In the city of New York from the 1930s to the 1990s, Irish attorney Paul O’Dwyer was a fierce and enduring presence in courtrooms, on picket lines, and in contests for elected office. He was forever the advocate of the downtrodden and marginalized, fighting not only for Irish Catholics in Northern Ireland but for workers, radicals, Jews, and African Americans and against the Vietnam War.
Our Lady of the World’s Fair: After Moses and Cardinal Spellman Brought the Pietà to the Fair, They Brought the Pope
By Ruth D. Nelson
Many services and facilities were donated. A “Papal Visit News Center” was set up in the wing of a high-rise building at United Nations Plaza, courtesy of Alcoa Plaza Associates, and volunteers from two public-relations firms worked the telephones, typed, and mimeographed the latest updates. To ensure that not one car in the pope’s motorcade would hit a pothole, the city’s Department of Highways assigned a two-thousand-man crew to the streets along the motorcade route one week before the visit. New York streets never looked so good.
The Battle For Gay Rights In New York City – a Conversation With Stephen Petrus
Stephen Petrus, interviewed by Adam Kocurek
Adam Kocurek interviews Dr. Stephen Petrus about his new project, a virtual exhibition titled The Battle for Intro. 2: The New York City Gay Rights Bill, 1971 – 1986. Petrus is the Curator, as well as the Director of Public History Programs, at the LaGuardia and Wagner Archives. This exhibition dives into the story of New York City’s Gay Rights Bill, a local law known as Intro. 2 in the City Council. This was a collaborative project, with faculty and undergraduate students at LaGuardia Community College compiling sources, conducting and recording oral history interviews, and chronicling the many key individuals and moments leading up to the passage of the Gay Rights Bill.
“The Same Slow Pace”: Nelson Rockefeller and Resistance to Open Housing in New York
By Marsha E. Barrett
Despite his continued interest in housing policy and urban renewal programs, integration proved to be a stumbling block that Rockefeller could not overcome. It was an especially difficult issue for Rockefeller because he relied heavily on suburban voters who, as the 1960s progressed, became more organized and vocal in their opposition to housing integration and state efforts to promote equality. Rather than bring diverse New Yorkers together, issues such as housing demonstrated the limitations of Rockefeller’s original approach to coalition building and a fundamental weakness to his brand of pro-government moderate Republicanism.
“Not only distressing but truly alarming”: New York City and the Embargo of 1807
By Harvey Strum
Regardless of these efforts, the embargo led to a deteriorating economy in the city. During the winter of 1808-09, “hundreds of…honest…and industrious citizens,” of New York City struggled “under the weight “of poverty and distress” produced by the embargo. In 1807, creditors imprisoned 298 people for debt; by 1808 that number had jumped to 1,317. By mid-February 1808, over 5,000 persons found shelter in the Alms House or received daily rations from it. More than a thousand laborers left the city seeking employment in the country, with hundreds of unemployed seamen similarly departing. On January 8th, in a truly radical response to their situation, 150 sailors turned their backs on their nation and accepted passage on British vessels headed for Halifax, Nova Scotia in search of employment in the British merchant marine. All considered, for New York the embargo ranked with the Great Depression as an economic nightmare that caused untold suffering on thousands of its inhabitants unable to find employment and dependent on public charity for subsistence.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
