The cities of USA
An immigrant himself, part of the wave of Irish inundating the city in the 1840's and 50's, Croker was at once crass, cynical and sophisticated. He helped assert the newcomers' presence in the one area in which their numbers mattered: politics.
Yet when his candidate for mayor was defeated in 1901, even Croker seemed to recognize that his New York - the wide-open town of sports and pleasure hounds -- was done for. In spring 1902, he took his spoils and sailed into exile.
The leadership of Tammany Hall passed to Charles Francis Murphy. The new boss understood that his increasingly Jewish and Italian constituents wanted more than crumbs of political patronage or the occasional satisfaction of sticking a thumb in the eye of the patrician elite. Along with his protégés, Al Smith and Robert Wagner, Murphy put Tammany Hall in pursuit of winning elections by supporting significant social and economic reform.The cleanup of New York had been gathering momentum for a generation. Backed by an alliance of clergy, industrialists and moral crusaders, the attack on corruption, rowdiness and overt sexual misconduct intersected with the rising tide of progressivism. Oscar Wilde had once admonished a New York audience that "in the race between vice and virtue, the wise money will be on vice, no matter what handicaps are laid upon it." But it was virtue, at and immediate sign that a new day had arrived was the astounding physical transformation that soon followed the consolidation. By the time Croker left New York in 1902, the long-awaited subway was halfway completed. The newly finished Flatiron Building punctuated the city's emerging verticality. A second East River crossing, the Manhattan Bridge, was under way. A third was planned.
In November 1902, Harper's Weekly judged that it was "as if some mighty force were astir beneath the ground, hour by hour pushing up structures that a dozen years ago would have been inconceivable." By mid-century, Harper's predicted, New York would be a world capital "unrivaled in magnitude, splendor and power." A month later, the City Council took a giant step in that direction when it granted the Pennsylvania Railroad the right to carry out a construction program to join its western and Long Island lines in a Manhattan terminal.
It was one of the largest nongovernment projects ever undertaken, and the master plan called for tunnels beneath the Hudson and East Rivers, electrified tracks, signals and switches, a power plant in Long Island City, sprawling train yards in Sunnyside and the world's largest railroad-arch bridge, over Hell Gate. The capstone was the colossal new train station to be built in midtown.
In charge of the station's construction was Charles Follen McKim, of McKim, Mead & White, then the country's most prestigious architecture firm; McKim's Beaux-Arts design was predicated on the conviction that form didn't follow function, but magnified and ennobled it. McKim intended that Pennsylvania Station would never be mistaken for a mere terminal or a transfer point. The towering travertine columns, glass roofs and soaring interiors told all who entered that they had arrived in a metropolis as self-assured and powerful as any on earth.
Ground was broken in 1904. In the six years it took to complete Penn Station, the city continued to molt its skin. A magnificent library rose on the site of the old Croton Reservoir on 42d Street. The ramshackle Grand Central Terminal was torn down and a stunning replacement soon graced midtown. The Singer Building pushed the skyline to new heights. The seedy stables and saloons around Longacre Square gave way to a new theater district, and the area itself, at the behest of the newspaper that built its headquarters there in 1904, was renamed Times Square.
The first decade of Greater New York had its share of turmoil and tragedy. Racial disturbances broke out in the Tenderloin district in 1900. The 1904 fire aboard the steamship General Slocum killed more than a thousand people. A financial panic hit Wall Street in 1907.
Yet the poised expanse of Pennsylvania Station, with its blend of Roman splendor and American industrial might, testified to the city's underlying confidence and optimism. Like the mighty Ozymandias of Shelley's poem, it embodied the exuberant delusion that there are human achievements so grandly conceived and imposingly constructed that they are immune to time and the wrecking ball.
3. Alaska. Anchorage. The Russian soul.
At all all the history of America is the history of immigrants. They had brought their own culture and rules to the territories where they inhabite. It is very interesting to see America like a mosaic of diffrent cultures, and without the every part of that mosaic it canùt be the full picture. But for us, for Russian people the post interesting part of America is of course Alaska. There we feel the precence of Russian spirit.
On March 30, 1867, the United States purchased Alaska from Russia for $7.2 million, about two cents an acre; "Seward's Folly" many called it, after Secretary of State William H. Seward. On January 3, 1959, Alaska, with a land mass larger than Texas, California and Montana combined, became the 49th state in the union. It is a large state, 1/5 the size of all the other states together, reaching so far to the west that the International Date Line had to be bent to keep the state all in the same day. It's also the only U.S. state extending into the Eastern Hemisphere. In Alaska, the "family car" has wings, vegetables and fruit grow to two times their normal size and moose interrupt golf games when they feel like it.
The name "Alaska" was used by the Russians to refer only to the peninsula. This name was used by the United States to refer first to the entire Territory and then to the State after its purchase in 1867.The name "Alaska" is taken from the Aleut word "aláxsxaq" that refers to an object to which the sea is directed, in this case the mainland.
The biggest city of Alaska is Anchorage. Anchorage has a maritime climate modified by its 61 degree north latitude and by continental influences. Summers are cool and winters are cold. However, Anchorage does not experience the seasonal temperature extremes of interior Alaska or the north-central U.S. Total precipitation for Anchorage is only 15.91 inches per year, with the greatest amount being recorded in late summer and fall. Total snowfall averages 69.3 inches, but is mostly light and dry, i.e. low in water content. Reflecting its northerly latitude, Anchorage experiences dramatic seasonal swings in the amount of daylight, ranging from a low of about 5.5 hours per day in mid-December to a high of over 19 hours in mid-June.
Suggesting our intention to find a place to live somwhere in America, Anchorage is maybe not the best place to live, but of cource it merit our attention. Only th eproblem with a cold climate. Let’ s we petter take a look of the Western coast of USA. There the climate is better and the people is more friendly. There where the Hoolywood is situated and where th edreams come true. We go to Los Angeles!