“Me kill Daddy-Wong-Wegs!” An idle conversation had lapsed comfortably into silence. Jessica was sitting in a state of summer-afternoon vacancy when the child’s voice and the mother’s quick reply aroused her. “Oh, no, darling, I wouldn’t do that.” The expressive …
In The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Ernst Cassirer argues that the distinguishing characteristic of man is his symbolizing activity. While the animal responds to signs and finds satisfaction in the manipulation and incorporation of physical objects, man also needs, and …
I first went down to Brooklyn to see the gang on a bone cold February afternoon this year. They were waiting for Bruce Davidson and me in a candy store about a half mile from their turf, a parlor they …
In Edward Albee’s two-character play, The Zoo Story, the publisher asks the young man who accosts him in Central Park if he lives in the Village. The boy, who eventually forces the publisher to kill him in a desperate attempt …
On the tombstone of our race, a famous writer has told us, there will some day be carved the single chilling remembrance: They copulated and read the newspapers. He didn’t go far enough, that writer. Our epitaph is actually going …
In the recent Broadway actors’ strike, things that most people only surmise came into the open: for instance, that out of 12,000 Equity members only 731 were involved in the Broadway productions that closed down, or that the weekly minimum …
The final tournament still takes place in New York. Here the jazzman from Detroit or Houston or Paris is tested. The judges who are by far most important to him are the other musicians. He is interested economically in being …
The newest faces in our city are Puerto Rican. They have come in great numbers and settled primarily in the slum areas close to the Negro ghettos. Like the national groups preceding them they speak a foreign language; but unlike …
At the age of nine I had already acquired the reputation of being the worst boy in the neighborhood. And in my neighborhood this was no easy accomplishment. My frequent appearance in juvenile court was beginning to bother the judges. …
In some ways Harlem is different. It is not the solidest or the best organized Negro community (Negro political representation came to Chicago a full decade before New York). It is not the most depressed, even in the New York …
Wherever enough middle class college graduates can be found to fill a New York meeting hall, there have sprung up Democratic political clubs bearing the label “reform.” Many of these clubs were originally founded as local campaign headquarters for Adlai …
This is the paradox of Greenwich Village: an historic artists’ quarter panders its worst trivia with the civic pride of Zenith’s Chamber of Commerce. Nowhere else in New York is the city’s ghetto-complex so challenged as by the interracial atmosphere …
This essay is both more and less than a portrayal of the beats of Greenwich Village and its environs. More, because much of it holds good for beats elsewhere. Less, because I have not depicted some of the Village beat …
John D. Rockefeller III, President of the Lincoln Center of Performing Arts, says, “Lincoln Center is a story in the American tradition of voluntary private initiative and of what it means in service to- the public…. It can be one …
The city planner’s approach to the improvement of society differs sharply from that of the intellectual. The planner seeks improvement by manipulating spatial relationships, that is, through the coordination of the natural environment, space, and man-made land uses such as …
