Sure, except the accent’s going, going and soon to be gone, by 2015 or 2020, according to Columbia University linguists, partly because New Yorkers suffering from “linguistic insecurity”, says Kara Becker of Reed University.  It was not always thus:  while now the traditional New York accent is seen as the “second worst” in the United States (only the traditional southern drawl ranks lower), up until World War Two it was seen as very prestigious.  But social mores and demographic change (including the large number of people who have moved into Manhattan from elsewhere in the last twenty or so years) have made profound changes to local speech patterns.

This news made it into today’s The Australian (21 January 2012) with an article by Will Pavia (from The Times).  Interested in following this?  A new documentary by Heather Quinlan about the New York accent is called If These Knishes Could Talk was featured on the Channel 13 (New York) website in August 2011.

So if you are interested in hearing the “real” (or historic) New York, you will need to spend less time in Manhattan and lots more time in Brooklyn, and hurry.

Here’s a slide show of the current station.  What a shame, as it was not always this way:  When the original Penn Station was completed in 1910, it was grand and beautiful.

Click here for some more photos. But the redevelopment czars had their way in New York in the 1960s, commencing its destruction in 1963.

And now, guess what?  They are talking about re-making it grand again – again only fifty years since the original desecration.  It is to be re-built across the street in the James Farley Post Office (post code 10001 – now, that’s a cool number, that’s the postcode we had when we lived on West 27^th Street, just four blocks away). There is a great New Yorker cover from 19 September 2011 which features this post office:

Check out photos of this post office here (I used this post office many times and assure you – it looks just like this!).

The new station is to be called Moynihan Station, named after the late Senator from New York (who served 24 years).  Not a moment too soon, but don’t hold your breath waiting: in my two months in New York in late 2011 I read The New York Times every day and saw not one mention of the new Penn Station.

-          Jeffrey Shandler (Rutgers University) analysing the Jewish and Yiddish elements of the film;

-          Shai Ginsburg (Duke University) looking at the film from the perspective of modern physics (Schrodinger’s Cat);

-          Riv-Ellen Prell (University of Minnesota) examining the verisimilitude (or not) of the setting – the Jewish suburb of St Louis Park in Minneapolis; and

-          Jonathan Boyarin (University of North Carolina) and Ariella Lang (Columbia University).

Strong writing, fascinating analysis – I particularly loved Prell’s piece about Jewish Minnesota.  Worthwhile for fans of Jewish film.

Watch the trailer here:

It was not always thus.  I grew up in suburban New Jersey in the post-war years; the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s were not kind to the City of New York.  In fact, according to crime statistics, the crime rates of New York steadily rose and only started to drop in 1990.  Yes, this also happened around the United States, but they dropped even faster in New York City.  Here are some useful links:

- A 2004 paper entitled “The Remarkable Drop in Crime in New York City”

- The Wikipedia entry on crime in New York City

- Heather McDonald’s City Journal article on New York police

- And especially, the October 2011 book The City that Became Safe: New York’s Lessons for Urban Crime and Its Control  by University of California criminologist Franklin E. Zimring , which has been extensively discussed in the media – see the New York Times and KQED.

Zimring particularly identifies the role of policing.  Check out the Oxford University Press links to a number of supporting tables.  And here’s a simple set of tables: New York Police Department borough by borough law enforcement staffing from 1990 to 2009 – a full twenty year period.  What we find here is that police numbers have risen from 25,839 in 1990 to 35,628 in 2009, an increase of almost 38 percent – paralleling the drop in crime.  Zimring examines all sorts of factors, including use of illegal drugs (not down by much, but drug-related violent crime sure is), the number of people in jail: again, New York has released far more people than most other places in the United States – meaning that the objective of putting problem people in jail as a way to reduce crime simply is not the answer.  What appears to be the answer is the sort of intensive policing of identified crime “hot” spots, and the result appears to be that when a “crime is prevented on 125^th Street, it does NOT go to 140^th Street”, according to Zimring.

And that’s one thing I observed in New York this (northern) autumn: large numbers of police.  Sure, we were there for the tenth anniversary of September 11^th, and for a UN General Assembly vote on Palestine, but the numbers are substantial, visible and impressive.  It’s interesting that more jurisdictions, including here in Australia, are not following the New York methodology more closely.

It unashamedly leans left-ward and boasts a stellar group of supporters including writer Paul Auster.  Fascinating model of a non-profit media organisation.  Worth checking out.

So try looking for college football in New York City; it’s astonishingly hard to find.  In fact, New York must be unique in American cities in this way.  Los Angeles has UCLA, University of Southern California and a host of smaller colleges and universities with active football programs.  San Francisco Bay area has powerhouses UC Berkeley and Stanford, as well as a number of others.  Boston has a number (think Boston College, Harvard), as does Chicago (Northwestern).

Certainly many of the powerhouse football colleges in the USA are not located in their states’ largest cities, as many are in state universities.  But New York is unique:  there are, in fact, thirteen different State University of New York campuses with inter-collegiate football programs:  Albany, Alfred State, Alfred University, Brockport, Buffalo State, Buffalo University, Cortland State, Erie Community, Hudson Valley Community, Maritime College, Morrisville State, Nassau Community and Stony Brook.  But unless I have my geography wildly wrong, none of these are in New York City – and only the University of Buffalo (which is almost in Canada, for goodness sake) actually has a football program of note.  Funny, that: think about the surrounding states (all with smaller populations):  New Jersey with Rutgers in the big leagues for some years now, Penn State in the “uber” big leagues and even University of Connecticut.

So clearly New York is not a college football state:  in fact (and I have not read any analysis of this, although it may exist), New York State’s public universities must surely be amongst the least visible state football programs in the USA (did you know that the University of Buffalo was actually a state school?) – although a number of private colleges (Syracuse particularly but also Cornell, Colgate and many others) are reasonably strong.

All of which makes watching live (as opposed to television) American college football in New York City a challenge.  There are only three NCAA “Division 1″ college football teams in New York City:  Fordham University, Columbia University (see below) and Wagner College on Staten Island, none of them with football programs of note.  It was not always thus:  in 1870 Columbia played Rutgers in the second football game in history, and for many years provided high level competition to Rutgers and others.  The Fordham teams from the late 1920s through the 1940s were some of the best in the country, appearing in the 1941 Cotton Bowl and 1942 Sugar Bowl.  But Fordham dropped its football program in late 1954, only reinstituting it in 1970.  In some ways Columbia football sank even lower:  from 1983 to 1988 the Columbia football team lost 44 games in a row, still an NCAA record.

Other universities in New York City?  New York University? A great and growing university, but no football team (discontinued after the 1952 season; too Greenwich Village?).  City University of New York? – City College dropped its team in 1951.  Brooklyn College dropped its football program after the 1990 season due to lack of funds.   So what makes New York City so immune to the charms of college football?  According to Nate Silver in The New York Times (September 2011), New York indeed is the American metropolitan area LEAST interested in college football, with only fourteen percent of the population following that sport.  The following table (from Silver’s article) shows the “most popular college football teams in the New York City TV market”:

Makes for interesting reading, doesn’t it?  What’s missing?  Actually, New York City-based teams are missing.

But this city does love sport:  think of the most successful baseball team in history, the New York Yankees. And the Mets and the (former) Brooklyn Dodgers; the city has hosted fourteen World Series to date.  And professional football: the Giants and the Jets (even if both of them actually play in New Jersey), the Rangers and the Islanders ice hockey teams, the basketball Knicks, the “Red Bulls” soccer.  And in fact, New York is unique in the USA in that it has more than one team in each of the most popular professional sports – baseball, basketball, football and ice hockey.

But still, no college football of note.  So for that reason on a glorious warm and dry Saturday this autumn, I attended a Columbia University football game at Baker Field at the very top of Manhattan, just below the Bronx.  According to the Ivy League football website, there were 3003 attendees, including we three from Australia.  The distance from the main university campus (and its somewhat “down-market” location) certainly does not add to the audience appeal.  Just take the “1” train uptown – whoops, if it is running on weekends that far north (it wasn’t the day we went; sigh).  (Click here for Jake Novak’s hilarious analysis of how to get to Baker Field.)  But it only cost $10 to get in (by contrast, University of Michigan general admission prices ran from $70 to $85/ticket this year, and up to three times higher for premiere seats).

Columbia lost, although they played their heart out.  As football games go, it was low-key:  at half-time Columbia fielded a marching band of about 18 (just about as far as you can get from the Michigan or Ohio State hundreds), a band much more notable for its intellectual stunts and outrageous behaviour than anything else.  But the football team’s pale blue uniforms looked great against the green Astroturf field, with the Hudson River and the Henry Hudson Parkway toll bridge in the background, set against the steep rising green Palisades of New Jersey in the distance.

Columbia’s football team was not bad this year – in fact frequently held the lead in a number of games but somehow managed to lose every one until the season’s end.  Columbia had one win and nine losses – curiously beating Brown University, the Ivy League leader, in their final game (after giving up 61 points to Cornell the week before).  As they say, go figure.  Not surprising that the University changed its coach in late November.  So New York college football seems inevitably mired in low interest and low appeal.  The moral of this story:  as great as that city is, if you want a real American college football experience, go just about anywhere but New York City.

PS:  I am not the only person who has noted the absence of competitive college football in New York City.  Last year (2010) was the first game of the creatively named “Pinstripe Bowl” (don’t you love that name?), which takes place at the new Yankee Stadium.  And this year – December 30th – the Rutgers University Scarlet Knights (Big East) go up against the Iowa State University Cyclones (Big 12) at this event.  The Pinstripe Bowl website proclaims the unusual fact that last year’s game was “the first college football bowl game played in the Bronx” since 1962 (American sports statistics are rich, are they not?).

(PPS:  Note to Highland Park High School, NJ, football fans:  HP’s football team beat Metuchen this year, 28 to 21; I arrived at the field just as the team buses were leaving. Maybe next season I will see my team win.)

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I live (most of the time) in Sydney, Australia – and as beautiful and wonderful as this city is (and it is), let me assure you, planning no longer matters here (or did it ever?).  Why do I care?  Well, I do, partly because I worked for many years as an urban planner (or, more accurately, “social planner” and I don’t mean the party type) and studied planning at the University of California at Berkeley – to this day still my most stimulating and satisfying academic experience, anywhere.  And … and this is a very big and … I still care about the liveability of cities.

As readers of this blog may know, I spent the months of September and October 2011 living in New York City.  One of the (many) unusual things that struck me was that debates over city planning were still current.  People were actually talking about Jane Jacobs (Death and Life of Great American Cities) and Robert Moses (see Robert Caro’s The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York) when I was there.  In fact, there is a great revival of interest in Jacobs and Moses.  Here are a few recently published books with links:

-          Wrestling with Moses: How Jane Jacobs Took On New York’s Master Builder and Transformed the American City, by Anthony Flint

-          Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places, by Sharon Zukin (in an obvious bow to Jacobs’ book)

-          Reconsidering Jane Jacobs, by Max Page

-          Block by Block: Jane Jacobs and the Future of New York by Timothy Mennel

Some of this interest may be due in part to a recent redevelopment controversy in downtown Brooklyn that has been chronicled in the Oscar (15-film long-list) nominated feature length documentary The Battle for Brooklyn.  This film chronicles the seven-year battle of one man, Daniel Goldstein, and his community to save their homes from being demolished to make way for a new basketball arena as part of the largest development plan in New York City history.  Want to know more about the controversy, go to this blog written by journalist Norman Oder -   (My review of this film coming soon.)

If you want to understand the background to this development proposal, all you need to do is to look closely at a subway map of New York City.  Notice how so many subway lines come together in downtown Brooklyn:  the 2, 3, 4, 5, A, B, C, D, M, N, Q and R lines all stop within a short radius of downtown Brooklyn.  In fact, if you want to work in downtown lower Manhattan is it much much easier to live in parts of Brooklyn and commute than in most of Manhattan.  Imagine, if you will, living in the Upper East or Upper West Sides – Brooklyn is easily more accessible.  Most visitors to New York City don’t realise or think about this, but believe me – New Yorkers understand.  Brooklyn has been well and truly “found” – at least those parts of it with historic housing and convenient to Manhattan.

In its review of telecommunications services in regional, rural and remote parts of Australia, the committee will have particular regard for initiatives that enable regional communities to participate in, and realise the opportunities of, the digital economy.

I have put a submission to this review, which is in part based on my digital inclusion paper, but extends the discussion further with particular regard to rural and remote Australia.  My submission is available here, and a list of all submissions to the Review can be seen here.