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.
In Walking East Harlem: A Neighborhood Experience, published by Rutgers University Press, historian Christopher Bell introduces readers and walkers to places and people. Organized around three tours, Walking East Harlem takes in churches, mosques, and synagogues; old theaters and new murals; the homes of artists and activists; and the recent pressures of gentrification.
“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.
These women’s prisons believed there were only three legitimate jobs a woman could have: wife, maid, or nursemaid. For any of those jobs, a woman needed to be properly feminine (in the eyes of white Victorians). Any woman deemed not feminine enough (too masculine, too sexual, too willful, too Black, etc.) would inevitably end up unmarried and out of work, at which point she would become a prostitute. For this reason, reformers spent the late 1800s and the early 1900s developing a system of “women’s justice” that targeted women at younger ages and for smaller offenses, in order to get them into prisons where they would be forcibly feminized. As the annual report of the first women’s prison in America put it in 1875, their job was “to take these [women] and so remold, reconstruct and train them, as to be fitted to occupy the position assigned them by God, viz., wives, mothers, and educators of children” — a sentiment not far off from that expressed in a report on prostitution and the Women’s Court put together for Mayor LaGuardia in 1934, which stated that the best way to reform arrested women was “wholesome marriage and the responsibility for children.”
In Brooklyn Heights, Private Schools Won So Integration Lost
By Rebecca Zimmerman
Public and private schools’ histories have often been told separately. By including private schools in the story of the attempted integration of Brooklyn Heights, we can better understand how they came to take on so much power. Furthermore, private schools are an underexplored actor within this tumultuous moment in New York City’s schools. With the added pressures of the 1964 school boycott and 1968 teacher strike, private schools got a unique boost from parents who gave up on public schooling. Those parents charted a course that continues to this day, with Brooklyn Heights private schools growing in both campus size and enrollment numbers over the second half of the twentieth century. This story also partly explains why New York’s public schools remain among the most segregated today.
At the end of the American Revolution, even as slavery was on the decline in places like Philadelphia, Boston, and neighboring Manhattan, slavery’s numbers strengthened in Brooklyn. And that traumatic history is intricately tied to the land. The economy in Kings County was still largely agricultural, and so it was the labor of enslaved people of African descent who made this land a capitalist possibility. Simply put, there would be no Brooklyn without the labor of unfree Brooklynites. That history deserves to be honored; we owe Black Brooklynites a debt today as New Yorkers. In addition, the idea of Brooklyn that we know today — a brand in its own right, with its own attitude and its own entrepreneurial spirit — all of that is deeply embedded in the history of its free Black communities.
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.
In the city of New York from the 1930s to the 1990s, Irish attorney Paul O’Dwyer was a fierce and enduring presence in courtrooms, on picket lines, and in contests for elected office. He was forever the advocate of the downtrodden and marginalized, fighting not only for Irish Catholics in Northern Ireland but for workers, radicals, Jews, and African Americans and against the Vietnam War.
The Battle For Gay Rights In New York City – a Conversation With Stephen Petrus
Stephen Petrus, interviewed by Adam Kocurek
Adam Kocurek interviews Dr. Stephen Petrus about his new project, a virtual exhibition titled The Battle for Intro. 2: The New York City Gay Rights Bill, 1971 – 1986. Petrus is the Curator, as well as the Director of Public History Programs, at the LaGuardia and Wagner Archives. This exhibition dives into the story of New York City’s Gay Rights Bill, a local law known as Intro. 2 in the City Council. This was a collaborative project, with faculty and undergraduate students at LaGuardia Community College compiling sources, conducting and recording oral history interviews, and chronicling the many key individuals and moments leading up to the passage of the Gay Rights Bill.
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.
