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.
“this city gets in one’s blood stream with the invisibility of a lover”: City-Making as Queer Resistance in New York, 1950-2020
By Davy Knittle
Despite the importance of urban systems to how Lorde characterizes power and inequality, she is not thought of as an urbanist writer. But what becomes possible when we think of Lorde as such is a new approach to telling the familiar history of spatial and political change after urban renewal. As with many queer and trans writers active from the early moments of urban renewal to the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, Lorde uses city-making tools to provide new ways of relating to the city. Importantly, these queer and trans urbanist writers — from the New York School poet James Schuyler to the contemporary trans novelist Zeyn Joukhadar — propose uses, designs, plans, and policies for urban spaces and environments that are focused on facilitating the survival of marginalized people. […] Their work makes evident how, after urban renewal, a cultural imaginary of the single-family home came to define heteronormativity as a relationship to housing as well as to race, gender, and sexuality. It becomes necessary, then, to account for how built environments and normative ideas of race, gender, and sexuality in the U.S. have been co-constituted since the end of World War II in order to more fully tell both queer and trans history and the history of urban redevelopment in New York City.
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.
“The Same Slow Pace”: Nelson Rockefeller and Resistance to Open Housing in New York
By Marsha E. Barrett
Despite his continued interest in housing policy and urban renewal programs, integration proved to be a stumbling block that Rockefeller could not overcome. It was an especially difficult issue for Rockefeller because he relied heavily on suburban voters who, as the 1960s progressed, became more organized and vocal in their opposition to housing integration and state efforts to promote equality. Rather than bring diverse New Yorkers together, issues such as housing demonstrated the limitations of Rockefeller’s original approach to coalition building and a fundamental weakness to his brand of pro-government moderate Republicanism.
Spectacular Ruins: Conservation and Boosterism in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park
By Melissa Zavala
On either side of debates over development and progress is the need to protect public health and open space belonging to us all equally. The borough of Queens faces a future of sinking developments just a short walk from each other. The funding and political will to preserve a prized structure have been missing for over half a century despite public interest. Now, the city considers losing 65 acres of parkland to a capitalist venture as its best option for preservation, especially as a response to flooding and rising temperatures, as has happened along the waterfront in Long Island City. It does not matter that LaGuardia Airport and nearby Arthur Ashe Stadium are also sinking or that a casino can very well mean more tumbling ruins. Will the city soon inherit another shrine to consumption in need of rescue from the fate of a neighboring sinking relic, if not in Flushing, then near the airport or elsewhere? Which world of tomorrow is worth preserving? This is an ongoing challenge facing the city.
How the Catholic Church Drove Suburban Expansion Within and Outside New York City
By Stephen M. Koeth, C.S.C.
Often overlooked, therefore, is the role that Catholic leaders, associations, and media played in spurring suburbanization, shaping the pattern of suburban development, and establishing the necessary infrastructure to sustain suburban communities. The Catholic bishops of metropolitan New York cooperated with urban planners and developers in order to maximize the Church’s real estate holdings and to anticipate where the Church would need to expand in order to serve its suburbanizing flock. They also moved financial resources from well-established urban parishes to newly established suburban parishes and oversaw massive building campaigns in suburban areas.
Frances Goldin and the Moses Threat to Cooper Square
By Katie Heiserman
Less remembered than her West Village counterpart Jane Jacobs, Frances Goldin deserves attention and further study as a model of both forceful and joyful neighborhood organizing. An activist with a distinctive style, she brought the community together and sustained engagement over many years. In her 2014 oral history interview with Village Preservation, Goldin highlighted the egalitarian, community-centered approach at the core of her work with CSC: “Fifty-nine years ago, dues were a dollar a year, and today, dues are a dollar a year.”
An Excerpt from Making Long Island: A History of Growth and the American Dream
By Lawrence R. Samuel
Beginning in the Roaring Twenties, Wall Street money looked eastward to generate wealth from a burgeoning land boom. After the Great Depression and World War II, Long Island—Nassau and Suffolk Counties—emerged as the site of the quintessential postwar American suburb, Levittown. Levittown and its spinoff suburban communities served as a primary symbol of the American dream through affordable home ownership for the predominantly White middle class, propelling the national mythology steeped in success, financial security, upward mobility, and consumerism. Starting in the 1960s, however, the dream began to dissolve, as the postwar economic engine ran out of steam and Long Island became as much urban as suburban. Over the course of these decades, the island evolved over the decades and largely detached itself from New York City to become a self-sustaining entity with its own challenges, exclusions and triumphs.
Kazan’s efforts, combined with the power of the city’s labor movement and astute political alliance making, led to the building of 40,000 homes for working class New Yorkers. At a time when The Housing Question has rarely been more pressing than since Frederick Engels first raised it in 1872, recognising Kazan’s legacy is important. He successfully developed a model that worked: an alternative to the brutality of the housing market that, despite many challenges, has endured.
Placemaker and Displacer: How Transit Shaped New York
By Polly Desjarlais
Before 1950, a vibrant multi-ethnic, residential neighborhood known as Little Syria existed at the very bottom of Manhattan. A concentration of immigrants from Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Palestine (countries collectively known then as Greater Syria) settled on Lower Washington Street beginning in the 1880s… As in the case of Chinatown, the transit connections between Little Syria and Brooklyn became instrumental in the community’s transplantation and survival… nearly the whole neighborhood was razed in the 1940s to make way for the construction of the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel (Hugh L. Carey Tunnel). . . In the case of Little Syria, the city’s transportation demands both displaced people and provided a means of resettlement in other parts of the city.
