New
York City Past in Full Array
At Inaugural History Festival
 |
| An
amused Martin Scorsese, left, with Gotham Center director
Mike Wallace at a screening of parts of his forthcoming
film Gangs of New York. |
In early October, the Gotham Center for New
York City History, which resides in the CUNY Graduate Center,
sponsored the first Gotham History Festival. The 10-day affair
kicked off with an October 5-7 conference that explored such
far-flung topics as Building Sports Stadiums in New York; Breweries,
Saloons and Taverns from 1840 to 1930; Gothamôs Garbage; and
Mambo to Salsa: Latin Music in the South Bronx. Following this,
myriad panels, performances, walking tours, exhibitions, and
screenings took place through October 14, creating what Festival
planners called "a citywide jamboree for citizens and tourists
alike to celebrate the Cityôs magnificent but under-appreciated
historical resources." Clio, the muse of history, must have
been delighted. During the Festival, Mike Wallace, Pulitzer-winning
co-author of Gotham, the book (Gotham: A History of New York
City to 1898) and founding director of Gotham, the Center,
spoke about some of his personal highlights on Metro Channels
TV. Following here, adapted for CUNY Matters, are excerpts
from his remarks.
The Gotham History Festival, which we hope to mount every two
years, is intended to pull together scholars and museum curators,
film-makers and video artists—indeed, history makers in
all media—with an eye to the non-scholarly audience, and
it seems to be working very nicely. There is a splendid mix
of ordinary folks, history buffs, union members, civil rights
activists, even some tourists just down from the Empire State
Building.
Our desire at the Gotham Center to place a wide range of contemporary
issues in historical perspective was, as you can imagine, put
to the test by September 11. The city's history never stands
still, and the Festival could not afford to either. So we offered
two well-attended sessions, one that set the attack in a larger
historical context, and one that examined the history of murderous
fantasies about destroying the city. Why, for over a century,
has Gotham served as a target?
The latter panel, "To Demolish New York: Precursors of
September 11 in Fact and Fiction," reminded us that 19th-century
novels pictured an apocalyptic heap of 250,000 corpses arrayed
in Union Square, or the destruction of the Metropolitan Life
Building. Then there were the bombings of Wall Street in 1920.
My guess is that this fixation has something to do with our
being the center of capitalism.
Other events planned long before took on a new resonance—for
example, for obvious reasons, a panel on "The History of
the Arab-American Community in New York City." Cultural myths
and misconceptions go back a long way in our city; one of the
panels, in fact, dealt with the city when it was New Amsterdam
and misconceptions about the Dutch. Another panel on the destruction
and resurrection of buildings in the South Bronx also became
more of-the-moment. Did we think of canceling the Festival?
For about a second and a half. Quite apart from the Mayor and
the President urging us to return to our lives, I thought the
Festival was the perfect opportunity to get away from the TV
and connect with other citizens on a subject we so obviously
have in common: Gotham. In effect, we wanted to say (borrowing
the title of E. B. Whiteôs now-famous-again book), "here
is New York!"
Speaking of attacks on New York, one Festival event offered
a documentary, The Brave Man, with a twist that explored
one of the greatest crises the city ever experienced—the
Battle of Brooklyn in 1776, when the British mounted the largest
amphibious assault in the history of warfare. If it had succeeded
in trapping George Washingtonôs army against the East River,
that would have been it for the revolution! Our panel recalled
the brave men who held the British off long enough to float
over to Manhattan. The documentary begins in the present with
an actor playing one of the American generals, and it is set
at the location in Brooklyn now—in the middle of the street,
with cars whizzing by. Then he is seen in a wig, then an 18th-century
military hat, and finally in full battle costume, acting out
the battle.
Our venues have been jammed, and this delights me, since I firmly
believe that most people do not get their historical knowledge
from school, but rather from museums, documentaries, historic
sites, from the History Channel. For a long time academic historians
did not pay attention to this; it was somehow beneath them.
Iôve always thought it was important for scholars to work with
museums and film-makers.
Speaking of which, I was thrilled and delighted that born-and-bred
New Yorker Martin Scorsese was generous enough to share with
us clips from a film which has not even been completed yet.
That is extremely rare. Heôs not only a master cinematographer,
he is a historian of New York City. This new film, Gangs
of New York is the farthest he has gone back in time, one
step farther than his The Age of Innocence (set in 1870s).
Now he is offering us New York in the 1850s and '60s. Another
extremely interesting panel was "New Perspectives on the
Movement for Civil Rights in New York." Say "civil
rights movement" and we immediately think of the South
and Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern schoolhouse steps
and buses. But I would argue New York City was very important
too, not only in terms of financial support but also activists
like Bayard Rustin, who actually connected King with Gandhiôs
movement in India.
In fact, our city was a hotbed of civil rights protest long
before the '60s. The civil rights movement here is arguably
150 years old, if you think of the anti-slavery movement largely
led by local blacks, Christians and white ministers. Or take
the NAACP—it started, after all, right here. Or consider
the race riot of 1935 in Harlem, which accelerated the movement
and led to significant activity in New York City in the '40s.
Another panel, "Building New Subways in New York," underscored
what must be a constant concern for all New Yorkers: infrastructure.
Just around the corner is the 100th anniversary of our subway
system. It is still amazing to think that the first subway was
built in a mere four years, opening for riders in 1904. This
panel offered a context for rethinking our transportation system
in light of the WTC attack. Do we want to build a Second Avenue
subway, for instance, that will connect lower downtown with
the south Bronx? Do we want to begin to expand out into the
wider region? Do we want to develop the kind of rail/transit
system that Paris has, that London has, that almost every great
city has, so that we can be less reliant on the automobile?
One other superb Festival event left me feeling bittersweet:
"Ordinary People, Extraordinary Lives: 100 Years of Work
in New York City." This exhibition of very powerful images of
every-day working people in the communities and at their workplaces
reminded us that, up to World War II and even the 1950s, our
city was predominantly a blue-collar town. With the massive
growth of the professional, corporate, and financial sectors,
humbler laborers have receded somewhat from the mental landscape
of the city. Not that our blue-collar folks are not here, as
the hundreds of victims of the WTC attack—notably firemen
and policemen—have shown!
Debra Bernhardt curated the exhibition and wrote the companion
book. She was an extraordinary woman and died this spring, at
a sadly early age. She was the Director of the Robert F. Wagner
Labor Archives at NYU, and one of her missions was to put working
people back into the civic consciousness—to, as she said,
"document the undocumented. We dedicated the conference
to Debra.
Finally, I would say that the History Festival—well, history
itself—is important because (as historians are duty-bound
to point out!) knowing about it can help us prepare for the
future. Take the economic depression that is now being touted
as imminent in the city. We have had them many times, and if
you know that there were depressions in the city (and the rest
of the country) not only in the 1970s but also in 1817 and 1837
and 1857 and 1873 and 1894 and 1907 and 1929, you can begin
to see there is sine curve built into the workings of a capitalistic
economy and that such an economy will routinely behave this
way. Then you can begin asking the right questions—not
only about how immediate events (the WTC attack, for example)
contribute to the problem, but also what deep structural issues
have been at work for a long time? Only a knowledge of history
can give us a handle on the way the world works, and we hope
to be polishing that handle for a long time to come at the Gotham
Center.
Now, if that is a bit too "theoretical," I would add that
studying New York City history is a way to learn about the ground
beneath your feet and get some traction on daily life.
You can get from point A to point B in the city if you know
the address and the transit system. But if you just begin to
listen to the names on the street signs or subway stations—Rector,
Duane, Beekman, Morris, Jay—you begin to recognize they
are invoking moments, places, sights, people and events of the
past. Knowing this stuff isnôt vital, but I think that, at the
very least, it lends some richness to our everyday life. And
New York City's history can be fun. You ask, "Was the Brooklyn
Bridge ever really sold?" and I will say it's an apocryphal
story. Still, the cliche says something about us—how we
revel in the vision of ourselves as hustlers and con artists.
We also revel in insults hurled at us. Take "Gotham,"
for instance. Our nickname came from a little town in England
near Nottingham, of Robin Hood fame, that was a proverbial village
of idiots in the Middle Ages. Then Washington Irving, snottily
putting down New York society, applied Gotham to New York in
his Salmagundi Papers early in the 19th century. His
intent was malicious, but New Yorkers took to the name Gotham
and made it their badge, beginning a tradition of re-inventing
ourselves that continues today! |
