In this episode of The Gotham Center podcast “Sites and Sounds,” Kurt Schlichting talks about the Waterfront Museum in Red Hook, Brooklyn.

This small barge, listed on the national registry of historic places, which is the last wooden vessel still floating in New York’s harbor, serves as the organization’s physical front. But the goal of the museum is far larger: to educate the public about the city’s outstanding maritime history and its contemporary importance. Schlichting, a  sociologist at Fairfield University, uses the museum to similarly explore this much larger subject, drawing on his recent book Waterfront Manhattan, the first to exclusively focus on the ways New York’s global and unique harbor and shoreline decisively shaped the fate of the city across its 400 years.

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In this episode of The Gotham Center podcast “Sites and Sounds,” Pamela Hanlon talks about the United Nations headquarters, in Turtle Bay.

Hanlon, an independent historian, is the author of A Worldly Affair: New York, the United Nations, and the Story behind Their Unlikely Bond. Here you’ll get in digest some of that larger narrative. The world may now take it for granted that the international diplomatic body is headquartered in Manhattan, but long after New York’s mayor Fiorello LaGuardia declined to compete with other cities for it, the UN’s address remained uncertain. And while New Yorkers may complain about things like the noisy traffic jams caused by its location, Hanlon reminds us that the city has gotten much benefit in return, economic and otherwise.

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In this episode of The Gotham Center podcast “Sites and Sounds,” Olga Sooudi talks about the Noguchi Museum in Long Island City, designed and created by the Japanese-American sculptor Isamu Noguchi in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Sooudi, an anthropologist at the University of Amsterdam, is the author of Japanese New York, an intimate, ethnographic portrait of Japanese creative migrants living and working in New York City. Here, she uses the example of Isamu Noguchi to discuss the larger community of Japanese artists who made NYC home to one of the largest overseas Japanese populations in the world. 

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In this episode of The Gotham Center podcast “Sites and Sounds,” we speak to David Gary about King Manor, in Jamaica, Queens.

The author of a dissertation on Rufus King -- an influential federalist who served as Alexander Hamilton’s "right-hand man," and later became an important anti-slavery leader -- Gary is a former Gotham Center Fellow and holds a PhD from The Graduate Center, City University of New York. He is now a curator at the American Philosophical Society.

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In this episode of The Gotham Center podcast “Sites and Sounds,” Blanche Wiesen Cook talks about Roosevelt House, the private home of Franklin and Eleanor, in Manhattan’s Upper East Side, now a progressive think tank affiliated with Hunter College.

Cook is Distinguished Professor of History at John Jay College and The Graduate Center, City University of New York, as well as the definitive biographer of Eleanor -- a powerful force in the making of the New Deal, the founding of the UN, and post-war American liberalism. Here, Cook reminds us that it was in this home that Eleanor first came to her own, leaving behind the doubt and depression of her early years to become, as many knew her, the "First Lady of the World." 

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In this episode of The Gotham Center podcast “Sites and Sounds,” Sergey Kadinsky talks about the Ridgewood Reservoir in Highland Park, a source of water for Brooklyn until the consolidation of Greater New York, provided the borough with access to the Croton aqueduct. Kadinksy, a Parks Department analyst, is the author of Hidden Waters of New York City: A History and Guide to 101 Forgotten Lakes, Ponds, Creeks, and Streams in the Five Boroughs.

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In this episode of The Gotham Center podcast “Sites and Sounds,” Michael Hattem talks about the Prison Ship Martyrs Monument in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, where the remains of nearly eleven thousand soldiers are buried, captives of the British who often died from unspeakable treatment and torture during the American Revolution.

New York was central to the military strategy of both the patriots and loyalists, and the scene of that war’s most important battle. Yet the city is seldom remembered as a major stage in our nation’s struggle for independence. Here, Hattem -- a visiting professor of history at Knox College, finishing a book on the surprisingly tense debates over popular memory of the Revolution during the early years of the republic -- explains why.

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In this episode of The Gotham Center podcast “Sites and Sounds,” Steve Lang talks about the Newtown Creek Alliance, a group of neighborhood activists advocating for environmental rehabilitation and increased recreational use of this notoriously polluted waterway running through Long Island City, Greenpoint, Sunnyside, and East Williamsburg.

As you’ll hear, the organization has done much to revitalize this formerly inaccessible Superfund site, but is struggling, like other communities around the world, to reclaim the formerly industrial shoreline without paradoxically closing it off to residents through gentrification. Lang, a sociologist who’s been studying these efforts is a professor of urban studies at LaGuardia Community College, CUNY.

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In this episode of The Gotham Center podcast “Sites and Sounds,” Marjorie Feld talks about Henry St. Settlement. This neighborhood agency has been providing immigrant, poor, and working class people from Manhattan’s Lower East Side with social services, art programs, education and health care for 125 years. It was founded by pioneering social worker Lillian Wald, at whose table, you’ll soon hear, presidents and businessmen from around the nation, and the world, came to visit -- occasionally even sitting down alongside labor organizers and radicals to discuss solutions to the various problems of the day. Feld, the author of a prize-winning biography of Wald, discusses the origins of this nationally path-breaking New York City institution, and the many ways in which its founder’s spirit still appears to animate the Settlement -- which sprang into existence to face the mass immigration and inequality of the First Gilded Age, and is now grappling with the Second.

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In this episode of The Gotham Center podcast “Sites and Sounds,” R. Scott Hanson talks about the Quaker meeting house in Flushing, Queens, the first house of worship in the area, and the oldest continually operating one in all of New York City. Often cited as a birthplace of religious liberty in America, because of the famous Flushing Remonstrance (written against the sectarian rule of Peter Stuyvesant in the Dutch Era), the meetinghouse now sits in perhaps the most religious diverse neighborhood in the world. Hanson, lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania, is the author of City of Gods, exploring this unique history. He began his research with the pluralism project at Harvard and did much of the New York City field work for the multimedia CD-ROM Uncommon Ground, exploring world religions in the country.

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