Word: urbane
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...purposes in 45 years ?so why build it to last any longer? Admits one construction-company official: "There's no such thing as a luxury rental building?only middle-income buildings at luxury prices." Most low-rent housing developments, says Whitney Young, executive director of the National Urban League, rapidly turn into "vertical slums." As for planning, while many cities like Philadelphia and Boston have become showplaces, most of them cling to the old pattern of dull city blocks, where even the prestige corporate structures determinedly ignore their neighbors...
Organized two years ago by New York City's Urban League, the program operates on the premise that the dropout hustling a living on the streets has a native savvy that can be channeled into the classroom. In the past year, eleven major U.S. corporations, including Time Inc., have anted up $30,000 to $50,000 as sponsors. The money pays for the leasing and remodeling of a ramshackle storefront, teachers' salaries, books, and the expenses of street workers, who roam the ghetto, "rapping" (talking) with dropouts and actively recruiting them for the academies. In turn, the corporation...
Sensitive to Needs. Harv Oostdyk, director of the program for the Urban League, argues that most slum children are potential college .material-shrewd, realistic decision makers whose choices often determine their own survival. "A kid who grows up on the streets," says Oostdyk, 35, who dropped out of New York University to become a youth worker, "is vastly more sensitive to human need and responses than most middle-class kids." The tragedy is that public schools have been unable to tap that potential...
This fall, an estimated 300 graduates of the Academies of Transition will go on to a third and final level, at either New Jersey's privately endowed Newark Prep or the Urban League's Harlem Prep. Founded last October and already accredited, Harlem Prep has its own school song, navy blue blazers and an unmistakable esprit, de corps. Both schools have thus far sent 96 former dropouts to college...
...Urban League believes that it has just begun to explore the possibilities of the street academies. Eventually, director Oostdyk hopes to have his all-girl academies sponsored by cosmetics firms, or a Chinatown academy supported by, perhaps, Northwest Orient Airlines. He foresees clusters of street academies surrounding each ghetto public high school, gathering up the dropouts and drawing out their full potential. "The people of the ghetto are very susceptible to change," he says. "You can't stop a bad idea on the streets, but you can't stop a good one either. Here...