Astoria is known for a lot of Greeks in the area, a good time, and a fun atmosphere. The people are very nice and friendly. Its a nice neighborhood which a lot of people know each other as well.

I walked around during the day and at night to capture some pictures and see what was going on. Families and just different people were walking around going into restaurants, walking to the train or the park. A popular place in Astoria is the Beer Garden which is popular for the night life and even now on sundays because football has started.

I saw the most media in windows of stores with ads and flyers for discounts or some type of deal that they were having. At some stores people were outside handing out flyers as well with a coupon on it.

Since Astoria Park is close by I walked there at night and saw the bridge and the buildings over the water. The pictures came out great! Its an awesome place to live.

 

– Lauren Rufrano

I’ve written poems about the L train running through Bushwick but I’d like to share a few pictures detailing the blocks surrounding me. In this series of photographs I hope the viewer comes to respect Bushwick as an emerging convergence of art and ungentrified culture. How much Puerto Rican mothers with babies in arms care for backyard plays put on by wino thespians I do not know. Both are symbolic to Bushwick’s character. The greatest challenge, I feel, would be making the viewer cease to see the difference between Puerto Rican mothers and young Brooklyn thespians. All of these are events in the blocks surrounding my apartment. Vegan stores, carnicerias, the “body self-actualization center.” I focused more on capturing situations instead of just still images. The photos have a small field of view, none are portraits, and you can generally see very little outside the object. I hoped each picture would be a thinking and emotional exercise, but unfortunately the collection was assembled hastily. Bushwick is expanding. Enjoy.

2013.

When people hear that I am from Great Neck they assume that I am the same as what they hear kids from great neck are on the news. They assume that we are all rich kids that pay for everything; including the SAT’s. People assume that because a group of kids paid for someone else to take their SAT’s for them or seeing the people from Great Neck that were on the show “Princesses of Long Island” then everyone else is the same way. From 60 minutes to eyewitness news every news station was there conducting interviews. They edited the interviews to make my hometown seem even worse. Through this mass communication the public had a bad image of Great Neck.

Great Neck is nothing like what it sounds like in the news. It is a tight knit predominately Persian-Jewish community full with kind people that help each other out. The media portrays people from Great Neck as the opposite. It showed our nice school with open campus and all of the houses with acres of land, but it didn’t show how almost everyone in the community are immigrants that have led extremely hard lives and worked really hard to get to this place.

Waking up on a nice Saturday morning you would see hundreds of people walking down middle neck road in both directions to get to temple. As you would past people everyone says “hi” to each other purely out of respect even if they do not know each other. It is almost guaranteed that you’ll see someone that you know and it is always fun to make connections and meet new people.Walking down middle neck road you would see all of the mom and popshops, the movie theatre and the little boutiques. Great Neck is more like how it is portrayed in “The Great Gatsby.” It is full of prosperous people with manners and is a great place to live.

David Neissani

I live in Murray hill. The neighborhood is loosely defined as about 32nd to 38th street covering 1st to 3rd avenues.  I personally live on 1st ave. The neighborhood is very uninteresting. Perhaps the most remarkable sight is the Armenian Church, yes hardly remarkable but it’s all we have. On any given day while strolling around the neighborhood one gets the pleasure of seeing crowds of very slow moving senior citizens. Another thing that is remarkable about my neighborhood is the amount of medical institutions present. There is Bellevue,NYU Medical centre, an insane asylum , The office of the medical examiner (final destination) amongst other smaller clinics.

Public transit is an issue in my neighborhood, While we do have the M15 bus which is dreary and slow, lovely for our plethora of senior citizens, but for us with something to do everyday there is no convenient subway line and thus one must walk at least a 3/4th of a mile (omg crisis!) to get to the train. Now this may seem like a minor inconvenience,  I assure you walking home on a rainy night past the waves of sports bars on third avenue full of yuppies is really annoying.  This leads us on to another prevalent demographic in Murray Hill. Yuppies, to be more specific, Midwestern yuppies working marketing jobs. I also work in this neighborhood so I get to deal with them on a pretty daily basis and it is terrible, they are pushy, at times disrespectful and miserly. In the interest of sanity I will leave it at that.

Another thing one may notice in my neighborhood is the horrendous police presence due to it’s close proximity to the UN.  This observation is especially clear this and next week while the the UN opens it’s 68th General Assembly. This police presence has the advantage of masking the area safer but the police are annoying to deal with and demand a sense of respect I am not prepared to hand out to them. Also the traffic patterns and street closures are under their mighty command.

This is all for now from  Boringville,Manhattan,New York

Qasim. W

 When I walk down from the F train to my building I think about how boring my neighborhood is. I am way down near the southern tip of Brooklyn, 20 minutes away from Brighton Beach. My neighborhood consists of mostly affluent Jewish families in their huge mansions and middle-class folk (most  are Russians) in their post-war buildings. The most lively part of my neighborhood is a walk to the Q train down Kings Highway where all of the businesses are compacted. There you can find expensive boutiques of gaudy clothing, kosher restaurants, delis, Mediterranean specialty food stores, 99 cent stores and so on.

I live a block away from Kings Highway and on Ocean Parkway, I simply think of my neighborhood as a place that people drive by on the way to another neighborhood. It’s an hour from Manhattan and an hour from anywhere worth being. In the front of my building there is a busy street that begins at the boardwalk (in Brighton Beach) and continues on to merge with the highway that goes north (eventually leads to the Bronx and upstate.)  I feel like if an outsider sometimes because I’m not part of the “real” Jewish community. Those who go to Yeshiva (which are prominent everywhere within the Midwood area) and go to Synagogues, follow their dress codes and eat kosher. My father is Jewish but is not religious, it’s in his blood and he brags about how great of a thing it is to be Jewish. He doesn’t even know Yiddish or Hebrew. It is easy to feel like an outsider when you’re not like the others around you, part of a different culture.

The most prominent media I notice are advertisements on storefronts, like Aldo, Walgreen’s and Dunkin Donuts. Other advertisements I notice are on the city buses and trains. One thing that is unavoidable as you walk down Kings Highway is being bombarded with people handing out flyers for small businesses that I figure no one will go to either way. Walking by those people always makes me nervous because I can never decide if I’ll take the paper or not. I think it’s fair to say that ‘the medium is the message’ in that case. That’s due to the way the flyers with a message are being handed out and how people walking by are reluctant to take them, that is where the message becomes lost and useless. No one ever takes a flyer advertising a Pawn Shop thinking, ” OH BOY! I SHOULD GO THERE TO GET RIPPED OFF!”

As I go to take out the trash in the hallway, there is something that is utterly unavoidable. There is one of my neighbors pacing the hallway with a Torah in his hand and a Yamaka on his head, muttering the holy words of the scriptures. It is a ritual for him; part of his devotion to God. You can always find him there, like it is his duty. I think the most influential medium in my neighborhood is the Torah. There is something that is ingrained into the people of this community, something deeper than other media can contribute to; the belief in God. Nothing can compare to a holy book that connects a human to something greater.

-Rachel Basevich

I live right off the 7 train in Flushing, Queens. There are so many things I could say about Flushing. During the day, its always busy. Filled with people, mainly Chinese immigrants from all different provinces but still very culturally diverse, all trying to get where they need to be. You can find restaurants, offices, shopping centers, and a bunch of little shops all around Flushing.

I took my walk around the block in the middle of the day on Sunday. People passing by, who are probably grocery shopping or heading to the main street. Some people are waiting for the bus. There are apartment complexes and a couple of small shops around my block. There’s a restaurant, a deli, a pharmacy, a Korean video store, a Western Union, and a couple of offices. Most of the media I found on my block came from all the different signs and storefronts, filling the street with color. Ads on the windows, displaying what they’re selling or if there are any special offers. A 20% off sign in one of the stores but I don’t know what they were selling. Some graffiti here and there and that’s about it.

I’m not sure how I feel about living in Flushing. I hate it but at the same time, I do kinda love it here.

 

-Austin Chou

 

Today’s Tuesday, a pretty ordinary weekday, not hated enough to be a monday but rather clumped in there with Wednesday and Thursday. I live on Long Island in Suffolk County and took my stroll around 5 p.m. I used to live in lower Manhattan, but for some reason even though I had always planned to go to a CUNY school, my dad thought it was a good idea to move a couple of years ago to come out the Island, which makes for a tiring commute, I promise you. Since my town is right near a train station with a direct route to Penn Station, I noticed bumper to bumper traffic on the one narrow street that runs through our entire town.

Most of the media I came across on my walk was just store front signs and a few advertisements in shop windows. The design of the signs and the names of the shops, as well, portray an image to customers, such as the tattoo shop called Inkpulsive with a flatline underneath it to give it emphasis.

Another shop is Slater Drugs, a local pharmacy that I have never seen a soul walk into or out of. In fact, this car is the first I’ve ever seen in the parking lot. They put an emphasis on the fact that it is family run, but most people still just go to CVS if you ask me. I went inside with two of my friends for a quick look around and noticed mostly elderly people and one child sitting and waiting with a presumed grandparent. This kid was demonstrating organic convergence because he was sitting in a chair near the counter playing a game on a Nintendo DS while watching the television on the wall. We left after that.

The most interesting form of media I saw today I wish I took a picture of but I was driving. I was driving over a small bridge to pick up one of my friends from the train station when a group of people standing right near the edge were waving signs up and down over the L.I.E. that said “Impeach Obama!” This example of propaganda practically caused me a car accident, so at least for me the message was not received. Besides, five people on a bridge aren’t going to get a president impeached, they’re just making themselves look kind of crazy. Can’t they just hand out flyers? I guess no one of Long Island owns a photo copier.

Michaela Yurick

It was around 5:30 when the sun was setting and creating tall, uncanny shadows of people who stood in its ray. I found myself looking keenly at my surroundings, and although they were familiar, my eyes were opened to new things. I walked along the quiet street with no one around and spotted graffiti along the the street and around the corner.

It was interesting to see the graffiti because I saw the different styles of art and was able to connect them to its artist. Although it’s illegal, I like graffiti; I think it’s a candid, direct message that reaches to a broad audience because it’s a part of the environment. Graffiti used to be a popular medium in the 1980’s, but through technological advancements, I think it lost a lot of its value. It was refreshing to see it impact me (causation) as a part of the audience as I hoped it did to other passersby.

Then I came across a street pole with a mod podge of flyers.

Because I am unfamiliar with Spanish, it was difficult to interpret the messages. I understood a few words like “clases”, “piano”, and obviously “reward”, but the rest was unknown! This was when I realized that media literacy is important because without it, it creates barriers and narrows the audience members to only those who understand.

I turned another corner onto the boulevard and walked across the LOOK! campaign.

I just found it extremely ironic that I stopped to take a picture on the street, even though the campaign was meant to remind the pedestrians to LOOK(!) and be mindful of oncoming traffic. As I safely crossed the street, I finally heard noise! People were hollering and buses were making entrances. I thought it was amazing how different sides on one block could be so… different.

I finally took my last turn around the corner to the blinding sunlight and made my way back home in the serenity of the windy weather.

–Jenn K.

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