East Coast Cities Research Articles

Planning For Resilience: Examining Gaps in Cyclone Preparedness and Impacts on Marginalized Communities in India's East coast cities

Cyclones and associated storm surges pose a major threat to coastal communities in India, especially along the Bay of Bengal where their intensity is higher. This paper examines cyclone resilience planning in four coastal cities - Visakhapatnam, Puri, Rameshwaram, and Velankanni. A multi-dimensional analysis is undertaken to focus on disaster preparedness, tourism economy contributions, socio-economic inclusion, and sustainability principles. The key objective is to study the integration of cyclone resilience with equitable, tourism-based development to strengthen vulnerable communities through conceptual modeling. The research methodology employs a mixed methods approach combining literature review, secondary data analysis of resilience infrastructure and tourism statistics, and conceptual model development. Findings highlight continued infrastructure and preparedness gaps alongside persisting socio-economic disparities limiting resilience access for marginalized groups. While progress is visible on early warnings, shelters, and evacuations, constraints exist regarding storm-proofing of amenities, customized enterprise support, secure housing, and risk financing tools. The study concludes that resilient, sustainable outcomes require planning processes that engage tourism-dependent communities through bottom-up participation. Coupled with hazard-resilient land use standards, customized livelihood protection schemes, resilient affordable housing programs, and coherent governance; tourism-centric coastal cities can enhance capacities to absorb cyclone impacts and enable inclusive rebuilding. Key Words: Cyclone resilience, Coastal city planning, Socio-economic vulnerabilities, Tourism economies

Chinese senior secondary students’ attitudes towards national, regional and foreign languages: the case of Chongqing

ABSTRACT This paper reports on language attitudes towards the national language (Putonghua), the regional dialect (Chongqing) and the key foreign language (English) of a group of senior high school students (N = 321) in Chongqing in mainland China. Unlike the numerous other studies of language attitudes in China this one is situated outside the more socially-economically developed east coast cities (such as Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong), focuses on high school students and uses an innovative multidimensional combination of direct and indirect measurements in order to measure and compare the dimensions of integrative/instrumental attitudes and overt/covert attitudes. The findings reveal clear and statistically significant differences in participants’ attitudes towards Chongqing dialect (their mother tongue), Putonghua (their national language) and English (their foreign language). These participants attach the highest integrative value to Chongqing dialect (followed by Putonghua then English) but the highest instrumental value to English (followed by Putonghua then Chongqing dialect). Their overt attitudes are more positive than their covert attitudes towards all three language varieties and there is generally more consistency in overt attitudes than in covert attitudes.

“The Strange Artistic Genius of This People”: The Ephemeral Art and Impermanent Architecture of Italian Immigrant Catholic Feste

abstract: During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Italian working-class immigrants in the United States staged religious feste (street feasts) in honor of the Madonna and other Catholic saints to express their beliefs in a socially acceptable, aesthetically pleasing, and recognizable manner. Impermanent edifices and other ephemeral constructions were integral parts of these cultural-religious extravaganzas. Hanging decorative illuminations, elaborate sidewalk altars, freestanding multistoried chapels, and various ambulatory structures were architectural wonders that boldly transformed, sacralized, and claimed American urban landscapes. A vernacular baroque aesthetic permeated the occupation and sacralization of the streets that engendered hallowed and convivial topographies that would have lasting ramifications for how people imagined their lives and neighborhoods. This article examines how these transient objects of devotion, predominantly in East Coast cities, enacted and proclaimed a diasporic community of believers that challenged hegemonic notions of artistry, religion, the built environment, and the public sphere. Ephemeral festival architecture captivated the attention of outsiders, including photographers, journalists, and visual artists, who depicted them in words and imagery. The article also contextualizes this source material as part of the Progressive era’s xenophobic climate and, in particular, the picturesque gaze that racialized and othered Italian immigrants.

Happiness-Oriented Parents: An Alternative Perspective on Privilege and Choosing Schools

Purpose: Research on privileged parents, defined here as those with the economic, social, and educational resources to navigate school choice processes to their advantage, often depicts such parents as anxious about maintaining social mobility, leading them to “opportunity hoard” desirable or academically competitive schools in ways that exclude other families. In contrast, we identify a subset of privileged parents in urban settings that we term “happiness-oriented parents” who seek schools that prioritize their child’s social-emotional happiness. Research Methods: Using a qualitative meta-analysis combining seven studies conducted by the authors in New York City; Hartford, Connecticut; and a small East Coast city between 2012 and 2021, we reanalyzed interview data from semistructured interviews with 106 privileged parents who have the ability to access and navigate a range of school choice options. Findings: We found a happiness orientation in a diverse group of privileged parents (40% identified as Black, Latinx, Asian American, or multiracial, and the remaining 60% were white). Although these parents were choosing a range of school options in different contexts and they identified different criteria as important to cultivating happiness, they consistently (1) centered happiness, (2) chose for social-emotional and noncompetitive academic factors, and (3) saw this choice as different from the norm. Implications: In identifying this repeated but understudied phenomenon, we consider that happiness-oriented parents’ choices might affect a range of education policy changes and outcomes. In the case of our studies, we examine the potential of these parents as allies in school integration efforts.

Epidemiology Trend of Urogenital System Disorders of Hospitalized Patients in an Eastern Chinese City from 2017 to 2019.

To evaluate trends in the prevalence and clinical characteristics of urogenital diseases in hospitalized patients of secondary and tertiary hospitals in Ningbo, an east coast city in China, from 2017 to 2019. We collected the data on hospitalized patients in Ningbo secondary and tertiary hospitals from January 1, 2017 to December 31, 2019. The data included age, sex, and diagnosis identified using the International Classification of Diseases (ICD) codes, which were obtained from Ningbo National Health Information Platform. We quantified the epidemiology (age/sex-specific) trend of urogenital system disorders. From January 2017 to December 2019, there were 256750 hospitalized patients with urogenital system disorders. These hospitalized patients comprised more women than men (1.45:1.00). The number of hospitalized patients with these diseases significantly increased over the 3 years (77505, 89167, and 90078, respectively; Z = 20.03, p < 0.001). The highest prevalence of these diseases was in the 40- to 64-year-old age group (47.37%), followed by the 18- to 39-year-old age group (23.94%). Over the 3 years, the five most common diseases in hospitalized male patients were male reproductive organ disorders, urolithiasis, tubulointerstitial disease, renal failure, and glomerular disease; Whereas the five most common diseases in hospitalized female patients were non-inflammatory disorders of the female genital tract, benign or dynamic undetermined tumors of the female reproductive organs, disorders of breast (according to ICD-10, disorders of breast (N60-N64) were involved in urogenital system diseases (N00-N99)), inflammatory diseases of female pelvic organs, and renal tubulointerstitial disease. In addition, the number of inpatients with renal tubulointerstitial disease significantly increased from 5952 to 9616 over the 3 years (rank increased from 6 to 3). Patients with urogenital system disorders significantly increased over the 3 years, occurring more often in women and most commonly in young and middle-aged people, which warrants more attention in clinical practice.

What matters most? Network analysis of mental health, recovery experiences, sleep, and fatigue among career firefighters.

Firefighters exhibit a higher prevalence of mental health issues than other occupations because they often directly or indirectly experience potentially traumatic events. Previous research has suggested that recovery experiences, sleep, and fatigue may be protective or risk factors for firefighters' mental health. This study conducted regularised partial correlation network analysis to investigate and visualise the complex relationships between these variables. We collected data through an online survey, and 3144 career firefighters from a large east-coast city in China, were included in the analyses. The results of the network analysis showed that: (1) only relaxation and mastery experiences directly correlated with one dimension of the mental health scale, namely, life/social functioning; (2) sleep quality had stronger correlations with mental health issues than sleep quantity; and (3) mental health issues were central nodes of the network. These results indicated that firefighters' mental health was close to other variables in the network and acted as a bridge linking other variables. Therefore, more attention should be paid to the mental health of firefighters to prevent comorbidities. The study's results also indicated that recovery experiences and sleep may be protective factors for firefighters' mental health.

“The Best Country in the World”: The Surprising Social Mobility of New York’s Irish-Famine Immigrants

Abstract Historians generally portray the Irish immigrants who came to the United States, fleeing the Great Famine of the mid-nineteenth century, as hopelessly mired in poverty and hardship due to discrimination, a lack of occupational training, and oversaturated job markets in the East Coast cities where most of them settled. Although the digitization of census data and other records now enables the tracking of nineteenth-century Americans far more accurately than in the past, scholars have not utilized such data to determine whether the Famine Irish were, in fact, trapped on the bottom rungs of the American socioeconomic ladder. The use of a longitudinal database of Famine immigrants who initially settled in New York and Brooklyn indicates that the Famine Irish had far more occupational mobility than previously recognized. Only 25 percent of men ended their working careers in low-wage, unskilled labor; 44 percent ended up in white-collar occupations of one kind or another—primarily running saloons, groceries, and other small businesses.

Providing gender affirming and inclusive care to transgender men experiencing pregnancy

Objectives and designInformation about providing professional and appropriate perinatal care to transgender men in the perinatal setting is scarce, and healthcare providers often have insufficient knowledge or skills to provide this care. In response, a quality improvement educational program for nursing staff was developed and implemented, with the goal of evaluating the impact of this intervention on nurses’ knowledge, skills, and attitudes when caring for pregnant transgender men. Setting and participantsThe training was offered to nursing staff of a 24-bed inpatient perinatal unit at a large, private academic medical center in a major East Coast city during the unit's quarterly staff meeting in March 2020. InterventionThe training covered the provision of affirming and inclusive perinatal care for transgender men. The content of the training was based on recommendations in the literature and reviewed by content experts. MeasurementsPre-test (N = 55) and post-test (N = 23) online self-administered surveys assessed nursing staff's knowledge of, comfort, and interest in providing gender affirming care for transgender men. Mann-Whitney U and Fischer's exact tests were used to determine significant changes in knowledge and attitudes over time. FindingsFindings suggest the training improved nursing staff's self-reported knowledge and skills in providing gender affirming care to pregnant transgender men over time, with participants demonstrating improved knowledge about communication around pronouns, gender identity, reproductive systems, and obstetric history. Awareness of resources for both professional development and to refer transgender patients also improved. However, persistent deficits in other knowledge, skills, and attitudes remained, suggesting that nurses would likely benefit from further support and training in transgender-specific health issues. Key conclusions and implications for practiceFindings support the utility of unit-based training in improving affirming and inclusive care in the perinatal setting. This highlights opportunities for supporting nurses’ professional practice of caring for transgender patients experiencing pregnancy and may be adapted for use in other specialty units.

Climate adaptation and risk preparedness in Florida’s East Coast cities: views of municipal leaders

Cities along Florida’s Atlantic coastline are particularly vulnerable to the effects of climate change, posing significant challenges for city planners. How cities see themselves in terms of developing or implementing their climate change adaptation action plans depends, in part, on the extent to which they perceive climate-related events as risks, and their city size. Data were obtained from city leaders (i.e. mayors, city/town managers, or their designees) from 86 cities along Florida’s Atlantic Coast from January to May 2021 to quantitatively assess factors influencing city adaptation planning. Validity and reliability were obtained for the survey. Multiple regression analyses showed significant positive correlations between perceived risk, city size, and (self-assessed) climate change preparedness. A statistical interaction was noted; as city size increased, risk perception decreased.

Reconciliation of asynchronous satellite-based NO2 and XCO2 enhancements with mesoscale modeling over two urban landscapes

Fossil fuel carbon dioxide (CO2ff), the main driver of global warming and climate change, is often co-emitted with nitrogen oxides (NOx) and precursors to ground-level ozone from anthropogenic sources like power plants or vehicles. In urban and suburban areas, satellite-based NO2 can be used as a proxy to track the emissions of CO2ff. Because of NO2's shorter lifetime, urban NO2 plumes are more distinguishable from backgrounds and more sensitive to variations in emissions. However, the combination of these two gases is limited by the asynchrony among NO2 and CO2 monitoring satellites. We used CO2ff simulated by the Weather Research and Forecasting model coupled with Chemistry (WRF-Chem) model to reconcile the tropospheric NO2 vertical column density (VCD) from Tropospheric Monitoring Instrument (TROPOMI) and column-averaged dry-air mole fractions of carbon dioxide enhancements (ΔXCO2) from Orbiting Carbon Observatory 3 (OCO-3) Snapshot Area Maps (SAMs) over a multicity area, Washington D.C.-Baltimore (DC-Balt), and a basin city, Mexico City. NO2/CO2ff ratios over DC-Balt are smaller than Mexico City, indicative of stricter emission restrictions, a more combustion-efficient vehicle fleet, and higher combustion efficiency due to lower altitude in DC-Balt. For single-track cases, the spatial correlations between NO2 and ΔXCO2 over Mexico City are stronger than DC-Balt because the NO2 and CO2 are mostly trapped in the valley of Mexico City, while DC-Balt is severely affected by distant sources (i.e., US East Coast cities). Using multi-track averaging, spatial correlation coefficients increase with the number of days used for averaging. The correlations reached a maximum when averaging >12 continuous images for DC-Balt and >10 continuous images for Mexico City. This finding indicates that multi-track averaging using modeled CO2ff as a proxy is helpful to filter the noise in single-track images, to cancel the interference from distant sources, and to magnify correlations between NO2 and CO2ff. Mexico City showed stronger spatial correlations but weaker temporal correlations than DC-Balt due to biomass burning hot spots and large transport errors caused by the trapping effects of the surrounding mountains. Tracking the 20-day moving average of CO2ff emissions using TROPOMI NO2 seems technically feasible, considering the relationship between correlation coefficients and the number of available satellite images.

Participatory and Spatial Analyses of Environmental Justice Communities' Concerns about a Proposed Storm Surge and Flood Protection Seawall.

In response to increasing threats from sea-level rise and storm surge, the City of Charleston, South Carolina, and the US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) propose constructing a seawall around the Charleston peninsula. The proposed seawall will terminate close to lower wealth, predominantly minority communities. These communities are identified as environmental justice (EJ) communities due to their history of inequitable burdens of industrial and urban pollution and proximity to highways and US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) designated Superfund sites. The present study documents community concerns and opinions related to the proposed seawall, existing flooding problems, and other issues. The project was guided by knowledge co-production and participant-observation approaches and included interviews with community members, collection of locality-specific data, GIS mapping to visualize key issues, development of an ArcGIS Story Map, and participation in public meetings. Community concerns are reported in the voices of community members and fell into eight major themes: community connections, drainage, impacts of road infrastructure, displacement, increasing vulnerability, sense of exclusion and isolation, mistrust of government, and civic engagement. Community members were significantly engaged in the study and are the owners of the results. As one of the first US East Coast cities pursuing major structural adaptation for flooding, Charleston is likely to become a model for other cities considering waterfront protection measures. We demonstrate the importance of meaningful engagement to ensure that climate adaptation will benefit all, including marginalized communities, and have as few unintended negative consequences as possible. Bringing more people to the table and creating vibrant, long-term partnerships between academic institutions and community-based organizations that include robust links to governmental organizations should be among the first steps in building inclusive, equitable, and climate resilient cities.

Privatising and financialising roads: The peculiar case of Transurban

AbstractThe Australian toll roads operator, Transurban, was created to build and operate Melbourne’s first toll road in the mid‐1990s. It has grown since to become a monopoly operator of motorways across Australia’s three east coast cities. The article interrogates this growth using a threefold framework involving an analysis of the company’s organisational and financial structures and its regulatory environment. Analysis reveals a complex set of actor decisions and circumstances within each of these frames. In respect to policy, we argue that pathways to sustainable, accessible urban transport services need to build on extant arrangements rather than reach nostalgically for an unattainable past.

Conceptualizastion of shtetl in American English: A Cultural Linguistic Study

This paper examines the conceptualizations of shtetl, ‘a small Jewish town or village formerly found in Eastern Europe’, in American English from the perspective of cultural linguistics. It can be observed that the concept of shtetl reflects cultural metaphors, where shtetl is viewed as a mythic Jewish idyll and, contemporarily, a metaphor for Jewish communality, for example, referring to an apartment building in an urban Jewish American neighborhood of the East Coast cities. It may be suggested that shtetl is also used to describe and categorize things such as tradition, a place of Jewish Diaspora and Yiddishkeit for, mainly, American Jewry. Therefore, this research paper presents cultural categorizations of a place that often emerges at the cultural level of cognition. Overall, the observations made in this paper reveal the potential of cultural schema theory for the studies of cultural linguistics. To recognize this role, the fundamentals of cultural linguistics and its schemes have been used to highlight the need for further research. Several cross-sectional studies have accentuated the cultural concept of a shtetl, e.g. Palmer (1996), Sharifian (2011, 2017). This study has tried to identify the key elements of a shtetl. I have applied Sharifian’s (2017) cultural conceptualization models as well as his distributed model of cultural schemas that can contribute to the knowledge of understating the concept of shtetl in Yiddish and American English, and among Holocaust survivors, first generation, second generation, and third generation American Jews.

Evaluating urban methane emissions from space using TROPOMI methane and carbon monoxide observations

Anthropogenic methane emissions from urban centers are important and addressable, yet remain poorly characterized, and the representativeness of studies from individual cities is unknown. A satellite-based approach provides a pathway to tackle this challenge on a national or global scale. Here we present a space-based method that uses the simultaneous, daily observation of methane and carbon monoxide from the TROPOMI satellite to estimate urban methane emissions. We assess and validate the method and demonstrate that using these simultaneous observations enables robust assessment of methane emissions from urban centers without relying on atmospheric transport models. Initial assessments with this approach in eight United States cities suggest emission inventory underestimates previously discovered in older East Coast cities are more broadly representative, with aggregated emissions totaling 1.47 (0.56, 3.19, 95% confidence interval) Tg CH4/year, compared to the Environmental Protection Agency estimate of 0.52 Tg CH4/year. We show this data driven approach provides a pathway to study urban methane emissions across the globe and track how emissions respond if urban mitigation measures are implemented by investigating three additional megacities outside the United States.

Measuring McCities: Landscapes of chain and independent restaurants in the United States

Urban planners have a stake in preserving restaurants that are unique to local areas in order to cultivate a distinctive, authentic landscape. Yet, over time, chain restaurants (i.e. franchises) have largely replaced independently owned restaurants, creating a landscape of placelessness. In this research, we explored which (types of) locales have an independent food culture and which resemble McCities: foodscapes where the food offerings can be found just as easily in one place as in many other (often distant) places. We used a dataset of nearly 800,000 independent and chain restaurants for the Continental United States and defined a chain restaurant using multiple methods. We performed a descriptive analysis of chainness (a value indicating the likelihood of finding the same venue elsewhere) prevalence at the urban area and metropolitan area levels. We identified socioeconomic and infrastructural factors that correlate with high or low chainness using random forest and linear regression models. We found that car-dependency, low walkability, high percentage voters for Donald Trump (2016), concentrations of college-age students, and nearness to highways were associated with high rates of chainness. These high chainness McCities are prevalent in the Midwestern and the Southeastern United States. Independent restaurants were associated with dense pedestrian-friendly environments, highly educated populations, wealthy populations, racially diverse neighborhoods, and tourist areas. Low chainness was also associated with East and West Coast cities. These findings, paired with the contribution of methods that quantify chainness, open new pathways for measuring landscapes through the lens of unique services and retail offerings.

Italianness in the United States between migrants’ informal gardening practices and agricultural diplomacy (1880–1912)

During the Age of Mass Migration more than four million Italians reached the United States. The experience of Italians in US cities has been widely explored: however, the study of how migrants adjusted in relation to nature and food production is a relatively recent concern. Due to a mixture of racism and fear of political radicalism, Italians were deemed to be undesirable immigrants in East Coast cities and American authorities had long perceived Italian immigrants as unclean, unhealthy and carriers of diseases. As a flipside to this narrative, Italians were also believed to possess a ‘natural’ talent for agriculture, which encouraged Italian diplomats and politicians to propose the establishment of agricultural colonies in the southern United States. In rural areas Italians could profit from their agricultural skills and finally turn into ‘desirable immigrants’. The aim of this paper is to explore this ‘emigrant colonialism’ through the lens of environmental history, comparing the Italian and US diplomatic and public discourses on the potential and limits of Italians’ agricultural skills.

Changes in Personal Social Networks across Individuals Leaving Their Street Gang: Just What Are Youth Leaving Behind?

Despite a small but growing literature on gang disengagement and desistance, little is known about how social networks and changes in networks correspond to self-reported changes in street gang membership over time. The current study describes the personal or “ego” network composition of 228 street gang members in two east coast cities in the United States. The study highlights changes in personal network composition associated with changes in gang membership over two waves of survey data, describing notable differences between those who reported leaving their gang and fully disengaging from their gang associates, and those who reported leaving but still participate and hang out with their gang friends. Results show some positive changes (i.e., reductions) in criminal behavior and many changes toward an increase in prosocial relationships for those who fully disengaged from their street gang, versus limited changes in both criminal behavior and network composition over time for those who reported leaving but remained engaged with their gang. The findings suggest that gang intervention programs that increase access to or support building prosocial relationships may assist the gang disengagement process and ultimately buoy desistance from crime. The study also has implications for theorizing about gang and crime desistance, in that the role of social ties should take a more central role.

JUE Insight: How much does COVID-19 increase with mobility? Evidence from New York and four other U.S. cities

How effective are restrictions on mobility in limiting COVID-19 spread? Using zip code data across five U.S. cities, we estimate that total cases per capita decrease by 19% for every ten percentage point fall in mobility. Addressing endogeneity concerns, we instrument for travel by residential teleworkable and essential shares and find a 25% decline in cases per capita. Using panel data for NYC with week and zip code fixed effects, we estimate a decline of 30%. We find substantial spatial and temporal heterogeneity; east coast cities have stronger effects, with the largest for NYC in the pandemic’s early stages.

Social distancing and inequality in the United States amid COVID-19 outbreak

Amid sweeping efforts to get Americans to stay at home to slow the spread of the coronavirus disease, we geovisualized how foot traffic has increased or declined in relation to six types of trips across the United States: homes, workplaces, retail and recreation establishments, parks, grocery stores and pharmacies, and transit stations. The geovisualization shows that most West and East Coast cities have reduced extensive movements while many Middle American cities even increased their movements, such as trips to grocery stores and parks. We further found that the poorest communities reduced fewer movements than the wealthiest communities, except for the trips to parks.

Richard Kogan, M.D., to Put Words to Music at Menninger Convocation Lecture

Back to table of contents Previous article Next article APA & MeetingsFull AccessRichard Kogan, M.D., to Put Words to Music at Menninger Convocation LectureNick ZagorskiNick ZagorskiSearch for more papers by this authorPublished Online:13 Feb 2020https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.pn.2020.1b2AbstractPsychiatrist and award-winning pianist Richard Kogan, M.D., will discuss Tchaikovsky’s music and melancholy.Annual Meeting favorite Richard Kogan, M.D., will discuss how the stigma of homosexuality contributed heavily to Tchaikovsky’s depression.Many people are likely familiar with the music of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, especially around the holidays when selections of “The Nutcracker” fill the airwaves. Yet few know of the turbulent emotional life of the composer behind iconic songs like the “Waltz of the Flowers” or the bombastic “1812 Overture,” said Richard Kogan, M.D., a clinical professor of psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College, artistic director of the Weill Cornell Music and Medicine Program, and co-director of the Weill Cornell Human Sexuality Program.Attendees at APA’s 2020 Annual Meeting in Philadelphia can learn more about one of the 19th century’s greatest composers and hear samples of his music at the Convocation of Distinguished Fellows, where Kogan will deliver the 2020 William C. Menninger Memorial Convocation Lecture.His lecture, titled “Tchaikovsky: Music and Melancholy,” is part of a long series of lectures that Kogan has presented at APA’s Annual Meeting on the connections between musical artistry and mental illness. The lectures are accompanied by piano performances by Kogan, who is an award-winning pianist.“Tchaikovsky’s music is the indelible outgrowth of his mental state,” Kogan told Psychiatric News. “His glorious ballets, for example, reflect an idealized fantasy world where he could escape his real-world despondency.”According to Kogan, juxtaposing Tchaikovsky’s glorious music with an exploration of his struggles helps illustrate the need to destigmatize mental illness. “It seems perverse to stigmatize a group that includes individuals like Tchaikovsky who have made such an immense contribution to civilization,” he said.In Tchaikovsky’s case, stigma also applied to his sexual orientation. “He was a gay man living in Russia at a time when such behavior was punished by banishment to Siberia. He was terrified of the implications and did everything to hide the truth. He even had a brief and ultimately disastrous marriage, which compounded his personal strife.”Those emotional troubles might have even led to Tchaikovsky’s death in 1893. Though his death was attributed to cholera, many historians suspect it might have been suicide.His only escape was music. Tchaikovsky once wrote in a letter that “without music, I would go insane.” That letter was one of thousands written by Tchaikovsky, who also kept extensive diaries. His most extensive correspondence was with wealthy widow Nadezhda von Meck, who offered to be his patron on the condition they never meet in person, a condition Kogan said is unique in the annals of artistic patronage. The pair, however, did exchange more than 1,200 letters over 14 years, which provided tremendous insight into Tchaikovsky’s psyche.“For years, I had heard that Dr. Kogan’s session should not be missed,” said APA CEO and Medical Director Saul Levin, M.D., M.P.A., “but I would miss it due to a ‘lecture I had to hear.’ After becoming the CEO and medical director, I bumped into him and told him I wish I could hear his lecture and recital. Alas, my duties always kept me away. I finally had the chance to hear his presentation on Shubert at another organization’s meeting, and I now make it a priority to attend these remarkable sessions. This year is a special year as Dr. Kogan rarely performs Tchaikovsky, so it is fortunate it will be the Convocation presentation.”Though unplanned on Kogan’s part, the location of Philadelphia is also symbolic in Tchaikovsky’s life. In spring 1891, Tchaikovsky traveled to the United States for a brief tour of several East Coast cities. The tour may be most remembered for Tchaikovsky’s providing the first-ever performance at the just-opened Carnegie Hall in New York; it concluded on May 18 at the Philadelphia Academy of Arts—the last time Tchaikovsky performed in the United States. ■The Convocation will be held on Monday, April 27, in Hall B, 200 Level, Pennsylvania Convention Center from 4:30 p.m. to 6:45 p.m. ISSUES NewArchived