Gotham
The Corporate Campaign to Save Madison Square Park
By Benjamin Holtzman
In the late 1970s, after a decade of budget cuts had decimated the New York City park system, an ambitious former Parks Department official named Donald Simon came up with a radical plan to save Madison Square Park and — he hoped — parks across the city. Simon believed that the park’s setting in a Manhattan business district could catalyze the park’s revitalization. If the corporations whose headquarters overlooked the park could see how their fortunes were tied to the park’s conditions, Simon believed, they would contribute funds that could provide the maintenance, security, and management necessary to revive the park.
Read MoreIn Pursuit of Knowledge: An Interview with Kabria Baumgartner
Interviewed by Katie Uva
Today on the blog, editor Katie Uva speaks to Kabria Baumgartner, author of In Pursuit of Knowledge: Black Women and Educational Activism in Antebellum America. In her book, Baumgartner explores the origins of the fight for school desegregation in the 19th century Northeast by focusing on the stories of African American girls and women.
Read MoreThe Regional Nationalism of New York’s Literary World
By Alex Zweber Leslie
In the 1840s literary New York was electric. The city was booming, and its material success fueled a surge in cultural aspirations. A new generation of authors, including Herman Melville, joined an influx of emigres such as Edgar Allan Poe and Caroline Kirkland, while old standbys like Washington Irving became firmly canonical. An explosion of new magazines devoted to arts and politics meant that there were ever more writing in print and editorial sides to take. Boston may have still been the nation’s cultural capital, but New York was experiencing a renaissance that shifted the regional balance of cultural authority. It was a world of tightly-knit cliques, petty rivalries, inside gossip, playful pseudonymity, waggish jokes, and, most of all, youthful hopes for the future of literature in America.
Read MoreMerchandising Modernism:
New York City Department Stores in the 1920s
By Donald Albrecht and Thomas Mellins
America’s nearly two-century love affair with the department store has cooled dramatically in recent decades. E-commerce is the much-blamed culprit, but there have been other factors at play. As cities regained allure following the financial crisis of 2008, particularly for young professionals and well-heeled foreigners, suburban shopping malls anchored by department stores withered. Once the leading incubators of luxury brands and purveyors of their merchandise, department stores were forced to compete for shoppers with those very brands’ own freestanding boutiques as well as with lower-priced outlet stores.
Read MoreThe 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.
Read More
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 More