Neighborhood Quotes - Page 38

• Most of the time, people are not actually concerned with prostitution and sex work. They're concerned about seeing people who they think are prostitutes and sex workers in their community. Sometimes this just comes down to profiling, the feeling of "I don't want someone who looks like that in my neighborhood." We need communities and neighbors to regard sex workers as part of the community and fellow neighbors. But that's really difficult. There's certainly nothing supporting that.

  Melissa Gira Grant

  Thinking, People, Community

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• When Allen Ginsberg was still alive, he was was an artist, but he was very local. He was just another wing-nut in the neighborhood and he was very accessible. You'd see him in Tompkins Square Park or in the local delicatessen, in one of the greasy spoon restaurants on First Avenue or a Chinese restaurant.

  Eric Drooker

  Artist, Chinese

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Street posters allowed you to have the last word. If you put them up in your neighborhood, you were speaking to your neighbor.

  Eric Drooker

  Neighbor, Posters, Last Words

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• One of the crucial underpinnings of New York as a culture capital is that there are multiple markets. There is not just one art gallery district, there are several art gallery districts. I feel that there should be art galleries and art studios in every neighborhood without exception. They should be integrated into the social and physical fabric of the streets. If we want a lively city, we can't just have high towers and dense constructions, we have to have living organisms of streets and neighborhoods. And the arts are a crucial part of that.

  Sharon Zukin

  Art, Culture, Construction

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Artists have been used over and over again since the early 1980s as the legitimizers of a neighborhood in New York. And entrepreneurial artists, meaning people who themselves start out as painters, musicians, dancers, and who open a café, a bar, a restaurant, or even a co-op art gallery - they unintentionally develop the kinds of attractions that bring the middle class with some kind of cultural ambition.

  Sharon Zukin

  Art, Ambition, People

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• When new businesses open that are trying to attract people with cultural capital or cultural ambitions, they are often more expensive than traditional neighborhood stores and cafés, they offer different products, and they have a different atmosphere. Longtime residents may feel uncomfortable there. Structurally, as a group of gentrifiers gets bigger, there is less room for longtime residents. When it becomes a pattern and you can see the effects, we call that displacement.

  Sharon Zukin

  Ambition, People, Atmosphere

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• I think that there is a middle-class desire, and maybe an almost universal desire, among many human beings to live in clean neighborhoods, among people like themselves, around people with whom they feel comfortable. That can be exclusive, it could be exclusionary. It could be racist, classist, genocidal, and so on. Most people like comfort. Now what provides a sense of comfort varies. I do think that people who like living in cities like small-scale human interaction and they like the social dimensions of aesthetic diversity that Jane Jacobs wrote about.

  Sharon Zukin

  Thinking, People, Diversity

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• I think people like difference. When you walk out the door in New York City, in a mixed-use neighborhood like the Village, you see exciting things! "Oh, this store is closing, that store is opening." And especially if it's not a chain store, then it is interesting because it is unique in some way. The small-scale familiar is also very comforting. Especially in the twenty-first century, when the world is rapidly changing and there are many risky situations, I think we need to build on and protect the comfort that we have in our neighborhoods in a way that does not exclude others.

  Sharon Zukin

  Unique, Thinking, People

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• When the Romani people came and settled in Gioia Tauro in the '60s and the '70s, they took over a neighborhood much like Africans are doing now that became like their "ghetto". Obviously, there are immense differences in Romani culture - there is more of a distrust of the outside and less willingness to integrate that stopped it from happening. The illiteracy rate is still very high, and they are still very much keeping themselves sectioned off from the rest of the community. I don't think that's going to happen with the African community.

  Jonas Carpignano

  Ghetto, Thinking, People

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Everywhere you go you find readers who are interested, even though the story takes place here in this very neighborhood. It doesn't matter that it takes place locally if the intention to make it universal is there. That's what I strive to do.

  Jaume Cabre

  Intention, Strive

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• I still don't know how to drive. I don't go anywhere, really. My brother drives me. I walk around my neighborhood but I don't go anywhere, nor do I want to.

  Fiona Apple

  Brother, My Brother

  Source: pitchfork.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• We're missing a lot of the real-life stories of what people's work looks like. Those are the people that I want sitting on the zoning board meetings, on the zoning commissions. Those are the people I want participating in business improvement in their own industry. The gentrification processes that often happen in cities so often manifest in street sweeps of sex workers. How do you get sex workers on neighborhood associations, regarded as members of the neighborhood?

  Melissa Gira Grant

  People, Missing, Improvement

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• There was this very deliberate move to just overlay an American reality in Iraq. I've never actually seen the map, but apparently Americans thought the names of places were just too complicated so they got decent maps of Baghdad and just renamed everything with familiar names. This neighborhood would be Hollywood, that neighborhood would be Manhattan, and that one's Madison, you're going to drive down Oak and take a left on Main Street.

  Elliott Colla

  Moving, Reality, Complicated

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• This is essential that we have a resurgence in democratic participation. And I don't mean big-D Democrat, I mean small-D democrat. I mean getting involved in your neighborhood, your community. This is no time to say, "I'm not into politics." This is a time to go headlong into the welfare of this nation.

  Keith Ellison

  Mean, Community, Welfare

  Source: www.truth-out.org

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• The thing I love about New York is getting lost but not worrying, just wandering and wandering, knowing that there's always a subway only ten blocks away in any direction. There's always a new neighborhood to discover, a new place to lose your bearings in, and yet however alien it seems you can escape. You can always get a cab. All of life's problems can be solved by hailing a cab.

  Colson Whitehead

  Block, Worry, Aliens

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Jim Jones started out as a civil rights crusader in Indianapolis. As a young preacher in the mid-50s, he used members of his congregation to integrate lunch counters and all-white churches in rich neighborhoods; they'd just march in and sit down at the pews and see what happened. Often they were received with racist insults, and once with a bomb threat. But the fact that you had this charismatic, white man, aggressively promoting racial equality, was a huge draw for African Americans, many of whom felt the Civil Rights Movement had stalled by the late 60s.

  Julia Scheeres

  Men, African American, Church

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• In terms of addressing some of the most impacted communities and historically excluded communities - often of color, often low income - there is this adage in specifically African American communities that on every corner in low income neighborhoods you'll find a liquor store.

  Bryant Terry

  Community, African American, Liquor

  "MoJo Video: Bryant Terry’s Vegan Soul Kitchen". Interview With Brittney Andres, www.motherjones.com. April 10, 2009.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• I'm very much inspired by the Latin music, especially the romantic boleros. Not that when I sit to write a play I listen to boleros. But I think it's part of my DNA, it's part of my upbringing. I grew up in a house where this is the kind of music my parents used to listen to. This is the kind of music I would even hear in my neighborhood. I think that sort of romanticism is part of the culture.

  Nilo Cruz

  Latin, Writing, Thinking

  4 Copy quote

• I lived on Thompson Street in SoHo for 13 years and I watched it go from a little Italian neighborhood to the Mall Of America. Then the obvious fact that it's pre-Internet, pre-cell phone. Everyone I think thinks their youth is a more innocent time. I just don't know.

  Greg Mottola

  Italian, Thinking, Youth

  4 Copy quote

• I think oldest children have a different mentality or know that there were different expectations of them, and I was not only the oldest child - I was the oldest grandchild of 18 grandchildren. I definitely grew up feeling like there were a lot of people who expected me to do something. But it was a very conservative family, very conservative neighborhood. I'm talking mid- to late '60s when I was growing up there, and so if I had stayed in the Boston area, I think my life would have been radically different.

  Susan Lyne

  Children, Growing Up, Thinking

  5 Copy quote

• No one likes to be treated like people in minority communities. What it's saying is that because you're poor, because you live in a neighborhood that deals with oppressed conditions, you deserve to be treated like a criminal. In our Constitution it says you have the right to live without illegal search and seizure.

  Talib Kweli

  People, Community, Constitution

  4 Copy quote

• What else is stop and frisk? These neighborhoods are unsafe not because there's not enough cops illegally frisking people. They're not safe because of economic conditions. They're not safe because of all types of things in the government that people like Mike Bloomberg and Ray Kelly should be looking to fix instead of randomly searching kids in the hood. If you go to a college campus and you do stop and frisk, you're going to find a lot of drugs there, too.

  Talib Kweli

  Kids, College, People

  "Talib Kweli Stands His Ground". Interview With AJ Vicens, www.motherjones.com. August 26, 2013.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• We must do more to protect our neighborhoods and give integrity to our community plans.

  Alan Autry

  Integrity, Giving, Community

  "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• My natural instinct after doing something shameful is not to rush into the street boasting about it but to put on dark glasses and head for the next county, hoping nobody notices I've been in the neighborhood.

  Russell Baker

  Dark, Glasses, Natural Instinct

  4 Copy quote

• Epidemic obesity is an enormous problem. It's a pendulum that's swung too far. We have to swing it back. So it should come as no surprise that solution must be built from the ground up on the banks of this flooding river and it must be raised to a height higher than flood waters. Now what does that look like? It looks like policies and programs that cultivate healthy levels of physical activity, healthy dietary patterns in homes, in schools, in supermarkets, in neighborhoods, in clinics, in churches, in workplaces, throughout our society, every place we can reach people.

  David Katz

  School, Home, People

  Source: bigthink.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source