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
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.
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.
Caribbean New York
Professor: Jennifer Lutton
ITF: Katherine Logan McBride
Campus: City College
URL: http://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/caribbeannewyork16/
Students in the course worked to understand the transnational connections between the Caribbean (specifically the West Indies and Haiti) and New York City from the early 20th century to the current context, and the influences they have had on each other’s cultural, political, and economic development. We explored theories of transnationalism, mobility, and diaspora to examine the impact of multidirectional flows of Caribbean people, culture, goods, and ideas enlivened by contemporary communication and transportation technologies.
Throughout the semester students contributed scaffolded assignments to a course website, building a repository of notes, data, papers, sources, scripts for their research and worked in small groups to curate a multimedia online exhibition to present what they learned. Group projects explore: political economy; music and dance; gender and identity through art and literature; media in the diaspora; and cultural identity through food.
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.
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: 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.
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.
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.
The Peopling of New York City
Professor: Ramona Hernandez
ITF: Aaron Kendall
Campus: City College
URL: http://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/hernandez2014/
This Seminar 2 website compares various aspects of two unique neighborhoods in New York City, Flushing and Washington Heights/Harlem. Several topics are discussed, including transportation, food, music and health.
Although the site was envisioned as a comparison between two neighborhoods, since groups were free to choose any topic from either neighborhood, instead of both neighborhoods, the result is more of a summary of various cultural aspects of each neighborhood.
The website is organized in a clear manner, with introdctory text and the option of choosing which neighborhood and topic the user would like to explore further. The use of media is somewhat limited, with a lot of very small images, and is lacking in video/audio that might help the user get a better idea of the feel of the neighborhoods.
Overall, the students did a fine job of researching their topics and presenting the information in a clear and concise manner.
Sounds and Scenes of New York City
Professor: Chris Bonastia
ITF: Ben Miller
Campus: Lehman College
URL: http://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/musicalnyc
A central landing site connects four subsites dedicated to musical “scenes” within NYC: Jazz, Latin, Disco, and Hip-Hop. All of these subsites share the same theme (Bushwick) and navigation, with pages for History, Music, Places, People, and Credits; the Genres tab and an image-mapped map allows for travel between them.
To create the site, students divided into five groups: one for each of the musical scenes, and one to work directly with the ITF on site-building skills like plugins, menus, iframes, and CSS. Members of the site-building team then acted as liaisons to the content groups; each group chose their own internal division of labor to produce or procure text, images (including maps), and sounds.
We Are New York
Professor: Prabal De
ITF: Dana Milstein
Campus: City College
URL: http://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/spring13definal
Walking tours of various neighborhoods in New York and analysis from students’ perspectives.
Gentrification in New York City
Professor: David Rosenberg
ITF: Emily Sherwood
Campus: Baruch College
URL: http://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/rosenberg13/
The Changing Personas of New York City: What is gentrification? Gentrification emerges in lower income level neighborhoods where the dynamics of the area change completely. It often involves the poor residents being pushed out by the new residents, who are significantly wealthier than the former. The average income increases, as well as rent property tax, real estate. Old buildings are modernized, and new infrastructures are built. New York City has certainly faced gentrification in many of its neighborhoods, including Chinatown, the Meatpacking District, Astoria, Harlem, and Williamsburg. Cultural, economical and social reforms have led to a series of numerous changes in NYC. These neighborhoods have encountered numerous transformations, for better or for worse. This site will give an insight into these neighborhoods and demonstrate the role gentrification plays in them.
The Peopling of New York City
Professor: Gabriel Haslip-Viera
ITF: Aaron Kendall
Campus: City College
URL: http://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/haslipviera2013/
Students investigated the role of immigration and migration in the shaping of New York’s identity – past, present, and future, through oral history interviews and neighborhood research projects. The projects were carried out individually and with little structuring, which made the website content too broad in my opinion. Next time around I would suggest the students do the project in groups and focus on a few particular issues related to immigration and migration.
Urban Ethnography
Professor: Ida Susser
ITF: Fiona Lee
Campus: Hunter
URL: http://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/susser11/
Professor Ida Susser’s class looked at three varied area and five neighborhoods in New York: Chinatown, the Greenpoint/Williamsburg area, and Harlem/Morningside Heights. Students completed entries on specific issues in each area, such as Columbia’s involvement in the community and street vendors in Chinatown. The class conducted interviews, went on walking tours, and provide video, maps, bibliographic resources, and demographic information.
West Harlem
Professor: Grazyna Drabik
ITF: Dana Milstein
Campus: City College
URL: http://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/drabik11/
Overview:
Prof Grazyna Drabik of City College and ITF Dana Milstein created a site that explores the neighborhood of West Harlem. The site takes a detailed look at a small area, covering numerous aspects of the neighborhood, from history to geography to cultural institutions.