Streets in Play: The Playstreets Photography of Katrina Thomas
By Rebekah Burgess and Mariana Mogilevich
Photographs of recreation programs like this one were commissioned to offer visual proof that, after four summers of nation-wide protest and violence, starting in Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant in 1964, the city was compensating for a long-term lack of investment in low-income, racially segregated neighborhoods…. A few of Thomas’ images were utilized for official purposes, reproduced in pamphlets to attract or to thank program sponsors, but her exceptional eye transcended the municipal task. Her lens recorded the city's sponsored activities as well as the more candid action at the edge of the frame. These captivating, impromptu images provide a rare perspective on a distressed urban landscape, privileging a child’s-eye view of the possibilities for play and delight.
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A Seat at the Table: LGBTQ Representation in New York Politics, Exhibit at LaGuardia and Wagner Archives
Reviewed by Danica Stompor
The beating heart of Gourjon-Bieltvedt and Petrus’s exhibit is turning these testimonies into a fervent call to young people for optimism and for action…It has been far from a linear path, but for many people my age and younger, the past decades have featured an enormous increase in visibility and significant legal wins for queer people, particularly in New York. A Seat at the Table inserts us into the lives and tactics of the city’s elected officials who made these gains possible while resisting the attitude that progress is inevitable…A Seat at the Table is attuned to the small moments that transform residents into leaders.
Read MoreAll the Queens Houses: An Architectural Portrait of New York’s Largest and Most Diverse Borough
Reviewed by Katie Uva
In a sense, emphasizing the vernacular architecture of New York City as quintessential to its character is the project undertaken by Rafael Herrin-Ferri in All the Queens Houses: An Architectural Portrait of New York’s Largest and Most Diverse Borough. The book is an outgrowth of his Instagram, which since 2018 has cataloged more than 600 domiciles throughout different parts of Queens and attempted to describe their incredible eclecticism and flamboyance. The book features a little over 200 houses, photographed on uniformly cloudy days and from a standard angle across the street, usually incorporating neighboring houses to highlight contrasts between houses on a single block.
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Site and Sounds: International Caribbean Center African Diaspora Institute
By Tyesha Maddox
In today’s episode of Sites and Sounds, Tyesha Maddox talks about the International Caribbean Center African Diaspora Institute.
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Site and Sounds: TWA Terminal, JFK International Airport
By Nicholas D. Bloom
This year marks the fourth season of Sites and Sounds, a podcast series by the Gotham Center for Open House New York’s annual OHNY Weekend. All this week Gotham will bring you new episodes of this award-winning podcast. Check out more about OHNY Weekend, happening October 16-17. In today’s episode of Sites and Sounds, Nicholas D. Bloom talks about the TWA Terminal at JFK International Airport.
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The Show that Saved the Amphitheatre
By Daniela Sheinin
On a summer evening in June 1945, 200 performers took to the aquatic stage at the former New York State Pavilion at Flushing Meadow Park. Spread throughout the 8,500 seats at the northern tip of Meadow Lake, spectators watched swimmers and a choreographed “water ballet” fill the pool, while divers sprung from the diving towers at each end.
Read MoreNew York’s Memory Palace: An Interview with Blagovesta Momchedjikova
Interviewed by Katie Uva
The Panorama of the City of New York is an enormous scale model of all five New York City boroughs. It has 895,000 structures in the scale of 1:1200 (1 inch = 100 feet, making the Empire State Building only 15 inches tall on the model) and stretches over 9,335 square feet in the Queens Museum. Commissioned for the New York World’s Fair of 1964/65 by the infamous city planner Robert Moses, the Panorama took one hundred people three years to build from geological and survey maps, and aerial photographs. It was created in 273 sections offsite under the supervision of Ray Lester, a long-time model maker for Moses, and his company Lester Associates. The Panorama was installed in 1964 in the same space it occupies today, in what was then the New York City Pavilion and is now the Queens Museum. There, fairgoers experienced the miniature metropolis as a short helicopter ride with a pre-recorded narration.
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Schlep in the City: Forest Hills
By Frampton Tolbert
Queens is a borough of enclaves, each distinct. While the borough was formed in 1897, development did not begin in earnest until the 1920s, when the population doubled to more than one million people.[1] For this increase in population, buildings were needed for people to live, work, go to school, and worship—and some of which were defining examples of early modern design. While people may think it was Manhattan where this architecture was focused, Queens definitely exemplifies this as well.
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When Long Island City Was the Next Big Thing
By Ilana Teitel
For about a hundred days this winter, Long Island City was in the spotlight as a neighborhood about to be transformed. Amazon was coming, the national media was running articles about the 7 train, and brokers were selling condos via text messages. The word was out about this patch of western Queens and its waterfront views, central location, cultural diversity, and overtaxed infrastructure.
And then, on Valentine’s Day, it was over. Amazon pulled out and locals began to debate whether that much change would have been good or bad for LIC. But, this wasn’t the first time that Long Island City was the neighborhood that almost, maybe, soon, was about to take off. Here’s a look at three other times that LIC was briefly New York’s Next Big Thing.