Relics of the Underground: The Afterlife of Cultural Spaces

By Jeffrey Patrick Colgan & Jeffrey Escoffier

In early 1974, members of the punk band Television spotted a newly reopened yet unavoidably dingy lower Bowery bar on their way home from rehearsal. Returning soon after, they approached the owner Hilly Krystal and asked if he would host performances by bands that were playing a different kind of rock music. After an initial four-week residency by Television, CBGB & OMFUG (Country, Bluegrass, Blues & Other Music for Uplifting Gormandizers) continued to host countless bands and fostered the emerging punk and No-Wave music scenes of the 1970s and 1980s. Even after its role in any identifiable and burgeoning music scene came to an end in the 1990s, it still hosted performances until its ultimate demise in 2006 — its final sendoff facilitated by Blondie and Patti Smith. By 2008 the former venue was occupied by clothing designer John Varvatos, who kept some of the graffiti, stickers, and concert posters as accents to the calculated ‘subversiveness’ of the items on sale.

Arts & Culture, Manhattan, Reviews, Urban Decline & Fiscal CrisisGuest UserNovember 8, 2018Comment

The Rise of Billy Rose: An Interview with Mark Cohen

Today on Gotham, editor Katie Uva interviews Mark Cohen, author of Not Bad for Delancey Street: The Rise of Billy Rose about the legendary New York City showman and his legacy.

Arts & Culture, Interviews, Postwar New York, Race & Ethnicity, Religion, Great Depression & New DealGuest UserOctober 25, 2018Comment

The Metropolitan Section: City Life, Delivered

By Julia Guarneri

“I thought I knew every nook and angle of this village, but it seems your staff are ferreting out new and interesting bits every week.” In 1919, subscriber Charles Romm sent this letter to the New York Tribune, praising the paper’s new “In Our Town” section. The Tribune — like the World, the Times, the American, and many of the city’s other daily papers — had begun printing a special local section on Sundays. These metropolitan sections, as they were often called, did not print local news, exactly. They were not the places to look for accident reports or the latest in city politics. Instead, metropolitan sections gave readers glimpses of the everyday city. They brought the sights, accents, and clamor of the city into readers’ laps, to be enjoyed from a living room couch or a lunch counter. Newspapers’ metropolitan sections packaged up city life for quick, enjoyable consumption.

Arts & Culture, Gilded Age, Progressive EraGuest UserOctober 11, 2018Comment

Daisy Chanler, Father Sigourney Fay & F. Scott Fitzgerald

By Margaret A. Brucia

Arts & Culture, Progressive EraGuest UserOctober 3, 2018 Comments

Jerome Robbins' New York: An Interview with Julia Foulkes

Today on Gotham, editor Katie Uva sits down with Julia Foulkes, curator of Voice of My City: Jerome Robbins and New York, to talk about how the city shaped his life and art.

Arts & Culture, Interviews, Postwar New York, Great Depression & New DealGuest UserSeptember 27, 2018Comment

Days of Future Past: Dystopian Comics and the Privatized City

By Ryan Donovan Purcell

“The past: a New and uncertain world, a world of endless possibilities and infinite outcomes. Countless choices define our fate — each choice, each moment, a ripple in the river of time — Enough ripples and you change the tide, for the future is never truly set.” This is the lesson Dr. Xavier learns at the end of the Marvel film, X-Men: Days of Future Past(2014). It’s a science-fiction alternative history in which the X-Men send Logan (Wolverine) back to the year 1973 to change their fate. In order to prevent the sequence of events that leads to mutant annihilation Logan must break into the Pentagon, prevent a landmark arms deal at the Paris Peace Accords, and save Richard Nixon from mutant radicals (as one might expect). The comic on which the film was based, however, is a far different story.

Arts & Culture, Bronx, Politics, Urban Decline & Fiscal CrisisGuest UserSeptember 25, 2018Comment

Remembrance of Things Not Yet Past: A Report from “Difficult Histories / Public Spaces: The Challenge of Monuments in NYC and the Nation”

By Arinn Amer

A year after white nationalists descended on Charlottesville, Virginia in a deadly riot they framed as a protest against the planned removal of a bronze rendering of Robert E. Lee from Emancipation Park, monuments loom large in our national consciousness. With new memorials and markers raising awareness of America’ dark history of racial terror and hundreds of Confederate flags and generals retreating from public view even as thousands more remain firmly entrenched, the incredible power of the stories we tell about the past in shared physical space has never been more apparent.

Arts & Culture, Contemporary Era, Gender & Sexuality, Politics, Race & EthnicityGuest UserSeptember 18, 2018Comment

Cracks in the Pre-Invented World: Disaster, Art and the Sublime in New York, 1970 to 1992.

By Jeffrey Patrick Colgan & Jeffrey Escoffier

When artist and writer David Wojnarowicz returned to New York City in 1979 from a lengthy stay with his sister in Paris, he used office equipment to print a large cutout of the face of poet Arthur Rimbaud, a cigarette to burn two narrow eye-holes, and a knife to carve out a gently sloping mouth. Long inspired by the French poet’s life and work, Wojnarowicz sought to impersonate the poet in order to stage his own coming-of-age among the city’s ruins and cultural underground. He used his friends as models and staged scenes that inserted the fragile, pale face of Rimbaud into the dirty confusion of 1970s New York.

Arts & Culture, Gender & Sexuality, Reviews, Urban Decline & Fiscal CrisisGuest UserAugust 22, 2018Comment

"People of the City": Children in the City

“People of the City”: Children in the City

By Robert A. Slayton

The Ashcan artists viewed the people of the city from a unique perspective. Unlike the elites, they did not consider these individuals their biological inferiors. Yet they also differed from the reformers, in that they rejected the notion that the people who lived in dense city neighborhoods were inherently subjects of pity. Instead, Henri, Sloan, Myers, and the others painted children and women and men, each from these individuals' own, unique perspective, rather than imposing a worldview on them. By so doing, in their paintings and drawings, they gave working-class individuals agency, showing how these people adapted to the world around them in a myriad of ways, ways that often enabled them to attain a measure of control over some parts of their lives.

Arts & Culture, Excerpts, Progressive EraGuest UserAugust 7, 2018Comment

"Vision From An Ashcan": A Radical Exploration of New Subjects

By Robert A. Slayton

The Ashcan school represented a challenge to its era. In a fundamental reinterpretation of art’s appropriate subject matter, it threw down a gauntlet, of canvas and paint, to the art world both of the right and of the left. It did not see the city through the narrow peephole of the elites, instead introducing new landscapes, new characters. But these perspectives were also different from what the reformers saw. This new approach painted the rest of the city, with beauty, endowing urban and working-class individuals of all ages and genders with agency and will. In so doing, the Ashcan artists created one of the great American art forms.

Arts & Culture, Excerpts, Progressive EraGuest UserAugust 2, 2018Comment