Entries tagged with “books” from Patell and Waterman's History of New York

The NEH's magazine, Humanities, has a terrific interview this month with one of my favorite historians -- and favorite people -- Jill Lepore. A Harvard prof (and chair of the school's History and Literature program) and award-winning author, Lepore also, along with our friend Caleb Crain, has become a key writer on American history and culture for the New Yorker. And she's an active parent of small children. And she's only a few years on the other side of 40. As Ari over at Edge of the American West asked, "Jealous?"

The whole interview is worth reading, but especially relevant to this site is the bit about her book New York Burning, a gripping read about the city's purported slave revolt of 1741:

HUMANITIES: In New York Burning, you wrote about ... the fires that swept through Manhattan in 1741.

LEPORE: ... Another long-forgotten episode in early American history. It's a little like Salem witchcraft, which everyone knows about, the 1692 witchcraft trials in which twenty people died, except that what happened in New York was a lot worse. Thirteen black men were burned at the stake; seventeen more were hanged. No one was burned at the stake in Salem. That's just a figment of our collective imagination. What happened in New York was also, historically, far more significant. It played a role in how slavery evolved in the North. And it played a role, I think, in how American politics evolved and how Americans came to tolerate partisanship and the two-party system.

I had wanted to write about this episode for my dissertation but decided against it because, while the prosecutors left behind a rich documentary trail (nearly two hundred black men were arrested and interrogated and many of them were brought to trial), the confessions aren't admissible as historical evidence, since they were confessing to avoid being burned to death and, under those circumstances, who wouldn't lie? I couldn't quite figure out how to deal with that evidentiary problem.

Then, in 1991, workers excavating the foundation for a new federal office building in Manhattan came across the African burial ground from the colonial period. And I thought, 'Oh, this will be incredibly loud, noisy, great historical evidence.' Except it wasn't. The burials and the remains were highly controversial, and the reports were not altogether forthcoming about what scholars ought to conclude from the analysis of those remains. But I wrote the book anyway.

HUMANITIES: In The Name of War [her first book, about "King Philip's War"] you showed how New Englanders described their humiliation and their suffering in language identical to how they described the Indians. In this book you showed pre-Revolutionary Americans describing the restraints on their political liberties in terms so drastic that they actually better describe the bondage in which they keep African slaves and the slaves then referred to as Spanish Negroes. There seems to be this kind of very careful, subtle argument about how we take our enemy's attributes and apply them to ourselves when we think we're in a really bad place.

LEPORE: I'm interested in our capacity to justify acts of tremendous, unspeakable cruelty. It's not obvious, at least not to me. And the way I have always tried to puzzle it out is by thinking mainly about language. What, literally, is the vocabulary of justification?

In eighteenth-century New York, a lot of people want to depose the governor. He is a tyrant. What they write about him, what they write about their right to get rid of him, is, to me, as a citizen, quite moving and inspiring. And yet those same people deploy that very same rhetoric to justify enslaving Africans. How do they manage that? How, honestly, is that possible? I don't know that we have ever really reckoned with that, with what Edmund Morgan called the "American paradox," that our democracy rests, at some level, on the idea of enslavement. It doesn't anymore. But that history matters. And I think we'd be stronger for seeing it more clearly.

HUMANITIES: You also make the argument that slavery is somehow crucial to understanding the development of political parties in America. How does slavery help illuminate the development of political parties?

LEPORE: I tried to make that argument, but I'm not sure it worked. The day that New York Burning was published, Hurricane Katrina touched down in New Orleans. I had a new baby, and I was home with him, and found myself glued to the television. Talking heads would come on--news anchors, commentators--and say, while looking at the footage of nobody but black people on the roofs of those houses, as if shocked, as if this had never occurred to them, 'Oh, my God. Race still exists in this country. There still is racism. Oh, my God. New Orleans is segregated!'

I'm trying to convince people that it matters that black men were burned at the stake in New York City in 1741, and people are surprised that black people are marooned on the roofs of New Orleans in 2005? Here I am, trying to make an argument about eighteenth-century politics, attempting to illustrate, with all manner of exhaustive archival research--charts about the census and the tax lists--and close readings of Blackstone's Commentaries and Restoration drama, trying to argue that the constant, ever-present threat of black conspiracy made white political pluralism possible. Because compared to that, having a two-party system was a piece of cake. And I had to go give some goofy book talks, and I'm thinking, at these bookstores, Sheesh, there's just this huge gap between what I'm trying to say and what people kind of need to know or where we can enter the conversation together, and that's my fault, all mine. What am I doing here in 1741? At the level of imagining our national past and wrestling with the consequences of slavery, the wages of slavery, well, that didn't even begin to happen until the last election where there was a genuine national conversation about what slavery has done to American politics.

HUMANITIES: To go back to the eighteenth century for just a second: So the threat or the partly imagined threat of a slave rebellion, it encouraged people to find a more friendly system of opposition, which was the beginnings of the party system?

LEPORE: History doesn't always work that way, neatly. And when it seems like it works that way, usually someone is being facile. But here's what I argued: In New York in the 1730s there was an extraordinary and unprecedented amount of political opposition, including the founding of an opposition political party. In 1735, a printer named John Peter Zenger was tried for sedition, for publishing a newspaper that opposed the policies of the royally appointed governor. Zenger's trial is one of the most thrilling episodes in early American political history, and it nearly tears the colony apart.

Six years later, an alleged slave conspiracy brings together these two political parties, who, I argue, heal the political divisions between them by burning black men at the stake. And, I think, like decapitating Philip and putting his head on a pike, this is a constitutive moment for a pluralistic politics. It's as if those executions say, 'You and I, we can disagree. We can disagree--a lot--because we are not beyond the limits of our own politics, we are not Indians on the warpath, we are not black men talking about burning the city down.' It's a dark story, I don't like that story, I sometimes wish the past were prettier, but it's how I read the evidence.

More on the African Burial Ground here.

Previously.

One of the things I like most about the moral orientation of David Freeland's new book Automats, Taxi Dances, and Vaudeville is its simultaneous focus on the lost and the found of living in the contemporary city. Most of the vanished forms of leisure he writes about require the archival efforts of a historian, to be sure, but they more often than not have left traces on the city -- architectural details or styles, fading signage, place names -- that even an observant amateur could spot and become curious about. Above all, it's the impulse toward curious observation that Freeland hopes to model and foster. (You'll see what I mean if you make it to the final session of our Lost New York conference next month, when Freeland will engage in conversation with another inveterate observer and urban theorist, Marshall Berman.)

To the end of fostering curiosity about traces of the lost city, Freeland has launched an interactive history installation he's calling "You Are Here." As he describes it on his blog, Gotham Lost and Found:

Throughout Manhattan I've put up 9 (with a bonus 10th to follow) dinner-plate sized signs, each on the surface of a building that once played a key role in the evolution of our entertainment culture.  When you find a "You Are Here" sign, simply text in the specified code to the number given on the sign - you'll receive an instant message back, telling you some interesting fact about where you are and why this building is important.  Think of it as my historian's fantasy - I'm putting up plaques on buildings that should have them, but don't.

These impromptu plaques might simply catch the eye of the curious and result in some spontaneous educating, but for those willing to play his game, he's devised a bit of a scavenger hunt, complete with rhyming clues:

#1 is south of Canal, along Elizabeth: you'll know the plot is getting thick, when you reach a site of russet brick.

#2 sits on twisting Doyers, above hidden foyers.

#3 lies east of Cooper Square; great Yiddish names once gathered there.

#4 captured New York scenes, in a building along Broadway in the lower teens.

#5 is on Second Avenue, in the East Village: where stars once ate, sushi takes the plate.

#6: They say old 28th sounded like a Tin Pan; see it now, while you still can.

#7: in the 130s east of 7th, the stars of swing would sing.

#8: On 135th, 'neath a 60s-styled wall, sat a great Harlem theater, accepting to all.

#9: Near the spot where Duffy stands, the food was served with invisible hands.

I'll provide a bonus clue for our readers. That's not the first time the name Duffy has appeared on this site.

Freeland writes about each of these locations in his book in great detail. Sure, you could pick up the book and use it as a guide on your quest to find his plaques. But he's also holding out, as a carrot to get you to hunt, the prize of a signed copy, plus a pass to the Museum of the City of New York, for the first five people to send in all the answers. Onward toward the production of cultural memory!

Horn & Hardart Automat Cafeteria, 146 W. 38 St. between Broadway and 7th Ave. (1986) (Image from 14to42.net)

David Freeland pulled in quite a crowd at the Tenement Museum the other night: standing room only in a room with no discernible air conditioning. I was a few minutes late and missed the opening comments, but I did catch him read from several chapters, including his finale for the evening -- the conclusion to his chapter on Times Square automats and Depression-era labor disputes.

I enjoyed the other passages he read, to be sure, but the prose in this particular passage really moved me. He'd been talking about the chain of automats -- automated restaurants, basically a huge selection of vending machines plus seating -- that once populated the city. The original and most famous was Horn and Hardart's, a Philadelphia import, which provided a cheap culinary centerpiece, the forerunner of fast food, for Times Square from the 1910s to the 1970s, when their locations were transformed into green-shingled Burger Kings, "an incongruous attempt," Freeland writes, "to bring faux-suburban rusticity to the Crossroads of the World." Oh, horrible harbinger of suburbanization to follow!

The chapter's conclusion offers a glimpse inside the chain's former location at 1557 Broadway, between 46th and 47th, where today you'll find three-floors of tourist knick-knacks in a store called Grand Slam. You have to give Freeland props for being brave enough to venture inside looking for signs of the old automat, and find them he does:

[I]n the harsh overhead light of high-wattage lamps -- the suspended, bowl-shaped kind used in gyms and cafeterias -- it is possible to make out one more thing, battle-scarred yet remarkable for having survived at all. In the ceiling's dead middle, clustered around the central pillar like a stalactite formation, twists a lovely design of blossoms and foliage, interspersed with tiny holes for the placement of incandescent bulbs. Then, on a perpendicular spot beside an air-conditioning grate, a rectangular patch of decoration -- viscous and dripping like melted caramel -- stands out against a bare white wall. Move back and the whole pattern becomes clear: it is what's left of the Art Nouveau centerpiece unveiled [at the automat] that long-ago morning of 2 July 1912, ignored but not yet willing to disappear.

That last line seemed to sum up the argumentative and moral thrusts of Freeland's project: a call to witness what surprising things remain -- persistent, insouciant, repurposed, perhaps --  and to let that survival cheer you and move you to preserve more and more of the city's quotidian past while we still can. Once a building's gone, he warns, it's really gone.

In the tradition of Ephemeral New York, here are a couple looks at an H&H postcard I found on line:





Under the first, Flickr user Betty Blade wrote: "When I was a kid ... I'd go wit my muddah to an automat (orw-dah-mat). She'd give me a fist fulla nickels and I'd run around and get what ever I wanted ... as long as I was tall enough to reach."

I'm one of those lady teachers,
A beautiful hostess you know,
The kind the Palace features
At exactly a dime a throw.



That's how Rodgers and Hart immortalized the Taxi Dance craze of the 20s and 30s. Taxi dances and other bits of detritus from New York's past will be the subject of tomorrow night's Tenement Talk at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum. The featured speaker is David Freeland, whose book Automats, Taxi Dances, and Vaudeville was reviewed and excerpted in the Wall Street Journal over the weekend. Grieve posted excerpts of the excerpt here. You can catch more of Freeland's New York stories at his blog, gothamlostandfound.com

The talk starts at 6:30 tomorrow night (8/11); RSVP from the museum's website.

 

Caleb Crain -- a contributor to our forthcoming Cambridge Companion, whose bookish blog, Steamboats Are Ruining Everything, we've long and consistently enjoyed -- had a piece in the NY Times Book Review last Sunday on nineteenth-century New York boardinghouses. Taking as its departure point a nineteenth-century book on boarding life, Caleb wonders whether past housing habits may return in the current economic crisis:

[O]nce upon a time, the boardinghouse thrived in America, especially in New York. In 1856, Walt Whitman claimed that almost three-quarters of Manhattanites lived in one. He may have been exaggerating slightly, but the historian Wendy Gamber has estimated that "up to 30 percent of all 19th-century households took in boarders," and the 1860 census counted 2,651 boardinghouse keepers in New York State alone. In 1857, foreseeing that the phenomenon might not last forever, Thomas Butler Gunn undertook to record it for posterity in The Physiology of New York Boarding-Houses, which is available in an opportunely reprinted edition from Rutgers University Press ($23.95) as well as a facsimile edition from Cornell University Library ($23.99). "I wonder what they were!" Gunn imagines a future researcher asking, and for an answer, he provides chapters on the Hand-to-Mouth Boardinghouse, the Fashionable Boardinghouse Where You Don't Get Enough to Eat and the Boardinghouse Where the Landlady Drinks, among other representative types. New Yorkers of the 21st century will probably recognize the 8-by-6-foot rooms and the walls soiled where mosquitoes "have encountered Destiny in the shape of the slippers or boot-soles of former occupants." But the unceasing drama of boardinghouse life -- the flirtations, drunkenness, mutual irritation, backbiting, whining, eccentricity, conspiracy, chiseling and deceit -- may come as a surprise. The closest modern parallel may be the comments section of a blog.

[Read the rest of the piece here.]

Tempted to rent out your sofa? If the past's prologue, you may want to get your hands on Gunn's book -- which is also available on Cornell's Making of America website -- to see what you may be in for.

One thing appears not to have changed from then until now: the persistent plague of bedbugs, which were thoroughly blogged about on New York sites last week and even mentioned in New York magazine's week-in-review. Don't miss the argument in the comments section of NYC The Blog, where readers debate the likelihood that the 2 Train Bedbug Man actually had bedbugs crawling on him when he was removed from the train by police. Oh, and over here you'll find bedbug photography, too.

Jeremiah Moss at Vanishing New York has a justified rant up about the use of books in promoting luxury lifestyles. Such trends seem of a piece with efforts to market downtown luxury living by appealing to "history" and to a neighborhood's "bohemian" past -- only to have the arrival of such luxury behemoths presage the death of a neighborhood's distinctive character. They're also, as JM blogged so entertainingly some time ago, in character with luxury settings that not only displace neighborhood bookstores, but masquerade as them as well. And then there are luxury settings that lead to the closing of libraries.

Apparently the glossy new building The Caledonia, in the meatpacking district -- which does, in fact, advertise itself as offering "a new exciting style of living in a historic downtown location" -- boasts a sort of library (or "culture lounge") as a "literary backdrop" for its residents. Only thing is, it's sponsored by a publisher of extraordinarily expensive, self-congratulatory design books targeting wealthy readers, and they're much more "backdrop" than "literary." Jeremiah laments:

That's because the books here are provided by Assouline, a publisher of objets that are meant to be seen and looked at, not so much read. They sell themselves as "the first luxury brand in the world that has used its publications as medium." They have a boutique in Dubai and another just opened in the new Plaza condo. Some of their books come wrapped in Chanel and Coach leather jackets.

Their subjects cater to the affluent and the aspirational. A few sample titles: Megalomania: Too Much Is Never Enough; High Society: The History of America's Upper Class; and A Privileged Life: Celebrating WASP Style.

A couple of taglines: "New York was vulgar, flashy and vibrant" and "Megalomania: excess, folly, splendor, vulgarity."

He concludes by asking: "Might there not be something vulgar about turning books into shiny objects without substance for the sole purpose of displaying wealth?" And while I agree wholeheartedly with the sentiment, I'm also struck that such conspicuous literary consumption has long been associated with the hazards of new fortunes in the city. (In Boston, too, for that matter.) Some old New York problems apparently won't go away, though in our day they've clearly been taken from personal to corporate levels.

As an antidote, I'd recommend a new mural housed in the belly of the beast -- the 30'x10' mural At Home with Their Books, by artist Elena Climent [slideshow] -- recently installed on the ground floor of 19 University Place, where our offices are located. The titles represented there, we hope, could actually lead a viewer to a library or bookstore to satisfy his or her curiosity about New York's literary heritage. Let's just hope the exhibit is open to the public from closer range than the sidewalk! (If it's not, I'll complain!)

Update: Promoted from comments, TMK reminds us about Gatsby's library, as well.

Do you know Kevin Walsh's Forgotten New York?

I've had a copy for a year or so, and every once in a while remember to pack it with me when I'm heading to an unfamiliar neighborhood. (There's also an accompanying blog, cheerfully cluttered, that's well worth checking regularly.)

The book offers hundreds of out-of-the-way or in-plain-sight-but-easily-overlooked details from the city's past, broken into categories like "Truly Forgotten," "Quiet Places," or "What's This Thing?" It's  designed for New Yorkers rather than tourists; it's for people constantly on the look for little glimpses into lost parts of the city.

I rarely use the book to find a destination for an afternoon outing, say, but when I pack it along it always adds a nice dimension to a trip to or from somewhere I already wanted to go. A few weekends ago, ssw and I took our bikes and headed up the paths along the Hudson. We weren't sure how far we'd go, though we had a vague idea we wanted to go kayaking up at Pier 96 before the weather turned. Once we were done (and had spent enough time spread out in the sun to dry our asses off) we got back on our bikes and headed up as high as St. Clair Place, around 125th street.

I had my copy of FN in my basket, and vaguely had some idea that we were close to Grant's Tomb, which we'd never managed to visit. So we circled around until we hit Riverside Drive, pumped our way up the rather steep hill, and made our way back a few blocks to 123rd St.

Do you know who's buried at Grant's Tomb? I'm sheepish to admit I didn't know the answer to that riddle until we visited with FN's assistance.

One minor disappointment, though. I remembered, when the Hudson River path hit St. Clair Place and we decided to stop our journey north, that FN had an entry explaining that street's name. It accompanies the entry on Grant's Tomb, in fact. It has to do not with the more famous tomb, but with an obscure grave nearby:

Five-year-old St. Clair Pollock was playing on the rocks overlooking the Hudson River on the Pollock property, and fell to his death on July 15, 1797. When the Pollocks later sold the property, his father (perhaps his uncle; records are unclear) made the request that St. Clair's grave, which was on the property, would always be respected. A small stone urn remains marked, "Erected to the memory of an amiable child." St. Clair is also commemorated with the very short St. Clair Place, which runs between the Hudson River and West 125th Street under the Riverside Drive Viaduct, about a half mile to the north.

We only spent about 15 minutes looking for it, but we couldn't find the little stone urn, which is supposedly a little ways "up Riverside" (I assumed that meant north), "standing by itself, surrounded by an iron fence."

I suppose I'll have to go back and look again. Tip for bikers: ride back downtown as far as you can along Riverside Drive itself, which is somewhat more spectacular than I would have imagined and certainly lusher than a ride along the river at that point.

One of the best things about my recent college reunion (the 25th!) was the opportunity to get to know Stefan Fatsis, who's married to my college friend Melissa Block (of NPR and All Things Considered fame). Stefan is a journalist who writes for the Wall Street Journal, contributes to NPR, and is the author of Wild and Outside: How a Renegade Minor League Revived the Spirit of Baseball in America's Heartland (1995) and Word Freak: Heartbreak, Triumph, Genius, and Obsession in the World of Competitive Scrabble Players (2001).

His new book is A Few Seconds of Panic: A 5-Foot-8, 170-Pound, 43-Year-Old Sportswriter Plays in the NFL, an account of how he tricked the Denver Broncos into "letting me do a Plimpton." After training for a year with both a strength coach and a kicking coach, Stefan joined the Broncos as a place-kicker during their 2006 training camp. The result is an inside-account of life with a professional football team that has already received shouts in the the July 11 issue of Entertainment Weekly and the July 14 issue of Time magazine, as well as a glowing review from the LA Times. You can find a brief interview with Stefan on nytimes.com.  

Stefan will be appearing this Monday, July 14, at 7:00 p.m. at the Barnes and Noble on Broadway and 82nd Street to read from the book. You can also catch him at at the Barnes and Noble in Park Slope on August 8 at 7:00 p.m. If you're not in the city, you can find out about his book tour at stefanfatsis.com.