Events in August 2020
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Brownstones and Ballot Boxes: Women’s Suffrage in Brooklyn Heights
Brownstones and Ballot Boxes: Women’s Suffrage in Brooklyn Heights
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Aug 6, 2020Thursday, August 6, 2020
6:00 p.m.
Via Zoom
This summer marks the centennial of the passage of the 19 th Amendment. In honor of this milestone year, let’s virtually visit one of the front lines in the fight for Suffrage: Brooklyn Heights, which was home to some of the nation’s earliest suffrage organizations, including those founded by Black women. The suffragists of Brooklyn Heights, known as the "wise women of Brooklyn” were doctors, lawyers, educators and orators whose vision and fortitude changed the course of history. On this virtual tour, we’ll explore suffrage history at what was once “the center of Black Brooklyn,” find out why the Brooklyn Bridge is a feminist icon, and see how the Brooklyn Academy of Music set the stage for the Women’s Movement.
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Sound Investment in a Better Society: A History of Cooperative Housing in New York City
Sound Investment in a Better Society: A History of Cooperative Housing in New York City
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Aug 12, 2020Wednesday, August 12, 2020
6:00 p.m.
Via Zoom
As New York City confronts a housing crisis, and questions abound around how to build affordable and middle income units around the 5 boroughs, let’s look back at a “revolution” in urban housing: the cooperative. This virtual tour will offer a history of cooperative housing in New York from 1881, when co-ops emerged in the city as a way for upper-middle-class urbanites choose their neighbors, to the turn of the century when the co-op model was the rage in artists’ housing, through the 1920s, when union-backed labor cooperatives represented a new dawn in comfortable, equitable and affordable, housing, to the post-war years and the rise of Mitchell-Lama middle-income cooperative housing development, to the 1970s, in the depths of the city’s fiscal crisis, when the Urban Homesteading Assistance Board emerged to help New Yorkers turn their buildings co-op strengthen their tenant associations. Today, the co-operative model is a familiar throughout New York, but the arts and labor history of the form are less well known. Can the history of the cooperative movement in New York City offer lessons for today’s housing crisis?
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Virtual Tour of Audubon Park
Virtual Tour of Audubon Park
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Aug 26, 2020Wednesday, August 26, 2020
6:00 – 7:00 p.m.
via Zoom
In a special Six to Celebrate walking tour, long-time Audubon Park resident and HDC Board Adviser, Wayne Benjamin will interview The Neighborhood Manhattan Forgot: Audubon Park and the Families Who Shaped It author Matthew Spady. During the discussion Mr. Spady will examine the Washington Heights neighborhood of Audubon Park (the interlocking Audubon Terrace and Audubon Park Historic Districts) and how it might have looked very different from the way it does now if events at strategic moments had played out differently. Starting with the current footprint of the neighborhood and working backwards he will explain how Audubon Park got its unusual shape and provide a history based on the streetscape.