Review: God in Gotham: The Miracle of Religion in Modern Manhattan
Reviewed by Kenneth T. Jackson
When we think of New York and history, religion is not typically the first thing that comes to mind. Organized crime perhaps, or skyscrapers, or labor disputes, or nightclubs, legitimate theaters, museums, subways, Wall Street, wealth, poverty, the list could be endless. To most people, Gotham is more associated with sin than with morality, more with prostitution than with sermons, more with sports venues than with churches.
Read MoreDecline, Rebellion, and Police Politics: Rethinking the Dissolution of New York’s Civil Rights Coalition
Reviewed by Joseph Kaplan
In his final book before his life was taken by an assassin’s bullet, Martin Luther King Jr. reflected on the state of the Civil Rights Movement and the conditional allyship of whites. According to King, whites generally believed “that American society is essentially hospitable to fair play and to steady growth toward a middle-class Utopia embodying racial harmony.” Emerging from a decade of unprecedented mobility in which a highly unionized white labor force entered the middle class en masse, many viewed the Civil Rights Movement as part of the unbroken march of progress.
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Review: New York, New Music, 1980-1986, Museum of the City of New York
Reviewed by Jeffrey Escoffier
The Museum of the City of New York has opened an ongoing exhibition, New York, New Music, 1980-1986, covering the full range of new music from modernist avant-garde to rock — punk, new wave, no wave & noise — to salsa, hip hop, and pop. The exhibit not only commemorates the numerous musical pioneers and performers that thrived in New York during this period, celebrates the dozens of venues that provided stages for the musical performances, and shows the interaction between musicians, visual artists, designers, and cultural entrepreneurs, it also situates the music of 1980s New York in time and place.
Read MoreFriends and Foes in the Real Estate Industry: A Review of Dan Garodnick’s Saving Stuyvesant Town
Reviewed by Kevin Ritter
Stuyvesant Town, a middle income housing development on Manhattan’s East Side, has been a consistent site of conflict and controversy in New York City since its creation in the 1940s. Dan Garodnick’s new book, Saving Stuyvesant Town: How One Community Defeated the Worst Real Estate Deal in History, covers the story of the development from its origins as a postwar housing development built on top of the former Gashouse District, which ha been cleared of its residents through eminent domain, to 21st century real estate dealings that threatened to displace many of the property’s rent stabilized tenants in favor of new market-rate residents.
Read MoreWasted City: A History of Waste and Water Pollution in New York City
Reviewed by Erik Wallenberg
Coastal cities face a dizzying array of environmental problems, from rising seas due to climate change chaos, to polluted waters endangering fish, wildlife, and drinking water. New York City, rocked by Superstorm Sandy and struggling to rebuild a harbor ecosystem that can sustain edible fish and shellfish populations, is ripe for historical examination as environmental crises increase. Throughout its modern lifetime, New York harbor has experienced waste dumping, toxic pollution, a changing coastline, and growth as an international shipping port with attendant dredging issues, all of which we might look to for current context, historical lessons, and to help us better understand our relationship within this ecosystem.
Read MoreDid All Jews Become White Folks?:
A Fortress in Brooklyn and Hasidic Williamsburg
Reviewed by Gabe S. Tennen
In A Fortress in Brooklyn: Race, Real Estate, and the Makings of Hasidic Williamsburg, Nathaniel Deutsch and Michael Casper add an important wrinkle into prevalent understandings of American Jewish history. Deutsch and Casper focus their text on the Hasidic Satmar sect and its creation of a “holy city of Jerusalem” in one corner of north Brooklyn, tracing that community from its nascent beginnings in the 1940s into the 21st century. By offering a detailed and crisply written account of this often discussed but largely underexamined group, the authors provide a caveat to nearly fifty years of scholarship.
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