Douglas Flowe, an associate professor of history in Arts & Sciences at WashU, is featured in a new documentary about New York’s now-demolished San Juan Hill neighborhood and in some episodes of the History Channel series “Prison Chronicles.”
“San Juan Hill: Manhattan’s Lost Neighborhood” will premiere Oct. 9 at the New York Film Festival. Directed by Stanley Nelson and narrated by Ariana DeBose, the documentary explores a formerly working-class African American neighborhood on New York’s Upper West Side. Now the site of Lincoln Center, San Juan Hill’s clubs and theaters nurtured important artists such as James P. Johnson, Josephine Baker and Thelonious Monk but ultimately were doomed by redlining and urban renewal.
“Prison Chronicles,” which recently completed its first season, takes viewers inside some of the world’s most notorious prisons, from Alcatraz and Devil’s Island to the Soviet Gulag, through interviews with journalists, academics, former correctional officers and previously incarcerated individuals. Flowe is featured in episodes dedicated to New York’s infamous Sing Sing and Dannemora facilities.
Flowe is the author of “Uncontrollable Blackness: African American Men and Criminality in Jim Crow New York,” which received the Littleton-Griswold Prize from the American Historical Association in 2021. His research focuses on criminality, illicit leisure and masculinity, and how they converge with issues of race, class and space.
