New York City Cultural History

SILENT BEACHES transports the reader into the extraordinary past and present embedded in New York City's more than 600 miles of coastline through a stunning selection of rare photographs, history, new fiction and poetry, and contemporary art. Eric W. Sanderson, author of Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City, calls it a "fascinating and poignant combination," a portrait of "New York City on the margins.  In the early 21st century city we are so focused on growth, and the consequences of that growth, for better or worse, that we forget how the city also leaves places and people behind.  Sandy Ground, Hart Island, Gowanus Creek, Dead Horse Bay, and other off-the-beaten track locales, remind us that abandonment, decay, isolation, and death, are also part of our experience on this particular verge between land and sea. You and your contributors give voice to the bright dreams and restless forces that transform." 
Please contact alberte@stjohns.edu for a pdf of the full text

Immigrants to America like me learn to love their new
country – and I not only did that, I brought a new love to
my country.
In addition to my dreams of an education and the warm,
loving contact I had with the Baha’i community in the U.S.,
I had a personal interest in energizing my entire life: I was
considering marrying Tahereh Missaghi, whom I had
known in Shiraz when I lived in Iran.
Tahereh was an extraordinary young woman. Her plan: to
finish medical school and move to Africa to help spread
the Baha’i principle of the oneness of humanity:
... in the contingent world, the human species hath
undergone progressive physical changes and, by a slow
process, hath scaled the ladder of civilization, realizing in
itself the wonders, excellencies and gifts of humanity in
their most glorious form, until it gained the capacity to
express the splendours of spiritual perfections and divine
ideals and became capable of hearkening to the call of
God. Then at last the call of the Kingdom was raised, the
spiritual virtues and perfections were revealed, the Sun of
Reality dawned, and the teachings of the Most Great
Peace, of the oneness of the world of humanity and of the
universality of men, were promoted. We hope that the
effulgence of these rays shall become more and more
intense, and the ideal virtues more resplendent, so that
the goal of this universal human process will be attained

and the love of God will appear in the utmost grace and
beauty and bedazzle all hearts. – Abdu’l-Baha, Selections
from the Writings of Abdu’l-Baha, pp. 285-286.

When Johan Maurits of Nassau, Governor-General of Dutch Brazil (1630-54), sent out expeditions against the maroons of Palmares, he was informed by his intelligence officers that the inhabitants followed the “Portuguese religion,” that they had erected a church in the capital, that there were chapels with images of saints and the Virgin Mary and that Zumbi, the king of Palmares, did not allow the presence of “fetishists.” Portuguese sources confirm that Palmares had a priest who baptized children and married couples and that its inhabitants followed Catholic rite, although according to Governor Francisco de Brito, they did so “in a stupid fashion.” Many more examples of the existence of Afro-Catholic elements in maroon communities in Latin America can be found. They question the widespread assumption that Catholicism had been forced upon all African slaves and that, even among those who seemingly embraced the colonizer’s faith, it functioned merely as a veneer underneath which their truly African, indigenous beliefs remained hidden. As the case of Palmares indicates, slaves did not necessarily wish to liberate themselves from all “Catholic ballast” once they ran away but sometimes remained strongly attached to it. 
This conclusion corresponds to the assumption by the Brazilian historian Marina de Mello e Souza that upon arrival in the Americas, many slaves did not perceive Catholic elements as something foreign since “Catholicism represented a link to their native Africa.” Souza is but one of several scholars who in recent years contributed to a shift in the study of black performance culture in the New World. The new paradigm essentially consists in the acknowledgment that our understanding of black performance culture can be bettered if we take into consideration that many Africans had already adopted certain European—predominantly Portuguese—cultural and religious elements before they were shipped as slaves to the Americas.
In the context of this shift, there has been an increased interest in Afro-Iberian brotherhoods (irmandades/hermandades) and confraternities (confrarias/cofradías). While it was long assumed that these so-called “black brotherhoods” were associated with slave culture on the Iberian Peninsula and in Latin America only, it can now be confirmed that Afro-Catholic fraternities also flourished in parts of Africa during the Atlantic slave trade era. As Linda Heywood has argued, “many Kongos and not a few Angolans had been Christians before their enslavement in Brazil. Thus they would have been familiar with the brotherhoods in Luanda, Soyo, and Kongo, and the central role they played in the creole society of Kongo, Angola and São Tomé.” Nicole von Germeten’s research on black brotherhoods in Mexico also concluded that “some Central Africans probably took part in social and religious brotherhoods and sisterhoods before crossing the Atlantic.” 
Ira Berlin also observed that black brotherhoods played a crucial role in the intercontinental networks that developed in the context of the transatlantic slavery. However, like most scholars, Berlin perceives brotherhoods as an essentially Iberian phenomenon that was crucial to the development of black identity the Iberian World, differing from North America, where “numerous informal connections between black people” developed, but not brotherhoods. Although Berlin confirms that slaves “created an intercontinental web of cofradias … so that, by the seventeenth century, the network of black religious brotherhoods stretched from Lisbon to São Tomé, Angola, and Brazil,” he believes that those slaves who ended up in Dutch, French or English colonies refrained from developing brotherhoods since there were no “comparable institutional linkages” that allowed them to do so. Berlin’s assumption thus presupposes that brotherhoods could only be established with institutional support and excludes the possibility that slaves themselves may have taken the initiative to create such organizations.
This article questions this conclusion and explores the possibility that slave organizations modeled upon Iberian brotherhoods have existed in North America. In doing so, it follows a reasoning by Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, Matt Childs and James Sidbury, editors of The Black Urban Atlantic in the Age of the Slave Trade (2013), according to whom “approved institutional structures authorized by the Catholic Church were not always necessary for Africans and their descendants to build fraternal structures.”  A first section provides an overview of the characteristics of Afro-Iberian slave brotherhoods. The following section presents a comparative analysis between king celebrations in Afro-Iberian brotherhoods and those at African-American Election Day and Pinkster festivals in New England and New York. The article ends with a reflection on the origins of Afro-Iberian cultural and religious elements among slave communities outside of the Iberian realm in the American diaspora.

In the immediate aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, public response was characterised by an inability to accept the reality of the situation. Contemporary cultural theorists Jean Baudrillard and Slavoj Zizek have suggested that the bombing of the World Trade Centre in particular constituted a symbolic destruction of an entire construction of reality. William Basinski's ambient music series The Disintegration Loops was released in this context, becoming part of a post-9/11 cultural discourse that allowed emotional response to take shape. This essay draws on Kant's theory of the sublime (as expanded upon by Thomas Weiskel) in order to examine how the relationship between noise and silence in The Disintegration Loops offers a means by which to deconstruct the sublime 'blockage' of 9/11; it presents change as a dialectical process, rather than as an incomprehensible single event.

Introduction to Queer Latino Testimonio, Keith Haring, and Juanito Xtravaganza: Hard Tails. 

In the tradition of the Latin American testimonio, this is the story of Juan Rivera, aka Juanito Xtravaganza, a Puerto Rican Latino runaway youth who ends up homeless on the streets of New York in the late 1970s and becomes partner of the internationally famous 1980s Pop artist Keith Haring, as told to the author and retold by him.  A hybrid text--part testimonio, part linguistic and cultural analysis, and part art criticism--this is also a history of New York Latino neighborhoods during this period of devastating disinvestment and gentrification, as well as personal, heart-felt meditation on the art of listening and the ethical limits of representing queer Latino lives.

Diaspora 26 (2016), p. 115-132.

This article examines the relationship between geographical and social mobility in the erratic career of Lorenzo Da Ponte and the opera milieu of the 18th Century. It stresses the role of patronage on the attraction and circulation of authors and composers as well as exploring the existence of more or less institutionalised corporatist forms of solidarity responsible for regulating a market of word and music. Although a certain and necessary degree of complementarity, if not interdependence, can be seen amongst the authors, composers and actors, their mobility patterns differ as do the dynamics driving their various careers. Precarious conditions and employment thus generated a search for security which often entailed a change of social and professional status. In this way, mobility was neither circulatory nor necessarily positive; on the contrary it often highlighted precarious economic and social circumstances.

Expanding Visions of a Shrinking World  : Zhang Hongtu:

The 340 pages book is the first survey of the art of China-born, Queens-based artist Zhang Hongtu. Zhang left China in 1982 to find greater artistic freedom and is perhaps best known for his “Mao” series, a group of works responding to the ubiquitous images of Mao Ze Dong. Zhang studied traditional Chinese painting, as well as Western Art history and Popular Art after arriving in New York, and skillfully adapted and transformed them to fit the ideas he was expressing in his work. These multi-cultural influences combined to yield the wide-ranging output of this unique artist.
Zhang’s mainland China sketches, small portraits and landscape paintingsThe early New York series, such as Soy Sauce Calligraphy and Self Portrait reliefs
The Mao series
Remade Landscapes, based upon a synthesis of ancient Chinese works of art and famed masterpieces in the Western painting tradition;
Brush ink portrayals of Zen Masters in the style of Van Gogh self-portraits. The ongoing Shan Shui Today series, concerned with the urban environment. Also discussed are never-before-seen drawings, and pieces such as Studs 9×9 x2, The Big Red Door, and Big Cube.
Contributions from 12 experts in Asian art put Zhang’s work into the context of his family background, the culture and society in which he grew up, and his pursuit of freedom in New York. They also examine the impact of Western art and the psychological effect of Mao’s phantom on Zhang. We encourage readers to consider these hybrid art worlds as places for cultural, psychological, and socio-political exploration and transformation.‎

Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Foreword
Chapters
1. The Displaced Artist Sees Things for Us: Zhang Hongtu and the Art of Convergence, by Jerome Silbergeld
2. Wall, Gate, Hole: Three Recurrent Motifs in Zhang Hongtu’s Art by Wu Hung
3. Zhang’s Contemporary Cubism  by Michael FitzGerald
4. The Man in the Moon: A Conversation with Zhang Hongtu, by Eugenie Tsai
5. “A Hundred Ways to Learn” about Zhang Hongtu, by Morgan Perkins
6. Restoring the Aura by Julia F. Andrews and Kuiyi Shen
7. Zhang Hongtu: Playing with Power by Alexandra Chang
8. Zhang Hongtu’s Fashionable Turn by Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu
9. Pop, Politics & Painting by Lilly Wei
10. Zhang Hongtu’s Queens by Tom Finkelpearl
11. What’s Next for Us? Zhang Hongtu’s Environmental Shan Shui  by Luchia Meihua Lee

Plates
Autobiography
Selected Bibliography
Guide to traditional and simplified Chinese Characters
Credits

This dissertation examines the life and times of the Canadian pianistcomposer Calixa Lavallee (1842-1891). Hailed as the 'national musician' in his twenties, he subsequently gained wide recognition as Canada's first pianist of international stature and its first truly original composer; his song, o Canada, became the country's official national anthem in 1980. This study focuses on the events of Lavallee's life and the musical world in which he lived. This study contends that Lavallee was much more active in minstrelsy and the popular music of his time than has previously been acknowledged. In assessing the claims of Eugene Lapierre and others who have described Lavallee as a French-Canadian nationalist, I conclude that his sense of nationalism was highly ambivalent. The events of Lavallee's life are traced primarily through advertisements, reviews, and news stories published in newspapers and music journals. City directories, histories, biographies, and a small number of archival sources provide additional information. Together with copies of Lavallee's published compositions, these sources provide the basis of a thorough chronology of Lavallee's life. The discussio;n of Lavallee's life is organised chronologically into three sections that reflect the changing directions of his career. The opening part examines his childhood, and the early years of career. It traces the events of his year in the army, his return to Montreal, and his numerous tours with minstrel troupes. The second part focuses mostly on his sojourn in C.anada in the 1870s. Its chapters examine his studies in Paris, his subsequent work in Montreal and Quebec City, and the music he composed during this period. The four chapters of the third section investigate his life in Boston in 2 the 1880s. They focus on the musical life of the city, pianists and piano makers, Lavallee's work with the Music Teachers' National Association, and his compositions. Each of the three parts of this study ends with an epilogue in which the events of the years under discussion are examined within the broader context of Lavallee's life and work. The appendices comprise a calendar of the major events of his life, a chronology of the many tours he participated in during the 1860s and early 1870s, a catalogue of compositions, and a listing of his concert appearances and repertoire.

Whether statues, plaques, street names, trees or buildings, New Yorkers live within an extensive commemorative landscape to World War One. However, if the plans of campaigners had been realized, then the war could have bequeathed a far more significant material legacy in the city. Indeed, New York might have been the resting place of the ‘Unknown Soldier’.

The text of a talk at Yale University Art Gallery about artist-organized exhibitions in New York City, in the late and early 20th century. Concludes with a comparison with late 20th century social movement in Europe to occupy spaces for public culture, called "social centers."

Art Work recaptures the unfamiliar cultural landscape of mid-nineteenth century New York City, where spirited young women, daring social reformers, and radical artisans conspired, at least for a moment, to reunite art and industry.  Between 1850 and 1880, thousands of women moved to New York City to study art at the Cooper Union and pursue careers as painters, designers, illustrators, and engravers.  In a tour de force of interdisciplinary writing, Masten connects their accomplishments to the city’s conspicuously democratic institutions, the rise of the illustrated press, and the prevailing aesthetic ideal, the Unity of Art, which did not distinguish between fine and applied arts or male and female abilities.

Overview of the cross-currents of American art from the Ashcan School to the advent of abstract expressionism, with a focus on the 1930's as a fulcrum of socio-political change. Subsequently published in The 1930's/ the Reality and the Promise, ed. Bennington, DaSilva, D'Innocenzo, and Pugliese (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016), pp. 217-226. See published papers section.

This article examines the construction, the development and the denouement of the Museum of Safety in New York during the early twentieth century. Through a detailed assessment of the institution's own bulletin, newspapers and accompanying literature, the manner in which the museum served its visitors, promoted its cause and failed to secure its own future will be examined. The significance of this institution has been overlooked despite the way its role and responsibilities in exhibiting safety devices and procedures to industry, workers and the public reflect important trends within late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century society. The Museum of Safety also emerged as the effects of capitalism, immigration and industrialization began to be addressed. Examining the history of this “lost museum” will, therefore, reveal how responsibility, awareness and modernity were encountered in New York.

The essay focuses on the year 1913 in New York and analyzes in detail the famous Armory Show as a groundbreaking moment for the reception of European modern art in the US. The story of the organization, reception and long-term legacy of The International Exhibition of Modern Art, that came to be remembered as Armory Show, is told here through the lens of its impact on the pre-existing structures of the New York artistic circles of the time. The underlying thread of this case study is Marcel Duchamp’s "Nude Descending the Staircase no.2" - the most (in)famous artwork of the show -  that exemplifies the difficulties that the New Yorkers initially experienced with receiving European modern art.

Published in the exhibition catalogue of the National Museum in Szczecin's anniversary show that celebrated the year 1913 as an international “spring” of artistic modernism.

The fiction of George Thompson, one of the America’s most popular and prolific novelists before the Civil War, is notable for its seemingly mindless exploitation of sensationalist themes. What has been generally ignored by commentators, however, is that Thompson’s preoccupation with the scandalous reflected the tensions between two distinct forms of sensationalism: the didactic, which American sensationalist writers generally claimed as their own, and the voyeuristic, which they attributed to European writers. As I demonstrate in this essay, Thompson skillfully maneuvered between these different traditions of sensationalism by exploiting the voyeuristic inclinations of his readers while at the same claiming that his works had a legitimate social purpose. This explains why Thompson made considerable efforts to give the impression that he belonged to the ranks of American sensationalists who saw—or at least presented—their works as legitimate efforts to raise awareness about various social issues. To emphasize the didactic and patriotic character of his works, Thompson even went as far as to attack what was generally considered bad foreign influence that emanated from Europe, including romantic and sensationalist literature which was believed to be overly sensual and voyeuristic. What was ironic about Thompson’s approach, however, was that his condemnation of European sensuality and decadence was often undermined by his appeal to the readers’ voyeuristic interest in the scandalous. In this respect, Thompson can be credited with striking a literary compromise between different forms of sensationalism.

A look at the cross-currents of art in New York city in the 1930's as they contributed to the ideas of modernity and of "modernism," with a focus on Rockefeller Center and on the work of Robert Moses and the 1939 World's Fair. Published in The 1930's/ the Reality and the Promise, ed. Bennington, DaSilva, D'Innocenzo, and Pugliese (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016), pp. 217-226.

The iconoclastic ingenuity of bohemians, from Gerard de Nerval to Allen Ginsberg, continually captivates the popular imagination; the worlds of fashion, advertising, and even real estate all capitalize on the alternative appeal of bohemian style. Persistently overlooked, however, is bohemians' distinctive relationship to work. In this book, sociologist Judith R. Halasz examines the fascinating junctures between bohemian labor and life. Weaving together historiography, ethnography, and personal experiences of having been raised amidst downtown New York's bohemian communities, Halasz deciphers bohemians' unconventional behaviors and attitudes towards employment and the broader work world. From the nineteenth-century harbingers on Paris' Left Bank to the Beats, Underground, and more recent bohemian outcroppings on New York's Lower East Side, The Bohemian Ethos traces the embodiment of a politically charged yet increasingly precarious form of cultural resistance to hegemonic social and economic imperatives. [Book published by Routledge, 2015]

In 1934, George Balanchine's "Serenade" was much more than an experimental work; it was a challenge to the whole conception of dance in America, and the beginning of a revolution.  Its opening tableau foreshadows the dance drama and history to come -- the transcendence of modernism by classicism.

This article examines how concepts of ‘play’ can be used within studies of cultural heritage to build an alternative to the dominant use of consumer-orientated models within current scholarship. Using the example of how the traditions, motifs and history of Ancient Greece have been reused within New York, from the nineteenth century to the present day this work demonstrates that this is a heritage that has been ‘played with’ by successive generations as a means of establishing identity within the metropolis. Whilst the ideals of Athenian democracy and classical learning inspired the formation of the early American republic, these associations were brought into wider usage in New York with the arrival of significant Greek immigration into the city during the twentieth century. This provided a new opportunity of a playful use of Ancient Greek heritage as this émigré community built new identities and became established in the metropolis. The Greek American enclave of Astoria, located in the borough of Queens, will be the focus of this study as the site where this playful use of heritage has taken place, undertaken both by members of the Greek American community and also by individuals and groups responding to their presence.

The City Performs: An Architectural History of NYC Theaters contains the city block locations, resource links, and brief summaries for over 400 historical and contemporary performance spaces in the five boroughs of NYC, from the colonial period to the present. Data is georeferenced for spatial and chronological analyses.

Curation and design by Christopher Swift. Research by Christopher Swift, Diego Atauchi, Solangie Falla Crespo and Freddy Ruiz. Support provided by the National Endowment of the Humanities (A Cultural History of Digital Technology) and the City Tech Emerging Undergraduate Scholars grant.

The City Performs: An Architectural History of New York City Theaters by Christopher Swift is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. Email cswift@citytech.cuny.edu with suggestions for amendments and additions.

This essay analyzes the coverage in The New York Times  of the Columbian quadricentennial at a time when Americans were less skeptical then today about theories of inevitable human progress, the workings of Divine Providence, and the greatness of national heroes, in addition to being less concerned about racial equality, social justice, and environmental destruction. Reporting in the New York Times during the quadricentennial reflected the positive images of Christopher Columbus that were created in the United States to serve various late nineteenth-century nationalistic, ethnic, and religious factions, which coalesced to produce what the newspaper considered America's first great national public spectacle.

To wander the streets of a bankrupt, often lawless, New York City in the early 1970s wearing a T-shirt with PLEASE KILL ME written on it was an act of determined nihilism, and one often recounted in the first reports of Richard Hell filtering into the pre-punk UK. Pete Astor, an archly nihilistic teenager himself at the time, was most impressed. The fact that it emerged (after many years) that Hell himself had not worn the T-shirt but had convinced junior band member Richard Lloyd to do so, actually fitted very well with Astor’s older, wiser self looking back at Blank Generation. Richard Hell was an artist who could not only embody but also frame the punk urge; having seeded and developed the essential look and character of punk since his arrival in New York in the late 1960s, he had just what was needed to make one of the defining records of the era.

This study combines objective, academic perspectives along with culturally centred subjectivities to understand the meanings and resonances of Richard Hell and the Voidoids’ Blank Generation.