SYMPOSIUM

Every year, the Lillian Wald Symposium at Henry Street Settlement in conjunction with the Humanities at Cooper Union will provide a reading list that goes along with the theme for that year. 

Readings from that list will be made availabe in the Cooper Library, reviving the “Reading Room” at Cooper Union where books and articles from Great Hall discussions were brought into the Library and made available to the public. 

READINGS

2026
PROMPTS: 

From Affordable Housing to Bike Lanes: How Can Big Change Happen in NYC? What Change Can A Mayor Make? 

LIST

New York City History, Labor History, Economic & Racial Disparity


Transformative Planning: Radical Alternatives to Neoliberal Urbanism, a collection of essays edited by Tom Angotti

Born in Flames by Bench Ansfield

To Stand and Fight: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Postwar New York City by Martha Biondi

The Whiteness of Wealth (about tax system discrimination) by Dorothy Brown

Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond

Poverty by America by Matthew Desmond

Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich

Wonder City: How to Reclaim Human-Scale Urban Life by Lynn Ellsworth

Working-Class New York Life and Labor Since World War II by Joshua Freeman

Tell Her Story: Eleanor Bumpurs & the Police Killing That Galvanized New York City by LaShawn Harris

The Long Crisis: New York City and the Path to Neoliberalism by Benjamin Holtzman

722 Miles: The Building of Subways and How They Transformed New York by Clifton Hood

The Bronx is Burning (history of NYC and Bronx in 70s) by Jonathan Mahler

American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass by Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton

Raising Brooklyn: Nannies, Childcare, and Caribbeans Creating Community by Tamara R. Mose

The Bowery by David Mulkins

Falling from Grace: Downward Mobility in the Age of Affluence by Katherine S. S. Newman

The Invention of Brownstone Brooklyn: Gentrification and the Search for Authenticity in Postwar New York by Suleiman Osman

Fear City by Kim Phillips-Fein

Fighting Jim Crow in the County of Kings by Brian Purnell

Color of Law by Richard Rothstein

The Park and the People: a History of Central Park by Roy Rosenzweig and Elizabeth Blackmar

Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York by Lucy Sante

Ed Koch and the Rebuilding of New York City by Jonathan Soffer

Capital City: Gentrification and the Real Estate State by Samuel Stein

Fight the Power: African Americans and the Long History of Policy Brutality in New York City by Clarence Taylor
Fear and Fury: The Reagan Eighties, the Bernie Goetz Shootings, and the Rebirth of White Rage by Heather Ann Thompson


City of Disorder: How the Quality of Life Campaign Transformed New York City Politics by Alex S. Vitale

The Colossus of New York by Colson Whitehead


Fiction & Plays


Deacon King Kong by James McBride

A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansbury

The Sign in Sidney Brunstein’s Window by Lorraine Hansbury

The City We Became: A Novel by N.K. Jemisin

2025

What is the relationship between a sense of place and ways of knowing that are required for the arts and creative practice to survive, for those practices to be shared and embodied? 

How can we look at culture as an infrastructure of norms and institutions rather than products of that infrastructure? 

The content of art may be an orientation in space and time. The work of art, a way to embody that orientation and see what’s revealed by that framework in our daily life. Creative practice becomes method, a way of navigating, manipulating, and re-articulating the resources available given the infrastructures at play. Creative practice reveals counter-structures supporting forms of life that may not be recognized by the dominant market. How can we utilize the tools of previous movements that fought gentrification, and how do we translate those methods into terms relevant today in order to make the spaces we need? 

With the capture of spaces that were public by making “civic” participation the price of the ticket to enter that “public,” how does care become an operation that constructs a space, holds and maintains social relations, and prohibits the dispossession of those means? How does this reorientation allow our practices to grow or attend to or change shape so as to question what is considered valuable? 

How do we reconsider spaces where we encounter objects from the past that inevitably change our present orientation to the world and, therefore, the future of these spaces– whether created by us or those spaces we are encouraged, forced, to occupy? What does this have to do with our ethics? How do we reconsider our participation in systems that seem to overdetermine our sense of what kinds of work are valuable? From the point of view of the objects themselves, we occupy a future context with respect to when they were made, thus posing the question, “what do we do with this space, today?”

LIST

Artists Surviving in NYC:


Art Monster: On the Impossibility of New York by Marin Kosut


Gentrification:


St. Marks is Dead: The Many Lives of America’s Hippest Street by Ada Calhoun


CHARAS: The Improbable Dome Builders by Syeus Mottel


The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination by Sarah Schulman


The Lofts of SoHo: Gentrification, Art, and Industry in New York, 1950-1980 by Aaron Shkuda


Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places by Sharon Zukin


Artists and Urban Planning:


Counter Institution: Activist Estates of the Lower East Side by Nandini Bagchee


Contested City: Art and Public History as Mediation at New York’s Seward Park Urban Renewal Area by Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani


Arts for Living by Kim Förster


DIY on the Lower East Side: Books, Buildings, and Art After the 1975 Fiscal Crisis by Andrew Strombeck


Artist Housing:


Affordable Housing in New York: The People, Places, and Policies That Transformed a City edited by Nicholas Dagen Bloom and Matthew Gordon Lasner


Loft Law: The Last of New York City’s Original Artists Lofts by Joshua Charow


The Twilight of Bohemia: Westbeth and the Last Artists of New York by Peter Trachtenberg


Lower East Side Artists:


Sweet Oblivion: The Urban Landscape of Martin Wong by Dan Cameron and Carlo McCormick


Memories of the Revolution: The First Ten Years of the WOW Café Theater edited by Jill Dolan, Holly Hughes, and Carmelita Tropicana


The Queer Nuyorican: Radicalized Sexualities and Aesthetics in Loisaida by Karen Jaime 


Offbeats: Lower East Side Portraits by Clayton Patterson and John Strausbaugh


Maybe the People Would Be the Times by Lucy Sante


Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration by David Wojnarowicz