“this city gets in one’s blood stream with the invisibility of a lover”: City-Making as Queer Resistance in New York, 1950-2020
By Davy Knittle
Despite the importance of urban systems to how Lorde characterizes power and inequality, she is not thought of as an urbanist writer. But what becomes possible when we think of Lorde as such is a new approach to telling the familiar history of spatial and political change after urban renewal. As with many queer and trans writers active from the early moments of urban renewal to the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, Lorde uses city-making tools to provide new ways of relating to the city. Importantly, these queer and trans urbanist writers — from the New York School poet James Schuyler to the contemporary trans novelist Zeyn Joukhadar — propose uses, designs, plans, and policies for urban spaces and environments that are focused on facilitating the survival of marginalized people. […] Their work makes evident how, after urban renewal, a cultural imaginary of the single-family home came to define heteronormativity as a relationship to housing as well as to race, gender, and sexuality. It becomes necessary, then, to account for how built environments and normative ideas of race, gender, and sexuality in the U.S. have been co-constituted since the end of World War II in order to more fully tell both queer and trans history and the history of urban redevelopment in New York City.
“Serving Canada in His Majesties Armies”: A Staten Islander in the Canadian Expeditionary Force
By Phillip Pappas
Across the United States, immigrant communities voiced their opinions about the wartime activities of the European nations and the American government’s policy towards the conflict. In the five boroughs of New York City, where three-fourths of the nearly 5 million residents were immigrants and their children, ethnic groups held rallies, parades, and demonstrations, sponsored public lectures, raised funds, and used the press to respond to the declarations of war in Europe and to promote the plight of their homelands. Many New Yorkers sought opportunities to join the fight in Europe. Some were resident aliens who were registered reservists in the militaries of their respective homelands, while others were U. S. citizens with cultural ties and ideological sympathies to the combatants.
In the midst of the “Roaring ‘20’s,” the Café Lafayette, in the heart of Greenwich Village, was a world apart from Staten Island’s truck farms, ocean beaches, and sleepy villages — despite being just half an hour away by ferry. If anything connects the two places — and has memorialized them—it is the work of Dawn Powell.
A Seat at the Table: LGBTQ Representation in New York Politics, Exhibit at LaGuardia and Wagner Archives
Reviewed by Danica Stompor
The beating heart of Gourjon-Bieltvedt and Petrus’s exhibit is turning these testimonies into a fervent call to young people for optimism and for action…It has been far from a linear path, but for many people my age and younger, the past decades have featured an enormous increase in visibility and significant legal wins for queer people, particularly in New York. A Seat at the Table inserts us into the lives and tactics of the city’s elected officials who made these gains possible while resisting the attitude that progress is inevitable…A Seat at the Table is attuned to the small moments that transform residents into leaders.
“Mortars over Stapleton Heights”: Audre Lorde on Staten Island
By David Allen
In the poem, “On My Way Out I Passed Over You and the Verrazano Bridge,” Lorde contemplates leaving Staten Island where she had lived for nearly thirteen years. Her connections to the place were complex, bringing together her love of nature, her need for a place to write and work, to be with her lover and her children, as well as with other poets and activists. All these had come to pass within a social and political climate inscribed with racism, homophobia, and violence.
Tong Kee Hang: A Chinese American Civil War Veteran Who Was Stripped of His Citizenship
By Kristin Choo
May is Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander Heritage month, an appropriate time to recognize the Chinese Americans whose lives were disrupted, constricted or uprooted by the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act and other racist laws and policies. Tong Kee Hang did not suffer the most egregious mistreatment meted out to Chinese immigrants during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He was not beaten, lynched, or driven from his home like many others. But the loss of his citizenship and right to vote was a cruel blow for a man who had served his country in wartime and who took deep pride in being American.
Crisis, Disease, Shortage, and Strike: Shipbuilding on Staten Island in World War I
By Faith D’Alessandro
On April 6th 1917 the United States officially joined the First World War. The casus belli was the sinking of three US ships by German U-boats on March 18th. However, the U-boat issue and its devastating consequences had been under way for far longer, and would fuel a shipping crisis throughout the remainder of the war. In February 1917 U-boats had sunk almost 540,000 gross tons of shipping, and in March another 600,000, creating an enormous need to increase merchant ship construction. The urgency of mobilization and defense affected ship manufacturing centers across the country, including the huge shipbuilding industry in New York Harbor, which was centered around three major areas: Greenpoint, Brooklyn, including the Brooklyn Navy Yard; the Camden-Bayonne area of New Jersey; and the North Shore of Staten Island.
This Is a Cemetery: The Saga of the Second Asbury African Methodist Episcopal Church Cemetery of Staten Island
ByPatricia M. Salmon
Having studied cemeteries for the last thirty-six years and spending the first nineteen years of my life living next to a Homestead Graveyard that was abandoned, I should perhaps not be so surprised about the demise of Second Asbury, an African Methodist Episcopal Church Cemetery in Port Richmond Center, Staten Island, also known colloquially as “Cherry Lane.” Designated a “Colored Cemetery” because African-Americans were interred at the site, it used to be called the “Old Slave’s Burying Ground.” Not only was the last living enslaved person from Staten Island buried therein, but numerous others were, too.
Interview: Thomas Balcerski on Sailor's Snug Harbor
Interviewed by Ryan Purcell
Today on Gotham, editor Ryan Purcell interviews Thomas Balcerski about his recent New York Historyessay about the history of Sailor’s Snug Harbor. Sailor’s Snug Harbor, located along the Kill Van Kull in New Brighton, on the northern shore of Staten Island, was opened in 1833 as the country’s first home for retired seamen from the US Merchant Marine and the US Navy. Supported through an endowment left in the estate of Revolutionary War soldier and ship Captain Robert Richard Randall, Snug Harbor served retired sailors through the 19th century.
