“She Wiggled Her Body in the Most Suggestive and Obscene Manner”: Sexuality and Respectability in the West Indian Labor Day Parade
By Marlene H. Gaynair
During the long 20th century, Caribbean carnival traditions and celebrations dispersed throughout the Atlantic World as West Indians migrated and settled in new locales. Carnival was not just limited to the Lenten period like in Trinidad and Tobago, Brazil, and New Orleans, but also took place around August 1st in the British Caribbean diaspora as a celebration for harvest and Emancipation. In New York City, the significant Caribbean community would recreate carnival celebrations in Trinidad and Tobago as the world-famous West Indian Labor Day Parade.
The Doctors Blackwell: An Interview with Janice Nimura
Interviewed by Katie Uva
Today on the blog, Gotham editor Katie Uva speaks to Janice Nimura, author of The Doctors Blackwell: How Two Pioneering Sisters Brought Medicine to Women and Women to Medicine. The book is a joint biography of Elizabeth Blackwell, the first woman to earn a medical degree in the United States, and her sister Emily Blackwell, the third woman to do so. The book examines the Blackwells’ struggle to obtain training and credentials in the increasingly professionalized field of medicine in the 19th century, and also provides insights into 19th century New York as a place of opportunity and obstacles for these groundbreaking women.
Piecework, Peddlers, and Prostitutes: Intertwined Lives on the Lower East Side
By Deena Ecker
At the dawn of the 20th century, the stoop of 102 Allen Street, near the corner of Delancey Street on Manhattan’s Lower East Side hopped with activity. Children played in front of the building, competing for space with “those women, called ‘Naphkes’” who would “say to men: ‘Come up’.” Isaac Yarmus, just 12 years old, said that when he “went on the stoop the Naphkes would take my hat and throw it into the street and tell me to keep away from the stoop.” Meanwhile, the building’s housekeeper, Hester Wolf, kept careful watch and would “say to the Naphkes: ‘Go inside’. when she saw a policeman or detective coming along the street.”
The Neighborhood Manhattan Forgot: Audubon Park and the Families Who Shaped It
Matthew Spady Interviewed by Robert W. Snyder
In northern Manhattan in 1841, the naturalist John James Audubon bought 14 acres of farmland on the banks of the Hudson River and built his family a home far from the crowded downtown streets. Audubon’s country homestead is long gone, but his story launches Matthew Spady’s The Neighborhood Manhattan Forgot: Audubon Park and the Families Who Shaped It.
The House on Henry Street: And Interview with Ellen M. Snyder-Grenier
Interviewed by Marjorie N. Feld
Today on the blog, Margorie N. Feld interviews Ellen M. Snyder-Grenier, author of The House on Henry Street: The Enduring Life of a Lower East Side Settlement. This book moves Snyder-Grenier into Manhattan and the rich history of a settlement house, founded by a dynamic Progressive activist named Lillian Wald, in 1893. Unlike so many of the settlement houses founded in that fascinating historical moment, Henry Street is still very much alive as a social service agency, still helping its Lower East Side neighbors after over a century.
Community Struggles for a New Gouverneur: Tackling the Deeper Roots of the City’s Unequal Hospital Care
By Hongdeng Gao
The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed deep inequalities in New York City’s hospitals. The decisions made by officials in power to direct money to private hospitals and close safety-net medical institutions in the past thirty years bear many similarities to another large-scale hospital closure effort in the city nearly six decades ago: the hospital affiliation plan authorized by Mayor Robert Wagner.
From 1899 to 1914, people around the world gave over 12,000 animals to the New York Zoological Park in the Bronx (almost 5,000 of them were snakes). Donations to the zoo fulfilled two purposes: they supplied the zoological park with more animals, and, perhaps more importantly, helped the zoo form a relationship with certain communities around them. This project is a focused look at a section of these animal donors, the people of New York City.
“My Colored House is on Fire”: Children, Housing, and the Architecture of Black Charity in San Juan Hill
By Jessica Larson
Following their displacement from the Tenderloin in the early 1900s, Manhattan’s largest Black population moved northward and sought to rebuild their community’s infrastructure in San Juan Hill, an area bounded by 59th Street to the south, 65th Street to the north, Amsterdam Avenue to east, and West End Avenue to the west. Black reformers — the majority of whom were women — worked to construct a neighborhood that offered to its residents missing social welfare services.
Prehistoric and Ahead of Her Time: Sapphasaura at the Museum of Natural History
By Rachel Pitkin
In the summer of 1973, members of the newly formed Lesbian Feminist Liberation (LFL) group were engaged in a unique construction project in the Upper West Side backyard of one of its members, Robin Lutsky. A physically onerous labor of love, the project unfolded over ten days of round-the-clock attention, a last-ditch protest effort to gain the attention of one of New York’s most celebrated yet controversial institutions: the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH).
Prohibition New York City: An Interview with David Rosen
Interviewed by David Huyssen
Today on the blog, editor David Huyssen speaks with David Rosen, independent writer and historian, about his new book Prohibition New York City:Speakeasy Queen Texas Guinan, Blind Pigs, Drag Balls and More (Charleston, SC: The History Press, 2020), his third book on transgression in American life, and second focusing on New York City.
