Rob Snyder becomes Manhattan Borough Historian

By Molly Rosner

On December 3, 2019, as a student jazz trio from LaGuardia High School for the Performing Arts played in the background, a group of local historians gathered at the New York Fire Museum to celebrate the appointment of Dr. Robert Snyder to Manhattan Borough Historian. The crowd – many of whom had worked together at different colleges and museums around the city – drank the signature cocktail, (appropriately a Manhattan) and examined the display of old fire trucks, art works, and Tiffany silver on display at the museum. The position of Borough Historian is an unpaid volunteer role first assigned under Borough President Robert Wagner in 1950.

Guest UserDecember 19, 2019Comment

Remembering the Activism Campaign that Made Samuel Battle the First Black NYPD Officer

By Matthew Guariglia

Dedicated in 2009, Samuel Battle Plaza, at the sprawling intersection at 135th Street and Lenox Avenue, commemorates Samuel Jesse Battle who, in 1911, became the first African American appointed to the NYPD. Presided over by embattled NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly, the dedication came near the height of the protest movement against the department’s disproportionate stopping and frisking of young men of color in the city. At a moment of mass community resistance to Kelly’s NYPD, renaming served a political purpose. Creating a visible landmark to Samuel Battle at that pivotal moment preserved a narrative of symbiosis between the people of Harlem and the NYPD.

Race & Ethnicity, Crime & PolicingGuest UserDecember 17, 2019Comment

Mapping a Queer New York: An Interview with Jen Jack Gieseking

Interviewed by Katie Uva

Today on the blog, Katie Uva interviews Jen Jack Gieseking about their mapping project, An Everyday Queer New York, a companion project to his book A Queer New York: Geographies of Lesbians, Dykes, and Queers, forthcoming in 2020. Jack discusses the challenges and opportunities in mapping as a way of understanding lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and queer (LGBTQ+) history in general, and the history of queer women and trans and gender non-conforming people (tgncp) in particular.

Gender & Sexuality, Contemporary Era, InterviewsGuest UserDecember 12, 2019Comment

“Just Between Ourselves, Girls”: Rose Pastor Stokes and the American Yiddish Press

By Ayelet Brinn

n 1918, socialist agitator and women’s rights activist Rose Pastor Stokes (1879-1933) was tried and convicted of espionage after making public comments criticizing America’s involvement in World War I. After an anti-war speech in Kansas City, Stokes had published a letter in the Kansas City Star criticizing the American government for aligning with war profiteers to the detriment of the American people: “No government which is for the profiteers can also be for the people, while the government is for the profiteers.”

Progressive Era, Gender & Sexuality, Business & LaborGuest UserDecember 10, 2019Comment

Stokely Carmichael: The Boy Before Black Power

By Ethan Scott Barnett

In the 1960 edition of The Observatory, The Bronx High School of Science’s yearbook, the recently appointed principal Alexander Taffel pronounced to the graduating class a quote from Thomas Paine: “These are the times that try men’s souls.” Paine had recognized the approaching revolution in 1776; the class of 1960 anticipated a similar upheaval. Amongst a sea of young faces in the sports section are two boys - one Black and one white - energetically shaking hands and displaying cheeky smiles. The boys are surrounded by their male teammates and the female management crew. Sports editors Judy Shapiro and Joel Engelstein captioned the image, “Stokely Carmichael and Gene Dennis showed their masterly leadership in preventing the abasement of the opposing teams.” Upon a first and even a second glance this image simply depicts the camaraderie that comes along with teenage boys and secondary school soccer games. However, the image pinpoints a pivotal moment in Stokely Carmichael’s political trajectory. The experiences that led up to this moment concretized Carmichael’s dedication to leftist organizing and a lifelong career in the Black Freedom Struggle.

Bronx, Education, Race & Ethnicity, Postwar New YorkGuest UserDecember 5, 2019Comment

Great Grandma Barrett was a Shining Woman: Reflections on the Radium Girls and Industrial Disease

By Erin Elizabeth Becker

“The great wonders of the world are sometimes listed as the telephone, wireless telegraphy, radium, spectrum analysis, the airplane, anesthetics, and antitoxins and X rays”

- The Long Island Traveler, November 13, 1925

On February 27, 1905, Marion Murdoch O’Hara was born in New York City, the daughter of two immigrants. Her father, George P. O’Hara, had immigrated to the United States from Liverpool and found work in New York City as a janitor. Her mother, Marion Dunlop, was a housewife from Scotland. Growing up in New York City, the younger Marion lived with her parents and two sisters. At age seventeen, she married Aiden J. Barrett, a twenty-three-year-old immigrant from Newfoundland in Rutherford, New Jersey. “Great Grandma Barrett was a dancer in New York City,” family stories go, “and- before he met her- Great Grandpa Barrett was studying to be a Catholic priest!” The couple would go on to have nine children together- Rosemary, Marion, Florence, George, William, John, Patricia, Robert, and Alice. They lived in Mt Vernon, New York for a time, but by 1925, they had settled in the Bronx.

Business & Labor, Medicine & Public Health, Metropolitan RegionGuest UserDecember 3, 2019Comment

Representing the Whole: An Interview with Dennis RedMoon Darkeem

Representing the Whole: An Interview with Dennis Redmoon Darkeem

Interviewed by Pilar Jefferson

One of the most thought provoking pieces to share and discuss with visitors since Urban Indian: Native New York Now opened at the Museum of the City of New York in late September has been “Flag” by Dennis Redmoon Darkeem. Hanging in the center of the north wall of the gallery, it sits a little apart from the posters and flyers around it, and the bold colors and patterns of the large rectangular work draw viewers in. The quilted fabric pieces that form the work create visually engaging aesthetic contrasts, and those same colors and patterns draw questions of deeper meaning from the viewer. Are the blue stars on a white background an inversion of the American flag? What is the source of the strip of checked green yellow orange and black fabric that cuts across the piece, bisecting it?

Interviews, Race & EthnicityGuest UserNovember 26, 2019Comment

Fraternal Purpose in the Establishment of Tammany’s “American Museum”

By Timothy Winkle

On May 21, 1791, a notice appeared in New York’s Daily Advertiser, announcing the opening of what would be the first public museum in the city. It had been established “for the purpose of collecting and preserving every thing relating to the history of America, likewise, every American production of nature or art.” The “generous public” was implored to help grow the collections, an appeal not only to wealthy patrons or men of science, but, in true republican fashion, to the people themselves, for “as almost every individual possesses some article, which in itself is of little value, but in a collective view, becomes of real importance.” It would truly be an “American Museum,” of the people, by the people, and for the people. Unlike other collections of the period, this museum was uniquely created by a fraternal organization, one that most citizens of New York City knew from their parades through the streets, members dressed in supposed Indian garb. The Society of Tammany, or Columbian Order, sought to keep the spirit of patriotism alive in the hearts and minds of the city’s populace, and this museum, “although quite in its infancy,” was born of this same fraternal purpose.

Guest UserNovember 21, 2019Comment

Brooklyn: The Once and Future City

Reviewed by Jocelyn Wills

In his latest book on city planning and the built environment, Thomas J. Campanella tackles the history of his hometown, Brooklyn, once, and until the consolidation of New York City’s five boroughs in 1898, the fourth-largest city in the United States. In 18 chronological episodes, Campanella follows Brooklyn’s history from the 17th-century encounter between the native Leni Lenape and immigrant Dutch, through its revolutionary experience, and on to its 19th-century rise and 20th-century decline as a major urban-industrial zone. Following a discussion of Brooklyn’s demise during the turbulent 1950s-1970s, Campanella then provides a short epilogue that considers the borough’s more recent revivification as a hot-spot of gentrification. Brooklyn: The Once and Future City thus joins a growing number of scholarly works attempting to rescue Brooklyn from is historic treatment as a “city of homes and churches” and America’s “first suburb.” Indeed, over the past twenty years, excellent monographs employing Brooklyn as a significant site for scholarly inquiry have finally begun to replace the coffee-table books that long lined the two or three shelves that New York City bookstores devoted to Brooklyn and Kings County.

Guest UserNovember 19, 2019Comment

Building for Us: Stories of Homesteading and Cooperative Housing

Reviewed by Katie Uva

New York City is in the throes of a housing crisis. Soaring housing costs and stagnant wages have left increasing numbers of New Yorkers rent-burdened, and have moved the possibility of homeownership even farther out of reach in a city that has always been dominated by renters. Pro-growth voices argue that rezoning and incentivizing private developers to do more building would open up supply and alleviate the crisis; progressives resist that narrative and see such ideas as furthering the city’s capitulation to the private sector and worsening the tension between housing as an asset versus housing as a right. Conflicts abound about how to create affordable housing, how to define affordable housing, and how to sustain affordable housing.

Housing & Realty, ReviewsGuest UserNovember 14, 2019Comment

Gotham

Rob Snyder becomes Manhattan Borough Historian

Remembering the Activism Campaign that Made Samuel Battle the First Black NYPD Officer

Mapping a Queer New York: An Interview with Jen Jack Gieseking

“Just Between Ourselves, Girls”: Rose Pastor Stokes and the American Yiddish Press

Stokely Carmichael: The Boy Before Black Power

Great Grandma Barrett was a Shining Woman: Reflections on the Radium Girls and Industrial Disease

Representing the Whole: An Interview with Dennis Redmoon Darkeem

Fraternal Purpose in the Establishment of Tammany’s “American Museum”

Brooklyn: The Once and Future City

Building for Us: Stories of Homesteading and Cooperative Housing