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Gotham

Before Central Park

Before Central Park

Reviewed by Kara Murphy Schlichting

Before Central Park is Sara Cedar Miller’s fourth publication about New York City’s famous greensward. Miller is historian emerita and, since 1984, a photographer for the Central Park Conservancy. Before Central Park is distinctive in its combination of Miller’s photography, her expert understanding of the park’s geography and archeology, and her meticulous real estate history of parkland from the 17th through the 19th centuries.

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American Revolution, Antebellum & Civil War, Built Environment, Business & Labor, Housing & Realty, Manhattan, Native Americans, Nature & Environment, New Amsterdam, Parks, Poverty & Inequality, Reviews, Urban PlanningGuest User Comment
Henry Collins Brown and the Museum of the City of New York
Henry Collins Brown and the Museum of the City of New York

Henry Collins Brown and the Museum of the City of New York

By Claudia Keenan

Since at least the turn of the 20th century, New Yorkers raised the possibility of establishing a city museum. In 1904 when subway excavations at Bowling Green turned up a stone from the early 17th-century Fort George, a local author named Charles Hemstreet opposed giving it to the New-York Historical Society. “Once in the possession of the Society,” he told a reporter, “it would be as inaccessible to the general public as if it had been left in its underground resting place.” He urged the creation of a “municipal museum.”

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Arts & Culture, Gilded Age, Progressive EraGuest User Comments
Dutch-American Stories: The Tale of the White Horse: The First Slave Trading Voyage to New Netherland

Dutch-American Stories: The Tale of the White Horse: The First Slave Trading Voyage to New Netherland

By Dennis J. Maika

The first direct shipment of enslaved Africans arrived in New Amsterdam in 1655. The voyage of the White Horse came in the wake of significant changes in the Dutch Atlantic. In this blog, American historian Dennis Maika outlines how family and business connections shaped the development of a slave-trading center in Manhattan.

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Business & Labor, New Amsterdam, Slavery & Antislavery, TransportationGuest User Comment
Central Park Soundscapes: The Rumba Cypher

Central Park Soundscapes: The Rumba Cypher

By Berta Jottar

Since the late 1950s, New York City has been an epicenter of rumba outside Cuba. For more than six decades, a rumba circle in Central Park has embraced those of African descent from Spanish-speaking islands (Cubans, Puerto Ricans, Dominicans) and Latin America (Panamanians, Colombians), local African Americans, AfroLatinxs (Nuyorican, NuyoDominicans, Cuban Americans) and those from other diasporas including American Jews. A focus on Central Park rumba illustrates the intricacies and ancestral functionings of the African Diaspora present in contemporary New York.

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Arts & Culture, Immigration, Manhattan, Parks, Race & EthnicityGuest User Comment
“Strike for the Prince of Orange!”: La Garce and the Vicarious Privateers of New Amsterdam
“Strike for the Prince of Orange!”: La Garce and the Vicarious Privateers of New Amsterdam

“Strike for the Prince of Orange!”: La Garce and the Vicarious Privateers of New Amsterdam

By Julie van den Hout

During the mid-1640s, Manhattan played host to the Dutch privateer Willem Albertsen Blauvelt, with his frigate, La Garce (The Wench).[1] From New Amsterdam, New Netherland Director Willem Kieft and his council granted a commission to Captain Blauvelt to intercept Iberian ships in the Caribbean, as “the enemies of the High and Mighty Lords of the States General of the United Netherlands.”[2] Blauvelt made at least three privateering voyages from New Amsterdam to the Caribbean with La Garce and captured at least seven Spanish ships as “prizes.” With each voyage, more and more local investors signed on to help finance the expeditions in return for a fairly unique commodity — a share in a Spanish prize ship and its cargo.

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Business & Labor, New Amsterdam, Waterfront & Islands, TransportationGuest UserComment
“Mortars over Stapleton Heights”: Audre Lorde on Staten Island
“Mortars over Stapleton Heights”: Audre Lorde on Staten Island

“Mortars over Stapleton Heights”: Audre Lorde on Staten Island

By David Allen

In the poem, “On My Way Out I Passed Over You and the Verrazano Bridge,” Lorde contemplates leaving Staten Island where she had lived for nearly thirteen years. Her connections to the place were complex, bringing together her love of nature, her need for a place to write and work, to be with her lover and her children, as well as with other poets and activists. All these had come to pass within a social and political climate inscribed with racism, homophobia, and violence.

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Arts & Culture, Crime & Policing, Education, Gender & Sexuality, Housing & Realty, Race & Ethnicity, Staten IslandGuest UserComment
Review: Anna Pegler-Gordon, Closing the Golden Door: Asian Migration and the Hidden History of Exclusion at Ellis Island

Rethinking Ellis Island: A History of Asian Detention and Deportation

Reviewed by Maria Paz G. Esguerra

Anna Pegler-Gordon’s Closing the Golden Door: Asian Migration and the Hidden History of Exclusion at Ellis Island offers a glimpse into the very interesting career of Ellis Island and traces its evolution from an immigration station into a detention and deportation center. This evolution unfolds in multiple chapters that focus on the relatively small number, but diverse group of Asian immigrants and nonimmigrants who have often and long been overlooked by scholars of migration: stowaways, smugglers, and sailors, Japanese nationals and Japanese Americans detained during World War II, and Chinese accused of pro-Communist activities in the Cold War.

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Immigration, Race & Ethnicity, Reviews, Waterfront & IslandsGuest UserComment
Review: Soyica Diggs Colbert's Radical Vision: A Biography of Lorraine Hansberry

Review: Soyica Diggs Colbert's Radical Vision

Reviewed by Shaun Armstead

Soyica Diggs Colbert’s Radical Vision eschews a traditional biographical account of artist-intellectual Lorraine Hansberry. Regarding Hansberry’s oeuvre as a “writing of her life,” Colbert asserts, that Hansberry used her work to creatively imagine an alternative way of being in the world through global collective emancipation. Thus, her writing was a source of her becoming in a world that persistently misunderstood — “misapprehended” — the playwright as well as her work.

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Arts & Culture, Gender & Sexuality, Reviews, Race & EthnicityGuest UserComment
Dutch-American Stories: Mass Murder on Manhattan

Dutch-American Stories: Mass Murder on Manhattan

By Mark Meuwese

Settler colonialism is not a story of friendly relations throughout. The confrontation with an unfamiliar other creates wariness and suspicion and often leads to violent outbursts in which noncombatants become innocent victims. Manhattan in the seventeenth century was no exception, as the events of 1643 show.

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Manhattan, Native Americans, New Amsterdam, Race & EthnicityGuest UserComment
Review: Hugh Ryan’s The Women’s House of Detention: A Queer History of a Forgotten Prison

Review: Hugh Ryan’s The Women’s House of Detention: A Queer History of a Forgotten Prison

Reviewed by Rachel Corbman

Fifty years ago, an art deco prison towered over Greenwich Village. Between the years of 1929 and 1971, tens of thousands of women and trans masculine people passed through the Women’s House of Detention, waiting for a trial or serving sentences. In The Women’s House of Detention: A Queer History of a Forgotten Prison, Hugh Ryan convincingly demonstrates why this largely forgotten prison matters to queer history. Despite Ryan’s central focus on the so-called House of D, The Women’s House of Detention does not read like an institutional history. Rather, Ryan weaves together the life histories of dozens of women and transmasculine people, following them before and after their time at the House of D.

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Crime & Policing, Gender & Sexuality, Manhattan, Reviews, BrooklynGuest UserComment