As he gingerly navigated our vehicle along the windy, highway-facing edge of Flushing Meadows—Corona Park, my colleague noted the incongruity of the landscape before us. “It’s the Robert Moses special,” Jack said as he rounded a curve to continue searching for his team. The path was matted with runoff  from the elevated road after a recent spell of rain. The spillage of vehicular waste, soil, and water had hewn this walkway over the years, yet it still received a fair amount of careful foot traffic on an unseasonably cold Tuesday morning. Thoroughfares bind this green expanse on all sides but its northern stretch, which sits on the shore of Flushing Bay. We wondered how anyone could get over here without driving a car or boat, or without flying into nearby LaGuardia Airport. Many of these 897 acres of public green space were remarkably difficult for the walking public to access. 

Former New York City Parks Commissioner Robert Moses conceived of the park in tandem with its adjacent highway infrastructure. The land upon which we stood had been used as a collection site for household coal ash and detritus swept from Brooklyn streets at the start of the twentieth century (NYC Parks, “Flushing Meadows–Corona Park”). The city began to transform the site when it was selected to host the 1939 World’s Fair, rehabilitating disused meadows and repurposing leveled ash mounds for the construction of major roads. Flushing Meadows and Grand Central Parkway emerged through an ambitious planning process, offering Queens a large recreational landscape fortified by eight lanes of automobile congestion (NYC Parks, “Grand Central Parkway”).

Despite its perceived inaccessibility, the park swelled with activity as the morning stretched over it. Pedestrians and cyclists who made it to the park’s eastern periphery thanked my colleagues as they passed. The team trimmed the wind-whipped weeds and restored the lawns around the park, helping to maintain the beauty that brings people back each day. Their tools joined the drone of cars and the hum of descending planes in a peculiar chorus. The breeze dispersed plant matter and the strong smell of gasoline. Residents hopped and swerved around us, enacting the delicate but certain choreography of their daily routines on this terrain. 

This was a version of New York. You get to know a city through its recreational spaces. People come because they need to. They find a way. The park has its own history, but is tied to many others. Like much of this city, it was once something else. It was inhabited by Indigenous Algonquian groups, who were displaced by European settlers in the 1600s (City of New York 2001, 5). The area was built and rebuilt. More people were forced to leave their homes to build the park and the roads that rip through it (Steinberg 2015, 218). The park was designed to be used, and its uses have changed with the years. The park is always becoming new. It is meaningful to people. While this highly detached narrative seems familiar, the park has its own life. The place is made and remade by those who flock to it. It has a specific, complex history, but its most significant events may have little bearing on its current relationships with devoted visitors. It is made in practice, activated through a kind of knowing that mirrors Jeanne Favret-Saada’s research on witchcraft in the Bocage of Western France (Favret-Saada 1980, 11). There is power in what we know and how we speak about this place.

Among the multifarious functions of this vast complex is the preservation of the city’s memory. The park is home to the New York Hall of Science, the Queens Wildlife Conservation Center, Queens Zoo, Queens Theatre, the Queens Museum, Citi Field, and the Billie Jean King National Tennis Center. Its large, bizarre central monuments are important to the city’s visual identity. The Unisphere and the New York State Pavilion were constructed for the 1964 World’s Fair, immortalizing the event in steel and concrete. The Queens Museum’s Panorama of the City of New York was also devised for the fair, but the beloved model has been updated to reflect changes to the built environment (Queens Museum). It is a physical structure, but it is not fixed, helping visitors make sense of the past and the shifting present. Rather than presenting a complete replica, this representation invites us to consider the immensity of our city.

Our buildings can shape an image of New York, but the city’s wrought silhouette looks different depending on where you stand. When perched on the highest natural point above sea level in Manhattan, the city looks like a series of six-story pre-war apartment buildings that have since dwarfed this unremarkable splash of schist. Two hours away on the A train, Manhattan’s grand pillars are reduced to tacks on the horizon west of Rockaway Beach. You can view the skyline woven into souvenir shirts when looking east from Hoboken, New Jersey. Marilyn Strathern identifies and critiques the concept of perspective that took hold in European Renaissance art, arguing that it is unable to capture the fluidity of exchange that is central to Melanesian dance displays (Strathern 2015, 97). Being able to accept perspective as something that is multiple and moveable can broaden our understanding of self and other. Every way we look at New York is different, and every way is true. 

Looking is participatory; we are always simultaneously performing and observing the city. The city can be a mess of buildings, but it must also constitute the things around them and under them and the people everywhere. It is an idea that we make. Structures buttress this idea so well that they can be mistaken for the city itself. Buildings are substantive, and perhaps New York’s spectacular assortment of towers legitimates the city. It communicates a capacity to build, if nothing else. When afforded the rare, often unexpected opportunity to admire the built environment, I experience the same muted veneration I feel when I notice an old painted sign where an awning was removed or catch a glimpse of a full moon through the yellowing film on a bus window. I have spent every year of my life looking upon the city’s architecture with an awe that expands when I am with someone who has never seen it before. It is an awe produced in context.

I love New York. I respect it and I fear it. The city and I perform our curiosity together. I am in relation to what I think the city is, and we are growing up. Renato Rosaldo’s meditations on emotional force provide a frame to assess the intensity and inconsistency of the many affective associations one might forge with this place. In his work with the Ilongot people of northern Luzon, Rosaldo could not comprehend the grief-informed rage that brought his interlocutors to perform the practice of headhunting (Rosaldo 2014, 117). After his wife, anthropologist Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo, died during a research trip to the Philippines in 1981, he began to grasp the descriptive power of emotional force (122). To accept headhunting as it was, he needed to abandon a learned attachment to reason. His collaborators spoke plainly about the loss that inspired their urge to hunt others and collect their heads. He appreciated the ineffable potentiality of upheaval through his own experience of loss, challenging the anthropological discipline to accept the potency of great feeling which might come at any time and get into everything.

Perhaps it is this feeling that inspired me to investigate the park. Until April of 2025, my grandfather lived by one of its poorly-lit entrances. The Grand Central Parkway separated him from the activity of the baseball stadium and the nearest subway station. Twenty-one years ago, he lost his wife in a car accident that severely injured him and reconfigured the life he knew. I was very close to my grandparents, and I spent most weekends in Elmhurst, Queens before they left for their first vacation in a long time. The event occurred in Hilo, Hawaii. I had grieved unexpected deaths before this, but I had never been so aware and so angry. My grandfather moved in with my family during his recovery. Then, he moved into a one-bedroom apartment in Corona. He kept every piece of the life he shared with my grandmother. A month ago, I brought two suitcases packed with their silverware and framed photographs to Manila. After living beside the strange, friendly expanse of Flushing Meadows for two decades, he decided to return home.

I had only known my grandfather as a resident of Queens. His presence saturated my mental associations to this neighborhood and to New York. It was a place of many sounds, with an abundance of Filipino restaurants, and it was where my family grieved. It was far from Washington Heights, where I grew up. However, I loved the car ride to my grandfather’s house over Randalls Island and the Robert F. Kennedy Bridge. Traversing a moderate distance made the journey feel special and new. Manila is much further away. This was not the first time I had wandered the park since my grandfather left the neighborhood, but there I could sense his absence. Rosaldo confronts a tendency in symbolic anthropology toward the categorization of events for the purpose of their study. However, he finds that in binding a moment to become legible as a text, one obfuscates “the untidiness of everyday life” (126). The fabrication of a geography of New York is an exercise in accepting the personal, the emotional, and the inexact. The map fills with events that fall into one another, calling them back and forth through time.

If the city cannot lie merely in buildings and bounded truths, we can turn to writers who can provide a more pliable scaffolding for the study of New York. In the first chapter of Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, Pierre Bourdieu presents an approach to the study of society through its various fields (Bourdieu 1986, 4). The field is a distinct social area in which people express their proximity to cultural, economic, social, and symbolic capital (5). He investigates the concept of taste, dissecting the perceived ineffability that had long constrained its analytical apprehension. He observes that one’s access to forms of capital determines one’s concept of taste, which can illuminate and reproduce class distinctions (4). Surveying French residents in 1963 and 1967-1968, Bourdieu learned that their preferences in areas like art and music communicated specific competences to receive legitimate cultural works (8). He writes: “Tastes (i.e., manifested preferences) are the practical affirmation of an inevitable difference. It is no accident that, when they have to be justified, they are asserted purely negatively, by the refusal of other tastes. In matters of taste, more than anywhere else, all determination is negation; and tastes are perhaps first and foremost distastes…” (49). The idea of taste can be best understood in opposition to what it is not, justifying the continued fracturing between those whose tastes do not align. It is a tool that reproduces both social desires and divisions. He continues: “…each taste feels itself to be natural—and so it almost is, being a habitus—which amounts to rejecting others as unnatural and therefore vicious. Aesthetic intolerance can be terribly violent. Aversion to different life-styles is perhaps one of the strongest barriers between the classes; class endogamy is evidence of this.” Bourdieu offers a means of interpreting the structures that guide our social world and their attendant cruelties. Social barriers pervade the city. Even the ones that resist observation mold the urban social order. What we think maps itself onto the spaces we occupy and shapes our relationships with one another.

New York provides a fruitful foundation for social exchange. Queens is home to 2.3 million residents, half of whom were born internationally and half of whom were born in New York state (NYU Furman Center). It is extremely diverse, and there is no ethnic majority in the borough. In a city of immense cultural difference, it can be challenging to find a concept like taste that might reveal the nuances of social life in New York. Arjun Appadurai develops a set of interdependent parameters to support the study of global systems in his 1990 text “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy.” Applying Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concept of deterritorialization to his expansion of Benedict Anderson’s imagined communities, Appadurai asks us to consider relationality through the lens of disjuncture. Appadurai assesses the economic, cultural, and political disjunctures that comprise our imagined worlds across five planes, which offer us some reference points in a frenzied geography. Ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, financescapes, and ideoscapes are fluid, “perspectival constructs,” which actors shape and metabolize in different ways (Appadurai 2016, 549). His description of these configurations of peoples, technologies, and transfers of capital, images, and ideologies aligns with the rhizomatic perspective Strathern studied in Melanesia, positioning these flows together and apart, everywhere and nowhere. This, of course, makes them difficult to pin down. Perhaps that is the point. If the patterns of exchange are fluid, our theoretical frame must be fluid as well. 

His discussion of deterritorialization can help us accommodate fragmented narratives of the globalized city. He writes: “It is in the fertile ground of deterritorialization, in which money, commodities, and persons are involved in ceaselessly chasing each other around the world, that the mediascapes and ideoscapes of the modern world find their fractured and fragmented counterpart” (552). He evokes Mira Nair’s 1985 film India Cabaret to elucidate the complex loops of this fracturing, as young women seek employment as cabaret dancers and sex workers in Bombay based on the fictionalized roles they had seen portrayed in Hindi films. Layers of relational displacement intersect in this constructed practice, particularly as the women work among men who may lack the opportunities in their own social worlds to elaborate their desires. All actors in this exchange are performing an adopted, exaggerated role, which gains substance through the act of performance. When we tell ourselves stories, we begin to believe they are true. A city is a conglomeration of constructed truths.

New York is in the throes of a fraught mayoral race, whose key actors must tell the city’s story in a way that resonates most with its constituency (Fitzsimmons and King 2025). Nair’s son, Zohran Mamdani, is a young, progressive New York State assemblyman who has joined a crowded field of Democratic candidates. Other notable figures in the Democratic primary race include City Council speaker Adrienne Adams, former governor Andrew Cuomo, comptroller Brad Lander, and activist Paperboy Love Prince. Mayor Eric Adams recently announced his retreat from the political party, campaigning as an independent for the November election. This news followed a judge’s dismissal of the incumbent’s five-count federal indictment on corruption charges, which involved the Trump administration’s intervention on the mayor’s behalf. The public denaturation of the city’s municipal leadership demonstrates the fundamental inconsistency in the top-down vision of New York. The cohesive story is seductive, but is dreadfully incomplete. New Yorkers have to choose the story that makes the most sense to them. Simultaneously, New Yorkers need to remain involved in the collaborative project of imagining the city. I suppose we have no choice.

It was difficult to find a thread through the histories of New York. There are several names, spots, and eras that come up over and over, but they are connected to so many other things. The web grew. To pause this futile excavation, I attended a screening at the Anthology Film Archives last week. My dear childhood friend Daniella Brito curated film screenings, performances, and discussions that will take place over the course of the summer. For the first installment in their Imaging Improvisation series, Daniella selected two films from The Kitchen’s archive. In one shaky video, Bronx hip hop group the Funky 4 + 1 performed their song “That’s the Joint” twice during the 1980 event Dubbed in Glamour (The Kitchen 2014). In the next clip, Fab 5 Freddy emceed the 1981 “Graffiti Rock” show, which brought crews of breakers from New York’s streets to an institutional stage (Anderson 1981). I sat beside Daniella’s father, and we laughed and cheered with the improvised quirks on the screen. This was the environment in which he was raised. I was transported to a time I had not experienced with someone who knew it well. Also, the movements of the camera for these single-shot films mimicked the way an audience member would have watched these shows. We were all in the room, and we were all moved to respond.

This was another New York. It was one my father cherished. He had a fondness for the ambient danger he sensed around him. By the time my mother arrived in the early 1990s, the city had changed. I was born into a different landscape. Anyone I ask has their own interpretation of the story of the city, but they all note its constant movement. It is impossible to identify what is happening until it has happened. Even then, the record is incomplete. Narratives are filled when we speak about the past. My version of New York persists in every person I witness on the subway, in what I catch on public access television, in the things my parents have told me, and in anything I have not come across yet. Every day I learn a bit more, but I am glad I cannot know everything. The city exists in how it changes and how we talk about it. We must accept its changing, and that gives us something to talk about.

Bibliography

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Appadurai, Arjun. “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy.” Essay. In Readings for a History of Anthropological Theory, 5th ed., 547–55. Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press, 2016. 

Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Oxfordshire: Taylor & Francis Group, 1986. 

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Funky Four + 1 in “Dubbed in Glamour” at The Kitchen (November 22, 1980). The Kitchen, 2014. https://vimeo.com/115293799. 

“Grand Central Parkway.” New York City Department of Parks & Recreation. n.d. Accessed May 21, 2025. https://www.nycgovparks.org/parks/grand-central-parkway/history. 

“The Panorama of the City of New York.” Queens Museum. n.d. Accessed May 21, 2025. https://queensmuseum.org/exhibition/panorama-of-the-city-of-new-york/.

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Rosaldo, Renato. The Day of Shelly’s Death: The Poetry and Ethnography of Grief. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014.

Steinberg, Theodore. Gotham Unbound: The Ecological History of Greater New York. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2015. ISBN 978-1-4767-4128-4.

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