The Gould Memorial Library in the Bronx may be the most famous building in New York City that you’ve never heard of. It recently made an appearance in The Greatest Showman, the 2018 Hugh Jackman musical about the life of P. T. Barnum, as the setting for a glorious party, but unless you know what you’re looking at, you’d think it was an elaborate Hollywood stage set—not a library.
Read MoreIn 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.
Read MoreThe reign of Beaux-Arts architecture reshaped the landscape of the city at the turn of the century with grand public buildings that projected a new found sense of national power. The architects who embraced this style emphasized classicism, monumentality, and embellishment in their work, and were skilled at adapting historical precedents for modern building types. Following this mission to create civic symbols, Cass Gilbert conceived the custom house as a gateway to the nation. From its triumphal arched entry, and honorific statuary, to the heraldic imagery on its facade, it was expressly designed to evoke a passageway into a walled city. The allusion to a gate reflected a desire to proclaim the identity of the nation to the world, but it also suggested a point of controlled access through a border. It thus offered a suggestive precedent for the headquarters of the most important district of the federal customs service, which served as the guardian of the nation’s chief port of entry.
Read MoreThe leafy Brooklyn neighborhood of Carroll Gardens is nestled between Degraw Street (or Sackett, depending on your source) to the north and Hamilton Avenue to the south, bounded to the east by either Hoyt or Bond Street (again, answers may vary) and Hicks Street to the west. It’s just a small slice of the borough’s “brownstone belt,” but it packs a wallop, as any pizza enthusiast will tell you. With its deep front lawns, stoop-sitters, and tiny pasticcerias, Carroll Gardens is a unique corner of the city, to be sure — but, in many respects, its past and present tell us much about New York City as a whole.
Read MoreVisitors 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.
Read MoreWhen 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.
Read MoreDavid 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.”
Read MoreToday on Gotham, Peter-Christian Aigner speaks with Britt Haas about her new book, Fighting Authoritarianism: American Youth Activism in the 1930s, exploring the lives of young radicals in New York City and their attempts to create a free, democratic society amid the Great Depression.
Read MoreIn Olmsted and Vaux’s Greensward Plan, the only sculpture was one atop the fountain at the center of Bethesda Terrace. The commission for the sculpture was given in 1863 to Emma Stebbins (1815-1882), an American-born sculptor working in Rome who happened to be the sister of a member of the Board of Commissioners of Central Park.
This post is an excerpt from the author's new book, Central Park: The Early Years.
Read MoreAbraham 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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