Brooklyn’s Renaissance: Commerce, Culture, and Community in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World

Reviewed by Jocelyn A Wills

One never knows where a family heirloom will lead. Brooklyn’s Renaissance began with a cultural artifact that Italian Renaissance scholar Melissa Meriam Bullard’s mother inherited from a distant cousin: a portrait of Luther Boynton Wyman (1804-79), a forgotten shipping merchant for Liverpool’s Black Ball Line, long-time resident of Brooklyn Heights, and “guiding hand” in the founding of the “arts-friendly community” along Montague Street during the 1850s and 1860s (with the Academy of Music, now “BAM,” as Brooklyn’s cultural center).

Brooklyn, Antebellum & Civil War, Arts & Culture, Business & Labor, Reviews, Waterfront & IslandsGuest UserFebruary 20, 2018Comment

Daniel Kane's "Poetry and Punk Rock in NYC"

Reviewed by Louie Dean Valencia-García

Punk culture, like most subcultures, depends upon mythology. These mythologies are built around people, spaces, and events of the past, often reused to create something new — pieced together in what cultural theorist Dick Hebdige calls “bricolage.” Daniel Kane’s “Do You Have a Band?”: Poetry and Punk Rock in New York City attempts to demystify one particular aspect of the early days of the New York City punk scene: its connection to the New York poetry scene. In a way, this work functions much like a sequel to the author’s 2003 work, All Poets Welcome: The Lower East Side Poetry Scene in the 1960s, focusing primarily on the well-known. Kane gives just about equal time to both analysis of poetic influences and to biography, intertwining them in his narrative. Do You Have a Band? is divided into chapters that focus on The Fugs, Lou Reed, St. Mark’s Poetry Project, Richard Hell, Patti Smith, Eileen Myles, Dennis Cooper, and Jim Carroll. The author’s decision to focus on these individuals and places does not surprise — they all fit into a sort of mythologized New York proto-punk canon. When given the opportunity to talk about punk-poets outside the canon, Kane avoids researching the less-famous individuals who were part of the scene. This focus on the select few is particularly noticeable in choices such as Kane’s decision not to elaborate upon the lesser known poets that figured into the mimeograph punk poet magazine published by Richard Hell — leaving the mythology of the New York punk-poetry scene largely intact.

Arts & Culture, Manhattan, Reviews, Urban Decline & Fiscal CrisisGuest UserJanuary 11, 2018Comment

Retrieved Rhythms: The Last Poets, Harlem, and Black Arts Movement(s)

By Christopher M. Tinson

In 1953, illustrator Bernie Robynson, in an effort to diagram the culturally diverse and magnetic appeal of Harlem, mapped some of the enchanting points of interest sure to attract wide-eyed tourists. The resulting map entitled “In the Heart of Harlem” calls that section of New York City: “The Largest Negro Community in the World. Its Culture Is An Integral Part of Americana.” Over 12 years later, Harlem’s place in the American imagination would take on a different meaning for its inhabitants of African descent.

Arts & Culture, Politics, Postwar New York, Race & Ethnicity, Urban Decline & Fiscal CrisisGuest UserJanuary 9, 2018Comment

The Monumental Possibilities of Public Art: MCNY's “Art in the Open”

Reviewed by Erik Wallenberg

As hundreds of artists and scholars call for the removal of local monuments that celebrate racist figures, the Museum of the City of New York unveiled a new exhibit. “Art in the Open: Fifty Years of Public Art in New York” has arrived at an opportune moment. The Mayor's Advisory Council is presently examining city art, monuments, and markers. Groups like Decolonize This Place are pushing for the removal of statues that celebrate historical figures who advocated or practiced racism and genocide, including Christopher Columbus, Theodore Roosevelt, and J. Marion Simms. This fight raises the question of what to replace these statues with, and “Art in the Open” offers some enticing potential answers. The exhibit holds up public art as a medium to prod society into thinking about our current world and our history, a fifty-year retrospective on how public art can reflect societies values as well as push it to recognize injustices and inequalities.

Arts & Culture, Contemporary Era, Reviews, Urban Decline & Fiscal CrisisGuest UserJanuary 2, 2018Comment

Alex Palmer: How a New Yorker Invented Christmas

Last week, in advance of Chanukah, we published a review of Jewish New York, the new digest from NYU Press based on their acclaimed multi-volume series, City of Promises: A History of the Jews of New York.

Today, just a few days before Christmas, we hear from journalist and writer Alex Palmer about how an early twentieth century New Yorker (his great grand-uncle) invented the popular, contemporary American fixtures of the Christian holiday. Gotham 's interview with the bestselling author of The Santa Claus Man follows.

Arts & Culture, Interviews, Progressive EraGuest UserDecember 21, 2017Comment

The Epistolarians

By Margaret A. Brucia

The nearly 300 letters were a jumbled heap— out of their envelopes, out of order, out of my field of expertise. But the moment I bargained for them that spring morning in the confusion of a Roman flea market, the academic focus of my life underwent a seismic shift, from the ancient Mediterranean world to New York City in the Gilded Age. Julia Gardiner Gayley’s letters, it turned out, were more than just interesting primary source material from the first three decades of the twentieth century, they were a passageway into the intimate lives of two strong, confident, articulate, independent-minded women. And they told a story worthy of Henry James or Edith Wharton, from the beginning of Mary’s Grand Tour of Italy in 1902 to her mother’s death in New York in 1937.

Arts & Culture, Gender & Sexuality, Gilded AgeGuest UserDecember 19, 2017Comment

Jeremiah Moss's Vanishing New York

By Seth Kamil

I first arrived in Manhattan in the summer of 1989, but it was very much a homecoming. With deep family roots in New York, I felt more comfortable here than almost anywhere else in the world. My parents were born here. All four grandparents spent most of their lives in the City and its suburbs. My fondest memories involved driving across the 59th Street Bridge in my grandfather’s Lincoln Continental. We would hit the Horn & Hardart Automat on 42nd Street & 2nd Avenue (or, if “Poppy” was flush, Katz’s Deli) and then drive or walk around Manhattan. See Times Square. Visit his sister who lived in the Amalgamated Houses in Chelsea. The day often ended with egg cream sodas at Moishe’s on the corner of Bowery & Grand Street. Having struggled his whole life economically, my grandfather always had a kind word and some pocket change for the homeless who gathered there. But, only a child, I remembered the men who tried to wash our car windows, the grime, and graffiti, as somewhat scary. This was the mid-1970s.

Arts & Culture, Built Environment, Contemporary Era, Reviews, Urban PlanningGuest UserDecember 14, 2017Comment