Haitian Refugees, ACT UP New York, and the Transnational Dimensions of Local Organizing for AIDS Housing
By Maggie Schreiner
…as small numbers of people started being released from Guantánamo under interim orders; the lawyers didn’t know how to arrange for supportive housing. A group in New Jersey had housed the first few people who had been freed, but as a plane carrying an HIV-positive Haitian child and his grandmother approached Newark Airport, the organization backed out of the arrangement. Unless alternate housing could be found immediately, the two would be returned to Guantánamo…
Working Class Utopias": A History of Cooperative Housing in New York City and Freedomland: Co-op City and the Story of New York
Reviewed by Nicholas Dagen Bloom
To understand why local cooperatives rank so low in progressive housing discourse, it’s worth reading either of the excellent books under review. Annemarie Sammartino’s Freedomland provides a socially informed history of Co-op City, chronicling its triumphs and travails, with particular attention to resident experiences and long-term outcomes. Legendary urban history Robert M. Fogelson’s Working-Class Utopias offers readers a comprehensive account of the New York cooperative movement, giving special attention to the spectacular collapse of Co-op City’s finances during the 1975-76 rent strike. Both books capture the complexity, and nearly insuperable challenges, faced by cooperative sponsors, state officials, and residents in sustaining communal housing.
Saving the Bronx River: An Excerpt From South Bronx Rising: The Rise, Fall, and Resurrection of An American City
By Jill Jonnes
Until the 21st century, few residents of New York City, much less the South Bronx, even knew there was a Bronx River, the City’s only river. And why would anyone know? For more than a century, the banks and flowing waters of the lower Bronx River had long been largely fenced-off and out of sight behind an almost-solid wall of riverfront factories, gargantuan scrap metal yards, sprawling warehouses, and parking lots (including, starting in 1967, the massive Hunts Point wholesale food market). The lower five miles of the twenty-three mile river below the New York Botanic Garden and Bronx Zoo served as an industrial dump and sewer, its few access points blocked by gigantic mounds of submerged cars, worn-out tires, less identifiable garbage, and rusting junk…
From roughly 1850 to 1950, Fulton Market would dominate wholesale fish provisioning in the United States and much of the country’s fish would pass through Fulton…As the market supplied itself from more distant locales, Fulton’s ecological impact widened. … wholesalers had to look further and further away and develop more and more complex means of preserving and moving fish. … the length and complexity of this process served to obscure the ecological impact of food—consumer appetites were, after all, destroying ecosystems a world away.
Bob Dylan first set foot in the Village in 1961, and even as he continues to make music, you can argue that his Greenwich Village years in the 1960s were a formative period in his life and work. Dick Weissman’s new book, Bob Dylan’s New York: A Historic Guide, published by the State University of New York Press, helps fans and students of Dylan walk the streets where his career took off.
“Fellow Citizens Too”: Puerto Ricans and Migration Politics in the New York Amsterdam News, 1954
By Daniel Acosta Elkan
On March 1, 1954, four Puerto Rican nationalists opened fire on the members of the House of Representatives from the gallery of the body’s chamber in Washington DC. This was but the most dramatic event in an important year for the Puerto Rican diaspora, and its effects were felt in profoundly local ways. In East Harlem, the most prominent stateside Boricua community, the FBI conducted a number of raids on bars, restaurants, and other community spaces. The New York Amsterdam News, the city’s leading Black newspaper, reported that “Negroes and Puerto Ricans are reportedly being rounded up, searched, and subjected to other indignities.”
New Ways to Understand Robert Moses: An Interview with Katie Uva and Kara Murphy Schlichting
By Robert W. Snyder
If you teach courses on New York City’s history, or just have a passing interest in its past, you are sure to come across Robert A. Caro’s biography The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York. Published in 1974, it remains influential and informs an exhibit at the New-York Historical Society, echoes into David Hare’s new play Straight Line Crazy, and appears conspicuously in Zoom conversations on the bookshelves of politicians and journalists.
New York City “600” Schools and the Legacy of Segregation in Special Education
By Francine Almash
In 1947 the New York City Board of Education announced the first centralized program for delinquent and maladjusted youth, known as the “600” schools (for their number designation). The “600” schools were the result of coordinated efforts beginning in the 1920s that linked the NYC Board of Education, the Bureau of Educational Measurements, which promoted psychological testing to aid in the education of “emotionally handicapped” children, and the New York City Children’s Courts, which gave judges the authority to act as surrogate parents to a growing number of “at-risk” youth.
“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.
New Collections From the CUNY Digital History Archive
By Stephen Brier
The CUNY Digital History Archive (CDHA), created in 2013 by the American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning at the CUNY Graduate Center, is committed to preserving and presenting on an open publicly accessible website the history of the City University of New York. Over the past eight years, a number of CUNY faculty, staff, graduate students, and alumni have created a series of curated collections of primary historical sources materials on key moments in CUNY’s rich history.
