At Play in Central Park’s Modern Landscapes: An Interview with Marie Warsh

Interviewed by Katie Uva

Today on the blog, Katie Uva talks to Marie Warsh, the Historian at the Central Park Conservancy and the author of the recently-published Central Park’s Adventure-Style Playgrounds: Renewal of a Midcentury Legacy. These playgrounds, which became popular in the 1960s and 1970s, demonstrate New York City’s effort to create dynamic, creative play spaces and also provide a window into the city’s history of public-private partnerships.

Interviews, Postwar New YorkGuest UserMay 14, 2020Comment

Engineering America: The Life and Times of John A. Roebling

Richard Haw, interviewed by Beth Harpaz

The beloved Brooklyn Bridge was one of the most daring feats of 19th Century engineering. The man who designed it was equally daring and a paradox of personality: An oddball who engineered a structure that was a marvel of stability at a time when suspension bridges routinely fell down. Richard Haw, a professor in the Interdisciplinary Studies Program at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, has written two previous books about the Brooklyn Bridge. The focus of his latest – after 13 years of research – is the man behind the bridge. Engineering America: The Life and Times of John A. Roebling tells one of the most fascinating American immigrant stories. Haw talks about it with Beth Harpaz, editor of CUNY SUM.

Interviews, Podcasts, Brooklyn, Built EnvironmentGuest UserMay 1, 2020Comment

Repowering Cities: An Interview with Sara Hughes

Interviewed by Katie Uva

Today on the blog, Katie Uva speaks to Sara Hughes about her recent book, Repowering Cities: Governing Climate Change Mitigation in New York, Los Angeles, and Toronto. The book examines how each of these cities have set climate change mitigation goals and how each city’s ability to achieve those goals has evolved over the past decade.

Interviews, Urban PlanningGuest UserApril 28, 2020Comment

The Unstoppable Irish: Songs and Integration of the New York Irish, 1783-1883

Interview by Elizabeth Stack

Today on the blog, Gotham editor Elizabeth Stack speaks with Dan Milner about his recent book, The Unstoppable Irish: Songs and Integration of the New York Irish, 1783-1883 and the importance of music to the Irish people both in Ireland and New York.

The Unstoppable Irish follows the changing fortunes of New York's Irish Catholics, commencing with the evacuation of British military forces in late 1783 and concluding one hundred years later with the completion of the initial term of the city's first Catholic mayor. During that century, Hibernians first coalesced and then rose in uneven progression from being a variously dismissed, despised, and feared foreign group to ultimately receiving de facto acceptance as constituent members of the city's population. Dan Milner presents evidence that the Catholic Irish of New York gradually integrated (came into common and equal membership) into the city populace rather than assimilated (adopted the culture of a larger host group). Assimilation had always been an option for Catholics, even in Ireland. In order to fit in, they needed only to adopt mainstream Anglo-Protestant identity. But the same virile strain within the Hibernian psyche that had overwhelmingly rejected the abandonment of Gaelic Catholic being in Ireland continued to hold forth in Manhattan and the community remained largely intact. A novel aspect of Milner's treatment is his use of song texts in combination with period news reports and existing scholarship to develop a fuller picture of the Catholic Irish struggle. Products of a highly verbal and passionately musical people, Irish folk and popular songs provide special insight into the popularly held attitudes and beliefs of the integration epoch.

Arts & Culture, Immigration, InterviewsGuest UserApril 16, 2020Comment

New York’s Memory Palace: An Interview with Blagovesta Momchedjikova

Interviewed by Katie Uva

The Panorama of the City of New York is an enormous scale model of all five New York City boroughs. It has 895,000 structures in the scale of 1:1200 (1 inch = 100 feet, making the Empire State Building only 15 inches tall on the model) and stretches over 9,335 square feet in the Queens Museum. Commissioned for the New York World’s Fair of 1964/65 by the infamous city planner Robert Moses, the Panorama took one hundred people three years to build from geological and survey maps, and aerial photographs. It was created in 273 sections offsite under the supervision of Ray Lester, a long-time model maker for Moses, and his company Lester Associates. The Panorama was installed in 1964 in the same space it occupies today, in what was then the New York City Pavilion and is now the Queens Museum. There, fairgoers experienced the miniature metropolis as a short helicopter ride with a pre-recorded narration.

Interviews, QueensGuest UserMarch 31, 2020Comment

Interview with Ansley Erickson, co-editor of Educating Harlem: A Century of Schooling and Resistance in a Black Community

Interview with Ansley Erikson, co-editor of Educating Harlem: A Century of Schooling and Resistance in a Black Community

Interviewed by Dominique Jean-Louis

This week on Gotham we hear from the Harlem Education History Project (HEHP), a multi-platform program at Columbia University that includes a digital collection, exhibits, and the recently published Educating Harlem: A Century of Schooling and Resistance in a Black Community, as well as many other resources for teaching the history of education. Today, Dominique Jean-Louis interviews the Project’s co-director, Ansley T. Erickson, co-editor of the book.

Education, Interviews, Manhattan, Race & Ethnicity, Poverty & InequalityGuest UserMarch 23, 2020Comment

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.

Bronx, Interviews, Postwar New York, Housing & RealtyGuest UserMarch 3, 2020Comment

Heaven's Wrath: Interview with Danny Noorlander

Interviewed by Deborah Hamer

Today on the blog Gotham editor Deborah Hamer speaks with Danny Noorlander, associate professor at SUNY-Oneonta, about his new book Heaven’s Wrath: The Protestant Reformation and the Dutch West India Company in the Atlantic World, religion in New Amsterdam and the Dutch Republic, and what is on the horizon for his next book.

New Amsterdam, Religion, InterviewsGuest UserFebruary 20, 2020Comment

Racial Migrations: New York City and the Revolutionary Politics of the Spanish Caribbean

Jesse Hoffnung-Garskof, interviewed by Tyesha Maddox

In the late nineteenth century, a small group of Cubans and Puerto Ricans of African descent settled in the segregated tenements of New York City. Jesse Hoffnung-Garskof’s book presents a vivid portrait of these largely forgotten revolutionaries and reveals the complexities of race-making within migrant communities and the power of small groups of immigrants to transform their home societies.

Interviews, Manhattan, Podcasts, Race & Ethnicity, ImmigrationGuest UserFebruary 11, 2020Comment

The Rise and Fall of The Young Lords

Johanna Fernandez, interviewed by Beth Harpaz

One of the most influential groups of the radical ’60s was the Young Lords, an organization of poor and working class Puerto Ricans that began as a street gang and rose to confront the racism of institutions from government to religion. Johanna Fernandez, a professor of history at Baruch College, traces their roots and tells the story of their rise and fall in The Young Lords: A Radical History.

Crime & Policing, Interviews, Podcasts, Poverty & Inequality, Race & EthnicityGuest UserFebruary 6, 2020Comment