Queens College President James Muyskens made the mission clear: Create a boroughwide tour to show faculty members where their students live.Queens College professors get lesson in borough neighborhoods
...historian Jeff Gottlieb explained how Queens was once divided into just three towns: Flushing, Jamaica and Newtown.
[Actually, Queens County consisted of six towns: Newtown, Flushing, Jamaica, North Hempstead, Hempstead, and Oyster Bay. Newtown (part of which had become LIC), Flushing, Jamaica, and the Rockaway Peninsula of the Town of Hempstead became the borough of Queens in New York City on January 1, 1898. The part of Queens County that was not consolidated into New York City, (North Hempstead, Oyster Bay and the rest of Hempstead) became Nassau County in 1899. Running for office, this guy is...]
The next stop was Station Square in Forest Hills Gardens, a Tudor-style entrance to one of the country's oldest planned communities.
Media studies Prof. Leslie McCleave, who is beginning her first semester at Queens College, described the Old World architecture as "beautiful."
"I know some of the names [of Queens sites] - the U.S. Open - but unless you walk around, you don't get to see it."
"This allows us to see what the neighborhoods are like, where our students are coming from," gushed Cynthia Lashley, 53, a new-to-Queens childhood education professor who taught last year at DePaul University in Chicago.
Education Prof. Line Augustin, who has lived in Flatbush for a decade, acknowledged that she rarely ventures into Queens but that she liked seeing the neighborhoods where her students live.
"You have to know the person to serve them," she said.
So why stop at Forest Hills Gardens? Is this where you think your students hail from?
24 comments:
Why is this blog so anti secondary education?
(Not sarcasm - a serious question) Thank you.
Displaying your knowledge of historic Queens County (i.e. that it included what now belongs to Nassau) is fine, but you're really stretching to turn it into a political slam. Gotlieb wasn't talking about pre-consolidation Queens County, and in fact he was correct that what is today Queens used to consist of three townships.
eBohn said...
Displaying your knowledge of historic Queens County (i.e. that it included what now belongs to Nassau) is fine, but you're really stretching to turn it into a political slam. Gotlieb wasn't talking about pre-consolidation Queens County, and in fact he was correct that what is today Queens used to consist of three townships.
Read:
(Historian) Jeff Gottlieb explained how Queens was once divided into just three towns: Flushing, Jamaica and Newtown.
If you are going to give historical perspective, it would be prudent to give it correctly.
Where's the other Jeff....
tuggin' at his wand in the John Jay College mens' room?
Hey Gottlieb aren't you too old for doin' a vaudeville road show?
That doofus is a wealth of misinformation!
My, my, my....
the Queens preservation community is in "good hands" with
"champions" like these!
Where's Dr. Eichenbaum?
Conjuring up a new tour fee schedule for taking some newbie groups on boring forays into neighborhoods he doesn't really know?
"Why is this blog so anti secondary education?(Not sarcasm - a serious question) Thank you."
Not sure I understand why you are asking this question. Do you not find it disturbing that the people in charge of dishing out the learning don't seem to know what the hell they are talking about?
I sooner send out a flank
of jingle-belled "Harre Krishna" converts to do battle with the voracious developers who are gobbling up Queens history rather than to depend upon these burro hall sanctioned mental midgets
as our elite Spartan warriors!
These are the gutless wonders that are responsible for making Queens
a preservation wasteland!
"Gotlieb wasn't talking about pre-consolidation Queens County"
Post-consolidation Queens County consisted of Newtown, LIC, Jamaica and Flushing, so in either case he messed up his history lesson.
Relax....
Borough Hall & Co. loves
the likes of Gottlieb, Kroessler, Eichenbaum and (more recently) Perlman (and soon more to follow,
no doubt).
They're the jellyfish of the "preservation" movement.
That's why Queens is way down on the list as #4 in possessing their mouse's share of NYC landmarks!
This blog's name is right.
Queens is crap.
That last poster sounds like
somebody who's very pissed off
that they can't put a muzzle the truth that's plainly spoken
on Queens Crap.
Hey, this ain't a politically controlled weekly rag... fella!
It could also be one of those "preservationists" who's got a guilty conscience about not doing his job!
I think it's the last one.
Those "preservationists"
prefer spinning their wheels rather than work up a real sweat.
And they get very embarrassed when the finger is pointed at them.
Well...here's my finger pointed skyward to you phonies!
Queens has got
its officially santioned "preservation" movement.
Unfortunately, it's a bowel movement!
QBM sounds
a lot more truthful than than QHS.
"Collect fragments
and record data, photos, etc.
from the mounting piles of destruction debris found
throughout Queens".
"Spend taxpayers' money to mount (yawn) redundant exhibits
better seen elsewhere and as little as possible on spearheading an effective preservation effort".
"Be sure and pay tribute to
the borough president's office,
without which the rape of our borough would not be possible"!
These are phrases that one might
likely cull from the
"mission statements"of our many "hysterical" societies!
There was nothing that I read in that article that led me to beleive that these professors were teaching anything ABOUT Queens, only that they were teaching IN Queens to students FROM Queens and they either do not live in Queens themselves or just moved here recently.
More importantly I have never seen a post on this blog that ever had a positive spin on higher education.
Everything I have ever read about a College or University has been negative.
Can you tell me why that is?
anonymous said:
Everything I have ever read about a College or University has been negative.
Can you tell me why that is?
Maybe it's because most of the institutions of higher learning in Queens and NYC in general do not make good neighbors. Ask their neighbors not their press agents.
"Maybe it's because most of the institutions of higher learning in Queens and NYC in general do not make good neighbors."
I think that colleges teaching their faculty about the history and neighborhoods of Queens so they can understand and relate to their students and the community better is a great example of institutions of higher learning being neighborly.
So whats your argument?
First of all, you seem to have missed the entire point of the post. Having a know-nothing teach false history to other know-nothings accomplishes nothing except leave them with the wrong impressions. Taking newbie Queens College professors to Forest Hills Gardens so they can see where their students come from is laughable. Do you think any kid from FHG is going to enroll at CUNY? Try NYU, Yale, etc. And yes, many times the local institutions make for bad neighbors. Grownups elsewhere generally don't want to live in a college town, so why would it be different here.
Education in and of itself is a wonderful thing. But the blog is called Queens CRAP, not Queens Wonderful. You are welcome to start up one with that title and post all about how great life at LaGuardia College is.
First of all the picture is in Forest Hills. That does not mean that they did not visit any other neighborhoods. (What were you thinking?) It just so happens to be the LIRR station on Austin street happens to be one of the best known landmarks in our borough.
Regardless I am sure the number of CUNY students that hail from Queens is at the very least 25% and at Queens College considerably higher.
My problem is that you spread hate and negativity around this borough and I am fucking sick of it.
Supposedly you created this blog to fight overdevelopment in residential neighborhoods.
Why dont you stick to what you know.
People like you are part of the problem of overdevelopment. You allow wannabe politician morons to insult our history by telling it falsely, which leads to less pride in one's area, which is part of overdevelopment. Second, I never said that the good professors didn't visit other neighborhoods. The article quite clearly states that they did. My favorite was the mention of the Mount Zion Cemetery as they whizzed through Maspeth. People don't live in a cemetery. Where else did they visit? Socrates Sculpture Garden - no students live there, either.
Ask yourself why the LIRR station is a landmark. It's in Forest Hills Gardens, which has special protections. You need to see the big picture here and if so-called "hate and negativity" sicken you so much perhaps you should not visit a blog which has the word "crap" in its title. This ain't the Land of Oz despite the literature coming out of Borough Hall and apparently, Queens College.
Let's see - a Maspeth cemetery, a train station in Forest Hills and a park in Astoria. Yes - this is where college kids are living these days. LOL
And my problem is that tweeding pols spread hate and negativity around this borough and I am fucking sick of it.
Negativity?
Why are you silent on Archie Bunker? Why arn't you fighting the deterioation of Queens, so obvious to anyone who is not bought.
Hate?
Why arn't you fighting displacement? Why arn't you fighting exploitation of immigrants? Why arn't you fighting the machine that can scarely conceal their disdain for us?
Why do you teach your kids that development is good - that Queens is well governed? That the same shit they read about in textbooks is happening in their back yards in this day and age?
Yes democracy is a bit messy. But the cornerstone of our republic is people that, as John Adams said, is to read, speak and think and write.
And from what I see in the product of the colleges in this country, you guys are doing a pretty lousy job of training them to do so.
This will shut them up:
Hey Mr Queens College Professor, do we have to mention about little things like the Jamaica Town Records that SOMEONE you might know tried to sell on the open market, or the Jacob Titus Bowne collection and Bowne House and tax donations and ...
Again, no argument. Disappointing.
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