ABSTRACT
In March 1630, on board the Arbella and heading for New England, Governor John Winthrop delivered a sermon in which he told his fellow Puritans that “we must consider that we shall be a city upon a hill.” Utopia is almost always envisioned as a city, and, from a certain point of view, all cities, whether as old as Copenhagen or as new as New York, may be interpreted as parcels of Utopia. At first glance a comparison between Copenhagen and New York may seem far-fetched, but starting from this shared utopian dimension it is possible to point out some important similarities underlying their obvious differences. In the mid-nineteenth century they shared a particularly entertaining and non-puritan version of this urban utopia and an entrepreneurial Dane, Georg Carstensen, became a key figure in the development of both cities, in Copenhagen as the founder of the Tivoli Gardens (1843) and in New York as one of the two architects behind the Crystal Palace of “the Great Exhibition” of 1853. In the following, I shall explore some of the forms and functions of urban entertainment in Copenhagen and New York around 1850. But first, a few general remarks on the idea of the city as a utopia.
