Toward a history of the corner

Abstract

There aren’t many corners of the past that remain unexplored. The history of the corner is one of them. To the best of my knowledge, no one has yet probed this chapter in the history of the built environment. Until recently, I didn’t think I would. Moving to New York City changed that. New York is perhaps the quintessential “city of corners.” In this essay, I’d like to offer some observations from the perspective of a cultural historian. Specifically, two avenues of inquiry intersect in this piece: it explores the history of the corner as a spatial object shaped by human design, but it also probes the agency of corners—that is, how they have shaped the ways in which people use and imagine the built environment. Two objections may be raised against my approach. For one thing, this piece mixes sources that some might argue should not be mixed: historical and literary texts, artistic and scholarly material, and personal and “objective” observations. For another, the piece doesn’t proceed in a strictly chronological fashion. In fact, not all periods of history will be treated with the same degree of detail: I will elaborate on some and only touch on others. The pragmatic reason is that this piece is merely an essay outlining the contours of a topic not yet studied. But perhaps a slightly unconventional approach might also suit an object that is, by definition, not straight, but bent. After all, would anyone really argue that a unifying thread or teleology is waiting to be uncovered in the history of the corner? There may be certain patterns or tendencies in this history, and I will try to elaborate on some of these constellations. Still, this essay remains preliminary and, to some extent, experimental—an experiment to determine whether it is possible to extract history from the corner of conventional disciplinary narratives. It is the historian’s inclination, but sometimes also his limitation, to look for avenues and “turning points” in the tangle that is the past—that is, to look for stories that can be mapped onto a grid of chronological progression