Civil War-Era Black New York and Historical Memory: Locating the Eighth Ward
By Marquis Taylor
Researching Manhattan’s Eighth Ward presented an exciting opportunity to learn about a neighborhood deeply tied to Civil War-era Black New York — yet it also posed challenges regarding archival constraints. Newspaper articles from the mainstream white press, records produced by the city’s burgeoning municipal government, and reports from reformers and their institutions comprise the dominant archive of Lower Manhattan’s Eighth Ward, which is fragmented and tainted with racist ideology. Also, with much of the 19th-century built environment of present-day SoHo gone, researchers and historians alike are forced to not only confront these limitations but construct a counter-archive. Only through engagement with the Black press, particularly The Weekly Anglo-African (later known as The Anglo-African), do critical aspects of the Black New York of Joseph and Rachel Moore’s era become more legible.
Going to Market: Wallabout Market and the Vanished Landscapes of Food Distribution in New York City
By Malka Simon
Wallabout Market no longer exists. Its facilities were bulldozed by the Navy Yard in 1941 to make more space for wartime production, and Brooklyn’s wholesale operations moved to the Terminal Market in Canarsie. But Wallabout’s rise and fall still has much to teach us about the rhythms of the city and the urban patterns that unfold in response to even the most ephemeral of commodities.
Spectacular Ruins: Conservation and Boosterism in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park
By Melissa Zavala
On either side of debates over development and progress is the need to protect public health and open space belonging to us all equally. The borough of Queens faces a future of sinking developments just a short walk from each other. The funding and political will to preserve a prized structure have been missing for over half a century despite public interest. Now, the city considers losing 65 acres of parkland to a capitalist venture as its best option for preservation, especially as a response to flooding and rising temperatures, as has happened along the waterfront in Long Island City. It does not matter that LaGuardia Airport and nearby Arthur Ashe Stadium are also sinking or that a casino can very well mean more tumbling ruins. Will the city soon inherit another shrine to consumption in need of rescue from the fate of a neighboring sinking relic, if not in Flushing, then near the airport or elsewhere? Which world of tomorrow is worth preserving? This is an ongoing challenge facing the city.
Mobilizing the Metropolis: An Interview with Philip Mark Plotch
By Robert W. Snyder
Mobilizing the Metropolis closely charts the evolution of the Port Authority as it went from improving rail freight around New York Harbor to building bridges and managing real estate. At the same time, the book explores the evolution of the authority’s internal culture in the face of actions by elected officials in New York and New Jersey that have reduced the agency’s autonomy and affected its operations. Mobilizing the Metropolis also extracts from the history of the Port Authority useful lessons about how organizations charged with solving governmental problems can win support and engage opposition.
Preserving a Lost Chapter of NYC Queer History Via Club Flyers: An Interview with David Kennerley
Interviewed By Ken Lustbader
What were meant to be disposable ads are now compelling pieces of ephemera that you can’t find in guidebooks or oral histories. In the book, we’ve mapped these locations, which create a cultural and geographic landscape of queer nightlife in the ‘90s. For me, personally and as a Manhattan resident, it’s been fascinating to revisit these spots to see their current incarnations. Some buildings survive, which has rekindled my emotional connection to those places. That speaks to the power of place and the value of LGBTQ history.
The World of Dubrow's Cafeteria: An Interview with Marcia Bricker Halperin
By Robert W. Snyder
In the middle decades of the twentieth century in New York City, Dubrow’s cafeterias in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn and the garment district of Manhattan were places to get out of your apartment, have coffee with friends, or enjoy a hearty but affordable meal. They were grounded in the world of Jewish immigrants and their children, and they thrived in years when Flatbush and the Garment District each had a distinctly Jewish character. […] before Dubrow’s cafeterias were shuttered, Marcia Bricker Halperin captured their mood and their patrons in black and white photographs. These pictures, along with essays by the playwright Donald Margulies and the historian Deborah Dash Moore, constitute Marcia’s book Kibitz and Nosh: When We All Met at Dubrow’s Cafeteria, published by Cornell University Press and winner of a National Jewish Book Council prize for Food Writing and Cookbooks.
Opening Credits: Urban Redevelopment, Industrial Policy, and the Revitalization of Motion Picture and Television Production in New York City, 1973-1983
By Shannan Clark
With the city’s fortunes reaching their nadir in the mid-1970s, a disparate coalition of union activists, creative professionals, cultural advocates, public officials, media executives, and real estate developers began to coalesce to rebuild the motion picture and television production industry in New York. The participants in this process acted at a pivotal conjuncture, working at the dawn of an era of austerity, the duration of which they could not foresee, but with a consciousness that was still shaped by their formative experiences in an earlier era of abundance that was coming to an end.
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.
