The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

The Double Erasure of Times Square
Musée Grévin. Founded by journalist Arthur Meyer and newspaper caricaturist
Alfred Grévin in 1882, the museum was designed to mimic the newspaper,
offering a random juxtaposition of tableaux much as newspaper
columns presented their readers with a series of unconnected stories. 51 It
offered the spectator the novelty of visualizing in precise detail familiar
newspaper stories, famous people, and well-known events, at a time
when photographs were not easily reproducible and had yet to accompany
newspaper reports. These three-dimensional tableaux vivants, along with
panoramas, dioramas, magic lantern shows, photographs, and stereoscopic
views, offered the nineteenth-century spectator a new kind of visual realism
by utilizing the most advanced technical means. 52 Not only did they faithfully
represent all the details, texture, and look of actual events or things,
but they were “mirror[s] with a memory” that reflected events and objects
from the past and projected them onto the present. 53 They relied, furthermore,
on technical means or an apparatus of vision to organize, manage, and
produce their effects. As Don Slater argues, it was not representational realism
but mechanical or instrumental realism that enthralled spectators in the
late nineteenth century. They flocked to theatrical spectacles that were produced
by mechanical means and thrilled as scenographic appearances were
magically transformed by machines and devices. This was one way that Victorian
society could become accustomed to living with machines and mechanical
processes. Technical accomplishments became the spectacle itself,
for at that time “to represent, to know, to transform become not only mutually
reinforcing but united activities, three forms of appropriation of the
material world which both produce and assimilate the modern experience of
command and control.” 54
Paradoxically, however, once instruments of realistic vision had deprived
the world of wonder, once too much understanding had destroyed occult
and supernatural effects, the nineteenth century then reenchanted this
view in theatrical events, visual spectacles, and quasi-magical shows. It simulated
the aura of magical effects and the spell of inexplicable processes,
simultaneously hiding the apparatus of display and highlighting the
technical artifice of re-creation. No matter how great the factual details of
realism were, there was always a pressure to move from mere representation
and factual understanding to simulation and the demonstration, not explication,
of how effective illusions and wonders were produced. On the other
side of rational and instrumental control over material reality lay the willing
suspension of disbelief and the pleasurable immersion in fantastically
simulated worlds. Pleasure resided not just in seeing the world duplicated
in realistic exactitude—an act demonstrating that one could appropriate
that world, could master, map, project, or reconstruct it—but also in being