In the Bronx, you have the southern Italians; in Queens, the Greeks, Koreans and Chinese; in Brooklyn, the Jewish community; and in Harlem, the Hispanics - all with their own markets.
I never grew up in the Valley. I lived in Compton/Gardena my whole life.
My people have very subtle slang, inflections and ways of saying things that has little to do with words. If you're from the same place, you'll feel the jargon and know exactly what's happening. Same with any neighborhood cat. What he sees and hears and feels and lives makes him what he is. That's what blues is.
I chose 'BronxWorks' because I'm from The Bronx, and I got raised in The Bronx, and I just know the struggle and how it is growing up in The Bronx.
I like the idea of a world, even within a big giant city, where you're not anonymous. You have an identity, and that's an identity that's known just sort of by shopkeepers. I felt that as a kid, and I loved it.
I never really thought of my neighborhood in South Philly as being a neighborhood; it was more a state of mind. For people who aren't familiar with those kinds of places, it's a whole different thing. Like, 42nd Street in New York City is a state of mind.
Rose Park is a community I'm very proud to be from.
I grew up in what my mom will always dispute as 'the hood.' She just doesn't like the name. But it had its similarities to any neighborhood like that. The all-black neighbors and the all-black problems and the all-black happiness. And I really loved it.
People don't know that New York really is just made up of a group of very small neighborhoods.
My background did not start with the East Side; it started with Greenwich Village, which is West Side.
Harlem's streets lead backward, into history, straight to a work such as 'This Was Harlem.'
No offense to Bushwick, where all my neighbors greeted me on the street and there is a growing arts community and a curious beauty to its industrial zone, but Bushwick is no Williamsburg, even if the real estate agents would have you believe it is.
In the days of segregation, when blacks were limited to certain neighborhoods, you could look around the black community and identify who the leaders were.
Everybody from our block got PnB in front of their name.
I'm a skinny kid from Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn.
You know, I still live in my neighborhood. I live in Brooklyn and the same neighborhood, so I don't really get star treatment like that. I'm still Vanessa from the neighborhood.
I got into a lot of fights, but it wasn't because of my name. Being from the neighborhood with a name like Chauncey, people think I got picked on. But a lot of strange names come out of the neighborhood.
When people think of the South Side of Chicago, they don't think about where I'm from. It was sort of a pocket: this idyllic community of black people who took care of each other, knew each other, spent time with each other.
Harlem is filled with moments of history.
Even if you live in a big city, everybody lives in a small town. We identify ourselves by our neighborhoods - 'I live in the Village, or in Chelsea.'
When you look at Harlem - and I lived there almost five years - most of the people who live in Harlem are transplants. They migrate to Harlem from another place. A lot of them are from the south, so they bring those southern influences with them.
Misery is when you heard on the radio that the neighborhood you live in is a slum but you always thought it was home.
I find Edinburgh a stimulating place in which to live, with it being a city of contrasts, both architecturally and socially, and each district having a definite character.
I'm from my hood, and everybody knows me in my neighborhood, and that's cool, I can do what I want over there, but in other people's neighborhoods, I can't.
