“Take a photo that shows us the story of your culture.”

My family’s time in New York City may be a small blip in our ancestors’ chronology, but it means a lot to me. It was where I was born, where I spent the first eight years of my life, and where I hope to return to in the future.

From 2007-2015, I lived in three different apartments in the Upper West Side neighborhood. Surrounded by parks, ice cream trucks, bagel shops, and little Jewish antique shops– I was proud to call the UWS my home. It’s a real shame that I couldn’t stay there until I grew old enough to roam the neighborhood by myself.

I took this picture from the rooftop of the Amazon Music offices in Brooklyn while on a tour for a summer pre-college program at NYU. Geologically, I was facing the Lower East Side, a neighborhood that I had never actually been to. The inclusion of the Stuyvesant Town/Peter Cooper Village neighborhood, a post-WWII-era residential development (see: the red brick apartments) is also a subtle nod to my great-grandparents and great-great-grandparents, who fled Nazi persecution in the 1920s and ’30s.