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This paper examines the history of New York City’s Greenmarket program, a municipal farmers market program designed to bring fresh local food to New Yorkers as well as to prevent the loss of regional farmland to increasing suburbanization. In the 38 years since it was established, Greenmarket has expanded from a single location with 7 vendors to 195 vendors selling at fifty-three markets across all five boroughs. This paper traces tensions created by the program’s growth, its shifting place in the city’s food retail environment, and its current renewed commitment to the original goals. Drawing on primary documents, New York Times articles, and other popular press, this paper presents a comprehensive history of NYC’s Greenmarket, describes its unique position in New York City, and ability to serve as a model for other cities’ food planning efforts. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article illuminates what it was like for African Americans dining at majority-white restaurants in New York City before the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Primary sources include: records of the Committee on Civil Rights in East Manhattan (the CCREM, an organization that investigated New York restaurant and housing sector discrimination in the 1950s), the personal papers of the CCREM’s secretary, contemporaneous newspaper accounts of restaurant discrimination, and 1950s travel guides for African Americans. This article argues that unlike southern cities, where Jim Crow laws clearly demarcated color lines in public accommodations, color lines in New York City restaurants were more ambiguous. Although African Americans were frequently discriminated against in New York restaurants, they were seldom refused service outright. Rather, the discrimination they experienced was more oblique—though no less benign—than in the South. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article uses the history of Brooklyn's Truant School from its inception in 1857 to its demise in 1924 to highlight the interconnected rationales for public education and juvenile incarceration in nineteenth and early twentieth century urban America. Drawing on newspaper accounts and Board of Education records, I seek to historicize current understandings of the so-called school-to-prison pipeline by examining how the nation's modern penal and school systems were developed together during the antebellum and Progressive eras, not in tension, but as two sides of the same coin. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contemporary scholars have focused on creative placemaking and the role of the arts in urban development, but there is less of an academic understanding of how artists contribute to neighborhood revitalization “on the ground.” In New York’s SoHo (South of Houston) neighborhood, artists created new methods of urban development in the 1960s by using their labor and design expertise to invent a new form of housing, the loft apartment, in former industrial space. They worked to legalize this novel form of residence through grassroots advocacy, lobbying, and collaborations with leading artists and politicians in New York. Their political advocacy, and the attractive loft homes they created, increased residential demand. By the 1970s, real estate speculation was rampant in SoHo, leading some artists to work with policymakers to rein in development and others to become investors themselves. SoHo’s history challenges the artist/developer binary usually associated with gentrification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the early twentieth century in New York City, the tongs of Chinatown established themselves as one of the most resilient, and clever, organized crime enterprises in Lower Manhattan. Through spectacular violence and shrewd political dealings, they survived by adapting to, and helping to shape, the evolution of Chinese America. Groups like the Hip Sings and On Leongs, inspiring awe and fear, spiced a chaotic urban stew in which race, class, and politics bubbled into a peculiarly American amalgam. But the tongs were never mere street criminals. These sophisticated organizations represented a formative period in New York’s Chinatown and the Chinese American community. Though rooted in Chinese culture, the tong was a uniquely American response to the racist oppression and political disenfranchisement of the Chinese, who were criminalized and legally excluded under immigration codes until the 1940s. The changes that the tongs underwent, in both their public image and their economic and political activities, reflected evolving, often contradictory, relationships with local law enforcement, civil society, and transnational political movements. Previous scholarship on the tongs is sparse, yet the tong wars appear in numerous literary, cultural, and analytical works on Chinese American history. The article examines the histories of two rival tongs with similar political underpinnings, the Hip Sings (協勝堂) and On Leongs (安良堂), who negotiated cultural and political boundaries to build power in the emerging Chinese American community. During the Exclusion Era, which lasted roughly from the late 1800s through 1943, the tongs consolidated their power by curating elements of tradition and Western urban society. In response to local, national, and global social change, the tongs continually honed and recast their public roles in Chinatown as the community came of age in modern America. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The creation of the South Street Seaport Museum in 1967 represents a dynamic synthesis of urban development, civic memory, and the use of heritage in urban revitalization. The dominant narrative of midcentury urban renewal debates, which pits growth-oriented modernism against a street corner preservationism antagonistic to change, offers an incomplete analysis of the founding of South Street as a historic museum district. The Seaport plan imagined historic preservation and the use of civic memory as integral factors in the process of urban modernity, not as a resistance to it. Rather than simply rejecting urban development and the modernist architectural landscape that had come to dominate the tip of lower Manhattan, boosters of South Street, like Progressive Era preservationists before them, envisioned historic preservation as an integral part of the future cityscape. This article argues that South Street boosters were far more concerned with sustainability and building a new urban future than preservationists of this era are often credited. The emergence of the South Street Seaport Museum symbolizes the maturation of historic preservation in the 1960s and uncovers an allegiance to early twentieth-century Progressive conceptions of a new urbanism. Finally, this narrative exposes the common ground that Seaport boosters and urban development supporters shared regarding the use of heritage and collective memory as necessary elements in the city’s development. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

While significant scholarly attention has been paid to retail in gentrified neighborhoods, the origins of this specific form of urban commerce are less clear. The history of New York’s SoHo neighborhood provides a way to explain how and why art galleries, boutiques, and restaurants have come to define the retail landscape of gentrification. It also can help scholars answer two important questions about the arts and city life: how do artists and art galleries spark retail growth? Furthermore, outside of the economic activity created by the sale of art, how do they inspire economic development and gentrification? In the case of SoHo, the art market, government arts funding, and the sweat equity of artists were of central importance in drawing visitors into the neighborhood. These artistic tourists eventually became the customer base for area retail, shaping its distinctive commercial landscape. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article discusses the founding of the Manhattan Institute as part of a wider mobilization of conservative ideology and activism in 1970s New York. Important to the success of this mobilization was the concerted effort to reframe the "urban crisis" as a problem of values and culture and to construct a narrative of moral decline—and ultimately of conservative redemption—based in liberal New York. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]