The Repeal of P.R. in New York City—Ten Years in Retrospect

1948 ◽  
Vol 42 (6) ◽  
pp. 1127-1148 ◽  
Author(s):  
Belle Zeller ◽  
Hugh A. Bone
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
York City ◽  
The United States ◽  
City Council ◽  
Liberal Party ◽  
Unsuccessful Attempt ◽  
The People ◽  
The One ◽  
The City

In November, 1936, the voters of New York City approved the use of proportional representation for the election of members of the city council by a vote of 923,186 to 555,217, after its opponents had failed by court action to prevent the question from being submitted. By a combination of Democratic delegates from New York City and machine Republicans from upstate, the constitutional convention of 1938 provided the people of the entire state an opportunity to reject decisively an amendment that would have prohibited the use of P.R. in any election in the state. Still another unsuccessful attempt to abolish the system was made in 1940—this time through initiative petition under provision of the New York City charter. With the entry of the United States into the war, no further serious effort at repeal was made until 1947, although dissatisfaction with the results of the councilmanic elections continued to be heard even above the din of war.How did the forces line up in the intense battle over P.R. in the campaign of 1947? The political parties, of course, had a direct stake in the results of the campaign. On the one side were the Democratic and Republican county organizations urging repeal of P.R., while the American Labor party, the Liberal party, the Communist party, and the Fusion forces worked for retention of the system.

Creating the Latino City

Latino City ◽  
2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Llana Barber
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
York City ◽  
Public Culture ◽  
Public Spaces ◽  
The United States ◽  
Latino Population ◽  
Transnational Activities ◽  
The City

Chapter Seven traces Lawrence's transition to a Latino-majority city with the 2000 census, including the tremendous increase in immigration during the 1980s that led Lawrence to become home to the largest concentration of Dominicans in the United States outside of New York City. The city's Latino population came to define Lawrence's public culture in this period, and the long push for Latino political power in the city was ultimately successful in many ways. This chapter discusses the transnational activities that brought new vitality to Lawrence's economy and its public spaces, yet larger structural forces continued to create obstacles to Latinos finding in Lawrence the better life they pursued.

New York: The Great Anomaly

1986 ◽  
Vol 19 (03) ◽  
pp. 591-597 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Mollenkopf
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
Political Participation ◽  
York City ◽  
Urban Policy ◽  
City Council ◽  
Political Incorporation ◽  
Minority Community ◽  
Minority Interests ◽  
The City

Rufus Browning, Dale Marshall, and David Tabb present some straightforward and convincing theses in their admirable workProtest Is Not Enough. Urban policy responsiveness to minority interests, they argue, depends not so much on the direct impact of protest as on the advent of a dominant liberal coalition in which blacks and Hispanics have some role. Where such coalitions have not succeeded, racial exclusion and policy resistance tend to hold sway. Where blacks or Hispanics have played a leading role in bringing such a coalition to power, or in Browning, Marshall and Tabb's terms where political incorporation has been greatest, then policy results favor minority interests. Political incorporation depends on protest and electoral mobilization among blacks and Hispanics combined with favorable white attitudes toward minority interests. The size of the minority community and its leadership capacity in turn explain minority political mobilization.By these propositions, New York City should be characterized by substantial black and Hispanic political incorporation and the resulting targeting of policy outputs on minority interests. In the 1980 Census, New York's population was 23.9% black and 19.9% Hispanic; these numbers may have been substantially undercounted. In any case, two-thirds of a decade later New York is clearly a majority minority city. Black political participation dates from Adam Clayton Powell and Benjamin Davis' election to the city council in 1941 and 1943. The first Puerto Rican assemblyman was elected on the Republican and American Labor Party lines in 1938. Subsequently, both groups have had a long and sophisticated history of political participation. From the 1960s onward, a new generation of leadership led both groups to assert their political demands more strongly. The Lindsay administration afforded a national model of how a new liberal coalition could experiment with new forms of political incorporation. Voting in state and national elections would suggest the city is on the liberal end of the urban political spectrum. In short, by Western lights New York should be a model of strong minority incorporation and the consequent targeting of city policies toward minority interests. The problem, however, is that New York City has not incorporated minorities and, depending on what indicators are chosen, has not produced policies that are especially aimed toward minorities.

scholarly journals Reform of the New York’s public health system in the context of rapid urban development (turn of the XIX – XX centuries)

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-10
Author(s):  
Evgeniya Vladimirovna Zhilina
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
Health System ◽  
York City ◽  
Preventive Measures ◽  
Public Health System ◽  
The United States ◽  
Administrative Reforms ◽  
The City

This article explores the factors for conducting administrative reforms in the United States in the area of public health. For detailed consideration, the author selected New York City as an example the largest metropolitan area that faced aggravation of social problems due to the shortcomings in the existing public health system. Rapid increase in the number of resident in the conditions of significant growth of population density led to proliferation of the dangerous infectious diseases, for elimination of which local authorities had to take prompt actions of state regulation, including creation of the new administrative branches. Special attention is given to the treatment of tuberculosis and preventive measures thereof, namely the importance of tracking all new cases. In studying public health system of New York City, the author applied interdisciplinary approach that ensured comprehensive and objective outlook upon the problems of poorest population groups of the city. Comparative-historical method was used juxtapose the situation in New York and typologically similar US metropolises. Chronological method allowed tracing the patterns in evolution of administrative innovations, and assessing them in a single historical perspective. The main conclusion consists in the statement that private medicine appeared to be insufficient due to the drastic changes of social conditions in the densely populated metropolises, as the constantly growing population of poor immigrant neighborhoods was capable of paying for medical services. At the same time, namely the residents of such ghettos were most vulnerable category of population from the standpoint of epidemiology. Taking preventive measures by the municipal authorities, which included mass vaccination and clearing New York streets from dirt and trash, became an effective way to alleviate the situation. The administrative reforms in the city significantly improved the situation, which laid the foundation for sweeping changes in the future.

Asthma, Allergy, and Air Pollution

2002 ◽  
Author(s):  
Inge F. Goldstein ◽  
Martin Goldstein
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
Air Pollution ◽  
New York City ◽  
Emergency Room ◽  
York City ◽  
The United States ◽  
York City Department ◽  
Diesel Trucks ◽  
The City

One night in early October 1997, Felipe G., a nine-year-old child of Dominican immigrants to New York City living in East Harlem, woke up struggling for breath. Felipe had had asthma attacks before, and his parents knew, or thought they knew, what to do: they called for an ambulance, which rushed him to the emergency room of Harlem Hospital nearby. But this time he stopped breathing on the way to the hospital, and could not be revived there. His younger sister Ana also has asthma, but so far has never had to go to the emergency room. The tenement building in which Felipe’s family lives is three blocks from the Harlem River Drive, a highway on which thousands of cars travel each workday, emitting, in spite of their catalytic converters, large quantities of oxides of nitrogen, carbon monoxide, and incompletely combusted gasoline. Several blocks north is a parking garage for the diesel trucks of the New York City Department of Sanitation. The drivers of the trucks that use the lot often keep their motors idling, so that great quantities of diesel exhaust particles are emitted to the surrounding area. The Harlem district of New York City, inhabited mainly by African-Americans and Hispanics, is shielded to a large extent from the prevailing west winds by higher areas on the west side of Manhattan. Hence, air pollution produced within Harlem—for example, by cars, diesel trucks, and buses, and by an electric power generating plant located there—tends to remain longer than in other areas of the city. The New York City Department of Environmental Protection operated a network of air monitoring stations from the 1940s to the 1970s, during which time Harlem was consistently found to be the most polluted area in the city. It had then, and still has, one of the highest rates of hospitalization for asthma in the city. In most countries, asthma is more common among children of higher social class. In the United States this pattern is reversed: people living in the inner cities of the United States, mostly low-income minorities, have higher rates of asthma than other Americans.

scholarly journals The Politics of Inequality in the Face of Financial Crisis

2013 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-7 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffrey C. Isaac
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
York City ◽  
New York State ◽  
Vice President ◽  
The United States ◽  
Daily News ◽  
Us Government ◽  
Queens College ◽  
The City

I entered college in September of 1975, a working class kid from Queens whose father, Hyman Isaac, was an unemployed linotype operator (I wonder how many of our younger readers even know what that is; it's a typesetter, a trade that no longer exists), and whose mother, Sylvia Isaac, was an office secretary. I thus enrolled at Queens College, the neighborhood school, part of the City University of New York which, in 1975, offered free tuition to all New York City high school graduates. A month later, on October 30, the New York Daily News carried one of the most famous newspaper headlines of the century: “Ford to the City: Drop Dead.” The Ford in question was Gerald Ford, the unelected President of the United States who had acceded to the office from the House of Representatives when first the Vice-President (Spiro Agnew) and then the President (Richard Nixon) resigned amid scandal and disgrace. And his “drop dead” to “the city”—New York City—was a strong declaration that the US government would not bail New York out of the severe fiscal crisis in which it was mired. That same autumn, the State of New York passed the New York State Financial Emergency Act of The City of New York, placing the city in receivership, under the fiscal control of a state-appointed Emergency Financial Control Board: EFCB. That acronym, and a second with which it was conjoined—MAC, or “Big MAC,” the Municipal Assistance Corporation, the bond authority led by Felix Rohatyn that became the veritable executive office of the city—is indelibly stamped on the psyches of all who lived in and around New York in those years. For me, a teenage college student, the most palpable effect of all of this was the abolition of tuition-free higher education in New York City in 1976—a sour note during that year's bicentennial celebration of American freedom.

scholarly journals Accessibility to Essential Medicines in New York City by Zip Code Income Levels and Boroughs

2013 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Yan Aronson ◽  
Joyce Addo-Atuah
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
Low Income ◽  
York City ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Other ◽  
Essential Medicines ◽  
Income Levels ◽  
Drug Prices ◽  
The City

Access to essential medicines is fundamental to medication adherence, continuity of care and hence population health outcomes and overall quality of life. Disparities in the availability and the cost of these medications in New York City, especially for low income neighborhoods, would compound the underlying health disparities in these neighborhoods. This study examined the physical and financial accessibility to 8 of the 150 Most Frequently Prescribed Drugs in New York, 2 each for Asthma, Diabetes, Hypertension, and Hyperlipidemia, 4 conditions that are among the top 10 most costly conditions in the United States. The study did not find any significant differences in mean drug prices between the high, medium, and low income neighborhoods in the City. However, the significantly different income levels and uninsured rates across neighborhood income strata in the City (p<0.001 for both), coupled with the high disease burden and other underlying disparities in low income neighborhoods, would point to potential affordability challenges for needed medications in these neighborhoods. On the other hand, significant differences in mean prices between the 5 City boroughs were found for 3 of the study drugs: Advair™, p=0.009; Amlodipine 10mg, p<0.001; and Lisinopril 10mg, p=0.046. No such significant differences were observed for the mean prices of the other 5 study drugs-Proventil HFA,™ Metformin HCL 500mg, Glipizide ER 5mg, Simvastatin 20mg, and Atorvastatin 10mg. The study findings did not also suggest that drug prices are dictated by the number of pharmacies in a neighborhood. Further studies would be needed to better understand the complexities associated with the accessibility of essential medicines in New York City. These studies could include qualitative ones which would examine the perceptions and experiences of City residents with respect to the accessibility of prescribed medications as the basis for targeted interventions directed at promoting access to needed medications for all New Yorkers.   Type: Student Project

Strings and Skins

2020 ◽  
pp. 54-81
Author(s):  
Benjamin Lapidus
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
Puerto Rican ◽  
York City ◽  
The United States ◽  
The People ◽  
The World ◽  
Percussion Instruments ◽  
Latin Music

This chapter outlines the important history and role of craftsmen based in New York City who produced and repaired traditional instruments used in the performance of Latin music. It introduces individuals who came from Cuban, Puerto Rican, Dominican, and Jewish communities, and examines how their instruments physically represented the actual sound of Latin Music to New York and the world on widely disseminated recordings. Many of these instrument makers also sold their instruments beyond New York City and the United States. The chapter also discusses the work of builders and musicians in New York City to create and modify the tools used to forge the sound of Latin music and diffuse both the instruments and their aesthetic throughout the world. Ultimately, the chapter seeks to unify into one coherent narrative, the efforts of folklorists, journalists, and authors who paid attention to the origins of hand percussion instruments in New York, their subsequent mass production, and the people who built the instruments used to play Latin music in New York City.

“Don't Sleep With Stevens!”: The J. P. Stevens Boycott and Social Activism in the 1970s

2005 ◽  
Vol 39 (3) ◽  
pp. 511-543 ◽  
Author(s):  
TIMOTHY J. MINCHIN
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Social Activism ◽  
The United States ◽  
City Council ◽  
City Hall ◽  
Hard Times ◽  
The City ◽  
Hilton Hotel

On 30 November 1978 thousands of people from across the United States took part in “Justice for J. P. Stevens' Workers Day.” In seventy-four cities activities such as rallies, marches, press conferences, film premieres, and leafleting were held in support of a union boycott against a giant textile company that had persistently shown its willingness to violate the law rather than recognize its workers' right to organize. In New York City more than 3000 demonstrators marched in front of the company's midtown headquarters as part of the nationwide day of protest that was endorsed by Governor Hugh L. Carey and the City Council. In Los Angeles hundreds of trade unionists and their supporters rallied in front of City Hall, while in Indianapolis protesters gathered at the local Hilton Hotel for a “hard times luncheon” of ham and beans that was designed to express solidarity with the company's low-paid workers. Finding that the hotel's table cloths were made by Stevens, enraged protesters ripped the fabrics from the tables and dumped them in a pile on the floor. Activities were also held in many smaller cities; in Albany, New York, for example, a rally was addressed by Secretary of State and Lieutenant Governor-elect Mario Cuomo, who told consumers “to shun the products of J. P. Stevens as you would shun the fruit of an unholy tree.” Across the country, protesters carried signs urging consumers to steer clear of the company's sheets, a staple part of its textile business.

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