Anti-Asian Violence and Acts of Community Care from the 1980s to the Present
Vivian Truong Interviewed by Hongdeng Gao
Today on the Blog, Gotham’s editor Hongdeng Gao speaks with Vivian Truong, author of “From State-Sanctioned Removal to the Right to the City” and a core committee member of the A/P/A Voices: A COVID-19 Public Memory Project.Truong discusses segregationist and police violence against Asian American, Black and Latinx residents in southern Brooklyn in the 1980s and 1990s and the cross-group, cross-issue movements that developed in response to such violence.
War Weary Nature: Environment, British Occupation, and the Winter of 1779-1780
By Blake McGready
In December 1779, New Yorkers helplessly watched as their harbor froze solid and ice slowly strangled the proud entrepôt. In the late 18th century, New York City served as the principal destination for packet ships, offered a range of specialized services for the British military, and facilitated trade between the continental interior and Atlantic world. The loss of the city’s maritime and riverine networks, even temporarily, were disastrous. Ice floes appeared in the Hudson River early in the month. By December 22, the lawyer William Smith reported that ice had formed along the shoreline and had obstructed transportation between Manhattan and New Jersey.
The Complicated Legacy of Paul Moss, La Guardia’s Infamous “Gutter-Cleaner”
By Jonathan Kay
Outside the conference room at the Bow Tie Partners offices in Times Square, there is a framed letter, dated September 5, 1944, addressed to one “Master Charles B. Moss, Jr.” — the grandson of legendary New York City film exhibitor B.S. Moss (1878-1951), who still presides over the family film and real-estate business.
“The Avant-Groove”: Excerpt from No Sounds Are Forbidden
By Matthew Friedman
Morton Subotnick arrived in New York in the fall of 1966 already a giant of the burgeoning avant-garde music scene. Together with composer Ramon Sender, a tape recorder, scattered equipment borrowed from a local high school or through a fortuitous connection with the local Ampex representative, and support from Mills College, he had built the San Francisco Tape Music Center into a force in electronic music rivaling the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center (CPEMC), uptown.
New Collections From the CUNY Digital History Archive
By Stephen Brier
The CUNY Digital History Archive (CDHA), created in 2013 by the American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning at the CUNY Graduate Center, is committed to preserving and presenting on an open publicly accessible website the history of the City University of New York. Over the past eight years, a number of CUNY faculty, staff, graduate students, and alumni have created a series of curated collections of primary historical sources materials on key moments in CUNY’s rich history.
Between Itself and Brooklyn: Gerritsen Beach’s Developing Identity from the 1920s-1930s
By Michael Sutherland
The sleepy seaside Brooklyn neighborhood of Gerritsen Beach resembles a New England fishing village far more than a neighborhood in the largest city in the United States. Its residents are insular, and rarely want to rely on the City or its officials for help. But, during the neighborhood’s infancy in the early 20th century, the people of Gerritsen Beach were grappling with forming and maintaining their own identity as a neighborhood while attempting to completely and equitably integrate the fledgling neighborhood into Brooklyn and as a part of the city as a whole.
The Gilded Age in a Glass: From Innovation to Prohibition
By Zachary Veith
In the early 20th century, bartenders at the world-famous Waldorf-Astoria memorized 271 concoctions. Scores of signature drinks were dreamt up in honor of people and events: the “Arctic” to celebrate Peary’s discover of the North Pole, the “Coronation” to commemorate King Edward’s ascension to the throne, the “Commodore” and “Hearst,” honoring business tycoons, and even the “Charlie Chaplin.” Imbibing at the mahogany bar aligned oneself with the wealth and tastemakers of America; crowds of Wall Street bankers like J.P. Morgan, celebrities like Buffalo Bill Cody and Mark Twain, and the high-society elites all enjoyed more than a few of the bar’s signature cocktails.
The Bank of United States, East European Jews and the Lost World of Immigrant Banking
By Rebecca A. Kobrin
On a particularly cold morning ninety-one years ago this month, the owner of a small candy store in the Bronx went to his branch of the Bank of United States to withdraw some much-needed cash. Over the past two years, the bank had been selling its shares to its depositors throughout New York city to help raise funds, guaranteeing their investment would maintain its value. The Bank promised it would buy back shares at any point. Now, this storeowner was taking them up on it.
Decline, Rebellion, and Police Politics: Rethinking the Dissolution of New York’s Civil Rights Coalition
Reviewed by Joseph Kaplan
In his final book before his life was taken by an assassin’s bullet, Martin Luther King Jr. reflected on the state of the Civil Rights Movement and the conditional allyship of whites. According to King, whites generally believed “that American society is essentially hospitable to fair play and to steady growth toward a middle-class Utopia embodying racial harmony.” Emerging from a decade of unprecedented mobility in which a highly unionized white labor force entered the middle class en masse, many viewed the Civil Rights Movement as part of the unbroken march of progress.
“I have shoes to my feet this time”: May Swenson, New York City, and the FWP
By Margaret A. Brucia
Penniless and hungry, her clothes in tatters, May Swenson was an emergency case for the Workers Alliance (WAA) in March 1938. She was fed at St. Barnabas House on Mulberry Street (“Boy, that butterless bread, gravyless potatoes, hashed turnips & salt-less meatloaf tasted swell!”)[1] and then given fifteen dollars to buy new shoes and clothing at S. Klein’s at Union Square and E 14th Street. “Jesus!” was all she could write in her diary.
