The cities of USA
The cities of USA.
Plan:
Introduction. America. Where to live?
Capital of the World. New York.
Alaska. Anchorage. The Russian soul.
LA. City of Angels.
Chicago. The faces of its people.
Boston. City or University?
Miami. Wellcome to Paradise!
Salt Lake City. Home of Olimpic magie.
1. Introduction. America. Where to live?
The USA is a very huge country. By its territory it stands on the third place after Russia and Canada. But of course the territory is nothing without the people leaving there and the cities that they build. Imagine you want to go to live in the United states because of some of your reasons, and imagine also you have no relatives and no friends there. But you have the freedom and enough money to leave in any place and in any city in America. What you choose? Little city somwhere on the seashore where you can see how the sun set, or the big meropolitan conglomerat from which you can reach any country in the world? All the cities have their advantages and disadvantages. Let’s we examine some of them!
2. Capital of the World. New York.
The first city which we are going to view as a possible place of living is… New York of course. There is a proverb that Pares is the capital of Europe and New York is the capital of the world. Of course after well-known events of 11 of September New York lost a lot of its power but anyway it remains one of the biggest cities of America. At first a little glance to the history…
Its supoorters hailed the creation of Greater New York as an event of historic significance on a par with the founding of Rome. Yet in the early light of Jan. 1, 1898, things didn't appear too different from before. No one among the five boroughs' 3.5 million residents proposed starting a new calendar, as the Romans had, ab urbe condita, "from the founding of the city."
In the sprawling slums of New York, the so-called other half lived as it always had, mostly hand to mouth. The tenement districts, concentrated near the Manhattan and Brooklyn shorelines, were home to notoriously squalid and overcrowded conditions, a source of misery to those who endured them and a concern to those who studied them.
Activists like Lillian Wald tried to relieve the physical suffering of the immigrant poor and help them find means of escape. Others were increasingly alarmed by the increasing presence of foreigners. In 1902, almost 500,000 immigrants landed at Ellis Island. By the end of the decade, the annual total reached a million. A quarter of them stayed in New York.
In 1908, Police Commissioner Theodore Bingham published an article in The North American Review in which he contended that at least half the city's criminals were Jews. The face of Italian immigrants, wrote Charles Bancroft, a doctor who worked on Ellis Island, displayed "a lack of intelligence." A powerful clique of eugenicists began to argue that the new immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe were genetically prone to crime, disease and depravity and should be kept out.
The attention of those who worried about the future of Greater New York wasn't limited to the behavior of the most newly arrived.
In 1899, Mark Twain wrote that if the United States were really interested in overthrowing corrupt and oppressive tyranny, it should send the Marines to occupy Tammany Hall instead of to fight insurrectionists in the Philippines.
Presiding over the new metropolis was Mayor Robert Van Wyck, handpicked for the job by the Tammany Hall boss Richard Croker. In 1899, the Mazet Investigation, pursuing yet another exposé of municipal corruption, put Croker on the stand. Asked if he was working for his own pocket, Croker retorted, "All the time, same as you."