From 1949 until his death in 1997, Murray Kempton was a distinct presence in New York City journalism. Peddling around town on a three-speed bicycle wearing a three-piece suit, he wrote about everything from politics to jazz to the Mafia. His writing was eloquent, his perspective unique, and his moral judgements driven by a profound sympathy for losers, dissenters and underdogs. […] Going Around: Selected Journalism / Murray Kempton (Seven Stories Press, 2025), edited by Andrew Holter, brings Kempton’s work to old admirers and a new generation of readers.
The Era Was Lost: The Rise and Fall of New York City’s Rank and File Rebels
Review By Benjamin Serby
Dyer laments that “a politically self-aware working class” no longer exists anywhere in the United States, including New York City. It would seem that until something profoundly shifts in our political culture, workers will simply defend what they already have rather than push for more. With longstanding institutional, legal, and economic arrangements in nothing short of crisis, perhaps this is the moment when the wheel of history — stalled fifty years ago — finally begins to turn once more.
The Hall of Fame for Great Americans: A Biography of Stanford White’s Forgotten Memorial
Review By Paul Ranogajec
The Hall of Fame for Great Americans, a group memorial and patriotic monument on the campus of the Bronx Community College, is a rich site for interrogating a range of cultural and political questions about American society from the 1890s to the present. Sheila Gerami’s book brings the now obscure monument to the attention of art historians and others who might want to approach New York’s memorial landscape from new angles.
Davida Siwisa James: Hamilton Heights and Sugar Hill
Interviewed by Rob Snyder
Davida Siwisa James explores two parts of Harlem in her book Hamilton Heights and Sugar Hill: Alexander Hamilton’s Old Harlem Neighborhood Through the Centuries, published by the Empire State Editions imprint of Fordham University Press. Exploring four centuries of life in a part of upper Manhattan that stretches from 135th Street to 165th Street and from Edgecombe Avenue to the Hudson River, James looks at the encounters between the Lenape and Dutch settlers, the rural village that was Harlem, and the Harlem Renaissance luminaries who lived in Hamilton Heights and Sugar Hill.
New York City’s borough of Staten Island has a long history of quarantines and public reactions to them. Just over five miles from Manhattan, Staten Island has faced numerous disease outbreaks, with quarantine measures playing a central role in containment efforts. In the nineteenth century, mass immigration and the spread of infectious diseases overwhelmed the city, leading to stricter quarantine enforcement.
African Americans and Real Estate in Queens in the 1920s
By Lawrence Samuel
In 1922, a milestone was reached when the reportedly last remaining large tract of farmland was divided into 1,500 lots that were then placed on the market as Forest Hills West. “Farm after farm, large as well as small, has been taken in the revolutionary movement that has changed Queens from New York’s vegetable garden to a great expanse of small homes, flats, factories, and building sites,” the New York Herald Tribune noted. Anticipating the arrival (and departure) of commuters, the LIRR was starting train service to Forest Hills West. Not far away, plans were in the works to widen Queens Boulevard to two hundred feet, as merchants and tradesmen believed it was the avenue best suited for retail business in the borough.
Fluoride in the Water and the Paranoid Style in New York City Politics
By Matthew Vaz
Fluoride has once again emerged as a matter of public controversy since a federal judge, in October of 2024, ordered the EPA to conduct a risk assessment on the effects of fluoride in the water. The issue has been further enlivened by indications that the incoming presidential administration may support ending fluoridation of water. Little remembered is the heated and drawn-out controversy that brought fluoride to the water supply of New York City. Richard Hofstadter, who lived and worked in New York all through the contentious debate, undoubtedly must have had some of his fellow New Yorkers in mind.
Reading from Left to Left: Radical Bookstores in NYC, 1930-2000s
By Shannon O’Neill
As pivotal spaces for leftists to strategize and engage one another, political party bookstores were key in supporting the labor movement, pushing for racial equality, working on behalf of revolutionary freedom fighters, and participating in global solidarity and struggle. In doing so, they created the space for their customers to not only radically reimagine their worlds, but to participate in activating their radical imaginations.
The walking tours were the basis for my photography, and my photographs seeded the later interviews I did with my tour guides. Each time someone took me on a tour, I would make note of the everyday places they’d taken me to — and then over the following weeks I would return to each place, remembering the story my tour guide had told me and making a photograph in response to that story. I thought about how those stories might be embedded in a photograph of a place. As a photographer, I like to be still in a place, watch it happen around me and then make a photograph. In some ways, my photography of cities and places is like a still life — though not of grapes on a table. I’m interested in stillness and careful looking —framing, light, and time are the materials of any photograph.
This short essay pairs two poets who relied in their time on the materials of New York City — its brick and mortar, its shatterable glass — in order to test the promise that poetry matters. Naomi Replansky (1918-2023) and June Jordan (1936-2002) each found they could get poems to admit their own possibilities and limitations as forms of action in the world by writing about what shelters New Yorkers, what they can and cannot see through, what goes up in flames or breaks apart, and what endures. Readers of Gotham may be interested in the way this infrastructural imagery draws language back, again and again, to the particularities of New York history. For Replansky and Jordan, poetry’s most salient social meanings emerge from awareness of the city as an inexorably unfinished construction, something poets and their readers — neighbors, whatever their address — must build together.
