The Country in the City: Central Park in Jonas Mekas's Walden and William Greaves's Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One

1997 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 337-360 ◽  
Author(s):  
SCOTT MACDONALD

On a map or from the air, nothing defines New York City more clearly than the rectilinearity of Central Park at the heart of the curvilinear island of Manhattan. And nothing encodes the paradox of the thinking that created Frederick Law Olmsted's first great park – and simultaneously distinguishes it from many of the parks inspired by Central Park – than the virtually perfect geometry of its outline. The Park simultaneously confirms the grid structure of the streets of Manhattan and dramatically interrupts this structure: streets that run vertically uptown and downtown or horizontally across town must, when they reach the horizontal and vertical boundaries of the park, leave their verticality and horizontality behind to traverse the Park before rejoining the grid of streets and avenues at the far boundaries of the Park's expanse. If the Cartesian clarity of midtown Manhattan has come to represent the efficiency of American capitalism that was making the United States a major industrial power during the years when the Greensward Plan was designed and Central Park constructed, the Park represented (and continues to represent) a counter-sensibility: as Olmstead and Vaux predicted.

Author(s):  
Llana Barber

Chapter Seven traces Lawrence's transition to a Latino-majority city with the 2000 census, including the tremendous increase in immigration during the 1980s that led Lawrence to become home to the largest concentration of Dominicans in the United States outside of New York City. The city's Latino population came to define Lawrence's public culture in this period, and the long push for Latino political power in the city was ultimately successful in many ways. This chapter discusses the transnational activities that brought new vitality to Lawrence's economy and its public spaces, yet larger structural forces continued to create obstacles to Latinos finding in Lawrence the better life they pursued.


Author(s):  
Inge F. Goldstein ◽  
Martin Goldstein

One night in early October 1997, Felipe G., a nine-year-old child of Dominican immigrants to New York City living in East Harlem, woke up struggling for breath. Felipe had had asthma attacks before, and his parents knew, or thought they knew, what to do: they called for an ambulance, which rushed him to the emergency room of Harlem Hospital nearby. But this time he stopped breathing on the way to the hospital, and could not be revived there. His younger sister Ana also has asthma, but so far has never had to go to the emergency room. The tenement building in which Felipe’s family lives is three blocks from the Harlem River Drive, a highway on which thousands of cars travel each workday, emitting, in spite of their catalytic converters, large quantities of oxides of nitrogen, carbon monoxide, and incompletely combusted gasoline. Several blocks north is a parking garage for the diesel trucks of the New York City Department of Sanitation. The drivers of the trucks that use the lot often keep their motors idling, so that great quantities of diesel exhaust particles are emitted to the surrounding area. The Harlem district of New York City, inhabited mainly by African-Americans and Hispanics, is shielded to a large extent from the prevailing west winds by higher areas on the west side of Manhattan. Hence, air pollution produced within Harlem—for example, by cars, diesel trucks, and buses, and by an electric power generating plant located there—tends to remain longer than in other areas of the city. The New York City Department of Environmental Protection operated a network of air monitoring stations from the 1940s to the 1970s, during which time Harlem was consistently found to be the most polluted area in the city. It had then, and still has, one of the highest rates of hospitalization for asthma in the city. In most countries, asthma is more common among children of higher social class. In the United States this pattern is reversed: people living in the inner cities of the United States, mostly low-income minorities, have higher rates of asthma than other Americans.


Author(s):  
Ana S. Gonzalez-Reiche ◽  
Matthew M. Hernandez ◽  
Mitchell Sullivan ◽  
Brianne Ciferri ◽  
Hala Alshammary ◽  
...  

ABSTRACTNew York City (NYC) has emerged as one of the epicenters of the current SARS-CoV2 pandemic. To identify the early events underlying the rapid spread of the virus in the NYC metropolitan area, we sequenced the virus causing COVID19 in patients seeking care at the Mount Sinai Health System. Phylogenetic analysis of 84 distinct SARS-CoV2 genomes indicates multiple, independent but isolated introductions mainly from Europe and other parts of the United States. Moreover, we find evidence for community transmission of SARS-CoV2 as suggested by clusters of related viruses found in patients living in different neighborhoods of the city.


Author(s):  
Sofia Baliño Rios

The Central Park jogger case has returned to news headlines with the 2019 Netflix mini-series When They See Us, a dramatised account of the original trials. It has reignited debate over the injustices faced by the Black community in the United States, and led to lawsuits and job resignations on the part of former police investigators and prosecutors. Since the case’s inception, issues of race, media reporting, economics, and the identity of New York City have influenced the trial and its aftermath and have inspired documentaries, books, and the landmark 1990 essay “Sentimental Journeys” by Joan Didion. In this article, I argue that the creators of two of these works, by testing the boundaries of narrative, demonstrate that the case was inexorably tainted by a pervasive feeling of social precarity and racial prejudice which cost five young men several years of their lives, and offer a productive line of enquiry for acknowledging such factors and their influence, if not resolving them.


Science ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. eabc1917 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ana S. Gonzalez-Reiche ◽  
Matthew M. Hernandez ◽  
Mitchell J. Sullivan ◽  
Brianne Ciferri ◽  
Hala Alshammary ◽  
...  

New York City (NYC) has emerged as one of the epicenters of the current SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. To identify the early transmission events underlying the rapid spread of the virus in the NYC metropolitan area, we sequenced the virus causing COVID-19 in patients seeking care at the Mount Sinai Health System. Phylogenetic analysis of 84 distinct SARS-CoV2 genomes indicates multiple, independent but isolated introductions mainly from Europe and other parts of the United States. Moreover, we find evidence for community transmission of SARS-CoV-2 as suggested by clusters of related viruses found in patients living in different neighborhoods of the city.


1997 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 195-223
Author(s):  
Lillian Taiz

Forty-eight hours after they landed in New York City in 1880, a small contingent of the Salvation Army held their first public meeting at the infamous Harry Hill's Variety Theater. The enterprising Hill, alerted to the group's arrival from Britain by newspaper reports, contacted their leader, Commissioner George Scott Railton, and offered to pay the group to “do a turn” for “an hour or two on … Sunday evening.” In nineteenth-century New York City, Harry Hill's was one of the best known concert saloons, and reformers considered him “among the disreputable classes” of that city. His saloon, they said, was “nothing more than one of the many gates to hell.”


1984 ◽  
Vol 55 (1) ◽  
pp. 231-240 ◽  
Author(s):  
Avraham Shama ◽  
Joseph Wisenblit

This paper describes the relation between values and behavior of a new life style, that of voluntary simplicity which is characterized by low consumption, self-sufficiency, and ecological responsibility. Also, specific hypotheses regarding the motivation for voluntary simplicity and adoption in two areas of the United States were tested. Analysis shows (a) values of voluntary simplicity and behaviors are consistent, (b) the motivation for voluntary simplicity includes personal preference and economic hardship, and (c) adoption of voluntary simplicity is different in the Denver and New York City metropolitan areas.


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