Professor Prabal De, CCNY 2014
Maxwell Berkow
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Posts by Maxwell Berkow
A Tour of West Harlem
010 years
by Maxwell Berkow
in Blog posts
Our class tour of West Harlem covered ground that I thought I was very familiar with. I live only a few minutes from many of the places we were and travel to 125th street and Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard regularly, but I was surprised by how many historical sites there are in the neighborhood. I knew about the Apollo Theater but that was it. I didn’t even know about the library where we stated our tour even though I drive past it every day from practice; I had always thought it was an extension of the hospital.
An upsetting fact that I learned on the tour was how many of the historical sites we visited were in ruin or already demolished. Specifically, the decrepit site of the New York Renaissance Basketball team surprised me. After hearing about its history, I thought that there would have been more support to preserve it. Unfortunately, this theme of disappearing landmarks became a theme on the tour. The Tree of Hope, and the Lafayette Theater that the tree was located outside of, are both now gone. Only a few pieces of the tree have been preserved and construction has already begun on the site of the Lafayette Theater. The new metal Tree of Hope placed on the ground where the original tree stood is a nice sentiment, but it lacks prominence of a real tree. Ironically, what appears to have lasted the best are the townhouses that failed to sell when they were originally built.
Inwood
010 years
Despite living in Manhattan my whole life, I have only travelled to Inwood a few times. I have visited the park and the Cloisters before, but I have not spent significant time anywhere else in the neighborhood. It is always interesting traveling to parts of Manhattan that are not loud and crowded like most of the borough is. I think that this trip would have been especially interesting to someone who is not accustomed to New York City and has little knowledge of the area besides the stereotypes seen in the media.
Our class trip also allowed me to see many things in the neighborhood that I had previously not known about. Specifically, I enjoyed the visit to the farmhouse. The story of its preservation, how ancestors of the original owners bought it back with the intention of protecting it, was especially interesting to me. Besides this story, many aspects of the house caught my attention. The proportions of the house were tiny, by modern standards, and it was interesting to think that people used to be smaller than they are now. I have read reports about this phenomenon before, but walking through the small doors and staircases of the farmhouse provided a fascinating visual comparison that was difficult to grasp through words. The small structure in the backyard also intrigued me. The bars on the windows along with the large padlock on the outside made me think that it was a storage container of some sort but it is not clear what would have been stored inside.
Eyes on Bangladesh
010 years
Eyes of Bangladesh did an amazing job presenting a variety of images all displaying different aspects of the country. Different styles of photography combined with different subjects, such as Old Dhaka, independence, economic classes, and environmental damage, kept the viewer interested at each instillation. The first installation, telling the story of one man’s mother, also helped to keep the exhibit interesting as it incorporated sound and framed its pictures differently.
That being said, I preferred the way that most of the exhibit was presented to this first installation. The absence of frames accentuated the photographs where a frame would have distracted. The use of a frame would distract even more from some of the many smaller photographs that were displayed. This would have directly affected my favorite installation in the exhibit: the second installation about Old Dhaka.
I thought that the many photographs of Old Dhaka provided the viewer a good perspective of the area. The photographs displayed many different scenes from celebration, to shaving, to a child alone in the street. This assortment of subjects made the installation extremely interesting, urging the viewer to look at each image individually rather than the group of photographs as one piece of art. In addition to the subjects, the framing of the images and the fact that they were all in black and white were two aspects of the art that I enjoyed. These characteristics made the images more powerful to me as well as making them interesting to look at. My favorite image was the one of a solitary man with a water basin surrounded by crows. Although it is difficult to understand everything that is going on in this image, it is just an amazing photograph. From the way that it is framed to the positioning of the animals I like everything about this picture.
I thought that the exhibit was well done and well rounded. The different installations had a variety of subjects that anyone could find appealing. It is incredible that it was put together with such a low budget.
A Surprisingly Large Gateway
010 years
by Maxwell Berkow
in Census Data
I was not able to attend John Salvo’s presentation, but from a quick look at his slides I can tell that immigration, specifically the constantly changing population of New York City, is an extremely complicated subject. After analyzing the information provided, many interesting realizations can be uncovered. For me, the most interesting discovery involved immigration from the Dominican Republic to New York. Growing up in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, my early education was at schools with large Dominican populations. Despite this heavy influence in my neighborhood, I had no idea that this path of immigration accounted for 13.0% of the city’s immigrants in 2012. Even more incredible was that this accounted for almost half of total Dominican immigrants to the United States in that year. In 2012, just under ten million Dominicans immigrated to the United States, over 10% of the entire population of the Dominican Republic.
