HOST:
Welcome to AMERICAN MOSAIC, VOA’s radio magazine in SpecialEnglish.
(THEME)
This is Doug Johnson. On our program today … we celebrate NewYork City.
We play some songs about the city …
answer a question about its buildings …
and tell about an unusual museum that explores its past.
Lower East Side Tenement Museum
HOST:
The United States was settled by people who came from othernations. Many of those immigrants lived in New York City. People canlearn about their lives by visiting the Lower East Side TenementMuseum. Shirley Griffith tells us about it.
ANNCR:
The Lower East Side Tenement Museum is in a building atNinety-Seven Orchard Street. The building was one of the firsttenements in New York City. It was built in Eighteen-Sixty-Three.”Tenement” is a word that describes an old and often crowdedapartment building. A tenement building included many smallapartments where families lived.
Workers at the Tenement Museum researched the history of thebuilding. They know that about seven-thousand people from more thantwenty countries lived there. The building closed inNineteen-Thirty-Five because the owner did not pay to improve it asrequired by new city laws.
The tenement building had twenty apartments. The museum showsfour of them. It recreated how they would have looked during fourtime periods. Visitors can learn about the lives of four familieswho lived in the building. One was the Gumpertz (GUM-pertz) family.They were Jews from Germany who lived there in theEighteen-Seventies. Visitors can also see the apartment of theRogarshevskys (RO-ga-shef-skeez) an Eastern European Jewish familywho lived there in Nineteen-Eighteen. And they can see the roomswhere the Italian Baldizzi (bal-DEET-see) family lived during theNineteen-Thirties.
A fourth apartment shows the life of the Confino (con-FEE-no)family, Jews from Turkey who lived there in Nineteen-Sixteen.Visitors can touch the Confino family’s clothes and otherbelongings. They can listen to music on the record player. They canmeet a performer who is dressed like teen-aged Victoria Confino.They can talk to Victoria about her life in the new country.
Visitors to the Lower East Side Tenement Museum say it teacheseveryone about the lives of people starting out in a new country.And it makes them want to find out how their own families lived whenthey first arrived in the United States.
Skyscrapers
HOST:
Our VOA listener question this week comes in an e-mail from HoChi Minh City, Vietnam. Nguyen Trung Dung asks about skyscrapers.
Skyscrapers are the world’s tallest buildings. They are called”skyscrapers” because they rise so high that they seem to touch thesky.
Skyscrapers provide space for offices, eating places, homes andhotels. The first one was built in Chicago, Illinois inEighteen-Eighty-Five. It was almost fifty-five meters tall. Today,skyscrapers are much taller. The world’s tallest skyscrapers are inKuala Lumpur, Malaysia. They are the Petronas Towers. Each buildingis four-hundred-fifty-two meters high.
New York City has more skyscrapers than any other city in theworld. New York is also home to the world’s most famous skyscraper– the Empire State Building. It was built in Nineteen-Thirty-One.It was the world’s tallest building for more than forty years. It isstill one of the most popular.
Each year, more than three-million people ride an elevator to thetop of the Empire State Building. They stand outdoors in a specialobservation area almost three-hundred-eighty meters above theground.
Last month, the American Society of Civil Engineers honored theEmpire State Building as one of the greatest structures of thetwentieth century. The group called it a “Monument of theMillennium.”
Other famous skyscrapers in New York include the two buildings ofthe World Trade Center. The Center was built inNineteen-Seventy-Three. It occupies six-and-one-half hectares ofland. Its two buildings are more than four-hundred-ten meters tall.They once were the tallest buildings in the world. Aboutfifty-thousand people work in the World Trade Center. Aboutseventy-thousand others visit the two buildings every day.
One place to learn more about skyscrapers is the SkyscraperMuseum in New York City. It was organized in Nineteen-Ninety-Six toshow visitors the tall buildings of the past, present and future.The museum explains the history, design, building and operation ofskyscrapers. The Skyscraper Museum is not among the most well knownmuseums in New York. But its managers say people should see itfirst, before visiting other areas of New York City.
New York Songs
HOST:
New York City is home to musical plays, music clubs and dancehalls. And many writers have celebrated the city in song. Americansinger Mel Torme recorded a whole record of songs about New York.Here is Shep O’Neal to play a few of them.
ANNCR:
One traditional song about New York is old, but is stillwell-known today. Listen as Mel Torme sings “Sidewalks of New York.”
((CUT 1: SIDEWALKS OF NEW YORK))
Perhaps the most famous street in New York City is Broadway. Manyvisitors go to New York just to see plays performed in theaters onor near Broadway. Here is a song about it.
((CUT 2: BROADWAY))
Another song about New York was written in the Nineteen-Fortiesfor a movie called “On the Town.” The movie is about three sailorswho are visiting New York for just one day. We leave you now withMel Torme singing the most famous song from that film, “New York,New York”.
((CUT 3: NEW YORK, NEW YORK))
HOST:
This is Doug Johnson. I hope you enjoyed our program today aboutNew York. And I hope you will join us again next week for AMERICANMOSAIC-VOA’s radio magazine in Special English.
Remember to write us with your questions about American life. Wewill try to answer them on future programs. Listeners whosequestions are chosen will be sent a Random House Webster’s CollegeDictionary.
Send your questions to American Mosaic, Special English, Voice ofAmerica, Washington, D.C. two-zero-two-three-seven, USA. Or use acomputer to e-mail your question to mosaic@voa.gov. Please include yourname and postal address. This AMERICAN MOSAIC program was written byNancy Steinbach. Our studio engineer was Tom Verba. And our producerwas Paul Thompson.