Four Streets and a Square: A History of Manhattan and the New York Idea
Four Streets and a Square: A History of Manhattan and the New York Idea

Author: Marc Aronson

Publisher: Candlewick Press

Published: 2021-12-03

Total Pages: 441

ISBN-13: 0763651370

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

From a Sibert Medalist comes the epic story of Manhattan—a magical, maddening island “for all” and a microcosm of America. A veteran nonfiction storyteller dives deep into the four-hundred-year history of Manhattan to map the island’s unexpected intersections. Focusing on the evolution of four streets and a square (Wall Street, 42nd Street, West 4th Street, 125th Street, and Union Square) Marc Aronson explores how new ideas and forms of art evolved from social blending. Centuries of conflict—among original Americans and Europeans, slavers and the enslaved, rich and poor, immigrants and native-born—produced segregation, oppression, and violence, but also new ways of speaking, singing, and being American. From the Harlem Renaissance to Hammerstein, from gay pride in the Village to political clashes at Tammany Hall, this clear-eyed pageant of the island’s joys and struggles—enhanced with photos and drawings, multimedia links to music and film, and an extensive bibliography and source notes—is, above all, a love song to Manhattan’s triumphs.

Capital
Capital

Author: Kenneth Goldsmith

Publisher: Verso Books

Published: 2016-03-08

Total Pages: 928

ISBN-13: 1784781576

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Acclaimed artist Kenneth Goldsmith’s thousand-page homage to New York City Here is a kaleidoscopic assemblage and poetic history of New York: an unparalleled and original homage to the city, composed entirely of quotations. Drawn from a huge array of sources—histories, memoirs, newspaper articles, novels, government documents, emails—and organized into interpretive categories that reveal the philosophical architecture of the city, Capital is the ne plus ultra of books on the ultimate megalopolis. It is also a book of experimental literature that transposes Walter Benjamin’s unfinished magnum opus of literary montage on the modern city, The Arcades Project, from nineteenth-century Paris to twentieth-century New York, bringing the streets and its inhabitants to life in categories such as “Sex,” “Central Park,” “Commodity,” “Loneliness,” “Gentrification,” “Advertising,” and “Mapplethorpe.” Capital is a book designed to fascinate and to fail—for can a megalopolis truly ever be captured in words? Can a history, no matter how extensive, ever be comprehensive? Each reading of this book, and of New York, is a unique and impossible project.

Book Row
Book Row

Author: Marvin Mondlin

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2019-10-15

Total Pages: 456

ISBN-13: 1510752560

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The American Story of the Bookstores on Fourth Avenue from the 1890s to the 1960s New York City has eight million stories, and this one unfolds just south of Fourteenth Street in Manhattan, on the seven blocks of Fourth Avenue bracketed by Union Square and Astor Place. There, for nearly eight decades from the 1890s to the 1960s, thrived the New York Booksellers’ Row, or Book Row. This richly anecdotal memoir features historical photographs and the rags-to-riches tale of the Strand, which began its life as a book stall on Eighth Street and today houses 2.5 million volumes (or sixteen miles of books) in twelve miles of space. It’s a story cast with characters as legendary and colorful as the horse-betting, poker-playing, go-getter of a book dealer George D. Smith; the irascible Russian-born book hunter Peter Stammer; the visionary Theodore C. Schulte; Lou Cohen, founder of the still-surviving Argosy Book Store; and gentleman bookseller George Rubinowitz and his formidably shrewd wife, Jenny. Book Row remembers places that all lovers of books should never forget, like Biblo & Tamen, the shop that defied book-banning laws; the Green Book Shop, favored by John Dickson Carr; Ellenor Lowenstein’s world-renowned gastronomical Corner Book Shop (which was not on a corner); and the Abbey Bookshop, the last of the Fourth Avenue bookstores to close its doors. Rising rents, street crime, urban redevelopment, and television are many of the reasons for the demise of Book Row, but in this volume, based on interviews with dozens of the people who bought, sold, collected, and breathed in its rare, bibliodiferous air, it lives again.

Death in New York: History and Culture of Burials, Undertakers & Executions
Death in New York: History and Culture of Burials, Undertakers & Executions

Author: K. Krombie

Publisher: Arcadia Publishing

Published: 2021

Total Pages: 192

ISBN-13: 1467149659

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Like every aspect of life in the Big Apple, how New Yorkers have interacted with death is as diverse as each of the countless individuals who have called the city home. Waves of immigration brought unique burial customs as archaeological excavations uncovered the graves of indigenous Lenape and enslaved Africans. Events such as the 1788 Doctors' Riot--a response to years of body snatching by medical students and physicians--contributed to new laws protecting the deceased. Overcrowding and epidemics led to the construction of the "Cemetery Belt," a wide stretch of multi-faith burial grounds throughout Brooklyn and Queens. From experiments in embalming to capital punishment and the far-reaching industry of handling the dead, author K. Krombie unveils a tapestry of stories centered on death in New York.

Alexis in America
Alexis in America

Author: Lee A. Farrow

Publisher: LSU Press

Published: 2014-12-15

Total Pages: 297

ISBN-13: 0807158402

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In the autumn of 1871, Alexis Romanov, the fourth son of Tsar Alexander II of Russia, set sail from his homeland for an extended journey through the United States and Canada. A major milestone in U.S.-Russia relations, the tour also served Duke Alexis's family by helping to extricate him from an unsuitable romantic entanglement with the daughter of a poet. Alexis in America recounts the duke's progress through the major American cities, detailing his meetings with celebrated figures such as Samuel Morse and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and describing the national self-reflection that his presence spurred in the American people. The first Russian royal ever to visit the United States, Alexis received a tour through post-Civil War America that emphasized the nation's cultural unity. While the enthusiastic American media breathlessly reported every detail of his itinerary and entourage, Alexis visited Niagara Falls, participated in a bison hunt with Buffalo Bill Cody, and attended the Krewe of Rex's first Mardi Gras parade in New Orleans. As word of the royal visitor spread, the public flocked to train depots and events across the nation to catch a glimpse of the grand duke. Some speculated that Russia and America were considering a formal alliance, while others surmised that he had come to the United States to find a bride. The tour was not without incident: many city officials balked at spending public funds on Alexis's reception, and there were rumors of an assassination plot by Polish nationals in New York City. More broadly, the visit highlighted problems on the national level, such as political corruption and persistent racism, as well as the emerging cultural and political power of ethnic minorities and the continuing sectionalism between the North and the South. Lee Farrow joins her examination of these cultural underpinnings to a lively narrative of the grand duke's tour, creating an engaging record of a unique moment in international relations.