Stranger Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2000 words

Stranger - Essay Example Also it is acknowledged that every city has a character of its own and to understand a city, we have to understand its character and the contributing factors for that particular character. This is mainly trying to understand the cities, its mobility, movement and settlement and the connected tensions. It is interesting to analyse what exactly is a city. It is a beehive of transactions, a centre of old and new buildings and heritages, leading to nostalgia and modernity, a mobile point in geography where everything seems to be moving, changing and altering at a highly intense pace and nothing static anywhere. If a city has to be watched, it should be done by stepping back, removing self from the humming mainstream and watch it like a hawk in the sky and then the right perspective of the city emerges. The picture presented is stunning in its originality and every piece of it is melting only to solidify itself into another shape, colour and form. Hence, the watcher finds pre-diluted forms, diluting material, half diluted forms, fully diluted shapeless mass, half-formed pictures and then, totally altered new forms. It is a thriving enormous pulsating mass of various puzzles that are always on the move, anxious to attain the next form. For a stranger, city presents this confusing and p uzzling picture. The seemingly unruly aggressiveness of the society and its presented disorder threatens him. Mostly it is an outside pose and need not be true. "Constructions of 'disorder' and 'order' are inextricably linked, and in any given urban context they frequently appear as 'idealized imageries'. However, it is only in the company of strangers in city spaces that they are symbiotically realized," (Pile et al, p.135). City cannot have one geography or one history because it is a synthesizer of multiple geographies and histories. It is a merger of various backgrounds and diverse activities. It is also a tantaliser with new possibilities and newer interactions. It is true that cities could be understood and characterised only through their historical, social and global context and not individually removed and isolated. City has to be filled with myriad flows and connections like people, ideas, cultures, rituals, principles, social priorities etc. and only then as a mixture of all these interconnections it could be analysed. Cities do not shake off their history easily. Even if they attain hitherto unrecognised proportions, its history can be recognised in every corner of the city. "There are strong echoes of the past which remain forceful in representations of urban disorder which are dominant today through, for example, notions of 'dangerous classes' such as 'out of place'" (Pile et al, 1999, p.88). A stranger coming into a certain city could be a city dweller, belonging to another city, or an individual based in a rural community and hence, his reactions would be different to the city life depending on his own background. He could either be comparing it with his earlier city favourably or negatively and this would prejudice his outlook and adjusting capabilities. If he is from a rural region, his reactions would be of wonder, loathing, contempt, surprise and amazement. He might even feel threatened by the all-consuming power of the city, because cities have their own

East Village NYC Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words

East Village NYC - Essay Example Marks, and the impact that the various cultures and movements have had on them, making them the East Village and St. Marks that we now know. Geographically placed in-between Houston Street on the southern border, 14th Street on the northern border, the East River on the eastern border, and the Bowery and Third Avenue to the west, the initial consideration is that East Village lies within the Lower East Side, and to some of the native residents, it still is. Regardless of what it is called, East Village has come to be synonymous with dive bars, artists, sidewalk cafes, indie boutiques, and a disreputable hipster artistic that has resisted the homogenization affecting the other parts of Manhattan, but that is also now changing. East Village has long been an urban frontier, acting as a starting point for numerous new immigrants coming to America. For Puerto Rican, Irish, Ukrainian, Jewish, and German immigrants, just to name a few, East Village was more than just a location as it was a toehold that gave them a chance at a fresh start in their lives. Other than immigrants, East Village was a magnet for radicals, artists, reformers, and bohemians. East Village was home to the cultural activity that transformed the global community, but the other side of the coin holds a regular occurrence of neglect and poverty. In a time preceding the establishment of New Amsterdam in the 1600s by Dutch traders, the portion of Manhattan that has changed over time to become the East Village known today was a vast stretch of swampy marshland. Native American game trails and paths crisscrossed with this expanse, and a larger portion of these segments was made into permanent thoroughfares. The largest of them all became what is commonly known as the Bowery. A huge segment of what came to be the East Village was in the beginning part of the expansive farm belonging to the last governor of New Amsterdam, Peter Stuyvesant. John Jacob Astor, who was an Americanized fur baron who switched p rofessions to become a real estate mogul, was the initiator of the transformations that changed the area to a status address, an upgrade from the pastoral countryside it was. This transformation was initiated by his luxurious style set up close to what is now known as Astor Place. By the East Village Visitor Center’s account, Astor place was the most sought after real estate by the close of the 1830s. Some of the most affluent industrialists, politicians, and merchants of that era including Gardiner, Vanderbilt, and Delano were buying property in this area from Astor. Astor Place soon joined the best of America’s fashionable addresses. Stuyvesant built the Reformed Dutch Chapel that later grew into St. Mark. This church was concentrated around the elders, who acted as the electors of their spiritual leader owing to their status as high-ranking congregation members. It is widely thought that during the initial era of St. Mark’s, the church made no secret about be ing people centered. Pew rent was collected at the church, and it selectively attended to the spiritual requirements of the incipient nobility centered on property, money, and trade. Early congregants still wallowing in magnitude of American insurgency considered themselves to be constitutionalists, however, their impartiality was founded predominantly on the protection of both their rights to economic expansion and property. Over time, Iron foundries gave way to blacksmith workshops, service posts gave way to livery posts, and Apartment buildings came