The Unruly City: Paris, London and New York in the Age of Revolution

Reviewed by Miriam Liebman

In recent years, scholars have published numerous books on the Age of Revolutions and the connections between the countries involved; usually the United States, Great Britain, and France. These books have focused on people and ideas. But in The Unruly City: Paris, London, and New York in the Age of Revolution, Mike Rapport, a professor of modern European history at the University of Glasgow, takes a different approach, focusing instead on the geography of “the city” and how it may or may not have been more conducive to revolution. Venturing into the transatlantic history of revolution, he is concerned principally with the importance of place to success and failure particularly the ways “spaces and buildings in these cities both symbolically and physically became places of conflict, how the cityscape itself became part of the experience of revolution and may even have helped shaped its course.” For Rapport, space itself has agency, which in this study has two meanings: a specific place or the city, itself. The Unruly City explores not only how New York City’s (and London’s and Paris’s) landscape propelled and hindered democratic revolution, but also how people interacted with the urban geography.

Early Republic, ReviewsGuest UserFebruary 13, 2018Comment

Enter Donald: The Trump Empire Goes to Manhattan

By Gwenda Blair

At the age of twenty-six Donald Trump had sealed his first multi-million-dollar deal. It was a sweet thing for a young man who had been his father’s full-time student ever since graduation from Wharton. Every morning he and his father drove from Jamaica Estates to Fred Trump’s modest office in Beach Haven, one of the large housing developments the older man had built near Coney Island in the early 1950s. Inside a nondescript, three-story brick building on Avenue Z, the headquarters of the Trump family empire still looked like the dentist’s office it had once been, with a linoleum floor, shag carpet, and chest-high partitions between cubicles.

This is the last of three profiles of the Trump patriarchs, adapted from the author's bestseller, The Trumps: Three Builders and a President, courtesy of Simon & Schuster.

Business & Labor, Contemporary Era, Housing & Realty, Manhattan, Politics, Postwar New YorkGuest UserFebruary 9, 2018Comment

Fred Trump Slays the King of Cooperative Housing

By Gwenda Blair

Nearly two decades after Friedrich Trump came to America and a year before his first son, Fred, was born, another boy landed at New York Harbor. He was fifteen, a year younger than Friedrich had been upon his arrival. Like Friedrich, he had traveled alone and left behind his family, his homeland, and his obligation to enter into his country’s military service. And he, too, did not intend to return. His name was Abraham Eli Kazan, and the country he left was Russia. In the coming decades, he, like Fred Trump, would become a real estate developer in New York, building apartments in a city with a desperate need for housing. In the late 1950s the two men each sought to build on the same stretch of Coney Island, a long and bitter struggle that eventually entangled the highest levels of city government. But it was more than a battle between two well-connected businessmen. Trump and Kazan were leaders in two separate movements battling for effective control of the way the city would grow — and because New York City was a bellwether for the rest of the nation, the way that cities all over the country would grow. Ultimately, on this patch of Coney Island, not far from the famous amusement rides, Fred Trump helped carve America's urban future.

Friedrich Trump Establishes a Dynasty

By Gwenda Blair

Back home, in Kallstadt, Germany, a young Friedrich Trump had listened to stories of those who had left for America and made it, determining to do likewise. Arriving in New York City in October 1885 at the age of sixteen, he listened to sagas of the West and picked up what he would need to head that way. In Seattle, he listened to descriptions of Monte Cristo and set himself up in the small Washington mining town. Now, at twenty-eight, he listened to the tales miners were telling one another about gold strikes in Alaska and, especially, in the Yukon.

This is the first of three posts on the Trump patriarchs, adapted from the author's bestseller, The Trumps: Three Builders and a President, courtesy of Simon & Schuster.

Housing & Realty, Politics, Postwar New YorkGuest UserFebruary 7, 2018Comment

Mapping Urban Renewal, Then and Now: An interview with Jakob Winkler

Today on Gotham, editor Katie Uva interviews Jakob Winkler about his Atlas of Urban Renewal, which blends historical research and critical cartography to challenge assumptions about urban renewal and empower communities resisting its impacts today.

Built Environment, Urban Planning, Contemporary Era, Interviews, Postwar New YorkGuest UserFebruary 1, 2018Comment

Who Put the Queen in “Queens”?

By Katie Uva

Each of the boroughs has its own naming history. The Bronx is named after early settler Jonas Bronck. Brooklyn comes from a Dutch word meaning “marsh” or “broken land.” Manhattan derives from a Lenape word which has been translated variously as “land of many hills,” and, more recently, “the place where we get wood for bows.” Henry Hudson himself is said to have named Staten Island Staaten Eylandt, after the Staaten Generaal, the Dutch parliament.

British Era, Politics, QueensGuest UserJanuary 30, 2018 Comment

The Struggle for Teacher Education in 19th Century New York

By Sandra Roff

Teaching as a profession aims to achieve the most noble of principles — educating children to be responsible, productive citizens. Unfortunately, the teachers hired in the early years of the new republic and well into the nineteenth century were usually untrained and unprepared for the job ahead. The civic-minded movers and shakers in New York City at the time were interested in the education of its youth, but the path to securing qualified teachers for the schools was slow to be realized.

Antebellum & Civil War, Education, PoliticsGuest UserJanuary 25, 2018 Comment

Solomon Northup’s Family in New York City

By David Fiske

Around the end of the winter in 1841, Solomon Northup encountered two men in Saratoga Springs, New York, who promised him work if he’d travel with them to New York City. Northup was a free black man who had lived in the resort for about seven years, where he had done various sorts of work to support his wife and three children. The two men, who were from a neighboring county, probably understood that employment in Saratoga was harder to find during the winter months when all the tourists were not around — therefore they had a good chance of finding a potential victim in need of cash.

Antebellum & Civil War, Politics, Race & EthnicityGuest UserJanuary 23, 2018 Comment

Grassroots Anti-Crack Activism in the Northwest Bronx

By Noël K. Wolfe

During the 1970s and 1980s, the Bronx was a national symbol of urban decay, used as a political backdrop to send messages of despair, governmental failure, the decline of urban spaces and other racialized messages of fear. Drug addiction and drug selling became a national, state, and local political battleground that reflected differing political ideologies. Even at the community level, a tension existed within New York City neighborhoods about how best to respond to drug crises. In 1969, New York Black Panther Party member Michael “Cetewayo” Tabor warned Harlemites about the long-term implications of inviting police, who he described as “alien hostile troops,” into their community to address heroin addiction and drug-related crime. While Tabor did not deny that those addicted to heroin were committing “most of their robberies, burglaries and thefts in the Black community against Black people,” he challenged community members to be suspicious of the motives behind “placing more pigs in the ghetto.” Tabor sought a community-driven solution to heroin addiction — one that did not include the police. Similarly in the Bronx, members of the Young Lords Party responded to heroin addiction by occupying the administrative offices of Lincoln Hospital in November 1970 and successfully demanding a drug treatment program for community members. The Lincoln Hospital Detox Program, a “community-worker controlled program,” paired political education with therapeutic support to assist those seeking help to overcome addiction.

Bronx, Crime & Policing, Medicine & Public Health, Urban Decline & Fiscal CrisisGuest UserJanuary 18, 2018Comment

Can this Mayor Save NYC?

Reviewed by Bruce Berg

Over the last half century, every New York City mayor has been the subject of at least one, if not more, published works. There is clearly a consensus that mayors merit this level of attention and scrutiny, and book-length examinations of the city’s mayors have been both journalistic and academic. The current mayor, William (Bill) de Blasio is no exception to this treatment. Two works, one by New York Daily News journalist Juan González (Reclaiming Gotham) and the other by CUNY professor Joseph Viteritti (The Pragmatist), offer the preliminary narrative on the current mayor. What makes these manuscripts interesting is that both were written before the end of Mayor de Blasio’s first term. And while both offer the reader an examination of the political roots of Bill de Blasio and a discussion of his early accomplishments as mayor, five years from now readers will want to know more about the progress made over his two terms as mayor. Is there a reason why these authors should not have waited a little longer to publish their work? Possibly. In a city where Democrats outnumber Republicans by more than five to one, Bill de Blasio is the first Democratic mayor elected in twenty years (five terms). Equally as important, de Blasio is only the second progressive Democratic mayor to be elected in recent years, with the support of minorities, municipal labor unions and progressive white voters; and the first of these mayors to be elected to a second term. And although Bill de Blasio was not a political unknown prior to being elected mayor, he clearly lacked the name recognition and the visibility of his two predecessors. So after twenty years of governance from the center of the political spectrum, the de Blasio mayoralty returned New York City to its liberal/progressive roots. As a result, New Yorkers want to know who this man is, what his origins are — political and otherwise — and how he might lead the city and its governing institutions. Mr. González and Professor Viteritti address these issues.

Contemporary Era, Politics, ReviewsGuest UserJanuary 16, 2018Comment

Gotham

The Unruly City: Paris, London and New York in the Age of Revolution

​Reviewed by Miriam Liebman

Enter Donald: The Trump Empire Goes to Manhattan

By Gwenda Blair

Fred Trump Slays the King of Cooperative Housing

By Gwenda Blair

Friedrich Trump Establishes a Dynasty

By Gwenda Blair

Mapping Urban Renewal, Then and Now: An interview with Jakob Winkler

​Who Put the Queen in “Queens”?

By Katie Uva

The Struggle for Teacher Education in 19th Century New York

By Sandra Roff

​Solomon Northup’s Family in New York City

By David Fiske

Grassroots Anti-Crack Activism in the Northwest Bronx

By Noël K. Wolfe

Can this Mayor Save NYC?

Reviewed by Bruce Berg

Reviewed by Miriam Liebman

Who Put the Queen in “Queens”?

Solomon Northup’s Family in New York City