"The city by the sea": recreation and re-creation at South Beach, Staten Island

Abstract

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, South Beach, a coastline on Staten Island in New York, was the site of a beach resort which attracted a primarily working-class audience from the surrounding cities during the late spring and summer. This thesis focuses on the earliest period of the resort, the years 1886 to 1898. ☐ Utilizing a material culture approach, the study reconstructs the landscape of South Beach through the analysis of primary sources, and relates this landscape to the urban environment from which its visitors came. It seeks to recover the expressive aspects of this landscape by determining how it corresponded to the physical and cultural environment of the urban tenement districts, and how it reflected the culture-specific world views, lifestyles, and systems of meaning created and sustained in urban working-class neighborhoods. ☐ Whereas the appeal of recreational landscapes often lies in their ability to offer visitors an escape from everyday realities, this analysis of South Beach maintains that visitors were attracted to the resort in these early years by its very maintenance and replication of their everyday physical and cultural world. Visitors to this resort found and created a familiar landscape, a landscape invested with meaning, a "city by the sea."