Reviewed by Jonathan W. Wilson
Have pity for John Holt. He lived in perilous times. As the publisher of the New-York Journal, and as a centrally located postmaster, Holt was poised to play an important role in the American Revolution. His evident sympathies were with the patriots. But he had to be careful.
Read MoreReviewed by Emily Brooks
Black and Hispanic or Latino youth are dramatically overrepresented in the city’s detention facilities. In addition to their overrepresentation in youth detention, black teens are also far more likely than whites to experience police brutality or harassment. Some of the widely-publicized examples include, mostly recently, a horde of NYPD drawing their guns and violently arresting an unarmed black teen on a crowded subway car, and officers filmed punching black teenagers in the face while supposedly breaking up a fight. From cell phone footage and Facebook posts to records produced by youth detention facilities and scholarly research in various disciplines, a substantial body of material attests to the over-criminalization and under-protection of youth of color, particularly black youth, in contemporary NYC. For anyone looking to understand the historical roots of our contemporary regime of racialized youth criminalization, Carl Suddler’s Presumed Criminal: Black Youth and the Justice System in Postwar New York will be essential reading.
Read MoreReviewed by Katie Uva
On October 30, 1975, The New York Daily News thudded onto curbs, newsstands, stoops, and doorsteps around the city trumpeting the (paraphrased, but nevertheless evocative) attitude of President Gerald Ford toward New York: “Drop Dead.” There was no question that New York was in trouble: rising crime, declining quality of life, mounting public debt, and arson all plagued the five boroughs.
Read MoreReviewed by Donald Mitchell
Almost immediately after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, crowds started gathering in Union Square, the closest big public space to Lower Manhattan’s “exclusion zone.” People brought candles and photographs, flowers and flags. They came to mourn and to commune, turning the square into “a shrine and memorial, layered with photos, handwritten messages, schoolchildren’s drawing, expressions of sympathy and sorrow from flight attendants who had been spared the luck of the draw,” as Michael Sorkin and Sharon Zukin later wrote.[1] Quiet and dedicated mostly to mourning in the first days, Union Square soon also became a place of debate and discussion: what should America’s response be to the attacks? Why invade Afghanistan? How to understand America’s geopolitical role in the world?
Read MoreReviewed by Benjamin L. Carp
New York is a city of destruction. What doesn’t burn by accident, somebody tears down on purpose. When Chip asks Hildy to take him to the Hippodrome in Leonard Bernstein’s On the Town, she replies, “It ain’t there anymore,” which might as well be the city’s motto. Nothing is too sacred to shatter. Nothing is too exalted to escape the city’s brutal contests over money and power.
Read MoreReviewed by Daniel Cumming
In the pantheon of towering urban developers in the post-WWII era, few figures have shaped our collective consciousness more than Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs. Whether you read Robert Caro’s The Powerbroker or Jacob’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities, whether you lived in the freeway path cleaved for the Cross Bronx Expressway or kept “eyes on the street” in Greenwich Village, most New Yorkers have been in some way exposed to the competing ideologies overpower and place embodied by Moses and Jacobs. You may have even picked a side in the morality tale that has become standard fare in accounts of urban renewal.
Read MoreReviewed by Katie Uva
New York City is in the throes of a housing crisis. Soaring housing costs and stagnant wages have left increasing numbers of New Yorkers rent-burdened, and have moved the possibility of homeownership even farther out of reach in a city that has always been dominated by renters. Pro-growth voices argue that rezoning and incentivizing private developers to do more building would open up supply and alleviate the crisis; progressives resist that narrative and see such ideas as furthering the city’s capitulation to the private sector and worsening the tension between housing as an asset versus housing as a right. Conflicts abound about how to create affordable housing, how to define affordable housing, and how to sustain affordable housing.
Read MoreReviewed by Jeffrey Escoffier
Dirty Dancing, the 1987 movie starring Patrick Swayze and Jennifer Grey, exploited a common cultural trope: the intimate connection many people feel between dancing and sex. It portrayed a couple whose dancing was explicitly sexual, who came from different social classes and who at the same time were falling in love. For many of its viewers, it presented a very romantic vision of the connection between sex and dancing. Dale Cockrell’s Everybody’s Doin’it: Sex, Music and Dance in New York, 1840-1917 (New York: W.W. Norton & Co. 2019) sets out to explore a more historical account of the interrelationship between popular music, social dancing and sexuality in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America. As he shows, the making of popular music during the nineteenth-century often took place in bars, brothels and dance halls where prostitution was endemic. Social dancing was one of the ways that sex and music are linked.
Read MoreBy Katie Uva
New York is a city defined by its density. Manhattan, with its unique geographical constraints, grew rapidly over the course of the 19th century; by 1890, Jacob Riis noted in How the Other Half Lives that the borough as a whole held 73,299 people per square mile and the Tenth Ward, the densest portion of the Lower East Side, held 334,080 people per square mile. This density was visible in multiple ways; in the innovative, epoch-defining skyscrapers that began to jut out of the Battery and Midtown but also cast worrying shadows on pedestrians below; in the tenement districts with their vibrant street life and their disturbing tuberculosis and fire rates. The 20th century would prove to be a time of experimentation and contestation when it came to density. New York would grow further outwards and further upwards, and would be shaped by the tension between density and sprawl.
Read MoreViolette’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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