New York City Archives - Public Seminar

New York City

What Makes Cities Go BANANA?

On zoning, New York City’s housing crisis, and Abundance

November 4, 2025 • by Achilles Kallergis

The nearly hundred-year-old Holland Tunnel, the first mechanically ventilated underwater vehicular tunnel, opened in 1927 after just seven years of work. By contrast, the humble subway station elevators unveiled in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, in 2020 took three years and approximately $80 million to realize. (The MTA, sensing commuter suspicion, even made ...

New York City

A Mayor Who Promises the Moon

Canvassing for Mamdani

October 29, 2025 • by Mitchell Abidor

In the run-up to this year’s election for New York City’s next mayor, I’ve spent several days canvassing for Zohran Mamdani. On every occasion I’ve been as much as a half-century older than the rest of my young, white comrades. Unlike most of them, I’m also a native New Yorker, ...

Film & Performing Arts

Revelations and Reservations at the 2025 New York Film Festival

Blame it on Mommy and Daddy

October 10, 2025 • by Mitchell Abidor

It’s almost as if the selection committee for the recently ended sixty-third New York Film Festival (NYFF) was acknowledging that giants no longer walk the cinematic earth when it chose to screen Richard Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague and Noah Baumbach’s Jay Kelly. Both directors are among the most important of American ...

Revelations and Reservations at the 2025 New York Film Festival

Activism

On “Reconnecting with Nature” as a City-Dweller

An education in wheelbarrows, pin oaks, and herring gulls

September 10, 2025 • by Chrisaleen Ciro

A few weeks into my time here in NYC back in the fall of 2021, I volunteered at an urban farm in East Harlem. The crew of volunteers was diverse—some of us had experience growing food and others didn’t. At the time, I had worked on farms and market gardens ...

On “Reconnecting with Nature” as a City-Dweller

Prisons and Police

Cooking Noodles on Rikers Island

In their new book, City Time, former inmates David Campbell and Jarrod Shanahan take a sociological look at life inside

May 6, 2025 • by Carina Filemyr

Not only is Rikers Island geographically isolated—a landmass situated on the East River between the Bronx and Queens—but what happens there is kept out of the public’s sight. Journalists are given limited entry into day-to-day life on the island, which houses the city's largest jail. Now, in City Time: On ...

Interviews

Why Progressive “Myths” Distort Solutions to the Housing Shortage

A big deal that’s not nearly big enough: what the “city of yes” will (and won’t) do

March 18, 2025 • by Center for New York City Affairs and Richard McGahey

In January 2025, Urban Matters, Center of New York City Affairs's weekly journal of ideas and opinion, wrapped up a wide-ranging two-part interview with noted urban policy expert Richard McGahey on the likely impact of New York City’s newly adopted "City of Yes" zoning package intended to jumpstart housing production. ...

Why Progressive “Myths” Distort Solutions to the Housing Shortage

Migration

Asylum and the Hierarchy of Suffering

Limitations of the US migration framework

February 27, 2025 • by Charlotte Soehner and Olivia Woldemikael

Even before Trump barred asylum seekers from the US-Mexico border by declaring all unauthorized border crossings to be “invasions,” American asylum was a system with no winners. Now, while migrants at the border are stripped of the meager options they previously had recourse to, it’s crucial to understand what it meant, until very ...

Art & Design

In Search of the Sublime … Underground

How far can art carry us through New York City’s broken subway system?

February 26, 2025 • by Mary Karmelek

Weekday mornings, as I walk to the 36th Street subway stop in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, I quicken my pace, anxious that if I miss the train, I’ll be late for work; worried that if it’s too crowded, I won’t get a seat on the 40-minute commute that lies ahead. As ...

Film & Performing Arts

Manga Colossus Goes Inflatable on Broadway

A review of Attack on Titan: The Musical

November 26, 2024 • by Abha Deshmukh

Sitting in a mezzanine seat at the New York City Center, I was startled by a Colossal Titan coming to eat me. But I relaxed when Survey Corps soldiers came spinning and flying on their mobility gear to slice the Titan’s neck which is, after all, the proper way to ...

Manga Colossus Goes Inflatable on Broadway

Migration

Noncitizen Voting and the Politics of Common Sense in New York City

Can proposals to expand local voting to noncitizens survive in the era of Stop the Steal?

October 28, 2024 • by Vasiliki Malouchou Kanellopoulou and Connor Smith

Even as Republican politicians continue to undermine faith in the U.S. electoral system by erroneously claiming the 2024 election will be “stolen” by undocumented immigrants, the New York Court of Appeals is quietly considering a law that would expand the right to vote in local elections to certain residents of ...

Noncitizen Voting and the Politics of Common Sense in New York City

Economy

Low-Paid Industries Rely on Gig Workers. Are They Actually Employees?

A new survey sheds light on the working conditions of New York City’s “independent contractors”

October 16, 2024 • by Lina Moe

Ask any organizer and you’ll hear how hard it is to reach gig workers. These workers typically lack a physical place of work or regular schedule (though many work all the time), and their work is poorly measured in Census Bureau and Bureau of Labor Statistics datasets. The gig workers ...

Low-Paid Industries Rely on Gig Workers. Are They Actually Employees?

Podcast

Picturing Asian America

Episode 58: Historian Mae Ngai on Corky Lee’s photographs of Asian American life

September 6, 2024 • by Claire Potter

On July 23, 2024, Vice President Kamala Harris reached the threshold of Democratic National Convention delegates that she needed to become the party’s de facto presidential nominee. In the two days since President Joe Biden had ceded the nomination, a diverse party had become re-energized around the 2024 race and ...