The first thing I think about when I remember my tour of East Harlem was the weather that day, it was really cold and that was perhaps the most discouraging part of the trip for me. Other than that the trip was great and when it warmed up throughout the day I was a lot happier. One of my partners wasn’t able to make it that day so Elizabeth and I got to take the tour with Professor Gardner which was interesting for several reasons. First of all, as we all know from the previous trip, Ms. Gardner walks super fast and has a lot of energy so that was good because it kept us up and moving quickly. Another benefit of having Professor with us was that we noticed many things we wouldn’t have noticed without her, for example she was able to spot small parks in small spaces between buildings that we probably would have overlooked. She also already had a lot of knowledge which she shared with us that will be useful for our project. Anyway, I had been to East Harlem before for several reasons and have passed it many times on the M101 but I had never really paid close attention to all the things there are to see in the neighborhood. My favorite thing that I was able to take a closer look at on this tour was all of the street art and murals hidden in small gardens or parks or even just on the sides of building complexes. A lot of the work was by De La Vega who we learned about earlier this year. It was really interesting to see how many different cultures inhabited one neighborhood, on almost any given block you could find food from 3 different countries and many different languages on posters and signs. It was extremely interesting to see all of the empty housing developments that have been built recently and as I saw each one I remembered the line”that’s public housing, it’s not going anywhere” from the documentary we watched in class because it was interesting to see how these developments are literally across the street from the projects. When I raised this point to Prof. Gardner she told me that many of these developers had the idea that the projects could later be turned into “co-ops” which is clearly not happening. I wondered why instead of trying to push people out why no one invests in trying to improve what’s already there. The best part of the trip for me was having lunch at a Mexican restaurant with Liz and Ms. Gardner. We had tacos and a quesadilla and it was delicious 😀