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Gotham: A Blog for Scholars of New York City History

 
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Operation Sail 1976: How New York City Came Together in a Time of Crisis

Operation Sail 1976: How New York City Came Together in a Time of Crisis

By Angelina Lambros

The On July 4, 1976, New York City celebrated the Bicentennial of American independence with a parade of ships that began at the Verrazano Narrows Bridge and moved up the Hudson River. Officially titled “Operation Sail,” more than 200 ships gathered for the event. With more than six million spectators, it became the largest crowd in New York City’s history. For America's largest city where people regularly turned out for special events, Operation Sail proved truly exceptional.

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Alyssa Lopez, Reel Freedom: Black Film Culture in Early Twentieth Century New York City

Reel Freedom: Black Film Culture in Early Twentieth Century New York City

Review By Deena Ecker

Reel Freedom challenges the reader to think beyond the Harlem Renaissance and place film, an important piece of leisure in the 1920s and ‘30s, at the center of the Black cultural and intellectual transformation in New York and the nation. While much of the book focuses on the theaters in Harlem, Lopez reminds us that in the first decade of the 20th century, there were pockets of Black life all over the city. The ways that Black moviegoers, critics, projectionists, and producers engaged with film demonstrated a claim to physical, intellectual, and cultural space in early-twentieth-century New York. In real and significant ways, these claims to space were part of the larger Black struggle for equality.

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Finch College: Reminiscences on a Bygone School

Finch College: Reminiscences on a Bygone School

By Clifford J. Dudley

The 1960s brought sweeping changes throughout America, and this included changes to women’s education. The Civil Rights Movement provoked a reassessment of the role of women in society. Many universities were reaching the conclusion that they could not, and should not, remain the restricted domains of male education. In 1963, Fordham began admitting women, as did Yale in 1969. While providing greater opportunities for women, these developments also presented new challenges for those colleges catering solely to female students. They now had to meet an ever-increasing operational cost and the loss of their monopoly on female applicants. Prospective students now looked at coeducational schools like nearby NYU or Sarah Lawrence College. Finch College was also negatively impacted through media coverage. Tales of Finch girls like Grace Slick or Jane Holzer, who joined anti-establishment rock bands or became muses for revolutionary artists like Andy Warhol, turned a nice profit for the papers, but did not enhance the school’s standing. News articles about the school oft focused on high tuition and “fluffy” academics. When Hunter College and Marymount Manhattan College became coeducational, Finch found itself competing with Barnard for the women-only market in the city.

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Illustrating Your Ride: Fred Cooper and The Subway Sun

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.

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Shirley Chisholm at 100: An Interview with Zinga Fraser and Sarah Seidman

Shirley Chisholm at 100: An Interview with Zinga Fraser and Sarah Seidman

Interviewed By Dominique Jean-Louis

“I think what connects Chisholm to this political moment is how 1972 was also a time of political turmoil and conflict between a true representative democracy and political autocracy in the form of the Nixon administration. Today, Chisholm would be in the fight for our nation to not fall prey to political leadership that does not believe they are accountable to the Constitution or the American people.”

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The Secret Man Behind the World’s Most Visible Building

The Secret Man Behind the World’s Most Visible Building

By Jason M. Barr and Ann Berman

And yet almost all the stories about the origins of this New York landmark [the Empire State Building], online and in print, are inaccurate. They all omit the pivotal, behind-the-scenes role played by Louis Graveraet Kaufman (LGK) (1870-1942), the secret schemer, without whom the Empire State Building would not have been built.  LGK’s hidden machinations irrevocably changed Gotham — and world — history, yet few today know his name.

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Andrew Holter: Going Around

Andrew Holter: Going Around

Interviewed by Rob Snyder

From 1949 until his death in 1997, Murray Kempton was a distinct presence in New York City journalism. Peddling around town on a three-speed bicycle wearing a three-piece suit, he wrote about everything from politics to jazz to the Mafia. His writing was eloquent, his perspective unique, and his moral judgements driven by a profound sympathy for losers, dissenters and underdogs. […] Going Around: Selected Journalism / Murray Kempton (Seven Stories Press, 2025), edited by Andrew Holter, brings Kempton’s work to old admirers and a new generation of readers.

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Glenn Dyer, The Era Was Lost: The Rise and Fall of New York City’s Rank and File Rebels

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.

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Sheila Gerami, The Hall of Fame for Great Americans: A Biography of Stanford White’s Forgotten Memorial

The Hall of Fame for Great Americans: A Biography of Stanford White’s Forgotten Memorial

Review By Paul Ranogajec

The Hall of Fame for Great Americans, a group memorial and patriotic monument on the campus of the Bronx Community College, is a rich site for interrogating a range of cultural and political questions about American society from the 1890s to the present. Sheila Gerami’s book brings the now obscure monument to the attention of art historians and others who might want to approach New York’s memorial landscape from new angles.

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Cultural Diversity, Ethnic Tensions, and Economic Marginality in an Early Bronx Settlement — Part 2

Cultural Diversity, Ethnic Tensions, and Economic Marginality in an Early Bronx Settlement — Part 2

By Marian Swerdlow

Only one church building from the time of the ancient Village still stands, the former Potts Memorial Church on Washington Avenue.  As for the “successor” buildings these congregations moved into after the dissolution of the Village, three of them — the former St. John’s German Evangelical Lutheran Church on Fulton Avenue, the First Congregational Church of Morrisania on Forest Avenue, and St. Paul’s Episcopal Church on Washington Avenue — still stand, although just outside the borders of the ancient Village. The latter two retain their  original congregations. Each of the three is a beautiful building in a very different style, and each well worth a visit.  The demolitions of the magnificent third St. Augustine’s church (1895 - 2013), and of the historic former Centenary Methodist Episcopal Church (2019), are part of the story of an area that has been one of the poorest in New York City for over half a century. 

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