The World of Dubrow's Cafeteria: An Interview with Marcia Bricker Halperin
By Robert W. Snyder
In the middle decades of the twentieth century in New York City, Dubrow’s cafeterias in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn and the garment district of Manhattan were places to get out of your apartment, have coffee with friends, or enjoy a hearty but affordable meal. They were grounded in the world of Jewish immigrants and their children, and they thrived in years when Flatbush and the Garment District each had a distinctly Jewish character. […] before Dubrow’s cafeterias were shuttered, Marcia Bricker Halperin captured their mood and their patrons in black and white photographs. These pictures, along with essays by the playwright Donald Margulies and the historian Deborah Dash Moore, constitute Marcia’s book Kibitz and Nosh: When We All Met at Dubrow’s Cafeteria, published by Cornell University Press and winner of a National Jewish Book Council prize for Food Writing and Cookbooks.
Policing the World from New York City: How Policing Changed from 1880 to 1920
A Collaboration with Public Books: Matthew Guariglia, interviewed by Emily Brooks
From the 1880s to the 1940s, New York City was transformed—and so too was the New York City Police Department. This is the second of two interviews—published in collaboration with Public Books—where Matthew Guariglia and Emily Brooks discuss this pivotal era, through their exciting new books on the NYPD. The first interview was published on Public Books. You can read it here.
Opening Credits: Urban Redevelopment, Industrial Policy, and the Revitalization of Motion Picture and Television Production in New York City, 1973-1983
By Shannan Clark
With the city’s fortunes reaching their nadir in the mid-1970s, a disparate coalition of union activists, creative professionals, cultural advocates, public officials, media executives, and real estate developers began to coalesce to rebuild the motion picture and television production industry in New York. The participants in this process acted at a pivotal conjuncture, working at the dawn of an era of austerity, the duration of which they could not foresee, but with a consciousness that was still shaped by their formative experiences in an earlier era of abundance that was coming to an end.
Frances Goldin and the Moses Threat to Cooper Square
By Katie Heiserman
Less remembered than her West Village counterpart Jane Jacobs, Frances Goldin deserves attention and further study as a model of both forceful and joyful neighborhood organizing. An activist with a distinctive style, she brought the community together and sustained engagement over many years. In her 2014 oral history interview with Village Preservation, Goldin highlighted the egalitarian, community-centered approach at the core of her work with CSC: “Fifty-nine years ago, dues were a dollar a year, and today, dues are a dollar a year.”
Staged News: The Federal Theatre Project’s Living Newspapers in New York
Review By J.J. Butts
Jordana Cox’s excellent study Staged News: The Federal Theatre Project’s Living Newspapers in New York explores the history of the New York Living Newspapers (NYLN) unit, revealing its complex engagement with news and performance. The focus on journalism within the FTP separates her book from many others on New Deal writing and performance arts. Scholars highlighting the value of the FTP and Federal Writers’ Project (FWP) have often made a case for them around the artistic innovations or careers they nourished. However, journalists constituted one of the major categories of writing professionals seeking work relief, and journalism prepared them for the kinds of fact-based work that typified many of the FTP and FWP productions. In consequence, Cox’s focus on the way the newsroom shaped and was reshaped by the Living Newspapers refreshingly spotlights a crucial element of the story of New Deal culture.
The Valentine’s Manuals, as the books came to be known, started life in 1801 as informational pamphlets. In 1818, they were renamed the City Directory. That title lasted until Valentine came along and transformed the volumes. “The idea was to make the books interesting to the public as well as to city officials,” he explained in 1865. Armed with new-old material, Valentine enlivened the dry data with excerpts from founding documents, essays about old buildings and parks, and anecdotes about New Amsterdam.
An Excerpt from Born in Blood: Violence and the Making of America
By Scott Gac
The Great Strikes of 1877 are recognized as a significant example of forceful labor protest in the United States. But, if we only look at what the workers did, we miss the important role of the state and state-backed violence in controlling workers and supporting the growth of American industrial capitalism. And it is this revolution of industrial capitalism, a revolution of contracts, wages, and courts backed by federal, state, and local force, that workers resisted during the Great Strikes. The following excerpt from Born in Blood: Violence and the Making of America details how Social Darwinism helped buttress worker suppression in the post-Civil War era and how, in 1874, the brutal treatment of peaceful working-class protesters in New York City’s Tompkins Square Park foreshadowed the militant response to workers seen three years later in the Great Strikes.
Our Secret Society: Mollie Moon and the Glamour, Money, and Power behind the Civil Rights Movement
Review By Dominique Jean-Louis
Tanisha Ford describes Mollie Moon, and social power brokers like her, as “the glue that connected Black social clubs, church groups, sororities, fraternities, and professional organizations into a national network of contributors who gave of their time and money to keep the movement afloat,” forming a “Black Freedom financial grid [that] established the economic base that supported the frontline activism of Martin Luther King Jr., Fannie Lou Hamer, and John Lewis.” Mollie Moon was perhaps best known for her role as head of the National Urban League Guild, the social and volunteer auxiliary arm of the National Urban League, connecting a national grid of donors, activists, strategists and philanthropists
“Our Brooklyn Correspondent”: William J. Wilson Writes the City
By Britt Rusert
William J. Wilson may very well have been New York’s first Black culture critic. A self-stylized flâneur, cultural aesthete, and frequent contributor to Black periodicals throughout the 1840s and 50s, he wrote under the name “Ethiop” and as “Brooklyn Correspondent” for Frederick Douglass’ Paper. In these columns, he provided readers across the nation with on-the-ground reports of New York’s people, places, and happenings based on his frequent “ramblings” around the city. Wilson was particularly interested in the sights and sounds of Broadway as it emerged as a hub of culture, entertainment, and conspicuous consumption in the middle of the century. Wilson would make his own contribution to the city’s cultural scene in 1859 with his publication of the Afric-American Picture Gallery, an experimental text that imagines the first museum of Black Art in the United States
Skyscraper Settlement: An Interview with Joyce Milambling
Joyce Milambling, interviewed by David Huyssen
[…] Christodora House has an amazing history, too much of which has become obscured by time and influenced by what the building has come to represent to many people. The building at 143 Avenue B deteriorated in the 1960s and 70s after the City abandoned it, making it a symbol of urban blight. Later, its 1986 conversion to condominiums associated it with conflicts over gentrification in the East Village. It took center stage in those conflicts when protesters from Tompkins Square Park broke into and vandalized the building in 1988. Although its architectural and historic value have since earned it spots on both the National Register and the State Register of Historic Places, its settlement-era history remains under-appreciated. The settlement house movement, despite its flaws, confronted social problems head-on and provided entire communities with both urgent social services and opportunities for growth and development. Christodora is an important part of that story.
