Placemaker and Displacer: How Transit Shaped New York
By Polly Desjarlais
Before 1950, a vibrant multi-ethnic, residential neighborhood known as Little Syria existed at the very bottom of Manhattan. A concentration of immigrants from Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Palestine (countries collectively known then as Greater Syria) settled on Lower Washington Street beginning in the 1880s… As in the case of Chinatown, the transit connections between Little Syria and Brooklyn became instrumental in the community’s transplantation and survival… nearly the whole neighborhood was razed in the 1940s to make way for the construction of the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel (Hugh L. Carey Tunnel). . . In the case of Little Syria, the city’s transportation demands both displaced people and provided a means of resettlement in other parts of the city.
Morganthau: Power, Privilege, and the Rise of An American Dynasty by Andrew Meier
Reviewed by David Huyssen
Henry wasn’t grateful. He hired Pinkerton agents to keep Lazarus away from his wedding. A talented, volcanically ambitious middle son, Henry had been nursing an Oedipal grudge for years. Lazarus had forced him to drop out of City College at fourteen to go to work, and the sting of this betrayal overshadowed the fact that it had also prompted a vital step on Henry’s journey to riches and repute: a job in a law firm run by one of Lazarus’s acquaintances, who initiated him into the world of property management.
Henry rejected his father but embraced his methods.
Right now, New York City is attempting to recover from the pandemic, more populous than ever before, and facing exorbitant housing costs. It seems… both booming and in crisis at the same time,… What are some ways the history featured in We Won’t Move! should inform our understanding of housing in New York in the present?
The tenant protections and affordable housing programs which we have today are primarily the result of grassroots organizing and advocacy. While the power of real estate capital can seem overwhelming, We Won’t Move aims to demonstrate the political power of tenants, and to offer an understanding of NYC’s rich history of tenant organizing as an inspiration and strategic tool.
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.
