“The Chance Begins to Assume a Fair Prospect”: Marc Brunel and the Invention of the Steamboat — Part II
By Mark Kleinman
New York was still a very small city at that time. Its population doubled between 1790 and 1800, but was still only 60,000 at that date compared with 600,000 in Paris and 1 million in London. Brunel’s location first in Murray Street, then in George Street, placed him close to, among others, Nicholas Roosevelt, Alexander Hamilton and probably Robert Livingston’s town address. More generally, he was living and working in New York City just at the point when the still nascent city was beginning its rapid trajectory from local backwater to global metropolis.
Jailed for Freedom: Afro-Spanish Sailors and Legal Resistance in Eighteenth-Century New York
By Beatriz Carolina Peña
The experiences of Fiallo and De la Torre reveal how Spanish American sailors captured through privateering were reclassified as “prize negroes,” sold, and forced to seek freedom within a legal system structured to uphold slavery. After arriving in New York from London as attorney general in November 1752, Kempe began bringing liberty claims grounded in the Law of Nations before the governor and council. These cases illuminate both the possibilities and the limits of law in a colonial society deeply committed to racialized slavery. Though they came from different Spanish colonies and reached New York about a year apart, their paths converged on July 7, 1753, when both were placed in jail for the protection of their freedom.
“The Chance Begins to Assume a Fair Prospect”: Marc Brunel and the Invention of the Steamboat — Part I
By Mark Kleinman
The Colonel and the Chancellor now had the monopoly, the ideas and the enthusiasm. What they lacked, however, was an actual working steam engine. Here they had two options: they could import a suitable steam engine from England, preferably from the world-leading workshop of Matthew Boulton and James Watt in Soho, Birmingham. Or, they could build their own steam engine in the primitive engineering landscape of 1790s America, with a dearth of both suitable machinery and skilled engineers.
Rural County, Urban Borough is a history with a strong sense of place. Covering the the history of Queens from European settlement to the present, Kroessler charts centuries of change in the landscape. He shows how politics, industry, transportation, government and real estate interests all shaped the borough. Linking Queens to New York City and the wider world, Kroessler illuminates important elements of American metropolitan history.
Illustrating Your Ride: Fred Cooper and The Subway Sun
By Es-pranza Humphrey
When the Interborough Rapid Transit Company opened to the public in 1904, there was an active effort to beautify the underground stations and its metal vessels in order to ease the anxieties of riders who were hesitant to travel throughout the unknown. The initiative to beautify included the presence of a variety of posters presenting transportation etiquette and advertising products and services as a way to capitalize on the fact that passengers spent an average of fifteen minutes in a train car during their commute. Among the advertisements for Viceroy Cork Tipped Cigarettes, Rheingold Lager Beer, and Heinz Cream of Tomato Soup, were a series of in-car posters that helped riders navigate the subway to visit some of New York City’s most scenic wonders. This series was called The Subway Sun.
The Era Was Lost: The Rise and Fall of New York City’s Rank and File Rebels
Review By Benjamin Serby
Dyer laments that “a politically self-aware working class” no longer exists anywhere in the United States, including New York City. It would seem that until something profoundly shifts in our political culture, workers will simply defend what they already have rather than push for more. With longstanding institutional, legal, and economic arrangements in nothing short of crisis, perhaps this is the moment when the wheel of history — stalled fifty years ago — finally begins to turn once more.
African Americans and Real Estate in Queens in the 1920s
By Lawrence Samuel
In 1922, a milestone was reached when the reportedly last remaining large tract of farmland was divided into 1,500 lots that were then placed on the market as Forest Hills West. “Farm after farm, large as well as small, has been taken in the revolutionary movement that has changed Queens from New York’s vegetable garden to a great expanse of small homes, flats, factories, and building sites,” the New York Herald Tribune noted. Anticipating the arrival (and departure) of commuters, the LIRR was starting train service to Forest Hills West. Not far away, plans were in the works to widen Queens Boulevard to two hundred feet, as merchants and tradesmen believed it was the avenue best suited for retail business in the borough.
Going to Market: Wallabout Market and the Vanished Landscapes of Food Distribution in New York City
By Malka Simon
Wallabout Market no longer exists. Its facilities were bulldozed by the Navy Yard in 1941 to make more space for wartime production, and Brooklyn’s wholesale operations moved to the Terminal Market in Canarsie. But Wallabout’s rise and fall still has much to teach us about the rhythms of the city and the urban patterns that unfold in response to even the most ephemeral of commodities.
Mobilizing the Metropolis closely charts the evolution of the Port Authority as it went from improving rail freight around New York Harbor to building bridges and managing real estate. At the same time, the book explores the evolution of the authority’s internal culture in the face of actions by elected officials in New York and New Jersey that have reduced the agency’s autonomy and affected its operations. Mobilizing the Metropolis also extracts from the history of the Port Authority useful lessons about how organizations charged with solving governmental problems can win support and engage opposition.
Mobilizing the Metropolis: How the Port Authority Built New York
Review by Elizabeth M. Marcello and Gail Radford
The New York City metropolitan area boasts an impressive infrastructural network that moves people, trains, motor vehicles, freight, ships, and airplanes. At the center of this network is the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the subject of Philip Mark Plotch and Jen Nelles’s Mobilizing the Metropolis, which they offer as a “reflective history” of this particular agency, but also as a series of “lessons” for other agencies around the country built on the public authority model.
