Blissville, Queens

Blissville is a tiny appendage of Sunnyside, cut off by the L.I.E., with a heavily industrial and downtrodden appearance. Some factories blend with a bunch of auto shops, tire shops and a scattering of depressing houses with cheap siding and clapboard facades. What really sets the tone are the boundaries, which are more than psychological: the freeway, the hyper-industrial Newtown Creek and, the neighborhood's one asset, Calvary Cemetery.

The population is small and mostly Hispanic, with a number of recent immigrants from Central and South America.

Calvary Cemetery is another world. A beautiful gem dating from the mid-19th century, it's a stately Catholic cemetery housing mostly Italian, Polish and Irish New Yorkers.

Maybe a little pretentious and overdone, as well.

Sunnyside, Queens

Right next to Hunters Point/Long Island City but separated by a formidable barrier of railyards is the very different world of Sunnyside, a large residential neighborhood of bewildering diversity. Somehow, Koreans, Romanians, Turks, South Americans, Irish and others coexist in this mostly middle-class ethnic stew.

Edges of industry, moments of disruptive infrastructure and too-wide boulevards give the neighborhood an occasionally jarring tone, but, for the most part, even the modest areas have a quiet and comfortable feel to them.

The architecture is not super urban and often extremely monotonous, showcasing every New York residential style from 1915 to 1950.

On the northeastern edge of the neighborhood is an idyllic and strangely suburban development called "Sunnyside Gardens," a large residential experiment of the 1920s with long stretches of 2-story row houses surrounded by trees, trees and more trees. Plus some actual gardens.

Churches abound in many forms: Catholic, Jehovah's Witness and many Korean Protestant examples, including this gray one below, which sits on the totally industrial northern edge of the neighorhood and beseeches onlookers, "Is it nothing to you, all who pass by?" (quoting, apparently, Lamentations 1:12).

Not necessarily the city's graffiti capital, Sunnyside writers can still represent.

Hunters Point, Queens

At the southwestern tip of the once-independent Long Island City, Queens sits Hunters Point, a small semi-industrial neighborhood of surprising variety. It's a sleepy and out-of-the-way place that has begun to slowly boom despite how much it feels bracketed by daunting barriers on all sides: the East River, the Long Island Expressway/Newtown Creek (which separates Queens from Greenpoint, Brooklyn), the Queensboro Bridge entryway and the sprawling mess of the Sunnyside Railyard.

The waterfront -- once the terminus of the Long Island Railroad, the area's original claim to fame -- has already grown an attractive park with tremendous views of Manhattan and is rapidly producing soulless and artless new residential towers. Huge riverfront sites have been cleared for construction and you can only imagine what the area will look like in a few years.

New Waterfront Residences

108th Precinct on 50th Avenue at Vernon

The main thoroughfares are Vernon and Jackson and their gritty, lightly industrial edges of low-rise factories and warehouses are now dotted with bistros, cafes and ethnic restaurants. MOMA's PS 1 is the neighborhood's most famous landmark.

PS 1 Contemporary Art Center, 21st Street at 46th Avenue

Hunters Point Historic District, 45th Avenue near Jackson

Immaculately preserved 19th century brick and stone rowhouses are in full effect on the neighborhood's northern side, while the southern end has a less masterplanned mish-mash of workers' homes featuring run-down Victorian ornamentation, clapboard, wood, brick and masonry.

Fixed up Tenements and Workers' houses near Vernon Blvd.

From an unacademic point-of-view, no ethnic group seems to dominate, but there are obviously many Hispanics, many ethnic whites, a noticeable number of young hipster and professional whites, and a mixture of everyone else.

Rize

I just saw David LaChapelle's Rize, a documentary about a dance sub-culture in South Central Los Angeles. Watching the clowning and krumping must be something like the feeling back in the 1970s or early 80s when people got their first glimpse of breakdancing. Like most non-Black people not from L.A., I'd never heard about this stuff before.

My first reaction, which was sustained throughout the entire crappily edited and stupidly directed movie, was inspiration. The dancing is awesome to look at -- fast and furious, skillful, inventive, a new and different blend of breaking, Hip Hop dance-moves and, apparently, the birthday party moves of "Tommy the Clown" -- but more inspiring even was the community and social good that it seemed to create. It was kids of all ages -- 15, 20, 12, 4, both boys and girls -- and they came together to boast and battle on the dancefloor as an alternative to being gangsters or just plain busters.

It feels so very positive that a large number of kids have been able to put dancing over the lure of the street, and they seem to get tons of strength and love from each other in the process.

And, excuse my bluntness, but Black people are just way better and more innovative dancers than others. I'm not going to get into the argument about whether it's some genetic thing they carried from Africa (a point that LaChapelle makes very unsubtly, by interspersing images of krumpers in face-paint with black and white footage of African tribesmen painting themselves and ritually dancing in a way that may or may not be similar) or a cultural thing learned in the community, but they've got it. And, again, everyone else is left to imitate, romanticize, co-opt.

I guess it's also just the simple matter of when you've got very little, you appreciate more and make better use of what you do have. Also, the combination of a highly attuned style-consciousness and an active sense of competition in Black neighborhoods seems to thrust good ideas quickly into the local spotlight (long before they get picked up by outsiders).

As for the movie itself, David LaChapelle should be chastised for taking such a wealth of nice footage (he's got a real aesthetic eye and is a champ behind the camera) and many good interviews and throwing them into such a mess of a documentary: too-long takes on nothing, contrived shots of silhouetted dancers on the beach, soft-piano strewn tear-jerking shmaltz. Just show the fucking dancing and let the kids talk, David!!