We have seen the evil of the manufacture and sale of intoxicating liquors in our midst; let us try prohibition and see what this will do for us… Thomas Jordan Jarvis

Interior of a crowded bar moments before midnight, June 30, 1919, when prohibition went into effect New York City.

Dry Manhattan : prohibition in New York City Michael A. Lerner Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 2007 Hardcover. 351 p. ; 25 cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. 311-341) and index. Clean, tight and strong binding with clean dust jacket. No highlighting, underlining or marginalia in text. VG/VG

New York City Deputy Police Commissioner watching agents pour liquor into sewer following a raid during the height of prohibition.

In 1919, the United States embarked on the country’s boldest attempt at moral and social reform: Prohibition. The 18th Amendment to the Constitution prohibited the manufacture, transportation, and sale of alcohol around the country. This “noble experiment,” as President Hoover called it, was intended to usher in a healthier, more moral, and more efficient society. Nowhere was such reform needed more, proponents argued, than in New York City — and nowhere did Prohibition fail more spectacularly. Dry Manhattan is the first major work on Prohibition in nearly a quarter century, and the only full history of Prohibition in the era’s most vibrant city.

Woman putting flask in her Russian boot.

Though New Yorkers were cautiously optimistic at first, Prohibition quickly degenerated into a deeply felt clash of cultures that utterly transformed life in the city. Impossible to enforce, the ban created vibrant new markets for illegal alcohol, spawned corruption and crime, fostered an exhilarating culture of speakeasies and nightclubs, and exposed the nation’s deep prejudices. Writ large, the conflict over Prohibition, Michael Lerner demonstrates, was about much more than the freedom to drink. It was a battle between competing visions of the United States, pitting wets against drys, immigrants against old stock Americans, Catholics and Jews against Protestants, and proponents of personal liberty against advocates of societal reform.

The “Hooch hound” in action. Man seated on pier, with pipe in his mouth, fishing on the River, as dog trained to detect liquor takes a bottle from his back pocket.

 

The skyscraper establishes the block, the block creates the street, the street offers itself to man… Roland Barthes

Flatiron building under construction, New York City

The Flatiron : the New York landmark and the incomparable city that arose with it Alice Sparberg Alexiou New York : Thomas Dunne Books, 2010 Hardcover. 1st ed. and printing. xxi, 298 p. : ill. ; 25 cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. Clean, tight and strong binding with clean dust jacket. No highlighting, underlining or marginalia in text. VG/VG

Fifth Avenue, New York

The marvelous story of the Flatiron: the instantly recognizable building that signaled the start of a new era in New York history.

Flat-iron [i.e. Flatiron Building] corner after snow storm, New York.

Critics hated it. The public feared it would topple over. Passersby were knocked down by the winds. But even before it was completed, the Flatiron Building had become an unforgettable part of New York City.

New York, N.Y., Flatiron Bldg. from Madison Square Park.

The Flatiron Building was built by the Chicago-based Fuller Company – a group founded by George Fuller, “the father of the skyscraper” – to be their New York headquarters. The company’s president, Harry Black, was never able to make the public call the Flatiron the Fuller Building, however. Black’s was the country’s largest real estate firm, constructing Macy’s department store, and soon after the Plaza Hotel, the Savoy Hotel, and many other iconic buildings in New York as well as in other cities across the country.

Madison Square from the Flat-Iron [i.e. Flatiron] Building, New York.

In The Flatiron, Alice Sparberg Alexiou chronicles not just the story of the building but the heady times in New York at the dawn of the twentieth century. It was a time when Madison Square Park shifted from a promenade for rich women to one for prostitutes; when photography became called an art; motion pictures came into existence; the booming economy suffered increasing depressions; jazz came to the forefront of popular music – and all within steps of one of the city’s best-known and best-loved buildings.

Bird’s-eye view of Victory Arch and Flatiron Bldg., New York City.

Hitherto, the rights and wrongs had seemed so beautifully simple… George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia

The ability of communism, its allies and associated opportunists to appear as chic and intellectually fashionable – at least among the feeble-minded and the easily impressionable – has always been one of its strong suits especially since the advent of mass media and its ability to deceive. While the morally and intellectually crippled like Norman Bethune and Ernest Hemingway would forever by swayed to the left by the war the brighter and more able thinkers like George Orwell and John Dos Passos would come to realize that if the right did not have the answers the left wasn’t even asking the right questions. We have just gone through our most recent orgy of this kind of nonsense where an avowed communist and practising terrorist has been buried with all the pomp and circumstance of a great statesman. When – or for that matter if – the masses will ever learn discernment are questions that turn the hair grey of those who have.

Communists get together. Washington, D.C., Feb. 12. Americans, all of whom fought and many wounded while fighting for the Loyalists in Spain, met today in Washington at the First National Conference of the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, left to right: Francis J. Gorman, President of the United Textile Workers of America; Lieut. Robert Raven, wounded and blinded in the Spanish War; and Commander Paul Burns of Boston Commander of the Lincoln Brigade, 2/12/38

Facing fascism : New York and the Spanish Civil War  Peter N. Carroll & James D. Fernandez, editors  New York : Museum of the City of New York : NYU Press, c 2007  Softcover. vii, 223 p. : ill. ; 26 cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. 206-207) and index. Clean, tight and strong binding with clean dust jacket. No highlighting, underlining or marginalia in text. VG/VG

William G. Ryan, of Milwaukee today told the Dies Committee that Communist Party members regard it as a generally accepted fact that the American Youth Congress is controlled by the Communist Party. Ryan, a former member of the Communist Party, said that he served 17 months with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in Spain and then ‘escaped’

When the Spanish Civil War began in 1936, loosely affiliated groups of writers, artists, and other individuals sympathetic to the communist cause emerged in New York City to give voice to anti-fascist sentiment by supporting the Spanish Republic. Facing Fascism: New York and the Spanish Civil War examines the participation of New Yorkers in the political struggles and armed conflict that many historians consider a critical precursor to World War II.

Nearly half of the 2,800 Americans who volunteered to fight in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade against Generalissimo Francisco Franco came from the New York area. Fundraising, propaganda, and deployment for anti-fascists everywhere in America were orchestrated through New York City. At the same time, powerful voices in New York expressed sympathy for the anti-communist side.

The fighting in Spain brought to the surface the complex ideological and ethnic identities always present in New York politics. Facing Fascism examines the full range of this experience, including that of the New Yorkers who supported Franco. It addresses the role of doctors, nurses, and social workers who left New York hospitals to provide assistance to the defenders of the Spanish Republic, as well as those who remained active on the home front. The book also describes the involvement of students in the war, the key role of writers and the media, and the contributions made by members of New York’s art and theater communities.

Facing Fascism serves as the catalog to an exhibition of the same name appearing at the Museum of the City of New York. The book and exhibition both make use of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives’ extensive holdings, which range from historical documents to video recordings of oral histories. Numerous other libraries, archives, museums, and private collectors have also been consulted to make this the most complete exhibition of its kind ever mounted. The exhibition also appeared in Spain.

Franco’s flag flies over Spanish Embassy in Washington for first time. Washington, D.C., April 4. The flag of the Nationalist government flying over the Spanish Embassy here for the first time since the Franco Regime was recognized by the United States. 4-4-39

You said I killed you – haunt me, then! The murdered do haunt their murderers, I believe. I know that ghosts have wandered on earth. Be with me always – take any form – drive me mad! only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you!

The murder of Helen Jewett : the life and death of a prostitute in nineteenth-century New York  Patricia Cline Cohen  New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 1998  Hardcover. 1st ed. viii, 432 p. : ill., map ; 25 cm. Clean, tight and strong binding with clean dust jacket. No highlighting, underlining or marginalia in text. VG/VG

In 1836, the murder of a young prostitute made headlines in New York City and around the country, inaugurating a sex-and-death sensationalism in news reporting that haunts us today. Cohen goes behind these first lurid accounts to reconstruct the story of the mysterious victim, Helen Jewett.

From her beginnings as a servant girl in Maine, Helen Jewett refashioned herself, using four successive aliases, into a highly paid courtesan. She invented life stories for herself that helped her build a sympathetic clientele among New York City’s elite, and she further captivated her customers through her seductive letters, which mixed elements of traditional feminine demureness with sexual boldness.

But she was to meet her match – and her nemesis – in a youth called Richard Robinson. He was one of an unprecedented number of young men who flooded into America’s burgeoning cities in the 1830s to satisfy the new business society’s seemingly infinite need for clerks. The son of an established Connecticut family, he was intense, arrogant, and given to posturing. He became Helen Jewett’s lover in a tempestuous affair and ten months later was arrested for her murder. He stood trial in a five-day courtroom drama that ended with his acquittal amid the cheers of hundreds of fellow clerks and other spectators.

With no conviction for murder, nor closure of any sort, the case continued to tantalize the public, even though Richard Robinson disappeared from view. Through the Erie Canal, down the Ohio and the Mississippi, and by way of New Orleans, he reached the wilds of Texas and a new life under a new name. Through her meticulous and ingenious research, Cohen traces his life there and the many twists and turns of the lingering mystery of the murder. Her stunning portrayals of Helen Jewett, Robinson, and their raffish, colorful nineteenth-century world make vivid a frenetic city life and sexual morality whose complexities, contradictions, and concerns resonate with those of our own time.

We should insist that if the immigrant who comes here does in good faith become an American and assimilates himself to us he shall be treated on an exact equality with every one else, for it is an outrage to discriminate against any such man because of creed or birth-place or origin. But this is predicated upon the man’s becoming in very fact an American and nothing but an American… Theodore Roosevelt

Hot time in the old town : the great heat wave of 1896 and the making of Theodore Roosevelt  Edward P. Kohn  New York : Basic Books, c 2010  Hardcover. 1st ed. and printing. xv, 288 p. ; 25 cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. 269-278) and index. Clean, tight and strong binding with clean dust jacket. No highlighting, underlining or marginalia in text. VG/VG

Theodore Roosevelt is best remembered as America’s prototypical “cowboy” president — a Rough Rider who derived his political wisdom from a youth spent in the untamed American West. But while the great outdoors certainly shaped Roosevelt’s identity, historian Edward P. Kohn argues that it was his hometown of New York that made him the progressive president we celebrate today.

During his early political career, Roosevelt took on local Republican factions and Tammany Hall Democrats alike, proving his commitment to reform at all costs. He combated the city’s rampant corruption, and helped to guide New York through the perils of rabid urbanization and the challenges of accommodating an influx of immigrants — experiences that would serve him well as president of the United States.

A riveting account of a man and a city on the brink of greatness, this book reveals that Roosevelt’s true education took place not in the West but on the mean streets of nineteenth-century New York.