A CITY DIVIDED!!!!!

GREENWOOD LAKE NEW YORK

Believe it or not, this beautiful Marina is only five minutes from where I live. In this post I will try to bring you into my neighborhood so that you can witness the difference in lifestyle, environment and people altogether from Greenwood Lake NY who only live 5-10 mintues away from each other.
OK, here we go.....my town pretty much consists of one main road. It is a long straight road that separates Greenwood Lake NY from West Milford NJ. The NY portion of the road is Jersey Avenue(where I live) and the NJ portion is called Lakeside Road. Most of the people in Greenwood Lake live on this road, along side the lake, it is a very small town. West Milford (the town that shares the road with my town), just to give you an idea is a very quiet, woodsy type of suburb. Most of its residents are middle and upper class.
OKAY, we are about to take a journey from West Milford NJ to Greenwood Lake NY....It is only about a ten minute drive.....Here are all of the things that you will see and hear.
We are starting at the beginning of Lakeside Road in West milford NJ, Around you, you will see many woods and houses very far apart from each other. The most you might hear are other cars passing you by if any. You are going to see people jogging and bicycling up the road. Not to mention, houses are huge and beautiful. As we continue to drive up Lakeside (3-5 minutes), houses are getting a little closer to one another but still a pretty good walking distance apart. The woods are starting to be replaced by small parking lots and dirt surfaces. With traffic picking up, people are not out jogging as much. It still pretty much looks like West Milford.
We are now in NY, Jersey Avenue (same road, different name now). Houses are now about three minutes in walking distance apart from one another. Now, on your right is a lake, it will now follow you until the end of this road. This part of NY has some of the same characteristics of NJ but now will see the boats and jetskis in the water, streets are picking up noise but still very suburban.
Just two minutes away we wil reach Breezy Point, a resturaunt. From this point on, the city life begins. For the next four minutes of Jersey Avenue, you will see pizza stores, a number of grocery stores,a deli, a Motor Vehicle Inspection Station and many many more businesses. Children are outside playing, in the summer you will hear the ice cream trucks, traffic is busy and people are like robots, all out to complete a task of some sort.
We are now at the one traffic light, the end of this road, beyond this point is the downtown area. "No more suburbia" if you didn't know better its like your on a busy street in Newark NJ.

The purpose of me taking you on this journey and hopefully you understood it all, was to reiterate some of the things that we have learned in class and prove how the smallest details can make a suburb appear urban and vice versa. Some concepts from class are;
1. From the Metropolis and Mental Life by Simmel, we learned that the city creates a blase or "i dont care attitude". As you get deeper into my city, people are no longer participating in family activities or events, many people just walk by one another without even saying hello, they are like robots.
2. We learned that trade is what really made cities possible, in saying that, the more businesses that we began to witness on our journey to NY, the city like everything else became.
3. You can see Gesell Schaft at its peak, people are doing their part and nothing more. For example, you have the owners of the grocery stores and then there are is the auto parts store right next door, everyone is dependent on the person to fulfill some aspect of their life.

The list of concepts that we learned goes on and on in relation to my topic but we will stop here.

NO EXCUSES!!!!!!!

In the beginnig of Douglas Massey's article,William Wilson is trying to explain why the poor are in their situation. His theory explained that due to fact that high paying jobs for the low skilled citizen that once existed in the city are no longer available, people have and are becoming more and more poor. My immediate response to this statement was the obvious......it is not high paying jobs for the unskilled worker that inner cities need, it is education and training that we are in desperate need of. With or without the availability of specific jobs, the quality of people that is being left behind is the real issue. If a quality education was a bit easier to attain, people would be able to move out of the city in search for better jobs. In my opinion, city reformers' intentions are to keep the poor, poor. I do not feel that enough effort is being put forth to fix the problem in the citites. For example, growing up,I have always wondered how my friends were getting new clothes and sneakers and their mothers didn't have jobs! I soon learned that the welfare system was supplying people with housing, food, clothes and money! And I always asked myself, what is the point of getting a job when luxuries are being given away for free? But boy was I wrong! Living in the city has taught me alot about survival, I knew by the time that I was able to fill out a job application, that there was something wrong with "the system". Yeah people were getting all of this help from "the system" but they were forced to live in impoverished areas for the rest of their lives. There is no chance, or shall I say legal chance for upward mobility once a person has given up their right attain an education. Once a person got on welfare, chances are, they are never getting off. Regardless if a person lives five minutes or fifty minutes of at least a half decent paying job, there is no excuse for not having one! Public transportation is always available to everyone so I think that it is silly when I hear or read about the "decline in manufacturing" or "the suburbanization of blue collar employent" in the cities.
As I continued reading the article, Massey began to talk about how racial and social segregation was at fault when determining the causes of poverty. I believe it is the complete opposite way around. It is because of the laziness of inner city people and the lack of motivation that they have that they have fallen so far behind in the race for success that they put themselves in a situaiton where the only place they can afford to go is to the ghetto streets of the city. While everyone else in suburbias are working hard for their dollar, the poor will continue to be left behind. I do happen to agree with Massey when he talks about the association of poverty and crime. It seems like, the poorer you are, they worser the neighborhood you live in, the more likely you are to commit or be a victim of a crime. It is sad to say but very true! But, and I hate to be critical of the city dweller but, I have come from and still belong in a poor neighborhood, people need to pick up a book on resposibility and get with the program, time and success waits for no one! Success does not care where you come from, what color you skin is or how much money you already have!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zaM6gUHEF5s