Past Events

  • Malkin Lecture Series

    Fifth Avenue

    September 24, 2024

    Once called America’s “Street of Dreams,” Fifth Avenue has gone through a myriad of architectural and societal transformations throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. Join Mosette Broderick on a journey through the avenue’s history, from its appearances on the Commissioners’ map of 1807 and the proposed grid plan of 1811, to chronicling how the speculative brownstone rowhouses that lined the avenue above Washington Square gave way to grand mansions designed by European-influenced architects and decorators as the center of the city marched northward. By the end of the 19th century, Fifth Avenue was synonymous with a lavish fashionable life catering to the wealthy. And then, as quickly as it was built, it was destroyed; the New York house was replaced by more modern architecture as the evolving city shifted again.

    Mosette Broderick, Clinical Professor in the Department of Art History, New York University, is also the Director of the London MA Program in Historical and Sustainable Architecture.

  • Malkin Lecture Series

    Bookshop

    November 13, 2024

    Scholar of American and urban history Evan Friss guides audiences through a chronicle of the bookshop in New York and across the country, illuminating how these vital institutions have shaped American life. Drawing on oral histories, archival collections, municipal records, diaries, letters, and interviews with leading booksellers, Friss offers an engaging look at this institution over time, from Benjamin Franklin’s first bookstore to local gems like The Strand and Gotham Book Mart, specialty stores like Oscar Wilde and Drum and Spear, sidewalk sellers of used books, national conglomerates like Barnes & Noble, the rise of e-tailers like Amazon Books, and more. Friss shares stories of the leading figures in American bookselling, often impassioned eccentrics, and a history of how books have been marketed and sold over the course of more than two centuries.

    Evan Friss is a Professor of History at James Madison University. Publications include The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore; The Cycling City: Bicycles and Urban America in the 1890s; and On Bicycles: A 200-Year History of Cycling in New York City.

  • Malkin Lecture Series

    Nineteen Reservoirs

    December 18, 2024

    As New York City incorporated, welcomed new inhabitants, and cemented itself as a center of American industry in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, it faced an existential problem: how to sustain its ever-increasing need for water. The solution: a network of reservoirs and aqueducts built across more than one million acres in upstate New York from 1907 to 1967. This feat of engineering allowed New York City to blossom into the metropolis we know today, but also demolished, submerged, and profoundly altered twenty-six villages across the Hudson Valley and their ecosystem. Join Guggenheim fellowship recipient Lucy Sante as she examines the triumph, tragedy, and unintended consequences of these decisions on New York City’s divided public—urban and rural, rich and poor, human and animal.

    Lucy Sante‘s book Nineteen Reservoirs: On Their Creation and the Promise of Water for New York City was published by The Experiment in 2022, and recently released in paperback in February 2024. Awards include a Cullman fellowship, Whiting Writer’s Award, Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Infinity Award in Writing from the International Center of Photography, and Grammy for album notes.