I’m on an upcoming panel about the creative activity of the neighborhood that was demolished in the building of Lincoln Center. Come! Thursday, November 9, 7pm, Sidewalk Studio of David Geffen Hall, Lincoln Center; it’s free–reservations and info here.
I was asked to write an essay for the Legacies of San Juan Hill website that Lincoln Center has created to interrogate and explore the history of its site. My contribution comes just as the New York Philharmonic plays the score of the latest (Spielberg) movie version of West Side Story. I ask: “Inspiration is a ground from which to imagine. What happens when inspiration abets ignoring? Erasure? Appropriation? Among the legacies of San Juan Hill, West Side Story leaves us grappling still with these questions.” Still.
The 18th International Cather Seminar will be held at The New School from June 21-23, 2023. The topic: Willa Cather’s New York–her home for nearly 40 years. How did the city shape her writing? I’ve been asked to start off the conference with some thoughts about the intersection of Cather and The New School. (There she is on the Advisory Committee (1925-31).) Join us!
The Museum of the City of New York turns 100 this year! To celebrate, they have put on a show: This is New York: 100 Years of the City in Art and Pop Culture. And I got to be part of the conversation in making it. Go see!
The jazz trumpeter and composer Etienne Charles has written a composition on the neighborhood that preceded Lincoln Center. And I provided some historical notes. He commissioned this mural by the Ex-Vandals at 2605 Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, and his composition premieres at part of the re-opening of Geffen Hall on October 8, 2022. Check out a video of the complete mural here. What a brilliant mural and effort!
A collection of essays marking the 100th anniversary of the founding of The New School, in 1919. Essays look at the role of the city in the school and the school in the city; the influence of women on the school; the importance of adults and the arts in shaping the school; and what it means to be considered a progressive institution. With Mark Larrimore.
Published as a freely available e-book in 2020; download here.
A year ago, I visited the archives at Yale to look at the papers of John Lindsay, the mayor of New York City from 1966-73. I’ve recently gone back to the documents, conjuring a city fifty years ago that faced growing racial tensions and fiscal constraints (minus a pandemic).
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Even though The New School’s centennial celebration has ended, our investigation of its past continues. We wrote a new introduction to the ebook edition of Alvin Johnson’s autobiography, Pioneer’s Progress. And I followed architect and urbanist–and 30-year Board of Trustee member–Albert Mayer to India and back to think through the design of The New School’s urban village.
My pandemic ode to New York (Public Seminar)
I teach courses about New York and often begin the semester’s conversation by asking students to share a personal anecdote that best describes their city. Invariably, the anecdotes are about encounters with strangers, often on the subway. It’s about help offered, anonymity made comforting, aloneness-yet-connection amid others.
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With a Broadway revival of the musical upon us and the film coming in December 2020, I was asked to reflect on why West Side Story still resonates for NPR’s Studio 360’s New York Icons series, and the Center for New York City Affair’s Urban Matters. And an excerpt from my book is featured on Public Seminar.
I chaired a panel at the Society for U.S. Intellectual History conference this past weekend that considered the state of Greenwich Village in the 1950s-60s. Artists such as Judith Malina of the Living Theater insisted that the Village at that time was “the center of the universe!,” while others thought the increase in residential and commercial rent values, the expansion of New York University, and the influx of tourists to the Washington Square area were indications of imminent death. The East Village and SoHo began to claim the mantle of edginess and bohemianism in the 1960s, suggesting that sites of experimentation had moved east and south.
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Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani has written a fascinating book about the long, dispiriting, and complicated history of the Seward Park Urban Renewal Area (SPURA) on the Lower East Side of New York. She uses art and pedagogy as intervention and gives me hope that another future for the city is possible. Our conversation here.
More essays on New School Histories at Public Seminar! One of my favorites is from my co-conspirator Mark Larrimore who penned an inspired investigation of Parsons centenary (in 1996) to see the New School’s centenary more clearly. And my latest on the tie of the school to the city: “New York is the place.”
So says the New York Times about the Robbins exhibition (full review here)! There was also an article in The Times of Israel; a clip on WABC-7 with Sandy Kenyon (also appearing in 6000 cabs!); another on CUNY-TV’s Arts in the City; an Instagram story with New York City Ballet’s Adrian Danchig-Waring; and a poignant account of remembering a beloved dance instructor–and former dancer in West Side Story–through the exhibition.