“They’re Tearing Down the Hippodrome”: A History of the Theater’s Demolition
By Sunny Stalter-Pace
Discourse about the Hippodrome follows the pattern observed by Max Page, where real estate development shapes not only the city’s landscape but its “written and displayed history” as well. Hippodrome memorials took place in ephemeral media: newspapers, magazines, radio broadcasts. As they marked the loss of the built environment, these memorials tried to preserve some of the utopian impulses associated with it.
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The War Brought Home: The Greenwich Village Townhouse Explosion of 1970
By Brendan Mahoney
The Weather Underground (Weathermen) rose from the dust as the pallbearers of the now deceased SDS and dying anti-war movement. This group sought to destroy many of the white, bourgeois remnants of the SDS, abandoning electoral and peaceful tactics in favor of guerrilla warfare, with solidarity across racial lines. Their motivation was to bring the war home. In plain terms that meant bringing the destruction and chaos that the US war machine had brought to the people in Vietnam and elsewhere, into the United States.
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Damn’d Good Shots: A Matter of Honor on the Streets of New York, 1783
By Todd Braisted
What had caused such hot-headed emotions between the two senior officers present with the regiment? Delicacy, in the 18th Century manner. This life-and-death struggle centered around the regimental clerk, Sergeant James Perkins, being illegally detained by Lt. Col. Campbell to transcribe all his legal proceedings after his being suspended from duty. Upon being ordered to join the corps, after Campbell’s suspension, the disgraced lieutenant colonel made us of “the most rude & violent Expressions, in which Colo. Campbell thought proper pointedly to make use of” against Major Coffin.
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Civil War-Era Black New York and Historical Memory: Locating the Eighth Ward
By Marquis Taylor
Researching Manhattan’s Eighth Ward presented an exciting opportunity to learn about a neighborhood deeply tied to Civil War-era Black New York — yet it also posed challenges regarding archival constraints. Newspaper articles from the mainstream white press, records produced by the city’s burgeoning municipal government, and reports from reformers and their institutions comprise the dominant archive of Lower Manhattan’s Eighth Ward, which is fragmented and tainted with racist ideology. Also, with much of the 19th-century built environment of present-day SoHo gone, researchers and historians alike are forced to not only confront these limitations but construct a counter-archive. Only through engagement with the Black press, particularly The Weekly Anglo-African (later known as The Anglo-African), do critical aspects of the Black New York of Joseph and Rachel Moore’s era become more legible.
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Working Against Type: Typographical Union No. 6 and the Battle Over Women’s Night Work
By R.B. Tiven
After the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, New York passed a law barring women from nighttime factory work. The definition of “factory” covered binderies and printing presses, including morning newspapers whose type was set overnight. As a result, bookbinders and the small number of women who worked as printers and proofreaders lost their prized night shifts, the shortest and best-paying positions. Two of the printers, Ada R. Wolff and Margaret Kerr-Firth, turned to their union to help salvage their jobs at the New York Times. Their advocacy triggered a fight that pitted the powerful New York Typographical Union against the New York State Federation of Labor, and generated bills vetoed by both Republican and Democratic governors. It also set the terms of a multi-decade dispute about who spoke for working-class women.
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“Twenty-Two of the Healthiest Blacks”; The Ship Bruynvisch and the First Arrival of Enslaved Africans in New Amsterdam in 1627
By Jaap Jacobs
[…] establishing that the first enslaved Africans arrived on the Bruynvisch allows us to pinpoint exactly when the institution of slavery was introduced into New Amsterdam and New Netherland and thus into what later became New York City and State. It is New York’s 1619 moment. Whether and in what way 29 August 1627 should be commemorated in New York is not a scholarly matter, but those who value accuracy and reliability in history will no doubt find ways to do so. And we now have not just a correct year but even an exact day to replace the inaccurate dating of 1625/1626. The year 2027 provides the opportunity to commemorate both the abolition of slavery in New York State—1827—as well as its beginning in 1627.
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Philip Mark Plotch: Mobilizing the Metropolis
Interviewed by Robert W. Snyder
Mobilizing the Metropolis closely charts the evolution of the Port Authority as it went from improving rail freight around New York Harbor to building bridges and managing real estate. At the same time, the book explores the evolution of the authority’s internal culture in the face of actions by elected officials in New York and New Jersey that have reduced the agency’s autonomy and affected its operations. Mobilizing the Metropolis also extracts from the history of the Port Authority useful lessons about how organizations charged with solving governmental problems can win support and engage opposition.
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“‘The World’s Most Arrested Lesbian:’ Corona Rivera and the New York Gay Activists Alliance, 1970-72.” An Interview with Marc Stein
Interviewed By Ben Serby
I think historians of LGBTQ+ activism should become more familiar with Corona’s story because it’s fascinating in and of itself, but also because it might change the way we think about the history of GAA-New York and the broader history of LGBTQ+ activism in the 1970s. More generally, I think GAA-New York was responsible for one of the most creative and powerful waves of direct action ever seen in the United States, with lessons for LGBTQ+ and other activists today. Corona was a leading GAA-New York activist for two years and we should know more about her.
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