Roar, Lion, Roar: Columbia Football History

By Joanna Rios and Jocelyn Wilk

This fall, the staff of the Columbia University Archives curated an exhibition at the Rare Book & Manuscript Library's Chang Octagon entitled "Roar, Lion, Roar: A Celebration of Columbia Football" (August 26-December 20, 2019). It's been a labor of love for us and we are thrilled to share the stories, artwork, photographs, and documents that tell the history of one of the oldest college football programs in the country. Our exhibit consists of six wall cases and three display cubes. It is not the biggest of spaces, but in it, we are able to showcase the places, the people, and the high and low points of this distinguished athletic program. But not everything can make it into the exhibit.

Guest UserOctober 31, 2019Comment

The American Museum of Natural History and How It Got That Way

Reviewed by Steven H. Jaffe

One of the privileges of growing up in New York City, or of visiting the city at a young age, is the opportunity to be exposed to the magic of the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH). Long before e-games, the internet, or even radio and television, the museum’s treasures brought to life the creatures and peoples of the world and the wonders of the universe. Admittedly, recent confrontations with activists protesting the racial politics of the museum’s Theodore Roosevelt Memorial statue on Central Park West and the outdated portrayal of Native Americans in its galleries, as well as critical assessments by scholars, point up just how profoundly AMNH and other museums founded in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries nurtured some of our most toxic assumptions. The museum’s past trustees, directors, curators, and designers played pivotal roles in bringing to public life a referential framework that classified all non-European peoples as “other” and in some sense “primitive.” (Evidently, non-Europeans, no matter how complex or dynamic their cultures, fell under the rubric of “Natural History,” just like orangutans, jellyfish, or dinosaurs—a fate avoided by European societies and their offshoots, and a categorization that still burdens museums in this century.)

Peter-Christian AignerOctober 29, 2019Comment

Tudor City: Manhattan’s Historic Residential Enclave

By Lawrence R. Samuel

Walk east a few blocks from Grand Central Station along 42nd Street, take the stairs near the Church of the Covenant and voila!—you’ve entered another world. Tudor City—the five-acre faux medieval village, albeit with high-rise apartment buildings—is on the far east side of midtown Manhattan between First and Second Avenues and 40th and 43rd Streets, right around the corner from the United Nations. Tudor City is not just the architectural masterpiece created by real estate developer Fred F. French and the first residential skyscraper complex in the world; it’s a unique community that has played a significant role in the history of New York City over nearly the past century. The story of the “city within a city,” as it quickly became known, tells us much about life in Manhattan since the late 1920s, when the development came into being.

Manhattan, Urban Planning, Housing & RealtyGuest UserOctober 24, 2019Comment

A Penny Earned is a Penny Saved: Pratt Institute’s “Thrift”

By Sandra Roff

There have been recent articles in the press concerning the fact that children do not save their money.

A recent New York Times article stated that the average weekly allowance is a whopping $30 a week but only 3% of parents reported that their children saved any of the money. Let’s turn back the clock one hundred and thirty-two years, to 1887 Brooklyn, New York, when Charles Pratt, a businessman turned philanthropist founded Pratt Institute to educate both men and women. On Founder’s Day at Pratt in 1889, Mr. Pratt announced, “that an association, to be called the Pratt Institute Thrift Association, which for convenience will be known as the Thrift, will be organized at once.” This new association was formed to help people in general, but particularly young people in saving and wisely investing their earnings.

Peter-Christian AignerOctober 22, 2019Comment

Material Politics of New York: From the Mafia’s Concrete Club to ISIS

By Vyta Baselice

Concrete receives far less attention than cocaine. And it seems for good reason as the two substances are most different: one is a building material while the other is a highly addictive drug; one is legal while the other is not; one materializes environments, like homes, offices, schools, and infrastructure while the other destroys families and communities. It is only in their beginnings as off-white powder that they appear to share any commonality. But what if I told you that politics around the two particles of dust was not especially different? What if I unearthed that concrete — much like cocaine — is embedded in histories of violence, illicit activity, and social and environmental harm?

Crime & Policing, Postwar New YorkPeter-Christian AignerOctober 17, 2019 Comment

The Piano in the Sukkah: Early Twentieth Century Immigrant Jewish Piano Culture in New York

By Sarah Litvin

In 1905, the Yiddish language New York newspaper Yiddishes Tageblatt reported on a new trend in the city’s Lower East Side, “The Greenhorn of Plenty: The Piano in the Sukkah.” Jewish families were hauling parlor pianos to rooftops to incorporate them into the fall harvest festival Sukkoth, the article explained. At the time, New York City was exploding as the center of the country’s bustling piano trade and its largest immigrant city. The peak year of immigration was in 1907 when 1.7 newcomers arrived, and the peak year of piano production was in 1909, when 364,545 pianos were sold. By 1910, more American homes had a piano than a bathtub.

Religion, Arts & Culture, Gender & SexualityPeter-Christian AignerOctober 15, 2019Comment

When the Cops were Spies, and the Terrorists were Everywhere

By David Viola

Just after dawn on February 16th, 1965, two men drove a late-model Chevy through cold, quiet Bronx streets. Robert Steele Collier, twenty-eight, was an Air Force veteran who had received an other-than-honorable discharge after slashing a man in a London knife fight. In the years since his discharge, he had made his way to New York City and become involved in the more militant side of the Civil Rights movement. Even the belligerent Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM), which he joined, proved too faint-hearted for his taste.

Postwar New York, Crime & PolicingPeter-Christian AignerOctober 10, 2019Comment

“Citizen Power” Rebuilds East Brooklyn: The Nehemiah Housing Plan in the 1980s

By Dennis Deslippe

The jubilant mood of the five thousand people gathered on an October day in 1982 to break ground for a housing project in the Brownsville area of Brooklyn contrasted sharply with the surrounding vacant lots and abandoned walkups. As the crowd of African Americans, Hispanics, and white ethnics cheered, New York mayor Ed Koch lauded the East Brooklyn Congregations (EBC) for its construction of affordable two- and three-bedroom single-family houses. To the shouts of “EBC!” Mayor Koch led the countdown, from ten to zero, as the bulldozer dug into the ground to create the foundation for the first house. Dubbed the “Nehemiah Plan” after the biblical prophet who rebuilt Jerusalem, its organizers sought to transform neighborhoods whose deterioration matched that of the South Bronx as a national example of urban decay.

Religion, Housing & Realty, BrooklynPeter-Christian AignerOctober 8, 2019 Comment

Voices of Queensbridge: Pedagogical Overview of an Oral History Project

Adapted from writing in Voice of Queensbridge: Stories from the Nation’s Largest Public Housing Development

By Molly Rosner

In the fall of 2018, a group of LaGuardia Community College students embarked on a year-long project to document the experiences of New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) residents. This project was funded by the Robert D. L. Gardiner Foundation. These stories were aimed at enriching the LaGuardia and Wagner Archives’ NYCHA collection, which until this project only reflected the agency’s perspective on public housing. The vastness of public housing in New York City necessitated that the students focus on one public housing project and Queensbridge Houses, the nation’s largest public housing development, were selected due to abundant documentation of the development, and its vicinity to the college.

Interviews, Housing & Realty, Contemporary EraPeter-Christian AignerOctober 3, 2019Comment

Density’s Child: How Housing Density Shaped New York

By Katie Uva

New York is a city defined by its density. Manhattan, with its unique geographical constraints, grew rapidly over the course of the 19th century; by 1890, Jacob Riis noted in How the Other Half Lives that the borough as a whole held 73,299 people per square mile and the Tenth Ward, the densest portion of the Lower East Side, held 334,080 people per square mile. This density was visible in multiple ways; in the innovative, epoch-defining skyscrapers that began to jut out of the Battery and Midtown but also cast worrying shadows on pedestrians below; in the tenement districts with their vibrant street life and their disturbing tuberculosis and fire rates. The 20th century would prove to be a time of experimentation and contestation when it came to density. New York would grow further outwards and further upwards, and would be shaped by the tension between density and sprawl.

Housing & Realty, Built Environment, ReviewsPeter-Christian AignerSeptember 26, 2019Comment

Gotham

Roar, Lion, Roar: Columbia Football History

The American Museum of Natural History and How It Got That Way

Tudor City: Manhattan’s Historic Residential Enclave

A Penny Earned is a Penny Saved: Pratt Institute’s “Thrift”

Material Politics of New York: From the Mafia’s Concrete Club to ISIS

The Piano in the Sukkah: Early Twentieth Century Immigrant Jewish Piano Culture in New York

When the Cops were Spies, and the Terrorists were Everywhere

“Citizen Power” Rebuilds East Brooklyn: The Nehemiah Housing Plan in the 1980s

Voices of Queensbridge: Pedagogical Overview of an Oral History Project

Density’s Child: How Housing Density Shaped New York