In The Labor of Faith Judith Casselberry examines the material and spiritual labor of the women of the Church of Our Lord Jesus Christ of the Apostolic Faith, Inc., which is based in Harlem and one of the oldest and largest historically Black Pentecostal denominations in the United States. This male-headed church only functions through the work of the church's women, who, despite making up three-quarters of its adult membership, hold no formal positions of power. Casselberry shows how the women negotiate this contradiction by using their work to produce and claim a spiritual authority that provides them with a particular form of power. She also emphasizes how their work in the church is as significant, labor intensive, and critical to their personhood, family, and community as their careers, home and family work, and community service are. Focusing on the circumstances of producing a holy black female personhood, Casselberry reveals the ways twenty-first-century women's spiritual power operates and resonates with meaning in Pentecostal, female-majority, male-led churches.

"A rich and detailed picture of a particular historical moment that has now passed . . . I found myself immersed in the world of the East Village theatre scene and its connections to the larger world of feminism, theatre, and politics. Davy's long-standing association with this world pays off handsomely---it is impossible to imagine that anyone could write a more informative portrait."
---Charlotte Canning, University of Texas at Austin

 "After hosting two annual international women's performance festivals in 1980 and '81, Peggy Shaw, Lois Weaver, and comrades put on such extravaganzas as the Freudian Slip party and the Debutante Ball (a coming-out party if ever there was one) to raise the first several months' rent for a narrow vestibule on East 11th Street, where they could keep the creativity going year-round. There, on a stage no bigger than a queen-sized mattress, . . . artists honed their craft, giving birth to a celebratory feminist-and-tinsel-tinged queer aesthetic. By the mid '80s . . . the rent quadrupled, and WOW moved to a city-owned building on East 4th Street, where it has flourished ever since, presenting hundreds---if not thousands---of plays, solo shows, concerts, dance pieces, cabarets, and sundry performances that defy classification."
---Alisa Solomon, Village Voice

Out of a small, hand-to-mouth, women's theater collective called the WOW Café located on the lower east side of Manhattan, there emerged some of the most important theater troupes and performance artists of the 1980s and 1990s, including the Split Britches Company, the Five Lesbian Brothers, Carmelita Tropicana, Holly Hughes, Lisa Kron, Deb Margolin, Reno, Peggy Shaw, and Lois Weaver. The WOW (Women's One World) Café Theatre appeared on the cultural scene at a critical turning point in both the women's movement and feminist theory, putting a witty, hilarious, gender-bending and erotically charged aesthetic on the stage for women in general and lesbians in particular.

The storefront that became the WOW Café Theatre saw dozens of excitingly original and enormously funny performances created, performed, and turned over at lightning speed---a kind of "hit and run" theater. As the demands on the space increased, the women behind WOW organized as a collective and moved their theater to an abandoned doll factory where it continues to operate today. For three decades the WOW Café has nurtured fledgling women writers, designers, and performers who continue to create important performance work.

Lady Dicks and Lesbian Brothers provides a critical history of this avant-garde venture whose ongoing "system of anarchy" has been largely responsible for its thirty-year staying power, after dozens of other women's theaters have collapsed. WOW artists were creating a wholly original cultural landscape across which women could represent themselves on their own terms. Parody, cross-dressing, zany comedy, and an unbridled eroticism are hallmarks of WOW's aesthetic, combined---importantly and powerfully---with a presumptive address to the audience as if everyone onstage, in the audience, and in the world is lesbian. Author Kate Davy's extensive research included in-depth interviews with WOW veterans; newspaper reviews of the earliest productions; and rare, unpublished photographs. The book also includes a chronology of productions that have highlighted WOW's performance schedule since the early '80s. 

Kate Davy is currently Provost and Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs at the University of Michigan-Dearborn. Her previous books include Richard Foreman: Plays and Manifestos and Richard Foreman and the Ontological-Hysteric Theatre.

More than thirty years after its demolition, the Polo Grounds -- like some other urban neighborhood parks such as Ebbets Field, Yankee Stadium, Fenway Park, and Wrigley Field -- still holds a place in the hearts of baseball fans.

The Polo Grounds was the home of the New York Giants from John McGraw and Christy Mathewson to Carl Hubbell and Mel Ott  to Willie Mays and Leo Durocher. It was also home to the Yankees when Babe Ruth's home run production was soaring (which led to "the House that Ruth built") and home to the Mets in their painful early years.

From "Merkle's Boner," which cost the New York Giants a pennant, to Bobby Thomson's homer, which won them one, Stew Thornley retells the legendary events of the park and its legendary personalities. He reveals little-known facts too:

    When the championship Giants and Yankees played in the 1921 and 1922 World Series, it
    wasn't a "subway series," because the two teams shared the same ballpark.

    The team Bays was playing for when he hit his firstd home run in the Polo Grounds was
    not the Giants, but the Birmingham Black Barons. The Polo Grounds was also the site for
    the Negro World Series games in 1946 and 1947.

Fans cherish not only the historic moments and team traditions of these stadiums, but treasure their physical peculiarities. Like the "Green Monster" at Fenway Park, the unusual horseshoe shape of the Polo Grounds made the park a special place to play. Stew Thornley analyzes the effect of the very short porches along the foul lines and of a cavernous center field on home run production and hitting in general.

Baseball wasn't the only sport played in the Polo Grounds. The footbal Giants played here from 1925 to 1955, but the stadium was better known for some of the great college games, including the 1924 Army-Notre Dame game in which the "Four Horsemen" of Notre Dame were christened. Numerous boxing title bouts were held at the Polo Grounds, and it also hosted tennis, rodeo, midget auto racing, outdoor opera, ice skating, and religious rallies.

New York City stands as the first expression of the modern city, a mosaic of disparate neighborhoods born in 1898 with the amalgamation of the five boroughs and shaped by the passions of developers and regulators, architects and engineers, politicians and reformers, immigrant entrepreneurs and corporate builders. Through their labor, their ideals, and their often fierce battles, the physical and social dimensions—the landscape—of the modern city were forged. The original essays in The Landscape of Modernity tell the compelling story of the growth of New York City from 1900 to 1940, from the beginnings of its skyscraper skyline to the expanding reaches of suburbanization. At the beginning of the century, New York City was already one of the world's leading corporate and commercial centers. The Zoning Ordinance of 1916, initially proposed by Fifth Avenue merchants as a means of halting the uptown spread of the garment industry, became the nation's first comprehensive zoning law and the proving ground for a new occupation—the urban planner. During the 1920s, frenzied development created a vertical metamorphosis in Manhattan's booming business district, culminating in its most spectacularly modern icon, the Empire State Building. The city also spread laterally, with the controversial development of subway systems and the creation of the powerful Port of New York Authority, whose new bridges and tunnels decentralized the population and industry of New York. New York's older ethnic enclaves were irrevocably altered by this new urban landscape: the Lower East Side's Jewish community was nearly dismantled by the flight of the garment industry and the attractiveness of new suburbs, while Little Italy fought government forces eager to homogenize commercial use of the streets by eliminating the traditional pushcart peddlers. Illustrated with striking photographs and maps, The Landscape of Modernity links important scenes of growth and development to the larger political, economic, social, and cultural processes of the early twentieth century.

By turns, an elegy, a celebration, and a social history, The Last Fine Time is a tour de force of lyrical style. Verlyn Klinkenborg chronicles the life of a family-owned restaurant in Buffalo, New York, from its days as a prewar Polish tavern to its reincarnation as George & Eddie's, a swank nightspot serving highballs and French-fried shrimp to a generation of optimistic and prosperous Americans. In the inevitable dimming of the neon sign outside the restaurant, we see both the passing of an old world way of life and the end to the postwar exuberance that was Eddie Wenzek's "last fine time."

By the 1970s, 42nd Street in New York was widely perceived to be unsafe, a neighborhood thought to be populated largely by drug dealers, porn shops, and muggers. But in 1979, civic leaders developed a long-term vision for revitalizing one especially blighted block, Bryant Park. The reopening of the park in the 1990s helped inject new vitality into midtown Manhattan and served as a model for many other downtown revitalization projects. So what about urban policy can we learn from Bryant Park?

In this new book, Andrew M. Manshel draws from both urbanist theory and his first-hand experiences as a urban public space developer and manager who worked on Bryant Park and later applied its strategies to an equally successful redevelopment project in a very different New York neighborhood: Jamaica, Queens. He candidly describes what does (and doesn’t) work when coordinating urban redevelopment projects, giving special attention to each of the many details that must be carefully observed and balanced, from encouraging economic development to fostering creative communities to delivering appropriate services to the homeless. Learning from Bryant Park is thus essential reading for anyone who cares about giving new energy to downtowns and public spaces.

Fort William Henry, America’s early frontier fort at the southern end of Lake George, New York, was a flashpoint for conflict between the British and French empires in America. The fort is perhaps best known as the site of a massacre of British soldiers by Native Americans allied with the French that took place in 1757. Over the past decade, new and exciting archeological findings, in tandem with modern forensic methods, have changed our view of life at the fort prior to the massacre, by providing physical evidence of the role that Native Americans played on both sides of the conflict. Intertwining recent revelations with those of the past, Starbuck creates a lively narrative beginning with the earliest Native American settlement on Lake George. He pays special attention to the fort itself: its reconstruction in the 1950s, the major discoveries of the 1990s, and the archeological disclosures of the past few years. He further discusses the importance of forensic anthropology in uncovering the secrets of the past, reviews key artifacts discovered at the fort, and considers the relevance of Fort William Henry and its history in the twenty-first century. Three appendixes treat exhibits since the 1950s; foodways; and General Daniel Webb’s surrender letter of August 17, 1757.

What is the mission of American public education? As a nation, are we still committed to educating students to be both workers and citizens, as we have long proclaimed, or have we lost sight of the second goal of encouraging students to be contributing members of a democratic society?In this enlightening book, Michael Johanek and John Puckett describe one of America's most notable experiments in "community education." In the process, they offer a richly contextualized history of twentieth-century efforts to educate students as community-minded citizens. Although student test scores now serve to measure school achievement, the authors argue compellingly that the democratic goals of citizen-centered community schools can be reconciled with the academic performance demands of contemporary school reform movements. Using the twenty-year history of community-centered schooling at Benjamin Franklin High School in East Harlem as a case study—and reminding us of the pioneering vision of its founder, Leonard Covello—they suggest new approaches for educating today's students to be better "public work citizens."

Examines the nuclear power plant constructed at Shoreham, New York, and the accumulated miscalculations and mishaps that eventually forced its deconstruction. An intricate study of the groups, policies and regulatory issues involved in a historic legal battle.

As the 1970s gave way to the 80s, New York's party scene entered a ferociously inventive period characterized by its creativity, intensity, and hybridity. Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor chronicles this tumultuous time, charting the sonic and social eruptions that took place in the city’s subterranean party venues as well as the way they cultivated breakthrough movements in art, performance, video, and film. Interviewing DJs, party hosts, producers, musicians, artists, and dancers, Tim Lawrence illustrates how the relatively discrete post-disco, post-punk, and hip hop scenes became marked by their level of plurality, interaction, and convergence. He also explains how the shifting urban landscape of New York supported the cultural renaissance before gentrification, Reaganomics, corporate intrusion, and the spread of AIDS brought this gritty and protean time and place in American culture to a troubled denouement.

 Like a warm family album, this lively book heralds and documents the rich and vibrant traditions of Yiddish-speaking immigrants and their children in “the golden land,” from the first arrivals to the Second World War.

             Meet the famous, the infamous, and the unknown—from hotelier Jenny Grossinger to mobster Jake “Greasy Thumb” Guzik to Moses Solomon, the would-be “Jewish Babe Ruth;” from anarchist Emma Goldman to entertainer Eddie Cantor.

            Share the struggles and the triumphs of the labor unions, of Yiddish playwrights and poets. Enter the sweatshops of New York’s Lower East Side and the first Jewish settlements in Los Angeles and Chicago. Taste pastrami from Canter’s Deli in Los Angeles, knishes from Yonah Shimmel’s in New York City, and the famous “smookmit” of the Montreal ghetto.

            Lavishly illustrated with photos, cartoons, theater posters, and song sheets, here is a book to delight and inform. It is a joyous celebration of life.

November 27, 1995: Late this afternoon I was diagnosed with cancer. I learned that I had a form of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma called 'malt,' for mucous-associated lymphoid tissue.' My oncologist, J. Gregory Mears, M.D., said that mine 'was not a bad story,' because my tumors were 'indolent,' slow-growing. Not a bad story? Doesn't just about everyone know that non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma is incurable? I have incurable cancer." So begins Natalie Robin's journal, first serialized in Self magazine, now compiled and expanded in Living in the Lightning. Robins writes frankly, with grace and realism, of her personal journey of learning to live with cancer. Her candid observations, reactions, and emotions throughout her diagnosis and treatment hit home, as she asks questions all of us might when faced with such appalling news:
* How should I tell my mother?
* Will my husband remarry after I die?
* What should I wear to chemotherapy?
* What would happen if I jumped off the table during radiation treatment?
* Can I ever forget I have cancer? Robins's warm and sincerely uplifting portrait of quiet courage will give encouragement to the millions of people with cancer, and the millions more who love them.

Since its initial publication, Loft Living has become the classic analysis of the emergence of artists as a force of gentrification and the related rise of “creative city” policies around the world.  This 25th anniversary edition, with a new introduction, illustrates how loft living has spread around the world and that artists’ districts—trailing the success of SoHo in New York—have become a global tourist attraction. Sharon Zukin reveals the economic shifts and cultural transformations that brought widespread attention to artists as lifestyle models and agents of urban change, and explains their role in attracting investors and developers to the derelict loft districts where they made their home.

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A groundbreaking look at the transformation of SoHo.

American cities entered a new phase when, beginning in the 1950s, artists and developers looked upon a decaying industrial zone in Lower Manhattan and saw, not blight, but opportunity: cheap rents, lax regulation, and wide open spaces. Thus, SoHo was born. From 1960 to 1980, residents transformed the industrial neighborhood into an artist district, creating the conditions under which it evolved into an upper-income, gentrified area. Introducing the idea—still potent in city planning today—that art could be harnessed to drive municipal prosperity, SoHo was the forerunner of gentrified districts in cities nationwide, spawning the notion of the creative class.

In The Lofts of SoHo, Aaron Shkuda studies the transition of the district from industrial space to artists’ enclave to affluent residential area, focusing on the legacy of urban renewal in and around SoHo and the growth of artist-led redevelopment. Shkuda explores conflicts between residents and property owners and analyzes the city’s embrace of the once-illegal loft conversion as an urban development strategy. As Shkuda explains, artists eventually lost control of SoHo’s development, but over several decades they nonetheless forced scholars, policymakers, and the general public to take them seriously as critical actors in the twentieth-century American city.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, northern resort towns were in their heyday as celebrated retreats for America's wealthy. "Lord, Please Don't Take Me in August" documents the experiences of African Americans in Saratoga Springs, New York, and Newport, Rhode Island--towns that provided a recurring season of expanded employment opportunities, enhanced social life, cosmopolitan experience, and, in a good year, enough money to last through the winter.
 
Affirming that the decision to live in their tiny resort communities was conscious and deliberate, Myra B. Young Armstead shows how Afro-Saratogians and Afro-Newporters organized their rhythms, their routines, and their communities to create meaningful identities for themselves.
Living on streets close to their churches, developing social organizations that promoted their standards of gentility and respectability, and lobbying for wider opportunities, these African Americans actively shaped their lives within the structures and limitations imposed on them.
Armstead situates the resort town between the poles of the rural South and the large industrial cities of the North. She shows how these small northern towns, with their seasonal economic rhythms and domestic wage work, permitted an important continuity between rural and urban lifestyles and a path from rural South to urban North besides the jarring, disruptive journey that often ended in the ghetto.
 
"Lord, Please Don't Take Me in August" tells a story that is at once American and uniquely African American: a story of economic imperatives and enlarged social aspirations culminating in a season--June, July, and August--that brought blacks as close as they could get to the American Dream.     
 

Opening with David Mancuso's seminal “Love Saves the Day” Valentine's party, Tim Lawrence tells the definitive story of American dance music culture in the 1970s—from its subterranean roots in NoHo and Hell’s Kitchen to its gaudy blossoming in midtown Manhattan to its wildfire transmission through America’s suburbs and urban hotspots such as Chicago, Boston, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Newark, and Miami.

Tales of nocturnal journeys, radical music making, and polymorphous sexuality flow through the arteries of Love Saves the Day like hot liquid vinyl. They are interspersed with a detailed examination of the era’s most powerful djs, the venues in which they played, and the records they loved to spin—as well as the labels, musicians, vocalists, producers, remixers, party promoters, journalists, and dance crowds that fueled dance music’s tireless engine.

Love Saves the Day includes material from over three hundred original interviews with the scene's most influential players, including David Mancuso, Nicky Siano, Tom Moulton, Loleatta Holloway, Giorgio Moroder, Francis Grasso, Frankie Knuckles, and Earl Young. It incorporates more than twenty special dj discographies—listing the favorite records of the most important spinners of the disco decade—and a more general discography cataloging some six hundred releases. Love Saves the Day also contains a unique collection of more than seventy rare photos.

Love, Sorrow, and Rage gives powerful voice to women like Nora Gaines and Dixie Register, who tell use what it's like to live on the streets of New York, how it feels to lose your mind, about the taste of crack cocaine and the sweetness of friendship. In this novel-like narrative of homelessness and hope, poor women share a table, their meals, and their intimacies with author Alisse Waterston. On the pages of this impassioned ethnography, Waterston puts mythic, demonized bag ladies to rest, and in so doing, brings ordinary women to life.

From drug addiction and the spread of AIDS to the growing gap between rich and poor in the U.S., the topics in this book get front-page coverage in daily newspapers across the country. Waterston seeks to understand, to explain, and to solve the human crisis that surrounds us. Towards this end, she challenges us to look at the ways in which our society and the workings of our political, economic, and popular culture contribute to the suffering experienced by our most vulnerable citizens. An important corrective to popular depictions of the urban poor, Love, Sorrow, and Rage provides a penetrating analysis of the causes and consequences of poverty. It offers a deeper understanding of what leads to and perpetuates poverty and of the human complex of love, sorrow, and rage felt by those who experience it.

Love, Sorrow, and Rage will engage readers interested in urban studies, women's studies, social issues and policies, anthropology, sociology, political economy, and New York City life.