New York Social Anonymity
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9/16/2006
Governing the City
Assignment # 1 – by Guy Bajour
For a person coming to a big city such as New York anonymity has a positive aspect as well as a negative one. On one hand it can give you the freedom to do whatever you want, dressing however you want knowing that no one knows you and nobody cares. It is sort of a safe net for being unique.
On the other hand coming alone to a city like New York can be a little bit frightening and the last thing one needs is the feeling of loneliness.
Therefore we can see throughout New York many close-knit neighborhoods with things in common such as: ethnicity, religion, race and even profession.
Such neighborhoods can be found in Chinatown for Chinese people, in Brooklyn for orthodox Jews, in Astoria for Greeks and in the East Village for young Bohemian artists. In order to become stronger and more confident to live in a community within a community, we can take the example of Langston Hughes and James Baldwin. Both of them talk about the separation of the black men from the white men in Harlem from the rest of New York City.
James Baldwin gives a great example for his close-knit neighborhood saying: “The area Im describing is bounded by Lenox avenue on the west, the Harlem river on the east, 135th street on the north and 130th street on the south. We never lived beyond these boundaries; this is where we grew up. Walking along 145th street, for example familiar as
it is, and similar, does not have the same impact because I dont know any of the people on the block. But when I turn east on 131st street and Lenox avenue, there is first a soda-pop joint, then a shoeshine “parlor”, the a grocery store, then a dry cleaners, then the houses. All along the street there are people who watched me grow up, people who grew up with me, people I watched grow up along with my brothers and sisters; and, sometimes underfoot, sometimes at my shoulder- or on it- their children, a riot, a forest of children, who include my nieces and nephews.”
Although the description by James Baldwin sounds nice and cozy some times living in such a neighborhood can be suffocating and overwhelming, causing someone to change the way of living and thinking just because of your neighbors pressure.
An example for a close-knit neighborhood causing a bad situation we can see in Jane Jacobs “The death and life of great American cities” where she describes the incident about the struggle of a man and a little girl about eight or nine years old. Because of that struggle all of the shop owners in that vicinity came out and surrounded the man and if it wasnt enough, people where watching from the windows above. As she says nobody had the intention of letting the man take the little girl, although nobody knew who she was. The problem started when everyone realized that she was his daughter. This is an example of people in a neighborhood who all know one another trying too hard to interfere in the life of others without actually being asked to do so.
Looking at the whole city instead of looking at the neighborhoods we can see the same picture of a city divided into groups of people that on one hand enjoy the fact that they