How Prohibition Killed the Bowery

By Alice Sparberg Alexiou

Back in the days when the Bowery epitomized New York at its grittiest, most honkey-tonk, warm-hearted best—between the end of the Civil War and World War I—nothing was more important to the well being of the street’s motley population of artists, actors, immigrant poor, and bums than the saloon. Yes, the saloon. It was a Bowery institution. During the Bowery’s peak years, the 1890s, the street boasted nearly 100 saloons, each with its own clientele and reasons for existing. In the days of Tammany, specific saloons functioned as political clubhouses; there were “concert saloons,” where the races mingled and drank and sang and had a grand old time, singing and dancing to songs with dirty lyrics banged out on rinky-dink pianos, and waitresses doubled as prostitutes. In some saloons, homesick German and Irish immigrants found compatriots with whom to drink away their pain. And other saloons were like drunken old grandmothers who gathered all those Bowery bums into their beery bosoms and comforted them, providing shelter and the chance to convene with other bummy alcoholics, all of whom had run away to the Bowery from all over the country and the world with a specific purpose: to drink among others who were just like them.

Manhattan, Crime & Policing, Poverty & InequalityGuest UserFebruary 27, 2020 Comment

Rumrunners and Smugglers in New York City

By Ellen NicKenzie Lawson

“New York City, as the greatest liquor marker in the United States, is a great temptation for the rum runners,” wrote a Coast Guard Intelligence officer in the 8th year of Prohibition. Liquor to be smuggled ashore first was taken to Rum Row, an area of floating foreign liquor supply ships over 12 miles out off Long Island and Nantucket. Then American contact boats smuggled the liquor to shore.

Although smugglers had hundreds of miles of metropolitan waterfront to choose from, they preferred landing directly at docks on Manhattan’s twenty miles of shoreline, or in Brooklyn on the East River, or across the Hudson in Newark and Hoboken and, if necessary, farther up that river in Yonkers or Kingston. Smuggling directly to New York City saved smugglers the cost of trucking liquor from landings in eastern Long Island or south on the Jersey Shore. But smuggling directly into the Upper Bay was difficult: it was patrolled by Customs, the Marine Police, and the Coast Guard.

Crime & Policing, Waterfront & IslandsGuest UserFebruary 26, 2020Comment

“Vote as You Drink”: How New York City Brought Down Prohibition

By Michael A. Lerner

At the stroke of midnight on January 17, 1920, national Prohibition arrived in the United States. The day before, a front-page New York Times headline reported that the federal efforts to enforce the Eighteenth Amendment, “WILL FOCUS ON BIG CITIES.” Fifty additional Prohibition agents had been assigned to New York in a symbolic show of force. Regardless, the sentiment in the city, according to the Times, was, “Oh, prohibition will never really be enforced here!”

Guest UserFebruary 25, 2020Comment

How The Volstead Act Ruined New York’s French Pleasure Palaces

By Alice Sparberg Alexiou

At the beginning of the twentieth century, when New York was rolling in dough but had a dearth of rarified places in which to spend it, enterprising immigrants who knew how to run restaurants began coming to New York. They knew because they’d grown up in France or Switzerland, in bistro-owning families. In New York, after working their asses off at one of the few already-existing luxury restaurants--Delmonico’s was the most famous—the newcomers then combined what they’d just learned about how to run a New York restaurant with their Gallic sensibilities around food, ambiance, and, most of all, drink—what French chef, after all, creates cuisine without the addition of alcohol, be it wine or brandy, and enlarged them to fit New York’s eye-popping scale. They opened big restaurants, then the trend in New York—“lobster palaces.” But these were different, because they were French, where New Yorkers were introduced to the joys of pate de foie gras and frogs legs, were taught them what wines to drink with these exotic dishes. And so was created a unique and scintillating French dining scene in New York , a product of a specific time in New York history, that is now largely forgotten.

Manhattan, Arts & CultureGuest UserFebruary 24, 2020 Comment

Heaven's Wrath: Interview with Danny Noorlander

Interviewed by Deborah Hamer

Today on the blog Gotham editor Deborah Hamer speaks with Danny Noorlander, associate professor at SUNY-Oneonta, about his new book Heaven’s Wrath: The Protestant Reformation and the Dutch West India Company in the Atlantic World, religion in New Amsterdam and the Dutch Republic, and what is on the horizon for his next book.

New Amsterdam, Religion, InterviewsGuest UserFebruary 20, 2020Comment

DyckmanDISCOVERED: Fostering Inclusive Historical Narratives

By Meredith Sorin Horsford

In 2015, the Dyckman Farmhouse Museum (DFM), which had been a very traditional historic site with little relationship to its community, came under new leadership. Soon after, DFM became the recipient of a grant program called shatterCABINET with the Chipstone Foundation, which provides funding to rethink how historic house museums can be relevant to their present-day community. Through this grant, the Dyckman Farmhouse removed all of the room barriers that had previously prevented visitors from entering the period rooms, installed bilingual labels and signage, and began offering bilingual programs, promotional materials, and visitor services. This not only impacted the audience that we serve, as neighborhood residents began visiting the museum for the first time, but it also helped the organization reshape public programs to feature interpretation that connects the history of the site and its rural roots to the present-day urban community.

Slavery & Antislavery, Race & Ethnicity, ManhattanGuest UserFebruary 18, 2020Comment

Henry Chalfant: Art vs. Transit, 1977-1987

Reviewed by Katie Uva

On October 30, 1975, The New York Daily News thudded onto curbs, newsstands, stoops, and doorsteps around the city trumpeting the (paraphrased, but nevertheless evocative) attitude of President Gerald Ford toward New York: “Drop Dead.” There was no question that New York was in trouble: rising crime, declining quality of life, mounting public debt, and arson all plagued the five boroughs.

Arts & Culture, Bronx, Urban Decline & Fiscal Crisis, ReviewsGuest UserFebruary 13, 2020Comment

Racial Migrations: New York City and the Revolutionary Politics of the Spanish Caribbean

Jesse Hoffnung-Garskof, interviewed by Tyesha Maddox

In the late nineteenth century, a small group of Cubans and Puerto Ricans of African descent settled in the segregated tenements of New York City. Jesse Hoffnung-Garskof’s book presents a vivid portrait of these largely forgotten revolutionaries and reveals the complexities of race-making within migrant communities and the power of small groups of immigrants to transform their home societies.

Interviews, Manhattan, Podcasts, Race & Ethnicity, ImmigrationGuest UserFebruary 11, 2020Comment

The Rise and Fall of The Young Lords

Johanna Fernandez, interviewed by Beth Harpaz

One of the most influential groups of the radical ’60s was the Young Lords, an organization of poor and working class Puerto Ricans that began as a street gang and rose to confront the racism of institutions from government to religion. Johanna Fernandez, a professor of history at Baruch College, traces their roots and tells the story of their rise and fall in The Young Lords: A Radical History.

Crime & Policing, Interviews, Podcasts, Poverty & Inequality, Race & EthnicityGuest UserFebruary 6, 2020Comment

Greater New Yorker: George McAneny, the Dual System and the Making of Greater New York

By Lucie Levine

On March 19, 1913, at the offices of the New York State Public Service Commission, in the New York Tribune Building at Nassau Street and Park Row, a group of city administrators and transit tycoons signed the “Dual Contracts,” a landmark deal between the City of New York, and the IRT and BRT subway companies, to vastly expand the city’s subway network. The Dual System was the largest single public works initiative in American history up to that time. It doubled the size of the subway network and tripled its capacity, made possible the development of the outer boroughs, and allowed for the unprecedented growth of an unparalleled city.

Transportation, Urban Planning, PoliticsGuest UserFebruary 4, 2020Comment