New York City claims the title: the Big Apple.  I discovered the metaphor to be true in a surprising way.  Every community in the state is the cambium in which nourishment flows to the port at the mouth of the Hudson River.  The term fits the city and the state of New York in ways that many New Yorkers don’t even realize.

            The skin of the apple is the protective outer core, and portrays the fruit to the rest of the world.  It makes the apple attractive to members of the ecosystem who can come and make sure the fruit reproduces and replenishes its species.  The apple’s outer layer  is the tough outer core that is beautiful to look at as it hides the bruises incurred in the apple’s fall.  The skin is the New York we see in movies and television shows.  In the news, we see the recovery from tragedy of the attack on the World Trade Center, we see major events and Yankee games.  We don’t see what’s under that tough skin.

            The flesh of the apple feeds the seed when it is planted and begins to grow.  It is the sweetness that we taste as we chew vigorously through the tough outside layer.  It is this nourishment that gives us a deeper appreciation of the fruit.  We found the sweet flesh of the Big Apple in how people came, how they survived, and how they conquered their environment.  Upstairs in the Old Hotel and Generous Enemies glowed with the tales of New York residents dealing with difficult situations in their lives caused by situations out of their control.  Tours of the Tenement Museum and the African Burial Ground showed us the resilience of the people who came to the city under extreme conditions and found ways to persevere.  Reading The Island at the Center of the World and touring Ellis Island revealed the determination of peoples who stepped off a boat, in two dissimilar eras in New York’s history, and showed those people using that determination to survive their world.  Devouring The Great Bridge, about the building of the Brooklyn Bridge, and hearing the stories of the early days of the women’s rights movement in Seneca Falls showed us how New Yorkers used new ideas to make their world a better place to live.  This is the flesh, the part that makes that apple enjoyable, yet necessary for the nourishment of a sprouting seed.

            What’s left of the apple?  The core.  The thing that holds the fruit together and, since it houses the seeds,  provides the opportunity for the apple to continue its survival.  Tales of the Dutch settlement, the English taking over, the Tories and Whigs in the Revolution making certain the city thrives, all feed the history that holds New York together, the reason everyone else could come in later years and find a way to eke out a living.  Stories of Ticonderoga and Saratoga showed how men ensured New York would remain a thriving port for the New Country on the eastern seaboard of the New World.

            The skin, flesh, and core all work together to protect and nourish the seed that ensures continuation of the species.  The stories in the readings, stories seen in the museums, stories heard at the historic sites, and our own stories in the discussions and blog posts shared with our colleagues on this trip, all of these stories contributed to an understanding of the seeds that ensure the continuation of New York City, the Big Apple, as a cornerstone of our past and a base for our future.

Competition with political and public one-upmanship began in the area of eastern upstate New York almost from its settlement by the first Europeans that arrived here.  From Adriaen Van der Donck struggling with Peter Stuyvesant for control of the future of the colony (see my post on The Island at the Center of the World) to current struggles between benefactors and directors at Ticonderoga, this region has been rife with leadership controversy.

In our country’s revolutionary history, the first leadership argument arrived when Benedict Arnold and Ethan Allen vied for control of the force that captured the fort from the British in 1775.  Arnold felt he was given the command of the force, yet, according to some accounts, Ethan Allen laughed in his face, metaphorically if not in actuality.  Both of the strong-willed men were determined to dominate the other, and you wonder if they had the work to be accomplished in mind.  Which was more important to them; the capture of the fort or who got the credit for the capture?

Fast forward two years and we have General John Burgoyne heading an army down the water route from Montreal to cut New England off from the rest of the colonies.  The first leadership conflict we here about has to do with the Hessian troops hired by the English crown to support and strengthen the war effort.  General Baum led his troops down to Bennington in the Hampshire Land Grants (Vermont) and faced a colonial force.  The reinforcements sent by Burgoyne were led by Baum’s arch-rival, General Breymann.  Breymann was slow to move, and Baum’s force was destroyed.  Which was more important to them; the security and safety of the troops or who got the glory in battle?

On the other side, Gates was maneuvering around Congress to get the appointment to command the Continental Armies in the Albany area.  The local guy, Schuyler, assumed his reputation would get him the appointment, for he had the respect of the men and had been with them for a while.  DId they want the paycheck or just the title?  Did they honestly feel the other man couldn’y do the job?  Was it practicality or ego?

Benedict Arnold and Horatio Gates also ran into each other.  We learned of the argument they had about whether to attack, and Gates, intending an insult and loss of power, gave Arnold command of only himself.  Arnold assumed this gave him unlimited discretion for his actions and then proceeded to go where he wanted and eventually having an important role in the Battles of Saratoga.  Gates further insulted him by not mentioning Arnold’s role in the report Gates sent to Congress.  Was it an omission, or a slap in the face?

The recent strife involves the Mars family, candy tycoons, and the management of the historic site at Fort Ticonderoga.   Forest and Deborah Mars pulled out their funding of the fort in a disagreement with the Executive Director Nicholas Westbrook, though I have been unable to nail down specifics just yet, Mars has stated that although Westbrook was a good historian and curator, the Mars’ felt he was not a good manager.  The Fort has been considering selling art to raise funds to keep functioning.  Is the fate of a major historical restoration merely at the whim of corporate money and the egos of those that control it?

The Ticonderoga/Saratoga area seems to bring to the forefront discussions of leaders in conflict.  My question to my students is this: Does controversy and competition in leadership struggles inspire these people to great things or deter them?

http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2008/08/09/cash_strapped_fort_ticonderoga_weighs_selling_art/

(July 17, 2009  by Michael Zschokke)

The second day in Vermont was a wonderful one.  Actually, more specifically, the day was in New York.  The plan was to visit Saratoga and Fort Ticonderoga.  Early in the morning, Mr. Sims, my dad, and I drove down the street to the Dunkin’ Donuts and purchased breakfast.  Then we were on our way.

The clerk at the Maple Museum told us there was a water ferry that carried passengers from Vermont to New York via Lake Champlain.  Thus we rode to the dock.  The entire car fits on top of the ship.  It was a couple minutes to get to New York, but Mr. Sims and I found time to walk and gaze at the water. 

We then continued to Fort Ticonderoga.  The Fort is big.  Stories were told that it was not kept up and became a pig sty; this is how the colonists captured it from the British in the Revolutionary War.  I guess the owner must have been constantly cleaning for 200 years.  The place was spick and span: the inside at least.  Outside the walls were lined with cannons. 

Each wall had at least five cannons pointing in every direction.  The fort itself is shaped kind of like a five-pointed star so each side covers another side. 

Inside the fort, each room is lined with muskets, uniforms, and other paraphernalia.  The most valuable item in Fort Ticonderoga is one of the first United States flags to be sewn.  It was actually sewn a month before Betty Ross made the official flag.  After we stared in amazement, the car would have probably been fast enough to race a jet as it sped to the battlefield of Saratoga.

Believe it or not the battlefield of Saratoga is larger than that of Gettysburg.  We payed $5 to drive our car up the trail that stopped by all the sites of the battle of Saratoga.  The battlefield had beautiful scenery, despite the torrential downpour. 

We then headed home, as I was dropped of at 5 Nichols Street, the home of my cousins, Kyle and Ben.

My mother, Elizabeth (Betty) Frink, was born on September 8, 1932.  In that year, the United States held its third presidential election with women voting and sent Franklin Delano Roosevelt to the White House.  She grew up in a working class Irish neighborhood outside of Boston.  Ma was a figure skater.  She never learned how to cook or bake from my grandmother, who worked professionally as a cook in various workplace cafeterias, and held a fabulous reputation as a preparer of meals and desserts.  Betty grew up playing baseball with her brother and his friends, and listening to the Red Sox on the radio with her father.   She liked to tell of the time she took her parents’ car  on a whim and drove to Rochester, New York, with her friend, Carol Meuse, driving through the area we investigated today.  From early in her childhood, my mother never intended on a traditional role as a woman in America.

Ma skated for the Boston Skating club, with people like Dick Button and Tenley Albright.  You might remember that Tenley Albright skated to the first Olympic Gold Medal in figure skating for an American woman.  My mother went to the Ice Follies.  In a practice session, Ma fell and tore the cartilage in one of her knees.  Now, she would have arthroscopic surgery and be back skating in six weeks.  In 1950, doctors told her she could never skate again.

Betty decided to join the newly formed United States Air Force and became trained as a meteorologist.  She was stationed in San Antonio for a while and the Rantoul, Illinois, where she met my father.  Tenley Albright won her Olympic Medal, finished her schooling, and became a physician, which continues to be a male-dominated field but in the 1950′s was a rare thing indeed.

Tenley Albright

Would my mother and Tenley have been able to accomplish what they did without the efforts of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott?  One never knows, but surely the women at the Seneca Falls conference that came up with Declarations of Sentiments changed attitudes in many people immediately, and through women who came after them , eventually resulting in women’s  suffrage and the Equal Rights Amendment.  Attitudes changed enough that these two women who were born before World War II felt they could succeed on their own, with their own careers.  The genesis of those ideas were rooted in the Seneca Falls conference.

Mark has shared a lesson with me called “A Gift of Age.”  Each student must interview someone at least fifty years old and, using that interview, must write a narrative of that person’s life and concerns.  It is often the most treasured assignment that the child ever brings home.  It even gets some parents to repeat it with their own parents.  My son questioned my parents and I learned much I hadn’t known before.  With what we investigated today, I could expand that to interviewing a woman over fifty in order to relate difficulties women continue to have in the workplace.  A lot of these ideas come up inadvertently, but with more pointed discussion, we surely can bring them more to the foreground.

My mother never shied away from a challenge and always felt should could do almost anything.  I need to go back to my son’s “Gift of Age” essay on her and re-read it, just like many of the parents of my students must do all the time.

June 13, 2010

Much of our trip has focused on immigrants landing, entering, and surviving in New York City.  Today, I think it is about the next generation and immigrants as Americans.

Our bus driver is an immigrant from Moscow, Russia. Vitaly earned a degree in engineering, but could not make enough money to support a family, so he took up driving a truck, which is a profitable occupation in Russia.  However, there is a tremendous amount of crime on the roads in Russia, and it was a stressful occupation.  Crime was rampant with the changes in the government, and Vitaly worried for the safety of his two daughters.  He said you do anything for your kids, no matter how difficult; surely a truism in any culture.  Twelve years ago, Vitaly moved his family to the United States.

Manhattan was too crowded and busy, with too many people everywhere, Vitaly prefers where he lives now, outside of Philadelphia where he can see some trees and is not surrounded by people.  His first profession was driving tractor-trailer trucks from “ocean to ocean” getting to know the United States quite well.  After six years, Vitaly began driving buses and compared to the large cross-country semis, he describes his current occupation as “like being retired.”  He has been in most areas of the northeast, and likes Boston the best of all the cities, though the small, tight streets are challenging when he drives school groups there.

Vitaly arrived when he was forty-two years old, and assimilating into America was hard for him because the entire culture was confusing.  His daughters had an easier time understanding America since they came as adolescents.  His older daughter married an “American guy,” and Vitaly now has two grandchildren.  He has a ticket for Cooperstown that Matt gave him, but he doesn’t understand baseball.  His grandchildren do, but the game is too slow and confounds him, and he prefers hockey.

In a lot of ways, Vitaly’s story is evident of any immigrant to our shores.  They left impossible conditions.  They had no exposure to language and customs.  Many (like Vitaly) were trained as skilled workers and had to take less skilled positions.  Today at the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York, we were exposed to major accomplishments of the sons of immigrants- through baseball.

If you need nine kids to field a baseball team, you don’t care that their parents were born somewhere else.  Baseball has paved the way for children of immigrants to meet on an equal par with other American kids.  The sandlot is the great equalizer in the neighborhood.  After learning baseball, other parts of the culture soon came into focus.

Joe and Dom Dimaggio, Moe Berg, Lou Gehrig, Tommy Lasorda, as well as hundreds more major league players, grew up with immigrant parents and went on to assimilate themselves and their ethnic group into the American psyche.  After Joe DiMaggio, it was no longer a surprise to hear an Italian-American in the major leagues.  In the previous generation, Lou Gherig helped make German-Americans recognizable in our culture.

Now, more than 25% of players on Major League teams were born outside of the United States and many of them have become U.S. citizens.  From Roberto Clemente to current day players like Manny Ramirez, Mariano Rivera, and David Ortiz, baseball is now a way to emigrate into our country.

So Vitaly can take heart in the fact that he made the right choice.  His children and grand children are living better than where they would be in Russia.  He has reached for and achieved the American Dream, and maybe someday will learn all about baseball from those grandkids.

We’ll end with a song from the grandson of Russian and German Jewish immigrants:

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Theodore Roosevelt home at Sagamore Hill

The tour of Theodore Roosevelt’s home at Sagamore Hill instills a message of tremendous importance to us and our students.  This message might be the most important of the trip to New York to bring to our classroom.  It may be the most important message we can carry to our family and friends.  To paraphrase the former President: Go explore, and have fun exploring.  Learn something in those explorations.  Accomplish something with what you learned.

The Library

Theodore Roovevelt lived by this creed.  He explored the world as well as expolring his ablities and his role in that world.  He did what he wanted to do.  When he faced obstacles, he found a way to vanquish them.  As seen in his home, his interests were many and varied, and he made sure he experienced all of them fully.  The Home at Sagamore Hill shows this attitude brilliantly.

On his daily hikes with the family, they would choose to go from one point to another.  When they came to an obstacle, they had to go over, under, or through it, they could not avoid it or go around the difficulty.  Figuring a way to traverse the obstacle required learning about it and deciding what to do about it.  This involved educating yourself in some ways about nature, even if it was only studying that particular situation and how nature caused or created it.  When faced with a similar situation, you already have some knowledge to apply to the new difficulty.  You have a confidence to face obstacles and overcome them.  We live a life not in hiding, but face forward and straight ahead.

Pueblo City Schools transports fifth-grade students six times each year to the Pueblo Mountain Park in Beulah, Colorado.  The students attempt learn about ecosystems and biomes in the Southern Colorado area and discuss issues crucial to nature use and conservation.  A biographical study of Theodore Roosevelt would add a tremendous impact to that program.  Maybe we can move in our classroom studies to a problem-solving model towards nature, rather than the informational approach we have now.  We do talk about conservation and nature concerns, as well as what has been done to alleviate the problems, but we don’t ask the students how them would approach the concern.  What are the obstacles?  How will you go through, over, or under these?  We could use this model to enhance our science and our social studies curricula.

Theodore Roosevelt’s home has inspired me.  When I introduce him to fifth-graders, maybe I can do the same for them!

p.s.   We have two songs because I couldn’t decide.  Billy Joel because we were at his hometown.  Simon and Garfunkel because that was what Theodore was to his family.

One of the artifacts in the collection of the New York Historical Society was a Union Officer’s Sword presented to Philip Schuyler.  I was unable to find the photo in the Historical Society’s  online collection, and didn’t get a good photograph of it, but it was similar to this one.  The minute I saw it, my mind flashed to the 54th Massachusetts in the Civil War.  I reflected on how the officers were treated differently than the enlisted men in the African-American units.  This led to thinking about other injustices suffered by men who had a right to fight for their own freedom.  How they received less pay than white soldiers.  How some units refused pay until they received the same as whites.  How conditions were different.  How uniforms and supplies never seemed to get to them, and if they did, the supplies were of inferior quality.  How the African-American soldiers were not even issued firearms at the beginning of the war.  How they could not become officers and had to serve under white officers.  How, because non-commissioned officers had to stay with the men, they Blacks were allowed to be sergeants and corporals.  We saw a photograph of a black soldier with sergeant’s stripes and, though an individual honor, it can be seen as another representation of the racism of the day.

I would lead my students in a questioning activity like the one we participated in at the New York Historical Society, leading them to the injustice that continued during the war even after the African-American soldiers were allowed to fight.  The students could then research officers who led African-American units, their attitudes and what happened to them.  This could give a better understanding for all about issues during the war and after, right up to issues of prejudice in the present day.

We visited the hospital Ward on Ellis Island today, wearing hard hats because it is not open to the public and is only partially renovated.  We viewed photographs, staged mostly, of various activities in the processing of immigrants through the facilities.  We were amazed at the relics that were there, wondered at the real story, since the ones we saw were obviously set for a public relations reason.  Most immigrants would probably be wide-eyed from both shock and amazement at the sight before them.

After the long, difficult voyage across the Atantic, imagine staring at the line in front of you, wondering when your turn will come.  Waiting isn’t too bad, you have just spent quite a while on a ship, but now that ou are so close, you become somewhat anxious.  People around you are speaking various languages, and your spirits are raised if you hear one you recognized.  The people who work here are brusque and terse, having done this for so long they have institutionalized the contempt that many service workers have for their clients.  Like teachers for their students, and doctors for their patients, the staff becomes impatient at the slightest step out of the ordinary, and you don’t know what you did to offend them.

Finally you approach the desk at the front of the line.  You have watched each and every person you could see in front of you and saw how they reacted to questions posed to them.  The staff works quickly, and you wonder if they ever look a person in the eye outside of the time they are looking for sickness.  The people at the desk ask you several questions, and you try to answer in a way that will get you into America.  They send you to another line and you wait some more.Finally, you are through all the lines, only to find out you must be quarantined on the island in the hospital ward for an indeterminate amount of time until you are well enough to cross the harbor and join the population of New York City.  The island across the Hudson River seems close enough to touch, yet, like a desert mirage, it is always just out of your reach.  After all the trials of the crossing and entrance process, you still have been kept from your goal.

The Hospital ward reminded me that some immigrants’ ordeals were not over on Ellis Island in one day.  Some were there months.  Was it necessary? or only an over-reaction?

By inserting the word “rube” into our lexicon, you have reached a new height.

Did you realize that the term “rube” originated around 1891, the same era we studied today in the tenement museum?  It is a corruption of “Reuben” and came to be known as a simple, unsophisticated person.  Can we leap to an assumption that it happened right here, in this area, about an unsophisticated immigrant recently landed in New York?

June 9, 2010

Touring the lower east side of Manhattan, in New York City, I was struck by anomaly.  Pizza joints with Chinese writing on the signs. Chinatown services and restaurants set in buildings topped by a Star of David  carved in relief. As Ed O’Donnell stated, “It doesn’t remain the old neighborhood for long.”  Conditions are so poor and crowded, people can not wait to get out.   They struggle, scrimp and save until the have enough to move out to a nicer neighborhood.

Evidence of various ethnic groups movement through the neighborhood was strewn on every block.  Irish blocks became Eastern European Jewish , then Italian, and Puerto Rican, then Chinese.  New York does recycle- it’s neighborhoods!  A company that made signs had many different languages on the signs on their door.  Imagine an Italian sign maker having to provide people with characters in English, Spanish, Mandarin, Korean, as well as maybe still some in Italian!  And everyone would need the sign to be accurate. The ironically named Transfiguration Catholic Church has transfigured itself  through several different ethnic groups.  This melting pot seems to warm things very quickly.

The tenement museum revealed two families from the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth century.  The Levines lived in the tenement, he was a tailor, and employed several people who worked in his miniscule three room flat.  The presser probably had to work around the wife in the kitchen, and she had to feed the workers as well as her family.  Family meals had to be finished and cleaned up by the time the workers arrived.  I couldn’t imagine how the tiny space was occupied by all those people.  I guess that’s why a lot of photographs from the era show so many people sitting on the steps o the tenements or standing on the corner.  You needed to get outside for youd sanity!

The Rosenthals arrived in a later immigration wave, he didn’t have to work in the apartment, but though the furnishings were slightly more comfortable, the conditions were still crowded and cramped.  Mrs. Rosenthal lived there until she died, and was the last resident of the building.

The first desire of these people seemed to be to get out of the neighborhood and the situation as quickly as possible, yet there seemed to always exist a sense of pride in being from the area.  The film we viewed showed a Puerto-Rican woman never left the area, and still had family gatherings at her home.  She never wanted to leave the old neighborhood.  This was contrary to all we discovered about the lower east side, yet people seem proud of growing up in a difficult situation.

When you work hard at something, you wear it as a badge of honor.  You are proud of the effort you expended, and you want the world to know it.  That difficult situation never leaves you, and becomes a part of the person you stare at in the mirror, it becomes part of your identity.  That is probably also why Mrs. Rosental never moved out.

In our classrooms, we all see the beaming faces of the students who never thought they could accomplish something, but when they work hard, and listen to us help them through, they discover their self-concept growing because they worked through a difficult situation.  When people are pushed, and they work through it, it cannot help but to build their pride.