Masthead_Gloucester_Kearn.jpg
Posts in Manhattan
Cut-Throat: The Murder of William Lurye
Cut-Throat: The Murder of William Lurye

Cut-Throat: The Murder of William Lurye

By Andy Battle

On an average day at midcentury, New York City’s Garment District was a chaotic welter of sewing, schlepping, and schmoozing. But on May 12, 1949, the streets went silent for William Lurye, an organizer for the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU), the 400,000-strong body representing workers in the women’s clothing trade. Three days earlier, Lurye had been shoved into in a telephone booth in the lobby of a building on West Thirty-Fifth Street that housed dozens of loft-style garment factories. There, two assailants had stabbed the thirty-seven year-old father of four in the neck with an icepick.

Read More
Business & Labor, Crime & Policing, Manhattan, Postwar New YorkGuest UserComment
To Build a Mature Society: The Lasting Legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “Beyond Vietnam” Speech

To Build a Mature Society: The Lasting Legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “Beyond Vietnam” Speech

By Kristopher Burrell

At Riverside Church in Harlem on April 4, 1967, exactly one year before his assassination, Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered a blistering and sophisticated critique of U. S. intervention in Vietnam. His “Beyond Vietnam” speech was prescient in ways that continue to haunt our society into the present day.

Read More
Manhattan, Politics, Postwar New York, Race & EthnicityGuest UserComment
Relics of the Underground: The Afterlife of Cultural Spaces
Relics of the Underground: The Afterlife of Cultural Spaces

Relics of the Underground: The Afterlife of Cultural Spaces

By Jeffrey Patrick Colgan & Jeffrey Escoffier

In early 1974, members of the punk band Television spotted a newly reopened yet unavoidably dingy lower Bowery bar on their way home from rehearsal. Returning soon after, they approached the owner Hilly Krystal and asked if he would host performances by bands that were playing a different kind of rock music. After an initial four-week residency by Television, CBGB & OMFUG (Country, Bluegrass, Blues & Other Music for Uplifting Gormandizers) continued to host countless bands and fostered the emerging punk and No-Wave music scenes of the 1970s and 1980s. Even after its role in any identifiable and burgeoning music scene came to an end in the 1990s, it still hosted performances until its ultimate demise in 2006 — its final sendoff facilitated by Blondie and Patti Smith. By 2008 the former venue was occupied by clothing designer John Varvatos, who kept some of the graffiti, stickers, and concert posters as accents to the calculated ‘subversiveness’ of the items on sale.

Read More
Arts & Culture, Manhattan, Reviews, Urban Decline & Fiscal CrisisGuest UserComment
New Podcast Series, Hosted by Gotham
New Podcast Series, Hosted by Gotham

New Podcast Series, Hosted by Gotham

Today on Gotham, something different: a podcast.

From now on, we'll occasionally be featuring not just written but oral interviews on the blog, with authors of recent books dealing with New York City history. The series is a partnership with the New Books Network, a consortium of academic podcast channels whose very admirable goal is, like ours here at The Gotham Center, to raise the level of public discourse by introducing serious research to much wider audiences than normally get scholarly work.

Today, Beth Harpaz, editor of CUNY SUM, interviews the esteemed Cuban scholar and sociologist Lisandro Pérez about his new book, Sugar, Cigars and Revolution: The Making of Cuban New York.

Listen to their interview here.

Read More
Interviews, Podcasts, Manhattan, Race & EthnicityGuest UserComment
"The New York Curb Market… Which has No Organization Whatever”: The Enclosure of New York’s Last Outdoor Stock Market, 1900-1921
"The New York Curb Market… Which has No Organization Whatever”: The Enclosure of New York’s Last Outdoor Stock Market, 1900-1921

"The New York Curb Market… Which has No Organization Whatever”: The Enclosure of New York’s Last Outdoor Stock Market, 1900-1921

By Ann Daly

Visitors to the New York Curb Market, located on the Broad Street sidewalk, also called “the gorge,” found themselves overwhelmed by the noise and frenzy. Hundreds of men on the street “writhed, leaped, swayed.” In New York’s last outdoor stock market, where orders were communicated by yelling or signaling out a window and anyone with lungs could trade, financial journalist Edwin C. Hill claimed in 1920, “some of those whirling dervishes down the street could borrow a million on their moral credit; for others the jail beckons.”

Read More
Business & Labor, Manhattan, Progressive EraGuest UserComment
Parable of the Bees: Leslie Day's Honeybee Hotel
Parable of the Bees: Leslie Day's Honeybee Hotel

Parable of the Bees: Leslie Day's Honeybee Hotel

Reviewed by ​Rebecca Dalzell

In 2012, the Waldorf-Astoria built six beehives in a rooftop garden. Twenty stories above Park Avenue, 300,000 bees pollinated flowering apple and cherry trees, and produced jugs of honey. Its flavor depended on the season: in the spring, it was light and minty; come fall, it darkened as bees foraged on aster and goldenrod. This miel de Manhattan made its way into cocktails, bread, and gelato served in the hotel restaurants.

Read More
Manhattan, Nature & Environment, ReviewsGuest UserComment
The Gateway to the Nation: The New York Custom House
The Gateway to the Nation: The New York Custom House

The Gateway to the Nation: The New York Custom House

By Alexander Wood

The reign of Beaux-Arts architecture reshaped the landscape of the city at the turn of the century with grand public buildings that projected a new found sense of national power. The architects who embraced this style emphasized classicism, monumentality, and embellishment in their work, and were skilled at adapting historical precedents for modern building types. Following this mission to create civic symbols, Cass Gilbert conceived the custom house as a gateway to the nation. From its triumphal arched entry, and honorific statuary, to the heraldic imagery on its facade, it was expressly designed to evoke a passageway into a walled city. The allusion to a gate reflected a desire to proclaim the identity of the nation to the world, but it also suggested a point of controlled access through a border. It thus offered a suggestive precedent for the headquarters of the most important district of the federal customs service, which served as the guardian of the nation’s chief port of entry.

Read More
Built Environment, Manhattan, Progressive Era, Urban PlanningGuest UserComment
The Earliest Sculptures in Central Park
The Earliest Sculptures in Central Park

The Earliest Sculptures in Central Park

By Dianne Durante

In Olmsted and Vaux’s Greensward Plan, the only sculpture was one atop the fountain at the center of Bethesda Terrace. The commission for the sculpture was given in 1863 to Emma Stebbins (1815-1882), an American-born sculptor working in Rome who happened to be the sister of a member of the Board of Commissioners of Central Park.

This post is an excerpt from the author's new book, Central Park: The Early Years.

Read More
Built Environment, Urban Planning, Gilded Age, Manhattan, Nature & Environment, ExcerptsGuest UserComment
Sneaky Pete: A Bowery Story
Sneaky Pete: A Bowery Story

Sneaky Pete: A Bowery Story

By Stephen Paul DeVillo

The Bowery emerged from the Depression greatly the worse for wear. But the old days remained the same at McSorley’s, despite some changes of ownership. When the childless Bill McSorley felt the heavy hand of age settling on him, he sold the place in March 1936 to a retired policeman named Daniel O’Connell. Bill McSorley died on September 21, 1938, and Dan O’Connell followed him in December 1939. Dan willed the saloon to his daughter Dorothy O’Connell Kirwan, who found herself inheriting a saloon that, as a woman, she had never been allowed to enter. After some reflection on the matter, Dorothy decided to continue John McSorley’s venerable no-women tradition. She allowed herself no excep­tion to this rule, setting foot in the place only when it was closed on Sun­day mornings to tally up the week’s receipts.

This post excerpted with permission from The Bowery: The Strange History of New York’s Oldest Street by Stephen Paul DeVillo. Copyright © 2017 by Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.

Read More
Excerpts, Manhattan, Great Depression & New DealGuest UserComment