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New York 1920s: 100 Years Ago Today (When We Became Modern offers archival materials related to New York City on this date one hundred years ago.

Panoramic in scope but local in focus, it includes articles and headlines from New York newspapers and magazines, and sound, image and video files and links, all telling the story of the life of the city in the 1920s. We post personal letters, cartoons, maps, and ephemera such as print ads, movie posters, police reports, building permits, etc. Reading the site will be both an enjoyable romp through the calendar and a way to discover obscure historical objects.

Helen Keller holding a magnolia, ca. 1920. Los Angeles Times. UCLA Library.

As distant and strange as the 1920s may seem at times, their driving narratives emerge as strikingly familiar. The seemingly daily tumult of our own times finds precursor in 1920s New York: immigration fears; rising white-supremacist violence; the fight for civil rights of women, people of color and marginalized communities; plus upheavals in the arts and entertainment worlds.

WATCH: NEW YORK 1920 INTRODUCTORY VIDEO

There was also what some would call less monumental news. Just consider the start of 1920. On January 5th. New York Yankees owner Jacob Ruppert announced that the Yankees had acquired star Babe Ruth, who raised his head from his golf game long enough to announce that he refused to play for any team except Boston. On January 9th, George Polley was arrested while trying to climb the Woolworth Building (the world’s tallest). On January 11th Vanity Fair fired theater critic Dorothy Parker, at least in part for her review of actor Billie Burke, who was married to Florenz Ziegfeld, one of the magazine's most reliable advertisers.

Deno’s Wonder Wheel, Coney Island, 1920. Courtesy Atlas Obscua.

“New York 1920s showcases such narratives, anecdotes and surprising facts. The website will address landmark moments such as the passing of the 19th Amendment, but also aim to highlight less known developments, such as New York's role in the creation of the Bureau of Investigation (the proto-FBI), its nascent Latinx community, the Lusk Committee's maps of "racial colonies" in the city and accompanying report, and New York’s first rent control laws (designed to support returning doughboys). It will include artistic milestones, such as the first commercial recording of blues music, Mamie Smith's session at Okeh Records. The year 1920 was also when "Swanee," composed by George Gershwin, became the first hit for Al Jolson (singing in blackface), when Charles Gilpin performed in the lead role in Eugene O'Neill's The Emperor Jones and achieved acclaim unprecedented for an African American actor, when avant-garde New York publishers Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap were charged with indecency for printing Chapter 12 of James Joyce’s Ulysses, when Zelda Sayre married F. Scott Fitzgerald after This Side of Paradise was commercially successful enough to convince Sayre’s family that he could support her. 1920 was when Nathan’s Famous, Silvercup Bakery and Coney Island’s Wonder Wheel opened to the public, when NYC’s first traffic light went up. 

The 1920s were a transitional period in US society, a moment that generated and crystallized social attitudes for the ensuing century–what we often consider modern times. 1920s New York reveals evolving attitudes about topics that remain contested issues today: immigration, celebrity, publicity, ethnicity (including whiteness), civil rights for minorities and women, marriage, privacy, state surveillance, and even US–Russia relations. The website will highlight those issues and concerns and thus make the case that understanding the 1920s can inform us about our own time. 

Columbus Circle in 1920, seen from the northwest

“New York 1920s: 100 Years Ago Today” is sponsored by New York Institute of Technology, thanks to a grant from the Office of Academic Affairs and a Dean’s Incentive Award from the College of Arts and Sciences.

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