UCLA class in fictional "Big Apple whores" this fall

bapopik at AOL.COM bapopik at AOL.COM
Mon Sep 12 20:25:23 UTC 2005


Yes, the fictional "Big Apple" whores have made UCLA. An not as an internet hoax, either. Incredible. UCLA!!!!
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Barry Popik
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http://www.uclaextension.edu/plato/ClassDescriptions.htm
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http://64.233.161.104/search?q=cache:baMDBYyhqisJ:www.uclaextension.edu/plato/ClassDescriptions.htm+%22big+apple%22+and+evremond&hl=en
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#25
 
NEW YORK, NEW YORK
 
Friday - 10:00 a.m.                                        Fall Term 2005 (14 Weeks)
 
Coordinator:  Ira E. Bilson                          Co-Coordinator:  George Alexander
 
 
Course Description
If Paris is "The City of Light," Rome "The Eternal City" and London "The City of Warm Beer," then what is New York?
 
"The Big Apple," of course.  But how many people know that this nickname comes not from jazz musicians of the 20th Century, but from one particular bordello that graced [or disgraced] lower Manhattan at the start of the 19th Century?
 
A young, beautiful and aristocratic Frenchwoman, Evelyn de Saint-Evremond, skipped out of The City of Light just a step ahead of the guillotine in the late 1790s and came to NYC where, at the beginning of the 1800s, she opened an elegant bordello in lower Manhattan.
 
New Yorkers being New Yorkers even then, they truncated her name to "Eve" and she, amused by the anglicization/biblicalization of her name, began calling her pretty young staff "my irresistible apples" and her male clients soon dubbed their visits to her place as "having a taste of Eve's Apples."
 
Because New York then appears to have been widely known, at home and abroad, for its large number of whorehouses - elegant, so-so and rough - several variations of the word "apple" [such as "The Apple Tree," "The Real Apple," etc.] came to be synonymous with the City.*  Today, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, the City Council and the New York Tourist Agency would rather you believed "Big Apple" derives from jazz musicians' term for making it big, but...
 
We digress.
 
New York City was, for a brief period after the Revolutionary War, the nation's capitol.  Even before that, however, NYC had already become the first among equals of colonial cities and, over the last 200 years, has eclipsed all the others.
 
How did this happen?  In large part, NYC owes its greatness to geologic good fortune, nature having given it resources with both hands full.  It was blessed with a superb harbor, at the mouth of an extensive, large river [the Hudson] valley, with sheltered, deep waters abutting solid bedrock.
 
 
*We're not making this up.  See The Society for New York City History's website [salwen.com/apple.]
 
The synergistic effect of that wide, deep, swift-running river coming out of a broad, fertile up-country and flowing around a series of granitic islands made NYC a world-class harbor and a "natural" for oceanic trade.  It also helped that the islands had good, hard bedrock at shallow depth so that it supported large buildings.
 
First the Dutch and then the English capitalized on NYC's advantages; the city that was New Amsterdam became New York.  Immigrants poured into NYC in the late 19th Century and early 20th Century and while most of the Irish, Jewish, Italian, African-American and Puerto Rican newcomers were not exactly greeted with open arms, their sons and daughters struggled to succeed - and did so, in so many different fields.  And as they succeeded, so did the City itself; it grew and prospered until it came to symbolize the vitality, the intellect, the wealth and the vision of the United States.  Not everyone loved New York, then or now, but everyone knew what New York stood for, everyone harbored some admiration for it and almost everyone wished he or she could be a New Yorker.
 
During the 20th Century, New York became the nation's principal financial and commercial center, its entertainment center, its fashion center, its communications center, its sports center, its intellectual center, its medical center, a pivotal political center and, perhaps more than anything else, the nation's glossiest, most elegant display window to the world.
 
It has inspired architecture [the Empire State Building; the Chrysler Building; the World Trade Center] and song after song after song:  New York, New York [A Helluva Town!]; New York [Start Spreadin' The News]; I'll Take Manhattan [the Bronx and Staten Island, too]; Autumn in New York; Take the A Train; On Broadway; 42nd Street; Give My Regards to Broadway; Stompin At the Savoy; Broadway Melody; How About You?; Another Rainy Day In N.Y. City; Goodbye, My Coney Island Baby; There's A Boat Dat's Leavin' Soon for New York; Take Me Back To Manhattan; I Happen To Like New York; The Sidewalks of New York; Lullaby Of Broadway; Harlem Serenade; Manhattan Lullaby; Do You Miss NewYork?
 
In this SDG, we will examine how New York came to be such a leader, a trend-setter in so many fields and where, in the sadness of post 9/11, it stands today.
 
 
Course Outline
1.         History of New York
 
2.            Immigration
 
3.            Education - P.S. System, CCNY, Private Schools
 
4.            Entertainment - The Great White Way, Jazz, Musical Theater, Vaudeville, Broadcasting
 
5.         Central Park
 
6.         The Brooklyn Bridge
 
7.         Sports Teams- Yankees, Giants, Knicks, Mets, Rangers, Dodgers
 
8.         Great Personalities - La Guardia, Walker Lehman, Giuliani, Clinton, Gershwin, Stanwyck, Boss Tweed, Vanderbilt, Al Jolson
 
9.         Wall Street, Commerce
 
10.       The Museums and Great Philanthropists 
 
11.       Politics - Tammany Hall - Machine politics, wards, patronage
 
12.       The Erie Canal
 
13.       The Subway System
 
14.            Architecture - Skyscrapers and the Slums - RCA Complex
 
15.       The Fashion Industry
 
16.       Triangle Shirt Waist Fire - The impact on the labor movement and
occupational safety
 
17.       The World Trade Center Attack - 9/11/01
 
18.            Greenwich Village
 
19.            Publishing - Intellectual life
 
 
Bibliography:
There are a thousand good books on New York and very few cover all of the areas we will study.  One of the few that is fairly comprehensive is Lloyd Morris, Incredible New York (High Life and Low Life From 1850 to 1950) Syracuse University Press - Available on Amazon.  Also Eric Homberger, The Historical Atlas of New York City, Henry Holt and Company
 



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