Sean Tarjoto
Prose Composition II
Prof. Goldfin
Mar. 4, 2000

	The phrase "The Big Apple" referring to New York City was first used in 1909 by Martin Wayfarer. In a metaphor explaining the sentiment in the Midwest that the city receives more than a fair share of the nation’s wealth, he explains: " ‘New York [was] merely one of the fruits of that great tree whose roots go down in the Mississippi Valley, and whose branches spread from one ocean to the other…[But] the big apple [New York] gets a disproportionate share of the national sap.’ " (Irving Lewis Allen, City in Slang [Oxford University Press, 1995], p. 62)
	The jaded modern man bears no allegiance and has ties to cynicism. He feels isolated from his present, separated from his past, and uncertain of his future. He is the product of his environment, until he learns about his environment.  This is the greatest transference of power through knowledge; where the phrase, “Knowledge is power” looses its ethereality and becomes quite solid, as concrete as the street.
	New York City is powerful.  It was engineered with conscious disregard to the topography of the island it was built on. Brute knowledge, of architecture, was the power harnessed, and the environment (in every sense of the word), was no longer dominant over its human inhabitants. Having learned of what controlled them, they gained power to control it.
	Once the island had been built, its people began to survive. The forces are categorically, sociological, economical, artistic, historical, institutional.  Individuals with vision and ambition and ego threw down subway lines, planted parks, built historical landmarks.  
	There are moments when I walk down an street and wonder when the next avenue will arrive.  But when I walk down an avenue, I see the street ahead, and it does not concern me.  The uncertainty which a street produces in it’s perpendicular subservience with the avenues frigthens me; I avoid avenue hopping, I try to cross streets.   I haven’t yet been to the Upper West Side.