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.
Read MoreMaking 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.
Read MoreSaving 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…
Read More(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.
Read MoreBefore 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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