Week 1--> Exhausting and Positive

My history in New York City spans the last twenty years, but most of my interactions with "The Big Apple" (see Note 1) up to this point have been strictly touristic. Living and working in the city is a whole new ball game. I grew up about 10 miles outside of New Haven, Connecticut. I'm an Urban and Regional Studies major with a possible concentration in Architecture. I like walking and playing outside. I'm having a really hard time writing this paragraph because I don't want it to be boring and/or annoying. To me, community service and the word "service" in general have a weird connotation that I can't verbalize, so I'm not going to address it right now. I decided to participate in CUSP because cities (and their infrastructure) are my principle academic interest, and it's hard to develop an understanding of them without first-hand experience. I also feel some kind of obligation to try to do things that are good. Perhaps I will identify and clarify this feeling as the summer progresses.

I'm working at the Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP...CUP, CUSP, confusing) in Brooklyn this summer. It is a small organization dedicated to educating people about places and how they change. (I got that blurb from the CUP answering machine message.) CUP started as an artists' collective, and now they run educational programs with schools, host public programs like lectures and film screenings, link designers with community-based organizations, and produce publications about the politics of the built environment. There are only two people working full-time in the CUP office and a whole lot of projects going on so I will be helping out wherever I'm needed for the next two months. I'm really excited both to learn about the specific topics of CUP's current projects and to see how a very small, very interdisciplinary non-profit is run!

Before my internship began, I wondered whether working for an "architectural organization" of sorts was social justice-y enough for me. However, in the past few days I have seen how CUP has helped high school students to learn and discuss difficult issues like gentrification and police brutality in their neighborhoods and how they link other public service organizations and social justice-minded individuals together for their mutual benefit. I think CUP provides the very necessary service of managing large projects, drumming up publicity, and helping to make the work done by others more accesible to the public. Without this service, community organizations voices could not be heard.

Note 1. How did New York City come to be known as "The Big Apple"?

There is no single, authoritative answer as to why New York City is known as The Big Apple. That the term is now widely known may be due to a tourism publicity campaign launched by the New York Convention and Visitors Bureau in 1971.

Certainly, the term was used before that. The most recent research traces the phrase back to a book published in 1909. In a New York Times article of February 1, 1989, David Shulman refers to The Wayfarer in New York, a collection of essays edited by Edward S. Martin. On page xiv of that book, Mr. Martin wrote that the rest of the country "inclines to think the big apple gets a disproportionate share of the national sap." This is the earliest use of the term yet brought to our attention.

Previously, the phrase had been linked to jazz slang, or to the popular dance named the Big Apple. The Dictionary of American Slang (Wentworth and Flexner) and The Morris Dictionary of Word and Phrase Origins both trace the phrase in this way, but this only takes it back as far as the 1930s.

John Ciardi (New York Times, 7/19/78) relates the phrase to the Spanish term "manzana principal," which denotes a city's main section. He goes on to say: "Translated as Big Apple by New Orleans jazzmen around 1900 with the sense "the big time," the idiom passed into show bizz..."


(http://www.nypl.org/research/chss/faq.html#apple)