By Sarah Miller-Davenport
When Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc was installed in Federal Plaza in Lower Manhattan’s Foley Square in 1981, it was meant to be a pioneering work of public art that would expose New York’s masses to post-minimalist sculpture. Tilted Arc would indeed become one of the most legendary sculptures in 20th century history—but not for its artistic merit.
Read MoreInterviewed by Katie Uva
Today on the blog, editor Katie Uva talks to Jeffrey Gurock about his recent book, Parkchester: A Bronx Tale of Race and Ethnicity. In it, Gurock combines his personal experience growing up in Parkchester with research into the history of this planned community in the Bronx, and offers an interpretation both of Parkchester’s uniqueness and what it reveals about the broader city.
Read MoreBy Ellen NicKenzie Lawson
Owney Madden, Joseph Bonanno, Frank Costello, and the Lower East Side’s Lansky-Siegel gang all claimed to have ties with Joseph Kennedy, father of the future U.S. President, during Prohibition. The Kennedys have consistently maintained that ‘the patriarch’ was neither a smuggler nor a bootlegger, and so has David Nasaw, Kennedy’s most recent biographer — neither in New England, where he lived until the eighth year of Prohibition, nor in metropolitan New York, where he lived and worked thereafter.
Read MoreBy 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.
Read MoreBy 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.
Read MoreBy 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!”
Read MoreBy 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.
Read MoreInterviewed 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.
Read MoreBy 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.
Read MoreReviewed 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.
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