“Writing the History of Greater New York”

A fellowship program established with the generous support of the Robert D.L. Gardiner Foundation. Two yearlong grants residency were awarded to scholars with book manuscripts substantially near completion that explore 1) the history of the “outer boroughs” (Queens, Brooklyn, Staten Island, and the Bronx), 2) Long Island’s contributions to the development of the metropolitan region, or 3) that integrate the history of Long Island and New York City somehow, approaching the fields of urban or suburban history with a metropolitan or regional lens.

The project led to the creation of four digital exhibitions, publications, and the Robert D.L. Gardiner Directory of Historical Archives in Long Island.

Elizabeth K. Moore is a freelance journalist with twenty-five years of experience, focused on government and politics. A member of the Newsday team that won a Pulitzer in 1997, she is a former lecturer at Stony Brook University’s School of Journalism, and is now writing her first book. The project builds on a study prepared for the Rauch Foundation that explores the troubled history of the Long Island Rail Road’s so-called ‘third track,’ from the days of ‘power broker’ Robert Moses to the governorship of Andrew Cuomo. The project looks at how America’s busiest commuter railroad was nearly strangled by the politically influential swing region it helped create, and how a shifting and social and regulatory climate finally allowed the project to advance in a time of radical changes for New York City’s commuter suburbs. It will be the first social and political history of the modern LIRR.

This book is contracted with Three Hills / Cornell University Press (forthcoming). View the digital exhibition here.

Bonnie Yochelson is an independent curator and art historian (PhD, New York University), and the author or co-author of several books, examining the life and work of such early modern photographers as Esther Bubley, Alfred Stieglitz, Berenice Abbott, and Karl Struss, as well as social reformer Jacob Riis. As a Robert D.L. Gardiner Fellow, she will be finishing her current project, "Alice Austen: Conservative Rebel of Staten Island," a study of an amateur photographer and ‘New Woman’ whose work provides an intimate look at Gilded Age New York. Her book will be the first biographical work since Ann Novotny's long-out-of-print 1976 monograph, published shortly after the prolific Victorian artist was rediscovered and became a feminist and lesbian icon.

This book was published as Too Good to Get Married: The Life and Photographs of Miss Alice Austen (Fordham University Press, 2025). View the digital exhibition here.

Allison M. McGovern is a working anthropologist (PhD, The Graduate Center, CUNY), and author of the forthcoming book, Challenging Myths and Disrupting Narratives: An Archaeology of Survivance in Eastern Long Island, New York. As a Robert D.L. Gardiner Fellow, she will be completing her new manuscript, "Long Island Dirt: Recovering our Buried Past through Historical Archaeologies," exploring the region's development in relation to the metropolitan core in New York through a series of vignettes that examine how the coastal area provided support for the rise of urban centers along the eastern seaboard. The project also explores how Long Island residents crafted their own identity and culture, including the “forgotten and silenced” past of Native American villages, slave and free black communities, working-class neighborhoods, and planned communities that existed alongside the well-known estates, farms, and suburbs. The book draws on fifteen years of research and fieldwork.

This book is contracted with SUNY University Press (forthcoming, 2027). View the digital exhibition here.

Jessica Fletcher is a doctoral candidate in Art History at The Graduate Center, CUNY, writing a dissertation entitled, “Accumulative Modernity: Architecture, Gender, and the Welfare State in New York City and London, 1920-1950.” This award will support four weeks of research for that study, examining the transatlantic reform networks formed by women in the late nineteenth century, which transformed the cities into foremost sites of progressive experimentation in public health and radical municipalism in politics. The work focus on the sites created during the interwar period to provide modern services to working-class families, principally women and children, often by adapting existing buildings and constructing new ones on existing public spaces in “slum” areas, which resulted in the accumulation of many New York City health clinics over the course of decades.

Maura McGee is a doctoral candidate in Sociology at The Graduate Center, CUNY, writing a dissertation entitled, “Globalizing Gentrification: Immigration, Race, and Ethnicity on Transforming Streets in New York and Paris.” This award will support four weeks of research for that project, which seeks to fill the gap on the social-scientific understanding of ‘gentrification’ by examining the complex interactions between race, ethnicity and immigration in two neighborhoods at the turn of the last century, Crown Heights in Brooklyn and la Goutte d’Or in Paris. The work examines commercial change in particular, and aims to show how differences between Brooklyn and Paris, and more generally, between the United States and France, shape the ways in which race, class, and nativity interact in constituting commercial streets. It argues that contestations over the nature of neighborhood shopping streets reveal tensions between groups over a fundamental right to the city.

Deena Ecker is a Ph.D. student in History at The Graduate Center, CUNY. This award will support four weeks of research for a dissertation exploring the lived experience of sex workers in early twentieth century New York City; a neglected aspect of the historical literature on prostitution, which often focuses on reform and reaction. The project will seek to answer why so many women chose this form of labor against others in the Progressive Era, what economic or social freedoms it might have afforded, the variety and level of control exerted by handlers, and the extent to which the illegal business created “a new kind of American culture,” with greater social and cultural mixing than found even in traditional brothels.

Lauren Rosenblum is a Ph.D. student in Art History at The Graduate Center, CUNY. This award will support four weeks of research for a pre-dissertation study entitled, “The Evolution of Manual and Mechanical Craftsmanship: Uniting Artistic and Industrial Histories of American Lithography, 1930-70.” The research will attempt to periodize the growing creative interest in the medium during the mid-twentieth century and its diminishing commercial application over time, highlighting the artists, printers, and print-shops operating within New York City; the first study to consider the development of modern, artistic lithography alongside its commercial equivalent.