Details of the Initiative
“The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty of the world.”
(From F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.)
Thinking about the image of New York means interpreting its changes through its portrayals in literature, film, and photography. We can no longer see the scenery when the novel was written. However, the Queensboro Bridge still links Manhattan and Queens in 2025, and the quotation above invites readers crossing the bridge today to imagine the view Nick might have seen. Literary works foster an imagination that breaks through the boundary between fiction and reality, and in recent years this imagination has become essential to the society the SDGs seek to realize. For example, Stephen Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893) is set in the Bowery, one of the poorest districts at the time. Maggie is driven from her home and eventually dies. By imagining Maggie’s life, readers are led to reflect on what economic and psychological poverty in this neighborhood was like. As though responding to such questions, dark, unsanitary tenements like those depicted in the story – once home to many immigrants and the poor – have now, in part, been opened to the public as a museum for educational purposes.