Rubberneckers and Orphans
March 22, 2018, by Kate
Focusing on Sante’s chapters entitled “Rubberneckers” and “Orphans”, I was truly shocked to learn about how much the city has changed, socially, over the past century. While I knew that child labor had been a prominent issue within city life, I had no idea the extent to which kids were working and stealing. Hearing about how many homeless children lived on these street shocks me—the lack of technological advancements and resources left them destitute and living in the filth of New York. Sante is clear through his definition of orphans, stating that they “they were often cast out, or ran out themselves from families too big or too small to support them” (305). It’s unfathomable to comprehend how a family could leave a small child to survive on its own, let alone run rampant with no help in New York City. Through this chapter, I drew parallels between the similar issues of child homelessness in London. One of the parks I lived next to, Coram’s Fields, was the home to the Foundling Hospital. This hospital was specifically designed for homeless children in mind, specifically those whose mothers would leave them on doorsteps, unable to care for them properly. It’s interesting to note how child homelessness has been a problem throughout different societies, not just the industrialized and crazed city of New York. However, it’s slowly transitioned into a less prominent issue with the creation of social programs and government intervention. Imagining a child on the streets of New York today let alone seeing one is rare.
Rubberneckers, however, highlights an issue we still face today: increasing rent prices and gentrification. We’ve mentioned these topics quite a bit throughout our class discussions, particularly with the evolution of the East Village. Spaces where I feel completely comfortable, such as Alphabet City, were seen as forbidden when my grandparents grew up here. Yet, the artsy coffee shops and trendy restaurants have encroached into this area, hiked up rent prices, and force its residents to move elsewhere. It’s a fine line for NYU students as well—we often preach about the harsh realities of gentrification and its negative effect on the residents, yet we reap the benefits of these new, renovated areas. I found it interesting that Sante brings up the idea of cultural tourism, specifically through the Chinatown tours that took place. I had no idea these were even a thing, let alone something that tourists would seek out. While we don’t have any tours as blatant as those, we still have food tours around specific neighborhoods, Chinatown included. It’s a new form of tourism: culinary tourism. Trying to find the best dumplings or “exotic” dishes as a way to identify a culture still exists. We focused on this concept of culinary tourism within one of my Food Studies courses, and while culinary tourism can be empowering and unique, it can also be stereotypical and generalizing. By taking food tours around these areas, are we really getting a chance to understand the people who live there, or just the stereotypical foods we often hear and read about? Foods like dumplings and pizza seem commonplace, but are rarely the traditional foods eaten—why do we exclude those?