How The Volstead Act Ruined New York’s French Pleasure Palaces

By Alice Sparberg Alexiou

At the beginning of the twentieth century, when New York was rolling in dough but had a dearth of rarified places in which to spend it, enterprising immigrants who knew how to run restaurants began coming to New York. They knew because they’d grown up in France or Switzerland, in bistro-owning families. In New York, after working their asses off at one of the few already-existing luxury restaurants--Delmonico’s was the most famous—the newcomers then combined what they’d just learned about how to run a New York restaurant with their Gallic sensibilities around food, ambiance, and, most of all, drink—what French chef, after all, creates cuisine without the addition of alcohol, be it wine or brandy, and enlarged them to fit New York’s eye-popping scale. They opened big restaurants, then the trend in New York—“lobster palaces.” But these were different, because they were French, where New Yorkers were introduced to the joys of pate de foie gras and frogs legs, were taught them what wines to drink with these exotic dishes. And so was created a unique and scintillating French dining scene in New York , a product of a specific time in New York history, that is now largely forgotten.

Manhattan, Arts & CultureGuest UserFebruary 24, 2020 Comment

Henry Chalfant: Art vs. Transit, 1977-1987

Reviewed by Katie Uva

On October 30, 1975, The New York Daily News thudded onto curbs, newsstands, stoops, and doorsteps around the city trumpeting the (paraphrased, but nevertheless evocative) attitude of President Gerald Ford toward New York: “Drop Dead.” There was no question that New York was in trouble: rising crime, declining quality of life, mounting public debt, and arson all plagued the five boroughs.

Arts & Culture, Bronx, Urban Decline & Fiscal Crisis, ReviewsGuest UserFebruary 13, 2020Comment

Iconoclasm in New York: Revolution to Reenactment

Reviewed by Benjamin L. Carp

New York is a city of destruction. What doesn’t burn by accident, somebody tears down on purpose. When Chip asks Hildy to take him to the Hippodrome in Leonard Bernstein’s On the Town, she replies, “It ain’t there anymore,” which might as well be the city’s motto. Nothing is too sacred to shatter. Nothing is too exalted to escape the city’s brutal contests over money and power.

Reviews, American Revolution, Arts & CultureGuest UserJanuary 9, 2020Comment

The Piano in the Sukkah: Early Twentieth Century Immigrant Jewish Piano Culture in New York

By Sarah Litvin

In 1905, the Yiddish language New York newspaper Yiddishes Tageblatt reported on a new trend in the city’s Lower East Side, “The Greenhorn of Plenty: The Piano in the Sukkah.” Jewish families were hauling parlor pianos to rooftops to incorporate them into the fall harvest festival Sukkoth, the article explained. At the time, New York City was exploding as the center of the country’s bustling piano trade and its largest immigrant city. The peak year of immigration was in 1907 when 1.7 newcomers arrived, and the peak year of piano production was in 1909, when 364,545 pianos were sold. By 1910, more American homes had a piano than a bathtub.

Religion, Arts & Culture, Gender & SexualityPeter-Christian AignerOctober 15, 2019Comment

Rough Paradise: Sex, Art, and Economic Crisis on the New York City Waterfront

By Jeffrey Patrick Colgan and Jeffrey Escoffier

New York City was for many years one of the world’s leading ports. In the early 1950s, the docks in New York City, by far the country’s busiest, directly and indirectly supplied, according to the City’s Department of Marine and Aviation, livelihood for almost 10% of the city’s population. Nevertheless, even then there were signs of the port’s impending doom. Plagued with racketeering, traffic congestion, and outmoded facilities, the invention of container shipping was the final straw. Without adequate rail and road access and the space to operate cranes and stack containers, most of the port’s Manhattan-based business moved to New Jersey where new container facilities were being built.

Arts & Culture, Gender & Sexuality, Reviews, Waterfront & Islands, Urban Decline & Fiscal CrisisGuest UserAugust 15, 2019Comment

Inclusive Archiving, Public Art, and Representation at the Hall of Fame for Great Americans

By Cynthia Tobar

The Hall of Fame for Great Americans, created in 1900, was the first monument of its kind that sought the active involvement of Americans in nominating their favorite "Great Americans.” The Hall was conceived of by Dr. Henry Mitchell MacCracken, Chancellor of New York University (NYU), who envisioned a democratic election process for selecting these greats modeled after presidential elections. Nominations came to the election center and after a person received a certain number of votes, an NYU Senate of 100 voters made the final choice. The Senate was composed of American leaders: past American presidents, presidents of colleges, senators, and men of renown in various fields. Problems soon arose, however, when this initial process yielded 29 nominees, all male. The lack of women created a scandal and in the next election eight women were elected (currently, there are 11 women in the Hall). However, the contentious nomination of Robert E. Lee remained.

Pinstripe Nation: The New York Yankees and American Culture

Reviewed by Tony Calandrillo

In Pinstripe Nation: The New York Yankees and American Culture, Baker University professor Will Bishop explores how the success, failure, and attendant drama of the New York Yankees fits into the larger narrative of American culture, and how both the Yankees and that culture constantly mirror each other in the 20th century. In the introduction, Bishop makes this point clearly when he states that “what plays out in our little cocoons of sport is so often a close parallel of what is going on outside of them, only dramatized in a way that frequently makes it clearer.” According to the author, “the narratives that play out in the world of sport often are somehow able to help us better see and understand who we are as a society, what we value, and how we are changing.” For the particular case of the New York Yankees, this mirror narrative sees that the Yankees’ story of success parallels and is interwoven with the narrative of American success in the twentieth century. For his book, Bishop uses the work of Roland Barthes in relation to unspoken communication through symbols to illustrate how the Yankees have been used as an American cultural icon from their rise to national prominence in the 1920s through the end of the twentieth century.

The Rebel Cafe: Sex, Race and Politics in Cold War America's Nightclub Underground

Reviewed by Burton W. Peretti

Stephen R. Duncan’s new book admirably fills a void in the historiography of 20th century American culture. We long have recognized that between the storied nightclub era of Prohibition days and the age of rock ’n’ roll, there was a perceptible but elusive set of nightlife entertainment venues that kept radical left-wing political values percolating during the Depression, World War II, and the Cold War. Historians have explored chapters in New York City’s interregnum — David Stowe, for example, covers Cafe Society in the late 1930s, Patrick Burke describes the jazz clubs on 52nd Street, and James Gavin chronicles European-style cabaret — but a comprehensive history, with more of a national perspective, has been lacking. Duncan’s ambitious and wide-ranging work makes a terrific new contribution toward defining the paramount significance of radical and intimate performance venues of the 1940s, 1950s, and early 1960s.

History Museums and Capitalism: The Need for Critical Conversations

By Andrew Urban

In November, 2018, the Public Historian published a review that I wrote of the Lower East Side Tenement Museum’s newest tour: Under One Roof. The tour interprets the lives of three families who lived in the tenement at 103 Orchard Street — which was acquired by the museum in 2007 — from the 1940s up until the recent past. Addressing post-World War II immigration and migration to the Lower East Side, the educators leading the tours that I took did an excellent job highlighting how Americans have frequently been reluctant to welcome the world’s “huddled masses,” national myths notwithstanding.

How Do We Mourn Publicly? Memorialization and the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

How Do We Mourn Publicly?: Memorialization and the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

By Kim Dramer

Around the turn of the 20th century, the shirtwaist, a type of blouse, was the choice of fashionable New York women. Stylish women in shirtwaists embellished by intricate tucks and lace inserts cut an elegant figure on the streets of New York. But the ample cut of the shirtwaist also gave the freedom of movement required by women who toiled in the city’s sweatshops where the shirtwaists were cut, sewn and trimmed. Across lower Manhattan, garment factories sprang up in which row after row of young women sat behind sewing machines. In their pursuit of the American dream, they toiled long hours for low wages, enduring dangerous working conditions. At the turn of the 20th century, there were more than 500 blouse factories in New York City, employing upwards of 40,000 workers.[1]