Welcome back to the History Works, following a remarkable early summer. There was a tweet that went around saying “If you're a socialist Knicks fan who loves soccer and lives in a rent-stabilized apartment, June 2026 could end up being the best month of your life,” and while I’m a Knicks fellow traveler (my primary basketball loyalty is to the St. John’s Red Storm and to the Liberty, also winners this month), this all definitely tracks for me. June was an incredible month, full of indelible memories for me and the city at large. And while the vibes around the city in July are a little different, I’m still thinking about that finals run in mid-June. I wrote a little reflection the evening after Game 5, before the parade (and the rent freeze and Gotham winning the Challenge Cup and the Libs winning the Commissioner’s Cup again, this time in front of the seafoam-clad faithful at Barclays, and indeed, the socialist sweep on primary day), which I’ll run here in retrospect:

The thing I’ll remember most about this run, more than 13 straight, the two straight sweeps, the turnaround in vibes from Game 3 to Game 4, capped by the biggest comeback in Finals history and arguably in any sport I’ve seen at least on a single-game basis, the heroics of the last player to wear the #11 shirt for the Knicks (and probably the last #3 and #8 while we’re at it): the seas of humanity seemingly everywhere, assembling by MSG — and under it, in the case of the folks watching in the Moynihan Station food hall; in Fort Greene; at Wollman Rink; at Brooklyn Bowl; and especially the scenes in the West Village, where the stretch from the Village Dispensary to the edges of Sheridan Square were unlike anything I’ve ever seen in this city. (I don’t know how we can put these makeshift plazas in concrete, reclaim the streets for the people beyond the back half or so of a 19-game run, but I hope urban-realm folks in the Mamdani administration are thinking big about this.) Game 5’s clincher was the capper, one where even I decided to leave my apartment and go for a walk around Bay Ridge, where even normally sleepy stretches found blaring horns, throngs of chanting fans (lifelong, bandwagoners, and everything in between), folks parading down 3rd and 5th and Bay Ridge Parkway heads out their sunroofs, Knicks flags flying. I walked with a giddy smile on my face that still comes back to me when I think about it. But it wasn’t just in Bay Ridge a little after midnight, it was everywhere, deep into the wee hours of the morning.

May we have more reasons for municipal ecstasy in the years to come, and more months like June ‘26. On to the links and stuff.

Coming Up Next

Nothing upcoming on the independent side, amid my bumper crop of partnered tours and classes with programming in partnership with Brooklyn Brainery, Untapped New York/Doubleday Books, and the Center for Brooklyn History, as part of their Battle of Brooklyn: Fought and Remembered exhibition. I kicked off the month with my test tour (thanks to Dominique and Lexy at CBH and a couple of nice folks in town from DC who joined along) and I’m really looking forward to running these starting this Saturday!

August 2026

• August 1, 2 pm: The Battle of Brooklyn: Fought and Remembered exhibition tour (at the Center for Brooklyn History)

• August 2, 10:30 am: The Harlem Trilogy Heads Downtown (in partnership with Doubleday Books and exclusive to Untapped New York Insiders)

• August 8, 2 pm: The Battle of Brooklyn at CBH

• August 15, 2 pm: The Battle of Brooklyn at CBH

• August 22, 2 pm (and possibly 11 am as well?): The Battle of Brooklyn at CBH (as part of Battle of Brooklyn Community Day)

• August 29, 2 pm: The Battle of Brooklyn at CBH

September 2026

• September 5, 2 pm: The Battle of Brooklyn at CBH

• September 6, 1 pm: Quenching Brooklyn’s Thirst (with Brooklyn Brainery; also running October 11 at 1 pm)

• September 12, 2 pm: The Battle of Brooklyn at CBH

• September 19, 2 pm: The Battle of Brooklyn at CBH

• September 26, 2 pm: The Battle of Brooklyn at CBH

And stay tuned for some upcoming Brainery classes:

• November 10 and 17 at 6:30 pm: The Olympics that Weren’t (a reworking of the class as a two-parter; Part One on 11/10 will focus on the antecedents to the Giuliani years; Part Two will examine the Bloomberg years into the future)

• December 2 at 6:30: (likely) Quenching Brooklyn’s Thirst

Looking to book a private tour? Email me.

Something from the Archives

One of the segments I dropped from the initial run of the Olympics class (but getting put back in for the two-parter!) focuses on the Giuliani administration and Disneyfication — not just the general policy landscape of making the city more family-friendly, tourist-friendly, and tourist-family-friendly, but in directly working with the literal Walt Disney Company. Michael Eisner and Rudy Giuliani brought the premiere of Pocahontas to the Great Lawn (with yours truly, age three, among the attendees); a renovated New Amsterdam Theater; the Times Square Studios to host Good Morning America; and the ESPNZone. There was even talk of Disney acquiring land at Coney Island (which if I had to guess would have been for their short-lived DisneyQuest VR arcade chain, aka what led to a hole in the ground in the center of Philadelphia). All told, the EDC estimated Disney brought direct impacts to the city, to the tune of $270 million.

And the nexus of Disneyfication and the Olympics was the premiere of Hercules in 1997.

The festivities included a weekend of arcade games and activities at Chelsea Piers (that I kind of remember attending?), a parade and brunch featuring all the American decathlon gold medalists, among other Olympic heroes (because the Olympics came from Greece, just like Heracles!), the film itself at the New Amsterdam, and in its first time it took place outside of a Disney property, the Main Street Electric Parade.

The parade went more than thirty blocks, from 42nd Street between 7th and 8th Avenues to 66th Street and 5th Avenue, requiring Disney and the city to convince hundreds of businesses (including the last of the adult businesses in a gentrifying Times Square) to darken their storefronts. And the convincing worked, as the Disney Channel special broadcast of the parade showed.

Welcome back Sea & Soil!

Our boy Vic got adopted and (for the moment) we’re empty-nesting, so this will be both the sensory stimuli and the outshot. Faithful readers of this newsletter will recall that Sea & Soil, the worker-owned sandwichery/bakery formerly of the Columbia Street Waterfront District, closed its doors to head north to “spot TBA in Cobble Hill” (as I put it in April). After a thirteen-month-ish interregnum that included a handful of pop-ups, one of which I was able to make, that spot TBA emerged on Atlantic Avenue. The former home of the Brooklyn Commons, the new Sea & Soil that is relatively sprawling compared to their cozy (read: cramped) former digs. The sandwiches still slap (the Lucy remains in my top five favorite sandwiches in the city). The baked goods are fantastic, as are the more regularly available pizzas. The bathrooms are clearly marked. There are, like, eight or ten tables, a massive increase from one in the old space. There’s even a cassette station with a selection of tapes (including an Interference Archive-curated mixtape). You can take my word, and that of Scott Lynch, that it is well worth the significantly more convenient (unless you live in Red Hook or the CSWD) trip.

The newish Sea & Soil is located at 388 Atlantic Avenue (between Hoyt and Bond Streets), nearest the A/C/G (Hoyt-Schermerhorn Sts) and 2/3 (Hoyt St), along with the B37, B57, B61, B63, B65, and B103 buses, and not too terrible a schlep from the 2/3/4/5/B/Q/D/N/R/LIRR (Atlantic Avenue) or NYC Ferry’s St. George and South Brooklyn routes (Pier 6).

Hope to see you in the streets soon! I’ll be back in touch in September. Until then, consider forwarding this newsletter to a friend, and stay safe out there.