Gotham Center Podcasts

Randall Mason, co-author of North Brother Island: The Last Unknown Place in New York City, on this now-abandoned, once-feared part of Gotham’s archipelago, which served for decades as (often forced) quarantine for the ill during various epidemics

Stacy Horn, author of Damnation Island: Poor, Sick, Mad, and Criminal in 19th-Century New York, on the notorious ‘lunatic asylum,’ prison, workhouses, and hospitals that once stood on Roosevelt Island

Brendan Cooper, author of “The Domino Effect: Politics, Policy, and the Consolidation of the Sugar Refining Industry in the United States, 1789–1895,” on the rise and fall of the enormous Williamsburg, Brooklyn factory

Bob McGee, author of The Greatest Ballpark Ever: Ebbets Field and the Story of the Brooklyn Dodgers, on the iconic stadium (formerly in Crown Heights) and its still-bemoaned departure

Shane White, author of Prince of Darkness and Stories of Freedom in Black New York, on the African Grove, a theater company which played with an entirely black cast and crew to mostly black audiences in the last days of slavery in NYC

Alexander Manevitz, author of The Rise and Fall of Seneca Village: Remaking Race and Space in Nineteenth-Century New York City (forthcoming), on the free black community destroyed to build Central Park

Graham Russell Gao Hodges, author of David Ruggles: A Radical Black Abolitionist and the Underground Railroad in New York City, on Mother Zion A.M.E. Church and its nationally influential antislavery leaders

Leslie Alexander, author of African or American? Black Identity and Political Activism in New York City, 1784-1861, on the African meetinghouse, headquarters of the secret society that created the state’s first incorporated black organization; for a century, NYC’s most prominent black mutual aid group

Christopher F. Minty, author of “American Demagogues”: The Origins of Loyalism in New York City (forthcoming), on James Rivington and his controversial printshop in Hanover Square

Russell Shorto, author of the national bestseller The Island at the Center of the World, on Fort Amsterdam and the Dutch colony it protected

Bonnie Yochelson, author of a forthcoming study of Alice Austen, on the pioneering Gilded Age photographer’s home in Staten Island

Amy Starecheski, author of Ours to Lose: When Squatters Became Homeowners in New York City, on Bullet Space in the Lower East Side

Mark R. Wilson, author of Destructive Creation: American Business and the Winning of World War II and The Business of Civil War, on the Brooklyn Navy Yard

Kathleen Murphy Skolnik, co-author of The Art Deco Murals of Hildreth Meière, on the lobby of the AT&T Long Distance Building in Tribeca

Francis Morrone, the noted architectural historian, author of eleven books, on the Institute of Classical Art and Architecture in Midtown

David E. Kaufman and Yitzchak Schwartz, architectural historians of Jewish New York, on Central Synagogue in Midtown

Martin Melosi, author of the forthcoming Fresh Kills: A History of Consuming and Discarding in New York City, on the infamous landfill-turned-park in Staten Island

Angela Kane, professor of dance at the University of Michigan and the forthcoming author of the first critical study of Paul Taylor, on the famous choreographer’s studio in the Lower East Side

Benjamin Flowers, author of Skyscraper: The Politics and Power of Building New York City in the Twentieth Century, on the Skyscraper Museum in Battery Park