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New York City’s Women Teachers, Equal Pay, and Suffrage
New York City’s Women Teachers, Equal Pay, and Suffrage

New York City’s Women Teachers, Equal Pay, and Suffrage

By Rachel Rosenberg

On May 7, 1908, Carrie Chapman Catt, the famous American suffragist, spoke at Association Hall in New York City.  There were women in the hallway outside selling “suffragette” buttons.  The hall was packed despite the bad weather, and the event went on past 11 pm.  The evening, however, was not about suffrage.  It was a meeting of the Interborough Association of Women Teachers (IAWT), the organization demanding equal salaries for men and women teachers in New York City.  Alongside many other speakers, Catt spoke as a woman taxpayer about the number of problems in the country that the women teachers in public schools were being asked to solve, and how important these teachers were to the nation.  Her speech called for equal pay for women teachers, but also for woman’s suffrage in acknowledgment of that importance.

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Education, Gender & Sexuality, Progressive EraGuest UserComment
Hiding in Plain Sight: Black Youth on Stage in 19th century New York City
Hiding in Plain Sight: Black Youth on Stage in 19th century New York City

Hiding in Plain Sight: Black Youth on Stage in 19th Century New York 

By Anna Mae Duane

Judging by their absence from most histories of the early republican and antebellum eras, one might think that children,  especially children of color, were largely hidden away from the public worlds of print and politics. This alleged historical invisibility would have come as a surprise for the young people attending the New York African Free Schools in the 1820s. Far from feeling hidden away from the public’s view, they spent much of their childhood on one form of stage or another. In the years which marked the growing popularity of minstrel performances appropriating Black culture in the service of white supremacy, students at the NYAFS were learning how to deploy performances that blurred the very racial categories they were being taught to inhabit.

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Education, Race & EthnicityGuest UserComment
Design for the Crowd: Patriotism and Protest in Union Square
Design for the Crowd: Patriotism and Protest in Union Square

Design for the Crowd: Patriotism and Protest in Union Square

Reviewed by Donald Mitchell

Almost immediately after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, crowds started gathering in Union Square, the closest big public space to Lower Manhattan’s “exclusion zone.” People brought candles and photographs, flowers and flags. They came to mourn and to commune, turning the square into “a shrine and memorial, layered with photos, handwritten messages, schoolchildren’s drawing, expressions of sympathy and sorrow from flight attendants who had been spared the luck of the draw,” as Michael Sorkin and Sharon Zukin later wrote.[1] Quiet and dedicated mostly to mourning in the first days, Union Square soon also became a place of debate and discussion: what should America’s response be to the attacks?  Why invade Afghanistan?  How to understand America’s geopolitical role in the world?

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Reviews, Metropolitan Region, Urban PlanningGuest UserComment
Who is the Village For? the troubled history of the Northern Dispensary
Who is the Village For? the troubled history of the Northern Dispensary

Who is the Village For? The Troubled History of the Northern Dispensary

By Salonee Bhaman

The dusty red brick façade of the Northern Dispensary sports a hand-lettered sign, a throwback to a bygone era. Built in a neo-Georgian style, the triangular, three-story building occupies the entirety of its oddly shaped, now-trendy West Village block bound by Christopher Street, Grove Street, and on two sides by Waverly Place. Remarkably, given its bustling and costly surroundings, the Dispensary is empty—a shell observing a city in constant flux. Underwritten by a mixture of public and private funds, the building and the land it sits on fall under a restrictive deed requiring that the premises serve the poor and infirm. Just what that requirement means has become a question determining much of the Dispensary’s fate over the twentieth century.

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Medicine & Public HealthGuest UserComment
Documenting the City: A Research Project Inspired by the Journalism of Edith Evans Asbury

Documenting the City: A Research Project Inspired by the Journalism of Edith Evans Asbury

By Molly Rosner

On November 20th, 2019 more than 100 people attended the celebration of the release of a book of student work at LaGuardia Community College. The book, Documenting the City: Journalism Inspired by Edith Evans Asbury, is comprised of essays and photographs by students and faculty who worked for a full year on a research-based project funded by the Robert David Lion Gardiner Foundation focused on introducing students to history and historical research practices.[1] The group is called the Gardiner-Shenker Student Scholars, in which students take on assignments outside of their classroom work and receive individualized mentoring and payment for their participation. The students have demonstrated a deep commitment to the program and produced rich materials ranging from photography to writing, to podcasting and video projects. Most importantly, though, through publication, presentations, and fieldwork the students learned that archival work is vitally important to understanding the world around them and can help them participate in the life of the city in new and profound ways.

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EducationGuest UserComment
Iconoclasm in New York: Revolution to Reenactment
Iconoclasm in New York: Revolution to Reenactment

Iconoclasm in New York: Revolution to Reenactment

Reviewed by Benjamin L. Carp

New York is a city of destruction. What doesn’t burn by accident, somebody tears down on purpose. When Chip asks Hildy to take him to the Hippodrome in Leonard Bernstein’s On the Town, she replies, “It ain’t there anymore,” which might as well be the city’s motto. Nothing is too sacred to shatter. Nothing is too exalted to escape the city’s brutal contests over money and power.

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Reviews, American Revolution, Arts & CultureGuest UserComment
Managing Urban Disorder in the 1960s: The New York City Model
Managing Urban Disorder in the 1960s: The New York City Model

Managing Urban Disorder in the 1960s: The New York City Model

By Jarrod Shanahan and Zhandarka Kurti

Surveying hundreds of urban riots throughout the 1960s, the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, commonly known as the Kerner Commission, used strident language to capture how “white racism” underlay the grievances of rioters and called for a commitment to the War on Poverty as a remedy to urban unrest. Yet far less scholarly attention is paid to the commission’s emphasis on counterinsurgency mechanisms—locally-specific, quasi-military strategies for pacifying unrest by politicking and/or force—geared toward managing disorder amid a deepening state of political and economic crisis. An early example of crisis planning in New York City immediately following the recommendations of the Kerner Commission Report demonstrates that at the local level, counterinsurgency relied heavily on the partnership with agents of what is today called the non-profit industrial complex (NPIC), a nexus of private philanthropic organizations constituting a mediating “buffer” between capital and the working class, while channeling social movement energy away from radical change and into piecemeal, pro-market reform.

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Postwar New York, Race & EthnicityGuest UserComment
Saving America's Cities: Ed Logue and the Struggle to Renew Urban America in the Suburban Age
Saving America's Cities: Ed Logue and the Struggle to Renew Urban America in the Suburban Age

Saving America's Cities: Ed Logue and the Struggle to Renew Urban America in the Suburban Age

Reviewed by Daniel Cumming

In the pantheon of towering urban developers in the post-WWII era, few figures have shaped our collective consciousness more than Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs. Whether you read Robert Caro’s The Powerbroker or Jacob’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities, whether you lived in the freeway path cleaved for the Cross Bronx Expressway or kept “eyes on the street” in Greenwich Village, most New Yorkers have been in some way exposed to the competing ideologies overpower and place embodied by Moses and Jacobs. You may have even picked a side in the morality tale that has become standard fare in accounts of urban renewal.

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Reviews, Urban Planning, Housing & RealtyGuest UserComment
Rob Snyder becomes Manhattan Borough Historian
Rob Snyder becomes Manhattan Borough Historian

Rob Snyder becomes Manhattan Borough Historian

By Molly Rosner

On December 3, 2019, as a student jazz trio from LaGuardia High School for the Performing Arts played in the background, a group of local historians gathered at the New York Fire Museum to celebrate the appointment of Dr. Robert Snyder to Manhattan Borough Historian. The crowd – many of whom had worked together at different colleges and museums around the city – drank the signature cocktail, (appropriately a Manhattan) and examined the display of old fire trucks, art works, and Tiffany silver on display at the museum. The position of Borough Historian is an unpaid volunteer role first assigned under Borough President Robert Wagner in 1950.

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