New York’s Unrighteous Beginnings
By Erin Kramer
In the initial instructions to New Netherland’s director general regarding obtaining land from indigenous peoples, the company leadership wrote: “For trading-goods or by means of some other amicable agreement, induce them to give up ownership and possession to us, without however forcing them thereto in the least or taking possession by craft or fraud, lest we call down the wrath of God upon our unrighteous beginnings, the Company intending in no wise to make war or hostile attacks upon any one.”[1]
When they first ventured into the spaces they would eventually call New Netherland, the Dutch knew that Europe was watching. Because they wanted to set themselves apart from the horrors of bloody conquest and slavery that made up the Black Legend of Spanish colonization, the Dutch were determined to set a better example. Instead of taking land by force, they relied on a legal tradition that acknowledged Native sovereignty over land in the Americas and they deployed capitalism to establish a foothold in North America.
Read MoreHow Dinosaurs Came to New York
By Lukas Rieppel
On February 16, 1905, the American Museum of Natural History unveiled an enormous dinosaur skeleton measuring more than sixty-five feet in length: Brontosaurus. This lumbering behemoth was discovered in a remote part of Wyoming several years earlier, and curators had just finished assembling its gargantuan bones into a free-standing display that would serve as the centerpiece of the museum’s recently inaugurated dinosaur hall. Over the next several decades, Brontosaurus became one of the most iconic dinosaurs of all time, and throngs of visitors flocked to the Upper West Side to see its fossil remains with their own eyes.
Read MoreBuilding Communities of Inquiry: Learning with the Harlem Education History Project
By Nick Juravich
I started with the Harlem Education History Project (HEHP) in the fall of 2013 as a newly minted doctoral candidate. Fresh from my exams and starting my dissertation research, I had the unique opportunity to participate in both sides of the emerging project, which today appear on the home page as the book and the digital collection. Despite the embryonic nature of my own project, co-directors Ansley T. Erickson and Ernest Morrell invited me to contribute to the inaugural scholarly workshop that served as their first step toward the edited volume. That same fall, I signed up to audit “Digital Harlem Research Collaborative” (DHRC), Erickson’s first HEHP course, a deep, yearlong dive into the worlds of digital, public, and Harlem history.
Intermediate School 201: Race, Space, and Modern Architecture in Harlem
By Marta Gutman
Faced with intransigent bureaucracy, struggling schools, deteriorating buildings, and entrenched racial segregation, parents in Harlem demanded direct control over the core functions of public education in the 1950s and 1960s. One new building became a flashpoint in the battle for community control—Intermediate School (IS) 201, the infamous windowless school that abuts the Park Avenue railroad viaduct two blocks north of East 125th Street, straddling Central Harlem and East Harlem. White architects and politicians, including the mayor, John Lindsay, rallied to defend “Harlem’s besieged masterpiece,” but parents in Harlem disagreed.[1] The location and the architecture, which many of them opposed, stood as a constant reminder of their unmet demands, from exclusion in policy making to broken promises of integration.
Read MoreBringing Harlem to the Schools: Langston Hughes’s The First Book of Negroes and Crafting a Juvenile Readership
By Jonna Perrillo
Chapter 5 of Educating Harlem examines Langston Hughes’s production of the often-overlooked The First Book of Negroes as a vantage point into how the author transformed ideas, images, and business practices that he developed as a young Harlem Renaissance writer to educate children during the Cold War. Moreover, thinking about the book’s readership provides a view into the politics of the books Harlem and New York City children otherwise were reading in 1950s classrooms. Hughes’s political critiques in The First Book of Negroes dated to some of his most seminal works as a writer in the Harlem Renaissance. Throughout his life and career, Hughes remained committed to the same questions that thrived at the heart of the Renaissance, including: What constitutes black culture and art? What are the responsibilities of the black artist to himself and his or her community? Can cultivating a black readership serve as a pathway to community advancement? And what is the role of a black aesthetic—and the black diaspora—within a larger U.S. culture? Now, he translated these questions into a genre for the people he saw as the most vulnerable and most in need of nuanced and humane accounts of black experience and accomplishment: children.
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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.
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The “Tavern on the Green”: How a Central Park Landmark Epitomizes Colonial New York City’s Urban Development
By Vaughn Scribner
The Tavern on the Green restaurant is an icon of New York City. Nestled in the seemingly-rustic, yet carefully-planned confines of Central Park, the building began life in 1870 as a shelter for the park’s grazing sheep.[1] In 1934, park officials transformed the building into a restaurant. Since then, various families bought into the business, and made renovations like a dance floor, glass-enclosed Crystal Room, and a new patio.[2] Beyond offering a diverse array of cocktails, main courses, and appetizers, however, much of the restaurant’s enduring popularity owes itself to setting: the Tavern on the Green is a carefully-crafted combination of urban and rural life; a “hybrid” space where customers feel like they’re escaping the gray, crowded confines of the city, but still have access to the entertainment and sociability for which New York City is famed.[3] But the Tavern on the Green does not just represent fantasy, or a New York that “never was.” On the contrary, the Tavern on the Green harkens back to the second half of the eighteenth-century, when New York City’s residents fostered an urban culture predicated upon a thriving network of taverns and green spaces which offered residents the hospitalities of city life within a bucolic, relaxing, and intentionally-constructed “natural” environment.
Read MoreThe Carleton Commission and Evidence of Arson in the Great New York Fire of 1776
By Bruce Twickler
In October of 1783, just six weeks before the British evacuated New York, the Commander-in Chief-of the British forces, Sir Guy Carleton, commissioned a panel of three British officers to investigate the disastrous fire that devastated the city seven years earlier. Shortly after midnight on September 21, 1776, fire had erupted in lower Manhattan. By daybreak it had consumed five hundred buildings – including schools, churches, warehouses and homes – and caused more destruction than all the previous colonial fires in New York combined.
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How Prohibition Killed the Bowery
By Alice Sparberg Alexiou
Back in the days when the Bowery epitomized New York at its grittiest, most honkey-tonk, warm-hearted best—between the end of the Civil War and World War I—nothing was more important to the well being of the street’s motley population of artists, actors, immigrant poor, and bums than the saloon. Yes, the saloon. It was a Bowery institution. During the Bowery’s peak years, the 1890s, the street boasted nearly 100 saloons, each with its own clientele and reasons for existing. In the days of Tammany, specific saloons functioned as political clubhouses; there were “concert saloons,” where the races mingled and drank and sang and had a grand old time, singing and dancing to songs with dirty lyrics banged out on rinky-dink pianos, and waitresses doubled as prostitutes. In some saloons, homesick German and Irish immigrants found compatriots with whom to drink away their pain. And other saloons were like drunken old grandmothers who gathered all those Bowery bums into their beery bosoms and comforted them, providing shelter and the chance to convene with other bummy alcoholics, all of whom had run away to the Bowery from all over the country and the world with a specific purpose: to drink among others who were just like them.
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