The Imaginative Geographies of Place Naming in New York City: Joshua Jelly-Schapiro’s Names of New York
Reviewed by Reuben Rose-Redwood and CindyAnn Rose-Redwood
In the opening chapter of Joshua Jelly-Schapiro’s Names of New York: Discovering the City’s Past, Present, and Future Through Its Place-Names, the author observes that New York is a city “in love with stories about itself.” That the Big Apple has an overinflated sense of its own self-importance will come as no surprise to those familiar with the city’s reputation for narcissistic self-indulgence informed by the belief that New York is the center of the universe. Yet, if one thing is certain, it’s that the streets of New York do indeed contain a multitude of stories clamoring to be told.
“Completion by Contrast”: Architecture and Sculpture in Postwar New York
By Donald Albrecht and Thomas Mellins
In the March 30, 1963 issue of the New Yorker, art critic and historian Calvin Tomkins profiled sculptor Richard Lippold, whom he described as “by all odds, the busiest artist now working predominantly in collaboration with architects.”
Kara Murphy Schlichting Interviewed by Garrett Reed Gutierrez
In New York Recentered: Building the Metropolis from the Shore, Kara Murphy Schlichting offers a fresh perspective on New York City’s history by shifting readers’ gaze away from Manhattan and towards the coastal periphery—where local planning initiatives, waterfront park building, the natural environment, and a growing leisure economy each had a stake in the regional development of New York City. Schlichting’s regional and environmental approach frames New York’s extensive waterways as points of connection that unite, rather than divide, the urban core and periphery to one another.
Dead Rivers and Day’s End: Cruising and Preserving New York’s Queer Imaginaries
By Fiona Anderson
Whenever I’m in New York, I make a point of spending time looking at the wooden pilings that stand in the Hudson, remnants of the warehouses and piers that occupied the waterfront until the mid-1980s. Gathered together in intimate coalition, they jut up and out along the riverside like rugged swimmers leaping in to rescue a drowning comrade. They look both like placeholders for future construction and hardy traces of a long-lost culture, like a forgotten work by Robert Smithson or an American Pompeii. This area is the subject of my recent book Cruising the Dead River: David Wojnarowicz and New York’s Ruined Waterfront (University of Chicago Press, 2019),which looks at how and why this site hosted a vibrant cruising scene and art scene in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
Review: Martin V. Melosi's Fresh Kills: A History of Consuming and Discarding in New York City
Reviewed by Simone M. Müller
Fresh Kills Landfill was a human-made structure whose scale was gigantic in every conceivable dimension. With some 400 staff on site, holding twenty different job titles, the facility covered an area of about 3,000 acres, 2200 of which were available for fill. At the peak of its operation, in the late 1980s, Fresh Kills received about 29,000 tons of New York City’s municipal solid waste on a daily basis. Until its closure in 2001, Fresh Kills functioned as the world’s largest landfill in the heart of one of the world’s megacities.
The Invention of Public Space: An Interview with Mariana Mogilevich
Interviewed by Katie Uva
Today on the blog, editor Katie Uva speaks to Mariana Mogilevich about her recent book, The Invention of Public Space: Designing for Inclusion in Lindsay’s New York.Mogilevich discusses the 1960s and 1970s as a uniquely inventive time in the city for defining and conceptualizing the use of public space. At a time when New York was dealing with deindustrialization, economic decline, and suburbanization, the Lindsay Administration made a conscious effort to develop inviting public space and support public interaction in city spaces, an attempt to lift up the city’s density and shared space as an asset rather than a liability.
The Sustainability Myth: An Interview with Melissa Checker
Interviewed by Katie Uva
Today on the blog, Gotham editor Katie Uva speaks to Melissa Checker about her recent book, The Sustainability Myth: Environmental Gentrification and the Politics of Justice. In it, Checker examines and critiques current frameworks of sustainability in New York, where sustainability and economic development are often seen as goals that are mutually supporting. Checker argues that this belief leads to gentrification, deepens economic inequality, and even winds up worsening environmental conditions in some parts of the city.
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?
New Amsterdam and Old New York: Remnants of Netherlandic Architecture in Late-17th Century New York City
By Jeroen van den Hurk
On the afternoon of Monday, June 7, 1697, Dr. Benjamin Bullivant set out from Boston on a trip down the East Coast that would take him all the way down to New Castle, Delaware, and back. The exact reason for his travel is unknown, but he carried with him various letters of introduction for dignitaries he would meet along the way. He also kept a travel diary in which he recorded notes on the built environment he saw in New York City, some of which he considered old and some of which he labeled new.
During the 1970s and 1980s, the South Bronx was the epicenter of American “ruin.” In the popular imagination, flames engulfed acres of developed cityscape; poverty and violence mingled with the remains of abandoned buildings; and a crack epidemic degenerated entire neighborhoods.
