The New York City Hall portrait collection, 1790--1830

Addeo, Deborah Bershad City University of New York 2005 해외박사(DDOD)

Since 1790, New York City has commissioned portraits to commemorate the lives and deeds of "those great and good men who have done honor and service to our Country." Generals, presidents, military and naval heroes, foreign dignitaries, New York State Governors, and New York City Mayors make up this diverse collection, housed in the same three-story federal-style building for almost two centuries. The collection contains portraits by some of America's most renowned painters, including John Trumbull, John Vanderlyn, Thomas Sully, John Wesley Jarvis, George Catlin, Charles Wesley Jarvis and Samuel F. B. Morse. Unlike many other collections that have been dispersed over time, the City Hall portrait collection remains largely intact. Moreover, the collection is still on view in the building for which many of the commissions were originally intended. The New York City Hall portrait collection thus provides us with a series of portraits that require study not just individually, but also as a group, for they were commissioned as a series of works by and for municipal government. As New York City, along with the rest of the nation, moved from the monarchical to democratic forms of government, traditional forms of visual representation, particularly portraiture, came into question. The goal of this study is to provide a detailed analysis of the changes in the meaning of portraiture, through a close examination of the first forty years of the City Hall collection, from 1790 to 1830---covering the post-Revolutionary period, federalism, and the initial growth of the mercantile city. This study will explore the diverse motivations behind the portrait commissions, particularly in relationship to notions of nationalism, patriotic pride, and the role of the arts in the development of a sense of civic identity. In order to clarify these motivations, the discussion focuses on the commissioning process, including who proposed the commission, the political circumstances surrounding the sitter, the process used for the selection of the artist, relationships among the artists and those involved in the selection process, the artists' responses to the commissions, and the reception of the portrait by the press and by the public.

A crisis in urban liberalism: The New York City municipal unions and the 1970s fiscal crisis

Spear, Michael City University of New York 2005 해외박사(DDOD)

This dissertation explores the important role that New York City's municipal unions played during the New York City fiscal crisis of the 1970s---critical moment in both New York City's and in the nation's history as the long postwar economic boom ended and as New Deal liberalism was rapidly replaced by a new fiscally and socially conservative politics. Municipal unions had emerged in New York City and many other of the nation's city's as major political forces in the 1960s. As New York City teetered on the edge of bankruptcy in 1975, the city's and the nation's political and economic elites watched anxiously to see what the city's powerful municipal unions would do. In the end, these unions would play a complex and paradoxical role. One the one hand, they were forced to accept wage freezes and the firing of thousands of their members. On the other hand, they remained one of the city's most powerful interest groups due to their agile political maneuvering and their control of the pension fund assets, which the city desperately needed access to in order to avoid bankruptcy. Throughout the fiscal crisis, the main goal of the city's municipal unions was to defend their institutional power. In order to insure that goal was reached during a period when they were under serious attack, the municipal unions decided that they had no choice but to work within the constraints of fiscal austerity. At the same time, their decision not to directly oppose the newly emerging politics of fiscal austerity and instead negotiate with the business community and the state to protect their institutional power had an enormous and long-lasting impact on the city's politics. This dissertation examines how the municipal unions' actions during the fiscal crisis affected the city's electoral politics, race relations, and labor politics during the fiscal crisis and in the decades since.

The tolerance point: Race, public housing and the Forest Hills controversy, 1945--1975 (New York City)

Wishnoff, Daniel A City University of New York 2005 해외박사(DDOD)

This dissertation examines New York City's efforts to establish a racially integrated public housing program from 1945 to 1975. It focuses on the struggle against the city's 1966 plan to construct a low-income project (housing mostly poor African American and Puerto Rican families) in Forest Hills, Queens (a Jewish, middle-income neighborhood). I argue that the protests and political compromises that punctuated the Forest Hills controversy symbolized the failure of the city's integration policies and contributed to the decline and fall of its public housing program. This study also examines the efforts of the housing reformers who created the nation's first public housing program in New York. Housing reformers initially backed the city's early racial policy that strictly segregated individual housing projects. During the 1940s, as the black population in a handful of projects that were located in white neighborhoods increased, housing reformers argued that through careful management public housing could promote inter-racial living and possibly end segregation. After World War II, racial barriers lifted, but the inter-racial vision for public housing was postponed. Robert Moses, who dominated the city's public housing program, built the majority of the city's low-income projects in poor neighborhoods experiencing racial transition. Moses' placement of the projects combined with the simultaneous migration of thousands of poor African American and Puerto Rican families to the city created a public housing program that by 1960 was predominantly minority. Refusing to live in projects with large minority populations whites fled public housing. The dissertation also examines efforts of housing reformers and the New York City Housing Authority to create more racially balanced projects. After failing to attract more whites to predominantly minority projects, housing reformers lobbied for what would later be known as scatter-site housing: the construction of low-income projects in predominantly white, middle-income neighborhoods to promote integration. The scatter-site housing policy was implemented by Mayor John V. Lindsay in 1966. Angry protests by ethnic whites against scatter-site projects slated for their communities forced the Lindsay administration to scale back the number of projects. In 1971, with only a few scatter-site projects built, construction began on the project in Forest Hills. The protests in Forest Hills, fueled by a mixture of racial intolerance, middle-class backlash, a rising fear of crime and Jewish militancy, forced the Lindsay administration into an embarrassing compromise that drastically altered the size and scope of the scatter-site project. The Nixon administration considered Forest Hills an example of government mandated "forced integration" and froze all Federal funding for public housing in 1973. The cut crippled the city's public housing program. After Forest Hills, the Housing Authority focused its efforts on maintaining its existing stock of housing and built very few new projects. My dissertation demonstrates that the struggle to integrate public housing effectively hastened the decline of public housing in New York.

From public market to La Marqueta: Shaping spaces and subjects of food distribution in New York City, 1930--2012

Audant, Anne Babette City University of New York 2013 해외박사(DDOD)

Public markets are definitive parts of the urban landscape. Policies shaping municipal food provisioning, including public markets, produce and reproduce differentiated subjects and unevenly developed spaces. Social science has not paid sustained attention to public food markets; this research contributes to a fragmented and multi-perspective body of work that demonstrates the many ways in which markets intersect with urban processes. I look at the geographic distribution of food in and through New York City's public markets from 1930 to the present by mapping intersections of politics, citizens, consumers, social class, gender, ethnicity, race, government, capital, and the retailing landscape. Tracing these processes over more than a century, this study demonstrates that food distribution is a dynamic and highly contested aspect of urban life, underscoring a deep if sometimes under-articulated recognition of the work done by the flow of food through city streets. Focused on New York City's public markets, particularly the enclosed retail markets built in the late 1930s and early 1940s to contain New York City's pushcarts and street peddlers, this study explores how the immigrant working classes became the objects of municipal food policy. Food habits became a means through which to Americanize – and civilize – the masses. Along with their bodies, their food landscapes became the targets of state intervention. Working class neighborhoods were – and are – vulnerable to state interventions that too often further alienate already disempowered populations. Food policy has the potential to advance social justice. In New York City, we are witnessing the emergence of a new municipal food policy, which, if implemented, will be the first comprehensive policy to be proposed since the Progressive Era. Aimed at reducing inequities and improving public health, and integrated with broad goals of environmental and economic sustainability, the proposals on the table point in promising directions.

"Erin's hope": The Fenian Brotherhood of New York City, 1858--1886

Lynch, Timothy G City University of New York 2004 해외박사(DDOD)

This dissertation proposes an investigation of the Fenian Brotherhood in New York City from its inception in 1858 until its ultimate dissolution in 1886. The Fenian Brotherhood was an Irish nationalist organization that advocated the creation of an independent, republican Ireland through the forced removal of Great Britain from that island. Active in both Europe and the United States, the Brotherhood was among the first political exile groups in America's history. It was particularly vocal and visible in New York City, which by 1860 counted one in every four residents as a native of Ireland. The city was home to a burgeoning immigrant population, a vibrant ethnic press, and the scene of some of the most vituperative battles in the tumultuous history of the movement. As such, a history of the Fenian Brotherhood in New York City will tell much of the movement and of the city that it called home. To best gauge the historical importance of the Fenian Brotherhood in New York, I will trace the trajectory of the movement, analyzing why the Brotherhood was successful at the times it was, and why its influence waxed and waned over the quarter century under discussion. An analysis of the "rise and fall of New York's Fenian Brotherhood" will enable me to reconstruct the internal history of the movement in New York, showing how those in the immigrant, Irish American, and native-born communities perceived the Brotherhood. In addition to depicting the strategies and tactics of the Brotherhood, I will correlate its successes and failures to its fluctuating levels of popularity and gauge the level of support it enjoyed over its nearly three decades of existence.

Hucksters and Trucksters: Criminalization and Gentrification in New York City's Street Vending Industry

Dunn, Kathleen City University of New York 2013 해외박사(DDOD)

The expansion of the informal economy since the 1970s developed in tandem with a growing militarization of urban public space, creating extreme precarity for street vendors, a leading occupational group within the informal sector. Based on over three years of participant observation and seventy interviews with street vendors and their advocates, this dissertation examines the present-day street vending industry in New York City, which has long been comprised of first-generation immigrants, but has in recent years seen a marked growth in highly educated, native-born gourmet food truck owners. The research illustrates how two processes, inherent to what I term <italic>the post-industrial complex, </italic> are increasing stratification within New York's street economy. First, there is a dramatic criminalization of immigrant street vendors who regularly encounter arrests and ticketing. This blocks their upward mobility, most acutely for women, and locates vendors in a <italic>liminal class position, </italic> possessing elements of proprietorship that are subjugated by the governance of public space. Second, a new wave of commercial gentrification has occurred within street vending, where more affluent native-born vendors are able to effectively capitalize on vending to rapidly establish brick-and-mortar businesses, and in so doing inflate the price of vending permits in the underground economy. These divergent conditions reveal how the governance of post-industrial urban space reinforces the criminalization of poor and working class people of color, while facilitating the advancement of more affluent and predominantly white professionals. The streets of the post-industrial complex are <italic> policed as a border</italic> for immigrant vendors, and are <italic>pioneered as a frontier</italic> by native-born food truck owners. Yet criminalization has produced street vendor solidarities, evidenced in a growing <italic>street labor movement</italic> amongst immigrant vendors in New York. Like most vendor organizations across the Global South, two immigrant street vendor worker centers in New York press the municipal government to uphold vendors' right to the city. In contrast, the city's native-born food truck owners have established a business association not to achieve social justice but to increase profitability. Post-industrial urban governance thus deepens inequalities within the informal economy while spurring new movements to claim the enduring resource of urban public space.

Biostratigraphy and paleoecology of the Givetian Hamilton group in Pennsylvania and New York

Brown, James O City University of New York 2001 해외박사(DDOD)

Revisions to previous chronostratigraphic correlations (cf. Ellison 1966, Willard 1939, Brett and Baird 1994, Slattery 1995) of the rocks at the sections studied within Pennsylvania to those of New York are proposed that include: (1) The Montebello and Sherman Ridge Members of the Mahantango Formation in the Harrisburg, Pennsylvania area are correlative with the Kashong Shale and Windom Shale Members, respectively of the Moscow Formation of New York; (2) The upper part of the Mahantango Formation at Bowmanstown is equivalent to the New Lisbon and Windom Shale Members of the Moscow Formation of New York. However, the uppermost portion previously referred to as the Mahantango Formation is now recognized as correlative to the Tully Mesosequence. In particular, fossil assemblages associated with the distinct Nis Hollow Member of Pennsylvania indicate this unit to be correlative with the Taunton Beds of the Windom Shale of New York; (3) The portion of the Port Jervis section is recognized as older than previously indicated by Slattery (1995). Historically the differentiation of the Mahantango Formation within Pennsylvania has proven difficult due to thick beds of sediments dominated by fine-textured clastics. The use of sequence stratigraphic concepts in conjunction with sedimentary, biostratigraphic, paleoecologic, and subtle lithologic differences of beds has provided a basis for the correlations proposed in this study. The term “Tully Mesosequence” is proposed for recognizing penecontemporaneous beds with a wide array of lithologies that are correlative with the classic Tully Limestone of central New York. This work reports the first occurrence of a unique pyritized microfauna from the Lower Member of the Tully Mesosequence at Lock Haven, Pennsylvania. This “small shelly fauna” (sensu Dzik 1993) consists of minute, postlarval specimens of pelecypods, gastropods, and dacryoconarids. Also present are the first reported specimens of <italic>Jinonicella</italic> from North America and a ctenosome bryozoan showing unusual body preservation.

Coming of age in neoliberal New York

Sugg, Jennifer City University of New York 2014 해외박사(DDOD)

Thirty years of neoliberal policies have left New York a divided city, with ever-rising rates of income inequality and widening social disparity. Structural transformations associated with global capitalism have led to divergent experiences for male and female youth coming of age in the 21st century. Girls are experiencing greater social integration and social mobility whereas, boys are facing social exclusion and limited opportunities. As young men precariously forge new transitions to adulthood, young women are constructed as ideal flexible subjects, benefiting from feminist achievements, and advancing in the new service economy. Yet in reality, girls continue to face gendered base violence, sexism, and burdens of responsibilities. Through this lens, I examine how gender operates as an organizing principle in young people's lives today in the Lower East Side (LES) of New York City. This study also documents how people create cultural alternatives that reflect their values and progressive politics and analyzes how this has been down in the past. It offers an organizational case study of The Lower Eastside Girls Club in an effort to increase our understanding of the history and significance of a successful struggle to educate, employ, and carve out a safe space for women and girls in neoliberal New York. It documents how the Girls Club builds upon a legacy of grassroots initiatives in the LES, including the settlement house movement of the Progressive Era and Mobilization for Youth of the 1960's. This study asks: what should an education accomplish in a democracy? (Giroux 2013) It examines the limitations of the Girls Club's engaged practice of uplift and empowerment in relation to its progressive politics and critical pedagogy. I suggest that education is a terrain in the "right to the city" (Lefebvre 1968), and that the Girls Club, in constructing alternative models of education and community engagement, is locally engaging in a broader struggle for social justice, albeit with limited success. This study concludes with an analysis of Girls Club's efforts to push forth a community-led development model that puts women and youth at the center, melding the politics of Jane Addams and Jane Jacobs and offering an alternative urban vision.

Nationhood in the city: Assimilation, citizenship, and national belonging among college-educated, second generation Turks in Berlin and Dominicans in New York City

Sezgin, Utku City University of New York 2013 해외박사(DDOD)

The main question posed by the study is: "How are university-educated immigrant-origin young people from disadvantaged backgrounds responding to the social and political opportunities provided by their cities and nations?" Through in-depth interviews and secondary research, my project sheds light on how local and national institutions, and the historical context, of host societies shape the outlook of upwardly mobile second generation immigrants on questions of citizenship and national belonging. It focuses on interviewing college-educated individuals from similarly disadvantaged groups in two similar locales: Turks in Berlin and Dominicans in New York. My hypothesis is that New York City and the United States offer an institutional package of opportunities and responses that provides a more favorable context of reception for these individuals; and that this in turn fosters a stronger sense of commitment to and membership in the U.S. polity than is the case in Berlin and Germany. This package includes: the civil rights culture/laws, the relatively liberal and pluralistic citizenship regime, an immigration-oriented national and local political culture and institutional history, and the relatively penetrable and inclusive local and national political system that accommodates immigrants.. The project goes beyond segmented assimilation theory to critique its overly structural and deterministic views of race, immigration, and class. The dissertation also takes issue with the view that citizenship and nation-states have been decoupled in our globalized age, a view that has by now largely superseded traditional notions of citizenship tied to the nation-state. My primary means of data collection have been 61 face-to-face, in-depth, semi-structured interviews in the two contexts. The interviews aimed to identify how respondents' identity construction and citizenship practices operate within the host context.

The fengsu-driven practice of sending infants to China: The experiences of Chinese immigrant mothers in New York

Wong, Kitching Rhoda City University of New York 2015 해외박사(DDOD)

This dissertation explores Fujianese women's transnational parenting experiences. Although transnational mothering is ubiquitous in an era of globalization, this study surfaces the unique aspects of this phenomenon among Chinese female migrants to New York City. These women send months-old infants to China for care expecting their return at school age. The "satellite-baby" phenomenon (Bohr, 2009) appears unique to Chinese immigrant mothers, particularly those from the Fujian-Fuzhou region. Conducted in the phenomenological tradition of qualitative research, I sought to uncover the complex, contextual experiences mothers experienced in their migration to the US. This included their experiences as immigrants, their decisions to send infants to China, their separation from their babies, and finally, their children's return to New York. This study employed homogeneous and criterion sampling. Informants were immigrant mothers aged 18 to 45 from the Fujian-Fuzhou region of China who spoke Mandarin, who had sent at least one infant for care in China, and whose children had returned to New York within the last six years. Recruited through fliers distributed by key members of the New York City Chinese community, sixteen migrant women participated in semi-structured interviews designed to collect narratives for this study. Two themes dominated study findings. Fengsu, or social customs, norms, and traditions, and mei-banfa, or having no other option, drove informants' decisions beginning with their migration, through employment, marriage, child-bearing, and ultimately the decision to send their infants at three to four months to China. Fengsu-migration led the women to come to the US. Their immigration status and limited English gave them no option (mei-banfa) but to work in subservient jobs. They sent earnings to China to pay migration debts and to support their families. Women had limited social lives in the US, but fengsu expectations that they marry led to xiangqin, or blind dating for husbands. Themes of deskilling and lack of agency predominated. Because of fengsu practice, many informants bore their first child immediately after marriage. As expectant mothers, they knew because of fengsu that their babies would go home to China until they reached school age. Throughout, they struggled with numerous in situ mei-banfa, including huge migration debts, poor living arrangements, and lack of childcare. Consequently, the mothers acted against their own desires to keep their infants in New York and sent them to China where grandparents and others cared for them. This study highlights the effects of this separation of child-absent transnational mothers from their babies. However, for some the experience resulted in renewed agency as women made decisions about subsequent children more consistent with their own aspirations as mothers.