conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Provide a description for a book titled Concrete Jungle about York, Ghetto, SHANNON with the genre: Literature & Fiction, Short Stories & Anthologies.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: SHANNON HOLMES -- Essence bestselling author of B-More Careful and Bad Girlz, and one of the brightest stars in urban fiction. AJ Rivers was raised in the notorious Bed-Stuy section of Brooklyn, New York. She developed a fondness for the written language early on as she was an avid reader by the third grade. Throughout it all she has continued to attend college, where she plans to receive a Bachelors Degree in English in May 2005. AJ RIVERS makes her debut in the literary career with the easy to follow, gripping page-turner. She currently resides in Central Virginia, where she is hard at work on her second book. She can be contacted at morivers@comcast.net or P.O. Box 35180, Richmond, VA. 23235. ANTHONY WHYTE lives and writes in New York City. He is also CEO and founder of Augustus Publishing. His books include Ghetto Girls, Streets of New York Vol.1, Ghetto Falsehoods.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Swap the first and the last sentence.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: 1, Ghetto Falsehoods. AJ Rivers was raised in the notorious Bed-Stuy section of Brooklyn, New York. She developed a fondness for the written language early on as she was an avid reader by the third grade. Throughout it all she has continued to attend college, where she plans to receive a Bachelors Degree in English in May 2005. AJ RIVERS makes her debut in the literary career with the easy to follow, gripping page-turner. She currently resides in Central Virginia, where she is hard at work on her second book. She can be contacted at morivers@comcast.net or P.O. Box 35180, Richmond, VA. 23235. ANTHONY WHYTE lives and writes in New York City. He is also CEO and founder of Augustus Publishing. His books include Ghetto Girls, Streets of New York Vol.SHANNON HOLMES -- Essence bestselling author of B-More Careful and Bad Girlz, and one of the brightest stars in urban fiction.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Provide a description for a book titled Concrete jungle about Toronto, Canadian, Author with the genre: Literature & Fiction, United States.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: the author is a rising new Toronto, Canadian Author of Urban Fiction. Her raw and explicit tale of life in the street for at risk youth in Toronto speaks to so many social conditions that affects anyone living in poverty. She has much more work on the way. This is just the beginning. Stay tuned.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Provide the first two paragraphs for this book.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Concrete Jungle
  Kalm had been Linnaeus's student, and Linnaeus eventually named the American mountain laurel (presumably Kalm's discovery insofar as his famed Swedish mentor was concerned) after him: Kalmia latifolia. In the November 2 entry in his 1748 diary, Kalm wrote of New York's waters: "There is no good water in the town itself, but a little distance away from there is a large spring which inhabitants use for their tea and other kitchen purposes. Those people who are less particular in the matter use the waters from wells in town, though it is very bad. This want of good water is hard on strangers' horses that come to the place, for they do not like to drink the well water."
  Whatever the precise location of Peter Kalm's "spring," Louis Pope Gratacap, in Geology of the City of New York, cites an early reference to Tea Water Pump: "The first mention we have of the use of the spring water from the site of the Tea-Water Pump is found in the diary of a traveller in New York, in 1748." The diarist had found the "once-celebrated Tea-Water Pump, long covered up and disused, again in use, but unknown, in the liquor store... [at] 126 Chatham Street," which was near the corner of Roosevelt Street. It is thought that the source of this pump was none other than nearby Collect Pond. A sort of resort, the Tea Water Gardens, grew up around the pump. In any case, as early as the 1740s, "tea water men" began importing water in barrels from this pump north of the city. This was of course a harbinger of things to come: as New York grew, so did its thirst for clean water. That need led fairly quickly to an extensive system of reservoirs and waterworks that reached its tentacles as far north as the Albany region—and jumped as well from the Hudson to the neighboring Delaware River drainage, a topic we pursue in greater depth in chapter 5.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Provide five more paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The Chinese mitten crab (Eriocheir sinensis) is a water-intake threat with a growing presence in the Hudson River in the New York region, first dredged up in 2005 by a Chesapeake Bay crabber. Mature specimens develop hairy growths on their claws, which accounts for the "mitten" moniker. Native to the Pacific coast of China and Korea, the crabs probably arrived in ballast water. They live in freshwater for the first two to five years of life and migrate to salt or brackish water to breed. The crabs can walk some distance on land and have been found as far as two hundred miles away from salt water. Their aggressive nature makes them a potential threat to the native blue crab population, although research on the mitten crab's full impact is still inconclusive. Meanwhile, the New York State fish and wildlife regulations prohibit "possession, importation, purchase or sale or offer of purchase or sale of Chinese mitten crab whether dead or live," while federal law prohibits their interstate transportation.
  But there are even more menacing crabs here: the European green crab (Carcinus maenas) is considered one of the world's ten worst invasive species. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, it was discovered on the Atlantic coast of America in 1817. By the 1950s, the green crab's predations were causing a notable effect on shellfish harvests, particularly clams, scallops, and young oysters. In Massachusetts, the ongoing depletion of soft-shell clams has been linked to an unwelcome abundance of green crabs. They are present in the East River in New York, as well as in coastal streams along the lower Hudson. Furthermore, the little silver-dollar-sized Asian shore crab (Hemigrapsus sanguineus) occupies the same territory, produces as many as four clutches annually of up to fifty thousand eggs, consumes a similarly broad diet, and enjoys the absence of native parasites that would plague it. In short, with twice the breeding season of native crabs and broader feeding and habitat parameters, these foreign crabs outcompete our native species and continue to contribute to their decline.
  It's the same story with invasive water plants: they arrived here from foreign lands, they choke out native plants and alter habitats, and they interfere with human commerce and recreation. Granted, the greatest damage to New York City's aquatic plant habitats is a result of economic development over the centuries, but in some cases that degradation only broadens the opening for invasive species. Such is the case with the lovely but pernicious purple loosestrife (Lythrum salicaria), encountered earlier in this chapter.
  The case of the common reed (Phragmites australis) is a bit more complex. In fact, Phragmites australis is now a global plant, but recent classification studies reveal that there is a specific native subspecies dating back to prehistoric times that is slightly less robust than the more recent invader. So it's hard to say whether our local common reed diminished because of harsh environmental conditions or because the invader is to blame. Whatever the history, the fact remains that the reeds are taking over. All too often, where once there was sandy beach or unclogged estuarine habitat, now there are acres of Phragmites. Once again, nature's diversity is the loser. From Central Park to the shores of the Hudson and East Rivers, those plumed, grassy-looking, head-high stalks take the place of what was once a diverse assemblage of grasses, cattails, reeds, and shrubs feeding and sheltering now-long-gone aquatic and avian species.
  Looking into the water, we find still more menaces afloat. One of the nastiest is the vigorous water chestnut (Trapa natans), which was first documented here in 1879 by the noted Harvard botanist Asa Gray after a worker at the Cambridge University Botanic Garden planted this Eurasian import in neighboring ponds and other local waterways. The rest, as they say, is history. If you've ever gone to a New York City beach such as Coney Island or Jones Beach and painfully stepped on a four-pronged, chestnut-sized, hard-shelled sort of nut, that's the water chestnut, or caltrop. The plant is found throughout the region floating on the surface of fresh or brackish water in broad mats of verdant diamond-shaped foliage that greatly reduces the availability of dissolved oxygen in the water below. This creates an oxygen-depleted environment unwelcoming to all but the hardiest fauna—such as carp, another aggressively competitive import, although one that is not yet a problem in metropolitan New York.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Provide the last four paragraphs.
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conversations.value: Central Park, , ; American elms in, , ; design of, , ; edible weeds of, ; geology of, , 56–57, , 75n4; as top-down creation, ; as wholly "unnatural," 30–31, ,
  Manhattan Island: alien species on, 165–71, 187–90; in early European period, 65–66; earthquakes on, 37–38; geological origin of, 38–51; glaciations of, 51–59; landfilling and building up of shoreline of, , 180–87; last farms on, ; postglacial period on, 60–65. See also New York City
  New York City: building stones of, 28–29; compared with Grand Canyon, 14–15; cultural institutions in, , 80–81, 238–39; gridlike street pattern of, , 38–39, 110–12, 116–17; irregular street pattern in parts of, , , 109–10; neighborhoods, ; plan for growth of, 211–13; port of, 183–85. See also Manhattan Island
  Queens, , , ; development of industry in, , ; development of parks in, 193–97, ; East River shoreline of, ; mass transit and growth of, ,