Columbia University Press

“It was clear to most New Yorkers that Koch had a deep abiding love for his city. That reputation, that started when he was in public office, was solidified because he stayed in the public eye. He would exert political power, but it always seemed to be because he wanted to continue helping New York.”—Jonathan Soffer

Never is a biographer’s perspective more relevant (or sought after) than when their subject is finally laid to rest. Since the passing of larger-than-life former NYC mayor Ed Koch on Friday, Jonathan Soffer, author of Ed Koch and the Rebuilding of New York City, has been a central voice in the debate on what shape Koch’s legacy should take. In the following post, we bring you an amalgamation of Soffer’s latest commentary on Koch, one that highlights the author’s argument that the “King of New York” will be a man of many legacies.

A Legacy of Free (and Colorful) Speech

Koch was sometimes honest about his politics to a fault. I think, more than any other reason, he lost his chances for re-election to a fourth term when he said that Jews would have to be crazy to vote for Jesse Jackson. He could not be deterred from saying things that were just excruciating. But paradoxically, it gave him a reputation for honesty.

~ From Soffer’s interview with TIME Magazine, for more click here.

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In his book Ed Koch and the Rebuilding of New York City, Jonathan Soffer offers a critique of Ed Koch’s complicated legacy for New York City. Soffer argues Ed Koch was instrument in leading New York City’s recovery from bankruptcy. Businesses and financial confidence returned to the city and Koch also brought new housing to thousands of low-income housing. At the same time, racial animosity was seemingly a constant in the city during his administrations and many social services were cut back.

In this video from the 92nd Street Y , Ed Koch discusses Ed Koch and the Rebuilding of New York City with Jonathan Soffer. (While not an “authorized” biography, Koch did participate in interviews for it, and, not surprisingly, helped to promote it.)

For more on the book, there is an interview with Jonathan Soffer and here is a video trailer for Ed Koch and the Rebuilding of New York City:

We continue our week-long (or, at least short week) feature on Thanksgiving with a quick look at the holiday’s history in New York City.

In his chapter, “The Food and Drink of New York from 1624 to 1898,” from Gastropolis: Food and New York City, Andrew Smith describes the role both George Washington and doughnuts have played in how the holiday has been celebrated in New York City:

Although it had originated in New England, [Thanksgiving] was quickly adopted in communities throughout New York. Indeed, it was in New York City that President George Washington issued the first presiden­tial thanksgiving proclamation, which set aside Thursday, November 26, 1789, as a day of prayer and thanksgiving. New York was one of the first states outside New England to declare Thanksgiving an official holiday. In 1795, John Jay, the governor of New York, tried to establish a statewide thanksgiving day, and in 1817 it was finally recognized as a state holiday. Thanksgiving was celebrated with what is now considered the traditional meal of turkey, apple pie, mince pie, and cranberries; New Yorkers often added doughnuts and crullers to the menu. Thanksgiving holiday remained an important holiday throughout the nineteenth century. The Ladies Home Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church opened a mission in the gang-infested Five Points District, and on Thanksgiving Day, under the eyes of their bene­factors, the ladies paraded and fed hundreds of Sunday- school students.

Later tonight, the Museum of the City of New York will be hosting an exciting celebration tied in with the sun’s position in the sky and with The Greatest Grid: The Master Plan of Manhattan, 1811-2011, both the exhibition at the museum and the accompanying book published by CUP.

From the Museum of the City of New York website:

Thursday, July 12 at 5:00 pm
A Celestial Angle on the Greatest Grid

Join us on this special day, one of two each year, when the setting sun aligns precisely with Manhattan’s street grid, a phenomenon known as Manhattanhenge. This program also honors the closing days of the Museum’s blockbuster exhibition The Greatest Grid: The Master Plan of Manhattan, 1811-2011. Curator Hilary Ballon will reflect on the Master Plan and Matt Knutzen, Geospatial Librarian at the New York Public Library, will explore the question: “Is the grid some sort of time piece?” Fans of The Greatest Grid which closes on July 15, can have a few minutes during a special open mic to express their thoughts about the grid–off-the-cuff or in poetry or prose! An event for all those who appreciate the many wonders of the grid.

Co-sponsored by the New York Public Library and presented in conjunction with the exhibition The Greatest Grid: The Master Plan of Manhattan, 1811-2011.

RESERVATIONS REQUIRED
$12 Non-members; $8 Seniors and Students; $6 Museum Members

For more information or to register by phone, please call 917-492-3395.

Happy Friday! Time for our weekly roundup of the best articles from the academic publishing blogosphere. As always, if you particularly enjoy something or think that we missed an important post, please let us know in the comments.

New York City features prominently in a couple great posts this week, so we can’t help but kick things off this week by showcasing them. (We apologize for the blatant homerism.)

First, the OUP blog has a fascinating guest post by Franklin E. Zimring in which he discusses the huge drop in street crime in NYC over the past two decades. Some of the numbers are staggering: “the risk of being robbed [by 2009] was less than one sixth of its 1990 level, and the risk of car theft had declined to one sixteenth.” Zimring’s explanation of this drop in crime is completely engrossing.

Next, the University of Illinois Press blog featured a Q&A with Julie Gallagher, author of the forthcoming book Black Women & Politics in New York City. Gallagher claims that the growing number of African American women on the ticket in political elections in NYC in the middle of the twentieth century “portends the national political dynamics, especially after 1960.”

Elinor Ostrom, the first and only woman awarded the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, passed away this week. Both The MIT Presslog and the Princeton University Press Blog ran pieces remembering Ostrom, her work in economics, and her importance as a public intellectual.

The MLA has recently come under fire for insisting that doctoral programs in English should include “advanced competence in at least one language other than English.” At the UNC Press Blog, Patrick Erben defends the MLA’s announcement, and puts forward the idea that promoting multilingual sensibilities has positive effects on communities.

While developments in the Egyptian politics are no longer making front page headlines in America, the situation in the lead up to the Egyptian first presidential elections since former President Hosni Mubarak stepped down is tense and fluid. And, as the Stanford University Press Blog shows in a recent post, however one looks at things, “the conclusion is a bit of a downer: no matter what happens this weekend, there’s not going to be a dramatic change from authoritarianism to democracy in Egypt. In other words, don’t hold your breath for a radical shift to democracy.”

The Chicago Blog from the University of Chicago Press ran an excerpt from Andrew Pickering’s The Cybernetic Brain in which he discusses Gregory Bateson, “the Kuhn-ian impresario behind systems-theory-based cybernetics,” and the ways that Bateson found similarities between Zen Buddhism and western psychiatry. Naturally, the post ends with a song by Captain Beefheart.

Teachers are being judged more and more frequently by “value-added reports,” calculated using test scores and complex statistical models. At Voices in Education, the blog of Harvard Education Publishing, Hilary Dauffenbach-Tabb questions our reliance on such reports, claiming that they “rely on inaccurate or incomplete data and have wide margins of error” and, as such, need to be used more responsibly. However, she does see and elaborate on other ways to use data more effectively to help schools.

Moving from primary to higher education, North Philly Notes, the Temple University Press blog, ran an article by James Saslow (originally published in Academe) in which he discusses how universities increasingly look and behave more like corporations than institutes of learning.

Atlanta megachurch pastor Creflo Dollar Jr. was arrested last week after he “allegedly punched and choked his 15-year-old daughter for defiantly attending a party.” At From the Square, the NYU Press Blog, Justin Wilford argues that it is important to view Dollar’s arrest as separate from other scandals involving megachurch pastors, since Dollar’s actions were actually in line with what he preaches week in and week out.

We absolutely love posts detailing the methods and art of translation, and there were a couple of really fascinating translation posts this week.

The University of Minnesota Press featured a post by Takayuki Tatsumi on Japanese speculative and science fiction. Tatsumi examines the complex and creative world of science fiction publishing in Japan, while also talking about the difficulty of bringing Japanese sci fi authors to the attention of the English-speaking world.

Meanwhile, Yale University Press has an article by Margaret Sayers Peden, who has translated La Celestina, one of the first European novels ever written. She discusses how she became a translator and how different it is to translate living authors and authors who are with us only through their writing.

At one point in Alison Bechdel’s acclaimed graphic novel Are You My Mother?, Bechdel depicts herself reading Adam Phillips’ On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored, a Harvard University Press title. Naturally, the folks at the HUP Blog ran a post detailing Bechdel’s relationship with the text and excerpting the part of Phillips’ book that Bechdel found so intriguing.

Time to switch from literature to films about literature: the University Press of Kentucky’s blog ran a post on David Cronenberg’s philosophy as a lead up to Cronenberg’s adaptation of DeLillo’s Cosmopolis. The post includes a video of Cronenberg discussing his filmmaking techniques.

Finally, we wrap things up this week with Beacon Broadside’s Fathers’ Day post by Jeremy Adam Smith on the changing roles of the father in modern life and the ways that policy-makers need to support new conceptions of “Dad.” Smith claims that the way we talk about families is of crucial importance: “We also need to shift the language we use to discuss work-family issues in a more inclusive direction, so that it includes fathers as well as mothers. That language should stress resilience and meaning to men instead of the language of equality that has mobilized women.”

We conclude our feature on They Wished They Were Honest: The Knapp Commission and New York City Police Corruption, with an interview the book’s author Michael F. Armstrong.

In the interview Michael F. Armstrong discusses the book, corruption in the New York Police department in the 1970s, and the ways in which the police are now policing themselves.

We continue our feature on They Wished They Were Honest: The Knapp Commission and New York City Police Corruption, with an interview with the book’s author, Michael F. Armstrong.

In the interview, Michael Armstrong describes the1970-72 Knapp Commission investigation into police corruption, prompted by the New York Times‘ report on whistleblower cop Frank Serpico. He also talks about how the commission affected the NYPD’s public image, what leads to police corruption, and the toll it takes on society.

Police corruption, prostitution, and illegal gambling are all revealed in this CBS news report from 1971 on the Knapp Commission, which uncovered rampant corruption in the New York Police Department . The chief counsel for the commission was Michael Armstrong, author of They Wished They Were Honest: The Knapp Commission and New York City Police Corruption .

As background, below is an excerpt from the CBS news report, in which an officer discusses how various plainclothes policeman were on the take. The clip also includes a short interview with Xaviera Hollander (aka Madame X and The Happy Hooker)

And for more background, here is the trailer for Serpico (1973), which starred Al Pacino as Frank Serpico. Serpico’s contribution to a New York Times story on the police as well as his testimony to the Knapp Commission revealed the depth of the corruption in the New York City Police Department.

This week’s featured book is They Wished They Were Honest: The Knapp Commission and New York City Police Corruption, by Michael F. Armstrong.

Throughout the week we will highlight aspects of They Wished They Were Honest: The Knapp Commission and New York City Police Corruption and we are also offering a FREE copy of the book to one winner.

To enter our book giveaway, simply e-mail pl2164@columbia.edu with your name and address (U.S. and Canadian mailing addresses only, unfortunately). We will randomly select one winner on Friday at 1:00 pm. Good luck and spread the word!

Michael B. Mukasey, Chief Judge of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, 1988 – 2006
said of They Wished They Were Honest: The Knapp Commission and New York City Police Corruption:

In this account, both colorful and accurate, of New York City’s police corruption scandals uncovered by the Knapp Commission in the 1970′s, Michael Armstrong … has told not only a tautly drawn and engaging story, but also a cautionary tale for our own time. The characters — Frank Serpico, the Mayflower Madam, Detective Robert Leuci — leap from the page; the lesson — that constant supervision and vigilance are necessary to assure honesty in those who enforce the law — resonates in every chapter.

American Showman: Samuel “Roxy” Rothafel and the Birth of the Entertainment Industry, 1908-1935, Ross Melnick’s biography of one of the most colorful characters in the entertainment industry in the early 20th century, has been generating a good deal of buzz, with great reviews in a number of important newspapers. We’ve collected excerpts from some of these reviews here. And make sure you don’t miss our interview with Ross Melnick on “Roxy” Rothafel, the art of presenting silent films, and what goes into writing a biography.

From the Washington Post’s Book World:

Such wizards gave 100 percent of themselves, and some, like Roxy, died early by doing so. Second only in prestige to Florenz Ziegfeld, Roxy micromanaged every detail of the theaters he oversaw, from the creases in the ushers’ trousers, to the hiring of talent, to the frame-by-frame editing of the films exhibited. When he clashed with corporate spreadsheets, censors or others, he simply quit and went on to exert his magic in a bigger theater — or on a radio microphone for a massive international audience, who considered his voice a balm to their harried souls. The Great Depression (and perhaps personal arrogance) finally blindsided him, but, as long as the ’20s roared, his name meant a standard of quality and cultural uplift in the forum of mass entertainment.

In this 52nd volume of Columbia University Press’s outstanding Film and Culture series, Melnick has placed his subject in a huge context, chronicling not only Roxy but also the movie and music businesses, the rise of radio, issues of anti-Semitism, the development of New York and much more during the first third of the 20th century. His writing clarifies, his judgments are eminently reasonable and his research is spectacular.

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April is National Poetry Month and in honor of the occasion, we have been posting poems from our poetry collections and those of our distributed presses throughout April. Today, in our final National Poetry Month post (this year, at least), we are coming back home with two great New York poems from our collection of poetry about NYC, I Speak of the City: Poems of New York, edited by Stephen Wolf. The first of our poems is Maya Angelou’s “Awakening in New York”, and our second is Frank O’Hara’s “Steps.” We hope you’ve enjoyed reading our poems as much as we have enjoyed posting them!

Awakening in New York
Maya Angelou

Curtains forcing their will
against the wind,
children asleep,
exchanging dreams with
seraphim. The city
drags itself awake on
subway straps; and
I, an alarm, awake as a
rumor of war,
lay stretching into dawn
unasked and unheeded.
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Congratulations to Lisa Keller upon winning The New York Academy of History’s Herbert H. Lehman Prize for Distinguished Scholarship for her book Triumph of Order: Democracy and Public Space in New York and London.

This award, named in honor of Governor Herbert H. Lehman, is part of the New York Academy of History’s mission to promote and honor outstanding historical research and writing. The Prize is made possible through the generosity of the Herbert H. Lehman Foundation.

For more on the book, you can read the introduction, A Perfect Storm of People or browse the book in Google Preview. And here’s Kenneth Jackson on the book:

Triumph of Order is one of the most important and provocative books to appear in recent years. Beautifully written, thoroughly researched, and impressively illustrated, it shatters our assumptions about freedom in even the greatest of cities, and it forces us to reconsider our priorities as the British and American governments use the excuse of both terror and traffic to resist even the possibility of public expression in public places.

Hilary Ballon, author of The Greatest Grid: The Master Plan of Manhattan, 1811-2011, will discuss the book, the very popular exhibit at the Museum of the City of New York, and the grid itself,at The Tenement Museum tomorrow, Tuesday, March 6 at 6:30.

The book was also recently featured on The Bowery Boys, which calls The Greatest Grid “invaluable.” The review continues, “Published in a slender landscape binding, the book condenses the exhibition but allows for unabated curiosity and imaginative wanderings over vivid prints of aged topography.”

For those who can’t make it to the Museum of the City of New York, the review suggests that the book makes an excellent alternative, comparing it to the companion to the Alexander McQueen exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art:

[The Greatest Grid], stuffed with short essays and full-bodied artifact descriptions by museum staff, reprints almost every image from the show.

Many such exhibition books suffer from the transfer. As an extreme example, last year’s lustrous, blockbuster Alexander McQueen exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art was rendered into a diminutive curio with its accompanying companion book. ‘The Greatest Grid’ suffers no such problem, especially to those of us who find tinted topographical maps and black-and-white images of old New York as scintillating as haute couture.

The following is a video for Ed Koch and the Rebuilding of New York City, which is now available in paperback.

For more on the book, you can browse the book using Google Preview or visit the site jonathansoffer.com

The Greatest Grid: The Master Plan of Manhattan 1811-2011, by Hilary Ballon was recently reviewed in today’s New York Times.

The exhibit currently at the Museum of the City of New York upon which the book is based was also featured in today’s New York Times. As the article points out the grid, now at 200, while not always appreciated for its aesthetic value has served the city well allowing it to expand, and became a model for other cities. Among the more obvious benefit of making the city more navigable, the grid also has promoted sociability, ecological efficiency, and of course allowed some landowners. to make a lot of money

In describing reactions to the grid, Sam Roberts writes in his review of the book The Greatest Grid:

Some planners despised the grid for its rigidity and for its contribution to gridlock, a term popularized during the 1980 transit strike by the Traffic Department engineers Sam Schwartz and Roy Cottam. But others hailed it as a utilitarian, egalitarian and resilient tool that fostered development in a city of pedestrians. It imposed a Cartesian orderliness on the city, much as this book does on its subject matter.

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In conjunction with The Greatest Grid: The Master Plan of Manhattan, 1811-2011, edited by Hilary Ballon, The Museum of the City of New York in conjunction with their exhibit on the grid is also presenting The Unfinished Grid: Design Speculations for Manhattan.

Given that the grid has been altered since it was first planned in 1811, the Architectural League of New York, in partnership with the Museum of the City of New York and Architizer, issued a Call for Ideas inviting architects and urban designers from around the world to speculate about how Manhattan’s grid might be adapted, extended, or transformed in the future. It asked them to consider issues such as how the grid might be modified to respond to climate change or new transportation infrastructures; how new digital technologies might affect the form and function of the buildings in which we live and work and the impact they might have on the city’s streets and public spaces; what the most pressing issues are facing the city today and into the future; and what solutions might emerge out of (and in turn modify) the street grid.

You can view a side show of the different proposals which include:

* A second grid 700 feet above the existing street grid. This new grid relieves street congestion, creates new sites and facilities for tourism, and redefines Manhattan as a truly three-dimensional grid.

* Extending the existing grid with “informal” configurations of blocks along the waterfront, creating both new sites for building and novel spatial experiences for pedestrians.

* The creation of a virtual grid which is overlaid on the existing physical grid, a digital platform onto which residents can upload ideas for their block, neighborhood, or the city as a whole. The ideas are then accessed by New York architects, who in turn upload design responses to the same virtual grid, which are visible to everyone using smart phones and social networks.

The Greatest Grid: The Master Plan of Manhattan, 1811-2011, edited by Hilary Ballon, recounts the history of the planning, implementation, and impact of the grid on New York City.

Conceived as a plan that was both logical and a reflection of the democratic values of the American republic, the grid has stood the test of time thanks to both its rigidity and its flexibility and has allowed for the city’s geographical and economic expansion. As the book and the accompanying exhibit at the Museum of the City of New York reveal, the grid is a reflection of and has shaped the city’s political, economic, and cultural character for more than two hundred years.

* The commissioners of the 1811 plan noted rather scornfully that they had eschewed the “circles, ovals and stars which certainly embellish a plan” in favor of “convenience and utility.”

* New York’s grid plan was to first to eliminate named streets altogether (the names came later). The rationality behind Manhattan’s street numbering system—Cartesian analytical geometry—also underpins early modern conceptions of space more generally.

* The key to the greatness of the grid is variety. It is not made up of evenly spaced, similarly sized blocks. The blocks, which are all 200 feet wide (north to south), vary in length (east to west) from less than 250 feet to more than 900 feet. Most east-west streets are 60 feet wide. However, seventeen of them are 100 feet wide. Most, but not all north-south avenues are 100 feet wide. Madison and Lexington Avenues (each 80 feet wide) were introduced after the 1811 plan to accommodate additional traffic.

* The original surveyors were regularly obstructed, attacked, and sued for damages for cutting branches to complete their work.

* The 1811 commissioners who laid out the grid had assumed that it would take several centuries for urban growth to reach above 155th Street.

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The Greatest Grid: The Master Plan of Manhattan, 1811-2011, edited by Hilary Ballon, contains a variety of different images and artifacts that offer a visual history of how the city changed as the grid evolved. Below are some images from the book:

A detail from the Randel Farm Map. John Randel’s survey of Manhattan was instrumental in developing the grid.

An 1886 photograph of 81st and 9th Avenue. As the grid extended upward rocks had to be removed.

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Our featured book of the week is The Greatest Grid: Manhattan’s Master Plan, 1811-2011, edited by Hilary Ballon. (The book makes an excellent gift and is part of our special 40% off holiday sale). The following is an excerpt from the book’s introduction, in which Ballon describes the impact and importance of the grid for New York City history and urban planning.

The street grid is a defining element of Manhattan, the city’s first great civic enterprise, and a vision of brazen ambition. It is also a milestone in the history of city planning and sets a standard to think just as boldly about New York’s future. This book and the related exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York honor the bicentennial of the Commissioners’ Plan of 1811 —the city’s foundational act of planning and a key to its identity.

The 1811 grid speaks to the city’s optimism about its future and its courage to do big things. In 1811, New York was a dynamic but still small city concentrated south of Canal Street, yet the commissioners boldly projected its extension to the heights of Harlem across 155 undeveloped streets. In the nineteenth century the grid grew horizontally, moving up the island. In the twentieth century it grew vertically, with skyscraper extrusions. The grid was a living framework, which enabled the city to grow and evolve over time; the grid itself also changed but without compromising its essential character.

The crooked streets of lower Manhattan remind us that the grid was not the natural or pre-ordained condition of the city. The grid was designed and required vigilant enforcement to secure its uninterrupted, straight streets and avenues. The Greatest Grid attempts to denaturalize the grid and recover the process of implementing it and developing New York’s gridded persona. That process involved reorganizing property lines; mobilizing government to open, grade, and pave streets; carving land into real estate parcels; and fostering the New York system of street walls, view corridors, and walkable streets that are also great social spaces.

Different interpretations have been projected on the grid. Some historians see the grid as emblematic of the democratic society forged in the early republic. All blocks are equal and no sites are inherently privileged, for example by a grand boulevard pointing the eyes of the city at a free-standing monument. Other historians have stressed the utility of the grid in subdividing the land and supporting real estate development. The grid enabled the efficient carving up of the land into rectangular ground lots, in parallel with Thomas Jefferson’s national rectangular survey that organized land sales in square mile townships. Another school of thought has stressed
the symbolic meanings of the grid, which materialize the ideal of Cartesian order in its numbered streets and coordinate system, unique among gridiron towns where streets typically are named for trees or people or places….

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We are very excited to be publishing The Greatest Grid: The Master Plan of Manhattan, 1811-2011, edited by Hilary Ballon, which accompanies an exhibit of the same name at the Museum of the City of New York.

In the following video Hilary Ballon talks with Jon Meacham about the history of the grid and some of the features of the book and exhibit: