Working Class Utopias": A History of Cooperative Housing in New York City and Freedomland: Co-op City and the Story of New York
Reviewed by Nicholas Dagen Bloom
To understand why local cooperatives rank so low in progressive housing discourse, it’s worth reading either of the excellent books under review. Annemarie Sammartino’s Freedomland provides a socially informed history of Co-op City, chronicling its triumphs and travails, with particular attention to resident experiences and long-term outcomes. Legendary urban history Robert M. Fogelson’s Working-Class Utopias offers readers a comprehensive account of the New York cooperative movement, giving special attention to the spectacular collapse of Co-op City’s finances during the 1975-76 rent strike. Both books capture the complexity, and nearly insuperable challenges, faced by cooperative sponsors, state officials, and residents in sustaining communal housing.
Read More
The Rise and Fall of Protestant Brooklyn: An American Story
Reviewed by Jon Butler
Between the Civil War and 1900, "old" Brooklyn both prospered and declined. Real estate developers and the new Brooklyn Bridge swelled Brooklyn's tony neighborhoods with middling and upper-class commuters to Manhattan….The New York Times may have been condescending when it labelled Brooklyn "that moral suburb" before the Brooklyn Bridge dedication, as Blumin and Altschuler put it. But it hadn't missed the Protestants' aim.
Read More
Dutch-American Stories: On the First Dutch Translation of the U.S. Constitution
By Michael Douma
There are a few topics that guarantee a historian an audience. Write a decent biography of Abraham Lincoln or James Madison, for example, and you are bound to have readers. Or, write something new and interesting about the Constitution and you might attract some attention.
Read More
“Completion by Contrast”: Architecture and Sculpture in Postwar New York
By Donald Albrecht and Thomas Mellins
In the March 30, 1963 issue of the New Yorker, art critic and historian Calvin Tomkins profiled sculptor Richard Lippold, whom he described as “by all odds, the busiest artist now working predominantly in collaboration with architects.”
Read MoreFriday, Bloody Friday: David Paul Kuhn's The Hardhat Riot
Reviewed by Steven H. Jaffe
David Paul Kuhn’s The Hardhat Riot: Nixon, New York City, and the Dawn of the White Working-Class Revolution focuses on May 8, 1970, a symbolic date in the exodus of such voters from the “New Deal Coalition.” On that day hundreds of blue-collar workers — many of them construction workers building the World Trade Center — converged in the streets of lower Manhattan, chanting “U—S—A. All the Way!” as they physically attacked students protesting the Vietnam War. Over one hundred students, bystanders, and others were injured in the melee on the streets.
Read More
Nieuw Amsterdam As Manhattan
By Harrison Diskin
In the summer of 1641, a Wiechquaskeck man murdered Claes Smits, an aged wheelwright who lived in a small house north of Fort Amsterdam. He had visited Smits’ house to exchange beaver skins for duffels of cloth. But as Smits bent over to grab the cloth from a chest, the Native man (the records have not preserved his name) struck him dead with an axe. The Commander of the Dutch garrison at Fort Amsterdam pursued the man back to his village and accosted him with questions.
Read MoreProjecting “Spread City”: The New York Metropolitan Region Study and Its Critics, 1956–1968
By Peter Ekman
“This project is not a blueprint for action. It has no recommendations to make about the physical structure of the Region or about the form or activities of the governmental bodies there. At the same time, it is a necessary prelude to future planning studies of the Region.” The project in question was the New York Metropolitan Region Study (NYMRS), executed 1956–59 for the Regional Plan Association (RPA) by an interdisciplinary group of scholars from Harvard’s Graduate School of Public Administration. Unlike the RPA’s original Regional Plan of New York, issued 1929–31, which was zealously promoted to the public and substantially implemented by 1940, the ten-volume NYMRS very deliberately was not a plan.
Read More
The Jewel of Eastern Long Island:
Precarity and the Peconic Bay Scallop Industry
By Erin Becker
Peconic Bay scallops, argopecten irradians, are the jewel of the Eastern Long Island recreational and commercial fishery; their market rate can be as high as $30 for a single pound. The shellfish are a fall and winter delicacy throughout the Northeastern United States. Peconic Bay scallops have enormous cultural and economic significance.
Read More
Design for the Crowd: Patriotism and Protest in Union Square
Reviewed by Donald Mitchell
Almost immediately after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, crowds started gathering in Union Square, the closest big public space to Lower Manhattan’s “exclusion zone.” People brought candles and photographs, flowers and flags. They came to mourn and to commune, turning the square into “a shrine and memorial, layered with photos, handwritten messages, schoolchildren’s drawing, expressions of sympathy and sorrow from flight attendants who had been spared the luck of the draw,” as Michael Sorkin and Sharon Zukin later wrote.[1] Quiet and dedicated mostly to mourning in the first days, Union Square soon also became a place of debate and discussion: what should America’s response be to the attacks? Why invade Afghanistan? How to understand America’s geopolitical role in the world?
Read More