Masthead_Gloucester_Kearn.jpg

Gotham

“Town Meetings by Television:" Regional Plan Association’s “CHOICES for ’76”
“Town Meetings by Television:" Regional Plan Association’s “CHOICES for ’76”

“Town Meetings by Television:" Regional Plan Association’s “CHOICES for ’76”

By Kristian Taketomo

Between Saturday, March 17 and Monday, March 19, 1973, every major television station in the New York urban region — ​from Hartford, Connecticut to Trenton, New Jersey — broadcast a one-hour, documentary-style program on housing in the tri-state region of New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut. “Housing — A Place to Live,” which aired at different times on eighteen channels, was the first of six “television town meetings” produced by Regional Plan Association, metropolitan New York’s private, citizen-led planning agency. Four other programs on transportation, the environment, poverty and urban growth followed the first, airing every other week. The sixth episode, on government, was slated for autumn.

Read More
Built Environment, Urban Planning, Urban Decline & Fiscal CrisisGuest UserComment
"Republics are not ungrateful": The American Revolution and Memory in New York City
"Republics are not ungrateful": The American Revolution and Memory in New York City

"Republics are not ungrateful": The American Revolution and Memory in New York City

By Jonah Estess

Four years before Abraham Lincoln was elected as president of a house divided, John McKesson Jr. (1807-1893) of Olcott, McKesson and Company (now the McKesson Corporation) petitioned Congress on a matter having to do with the very revolution that established the now troubled union. He had requested that Congress redeem continental currency paid to his great-uncle, John McKesson (1734-1798) — a practicing lawyer in New York City — ​likely for his services as secretary to the New York Provincial Congress, to the New York Committee of Safety, and to the New York State Convention on the ratification of the U.S. Constitution. McKesson Jr. expressed a belief that Congress remained indebted to his great-uncle for his service to the cause of American independence. But by virtue of blood relation, he requested that some repayment be paid to him.

Read More
American Revolution, PoliticsGuest User Comment
Days of Future Past: Dystopian Comics and the Privatized City
Days of Future Past: Dystopian Comics and the Privatized City

Days of Future Past: Dystopian Comics and the Privatized City

By Ryan Donovan Purcell

“The past: a New and uncertain world, a world of endless possibilities and infinite outcomes. Countless choices define our fate — each choice, each moment, a ripple in the river of time — Enough ripples and you change the tide, for the future is never truly set.” This is the lesson Dr. Xavier learns at the end of the Marvel film, X-Men: Days of Future Past(2014). It’s a science-fiction alternative history in which the X-Men send Logan (Wolverine) back to the year 1973 to change their fate. In order to prevent the sequence of events that leads to mutant annihilation Logan must break into the Pentagon, prevent a landmark arms deal at the Paris Peace Accords, and save Richard Nixon from mutant radicals (as one might expect). The comic on which the film was based, however, is a far different story.

Read More
Arts & Culture, Bronx, Politics, Urban Decline & Fiscal CrisisGuest UserComment
Lindsay K. Campbell's City of Forests, City of Farms: Sustainability Planning for New York City’s Nature
Lindsay K. Campbell's City of Forests, City of Farms: Sustainability Planning for New York City’s Nature

Lindsay K. Campbell's City of Forests, City of Farms: Sustainability Planning for New York City’s Nature

Reviewed by Kubi Ackerman

In November of 2015, a tree planted in the Bronx was commemorated as the one millionth tree of the city’s MillionTreesNYC initiative. The accompanying ceremony celebrated the culmination of this ambitious urban forestry project spearheaded by former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg. A little more than two years later, the City Council passed what was described as the city’s first ever bill focused specifically on urban agriculture, characterized modestly as “a first step” aimed merely at collecting information on urban agriculture organizations and businesses. Given the mainstreaming of environmental issues in New York City, which are inclusive of both urban forestry and urban agriculture, why was the former enthusiastically embraced at the top levels of municipal governance while the latter is still now only very slowly receiving the attention of policymakers? This is the central question of Lindsay Campbell’s book, City of Forests, City of Farms: Sustainability Planning for New York’s Nature, which juxtaposes and contrasts these two distinct but interrelated conceptions of nature in the city that rose to prominence in the Bloomberg Era. In so doing, Campbell provides insight on the complex interplay between politics and biological and social ecologies, and raises critical questions as to who ultimately benefits from sustainability initiatives.

Read More
Contemporary Era, Nature & Environment, Politics, ReviewsGuest UserComment
Remembrance of Things Not Yet Past: A Report from “Difficult Histories / Public Spaces: The Challenge of Monuments in NYC and the Nation”
Remembrance of Things Not Yet Past: A Report from “Difficult Histories / Public Spaces: The Challenge of Monuments in NYC and the Nation”

Remembrance of Things Not Yet Past: A Report from “Difficult Histories / Public Spaces: The Challenge of Monuments in NYC and the Nation”

By Arinn Amer

A year after white nationalists descended on Charlottesville, Virginia in a deadly riot they framed as a protest against the planned removal of a bronze rendering of Robert E. Lee from Emancipation Park, monuments loom large in our national consciousness. With new memorials and markers raising awareness of America’ dark history of racial terror and hundreds of Confederate flags and generals retreating from public view even as thousands more remain firmly entrenched, the incredible power of the stories we tell about the past in shared physical space has never been more apparent.

Read More
Arts & Culture, Contemporary Era, Gender & Sexuality, Politics, Race & EthnicityGuest UserComment
Erica Wagner's Chief Engineer: Washington Roebling, The Man Who Built the Brooklyn Bridge
Erica Wagner's Chief Engineer: Washington Roebling, The Man Who Built the Brooklyn Bridge

Erica Wagner's Chief Engineer: Washington Roebling, The Man Who Built the Brooklyn Bridge

Reviewed by Richard Howe

The name Roebling is so closely bound up with the Brooklyn Bridge that it’s probably worth saying at the outset of this review that Erica Wagner’s Chief Engineer: Washington Roebling: The Man Who Built the Brooklyn Bridge(Bloomsbury, 2017) really is a biography of the man and not — as might be said of David McCullough’s classic The Great Bridge (Simon & Schuster, 1972) — a biography of the bridge. The eldest son of the bridge’s designer and promoter, John A. Roebling, Washington Roebling was born on May 26, 1837, in Saxonburg, Pennsylvania, and died shortly past his eighty-ninth birthday, on July 21, 1926, in Trenton, New Jersey. He served as chief engineer for the construction of what was then known as the East River Bridge for nearly fourteen years, from shortly after his father’s death on July 22, 1869, until he resigned the position not long after the bridge was opened to the public on May 24, 1883 (his assistant C. C. Martin was appointed in his place on July 9, 1883). Washington Roebling was thirty-two when he was appointed chief engineer for the Brooklyn Bridge; he lived another forty-three years after leaving that post. Though it was his position with the bridge project that secured him a place in the history of New York, seventy-five of his eighty-nine years were not spent on the great bridge, and it is perhaps the greatest merit of Erica Wagner’s book that it would be a fascinating and moving read even if its subject had never been chief engineer of the Brooklyn Bridge. I would almost go so far as to say that it might have been an even more fascinating and moving read had he not been.

Read More
Brooklyn, Built Environment, Urban Planning, Reviews, Gilded AgeGuest UserComment
The Gould Memorial Library: A Forgotten Stanford White Gem in the Bronx
The Gould Memorial Library: A Forgotten Stanford White Gem in the Bronx

The Gould Memorial Library: A Forgotten Stanford White Gem in the Bronx

By Elizabeth Macaulay-Lewis

The Gould Memorial Library in the Bronx may be the most famous building in New York City that you’ve never heard of. It recently made an appearance in The Greatest Showman, the 2018 Hugh Jackman musical about the life of P. T. Barnum, as the setting for a glorious party, but unless you know what you’re looking at, you’d think it was an elaborate Hollywood stage set—not a library.

Read More
Bronx, Built Environment, Gilded Age, Urban PlanningGuest User Comments
Parable of the Bees: Leslie Day's Honeybee Hotel
Parable of the Bees: Leslie Day's Honeybee Hotel

Parable of the Bees: Leslie Day's Honeybee Hotel

Reviewed by ​Rebecca Dalzell

In 2012, the Waldorf-Astoria built six beehives in a rooftop garden. Twenty stories above Park Avenue, 300,000 bees pollinated flowering apple and cherry trees, and produced jugs of honey. Its flavor depended on the season: in the spring, it was light and minty; come fall, it darkened as bees foraged on aster and goldenrod. This miel de Manhattan made its way into cocktails, bread, and gelato served in the hotel restaurants.

Read More
Manhattan, Nature & Environment, ReviewsGuest UserComment