The walking tours were the basis for my photography, and my photographs seeded the later interviews I did with my tour guides. Each time someone took me on a tour, I would make note of the everyday places they’d taken me to — and then over the following weeks I would return to each place, remembering the story my tour guide had told me and making a photograph in response to that story. I thought about how those stories might be embedded in a photograph of a place. As a photographer, I like to be still in a place, watch it happen around me and then make a photograph. In some ways, my photography of cities and places is like a still life — though not of grapes on a table. I’m interested in stillness and careful looking —framing, light, and time are the materials of any photograph.
This short essay pairs two poets who relied in their time on the materials of New York City — its brick and mortar, its shatterable glass — in order to test the promise that poetry matters. Naomi Replansky (1918-2023) and June Jordan (1936-2002) each found they could get poems to admit their own possibilities and limitations as forms of action in the world by writing about what shelters New Yorkers, what they can and cannot see through, what goes up in flames or breaks apart, and what endures. Readers of Gotham may be interested in the way this infrastructural imagery draws language back, again and again, to the particularities of New York history. For Replansky and Jordan, poetry’s most salient social meanings emerge from awareness of the city as an inexorably unfinished construction, something poets and their readers — neighbors, whatever their address — must build together.
In Walking East Harlem: A Neighborhood Experience, published by Rutgers University Press, historian Christopher Bell introduces readers and walkers to places and people. Organized around three tours, Walking East Harlem takes in churches, mosques, and synagogues; old theaters and new murals; the homes of artists and activists; and the recent pressures of gentrification.
By 1929, Black lady lovers were becoming so visible in Harlem that the powerful and popular pastor of the Abyssinian Baptist Church, Adam Clayton Powell Sr., delivered one of the first known sermons that singled out the harm caused by queer women. The New York Age reported he declared, “homo-sexuality and sex perversion among women” has “grown into one of the most horrible debasing, alarming and damning vices of present day civilization.” Powell “asserted that it is not only prevalent to an unbelievable degree but that it is increasing day by day.” This shows the community pushback that accompanied the increasing awareness of Black women in Harlem who sought relationships with other women.
Two Hundred Fifty years of Organ-Building in the City, Part II: 1850 to 1930: New York Becomes a City of Organs
By Bynum Petty
In 1800 [...] the population of New York City was 60,515, consisting of many tradesmen and shopkeepers who lived over their places of business with their families (still true today for some organ builders residing over their workshops). This population established about thirty churches, most of which had no organ — certainly a growth opportunity for the two or three resident organ-builders. Fifty years later, the city’s population had grown to more than 515,000 and more than 250 houses of worship had been erected; of these, about six Reform Synagogues had pipe organs. Rightly assumed, the greatest growth in pipe organ building was in Christian places of worship, both Catholic and Protestant; but proportionally, growth was just as strong in Jewish houses of worship.
“They’re Tearing Down the Hippodrome”: A History of the Theater’s Demolition
By Sunny Stalter-Pace
Discourse about the Hippodrome follows the pattern observed by Max Page, where real estate development shapes not only the city’s landscape but its “written and displayed history” as well. Hippodrome memorials took place in ephemeral media: newspapers, magazines, radio broadcasts. As they marked the loss of the built environment, these memorials tried to preserve some of the utopian impulses associated with it.
Preserving a Lost Chapter of NYC Queer History Via Club Flyers: An Interview with David Kennerley
Interviewed By Ken Lustbader
What were meant to be disposable ads are now compelling pieces of ephemera that you can’t find in guidebooks or oral histories. In the book, we’ve mapped these locations, which create a cultural and geographic landscape of queer nightlife in the ‘90s. For me, personally and as a Manhattan resident, it’s been fascinating to revisit these spots to see their current incarnations. Some buildings survive, which has rekindled my emotional connection to those places. That speaks to the power of place and the value of LGBTQ history.
In 1849, riots, including theater riots, were nothing new in New York, and the Astor Place tragedy came in an era of profound social unrest in New York. But the city’s militaristic response—opening fire on civilians—was something new, and armed violence, or the threat of it, was used again and again in the wake of Astor Place […]
Astor Place, though barely five hundred feet long, is a hectic street of cafes and stores, with the bustling Astor Place subway station as the centerpiece and Cooper Union at its eastern end. But 175 years ago this month, the state militia confronted an angry mob on Astor Place and blood was spilled. It was one of the deadliest riots in New York’s history. How did it happen, and why did it happen there?
New York’s Forgotten Pioneers: The National Basketball Association’s first all-Black Team
By Adam Criblez
In 1979, the New York Knicks — a storied organization with roots dating to the creation of the National Basketball Association (NBA) decades earlier — became the first franchise to field an all-Black NBA team. And, at least at first, almost no one seemed to notice.
