From The Triangle To The Tiger: New York's Garment Center In American Popular Culture, 1920-1970
Wednesday, January 27, 2010, at 7:00 p.m.
Chelsea Recreation Center
430 West 25th Street
artsculturefun@parks.nyc.gov
(212) 408-0296
A multimedia examination of a completely overlooked aspect of Popular Culture -- the popular take on New York's Garment Center during its years of peak importance.
From the 1920s through the 1970s Seventh Avenue was the undisputed center of American garment-making. During these years the industry shook off its sweatshop roots, and owners worked tirelessly to promote an aura of glamour and confidence. From the industry's remorseless waves of success and failure, garment workers created some of the great rhythms of the City, while the lunchtime oceans of streetside workers, designers and owners made up one of New York's daily spectacles.
But in the 1960s the ground began to shift. Rising costs and other factors drove a growing share of manufacturing abroad -- first to New Jersey and Pennsylvania, then to the South and West, to the Caribbean and around the world. A fatal combination of increasingly national-scale retail, heavily-promoted competition from Western companies like Levi's, the fashion-spurning "Youthquake" or counterculture, and the aging-out of many of the old firm owners, all rang down the curtain on the Garment Center's mid-century dominance. By the 1980s Seventh Avenue's proud place as the foremost emblem of the City's economy had been taken over by real estate developers -- and by Wall Street.
Learn about the Golden Age of the Garment Center, and its Pop Culture artifacts -- the novels, plays, songs, films, advertising and other popular imagery that tells the changing fortunes of the Garnment District. By turns informative, campy, bigoted, and just plain naive, this imagery is deeply evocative of a once-vital City sector, now more a tourists' lure than a force in New York's life.
The New York City Origins Of The Disability Rights Movement
Thursday, March 11, 2010, at 7:00 p.m.
Tony Dapolito Recreation Center
3 Clarkson Street
artsculturefun@parks.nyc.gov
(212) 408-0296
The disability rights movement is an important branch of the civil rights revolution of the 1960s and 1970s. This movement is often overlooked, but it was truly a revolutionary effort. The founders of that movement began the journey of an entire class of the American population up out of utter powerlessness.
By fighting to allow the disabled to enter the agora and participate in mainstream social and political life; by redefining the disabled -- even to themselves -- as a minority group, the pioneers made the disabled community, for the first time, both conscious of its own existence and visible to the able-bodied world. Yet the story of the New York beginnings of the disability-rights struggle has never been publicly discussed, anywhere -- until now.
This location is fully accessible by persons with disabilities.
How Nieuw Amsterdam Became New York
Thursday, April 15, 2010, at 12:45 pm
Brooklyn College
Boylan Hall
The British Conquest of Nieuw Netherland in 1664 put the Dutch colony's future up for grabs. How would the British control this foreign place, with its diverse, loud, disorderly and trade-obsessed people? A generation-long tug of war followed. Britain repeatedly tried to remake Nieuw Amsterdam in its own image, but the city fought back with unbelievable persistence. It even mounted a full-blown military rebellion, which lasted about 18 months.
The truce that emerged at the end of this stormy, violent, formative time found a changed Nieuw Amsterdam. The no-longer Dutch city accepted the reality of British rule, but retained its unique spirit, its diversity, and much of its way of life. It had become a cultural hybrid which would, in the centuries to come, exert a dominant influence on the British colonies, on the future United States, and the entire world. It had become New York.
This event is not open to the public