Working Class Utopias": A History of Cooperative Housing in New York City and Freedomland: Co-op City and the Story of New York
Reviewed by Nicholas Dagen Bloom
To understand why local cooperatives rank so low in progressive housing discourse, it’s worth reading either of the excellent books under review. Annemarie Sammartino’s Freedomland provides a socially informed history of Co-op City, chronicling its triumphs and travails, with particular attention to resident experiences and long-term outcomes. Legendary urban history Robert M. Fogelson’s Working-Class Utopias offers readers a comprehensive account of the New York cooperative movement, giving special attention to the spectacular collapse of Co-op City’s finances during the 1975-76 rent strike. Both books capture the complexity, and nearly insuperable challenges, faced by cooperative sponsors, state officials, and residents in sustaining communal housing.
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Saving the Bronx River: An Excerpt From South Bronx Rising: The Rise, Fall, and Resurrection of An American City
By Jill Jonnes
Until the 21st century, few residents of New York City, much less the South Bronx, even knew there was a Bronx River, the City’s only river. And why would anyone know? For more than a century, the banks and flowing waters of the lower Bronx River had long been largely fenced-off and out of sight behind an almost-solid wall of riverfront factories, gargantuan scrap metal yards, sprawling warehouses, and parking lots (including, starting in 1967, the massive Hunts Point wholesale food market). The lower five miles of the twenty-three mile river below the New York Botanic Garden and Bronx Zoo served as an industrial dump and sewer, its few access points blocked by gigantic mounds of submerged cars, worn-out tires, less identifiable garbage, and rusting junk…
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Site and Sounds: New York Botanical Garden
By Jane Garmey
In today’s episode of Sites and Sounds, Jane Garmey talks about the New York Botanical Garden.
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Hart Island and the Paradox of Redemption
By Sally Raudon
In the twelve months before January 2021, 2,225 people were buried on Hart Island, New York City’s public burial ground. At a time when the Island’s operations are undergoing the most significant organizational changes in its modern history, that’s the highest number of such burials recorded since the 1918-1920 influenza pandemic.
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“Little Pittsburgh”: Creating an Industrialized Landscape in Hunts Point
By Sam Hege
Since the 1950s, New York City has relied on the South Bronx to handle the vital and taxing components of its processing and distribution infrastructures. This strategy began with the decision to relocate the Terminal Market from downtown Manhattan to the Hunts Point peninsula, and has since been used to justify the siting of waste transfer stations, prisons, and industrial processing facilities. This consolidation of waste and congestion to the South Bronx supported the emergence of Manhattan as a tourist destination and financial capital, embodied by the redevelopment of the Manhattan market space as part of the World Trade Center project.
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Pets, Stowaways, Souvenirs, and Snakes
By Katherine McLeod
From 1899 to 1914, people around the world gave over 12,000 animals to the New York Zoological Park in the Bronx (almost 5,000 of them were snakes). Donations to the zoo fulfilled two purposes: they supplied the zoological park with more animals, and, perhaps more importantly, helped the zoo form a relationship with certain communities around them. This project is a focused look at a section of these animal donors, the people of New York City.
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Monuments of Colonial New York: Stuyvesant and Hudson
Douglas Hunter and Nicole Maskiell
Today’s installments in Gotham’s ongoing series on monuments in / about colonial NYC, takes us back to Nieuw Amsterdam. Douglas Hunter and Nicole Maskiell ask us to reconsider the memorials of two dominant figures of the Dutch period: Henry Hudson and Petrus Stuyvesant. Uniting their pieces is a call to think more about the men — and in Maskiell’s case, the women, too — who toiled under these leaders.
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Reassessing American “Ruin”
Reviewed by Pedro A. Regalado
During the 1970s and 1980s, the South Bronx was the epicenter of American “ruin.” In the popular imagination, flames engulfed acres of developed cityscape; poverty and violence mingled with the remains of abandoned buildings; and a crack epidemic degenerated entire neighborhoods.
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Parkchester: An Interview with Jeffrey S. Gurock
Interviewed by Katie Uva
Today on the blog, editor Katie Uva talks to Jeffrey Gurock about his recent book, Parkchester: A Bronx Tale of Race and Ethnicity. In it, Gurock combines his personal experience growing up in Parkchester with research into the history of this planned community in the Bronx, and offers an interpretation both of Parkchester’s uniqueness and what it reveals about the broader city.
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