Factors Associated with COVID-19 Infection, Hospitalization and Death in New York City Neighborhoods

Background: A key to an effective Coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) Community Intervention is to understand populations who are most vulnerable to it. We aimed at evaluating characteristics of New York City communities where rates of confirmed COVID-19 cases were particularly high. Methods: The study outcomes - neighborhood-specific confirmed COVID-19 cases, positive tests, and COVID-19 attributable deaths were calculated using data extracted from the New York City government health website, which were linked to results from Community Health Survey. Distributions of study outcomes across New York City community districts and their associations with neighborhood characteristics were examined using Jonckheere-Terpstra tests. Results: As of May 21, 2010, rates of confirmed cases ranged from 0.8% (Greenwich Village and Soho) to 3.9% (Jackson Heights), and the rates of attributable death from to 0.6‰ (Greenwich Village and Soho) to 4.2‰ (Coney Island). Higher percentages of black, Hispanic and foreign-born populations, lower educational attainment, poverty, lack of health insurance, and suboptimal quality of health care were all factors found to be correlated with increased rates of confirmed COVID-19 cases. Conclusions: The epidemiology of COVID-19 exhibited great variations among neighborhoods in New York City. Community interventions aimed at COVID-19 prevention and mitigation should place high priorities in areas with large populations of blacks and Hispanics and economically disadvantages areas.

Introduction

This chapter mentions New York police commissioner James P. O’Neill, who during a safety briefing for the 2019 WorldPride festival apologized for an event that took place on June 28, 1969. It recounts the raid of the Stonewall Inn in 1969, a bar in Greenwich Village that provided a safe environment for LGBT people to gather and socialize. The raid turned into a violent clash that spread around the bar’s vicinity and lasted for several days. It also speculates what prompted the rioting at the Stonewall Inn, exploring the theory that the death of singer-actress and gay icon Judy Garland put gay New Yorkers on edge. The chapter discusses the paramount importance of the Stonewall Riots to the rise of the contemporary gay rights movement. It points out that conventional wisdom considers the Stonewall rebellion to have been the first instance of gay resistance in American history.

'I chose the values I regarded as American': sexuality, ethnicity, and FBI informant Angela Calomiris

For personal or political reasons undocumented and controversial to this day, Greenwich Village lesbian photographer Angela Calomiris joined forces with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) during the Second World War to infiltrate the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA). As Calomiris rose through CPUSA ranks in New York City, espionage efforts resulted in the Attorney General's office declaring the avant-garde Film and Photo League to be a subversive communist organisation in 1947, and the conviction of communist leaders during the Smith Act trial two years later. Interestingly, despite J. Edgar Hoover's indeterminate sexuality and well-documented harassment of gays and lesbians in public life, what mattered to him was not whether Calomiris adhered to heteronormativity, but that her ultimate sense of duty lay with the US government. This article demonstrates how this distinction helped Calomiris find personal satisfaction in defiance of patriarchal conservative expectations and heteronormative cold war gender roles. This article, which utilises FBI files, press coverage, some of Calomiris's papers and her memoir, concludes with a brief discussion of Calomiris's later life in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where she continued to craft her identity as a left-liberal feminist, with no mention of the service to the FBI or her role in fomenting the second Red Scare.

Green to Bluegrass

In 1949 Lily Isaacs came to New York from Germany with her Jewish family. She met Joe Isaacs when he played a Greenwich Village folk club with Frank Wakefield and the Greenbriar Boys. Married in 1970, they moved to South Lebanon, Ohio. Joe played with Larry Sparks. After Joe’s brother died in an accident, Lily converted to Christianity. She and Joe began singing gospel, and recorded with Hamilton’s Pine Tree Records and at Jordan Studios in Covington, traveled with children Ben, Becky and Sonya as Sacred Bluegrass, then moved to LaFollette, Tennessee. After Lily and Joe divorced, Lily and her children performed as the Isaacs, earned a 2016 Grammy nomination, and Lily published her 2014 autobiography, You Don't Cry Out Loud.

David Burliuk in Color and Rhyme Magazine. Article 1. Painter and Poet on the Crossroads of Cultures

The paper traces David Burliuk’s evolution as a poet, essayist and editor in the United States, where he began his career in the pro-Soviet Russian émigré newspaper Russky Golos and then switched to his personal project — Color and Rhyme, the Burliuk family magazine. The paper examines some strategies of Burliuk's self-presentation in Color and Rhyme; since in this edition Burliuk is presented as a poet and an artist, the paper analyzes, how both of these roles of Burliuk relate to each other in the texts published in the magazine. Focusing on the English-speaking reader, Burliuk emphasized the European context of his artistic biography; other contributors that published their articles and reviews in the Color and Rhyme stressed his cultural affinity with Paul Gaugin, Expressionists, Fauvists and characterized Burliuk as “American Van Gogh”. Special attention is paid to the ways of representation of American poetry in Color and Rhyme. Burliuk’s magazine published works by members of some New York poetic communities, such as The New York Poetry Forum and The Raven Poetry Circle of Greenwich Village. In particular, it is described how Burliuk as an editor represented beginners or littleknown authors in the earlier periods of his editorial activity. The article shows that Color and Rhyme magazine can be viewed not only as a tool for “promoting” D. Burliuk's art, but also as a chronicle of his activity as a writer and artist.

The Only Wonderful Things

This book tells for the first time the story of the central relationship of novelist Willa Cather’s life, her nearly forty-year partnership with Edith Lewis. Cather has been described as a distinguished artist who turned her back on the crass commercialism of the early twentieth century and as a deeply private woman who strove to hide her sexuality, and Lewis has often been identified as her secretary. However, Lewis was a successful professional woman who edited popular magazines and wrote advertising copy at a major advertising agency and who, behind the scenes, edited Cather’s fiction. Recognizing Lewis’s role in Cather’s creative process changes how we understand Cather as an artist, while recovering their domestic partnership (which they did not seek to hide) provides a fresh perspective on lesbian life in the early twentieth century. Homestead reconstructs Cather and Lewis’s life together in Greenwich Village and on Park Avenue, their travels to the American Southwest that formed the basis of Cather’s novels The Professor’s House and Death Comes for the Archbishop, their summers as part of an all-woman resort community on Grand Manan Island, and Lewis’s magazine and advertising work as a context for her editorial collaboration with Cather. Homestead tells a human story of two women who chose to live in partnership and also explains how the Cold War panic over homosexuality caused biographers and critics to make Lewis and her central role in Cather’s life vanish even as she lived on alone for twenty-five years after her partner’s death.

“We Are the Only Wonderful Things”

After losing their Greenwich Village apartment in 1927, Cather and Lewis had no permanent home in New York City, living together instead at the Grosvenor Hotel when both were in the city. In 1932, they finally leased an apartment on Park Avenue. The first half of this chapter reconstructs their life together in the 1930s and 1940s living on Park Avenue and traveling to Europe and Mt. Desert Island in Maine. The chapter includes their responses to the Great Depression and World War II, the formation of new friendships and maintenance of old ones, the deeper intertwining of their families, and Cather’s declining health. After describing Cather’s death and burial, the second half of the chapter tells the story of Edith Lewis’s mourning for Cather in the years immediately after Cather’s death and her work as Cather’s literary executor.

Office Bohemia

Edith Lewis moved to Greenwich Village in 1903 to pursue literary work and Bohemian life. Willa Cather visited her there twice before moving to the Village herself in 1906 to become an editor at McClure’s Magazine, the staff of which Lewis also joined. This chapter argues that Lewis’s editorial collaboration with Cather emerged out of their work at McClure’s. It also argues that when they moved in together in 1908, they followed the example of Sarah Orne Jewett and Annie Fields, whom Cather had met while working for McClure’s in Boston. Cather left magazine work to take up full-time authorship, but Lewis continued working at McClure’s and then Every Week. Lewis gave up writing bylined fiction and poetry, but together she and Cather merged pragmatism and idealism, the market and aesthetics.

Building the Beloved Community in Provincetown

The ‘beloved community’ formed in Provincetown, Massachusetts in tandem with the high period of Greenwich Village’s bohemian ‘little renaissance.’ Once a prosperous whaling port, the village of Provincetown had been undergoing economic decline and a marked ethnic shift in the decades preceding its development as an art colony. By the turn of the century, its Catholic, Portuguese population overtook its ‘native’ Yankee one; at this time, the village amplified its reputation as home to two successful summer art schools and boosted its image within a booming regional tourist economy as a quaint, Cape Cod fishing village. A coterie of moderns from Greenwich Village discovered Provincetown’s relatively underdeveloped beaches and wharves and by the teens had made it their home base, at least during the summer season. This chapter core of this coterie lived out their bohemian identities by drinking copiously, dressing wildly, bathing naked, and forming the performing group that would come to be known as the Provincetown Players. This endeavour brought together individuals with a wide range of talents (as well as those with very little talent but a desire to participate in the fun) for theatrical events that served to consolidate—physically, in the space of the theatre, as well as ideologically, through the content of their plays—a distinctly modern and modernist ‘beloved community’ of friends, lovers, and associates at a distance from the metropolis.