History, Natural History & the Arts
Taking visitors back to a decade when the new music genres of punk, disco, and hip hop sprang up in New York City and then exploded across the world, The New York Historical presents its new exhibition, “You Should Be Dancing: New York, 1976 and Beyond.”
On view through April 4, 2027, the exhibition explores how, in a time of financial crisis, New York City cultivated a new generation of creativity and celebration. [Read more…] about You Should Be Dancing: New York, 1976 and Beyond
History is often kindest to people who leave something permanent behind — a building, a business, a name etched onto a marquee. Their legacy remains visible. But those who built careers around live entertainment worked in a far more fleeting medium. The worlds they created existed in sound, light, energy, and memory, disappearing almost as quickly as they arrived.
Harry Altman (1890-1966) was one of those people: a once-prominent Buffalo nightclub owner and entertainment promoter whose name has largely faded from New York’s cultural memory, despite decades spent shaping the nightlife of Western New York. [Read more…] about The Man Buffalo Forgot: Harry Altman’s Lost Entertainment Empire
Using previously unstudied Coast Guard records from 1920 to 1933 for New York City and environs, Ellen NicKenzie Lawson’s Smugglers, Bootleggers, and Scofflaws: Prohibition and New York City (SUNY Press, 2013) examines the development of Rum Row and smuggling via the coasts of Long Island, the Long Island Sound, the New Jersey shore, and along the Hudson and East Rivers.
With the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment, “drying up” New York City promised to be the greatest triumph of the proponents of Prohibition. Instead, the city remained the nation’s greatest liquor market. [Read more…] about Smugglers, Bootleggers and Scofflaws: Prohibition and New York City
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