Piecework, Peddlers, and Prostitutes: Intertwined Lives on the Lower East Side
By Deena Ecker
At the dawn of the 20th century, the stoop of 102 Allen Street, near the corner of Delancey Street on Manhattan’s Lower East Side hopped with activity. Children played in front of the building, competing for space with “those women, called ‘Naphkes’” who would “say to men: ‘Come up’.” Isaac Yarmus, just 12 years old, said that when he “went on the stoop the Naphkes would take my hat and throw it into the street and tell me to keep away from the stoop.” Meanwhile, the building’s housekeeper, Hester Wolf, kept careful watch and would “say to the Naphkes: ‘Go inside’. when she saw a policeman or detective coming along the street.”
The Neighborhood Manhattan Forgot: Audubon Park and the Families Who Shaped It
Matthew Spady Interviewed by Robert W. Snyder
In northern Manhattan in 1841, the naturalist John James Audubon bought 14 acres of farmland on the banks of the Hudson River and built his family a home far from the crowded downtown streets. Audubon’s country homestead is long gone, but his story launches Matthew Spady’s The Neighborhood Manhattan Forgot: Audubon Park and the Families Who Shaped It.
The House on Henry Street: And Interview with Ellen M. Snyder-Grenier
Interviewed by Marjorie N. Feld
Today on the blog, Margorie N. Feld interviews Ellen M. Snyder-Grenier, author of The House on Henry Street: The Enduring Life of a Lower East Side Settlement. This book moves Snyder-Grenier into Manhattan and the rich history of a settlement house, founded by a dynamic Progressive activist named Lillian Wald, in 1893. Unlike so many of the settlement houses founded in that fascinating historical moment, Henry Street is still very much alive as a social service agency, still helping its Lower East Side neighbors after over a century.
Community Struggles for a New Gouverneur: Tackling the Deeper Roots of the City’s Unequal Hospital Care
By Hongdeng Gao
The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed deep inequalities in New York City’s hospitals. The decisions made by officials in power to direct money to private hospitals and close safety-net medical institutions in the past thirty years bear many similarities to another large-scale hospital closure effort in the city nearly six decades ago: the hospital affiliation plan authorized by Mayor Robert Wagner.
From 1899 to 1914, people around the world gave over 12,000 animals to the New York Zoological Park in the Bronx (almost 5,000 of them were snakes). Donations to the zoo fulfilled two purposes: they supplied the zoological park with more animals, and, perhaps more importantly, helped the zoo form a relationship with certain communities around them. This project is a focused look at a section of these animal donors, the people of New York City.
“My Colored House is on Fire”: Children, Housing, and the Architecture of Black Charity in San Juan Hill
By Jessica Larson
Following their displacement from the Tenderloin in the early 1900s, Manhattan’s largest Black population moved northward and sought to rebuild their community’s infrastructure in San Juan Hill, an area bounded by 59th Street to the south, 65th Street to the north, Amsterdam Avenue to east, and West End Avenue to the west. Black reformers — the majority of whom were women — worked to construct a neighborhood that offered to its residents missing social welfare services.
Prehistoric and Ahead of Her Time: Sapphasaura at the Museum of Natural History
By Rachel Pitkin
In the summer of 1973, members of the newly formed Lesbian Feminist Liberation (LFL) group were engaged in a unique construction project in the Upper West Side backyard of one of its members, Robin Lutsky. A physically onerous labor of love, the project unfolded over ten days of round-the-clock attention, a last-ditch protest effort to gain the attention of one of New York’s most celebrated yet controversial institutions: the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH).
Prohibition New York City: An Interview with David Rosen
Interviewed by David Huyssen
Today on the blog, editor David Huyssen speaks with David Rosen, independent writer and historian, about his new book Prohibition New York City:Speakeasy Queen Texas Guinan, Blind Pigs, Drag Balls and More (Charleston, SC: The History Press, 2020), his third book on transgression in American life, and second focusing on New York City.
Thomas J. Shelley has added to his already substantial oeuvre of New York Catholic history with the publication of Upper West Side Catholics: Liberal Catholicism in a Conservative Archdiocese: The Church of the Ascension, New York City, 1895-2020 (New York: Empire State Editions, 2020).[1] His deep and broad understanding of New York’s Catholic institutions provides the context for his study of the Church of the Ascension, which was founded in 1895 on the Upper West Side. While his history of Ascension starts from its founding, Shelley’s book offers an extended view of the neighborhood during the 1960s and 1970s, a period when demographic transition overlapped with economic decline and produced immense political conflicts that destabilized New York’s institutions, including the Catholic Church.
Monuments of Colonial New York: George III and Liberty Poles
Wendy Bellion and Shira Lurie
For the last installment in our six-part series on monuments in / about colonial Gotham, Wendy Bellion and Shira Lurie discuss NYC’s rebellion against British rule during the volatile decade before the War for Independence. Bellion begins with a story of destruction — the tearing down of the statue of George III in Bowling Green. Lurie tells of construction — the raising of five liberty poles on the Common (present day City Hall Park).
