Good morning. It’s Monday. Today we’ll look at a museum that celebrates the way a newspaper in Harlem used to be written and edited. We’ll also get details on New York State’s decision to cut off funding to two private Hasidic Jewish schools in Brooklyn.
Right now there is not much to see in the newspaper building on Frederick Douglass Boulevard in Harlem. There are old typewriters and stacks of reporters’ notebooks on one floor. On another floor are framed front pages with stories about the inauguration of President Barack Obama in 2009 and the death of Nelson Mandela in 2013. But, as my colleague Sarah Bahr explains, there are big plans for the space:
This used to be the newsroom of The New York Amsterdam News, the 115-year-old Black newspaper that was once the largest weekly community newspaper in the United States.
But now the newsroom is mostly empty — of people, anyway. The publication’s nine editors and reporters are scattered from Santa Cruz, Calif., to Barcelona, Spain. They have continued to work remotely since the coronavirus pandemic.
So The Amsterdam News is turning the newsroom, and several other floors of its building in Harlem, into a museum.
The left-behind typewriters are hardly the only relics of the way newspapers used to be written and produced. There are metal printing plates and a darkroom from the days when photographs were shot on film and developed with chemicals.
“It feels like stepping into another time,” said Elinor Tatum, the publisher and editor in chief, who is sorting through it all with Siobhan Bennett, the president and chief revenue officer.
“We want to celebrate the pivotal role both The New York Amsterdam News, and the Black press writ large, have played in advancing civil rights in our country,” Tatum said. She works out of an office on the second floor surrounded by dozens of books, including a biography of Andrew W. Cooper, who wrote a column for the paper in the 1970s called One Man’s Opinion.
The newspaper’s first publisher, James Henry Anderson, started it with just $10, six sheets of paper and a pencil. The Amsterdam News went on to publish columns by influential Black leaders, including W.E.B. Du Bois, Roy Wilkins and Adam Clayton Powell Jr. It was one of the first newspapers to publish Malcolm X. It covered the civil rights movement in the 1960s and claims credit for coining the term “hip-hop” in 1980. At the height of The Amsterdam News 60 years ago, it had 100,000 subscribers. Tatum took over from her father, Wilbert Tatum, in the late 1990s.
The plan for the museum is being led by the Amsterdam News Educational Foundation, the nonprofit that owns the building. Newsroom operations would shift to the second floor, which would be leased to the paper. The museum and gallery space would be spread across the basement and three other floors, with the fourth restored as a 1930s newsroom, complete with an archival research room. The first floor would become a community lounge with a cafe.
“We want it to be a place for people to organize, like where the Beat poets hung out in San Francisco,” Tatum said. “People can come through and stop in, whether it be politicians or community leaders, so that we can talk to them about what’s going on in the world.”
The foundation has raised $450,000 to plan and design the museum.
Like almost every other newspaper publisher in the past decade, Tatum has presided over a digital transformation of the paper, which now counts 153,000 average monthly visitors to its website. The Amsterdam News also has a circulation of approximately 20,000 for its 40-page print edition, which comes out on Thursdays and is available on newsstands for $1. The Amsterdam News draws 56 percent of its revenue from advertising, including 11 percent from digital advertising, Bennett said.
Tatum also established Blacklight, the first investigative unit at a Black legacy newspaper. The unit is overseen by the paper’s executive and investigative editor, Damaso Reyes, and has two grant-funded reporters. In the last three years it has produced a series on the root causes of gun violence in Black and brown communities, reported on the link between rising temperatures and an increase in gun violence, and explored the impact of bail reform in New York City and beyond.
Now Reyes wants to create a template for other news organizations to follow.
“I want to give opportunities to young journalists of color that I didn’t have,” he said.
Weather
Expect a mostly sunny sky, with light wind and a high near 48. Tonight will be mostly cloudy and the temperature will drop to 39.
ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING
In effect until Feb. 28 (Losar).
The latest New York news
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A chance to weigh in on housing: The city’s Charter Revision Commission is holding public hearings at which New Yorkers can testify about how the city should deal with the housing crisis. The panel will come up with proposals to put before voters in November.
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Living in fear: Latino immigrants who work as housekeepers or for landscaping, catering and construction firms in the Hamptons are panicking about President Trump’s deportation orders. Local officials have tried to calm immigrants’ fears.
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Ready and willing: Jumaane Williams, the New York City public advocate, is preparing himself to serve as interim mayor if Mayor Eric Adams resigns or is removed.
New York ends funding for two yeshivas
For the first time, the New York State Department of Education is withholding money from two private Hasidic schools in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, for not teaching sufficient math and English skills.
My colleagues Eliza Shapiro and Brian M. Rosenthal write that the move is one that many Hasidic leaders — and even critics of the yeshiva system — doubted the state would ever take. The state’s process for penalizing schools that do not provide an adequate secular education is tangled and time-consuming, and resisting outside oversight of religious education has become perhaps the top political priority for the Hasidic community. The yeshivas teach religious lessons in Yiddish and Hebrew for most of the school day and offer little instruction in English or math.
Leaders of the two schools, Yeshiva Talmud Torah of Kasho and Yeshiva Bnei Shimon Yisroel of Sopron, refused to meet with state education officials to work on an improvement plan, according to the State Education Department. The two schools are part of a larger group of yeshivas that have not made sufficient progress, said Rachel Connors, a spokeswoman for the department.
Spokespeople for a group that represents yeshivas did not respond to requests for comment. But an editorial published Friday in Yeshiva World News, a Hasidic news outlet, offered an indication of the community’s reaction.
“It is always wiser to make your case to government rather than to refuse to respond,” the editorial read. “That makes it seem like they had something to hide.” The editorial noted that the yeshivas were being judged not on their curriculum or “approach to education” but because they had not engaged with the government.
METROPOLITAN diary
Presidential jam
Dear Diary:
It was 2019, and I was living in a section of Yorkville that was tumbleweed-quiet. If it was a balmy night and I was feeling restless, I’d grab my guitar and head down to Washington Square Park to find a jam session to jump into.
There was a motley crew of regulars: N.Y.U. students always calling the same Dylan tunes, and grizzled hippies always happy to oblige. There was an E.R. doctor who lived nearby and never missed a jam. And more often than not, there was Abraham Lincoln, singing along in a black suit and a stovepipe hat.
I didn’t want to puncture the myth of this mystical man who looked and dressed like President Lincoln but also knew “Tangled Up in Blue,” so I never asked any questions. I figured he was a Greenwich Village institution and left it at that.
After skipping the sessions for two pandemic winters, I made a beeline for the park on the first warm night of spring and spotted the E.R. doc lounging on a bench.
We fist-bumped hello and caught up on what we had been doing. I told him it was my first night back in a while, and I was looking for familiar faces, one in particular.
“Any idea how Abe is doing?” Not seeing him in the park, I feared the worst.
“Oh, Bill?” the doctor said. “I think he’s in Florida for the winter.”
— Michael Harmon
Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.
Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B.
P.S. Here’s today’s Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here.
Makaelah Walters and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at [email protected].
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