York Subway Research Articles

Furnace Blasts for the Tuskegee Wizard: Revisiting Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins, Booker T. Washington and the Colored American Magazine

Furnace Blasts for the Tuskegee Wizard:Revisiting Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins, Booker T. Washington and the Colored American Magazine Alisha R. Knight (bio) Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins (1859–1930), author of Contending Forces (1900), was the most prolific black woman writer of her time. Her work with the Colored American Magazine had no small part in earning her this distinction, for she published three serialized novels and several short stories and editorial pieces in the magazine. She abruptly stopped editing and contributing to the magazine in 1904, however. Some literary historians have assumed she left because Booker T. Washington purchased the journal and replaced her with one of his allies, and they dismiss the end of her tenure there as merely a casualty of the Tuskegee Machine. Hopkins's contemporary, W.E.B. Du Bois, theorized, with little elaboration, that Hopkins "was not conciliatory enough" toward white readers.1 In his 1947 version of the publication's history, William Stanley Braithwaite, who worked directly with Hopkins as one of the Colored American Magazine's literary critics, chose not to comment on how readers responded to Hopkins's political ideas. Instead, he characterized Hopkins as a "temperamental editor" whose desire for "an independence of action in making selections, and a dignity in soliciting manuscripts of the best" caused "friction" in the magazine's work environment.2 Indeed, considering his first-hand experiences with the magazine, Braithwaite's account is surprisingly devoid of details pertaining to the challenges Hopkins faced as she maneuvered the periodical publication process. As a result, scholars continue to speculate why she left and under what circumstances.3 By revisiting the case, I will show how Hopkins's defiant nature (which has either been misread or overlooked) and her radical ideology about the role of literature in the early twentieth-century racial uplift movement constitute a subversive subtext in the [End Page 41] articles she wrote and the editorial decisions she made for the Colored American Magazine. Hopkins was more antagonistic towards Booker T. Washington and his supporters than previously believed. Unlike former approaches, which do not utilize primary sources, especially Hopkins's own voice, my analysis examines her private and public writings to solve the mystery of the disappearing journal editor.4 From 1900 to 1904, Hopkins was a dedicated contributor to the Colored American Magazine, and she rose to the rank of literary editor in May 1903. Hopkins was also a member of the Colored Co-operative Publishing Company, the firm that published the magazine and her first novel, Contending Forces. In 1904 Hopkins helped found the Colored American League and worked to raise subscriptions and funding for the periodical. Despite Hopkins and the League's efforts to sustain the periodical, it was sold to Fred R. Moore in the spring of 1904. At the time, Moore was known to be one of Washington's allies who received various degrees of assistance from him. It was Washington who actually orchestrated the purchase of the magazine and moved it from Boston to New York.5 When the magazine was moved to New York, Hopkins was demoted from editor to assistant editor, and Moore was installed at the head of the publication. The November 1904 Publishers' Announcements states that Hopkins left the magazine because of poor health.6 The magazine's explanation for her departure is highly questionable, since her work appeared in a rival publication a month later. When Hopkins left the magazine in 1904, she attempted to continue her writing career by contributing the series "The Dark Races of the Twentieth Century" and the article "The New York Subway" to the Voice of the Negro. Later, in 1905, she established her own publishing venture, Pauline E. Hopkins and Company, and published A Primer of Facts Pertaining to the Early Greatness of the African Race and the Possibility of Restoration by Its Descendants, with Epilogue. In 1916 she attempted to start another magazine, New Era, which unfortunately lasted only two issues. After this magazine failed, Hopkins retreated from public life and resumed her work as a stenographer at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It appears that by the time Hopkins died on August 13, 1930, her important work as an...

New York Subways: An Illustrated History of New York City's Transit Cars (review)

New York Subways: An Illustrated History of New York City's Transit Cars (review)

New York subways: an illustrated history of New York City's transit cars

The first subway line in New York City opened on October 27, 1904. To celebrate the centennial of this event, the Johns Hopkins University Press presents a new edition of Gene Sansone's acclaimed book, Evolution of New York City Subways. Produced under the auspices of New York's Metropolitan Transit Authority, this comprehensive account of the rapid transit system's design and engineering history offers an extensive array of photographs, engineering plans, and technical data for nearly every subway car in the New York City system from the days of steam and cable to the present. The product of years of meticulous research in various city archives, this book is organized by type of car, from the 1903-04 wood and steel Composite cars to the R142 cars put into service in 2000. For each car type, Sansone provides a brief narrative history of its design, construction, and service record, followed by detailed schematic drawings and accompanying tables that provide complete technical data, from the average cost per car and passenger capacity to seat and structure material, axle load, and car weight. Sansone also includes a helpful subway glossary from A Car (the end car in a multiple car coupled unit) to Zone (a section of the train to the conductor's left or right side). Subway and train enthusiasts, students of New York City history, and specialists in the history of technology will appreciate this updated and authoritative reference work about one of the twentieth century's greatest urban achievements.

The Virtualization of Elián González

The Virtualization of Elián González

The pitfalls of family resemblance: why transferring planning institutions between ‘similar countries’ is delicate business

It is tempting, and in this age of intensified international information exchange only increasingly so, to look across the national state borders for promising planning institutions that have been developed elsewhere. This occurs usually with the hope and expectation that similar positive results can be achieved on domestic soil. It is commonly realised that the transfer of planning institutions from countries with very different political, legal and cultural traditions is difficult and that such transplants require lots of adaptation before they can be successfully implemented. It is less well known that copying planning institutions from similar countries, that is countries belonging to the same legal or cultural family, is hardly any easier. This article focuses on the process of institutional transplantation between similar nations and describes the mechanisms of success and failure with the help of several empirical examples in the field of spatial planning. The case of the refurbishment of the London Underground refurbishment based on the example of the New York Subway is analysed more in detail. The article concludes with a set of conclusions and recommendations aimed at helping future ‘transplanters’ to be more aware of opportunities and pitfalls of institutional transplantation.

Faultlines, Limits, Transgressions: A Theme-Cluster in Late Twentieth-Century Irish Poetry

FAULTLINES, LIMITS, TRANSGRESSIONS: A THEME-CLUSTER IN LATE TWENTIETH-CENTURY IRISH POETRY ROBERT WELCH Lines of history lines of power . . . Lines of defiance lines of discord under Walker’s arm brisk with guns British soldiers patrol the walls the gates between Ulster Catholic Ulster Protestant. . . . Lines of loss lines of energy . . . John Montague, The Rough Field These are the incantatory openings of various strophes in John Montague ’s The Rough Field, taken from the section of that sombre poem called “A New Siege” (1974:74,77). Looking back now, nearly thirty years after it was written, it may not be an exaggeration to suggest that much Irish poetry since 1972 has taken a kind of inner direction, an urgent prompting , from Montague’s fierce but elegant analysis of the reemerging Troubles in Ireland in that intensely orchestrated long work. The volume is a formal meditation that brings together history, memory, politics, the cascade of events as they unfold in the disparity of crisis, biography, and family history. Montague’s poem creates the “rough field” of living history by means of an individual conscience trying to negotiate its terrain, which is on the one hand as familiar as a townland, but on the other as strange and A THEME-CLUSTER IN LATE TWENTIETH-CENTURY IRISH POETRY 161 terrifying as the places and landscapes of nightmare. In its nervous syntax, its curt lines stripped down to a kind of bardic economy, The Rough Field registers the reopening of old wounds, old faultlines in the Irish psyche, while recognizing too that these cuts and tears are not unconnected to other fissures and cracks opening up in Europe and America in the late 1960s and early 1970s: streets of Berlin Paris, Chicago seismic waves zig-zagging through a faulty world (1974:76) It is one of the achievements of Montague’s poem that these broader issues of political and social fissure are integrated into a series of biographical and familial explorations, so that the genealogy of public rifts and disruptions is given a personal and intimate stress, a felt interiority. The faultline is not only between different communities in Northern Ireland , between North and South, Ireland and Britain, Teague and Prod; it is also within communities, within families, within the Montagues themselves whose townland is the Rough Field of the title, Garvaghey (Mod. Ir. Garbh Achadh, literally ‘rough field’). And it runs, this fault, from father to son, from James Montague, estranged from his Tyrone family while he works behind a grille in the New York subway, to John Montague , who grows up to be very like his father, “the least happy / man I have known” (1974:47). This is candidly, bravely recorded in “The Fault”: When I am angry, sick or tired The line on my forehead pulses, The line on my left temple Opened by an old car accident. My father had the same scar In the same place, as if The fault ran through Us both: anger, impatience, A stress born of violence. (1974:45) Montague goes on remorselessly to describe the kind of sound a wound makes, this time the historical wound of the defeat of Irish civilization in the century following Kinsale: Who knows the sound a wound makes? A THEME-CLUSTER IN LATE TWENTIETH-CENTURY IRISH POETRY 162 Scar tissue can rend, the old hurt tear open as the torso of the fiddle groans to carry the tune . . . (1974:46) The consciousness of loss, the avid and tormenting awareness of it, rises up in bitterness, accusation, anger, and hatred. Montague owns up to the lot in verse dignified but also shocking in its candor: This bitterness I inherit from my father, the swarm of blood to the brain, the vomit surge of race hatred, the victim seeing the oppressor . . . (1974:46) This is what erupted during the Civil Rights March to Burntollet; on Bloody Sunday in January 1972; and in more recent times, before the cease-fires, at Greysteel. It was at Greysteel on Halloween 1993 that Robert Torrens McKnight from Macosquin, with others, walked into the Rising Sun overlooking Lough Foyle, said “Trick or Treat?” and sprayed the bar with automatic fire, killing 13 people. It is...

Going Underground

Going Underground

Taking Up Space: An Interview with Bio of TATS CRU, Inc.

I began my interview with Bio with an idea of graffiti as a pure form, as the human need to create, separated from content, context, culture, and reason. Graffiti, or so I thought, was a raw material, capable of offering an unobscured view into what lies beneath. Although not initially aware of it, I was looking for the myth of graffiti: the romantic epic of renegade writers, braced in an uncompromising stance of rebelliousness against an unjust and bourgeois society. Like heroic ghosts, I imagined them creeping deftly through an underground labyrinth, moving in and out of the shadows, here one moment, gone the next, leaving beautiful signatures as the mark of their fleeting presence. The legend of the writer, of the masked Zorro of subterranean New York City, “unfolded on the trains, in the dark tunnels where they encountered danger, high voltage, cold crushing steel wheels, giant hurtling monsters” (Chalfant and Prigoff 1987, 8).During the fall of 2000, I met with Bio, a thirty-four-year-old writer from the Bronx, at his studio in Hunt's Point. He was once the embodiment of the graffiti hero, a young vandal, illegally bombing New York subway's No. 6 IRT line as part of the Tough and Talented (or TATS) CRU. “We started at the height of the scene,” he reminisces in an interview with Mhari Saito. “There was so much painting going on, with everyone talking to each other” (Saito 1996, 2). But things began to change under the heavy fist of the city's antigraffiti campaigns. With the advent of the new paint-resistant metal subway cars, or “ding-dongs,” in 1987, TATS CRU and other writers were driven out of the subway and above ground. Rather than living the myth of the New York graffiti writer, committing beautiful acts of transgression against social law and accepted order, Bio was forced to give up the struggle.In 1995, Bio and two lifelong friends, BG 183 and Nicer, transformed their graffiti into a commercial enterprise, marketing their skills to private interests and corporate advertisers. The three writers refounded (and renamed) their group as Top Artistic Talent's Cm, Inc., now an advertising agency commissioned to create graffiti for business murals and billboards, rap music backdrops, and video sets. In the past decade, the group's transition has proved financially successful. They have painted fifty murals for Coca-Cola throughout the New York area and are working on a project for the House of Seagram's. Local churches, schools, and individuals also hire the agency to create public murals and memorial walls (plate 1).

Addressing bioterrorist threats: where do we go from here?

Abstract : In discussing the threat of bioterrorism, planning, coordination, and preparedness are recurrent themes. State and local planning are of particular concern to me, having served as a local health officer and as health commissioner in New York City during the World Trade Center bombing. I have no doubts that the threat of terrorism within our borders is real. And several years later, when the sarin attack occurred in the Tokyo subway system, it was hard not to imagine what such an event would have meant in the New York subway system. A fundamental step toward addressing the threat of bioterrorism is comprehensive planning that focuses first and foremost on local preparedness and response capacity-integrating the role of state, regional, and federal governments, as well as state, regional, and national assets. To plan effectively, we have to think through the different types of scenarios that may confront us, including the announced release of a biological agent, the silent release of a biological agent, or some kind of hybrid event, such as having a bomb go off, that is followed by the release of a biological or chemical agent. In addition, we have to think about the scenarios where person-to-person transmission can occur or those with noncommunicable infectious diseases. Bioterrorism covers a very broad spectrum of concerns, from catastrophic terrorism with mass casualties, to microevents using low technology but producing civil unrest, disruption, disease, disabilities, and death. All these scenarios must be considered. We need to identify the assets and capabilities at all different levels and identify the gaps, critical players, policymakers, and stakeholders, and we must forge working relationships within the public health and health-care community as well as with outside partners.

Creolizing for Survival in the City

world. To regain control over the subways, New York mayors Lindsay and later Koch initiated and sustained multi-million dollar campaigns to erase the paintings and arrest the painters. While the passionate and bold murals have vanished from New York's subways, the art form has become a world-wide phenomenon with adherents in Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and all major U.S. cities. In New York the original who are mostly male, still call themselves painters, aerosol artists, graffiti artists, or writers, and the most dedicated of them continue to create their work in public spaces and for art galleries. Since the beginning of their movement in 1971, New York City subway painters have used diverse cultural ideas in their creative processes. Most of the great painters were young (between 12

Can Ethnic Differences in Men's Preferences for Women's Body Shapes Contribute to Ethnic Differences in Female Adiposity?

In the United States, obesity is more common among black and Hispanic than white women. One putative cause of this difference is different cultural norms for attractiveness. Two studies assessed ethnic differences in men's perceptions of the attractiveness of females of varying sizes. In the first, 108 men recruited on the New York subway were shown sets of silhouettes depicting female bodies varying in fatness and were asked to pick the silhouette they found most attractive. They were also asked to indicate the thinnest and fattest figures they would consider dating. A measure of "latitude of acceptance" was computed as the difference between the thinnest and fattest figures considered. Results indicated no relationship between ethnicity and preference (F = 1.383, p = .257) or "latitude" (F = .102, p = .903). In Study 2, "personal advertisements" placed by 373 black, 1915 white, 110 Hispanic, and 30 Asian men from 35 newspapers and magazines were coded as: 1) thinness preferred; 2) no information on weight preference; 3) fatness preferred; or 4) states weight or looks unimportant. Results indicated a statistically significant but small association between ethnicity and preference (chi2 = 49.55, df = 9, p < .00001). Relative to white and Asian men, black and Hispanic men more frequently requested fat women, Hispanic men less frequently requested thin women, and black men more frequently stated that looks or weight did not matter. Ethnicity explained only 2.1% of the variance in preference. Thus, it seems unlikely that ethnic differences in men's preferences for women's body shapes contribute substantially to ethnic differences in female adiposity.

Theorizing movement in an urban transportation system by use of the constant comparative method in field research

Blending acquaintance knowledge and theoretical knowledge is one of the strengths of field method research. That blending can be systematically related by utilizing the constant comparative method developed in the grounded theory approach to theory construction. A detailed account of the use of a version of that method is given from research on New York subway systems. That account describes how on-site designs can be devised to test successive provisional hypotheses. Ethnographic research is accordingly characterized as a way of thinking rather than being solely a set of observational techniques.

Snakehunter (review)

At the heart of The Border Men is a description of the Battle of King's Mountain in 1780. Being partial to Wilma Dykeman's account ofthat battle in her book With Fire and Sword (1978), I wished for less anecdote and more historical texture in Judd's account than I got. In his afterword, however, Judd admits that "this episode alone could easily be developed into a large novel; my treatment of it in this broader-scoped work is brief and somewhat simplified." True. But I felt a bit deprived, just as I remember feeling disappointed when Richard Waverley missed the entire Battle of Culloden in Scott's Waverley. That progenitor of historical fiction is certainly no War and Peace, and I suppose the dilemma for historical novelists faced with such a huge moment as a major battle has always been either omit it, simplify it, or devote a thousand pages to it. Cameron Judd, to his credit, does give his readers some of the high moments at King's Mountain, with historical accuracy. Best of all in this novel, as in the first, are the stories of Joshua's interaction with the Cherokee. Cameron Judd handles the sensitive issue of Cherokee/ Anglo relations very well, but the shadow of the coming Trail of Tears (1838) looms ahead. Dragging Canoe, Oconostota, Nancy Ward—all have their parts to play in Joshua's life. If Judd's hero lives to a grandfatherly eighty-eight years, he will see the events of his youth play out with tragic results. With his major characters off to Kentucky at the end of this book, there is opportunity for yet another volume; whether Judd would take it as far as 1838 is questionable. The Border Men is a novel that can usefully be extra credit reading for a course in Tennessee, North Carolina, or Virginia colonial history, or Appalachian history. It has both the exciting pace that a New York subway commuter enjoys in a book after a hard day's work, and the historical authenticity even a DAR member would demand. For a second time, Cameron Judd offers Appalachian history to a wide audience: entertainment with style. —Parks Lanier Chuck Kinder. Snakehunter. Frankfort, Kentucky: Gnomon Press, 1991. 224 pages. $10.50. In the finest Appalachian tradition of James Still's Pattern of a Man, Gurney Norman's Kinfolks, and John Jacob Niles's ballads, Gnomon Press has published another major Appalachian work, Chuck Kinder's Snakehunter. Kinder's novel, which first appeared in print in 1973, details the coming of age of Speer Whitfield, who grows up in the town of Century, West Virginia, located on the Kanawha River. Three generations ofWhitfield family members, many ofwhom 68 are dead, are important in the life of this child whose father was killed in World War I. Snakehunter is full of interesting Whitfield characters—notably Aunt Erica, Grandpaw Clint Whitfield, and Hercules, Catherine, and Speer Whitfield. Aunt Erica, who owns the house in Century where the whole family lives, has money and political influence. Tobacco-chewing Grandpaw Clint Whitfield likes to talk about the old days during the coal boom when Century was called Hundred Mines and there were dams and locks on the river, and he pulled coal barges down the river in his own boat, the Snakehunter. Hercules, who is Speer's older cousin, is the meanest brat in the town of Century. Aunt Catherine is Speer's star relative. She shows an early interest in the boy, taking him with her to the library, letting him read while she is at work, and to the theater to see westerns and horror movies. Later, from a sanitarium, she writes in a language he cannot understand for years. In addition, he has a copy of her unsuccessful novel, in which a page index containing her symbols and archetypes was dedicated to all "Assistant Professors on the make." Speer concludes that she was a caution. The main character and narrator of Snakehunter is, of course, Speer Whitfield, a character of mythic proportions who tells us how he grew up in a diseased and dying family in a West Virginia coal town. He is always haunted...

Interborough Rapid Transit, 1904: the New York subway: its construction and equipment

Interborough Rapid Transit, 1904: the New York subway: its construction and equipment

Rules and Compliance in the New York Subways

The article explores the system of management control and worker compliance in a unionized industrial workplace. In a four-year participant observer study, the researcher found workplace rules to be an ambiguous framework within which supervisors negotiated or enforced compliance. The findings supported criticisms that Braverman underestimated the impact of worker resistance upon strategies of workplace control and the problems of direct control. Coercion still played an important indirect role in management control, suggesting limits to Burawoy's generalization that U.S. workers no longer feel the "whip of the market." Workers' compliance was pragmatic, based upon existing power relations. Possibilities for change are discussed.

A crime of self-defense: Bernhard Goetz and the law on trial

The popular press dubbed him subway vigilante: Bernhard Goetz, who on December 22, 1984, shot four black youths on a New York subway train when one of them asked for five dollars. Goetz claimed to have fired in self-defense, out of fear that the young men were about to rob him.

“Rails to the Metropolis” at the New York State Museum

“RAILS TO THE METROPOLIS” AT THE NEW YORK STATE MUSEUM BRIAN J. CUDAHY Albany, New York, is a capital city overshadowed in many ways by the state’s principal metropolis 150 miles downriver. But in recent years it has started to feel comfortable with its role as the capital of a state whose affairs are often so totally dominated by New York City. The New York State Museum is an excellent reflection of this new confidence. Founded in 1936, it now occupies a prime location in the vast Empire State Plaza, a collection of public buildings built to world capital proportions during the administration of Governor Nelson Rockefeller. The museum is in the Cultural Education Center, also headquarters of the state’s Department of Education, and home of archival materials that continually draw scholars from near and far. “Rails to the Metropolis” is a new permanent exhibit in an area of the museum dedicated primarily to affairs of New York City but also evoking recollections that people from the state’s other major cities will find familar. (A collection of beautifully restored fire engines, e.g., traces the evolution of that always-interesting industrial art form.) “Rails to the Metropolis” proceeds sequentially along a wall and in­ cludes treatments of three major railroads that helped to develop New York City: the New York Central, the Pennsylvania, and the Long Island. Glass cases contain period and contemporary graphic material as well as very nicely executed models of various pieces of railroad equipment that together communicate a sense of the growth of New York railroading. The wall leads to the exhibit’s principal attraction, a large model of Grand Central Terminal. Bear with me, please, about Grand Cen­ tral. I was raised in New York and had occasion to visit Grand Central’s marvelous spaces and corridors from time to time, sometimes as a prelude to a train ride, more often simply in passage from a subway Mr. Cudahy works for the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Urban Mass Trans­ portation Administration in Washington, D.C., and has written widely on urban trans­ portation matters. His latest book, Over and Back: The History of Ferryboating in New York Harbor will be published by Fordham University Press, and a revised second edition of his book on New York subways, Under the Sidewalks ofNew York, is scheduled for publication.© 1988 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved. 0040-165X/88/2902-0008$01.00 276 “Rails to the Metropolis” at the New York State Museum 277 station to some nearby address. But as much as Grand Central fills one’s senses with multiple sights and sounds and feelings, when it comes to the railroad trains that are its raison d’être, the impression this terminal always created was mystery. You couldn’t see them. Or hear them. Or know when they arrived or departed, except by the testimony of others. Oh, you could sometimes catch a fast look through the gates at the observation car on the tail end ofthe Twentieth Century Limited before it made its departure at 6:00 p.m. (A piece of the famous “red carpet” that was nightly laid out along the platform of this most fa­ mous of American trains is preserved in the exhibit.) But more than any other train station I have ever known, in big city or small, Grand Central meant mystery. (Let me offer assurances that this sense of mystery is not the product merely of boyhood remembrances. To visit the New York State Museum in June of 1987 I traveled north by train from Grand Central, and while the cars are now lettered Amtrak and the curtain signs on the various departure tracks have been replaced by a new electronic system, the old mood is still there.) The model of Grand Central helps unveil some of this mystery in a way that photographs and diagrams never can. It is built to a scale of 1/8 inch = 1 foot, measures over 8 feet in its longest dimension, and thanks to its cutaway construction allows one to see perspectives and relationships that cannot be achieved in the real Grand...

Uptown, downtown a trip through time on New York's subways

Uptown, downtown a trip through time on New York's subways

Getting up. Subway Graffiti in New York

Getting Up is the term used by graffiti artists to describe their success in making their mark on the New York subway system. Through candid interviews, New Yorker Craig Castleman documents the inside story of the lives and activities of these young graffitists.

Networks—New York Subways, A Piece of String, and African Traditions

Children now growing up in our rapidly advancing technological society must be prepared to cope with problems that will arise not only in this century but also in the twenty-first century. Yet we ourselves do not know what kind of society today's children will face in the future. The best we as mathematics educators can do is to encourage children to deal with new situations, to be unafraid of challenges, and to learn to think.