1 New York arrivals
 2 Chinatown's History
 3 New York's Three Chinatowns - Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens
 4 City Univ of New York (ESL scandal)
 5 NYC Public Library
 6 Subways, crime etc
 7 Q-A (trivia)
 8 Warnings

\1 New York arrivals

Destination: NY. The city has undergone many changes, but one thing remains the same: more than anywhere else on the planet, it's the paace people go hoping to transform their lives. By KURT ANDERSEN

 Scenes in the key of New York by Vladimir Syomin, who arrived from Russia in Sep 1999.

"How the lunatics flung up their caps and roared in sympathy with the headlong engine and the driving tide!" -- Charles Dickens, on arrival in New York, passing the insane asylum on Blackwell's Island aboard the steamboat New York Sure, there are people who simply wind up in New York, find themselves living here the way people wind up in Des Moines or Fullerton or Fort Worth, by accident or default. She is raised at 74th and Amsterdam, rents her own first apartment up West End Avenue at 103rd, then settles in a brownstone duplex in Park Slope; he grows up in Bayside and after dental school decamps a few miles west, to a junior two-bedroom at 67th and York with a view (of Queens). Or they arrive for college and never leave; or they're transferred in for a headquarters tour of duty; or they tag along with a wife or boyfriend. But surely, for more people here than anywhere else, moving to New York was an urban choice, particular and self-conscious, bedazzling and scary. Moving to New York requires a yearning -- to live by one's wits or test one's mettle; to make art or a pile of cash (or, during the 80's, both at once); to live nakedly or anonymously or simply to get as far as possible from Des Moines or Fullerton or Fort Worth; or even, still, to breathe free. Fifty-one years ago, E.B. White wrote that those who were "born somewhere else and came to New York in quest of something" make up "the greatest" New York. Each of them "embraces New York with the intense excitement of first love" and must come here "willing to be lucky." Given the cost of living, the ambient hypertension and the clattering grind, the decision to move to New York remains at least somewhat irrational, requiring a kind of quasi-religious commitment. And yet in this ostensibly hyperrational age, people from all over still make that decision in staggering numbers. It's corny but true: arriving in New York, from the provinces or overseas, remains a central episode in the American narrative, a kind of living iconic rite. The mythic pull of the city has been gathering force for a long time, encoded in a body of literature so extensive and so familiar as to constitute its own genre. Walt Whitman invented (and embodied) the modern ode-to-New York mode, embracing the coarse and unlovable aspects of the place together with the plainly grand ones. His poems have colored coming-to-New York stories ever since, seeping into American Bildungsromane that celebrate the grunge and stink and bloody-minded rattle of the city along with the martinis and art and sleek talk. In this romantic urban landscape, game tyros dare the tough big city to defeat or disillusion them -- David Copperfields without all that David Copperfield stuff that Holden Caulfield was too cool to indulge explicitly. Stories as various as "Catcher in the Rye," "The Godfather," "  Chorus Line," "New York, New York," "Working Girl," "Bright Lights, Big City," "Wall Street," "Slaves of New York," "Angela's Ashes" and "Felicity" are all New York newcomer stories, each somewhere on the spectrum between the perpetually wowed ("Breakfast at Tiffany's") and the relentlessly dark ("Midnight Cowboy").

Kurt Andersen is the author of "Turn of the Century" and a founder of Inside, a new media company.

Each generation and each caste has had its fresh iteration of the New York myth. (Jackson Pollock and the Beats replace John Reed and the Communists, Don DeLillo replaces John O'Hara, "Seinfeld" replaces "Annie Hall," Tito Puente replaces Duke Ellington, Fran Lebowitz replaces Dorothy Parker, Wendy Wasserstein and Paul Rudnick replace Kaufman and Hart, Melissa Bank replaces Dawn Powell, Jeff Koons replaces Andy Warhol, Biggie Smalls replaces Charlie Parker.) But the city's starring role in that myth -- and its resulting position in the popular imagination of America and the world -- remains the same. Even the New York that Dickens depicted in 1842 is uncannily familiar: the city, he wrote, was manic (people and vehicles "all travelling to and fro: and never idle. . . . These restless Insects"), physically delirious ("confused heaps of buildings"), fashion-forward ("Heaven save the ladies, how they dress! What pinking of thin stockings, and pinching of thin shoes, and fluttering of ribbons and silk tassels") and media-mad ("fifty newspapers . . . pimping and pandering for all degrees of vicious taste, and . . . imputing to every man in public life the coarsest and the vilest motives").

Each generation has had its fresh iteration of the New York myth. But the city's starring role in that myth remains the same.

The real-life city of New York, of course, has recently undergone a radical transformation. Twenty-five years ago, the city was in bankruptcy, the sidewalks teemed with crazy people, commercial sex was in its golden age and swaths of West 42nd Street and the Bowery were druggy dead zones. (All of which young knee-jerk nihilists, nurtured by a century of Whitmans and Allen Ginsbergs and Lou Reeds, regarded as attractive anti-amenities.) Today there are brand-new chunks of New York that could pass for Toronto or San Diego; Times Square is spectacularly family-friendly (again); Central Park and Bryant Park have been redeemed to an extent not possible to imagine in the 70's. There are a third as many murders, thousands of new information-age jobs, a shocking sense of civic life more or less in control. But while starting salaries have doubled, some rents have quintupled. For people without an M.B.A. or a law degree, entry-level pay no longer covers a decent one-bedroom in a pleasant Manhattan neighborhood. The supply of cheap garrets has been outsourced to Brooklyn. For most people who come here from Sri Lanka, or Nigeria, or Ecuador, of course, there is nothing bittersweet about the new, improved New York of 2000. They do not come here because they loved "Bright Lights, Big City" in high school or heard about the Cedar Tavern on N.P.R. They come for the same reason immigrants have always come: the chance to make more money than they could in Bangladesh or Ukraine or Ireland. And while today they don't believe (if they ever did) that the streets are paved with gold, they do know, or sense, that nowhere in America is there more opportunity for sheer stamina to be rewarded. A taxi can be driven 18 hours a day. Drywall can be taped 70 hours a week. Wallets and umbrellas and falafels can be peddled on the sidewalks pretty much all the time. In other words, the workaholic money madness of New York is part of the attraction for new arrivals at the bottom of the ladder as well as at the top. The couple from St. Kitts working five jobs between them surely belies the newest New York myth -- that there is no more middle or working class, only the rich and the permanently poor. But for the immigrants who were drawn here from the American sticks (like me), the appeal is less obvious. Manhattanism has spread deep into the provinces. Epicurean grocery stores and Miramax films and alternative weeklies and imitation SoHo's are now a part of even small cities and leafy suburbs. So how has New York itself sustained its spell? Why do people still come here in such numbers, from so many other American places? For approximately the same reason, I think, that the new nationwide ubiquity of casino gambling and strip clubs improbably fed the explosive growth of Las Vegas during the last 20 years -- as more and more Americans acquire a taste in their hometowns for sin or old-fashioned urban civilization, more and more of them yearn for the wellspring, the big show, the real thing. n retrospect, my childhood in Omaha, a half-mile from a cornfield, looks like a New York 101 distance-learning experiment. Every week on TV during the 1960's, I watched a couple of movies from the 1930's or 40's, almost all of them glorifications of this city -- My Man Godfrey," "His Girl Friday," "On the Town." On TV, half my pleasure in programs like Leonard Bernstein's "Young People's Concerts," "The Dick Cavett Show" and Johnny Carson's "Tonight" (before the move to California) derived from their unmistakable Manhattan tang -- the occasional evening clothes, the jokes about Central Park, the unapologetic cosmopolitanism. I played the cast album of "West Side Story" over and over and spent years studying Mad magazine, by far the New Yorkiest artifact generally available to children in Nebraska. Venturing regularly by bus into downtown Omaha -- alone, almost sneakily -- I managed to see the big old stone buildings, the used-book shops, the single adult theater, the liquory breezes from pitch-black bars, the people of color, the policemen on foot, the kooks, the bums, the suspicious characters and all the rest as a thrilling miniature glimpse of what New York might be like.

Scenes in the key of New York by Vladimir Syomin, who arrived from Russia in September 1999.

So, just after college, I turned down a good job in Alexandria, Va., and moved, unemployed, directly to New York. Like all newcomers, I felt my outsiderdom acutely. I've found that this is a feeling that attenuates but never entirely goes away -- living here is always part "Blade Runner," part Edith Wharton. And some of the pleasure of the place derives from those regular frissons of alienation. Unlike San Francisco's or Seattle's, New York's scale makes overfamiliarity impossible. That rule extends to professional subcultures as well as to geography. Unlike Washington or Los Angeles, New York has no single, oppressively dominant professional realm, but a half-dozen different major leagues, countless self-obsessed pecking orders you've never even heard of. Whereas in more anodyne, more normal American cities, the treacly breeze from the Cinnabon shop at the mall is the single-most intense public aroma, New York assaults pedestrians with intense odors -- South Street's dead fish, the meat district's day-old beef, horse manure on Central Park South, peppers and hot fat in Chinatown. And whereas those cities are optimized to anticipate every consumer desire, New York, with its tiny markets and tinier kitchens, demands a constant rhythm of commercial intercctions -- newspaper here, bread here, vegetables here, wine there -- that can be exhausting once the novelty wears off. It is not a Welcome Wagon kind of place. Yet it can be more comfortable for newcomers than overtly "friendly" cities. New York's waves of immigration and emigration become a self-perpetuating spiral: newcomers as a class feel less like oddballs here, and so new newcomers keep pouring in, attracting more newcomers still. They ride that great assimilation machine, the subway, an egalitarian marvel that permits (O.K., forces) a real and immediate engagement with the urban tide unavailable in cities where everyone drives cars. Newcomers here wander on streets crowded with people and shops, getting a de facto crash course in urbanism. They eat among crowds of interesting strangers (during my first year here, I probably ate more restaurant meals than my relatively cosmopolitan parents ate in their whole lives), and every meal out is another chance to eavesdrop and stare at people you don't know -- a pleasure that in other cities can result in the police being summoned. So the newcomers don't stay newcomers for very long. envy new New Yorkers. not the rents they have to pay, or the loneliness that goes without saying. Assuming they arrive equipped with some basic New York catechism, I envy them that first year's plunge into the city of their imaginations.

Scenes in the key of New York by Vladimir Syomin, who arrived from Russia in September 1999.

Am I sentimentalizing? Should I be embarrassed by the civic-booster goosebumps I still get when I hear the first bars of "Rhapsody in Blue" and read the 30-year-old Dickens's first glimpses of the city? Is it undue pleasure I take in my 24-year-old niece's giddy arrival in the city this summer? She could have stayed in Minneapolis -- where she had an excellent job, free housing, plenty of friends, a progressive civic ambience and hot and cold running espresso -- rather than pay her share of $3,000 for a small three-bedroom walk-up on the unfashionable edge of Williamsburg. But instead she has moved to New York, simply because it's New York: New York for New York's sake. The other night, she told me, she discovered a charming dive just down the block from her apartment where Latin Americans drink sweet cocktails and dance to merengue on the jukebox. "I thought there was just 'merengue music,"' she said, sounding like a postmodern That Girl, both amused by her own newcomer's excitement and also genuinely excited. "It turns out there are like a hundred different kinds of merengue!" A 43-year-old Peruvian she met at the bar, a man named Pepe, wants to take her out dancing in Manhattan. I doubt she'll go, but she couldn't be more pleased to have been asked, and to be here.

-------------------------------- MY FIRST YEAR IN NEW YORK 1980 By MICHAEL CUNNINGHAM

I lived that first year in a cheap, unheated loft on Water Street, literally in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge, with my friends Francis O'Shea and Darrah Cloud. This was 20 years ago, before the South Street Seaport, when Water Street looked like the set of a movie about postwar Berlin, when at most hours its only visible inhabitants were a tribe of scrappy but prosperous cats.

Our landlord -- the same one who neglected to mention that our loft was unheated -- habitually assured new tenants that the six-story building had a freight elevator that opened onto each loft. He didn't tell them it had not worked in at least 50 years. Newcomers would arrive with vans full of furniture, ring for the elevator and wait. And wait. Confronted, the landlord would rig up a pulley system, open the trapdoors that closed the shaft on each floor and help them haul their possessions up by means of an ancient hydraulic winch. So every now and then we moved Francis's bed out of the elevator shaft, opened the trapdoors, made cocktails and watched as someone's earthly goods gradually ascended past our floor to an upper one. Here came a great green dowager of a sofa, then a pine table, then a queen-size bed with cherubs carved on its headboard. On moving days, with all six trapdoors open, you could look some 90 feet straight up and see, all along the brick walls, pictures hanging in gilt frames, candles in niches, hat racks with hats on them, exactly like the rabbit hole in Alice in Wonderland. Above us lived an ordinary-looking middle-aged man and woman. They were robust, vaguely suburban; he prone to chinos and polo shirts, she to sheath dresses and nylons. They were neither friendly nor hostile; their only visible mystery was the fact that they lived in this neighborhood at all, stepping complacently each morning over the weedy sidewalks and broken cobbles in their sensible shoes. Every night, however, they stomped around on the floorboards over our heads as if they were marching to an especially rousing Sousa selection, and often, at least three or four times a night, they dropped the Object. The Object fell, always, with a thud decisive enough to rattle the light bulb over our kitchen table. It seemed to be about the size and weight of an ottoman, with a solid/soft quality, like a medicine ball. It fell every night, at unpredictable intervals. It became impossible not to wait for it. It was equally impossible to ask them about it -- they were as self-contained as manatees, and about that approachable. We decided that they had a curse on them: they were permitted to live obscurely, incognito, unpunished for their crimes, but whenever they were at home one or the other of them had, at all times, to be carrying the Object, which we came to imagine as a giant potato, tufted here and there with hair, teeth and eyes. Naturally they dropped it every now and then. Approximately once a month a huge bin, the size of six conventional Dumpsters, appeared in front of the warehouse down the block, overflowing with shoes. They were variously women's, men's and children's shoes; some were new and some used. Passers-by made arrangements of them. During the days of the shoes we'd come home to find 10 or more pairs of spike heels, or cowboy boots, or wingtips, sometimes in a straight line down the middle of the street, sometimes in more elaborate formations. Once we found a phantom choir of little girls' patent-leather party shoes in prim lines on the stairs to our building. After two or three days the shoes were gone again, though we never saw anyone take them away. The arranged pairs were always left behind, along with miscellaneous spillage: a brand-new platform shoe might lie on its side in a puddle; a well-worn hiking boot might still stand, stalwart as an old dog, on the shattered sidewalk.

MY FIRST YEAR IN NEW YORK 1949 By LIZ SMITH

I arrived in the city and, having failed to impress The New Yorker, Time, Newsweek or any of the eight New York newspapers with my journalism degree, I went to work for one of the last of the movie magazines, Modern Screen. The publication and its rival, Photoplay, were real fan magazines and extremely benign. We wrote over and over about the same young stars -- Elizabeth Taylor, Piper Laurie, Debbie Reynolds, Tab Hunter and Tony Curtis. According to Modern Screen they all lived blameless, perfect lives. I took on some extra jobs to help my finances, typing for Blue Cross in the evenings and working as a proofreader for Newsweek on the weekends. It was here in the old offices on 42nd Street that I began to feel like a real New Yorker. There were no computers then, so the proofreading experience was personal and unique. A "pitcher" (the reader) read aloud every word, comma, question mark and quote to a "catcher" (the checker). Then a dot went over every word to indicate it was O.K. There was an arcane language to proofing. We used "com" for comma, "query" for question mark, "screamer" for an exclamation point and "stop" for every period. Anyone listening to us would have thought we were dealing in Sanskrit.

MY FIRST YEAR IN NEW YORK 1936 By BOBBY SHORT I remember very clearly coming through the Holland Tunnel that first time. It had been an overnight journey in a 1936 Chevy all the way from Cleveland, where I'd just finished an engagement. I was 12 years old and consumed with excitement about seeing New York, where, it had been pointed out, I would be a grand success and become a child star.

I came here with my two managers, Leonard Rosen and J.J. Levin, known as Bookie. We stayed for a while in the old Somerset Hotel in the West 40's, in a spacious suite of rooms. One day, I saw young Harold Nicholas strolling with his mother on Broadway. His wraparound camel's-hair overcoat knocked me for a loop. Nothing would do but that I have one exactly like it. From his tailor we ordered that coat and a new set of white tails. The latter is hanging still in my closet. I glance at it now and then, wondering how I could have ever been so small. I landed a number of one-night engagements and at one point held down simultaneous jobs in two different nightspots -- at the Frolics, a space still extant over the Winter Garden Theater, and across town at an elegant and pint-size bote called La Grande Pomme, which provided me with a taste of the sort of supper club that would become my bread and butter. One highpoint of those first days was my weeklong run uptown at the Apollo Theater in Harlem, where the advance publicity hailed me as everything from "the new juvenile star" to "the Negro Bobby Breen," titles to which I never truly ascended during my seven days there. But the Apollo was a learning ground for me. The savvy, glamour and expertise surrounding me were mind-blowing. Even today, I can simply close my eyes and be back there standing in the wings, goggle-eyed and totally entranced by the magical professionalism of the chorus line, the comics and the stars. I never saw a Broadway show, but the radio poured forth all the hit tunes from them day and night. Rodgers and Hart, Porter and Vernon Duke were all represented right along with the popular items from Tin Pan Alley. My managers wangled an audition for me at the famous Cotton Club, so we walked over one hot afternoon to show the producers what I could do. Wearing my new tail suit through the blistering streets was an embarrassment for me, but it was pointed out that the club was the most prestigious of its sort in the country. No one there was impressed enough to offer me a job, but only a year or so ago one of the chorines who had been present that day informed me that she remembered it all.

The most wonderful occurrence of those early New York days happened quite out of the blue. We were sitting one afternoon in the office of Irving Mills, Duke Ellington's manager, business partner and alleged collaborator on many of his compositions. Very quietly a side door opened, and Duke Ellington walked into the room, exuding all his charm and putting all of us at ease. After some conversation, Mills suggested that he play his new score for the Cotton Club show coming up that fall. The Duke played all of the songs, and I was transported.

Then they asked me to play, after which Duke offered me some praise and encouraged me to work hard because I had a very bright future. He was never patronizing. This attention erased many of the frustrations we had begun to experience after months of making the rounds in search of that one lucky break.

A few months later, when I went back to my hometown in Illinois, the radio and the local jukeboxes were giving out with songs from the new Cotton Club revue. When I mentioned to my old buddies that I'd heard them all before and that Duke Ellington himself had played them for me in NY, were they incredulous? But of course they were! We proofers worked in almost total seclusion, away from the clacking typewriters and the big-deal editors and reporters.

(Occasionally, we'd catch glimpses of them in the eleva-tor.) Still, we were part of a real news operation, and we felt as if we were the vanguard of perfection, sitting up in our dark offices above Times Square, the last people to see the news before it went out to the world.

MY FIRST YEAR IN NEW YORK 1978 By CANDACE BUSHNELL I'll never forget the first day I came to NY. I was actu-ally wearing a straw hat. I had a rm at the Roosevelt Htl, and in the late afternoon I was in the bar drinking a Singapore sling. There was a huge bang and then sirens and a big commotion outside, and someone ran in and said that a helicopter had fallen off the Pan Am bldg across the street. I thought, "Oh, these kinds of things always happen in NY - helicopters fall off buildings." That was when I decided to run away from college and move here.

I was 18 and didn't know how to go about becoming a writer, so I decided to try my hand at acting instead. I signed up for classes at the HB Studio on Bank Street. I knew only two people in New York, so I moved in with one of them -- a man who happened to be about 40 years older. It was all very glamorous and frightening. Gay Talese, who was writing "Thy Neighbor's Wife" then, came over for dinner, and I think even he was scandalized.

I stopped going to acting school because it was literally making me sick. They tried to make me brush my teeth in a basin of water in front of the class, and I nearly threw up, so I started going to Studio 54 instead. During the day, I hung out at Fiorucci's. Everyone who was at Studio the night before showed up there in the afternoon and drank cappuccinos, which were new and all the rage. I wore Fiorucci T-shirts and jeans and had a pair of electric blue boots with spike heels, and somewhere along the way I ended up being in punk fashion shows. One night at the Mudd Club, a photographer took my picture.

I was wearing a white vinyl dress with strategically placed cutouts, and this photograph appeared in The NY Times with the caption "Neo-Mod Candy." My parents happened to be on vacation at the time and saw the photo. They called me the next day and insisted I go back to college.

Eventually I met a man named Anton Perich, who published a magazine called Night. It mostly consisted of photographs of people at Studio 54, and I begged him to let me write my first article, titled "How to Act in a Disco," for which I got paid $50. The last line was, "If someone dies, ignore them."

MY FIRST YEAR IN NEW YORK 1949 By DOMINICK DUNNE The prospect of NY terrified me to the roots. I had no clear idea of what I wanted to do, just that I wanted to be successful and rich and move in the right circles and go to the Stork Club and El Morocco. It was one thing to have been the darling of my class at Williams (where I sang and danced in Stephen Sondheim's first musical), but quite another thing to earn a living for the first time in my life.

I got a temp job for $35 a week at a theatrical publis-hing house doing odd jobs. Two weeks into the job, I was sent over to 30 Rockefeller Plaza to talk to an NBC exec named Pete Barnham, who had written a book about the new television industry. He was a huge man and such a nice guy. We got into a conversation about television, about which I knew nothing (my family didn't even have a set yet), and I became fascinated by his passion and vision. By the end of our conversation, he asked me if I wanted a job. I said sure. He made a phone call, and I walked out of his office with a job at NBC as a floor manager in live tv for $75 a week, a fortune to me.

I went on to floor-manage some of the legendary shows of the golden age of television, but everything I knew I learned at the "Howdy Doody" show, where I worked for a year and a half. It was a magical assignment. I became friends with Buffalo Bob and Clarabell the clown and Princess Summerfall Winterspring, and with two of the puppeteers,

Rhoda Mann and Dayton Allen. (Dayton, up on the bridge where the kids couldn't see him, once sculptured an anatomically correct body part out of a dozen Three Musketeers bars -- one of our sponsors -- and hung it out of his fly while he was puppeteering and doing the voices of Phineas T. Bluster and Flub-a-Dub.)

At my cue to start at exactly 5:30 p.m., Buffalo Bob would open the show each day by yelling out, "Hey, kids, what time is it?" And the kids in the Peanut Gallery, whom I was in charge of, would yell back, "It's Howdy Doody time," and they'd all sing the opening song that every kid in America seemed to know. Some kids would cry, they were so excited to be there. This was the thrill of live television. It was a great time.

MY FIRST YEAR IN NEW YORK 1957 By PHILIP GLASS I was 20 years old and had come from five months working as a crane operator at the Bethlehem Steel Mills in Sparrows Point, Md., near Baltimore. I had managed to save about $1,200, and that would be my stake to get started in music school in New York. It would carry me for about only half a year, so I immediately began a series of day jobs to supplement my savings. And that's how I managed for most of the next 21 years -- working as a truck loader, furniture mover, plumber, artist's assistant((to Richard Serra) and, yes, taxi driver.

Looking back, I think it was the furniture moving that provided me with my most intimate knowledge of the life of the city. I started a moving company with my friend and cousin, the artist Jene Highstein. We discovered early on that the secret of success in the moving business was the company's name. After a few false starts we came up with "Chelsea Light Moving." The name seemed to evoke feelings of confidence in our customers and gave us an air of professionalism, which wasn't exactly accurate.

Since most moving takes place at the end and beginning of each month, we would place an ad in The Village Voice around the 15th. By the end of the month, we'd have reservations for about 10 days' worth of work. We rented a truck on the Bowery for a couple of weeks, and we were in business.

I discovered that house moving is always a crisis in people's lives, a most vulnerable moment. Whatever unfinished personal business people have seems to spill out of their furniture and half-packed boxes. A few hours moving someone from house to house, and you will know more about them than their psychiatrist can find out in months on the couch. No question.

One particularly poignant story: we were moving a young couple out of their West Village apartment. They were separating, and they were dividing up their household belongings right there on the sidewalk. It was going along O.K. until they finally got to the last item -- a wind-up pendulum clock made to sit on a mantelpiece. They were both getting quite worked up about it, and there was no resolution in sight. I saw that they couldn't settle it between themselves, so I quietly picked it up and put it in the cab of our truck. They didn't say a word.

MY FIRST YEAR IN NEW YORK 1994 By CECILY BROWN I was afraid to leave NYC for at least a year after moving here. I didn't even like to sleep, I was so madly in love with the place. I barely knew anyone and at first would do nothing but walk, miles up and down and across the city, obeying the commands to walk and not walk, letting the lights direct the route. I fell in love on Orchard Street, and we existed on an exotic diet: egg creams and Krispy Kremes, huge tubs of the world's best potato salad and overstuffed Italian sandwiches from Parisi's; bialies and pirogies and blintzes. We'd get high and go on long luxurious excursions to Rite Aid and the cut-price supermarket far east on Grand. There was a Chinese aisle and a kosher aisle, and most of the rest was Latino. The whole thing looked to me like living Pop Art -- the shiny bright red and yellow of El Pico and Cafe Bustelo bordering towers of goods by Goya, tins of guava and hearts of palm with gaudy, faded print labels. Vast slabs of welfare cheese. Pregnant children on the checkout and beautiful boys actually packaging your things for you. New York: fairy-tale island of food and art supplies. Yonah Schimmel's and Ratner's and Katz's, Sammy's Roumanian and Schapiro's House of Kosher Wines. . . . Central Art Supply, Cheap Paint, Utrecht and Pearl Paint. Opulent palaces with 20 brands of oil paint instead of 2. A special section just for white! And all those empires of fantastic hardware. I lost hours wandering Canal Street admiring the staggering arrays of industrial frippery, potential artware -- sheets of colored Perspex and Mylar and glittering plastics and laminates, defying a painter not to throw out the canvas and take up scatter art or ready-mades. In fact, it was tempting to stop making art altogether and spend the rest of my life roaming the streets of the city, just to see if I could see it all.

MY FIRST YEAR IN NEW YORK 1963 By SAM SHEPARD

I was 19 and had worked my way across the country for the previous six months driving a bus for a small repertory company called the Bishops, out of Southern California. I abandoned the bus in the middle of Times Square and I remember watching the red butt of it move away from me down 42nd Street and thinking, "Now Im really in for it. One hot tip Id picked up from a tall, skinny actor on the bus was about the Burns Detective Agency. Hed told me it was a sure-fire job opportunity if everything else failed. My immediate mission, though, was a cheeseburger, but I had zip in my pocket. I found myself hovering outside the plate-glass window of a White Castle watching the cook scoop big mounds of fried onions onto a row of sizzling greasy burgers and then flopping slices of white cheese on top that bubbled and popped like Elmers glue. Id never seen burgers done like this before. Whores of various nationalities were hitting on me, although I didnt recognize their intentions at first. I thought maybe all the girls in New York were just friendly. Weird bald guys with flashy vests were trying to lure me into strip joints. Id never seen sex so out-front, except maybe in Tijuana. There was a big white sign in a storefront with red letters that read: "GIVE A PINT OF BLOOD -- GET $5 CASH.I went in and climbed the stairs to a little office. The stairs smelled like garbage. The iron handrail was sticky. Inside the office was a legitimate-looking nurse in a white uniform sitting behind an oak desk. She had me fill out a form and sign my blood away. She took me into a back room with a green plastic curtain, a metal chair and a little table with stainless-steel trays holding syringes and needles and a glass apothecary jar filled with cotton balls. She tied off the vein on my left arm with a thin, blond rubber hose. I watched the blood slowly fill the syringe. It was rich, dark red. The nurse never looked me in the eyes. Not once. I took the five bucks and went straight back down to the White Castle, sat on one of those chrome stools and ordered me a cheeseburger with fried onions and all that gooey white cheese, just like Id seen in the window. It was one of the best things Id ever tasted. Next day I became a Burns Detective right off the bat. My actor friend was right. I had a brown uniform with a badge, a club, a Marine-looking hat and one of those timecard clocks that I wore on my hip in a black leather pouch. My mission was to guard a whole fleet of coal barges on the East River from 8 p.m. until 4 in the morning. My station was a little 4-by-14 wooden hut set on the edge of the docks overlooking the Con Ed smokestack and the shimmering, oily river. There wasnt a soul around. Just me, the river and the barges. I had to walk from one end of the dock to the other every 15 minutes, insert a key that hung on a pipe into my clock and turn it, causing a punch mark to appear on the card inside to prove that Id done my duty. It was probably the most peaceful job in New York City, and I never could fathom why anyone would want to vandalize a coal barge. My next gig was really my first introduction to the heart and soul of life in the Big City: busboy at the famed Village Gate. Suddenly I was in the thick of it. In the early 60s the Gate was the mecca of jazz in the entire country, and like magic, I was delivered into the belly of it as a stunned witness. Thelonius Monk mauling the piano with his huge hands, doing his little shuffle-step hat dance around the stage then returning to the stool to begin the hauntingly simple melody line of "'Round About Midnight. Right away I recognized that this was the real thing. This was music unschooled, totally inspired and coming directly from the experience of the man playing it. Like a story by a campfire in the middle of nowhere. Charles Mingus unleashing torrential angry riffs through "Fables of Faubus, chanting "FAUB-ASS into the face of a mostly white audience. Nina Simone in her absolutely scary rendition of "Jenny the Pirate. Cannonball Adderly and his brother shaking the whole place down with saxophone frenzy. Dizzy Gillespie busting his round face into that weird-looking horn with the gold bell pointing straight up to the rafters. Ella Fitzgerald, Gerry Mulligan, Mongo Santamaria, Coleman Hawkins, Roland Kirk, Eric Dolphy -- Id come reeling out of the place at daybreak when the garbagemen were just finishing up, and I remember that first blast of fresh, crisp morning air tinged with the rank smells of the clubbers leftover salads and steaks and the sounds of glass crashing as the garbage trucks churned away, pulverizing everything back into itself, and I was heading for the Lower East Side and Tompkins Square Park and a bowl of hot borscht at the Polish joint and no one was on the streets, not a single soul, and I thought to myself the only thing to be in this life is an artist. Thats the only thing that makes any sense.

MY FIRST YEAR IN NEW YORK 1995 By JUNOT DIAZ My father was the first; he arrived in Nueva York at the start of the 70's, in the Years of the Puerto Rican Obituary. He had the "usual" Caribbean immigrant experience: he worked lousy jobs, his hands bled almost constantly (the stigmata of the factory), he slept in unheated buildings and he starved himself thin. All around him buildings exploded into fire. Fortunately he wasn't in them, but it didn't help his sleep any knowing that a family of seven had been roasted to death the week before one block over. The stench of the smoke, of those destroyed lives, seeped into his dreams. Who is surprised that after five unhappy years in Nueva York my father decided that he'd had enough? Right before the rest of our family immigrated, my old man abandoned New York City, where he had friends, where he had a life, and relocated to New Jersey, where he knew no one. (We didn't hear about this move until after we'd arrived.) We settled in a Section 8 apartment complex that was bounded on one side by Old Bridge (where Vitamin C is from) and on the other by Sayreville (Bon Jovi land). This is where I lived when I reached the States, where I spent my American childhood, marooned in the middle of suburbs white as a gringo's behind. New York went from the Oz I dreamed about in the Dominican Republic to the distant sight of the Verrazano Bridge. Transformed from the City of Everything to the city we visited on weekends. A future that had been promised but never arrived. Many years later I would move to Nueva York, at 26 gaining the life I always thought should have been mine. It was no longer the Years of the Puerto Rican Obituary; by then, it was the Years of the Gentrifying Nightstick. I had the "usual" Caribbean college-graduate experience. I worked temp jobs, I lived in an unwinterized apartment in Brooklyn, I smoked cheap hydro and was too broke for anything but activism. Nothing burned, thank God, not even the bread. Often I would find myself in Washington Heights, the capital of the Dominican diaspora, imagining what could have been. I was wanting to be a writer, so I was studying my parents' life and trying to remember my own. Certain nights, when I was restless and nothing was working out, I'd take the D train over the Manhattan Bridge. As the train left the tunnel and began to cross the East River, I'd step between the cars, steadying myself with my hands. This, for some reason, made me happy. It wasn't really dangerous, and the view that it afforded was beyond words. A city ablaze, suspended between black sky and river. Our first night in the States my old man wanted us to see this city, so he drove us through it on our way home from J.F.K. There it is, he said. There it is. I remember our silence, the cold of the windows against our faces. It looked to me like science fiction. Like an incubator for stars, where suns are made. This was before we realized that we were actually bound for New Jersey, when we thought one of those lights was going to be our home.

MY FIRST YEAR IN NEW YORK 1968 By LUC SANTE

That fall I started commuting, two hours each way, from suburban New Jersey to a Jesuit high school on the Upper East Side. I would emerge every morning at 8 from the PATH station, the old Hudson Terminal, where construction was just beginning on the World Trade Center, and walk down John Street to the Lexington Avenue IRT, which I would ride up to 86th. I wore a coat and tie and carried a briefcase. I was 14 years old.

It did not take me long, however, to realize that I was a sailor on shore leave in the greatest brawling port of the seven seas, a starveling in a giant pantry, a pond carp released into the River Alph. It started with the subway. First I discovered that if I had homework not yet done in the morning, I could effect a complicated relay via the BMT, whose ancient cars, with their rattan seats and ceiling fans, moved slowly enough that I could write without my pen jumping very much. Then I started getting off at random stations. I'd hang around the great Latin record shop in the Times Square station, the derelict snack bar in the passage from Grand Central to the shuttle, the arcade of dim and grimy shops at Union Square.

I started hanging out in the automats, especially the landmark on 57th, as well as the Garment District cafeterias. I'd buy some mimeographed poetry rag at the Gotham Book Mart and repair to a table in a far corner of a cafeteria. I'd find obscure movie theaters, neighborhood houses on their last legs, and always sit in the balcony, where I could smoke. I spent a lot of time staring at the displays outside the 42nd Street movie houses. I loved the edges of things: the remaining industrial and truck and warehouse zones in the middle West Side, where I could wander for hours and then buy myself a cup of coffee in the saddest-looking luncheonette around. Eventually I found my way downtown, to the modern world on St. Marks Place, where I was sold little bags of oregano once or twice before I got hep. I'd sidle into incense-and-patchouli boutiques, looking for I don't know what, and always leave disappointed. I searched everywhere for the famous Peace Eye Bookstore, but never found it, because I had no idea there could be any avenues east of First. Mostly I spent hours in the Eighth Street Bookshop and East Side Books and the Phoenix, reading everything, high and low. Did I mention school? Well, eventually the authorities figured out I wasn't spending a lot of time there, and kicked me out midway through junior year. I moved to the city a year and a half later, apparently for good.

MY FIRST YEAR IN NEW YORK 1965 By LOU REED When I moved into my first New York apartment, my uncle gave me a cot and a folding chair. I had been working as a copy editor for a divorce lawyer for two weeks to build up rent money. With $200 in my pocket, I quit and got the apartment ($45 a month) with a friend. It was one room with a bathtub. The bathroom was in the hall and unusable. We took electricity from the hall lighting fixture. There was no heat, but there was a window that overlooked the street three floors below.

Much of my income came from selling envelopes of sugar to girls I met at clubs, claiming it was heroin. This led to hours of feigned stonedness with those more gullible than I, watching carefully to make sure they didn't OD on sweets. What happened to the original drugs is another story.

I slept in a used Navy peacoat and did what laundry I had at a dealer's house on East Sixth Street, until a jealous lover shot my friend's leg off with a shotgun blast through the door. This caused some consternation in our crowd, and eventually eight of us banded together and moved en masse to a new apartment on Grand Street. There I slept on a small cut-up mattress that rested on the floor. It made me nervous because we had rats and I worried about being bit. At this point the Velvet Underground had sprung into being. The junkies who lived below us honored our first job by robbing the entire band of everything that was not with us at the gig.

The next apartment was on East 10th Street. This was a real apartment, $65 a month. It had a bathroom. I made the mistake of letting Ondine stay there once when I was out of town and returned to find the apartment flooded with water and a comatose body in the bathtub. Jimmy Smith had taken all my belongings. Rotten Rita had carved a poem on the front door, which hung off its hinges. The amphetamine elves had Magic Markered the walls, and the landlord had left the notice of eviction Scotch taped to the working stove. I still had my guitar and my peacoat and my B.A. in English.


\2 Chinatown's History

The History of New York's Chinatown by Sarah Waxman
 New York City's Chinatown, the largest Chinatown in the United States—and the site of the largest concentration of Chinese in the western hemisphere—is located on the lower east side of Manhattan. Its two square miles are loosely bounded by Kenmore and Delancey streets on the north, East and Worth streets on the south, Allen street on the east, and Broadway on the west. With a population estimated between 70,000 and 150,000, Chinatown is the favored destination point for Chinese immigrants, though in recent years the neighborhood has also become home to Dominicans, Puerto Ricans, Burmese, Vietnamese, and Filipinos among others.

Chinatown is born Chinese traders and sailors began trickling into the United States in the mid eighteenth century; while this population was largely transient, small numbers stayed in New York and married. Beginning in the mid nineteenth century, Chinese arrived in significant numbers, lured to the Pacific coast of the United States by the stories of “Gold Mountain” — California — during the gold rush of the 1840s and 1850s and brought by labor brokers to build the Central Pacific Railroad. Most arrived expecting to spend a few years working, thus earning enough money to return to China, build a house and marry.

As the gold mines began yielding less and the railroad neared completion, the broad availability of cheap and willing Chinese labor in such industries as cigar-rolling and textiles became a source of tension for white laborers, who thought that the Chinese were coming to take their jobs and threaten their livelihoods. Mob violence and rampant discrimination in the west drove the Chinese east into larger cities, where job opportunities were more open and they could more easily blend into the already diverse population. By 1880, the burgeoning enclave in the Five Points slums on the south east side of New York was home to between 200 and 1,100 Chinese. A few members of a group of Chinese illegally smuggled into New Jersey in the late 1870s to work in a hand laundry soon made the move to New York, sparking an explosion of Chinese hand laundries.

Living arrangements From the start, Chinese immigrants tended to clump together as a result of both racial discrimination, which dictated safety in numbers, and self-segregation. Unlike many ethnic ghettos of immigrants, Chinatown was largely self-supporting, with an internal structure of governing associations and businesses which supplied jobs, economic aid, social service, and protection. Rather than disintegrating as immigrants assimilated and moved out and up, Chinatown continued to grow through the end of the nineteenth century, providing contacts and living arrangements — usually 5-15 people in a two room apartment subdivided into segments — for the recent immigrants who continued to trickle in despite the enactment of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.

Immigration and Chinatown The Chinese Exclusion Act (1882-1943), to date the only non-wartime federal law which excluded a people based on nationality, was a reaction to rising anti-Chinese sentiment. This resentment was largely a result of the willingness of the Chinese to work for far less money under far worse conditions than the white laborers and the unwillingness to "assimilate properly". The law forbids naturalization by any Chinese already in the United States; bars the immigration of any Chinese not given a special work permit deeming him merchant, student, or diplomat; and, most horribly, prohibits the immigration of the wives and children of Chinese laborers living in the United States. The Exclusion Act grew more and more restrictive over the following decades, and was finally lifted during World War II, only when such a racist law against a wartime ally became an untenable option.

The Bachelor's Society The already imbalanced male-female ratio in Chinatown was radically worsened by the Exclusion Act and in 1900 there were only 40-150 women for the upwards of 7,000 Chinese living in Manhattan. This altered and unnatural social landscape in Chinatown led to its role as the “Bachelor’s Society" with rumors of opium dens, prostitution and slave girls deepening the white antagonism toward the Chinese. In keeping with Chinese tradition — and in the face of sanctioned U.S. government and individual hostility — the Chinese of Chinatown formed their own associations and societies to protect their own interests. An underground economy allowed undocumented laborers to work illegally without leaving the few blocks they called home.

An internal political structure comprised of the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association and various tongs, or fraternal organizations, managed the opening of businesses, made funeral arrangements, and mediated disputes, among other responsibilities. The CCBA, an umbrella organization which drafted its own constitution, imposed taxes on all New York Chinese, and ruled Chinatown throughout the early and mid twentieth century, represented the elite of Chinatown; the tongs formed protective and social associations for the less wealthy. The On Leong and Hip Sing tongs warred periodically through the early 1900s, waging bloody battles that left both tourists and residents afraid to walk the streets of Chinatown.

Growth in Chinatown When the Exclusion Act was finally lifted in 1943, China was given a small immigration quota, and the community continued to grow, expanding slowly throughout the ‘40s and ‘50s. The garment industry, the hand-laundry business, and restaurants continued to employ Chinese internally, paying less than minimum wage under the table to thousands. Despite the view of the Chinese as members of a “model minority,” Chinatown’s Chinese came largely from the mainland, and were viewed as the “downtown Chinese," as opposed the Taiwan-educated “uptown Chinese,” members of the Chinese elite.

When the quota was raised in 1968, Chinese flooded into the country from the mainland, and Chinatown’s population exploded, expanding into Little Italy, often buying buildings with cash and turning them into garment factories or office buildings. Although many of the buildings in Chinatown are tenements from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the rents in Chinatown are some of the highest in the city, competing with the Upper West Side and midtown. Foreign investment from Hong Kong has poured capital into Chinatown, and the little space there is a precious commodity.

Chinatown Today Today’s Chinatown is a tightly-packed yet sprawling neighborhood which continues to grow rapidly despite the satellite Chinese communities flourishing in Queens. Both a tourist attraction and the home of the majority of Chinese New Yorkers, Chinatown offers visitor and resident alike hundreds of restaurants, booming fruit and fish markets and shops of knickknacks and sweets on torturously winding and overcrowded streets.

Lower Mott Street area of people from Hong Kong and Canton, One of three chinese communities. There is one in Sunset Park (mainlanders), Brooklyn and one in Flushing, Queens (Taiwanese).

Only Chinese Musuem in the U.S. at the old (PS-1) school at Bayard and Mulberry. 2fl. Tu-Sa, noon-5pm. - - - Chinatown: A Portrait of a Closed Society by Gwen Kinkead (New York: HarperCollins, 1992) The Tea That Burns by Bruce Edward Hall (New York: The Free Press, 1998)


\3 New York's Three Chinatowns - Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens

Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens - Great dim sum, chinese chow, and late night eateries. A Hungry Explorer in New York's Three Chinatowns.

IN BROOKLYN - TWO CHOICES Dim sum at the Ocean Palace Pavilion in Homecrest. There is a larger Chinese neighborhood in Sunset Park.

Deep fried and braised chicken claw is not my usual breakfast of choice. But I was at the Ocean Palace Pavilion on Avenue U in Brooklyn, and a latte and croissant were not on the menu. As I nibbled at this delicacy, flavored with ginger and soy, I discovered that chicken claw is pretty tasty. Even at 10 a.m.

It was the kind of revelation I would have again and again over the next two days, as I embarked on a journey through the many Chinatowns of New York City. From a culinary point of view, they are among the most fascinating and often mysterious neighborhoods in the city.

Manhattan's Chinatown has been around as far back as the late 19th century, and has recently grown, nudging its way into Little Italy. In the past decade or so, new Chinatowns have sprung up in Brooklyn and Queens. As immigration laws have relaxed and more Asians have moved to New York, these neighborhoods have become increasingly complex, with groups from nearly every region of Asia gaining a presence. Gradually, the neighborhoods have developed their own personalities and specialties, not immediately apparent to the uninitiated.

Manhattan's Chinatown has maintained some of the city's best Cantonese restaurants while making room for less familiar cuisines. Brooklyn's restaurants are almost entirely Cantonese, and Queens is home to a large number of Taiwanese, Korean, Shanghai-style and Chiew Chow restaurants. Each neighborhood offers terrific shopping for the home cook.

In Manhattan, the streets are often pulsating with tourists but you'll find great specialty stores; in Brooklyn and Queens, you'll find good prices and the mood is calm enough that you can ask questions. Because they are all actively evolving they continue to surprise, even if you know them well.

Exploration has its virtues, but it was clear I needed a guide, someone who considered these neighborhoods his own. So I called Norman Weinstein, one of the most respected teachers of Chinese cooking in New York. Born in Manhattan, Mr. Weinstein's obsession with Chinese food and culture took hold in 1963, when he was studying for a master's degree in choral music. He finished school, learned to cook Chinese food, and has been teaching it to others ever since.

It was my turn. He agreed to show me around and take me to his favorite pockets, and help me begin building my own shopping and dining map of these communities.

BROOKLYN: The chicken claw wasn't just a warm up, but a test. Mr. Weinstein, a small, earnest man, likes to take the measure of his students' willingness to change the way they look at Chinese food. Had I not tasted the chicken claw, I might have been relegated to the wonton soup class.

Thankfully, I passed. We had a long day ahead. It was the breakfast hour, and the restaurant was full of diners eating dim sum and reading the paper. We had dumplings filled with thick, fleshy Chinese chives, then fried bean curd skin stuffed with shrimp paste made its way onto the table. It was served with Worcestershire sauce. It was just the kind of contradiction we would see again and again, and part of what makes New York's Chinatowns so difficult to sort out.

"You see the roasted duck on the top?" Mr. Weinstein asked, pointing to the window display at the front of the restaurant. He continued past roasted pig, chicken roasted with soy sauce, "white cooked" chicken, which is steeped in broth, cuttlefish, sausage and spare ribs. "This is how you know immediately that it's a Hong Kong-style restaurant," he said.

Hong Kong and Cantonese restaurants are similar in style, though Hong Kong restaurants tend to be glitzier and have much larger menus. Either might have fish in a tank by the window. The displays are meant to emphasize the freshness of the cuisine. Cantonese cooks steam and stir fry and keep to simple sauces. Shanghai-style restaurants never have live fish in the window. It is an inland cuisine with sweeter, darker, more complex sauces. Taiwanese restaurants serve many different kinds of soups and a colorful array of organ meats. We weren't in a full-fledged Chinatown, but a "Chinatownette," as Mr. Weinstein calls it, that stretches just nine blocks along Avenue U in Homecrest, from East 12th Street to Ocean Avenue. It is New York's newest Chinatown, emerging much as the others outside Manhattan did. Ed Schoenfeld, a restaurant consultant, said, "It's from this class of Chinese people making enough money to leave New York and move to what to them is the suburbs." The restaurants and shops have sprung up to serve these new communities.

For now, Homecrest is nothing like the city's other bustling Chinatowns. You might even call it sleepy. But we ate and ran. Mr. Weinstein wanted to get to the livelier scene, a few miles away on Eighth Avenue in Sunset Park, where a large Cantonese population has settled. He headed for Hong Kong Supermarket, a chain with locations in Manhattan as well as around the country.

He went straight for a stack of lotus root, a creamy peach vegetable shaped like a gourd that is sliced and used much like a potato. Next to it were fresh green snow pea leaves that looked like they had been plucked off the vine minutes before, water spinach, yellow chives, Chinese chives and flowering chives.

He patted them all, then turned toward another aisle. "And here, of course," he said wryly, "is your soda section."

Hong Kong is a terrific market clean and vast with high quality meats and vegetables but also an amusing clash of cultures. Kosher dill pickles share an aisle with curry pastes. Campbell's soups stare across at fermented mixed vegetables. There are Korean kimchi, oyster sauces, dried salted fish, Chinese bean curd skins, Italian olive oils and dried shrimp paste.

"These cuisines are condiment based," Mr. Weinstein said. "I have a lot of interesting things in my cupboard at home." One that has remained unopened is Har Har Tickled Vegetables.

The very sight of the pastry counter got Mr. Weinstein in a huff. "Now explain this if you will," he said. "What is a `Japanese style cheesecake?' " It didn't look half bad, nor did the napoleon nearby. "I haven't had the heart to try it," he said.

Now he was on a roll. He needed more coffee, and we were aiming for Kingly Bakery, across Eighth Avenue. We nibbled on a sweet bun filled with chewy winter melon while Mr. Weinstein got on the subject of Chinese home cooks.

"They don't bake and they don't roast," he said. "It consumes too much fuel. I have friends who are second generation and they haven't opened their ovens." Chinese home cooking involves quick techniques like stir frying and steaming. You go to a restaurant or a bakery if you want a roasted duck or a baked sweet.

MANHATTAN: We got into Mr. Weinstein's car and pressed our way through the afternoon traffic to Manhattan, where Mr. Weinstein had his first Chinatown experience in 1963. "Back then," he said, "it was literally confined to Mott and Mulberry and a little bit on Elizabeth." Now, it sprawls from East Broadway to Allen Street, and from Catherine Street to South Street.

We started down Mott Street. Left and right were vendors selling knockoff purses, beaded bracelets and glass rings. "They're going to change this to Tchotchke Street someday," Mr. Weinstein said.

Then he began sifting through the street's offerings. We stopped at a street vendor with a griddle covered with turnip cakes and a steel soup pot, outside Fong Inn Too, a noodle and bean curd store. "Ah," said Mr. Weinstein. "Soft bean curd." The vendor scooped some into a cup and poured on a syrup that broke the curd into layers. It was like a delicate pudding, and yogurt, too, but warm. The syrup, a mixture of sugar, molasses and water, broke the monotony. Then we entered the store, a yeasty-smelling little workshop. A scale dangled from the ceiling, and a rotary phone hung on the wall. Mr. Weinstein, who has shopped here since 1968, buys his ho fun noodles here, he said, because it is one of the few stores that still use all rice flour, which they grind themselves. It makes a much smoother, softer noodle. They also make the turnip cakes out on the griddle, as well as tofu and egg noodles. Kevin Chan, the manager, fed us each a sticky, yeasty sliver of fermented rice cake and waved us goodbye.

On Bayard Street, we breezed through Thai Indonesia Grocery, a closet-size store crammed with every kind of paste imaginable, then pushed our way through the crowded sidewalks to New Beef King, a store specializing in beef jerky. The flat rectangles of beef are displayed neatly on trays like dainty petits fours. There is fruit- flavored beef scented with pineapple, banana, lemon and vanilla, spicy beef and oyster-flavored beef.

Around the corner on Mulberry Street, we stopped at Sui Cheong Meat Market, a butcher shop with a number of fans, including Mr. Schoenfeld, the restaurant consultant, and Eileen Yin-Fei Lo, a cookbook author. "There's a very high level of expertise," Mr. Schoenfeld said. "Here we are with our big band saws, and they're separating one muscle from the next."

Mr. Weinstein showed me around as if it were a tour of his house. "There's every organ of the pig," he said. And there was. We passed a row of silky, a black skinned chicken used for making soups, ducks, quail and partridge. "Then all your feet," he said.

We skipped the feet this time, though, and went on to lunch at New Green Bo, a Shanghai-style restaurant with homey food and, according to some Chinese food connoisseurs, the best fried dumplings in the city. We were tasting our way through kau fu (spongy wheat gluten with shiitake mushrooms), mock duck (puff pastry-like layers of bean curd skin wrapped around mushrooms) and shredded pork and tart preserved cabbage with lozenge shaped rice cakes. All, Mr. Weinstein said, were well- executed, typical Shanghai dishes, characterized by both sweet and salty flavors.

Mr. Weinstein stared at a kitchen worker across the room who was holding a blade bone in his hands and chewing on it as if it were a sparerib. "That's what I've been after," he said. "See what they're eating? Knuckle bones, a big plate of rice and vegetables. That's real home cooking."

QUEENS: Main Street in Flushing is large and wide, and though it bears the signs of a Chinatown, its real pulse is on the side streets to the east and the west. One block in particular 40th Road between Prince and Main Streets is a model of diversity. On it you can find Cantonese, dim sum, Shanghai, Japanese, Taiwanese, Chiew Chow (a simpler regional cuisine with influences from Cambodia, Vietnam and Canton) and Malaysian restaurants, a large supermarket and an Italian and Spanish barber shop. On Main Street, chains like the Wiz and McDonald's interrupt the flow.

It's a fairly remarkable change, considering that the first Cantonese restaurant showed up in this neighborhood just over a decade ago. You had to know about it, Mr. Schoenfeld said. To get into it, you had to take an elevator to the basement of a bank.

Now, though its markets are not as sophisticated as those in Manhattan and Brooklyn, Flushing has perhaps the best selection of Taiwanese and Chiew Chow restaurants.

We walked to Laifood, a small Taiwanese restaurant on Prince Street. Mr. Weinstein ordered, and soon warm platters heaped with unfamiliar flavors were paraded to our table. Shredded squid with thin, crunchy Chinese celery; luffa, a juicy soft squash saut ed with garlic and tiny, smoky red salted shrimp; bitter melon saut ed with dried anchovies; and a spicy, brothy stomach and sour mustard soup.

We ambled on to Ten Ren's Tea Time, a Taiwanese tea shop with locations in Manhattan and Brooklyn, where we indulged in trendy tapioca drinks. The back of the store is like a museum, with aluminum urns filled with teas as expensive as $140 a pound. At the front is a counter managed by two young men, simmering marble-size tapioca pearls in a stock pot and mixing drinks with a cocktail shaker. I ordered a kumquat lemon iced tea with a fat yellow straw for sucking up the tapioca.

As our tour was winding down, Mr. Weinstein spotted something new a couple making tiny round batter cakes with fillings and began asking questions. Soon we were tasting one filled with candied melon and peanut, another with red bean. As a cake was firming up in one of the circular molds on the griddle, he asked, "How do you get it out?" Smiling, the woman said, "You take it."

Mr. Weinstein laughed. It's the kind of vague response he has become accustomed to after more than 35 years of asking and tasting his way through New York's Chinatowns. None of it seems to have worn down his curiosity. And this whirlwind had only begun to spark mine.


\4 City Univ of New York

The (CUNY) system of higher education institutions in New York, New York, U.S. It was created in 1961 to combine New York City's municipally supported colleges (now numbering 21, including the CUNY Baccalaureate Program). The university includes the Graduate School and University Center, New York's four original liberal arts colleges (City College of New York [CCNY], Hunter College, Brooklyn College, and Queens College), six other four-year colleges, a four-year technical college, a law school, and six two-year community colleges; in addition, the Mount Sinai School of Medicine is affiliated with CUNY. The four-year institutions are largely autonomous. An open-admissions policy inaugurated in 1970 makes all New York City residents who earn high school diplomas eligible for admission to a CUNY institution.

The oldest of the CUNY colleges is the City College of New York, founded as the all-male Free Academy in 1847 by the New York City Board of Education, under the auspices of politician and diplomat Townsend Harris. It was chartered as a college in 1866. During the first half of the 20th century many of the city's civic and business leaders were students there, as were such prominent New York intellectuals as Sidney Hook and Irving Kristol. Women were first admitted to graduate programs in 1930, and the college was completely coeducational by 1951.

Hunter College was founded in 1870 as a teacher-training institution for women. It added instruction at the college level in 1888, was fully accredited as a college in 1905, and began offering graduate instruction for both men and women in 1921; it became fully coeducational in 1964. The college now includes schools of nursing, health sciences, and social work.

Brooklyn College, founded in 1930, and Queens College, founded in 1937, offer training in liberal arts and education. They also offer, with CCNY and other institutions, combined programs in engineering and health-related fields. The Graduate School and University Center, founded in 1961, is the only school in the CUNY system to offer the Ph.D. degree.

The College of Staten Island, formed in 1976 by the merger of Richmond College (founded 1965) and Staten Island Community College (1955), offers liberal arts and vocational programs. York College (1966) offers liberal arts. Lehman College, formerly Hunter College's Bronx campus (opened 1931), joined CUNY in 1968; it offers liberal arts, education, communications, and health programs. Baruch College, founded in 1919 as part of CCNY, became a separate institution within the university in 1968; it specializes in business and public administration. John Jay College of Criminal Justice, founded in 1964, trains criminal-justice agency personnel and public-service professionals. Medgar Evers College, founded in 1969, serves a predominantly African-American student body.

Education Digest By Ward, Marc Mag: THE EDUCATION DIGEST; MYTHS ABOUT COLLEGE ESL.

The furor in the spring of 1997 when students, including many whose native language is not English, failed the Writing Assessment Test at City University of New York (CUNY)--and CUNY trustees' May 27 decision to require all of the system's community-college students to pass the test--have drawn national attention to the university's debate over academic standards. The focus on standards, however, has obscured an important difference between past and present generations of students. Immigrants used to spend their working lives in factories and shops doing jobs that did not call for higher education. But contemporary immigrants must earn educational credentials to succeed in today's job market, and they have come straight to CUNY-and other urban campuses in large cities--in unprecedented numbers. As a result, nearly 50% of incoming CUNY students now are first-generation immigrants or Puerto Rican migrants. In the past, CUNY students were often the children of immigrants, not immigrants themselves: They entered the university having already learned English in childhood as a first or second language. Many of today's students, however, are adults who need classes in English as a second language. Few policy makers understand that traditional standards of judging writing may not be the best way to assess their progress, and what problems these students face in learning English. Cuny's Writing Assessment Test requires students to write a persuasive essay in 50 minutes on a topic such as the death penalty, or the role of religion in the modern world. Some politicians and faculty members have suggested that students should master this skill before coming to college. Behind that deceptively simple position are unexamined assumptions about the way in which adults learn a foreign language. Since facts about how people learn a language are often surprising, even to professional linguists, it is important to understand what is not true about how adults become proficient in a second language for academic purposes. o Myth 1: It takes only a year or two to learn a foreign language. Getting "little things" such as plurals and prepositions consistently right in English takes a long time, although many adult English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) students are able to do "big things" with their second language within a year or two. Understanding a text, summarizing an argument, or expressing an opinion do not necessarily depend on the ability to produce idiomatic or grammatically perfect language.

For example, when Boutros Boutros Ghali came to CUNY'S Lehman College in 1995, he spoke with charm and wit about what he called "the United Nation." Although it is true that many people can function well in a new language after studying it for a year or two, exactly what we mean by "function well" depends on what a student needs to do with the foreign language at school or work. In other words, how we define proficiency, and whether the definition includes the ability to speak or write grammatically in an impromptu situation, must take into account the actual tasks a student will face. College-level proficiency includes performing academic tasks such as listening to lectures, taking notes, reading textbooks, and writing term papers--skills that the Writing Assessment Test does not measure. For many of these tasks, understanding academic language is more important than producing it. Research suggests that children who do not speak English need about five to 10 years in school, depending in part on how literate they are in their native language, before they can do as well in English as their peers who are native speakers. College students taking ESL classes, on the other hand, often begin to cope academically within two years of starting to learn English. This is much less time than is needed to learn to write grammatical English spontaneously, as the writing test requires. Because they need to form their English sentences more slowly and deliberately, ESL students, to write acceptable papers, need time, background reading, and a dictionary-three things that all college students normally are expected to use, but which the writing test limits or prohibits.

That helps to explain why college ESL students can do as well as native speakers of English in most academic subjects before they can achieve linguistic parity in impromptu writing. They may fail a writing test that favors students who can offer a quick opinion in grammatical English, but do well when they write about books or lectures they have studied or discussed. They may also do well in courses that do not require them to write term papers, or when their professors give priority to the content rather than the grammar of their writing. o Myth 2: Anyone can master a second language. This myth celebrates the fact that hard work and persistence can sometimes triumph over nature. Acquiring a first language is a complex process that takes years; the same is true of learning a second language. The time required to master any language, native or foreign, is one limitation of being human, and our attempt to shorten it is a fight against nature. Many linguists believe that people generally become more proficient in a second language if they learn the language as children rather than as adults, and some researchers now feel that maturational changes in the human brain during puberty make it impossible for most adults to reach nativelike proficiency in the grammar of a foreign language. Only rarely can adults learn to speak without an accent in a new language. o Myth 3: College ESL classes are remedial. As is the case with all students, those in ESL classes are a diverse group, including some who need remedial help and many who do not. But even in the case of nonnative speakers of English who are under prepared, their proficiency in English tells us little about their overall academic ability or preparation. In contrast, native speakers in remedial English classes often must review material that they should have learned in high school, and their weaker English skills may predict problems in other areas. In ESL classes, students study the pronunciation, vocabulary, and structure of the English language. They also use English for academic purposes, such as discussing novels, writing term papers, or comparing arguments. Often they read complete works of fiction or autobiography, and newspaper or magazine articles analyzing contemporary cultural trends. Sometimes ESL classes are linked to other college courses, so that language skills are tied to a specific subject area or theme; but, regardless of the approach or subject matter, ESL students usually work on material that they have never seen before. Although most universities award academic credit to students for learning even the basics of a foreign language, ESL students receive little or no academic credit for their freshman level work in learning English. Since most enter college at the intermediate or advanced ESL level, they are usually much more proficient in their second language, and doing more-sophisticated work, than are their peers who receive credit in foreign-language classes. In a 1994 report, the ESL Task Force at CUNY concluded that ESL students do as well as other students, as indicated by grades, retention rates, and accumulation of credits. Studies in 1995 and 1997 at CUNY's Lehman College indicated that ESL students dropped out at lower rates and graduated at rates comparable to or higher than those of non-ESL students. Of 38 Lehman students elected to Phi Beta Kappa in the past two years, 12 had taken ESL classes.

The findings of the ESL Task Force notwithstanding, the CUNY Board of Trustees failed to distinguish between students in ESL and those in remedial programs when it passed resolutions in 1995 requiring all students at senior colleges to complete any necessary ESL or remedial instruction within the first year. Similarly, during May's writing-test controversy, the board also overlooked the conclusions of a large faculty panel that had conducted a two-year review of CUNY'S assessment policies.

That panel had stated specifically, among many other findings and recommendations, that the writing test should not be used to certify English proficiency. (A state judge recently ordered CUNY to award diplomas to 50 seniors who had failed the Writing Assessment Test and who were otherwise eligible to graduate from Hostos Community College, but the trustees intend to appeal. Meanwhile, the requirement to pass the test probably will remain in force for students who hope to graduate in the future.)

In setting policies without reference to research findings in applied linguistics or to the work of faculty committees convened to examine exactly those practices under scrutiny, the Board of Trustees has never articulated the reasoning behind its decisions. While the board obviously intends to take an active role in enforcing educational standards, it has not revealed the basis for those standards or any evidence that the writing test used by CUNY reliably measures appropriate language skills.

We should not mistake the rhetoric of the standards debate for sound educational policy based on solid evidence. Our standards for admissions, placement, and probation should take into account the ways in which educated adults actually function when they use a second language in the real world. Nearly all of them have a foreign accent, and most, if not all, also have a "foreign syntax," which persists for years. Ultimately, we may have to accept a small inconvenience of the diversity of a modem, cosmopolitan society: Adult ESL students, although often ready to succeed in college, probably have some natural, built-in limitations that affect their performance on examinations such as CUNY'S Writing Assessment Test. Until we recognize the likely existence of these natural limitations, we will continue to have trouble assessing the work of many immigrant students in college.

By Marc Ward Marc Ward is Acting Dir of the pgm for ESL, Lehman College, CUNY, 250 Bedford Park, Blvd. W, Bronx, NY 10468. He was a member of the Certification Subcommittee of the CUNY Assessment Review. Condensed from The Chronicle of Higher Education, 44 (Sep 26, 1997).

The CUNY Grad Ctr use to be at 55 W 42 has moved to Fifth Ave/34th St. and SUNY in now in the 42 St facility.


\5 NYC Public Library

Main reading room holds 500 people and 11 million books.
See Cuban Rest on W38 St.

My etymological maunderings have been prompted by the giddy adulation, all across the media, of the New York Public Library's new hundred-million-dollar Science, Industry, and Business Library, which opened this past summer. SIBL, as it is called (pronounced "sibyl"), is, if the media hype is to be believed, the Alexandrian library of the twenty-first century. Why, it's so up-to-date that it is scarcely a library at all--scarcely an icky, antediluvian "museum of compressed wood pulp," as one eminent "futurist;' a columnist for Library Journal, has put it. And this is cause for glee. Al Gore and Newt Gingrich say so.

New York has long taken justifiable pride in its museums of compressed wood pulp. The New York Public Library has, since the completion in 1911 of its main edifice on Fifth Avenue, been the veritable lifeblood of intellectual New York. In the Carnegie branches spotted about the boroughs, as well as in the hallowed hall of the Main Reading Room, countless New Yorkers, young and old, native and immigrant, have plied the compressed wood pulp to see what it might yield--in the way of pointers to a better life, in the way of a richer understanding of experience, in the way of breakthroughs in scholarship. It is easy to get sentimental when talking about the New York Public Library. And the futurists hate nothing more than sentimentalism.

When the NY Public Library's central research facility was opened, on May 23, 1911, it was the most sumptuous edifice ever erected in New York, the stately symbol of the classical ideal of the city as an instrument to foster the innately and peculiarly human capacity to learn.

As a city, New York is a crosshatched congeries of thoroughfares and byways, an anti-hierarchical "horror of non-relation," in the words of the late English architectural critic Ian Nairn. Yet if the city can be said in any respect to possess a focal edifice, then surely it is the Public Library building on Fifth Avenue. It stands monumentally in one of the most densely trafficked parts of town. It commands an axial vista--such a rarity in New York. E. C. Potter's lumbering lions--named "Patience" and "Fortitude" by Mayor La Guardia--are reassuringly familiar presences even to those viewing them for the first time. And the building itself is one of our country's finest examples of Beaux-Arts design. It is no stylistic retardataire, as some modernist critics might have us believe. Rather, the building's architects, John Carrere and Thomas Hastings, gave us equal measures of Jacques-Ange Gabriel and Henri Labrouste, and a building which for all the ornateness of its symbolic program is also strikingly modern. It is, as much as any building in New York can be said to be, an architectural masterpiece.

It was an era in which hoi polloi were routinely treated to heavenly visions. Public libraries, railroad stations, post offices, savings banks, firehouses--each of these building types, serving the average New Yorker, was a "people's palace" which, in materials and craftsmanship, was beyond the dreams of Suleiman or Lorenzo the Magnificent. The echoing marble halls and the gilt ornament would, in short order, become the object of scorn and ridicule. Yet even so modernist a critic as Lewis Mumford could, reflecting from his eighties, scarcely contain his sentimental approbation of the ornate room in which he first read the books that taught him to hate ornate rooms. Mumford is, I think, worth quoting at length on this subject: I began to use the great central library on Fifth Avenue in 1912, shortly after it was opened, and I have memories of its original space and amplitude, its bright marbled freshness, the soul-filling silence that once pervaded its halls, the sense of a building lifted above the rush, the congestion, the pressures of the teeming city outside. . . . If the decoration was a too sedulous mixture of classical motifs, with such atavistic features as lions' heads spouting water for a drinking fountain . . . my reproaches even on this score would not be too heavy; for I can remember what a blessed relief it was, after an hour of close reading, to lean back in my chair and pick out some intricate figure on the ceiling, so much better than a blank space or a spot on the plaster, on which to rest my eyes: indeed, there was a nude girl, whose beautiful trunk tapered into a leafy scroll design, who became a sort of platonic mistress and sometimes served as the center of my still youthful erotic dreams.[1]

Mumford, Philip Rahv, and other New York intellectuals who never finished or never attended college have written of how the library on Fifth Avenue was where they educated themselves. In the years of the Great Depression, when use of the Fifth Avenue facility was at an all-time high, it was popularly known as the "People's University."

Half a century later, the "futurists" Edward Feigenbaum and Pamela McCorduck made this remarkable observation: Libraries of today are warehouses for passive objects. The books and journals sit on shelves waiting for us to use our intelligence to find them, read them, interpret them, and finally, make them divulge their stored knowledge.

The prophets and progressives advocate a new kind of "library": one in which there are no "passive objects," i.e., books. Apropos the repository of passive objects, MIT's artificial-intelligence guru Marvin Minsky (one of the most popular college professors in the country, for those of you who are not hip) had this to say: "Can you imagine that they used to have libraries where the books didn't talk to each other?"

Because of the goofy notions of such men as Minsky and his MIT colleague Nicholas Negroponte, who is on record as saying he has never much cared for books, the "digitizing" (another of those newspeak coinages) of our library collections proceeds apace. And what is more, library patrons are being encouraged and conditioned to seek their information via electronic sources. In the nomenclature of one supremely trend-mongering magazine dedicated to the "digital lifestyle," compressed wood pulp is tired; electronic databases are wired.

Nothing in America today stands as more of a symbol of the future prospects of our public libraries than SIBL. The central research library has long been in the very necessary habit of dispersing its specialized collections to other locations. Thus, the music and drama collections are housed at the Library for the Performing Arts, part of the Lincoln Center complex. Collections relating to the African-American experience have been shunted uptown, to Harlem, to the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. And so on. SIBL involves the dispersal of the collections concerning science, industry, and business. The keynote among users of these collections has always been rapid access to up-to-the-minute data. And so it seemed that here was the library's ideal opportunity to take a national lead in providing "digital" access via personal computers attached to data-exchange networks. On the face of it, it seems unobjectionable enough. Scratch just a little deeper, however, and all sorts of problems emerge.

SIBL is housed in a portion of a somberly beautiful building, faced in luscious French limestone, which once was home to the venerable B. Altman & Co. department store. Altman's withered, like so many old department stores, in the boutique-crazed 1980s. After the building lay fallow for a few years, SIBL decided to make it its new home. (Another portion is occupied by of-rices of Oxford University Press, while the bulk of the building will soon be welcoming its new tenant, the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. The State of New York has christened the renovated department store the "Altman Advanced Learning Superblock.")

In years past, one might have seen a small group of middle-aged women standing at the door of Altman's early in the morning, waiting for the store to open. Today, one sees slightly larger, more diverse groups congregated at the entrance to SIBL, waiting to get in to jockey for computer time. For although SIBL houses over a million books, it is the sixty computer workstations in the "Electronic Information Center," on the lower level, that has made SIBL "a cultural happening;' as one nose-ringed twenty-year-old told Margaret Scott of The Wall Street Journal.

The public spaces of SIBL are arrayed on two floors--street level and basement level. One enters off Madison Avenue (the rear of the department store) into a feeble 1990s stab at a grand foyer. The architects were Gwathmey Siegel & Associates, a firm occasionally capable of subtle and refined architectural statements, but given far more often to the production of buildings that look like they fell off the hardware-store shelf. The dominant note of SIBL's architecture is finny. Followed by mean. The lower level, where the action is, has depressingly low ceilings, contributing to one's overall sense of being cramped--the polar opposite of the generous spatiality of Carrere & Hastings's masterpiece. Perhaps when one's spatial horizons are delimited by the view into a computer monitor it simply does not matter what one's surroundings are like. And as one traverses the metallic spaces of SIBL, one indeed notices that those seated before the monitors gaze with intentness, indeed rapture, into their cybernetic realm.

What's the problem with this picture? For starters, our "digitized" databases are as mean as SIBL's architecture. This surprises many people, although I cannot quite figure out why. Do people suppose that data just magically appears in software form? Well, perhaps a great portion of newly produced data does get put into digital form from the outset. But older data--the sort in which libraries have traditionally specialized--requires "inputting," being keyed or scanned into databases. The people hired to do the keying and scanning are often minimum-wage workers (and there will now probably be fewer of them) with no ultimate stake in the accuracy of their work. So the stuff that gets inputted is often ridden with typos.

(Scanning does not solve this problem, since Optical Character Recognition software is not 100 percent accurate.) And then there is the 99 percent of all the stuff out there that has not been inputted, and probably never will be. There are not enough man-hours available to digitize the entire Public Library. And even if there were, there are little issues like copyright protection that are far from being adequately worked out. In our lifetime we will not see anything like a fully digitized library.

And a good thing, too: it's unarchival. Not that the electronic records are going to deteriorate. The electronic records themselves will probably outlast most books. It is the means of accessing these records that become obsolete--with frightening rapidity. The distinguished planetary astronomer and digital apostate Clifford Stoll gets to the heart of this issue. Suppose, he says, that Caliph Omar had not destroyed the library at Alexandria. Suppose all those cylindrical scrolls had been preserved through the centuries. We would still be able to read them! (And what a story they would tell--it would put the author of Black Athena, Martin Bernal, out of business.) Stoll then reminds us that no new computer being sold today has the capability of reading eight-inch CP/M disks . . . from the 1980s. The computer marketing juggernaut is bound to put institutions like libraries in a terrible bind, as they will be forced constantly to upgrade hardware just to keep pace with new record formats.

How long will it be before electronic databases come to be relied upon by students and scholars as their principal sources of information? Before "knowledge" becomes that which is contained in these databases?

We are told many times each day that we live in the "information society." Alvin Toffler says it is the "Third Wave" of the progress of civilization, following agricultural society and industrial society. Newt Gingrich dreams of tax credits to place portable computers in the laps of underprivileged children. In his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention, President Clinton said one of his goals was to have a computer on every schoolchild's desk by the year 2000. And on and on and on, we are exhorted to get with the information program.

We are told that information streams at us through the cathode-ray monitors of computer workstations. "Bits" is the word information scientists have coined--it means "binary units"--to measure data flow. And sure enough, bit by bit our libraries are being eaten alive by electronic databases and by the Internet. Digital information is seductive. Often it is in "multimedia" form, with images and sounds accompanying the text, which is usually "hyperlinked," meaning that by clicking one's mouse on key words or symbols, one is instantly transported to a cross-referenced page or passage in the same or another document. This lends to research the visceral satisfactions of playing video games. And let us not discount the sheer novelty of the medium. Books have been around for centuries. How could they possibly have anything to offer our brave new world?

Could it be that "information" is the most overrated commodity on the planet today? The educator Mortimer Adler has long liked to speak of a hierarchy of learning, beginning with information, moving on to knowledge, thence to understanding, thence to wisdom. To place Adler's hierarchy in the more fashionable terms of information theory, we could actually say that knowledge involves a reduction, not an increase, in information; and that, by extension, understanding and wisdom mark further reductions in information.

According to information theory, as between the Gettysburg Address and a string of nonsense characters containing exactly the same number of bits, the latter can actually be said to contain more "information," being higher in entropy or randomness. When we speak of information, then, digital or otherwise, we speak of more or less random bits. Knowledge is the sculpture chiseled from the stone mass of information, as understanding is chiseled of knowledge, and wisdom of understanding.

We hear from the media of the "information economy" and of the "knowledge economy." Are we to infer, listening to cybernetics proselytizers, that in our "knowledge economy" we are producing and making use of more intelligent, educated men and women than before? I suspect many "educated" people believe this to be so. I feel sorry for them, because anyone who believes this is someone who has never experienced the profound joy of the greatest literature, art, or music. I wonder, indeed, if someone who believes this has ever experienced the profound joy of holding a book, turning its paper pages, and tracking with his eyes the inked symbols representing an amazingly intricate, codified means of expressing something which has been molded of pure information by discarding whole huge chunks of detritus. Nicholas Negroponte says we are moving from an atom-based culture to a bit-based culture. Seems to me this is a step backward, at least in terms of Mortimer Adler's hierarchy of learning.

For my own part, I would like to say that I am no Luddite. I have nothing against technology per se. And as for computers--well, I love them. I own and use several; I am involved in "online communities"; and I spend inordinate amounts of my time engrossed in what I feel to be the intellectually stimulating pursuits of tinkering with computer HW and SW. But I see abuses of this magnificent instrument we call the personal computer. And these abuses amount to nothing less than an assault on much of what we have long thought of as civilization itself. And it is not even as though we are experiencing unintended consequences. The "digerati" are quite outspoken about their desire to sink civilization. It is an open conspiracy. The libraries are buying into it.

The fear is not that we will end up with bookless libra-ries. That's unlikely. But the trend toward computerized databases will continue to grow from within like a cancer, as libraries and librarians become ever more adept at providing quick, facile, low-quality info and as the public clamors to have its informational appetites sated by such pabulum.

On the recently launched MSNBC cable-TV news network, a much-touted joint venture of NBC and MS, the "Internet correspondents" (who look like, and for all I know may be, college students), demonstrate and provide critiques of World Wide Web sites. In an invariable, mantralike manner, the correspondents tell us that such and such a Web site contains "anything you want to know" about its subject. These sites' subjects range from the Grand Canyon to the Democratic Party to breast cancer. Anything you want to know?

On the TV news, a businessman-patron of SIBL exults that he has in half an hour found exactly what he needs by using an online database. I do not know, of course, what this man was looking for or what he found.

My own experience tells me this: he found something, and he took it. He may have performed a "keyword search." The database yielded a result. A database, mind you, with the imprimatur of the NY Public Library. The "answer" is retrieved. Let us gush about it on TV. The poor man wishes devoutly to believe that research is a breeze. Vice President Gore and Rep. Gingrich tell him it ought to be. It is not. And therein lies the rub.

Research and learning are about one thing above all others: the sustained and consecutive reading of texts. And what medium has proved itself to be by far the best for the sustained reading of texts? The cathode-ray screen? No. Ink on paper. What SIBL and its ilk demon-strate is that the "knowledge society" of the 21st cen may be about all sorts of wondrous things. One thing it is not about is the sustained and consecutive reading of texts. Put another way, one thing it is not about is research and learning. Most telling of all is a quotation on one of SIBL's walls.

It is the beautiful remark of John Ruskin: "Life without industry is guilt; industry without art is brutality." Truer words have never been uttered. But I wonder: do the library people who selected this quotation realize that John Ruskin does not mean "industry" in quite the sense in which the word is used in "Science, Industry, and Business"? I suspect they went to an electronic database and, in search of an apt quotation, entered the keyword "industry"--and this is what they got. Clearly, the barbarians are inside the gates. 1 See Sketches from Life: The Autobiography of Lewis Mumford. The Early Years (The Dial Press, 1982).


\6 Subways, crime etc

UNTIL a few years ago, the NYC Subway and the LON Underground were polar opposites in their approach and practice of public transportation philosophy, differing in every significant way in matters of customer care, fare structure, route and station design, availability of service, accessibility, rush hour provision and auxiliary services. The two systems seemed to reflect in miniature the crucial differences so evident in every other contrasting facet of American and British society.

The most obvious difference to strike any visitor was that New York ran 'round the clock' non-stop 24 hours a day with the necessary but invisible maintenance and repair somehow sandwiched between the regular operating shifts of running trains. London, on the other hand, needs a 5-6 hour 'break' during the early morning hours from half past midnight until about 5 a.m. when no passenger service is available, a situation which many Americans label as 'inconvenient' and akin to the strange and the unfathomable closing hours in Britain of pubs serving hot food, supermarkets or 'fast food joints' which Americans also expect to run round-the-clock. This constant non-stop pace of American life contrasts with the more leisurely ordered and 'civilised' face of the London tube. Occasional sensationalist stories in the British tabloid press contrasting the two systems would revert to the slogan of 'it can't happen here' in featuring such classic horror stories as a corpse discovered on the subway which had been riding around for a few days unnoticed in New York.

An even greater contrast sharply reflecting the American and British 'way of life' was the almost 100-year-old policy on the New York subway of the flat single-fare for single journeys only, regardless of distance travelled, time spent in the system or number of stations traversed as opposed to the extraordinarily complex fare system of the London Underground. In New York one can ride in the A train from 241st Street in the Bronx to Far Rockaway in Queens -- a total of 38 miles for the same $1.50 fare, traditionally paid by token, as a quarter mile journey between several stations in Lower Manhattan. In classic American fashion, everyone is treated equally -- and pays equally. Britain has long been regarded as a highly developed class system of groups enjoying a hierarchy of privileges. It is not too far fetched for most Americans travelling in the London Underground to see this class society reflected in the fare system based on ten geographic zones, 'off-peak' or morning rush hour (until 9:00, 9:30 or 10:00 a.m. depending on the particular type of discount travel card), special status of the passenger (age, 'freedom passes' provided for medical and social/economic reasons by local authorities, the blind, students, 'families' -- although technically speaking this means adults and children travelling together in a group and not necessarily biologically related, active staff, retired railway staff, different types of 'validity' for unlimited journeys for varying periods of time from one day to one year, and a host of other considerations amounting to close to one hundred different ticket types -- most of which must be accompanied by photo ID cards and monitored by a huge staff of station assistants).

The American system was based on the rough equality of one token equals one universal flat fare no matter when, where or who you are.

No control was ever necessary to monitor the type of ticket, the time or destination of travel, meaning a much smaller staff and no sophisticated gates or turnstiles to control (i.e. impede and slow down) the flow of traffic whereas the London Underground had divided the 'public' into numerous sub-groups, each with their own specific validity and availability of travel. The New York system required almost no control to prevent fraudulent travel since there were only two ways this could be achieved -- jumping turnstiles and thus travelling without a token or illegally acquiring tokens through inside contacts. In the London Underground with its multiplicity of fares and zones, the problem is much more difficult to control and fraud is conservatively estimated at 35-40 million pounds annually.

The third major difference is the variation in service during 'rush-hours' The New York subway map is so difficult to read, primarily because all the lines have many 'local stations' which are skipped by express trains so that passengers must know in advance at what time of the day they wish to travel to or from a particular station. During rush hours, the A or D or E trains serve only the major stations in Manhattan on their way from the residential boroughs of Bronx, Brooklyn and Queens whereas the AA, DD and EE trains make all local stops running along the same routes, a distinction which requires the reader to pay attention to the 'small print'. The fourth contrast between the two systems is in the level of customer care. The station assistants whose primary duty is to monitor the tickets at entry and exit gates also fulfil all the functions of tour guides, information desks, map interpreters, and hotel clerks as part of their duties. Any station assistant working an 8 hour tour of duty at a busy London station is sure to be approached by hundreds of passengers and bombarded with questions, many of which could be ascertained by simply reading a map, reading a notice prominently displayed at the station or transmitted through the public address system at frequent intervals. Londoners expect that the underground should provide them with this service as part of their customer care yet British tourists must quickly learn to sink or swim in the New York subway. There is no army of station assistants to provide them with personal instructions. They learn to fend for themselves or simply ask native New Yorkers who are their fellow passengers and often able to provide the answer. This too is part of the American mentality of relying on oneself or one's neighbours rather than the government. There is almost a total lack of escalators and lifts (elevators) on the New York subway which are characteristic of many deep level London tube stations. Part of the reason is due to geography but there is probably the unspoken assumption in New York as well, that this was a costly service not to be provided to pamper the public who could not (and should not) expect this in return for the flat rate bargain of being able to travel from one end of the city to the other for a single fare.

Finally there is the purely aesthetic consideration of art. In this regard, London long ago won the contest with New York hands down. The underground's art-nouveau posters, bar and circle logo and its brilliantly designed map -- the masterpiece of popular cartography designed by Harry Beck in 1931 -- are renowned the world over for their originality, humour and elegance. The New York subway has produced nothing like them and as a result, never achieved the same sense of being an integral part of the city's cultural creativity. Rather it has remained just part of the city's physical infrastructure.

Both subway and underground are the result of the amalgamation of numerous rail lines which were incorporated over time into a single system and have suffered from long delayed maintenance due to budgetary constraints resulting in many miles of worn track, deteriorating infrastructure -- especially signals and tunnel lighting, ageing trains and dilapidated stations. Spokesmen for New York and London have often referred to their subway/underground as the 'leading' mass transit system in the world. Annual passenger usage amounts to 1.2 billion in New York and 770 million in London. This Anglo-American rhetoric ignores the fact that both fall far short of the average annual ridership of Moscow (3.1 billion), Tokyo (2.7 billion), Mexico City (1.4 billion) and Seoul (1.3 billion) -- all in cities where private automobile ownership is a tiny fraction of New York and London. New York with its 468 stations, 658 track miles and over 242 million miles travelled each year outranks London in all three categories as London has 240 stations, 249 track miles and only 40 million miles travelled. Part of the disparity between the two systems is the result of the difficult sub-soil conditions which exist south of the Thames where there are only one-tenth the number of stations for approximately half the population of London. In reality however, the two systems are more difficult to compare because both are linked with metropolitan-wide connecting main rail lines and bus services and serve much wider commuter areas than the legal boundaries of the city. Since May 1997, the Metropolitan Transit Authority in charge of the New York subway has adopted far reaching changes that have altered the simple flat fare structure by automating turnstiles to accept the new MetroCard, a smart card more sophisticated than the London Travel Card. MetroCard keeps a running tab of a customer's 'account of remaining journeys' and subtracts one every time it is swiped in the turn-style. It also allows customers to transfer freely between bus and subway. The MetroCard can also take into account reduced rates for travel during off-peak hours, discount rates for old age pensioners and reduced multiple fares (11 rides for the price of 10). A variant of the card allows for unlimited trips during 7 days or 30 days. These changes in fare rates have thus made the New York system a bit more like London's but have not adopted the crucial element of adjusting the fare according to complicated distance or zone rates which characterise the London underground. They have achieved a major success in increasing ridership and revenue especially during non-peak times. Major capital investments and a tougher policing of the subway have reduced crime and improved service, introduced new air-conditioned trains, eliminated graffiti and rehabilitated many facilities and much infrastructure. New York's subway has also been made much more 'user-friendly' for the disabled. The result is that the tables have turned and many British tourists returning from a stay in New York and having experienced the new air conditioned subway carriages during a sweltering summer heat wave, have begun to deluge the British tabloid press with their praises of the New York subway and how much more civilised it is in contrast to the tube. Both the subway and the tube are crucial to the economy of the two cities and have made a major contribution to the primacy of New York and London. Short-sighted passengers who are upset because of a minor delay don't have the slightest concept how complicated and demanding a technical feat it is to maintain the efficient and punctual running of more than 90 per cent of the thousands of trains in operation each day and the attendant necessary crowd control. We cannot do without the underground/subway -- neither in New York nor in London where both systems are being constantly improved. In fact, there may already be an unspoken competition between them and this competition benefits the customer in both cities.

How To Avoid Subway Crimes. In countries where poverty is excessive and crime rates are high, or in cultures where a woman alone is considered fair game, it's a definite plus to be subway savvy. As you travel around the world, it's wise to keep the following cautions in mind: Always have your fare ready when entering the subway.

This way potential thieves never see where you keep your wallet. Keep safe. When waiting on the platform, stand far back from the subway tracks. An experienced pick-pocket can usually pick a tourist out in a crowd. Wear your purse over one shoulder with the opening flap against your stomach so that it's impossible to get into.

If you're carrying a day pack, wear it in front, kangaroo style. Don't tempt thieves by carrying credit cards or money in a fanny pack. In a crowded car, these pouches can easily be sliced open with a razor blade and you will be none the wiser until it's too late. Avoid remaining in an empty car. If you find yourself alone, simply exit one car and enter another at the first avail stop. Remember that it's generally the center cars on the train that get the heaviest traffic and there's greater safety in numbers.

Avoid constantly referring to your subway map on the train. This only serves to advertise that you're not sure where you're going. Instead, situate yourself so that you can study the route map posted in the car. Or better still, pick a woman in close proximity and ask for help in getting off at the proper stop. Generally she'll become a mother hen and get you exactly where you want to go.

Don't draw unnecessary attention to yourself by what you wear. Be culturally correct and dress appropriately. Try saving that mini skirt for parties back home. Muted colors and conservative clothing always helps you to fade into the crowd and stay out of trouble. Unfortunately, crowded subway cars can be perfect breeding grounds for antisocial behavior. Some men will use this opportunity to touch or pinch the female passengers close to them.

If this happens to you, make a fuss in any language you choose. Point at the offender and chastise him in a loud voice. He'll probably just slink away. However, don't become so offended that you stop paying attention to your belongings. It's a fact that women are often groped on packed subways simply to divert their attention while their purse or backpack is being pilfered.

Be ever watchful, ladies. Both pinched bottoms and stolen wallets are not fun! Special Traveler's Tip: When using the subway in developing countries in male-dominated societies, make every effort to behave modestly. Wear a fake wedding ring to deter unwanted advances and sport sunglasses to hide your eyes. In some cultures, simply meeting a man’s gaze means that you welcome both his attention and his company.


\7 Q-A (trivia)

Q. Just below Chambers Street, odd and even addresses exist on the west side of Bway, instead of just odd. Why?

A. You can't fight City Hall. That stretch of Broadway lies directly across from City Hall, which was completed in 1812, and City Hall Park, where a commons has existed at least as far back as 1776.

Lisa Daglian, a spokeswoman for Borough President C. Virginia Fields, said that because there were never plans to build on those sites, the Post Office assigned both odd and even numbers to the opposite side of the street in order to allow for the construction of more buildings there.

Q. The sidewalks in downtown Manhattan are much narrower than those in Midtown, is there a reason for this? A. Despite what some might think, it's not another mayoral effort to control crowds around City Hall. Sidewalks in all sections of the city must be at least five feet wide, according to the Department of Trans-portation, which (not Mamie O'Rourke) has jurisdiction over the sidewalks of New York. There is no upper limit on the size of a sidewalk, and in most parts of the city they are much wider than five feet, as in the ample gray swaths of the Avenue of the Americas in Midtown. Because of the old labyrinthine layout of Lower Manhattan, which made for narrower streets, sidewalks much wider than five feet would come at the expense of many a car's side mirror.

Q.: Where was the so-called Street of Brides? A.: A two-block stretch of Grand Street between Chrystie and Elizabeth Streets was sometimes jokingly called by that name until the 1960's. Though in what was then one of the poorer sections of the city, the street was lined with shops that sold nothing but bridal gowns, some at Fifth Avenue prices. Most shops were owned by Italians, and many of the brides-to-be were Italian or Polish. Nuptial commerce was such that many stores stayed open seven days a week. The Bridal Building, which offers similar wares, remains at 1385 Broadway, at 38th Street, in the garment district.

Q.: The NYC Dept of Sanitation insignia looks like a caduceus. Why? A.: The caduceus, a winged staff with two serpents twined around it, which was carried by Hermes in Greek mythology, is the traditional symbol of the medical profession. In 1866, when the Metropolitan Board of Health assumed control over street cleaning and waste disposal, decaying garbage and widespread human and animal excrement were believed to pose a direct threat to public health. The Department of Street Cleaning was formed in 1881, and when it took its current name in 1929 the caduceus was chosen as its symbol to reinforce the link between sanitation and health.

Reintroduced in 1997, the caduceus is now set on an aqua background, with a bright red S in the center. It appears as a patch on the left shoulder of all sanitation workers, and on the collection trucks you hear outside your window in the middle of the night.

Q.: What ever happened to that plan for a boulevard between Fifth and Sixth Avenues? Q.: An additional boulevard, between Fifth Avenue and the Avenue of the Americas, was once mapped out for Manhattan. What became of the plan? A.: Since it was first approved in 1811, Manhattan's grid plan has proven impervious to all but a few attempts to improve on it. One occurred in 1910, when Mayor William J. Gaynor, astounded by the automobile traffic he saw snarling Fifth Avenue, called for a broad new thoroughfare to be carved out of Midtown, just west of Fifth Avenue.

The new avenue, which was to stretch from Eighth Street to Central Park, would be 100 feet wide, and would cost, by the mayor's calculations, $40 million. Though the street would require the demolition of hundreds of buildings, Mayor Gaynor was convinced that property owners would willingly finance the scheme, since their back lots would be transformed overnight into high-priced real estate on a principal avenue.

Many motorists preferred Fifth Avenue because it was free of street railways and freight traffic from the waterfront. Traffic on the street increased eightfold between 1885 and 1913, while that on Broadway only doubled. A study found that rush-hour pedestrians on the avenue traveled at approximately the same speed as cars.

While the public considered the proposal, newspapers printed cartoons depicting the mayor scooping up buildings with a shovel. The plan was mostly ignored after he was wounded by an unemployed dock worker in summer 1910, and when the mayor died three years later it was completely forgotten. In 1911, the architect Henry Rutgers Marshall suggested a broad, gently curved boulevard linking the old Pennsylvania Station with Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street. It, too, was quickly forgotten.

Q.: When did the city introduce 911 as an emergency number? A.: New York was the first city in the nation to adopt the number, in 1968. This year alone, more than nine million calls have been logged, the police said. DANIEL B. SCHNEIDER

Q.: When I took my grandchildren to visit the Museum of Holography this summer, it wasn't there anymore. Where did it go? A.: Faced with mounting debt, the erosion of corp and governmental support and a decline in tourism brought on by a recession, the museum, at 11 Mercer Street, closed in 1992. At a bankruptcy auction the following year, its entire collection of 1,500 holograms -- three-dimensional photographs made with laser beams -- was bought by the M.I.T. Museum for $180,000. It was believed to be the world's largest.

The collection was moved to Cambridge, Mass., and put in archival storage. "Now we're cleaning it up and going back though it," said Prof. Stephen A. Benton, curator of holography for the museum. Holograms will occupy less than a third of the 10,000-square-foot museum, he said.

The Museum of Holography opened in 1976, before commercial applications made holograms a ubiquitous part of the consumer environment, and when they were seen as a promising new artistic medium.

"It had a bit of an identity crisis," Professor Benton said. "It started out as an art gallery, but found out a much bigger constituency was interested in the science of holograms, so it tried to be both things."

Q.: A friend recently told me about a young man who used to build elaborate hidden treehouses in Central Park. What has become of the treehouses, and the man? A.: The treehouses are long gone, but the man who built them, Bob Redman, can still be found amid the leaves and boughs of New York City. He began building tree houses in Central Park as a teenager in 1978. Over the next eight years he built 13 between 79th and 86th Streets, each more spectacular than the last.

Occasional sightings of Mr. Redman as he scrambled from branch to branch, and the sounds created by bongo-playing visitors, fueled legends of drum-beating tree dwellers. Hearing those rumors, Parks Department officials began hunting for the treehouses and dismantling them. But each time they took one down, Mr. Redman built another.

His final treehouse, which he named Spacecraft Epsilon Eridani, was built high in a towering beech across from a Parks Department equipment yard in 1986 and escaped detection for four months. That treehouse was put together using over 1,000 pounds of scrounged scrap lumber, which Mr. Redman took bit by bit into the park at night. It had five rooms with ladders, rope bridges, tables and benches and was camouflaged with branches and green paint. When Parks Department officers caught up with Mr. Redman, they admired the quality of his work and his evident appreciation of nature, noting that his dwellings were built without injuring any trees.

Mr. Redman worked for the Central Park Conservancy from 1986 to 1989, then started a company, Bob Redman Urban Forest and Backyard Tree Care, in 1990. Although last year he built a 2,500-pound treehouse in North Salem, N.Y., Mr. Redman spends most of his time pruning branches in Manhattan. ''I enjoy being up in the trees,'' he said. ''I like the solitude and the view. There's something mystical about it.''

Q.: For years I have watched the unvarying routine of the Staten Island Ferry from the Brooklyn Heights promenade. On Aug. 4 at 8:30 p.m., the ferry had just pulled out when it suddenly cut its engines and returned to the slip. Only after a small, tug-shaped boat had sailed straight across the ferry's route did it set off again for Staten Island. Who can stop the ferry dead in its tracks? A.: The Staten Island Ferry enjoys no special harbor privileges and routinely yields the right of way to other vessels, according to Pamela Cess, the ferry's director of operations.

In this case, however, a minor incident occurred as the ferry Andrew J. Barberi was leaving the terminal on the evening of Aug. 4. "Police from the 120th Precinct in St. George ride the ferries back and forth," Ms. Cess said. "When they get to Whitehall they normally get off the boat, wait in the terminal, and take the next one back. In this case, just as the boat was leaving, someone notified the captain that there was an emotionally disturbed passenger on board, so he pulled the boat back in, called down and got the police to come back on board."

Ms. Cess said that the perspective on the terminal from Brooklyn Heights can be deceptive, and the ferry had not really even left the slip when it was pulled back. "The boat," she said, "wasn't even late when it arrived back at St. George."

Q.: When did Walk/Don't Walk signs start appearing on corners here? When I was a kid, we just ran across the street when the light was green. A.: Flashing pedestrian signals were introduced in 1955, according to Mark Patterson, Department of Transportation spokesman. Before that, children were taught to ''cross at the green, not in between.''

Q.: Recently my daughter was taking photos of the downtown courthouses for a school project. When she tried to photograph the United States Court House at 40 Centre Street, however, a United States marshal told her photographs of the building are forbidden. Is it actually illegal? A.: No. But since the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, security guards and law enforcement officers at Federal buildings in New York have been required to prevent the building's security arrangements and equipment from being photographed, according to Renee Miscione, a spokeswoman for the General Services Administration. Since security measures are concentrated at the building's entrances and exits, guards can apply the restriction to just about anyone.

''Sometimes they will just approach someone when they see a camera,'' Ms. Miscione said. ''We know these are public buildings, but it's a balancing act.''

The restrictions apply to both the interior and exterior of Federal buildings, and include film and videotape as well as still photographs, Ms. Miscione said. Apart from post office buildings and parking garages, the Federal Government owns, operates and manages 13 office buildings and courthouses in the city. These include, in addition to the United States Court House, offices at 26 Federal Plaza and 290 Broadway, and the Custom House at 1 Bowling Green.

John A. Schmaltz, assistant chief of United States marshals for the Southern District of New York, said marshals at the United States Court House have been on high alert since the two trials, in 1994 and 1997, of the conspirators in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. The trial of six men for the 1998 bombings of two United States Embassies in East Africa, to begin next year, is cause for further concern, he said.

Q: I seem to recall that when they first appeared in the late 1970's, the Guardian Angels went by a different name. What was it? A: When the volunteer crime-fighters were organized by Curtis Sliwa in 1979, they called themselves the Magnificent Thirteen Subway Safety Patrol. Then came the white T-shirts and the red berets, and, just over six months later, the current name, which isn't heard that much anymore.

Q: There are two figures on the official New York City seal. One, an Algonquin Indian, holds a bow, which I can comprehend. Why does the figure on the left hold a yo-yo?

A: Actually, the figure wearing breeches on the left is a sailor, meant to represent the city's origins as a commercial port. Dangling from his right hand is a lead plummet, a device once used for sounding channels. The design of the modern city seal dates from 1915.

Q: An uninhabited corridor called Mechanics Alley runs between Monroe and Henry Streets in Manhattan, in the shadow of the Manhattan Bridge. Where are the mechanics? A: In the 18th and early 19th centuries, the term ''mechanic'' was loosely applied to a wide range of artisans, builders and craftsmen. New York was one of many American cities to have a Mechanics Row, Alley or Place near the waterfront, usually where ships were built and repaired.

The first shipbuilding yards in Manhattan were established at the foot of Catherine Street in 1728. By the 1790's the yards covered the waterfront all the way to Corlears Hook, attracting carpenters, smiths, shipwrights, coopers, chandlers, joiners, sail makers and rope makers. Mechanics Alley appears on maps of the district from the early 1800's on, but it runs closer to the riverfront, between Cherry and Monroe Streets, while another tiny lane, called Birmingham Alley, runs from Madison to Henry Streets. Presumably, the two alleys were joined at some point. Mechanics Alley disappeared from city maps after the Manhattan Bridge was constructed, almost directly overhead, in 1905.

Q: I understand that the Hell Gate Bridge has another name. What is it? A: The 1,087-foot steel arch bridge -- the world's longest when it was completed in 1917 -- is more officially known as the New York Connecting Railroad Bridge. It spans the Hell Gate between Wards Island and Queens, but more important, provides a rail link between Manhattan and Queens, the Bronx and New England.

Q: While strolling the galleries of the Guggenheim Museum, I noticed a number of small children trying to peer over the inner parapet wall to gaze down at the rotunda below. Some were even trying to shimmy up the side, much to their parents' horror. Has anyone ever fallen over? A: Not that anyone at the museum can recall, according to Tom Foley, the Guggenheim's director of security. In fact, visitors are not allowed to lean against or sit upon the 36-inch-high parapet wall, and guards are posted at each level of the spiraling 1,416-foot ramp to insure that decorum prevails, Mr. Foley said. "We have a guard who's been here since 1975, and she's never heard of anyone going over the edge." The famously troublesome, inside-out architecture of the Guggenheim, with its six-story cantilevered gallery and soaring, 110-foot interior void, does present safety concerns, particularly since the view across the rotunda can be as compelling as the art itself. "People with bifocals sometimes have problems with depth perception, and we are always concerned about people with high blood pressure or fear of heights," Mr. Foley said. Small children run free at the Guggenheim; strollers are banned since unattended ones might roll away on the ramp, which slopes 18 degrees. When guards see a child approaching the parapet wall, they are instructed to ask the parent to take the child's hand, Mr. Foley said. As you have seen, it doesn't really work if neither parent nor guard is nearby.

Q: Twice last month I heard radio reports attributing traffic tie-ups to a ''missing manhole cover.'' How exactly does a manhole cover come to be ''missing''? A: According to Robert Leonard, a spokesman for the Consolidated Edison Company, manhole covers are very rarely stolen or misplaced, since they weigh about 310 pounds and require two workers just to yank them a few inches off the hole.

In the winter, however, it isn't uncommon for a manhole cover to be ''displaced'' by a small underground explosion, as happened around the city after last month's snows.

Though underground cables do occasionally overheat in summer months, manhole explosions generally occur in freeze-thaw cycles, Mr. Leonard said. When salt spread on the roadway mixes with melting ice and snow and flows into a manhole, the liquid can corrode the insulation on electrical cables or cause power to arc from one cable to the next. The resulting sparks or flames then ignite gases that have accumulated in the manhole, causing an explosion that can lift a cover a few inches or even several feet into the air.

''Studies have shown that they are in direct proportion to the amount of salt that's been put down on the road,'' Mr. Leonard said. Though there are other types of manholes, and other types of blasts, a vast majority follow this pattern, he said. Dozens of incidents were reported over several days last month, an uncommonly high number, Mr. Leonard said.

Con Ed has about 59,000 electrical manholes in Manhattan, the only borough where Con Ed's entire electrical system is serviced underground.

Q. When a small bomb exploded two weeks ago outside 75 Wall Street, I was immediately reminded of the blast at the corner of Broad and Wall Streets in 1920, which killed almost 40 people. Was anyone ever charged? A. Though it was widely assumed that anarchists had planted the bomb, which was left in the back of a horse-drawn wagon across the street from the J. P. Morgan Building, no suspects were ever caught. The scars from the explosion are still visible on the building at 23 Broad Street, just below the second windowsill, on the east end of the facade.

Q: It seems to me that subway trains are no longer held in the station -- even momentarily -- to allow for connections between express and local trains, as they were in the past. Has policy changed? A: Not at all, says Melissa Farley, a spokeswoman for New York City Transit. It depends on when you ride the trains. Since rush hour trains arrive so frequently, holding one in a station only makes that train -- and those immediately behind it -- late, often causing delays to spread like falling dominoes. Conductors are therefore instructed not to hold their trains in order to make connections from about 7 a.m. to 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. to 7 p.m. on weekdays.

During non-rush periods, conductors are instructed to make whatever connections are possible, Ms. Farley said. ''If they see a train coming into the station, they must hold the doors open,'' she said. ''But if the doors are already closed, they are not supposed to reopen them.'' This phenomenon, of course, can drive passengers to the brink of madness, but it is done for safety. ''The closed doors signal a train operator to start the train,'' Ms. Farley said, ''so once the doors are closed, they should stay that way.'' The only time connections are scheduled, she said, is from midnight to 5 a.m.

Q: Where was the old New York Playboy Club, and when did it close? A: The New York Playboy Club opened in December 1962 in a seven-story building at 5 East 59th Street that had previously been home to the Savoy Art Galleries. The rather nondescript structure was remodeled by the architectural firm of Oppenheimer, Brady & Lehrecke to suggest a movie set from Hollywood's golden age, and featured a dramatic two-story entrance court with a spiral stair snaking upward inside a shimmering glass cylinder.

Beyond the cantilevered stair, visitors entered a multilevel stack of interwoven balconies, mezzanines and lounges, usually packed with well-oiled businessmen and women in tiny bunny costumes teetering around on three-inch heels. ''Men-about-town who thirst for fun, glamour and excitement look to the Club as their urban oasis,'' purred the ads in Playboy magazine, and despite the abundance of LeRoy Neiman paintings and the intergalactic penthouse decor, the illusion of chic cosmopolitanism held for over a decade.

Gloria Steinem spent 17 days working at the club as a hostess, hat-check girl and table waitress under the name of Bunny Marie, and published an essay on her experiences in Show magazine in 1963. It became a cornerstone of that era's feminist movement, but it wasn't until the late 1970's that changing sexual protocols finally rendered the club's winking-bachelor ambience anachronistic, if not plain silly. Attendance fell off precipitously, and in 1982 the club served its last Rabbit Punch. The site was sold to the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation and after an extensive remodeling, the building is now occupied by offices and an Italian restaurant.

The Playboy Empire Club opened at 515 Lexington Avenue, near 48th Street, in November 1985, and featured a score of male ''Rabbits'' along with the usual corps of Bunnies. The Rabbits wore modified tuxedos, which revealed only the occasional back, bicep, or tuft of chest hair. It closed in less than a year.

Q: What are the origins of the word ''Rockaway''? A: Scholars favor the theory that ''Rockaway'' is derived from the Delaware and Chippewa words for ''sandy'' and the Chippewa term for ''place,'' according to ''Native American Place Names in New York City'' by Robert Steven Grumet (Museum of the City of New York, 1981).

The main settlement of the Rockaway tribe, which inhabited western Long Island and parts of what is now southeastern Queens, was situated approximately where Far Rockaway is now, and was called Rechqua Akie. English spellings of the name during the 17th century included ''Rechkewack,'' ''Rechonhacky,'' ''Rechowacky'' and ''Rockeway.'' The native people at Rockaway sold their last remaining land claims to the English in 1685.

Q: Was Plumb Beach, in southeast Brooklyn, ever inhabited? A: Plumb Beach, which was actually an island until it was connected to the rest of Brooklyn during the construction of the Belt Parkway, was the home of a small bungalow colony until the 1950's. It was named for the beach plums growing in the area, so the real mystery is that ''b'' at the end of ''Plum.''

Q: Did Joni Mitchell, who wrote the song "Chelsea Morning" actually live in Chelsea? A: Yes. When Mitchell composed the song in 1967, she was living in a ground-floor apartment at 41 West 16th Street. One cannot help wondering if the sun actually "poured in like butterscotch."


\8 Warnings

Travel has been defined as one of humankind's primary and universal activities. This interdisciplinary collection of essays calls attention to the extent to which travel and tourism have permeated our lives and our society. The contributors introduce a wide range of intellectual perspectives through which travel culture is defined. From classic literature to travel diaries, from commercial films to home photography, this study of travel culture includes both high and low art.

- As we drew near to New York I was at first amused, and then somewhat staggered, by the cautious and the grisly tales that went the round. You would have thought we were to land upon a cannibal island. You must speak to no one in the streets, as they would not leave you till you were rooked and beaten. You must enter a hotel with military precautions; for the least you had to apprehend was to awake next morning without money or baggage, or necessary raiment, a lone forked radish in a bed; and if the worst befell, you would instantly and mysteriously disappear from the ranks of mankind.

I have usually found such stories correspond to the least modicum of fact. Thus I was warned, I remember, against the roadside inns of the Cevennes, and that by a learned professor; and when I reached Pradelles the warning was explained - it was but the far-away rumour and reduplication of a single terrifying story already half a century old, and half forgotten in the theatre of the events. So I was tempted to make light of these reports against America. But we had on board with us a man whose evidence it would not do to put aside. He had come near these perils in the body; he had visited a robber inn. The public has an old and well-grounded favour for this class of incident, and shall be gratified to the best of my power.

My fellow-passenger, whom we shall call M'Naughten, had come from New York to Boston with a comrade, seeking work. They were a pair of rattling blades; and, leaving their baggage at the station, passed the day in beer saloons, and with congenial spirits, until midnight struck. Then they applied themselves to find a lodging, and walked the streets till two, knocking at houses of entertainment and being refused admittance, or themselves declining the terms. By two the inspiration of their liquor had begun to wear off; they were weary and humble, and after a great circuit found themselves in the same street where they had begun their search, and in front of a French hotel where they had already sought accommodation. Seeing the house still open, they returned to the charge. A man in a white cap sat in an office by the door. He seemed to welcome them more warmly than when they had first presented themselves, and the charge for the night had somewhat unaccountably fallen from a dollar to a quarter. They thought him ill-looking, but paid their quarter apiece, and were shown upstairs to the top of the house. There, in a small room, the man in the white cap wished them pleasant slumbers.

It was furnished with a bed, a chair, and some conveniences. The door did not lock on the inside; and the only sign of adornment was a couple of framed pictures, one close above the head of the bed, and the other opposite the foot, and both curtained, as we may sometimes see valuable water-colours, or the portraits of the dead, or works of art more than usually skittish in the subject. It was perhaps in the hope of finding something of this last description that M'Naughten's comrade pulled aside the curtain of the first.

He was startlingly disappointed. There was no picture. The frame surrounded, and the curtain was designed to hide, an oblong aperture in the partition, through which they looked forth into the dark corridor. A person standing without could easily take a purse from under the pillow, or even strangle a sleeper as he lay abed. M'Naughten and his comrade stared at each other like Vasco's seamen, 'with a wild surmise'; and then the latter, catching up the lamp, ran to the other frame and roughly raised the curtain. There he stood, petrified; and M'Naughten, who had followed, grasped him by the wrist in terror. They could see into another room, larger in size than that which they occupied, where three men sat crouching and silent in the dark. For a second or so these five persons looked each other in the eyes, then the curtain was dropped, and M'Naughten and his friend made but one bolt of it out of the room and downstairs. The man in the white cap said nothing as they passed him; and they were so pleased to be once more in the open night that they gave up all notion of a bed, and walked the streets of Boston till the morning.

No one seemed much cast down by these stories, but all inquired after the address of a respectable hotel; and I, for my part, put myself under the conduct of Mr. Jones. Before noon of the second Sunday we sighted the low shores outside of New York harbour; the steerage passengers must remain on board to pass through Castle Garden on the following morning; but we of the second cabin made our escape along with the lords of the saloon; and by six o'clock Jones and I issued into West Street, sitting on some straw in the bottom of an open baggage-wagon. It rained miraculously; and from that moment till on the following night I left New York, there was scarce a lull, and no cessation of the downpour. The roadways were flooded; a loud strident noise of falling water filled the air; the restaurants smelt heavily of wet people and wet clothing.

It took us but a few minutes, though it cost us a good deal of money, to be rattled along West Street to our destination: 'Reunion House, No. 10 West Street, one minutes walk from Castle Garden; convenient to Castle Garden, the Steamboat Landings, California Steamers and Liverpool Ships; Board and Lodging per day 1 dollar, single meals 25 cents, lodging per night 25 cents; private rooms for families; no charge for storage or baggage; satisfaction guaranteed to all persons; Michael Mitchell, Proprietor.' Reunion House was, I may go the length of saying, a humble hostelry. You entered through a long bar-room, thence passed into a little dining-room, and thence into a still smaller kitchen. The furniture was of the plainest; but the bar was hung in the American taste, with encouraging and hospitable mottoes.

Jones was well known; we were received warmly; and two minutes afterwards I had refused a drink from the proprietor, and was going on, in my plain European fashion, to refuse a cigar, when Mr. Mitchell sternly interposed, and explained the situation. He was offering to treat me, it appeared, whenever an American bar-keeper proposes anything, it must be borne in mind that he is offering to treat; and if I did not want a drink, I must at least take the cigar. I took it bashfully, feeling I had begun my American career on the wrong foot. I did not enjoy that cigar; but this may have been from a variety of reasons, even the best cigar often failing to please if you smoke three-quarters of it in a drenching rain.

For many years America was to me a sort of promised land; 'westward the march of empire holds its way'; the race is for the moment to the young; what has been and what is we imperfectly and obscurely know; what is to be yet lies beyond the flight of our imaginations. Greece, Rome, and Judaea are gone by forever, leaving to generations the legacy of their accomplished work; China still endures, an old- inhabited house in the brand-new city of nations; England has already declined, since she has lost the States; and to these States, therefore, yet undeveloped, full of dark possibilities, and grown, like another Eve, from one rib out of the side of their own old land, the minds of young men in England turn naturally at a certain hopeful period of their age. It will be hard for an American to understand the spirit. But let him imagine a young man, who shall have grown up in an old and rigid circle, following bygone fashions and taught to distrust his own fresh instincts, and who now suddenly hears of a family of cousins, all about his own age, who keep house together by themselves and live far from restraint and tradition; let him imagine this, and he will have some imperfect notion of the sentiment with which spirited English youths turn to the thought of the American Republic. It seems to them as if, out west, the war of life was still conducted in the open air, and on free barbaric terms; as if it had not yet been narrowed into parlours, nor begun to be conducted, like some unjust and dreary arbitration, by compromise, costume forms of procedure, and sad, senseless self-denial. Which of these two he prefers, a man with any youth still left in him will decide rightly for himself. He would rather be houseless than denied a pass-key; rather go without food than partake of stalled ox in stiff, respectable society; rather be shot out of hand than direct his life according to the dictates of the world.

He knows or thinks nothing of the Maine Laws, the Puritan sourness, the fierce, sordid appetite for dollars, or the dreary existence of country towns. A few wild story-books which delighted his childhood form the imaginative basis of his picture of America. In course of time, there is added to this a great crowd of stimulating details - vast cities that grow up as by enchantment; the birds, that have gone south in autumn, returning with the spring to find thousands camped upon their marshes, and the lamps burning far and near along populous streets; forests that disappear like snow; countries larger than Britain that are cleared and settled, one man running forth with his household gods before another, while the bear and the Indian are yet scarce aware of their approach; oil that gushes from the earth; gold that is washed or quarried in the brooks or glens of the Sierras; and all that bustle, courage, action, and constant kaleidoscopic change that Walt Whitman has seized and set forth in his vigorous, cheerful, and loquacious verses.

Here I was at last in America, and was soon out upon New York streets, spying for things foreign. The place had to me an air of Liverpool; but such was the rain that not Paradise itself would have looked inviting. We were a party of four, under two umbrellas; Jones and I and two Scots lads, recent immigrants, and not indisposed to welcome a compatriot. They had been six weeks in New York, and neither of them had yet found a single job or earned a single halfpenny. Up to the present they were exactly out of pocket by the amount of the fare.

The lads soon left us. Now I had sworn by all my gods to have such a dinner as would rouse the dead; there was scarce any expense at which I should have hesitated; the devil was in it, but Jones and I should dine like heathen emperors. I set to work, asking after a restaurant; and I chose the wealthiest and most gastronomical-looking passers-by to ask from. Yet, although I had told them I was willing to pay anything in reason, one and all sent me off to cheap, fixed- price houses, where I would not have eaten that night for the cost of twenty dinners. I do not know if this were characteristic of New York, or whether it was only Jones and I who looked un-dinerly and discouraged enterprising suggestions. But at length, by our own sagacity, we found a French restaurant, where there was a French waiter, some fair French cooking, some so-called French wine, and French coffee to conclude the whole. I never entered into the feelings of Jack on land so completely as when I tasted that coffee.

I suppose we had one of the 'private rooms for families' at Reunion House. It was very small, furnished with a bed, a chair, and some clothes-pegs; and it derived all that was necessary for the life of the human animal through two borrowed lights; one looking into the passage, and the second opening, without sash, into another apartment, where three men fitfully snored, or in intervals of wakefulness, drearily mumbled to each other all night long. It will be observed that this was almost exactly the disposition of the room in M'Naughten's story. Jones had the bed; I pitched my camp upon the floor; he did not sleep until near morning, and I, for my part, never closed an eye.

At sunrise I heard a cannon fired; and shortly afterwards the men in the next room gave over snoring for good, and began to rustle over their toilettes. The sound of their voices as they talked was low and like that of people watching by the sick. Jones, who had at last begun to doze, tumbled and murmured, and every now and then opened unconscious eyes upon me where I lay. I found myself growing eerier and eerier, for I dare say I was a little fevered by my restless night, and hurried to dress and get downstairs.

You had to pass through the rain, which still fell thick and resonant, to reach a lavatory on the other side of the court. There were three basin-stands, and a few crumpled towels and pieces of wet soap, white and slippery like fish; nor should I forget a looking- glass and a pair of questionable combs. Another Scots lad was here, scrubbing his face with a good will. He had been three months in New York and had not yet found a single job nor earned a single halfpenny. Up to the present, he also was exactly out of pocket by the amount of the fare. I began to grow sick at heart for my fellow- emigrants.

Of my nightmare wanderings in New York I spare to tell. I had a thousand and one things to do; only the day to do them in, and a journey across the continent before me in the evening. It rained with patient fury; every now and then I had to get under cover for a while in order, so to speak, to give my mackintosh a rest; for under this continued drenching it began to grow damp on the inside. I went to banks, post-offices, railway-offices, restaurants, publishers, booksellers, money-changers, and wherever I went a pool would gather about my feet, and those who were careful of their floors would look on with an unfriendly eye. Wherever I went, too, the same traits struck me: the people were all surprisingly rude and surprisingly kind. The money-changer cross-questioned me like a French commissary, asking my age, my business, my average income, and my destination, beating down my attempts at evasion, and receiving my answers in silence; and yet when all was over, he shook hands with me up to the elbows, and sent his lad nearly a quarter of a mile in the rain to get me books at a reduction. Again, in a very large publishing and bookselling establishment, a man, who seemed to he the manager, received me as I had certainly never before been received in any human shop, indicated squarely that he put no faith in my honesty, and refused to look up the names of books or give me the slightest help or information, on the ground, like the steward, that it was none of his business. I lost my temper at last, said I was a stranger in America and not learned in their etiquette; but I would assure him, if he went to any bookseller in England, of more handsome usage. The boast was perhaps exaggerated; but like many a long shot, it struck the gold. The manager passed at once from one extreme to the other; I may say that from that moment he loaded me with kindness; he gave me all sorts of good advice, wrote me down addresses, and came bareheaded into the rain to point me out a restaurant, where I might lunch, nor even then did he seem to think that he had done enough. These are (it is as well to be bold in statement) the manners of America. It is this same opposition that has most struck me in people of almost all classes and from east to west. By the time a man had about strung me up to be the death of him by his insulting behaviour, he himself would be just upon the point of melting into confidence and serviceable attentions. Yet I suspect, although I have met with the like in so many parts, that this must be the character of some particular state or group of states, for in America, and this again in all classes, you will find some of the softest-mannered gentlemen in the world.

I was so wet when I got back to Mitchell's toward the evening, that I had simply to divest myself of my shoes, socks, and trousers, and leave them behind for the benefit of New York city. No fire could have dried them ere I had to start; and to pack them in their present condition was to spread ruin among my other possessions. With a heavy heart I said farewell to them as they lay a pulp in the middle of a pool upon the floor of Mitchell's kitchen. I wonder if they are dry by now. Mitchell hired a man to carry my baggage to the station, which was hard by, accompanied me thither himself, and recommended me to the particular attention of the officials. No one could have been kinder. Those who are out of pocket may go safely to Reunion House, where they will get decent meals and find an honest and obliging landlord. I owed him this word of thanks, before I enter fairly on the second and far less agreeable chapter of my emigrant experience.