![]() ![]() The Old Neighborhood captures a crucial chapter in the experience of postwar America. The result is a rich tapestry of voices and history. He has talked to longtime residents, recent arrivals, and recent departures community organizers, priests, cops, and politicians and scholars who have studied neighborhoods, demographic trends, and social networks. Ray Suarez, veteran interviewer and host of NPR's "Talk of the Nation ®," is a child of Brooklyn who has long been fascinated with the stories behind the largest of our once-great cities. Since then, especially since the mid-60s, a way of life has simply vanished. ![]() ![]() In 1950, except for Los Angeles, the top ten American cities were all in the Northeast or Midwest, and all had populations over 800,000. One in seven of us can directly connect our lineage through just one city, Brooklyn. This life in "the old neighborhood," so lyrically captured by Ray Suarez, was once lived by a huge number of Americans. A concertina maybe? A family Bible? A hunting rifle?" Their material life was made of the things they didn't have to eat, wear, or burn right this minute. For most, the home was not a display object but a place to keep the few things they had managed to hold on to from the surpluses produced by their labor. "Life in the city, for the millions who lived it, was once something less than the sum of their lifestyle choices: they woke up, they ate, they shoveled coal, loved, hated, prayed, mated, reproduced, died. ![]()
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