Down the Up Staircase: Three Generations of a Harlem Family
Bruce Haynes Interviewed by Tyesha Maddox
Down the Up Staircase: Three Generations of a Harlem Family tells the story of one Harlem family across three generations, connecting its journey to the historical and social forces that transformed Harlem over the past century. Bruce D. Haynes and Syma Solovitch capture the tides of change that pushed blacks forward through the twentieth century — the Great Migration, the Harlem Renaissance, the early civil rights victories, the Black Power and Black Arts movements--as well as the many forces that ravaged black communities, including Haynes's own. As an authority on race and urban communities, Haynes brings unique sociological insights to the American mobility saga and the tenuous nature of status and success among the black middle class.
“The Scourge of the ‘90s:” Squeegee Men and Broken Windows Policing
By Jess Bird
There is perhaps no other bogeyman of New York City’s “bad old days” that has incited greater ire than the squeegee man. Cars created a sense of safety, of separation from the unruly world of the street, but a window washer approaching a car stopped at a red light ruptured that sense of safety, incited panic, and demonstrated, to some, a breakdown in law and order. Squeegee men, “the scourge of the ‘90s,” symbolized the need to be tough on crime, regardless of the costs. Unsurprisingly then, the so-called squeegee pest featured heavily in the mayoral race of 1993, a rematch between incumbent Mayor David Dinkins and Rudy Giuliani.
New York: Where the Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get… Art?
Reviewed by Alexis Monroe
The class divisions inherent in the New York art world which Rachel Klein deftly identifies in her book are all too persistent today. Art Wars: The Politics of Taste in Nineteenth Century New York promises a history of taste fundamentally informed by class tensions and sectional strife. Klein crafts this history around three case studies, which she sees as defining events in the 19th-century art world: the collapse of the American Art-Union in 1852, the controversy in the mid-1880s around the Cesnola collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the push in the mid-1880s to open the Met on Sundays.
“Little Pittsburgh”: Creating an Industrialized Landscape in Hunts Point
By Sam Hege
Since the 1950s, New York City has relied on the South Bronx to handle the vital and taxing components of its processing and distribution infrastructures. This strategy began with the decision to relocate the Terminal Market from downtown Manhattan to the Hunts Point peninsula, and has since been used to justify the siting of waste transfer stations, prisons, and industrial processing facilities. This consolidation of waste and congestion to the South Bronx supported the emergence of Manhattan as a tourist destination and financial capital, embodied by the redevelopment of the Manhattan market space as part of the World Trade Center project.
Clifford Mason’s Macbeth in Harlem traces how African-American theater artists shaped theater in the United States, beginning in the early 19th century and ending in the mid-20th century. Mason reveals how events gave rise to different Black performers and movements, beginning with Harlem’s particular contributions to Broadway and concluding with a discussion of the post-World War II conditions that gave rise to Lorraine Hansberry’s 1959 play A Raisin in The Sun.
Those Who Know Don’t Say: Interview with Garrett Felber
Interviewed by Kenneth M. Donovan
Today on the blog, Kenneth Donovan interviews Garrett Felber about his recently published book Those Who Know Don’t Say: The Nation of Islam, The Black Freedom Struggle, and the Carceral State. Those Who Know, which reevaluates the civil rights activism and legacy of the Nation of Islam, was shortlisted for the 2020 Museum of African American History Stone Book Award.
“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.
The World That Fear Made: Interview with Jason T. Sharples
Interviewed by Madeline Lafuse
Today on the blog, Madeline Lafuse speaks with Jason T. Sharples, author of the recently published The World That Fear Made : Slave Revolts and Conspiracy Scares in Early America, about how the fear of slave conspiracies shaped New York City and early America.
Interview with Douglas J. Flowe on Uncontrollable Blackness: African American Men and Criminality in Jim Crow New York
Interviewed by Willie Mack
African American men in early 20th-century New York City faced social and economic segregation, and a racist criminal justice system punctuated by violence by the police and white citizens. In Uncontrollable Blackness: African American Men and Criminality in Jim Crow New York, Dr. Douglas Flowe interrogates the effects that segregation, crime, and violence had on black men, and how these men were forced to navigate the “crucible of black criminality” in Jim Crow Era New York City in order to survive.
Thomas J. Shelley has added to his already substantial oeuvre of New York Catholic history with the publication of Upper West Side Catholics: Liberal Catholicism in a Conservative Archdiocese: The Church of the Ascension, New York City, 1895-2020 (New York: Empire State Editions, 2020).[1] His deep and broad understanding of New York’s Catholic institutions provides the context for his study of the Church of the Ascension, which was founded in 1895 on the Upper West Side. While his history of Ascension starts from its founding, Shelley’s book offers an extended view of the neighborhood during the 1960s and 1970s, a period when demographic transition overlapped with economic decline and produced immense political conflicts that destabilized New York’s institutions, including the Catholic Church.
