Sight and Memory at the Crossroads in Manhattan
By Marjorie N. Feld
First, as with so many things, the Manhattan course needed a name. In 2017, the Glavin Office of Multicultural and International Education asked me to teach Babson College’s first undergraduate “elective away,” an in-depth history of Manhattan to be taught in Manhattan. As with students on campuses across the country, Babson students of all backgrounds are increasingly accessing electives abroad; this was a full-credit course within U.S. Borders—away and not abroad—and it needed a name.
I had researched the city as a social historian for decades, and I was so excited to use the city itself as a text that I found the name choice difficult. While my own research highlighted the centrality of immigration to Manhattan history, the course began its reach across the centuries, from the 17th to the 21st, with the acknowledgment that a thriving community lived on Manhattan long before immigrants ever arrived. The course would focus on encounters among groups of diverse identity categories—people of all genders, sexualities, points of origin, classes, abilities, and races—and so I chose a name that focused on points of contact: Crossroads Manhattan. The course themes were listed in the description for enrollment: New York’s indigenous history/Lenape history; slavery and freedom in New York City; African American liberation, history and culture; LGBTQIA liberation, history, and culture; immigration and migration.
In our pre-departure classes, students’ group presentations on neighborhoods we would visit (Washington Heights, Harlem, Chinatown, Greenwich Village, and the Lower East Side) provided a quick immersion into New York City history. Each group assembled a timeline and slides along with an academic bibliography. Students assigned to Washington Heights, for example, talked about Jewish refugees, the history of immigration from the Dominican Republic, the Manhattan Times Newspaper, and the Quisqueya en el Hudson festival. Presentation topics also included the history of sites we were to visit, such as the Museum of Chinese in America and the LGBT Center, and people whose footsteps we would be tracing, like Lorraine Hansberry and Marcus Garvey. For most, this was their first time learning about events such as the Stonewall Uprising and the Young Lords’ takeover of the Statue of Liberty in 1977 for Puerto Rican Independence.
Slowly, a Manhattan timeline took shape. For Manhattan before European contact, we made use of landscape ecologist Eric Sanderson’s Ted Talk and the Wildlife Conservation Society’s Welikia Map (welikia means “my good home” in Lenape), where we chose neighborhoods, even streets, and juxtaposed images from 1609 with images from today. We also read Dr. Joanne Barker, “Territory as Analytic: The Dispossession of Lenapehoking and the Subprime Crisis,” which analyzes the invisibility of indigenous people in scholarship about the 2008 financial crisis and the Occupy Movement. From the Lenape’s Manna-hatta, we moved to Dutch and British colonization, the building of Wall Street and the beginning of slavery. We used Dr. Thelma Foote’s Black and White Manhattan: The History of Racial Formation in Colonial New York City—its text and its cover art. We studied the 1863 Draft Riots, the Chinese Exclusion Act, migration to the Village and to Harlem, the making of Chinatown. Because Ellis Island was a course site, we used sections of Dr. Erica Rand’s Ellis Island Snow Globe to talk about the policing of both racial and gender norms in border crossing. Dr. George Chauncey’s Gay New York proved essential to learning about LGBT life in Manhattan, as was the work of Dr. John Kuo Wei Tchen in learning about Chinese immigration. For amazing early footage of Harlem and the revolutionary nature of Marcus Garvey’s United Negro Improvement Association, I relied on the Institute of the Black World 21st Century documentary The Story of Marcus Garvey. After we discussed the 1970s financial crisis, we studied the role of activists in the Village—and in the LGBT Center in particular—during the AIDS crisis. Students watched David France’s superb documentary, How to Survive a Plague.
Especially in their presentations, students saw the interplay of broader forces—colonialism, white supremacy, global capitalism, immigration, deindustrialization and gentrification—at work in the lives of Manhattan’s residents. Perhaps above all, we talked about movement—of time, of people, of resources. All of this prepared us for our own movement, to Manhattan.
On our first evening on the island, we met Karen Mosko from the Nalahii (Munsee-Delaware) Nation. Mosko lives in Ontario, Canada and regularly teaches classes in Lunaape, the language of the Lenape nation, at the Endangered Language Alliance in New York. Mosko began with her own family history, which spans twentieth and twenty-first-century government campaigns to annihilate indigenous culture. For three generations, the women in Mosko’s family have resisted by teaching this culture. In learning Lunaape words and conjugations with Mosko, students understood the politics of memory and resistance.
On day two, we traveled south to Battery Park to hop on a ferry to Ellis Island. Before entering the exhibits, we sat on the grass and together read portions of Dr. Diana diZerega Wall and Dr. Anne-Marie Cantwell’s Touring Gotham’s Archaeological Past. The first “tour” provides a history of the Harbor Islands, including information about artifacts unearthed when workers renovated Ellis Island in the 1980s. We learned that workers constructed Ellis Island’s main building on top of an indigenous site. After we toured the exhibits about immigration, then, a few of us sought out the plaque honoring the Native people who had lived here before European conquest; the plaque was dedicated when leaders from the Delaware Nation came for the spiritual ceremony in memory and honor of their ancestors in 1986. We asked park rangers, and even after receiving precise guidance were disheartened to find only a small plaque on the ground, hidden by dirt and trees. This was not the last time we were reminded how physical historical invisibility reinforces colonialist ways of thinking.
Once back on Manhattan, we visited the Irish Hunger Memorial. Several of the students on the course worked in finance jobs nearby but had never seen the Memorial. Its beauty—modeled on the topography of Ireland—took us all by surprise. The many quotes about hunger that adorn the Memorial’s structure prompted interesting conversations about memory, about universalizing one group’s particular historical experience to create awareness of contemporary problems.
The next day began with what was, for many of us, the most powerful part of our time together: a Black Gotham Tour, followed by a visit to the African Burial Ground National Monument and its Visitor Center. The Black Gotham Tour provides information about the 17th century Land of the Blacks, the community of Free Black people that existed during Dutch and British conquests of the Island. The brilliance of this tour—which follows evidence, but which has not a single public historical marker on which to rely—lies in its firm historical grounding and also in its invitation to imagine what liberation and oppression looked like to those living in that community. The Burial Ground and Visitor Center also invite students to imagine. In fact, I would go further: these sacred spaces pushed us to acknowledge dehumanization and degradation, both past and present. One of the most difficult conversations we had was about how the City planned to continue building on the site of the African Burial Ground in the 1990s even after this graveyard, containing perhaps over 20,000 enslaved and free Black people (the largest in the country), was discovered. Only after protests—some at the Schomburg, where we spent time later—did City officials agree to respect and memorialize these people’s lives.
That same afternoon, at the Museum of Chinese in America, students made excellent historical connections about the continuous history of white supremacy on Manhattan. We talked about entrepreneurship as a response to exclusion and prejudice, and, too, about how it can contribute to community empowerment. MOCA was also a good space in which to think about the impact of 9/11 on different communities. Students had already begun to broach the topic of gentrification: one of the students’ favorite Instagram sites connected to the course was the Wing on Wo Project, a community-based initiative based in Chinatown’s oldest continually-run family business. Wing on Wo alerted us to the importance of keeping communities together and living in dignity as key to empowerment and to resisting gentrification. Following the suggestion of MOCA’s Molly Gibson, we concluded the day by reading Frances Chung’s poetry in the MOCA classroom. Chung’s evocative, deeply humane poems struck just the right note: we had spent the day reckoning with difficult historical encounters; we ended the day thinking about strong communal and individual spirits.
We dedicated the following day entirely to Harlem’s history, as we continued to talk about and see, first hand, gentrification, and struggles for liberation. Dr. Brian Jones, Associate Director of Education at The Schomburg Center For Research in Black Culture, introduced the Schomburg as “talking back to gentrification.” His narrative of the Center’s founding accompanied his tour of the Cosmogram and Langston Hughes’s poem, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers.” Dr. Jones conveyed the importance of communities’ documenting their own histories so as to have agency over their own lives. Students then accessed items from the Schomburg’s tremendous archive: menus from Harlem restaurants across the years; materials from Marcus Garvey’s United Negro Improvement Association; and finally, from the collection of performer and gay rights activist Storḿé DeLarveríé, we saw awards and performance advertisements. DeLarverie’s materials, in particular, helped us begin a conversation about intersectionality that we continued throughout the rest of the trip.
On the Lower East Side, our next destination, I felt something akin to a home-court advantage. My research on New York City began in the 1990s with a study of Lillian Wald and her Henry Street Settlement. Katie Vogel, the Settlement’s public historian, took us on a tour of the House, founded in 1893, and of the history exhibit about the House’s role in Progressive Era reform campaigns—for woman suffrage, workers’ rights, and public playgrounds, to name just a few. (Full disclosure: I served as a historical consultant for this exhibit). While there, we took note of the Settlement’s responses to crises over the decades, from AIDS and other public health crises to Hurricane Sandy and other disasters tied to climate change. Students also alerted me to something that I had not previously seen: that Henry Street was thus far the only site on our tour that had, at its entrance, a plaque acknowledging that the land on which it stood had been stolen from Native People.
After a Tenement Museum tour across the 20th century, we took a look at today’s Lower East Side activism at the collectively-owned radical Bluestockings bookstore. The co-operative store offered students a business model they likely do not frequently encounter. Each evening, the Bookstore offers its space to community social justice organizations free of charge. LGBT+ rights, immigrant rights, workers’ rights, disability rights: all of these campaigns we saw reflected in the store—in the book titles, and also in the commitments of Matilda Sabal and Sabal’s fellow collective members.
Day five we spent in Greenwich Village thinking a great deal about social justice. At the LGBT Community Center, we were fortunate to meet and tour with Robert Woodworth, one of the founders of the Center. He offered us a fascinating history of the building, the first in New York City to have “gay” on its deed. Woodworth spoke to us while we sat in the Center’s main auditorium, where so many of the meetings about the AIDS crisis, captured in France’s film, took place. The Center’s fearless and talented archivist, Caitlin McCarthy, showed us historical items from Pride Parades across the decades. She spoke with students about the radical nature of a Gay Archive, about the founding of ACT UP and other organizations. With McCarthy, we talked about the concerted efforts to include people of color in LBGT+ history and then challenged ourselves to think about how DeLarverie or DeLarverie’s family might have decided to place all historical artifacts and papers in an archive dedicated to Black history or to LGBT+ history. Meditating on all we had encountered, we walked across the Village to the New York City AIDS Memorial. And we ended the day’s tour at Big Gay Ice Cream, where we talked again about the power of community entrepreneurship.
On our last full day, we traveled all the way up the island for a vigorous tour with Professor Rob Snyder, author of Crossing Broadway: Washington Heights and the Promise of New York City. Snyder spoke to us about micro-geography, the geography of a block in any given region or area. He highlighted stories in which community members fought for autonomy and decent qualities of life. We had begun our own movement on the Island with a ferry ride from its southern-most tip; our final trip with Prof. Snyder took us to the northern-most part of Manhattan, to Fort Tryon’s beautiful views and its compelling illustration of the need for green public places.
By all accounts (including students’ anonymous surveys), the course was a success. I was fortunate to have a diverse set of open-minded students—a few from New York, many from other East Coast US cities, as well as China, Russia, and Colombia—who felt comfortable walking and talking, sometimes about difficult historical topics. The learning transformed how they thought about entrepreneurship, about memory and memorialization. And certainly, I cannot think about Manhattan in the same way now that I have walked its length with these students.
Though of course there were pieces of Manhattan history missing in my course, and though I hope for continuous feedback (on the part of others) and improvement (on my part), I had no regrets when the course ended. Indeed, I am thinking back now to our final class meeting on a beautiful May day in Central Park. I chose a location near Seneca Village, an early nineteenth-century community of mostly Free Black and Irish people that was razed to build Central Park. At our final meeting, the park was full of New Yorkers jogging, biking, walking and playing, and together the class talked about the histories we see and do not see, the populations with and without access to “public” places across the history of New York City. As I sat down to write this essay, a New York Times story flashed across my phone: the City will commission a sculpture memorializing Seneca Village. The quote in the story is from Dr. Michelle Commander, a curator at the Schomburg. I feel deeply gratified to have offered students an experiential course about the ever-shifting and bending currents of history, about whose lives and contributions we respect and remember. Here’s hoping that those currents continue to bend towards justice.
Marjorie N. Feld is professor of history at Babson College in Massachusetts, USA, where she teaches courses on U.S. social, gender, and labor history. She is the author of Lillian Wald: A Biography and Nations Divided: American Jews and the Struggle over Apartheid. This was her first experience using Washington Square Park as a classroom, and she cannot wait to do it again next year.