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Posts in Politics
Enter Donald: The Trump Empire Goes to Manhattan
Enter Donald: The Trump Empire Goes to Manhattan

Enter Donald: The Trump Empire Goes to Manhattan

By Gwenda Blair

At the age of twenty-six Donald Trump had sealed his first multi-million-dollar deal. It was a sweet thing for a young man who had been his father’s full-time student ever since graduation from Wharton. Every morning he and his father drove from Jamaica Estates to Fred Trump’s modest office in Beach Haven, one of the large housing developments the older man had built near Coney Island in the early 1950s. Inside a nondescript, three-story brick building on Avenue Z, the headquarters of the Trump family empire still looked like the dentist’s office it had once been, with a linoleum floor, shag carpet, and chest-high partitions between cubicles.

This is the last of three profiles of the Trump patriarchs, adapted from the author's bestseller, The Trumps: Three Builders and a President, courtesy of Simon & Schuster.

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Business & Labor, Contemporary Era, Housing & Realty, Manhattan, Politics, Postwar New YorkGuest UserComment
Fred Trump Slays the King of Cooperative Housing
Fred Trump Slays the King of Cooperative Housing

Fred Trump Slays the King of Cooperative Housing

By Gwenda Blair

Nearly two decades after Friedrich Trump came to America and a year before his first son, Fred, was born, another boy landed at New York Harbor. He was fifteen, a year younger than Friedrich had been upon his arrival. Like Friedrich, he had traveled alone and left behind his family, his homeland, and his obligation to enter into his country’s military service. And he, too, did not intend to return. His name was Abraham Eli Kazan, and the country he left was Russia. In the coming decades, he, like Fred Trump, would become a real estate developer in New York, building apartments in a city with a desperate need for housing. In the late 1950s the two men each sought to build on the same stretch of Coney Island, a long and bitter struggle that eventually entangled the highest levels of city government. But it was more than a battle between two well-connected businessmen. Trump and Kazan were leaders in two separate movements battling for effective control of the way the city would grow — and because New York City was a bellwether for the rest of the nation, the way that cities all over the country would grow. Ultimately, on this patch of Coney Island, not far from the famous amusement rides, Fred Trump helped carve America's urban future.

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Built Environment, Housing & Realty, Urban Planning, Postwar New York, Politics, Great Depression & New DealGuest User Comments
Friedrich Trump Establishes a Dynasty
Friedrich Trump Establishes a Dynasty

Friedrich Trump Establishes a Dynasty

By Gwenda Blair

Back home, in Kallstadt, Germany, a young Friedrich Trump had listened to stories of those who had left for America and made it, determining to do likewise. Arriving in New York City in October 1885 at the age of sixteen, he listened to sagas of the West and picked up what he would need to head that way. In Seattle, he listened to descriptions of Monte Cristo and set himself up in the small Washington mining town. Now, at twenty-eight, he listened to the tales miners were telling one another about gold strikes in Alaska and, especially, in the Yukon.

This is the first of three posts on the Trump patriarchs, adapted from the author's bestseller, The Trumps: Three Builders and a President, courtesy of Simon & Schuster.

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Housing & Realty, Politics, Postwar New YorkGuest UserComment
​Who Put the Queen in “Queens”?
​Who Put the Queen in “Queens”?

​Who Put the Queen in “Queens”?

By Katie Uva

Each of the boroughs has its own naming history. The Bronx is named after early settler Jonas Bronck. Brooklyn comes from a Dutch word meaning “marsh” or “broken land.” Manhattan derives from a Lenape word which has been translated variously as “land of many hills,” and, more recently, “the place where we get wood for bows.” Henry Hudson himself is said to have named Staten Island Staaten Eylandt, after the Staaten Generaal, the Dutch parliament.

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British Era, Politics, QueensGuest User Comment
The Struggle for Teacher Education in 19th Century New York
The Struggle for Teacher Education in 19th Century New York

The Struggle for Teacher Education in 19th Century New York

By Sandra Roff

Teaching as a profession aims to achieve the most noble of principles — educating children to be responsible, productive citizens. Unfortunately, the teachers hired in the early years of the new republic and well into the nineteenth century were usually untrained and unprepared for the job ahead. The civic-minded movers and shakers in New York City at the time were interested in the education of its youth, but the path to securing qualified teachers for the schools was slow to be realized.

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Antebellum & Civil War, Education, PoliticsGuest User Comment
​Solomon Northup’s Family in New York City
​Solomon Northup’s Family in New York City

​Solomon Northup’s Family in New York City

By David Fiske

Around the end of the winter in 1841, Solomon Northup encountered two men in Saratoga Springs, New York, who promised him work if he’d travel with them to New York City. Northup was a free black man who had lived in the resort for about seven years, where he had done various sorts of work to support his wife and three children. The two men, who were from a neighboring county, probably understood that employment in Saratoga was harder to find during the winter months when all the tourists were not around — therefore they had a good chance of finding a potential victim in need of cash.

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Antebellum & Civil War, Politics, Race & EthnicityGuest User Comment
Can this Mayor Save NYC?
Can this Mayor Save NYC?

Can this Mayor Save NYC?

Reviewed by Bruce Berg

Over the last half century, every New York City mayor has been the subject of at least one, if not more, published works. There is clearly a consensus that mayors merit this level of attention and scrutiny, and book-length examinations of the city’s mayors have been both journalistic and academic. The current mayor, William (Bill) de Blasio is no exception to this treatment. Two works, one by New York Daily News journalist Juan González (Reclaiming Gotham) and the other by CUNY professor Joseph Viteritti (The Pragmatist), offer the preliminary narrative on the current mayor. What makes these manuscripts interesting is that both were written before the end of Mayor de Blasio’s first term. And while both offer the reader an examination of the political roots of Bill de Blasio and a discussion of his early accomplishments as mayor, five years from now readers will want to know more about the progress made over his two terms as mayor. Is there a reason why these authors should not have waited a little longer to publish their work? Possibly. In a city where Democrats outnumber Republicans by more than five to one, Bill de Blasio is the first Democratic mayor elected in twenty years (five terms). Equally as important, de Blasio is only the second progressive Democratic mayor to be elected in recent years, with the support of minorities, municipal labor unions and progressive white voters; and the first of these mayors to be elected to a second term. And although Bill de Blasio was not a political unknown prior to being elected mayor, he clearly lacked the name recognition and the visibility of his two predecessors. So after twenty years of governance from the center of the political spectrum, the de Blasio mayoralty returned New York City to its liberal/progressive roots. As a result, New Yorkers want to know who this man is, what his origins are — ​political and otherwise — and how he might lead the city and its governing institutions. Mr. González and Professor Viteritti address these issues.

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Contemporary Era, Politics, ReviewsGuest UserComment
Retrieved Rhythms: The Last Poets, Harlem, and Black Arts Movement(s)
Retrieved Rhythms: The Last Poets, Harlem, and Black Arts Movement(s)

Retrieved Rhythms: The Last Poets, Harlem, and Black Arts Movement(s)

By Christopher M. Tinson

In 1953, illustrator Bernie Robynson, in an effort to diagram the culturally diverse and magnetic appeal of Harlem, mapped some of the enchanting points of interest sure to attract wide-eyed tourists. The resulting map entitled “In the Heart of Harlem” calls that section of New York City: “The Largest Negro Community in the World. Its Culture Is An Integral Part of Americana.” Over 12 years later, Harlem’s place in the American imagination would take on a different meaning for its inhabitants of African descent.

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Arts & Culture, Politics, Postwar New York, Race & Ethnicity, Urban Decline & Fiscal CrisisGuest UserComment
Woodrow Wilson: “Our Pious President”
Woodrow Wilson: “Our Pious President”

Woodrow Wilson: “Our Pious President”

By Margaret A. Brucia

On June 16, 1915, Julia Gardiner Gayley dined with her friend Elizabeth Lovett at Lucy Frelinghuysen’s summer house on Mt. Desert Island in Maine. Less than six weeks earlier, a German U-boat had torpedoed the Lusitania, a British luxury liner, off the southern coast of Ireland, killing nearly 1,200 people, including 128 Americans. President Woodrow Wilson, two years into his first term, clashed with his Secretary of State, William Jennings Bryan, over how America, clinging to neutrality, should deal with Germany in the aftermath of the disaster. Bryan, a pacifist, refused to back the strict demands Wilson imposed on the Germans. A week before Julie’s evening at Lucy’s, Bryan resigned from office in protest, weakening Wilson’s bargaining position during an international crisis. Bryan’s action not only fractured the Democratic Party, but sowed further doubts among pro-intervention Republicans, like Julie, about the Democrats’ ability to lead an America threatened by war.

This is the latest in a series of posts based on the letters of the New York socialite, Julia Gardiner Gayley (1864-1937), to her eldest daughter, Mary Gayley Senni (1884-1971), a countess who lived on the outskirts of Rome. In 2010, the author purchased a trove of the letters in a Roman flea market. This mother-daughter correspondence spanned the years 1902-1936 and provides an intimate and unfiltered view of life in New York during the early twentieth century.

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Politics, Progressive EraGuest UserComment