John Strausbaugh's Victory City: A History of New York and New Yorkers During World War II

Reviewed by Steven H. Jaffe

In recent years writers and historians have turned their attention to New York City’s experience in World War II. Contributions to the field have included Lorraine B. Diehl’s Over Here! New York City During World War II (2010), Richard Goldstein’s Helluva Town: The Story of New York City During World War II (2010), my own New York at War: Four Centuries of Combat, Fear, and Intrigue in Gotham (2012), and Kenneth T. Jackson’s WWII & NYC(2012), the latter accompanying an exhibition of the same name at the New-York Historical Society. Other scholars have tackled specific aspects of the story, including the crucial military role of the city’s port (over 3 million GIs and 63 million tons of materiel departed from the harbor’s piers to the North African and European fronts), and the volatile political, ethnic, religious, and economic tensions that vexed relations between New York’s Jewish, German, Irish, Italian, and African-American communities before and during the war.

Politics, Reviews, Great Depression & New DealGuest UserJanuary 10, 2019Comment

Heidi Waleson's Mad Scenes and Exit Arias: The Death of the New York City Opera and the Future of Opera in America

Reviewed by Lily Kass

Heidi Waleson’s Mad Scenes and Exit Arias: The Death of the New York City Opera and the Future of Opera in Americatakes us behind the scenes at a long-beloved, and recently resurrected, New York cultural institution. The New York City Opera was founded in 1944 when the New York City Council and Mayor Fiorello H. LaGuardia inaugurated the City Center of Music and Drama. As one of the center’s constituent performance ensembles, the opera company’s original mission was to bring opera to the people through affordable ticket prices and popular repertoire. Waleson recounts the company’s struggle to survive through the decades as views changed about the importance of opera, both in New York City and around the country. Readers of the book are made constantly aware that City Opera, even from the start, was only barely cheating death and that its demise was preordained.

Arts & Culture, Contemporary Era, Reviews, Urban Decline & Fiscal CrisisGuest UserJanuary 3, 2019Comment

“The Work Is Never Done:” Judson Dance Theater Transforms MoMA

By Joanna Steinberg

In 1968, Village Voice critic Jill Johnston proclaimed that between 1962 and 1964 a “revolution” had occurred at Judson Memorial Church. With its exhibition Judson Dance Theater: The Work is Never Done, MoMA brings visitors into this seminal moment when a collective of choreographers and downtown artists across disciplines came together to create and show new works in non-commercial spaces, works that transformed the definitions of art and how we experience it. MoMA pushes the boundaries and conventions of the museum space as well, beginning the exhibition in the Atrium, where a video installation and a series of live performances take place daily, showing the work of preeminent choreographers from Judson Dance Theater: Yvonne Rainer, Deborah Hay, David Gordon, Lucinda Childs, Steve Paxton, and Tricia Brown. As the subtitle suggests, “the work is never done.” The performances embody the idea that experimentation is ongoing, as is the interpretation by both artists and audiences who come together in the present moment.

Arts & Culture, Postwar New York, ReviewsGuest UserDecember 18, 2018Comment

Ninth Street Women

Reviewed by Marjorie Heins

Mary Gabriel's group biography of five leading women artists in the Abstract Expressionist movement — Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler — weighs in at 722 pages (892 if you count endnotes and bibliography), yet leaves the reader (or at least, this reader) hungry for what is left out. Gabriel spends almost as much time recycling well-known stories about the men these five "Ab Ex" stars married, bedded, or hung out with, as it does on the women themselves. In the process, it pays scant attention to dozens of other female artists of the time.

Arts & Culture, Gender & Sexuality, Postwar New York, ReviewsGuest UserDecember 6, 2018Comment

Mrs. Maisel is Indeed Marvelous — Mostly

By Stephen R. Duncan

Arts & Culture, Manhattan, Postwar New York, ReviewsGuest UserDecember 4, 2018Comment

Relics of the Underground: The Afterlife of Cultural Spaces

By Jeffrey Patrick Colgan & Jeffrey Escoffier

In early 1974, members of the punk band Television spotted a newly reopened yet unavoidably dingy lower Bowery bar on their way home from rehearsal. Returning soon after, they approached the owner Hilly Krystal and asked if he would host performances by bands that were playing a different kind of rock music. After an initial four-week residency by Television, CBGB & OMFUG (Country, Bluegrass, Blues & Other Music for Uplifting Gormandizers) continued to host countless bands and fostered the emerging punk and No-Wave music scenes of the 1970s and 1980s. Even after its role in any identifiable and burgeoning music scene came to an end in the 1990s, it still hosted performances until its ultimate demise in 2006 — its final sendoff facilitated by Blondie and Patti Smith. By 2008 the former venue was occupied by clothing designer John Varvatos, who kept some of the graffiti, stickers, and concert posters as accents to the calculated ‘subversiveness’ of the items on sale.

Arts & Culture, Manhattan, Reviews, Urban Decline & Fiscal CrisisGuest UserNovember 8, 2018Comment

The History of the Future: Contextualizing the Exhibition of the Fourth Regional Plan for the New York Metropolitan Region

By Kristian Taketomo

A basement in Greenwich Village may hold a sneak peek of what’s to come in the New York Metropolitan region. Until November 3rd, the ground floor at the Center for Architecture houses a free exhibition of the Regional Plan Association’s latest long-range strategic vision for the New York-New Jersey-Connecticut region, the Fourth Regional Plan.

Built Environment, Urban Planning, Reviews, Contemporary EraGuest UserOctober 30, 2018Comment

Lindsay K. Campbell's City of Forests, City of Farms: Sustainability Planning for New York City’s Nature

Reviewed by Kubi Ackerman

In November of 2015, a tree planted in the Bronx was commemorated as the one millionth tree of the city’s MillionTreesNYC initiative. The accompanying ceremony celebrated the culmination of this ambitious urban forestry project spearheaded by former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg. A little more than two years later, the City Council passed what was described as the city’s first ever bill focused specifically on urban agriculture, characterized modestly as “a first step” aimed merely at collecting information on urban agriculture organizations and businesses. Given the mainstreaming of environmental issues in New York City, which are inclusive of both urban forestry and urban agriculture, why was the former enthusiastically embraced at the top levels of municipal governance while the latter is still now only very slowly receiving the attention of policymakers? This is the central question of Lindsay Campbell’s book, City of Forests, City of Farms: Sustainability Planning for New York’s Nature, which juxtaposes and contrasts these two distinct but interrelated conceptions of nature in the city that rose to prominence in the Bloomberg Era. In so doing, Campbell provides insight on the complex interplay between politics and biological and social ecologies, and raises critical questions as to who ultimately benefits from sustainability initiatives.

Contemporary Era, Nature & Environment, Politics, ReviewsGuest UserSeptember 20, 2018Comment

Erica Wagner's Chief Engineer: Washington Roebling, The Man Who Built the Brooklyn Bridge

Reviewed by Richard Howe

The name Roebling is so closely bound up with the Brooklyn Bridge that it’s probably worth saying at the outset of this review that Erica Wagner’s Chief Engineer: Washington Roebling: The Man Who Built the Brooklyn Bridge(Bloomsbury, 2017) really is a biography of the man and not — as might be said of David McCullough’s classic The Great Bridge (Simon & Schuster, 1972) — a biography of the bridge. The eldest son of the bridge’s designer and promoter, John A. Roebling, Washington Roebling was born on May 26, 1837, in Saxonburg, Pennsylvania, and died shortly past his eighty-ninth birthday, on July 21, 1926, in Trenton, New Jersey. He served as chief engineer for the construction of what was then known as the East River Bridge for nearly fourteen years, from shortly after his father’s death on July 22, 1869, until he resigned the position not long after the bridge was opened to the public on May 24, 1883 (his assistant C. C. Martin was appointed in his place on July 9, 1883). Washington Roebling was thirty-two when he was appointed chief engineer for the Brooklyn Bridge; he lived another forty-three years after leaving that post. Though it was his position with the bridge project that secured him a place in the history of New York, seventy-five of his eighty-nine years were not spent on the great bridge, and it is perhaps the greatest merit of Erica Wagner’s book that it would be a fascinating and moving read even if its subject had never been chief engineer of the Brooklyn Bridge. I would almost go so far as to say that it might have been an even more fascinating and moving read had he not been.

Brooklyn, Built Environment, Urban Planning, Reviews, Gilded AgeGuest UserSeptember 13, 2018Comment

Parable of the Bees: Leslie Day's Honeybee Hotel

Reviewed by Rebecca Dalzell

In 2012, the Waldorf-Astoria built six beehives in a rooftop garden. Twenty stories above Park Avenue, 300,000 bees pollinated flowering apple and cherry trees, and produced jugs of honey. Its flavor depended on the season: in the spring, it was light and minty; come fall, it darkened as bees foraged on aster and goldenrod. This miel de Manhattan made its way into cocktails, bread, and gelato served in the hotel restaurants.

Manhattan, Nature & Environment, ReviewsGuest UserSeptember 6, 2018Comment

John Strausbaugh's Victory City: A History of New York and New Yorkers During World War II

Reviewed by Steven H. Jaffe

Heidi Waleson's Mad Scenes and Exit Arias: The Death of the New York City Opera and the Future of Opera in America

Reviewed by Lily Kass

“The Work Is Never Done:” Judson Dance Theater Transforms MoMA

By Joanna Steinberg

Ninth Street Women

Reviewed by Marjorie Heins

Mrs. Maisel is Indeed Marvelous — Mostly

By Stephen R. Duncan

Relics of the Underground: The Afterlife of Cultural Spaces

By Jeffrey Patrick Colgan & Jeffrey Escoffier

The History of the Future: Contextualizing the Exhibition of the Fourth Regional Plan for the New York Metropolitan Region

By Kristian Taketomo

Lindsay K. Campbell's City of Forests, City of Farms: Sustainability Planning for New York City’s Nature

Reviewed by Kubi Ackerman

Erica Wagner's Chief Engineer: Washington Roebling, The Man Who Built the Brooklyn Bridge

Reviewed by Richard Howe

Parable of the Bees: Leslie Day's Honeybee Hotel

Reviewed by ​Rebecca Dalzell

Reviewed by Rebecca Dalzell