Two-Hundred Fifty Years Of Organ-Building In the City: PART I — 18th-Century Imports and a Burgeoning 19th-Century Cottage Industry
By Bynum Petty
Thus, Henry Erben established himself as the greatest organ builder in the country, and with this instrument set new standards of construction and tonal quality by which all others were judged. Erben’s instruments simultaneously established New York City as the leading center of organ building, which it remained for the next nine decades.
The World of Dubrow's Cafeteria: An Interview with Marcia Bricker Halperin
By Robert W. Snyder
In the middle decades of the twentieth century in New York City, Dubrow’s cafeterias in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn and the garment district of Manhattan were places to get out of your apartment, have coffee with friends, or enjoy a hearty but affordable meal. They were grounded in the world of Jewish immigrants and their children, and they thrived in years when Flatbush and the Garment District each had a distinctly Jewish character. […] before Dubrow’s cafeterias were shuttered, Marcia Bricker Halperin captured their mood and their patrons in black and white photographs. These pictures, along with essays by the playwright Donald Margulies and the historian Deborah Dash Moore, constitute Marcia’s book Kibitz and Nosh: When We All Met at Dubrow’s Cafeteria, published by Cornell University Press and winner of a National Jewish Book Council prize for Food Writing and Cookbooks.
Opening Credits: Urban Redevelopment, Industrial Policy, and the Revitalization of Motion Picture and Television Production in New York City, 1973-1983
By Shannan Clark
With the city’s fortunes reaching their nadir in the mid-1970s, a disparate coalition of union activists, creative professionals, cultural advocates, public officials, media executives, and real estate developers began to coalesce to rebuild the motion picture and television production industry in New York. The participants in this process acted at a pivotal conjuncture, working at the dawn of an era of austerity, the duration of which they could not foresee, but with a consciousness that was still shaped by their formative experiences in an earlier era of abundance that was coming to an end.
Staged News: The Federal Theatre Project’s Living Newspapers in New York
Review By J.J. Butts
Jordana Cox’s excellent study Staged News: The Federal Theatre Project’s Living Newspapers in New York explores the history of the New York Living Newspapers (NYLN) unit, revealing its complex engagement with news and performance. The focus on journalism within the FTP separates her book from many others on New Deal writing and performance arts. Scholars highlighting the value of the FTP and Federal Writers’ Project (FWP) have often made a case for them around the artistic innovations or careers they nourished. However, journalists constituted one of the major categories of writing professionals seeking work relief, and journalism prepared them for the kinds of fact-based work that typified many of the FTP and FWP productions. In consequence, Cox’s focus on the way the newsroom shaped and was reshaped by the Living Newspapers refreshingly spotlights a crucial element of the story of New Deal culture.
Our Secret Society: Mollie Moon and the Glamour, Money, and Power behind the Civil Rights Movement
Review By Dominique Jean-Louis
Tanisha Ford describes Mollie Moon, and social power brokers like her, as “the glue that connected Black social clubs, church groups, sororities, fraternities, and professional organizations into a national network of contributors who gave of their time and money to keep the movement afloat,” forming a “Black Freedom financial grid [that] established the economic base that supported the frontline activism of Martin Luther King Jr., Fannie Lou Hamer, and John Lewis.” Mollie Moon was perhaps best known for her role as head of the National Urban League Guild, the social and volunteer auxiliary arm of the National Urban League, connecting a national grid of donors, activists, strategists and philanthropists
“Our Brooklyn Correspondent”: William J. Wilson Writes the City
By Britt Rusert
William J. Wilson may very well have been New York’s first Black culture critic. A self-stylized flâneur, cultural aesthete, and frequent contributor to Black periodicals throughout the 1840s and 50s, he wrote under the name “Ethiop” and as “Brooklyn Correspondent” for Frederick Douglass’ Paper. In these columns, he provided readers across the nation with on-the-ground reports of New York’s people, places, and happenings based on his frequent “ramblings” around the city. Wilson was particularly interested in the sights and sounds of Broadway as it emerged as a hub of culture, entertainment, and conspicuous consumption in the middle of the century. Wilson would make his own contribution to the city’s cultural scene in 1859 with his publication of the Afric-American Picture Gallery, an experimental text that imagines the first museum of Black Art in the United States
Born in New York City in 1815, she [Emma Stebbins] was one of the most famous and applauded American sculptors in 1863 when she got the commission for the fountain, the first woman to be commissioned for a public artwork in New York City. But after the inauguration she retired from artistic activity and was soon forgotten. When Emma died in 1882, the New York Times did not dedicate an obituary to her, or even a news item. Only in 2019 it published an article on her for its “Overlooked” series: a posthumous tribute, atoning for the newspaper’s silence on such a remarkable artist.
The Williamsburg Avant-Garde: Experimental Music and Sound on the Brooklyn Waterfront
Review By Tom Greenland
Professor Cisco Bradley’s book, The Williamsburg Avant-Garde: Experimental Music and Sound on the Brooklyn Waterfront, is product of a decade-long investigation into the creative music scene(s) hovering around Brooklyn’s Williamsburg neighborhood from 1988 to 2014, documenting its ostensible rise and fall. The narrative pits struggling DIY artists against the 2005 rezoning and consequent gentrification that brought economic sea changes on the area, a battle between art and capitalism, with capitalism the clear victor.
In the midst of the “Roaring ‘20’s,” the Café Lafayette, in the heart of Greenwich Village, was a world apart from Staten Island’s truck farms, ocean beaches, and sleepy villages — despite being just half an hour away by ferry. If anything connects the two places — and has memorialized them—it is the work of Dawn Powell.
The Slip: The New York City Street That Changed American Art Forever
Review By Miriam Grotte-Jacobs
Immortalized by writers like Herman Melville and Walt Whitman, the Slip dates back to the seventeenth century, a liminal site between land and water that maintained, as Peiffer argues, an altogether distinct sensibility; a place apart from the rest of Manhattan that offered artistic alternatives to its inhabitants with major consequences for the trajectory of modernism and postmodernism in the United States. A counternarrative to accounts of the New York art world that center around Cedar Tavern and Max’s Kansas City, Peiffer offers a close reading of a different New York and the artistic community it enabled.
