Women Were a Force Behind New York Progressive Reform
By Bruce W. Dearstyne
Several of the women progressive leaders in New York City knew and collaborated with each other and worked on more than one reform. New York City had a community of women leaders and many of the ideas that came to fruition in New York in the Progressive Era, and at the national level, originated there. Some women honed their leadership skills in New York before later using them on a national level.
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.
“Not only distressing but truly alarming”: New York City and the Embargo of 1807
By Harvey Strum
Regardless of these efforts, the embargo led to a deteriorating economy in the city. During the winter of 1808-09, “hundreds of…honest…and industrious citizens,” of New York City struggled “under the weight “of poverty and distress” produced by the embargo. In 1807, creditors imprisoned 298 people for debt; by 1808 that number had jumped to 1,317. By mid-February 1808, over 5,000 persons found shelter in the Alms House or received daily rations from it. More than a thousand laborers left the city seeking employment in the country, with hundreds of unemployed seamen similarly departing. On January 8th, in a truly radical response to their situation, 150 sailors turned their backs on their nation and accepted passage on British vessels headed for Halifax, Nova Scotia in search of employment in the British merchant marine. All considered, for New York the embargo ranked with the Great Depression as an economic nightmare that caused untold suffering on thousands of its inhabitants unable to find employment and dependent on public charity for subsistence.
Civil War-Era Black New York and Historical Memory: Locating the Eighth Ward
By Marquis Taylor
Researching Manhattan’s Eighth Ward presented an exciting opportunity to learn about a neighborhood deeply tied to Civil War-era Black New York — yet it also posed challenges regarding archival constraints. Newspaper articles from the mainstream white press, records produced by the city’s burgeoning municipal government, and reports from reformers and their institutions comprise the dominant archive of Lower Manhattan’s Eighth Ward, which is fragmented and tainted with racist ideology. Also, with much of the 19th-century built environment of present-day SoHo gone, researchers and historians alike are forced to not only confront these limitations but construct a counter-archive. Only through engagement with the Black press, particularly The Weekly Anglo-African (later known as The Anglo-African), do critical aspects of the Black New York of Joseph and Rachel Moore’s era become more legible.
Going to Market: Wallabout Market and the Vanished Landscapes of Food Distribution in New York City
By Malka Simon
Wallabout Market no longer exists. Its facilities were bulldozed by the Navy Yard in 1941 to make more space for wartime production, and Brooklyn’s wholesale operations moved to the Terminal Market in Canarsie. But Wallabout’s rise and fall still has much to teach us about the rhythms of the city and the urban patterns that unfold in response to even the most ephemeral of commodities.
Working Against Type: Typographical Union No. 6 and the Battle Over Women’s Night Work
By R.B. Tiven
After the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, New York passed a law barring women from nighttime factory work. The definition of “factory” covered binderies and printing presses, including morning newspapers whose type was set overnight. As a result, bookbinders and the small number of women who worked as printers and proofreaders lost their prized night shifts, the shortest and best-paying positions. Two of the printers, Ada R. Wolff and Margaret Kerr-Firth, turned to their union to help salvage their jobs at the New York Times. Their advocacy triggered a fight that pitted the powerful New York Typographical Union against the New York State Federation of Labor, and generated bills vetoed by both Republican and Democratic governors. It also set the terms of a multi-decade dispute about who spoke for working-class women.
Mobilizing the Metropolis: An Interview with Philip Mark Plotch
By Robert W. Snyder
Mobilizing the Metropolis closely charts the evolution of the Port Authority as it went from improving rail freight around New York Harbor to building bridges and managing real estate. At the same time, the book explores the evolution of the authority’s internal culture in the face of actions by elected officials in New York and New Jersey that have reduced the agency’s autonomy and affected its operations. Mobilizing the Metropolis also extracts from the history of the Port Authority useful lessons about how organizations charged with solving governmental problems can win support and engage opposition.
An Excerpt from Born in Blood: Violence and the Making of America
By Scott Gac
The Great Strikes of 1877 are recognized as a significant example of forceful labor protest in the United States. But, if we only look at what the workers did, we miss the important role of the state and state-backed violence in controlling workers and supporting the growth of American industrial capitalism. And it is this revolution of industrial capitalism, a revolution of contracts, wages, and courts backed by federal, state, and local force, that workers resisted during the Great Strikes. The following excerpt from Born in Blood: Violence and the Making of America details how Social Darwinism helped buttress worker suppression in the post-Civil War era and how, in 1874, the brutal treatment of peaceful working-class protesters in New York City’s Tompkins Square Park foreshadowed the militant response to workers seen three years later in the Great Strikes.
Free from the Stain: New York’s Free Produce Stores
By Charline Jao
American proponents of free produce saw clearly the connection between commercial consumption and the institution of slavery, seeking to overthrow what Frances Harper called slavery’s “commercial throne.” Not only did they refuse to buy items that came from southern plantations, they also sought to create new networks of trade, labor, and production. Ruggles, for instance, did not only secure “free” butter from Goshen, New York for his customers, he also employed formerly enslaved men like Samuel Ringgold Ward and Isaiah Harper Ward. Advocates of free produce set out on expeditions to find alternatives to sugar, reached out to farmers and merchants, did speaking tours in England, and opened stores where they could proudly state – as Elizabeth Kent in Pennsylvania did – that they had “EVERYTHING FOR SALE EXCEPTS PRINCIPLES!!”
Grand Emporium, Mercantile Monster: The Antebellum South’s Love-Hate Affair with New York City
Review by Emily Holloway
In 1788… a mere 62 bales were shipped to Europe via New York, compared to 153,757 less than thirty years later (2)….Despite the lengthy and arduous journey, tourists, planters, and writers flocked to the city... During their visits, these elite southerners – many of whom owned cotton plantations -- were rubbing elbows with New York’s mercantile and financial leaders,… The close social ties that developed between these classes built on their intimate financial connections through cotton… southern writers remarked critically on the vast economic inequality on display throughout the rapidly growing city, a characteristic they frequently tied to the machinations of industrial capitalism. This critique was frequently deployed as a reaction to northern abolitionist sentiments, a false equivalence between the ravages of industrial “wage slavery” and the racist violence of plantation slavery.
