The Official Blog of the Urban History Association
The theme for our 2023 Graduate Student Blogging Contest is “Stumble.” Our sixth entrant, Katelin Penner, discusses how leaders in real estate and finance forced New York City government to stumble into a relationship with them that has led the city to subsidize private development projects while reducing public services that support working-class residents. To […]
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McGruder, Kevin. Philip Payton: The Father of Black Harlem. New York: Columbia University Press, 2021. Reviewed by Carla DuBose-Simons In his latest work, Philip Payton: The Father of Black Harlem, Kevin McGruder continues to explore the processes by which Harlem became the “Culture Capital” for African Americans. This book, which follows his first book, Race […]
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Martinko, Whitney. Historic Real Estate: Market Morality and the Politics of Preservation in the Early United States. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020. Reviewed by Stephanie Gray The practice of historic preservation is and always has been political. While “the politics of preservation” are time and place specific, in Whitney Martinko’s Real Estate: Market Morality […]
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For the final installment in our series on the Cambridge Elements in Global Urban History, Alexia Yates presents the following essay-in-images that reflects on her recently published Element, Real Estate and Global Urban History. By Alexia Yates Between 1936 and 1941, the WPA Writer’s Program penned a study of New York City’s Black community. In […]
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By Dan Garodnick As New York City gets ready to choose its new mayor, one community is watching the results with particular interest. Having recently seen a decade of tumult across two mayoralties, the residents of Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village understand that the occupant of Gracie Mansion matters to their safety and security. […]
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The Metropole 