Reading Summary #1

Alexander Reid
Professor Arrington
English 1102
14 February, 2016
Summary of The Tunnel (on p.57)
The Tunnel by Margaret Morton is a part of “The Architecture of Despair” and ongoing photographic documentation by Morton of the lives of the homeless in New York City and how they survive and make their living. This entry in this project centers specifically on the homeless community that occupies the abandoned Amtrak tunnel that stretches from 72nd street to 123rd street from Riverside Park to the Hudson River. Morton starts off describing the history of this tunnel and the land it occupies, saying “The mud flats along the Hudson River were occupied by squatters when the Hudson River Railroad arrived in the mid-1800s. (Morton, ix)” Once the railroad was built, the area became a shanty town that fed on the garbage dumped there by the Sanitation Department. In 1934, in order to gentrify the mud flats into a stylish strip for residents of the nearby apartments, the garbage dumping was ceased and the railroad tracks were covered with a concrete tunnel to conceal “the dirt of the dense black smoke of the diesel engines and the odor of carloads of pigs and cattle en route to the slaughter house (Morton, ix)”. The tunnel was outfitted with concrete structures for use by railroad personnel. Once shipping methods had advanced to the point of making rail shipping no longer viable, the tunnel was largely abandoned and occupied once again by a community of homeless people who took shelter there.
The text is organized by chapters labeled with different areas of the tunnel,
which are then broken down into sections which recount the stories of the residents of those areas. In the first chapter “The north gate”, the reader is introduced to the most recurrent character, Bernard Monte Isaac. Nearly every subsequent interviewee is a friend or acquaintance of Bernard and most were invited to live in the tunnels by Bernard himself. In the acknowledgements, Morton thanks Bernard for acting as her guide throughout the length of the tunnel between 1991 and 1995 while she was compiling pictures and interviews for this book. Bernard and some of the other residents lived in the concrete structures built for railroad employees and have cleaned them out and intricately decorated their own personal spaces to make them more of a home. There is also plenty of graffiti, with some of the pieces being random and haphazard and others being full murals by recognized artists that are subsequently named and credited in the acknowledgements at the end of the book. There are many common themes among the stories, especially when discussing different ways of surviving in the tunnels. Nearly everyone talks about having to collect cans to return to stores, going to soup kitchens, churches and shelters for food and going up to the surface to scavenge wood out of dumpsters for fuel to keep warm during the winter months. This a very fascinating piece of literature chronicling a piece of New York culture that is literally and figuratively underground. This book would be useful to anyone looking to further research the built environment and how it creates little enclave communities like this one that almost exist in their own separate worlds from the rest of society.

Disabled by Design Annotated Bibliography by Alex Reid and Kittiya Chaiyachati

Miller, Clark, and Claire Gordon. “Disabled by Design.” Slate 26 Feb. 2015. Slate. Web. 9 Feb. 2016.

This article discusses social attitudes about the inclusion/exclusion of disabled people based on the characteristics of the built environment around them. It references the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) as instrumental in the shift of perceived blame from the disabled person to their environment for not accommodating them, saying “This cultural perspective pits people with disabilities … in a competitive race against those with greater abilities.” This article would be somewhat useful for someone attempting to discuss the effects of the built environment on people with disabilities and the changing attitudes to whether or not we should alter the built environment to include them and how deep these alterations should run. This article does have a few hang ups though. One of the main examples used in this articles is that the size of a Black Hawk attack helicopter excludes people of certain body shapes and sizes. This may be indicative of my own opinion, but it doesn’t seem defensible to claim that every person of every shape and size has a right to drive a multi-million dollar killing machine. The much more glaring objective error in the study about Black Hawks referenced in the article is that it did not include data of the shapes and sizes of men who would have been eligible to pilot these helicopters. These two holes in the primary example presented here greatly detract from the value of this article to be referenced or quoted without exposing these errors in the text that is using it as a source.

Annotated Bibliography #3

Ferguson, Karen. “Kruse, Kevin M. White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005.”Urban History Review 35.1 (2006): 61. Web.

This article covers the redistribution of blacks and whites in Atlanta throughout the 1950’s-1970’s caused by a shortage of housing in traditionally black neighborhoods after World War II, resulting a diaspora of these people into what was then considered “White Territory”. Resistance from the white community came in two forms: blatant support for segregationist policies and a more inconspicuous concern for the condition of property values in the areas that many black families were moving into. Many church and local community leaders would urge home owners to refuse to sell to black families, as once one house sold, the rest of the neighborhood would scramble to sell their property as well in preparation for the anticipated drop in housing values. Kirkwood was one of these neighborhoods significantly affected. Kirkwood was originally majority white and soon became majority black in a couple of years as a result of this phenomenon. The ultimate conclusion is that instead of integrating, most white citizens fled to the suburbs which greatly influenced the demographic makeup of the metropolitan community to this day. This article would be useful to anybody seeking to demonstrate how the built environment has changed where people are “allowed” to live based on racist and classist ideals and how those ideals have survived into modernity. I chose this article because it also ties in very nicely with Cities and Inequalities in a Global and Neoliberal World in discussing changes in Kirkwood’s racial demographics and this article uses Kirkwood as a specific example much more extensively than the other two articles I researched.

Annotated Bibliography #2

“The Demise of Queer Space? Resurgent Gentrification and the Assimilation of LGBT Neighborhoods.” N.p., n.d. Web. 5 Feb. 2016.

This article examines the Atlanta Metropolitan Area as a case study to analyze the effects of gentrification on the concentration of LGBT couples in different neighborhoods. It also covers race relations through the lens of this dispersion of gay and lesbian citizens of the city. The conclusion reached is that gentrification has served to price-out LGBT residents of the neighborhood of midtown and disperse them into other areas of the city, effectively diluting the gay and lesbian community and resulting in former LGBT neighborhoods to become less tolerant. Kirkwood was one of the traditionally Black neighborhoods that many gay and lesbian people moved to as midtown was becoming increasingly gentrified. This source also uses visual aides in the form of maps and charts displaying relevant data. This article would be very helpful to anyone trying to explore gentrification in Atlanta and its effects on distribution of same-sex couples throughout the city as well as the businesses and institutions that rely on them. While this article only mentions Kirkwood by name once, I chose it because it covers broader concepts that have definitely affected the neighborhood of Kirkwood. It also doesn’t reference any other articles I’ve written bibliographies but it does touch on a lot of the same problems discussed in Cities and Inequalities in a Global and Neoliberal World.

Annotated Bibliography #1

Miraftab, Faranak, and Inc ebrary. Cities and Inequalities in a Global and Neoliberal World. 2015. Web. 4th February 2016.

This section of this article that discusses the built environment of Atlanta is called The Politics of Relocating Atlanta’s Poor and it explores how needs of the economic elite have shaped where low-income citizens are allowed to live through the strategic placement of public housing complexes and provides visual aides in the form of photos, maps and tables displaying relevant data. It explains that there have been 4 phases of public housing in Atlanta: 1) Birth of Atlanta’s public housing, 2) Expanding the City and moving public housing out, 3) Projects get smaller and tenants get poorer, and 4) Public Housing is reduced during the Olympics. Kirkwood’s place in this process comes in phase 3, as public housing land gets pushed away from downtown to make room for financial districts and more middle class white families move to the suburbs. It states that Kirkwood shifted from majority white to majority black within a few years. This article would be useful to anyone attempting to show the progression of the built environment in Atlanta and the effect of racism and classism on the citizens of Atlanta and their ability to choose where they can live. This article doesn’t appear to have any major flaws that affect my use of it in examining Kirkwood as a built environment. I chose this article because it is one of only a few I could find that mentioned Kirkwood specifically in the capacity that I desired to research it in.