Defining Brooklyn - City Limits Magazine

IN THIS ISSUE
FIRST FOCUS
04 | Work in Progress Residents Get More NYCHA Jobs By Diana Scholl 10 | A Fork In The Paper Trail Dark Marks and Light Secrets By Neil deMause and Jarrett Murphy 04 | Health Care Diagnosing a Defeat By Neil deMause
Vol. 35, No. 1 March 2011
04 | Government Obama and the Cities By Jarett Murphy
City Limits is published bi-monthly by the Community Service Society of New York (CSS). For more than 160 years, CSS has been on the cutting edge of public policy innovations to support low-income New Yorkers in their quest to be full participants in the civic life of the nations largest city. City Limits 105 East 22nd Street, Suite #901 New York, NY 10010 212-614-5397 CityLimits.org features daily news, investigative features and resources in the citys five boroughs. Letters to the Editor: We welcome letters, articles, press releases, ideas and submissions. Please send them to magazine@citylimits.org. Subscriptions and Customer Service: U.S. subscriptions to City Limits are $25 for one year for the print edition, $15 for one year for the digital edition and $30 for both the print and digital editions. Digital and print single issues are $4.95. To subscribe or renew visit www.citylimits.org/subscribe or contact toll free 1-877-231-7065 or write to City Limits, P.O. Box 3000, Denville, NJ 07834-9253 Contributions: City Limits depends on your support to provide investigative journalism and cover the five boroughs. Contribute at www.citylimits.org/support or contact 212-614-5398 for development opportunities. For Bulk Magazine Orders: visit www.citylimits.org/subscribe or contact City Limits subscription customer service at 1-877-231-7065 or write to P.O. Box 3000, Denville, NJ 07834-9253
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CHAPTERS
THE FEATURE
By Jake Mooney Photographs by Marc Fader
The Borough Behind The Brand
Brooklyn
14 | Waking the Dead Reputation and reality in todays Brooklyn 23 | Hot and Cool How Brooklyn became a destination 33 | Quitting Time A factorys fall, a neighborhoods fallout 44 | Living on the Edge From East New York to Bay Ridge, change in Brooklyn goes off script 44 | The Destination The new history of Brooklyn
MORE
58 | Homework Explore Brooklyn 62 | ExtraExtra Events, Jobs, Announcements and Offers 64 | LookBack Tip of an Iceberg
ON THE COVER:
Brooklyn, the citys most populous county, has an international mystique and has been the epicenter of demographic and economic change in the five boroughs. How does that evolving reality match up to the longstanding reputation? Photo by Marc Fader
www.citylimits.org
City Limits staff

Director Mark Anthony Thomas Editor-in-Chief Jarrett Murphy Deputy Editor Kelly Virella
Back to Brooklyn
Thirty-five years ago this month, in blocky typeface on stapled yellow sheets, City Limits published its first issue. The lead article began with the word Brooklyn. How fitting that we launch this anniversary year with an issue dedicated to understandingat least a little more clearlywhat has been going on in that borough. Thanks to the pen of Neil Simon, the camera of Spike Lee and the beats of everyone from the Beastie Boys to Jay-Z, Brooklyn has a worldwide cultural profile, representing something authentically urban even to people who couldnt find it on a map. The real Brooklyn has never really matched the image. And now that reality is changing, its evolution measured in the number of blogs launched, the number of high-rises built, the number of Chinese families moving to Bensonhurst and the transformationfor good and illof Williamsburg and Bushwick. In the pages that follow, Jake Mooney explores three sides of the modern Brooklyn. In Fort Greene, we see the influx of youthful energy and investment that is reshaping the borough. At a site in Bed-Stuy, theres evidence of a differentnegativechange from Brooklyns past decade: deindustrialization. And on the streets of East New York, Bushwick, Bensonhurst, there are narratives of change that fit neither the script of real estate resurrection nor the elegy for forgotten factories. At each site, Mooney finds that sizing up the changes, their causes and their impact is not simple. Photographer Marc Fader, meanwhile, explores the world of Brooklyn at night. In a borough that is big enough to be Americas fifth largest city, the true identity of neighborhoods can sometimes be detected only when most of its people have gone to bed. Vast and varied, Brooklyn defies comprehensive depiction in words or images. But Mooney and Fader give us a sense of the more challenging, more interesting reality that lies beneath the boroughs reputation. Its the kind of story City Limits was founded 35 years ago to publish. And weve recently learned that two foundations are taking a bold stake in our ability to continue that kind of journalism. The Ford Foundation this month announced a grant of up to $225,000 to expand our editorial capacity, and the Brooklyn Community Foundation last month agreed to partner with us in creating a Brooklyn bureau to provide the kind of in-depth coverage the borough deserves. Thus, as it enters this landmark year, City Limits returns to where it started, looking at a part of New York that fascinates the world. The stories have changed since 1976. But the thirst to understand them is still what animates our writers and readers. Sincerely yours, Jarrett Murphy
WHATS NEW ANd WHATS NExT AT CITylIMITS.ORg
Commuters on the No. 7 train platform at Grand Central. Photo by Marc Fader
It has been more than 70 years since New York City has opened a new subway line. Meanwhile, our global competitors from London to Paris to Moscow to Hong Kong to Tokyo have been steadily expanding their transit networks.
- GENE RuSSIANOFF, STRAPHANGERS CAMPAIGN RESPONDING TO
Contributing Editors Neil deMause, Marc Fader, Jake Mooney, Diana Scholl, Helen Zelon Advertising Director Allison Tellis-Hinds Marketing Assistant Nekoro Gomes Creative Direction Smyrski Creative Proofreader Danial Adkison Interns Catherine Dunn, Becca Fink, Laura Gottesdiener, Isabella Moschen, Joshua Peguero, Tiffany Walden
ALL I WANT FOR CHRISTMAS IS A SuBWAY TO STATEN ISLAND, BY SAMuEL GRIDLOCK SAM SCHWARTz, DEC. 16, 2010
ECONOMICS
FLYING BLIND
WORKING FROM HOME
HOUSING
When the City Council asked the citys Human Resources Agency for information on how levels of welfare usage compared with those of past years as well as present needs, it got a surprising answer: HRA didnt know how many people applied before 2009, doesnt really explain why people are falling out of the application process now and doesnt track how many errors it makes
Board
For years, federal law required public housing authorities to employ residents in maintenance and construction jobs. And for years the New York City Housing Authority didnt comply. But a new NYCHA program is reversing that record of failure. Is it changing lives as well?
Mark Edmiston, chair Adam Blumenthal Andy Breslau Michael Connor David R. Jones Andy Reicher Michele Webb
CHILD WELFARE
EMPTY RHETORIC
Mayor Bloombergs bid to take over the citys youth justice system from the state has raised broad supportand new questions.
BEHIND BARS
Guards and inmates, sex and rape, in New Yorks prisons
COMING IN FEBRUARY
Up Next
The Note
City Limits / Vol. 35 / No. 1
www.citylimits.org
first foCUs
WorK in ProGrEss: RESIDENTS GET MORE NYCHA JOBS
Since 1968, public housing authorities nationwide have largely been ignoring a law requiring that they employ residents. Evidence suggests that at NYCHA, at least, thats changing.
In part because of pushback from advocates calling for residents to be employed on stimulus-related housing work and increased follow-up from HUD, even NYCHA critics agree the agency has made a real effort to step up job training and hiring of tenants.
fill in the gaps by offering these trainings. While the trainings fill up fast, at least NYCHA is now offering them. NYCHA isnt providing these opportunities to residents solely on its own volition. Technically, theyre required by federal law. Section 3 of the 1968 Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Act created the goal of employing public housing residents on public housing development projects. The policy was amended in 1997 to state that housing authorities should fill at least 30 percent of their full-time jobs with public housing residentsto the greatest extent possible. This language gives a lot of wiggle room and was rarely enforced by HUD. In turn, public housing authorities, including NYCHA, rarely complied. And even when jobs were available, one of the largest complaints by NYCHA residents about Section 3 compliance has been that is that there isnt enough training to make residents eligible for those jobs. But in part because of pushback from advocates calling for residents to be employed on stimulus-related housing work and increased follow-up from HUD, even NYCHA critics agree the agency has made a real effort to step up job training and hiring of tenants. I think more people are starting to hear about Section 3, says Roxanne Reid, the Castle Hill tenant association president and a member of the advocacy group Community Voices Heard, who worked for eight hours a week through a Section 3 contract from July through December, when the project expired. They are getting people hired. Some of them are even getting into the union. I dont like to see young kids on the street, wasting their time. I just wish [NYCHA] would get more [people] on board and hire more, so they have something to look forward to. By the end of 2010, NYCHA residents accounted for 852
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erome Mosley, a resident of the Thomas Jefferson Houses in Harlem, was unemployed and wanted to get work in constructionwhich would offer much better pay than the retail management job he had lost a year earlier. Despite filling out dozens of employment applications, he was reaching dead ends. Then in May he enrolled in the Bloomberg administrations Jobs Plus program, where he heard about a New York City Housing Authority training program open to public housing residents like him. After taking a test and an interview, Mosley was chosen for NYCHAs selective job training program. After 40 hours of hands-on experience in painting and 125 hours of training in carpentry and scaffolding, Mosley obtained his U.S. Occupation Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) certification and was recently hired for a roofing project for NYCHA through a private contractor, GTS Construction. He has another project lined up in asbestos abatement which he plans to start in February. Both projects pay $40.50 an hour for 38 to 40 hours a week.
A year after losing a retail job, Jerome Mosley entered a job-training program for NYCHA residents. Now hes making good money on a roofing project.
NYCHA staff members and 48 percent of new NYCHA staffers in 2010. And residents share of the more coveted, well-paying jobs with outside contractors that can lead to union membership, such as Mosleys construction assignment, have also improved. In 2009 there were only 265 placements with external contractors. In 2010, there were 613. Eighty-five of those residents became union members. According to NYCHA, the average job pays $33 an hour and lasts 11 months. The authoritys 2011 annual plan says 25 percent of NYCHAs workforce and 53 percent of its new hires in 2009 were residents. Its a challenge, but I think its a significant success, says NYCHA Senior Advisor Michelle Pinnock. Pinnock says that NYCHAs Section 3 progress was the result of increased training programs, as well as working with contractors and unions to create opportunities for career advancement.
Im ecstatic, Mosley says. Not only am I working, but Im learning. Of the six people working on his current project, Mosley is the only NYCHA resident. Still, it is safe to say that Mosleys story, though still rare among NYCHA residents, would probably not have happened a year ago. While NYCHA has for
years offered apprenticeship programs, it was only in September that it offered the first of its Resident Training Academies. Mosley was one of 150 residents who benefited from that Robin Hood Foundation-sponsored program. For most construction jobs, an OSHA card is required. In 2009 tenant groups tried to
onLy a start
These jobs, while an improvement, only make a dent in unemployment among NYCHA tenants. In 2005, before the national recession, 20,000 NYCHA residents were seeking jobsthe equivalent of a 17 percent unemployment rate, according to a May 2009 study by Community Service Society of New York (which owns City Limits). According to CSSNY, NYCHA residents pre-recession unemployment numbers were comparable to those for similar demographic groups
The Death and Life of the Neighborhood Store First Focus
City Limits / Vol. 34 / No. 5 35 1
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throughout the city. However, as the report noted, There is a cruel irony when residents from day to day watch large-scale capital improvements being carried out in their developments, while family members and neighbors cannot access the jobs being created. In an unscientific survey by Community Voices Heard in October 2010 of NYCHA buildings getting stimulus dollars for public improvement projects, only one percent of the residents were working on a project, and seven percent knew people working on projects. Erik Crawford, the president of the resident association at Davidson Housing in the Bronx says he attempted to do Section 3 training. Ive never been called for contracting. My name got lost, says Crawford, who currently works part-time elsewhere. I would like to get a job through Section 3. A lot of these jobs have great opportunities and benefits. Although NYCHA says the average Section 3 job lasts 11 months, Crawford says among residents of his development, the project appear to be shorter-term. The few people that receive these jobs complain that theyre not long-term, he says. According to National Low Income Housing Coalition Staff Attorney Catherine Bishop, who coordinates a Section 3 working group, tenants who qualify for Section 3 jobs across the country tend to be higher educated. The ones they end up serving are the ones easier to train, Bishop says. Im not saying its easy to make a carpenter into a computer programmer, but it is easier than working with someone who has no training. Most workforce investment programs dont reach the lowest income families who havent been in a legitimate job in the job market. Pinnock says that the goal is to place people in longer-term jobs. Many of the jobs have been temporary, but people are building a career and connecting to additional opportunities. What youre seeing is the steps that are underway to increase the participation of residents that [as a result of Section 3] constantly have money come in and have a situation righted, she says. One uncomfortable aspect of Section 3 is that it is still primarily a boys club. According to CSSNYs 2009 study, female NYCHA residents are more likely to be job-hunting. However, Section 3 jobs are largely going to men, as construction and janitorial jobs often do nationwide. Only 21 percent of the contractor jobs in 2010 went to female residents. To try to close the gender gap, NYCHA is now offering all-women classes in basic construction and janitorial services. NYCHA has been improving its track record on Section 3 within the last year or two, says Victor Bach, CSSNYs senior housing policy analyst. But I
HEaLtH CarE
Diagnosing a Defeat
Last winter, it seemed all but inevitable that New York would become the latest municipality to pass a law mandating that all city businesses provide paid sick leave to their employees. A veto-proof majority of 37 City Council members backed a bill that would mandate at least five days of annual leave for all workers. One year later, the Paid Sick Time Act is virtually dead. Why? Blame the murky science of calculating costs, political maneuvering by a potential mayoral candidate and the deferential customs of the City Council. The Community Service Society (which owns City Limits) estimated last year that about 48 percent of the privateindustry workforce received no paid sick time, and 39 percent had no paid leave time at all. But the Partnership for New York Citythe citys largest business groupthis fall released its own survey, which estimated that a mere 12 percent of workers lacked sick time. And while sick-leave proponents figured that any added costs to businesses would be minimalsince the costs of sick pay were offset by increased productivity the partnership study projected $789 million a year in added costs. Opponents said the bill would force many firms that already offer sick-leave to revise or expand their policies. Backers said this wasnt so. Details like these were expected to be hashed out in negotiations. But that never happenedsomething that each side blames the other for. The final nail in the bills coffin was when Council Speaker Christine Quinn declared in October that now is simply not the right time for a measure that threatens the survival of small-business owners. Some wonder if Quinns purported mayoral ambitionsif she runs in 2013, shell probably want the backing of business leaders and Mayor Bloomberg, a strong opponent of the paid-sickleave lawshaped her strategy. Whatever Quinns reasons, the Council had the numbers to pass the bill over the speakers objections. But such a mutiny hasnt occurred in recent memory. With the speaker having the power to control committee chairmanships and the stipends that go with them, its almost impossible for councilmembers to muster support for any bill without the speakers blessing. Quinn says shes open to reconsidering the legislation in a better economy, though she hasnt provided specifics. One hopeful sign for proponents is that similar legislation is moving forward elsewhere: The National Councilwoman Partnership for Women and Gale Brewer, sick Families notes that theres leave bill author broad legislative support for statewide sick-leave laws in both Connecticut and Massachusetts. Neil deMause
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GoVErnmEnt
Obama and the Cities
With his political roots
on Chicagos South Side, Barack Obama has the most urban pedigree of any president since onetime New York City police commissioner Theodore Roosevelt. And his 2008 vicPhoto courtesy White House tory owed much to cities: 86 percent of his popular-vote margin was generated in Americas 50 largest metro areas. A month after his inauguration, Obama made good on his promise to create the White House Office of Urban Affairs. But while the office conducted a national listening tour and ordered federal agencies to consider how their policies affected cities and metro regions, it certainly didnt garner headlines, which was part of what cities advocates hoped the White House office would do: elevate the urban agenda. Now more ambitious urban programs are gathering steam. In October, the Partnership for Sustainable Communities, which links the Department of Housing and Urban Development and Department of Transportation to the Environmental Protection Agency, announced two mass funding awards encompassing $166 million and 107 communities. One recipient, the Manhattan-based Regional Plan Association, is working with a consortium of governments from Connecticut, Westchester County, Long Island and the city to develop the Housing Incentive Fund, which aims to spur more development near transit centers, especially along the Metro-North rail line and Interstate 287 and to run a strategic planning process to gird New York City for the effects of climate change. The Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning received $4.25 million to implement GO TO 2040, a comprehensive plan linking housing, transit and economic development. In Kansas City, the Mid-America Regional Council was awarded funding to create a regionwide system so decisions on where to house people would include consideration of broader demand and wider supply than just whats located in one city or town. The Puget Sound Regional Council already has a Vision 2040 plan, and the region will soon build a new transit system, so the HUD money is supposed to help PSRC fit the latter into the former. The Capitol Region Council of Governments in Connecticut plans a raft of initiatives. But the linchpin of the CRCOG plan is a busway between Hartford and New Britain, a small city nine miles from the capital, is suddenly imperiled by fiscal concernsworries that are likely to challenge all the plans fostered by Obamas initiative.. Jarrett Murphy
still think it needs to face the challenge, fullscale, of tens of thousands of working-age resident who are seeking employment and who have not yet been absorbed into training and job opportunities. I think the challenge is even greater given the economic stimulus capital funding that NYCHA received$423 million. I think many resident leaders would have expected more by way of outcomes.
a steamfitter. He says he hopes to join the union, and get a job where he can work more hours. The paycheck is great, says Novarro, the father of four. The kids love it too. They know when its payday.
WHats HaPPEninG nationaLLy?
The paycheck is great, says one worker, the father of four. The kids love it too. They know when its payday.
GEttinG ContraCtors on Board
The other chief complaint about NYCHAs Section 3 program is that outside contractors are loathe to hire NYCHA residents. Although contractor hiring is improving, NYCHA doesnt require contractors to hire residents. We will work with contractors and look at what is feasible, says Pinnock. The expectation is they will hire residents when possible. Vincent Grays is one of those people. Already a trained electrician, he got his OSHA card renewed through the NYCHA training. He worked at Queensbridge House, as an electrician for sub-contractor Ohms Electric for 10 months. Ohms plans to hire him permanently. The whole experience has been wonderful for me, Grays says. They paid me the scale that was owed to me. Id recommend the training for anyone whos serious about getting to work. Another happy employee is Christopher Novarro, who received his OSHA card after completing a training set up by his resident association and is currently working eight hours a week doing scaffolding, making $33 an hour. He had previously worked as
While NYCHAthe nations oldest and largest public housing authorityhas certainly stepped up its Section 3 game, its unclear if other housing authorities are following suit. There is little Section 3 enforcement from HUD. The feds rarely impose sanctions, and because this is an unfunded mandate, it is easy for public housing authorities to simply not fund job training, and then claim there are no qualified residents for the work. Bishop says that although she believes HUD is making some progress at enforcement, the Section 3 office is short-staffed. Because their staff is so small, they have not had the capability of doing anything about Section 3 compliance,
she says. They seem to wait for people to complain. Assistant Secretary for Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity at HUD John Trasvia counters, Obviously we can always use more resources, but there are things weve been able to accomplish with the political will. Trasvia says the next step is making sure each jurisdiction has a Section 3 coordinator to help with enforcement. Trasvia says a new effort toward that end will soon get underway, but wouldnt divulge details. A long-standing issue is Section 3s language, especially the to the greatest extent possible caveat that has given jurisdictions an easy out. In the last ten years, Ive reviewed a couple of drafts to change the Section 3 regulation, Bishop says. But it is a bureaucracy. Its very time-consuming and complex to change a regulation. You need someone whos going make it happen. There have been some efforts to change the language, but it hasnt gone very
far. Rep. Nydia Velazquez (D-NY) has periodically introduced legislation to set much clearer benchmarks. However, it has not been re-introduced since 2007. In the meantime, HUD says it plans to step up implementation. In 2009, only 20 percent of jurisdictions even reported to HUD. In 2010, Trasvia says, 76 percent of jurisdictions reported their progress. [Section 3 compliance] is a priority of the entire administration. It speaks to the economic situation. It also speaks to good government. Diana Scholl
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THE fEatUrE
MANHATTAN IN THE BACkGROUND: The view of downtown from downtown.
Brooklyn: The Borough Behind The Brand

By Jake Mooney / Photographs by Marc Fader
Lunch At Juniors
Reputation and reality in todays Brooklyn
omewhere on the westbound Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, past Newtown Creek and the low rooftops of South Williamsburg but before the Jehovahs Witnesses headquarters, drivers pass a billboard for Juniors, the 60-year-old restaurant and cheesecake emporium on Flatbush Avenue. As Brooklyn as it gets, the sign proclaims. The billboard stands off to the right, next to the Brooklyn Navy Yardthe site, these days, of a tow pound and a movie studio, though no navy. To the left, past the square brick buildings of a public housing complex, is a glowing clock tower and, beyond it, the vast expanse of a borough that holds nearly a third of New York Citys residents. Juniors, as Brooklyn as it gets, is a few blocks from the highway, its marquee lights flashing on a busy corner. Inside, what it is to be Brooklyn is not made clear, but the pictures on the dining rooms walls offer a hint. On one is Jackie Gleason, who hustled pool in his native Bedford-Stuyvesant and set his famous bus driver, Ralph Kramden, in an apartment there too. On another, theres Biggie Smalls, who came of age on the same streets and reached for the same brash fame generations later. Nearby are Barbra Streisand, Lena Horne, Danny Kaye and Harvey Keitel. Across the room is a framed jersey for the Brooklyn Nets, a basketball team that does not yet exist and whose arrival in the borough will come, if it does, over the vehement protests of many of its closest Brooklyn neighbors. In another corner are two baseball gloves and a Brooklyn Dodgers hatrelics of a team beloved by its fans despite, or even because of, the years it spent as second best. No sooner had the team finally won than it left for California.
CHAPTER onE
Juniors, a 60-yearold institution, as Brooklyn as it gets. But the Juniors brand is known well beyond the boroughs borders.
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All these images are, somehow, Brooklynas is Juniors, an enterprise that has grown from one restaurant near Borough Hall into a minichain, with locations in Times Square, Grand Central Terminal and Foxwoods casino. The Brooklyn name itself has evolved into a powerful marketing tool, for products madeor notin the borough. There is, of course, Brooklyn Lager and Brooklyn Industries, and there are also Brooklyn Brine pickles, Brooklyn perfume and Absolut Brooklyn vodka, an apple-and-ginger-flavored spirit endorsed by another figure from the Juniors wall of fame, Spike Lee, but not on the menu at the Brooklyneer, a Brooklyn-themed bar and restaurant ... on Manhattans West Houston Street.
hardware store. So are Jay-Z, one-third of the Beastie Boys and Neil Diamond. So, as the writer Levi Asher (from Queens) points out, was Bugs Bunny. Something besides locationan attitudelinks them all together. When Marty Markowitz, the boroughs voluble president, unveiled wisecracking highway signs, Leaving BrooklynFuhgeddaboudit, even people just passing through got the joke. When youre out of town and you tell people youre from Brooklyn, says Karen Buryiak, a Juniors waitress who grew up in Flatbush, people know what youre talking about. It brings an idea to mind. Usually its the tough-guy thing, she muses. But now I think its changing a little bit. Youve got the hipster thing going on a little bit. There is reason to wonder if the image ever matched reality. The borough was never populated exclusively by wisecracking hustlers or tough guys with hearts of gold, just as it isnt wall-to-wall with hipsters now. Like Queens and the Bronx and Staten Island, Asher writes, the outer boroughs are where the service industry lived, and still lives. Plumbers, cab drivers, teachers, factory workers, receptionists, tailors, fry cooks, executive assistantsits this economic sector that makes Brooklyn Brooklyn. Something, though, has shifted of late. There are Brooklyn tourists now, drawn over the bridge by guidebooks or carried by tour buses that stop at Juniors for lunch. Brooklyn now is a destination. The borough that was defined by its outsider status, that drew its defining scrappiness and even hipness from its littlebrother relationship to the metropolis next door, now has a following of its own. In Park Slope, Fort Greene and even Red Hook, taxis from across the river ferry Manhattanites to trendy restaurants. Rents are higher in Dumbo, with its vintage modernist furniture stores, than in some parts of the Upper East Side. Brooklyn even has skyscrapers, a cluster of new residential towers just up Flatbush Avenue from Juniors, glassy and full of freshly minted Brooklynites. Their coming is celebrated as proof of Brooklyns emergence. But is it the same Brooklyn, the real Brooklyn, that they are coming to, or is it a new place that they have made? Some things have been lost. In becoming something new, the borough has left behind much of what once made it known. Brooklyn Brewery is thriving, but Schaefer is long gone, the site of its old brewery on the Williamsburg waterfront now home to a condominium building that glows neon at night. Scores of other industrial and manufacturing companies have
Brooklyn, By the numbers

Brooklyn isnt one storyits 70 square miles and 2.5 million people worth of stories. The boroughs diversity and complexity is visible when you walk its streets, take the subway or look at statistics on Brooklyns demography, economy, politics, health and crime. Throughout this issue are charts that capture some of these facts. And theres more data online at www.citylimits.org
Population
6,930,446
8,391,881 7,891,957 7,894,862 7,071,639
8 Million 7 Million 6 Million 5 Million 4 Million 3 Million 2 Million 1Million

1900 1910 1920 1930 1940 1950 1960 1970 1980 1990 2000 2009 3,437,202 2,560,401 2,018,356 1,634,351 1,166,582 2,738,175 2,602,012 2,230,936 2,567,098 5,620,048 4,766,883
The Brooklyn name itself has evolved into a powerful marketing tool, for products madeor notin the borough. It is all meant, in a branding sense, to evoke something. But what?
It is all meant, in a branding sense, to evoke something. But what? Deres no guy livin dat knows Brooklyn troo an troo, the North Carolinian Thomas Wolfe once wrote, in what might have struck him and the New Yorkers editors as Brooklynese, because itd take a guy a lifetime just to find his way aroun duh goddam town. James Agee, another Southerner, put it more elegantly: In the conviction of the body, there seems almost no conceivable end to Brooklyn; it seems, on land as flat and huge as Kansas, horizon beyond horizon forever unfolded, an immeasurable proliferation of house on house and street on street; or seems as China does, infinite in time in patience and in population as in space. It is a land, in short, with a mystiqueone that is hard to pin down but easy to recognize. Maggio, the tough, doomed GI in From Here to Eternity, was from Brooklyn. So was Tony Manero in Saturday Night Fever, dreaming of glory and working in a Bay Ridge
New York Brooklyn
Ethnicity
.16% .02% .5% .95% 19.59%
White alone Black of African Amerian alone Hispanic of Latino American Indian and Alaska Native alone
36.61%
Asian Alone Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander alone Some other race aone Two or more races
33.09%
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followed, out of Brooklyn or out of existence altogether. This is the trade that has accompanied hipness: new residents in and old jobs out. People have left too, for the suburbs or the less expensive boroughs, and they have taken some of the character with them. Whether it will come back is an open question. But if the image of the new Brooklyn has a dark side, it also has stark limitations. The fact is, most of the boroughwhich would be the countrys fifth largest city if it were independentexists distinct from hipsters, high-rises and padlocked factories. The new Brooklyn mystique leaves out vast swaths of the boroughfrom Karen Buryiaks Flatbush, where you can now stroll down Bob Marley Boulevard or dine on Afghan cuisine, to her fathers Brownsville, which sank, like neighboring East New York, into the abyss of blight before starting to claw itself out. The image leaves out the Canarsie of Allen Fleming, the general manager of Juniors, who arrived there 20 years ago from Grenada, and it leaves out Bensonhurst, where storefront signs change from Yiddish to Chinese in the space of a few blocks. All those places, and dozens more, make up a modern Brooklyn too complex to fit in a slogan. The rise of one part of Brooklyn, then, has obscured all the other rises, falls and evolutions happening in the borough at the same time. This conceals, from other urban areas that may want to emulate its rise, the lessons Brooklyn has to offer: why the new affluent people came to places like Fort Greene, why the old businesses left areas like Clinton Hill and how other neighborhoods charted their own separate courses of change. And it prevents New Yorkers from understanding their own history over the past decade, which Brooklyn embodies but which is too often told as a tale that begins and ends with real estate development. Simply put, theres more to it than that. In the chapters that follow are a few of the stories of todays Brooklynstories of the changes everyone has noticed and of the others as well. Along with the consequences. Too much change can actually be harmful in a way, Buryiak says between customers. So I hope they keep enough of the good old stuff in Brooklyn not to risk losing its integrity. She pauses, answers a few more questions, then repeats, Hopefully, therell be enough of the good old stuff.
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The UnPlanned City
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CHAPTER tWo
Hot and Cool

How Brooklyn became a destination
t was around 1858, historians say, when a woman named Mary Powers stood on the corner of Hanson Place and St. Felix Street, in a freshly built neighborhood in Brooklyn, and had a vision. Gazing at the rows of new houses that had sprung up on the former site of the Jackson familys 30-acre farm, she pronounced that the spot would one day be the crossroads of a mighty city. She donated money to build a church. Nearly 70 years later, the trustees of the Williamsburgh Savings Bankthe fourth largest in New Yorklooked at the same crossroads and had a vision of their own. They had outgrown their headquarters on Brooklyns Broadway and envisioned a grand new building in a spot that they too believed would become the hub of the boroughs business life. In 1928, they laid the foundation, on Hanson Place, for a 512-foot neo-Romanesque tower, to be crowned with one of the largest four-faced clocks in the world and the banks signature gilded dome. The cavernous first-floor banking hall was ornamented with icons of commerce: a grocer, a carpenter and an electrician on the rooms entrance gates; a printer, a textile worker and a jeweler on the elevator doors. The halls ceiling soared, vaulted in conscious imitation of a churcha cathedral, as the buildings architect put it, dedicated to
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The Williamsburgh Savings Bank building, now One Hanson Place, links the boroughs storied past to the more affluent side of its present.
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the furtherance of thrift and prosperity of the community it serves. At the far end of the hall, opposite the swinging doors, stood a glittering mosaic depiction of Brooklyn, the tower at its center. Glowing rays of sunlight shone down from above. Manhattan was a faded sliver in the background. For decades, the tower rose boldly above its neighbors, its clock visible for miles. It was Brooklyns tallest building, one dedicated to the pursuits that its builders intended. The main hall was a bank: first, Williamsburgh Savings and then, in the 1980s, a branch of Republic National Bank and, after that, HSBC Bank USA. On the upper floors were offices for the types of professional depicted on the banking halls trim: construction contractors, insurance agents and, most of all, dentists. The latters examination chairs, patients said, had some of the best views in New York.
are its presentincluding one, a rental building called the Brooklyner, that has surpassed the bank building as Brooklyns tallest structure. What is not visible, from any height or price point, is Brooklyns future. Helen Lee grew up in TK and moved to New York City in 1994 as a freshman at New York University. In the years after that, she says, she enjoyed the flexibility of being young, unattached and a renter. She moved yearly, she says, living for a time at every street with a subway stop along TK between Canal and 96th. Her arrival in Brooklyn in 2005 was a flop. In a year and a half spent living in a co-op complex in the gentrifying neighborhood of Clinton Hill, she says, she found the appeal of cheaper rents was outweighed by the lack of convenient transit servicethe nearest subway line was the G train, which runs between Brooklyn and Queens but never enters Manhattan. Moreover, Lee says she was annoyed by her neighborsby people smoking in the elevators or not picking up after their dogs. And as a new face in the area, she began to believe that the feeling was mutual. I just wouldnt feel welcome, she recalls, and I would overhear conversations about how the local doughnut shop that had been there for 30 years was being converted to a restaurant that nobody there could afford. It was very disheartening, because I couldnt do anything about it, but I knew that a lot of these businesses were being formed to benefit me. Though she says she had lived in uncomfortable areas beforeincluding the Lower East Side during the heroinplagued 1990sshe decided that Brooklyn was not for her. In January 2006, she moved back to Manhattan, to an apartment on East 57th Street. Just months later, though, she heard about One Hanson Place from an old Clinton Hill neighbor who was a broker, and Brooklyn began to seem viable again. In fact, she and her boyfriend, Kai Hecker, liked the building so much that they bid on a one-bedroom apartment there sight unseen. They went into contract that summer, as the seventh buyers in the new condo tower. In 2008, when their apartment was ready, they moved in. Lee, who is 34 and works in advertising at Google, and Hecker, a 44-year-old Web designer at Forbes magazine whom she married in September, are, government data indicate, the face of a more prosperous Brooklyn. Between the 2000 Census and the Census Bureaus most recent update (with numbers collected from 2005 to 2009), the number of households in the borough with a combined income of at least $150,000 more than doubled, while Brooklyns overall population increased only slightly. The percentage of such households doubled too, from 3.29 percent of the total population to 7.17 percent. Lee says Hecker is a more natural fit for Brooklyn; he has lived in the borough since 1994, including in a Red Hook
I think its the equivalent of greenwashing. Its sort of Brooklyn-washing.

Until 2005, that is, when they had to leave. In the spring of that year, HSBC sold the building to a team of investors including the Dermot Company and the retired basketball star Magic Johnson, who planned to convert it to condos. The banking hall went dark, and after a renovation, the buildings upper floors were soon being prowled by Realtors, a species not depicted in the buildings brass etchings or stone carvings. By 2008, the former Williamsburgh Savings Bank tower, renamed One Hanson Place, was open to new residents. Some units fetch seven-figure prices. Brooklyns tallest building is now a monument to the boroughs biggest business: real estate. The evolution of Brooklyn into a place where a former dentists office can become a million-dollar apartment was a gradual one, enabled by crowding in Manhattan, rising white-collar salaries and the citywide drop in crime. Just as important, though, was a widespread shift in perception, one that made the boroughperennially second bestinto a destination unto itself. For some buyers, the mosaic in the banking hall became a version of reality: Brooklyn as a favored world of its own. But if all those changes make loving Brooklyn possible, is it the mythical Brooklynhome of the Dodgers and the docksthat they love, or is it the changed one? And by arriving in a place, how much would they change it themselves? The view from the tower is broad and wide, stretching to the edges of Brooklyn and beyond. It takes in abandoned piers that are the boroughs past and the apartment towers that
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apartment from which he commuted 45 minutes by bike. Still, she says, their new apartment suits both their needs. This building is probably why we get along, she jokes. Its like Brooklyn lite because its so incredibly centrally located. Its one of the best commutes Ive ever had in my 16, 17 years in New York. Besides, the grittier Brooklyn that Lee remembers from her days in Clinton Hill has receded farther into the borough. In the blocks between her old neighborhood and her new building is the now fully gentrified neighborhood of Fort Greene, its streets lined with boutiques and restaurants. And on weekends throughout the winter, the banking hallnow an event space that hosts weddings and private partiesis home to the Brooklyn Flea, a curated flea market selling antique furniture, vintage clothes, art and fresh food. Sometimes, Lee says, she heads downstairs in her pajamas for coffee and a pastry. She enjoys the building so much, she says, that she would hate to leavethough she will probably have to. In January, when Lee spoke to City Limits, she was pregnant with her first child and was looking for a larger apartment, having listed her current unit for sale for $515,000. Its less than she and Hecker paid. They bought at the top of the real estate market. But a bigger worry is over where to move. Nearby Carroll Gardens, she says, is inconvenient to transportation. Park Slope is too homogeneous. The leading candidatebarring the possibility of a two-bedroom unit in their price range becoming available in One Hansonis one of the new high-rises on Flatbush Avenue. Notably, though, all of the possibilities are in Brooklyn. Improbably, the borough has become home, Lee says, though she believes only pockets of it are familyfriendly. Still she hopes the public schools will improve as new people continue to move ina process that she says seems likely. People from Manhattan, young couples and young families, are looking at Brooklyn very actively, she says people who would never have considered living in Brooklyn. Lee says the borough is not all that has changed. She describes herself as more tolerant and open-minded, and more aware of the other boroughs, than she was in her Manhattan days. Its made me more of a New Yorker. I really value living in a multicultural neighborhood, she says. That 45-minute commute to the city, you get a really good cross section of the people that are coming in from the greater depths of Brooklyn. Besides the fact that two-bedroom units in Manhattan
are out of the couples price range, she adds, I think at this point, Ive fallen in love with Brooklyn. Which is very interesting. Had Lee made her way to the banking hall for breakfast in the waning weeks of 2010, she might have come across Michael Berick, a vendor at the Brooklyn Fleas holiday market. The merchants around him, lined up along the old teller windows, were selling antique land-use maps, baby onesies and terrariums. Downstairs, an artist sold T-shirts with renderings of the sign from the old Kentile Floors factory. (The company, which was located a block from the Gowanus Canal, went bankrupt in 1992.) Nearby was a booth with 19th-century clocks, some that had been produced by Ansonia at its factory in Park Slope, in a building that is now co-op apartments. Berick was running a booth for Maptote, the company he and his wife, Rachel Rheingold, founded in 2006. Maptote sells bags, bandannas and baby clothes emblazoned with maps of cities around the lIVINg IN THE CITy world, but Brooklyn, Berick More coverage of housing says, is by far the most popuwww.citylimits.org lar. Customers, he says, just respond to something about the Brooklyn name. The irony, Berick says, is that making things in Brooklyn is not easy to do. Aside from its onesies (which are produced in Los Angeles) and its note cards (in Ohio), the company does manufacture its products in the borough. But every year, Berick says, it seems that the prices at factories in Midwood or Sunset Park have gone up, or the shops are shutting down. Manufacturers in China, meanwhile, can integrate every step in the production process for cheaper. Part of the appeal of overseas facilities, Berick says, is cost-effectiveness. Besides, he adds, the local alternatives are scarce. Its just a dying breed of manufacturers in the city, and the country for that matter, Berick says, whether its mills that youre getting your fabric from or factories where theyre cutting the fabric. Brooklyn, then, may be more effective as a trademark than as a home base. That, of course, doesnt stop some companies that manufacture abroad from claiming Brooklyn as homea trend that rankles advocates of local manufacturing. I think its the equivalent of greenwashing, says Paul Parkhill, director of planning and development at the Greenpoint Manufacturing and Design Center. Its sort of Brooklyn-washing. Still, Berick says he can sympathize with companies, like Brooklyn Industries and Brooklyn Brewery, that
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Brooklyn has a certain vibe to it thats very hard to articulate I would call it a boutique Manhattan.
have produced their products outside the borough. The more complex the item, he says, the more expensive it would be to make locallywhich can push some products out of potential customers price range. Im happy that we make our stuff here, Berick says. I used to kind of begrudge people who didnt, but now I understand why. Its a difficult thing. Undeniably, though, Brooklyns appeal as a concept is strong. When J. Crew commissioned a special line of the Maptote bags for sale in some of its stores, in fact, it asked for the phrase Made in Brooklyn to be part of the design. Berick says the label is a simple matter of location, not cool huntingbut the use of the boroughs name has had an impact on sales. It probably does better than Manhattan, New York City and Queens put together, because I guess people have a lot of pride, he says. Whether its new people that want to assert themselves, I guess it has a lot of cachet now. Chris Benfante, the senior associate at the Corcoran Group who is selling Helen Lees apartment, says about half of the buildings residents are new to Brooklyn, the other half relocating from somewhere else in the borough. Many, he says, are attracted to the towers history and its ties to the Brooklyn of oldit is a product of the same era as Ebbets Field and Coney Islands Cyclone. Benfante, who grew up in Flatbush, has less romantic memories too. My mom used to drag me there when it was filled with dentists and orthodontists and stuff, he says. Called it the House of Pain. Still, when the towers condos hit the market, Benfante bought one for himself. Several other real estate agents, he says, are his neighbors there. The buildings appeal, he says, is that while its exterior is steeped in the boroughs history, it is renovated inside, with central air conditioning having replaced the window units that used to cool the towers offices. Such touches, he says, should help attract people who work at the Atlantic Yards development planned just across Flatbush Avenue, with its basketball arena and office towers.
Its like old Brooklyn meets new Brooklyn, Benfante says, and people like that. James Cooper and Alessandra Lariu, both creative directors at Manhattan advertising agencies, are another couple who bought an apartment at One Hanson without seeing the building. Cooper, who walked around the area twice while visiting from his native London, says Fort Greene reminded him of that citys cosmopolitan Notting Hill neighborhood. He and Lariu bought their two-bedroom, two-bathroom apartment three years ago, he says, after having seen only the plans. Now they are selling the apartmentit was listed in January for $1.05 million, also through Benfantebut Cooper says they do not plan to go far. Aside from visiting friends in Park Slope and Williamsburg, he says, they have not had time to explore the borough much. But they are looking for a brownstone nearby, one with a backyard. The Brooklyn-centric vision of Mary Powers, still shifting shape and coming into focus, has claimed two more adherents. It was never like, Oh, well move to Brooklyn because we cant afford to move to Manhattan, Cooper says. Even if I had like $15 million to buy a townhouse in Manhattan, I wouldnt do it. Brooklyn has a certain vibe to it thats very hard to articulate, Benfante says. Its more neighborhoody. When youre working in an office tower in the financial district or something like that and youre coming home to another high-rise, youre not really changing your environment the way that you are when you come to Brooklyn. One Hanson is, of course, itself a highrise. But people moving to the borough appreciate the contrast, Benfante says, adding, Its got everything that Manhattan has. Only, its got a different feel to it. Its more urbane but less urban these days. That contrast grows subtler by the year, eroded by the rows of glassy Downtown Brooklyn towers like the Brooklyner, or the condo buildings on Fourth Avenue that replaced warehouses and tenements, or the thousands of new housing units that stand to make the Atlantic Yards site one of the densest in the city. Newcomers are falling in love with a changed borough, but they are also changing it themselves, physically, in ways that seem permanent. What is at stake may be what made Brooklyn attractive in the first place. The appeal of Brooklyn, Benfante says, often comes down to a vibe. He thought of the street life, the greetings between neighbors, the small-scale storefronts, and he settled on a metaphor. I would call it, he says, a boutique Manhattan.
Education
100% 80% 60% 40% 20%
Graduate or professional degree Bachelors degree Associate degree Some college, no degree High school graduate (includes equivalency 9th to 12th grade, no diploma Less than 9th grade
1990 2000 2009
Presidential Votes
Georg W. Bush Al Gore George W. Bush John Kerry John McCain Barack Obama
20% 79% 15% 77% 24% 74%
01
02
03
04
05
06
07
Party affiliation
.88% 2.09% 16.41%
Democrat Republican Indpendence Other party

11%
9.14%
No party
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The Unplanned City Brooklyn: The Borough Behind The Brand
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POVERTY
Poverty
45% 40% 35% 30% 25% 20% 15% 10% 5% 0% 40% 31% 18% 21% 21% 11% 28% 27% 28% 23% 26% 19% 17% 28% 19% 22% 12% 14% 13% 33%
Source: American Community Survey, 2005-2009 averages
HEALTH
Infant Mortality, 2009
(deaths per 1,000 live births) 11.3 8.7 5.4 6.4 4.2 4.7 3.5 5.2 3 3.5 5.8 9.5 4.7 2.6 4.9 5.5 5 4.9 4.3 6.2 6.3
Selected Causes of Death, 2009

45 40 35 30 25 20 15 10 5 0 HIV disease Homicide Diabetes mellitus Chronic liver disease & cirrhosis Mental disorders due to substance use & accidental poisoning
12 10 8 6 4 2 0
3.8 3.2 3.6
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Quitting Time
A factorys fall, a neighborhoods fallout
he morning of Monday, Jan. 22, 2007, brought mixed news for Pfizer Inc., the multinational pharmaceutical giant. Revenue in the previous quarter, the company announced, was flat from a year earlier, at $12.6 billion. Earnings per share were up but only factoring in the one-time windfall from the companys sale of its consumer health care business. Otherwise, profit was down, and analysts were worried. In the competitive drug industry, the companys future was uncertain: Viagra, a Pfizer product, was losing market share to rival erectile dysfunction drugs, and the patent for the heart drug Lipitor, a Pfizer standard-bearer and one of the most popular medications in the world, was set to expire in a few years. Cheaper generics would soon be cutting into sales, and Pfizer had just halted development on a planned replacement for the heart drug after trials linked that new medication to an increased death rate. The companys earnings announcement came paired with a tough proposed remedy: In a move to save $2 billion a year, Pfizer would close research sites in Japan, France and Michigan. It would sell a factory in Germany and close one in Omaha, Neb. In all, the job cuts would total 10,000 worldwideincluding 600 at one other shuttered factory: In a move that shocked workers at a facility that had only recently been featured in a prominent Pfizer ad campaign, the company announced it was closing its plant in Brooklyn, a 600,000-square-foot brick hulk on Flushing Avenuethe site where Pfizer was founded in 1849. For much of its century and a half in Brooklyn, Pfizer was just one of the industrial powerhouses that moved the boroughs economya blue-collar bastion that included shipbuilding and auto parts manufacturing plants, chemical producers, breweries and, less than two miles northwest of Pfizer, the Domino Sugar refinery. By the time the Domino facility closed in 2004, leaving its last 200 or so workers jobless, the Pfizer plantoperating with a fraction of the workers it had employed just a few years earlier was one of the boroughs only remaining traces of big industry. At the time, reactions to the Pfizer closing were mixed, a mlange of resignation, anger over the lost jobs and respect for the companys long history in Brooklyn. Laid-off employees told the newspapers they had been expecting cuts but were nonetheless surprised to see them come. Community leaders praised the company for the good it had done in the neighborhood, including building low-income housing and financing a charter school in one of the companys vacant buildings. As for the jobs, they said, the losses would hurt. But even so, there was an upside: At least the economy was good. Four years later, the charter school is still therea gravel lot next door, former Pfizer land, is strewn with half-deflated rubber balls, in pink, purple and yellow, that have escaped over a playground fence. The low-income housing survives as welltidy rows of townhouses just across a parking lot from the old factory, immediately east of the citys sprawling Marcy Houses public housing complex. Even the 1940s-era factory building itself is there, in a state of suspended animation, its guardhouse empty, its entrances clogged with piles of dry leaves. What is gone are the jobs, from Pfizer, Domino and most of the rest of industrial Brooklyn. From 1997 to 2007, according
The closure in 2007 of this Pfizer plant, located on the site where the company was founded, was another blow to the boroughs once booming manufacturing base.
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to a City Limits analysis of census data, the number of people employed in manufacturing nationwide dropped 20 percent. In New York State, the decline was 31 percent. Brooklyn was hit even harder: In 2007, more than 20,000 fewer people in the borough were working in manufacturing than were a decade earliera drop of 46 percent. Experts doubt that the numbers will ever rebound. The question, then, is whether those good jobs can be replaced and what will occupy the physical space that Pfizer has left behind.
When the factory was open, to get a job in there, it was a who-you-know type of thing. Now its becoming an eyesorethe weeds are coming up, whatever the case may be. Mother Natures doing what she do. The thing is, now what do we do with the space?
Magno Shaw, a 51-year-old immigrant from Panama who lives near the plant, once thought about getting a job there or at one of the areas other factories. But, he says passing by the vast empty parking lot north of Flushing Avenue on a chilly winter day, the hiring process was long, and soon it was too late. Now he commutes to work at a hotel in Manhattan. The neighborhood, he says, feels the plants absence. Around this time, they used to have their parties for employees, all that stuff, he says. The parking lot used to be full of people, cars. Right now its just an empty space. For a while, he recalls, there had been talk of a supermarket. Soon after the close, Pfizer officials told The New York Times they would work with the city to develop housing and commercial space. Then nothing happened, Shaw says, and you know, that was it.
The hole that industry left in the borough was a long time in the making. Jerry Krase, a professor emeritus of sociology at Brooklyn College, says the fall of the New York factory began citywide in the 1970s, with heavy industry. Manufacturing from New York moved first to the Southeastern states and then farther south to Mexico and elsewhere overseas, he says, with chemical plants, textile mills and assembly plants following a decade later. Krase recalls a friend who ran a shop making ambulances near the Gowanus Canalimporting trucks from Detroit and retrofitting them. His business, I think, moved down to Georgia, Krase says. He went down to consult with them for a while. At the time, some observers welcomed the shift away from manufacturing, arguing that pay in the sector was low and the work was dirty and dangerous. Better, the argument went, to see people employed in the more modern fields like health care, technology and entertainment. These are the sectors that have grown in Brooklyn in recent years, and none more than health care, which saw a $5.9 million increase in payroll in the borough from 1997 to 2007. The number of Brooklyn residents working in the field grew 560 percent during that period. Growth was 392 percent in educational services and 338 percent in arts, entertainment and recreation. In terms of raw jobs gained192,705those increases make up for the manufacturing losses nearly 10 times over. But, Krase argues, the number of raw jobs tells only a small part of the story. For example, even though the medical industry pays well on average, that average is skewed, he argues, by the salaries of a small number of employees: doctors. Middle-income medical workers, meanwhile, might make less than middle-income workers in a unionized factory. What youre talking about is somebody who was working as a welder, or in an electrical factory, Krase says. They would have been making a good, solid middle income. And that job, other than totally disappearing or being no job at all, is somebody who is now working at Kings County Hospital, or at some senior citizens place as an aide, or at a bank or insurance company doing some kind of clerical work. And those are not good jobs. Similarly, he adds, many households source of income has shifted from one family member to another as manufacturing jobs, traditionally held by men, have disappeared. The jobs that replaced them are so-called pink-collar jobs traditionally held by womenjobs that also traditionally pay less. As for the original wage earners, he says, The point is, there is no equivalent. There is no equivalent wellpaying job for someone who is not particularly well
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educated or skilled. There may be jobs there, but theyre not jobs where its possible to make a good living. In the Marcy Houses, some residents say the Pfizer closing didnt affect as many people as the sites proximity might suggest. When the factory was open, to get a job in there, it was a who-you-know type of thing, says one resident, Salimah A. Malik, walking down Marcy Avenue between the complex and the factory building one afternoon. The problem, she says, is what has replaced the factory: nothing. Now its becoming an eyesorethe weeds are coming up, whatever the case may be. Mother Natures doing what she do. The thing is, now what do we do with the space? Malik, for one, would like to see the Pfizer site used for housing that is affordable to MAdE IN NyC? the working poor and to older The plight of urban people receiving Social Secumanufacturing rity; Section 8 housing in the www.citylimits.org area, she says, is too hard for many people to get into. At the same time, the streets around the factory, in a border zone south of Williamsburg and north of Bedford-Stuyvesant, are in increased demand for residential development. Part of the areas rise in rents is the residual effect of new construction during the boom years of the past decadea boom during which the number of Brooklyn residents working in real estate, incidentally, nearly tripled. One new building, across Flushing Avenue from the Marcy Houses, calls itself the Platinum Condos, with a banner outside advertising studio apartments in the $200,000 range, one-bedroom units more than $300,000 and two- and three-bedroom units for upwards of half a million dollars. (Whether there have been buyers is unclear. A representative from the Real Estate Group, which was marketing some units in the building, said it is no longer involved with the project, and a spokeswoman for the Corcoran Group, which was marketing others, said they had all been temporarily taken off the market.) Pressure is also coming from one community in which demand for real estate is still high: the Satmar sect of Hasidic Jews from nearby South Williamsburg. The Hasidic populations growth in the area has overtaken much of the formerly industrial land north of the Pfizer site and brought its members and the Marcy Houses predominantly black residents physically closer than ever before. Im Muslim, Malik quips, so I tell my friends I live
in the West Bank. Naomi Colon, president of the tenants association of Marcy Houses, says her group has had no contact with leaders of the Hasidic community. But, she adds, there are tensions, because many Marcy residents believe they are improperly prevented from renting affordable apartments in predominantly Jewish buildings. Combined with the rising cost of market-rate apartments, she says, this leaves residents feeling stuck in the projects. Faced with the increased competition for local resources, some are philosophical. If youre not going to take care of your shit, someone else will, says James Young, who is walking his dogs in a Marcy courtyard one afternoon. But, Colon says, one result of scarce housing is that many of the 1,700-plus families in the complex are now crowding more people into their apartmentsa move that is against the rules but to which there is no alternative. She can tell people are doubling up, she says, because the complex generates more trash that it used to, and units seem to use more electricity. She hopes the Pfizer site can be used for housing, she says, and that it is housing available to everyone. Theres a lot of families here thats living with their children, grandchildren, their husband and wife and other family, Colon says. Thats how it is. But its not like theyre not trying to find apartments. Its hard. Building housing on the Pfizer property is no simple solution to the areas crowding, in part because the company and local-government officials are at an impasse. Though company officials mentioned the possibility of new housing early on, the site is still zoned for manufacturing usea designation that would require an action of the City Council and the support of many others in the community and in local government to change. Whether that support would be forthcoming from manufacturing advocates, community leaders or anyone else is uncertain. And while many officials support housingmost notably the powerful State Assembly member Vito Lopezthey do not necessarily agree with Pfizer on the terms. Complicating matters further, many in government were outraged that the company announced the plants closing less than three years after accepting $46 million in city tax breaks aimed at job development. That deal was frozen before Pfizer collected the full amount, and in December the citys Industrial Development Authority announced the company had paid back the city $24.7 milliontwice the sum it had originally received. Still, in the view of some officials who support housing, Pfizer should pay a steep price to be able to develop the land. Lopez says in an interview that he still wants affordable
BROOKLYN AQUARIUM SOCIETY AD
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One thing we certainly dont need any more of is luxury condominiums. Weve got plenty of them. Its a question of keeping the working classes of this city in the city.
Change in Employees by industry, 1997-2007

-37,419 Information -23,534 Manufacturing +2,274 Education services +2,914 Real estate and rental and leasing + 4,210 Other services (except public administration) + 4,580 Arts, entertainment and recreation +7,774 Accomodation and food services + 8,299 Administrative, support, waste +13,539 Professional, scientific and technical services 32,527 Retail trade + 132,547 Health care and social assistance -30,000
Source: Economic Census of the United States
30,000
60,000
90,000
120,000
Commuting times in Brooklyn, 2005-2009

7% 4% 12% 21% 11%
Less than 10 minutes 10 to 19 minutes 20 to 29 minutes 30 to 44 minutes 45-59 minutes 60 to 89 minutes
18%
26%
90 or more minutes
housing to be built on the site, with Pfizer and the city, state and federal governments subsidizing apartments for households making between $40,000 and $60,000 a year. Without guarantees about the nature of the housing, he says, he is not inclined to support a rezoning that could raise the value of the site several times over. And in 2008, in a move aimed in part at pressuring the company to make a deal, Lopez introduced a bill to seize the property by eminent domain. Though the bill stalled initially, Lopez says he plans to reintroduce it this year. City Council member Steve Levin, who represents part of the site and who was once Lopezs chief of staff, blames the company for the stalemate. Pfizer would rather sit on that vacant property and wait for the economy to come back so they can hold on to that plan of doing luxury condos there, he says. Pfizer should give the property away for a dollar, is what they should do. They dont need the money. Christopher Loder, a Pfizer spokesman, says that in 2007 the company sought proposals and community input for the site, with an emphasis on core principles such as affordable housing, job creation and participation by female- and minority-owned businesses. The economic downturn, he says, prevented the company from completing the process. We notified community stakeholders in early 2009 that while the properties would remain on the market, our proactive marketing efforts would be suspended as we waited for the market to strengthen, Loder wrote in an e-mail. Though it is clear that the financial and real estate markets are still extremely challenging, we continue to be open to conversations regarding potential development of these properties and our commitment to our community-based development principles is unchanged, he added. We remain dedicated to making the best decisions possible for a neighborhood we have proudly been part of for more than 150 years. Notably, what the leading proposals for the site do not include is more industry. Though Levin laments the passing of an era when thousands of North Brooklyn residents could walk to work in well-paying, attainable manufacturing jobs, he calls the idea of replacing the lost Pfizer jobs an awfully tall order, adding, Its not something that looks very possible. There is also the question of whether residents want industry next to them. In an interview for the Brooklyn Historical Society, a former Pfizer employee named Roslyn Sheer recalled fielding complaints from the plants neighbors about its smell.
It was like old garbage, she said of one odor that came and went with the seasons. Colon, from the residents association, says jobs would be welcome, but not at any cost. We have to be careful, because rememberPfizer, when I was a child, didnt have a cap on that chimney of theirs, she says. A lot of us, including myself, caught bronchitis and asthma. Though they have no proof it made them sick, she says, the presence of the smell and the smokestack left many residents wary of industry. Levin argues that residential constructionof a certain kind, anywaywould be a way to address the problems of local working-class people from a different angle. The way that I look at it is, theres always going to be a need for affordable housing, especially in North Brooklyn, Levin says. One thing we certainly dont need any more of is luxury condominiums. Weve got plenty of them. Its a question of keeping the working classes of this city in the city. Whether its a place for them to live or a place for them to work, theyre both valuable and necessary. Still, some manufacturing advocates have mulled the idea of repurposing the main Pfizer factory building for light industry. The Greenpoint Manufacturing and Design Center, which has four buildings totaling more than 600,000 square feet of industrial space around Brooklyn, developed a plan to retrofit the facility in 2008, in response to Pfizers request for proposals. The plan would have subdivided the old factory building into units ranging from 3,000 and 50,000 square feet and brought in a development partner to build affordable housing on the former parking lot and other vacant land around the site. The idea, which would have doubled the organizations square footage, fizzled when Pfizer delayed plans to sell the property. Looking back, Paul Parkhill, the centers director of planning and development, says the ideas failure may have been a blessing in disguise. What was palatable to the neighborhood at large and what was achievable financially was kind of a big open question, Parkhill says. Between the smaller number of tenants available in a tight economy and the scarcity of loans available for largescale projects, he says, it would have been a very heavy lift. In short, he says, todays Brooklyn may not have a demand for that much industrial space. And, though Pfizer has never put it in these terms, he says he can understand why the company might simply prefer to sell.
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Dont Fuhgeddaboudit Events to remember from Brooklyns past
PROSPECT ZOO AD
Weve noticed this in a lot of instances, Parkhill says, where an industrial business that owns a building will choose to cash out because the value of the real estate exceeds the value of the business. Are, then, Brooklyns days of producing things nearing an end? Not necessarily, says Parkhill, who believes the area still has some natural advantages over other parts of the country and the world. First, he says, there is the areas large and diverse workforce, with plentiful skilled and unskilled labor. Even more important, there is its proximity to market: its location at the heart of an enormous population center, with minimal shipping required to reach millions of potential buyers. Whether the company is Greenpoints Acme Smoked Fish or Bushwicks Supreme Poly Productsmakers of plastic bagsthere are reasons Brooklyn makes sense as a location for the scores of small manufacturers that remain. And, Parkhill says, the city can do even more to keep industry, through tax breaks, development incentives and lending programs. The natural advantages are, of course, some of the same advantages that made Brooklyn an industrial powerhouse in the first place, before a decline that began decades ago and has not abated. At the Marcy Houses, Naomi Colon says she has seen the
heartache that results when young people finish college, look for a job and have to return to the projects because nothing is available. As for their younger siblings, she says, there is not much work to be had in the neighborhood. We have a Duane Reade on the corner of Myrtle and Nostrand, Colon says. We have a Family Dollar across the street, and I think a couple of young people from here work there. Key Food all the way up the block, some girls work there. Krase, of Brooklyn College, argues that New York City has always come out of recessions well because of its versatile economy, with real estate and financial services existing alongside manufacturing. The borough still has the workers and infrastructure, he says; it is the balance between sectors that has become skewed. In a healthy local economy, when one sector weakens, others can pick up the slack. Without diversity, cities become too reliant on the employers that they have and suffer when those employers fail. Many in the city, Krase says, did not realize soon enough what harm the departure of factories could do. There was this euphoria of gentrification and all these new industries that were going to develop, which just didnt happen and didnt make sense even, Krase says. How long can you sustain an economy based on retail?
1624 First Dutch settlements spring up at Midwout and Vlackebos, now Midwood and Flatbush, amid the Lenape (or Canarsee) Indians. 1776 American troops under George Washington lose the Battle of Brooklyn but manage to retreat to Manhattan. 1829 The Coney Island Hotel is constructed, the first step in creating a legendary amusement destination. 1841 The Brooklyn Daily Eagle is launched. It will print daily until 1955. 1861 The Brooklyn Academy of Music is founded 1862 The famous ironclad USS Monitor is launched from the Continental Iron Works. 1867 Prospect Park opens to the public. 1883 The Brooklyn Bridge opens. 1898 Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island consolidate with Manhattan and the Bronx to form the five-borough city. 1927 The 37-story Williamsburgh Savings Bank tower is constructed. It will reign as the tallest building in Brooklyn until being replaced by the 51-story Brooklyner in 2010. 1943 Betty Smith publishes A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. 1955 After losing the World Series to the Yankees five times in the previous 15 years, the Brooklyn Dodgers beat the Bombers in seven games. 1958 The Brooklyn Dodgers leave for Los Angeles. 1960 United Airlines Flight 826 and Trans World Airlines Flight 266 collide in midair, with the United jet crashing into Park Slope, killing everyone on board and six people on the ground. 1966 The Navy abandons the Brooklyn Navy Yard, reflecting the deterioration of the entire waterfront. 1968 An experiment in community school control in Brownsville leads to a dispute between majorityblack parents and mostly white teachers, triggering a massive school strike. 1972 Shirley Chisholm, the first black woman elected to Congress, receives 152 votes as a candidate for president at the Democratic National Convention. 1974 Starrett City, the largest federally subsidized housing complex in the nation, opens in Spring Creek. 1977 Rioting in Bushwick during a blackout leaves 27 stores burned down. 1978 A Coast Guard helicopter patrol discovers an oil slick in Newtown Creek. The Greenpoint oil spill
would come to be known as one of the largest in U.S. history. 1983 Brighton Beach Memoirs, the first installment of Neil Simons Eugene trilogy, opens at the Alvin Theatre. 1987 Brooklyn Democratic boss Meade Esposito is found guilty of bribery. 1988 Life magazine calls Red Hook the crack capital of America. 1989 Spike Lee releases Do the Right Thing. 1991 After a black child is killed and another is injured in an accident involving leading figures in the Hasidic community, the Crown Heights riots erupt. A 29-year-old Jewish graduate student is killed. 1997 After being arrested outside a Brooklyn nightclub, Abner Louima is sodomized with a plunger handle in a bathroom at the 70th Precinct in Flatbush. 2005 Brooklyn Democratic boss Clarence Norman is found guilty of violating election law. 2006 The New York State Public Authorities Control Board approves Atlantic Yards. 2007 The Pfizer factory in Bed-Stuy closesanother blow to the boroughs manufacturing sector. 2008 Ikea opens in Red Hook. 2010 Over the citys objections, the Gowanus Canal is named a federal Superfund site.
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CHAPTER foUr
Living on the Edge

From East New York to Bay Ridge, change in Brooklyn goes off script
ighty years ago, when East New York was new, the land now known as Spring Creek along its southeastern border was where the city came to an end. When people fleeing the tenements built houses in an area of East New York called New Lots, when they grew vegetables on the empty land next door and watched government paving crews lay down Linden Boulevard, Spring Creek was the land beyond that. It was the scrubby turf where their teenagers played sandlot baseball, the forbidding tall grass where the ill intentioned stashed stolen cars, or worse. It was all this, in short, because Spring Creek was a part of Brooklyn that nobody wantedwell past the end of any subway line and miles from the Manhattan skyscrapers that were sometimes visible in the distance. But over the years, the city spread out. As East New York filled up, land in Spring Creek was there, cheap and available, to handle the overflow. In one corner, a street grid developed around Flatlands Avenue. Public housing projects followed in the 1950s, and in 1974 came the vast subsidized rental complex at Starrett City. By the Belt Parkway, in 2002, came the Gateway Center Mall.
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Large swaths, though, remained untouched. And in the citys lowest years, when drugs and guns threatened to drag poor places underwater, it seemed that the fringes of Spring Creek might stay empty forever. After all, the rest of East New York, long a bastion for the working class, itself felt hollowed out. By the 1980s, the neighborhoods residents picked their way home through blocks of vacant buildings that were burned out, stripped or simply left to crumble. This is the East New York that lingers in the citys imagination. As Brooklyn surged over the past decade, as Flatbush Avenue and Fourth Avenue saw construction of tower after tower, and as factories of all kinds (the Toy Factory apartments, the Chocolate Factory condos) filled with bright-eyed young artists and professionalssomehow the image of East New York never changed in the public mind. As far as it was from Manhattan, it was further stillin the collective imagination anywayfrom the new Brooklyn. But something new was happening there tooa dozen L-train stops past Williamsburgs most intrepid hipsters. East New York, a half-century ago a neighborhood of immigrants and blue-collar commuters, was growing back into just that again. Since the early 1980s, on thousands of acres of vacant land, groups like East Brooklyn Congregations have built more than 3,000 new affordable houses for local buyers. The empty core of East New York has, essentially, filled back up. Its all been rebuilt, says Michael Gecan, a community organizer for the Industrial Areas Foundation. And not for the artists, God bless em, or the students or tourists or stockbrokers. Its all been built for the corrections officers and the health workers and the city workers, almost all Hispanic and black buyers and renters. Taken as a whole, Gecan argues, the physical rebuilding of eastern Brooklyns blighted neighborhoods ranks as one of the great public works projects of the past century. And its not happening in the cool neighborhoods, he says. Its in what used to be the uncool neighborhoods. All across uncool Brooklyn, in fact, neighborhoods have been regenerating. Some, like East New York and Bushwick, have come a long way back from disaster. Meanwhile, other neighborhoods far from Brooklyns trendier zones, like middle-class Bensonhurst and Bay Ridge, have maintained their prosperity while undergoing dramatic yet largely peaceful ethnic shifts. These places, and neighborhoods like them, are not the Brooklyn for which David Beckhams child is named. They arent the Brooklyn electrified by upwardly mobile newcomers or abandoned by industry, but they are where most of the boroughs 2.5 million residents actually live. They are places where the story of the new Brooklyn is different. The story in Spring Creek is that on land that was empty throughout the citys history, someone is building houses. Driving down Flatlands Avenue now, along what used to be
the neighborhoods fringe, the change is unmistakable. Fresh streets stretch out to the south, lined with new sidewalks and streetlights. Behind construction fences, workers are busy: They are putting up a building that will hold two new schools, to go with the 2,200 units of owner-occupied housing that have already been built around it. The development is part of the Nehemiah Homes, the longterm neighborhood redevelopment project of East Brooklyn Congregations, a community organization made up of 32 schools, neighborhood associations and houses of worship. The group has been building housing on vacant land in East
median Household income

White Native Hawaiian / Other Pacific Islander Hispanic Asian American Indian and Alaska Native Black
$52,368 $25,192 $32,308 $45,366 $37,679 $39,009
Ethnic succession affirms the citys openness to newcomers, researchers say, but it can also exacerbate racial segregation.
New York, Brownsville, Bedford-Stuyvesant and Bushwick since the 1980sfirst in the interior of the neighborhoods and now, with most of that land filled in, on the edge. At the Spring Creek development, one-bedroom attached houses start at $204,000, with three-bedroom semiattached units going for as much as $548,000. The waiting list, says Grant Lindsay, an organizer with the group, is long. Theres no limit to the amount of houses that we could build at this price for homeownership, Lindsay says, driving down a new street in Spring Creek, past rows of houses stretched out under a wide sky. We could build 10 times this, and there would still be a waiting list for it. The success of Nehemiah housing, named for the biblical figure who rebuilt the walls of Jerusalem and repopulated the city, was not always assured. In fact, before the housing initiative launched, East Brooklyn Congregations began its work in the neighborhood in 1980 with a humbler target: street signs. Signs are metal, and scrap metal and copper was one of the things that, after the city had deteriorated, people had stolen, Lindsay says. The city never put them back up again. Once the signs were back, the group, in association with the Industrial Areas Foundation, moved on to bigger causes, like crosswalks and, eventually, housing. The land, much of which had been seized by the city because of owner neglect, was easy to come by. One wide expanse of blight was across
Poverty rates by race / Ethnicity income Quintiles (2009)

23% 23% 22% 21% 18% 15% 23% 23% 30%
42%
18%
0$ to $17,737
Source: Furman Center
$17,738 to $37,866 $37,865 to $64,769
$64,770 to $108,114
$108,115 and up
Black
American Indian / Alaska Native
Asian
Hispanic
Native White Hawaiian / Other Pacific Islander
Bank deposits (millions, top 10 ZiP Codes)

$3000 $2500 $2000 $1500 $1000 $500
112 01 Bo eru mH ill 112 09 112 Bay 29 Rid Ma ge diso n, H om ecr est 112 19 Bo rou gh Par k 112 35 Bat hB 112 eac 34 h Flat lan ds Mil l Ba sin 112 30 Mid wo od 112 14 Ben son 112 hur 15 st Par kS lop e,W ind sor 112 04 Ben son hur st
Source: FDIC. Data as of June 30, 2010
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Mother Gaston Boulevard from the Our Lady of Mercy Roman Catholic church in Brownsville. When they looked out their door 30 years ago, Lindsay says, standing on the sidewalk in front of the church, what they saw were empty lots or halfabandoned buildings that had been stripped of all their copper by bandits. Looking to the left, they would have seen the towering Samuel J. Tilden Houses, an eight-building public housing complex that, residents say, even police were hesitant to enter. There were many residents inside and outside the projects who wanted a better place to live, Lindsay says. But if the city had redeveloped the empty land itself, it probably would have built more high-density rental housing. The Nehemiah concept, on the other hand, called for single-family houses assembled at the Brooklyn Navy Yard to be trucked into the neighborhood and installed for approved buyers. The city would donate the land and pay some construction costs, and East Brooklyn Congregations would cover the balance and handle the sales. One condition of sale: All residents would have to join a homeowners association. Skepticism was high, not least among the neighborhoods residents. People were trying to get out and go to Queens, anywhere else, says Carmelia Goffe, who grew up in Brownsville and worked in control towers for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. When word of the housing plans got out, she says, most people in the neighborhood said, No, those are little stick houses over there. Theyre not gonna last and be successful. Goffe, who was living in Section 8 housing in East New York, decided to take a chance for one reason: Because it was affordable, she says. I had three sons, and I thought it would be a better type of situation for them. I couldnt afford to go to Queens or anything else. Twenty-five years later, her sons have grown up and moved away, but Goffe, 62, and retired, still owns the house. Her neighbors include bank workers, city workers, nurses and businesspeople. The neighborhood is no paradisethe Tilden Houses are still forbiddingbut she says there are hopeful signs, like the arrival of chain stores on Pitkin Avenue. Goffe, who is on the board of the homeowners association, says early doubts have been proved wrong. Eastern Brooklyn, city crime statistics show, has indeed grown safer. Since 1990the year that murders citywide peaked at 2,605murders in the two police precincts covering East New York, Brownsville and the surrounding neighborhoods combined have declined by almost two-thirds, though the improvement has not
kept pace with the citywide decline in murders of 79 percent over the same period. Meanwhile, East New Yorks population has swelled. According to an analysis by the Center for the Study of Brooklyn at Brooklyn College, the population of the neighborhoods community district grew almost 17 percent from 1990 to 2008. The median household income, adjusted for inflation, actually declined slightly over those decades, and the poverty rate stayed level at around 30 percent (compared with Brooklyns overall poverty rate of 22.4 percent in 2008), but the percentage of residents over 25 with a bachelors degree or higher rose from 6.5 to 13.7, while the percentage of residents without a high school diploma was cut in half. The changes are subtle enough that, on bad days, they can be hard to see. But Lindsay insists they are there. A few years ago, as residents of one Brownsville building met to discuss the things that would improve the property, a gunfight broke out in an adjacent courtyard. Now after a renovation of the complex sponsored by East Brooklyn Congregations, complaints tend to focus on noise from children playing. In front of a row of NeheBROOKlyNS WORldS miah houses on nearby Thatford Avenue, Lindsay Covering the neighborhoods stops at a spot on the sidewalk www.citylimits.org that was the site of a shooting last summer. Maybe the difference, between that recent killing and those of earlier years, is they caught the guy, and people went down and testified, because they expect the police to do their jobs, he says. This is not the neighborhood that it was, he adds later, and it will never be the neighborhood it was 30 years ago, because theres people actively rebuilding it who wont allow it to be that way. One thing that has not changed about East New York, at least in the few decades since white residents abandoned it for the suburbs and Staten Island, is race. As it was in 1990, the community district today is roughly half black. But other Brooklyn neighborhoods have seen stark demographic shifts. For the past 10 years, its been quite dizzying, says Jerry Krase of Brooklyn College. During that time, he says, Russians have taken over many of the businesses on 18th Avenuealso known as Cristoforo Colombo Boulevardin the longtime Italian stronghold of Bensonhurst. Middle Easterners have made their mark on Bay Ridge. And Chinese immigrants, starting from a foothold in Sunset Park, have expanded into several surrounding neighborhoods.
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If you could go back in the 70s and 80s and look at pictures of the neighborhood and the devastation and the flight, its totally different. If somebody had told you then, Oh, were going to rebuild the neighborhood, you would shake your head and say, No way.
The Center for the Study of Brooklyns numbers, derived from the Census, are dramatic: In 1990, the language other than English spoken by most people in Bensonhurst was Italian. By 2008, it was Chinese, followed by Russian, with Italian a distant third The percentage of residents who dont speak English at all doubled, to more than 26 percent. In the neighborhoods community district and in the district to the west that encompasses the neighborhoods of Bay Ridge and Dyker Heights, the population of residents with Asian ancestry has more than tripled. In both districts, the second most common place of birth, behind New York State, is China. But the change has come, the numbers indicate, without a corresponding socioeconomic shift. In both districts, inflationadjusted household incomes have remained stable since 1990, and poverty rates have stayed low. The scene on 18th Avenue on a weekday afternoon is busy: people coming home from work, buying food for dinner. They stop at places like the Bari Pork Store and Salumeria or, just to its left, the Hong Bao Bakery. Rows of brick and wood-frame houses stretch away from the avenue on both sides. On the corner of 64th Street, the neighborhoods recent history is neatly stacked in one two-story brick building: On the ground floor is the J&V Pizzeriain place, the sign says, since 1950. Above it, with a yellow-and-red sign mostly in Chinese, is a business called Guan Yuen Co. Asked what his upstairs neighbor does, a pizzamaker just shrugs. (A man smoking a cigarette outside says the business helps new immigrants navigate government programs.) John Mollenkopf, director of the Center for Urban Research at the City University of New York, says the scene is one that
has played out, with slight variations, across much of Brooklyn: the descendants of the last great wave of migration gradually giving way to the next great wave. The communities that used to live there are aging, Mollenkopf says. They were solidly middle class, but their children dont really want to live in Bensonhurst. A few blocks down the avenue, 20-year-old Danny Lanno is working in his familys store, the Cristoforo Colombo Bakery. He grew up in the neighborhood, he says, and the change has come quickly. It started, he says, when Italian people moved en masse to Staten Island and New Jersey. The result, as Chinese people filled the void, has been jarring. Everyone is kind of, not pissed, but surprised. You know: Where did all the Italians go? he says. I feel like the only Italians are the old people. And I feel like once theyre gone, I
dont know if theres going to be any Italians left. Lanno says he plans to stay in Brooklyn foreverthough not necessarily in Bensonhurst. As for the bakery, he says, business is good; Chinese people come in to buy bread too. The Chinese communitys arrival in Bensonhurst was a logical one, says Steve Chung, president of the United Chinese Association of Brooklyn, who came to the neighborhood from Hong Kong in 1973 and now lives in Marine Park. Chung says the older Chinese destination of Sunset Park started getting more crowded and expensive, with cost concerns rising after Sept. 11, 2001, as business in Manhattans Chinatown were stifled by increased security and
street closures. Meanwhile, Bensonhurst offered good housing and schools. Besides, he says, Its a beautiful place to live, really, to raise a family. Chungs group started in 2002 in response to violence and harassment of Asian students in local high schools. Since then, he says, the problems have faded. The Italians who remain in the area, he says, are friendly. As for the local Chinese, he says, recent immigrants need education in American culture, while the more established members of the community are beginning to get involved in local government and politics. Were still not up to my ideal community, Chung says. My vision is, there shouldnt be
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any areas or borders between peoples. But a lot of the new immigrants, a lot of the different ethnic backgrounds, they tend to live together because they feel more comfortable. As encouraging as the areas largely peaceful neighborhood transitions can seem, they are not without downsides. Ethnic succession affirms the citys openness to newcomers, researchers say, but it can also exacerbate racial segregation. Some ethnic groups, Krase suggests, have been attracted to neighborhoods like Bensonhurst in part because of their middle-class statusand their relatively low black populations. Some of the newer groups dont want to live in black neighborhoods, so they dont go there, he says. A similar dynamic, Mollenkopf says, can be seen in Bay Ridge. The reason that people from different Arabic-speaking communities are going there is because its perceived to be a safe, white, middle-class neighborhood. From the perspective of the existing ethnic groups, he adds, people dont think that property values are going to fall because the Chinese are coming into the neighborhood. Still, though the skin colors are different, the pattern is the same: As in East New York, where Italians and Jews were replaced by black and Hispanic residents, in Bensonhurst and Dyker Heights they have been followed by immigrants from Asia. The process repeats as new groups move to Brooklyn, establish themselves, prosper and move out. It creates an opening, Krase says. And then whos going to move in? In Bensonhurst, the next change may already be under way. In a drive to promote last years census, Chungs group printed a set of fliers aimed at reaching some of the neighborhoods newest arrivals, who so far have no civic group of their own. The fliers, he says, were in Spanish. In Spring Creek, the opportunity for development has always been there, but the land was just too far from shopping or transit. East Brooklyn Congregations hopes to change that. The group has plans for a supermarket on the site and is pressing the transit authority for bus lines nearby. Until those services arrive, the neighborhoods downsides remain. But the long-fallow land is attractive anywayin part because it is cheap, which makes for low housing costs. As the rest of Brooklyn becomes more expensive, East New Yorks population is surging as poorer residents are forced eastward. Linda Boyce, a retired city administrator and travel agent who lived in the nearby Linden Plaza apartments
for 25 years, knows the area as well as anyone. The idea of housing in Spring Creek, she says, was a jolt. I thought the whole idea was just so exciting, she says, because this whole area was a place where you dump garbage. She heard talk of development in the mid-90s, she says, and signed on to the waiting list, and years later got a letter saying she was approved. She delayed retirement for two years until her sale was final, and she moved into her new house, where she lives with her husband and son, in the summer of 2009. The garbage and tall weeds are long gone, of course, just as the sprawling blocks of boarded-up houses are gone from the rest of the neighborhood. In their place, on the edge of the city, is Boyces three-bedroom house. I had never owned a home before and always wanted to own one, she says. However, I thought that when I retired, I would have to leave New York. The Nehemiah program has its critics, who argue that low-density housing is an inefficient use of land in a crowded metropolis. Others say the emphasis on homeownership and the programs tight screening of potential buyers leave out many of the people in the community who are most in need of housing assistance. But Nehemiah residents say the programs strict rules have a clear upside: Their developments have been remarkably stable and free of foreclosures, even in the recent years economic collapse, when neighboring areas, like Canarsie, were among the worst-hit places in the city. If you could go back in the 70s and 80s and look at pictures of the neighborhood and the devastation and the flight, its totally different, says Pat Worthy, a retired corrections officer who bought a house in the New Lots Nehemiah development in 2000. If somebody had told you then, Oh, were going to rebuild the neighborhood, you would shake your head and say, No way. But now, she says, You come in the summertime, everybodys grass is green, everybodys got nice flowers. People look at it, and theyre totally shocked.
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CHAPTER fiVE
The Destination
The new history of Brooklyn
ear the back of Juniors, facing out into the restaurant from in front of a mirrored wall, Bob Trentacoste waits for his salmon to arrive and ponders Brooklyn. He has just turned 60, and in a few weeks, it would be the 50th anniversary of his parents buying a house in Carroll Gardens. Years ago, he moved away to New Jersey for a while, but he came back to the house in 2006, after his parents died. Trentacoste, who used to work in software but is shifting into property management, has been coming to Juniors twice a week for eight or nine years, he says. The food is good enough, he adds, that he takes the train and the bus across neighborhoods, bypassing countless other restaurants. Juniors, he says, is one of the last places in the city where you can sit and drink an egg cream with your meal. For a student of Brooklynand he is onethat is important. And why study Brooklyn? That is a different question. I suppose its where we grew up, Trentacoste says with a small shrug. If I grew up in East McKeesport, Im sure Id want to know the history of that. But, he is asked, is there something more? Some mystique? Brooklyn, he allows, has probably had a richer history than East McKeesport. For example, he says, across Flatbush Avenue from Juniors is a Long Island University building, home of a pool and some classrooms, that was once the Paramount Theatre. In its heyday, it played host to Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald and some of the earliest rock-n-roll performers. Much farther down Flatbush, of course, was Ebbets Field, home of the Brooklyn Dodgers. Trentacoste points to a set of stadium chairs mounted on the wall above a row of ketchup bottles.
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Brooklyns share of new yorks Crime

Population Grand Larceny, Auto Grand Larceny Burglary Felony Assault Robbery Rape Murder
Source: NYPD
30.6% 32.3% 25.8% 35.7% 33.7% 34% 30% 41.2%
CRIME
Total Felonies
3,500 3,000 2,500 2,000 1,500 1,000 500 0 1,323 1,106 1,249 1,334 1,264 899 1,023 2,120 1,974 1,457 1,197 581 2,011 1,364 845 3,100
1,829 1,404
1,836 1,143
1,733 986 906
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Before it was all factory, industrial and longshoremen, this area. The last 20 years, all the factories closed, the longshoremen, theyre not there anymore.
The owner himself told me that he bought them on eBay, he says with a smile. They were billed as bleacher seats from the original Ebbets Field. But the owner himself admitted that has no way of verifying that theyre authentic. Perhaps the appeal of Brooklyn, Trentacoste says, is thatEbbets Field notwithstanding most of the infrastructure is intact, even as everything else around it changes. For some people, he adds, that makes the new skyscrapers dotting the borough seem all the more disturbing. The way I like to say it is, sometimes history gets paved over, he says. The example he has in mind is the Williamsburgh Savings Bank tower, recently surpassed as the tallest building in Brooklyn. Something about the height of the new apartment building that dethroned it just feels wrong. So, for that matter, does the flea market crowding the towers banking hall, but mostly, what bothers him is the buildings loss of its top spot to this apartment tower. The emotions, though, are hard to explain. On one hand, he says, change is necessary. On the other ... Its tradition. Its like losing an old friend, Trentacoste starts, psychologically, really. He hesitates. I mean, the Williamsburgh Savings Bank building is still standing, he says. Its not going away. Just over a mile away, where the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway cuts a gully along the edges of Red Hook and Carroll Gardensa few blocks from Trentacostes house, in factFerdinandos Focacceria is open for business too. Its 1904 founding makes Juniors, a halfcentury younger, look like a glitzy new kid on the block. Francesco Buffa, who arrived in the borough from Sicily 39 years ago, is the third-generation owner, manager and cook. Ferdinandos has some pictures on the wall too scenes from the old daysand it has drawn its share of tourists over the years. And like every other square inch of its home borough, it has seen change. First and foremost, in the people who walk in the door. Before it was all factory, industrial and longshoremen, this area, Buffa says. The last 20 years, all the factories closed, the longshoremen, theyre not there anymore, and slowly its become a more residential area. For a business owner, that kind of change is good. Its the young people, Buffa says. They go for a good time, spend the money. Over time, these new Brooklynites will grow old, and some of them will stay as long as Buffa has, or longer. Some will leave their markeither physically, with tall buildings, maybe even the tallest aroundor in the ever evolving spirit of the place. They will all change it a little, if only by their presence, but that is nothing new: Ferdinandos, has been serving chickpea-andricotta sandwiches and Manhattan Special soda (made in Greenpoint) for 105 years. But at some point, more than a century ago, a new person found a spot near the Brooklyn waterfront, looked around and decided to create something. Now, Buffa says, Its a destination, because they cant get this kind of food nowhere else. The processregeneration, expansion, adaptation plays itself out eternally, even in East McKeesport. But when people say Brooklyn is special, part of what they mean is the scale on which this all happens. It is a place with the Williamsburgh Savings Bank tower at one end, the Spring Creek Nehemiah homes at another and dozens of sprawling, roiling neighborhoods in between. In all of them, at any time, someone is leaving and someone else is arriving, and the Chinese in Bensonhurst have the same reasons for coming as the advertising executives in Fort Greene. They come because Brooklyn, whatever it is, can work for them. The image, though enduring, is secondary. Brooklyn is a concept, but it is also a place. Or really, it is many concepts and many places. They are held together, on a rounded mass on the western tip of Long Island, by convenient accidents of luck and landform and also by a notion in the heads of people around the world who look at the name and think, Now, thats a place to be from. And though they dont quite know why, theyre right. Francesco Buffa is talking about his restaurant, but he might be offering a motto for his adopted borough. Different type of people, he says, but the place is still here. CL
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ExPlORE BROOKlyN
Brooklyn covers 70 square miles and is home to more people than 16 states. Getting to know the boroughor getting to know it better if youve lived there for yearsis a tall order. Brooklyn boasts at least 60 neighborhoods, each one a world unto itself. And each one offers a bite-size way to explore the states most populous county. Here are two tours for folks hoping to learn as they walk. For more information, go to www.brooklynhistory.org/ publications/neighborhood.html:
Melrose, a low-income South Bronx neighborhood, was redeveloped along the lines of a community plan.
North Slope
Courtesy Brooklyn Historical Society 1. Francis H. Kimballs Montauk Club (188991), Eighth Avenue and Lincoln Place. The exotically decorated building housed the defining institution of elite Park Slope gentlemen. 2. The no-Grec brownstone (built in 1883) at 20 Eighth Avenue, across the street from the Montauk Club between St. Johns and Lincoln places, was the home of William J. Gaynor (18491913) during the time he served as one of the most remarkable mayors in New York City history. A Christian Brothers missionary turned lawyer, he practiced first in the town of Flatbush then in the city of Brooklyn. As a judge, he sent the notoriously corrupt Gravesend political boss John Y. McKane to prison for election
fraud, thus making it possible for the great amusement parks (Steeplechase, Luna Park, Dreamland) to thrive at Coney Island. Gaynor was elected mayor in 1909 and liked to walk to work from here to City Hall. He survived a 1910 assassination attempt, though complications from his wound caused him to die in office.
3. On the north side of Lincoln Place between Seventh and Eighth avenues is the private Berkeley-Carroll School. It was founded as the all-girl Berkeley Institute in 1887 by David Augustus Boody, who would later be mayor of Brooklyn. The 1896 Jacobean-style building was designed by Walker &
Morris. The superb 1992 addition is by Fox & Fowle. 4. The house at 274 Berkeley Place, between Eighth Avenue and Plaza Street West, was designed by Lamb & Rich and built in 189091 for George P. Tangeman, owner of Royal Baking Powder, a company that through its marketing expertise grew
into a consumer goods conglomerate. The style of the house is transitional from the Romanesque revival of the 1880s to the Classical of the 1890s. 5. Grand Army Plaza, with the Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Arch (John H. Duncan, 188992) featuring the 1898 quadriga by Frederick W. MacMonnies, and the groups Army (west pier facing the park, 1901) and Navy (east pier, 1901). On the inside walls of the arch are two equestrian reliefs in bronze. One depicts Ulysses Grant, the other Abraham Lincoln. This is the only known equestrian portrait of the 16th president. The human figures were sculpted by William ODonovan, the horses by the great Philadelphia realist painter Thomas Eakins. 6. Brooklyn Public Library, 193741, Githens & Keally. Be sure to go inside. 7. Mary Louise Bailey Fountain, 1932, Eugene Savage, sculptor, Egerton Swartwout, architect. 8. Though it is technically in Prospect Heights, you wont help noticing the striking, glassy Modernist apartment house One Prospect Park (2008), designed by the world-famous Richard Meier, on Eastern Parkway across from the Brooklyn Public Library. 9. The twin Tudor-style houses at 13 and 15 Prospect Park West (between President and Carroll streets) were built in 1919. They represent the late incursion into Park Slope for the quaint and lovely suburban style (e.g., Forest Hills Gardens in Queens) of the time. They also represent one of the earliest instances of driveways and garages in Park Slope. The architect was William McCarthy. 10. 869 President Street, between Seventh and Eighth avenues, an artistic house designed by Henry Ogden Avery for Stewart Lyndon Woodford, built in 1885. 11. 97 Eighth Avenue, southeast corner of President Street, was built in 1909 for John W. Weber, president of the William Ulmer Brewery in Bushwick. The architects Daus & Otto designed it in a Classical style at a time when virtually everything
in Park Slope was Classical. 12. 105 Eighth Avenue, between President and Carroll streets, may be one of the finest Classical houses in Brooklyn, and one of the cleverest, with the rounded colonnade lending a kind of monumentality that would otherwise have been difficult to attain on the tight site. It was built in 1912 for Michael Tracy, owner of one of the East Coasts largest stevedoring firms. Brooklyns Helmle & Huberty were the architects. 13. 115 Eighth Avenue, northeast corner of Carroll Street, was built in 1888 for Thomas Adams Jr., whose father had invented modern chewing gum. Adams Jr. manufactured Chiclets and Dentyne, among other gums, and helped form the chewing gum trust. Architect C.P.H. Gilberts house is a bravura exercise in Richardsonian Romanesque. 14. 121 Eighth Avenue, southeast corner of Carroll Street, was built in 1894. Architect Montrose Morris, a master of Richardsonian Romanesque, jettisoned that style for an exuberant Classicism when that was what his clients wanted. 15. 838, 842 and 846 Carroll Street, on the south side between Eighth Avenue and Prospect Park West, were all designed by C.P.H. Gilbert and built in 1887. 16. 850 Carroll Street, on the south side between Eighth Avenue and Prospect Park West, was built in 1922, one of the last rich mens houses built in the neighborhood. Mott B. Schmidt, architect of Manhattans Sutton Place from around the same time, designed the house in his trademark light Georgian Revival style, so different in feeling from the Victorian architecture of Park Slope. 17. Speaking of that Victorian architecture, William B. Tubby designed the delightful row of four Queen Anne houses at 864872 Carroll Street (south side between Eighth Avenue and Prospect Park West), built in 1887. In this wildest and most picturesque of styles, its sometimes hard to tell where one house ends and the next begins. 18. 863 Carroll Street (north side
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between Eighth Avenue and Prospect Park West), 1890, is a rare domestic work by the famous firm of Napoleon Le Brun & Sons. 19. Two houses at the northwest corner of Prospect Park West and Carroll Street, 16 and 17 Prospect Park West, and two on the opposite corner, 18 and 19 Prospect Park West, are limestone Classical beauties built in 189899 and designed by Montrose Morris to form a grand gateway to this splendid block of Carroll Street. 20. 28 Prospect Park West, at the southwest corner of Montgomery Place, was designed by Bostons Charles Brigham and built in 1901. 21. Montgomery Place was developed by Harvey Murdock (co-developer of the resort Locust Valley farther out on Long Island), who had a close working relationship with a very young architect (only 24 when he began work on Montgomery Place) named Charles Pierrepont Henry Gilbert, recently trained at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. In his youth, Gilbert was under the spell of Bostons Henry Hobson Richardson, who had evolved a personal variation on French and Spanish Romanesque prototypes and in so doing created what struck many people in the 1880s as somehow peculiarly American. Richardsons acolytes were numerous in Brooklyn, and none was better or more prolific than Gilbert. 22. Two gorgeous Beaux-Arts Classical apartment houses, 10 Montgomery Place and 143 Eighth Avenue, stand at the southeast corner. Designed by Montrose Morris and built in 191011, the four-story buildings are like rich French pastry. 23. Simeon Eisendrath, who had worked in Chicago for Louis Sullivan, designed Temple Beth Elohim, 190810, at the northeast corner of Eighth Avenue and Garfield Place. It is one of the most beautiful Classical synagogues in New York City. 24. The Belvedere, at the northwest corner of Eighth Avenue and Garfield Place, is a simple but elegant four-story apartment house from 1903 designed by Henry Pohlman. Along Garfield Place
going west from Eighth Avenue are its three siblings, the Serine, the Lillian and the Ontrinue. Buildings such as these form the rich architectural background of Park Slope and are as necessary to the neighborhoods quality as anything by C.P.H. Gilbert or Montrose Morris.
Brooklyn Heights
Courtesy Brooklyn Historical Society 1. Brooklyn Historical Society: Founded in 1863, the Brooklyn Historical Societys building was erected in 1878-81 as one of several important institutions that made this part of Brooklyn Heights the cultural center of Brooklyn. 2. St. Anns School (formerly Crescent Athletic Club): Originally a prestigious gentlemens sporting club, This 1906 building, designed by Frank Freeman (one of Brooklyns greatest architects), has since 1966 house a private school. 3. First unitarian Church (a.k.a. Church of the Saviour): This Gothic Revival church, built in 1842-44, is one of the few remaining works by the architect Minard Lafever, one of 19th-century New Yorks most important designers. 4. Former Herman Behr residence: This beautiful house, in the Romanesque Revival style, was designed by Frank Freeman for a wealthy industrialist in 1888-90. It is now apartments. 5. St. George Hotel: The St. George was one New Yorks largest hotel, with 2,632 guest rooms, and featured the largest indoor salt-water swimming pool in the world. Built in several stages between 1885 and 1930, the group of structures now serves a variety of functions, including apartments. 6. Plymouth Church of the Pilgrims: This was the home church of Henry Ward Beecher (1813-87), Americas most famous preacher and anti-slavery crusader in the 19th-century/ He helped design the simple 1849 church, which contains a great deal of beautiful stained glass. 7. Eugene Boisselet Residence: This lovely wooden house built in 1824 is one of the best reminders of the early days of
Brooklyn Heights. 8. Former Adrian von Sinderen residence: Built in the late 1830s, this is one of New Yorks largest remaining houses in the Greek Revival style. Later the home of the renowned stage designer Oliver Smith, it is where the novelist Truman Capote lived when he wrote his classic New York novella Breakfast at Tiffanys (published in 1958). 9. Former Alexander M. White residence: This beautiful Italianate brownstone mansion was the childhood home of Alfred Tredway White, philanthropist and reformer who in the late 19th-century pioneered the construction of model housing for working people in New York. 10. Former A.A. Low residence: The near-twin of the house next door, this was home to Abiel Abbot Low, whose House of Low: was royalty in the 19th-century China trade, employing beautiful clipper ships docked across the East River at South Street Seaport. His son, Seth Low, who grew up in this house, because a reforming mayor of Brooklyn, and later of New York City, and president of Columbia University. 11. Brooklyn Heights Promenade: Constructed in the early 1950s, the Promenadeone of the most popular attractions in Brooklyn, was cantilevered out from the bluff of Brooklyn heights to minimize the impact of the new Brooklyn-Queens Expressway on the Heights neighborhood. 12. Heights Casino: Built in 1905, this distinctive building is a private club for the playing of racquet sports, especially squash, for which the club is world famous. 13. Hotel Bossert: Once considered one of the finest hotels in New York City, the Bossert, opened in 1909, was especially renowned for its Marine roof restaurant and nightclub, with its sensational views of Manhattan. The Jehovahs Witnesses, major Heights landowners, now own the building. 14. Grace Church: Richard Upjohn, who lived in Cobble Hill and was one of Americas most important 19th-century architects, designed this picture-perfect example of the Gothic Revival architecture of High Church Episcopalianism in the 1840s.
Trinity Church to form the Church of St. Ann and the Holy Trinity on Montague and Clinton Streets. 20. Packer Collegiate Institute: This prestigious private school is housed in a lovely, romantic main building designed by Minard Lafever and built in the 1850s. 21. Our Lady of Lebanon Maronite Rite Roman Catholic Church (formerly Church of the Pilgrims): Richard Upjohn, who designed Manhattans Trinity Church, designed this 1840s Congregational church in the Romanesque Revival stylethe first church in America to be so designed. It was home to the Rev. Richard Salter Storrs, one of Americas most famous 19th-century clergymen. Now home to Our Lady of Lebanon Church, the bronze doors were salvaged from the Normandie ocean liner. 22. Former Brooklyn Trust Company (now J.P. Morgan Chase branch bank): One of New York Citys most beautiful banks, built in 1915 in the High Renaissance style of Italy. Be sure to look inside. The architects, York & Sowyer, are among Americas outstanding bank architects. 23. St. Ann and the Holy Trinity Church: This Gothic Revival church of 1844-47 is considered architect Minard Lafevers masterpiece. Unfortunately, its high toweronce the tallest structure in all of New Yorkhad to be removed when the subway was built under Montague Street. 15. 31 Grace Court: Among the homes in picturesque Grace Court, one of several quaint mews in Brooklyn Heights, this was the home from 1947 to 1951 of the famous playwright Arthur Miller, author of Death of a Salesman, and the home from 1951 to 1961 of the important African-American philosopher, social critic and civil rights crusader W.E.B. DuBois. 16. Riverside Apartments: Alfred Tredway White, a son of privilege who used his wealth to effect reform in workers lives, built these pioneering model tenements in 1890. 17. Former Willow Place Chapel: Russell Sturgis, an important 19th-century architect and critic, built this charming chapel in 1875-1876. 18. St. Charles Borromeo Church: This Roman Catholic church, built in 1868, is one of an estimated 500 to 700 churches designed by the Irish immigrant Patrick C. Keely, a Brooklyn resident who was the most prolific Catholic church architect in American history. 19. Former St. Anns Church: James Renwick, Jr., architect of Manhattans St. Patricks Cathedral, designed this spectacular example of the colorful and flamboyant architectural style called High Victorian Gothic.: the church was built in 1867-69. St. Anns later merged with Holy
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THuRSDAY, JANuARY 6 ALL DAY LEED Green Associate Seminar New York, NY The U.S. Green Building Council has made a number of recent changes to the LEED examination required for accreditation. Green Associate is the Tier 1 achievement within USGBCs new LEED 2009 three-tiered accreditation system, and signifies a strong knowledge base of the principles of LEED Sustainable Design without the technical knowledge requirements of LEED AP+. This seminar goes over LEED principles and certified projects. For more information, visit http://www.greenedu. com/new-york-city-leed-seminars/
WEDNESDAY, FEBRuARY 16 ALL DAY Intelligent Infrastructure The Architecture of Progress New York, NY Infrastructure is one of the great challenges of the twenty-first century. Over the next 30 years, the global population will skyrocket from roughly six and a half billion to between nine and twelve billion. Reserve your place today for Intelligent Infrastructure, the next event offered in the Ideas Economy series from The Economist. To register, please visit http://intelligentinfrastructure.eventbrite.com/
developed the agencys first domestic violence strategic plan, supported the placement of domestic violence consultants in child protective offices throughout the city, and designed mental health, substance abuse and medical policies and programs. In her most recent role as the Deputy Commissioner of Family Support Services, Ms. Roberts has overseen the citys preventive service programs, working to prevent child abuse and neglect and reduce the need for foster care placement.
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Safe Horizon Appoints New Chief Program Officer Safe Horizon, the nations leading victim assistance organization, has announced the appointment of Liz Roberts as Chief Program Officer, effective as of November 29, 2010. Liz Roberts comes to Safe Horizon with 23 years of experience as an advocate, clinician and administrator working on behalf of children and families affected by violence. She began her career as a shelter counselor, hotline worker, and childrens program coordinator for community-based domestic violence programs in the Boston area. At the Massachusetts Department of Public Health, Ms. Roberts trained more than a thousand health care providers to screen for intimate partner violence during health care visits. Next, she worked as a therapist with young children who had witnessed violence. She has taught courses on family violence at the Columbia University School of Social Work and at Wheelock College in Boston. For the last ten years, Ms. Roberts has held several leadership positions at the New York City Administration for Childrens Services (ACS). She began in 2000 as the Director of the Office of Domestic Violence Policy and Planning and became the Assistant Commissioner for the Office of Child and Family Health in 2004. In 2006, she was appointed the Deputy Commissioner of Family Support Services. During her years at ACS, Liz
The CUNY School of Law Job Type: Full-Time Job Category: Education/Academic
ExECuTIvE DIRECTOR OF INSTITuTIONAL ADvANCEMENT
THuRSDAY, JANuARY 27 ALL DAY Upgrading to World Class: The Future of New York Citys Airports New York, NY Join Regional Plan Association, the Better Airports Alliance, and JP Morgan Chase at a major conference to address the chronic problem of airport congestion and delays in the New York Region. For more information, visit www.betterairportsnow.org or call (212) 253-5796.
The Associate Administrator manages one or more College administrative functions. He/she develops, implements, and assesses programs and services to produce high-quality results and meet strategic goals. He/she also coordinates activities among different units, and with areas outside the College, and may oversee staff, budget, operations, and facilities. He/she develops, implements, and assesses programs and services to produce high-quality results and meet strategic goals. He/she also coordinates activities among different units, and with areas outside the College, and may oversee staff, budget, operations, and facilities. The Executive Director of Institutional Advancement will be working with the Dean of the Law School. The successful candidate will oversee the development, marketing, and public relations operations. The successful candidate will work closely with the Dean, faculty, volunteers, and colleagues (as appropriate) to design and implement identification, cultivation, solicitation, and stewardship strategies to build recognition and support for the Law School. The Executive Director of Institutional Advancement will serve as Executive Director of the Law School Foundation and will build strong working relationships with the Law School Foundation Board of Directors, the Office of the Chancellor of CUNY,
departmental staff, colleagues, and faculty. As a key member of The Law School team, the Executive Director of Institutional Advancement will be expected to contribute broadly to all aspects of the fulfillment of the institutions mission and growth. The Law School seeks an experienced professional with the demonstrated ability to respond effectively to the following challenges: Prepares for, plans and executes the Law Schools first comprehensive fundraising campaign. Creates and successfully implements annual strategic plans for fundraising and communications operations to innovatively lead the institutions overall advancement efforts to a higher and more sophisticated level of achievement. He/she will develop long-range plans, operating guidelines and department budgets. This position is in CUNYs Executive Compensation Plan. All executive positions require a minimum of a Bachelors degree and eight years related experience. Additional qualifications are defined below by the College. Broad intellectual curiosity about, and familiarity with, political, academic and historical issues, on a local, national and international level, and in particular a knowledge of New York Citys social justice community and its unique role in the legal community; Understanding of and appreciation for the legal and social justice needs of the communities in New York City that are underserved and underrepresented; Significant experience in the design and leadership of development, marketing, and public relations programs within a complex higher education environment and/or social justice organizations, resulting in marked improvement and growth; Progressively responsible, substantial and diverse fund-raising experience and a proven track record demonstrating the ability to secure significant gifts, including major gifts and annual fund, from both defined and non-defined constituencies; Proven ability to build strong relationships with key audiences, including donors, colleagues, and peer organizations and individuals in the social justice community; Knowledge of and experience in developing communications advocacy campaigns on social justice legal issues, including local and national legislative
issues and impact litigation; Bold and imaginative mindset and an ardent desire to act in an entrepreneurial and collegial manner to design, shape and build a strong and successful institutional advancement program; Exceptional interpersonal skills combined with the self-confidence and sensitivity needed to build consensus for policy and operational changes; Demonstrated ability to work effectively with, and, by virtue of a keen intellect and superb written and presentational skills, quickly gain the trust and confidence of, various constituencies, including the Dean, the faculty, Board members, staff, potential donors, and community and business leaders; Knowledge of the culture of academic institutions and in particular of graduate education; Patience, tolerance, maturity, stature, self-motivation, energy, a personable nature, a strong work ethic and integrity. To Apply: Send resume and cover letter to: Angela Kofron Search Committee 65-21 Main Street Flushing, New York 11367. EQUAL EMPLOYMENT OPPORTUNITY; The City University of New York is an Equal Opportunity Employer, which complies with all applicable laws and regulations, and encourages inclusive excellence in its employment practices
(5) years fundraising experience, including in a supervisory capacity; a proven record of success and accomplishment; management of high dollar individual donors from identifying prospects through securing major gifts; excellent interpersonal and team building skills; ability to take initiative, work under pressure and handle multiple coinciding deadlines; knowledge of, and commitment to, LGBT issues and communities. Background and experience working with city, state and federal elected officials highly desirable; proficiency with Raisers Edge preferred. To Apply: Submit a cover letter (stating desired position and salary requirements) and resume, by email to jobs@gaycenter.org. For regular mail or fax: Center Human Resources 208 West 13th Street, New York, NY 10011 FAX (212) 924-2657. Duplicate submissions are not necessary. No phone calls, please. The Center is proud to be an Equal Opportunity/ Affirmative Action Employer. Learn more at gaycenter.org.
Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center Job Type: Full-Time Job Category: Social Service and Agency The NYC LGBT Center is seeking an experienced fundraising professional to work closely with the Director of Development, Executive Director, key volunteers and committees to execute an aggressive fundraising strategy. The Deputy will be responsible for all aspects of major donor and government relations strategies, work with other development team members to support overall departmental goals and objectives, and will assume day-to-day management in the absence of the Director. Qualified applicants will have a minimum five
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Tip of an Iceberg
Today, Jing Fong restaurant is one of the icons of Chinatown, a dazzling palace of dim sum on Elizabeth Street just south of Canal. Fifteen years ago, Jing Fong was the setting for a battle between food service workers and restaurant owners over wagesa battle that continues, largely in other settings, to this day. Organized by the upstart Chinese Staff and Workers Association, Jing Fong workers claimed the restaurant had been stealing tips and shorting workers on overtime. In 1997, then New York State attorney general Dennis Vacco sued Jing Fong for $1.5 million. A short time later, the CSWA claimed its offices were firebombed. The state and restaurant ultimately settled for $1.1 million and the reinstatement of one employee. Jing Fongs lawyer told the press that the eatery had not admitted wrongdoing. According to a 2009 study by a consortium led by the National Employment Law Project, three-quarters of workers in L.A., Chicago and New York were not paid for overtime, and 3 in 10 tipped workers didnt receive the minimum wage. Those and other forms of wage theft might cost New York workers a billion dollars a year. Restaurants are far from the only perpetrators. Vacco successor Eliot Spitzer found that a painting contractor working on New York City schools had stiffed 13 employees of wages. Former Attorney General (now governor) Andrew Cuomo won wage restitution from grocery stores, construction contractors working on a state office building, a money transfer company, even the clothing retailer Yellow Rat Bastard. In the final month of his term, Gov. David Paterson signed a new wage theft law that protects workers who complain about wage theft from retaliation and gives workers who prove theyve been ripped off a chance to get additional payment for damages equal to the back wages they win; previous law capped such damages at 25 percent of back pay. -JM
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IN THIS ISSUE

Vol. 35, No. 1 March 2011

04 | Government Obama and the Cities By Jarett Murphy

By Jake Mooney Photographs by Marc Fader

The Borough Behind The Brand

City Limits staff

WHATS NEW ANd WHATS NExT AT CITylIMITS.ORg

WORKING FROM HOME

City Limits / Vol. 35 / No. 1

The Death and Life of the Neighborhood Store First Focus

City Limits / Vol. 34 / No. 5 35 1

The Death and Life of the Neighborhood Store First Focus

City Limits / Vol. 34 / No. 5 35 1

WHats HaPPEninG nationaLLy?

The Death and Life of the Neighborhood Store First Focus

City Limits / Vol. 34 / No. 5 35 1

MANHATTAN IN THE BACkGROUND: The view of downtown from downtown.

Brooklyn: The Borough Behind The Brand

Brooklyn: The Borough Behind The Brand

City Limits / Vol. 35 / No. 1

Brooklyn, By the numbers

8,391,881 7,891,957 7,894,862 7,071,639

8 Million 7 Million 6 Million 5 Million 4 Million 3 Million 2 Million 1Million

New York Brooklyn

.16% .02% .5% .95% 19.59%

Brooklyn: The Borough Behind The Brand

City Limits / Vol. 35 / No. 1

OWN OR MANAGE A RESIDENTIAL BUILDING WITH 5 TO 75 UNITS?

PLUG INTO SAVINGS

CONNECT WITH THE GREEN TEAM AT

The UnPlanned City

City Limits / Vol. 34 / No. 6

Hot and Cool

Brooklyn: The Borough Behind The Brand

I think its the equivalent of greenwashing. Its sort of Brooklyn-washing.

Brooklyn: The Borough Behind The Brand

City Limits / Vol. 34 / No. 6

1990 2000 2009

Democrat Republican Indpendence Other party

The Unplanned City Brooklyn: The Borough Behind The Brand

City Limits / Vol. 35 / No. 1 34 6

Source: American Community Survey, 2005-2009 averages

Selected Causes of Death, 2009

3.8 3.2 3.6

Brooklyn: The Borough Behind The Brand

City Limits / Vol. 35 / No. 1

Brooklyn: The Borough Behind The Brand

City Limits / Vol. 35 / No. 1

Brooklyn: The Borough Behind The Brand

City Limits / Vol. 35 / No. 1

BROOKLYN AQUARIUM SOCIETY AD

Brooklyn: The Borough Behind The Brand

City Limits / Vol. 35 / No. 1

Change in Employees by industry, 1997-2007

Commuting times in Brooklyn, 2005-2009

Less than 10 minutes 10 to 19 minutes 20 to 29 minutes 30 to 44 minutes 45-59 minutes 60 to 89 minutes

Source: American Community Survey, 2005-2009 averages

Brooklyn: The Borough Behind The Brand

City Limits / Vol. 35 / No. 1

Dont Fuhgeddaboudit Events to remember from Brooklyns past

The Unplanned City

City Limits / Vol. 34 / No. 6