A Century Downtown
A Century Downtown

Author: Matt Kapp

Publisher: powerHouse Books

Published: 2020-02-04

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781576879443

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Showcasing an unprecedented array of photographs, paintings, renderings, drawings, and other images culled from dozens of archives and individual collections worldwide, A Century Downtown ensures that no one will ever forget the vast and varied history of this famous part of New York City. Catchphrases like "urban renewal" have a nice ring to them, but none measure up to the tectonic, often brutal metamorphoses that have remade Lower Manhattan over the last century. Downtown's defining cataclysmic event is undeniably 9/11. Yet we often forget that the original World Trade Center grew out of the wholesale demolition of an entire neighborhood, home to more than 300 electronics businesses employing some 30,000 workers. We forget that the first "worst terrorist attack in American history"-the Wall Street bombing of 1920-claimed 38 lives and triggered a tsunami of anti-immigrant sentiment that swept Warren G. Harding into the White House. We forget that Washington Street was once home to the biggest Arab-American community in the country, known as Little Syria, eventually displaced by the transportation appetite of a burgeoning suburbia. A Century Downtown raises these and other pivotal events-some mere footnotes to the city's official history-into sharp relief. It's a remarkable visual journey guided by a fascinating historical narrative that sheds new light on the evolution of Lower Manhattan over the past hundred years.

The Downtown Pop Underground
The Downtown Pop Underground

Author: Kembrew McLeod

Publisher: Abrams

Published: 2018-10-23

Total Pages: 594

ISBN-13: 1683353455

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“McLeod’s deft and generous book tells of a constellation of avant-garde squatters, divas, and dissidents who reinvented the world.” —Jonathan Lethem, New York Times-bestselling author of Motherless Brooklyn The 1960s to early ’70s was a pivotal time for American culture, and New York City was ground zero for seismic shifts in music, theater, art, and filmmaking. The Downtown Pop Underground takes a kaleidoscopic tour of Manhattan during this era and shows how deeply interconnected all the alternative worlds and personalities were that flourished in the basement theaters, dive bars, concert halls, and dingy tenements within one square mile of each other. Author Kembrew McLeod links the artists, writers, and performers who created change, and while some of them didn’t become everyday names, others, like Patti Smith, Andy Warhol, and Debbie Harry, did become icons. Ambitious in scope and scale, the book is fueled by the actual voices of many of the key characters who broke down the entrenched divisions between high and low, gay and straight, and art and commerce—and changed the cultural landscape of not just the city but the world. “The story of underground artists of the 1960s and ’70s, an amalgam of bustling radical creativity and fearless groundbreaking work in art, music, and theater.” —Tim Robbins “Breathes new fire into a familiar history and is a must-read for anyone who wants to know how American bohemia really happened.” —Ann Powers, critic, NPR Music “Honors those who were at the forefront of a movement that transformed our understandings of sexuality and artistic freedom.” —Lily Tomlin

New Yorkers: A City and its People in Our Time
New Yorkers: A City and its People in Our Time

Author: Craig Taylor

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Published: 2021-03-23

Total Pages: 432

ISBN-13: 0393242331

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Winner of the 2021 Brooklyn Public Library Literary Prize A symphony of contemporary New York through the magnificent words of its people—from the best-selling author of Londoners. In the first twenty years of the twenty-first century, New York City has been convulsed by terrorist attack, blackout, hurricane, recession, social injustice, and pandemic. New Yorkers weaves the voices of some of the city’s best talkers into an indelible portrait of New York in our time—and a powerful hymn to the vitality and resilience of its people. Best-selling author Craig Taylor has been hailed as “a peerless journalist and a beautiful craftsman” (David Rakoff), acclaimed for the way he “fuses the mundane truth of conversation with the higher truth of art” (Michel Faber). In the wake of his celebrated book Londoners, Taylor moved to New York and spent years meeting regularly with hundreds of New Yorkers as diverse as the city itself. New Yorkers features 75 of the most remarkable of them, their fascinating true tales arranged in thematic sections that follow Taylor’s growing engagement with the city. Here are the uncelebrated people who propel New York each day—bodega cashier, hospital nurse, elevator repairman, emergency dispatcher. Here are those who wire the lights at the top of the Empire State Building, clean the windows of Rockefeller Center, and keep the subway running. Here are people whose experiences reflect the city’s fractured realities: the mother of a Latino teenager jailed at Rikers, a BLM activist in the wake of police shootings. And here are those who capture the ineffable feeling of New York, such as a balloon handler in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade or a security guard at the Statue of Liberty. Vibrant and bursting with life, New Yorkers explores the nonstop hustle to make it; the pressures on new immigrants, people of color, and the poor; the constant battle between loving the city and wanting to leave it; and the question of who gets to be considered a "New Yorker." It captures the strength of an irrepressible city that—no matter what it goes through—dares call itself the greatest in the world.

Andy Warhol's New York City
Andy Warhol's New York City

Author: Thomas Kiedrowski

Publisher: National Geographic Books

Published: 2011-07-12

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 1892145936

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Andy, Andy everywhere. Twenty-three years after his death, few figures hover over New York City—its art, its street life, its commerce, its creativity, its nightlife, its myths, and its idea of itself—like Andy Warhol. Andy Warhol’s New York City provides a panoramic view of the artist’s life there from the fifties through the eighties. Eighty sites associated with the artist careen delightfully from coffee shops to museums, from disco clubs to churches, with dozens of glamorous and gritty places in between. Fashionistas will love reading about the rare pretzel-print dress Warhol designed (now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art) and seeing him looking like a character out of Mad Men as he’s photographed on the steps of the Met; cineastes will be riveted to the behind-the-scenes stories of his films; art lovers will appreciate the comprehensive listing of his many shows; and New York City history buffs will savor glimpses of the city’s icons—vanished (Schrafft’s), current (Serendipity 3), and never-realized (the Andy-Mat). There are sidebars on Warhol’s residences, favorite restaurants, and factories. Brief biographies of figures in the book familiarize the reader with the revolving cast of glittering characters that enter and leave the stage as Warhol’s story unfolds. Nine original drawings in the book were made specially for Andy Warhol’s New York City by the artist Vito Giallo, a former studio assistant of Warhol’s who executed hundreds of Warhol’s ink blot drawings, and who later owned the antique store where Warhol bought thousands of items that were posthumously auctioned at Sotheby’s.

Inventing Downtown
Inventing Downtown

Author: Melissa Rachleff

Publisher: National Geographic Books

Published: 2017-01-10

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 3791355589

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This enlightening and thought-provoking look at New York City’s postwar art scene focuses on the galleries and the artists that helped transform American art. While the achievements of New York City’s most renowned postwar artists—de Kooning, Pollock, Rothko, Franz Kline— have been studied in depth, a large cadre of lesser-known but influential artists came of age between 1952 and 1965. Also understudied are the early, experimental works by more well- known figures such as Mark di Suvero, Jim Dine, Dan Flavin, and Claes Oldenburg. Focusing on innovative artist-run galleries, this book invites readers to reevaluate the period—uncovering its diversity, creativity, and nuances, and tracing the spaces’ influence during the decades that followed. Inventing Downtown charts the development of artist-run galleries in Lower Manhattan from the early 1950s to the mid-1960s, showing how the area’s multicultural spirit played a major role in shaping the artworks exhibited there. The book explores 14 key spaces in which styles such as Pop, Minimalism, and performance and installation art thrived. Excerpts from 33 revealing interviews with artists, critics, and dealers, conducted by Billy Klu&̈ver and Julie Martin, offer unique personal insight into the era’s creative milieu. Taken together, the book’s essays and interviews provide a distinctly new assessment of how downtown New York’s fertile environment nurtured an innovative art scene.

Panpocalypse
Panpocalypse

Author: Carley Moore

Publisher: Feminist Press at CUNY

Published: 2022-04-05

Total Pages: 170

ISBN-13: 1952177022

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During the coronavirus pandemic, a queer disabled woman bikes through a locked-down NYC for the ex-girlfriend who broke her heart. Orpheus manages to buy a bicycle just before they sell out across the city. She takes to the streets looking for Eurydice, the first woman she fell in love with, who also broke her heart. The city is largely closed and on lockdown, devoid of touch, connection, and community. But Orpheus hears of a mysterious underground bar Le Monocle, fashioned after the lesbian club of the same name in 1930s Paris. Will Orpheus be able to find it? Will she ever be allowed to love again? Panpocalypse—first published as an online serial in spring of 2020—follows a lonely, disabled, poly hero in this novel about disease, decay, love, and revolution.

Magnetic City
Magnetic City

Author: Justin Davidson

Publisher: Random House

Published: 2017-04-18

Total Pages: 258

ISBN-13: 0553394703

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From New York magazine’s architecture critic, a walking and reading guide to New York City—a historical, cultural, architectural, and personal approach to seven neighborhoods throughout Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the Bronx, including six essays that help us understand the evolution of the city For nearly a decade, Pulitzer Prize–winning critic Justin Davidson has explained the ever-changing city of New York to his readers at New York magazine, introducing new buildings, interviewing architects, tracking the way the transforming urban landscape shapes who New Yorkers are. Now, his extensive, inspiring knowledge will be available to a wide audience. An insider’s guide to the architecture and planning of New York that includes maps, photographs, and original insights from the men and women who built the city and lived in it—its designers, visionaries, artists, writers—Magnetic City offers first-time visitors and lifelong residents a new way to see New York. Includes walking tours throughout Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the Bronx • the Financial District • the World Trade Center • the Seaport and the Brooklyn waterfront • Chelsea and the High Line • 42nd Street • the Upper West Side • the South Bronx and Sugar Hill Praise for Magnetic City “An intimate, seductive guidebook.”—The New York Times “An enthralling new book makes clear that I’m not alone in my home-town infatuation . . . lends nuance, texture and historical perspective to my impression that New York City has never been so appealing or life-affirming as it is today.”—New York Post “[Davidson] combines a keen intelligence, experience, observational skills, expertise (especially but not solely architectural), and an elegant writing style to make this beautifully produced book indispensable.”—Booklist (starred review) “A street-level celebration of New York City in all ‘its perpetual complexity and contradiction’ . . . a worthy companion to Alfred Kazin’s A Walker in the City and the American Institute of Architects guides to the architecture of New York as well as a treat for fans of the metropolis.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review) “Justin Davidson does more than direct our feet to New York’s hidden monuments. He explains the structure of the city with a clarity that would be bracing even for a Gotham habitué, but more than that, he finds the meaning in every building and byway.”—Andrew Solomon, National Book Award-winning author of Far from the Tree “Mr. Davidson’s exceptional knowledge of our beloved city is inspiring. Magnetic City is now my official chaperone.”—Patti LuPone “Justin Davidson has a mind alive to every signal, and his brilliant prose style transmits that electricity in black-and-white type. He is thus born to the task of capturing the chaotic splendor of New York City on the page.”—Alex Ross, author of Listen to This “Justin Davidson’s beautiful tours of New York City invoke and redouble our love of the metropolis.”—Jerry Saltz, senior art critic, New York

Moon New York City
Moon New York City

Author: Christopher Kompanek

Publisher: Hachette UK

Published: 2019-06-18

Total Pages: 350

ISBN-13: 1640491767

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From the corner bodega to the top of the Empire State Building, NYC is overflowing with energy and culture. Experience the city with a local with Moon New York City. Explore the City: Navigate by neighborhood or by activity with color-coded maps, or follow a self-guided neighborhood walk See the Sights: Dive into culture at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, or stroll down sun-dappled paths in Central Park before dinner and a Broadway show Get a Taste of the City: From cutting-edge fine dining to a slice from a beloved pizzeria, New York has something for every palate Bars and Nightlife: Jazz clubs, beer gardens, cocktail lounges, world-class theater, and parties that don't end before dawn: New York is truly the city that never sleeps Trusted Advice: Native New Yorker and journalist Christopher Kompanek shows you his hometown Strategic Itineraries: Make the most of your trip with ideas for foodies, culture-seekers, families traveling with kids, and more Full-Color Photos and Detailed Maps so you can explore on your own Handy Tools: Background information on history and culture, plus an easy-to-read foldout map to use on the go With Moon New York City's practical tips and local know-how, you can plan your trip your way. Looking to experience more world-class cities? Try Moon Boston or Moon Chicago. Exploring the rest of the Empire State? Check out Moon New York State or Moon Niagara Falls.

Revolting New York
Revolting New York

Author: Neil Smith

Publisher: University of Georgia Press

Published: 2018

Total Pages: 363

ISBN-13: 0820352829

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"For many, the appearance of Occupy Wall Street seemed so sudden and so surprising it seemed to have come out of nowhere. But Occupy Wall Street was in some sense not unusual: it was part and parcel of a long history of riot, revolt, uprising, and sometimes even revolution that has shaped the city and the larger histories and geographies of which it is part. The history of New York is, in significant part, a history of revolt. Many citizens, activists, and scholars know pieces of that history, but nowhere has it been put together in something close to its entirety. The effect is that each revolt or uprising seems almost sui generis, always surprising, disconnected from both its long- and near-term history and social geography. Revolting New York brings together the historical geography of revolt in New York in its fullness, from the earliest uprisings of the Munsee against Dutch occupation of Manhattan to Occupy. All in a style accessible to a broad as well as academic audience The book will show that there is a continuous, if varied and punctuated, history of rebellion in New York that is at least as vital as the more standard histories of formal politics, planning, economic growth and restructuring that largely define our consciousness of New York's evolution and the structuring of life within it" --

Infinity of Nations
Infinity of Nations

Author: National Museum of the American Indian

Publisher: Harper Collins

Published: 2010-10-12

Total Pages: 324

ISBN-13: 006154731X

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The National Museum of the American Indian is one of the world's great conservators of cultural heritage, and its collections hold more than 800,000 objects spanning 13,000 years of history of the Native peoples of the Western Hemisphere, from Tierra del Fuego in the south to the Arctic in the north. Drawing on new insights from archaeology, history, and art history, Infinity of Nations uses culturally, historically, and aesthetically significant objects as a point of entry to understanding the people who created them. Following an introduction on the power of objects to engage our imagination, each chapter presents an overview of a region of the Americas and its cultural complexities, written by a noted specialist on that region. Community knowledge-keepers and an impressive new generation of Native scholars contribute highlights on objects that represent important ideas or that capture moments of social change. Together these writers create an extraordinary mosaic. What emerges is a portrait of a complex and dynamic world shaped from its earliest history by contact and exchange among peoples. Illustrated with more than 200 strikingly beautiful photographs published here for the first time, Infinity of Nations opens new avenues that extend well beyond those of conventional cultural studies. Authoritative and accessible, here is an important resource for anyone interested in learning about Native cultures of the Americas.