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While the issue of “Blackness” has long pervaded American society, it has rarely been problematized in social science literature and treated as a taken-for-granted. This article utilizes in-depth interviews with second generation West Indian adults in New York City to examine the ways in which they conceive of their Blackness, both racially and ethnically. New York City is viewed as an important urban context that in many ways facilitates the formation of identity for this population. The assimilation process, or not, of second generation West Indians is also considered in terms of socioeconomic status and gender. The results indicate that second generation West Indians strongly identify with both their racial and ethnic identities, which in turn calls for a reconceptualization of “Blackness”. There is also evidence that points to New York City as a space of cross-cultural integration where identity formation is significantly impacted by the presence of other immigrants (and their children) that leads to a pan-immigrant or pan-ethnic identity among young New Yorkers.

The rise of arts and culture is transforming citizen politics. Though new to many social scientists, this is a commonplace for many policy makers. We seek to overcome this divide by joining culture and the arts with classic concepts of political analysis. We offer an analytical framework incorporating the politics of cultural policy alongside the typical political and economic concerns. Our framework synthesizes several research streams that combine in global factors driving the articulation of culture into political/economic processes. The contexts of Toronto and Chicago are explored as both enhanced the arts dramatically, but Toronto engaged artists qua citizens, while Chicago did not.

This article examines the framing of immigrants in nineteenth-century New York City. A content analysis of local and national newspapers on the Lower East Side of the borough of Manhattan that included the infamous Five Points neighborhood demonstrates that the contemporaneous media narratives constructed a discourse of fear and contempt about residents of the area by emphasizing their alleged vice-ridden lifestyle. This discourse framed immigrants as a threat to the existing social order and diagnosed their moral failings on their cultural alienation. We argue that this process can be seen as an example of the exercise of symbolic power that sought to maintain existing social and cultural hierarchies by denigrating the disadvantaged sections of the population.

Purpose – This chapter will examine the role of Central Park in setting in motion certain practices related to park development as well as revolutionizing park financing in the mid-nineteenth century and again in modern times. It will examine the shift from public financing of parks to the development of public–private partnerships to design, build, fund, and administer urban parks.

Design/methodology/approach – The author takes an historical approach to put contemporary park debates vis-à-vis funding and administration in context. Archival materials are used to examine park financing models all over the country.

Findings – Central Park still continues to revolutionize urban park financing. Cities are cutting back on funding for public parks; as a result, there is a greater reliance on private financing options. Not all parks are in a position to rely heavily on private financing, and this raises questions about access to open space in cities.

Originality/value – The chapter raises questions about equity in the shift toward the private financing of urban parks. It extends the environmental justice discourse to examine open space issues. It examines long-term historical trends in helping the reader understand the contemporary state of urban park financing.

Some chapters provide us with a snapshot (intentional) of ethnic community across the city. Others look closely at a particular place. Still others look across the whole ethnic landscape of the city. Neither individually nor as a whole collection do they form a complete picture. But perhaps because they are so eclectic maybe they form a challenge to urban sociology to exam not just macro level change in urban form and metropolitan space, but to apply other methodologies to better understand the increasingly complex, unfocused mosaic of social worlds in the American city.

The boundaries of Little Italy are not precise, and have shifted over time. In the 19th century, the district extended south of Canal Street into the area identified by Jacob Riis as the “Mulberry Bend,” and described as “the foul core of New York’s slums.”³ By the 1960s, Little Italy had retreated across Canal Street, as the Italian population began to leave the neighborhood for other areas in the city. For the purposes of this paper, Little Italy shall be understood as comprising three census tracts in New York City’s Manhattan county, numbers 41, 43, and 45. This area, lying within a short walking distance of City Hall, is roughly bounded by Canal Street on the south, Bowery on the East, Broadway on the west, and East Houston street to the north. Nicknamed the Mulberry District, it became the first and largest Italian enclave in the United States between 1870s and 1924. While there had been an Italian community in New York for generations, historian George Pozetta has argued that the winter of 1872–1873 was pivotal in the development of this community, when more than 2000 poor Italian immigrants, arrived at Castle Garden, the immigrant reception center, unable to care for themselves.⁴ These immigrants were quickly fitted in to the preexisting Italian community, taking advantage of the contacts provided by the bossi, typically northern Italian men who had arrived earlier, to find jobs in such local enterprises as groceries and saloons, and with American employers. Once the new comers settled, a process of chain-migration began. By the later 1870s, the bossi were acting as agents for gangs of labor sent out from New York to work in other areas across North American. As a result, the Mulberry district became a sort of transshipment point for Italian labor.