Activity # 1- Nicole McGuire

Nicole McGuire
2/9/10
Activity #1

As I was walking through Manhattan Mall on February 4th, I never realized how big it was inside. I have passed it numerous times but only looked through the door and saw one or two stores but lots of people. There were two floors filled with the most popular stores in America such as Victoria Secret and Bath and Body Works. But I decided to sit on the lower level of the mall near the food court to observe the different things that was going on.

Many people in the mall were shopping but a lot of people were window shopping. People were looking at certain expensive items and heard a few couples promise their children that in a few weeks they would buy them that certain thing they wanted. There was a group of teenage boys hanging out by the food court trying to talk to the different girls walking past. While I was watching the different groups of people in the food court, I realized that some people have a lot of different shopping bags and some only had one or two. There were all different types of races shopping together. There were black, white, Spanish, and Asian people. Even though there were all these different backgrounds I mainly saw white people shopping in the different stores. This mall was a lot different than the one near my house in Long Island. Until recently most of the people that shopped at the mall were white, until they created a bus system to the mall from other towns and more minorities started shopping there also. This actually makes the mall feel safer because it is more diverse. “But unless eyes are there, and unless in the brains behind those eyes is the almost unconscious reassurance of general street support in upholding civilization, lights can do no good” (Jacobs, 42). In the Manhattan Mall I felt safer because there was this consistent flow of different people walking around and watching everything. “

One instance that I saw at the Manhattan Mall was these two security guards telling this homeless man he has to leave. I saw this as I was leaving the mall and the homeless man started to shout back “I deserve a right to be here too”. Many people were looking at him as if he was crazy and started to give him dirty looks because of his stench and the outfit he was wearing. His hair and face was covered in soot from lying in the streets, at least ten different sweat shirts on, ripped jeans, and he was carrying a huge cart with him that had nothing but bags of clothes in it. But nobody said anything to him; they just ignored him and continued with their shopping. The sad part about this situation is that anyone of these people including myself could lose all the money we have and be homeless just like him one day. Will other people just walk past us and ignore the situation? It does not surprise me that people just stared and acted like this homeless man was not even worth acknowledging because of all the other numerous homeless people, people ignore on a daily basis. But it still amazes me that even though we have all these shelters and programs for the homeless people and the city promotes these ads showing strangers helping the homeless that people are left stranded with nowhere to go. Jane Jacobs’ states in her introduction “Civic centers that are avoided by everyone but bums, who have fewer choices of loitering place than others” (4). This proves Jacob’s point in saying that the city has wasted countless dollars on trying to rebuild but instead of making it better they only made it worse for the people living in the cities. No one living within the urban areas has benefitted which hurts the city as a whole.