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The Forgotten New York
By Kit R. Roane
Posted 1/7/07
SCHENECTADY, N.Y.-"In Schenectady, Our Schenectady," the city song goes, "what a warm and friendly place it is to be," full of "stores and shops with all that one might need or wish to see."
Back in the 1950s, maybe. But the song, adopted by the city in 1995, expresses more hope than reality these days. Once known as "the city that lights and hauls the world," Schenectady has become a dim bulb and the first stop in a long, bleak road that runs through much of upstate New York, a countryside pockmarked with a series of eerie industrial relics and shuttered mill towns.
In sharp contrast to prosperous New York City and its suburbs, where multi-million-dollar Wall Street bonuses have helped fuel a booming economy, the poverty upstate led new Gov. Eliot Spitzer to compare it to Appalachia during his campaign for office last year. And while turning around this depressed region is not the only problem confronting Spitzer-who gained fame as a Wall Street dragon slayer during his tenure as the state's attorney general-it will be at the top of his agenda and among the most difficult to solve. "Like Rip van Winkle," Spitzer told those gathered for his inauguration last week, "New York has slept through much of the past decade while the rest of the world has passed us by."
No one needs to tell that to Bernard Lupi, 59, who looked out on State Street, Schenectady's main drag, recalling a time when his hometown was booming, with General Electric and the American Locomotive Co. employing tens of thousands of hard-working Schenectadians.
But American Locomotive shuttered its factory in 1969, and GE has slowly moved its manufacturing elsewhere. Bechtel is following suit. And the city is about to lose one of its two remaining hospitals. Mirroring the losses in Buffalo, Rochester, and other upstate cities, Schenectady's population has sunk to less than 62,000, from 92,000 in 1950. "I've lived here 58 years, and I've seen it when it was good," says Lupi, stirring his coffee. "But Schenectady is gone, and they ain't never gonna bring it back."
Anemia. Pessimism is rampant across upstate New York, a recent Empire Center for New York State Policy survey showed, with 35 percent of those in the western part of upstate saying they expected things to get worse over the next five years. Poverty rates hover around 30 percent in some cities. Property tax rates are among the highest in the nation. Unemployment rates are not historically high-around 4 percent in many upstate areas-but job growth is anemic. And the jobs being created tend to be both lower skill and lower paying than the ones that were there before. Crime and teen pregnancies are on the rise.
"One hundred years ago, upstate New York was the Silicon Valley of North America, with GE, Kodak, and Carrier [Corp.] air conditioning," explains Prof. Mitchell Moss of New York University's Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service. "Now we are left with the relics of this industrial age."
New York is one of the few states actually losing population, thanks in good part to people fleeing from upstate. One recent study found that the young adult population of upstate New York declined at nearly four times the national rate between 1990 and 2005. "If you are smart, ambitious, creative, and can produce, and are under 25, you get out of upstate New York as fast as you can," says Moss.
Spitzer has already announced plans to appoint an upstate development czar. He has also signaled a willingness to reform state worker's compensation and liability laws that businesses believe have fueled the flight of jobs south. Economists are also advocating a more focused use of state aid, which has been spent on a myriad of sometimes questionable projects. Case in point: Rochester's fast ferry to Toronto project, meant to revitalize the city, ended up costing it more than $10 million in less than a year. It was abandoned last month.

No one doubts Spitzer's task is daunting. Outgoing governor George Pataki, who is credited with bringing some high-tech jobs upstate, generally failed to gain much traction during his three terms. James Parrott, chief economist of the nonpartisan Fiscal Policy Institute, says that Spitzer has brought a "credible commitment" to fixing upstate, one that wasn't there before.

JoAnn Sifo, who opened up Chez Daisie Creperie just off Schenectady's State Street early last year, is one of many upstate New Yorkers banking on that commitment to last. "Upstate has been neglected for so long it will take years to turn it around," she says. "We've been working for 10 years, and we only have a glimmer of hope." It will be Spitzer's job to give upstate trailblazers like Sifo something more.

Gilding the Big Apple
New York is living large again, as diners spend big, summer rentals soar, and butlers--hey, where are all the butlers?
By Kit R. Roane
Posted 5/14/06

The International Guild of Professional Butlers can't keep up with demand. Manhattan Motorcars has so many orders for the new Lamborghini Gallardo Spider that the wait list stretches to next March. And rentals in the Hamptons, the summer playground for New York City's elite, are perilously close to all booked up.

If the spending by the richest New Yorkers is any gauge, the Big Apple is doing quite well indeed, thank you. "The wealth has just come out of the woodwork," says David Patrick Columbia, editor of newyorksocialdiary.com. "Nobody talks about debt. Nobody seems to even be aware of it, not even their own."

Luckily, other gauges also point in the right direction. Less than five years after the 9/11 terrorist attacks seemed to spell doom for its recovery, New York City's economy has caught up with the rest of the nation in several respects and is leading in some.

Not all New Yorkers are benefiting equally--far from it. But thanks to the real-estate boom, the return of tourism, and the revival of Wall Street, the city just tacked on the highest quarterly employment growth rate in five years and saw its rate of unemployment drop to 5.4 percent, down from 8 percent just two years ago. Boosted by increases in some higher-paying industries, average wages have also risen in the private sector, reaching $1,348 a week last fall, a 5.9 percent gain from the year before. Meanwhile, better-than-expected tax revenue left the city with a $3.5 billion surplus in 2005, and a $3.1 billion surplus is projected this year.

Led by hefty profits from trading and investment banking, Wall Street bonuses reached a record $21.5 billion, with securities workers taking home an average $125,000 in additional compensation last year. Tourists are flocking to the city (over 43 million came in 2005), and Broadway is doing better than at any other time since 9/11, bringing in $4.8 billion last year.

New York certainly isn't alone among American cities on the rebound after decades of decline. Cities as diverse as Miami, Chicago, Dallas, and Boston are all riding a wave of new urbanism, as young professionals are drawn to city lofts and skyscrapers after coming of age among suburban tract homes and manicured yards. But America's densest and most populous city, which novelist Christopher Morley once called "the nation's thyroid gland," has had one of the hardest roads to travel.

Sunny side. "New York fell farther during the recession, but it is climbing up the ladder, and the conditions are much stronger than they were a year or two ago," says Kathy Kalser, the New York regional manager of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. "We will have to see what happens with energy costs and housing prices, but there are reasons to justify improved optimism among people living in New York City."

That outlook has kept New Yorkers in the real-estate game despite signs that the market is softening. Appraiser Miller Samuel notes in its recent survey of Manhattan's residential co-ops and condos that the average sales price has continued to climb in 2006, reaching $1,004 per square foot. New luxury residential buildings are popping up across the city. The late Philip Johnson's sleek 40-unit Urban Glass House, whose apartments go for up to $10 million, is more the norm than the exception. Such buildings "say that there are jobs that are paying high wages and that people are willing to spend their money to be at the center of things," says Carol Willis, founder of New York's Skyscraper Museum.

Real-estate buyers can at least comfort themselves by thinking they have made an investment. But what about those spending $100,000 and more on a summer's rental in the Hamptons, Long Island's most exclusive shoreline? The summer rental market there has rebounded strongly. "It's one of the best seasons ever," says Steven Gaines, author of The Sky's the Limit: Passion and Property in Manhattan. "People are spending a quarter of a million on a summer rental. That's money you never get back."

Summer rentals are just one way New Yorkers are finding to spend their money. Although the monthly cost of a parking space in Manhattan can be higher than an apartment rental in many other cities, both car dealers and rental agencies that specialize in high-end automobiles report brisk business, with several ultraexpensive cars now back-ordered for months.

Butlers are also in short supply. Charles MacPherson, vice chairman of the butlers' group, says he's doing a booming business, even though scarcity has pushed the salary of a seasoned butler upwards of $120,000 a year, plus benefits. For many employers, he says, "money just isn't an issue."

Recent Zagat consumer surveys found that New Yorkers are both shopping and dining out in style, with the average meal costing $37 per person and the high end topping $112.

Last year, the survey found that more than 247 new "noteworthy" eateries opened in the city, including a few new supertrendy restaurants able to seat 200 to 300 at a time. "It says something about the economy, not only that people would be confident opening these large restaurants but that you can't get a reservation at any of them," says Heather Tierney, a former food writer who recently started Sorted, a service to help exclusive clients get tables at the right restaurants.

Fully loaded. Charities in the city are also feeling flush. Hedge fund managers have raised the stakes at benefits and silent auctions. The Robin Hood Foundation, which raises money for abused children, had an enviable problem at last year's ball. Organizers couldn't seem to give away the door prize, a Ford Mustang. Everyone who won the muscle car kept donating it back to the foundation. By the end of the night, the Mustang, which fully loaded would barely top $30,000 in price, had raised $390,000 of the $32 million brought in for the charity that night.

The big question now is how long the good times will roll. Middle-class flight from the rising cost of living threatens the city's continuing growth prospects. Meanwhile, foreclosures have ticked up as both interest rates and energy costs have risen. And the city's Independent Budget Office warns that by fiscal 2007, the budget surplus will turn into a $445 million budget gap as a real-estate slowdown dampens city income from transfer taxes and other fees.

While some New Yorkers are making huge sums and spending lavishly, they aren't the majority. In fact, according to data from the liberal Fiscal Policy Institute, the income inequality in New York is among the worst in the country. The combined income of the richest 5 percent of city families is greater than the entire amount made by the bottom 60 percent of the rest, says James Parrott, the institute's chief economist, adding that the middle class has also been losing--and leaving.

"The long-term risk for New York City is that Manhattan becomes a gated community for luxury consumption, while the standards for those in the boroughs outside Manhattan continue to be squeezed," he says. "The city has come back stronger than almost anyone expected four or five years ago. But a key weakness of the recovery has been that the benefit has not been broadly shared."

This story appears in the May 22, 2006 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.

A Zero at Ground Zero?
By Kit R. Roane
Posted 5/15/05

Whatever critics thought of the World Trade Center before 9/11, its twin towers immediately became sacred the moment they were destroyed.

The towers were no longer viewed as cold, dehumanizing monoliths weighing down Lower Manhattan. The World Trade Center, in memory, cast a much different shadow than it had in life. It became a symbol of American resolve.

But these days, resolve seems to be in short supply in Lower Manhattan. Three and a half years after the terrorist strike, the World Trade Center site remains an empty shell. The cornerstone has been laid. But those trying to divine the grand plans for the site, the sunken reflective pools marking the destroyed World Trade Center footprints, the vast cultural spaces, the soaring Freedom Tower, are out of luck. This place was deemed ground zero because it was the epicenter of the terrorist attack. Now the moniker has taken on another connotation: nothing going on.

At least nothing good. Kevin Rampe, head of the Lower Manhattan Development Corp., resigned earlier this month, leaving a project that seems increasingly rudderless without a leader. Dismayed by the "bureaucratic obstacles" set in place, New York Sen. Charles Schumer told business leaders that more than $700 million provided by Congress for the project remained unspent and "we have not yet ordered one beam of steel for the Freedom Tower."

The New York City Police Department, meanwhile, has thrown a wrench into construction plans for the 1,776-foot tower, the site's signature spire. The NYPD has advised that the tower, as planned, is vulnerable to attacks by truck bombs. The Freedom Tower, which will have to be moved, is already months behind schedule.

Backing away. Meanwhile, Goldman Sachs, an anchor that would have drawn others to the area, has backed away from plans to build a new headquarters at the site--midtown seems a safer bet. A "Freedom Center" is being funded even though what it will hold remains in dispute. And money for a Frank Gehry-designed performing arts center, which has tenants, hasn't even been sought.

On top of all this, the site's developer, Larry Silverstein, is said to be nosing around for greater public financing, griping that new security concerns will cost him millions he doesn't have. And Schumer is threatening to redirect about $2 billion in federal aid meant to link the site to JFK International Airport if the project's problems aren't fixed.

Joanna Rose, a spokeswoman for the Lower Manhattan Development Corp., says everything remains on track. But not everyone is opposed to the project's slowing down. Alissa Torres, who lost her husband, Luis, in the terrorist attack, notes that she's "never been impressed" with the project as planned. Currently, she says, it "lacks meaning." More than a few others agree.

Relatively absent during all this, critics charge, have been the two men with the political clout to fix the problems. Over the past couple of weeks, both Gov. George Pataki and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg have gone on the offensive, calling meetings and attending a well-planned publicity event in Lower Manhattan. Pataki also announced last week that he would earmark millions more in federal funds for the reconstruction and that he would put his chief of staff, John Cahill, in charge of ground zero.

The ground zero development was to be Pataki's swan song, as he is unlikely to seek another term when his current one ends in late 2006. But recently, says one official with knowledge of the machinations surrounding the site, the governor has appeared "out to lunch." The mayor, meanwhile, has been spending enormous amounts of time on another Manhattan project, the bid to build a West Side football stadium.

Jeremy Soffin, spokesman for the nonprofit Regional Plan Association, says there will be no Freedom Tower or anything like it unless the lack of momentum in every other aspect of the project is cured. His group is advocating a renewed focus on other buildings and amenities planned for the site. Pointing to the headway made by the mayor on the proposed West Side stadium, he notes that where there is a political will, there is a way. "The governor and the mayor are the ones in the position to exert their will over this project," he says. True enough. And a lot of New Yorkers believe they'd better get going.

This story appears in the May 23, 2005 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.

Just Another Everyday Heroic New Yorker
By Kit R. Roane
Posted 1/7/07

In a world short on heroes, you have to wonder where we come up with folks like Wesley Autrey.

You probably know him as the "Subway Superman," which rings pretty true, even if Autrey can't bring himself to use it. Feted by David Letterman, paid by Donald Trump, and praised by New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg for his "astonishing bravery," Autrey is the selfless Harlem construction worker who last week let go the hands of his two young daughters and jumped onto the Manhattan subway tracks to save a fellow New Yorker. The man, a film student named Cameron Hollopeter, had suffered a seizure and fallen onto the tracks. Autrey, 50, pulled Hollopeter to a small trough between the tracks, covering him as a train screeched to a halt overhead-with horrified onlookers assuming he was dead.

Now Autrey is the toast of the town. Trump handed him a $10,000 check. The MTA, which runs the subway system, gave him a year's worth of unlimited metro cards. He's been offered free trips to Disney World and tickets to Broadway's The Lion King. People stop to shake his hand. And the hard-nosed city columnist Michael Daly is pushing for the city to name a school after the good Samaritan.

But to hear Autrey tell it, he did what he would expect any New Yorker to do. "You should do the right thing," he said. "I did it out of kindness. Not for recognition or glory." Still, even he would admit he's not just Everyman. After accepting the city's Bronze Medallion-an honor previously bestowed upon such luminaries as Gen. Douglas MacArthur and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.-Autrey noted that on a platform full of commuters, only he and two women came to Hollopeter's aid. "We've got to show each other some love," he said.

Maybe he was heard. A few days later in the Bronx, two men rushed to the aid of a toddler dangling from a fourth-story fire escape. When the boy fell, the men, Julio Gonzalez and Pedro Nevarez, caught him, saving his life. "I'm not a hero," said Nevarez. "I did what any other father would do." Just two more ordinary New Yorkers stepping up.

This story appears in the January 15, 2007 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.

High Rents, No Parking
By Kit R. Roane
Posted 1/1/06

What's a name worth? If the name is Greenwich, more than $100 a square foot.

This leafy old town along Connecticut's Gold Coast has long been exclusive. It took a lengthy court battle, after all, to open up access to its public beaches to the, well, public. But these days even the rich and powerful are experiencing the backbite of prosperity. The trouble is apparent to anyone willing to disembark from the safety and quiet of a yacht.

While Greenwich has long been the bedroom community of hedge-fund magnates, the firms themselves are increasingly seeking to relocate here. This trend has been a boon for both Greenwich and Connecticut--and their tax bases. But the growth of Hedge Fund Row into Wall Street East may be too much of a good thing.

Priced out. Other businesses are being crowded out. Rush-hour traffic is a nightmare. And parking? Forget about it. "People say, 'Gee, I'd love to have your issues,' " says Mary Ann Morrison, president of the Greenwich Chamber of Commerce, admitting that an empty business district and a high unemployment rate would certainly be worse. "But employees can't afford to live in Greenwich anymore," she adds. Some businesses are paying a cost-of-living differential just to get workers to battle the traffic into town.

And many workers won't make the commute for any price, say business owners on fashionable Greenwich Avenue, where teenage girls casually swing $1,200 Chanel purses and luxury autos jockey for parking under the watchful eye of a police officer at each intersection.

A few businesses tied to the exclusive clientele of the town have tried to compensate for the rush-hour crush by changing store hours, so their employees can arrive in town early enough to find a parking space and leave before getting stuck in the afternoon crawl. But how early can you open and close and still capture customers?

The less well-heeled shoppers in town are also in a complaining mood. "I can't afford to shop here anymore," says Carl White, adding he recently saw a $2,000 sweater being pitched as a Christmas present. "The character of the town has changed," he says.

And it's not just the avenue. A group of investors has turned an old boat-dock motel into a new luxury lodging, where guests pay $350 and up for rooms with a view of Interstate 95; prices are much higher if you want to see the harbor, where yachts dock for dinner and drinks.

The movement of hedge funds and other financial firms has helped James McArdle Jr.'s family florist business bloom. But McArdle, 64, a lifelong resident of Greenwich, remembers when Woolworth's beckoned from Main Street and Electrolux was one of the biggest employers in town. "I miss the slower pace," he says. "It was a quiet town, a New England town."

So far, Greenwich's rising rents, insufferable traffic, and changing character haven't caused hedge funds to slow their assault. Already, the funds and the firms that support their trades take up over 60 percent of the available commercial space in town. And real-estate agents say they continue to seek more space.

Bruce McGuire, president and founder of the newly minted Connecticut Hedge Fund Association, says Greenwich's appeal is obvious. It's where many of the biggest hedge fund managers live already.

And the more hedge funds, the more synergy, he adds, noting that hedge funds also save money, post-9/11, on property insurance compared with costs in Lower Manhattan and reap a nice tax savings. Although Connecticut legislators are contemplating increasing the tax bill for the state's richest earners, right now hedge fund managers in Greenwich pay a 5 percent income tax rate, compared with 11.34 percent in state and local taxes for those working and living in New York City.

But there's only so much space. And while the hedge fund managers can zip to work from their gated mansions or take a quick speedboat ride across Long Island Sound, others must still brave jammed highways and commuter trains.

In a possible sign of things to come, some firms have had enough. After 17 years in Greenwich, LeGrand S. Redfield, CEO of Asset Management Group, decided to move its offices to nearby Stamford when faced with a 50 percent rent increase. Redfield found three times the space for the old rent. "There's still a lot of cachet in Greenwich, but you open up the paper and you see people moving up the line," says Redfield. "Most people can't afford to live in Greenwich anymore except for the owners of the hedge funds, and nobody wants to do that commute."

This story appears in the January 9, 2006 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.

Rewriting history
The 1967 riots defined Newark for years. Now a bitter mayor's race focuses on the renaissance
By Kit R. Roane
Posted 5/5/02

NEWARK, N.J.--After 16 years on the job, Mayor Sharpe James knows how to make a case for Newark's revival--and for his considerable part in the process. Rows of polished shovels line the walls of his office, commemorating groundbreakings: the New Jersey Performing Arts Center, the city's first Starbucks, a new baseball stadium. And if voters elect him to a fifth term later this month, James, 66, pledges to bring home another golden spade--marking construction of a $355 million sports arena. For anyone who hasn't been to Newark anytime recently, it's hard to believe. But the New York Times has called Newark "newly cool." And last month's Travel & Leisure, a magazine normally laced with paeans to the trendiest South Beach bistros, has a story: "Newark? Yes, Newark." "If Ray Charles and Stevie Wonder can see it," the mayor says facetiously of the city's rise from the ashes of its 1967 riots, "I don't know why others can't."

Among those who don't agree is James's first serious challenger in more than a decade: Cory Booker, a cerebral city councilman and Yale Law School alum. Booker is seeking to topple the streetwise mayor on Election Day, May 14, and he's pointing out the holes in James's shovel collection to do so. While James talks of a city revived, Booker sees a downtown rebuilt for the rich, and poor neighborhoods stuck in time. The James "renaissance"? In Booker-speak, "It's time for a renaissance for the rest of us."

But the concept of any sort of renaissance here is shocking. At a time when many American cities are undergoing fitful revivals, Newark's is perhaps the most remarkable. A 19th-century industrial behemoth, home to breweries and paint factories, the city was knocked off its feet by the Great Depression and drained by the post-World War II lure of the suburbs. As white residents fled, blacks moved into Newark's rotting core. By the 1960s, they'd inherited a metropolis in its twilight and a white city government that didn't seem to care.

Then came the night of July 12, 1967, when white police officers arrested black cabdriver John Smith outside the Rev. William P. Hayes public housing development. Smith was charged with tailgating a police car. False rumors spread that the cops had killed him. Then "the whole thing took off," recalls Shirley Jones, 51, who now owns a townhouse on the former site of the Hayes development.

Streets ablaze. Angry youths threw molotov cocktails. Fires licked the sky, as scores of stores were looted and burned. The National Guard, some 2,600 strong, arrived carrying M-1 rifles and riding in tanks. Four days of riots covered nearly half of the city's 24 square miles. Twenty-six people died, and at least 1,100 were injured. The destruction was broadcast into America's bedrooms, and Newark came to symbolize America's worst nightmare of urban decay.

But a few people saw a different future. Prudential Insurance, founded behind a Broad Street storefront in 1875, refused to abandon its birthplace. Other Newark stalwarts, such as Public Service Electric & Gas and New Jersey Bell, jumped on board, helping fund various development projects. A handful of philanthropists have embraced the troubled city, too, none more prominent than Raymond Chambers, now 59, a former Wall Street takeover wizard. The product of a blue-collar Italian neighborhood called West Side, Chambers recalled once that Newark had been a place where "people looked out for one another." But nobody seemed to be looking out for Newark anymore. So, following his retirement in 1989, Chambers decided to hoist Newark back up--and he had the money to do it.

Since then, Chambers has spearheaded downtown's most ambitious projects, including the $187 million New Jersey Performing Arts Center, which many credit with sparking the city's turnaround. Then Gov. Tom Kean had no takers when he proposed an arts center in 1987, but Chambers soon stepped forward with a $5 million donation that later grew fourfold. Businesses and politicians fell in line. The brick-and-glass complex now attracts half a million visitors a year. Soon, a waterfront park and office complex will be completed nearby, as will a host of condominiums. The proposed arena has been delayed by state budget woes and political wrangling, but now a deal seems imminent. Chambers bought into the Nets basketball team and the Devils hockey team--which now play elsewhere--in hopes of moving them to Newark; their presence is crucial to the arena's proposed financing scheme. Even without the arena, residents see progress. "We were urban pioneers when we moved down here 14 years ago," said Carole Desenne, who moved into Renaissance Towers, Newark's first downtown luxury condominium project, following the riots. "Now I'm within walking distance of three fine restaurants."

Perhaps most significant, people are no longer fleeing. Newark's population plummeted from 438,776 in 1950 to 275,221 in 1990, but the 2000 census showed that the city's population had more or less stabilized at 273,546 residents. A stream of big companies--like telecommunications giant IDT--have been moving into town, and the crime rate has dropped by more than 50 percent in the past five years.

Today, there is pedestrian traffic in the once desolate downtown. Residents and commuters lounge after work at outdoor cafes like Calceda and take in free jazz concerts on the performing arts center's plaza. "This means a lot because it brings people together that wouldn't normally be together," says Abdul Aleem Razzaqq, 52, amid the strains of trumpets and bongos one Thursday night.

So it's not the same old Newark anymore. But as candidate Booker likes to point out, there's still plenty of bad news here. The city's school system has remained under state control for six years, and the dichotomy between the buzz downtown and Central Ward neighborhoods still pockmarked with abandoned buildings is contributing to new resentments. The infant mortality rate is double that in the rest of the state. Unemployment is at 9.9 percent; one fourth of Newark's residents still live below the poverty line. "Newark," says Msgr. William Linder, a prominent community activist, "is still the story of two cities."

It is an issue Newark's voters have seen bantered about in stump speeches for more than a month. A recent WABC-TV poll found the race to be a dead heat, and now the contest has grown nasty. Someone threw a hammer through a plate glass window at James's campaign headquarters in late March; a few days later, Booker's headquarters was ransacked. A Booker aide was detained outside a strip club that cops said was a haven for prostitution. Then the club's employees said that James was a patron, too, an allegation denied by the mayor. Such is politics here; hey, Newark is a tough town. But it's proving to be a surprisingly resilient town as well.

This story appears in the May 13, 2002 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.

Excuse me, Can we talk?
Why emergency responders still can't communicate with each other
By Kit R. Roane and Edward T. Pound
Posted 5/16/04

More than two years after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, emergency response agencies around the nation still can't talk to each other in a crisis. New York is a case in point. The city's police and fire agencies still aren't communicating, even though their inability to work together on 9/11 contributed to the deaths of firefighters when the second tower of the World Trade Center collapsed.

This week, the national commission investigating the 9/11 attacks will hold hearings in Manhattan to gain further insight into what went wrong that day and to see what has been done since to fix the problem--not just in New York but across the nation. The answers are unlikely to calm many fears.

In Washington, Democrats on the House Homeland Security Committee plan to introduce legislation this week that they believe will help solve fundamental problems in communications systems across the country. Called the CONNECT First Responder Act, it would require the Department of Homeland Security to fund and "implement a strategy" that would improve communications links among federal, state, and local government agencies. Emergency responders have a term for talking to each other--it's called "interoperability." Simply put, it means having a structure and technology that allows different agencies in the same area to communicate through a common language and a common system. "It is clear that achieving interoperability should be the highest priority that we have in terms of preparing the nation to deal not only with a terror attack but any large catastrophic event," says Jim Turner, a Texas Democrat and ranking member of the Select Committee on Homeland Security. "I believe that if we have another terrorist attack--and it is highly probable we will--there will be some folks held accountable for the failure to move on with this issue."

Disconnect. Tom Ridge, secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, announced earlier this year that the department had finally identified the right national standard for minimal interoperability and that, if the standard is adopted at the state and local level, "by the end of 2004, most first responders will have a way to communicate with each other during a crisis." Experts are skeptical. The lack of a reliable system, says the Association of Public-Safety Communications Officials, International, is "a long-standing, complex, and costly problem." Federal efforts have often been "disconnected, fragmented, and often conflicting."

The Department of Homeland Security may also have some reservations. Last Wednesday, David Boyd, the director of DHS's emergency communications initiative, called SAFECOM, held a conference call with state and local officials about stopgap measures that could be implemented. According to a report obtained by U.S. News , SAFECOM would bring together the resources of several federal agencies that have been working on the issue. Together they would offer 10 of the highest-risk cities, including New York, additional funding and training to link their existing emergency communications systems and provide a way to govern their use. The goal would be to have limited systems, in each city, fully operational by September 30. "We need to have interoperability up now," Boyd says. "We know the terrorists are not going to wait."

There have been efforts to tackle the interoperability problem after almost every major disaster or terrorist event of the last decade, but lack of money has precluded progress. One study estimated that the cost nationwide of such an emergency communications system is $18.3 billion. Funding levels from the federal government improved following the 9/11 terrorist attack. But despite the new efforts by SAFECOM, experts say, funding hasn't been coordinated, is often tied to matching grants, and is seldom earmarked to address this specific problem.

Who's the boss? But the money woes pale in comparison with a far bigger problem--many agencies just don't want to talk to each other unless they're in charge. "People keep lamenting, 'If only I could buy this piece of technology, all my problems would be solved,' " says John Cohen, a former police officer and now homeland security adviser to the state of Massachusetts. "But we are finding that that problem has more to do with the fact that these agencies haven't figured out how to work together, either because they didn't know how or because they didn't want to. The real issue now is changing the cultures in these agencies so they understand why talking to each other is important."

Getting everybody on the same page is the priority now, experts say. Investigations into the emergency response after the 9/11 attacks found that the New York City's Office of Emergency Management, despite spending more than $25 million on emergency preparations, had never conducted a drill involving the city's Fire Department and Police Department, as well as the Port Authority emergency staff. On 9/11, fire and police officials set up separate staging areas, blocks from each another, then failed to communicate or coordinate their response. Off-duty firefighters and police officers rushed to the scene, often without orders to do so, further complicating the rescue effort. The Fire Department used old analog radios that had failed during the first World Trade Center attack in 1993. They failed again, and even if they had worked, they weren't compatible with the police radio system.

People familiar with the city's emergency planning since 9/11 say that any effort to coordinate a response to a new attack seems doomed. The Office of Emergency Management, which prior to 9/11 was supposed to manage the response, has found itself placed in little more than an advisory role. Asked about what the city had done to improve inter-agency communications, a spokesman said the matter was being taken care of by City Hall. The mayor's office said it was a question for the police and fire departments. But they aren't really talking to each another, current and former fire officials say.

Instead, the two departments have been investing in their own technologies. The Fire Department has upgraded its radios, and fire officials could theoretically be patched into several new interoperable frequencies under the police control. But more than two years after 9/11, the frequencies have never been tested. "There is no defined protocol on how the frequencies will be used or on who will talk on them," says one fire official, speaking on condition of anonymity. One reason they have not been used is because the police and fire departments can't agree on who will be in charge if another disaster occurs.

City Hall, however, hasn't intervened, according to consultants who have worked with the city. "There is no one sitting on top of this, making sure everybody plays nice with each other," a consultant said. Adds Victor Mayer-Schonberger of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government: "New York is just horrendous in terms of a lack of willingness to interoperate." How that unwillingness impeded the response to the 9/11 attacks will be the subject of this week's public hearing in New York. Some city officials say the mayor is eager to end the squabbling and announce a new emergency-incident command structure. "We've all heard about the courage and bravery in New York City, enough to fill the whole world three times over," says Timothy Roemer, a 9/11 commissioner who will be questioning New York's officials this week. "But we also will be looking at some of the mistakes."

Talk Ain't Cheap

Hoping to address the continuing lack of fluid communication between first responders in many of the nation's biggest cities, David Boyd, the director of the Department of Homeland Security's SAFECOM program, proposed last week to coordinate the flow of additional federal funds and government expertise to 10 cities thought to be at the highest risk of a terrorist incident. The initiative, if it's adopted by the cities, could lead to limited, interoperable communications systems in these cities by September 30. The following cities have been selected as participants in the Homeland Security Department's Urban Area Security Initiative:

Boston

Chicago

Houston

Jersey City, N.J.

Los Angeles

Miami

New York

Philadelphia

San Francisco

Washington

With Chitra Ragavan

This story appears in the May 24, 2004 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.

Boutique Hotels: Uneven Elegance
Butlers, celebrities -- and windowless rooms
By Kit Roane
Posted 6/24/01

The room was a dream, large enough for a queen-size bed and a sofa or two, wired for high-speed Internet access and full of snazzy accouterments like real cocktail glasses and a cashmere throw. But Hung Vu was having trouble with his butlers. They were always around--not just there at a button's push, but checking in out of the blue. "Even when I put the privacy light on, the butler would slip a note under the door letting me know he was there," says Vu, creative director for an Internet branding and consulting service, who was camping out at New York's Bryant Park Hotel. "It was alarming at first, because you don't expect that kind of service."

No longer must the hip, rich, or trendy hang out with the sipping set at stuffy five-star digs. Nor must they wade through vacationing conventioneers at stadium-size hotels. In the nation's gateway cities, "boutique" hotels such as Manhattan's Hotel Giraffe and West Hollywood's Mondrian are billing themselves as alternatives for the upscale traveler, combining the attentiveness of a bed-and-breakfast with the exclusivity of a Gucci store.

Higher occupancy. Smith Travel Research estimates that some 163 boutique hotels, containing more than 38,000 units, now populate the United States, with a few more in European capitals. They are defined by their small size (usually fewer than 400 rooms), personalized service, highly stylized motifs, and generous amenities--topped off by a sprinkling of celebrity sightings in their lobbies or bars. Although boutiques account for only 1 percent of hotel rooms, the research group estimates they took in $3.5 billion in revenue last year, almost 3 percent of the industry's total. Boutique hotels also have higher occupancy rates, despite prices of $150 and up.

Numbers like that get noticed. Smaller developers predominated in the boutique segment for more than a decade; now large chains are muscling in. And construction continues unabated despite the recent softening in the travel industry. In a little over two years, Starwood Hotel & Resorts has opened 14 of its W hotels and has five more in various stages of construction or planning. Marriott International Inc. has just christened one in South Beach, Fla., and inked a partnership with Bulgari SpA to design a new line of hip Italian-influenced boutique hotels. Wyndham International Inc. opened its first in New Orleans last September, with plans to roll out more.

"They expected go-go dancers in my lobby when I opened my first hotel 20 years ago," sniffs Studio 54 club kingpin Ian Schrager, a pioneer of the boutique concept who now fields frequent offers from prospective buyers. "They didn't understand this wasn't just about fashion--being trendy--but about hotels that reflect the basic, profound ways we go about our lives."

Whether the hotels reflect anything profound can be debated. While there is no doorman behind a velvet rope deciding who can come in, some boutiques have a way of making guests feel they have yet to arrive. Some are also, well, a bit gimmicky. Could a Disney or McDonald's brand be far behind? In Manhattan, the Library Hotel lists its small rooms by the Dewey Decimal System--"You'll be in social science, room 300.001, sir." The Dylan plays off its Gothic architecture; one suite has stained-glass windows. The Bryant Park, lauded for large, well-appointed rooms and superb dining, has a butler for every two floors--an amenity only the truly rich seem to know how to use.

Then there's Schrager's own unleashing of his signature look on the 1,000-room Hudson, perhaps the first super-size "boutique." For Vu, who later fled to the Bryant Park, his stay at the Hudson was like living in "a rock party." The staff was "very distant," the rooms "small." The hotel's restaurant fared little better with the New York Post food critic who wrote that "not all the gossip column celeb sightings can redeem a $9.50 sirloin burger so hard and dry it might have come from a quarry." Ouch.

While a Marriott is a Marriott is a Marriott, a stay at a boutique hotel can be an expensive throw of the dice, both travelers and industry experts say. The glitterati at the bar would probably never deign to squeeze into some of these hotels' more typical rooms. "I remember thinking, I get a phone in my bathroom but there's no vending machine or restaurant in the place," says Terry Young about her recent stay in a New York boutique hotel. "Some of my colleagues were in rooms without windows. The concept is good, but nice little chocolates in the room aren't so great when you have to go across the street to get something to wash them down with."

This story appears in the July 2, 2001 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.

The New York Times

September 14, 1999, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final

These Grand Old Schools Nurtured a City;
Some Say It Is Time To Tear Them Down

BYLINE: By KIT R. ROANE

SECTION: Section B; Page 1; Column 2; Metropolitan Desk

LENGTH: 1509 words



It has stood on a busy stretch of road in the Bronx for almost a century, a city landmark and a beacon of promise to the children who clamored down its great halls. It served as an anchor of civic pride for a community defined by waves of immigration and poverty. But for two years, Public School 31 in Mott Haven has been idle, its ornate five-story walls behind scaffolds, its flourishes pockmarked by decay.

At issue is whether the school should stand at all. That question has divided the two city agencies charged with safeguarding the school system, one of the nation's largest and oldest. The School Construction Authority wants the building demolished to make way for a technologically advanced school, while the Board of Education, community advocates and preservationists want it restored.


Preservationists and community leaders are also attempting to halt the demolition of P. S. 109, a turn-of-the-century school in Harlem that officials with the state Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation say is eligible for the State Register of Historic Places.

"Both of these schools are monuments in communities that have little else," said Gwen Goodwin, whose Coalition to Save P. S. 109 first brought that building's imminent destruction to the attention of preservationists like the New York Landmarks Conservancy. "Generations attended these schools, and tearing these things down will rip the heart out of these neighborhoods."

These disputes have brought to the forefront what is likely to become a growing concern as a school system filled with remnants of the late 19th and early 20th centuries heads into the 21st: how to maintain hundreds of architectural treasures in some of the city's poorest neighborhoods while giving children the most advanced learning environments the city can afford.

Half the city's 1,100 main school buildings are already more than 50 years old, and nearly 40 percent were built before 1930. Many lack gymnasiums, air-conditioning and cannot accommodate computers and other modern technology. Like P. S. 31 and P. S. 109, many great neo-Gothic and Renaissance-style schools were built from 1891 to 1923 during Charles B. J. Snyder's tenure as Superintendent of School Buildings. The City Comptroller has estimated that it would take more than $9 billion to modernize 455 of the schools built before 1950.

"Some of these schools are almost like a church, quite elegant, handsome, massive and distinctive buildings that are likely to lead to lofty thoughts," said Timothy D. Lynch, an engineer at Robert Silman Associates P.C., which has worked with both the construction authority and with preservationists in rehabilitating old schools. "Do you need 30 landmarked Snyder schools? Probably not. Is one better than the other? Probably not."

While these schools are expensive to rehabilitate -- sometimes it costs as much as a new school -- preservationists and residents say they should not be destroyed. In many instances, they are the last architectural jewels in their neighborhoods. And over the decades, they have remained productive, providing classrooms for generations and acting as town halls.

Ms. Goodwin said that the construction authority has already torn down two other old schools in Harlem. P. S. 109 was closed for repairs four years ago, then closed permanently two years later when repair estimates continued to rise and the authority deemed it unsafe.

About the same time, problems were found during the renovation of P. S. 31, increasing the cost of repairs threefold to at least $34 million -- roughly the cost of a new school. It too was closed. Students at P. S. 31 and 109 have been parceled out to other schools.

But while the Board of Education has tentatively backed the construction authority's decision to tear down P. S. 109, it has continued to push for the rehabilitation of P. S. 31, much to the authority's annoyance.

"For the same price or less of repairing this 100-year-old landmarked building, we could give the district a brand new state of the art school with air conditioning, elevators," said Jack Deacy, an authority spokesman. "We're coming into the new century and feel that children need a modern environment for learning. We just felt that we were getting into a sinkhole in terms of time and money."

P. S. 31, the centerpiece of a neighborhood of walk-ups and abandoned warehouses, rises far above buildings on 146th Street and the Grand Concourse, its steep gabled roofs and high towers catching the eyes of drivers on the Major Deegan Expressway a half-mile away.

Staring up at the fenced-in structure last week, Glen Mulero, 17, recalled eating in a cafeteria "as big as a football field" and cracking books in classrooms bathed with natural light from windows as tall as his own 5-foot-6-inch frame.

"I just always thought of it as this great castle," he said. "This grand building full of great teachers who helped us to achieve our goals. It's like everybody went to school there, from our mothers to our grandmothers."

Pablo Martinez, 38, remembered how life once revolved around the school, with everything from community meetings to school plays. He pointed to trees in concrete pots lining the front of the cream-colored brick exterior that he helped to plant when he was 8, in honor of Martin Luther King Jr., Robert F. Kennedy and John F. Kennedy.

"They wouldn't even think of destroying a historic school like this if it was in a rich area," Mr. Martinez said. "If it happens here it will be like killing a sister to many of us, but this is the Bronx, the ghetto, so you know they'll just knock it down."

At a time of heavy immigration, Snyder designed this and nearly 200 other H-shaped schools, each designed to bring light and air to children who spent much of their day crammed in stifling dark tenements. In contrast to the stark utilitarianism of today's public buildings, his imposing creations included towers and ornate carving around windows and doors.

So far, both P. S. 31 and P. S. 109 in East Harlem have been spared destruction while the State Office of Parks and Historic Preservation studies their eligibility for the Register of Historic Places. Although the office has yet to review the case of P. S. 31, which is already a city landmark, Kathy Howe, the office's liaison with the construction authority, said that P. S. 109 appears eligible for the register because of its notable design and the role it played in the development of Harlem in the 1900's.

The authority is supposed to inform Ms. Howe's office of any plans to demolish buildings more than 50 years old, which it did not do in the case of either school, she said. Ms. Howe added that the authority, which is supposed to provide an inventory of all city school buildings that might be eligible for the register, did not agree to do so until last month, after people in the community objected to the demolition plans.

City historic preservation laws do not apply to the construction authority, a quasi-governmental agency created more than a decade ago by the State Legislature. Preservationists say this exemption has allowed the agency to make decisions about the future of buildings that it has no specialty in handling and little interest in restoring. They say that the cost of rehabilitating P. S. 31 rose substantially because the authority botched a restoration and that a lack of oversight has allowed it to harm other buildings.

An entire wall at P. S. 34 in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, was replaced after a work crew used high-pressure water to clean the masonry at the Civil War-era school, blasting off much of its surface, according to officials with the New York Landmarks Conservancy. Most recently, they say, workers checking the condition of roof steel at P. S. 95 in Gravesend, Brooklyn, smashed pieces of the school's crown parapet before a neighbor contacted the conservancy and stopped them.

Mr. Deacy said that such blunders have been rare, adding that his authority has 600 active jobs at any one time and is continually confronted with structural and renovation problems at the city's old schools.

Beyond money and logistics, the debate over how best to bring New York's schools into the next century also concerns a question of what elevates students the most: new structures with the latest technical innovations or those built when school architecture itself could be inspiring?

Following a tour of P. S. 31, Mr. Deacy took a reporter to the new Rafael Hernandez Dual Language Magnet School nearby. Costing $32 million, it is the authority's vision of how to provide quality education in the future, Mr. Deacy said as he showed off the school's large elevator, soundproof television studio and an air-conditioned auditorium that can hold nearly 400 students.

But preservationists like Peg Breen, the president of the New York Landmark's Conservancy, say the sturdy old schools remain "beautiful shelters for our kids today. And if properly maintained, they will be here long after we are."

The New York Times

August 22, 1999, Sunday, Late Edition - Final

For Jews Around World, Borough Park Is the Place to Shop

BYLINE: By KIT R. ROANE

SECTION: Section 1; Page 1; Column 5; Metropolitan Desk

LENGTH: 1712 words



It was only noon and Motty Notis was already halfway into his race along 13th Avenue in the Borough Park section of Brooklyn. Sacks of electronics, Judaic books and a wide-brimmed black hat were strewn about the trunk of his rental car, and arrangements had been made to ship dozens of other items.

But with one hand on the steering wheel and the other hand holding the cell phone through which his wife in Los Angeles gave more orders, Mr. Notis set off again. There were silver Kiddush cups to buy, possibly a camera and, if he had time to get them, some of those nice white shirts he liked could be jammed inside his bag before his 8 P.M. flight home.


"It's the best place to buy everything for a Jewish household, so people from all over the world come to shop," said Mr. Notis, a 26-year-old general contractor, before zooming off in his car. "A lot of people fly in to shop in the morning and are back on a plane by the afternoon. This is just the beginning for me. I've still got to get a gift for my wife -- it's her birthday."

At first glance, the central shopping district of Borough Park would not seem world-class. Parking is difficult, upscale restaurants are few, and there are none of the famed stores that draw shoppers to Manhattan -- like Bloomingdale's, Barneys and Tiffany.

But driven by the density of its Jewish population and an entrepreneurial spirit among its business community, especially over the last few years, Borough Park has become what the Lower East Side used to be: the place for Orthodox Jews to shop. On any day but the Sabbath, the mile-long strip of storefronts is teeming with people in search of everything from kosher groceries and refined flatware to electronic equipment. The reason they come, they say, is simple: to get high quality, great selection and competitive prices.

But unlike the Lower East Side of decades ago, 13th Avenue has developed a global reach, because of the ease of air transportation and the Internet. Many of the businesses have their own Web sites.

The area has become so bustling that a 52-room kosher hotel opened three weeks ago on 13th Avenue, the first hotel to rise in Borough Park in more than a decade and one of the few to be built in Brooklyn.

"It has become our Manhattan," said Max Schwartzberg, who came to Borough Park from Tel Aviv to shop and conduct business, and was staying at the hotel. "I swear, 50 percent of the people on my flight were coming here to shop."

Mr. Schwartzberg represents only one strand of a diverse and far-flung clientele that can be found walking in and out of the stores. The shoppers may be Hasidim: Bobovers, Satmars, Viznitzers or members of smaller sects in New York. Or they may be modern Orthodox, coming from Belgium, France, Israel, South America or anywhere in the United States.

The neighborhood itself, which began attracting Jewish immigrants around 1900, now holds the largest concentration of Jews in the country and has become one of the world's most Orthodox. Much of the commercial growth has been created by members of a younger generation who prefer to do business with other Jews. Many have become entrepreneurs, according to Egon Mayer, the director of the Center for Jewish Studies at the City University of New York and the author of a book about Borough Park called "From Suburb to Shtetl" (Temple University Press, 1979).

"It is an ethnic village that has been able to broadcast its wares," Professor Mayer said, "a community that was historically much more insular but is now being able to make its presence known through the world."

In doing so, it has also become one of the richest Jewish communities, drawing many banking concerns. Charles J. Hamm, chairman, president and chief executive of the 45-branch Independence Community Bank, said he opened the bank's first branch on 16th Avenue 10 years ago and then opened another on 13th Avenue in 1997.

"We went from zero deposits to more than $350 million in these two branches," he said, adding that the average branch has around $110 million in deposits. "It's just a hotbed of merchants and one of the most vital economic locations in the United States."

Most days, shoppers cram the sidewalks, and cars back up for blocks as everyone converges on the busy thoroughfare. At the many groceries and bakeries that dot the avenue, a dozen kinds of gefilte fish and rugelach line the shelves, while every form and size of modest clothing -- from felt bend-up hats to the long black coats called kapotes -- can be found at haberdasheries and tailor shops. Silver shops line the avenue, catering to every conceivable religious and social occasion, while some of the country's largest selections of Jewish books, records and videos can be found -- or, increasingly, ordered over the Internet.

"In places like London or Paris, you don't have the concentration that warrants this diverse array of specialty goods: I mean, where can you get a fur streimel?" asked Professor Mayer, speaking of the beaver-wrapped hats popular among some Hasidim. "I wouldn't believe it if I hadn't seen it with my own eyes."

Professor Mayer can point to his own cousin in Sao Paulo, Brazil, who said he came to Borough Park five to six times a year to stock up on kosher food and other Jewish goods.

That cousin, Sandor Friedlander, said in a telephone interview that he could not find many kosher items in Brazil, adding that he tended to keep a low profile about his trips so that neighbors would not pester him to bring back items for them, too. "I have enough orders for my own family," he said.

But it's not only out-of-towners who are attracted to the variety offered in Borough Park. "I came from Flatbush to buy my granddaughter an engagement gift," said Eva Fertszfeld as she shopped in one silver store. "You just can't find this selection and price anywhere else."

While the Lower East Side's commerce has ceased to be Jewish except for a few bakeries and stores, Borough Park's wares continue to expand. Doron Food Corporation, which makes a kosher frozen pizza that is shipped around the country and to Canada, is moving its 5,000-pizzas-a-week operation from lower Manhattan to Borough Park. The move was partly to get more space and partly for the name recognition the Brooklyn area had around the world for fine kosher products, said Ari Fishbaum, who owns the business with his brother, Eddie.

Last month, several local developers opened Avenue Plaza Hotel, an eight-story kosher hotel at 13th Avenue and 47th Street. After three weeks in operation, half its 52 rooms are occupied. And it is booked solid from the end of this month through mid-November, said Nathan Tessler, the general manager, even though its rates -- from $150 to $450 a night -- rival those of many hotels in Manhattan. He said the owners were considering doubling its size within two years.

The hotel offers many things those Manhattan hotels lack, including a kosher kitchen and a mezuza outside each door. During the Sabbath, when Orthodox Jews honor the prohibition against labor, an elevator automatically stops on every floor so that no button has to be pushed, and a hotel staff member can be called to turn lights on and off for guests. The hotel keeps nearly 30 folding beds on hand for the many large families it expects to stay during weddings and bar mitzvahs, and has a baby-sitting and crib service and will soon begin offering guided tours of the neighborhood.

Mosha Reich, a real estate developer from Tel Aviv, heard about the hotel from friends before his latest trip to New York and quickly booked a room. "I used to stay in Manhattan, but there I can only find a couple of places to pray, so every day it is a problem," he said. "Here everything is nearby. I don't think I would ever go back" to Manhattan.

Such sentiments have fed the growth of local businesses, many of which have tailored their appeal to overseas customers. Eagle Electronics, which has an international mail order and Internet business from its 13th Avenue store, does such a brisk trade in the 220-volt appliances used overseas that many are displayed in its windows.

Eichlers, one of the largest sellers of Jewish books in the world, sits across the avenue at 50th Street and last year doubled its size. It now carries about 50,000 Hebrew and English books and offers about 200,000 other Judaic items like Kiddush cups and prayer shawls. About 30 percent of the store's business comes from out-of-state customers, while the eight-month-old Internet site -- which also draws from two smaller satellite stores in Manhattan and Flatbush -- accounts for nearly 15 percent of all mail-order sales, said Moish Perl, a manager.

The store's prices help to draw many Europeans and Israelis, said Mr. Perl, noting that one volume of the Schottenstein Talmud costing $80 in Israel can be bought in his store for around $35.

Another store that says it undercuts European prices is Mostly Music. The store's manager said it charged about 10 percent less for compact discs than a customer might pay overseas. The store, one of the largest Jewish music stores in the world, recently tripled its size and now carries more than 10,000 Jewish titles, from wedding music to rap. All of its inventory can also be bought over its new Internet site.

Since few storefronts are available, some entrepreneurs are buying out longtime merchants. Sara Kasten and her family took over a basement variety store called All in One last month after noticing that people were buying suitcases at the 11-year-old business and then filling them up with merchandise there before flying back home. They have not changed the name or the merchandise, and more than half the store's business is now from tourists, she said.

On most Sundays, Ms. Kasten said, "You can't even walk down the street, it's so packed."

So some shoppers, like Mr. Notis, were happy to be out on a weekday to avoid the crush. After two nights in the Avenue Plaza Hotel and hours buzzing in and out of stores, he finally found a birthday present for his wife: a cherry wood jewelry box.

"Just a day at the mall," he said, looking at the box before getting ready for his flight. "Now I'll have to come back and buy some jewelry to fill it up."

The New York Times

October 11, 1999, Monday, Late Edition - Final

These Aren't the Days, My Friends;
Russian Singers See Young Snub Brighton Beach Clubs

BYLINE: By KIT R. ROANE

SECTION: Section B; Page 1; Column 2; Metropolitan Desk

LENGTH: 1483 words



Misha Gulko sat in a dinner club on Brighton Beach Avenue in Brooklyn, tripping excitedly on his words as he tried to recount the decades of his fame, from Khrushchev to Yeltsin, in just a few minutes.

Mr. Gulko, an icon of Russian lounge singing, flipped through dozens of posters and photo albums, with picture after picture of him in his signature Cossack hat with an accordion slung around his beefy middle. He fingered the tapes of his greatest hits -- songs of war's pain, love's loss, the cold of Siberia, the trials of immigration.


But what he really wanted to do was sing, not reminisce. So as the floor above thumped with the oompah beat of synthesizers and the wail of other Russian musicians, the man who says his age is a professional secret packed up nearly 40 years of memories and walked up the sweeping staircase to the stage of the National Restaurant.

Dressed in black, he was Perry Como with Wayne Newton moves. And the other musicians, whether middle-aged or barely in their 30's, rose in cheers when he finished belting out a brassy Russian love song. He had played everywhere, from Australia to Jerusalem, but sliding into a chair next to a smiling young woman, he pulled down the brim of his leather hat, still wanting to bask in this small moment.

"What do you think about that?" he asked, pushing every word through a thick accent. "Pretty darn good."

None of the other musicians contradicted him, although he had just crashed their party, a practice session for a music festival aimed at younger Russians. Instead, they crowded around to shake the hand of a man who had inspired so many of them, a living legend of the music scene in Little Odessa by the Sea, as this community is known because so many here emigrated from that city in Ukraine.

But Mr. Gulko also illustrates why the dinner clubs and cafes of Brighton Beach find themselves confronting a generation gap. He and other popular performers still draw an older crowd, but younger Russian-Americans generally shun the clubs, with their towering platters of sliced beef, bottomless glasses of vodka and schmaltzy Russian standards. Nor have they been stirred by modern Russian pop, which is still mired in the Western styles of one or two decades ago.

"The Russian culture here is just bad; it's plastic and tacky," said Alisa Nevmark, 15, whose parents brought her to this country when she was 5. "I would rather go to a museum than one of these places. It's just too bizarre."

Ms. Nevmark, who was standing one night outside the Odessa, another famous dinner club just off the strip, at first even refused to admit that her parents were Russian, choosing to note instead that her father was "a chemist."

Her generation's indifference and, in some cases, outright loathing, are not the only reasons for worry in the traditional music scene in Brighton Beach.

While Russians continue to move to New York in record numbers, many are settling in other parts of the city. Some older Brighton Beach residents are doing the same as they gain economic stature and feel more at ease.

And the recent immigrants are more diverse. While many of their predecessors were Russian Jews escaping persecution, they tend to be more splintered by religion, education and economic class, with different tastes in entertainment.

But those who hope to keep the Russian lounge scene alive see the biggest difficulty in attracting teen-agers like Ms. Nevmark and their older siblings, who came here as children and feel little attraction to the culture. Older performers lament that many young Russians even refuse to speak their native tongue.

The bittersweet times evoked in the sentimental songs of Mr. Gulko mean little to young Russians. To them, "Gulko is like a dinosaur," said Anatoly Aleshin, 45. And Mr. Aleshin's pop style, while newer, is still stuck in the 1970's and 1980's, he said.

"The people coming to these shows now are my age and older," Mr. Aleshin added, noting that his son, now a 20-year-old college student, stopped coming to his shows once the family moved from Russia to Brighton Beach.

"There aren't a lot of young musicians coming up in the clubs anymore," Mr. Aleshin said, "and the youngsters just are not interested in this stuff. They would all rather go to discos."

Making matters worse, some performers said, is that some of the area's most popular Sinatra-style crooners have returned to Russia, while younger stars of the hit parade in Russia come to New York only to buy vacation homes. They said there is little reason for these musicians to perform in Brighton Beach for less money, and often with less artistic freedom.

Some of the club singers, especially those few in their 20's and 30's, say they have notebooks full of original compositions -- from rhythm and blues to songs in the angry-girl style of L7 and the funky blend of a Luscious Jackson. But the Brighton Beach club crowd expects mostly golden folk oldies, with an occasional late-night English rendition of "Fools Rush In" or "That's Amore."

For the jam session Mr. Gulko crashed, the acts had been carefully picked to represent the diversity of Russian music and attract younger people. Alla Samoilova, the manager of Brighton Beach's Interesting Gazette Newspaper, a sponsor of the event, said there was even an age cutoff, which left Mr. Gulko and his songs of the Czar and the cold war out of the spotlight. Two similar festivals are planned for next month, she said, the first on Nov. 4 at Restaurant Tatiana.

"We need to let people know that these great musicians exist," she said. " Who knows, maybe an American producer will come."

But if the Sept. 23 festival at the National Restaurant was any evidence, a vast divide remains between what club owners consider hip and what young Russians think is cutting edge.

Mr. Aleshin was there, his hair feathered and his black shirt slightly open, inciting the crowd to clap along between courses of pickled herring, chicken Kiev and caviar. Misha Botsman sauntered around under sparkling disco balls, singing Russian and Italian love songs in the style of Burt Bacharach, reducing the audience to a weepy silence. And Anatoly Kireev let it all hang out in the Tom Jones tradition, sending the crowd home humming "Delilah."

Some of the singers had been warned not to perform anything too biting, original or bawdy, so as not to offend the older fans. Few did, although Lera Max performed an edgy tune as she swept about the stage tossing a shock of red hair. And Veronica, who goes by the single name, pushed the dress code as she sang coolly of love in a platinum page-boy haircut and a tight pink miniskirt with a low-cut top.

The festival was a compilation of what young Russians have come to expect: out-of-date songs and unsettling kitsch no more likely to appeal to them than a Catskills comic or a Las Vegas crooner.

Ms. Nevmark said that the only reason she had come to the Odessa, a palace of cruise ship opulence with a mirrored ceiling, was to celebrate a sweet-16 birthday party sponsored by a friend's parent. She and her friends grimaced when asked about the clubs and the festival.

In Manhattan and elsewhere, they said, there are clubs with Russian-language music more to their tastes -- techno, rap and pop not unlike the music on MTV.

But little of that can be found in Brighton Beach. Even though the cafes serve food and welcome all ages, the teen-agers clearly had no interest in spending any time at places like Club Arbat, Rasputin or Pastorale, where a woman in a black-and-white-striped top hat was likely to be singing "Lean on Me" or pirouetting around a man juggling silver propellers.

"I barely even speak Russian," said Neil Spitkov, 16. His friend Richard Batelman, 15, added that the clubs play "this old Russian music" for young people "who are basically American."

As the teen-age partygoers loitered in their high-cut evening dresses and black Gucci-style suits, the faint echo of a synthesizer came from inside the Odessa. The familiar blippy beat caused the teen-agers and people in their 20's to flee the dance floor as middle-aged men jumped up to dance.

"It's just not our generation," Ross Knopov, 16, exclaimed in frustration. "I mean, a lot of it's just so cheesy."

It is doubtful that Mr. Gulko would agree. He said the old Russian tunes he lays out every few nights in Brighton Beach remain the richest in the world. The younger generation likes "music without soul," he said, but he holds out hope that they will come around as they grow older.

"People hunger for bread, vodka and music, that is all," he said. "But people want understanding from music about broken life, broken love."

Mr. Gulko held up a small, yellowed picture of his parents, taken before the Communist revolution. "Only the old music is meaning over money," he said. "Only it comes from the gut and the soul."

The New York Times

July 19, 1999, Monday, Late Edition - Final

New Neighbors Pushing at the Edge;
Brooklyn Hasidim Seek to Expand Into a Black and Hispanic Area

BYLINE: By KIT R. ROANE

SECTION: Section B; Page 1; Column 1; Metropolitan Desk

LENGTH: 1793 words



Like many of his neighbors in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Charles O'Connor has grown accustomed during the last few months to frequent and unwanted visits from strangers interested in buying the home he has owned for 35 years. One day, though, the banging on his front door was like an alarm. Mr. O'Connor opened it to find a man hammering up a "For Sale" sign, even though he had already told the man's real estate company that he did not wish to sell.

"I said: 'What are you doing? This is my house,' " Mr. O'Connor recalled. "The man said, 'Are you sure?' and kept on going."


Since there is an auto parts shop directly behind it and vacant lots are a stone's throw away, Mr. O'Connor's four-story home near the edge of Bedford-Stuyvesant would not seem a desirable address. Yet his neighborhood has become the latest front in a long battle for living space involving Hasidim in Williamsburg, who have no room to expand, and their predominantly black and Hispanic neighbors in adjacent parts of Brooklyn.

For decades, as their numbers have swelled, the Satmar Hasidim have pushed east and north, colliding with resistance, particularly from Hispanic residents, in a fight as much about identity and cultural differences as real estate. Now the same struggle has started to the south, where the Hasidim are not only trying to buy homes from people like Mr. O'Connor but are also seeking variances to rezone about 40 industrial lots for condominiums, co-ops and apartments.

He and other longtime residents, fearful of rising rents and a loss of jobs, are accusing Hasidic leaders of block-busting and shady dealings. Many complain that they have been harassed by repeated nighttime knocks on their door from Hasidim interested in buying their property, and some say potential buyers have told them it would be wise to leave before the area becomes inhospitable.

Mr. O'Connor said potential buyers have told him to put up a "Not for Sale" sign if he wants to avoid further inquiries. It is a step some of his neighbors have already taken.

"People are afraid because of all the zoning changes from commercial to residential, and because the Hasidic community is buying all the available residential properties," said Peter Crisci, the Bishop of the Cathedral of St. Lucy, where many residents attend church. "They are afraid that these people are coming into the community not to build it up, but to create a community within a community, and that doesn't work."

The Hasidim dismiss the complaints as unrealistic, saying that they should be praised for trying to revitalize a sagging area of closed warehouses and boarded-up row houses that is just now beginning to benefit from dropping crime rates and an interest in its many loft spaces. Hasidic leaders and the developers working for the religious community say that most of the resistance is based on stereotypical beliefs that border on anti-Semitism.

"It is basically saying, 'Stay out of here,' " said Rabbi David Niederman, executive director of United Jewish Organizations. "I would hate to characterize why, but what has been said at various meetings is scary."

There have been numerous meetings at which each side's complaints about the other have been discussed, but those meetings have produced no real agreement, and have stopped. The Hasidim have pushed on with their development plans, further angering residents, who have responded with a lawsuit and letter-writing campaigns to politicians.

Last month, the Kent Avenue Block Association won a lawsuit in State Supreme Court to stop a plan to turn a commercial lot into housing for the Hasidim. The court sent the request for a zoning variance back to the Board of Standards and Appeals. Lawyers for the neighborhood group said other lawsuits might follow.

Meanwhile, Melvin Foster, chairman of a community group called the Neighborhood Stabilization Task Force, has lobbied local and state political leaders for support, and one of them, State Senator Velmanette Montgomery, a Democrat whose district includes Bedford-Stuyvesant, expressed sympathy. Mr. Foster also helped spur city planners to begin talking about rezoning the area to balance the community's needs for jobs and housing.

The controversy centers on a predominantly light-industrial area from Flushing Avenue south to DeKalb Avenue, and between Classon Avenue on the west and Marcy and Nostrand Avenues on the east.

According to the city's Board of Standards, which decides on variance requests, in the last three years developers have been allowed to build 385 units of housing in former manufacturing spaces in this area and in the most southern edge of Williamsburg. Variances that would add 433 more units in the area are before the board.

Although Pat Pacifico, a spokesman for the board, said the amount of housing was relatively small, some land use experts have worried that the variances will amount to a rezoning of the area. The housing is designed for Hasidic occupants, Mr. Pacifico said, noting that the variances describe buildings made up of three- to seven-bedroom apartments with amenities like kitchens suitable for observing kosher rules: they have two sinks and space for two refrigerators, so that meat and dairy products can be kept separate.

The Hasidim and their lawyers say they are merely doing what any well-organized group could accomplish by paying attention to land use law. They add that the housing will help the local economy, bringing in businesses and increasing the tax base. They talk of creating a neighborhood where people feel safe walking the streets at night. Residents say the neighborhood is already reasonably safe.

Rabbi Niederman says that developers have sought the Hasidim because they need housing and, unlike others, are willing to pay for new development. He characterizes the movement into Bedford-Stuyvesant as a reshuffling that would leave other apartments in Williamsburg open to "Jew, Latino, poor or rich."

But such thoughts give many longtime residents in Bedford-Stuyvesant pause. They speak of a past when they could walk to work and businesses flourished. They recall the hard times that followed, the crime and the closing of shops, a time when some say the neighborhood "burned like the South Bronx." Now that the future looks brighter, they worry that the benefits are headed toward somebody else.

At a community meeting, Wilfredo Perez, 23, said he and other residents were repeatedly "harassed" by individuals and real estate agents "asking us to sell or asking us who the landlord is so they can sell our homes out from under us."

"I've been here for 22 years and I don't want to be kicked out," added Beatrice Ponnelle, 49. "This is a low-income community and they're coming up with housing that nobody can afford even if we were allowed into it."

Rents have almost doubled during the last two years, and landlords are now charging up to $900 for one-bedroom apartments. Pointing to warehouses where relatives once worked, residents are worried about variances allowing their conversion to residences, cutting out even more jobs in their neighborhood. In one variance case, a developer bought out a manufacturer who threatened to block the construction of apartments in a factory next to his. The manufacturer then moved his business and its jobs to another area in the borough, his lawyer said.

These concerns could surface in any neighborhood facing development and a new population mixture. But residents in Bedford-Stuyvesant are also confronting a question of identity. A movement of mysticism founded in the 18th century, Hasidism requires practitioners to hold themselves apart from the secular world. They have their own religious court system, schools, kosher businesses and security patrols.

Fearing they will be slowly isolated, members of Mr. Foster's task force and other residents of Bedford-Stuyvesant talk of how their corner bodegas will be replaced by kosher groceries and how their longtime friends with be pushed out by a religious community. Realistically or not, they fear becoming second-class citizens who are ordered around on their own streets.

Already, residents say, some Hasidim in the area have complained about the ringing of church bells, and others have painted no-parking stripes on their streets to reserve spaces for cars and Hasidic school buses. Other homeowners say hopeful buyers are unwilling to take no for an answer.

"I can't see in one eye and can't walk the stairs, but they don't feel sorry that you're 83 years old and in bad health," said Francine Palmieri, who had her more able-bodied tenant, Peter Recine, 89, place a "Not for Sale" sign on their building's front door.

But residents like Abe Stein, 51, an Orthodox Jew who has lived in Bedford-Stuyvesant for 20 years and has run a manufacturing business there for 16, said that the unrest was being caused by people "who don't understand that the Hasidim are trying to live within the community."

While he said he had thought about selling his die-cutting factory for housing for the Hasidim, he added, "No one is trying to tell anyone that only Hasidim can live here."

Relations between the Hasidim and other residents remain tense, and some residents are beginning to worry that the current disagreement may turn into a replay of the groups' past disputes.

In the late 1970's, Hispanic and black residents in Williamsburg began to clash with Hasidic residents over what they considered preferential treatment given to Hasidic applicants seeking federally subsidized housing. Some Hispanic residents also complained that they were harassed by Hasidic security patrols while the police turned a blind eye to complaints about the patrols.

Both sides have tried to reconcile over the years, but the fuel that drives their animosity -- the lack of affordable housing in and around Williamsburg -- has remained.

"If the Hasidics move in, bias incidents could flare up," said Ruben R. Pratts, a member of Community Board 3 in Bedford-Stuyvesant, "because nobody here is going to stand by and be manhandled." He said neighbors have already been challenged by Hasidic security patrols.

The difficulty of changing such attitudes is not lost on Rabbi Niederman, who says he continues to urge talk with his neighbors to the south and wants to show them that the Hasidim are their "allies, not adversaries."

"Some people out there are instilling fear," he concluded. "But I would venture to say to any of them, 'Come to Williamsburg, come into the housing projects, and tell us we are not good neighbors.'

"We have African-Americans, Latinos, everybody, and everybody feels safe and secure," he said. "We want to make this area a better place to live for everyone."

The New York Times

December 1, 1996, Sunday, Late Edition - Final

IN PERSON;
Behind the Scenes at the Track, the Rink, the Field

BYLINE: By KIT R. ROANE

SECTION: Section 13NJ; Page 4; Column 1; New Jersey Weekly Desk

LENGTH: 1788 words

DATELINE: EAST RUTHERFORD

The Meadowlands sports complex, one of the world's largest entertainment centers, opened 20 years ago on a 750-acre site that once was swamp. Since then, it has drawn millions to its stadium, racetrack and arena for football, soccer, hockey, horse racing and popular entertainment. Pope John Paul II celebrated Mass there; the Grateful Dead recreated the 60's.
But nothing of such magnitude happens spontaneously. It takes a work force of ushers, waiters, ticket takers, security officers -- 3,000 in all, who work at the gates, in the stands and behind the scenes.
Some took their jobs as a lifeline, part time, in an uneasy economy. Others looked upon them as additional income to help support a family. A few signed up just to be sociable and have fun. Here is a visit with four of them, their reasons for being there as varied as the events that help provide their livelihood.

LOUIS DeANGELO
At the Window
He dreamed of being a beautician, but life didn't turn out that way. So when the shoe store closed on him and construction work faded, Louis DeAngelo went to the track.
It was 1976, and the Meadowlands was about to open with the promise of world-class entertainment and jobs for the masses. Jobless at 23, Mr. DeAngelo felt the call of a job as a cashier at the $2 window, deciding to stake his future on the horses and those who would spend their days handing him money in search of a lucky ticket.
That was 20 years and countless gamblers ago for the wiry cashier, who now works the high-end $50 window at the Meadowlands racetrack, handling perhaps $60,000 in bets on a given night.
It is a vigil, Mr. DeAngelo said, noting that he must be both quick and cautious because any shortfall in the receipts at the end of the night is his responsibility and comes out of his pocket.
He's been taken only once, he said. It was 1977, and he lost $1,000 out of the till. "Either someone in line did it or someone outside," he said, shaking his head. "I guess it was just a reach into my window, but I'll never know."
The fear of a recurrence keeps him on his toes, as do the scammers and flimflam artists who creep about daily with such schemes on their minds. Sometimes they will just say they have been given the wrong change when making a bet, although good cashiers know always to leave the money on the tray until the transaction is finished. But there are a surprising number of grifters with the time to concoct elaborate traps.
One favorite is to paste the edges of a $50 bill onto the face of a dollar, a trick that can go unnoticed when jittery bettors press long lines before a race. Other times, people have come up with a wad of bills to make a bet of several thousand dollars. But once all the bills are counted, the cashier will find a $100, some $20's and a few dollar bills sandwiching a loaf of perfectly cut paper. By the time it is counted, the cheater is usually long gone.
Others fake winning tickets by surgically carving a losing ticket so that the correct numbers can be inserted.
"You'd be surprised how much time people will spend on these things to keep betting," he said. "They try to beat you. You got to be like a boxer and roll with it. It's part of the game."
He still thinks about hair styling sometimes, but he is not complaining about working the windows, a skill he learned through one trial session with play money before the official opening. As he is quick to note, things could be worse. He is happily married, with a 5-year-old son and an 18-year-old daughter now at Montclair State University.
"I'm not going to get rich from this job, but after 20 years I can't complain because there are a lot of people out there who go out and break their backs every day," he said. "I've been able to provide for my family and pay my bills. I was brought up working-class. And like I tell my kids all the time, you can't get nothing unless you work for it. I'm proving that by example."

BOB JACQUES
Finding Motivation
For 15 years, Bob Jacques has been studying acting at the Meadowlands, looking into customers' faces and listening to their disputes, all to get an insight into character.
"I see people at their best and at their worst, in all situations from love to drag-out fights," he said. "You just get to see people the way they really are, and that's good when you're an actor."
But at the Meadowlands, Mr. Jacques is an usher, in maroon jacket and sensible shoes. Off duty, he pursues an acting career. He has appeared on several commercials as well as a few movies and sitcoms when not taking tickets or helping patrons to their seats. No one has recognized him yet.
His latest acting job was in a movie called "Devil's Own," he said, noting that his experiences at the Meadowlands -- particularly with unruly fans and fights on the ice during hockey games -- helped him get the part of a mobster "roughing up Brad Pitt."
Although he says he is nice with the customers, they do not always reciprocate. He recalls one night when a big fight broke out on the ice, causing blood-hungry hockey fans in the front rows to leap from their seats for a better view. When he calmly asked them to sit back, another man rows back jumped up and began cursing Mr. Jacques for blocking his view of the fight.
"He ran at me screaming," the usher said. "It was so weird that even the guys who first stood up thought it was a joke, but it wasn't. He was really mad and just kept screaming till I left.
"I guess that's the one thing I dread about the job, the fact that you sometimes get really arrogant people on you, but you have to treat them all the same," he said.
He has even heard people complain about the price of tickets bought from scalpers outside. "I mean, you're not even supposed to buy tickets from scalpers," he said. "If they paid $500 for tickets to some guy walking around outside the stadium, it's not really our problem, but you've got to keep a face on and . . . act."
He handles diverse situations, from taking care of seating problems and offering directions, to helping entertainers slip out of the complex. He even gained the nickname Snowplow after Michael Jordan used him to push through a crowd of autograph seekers after a Chicago Bulls game.
"I felt these big hands; then I could smell his cologne," Mr. Jacques said. "I turned around and saw this huge guy in an Armani suit, and he just said, 'Go.' "
One day he hopes to be on the other side.
"But you can't think about it or give yourself time limits because you'd just go nuts," he said. "And while you could teach an orangutan to do my basic job here -- section, row, seat number -- I'm not ashamed of it because it's really about interacting with people and helping them beyond that. Believe me, people here have a thousand questions every night, and they want answers."

SAM DePALMA
Along for the Ride
"There are ups and downs to this job," said Sam DiPalma, pasting back his graying hair before greeting some of the first guests of the night into his V.I.P. elevator at the Continental Arena, where his has controlled the buttons for most of the last nine years.
Mr. DePalma, 55, has worked at the Meadowlands for 14 seasons, first as an usher, then as an elevator man. He calls the stint a form of meditation, noting that he still teaches seventh grade math during the day. "I do this for a break," he said. "I know everybody, and everybody's like family. It's relaxation after all the stress with the kids at school."
But he also sees a lot of his former students, many of whom pop by to say hello and keep him up to date on their lives. He's there more than not, even working on his birthday this year.
"They put me up on the scoreboard for my birthday," he said. "And if I miss a day, people come in saying, 'Where's Sam?,' asking whether I'm O.K., or sick. It's nice."
Mr. DePalma took the job to make extra money while his children were growing up. A big soccer fan, he got the idea of working for the Meadowlands after taking his young sons to Giants stadium for Cosmos soccer games. "Ushering was the ticket," he said. "That way I got to watch the games while I worked."
Both his sons followed his footsteps and worked as ushers once they were old enough. Frank, 27, left this year to take a job as an accountant, but Robert, 24, still juggles several shifts a month over his day job as an industrial engineer.
"We've been coming here so long that I'm a grandpa now," Mr. DePalma said as one customer greeted him with a handshake and another let loose a soliloquy of how "Sam is the cornerstone" of the Meadowlands whose departure would "shut the place down."

MICHELLE BROWN
Hustle and Bustle
Eleven years ago, Michelle Brown came to the Meadowlands with a mission. She was 21 years old, 6 feet tall, in nursing school and single. She liked sports. And, more important, she liked men.
"So I took a job as a security guard," she explained with a smile before going out to walk her Thursday beat in the women's lounge at the Continental Arena. "I mean, it's a sports complex, right? There's hockey, basketball, football and racing. I figured I was bound to meet someone."
She has, of course, although that is not what has kept her coming back nightly, past her 32d birthday and well into a daytime career of handling claims and billing for an anesthesiologist. After all, most of her close contact has been with "cranky old guys smoking cigars," teen-age brawlers and other ne'er-do-wells, none of which were good marriage prospects and some of whom proved dangerous.
Four weeks into the job, her elbow was shattered when she tried to quell a fight involving four men, three of them drunk. "People thought I wouldn't have the nerve to come back, but I did," she said, adding that the bone took nearly six months to repair.
Other days, she's had to pull youngsters out of the beer line and save patrons whose shoelaces caught in one of the escalators. Ushers have been protected from the slurs of abusive drunks; people stealing toilet paper have been chased out of restrooms, and men wandering into the wrong restroom looking for women have been discouraged.
The scene might turned many women off from the job, but to Ms. Brown it's become surprisingly appealing. It's a nice change after sitting in a seat all day with medical terminology and complex financial statements filling her mind. At the Meadowlands, she's on, eyes darting across the crowds, mind keeping a vigil on the line that patrons must not to cross.
"It's the hustle and bustle," she said, eyes brightening. "It's never seeing the same people twice and being ready to handle any situation."
"Don't mess with me," she added with a stern finger. "I'm good."

The New York Times

March 31, 1997, Monday, Late Edition - Final

At Prayer and on Parade, a City Basks in Easter

BYLINE: By KIT R. ROANE

SECTION: Section B; Page 3; Column 1; Metropolitan Desk

LENGTH: 891 words

They arrived in clusters yesterday through an old iron gate and past rusted steel girders. Each parishioner clutched a Korean-English hymnal, stares falling on cracked walls and twisted metal, feet resting in the puddles of a recent rain.
It was the first service at Hyo Shin Bible Presbyterian Church in Flushing, Queens, since September, when a gas explosion leveled everything in the building down to the basement. There they gathered, blocked in by aching walls and floors cluttered with memories, to hear the Rev. Ji Kag Pang give a sermon that many thought especially appropriate for this place on this day.
Churchgoers, who had been attending services in a small building in Woodside, have raised about $300,000 of the $2 million that it will cost to rebuild the structure.
Afterward, the Rev. James Lee, another minister of the congregation, said, "Easter represents resurrection and rebirth," as he stood in a basement classroom now inhabited by only a few soggy stuffed animals and a solitary wooden cross, and talked of plans to rebuild the church. "These past six months have been a long dark tunnel. Now we can see a light at the end."
Much of New York appeared to have similar thoughts this Easter, with a spring sun momentarily burning away winter. Woe and crime were never far away. There was even a robbery of another Queens church during Mass. But few people seemed to fall into pessimism. A homeless man begging, Easter paraders, churchgoers: each managed to pluck, whatever his troubles, a tale of happiness and hope.
After a foot-stomping service at the House of the Lord Pentecostal Church, Patricia and Michael Middleton spoke of their new-found drive to end the killing that has become so common in America's streets. Their 18-year old son, Wade, was murdered two years ago; now his parents help lead a local chapter of Families of Victims Against Violence.
Tory Medaglia left St. Patrick's Cathedral praising new medical care for her year-old nephew.
And Malia Herndon thanked God for her health after a service at Riverside Church.
"This is a great Easter as far as I'm concerned," said Phil Hart, a burly man working the shine on his white limousine while his passengers attended Mass at St. Patrick's Cathedral. "I'm 51 and things are finally working out. I've got money in the bank and six limousines working for me. It wasn't the same last year, so you can bet I prayed this morning."
Thomas Green, 47, counted out change he had collected from people heading into the cathedral. Though the take was not as good as last year's, his chief complaint was that the costumes were too bizarre at the annual Easter parade, which was proceeding in the mild 65-degree weather in free-form abandon along Fifth Avenue.
"I'm homeless, got no job, no money and no food," he said, adding that he would wander into St. Patrick's to say a little prayer for luck once the crowds diminished. "But you know what bothers me most is, I wish the parade was better."
The procession has, over the years, become a commingling of political protest and outlandish taste with a bunny theme. And to some, the slide has left them chagrined.
Mary Martin, a parader from Long Island, said that in years gone by, it was de rigueur to wear a "dress, hat, gloves and a veil."
Bertha Sheppard, a 73-year-old parader from Elizabeth, N.J., added from under her bejeweled, Barbie-bedecked hat that pretty dresses and furs were out of fashion. And she, for one, intended to stay hip. "Now everybody dresses crazy," she said. "I figure I've got to get with everyone."
Among the high spirits were those of protest. Demonstrators, led by Michael Shenker, punctured the parade, promising that along with the Savior and the bunny rabbit, New Yorkers would see what Mr. Shenker called "the rebirth of the rent-control movement this Easter."
Then there was Vivaveggie.
Waving placards deploring "Eggstreme Cruelty" and urging "Give Peas a Chance," animal rights supporters pushed a totally meat-, fish- and dairy-free agenda and leveled eyes at both those hawking hot dogs and those passing out chocolate eggs.
"Easter is the beginning of life, and hens are very protective of their eggs, but they give birth in noisy, filthy, crowded environments," said Pamela Rice. "You don't have to anesthetize a pea pod."
Shortly after, advocates in wheelchairs handed out fliers at Radio City Music Hall protesting inadequate seating for the handicapped, hitting both the 1 P.M. and 3 P.M. performances of the 51st annual "Easter Eggstravaganza!"
Making a point with one's life was perhaps the message of the day. Sermons pressed the idea of peace and understanding, with some clergy members referring to the recent suicide of 39 cult members in California.
"There is so much bad news, hour after hour, about escalating greed and diminishing compassion," the Rev. Dr. James Forbes Jr. said to his congregation at Riverside Church in Morningside Heights, Manhattan. "So shouldn't there be at least one day where we can make, all day long, space and grace?"
"If we really capture the essence of the Easter story, we will address the most pressing problem among us today," he added. "I saw a hopelessness in the faces of those dead young men. There's a lot of people like that who have lost all hope, have lost all meaning in this world."

The New York Times

December 8, 1996, Sunday, Late Edition - Final

A Safety Net Wears Thin

BYLINE: By KIT R. ROANE

SECTION: Section 13NJ; Page 1; Column 1; New Jersey Weekly Desk

LENGTH: 2680 words

THEY woke about 10 A.M. and began to scrounge for change. Philip, Florence and Raymond, emerging from a cinderblock enclosure and slinking toward a Hoboken liquor store for the tall boy and a fifth of vodka. In an hour both bottles were empty but their bellies were warm, the day after Thanksgiving like the day before, this year like the last, their future seeming as bleak as their past.
Florence Golden, 50, swathed in rags, had just got out of a hospital. She had walking pneumonia, not the first time. Raymond Ulish, 40, was nursing his swollen and cut hands after drunkenly punching walls all night. Philip Bonfiglio, 49, was thinking about his dead wife.
"This is the worst year ever," Mr. Bonfiglio said. "People have just gotten colder, more heartless. When I got on the streets it was nice, people were generous. But now, it's once in a blue moon when people give you something."
Mr. Bonfiglio is right. Being homeless in New Jersey is more difficult than it used to be, whether you fit the visible stereotype of Mr. Bonfiglio and his companions as street-hugging panhandlers or are more suitably characterized by the term that for more than 15 years has defined a far larger segment of an out-of-luck, unhoused society: the homeless.
For all of them, life is getting tougher, advocates and local government officials say, adding that a growing frustration with the chronic nature of the problem has led an economically cautious state government to be much more selective about who it helps and how much it will spend.
This erosion continues on other fronts: affordable housing continues to be scarce in New Jersey. The waiting period for housing-assistance funds can drag on for months, and, in the case of low-income apartments, years. Requests for shelter also routinely outpace bed space, with thousands of the homeless being turned away from shelters every year.
Homelessness, which began as a trickle in the late 1970's, became a flood in the late 1980's, the numbers of homeless rapidly expanding not only in major cities like New York and Newark, but also in smaller urban and suburban areas in New Jersey. In part, the phenomenon was driven by the drug crisis and, particularly in New York, the wholesale release of mental patients who could not care for themselves. But the major cause was much more simple: the skyrocketing cost of housing, the issue still at the nub of the problem.
In Middlesex County, which once allowed its few homeless to sleep under bridges and in church pews, two temporary shelters were in use by the mid-1980's. By the early 90's, there were two permanent shelters and three others that either alternated between churches or operated in winter.
Statewide, the number of homeless shelters nearly tripled between 1987, when 66 were registered with the New Jersey Department of Community Affairs, and 1996, when 164 had opened.
But while advocates for the homeless say the number of those needing aid has remained constant over the last four years -- about 15,000 on a given day, more in winter -- the amount of Federal and state dollars being allocated for the homeless and those in dire need of housing has shrunk.
Emergency funds for families with dependent children and single people have gone from $125 million in the fiscal year 1993 to $68 million in fiscal 1997, according to the State Deparment of Human Services. State block grants meant to cover those not eligible for welfare went up slightly because of cost-of-living increases, rising from $7 million in 1993 to $7.7 million for 1997.
It's not news to the dispossessed that things are tougher.

THE PEOPLE
Coming Up Short
Glenn Statten, 63, lost his home in Perth Amboy a month ago after he was laid off from his job and his wife began using drugs. He had lived in a rent-subsidized house for 35 years, driving a truck for $10.20 an hour and toward the end helping to raise three children who are still in their teens. He had never imagined falling into this situation. Now he doesn't understand why it took so long.
"I never had a bank account, never had enough money for that, even $10 an hour ain't enough in this day and age," he said, shuffling cards for a game of solitaire at the Ozanam Family Shelter. a former barracks in Edison where he lives with Danielle, 12, Travis, 9, and Trever, 6.
"All it took was a couple of missing paychecks," he said. "I don't drink or do drugs, and I have always supported my kids," he added. "People may think we're bums, but I'm not so different from the rest of you. You could be here too."
Mr. Statten's fellow residents include a woman in her 60's who was evicted when the man with whom she lived died; a 50-year-old woman fighting to win a worker's compensation claim, and a family with five children, their only income a Burger King fry cook's salary. Others have lost jobs, had drug problems or escaped bad marriages.
Some were on the streets for months before finding shelter at Ozanam, which houses more than 90 people. Others spent only days. None are quite sure how to turn their lives around.
"I took care of my husband for 20 years, but when he died there was no will and his children took what money there was," said one elderly woman who refused to give her name because she was a lifelong resident of Edison.
"I finally ended up sleeping on the street with two suitcases -- I felt like dying," she said, adding that she came to Ozanam after one of her suitcases was stolen from her while she was resting at a McDonald's. "You have no idea what it's like out there."
A woman who gave her name as Nancy, 50 years old, wears a brace on her right leg. She injured it almost two years ago when she tripped over some debris in the trucking yard she managed. It was a sprain that grew worse, she said, and required two operations. Company doctors finally disagreed with private doctors, and worker's compensation was cut off last month.
Now she subsists on $200 a month in welfare and $100 in food stamps, has exhausted her savings and can neither get a job nor afford an apartment until her claim is settled. But even a settlement in her favor would give few options, since rental agents will not consider those without a steady income.
Caridad Centeno, 29, asked for a cigarette, her 10-month-old boy crying in a corner, her other four children playing games in a back room. She said she fled to the shelter with her boyfriend, Armando Rodriguez, 32, after being evicted from a drug-infested apartment in the Bronx when her welfare check was late.
She has applied for assistance in New Jersey, her boyfriend working for minimum wage at the local Burger King. This, she hopes, will open a new life for her and her family, minimum wage and a welfare check providing the key to a shaky success away from drugs and gangs.

THE NUMBERS
Chronic Problems
Of the roughly 750,000 people homeless nationwide, 36.5 percent are families with children, while children themselves account for 25 percent of the homeless population, according to the National Alliance to End Homelessness, the National Coalition for the Homeless and the United States Conference of Mayors.
The contributing factors to their homelessness vary. While 69 percent of the homeless surveyed by the Conference of Mayors were substance abusers or mentally ill, 1 in 5 were the working poor. Roughly 50 percent of the women were fleeing domestic abuse. Most of those studied were homeless for six to eight months before pulling themselves off the street, though they often return.
New Jersey reflects these national trends, with children and the elderly accounting for an increasing number of the state's estimated 40,000 homeless.
The main problem is affordable housing. According to the National Low Income Housing Coalition, the fair market rent for a one-bedroom apartment in Trenton, in Mercer County, is about $610, while the same apartment in Middlesex County would reach $705. Both prices far outstrip the income of most seasonal and minimum-wage earners, even if both spouses work.
According to the Conference of Mayors, there is also a lack of state subsidies that might make such housing affordable, with people waiting up to five years for Federal subsidies for private housing, called Section 8 certificates, and others waiting three years for public housing. In the City of Trenton, officials are not even accepting any more applications for the state subsidy, the report said. (The state subsidy is based on an average rental price in each of various regions in the state.)
"People look at us and think we're all alcoholics and drug addicts, but it's not like that," said a 30-year-old warehouse worker in New Brunswick who recently lost his $6-an-hour job and is now homeless. "There are a lot of people out there being forced to decide whether to pay the rent or eat. When they lose their jobs, they end up like me. Without the shelters, they'd be lost in the world."
But while shelter needs remain as great as ever, the safety net meant to catch those battered by a lack of skills, money or family is fraying. In Middlesex County -- a mix of New Jersey's rural, suburban and urban landscape -- operators of emergency shelters reported a combined loss of more than $400,000 in operating income -- primarily government funds -- during the fiscal year that ended in September. The result has meant belt-tightening and layoffs.
The loss of revenue reflects a change in direction by state government, which is more narrowly defining which of the homeless qualify for temporary rental assistance and moving toward a program that puts more of those who do qualify into temporary apartments. (Recipients can receive the housing aid for up to a year, with the state covering all but 35 percent of their rent. But a shelter stay can cost $1,200 a month, far surpassing the $600 to $800 that can put many in an apartment.)
This has left shelters with a growing number of residents who can contribute nothing to their care. Although shelters also receive private donations, and block grants meant to pay for those who don't qualify for state assistance, these fall far short of the need, according to Marilyn Wightman, director of shelters and housing for Catholic Charities, Diocese of Metuchen.
Catholic Charities is the county's largest provider, offering beds and counseling for 1,382 residents in the last year. It had a deficit of $213,000 in the fiscal year ended June 30, mainly due to a cutback in temporary housing-assistance funds, and expects a loss in the next year of $150,170. Five counselors and staff assistants have already been laid off.
"Welfare continues to refer people to us for help but there is less willingness to help pay the cost," said Ms. Wightman, whose group runs a men's shelter in New Brunswick and the Ozanam shelter in Edison.
"The need has not gone down with the funding. There are waiting lists even to get into a shelter," she said. "But there is a hostility toward the poor and these people are being blamed for the positions they are in. Some may have made bad decisions, but the vast majority made the mistake only of being poor."

THE OUTLOOK
Leaner Times
New Jersey's county and city governments, which dole out state emergency-assistance funds to welfare recipients who find themselves homeless, say they are under increased pressure from the state to define more strictly which of the homeless are eligible for help.
Those perceived as contributing to their own homelessness are scrutinized more closely before any aid comes their way, local officials say. This includes people who quit their jobs, not complied with counseling requirements when they last applied, have been recently arrested or released from jail, or been forced out of their homes because their partners have accused them of domestic violence. But battered women who do not file charges against their abuser or bring hospital documentation of the abuse have also been refused, as have families evicted from illegal apartments by safety inspectors.
"The state is increasingly overturning cases that an administrative law judge has said meet the definition of needing assistance," said Angela B. Mackaronis, director of the Middlesex County Board of Social Services, which handles emergency assistance for families with children. "It worries us a lot because there are no absolutes in these situations. People need to be responsible for their own actions but we cannot have people left on the street either. A very delicate balance has to be maintained. But, so far, this seems more like fiscal than social policy."
State officials say that the guidelines for eligibility are unchanged, and that while less money may be allocated for homeless programs, they believe that cost-saving measures like placing the homeless in apartments instead of the more costly shelters will help just as many people.
No matter what action the state takes, the homeless will continue to seek shelter, but the shelters will simply not be reimbursed fully or at all for caring for them, advocates for the homeless say.
This could mean an end to many programs that help keep those wobbling on and off the streets from becoming chronically homeless. Many of those residing at Catholic Charities shelters in Middlesex County say they become self sufficient in a few months because of the heavy emphasis on drug, alcohol and mental counseling, and because staff members relentlessly coach residents on how to get a job, help them construct resumes and run through mock interviews.
Those who receive money at the shelter, either through welfare payments, emergency-housing assistance or part-time work must also put half their funds into a savings account, giving them a financial buffer if laid off and increasing their chances of staying off the street when they leave the shelter.
Many of them could have easily slipped into Mr. Bonfiglio's shoes, for he was not always so downtrodden. He once owned a delivery truck, was married and had a house. He was building a business and a life, saving money and controlling his drinking.
Then things began to unravel, a cycle set in stone after his wife died of cancer three years ago. Mr. Bonfiglio grabbed hold of a bottle, keeping a firm grip all the way through a bankruptcy, an eviction and several cold winters on the street. He is now seen as one of the chronic homeless, unwilling to get counseling even if it were offered.
At 32, a new resident at the Catholic Charities shelter in New Brunswick named Greg said he had already spent more than a decade sliding down Mr. Bonfiglio's path. It began at 16, he said. That was when we was kicked out of school for smoking pot and joined the Navy. He quit at 17 and returned home to Maryland. A fight with his father ended his stay there a few months later. He has quit numerous jobs and has a string of 20 arrests for public intoxication and disorderly conduct. He says he has slept in crack houses and on the street and watched fellow addicts go stone cold.
With only four days down at the shelter he still wrestles demons, but all around him, among the staff and in the eyes of his 40 fellow residents, he sees encouragement. Sitting across the table, is a West African named Leomine, also 32, who has conquered a crack addiction, found Jesus and started a job driving a forklift. He is saving for an apartment.
In the hallway, a former resident who is a part-time helper at the shelter, Michael Slana, 36, now works as a cook at Rutgers University.
"Sometimes when you're sitting in the shelter and looking back at your life, you just don't want to get out of bed," said Greg, cutting into Thanksgiving day leftovers.
"But when I look around here, I see there are lots of people like me, people who have just come across a burden in life, and don't have many skills," he said. "Maybe the system doesn't think we're worth the time, but there are lots of people here digging themselves out. I'm not like I was. I want a job and I want to work. I'm not going back on the street."

The New York Times

November 10, 1996, Sunday, Late Edition - Final

IN PERSON;
Where the Memories Outnumber the Men

BYLINE: By KIT R. ROANE

SECTION: Section 13NJ; Page 4; Column 1; New Jersey Weekly Desk

LENGTH: 1433 words

DATELINE: ORADELL

One thing could be said for this day. At least Fred Hansen didn't know the guy now resting in a box.
Mr. Hansen, 84, a World War II veteran who is food chairman for American Legion Post 41, was trying to make a little bit of money for the post by renting out the lodge for a stranger's wake. But the process brought up something most uneasy. And as Mr. Hansen prepared the coffee and set up the food trays for this man's remembrance in Oradell's Veterans Memorial Building, he was overcome with thoughts of other veterans who had recently succumbed to age.
"My post commander died last week and we had two others go out last month," said Mr. Hansen, a 52-year Legion member who was an Army corporal in North Africa in World War II. "We're trying to keep this place going but I fear the handwriting is on the wall. We're dropping like flies."
As they gather Monday to observe Veterans Day, members of the Legion and the nation's other leading veterans' group, the Veterans of Foreign Wars, may well wonder who will lay the wreaths and march in the parades when they no longer can. The Legion and the V.F.W., products of the first World War and the Spanish-American War, respectively, are facing the prospect of a sharp membership loss as their mainstay, World War II veterans, die off.
This is certainly true in Oradell, where the American Legion and the Veterans of Foreign Wars share a lovingly self-built meeting hall. On the walls are names or portraits of their dead friends, most prominently Staff Sgt. Thomas H. Cordes, a blue-eyed radio operator and gunner in a bomber squadron who was one of the first hometown boys shot down in the air war in Europe. In cabinets are their helmets, ribbons and other mementos of combat, while behind the bar and flanking the rickety meeting table is the flag for which they fought.
The groups' meetings are a bittersweet remembrance, half taken up with talk of the recently dead, otherwise wondering how to keep their organizations afloat. While each lodge can boast more than 120 members, many are men already in their 80's who have joined both groups in an effort to artificially increase their numbers. And a good meeting night still brings out only about 15 of the faithful.
After opening prayers, the pledge of allegiance comes with a sharp salute, minutes are read and it's down to business at a recent V.F.W. meeting. "Is there a comrade or a family of a comrade in distress?" asks Bill H. Wassmann the post commander, to a flurry of response and follow-up questions about who gets a fruit basket. (Only the bedridden or the families of those who died are eligible.)
Commander Wassmann, at 67, is the spring chicken of the bunch. A Korean War veteran, he joined up in Oradell after his own post in nearby Emerson closed for lack of members and he has been re-elected president nearly every year since. He'd love to pass the torch, if only there was a young man ready to take overe. So far, there isn't.
"We had a wake a while ago and we have been having a lot more lately," says the commander, searching his men for an answer to their future. Motions are made for a Christmas recruitment party and there is discussion of forming a group involving both the Legion and the V.F.W. that brings in families and sons. But the moments are filled with more hope than solution.
The problem is perhaps that all wars are not created equal, nor have combatants always come home to a ticker-tape parade. These social organizations grew strong on the euphoria and camaraderie that came out of World War II, and their original members carried the same sense of unity that the whole country felt at the time.
Though wars continued, with Americans being called on to fight in Korea, Vietnam and the Persian Gulf, that defining togetherness has never been re-established, neither on the battlefield nor at home.
"In general, we are no longer a nation of joiners," said Col. John Dwyer, a spokesman for the New Jersey Department of Military and Veterans Affairs who, along with two brothers, was drafted for Vietnam.
"When we came back, the time was different than after World War II, and we were different," he said. "We were not like our fathers. We had mustaches, long hair and wanted fast cars. We weren't joiners and there was little outreach to us asking us to be a part of things."
Vietnam veterans account for only 25 percent of the V.F.W.'s national memberships, while more than 45 percent come from World War II, said Walter Merklin, the organization's state adjunct quartermaster and a Vietnam veteran.
"I got involved after going to a bowling league sponsored by the V.F.W.," said Mr. Merklin. "Then slowly I began to realize how important these organizations were to protecting veterans rights and entitlements, and I became more heavily involved."
To other veterans who have so far resisted joining the groups, he says: "Look at the U.S. Congress, we're losing more and more vets there, and that means there's less protection for our rights. The V.F.W. has to stay strong in order to keep what veterans deserve."
Combined, the American Legion and the V.F.W. still have about 5 million members nationwide but the numbers are getting smaller, with posts like those in Oradell losing 15 to 20 members a year.
When the men of the Oradell Veterans Memorial Building were young, things were different. The American Legion and the V.F.W. were strong lobbies, championing the rights of those disabled while fighting for their country and of the orphans and widows so often left behind.
They helped bring about the Veterans Administration in 1930 and wrote the G.I. Bill of Rights, which gave education and economic assistance to a generation of young men following World War II.
Now these posts survive on meager budgets of a few thousand dollars and age has slowed their community work. In Oradell the members take pride in doing things that they say the younger generation doesn't; providing 280 pairs of socks to paraplegics at the Veterans Memorial Home in Paramus and buying special wheelchairs for people with Alzheimer's Disease. They also coordinate Boy Scout activities, help out as school crossing guards and sit on the boards of the local charities and historical societies.
These men in their twilight years say they often are the only regular visitors to go down to veterans' hospitals.
"You'd be surprised how many of them are sitting in their wheelchairs with no socks and things," said Dan Ryan, 75, a former Navy sailor on an Atlantic minesweeper. "Sometimes I think, but for the grace of God, I could be there like that too."
John Farrell, a 74-year-old former Seabee, leaned over the post bar to add: "Some people think we just sit around here like a bunch of drunks. But we're out there in the community, we're doing our part."
Over beer and pizza, Oradell's veterans often now discuss why time has chosen to pass by both them and their mission of remembrance. Some figure younger veterans are afraid they would be dominated by this tough older crew. Others suggest that the young might think they are stodgy, a belief they counter by noting that several of "the boys" are voting for President Clinton because they don't like Bob Dole's tax cut idea or his stance on abortion.
Every year they send out invitations to join up during their Memorial Day poppy drive -- a commemoration of war dead stretching back to World War I -- and they always encourage the Vietnam veterans to join their ranks at parades on Memorial Day and the Fourth of July, parades that have gotten shorter every year.
"But I can't think of a one that has joined," Mr. Farrell said.
As posts close, he believes, the country will lose more than just meeting places for some aging soldiers. "We are the conscience of what the country has gone through," he said. "We are there to remind people and Congressmen that there are still veterans lying in hospitals, that there was a Pearl Harbor and a death march. It's like the Holocaust, we need to recall these things to make sure they don't happen again."
Before the Oradell meeting breaks up, there is another prayer, a way to close with just such a remembrance. Like most things, it doesn't always go without a hitch, laughter erupting in the final moments when the Bible is opened to the wrong place, a passage that would be more appropriate at a funeral.
"You sure this is the right page?" Ray LaCour, 80, a World War II radio operator, said jokingly to his friends. "I don't think this is the one we want."
He turns to "suffer thy children" and it has a much better ring.

LOAD-DATE: November 10, 1996

LANGUAGE: ENGLISH

GRAPHIC: Photo: Empty chairs were easy to find at a recent meeting of the Veterans of Foreign Wars in Oradell; the group shares the hall with the local American Legion post. (Norman Y. Lono for The New York Times)

Chart: "By the Numbers: War and Peace"

More than 10 percent of all adults in New Jersey were military veterans in July 1995, federal records show. More specifically, there were 124.3 veterans for every 1,000 civilians age 18 and older.

Wartime Veterans

Persian Gulf War 22,000
Vietnam era 195,000
Korean conflict 118,000
World War II 242,000
World War I 400
Total wartime: 577,400

Peacetime Veterans

Post-Vietnam 70,000
Between Korea and Vietnam 89,000
Other peacetime 5,000
Total peacetime 164,000
Total wartime and peacetime: 741,400

Source: Federal Department of Veterans Affairs

The New York Times

December 29, 1996, Sunday, Late Edition - Final

IN PERSON;
Blossom Peretz's No-Win Job

BYLINE: By KIT R. ROANE

SECTION: Section 13NJ; Page 4; Column 1; New Jersey Weekly Desk

LENGTH: 1501 words

Blossom A. Peretz was sitting in her Newark office among the cluttered papers and calculations of her trade when the phone rang. It was a reporter, one of many this day, asking her what it was like to hold what could easily be the most thankless and least understood job in New Jersey government.
Mrs. Peretz, a 62-year-old former utilities lawyer, is director of the Division of the Ratepayer Advocate, which means she is charged with aligning the state's interest in having competitive utilities with its interest in having contented utilities customers. It isn't easy. She had just concluded negotiations that will result in a rebate of more than $90 million from the state's largest power company, the Public Service Electric and Gas Co., which is a major owner of the shuttered Salem nuclear power plant. The agreement, accepted by state regulators, would return about $15 to the average customer.
But this did not make Mrs. Peretz a popular figure among those she was appointed to protect. The settlement was immediately labeled a sellout by consumer advocates, customers and two state senators.
"We know we did an excellent job," said Mrs. Peretz, characterizing the flood of complaints about the settlement, which critics say should have resulted in at least $100 million more, as "unfair, not justified and totally wrong."
For Mrs. Peretz, the attacks come with the territory. She had few illusions about her reception when chosen nearly two years ago by Governor Whitman to be the first Ratepayer Advocate. Case law and compromise were not what her constituents wanted to hear. They were eager for divine judgment and moral resolution -- neither of which seem to mesh with the business of utility regulation.
Mrs. Peretz has taken charge of this new agency at a hectic time, when former monopolies -- from electric and gas companies to telecommunications conglomerates -- are being forced to navigate in the uncharted waters of deregulation. Vying for a position of strength in what is becoming a national marketplace, corporations have been merging, making alliances, trying to quickly shed debt and gain market share, not always to the benefit of customers.
Much like the long-distance telephone services that consumers can choose from, New Jerseyans will soon be able to pick from numerous companies to provide their electric, gas and even local telephone service. The start of electric-utility deregulation will occur early next year, when local utilities will be forced to unbundle their power generation costs and allow other companies to transmit over their lines.
Choice could drive down prices and promote technological advances. But there are pitfalls for the individual consumer, who could become confused by choices, or left out of the kinds of deals that large, industrial customers can will be able to negotiate. The poor, who have been protected from losing service by government regulations and the transfer of cost to bigger electric users, could be overlooked, she said.
"We must make sure that the benefits of competition reach the level of residents and other small consumers, that the inner cities and the high cost geographic areas are not left out and big industry is not the only one with market power," she said.
The Salem settlement proves how tricky her task can be. While consumer and business interests lobbied for a settlement that would reap several hundred million dollars in rebates as well as a promise not to pass on capital costs of current repairs to ratepayers, Mrs. Peretz chose a carrot-and-stick approach that she said would not only keep the process from reaching the courts (where a battle could be long and costly) but also bring greater benefits in the long term.
She pushed an easily defensible rebate structure for consumers, then asked the utility, P.S.E.&G., for several good-will gestures that would broaden the safety net for the state's poorest electricity users. These included spending $30 million to set up a low-income energy trust fund to insure that those who cannot pay for higher electricity costs will still be maintained on the system as it is deregulated, and the installation of a computer network to put poor customers in touch with social services.
Not everyone liked the approach, with both Senator John H. Adler, Democrat of Camden, and Senator C. Louis Bassano, Republican of Union County, criticizing the terms as merely a slap for the long-troubled utility. P.S.E.&G. had been billing ratepayers for nearly two years for energy never produced at the Salem nuclear powerplant, which had been undergoing repairs since early-1995 and still remains shut because of safety concerns.
Senator Adler said that while it was admirable to win benefits for low-income residents, Mrs. Peretz should not have allowed that concern to override the immediate issue of what was owed to all consumers.
"She got the minimum amount we were guaranteed and then declared victory," Mr. Adler said in a telephone interview. "While it was fine to get services for the low-income population, this is a small amount for P.S.E.&G. Besides, I'd rather have lower rates for everybody in the state. It would do more long-term good because it would help attract new businesses that employ people."
Mrs. Peretz has forcefully disagreed with such theories. "I did my legal analysis and crunched my numbers to come up with a position that will withstand an appeal, that is within the realm of the current law and the current administrative process," she said of the criticism, which has come also from the largest consumer protection group in the state and several environmental organizations. "The groups that criticize us have spent their dollars on balloons and turkeys and protests, but they don't do the same legal analysis," she added. "I would love to give every ratepayer in the state the dollars they are asking for but it is not realistic, and wouldn't withstand an appeal."
Much of the complaints may have more to do with a general distrust of the new agency and its philosophy. The division of the Ratepayer Advocate grew out of Governor Whitman's desire to move the state's dealings with utilities away from what had become a cycle of litigation in small ratepayer suits. Instead, the governor fashioned an agency that brings mediation to the process and that can look at the broader issues that would soon be affecting the state's former monopolies.
With that in mind, Mrs. Whitman replaced the Division of Rate Counsel, with the Division of the Ratepayer Advocate, a $95,500 a year job, and appointed Mrs. Peretz, of Sea Bright, a longtime utilities lawyer and former legal analyst for the Board of Public Utilities, the regulatory board, to head it.
"People were suspicious of the change and they were afraid of deregulation," Mrs. Peretz said. "They were used to an office that represented residential customers in litigation, but we have moved to a new role that fits into what is now happening in the utility industry. We are not so much litigating these issues anymore, as sitting at a table, and we are representing all classes of customers while helping to restructure the industry."
Mrs. Peretz also dismisses talk that she is afraid or unwilling to bring utilities to court when necessary, pointing to nearly six years as a lawyer for the Attorney General's office assigned to the Board of Public Utilities from the late 1970's to the early 1980's.
During that time, the board also regulated waste haulers in New Jersey, a group repeatedly accused of price fixing and often associated with the mob. Litigation was the preferred weapon, but the fight didn't always remain in court, she said.
"One day the accountant working for me had his brake lines slashed and my son was hit while driving down the highway by a car that then backed off and took the exit ramp," she said. "These things did not change our position."
She said she was also responsible for drafting a consumer bill of rights and helped enforce nascent conservation measures on utilities. It was at the height of the Iranian oil embargo and utilities were clamoring to raise rates.
"The utilities were told when they came in that they not only had to prove they needed higher rates because of escalating prices but also that they had put in policies that would conserve energy," she said. "This was the beginning of regulation based on conservation."
Now, as Ratepayer Advocate, Mrs. Peretz says she is again trying to steer utilities in the proper direction during a time of uncertainly and flux, this time with a minimum of litigation and an eye toward dependable future consumer protections.
"Hopefully in five years we will start to see the impact of deregulation," she said. "But there will be a lot of suppliers in the market and choosing one will be a lot like trying to buy a used car. If we put in the correct structures to safeguard the consumer all consumers will benefit. That's what this office is trying to do."

LOAD-DATE: December 29, 1996

LANGUAGE: ENGLISH

GRAPHIC: Photo: Blossom A. Peretz at a meeting of the Board of Public Utilities. Governor Whitman appointed her the state's first Ratepayer Advocate last June.

Chart: "Blossom A. Peretz: Ratepayer Advocate"

AGE 62

BORN Brooklyn

EDUCATION Wellesley College, A.B., 1954; masters in political science, Yale University, 1955; law degree, Yale, 1958.

CAREER HIGHLIGHTS deputy Attorney General assigned to the Board of Public Utilities, 1977-1983; secretary of the Board of Public Utilities, 1983-87 and 1994-1995; private law practice focusing on utility law, 1988-1994; appointed Ratepayer Advocate, June 1995.

FAMILY Married, 1961 to Walter Peretz, a doctor; three grown children.

INTERESTS Tennis, reading and travel.

The New York Times

March 2, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final

AGRICULTURE;
As Price Supports Fade, Family Dairy Farms Dwindle

BYLINE: By KIT R. ROANE

SECTION: Section 13NJ; Page 6; Column 2; New Jersey Weekly Desk

LENGTH: 1015 words

DATELINE: VERNON

At 41, Warren Baldwin has known no other life but the farm and the milk cow. It was his father's way and it became his, a lifetime of days that began before first light and ended long past dark.
Like many small, family-run farms in the state, Mr. Baldwin's has long been dependent on two vital components: a few score of milk cows and a stable wholesale milk price guaranteed by the Federal Government.
But that guarantee, begun in 1937 in the form of price supports on butter, powdered milk and cheese, will be phased out by the year 2002. This move, combined with the Government's decision earlier in the decade to stop stockpiling these items, has led to wild gyrations in milk prices at a time when the cost of producing milk continues to rise. It has left Mr. Baldwin and other dairy farmers like him in a bind: they must find a way to make their farms profitable or find another way to make a living.
Flight to more stable occupations has left New Jersey as a leader in both farm and cow loss. Between 1990 and 1996, 77 farms and more than 3,000 cows vanished from dairy production in the state. At the same time, Southern superdairies with up to 4,000 head have begun to rule the business.
Volatile prices are not the only reason for the flight. Mr. Baldwin says he now often makes only $12 per hundred pounds of milk, or roughly the same price he got in the late 1970's, though the price of milk in stores continues to rise. Yet the cost of feed has nearly doubled, to $225 a ton, and the $14,000 that would have once bought a new tractor will now pay for only 10 or 15 percent of one.
Mr. Baldwin, like many others, does not know how much longer he can hold out and may soon leave farming to accept a 9-to-5 life of steady paychecks. Instead of planting in the earth, he'll be moving it around as a gravel loader.
"It bothers me, especially when I turn the lights out in the barn and all the cows are resting, looking up at me after a long day of milking," he said. "We raised them and they became part of the family."
"But times have changed," he added. "The last vacation I had was a funeral three years ago and we don't make enough money to even fix the barn. I don't see things getting any better."
Although the number of cows has remained relatively stable over the last five years nationwide, the number of dairy farms decreased by 50,000. And many of the 140,000 or so left are now in Southern states or California, which now has more dairy cows than Wisconsin.
It is a game that few family farmers can afford to play, particularly those in New Jersey, where the average farm size is 80 milking cows and growth is hampered not only by high taxes and labor costs, but also by a lack of available farmland. As a result, the dairy business has rapidly grown unappealing to many of those now growing up on the farm, leaving the battle to dairymen now edging up on old age.
The New Jersey Department of Agriculture has estimated that the state's 230 remaining farms could be lost in the next 25 years unless more efficient milking systems and more diversified farms stem the tide.
Small farms try to survive by linking up with large cooperative dairies, like Dairylea Cooperative, based in Syracuse, N.Y., which has more than 2,600 members from Pennsylvania, New York and New Jersey. Co-ops try to help their clients compete by offering cooperative buying arrangements for everything from seeds, timber and tractors to computers and faxes. They also offer a consulting network of dairy experts for farm planning and try to shop around their members milk for the best price. But it will remain a tough go.
"Right now we are telling our members to expect prices to be more like a roller coaster than a bumpy ride," said Ed Gallagher, director of planning for Dairylea. "All we can do is give some tools to manage through it."
Farmers like Larry Freeborn, 38, are also trying to develop a local market for their wares. A third-generation farmer in Newton, in Sussex County, with 75 of the state's most productive milk cows, he recently began farming produce on some of his land, and also sells freezer beef and hay locally. His wife supplements the family income by working off the farm as a part-time speech therapist and he has plans to double his milking herd.
"I'm putting in 80 hours a week with these cows but I still can't survive without moving into other businesses," said Mr. Freeborn, patting cow No. 39, otherwise known as Peaches, as his dog, Nala, nipped at his duck boots. What followed was a common litany of dairyman complaints: manipulation of milk prices by big cheese producers, bankers who won't lend money to to dairies and a history of people like Mr. Freeborn who must pay retail costs while getting wholesale prices for their milk.
Turning to his agricultural agent, Bob Mickel, he added with frustration that another option had been considered in conversation during the last wrestling match at the local high school. It was up in the bleachers -- between matches, he assured.
"We could dump the milk," he whispered. "We could have a milk strike. Two months' loss is not much sacrifice for 25 years of gain."
But it was a fleeting thought, he admitted, because no one knows more than a New Jersey dairyman just how little power he really has. The big dairies coming up in the South would probably just use a strike to increase their market, he said, and even small, debt-soaked farms in New Jersey would likely cave in to reap some profit from the higher prices that came from a shortage of milk.
He quickly switched to more pleasant conversation: how his two older girls were active in Four-H and his son Zachary, 5, plowed more carpet in the house with his tiny metal tractors than his father did earth on his 450 acres. The thought of getting out like Mr. Baldwin drew a shudder.
"I never thought about that," he said, lifting his cap to wipe his brow. "I don't know if I would encourage my kids to get into this because there's no money here and it's hard work. But it's what I do and I'm going to make it work."

The New York Times

October 10, 1996, Thursday, Late Edition - Final

PLAYOFFS;
High Drama, Hi-jinks, High-Fives

BYLINE: By KIT R. ROANE

SECTION: Section B; Page 20; Column 1; Sports Desk

LENGTH: 556 words

Yankee Stadium offered up high drama this evening, giving baseball fans both a villain to boo and a hero to cheer, lessons to forget and to learn.
The self-described "animals" in the back bleachers had come out to tar the Orioles' second baseman, Roberto Alomar, the man reviled for spitting in an umpire's face in the last week of regular season.
But they were softened by a boy with a golden glove. Twelve-year-old Jeff Maier, in the bottom of the eighth, reached out his 3-year-old glove to thwart an Oriole catch, pulled it in, then watched the ball fall to a mob of fans as the Orioles protested the whole turn of events.
Asked whether he was sorry that he had caught the ball, Jeff looked up and said: "Hey, the ball landed in my mitt. I don't think they should be mad, I'm just a 12-year-old who caught a ball."
It was a bright moment in a game largely focused on Alomar's indiscretion and the fans' desire to express their irritation with him. From his first bat, he was a target.
"Yo, Roberto, I got a shoe you can spit-shine for me," yelled Ed Gonzales as the man he had come to revile pranced onto the Yankees' battlefield. Other, more vulgar comments were heard as well.
Some feared violence at the game, with Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani pleading with Yankee fans to turn their back on the unpopular ballplayer instead of ratcheting the mood toward physical attack.
Just in case, hundreds of police officers roamed about the Stadium or sat dispersed secretly through the crowds ready to whip the legendary ruffians of Yankee Stadium into shape should one chose to violate the peace.
But not one battery was thrown, at least not conspicuously, at Alomar as he emerged from his bunker in the Orioles' dugout, or ran across the field. And little but a rousing boo would be his legacy for most of the game.
The fans said they had come to teach Alomar a lesson, and even in the bleachers there was consensus it would not be accomplished by a brawl.
"I'm not going to stoop to his level," said Mike Verdi, 22, as he raised his cardboard "spit" shield.
"I mean, I'll give him a piece of my mind and I'll yell, but I'd never touch him because that is totally out of line," he said. "That's what sets us apart from people like him, people who spit on umps."
Glen Cucinotta, a Yankee fan for more than two decades added that baseball didn't clean its own house by giving Alomar a slap on the wrist and that fans "would remember until this thing is righted."
But that 12-year-old's luck softened the blow for much of the game, giving many of those obsessed with Alomar a new more hopeful object to glorify.
"Hey, sign my hat," said Carlow Garcia, 29, waving a big red and white, "Cat in the Hat" hat in front of Jeff's face.
"This kid's gonna be famous some day," he said. "He's let all those big-time ballplayers know that it's not just about them, that a kid can come here and make a dream come true too. That's the game."
When Bernie Williams hit his game-winning home run a flurry of bottles were tossed out of the left-field stands, which resulted in 11 disorderly conduct charges, and more were expected to be be filed last night.
"That was really uncalled for, and I didn't expect it," said one Sgt. Lopez. "One bottle is too many and there was certainly more than one coming out from the stands."

The New York Times

June 29, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final

From Shore To Ships And Beyond

BYLINE: By KIT R. ROANE

SECTION: Section 13NJ; Page 1; Column 1; New Jersey Weekly Desk

LENGTH: 2898 words

DATELINE: NEWARK

THE roar of the trucks was penetrating, seeming to set the sturdy iron cross humming on the wall. Then a ship in the distance let out a hoarse wail, completing a symphonic greeting to the Seaman's Church Institute of New York & New Jersey.
Inside, the Rev. Jean R. Smith, the director of the Institute's Seafarers' Services, sat cloistered with other ministers, heads bowed under candlelight, a prayer on their lips.
The list would begin with specifics: a homeless man encountered in last night's rain, his wife in a hospital cancer ward; a waitress trying to find God; a trucker who had collapsed on the job the day before; prostitutes in Madagascar; couples about to marry; priests in ports and on roads around the world. It would end with a nod to us all.
For more than a century, this Episcopal charity has served the needs of sailors, helping more people a year than any other work-place ministry in North America and offering one of the few hands-on training programs in labor ministry in the country, according to the Episcopal Church and other religious groups.
The Institute, an outgrowth of an earlier floating port ministry begun in 1834, has rolled with a multitude of changes in commerce and constituency in recent decades, leaving behind early concerns over shanghaied sailors to focus on the more complex situations resulting from the increase in foreign-flagged ships with multi-ethnic crews visiting the port and the explosion of truck traffic there.
Linked with scores of other port ministries across the globe, the Institute has helped raise money for other work-place ministries, trained hundreds of ministers from a variety of religious traditions and helped protect working men and women by stepping in when companies withheld their pay or forced unsafe or unfair conditions on them.
"This is a significant and ambitious program with an international reach," said James Thrall, a deputy director with the Episcopal Church. "They are serving a non-traditional constituency, focusing on the pastoral, spiritual and physical needs of people who for the most part either don't go to church or have occupations that keep them on the road and far from home most of the time."
"They are going aboard ships and into truck stops, helping stowaways and seamen working in impossible conditions," he continued. "Much of it is day-to-day stuff, providing a home away from home, but sometimes their interjection can mean the difference between life or death for these people."
The era of the floating chapel ended in 1912 when the Institute built the nation's first full-service seafarers' center on South Street in lower Manhattan. It then moved its International Seafarers Center to New Jersey shortly before the ports of Newark and Elizabeth started accepting ships in 1962, though its branches for advocacy and seamen's retraining remain in New York City.
Building upon its success with seafarers, the Institute began a trucking ministry three years ago, assigning a full-time chaplain, based in Newark, to truckers' needs and setting up an information area complete with maps, trucker magazines and photographs of the highway life -- taken by a trucker, Marc F. Wise, who had once made his living as a photographer.
The ministry will soon expand up America's rivers, having just christened a center to offer both job training and religious counsel in Paducah, Ky., where the heavily traveled Ohio and Tennessee rivers meet.
This $6 million center will use the nation's first interactive inland river simulator to teach navigation to more than 600 people a year. The training will be paid for by barge companies, concerned because there are now more than 3,000 river accidents a year.
Mrs. Smith said the Institute also plans to open a ministry at the river center that will link up with preachers along the nation's waterways -- offering counseling and advocacy that seafarers and truckers have grown accustomed to receiving in Newark.
There, visitors are encouraged to take part in daily interdenominational services, use the center's showers and beds, relax in its cafeteria, play sports on its field, or work out in an upstairs fitness center. Some take back Bibles -- available in nearly a dozen languages -- while others are given used clothing donated by local churches. Every Christmas more than 13,000 seafarers receive care packages, each bundle containing caps, socks and other necessities knit by volunteers around the country.
The Institute's $4.8 million annual budget, which is funded by donations, grants and the selling of international phone cards, pays for Bibles, legal help and retraining programs. It also helps cover the cost of 14 full-time and 8 part-time staff members at the center, where more than 200,000 seafarers from 60 countries receive direct assistance every year.
"We don't do religion here, we do people," said Mrs. Smith, 52, the director of the center for the last seven years.
"These workers are risking their lives every day to bring us our cocoa, paper and booze, spending months away from home and their families," she said, before heading out to visit ships one morning. "We are here for them, helping people on the move."

Working in Newark, Seeing the World
This day would be fairly typical for Mrs. Smith and her colleagues. During the night, 19 cargo and passenger ships had docked at ports in the New York and New Jersey harbors. Each one would be reached, the sailors asked about their problems and offered a safe place on land to relax, the ships given a hard glance for signs that their workers were being mistreated.
In portside parking lots, scores of big rigs would hold truckers, pausing in their transient life to search for spiritual solace or a hot meal. Then there was the trucker who had collapsed with a gall bladder attack last evening. He would be visited in the hospital, his truck checked and his family told of his condition.
All of this and more was on Mrs. Smith's mind as she zipped down the dock, past crashing containers and monstrous cargo-moving cranes sliding their long legs along the macadam. She knew many of these ships, remembered those that were well maintained and those with spotty records. And those she didn't recall received an especially close inspection, her eyes darting over the ship's metal and the food in the galley like a stubborn scientist searching out a disease.
"Each vessel is a different world," she explained, walking up the gangplank of the Dainty River, a Panama-flag vessel with a Taiwanese crew on its maiden docking in the port.
Few companies refuse to let representatives of the Institute on their ships. And should it happen, an army of informers, from longshoremen to port officials, usually turns up at the Institute providing information as to why.
"We've been around for more than one hundred years, so we have some clout," Mrs. Smith said. "Most of them are well-run but every once and awhile they are more like floating prisons. Sometimes the crew isn't allowed on shore, or you find they haven't been paid. Some vessels you don't find water on the table because the ship's in arrears and they are rationing it. You never know what to expect."
The Dainty River proved to be spotless, the crew mystified by the woman gliding down the corridor with promises of a helping hand on shore and phone cards for a fee. Yang Li Man, the ship's 49-year-old captain, showed her proudly into his office.
It had taken a month to reach the port from Hong Kong, a small section in the six-month stretches that he usually pulled on the ship. He was apologetic in explaining to Mrs. Smith that neither he, nor his crew, would be able to visit the center on this trip because customs officials would be busy most of the day checking their credentials and cargo. By midnight, the Dainty River would be on to other destinations.
"It is a hard job," he said glumly, before ticking off the ports down the coastline still be visited. "Every time I go home, my wife asks me to stay. But this is my job and I must continue on the sea."
Mrs. Smith made a mental note to send a Chinese-speaking minister to the ship later in the afternoon, then continued with a story about the difficulties some foreign crews have had understanding her mission.
"Sometimes they ask me if I can find them a woman," she said with a laugh. "I just tell them that it's not part of my job description."
The Guayama would be next, with crew members from the United States, Indonesia and Yemen working their cargo as Mrs. Smith walked about making her presence known. Breaking for hamburgers in the galley, workers would joke with friends, telling them that they had been bad and "she's coming to convert you." A few would slide up silently to hear about the Institute and ask where they might talk alone later in the afternoon.
It was the same in all the ships that Mrs. Smith visited: requests for lodging on another trip, thanks for past good deeds and at least one hint from a captain that a sailor with drug or alcohol problems might be calling soon.
"You try to read between the lines," she said.
As a strong wind blew the choppy gray water, Mrs. Smith recounted the four-year-old story of a Filipino sailor with a mangled hand who had been prevented by his captain from leaving the ship for treatment.
Mrs. Smith walked the young man down the plank and into a clinic, then found the captain yelling profanities at her when they returned. She could have ignored him or written a letter to his boss in the shipping company, but instead they went into his office for a private chat.
It turned out that the captain was running a ship where roughly half the crew was Orthodox Serb and the other half Catholic Croat during a period of brutal war between the two religious rivals back in their homeland of the former Yugoslavia. As they sat, he talked of being a Croat, the fear for his wife at home and his brother now fighting there.
"I could have just labeled him as an animal," she said. "But it turned out that he was confronting very real issues that I could help him deal with. Now he calls me every time he is in the port and the young Filipino writes me all the time."

Answering a Call To a New Ministry
Mrs. Smith had never intended to do work-place ministry when she graduated from the Church Divinity School of the Pacific in Berkeley, Calif. She had trained to preach in a parish and for 10 years worked happily in the more traditional setting of Trinity Church in Princeton. But in 1990, Episcopal officials asked her to think about moving to the port and since then she has become a vocal advocate of the sort of work-place ministries that are now growing rapidly across America.
"Here we have some of the most vulnerable workers in the world, people cut off from their communities for months at a time with no one to complain to should something go wrong," she said. "I hadn't thought about leaving the parish setting, but when I got out here I became very excited."
"The only reason for a steeple is to call people to a need," she added with a smile. "And there is a need here."
Such ministries are in many ways a response to a changing society, one in which people increasingly seek spiritual meaning in their daily lives, outside church walls. In the last three decades this has helped a steady growth in labor ministry, with programs popping up for miners, loggers, nurses and truckers.
At the same time, there has been a surge in the number of lay people teaching through example at their work places or joining groups of like-minded professionals to ponder the spiritual and moral questions that arise on the job.
People of all religious traditions are confronting these questions, according to Gregory Pierce, co-publisher of ACTA Publications, a Catholic publishing house in Chicago, who said he knows of at least 40 books on the subject being published this year. His own booklist includes a series called "The Spirituality of Work," with volumes by nurses, teachers, homemakers, visual artists and, most recently, military personnel.
"The old formula was to see church as a refuge from the world, a place to get away from daily activity, to find silence, solitude and surrender," he said. "That still works for some people but a lot of others are very active in their lives and want to make that activity the grist for their spiritual mills."
"People have values," said Mr. Pierce, noting that he meets regularly with a group of Christian businessmen in Chicago to talk about issues like terminations, layoffs, and wages, all within a spiritual framework. "The underlying question is do we do anything differently because of our moral beliefs or do we base everything on what the market will bear?"
One of the Institute's most pressing goals is to begin teaching work-place ministry to laymen like the ones Mr. Pierce describes. The center already has a program that trains a dozen seminarians and chaplains a year, with a 10-month program designed for international students and a 10-week course for summer interns. The students are also farmed out to other work places, like the University of Medicine and Dentistry in Newark, and East Rahway Prison.
Mrs. Smith thinks the program could be useful for people who don't want to formally enter the ministry.
"These could be people with no interest in wearing a collar but would like some training in work-place ministry," she said, nothing that the janitor at her Princeton church was known as "the pastor to the staff." "There are people everywhere known by their peers as the one who can keep a confidence or has good advice to give. We could give them two weeks and show them what it's like to be a work-place minister."
Many of the Institute's interns this summer began in as laymen with a knack for helping out their fellow workers, deciding many years down the line to turn their spirituality into their vocation.
Meeting in the center's cafeteria to discuss their day, the interns recalled how they had reached this point.
Jeff Crim, a 23-year-old Quaker from Chattanooga, spent time in nursing homes and helped repair churches and other buildings in Belize before coming to study at the Institute. Another intern, Reuben E. Thompson, 43, left the Navy and worked nine years in the post office before his move. "I have some insight to what seamen go through," he said, adding that he first began his schooling during off-hours at the post office in Manhattan.
"I found out that work is where people go through their problems and if you open yourself up to them, then people will come to you," he said. "The focus isn't on religion so much as letting people know that you are there to listen."
Gary Jones, a 53-year-old divinity student at Emmanuel College in Toronto, spent most of his life in afactory in Canada, working enormous caldrons of molten steel out of an open hearth furnace.
"It was long hours in a place where you could smell the heat and outside there was little but temptation, drinking and whoring around," he said sheepishly, adding that he plans to work as a minister to loggers, miners and truckers in a remote Canadian outpost when he finishes divinity school.
"I feel there is a need for a gentle presence, a helping hand, in these places," he said. "We often talk about the ministry of being present, being there as people are really moving through the problems and pains of life. I think we have to be present in order to offer a refuge, an oasis, in a tough world."
Expaining that this presence had to encompass more than the workplace and the nine-to-five hours of a regular job, Mr. Thompson added that the interns' day had really begun at midnight, awakened by the sound of scraping outside their dorm and the sight of a weary man readying his bed under the stars. They made him sandwiches, gave him blankets and offered an ear. Mr. Thompson ended up sitting for 40 minutes as the homeless man reeling off tales of his wife dying in a cancer ward and his life on the street.
"Being a chaplain here means helping anyone who you come into contact with because the whole earth is our missionary field," he said.

16 Wheels And No One to Talk To
Rolling out tales of mishap and tedium during their downtime at the cafeteria, seafarers and truckers spoke of this brief respite from a world of unsafe trucks and hexed ships, long hours, little pay, bad marriages and the bad life. George Brown, 41, years old and as large as a house, sat over his coffee and worried that he would have to "bobtail" home -- drive back without a load, making just enough to pay for gas.
"It's lonely out there and there's a lot of people talking about their troubles," he said, adding that there's seldom much sympathy on the road.
Charlie Campbell, a 48-year-old driver from Akron, Ohio, piped up that he couldn't agree more.
"These people here are the first preachers I ever talked to," he said.
"I've seen them get drunk sailors back to their ships and help all sorts of people, like me, under stress," he said, packing up his 94 Peterbilt rig for the run home. "You need a place like this when you're a trucker because we've got no money and most people treat us lower than a dog. Everybody needs someone they can trust, someone who doesn't let the collar get in the way of a good ear. I bless them every day."

GRAPHIC: Photos: The Rev. Jean R. Smith of Seaman's Church Institute, which was once housed on a barge, below. She was leaving the Guayama, a cargo ship docked in Newark. (Norman Y. Lono for The New York Times)(pg. 1); The Rev. Jean R. Smith and her colleagues starting the day with planning and prayer. While visiting the vessel Dainty River, Mrs. Smith talked with crew members from Taiwan. George Brown, an Ohio trucker, visited the Seaman's Institute before heading home. Mrs. Smith's job is a long way from the Princeton parish where she used to preach. (Photographs by Norman Y. Lono for The New York Times); A view of the old Seaman's Church Institute on South Street. On top is the Titanic Memorial Lighthouse, commemorating the sinking of the ship in 1912. When the Institute's building was demolished in 1968, the lighthouse was donated to the South Street Seaport.

The New York Times

June 15, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final

IN PERSON;
The Hip-Hop Man

BYLINE: By KIT R. ROANE

SECTION: Section 13NJ; Page 4; Column 1; New Jersey Weekly Desk

LENGTH: 1168 words

DATELINE: MADISON

BEHIND the battered brown apartment door, past the stacks of social polemics and under the pensive gaze of Miles Davis, Bruce Grant is crouched on the floor, starting to compose.
It is slow going at first, his rough hands working in and out of shoe boxes filled with tapes, thrusting selections into a series of Walkmans resting by his work shoes. He whirls dials, speakers crackle and a beat begins to filter through the room. Over comes an atmospheric layering of sound; then Elizabeth Taylor, her voice slowed to a drawl, asks for a man and a knife.
Surrounded by middle-class Madison, Mr. Grant, 47, a disabled former plumber, lives on a welfare stipend in a subsidized walk-up, amid decades of collected sound and mountains of black history. Though white, Mr. Grant has steeped himself in black culture and language. Though schooled in the American work ethic, he prefers to quote from Ho Chi Minh.
And though pushing 50 with virtually no musical training, he has become something of a local guru in the progressive hip-hop music movement now fueling gyrations in dance clubs by those half his age.
"He's original, a fat white plumber who's a musical and technical genius," said El-P, a 22-year-old hip-hop artist from Brooklyn, who describes Mr. Grant's sound as often dark, like "the feeling of a population of children dying," or claustrophobic, like "the soundtrack for a robotic ant farm."
"He's just ill'in," concluded El-P, using one of hip-hop's grandest compliments. "This man is literally recording 22 tracks of music on the fly with nothing but eight Walkmans and a mixer -- stuff more complex than any music I've ever heard. He cannot be duplicated."
Hip-hop, the movement that encompasses the rap music begun in the early 80's, has several offshoots of its own. Mr. Grant's sound is best thought of as a low-fi rendering of "trip-hop," which backs the sampling and rhythms found in hip-hop with dance beats and layers of slow, moody, atmospheric sounds or singing to create a musical collage. While hip-hop composers have traditionally used synthesizers and samplers to create these patterns and textures, Mr. Grant, who has adopted Huge Voodoo as his professional name, masters a more primitive process akin to early humans' use of flint and sticks to start a fire. He relies on piles of edited and manipulated tape recordings, which are played in Walkmans and then refashioned as they run through a small mixing board. The tapes are further altered by changing the voltage on the cassette decks or by using worn-out batteries to manipulate the sound.
Mr. Grant's instrument is the board, which he uses to throw out sounds like a shaman tossing mystically charged bones on the floor.
"I call it chance systematically explored," said Mr. Grant, his hands in a mad dance across the tape-strewn floor, his mouth sucking on a cigarette. "It's an organically produced sonic adventure."
Mr. Grant's music speaks to his social conscience, one reflected in the lifetime collection of sounds and words slowly encroaching on what little walkway is left in his small apartment. To his left are piles of books, "The Politics of Rich and Poor," "Arguments About Slavery," "The Revolt of the Elites," peeking out from what he sees as a grim presence in his book stack, "The Central Intelligence Agency."
To his back, portraits of Bobby Seale and Huey Newton fight for wall space. On the table, yellowed clippings of war and plague rest dangerously close to ash trays. In front, there are his raw materials -- the taped clips of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X and Eldridge Cleaver, readings from James Joyce's "Ulysses," talk of feminism and sex, and snippets of obscure film dialogue -- the narrative for Mr. Grant's moral messages.
"Politically and socially, I am aware enough to be a really righteous person," he explained with an exhale that brought back the most enlightening moment of his youth in Union Township. He was 14, a fan of rock music about to encounter his first Muddy Waters album at a Newark record store. "I took it home and found out that the Rolling Stones were ripping off black men who couldn't get play on white radio," he explained, saying that the history revolving around him from that point on -- the King assassination, the Vietnam War, Watergate and the Newark riots -- has jaundiced his eye forever. "It became clear that all the good in the world was being snatched from us, so I turned to psychic activism," he said.
Producing it hasn't been an easy go, for the life of rebellion is not well rewarded.
Odd jobs have been the rule, from record store clerk and construction worker to his final and longest-held job, as a plumber. He learned that trade at Showplace, a now-defunct concert hall in Victory Gardens. He also learned to mix sound. Although the mixing has remained, Mr. Grant left behind two decades of plumbing in 1995 after he hurt his back lifting 80-pound sacks of salt. Since then, he has lived on welfare checks and the kindness of friends.
He has yet to become a commercial success, although he has stepped into national television by accompanying poets like Reg E. Gaines and Maggie Estep on an MTV spoken-word series and folded his sounds into the recordings and stage shows of young hip-hop artists like Mike Ladd.
"He's a really gifted guy who's spent much of his career making others look great but has somehow been overlooked himself," said Dennis Kelley, a New Jersey-based music producer who worked with Todd Rundgren in the 70's. Brother Cleve, a longtime friend of Mr. Grant's and a member of the popular band Combustible Edison, added that this role in the shadows seemed almost by design, noting that his friend "seems driven to create and work with sound, whatever the cost."
ALL this could be changing. Word of mouth, and a cult following for an extended-play album on vinyl, has led Mr. Grant to a producer willing to press his first full-length CD. The producer, Amaechi Uzoigwe of the Manic label in Manhattan, like most others in hip-hop, is half Mr. Grant's age and amazed by the sound of this middle-aged loafer.
"He's a futuristic, primitive composer coming up from the underground," said Mr. Uzoigwe, explaining Mr. Grant's sound as "a progressive electronica, trip-hop kind of abstract stream-of-consciousness collage" before stumbling to the conclusion that "it's just dope" -- that is, wonderful. "We're going to make Bruce a star, like he should have been a long time ago," he added.
It's an impressive thought for Mr. Grant, though one tempered by a history of toil and musical disappointment. "It's kind of exciting, but the future is really a big X because I'm kind of old to be a rock-and-roll star," he said, stroking his Vandyke and looking back toward his Miles Davis poster before walking guests to his door. "Whatever the case, I'll keep the faith and do what it takes to get the message out. We need a lot of magic to make the world a better place."
"Peace," he said.

The New York Times

June 8, 1997, Sunday, Late Edition - Final

IN PERSON;
The Key to the Booth

BYLINE: By KIT R. ROANE

SECTION: Section 13NJ; Page 4; Column 1; New Jersey Weekly Desk

LENGTH: 1571 words

AT least twice a year, every June and every November, New Jerseyans are asked to cast their votes, rushing out before breakfast, during lunch hours and after work to polling places in classrooms, parking garages, gymnasiums and apartment buildings.
They may -- or may not -- know something about the candidates. But they almost certainly don't know anything about the army of workers who have devoted themselves, some of them for decades, to keeping the political process running smoothly. Some of them, loyal to a specific party or candidate, do most of their work before Election Day, sending out letters, ringing doorbells and making phone calls, to make sure that voters know there is an election coming up and who the party's preferred candidate is. Others handle the nitty-gritty work on Election Day, keeping careful records on who comes to the polls and making sure the voting machines are properly tallying the votes that are cast.
Here are three of the hundreds of workers who made Tuesday's primary possible.

In Search of Republicans In a Town of Democrats
Fifty-four years ago, Anna Fontana knocked on her first door with Republican petitions in hand. And it was quickly slammed in her face.
"I came home crying and told my husband that I never wanted to go out ever again," she said with a laugh. "But he told me next year would be better. It was, and I've been doing it ever since."
At 77, Mrs. Fontana is something of a legend in the overwhelmingly Democratic city of Hoboken, a woman who still often handwrites hundreds of letters encouraging Republicans in her district to vote and Democrats to change their allegiances.
Politics is in her marrow, the standard of her social dealings and perhaps the only subject where she gives no quarter: Democrats put up their mitts at the door. Although she comes from what she euphemistically calls a "mixed family," on her wedding day, and at her husband's bidding, she joined the Republican ranks. Since then, it's been a family affair: doors knocked, buzzers rung, leaflets dropped and signs posted.
Even her two sons were not spared. Republicanism was drilled harder than religion at the dinner table, and their bicycles often carried a Republican political slogan or two around town during playtime.
To turn Democrat was a sin. The only greater transgression was not to vote at all, she said, recalling that one of her two sons once decided he wasn't going to the polls. "I countered that I wasn't going to iron any more of his shirts," she said.
Mrs. Fontana, who was working for the Board of Elections by then, saw him enter the voting booth the next day. "Of course he voted Republican," she said. "That was a house rule."
Over the years, countless neighborhood doors have opened to Mrs. Fontana, and she says her efforts have even helped produce a few Republican victories in the Democratic bastion. She has also made a lot of friends on both sides of the aisle.
"It wasn't easy in the beginning, but even that first couple who didn't want anything to do with me let me in the next year," she said. "Now we have coffee together all the time."
"I enjoy people, love politics and think of voting as both an honor and a privilege," she added. The only time she hasn't made it to the polls was when she was giving birth to a son.
And she is already readying a new generation of Republican Fontanas to take over when she can no longer do the job.
"When my grandson was 4, I showed him an absentee ballot and explained what it was," she said. "I don't know if he understood, but we're working on it."

An Education Student And a Student of Politics
On Tuesday, while her friends at St. Peter's College in Jersey City were studying for tests to come or celebrating those they had survived, Alyson Breitwieser was sifting through a large book for the records of voters whose last names began with the letters A to M.
It was the 19-year-old education student's second stint as a $125-a-day poll worker, a job she first took mainly out of curiosity about the process, but also in a deliberate effort to inject a little youth into the scene.
"I thought I'd breathe a little new life into it," she said, adding that she had talked a few friends into doing the same. "The older people always say it's nice to see a young face behind the books. It makes you feel good and like you're making a difference."
Ms. Breitwieser's day at the Jersey City polling station lasted from 6 A.M. to past 9 P.M. And since the Board of Elections is always critically short of workers, she had to work two districts on Tuesday, although luckily they were set up at the same apartment building lobby.
While there, she matched voters in the books, handed out voting authority slips and worked the polling machines, then packed up everything in the hour after the polls closed.
The Board of Elections had given all poll workers a class explaining their duties: how to make sure people sign the book correctly, how to insert the key and break the seal that opens the polling machines, and how to tally the votes after the night was over.
Ms. Breitwieser said she also learned about the law, at least enough to know when it was proper to call the police on overzealous political workers outside the station. Last year, she did just that when one of the barkers outside used a bullhorn to woo voters to his candidate. "That's illegal," she said. "It's one of the things I learned in this job."
Although she usually votes Democratic, Ms. Breitwieser registered as a Republican because the Board of Elections, at least in Hudson County, is chronically short of workers from that party. Every district must be staffed by at least four workers, two registered Democrats and two registered Republicans. In districts where at least 10 percent of the population is Hispanic, the law requires two additional bilingual workers, one from each side of the aisle.
Echoing a refrain common among the older workers who are veterans of many Election Days, she said very few of her generation had the same volition either to enter or to work the polls. Many of her friends just don't vote. The young say the government is full of old people and doesn't represent their interests.
"I found out that very few people cast a ballot, and the ones that do are usually older," Ms. Breitwieser said, noting that once a young man drove his mother to the polls but didn't come in to vote himself.
"Everyone seems to have an excuse to fit," she said. "But I feel that if you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem. There would be young politicians if young people voted, and if they don't, they're just throwing their rights away."

Talking to Friends And Keeping the Books
Laura Zukowsky is tired. Who can blame her?
At 76, she has spent more than 25 years lugging heavy voter books to Jersey City polling stations, combating car fumes in some that were set up in parking garages, and dealing with disgruntled voters who whined about the wait or insisted on writing in the names of cartoon characters as candidates.
"They ask you why you can't hurry up or don't know how to vote, even though it's written on the back of the ballot," she complained, adding that such voters seem drawn to her table every year because she's so nice -- even if their names don't fall in the part of the alphabet over which she is presiding "The worst are the ones who write Mickey Mouse in, and then we have to pull all that paper out, rip it off and count it as a vote. They have no idea how difficult that makes our lives."
Mrs. Zukowsky took the two-day-a-year job when a friend had a toothache and needed a replacement at the polls. She stuck with it for the camaraderie and conversation.
"I like to talk, and while work comes before pleasure, there's usually lots of time to chat," she explained, adding that she had lots of friends who came in to see her after voting.
"And since I like to cook, its a good place to pick up hints for my cooking," she whispered. "You're never too old to find a new tip."
But as she has aged, with many of her friends leaving town or too frail to go out much, the lure of the polling station has increasingly waned. After all, it is foremost a social occasion for Mrs. Zukowsky, a place to talk of cuisine and crocheting. And with fewer old friends around, she says she might get just as much out of Election Day if she stayed home and talked on the telephone.
Besides, she said, working the polls cramps her own efforts to vote. Poll workers are not necessarily assigned to the districts where they live.
She made it this time only because her husband, Walter, picked her up on her lunch break. They drove the 10 or so blocks together to cast their votes.
But while she has repeatedly tried to give up her duties, every election finds her back on the job.
"I'm always threatening to quit, but they plead with me to stay," she said, adding, "There just aren't any young people interested, though they're the first ones to squawk when things go bad."
Because of this, Mrs. Zukowsky said she will probably still be holding court at a fold-up table well into her 80's.
"A lot of people my age are ready for the shroud to come and take them away, but not me," she said. "I want to live every day to the fullest. So, while I've got my marbles and am still able to move, I'll probably be doing this. Somebody's got to."

GRAPHIC: Photos: Laura Zukowsky organizing election materials in Jersey City. Assigned outside her home district, she barely has time to vote herself. Anna Fontana in her Hoboken kitchen, a Republican stronghold. (Photographs by James Estrin/The New York Times)