Bringing Harlem to the Schools: Langston Hughes’s The First Book of Negroes and Crafting a Juvenile Readership

By Jonna Perrillo

Chapter 5 of Educating Harlem examines Langston Hughes’s production of the often-overlooked The First Book of Negroes as a vantage point into how the author transformed ideas, images, and business practices that he developed as a young Harlem Renaissance writer to educate children during the Cold War. Moreover, thinking about the book’s readership provides a view into the politics of the books Harlem and New York City children otherwise were reading in 1950s classrooms. Hughes’s political critiques in The First Book of Negroes dated to some of his most seminal works as a writer in the Harlem Renaissance. Throughout his life and career, Hughes remained committed to the same questions that thrived at the heart of the Renaissance, including: What constitutes black culture and art? What are the responsibilities of the black artist to himself and his or her community? Can cultivating a black readership serve as a pathway to community advancement? And what is the role of a black aesthetic—and the black diaspora—within a larger U.S. culture? Now, he translated these questions into a genre for the people he saw as the most vulnerable and most in need of nuanced and humane accounts of black experience and accomplishment: children.

Education, Manhattan, Race & EthnicityGuest UserMarch 24, 2020Comment

Interview with Ansley Erickson, co-editor of Educating Harlem: A Century of Schooling and Resistance in a Black Community

Interview with Ansley Erikson, co-editor of Educating Harlem: A Century of Schooling and Resistance in a Black Community

Interviewed by Dominique Jean-Louis

This week on Gotham we hear from the Harlem Education History Project (HEHP), a multi-platform program at Columbia University that includes a digital collection, exhibits, and the recently published Educating Harlem: A Century of Schooling and Resistance in a Black Community, as well as many other resources for teaching the history of education. Today, Dominique Jean-Louis interviews the Project’s co-director, Ansley T. Erickson, co-editor of the book.

Education, Interviews, Manhattan, Race & Ethnicity, Poverty & InequalityGuest UserMarch 23, 2020Comment

The “Tavern on the Green”: How a Central Park Landmark Epitomizes Colonial New York City’s Urban Development

By Vaughn Scribner

The Tavern on the Green restaurant is an icon of New York City. Nestled in the seemingly-rustic, yet carefully-planned confines of Central Park, the building began life in 1870 as a shelter for the park’s grazing sheep.[1] In 1934, park officials transformed the building into a restaurant. Since then, various families bought into the business, and made renovations like a dance floor, glass-enclosed Crystal Room, and a new patio.[2] Beyond offering a diverse array of cocktails, main courses, and appetizers, however, much of the restaurant’s enduring popularity owes itself to setting: the Tavern on the Green is a carefully-crafted combination of urban and rural life; a “hybrid” space where customers feel like they’re escaping the gray, crowded confines of the city, but still have access to the entertainment and sociability for which New York City is famed.[3] But the Tavern on the Green does not just represent fantasy, or a New York that “never was.” On the contrary, the Tavern on the Green harkens back to the second half of the eighteenth-century, when New York City’s residents fostered an urban culture predicated upon a thriving network of taverns and green spaces which offered residents the hospitalities of city life within a bucolic, relaxing, and intentionally-constructed “natural” environment.

British Era, Manhattan, Nature & Environment, Urban PlanningGuest UserMarch 19, 2020Comment

“An American Organization, a Hundred Per Cent”: The Competing Legacies of New York’s First Neo-Nazis, the National Renaissance Party

By Anna Duensing

In July 1963, the New York branch of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) organized demonstrations in the Bronx to protest hiring discrimination at White Castle hamburger stands. An “undercurrent of racism” existed throughout the North, stressed James Farmer, National Director of CORE.

Postwar New York, Race & EthnicityGuest UserMarch 17, 2020Comment

Presumed Criminal: Black Youth and the Justice System in Postwar New York

Reviewed by Emily Brooks

Black and Hispanic or Latino youth are dramatically overrepresented in the city’s detention facilities. In addition to their overrepresentation in youth detention, black teens are also far more likely than whites to experience police brutality or harassment. Some of the widely-publicized examples include, mostly recently, a horde of NYPD drawing their guns and violently arresting an unarmed black teen on a crowded subway car, and officers filmed punching black teenagers in the face while supposedly breaking up a fight. From cell phone footage and Facebook posts to records produced by youth detention facilities and scholarly research in various disciplines, a substantial body of material attests to the over-criminalization and under-protection of youth of color, particularly black youth, in contemporary NYC. For anyone looking to understand the historical roots of our contemporary regime of racialized youth criminalization, Carl Suddler’s Presumed Criminal: Black Youth and the Justice System in Postwar New York will be essential reading.

Crime & Policing, Postwar New York, Race & Ethnicity, ReviewsGuest UserMarch 12, 2020Comment

The Carleton Commission and Evidence of Arson in the Great New York Fire of 1776

By Bruce Twickler

In October of 1783, just six weeks before the British evacuated New York, the Commander-in Chief-of the British forces, Sir Guy Carleton, commissioned a panel of three British officers to investigate the disastrous fire that devastated the city seven years earlier. Shortly after midnight on September 21, 1776, fire had erupted in lower Manhattan. By daybreak it had consumed five hundred buildings – including schools, churches, warehouses and homes – and caused more destruction than all the previous colonial fires in New York combined.

American Revolution, ManhattanGuest UserMarch 10, 2020Comment

The Unexpected Logic of Art Economics: Arts and Inequality in 1980s New York

By Sarah Miller-Davenport

When Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc was installed in Federal Plaza in Lower Manhattan’s Foley Square in 1981, it was meant to be a pioneering work of public art that would expose New York’s masses to post-minimalist sculpture. Tilted Arc would indeed become one of the most legendary sculptures in 20th century history—but not for its artistic merit.

Arts & Culture, Contemporary Era, Urban Decline & Fiscal CrisisGuest UserMarch 5, 2020Comment

Parkchester: An Interview with Jeffrey S. Gurock

Interviewed by Katie Uva

Today on the blog, editor Katie Uva talks to Jeffrey Gurock about his recent book, Parkchester: A Bronx Tale of Race and Ethnicity. In it, Gurock combines his personal experience growing up in Parkchester with research into the history of this planned community in the Bronx, and offers an interpretation both of Parkchester’s uniqueness and what it reveals about the broader city.

Bronx, Interviews, Postwar New York, Housing & RealtyGuest UserMarch 3, 2020Comment

Joseph Kennedy and the New York Underworld during Prohibition

By Ellen NicKenzie Lawson

Owney Madden, Joseph Bonanno, Frank Costello, and the Lower East Side’s Lansky-Siegel gang all claimed to have ties with Joseph Kennedy, father of the future U.S. President, during Prohibition. The Kennedys have consistently maintained that ‘the patriarch’ was neither a smuggler nor a bootlegger, and so has David Nasaw, Kennedy’s most recent biographer — neither in New England, where he lived until the eighth year of Prohibition, nor in metropolitan New York, where he lived and worked thereafter.

Crime & PolicingGuest UserFebruary 28, 2020 Comments

How Prohibition Killed the Bowery

By Alice Sparberg Alexiou

Back in the days when the Bowery epitomized New York at its grittiest, most honkey-tonk, warm-hearted best—between the end of the Civil War and World War I—nothing was more important to the well being of the street’s motley population of artists, actors, immigrant poor, and bums than the saloon. Yes, the saloon. It was a Bowery institution. During the Bowery’s peak years, the 1890s, the street boasted nearly 100 saloons, each with its own clientele and reasons for existing. In the days of Tammany, specific saloons functioned as political clubhouses; there were “concert saloons,” where the races mingled and drank and sang and had a grand old time, singing and dancing to songs with dirty lyrics banged out on rinky-dink pianos, and waitresses doubled as prostitutes. In some saloons, homesick German and Irish immigrants found compatriots with whom to drink away their pain. And other saloons were like drunken old grandmothers who gathered all those Bowery bums into their beery bosoms and comforted them, providing shelter and the chance to convene with other bummy alcoholics, all of whom had run away to the Bowery from all over the country and the world with a specific purpose: to drink among others who were just like them.

Manhattan, Crime & Policing, Poverty & InequalityGuest UserFebruary 27, 2020 Comment