Relics of the Underground: The Afterlife of Cultural Spaces
By Jeffrey Patrick Colgan & Jeffrey Escoffier
In early 1974, members of the punk band Television spotted a newly reopened yet unavoidably dingy lower Bowery bar on their way home from rehearsal. Returning soon after, they approached the owner Hilly Krystal and asked if he would host performances by bands that were playing a different kind of rock music. After an initial four-week residency by Television, CBGB & OMFUG (Country, Bluegrass, Blues & Other Music for Uplifting Gormandizers) continued to host countless bands and fostered the emerging punk and No-Wave music scenes of the 1970s and 1980s. Even after its role in any identifiable and burgeoning music scene came to an end in the 1990s, it still hosted performances until its ultimate demise in 2006 — its final sendoff facilitated by Blondie and Patti Smith. By 2008 the former venue was occupied by clothing designer John Varvatos, who kept some of the graffiti, stickers, and concert posters as accents to the calculated ‘subversiveness’ of the items on sale.
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The History of the Future: Contextualizing the Exhibition of the Fourth Regional Plan for the New York Metropolitan Region
By Kristian Taketomo
A basement in Greenwich Village may hold a sneak peek of what’s to come in the New York Metropolitan region. Until November 3rd, the ground floor at the Center for Architecture houses a free exhibition of the Regional Plan Association’s latest long-range strategic vision for the New York-New Jersey-Connecticut region, the Fourth Regional Plan.
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Lindsay K. Campbell's City of Forests, City of Farms: Sustainability Planning for New York City’s Nature
Reviewed by Kubi Ackerman
In November of 2015, a tree planted in the Bronx was commemorated as the one millionth tree of the city’s MillionTreesNYC initiative. The accompanying ceremony celebrated the culmination of this ambitious urban forestry project spearheaded by former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg. A little more than two years later, the City Council passed what was described as the city’s first ever bill focused specifically on urban agriculture, characterized modestly as “a first step” aimed merely at collecting information on urban agriculture organizations and businesses. Given the mainstreaming of environmental issues in New York City, which are inclusive of both urban forestry and urban agriculture, why was the former enthusiastically embraced at the top levels of municipal governance while the latter is still now only very slowly receiving the attention of policymakers? This is the central question of Lindsay Campbell’s book, City of Forests, City of Farms: Sustainability Planning for New York’s Nature, which juxtaposes and contrasts these two distinct but interrelated conceptions of nature in the city that rose to prominence in the Bloomberg Era. In so doing, Campbell provides insight on the complex interplay between politics and biological and social ecologies, and raises critical questions as to who ultimately benefits from sustainability initiatives.
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Erica Wagner's Chief Engineer: Washington Roebling, The Man Who Built the Brooklyn Bridge
Reviewed by Richard Howe
The name Roebling is so closely bound up with the Brooklyn Bridge that it’s probably worth saying at the outset of this review that Erica Wagner’s Chief Engineer: Washington Roebling: The Man Who Built the Brooklyn Bridge(Bloomsbury, 2017) really is a biography of the man and not — as might be said of David McCullough’s classic The Great Bridge (Simon & Schuster, 1972) — a biography of the bridge. The eldest son of the bridge’s designer and promoter, John A. Roebling, Washington Roebling was born on May 26, 1837, in Saxonburg, Pennsylvania, and died shortly past his eighty-ninth birthday, on July 21, 1926, in Trenton, New Jersey. He served as chief engineer for the construction of what was then known as the East River Bridge for nearly fourteen years, from shortly after his father’s death on July 22, 1869, until he resigned the position not long after the bridge was opened to the public on May 24, 1883 (his assistant C. C. Martin was appointed in his place on July 9, 1883). Washington Roebling was thirty-two when he was appointed chief engineer for the Brooklyn Bridge; he lived another forty-three years after leaving that post. Though it was his position with the bridge project that secured him a place in the history of New York, seventy-five of his eighty-nine years were not spent on the great bridge, and it is perhaps the greatest merit of Erica Wagner’s book that it would be a fascinating and moving read even if its subject had never been chief engineer of the Brooklyn Bridge. I would almost go so far as to say that it might have been an even more fascinating and moving read had he not been.
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Parable of the Bees: Leslie Day's Honeybee Hotel
Reviewed by Rebecca Dalzell
In 2012, the Waldorf-Astoria built six beehives in a rooftop garden. Twenty stories above Park Avenue, 300,000 bees pollinated flowering apple and cherry trees, and produced jugs of honey. Its flavor depended on the season: in the spring, it was light and minty; come fall, it darkened as bees foraged on aster and goldenrod. This miel de Manhattan made its way into cocktails, bread, and gelato served in the hotel restaurants.
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The Medium and the Message: Sara Blair's How the Other Half Looks
Reviewed by Aaron Shkuda
Visitors to Seward Park on Manhattan’s Lower East Side from July 2018 through July 2019 can view “Mom-and-Pops of the L.E.S.,” a project by the photographers James and Karla Murray. The installation is a trompe l'oeil storefront, a cube containing four large-format prints of the couple’s photographs of the vanishing businesses of the Lower East Side. These include a delicatessen modeled on the façade of the still-extant Katz’s, but meant to stand in for any of the shuttered Jewish delis across the city. This project, with its mix of Lower East Side iconography, nostalgia for a lost immigrant New York, and the complicated, multiply-mediated encounters it inspires, is an appropriate companion to Sara Blair’s powerful and compelling new book, How the Other Half Looks: The Lower East Side and the Afterlives of Images.
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Cracks in the Pre-Invented World: Disaster, Art and the Sublime in New York, 1970 to 1992.
By Jeffrey Patrick Colgan & Jeffrey Escoffier
When artist and writer David Wojnarowicz returned to New York City in 1979 from a lengthy stay with his sister in Paris, he used office equipment to print a large cutout of the face of poet Arthur Rimbaud, a cigarette to burn two narrow eye-holes, and a knife to carve out a gently sloping mouth. Long inspired by the French poet’s life and work, Wojnarowicz sought to impersonate the poet in order to stage his own coming-of-age among the city’s ruins and cultural underground. He used his friends as models and staged scenes that inserted the fragile, pale face of Rimbaud into the dirty confusion of 1970s New York.
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Working for the Public: Black Firefighters and the FDNY
Reviewed by Nick Juravich
David Goldberg’s Black Firefighters in the FDNY opens in court, where Judge Nicholas Garaufis of the Eastern District ruled in 2012 that the New York City Fire Department “knowingly and intentionally implemented and maintained racially discriminatory hiring processes throughout its history.” It is this history of segregation, and of resistance to it, that Goldberg chronicles masterfully, from firehouse fistfights to fraternal organizations to federal litigation. Black firefighters faced tremendous obstacles; as Goldberg explains in the introduction, “no group of white workers better exemplifies the prolonged nature of white resistance and recalcitrance to Black equality more than white firefighters and their politically powerful and influential union, the International Association of Firefighters.” Black firefighters responded by building “a tradition of resistance, militancy, and race consciousness” both inside and beyond their profession, which generated “intergenerational activism, civic and community-centered coalition building, and the immersion and intersection of their struggle with local and national Black freedom movements.”
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Lincoln’s Near Duel-to-the-Death with an Irish Rival
By Niall O'Dowd
Abraham Lincoln’s long-standing and colorful history with the children of Ireland played a major role in his political rise, his presidency, and ultimately the Union victory in the Civil War. Much of that history has never been told, such as the near duel between Lincoln and rival — and future Union general — James Shields, reminiscent of Hamilton — Burr.
Excerpted from Lincoln and the Irish: The Untold Story of How the Irish Helped Abraham Lincoln Save the Union with author's permission. Copyright © 2018 Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.
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