Utica: Second Chance City (nickname)
The city of Utica, in Oneida County, New York, saw its population decrease as industry moved out after 1950. However, refugees moved to the city in the 1980s and 1990s, boosting the population. About one in six residents is a refugee.
Reader’s Digest called Utica “Second Chance City” in August 2007. Another Utica nickname is “The City that God Forgot.”
Wikipedia: Utica, New York
Utica (pronounced /ˈjuːtᵻkə/) is a city in the Mohawk Valley and the county seat of Oneida County, New York, United States. The tenth-most-populous city in New York, its population was 62,235 in the 2010 U.S. census. Located on the Mohawk River at the foot of the Adirondack Mountains, Utica is approximately 90 miles (145 km) northwest of Albany and 45 miles (72 km) east of Syracuse. Although Utica and the neighboring city of Rome have their own metropolitan area, both cities are also represented and influenced by the commercial, educational and cultural characteristics of the Capital District and Syracuse metropolitan areas.
Formerly a river settlement inhabited by the Mohawk tribe of the Iroquois Confederacy, Utica attracted European-American settlers from New England during and after the American Revolution. In the 19th century, immigrants strengthened its position as a layover city between Albany and Syracuse on the Erie and Chenango Canals and the New York Central Railroad. During the 19th and 20th centuries, the city’s infrastructure contributed to its success as a manufacturing center and defined its role as a worldwide hub for the textile industry. Utica’s 20th-century political corruption and organized crime gave it the nicknames “Sin City”, and later, “the city that God forgot.”
Google Groups: soc.culture.vietnamese
Second Chance City
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10/1/07
A wave of refugees is bringing new life to a dying American town.
By Derek Burnett
>From Reader’s Digest
August 2007
Utica, New York
For the first time in his 22 years, Abdi Ibrahim is living in luxury. But his new residence isn’t a mansion with a million-dollar view. “I have my own room,” he says, laughing at his good fortune. That’s right: a rented room in the small upstate New York city of Utica. A member of a persecuted minority group from Somalia, Ibrahim, who at age seven found an older female cousin after she’d been shot by marauders, spent most of his life in violent refugee camps in Kenya. There he shared a mud-walled hut, scarce food and water with several family members. But in 2005 he heard that he’d be joining dozens of Somali Bantu refugees already settled in Utica. For decades, the city has opened its doors to some of the world’s neediest people. In exchange, the newcomers bring the kind of energy and drive that most cities would pay recruiters to attract.
Urban Dictionary
Utica
City in upstate new york. Hollllaaaa ..... Close to the mountains. Also called the second chance city b/c of the large refugee population; bosnian somalian iraqi. Split into four parts north utica is white, west utica is black, east utica is bosnian and off the boat italians. Lots of polish. All it got is redic foods and a large drug problem. Crack addicts have taken over! Corn Hill is known for prostitutes and dirty run down crack houses. Not the safest place to be at night, taken a turn for the worse. only famous person to come out of Utica is “i love Ny”.
Lets go to utica.
by hollaaa123445 June 04, 2009
City Dictionary
Second Chance City
A nickname recently given to Utica for its acceptance of immigrants from war-torn countries—particularly Bosnia, Somalia, and a few Southeast Asian countries.
Posted by: Anonymous on Jun 24, 2009
YouTube
Second Chance City
Matt Foster
Published on May 5, 2013
A documentary with an in-depth look into attempts to revitalize the city of Utica, NY.
Google Books
Taste of Upstate New York:
The People and the Stories Behind 40 Food Favorites
By Chuck D’Imperio
Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press
2015
Pg. 65:
Utica is known as the City of Immigrants. In fact, it is because of the influx of new immigrants to this city of sixty-two thousand in the Mohawk Valley that Utica is perhaps the only upstate New York city to gain in population since the last census was taken. Reader’s Digest was one of the first national periodicals to acknowledge this when it dubbed Utica the “second chance city.”
Al Jazeera America
Refugees sue NY district, say it’s channeling them into inferior schools
Class-action lawsuit argues Utica unlawfully deprives refugees of education by diverting them into separate schools
April 24, 2015 2:13PM ET
by Michael Pizzi @michaelwpizzi
(...)
Utica, a city of 60,000 in upstate New York, has earned the moniker of “the second-chance city” for its high refugee population — approximately 1 in 6 residents, according to the NYCLU.