Masthead_Gloucester_Kearn.jpg

Gotham

Rainbow LaGuardia: An Interview With Stephen Petrus and Thierry Gourjon-Bieltvedt

Rainbow LaGuardia: An Interview With Stephen Petrus and Thierry Gourjon-Bieltvedt

Interviewed by Adam Kocurek

Today on the blog, we talk to Stephen Petrus and Thierry Gourjon-Bielvedt about their project Rainbow LaGuardia, a virtual exhibition that examines what it means to be LGBTQ in academia. In it, viewers can explore dozens of video and audio clips taken of twenty-seven LGBTQ faculty and staff at LaGuardia Community College. In these clips, participants talk about everything from their professional lives as LGBTQ academics to their formative experiences in their youth.

Read More
The Neighborhood Manhattan Forgot: Audubon Park and the Families Who Shaped It

The Neighborhood Manhattan Forgot: Audubon Park and the Families Who Shaped It

Matthew Spady Interviewed by Robert W. Snyder

In northern Manhattan in 1841, the naturalist John James Audubon bought 14 acres of farmland on the banks of the Hudson River and built his family a home far from the crowded downtown streets. Audubon’s country homestead is long gone, but his story launches Matthew Spady’s The Neighborhood Manhattan Forgot: Audubon Park and the Families Who Shaped It.

Read More
“The Scourge of the ‘90s:” Squeegee Men and Broken Windows Policing

“The Scourge of the ‘90s:” Squeegee Men and Broken Windows Policing

By Jess Bird

There is perhaps no other bogeyman of New York City’s “bad old days” that has incited greater ire than the squeegee man. Cars created a sense of safety, of separation from the unruly world of the street, but a window washer approaching a car stopped at a red light ruptured that sense of safety, incited panic, and demonstrated, to some, a breakdown in law and order. Squeegee men, “the scourge of the ‘90s,” symbolized the need to be tough on crime, regardless of the costs. Unsurprisingly then, the so-called squeegee pest featured heavily in the mayoral race of 1993, a rematch between incumbent Mayor David Dinkins and Rudy Giuliani.

Read More
One Day in New York, 1882: Interview with Filmmaker Arne Peisker

One Day in New York, 1882: Interview with Filmmaker Arne Peisker

Interviewed by David Huyssen

Today on the blog, David Huyssen speaks with Arne Peisker, a director with the German/American production company, Story House Productions, about his new documentary film, One Day in New York, 1882. The film is part of a series, and in the final stages of production for one of Germany’s major national broadcasters, ZDF.

Read More
“God is Forgotten, and the Soldier Slighted”: New York City’s Golden Hill and Nassau Street Riots and the Affective Rhetorics of Crowd Violence

“God is Forgotten, and the Soldier Slighted”: New York City’s Golden Hill and Nassau Street Riots and the Affective Rhetorics of Crowd Violence

By Russell L. Weber

Winter’s chill clutched New York City the morning of January 19, 1770. Such unwelcoming weather might have persuaded some New Yorkers to remain indoors, supply their stoves with more kindling, and delay their trip to the market until warmth returned to either their bones or their city. The soldiers of Britain’s 16th Regiment of Foot, however, ignored January’s harsh bite. As these regulars made the half-mile walk from their barracks to Fly Market, their enraged, boiling blood kept them warm.

Read More
Review: John Harris’s The Last Slave Ships: New York and the End of the Middle Passage

New York and the Death of the Atlantic Slave Trade

Reviewed by Samantha Payne

John Harris’s The Last Slave Ships: New York City and the End of the Middle Passage reveals how and why the long survival of the slave trade in the United States was related to the politics of slavery across the Atlantic World. During the first half of the 19th century, more than seventy-five percent of enslaved Africans transported to the New World arrived in Brazil. In 1850, Brazil abolished the slave trade — an act which, Harris argues, transformed the inner workings of the illegal traffic in the United States.

Read More
Authentic Survivors: Religion and Gentrification in Williamsburg, Brooklyn

Authentic Survivors: Religion and Gentrification in Williamsburg, Brooklyn

By Alyssa Maldonado-Estrada

Every July in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, the Italian American Catholic community celebrates its patron saints in spectacular fashion. During the annual Feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel and San Paolino di Nola, men in the community perform the Dance of the Giglio, a ritual that has been celebrated in Brooklyn since 1903. Hundreds of men lift the seventy-foot-tall, four-ton tower, decorated with baroque angels, saints, and arches, through the streets in honor of Saint Paulinus (San Paolino), the patron saint of Nola, Italy.

Read More
Announcing GothamEd

Announcing GothamEd

The Gotham Center is very pleased to announce the launch of a new, year-round program offering online seminars in New York City history. These courses are designed to serve a range of backgrounds and interests. Looking for a general introduction into a subject? Are you an avid history buff looking for a deep dive into a topic? Then these courses are for you!

Read More
Guest UserComment
Review: Rachel N. Klein's Art Wars: The Politics of Taste in Nineteenth-Century New York

New York: Where the Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get… Art?

Reviewed by Alexis Monroe

The class divisions inherent in the New York art world which Rachel Klein deftly identifies in her book are all too persistent today. Art Wars: The Politics of Taste in Nineteenth Century New York promises a history of taste fundamentally informed by class tensions and sectional strife. Klein crafts this history around three case studies, which she sees as defining events in the 19th-century art world: the collapse of the American Art-Union in 1852, the controversy in the mid-1880s around the Cesnola collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the push in the mid-1880s to open the Met on Sundays.

Read More
In Service to the New Nation: An Interview with Robb K. Haberman of The John Jay Papers Project

In Service to the New Nation: An Interview with Robb K. Haberman of The John Jay Papers Project

Interviewed by Helena Yoo Roth

Few political leaders in the revolutionary and early nationals eras were more influential than John Jay (1745-1829). A New Yorker born and bred and a 1765 graduate of the nascent King’s College, this austere lawyer of Huguenot and Dutch descent went on to lead a life marked by continuous service and a steadfast devotion to his family, state, and country. The John Jay Papers Project based at the Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Columbia University has documented Jay’s life through a series of published volumes containing his personal correspondence and public papers.

Read More