Gabe: A Tribute to the U.S. Merchant Mariner Veterans of World War II

By Johnathan Thayer

The American Merchant Marine Veterans Association (AMMV) has worked on behalf of merchant mariner veterans of World War II since its founding in 1984. Representing a “Voice for the American Merchant Mariner” and advocating for just compensation and recognition for merchant mariner veterans of WWII and other wars, the the New York and New Jersey chapters of the AMMV have hosted countless meetings and celebrations for decades. Sadly, they have also lent their services to memorial remembrances for chapter members who have passed away. It is with a heavy heart that the New York City-based Edwin J. O’Hara chapter recently did so recently for Gabriel “Gabe” Frank, who passed away on January 29th.

Brooklyn, Waterfront & IslandsGuest UserApril 7, 2020 Comment

The Lawyer and the Fox: A Tale of Tricks and Treachery in New Amsterdam

By Jaap Jacobs

Historians of New Netherland have largely viewed Adriaen van der Donck positively, portraying him as a conduit for enlightened Dutch tolerance into North America. But this image of Adriaen van der Donck is hard to reconcile with the historical record. In fact, many aspects of his life point the other way. Van der Donck’s exile from Breda, his marriage to a daughter of a puritan minister from England, and his continuing membership of the Calvinist church suggest that his engagement in colonial projects stemmed from religious motives very like other New England colonists: the desire to create a safe haven overseas, free from persecution. If so, Van der Donck entertained religious ideas quite similar to those of Petrus Stuyvesant.

New Amsterdam, PoliticsGuest UserApril 2, 2020Comment

New York’s Memory Palace: An Interview with Blagovesta Momchedjikova

Interviewed by Katie Uva

The Panorama of the City of New York is an enormous scale model of all five New York City boroughs. It has 895,000 structures in the scale of 1:1200 (1 inch = 100 feet, making the Empire State Building only 15 inches tall on the model) and stretches over 9,335 square feet in the Queens Museum. Commissioned for the New York World’s Fair of 1964/65 by the infamous city planner Robert Moses, the Panorama took one hundred people three years to build from geological and survey maps, and aerial photographs. It was created in 273 sections offsite under the supervision of Ray Lester, a long-time model maker for Moses, and his company Lester Associates. The Panorama was installed in 1964 in the same space it occupies today, in what was then the New York City Pavilion and is now the Queens Museum. There, fairgoers experienced the miniature metropolis as a short helicopter ride with a pre-recorded narration.

Interviews, QueensGuest UserMarch 31, 2020Comment

Remembering Michael Sorkin

A tribute to the giant architectural critic, taken on Thursday by COVID-19.

Peter-Christian AignerMarch 28, 2020Comment

Building Communities of Inquiry: Learning with the Harlem Education History Project

By Nick Juravich
I started with the Harlem Education History Project (HEHP) in the fall of 2013 as a newly minted doctoral candidate. Fresh from my exams and starting my dissertation research, I had the unique opportunity to participate in both sides of the emerging project, which today appear on the home page as the book and the digital collection. Despite the embryonic nature of my own project, co-directors Ansley T. Erickson and Ernest Morrell invited me to contribute to the inaugural scholarly workshop that served as their first step toward the edited volume. That same fall, I signed up to audit “Digital Harlem Research Collaborative” (DHRC), Erickson’s first HEHP course, a deep, yearlong dive into the worlds of digital, public, and Harlem history.

Education, ManhattanGuest UserMarch 26, 2020Comment

Intermediate School 201: Race, Space, and Modern Architecture in Harlem

By Marta Gutman

Faced with intransigent bureaucracy, struggling schools, deteriorating buildings, and entrenched racial segregation, parents in Harlem demanded direct control over the core functions of public education in the 1950s and 1960s. One new building became a flashpoint in the battle for community control—Intermediate School (IS) 201, the infamous windowless school that abuts the Park Avenue railroad viaduct two blocks north of East 125th Street, straddling Central Harlem and East Harlem. White architects and politicians, including the mayor, John Lindsay, rallied to defend “Harlem’s besieged masterpiece,” but parents in Harlem disagreed.[1] The location and the architecture, which many of them opposed, stood as a constant reminder of their unmet demands, from exclusion in policy making to broken promises of integration.

Education, Manhattan, Race & EthnicityGuest UserMarch 25, 2020Comment

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