This lively, nuanced history of New York City's early public libraries traces their evolution within the political, social, and cultural worlds that supported them. On May 11, 1911, the New York ...Public Library opened its "marble palace for book lovers" on Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street. This was the city's first public library in the modern sense, a tax-supported, circulating collection free to every citizen. Since before the Revolution, however, New York's reading publics had access to a range of "public libraries" as the term was understood by contemporaries. In its most basic sense a public library in the eighteenth and most of the nineteenth centuries simply meant a shared collection of books that was available to the general public and promoted the public good. From the founding in 1754 of the New York Society Library up to 1911, public libraries took a variety of forms. Some of them were free, charitable institutions, while others required a membership or an annual subscription. Some, such as the Biblical Library of the American Bible Society, were highly specialized; others, like the Astor Library, developed extensive, inclusive collections. What all the public libraries of this period had in common, at least ostensibly, was the conviction that good books helped ensure a productive, virtuous, orderly republic-that good reading promoted the public good. Tom Glynn's vivid, deeply researched history of New York City's public libraries over the course of more than a century and a half illuminates how the public and private functions of reading changed over time and how shared collections of books could serve both public and private ends. Reading Publics examines how books and reading helped construct social identities and how print functioned within and across groups, including but not limited to socioeconomic classes. The author offers an accessible while scholarly exploration of how republican and liberal values, shifting understandings of "public" and "private," and the debate over fiction influenced the development and character of New York City's public libraries in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Reading Publics is an important contribution to the social and cultural history of New York City that firmly places the city's early public libraries within the history of reading and print culture in the United States.
Illustrates examples of successful community development on the Lower East Side of Manhattan and in the Bronx, using seven different methods of finance, only one of which is still available ...today.Spells out the author's policy recommendations, based on developing over 50 sites and visiting many others. Settlement Housing Fund's model is to create mixed-income developments, integrating low income families with middle income families in need of housing, while serving the needs and goals of various communities.Highlights the redevelopment of the Lower East Side of Manhattan involving six different Federal housing programs with all the buildings remaining in great shape today, forty years later.
The high cost of building affordable housing in New York, and cities like it, has long been a topic of urgent debate. Yet despite its paramount importance and the endless work of public and private groups to find ways to provide it, affordable housing continues to be an elusive commodity in New York City-and increasingly so in our current economic and political climate. In a timely, captivating memoir, Carol Lamberg weighs in on this vital issue with the lessons she learned and the successes she won while working with the Settlement Housing Fund, where she was executive director from 1983 until 2014. Lamberg provides a unique perspective on the great changes that have swept the housing arena since the curtailment of the welfare state in the 1970s, and spells out what is needed to address today's housing problems.
In a tradition of "big city" social work memoirs stretching back to Jane Addams, Lamberg reflects on the social purpose, vision, and practical challenges of the projects she's been involved in, while vividly capturing the life and times of those who engaged in the creation and maintenance of housing and those who have benefited from it. Using a wealth of interviews with managers and residents alike, alongside the author's firsthand experiences, this book depicts examples of successful community development between 1975 and 1997 in the Bronx and on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. In the "West Bronx Story," Lamberg details the painful but ultimately exhilarating development of eighteen buildings that comprise New Settlement Apartments-a dramatic transformation of a devastated neighborhood into a thriving community. In "A Tale of Two Bridges," the author depicts a different path to success, along with its particular challenges. The redevelopment of this area on the Lower East Side involved six different Federal housing programs and consisted of six residential sites, a running track, and a large scale supermarket. To this day, forty years later, all the buildings remain strong.
WithNeighborhood Success Stories,Lamberg offers a roadmap to making affordable housing a reality with the key ingredients of dogged persistence, group efforts, and creative coalition building. Her powerful memoir provides hope and practical encouragement in times that are more challenging than ever.
"Carol Lamberg knows her stuff, and she shares it all in this book. It's a testament to her decades-long struggle to create affordable housing in New York City by any means necessary-one that has great relevance today, even as federal support for housing programs has dwindled to a trickle."-Gale A. Brewer, Manhattan Borough President, from her Foreword
Shows the dramatic transformation of a devastated Bronx neighborhood into a thriving community. "West Bronx Story," describes the details, painful and exhilarating.
Built on an estuary, New York City is rich in population and economic activity but poor in available land to manage the needs of a modern city. Since consolidation of the five boroughs in 1898, New ...York has faced innumerable challenges, from complex water and waste management issues, to housing and feeding millions of residents in a concentrated area, to dealing with climate change in the wake of Superstorm Sandy, and everything in between. Any consideration of sustainable urbanism requires understanding how cities have developed the systems that support modern life and the challenges posed by such a concentrated population. As the largest city in the United States, New York City is an excellent site to investigate these concerns. Featuring an array of the most distinguished and innovative urban environmental historians in the field, Coastal Metropolis offers new insight into how the modern city transformed its air, land, and water as it grew.
Since its emergence in the mid-nineteenth century as the nation's "metropolis," New York has faced the most challenging housing problems of any American city, but it has also led the nation in ...innovation and reform. The horrors of the tenement were perfected in New York at the same time that the very rich were building palaces along Fifth Avenue; public housing for the poor originated in New York, as did government subsidies for middle-class housing. A standard in the field since its publication in 1992, A History of Housing in New York City traces New York's housing development from 1850 to the present in text and profuse illustrations. Richard Plunz explores the housing of all classes, with comparative discussion of the development of types ranging from the single-family house to the high-rise apartment tower. His analysis is placed within the context of the broader political and cultural development of New York City. This revised edition extends the scope of the book into the city's recent history, adding three decades to the study, covering the recent housing bubble crisis, the rebound and gentrification of the five boroughs, and the ecological issues facing the next generation of New Yorkers. More than 300 illustrations are integrated throughout the text, depicting housing plans, neighborhood changes, and city architecture over the past 130 years. This new edition also features a foreword by the distinguished urban historian Kenneth T. Jackson.
New York City English is one of the most recognizable of US dialects, and research on it launched modern sociolinguistics. Yet the city's speech has never before received a comprehensive description ...and analysis. In this book, Michael Newman examines the differences and similarities among the ways English is spoken by the extraordinarily diverse population living in the NY dialect region. He uses data from a variety of sources including older dialectological accounts, classic and recent variationist studies, and original research on speakers from around the dialect region. All levels of language are explored including phonology, morphosyntax, lexicon, and discourse along with a history of English in the region. But this book provides far more than a dialectological and historical inventory of linguistic features. The forms used by different groups of New Yorkers are discussed in terms of their complex social meanings. Furthermore, Newman illustrates the varied forms of sociolinguistic significance with examples from the personal experiences of a variety of New Yorkers and includes links to sound files on the publisher's site and videos on YouTube. The result is a rigorous but accessible and compelling account of the English spoken in this great city.
For a generation, Alan M. Wald'sThe New York Intellectualshas stood as the authoritative account of an often misunderstood chapter in the history of a celebrated tradition among literary radicals in ...the United States. His passionate investigation of over half a century of dissident Marxist thought, Jewish internationalism, fervent political activism, and the complex art of the literary imagination is enriched by more than one hundred personal interviews, unparalleled primary research, and critical interpretations of novels and short stories depicting the inner lives of committed writers and thinkers. Wald's commanding biographical portraits of rebel outsiders who mostly became insiders retains its resonance today and includes commentary on Max Eastman, Elliot Cohen, Lionel Trilling, Sidney Hook, Tess Slesinger, Philip Rahv, Mary McCarthy, James T. Farrell, Irving Kristol, Irving Howe, Hannah Arendt, and more. With a new preface by the author that tracks the rebounding influence of these intellectuals in the era of Occupy and Bernie Sanders, this anniversary edition shows that the trajectory and ideological ordeals of the New York intellectual Left still matters today.
With this book, Cheryl Hicks brings to light the voices and viewpoints of black working-class women, especially southern migrants, who were the subjects of urban and penal reform in ...early-twentieth-century New York. Hicks compares the ideals of racial uplift and reform programs of middle-class white and black activists to the experiences and perspectives of those whom they sought to protect and, often, control. In need of support as they navigated the discriminatory labor and housing markets and contended with poverty, maternity, and domestic violence, black women instead found themselves subject to hostility from black leaders, urban reformers, and the police. Still, these black working-class women struggled to uphold their own standards of respectable womanhood. Through their actions as well as their words, they challenged prevailing views regarding black women and morality in urban America. Drawing on extensive archival research, Hicks explores the complexities of black working-class women's lives and illuminates the impact of racism and sexism on early-twentieth-century urban reform and criminal justice initiatives.
Stop and Frisk White, Michael D; Fradella, Henry F
10/2016
eBook
No policing tactic has been more controversial than "stop and frisk," whereby police officers stop, question and frisk ordinary citizens, who they may view as potential suspects, on the streets. As ...Michael White and Hank Fradella show inStop and Frisk, the first authoritative history and analysis of this tactic, there is a disconnect between our everyday understanding and the historical and legal foundations for this policing strategy. First ruled constitutional in 1968, stop and frisk would go on to become a central tactic of modern day policing, particularly by the New York City Police Department. By 2011 the NYPD recorded 685,000 'stop-question-and-frisk' interactions with citizens; yet, in 2013, a landmark decision ruled that the police had over- and mis-used this tactic.Stop and Frisktells the story of how and why this happened, and offers ways that police departments can better serve their citizens. They also offer a convincing argument that stop and frisk did not contribute as greatly to the drop in New York's crime rates as many proponents, like former NYPD Police Commissioner Ray Kelly and Mayor Michael Bloomberg, have argued.
While much of the book focuses on the NYPD's use of stop and frisk, examples are also shown from police departments around the country, including Philadelphia, Baltimore, Chicago, Newark and Detroit. White and Fradella argue that not only does stop and frisk have a legal place in 21st-century policing but also that it can be judiciously used to help deter crime in a way that respects the rights and needs of citizens. They also offer insight into the history of racial injustice that has all too often been a feature of American policing's history and propose concrete strategies that every police department can follow to improve the way they police. A hard-hitting yet nuanced analysis,Stop and Friskshows how the tactic can be a just act of policing and, in turn, shows how to police in the best interest of citizens.
This second edition of Historical Dictionary of the Broadway Musical contains a chronology, an introduction, an appendix, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 1000 ...cross-referenced entries on Broadway shows, composers, playwrights, directors, producers, designers, actors, and theatres. This book is an excellent access point for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about Broadway musicals.
