In 2021, New York’s 421-a tax exemption for new residential construction turned fifty years old. That fiscal year, it cost the city $1.7 billion in uncollected tax revenue, a larger amount than any other single New York City housing budget item. Since 1990, as far back as public data is available, the tax exemption has cost the city over $22 billion (adjusted for inflation). In June of 2022, the program will expire unless it is renewed or replaced.
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.
Review: The Great Migration and the Democratic Party
Reviewed by Christopher Shell
The migration of roughly six million Black Americans to the North between 1915-1965 is the subject of Keneshia N. Grant’s book, The Great Migration and the Democratic Party: Black Voters and the Realignment of American Politics in the 20th Century. In the United States popular imagination, when we think about the Great Migration, we may think about its cultural implications such as the Harlem Renaissance, the New Negro movement, or Motown. Perhaps we think about its impact on Black radical activity such as the Universal Negro Improvement Association, Nation of Islam, or the Black Panther Party. Grant’s study, rather, urges readers to reconceptualize the Great Migration as an event that critically transformed the northern political system.
In the late summer of 1883, the Dakota Apartments was nearly ready for tenants. After three years of construction, the luxury apartment building had only a few months’ work left to go. Slate-tile roofers, sheet-metal workers, and ironworkers were completing the roof, while carpenters, plasterers, and plumbers finished the interiors. Every day, hundreds of craftsmen trekked uptown to work on the million-dollar building that was not only unusually expensive but also remote in location.
Interview: Anthony Tamburri on the John D. Calandra Italian American Institute
Interviewed by Adam Kocurek
Today on the blog, Gotham editor Adam Kocurek speaks with the dean of the John D. Calandra Italian American Institute, Anthony Tamburri about the history of the Institute, and the work it does for supporting Italian American scholars and the history of Italian Americans.
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.
The Great Disappearing Act: An Interview with Christina A. Ziegler-McPherson
Interviewed by Hongdeng Gao
Today on the Blog, Gotham editor Hongdeng Gao speaks to Christina Ziegler-McPherson about her latest book, The Great Disappearing Act: Germans in New York City, 1880-1930. Ziegler-McPherson discusses how over the span of a few decades, New York City’s German community went from being the best positioned to promote a new, more pluralistic American culture that they themselves had helped to create to being an invisible group. She offers fresh insights into how German immigration shaped cultural, financial, and social institutions in New York City and debates about assimilation and multi-lingualism in the United States.
Transatlantic Radicalism in Early National New York
By Sean Griffin
New York City has long been considered a hotbed of radical political ideas, as well as a cosmopolitan center of culture and commerce. But while the roots of the latter have been traced back to the city’s origins as a Dutch trading post with a decidedly commercial outlook and a polyglot population, fewer historians have explored the origins of the city’s radical political culture.
Review: God in Gotham: The Miracle of Religion in Modern Manhattan
Reviewed by Kenneth T. Jackson
When we think of New York and history, religion is not typically the first thing that comes to mind. Organized crime perhaps, or skyscrapers, or labor disputes, or nightclubs, legitimate theaters, museums, subways, Wall Street, wealth, poverty, the list could be endless. To most people, Gotham is more associated with sin than with morality, more with prostitution than with sermons, more with sports venues than with churches.
