Activism from the Start

2021 ◽  
pp. 9-26
Author(s):  
Daniel R. Garodnick
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
World War I ◽  
York City ◽  
Housing Crisis ◽  
World War ◽  
City Life ◽  
East Village ◽  
The Town ◽  
New Yorkers

This chapter begins by describing the redbrick buildings that emerge out of the East Village on Manhattan's East Side, the plain and unenticing facades of Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village that disguise the unique slice of city life that takes place within. It talks about Stuy Town's idyllic quality that contradicts the tumultuous history that produced this middle-class enclave tucked in the midst of Manhattan. It also explains Stuy Town's roots that are planted in bitter soil as the town was born of government-backed, and subsidized, racist policies and displaced with poor New Yorkers. The chapter tells Stuy Town's story of activism, where elected officials, civil rights leaders, and tenants joined together to fight against corporate greed and unjust policies, and for the rights of New Yorkers. It recounts how Stuy Town emerged from a housing crisis in New York City that began during World War I.

Anglo-Jewry and the Jewish International Traffic in Prostitution, 1885–1914

AJS Review ◽  
1982 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. 129-178 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lloyd P. Gartner
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
World War I ◽  
Young Men ◽  
Great Majority ◽  
World War ◽  
Military Conscription ◽  
The Town ◽  
International Traffic

Our tale opens in some little town in the Pale of Settlement between the 1880s and World War I. A well-spoken, well-dressed young man appears and courts an attractive girl of a family belonging to the great majority of the Jewish townspeople—that is, impoverished and burdened with many children. The unknown suitor offers charm and gifts, and speaks knowingly of the great places he has seen and where he has a good business—Paris, Johannesburg, London, or New York. Will the girl accompany him westward and become his bride once they reach their destination.He does not want to stay long enough in town to marry publicly, since he might be seized for military conscription. The girl, excited by the prospect, implores her parents to give their consent to this proposal. She feels she loves this young man. With him, the bleak life and dismal future in the town will be exchanged at a stroke for happiness and prosperity in a great, distant city. Every month a few young townspeople were leaving, mainly for America. Already there were many more marriageable girls in town than there were young men for them. How could such a chance be thrown aside? Might it ever recur? If the girl wondered why of all the numerous poor girls in town she was enjoying these attentions, she would answer in her own mind by complimenting herself on her prettiness. Her parents, or her surviving parent or step-parents, gave their consent.

Black Song, Dance, and Theater in pre-World War I New York City

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Gilbert
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
World War I ◽  
York City ◽  
Musical Theater ◽  
Labor Union ◽  
Symphony Orchestra ◽  
Development Stage ◽  
World War ◽  
Performance Space

Between 1896 and 1915, Black professional entertainers transformed New York City’s most established culture industries—musical theater and popular song publishing—and helped create two new ones: social dancing and music recording. While Black culture workers’ full impact on popular entertainment and Black modernism would not be felt until after World War I, the Harlem Renaissance and the Jazz Age were decades in the making. Stage performers Williams and Walker and their musical director Will Marion Cook introduced full-scale Black musical theater to Broadway between 1902 and 1909; songwriters-turned-performers Cole and Johnson expanded the style and substance of ragtime songs along Tin Pan Alley; James Reese Europe created a labor union for Black musicians that got hundreds of players out of Black nightclubs into high-paying White elites’ homes, eventually bringing a 200-person all-Black symphony orchestra to Carnegie Hall for the first concert of its kind at the august performance space. James Europe’s Clef Club Inc. also caught the ears of Manhattan’s leading social dancers, the White Irene and Vernon Castle, in ways that helped disseminate Europe’s ragtime dance bands across America and, by 1913, became the first Black band to record phonographs, setting important precedents for the hit jazz and blues records of the postwar era. While James Europe would go on to win renown as the musical director of the Harlem Hell Fighters—the most-decorated infantry unit to fight in World War I—his prewar community of professional entertainers had already successfully entered into New York City’s burgeoning, and increasingly national, commercial culture markets. By studying some of the key figures in this story it becomes possible to get a fuller sense of the true cultural ferment that marked this era of Black musical development. Stage performers Williams and Walker and Cole and Johnson, behind-the-scenes songwriters Will Marion Cook and James Weldon Johnson, and musicians such as James Reese Europe’s artistic and entrepreneurial interventions made African Americans central players in creating the Manhattan musical marketplace and helped make New York City the capital of U.S. performance and entertainment.

Martha Dickinson Bianchi: War Poet

2007 ◽  
Vol 80 (2) ◽  
pp. 317-321
Author(s):  
Marcy L. Tanter
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
World War I ◽  
York City ◽  
Emily Dickinson ◽  
Red Cross ◽  
World War

The article recovers poet Martha Dickinson Bianchi, niece of Emily Dickinson, who served in the Amherst, Massachusetts, branch of the Red Cross and tended wounded soldiers in New York City at the end of World War I. Two previously unpublished poems reflect American despair in the aftermath of the war.

Freytag-Loringhoven, Baroness Elsa von (1874 –1927)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Caroline Knighton
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
World War I ◽  
York City ◽  
Department Stores ◽  
World War ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Public ◽  
New York Dada ◽  
Visual Artist ◽  
Naked Body

Born Else Hildegard Plötz in the German Baltic seaport town of Swinmünde in 1874, the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven was an avant-garde poet, performer, visual artist, model, and autobiographer associated with the retrospectively named New York Dada movement. Arrested in Pittsburg for wearing men’s clothes and publicly smoking in 1910, the Baroness became an increasingly notorious figure in New York city as World War I took hold in Europe. Head shaved and lacquered in high vermilion, her often naked body decorated with the tin cans, ice cream spoons, and gilded vegetables that she collected from the city’s gutters or stole from its department stores, the Baroness both embodied and challenged the limits of established avant-garde gestures through a radical lived-Dada practice performed on and through her body. Well-suited to The Little Review’s tagline "Making no Compromise with the Public Taste," the Baroness was, as editor Jane Heap put it, "the only one living anywhere who dresses Dada, loves Dada, is Dada" (1922: 46).

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roberta Gold
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Labor Union ◽  
Housing Crisis ◽  
Alternative Vision ◽  
Racially Mixed ◽  
The Right ◽  
The City ◽  
New Yorkers

This book explores the emergence of New York City's tenant movement as the leading voice for an alternative vision of residence and citizenship against the backdrop of suburban expansion. It considers how tenants responded to the unprecedented housing crisis that faced New Yorkers at the end of World War II and discusses their positions on three public policy questions: public housing, slum clearance, and civil rights. It also examines the tenants' creation of labor-union cooperatives and their fight against “urban renewal”; the struggle over the rent strikes that erupted in Harlem and other ghettos in 1963; and how community politics played out in racially mixed neighborhoods where tenants waged campaigns against redevelopment in the mid-1960s. The book highlights the variety of ways in which New York tenants laid claim to what Marxists have called “the right to the city”: a kind of democratic say over the uses of capital to shape the urban environment and the lives of its inhabitants.

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