I’ve spent the last few days at the New York Public Library Performing Arts Collection which is located at 40 Lincoln Center Plaza. All of my research here has been going through their vast collection of playbills, photographs, architectural plans, newspaper clippings about the various theaters that I’ve determined will be the focus of my study. I’m not a stranger to research libraries, but I had never before used an actual card catalog before – of the analog sort where one has to pull out a drawer and search for related information. I was a little shocked when the librarian suggested this was the easiest way to find all materials related to theaters in Brooklyn, but I ended up really enjoying the process and it made my research feel more like a fun scavenger hunt. I also got to use microfilm for the first time when I was looking at old vaudeville programs from 1912-13 from the Bushwick Theater and the Greenpoint Theater.
Thus far I’ve done two major steps in my archival retrieval. The first being the research at the New York Public Library that I mentioned in the previous paragraph. Second is, although it isn’t technically archival, I’ve logged and mapped the various sites of theaters that I’ve found and taken photographs of their current condition (or if the theater doesn’t exist – which almost none of them do, I’ve taken photos of the current buildings that are situated on the former theater sites. These photographs will provide the last point in the timeline that I’m creating and more importantly, help to address some of the major questions have arisen since starting this project: With such a plethora of former theaters in the area, how were these entertainment sites repurposed? Why did almost all of the movie theaters close in the 1970’s (as my research seems to suggest)? Was this due to some sort of radical shift going on in the neighborhood or in cinema itself?
There are three more phases of research left to do that include going to the Brooklyn Public Library and looking for more photographs of the theaters. I also need to look at the deeds for each property to get a bigger picture for just how use has changed over the years. The deeds are located at the Municipal Records Office. And lastly I think it would be interesting to see how the demographics of the neighborhood shifted over the course of time and thus altered the need and availability of theaters. This can be done by looking at old census data.
http://www.bandtoband.com
“mapping the rock n roll genome”
Band2Band is an interesting user created map taking the form of a family tree and is meant to show the interconnected relationships between musicians and bands. Unlike websites like Pandora, which are able to aggregate not only musicians, but genres of music resulting in an accurate forecast of musical taste, Band2Band is set up to visually display connections between groups.
It is possible to submit bands to the website that haven’t yet been listed, but to do so requires the adherence to a very strict set of rules. These rules, which (to name just a few) range from what to do when a band changes its name, when an artist changes their name, how to categorize super-groups and jam bands which have revolving cast of musicians – could be the reason why there is a real lack of bands and musicians listed on the site. When trying the map out, the first two bands that I wanted to check out weren’t in the database. Both of the bands, Dirty Projectors and Bon Iver, are less than ten years old so I decided to try something a little bit older and my next input, Smog, a band from the 90’s, did show up. With Smog, the first page that the search feature takes you to contains a photographic list of all the albums that the band produced. When I scrolled down I was also able to see that the site only listed Bill Callahan as the sole member of the band. And upon further scrolling I could see the family tree with 119 bands stemming from Smog. The bands are hyperlinked, so you can go into each of their specific sites and explore.
I checked to see when the site was last updated and found that the copyright was current. How could it be that there was such a lack of bands in the database? Couldn’t Band2Band hook up with a website like last.fm or myspace music to automatically create a database of bands, band members, and albums to then create a visual map using that data?
This site, in my opinion, requires a major revamp. Although there is a link that allows you to play a short preview of songs by the artist whose page you are on, it would be nice if it could do that within the map, instead of on the sidebar. I’d also like to know more about band history that could be located on a subpage. I’d also like the map to be the central feature of the site, instead of having it placed at the bottom of the page.
As far as the map itself, perhaps it would be better to create an interactive web. This way it is possible to see the larger picture of the various connections within the music industry. Facebook, in its very early days, had a feature that I absolutely loved: you could map out how all of your friends were connected and through whom. You could then see who were the key members of groups of friends, an activity that I remember spending hours on until it was mysteriously taken down. Perhaps it could even have two options for viewing: if you want to get lost in music connections, a sort of “choose your own adventure” click-through flash application could work best. But if you wanted to see the overall picture, perhaps a full web could be shown with the closest 150 connections related to the artist of your choosing.
I do like how the site allows you to link to amazon to purchase albums. I also like that it is possible to generate random maps between artists and bands but so much redesign needs to go into creating a useful interactive map.
by Douglas Gomery
My neighborhood of Greenpoint, Brooklyn is full of old movie theaters that have been repurposed into other important community centers, be it a bank, pharmacy, or even a church. While I’ve bemoaned the lack of a proper cinema in north Brooklyn, new, ultra indie movie theaters are starting to pop up in storefronts, apartment buildings and other non traditional spaces in the neighborhood.
I’m assuming that it was a lack of profitability, due to a shift to a vertical production and distribution method by Hollywood that led to the shuttering of the neighborhood’s original theaters, whose ornately decorated ceilings and walls allow for a glimpse into the past. North Brooklyn’s new population of working creatives, who desire more venues of entertainment within the neighborhood, are clearly what are driving the current surge in boutique film venues today.
By analyzing the history of both the neighborhood (in terms of demographics) and film production within the United States, I believe that I’ll be able to quantify just how the two waves of movie theater existence came to happen. My research will begin by looking at the locations of the old theaters as well as their specific neighborhood’s demographic at the time of establishment. I’ll gather not only the data, but also images from the archives of the interior and exterior of the buildings at (hopefully) the time of their establishment and time of closing. I’ll juxtapose those images with ones of what the buildings look like now. This will in turn show if they had been torn down or repurposed. It is possible to do this with today’s theaters, showing what they were originally and what they are today while also studying the current demographic of the specific area within north Brooklyn in which they are located.
Even with some preliminary investigation that included looking at maps of my neighborhood on the New York Public Library’s digital archive site, I learned that several places I frequent, including my grocery store, were, in 1916, theaters. So why study these two waves of theaters in the neighborhood? Entertainment’s, and the various buildings that house centers of entertainment, use in society can be seen as a marker for the healthiness of the economy and also can help to pinpoint major changes within the demographics of a city (or within a city, a specific neighborhood). It is also important to chart how the failing of Hollywood to achieve the monetary success that it once had in the 1980’s and 90’s has contributed, on a more localized level, to the development of a stronger independent movement within cinema.
Besides for having archival and recent images, the interactive map should also be able to convey the changing demographics of the neighborhood. Perhaps the best way to show this would be with some sort of color overlay that could represent the amount of recent immigrants or median income or even what job sector residents resided in, with a different color for a different decade. And when placed with the other maps from class, a portrait of New York City should emerge; one that traces nearly every element of urban life since, let’s assume, the era of industrialization.
Possible Bibliography:
Dunn, Angela Fox. “William Fox: Cinema Czar.” Westways. 73.11 (1981): 35. Print.
Hiler, Mary Louise. [1973] The Beginnings of the Cinema in Brooklyn: the Vitagraph Company of America, 1898-2925. Thesis (BA) St. Joseph’s College. USA.
Levy, Emanual. Cinema of Outsiders: The rise of American independent film. New York, NY: New York University Press, 1999.
Musser, Charles. “American Vitagraph: 1897-1901.” Cinema Journal. 22.3 (1983): 4-46
Newman, Michael. “Indie Culture: In pursuit of the Authentic Autonomous Alternative.” Cinema Journal. 48.3 (2009): 16-34.
Perera, L.A.D. The rise, decline, and fall of Hollywood’s mighty empires. 1st. New York, NY: Vantage Press, 1992.
Torrence, Bruce. Hollywood, the fist hundred years. New York, NY: Zoetrope, 1979.
Other sources:
The NYC Department of Records – Municipal Archives’ Collection includes original census documents from 1905 and 1915. These are organized by Ward. It also has assessed values of real estate from 1789 – 1979. This could be an interesting marker for inflation and the changing value of property within neighborhoods. The collection also includes the archives of the WPA FEDERAL WRITERS’ PROJECT (NYC UNIT) which lasted from 1936-1943.
Brooklyn College has one specific archive that could be of use called Brooklyniana. This includes photographs and maps.
BrooklynPix.com has a collection of photographs of old theaters.
use bell hooks’s (and others) concepts of the Other and imperialist nostalgia to read the Burger King whopper virgins commercial.
My research began with the assumption that sometime in the future I am going to create a visual ethnography about recent Chinese immigrants in New York’s Chinatown. Living within close proximity to the enclave, I became fascinated by the motivation required to travel across the world for a better life and concurrently if when here, are the immigrants happy with their decision to leave their homes and families? To begin such a project requires an understanding of the history of Chinatowns across the United States, as well as knowledge of current trends in Chinese immigration patterns.
Mark Abraham’s book, Urban Enclaves, argues that within current ethnic enclaves today, there is no longer a desire for assimilation, nor does “social mobility…require movement out of the enclave” (Abrahamson 15). This is a major shift from the historical ideal assimilation and movement understood from previous generations. Min Zhou and John R. Logan explain that the reasons for the increased high numbers of Chinese in Chinatown, in contrast to the lower numbers of other ethnic groups who actually live in designated ethnic enclaves, results from specific factors—that “most of the Chinese immigrants entered New York to join their families, and they came disproportionately from rural areas of South China, bringing little education and few industrial skills with them. These immigrants provided the labor force for an ethnic economy” (Zhou 392). And yet, this answer doesn’t seem to explain or provide credible reasoning as to why such a thriving and self-inclusive Chinatown exists while, for instance, Korea town can barely be called an ethnic enclave. There does not seem to be any conclusive answer as to why Chinatown became so centralized as opposed to other immigrant communities.
Min Zhou and John R. Logan’s sociological study of Chinatown and its residents, although important for understanding the enclave’s history, is outdated. Almost all of the data cited census statistics from the early 1970s until the late 1980s. Migration patterns can change greatly in the course of fifteen years and a new study needs to be conducted to update and expand previous work. Christopher J. Smith conducted a detailed ethnography for his article Asian New York: The Geography and Politics of Diversity that was published in 1995. It is important to note that his article focuses on Asian immigration more broadly (not just on Chinese immigration) with an emphasis on Flushing, Queens as a destination for Asian immigrants. In fact, according to yet another outdated source, two-thirds of recent immigrants (not just Chinese) settle in Brooklyn or Queens (Edmondson 16). Flushing has, according to Smith’s paper, become an important cultural capital and destination for all Asian immigrants. As of the winter of 2007, there are more than twenty civic organizations of ethnic Chinese from main land China active in the Flushing Community (Haifeng 10). This shows that there is an incredibly strong community, but is the community only self-inclusive? Does the enclave understand the importance of representation in local and state government? In 2000, Chen Daoying became the first ethnic Chinese New York State member of Congress. (Haifeng 11) Such political participation perhaps reflects a dissolution of the enclave by opening a greater channel of communication between residents and the government. Are community leaders now more than ever required to abide by labor laws and housing codes in order to receive government funding?
It is important to note that the bulk of existing research, specifically the sociological studies which relied on data and numbers, does not include the undocumented population. The majority of recent immigrants from China are illegal (cite source). In order to get an accurate estimate of the number of illegal immigrants in the New York area (incorporating all Chinatowns such as the ones in Manhattan and Flushing), community organizations and churches within Chinatown seem to be the best way to not only get an accurate statistic of the number of undocumented Chinese immigrants, but also serve as a gateway.
Much of the existing research tends to use statistical analysis as the primary methodology. However, some studies used ethnographic means such as Kenneth Guest’s ethnography, God in Chinatown: Religion and Survival in New York’s Evolving Immigrant Community (2003), which uses religion and various churches in Chinatown to explain both the documented and undocumented Chinese immigrant experience. This book provides an excellent model for documentary work and for future research that is concerned less with sweeping statistical data and more with intimate stories. What must it be like to grow up in a household that includes several generations including recent immigrants and children born in the United States to these immigrants? This question is reminiscent of Joan Mandell, Andrew Shryock, Sally Howell and Dwight Reynold’s visual ethnography, Tales from Arab Detroit, which was – at its essence – about the assimilation and the dissolving traditional cultural practices with each generation within Dearborn, Michigan’s Arab enclave. This same subject, while focusing on Chinese immigrants in New York, could be a fascinating way to record a particular unique perspective on the immigrant experience.
There is one passage in Guest’s book that diverges from the positive images that predominate stories of Chinese immigration found in other works on the subject. He writes, “For while Chinatown is a gateway into America for most Fuzhounese and the beginning of their pursuit of the American dream, for many Chinatown is also a trap, an ethnic enclave manufactured by the economic and political Chinatown elites to keep them [recent immigrants] isolated and thus vulnerable to labor exploitation” (Guest 17).
Ko-Lin Chin, in his book Smuggled Chinese: Clandestine Immigration to the United States, surveys and interviews several hundred illegal immigrants, community workers and social workers in the New York area. These immigrants primarily come from Fuzhou, “a city in southeastern China [that] has overtaken Canton as the leading ethnic community origin of immigrants from China” (Guest 4). Both Chin and Guest chronicle the human smuggling business that has evolved to accommodate the many Fuzhounese who wish to leave China. While documenting their struggle, Chin also asks the question of why such a mass exodus seems to be occurring. He concludes that it is because of both the myth of the American dream and the established immigrant network that provides jobs and support for a new life (Chin 34).
There seems to be confusion as to whether the smugglers are part of organized crime rings or work on their own. This could be an interesting question to address in future research. Smugglers, also known as snakeheads, charge anywhere between $30,000 up to $60,000 (US dollars) per person (Chin 20). They provide false visas and passports for flying as well as accommodation on ships to Mexico where the immigrants are brought across the border into the United States by the same routes that Mexicans use to cross over illegally.
Once in America, it is usually the extended family within the United States that pays the smuggler, leaving the immigrant in debt to the family. The debt, which in many ways resembles indentured servitude, is normally paid off within several years (Sawoski-Smith 794). The enclave and religious institutions provide the necessary network for immigrants to find places to live, food to eat and jobs. The new illegal Chinese are subcontracted, along with recent immigrants from across the world, to provide services at the bottom of the social ladder: construction, kitchen, factory etc. And yet, more than other immigrant groups, the Chinese tend to subcontract within their own enclave; the recent immigrants working long hours and for less than legal pay for the business leaders of Chinatown (Light 1345). “The business leadership has actually attempted to prevent the American public from gaining access to information about crime, housing, poverty and disease in Chinatowns…which has led to a failure to attract federal welfare funds” (Light 1355). Does the recent representation of the community in government (as I wrote earlier) have any effect on this lack of welfare? And yet, even with the previously noted crime, cramped housing conditions and poverty found in Chinatown, the area is still able to remain a tourist destination.
Greg Umbach and Dan Wishnoff’s article, Strategic Self Orientalism: Urban Planning Policies and the Shaping of New York City’s Chinatown, 1950-2005, examines how and why New York’s Chinatown never evolved into the tourist spectacle characteristic of other major Chinatowns. They argue that Chinatowns across the United States (and even in Canada and Great Britain) were built in such a way as to promote exoticism and authenticity as means to increase tourism – the mainstay of most Chinatowns. The economy of New York’s Chinatown was never based only on vice or tourism. It was a true immigrant ghetto instead of a manufactured quasi-reality. The reality is that recent immigrants are forced to work so hard that it seems as if there isn’t even enough time for assimilation. While I wasn’t able to find any numbers or first hand accounts to support this claim, it is a subject that I plan on tackling when I begin interviewing immigrants.
Annette Bernhardt conducted extensive research on workplace violations in New York City. Her research took the form of interviews with 326 individuals ranging from workers to supervisors in unregulated and semi-regulated industries. According to her own research, the Department of Labor “found that in 1999, only 35 percent of apparel plants in New York City were in compliance with wage and working-time laws” (Bernhardt 137). The apparel industry is a major employer of recent Chinese immigrants. Even employment agencies exploit new immigrants by, after charging for their services, sending workers to jobs that do not exist or to jobs that violate labor laws (Bernhardt 153). The articles on exploitation state the problem in a detached manner, but never are the stories heard of those who are facing such exploitation. Future research could provide an outlet and bring the issue to the forefront of academic circles.
Although Umbach and Wishnoff state that the economy was never based on vice, this does not mean that illegal activities do not exist in New York’s Chinatown. On the contrary, prostitution seems to be thriving. There is a lack of academic articles specifically adressing the sex trade in Chinatown. However, Denny Lee’s New York Times article Immigrants Work in Parlors Offering More Than Massages does offer a journalistic view. This article, although from eight years ago, noted that the New York police department does not keep track of massage parlors that act as fronts for prostitution in back rooms. Lee also references two community groups: the Chinatown Planning Council and the Better Chinatown Association as sources for realistic statistics on illegal sex workers in the area.
James McKinley and N.R. Kleinfield wrote several articles, also for the New York Times, about a specific brothel on the Bowery in Chinatown that had trafficked women from Thailand to New York and kept them against their will. It seems that the majority of women who are trafficked come from Thailand, a country that specializes in the business of prostitution. Even though Siddharth Kara’s book, Sex Trafficking: Inside the Business of Modern Slavery, is about prostitution and slavery in Thailand, his methods (surveys and interviews of young women forced into prostitution) provide excellent guidelines for future research. He would actually go to the brothels and instead of engaging in sexual acts with the girls he would talk to them. Perhaps my gender will be a hinderence to conducting field studies, but it is nonetheless important to try to get a dialogue started. By using resources available, such as community advocate and health organizations, I think that it would still be possible to conduct research on a subject that is inevitably cloaked in secrecy.
I was struck by the lack of academic writing on the subject. From the numerous massage parlors I pass daily where I have noticed men entering and exiting, it is obvious that prostitution and the exploitation of women occurs in the enclave. Why isn’t this part of any academic discourse? Perhaps sex trafficking and prostitution are separate issues that deserve their own ethnographic study. But there needs to be a defining text on Chinese immigrants in Chinatown that provides a detailed account of real life, just as Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle did in it’s representation of Chicago’s immigrant community working in meat processing factories. My ethnography could be this text.
Works Cited
Abrahamson, Mark. Urban Enclaves : Identity and Place in America. New York: Worth, Incorporated, 1995.
Bernhardt, Annette. “The state of worker protections in the United States: Unregulated work in New York City.” International Labour Review 147 (2008): 135-62.
Chin, Ko-lin. Smuggled Chinese: Clandestine Immigration to the United States. Philadelphia, PA: Temple UP, 1999.
Edmondson, Brad. “The Newest New Yorkers.” American Demographics 19 (1997): 16-17.
Guest, Kenneth J. God in Chinatown : Religion and Survival in New York’s Evolving Immigrant Community. New York: New York UP, 2003.
Haifeng, Zhu. “Self-Balancing of New Immigrants in Social Ecology.” Chinese Studies in History 41 (2007-8): 8-14.
Kara, Siddharth. Sex Trafficking Inside the Business of Modern Slavery. New York, NY: Columbia UP, 2009.
Kleinfield, N.R. “Five Charged With Holding Thai Women Captive for Prostitution.” The New York Times 5 Jan. 1995: B1.
Kleinfield, N.R. “Former Office in Chinatown Admits That He Took Bribes.” The New York Times 14 June 1995: B2.
Lee, Denny. “Immigrant Work in Parlors Offering More Than Massages.” The New York Times 12 Nov. 2000: CY9.
Light, Ivan, and Charles Wong. “Protest or Work: Dilemmas of the Tourist Industry in American Chinatowns.” The American Journal of Sociology 80 (1975): 1342-368.
McKinley Jr, James C. “Woman Testifies on Weeks Held Against Her Will in a Brothel.” The New York Times 6 June 1995: B2.
Sadowski-Smith, Claudia. “Unskilled Labor Migration and the Illegality Spiral: Chinese, European, and Mexican Indocumentados in the United States, 1882-2007.” American Quarterly 60 (2008): 779-804.
Smith, Christopher J. “Asian New York: The Geography and Politics of Diversity.” International Migration Review 29 (1995): 59-84.
Umbach, Greg, and Dan Wishnoff. “Strategic Self-Orientalism: Urban Planning Policies and the Shaping of New York City’s Chinatown, 1950-2005.” Journal of Planning History 7 (2008): 214-38.
Yee, Shirley J. “Dependency and Opportunity.” Journal of Urban History 33 (2007): 254-76.
Zhou, Min, and John T. Logan. “In and Out of Chinatown: Residential Mobility and Segregation of New York City’s Chinese Author(s).” Social Forces 70 (1991): 387-407.
