Before Central Park

Reviewed by Kara Murphy Schlichting

Before Central Park is Sara Cedar Miller’s fourth publication about New York City’s famous greensward. Miller is historian emerita and, since 1984, a photographer for the Central Park Conservancy. Before Central Park is distinctive in its combination of Miller’s photography, her expert understanding of the park’s geography and archeology, and her meticulous real estate history of parkland from the 17th through the 19th centuries.

Review: Terry Williams, The Soft City: Sex for Business and Pleasure in New York City

Reviewed by Timothy J. Gilfoyle

Public sex in New York evolved amidst wide-ranging social and economic change in Gotham from 1979 to 2018. The “Disneyfication” of Times Square and the elimination of the most visible forms of public pornography attracted the most attention and commentary. But an evolving sexual revolution of sorts simultaneously occurred throughout the city. For four decades, the sociologist and ethnographer Terry Williams was watching closely, taking notes. Literally.

Sites and Sounds: Bike New York

Site and Sounds: Bike New York

By Evan Friss

On today’s episode of Sites and Sounds, Evan Friss talks about the the history of the bicycle and cycling spaces in New York.

Podcasts, Transportation, Gilded Age, Parks, Urban PlanningGuest UserOctober 14, 2021Comment

Farming between the Heights

By Cynthia G. Falk

Quiara Alegría Hudes and Lin-Manuel Miranda’s stage musical, now turned feature film, has brought increased attention to northern Manhattan above 155th Street. In the Heights depicts a vibrant Latinx community facing the challenges of gentrification, immigration policy, educational and economic inequality, and stereotyping. If we were to travel back in time to the northern Manhattan of Alexander Hamilton’s era, we would find a very different landscape than the one we see today in Washington Heights and neighboring Inwood to the north and Harlem to the south. That is true whether our observations are based on actual encounters with place or representations on the stage or screen.

New York Recentered: Building the Metropolis from the Shore

Podcast Interview: New York Recentered

Kara Murphy Schlichting Interviewed by Garrett Reed Gutierrez

In New York Recentered: Building the Metropolis from the Shore, Kara Murphy Schlichting offers a fresh perspective on New York City’s history by shifting readers’ gaze away from Manhattan and towards the coastal periphery—where local planning initiatives, waterfront park building, the natural environment, and a growing leisure economy each had a stake in the regional development of New York City. Schlichting’s regional and environmental approach frames New York’s extensive waterways as points of connection that unite, rather than divide, the urban core and periphery to one another.

Built Environment, Interviews, Nature & Environment, Parks, Podcasts, Urban Planning, Waterfront & IslandsGuest UserJuly 9, 2021Comment

Review: Timo Schrader's Loisaida as Urban Laboratory: Puerto Rican Community Activism in New York

Claiming the Right to the City: Timo Schrader's Loisaida as Urban Laboratory

Reviewed by Hongdeng Gao

In the 1970s, New York City witnessed an unprecedented level of housing abandonment and disinvestment, especially in low-income neighborhoods including Harlem, the South Bronx, Williamsburg, Bedford-Stuyvesant, and the Lower East Side. Amid the citywide housing crisis, one local newspaper in Loisaida — a term coined by the activist and poet Bittman “Bimbo” Rivas in 1974 to refer to the largely Puerto Rican and low-income community on the Lower East Side — proclaimed a “Miracle on Avenue C.”

The Sustainability Myth: An Interview with Melissa Checker

Interviewed by Katie Uva

Today on the blog, Gotham editor Katie Uva speaks to Melissa Checker about her recent book, The Sustainability Myth: Environmental Gentrification and the Politics of Justice. In it, Checker examines and critiques current frameworks of sustainability in New York, where sustainability and economic development are often seen as goals that are mutually supporting. Checker argues that this belief leads to gentrification, deepens economic inequality, and even winds up worsening environmental conditions in some parts of the city.

Review: Roberta Brandes Gratz's It’s a Helluva Town: Joan K. Davidson, the J.M. Kaplan Fund, and the Fight for a Better New York

Activist Philanthropy, Indeed

Reviewed by Jeffrey A. Kroessler

Have you recently trekked to a farmers’ market for fresh produce? In this lockdown year, do you miss attending concerts at Carnegie Hall? A Broadway show? Have you enjoyed roaming through the romantic landscape of Central Park, or wandered the streets of the city’s historic districts? Do you go out of your way to experience the inspiring urban spaces of Grand Central Terminal? Are you invigorated when you head west to the Hudson River Park and marvel at the river’s recovery?

Arts & Culture, Built Environment, Parks, Reviews, Urban PlanningGuest UserFebruary 16, 2021Comment

Projecting “Spread City”: The New York Metropolitan Region Study and Its Critics, 1956–1968

By Peter Ekman

“This project is not a blueprint for action. It has no recommendations to make about the physical structure of the Region or about the form or activities of the governmental bodies there. At the same time, it is a necessary prelude to future planning studies of the Region.” The project in question was the New York Metropolitan Region Study (NYMRS), executed 1956–59 for the Regional Plan Association (RPA) by an interdisciplinary group of scholars from Harvard’s Graduate School of Public Administration. Unlike the RPA’s original Regional Plan of New York, issued 1929–31, which was zealously promoted to the public and substantially implemented by 1940, the ten-volume NYMRS very deliberately was not a plan.

Metropolitan Region, Postwar New York, Urban PlanningGuest UserFebruary 11, 2021Comment

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.

Manhattan, Medicine & Public Health, Poverty & Inequality, Postwar New York, Urban PlanningGuest UserJanuary 5, 2021Comment