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New York, like no other American city, is built to human scale, and the best way to comprehend it and feel its rhythms, is to walk it, to hit the pavement and join the mix. Street Level celebrates this direct impact. It re-introduces “good old-fashioned shoe-leather reporting.” Zooming in on the streets of New York City, Street Level talks about the quotidian and the quirky, the personal and the global, and gets down to the urban experience. It celebrates the “choreography” of the streets—the elaborate dances of individuals colliding with each other, with architecture, with the economy, with politics, with culture. Computers may have relegated writers inside, but we are getting back out there, re-creating the texture of the street, and bringing the experience of “being there” back on-line. By focusing on one street per installment we begin to understand on a hyper-local level how people make sense of their world, how they shape it, and how their world shapes them. The “idea of a city” is embedded in a street’s language—the physical and social boundaries, the history, events, artistic movements, even the details of a sidewalk. In the personal narratives that run through a street’s apartments, shops, stoops, schools, offices, theaters, parks, banks, brown fields, bus stops, and barbershops, Street Level finds stories that resonate and have moments of insight linking to larger trends and ideas. The Website itself becomes
an extension of the street, serving to connect the people, places,
and events of a street to each other as well as to a larger community. |
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Amy
Zimmer |
