Review: Hugh Ryan’s The Women’s House of Detention: A Queer History of a Forgotten Prison
Reviewed by Rachel Corbman
Fifty years ago, an art deco prison towered over Greenwich Village. Between the years of 1929 and 1971, tens of thousands of women and trans masculine people passed through the Women’s House of Detention, waiting for a trial or serving sentences. In The Women’s House of Detention: A Queer History of a Forgotten Prison, Hugh Ryan convincingly demonstrates why this largely forgotten prison matters to queer history. Despite Ryan’s central focus on the so-called House of D, The Women’s House of Detention does not read like an institutional history. Rather, Ryan weaves together the life histories of dozens of women and transmasculine people, following them before and after their time at the House of D.
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.
“Never No Wells of Lonelinesses in Harlem:” Black Lady Lovers in Prohibition Era New York
By Cookie Woolner
In 1928, the British novel The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall was published in the United States, which brought conversations on the topic of lesbianism into the mainstream like never before. The book was one of the first on the subject written by someone who openly identified as queer. Although the novel was deemed controversial and became the object of censorship trials in the United States and at home in Britain, this notoriety helped it become a best seller in bookstores nationwide, including in Harlem. In February 1929, African American journalist Geraldyn Dismond reviewed the annual masquerade ball at the Hamilton Lodge, which had become one of the preeminent institutionsof queer life uptown.
Tong Kee Hang: A Chinese American Civil War Veteran Who Was Stripped of His Citizenship
By Kristin Choo
May is Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander Heritage month, an appropriate time to recognize the Chinese Americans whose lives were disrupted, constricted or uprooted by the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act and other racist laws and policies. Tong Kee Hang did not suffer the most egregious mistreatment meted out to Chinese immigrants during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He was not beaten, lynched, or driven from his home like many others. But the loss of his citizenship and right to vote was a cruel blow for a man who had served his country in wartime and who took deep pride in being American.
In the late summer of 1883, the Dakota Apartments was nearly ready for tenants. After three years of construction, the luxury apartment building had only a few months’ work left to go. Slate-tile roofers, sheet-metal workers, and ironworkers were completing the roof, while carpenters, plasterers, and plumbers finished the interiors. Every day, hundreds of craftsmen trekked uptown to work on the million-dollar building that was not only unusually expensive but also remote in location.
Review: God in Gotham: The Miracle of Religion in Modern Manhattan
Reviewed by Kenneth T. Jackson
When we think of New York and history, religion is not typically the first thing that comes to mind. Organized crime perhaps, or skyscrapers, or labor disputes, or nightclubs, legitimate theaters, museums, subways, Wall Street, wealth, poverty, the list could be endless. To most people, Gotham is more associated with sin than with morality, more with prostitution than with sermons, more with sports venues than with churches.
War Weary Nature: Environment, British Occupation, and the Winter of 1779-1780
By Blake McGready
In December 1779, New Yorkers helplessly watched as their harbor froze solid and ice slowly strangled the proud entrepôt. In the late 18th century, New York City served as the principal destination for packet ships, offered a range of specialized services for the British military, and facilitated trade between the continental interior and Atlantic world. The loss of the city’s maritime and riverine networks, even temporarily, were disastrous. Ice floes appeared in the Hudson River early in the month. By December 22, the lawyer William Smith reported that ice had formed along the shoreline and had obstructed transportation between Manhattan and New Jersey.
“The Avant-Groove”: Excerpt from No Sounds Are Forbidden
By Matthew Friedman
Morton Subotnick arrived in New York in the fall of 1966 already a giant of the burgeoning avant-garde music scene. Together with composer Ramon Sender, a tape recorder, scattered equipment borrowed from a local high school or through a fortuitous connection with the local Ampex representative, and support from Mills College, he had built the San Francisco Tape Music Center into a force in electronic music rivaling the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center (CPEMC), uptown.
Decline, Rebellion, and Police Politics: Rethinking the Dissolution of New York’s Civil Rights Coalition
Reviewed by Joseph Kaplan
In his final book before his life was taken by an assassin’s bullet, Martin Luther King Jr. reflected on the state of the Civil Rights Movement and the conditional allyship of whites. According to King, whites generally believed “that American society is essentially hospitable to fair play and to steady growth toward a middle-class Utopia embodying racial harmony.” Emerging from a decade of unprecedented mobility in which a highly unionized white labor force entered the middle class en masse, many viewed the Civil Rights Movement as part of the unbroken march of progress.
“I have shoes to my feet this time”: May Swenson, New York City, and the FWP
By Margaret A. Brucia
Penniless and hungry, her clothes in tatters, May Swenson was an emergency case for the Workers Alliance (WAA) in March 1938. She was fed at St. Barnabas House on Mulberry Street (“Boy, that butterless bread, gravyless potatoes, hashed turnips & salt-less meatloaf tasted swell!”)[1] and then given fifteen dollars to buy new shoes and clothing at S. Klein’s at Union Square and E 14th Street. “Jesus!” was all she could write in her diary.
