The Famous Lady Lovers: An Interview with Cookie Woolner
Interviewed By Katie Uva
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.
Thinking Black, Collecting Black: Schomburg’s Desiderata and the Radical World of Black Bibliophiles
By Laura E. Helton
In this circle, Schomburg also explored the concept of collectivity, engaging in a method he and Bruce each called the practice of “thinking black.” Subverting the narrow, stifling ways that the United States codified racial segregation, this method looked elsewhere—in both time and space—to harness the power of “thinking black” in diasporic and global terms. Schomburg saw the stakes of his project as at once mapping the contours of an explicitly Black modernity—embodied in objects like the earliest books printed in Africa, paintings by Black Renaissance artists, or the proceedings of free Black institutions in the Americas—and rethinking the writing of history more broadly.
Two-Hundred Fifty Years Of Organ-Building In the City: PART I — 18th-Century Imports and a Burgeoning 19th-Century Cottage Industry
By Bynum Petty
Thus, Henry Erben established himself as the greatest organ builder in the country, and with this instrument set new standards of construction and tonal quality by which all others were judged. Erben’s instruments simultaneously established New York City as the leading center of organ building, which it remained for the next nine decades.
The World of Dubrow's Cafeteria: An Interview with Marcia Bricker Halperin
By Robert W. Snyder
In the middle decades of the twentieth century in New York City, Dubrow’s cafeterias in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn and the garment district of Manhattan were places to get out of your apartment, have coffee with friends, or enjoy a hearty but affordable meal. They were grounded in the world of Jewish immigrants and their children, and they thrived in years when Flatbush and the Garment District each had a distinctly Jewish character. […] before Dubrow’s cafeterias were shuttered, Marcia Bricker Halperin captured their mood and their patrons in black and white photographs. These pictures, along with essays by the playwright Donald Margulies and the historian Deborah Dash Moore, constitute Marcia’s book Kibitz and Nosh: When We All Met at Dubrow’s Cafeteria, published by Cornell University Press and winner of a National Jewish Book Council prize for Food Writing and Cookbooks.
