Here’s the Wordle cloud for Barack Obama’s inaugural address, using the prepared text given to the New York Times: 
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It’s worth remembering on this most auspicious of days that the first U.S. presidential inauguration took place in New York City, the first capital of the United States. In February 1789, the newly formed electoral college unanimously selected George Washington to become the first President of the United States. (John Adams was elected vice-president because he had received the second highest number of votes.) The date for the inauguration was set for April 30.
Washington set out for New York from his home in Mount Vernon, Virginia, on April 16 and recorded this entry in his journal:
About
10 o’clock I bade adieu to Mount Vernon, to private life, and to
domestic felicity, and with a mind oppressed with more anxious and
painful sensations than I have words to express, set out for New York
in company with Mr. Thompson, and Colonel Humphries, with the best
dispositions to render service to my country in obedience to its call,
but with less hope of answering its expectations.
It took Washington a week to get to New York City, and he was greeted by cheering crowds all along the way. On April 23, he arrived at Elizabeth Town, New Jersey, where he boarded a ceremonial barge that took him across the Hudson River to Manhattan.
The oath of office was administered to Washington by the Chancellor of New York, Robert R. Livinsgston, on the balcony of the Senate Chamber located in Federal Hall on
Wall Street. General Washington had been unanimously elected President
by the first electoral college, and John Adams was elected Vice
President because he received the second greatest number of votes. Both men were Freemasons, and the Bible used during the ceremony belonged to St. John’s Masonic Lodge in New York City. In The Life of George Washington (1855-59), Washington Irving wrote that the first president added the words “So help me God” at the conclusion of the oath, but historians are uncertain about the truth of that assertion. The only contemporary transcription of the oath, from the Documentary History of the First Federal Congress, doesn’t include the phrase. Neither the use of a Bible nor the invocation of God is required by law.
The site inaugural.senate.gov notes that “the nation’s first inauguration established many precedents: Washington
added the words, ‘So help me God’ at the end of his oath; he kissed the
Bible; and and he delivered an Inaugural address, all of which have
been followed by future Presidents.” The chart on the site devoted to the first inauguration also tells us that Washington wore a “dark brown suit (made in America), with steel-hilted sword, white silk stockings, and silver shoe buckles.”
The new President gave his inaugural address
before a joint session of the two Houses of Congress, which had inside
the Senate Chamber in Federal Hall. He began by registering his uncertainties about his new job:
Among the vicissitudes incident to life no event could have filled
me with greater anxieties than that of which the notification was
transmitted by your order, and received on the 14th day of the present
month. On the one hand, I was summoned by my Country, whose voice I can
never hear but with veneration and love, from a retreat which I had
chosen with the fondest predilection, and, in my flattering hopes, with
an immutable decision, as the asylum of my declining years–a retreat
which was rendered every day more necessary as well as more dear to me
by the addition of habit to inclination, and of frequent interruptions
in my health to the gradual waste committed on it by time. On the other
hand, the magnitude and difficulty of the trust to which the voice of
my country called me, being sufficient to awaken in the wisest and most
experienced of her citizens a distrustful scrutiny into his
qualifications, could not but overwhelm with despondence one who
(inheriting inferior endowments from nature and unpracticed in the
duties of civil administration) ought to be peculiarly conscious of his
own deficiencies. In this conflict of emotions all I dare aver is that
it has been my faithful study to collect my duty from a just
appreciation of every circumstance by which it might be affected. All I
dare hope is that if, in executing this task, I have been too much
swayed by a grateful remembrance of former instances, or by an
affectionate sensibility to this transcendent proof of the confidence
of my fellow-citizens, and have thence too little consulted my
incapacity as well as disinclination for the weighty and untried cares
before me, my error will be palliated by the motives which mislead me,
and its consequences be judged by my country with some share of the
partiality in which they originated.
The second paragraph of the address pays homage to God, whom Washington invokes as “the Great
Author of every public and private good,” arguing that “no people can be bound to
acknowledge and adore the Invisible Hand which conducts the affairs of
men more than those of the United States.” Noting the “tranquil deliberations and voluntary consent of so many
distinct communities” that have resulted in the formation of the country’s new “system of their united
government,” Washington suggests that “every step by which they have
advanced to the character of an independent nation seems to have been
distinguished by some token of providential agency.”
You can read the full text of the address at bartleby.com. The New York Times has an online feature that allows you to select an inaugural address, from Washington’s to George W. Bush’s second, and see which words are used most often and which words are particularly distinctive. The Library of Congress has a wonderful set of online documents related to presidential inaugurations, including a scan of the first inaugural address in Washington’s own hand. And you can read a more detailed account of Washington’s trip to New York and swearing-in at eyewitnesstohistory.com.
Washington would deliver his second inaugural address in Philadelphia on March 4, 1793. John Adams would deliver his inaugural address there as well. The first inaugural address to be delivered in Washington, DC, was given by Thomas Jefferson, who had been instrumental in negotiating the site of the new capital.
All inaugurations were scheduled for March 4 until 1937, when the Twentieth Amendment changed the date and time to to noon on January 20. Franklin Delano Roosevelt began his second term on January 20, 1937.
The word used most often in Washington’s address, according to the Times, is “government.” The word used most often in Lincoln’s second inaugural is “war”; in George W. Bush’s second inaugural, it is “freedom.”
What word President Obama will use most often later today? Just for fun, I created word-frequency clouds for Obama’s Nominatinon Acceptance Speech (August 28, 2008) and his Victory Speech on November 4 in Chicago using Wordle. Click on the continuation link to see them.
Okay, Pete Seeger may just be cooler than Obama. Maybe cooler than Dylan.
My favorite verse, which I don’t think I’ve ever heard before, begins “In the squares of the city,” a little over two minutes in. The dig at private property that follows ain’t bad either.
UPDATE: I’m leaving the first video link to memorialize the irony TMK pointed out in comments — that HBO was lame enough to force YouTube to take down a song decrying private property in the name of a better America. Zoiks.
Tags: inauguration, Obama, Seeger, Springsteen
The final season of the Sci-Fi Network’s series Battlestar Galactica resumes tonight at 10:00 p.m., with the first of ten episodes that will bring the series to its conclusion.
The show is a brilliant remake of the late 1970s series starring Lorne Greene about a race of robots called Cylons who destroy all of humankind’s colonies, forcing the few surviviors to embark on a quest to find their mythical home planet — Earth.
The new series, which began in June 2005, is a gritty update that is one of the smartest “political” shows on the air today. Full of Biblical overtones with its lost tribes searching for a promised land, the series is also about the ancient struggle between the Greeks and the Persians — between a polytheist culture and a monotheist culture — with the added twist here that it’s the humans who are the polytheists. (“Praise the Gods!”) In addition, the new show offers a further twist: the robots have evolved so that many of them look identical to humans (that there is a robot at the right), and they believe that they’re on a mission to do God’s will in cleansing the galaxy of humanity — or at least converting humanity to their fundamentalist point of view.
Another reason for readers of this blog to be interested in the show: one of its lead characters, a fighter pilot played by Katee Sackhoff, is named “Starbuck.” (In the original series, Starbuck was a man, played by Dirk Benedict, who went on to star with George Peppard and Mr. T in The A-Team.)
The show left us with a mid-season cliffhanger last June, in which the humans and a group of Cylons have in fact discovered Earth. But a promised land, it is not, as the episode’s title, “Revelations,” turns out to be a pun:
When I first saw this post-apocalyptic image last summer, I immediately thought: It’s New York — and a homage to the conclusion of Planet of the Apes, in which the protagonist (played by Charlton Heston) sees the ruins of the statue of Liberty and realizes that the planet ruled by apes on which he’ thought he had been stranded is actually Earth after some future war. (You can see that scene here on YouTube.)
Compare the image above to this one of the Brooklyn Bridge:
In the intervening months, fans of the series have studied that image, looking for clues about the future of the series in it; apparently, many have also suggested that what we’re seeing is a ravaged New York City.
But perhaps Manhattan won’t turn out to be the island at the center of the world, as far as Battlestar Galactica is concerned. One of the special-effects gurus who worked on the Battlestar shot reveals that original scene was filmed in Vancouver. Check out his blog for an interesting account of the creation of the shot and a peek into the world of special visual effects.
We’ll learn more tonight about post-apocalyptic Earth. If this sounds interesting to you but you haven’t been watching the show, don’t worry: you can still hop on board the Battlestar. There’s a marvelous 13-minute recap available called “Catch the Frak Up” (“frak” being a swear word in the BG universe). The amusing video is narrated at breathtaking speed by Sackhoff and is available on the show’s website, as well as on iTunes (free) and amazon.com (free and downloadable to your Tivo). And the first three-and-a-half seasons are available on DVD if you find yourself getting hooked!
I feel compelled to mark the passing of the actor Ricardo Montalban, who died on Wednesday in Los Angeles at the age of 88. You can read his New York Times obituary here.
Okay, you say, but what does Ricardo Montalban have to do with this website’s ostensible subject, the history of New York City’s literature and culture? Bear with me.
Some of you may remember Montalban from the series of ads that Chrysler ran during the mid-1970s for its Cordoba luxury sedan. Here’s the 1975 version:
Others may remember Fantasy Island, which starred Montalban as Mr. Roarke, the owner of an exotic island where guests would arrive in a small plane each week to go on adventures or play out fantasies that would change their lives. The show co-starred the late Hervé Villechaize as Montalban’s major domo, Tattoo, who would open each episode by ringing the island’s bell and exclaiming, “Da plane, da plane!” Here’s an opening from a 1978 episode:
(If watching this video brings on a wave of nostalgia that will require you to view complete episodes of the series, don’t worry: it’s now available on DVD.)
For me, however, Montalban will always be Khan Noonien Singh, one of the villains in the original Star Trek series starring William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy, a role that Montalban memorably reprised in the second Star Trek film, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982).
We’ve established on this site that Herman Melville’s novel Moby-Dick is an important subject if you’re interested in the history of New York literature and culture. Over the years, I’ve been collecting allusions to the novel in later texts and in popular culture. And Star Trek II is chock full of them. Thus, the memorial to Ricardo Montalban here.
Montalban first appeared as Khan in “Space Seed,” an episode from the television show’s first season (1967), in which the Starship Enterprise discovers the Botany Bay, a derelict ship that contains cryogenically frozen super-beings exiled from Earth in the aftermath of the Eugenics Wars of the 1990s. (Don’t you love the way the 1960s imagined the 1990s and beyond? Question: are things better or worse than expected?) Khan is their leader, an imperious intellectual with a taste for Milton and Melville. When Kirk and his landing party board the ship, the super-beings are awakened and complications ensue.
After a failed attempt to take over the Enterprise, Khan’s group are exiled on a planet called Ceti Alpha V. Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan opens when Pavel Chekov (played by Walter Koenig — and no that’s not a typo, that’s the way the series spelled the surname), the former navigator for the Enterprise, is surveying what is supposed to be an uninhabited waste land of a planet in the Ceti Alpha system. What Chekov and his captain (played by Paul Winfield) discover to their horror is that the planet is in fact Ceti Alpha V, laid waste when another planet in the system exploded, and that Khan and his mates have become very bitter indeed. Just before Khan reveals himself, Chekov surveys the ruined ship that he and his captain have discovered and sees a bookshelf that holds a copy of Moby-Dick .
Khan will spend the rest of the film chasing down his white whale — now-Admiral James T. Kirk — and quoting Ahab’s speeches from Melville’s novel. In the trailer below, you’ll hear the film’s adaptation of these lines from Ahab:
Aye, aye! and I’ll chase him round Good Hope, and round the horn, and
round the norway maelstrom, and round perdition’s flames before I give
him up. And this is what ye have shipped for, men! to chase that white
whale on both sides of land, and over all sides of earth, till he
spouts black blood and rolls fin out.
The film’s plot involves the theft of a terraforming device called “Genesis,” which Khan realizes can also be used as a doomsday weapon. As the film draws to its close, Khan launches Genesis at Kirk and the Enterprise, and his final words are Ahab’s: “”To the last, I grapple with thee; from hell’s heart, I stab at thee; for hate’s sake, I spit my last breath at thee.”
Melvilleans may find it a nice, though I’m sure unintended, touch that the shock waves from the explosion of the Genesis device echo the vortex that Ishmael describes in his epilogue:
So. floating on the margin of the ensuing scene, and in full sight of
it, when the half-spent suction of the sunk ship reached me, I was
then, but slowly, drawn towards the closing vortex. When I reached it,
it had subsided to a creamy pool. Round and round, then, and ever
contracting towards the button-like black bubble at the axis of that
slowly wheeling circle, like another ixion I did revolve. till gaining
that vital centre, the black bubble upward burst; and now, liberated by
reason of its cunning spring, and owing to its great buoyancy, rising
with great force, the coffin like-buoy shot lengthwise from the sea,
fell over, and floated by my side.
If you’d like to watch the whole film, it’s available in a 2-disc director’s cut edition on DVD.
Rest in peace, Ricardo!
Apropos of yesterday’s post: I was reading in Wallace and Burrows’s
Gotham this morning while doing a little work and came across this
passage on a bunch of gentrifiers buying out a dive bar and trying to
scrub up the neighborhood:
Bowery Village remained
notorious for some of the stomach-turning stench of its slaughterhouses
and tanyards. As late as 1825, upstate drovers … were herding an
estimated two hundred thousand head of cattle across King’s Bridge each
year and making their way, accompanied by hordes of pigs, horses, and
bleating spring lambs, down Manhattan to Henry Astor’s Bull’s Head
Tavern and adjacent abattoirs. A butcher who acquired an exceptionally
fine cow would then parade it through the streets, preceded by a band
and followed by fellow butchers in aprons and shirtsleeves, stopping
before homes of wealthy customers, who were expected to step out and
order part of the animal.Some of those customers, bolstered by gentry families filtering in from the lower wards, wanted to transform the Bowery into a more genteel neighborhood. Taking aim at the stink, the endless whinnying, lowing, and grunting, and the occasional steer running amok and goring passers-by, they set about driving the Bull’s Head from the area. In the mid-1820s, an association of socially prominent businessmen bought out Henry Astor and dismantled his enterprise. (A new Bull’s Head opened in semirural surroundings at Thirds Avenue and 24th Street and soon attracted cattle yards, slaughterhouses, pig and sheep pens, and a weekly market; the area became known as Bull’s Head Village, the city’s northern frontier.) Meanwhile, in place of the old tavern, the consortium set about erecting Ithiel Town’s splendid Greek Revival playhouse–the New York (soon to be Bowery) Theater. Mayor Philip Hone hailed the transformation as marking the “rapid progress of improvement in our city.” But neither theater nor street was destined for gentility, and the Bowery would soon evolve into an entertainment strip for surrounding communities. (475-76)
Wallace and Burrows don’t cite this (I found it instead in Robert Allen’s Horrible Prettiness, a history of burlesque), but when Mayor Hone laid the cornerstone for the Bowery Theater in 1826 he said he hoped the institution would “improve the taste, correct the morals, and soften the manners of the people.” By this he meant he wanted to use the theater (which would conveniently siphon off rowdy audiences from the more genteel Park Theater farther downtown) as a means of social uplift and social control. I doubt the hotel and condo developers have a similar benevolent — if condescending — agenda for folks living around the rapidly gentrifying Bowery today.
Hone misjudged the neighborhood. Let’s hope Bloomberg has too.
Lots of print and digital type already devoted to the announcement that the Amato Opera, as old as the idea of the East Village itself, will close this May at the end of its 61st season. The news was delivered by the 88-year-old founder, Anthony Amato, prior to a performance of The Merry Widow on January 10.
Curbed’s revelation that the building had been sold (for a surprisingly low $3.7 million) to a developer once listed by the Voice as among the worst landlords in the city has a lot of folks worried that the Amato’s building might eventually be replaced by yet another sore pinky finger — part of the ongoing Dubaification of the Bowery.
The Times registered the community’s shock (with an audio slideshow to boot), but not as personally as Jeremiah at Vanishing New York, who has a great post from a year ago about a night at the opera.
You can also catch some video of the Amato — and more detailed background on its history — at the companion site to a PBS documentary produced a few years back.
Photo credit: Stefan Falke.
Tags: Amato Opera, Bowery
ABC news and others reported over the weekend the death, at age 69, of William Zantzinger, whose caning to death of “poor Hattie Carroll,” an African-American barmaid, provoked one of Dylan’s most memorable protest songs, released on his 1964 album The Times They Are A-Changin’.
Zantzinger served six months for manslaughter and paid a $500 fine for the crime. He was sentenced on the same day Martin Luther King led his famous march on Washington. He later went into real estate and became a notorious slumlord.
These and other details I gleaned from a Mother Jones essay by Ian Frazier a couple years back, which contains background on the crime, the criminal, and the song:
The song contains errors of fact. Dylan misspells the perpetrator’s name, omitting the t — perhaps deliberately, out of contempt, or perhaps to emphasize the Snidely Whiplash hissing of the zs.
Zantzinger’s actual arrest and trial were more complicated than the
song lets on. Police arrested Zantzinger at the ball for disorderly
conduct — he was wildly drunk — and for assaults on hotel employees
not including Hattie Carroll, about whom they apparently knew nothing
at the time. When Hattie Carroll died at Mercy Hospital the following
morning, Zantzinger was also charged with homicide. The medical
examiner reported that Hattie Carroll had hardened arteries, an
enlarged heart, and high blood pressure; that the cane left no mark on
her; and that she died of a brain hemorrhage brought on by stress
caused by Zantzinger’s verbal abuse, coupled with the assault. After
the report, a tribunal of Maryland circuit court judges reduced the
homicide charge to manslaughter. Zantzinger was found guilty of that,
and of assault, but not of murder.The judges probably thought they were being reasonable. They
rejected defense claims that Hattie Carroll’s precarious health made it
impossible to say whether her death had been caused, or had simply
occurred naturally. The judges considered Zantzinger an “immature”
young man who got drunk and carried away, but they nevertheless held
him responsible for her death, saying that neither her medical history
nor his ignorance of it was an excuse. His cane, though merely a toy
one he got at a farm fair, they considered a weapon capable of assault.
They kept the sentence to only six months because (according to the New York Herald Tribune)
a longer one would have required that he serve it in state prison, and
they feared the enmity of the largely black prison population would
mean death for him. Zantzinger served his six months in the comparative
safety of the Washington County Jail. The judges also let him wait a
couple of weeks before beginning his sentence, so he could bring in his
tobacco crop. Such dispensations were not uncommon, apparently, for
offenders who had farms.
Peter Eisenstadt, editor of The Encyclopedia of New York State (to which I contributed several pieces on 1790s New Yorkers some years ago) has what I found to be a moving response to Zantzinger’s death over on his Greater New York blog. I’ll let him have the final word:
If “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll” is not
Dylan’s best song–it would probably get my vote–it is certainly (IMHO)
his greatest protest song, a genre that he would abandon, more or less,
not that long after writing it. His later work, as great as it is,
traded the directness of “Hattie Carroll” for a certain willful poetic
obscurity, and in place of the keen sense of the interaction of the
personal and the public in “Hattie Carroll”, offered instead a long
series of brilliant songs on Dylan’s private woes and obsessions. And
unlike some of his other protest songs, like “Blowin’ in the Wind” or
“Masters of War,” “Hattie Carroll” is descriptive, not prescriptive,
just a ballad, telling a story.“Hattie Carroll” came out about the same time as Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem,
which added the endlessly debated phrase “the banality of evil” to our
language. Whatever else you want to say about William Zantzinger, he
was no Adolf Eichmann, and perhaps he better illuminates how an evil
social order is more built upon myriad acts of relatively banal crimes
than great horrors, and how the system of racial and class oppression
that is central to the events of Dylan’s song are less the product of
calculated evil, than selfishness and greediness defended through a
series of endless rationalizations.And finally it is a song about
the sadness and sorrow that is at the heart of all human history, the
great men and deeds which are built upon the trough of meanness and
pettiness, the unfairness, and the inequalities of every social order.
All of us, have from time to time, tried to “philosophize disgrace and
criticize all fears,” look at the public face of evil calmly and
rationally, and try to understand and deal with it. At other times, all
one can do, as the song finally recommends, “Bury the rag deep in your
face, For now’s the time for your tears.” When my brother died last
year, suddenly and tragically, it is this song, above all others, that
I found myself singing to myself, again and again. I’m not sure why. It
certainly was a time for my tears. And by making sure that the crimes
of one relatively unimportant unsung man would be sung about forever,
Dylan has rendered us all a service. Those of us who spend our lives
writing about history, the lives of others, need to study, to analyze,
to put things in proportion. We also need to remember, from time to
time, to bury our faces in our handkerchiefs, and let the tears flow,
and flow, and flow.
Photo credit: AP/Getty
Tags: Dylan, Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll, William Zantzinger
NOTABLE BOOKS
Hot off the presses: one of the contributors to our forthcoming Cambridge Companion to the Literatures of New York City, Elizabeth L. Bradley of the New York Public Library, has just edited a new edition of Washington Irving’s A History of New York. Penguin published the book last December 30, in time for this year’s 200th anniversary of the publication of Irving’s mock history, which appeared on St. Nicholas’ Day in 1809.
To generate interest in the History‘s publication, Irving created a sort of publicity campaign, running a notice in the New York Evening Post in late October seeking information about “a small elderly gentleman dressed in an old black coat and cocked hat, by the name of KNICKERBOCKER,” who seemed to have disappeared from his lodgings at the Columbian Hotel, without paying his back rent. The notice was supposedly placed by Seth Handaside, the proprietor of the hotel.
A subsequent letter to the editor of the Post purported to have caught sight of the missing Knickerbocker
SIR, Having read in your paper of the 26th of Oct. last a paragraph respecting an old gentleman by the name of Knickerbocker, who was missing from his lodgings; if it would be any relief to his friends, or furnish them with any clue to discover where he is, you may inform them, that a person answering the description given was seen by the passengers of the Albany Stage early in the morning, about four or five weeks since, resting himself by the side of the road, a little above Kingsbridge–He had in his hand a small bundle tied in a red bandana handkerchief; he appeared to be travelling northward, and was very much fatigued and exhausted.
Finally, an ad dated November 16 divulged the existence of “a very curious kind of a written
book,” which Handaside warned would be published to “pay off
[Knickerbocker's] bill for board and lodging.” That curious volume, of
course, was Irving’s A History of New York.
This edition presents Irving’s original 1809 text. As Bradley notes in her introduction, Irving amended the History several times, most drastically for Putnam’s uniform edition of his works in 1848: “In Putnam’s 1848 edition, the racy humor and earthy language of Knickerbocker’s original has been rendered parlor ready: but if it was less daring, the book was also decidedly less delightful.”
In addition to her introduction, Bradley has written a useful set of notes to the volume and includes, along with the 1809 edition’s “Account of the Author” (supposedly written by Seth Handaside) and “To the Public” (supposedly written by Knickerbocker himself), Irving’s foreword to the 1848 edition.
“Irving’s History,” Bradley writes, “connected readers to New Amsterdam by taking the colony out of the realm of mystery and conjecture.” More importantly, Irving’s text was the first great piece of New York literature. Evoking Whitman’s poem “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” Bradley suggests that Whitman’s “hymn to the city, and those ‘a hundred years hence,’ are made possible not by the ferry, but by the example of Washington Irving, who built New York’s first literary bridge.”
The book’s delightful cover juxtaposes two images: a painting called View of New Amsterdam (c. 1650-53) appears in the foreground, while a mid-twentieth-century photography by George Marks entitled Skyline appears int he background.
We look forward to the publication this summer of Bradley’s extended investigation of the Knickerbocker mythology, Knickerbocker: The Myth behind New York (Rutgers University Press).
Via the awesome Brooklyn blog Gowanus Lounge, a photo of Coney Island from the mid-20c.
It shows the Steeplechase Pavilion that was murdered by Fred Trump and
to its right the Thunderbolt roller coaster, which was slaughtered by
Rudolph Giuliani. The date of the photo is unclear, but we would place
it in the 40s or 50s. Steeplechase was demolished in 1964, and Keyspan
Park and a parking lot now stands in its place. The Thunderbolt lot is
a huge vacant city block over run with weeds.
Meanwhile, the Municipal Art Society of New York has launched an “Imagine Coney Island” website to promote creative redesign efforts for the park. From their year-end fund-raising letter:
MAS has collected more than 200 new ideas – from the outlandish to the
inspiring: a Ferris wheel powered by the waves off Coney Island’s
beach; a rebuilt Elephant Hotel; an interactive “Dig a Hole to
China”: “Keep Coney Island subversive, quasi-outlaw, quirky,
individual and raffish” wrote one participant.We’ve also convened an international team of designers, entertainment
professionals and economists to develop new ideas for rides, activities, events
and big ideas for summer 2009 and beyond.
For all other things Coney Island, bad news and good, visit Coney Island USA’s website.
Updated with info from the comments section:
Thanks to Saving Coney Coalition for the following, left as a comment:
ImagineConey Public Meeting January 14th, 2009
Now, it is critical that we demonstrate to the decision-makers that
New Yorkers passionately believe that Coney Island should become a
great amusement and entertainment destination once again. So please
join us on January 14 at 6.30 pm, when the MAS will be participating in
a public meeting in Coney Island at Our Lady of Solace Church, 1717 Mermaid Ave, Brooklyn. Seating is limited and reservations are encouraged. RSVP online now.
Click here for a map.
MAS will present a selection of the ideas contributed as well the
economic and design work conducted by the charrette team. More details here.
On Jan 1 the Save Coney Coalition held a New Year’s Day Rally on the Boardwalk.
Downloadable protest art here.
Press coverage here.
CALL 311 AND LEAVE A COMMENT FOR THE MAYOR!
Email Mayor Michael Bloomberg or phone 311 (1-
212-NEWYORK outside of the city) and leave a “Comment for the Mayor”
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