New York history

RON DOUD'S life reads like a film, but with a tragic ending. Doud grew up and studied interior design at Seattle, graduating in 1970. Decades before Grunge rock, Seattle did have an active counter-culture in the 1960s but for young Doud by the early Seventies, another city was calling... New York and bright lights beckoned and he moved here in 1972. By the mid-1970s he was in independent practice and in 1977 Doud rose to fame as the interior designer of the most famous nightclub of all time: Studio 54. Fame even lead to an interior designer advertising luggage for Samsonite. During 1977-79 Doud consolidated his position as 'a leading New York interior designer' (The New York Times, 1983). We might know what Studio 54 looked like but what was the rest of Doud's work like? This is the first profile of this much overlooked designer: Doud would probably be well-known today if he was still alive, able to speak up for himself but alas his life was snatched away from him as a quite early victim of AIDS, dying aged only 35 in 1983, several months before Klaus Nomi and Glam Rocker/cabaret artiste Jobriath's death in the same year. Best known for his Studio 54 work, by the time Doud-openly gay at a time when this was highly unusual-died in February 1983 he was treated like a leper.

Artists and art communities are essential to the cultural life of cities. In New York City, artists have created networks of artist-run galleries in unlikely spaces that are outside the corporate gallery system. Sociologist Mary Kosut explores how artists generate alternative urban art economies within the contemporary New York art world.

When Ivory Towers Were Black: A Story about Race in America's Cities and Universities is a longitudinal historical account of what was undoubtedly the most audacious effort in the nation to ride the 1960s wave of black power and transform an Ivy League university's elitist practices on campus and in the surrounding community. Written to appeal to community-engaged faculty, students, and community activists in a variety of fields, the book (1) assesses the triumphs and subsequent unraveling of experiments to achieve racial justice in Columbia University's School of Architecture and in the nearby Harlem/East Harlem community, (2) demonstrates how those triumphs lived on in the lives of the school's ethnic minority recruits and as best practices in university-community relationships, and in the fields of architecture and urban planning, and (3) derives lessons learned about public scholarship and service to marginalized minority communities in todays so-called colorblind society.  Its subject matter lies at the confluence of urban history, higher education, and ethnic studies, its story narrated by a cohort of the school's highly accomplished ethnic minority alumni (the author included), who offer a unique from-below perspective on Columbia's well-documented university-community conflicts of the 1960s

Black public-affairs television programming in New York City
between 1967 and 1968 happened because of a convergence
of several factors. They include (a) the upheavals in urban
America between 1964 and 1967, (b) the release of the Report
of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (a.k.a.,
the Kerner Commission report) and (c) the assassination of
Martin Luther King, the latter two both within months of
each other in 1968. Other equally important factors include
the organic development of Black American-owned and
Black American-oriented media—newspapers and radio
outlets buttressed and informed by more than a century of
Black Left/Nationalist/Pan-Africanist/integrationist intellectual
thought and African-centered/Afrocentric ideology. Using and
critiquing the emerging scholarship on such programming, a
brief historical review of the creation and development of 4==
such shows in 1967 and 1968—WABC-TV’s Like It Is, WNEW-TV’s
Inside Bedford-Stuyvesant, and National Educational Television’s
two locally produced (but nationally broadcast) programs, Black
Journal and Soul!—shows that these programs sought to correct
the Kerner Commission’s critique that the American mass media
show “a White man’s world” by attempting to show, for the first
time, a Black world to large mainstream broadcast markets.

Enzo Fiermonte is a forgotten star of Italian cinema who acted in over 100 films between 1941 and 1979. His screen career started with "L’ultimo combattimento" (The Last Fight), in which he played the role of the main character: a boxer who was on his way to stardom – until he met a wealthy American woman: he felt in love with her, and she gradually persuaded him to get rid of the gloves and live as a gentleman. It was quite an ordinary story for film-goers to see, but actually that was Fiermonte’s real story.

Prior to join the film world, Enzo was a boxer himself – and a very talented one. He won Italy’s middleweight crown at just 23 years old, and after a series of brilliant bouts in the U.S. he entered the list of the main contenders for the world championship title. Success in the boxing ring, however, was not Enzo’s only success. Women literally felt at his feet: his was tall and muscular like a Michelangelo’s statue, with olive skin and black curly hair. For press reporters, he was “the Rudolph Valentino of boxing”.

In 1932, his beauty was noticed by one of the richest women in the world – Madeleine Astor Dick. She was mother to the heir of America’s most influential family – the Astors – and was known in her country for having survived his husband in 1912, as they were honeymooning aboard the most disgraceful ocean liner of human history – the Titanic. Very soon, Madeleine became infatuated with that gorgeous and kind Italian; Enzo, too, could not stop thinking of her. After a few months, the two got married amid sensational headlines: not only Fiermonte was a boxer with peasant origins, but he also was much younger than her: 25 years as opposed to Madeleine’s 39.

For Madeleine and for the privileges of being married with a millionaire, Fiermonte announced his retirement from boxing, but then he changed his mind; he left his wife, returned into the ring, and the whole world talked about him. Such a story, however, was just one of the many incredible stories he happened to be involved with. Enzo Fiermonte’s life was rich with hazards and hard-to-believe situations in every respect, to the point that Hollywood producers have occasionally thought of making a film about him. ***MORE INFO AT [email protected]***

In the post–World War II period, the police department emerged as one of the most problematic municipal agencies in New York City. Patrolmen and their superiors did not pay much attention to crime; instead they looked the other way, received payoffs from organized crime, performed haphazardly, and tolerated conditions that were unacceptable in a modern city with global ambitions. At the same time, patrolmen demanded deference and respect from African American civilians and routinely demeaned and brutalized individuals who appeared to be challenging their authority. The antagonism between African Americans and the New York Police Department (NYPD) intensified as local and national black freedom organizations paid more attention to police behavior and made police reform one of their main goals.

This is the first-ever comprehensive survey of Friends' radical contributions to the merchant marine and the rise of the Port of New York. Quaker historians have yet to appreciate the crucial role these Friends played in the utter transformation of global shipping, not to mention of New York City, although it is a familiar story to New York historians. This essay attempts to establish awareness of forgotten Quaker roles in the merchant marine, the Erie Canal, finance, philanthropy, and the spectacular development of New York City. A version of this essay was published in Quaker History, Spring 2019.

A Fortress in Brooklyn highlights Hasidic agency in urban change. While those with only a passing knowledge of Hasidic life might look at the community’s most visible markers—the sheitels, the shtreimels, the commitment to religious orthodoxy—and mistake Satmar Hasidim for habitual preservationists or apolitical isolationists, Deutsch and Casper make the opposite case, persuasively presenting Hasidic New Yorkers as active and organized participants in the social production of urban space. The book shows what happens when a community seeks, and to a large degree achieves, spatially bounded self-determination in a city where it remains a tiny minority.

http://thevarsovian.com/articles/my-new-york-travelogue-part-3
New York City has a population of more than eight million people living on an area of just over 780 square kilometres.
The population of NYC’s metropolitan area is over 20 million, more than half of Poland’s population.
The NYC Subway has 26 lines, running a total length of 369 kilometres. The Subway is home to some two million rats, some of which one can see blithely running between the tracks.
Times Square, sometimes known as “the world’s crossroads,” is the city’s most crowded location.
It’s also where I spent most of my 10 days in the city: among the advertising billboards and Broadway theatres, recruitment stations for the US Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines, and not far from the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art (MoMa), with its five million annual visitors – now including myself five milion and one.

The story of the Louis Down-Town Sabbath & Daily School, later called the Hebrew Technical School For Girls, stands as a fascinating account of an institution’s founding and evolution over
time, including its ultimate closure. However, it becomes even more illuminating in its historical and social context. I investigated the motivations of the key players in the story, especially Minnie Louis’s motivations and later, those of Nathaniel Myers, who led the school for twenty-one years. I looked at the many assumptions made by uptown German-American Jews about their downtown coreligionists, from literacy to cleanliness to what it meant to be an American and a Jew.

The Tweed Ring spawned a vibrant financial sector that was integral to its brief success but has never been previously examined. William “Boss” Tweed and his allies employed banks controlled or comanaged by Tammany politicians to embezzle funds, build political alliances, and invest in a wide array of business ventures. The capital of these savings and commercial banks—city money, deposits from Catholic charities, and the savings of immigrant laborers—was accumulated through political channels. During their operation between 1867 and 1871, politician-bankers engaged in a mix of patronage deals and profit-driven financial speculation. In effect, Tammany banks were ground zero for the Ring's conversion of political hegemony into a windfall of economic capital that fueled party activities and buoyed personal fortunes. Importantly, the anti-Ring mobilization by upper-class reformers was more than a revolt of wealthy taxpayers concerned with abstract goals of good government or rescuing city credit; it was also a reaction by old-line bankers in direct competition with Tammany upstarts. A dramatic bank run catalyzed by reformers in November 1871 drove them into bankruptcy, bringing this novel experiment in political capitalism to an end.

This article explores the shift from the utopian theme of the 1939 New York World's Fair to the nostalgic theme of the 1940 New York World's Fair. It argues that both seasons offered narratives intended to neutralize the disturbing implications of world war in Europe. The World of Tomorrow theme, conceived in the mid-1930s, represented an attempt to reconstitute a national narrative of progress shattered by a traumatic past experience (the Great War), an unstable present (the Great Depression), and uncertain expectations for the future (the spectre of ascendant totalitarian ideologies and another world war). The abandonment of the World of Tomorrow in 1940 suggests the failure of this attempt to resurrect a coherent narrative of progress in the face of renewed violence in Europe.

With the effects of war echoing in the empty spaces of the pavilions of 'orphan nations', silences and nostalgic motifs disrupted the original forward-looking theme of the Fair's planners. Towards the end of the Fair's first season, with the war unsettling the utopian premise of the World of Tomorrow, the exposition's organizers increasingly invoked nostalgic themes related to a harmonious pre-industrial past. As the organizers embraced ethnic folk traditions, the particularism characteristic of nostalgia replaced universalist assumptions of progress during the exposition's second season. Similarly, the 1940 Fair organizers rejected the universalistic blurring of ideological distinctions between democratic and totalitarian systems promoted during the first season. The spectre of war cast a growing shadow across the fairgrounds and in the consciousness of fair-goers. War-related discontinuities and anxieties allowed the more troubling aspects of modernity to emerge from the Fair's imaginative cocoon.

In Staten Island, New York, near a derelict building that was once part of the historic Seaview Hospital, stands a group of beech trees carved with human figures and sacred hearts, each in a consistent but highly distinctive style. Most of these trees are signed by a W. Dixon, and two are dated to the early 1930s. These carvings constitute a previously undiscussed collection of folk art in New York City. This article documents these carvings in detail, while advocating for a broader consideration of tree carvings in folklore studies.

This is a Green Open Access article. Published as Pentangelo, Joseph. 2020. A Grove of Folk Art on Staten Island: Documenting the Carvings of W. Dixon. Voices: The Journal of New York Folklore 46(1–2), 3–11. © 2020 by the Board of Trustees of New York Folklore.

New York City's streets, parks, museums, architecture, and its people appear in an array of literary works published from New York's earliest settlement to the present day. The exploration of the city as both a symbol and as a reality has formed the basis of New York's literature. Using the themes of adaptation, innovation, identity, and hope, this history explores novels, poetry, periodicals, and newspapers to examine how New York's literature can be understood through the notion of movement. From the periodicals of the nineteenth century, the Arabic writers of the city in the early twentieth century, the literature of homelessness, childhood, and the spaces of tragedy and resilience within the metropolis, this diverse assessment opens up new areas of research within urban literature. It provides an innovative examination of how writing has shaped the lives of New Yorkers and how writing about the city has shaped the modern world.

This paper explores the influence of the Cold War on the design and reception of one the seminal office buildings of the 20th century: the Seagram Building. Using material collected from the archives of the Seagram Company as well as the papers of the Bronfman family, I explore how the technology, wealth, and power necessary to construct the Seagram Building were linked in the late 1950s and early 1960s to the social and political milieu of the Cold War, in particular the bomb.

Book Review: Talking Prices by Olav Velthuis

TABLE OF CONTENTS:
I. Introduction
II. Juxtaposition of art and commerce: the trichotomy of the avant-garde galleries, conservative dealers and auction houses
III. Money as the building block of relationships between artists, dealers and collectors
IV. Pricing works of art: bending rationality and twisting the economic principles
V. Social fabric of the art market
VI. Conclusion

MORE INFO on: angelversetti.com
Angel Versetti

Born in 1820, John Taylor Johnston is a pivotal figure in the history of American collecting. A pioneer in transatlantic art collecting, his numerous visits to Europe helped him develop his taste, enrich his possessions, and build a reliable network of artists and dealers. He then re-injected this experience into a rising New York art market, becoming the first collector to enjoy success through the weekly public opening of a domestic art gallery. Here he displayed his highly-praised collection of European and American paintings, comprising works by Vernet, Gérôme, Meissonier, Homer and Church. Along with his brother James, Johnston also founded the very first edifice in the United States devoted entirely to housing artists – the Tenth Street Studio Building, designed by architect Richard Morris Hunt. His reputation as a collector eventually led to his appointment as first president of the newly formed Metropolitan Museum in 1871.

New York’s fiscal decline in the 1970’s was radically reversed in the wake of financial deregulation and electronic trading in the 1980s. No architects and urbanists at that time anticipated the transformations the introduction of new digital technologies would unleash into the 21st century. The 1980s was
followed by three decades of the irrational exuberance: the dot.com boom and bust, Rudolf Giuliani’s Zero Tolerance policing, the attack on the World Trade Center, mounting evidence of the irreversibility of climate change, the
financial meltdown of 2008, and the occupation of Wall Street last year. This chapter unfolds the process of the recycling of New York City’s urban form in three stages of design research following of the introduction of electronic trading on Wall Street: damage control, where new forms of practice engaged
with the “urban leftovers” in the wake of massive gentrification in the 1980s; seizing the means of production involved the beginnings of digital design practice in the 1990s, and finally the possibilities of the twittering social activism of today which began at the start of the 21st century creating new forms
of inclusive urbanisms based on broad civic participation in design activism.

Pesquisa desenvolvida e apresentada no Seminário de Teoria, História e Crítica de Arquitetura "Quando o projeto é patrimônio: a modernidade póstuma em questão", ministrado por Ana Carolina Pellegrini, durante doutorado no PROPAR/UFRGS.
A Apresentação traz a Análise do lugar, a cronologia de ocupação da ilha, a cronologia do projeto, o projeto final de Louis Kahn, declarações da imprensa quando da construção do empreendimento e algumas especulações quanto ao futuro da área.

This book chapter on Lorca's Bodas de sangre/Blood Wedding gives an archival account of the first production of a Lorca play in the USA; examines conflicting early translations of its text; compares Lorca to a work by his translator Hughes; and reads Bodas psychoanalytically for the queer introjection of the loved and lost male object into the subject.

During the 1960s, adidas was the world's leading sports footwear manufacturer. Based in Bavaria and with a history stretching to the 1920s, the company dominated elite sports through aggressive promotion and innovative shoes that catered to athletes' needs. The ‘Superstar’ is one of the company's most successful models, still in production over 40 years since its launch in the late 1960s. Designed to wrest control of the basketball market from American rubber companies, in the two decades that followed it developed cultural meanings far beyond those envisaged by adidas, becoming associated with hip hop, a youth music and subculture born in 1970s New York. Arguing that design is shaped by use and consumption is allied to practice, this article examines the processes by which the ‘Superstar’ came into being, placing it into a wider context of changes within basketball, corporate ambition, and international trade. Tracing the actions and influence of young consumers in New York, it also considers how new ways of thinking about the shoe arose, spread, and were eventually commodified by adidas. It argues that a product's meaning can never be fixed, that producers and consumers are engaged in a constant dialogue over how things are used and perceived.

When did slavery end in New York State? That’s not an easy question to answer. In 1799, New York gradually freed future generations who would otherwise have been born into slavery, but left enslaved thousands born before 1799. It was not until March 31, 1817 that the New York legislature ended two centuries of slavery within its borders, setting July 4, 1827 as the date of final emancipation and making New York the first state to pass a law for the total abolition of legal slavery. When Emancipation Day finally arrived, the number of enslaved men and women freed was roughly 4,600 or 11% of the black population living in New York and the black community and its supporters held joyous celebrations and parades throughout the state.

Slavery existed in New York State from colonial times through the creation of the modern state. Alexander Hamilton, John Jay and other prominent New Yorkers owned slaves at one time, but the more reform-minded of these formed organizations to end slavery in New York, such as the New York Manumission Society. New York’s free African-American community also led the anti-slavery movement through activist ministers and tireless black abolitionists.


The 1799 gradual abolition law declared that children born after July 4, 1799 to enslaved mothers in New York would be born free, but would have to provide free services to their mothers’ masters until they reached 25 if female and 28 if male. Because the law applied only to those born after 1799, slavery continued for those enslaved born before that year and a final act of emancipation was needed to eradicate slavery in the state. One was passed on March 31, 1817, even though some of those freed were required to continue to serve their masters under an indenture for a term of years. Yet no sooner had slavery been slated for extinction in New York than the right of blacks to vote in New York came under bigoted political attack. The New York Constitutional Convention of 1821 was called to extend universal suffrage across the state and it did abolish property qualifications for white men, but at the same time the convention delegates disenfranchised the states’ African-American citizens—including those to be freed in 1827—by limiting the right to vote by free black men to those who owned substantial property. New York’s racialized suffrage standards would not be remedied until the Fifteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution was passed in 1870. Sadly, the state had to be compelled to allow equal voting rights for New York’s African-Americans.

Contrary to the popular narrative, the southern states were not alone in their adamant refusal to end slavery. New York also held on to that repressive institution until the free black community and the Manumission Society combined to persuade Governor Daniel D. Tompkins and the state legislature to end slavery within its boundaries. The 200th anniversary of the Final Act of Emancipation is celebrated in “When Men Amongst Us, Shall Cease to be Slaves: The Bicentennial of New York’s 1817 Final Act of Emancipation,” in the forthcoming issue of Judicial Notice soon to be released.

Anneke Jans Bogardus (c1605-1663) owned a farm of 62 acres on Manhattan Island. Sometime after 1697, this land became the property of Trinity Church.  For 200 years (from 1738 to 1935), various descendants of Anneke Jans claimed to retain ownership of the farm, and sought to recover it through legal action.  Their extraordinary efforts, displaying a remarkable mixture of faith, righteousness, stubbornness, naiveness, and delusion, are chronicled here. It is not my purpose to judge the merits of their claim - the legal questions have long been settled - but rather to document this fascinating episode in the history of a large and distinguished family.