These illustrated talks are attractive as spousal activities for corporate meetings, introductions to NYC for newcomers, special events for organizations, orientation programs for colleges, or part of a training curriculum for hospitality personnel.
Talks can be customized to address the special interests of the group. Depending on the venue and the number of people attending, Joyce welcomes questions throughout the talk, and always holds a lively Q&A session at the end.
Contact Joyce for more information or to schedule a talk for your organization.
This talk features New York City's earliest years, the company that put down the first roots, the people who came and lived here, and the natives already here when the settlers arrived. The Dutch settlement lasted just 40 years, from 1624 to 1664. Yet these commercial origins have had an enduring influence as the city became one of the greatest business centers in the world.
New York City gave the North a decisive advantage in the American Civil War. The city’s financiers provided the bonds and bondholders to cover the huge cost of waging war. Manufacturers produced uniforms, pharmaceuticals, munitions, and the world’s first iron-clad ship. But as the war dragged on, tensions between Irish and Blacks, and between the poor and the wealthy exploded into the violent Draft Riots.
Home to many of the political, creative, and intellectual movements in New York's history, Washington Square with its amazing female population accounts for much of that vitality. Factory workers, scholars, artists, radicals, aristocrats — remarkable women left their imprints on this neighborhood and well beyond.
Home to many of the political, creative, and intellectual movements in New York's history, Washington Square with its amazing female population accounts for much of that vitality.
Perhaps in no other six blocks on earth have so many notable women lived and achieved for the last 150 years. Throughout the years, it has seen an unparalleled variety of womenworking class, gentry, radical, literary, academic, theatrical, convict, and immigrant. Eleanor Roosevelt, Edith Wharton, Louisa May Alcott, Emily Roebling, Bella Abzug, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, Ida Tarbell, Emily Post, Edna St Vincent Millay, and even the woman who invented the kewpie doll, all shared this famed New York neighborhood.
Highlights of the talk include:
• literary, art, and theatre iconoclasts:
• The salon of Mable Dodge, a center of WW I-era activism
• The tragedy of the Triangle fire and its role in the labor movement
• The Suffrage Movement
Grand Central accommodates 700,000 people a day in one of the most beautiful buildings in America. The building seems to embody the huge purpose of the terminal—to move great numbers of people, to provide services for travelers, to outshine its rival, and to create a real estate boom. This talk highlights the aesthetics, personalities and technology that created this masterpiece.
From the earliest days, hard-working, skilled and unskilled immigrants brought New York energy, intelligence and a continually changing mix of cultures.
The streets of Greenwich Village can bring even seasoned New Yorkers to their knees. For them, and for anyone curious about how the meandering by-ways of Greenwich Village were carved into the island of Mannahatta, this talk is the essential primer.
Streets bend, diagonals come out of nowhere, roads stop for no good reason, and thoroughfares change direction. Such intersections as Waverly Place & Waverly Place, and W 4th Street & W 10th Street do little to help.
There are good reasons behind the confusion, but it takes some digging to uncover them. Joyce Gold will explain how topography, natural boundaries, Indian paths, and estate ownership carved the first convoluted pattern of roads. And she will also show the strange result of the city’s insisting upon connecting areas north and south of the Village.
The Village is one of New York's earliest landmarked communities. On quirky angled streets lie 1920s speakeasies, literary hang-outs, European-style coffeehouses, Off-Broadway theatres — the quintessential American Bohemia.
Origins and design of this much-loved refuge, the city's gift to the people.
NY's place in history owes a debt to the physical characteristics of the place now seen as a city of glass and concrete. What do the natural origins of Manhattan have to do with the city today?
sFrom the time of J P Morgan and the Easter Parade through the Roaring 20s, Depression Years, and Post-WW II period, Manhattan grew to be today's cultural, financial, and creative mecca of international stature.
Discover how historical structures embody the social, political, and technological movements of their times.
