“The Lungs of the City”: Frederick Law Olmsted, Public Health, and the Creation of Central Park
By Lucie Levine
As the nation’s first great urban park, Central Park was conceived as “The Lungs of the City,” and built in 1858 as an oasis for “the sanitary advantage of breathing.” A half-century later, a letter to the editor of the New York Times glowed that “thousands visit the park daily just to breathe.” But today, “I can’t breathe” is the defining cry of the moment, as the city and the nation confronts both a global respiratory pandemic and the ongoing scourge of police brutality against black people.
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Refuge in the Heights: Migration, Memory and Authoritarianism in the Twentieth Century
By Robert W. Snyder
Immigrants travel with baggage, and some of the most important things they carry are their memories of life in their original homes. In Washington Heights and Inwood, where immigrants include German Jews, Dominicans, and Jews from the former Soviet Union, personal and collective memories embrace an unusual cast of characters: some of the most brutal dictators of the 20th century.
Upper Manhattan is haunted, you might say, by memories of Hitler, Trujillo, and Stalin.
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In Pursuit of Knowledge: An Interview with Kabria Baumgartner
Interviewed by Katie Uva
Today on the blog, editor Katie Uva speaks to Kabria Baumgartner, author of In Pursuit of Knowledge: Black Women and Educational Activism in Antebellum America. In her book, Baumgartner explores the origins of the fight for school desegregation in the 19th century Northeast by focusing on the stories of African American girls and women.
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NYC Parks as Historical Battlegrounds between Black Equality and White Supremacy
By Marika Plater
When Amy Cooper threatened Chris Cooper’s life by calling the police with the wildly fabricated claim, “There is a man, African American…threatening me” in Central Park, she joined a long history of white New Yorkers who have made public parks unsafe for black people. Looking back to the early 19th century lays bare the connection between this tense moment in the Ramble and the question of who constitutes “the public” entitled to use public spaces. Between the 1820s and 1860s, the city’s parks were battlegrounds — sometimes literally — between black New Yorkers who asserted their equal right to relax, play, and protest there and whites who fought to keep these public spaces for themselves.
Read MoreSwept From the Streets: Mario Procaccino and the Rise of Law-and-Order Politics in New York City
By Gabe S. Tennen
Mario Angelo Procaccino strode down Fulton Street, waving to onlookers and shaking hands. Accompanied by his running mate for city council president, Abraham Beame; his teenage daughter, Marierose; and a cabal of campaign staff, the Democratic candidate for mayor seemed at home in the working-class shopping center in Downtown Brooklyn.[1] In 1969, the appearance of Procaccino, then serving as city comptroller, at a blue-collar hub outside of Manhattan was both practical and symbolic. Attempting to assemble a coalition of voters dissatisfied with the liberal bent of incumbent Mayor John V. Lindsay, Procaccino considered outreach to white homeowners in Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, and Staten Island his best chance to ascend to City Hall. Beginning his excursion in front of Mays Department Store, a campaign spokesman with a bullhorn declared to passers-by that “John Lindsay probably doesn’t even know where Mays Department Store is!”[2] As he had done throughout his Democratic primary campaign, the pencil-mustached, diminutive Procaccino would allude to that gulf between a Manhattan-reared, Protestant, Yale-educated mayor and a working-class Catholic and Jewish outer-borough constituency during the general election. The issue that most galvanized that effort was one gaining traction across the country: “law-and-order.”
Read MoreRiot
By Mike Wallace
All day the twelfth of August 1900, the city roasted through a heat wave. Night brought no relief. In Hell’s Kitchen, sleepless residents perched on stoops or fled to local watering holes. Arthur Harris, a 22-year-old, Virginia-born recent migrant, sought refuge at McBride’s Saloon on the corner of Eighth Avenue and 41st Street, just down the block from the apartment in which he lived with his girlfriend, 20-year-old May Enoch. At 2:00 a.m., Enoch came by, asked him to “come on up home,” then waited outside for him to join her. On departing, Harris found her struggling in a man’s grip. He leapt to rescue her. The man produced a club and began battering him, shouting racist epithets. Harris pulled a knife and cut his assailant twice. Robert J. Thorpe, a plainclothes policeman who had been arresting Enoch for presumed soliciting, fell mortally wounded.
Read MoreJump Up! Caribbean Carnival Music in New York City
Reviewed by Gage Averill
It is fitting that it was two New Yorkers in the early 1930s, Harold Arlen and Ted Koehler, who composed the showtune “I Love a Parade,” because for all the diversity and excess of its public processions, there is likely no city anywhere that has exceeded New York. The home of the renowned ticker-tape parades, the Macy’s Day Parade, the St Patrick’s Day Parade, NYC Pride the Village Halloween Parade, and numerous ethnic celebrations (modeled on St. Patrick’s), New York City’s streetscapes have conferred both prestige and visibility on those who have been able to muster the necessary funding and authorizations and crowds. It is not without a powerful sense of the current moment, the Covid-19 pandemic, that I’ve taken on the otherwise enviable, and the now more somber, task of reviewing a book about some of the most raucous, colorful, noisy and crowded events in New York: Brooklyn’s Caribbean Carnival celebrations.
Read MoreBoss of the Grips: Interview with Eric K. Washington
Interviewed by Prithi Kanakamedala
Today on the blog, Prithi Kanakamedala talks to Eric K. Washington about his current work, Boss of the Grips: The Life of James H. Williams and the Red Caps of Grand Central Terminal. This book has garnered a great deal of praise, including citation as one of the Best Biographies of 2019 by Open Letters Review and special recognition from The Municipal Art Society of New York as a 2020 Brendan Gill Prize Finalist.
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“Skull Trouble”: A Brief History of Police Harassment of Black New Yorkers
By Marcy S. Sacks
As a fresh recruit to the New York City police force at the turn of the twentieth century, Dutch immigrant Cornelius Willemse learned an important lesson from his superior officer about how to treat the black residents on his beat. One day, the novice patrolman encountered a group of black men congregating on a street corner. He attempted to disperse the group. “At my order to move along,” he recalled, “they shuffled off slowly, dragging their feet on the sidewalk, in a way which seemed to say, ‘Feet, we’ll be back as soon as this fool cop is gone.’” Angered by their perceived insolence, Willemse decided that they were “ripe for a lesson.” Without warning, he began beating any black man within reach, “work[ing] with the old nightstick as hard as I could.” In short order, “Negroes were lying all over the sidewalk, some of them half conscious, others bruised and bleeding.” He smugly evaluated his success. “I had made good on my threat of ‘skull trouble.’” He expected no further difficulty from them.
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