Publications
New York Recentered: Building the Metropolis from the Shore (The University of Chicago Press, 2019)
The history of New York City’s urban development often centers on titanic municipal figures like Robert Moses and on prominent inner Manhattan sites like Central Park. New York Recentered boldly shifts the focus to the city’s geographic edges—the coastlines and waterways—and to the small-time unelected locals who quietly shaped the modern city. Kara Murphy Schlichting details how the vernacular planning done by small businessmen and real estate operators, performed independently of large scale governmental efforts, refigured marginal locales like Flushing Meadows and the shores of Long Island Sound and the East River in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The result is a synthesis of planning history, environmental history, and urban history that recasts the story of New York as we know it.
Read more about Chapter 6 “‘From Dumps to Glory’: Flushing Meadows and the New York World’s Fair of 1939–1940” of New York Recentered at the Living New Deal.
Read more about this book at “The Metropole Bookshelf: Kara Schlichting On Her New Book, New York Recentered: Building the Metropolis From The Shore,” (Nov. 20, 2019) The Metropole: The Official Blog of the Urban History Association.
Read an excerpt of Chapter 2 “Laying Out the Trans-Harlem City” from New York Recentered at Gotham: A Blog for Scholars of New York City History.
New and Noteworthy
“The Narrowing of Broad Beach: Coastal Change and Public Beaches in Malibu, California,” Pacific Historical Review 92, no. 2 (Spring 2023): 199-226.
Winer of the 2024 Forest History Society Theodore C. Blegen Award for best scholarship in forest and conservation history published in a journal other than Environmental History.
Additional Articles and Chapters
“Urban Seasonality: Prospecting New Paths in Urban Environmental History,” co-author Avi Sharma, Journal of Urban History, OnlineFirst 2024.
“Thinking with Urban Natures,” co-authors Raúl Acosta, Joseph Adeniran Adedeji, Maan Barua, Matthew Gandy, and Sasha Gora, Global Environment No. 16.2 (2023): 177-221. online.
“The Narrowing of Broad Beach: Coastal Change and Public Beaches in Malibu, California,” Pacific Historical Review 92, no. 2 (Spring 2023): 199-226.
“Three Case Studies for Reassessing New York’s Power Broker,” w/ Katie Uva (lead author), New York History 103 no. 1 (Summer 2022): 168-177.
“Teaching Robert Moses in the Twenty-First Century: Part I,” w/ Katie Uva (lead author), New York History 102 no. 2 (Winter 2021-2022): 399-405.
“Hot Town: Sensing Heat in Summertime Manhattan,” Environmental History 27 no. 2 (April 2022): 354-68.
“Misremembering Risk in the Age of Hurricanes: The Rhode Island Coast in the 1930s-1950s,” Coastal Studies and Society (2021). online.
“The Health of the Harbor,” chapter in Coastal Metropolis: Environmental Histories of Modern New York City (2021).
“Invisible Inequalities: Persistent Health Threats in the Urban Built Environment,” lead author, with Melanie Kiechle, Journal of the History of Environment and Society, 5 (2020). online.
“Rethinking the Bronx’s ‘Soundview Slums’: The Intersecting Histories of Large-Scale Waterfront Redevelopment and Community-Scaled Planning in an Era of Urban Renewal,” Journal of Planning History 16, Issue 2 (May 2017), 112–138. online.
“‘They Shall Not Pass:’ Opposition to Public Leisure and State Park Planning in Connecticut and on Long Island,” Journal of Urban History 41, no. 1 (Jan. 2015), 116-142. online.
