At Play in Central Park’s Modern Landscapes: An Interview with Marie Warsh

Interviewed by Katie Uva

Today on the blog, Katie Uva talks to Marie Warsh, the Historian at the Central Park Conservancy and the author of the recently-published Central Park’s Adventure-Style Playgrounds: Renewal of a Midcentury Legacy. These playgrounds, which became popular in the 1960s and 1970s, demonstrate New York City’s effort to create dynamic, creative play spaces and also provide a window into the city’s history of public-private partnerships.

Interviews, Postwar New YorkGuest UserMay 14, 2020Comment

A Petition to Keep New York under Dutch Rule

By Wim Klooster

In 1664, the residents of New Amsterdam famously gave up their city—without a fight. But there was more resistance to surrendering the Dutch colony of New York in old Amsterdam. A remarkable group of men, nearly all merchants, joined hands in 1667, as the second Anglo-Dutch War was winding down, and petitioned the States General – the Dutch government – to demand restoration of New Netherland. Amazingly, this document and its seventy authors have never been analyzed.

New AmsterdamGuest UserMay 12, 2020Comment

A Murky Mess of Monuments in Crisis New York

By Todd Fine

Gonzalo Casals, New York City's new commissioner of the Department of Cultural Affairs (DCLA), begins work this week after recovering from the coronavirus. Hired to replace Tom Finkelpearl, who resigned after repeated controversies over an ambitious effort to build at least a dozen new historical monuments, Casals was tasked to bring the initiative to the "finish line” in the remaining twenty months of Mayor Bill de Blasio's second and final term.

Arts & Culture, Contemporary Era, PoliticsGuest UserMay 7, 2020Comment

Horace Greeley: Print, Politics, and the Failure of American Nationhood

Reviewed by John Bugg

How many New Yorkers could identify the large, weathered bronze statue of a journalist with a newspaper open across his lap that sits in City Hall Park, just off Chambers Street? Probably no more or less than could identify the equally imposing bronze statue of the same journalist, nestled in the park that bears his name on 32nd Street and Broadway, clutching a rolled newspaper at his side. The fact that Horace Greeley is honored by two large memorials in New York City testifies to his massive importance to the city’s history. That Greeley is hardly a household name in 2020, meanwhile, reveals that unlike other major figures in the history of New York, and unlike other prominent agents in the abolition movement, Greeley’s fame has receded sharply in the modern era. Receded, but not vanished: Greeley continues to appear in scholarly accounts of the importance of the press during the Civil War, and every few years he is the focus of a book-length study. He even made a cameo, trademark unkempt white hair and all, in Martin Scorsese’s 2002 Gangs of New York (based on Herbert Asbury’s 1928 book of the same name). Scorsese shows Greeley both walking through the notoriously violent “Five Points” and lounging in an opulent billiards room: though brief, these scenes together show Greeley’s presence in New York City as a kind of bridge between very different loci of power.

Antebellum & Civil War, ReviewsGuest UserMay 5, 2020Comment

Engineering America: The Life and Times of John A. Roebling

Richard Haw, interviewed by Beth Harpaz

The beloved Brooklyn Bridge was one of the most daring feats of 19th Century engineering. The man who designed it was equally daring and a paradox of personality: An oddball who engineered a structure that was a marvel of stability at a time when suspension bridges routinely fell down. Richard Haw, a professor in the Interdisciplinary Studies Program at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, has written two previous books about the Brooklyn Bridge. The focus of his latest – after 13 years of research – is the man behind the bridge. Engineering America: The Life and Times of John A. Roebling tells one of the most fascinating American immigrant stories. Haw talks about it with Beth Harpaz, editor of CUNY SUM.

Interviews, Podcasts, Brooklyn, Built EnvironmentGuest UserMay 1, 2020Comment

The Women of Atelier 17: Modernist Printmaking in Midcentury New York

Review by Jennifer Farrell

While there is certainly no dearth of scholarship on midcentury art in the United States, especially work made in New York City, this informative and important new book proves that there are still many areas in this period which demand further study. In The Women of Atelier 17, the independent historian Christina Weyl closely examines a world largely ignored in both art history and cultural studies—modernist printmaking and work done by female artists at the celebrated print studio when it operated in Gotham. Using archival sources, interviews, skillful visual analysis, as well as literature from a variety of fields (including art history, women’s studies, cultural studies, history, sociology, and other subjects), she considers both their work and influence, in this particular field and beyond it.

Arts & Culture, ReviewsGuest UserApril 30, 2020Comment

Repowering Cities: An Interview with Sara Hughes

Interviewed by Katie Uva

Today on the blog, Katie Uva speaks to Sara Hughes about her recent book, Repowering Cities: Governing Climate Change Mitigation in New York, Los Angeles, and Toronto. The book examines how each of these cities have set climate change mitigation goals and how each city’s ability to achieve those goals has evolved over the past decade.

Interviews, Urban PlanningGuest UserApril 28, 2020Comment

“Skull Trouble”: A Brief History of Police Harassment of Black New Yorkers

By Marcy S. Sacks

As a fresh recruit to the New York City police force at the turn of the twentieth century, Dutch immigrant Cornelius Willemse learned an important lesson from his superior officer about how to treat the black residents on his beat. One day, the novice patrolman encountered a group of black men congregating on a street corner. He attempted to disperse the group. “At my order to move along,” he recalled, “they shuffled off slowly, dragging their feet on the sidewalk, in a way which seemed to say, ‘Feet, we’ll be back as soon as this fool cop is gone.’” Angered by their perceived insolence, Willemse decided that they were “ripe for a lesson.” Without warning, he began beating any black man within reach, “work[ing] with the old nightstick as hard as I could.” In short order, “Negroes were lying all over the sidewalk, some of them half conscious, others bruised and bleeding.” He smugly evaluated his success. “I had made good on my threat of ‘skull trouble.’” He expected no further difficulty from them.

Crime & Policing, Race & EthnicityGuest UserApril 23, 2020Comment

Stirrings: How Activist New Yorkers Ignited a Movement for Food Justice

Reviewed by Nevin Cohen

It is impossible to read Stirrings: How Activist New Yorkers Ignited a Movement for Food Justice in the midst of the 2020 Democratic primaries without drawing comparisons between the tensions faced by the food justice pioneers profiled in Lana Dee Povitz’s history and the very different visions of social change articulated by the two candidates. Bernie Sanders’s case for the radical transformation of an unequal and unjust economic and political system seems diametrically opposed to Joe Biden’s more conservative approach, emphasizing incremental change within existing institutions. Their ideologies seem irreconcilable. But as the organizations profiled in Lana Dee Povitz’s compelling history of food activism illustrate, on the ground social change is more nuanced and complex than the Sanders/Biden schism suggests.

Reviews, Poverty & Inequality, Food & DrinkGuest UserApril 21, 2020Comment

The Unstoppable Irish: Songs and Integration of the New York Irish, 1783-1883

Interview by Elizabeth Stack

Today on the blog, Gotham editor Elizabeth Stack speaks with Dan Milner about his recent book, The Unstoppable Irish: Songs and Integration of the New York Irish, 1783-1883 and the importance of music to the Irish people both in Ireland and New York.

The Unstoppable Irish follows the changing fortunes of New York's Irish Catholics, commencing with the evacuation of British military forces in late 1783 and concluding one hundred years later with the completion of the initial term of the city's first Catholic mayor. During that century, Hibernians first coalesced and then rose in uneven progression from being a variously dismissed, despised, and feared foreign group to ultimately receiving de facto acceptance as constituent members of the city's population. Dan Milner presents evidence that the Catholic Irish of New York gradually integrated (came into common and equal membership) into the city populace rather than assimilated (adopted the culture of a larger host group). Assimilation had always been an option for Catholics, even in Ireland. In order to fit in, they needed only to adopt mainstream Anglo-Protestant identity. But the same virile strain within the Hibernian psyche that had overwhelmingly rejected the abandonment of Gaelic Catholic being in Ireland continued to hold forth in Manhattan and the community remained largely intact. A novel aspect of Milner's treatment is his use of song texts in combination with period news reports and existing scholarship to develop a fuller picture of the Catholic Irish struggle. Products of a highly verbal and passionately musical people, Irish folk and popular songs provide special insight into the popularly held attitudes and beliefs of the integration epoch.

Arts & Culture, Immigration, InterviewsGuest UserApril 16, 2020Comment