Wednesday, April 10, 2019

the last book I ever read (Patriot Number One: American Dreams in Chinatown by Lauren Hilgers, excerpt two)

from Patriot Number One: American Dreams in Chinatown by Lauren Hilgers:

Flushing, Queens, lies at the end of the number 7 train, under the shadow of a giant metal globe that someone, in 1964, named the Unisphere. It was mounted atop a rehabilitated ash heap, a trash pile so notorious that it was the likely inspiration for the “Valley of Ashes” described in The Great Gatsby, lying along the road from West Egg to New York City. The Unisphere was the crowning structure of the 1964 World’s Fair. Lights were placed to indicate capital cities, and circles of steel around it represented orbiting satellites, an intended tribute to “man’s achievement on a shrinking globe, in an expanding universe.”



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