About Us

From The Peopling of New York City: Harlem

Contents 1 Rachel 2 Sushanta 3 Christie 4 Diego 5 Joshua 6 Grecia 7 Keren 8 Eugene 9 Ruth 10 Andrew 11 Audrey 12 Sherin 13 Davi 14 Kate 15 Professor Spencer

Rachel

Hi! My name is Rachel and I am 19 years old and live in Riverdale, NY. I have lived in NYC all my life and I plan to continue to live here. My great grandmothers were born on the Lower East Side, so NYC has been my family's home for generations. I had never been to Harlem on a proper tour so my favorite part of this course was undoubtedly our walking tour. The buildings, landmarks and people all have stories to tell and I was excited to listen. This is just the start for me; I am eager to learn about all the various communities this amazing city has to offer.

Sushanta

Hello. My name is Sushanta Singha and I am 18 years old. I was born in Bangladesh and currently live in Woodside, NY. I am not sure what I want to do when I am older, so I am still undecided. However, I am interested in economics and political science so that's probably where I am heading.

Christie

Christie is a freshman at Lehman College and part of the Macaulay Honors College. She was born (and lives) in Yonkers, NY, which is most definitely not upstate. She's a Psychology major, though she isn't sure what she plans on doing with herself after college. She loves taking photos (more) of nature and really silly internet jokes.

Diego

Diego Molano was born in a log cabin in Illinois. He polished shoes and sang silent movie scores for pennies to pay for his dog's cancer treatment. He went on to discover penicillin and was awarded the Nobel Prize for his efforts, a prize which he squandered trying to prove the existence of G-d . In a striking twist of irony, he died of syphilis at age 24, a disease which can be cured by the very drug he discovered.

I HOPE YOU ENJOYED THAT.

Diego Molano is graduate of Port Chester High School and current student at CUNY Lehman. He is a self-described lover of history and a huge fan of The Seattle Seahawks. Having emigrated from Colombia in the spring of '95, he feels strong ties between both his hispanic heritage and the love for his adopted country. Though he has lived about 30 miles from New York City for the last 13 years, he has spent little time in it, and even less in Harlem.

Joshua

I am an American, and have lived in the suburbs of New York City all of my life. Ironically, I had never even been into the city until I was 14 years old, and at first I was not a huge fan of it. The honks of the buses and taxis, the pushiness of the people, and the intense crowds at all times made me long for my quiet dead end street in Westchester. However, over time I learned to love the city. What made this change? Over time my friends in college had me learn the ways to adapt and enjoy the hustle and bustle of the city and also made me realize that there is much more to the city. New York City has a culture and identity of its own, and it takes a lifetime to grasp a glimpse of it.

Relating my experiences to Harlem, I have only been there a couple of times, but the experience that stands out most for me is when I got lost in Spanish Harlem at eight o'clock at night. I made it out alive, but nonetheless it gave me a scare. It was quite the adventure. While I first stereotyped Harlem as every other non-city person does, the more I am learning about its culture the more I am fascinated by it.

Grecia

My name is Grecia Huesca. I am a student at Macaulay Honors College at Lehman College Class 2012!I was born in Mexico and came to New York State when I was ten. I love NYC and I had a great time in this class. I am a comparative literature major and a creative writing minor. I love watching comedy, and I am disappointed I couldn't find an appropriate way to put Chris Rock somewhere in this Wiki.

I had a lot of fun working on this project and getting to know a new neighborhood in Harlem. My favorite thing I did for this project was going around with Diego to eat at the restaurants for the food reviews. My favorite place was also Sylvia's. The ribs were simply amazing. I also enjoyed going to Mourningside Park to rest from all the walking and eating.

Peace!

Keren

Hello universe, my name is Keren Minto and I attend Macaulay Honors College at CUNY Lehman College. I take a great deal of music classes and I play percussion and piano. I enjoy sunny days, dried papaya, and listening to Beethoven. I currently reside in the Bronx, New York.

Eugene

This is the best page in the world

click here if u agree, click here if u don't.

Hi I'm Eugene Kuksa. I like riding bikes, racing cars, and skydiving. Have a nice day <3

Ruth

My name is Ruth Barral and I live in New York City. I currently attend Lehman College, and I am majoring in Art History and Political Science. I work at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and here's a sample of the work I did last summer [1]. I love New York, and I couldn't imagine living anywhere else. This assignment has been an opportunity to explore other neighborhoods within my own home city. My favorite thing to do is scuba dive, and I have travelled to Hawaii, Mexico, Grand Cayman, Dominica, Honduras, Bonaire, and most recently, England. Working on the wiki this semester has been a lot of fun, even though I'm somewhat of a technophobe.

Andrew

Ode to Andy

Andrew is nice.

But Andrew can't draw.

Andrew's name should be Andy.

Andy looks like Dan Faraday

Faraday is dead =[

WHY, FARADAY, WHY??

- by Christie =]

Audrey

When you want to hear a funny story, just ask Diego for one, because I can never finish one without bursting out laughing first and basically not being able to tell the story ("LOL"). So, about me...

I'm Audrey, a Macaulay Honors College freshman at Lehman College. I'm a Speech Language Pathology major and I'm still deciding if I'm going to double major in Psychology. I was born and raised in a small suburban town in the Philippines, and I just came here to the US in May 2005 (yeah, you can just imagine the culture shock I experienced...).

Some things I love:

I love food... Filipino, Spanish, Chinese... Sushi, Gyro, Adobo... yumm...

I love to laugh... I can sometimes forget that I'm hungry when I start laughing. :)

I love people... People have such different personalities yet we always find something in common. It's fun just people-watching and listening to them talk with their different dialects, intonations, languages.

I love life... It's not always easy to say that because it's not all smooth and dandy all the time, but when I stop and think about it, I'm so lucky that I actually was and still am given a chance to experience it. Life has so much to offer--sometimes we just need to keep our eyes open and even when we encounter some bumps, we just have to go over them and keep going.

Sherin

My name is Sherin Mathew and I am a freshman at Lehman College. I came to the US five years ago from India where I was born. I have travelled extensively to countries including but not limited to Oman, Britain and Uzbekistan and intend to travel to many more. I love books and reading and am a decided English major for now. And an all important fact regarding me- I am shy!

Davi

A personified Harlem should be like a friend whom one always receives the most profound benefit, a mirror of the soul, a spotlight of purpose and a catalyst for self motivated excellence. Such a golden basket can only come from the kitchen of creativity, of art, and of love. The Harlem of the 60s was a fallen artist, emaciated and disillusioned. His Pygmalion facelift in the decades that followed masked the beauty that once defined the community, but then, what once was, is no more, and thus the concealment was not of a substantially ancient photograph but of a prostrate defacement that only brought antipathy, suffering, and wounded nostalgia to those Uptown streets. Harlem today is less than a ghost in a new shell; it is a smiling clerk in an outer-borough shopping mall, a super-cool vender of extortionate gallery material. Harlem today is SoHa.

DAVI's Harlem!

Welcome to the Gates of Davi's Harlem, where you eventually end up in a front seat between his electric brains and his cornea, looking at the one and only Harlem!

"Unforgettable!"

If Davi Santos were a Harlemite, he would belong to the city's Renaissance. He advocates that "life imitates art," that a life without art is no different than a life without living.

Davi was born AD1990 amidst harsh political turmoil in post portuguese colonial South America. Raised in Astoria, Queens, he attended the local magnet school where he discovered art and made a tile of what looks like a pizza shaped face of himself. The work is still open to the public outside the elementary school's auditorium until mankind has no more time left. His education continues at the Professional Performing Arts School in midtown Manhattan and then LaGuardia Arts Highshool in Lincoln Center. His adolescence has been a statement for perpetual learning and creative exploration, building an exoskeleton of empathetic values that dictate his heartwarming actions and spreading all that magical butter amongst the masses of this cruel egocentric establishment. Viva La Revolucion! Viva el arte! Viva Amor!

Kate

I am a graduate student in the History Program at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. I am writing my dissertation about American women and World War I, especially focusing on conservative women and ideals of patriotic motherhood. World War I was unpopular with large numbers of Americans until effective propaganda campaigns whipped up support for government policies, while laws silenced opponents by restricting free speech. Women were central to building support for the war, and even after the war ended mothers of soldiers used their status as patriots to oppose pacifism and communism, promote American nationalism, and support a larger U.S. military.

I've taught U.S. History at Lehman College, and worked as a Writing Fellow at Hunter College. Before going to graduate school, I worked as teacher of English as a Foreign Language in Krakow, Poland, an assistant to the assistants at Conde Nast Traveler magazine, a public relations assistant, and a cake, cookie and sandwich-slinger at Lucy's Cakes in Austin, TX.

I was born near Chicago, and spent my childhood in Ann Arbor, MI, Oak Park, IL, Santa Fe, NM, and Texarkana, TX. I even went to two different colleges--Wellesley College in MA and Rice University in Houston, TX. I've enjoyed living in NY for about ten years, and Brooklyn for seven of these, but will be moving to Washington, DC in June.

This is my first year as an ITF at the Macaulay Honors College.

Professor Spencer

I have enjoyed working with students in the creation of this course blog. I consider myself to be low tech so I approached this task with some trepidation. However, with the assistance of Kate Hallgren, our tech fellow, and inspired by the energy and enthusiasm of the 13 students in The Peopling of New York, the creation of this blog was actually quite enjoyable. During the semester we went on several trips, heard from various speakers, read many different scholarly works and viewed films in order to understand the complexity of New York's diverse history. We became a respectful and energetic learning community and our engagement with Harlem reflects our collective efforts. I hope that future students and professors find this wiki useful.

My scholarly biography:

Robyn C. Spencer received her PhD in History from Columbia University in 2001. She was an Assistant Professor of African and African American Studies, and History at Penn State University from 2001-2007 and currently works as an Assistant Professor of US History at Lehman College in the Bronx, NY. Fall 2009 was Professor Spencer's first time teaching in the Honor's College at Lehman and she has enjoyed playing a small part in the intellectual development of tomorrow's leaders.

Since she began studying social movements as an undergraduate history major at SUNY Binghamton, Professor Spencer's inspiration has come from the examples of those who chose to fight injustice, racism, and sexism. Her areas of expertise include black social protest after World War II, urban and working-class radicalism, and gender. She is currently completing a book on the Black Panther Party's political and organizational evolution in Oakland, California with the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill press.

Professor Spencer has several publications. Her master’s essay entitled “Contested Terrain: The Mississippi Flood of 1927 and the Struggle to Control Black Labor” explored the impact of the Mississippi Flood of 1927 on almost 300,000 displaced African Americans. This research, which was published in the Journal of Negro History (Vol. 79, No. 2 Spring, 1994), was featured in the documentary “When Weather Changed History,” which aired on the Weather Channel on March 9, 2008 at 9pm EST. She published an essay entitled "Inside the Panther Revolution: The Black Freedom Movement and the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California" in Groundwork: Local Black Freedom Movements in America edited by Jeanne Theoharis and Komozi Woodard (New York University Press: 2005), which explored the internal organizational dynamics of the Black Panther Party. Her article entitled “Engendering the Black Freedom Struggle: Revolutionary Black Womanhood and the Black Panther Party in the Bay Area, California” explores how black women who joined the Black Panther Party were empowered to challenge racism and sexism in society, in the Panthers, and in themselves. It was published in the Journal of Women's History (Vol. 20, No. 1, Spring 2008). This article was awarded the 2008 Letitia Woods Brown Memorial Article Prize by the Association of Black Women Historians.

Through writing, teaching and public presentations, Professor Spencer aims to educate others about the contributions of urban, working-class African Americans, especially women, to the black freedom movement. She has presented her work at close to a dozen universities and several correctional institutions. She has also participated in seminars aimed at educating high school teachers about the latest interpretive trends in her field. She will be in residence at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Spring 2010, doing research on how working class African Americans’ anti-imperialist consciousness in the 1960s shaped their engagement with the movement against the Vietnam War. In many ways, it continues her emphasis on exploring overlapping and intersecting boundaries between social protest movements.