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Posts in Reviews
Review: Daniel Garodnick’s Saving Stuyvesant Town: How One Community Defeated the Worst Real Estate Deal in History

Friends and Foes in the Real Estate Industry: A Review of Dan Garodnick’s Saving Stuyvesant Town

Reviewed by Kevin Ritter

Stuyvesant Town, a middle income housing development on Manhattan’s East Side, has been a consistent site of conflict and controversy in New York City since its creation in the 1940s. Dan Garodnick’s new book, Saving Stuyvesant Town: How One Community Defeated the Worst Real Estate Deal in History, covers the story of the development from its origins as a postwar housing development built on top of the former Gashouse District, which ha been cleared of its residents through eminent domain, to 21st century real estate dealings that threatened to displace many of the property’s rent stabilized tenants in favor of new market-rate residents.

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Contemporary Era, Housing & Realty, Manhattan, ReviewsGuest UserComment
A Review of Coastal Metropolis: Environmental Histories of Modern New York City, edited by Carl A. Zimring and Steven H. Corey

Wasted City: A History of Waste and Water Pollution in New York City

Reviewed by Erik Wallenberg

Coastal cities face a dizzying array of environmental problems, from rising seas due to climate change chaos, to polluted waters endangering fish, wildlife, and drinking water. New York City, rocked by Superstorm Sandy and struggling to rebuild a harbor ecosystem that can sustain edible fish and shellfish populations, is ripe for historical examination as environmental crises increase. Throughout its modern lifetime, New York harbor has experienced waste dumping, toxic pollution, a changing coastline, and growth as an international shipping port with attendant dredging issues, all of which we might look to for current context, historical lessons, and to help us better understand our relationship within this ecosystem.

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Nature & Environment, Reviews, Science, Waterfront & IslandsGuest UserComment
Did All Jews Become White Folks?: A Fortress in Brooklyn and Hasidic Williamsburg

Did All Jews Become White Folks?:
A Fortress in Brooklyn and Hasidic Williamsburg

Reviewed by Gabe S. Tennen

In A Fortress in Brooklyn: Race, Real Estate, and the Makings of Hasidic Williamsburg, Nathaniel Deutsch and Michael Casper add an important wrinkle into prevalent understandings of American Jewish history. Deutsch and Casper focus their text on the Hasidic Satmar sect and its creation of a “holy city of Jerusalem” in one corner of north Brooklyn, tracing that community from its nascent beginnings in the 1940s into the 21st century. By offering a detailed and crisply written account of this often discussed but largely underexamined group, the authors provide a caveat to nearly fifty years of scholarship.

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Brooklyn, Contemporary Era, Housing & Realty, Immigration, Postwar New York, Race & Ethnicity, Religion, ReviewsGuest UserComment
Review: Joshua Jelly-Schapiro’s Names of New York: Discovering the City’s Past, Present, and Future Through Its Place-Names

The Imaginative Geographies of Place Naming in New York City: Joshua Jelly-Schapiro’s Names of New York

Reviewed by Reuben Rose-Redwood and CindyAnn Rose-Redwood

In the opening chapter of Joshua Jelly-Schapiro’s Names of New York: Discovering the City’s Past, Present, and Future Through Its Place-Names, the author observes that New York is a city “in love with stories about itself.” That the Big Apple has an overinflated sense of its own self-importance will come as no surprise to those familiar with the city’s reputation for narcissistic self-indulgence informed by the belief that New York is the center of the universe. Yet, if one thing is certain, it’s that the streets of New York do indeed contain a multitude of stories clamoring to be told.

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Built Environment, ReviewsGuest UserComment
Review: Sarah Schulman's Let the Record Show

Review: Sarah Schulman's Let the Record Show

Reviewed by James Barney

The AIDS crisis peaked in New York City from 1987 to 1993. In those six years, thousands of HIV-positive men and women died of opportunistic infections from weakened immune systems. While the disease has become linked to gay white men in the public imagination, women, people of color, and intravenous drug users made up the majority of people with AIDS (“PWAs”) in New York City. Anger over the slow response by government and drug companies, as well as lack of the public’s disinterest, prompted many advocates to form groups that sought to raise awareness and promote research into effective treatments for HIV-related conditions.

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Medicine & Public Health, ReviewsGuest UserComment
Review: Robert A. McCaughey’s A College of Her Own: The History of Barnard

Review: Robert A. McCaughey’s A College of Her Own: The History of Barnard

Reviewed by Kelly Marino

In A College of Her Own, scholar Robert McCaughey examines the history of Barnard College and the changes in its leadership, programs, and demographics from its founding in 1889 to the present. He argues that the school's administrators, location in New York City, and relationship with Columbia University made Barnard distinct among the “Seven Sisters,'' the group of elite women’s liberal arts colleges in the Northeast.

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Education, Gender & Sexuality, Gilded Age, Manhattan, ReviewsGuest UserComment
Alice Neel: A Painter of Her Time

Alice Neel: A Painter of Her Time

Reviewed by Jeffrey Escoffier

Alice Neel believed that “art is a form of history.” Born in 1900, she claimed that “I represent the 20th century… I’ve tried to capture the zeitgeist.” Yet her painting bore no resemblance to the vast canvases of iconic scenes from the French revolution by Jacques-Louis David, Anne-Louis Girodot, or Theodore Gericault. Instead, she portrayed the history of the 20th century through individual people — neighbors, friends, artists, celebrities, and political activists — that she knew in New York City, a city which might be considered the capital of the 20th-century — the successor to Paris as “the capital of the 19th-century.”

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Arts & Culture, Gender & Sexuality, Great Depression & New Deal, ReviewsGuest UserComment
Review: Melissa Castillo Planas's A Mexican State of Mind: New York City and the New Borderlands of Culture

Mexican (In)Visibility: Melissa Castillo Planas's Journey Into New York's Mexican State of Mind

Reviewed by Nelson Santana

When one thinks about Mexican migrants, often what comes to mind, partly due to conservative narratives, are Mexican-descended people in the US-Mexico border states of California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas. However, the Mexican community — some whose ancestors lived on Mexican land prior to the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848) and who suddenly went from living in Mexico to living in the United States on the same land[1] — is dispersed throughout the United States with significant populations in Illinois, Washington, DC, and New York. The Mexican population in New York City is one that has been booming for quite some time.

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Immigration, Race & Ethnicity, ReviewsGuest UserComment
“Working-Class New York Revisited” Conference Honors Joshua Freeman, Discusses the History and Prospects of Working-Class Power and Social Democracy in New York City  

“Working-Class New York Revisited” Conference Honors Joshua Freeman

By Marc Kagan

“I do hope that this book illuminates the possibilities for ordinary people to play a greater role in shaping their city and nation than they do today.” Joshua Freeman, Working-Class New York, 2000.
New York City’s working-class had real political, economic, and social power for almost thirty years after World War II. That power, expressed primarily through private- and, increasingly, public-sector unions, made life substantially better not just for their own members, but millions of other working-class New Yorkers.

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Business & Labor, Postwar New York, Politics, Race & Ethnicity, Reviews, Urban Decline & Fiscal CrisisGuest UserComment
Review: Malgorzata Szejnert's Ellis Island: A People’s History

Review: Malgorzata Szejnert's Ellis Island: A People’s History

Reviewed by Sarah Litvin

Ellis Island: A People’s History, by Polish journalist Malgorzata Szejnert, tells an undulating history of the island through a chronological series of character studies and vignettes. Five sections, aptly entitled “Rising Tide,” “Flood,” “Becalmed,” “Pitch and Toss,” and “Ebb Tide” chart the rise and fall of New York’s famous immigration station that processed more than twelve million people between 1892, when it opened, and 1954, when it closed. Immigration through Ellis Island peaked in 1907, when 3,818 ships delivered more than 1.2 million people, a flood that calmed at the outbreak of WWI, and ebbed as deportations increased during the Red Scare and immigration was restricted by quotas created by the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924.

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Immigration, Race & Ethnicity, Reviews, Waterfront & IslandsGuest UserComment