Green Apple: An Environmental History of New York City
Photo by Markley Boyer / Wildlife Conservation Society; composite by Yann-Arthus Betrand / CORBIS
New York City’s association with skyscrapers, density, and all things concrete hides a robust environmental history. This course explores that history, with particular attention to struggles over land use, from the Indigenous era to the present moment.
Analyzing historical documents, you will learn about the extraordinary world of ‘Mannahatta’ and the surrounding region at the point of European arrival — more biodiverse than Yellowstone and Yosemite national parks. After examining the wetlands, forests, and Lenape farms and villages that used to be here, we will recover how various groups of people lived with the land during the colonial era.
As New York City’s population exploded after independence, local relationships with the environment shifted again. We examine the hazards of pollution from early manufacturing, the periodic outbreak of infectious disease, and the routine fires that plagued an increasingly dense 19th century Gotham. Uneven access to solutions to these problems — like the development of a clean water system, new parks, and private waste removal — exacerbated environmental inequality. Resistance is a theme that runs throughout the course, and you will meet largely forgotten advocates of the late 19th century who argued that parks were a right, not a privilege, especially for the poor.
Major social changes in the 20th century shaped New York City’s environment further still. In the final section of this course, we consider the New Deal era expansion of both the park and highway systems. We will explore environmental dimensions of the fiscal crisis of the 1970s, as the collapse of manufacturing remade the waterfront, fires blazed, and uncollected garbage festered in the streets. Communities responded with activism and clean-ups, and turned abandoned spaces into places for gardening or connecting with one another. The course draws to a close with a conversation about today’s urban environment, weighing both the changes and the continuities. Drawing links between the past and the present, we’ll imagine the future of this land.
Mondays & Wednesdays (3/8-31), 6:30-8PM (ET)
$350 (8 sessions, 90 min. each)
Marika Plater holds a PhD from Rutgers University, where their research focused on the history of urban environments, with a particular focus on resistance to unequal access to green spaces in New York City. They are a recipient of the Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library dissertation fellowship and the Andrew Mellon Foundation Fellowship in Museum Education at the Museum of the City of New York.