The Peopling of New York City
Professor: George Gonzalez
ITF: Hamad Sindhi
Campus: Baruch College
URL: https://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/gonzalez19/
Class site for Professor George Gonzalez's IDC 3001H The People of New York. Site was used mainly for hosting the syllabus and reading materials, as well as for student essays on the readings.
Seminar Two
Professor: Grazyna Drabik
ITF: Andres Orejuela
Campus: City College
URL: https://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/20crossroads/
Students visited 20 crossroads on Broadway and Fifth Avenue. The stops began in lower Manhattan on Wall Street, and arrived at 181st Street in Washington Heights. The stops are arranged in order on the homepage of site, including the name of the street and neighborhood. For each entry, students wrote up a short post about their experience of the location and about the location itself.
NYCROPOLIS
Professor: Peter Vellon
ITF: Amanda Matles
Campus: Queens College
URL: https://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/vellon18/
New York is dying. “But wait,” you say. “New York is dying? Impossible.” Sure, a visit to the Big Apple on any given day will yield sights of glass high-rises, bustling crowds of tourists and professionals, and shops with bedazzling variety: from classic bodegas to swanky yoga studios. But look closer. How can there be so many new skyscrapers and yet so many homeless? Why are trains on-time in Yorkville but not in Van Nest? And what on earth happened to the rent in Chelsea?
A visit to NYCropolis might leave you angry and frustrated with the current state of affairs. Good- that’s why we made it. The issues we researched relate to deep, unsolved problems in New York’s physical and social architecture. But our city is an amazing city, a feat of history that’s constantly reinventing itself. And we need you to be a part of its resurrection. Today, New York’s development conceals its death in essential areas. New life only comes when we stop treating the symptoms and start honestly working toward a cure. The more of NYCropolis you read, the more you will find that solutions to these problems don’t lie with the powers that be, but with the power of the people. Call your council member, join an advocacy group, and participate in Community Board meetings using your informed opinions. Turn this dying city into bright lights that inspire you and streets that make you feel brand-new.
-From the students of Honors 126, “The Peopling of New York,” Professor Vellon, and Amanda Matles
Macaulay Honors College and Queens College
Spring 2018
*With apologies to Jay-Z and Alicia Keys
A People's Guide to NYC
Professor: Arianna Martinez
ITF: Lindsey Albracht
Campus: Queens College
URL: https://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/peoplesguidetonyc/
Inspired by the recently published book, A People’s Guide to Los Angeles, this assignment asked students at Queens Macaulay Honors College to construct an alternative tourist guide to New York City: a guide that highlights immigrant stories, prioritizes contested spaces, and creates a geographic record of sites of social movements and political struggles within the city.
Students selected a site in their own neighborhood or a neighborhood that was familiar to them, conducted research on the site, visited it to take photographs, and crafted a story about the site using excerpts from A People’s Guide to Los Angeles as a model.
The Peopling of NYC through Film
Professor: Robert Tutak
ITF: Frieda Benun
Campus: Brooklyn College
URL: https://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/tutak18/category/documentary-projects/the-community-i-dont-know/
For the final project, students were assigned to make a documentary film on the topic: "Their Community: The Community I Know the Least or Fear the Most"
The prompt:
Using journalistic, photojournalistic, and filmmaking tools, document the community that is most alien to you:
(1) Learn about the community and its members first hand; hear their story
(2) Confront your stereotypes, challenge your reservations & prejudice or confirm your fears
The students were encouraged to confront their own fears and/or prejudices by venturing out and delving deep into the feared/unknown community through interviews.
Note: A few of the interviews were secured with the promise that they would only be shown to the closed room of students in our class, as they feature incriminating (e.g. drug or crime-related) content. Those are password-protected.
An Exploration of Midwood
Professor: Karen Williams
ITF: Ben Haber
Campus: Brooklyn College
URL: https://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/midwoodneighborhood/
This site looks at the Brooklyn neighborhood of Midwood, focusing in particular on the Jewish community.
The People of New York City
Professor: Sarah Bishop
ITF: Anna Gjika
Campus: Baruch College
URL: https://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/bishop17/
Class website to retain course materials (readings, syllabus), student reading reflections, and scaffolded final project assignment posts.
Podcasting the People of New York
Professor: Amy Weiss
ITF: Katherine Logan McBride
Campus: City College
URL: https://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/weiss17/podcasts/
Students created podcasts to address an historical question of their choosing about the inhabitants of New York City.
Oral Histories: Becoming American
Professor: Nancy Aries
ITF: Julie Fuller
Campus: Baruch College
URL: https://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/becomingamerican17/
Students created multi-media oral history stories on each other and also on someone else they know. Their public facing projects integrated long-form text (based on personal interviews) with visual artifacts, audio, moving clips, graphs, maps, and timelines that clarify both the informant's story and the context of the immigrant group which this person represents.
The Peopling of New York
Professor: Stephen Steinberg
ITF: Lindsey Albracht
Campus: Queens College
URL: https://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/steinberg17/category/oral-history-project/
For the final project in this Seminar 2, students interviewed a member of their family about an immigration experience. They also reflected on the exercise in a brief statement that accompanied the post.
The goal of the oral history was to consider how some of the more abstract themes of the class actually played out in the particular lives of people that students actually knew. In the reflection, they were asked to make the connection between course themes and the interview, but also to reflect on the experience of interviewing itself.
The professor opted to display these projects on the existing course website rather than asking students to create separate sites or asking me to create something new. I think a site which displayed all of the posts at once (in Aesop, though I know that theme has its issues) and allowing the user to navigate to the histories that interested them would have been a better design choice, because the histories of students who posted early are a bit buried. But overall, I think the reflections mostly demonstrate that students met the goal of the assignment.
Contested New York
Professor: Peter Vellon
ITF: Amanda Matles
Campus: Queens College
URL: https://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/vellon17/
This website is the hub for a collection of six digital projects that focus on several key points of socio-economic conflict, struggle, and tension in New York City from the post World War II period to the present.
It would have been great to coordinate link-backs to the hub site from each of the group project sites, but not all of the groups included one.
Reading Between the skyLines
Professor: Moustafa Bayoumi
ITF: Kelly Eckenrode
Campus: Brooklyn College
URL: https://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/skylines/
Students divided into 7 groups and choose a language generally based on their ease with the language. The 7 groups included: Spanish, Japanese, Hebrew, Russian, African American, Arabic and Korean. Each group went to a bookstore that specializes in that language of literature. Students quickly learned that these stores are much more than deposits for books. Typically, the serve as a culture refuge to preserve culture of immigrants groups into the city. I thought it was a successful project.
For myself and the students, it was interesting to learn how different language prompted different interviews. Our most extreme example was the Arabic bookstore. The manger did not give consent to share their interview on the internet. What seemed like a snag initially–gave the students a moment to pause and reflect on seriousness of sharing stories of people. The students decided to re-frame their work to discuss Trump era problems.
Storefront Survivors
Professor: Mike Benediktsson
ITF: Christina Nadler
Campus: Hunter College
URL: https://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/storefrontsurvivors
This website is the result of a unique research project undertaken by first year Macaulay Honors students at Hunter College, City University of New York (CUNY) under the supervision of Mike Owen Benediktsson, Marnie Brady, Caroline Loomis, Christina Nadler, and Tommy Wu. The interviews, images, and research collected here were collected entirely by students, as part of their coursework for the People of New York City seminar, or Seminar II, an interdisciplinary class on the past and present of the city’s neighborhoods, with a focus on migration and immigration. In the last few years, elected officials and the media have begun to acknowledge the plight of small, independent businesses in the city. Blogs like Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York have called attention to the loss of valuable landmark institutions due to unregulated commercial rent markets and municipal rezoning. Local elected officials, including Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer, have put forth competing legislative measures that would seek to relieve some of the economic pressure faced by small business owners in the city. Attention to the precarious position of small business is growing. But is it enough? Explore our website to find profiles of small business owners across the city who are conducting their own individual struggles against the crosscurrents of economic, social, and policy change in the city.
Becoming American
Professor: Nancy Aries
ITF: Kara van Cleaf
Campus: Baruch College
URL: http://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/aries16/
Students created oral history projects on each other and also on someone else they know.
Contested New York
Professor: Peter Vellon
ITF: Amanda Matles
Campus: Queens College
URL: http://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/vellon16/
Contested New York is a collection of digital essays that focus on several key points of socio-economic conflict, struggle, and tension in New York City from the post World War II period to the present. Our guiding questions were: Does NYC always “work,” and what happens when it does not? Our project was created during the Spring 2016 semester by students from the Macaulay Honors College at Queens College, Class of 2019, as part of the seminar course The Peopling of New York City.
Conflict and Coexistence in NY
Professor: Grazyna Drabik
ITF: Andrew Lucchesi
Campus: City College
URL: http://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/drabikgallery
This website focuses on the connections between personal storytelling and the deep repository of history connected to the New York City region. It is broken into three interrelated galleries: one contains objects from each author’s family history, as well as their personal reflections on how they see their relationship to history. The second and third galleries focus on New York City history, on iconic historical sites (which are mapped on an interactive Google Map) and on the historical and present-day figures associated with those sites. Readers of this website will see a complex, multi-layered representation of New York City, past and present–full of people, stories, objects, and an ever-changing urban background.
Weddings of New York
Professor: David Rosenberg
ITF: Anna Gjika
Campus: Baruch College
URL: http://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/weddingsofnewyork/
This site focuses on weddings in Jewish, Chinese and Indian subcontinent immigrant communities as a way of examining the experiences of these groups with assimilation and acculturation in New York City, and American culture more broadly.
History Through Objects
Professor: Constance Rosenblum
ITF: Andres Orejuela
Campus: City College
URL: http://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/objects2016/
The students in Professor Rosenblum’s Seminar 2 participated in The Museum’s Your Stories, Our Stories project. For our final course site, students used the assignments they had prepared for that project, and added them to a site with the Aesop story engine, experimenting with different ways to present their stories.
The Peopling of Flatbush
Professor: Paul Moses
ITF: Maggie Galvan
Campus: Brooklyn College
URL: http://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/moses2015
In Spring 2015, Paul Moses, both a Brooklyn College English Professor and journalist, led students to deeply analyze the Brooklyn neighborhood of Flatbush through a variety of methods including oral histories and archival research. Their website, The Peopling of Flatbush, featured original research from the precolonial through the contemporary era. ITF Maggie Galvan taught students methods for recording their oral histories, how navigate an array of digital resources and work with demographic databases, and worked with groups of students over a series of classes as they organized their research for presentation on the class website.
Rhythm, Identity, and Turf
Professor: Chris Bonastia
ITF: Ben Miller
Campus: Lehman College
URL: http://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/bonastia15_turf/
The site gathers together individually researched and written multimedia-enhanced research essays by all the students in the class. These projects clustered into three themes related to the peopling of New York City: the role of musical scenes (“rhythm”), the relations among ethnic or cultural groups (“identity”), and the changing faces of particular neighborhoods (“turf”).
Each student was able to customize a “cover” image, which displays in a grid on the list of posts as well as in a parallax splash screen within each post.
Uses the Jorgen theme, with five active plugins: Aesop Story Engine, Aesop Story Front, CMB2, Co-Authors Plus, Jetpack, and Subtitles.
The Peopling of New York City
Professor: Rafael Mutis
ITF: Joseph Pentangelo
Campus: College of Staten Island
URL: http://peoplingofnyc.tumblr.com/
The Seminar 2 class was broken up into groups which each focused on a particular population’s role in the peopling of NYC: Native Americans, Greeks, Italians, Sri Lankans, and Jewish immigrants were covered. The site presents all posts in reverse chronological order, by default as an amalgamation of all groups, but each group also tagged their posts consistently, allowing the site to be navigated by simply clicking on one of the groups’ links. Posts are almost entirely original content, including photographs, interviews, and ethnic restaurant reviews. Students were engaged and posted regularly, and took to the ease of tumblr-use quickly.
NEW YORK: A CITY WITH NO LIMITS
Professor: Grazyna Drabik
ITF: Katherine Logan McBride
Campus: City College
URL: http://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/conflictandcoexistenceincosmopolis/
New York City is the city that never sleeps: its inhabitants run on the coffee served by cafes around every corner, but more than that, its history never sleeps. This city is the madness that courses through its veins. But it is also a single tapestry woven by diverse ideas and people. This is how we change throughout the course of hundreds of years: building, deconstructing, rebuilding. Today, this is our city.
This site represents both the discovery of NYC and its history by MHC CCNY First Year students in Professor Drabik’s class and also their reflections of their coursework, themselves as New Yorkers and the city they study in.
The Peopling of New York City: Neighborhood Stories
Professor: Ellen Scott
ITF: Andres Orejuela
Campus: Queens College
URL: http://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/neighborhoodstories14/
This site conglomerates the individual sites that each student group made. One of the strengths of this approach was that students were not only able to design and think about their site’s organization, but also worked with tools that were new to them.
Religious Life on Staten Island and New York City
Professor: Melissa Borja
ITF: Kamili Posey
Campus: College of Staten Island
URL: http://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/borja2014/
This spring, the students of Prof. Borja’s Macaulay Honors College seminar studied “The Peopling of New York City,” with a special focus on Staten Island. By conducting original research with archival sources and multilingual oral history interviews, we endeavored to document the rich diversity of religious practices and institutions on Staten Island, the most understudied borough of New York City. Ultimately, our research and our website were motivated by a public-minded commitment to Staten Island. Our goals were to deepen understanding of Staten Island’s changing population, to share stories of religious life on the ground, and to create a public archive in the service of preserving the collective history—and diverse histories—of our community.
NYC’s D Train
Professor: Nancy Aries
ITF: Owen Toews
Campus: Baruch College
URL: http://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/aries2014finalproject/
In Spring 2014, professor Nancy Aries’ CUNY Baruch/Macaulay Honors seminar studied the diverse neighborhoods linked by New York City’s D Train. The class broke into small teams, each researching one of seven neighborhoods. The primary purpose of the site is to bring together the seven neighborhood studies, with links to individual sites for each neighborhood (students decided to use the same theme for each of their sites, which gave them the united aesthetic they wanted, but limited some groups in what they could do). The secondary purpose of the site is to host a map displaying the seven stops along the D train. The map includes bubbles displaying photos and basic information for each stop, giving a nice overview of the entire project. However, the way the Google map embed displays makes it a bit difficult to see all this information at once. Students chose the ever-popular sliding doors theme to create a colorful, engaging snapshot of human life on the D train.
Seminar 2: The Peopling of NYC | Prof. Ken Guest
Professor: Ken Guest
ITF: Gwen Shaw
Campus: Baruch College
URL: http://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/guest14/
This site was meant to supplement the students work throughout the course, acting as an archive of their experience conducting research and field work on East Broadway in New York City under the supervision of Dr. Ken Guest. For their projects, the students conducted their own fieldwork, formulated questions for further research, and engaged the community with site visits and interviews. This site acts as an archive of their experiences in class and a resting place for their final projects. Although ultimately designed for their final projects, I am especially proud of the students reflections on creating both hand-drawn and digitized maps– they offer astute insights and cost-benefit analysis of each mode of representation.
New York Dreams
Professor: Constance Rosenblum
ITF: John Boy
Campus: City College
URL: http://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/nydreams/
An immersive storytelling site. The stories presented on this site tell of New Yorkers who chased their dreams — sometimes succeeding, sometimes not. These people traveled very different paths, but they have one thing in common: All of them sought to make a place for themselves in a big, complicated, challenging but often profoundly rewarding metropolis.
Food and Immigration in NYC
Professor: Kim Libman
ITF: Maggie Dickinson
Campus: Queens College
URL: http://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/libman2014/
Our Peopling of New York Seminar looked at the issue of immigration in New York City through the lens of food and foodways. Each group focused on a particular neighborhood, researching the local history and culture by collecting both qualitative and quantitive data. We also produced menus featuring typical, culturally appropriate foods for each neighborhood based on our research. Each neighborhood group produced their own website, showcased on our collective class site. Take a look at our neighborhood websites to learn more!
The Peopling of East Broadway
Professor: Ken Guest
ITF: Owen Toews
Campus: Baruch College
URL: http://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/guest2013/
This site displays students’ research findings in a brief, visually attractive way. It allows students to share multi-media creations, such as video, photography, and visual presentations. The site functions as a static, outward-facing exhibition of student work, rather than as an evolving, interactive space for students to share and communicate over time. Because of the way the assignment was structured – students were each assigned segments of the East Broadway strip to research and report back on – gathering their work together on this site conveys an overall sense of place produced by students in collaboration over the course of the semester.
Seminar 2, Professor Sharman
Professor: Russell Sharman
ITF: Maggie Galvan
Campus: Brooklyn College
URL: http://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/sharman2013/
Three groups of students investigated the ethnic diversity and immigrant populations in three neighborhoods in Manhattan and Brooklyn. These students identified cultural points of interest and put together an audio walking tour and map guide using the Leaflet Maps Marker plugin.