Gotham
The Show that Saved the Amphitheatre
By Daniela Sheinin
On a summer evening in June 1945, 200 performers took to the aquatic stage at the former New York State Pavilion at Flushing Meadow Park. Spread throughout the 8,500 seats at the northern tip of Meadow Lake, spectators watched swimmers and a choreographed “water ballet” fill the pool, while divers sprung from the diving towers at each end.
Read MoreA Loyalist and His Newspaper in Revolutionary New York
By Joseph M. Adelman
New York in the 1760s was a divided town, riven by local factions as well as imperial politics. Local elections were fiercely contested, as they had been for decades. The imperial crisis didn’t help.
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Flash: The Making of Weegee the Famous
Christopher Bonanos Interviewed by Robert W. Snyder
In the middle of the 20th century, a newspaper photographer who went by the name of Weegee took memorable pictures of New York City’s street life that appeared everywhere from tabloid newspapers to seminars on the history of photography.
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Mapping the Suffrage Metropolis
By Lauren C. Santangelo
Last summer, Oxford University Press published my book, Suffrage and the City: New York Women Battle for the Ballot. The book examines how leaders in such suffrage organizations as the New York City Woman Suffrage League and the Woman Suffrage Party perceived New York City, how those perceptions changed over the course of five decades, and how they informed campaign strategies.
Read MoreNew Editors
We’re delighted to announce that we have once again expanded our team of editors here at Gotham.
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Magdalena Dircx’s New Amsterdam:
Speech, Sex, and the Foundations of a City
By Deborah Hamer
There is a curious passage in the correspondence of the directors of the Dutch West India Company and Peter Stuyvesant. Commenting in May 1658 on one Magdalena Dircx, who had been banished from New Amsterdam on Stuyvesant’s orders for her “dissolute life,” the directors wrote she would “not again receive our permission to return to New Netherland.” If she returned through “deceitful practices or under a false name,” the directors authorized Stuyvesant to punish her with a yet harsher sentence than banishment.
Read MoreIsland Gospel: Pentecostal Music and Identity in Jamaica and the United States
Review by Ray Allen
Writing about musical performance during the time of COVID-19 gives me pause, as it does, no doubt, for all of us who revel in live music. Whether we choose to raise our voices in praise of the deities or to drum and dance to the most sensual rhythms, the act of communal music making is, at its core, a celebration of our deepest humanity. Michael Butler’s Island Gospel is a keen reminder of this reality, and leaves us longing for the day when we can again gather in places of worship, dance halls, clubs, concert venues, and street fetes for the simple joy of making music together.
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“Down Here Near the End of Staten Island”:
Dorothy Day on the Beach and on the Page
By David Allen
In the Map Division of the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue is a 1924 survey of New York conducted by the Fairchild Aerial Camera Corporation for the City’s Office of the Chief Engineer. If you look closely at plate 33C, you will see the section of Staten Island’s South Shore that stretches along Raritan Bay from Seguine Point to Arbutus Lake: a crescent of white beach, a few houses, trees, and fields offering a buffer from more developed neighborhoods closer to Amboy Road and the Huguenot Station of the Staten Island Railroad.
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