“My Colored House is on Fire”: Children, Housing, and the Architecture of Black Charity in San Juan Hill
By Jessica Larson
Following their displacement from the Tenderloin in the early 1900s, Manhattan’s largest Black population moved northward and sought to rebuild their community’s infrastructure in San Juan Hill, an area bounded by 59th Street to the south, 65th Street to the north, Amsterdam Avenue to east, and West End Avenue to the west. Black reformers — the majority of whom were women — worked to construct a neighborhood that offered to its residents missing social welfare services.
Read More“Ten Thousand Bigamists in New York”:
The Criminalization of Jewish Immigrants Using White Slavery Panics
By Mia Brett
The late 19th century and early 20th century saw a huge influx of Jewish immigrants settling in New York City. Eastern European Yiddish speaking immigrants fled the Pale Settlements due to violent pogroms and punitive decrees after the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881.[1] This rise in immigration created a backlash of nativism and criminalization. In particular, anti-Jewish bigotry in New York City’s criminal justice system began to take the form of large-scale stereotypical assumptions as police, judges, prosecutors, and investigators became more familiar with Jewish immigrants from Russia and Poland.
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Imitation Artist:
An Interview with Sunny Stalter-Pace
Interviewed by Katie Uva
Today on the blog, Katie Uva talks to Sunny Stalter-Pace, author of the recently published Imitation Artist: Gertrude Hoffmann’s Life in Vaudeville and Dance. The book examines the life and times of Gertrude Hoffmann, an early 20th century dancer and choreographer whose career highlights the intersections of high and low culture in the performing arts of that era.
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 MoreThe New York City Overalls Parade, 1920
By Jonathan Goldman
New York City's "Overalls Parade," held on April 24, 1920 was, viewed generously, an inspired if quixotic attempt to inaugurate a new, labor-conscious political movement. From a more critical perspective, it was a neutered form of activism that undermined the progressive movements that had flourished over the previous two decades, now under threat at the start of the 1920s. In some respects, it even worked against the interests of labor. The "Economy Parade" – its official name never caught on – aimed to protest the rising cost of clothing as one instance of the rising cost of living in the postwar United States. Marchers, representing civic organizations and private clubs from multiple strata, wore overalls, a recent sartorial innovation, as a show of allegiance to democratic principles. Organized by the Cheese Club, a private social group whose members worked in theater, entertainment journalism, and publicity, the parade drew far fewer participants than predicted by its leaders and friendly journalists, and became a byword for failure.
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New York City’s Women Teachers, Equal Pay, and Suffrage
By Rachel Rosenberg
On May 7, 1908, Carrie Chapman Catt, the famous American suffragist, spoke at Association Hall in New York City. There were women in the hallway outside selling “suffragette” buttons. The hall was packed despite the bad weather, and the event went on past 11 pm. The evening, however, was not about suffrage. It was a meeting of the Interborough Association of Women Teachers (IAWT), the organization demanding equal salaries for men and women teachers in New York City. Alongside many other speakers, Catt spoke as a woman taxpayer about the number of problems in the country that the women teachers in public schools were being asked to solve, and how important these teachers were to the nation. Her speech called for equal pay for women teachers, but also for woman’s suffrage in acknowledgment of that importance.
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“Just Between Ourselves, Girls”: Rose Pastor Stokes and the American Yiddish Press
By Ayelet Brinn
n 1918, socialist agitator and women’s rights activist Rose Pastor Stokes (1879-1933) was tried and convicted of espionage after making public comments criticizing America’s involvement in World War I. After an anti-war speech in Kansas City, Stokes had published a letter in the Kansas City Star criticizing the American government for aligning with war profiteers to the detriment of the American people: “No government which is for the profiteers can also be for the people, while the government is for the profiteers.”
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Theodore Roosevelt: A Man for the Modern World
Reviewed by Kathleen Dalton
“Theodore Roosevelt: A Man for the Modern World” greets visitors in the entrance as they enter the Old Orchard Museum to buy tickets to visit his house, Sagamore Hill. The current exhibit, on view until December 2019, is a temporary addendum to Sagamore Hill’s extensive permanent exhibit on Roosevelt’s life and argues that TR was “A Man for the Modern World” who embraced new technologies in order to communicate better with the public. Born into a world of the horse and buggy, he became president at a time when telephones, movies, radio, and automobiles were changing daily life for average Americans. However, the actual central theme of the exhibit is broader than the idea of TR as technologically modern; the exhibit also gathers in moments that exemplify TR as a modern political thinker and reformer.
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The Decorated Tenement: How Immigrant Builders and Architects Transformed the Slum in the Gilded Age
Reviewed by Paul Ranogajec
Violette’s important book opens a new chapter on urban housing in architectural history and helps the reader understand a whole set of buildings—indeed, whole swathes of the cityscapes of both New York and Boston—that are prominently visible but often overlooked. Amplifying elite architects’ and reformers’ disdain for so-called tenement “skin-builders,” architectural historians have studied in detail bourgeois design but have paid much less attention to buildings built by and for the working class. The Decorated Tenement helps to correct the historical record, treating the immigrant-built tenement commensurate with its prominence in the two cities. It is a timely book for that, even if the author does not explicitly make the connection to today’s immigration debates.
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