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Gotham: A Blog for Scholars of New York City History

 
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The Art of Blackwell's Island

The Art of Blackwell's Island

By Kristen Osborne-Bartucca

Hopper’s second work depicting the island, Blackwell’s Island (1928), is stark and unsettling, related mostly in title to the 1911 piece. […] The river, a bright cerulean blue, occupies the bottom half of the canvas, and the top half consists of pale blue sky and odd clouds receding into the distance. All of the infamous institutions on the island are there, but by now had almost ceased operating. Hopper paints them as flattened, simplified, and lit brilliantly by the sun. Like most of his works, there is something slightly off about the scene — it is too quiet, too placid. Though the buildings are banal, Hopper suggests that there is something ominous that occurred within their walls.

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Contributions Have Poured in from All Classes, from All Sects: New York City and Great Hunger in Ireland

Contributions Have Poured in from All Classes, from All Sects: New York City and Great Hunger in Ireland

By Harvey Strum

In 1847, New Yorkers of all religious denominations donated first to Irish, and second to Scottish relief efforts as part of a national movement of American philanthropy. It was during this moment that the United States emerged as the leader in voluntary international philanthropy. Commenting on the remarkable ecumenical convergence of relief efforts, New York’s mayor, Philip Hone wrote in his diary, “The Catholic Churches have given nobly, and every denomination of Christians has assisted liberally in the good work: Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Methodists, Baptists, and Romanists are all united in the brotherhood of charity.”

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Men at Work: A New Look at the Central Park Gates

Men at Work: A New Look at the Central Park Gates

By Sara Cedar Miller

Pass through any of Central Park's twenty original entrances today (Figure 1), and you're walking through spaces defined more by absence than presence. These "gates" are really just gaps in the perimeter wall, full of intention never realized — invisible stories of artistic talent, social connection, and personal ambition in antebellum New York. Like the carefully framed views created by Central Park’s designers Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, they offer at its threshold a glimpse into unseen forces that shaped America's first great public space.

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Melting Metropolis: An Interview with Daniel Cumming and Kara Murphy Schlichting

Melting Metropolis: An Interview with Daniel Cumming and Kara Murphy Schlichting

Interviewed By Rachel Pitkin

Public archives help create a record that highlights, or at least can suggest, the varied experiences of summer heat, even if one must learn to “read” the images with a critical eye. And while the archive itself is inherently selective — not everyone can or will upload their images of summer, of course — visual records that cross all five boroughs and span multiple generations reveal a rich tapestry of New York City life over many summer seasons.

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Tom Arnold Foster: Walter Lippmann: An Intellectual Biography

Arnold Foster: Walter Lippman: An Intellectual Biography

Interviewed by Rob Snyder

From the years before World War I until the late 1960s, the journalist and political theorist Walter Lippmann was one of the most influential writers in the United States of America. His words and ideas had a powerful impact on American liberalism and his writings on the media, particularly on stereotyping and journalistic objectivity, are still taught today. Lippmann is now the subject of Tom Arnold-Forster’s Walter Lippmann: An Intellectual Biography, published by Princeton University Press. Arnold-Forster explores Lippmann in his evolving historical context, from the Progressive Era to the Cold War. He argues that Lippmann was a much more complicated thinker than is usually recognized who went from being a liberal socialist to a conservative liberal.

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Operation Sail 1976: How New York City Came Together in a Time of Crisis

Operation Sail 1976: How New York City Came Together in a Time of Crisis

By Angelina Lambros

The On July 4, 1976, New York City celebrated the Bicentennial of American independence with a parade of ships that began at the Verrazano Narrows Bridge and moved up the Hudson River. Officially titled “Operation Sail,” more than 200 ships gathered for the event. With more than six million spectators, it became the largest crowd in New York City’s history. For America's largest city where people regularly turned out for special events, Operation Sail proved truly exceptional.

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Alyssa Lopez, Reel Freedom: Black Film Culture in Early Twentieth Century New York City

Reel Freedom: Black Film Culture in Early Twentieth Century New York City

Review By Deena Ecker

Reel Freedom challenges the reader to think beyond the Harlem Renaissance and place film, an important piece of leisure in the 1920s and ‘30s, at the center of the Black cultural and intellectual transformation in New York and the nation. While much of the book focuses on the theaters in Harlem, Lopez reminds us that in the first decade of the 20th century, there were pockets of Black life all over the city. The ways that Black moviegoers, critics, projectionists, and producers engaged with film demonstrated a claim to physical, intellectual, and cultural space in early-twentieth-century New York. In real and significant ways, these claims to space were part of the larger Black struggle for equality.

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Finch College: Reminiscences on a Bygone School

Finch College: Reminiscences on a Bygone School

By Clifford J. Dudley

The 1960s brought sweeping changes throughout America, and this included changes to women’s education. The Civil Rights Movement provoked a reassessment of the role of women in society. Many universities were reaching the conclusion that they could not, and should not, remain the restricted domains of male education. In 1963, Fordham began admitting women, as did Yale in 1969. While providing greater opportunities for women, these developments also presented new challenges for those colleges catering solely to female students. They now had to meet an ever-increasing operational cost and the loss of their monopoly on female applicants. Prospective students now looked at coeducational schools like nearby NYU or Sarah Lawrence College. Finch College was also negatively impacted through media coverage. Tales of Finch girls like Grace Slick or Jane Holzer, who joined anti-establishment rock bands or became muses for revolutionary artists like Andy Warhol, turned a nice profit for the papers, but did not enhance the school’s standing. News articles about the school oft focused on high tuition and “fluffy” academics. When Hunter College and Marymount Manhattan College became coeducational, Finch found itself competing with Barnard for the women-only market in the city.

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Illustrating Your Ride: Fred Cooper and The Subway Sun

Illustrating Your Ride: Fred Cooper and The Subway Sun

By Es-pranza Humphrey

When the Interborough Rapid Transit Company opened to the public in 1904, there was an active effort to beautify the underground stations and its metal vessels in order to ease the anxieties of riders who were hesitant to travel throughout the unknown. The initiative to beautify included the presence of a variety of posters presenting transportation etiquette and advertising products and services as a way to capitalize on the fact that passengers spent an average of fifteen minutes in a train car during their commute. Among the advertisements for Viceroy Cork Tipped Cigarettes, Rheingold Lager Beer, and Heinz Cream of Tomato Soup, were a series of in-car posters that helped riders navigate the subway to visit some of New York City’s most scenic wonders. This series was called The Subway Sun.

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Shirley Chisholm at 100: An Interview with Zinga Fraser and Sarah Seidman

Shirley Chisholm at 100: An Interview with Zinga Fraser and Sarah Seidman

Interviewed By Dominique Jean-Louis

“I think what connects Chisholm to this political moment is how 1972 was also a time of political turmoil and conflict between a true representative democracy and political autocracy in the form of the Nixon administration. Today, Chisholm would be in the fight for our nation to not fall prey to political leadership that does not believe they are accountable to the Constitution or the American people.”

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