By Robert W. Snyder Kibbitz & Nosh: When We All Met at Dubrow’s Cafeteria by Marcia Bricker Halperin Cornell University Press May 2023, 150 pp. In the middle decades of the twentieth century in New York City, Dubrow’s cafeterias in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn and the garment district of Manhattan were places to get out of your apartment, have coffee with friends, or enjoy a hearty but affordable meal. They were grounded in the world of Jewish immigrants and their children, and they thrived in years when Flatbush and the Garment District each had a distinctly Jewish character. The caf ..read more

By Shannan Clark In the decades that followed the Second World War, deindustrialization and disinvestment ravaged New York City, leading to its near bankruptcy in 1975. The loss of hundreds of thousands of jobs in the manufacturing, transportation, and distribution sectors badly hurt the metropolitan economy, but cultural deindustrialization also contributed to the city’s crisis. Four of the seven daily mass-circulation newspapers published in Manhattan at the beginning of the 1960s, for example, ceased operations over the course of the decade, resulting in thousands of layoffs. Mass-circulati ..read more

By Katie Heiserman “When Robert Moses came to the Lower East Side, we were really ready for him. Boy, did he pick the wrong neighborhood.” – Frances Goldin When Robert Moses’ Slum Clearing Committee developed a plan in 1959 to level a dozen city blocks from East 9th Street to Delancey Street, a community-led opposition movement sprang up. The demolition of 2,400 housing units became the primary focus of the anti-slum clearance activists. [1] At the head of the organizing effort stood Frances Goldin, a spirited Queens-born literary agent who, at age 21, moved to 11th Street and, at 26, ran for ..read more

By Claudia Keenan After reading the morning papers on February 25, 1869, David T. Valentine closed the door on his life in the brownstone city. [1] Friends believed he died of a broken heart. Fourteen months earlier, Valentine had been fired from the job he loved dearly. For almost thirty years, he arrived each morning at his office, City Hall #8, a room tossed with old maps, letters, and records. Without the work, he was lost. New York (N.Y.), Common Council., Hufeland, O., Hardy, J., Shannon, J., Valentine, D. T. (David Thomas)., Willis, S. J. (184270), Manual of the corporation of the city ..read more

By Scott Gac The Great Strikes of 1877 are recognized as a significant example of forceful labor protest in the United States. But, if we only look at what the workers did, we miss the important role of the state and state-backed violence in controlling workers and supporting the growth of American industrial capitalism. And it is this revolution of industrial capitalism, a revolution of contracts, wages, and courts backed by federal, state, and local force, that workers resisted during the Great Strikes. The following excerpt from Born in Blood: Violence and the Making of America details how ..read more

Reviewed By Dominique Jean-Louis Our Secret Society: Mollie Moon and the Glamour, Money, and Power behind the Civil Rights Movement by Tanisha C. Ford Amistad Harper Collins October 2023, 368 pp. If you’re anything like me, when you pick up a historical biography, the very first thing you do is zip your thumb along the page edges, in search of the slight divot of a photo plate insert or two. Especially for a book with “glamour” and “power” in all caps on the cover, the photos in the plate inserts of Our Secret Society: Mollie Moon and the Glamour, Money, Power Behind the Civil Rights Movement ..read more

By Britt Rusert William J. Wilson may very well have been New York’s first Black culture critic. A self-stylized flâneur, cultural aesthete, and frequent contributor to Black periodicals throughout the 1840s and 50s, he wrote under the name “Ethiop” and as “Brooklyn Correspondent” for Frederick Douglass’ Paper. In these columns, he provided readers across the nation with on-the-ground reports of New York’s people, places, and happenings based on his frequent “ramblings” around the city. Wilson was particularly interested in the sights and sounds of Broadway as it emerged as a hub of culture, e ..read more

Today on Gotham, David Huyssen interviews Joyce Milambiling about her recent book, Skyscraper Settlement: The Many Lives of Christodora House (New Village Press, 2023). Joyce Milambiling is a writer and educator. Retired since 2021 from the Department of Languages and Literatures at the University of Northern Iowa, she also taught within the CUNY system as an Adjunct Instructor while pursuing a doctorate in Linguistics at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her articles have appeared in such publications as Academe and English Teaching Forum, and she contributed a chapter entitled "The Universal Declara ..read more

By Arthur Banton, Ph.D. On March 12, 1977, when DeWitt Clinton High School of the Bronx defeated McKee High School of Staten Island 73-67 in the New York City Public Schools Athletic League basketball championship game, it marked a turning point in the seventy-four-year history of the league. McKee was vying to become the first school from Staten Island to win the title in the history of the tournament and break the twenty-year stranglehold by the Brooklyn and Bronx schools. For Clinton, the victory was their seventeenth title in school history – the most by any New York City public high schoo ..read more

Reviewed By Douglas J. Flowe Gotham’s War Within a War: Policing and the Birth of Law-and-Order Liberalism in World War II-Era New York City by Emily Brooks University of North Carolina Press October 2023, 258 pp. Former New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani is often credited with transforming the city from the gritty, dystopian, urban jungle, popularized in films such as The Warriors (1979) and Escape from the Bronx (1983), into one of the safest cities in the country in the 1990s. A successful prosecutor, famous for going after organized crime and the prosecution of corrupt officers, Giulian ..read more