Have you recently trekked to a farmers’ market for fresh produce? In this lockdown year, do you miss attending concerts at Carnegie Hall? A Broadway show? Have you enjoyed roaming through the romantic landscape of Central Park, or wandered the streets of the city’s historic districts? Do you go out of your way to experience the inspiring urban spaces of Grand Central Terminal? Are you invigorated when you head west to the Hudson River Park and marvel at the river’s recovery?
Down the Up Staircase: Three Generations of a Harlem Family
Bruce Haynes Interviewed by Tyesha Maddox
Down the Up Staircase: Three Generations of a Harlem Family tells the story of one Harlem family across three generations, connecting its journey to the historical and social forces that transformed Harlem over the past century. Bruce D. Haynes and Syma Solovitch capture the tides of change that pushed blacks forward through the twentieth century — the Great Migration, the Harlem Renaissance, the early civil rights victories, the Black Power and Black Arts movements--as well as the many forces that ravaged black communities, including Haynes's own. As an authority on race and urban communities, Haynes brings unique sociological insights to the American mobility saga and the tenuous nature of status and success among the black middle class.
New York: Where the Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get… Art?
Reviewed by Alexis Monroe
The class divisions inherent in the New York art world which Rachel Klein deftly identifies in her book are all too persistent today. Art Wars: The Politics of Taste in Nineteenth Century New York promises a history of taste fundamentally informed by class tensions and sectional strife. Klein crafts this history around three case studies, which she sees as defining events in the 19th-century art world: the collapse of the American Art-Union in 1852, the controversy in the mid-1880s around the Cesnola collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the push in the mid-1880s to open the Met on Sundays.
Clifford Mason’s Macbeth in Harlem traces how African-American theater artists shaped theater in the United States, beginning in the early 19th century and ending in the mid-20th century. Mason reveals how events gave rise to different Black performers and movements, beginning with Harlem’s particular contributions to Broadway and concluding with a discussion of the post-World War II conditions that gave rise to Lorraine Hansberry’s 1959 play A Raisin in The Sun.
From 1899 to 1914, people around the world gave over 12,000 animals to the New York Zoological Park in the Bronx (almost 5,000 of them were snakes). Donations to the zoo fulfilled two purposes: they supplied the zoological park with more animals, and, perhaps more importantly, helped the zoo form a relationship with certain communities around them. This project is a focused look at a section of these animal donors, the people of New York City.
Prehistoric and Ahead of Her Time: Sapphasaura at the Museum of Natural History
By Rachel Pitkin
In the summer of 1973, members of the newly formed Lesbian Feminist Liberation (LFL) group were engaged in a unique construction project in the Upper West Side backyard of one of its members, Robin Lutsky. A physically onerous labor of love, the project unfolded over ten days of round-the-clock attention, a last-ditch protest effort to gain the attention of one of New York’s most celebrated yet controversial institutions: the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH).
Stages, Streets, and Screens: The Geography of NYC Dance in the 1960s-1970s “Dance Boom”
By Emily Hawk
In the early 1970s, New Yorkers could see concert dance performances at Lincoln Center as well as in the open-air splendor of Central Park’s Delacorte Theater. Crowds could gather in Harlem to catch the DanceMobile, and families could turn on their television sets to watch evening-length concerts on PBS. The prevalence of dance throughout and beyond the city resulted from the “dance boom” in the previous decade.
Imitation Artist: An Interview with Sunny Stalter-Pace
Interviewed by Katie Uva
Today on the blog, Katie Uva talks to Sunny Stalter-Pace, author of the recently published Imitation Artist: Gertrude Hoffmann’s Life in Vaudeville and Dance. The book examines the life and times of Gertrude Hoffmann, an early 20th century dancer and choreographer whose career highlights the intersections of high and low culture in the performing arts of that era.
Monuments of Colonial New York: George III and Liberty Poles
Wendy Bellion and Shira Lurie
For the last installment in our six-part series on monuments in / about colonial Gotham, Wendy Bellion and Shira Lurie discuss NYC’s rebellion against British rule during the volatile decade before the War for Independence. Bellion begins with a story of destruction — the tearing down of the statue of George III in Bowling Green. Lurie tells of construction — the raising of five liberty poles on the Common (present day City Hall Park).
Monuments of Colonial New York: The Tulip Tree and 'Signal'
Lisa Blee and John C. Winters
This week Gotham presents a six-part series on monuments, statues, and commemorations in / about colonial New York City. Recognizing that one of the more recent debates over public memory has been the conflict over Columbus / Indigenous People’s Day, we begin with Lisa Blee and John C. Winters, who examine monuments of and by Native peoples in Manhattan.
