Urban History

Under Threat: The Downtown Oneonta Historic District

June 12, 2022 by Editorial Staff Leave a Comment

The Downtown Oneonta Historic District is representative of more than two centuries of economic activity and urban development. The district remains largely intact, and contains an architecturally significant collection of commercial, converted residential, and civic buildings.

The downtown district characterizes broader trends in small urban areas where disinvestment and rural poverty are a direct threat to historic resources. Small cities like Oneonta represent important parts of the overall historic tapestry of New York State that without creative solutions could be lost forever. [Read more…] about Under Threat: The Downtown Oneonta Historic District

Architect Adolf Loos and the American Legacy in Vienna

May 22, 2022 by Jaap Harskamp Leave a Comment

A chronology of cultural interactions between Europe and the United States tends to be a narrative about identity formation. It concerns the transfer of the American artist from a pilgrim to the shrines of European achievement to an active participant in redefining the boundaries of art and literature.

European modernism was the spontaneous expression of gifted but rebellious youngsters. It was rooted in urban settings and the post-war influx of young American writers fleeing the puritanical spirit at home added energy to the avant-garde. The presence of African-American performers and musicians boosted the raucous mood amongst the cosmopolitan mix of artists in Paris and Berlin.

Modernism had started with joyful artistic irreverence, it suffered in the trenches and, under the repression of the 1930s, was forced to seek asylum in New York. As war in Europe became inevitable, most cultural exiles returned to America, bringing with them a bounty of experience to fructify the cultural landscape at home (the term “lost generation” is a misnomer).

Such an account however obscures the fact that young and curious visitors to the United States – unlike their elders who resented the prospect of “Americanization” – returned home inspired by what they had experienced whilst questioning Europe’s haughty pretension of cultural superiority. [Read more…] about Architect Adolf Loos and the American Legacy in Vienna

Trust Busting: William Jennings Bryan & Theodore Roosevelt

February 10, 2022 by James S. Kaplan 2 Comments

As control of the American economy became increasingly centralized in trusts located on Wall Street after the Civil War, and the wealth of men like J.P. Morgan and John D. Rockefeller grew exponentially, there developed an increasing backlash against such concentrations of wealth. In the 1880s, through an investigation by a committee of the New York State Legislature, Americans became aware that Standard Oil secretly controlled a number of supposedly competing oil companies. By 1910 almost 90% of the world’s oil supply was controlled from the company’s headquarters at 26 Broadway in Manhattan. [Read more…] about Trust Busting: William Jennings Bryan & Theodore Roosevelt

Saving the Broadway Theater Business (Podcast)

November 26, 2021 by Editorial Staff Leave a Comment

This week on The Historians Podcast, New York City attorney and walking tour guide Jim Kaplan explains the role played by Democratic Party district leader Jimmy McManus in reviving the Broadway theater industry and the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood in Manhattan.

An online version of Kaplan’s story was published in New York Almanack.
[Read more…] about Saving the Broadway Theater Business (Podcast)

Albany’s Clinton Ave Historic Apartments Wins Preservation Award

November 25, 2021 by Editorial Staff Leave a Comment

Albany’s Clinton Avenue Historic Apartments have won a 2021 Excellence in Historic Preservation Award from the Preservation League of NYS.

The Clinton Avenue project involved the careful rehabilitation of 70 historic rowhouses spread across a one-mile span in Albany’s Clinton Avenue and Arbor Hill Historic Districts. The development includes 3 studios, 123 one-bedrooms, 68 two-bedrooms, and 16 three-bedrooms – a total of 210 apartments.

Tenants include households who earn from 50%-90% of the area median income, providing much-needed affordable housing in the city of Albany. Supportive housing has also been included, with 40 units reserved in partnership with DePaul, who provides services under contract with the Office of Mental Health. [Read more…] about Albany’s Clinton Ave Historic Apartments Wins Preservation Award

Lethal Chambers: The Curse of Anglo-American Eugenics

November 8, 2021 by Jaap Harskamp 3 Comments

The relationship between politics and science has always been complicated, and at times, disastrous.

The term eugenics was coined in 1883 by the British scientist Francis Galton who advocated that society should promote the marriage of the “fittest” individuals by providing monetary incentives.

Numerous intellectuals and political leaders (Winston Churchill and John Maynard Keynes in Britain; Woodrow Wilson and Alexander Graham Bell in the United States) came to accept the idea that society should strive for the improvement of the human race through governmental intervention. [Read more…] about Lethal Chambers: The Curse of Anglo-American Eugenics

Tammany’s McManus Club: The Final Decades

November 7, 2021 by James S. Kaplan 1 Comment

In 1984, longtime Tammany politician and leader of McManus Democratic Club James R. McManus was challenged for his position as Hell’s Kitchen’s District Leader by a reform politician named Hamed Houssain. Houssain argued that it was time for the district’s voters to retire the last vestige of Tammany Hall and throw out the organization affiliated with the corrupt disgraced Camine DeSapio.

McManus however, was overwhelmingly reelected and Mayor Ed Koch attended his victory party. For the next 33 years, until his retirement in 2017, there would be no other challenges to Jimmy McManus for the position of District Leader in Hell’s Kitchen. [Read more…] about Tammany’s McManus Club: The Final Decades

Native Americans in Early American Cities

November 3, 2021 by Liz Covart Leave a Comment

Have you ever considered early American cities as places where Native Americans lived, worked, and visited?

Native Americans often visited early American cities and port towns, especially the towns and cities that dotted the Atlantic seaboard of British North America.

In this episode of Ben Franklin’s World: A Podcast About Early American History, Colin Calloway, an award-winning historian and a Professor History and Native American Studies at Dartmouth College, joins us to investigate Native American experiences in early American cities with details from his book, The Chiefs Now In This City: Indians and the Urban Frontier in Early America (Oxford University Press, 2021). [Read more…] about Native Americans in Early American Cities

The Theatre District & Hell’s Kitchen Revival

October 31, 2021 by James S. Kaplan Leave a Comment

With the recent reopening of Broadway and the Theatre District in the city of New York, which is claimed to be a $1.8 billion industry, it’s appropriate to remember James R. McManus’s role in the efforts to bring Broadway and the adjacent Hell’s Kitchen district to what it is today.

Around 1972 economic and social conditions in Hell’s Kitchen and the rest of the city of New York were beginning to deteriorate. At the time that Jim’s father and great grand uncle had been the District Leaders, living conditions in the once notorious slum had improved for most residents.

This was partially because of improvements in the city’s manufacturing economy during the two world wars, and because of the New Deal social welfare policies pioneered by Al Smith and Frances Perkins. [Read more…] about The Theatre District & Hell’s Kitchen Revival

Tammany’s Last Stand: The McManus Club & The McGovern Campaign

October 28, 2021 by James S. Kaplan 1 Comment

James R. McManus was born in Hell’s Kitchen in 1936 and recently died in 2019. For 54 years (from 1962 to 2016) he was the Democratic Party District Leader from the Hell’s Kitchen area. This was a position that his father Eugene E. McManus had held for 20 years before him.

Previously Eugene McManus’s great grand uncle, Thomas J. McManus, had held the position, since the formation of the McManus Democratic Club in 1892, when he defeated the prior District Leader George Washington Plunkitt, author of Plunkitt of Tammany Hall: A Series of Very Plain Talks on Very Practical Politics (1905). [Read more…] about Tammany’s Last Stand: The McManus Club & The McGovern Campaign