The Deuce Times Two

By Jeffrey Escoffier

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” The famous opening line of Dickens’ Tale of Two Cities certainly seems like an appropriate way sum up 1970s New York, but I cite it also because the novel itself comes up in The Deuce’s first season as a book that launches a young prostitute on the road to reading and going back to school. Objectively life in New York City during the 1970s and early 80s was pretty bad — high crime rates, rampant homelessness, loose trash everywhere, whole neighborhoods of abandoned buildings crumbling and burning — yet it was an incredibly creative time as well: in music, art, performance, theater and sexuality. This was brought home to me recently when a 70-year-old retired professor of history said to me: “I know everything was so terrible in that period, but it was also incredibly exciting.”

Arts & Culture, Crime & Policing, Gender & Sexuality, Manhattan, Urban Decline & Fiscal CrisisGuest UserFebruary 19, 2019Comment

Ninth Street Women

Reviewed by Marjorie Heins

Mary Gabriel's group biography of five leading women artists in the Abstract Expressionist movement — Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler — weighs in at 722 pages (892 if you count endnotes and bibliography), yet leaves the reader (or at least, this reader) hungry for what is left out. Gabriel spends almost as much time recycling well-known stories about the men these five "Ab Ex" stars married, bedded, or hung out with, as it does on the women themselves. In the process, it pays scant attention to dozens of other female artists of the time.

Arts & Culture, Gender & Sexuality, Postwar New York, ReviewsGuest UserDecember 6, 2018Comment

The Life of Elizabeth Seton: An Interview With Catherine O'Donnell

Today on the blog, editor Katie Uva sits down with Catherine O'Donnell, author of Elizabeth Seton: American Saint, to discuss how New York City shaped Seton's life and faith.

Early Republic, Gender & Sexuality, Interviews, Manhattan, ReligionGuest UserNovember 13, 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

The Case of Mrs. Brinsmade and Civil War New York

By Wyatt Evans

In October 1862, the New York City Metropolitan Police held Mrs. Isabella Brinsmade for over a month without charge in the precinct house on West 47th Street. The twenty-year old Louisiana native had arrived in New York that August, sent by her merchant father who thought she would be safer there than in Union-occupied New Orleans. Her husband was away fighting in the Confederate Army, and she does not appear to have maintained any special affection for him. By all accounts Mrs. Brinsmade was intelligent, high-spirited, very attractive, and... liked to talk.

Antebellum & Civil War, Gender & Sexuality, PoliticsGuest UserJuly 19, 2018Comment

"Out of ashes comes beauty": An interview with Jeffrey C. Stewart

Today on Gotham, Peter-Christian Aigner speaks with Jeffrey C. Stewart about his new book, The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke, the most comprehensive biography on the "father of the Harlem Renaissance."

Arts & Culture, Gender & Sexuality, Interviews, Progressive Era, Gilded Age, Race & EthnicityGuest UserJuly 17, 2018Comment

Women after Suffrage: An Interview with Elisabeth Israels Perry

Today on the blog, editor Katie Uva sits down with Elisabeth Israels Perry to talk about her research process and her insights as she prepares her new book, After the Vote: Feminist Politics in La Guardia's New York (Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2019).

Gender & Sexuality, Interviews, Politics, Progressive Era, Great Depression & New DealGuest UserJuly 10, 2018Comment

Place and Community: An Interview with the NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project

Today on the blog, coordinating editor Katie Uva sits down with Amanda Davis of the NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project to learn about the distinct value of approaching LGBT history from a place-based perspective.

Gender & Sexuality, InterviewsGuest UserJune 26, 2018Comment

Amy Werbel's Lust on Trial: Censorship and the Rise of American Obscenity in the Age of Anthony Comstock

Reviewed by Marcela Micucci

Anthony Comstock was a household name in nineteenth-century America, so much so that his last name became synonymous with a movement and set of laws that sought to censor obscenity and eradicate vice. Historian Amy Werbel explores this anti-obscenity movement — and its champion — in her provocative and cutting-edge work, Lust on Trial: Censorship and the Rise of American Obscenity in the Age of Anthony Comstock (2018).

Gender & Sexuality, Gilded Age, Politics, Progressive Era, ReviewsGuest UserJune 19, 2018Anthony ComstockComment