By Jennifer Glickel
DNAinfo Reporter/Producer
EAST HARLEM — Cars and New York City seem almost incompatible for most Manhattanites, but a new exhibit opening Thursday at the Museum of the City of New York reveals quite a different picture.
"Cars, Culture, and the City" displays the long, interwoven history of New York City and the automobile, and how each impacted the development of the other.
"The exhibition tells the unexpected story of New York City’s relationship to the car over the last 100 years," said Donald Albrecht, the museum's curator of architecture and design and co-curator of the show.
"We show how New York manufactured the magic of the car like no other city did, and also how the automobile shaped the city itself.”
Albrecht explained that New York popularized a glamorous image of the car beginning with the country's first auto show at Madison Square Garden in 1900. Still the most popular car show in the world, the event presented the automobile as a futuristic display of cutting-edge technology — something it continues to do more than a century later.
From there, New York grew into a city where streets were lined with sparkling showrooms, where advertisements were developed promoting the car as a sexy status symbol, and where automobiles were sold to the rest of the country for many years.
In addition to showing how New York influenced the image of the car, the exhibit displays how the automobile shaped the infrastructure of the city itself.
"The big problem in Manhattan at the turn of the last century was that the grid for the streets was developed in the 19th century, so it wasn't made for cars," Albrecht said.
"All the infrastructure in Manhattan, like the bridges and tunnels we live with today, was built for the car."
"Cars, Culture, and the City" uses historical photographs, design drawings, model cars and video clips to elucidate this century-long relationship that may surprise most city-dwellers.
The show opens on Thursday at MCNY, 1220 Fifth Ave. at East 103rd Street, and runs through Aug. 1.
