Jump Up! Caribbean Carnival Music in New York City

Reviewed by Gage Averill

It is fitting that it was two New Yorkers in the early 1930s, Harold Arlen and Ted Koehler, who composed the showtune “I Love a Parade,” because for all the diversity and excess of its public processions, there is likely no city anywhere that has exceeded New York. The home of the renowned ticker-tape parades, the Macy’s Day Parade, the St Patrick’s Day Parade, NYC Pride the Village Halloween Parade, and numerous ethnic celebrations (modeled on St. Patrick’s), New York City’s streetscapes have conferred both prestige and visibility on those who have been able to muster the necessary funding and authorizations and crowds. It is not without a powerful sense of the current moment, the Covid-19 pandemic, that I’ve taken on the otherwise enviable, and the now more somber, task of reviewing a book about some of the most raucous, colorful, noisy and crowded events in New York: Brooklyn’s Caribbean Carnival celebrations.

Arts & Culture, Brooklyn, Race & Ethnicity, ImmigrationGuest UserMay 28, 2020Comment

The New York City Overalls Parade, 1920

By Jonathan Goldman

New York City's "Overalls Parade," held on April 24, 1920 was, viewed generously, an inspired if quixotic attempt to inaugurate a new, labor-conscious political movement. From a more critical perspective, it was a neutered form of activism that undermined the progressive movements that had flourished over the previous two decades, now under threat at the start of the 1920s. In some respects, it even worked against the interests of labor. The "Economy Parade" – its official name never caught on – aimed to protest the rising cost of clothing as one instance of the rising cost of living in the postwar United States. Marchers, representing civic organizations and private clubs from multiple strata, wore overalls, a recent sartorial innovation, as a show of allegiance to democratic principles. Organized by the Cheese Club, a private social group whose members worked in theater, entertainment journalism, and publicity, the parade drew far fewer participants than predicted by its leaders and friendly journalists, and became a byword for failure.

Business & Labor, Progressive EraGuest UserMay 26, 2020Comment

Boss of the Grips: Interview with Eric K. Washington

Interviewed by Prithi Kanakamedala

Today on the blog, Prithi Kanakamedala talks to Eric K. Washington about his current work, Boss of the Grips: The Life of James H. Williams and the Red Caps of Grand Central Terminal. This book has garnered a great deal of praise, including citation as one of the Best Biographies of 2019 by Open Letters Review and special recognition from The Municipal Art Society of New York as a 2020 Brendan Gill Prize Finalist.

Interviews, Race & Ethnicity, TransportationGuest UserMay 21, 2020Comment

Civilian Anticrime Patrols in 1970s New York: Crime, Self-Help and Citizenship in the Neoliberal City

By Joe Merton

Recent scholarship has done much to illuminate the so-called “neoliberalization” of New York during the 1970s and 1980s, in which a bold midcentury experiment in urban social democracy was dismantled in the wake of the city’s fiscal crisis and replaced by an agenda of municipal austerity, business-oriented economic development, and market-led privatization.[1] Much of this work identifies this process as a top-down transformation led by the city’s financial and political elite and resisted by many New Yorkers.[2] But what if New Yorkers did not always resist or passively receive this process but actively perpetuated it themselves?

Crime & Policing, Urban Decline & Fiscal CrisisGuest UserMay 19, 2020Comment

At Play in Central Park’s Modern Landscapes: An Interview with Marie Warsh

Interviewed by Katie Uva

Today on the blog, Katie Uva talks to Marie Warsh, the Historian at the Central Park Conservancy and the author of the recently-published Central Park’s Adventure-Style Playgrounds: Renewal of a Midcentury Legacy. These playgrounds, which became popular in the 1960s and 1970s, demonstrate New York City’s effort to create dynamic, creative play spaces and also provide a window into the city’s history of public-private partnerships.

Interviews, Postwar New YorkGuest UserMay 14, 2020Comment

A Petition to Keep New York under Dutch Rule

By Wim Klooster

In 1664, the residents of New Amsterdam famously gave up their city—without a fight. But there was more resistance to surrendering the Dutch colony of New York in old Amsterdam. A remarkable group of men, nearly all merchants, joined hands in 1667, as the second Anglo-Dutch War was winding down, and petitioned the States General – the Dutch government – to demand restoration of New Netherland. Amazingly, this document and its seventy authors have never been analyzed.

New AmsterdamGuest UserMay 12, 2020Comment

A Murky Mess of Monuments in Crisis New York

By Todd Fine

Gonzalo Casals, New York City's new commissioner of the Department of Cultural Affairs (DCLA), begins work this week after recovering from the coronavirus. Hired to replace Tom Finkelpearl, who resigned after repeated controversies over an ambitious effort to build at least a dozen new historical monuments, Casals was tasked to bring the initiative to the "finish line” in the remaining twenty months of Mayor Bill de Blasio's second and final term.

Arts & Culture, Contemporary Era, PoliticsGuest UserMay 7, 2020Comment

Horace Greeley: Print, Politics, and the Failure of American Nationhood

Reviewed by John Bugg

How many New Yorkers could identify the large, weathered bronze statue of a journalist with a newspaper open across his lap that sits in City Hall Park, just off Chambers Street? Probably no more or less than could identify the equally imposing bronze statue of the same journalist, nestled in the park that bears his name on 32nd Street and Broadway, clutching a rolled newspaper at his side. The fact that Horace Greeley is honored by two large memorials in New York City testifies to his massive importance to the city’s history. That Greeley is hardly a household name in 2020, meanwhile, reveals that unlike other major figures in the history of New York, and unlike other prominent agents in the abolition movement, Greeley’s fame has receded sharply in the modern era. Receded, but not vanished: Greeley continues to appear in scholarly accounts of the importance of the press during the Civil War, and every few years he is the focus of a book-length study. He even made a cameo, trademark unkempt white hair and all, in Martin Scorsese’s 2002 Gangs of New York (based on Herbert Asbury’s 1928 book of the same name). Scorsese shows Greeley both walking through the notoriously violent “Five Points” and lounging in an opulent billiards room: though brief, these scenes together show Greeley’s presence in New York City as a kind of bridge between very different loci of power.

Antebellum & Civil War, ReviewsGuest UserMay 5, 2020Comment

Engineering America: The Life and Times of John A. Roebling

Richard Haw, interviewed by Beth Harpaz

The beloved Brooklyn Bridge was one of the most daring feats of 19th Century engineering. The man who designed it was equally daring and a paradox of personality: An oddball who engineered a structure that was a marvel of stability at a time when suspension bridges routinely fell down. Richard Haw, a professor in the Interdisciplinary Studies Program at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, has written two previous books about the Brooklyn Bridge. The focus of his latest – after 13 years of research – is the man behind the bridge. Engineering America: The Life and Times of John A. Roebling tells one of the most fascinating American immigrant stories. Haw talks about it with Beth Harpaz, editor of CUNY SUM.

Interviews, Podcasts, Brooklyn, Built EnvironmentGuest UserMay 1, 2020Comment

The Women of Atelier 17: Modernist Printmaking in Midcentury New York

Review by Jennifer Farrell

While there is certainly no dearth of scholarship on midcentury art in the United States, especially work made in New York City, this informative and important new book proves that there are still many areas in this period which demand further study. In The Women of Atelier 17, the independent historian Christina Weyl closely examines a world largely ignored in both art history and cultural studies—modernist printmaking and work done by female artists at the celebrated print studio when it operated in Gotham. Using archival sources, interviews, skillful visual analysis, as well as literature from a variety of fields (including art history, women’s studies, cultural studies, history, sociology, and other subjects), she considers both their work and influence, in this particular field and beyond it.

Arts & Culture, ReviewsGuest UserApril 30, 2020Comment