“Ten Thousand Bigamists in New York”:
“Traitors In Our Midst”:
Race, Corrections, and the 1970 Tombs Uprising
By Willie Mack
In 1966, newly elected New York City Republican Mayor John V. Lindsay appointed George F. McGrath as Commissioner of Correction. McGrath was previously the commissioner of the Massachusetts Department of Correction and was widely known as a respected and progressive liberal penologist. But by 1969, the New York City jails were in worse condition than ever before.
Read MoreErich Goode’s Taming of New York’s Washington Square: A Wild Civility
Reviewed By Stephen Petrus
Even during COVID-19, New York’s Washington Square Park maintains its quirky identity. Chances are on a visit you’ll still encounter locals, tourists, buskers, sunbathers, NYU students, dog walkers, chess players, homeless people, petty drug dealers, and maybe even Fartman, Pigeon Man, and the Squirrel Whisperer.
Read More"Sorry Junior, Recess is Over":
Integration, White Backlash and the Origins of Police in New York City Schools
By Rachel Lissy
On the morning of September 19, 1957, 17 year old Maurice Kessler walked into an American History class at Thomas Jefferson High School in East New York, Brooklyn and tossed a bottle of lye. The bottle exploded, splattering 18 pupils and the teacher with corrosive liquid. The attack was aimed at 16 year-old David Ozersky, whose face was described by other students as "melting off," and who was reported to be partially blinded in the attack.
Read MoreSwept From the Streets: Mario Procaccino and the Rise of Law-and-Order Politics in New York City
By Gabe S. Tennen
Mario Angelo Procaccino strode down Fulton Street, waving to onlookers and shaking hands. Accompanied by his running mate for city council president, Abraham Beame; his teenage daughter, Marierose; and a cabal of campaign staff, the Democratic candidate for mayor seemed at home in the working-class shopping center in Downtown Brooklyn.[1] In 1969, the appearance of Procaccino, then serving as city comptroller, at a blue-collar hub outside of Manhattan was both practical and symbolic. Attempting to assemble a coalition of voters dissatisfied with the liberal bent of incumbent Mayor John V. Lindsay, Procaccino considered outreach to white homeowners in Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, and Staten Island his best chance to ascend to City Hall. Beginning his excursion in front of Mays Department Store, a campaign spokesman with a bullhorn declared to passers-by that “John Lindsay probably doesn’t even know where Mays Department Store is!”[2] As he had done throughout his Democratic primary campaign, the pencil-mustached, diminutive Procaccino would allude to that gulf between a Manhattan-reared, Protestant, Yale-educated mayor and a working-class Catholic and Jewish outer-borough constituency during the general election. The issue that most galvanized that effort was one gaining traction across the country: “law-and-order.”
Read MoreRiot
By Mike Wallace
All day the twelfth of August 1900, the city roasted through a heat wave. Night brought no relief. In Hell’s Kitchen, sleepless residents perched on stoops or fled to local watering holes. Arthur Harris, a 22-year-old, Virginia-born recent migrant, sought refuge at McBride’s Saloon on the corner of Eighth Avenue and 41st Street, just down the block from the apartment in which he lived with his girlfriend, 20-year-old May Enoch. At 2:00 a.m., Enoch came by, asked him to “come on up home,” then waited outside for him to join her. On departing, Harris found her struggling in a man’s grip. He leapt to rescue her. The man produced a club and began battering him, shouting racist epithets. Harris pulled a knife and cut his assailant twice. Robert J. Thorpe, a plainclothes policeman who had been arresting Enoch for presumed soliciting, fell mortally wounded.
Read MoreCivilian Anticrime Patrols in 1970s New York: Crime, Self-Help and Citizenship in the Neoliberal City
By Joe Merton
Recent scholarship has done much to illuminate the so-called “neoliberalization” of New York during the 1970s and 1980s, in which a bold midcentury experiment in urban social democracy was dismantled in the wake of the city’s fiscal crisis and replaced by an agenda of municipal austerity, business-oriented economic development, and market-led privatization.[1] Much of this work identifies this process as a top-down transformation led by the city’s financial and political elite and resisted by many New Yorkers.[2] But what if New Yorkers did not always resist or passively receive this process but actively perpetuated it themselves?
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“Skull Trouble”: A Brief History of Police Harassment of Black New Yorkers
By Marcy S. Sacks
As a fresh recruit to the New York City police force at the turn of the twentieth century, Dutch immigrant Cornelius Willemse learned an important lesson from his superior officer about how to treat the black residents on his beat. One day, the novice patrolman encountered a group of black men congregating on a street corner. He attempted to disperse the group. “At my order to move along,” he recalled, “they shuffled off slowly, dragging their feet on the sidewalk, in a way which seemed to say, ‘Feet, we’ll be back as soon as this fool cop is gone.’” Angered by their perceived insolence, Willemse decided that they were “ripe for a lesson.” Without warning, he began beating any black man within reach, “work[ing] with the old nightstick as hard as I could.” In short order, “Negroes were lying all over the sidewalk, some of them half conscious, others bruised and bleeding.” He smugly evaluated his success. “I had made good on my threat of ‘skull trouble.’” He expected no further difficulty from them.
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Presumed Criminal: Black Youth and the Justice System in Postwar New York
Reviewed by Emily Brooks
Black and Hispanic or Latino youth are dramatically overrepresented in the city’s detention facilities. In addition to their overrepresentation in youth detention, black teens are also far more likely than whites to experience police brutality or harassment. Some of the widely-publicized examples include, mostly recently, a horde of NYPD drawing their guns and violently arresting an unarmed black teen on a crowded subway car, and officers filmed punching black teenagers in the face while supposedly breaking up a fight. From cell phone footage and Facebook posts to records produced by youth detention facilities and scholarly research in various disciplines, a substantial body of material attests to the over-criminalization and under-protection of youth of color, particularly black youth, in contemporary NYC. For anyone looking to understand the historical roots of our contemporary regime of racialized youth criminalization, Carl Suddler’s Presumed Criminal: Black Youth and the Justice System in Postwar New York will be essential reading.
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Joseph Kennedy and the New York Underworld during Prohibition
By Ellen NicKenzie Lawson
Owney Madden, Joseph Bonanno, Frank Costello, and the Lower East Side’s Lansky-Siegel gang all claimed to have ties with Joseph Kennedy, father of the future U.S. President, during Prohibition. The Kennedys have consistently maintained that ‘the patriarch’ was neither a smuggler nor a bootlegger, and so has David Nasaw, Kennedy’s most recent biographer — neither in New England, where he lived until the eighth year of Prohibition, nor in metropolitan New York, where he lived and worked thereafter.
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