TOPIC

Race

New City Critics

The Invisible Arch

Public art proposals are a highly contested terrain. But the processes for the commissions themselves escape scrutiny.

New City Critics

The Shortest Ramp Is a Longer Road

A new Crown Heights bookshop is a cipher for conflicting feelings of ambivalence, betrayal, and belonging

Seneca Village, Envisioned

No visual records remained after a thriving, majority Black village was cleared to make way for Central Park. A multidisciplinary team is using historical research, digital modeling, and informed speculation to return the community to our collective imagination.

More Than Skin Deep

Renovated facades provide a window into existential questions for the future of New York City’s public housing.

Circulation Desk

What Colors Are the Crabgrass?

New books chronicle US suburbs' divergence from their mythical origin scenes of verdant lawns and white picket fences — and detail how social struggles have always been part of their story.

Bus Time

Slow moving and overstuffed, the public bus is also a space of communion, curiosity, and solidarity for residents on the city's margins.

New City Critics

Long Island is Bugging Me

A disquisition into the urban/suburban and human/insect divides, and how people might come together when their surroundings are planned to keep them apart.

Behind the Curtain

Massage parlor storefronts along New York City streets are an invitation to wellbeing . . . and suspicion. Red Canary Song reframes these spaces for intimate bodywork in terms of care, healing, and survival.

Make Yourself at Home

Three researchers explore how queer, Black, and undocumented communities subvert and transcend dominant norms and forms of housing in New York City.

A New Harvest

Herbs and berries are free for the picking along the Bronx River Foodway. But the public place for foraging is also a pathway to stronger connections with local ecologies and community self-determination.