Activity #4 Scavenger Hunt (#7)

Activity #4: Scavenger Hunt

Rosedelle A Chery

Since 2001 terror attacks the US economy has been on a downslide. Even with two wars in our pockets and unemployment increasing, the 2008 financial crisis still came as a bog shock to most Americans. Banks were going broke, businesses were failing and the worse part of it all, houses were being lost. Because the economy was so bad, business had to lay off thousands of workers and people were defaulting on loans and mortgages. Banks that were barely staying a float were desperate to collect collateral from people that weren’t paying their bills. That massive collateral collect created the foreclosure boom in the US. People were losing their houses to banks left and right, and banks were putting those houses for public auctions as fast as they repossessed them.

One of the places hardest hit in New York was Brooklyn. With unemployment, especially for African Americans and women, skyrocketing, people couldn’t keep up with their mortgages lost their homes to the financial crisis. Among the hardest hit Brooklyn neighborhoods were East Flatbush, Flatlands, East New York, and Bedford- Stuyvesant. I decided to visit Bedford because my siblings and I were born and raised there for some time. Walking through the neighborhood was really depressing, seeing the houses boarded up or with the for sale or foreclosure sign, realizing that these houses was someone’s home who was forced out of it. One can argue that the banks were just doing what they had to do to survive and the homeowners should have paid their loans, which is true but everyone is suffering from this financial crisis and people are not in control when they lost there jobs. The worst part of the financial crisis was that while people were getting fired barely any companies were hiring, so either way people were out of luck.The house in the picture above looked as those the owners had to abandon that house in hast. Its a one family 2 story house with back yard. I wasn't sure if the house was under foreclosure so I asked a neighbor, who told me that it was in deed foreclosed and that both the parents, long time friends of his, had lost their jobs.

Bed-Sty, as we called it back in the day, seemed so empty and hollow. There were people there but there was a sadness and desperation in the air. I couldn’t help but to wonder what happen to the people that were living in these foreclosed houses. Did they find another house, are they in homeless shelters, did these families have kids, where elderly people that had lost their retirement funds? All these questions went through my head as I looked at each house. I wonder if the people that will eventually by these houses thing the same. I also wondered if the method of “red lining” that James Kunstler mentioned in his book “The Geography of Nowhere” still exists today. Does the FHA still refuse to back up mortgages in areas they deem unworthy. I think it can be partly confirmed by the fact that many of the increasing foreclosure rates are in minority neighborhoods. Kunstler stated that FHA was created to back up the mortgages that banks gave to owners so interest rates could decrease and if, incase, nonpayment occurred the banks would still get their money. However, there was a catch. The FHA would only back up mortgages in places it deemed desirable, which excluded many areas in which blacks and immigrants were living. With out help from the FHA, lenders are being charged high interest rates to compensate for the banks lending them the money. However, foreclosure rates are still increasing in the suburban places, were the majority may be white. At the end of the day, no matter what race, people are still losing their homes and the economy and the spirit of Americans are still sinking into depression.

Activity #3 Public vs. Private

Activity #3 Public vs. Private

Rosedelle A Chery

Manhattan is probably the most well known borough in New York and the rest of the country. It is always bustling with people, cars, buses and, its one of the main reasons why New York City is called the city that never sleeps. However, in such a big borough with massive amounts of people, there really aren’t many truly public places, in my opinion. To me a public place is somewhere that anyone can go into no matter who they are or the time. I decided to walk down the 68^th and 3^rdave to about 58^th and 3^rdave on a Tuesday and Saturday afternoon to see if there any public gathering places or was it all private areas. The weather on both of these days was pretty nice, and the amount of people on the streets was much more on Saturday then on Tuesday. 3^rdave is one of the many major retail areas in New York city so I wasn’t so optimistic about my chances of finding public gathering places or many city own public places, besides the streets and sidewalks. As I walked down the streets, there were many stores, which were all privately owned. Through stores, like starbucks and shopping centers are supposed to be open to the public, they are privately owned and I would assume if the store owner or manager didn’t want a certain person in the store than they could refuse their business. Of course I’m not saying they can discriminate based on race or sex, but if the manager or owners knows that you have stolen from the store then they can surly refuse your business.

For a public area, I was looking for an open non gated place, anywhere that looked free and owned by the city. Granted even city owned places aren’t really public because, even though tax payers are footing the bill, the city can set up rules and require permits for a certain number of people to occupy that space for a certain time or reason. When I reached 62^nd and 3^rdave, a pigeon flew passed me, a little too close for comfort, right into this little sitting area. It looked like park or green area. I didn’t see any signs of ownership, but I didn’t see any people there. However, there were a lot of pigeons that landed there. I assumed that it was a public area because there were no guards or gates blocking the entrance, or any signs permitting entrance, it was just there and open. I think that there weren’t any people there because of the massive amount of dirty pigeons that was there. I asked people walking pass if they knew what the named of this place was or who it belonged to but no one knew. Still, I was happy I found a seemingly public place, and it was a cute little area. In the process of trying to get a picture, I walked into the street because I am deathly terrified of pigeons and there was no way I was going to get close to them. However, I almost got hit by a truck, so that wasn’t my best idea.

The only other places that were public were in areas in front of stores, where people were standing or smoking. It wasn’t directly in front of the door of the stores, but it was either to the side of or to a few feet in front on the sidewalk. On this journey, I came across 2 homeless men sitting across the street from Bloomingdales, near the train station and trucking area on 59^th and 3^rd. Since they weren’t sitting in front of any stores and no one was telling them that they had to leave, I assumed that they were sitting on public property. I know that if that area was owned by Bloomingdales or another store, they wouldn’t let these homeless men loiter in front of a privately owned area. The line between public and private really is blurred in the city. Even if an area is being paid for by tax dollars, we don’t really own it, city officials do and they make loitering and permit rules to assert control. Then there are places in which the public can enter but at the end of the day someone privately owns it. So nothing is truly public and free from control anymore.

Activity #4 - Scavenger Hunt by Patricia Fraser

For the scavenger hunt activity I chose to do numbers 1, 9, 10, and 11. When researching the Phillip Johnson AT&T Building, I immediately recognized it as the Sony Building in midtown Manhattan. This building is home to the Sony Wonder Technology Lab, a place I have visited dozens of times. Taking the pictures for the assignment was fun as well because I love skyscrapers. They are such a unique feature of big cities and I get lost in time observing the architectural features, height and scope of these buildings.

Gated communities do exist in NYC. In researching this topic, I came across some examples of gated communities in the traditional sense and some with traditional features with an urban backdrop. Gramercy is a neighborhood that was originally designed in the 1870's for the upper classes and rich of New York, an area facing a park for exclusive use of the residents. The area remains that way today. In order to access Gramercy Park, you must be a resident of one of the buildings facing the park and have a key that is provided by a residents group. The exclusivity of the buildings, the parks and the surrounding area help define it as gated. Taino Towers in Harlem and River Park Towers in the Bronx were built to accommodate people with lower to middle incomes in NYC. These communities are a series of tall buildings, surrounded by gates that are manned 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. In order to gain admittance you have to live there, or know someone that does. You also have to state where the person lives and in the case of River Park Towers, there are separate designated parking places for residents and non residents. Within the grounds are seating areas, play areas, stores and facilities for the exclusive use of residents and their guests.

For number 11, I chose to photograph two street configurations in Harlem. First the intersection of 110th Street and 5th Avenue, next to Central Park North, and 116th Street that crosses with 7th Avenue and Convent Avenue. In the middle of the street on 5th avenue and 110th Street is a huge circular seating area topped off with a life size statue of a famous musician, standing next to a piano. Going west by car/bus on 11oth Street you have to make a slight right turn, then immediate soft left turn to continue on 110th Street. Fifth Avenue flows south in an even pattern. Traffic heading east on 110th Street must bear left unto 5th Avenue, then turn left at the next available street in order to continue eastward. On the southeast and northeast corners of this intersection are tall residential buildings that also create an awkward traffic flow.

At the second location, it seems alot more complicated. Standing on the corner of 116th Street and Convent Avenue, facing north, you see traffic flowing in many different directions. Seventh Avenue flows north and south on the easternmost side of the street. Convent Avenue flows south on a diagonal, meeting 7th Avenue at 116th Street and continuing south. At the same time, 116th Street flows east and west. That section is a dizzying array of traffic lights, buses, cars, bikes and no accidents!

How 10 blocks can be categorized in 2sets of 5 !

Oceane Mercadal

Activity 3#

The third activity for my Urban Studies class was to walk a ten-block radius and identify public from private places. In order to accomplish this activity I decided to walk around my friends place s I’m staying there for a little while. He lives on 85^th and Lexington Avenue. I decided to walk up Lexington Avenue to 95^th, which is near the EHS dorms were I first lived when I moved the city. I thought the activity was going to be fun and a piece of cake but actually came to be one of the hardest things I had to do.

A quote, which I found particularly appropriate for this exercise was from Jane Jacobs book The Death and Life of Great American Cities: "...frequent streets and short blocks are valuable because of the fabric of intricate cross-use that they permit among the users of a city neighborhood." I thought this quote was good for this exercise because it clearly states that the streets we live on today exist for what they are due to what the neighborhood makes them to be.

As I walked up the streets I realized it was really crowded from 85^th to 89^th-90^th, everything started becoming quite after that. I would say that 85^th and 86^th street are public blocks. A Best Buy, Pet Co, Victoria Secret, H&M, Sephora and some other utility stores such as the small AT&T shop and the Duane Read can be found on this very small radius. These streets also shelter the 6-train subway line as well as the express trains 4 and 5. This area could be considered public. It is busy from morning to night with people coming out or going in the subways, busy workers going to get coffee at the Starbucks on the corer before work and the ones going shopping on a nice day off from work. "Traffic congestion is caused by vehicles, not by people in themselves.” This quote from Jane Jacobs book fits this public area perfectly. Even though the street is packed with people, what stands out the most are the yellow cabs going stopping in the middle of the sidewalk to take passengers when your crossing the street.

As you go further up the amount of big stores decrease and the noise level diminishes as well. I can’t really say that it gets quiet, as it never does in the streets of Manhattan. You’re always going to have a fire truck or a police car coming out of nowhere blasting their annoying and painful serene. As you walk up to 95^th the streets become more private though. There aren’t any big stores like the Barnes & Nobles on 85^th between Lexington and 3^rd Avenue. It is mostly private apartment buildings. On the contrary to the rest of Manhattan there is a mixture of tall skyscrapers and small 4-5 stories buildings. Actually you can distinguish the difference from one avenue to the next. Between Lexington and Park Avenue are the shorter buildings; while on the other between Lexington and 3^rd Avenue are the humongous skyscrapers. As you walk up you can find some small shops such as the nail place, which you never know whether it is open or not. A few restaurants all a block away from one another and the Crumbs Cupcake shop on 91^st (where I was obliged to stop in order to get a tiramisu cupcake).

Walking up these 10 blocks on Lexington Avenue as fun and interesting because you get to discover the city and your neighborhood and a completely new way. You also realize how the surroundings can change from one block to the next. I’d say there is a wide variety of public and private places everywhere and that it is up to you to decide what you want this area to be for you.

Activity #2

Activity #2
Rosedelle A. Chery
Visit a place someone told you to go
For this activity one of my classmates, Selma, suggested that I visit Arthur Ave. in the Bronx. The only thing she told me about the area was that people called it “Little Italy”. When I asked a friend of mine, who lived in the Bronx, if she ever heard of that area, all she told me was that it always smelt like food. I didn't put all the information together until I actually reached Arthur Ave and I could see what they were talking about. I have never been to the Bronx before, mostly because I always heard about bad things happening over there. Over all, going to new places can be intimidating. I used to brag that I have been to ever part of New York except the Bronx and vowed that I would never go there. This assignment definitely put an end to that, but luckily, I was pleasantly surprised when I reached “Little Italy”.
Though this activity eased my fears about going to the Bronx, it confirmed my thoughts that the train ride from Rockaway Beach, Queens, to the Bronx would be the longest ride I would ever take going from one borough to the next. The bus and train ride took about 2hrs and 35 minutes and I had to transfer between the Q53, the A and the D trains. Thankfully I had a test coming up so I had plenty of reading material for that long ride. When I got to the Bronx at Fordham Road, I realized that it looked a lot like Jamaica Ave. in Queens expect for the fact there was a highway passing along side. I thought this was Arthur Ave at first, but I was told by someone that I had to take another bus. Of course, this was after two people told me Arthur Ave was in the opposite direction. I found a map and realized that I, indeed, had to take another bus. While on the bus, we passed Fordham University and it looked like it was its own little town. Its old style buildings and the plush green yards looked way different from the Fordham Road, which was more urban and mixed with a shopping Center. This illustrated Jane Jacob’s belief in “mixed- development of cities”. Here in one area there were stores, mostly small business and residential buildings, and down the block there was a big university that had a very old Victorian look to it. I think it really does add to the diversity in the Bronx that within this local urban area, there’s a big and different college campus in the center of it all. I think this differs from the schools in Manhattan or in other parts of the city in that there is not really any diversity in the buildings. The schools look the same as the other buildings that surround it and there’s nothing really special about them.
When I finally reached Arthur Ave, I walked down the entire area not really seeing what was there. The only thing that I saw was that, unlike the busy streets of Fordham road, this neighborhood was quite and had more of a homey feeling. As I walked around a second time, I started to see why it was called “Little Italy”. On almost every block there was a pizza shop, an Italian restaurant, or some other kinds of Italian business, with residential buildings and houses, like Fordham Road. However, it lacked diversity. Arthur Ave is a beautiful area with some cobble sidewalks and beautiful stores, but to me, it was sort of bland. I think that Arthur Ave was developed to attract Italian people looking for a place that would make them feeling like they were still in Italy or people looking for an area in the city that had a suburban feel. The Bronx as a whole reflects Jacob’s point of “Cities as Ecosystems”, “Mixed- development of cities” because it is very diverse pertaining to the different communities that are there. However, Arthur Ave seemed like it was its own ecosystem and kind of secluded from the rest of the Bronx. It did seem like the economy of that area was dependent on the local shops and stores that were around there because there wasn't many main major chain stores around. However, Arthur Ave helped give lift my sour expectations of the Bronx and showed me that you really have to go to a place and examine it before you make judgments.

Activity #4

Jennifer Rios

Activity #4

For someone who has always lived in Queens, New York, having to travel to the city- also known as Manhattan- has never been an issue for me. It has always been very easy for me to get into the city in forty-five minutes or less. I have a number of trains to choose from that can transport me from my neighborhood to the busy streets of Manhattan. In terms of the typical commuter, it is often more common to see people traveling from suburban areas out to metropolitan areas. This can be shown by simply using Manhattan and the subway lines as an example. While looking at a map, I realized that Manhattan has a majority of the subway lines, which come in from its neighboring boroughs. This may occur because of the fact that a majority of businesses and jobs are located in cities rather than the suburbs, causing there to be a need for more transportation into the city since a larger number of people would be going into this specific area. As a result of trains which, “shattered any previous constraints of time and travel to lure people away from the city in greater numbers and at greater distances” (Kunstler, 46), cities were made more convenient for the working world to be located in. For example, it is common to meet many people from Long Island, which can be considered a suburb, who work in the borough of Manhattan. Despite the fact that this specific flow of commuters is the most witnessed, reverse commuting also takes place.

The term reverse commuting is used to refer to those commuters who travel from the city into the suburban areas to work. Since I have been so used being aware of the fact that people commute from the suburbs into the city, it was difficult for me to grasp the fact that reverse commuting does exist. Therefore, to find some truth behind reverse commuting, I went to Grand Central on a Saturday morning to search for someone who was reverse commuting. Since there was no specific way to approach this task, I decided to just go up to people and ask them where they were coming from and where they planned on going, letting them know that this was for a school assignment. I came across twelve people who mentioned that they were coming into the city to work that Saturday, since they worked six days a week. Finally, as I approached the thirteenth person without any hope of hearing a different commuting flow, after asking this person several questions about where he was going and coming from, he mentioned how he was going from Manhattan to a suburban area in Connecticut. This man mentioned how he was a carpenter in the city but had been laid off for a couple of months. Due to the fact that he needed money to support himself, he began to apply for work wherever it was possible. After applying to a carpentry job in Connecticut, he got called for an interview and got the job.

This one commuter has to travel from Manhattan to Connecticut six days a week in order to get to work and make a living as a result of being laid off from his job in the city. Despite the fact that I believe, “Commuting might not be an economic obstacle for a citizen fortunate enough to be employed” (Kunstler, 103), I believe it can have a larger effect depending on the distance one has to travel. This stirred up the idea that the recession and loss of jobs might be powerful enough to cause the typical commuter flow to change from a regular commuter flow to reverse commuting because of job availability. It can also cause people to move into the suburbs because of the cost of travel in relation to the distance one has to commute.

Trip to Columbus Circle

Oceane Mercadal

Activity #2

A class assignment was to partner up with someone who was going to tell us to go somewhere they liked. I had two options, which were going to Coney Island with someone to experience Nathan’s hot dogs or exploring Columbus Circle. Due to a busy schedule I couldn’t find a friend to accompany me so I decided to take a walk around my second option.

As soon as I got off the D train and saw Columbus Circle I turned around to a guy that was walking by and asked him if that was really Columbus Circle. The poor man looked at me wondering if I was fun of him, and said it was as he laughed and continued to walk.

It was amazing to see how it looked like. When I realized it was only 3 blocks away from Abercrombie & Fitch I was shocked. I go to this store all the time and the area is so different from what Columbus Circle looks like. It’s funny to observe the difference between 2 places, which are so close to one another. When I got off the train it felt like I wasn’t in New York any more. There was so much space. The big metal earth sculpture was so impressing by it’s size and purity. There was a lot of traffic but the place was so large itself that it looks empty at the same time. Columbus Circle being right by Central Park helps to alienate it from the rest of the city.

All the horse carriages lined up by the road made me nostalgic. I’m a horse rider and had to stop my passion when I moved to the city for college. Honestly Columbus Circle is fascinating, I understand why my partner wanted me to go there. You are in the city with out really being in it. There is no much space in this area. The space is confined in the middle of all the skyscrapers, which makes it intimidating at the same time as intriguing. You feel so free by watching what is happening around you, while you’re also a little scared at the same time because the skyscrapers are watching you.

I could say that Columbus is now on of my favorite places in New York City. It is wild and so calm at the same time. There is so much space, which makes you think you are in a complete different place, while the buildings around out are present to remind you were you are. This place is peaceful and energetic at the same time, which is a great aspect to the city. I will definitely go back with a friend to just sit on a bench in between the park and the road and just observe. There is so much to take in at the time that it because overwhelming.