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NYC Historic Districts Council 2017 Highlights

January 2, 2018 by Editorial Staff Leave a Comment

historic districts councilNew York City’s Historic Districts Council Public Review Committee is a group that reviews Certificate of Appropriateness applications submitted to New York City’s Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC).

The volunteer committee and professional staff examine each proposal and create testimony that is read to the Commission at public hearings. The following properties were some of the biggest projects that were reviewed this past year. [Read more…] about NYC Historic Districts Council 2017 Highlights

Filed Under: History Tagged With: Architecture, Historic Districts Council, Historic Preservation, Landmarks Preservation Commission, NYC

Radical Gotham: Anarchism in NYC

August 6, 2017 by Editorial Staff Leave a Comment

radical gothamNew York City’s identity as a cultural and artistic center, as a point of arrival for millions of immigrants sympathetic to anarchist ideas, and as a hub of capitalism made the city a unique and dynamic terrain for anarchist activity. For 150 years, Gotham’s cosmopolitan setting created a unique interplay between anarchism’s human actors and an urban space that invites constant reinvention.

A new book edited by Tom Goyens’, Radical Gotham: Anarchism in New York City From Schwab’s Saloon To Occupy Wall Street (UI Press, 2017) gathers essays that demonstrate anarchism’s endurance as a political and cultural ideology and movement in New York from the 1870s to 2011.

The authors cover the gamut of anarchy’s emergence in and connection to the city. Some offer important new insights on German, Italian, and Yiddish- and Spanish-speaking anarchists. Others explore anarchism’s influence on religion, politics, and the visual and performing arts. A concluding essay looks at Occupy Wall Street’s roots in New York City’s anarchist tradition. [Read more…] about Radical Gotham: Anarchism in NYC

Filed Under: Books, History Tagged With: Books, NYC

Beauty In The City: The Ashcan School

August 5, 2017 by Editorial Staff Leave a Comment

beauty in the cityRobert A. Slayton’s book Beauty In The City: The Ashcan School (SUNY Press, 2017) takes a look back to the beginning of the twentieth century, when the Ashcan School of Art blazed onto the art scene, introducing a revolutionary vision of New York City.

In contrast to the elite artists who painted the upper class bedecked in finery, in front of magnificent structures, or the progressive reformers who photographed the city as a slum, hopeless and full of despair, the Ashcan School held the unique belief that the industrial working-class city was a fit subject for great art.

Beauty in the City illustrates how these artists portrayed the working classes with respect and gloried in the drama of the subways and excavation sites, the office towers, and immigrant housing. Their art captured the emerging metropolis in all its facets, with its potent machinery and its class, ethnic, and gender issues. [Read more…] about Beauty In The City: The Ashcan School

Filed Under: Books, History Tagged With: Art History, Books, Cultural History, New York City, NYC

New Book Explores Class Conflict in Eighteenth Century NYC

June 18, 2017 by Editorial Staff Leave a Comment

Who Rules at HomeIn Who Should Rule at Home? (Cornell University Press, 2017) Joyce D. Goodfriend argues that the high-ranking gentlemen who figure so prominently in most accounts of New York City’s evolution from 1664, when the English captured the small Dutch outpost of New Amsterdam, to the eve of American Independence in 1776, were far from invincible and that the degree of cultural power they held has been exaggerated.

Goodfriend explains how the urban elite experienced challenges to its cultural authority at different times, from different groups, and in a variety of settings. [Read more…] about New Book Explores Class Conflict in Eighteenth Century NYC

Filed Under: Books, History Tagged With: Cornell University Press, Cultural History, New Netherland, New York City, NYC, Social History

International Express: New Yorkers on the 7 Train

April 30, 2017 by Editorial Staff Leave a Comment

In the new book International Express: New Yorkers on the 7 Train (Columbia University Press, 2017) by Stéphane Tonnelat and William Kornblum, the French ethnographer Tonnelat and his collaborator Kornblum, a native New Yorker, ride the 7 subway line to better understand the intricacies of the New York City Transit Authority 7 subway.

Nicknamed the International Express, the New York City Transit Authority 7 subway line runs through a highly diverse series of ethnic and immigrant neighborhoods in Queens. People from Andean South America, Central America, China, India, Italy, Korea, Mexico, Pakistan, Poland, Romania, and Vietnam, as well as residents of a number of gentrifying blue-collar and industrial neighborhoods, fill the busy streets around the stations. The 7 train is a microcosm of a specifically urban, New York experience, in which individuals from a variety of cultures and social classes are forced to interact and get along with one another. For newcomers to the city, mastery of life in the subway space is a step toward assimilation into their new home. [Read more…] about International Express: New Yorkers on the 7 Train

Filed Under: Books, History Tagged With: New York City, NYC, Subway

Lecture: Metropolitan Hospital Goes to WWI

April 5, 2017 by Editorial Staff Leave a Comment

Wounded Soldiers Arrive at Base Hospital 48The Roosevelt Island Historical Society will host a free lecture on Thursday, April 6, 2017 at 6:30 pm, “Metropolitan Hospital Goes to the Great War” by Judith Berdy, President Roosevelt Island Historical Society, at the New York Public Library Branch on Roosevelt Island .

The wounded and dying soldiers on the battlefields of the Great War required a new level of medical care. Roosevelt Island’s Metropolitan Hospital played a role as one of a number of American hospitals that sent doctors, nurses and other staff members to run base hospitals in Europe during World War I. [Read more…] about Lecture: Metropolitan Hospital Goes to WWI

Filed Under: Events, History Tagged With: NYC, Roosevelt Island, World War One

The Orange Riots of 1870 and 1871

February 5, 2017 by Miguel Hernandez 4 Comments

orange riotIn the 19th century extremely violent conflicts took place between mostly Northern Irish Protestants (Orangemen) and Irish Catholics.  The Orange Riot of 1870 began on July 12 (known as Marching Day in Northern Ireland), when a parade was held in Manhattan by Irish Protestants celebrating the victory at the Battle of the Boyne of William III, the King of England and Prince of Orange, over James II in 1690. [Read more…] about The Orange Riots of 1870 and 1871

Filed Under: History Tagged With: Black History, Immigration, Irish History, Nativism, New York City, NYC, riots, Tammany Hall

Greenwich Village: Past and Present

January 5, 2017 by Jules Stewart 2 Comments

453-461-sixth-avenue-in-the-historic-districtOn a bitterly cold January morning in 1917, the painters John Sloan and Marcel Duchamps, along with friends, climbed to the top of Washington Square Arch to proclaim the secession of Greenwich Village from the United States. Thenceforth the neighborhood that stood as America’s repository of avant-garde art, literature and social enlightenment would be known as the Free and Independent Republic of Washington Square. The stunt defined the character of the Village, as it is popularly known to New Yorkers, for the ensuing half century. [Read more…] about Greenwich Village: Past and Present

Filed Under: History, New York City Tagged With: Greenwich, Greenwich Village, Historic Preservation, New York City, NYC

The Flour Riot of 1837

December 26, 2016 by Miguel Hernandez 1 Comment

flour riot 1837Generally speaking, riots tend to happen on hot summer days but the Flour Riot erupted on a cold winter night in February of 1837. The attack on warehouses was sparked by a fear that food was being hoarded by wealthy merchants in lower Manhattan and people in the lower classes might face starvation.

In reality, the rumors which inflamed the crowd were greatly exaggerated, lasted about a day and the vandalism which resulted was fairly minor, especially when compared to such later disturbances such as the Astor Place Riot or the colossal Draft Riots. Nonetheless, the Flour Riot was a significant affair because it underscored a growing divide in the city between New York’s prosperous merchant class and a quickly growing lower class of newly arrived Irish immigrants. The riot was also memorable because new method of communication, the “penny press,” had helped to inflame tensions. These cheap newspapers, widely available to the poor, had spread dangerous rumors and provoked a mob to attack a warehouse where flour was stored. [Read more…] about The Flour Riot of 1837

Filed Under: History, New York City Tagged With: Black History, Crime and Justice, Culinary History, New York City, NYC, Panic of 1837, poverty, riots, Troy

The Slave Conspiracy Riot of 1741

December 13, 2016 by Miguel Hernandez Leave a Comment

slave revolt 1741This conflict also known as “The New York Conspiracy Riot” was an amazingly intricate and brutal affair that in addition to its local implications had an international twist as well.

In the context of the longstanding European conflicts, English colonists in New York City felt anxious about the French presence in Canada to the north and Spanish colonies in the Gulf Coast and the Mississippi River Valley to the South and West. They also felt threatened by a recent influx of Irish immigrants, whose Catholicism might incline them to spy for France and Spain. [Read more…] about The Slave Conspiracy Riot of 1741

Filed Under: History Tagged With: Black History, Hispanic History, New York City, NYC, riots, Slavery

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