David Jaffee was a remarkable colleague and friend: an historian with a rare sensitivity to tangible things, dedicated to addressing some of the great puzzles of the American past. Relatively late in his career, he realized the potential of the exhibition as a scholarly form. The exhibition, as we conceive of it in the Focus Project, is a process combining research, teaching, and the exposition of historical ideas, that makes use of things both firsthand in the classroom and the gallery and as central subjects of discussion in digital form. Jaffee’s first foray into exhibiting in conjunction with a digital publication—indeed, his first exhibition of any kind—was the highly successful Focus Project in 2014–15, Visualizing 19th-Century New York. The current exhibition and digital publication is a complement to that first project. Professor Jaffee proposed it as the next installment of his larger endeavor of studying how a new middle-class culture emerged in nineteenth-century New York with the domestic interior at its center.

Although many other things, the New York Crystal Palace of 1853 was a grand source of inspiration for many Americans who, as a result of their visits, revised their domestic arrangements. They adopted new technologies, such as the sewing machine, and new modes of décor—furniture, textiles, lighting equipment, and even statuary. This focus on consumption might suggest that Professor Jaffee’s concern was with the “haves”—those whose burgeoning income and wealth allowed them to consume at an unprecedented level. But he was equally attentive to the “have nots”—those who made the things so lavishly displayed in ill-ventilated and unsafe workshops; those who, because of their ethnicity, were effectively excluded from so much as even viewing the goods shown in the New York Crystal Palace.

A diligent historical researcher himself, Professor Jaffee believed in the capacity of his students to conduct research on their own initiative. He inspired and guided his students, and—although prepared to correct and edit their work—above all, he trusted them. The result is a series of essays that complement those already available in Visualizing 19th-Century New York. Thanks to the careful work of David Jaffee and his students, we can now enter the New York Crystal Palace through our historical imaginations, prompted by the things in the exhibition, and the things discussed in the digital publication. We see that the delight of consumption—actual or vicarious—is dependent on the misery of production. The United States of America has always been as ruthless to some as it is compassionate to others. The New York Crystal Palace was a prism in which ingenuity and entrepreneurship vied with exploitation and greed. In a land in which many believed—and continue to believe—in the judgment of divine providence, it seems only appropriate that it should have gone up in flames.

Ivan Gaskell
Professor of Cultural History and of Museum Studies
Curator and Head of the Focus Gallery Project
Bard Graduate Center