How The Volstead Act Ruined New York’s French Pleasure Palaces

By Alice Sparberg Alexiou

At the beginning of the twentieth century, when New York was rolling in dough but had a dearth of rarified places in which to spend it, enterprising immigrants who knew how to run restaurants began coming to New York. They knew because they’d grown up in France or Switzerland, in bistro-owning families. In New York, after working their asses off at one of the few already-existing luxury restaurants--Delmonico’s was the most famous—the newcomers then combined what they’d just learned about how to run a New York restaurant with their Gallic sensibilities around food, ambiance, and, most of all, drink—what French chef, after all, creates cuisine without the addition of alcohol, be it wine or brandy, and enlarged them to fit New York’s eye-popping scale. They opened big restaurants, then the trend in New York—“lobster palaces.” But these were different, because they were French, where New Yorkers were introduced to the joys of pate de foie gras and frogs legs, were taught them what wines to drink with these exotic dishes. And so was created a unique and scintillating French dining scene in New York , a product of a specific time in New York history, that is now largely forgotten.

Manhattan, Arts & CultureGuest UserFebruary 24, 2020 Comment

DyckmanDISCOVERED: Fostering Inclusive Historical Narratives

By Meredith Sorin Horsford

In 2015, the Dyckman Farmhouse Museum (DFM), which had been a very traditional historic site with little relationship to its community, came under new leadership. Soon after, DFM became the recipient of a grant program called shatterCABINET with the Chipstone Foundation, which provides funding to rethink how historic house museums can be relevant to their present-day community. Through this grant, the Dyckman Farmhouse removed all of the room barriers that had previously prevented visitors from entering the period rooms, installed bilingual labels and signage, and began offering bilingual programs, promotional materials, and visitor services. This not only impacted the audience that we serve, as neighborhood residents began visiting the museum for the first time, but it also helped the organization reshape public programs to feature interpretation that connects the history of the site and its rural roots to the present-day urban community.

Slavery & Antislavery, Race & Ethnicity, ManhattanGuest UserFebruary 18, 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

Tudor City: Manhattan’s Historic Residential Enclave

By Lawrence R. Samuel

Walk east a few blocks from Grand Central Station along 42nd Street, take the stairs near the Church of the Covenant and voila!—you’ve entered another world. Tudor City—the five-acre faux medieval village, albeit with high-rise apartment buildings—is on the far east side of midtown Manhattan between First and Second Avenues and 40th and 43rd Streets, right around the corner from the United Nations. Tudor City is not just the architectural masterpiece created by real estate developer Fred F. French and the first residential skyscraper complex in the world; it’s a unique community that has played a significant role in the history of New York City over nearly the past century. The story of the “city within a city,” as it quickly became known, tells us much about life in Manhattan since the late 1920s, when the development came into being.

Manhattan, Urban Planning, Housing & RealtyGuest UserOctober 24, 2019Comment

“HORRID BARBARITY:” A Trial Against Slaveholders in New York City

By Kelly A. Ryan

In February 1809, three seamstresses made their way to the special justices of New York City to register a complaint against their employers for abusing the slaves living in their household. They charged Amos and Demiss Broad, a married couple who ran an upholstery and millinery business in the second ward of New York City, with a litany of abuses, including throwing a knife at a three-year-old child. An unlikely trial occurred at the Court of General Sessions by the end of the month, in which the Broads stood trial for assaulting Betty and her three-year-old daughter Sarah. Ultimately, nine witnesses came forward against the Broads, and two of the witnesses who originally agreed to provide evidence for the Broads ended up supporting the prosecution. Though the employees and neighbors of the Broads would be critical to pushing this case forward, Betty’s efforts to get help forced New York City to reckon with the cruelty of slaveholding. The case against the Broads would be a stunning victory for African Americans and the New York Society for the Manumission of Slaves (NYMS), as well as an important moment in generating discussions about the rights of slaves to live unmolested.

Antebellum & Civil War, Manhattan, Politics, Race & EthnicityGuest UserAugust 8, 2019Comment

The Rebel Cafe: Sex, Race and Politics in Cold War America's Nightclub Underground

Reviewed by Burton W. Peretti

Stephen R. Duncan’s new book admirably fills a void in the historiography of 20th century American culture. We long have recognized that between the storied nightclub era of Prohibition days and the age of rock ’n’ roll, there was a perceptible but elusive set of nightlife entertainment venues that kept radical left-wing political values percolating during the Depression, World War II, and the Cold War. Historians have explored chapters in New York City’s interregnum — David Stowe, for example, covers Cafe Society in the late 1930s, Patrick Burke describes the jazz clubs on 52nd Street, and James Gavin chronicles European-style cabaret — but a comprehensive history, with more of a national perspective, has been lacking. Duncan’s ambitious and wide-ranging work makes a terrific new contribution toward defining the paramount significance of radical and intimate performance venues of the 1940s, 1950s, and early 1960s.

New York Recentered: Building the Metropolis from the Shore

By Kara Murphy Schlichting

In 1865 New York City park commissioner Andrew Haswell Green came to the conclusion that the city had outgrown Manhattan Island. In a report for the Board of Commissioners of Central Park, Green argued that the city’s future should include its mainland environs of Westchester County north of the Harlem River. He articulated a river-spanning future for New York. Green reasoned that lower Westchester was “so intimately connected with and dependent upon the City of New York, that unity of plan for improvements on both sides” of the Harlem was “essential.”

Reprinted with permission from New York Recentered: Building the Metropolis from the Shore, by Kara Murphy Schlichting, published by the University of Chicago Press. © 2019 by the University of Chicago Press. All rights reserved.

Recovering New York’s Entangled Dutch, Native American, and African Histories: An Interview with Jennifer Tosch

By Andrea Mosterman

Many of New York’s Dutch colonists and their descendants relied on the labor of enslaved people. Some historic sites have struggled to address this part of their history and looked for ways in which they can share it with their visitors. For example, an exhibit at the Old Stone House in Brooklyn, built in 1699 by Hendrick Claessen Vechte, includes a brief discussion of the home’s enslaved residents. Yet, much of the Dutch history of slavery in New York City and its surroundings is still little known, especially among the general public.

History Museums and Capitalism: The Need for Critical Conversations

By Andrew Urban

In November, 2018, the Public Historian published a review that I wrote of the Lower East Side Tenement Museum’s newest tour: Under One Roof. The tour interprets the lives of three families who lived in the tenement at 103 Orchard Street — which was acquired by the museum in 2007 — from the 1940s up until the recent past. Addressing post-World War II immigration and migration to the Lower East Side, the educators leading the tours that I took did an excellent job highlighting how Americans have frequently been reluctant to welcome the world’s “huddled masses,” national myths notwithstanding.

The State Versus Harlem

By Matt Kautz

Over the past few years, Americans have paid greater attention to the harm caused by opiates and rising heroin use, specifically in white, rural areas. The New York State Department of Health has dedicated a large portion of its website to sharing statistics of opioid overdoses in the state, warning signs about what addiction looks like, information on the state’s program for monitoring doctor’s prescriptions, and how those addicted can receive treatment.