Welcome back fellow Commoners,

I’ve been thinking a lot about New York City lately because I’m teaching a course on Literature and Place this semester at Queens College. I decided to focus the class not only on how place and setting are important to literature, but on New York City as a particularly “literary” place. There are so many stories about the places my students currently inhabit, and it’s been my hope throughout the semester that students contrast their experiences living in the city with it’s literary depictions. One weekly reminder I have of the dissonance these can have is when the bus I ride to QC drives past Flushing-Corona Park. The site now famous for being home to two World’s Fairs and (perhaps ingloriously) as the site for the dramatic ending sequence in the movie Men in Black (). My students are often stunned to realize that Flushing-Corona Park was once the home to massive dump for the coal ashes that heated homes throughout the city and that the “Valley of Ashes” made famous by F. Scott Fitzgerald in the Great Gatsby is one and the same. So this week I want to highlight a few New York City-focused pages from around the Commons.

New York State of Mind: Dispatches on American Literature, Culture & Identity – A mapping project from Professor J. Brett Maney and students at Lehman College, this maps the locations of well-known texts with links so you can read them!

How Poor Public Transit Makes Idiots of Us All – There isn’t much that can be more New York than complaining about public transit, especially recent amidst increasing MTA service problems and derailments. In this post hosted by the CUNY school of Professional Studies’ Murphey Institute, Professor Kafui Attoh discusses what our public transit problem mean for city planning.

The Bronx was Brewing: Mapping the Breweries of the 23rd Ward – I guess I’m a sucker for a mapping project. In this MALS capstone project, the historical breweries of the Bronx (once home to 17 breweries in a 10 block radius!) are mapped and discussed.

That’s it for this week. Have fun exploring the Commons!

Best,

Paul