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theses

While historic preservation in the postwar era has been conventionally explored as a response to urbanism and urban development, this dissertation examines the preservation impulse of the 1960s as a sign of the cultural crisis of that decade. The postwar urban crisis - culminating in summer riots in 1967 and ’68, student takeovers, draft card burnings, and proliferating protests against the nation’s racial, financial and political hierarchies across the country- indicate the crisis of the 1960s was much broader than simply one of urban crime rates and deindustrialization. This larger cultural landscape of the ‘60s, its ubiquitous challenges to the political, financial, racial, and moral foundations of the country, gave birth to an “anguished scrutiny” surrounding the meaning of the most fundamental tenets of American society. For many, the answer to the question of the urban crisis was found in the preservation and commemoration of American origin stories, of maritime-inspired myths, of a time when we were good. The crisis of the 1960s is the critical landscape from which historic preservation and commemoration emerged at the South Street Seaport Museum in lower Manhattan, a commemorative landscape reimagined to recall traditional American hero myths and a “different breed of men” which seeded the city’s early prosperity during the golden Age of Sail.

ETD_6209

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references

Includes vita

by Robin K. Foster

doi:10.7282/T30K2BFP

ETD doctoral

The author owns the copyright to this work.