Richard Fowler, City
of the Future: A Narrative History of Kansas City
(Kansas City: F. Glenn Pub. Co., 1950), pp. 16-
17; and Darrel Garwood, Crossroads of Anterica:
The Story of Kansas City (New York: Norton &
Co., 1948), p. 327.
S2 Cf. Alvin F. Harlow, op. cit., and Struthers
Burt, op. cit.
3 Alfred N. Whitehead, Symbolism (New York:
Macmillan Co., 1927).
532 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
affairs. When the city has been symbolized
in some way, personal action in the urban
milieu becomes organized and relatively
routinized.34To be comfortable in the city
-in the widest sense of these words-re-
quires the formulation of one's relations
with it, however unsystematically and
crudely. Uncertainty about the character
of the environmentcan only engender deep
psychological stress.
All such symbolic representationsof an
urban milieu, however, are inherently un-
stable. Cities change, forcing those who live
in them to face the inadequacies of what
once were tried and true conceptions. A
city after an economic boom, or swamped
34We are here following out the implications of
the symbolic interactionist view of language. "Lan-
guage symbols not merely stand for something else.
They also indicate the significance of things for
human behavior, and they organize behavior
toward the thing symbolized." "A category . . .
constitutes a point of view, a schedule, a program,
a heading or a caption, an orientation." The quo-
tations are, respectively, from Alfred R. Lindesmith
and Anselm L. Strauss, Social Psychology (rev. ed.;
New York: Dryden Press, 1956), p. 63; and John
Dewey, Logic, the Theory of Inquiry (New York:
Henry Holt & Co., 1938), p. 273.
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by an influx of immigrants,is obviously not
the same city it was before. But whether
change is dramatic and massive, or mudane
and subtle, urban social perspectives-and
their symbols-ultimately fail even their
most ardent backers. The most insensitive
city-dweller, moreover, cannot fail to dis-
cover new facets of the city from time to
time. One of the fixed conditions of an ur-
ban existence is that it provides an inex-
haustible store of surprises. And it does not
matter whether the surprise is pleasant,
challenging, or deeply discomforting; it
must, like all such impressions, be man-
aged; it must be brought into consonance
with other impressions of city life.
As new conceptualizations of urban sur-
roundings are required, rhetorical devices
once more come into play; only their con-
tent changes. To assess the novel and man-
age the discordant, analogy or some other
rhetoricalresourcemust be brought to bear.
At that moment new symbolic representa-
tions-embodied in anecdote, slogan, poem,
or some more prosaic form-crystallize and
become public property.
UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO