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Posts in Nature & Environment
Spectacular Ruins: Conservation and Boosterism in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park

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.

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The Battle Nearer to Home: The Persistence of School Segregation in New York City

The Battle Nearer to Home: The Persistence of School Segregation in New York City

Review by Erika Kitzmiller

Despite its global reputation as a proudly diverse and progressive city, New York City public schools remain deeply segregated and inequitable. Bonastia covers two periods in which officials considered and local residents pushed for integration: from Brown v. Board (1954) to the fiscal crisis of the mid-1970s and then from the early 2010s to the present. He asserts that he chose these two periods because they were the only times in recent history when there was any hope of enacting and implementing policies and programs to advance integration and equity.

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Making Book on the Rez: A Hundred Years of Watershed Inquietude

Making Book on the Rez: A Hundred Years of Watershed Inquietude

Review by Gerard Koeppel

Lucy Sante’s Nineteen Reservoirs is an odd little book. “I would like simply to give an account of the human costs,” she concludes the Introduction, “an overview of the trade-offs, a summary of unintended consequences.”…Readers uninitiated in the history of New York’s water supply and watershed-dweller psychosis will find a useful if derivative primer.

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Saving the Bronx River: An Excerpt From South Bronx Rising: The Rise, Fall, and Resurrection of An American City

Saving the Bronx River: An Excerpt From South Bronx Rising: The Rise, Fall, and Resurrection of An American City

By Jill Jonnes

Until the 21st century, few residents of New York City, much less the South Bronx, even knew there was a Bronx River, the City’s only river.  And why would anyone know? For more than a century, the banks and flowing waters of the lower Bronx River had long been largely fenced-off and out of sight behind an almost-solid wall of riverfront factories, gargantuan scrap metal yards, sprawling warehouses, and parking lots (including, starting in 1967, the massive Hunts Point wholesale food market). The lower five miles of the twenty-three mile river below the New York Botanic Garden and Bronx Zoo served as an industrial dump and sewer, its few access points blocked by gigantic mounds of submerged cars, worn-out tires, less identifiable garbage, and rusting junk…

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Stephanie Azzarone, Heaven on the Hudson

(Podcast) Stephanie Azzarone, Heaven on the Hudson

Interviewed by Robert W. Snyder

On the west side of Manhattan, Riverside Park winds between the banks of the Hudson River and the elegant housing of Riverside Drive. In her new book Heaven on the Hudson: Mansions, Monuments, and Marvels of Riverside Park (Fordham UP, 2022), Stephanie Azzarone seeks to lift the park and its surroundings from the shadows of more famous places, like Fifth Avenue, Central Park, and Central Park West.

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Before Central Park

Before Central Park

Reviewed by Kara Murphy Schlichting

Before Central Park is Sara Cedar Miller’s fourth publication about New York City’s famous greensward. Miller is historian emerita and, since 1984, a photographer for the Central Park Conservancy. Before Central Park is distinctive in its combination of Miller’s photography, her expert understanding of the park’s geography and archeology, and her meticulous real estate history of parkland from the 17th through the 19th centuries.

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War Weary Nature: Environment, British Occupation, and the Winter of 1779-1780

War Weary Nature: Environment, British Occupation, and the Winter of 1779-1780

By Blake McGready

In December 1779, New Yorkers helplessly watched as their harbor froze solid and ice slowly strangled the proud entrepôt. In the late 18th century, New York City served as the principal destination for packet ships, offered a range of specialized services for the British military, and facilitated trade between the continental interior and Atlantic world. The loss of the city’s maritime and riverine networks, even temporarily, were disastrous. Ice floes appeared in the Hudson River early in the month. By December 22, the lawyer William Smith reported that ice had formed along the shoreline and had obstructed transportation between Manhattan and New Jersey.

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The Problem of Water in New York’s History

The Problem of Water in New York’s History

By Carolyn Eastman

New York’s water problem has been on my mind because in the evening after I arrived in the city on September 1, 2021 to start a fellowship at the New-York Historical Society, Hurricane Ida barreled through the region. The water was devastating. Dozens died in basement apartments or when they unwittingly drove their cars into flooded streets and got swept away by the rushing water. Media filled with video of torrents of water pouring into the subway and dramatic water rescues in New Jersey.

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