Remembering the Columbia Protest of '68: Faculty

Fifty years ago this week, students at Columbia shut down the university for seven days, in protest of plans to build a gymnasium in a nearby Harlem park, university links to the Vietnam War, and what they saw as Columbia’s generally unresponsive attitude to student concerns.

Today on Gotham, we continue a weeklong series featuring excerpts from a new collection of more than sixty essays, edited by Paul Cronin, reflecting on that moment. A Time to Stir reveals clearly the lingering passion and idealism of many strikers. But it also speaks to the complicated legacy of the uprising. If, for some, the events inspired a lifelong dedication to social causes, for others they signaled the beginning of a chaos that would soon engulf the left. Taken together, these reflections move beyond the standard account, presenting a more nuanced Rashoman-like portrait. Yesterday we considered the remembrances of students (male, female, black, white, visiting, resident, pro, anti). Today, we carrying forward the approach with faculty. Tomorrow: police officers.

Excerpts, Politics, Postwar New YorkGuest UserApril 24, 2018 Comments

Remembering the Columbia Protest of '68: Students

Fifty years ago this week, students at Columbia shut down the university for seven days, in protest of plans to build a gymnasium in a nearby Harlem park, university links to the Vietnam War, and what they saw as Columbia’s generally unresponsive attitude to student concerns.

Today on Gotham, we begin a weeklong series featuring excerpts from a new collection of more than sixty essays, edited by Paul Cronin, reflecting on that moment. A Time to Stir reveals clearly the lingering passion and idealism of many strikers. But it also speaks to the complicated legacy of the uprising. If, for some, the events inspired a lifelong dedication to social causes, for others they signaled the beginning of a chaos that would soon engulf the left. Taken together, these reflections move beyond the standard account, presenting a more nuanced Rashoman-like portrait. We begin today with the remembrances of students (male, female, black, white, visiting, resident, pro, anti), carrying forward the approach with faculty, police officers, government servants, and "outside agitators," every day the rest of this week.

Excerpts, Politics, Postwar New YorkGuest UserApril 23, 2018Comment

Eddy Portnoy's Bad Rabbi: And Other Strange But True Stories From the Yiddish Press

Reviewed by Tamar Rabinowitz

In April of last year, a play about a play became a surprise Broadway hit. The Pulitzer Prize winning Indecent recounted the making of renowned Yiddish playwright, Shalom Asch’s 1906 God of Vengeance — a story of a wealthy, exploitative, and violent Jewish brothel owner eager to marry off his daughter to a respectable scholar. A tale about faith, hypocrisy, sexuality, and deceit, God of Vengeance unearthed the unsavory aspects of Eastern European Jewish life, leaving contemporaries to wonder if it “was good for the Jews?”

Progressive Era, Race & Ethnicity, Religion, ReviewsGuest UserApril 17, 2018Comment

Ruinous, Bleak and a Bitter Sense of Freedom

By Jeffrey Escoffier

Photography, at least before the digital era, has a special relationship to history. Unlike other visual images, photographs are ‘traces’ of what they portray— they are the direct result of light reflected from objects in front of the camera onto a chemical emulsion. The photographic trace is recorded at a moment of time and then stored for future viewing; it is, thus, automatically an historical representation. According to cultural critic Siegfried Kracauer, the historical significance of photographs rests on their capacity to record things normally unnoticed at the time.

Arts & Culture, Gender & Sexuality, Reviews, Urban Decline & Fiscal CrisisGuest UserApril 12, 2018Comment

A Vital Force: Immigrant Garment Workers and Suffrage

By Karen Pastorello

At a New York City suffrage parade in the fall of 1912, Wage Earner’s Suffrage League vice-president Leonora O’Reilly led a delegation of working women toward Union Square toting a sign that read “We Want the Vote for Fire Protection.” Other women marching held signs depicting the “Asch Building Fire” that had ripped through the Triangle Shirtwaist Company the previous year.[1] The industrial tragedy shook the city and exposed the plight of urban immigrant workers to the rest of the world for the first time in history. For activists already engaged in working to better the lives of industrial workers, women labor activists’ reaction to the tragedy directly linked the possibility of improving working women’s lives to the vote. Women in the United States felt powerless in the workplace and the broader world around them. They did not have the right to influence legislation that would affect their daily lives. They did not have the right to vote. Suffrage would give working-class women another weapon to fight against the harsh conditions of their labor.

Business & Labor, Gender & Sexuality, Politics, Progressive EraGuest UserApril 10, 2018Comment

Jennifer Packard's A Taste of Broadway: Food in Musical Theater

Reviewed by Morgen Stevens-Garmon

“Food, glorious food” sing the workhouse boys of Lionel Bart’s musical Oliver!, and so too sings Jennifer Packard in her new book A Taste of Broadway: food in musical theater, the latest offering in Rowman & Littlefield’s series, Studies in Food and Gastronomy. Part food history, part musical theater analysis, and part cookbook, A Taste of Broadway presents a flavorful if slightly confused dish.

Arts & Culture, Postwar New York, ReviewsGuest UserApril 5, 2018Comment

After the Rent Strike: Neoliberalism and Co-op City

By Annemarie Sammartino

In mid-1976, a provisional settlement awarded control of Co-op City to its residents. Co-op City was, and is, a 15,382 apartment middle-income development located in the Northeast Bronx. The achievement of resident control represented the culmination of negotiations following a thirteen-month rent strike that destroyed the non-profit United Housing Foundation (UHF) that had built Co-op City and nearly bankrupted the New York State Housing Finance Agency. As the terms of the provisional settlement began to come out, the Wall Street Journal was apoplectic about what awarding resident control might mean:

If the state wants to regain its financial credibility, it will have, to put it brutally, to make an example of the Co-op City rent strikers… The state may find… that the rent strike will collapse after the first tenants lose their apartments. But in any case, it will be more humane to throw people out into the June sunshine than into the December snow.

Bronx, Housing & Realty, Urban Decline & Fiscal CrisisGuest UserApril 3, 2018Comment

Fifty Years of Struggle at NYC's Public University: An interview with Anthony G. Picciano & Chet Jordan

Today on Gotham, editor Nick Juravich sits down with Anthony Picciano, Professor of Urban Education at Hunter College and The Graduate Center, and Chet Jordan, Ph.D. student in Urban Education at the Graduate Center, to discuss their new book, CUNY's First Fifty Years, which traces the story of the nation’s largest urban university from its inception as CUNY in 1961 through the forces and events shaping it today.

Contemporary Era, Education, Interviews, Postwar New York, Urban Decline & Fiscal CrisisGuest UserMarch 29, 2018Comment

Advocacy and Memory at the Hall of Fame For Great Americans

By Kate Culkin

“I am a little frightened by what is necessary to elect Miss Lillian D. Wald but am determined to do all I can to bring the election of this great lady, deserving of a place in the Hall of Fame,” Aaron Rabinowitz wrote in October 1964. He was referring to his campaign to elect Wald, the public health advocate who founded the Visiting Nurse Service and the Henry Street Settlement, to the Hall of Fame for Great Americans. Dedicated in 1900 and designed by Stanford White, the monument was the first hall of fame in the United States. The open-air colonnade with spaces for 102 busts is located at Bronx Community College (BCC), formally home to New York University’s University Heights campus. In August 2017, it was thrust into a national conversation about commemoration in the wake of the riots in Charlottesville, VA, over the removal of confederate monuments. News reports and city and state politicians condemned the presence of Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee in the hall. The school removed the busts and is considering how to address their presence and removal. The conversation around the monument, however, more commonly focuses on its being old-fashioned and in need of repair, such as the 2009 New York Times article “A Hall of Fame: Forgotten and Forlorn.”

Bronx, Politics, Postwar New YorkGuest UserMarch 27, 2018Comment

Al Smith's Revolution: An interview with Robert Chiles

Today on Gotham, managing editor Peter-Christian Aigner speaks with Robert Chiles, author of the new book The Revolution of '28 (released today!), about the long-debated question of whether Al Smith — the beloved representative of Manhattan's nationally symbolic (immigrant and working-class) Lower East Side — set in motion the New Deal "realignment" with his 1928 presidential race.

Interviews, Politics, Progressive Era, Great Depression & New DealGuest UserMarch 22, 2018Comment