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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Henry Chalfant: Art vs. Transit, 1977-1987
Reviewed by Katie Uva
On October 30, 1975, The New York Daily News thudded onto curbs, newsstands, stoops, and doorsteps around the city trumpeting the (paraphrased, but nevertheless evocative) attitude of President Gerald Ford toward New York: “Drop Dead.” There was no question that New York was in trouble: rising crime, declining quality of life, mounting public debt, and arson all plagued the five boroughs.
Read MoreStokely Carmichael: The Boy Before Black Power
By Ethan Scott Barnett
In the 1960 edition of The Observatory, The Bronx High School of Science’s yearbook, the recently appointed principal Alexander Taffel pronounced to the graduating class a quote from Thomas Paine: “These are the times that try men’s souls.” Paine had recognized the approaching revolution in 1776; the class of 1960 anticipated a similar upheaval. Amongst a sea of young faces in the sports section are two boys - one Black and one white - energetically shaking hands and displaying cheeky smiles. The boys are surrounded by their male teammates and the female management crew. Sports editors Judy Shapiro and Joel Engelstein captioned the image, “Stokely Carmichael and Gene Dennis showed their masterly leadership in preventing the abasement of the opposing teams.” Upon a first and even a second glance this image simply depicts the camaraderie that comes along with teenage boys and secondary school soccer games. However, the image pinpoints a pivotal moment in Stokely Carmichael’s political trajectory. The experiences that led up to this moment concretized Carmichael’s dedication to leftist organizing and a lifelong career in the Black Freedom Struggle.
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Inclusive Archiving, Public Art, and Representation at the Hall of Fame for Great Americans
By Cynthia Tobar
The Hall of Fame for Great Americans, created in 1900, was the first monument of its kind that sought the active involvement of Americans in nominating their favorite "Great Americans.” The Hall was conceived of by Dr. Henry Mitchell MacCracken, Chancellor of New York University (NYU), who envisioned a democratic election process for selecting these greats modeled after presidential elections. Nominations came to the election center and after a person received a certain number of votes, an NYU Senate of 100 voters made the final choice. The Senate was composed of American leaders: past American presidents, presidents of colleges, senators, and men of renown in various fields. Problems soon arose, however, when this initial process yielded 29 nominees, all male. The lack of women created a scandal and in the next election eight women were elected (currently, there are 11 women in the Hall). However, the contentious nomination of Robert E. Lee remained.
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Urban Ornithology: 150 Years of Birds in New York City
Reviewed by Leslie Day
I lived on a boat on the Hudson River in Manhattan from 1975 to 2011 and it was then that I became an avid birder. Living on the Hudson I watched canvasback ducks with their beautiful red heads arrive each winter in huge numbers in the 1980’s. And I observed them as their numbers diminished greatly after the 1990’s. When I first moved to the river there were many laughing gulls that migrated to the city each April. My father’s birthday was April 12th, around the time they’d show up. The happy sound of their calls would bring me running outside to my deck to look at them and hear the joyous cries — my harbinger of the beautiful warm months to come. By the time I moved away in 2011, there were just a few arriving each spring.
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Carol Lamberg's Neighborhood Success Stories: Creating and Sustaining Affordable Housing in New York
Reviewed by Nicholas Dagen Bloom
Building and operating subsidized housing in New York City is a tough business. Carol Lamberg, a master at the trade, offers us a candid and nuanced account of the perils and promise of this enterprise in her readable autobiographical account, Neighborhood Success Stories. Lamberg, who served for decades as the Executive Director of the Settlement Housing Fund, helped build the organization into one of the most respected affordable developers and managers in the city, with outstanding multi-family properties in the Bronx and Lower East Side.
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.
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The Gould Memorial Library: A Forgotten Stanford White Gem in the Bronx
By Elizabeth Macaulay-Lewis
The Gould Memorial Library in the Bronx may be the most famous building in New York City that you’ve never heard of. It recently made an appearance in The Greatest Showman, the 2018 Hugh Jackman musical about the life of P. T. Barnum, as the setting for a glorious party, but unless you know what you’re looking at, you’d think it was an elaborate Hollywood stage set—not a library.
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