The Meridian Archive
MER
December 1994
The Zone Above 96th Street

The Zone Above 96th Street

Closed mid-November 1994 · On stands late November 1994

The Front

The Excerpt and Its Nineteen Answers

The New Republic runs the Bell Curve excerpt with nineteen rebuttals — a media-column item on the controversy as an industry event, the resignation threat, the nineteen rebuttals as a working method, without engaging the genetic-causation argument itself

The Meridian Index

November's small numbers — the average Thanksgiving travel fare out of a mid-continent hub airport, holiday ad pages against last year, the price of a decent bottle of bourbon before the season's markups

The Essay

What a Zone Promises

The difference between a federal designation and a neighborhood's actual recovery, read through the decade's other empowerment-zone experiments

The Foreign File

The Count Before the Vote

A dispatch on the transition's early administrative weeks

The Feature Well

The Fund and the Block

A reported piece walking the boundaries of the new empowerment zone block by block, before any of the fund's money has been spent

The City

Subject: Upper Manhattan is designated a federal empowerment zone; a quarter-billion-dollar development fund follows

The Back

A Life, Plainly Told

Pete Hamill's memoir A Drinking Life prompts a Back-section book review

A Notice on the Season's Photography Annuals

A round-up of the year's photography-annual publishing