“Eternal Vigilance is the Price of Liberty”:
Irving Berlin in Chinatown
By Samuel Backer
Few individuals are more closely associated with the development of 20th century American music than lyricist and songwriter Irving Berlin. From the early 1910s, when he was first launched into the stratosphere by era-defining pieces like “Alexander’s Ragtime Band,” until the late 1950s, when his success finally dried up, Berlin remained at the forefront of the nation’s burgeoning music industry.
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The Show that Saved the Amphitheatre
By Daniela Sheinin
On a summer evening in June 1945, 200 performers took to the aquatic stage at the former New York State Pavilion at Flushing Meadow Park. Spread throughout the 8,500 seats at the northern tip of Meadow Lake, spectators watched swimmers and a choreographed “water ballet” fill the pool, while divers sprung from the diving towers at each end.
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Flash: The Making of Weegee the Famous
Christopher Bonanos Interviewed by Robert W. Snyder
In the middle of the 20th century, a newspaper photographer who went by the name of Weegee took memorable pictures of New York City’s street life that appeared everywhere from tabloid newspapers to seminars on the history of photography.
Read MoreIsland Gospel: Pentecostal Music and Identity in Jamaica and the United States
Review by Ray Allen
Writing about musical performance during the time of COVID-19 gives me pause, as it does, no doubt, for all of us who revel in live music. Whether we choose to raise our voices in praise of the deities or to drum and dance to the most sensual rhythms, the act of communal music making is, at its core, a celebration of our deepest humanity. Michael Butler’s Island Gospel is a keen reminder of this reality, and leaves us longing for the day when we can again gather in places of worship, dance halls, clubs, concert venues, and street fetes for the simple joy of making music together.
Read MoreThere Went New York; or What Is New York?
Reviewed by Mason B. Williams
New York is layered with ghosts. “It carries on its lapel,” E.B. White wrote, “the unexpungeable odor of the long past, so that no matter where you sit in New York you feel the vibrations of great times and tall deeds, of queer people and events and undertakings.” Holed up in the Algonquin Hotel, White compiled a brief compendium: “I am twenty-two blocks from where Rudolph Valentino lay in state, eight blocks from where Nathan Hale was executed, … thirty-four blocks from the street Willa Cather lived in when she came to New York to write books about Nebraska … (I could continue this list indefinitely); and for that matter I am probably occupying the very room that any number of exalted and somewise memorable characters sat in, some of them on hot, breathless afternoons, lonely and private and full of their own senses of emanations from without.”
Read MoreMerchandising Modernism:
New York City Department Stores in the 1920s
By Donald Albrecht and Thomas Mellins
America’s nearly two-century love affair with the department store has cooled dramatically in recent decades. E-commerce is the much-blamed culprit, but there have been other factors at play. As cities regained allure following the financial crisis of 2008, particularly for young professionals and well-heeled foreigners, suburban shopping malls anchored by department stores withered. Once the leading incubators of luxury brands and purveyors of their merchandise, department stores were forced to compete for shoppers with those very brands’ own freestanding boutiques as well as with lower-priced outlet stores.
Read MoreThe End of the Downtown Scene
Jeffrey Patrick Colgan and Jeffrey Escoffier
Late in 1978, Peter McGough arrived in New York City, just when it was its most “dirty and dangerous.” He was 20 years old and had grown up in Syracuse. He came to attend the Fashion Institute of Technology but soon dropped out. He spent his tuition going to clubs like the Ninth Circle and Studio 54, drinking, taking drugs, and hanging out at the Chelsea Hotel with Village denizens like Cookie Mueller, the writer and John Waters actress, and fashion designer Michael Kors, a former classmate at FIT. For a while he made money doing odd jobs, sketching for fashion magazines, working at vintage shops, and eventually selling drink tickets at Danceteria. When he first became acquainted with the fledgling artist David McDermott, his friends warned him that McDermott was crazy.
Read MoreVisualizing New York City by the Numbers: An Interview with Kubi Ackerman
Interviewed by Hannah Diamond
Today on Gotham, Hannah Diamond interviews Kubi Ackerman, guest curator of Who We Are: Visualizing NYC by the Numbers, a special exhibition now on view and available online at the Museum of the City of New York. Who We Are examines the role data plays in shaping and reflecting the city around us. The exhibition examines New York City’s own history with the census and features works by contemporary artists and designers that illuminate our urban environment and our own identities.
Read More"Imagination Aided by the Painter's Brush": William Ranney and the Creation of the Purchase of Manhattan, 1844–1909
By Stephen McErleane
“Twenty-four bucks worth of beads and trinkets. This whole island.” One can easily imagine this remark from any of the more than 1,000,000 parade spectators on Fifth Avenue as they watched the “Purchase of Manhattan Island” float go by in the 1909 Hudson-Fulton Celebration. The fifteenth in a procession of fifty-four historical floats depicting notable events, persons, and places in the history of the Hudson River region, the thriftily constructed display of paper-mâché and painted canvas portrayed the legendary 1626 transaction in which the Dutch allegedly purchased the island for the paltry sum of twenty-four dollars.
Although it is now a fundamental piece of the city’s earliest history, it was not until 217 years after the event that New Yorkers first learned of the transaction. The story surfaced in 1844 and filled a void in a city largely ignorant of its earliest history, a city whose Dutch origins had, as Washington Irving wrote, left it with “an antiquity… extending back into the regions of doubt and fable.” Based on a single sentence in a contemporaneous letter reporting the news of the purchase, the story’s lack of detail and frequent retelling encouraged imaginative leaps. In the decades that followed the letter’s discovery, historians, artists, and others—who could now reach a larger audience due to a media revolution—obliged.
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