Two Hundred Fifty years of Organ-Building in the City, Part II: 1850 to 1930: New York Becomes a City of Organs
By Bynum Petty
In 1800 [...] the population of New York City was 60,515, consisting of many tradesmen and shopkeepers who lived over their places of business with their families (still true today for some organ builders residing over their workshops). This population established about thirty churches, most of which had no organ — certainly a growth opportunity for the two or three resident organ-builders. Fifty years later, the city’s population had grown to more than 515,000 and more than 250 houses of worship had been erected; of these, about six Reform Synagogues had pipe organs. Rightly assumed, the greatest growth in pipe organ building was in Christian places of worship, both Catholic and Protestant; but proportionally, growth was just as strong in Jewish houses of worship.
“They’re Tearing Down the Hippodrome”: A History of the Theater’s Demolition
By Sunny Stalter-Pace
Discourse about the Hippodrome follows the pattern observed by Max Page, where real estate development shapes not only the city’s landscape but its “written and displayed history” as well. Hippodrome memorials took place in ephemeral media: newspapers, magazines, radio broadcasts. As they marked the loss of the built environment, these memorials tried to preserve some of the utopian impulses associated with it.
The War Brought Home: The Greenwich Village Townhouse Explosion of 1970
By Brendan Mahoney
The Weather Underground (Weathermen) rose from the dust as the pallbearers of the now deceased SDS and dying anti-war movement. This group sought to destroy many of the white, bourgeois remnants of the SDS, abandoning electoral and peaceful tactics in favor of guerrilla warfare, with solidarity across racial lines. Their motivation was to bring the war home. In plain terms that meant bringing the destruction and chaos that the US war machine had brought to the people in Vietnam and elsewhere, into the United States.
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 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.
