Last Subway: The Long Wait for the Next Train in New York City
Philip Mark Plotch Interviewed by Robert W. Snyder
Ever since New York City built one of the world’s great subway systems, no promise has been more tantalizing than the proposal to build a new subway line under Second Avenue in Manhattan. Yet the Second Avenue subway — although first envisioned in the 1920s, did not open until 2017 — and even then in a truncated form.
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“The Lungs of the City”: Frederick Law Olmsted, Public Health, and the Creation of Central Park
By Lucie Levine
As the nation’s first great urban park, Central Park was conceived as “The Lungs of the City,” and built in 1858 as an oasis for “the sanitary advantage of breathing.” A half-century later, a letter to the editor of the New York Times glowed that “thousands visit the park daily just to breathe.” But today, “I can’t breathe” is the defining cry of the moment, as the city and the nation confronts both a global respiratory pandemic and the ongoing scourge of police brutality against black people.
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Refuge in the Heights: Migration, Memory and Authoritarianism in the Twentieth Century
By Robert W. Snyder
Immigrants travel with baggage, and some of the most important things they carry are their memories of life in their original homes. In Washington Heights and Inwood, where immigrants include German Jews, Dominicans, and Jews from the former Soviet Union, personal and collective memories embrace an unusual cast of characters: some of the most brutal dictators of the 20th century.
Upper Manhattan is haunted, you might say, by memories of Hitler, Trujillo, and Stalin.
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There Went New York; or What Is New York?
Reviewed by Mason B. Williams
New York is layered with ghosts. “It carries on its lapel,” E.B. White wrote, “the unexpungeable odor of the long past, so that no matter where you sit in New York you feel the vibrations of great times and tall deeds, of queer people and events and undertakings.” Holed up in the Algonquin Hotel, White compiled a brief compendium: “I am twenty-two blocks from where Rudolph Valentino lay in state, eight blocks from where Nathan Hale was executed, … thirty-four blocks from the street Willa Cather lived in when she came to New York to write books about Nebraska … (I could continue this list indefinitely); and for that matter I am probably occupying the very room that any number of exalted and somewise memorable characters sat in, some of them on hot, breathless afternoons, lonely and private and full of their own senses of emanations from without.”
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The Corporate Campaign to Save Madison Square Park
By Benjamin Holtzman
In the late 1970s, after a decade of budget cuts had decimated the New York City park system, an ambitious former Parks Department official named Donald Simon came up with a radical plan to save Madison Square Park and — he hoped — parks across the city. Simon believed that the park’s setting in a Manhattan business district could catalyze the park’s revitalization. If the corporations whose headquarters overlooked the park could see how their fortunes were tied to the park’s conditions, Simon believed, they would contribute funds that could provide the maintenance, security, and management necessary to revive the park.
Read MoreMerchandising Modernism:
New York City Department Stores in the 1920s
By Donald Albrecht and Thomas Mellins
America’s nearly two-century love affair with the department store has cooled dramatically in recent decades. E-commerce is the much-blamed culprit, but there have been other factors at play. As cities regained allure following the financial crisis of 2008, particularly for young professionals and well-heeled foreigners, suburban shopping malls anchored by department stores withered. Once the leading incubators of luxury brands and purveyors of their merchandise, department stores were forced to compete for shoppers with those very brands’ own freestanding boutiques as well as with lower-priced outlet stores.
Read MoreThe End of the Downtown Scene
Jeffrey Patrick Colgan and Jeffrey Escoffier
Late in 1978, Peter McGough arrived in New York City, just when it was its most “dirty and dangerous.” He was 20 years old and had grown up in Syracuse. He came to attend the Fashion Institute of Technology but soon dropped out. He spent his tuition going to clubs like the Ninth Circle and Studio 54, drinking, taking drugs, and hanging out at the Chelsea Hotel with Village denizens like Cookie Mueller, the writer and John Waters actress, and fashion designer Michael Kors, a former classmate at FIT. For a while he made money doing odd jobs, sketching for fashion magazines, working at vintage shops, and eventually selling drink tickets at Danceteria. When he first became acquainted with the fledgling artist David McDermott, his friends warned him that McDermott was crazy.
Read MoreNew 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.
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