Andrew Cuomo’s Finish Line

Last Subway ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 221-246
Author(s):  
Philip Mark Plotch
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
York City ◽  
Finish Line ◽  
Cost Overruns ◽  
Public Agency ◽  
Signal Systems ◽  
The Right ◽  
Line P ◽  
New Yorkers

This chapter recounts how, in late 2015, Governor Andrew Cuomo decided to prioritize the Second Avenue subway, pressuring the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) to complete the project by January 1, 2017. When making decisions about the Second Avenue subway, MTA officials always had to balance various factors, including budget, schedule, and quality. Cuomo changed the MTA's priorities to emphasize speed. As a result, some factors were deemphasized, such as New York City Transit's concerns about maintainability, budget officials' worries about cost overruns, and engineers' expectations that they would thoroughly test every single component. The governor's insistence on meeting the New Year's deadline would consume the MTA as it turned its attention from other projects, other escalators, and other signal systems. Ultimately, Governor Cuomo had pressed the right buttons to open up the Second Avenue subway on first day of the New Year. But New Yorkers did not realize what happens when a public agency pours too much of its attention and resources into expediting one megaproject.

Nearly Got Shot Dead, and He Didn’t Get His Little Check Yet: Workers, Crime, and Law and Order in New York City, 1962-1970

2021 ◽  
pp. 009614422199964
Author(s):  
Glenn Dyer
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
Collective Action ◽  
York City ◽  
Important Research ◽  
Law And Order ◽  
Fertile Ground ◽  
Management Conflicts ◽  
High Crime ◽  
New Yorkers

Historians have conducted important research on the rise of law-and-order politics in New York City, where anxieties over women’s freedoms, political battles over police oversight, and crime impacts in poor communities contributed to its rise. The numerous walkouts, negotiations, and worker-management conflicts around high-crime areas in New York City suggest that the question of law and order was a salient workplace issue as well for the members of Communication Workers of America Local 1101. In their case, such concerns predate the rhetorical rise of law and order and help us better understand why such politics found fertile ground among working-class New Yorkers, white and black. Repeated incidences, largely in the city’s black ghettoes, prompted workers with a strong class consciousness and commitment to solidarity to transform the problems and experiences of individual workers into a shared question to be addressed via collective action.

“A Shelter Can Tip the Scales Sometimes”: Disinvestment, Gentrification, and the Neighborhood Politics of Homelessness in 1980s New York City

2017 ◽  
Vol 43 (6) ◽  
pp. 915-931 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ariel Eisenberg
Keyword(s):  
Quality Of Life ◽  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
York City ◽  
Urban Spaces ◽  
Neighborhood Politics ◽  
New Yorkers

In the 1980s, visible homelessness became one of the most pressing problems in New York City. While most New Yorkers expressed sympathy for the homeless, many of them also resisted efforts to site shelters and service facilities in their neighborhoods. But far from being simply a case of NIMBY (not-in-my-back-yard) sentiment, protests over the placement of these facilities arose in the context of decades-long neighborhood movements against urban disinvestment and the beginning of gentrification in some New York City neighborhoods. I argue that understanding this history is crucial to parsing the complex politics of anti-homeless facility protests in the 1980s and to understanding the rise of “quality of life” policies that would govern many neoliberal urban spaces by the 1990s.

scholarly journals Fostering food equity in an immigrant neighborhood of New York City during COVID-19

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-5
Author(s):  
Valerie Imbruce
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
York City ◽  
Grocery Stores ◽  
Production Distribution ◽  
Food Equity ◽  
The Right ◽  
The City ◽  
Immigrant Neighborhoods

Food equity includes the right to food that is cul­turally appropriate. Immigrant neighborhoods can be sites of contestation over who participates in the production, distribution, and consumption of food. Manhattan’s Chinatown is a good example of a neighborhood where food is central to its com­merce, cultural heritage, and reputation as a tourist destination. The coronavirus’ origin in China caused imme­diate material impact on Chinese restaurants and food purveyors in New York City as well as in other cities with major populations of Chinese people. Chinatown suffered disproportionate closures of its grocery stores, restaurants, and produce vendors due to COVID-19 as compared to other neighbor­hoods in NYC. The grassroots response to this crisis is a reminder that people have the power to use food to assert the society that they desire, to shape a highly contested urban space, and to claim their right to the city.

The Floating Pool Lady

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ann L. Buttenwieser
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
York City ◽  
Urban Landscape ◽  
Environmental Issues ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Public ◽  
Public Projects ◽  
New Yorkers

Why on earth would anyone want to float a pool up the Atlantic coastline to bring it to rest at a pier on the New York City waterfront? This book recounts the author's triumphant adventure that started in the bayous of Louisiana and ended with a self-sustaining, floating swimming pool moored in New York Harbor. When the author decided something needed to be done to help revitalize the New York City waterfront, she reached into the city's nineteenth-century past for inspiration. The author wanted New Yorkers to reestablish their connection to their riverine surroundings and she was energized by the prospect of city youth returning to the Hudson and East rivers. What she didn't suspect was that outfitting and donating a swimming facility for free enjoyment by the public would turn into an almost-Sisyphean task. As the book describes, the author battled for years with politicians and struggled with bureaucrats to bring her “crazy” scheme to fruition. The book retells the improbable process that led to a pool named The Floating Pool Lady tying up to a pier at Barretto Point Park in the Bronx, ready for summer swimmers. Throughout, the book raises consciousness about persistent environmental issues and the challenges of developing a constituency for projects to make cities livable in the twenty-first century. The story functions as both warning and inspiration to those who dare to dream of realizing innovative public projects in the modern urban landscape.

Sabotaging the Civilizers

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joyce D. Goodfriend
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
New York City ◽  
York City ◽  
Cultural Authority ◽  
Poor People ◽  
Immoral Behavior ◽  
Moral Standards ◽  
Rules Set ◽  
New Yorkers

This chapter examines how lowly city dwellers confounded their purported benefactors, for example, by violating cardinal points of civility, indulging their appetites at taverns and brothels, or intruding into the exclusive spaces of the well-to-do. Many urban New Yorkers behaved in ways that were contrary to elite expectations and in so doing risked sanctions from those who controlled important resources. Poor people tended to transgress the rules set by gentlemen and engage in immoral behavior. In precarious circumstances, they perpetually did what was necessary to stay afloat, even if it meant flouting the Christian-based moral standards upheld by the elite. This chapter considers how people disdained as nonentities in eighteenth-century New York City, including blacks and prostitutes, contested the dominion of the city's gentlemen and thus diminished the elite's cultural authority.

The Freethinker, the Jews, and the Missionaries: George Houston and the Mystery of Israel Vindicated

AJS Review ◽  
1980 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
pp. 101-114 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan D. Sarna
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
York City ◽  
Minority Groups ◽  
Self Interest ◽  
History Of ◽  
American Society ◽  
First Time ◽  
New Evidence ◽  
New Yorkers

In 1820, a volume entitled Israel Vindicated, written by "An Israelite," was published in New York City. It was the first Jewish polemic composed in response to the founding of a missionary society, the American Society for Meliorating the Condition of the Jews, and it remained influential throughout the nineteenth century. The author of this work, however, has never been identified. Nor has the volume itself received the attention it deserves. This article attempts to fill both of these lacunae.Section one describes and analyzes Israel Vindicated. It places the work within the context of its times, and compares it to other, more traditional anti-Christian polemics. Section two outlines the postpublication history of Israel Vindicated. Soon after it appeared, some New Yorkers attempted to have the work banned, and its author exposed and punished. Later, the work was variously invoked by Jews and Judeophobes alike, though, of course, for different purposes. In section three, the author of Israel Vindicated assumes center stage. A review of old and new evidence leads to the conclusion that the work flowed from the pen of freethinker George Houston, assisted probably by his Jewish printer, Abraham Collins. Finally, section four analyzes the motivations of George Houston and his Jewish supporters. As is shown, this was far from the first time that Jews joined forces temporarily with other, sometimes hostile minority groups in pursuit of self-interest. Adversity makes strange bedfellows.

Beyond the Melting Pot 35 Years Later: On the Relevance of a Sociological Classic for the Immigration Metropolis of Today

2000 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 243-243 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Alba
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
African Americans ◽  
York City ◽  
American City ◽  
Melting Pot ◽  
Sociological Society ◽  
First Time ◽  
New Yorkers ◽  
Accessible Form

The following essays were originally presented at a symposium at the 1998 annual meeting of the Eastern Sociological Society. The charge to the authors was to revisit Beyond the Melting Pot, the classic statement about ethnicity, race, and the American city, first published in 1963, and to assess how well its interpretations apply to the contemporary immigration metropolis. The commentators included two New Yorkers (Nancy Foner and Philip Kasinitz), since New York City was the terrain of the book, and two non-New Yorkers (Elijah Anderson and Alejandro Portes). Their commentaries touch on many points in the immigration landscape of today, from immigration's impacts on African Americans to immigrant transnationalism, and identify a number of continuities and discontinuities between the contemporary metropolis and that of nearly four decades ago. Further, Nathan Glazer's response provides, for the first time in a widely accessible form, his reflections on how well the book's portrait and predictions have held up. I am grateful to the IMR editor, Lydio Tomasi, and the journal's board for the opportunity to present this symposium to readers.

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