Percy Loomis Sperr and the Total Photographic Documentation of New York City, 1924-45
By Susan Smith-Peter
Using crutches because of an early bout with meningitis, Percy Loomis Sperr managed to photograph nearly all of New York City from the 1920s to the 1940s. Sperr sought to document and preserve the city as fully as possible. He was interested in telling the story of New York through the lives and environments of everyday people. This work brought him into contact with important photographers such as Berenice Abbott and, to a lesser extent, Walker Evans. And his work has deeply shaped our vision of this New York City during the Jazz Age and Depression era.
The Journalism of Style: How New York’s Fashion Editors Set The Stage For Fashion Reporting
By Kimberly Wilmot Voss
New York City’s deep fashion history created the foundation for the American fashion industry, though often missing from that story is the influence of newspaper fashion editors. Within the first few decades of the 20th century, these editors began to forge important shifts on how the fashion industry was reported on and who got to do that very reporting. For example, in the 1930s, when only fashion magazine reporters and store buyers were permitted in fashion shows, Milwaukee Journal fashion editor Aileen Ryan elbowed her way into New York City shows by simply ignoring the rule.
Friends and Foes in the Real Estate Industry: A Review of Dan Garodnick’s Saving Stuyvesant Town
Reviewed by Kevin Ritter
Stuyvesant Town, a middle income housing development on Manhattan’s East Side, has been a consistent site of conflict and controversy in New York City since its creation in the 1940s. Dan Garodnick’s new book, Saving Stuyvesant Town: How One Community Defeated the Worst Real Estate Deal in History, covers the story of the development from its origins as a postwar housing development built on top of the former Gashouse District, which ha been cleared of its residents through eminent domain, to 21st century real estate dealings that threatened to displace many of the property’s rent stabilized tenants in favor of new market-rate residents.
Excerpt: The Barbizon: The Hotel That Set Women Free
By Paulina Bren
There were two types of office-bound women. There were the secretaries who flooded New York’s shiny new skyscrapers in the 1920s and then hung on as best they could through the Great Depression. And then there were the women who had not just jobs but careers. Betsy Talbot Blackwell, or BTB, as she signed herself, was one of them.
In Saved at the Seawall: Stories from the September 11 Boat Lift (Cornell University Press, 2021), Jessica DuLong reveals the dramatic story of how the New York Harbor maritime community heroically delivered stranded commuters, residents, and visitors out of harm's way.
The Gotham Center is excited to announce our new partnership with Untapped New York. This partnership will include joint programming as well as a Gotham column in Untapped New York’s monthly newsletter highlighting some of the projects, programs, and scholarship coming out the of the Gotham Center.
Twenty years after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the novel Rockaway Blue(Cornell UP, 2021) probes the griefs, trauma and resilience of Irish American New Yorkers wresting with the deaths and aftershocks of that terrible day. The book weaves throughout New York City, from the Midtown North precinct in Manhattan to Arab American Brooklyn, but it is so grounded in the Irish section of Rockaway in the borough of Queens that Rockaway itself becomes a kind of character.
Wasted City: A History of Waste and Water Pollution in New York City
Reviewed by Erik Wallenberg
Coastal cities face a dizzying array of environmental problems, from rising seas due to climate change chaos, to polluted waters endangering fish, wildlife, and drinking water. New York City, rocked by Superstorm Sandy and struggling to rebuild a harbor ecosystem that can sustain edible fish and shellfish populations, is ripe for historical examination as environmental crises increase. Throughout its modern lifetime, New York harbor has experienced waste dumping, toxic pollution, a changing coastline, and growth as an international shipping port with attendant dredging issues, all of which we might look to for current context, historical lessons, and to help us better understand our relationship within this ecosystem.
James Rivington: Music Purveyor in Revolutionary New York
By Lance Boos
Printer and bookseller James Rivington arrived in New York in the autumn of 1760 with a hoard of books, pamphlets, sheet music, and instruments ready for sale. Rivington (the namesake of Rivington Street in lower Manhattan) went on to become a prominent figure in New York: he was a fervent Loyalist propagandist during the American Revolution, a spy for the Americans late in the war, and one of the first merchants in the American colonies to import and advertise a significant amount of music.