1. How do you make a new page on Wikipedia?
2. Is there a limit on how many pictures can be used?
3. Is there a limit to how many subtopics a page can include? Is there a maximum size for each page?

transportation bibliography final

ben sternhell site report 5 farragut houses

ben sternhell bibliography

It was interesting meeting a NYCHA representative, property manager Cyriaca Decaille, and learning about how the people in the Farragut Houses live. I didn’t know, for instance, that their rent was tied to their income, and I didn’t know that there was a long waiting list to get into the projects. It was also really interesting going inside a building and seeing a lobby. I found it kind of depressing. I live in a kind of “project” myself—Stuyvesant Town in Manhattan, much in the news lately—but our lobbies and hallways are much more inviting.

I enjoyed learning about the services available to the Farragut Houses residents, everything from tutoring to elder care. I was impressed—though not surprised—to hear about all the work that goes into maintaining a complex of this size. Ms. Decaille answered a wide variety of questions about everything from safety to apartment sizes to education in the area, all of which gave me a fuller understanding of the community. Unfortunately she was not able to answer my questions about public transportation in the neighborhood (she said, “I don’t know; I drive!”). I had hoped to find out which subways stations most residents used, whether they commuted to work by subway, whether they tended to work in Brooklyn, Manhattan, or another borough, whether the local stations were convenient, and whether the neighborhood was well served by public transportation. Although these questions weren’t answered, the visit was enlightening in other ways.

One thing I’m very interested in, in addition to transportation (my hobby!), is gentrification, the sharp divide between rich and poor—seen so clearly in the Farragut Houses/Vinegar Hill/DUMBO neighborhood. Ms. Decaille addressed some of this when she talked about the availability of jobs, the neighborhood schools, the lack of a nearby supermarket (something I had already read about in The New York Times), and the sharp dividing line between rich and poor neighborhoods. We also heard about it in the WNYC radio program we listened to and many articles exist online, including one in the New York Daily News titled “Life of Poverty and Fear in Brooklyn Housing Project for Those in Shadow of Wealth.” This is a problem throughout the city, and an issue I care about deeply myself. I hope the residents of Farragut Houses and their wealthy DUMBO neighbors can find ways of bridging the divide.

I really enjoyed our visit to the New York Public Library map room. I’d been to the library many times, of course, but I’d never been to the map room before. I didn’t even know it existed!

I looked at many different maps of the area around the Farragut Houses, generally known as DUMBO, downtown Brooklyn, and/or Vinegar Hill. I found lots of interesting information about the street layout and how it changed over the years. The most interesting thing actually was the fact that it didn’t change very much until the Farragut Houses were constructed.  At that point, the neighborhood was demolished. Streets disappeared, were deleted, replaced by superblocks.

I didn’t find a lot of new information about transportation to the area—the main topic of my research project—because transit maps were not made available to us during our visit to the library. I did find one page in one book relating to the subway system, however, a map showing plans for the second system, the city’s planned expansion of the subway right before the Great Depression. The Depression derailed the plans, and then World War II killed them entirely: there were no workers around to do the building and all available iron and steel was needed for the war effort. One part of the planned system, the Second Avenue subway, is still under construction today.

It was very meaningful to me to be surrounded by all those maps, the physical record of our changing city. I find maps—especially paper maps—fascinating, almost poetic, a way to be in touch with history. I’m glad I discovered the NYPL map room. I’m sure I’ll return.

I’m looking forward to our visit to the New York Public Library map room. I’m very fond of that library; when I was a kid I used to sit on the steps and talk to the lions, Patience and Fortitude. I got a library card as soon as I could print my first name, though I mainly went to my local branches to take out books. I’m also looking forward to the visit because I’ve never been to the map room and I’ve always liked looking at maps. I really like geography so I find looking at old maps very interesting. I collect city maps whenever I travel—and of course I collect subway/metro/underground maps.

Matthew Allen Knutzen’s article, “Unbinding the Atlas: Moving the NYPL Map Collection Beyond Digitization,” was fascinating. I hadn’t thought much—at all—before about the process of digitizing paper maps. It’s an amazing project: not just simply putting maps online, but coordinating them with all sorts of other data about the region displayed and making them searchable not just by area names but by coordinates of longitude and latitude. That means it will be possible to find a map of a region even if the region had a different name or was still unnamed. It will be possible to visualize the changes in a region over time. An earlier project discussed, Building a Globally Distributed Historical Sheet Map Collection—“centered on a set of 776 topographic maps published in multiple editions by the Austro-

Hungarian Empire from 1877 to 1914”—would have been incredibly useful for another class I’m taking right now on immigration history. My own ancestors came from the Austro-Hungarian Empire during exactly those years.

It will be interesting to see the NYPL’s map collection, hundreds of thousands of maps spanning centuries—and it’s exciting to think that in the future I’ll be able to search many (most? all?) of this material online.