Today on Gotham, managing editor Peter-Christian Aigner speaks with Robert Chiles, author of the new book The Revolution of '28 (released today!), about the long-debated question of whether Al Smith — the beloved representative of Manhattan's nationally symbolic (immigrant and working-class) Lower East Side — set in motion the New Deal "realignment" with his 1928 presidential race.
Read MoreToday on Gotham, editor Nick Juravich interviews Scott Sherman about his new book, Patience and Fortitude, and the fight to save the New York Public Library.
Read MoreToday on Gotham, editor Nick Juravich interviews George C. Daughan about his recent book, Revolution on the Hudson: New York City and the Hudson River Valley in the American Revolution.
Read MoreToday on Gotham, editor Nick Juravich interviews Brian L. Tochterman about his new book, The Dying City: Postwar New York and the Ideology of Fear, about the competing narratives that shaped the city after World War II, in the age of mass suburbanization and deindustrialization.
Read MoreToday on Gotham, editor Nick Juravich sits down with Steven J. Diner, the former chancellor of Rutgers University-Newark, to speak about his new book, Universities and their Cities: Urban Higher Education in America.
Read MoreAt the age of twenty-six Donald Trump had sealed his first multi-million-dollar deal. It was a sweet thing for a young man who had been his father’s full-time student ever since graduation from Wharton. Every morning he and his father drove from Jamaica Estates to Fred Trump’s modest office in Beach Haven, one of the large housing developments the older man had built near Coney Island in the early 1950s. Inside a nondescript, three-story brick building on Avenue Z, the headquarters of the Trump family empire still looked like the dentist’s office it had once been, with a linoleum floor, shag carpet, and chest-high partitions between cubicles.
This is the last of three profiles of the Trump patriarchs, adapted from the author's bestseller, The Trumps: Three Builders and a President, courtesy of Simon & Schuster.
Read MoreNearly two decades after Friedrich Trump came to America and a year before his first son, Fred, was born, another boy landed at New York Harbor. He was fifteen, a year younger than Friedrich had been upon his arrival. Like Friedrich, he had traveled alone and left behind his family, his homeland, and his obligation to enter into his country’s military service. And he, too, did not intend to return. His name was Abraham Eli Kazan, and the country he left was Russia. In the coming decades, he, like Fred Trump, would become a real estate developer in New York, building apartments in a city with a desperate need for housing. In the late 1950s the two men each sought to build on the same stretch of Coney Island, a long and bitter struggle that eventually entangled the highest levels of city government. But it was more than a battle between two well-connected businessmen. Trump and Kazan were leaders in two separate movements battling for effective control of the way the city would grow — and because New York City was a bellwether for the rest of the nation, the way that cities all over the country would grow. Ultimately, on this patch of Coney Island, not far from the famous amusement rides, Fred Trump helped carve America's urban future.
Read MoreBack home, in Kallstadt, Germany, a young Friedrich Trump had listened to stories of those who had left for America and made it, determining to do likewise. Arriving in New York City in October 1885 at the age of sixteen, he listened to sagas of the West and picked up what he would need to head that way. In Seattle, he listened to descriptions of Monte Cristo and set himself up in the small Washington mining town. Now, at twenty-eight, he listened to the tales miners were telling one another about gold strikes in Alaska and, especially, in the Yukon.
This is the first of three posts on the Trump patriarchs, adapted from the author's bestseller, The Trumps: Three Builders and a President, courtesy of Simon & Schuster.
Read MoreEach of the boroughs has its own naming history. The Bronx is named after early settler Jonas Bronck. Brooklyn comes from a Dutch word meaning “marsh” or “broken land.” Manhattan derives from a Lenape word which has been translated variously as “land of many hills,” and, more recently, “the place where we get wood for bows.” Henry Hudson himself is said to have named Staten Island Staaten Eylandt, after the Staaten Generaal, the Dutch parliament.
Read MoreTeaching as a profession aims to achieve the most noble of principles — educating children to be responsible, productive citizens. Unfortunately, the teachers hired in the early years of the new republic and well into the nineteenth century were usually untrained and unprepared for the job ahead. The civic-minded movers and shakers in New York City at the time were interested in the education of its youth, but the path to securing qualified teachers for the schools was slow to be realized.
