Steps Away But Worlds Apart - by by Ginia Bellafante of the New York Times
For decades, the intersection of Park Avenue and 96th Street has remained one of the city’s most obvious and despairing emblems of disparity, with East Harlem and its challenges spreading out to the north, and a vast gridlock of extraordinary privilege colonizing the acreage below. It is worth debating whether a visit to this corner ought to be mandated for tourists; few spots so profoundly render the truths of New York’s economic extremism. Liberal parents hoping to foster their own political values in their children might consider pilgrimages. When I stood there, as a teenager, for the first time in the early 1980s, I felt a call to fierce and equalizing justice, ready, suddenly, for Latin American guerrilla work and the Red Brigades. Read the full article