"A People's Guide to New York City is the fourth in a series of People's Guide books that seek to create a 'deliberate political disruption"'of the ways we know and experience the urban environment. As told by most guidebooks, the story of New York City lingers on the stories of celebrities and artists who made their fortunes here and shared their fame with the city itself. The everyday citizens of New York are not necessarily forgotten in these guidebooks. Indeed their diversity and hardiness, their capacity for invention ...
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"A People's Guide to New York City is the fourth in a series of People's Guide books that seek to create a 'deliberate political disruption"'of the ways we know and experience the urban environment. As told by most guidebooks, the story of New York City lingers on the stories of celebrities and artists who made their fortunes here and shared their fame with the city itself. The everyday citizens of New York are not necessarily forgotten in these guidebooks. Indeed their diversity and hardiness, their capacity for invention and overcoming adversity, their toughness, tolerance, and fast-talking hustles are often celebrated. New York is a global city, an immigrant city, a rags-to-riches city, a mecca for money and artistry. New York has created or refined dozens of cultural motifs that leap beyond its boundaries, and fortunes that span the world as well. A People's Guide to New York City makes a straightforward proposition that the life and landscape of New York are a product of social power and its attendant struggles. The streets, the buildings, the institutions, the people, tell a story of movement and countermovement. It is often a story of the prerogatives of great wealth; a story of government invention, intervention and repression; a story that is also of people's demands, creativity, and self-organization. It is a story of stand-off and a story of compromise; battles won, lost, avoided, celebrated, forgotten. To see this, you have to see the whole of the city. As such, A People's Guide brings you to the five boroughs. We present them from north to south, and also organize our sites from north to south and by neighborhoods, moving from Montefiore Hospital in the Bronx to the Lenape Burial Ridge in Staten Island. We selected sites that tell different parts of the stories of New York City's peoples over time and today; not just who they were and are, but how they've made and re-made the city around them. Our sites should change how you view the city itself--its physical landscape, and the places that are most significant in the city's history and ongoing development. By making visible the invisible social dynamics that undergird the city, we hope to shift how the city's students and visitors determine what and who is important to the Big Apple"--
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