History.Workshoppin’: Issue 3 (December 2024)
If years were seasons, this December would be the December of our December. A time of endings and hibernation, but also of squeezing out the joy when you can find them. Since last I wrote, I’ve spent a lot of time in some big feelings. The election brought fear but also a sense of resolution — the anxiety from the rest of 2024 disappearing like a mist, the path ahead really bad, but at least clear, and the potential responses to it (either proactive or reactive) also apparent. The brushfires across the New York area brought an immense sadness, a Munchian cry across nature as the Palisades, Prospect Park, and part of the last old-growth forest in Manhattan burned. But I was also able to have moments together with friends (making up for lost time over the summer), made some art, and got some writing done (more below). And New York remains red in a footballing sense (and on to the final!) once again, so that’s good news. Onto the newsletter…
Coming Up Next
We’re right in the thick of Dyker Lights season, every Tuesday, Friday, Saturday, and select Sundays and Mondays from now until Three Kings Day, all of which you can register for on the DHCL website as space allows. Otherwise, I just have two daytime tours in December, and then a break before my winter/spring 2025 season of tours kicks off.
And I’ll be honest: giving tours in Jan/Feb/Mar is not the most fun. So I’m sweetening the pot: use code KICKOFF25 for $5 tickets to all tours from New Year’s Day through March 30. So what are you waiting for? Sign up for one of my tours in the new year, or consider buying a gift card this holiday season, in the “Book Now” section of my website.
December
12/3, 7:00 p.m.: Dyker Heights Christmas Lights
12/6, 7:00 p.m.: Dyker Heights Christmas Lights
12/7, 1:00 p.m.: The Lost Theaters of Bay Ridge
12/7, 7:00 p.m.: Dyker Heights Christmas Lights
12/10, 7:00 p.m.: Dyker Heights Christmas Lights
12/13, 7:00 p.m.: Dyker Heights Christmas Lights
12/14, 7:00 p.m.: Dyker Heights Christmas Lights
12/15, 1:00 p.m.: The Lost Theaters of Bay Ridge
12/17, 7:00 p.m.: Dyker Heights Christmas Lights
12/30, 7:00 p.m.: Dyker Heights Christmas Lights
January 2025
1/3, 7:00 p.m.: Dyker Heights Christmas Lights
1/4, 7:00 p.m.: Dyker Heights Christmas Lights
1/5, 1:00 p.m.: The Lost Theaters of Bay Ridge
1/5, 7:00 p.m.: Dyker Heights Christmas Lights
1/19, 12:00 p.m.: Green-Wood, Sunset Park, and LGBTQS Lives
1/20, 11:00 a.m.: Frederick Douglass in Brooklyn
February 2025
2/2, 10:00 a.m.: The Bridges of Gowanus: Rezone Remix
2/9, 1:00 p.m.: The Lower East Side: History and Foodways
2/14, 1:00 p.m.: Frederick Douglass in Brooklyn
2/15, 1:00 p.m.: Frederick Douglass in Brooklyn
March 2025
3/1, 2:00 p.m.: The Lower East Side: History and Foodways
3/2, 12:00 p.m.: Quenching Gotham’s Thirst: New York Before the Croton Era
3/16, 11:00 a.m.: The Lower East Side: History and Foodways
3/30, 11:00 a.m.: Greenwich Village: Activists and Agitators
And while we’re at it, save the date for some special tour weekends in the Spring, Summer, and Fall:
May 3–4: Jane’s Walk NYC, including the free premiere of Quenching Brooklyn’s Thirst: The Water Supply Before 1898 and another walk TBD
May 17–18: Bay Ridge Constitutionals, four fixtures before and after the Viking Festival and Norwegian Day Parade (use code NORWAY25 for $18.14 tickets for these tours)
June 22: I celebrate the summer solstice (which is actually June 20, but who’s counting) with three tours from morning to sunset (use code RUNAROUND for half-off tickets for those tours)
Stuff I Wrote
For MovieJawn, I wrote about Attack the Block for SpookyJawn Grotesqueries Week. It’s about the aliens in the movie, but also about cops and the government. (Maybe the true monsters are us, maaaaan.) And coming to your mailbox soon, I’ll have a piece on Can You Ever Forgive Me?, letters, and queer histories for the winter issue of the zine. (Subscribe now to make sure you get your issue.)
Something from the Archive
We recently commemorated sixty years of the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge, so now’s as good a time as any to share one of my favorite finds from Freebird Books on Columbia Street. Spanning the Narrows is the commemorative program from the opening of the bridge, then the longest in the world (and still the longest in the Western Hemisphere), and oh man is it a fascinating booklet. The photos are awe-inspiring, and the text is pure Robert Moses developer porn. (From RM himself: “No one knows how long a suspension bridge will last. I suppose indefinitely.”) As soon as I saw it at Freebird’s booth at the Brooklyn Book Festival in 2018 or so, I immediately plunked down the $45 to buy it (worth every penny, IMO), and today it sits next to my first edition copy of Gay Talese’s The Bridge in the “books about the Verrazzano” section of our library. I’m going out on a limb that as a publication of the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority it’s in the public domain, so you can access excerpts I scanned from Spanning the Narrows via my Dropbox below.
I’m a Terrible Businessperson, So Here’s Another Tour You Might Like
Asad Dandia absolutely doesn’t need my help; he’s got it covered on his own. He’s a tour guide at the Museum of the City of New York and the Metropolitan Museum, David Prize finalist, and all-around cool dude. But I feel like I must tell you how good his Remembering Little Syria tour is. I knew the vague history of the Lower West Side coming in: some of the earliest Arab Americans settled just north of the Battery, largely evicted when the tunnel was built, resettled on Atlantic Avenue, and that’s why Sahadi’s is where it is now. But Asad (a fellow lifelong New Yorker) brings this story to life, with oral histories, collaborations with the Washington Street Historical Society, and outside the confines of the tour advocacy for preservation and memorial of Little Syria amid the pedestrian bridges and parking garages. The tour also brings in the lengthy history of Arabs in New York, from the story of Anthony Van Salee in the Dutch colonial period (at the current site of a hotel loading dock) to the first American alliance (with Morocco) just after independence at Fraunces Tavern. It’s just an outstanding tour, and one of many from his independent outfit, New York Narratives. As soon as he announces more public tours, get on buying tickets. Run, don’t walk, y’all.
A Course You Might Like
I don’t think it should surprise anyone reading this that I (a) applied to a multi-week course on how the sanitation system in New York city works and how to be more sustainable and advocate for sustainable solutions at the corporate and community levels, and that (b) I frickin’ loved it. I left the Sanitation Foundation’s NYC Trash Academy with some new perspectives on how the city works, how to change it, and how containerization and extended producer responsibility are really damn good things. (And some of the stuff I learned ended up in my Meatpacking/Chelsea and Quenching Gotham’s Thirst tours.) If you want the full NYC Trash Academy experience, applications are opening this month for the 2025 course, and I highly encourage your application. And even if a multi-week, hybrid course is not your thing, opportunities to drop into the sessions will likely be available, too.
Some Sensory Stimuli
Okay so this is going to require a bit of background. Android’s never been great with having a default podcast app. Google Podcasts was useful for a while, and then (as is the penchant for Alphabet, Inc.) the app got shut down to make way for YouTube Music. Which led me back into the third-party podcatcher world with Podcast Addict, and (germane to this tale) to its radio streams feature. That’s how I started listening most Sunday nights to Washington DC’s WAMU, and their long-running celebration of radio’s golden age, The Big Broadcast. As a fan of The Thrilling Adventure Hour and similar radio dramedies, I was a pretty good mark to enter Murray Horwitz and Jill Ahrold Bailey’s thrall. Soon, the weekend was capped with excerpts from The Jack Benny Show (solid), Gunsmoke (meh), and Dragnet (ugh), along with some more sparingly featured shows like the Tallulah Bankhead—hosted The Big Show (sponsored by the Plebo Company) and the Black history program Destination Freedom.
But the program I’ve really come to love, and am now mainlining on the Internet Archive, is Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar, particularly the era of the program from 1955 to 1960 starring Bob Bailey. It’s a mystery series, but it isn’t copaganda; it’s a detective show, but not a straight-up hard-boiled private eye series. In other words, it’s my kind of mystery, and now I can’t get enough of “the insurance investigator with the action-packed expense account.” The storylines are thorough (75-minute serials) but episodic, the show keeps the exoticism of the policy-holder’s locales to a minimum, and the scripts give the femmes fatales at least some agency. If you’ll need me outside of work and tours, I’ll be whistling the theme song and putting together the signs for my protest in front of the CBS Broadcasting Center, and with any luck, enjoy Johnny Dollar, coming to Paramount+ or whatever next fall. (Probably not, but I can dream.)
A Cat Photo
I’m at more or less status quo ante with regard to The Power Broker (got up to page 920 over the weekend, but still behind schedule), so I’m flipping things up for the outshot. Fairy is our current foster, a shy gray cat, nuestra Panterita, our gray carioca bean, and just a sweet li’l girl. Coming soon to a Meow Parlour near you!
Hope to see you in the streets soon; otherwise, Merry Crisis, and I’ll talk to you in early February. Until then, consider forwarding this newsletter to a friend, and stay safe out there.