Theodore Roosevelt's fruitless quest to clean up New York's 'Island of Vice' in the 1890s:
Richard Zacks' 'Island of Vice' chronicles Theodore Roosevelts heroic yet ultimately failed efforts to clean up New York City
Bio: Brian Sholis writes about photography, landscape, and the American past. He is a Ph.D. candidate in the department of history at CUNY's Graduate Center. Read more here.
Prostitutes were at one point working out of numbers 6, 8, 10, 12, 14, and 16 Delancey Street. The sale of alcohol was outlawed on Sundays, yet nearly every bar or saloon had side and rear entrances. Casinos catered to both low- and high-end customers. And the police profited from nearly all of this illicit business. Big Bill Devery, when appointed captain of the notorious Eleventh Precinct on today’s Lower East Side, charged madams a $500 “initiation fee” and $50 in monthly protection money. More
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on March 20th, 2012 9:36amIn one particular photo at the exhibit Weegee: Murder Is My Business (at the International Center for Photography through September 2), one can see all that made the pioneering photojournalist an icon of the early 20th century’s underbelly. Taken at the scene of a murder, the photo shows a woman is swooning in the midst of a crowd of children. The kids, just out from school, lend the picture its title, Their First Murder. The woman, who is the victim’s aunt, gives it a fulcrum around which the children’s nervous energy surges. This is Weegee at his best, providing a hard-boiled chronicle of city life and death, while also managing to elevate such human drama to the level of lasting art. It was a trick the famed photographer rarely let people forget he possessed. More
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on January 23rd, 2012 11:59amAt the exhibit’s center is one of the three original copies of the nearly nine-foot-long map of the Commissioners’ Plan, its size and detail a measure of the ambition it represented. Generations of canny politicians, imperious real-estate developers, and visionary architects have tried to implement changes or carve out exceptions to its rule, yet the Manhattan this map depicts is recognizable to us today: a somewhat claustrophobic, undifferentiated mass of right angles that cedes almost nothing to topography or the human need for variety.
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on December 19th, 2011 8:33am
