Right now, New York City is attempting to recover from the pandemic, more populous than ever before, and facing exorbitant housing costs. It seems… both booming and in crisis at the same time,… What are some ways the history featured in We Won’t Move! should inform our understanding of housing in New York in the present?
The tenant protections and affordable housing programs which we have today are primarily the result of grassroots organizing and advocacy. While the power of real estate capital can seem overwhelming, We Won’t Move aims to demonstrate the political power of tenants, and to offer an understanding of NYC’s rich history of tenant organizing as an inspiration and strategic tool.
Haitian Refugees, ACT UP New York, and the Transnational Dimensions of Local Organizing for AIDS Housing
By Maggie Schreiner
…as small numbers of people started being released from Guantánamo under interim orders; the lawyers didn’t know how to arrange for supportive housing. A group in New Jersey had housed the first few people who had been freed, but as a plane carrying an HIV-positive Haitian child and his grandmother approached Newark Airport, the organization backed out of the arrangement. Unless alternate housing could be found immediately, the two would be returned to Guantánamo…
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.
Saving the Bronx River: An Excerpt From South Bronx Rising: The Rise, Fall, and Resurrection of An American City
By Jill Jonnes
Until the 21st century, few residents of New York City, much less the South Bronx, even knew there was a Bronx River, the City’s only river. And why would anyone know? For more than a century, the banks and flowing waters of the lower Bronx River had long been largely fenced-off and out of sight behind an almost-solid wall of riverfront factories, gargantuan scrap metal yards, sprawling warehouses, and parking lots (including, starting in 1967, the massive Hunts Point wholesale food market). The lower five miles of the twenty-three mile river below the New York Botanic Garden and Bronx Zoo served as an industrial dump and sewer, its few access points blocked by gigantic mounds of submerged cars, worn-out tires, less identifiable garbage, and rusting junk…
From roughly 1850 to 1950, Fulton Market would dominate wholesale fish provisioning in the United States and much of the country’s fish would pass through Fulton…As the market supplied itself from more distant locales, Fulton’s ecological impact widened. … wholesalers had to look further and further away and develop more and more complex means of preserving and moving fish. … the length and complexity of this process served to obscure the ecological impact of food—consumer appetites were, after all, destroying ecosystems a world away.
Boukary Sawadogo’s book Africans in Harlem: An Untold New York Story resonated with me as an African migrant living in Harlem. From the introductory section, “Africa in Harlem,” to the conclusion of the last chapter, “Searching for Africa in the Diaspora,” the writer allowed me to understand the genesis, formation, and growth of this community.
All the Queens Houses: An Architectural Portrait of New York’s Largest and Most Diverse Borough
Reviewed by Katie Uva
In a sense, emphasizing the vernacular architecture of New York City as quintessential to its character is the project undertaken by Rafael Herrin-Ferri in All the Queens Houses: An Architectural Portrait of New York’s Largest and Most Diverse Borough. The book is an outgrowth of his Instagram, which since 2018 has cataloged more than 600 domiciles throughout different parts of Queens and attempted to describe their incredible eclecticism and flamboyance. The book features a little over 200 houses, photographed on uniformly cloudy days and from a standard angle across the street, usually incorporating neighboring houses to highlight contrasts between houses on a single block.
Review: Terry Williams, The Soft City: Sex for Business and Pleasure in New York City
Reviewed by Timothy J. Gilfoyle
Public sex in New York evolved amidst wide-ranging social and economic change in Gotham from 1979 to 2018. The “Disneyfication” of Times Square and the elimination of the most visible forms of public pornography attracted the most attention and commentary. But an evolving sexual revolution of sorts simultaneously occurred throughout the city. For four decades, the sociologist and ethnographer Terry Williams was watching closely, taking notes. Literally.
New Collections From the CUNY Digital History Archive
By Stephen Brier
The CUNY Digital History Archive (CDHA), created in 2013 by the American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning at the CUNY Graduate Center, is committed to preserving and presenting on an open publicly accessible website the history of the City University of New York. Over the past eight years, a number of CUNY faculty, staff, graduate students, and alumni have created a series of curated collections of primary historical sources materials on key moments in CUNY’s rich history.
“People Love the Rat”: How Scabby, Labor’s Mascot, Took New York
By Benjamin Serby
Anyone who has spent time in New York will not be surprised to learn that it is the most rat-infested city in the United States, with an estimated population of two million (roughly one rat for every four people). Strangely, rats are part of the city’s culture — and long have been. As Luc Sante explains in Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York, rat-baiting was the city’s “premier betting sport” in the 19th century. Boys were paid to collect rats from the street “at a rate of five to twelve cents a head,” and spectators wagered on how quickly fox terriers or “men wearing heavy boots” could massacre dozens of them at a time.
