New York: Where the Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get… Art?
Reviewed by Alexis Monroe
The class divisions inherent in the New York art world which Rachel Klein deftly identifies in her book are all too persistent today. Art Wars: The Politics of Taste in Nineteenth Century New York promises a history of taste fundamentally informed by class tensions and sectional strife. Klein crafts this history around three case studies, which she sees as defining events in the 19th-century art world: the collapse of the American Art-Union in 1852, the controversy in the mid-1880s around the Cesnola collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the push in the mid-1880s to open the Met on Sundays.
Read MoreThe House on Henry Street: And Interview with Ellen M. Snyder-Grenier
Interviewed by Marjorie N. Feld
Today on the blog, Margorie N. Feld interviews Ellen M. Snyder-Grenier, author of The House on Henry Street: The Enduring Life of a Lower East Side Settlement. This book moves Snyder-Grenier into Manhattan and the rich history of a settlement house, founded by a dynamic Progressive activist named Lillian Wald, in 1893. Unlike so many of the settlement houses founded in that fascinating historical moment, Henry Street is still very much alive as a social service agency, still helping its Lower East Side neighbors after over a century.
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Community Struggles for a New Gouverneur: Tackling the Deeper Roots of the City’s Unequal Hospital Care
By Hongdeng Gao
The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed deep inequalities in New York City’s hospitals. The decisions made by officials in power to direct money to private hospitals and close safety-net medical institutions in the past thirty years bear many similarities to another large-scale hospital closure effort in the city nearly six decades ago: the hospital affiliation plan authorized by Mayor Robert Wagner.
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“Little Pittsburgh”: Creating an Industrialized Landscape in Hunts Point
By Sam Hege
Since the 1950s, New York City has relied on the South Bronx to handle the vital and taxing components of its processing and distribution infrastructures. This strategy began with the decision to relocate the Terminal Market from downtown Manhattan to the Hunts Point peninsula, and has since been used to justify the siting of waste transfer stations, prisons, and industrial processing facilities. This consolidation of waste and congestion to the South Bronx supported the emergence of Manhattan as a tourist destination and financial capital, embodied by the redevelopment of the Manhattan market space as part of the World Trade Center project.
Read MoreStirrings: How Activist New Yorkers Ignited a Movement for Food Justice
Reviewed by Nevin Cohen
It is impossible to read Stirrings: How Activist New Yorkers Ignited a Movement for Food Justice in the midst of the 2020 Democratic primaries without drawing comparisons between the tensions faced by the food justice pioneers profiled in Lana Dee Povitz’s history and the very different visions of social change articulated by the two candidates. Bernie Sanders’s case for the radical transformation of an unequal and unjust economic and political system seems diametrically opposed to Joe Biden’s more conservative approach, emphasizing incremental change within existing institutions. Their ideologies seem irreconcilable. But as the organizations profiled in Lana Dee Povitz’s compelling history of food activism illustrate, on the ground social change is more nuanced and complex than the Sanders/Biden schism suggests.
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Interview with Ansley Erikson, co-editor of Educating Harlem: A Century of Schooling and Resistance in a Black Community
Interviewed by Dominique Jean-Louis
This week on Gotham we hear from the Harlem Education History Project (HEHP), a multi-platform program at Columbia University that includes a digital collection, exhibits, and the recently published Educating Harlem: A Century of Schooling and Resistance in a Black Community, as well as many other resources for teaching the history of education. Today, Dominique Jean-Louis interviews the Project’s co-director, Ansley T. Erickson, co-editor of the book.
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How Prohibition Killed the Bowery
By Alice Sparberg Alexiou
Back in the days when the Bowery epitomized New York at its grittiest, most honkey-tonk, warm-hearted best—between the end of the Civil War and World War I—nothing was more important to the well being of the street’s motley population of artists, actors, immigrant poor, and bums than the saloon. Yes, the saloon. It was a Bowery institution. During the Bowery’s peak years, the 1890s, the street boasted nearly 100 saloons, each with its own clientele and reasons for existing. In the days of Tammany, specific saloons functioned as political clubhouses; there were “concert saloons,” where the races mingled and drank and sang and had a grand old time, singing and dancing to songs with dirty lyrics banged out on rinky-dink pianos, and waitresses doubled as prostitutes. In some saloons, homesick German and Irish immigrants found compatriots with whom to drink away their pain. And other saloons were like drunken old grandmothers who gathered all those Bowery bums into their beery bosoms and comforted them, providing shelter and the chance to convene with other bummy alcoholics, all of whom had run away to the Bowery from all over the country and the world with a specific purpose: to drink among others who were just like them.
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The Rise and Fall of The Young Lords
Johanna Fernandez, interviewed by Beth Harpaz
One of the most influential groups of the radical ’60s was the Young Lords, an organization of poor and working class Puerto Ricans that began as a street gang and rose to confront the racism of institutions from government to religion. Johanna Fernandez, a professor of history at Baruch College, traces their roots and tells the story of their rise and fall in The Young Lords: A Radical History.
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The Decorated Tenement: How Immigrant Builders and Architects Transformed the Slum in the Gilded Age
Reviewed by Paul Ranogajec
Violette’s important book opens a new chapter on urban housing in architectural history and helps the reader understand a whole set of buildings—indeed, whole swathes of the cityscapes of both New York and Boston—that are prominently visible but often overlooked. Amplifying elite architects’ and reformers’ disdain for so-called tenement “skin-builders,” architectural historians have studied in detail bourgeois design but have paid much less attention to buildings built by and for the working class. The Decorated Tenement helps to correct the historical record, treating the immigrant-built tenement commensurate with its prominence in the two cities. It is a timely book for that, even if the author does not explicitly make the connection to today’s immigration debates.
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