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Posts in Transportation
Philip Mark Plotch and Jen Nelles, Mobilizing the Metropolis: How the Port Authority Built New York

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.

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Placemaker and Displacer: How Transit Shaped New York

Placemaker and Displacer: How Transit Shaped New York

By Polly Desjarlais

Before 1950, a vibrant multi-ethnic, residential neighborhood known as Little Syria existed at the very bottom of Manhattan. A concentration of immigrants from Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Palestine (countries collectively known then as Greater Syria) settled on Lower Washington Street beginning in the 1880s… As in the case of Chinatown, the transit connections between Little Syria and Brooklyn became instrumental in the community’s transplantation and survival… nearly the whole neighborhood was razed in the 1940s to make way for the construction of the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel (Hugh L. Carey Tunnel). . . In the case of Little Syria, the city’s transportation demands both displaced people and provided a means of resettlement in other parts of the city.

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Dutch-American Stories: The Tale of the White Horse: The First Slave Trading Voyage to New Netherland

Dutch-American Stories: The Tale of the White Horse: The First Slave Trading Voyage to New Netherland

By Dennis J. Maika

The first direct shipment of enslaved Africans arrived in New Amsterdam in 1655. The voyage of the White Horse came in the wake of significant changes in the Dutch Atlantic. In this blog, American historian Dennis Maika outlines how family and business connections shaped the development of a slave-trading center in Manhattan.

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“Strike for the Prince of Orange!”: La Garce and the Vicarious Privateers of New Amsterdam

“Strike for the Prince of Orange!”: La Garce and the Vicarious Privateers of New Amsterdam

By Julie van den Hout

During the mid-1640s, Manhattan played host to the Dutch privateer Willem Albertsen Blauvelt, with his frigate, La Garce (The Wench).[1] From New Amsterdam, New Netherland Director Willem Kieft and his council granted a commission to Captain Blauvelt to intercept Iberian ships in the Caribbean, as “the enemies of the High and Mighty Lords of the States General of the United Netherlands.”[2] Blauvelt made at least three privateering voyages from New Amsterdam to the Caribbean with La Garce and captured at least seven Spanish ships as “prizes.” With each voyage, more and more local investors signed on to help finance the expeditions in return for a fairly unique commodity — a share in a Spanish prize ship and its cargo.

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Crisis, Disease, Shortage, and Strike: Shipbuilding on Staten Island in World War I

Crisis, Disease, Shortage, and Strike: Shipbuilding on Staten Island in World War I

By Faith D’Alessandro

On April 6th 1917 the United States officially joined the First World War. The casus belli was the sinking of three US ships by German U-boats on March 18th. However, the U-boat issue and its devastating consequences had been under way for far longer, and would fuel a shipping crisis throughout the remainder of the war. In February 1917 U-boats had sunk almost 540,000 gross tons of shipping, and in March another 600,000, creating an enormous need to increase merchant ship construction. The urgency of mobilization and defense affected ship manufacturing centers across the country, including the huge shipbuilding industry in New York Harbor, which was centered around three major areas: Greenpoint, Brooklyn, including the Brooklyn Navy Yard; the Camden-Bayonne area of New Jersey; and the North Shore of Staten Island.

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Site and Sounds: TWA Terminal, JFK International Airport

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 Great Epizootic of 1872: Pandemics, Animals, and Modernity in 19th-Century New York City

The Great Epizootic of 1872: Pandemics, Animals, and Modernity in 19th-Century New York City

By Oliver Lazarus

Monday, October 21st, 1872, began like many mid-fall days in New York — overcast and muggy with spitting rain, and a high of sixty-six degrees. Fall was supposed to mark the height of business in the city, when commerce and trade peaked. But as the week of October 21st dragged on, this seemingly unstoppable progress came to a halt. The cause of this stoppage was an attack on what is often dismissed as a vestige of that pre-modern city, but what was arguably New York’s most important energy supply: horsepower.

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