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Gotham: A Blog for Scholars of New York City History

 
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The Benab: Where Caribbean Culture Took Root in Queens

The Benab: Where Caribbean Culture Took Root in Queens

By Shafrana Carpen

By the mid-1980s, New York City had become a second home for tens of thousands of Caribbean immigrants. Guyanese, Trinidadians, Jamaicans, and others settled in Queens, Brooklyn, and the Bronx, bringing their cultures with them. Between 1980 and 1990, immigrants from the Caribbean made up almost a third of new arrivals, yet in those years, there were few places designed for them—no club where a nurse from Georgetown or a roofer from Berbice could truly feel at home. That absence gave rise to The Benab, a nightclub that became far more than a nightlife destination. Located on Jamaica Avenue in Jamaica, Queens, The Benab was one of the first Indo-Caribbean clubs in the borough and a central meeting point for a generation yearning to find a home away from home. 

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‘The Chance Begins to Assume a Fair Prospect’: Marc Brunel and the Invention of the Steamboat, Part 2

“The Chance Begins to Assume a Fair Prospect”: Marc Brunel and the Invention of the Steamboat — Part II

By Mark Kleinman

New York was still a very small city at that time. Its population doubled between 1790 and 1800, but was still only 60,000 at that date compared with 600,000 in Paris and 1 million in London. Brunel’s location first in Murray Street, then in George Street, placed him close to, among others, Nicholas Roosevelt, Alexander Hamilton and probably Robert Livingston’s town address. More generally, he was living and working in New York City just at the point when the still nascent city was beginning its rapid trajectory from local backwater to global metropolis.  

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Jailed for Freedom: Afro-Spanish Sailors and Legal Resistance in Eighteenth-Century New York

Jailed for Freedom: Afro-Spanish Sailors and Legal Resistance in Eighteenth-Century New York

By Beatriz Carolina Peña

The experiences of Fiallo and De la Torre reveal how Spanish American sailors captured through privateering were reclassified as “prize negroes,” sold, and forced to seek freedom within a legal system structured to uphold slavery. After arriving in New York from London as attorney general in November 1752, Kempe began bringing liberty claims grounded in the Law of Nations before the governor and council. These cases illuminate both the possibilities and the limits of law in a colonial society deeply committed to racialized slavery. Though they came from different Spanish colonies and reached New York about a year apart, their paths converged on July 7, 1753, when both were placed in jail for the protection of their freedom.

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‘The Chance Begins to Assume a Fair Prospect’: Marc Brunel and the Invention of the Steamboat, Part 1

“The Chance Begins to Assume a Fair Prospect”: Marc Brunel and the Invention of the Steamboat — Part I

By Mark Kleinman

The Colonel and the Chancellor now had the monopoly, the ideas and the enthusiasm. What they lacked, however, was an actual working steam engine. Here they had two options: they could import a suitable steam engine from England, preferably from the world-leading workshop of Matthew Boulton and James Watt in Soho, Birmingham. Or, they could build their own steam engine in the primitive engineering landscape of 1790s America, with a dearth of both suitable machinery and skilled engineers. 

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Oaths and Interracial Solidarity: New York City’s 1741 Plot

Oaths and Interracial Solidarity: New York City’s 1741 Plot

By Kevin Murphy

In early 1741, an investigation into a robbery in Manhattan led to rumors of an interracial plot to destroy the city. Local officials tracked stolen coins and other items to John Hughson, a tavern-keeper known for serving enslaved people. Authorities were already concerned about illicit rendezvouses among slaves, soldiers, and poor whites; their suspicions spiked, however, when a series of unexplained fires started at Fort George and then at various places across the city. Mary Burton, the Hughson’s sixteen-year-old “Irish servant girl,” came forward to implicate her “master” and his customers, painting a vivid picture of impending mayhem.

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Russell Shorto, Taking Manhattan: The Extraordinary Events That Created New York and Shaped America

Taking Manhattan: The Extraordinary Events That Created New York and Shaped America

Review By Dillon L. Streifeneder

That the English took New Netherland from the Dutch in 1664 is well known. Why the English seized the Dutch colony, along with the circumstances of how they managed to achieve their conquest, however, remain largely forgotten to all but a small number of professional historians and archivists. Russell Shorto’s Taking Manhattan: The Extraordinary Events That Created New York and Shaped America, in what is surely the most comprehensive and accessible account of the English conquest, is therefore a welcome addition to scholarship on New York’s Dutch period and well-worth the read.

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New York Sari: An Interview with Curator Salonee Bhaman

New York Sari: An Interview with Curator Salonee Bhaman

Interviewed By Dominique Jean-Louis

Our social, material, and emotional worlds are shaped by history that is often far more complicated and varied than what we’re likely to learn in a classroom. I hope that people come away from this exhibition with a curiosity to learn more about how and why the things they love in this city — be it a beautiful and colorful fabric or a funky groove, or a tasty and transcendent meal — got to where they are and then follow that curiosity to learn more about the people that brought that thing, or food, or color palate into their lives. New York is a city of immigrants. It has been for a very long time. The themes of displacement, segregation, and persecution that often suffuse our stories of migration come to exist alongside a different set of narratives in this place: stories of community forged across differences of culture and experience.

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“In Any Character Except that of a British Subject”: The Staten Island Diplomatic Peace Conference of 1776

“In Any Character Except that of a British Subject”: The Staten Island Diplomatic Peace Conference of 1776

By Phillip Papas

The conference on Staten Island delayed the British military campaign, providing General Washington with more time to prepare his troops for the inevitable battle for New York City (lower Manhattan). Four days after the “negotiation” the British recaptured New York, forcing the Continental Army’s retreat. The Howe brothers believed the defeat, like the humiliation in Brooklyn, would result in a bid for peace. But the conference on Staten Island exposed the flaw in that logic, since the leadership in Congress was beyond persuasion. It confirmed the irreconcilable differences between the two sides, only stiffening the resolve of each to continue, until the war itself, and the long train of nightmares it produced, forced the British to relent.

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Jeffrey A. Kroessler: Rural County, Urban Borough

Laura Heim: Rural County, Urban Borough

Interviewed by Rob Snyder

Rural County, Urban Borough is a history with a strong sense of place. Covering the the history of Queens from European settlement to the present, Kroessler charts centuries of change in the landscape. He shows how politics, industry, transportation, government and real estate interests all shaped the borough. Linking Queens to New York City and the wider world, Kroessler illuminates important elements of American metropolitan history.

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Tell Her Story: An Interview with LaShawn Harris

Tell Her Story: Eleanor Bumpurs & The Police Killing That Galvanized New York City

Interviewed By Emily Brooks

The Eleanor Bumpurs story is one of those hard histories. Parts of her story include scenes of personal disappointments, economic struggles, maternal loss, and ultimately state violence. As I was writing the book, I continuously told myself that it was my responsibility to tell this complicated story with nuance and compassion and care. Presenting a nuanced perspective on Eleanor’s life and killing created space for me to offer a full biography, to tell broader stories about 1980s New York City, and to shed light on late-twentieth-century Black women’s socioeconomic and political lives. Moreover, telling hard histories presents the opportunity to draw important lessons and insights from the past and place contemporary moments within historical context.

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