Exhibition at Museum of City of N.Y. focuses on cars and city

In a 2003 television advertisement being shown in a loop with other commercials at the exhibition "Cars, Culture and the City," a black Lamborghini curls through the streets of New York, inspiring fantasies in anyone lucky enough to gaze at its sleek body and slick maneuvers.

The video could also be a portrayal of the car's fantasies about the perfect city: empty rain-washed streets, roads curving into urban canyons, majestic nocturnal geometry. It is as if New York were this creature's natural habitat. And when the car comes across traffic or crowds, it is more at home than those who get in its way; it is the master while everyone else are just spectators.

Anyone who has ever driven in the city unencumbered - during, say, a midsummer weekend morning - might identify with this fantasy. But as for the harsh reality, which this charming exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York also touches on, it involves more than just potholes and cryptic "No Parking" signs. It can be sampled at Park Circle, the southwest corner of Prospect Park in Brooklyn: an active traffic circle that has recently been turned into an obstacle course by new concrete islands and tight constraints that shunt cars into choked channels, almost as if rigidity and awkwardness were the punishing point, at least for drivers.

That isn't an unlikely speculation given some of the city's planning documents. And after all, could anything seem more intrusive for pedestrians and bicyclists than these exhaust-puffing, overpowered, metal-clad combustion engines clogging our streets? Wouldn't life be simpler in a city without cars?

The exhibition, which closes on Aug. 8, doesn't give a full enough picture of this controversy but it does reveal just how central the car has been to New York's evolution. New York, it suggests, as much as Detroit or Los Angeles, has been shaped by the automobile.

The show was organized by Donald Albrecht, the museum's curator of architecture and design, and a guest co-curator, Phil Patton, who writes about automobile design for The New York Times. The displays gather commercial ephemera and art, planning sketches and memorabilia, utopian and dystopian imaginings; the portrait is filled out in a generously illustrated catalog.

A 1952 Oldsmobile repair manual is displayed (with a rocket ship next to the engine on the cover) as is a 1923 photograph of a full-sized mockup of a cross section of the Holland Tunnel (one of the first tunnels designed for automobiles). A 1909 book, "Street Traffic Regulation," is by William Phelps Eno, who also we are told wrote the world's first city traffic code, for New York, in 1903 and is credited with the invention of the stop sign, the crosswalk, the one-way street and the taxi stand.

There are mementos from the 1939 and 1964 New York World's Fairs (both of which treated the automobile as a harbinger of innovative design and technological transformation). And there are videos made by a contemporary advocacy group imagining how some of the city's major thoroughfares might look if the recently created (and, frankly, artificial and bizarre) pedestrian mall in Times Square were to inspire the transformation of many New York streets into multi-use boulevards.

At any rate, the histories of the car and the city, the exhibition shows, are inseparable. In 1900, there were only 8,000 cars in the United States but 2,500 of them were owned by New Yorkers. The Sheepshead Bay Speedway, pictured here in a grand panoramic photograph from 1915, was only one of the city arenas used for car racing; a 1905 photo shows a race in front of City Hall. The nation's first road for high-speed cars, we learn, was the Long Island Motor Parkway, designed in 1908.

The nation's first course of study in automobile design was in New York City, in the 1890s. Before Detroit became the manufacturing center for the mass-market automobile, New York was the manufacturing center for luxury models. One of the most famous early manufacturers, Crane-Simplex, made a car owned by John D. Rockefeller; its literature proudly declared: "Made in New York."

By 1924, when cars had become more affordable, New York had about 800,000 on its roads.

In fact, it is impossible to separate the development of modern New York from the automobile's evolution. The city and the car were both expressions of the technological hopes of early modernism. They reflected a wide-ranging sense of possibility, in which speed, ease and power would seemingly become available to all.