Seminar 2 Encyclopedia

Neighborhoods of New York

Professor: Joseph Berger
ITF: Madison Priest
Campus: Hunter College
URL: https://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/neighborhoodsofnyc/

Neighborhoods of New York is the result of research project undertaken by first year Macaulay Honors students at Hunter College, City University of New York (CUNY) under the supervision of Professor Joseph Berger and Madison Priest. This website showcases student groups' profiles of New York City neighborhoods. Students integrated images, video and sound, created timelines, and left room for "surprises and serendipities."

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.

Hispanic/Latino Nueva York

Professor: Francisco Soto
ITF: Joseph Pentangelo
Campus: College of Staten Island
URL: https://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/soto2018/

Each student was randomly assigned a topic pertinent to the Cuban, Dominican, and Puerto Rican communities in NYC, including subjects as diverse as Avenue of the Americas and Santería. Each student made three posts on these topics, as they focused their attention from a general overview to a specific aspect that they found particularly interesting.

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.

Their New York

Professor: Mike Benediktsson
ITF: Christina Nadler & Madison Priest
Campus: Hunter College
URL: https://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/theirnewyork/

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, Madison Priest and Christina Nadler. 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.

Freaks on a Ferris Wheel

Professor: Karen Williams
ITF: Ben Haber
Campus: Brooklyn College
URL: https://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/freaksonaferriswheel/

This whimsical site explores the history and present of Coney Island. Working through the five senses, the students paint a rich portrait of this entertainment center.

An Expedition into Chinatown

Professor: Karen Williams
ITF: Ben Haber
Campus: Brooklyn College
URL: https://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/ayampplnyc/

This site explores the transformation and gentrification of Chinatown. Includes a history of the neighborhood in the form of an interactive timeline and textual and audio-visual accounts of the neighborhood through the five senses

Brighton Beach Bro

Professor: Karen Williams
ITF: Ben Haber
Campus: Brooklyn College
URL: https://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/bbbb/

This site uses the five senses to explore Brighton Beach. Well organized and aesthetically pleasing, this site includes student made videos, thick description and an interactive timeline of the neighborhood

People of the Ridge

Professor: Karen Williams
ITF: Ben Haber
Campus: Brooklyn College
URL: https://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/peopleoftheridge/

This site explores Bay Ridge from the perspective of three student residents. They walk through the neighborhood and provide a visual and textual demonstration of the "surprisingly linear wealth gradient"

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.

Here to Stay NYC

Professor: Lina Newton
ITF: Tommy Wu
Campus: Hunter College
URL: https://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/heretostaynyc/

This is a public-facing site for the class (in addition to a class site for administration). I'm using the Kerouac theme here and I have mixed feelings about it. Aesthetically, I think it looks great but there are also some bugs and limitations (if students don't want to use CSS). Overall, I would recommend it because the student groups took ownership of the site and spent a lot time perfecting their profile pages. They seemed to be proud of what they have produced. I think this would be a good example for future students.

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.

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.

Astoria: The Falafel Squad

Professor: Karen Williams
ITF: Alexis Carrozza
Campus: Brooklyn College
URL: http://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/astoriablvd/

This site explores Astoria by documenting the sites, sounds, scents, textures, and tastes that the students experienced while visiting the neighborhood. The site’s organization and content reflects the course’s emphasis on ethnographic research using the five senses. The group put together a brief but informative history of Astoria and the inclusion of demographic data is especially helpful. One suggestion to improve on the site’s exploration of Astoria might be a comparison between the quantitative data about the demographics and the students’ qualitative data (field notes, reflections, etc.). How do their experiences reflect, refute, correspond, etc. to the data?

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.

The Astoria Project

Professor: Christos Ioannides
ITF: Caroline Erb
Campus: Queens College
URL: https://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/ioannides16_astoriaproject/

Professor Christos Ioannides’ students created a site to highlight the demographic changes, cultural outlets, institutions, and commercial ventures of Greeks in Astoria, Queens. The website showcases the highlights of the Greek community as Astoria rapidly gentrifies. Each student authored a page for the site and the entire class revised different portions of the website.

Our Top 20 NYC Albums

Professor: Chris Bonastia
ITF: Rachel Bogan
Campus: Lehman College
URL: http://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/twentymostnycalbums/

Students in Chris Bonastia’s class examined social and political changes in NYC’s neighborhoods via NYC’s shifting music scenes. Using the 2014 Village Voice article, The 50 Most NYC Albums Ever, as inspiration, students chose one album and researched not only the artist/album, but also the space(s) the artist wrote about and where the artist performed.

The site’s purpose is to showcase each student’s artist/album analysis + to provide some collaborative aspect (the timeline!). Students wrote final papers and then turned their papers into blog posts, adding digital components. Good stuff: a few students created a timeline, showing the progression of albums. While they didn’t end up using TimelineJS, the timeline is the homepage’s focal point and is well-made and a strong asset to the site. Another student activated the plugin, Soundy Background Music, which allowed students to attach song(s) to their posts — this really added to the flavor of the site.

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.

Astoria Project: A Brief Overview of Life in Astoria, Queens

Professor: Christos Ioannides
ITF: Caroline Erb-Medina
Campus: Queens College
URL: http://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/ioannides15_astoriaproject

Welcome to the Astoria Project, a website completed by the Macaulay Honors College students of Dr. Christos Ioannides’ Seminar 2 course, The Peopling of New York. Students used WordPress and custom CSS coding to create an in-depth view of the cultural, historical, and social aspects of one of the most important ethnic enclaves in New York City. These aspects, as you will see as you explore the site, range from the influence of the Greek Orthodox Church to the importance of soccer in the area. The class hopes that their efforts and the website will give you an insight into how important and amazing Astoria, NY is.

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.

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.

Exceptional NYC

Professor: Lina Newton
ITF: Christina Nadler
Campus: Hunter College
URL: https://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/exceptionalnyc/

This is a site created by Prof Lina Newton’s Seminar 2 course–the Peopling of New York City.

Students worked in groups throughout the semester to undertake research on 5 immigrant groups–Chinese, Haitian, Dominican, Russian and Mexican. In these posts you can find the key findings of the research, statistical profiles, and researched narratives on the history of the immigrant group’s migration & settlement.

Enjoy exploring the projects on the exceptional histories of NYC residents!