In the 1820s, bootblack and cartman Andrew Williams bought land in the primarily African American community of Seneca Village, which once thrived on land that is now part of Central Park, from West 83rd Street to West 89th Street. [Read more…] about Seneca Village: Razed To Build Central Park
Urban History
New Book on Immigrant Builders and Architects in New York
Zachary J. Violette’s new book The Decorated Tenement: How Immigrant Builders and Architects Transformed the Slum in the Gilded Age (University of Minnesota Press, 2019) reexamines urban America’s tenement buildings born of the housing reform movement embraced by the American-born elite in the late nineteenth century, centering on the immigrant neighborhoods of New York and Boston.
Violette focuses on what he calls the “decorated tenement,” a wave of new buildings constructed by immigrant builders and architects who remade the slum landscapes of the Lower East Side of Manhattan and the North and West Ends of Boston in the late nineteenth century. [Read more…] about New Book on Immigrant Builders and Architects in New York
Rethinking the NYC Street Grid Event at CUNY
The Gotham Center for New York City History has announced Rethinking the Grid, a program looking at the NYC street grid, has been set for Monday, May 6th, at 6:30 pm, in the The Graduate Center of CUNY, Skylight Room (9th Floor).
Although the Manhattan grid plan was conceived over two centuries ago, its impacts on the city and the mystery surrounding its creation continue to foster controversy and debate. Four scholars will challenge some of the widely-held myths and misconceptions about it. [Read more…] about Rethinking the NYC Street Grid Event at CUNY
Lecture on Albany’s Brunner-Lay Plan of 1914
The Albany Institute of History & Art is set to host a lecture on the Brunner-Lay Plan of 1914 with professor emeritus John Pipkin.
The lecture explores the book Studies for Albany, released in 1914, which contains the observations and improvements proposed by architect Arnold Brunner and landscape architect Charles Downing Lay for the city of Albany, part of the City Beautiful movement.
[Read more…] about Lecture on Albany’s Brunner-Lay Plan of 1914
Reframing Urban Renewal in Newburgh Sunday
A discussion about urban renewal in the Hudson Valley and exploring creative ways communities mobilize around contested landscapes has been set for Sunday, April 7th, from 3 to 5 pm, at the Fullerton Center, 297 Grand Street, Newburgh. [Read more…] about Reframing Urban Renewal in Newburgh Sunday
Rochester’s Near Northside and Neighborhood Change
Neighborhoods change. Ours was changing when my single parent mom managed to buy a modest house for cash in Rochester’s Near Northside in 1952. My mom was an immigrant from Toronto whose own mother had emigrated from England.
She had grown up in this working-class immigrant neighborhood somewhat northeast of downtown. In 1937, she graduated from Vocational High, located in the Bausch and Lomb plant. In 1952 she was newly divorced and had been hired to work on an assembly line – she could walk to work. [Read more…] about Rochester’s Near Northside and Neighborhood Change
Colonial New York City and Its Culture
In this episode of the Ben Franklin’s World podcast, Joyce Goodfriend, a professor of history at the University of Denver and author of Who Should Rule at Home? Confronting the Elite in British New York City (Cornell University Press, 2017), helps us investigate how early New Yorkers established and negotiated the culture of their city between 1664 and 1776. You can listen to the podcast here: www.benfranklinsworld.com/185
1930s Gotham Rising: New York Skyscrapers
The skyscraper can trace its ancestry back many years, millennia in fact, before the existence of New York City. The book of Genesis tells the story of Babel, the Babylonian city in which Noah’s descendants tried to erect the mythological tower: ‘Come, let us build for ourselves a city, and a tower whose top will reach into Heaven.’ For their presumption the people were punished: their words were made incomprehensible to one another. This aetiological tale of the diversity of speech could easily be applied to New York, home to the speakers of some 800 languages, a city in which cab drivers routinely set their satnavs to Russian, Bengali or Serbo-Croatian. [Read more…] about 1930s Gotham Rising: New York Skyscrapers
A Tale of Two Bostons in the 17th Century
The City Upon a Hill. The Athens of America. The Cradle of Liberty.
Boston has many names because it has played important roles in the history of North America. But how did Boston, or “The Hub,” come to be?
Why did the Puritans who sailed from England in 1630, choose to settle in Massachusetts Bay on the Shawmut Peninsula?
What were their early days like?
In this episode of the Ben Franklin’s World podcast, we explore answers to those questions by exploring the history of the two Bostons—Boston, England & Boston, New England— during the 17th century with Rose Doherty, President of the Partnership of Historic Bostons. You can listen to the podcast here: www.benfranklinsworld.com/095
[Read more…] about A Tale of Two Bostons in the 17th Century
‘No One Helped’: The Myth of Urban Apathy
Marcia M. Gallo takes a look at one of America’s most infamous crime stories, in No One Helped (2015 Cornell University). This new book examines the 1964 rape and murder of Catherine “Kitty” Genovese, in a middle-class neighborhood of Queens.
Front-page reports in the New York Times incorrectly identified thirty-eight indifferent witnesses to the crime, fueling fears of apathy and urban decay. Genovese’s life, including her lesbian relationship, was also obscured in media accounts of the crime.
Fifty years later, the story of Kitty Genovese continues to circulate in popular culture. Although it is now known that there were far fewer witnesses to the crime than was reported in 1964, the moral of the story continues to be urban apathy. No One Helped traces the Genovese story’s development and resilience while challenging the myth it created. [Read more…] about ‘No One Helped’: The Myth of Urban Apathy