Few individuals are more closely associated with the development of 20th century American music than lyricist and songwriter Irving Berlin. From the early 1910s, when he was first launched into the stratosphere by era-defining pieces like “Alexander’s Ragtime Band,” until the late 1950s, when his success finally dried up, Berlin remained at the forefront of the nation’s burgeoning music industry.
A Long and Complex Legacy: An Interview with Thai Jones on the Columbia University and Slavery Project
Interviewed by Robb K. Haberman
Today on the blog, editor Robb Haberman speaks with Thai Jones, who co-taught the Columbia University and Slavery Seminar in 2020, about the history of slavery and its continuing legacy at King’s College and Columbia University.
Erich Goode’s Taming of New York’s Washington Square: A Wild Civility
Reviewed By Stephen Petrus
Even during COVID-19, New York’s Washington Square Park maintains its quirky identity. Chances are on a visit you’ll still encounter locals, tourists, buskers, sunbathers, NYU students, dog walkers, chess players, homeless people, petty drug dealers, and maybe even Fartman, Pigeon Man, and the Squirrel Whisperer.
Biotechnology, Race, and Memory in Washington Heights
By Robin Wolfe Scheffler
Amidst the economic and human toll inflicted by the COVID-19 pandemic on the City of New York, one industry still thrives: the city’s Economic Development Corporation trumpeted the news in June that biotechnology companies were still “gobbling” up space in an otherwise sagging real estate market.
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.
“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.
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.
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.”
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.
Merchandising 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.
