The almost three hundred portraits that once composed the New York Chamber of Commerce's renowned collection capture the giants of American business with aesthetic and symbolic power. The images of civic leaders and entrepreneurs, carefully assembled over two hundred years, tell the story of American industry as shaped and reflected in the life of a major institution. Interpreting these images as historical documents, "Picturing Power" traces the establishment, growth, and eventual decline of the nation's most powerful business organization. Lavishly illustrated, this book also charts the social and aesthetic course of institutional portraiture in the United States.

From its inception in 1768, the Chamber regulated and codified commercial practice, provided business interests with a unified means of forming and advancing their agendas, and consolidated and elevated the status of its members and their professions. By linking commercial development to social and cultural progress, portraiture did much to support these ends. Whether enhancing, sanitizing, or stabilizing the reputations of business leaders; downplaying their wealth; or whitewashing their questionable practices, portraiture fashioned a public identity that matched corporate and civic needs as they evolved over time.

By following changes in the use of these images, "Picturing Power" reveals the strategies and preoccupations of an American business culture that strove for egalitarian virtue while remaining firmly committed to the principles of competitive capitalism. Americans' shifting and ambivalent relationship to commerce situates these portraits -- representations of the human face of business -- at the critical intersection of enduring contests in American life, between self-interest and the greater good, between equality and the social hierarchy that wealth engenders.

Chicago's impressive industrial expansion in the late nineteenth century convinced most observers that the city was defined by the crass pursuit of wealth and that its architecture was, as described by Lewis Mumford, "a brutal network of industrial necessities." In a major new book, Daniel Bluestone disputes this vision of the city. Combining architectural history and cultural analysis, Bluestone explores the creation of Chicago's parks, churches, skyscrapers, and civic buildings. He finds that the structure of the city was influenced as much by the moral, cultural, and aesthetic aspirations of its local elite as by the untempered forces of commerce and capital. Bluestone shows how nineteenth-century Chicago architects and their clients attempted to create a distinctive landscape that could distract residents and visitors form the gritty commercial workings of the city while demonstrating a commitment to urbanism that went beyond the marketplace. He surveys the parks that were created to mediate relations between social classes; the churches relocated in residential areas so that they could avoid the dominance of new downtown buildings; the plans for lakefront civic centers architecturally distinguished from the forms of the city's famous early skyscrapers-including the Rookery, the Monadnock, the Columbus Memorial, and the Masonic Temple. And he examines these early Chicago skyscrapers, noting how their monumental entrances, embellished lobbies, artistic elevators, and spacious light courts were designed to soften their commercial edges to recast the city's image, and to cultivate an emerging middle class of white-collar workers. A richly illustrated contribution to urban and architectural history, Bluestone's book is also a perceptive look at central features in the design of this quintessential American city.

Buildings, Landscapes, and Memory: Case Studies in Historic Preservation explores historically and critically the historic preservation movement in the United States. Analyzing ten extraordinary places, this provocative analysis of historic preservation s past and future will transform contemporary understanding of the movement, examining assumptions about why history, heritage, and place should matter. It ranges broadly from a discussion of the commemoration of place in the Marquis de Lafayette s triumphal tour of the United States in 1824 25 to speculation about the cultural and political import of interpreting history on EPA Superfund toxic waste sites.

Thinking critically about preservation requires also thinking critically about its opposite: destruction. The book treats the movement to conserve the Hudson River Palisades from destruction at the hands of trap rock quarrymen as well as the effort to save Dutch-American homesteads that stood in the path of development in Brooklyn. It explores the intersection between race, culture, and preservation in the 1940s effort of African Americans to preserve the Mecca Flats in Chicago, an apartment building that was the subject of popular blues music and that was threatened by Mies van der Rohe s designs for the Illinois Institute of Technology.

Focusing on the relationship among tradition, preservation, and modern design, Buildings, Landscapes, and Memory explores the making of Eero Saarinen s Jefferson National Expansion Memorial Arch on the historic Mississippi riverfront in St. Louis as well as the tension between tradition and modern design at Thomas Jefferson s University of Virginia, declared a World Heritage site in 1987. Engaging early efforts to build an economy on preservation and heritage tourism, the book also looks at the creation of Virginia s historic highway marker program in the 1920s."