Lecture by Chelsea Spencer
Chaired by Lucia Allais

This talk examines the relationship between architecture, urbanization, and “machine politics” in the United States during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It focuses on New York’s Tammany Hall, the political machine long regarded as the paradigmatic case of Gilded Age municipal corruption, tracing its paradoxical evolution over the nineteenth century from civic club to notorious party apparatus through its extraordinary building program, which included three party headquarters, as well as the Croton Aqueduct (1837–1842), Central Park (1857–1876), and the New York County Courthouse (1861–1881), among countless other projects that still define the city today. Within the political economy of nineteenth-century machine politics, the talk argues, building and public works functioned in at least two ways. First, they produced a series of designed architectural objects and urban spaces through which political meaning and social belonging were staged and symbolized. Second, through spoils, patronage jobs, and other forms of what one politician called “honest graft,” public building and maintenance processes were themselves designed as instruments in a system of welfare and coalition-building that materially sustained Tammany’s control over city government for over a century.

Fall Thursday Lecture Series events are open to Columbia-affiliated faculty, students, and invited guests. All others interested in attending, please email the SOF/Heyman at [email protected].

Please email [email protected] to request disability accommodations. Advance notice is necessary to arrange for some accessibility needs.