All articles by Lucie Levine

October 1, 2018

Ten secrets of the Eldridge Street Synagogue

As a media sponsor of Archtober–NYC’s annual month-long architecture and design festival of tours, lectures, films, and exhibitions–6sqft has teamed up with the Center for Architecture to explore some of their 70+ partner organizations. With stunning stained glass windows and a striking mix of Moorish, Gothic, and Romanesque features, the Eldridge Street Synagogue cuts an imposing figure on the Lower East Side. The Synagogue opened in 1887 as the first and finest Orthodox house of worship built by Eastern European Jews in America and served as a spiritual headquarters for millions of immigrants as they made new homes in New York. By the turn of the 20th century, over 4,000 congregants supported three daily services, and holiday crowds overwhelmed the building. But, by the 1940s, the congregation dwindled, and the doors of the great sanctuary were sealed; not to be reopened until the 1970s. When preservationists rallied to save the building on its 100th anniversary, they rediscovered the splendor of the sacred structure and spent 20 years restoring it. Following a meticulous restoration, the Synagogue reopened in 2007 as the Museum at Eldridge Street. Today, the museum welcomes visitors from around the world, and preserves city’s immigrant history as well as the structure’s sacred secrets.
Learn about these 10 secrets of the synagogue
September 19, 2018

How the East Village grew to have the most community gardens in the country

Awash in gray pavement and grayer steel, New York can be a metropolis of muted hues, but with 39 community gardens blooming between 14th Street and East Houston Street, the East Village is the Emerald City. The neighborhood boasts the highest concentration of community gardens in the country thanks to a proud history of grassroots activism that has helped transform once-abandoned lots into community oases. By the mid-1970s, as the city fought against a ferocious fiscal crisis, nearly 10,000 acres of land stood vacant throughout the five boroughs. In 1973, Lower East resident Liz Christie, who lived on Mott Street, refused to let the neglected lots in her neighborhood lie fallow. She established the urban garden group Green Guerillas, a rogue band of planters who lobbed “seed bombs” filled with fertilizer, seeds, and water into vacant, inaccessible lots, hoping they would flourish and fill the blighted spaces with greenery.
Get to the root of the story!
September 10, 2018

In 1867, this lost Broadway bridge caused a feud between two hat shop owners

Lower Broadway is the city’s oldest thoroughfare and has always been one of the busiest. In fact, in 1867, the intersection of Broadway and Fulton Street was “continually thronged with vehicles of all kinds, rendering it almost impossible for pedestrians to pass.” Without the benefit of traffic lights, the crush of traffic was so snarled and thick that policemen had to untangle the flow during business hours so pedestrians could cross. Concerned that the sheer mortal hazard of simply crossing the street was losing him business, nearby hat shop owner Philip Genin convinced the City to build a bridge across Broadway that would ease foot traffic and just so happen to deliver pedestrians safely to his shop.
Hats off to the rest of the story
September 5, 2018

How New York City’s female teachers led the charge for ‘Equal Pay for Equal Work’

With public schools back in session as of today, let’s remember that it was from the classrooms of New York City that the call for “Equal Pay for Equal Work” was sent thundering around the world. In 1893, Kate Hogan graduated from NYU Law School with the first class of women allowed to earn JDs. By 1906, she was working as a seventh-grade teacher in Manhattan. At the time, the starting salary for a male teacher in the New York City public schools was $900 per year, but a woman in the same position earned just $600. Seeing no justice in that situation, Hogan founded the Interborough Association of Women Teachers. The Association’s mission and cry: “Equal Pay for Equal Work.”
Learn more!
August 28, 2018

In the 1890s, New Yorkers took a bicycle railroad to Brooklyn’s beaches

As Labor Day draws near and New Yorkers run to squeeze a few more beach days into the end of the summer, packed trains and ferries carry crowds to the city’s sandy shores. But, beachgoers of yore weren’t simply piling onto the Q train to get out to Coney Island. They reached the southern tip of Brooklyn via a much more zany (or visionary?) mode of conveyance: Boynton’s Bicycle Railroad. In the summer of 1890, Boynton’s Bicycle, so named because it featured two rails, one beneath the train and one above it, shuttled passengers between Gravesend and Coney Island via an abandoned section of the Sea Beach and Brighton Railroad.
The Story Rolls on This Way
August 23, 2018

Learn about revolutionary New York at Fraunces Tavern’s new ‘Fear and Force’ exhibit

The Sons of Liberty may be best known for the Boston Tea Party, but Fraunces Tavern, the Revolutionary-era watering hole and museum at 54 Pearl Street, is showcasing the group’s history in New York City. The new exhibit, Fear and Force: New York City’s Sons of Liberty, opened on Wednesday, August 22nd in the Museum’s Mesick Gallery. In 1765, New York’s Sons of Liberty began protesting the Stamp Act, and other measures they believed the King had no right to impose. Their active resistance to the trappings of British Rule makes for an exciting exhibition. The items on display, all culled from the Museum’s own collection, reveal the group’s pivotal role on the road to Revolution. Interactive features, like chests of Bohea tea, which you can sniff, help make visitors feel like a part of that story.
The revolution continues...
August 22, 2018

University in Exile: How refugees at the New School helped win WWII and transform American scholarship

In 1937, the great German writer Thomas Mann suggested “To the Living Spirit” as a motto for the New School’s University in Exile. Since the Nazis had removed the same motto from the great lecture hall at the University of Heidelberg, the phrase would “indicate that the living spirit, driven from Germany, has found a home in this country,” and that home was on West 12th Street. Between 1933 and 1945, The New School’s University in Exile offered asylum to more than 180 refugee scholars from fascist Europe. The exiled academics became the Graduate Faculty of The New School for Social Research and represented the largest contingent of refugee intellectuals in the United States. In the classroom, they made pioneering advances in the social sciences; in the war room, they advised the Roosevelt Administration on economic policy, war information, and espionage. Educating future Nobel Prize winners as well as future Oscar winners, they influenced American scholastic and cultural life to such a degree that even Marlon Brando remembered his émigré professors at the New School, “enriching the city's intellectual life with an intensity that has probably never been equaled anywhere during a comparable period of time."
More living and learning this way!
July 31, 2018

How six Italian immigrants from the South Bronx carved some of the nation’s most iconic sculptures

When the Piccirilli Brothers arrived in New York from Italy in 1888, they brought with them a skill-- artistry and passion for stone-carving unrivaled in the United States. At their studio at 467 East 142nd Street, in the Mott Haven Section of the Bronx, the brothers turned monumental slabs of marble into some of the nation’s recognizable icons, including the senate pediment of the US Capitol Building and the statue of Abraham Lincoln that sits resolutely in the Lincoln Memorial on the National Mall. The Piccirillis not only helped set our national narrative in stone but they also left an indelible mark on New York City. They carved hundreds of commissions around the five boroughs, including the 11 figures in the pediment of the New York Stock exchange, the “four continents” adorning the Customs House at Bowling Green, the two stately lions that guard the New York Public Library, both statues of George Washington for the Arch at Washington Square, and upwards of 500 individual carvings at Riverside Church.
Chisel away at this tale
July 25, 2018

Men of steel: How Brooklyn’s Native American ironworkers built New York

The Empire State Building. The George Washington Bridge. The United Nations. The Woolworth Building. 30 Rock. The Seagram Building. Lincoln Center. The Waldorf Astoria. Virtually all of New York’s most iconic structures were raised in part by Mohawk Native American ironworkers. Since 1916, when Mohawk men made their way to New York to work on the Hell Gate Bridge, ironworkers from two Native communities, Akwesasne (which straddles Ontario, Quebec, and New York State) and Kahnawake (near Montreal), have been “walking iron” across the city.
Get the rest of this stories-high story
July 20, 2018

Design unveiled for Central Park’s first statue dedicated to real women

Coinciding with the 170th Anniversary of the Seneca Falls Women's Rights Convention, members of the Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony Statue Fund unveiled on Thursday the official design of the first statue of non-fictional women in Central Park. Designed by Meredith Bergmann, the sculpture includes both legible text and a writing scroll that represents the arguments that both women -- and their fellow suffragists -- fought for. There is also a digital scroll, which will be available online, where visitors are encouraged to join the ongoing conversation. The sculpture of Stanton and Anthony will be dedicated in Central Park on August 18, 2020, marking the 100th anniversary of the passage of the 19th Amendment, which granted women the right to vote nationwide.
Learn more about this monumental monument
July 18, 2018

The history of Weeksville: When Crown Heights had the second-largest free black community in the U.S.

It’s a mighty sounding moniker, but the name “King’s County” also speaks to Brooklyn’s less-than-democratic origins. At the turn of the 19th century, the city of Brooklyn was known as the “slaveholding capital” of New York State and was home to the highest concentration of enslaved people north of the Mason-Dixon Line. But, after New York State abolished slavery in 1827, free black professionals bought land in what is now Crown Heights and founded Weeksville, a self-supporting community of African American Freedman, which grew to become the second-largest free black community in Antebellum America. By 1855, over 520 free African Americans lived in Weeksville, including some of the leading activists in the Abolitionist and Equal Suffrage movements.
More about free black Brooklyn
June 18, 2018

The 1936 ‘Summer of Pools’: When Robert Moses and the WPA cooled off NYC

On June 24, 1936, thousands of Lower East Siders turned out for a spectacle the likes of which New York had never seen. They jammed Hamilton Fish Park, filled Pitt Street, and perched on surrounding fire-escapes and rooftops to get a glimpse. With great fanfare (and the swim stylings of the Jones Beach Water Troupe) Mayor La Guardia and Parks Commissioner Robert Moses officially opened Hamilton Fish Pool. The dedication kicked off New York’s “Summer of Pools.” One by one, for each week of the summer, 11 gleaming outdoor pools, financed and built by the Works Progress Administration (WPA), opened in underserved neighborhoods across the city, providing recreation and relief to millions of heat-addled, Depression-strapped New Yorkers.
Learn more about the summer of 1936
June 8, 2018

From the ‘Queens Riviera’ to Robert Moses: The history of Rockaway Beach

Eleven blocks of Rockaway Beach will be closed this summer due to erosion, but that’s just one setback in a long history of resilience on the peninsula. Four-and-a-half miles of the beach are open right now, with every block steeped in history. The Rockaways ushered Henry Hudson into the New World; Walt Whitman into paradise; Hog Island into oblivion; and the Transatlantic Flight into existence. As “the brightest jewel within the diadem of imperial Manhattan,” the pristine beaches of the “Queens Riviera” became the preferred summer locale for New York’s most illustrious citizens. Later, the “people’s beach” at Riis Park helped make the Rockaways accessible to more New Yorkers. From, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, to Patti Smith to Robert Mosses, everybody wanted to be at Rockaway Beach.
Get the full history here
May 23, 2018

Reading between the lions: A history of the New York Public Library

The New York Public Library first roared into existence on May 23, 1895, educating and inspiring countless millions, free of charge. The Library’s 92 locations include four research divisions and hold over 51 million items. Out of all these tomes, the greatest tale might be Library’s own history: Founded by immigrants and industrialists, it was equally admired by William Howard Taft and Vladimir Lenin; open to all, it has counted among its staff American Olympians and Soviet spies; dedicated to intellectual exploration and civic responsibility, it has made its map collection available to buried treasure hunters and Allied Commanders; evolving with the city itself, it has made branch locations out of a prison, a movie theater, and most recently, a chocolate factory. The history of the New York Public Library is as vital and various New York itself, so get ready to read between the lions.
The 123-year-old history of the NYPL
May 7, 2018

Going nuclear: The Manhattan Project in Manhattan

Most people assume that “The Manhattan Project” is a clever codename, a misnomer for the famous test sites in New Mexico. But, with over 1,200 tons on uranium stashed on Staten Island, and a nuclear reactor whizzing away at Columbia University, the top-secret wartime program began in Manhattan, and fanned out across the island, from its southern tip to its northern reaches, from its dimmest docks to its brightest towers. Ultimately 5,000 people poured into New York to work on the project, so duck, cover and get ready for an atomic tale of scientists, soldiers, and spies.
Learn all about the Manhattan Project in Manhattan
March 15, 2018

Brownstones and ballot boxes: The fight for women’s suffrage in Brooklyn

Today, Brooklyn is home to all things avant-garde, but Kings County has always led the pack. Beginning as early as 1868, the women of Brooklyn established one of the first suffrage organizations in the country and began advocating for women’s enfranchisement and political equality. The "wise women of Brooklyn," as they were lauded in suffrage literature, made some of the foremost contributions to the movement. From the Silent Sentinels, who organized the first March on Washington, to the African American women who established the nation’s first suffrage organization by and for Black women, Brooklyn was home to extraordinary advocates. Here are eight badass Brooklynites who brought us the ballot.
Learn their histories here
February 26, 2018

Highly elegant and highly classified: The history of espionage at the St. Regis

You know that Old King Cole had a pipe and bowl, but did you know he also had a cloak and dagger? New York’s hyper-illustrious St. Regis Hotel, home to the famous King Cole Bar, has a clandestine pedigree that goes straight to its core. Founded by a family of spies, the Hotel became headquarters for the nation’s wartime spy service, and in the process helped inspire not only the Bloody Mary cocktail but also the Invasion of North Africa.
Read on for the history of Midtown’s preeminent spy den
January 5, 2018

The highlife: Architecture, spectacle and Art Deco New York

The architects who built the Jazz Age really knew how to get down. In January 1931, they turned the city’s annual Beaux Arts Ball into the ultimate Gatsby-approved bash. Instead of the stuffy historicism of years past, the party’s theme was “Fête Moderne -- a Fantasie in Flame and Silver." Advance advertising for the Ball in the New York Times promised an event “modernistic, futuristic, cubistic, altruistic, mystic, architistic and feministic," featuring the city’s most renowned architects dressed as their buildings, celebrating both themselves and the modern fantasy metropolis they had forged in flame and silver. Art Deco New York: the skyscraper city, glittering and strong, reaching ever higher – through technological advancement and American ingenuity – toward excitement, prosperity, enlightenment, and power.
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June 6, 2017

Roasteries and refineries: The history of sugar and coffee in NYC

Brooklyn is properly known as Kings County. During New York’s Gilded Age, Sugar King Henry Osborne Havemeyer and Coffee King John Arbuckle made sure the borough lived up to its name, building their grand industrial empires on the shores of the East River. By the turn of the 20th century, more sugar was being refined in Williamsburg and more coffee roasted in DUMBO than anywhere else in the country, shaping the Brooklyn waterfront and NYC as a preeminent financial and cultural center. The history of coffee and sugar in this town is as rich and exciting as these two commodities are sweet and stimulating, so hang on to your homebrew and get ready for a New York Story.
The whole juicy history of sugar and coffee in NYC