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The “Tavern on the Green”: How a Central Park Landmark Epitomizes Colonial New York City’s Urban Development
The “Tavern on the Green”: How a Central Park Landmark Epitomizes Colonial New York City’s Urban Development

The “Tavern on the Green”: How a Central Park Landmark Epitomizes Colonial New York City’s Urban Development

By Vaughn Scribner

The Tavern on the Green restaurant is an icon of New York City. Nestled in the seemingly-rustic, yet carefully-planned confines of Central Park, the building began life in 1870 as a shelter for the park’s grazing sheep.[1] In 1934, park officials transformed the building into a restaurant. Since then, various families bought into the business, and made renovations like a dance floor, glass-enclosed Crystal Room, and a new patio.[2] Beyond offering a diverse array of cocktails, main courses, and appetizers, however, much of the restaurant’s enduring popularity owes itself to setting: the Tavern on the Green is a carefully-crafted combination of urban and rural life; a “hybrid” space where customers feel like they’re escaping the gray, crowded confines of the city, but still have access to the entertainment and sociability for which New York City is famed.[3] But the Tavern on the Green does not just represent fantasy, or a New York that “never was.” On the contrary, the Tavern on the Green harkens back to the second half of the eighteenth-century, when New York City’s residents fostered an urban culture predicated upon a thriving network of taverns and green spaces which offered residents the hospitalities of city life within a bucolic, relaxing, and intentionally-constructed “natural” environment.

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British Era, Manhattan, Nature & Environment, Urban PlanningGuest UserComment
“An American Organization, a Hundred Per Cent”: The Competing Legacies of New York’s First Neo-Nazis, the National Renaissance Party

“An American Organization, a Hundred Per Cent”: The Competing Legacies of New York’s First Neo-Nazis, the National Renaissance Party

By Anna Duensing

In July 1963, the New York branch of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) organized demonstrations in the Bronx to protest hiring discrimination at White Castle hamburger stands. An “undercurrent of racism” existed throughout the North, stressed James Farmer, National Director of CORE.

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Postwar New York, Race & EthnicityGuest UserComment
Presumed Criminal: Black Youth and the Justice System in Postwar New York
Presumed Criminal: Black Youth and the Justice System in Postwar New York

Presumed Criminal: Black Youth and the Justice System in Postwar New York

Reviewed by Emily Brooks

Black and Hispanic or Latino youth are dramatically overrepresented in the city’s detention facilities. In addition to their overrepresentation in youth detention, black teens are also far more likely than whites to experience police brutality or harassment. Some of the widely-publicized examples include, mostly recently, a horde of NYPD drawing their guns and violently arresting an unarmed black teen on a crowded subway car, and officers filmed punching black teenagers in the face while supposedly breaking up a fight. From cell phone footage and Facebook posts to records produced by youth detention facilities and scholarly research in various disciplines, a substantial body of material attests to the over-criminalization and under-protection of youth of color, particularly black youth, in contemporary NYC. For anyone looking to understand the historical roots of our contemporary regime of racialized youth criminalization, Carl Suddler’s Presumed Criminal: Black Youth and the Justice System in Postwar New York will be essential reading.

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Crime & Policing, Postwar New York, Race & Ethnicity, ReviewsGuest UserComment
The Carleton Commission and Evidence of Arson in the Great New York Fire of 1776

The Carleton Commission and Evidence of Arson in the Great New York Fire of 1776

By Bruce Twickler

In October of 1783, just six weeks before the British evacuated New York, the Commander-in Chief-of the British forces, Sir Guy Carleton, commissioned a panel of three British officers to investigate the disastrous fire that devastated the city seven years earlier. Shortly after midnight on September 21, 1776, fire had erupted in lower Manhattan. By daybreak it had consumed five hundred buildings – including schools, churches, warehouses and homes – and caused more destruction than all the previous colonial fires in New York combined.

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American Revolution, ManhattanGuest UserComment
The Unexpected Logic of Art Economics: Arts and Inequality in 1980s New York
The Unexpected Logic of Art Economics: Arts and Inequality in 1980s New York

The Unexpected Logic of Art Economics: Arts and Inequality in 1980s New York

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.

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Arts & Culture, Contemporary Era, Urban Decline & Fiscal CrisisGuest UserComment
Parkchester: An Interview with Jeffrey S. Gurock
Parkchester: An Interview with Jeffrey S. Gurock

Parkchester: An Interview with Jeffrey S. Gurock

Interviewed 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.

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Bronx, Interviews, Postwar New York, Housing & RealtyGuest UserComment
Joseph Kennedy and the New York Underworld during Prohibition
Joseph Kennedy and the New York Underworld during Prohibition

Joseph Kennedy and the New York Underworld during Prohibition

By 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.

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Crime & PolicingGuest User Comments
How Prohibition Killed the Bowery
How Prohibition Killed the Bowery

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.

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Manhattan, Crime & Policing, Poverty & InequalityGuest User Comment
Rumrunners and Smugglers in New York City
Rumrunners and Smugglers in New York City

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.

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Crime & Policing, Waterfront & IslandsGuest UserComment
“Vote as You Drink”: How New York City Brought Down Prohibition
“Vote as You Drink”: How New York City Brought Down Prohibition

“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!”

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