The Toughest Gun Control Law in the Nation: The Unfulfilled Promise of New York’s SAFE Act
Reviewed by Andrew C. McKevitt
When Governor Andrew Cuomo pushed a new gun control law, the Secure Ammunition and Firearms Enforcement (SAFE) Act, through the New York State Assembly in January 2013, just a month after the tragic mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut, critics said he acted in haste. Cuomo’s administration started drafting a bill before the New Year; it submitted the bill to the Assembly on January 13 and, utilizing a rare emergency measure, the governor signed it an incredible 18 hours later.
“The Lungs of the City”: Frederick Law Olmsted, Public Health, and the Creation of Central Park
By Lucie Levine
As the nation’s first great urban park, Central Park was conceived as “The Lungs of the City,” and built in 1858 as an oasis for “the sanitary advantage of breathing.” A half-century later, a letter to the editor of the New York Times glowed that “thousands visit the park daily just to breathe.” But today, “I can’t breathe” is the defining cry of the moment, as the city and the nation confronts both a global respiratory pandemic and the ongoing scourge of police brutality against black people.
Refuge in the Heights: Migration, Memory and Authoritarianism in the Twentieth Century
By Robert W. Snyder
Immigrants travel with baggage, and some of the most important things they carry are their memories of life in their original homes. In Washington Heights and Inwood, where immigrants include German Jews, Dominicans, and Jews from the former Soviet Union, personal and collective memories embrace an unusual cast of characters: some of the most brutal dictators of the 20th century. Upper Manhattan is haunted, you might say, by memories of Hitler, Trujillo, and Stalin.
New York is layered with ghosts. “It carries on its lapel,” E.B. White wrote, “the unexpungeable odor of the long past, so that no matter where you sit in New York you feel the vibrations of great times and tall deeds, of queer people and events and undertakings.” Holed up in the Algonquin Hotel, White compiled a brief compendium: “I am twenty-two blocks from where Rudolph Valentino lay in state, eight blocks from where Nathan Hale was executed, … thirty-four blocks from the street Willa Cather lived in when she came to New York to write books about Nebraska … (I could continue this list indefinitely); and for that matter I am probably occupying the very room that any number of exalted and somewise memorable characters sat in, some of them on hot, breathless afternoons, lonely and private and full of their own senses of emanations from without.”
The Gomez Family and Atlantic Patterns in the Development of New York's Jewish Community
By Noah L. Gelfand
On November 1, 1750, Mordecai Gomez, a member of one of North America’s most prominent Jewish mercantile families, died in New York City. According to a notice a few days later in the New-York Gazette, or Weekly Post-Boy, the sixty-two year old Gomez was “esteemed a fair Trader, and charitable to the Poor” who passed away “with an unblemish’d Character;” and who would be “deservedly lamented” by his large family and all his acquaintances.
The Corporate Campaign to Save Madison Square Park
By Benjamin Holtzman
In the late 1970s, after a decade of budget cuts had decimated the New York City park system, an ambitious former Parks Department official named Donald Simon came up with a radical plan to save Madison Square Park and — he hoped — parks across the city. Simon believed that the park’s setting in a Manhattan business district could catalyze the park’s revitalization. If the corporations whose headquarters overlooked the park could see how their fortunes were tied to the park’s conditions, Simon believed, they would contribute funds that could provide the maintenance, security, and management necessary to revive the park.
In Pursuit of Knowledge: An Interview with Kabria Baumgartner
Interviewed by Katie Uva
Today on the blog, editor Katie Uva speaks to Kabria Baumgartner, author of In Pursuit of Knowledge: Black Women and Educational Activism in Antebellum America. In her book, Baumgartner explores the origins of the fight for school desegregation in the 19th century Northeast by focusing on the stories of African American girls and women.
The Regional Nationalism of New York’s Literary World
By Alex Zweber Leslie
In the 1840s literary New York was electric. The city was booming, and its material success fueled a surge in cultural aspirations. A new generation of authors, including Herman Melville, joined an influx of emigres such as Edgar Allan Poe and Caroline Kirkland, while old standbys like Washington Irving became firmly canonical. An explosion of new magazines devoted to arts and politics meant that there were ever more writing in print and editorial sides to take. Boston may have still been the nation’s cultural capital, but New York was experiencing a renaissance that shifted the regional balance of cultural authority. It was a world of tightly-knit cliques, petty rivalries, inside gossip, playful pseudonymity, waggish jokes, and, most of all, youthful hopes for the future of literature in America.
Merchandising Modernism: New York City Department Stores in the 1920s
By Donald Albrecht and Thomas Mellins
America’s nearly two-century love affair with the department store has cooled dramatically in recent decades. E-commerce is the much-blamed culprit, but there have been other factors at play. As cities regained allure following the financial crisis of 2008, particularly for young professionals and well-heeled foreigners, suburban shopping malls anchored by department stores withered. Once the leading incubators of luxury brands and purveyors of their merchandise, department stores were forced to compete for shoppers with those very brands’ own freestanding boutiques as well as with lower-priced outlet stores.
Late in 1978, Peter McGough arrived in New York City, just when it was its most “dirty and dangerous.” He was 20 years old and had grown up in Syracuse. He came to attend the Fashion Institute of Technology but soon dropped out. He spent his tuition going to clubs like the Ninth Circle and Studio 54, drinking, taking drugs, and hanging out at the Chelsea Hotel with Village denizens like Cookie Mueller, the writer and John Waters actress, and fashion designer Michael Kors, a former classmate at FIT. For a while he made money doing odd jobs, sketching for fashion magazines, working at vintage shops, and eventually selling drink tickets at Danceteria. When he first became acquainted with the fledgling artist David McDermott, his friends warned him that McDermott was crazy.
