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Posts in Brooklyn
Pioneras Boricua

Pioneras Boricuas

By Cathy Cabrera-Figueroa

Puerto Ricans who migrated to the United States in the early 20th century were not the first to do so. Trade and commerce linked Puerto Rico and the United States before the 19th century and movement between the two has continued since then. Piecing together the migration stories of Puerto Rican women who came to New York City after the Great War is quite challenging. These women were regular people, and until the 1960s and 1970s, there was little incentive to collect or archive their experiences.

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Prison Land: An Interview with Brett Story

Prison Land: An Interview with Brett Story

Interviewed by Willie Mack

Today on the blog, Gotham editor Willie Mack speaks to filmmaker and geographer Brett Story about her book, Prison Land: Mapping Carceral Power across Neoliberal America. Story reexamines the prison as a set of social relations which includes property, race, gender, and class across the urban landscape. In this way, Story demonstrates how carceral power is distributed outside of the prisons walls to include racially segregated communities, gentrifying urban spaces, and even mass transit.

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Marriage, Failure, and Exile: H.P. Lovecraft in New York

Marriage, Failure, and Exile: H.P. Lovecraft in New York

By David J. Goodwin

Horror writer H.P. Lovecraft is identified with his native city of Providence, Rhode Island and greater New England. That region — its geography, architecture, history, and lore — stood as the primary connective tissue of many of his best conceived and most popular stories, such as “The Dunwich Horror,” “The Colour Out of Space,” and “The Whisperer in Darkness.” Lovecraft once declared, “Few persons have ever been as closely knit to New England’s rock-ribbed hills as I.” He spent all of his adult life living and writing in a single Providence neighborhood with one notable exception — his two years in New York City between 1924 and 1926.

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Duties and Desires: The Brooklyn Eagle Cookbook, 1926

Duties and Desires: The Brooklyn Eagle Cookbook, 1926

By Megan J. Elias

Community cookbooks were usually assembled by groups of women organized for a charitable purpose — restoring an old church, for example. These cookbooks can reveal many things about a community. By focusing on two sections in the book, “Household Hints” and “Tasty Dishes,” we can access the sensations of domestic life in Brooklyn in 1926, its rhythms and expectations.

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Authentic Survivors: Religion and Gentrification in Williamsburg, Brooklyn

Authentic Survivors: Religion and Gentrification in Williamsburg, Brooklyn

By Alyssa Maldonado-Estrada

Every July in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, the Italian American Catholic community celebrates its patron saints in spectacular fashion. During the annual Feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel and San Paolino di Nola, men in the community perform the Dance of the Giglio, a ritual that has been celebrated in Brooklyn since 1903. Hundreds of men lift the seventy-foot-tall, four-ton tower, decorated with baroque angels, saints, and arches, through the streets in honor of Saint Paulinus (San Paolino), the patron saint of Nola, Italy.

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“The Colored People Have Dispersed”: Race, Space, and Schooling in Late 19th-Century Brooklyn

“The Colored People Have Dispersed”:
Race, Space, and Schooling in Late 19th-Century Brooklyn

By Judith Kafka and Cici Matheny

“The doing away with the distinctively colored schools and … bringing about mixed classes,” wrote the Brooklyn Daily Eagle in September of 1899, “has done more toward the education of the race than any other individual effort.” Brooklyn’s Board of Education had officially ended racial segregation in schooling in 1883, by requiring all district schools to admit any student living within their enrollment boundaries.

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Island Gospel: Pentecostal Music and Identity in Jamaica and the United States

Island 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.

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Jump Up! Caribbean Carnival Music in New York City

Jump Up! Caribbean Carnival Music in New York City

Reviewed by Gage Averill

It is fitting that it was two New Yorkers in the early 1930s, Harold Arlen and Ted Koehler, who composed the showtune “I Love a Parade,” because for all the diversity and excess of its public processions, there is likely no city anywhere that has exceeded New York. The home of the renowned ticker-tape parades, the Macy’s Day Parade, the St Patrick’s Day Parade, NYC Pride the Village Halloween Parade, and numerous ethnic celebrations (modeled on St. Patrick’s), New York City’s streetscapes have conferred both prestige and visibility on those who have been able to muster the necessary funding and authorizations and crowds. It is not without a powerful sense of the current moment, the Covid-19 pandemic, that I’ve taken on the otherwise enviable, and the now more somber, task of reviewing a book about some of the most raucous, colorful, noisy and crowded events in New York: Brooklyn’s Caribbean Carnival celebrations.

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Engineering America: The Life and Times of John A. Roebling

Engineering America: The Life and Times of John A. Roebling

Richard Haw, interviewed by Beth Harpaz

The beloved Brooklyn Bridge was one of the most daring feats of 19th Century engineering. The man who designed it was equally daring and a paradox of personality: An oddball who engineered a structure that was a marvel of stability at a time when suspension bridges routinely fell down. Richard Haw, a professor in the Interdisciplinary Studies Program at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, has written two previous books about the Brooklyn Bridge. The focus of his latest – after 13 years of research – is the man behind the bridge. Engineering America: The Life and Times of John A. Roebling tells one of the most fascinating American immigrant stories. Haw talks about it with Beth Harpaz, editor of CUNY SUM.

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Gabe: A Tribute to the U.S. Merchant Mariner Veterans of World War II

Gabe: A Tribute to the U.S. Merchant Mariner Veterans of World War II

By Johnathan Thayer

The American Merchant Marine Veterans Association (AMMV) has worked on behalf of merchant mariner veterans of World War II since its founding in 1984. Representing a “Voice for the American Merchant Mariner” and advocating for just compensation and recognition for merchant mariner veterans of WWII and other wars, the the New York and New Jersey chapters of the AMMV have hosted countless meetings and celebrations for decades. Sadly, they have also lent their services to memorial remembrances for chapter members who have passed away. It is with a heavy heart that the New York City-based Edwin J. O’Hara chapter recently did so recently for Gabriel “Gabe” Frank, who passed away on January 29th.

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