Today on the blog, Gotham editor Willie Mack speaks to filmmaker and geographer Brett Story about her book, Prison Land: Mapping Carceral Power across Neoliberal America. Story reexamines the prison as a set of social relations which includes property, race, gender, and class across the urban landscape. In this way, Story demonstrates how carceral power is distributed outside of the prisons walls to include racially segregated communities, gentrifying urban spaces, and even mass transit.
“The presentation of the civic and commercial life of the city”: May King Van Rensselaer and the founding of the Museum of the City of New York
By Alena Buis
At the January 2, 1917 annual meeting of the New-York Historical Society (N-YHS), May King Van Rensselaer (1848-1925) delivered a passionate speech. Addressing the organization’s staid (and at that point startled) representatives she proclaimed: “I have been attending the meetings of the New-York Historical Society for nearly three years, and have not heard one new or advanced scientific thought, although many distinguished scholars have visited the city.”
Explaining Amelia Norman’s Murder Attempt: Julie Miller’s Cry of Murder on Broadway
Reviewed by Lindsay Keiter
On the steps of the Astor Hotel on a fall evening in 1843, Amelia Norman plunged a small knife into her former lover’s chest. Immediately apprehended, Norman’s subsequent trial for attempted murder caused a media sensation. Championed by an unlikely coalition of middle-class moral reformers, including abolitionist Lydia Maria Child, and working-class political activists, Norman’s story did not “change history.”
In the Company of Pirates: New Amsterdam and the Atlantic World
By Timo McGregor
Preserved in an unassuming folder of Dutch colonial correspondence at the New York State Archives lies a vivid first-hand account of deceit, avarice, and violence in the seventeenth century Atlantic world. The scene, surprisingly, is not New Amsterdam or the Hudson Valley but the coast of modern-day Senegal. Here, in the winter of 1659, Abraham Velthuijsen witnessed a small but swashbuckling episode in the rise of Atlantic piracy and privateering.
Review: Martin V. Melosi's Fresh Kills: A History of Consuming and Discarding in New York City
Reviewed by Simone M. Müller
Fresh Kills Landfill was a human-made structure whose scale was gigantic in every conceivable dimension. With some 400 staff on site, holding twenty different job titles, the facility covered an area of about 3,000 acres, 2200 of which were available for fill. At the peak of its operation, in the late 1980s, Fresh Kills received about 29,000 tons of New York City’s municipal solid waste on a daily basis. Until its closure in 2001, Fresh Kills functioned as the world’s largest landfill in the heart of one of the world’s megacities.
A Celebrity Orator in the Early Republic: Carolyn Eastman’s The Strange Genius of Mr. O
Reviewed by Mark Boonshoft
I have never had to worry about spoiler alerts when writing a book review. Until now. (I’ll try to confine them to the footnotes). Carolyn Eastman’s new book tells the tale of a Scottish-born, melancholic, laudanum-using celebrity who barnstormed the early-19th century United States and drew crowds to his eloquent oratorical performances. Who was this omnipresent, opium-addicted, opinionated, oracle of oratory? Mr. O, of course. The Strange Genius of Mr. O: The World of the United States’ First Forgotten Celebrity is a mesmerizing biography of an early American celebrity who, for a decade, was seemingly everywhere, and then everywhere forgotten.
Marriage, Failure, and Exile: H.P. Lovecraft in New York
By David J. Goodwin
Horror writer H.P. Lovecraft is identified with his native city of Providence, Rhode Island and greater New England. That region — its geography, architecture, history, and lore — stood as the primary connective tissue of many of his best conceived and most popular stories, such as “The Dunwich Horror,” “The Colour Out of Space,” and “The Whisperer in Darkness.” Lovecraft once declared, “Few persons have ever been as closely knit to New England’s rock-ribbed hills as I.” He spent all of his adult life living and writing in a single Providence neighborhood with one notable exception — his two years in New York City between 1924 and 1926.
Claiming the Right to the City: Timo Schrader's Loisaida as Urban Laboratory
Reviewed by Hongdeng Gao
In the 1970s, New York City witnessed an unprecedented level of housing abandonment and disinvestment, especially in low-income neighborhoods including Harlem, the South Bronx, Williamsburg, Bedford-Stuyvesant, and the Lower East Side. Amid the citywide housing crisis, one local newspaper in Loisaida — a term coined by the activist and poet Bittman “Bimbo” Rivas in 1974 to refer to the largely Puerto Rican and low-income community on the Lower East Side — proclaimed a “Miracle on Avenue C.”
In the summer of 1641, a Wiechquaskeck man murdered Claes Smits, an aged wheelwright who lived in a small house north of Fort Amsterdam. He had visited Smits’ house to exchange beaver skins for duffels of cloth. But as Smits bent over to grab the cloth from a chest, the Native man (the records have not preserved his name) struck him dead with an axe. The Commander of the Dutch garrison at Fort Amsterdam pursued the man back to his village and accosted him with questions.
The Invention of Public Space: An Interview with Mariana Mogilevich
Interviewed by Katie Uva
Today on the blog, editor Katie Uva speaks to Mariana Mogilevich about her recent book, The Invention of Public Space: Designing for Inclusion in Lindsay’s New York.Mogilevich discusses the 1960s and 1970s as a uniquely inventive time in the city for defining and conceptualizing the use of public space. At a time when New York was dealing with deindustrialization, economic decline, and suburbanization, the Lindsay Administration made a conscious effort to develop inviting public space and support public interaction in city spaces, an attempt to lift up the city’s density and shared space as an asset rather than a liability.
