'Sites and Sounds' Nominated for a Second GANYC Award for 'Lost NYC'
Sites and Sounds, the Gotham Center’s annual podcast series, created for Open House New York Weekend, has been nominated for the second time in three years for an Apple Award by the Guides Association of New York City (GANYC). Past awardees include WNYC’s Brian Lehrer Show, The Bowery Boys, and WFUV’s Cityscape. This year’s nomination for Outstanding Achievement in NYC Radio / Podcast (Audio / Spoken Word) is for Lost NYC, a special edition of Sites and Sounds, focusing on places in New York that are gone, but were nonetheless of great importance to the city's history — in light of the fact that COVID-19 robbed the city of the many spaces Open House New York makes accessible to the public each fall.
The Gotham Center commissioned eleven independent and professional scholars to discuss just a few of these lost treasures, from the military headquarters that served as the nucleus of the Dutch (and later British) colony to some of New York City's great (and not-so-great) 19th century social institutions, to icons of 20th century popular culture that still endure in local (and national) imagination:
Russell Shorto, author of the national bestseller The Island at the Center of the World [russellshorto.com], on Fort Amsterdam and the Dutch colony it protected
Christopher F. Minty, author of “American Demagogues”: The Origins of Loyalism in New York City [cfminty.com](forthcoming), on James Rivington and his controversial printshop in Hanover Square
Leslie Alexander, author of African or American? Black Identity and Political Activism in New York City, 1784-1861 [press.uillinois.edu], on the African meetinghouse, headquarters of the secret society that created the state’s first incorporated black organization; for a century, NYC’s most prominent black mutual aid group
Alexander Manevitz, author of The Rise and Fall of Seneca Village: Remaking Race and Space in Nineteenth-Century New York City [alexandermanevitz.com] (forthcoming), on the free black community destroyed to build Central Park
Russell Gao Hodges, author of David Ruggles: A Radical Black Abolitionist and the Underground Railroad in New York City [uncpress.org], on Mother Zion A.M.E. Church and its nationally influential antislavery leaders
Stacy Horn, author of Damnation Island: Poor, Sick, Mad, and Criminal in 19th-Century New York [nytimes.com], on the notorious ‘lunatic asylum,’ prison, workhouses, and hospitals that once stood on Roosevelt Island
Shane White, author of Prince of Darkness [us.macmillan.com] and Stories of Freedom in Black New York [hup.harvard.edu], on the African Grove, a theater company which played with an entirely black cast and crew to mostly black audiences in the last days of slavery in NYC
Bob McGee, author of The Greatest Ballpark Ever: Ebbets Field and the Story of the Brooklyn Dodgers [rutgersuniversitypress.org], on the iconic stadium, formerly in Crown Heights, and its still-bemoaned departure
Randall Mason, co-author of North Brother Island: The Last Unknown Place in New York City [chrispaynephoto.com], on this now-abandoned, once-feared part of Gotham’s archipelago, which served for decades as (often forced) quarantine for the ill during various epidemics
Sharon Zukin, author of Point of Purchase: How Shopping Changed American Culture [routledge.com], on ‘B. Altman’s,’ the famous Midtown department, store and the new world of consumption it helped make
Brendan Cooper, author of “The Domino Effect: Politics, Policy, and the Consolidation of the Sugar Refining Industry in the United States, 1789–1895,” on the rise and fall of the enormous Williamsburg, Brooklyn factory
This series was also featured in the New York Post before Open House New York Weekend in October 2020. You can download and listen to episodes of Lost NYC here, or wherever you get podcasts.