An epic art show at the Lexington Avenue Armory made a young Marcel Duchamp, who was back in France, one of America’s first modern celebrities even before he first arrived in New York City for what became decades of painting, conceiving, chess-playing and love-making — though not always in that order. John Strausbaugh, the author […]
LIT NYC
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LISTEN: The Vital Records of Mr. George Rex, ‘The Last Slave’
There’s a startling occupation listed in entry 983 of the death ledger for the town of Newtown, Queens covering the years 1881-1897: “The Last Slave.” Department of Records Associate Commissioner Kenneth Cobb and Research Associate Marcia Kirk visited Lit NYC to explain how the Municipal Archives found that entry, what they’ve learned since then about […]
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LISTEN: Reviving the Missing Link in Queens
*When this is built, I want New Yorkers to take it for granted” that’s there a north-south train line in Queens, says Andrew Lynch, the chief operating officer of QueensLink. “I want people to take this and never think about it”. The geographer, cartographer and urban explorer joins Lit NYC to discuss the group’s vision […]
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LISTEN: The Other Guy Was No Joke
Joe Flaherty was a dock worker and high school dropout on the wrong side of 30 when he found an unexpected writer’s life beginning as a columnist for the Village Voice. A couple years later, he was running the 51st State campaign of Norman Mailer and Jimmy Breslin as two of the city’s most famous […]
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LISTEN: ‘The Master Plan of New York is the Subway’
Mamdani swept into City Hall on hopes and dreams of making the city affordable, and the key to affordability in New York City is housing. People are not moving out of New York City because the bus fare is three dollars. People are moving out because they can’t afford the rent. Child care is too […]
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LISTEN ‘The Last Confederate Widow’ of 1960s Cruising
That sense of mystery is something that a lot of my better photographs have, and The Ramble at the time exuded a kind of mysterious… 19th century romanticism of the English garden that gave you that kind of experience. I used it as a kind of leitmotif when I was creating the photos, a kind […]
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LISTEN: The Resurrection of a Brooklyn Icon
An iconic restaurant in Fulton Mall became an Arby’s, before it was revived amid the pandemic. St. John Frizell, one of the new stewards of Gage and Tollner, joins Lit NYC hosts Amy Sohn and Harry Siegel to talk about the craft of the cocktail, the business of Brooklyn, the nature of the great good […]
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LISTEN: One Simple Secret for Pleasantly Populated Public Spaces
In 1980, a movie narrated by a sociologist once described as Jimmy Stewart’s urban planner cousin, and full of surveillance footage of the city’s public spaces, delivered perhaps the richest and wisest look ever made at how New Yorkers use the city’s public spaces. Municipal Art Society president Keri Butler joins LIT NYC hosts Harry […]
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LISTEN: Kishkes, Knishes and a Lost New York City
In my quest to be more American than Americans, I wanted to know more than American music [and in 1972] I was staying with a great fiddle player and banjo player in North Carolina named Tommy Jarrell and he was puzzled, because a lot of the people who had come from up north to study […]
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LISTEN: A Vision for NYC’s Deliveristas and a Battery-Powered Future
“I bought myself an electric bike to take my kids to the beach and started charging it outside after seeing stats on how many battery fires there were. I looked at other countries that are doing battery-swap networks and I said, ‘We should do this in New York… My plan, if I can be this […]