Gotham City Soul

I was walking home yesterday and it was a time of the evening when many Muslims in New York City pray to Mecca. We have a mosque in the East Village, the Madina Masjid , located on First Avenue and 11 th Street. The mosque was founded in 1976 by Bengali immigrants, some of whom ran restaurants on "Indian Row" on 6 th Street. On a marquee-like sign you can see that Allah is the true God but that Judaism and Christianity are also part of the true faiths. Listed along with Abraham and a few other prophets, including Muhammad, is Jesus. All this is in large green and red letters. On top of the mosque is a minaret—turquoise with gold leaf. As I walked up First Avenue toward 12 th Street I could see some Muslim men making their way toward the mosque, chatting, greeting each other. I turned the corner and walked down 12 th Street toward home and was surprised by the sight of a large skateboard ramp that had been erected in a public yard adjacent to a yard the members of the m...

This morning I walked out of my building and down the street toward Avenue A when I saw something that made me stop. Written in colored chalk on the sidewalk in front of a building a few feet from my own was this: Josephine Carlisi Age 31 Lived at 502 East 12 Street Died March 25, 1911 Triangle Factory Fire Who wrote this? It was clear by the date why it was written. The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire was a horrifying event; immigrant seamstresses, many of them teenagers were trapped in a blazing building with almost no way out but to jump. And many did jump from the eighth ninth floors of the building and died right in front of witnesses. The reasons for the senseless death of 146 young men and women (most of whom lived in my neighborhood and the Lower East Side ) were typical. The factory, located in the Asch Building (now the Brown Building) on Washington Place and Greene Streets—today a posh neighborhood—was a sweatshop—unsanitary, unsafe, rarely, if ever inspected, where indivi...