New York is, once more, an immigrant town. Not only do the public schools now give instruction in seven languages (eight if you count Mandarin and Cantonese separately), but programs to serve eight additional language groups with instruction primarily in …
Governor Cuomo caught the attention of the social welfare world last year with the announcement of a jobs program he called “Work-not-Welfare.” (Welfare here refers to Aid to Families With Dependent Children, AFDC, 94 percent of whose recipients in New …
Since the 1950s the politics of New York blacks has been characterized by weakness and factional division. Compared with the political gains of blacks in cities like Atlanta, Chicago, Philadelphia, Cleveland, and Detroit, black politics in New York is marked …
The commonly told tale about postindustrial New York is that of two cities, of white elites and minority poor, of advanced services and a crumbling manufacturing base. The conventional explanation for the ills of the minority poor is equally simple: …
I was born in 1920 in the old Women’s Hospital of St. Luke’s at 110th Street and Amsterdam Avenue. Two-thirds of a wretched century later, I reside one block west and five blocks north on Broadway and 115th Street, overlooking …
A gay man unflinchingly attends to his lover having seizures even though he knows that his own developing symptoms of AIDS may hold the same agony for him. A priest visits a homebound man with AIDS-related dementia who, convinced there …
New York City politics are at a low point. The city that pioneered in municipal unionism, public hospitals, and a university system, the city that seemed to be a “social democratic bastion” in a capitalist nation and a significant factor …
The Latino press and Latino leaders claim that their group may well be the political movement of the 1980s. Estimates show that by the year 2005 those classified by the census as Hispanics will outnumber blacks to become the largest …
Nineteen twenty-nine was a banner year for visions of New York. In the heady atmosphere of the beautiful life and endless tomorrows of that doomed decade, just before the future died, all dreams were possible. In 1929 the architect-delineator Hugh …
The legacy is invariable—a brief pang of guilt followed by overwhelming relief at my own escape from the northeast Bronx. I come off the Henry Hudson Parkway and where the traffic light flags me down, at the pocked and rutted …
At a conference on “leadership succession” in New York late in 1985, I was struck by the remarks of David Jones, then executive director of the city’s Youth Bureau, now head of one of the city’s oldest nonprofit social service …
Mayor Koch’s face stared out from the bus poster. “I want you to have my children,” the caption read, part of a stepped-up campaign to recruit badly needed foster homes. After six years of the Koch administration, its brazenness should …
Throughout U.S. history, periods of rapid social and economic change have led to political realignment, especially under the stimulus of a severe economic downturn. By these lights, realignment should now be taking place in New York politics. All the ingredients …
My aunt and her friends played Mah Jongg in Van Cortlandt Park. They’d bring their card tables, folding chairs, beach chairs (the striped-awning kind), food, and ice-water, then settle in for the day. They were Russian émigrés who had found …
When people speak of New York as being different, something other than America, they seem to have in mind a special quality of the city’s culture and politics, perhaps associated with its ethnic makeup. Such perceptions, however imprecise, have a …
