Kara Murphy Schlichting

Assistant Professor of American and New York City History

Kara Schlichting is an Assistant Professor of History at Queens College, CUNY. She earned her PhD from Rutgers University in 2014. Her work in late-19th and 20th-century American History sits at the intersection of urban, environmental, and political history, with a particular focus on property regimes and regional planning in greater New […]

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Academia
Contact
kara.schlichting@qc.cuny.edu
Quick Link
http://cuny.is/karaschlichting
Positions
  • Assistant ProfessorHistoryQueens College
Publications
Schlichting, Kara Murphy, “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.

http://academicworks.cuny.edu/qc_pubs/159

Abstract

In the 1910s, the bungalow colony Harding Park developed on marshy Clason Point. Through the 1930s–1950s, Robert Moses sought to modernize this East Bronx waterfront through the Parks Department and the Committee on Slum Clearance. While localism and special legislative treatment enabled Harding Park’s preservation as a co-op in 1981, the abandonment of master planning left neighboring Soundview Park unfinished. The entwined histories of recreation and residency on Clason Point reveal the beneficial and detrimental effects of both urban renewal and community development, while also demonstrating the complicated relationship between localism and largescale planning in postwar New York City.

Comments

This is the accepted manuscript of an article originally published in the Journal of Planning History.