Frances Goldin and the Moses Threat to Cooper Square
By Katie Heiserman
Less remembered than her West Village counterpart Jane Jacobs, Frances Goldin deserves attention and further study as a model of both forceful and joyful neighborhood organizing. An activist with a distinctive style, she brought the community together and sustained engagement over many years. In her 2014 oral history interview with Village Preservation, Goldin highlighted the egalitarian, community-centered approach at the core of her work with CSC: “Fifty-nine years ago, dues were a dollar a year, and today, dues are a dollar a year.”
The Valentine’s Manuals, as the books came to be known, started life in 1801 as informational pamphlets. In 1818, they were renamed the City Directory. That title lasted until Valentine came along and transformed the volumes. “The idea was to make the books interesting to the public as well as to city officials,” he explained in 1865. Armed with new-old material, Valentine enlivened the dry data with excerpts from founding documents, essays about old buildings and parks, and anecdotes about New Amsterdam.
Skyscraper Settlement: An Interview with Joyce Milambling
Joyce Milambling, interviewed by David Huyssen
[…] Christodora House has an amazing history, too much of which has become obscured by time and influenced by what the building has come to represent to many people. The building at 143 Avenue B deteriorated in the 1960s and 70s after the City abandoned it, making it a symbol of urban blight. Later, its 1986 conversion to condominiums associated it with conflicts over gentrification in the East Village. It took center stage in those conflicts when protesters from Tompkins Square Park broke into and vandalized the building in 1988. Although its architectural and historic value have since earned it spots on both the National Register and the State Register of Historic Places, its settlement-era history remains under-appreciated. The settlement house movement, despite its flaws, confronted social problems head-on and provided entire communities with both urgent social services and opportunities for growth and development. Christodora is an important part of that story.
Basketball was especially popular in New York City and by the turn of the century, nearly every public school were sponsoring teams. The Public Schools Athletic League (PSAL), founded in 1903, was initially a private organization whose primary function was to supervise physical education and interscholastic athletics in all New York City public schools. With about fifteen high schools throughout the city, the PSAL sponsored its first formal basketball tournament in 1905. In that inaugural championship game on March 4, 1905, DeWitt Clinton defeated Boys High in Brooklyn to lay claim to the first ever PSAL tournament champion. In other words, Clinton was crowned the first king of basketball.
An Excerpt from Making Long Island: A History of Growth and the American Dream
By Lawrence R. Samuel
Beginning in the Roaring Twenties, Wall Street money looked eastward to generate wealth from a burgeoning land boom. After the Great Depression and World War II, Long Island—Nassau and Suffolk Counties—emerged as the site of the quintessential postwar American suburb, Levittown. Levittown and its spinoff suburban communities served as a primary symbol of the American dream through affordable home ownership for the predominantly White middle class, propelling the national mythology steeped in success, financial security, upward mobility, and consumerism. Starting in the 1960s, however, the dream began to dissolve, as the postwar economic engine ran out of steam and Long Island became as much urban as suburban. Over the course of these decades, the island evolved over the decades and largely detached itself from New York City to become a self-sustaining entity with its own challenges, exclusions and triumphs.
In the midst of the “Roaring ‘20’s,” the Café Lafayette, in the heart of Greenwich Village, was a world apart from Staten Island’s truck farms, ocean beaches, and sleepy villages — despite being just half an hour away by ferry. If anything connects the two places — and has memorialized them—it is the work of Dawn Powell.
The Slip: The New York City Street That Changed American Art Forever
Review By Miriam Grotte-Jacobs
Immortalized by writers like Herman Melville and Walt Whitman, the Slip dates back to the seventeenth century, a liminal site between land and water that maintained, as Peiffer argues, an altogether distinct sensibility; a place apart from the rest of Manhattan that offered artistic alternatives to its inhabitants with major consequences for the trajectory of modernism and postmodernism in the United States. A counternarrative to accounts of the New York art world that center around Cedar Tavern and Max’s Kansas City, Peiffer offers a close reading of a different New York and the artistic community it enabled.
Mobilizing the Metropolis: How the Port Authority Built New York
Review by Elizabeth M. Marcello and Gail Radford
The New York City metropolitan area boasts an impressive infrastructural network that moves people, trains, motor vehicles, freight, ships, and airplanes. At the center of this network is the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the subject of Philip Mark Plotch and Jen Nelles’s Mobilizing the Metropolis, which they offer as a “reflective history” of this particular agency, but also as a series of “lessons” for other agencies around the country built on the public authority model.
Placemaker and Displacer: How Transit Shaped New York
By Polly Desjarlais
Before 1950, a vibrant multi-ethnic, residential neighborhood known as Little Syria existed at the very bottom of Manhattan. A concentration of immigrants from Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Palestine (countries collectively known then as Greater Syria) settled on Lower Washington Street beginning in the 1880s… As in the case of Chinatown, the transit connections between Little Syria and Brooklyn became instrumental in the community’s transplantation and survival… nearly the whole neighborhood was razed in the 1940s to make way for the construction of the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel (Hugh L. Carey Tunnel). . . In the case of Little Syria, the city’s transportation demands both displaced people and provided a means of resettlement in other parts of the city.
Working Class Utopias": A History of Cooperative Housing in New York City and Freedomland: Co-op City and the Story of New York
Reviewed by Nicholas Dagen Bloom
To understand why local cooperatives rank so low in progressive housing discourse, it’s worth reading either of the excellent books under review. Annemarie Sammartino’s Freedomland provides a socially informed history of Co-op City, chronicling its triumphs and travails, with particular attention to resident experiences and long-term outcomes. Legendary urban history Robert M. Fogelson’s Working-Class Utopias offers readers a comprehensive account of the New York cooperative movement, giving special attention to the spectacular collapse of Co-op City’s finances during the 1975-76 rent strike. Both books capture the complexity, and nearly insuperable challenges, faced by cooperative sponsors, state officials, and residents in sustaining communal housing.
