In this episode of The Gotham Center podcast “Sites and Sounds,” Don Hawkins talks about Federal Hall on Wall Street, home to colonial New York’s city hall, former site of the US sub-treasury, and most famously, the place where George Washington took the oath as America’s first President. Hawkins, considered by many the dean of Washington D.C.’s architectural history, is working on a book about Pierre Charles L'Enfant, who redesigned the building. He is also an urban planner, who has played a role in more than two-hundred-fifty building projects throughout the nation’s capital.

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In this episode of The Gotham Center podcast "Sites and Sounds," Barbara Christen talks about the Brooklyn Army Terminal, the military site-turned-manufacturing complex in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, designed by the famous architect Cass Gilbert.

Christen, who holds a PhD in architectural history from The Graduate Center (CUNY), is the author of a celebrated biography of Gilbert, who gained a national reputation for designing the Alexander Hamilton custom house and pioneering skyscrapers downtown, like the Woolworth. Here, she tells us about Gilbert’s commission in the last year of World War I: to build a cargo station, later the largest military supply base in World War II, and since then, a commercial warehouse and space for light industry.

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In this episode of "Sites and Sounds," Andrea Frohne talks about the African burial ground in lower Manhattan, where the remains of perhaps 20,000 Africans, slave and free, buried in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, were uncovered in the late twentieth.

We don’t often associate new York with slavery, but the size of this graveyard, the oldest and largest excavated site in North America, reminds us of the major role it played in building the city, just as it did for the country at large.

Frohne, Associate Professor of African Art History at Ohio University, is the author of The African Burial Ground in New York City: Memory, Spirituality, and Space.