Gotham
Merchandising Modernism:
The End of the Downtown Scene
Jeffrey Patrick Colgan and Jeffrey Escoffier
Late in 1978, Peter McGough arrived in New York City, just when it was its most “dirty and dangerous.” He was 20 years old and had grown up in Syracuse. He came to attend the Fashion Institute of Technology but soon dropped out. He spent his tuition going to clubs like the Ninth Circle and Studio 54, drinking, taking drugs, and hanging out at the Chelsea Hotel with Village denizens like Cookie Mueller, the writer and John Waters actress, and fashion designer Michael Kors, a former classmate at FIT. For a while he made money doing odd jobs, sketching for fashion magazines, working at vintage shops, and eventually selling drink tickets at Danceteria. When he first became acquainted with the fledgling artist David McDermott, his friends warned him that McDermott was crazy.
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NYC Parks as Historical Battlegrounds between Black Equality and White Supremacy
By Marika Plater
When Amy Cooper threatened Chris Cooper’s life by calling the police with the wildly fabricated claim, “There is a man, African American…threatening me” in Central Park, she joined a long history of white New Yorkers who have made public parks unsafe for black people. Looking back to the early 19th century lays bare the connection between this tense moment in the Ramble and the question of who constitutes “the public” entitled to use public spaces. Between the 1820s and 1860s, the city’s parks were battlegrounds — sometimes literally — between black New Yorkers who asserted their equal right to relax, play, and protest there and whites who fought to keep these public spaces for themselves.
Read MoreVisualizing New York City by the Numbers: An Interview with Kubi Ackerman
Interviewed by Hannah Diamond
Today on Gotham, Hannah Diamond interviews Kubi Ackerman, guest curator of Who We Are: Visualizing NYC by the Numbers, a special exhibition now on view and available online at the Museum of the City of New York. Who We Are examines the role data plays in shaping and reflecting the city around us. The exhibition examines New York City’s own history with the census and features works by contemporary artists and designers that illuminate our urban environment and our own identities.
Read MoreNew York’s Unrighteous Beginnings
By Erin Kramer
In the initial instructions to New Netherland’s director general regarding obtaining land from indigenous peoples, the company leadership wrote: “For trading-goods or by means of some other amicable agreement, induce them to give up ownership and possession to us, without however forcing them thereto in the least or taking possession by craft or fraud, lest we call down the wrath of God upon our unrighteous beginnings, the Company intending in no wise to make war or hostile attacks upon any one.”[1]
When they first ventured into the spaces they would eventually call New Netherland, the Dutch knew that Europe was watching. Because they wanted to set themselves apart from the horrors of bloody conquest and slavery that made up the Black Legend of Spanish colonization, the Dutch were determined to set a better example. Instead of taking land by force, they relied on a legal tradition that acknowledged Native sovereignty over land in the Americas and they deployed capitalism to establish a foothold in North America.
Read More"Imagination Aided by the Painter's Brush": William Ranney and the Creation of the Purchase of Manhattan, 1844–1909
By Stephen McErleane
“Twenty-four bucks worth of beads and trinkets. This whole island.” One can easily imagine this remark from any of the more than 1,000,000 parade spectators on Fifth Avenue as they watched the “Purchase of Manhattan Island” float go by in the 1909 Hudson-Fulton Celebration. The fifteenth in a procession of fifty-four historical floats depicting notable events, persons, and places in the history of the Hudson River region, the thriftily constructed display of paper-mâché and painted canvas portrayed the legendary 1626 transaction in which the Dutch allegedly purchased the island for the paltry sum of twenty-four dollars.
Although it is now a fundamental piece of the city’s earliest history, it was not until 217 years after the event that New Yorkers first learned of the transaction. The story surfaced in 1844 and filled a void in a city largely ignorant of its earliest history, a city whose Dutch origins had, as Washington Irving wrote, left it with “an antiquity… extending back into the regions of doubt and fable.” Based on a single sentence in a contemporaneous letter reporting the news of the purchase, the story’s lack of detail and frequent retelling encouraged imaginative leaps. In the decades that followed the letter’s discovery, historians, artists, and others—who could now reach a larger audience due to a media revolution—obliged.
Read MoreSwept From the Streets: Mario Procaccino and the Rise of Law-and-Order Politics in New York City
By Gabe S. Tennen
Mario Angelo Procaccino strode down Fulton Street, waving to onlookers and shaking hands. Accompanied by his running mate for city council president, Abraham Beame; his teenage daughter, Marierose; and a cabal of campaign staff, the Democratic candidate for mayor seemed at home in the working-class shopping center in Downtown Brooklyn.[1] In 1969, the appearance of Procaccino, then serving as city comptroller, at a blue-collar hub outside of Manhattan was both practical and symbolic. Attempting to assemble a coalition of voters dissatisfied with the liberal bent of incumbent Mayor John V. Lindsay, Procaccino considered outreach to white homeowners in Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, and Staten Island his best chance to ascend to City Hall. Beginning his excursion in front of Mays Department Store, a campaign spokesman with a bullhorn declared to passers-by that “John Lindsay probably doesn’t even know where Mays Department Store is!”[2] As he had done throughout his Democratic primary campaign, the pencil-mustached, diminutive Procaccino would allude to that gulf between a Manhattan-reared, Protestant, Yale-educated mayor and a working-class Catholic and Jewish outer-borough constituency during the general election. The issue that most galvanized that effort was one gaining traction across the country: “law-and-order.”
Read MoreThe Enigma of Rescue: On a Recent History of the New School for Social Research
By Ben Wurgaft
The New School for Social Research holds a story of rescue dear. This is the tale of how its co-founder and first president, the economist Alvin Johnson, climbed a mountain of correspondence and paperwork to save scores of German scholars after Nazism’s rise to power in the early 1930s. Johnson saved lives and scholarly lineages. He also burnished the reputation of the institution he helped build, establishing a University in Exile (renamed the Graduate Faculty) within the New School itself. An academic institution in downtown Manhattan, equally committed to adult education and to using the social sciences to analyze all that is oppressive in social, cultural, and political life, the New School has — at certain moments in its history — embodied a set of egalitarian and progressive values. In 1918, the sociologist Thorstein Veblen published his The Higher Learning in America: A Memorandum on the Conduct of Universities by Business Men, in which he criticized academic institutions for defending the interests of the ruling class. He practically anticipated the 1919 founding of the New School in response to the actions of Nicholas Murray Butler, president of Columbia University, who had fired two faculty members for protesting the U.S.’s entrance into the war in Europe. Many elite academic institutions have flattering stories they tell about themselves. Some value their historical connections to wealth and power. Some value their political histories (“the Free Speech Movement happened here”). Some their famous former professors (“That was Foucault’s favorite sandwich shop”). The New School values its two foundations: on the basis of protest, in 1919, and on the basis of rescue, in 1933. In his memoir Kafka was the Rage, the writer and critic Anatole Broyard captured the way American students at the New School, after WWII, could turn the narrative of rescue into one of personal triumph: “We admired the German professors. We had won the fight against fascism and now, with their help, we would defeat all the dark forces in the culture and the psyche.”
Read MoreHow Dinosaurs Came to New York
By Lukas Rieppel
On February 16, 1905, the American Museum of Natural History unveiled an enormous dinosaur skeleton measuring more than sixty-five feet in length: Brontosaurus. This lumbering behemoth was discovered in a remote part of Wyoming several years earlier, and curators had just finished assembling its gargantuan bones into a free-standing display that would serve as the centerpiece of the museum’s recently inaugurated dinosaur hall. Over the next several decades, Brontosaurus became one of the most iconic dinosaurs of all time, and throngs of visitors flocked to the Upper West Side to see its fossil remains with their own eyes.
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NYPD at the Crossroads: Some Background History
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.
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