Kara Murphy Schlichting Interviewed by Garrett Reed Gutierrez
In New York Recentered: Building the Metropolis from the Shore, Kara Murphy Schlichting offers a fresh perspective on New York City’s history by shifting readers’ gaze away from Manhattan and towards the coastal periphery—where local planning initiatives, waterfront park building, the natural environment, and a growing leisure economy each had a stake in the regional development of New York City. Schlichting’s regional and environmental approach frames New York’s extensive waterways as points of connection that unite, rather than divide, the urban core and periphery to one another.
In the twelve months before January 2021, 2,225 people were buried on Hart Island, New York City’s public burial ground. At a time when the Island’s operations are undergoing the most significant organizational changes in its modern history, that’s the highest number of such burials recorded since the 1918-1920 influenza pandemic.
The Invention of Public Space: An Interview with Mariana Mogilevich
Interviewed by Katie Uva
Today on the blog, editor Katie Uva speaks to Mariana Mogilevich about her recent book, The Invention of Public Space: Designing for Inclusion in Lindsay’s New York.Mogilevich discusses the 1960s and 1970s as a uniquely inventive time in the city for defining and conceptualizing the use of public space. At a time when New York was dealing with deindustrialization, economic decline, and suburbanization, the Lindsay Administration made a conscious effort to develop inviting public space and support public interaction in city spaces, an attempt to lift up the city’s density and shared space as an asset rather than a liability.
Forbs, Fungi, and Fading Memories: What Can Preserving a Disappearing Staten Island a Century Ago Teach Us Today?
By Melissa Zavala
Staten Island’s rich history of conservation is overshadowed by its reputation as a “dump,” most often associated with Fresh Kills, the notorious landfill which at its peak point of operations in the 1980s was considered the largest landfill in the world. A look through the Staten Island Museum’s archival collections, however — its founder’s letters, journals, publications, photographs, and a wide array of other objects including herbariums, assorted wet and dry collections of specimens, and more — reveals an island that has transformed radically.
Have you recently trekked to a farmers’ market for fresh produce? In this lockdown year, do you miss attending concerts at Carnegie Hall? A Broadway show? Have you enjoyed roaming through the romantic landscape of Central Park, or wandered the streets of the city’s historic districts? Do you go out of your way to experience the inspiring urban spaces of Grand Central Terminal? Are you invigorated when you head west to the Hudson River Park and marvel at the river’s recovery?
From 1899 to 1914, people around the world gave over 12,000 animals to the New York Zoological Park in the Bronx (almost 5,000 of them were snakes). Donations to the zoo fulfilled two purposes: they supplied the zoological park with more animals, and, perhaps more importantly, helped the zoo form a relationship with certain communities around them. This project is a focused look at a section of these animal donors, the people of New York City.
Erich Goode’s Taming of New York’s Washington Square: A Wild Civility
Reviewed By Stephen Petrus
Even during COVID-19, New York’s Washington Square Park maintains its quirky identity. Chances are on a visit you’ll still encounter locals, tourists, buskers, sunbathers, NYU students, dog walkers, chess players, homeless people, petty drug dealers, and maybe even Fartman, Pigeon Man, and the Squirrel Whisperer.
“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.
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.
