New York: Metropolitan Studies (NYCM1-CE)

Learn the essential history of the city's built environment––from Dutch days to the present. All building types are discussed in this course, including row houses; apartment buildings; tenements; office buildings; industrial loft buildings; houses of worship; and civic buildings, as well as bridges, parks, and other public works. All styles are covered, from the Georgian of the English colonial era to 19th-century revival styles through beaux arts, art deco, modernism, and postmodernism. By the end of the course, students are able to tell a Federal from a Greek Revival row house; know what motivated Victorian designers; and understand where modernism came from and why.

In 2020, we celebrate the 100th anniversary of the publication of Edith Wharton&rsquo;s great novel <em>The Age of Innocence.</em> This course explores New York City at the time of the book&rsquo;s setting: the 1870s and 1880s, a period of dramatic change, with the coming of the elevated railway, electric light, the skyscraper, the Metropolitan Opera, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, as well as of economic panic. It also was the era of the transcontinental railroad and the Wild West, as depicted in Hollywood Westerns. We will read <em>The Age of Innocence</em> along with <em>A Hazard of New Fortunes</em> by William Dean Howells, and perhaps other works as we view a city of tension, turmoil, and innovation.

<p>This year marks the 50th anniversary of the law creating the Landmarks Preservation Commission, which has helped to preserve some of New York City&rsquo;s great structures. Explore some buildings that fell before the enactment, including the City&rsquo;s first &ldquo;built&rdquo; City Hall, the nation&rsquo;s first capitol, the Singer Building, and Pennsylvania Station. Also, rediscover landmarked beauties&mdash;St. Paul&rsquo;s Chapel, the Woolworth Building, and whole neighborhoods such as Greenwich Village. The 34th Street mansion of Mrs. Astor was torn down for the original Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, which was torn down for today&rsquo;s Empire State Building. The first two would no doubt have been designated; the Empire State Building is, as is the current Waldorf-Astoria.</p>

From the 1950s to the 1970s a battle raged for New York&rsquo;s soul, pitting Robert Moses&mdash;the public works &ldquo;czar,&rdquo; advocate of building on a grand and disruptive scale, and the man who &ldquo;got things done&rdquo;&mdash;against Jane Jacobs, a Greenwich Village journalist (often called &ldquo;housewife&rdquo;) who boldly opposed the bulldozer approach to urban renewal in favor of the vital messiness of cities that evolved to suit their residents&rsquo; needs. We read substantial selections by and about the two, and we consider how their story has been oversimplified, and above all, how that battle resonates&mdash;or doesn&rsquo;t&mdash;in today&rsquo;s hyper-gentrified City.

Gain insights from New York&rsquo;s movers and shakers. Sessions include visits from Sam Lubell, coauthor of <em>Never Built New York,</em> who will speak about unbuilt architectural plans that might have changed New York City&rsquo;s skyline; Alice de Almeida, &ldquo;chief cat officer&rdquo; of The Algonquin Hotel, who will describe what being a cat wrangler entails; Andrew Rosenthal who will share his experiences producing and promoting the NBC show, <em>New York Live;</em> Daniel Palmer, associate curator at the Public Art Fund, who will explain how they make extraordinary art accessible to all; and Diana Carulli, designer of labyrinths, and Mary McHugh, with a labyrinthian journalistic career, who will trace those paths. Site visits will include a tour of Gulliver&rsquo;s Gate, which has cut major cities of the world down to size in a creative exhibition; the National Arts Club, dedicated to generating and maintaining interest in the arts; and a visit to the famous Hotel Edison in the Theater District to discover how it has remained a constant in New York City&rsquo;s changing landscape.

Through four centuries of explosive growth, New York City emerged as one of the world&rsquo;s most important commercial, industrial, financial, and cultural capitals. This course offers a framework for understanding the varied and eventful history of New York, working chronologically from its Native American and colonial roots, to the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and through to the de Blasio administration. Examine many different facets of the city&rsquo;s growth, including its politics, economics, infrastructure, immigrant cultures and social geography, and much more, with highlights on significant figures such as Alexander Hamilton, De Witt Clinton, Robert Moses, and Jane Jacobs.

<p>It&rsquo;s a good time to take stock of New York, as the City leaves behind 12 years of the Bloomberg administration and moves forward with a new, very different mayor. How has the City changed in the last 30 or so years? How did charter reform change the City? How has the City coped with deindustrialization? With gentrification? Will crime go back up? Is New York the same or a dramatically different city from what it was in 1980? What about housing? Occupy Wall Street? In class, we ask a lot of questions and put them into historical perspective.</p>

Cities are engines of innovation. Also, they always have been repositories of collective memory. How do we balance these conflicting purposes? This course looks at the long history of efforts to preserve historic buildings and &ldquo;cultural heritage&rdquo; in places around the world, with a particular focus on New York City. Among the things we will look at are the many great losses that the city has endured, the successful movement to create the Landmarks Law (1965), the destruction of Penn Station, the recent controversies concerning the New York Public Library and the Frick Collection, the impact of gentrification on the historic character of such places as Manhattan&rsquo;s Meatpacking District, adaptive reuse of old buildings (and such structures as the High Line), and much more.

Since ancient times, civilizations have sought to define their shared cultural identity by erecting memorials and monuments. From triumphal arches of ancient Rome to the National 9/11 Memorial at the World Trade Center site, the built environment is replete with commemorative architecture, erected to honor noble citizens and memorialize momentous events. Today, many of these architectural treasures are often overlooked, misunderstood, or forgotten entirely. In this course, explore the contemporary issues associated with memorials and monuments by learning to observe, question, and investigate their historic significance in order to gain new appreciation for and an understanding of these architectural treasures. Case studies will be examined both in the classroom and in six walking tours of some of New York City&rsquo;s most iconic monuments.

New York is known as a center of art, culture, and finance, but the most prominent images of the physical city are its great buildings and bridges, its parks and transportation network, and its statues. Many are with us still, such as the Brooklyn Bridge, the Woolworth Building, the Empire State Building, the Chrysler Building, and Rockefeller Center, but some have been ripped from the city&rsquo;s fabric, such as the Singer Building, the world&rsquo;s tallest in 1908. In a series of eight illustrated lectures, explore the fascinating stories behind the city&rsquo;s great structures, present and past.

The growing gap between rich and poor, record housing shortages, unstoppable gentrification. This could describe New York City today, but it also describes the city in the 1920s. In this course, explore New York and the United States from the end of World War I in 1918 to the stock market crash of 1929, as postwar New York gained a new global importance and surpassed London as the center of world finance. Rising prosperity, new cultural forms (jazz, movies, musical comedy), and new technologies (cars, radio) transformed people&rsquo;s lives. We will look at architecture (Sutton Place, Chrysler Building), fashion (flappers, Hattie Carnegie, Poiret, Vionnet), Prohibition, the 19th Amendment, the Harlem Renaissance (W. E. B. Du Bois, Aaron Douglas), the anti-immigration movement, the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, and much more in a wide-ranging, fully illustrated survey of the city in one of its headiest times.

Catch the excitement of 19th-century New York City&mdash;a boomtown, a promised land, and a place of social upheaval. New modes of transportation bring great wealth to the city and facilitate changes in daily life. Waves of new immigrants provide cheap labor for growing industries. The line of settlement moves up the island as social conflicts and the Civil War take their toll. This course will include four illustrated lectures and four walking tours to Washington Square, Chelsea, Hell&rsquo;s Kitchen, and Grand Central Terminal.

A hallmark of New York City&rsquo;s transportation system is its efficiency, but the aesthetic treasures of some of these engineered spaces&mdash;both sung and unsung&mdash;are what make the system glorious. Consider the beauty and functionality of mosaics and bas-reliefs in the subway; Grand Central Terminal, both inside and out; and the new transportation hub in lower Manhattan&mdash;a real &ldquo;Calatravaganza.&rdquo; From iconic structures such as Eero Saarinen&rsquo;s TWA Building at JFK Airport to hidden details like the depictions of life preservers worked into a balustrade on an East River pier, New York City&rsquo;s system is among the greatest in the world. And just think of glories past&mdash;the elevated stations that resembled Swiss chalets, the original Pennsylvania Station, and more.

Finding a place to live in New York City has been a problem since the place was called New Amsterdam. Private houses became prohibitively expensive early on, and shortly thereafter, boarding houses and inns sprang up to fill the void. Multifamily dwelling units were beginning to be built by the early 19th century, followed by residential hotels, and then, in the 1870s, the City saw its first apartment house for the middle class&mdash;the Stuyvesant on East 18th Street. Novelists such as Edith Wharton and William Dean Howells wrote about the situation, and contemporary writers and journalists continue to cover the issue today. Join us for eight illustrated lectures to explore the best and the meanest of New York real estate, from cheap lodging houses to Billionaires&rsquo; Row, and everything in between.

New York City is famous for its architecture&mdash;the Empire State Building, Grand Central Terminal, and One World Trade Center. But have you ever wondered what was there before these buildings were constructed? For example, Pennsylvania Station was once a Beaux-Arts masterpiece, the original Waldorf Astoria Hotel was razed to make way for the Empire State Building, and Madison Square Park used to be home to Madison Square Garden. Through a series of illustrated lectures and walking tours, we will explore some of New York&rsquo;s most iconic, and a few lesser-known, landmarks, revealing the stories of what was lost in the quest to build the city&rsquo;s constantly changing skyline.

Religion has played an extremely important role in the history of the world, of the United States, and of New York City. It does not matter if you are religious, atheist, or agnostic: to understand history, you have to know about religion and the differences among faiths and denominations. For example, you can&rsquo;t begin to understand the anti-slavery movement without knowing about evangelical Protestantism in the 19th century. And to understand the New York of today, you must understand how churches, synagogues, and mosques helped to give neighborhoods their distinct identities. In this course, we will look at the role of religion in New York history and in New York today, in part through the lens of the City&rsquo;s religious landmarks. The focus will be on Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, as well as atheism. We will cover others, too, as the City today is more religiously diverse than ever.

New York City is known for its great parks, and there is none more famous than Central Park. The city is also full of smaller parks, squares, and green spaces that offer residents and visitors places for recreation, reflection, or rest from city life. This course will study some of these delightful public spaces and examine how their designs help New Yorkers and visitors to enjoy the great outdoors in the heart of the city. Case studies are examined both in the classroom and on six walking tours of some of New York City&rsquo;s most iconic public outdoor spaces, including Bryant Park, Madison Square, and the High Line.

Jazz Age Harlem in the 1920s and 1930s may be best known for the work of musical giants such as Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Louis Armstrong, Ethel Waters, and Chick Webb, but the flowering of art and literature that came to be known as the &ldquo;Harlem Renaissance&rdquo; is of equal note. James Weldon Johnson&rsquo;s &ldquo;Black Manhattan&rdquo; was the seedbed of writers and poets, such as Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, and Zora Neale Hurston, and of sculptors and painters, like Richmond Barth&eacute;, Aaron Douglas, Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller, Palmer Hayden, Augusta Savage, and Lo&iuml;s Mailou Jones. Harlem also became the site of intense intellectual debate and analysis, about African American identity, politics and religion in America, and the New York cultural scene, raising questions such as whether a Harlem artist or writer would better be served by seeing himself or herself as a Black artist or as an American modernist. We will explore these issues in essay selections by Harlem writers Alain Locke, Langston Hughes, W. E. B. Du Bois, and more.

Through four centuries of explosive growth, New York City emerged as one of the world&rsquo;s most important commercial, industrial, financial, and cultural capitals. In this course, we offer a framework for understanding the city&rsquo;s varied and eventful history, from its Native American roots through the 9/11 terrorist attacks to the Bloomberg administration. We examine many different facets of the city&rsquo;s growth, including its politics, finance, architecture, arts, high life and low life, immigrant cultures, and national and international importance. We also highlight some of the city&rsquo;s most significant figures, such as Alexander Hamilton, DeWitt Clinton, Robert Moses, and Jane Jacobs.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Edith Wharton and Theodore Dreiser were the greatest literary chroniclers of New York. In <em>The House of Mirth, The Age of Innocence,</em> and <em>The Custom of the Country,</em> Wharton, a native Manhattanite, provided a brutally honest portrait of upper-class New York. Dreiser, who came to New York from Chicago, gave us, in <em>Sister Carrie,</em> an unforgettable description of metropolitan triumph and ruin, a searing evocation of a broad swath of New York life. This course involves reading and discussion, and the instructor will provide the historical background needed for a full appreciation.

Discover how the Irish experience in New York City differed from the Italian experience, why certain buildings took on a particular style, and what a stream and a statue have to do with the design of Greenwich Village. Learn why African Americans settled in Harlem, find out how New York City established its magnificent Central Park, and discover the hidden charms of Chelsea. These are among the topics discussed in four walking tours and four lively slide-illustrated talks.

From Green-Wood Cemetery and Central Park in the 19th century to the parks of Robert Moses in the 20th century, New York has long laid claim to a rich legacy of landscape design. In recent decades, however, New York has emerged as perhaps the world&rsquo;s leading showcase of landscape planning. Such renowned figures as James Corner, Michael Van Valkenburgh, Piet Oudolf, West 8, Lynden B. Miller, and many others have transformed the city&rsquo;s postindustrial landscape with such works as Brooklyn Bridge Park, the High Line, and Hudson River Park. Through lively online discussions, trace the history of the design of public spaces in New York City.

Twentieth-century New York City has a vast and varied architectural history. This online class focuses on four different aspects: Grand Central Terminal, the great Broadway theatres, art deco, and the original World Trade Center. Grand Central epitomizes the Beaux-Arts approach to grand urban monuments and planning. The Broadway theatres themselves are works of art and architecture, featuring museum-quality murals and stained glass. Though art deco in New York began as a skyscraper style, it spread to buildings of all kinds and still defines much of the city&rsquo;s visual character. The World Trade Center was by far the city&rsquo;s largest building project of the post-World War II era, and its Twin Towers once symbolized the city&rsquo;s might.

Baseball is an important part of New York&rsquo;s history. In the city where the game was developed and its rules codified, baseball served&mdash;as perhaps no other institution or pastime did&mdash;to bring diverse New Yorkers together and to make immigrants feel at home in their new land. This course will look at baseball as part of New York&rsquo;s history and at the history of baseball itself, from the antebellum days of Alexander Cartwright&rsquo;s New York Knickerbockers and Brooklyn&rsquo;s rich baseball history, to the modern Yankees, Giants, Dodgers, and Mets; the Negro Leagues and Jackie Robinson&rsquo;s breaking of Major League Baseball&rsquo;s color barrier; and today. The course will be of interest even to those who are not fans of the sport&mdash;though by the end of the course you likely will be&mdash;and you will learn about many aspects of the game, up to and including the modern analytics that were the subject of the book and movie <em>Moneyball.</em>

Grand Central Terminal celebrates its 100th anniversary this year. The celebration, and the controversial proposed rezoning of East Midtown, offer an opportunity to rediscover this remarkable district. After exploring one of the world&#8217;s most beautiful train stations, visit Rockefeller Center, another attempt to rebuild an entire section of Midtown. Visit the Broadway theater district to consider its story of resurrection via public policy and private development, and the Garment District, created by reform movements. End with a look at Midtown&#8217;s privately built public plazas (Sony, Trump, and IBM), and compare them to Greenacre Park, a Rockefeller project.

New York City&rsquo;s museums overflow with the world&rsquo;s greatest treasures&mdash;it&rsquo;s why many of us choose to live here! How on earth did all these treasures end up in New York? In this course, examine the amazing history of the transoceanic transfer of artwork that took place from the 19th to the 21st centuries; the lives of the often eccentric collectors (including Morgan, Altman, Frick, Louisine Havemeyer, the Rockefellers, and the Wrightsmans); and the dealers and museums (Met, MoMA, Frick, and Whitney) that&mdash;thanks to these collections&mdash;are now considered to be among the most important in the world. Along with stories of intrigue, daring, scandal, farce, and generosity, the course will provide a guide to the treasures to be seen in New York. Each weekly lecture will be fully illustrated with slides.

New York City has inspired countless artists to create unforgettable images in print, paint, photography, film, and television. From the 19th-century lithographs of Currier and Ives to the contemporary films of Woody Allen, learn how images from the city's multifaceted history deepen our understanding of the city as it was, as it is today, and how it has been imagined, idealized, and, at times denigrated, by visual artists throughout the ages. Explore the impact these images have had on perceptions of the city and examine how New York inspires images that then, reciprocally, influence it.

When New York City was mostly farms, &ldquo;farm to table&rdquo; was the norm. With urbanization, where did our food sources go? How have New Yorkers&mdash;working class, middle class, upper class&mdash;eaten through the centuries? How have immigrants shaped the city&rsquo;s food culture? Delve into the ethnic foodways of New York City and the history of dining out (from haute cuisine to street vendors), as we ask how our food-obsessed culture of the 21st century is informed by a historical understanding of food in New York City. Throughout the course, discuss oysters, hot corn, terrapin, bagels, sushi, diet crazes, and more.

Incorporated as a city in 1834, Brooklyn was the nation&#8217;s fourth largest city when it merged with New York City in 1898. Today, Brooklyn still is the fourth largest city in the nation, more populous than Houston or Philadelphia, and one of the most diverse places on earth. Explore the history of the six towns of Kings County (established in 1684) that formed the City and Borough of Brooklyn, and look at the New England Puritans of 19th-century Brooklyn Heights, the Hasidic Jews of 20th-century Borough Park, the hipsters of Williamsburg, and everything in between.

New York City residents may be familiar with their own neighborhood landmarks. Few, however, know the monuments and architectural contexts of other communities. Despite a few similarities, each neighborhood is stylistically and structurally distinct. The architecture ranges from Upper East Side neoclassical townhouses to Greenwich Village Greek Revival rowhouses; from Lower East Side tenements to Upper West Side apartment houses built in styles that vary from federal to Beaux Arts to art deco. Join us for one lecture and seven walking tours of the city's most architecturally interesting and eclectic neighborhoods.

Harlem wouldn&#8217;t be Harlem without the elevated railroads, and Sunnyside Gardens wouldn&#8217;t be the same without the subway. In this illustrated lecture course, explore how New York City came to look the way it does and why its infrastructure is the glue that holds it all together. Learn about the Commissioners&#8217; Plan of 1811, which gave New York the gridiron street plan, and discover how laws have come to govern the design of the City&#8217;s buildings. Discuss the Zoning Law of 1916, which led to the ziggurat form and freestanding towers, and learn how public works have influenced neighborhoods.

<p>New York architecture evolves in ways that reflect changing lifestyles, and also helps foster those changes. This course looks at six episodes of change: the beginnings of commuting and rise of domesticity, reflected in changing row house styles in the 1830s; the rise of apartment living in the late 19th century; the planned communities and garden suburbs of the early 20th century; relaxed modern lifestyles, &ldquo;gentrification,&rdquo; and the row house renovation movement of the early 20th century; the boom in modern apartments (especially white brick high rises) after World War II; and our adaptations to the post-industrial city of the early 21st century. The course will touch on many topics in social history and urban technology.</p>

This course will examine the rich history of hospitality and dining in New York City. In the first class, we will explore the history of the hospitality industry and some of its most alluring spaces such as the Starlight Roof at the Waldorf and The Forum of the Twelve Caesars. In subsequent classes, we will gain behind-the-scenes insights through guided visits to famous hotels and restaurants such as Daniel, The Leopard at des Artistes, La Mirabelle, the Baccarat Hotel, The New Yorker Hotel, and the Knickerbocker Hotel. During these visits, we will have access to a perspective not available to the public, and we will meet some of the movers and shakers who work behind the scenes. The final class with feature special guest Jonathan Cohen, an esteemed risk management expert for fine restaurants in New York City.

Through novels, stories, essays, poems, and journal extracts by New York&rsquo;s finest writers, examine how the City&rsquo;s diverse population&mdash;working class, upper class, immigrants, bluebloods, bohemians, and businessmen; young and old; male and female; black and white; Latino and Asian; and gay and straight&mdash;has experienced urban life. Great summer reading will be combined with urban studies in a course meant to stand on its own or to supplement additional courses on New York history.

<p><i>How the Other Half Lives</i>, Jacob Riis&rsquo;s gripping account of the miseries of lower-class life in New York City at the turn of the 20th century, had its flip side then and still does today. Join us for an exploration of housing the masses, the solid and not-so-solid middle classes, and the chosen few, from the days when New York was perched on the edge of the wilderness to its current position at the center of the world.</p>

<P>Call it what you will&#8211;&#8211;the Great White Way, <I>Heere Straat</I>, the Broad Wagon Way, the Albany Post Road, the Boulevard&#8211;&#8211;Broadway is Broadway and it is, without question, great.&nbsp;Countless books have been written about it, from its southern tip at Bowling Green and all the way to Albany; still others have been written about small stretches of Broadway, such as Ladies' Mile and Times Square. Join us for one illustrated lecture and seven walking tours to see today's Broadway, beginning at Bowling Green and taking us as far north as we can go in seven walks.<BR></P>

Whether you consider yourself to be a lifelong New Yorker or a recent transplant, you will find that New York City contains countless surprises. In this course, venture off the beaten path to find out about NYC experiences that you shouldn&rsquo;t miss, from budget-friendly to break-the-bank. Skip the tourist traps and instead explore the Grolier Club or the mosaics surrounding Grant&rsquo;s Tomb. Celebrate Verdi&rsquo;s birthday on Broadway with a walk and a sing-along, find a labyrinth in a landmarked church, and tap your toe to jazz where the elite meet. Receive extensive handouts on how to maximize NYC, including beneficial memberships, a list of not-your-run-of-the-mill New York guidebooks, and intriguing volunteering opportunities. Finally, spend two sessions exploring some of the City&rsquo;s hidden gems together as a class. Field trips may include special behind-the-scenes tours of the New York Public Library&rsquo;s Stephen A. Schwarzman Building and the Carlyle Hotel, including its famous Bemelmans Bar.

New York is known as a center of art, culture, and finance, but the most prominent images of the physical city are its great buildings and bridges, its parks and transportation network, and its statues. In a series of eight illustrated lectures, explore the fascinating stories behind the city&#8217;s great structures. Many are with us still, such as Brooklyn Bridge, the Woolworth Building, the Empire State Building, the Chrysler Building, and Rockefeller Center. Some were ripped from the city&#8217;s fabric, such as the Singer Building, the world&#8217;s tallest in 1908.

Alexander Hamilton, the subject of the most acclaimed Broadway musical of our time, came to New York as an immigrant with a dream; got caught up in the Revolution; and, at a shockingly young age, became one of the most important individuals in the new nation. Arguably, no other &ldquo;Founding Father&rdquo; so shaped the destiny of the United States. Hamilton&rsquo;s story culminated on June 11, 1804, when he was shot dead in a duel by Vice President Aaron Burr. Burr, who unlike Hamilton was to the manner born, was frustratingly hard to know, though similarly remarkable. In this course, both Hamilton&rsquo;s and Burr&rsquo;s stories will be told against the rich background of a fast-growing mercantile city with global reach&mdash;a city physically and morally devastated by the Revolution, but one that rose to become, by the time of Hamilton&rsquo;s death, one of the most important port cities of the world, and, by the time of Burr&rsquo;s death (1836), the &ldquo;London of the New World.&rdquo; Go beyond the story told in the hit Broadway show and discover the <em>real</em> men behind these legendary figures.

Between the opening of the Erie Canal and the Civil War, New York became the &ldquo;Empire City,&rdquo; the preeminent commercial metropolis of the nation. Our modern world came into being, with telegraph, modern newspapers, railroads, water supply, and new forms of retailing and entertainment. It was the age of Greek revival and Gothic revival architecture, the Hudson River School of painting, Whitman&rsquo;s poetry, Central Park, and opera at Castle Garden. It also was the era of the great waves of Irish and German immigration, the &ldquo;Gangs of New York,&rdquo; and two depressions. This course will depict how modern New York came into being.

Central Park is one of the greatest works of art of the 19th century, the greatest work of architecture in New York, and a fascinating example of 19th-century social engineering. This course provides an in-depth history of Central Park, as well as close looks at the lives and works of the park&rsquo;s many creators&mdash;especially Calvert Vaux and Frederick Law Olmsted, whose many other designs will also be discussed. These topics will be examined against the background of a city that was growing, changing, and confronting new problems as few&mdash;if any&mdash;cities ever had before.

For about 30 years in New York City and for 40 years in New York State, Robert Moses wielded improbable power over the physical development and character of New York City. Few of his ideas&mdash;or his prejudices&mdash;were his alone, and very similar patterns that are associated with Moses can be seen in multiple cities throughout the United States. The difference, of course, is that in other cities &ldquo;master builders&rdquo; seldom prevailed for so long or were quite as fiercely determined as Moses, which makes him the emblem for a whole chapter of American urban history. What was the nature of Moses&rsquo;s accomplishments? How did he transform, help, or hurt his city? And what is his legacy and how does it continue to affect our lives today?

Holding the title of New York City parks commissioner, and eventually many other unelected but exceedingly powerful administrative offices over a 50-year career, master builder and power broker Robert Moses oversaw one of the greatest urban rebuilding programs in human history. He began with parkway and beach projects that opened Long Island to a general middle class population. He then went on to complete vast infrastructure projects, including &ldquo;slum clearance&rdquo; and urban rebuilding programs that radically reconceptualized &ldquo;The City of Tomorrow&rdquo; (to borrow the language of the 1939 World&rsquo;s Fair). Eventually, Moses&rsquo;s automobile-centered vision was countered by urban activists, such as Jane Jacobs, whose vision of urban neighborhoods with vital and varied street life eventually blocked his plans to run superhighways through Greenwich Village, SoHo, Little Italy, Chinatown, and the Lower East Side. We will look at selected passages from Jacobs&rsquo;s tremendously influential book, <em>The Death and Life of Great American Cities</em> (1961), and we will discuss how her contrasting idea of urban street life holds up more than a half century after it challenged the urban planning establishment.

Neighborhoods have a way of changing. Some neighborhoods (think of Five Points, once the lowest of the low) have disappeared altogether, while others that catered to the upper crust (St. John&rsquo;s Park, for instance) are not only gone but also for the most part now totally forgotten. And so the story continues. A neighborhood that was the cr&egrave;me de la cr&egrave;me a generation ago is today&rsquo;s skim milk, and warehouse neighborhoods that harbored light industry only yesterday house kazillion-dollar condos today. Join us via Zoom for six neighborhood &ldquo;walks&rdquo; through history.

<p>Longacre Square was the center of the carriage trade, Hamilton Square might have beckoned for a nice picnic, and the Boulevard was a favorite place to show off your four-in-hand skills. Yes, those were real places in 19th century New York City. Longacre Square is today&rsquo;s Times Square, the Boulevard is Broadway from 59th to 155th Streets, and Hamilton Square, which stretched from Third Avenue to Fifth Avenue between 66th and 69th Streets, was simply demapped and developed. The city still owns some of the land, and the great firehouse and police station (the Nineteen) on 67th Street date from the 1880s. Join us in this in-person class to learn more about this changing city, from brownstones to apartment houses, from horse cars to subways. Questions? Contact us at The Center for Applied Liberal Arts (CALA). Email sps.cala@nyu.edu or call 212-998-7289.</p>

Discover how New York City&rsquo;s fascinating past illuminates its vibrant life today. Through lectures and walking tours, discover in depth the history of various Lower Manhattan neighborhoods, as well as fascinating insights into New York&rsquo;s natural environment. Topics include New York&rsquo;s pre-European topography; Dutch New Amsterdam and life after the American Revolution; the street patterns of Greenwich Village; and the history of neighborhoods, including the Financial District, the West Village, the Five Points area, and the East Village.

In the mid-19th century, diarist and New York City Mayor Philip Hone said, &ldquo;The whole of New York is rebuilt about once in 10 years.&rdquo; The dynamic nature of the City&rsquo;s landscape means that no two Manhattan neighborhoods are the same. Even within neighborhoods there are differences, sometimes on a block-by-block basis. Some swaths might seem to have been built at the same time and cut from the same cloth, but the average neighborhood has developed over time. Join us for eight illustrated lectures to see how neighborhoods change with the times and how the look of the City changes with ever-evolving architectural styles.

Residents on one side of Central Park or the other may feel like they need a visa to visit the other side. Both sides of the park began developing in a serious fashion within a decade or so of each other by the late 19th century with the arrival of public transportation. Join us to discover the economic, social, and cultural factors that contributed to Central Park&rsquo;s renowned neighborhoods. Find out what&rsquo;s left of the neighborhoods&rsquo; early development, including unique landmarks such as a late-18th-century house overlooking the East River, and the changes that have come since to create the Upper East Side and the Upper West Side that we know today.

<p>There are exclusive residential areas like Sutton Place, and then there are the even more exclusive secrets, such as Riverview Terrace&ndash;&ndash;it&rsquo;s like a gated community without the gates). Start the course with an illustrated lecture on Manhattan&rsquo;s neighborhoods in general, and then take seven walks to see some of the neighborhoods firsthand&mdash;including Hamilton Terrace, Henderson Place, and Sniffen Court&mdash;while learning about the secrets within them.</p>

As the world faces an uncertain environmental future, the density and energy efficiency of cities provide answers to vexing problems. There has been a revival of urban living as people recognize the advantages and conveniences of residing in cities. Examine the great urban theorists and their work including Charles Robinson and the "City Beautiful," Ebenezer Howard and the "Golden City," Le Corbusier and the "Radiant City" of high-rises, and Jane Jacobs with her defense of dense, polyglot cities.

<p>Manhattan's Upper West Side, from Columbus Circle to Morningside Heights, is filled with architectural glories for all to see. Some, such as the four twin-towered apartment houses on Central Park West, define the skyline, while others, such as the idiosyncratic rowhouses by Clarence True, are tucked away and easily overlooked. This course features an illustrated lecture on the history of the neighborhood and seven walks to explore the area up close.</p>

In 10 weeks, this course covers 10 issues facing New York City, including COVID-19, the state of the subway system, gentrification, city finances, the impact of climate change, and city-state relations. These are just some of the issues we may discuss, as we will shape our conversations according to the most pressing matters at hand. We then will view these topics through a historical lens: Have we been down this road before? How did we do? How have other cities managed? The goal is to be the best-informed citizens we can be.

Spend an afternoon contemplating the tremendous changes brought about in mid-19th-century New York City by huge demographic, socioeconomic, and political changes. We will begin with the story of the rise of New York as &ldquo;The Empire State,&rdquo; which encompasses the early waves of 19th-century German and Irish immigration. Lower Manhattan sees the burgeoning of the notorious Five Points district, home of the &ldquo;Gangs of New York,&rdquo; and the contentious politics that led to the Draft Riots. While others deplore the tumultuous new diversity of NYC, Walt Whitman famously sacralizes it in <em>Leaves of Grass.</em> Meanwhile, Olmsted and Vaux, motivated by the healing values of nature, design Central Park and Prospect Park. We&rsquo;ll consider the parks as landscape design masterpieces, as well as examples of a budding social reform movement, attempting to accommodate the needs of a new culturally and ethnically diverse New York.

Explore the culture of New York City in the 20th century prior to the Crash of &rsquo;29 and the Great Depression. It is the New York City of Theodore Roosevelt and the Progressive Era, the Ashcan School painters of Greenwich Village, the 1913 Armory Show, and the advent of modernism. F. Scott Fitzgerald famously represented the era not only in <em>The Great Gatsby</em> (1925), but also in his poignantly personal <em>Jazz Age</em> essays. This is the era when Greenwich Village emerged prominently as an artistic, intellectual, and politically activist center of New York life. Village intellectuals involved themselves in multiple and sometimes contrarian affiliations&mdash;with radical labor leaders such as the Wobblies&rsquo; &ldquo;Big Bill&rdquo; Haywood, along with Fifth Avenue socialites and art collectors such as Mabel Dodge Luhan. This also is the era when New York City architecture turns distinctly vertical, and we trace the evolution of New York buildings from Beaux-Arts monumentality to the development of the skyscraper, culminating with the iconic Empire State Building project.

Experience the culture of New York City in the 1930s, when Mayor La Guardia won the support of the federal government under Franklin D. Roosevelt for the stimulus spending policies that would come to be known as the New Deal. During these &ldquo;lean years,&rdquo; NYC civic culture turned more and more toward social realism, finding expression in WPA mural art and in provocative Federal Theatre projects. We will look closely at two of the most distinctive Depression-era projects: the creation of Rockefeller Center and the story of Diego Rivera&rsquo;s ill-fated mural, <em>Man at the Crossroads;</em> and the staging of Marc Blitzstein&rsquo;s agitprop musical, <em>The Cradle Will Rock.</em> At the other end of the cultural spectrum, this was also an era of blatant escapism as found in the musical extravaganzas of Busby Berkeley and the Ziegfeld Follies&mdash;although sometimes even there, shades of social concern emerge when least expected. The period culminates with the New York World&rsquo;s Fair of 1939 and its vision of &ldquo;The World of Tomorrow&rdquo;&mdash;ironically, a vision very much at odds with the urban character of New York City.

<p>Explore the history of transportation in New York City from concept and design to development. Learn about the waterfront, the highways and airports, the railroads, the elevated trains, and the subway system. Topics include the role of government and how funding is allocated, street signs and bus stops, way finding and mapping, and the fascinating subject of the dreaded subway quiz.</p>

Beginning with reflections on the cultural geography of the island known in some Native languages as &ldquo;Mannahatta,&rdquo; this seminar looks at the earliest European encounters with Native Algonquian peoples, at the process by which the Dutch West India Company established the polity of New Amsterdam, and at the survival of Dutch culture in succeeding centuries. We explore the 17th-century relations between the Low Countries and England, the transfer of authority to the British Crown, and the story of colonial New York through the French and Indian War, the American Revolution, and the establishment of New York as the first capital of the United States. We conclude with a look at the urban plan and the art and culture of New York in the federalist period and the early 19th century.

Many great structures have been erected during the course of New York City&#8217;s history, including the Empire State Building, the Brooklyn Bridge, Lever House, and Saint Patrick&#8217;s Cathedral. Other great ones have come down, like Pennsylvania Station (still making the news), the Singer Tower (the world&#8217;s tallest building when erected in 1908), the first Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, and the nationally historic building on Wall Street in which George Washington took his oath of office. Join us for a series of eight illustrated lectures to explore what some visionary builders erected and what some shortsighted citizens tore down.

<p>Healthy, vibrant cities have a way of changing. The residential neighborhood that ringed Madison Square in the mid-nineteenth century was becoming a commercial office center by the turn of the twentieth century, and by the turn of the twenty-first century, it was returning to residential again, sometimes by repurposing former office buildings. Today&rsquo;s stretch of commercial office buildings on Park Avenue north of Grand Central Terminal was lined instead by high-class apartment houses in its earlier incarnation beginning in the 1910s, and before that, when the New York Central Railroad still operated its trains at street level, it was a strip of light manufacturing. Steinway built pianos on the site of today&rsquo;s Seagram Building, and Schaeffer brewed its beer on the site of today&rsquo;s St. Bartholomew&rsquo;s Church. Join us for four classes celebrating changing neighborhoods, and the changing city. Questions? Contact us at The Center for Applied Liberal Arts (CALA). Email sps.cala@nyu.edu or call 212-998-7289.</p>

<p>A few cities have at different times been centers of boundless artistic creativity. In describing the achievements of 10 such cities we will ask: Why? What circumstances encouraged this artistic output? What is the role of trade in the growth of artistic centers? How do democracies differ from aristocracies as incubators of the arts? Above all, what was the nature of the accomplishment? Cities covered include 15th-century Florence, 16th-century Venice and Rome, 17th-century Amsterdam and Delft, early 19th-century London, mid-19th-century Paris, turn-of-the-20th-century Vienna and Chicago, and New York and Los Angeles between the world wars. The lectures will be illustrated with slides.</p>

<p>This year marks the 50th anniversary of New York City&rsquo;s Landmarks Law. Explore major moments in the growth of the preservation movement in four fascinating walks. On these tours, visit Margot Gayle&rsquo;s Tribeca&mdash;the work of the legendary preservation pioneer who promoted the protection of the City&rsquo;s cast-iron architecture; major landmarks battles in midtown Manhattan, including the Villard Houses, St. Bart&rsquo;s, Lever House, and Grand Central Terminal; the reimagined Times Square/Broadway theatre district with preserved historic theatres; and SoHo, featuring 19th-century cast-iron buildings and 20th- and 21st-century neighbors, in an attempt to balance the original character with a modern sensibility.</p>

<p>Just as Dickens is unthinkable without London (and London without Dickens), James, Wharton, and Howells are unthinkable without New York. Look at New York through their works and at their works through New York. Discuss Wharton&rsquo;s <em>The Age of Innocence</em> and <em>The House of Mirth</em>, James&rsquo;s <em>Washington Square</em> and &ldquo;The Jolly Corner,&rdquo; and Howells&rsquo;s <em>A Hazard of New Fortunes</em>. The course&rsquo;s theme is New York as a character in their fiction, and these authors as characters in the drama that is New York.</p>

We tend to think of New York as a &ldquo;new&rdquo; city, a single entity that exists only in the present. But not only is New York City not entirely new, it is in fact composed of a number of older municipalities joined together only in the last century. Through an introductory lecture and five walking tours, explore the still visible remnants of these distinct towns and cities, including a company town in Queens, a community of middle class and experimental apartments in that borough, workers&rsquo; housing in Brooklyn, and a religious settlement that evolved into a gambling paradise.

New York City has been the national capital of book publishing and bookselling for 200 years. Trace the history of book publishing in New York from 1800 to today, and consider the history of bookstores in the context of the City&rsquo;s changing economy and culture. Discuss Harper, Scribner, Wiley, Simon &amp; Schuster, Random House, and other publishers, as well as booksellers from Brentano&rsquo;s to the fabled Book Row. What has the book meant to New York&mdash;and New York to the book? And does the publishing world&rsquo;s changed nature mean that the storied relationship between book and City is about to end?

In the past, many artists believed that their highest calling was the embellishment of the public realm. Art wasn&rsquo;t meant to be shut up in museums, but rather to enrich people&rsquo;s everyday lives. New York has a legacy of great public art&mdash;the equal, in the last 300 years, of any city. In this course, we will survey the city&rsquo;s statues, murals, fountains, and other public installations, looking at styles and movements, meanings, and public reception, from Joseph Wilton&rsquo;s statue of King George III that was toppled by revolutionaries in July 1776 to the temporary installations of such contemporary artists as Jeff Koons and Kara Walker.

New York entered the 20th century at the height of the City Beautiful era, which produced such masterpieces as the New York Public Library and Grand Central Terminal. After World War I, however, the old verities were rejected. The 1920s gave us art deco, and after World War II, New York turned to International Style (a term coined by the Museum of Modern Art in 1932), which was a form of modernism. The 1980s rebelled against orthodox modernism, and we&rsquo;re still in the era of &ldquo;starchitects,&rdquo; picking up the pieces. Here is a full, unbiased, lavishly illustrated survey of a century of New York City architecture.

Turn-of-the-20th-century New York City was renowned for the Fifth Avenue mansions of &ldquo;the 400&rdquo; and for the grandiose Beaux-Arts public buildings of New York&rsquo;s high culture. But there was another New York, vastly removed from these refined and rarefied zones; it was <em>How the Other Half Lives,</em> a teeming world of immigrants and tenements concentrated in New York&rsquo;s Lower East Side famously exposed by the crusading journalist/reformer and Danish immigrant Jacob Riis, whose work laid much of the groundwork for the Progressive Era policies of social reform. It also is a world reflected in the literary work of socially conscientious writers such as Stephen Crane and the pioneering Yiddish writer Abraham Cahan.