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Welcome to mulberry promenade, a personal site dedicated to a variety of musings about art, design and anything else I fancy. My name is Jeff and I’m a graphic designer living in north London. Feel free to stroll the promenade.
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The Ashcan School
In 1898 Manhattan was consolidated with other areas to form the modern New York City, and extraordinary processes were unleashed that transformed the island. To manage the population boom, teams of workers built a modern mass transit infrastructure with a subway, railways and bridges, and threw up skyscrapers to accommodate the finance sector. Black Americans arrived from the south, immigrants arrived from abroad. Between 1890–1920, New York’s population more than doubled to 5.6 million, and by the early 1920s New York was the most populated urban area in the world.
The boom of New York’s banking and finance sectors meant that millionaires were building houses on Fifth Avenue, whereas on the Lower East Side, thousands of immigrants — Irish, German, Jewish, Italian and Chinese, amongst many others — squeezed into tenements and slums. Just as it does today, immigration brought economy and cultural vitality that was of huge benefit to the city. But they and the other impoverished residents of New York’s poor areas lived in squalid conditions, working for miserable wages.
Apostles of ugliness
It was in this dynamic environment that the artistic tendency known as the ‘Ashcan School’ arose.
