Before and After West Side Story:
San Juan Hill and the History of Housing Displacement in Puerto Rican New York
Tuesday, May 21st 6-7pm FREE! Live via Zoom
with Professor Lorrin Thomas, PhD
Join LW! and Professor Lorrin Thomas, PhD for this talk exploring how Puerto Rican New Yorkers responded to city officials' broken promises of fair housing access in the 20th century, beginning with the displacement of several thousand Puerto Rican families in San Juan Hill, the Manhattan neighborhood razed to make way for Lincoln Center in the 1950s.
LANDMARK WEST! is proud to rebuild, block by block, the buildings and stories of the San Juan Hill community. The online San Juan Hill project has been launched with the support of a growing list of stakeholders. LW! especially thanks New York State Senator Brad Hoylman, former New York City Council Member Ben Kallos and the City Council’s Cultural Immigrant Initiative, and the UWS's Council Member Gale Brewer. We hope this project will serve as the foundation for a fuller history of San Juan Hill in the coming years, and we eagerly welcome community participation to more fully tell this story. As preservationists, we recognize that once something is gone, it is gone for good. Hopefully, with this project, San Juan Hill will, at least, not be lost.
This project for the Cultural Immigrant Initiative is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council. Special thanks, as well, to the NYC Municipal Archives. Banner image used with permission from the Museum of the City of New York.
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Speaker Lorrin Thomas, Ph.D. is a professor in the Department of History at Rutgers University in Camden. Her research focuses on the different ideas of rights and equality in the 20th century Americas. An author, Professor Thomas has published Puerto Rican Citizen: History and Political Identity in Twentieth Century New York City, and co-authored Rethinking the Struggle for Puerto Rican Rights. Between teaching duties, she is currently writing Minority: Latino Civil Rights and the Making of Multiracial America after the 1960s.
