The Hudson-Fulton Celebration: New York's River Festival of 1909 and the Making of a Metropolis [Hardcover]

Told with wit and charm, Kathleen Eagen Johnson's engaging account of the Hudson-Fulton Celebration restores to prominence an all but forgotten chapter in American history, the two weeks in September 1909 when New York boisterously announced its arrival on the world stage with a dazzling variety of parades, pageants, and parties.

Commemorating Henry Hudson 1609 voyage of discovery and Robert Fulton's 1807 introduction of commercial steamship travel between New York City and Albany, the Celebration built on Washington Irving's world famous history of Knickerbocker New York - here gloriously illustrated by George Cruikshank, Maxfield Parrish and others - to create an Empire City whose past rivaled that of Boston and Philadelphia.

The backstory was more complicated. New York's great history parade advanced a confused social agenda bent on tutoring immigrants - New York was awash with them - in traditional American values while selling the public a raft of progressive programs. Electricity, used with manic zeal to illuminate every bridge, boat and boulevard in the five boroughs and beyond, was the Celebration's leitmotif.

Johnson's lively pictorial review makes outstanding use of the fine and popular arts produced by the Celebration, reproducing more than two hundred photographs, illustrations, and souvenirs of every variety, from medals and badges to sheet music, cigar box labels, china, silver, and needlework.

An expert on the material culture of Dutch and English New York, the author has an eye for telling detail. Dressed as Dutch girls or sailor boys, children marched in parades throughout the state in a quixotic display of cultural diversity. Barely recognized, writes Johnson, were African Americans, who had lived in New York since the early seventeenth century.

Art afficionados will likely recall the Hudson-Fulton Celebration for the pair of exhibitions Manhattan's Metropolitan Museum of Art organized in tribute. In the great international art grab of the post Civil War era, American wealth trumped European lineage. American financier J.P. Morgan organized the Met's spectacular Dutch paintings show, including thirty-four Rembrandts, twenty Hals, and five Vermeers, a staggering assertion of power even by today's blockbuster standards.

The Met's tandem exhibition is rightly considered pivotal. It marked the first time that American decorative arts were displayed by a major American fine-arts museum and validated the ensuing antiques collecting craze that continues today.

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