York Neighborhoods Research Articles

Estrogen receptor positive breast cancer in an Afro-Caribbean cohort.

e12550 Background: Estrogen receptor-positive breast cancer (EBC) accounts for 78% of breast cancer (BC) cases in the United States, and with better prognosis compared to other BC subtypes. There is limited information on the incidence, presentation, and outcomes of BC in black women from the Caribbean. We describe the clinicopathologic features and treatment outcomes of EBC in this underrepresented immigrant patient population. Methods: This is a retrospective study conducted at Kings County Hospital, a public hospital in a Brooklyn, New York neighborhood with the second highest population of Afro-Caribbeans in the United States. Demographics and clinicopathological data of patients diagnosed with BC from 2015-2018 were collected from the hospital’s tumor registry. Descriptive statistics and Chi-square testing were used to analyze the data. Results: Of the 299 women with a BC diagnosis, 185 (62%) had EBC, with median age of 61, and median BMI of 29.9. Stratification by menopausal status revealed 75% of these patients were post-menopausal. 37% of pre-menopausal and 28% of post-menopausal women presented with lymph node involvement (LNI). At diagnosis, 61% of patients had localized disease, 30% regional LNI, and 9% distant metastases. Sub-analysis revealed 25%, 22%, 28%, 16% and 9% with stages 0, I, II, III and IV respectively. 39% of patients presented with Nottingham Grade 3, 50% with Grade 2, and 11% with Grade 1 disease. 25% of patients without LNI had Oncotype Dx testing. 22% of these had Recurrence Score (RS) less than 11, 50% RS 11-25, and 28% RS 26 or higher. Of the 27 patients who received neoadjuvant treatment, 22% had complete pathologic response, 37% had partial response, and 33% had disease progression. 81% of patients self-identified as Afro-Caribbean, 27% reported first- or second-degree relatives with a BC diagnosis and 22% first-degree relatives with non-breast malignancy. At time of data analysis, at median of 6 years, 75% of all patients were relapse and progression-free. Lasting response was correlated with cancer stage (p < 0.01) but independent of tumor grade and Oncotype Dx RS (p = 0.18 and p = 0.29, respectively). Conclusions: In our study, Afro-Caribbean women with EBC presented with high-grade tumors and high incidence of regional LNI. Pre-menopausal women had a higher incidence of nodal involvement. Notable was a strong family history of cancer implying inherited or familial cancer syndromes. Progression-free survival was lower than expected and correlates with disease stage, but not with low Oncotype Dx RS. Further research is warranted to investigate better prognostic tools for this population.

A Portrait of Amos Pollard: The Doctor at the Alamo

A Portrait of Amos Pollard:The Doctor at the Alamo Francis J. Leazes Jr. (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution There are five known oil portraits of Alamo garrison members. Amos Pollard's was done from life before he went to Texas. From the Collections of the Historical Society of Cheshire County, Keene, New Hampshire. [End Page 438] At the back of Prospect Hill Cemetery in Brattleboro, Vermont, at the bottom of a steep slope, a small broken gravestone with a barely legible inscription carved into it lies flat, partially concealed by mud and dry grass. This unassuming headstone is the eternal link between Brattleboro and San Antonio, Texas, because it marks the final resting place of Fanny Oella Wilder, the only surviving grandchild of Doctor Amos Pollard, who perished within the Alamo on March 6, 1836. Historian William C. Davis wrote in Three Roads to the Alamo that it was the deaths of the backwoods politician David "Davy" Crockett, knife-fighting plantation owner Jim Bowie, and the lawyer, turned soldier, William Barret Travis, that made their lives "a matter of interest."1 While Doctor Amos Pollard shares in the same glory of the famed Alamo trio, much less has been written about how this determined and educated New Englander came to live in Texas and die at the Alamo. Pollard stands in the shadow of those famous Alamo luminaries, but his story should also be a matter of [End Page 439] interest. His death at the Alamo is an exclamation point marking the end of his life. Ambition fueled Pollard's search for respect and standing as he tested what American liberty meant. This biography brings Amos Pollard out of the shadow and tells his long overdue story. The story of Amos Pollard's dramatic life is a complex saga. It unfolded during the period historians identify as the Early Republic (1790–1840) when, according to J. M. Opal in Beyond the Farm: National Ambitions in Rural New England, ambition shaped the lives of New England men like Amos Pollard. The essential facts of his biography are that he was born in 1803, obtained his medical degree in 1826, and then left the farm forever. He practiced his profession in reform-centered Boston until early in 1828, when he moved to New York City and married. During the next five years his medical skills and resilience were severely tested, his politics matured, and his association with the nation's reform agenda strengthened. In 1833, he left New York for Texas, leaving behind his wife and child, but not his ambition or convictions. He settled at Brazoria in Stephen Austin's colony in Southeast Texas, a fractious place brimming with opportunity and rife with conflict. Pollard had by then embraced the idea of a slave-free Texas independent from Mexico. In October 1835, he accepted an appointment from Austin to be the surgeon in the Texas army that marched to besiege San Antonio in December 1835. He never left. Dedicated to his profession, he died at his hospital post on March 6, 1836, within the walls of the battered Alamo. Amos Pollard's Alamo story does not end with his death. The epilogue to his life story centers on two dramatic props: his portrait and a combbacked rocking chair. Considerable irony and tragedy for his surviving family is intertwined with the preservation of those personal possessions. Both items reminded subsequent generations that the man in the portrait was a real person, who, in the last three years of his life probably sat in that rocking chair listening to the medical complaints of Texas patients, while discussing what liberty meant to them. The aspiring physician was still grappling with that question himself, even as he ultimately decided to fight to his death for what he believed to be a worthy cause. That is who the Amos Pollard of this biography is: not a failed transplant from the far distant hills of New England or crowded New York neighborhoods, and not a rugged pioneer or frontiersman; he was an ambitious, educated, dedicated professional searching for standing and respect with a determined focus on the future...

Anzalone Prime: An Interview with Prime Editing Developer Andrew Anzalone

Anzalone Prime: An Interview with Prime Editing Developer Andrew Anzalone

Jump Up! Caribbean Carnival Music in New York

Jump Up! Caribbean Carnival Music in New York

Anti-Asian Attitudes in the Context of the COVID-19 Pandemic: an Exploratory Study.

ObjectiveThe purpose of this paper was to measure if people with greater “structural literacy,” as indicated by greater awareness of racial and socioeconomic disparities in COVID-19 impact, would hold fewer negative attitudes against those perceived to be Asian in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic.MethodsA survey was administered between April and August 2020 to participants from two longitudinal cohorts in New York State. The survey assessed anti-Asian attitudes relating to COVID-19, awareness of racial and socioeconomic disparities in COVID-19, residential location, socioeconomic status, and other demographic information. The sample included 233 Black, Latinx, and White midlife adults from urban, suburban, and rural New York neighborhoods. Multivariable regression modeling was used to assess associations between COVID-19 disparities awareness, an indicator of structural literacy, and anti-Asian attitudes, adjusting for gender, race/ethnicity, residential location, and socioeconomic disadvantage.ResultsGreater awareness of disparities in COVID-19 was associated with lower levels of anti-Asian attitudes after adjustment (adj-slope = − 0.358, p < 0.001).ConclusionGreater structural literacy, as measured by awareness of socioeconomic and racial disparities in COVID-19 impact, was associated with fewer anti-Asian attitudes among Black, Latinx, and White adults.ImplicationsIncreasing structural literacy may reduce anti-Asian attitudes that motivate harmful acts against oppressed groups.

Dreamin’ California

Dreamin’ California Michael A. Gonzales (bio) When I was a young boy living in Harlem during the early 1970s, I thought of Los Angeles as the Promised Land. It was where Disneyland was located, television and movies were filmed and, I imagined, palm trees grew on every block. L.A. wasn’t a city, but a fantasy—a pleasant dream where the Beach Boys provided the soundtrack and the sun always shined. Staring at the smiling faces of game show contestants on the TV screen, I was convinced that everything in the West was perfect. “If we ever move, can we go to Los Angeles?” I asked my mom when I was about six. “Of course,” she said. I realized her answer was just another parental lie nine years later when mom announced, in the winter of 1978, that we’d soon be moving to Baltimore. We’d visited my Aunt Charlotte and cousin Marie there for years, so I somewhat knew that the spooky industrial southern metropolis by the sea, best known for steamed crabs, the Colts football team, and being the place where Edgar Allan Poe died, was the complete opposite of Los Angeles and the dream city I imagined living in. ________ It was the era of Jimmy Carter in the White House, Three’s Company on television, and disco music taking over America’s airwaves. At my new high school, Northwestern, I became fast friends with Larry Ressin, a jock who played lacrosse and drew as well as anyone at Marvel Comics except Jack Kirby. We met in first period journalism. He and I bonded over rock music, comic books, and movies. After a while I was spending more time at his house than my own. His mother and father were cool, and he had a twin brother named Terry who was in a couple of my classes. Although I made a few white friends the first few weeks of school, I couldn’t help but notice how segregated the city was as opposed to my old New York neighborhood. There was a huge Confederate flag hung in a Dundalk comic book shop I visited and, later, I was warned from venturing into the white enclave of Hampden. Coming from a community that was a melting pot of cultures, races, and religions, I had grown up in a family that befriended, and sometimes married, other races; I rarely thought about race and racism until I moved to Baltimore. [End Page 117] One afternoon, Larry and I were hanging out in the third-floor hallway waiting for our biology teacher, Miss Solomon, when I noticed a tall, stunning blonde wearing blue jeans and a gray Jackson Browne T-shirt. Though it was cold outside, Northwestern was always overheated. Most kids left their coats and sweaters in their lockers. Her Browne tee indicated that she was, like me, a music fan. Unlike some kids today who wear vintage band shirts without knowledge of group, back then who you wore on your T-shirt reflected personal taste. “Who the hell is that?” I asked Larry as we both glanced at the girl leaning against the wall. Larry smirked. “I don’t have the slightest idea, but she’s hot.” Indeed, it was the also the era of Hollywood starlets like Loni Anderson, Suzanne Somers, and Farrah Fawcett—“hot blondes.” The stranger looked as though she’d come straight from central casting. I moved closer to Larry and whispered, “Watch this.” I started speaking louder so the mystery blonde could hear me. “If the teacher doesn’t hurry up, I’m going to cut class and go home and play my Jackson Browne album.” The blonde turned around, looked at me and smiled. “Are you a Jackson Browne fan?” she asked. Truthfully, I knew that Browne was down with the Los Angeles/Laurel Canyon music scene that included Joni Mitchell, The Eagles, Linda Ronstadt, Neil Young, James Taylor, and others who rocked in a folksy/country acoustic guitar way. In the 2018 documentary Echo in the Canyon, everyone interviewed (The Mamas & the Papas vocalist Michelle Phillips, Jackson Browne, and the film’s guide, Jakob Dylan) tells us how much...

Leaded Soil Endangers Residents in New York Neighborhoods

New research documents dangerously high levels of lead in the soils of New York City parks and growing communities.

Review: The Lofts of SoHo: Gentrification, Art, and Industry in New York, 1950–1980, by Aaron Shkuda, and The Roots of Urban Renaissance: Gentrification and the Struggle over Harlem, by Brian D. Goldstein

Aaron Shkuda The Lofts of SoHo: Gentrification, Art, and Industry in New York, 1950–1980 Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016, 320 pp., 23 b/w illus. $45.00, ISBN 9780226334189 Brian D. Goldstein The Roots of Urban Renaissance: Gentrification and the Struggle over Harlem Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2017, 400 pp., 40 b/w illus. $39.95, ISBN 9780674971509 Gentrification has been one of the most controversial and problematic urban developments of the past fifty years. It has benefited cash-strapped central-city governments in need of wealthier taxpayers and higher assessed property values but has proved a bane to lower-income residents who can no longer afford the rent in their gentrifying neighborhoods and feel increasingly out of place among the invading hordes of young professionals. Nowhere has this dilemma of gain and loss been more evident than in New York City. During the 1970s commentators bewailed New York's impending bankruptcy and rampant housing abandonment; the South Bronx was a burned-out ruin eliciting comparisons with Berlin at the close of World War II. Thirty years later, reporters told of the transformation of once-empty shells into upscale town houses, of hyperinflated housing values, and of an unabated influx of the rich and hip to Gotham's inner city. New York had seemingly quick-changed from a basket case to a treasure chest, with accompanying gains to city coffers and real estate moguls and losses to the displaced poor. In The Lofts of SoHo and The Roots of Urban Renaissance , Aaron Shkuda and Brian D. Goldstein explore the origins of this transformation in two famed New York neighborhoods. Shkuda addresses the early history of gentrification in Lower Manhattan's SoHo district, whereas Goldstein delves deeply into the recent history of Harlem. Although only seven miles apart on the small island of Manhattan, the two neighborhoods and their histories are quite different. Yet they are both part of the story of New York gentrification, and the authors ably describe their often difficult and complicated progress toward community revitalization. In the 1950s, as Shkuda relates, SoHo was a district of aging factory lofts that accommodated small manufacturing concerns employing many minority workers. Its multistory late nineteenth-century buildings …

Petty Crimes and Harassment: How Community Residents Understand Low-Level Enforcement in three High-Crime Neighborhoods in New York City

This paper examines how residents of high-crime communities understand so-called “quality of life” policing tactics and their effects on police-community relations. We demonstrate how focus groups offer a unique opportunity to understand how community members perceive police activity by giving research participants an opportunity to dialog with each other to collectively articulate the meanings of this complex issue. We draw on focus groups conducted in three New York neighborhoods with high levels of violence, police contact, poverty, and other indicators of concentrated disadvantage. One set of focus groups was conducted with Black and/or Latino males ages 16–20 living in each community, while another set was held with adult residents over age 30, who had lived in the community for at least 10 years. We closely examine how these two sets of community residents express concerns related to aggressive low-level enforcement actions in their communities and the concomitant issues of the over-policing of young men of color, the under-policing of what residents understand to be the primary threats to their personal safety, and the perceived lack of police accountability. We consider the implications of these findings for police-community relations more broadly.

Neerkijken en rondzien

Abstract Looking down and looking around: Two travelers portray and present HarlemIn the 1930s and 1950s two white Dutch writers, Mary Pos (1904-87) and Rosey Pool (1905-71), visited the New York neighborhood of Harlem. They reported on these journeys in letters, newspaper articles, monographs, and lectures. Jointly, this material offers us a valuable contemporary portrait of Harlem, and is a source for reconstructing the ways in which these women acted as cultural mediators between the Netherlands and the black community in New York. In their work Pos and Pool demonstrate rather different responses to Harlem. But they appear to be similar in their (partial) confirmation of contemporary racial and ethnic discourses, and in their questioning and even rejection of some of the gender conventions of their time.

Sono-Montage: Langston Hughes and Tony Schwartz Listen to Postwar New York

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, large-scale population shifts, urban-development projects, and new media transformed New York City in ways that were heard as much as seen. In this context, Langston Hughes and sound documentarian Tony Schwartz each experimented with techniques of montage to splice the sounds of their local New York neighborhoods. Hughes’s Montage of a Dream Deferred and Schwartz’s “New York 19” tape-recording projects locate a crisis in listening in New York’s postwar urban geography of race and economics. Although their projects differ in significant ways, both employ montage to expose listening as a mediated and socially constructed act often intertwined with the structural violence of racial and economic discrimination. In response, both develop alternative models of collective listening, which together offer contrasting perceptual strategies for remapping social, spatial, and sonic relations in the diverse and unequal urban geographies of the United States.

Anna &amp; Solomon by Elaine Snyder (review)

Reviewed by: Anna & Solomon by Elaine Snyder Hope Morrison Snyder, Elaine Anna & Solomon; illus. by Harry Bliss. Ferguson/Farrar, 2014 32p ISBN 978-0-374-30362-4 $17.99 R* 6-9 yrs “Once—and not once upon a time, because this is a true story—in 1897 in Russia there lived a handsome young man who fell in love with a beautiful young woman.” Shortly after the two marry, the Czar’s soldiers destroy the homes of Jewish families in their village and Anna and Solomon decide to emigrate to America. They only have enough for one ticket, however, so Solomon goes ahead, with Anna promising to join him later. Solomon arrives in New York, works hard, and soon sends money for a ticket … but when the day comes to meet Anna at the ship, he is surprised to find that she instead sent her younger brother. When Solomon once again saves up the cost of a ticket sends for Anna, her older brother shows up instead; a third time, Solomon finds himself welcoming his mother-in-law (“‘Could Anna leave her old mother behind? Of course not,’ he said to himself, and bravely took her home”). Finally, after Solomon sends money for a fourth ticket, the couple is happily reunited. Based on the author’s family story (even the illustrator, the author’s son-in-law, is part of the family), the narrative is drenched in warmth and familial affection, and the folkloric patterning and rich imagery enhance Anna and Solomon’s story. Bliss’ easygoing, slightly cartoonish renderings capture the feel of the small Russian village as well as the crowded Lower East Side New York neighborhood where Solomon lives and effectively depict the gamut of emotions Solomon experiences—from confusion to anger to sadness to resolution—as he welcomes his in-laws over and over again when expecting his beloved wife. Young listeners will no doubt share Solomon’s joy at the long-awaited happy reunion in this lovely love story. [End Page 67] Copyright © 2014 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Ghosts in the Dressing Room

The author discusses a patient he treated in psychotherapy when he was a psychiatry resident. Both patient and therapist are openly gay and had a chance meeting in their New York neighborhood. Issues of intimacy, fear of intimacy, and boundary crossings in psychotherapy are discussed. The closet and the stage are used as metaphors for psychotherapy and life.

Review: Place, Race, and Story: Essays on the Past and Future of Historic Preservation by Ned Kaufman; Our Unprotected Heritage: Whitewashing the Destruction of Our Cultural and Natural Environment by Thomas F. King

Ned Kaufman Place, Race, and Story: Essays on the Past and Future of Historic Preservation . New York: Routledge, 2009, xi + 421 pp., 50 b/w illus. $39.95, ISBN 9780415965408 Thomas F. King Our Unprotected Heritage: Whitewashing the Destruction of Our Cultural and Natural Environment . Walnut Creek, Calif.: Left Coast Press, 2009, 200 pp., no illus. $24.95 (paper), ISBN 1598743813 Place, Race, and Story presents essays on historic preservation's past and future that are intellectually provocative, culturally incisive, and politically astute. At its core this book challenges the twentieth-century alliance, or confusion, between the practices of architectural history and historic preservation. That alliance often tended to define historic preservation as a curatorial pursuit, committed to preserving a three-dimensional encyclopedia of the objects of historians’ desire, aesthetically and stylistically considered. This framing of historic preservation drastically narrowed its social and cultural possibilities. Ned Kaufman points the way toward a more relevant, expansive, and vital historic preservation movement; a movement committed to social equity, steeped in ethnography and politics and guided less by the imperatives of architectural history practice and more by sensitivity to the human values manifested in everyday attachments to place. Some historic preservation practitioners have used the criteria and models of architectural history to insulate their work from social claims of various stakeholders and communities. Kaufman argues, “It is hard to understand how separating heritage from society's most pressing concerns can enhance the cause of conservation.” He challenges the tendency of many not-for-profit preservation organizations that allocate “resources to protect a historic site admired by architectural historians” (9) while making no effort to discover and help protect sites that are meaningful to a much broader array of neighborhood and community groups. Kaufman does not stand alone. Retiring in 2010 as president of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, Richard Moe reflected on the field; he wrote, “Historic preservation has evolved into something much more than just saving historic buildings. Today it is about people and the places that they care about—where they live, work, shop, worship, and celebrate. We need historic places to help ground us in our past, but also in our future, as …

Sorting Black and Brown Latino service workers in gentrifying New York neighborhoods

Ethnography, qualitative interviews and census data document a new process of spatial and racial exclusion among Brown and Black Latino workers in New York's service sector. Unlike manufacturing, many service workers directly interact with customers, and therefore employers use race, gender and immigrant status to position workers in front or back stage jobs; depending on their interaction with mainstream clientele. The sorting of workers is a largely hidden process outside the reach of labor regulations. Racialization of workers is more evident in minority neighborhoods undergoing rapid gentrification, as owners import their labor force and clientele from outside the neighborhood.

Tillman's Turbulent Thinking

Tillman's Turbulent Thinking Eric Dean Rasmussen (bio) Reflecting on the art of fiction in her 1995 essay "Telling Tales," Lynne Tillman repeats a familiar narratological claim—conflict is essential to storytelling—but expands it to encompass "theorizing," indeed cognition itself, which, she emphasizes, includes an affective dimension. Using vocabulary reminiscent of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's philosophizing on affect in What Is Philosophy? (1994), Tillman notes that "turbulence," the "wordless conflict" from which language likely emerged, is everywhere. This omnipresent turbulence, however, is easily overlooked. Writers, she proposes, work with words to make this turbulent activity present—that is, not just perceptible but communicable: There may be imperceptible conflicts, actions, events—I think, thinking is an activity. An emotion may produce an action, be an action, or be a re-action. In some form the writer addresses some kind of event. In some way there is a problem, an event, an action, a thought, an issue, an emotion, to be resolved or left unresolved; there's a problem to be solved, or incapable of solution, a problem engaged or contemplated. There's a kind of adjudicating, whatever the writer does. As Tillman's fictional art critic Madame Realism observes in The Madame Realism Complex (1992), "[S]tories do not occur outside thought. Stories, in fact, are contained within thought. It's only a story really should read, it's a way to think." Madame Realism aptly summarizes Tillman's cognitive aesthetic, which posits literary writing as a way of thinking through imperceptible conflicts. And though this process involves making critical judgments, literary adjudicating entails more than conscious ratiocination—more than predominantly logical operations occurring in the mind. Tillman regards storytelling, indeed all modes of intellection, as a thoroughly embodied activity in which meaningful comprehension results from complex, recursive processes involving both cognitive and affective operations. A survey of the short fictions in This Is Not It (2002), which collects some of Tillman's many collaborations with contemporary artists, reveals that, throughout her career, she has been experimenting with ways of registering the effects of imperceptible intensities, of tracing in language the recursive processes through which asignifying affects resonate, give rise to, and interfere with signifying emotions—the "subjective content, the sociolinguistic fixing of the quality of an experience, which is from that point onward defined as personal," as the Deleuzian theorist and translator Brian Massumi puts it in Parables for the Virtual (2002). Consider for instance: the struggle to articulate adequately the intimate bond between Julie and Joe, the couple who co-habit but are no longer lovers, in "Living With Contradictions" (1984); the description of the depressed man's behavior at a dinner party as a tropism in Madame Realism (1984) ("Indifferent to everyone but his object of the moment, upon whom he thrives from titillation, he blooms. Madame Realism sees him as a plant, a wilting plant that is being watered"); the narrator's identification of herself as the "obstacle," the "swelling of emotion" that "becomes physical," stuck in the writer Paige Turner's throat in "To Find Words" (1992); the ecstatic, dizzying dance Madame Realism is moved to perform before the tombstones on Normandy's Omaha beach in "Lust for Loss" (1994); or the man's struggle to grieve, "the most private act a human being could do, next to shitting," which only finds release during masturbation in "Hold Me (9 Stories)" (2002). This effort to articulate, in unconventional, quasi-parabolic, prose forms, the "relationship between the levels of intensity and qualification" (Parables), i.e., the generative disconnect between affect and emotion, has become increasingly central to Tillman's cognitive aesthetic, which makes apparent that negotiating the contemporary crisis of belief requires subjects able to practice a measured "response-ability" when experiencing the excess of affect circulating in neoliberal social systems. In the "Next to Nothing" passage from No Lease on Life (1998), a tragicomedy depicting the socioeconomic tensions affecting a New York neighborhood, imagined as a fragile urban ecosystem, Elizabeth Hall only becomes truly committed to a cause, fighting the illegal rent increase imposed by her unscrupulous landlord, after an intensely affective encounter with her upstairs neighbor, Ernest. Elizabeth catches her aptly named...

Making Designs Dissonant

Products like the Bugaboo stroller and the Dyson vacuum go against the grain. They are counter intuitive. They command attention and a premium price. In the New York neighborhoods where well-off new parents live, Bugaboo strollers are everyehere. Our sidewalks are congested with bug-eyed, sunglassed mons and Lacosted dada wheeling these all-terrain strollers from one shop to another. Bugaboo strollers command $500 premiums over non-urban-assault strollers. While Bugaboos are more versitile and rugges, the image defined by the product's usage earns a significant portion of the premium... Language: en

The Effect of West Nile Virus Perceptions and Knowledge on Protective Behavior and Mosquito Breeding in Residential Yards in Upstate New York

A knowledge, attitudes, and practices (KAP) questionnaire combined with entomological surveys of residential mosquito-breeding sites were conducted in two Upstate New York neighborhoods. We tested the hypothesis that "correct" West Nile virus (WNV) knowledge and perceptions correspond with the use of practices that prevent mosquitoes from breeding and biting. Our results demonstrate that perceptions of WNV relate to the number of positive containers in yards and the use of mosquito preventive measures. In contrast, WNV knowledge was not related. Culex pipiens and Cx. restuans were common species found breeding in containers. Aedes japonicus was the most abundant species in 77% of positive containers (buckets, flower pots, and birdbaths). This new, invasive mosquito together with the Culex species identified in this study represent significant potential as vectors of WNV and other arboviruses affecting human and animal health. We conclude that more training and education programs should focus on WNV control strategies and recognizing mosquito breeding in residential yards. This is the first study to directly investigate the relationship between KAP and breeding of WNV vectors in residential yards.

“Fulfillment of a collective dream”: Culinary pilgrimage to Russian–Jewish New York

Since the early 1990s a new wave of Jewish immigration from the former Soviet Union has dramatically reshaped the gastronomic landscapes of many New York neighborhoods, most notably Brighton Beach, Rego Park, Washington Heights, Flatbush and Ocean Parkway. A new culinary infrastructure has emerged to support the culinary preferences and practices of these communities in homes, restaurants, bars, coffee shops, nightclubs and catering halls. Alongside this new culinary infrastructure, a new culinary practice, that of culinary pilgrimage to the food worlds of Russian Jewish New York has emerged among New Yorkers and visitors to New York, many but by no means all of whom are Jewish. Culinary pilgrims visit restaurants and nightclubs, come shopping for items unavailable elsewhere, and take part in one or more of the rapidly multiplying culinary walking tours that offer what historian (and tour guide) Seth Kamil calls “micro-histories” of New York's Russian–Jewish neighborhoods. These visitors are seeking more than just a good meal. Folklorist Lucy Long has found that culinary pilgrims seek a deeper and more personal understanding of foodways that are in some way more authentic than those of their everyday lives. Within the Jewish context, the cuisines of the former Soviet Union evoke both a places and times of heightened significance. This is the case when a young Russian journalist suggests that certain restaurants can provide “the fulfillment of a collective dream”.

Street smart: the New York of Lumet, Allen, Scorsese, and Lee

New York has appeared in more movies than Michael Caine, and as a result of overfamiliarity, the City poses a problem for critics and casual moviegoers alike. Audiences mistake the New York image of skyscrapers and glitter for the real thing, but in fact the City is a network of small villages, each with its unique personality. Street Smart offers a novel approach to understanding the cultural influences of New York's neighborhoods on the work of four quintessentially New York filmmakers: Sidney Lumet, Woody Allen, Martin Scorsese, and Spike Lee. The city's diverse economic and ethnic enclaves, where people live, work, shop, worship, bank, and go to school, often have little relationship to the concept of New York City created by the movies. Their New York, however, is as real as the smell of fried onions in the stairwell of an apartment building, and it is this New York, not the movie New York, that has left its impressions on their films. Lumet, Allen, Scorsese, and Lee's imaginations have been shaped by their neighborhoods, not the New York of the movies. In turn, these directors have used their own life experiences to shape their films. Richard A. Blake examines their home villages - from Flatbush and Fort Green in Brooklyn to the Lower East Side of Manhattan - to enrich our critical understanding of the films of four of America's most accomplished contemporary filmmakers.