Notable New Yorkers of Manhattan’s Upper West Side
Notable New Yorkers of Manhattan’s Upper West Side

Author: Jim Mackin

Publisher: Fordham Univ Press

Published: 2020-11-24

Total Pages: 464

ISBN-13: 0823289311

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Nearly 600 captivating stories of notable former residents of Manhattan’s Upper West Side, some famous, some forgotten What do Humphrey Bogart and Patty Hill (co-author of “Happy Birthday,” the most popular song of all time) have in common? Both of them once lived in the neighborhood of Morningside Heights and Bloomingdale, a strip of land that runs from the 90s to 125th Street, between the Hudson River and Central Park. Spanning hundreds of years, Notable New Yorkers of Manhattan’s Upper West Side is a compilation of stories of nearly 600 former residents who once called Manhattan’s Upper West Side home. Profiling a rare selection of wildly diverse people who shaped the character of the area, author Jim Mackin introduces readers to its fascinating residents—some famous, such as George and Ira Gershwin and Thurgood Marshall, and some forgotten, such as Harriet Brooks, Augustus Meyers, and Elinor Smith. Brief biographies reveal intriguing facts about this group, which include scientists, explorers, historians, journalists, artists, entertainers, aviators, public officials, lawyers, judges, and some in a category too unique to label. This collection also promotes accomplished women who have been forgotten and spotlights The Old Community, a tight-knit African American enclave that included such talented and accomplished residents as Marcus Garvey, Billie Holiday, and Butterfly McQueen. The book is divided into five geographical sections: the West 90s, the West 100s, the West 110s, the West 120s, and Riverside Drive. Addresses are arranged in ascending order within each section, first by street number and then by street address number. While the focus is on people, the book includes an eclectic collection of interesting facts and colorful stories about the neighborhood itself, including the 9th Avenue El, Little Coney Island, and, notoriously, one of the most dangerous streets in the city, as well as songs and movies that were written and filmed in the neighborhood. Notable New Yorkers of Manhattan’s Upper West Side provides a unique overview of the people who shaped the neighborhood through their presence and serves as a guide to those who deserve to be recognized and remembered.

Morningside Heights
Morningside Heights

Author: Andrew S. Dolkart

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2001-03-15

Total Pages: 532

ISBN-13: 9780231078511

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Few aspects of American military history have been as vigorously debated as Harry Truman's decision to use atomic bombs against Japan. In this carefully crafted volume, Michael Kort describes the wartime circumstances and thinking that form the context for the decision to use these weapons, surveys the major debates related to that decision, and provides a comprehensive collection of key primary source documents that illuminate the behavior of the United States and Japan during the closing days of World War II. Kort opens with a summary of the debate over Hiroshima as it has evolved since 1945. He then provides a historical overview of thye events in question, beginning with the decision and program to build the atomic bomb. Detailing the sequence of events leading to Japan's surrender, he revisits the decisive battles of the Pacific War and the motivations of American and Japanese leaders. Finally, Kort examines ten key issues in the discussion of Hiroshima and guides readers to relevant primary source documents, scholarly books, and articles.

Manhattanville
Manhattanville

Author: Eric K. Washington

Publisher: Arcadia Publishing

Published: 2002

Total Pages: 132

ISBN-13: 9780738509860

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During the 1800s, Manhattanville flourished as the West Side counterpart to its parent village of Harlem. The wide valley around present-day Broadway and 125th Street formed a unique gateway to the Hudson River between Morningside Heights and Washington Heights. Although rural, Manhattanville was the convergence of river, railroad, and stage lines, representing one of nineteenth-century New York City's most significant residential, manufacturing, and transportation hubs. However, this once-prominent upper Manhattan suburb eventually succumbed to the advent of mass transit and to the absorption of its distinctive features by the city in chase. Manhattanville: Old Heart of West Harlem acquaints readers with the richly diverse history and lore of this famously picturesque locale. From Henry Hudson's exploration of the area's waterfront in 1609 to Gen. George Washington's conversion of its terrain into a battlefield in 1776, momentous events marked Manhattanville's crossroads long before the village streets were laid out in 1806. Readers discover later landmarks, including New York's first Episcopal church to abolish pew rentals, where patriots, Tories, and African American abolitionists convened-today, Harlem's oldest continuing congregation on the same site. The book also introduces notable Manhattanville residents, such as founders Jacob and Hannah Lawrence Schieffelin, clothier Daniel Devlin, and New York City Mayor Daniel F. Tiemann.

Upper West Side Story
Upper West Side Story

Author: Peter Salwen

Publisher: Peter Salwen

Published: 1989

Total Pages: 384

ISBN-13: 9780896598942

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"As any resident, restaurateur, or realtor will tell you, New York's Upper West Side--that swath of Manhattan between Central Park and the Hudson River, from roughly Columbus Circle to Columbia University--is the place for fashionable dining, dwelling, and dressing up. But the Young Urban Professionals now discovering the area (and many oldtimers, too) might be surprised to learn that other colonists had preceded them by two or three hundred years--Dutch farmers and English gentry with names like Theunis Idens van Huys, Hendrick Hendrickon Bosch, Charles Ward Apthorpe, and Oliver De Lancey. The names of many later residents are more familiar: Edgar Allan Poe, William Tecumseh Sherman, Lillian Russell, Diamond Jim Brady, Florenz Ziegfeld, Arturo Toscanini, Fanny Brice, William Randolph Hearst, Theodore Dreiser, Lewis Mumford, Humphrey Bogart (he was a child there), Lauren Bacall (so was she), Gertrude Stein, Mae West, Leonard Bernstein, John Lennon. Quite a neighborhood. And Peter Salwen’s Upper West Side Story is quite a book: an engaging, often hilarious history of this fabulous city-within-a-city. It is a treasury of colorful biographies--of farmers, tycoons, thieves, and artists. It is an architectural grand tour--of the Dakota, the Ansonia, Lincoln Center, and the romantic residential skyscrapers of Central Park West. It is a compendium of Manhattan lore and delightful as well as occasionally horrifying trivia, enough to turn even a casual browser into the Compleat Upper West Sider. The story of this dynamic neighborhood begins with the colonial period, when merchant princes commanded royal views of the Hudson--until the approach of Washington’s troops drove them from their mansions--and continues through the bucolic nineteenth century, when the Bloomingdale Lunatic Asylum at 116th and Broadway (site of today's Columbia University) was the Upper West Side's prime tourist attraction. By the turn of the [twentieth] century, the fashionable “West End," as the neighborhood was then known, boasted extravagant mansions and private homes, grand parks and equestrian boulevards, and its own unique theatrical and night life. Author Peter Salwen chronicles those high-living years, and the half century of inexorable decline that followed--with its poverty and often sensational crime--and brings us up-to-date with a lively account of [the 1980s'] galloping renaissance. [This book] is living history--an unfinished story--generously illustrated with vintage engravings and photos of the buildings and people great and humble (those still with us and those that are no more). Also included are special walking tours to suit all levels of ambition and energy, and a who’s who of famous and infamous residents and where they lived."--Dust jacket.

The Roots of Urban Renaissance
The Roots of Urban Renaissance

Author: Brian D. Goldstein

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2023-03-14

Total Pages: 400

ISBN-13: 0691243476

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An acclaimed history of Harlem’s journey from urban crisis to urban renaissance With its gleaming shopping centers and refurbished row houses, today’s Harlem bears little resemblance to the neighborhood of the midcentury urban crisis. Brian Goldstein traces Harlem’s Second Renaissance to a surprising source: the radical social movements of the 1960s that resisted city officials and fought to give Harlemites control of their own destiny. Young Harlem activists, inspired by the civil rights movement, envisioned a Harlem built by and for its low-income, predominantly African American population. In the succeeding decades, however, the community-based organizations they founded came to pursue a very different goal: a neighborhood with national retailers and increasingly affluent residents. The Roots of Urban Renaissance demonstrates that gentrification was not imposed on an unwitting community by unscrupulous developers or opportunistic outsiders. Rather, it grew from the neighborhood’s grassroots, producing a legacy that benefited some longtime residents and threatened others.

Harlem
Harlem

Author: Jonathan Gill

Publisher: Open Road + Grove/Atlantic

Published: 2011-02-01

Total Pages: 529

ISBN-13: 0802195946

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“An exquisitely detailed account of the 400-year history of Harlem.” —Booklist, starred review Harlem is perhaps the most famous, iconic neighborhood in the United States. A bastion of freedom and the capital of Black America, Harlem’s twentieth-century renaissance changed our arts, culture, and politics forever. But this is only one of the many chapters in a wonderfully rich and varied history. In Harlem, historian Jonathan Gill presents the first complete chronicle of this remarkable place. From Henry Hudson’s first contact with native Harlemites, through Harlem’s years as a colonial outpost on the edge of the known world, Gill traces the neighborhood’s story, marshaling a tremendous wealth of detail and a host of fascinating figures from George Washington to Langston Hughes. Harlem was an agricultural center under British rule and the site of a key early battle in the Revolutionary War. Later, wealthy elites including Alexander Hamilton built great estates there for entertainment and respite from the epidemics ravaging downtown. In the nineteenth century, transportation urbanized Harlem and brought waves of immigrants from Germany, Italy, Ireland, and elsewhere. Harlem’s mix of cultures, extraordinary wealth, and extreme poverty was electrifying and explosive. Extensively researched, impressively synthesized, eminently readable, and overflowing with captivating characters, Harlem is a “vibrant history” and an impressive achievement (Publishers Weekly). “Comprehensive and compassionate—an essential text of American history and culture.” —Kirkus Reviews, starred review “It’s bound to become a classic or I’ll eat my hat!” —Edwin G. Burrows, Pulitzer Prize–winning coauthor of Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898

Columbia in Manhattanville
Columbia in Manhattanville

Author: Caitlin Blanchfield

Publisher:

Published: 2016

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781941332238

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Home to the famed Cotton Club, Alexander Hamilton's grange, the Manhattan Project, and a Studebaker factory, West Harlem has been an ever-transforming pocket of New York City. With the arrival of Columbia University's Manhattanville expansion-a campus master plan designed by architect Renzo Piano-it is now also a site of experimentation in the future of the twenty-first century university. Bringing together conversations with the architects and planners designing the Manhattanville campus, the educators who will inhabit its buildings, and essays from urban and architectural historians, this book both documents the making of Manhattanville and critically engages with the University's own history of expansion. Featuring contributions from Renzo Piano, Elizabeth Diller, Charles Renfro, Amale Andraos, Reinhold Martin, Tom Jessell, and Maxine Griffith, among others.

Harlem vs. Columbia University
Harlem vs. Columbia University

Author: Stefan M. Bradley

Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Published: 2010-10-01

Total Pages: 274

ISBN-13: 0252090586

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In 1968–69, Columbia University became the site for a collision of American social movements. Black Power, student power, antiwar, New Left, and Civil Rights movements all clashed with local and state politics when an alliance of black students and residents of Harlem and Morningside Heights openly protested the school's ill-conceived plan to build a large, private gymnasium in the small green park that separates the elite university from Harlem. Railing against the university's expansion policy, protesters occupied administration buildings and met violent opposition from both fellow students and the police. In this dynamic book, Stefan M. Bradley describes the impact of Black Power ideology on the Students' Afro-American Society (SAS) at Columbia. While white students--led by Mark Rudd and Students for a Democratic Society (SDS)--sought to radicalize the student body and restructure the university, black students focused on stopping the construction of the gym in Morningside Park. Through separate, militant action, black students and the black community stood up to the power of an Ivy League institution and stopped it from trampling over its relatively poor and powerless neighbors. Comparing the events at Columbia with similar events at Harvard, Cornell, Yale, and the University of Pennsylvania, Bradley locates this dramatic story within the context of the Black Power movement and the heightened youth activism of the 1960s. Harnessing the Civil Rights movement's spirit of civil disobedience and the Black Power movement's rhetoric and methodology, African American students were able to establish an identity for themselves on campus while representing the surrounding black community of Harlem. In doing so, Columbia's black students influenced their white peers on campus, re-energized the community's protest efforts, and eventually forced the university to share its power.

Honky
Honky

Author: Dalton Conley

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2023-09-05

Total Pages: 263

ISBN-13: 0520397843

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This vivid memoir captures how race, class, and privilege shaped a white boy’s coming of age in 1970s New York—now with a new epilogue. “I am not your typical middle-class white male,” begins Dalton Conley’s Honky, an intensely engaging memoir of growing up amid predominantly African American and Latino housing projects on New York’s Lower East Side. In narrating these sharply observed memories, from his little sister’s burning desire for cornrows to the shooting of a close childhood friend, Conley shows how race and class inextricably shaped his life—as well as the lives of his schoolmates and neighbors. In a new afterword, Conley, now a well-established senior sociologist, provides an update on what his informants’ respective trajectories tell us about race and class in the city. He further reflects on how urban areas have (and haven’t) changed over the past few decades, including the stubborn resilience of poverty in New York. At once a gripping coming-of-age story and a brilliant case study illuminating broader inequalities in American society, Honky guides us to a deeper understanding of the cultural capital of whiteness, the social construction of race, and the intricacies of upward mobility.

Policing the City
Policing the City

Author: Didier Fassin

Publisher: Other Press, LLC

Published: 2022-03-01

Total Pages: 113

ISBN-13: 1635422515

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Adapted from the landmark essay Enforcing Order, this striking graphic novel offers an accessible inside look at policing and how it leads to discrimination and violence. What we know about the forces of law and order often comes from tragic episodes that make the headlines, or from sensationalized versions for film and television. These gripping accounts obscure two crucial aspects of police work: the tedium of everyday patrols under constant pressure to meet quotas, and the banality of racial discrimination and ordinary violence. Around the time of the 2005 French riots, anthropologist and sociologist Didier Fassin spent fifteen months observing up close the daily life of an anticrime squad in one of the largest precincts in the Paris region. His unprecedented study, which sparked intense discussion about policing in the largely working-class, immigrant suburbs, remains acutely relevant in light of all-too-common incidents of police brutality against minorities. This new, powerfully illustrated adaptation clearly presents the insights of Fassin’s investigation, and draws connections to the challenges we face today in the United States as in France.