The Sustainability Myth: An Interview with Melissa Checker
Interviewed by Katie Uva
Today on the blog, Gotham editor Katie Uva speaks to Melissa Checker about her recent book, The Sustainability Myth: Environmental Gentrification and the Politics of Justice. In it, Checker examines and critiques current frameworks of sustainability in New York, where sustainability and economic development are often seen as goals that are mutually supporting. Checker argues that this belief leads to gentrification, deepens economic inequality, and even winds up worsening environmental conditions in some parts of the city.
Mastering Paradox: John Jay as a Slaveholding Abolitionist
By David N. Gellman
“Alexander Hamilton, Enslaver? New Research Says Yes” announced the New York Times in a November 2020 news story. A paper published online by Jessie Serfilippi, a researcher at the Schuyler Mansion State Historic Site, uncovered striking new evidence to clarify long muddied waters about Hamilton’s personal connections to this deep-seated New York institution. Serfilippi’s dogged research is proof once again that even traditional archives still hold revelations.
The Unequal City: A Review of Racial Inequality in New York City since 1965
Reviewed by Kenneth S. Alyass
New York City is a nexus of racial and class inequality. The COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent economic fallout has made this all too clear. Nearly one in four New Yorkers of color have lost their job since March. City institutions like the MTA and CUNY, which the majority-minority population of the city rely on in their daily lives, are facing apocalyptic budget cuts. And while the media’s attention is often on the abandonment of corporate offices in downtown Manhattan, thousands of small businesses owned by people of color — the lifeblood of neighborhoods — have shut down, usually for good.
Duties and Desires: The Brooklyn Eagle Cookbook, 1926
By Megan J. Elias
Community cookbooks were usually assembled by groups of women organized for a charitable purpose — restoring an old church, for example. These cookbooks can reveal many things about a community. By focusing on two sections in the book, “Household Hints” and “Tasty Dishes,” we can access the sensations of domestic life in Brooklyn in 1926, its rhythms and expectations.
The stories in Joseph P. Alessi’s Settling the Frontier are familiar ones. Europeans, drawn by Native trade networks, voyaged to North American ill-prepared for survival. Without Native American assistance, most of these European traders would not have survived let alone established permanent settlements. Alessi delves more deeply into these stories, and claims that the foundation for European settlement in North American began before Europeans ever arrived.
Forbs, Fungi, and Fading Memories: What Can Preserving a Disappearing Staten Island a Century Ago Teach Us Today?
By Melissa Zavala
Staten Island’s rich history of conservation is overshadowed by its reputation as a “dump,” most often associated with Fresh Kills, the notorious landfill which at its peak point of operations in the 1980s was considered the largest landfill in the world. A look through the Staten Island Museum’s archival collections, however — its founder’s letters, journals, publications, photographs, and a wide array of other objects including herbariums, assorted wet and dry collections of specimens, and more — reveals an island that has transformed radically.
Everyday Politics are Everywhere in Arab New York: Emily Wills' Ethnography of a Community Under Pressure
Reviewed by Todd Fine
The defeat of Donald Trump promises the imminent end of the “Muslim ban” targeting people from several Arab countries, yet the challenges facing Muslim and Arab communities in the United States will surely continue. In the recent book Arab New York, University of Ottawa political scientist Emily Regan Wills seeks to depict how Arab communities in New York City, whose lives are greatly shaped by external politics, engage in politics themselves.
The Great Epizootic of 1872: Pandemics, Animals, and Modernity in 19th-Century New York City
By Oliver Lazarus
Monday, October 21st, 1872, began like many mid-fall days in New York — overcast and muggy with spitting rain, and a high of sixty-six degrees. Fall was supposed to mark the height of business in the city, when commerce and trade peaked. But as the week of October 21st dragged on, this seemingly unstoppable progress came to a halt. The cause of this stoppage was an attack on what is often dismissed as a vestige of that pre-modern city, but what was arguably New York’s most important energy supply: horsepower.
“Lost NYC” Wins Guides Association Award For “Outstanding Achievement In Radio / Podcast”
The Gotham Center is thrilled to announce that “Lost NYC,” its special edition of the yearly podcast series “Sites and Sounds,” has won the Guides Association of New York City (GANYC)’s Apple Award for “Outstanding Achievement in NYC Radio / Podcast (Audio / Spoken Word).” This is the second nomination in three years.
Dismantling Jim Crow from the Stage: A Review of The Civil Rights Theatre Movement in New York, 1939-1966
Reviewed by Madeline Steiner
Back in the olden days, before the global spread of COVID-19, when we could freely attend live theatre, I was fortunate enough to see the 2011 revival of Alice Childress’s play Trouble in Mind at Arena Stage in Washington, DC. Written in 1955, the play, a metatheatrical commentary on Black civil rights, contains a complex message about racial representation, whites’ complicity in upholding racist institutions, and a critique of civil rights plays from earlier in the 20th century. Over half a century after it was written, the play is still quite stirring and its civil rights message feels unfortunately just as relevant now as at the time of its writing.
