With the development of the first skyscrapers in the 1880s, urban built environments could expand vertically as well as horizontally. Tall buildings emerged in growing cities to house and manage the large and racially diverse populations of migrants and immigrants flocking to their centers following Reconstruction. Beginning with Chicago's early 10-story towers and concluding with the 1931 erection of the 110-story Empire State Building, Adrienne Brown's The Black Skyscraper provides a detailed account of how scale and proximity shape our understanding of race. Over the next half-century, as city skylines grew, American writers imagined the new urban backdrop as an obstacle to racial differentiation. Examining works produced by writers, painters, architects, and laborers who grappled with the early skyscraper's outsized and disorienting dimensions, Brown explores this architecture's effects on how race was seen, read, and sensed at the turn of the twentieth century. In lesser-known works of apocalyptic science fiction, light romance, and Jazz Age melodrama, as well as in more canonical works by W. E. B. Du Bois, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Aaron Douglas, and Nella Larsen, the skyscraper mediates the process of seeing and being seen as a racialized subject. From its distancing apex-reducing bodies to specks-to the shadowy mega-blocks it formed at street level, Brown argues that the skyscraper called attention to the malleable nature of perception. A highly interdisciplinary work, The Black Skyscraper reclaims the influence of race on modern architectural design as well as the less-well-understood effects these designs had on the experience and perception of race.
Adrienne Brown is an assistant professor of English at the University of Chicago. She is the coeditor of Race and Real Estate.
Acknowledgments1. Introduction2. Architecture and the Visual Fate of Whiteness3. The Miscegenated Skyscraper and Passing Metropolitans4. The Black Skyscraper5. Feeling White in the Darkening CityEpilogueNotesWork CitedIndex
A lucid, engaging look at how race was read in and through the skyscraper in early twentieth-century literature, The Black Skyscraper contributes in a substantial way to the growing body of literature that examines the connections between racial identity and the built environment. -- Dianne S. Harris, University of Utah, author of Little White Houses: How the Postwar Home Constructed Race in America
The issues are at once new and familiar: how architecture and race entwine, and how writers contend with those links. -UChicago Magazine [A] deeply researched and original study of a wide range of important literary texts that evoke the unease experienced by some black American writers in the early decades of skyscrapers. -Thomas Bender, Emeritus, New York University, Journal of American History The Black Skyscraper has the great virtue of employing an unexpected interdisciplinary methodology coming from three different fields-architecture, literature, and race-in a solid and eloquent manner. -Miguel Caballero, The University of Chicago, Journal of Modern Literature
