By Mark Naison
All over the nation, protesters are demanding that police budgets be cut and that the funds saved be invested in community development projects in working class neighborhoods, particularly those which have high concentrations of Black people. As this movement spreads to NYC, it might be useful to review the history of police expansion and militarization in NYC, its surprising origins and unintended consequences.
Read MoreBy Mike Wallace
All day the twelfth of August 1900, the city roasted through a heat wave. Night brought no relief. In Hell’s Kitchen, sleepless residents perched on stoops or fled to local watering holes. Arthur Harris, a 22-year-old, Virginia-born recent migrant, sought refuge at McBride’s Saloon on the corner of Eighth Avenue and 41st Street, just down the block from the apartment in which he lived with his girlfriend, 20-year-old May Enoch. At 2:00 a.m., Enoch came by, asked him to “come on up home,” then waited outside for him to join her. On departing, Harris found her struggling in a man’s grip. He leapt to rescue her. The man produced a club and began battering him, shouting racist epithets. Harris pulled a knife and cut his assailant twice. Robert J. Thorpe, a plainclothes policeman who had been arresting Enoch for presumed soliciting, fell mortally wounded.
Read MoreReviewed by Dylan Gottlieb
“She is loud. She is good and rude,” wrote Jimmy Breslin, the redoubtable New York newspaperman. Like “a fighter in training,” he continued, Bella Abzug was “pushing, brawling, poking, striding her way toward the Congress of the United States.” In the 1970s, as New York approached its nadir, Abzug emerged onto the political scene as a pugilist for the people: a “tough broad from the Bronx” (to borrow the title of another biography), whose combative style and populist message fit the tough times.
Read MoreReviewed by Gage Averill
It is fitting that it was two New Yorkers in the early 1930s, Harold Arlen and Ted Koehler, who composed the showtune “I Love a Parade,” because for all the diversity and excess of its public processions, there is likely no city anywhere that has exceeded New York. The home of the renowned ticker-tape parades, the Macy’s Day Parade, the St Patrick’s Day Parade, NYC Pride the Village Halloween Parade, and numerous ethnic celebrations (modeled on St. Patrick’s), New York City’s streetscapes have conferred both prestige and visibility on those who have been able to muster the necessary funding and authorizations and crowds. It is not without a powerful sense of the current moment, the Covid-19 pandemic, that I’ve taken on the otherwise enviable, and the now more somber, task of reviewing a book about some of the most raucous, colorful, noisy and crowded events in New York: Brooklyn’s Caribbean Carnival celebrations.
Read MoreBy Jonathan Goldman
New York City's "Overalls Parade," held on April 24, 1920 was, viewed generously, an inspired if quixotic attempt to inaugurate a new, labor-conscious political movement. From a more critical perspective, it was a neutered form of activism that undermined the progressive movements that had flourished over the previous two decades, now under threat at the start of the 1920s. In some respects, it even worked against the interests of labor. The "Economy Parade" – its official name never caught on – aimed to protest the rising cost of clothing as one instance of the rising cost of living in the postwar United States. Marchers, representing civic organizations and private clubs from multiple strata, wore overalls, a recent sartorial innovation, as a show of allegiance to democratic principles. Organized by the Cheese Club, a private social group whose members worked in theater, entertainment journalism, and publicity, the parade drew far fewer participants than predicted by its leaders and friendly journalists, and became a byword for failure.
Read MoreInterviewed by Prithi Kanakamedala
Today on the blog, Prithi Kanakamedala talks to Eric K. Washington about his current work, Boss of the Grips: The Life of James H. Williams and the Red Caps of Grand Central Terminal. This book has garnered a great deal of praise, including citation as one of the Best Biographies of 2019 by Open Letters Review and special recognition from The Municipal Art Society of New York as a 2020 Brendan Gill Prize Finalist.
Read MoreBy Joe Merton
Recent scholarship has done much to illuminate the so-called “neoliberalization” of New York during the 1970s and 1980s, in which a bold midcentury experiment in urban social democracy was dismantled in the wake of the city’s fiscal crisis and replaced by an agenda of municipal austerity, business-oriented economic development, and market-led privatization.[1] Much of this work identifies this process as a top-down transformation led by the city’s financial and political elite and resisted by many New Yorkers.[2] But what if New Yorkers did not always resist or passively receive this process but actively perpetuated it themselves?
Read MoreInterviewed 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.
Read MoreBy 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.
Read MoreBy 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.
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