_'

JUN[/JULY 1996 $3.0 (

Solitary
Psychosis
Kids in
the Cage
A Parolee's
O dyssey
T W ( M T I ( T H A M M I V ( R S A R Y Y ( A R 1 9 1 6 - 1 9 9 6

Unchained
G
ood news arrived from Albany last month when the state
Senate Republicans decided to align with assembly
Democrats in support of a budget that pushes aside
Governor George Pataki's most extreme proposals. Among the policy
ideas at least temporarily left behind: the governor's plans for yet
another massive expansion of the state prison system, lengthy new sen-
tences for several different types of felonies and-most shortsighted and
political of all of the governor's ideas this year-the transfer of 16-year-
old juvenile offenders from teen residential facilities to adult prisons.
Perhaps it's politically acceptable to train impressionable kids how
to be especially violent. But criminal justice experts already know that
treating teenage criminals as adults increases the
...... ,.. .. ~ .... -.-: ... ".. - chances they will commit more crimes when they get
older and makes it more likely they will end up in prison

EDITORIAL
again when they become adults themselves.
This is only one way state governments across the
country exacerbate urban crime problems. Our special
report on prisons in this issue looks at the rapid increase
in the use of solitGlY confinement and the psychological damage it can
cause inmates who ultimately return to our neighborhoods. We look at
the reduction in funding for rehabilitation programs. And for a better
understanding of the tens of thousands of ex-offenders who live in the
city, we profile one man's struggle to break free of his criminal past after
six years inside.
The lesson here is not that New York should have more sympathy for
criminals. It's about comprehending the consequences of locking people
up, agreeing honestly on what it takes to rehabilitate people, and decid-
ing what we should expect from the state before it releases prisoners
back into our communities. Prison is only a temporGlY solution for
crime, and our corrections empire is already an extraordinary drain on
taxes. The New York State system has tripled in size since 1983.
As one top parole official told City Limits, "These guys come back
to the street worse than they were when they went in."
***
A memorial service for I. Donald Terner, the founding executive
director of the Urban Homesteading Assistance Board, will be held June
19 from 1 :00 to 2 :30 pm at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine,
Amsterdam Avenue at West l12th Street. For information on the service
or on how to make donations in Don's memory, call (212) 226-4119.
Cover illustration by Kenneth M. Blumberg
(ity Limits
Volume XXI Number 6
City Limits is published ten times per year, monthly except
bi-monthly issues in June/July and August/September, by
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concerning neighborhood revitalization.
Editor: Andrew White
Senior Editors: Kim Nauer, Glenn Thrush
Special Projects Editor: Kierna Mayo Dawsey
Contributing Editors: James Bradley, Linda Ocasio,
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Pran Institute Center for Community
and Environmental Development
Urban Homesteading Assistance Board
Board of Directors":
Eddie Bautista, New York Lawyers for
the Public Interest
Beverly Cheuvront, City Harvest
Francine Justa, Neighborhood Housing Services
Errol Louis, Central Brooklyn Partnership
Rima McCoy, Action for Community Empowerment
Rebecca Reich, Low Income Housing Fund
Andrew Reicher, UHAB
Tom Robbins, Journalist
Jay Small, ANHD
Doug Turetsky, former City Limits Editor
Pete Williams, National Urban League
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CITY LIMITS
JUNE/ JULY 1996
FEATURES
Rage in the Cage
Solitary confinement may sound like a good way to deal with hardened prisoners
-until they're released and hit the streets. When inmates come out of "the hole"
and return home with psychological damage, it's the people around them who
get punished. By Sasha Abramsky and Andrew White
Paroled
An ex-bus driver, shipped home from state prison, fInds no easy way in the
free world. Staying off crack and out of jail is tough. Figuring out what to do with
his life is tougher. By Amanda Bower
Double Exposure
Brian Weirs AIDS photographs and his angry advocacy for needle exchange won him more
than his share of acolytes and enemies. But in the end, the man who strove to inhabit other
people's lives died alone of a heroin overdose. By DylJJn Foley and Glenn Thrush
PROFILE
Worldly Ambitions
France's Fourth World Movement is taking lessons on poverty in East New York.
By Isabelle de Pommereau
PIPELINES
Harmony Rising
Everyone's talking about reforming child welfare, but the voices of parents and children
caught in the system have only just begun to be heard. By Seema Nayyar
Air Assault
Asthma, colds, bronchitis, nosebleeds-what's in the air? Hunts Point residents
yearn to breathe free. By Kemba Johnson
@CTIVISM
Web Research Central
Nine ways to frnd the answer, on-line. By Steve Mitra
COMMENTARY
The Press 131
Industrial Noise By James Bradley
Cityview 132
Chicago Hope By Jon Kest
Review 133
The Ungrateful Dead By Norman Adler
Spare Change 138
Four Comers
By Camilo Jose Vergara
DEPARTMEMTS
Briefs
6, 7 Editorial
Public Housing Stealth Attack
Wisdom in Action
Budget Menu: Rudy's Cold Cuts
Letters
Professional
Directory
Job Ads
2
4
36,37
37
M

Sorry, Sal
We have enormous respect and affec-
tion for Msgr. John Powis, whose inter-
view ["Father of the People"] appeared in
the April issue. It is hard to think of a more
persistent and effective community advo-
cate over the last 30 years.
At the same time, we believe Msgr.
Powis made several statements
Smok. In Your Artlel.
.. _ .. _ - - ~ - " . , . " ... - that require correction. The whole
Industrial Areas Foundation
(IAF) network has no intention of
breaking our 20-year tradition of
Aside from the virtue of revealing how
a motivated group of citizens can affect a
vote of the City Council, your interview
with John Powis does little to enlighten
readers about the real issues of whether the
fire boxes should be removed or not. I
believe you have the responsibility to pro-
vide both sides of an issue, including state-
ments from the politicians your subject
criticizes.
Norman Kaufman
Upper East Side
~ .
L E T T E R S
political nonpartisanship by
endorsing a candidate in the
upcoming mayoral election. We
do not plan to "rally around" any
candidates for public office, as Msgr.
Powis implied. We do intend to register,
train and mobilize thousands of additional
New Yorkers in the election cycle begin-
ning in 1996 and ending in 1998.
Mike Gecan, Rev. Bob Crabb
and eight co-signers
Metro IAF
Colorblind Rud.nus
As a white male professional who has
always dressed in a suit and is usually
carrying a briefcase, I must take excep-
tion to [black parent] Anthony Morton's
feelings that his rude reception in a local
school was based on racism ["Race
Factor," May 1996]. It may have been
racism, but I have received the same
treatment in the same district, in other
city schools--even in affluent New
How Do You TEACH A CLASS
OF SIX BILLION STUDENTS?
These times demand a teacher with inspiring credentials:
the wisdom of a Buddha, the love of the Christ,
the joy of Krishna, the power of the Messiah and
the justice of the Imam Mahdi.
Humanity needs a teacher who embodies all these qualities,
to teach US how to share and live together in peace.
According to international author Benjamin Creme,
this World Teacher is now among us.
"The audience was fascinated. Mr. Creme is exceptional."
AI Angeloro. WNBC, New York
ONE DAY ONLY!
BENJAMIN CREME WILL SPEAK ON
THE EMERGENCE OF MAITREYA, THE WORLD TEACHER
THURSDAY, JULY 11,1996 AT 7:30 PM
SKYTOP ROOM, HOTEL PENNSYLVANIA, 7TH AVE/33RD ST, NYC
A HEALING BLESSING FOLLOWS THE LECTURE.
FREE RECORDED MESSAGE: 212-459-4022
WORLD WIDE WEB: http://www.shareintl.org/
MNN-TV: TUESDAYS AT 10PM ON CHANNEL 69 THRU JUNE
FOR LECTURE INFO, PLEASE CAlL 718-852-8679 OR 718-884-2287. ResERV. NOT NEe. No CHARGE, BUT DONATIONS APPRECIATED.
F
Jersey communities. It does not matter if
you are black or white: all school staff
must have been taught rudeness is a
weapon they can use to keep out all
potential troublemakers.
It is my feeling they should be given
sensitivity training, not only on racial and
religious differences, but on human rela-
tionships since they project a school's
image to the outside world .
Allen Cohen
Senior Advisor
Chinese-American Planning Council
Contacts, PINS.
I suggest you publish the postal and
Internet addresses of all the groups you
profiled in your article on 'Net organizing
["Downloading Democracy," May 1996].
It's about access, isn't it? Thanks for the
great article.
Tim Siegel
Center for Community Change
Kim Nauer replies: Good idea. In the
interest of promoting telecommunications,
however, I am including only e-mail
addresses and, for the techno-phobic,
phone numbers. In order of appearance:
Ken Deutsch, Issue Dynamics Inc.,
deutsch@idi.net, (202) 408-1920.
Audrie Krause, Computer Professionals
for Social Responsibility, cpsr@cpsr.org,
(415) 322-3778.
Martha Ross, SCARCNet,
ai002Q@advinst.org, (202) 659-8475.
Nalini Kotamraju, Stand for Children,
103661.222@compuserve.com,
(202) 234-0095.
Nathan Henderson-James, ACORN,
resgeneral@acorn.org, (202) 547-9292.
Jonah Seiger, Center for Democracy
and Technology, jseiger@cdt.org,
(202) 637-9800.
Barbara Duffield, National Coalition for the
Homeless, nch@ari.net, (202) 775-1322.
Anthony Wright, Center for Media
Education, infoactive@cme.org, (202)
628-2620 .
CITYUMITS
winnerf!!
THE
DEADLINE
CLUB,s
TOP JOURNALISM
AWARD FOR 1996
PRESENTED BY
THE NEW YORK CHAPTER OF THE SOCIETY
OF PROFESSIONAL JOURNALISTS
Senior Editor KIM NAUER, Editor AND REW WHITE
and former Senior Editor JILL KIRSCHENBAUM
were awarded the James Wright Brown Award recognizing "the news
organization that renders outstanding public service to its community"
for "Profits from Poverty," our May 1995 series that exposed
the private fmanciers who operate behind the scenes in poor
communities, reaping huge profits from slum properties.
JUNE/JULY 1996
WHAT WILL CITY LIMITS
UNCOVER NEXT?
Social Policy magazine and
The Learning Alliance present:

IS there a
politics
beyond
liberal
and

conservative
New York City-Saturday, June 15
JOin the country's cutting-edge thinkers and
activists for a fresh, bold, day-long conference
setting aside politics as usual. Come help lay
the groundwork for a dynamic post-liberal,
post-conservative political philosophy.
info: 212/226-7171 or
www.sodalpolicy.org
($15, $25, $35, sliding scale; no one rurned away.)
ro-sponsors: Center for a New Democracy, Cenrer for
Democracy and Cirizenship, Center for Human
Rights Education, Center for Living Democracy,
City Limits, Environmental Action, Grassroots
Policy Projecr, Insrirure for Women Policy
Srudies, National Cenrer for Economic and
Securiry Alrernarives, Tht Ntighborhood
Works, The New Pany, New York Online,
Tht Progmsivt Populist, Third Foret,
The Union Insriture, Who Cam?

PUBLIC HOUSING STEALTH ATTACK
blue on us," the veteran
administrator says. "But its
not necessarily bad news ....
We look favorably on any fed-
eral legislation that leads to
deregulation."
go
~
'"
BRIEFS i
. ,
Students cast
protest ballots in a
mock election on
the steps of the
Bronx County
Courthouse.
Short Shots
Tenant advocates knew
the housing bill passed by the
House of Representatives
last month meant bad news
for poor people, but no one
suspected the bill contained
a stealthy doomsday clause
that gives New York officials
the right to entirely dismantle
the city's public housing sys-
tem.
The provision, written into
the housing bill by Republican
Rick Lalio of Long Island,
specifically exempts the New
York City Housing Authority
from almost all federal public
housing regulation for at least
three years. -That means the
sky's the limit in terms oftear-
ing public housing apart:
says Billy Easton, executive
director of the New York State
Tenants and Neighbors and
Coalition.
i BROOKLYN CON6RESSMAN
erals among Newtered
Democrats in the l04th
Congress, unexpectedly
voted the GOP party line on
an illiberal overhaul of pub-
lic housing policy (see item
above). Could Chuck's
wagon be veering to the
right?
'" 0IARIfS SOIUMER MAY
run for governor two years
from now, but don't expect
him to do his baby-kissing
in the corridors of public
housing projects. Schumer,
one of the more spunky lib-
"NYCHA could tear build-
ings down," he adds. -They
could drive poor tenants out
and replace them with mid-
dle-income people and never
build any more low income
units .... They could force poor
people out and give them
vouchers-even though
there's practically no afford-
able private housing in New
York City."
The Lalio bill, which repre-
sents the most significant
overhaul of federal housing
policy in six decades, puts
$6.3 billion in federal housing
subsidies in block grants to
states. For the first time, it
also allows public housing
authorities to evict poor ten-
ants simply because they
could not afford to pay rent
increases. It passed the
House with broad bipartisan
REPUBUCAN SENAH MAJOR-
ITY lIADER JOSEPH BRUNO
has abandoned Governor
George Pataki to ally with
Democratic Assembly chief
Sheldon Silver in a fight
against the governor's deep
cuts to welfare and educa-
tion. The news makes even
Pataki's growing list of ene-
support by a 315 to 107 vote
May 9.
But the clause singling out
the city was carefully hidden
in a section that allows 200
local housing authorities to
opt into a public housing
deregulation plan. The bill
specifically targeted munici-
palities with "more than
99,999" public units for
mandatory deregulation.
NYCHA, with 164,000 public
apartments, is the only hous-
ing authority large enough to
fit that description.
There has been much
speculation that NYCHA offi-
cials helped insert the provi-
sion, a contention denied by
an authority spokesman. Still,
a high-ranking agency official
tells City Limits that the Lalio
bill isn't exactly unwelcome.
"It was dropped out of the
The bill now goes to con-
ference committee with the
Senate, which passed its own
housing bill in January. The
Clinton administration has not
said it will support the Lalio
plan, but Democrats concede
that a measure that gets
tough on public housing ten-
ants will be hard to fight in a
presidential election year.
"I don't think the President
is willing to go to the mat on
low income housing," cau-
tions one House staffer with
close ties to the White House.
"I think [HUD Secretary
Henry) Cisneros already
thinks Lazio's version is fine
the way it is .... So there's a
chance this might become
law." Glenn Thrush
WISDOM IN AOION
A news photographer
scrambled on the steps of the
Bronx County Courthouse try-
ing to align the figure of a
sleeping 7 year old with the
marble-etched quotation above
the doors: "Government is a
contrivance of human wisdom
to provide for human wants."
If only it were so. This
neighborhood is home to
Community School Board 9,
one of the most corrupt and
undemocratic of the 32 boards
in the city, and its only con-
trivance is to get reelected.
But on May 7- school
board election day- about
1,500 parents, students, and
clergy from South Bronx
Churches, a community organi-
zation, marched down the
Grand Concourse to call for the
elimination of the boards and
mies feel bad for the guy.
First, Rudy leaves him for
Mario; than his lieutenant
governor deserts him for her
conscience. Now Joe's gone.
So much for the Man from
Peekskill's amiable reputa-
tion. Rumor has it "Pataki"
means "doesn't play well
with others" in Hungarian.
the dethroning of Board 9's
longtime president, Carmelo
Saez.
"Jesus blessed the chil-
dren," thundered Father John
Grange of Mott Haven's St.
Jerome's Catholic Church.
"When people tried to keep him
away from them, he got angry!"
The crowd roared.
But if the rally was a sign of
community strength, the elec-
tion that took place atthe same
time was not. Although the SBC
has registered 4,800 new voters
since the beginning of the year,
the only five candidates on the
ballot were Saez allies. (At
press time, schools Chancellor
Rudy Crew had suspended
Saez for the second time in six
months. And the results of the
election had been delayed by a
computer glitch.)
At least one person attend-
ing the protest didn't care much
about the politics. Maria Plaza,
a 15-year-old 8th grader told a
bystander she was worried her
sister was about to drop out of
school. "She's 14 and they put
her in special ed," she said.
"During the day they just let her
roam around the halls. They
don't care .. .. What kind of edu-
cation is that?" Glenn Thrush
CITVLlMITS
BUDGET MENU: RUDY'S COLD CUTS
he first hints of trouble can be found in the opening pages of Mayor Giuliani's most recent budget
proposal for the upcoming fiscal year, which begins July 1. The table of contents lists all the wrong
page numbers, as well as appendices that don't exist.
Will Giuliani's budget numbers be any more accurate as the year plays out?
Whatever happens, there will certainly be major reductions in services for low and moderate
income New Yorkers. While tax cuts have been delayed and the city budget is slated to grow to $32.7 billion
from $31 .1 billion, the budget ax will still strike everything from sanitation and libraries to welfare and home-
less services. The following is a summary of some of the notable impacts:
Welfare
he proposed half-bil-
lion dollar cut to city
welfare spending-
about one-quarter of
that in city funds-
depends on reducing the welfare
rolls by about 90,000 people. By
June 1997, The administration
hopes to cut the number of peo-
ple receiving Aid to Families with
Dependent Children by 52,665;
Home Relief rolls by 35,633. HRA's
staff will be slashed by 1,100
positions.
Giuliani's welfare budget plan
depends on passage of most of
Governor Pataki's own budget
proposal to reduce welfare ben-
efits and impose time limits. But
Pataki's budget is currently
locked in Albany negotiations
and is likely to be revised.
The mayor's workfare pro-
gram, NYC WAY, will be
expanded to include AFDC fam-
ilies. And many other parts of
the city budget appear to rely
on welfare recipients providing
services. Administration offi -
cials have already testified in
public hearings that some
parks and civilian police
department slots will be filled
by welfare recipients.
Still, Giuliani's previous
attempts to cutthe rolls have not
occurred at the city's projected
rate. In FY 96 the city spent $42
million more than planned for
public assistance and for FY 97
that number is expected to be as
high as $82 million.
Homeless Services
he Giuliani budget pro-
jects a decrease in
shelter populations for
1997, despite the
steady increase in the
number of single men entering
the system last year. And there
still aren't enough shelters to
meet the city's need. In May, the
JUNE/JULY 1996
mayor and city were fined $1 mil-
lion for failing to move homeless
families out of the Bronx intake
office to shelter rooms within 24
hours as required by law. The
Coalition for the Homeless con-
tends that growth in the shelter
population has been driven by a
growing number of welfare
recipients cut off the rolls.
The mayor's plan would
reduce staff atthe Department of
Homeless Services by more than
700 employees, a 30 percent
reduction. Some of this loss
would be made up by the privati -
zation of seven city shelters-
but not all. Cuts include an $11
million (6.B percent) reduction in
services for single adult men.
Family shelters can only hold
about 5,BOO homeless families
and the number of permanent
apartments available to families
in the shelter system continues
to decline. In Rscall994, the city
helped more than 5,400 home-
less families find new homes; the
Fiscal 1997 projection is 3,960.
"These reductions are the very
reason the city was just held in
contempt," says Steve Banks of
Legal Aid's Homeless Family
Rights Project
City Hospitals
o agency is feeling
the knife more than
the Health and
Hospita l s
Corporation, which
administers 11 public hospitals
and 20 other health care facilities
that accounted for almost 5 mil-
lion patient visits last year. The
city's annual contribution to HHC
has shrunk from $350 million
three years ago to a mere $37
million in next year's proposed
budget. Coupled with state
Medicaid cuts, HHC stands to
lose almost half a billion dollars
from its current$I .2 billion in rev-
enues. The corporation is now
almost entirely funded by
Medicaid.
Current city funding doesn't
even cover the approximately
$60 million in services the hospi-
tals provide police officers and
prisoners. And the city's commit-
ment to capital improvements in
its hospitals- which had de-
creased from $204 million in 1992
to $17 million in FY 199B-has
now officially disappeared.
HHC sources say the agency
will likely lose B,ooo of its 3B,ooo-
member workforce, a whopping
reduction of 22 percent. Last
month, HHC President Luis
Marcos began the blood-letting
by announcing the layoffs of
2,700 employees, including doc-
tors, nurses, administrators and
lab technicians. For patients it
will, at the very least, mean
longer waits in emergency
rooms and clinics. At worst. it
could mean a shortage of quali-
fied personnel at a time when
health care for uninsured work-
ing people is getting harder to
find.
Sanitation
ore garbage will
pile up on corners
if Giuliani's plan to
cut litter basket
collection in half
is approved. The mayor is seek-
ing to reduce the sanitation
department's budget by nearly
$100 million, in part by reducing
garbage collection from schools
and public housing.
Most strikingly, he would cut
away a massive piece of the
agency's recycling program. The
recycling proposal would cut
back pick-up to once every two
weeks in most of the city and
eliminate the recycling of mixed
paper-just recently implement-
ed in parts of Brooklyn, Staten
Island and the Bronx. The
administration will continue to
fall afoul of state and city laws
that require the city to be recy-
cling 40 percent of its trash by
late 1997. At last count, the actu-
al rate was about 14 percent
Housing
he Department of
Housing, Preservation
and Development,
which accounts for
only 7 percent of the
city's capital spending, is slated
for a 35 percent cut under the
plan-a loss of $59 million.
To make the reductions, HPD
is no longer bankrolling many of
its smaller neighborhood revital -
ization plans. But the city is also
taking a bite out of programs
central to the agency's mission
of preserving and maintaining
low income private housing. The
Article BA loan program, which
gives landlords low-interest
loans to repair pipes and heat-
ing systems in apartment hous-
es, has been cut by nearly one-
third to $3 million; the
Participation Loan Program is
losing $800,000.
The Neighborhood Pre-
servation Consultants-local
nonprofit housing experts hired
by HPD to provide technical
expertise-are being given
increasing responsibilities with-
out the cash to cover them.
In the meantime, the city's
effort to sell off its tax-delin-
quent housing stock rolls on.
Capital spending on the Tenant
Interim Lease program, which
bankrolls tenant-owned cooper-
atives, remains steady at $20
million. The Neighborhood
Entrepreneurs Program, which
rehabs buildings for sale to for-
profit landlords, is one ofthe few
HPD programs to be boosted-
to $57 million, one-fifth of the
agency's total capital budget
Kierna Mayo Dawsey.
Andrew White and Glenn Thrush
-

PROFILE ~
,
Deni s Cretinon
(right) has worked
with the residents
of one block i n
East New York
for five years.
Worldly Ambitions
For this crew of Europeans, serving the poor in East New York
means spending years building trust and documenting lives.
By Isabelle de Pommereau
I
t has been five years since Rosalyn
Little moved with her children from
the Prince George welfare hotel in
Manhattan to a city-owned building
in East New York. Like many of her
neighbors on Montauk Avenue, Little's life
since then has been punctuated by meet-
ings and phone calls with people paid to
help her-the city's housing bureaucrats,
social workers, school teachers. They
flicker in and out of her days, one person
quickly replacing another, few taking the
time to say hello, let alone have a mean-
ingful conversation.
Little has been talking with a couple of
more responsive poverty workers, howev-
er. They happen to come from France.
Denis and Babette Cretinon, two leaders of
the Fourth World Movement-an organi-
zation based in the low income suburbs of
Paris that has outposts worldwide-have
visited her block with other volunteers
every Tuesday for the last five years in a
van filled with books, computers and craft
tools. The street library is a diversionary
tactic of sorts: while some volunteers work
with the children, helping them read or
build projects, others chat with Little and
her neighbors, catching up on the past
week and encouraging them to "docu-
ment" their lives for people from other
walks of life who do not understand the
true nature of a life lived in poverty.
At the movement's urging, Little has
spoken at the White House and the United
Nations, outlining her daily routines and
her frustrations with America's social ser-
vice system. It's the least she could do,
she says. "They're my rock," Little adds
in a low voice. "Sometimes you meet peo-
ple who pretend they care about you, but
they don't. But there's nothing phony
about the Fourth World."
The Fourth World Movement-the
name refers to the chronically poor who
live in every part of the world-is almost
invisible in the shadow of much larger non-
profit organizations here in New York City
and across the United States. But in France,
where the antipoverty organization was
born 39 years ago, the movement has
gained considerable influence in social pol-
icy and advised national leaders on ways to
help the poorest of the poor-those who
were born into poverty and have been
unable to use that country's rich social ser-
vice system to climb out. The organization
claims to have a special vantage point:
Instead of "serving" people with housing
or social services, full-time volunteers
commit to working in a community for
years, moving into the neighborhood and
understanding the culture. Workers offer
local residents little in the way of tangible
benefits-most live near the poverty line
themselves-but they try to give people a
sense that they're not alone, that they're
part of an international network of people
who happen to be very poor.
"Part of what they say is, no matter
who's been in power, the fourth world's
been screwed-whether it's the socialists,
communists or capitalists," says Daniel
Kronenfeld, executive director of New
York's Henry Street Settlement and a
member of the movement's U.S. board of
directors. ''They want to document the
lives [of the poor] so those in power will
really understand poverty and change the
way they deal with it."
Posltlv_ Pr_Judlc_
The Fourth World Movement was
founded in 1957 by Father Joseph Wre-
sinski, a Roman Catholic priest who grew
up poor and was assigned to an impover-
ished suburb of Paris. Upon arriving, he
immediately expelled a group running a
soup kitchen in a shantytown where he was
working, thinking it made people too
dependent. Instead, he set up a library and
opened a research center, hoping to con-
vince the government that extreme poverty
is a violation of human rights and rallying
people to join what's become an interna-
tional non-sectarian movement. In 1964, he
opened the organization's New York office
on the Lower East Side. Others have fol-
lowed in Washington, D.C. , and New
Orleans. The group's 350 full-time volun-
teer leaders work and live with the poor in
more than 20 countries around the world.
In France, the Fourth World Movement
has brought national attention to the fact
that hundreds of thousands of French kids
were illiterate, helping persuade the gov-
ernment to enact reading programs for poor
children. In 1979, President Valery Giscard
d'Estaing, a conservative, appointed one of
the movement's leaders to the govern-
ment's Economic and Social Council, a
third house of government charged with
recommending social policy. Eight years
later, after considerable debate, the council
endorsed a plan written by Wresinski call-
ing for a guaranteed income for all resi-
dents, as well as housing, health insurance
and legal support. In 1989, the French gov-
ernment enacted a key part of the plan, leg-
islation strengthening the nation's consid-
erable social safety net with a first-ever
CITY LIMITS
mandated minimum income.
The Fourth World Movement has seen
none of this success in the United States.
The movement here remains politically
weak, Denis Cretinon admits. The prob-
lem, says his wife Babette, is that most
Americans view impoverished people with
too much hostility, absorbing only the
most superficial details about how they
live. "Society just judges, judges, judges,"
she says. "But they don't know anything. "
That, argues Denis Cretinon, is why it is
important to have people report uncritical-
ly, with a "positive prejudice" rather than a
negative one. Fourth World volunteers
keep journals of their experiences in poor
communities, using the material later in
books and public testimony.
"We talk, for example, about the 'fem-
inization of poverty, '" he says. "It has to
be that way. It is the only way mothers can
get [welfare] payments for their children.
But when you take time and look, you see
that there is a man in that family. They
share in the housekeeping. They have a
real role. It just doesn't exist statistically.
"[People in poverty] always have to
wear a mask to get what they need. You
become what people need you to be to get
what you want. " Policy makers, he insists,
need to design laws offering low income
people help without forcing them to con-
form to traditional preconceptions.
StrMchH Thin
Driving a rusty van to haul their street
library, the Cretinons have been working on
two patches of Montauk Avenue in East
New York since they came here five years
ago. But the Fourth World Movement has
been a presence on this stretch far longer.
According to residents, volunteers have
been visiting every week for the last decade.
"You don' t see this type of thing on a
consistent basis," says Emma Speaks, a
mother of four who travels from the
Cypress Hills housing project every week
to bring her kids to Fourth World's mobile
center. "Week to week, you keep it in
mind. You look forward to it. You start
making plans and you build on it."
Angela Price's building used to be open
turf for dope dealers who'd stash their bags
of cash and crack into gaping holes in hall-
way walls, often leaving residents too fear-
ful to leave their apartments. Things have
improved since, she says, thanks to a police
crackdown. But Price and other tenants
also credit the Fourth World's consistent
JUNE/JULY 1996
presence, week after week, for luring ten-
ants out of their apartments and giving
them hope. "When the street library started
coming, the dealers moved right out and
didn't come back," Price says.
The Cretinons are the first to admit
their reach is limited. With an annual bud-
get of less than $l00,OOO--raised mainly
from individual contributions-and a
mandate to maintain contact as long as a
block wants them there, the volunteer
staff is stretched too thin to make much of
an impact. In America, where "move-
ments" are judged on results, people have
to ask, what are these volunteers really
accomplishing?
It's something deeper, more "mystical"
than literacy services or political organiz-
ing, says Daniel Kronenfeld. "I've worked
in agencies where you come and you go.
The funding comes and the funding goes.
You start a project, but as soon you're in
there, you're out of there.
"The Fourth World is not a program that
begins and ends. Once they've made con-
tacts with families, they maintain them."
On Montauk Avenue, 8-year-old Erica
Babilonia doesn't know where the book
van comes from and she doesn't care. With
the volunteers' paint and brushes, she's
painted a slat of wood with colorful letters.
Her message: "Peace and Love. " The wood
will be built into a big flower pot contain-
ing tulips and plants-and it will stay on
the block for a long time to come, just like
the Fourth World Movement, a bright
splash of spring brightening a bleak:
Isabelle de Pommereau is a regular con-
tributor to the Christian Science Monitor.
Nev# York La"'Yers
for the Public Interest
provides free Legal referrals for community based and non-profit groups
seeking pro-bono representation. Projects include corporate, tax and real
estate work, zoning advice, housing and employment discrimination,
environmental justice, disability and civil rights.
For further information,
call NYLPI at (212) 727-2270.
There is no charge for NYLPI's services.
FINDING THE GRASSROOTS:
A directory of more than 250 New York City activist organizations.
"A superb and necessary resource."
-Barbara Ehrenreich
"A wonderful guide for coalition building ... A resource
permitting us to transcend race, gender, sexual
orientation, class and other boundaries."
-Manning Marable
Available for $10 plus $3 mailing costs. Checks to: North Star Fund
Mail to: North Star Fund, 666 Broadway, 5th Fl., New York, NY 10012.
Call 212-460-5511 for more information.
s


@CTIVISM t
,
Web Research Central
The Internet is loaded with information on government, politics and corporations.
Here are nine gold mines for organizers and advocates. By Steve Mitra
W
ith the explosion of
information on the
World Wide Web, the
question now is not
whether the information
you want is available-it's how you get to
it. Of course there are the "Yahoos" and
"Altavistas" of the Web-"search en-
gines" that purportedly sort things out for
you. But by their nature these indexing
tools are incomplete. And you wouldn't
want to miss many undisputed gold mines
that can help you learn more about your
neighborhood, your elected officials,
Washington politics and national activism.
Covernment
Starting locally, the New York State
Local Government Telecommunications
Initiative web site (http://nyslgti .
gen.ny.us:80!) has state information orga-
ful job training projects, and the increasing
use of home health care in the Medicare
population. The reports also expose flaws
in federal programs and outline possible
reforms. The site even maintains an e-mail
"listserv" that alerts you to reports as they
are released.
The FEC site includes so much cam-
paign finance information that it will either
make you drool with glee or leave you
hopelessly confused. AU candidates run-
ning for election have a summary record
that includes campaign receipts, money
received from individuals and different
categories of Political Action Committees
(PACs), the amount candidates spend,
their cash on hand, and debts owed by the
campaign. But you can also get details
sorted by contributors, both individuals
and PACS. Best of all, the site is current
for the 1995-96 election cycle. The text-
hud.gov/local/nyn/nynmailk.html).
One of the few good things to come out
of the 100th Congress, the grandly-named
"Thomas" (as in Jefferson), is at
http://thomas.loc.gov.This is one of the
best free sources of information on con-
gressional activities. It includes searchable
daily proceedings from the floors of the
House and Senate; summaries and legisla-
tive histories of bills and amendments, and
lists of laws and vetoed bills.
Business and Banking
but the type of published information varies.
As of May 6, every corporation that
sells stock on the public exchanges must
file its annual and quarterly reports with
the Securities and Exchange Commission
via computer. As a result, the "Edgar"
database of corporate information is more
up-to-date than ever before. If you 're
doing company research, what you want is
probably here (http://www.sec.gov/
edgarhp.htm), including extremely
detailed reports on the company's history,
owners, future plans, revenue and debts.
The reports can be downloaded directly to
your computer.
[.M
nized by county. Proflles of each borough
in New York include the census snapshot,
demographic and business trends. Also
included are maps showing race, income,
education, and occupation distribution
throughout the state.
Just about every federal agency is on the
Web, but the amount and type of published
information varies. One important feature
most include is a directory with names and
numbers of local agency offices. A good
place to access this universe of information
is the FedWorid site (http://www.fed
world.gov!). Another useful feature is a col-
lection of abstracts of recently released
reports by different agencies.
Two federal sites stand out for their
depth: the Web site of the General
Accounting Office (GAO) and the Federal
Election Commission (FEC). Both publish
material that's often the basis of front-page
stories for major newspapers. Now you
can do what reporters do, and dive right in
to the source material from your home
computer.
The GAO's probes reveal comprehen-
sive information on thousands of topics
(find the site at http://www.gao.gov).
Recent reports covered subjects like the
benefits of economic development pro-
grams, the common strategies of success-
based version of the FEC site is at
http://www.fec.gov / 1996/txindex.html.
(The slower, graphics version is at
http://www.fec.gov).
Of course, there are ways to hide influ-
ence-peddling. For example, when corpo-
rations ask (or coerce) employees to
donate to a particular candidate, they can
"bundle" the donations. Exposing this tac-
tic requires a sophisticated analysis of con-
tribution patterns. Mother Jones magazine,
in collaboration with the Center For
Responsive Politics, did this recently, and
they've put their database on the Web in a
searchable format. It's at http://www.
motherjones.com/coinop_congress/mojo_
400/search.html.
The Department of Housing and Urban
Development's Office of Policy Develop-
ment and Research has put its research
reports on the Web-covering everything
from lead paint hazards to the long-term
prospects of HUD-sponsored housing.
They're all available at http://
www.huduser.org/. To search the database,
go directly to http://www.huduser.
org/cgi/huduser.cgi. And the home page of
the New York HUD office (http://www.
hud.gov/local/nyn/nynhome.html) has local
program information as well as e-mail
addresses of all employees (http://www.
When banks in the New York area
plan to merge or open or close branch
offices, they must first submit an applica-
tion to the Federal Reserve Bank of New
York and the public gets a chance to offer
comments on the proposal. This is the
time when neighborhood groups force
banks to pay attention to poor communi-
ties by testifying before the regulators.
Keep up with the schedule of applications
at http://www.ny.frb.org/.
Politics
Project Vote Smart (http://www.vote
smart.org) is arguably the best Web site
covering U.S. politics. Find out every-
thing from the status of legislation on
important issues to detailed biographical
information on members of Congress. Of
note are answers by the legislators them-
selves to a series of "No-Wiggle Room"
questions, as well as performance evalua-
tions from special interest groups from the
Christian Coalition to the Children's
Defense Fund .
Steve Mitra is an editor of a new political
on-line project in Washington, D.C.
CITY LIMITS
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s
PIPELINE ~
,
f
Harmony Rising
Parents and foster children raise their disparate voices in a call
for change in the child welfare bureaucracy. By Seema Nayyar
"They dangled my son in front of my face
like some carrot. They'd say, 'If you want
him back, you have to be clean and do all
of these steps,' like check into a drug
rehab, take parenting skills classes and
make your visits. But sometimes they
didn't have enough room in the classes.
Or enough money to provide the services.
They'd blame you and say, 'You're not
ready."'-Nancy Sanchez Wright, 39
"The whole time that I was in the system,
there wasn't anybody there to talk to. I
had no say about where I would live; no
one told me I had rights as a child."
-Sabrina Hines, 19.
N
ancy Sanchez Wright and
Sabrina Hines have different
reasons for disliking the
child welfare system.
Sanchez Wright is a biologi-
cal parent who had three children taken
away by city social workers; Hines is a
foster teen who spent 10 years of her
childhood in the bureaucratic system. For
different reasons, both women harbor a
certain resentment for the city's child wel-
fare agency. But now, the voices of both
women are resonating as one in an effort
to reform the child welfare system and
make it more responsive to people like
themselves.
Fueled by deep-rooted anger and frus-
tration over broken promises and humiliat-
ing experiences, the voices of biological
parents and foster kids are reaching a
crescendo. There's a movement afoot to tie
together complaints of disparate groups
within the child welfare system and create
a common platform for reform.
But it's not exactly a cohesive coalition
just yet; it's more of an emerging move-
ment: The newly-formed Child Welfare
Organizing Project is rallying biological
parents to gain political clout. The Child
Welfare Fund, a group that gives $1 rnil1ion
a year to child welfare reform, is testing a
project that would give biological parents
more of a say with agencies that place kids
in foster care. Youth Communication,
which publishes a magazine for foster kids,
recently released a book written by
teenagers chronicling their experiences in
the foster care system. And this month,
University Settlement, an advocacy group,
will present a comprehensive, 30-page
"Bill of Rights and Responsibilities" to the
mayor in hopes that it will be used as a
guide by those in the child welfare system.
The booklet was written by biological par-
ents, teens and foster parents.
While all these different groups have
competing interests, there are signs that
some are willing to work together to pres-
sure the Administration for Children's
Services (ACS) and private nonprofit fos-
ter care agencies to handle their cases with
more sensitivity and care. "I'm not a foster
care basher," says AI Desetta, editor of
Foster Care Youth United, the magazine
published by Youth Communication and
written by kids in foster care. "It's a bureau
that, in some ways, has been given an
impossible job of replacing the family. But
you can't use that as an excuse. The sys-
tem can't continue the way it is."
R.unltlng Chlldr.n
Six months of public and press atten-
tion focused on the child welfare bureau-
cracy following the death of Elisa
Izquierdo last fall has led to reforms at one
level of ACS. Commissioner Nicholas
Scoppetta has sought to make caseworkers
and their supervisors more responsive to
reports of abuse and neglect and more
accountable for the safety of children
known to the agency. Yet, while outside
experts have been calling for better train-
ing of caseworkers, little attention is given
to ACS's other main mission: reuniting
children with their families, or moving
them to new, safe homes.
Most children removed from their par-
ents by ACS caseworkers are quickly
turned over to private nonprofit organiza-
tions contracted by the city to place kids
in foster care, supervise foster parents
and provide biological parents with coun-
seling.
Mabel Paulino, director of the Child
Welfare Organizing Project, a one-year-
old group dedicated to helping biological
parents, surveyed 42 of the city's 53 foster
care agencies to see whether clients had
any significant role in making decisions
about their own lives. The answer, Paulino
says, was an across-the-board no. "The
[biological] parents don't know what's
going on, they don't have participation in
their children's planning, no say in visita-
tions. There's little effort being made to
involve them," she says.
The one exception is the Westchester-
based St. Christopher's-Jennie Clarkson
agency, which supervises about 1,600
New York City foster care children. Three
years ago, the agency began an experiment
with the support of the Child Welfare
Fund. Among the changes: the agency's
caseworkers are on call 24 hours a day,
seven days a week; drug rehabilitation ser-
vices are provided immediately upon
request; parent representatives sit on the
organization's personnel committee and
have a say in hiring and firing decisions,
and they will soon have a designated seat
on the board of directors. Most important-
ly, each parent can choose to have their
own advocate within the agency, usually a
fellow parent who has overcome her own
problems with the child welfare system.
"We've shifted from a child focus to a
family focus and incorporated parent feed-
back at every level," explains Jeremy
Kohomban, director of family services at
St. Christopher's. "We're no longer treat-
ing parents as second class citizens."
The agency's principles and guidelines
read as if they were written by enraged
clients: "Parents have a right to challenge -
the agency without fear of reprisal .... The
parent has a right to visitation and sched-
uled meetings that do not conflict with
their work schedules .... The role of the fos-
ter parent is not just to care for the child,
but also to assist the parent in staying
closely connected to his/her children."
Sanchez-Wright, a former crack
cocaine addict, had three children taken
away from her soon after each was born.
After the third time, she decided to clean
up her act and promised to stay off drugs.
In exchange, St. Christopher's promised to
return her third child. Now, she and the
agency work together toward the same
goal: reuniting families. As a parent advo-
cate employed by the organization, she
accompanies agency workers to other par-
ents' homes. "When I visit people, I tell
them, 'I did it. You're not any worse than I
was.' Then I bring them to my home and
let them see life now."
For Jo-Ann Johnson, being a parent
advocate is an issue of experience, decen-
cy and credibility. "I dido't like strange
CITY LIMITS
people corning into my house and looking
me over. It's insulting," says Johnson, who
was separated from her daughter, Maari, 5,
for three years. "But when a recovering
addict goes to another addict's house, we
can share our experiences."
As a result of the changes, St.
Christopher's has reduced foster care stays
from 1993's average of 2.35 years to 1.75
years today, Kohomban says. Even more
telling are the agency's recidivism num-
bers. Nationally, almost one-third of all
children returned to their biological parent
from foster care ultimately end up being
taken away again. St. Christopher's has
gotten that number down to
less than three percent.
More than one-third of
the agency's staff has been
replaced since 1993-by
people willing to abide by
the new rules. "I have a non-
negotiable position on this,"
Kohomban says. "If you
don't agree with the philoso-
phy that parents should be
included, then leave. The
ones who have stayed have
made the shift. I wish I
could say we did something
magical. We just opened the
door to sharing the power."
Dlv.rg.nt Croups
Many of the most elo-
quent critics of the system
are the foster youth them-
selves. Zcherex Solis, now
19, lived for nearly four
years in a residential treat-
ment center for young peo-
ple deemed "innappropriate" for foster
care by the agencies. There, she says, case-
workers refused to give her critical infor-
mation about her own case. They wouldn't
even tell her the name and phone number
of her court-appointed lawyer. "I would
get, 'I don't know' or 'I can't get that
information now,'" Solis says. She finally
got in touch with the Youth Advocacy
Center, a three-year-old foster child advo-
cacy group. Its executive director, Betsy
Krebs, found her a new lawyer who helped
Solis find a foster mother in Brownsville.
Now, Solis helps other teens navigate
the system, testifies at state and city hear-
ings and speaks to social workers learning
about child welfare issues. "Most of the
time when we go to social work school and
JUNE/JULY 1996
ask what they've heard about us, they say,
'We've heard that you're troubled kids.'
That's not true. We tell them kids in foster
care should be listened to and not forgotten
about. The kids in the system are the real
child welfare experts."
In February, the Child Welfare
Organizing Project co-sponsored a closed-
door summit bringing together divergent
groups affected by the system. The day-
long event included biological parents,
foster children and foster parents.
Participants were not able to agree on
many issues, and some of the sessions
were rancorous, but by the end of the day
many of them agreed to join a coalition to
formulate a platform for child welfare
reform.
Skeptics question whether a collective
voice will triumph or cower under the
pressure of such diverse interests. It's one
thing to agree that change is necessary. But
it's quite another to decide what those
changes will be. Meryl Berman, director
of community development at University
Settlement on the Lower East Side, says
she wouldn't have believed it, yet all of the
various voices seem to be forming a har-
monious chorus.
Starting two years ago, volunteers from
two University Settlement groups, Women
as Resources (WAR) and Youth
Empowered to Speak (YES) began meet-
ing every week to put together a manual to
help parents and children deal with child
welfare investigations. Co-authors of the
resulting "Child Welfare Bill of Rights and
Responsibilities" included people like
Cheryl Moran, 36, whose child was once
taken from her by the city; Norma
Hubbard, 27, a foster mother; and Chaem
Dudley, 16, who claims that overly-zealous
caseworkers almost ripped apart her fami-
ly. "At some meetings you thought people
would never talk to each other again,"
Berman says. But at others, she adds, "mir-
acles would happen. People would sudden-
ly discover that they had something in
common with people they thought they
hated." This month, the guide will be pub-
lished and presented to the mayor.
Yet for the moment, issues like respon-
siveness and sensitivity are not even on the
table at ACS. Scoppetta's agenda, as of
late last month, detailed plans for improv-
ing worker training, upgrading the com-
puter system and developing tighter links
with other agencies, like the police, who
are in a position to see and report abuse.
Advocates say Scoppetta would do well to
open up the system to the people it is
meant to serve and incorporate their points
of view-one voice at a time .
Seema Nayyar is a reporter/researcher
for Newsweek.

Meryl Berman
(center) and the
co-authors of a
new manual on
how to deal with
the child welfare
system represent
a wide variety of
experience.

PIPELINE i
,
"You're enclosed,
and you can't get
away from pollu-
tion in Hunts Point,
says Antoinette
Mildenberger, a
school teacher
who has lived in
the neighborhood
for 47 years. Gar- 0
bage fires (below) I
are one of the '"
many air quality ~
problems here. ~
Air Assault
Poor health in Hunts Point may have more to do with pollution
than poverty. By Kemba Johnson
T
hese days, whenever Antoinette
Mildenberger steps out of the
building she's lived in for the
last 47 years, she fmds herself
surrounded by garbage.
To the right, Triboro USA Recycling.
To the left, Delmar Waste Management.
Behind her, a vacant lot where homeless
men and women bum plastic and rubber
coatings off salvaged wire so they can sell
the copper that's inside. Today,
as she walks past this lot, thick
gray smoke from the latest air ,
assault rises into the sky. She ,
coughs. "It's like you're
enclosed in it and you can't get
away," says Mildenberger. She
coughs again.
Mildenberger coughs a lot
but that 's not unusual in Hunts
Point. Neither are heavy nose-
bleeds, rashes, chest pains,
chronic colds and asthma. "We
don't get common colds," says
Eva San Jurjo, another Hunts
Point resident. "We get kids
with bronchial problems,
wheezing problems. They end
up in the hospital. It's really
scaring us."
Hunts Point residents have
long known that their neigh-
borhood is home to alarmingly high asth-
ma rates. At Lincoln Medical and Mental
Health Center, which serves the South
Bronx, 15,000 people visited the emer-
gency room for asthma last year. Some
2,500 were hospitalized-more than six
times the national average-and 22 died-
more than 10 times the national average,
says Dr. Harold Osborn, director of emer-
gency medicine at Lincoln. These trends
alone are a clue that air-borne pollutants
are a real problem, he says. "There's some-
thing in the air that's irritating."
Researchers are still not entirely clear
on why asthma rates are so
high in low income neigh-
borhoods like Hunts Point,
which has a median house-
hold income of about
$7,000 and is part of the
poorest community district
in the city. Studies by the
National Institutes of Health
point to indoor air pollution
as the prime suspect, how-
ever, including dust mites,
cockroach body parts,
rodent infestation and even
poor ventilation from
kerosene heaters and old
gas stoves.
Yet many Hunts Point
people are convinced
there's more to it than that,
and point to the overwhelm-
ing number of waste plants
and other polluting facilities
in the community. Government environ-
mental regulators say that all of the
sewage-related plants they regulate are in
compliance with state and federal emis-
sions standards, but no research studies
have yet looked at the cumulative health
impact of so many transfer stations and
waste processing facilities in one area.
It's the chest pains and chronic nose-
bleeds that have residents feeling especial-
CITY LIMITS
No research studies have yet looked
at the cumulative health impact of
so many transfer stations and waste
processing facilities in one area.
the three-year-old plant is responsible for
some of the area's most noxious odors, a
fetid stench of "human waste and I don't
know what else. " Periodically, the smell
wafts through the community for days at a
time. Residents say it has caused children
to throw up on their way to school.
And still others report that the smell
has triggered asthmatic reactions. Charles
White, who lives near the plant on Faile
Street, worries that toxic substances may
be floating amidst the acrid smell. "There
is something in the air that no one is telling
us about," he insists.
ly nervous these days. After meeting each
other at an asthma-education session, host-
ed by The Point Community Development
Co. , Mildenberger, San Jurjo and a dozen
others compared reports of health prob-
lems in their families and realized there
might be serious health issues beyond the
respiratory illnesses they had long been
familiar with. As a result, they formed the
Hunts Point Awareness Committee in the
hopes of convincing neighbors, doctors
and city officials that answers had to be
found soon-and that the poor outdoor air
quality should be looked at first.
Call For Action
The point hardly seems worth arguing
in a neighborhood sitting alongside the
Bruckner Expressway, amidst more than
40 garbage and recycling facilities. And
the community's call for action has
spurred a response. The Environmental
Protection Agency will soon release
results from a month-long pilot study of
the neighborhood's air quality, a fIrst step
toward determining if the area's waste and
recycling facilities pose any special health
risks. Local physicians have also taken a
fresh interest in the subject, proposing new
research on the link between Hunts Point
pollutants and asthma.
Government agencies responsible for
environmental safety insist that air pollu-
tion isn't a problem in Hunts Point. Two
state Department of Environmental Con-
servation air monitoring units in the South
Bronx consistently report that the air con-
tains less than half the state-mandated lim-
its of sulfur dioxide, airborne particles and
other chemicals known to aggravate respi-
ratory problems, according to a department
spokesman. (The Department of Sanitation
refused to comment on their regulation of
waste transfer stations in the area.)
Neither air-monitoring unit is in Hunts
Point, however. And members of the
Awareness Committee remain uncon-
vinced. in addition to the many waste
JUNE/JULY 1996
transfer and recycling companies based
here, there is a city-owned sewage treat-
ment plant and de-watering facility.
Trucks, frequently uncovered, rumble
through the neighborhood constantly,
kicking up road dust and dropping debris.
And acrid garbage and tire fIres are an all-
too-common sight.
Air-Quality VIolations
State environmental officials counter
that these concerns are unwarranted. Stack
testing of the fertilizer plant shows regulat-
ed emissions well below state limits, and
the DEC says the odor does not pose health
risks. "There are lots of problems [that
cause respiratory distress], but to point a
fmger at one particular cause is a mistake,"
Most worrisome to some residents is
the New York Organic Fertilizer
Company, a sludge-to-fertilizer plant that
converts nearly three-quarters of the city's
treated sewage waste into fertilizer pellets
sold to farmers nationwide. San Jurjo says continued on page 34
~ F
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the
-
CITY LIMITS
n the box, you are only allowed two showers, one
shave and one pack of cigarettes a week, and that's
only if you behave. The sink runs cold, and the guard
brings a bucket of hot water once a day. You see just
a sliver of sky through a window across the gallery.
Food is slid to you through a slot in the steel door.
You sleep. You think a lot about the streets and the
people in the outside world. It makes you angry.
Sometimes you get delirious and forget whether it's day or night.
One hour out of every 24, you are let out of your barren cell, shack-
led, in handcuffs and heavily guarded. You go alone to an outdoor cage
Inmates locked in
solitary quickly find
that sanity can
be a fuzzy concept.
Sensory deprivation
is becoming a
common incarceration
technique-but it
may backfire on
New York City.
By Sasha Abramsky
and Andrew White
a little larger than your cell to jog in place and breathe the air.
To pass the time you read. The librarian comes around, but
you only get one book at a time, so you fish around the tattered
stock and try to frnd a fat one with all of its pages so it will last
the week.
Even reading won't necessarily help you keep your sanity.
"You know how you read a story sometimes and you think you're
in the story? In isolation, you really are in the stories you read. You
act them out," says Lynwood Jones, who spent 12 years upstate on
burglary, attempted homicide, weapons and drug charges. "You
find yourself talking to yourself unconsciously without even real-
izing it. You read yourself crazy." Jones lived for nine months in
the box, punishment for sticking a fellow prisoner with a shank.
Today, one year out of prison, he is a counselor at Fresh Start,
a program for inmates and former inmates of Rikers Island. He
JUNE/JULY 1996
says he believed in God so strongly that he was able to get through
the long period of near-total isolation and emerge from prison to
build a new life for himself working with other ex-offenders.
Jones knows, however, that most other troubled inmates have
not done so well. Punitive isolation has badly damaged some men
and women, particularly those who are psychologically or mental-
ly impaired-a description that fits a significant number of the
inmates in New York State prisons. A few have gone on to kill peo-
ple after their release.
In New York, use of isolation units in state prisons is up by
more than 60 percent in just five years, even as funding for reha-
bilitation programs such as drug treatment and job training has
been reduced. At any given time, more than 2,100 inmates are
locked up in the box for stretches that range from two months to
five years, with nothing but a cot and a cold-water tap. Since two-
thirds of state prisoners come from the five boroughs, most of
them will come home to the city-and many will be mad, bitter
and confused when they are released.
Although there's no sure way to link later crimes with an
inmate's prison experience, a growing number of psychiatrists and
corrections experts say that intense and lengthy periods of isola-
tion of prisoners can prove volatile for inmates already on the
edge. Someday, they say, these men and women must return to the
streets-and communities will have to cope with the results.
"Severe perceptual deprivation continued for a period of time
has a toxic effect on the brain," says Dr. Stuart Grassian of
Harvard Medical School, who has published his research on the
effects of isolation in The American Journal of Psychiatry. "I
don't think people recognize the tremendous danger this poses for
the community. You make them sick, then you take them back to
the city, open the cage and run away."
~ _ . his new direction in incarceration reflects
a profound shift in priorities. Prisons were
once a relatively small sideline for a state
government that spent most of its money
building roads and bridges and managing
educational and safety-net programs. No
longer. Today the Department of
Correctional Services takes a massive $2
billion chunk out of the state budget every year, meaning every
New York family contributes nearly $300 a year to keep the guard
towers manned and cage doors locked up tight.
Incarceration has been the fastest growing state-run industry in
New York for more than a decade. When Mario Cuomo was elect-
ed governor in 1982, the state had 28,500 prison inmates. Today
there are more than 68,400. During his three terms in office,
Cuomo built 27 new prisons, many of them maximum security
facilities. It is his single most expensive legacy.
Governor George Patalci is pursuing the same policy, with the
full cooperation of the state legislature. In 1995, he pushed
through laws increasing minimum sentences and limiting parole
for violent felons-changes that will increase the prison popula-
tion by at least another 10,000 men and women during the next 10
years, according to a state Senate analysis. This year, he aims to
eliminate parole for violent offenders and increase minimum sen-
tences even further while adding greatly to sentences for anyone
caught committing a crime with a gun. He would also move hun-
dreds of teenage criminals into the adult corrections system as
soon as they reach the age of 16 (see sidebar, page 19). In addition,
Patalci is proposing to build 8,800 new prison cells which would
cost, conservatively, $476 million.
-
--
More than $440 million of this is slated for three new maxi-
mum security prisons in upstate New York. Local governments
and businesses in the economically depressed towns of
Johnstown, Altamont, Friendship and Romulus have been franti-
cally bidding for the prisons, viewing them as job producers and
money-spinners capable of rejuvenating communities devastated
by the flight of industrial jobs.
While the number of New York prison cells grows, the number
of secure isolation units explodes twice as fast. One reason is the
increasingly punitive public attitude towards offenders. Many pris-
oners are placed in isolation for acts of violence against fellow
inmates or guards. Others are thrown into the hole for talking back
to officers or repeatedly refusing work assignments. But greater
use of segregation is also the result of the increasingly difficult
environment with which guards must cope. Despite new construc-
tion, state prisons are overcrowded and more than 1,400 New York
State inmates are double-bunked, two to a cell. Doubling up was
once considered a temporary measure. This year, however, it has
become a central part of Pataki's expansion plans.
"It's easier to put people in isolation than to supervise dou-
ble-bunking," says Elie Ward, director of Statewide Youth
Advocacy, a group that opposes Pataki proposals to send more
teenagers into the adult prison system. "The corrections staff is
scared. They're hysterical. They can't deal with these people the
way they should."
Maximum security prisons each include between 30 and 100
isolation units, and they are almost always filled to capacity.
Today, more than 630 prisoners are in solitary at the Southport
prison, and there is talk of expanding that ultra-high-security
facility. The state has more than 100 isolation cells at Attica, and
dozens of men at the state's 13 other maximum security and 36
medium security prisons also live in isolation, as do several
women at Albion and Bedford Hills.
In the city, a new, million-dollar segregation unit at the Otis
Bantum Center on Rikers Island has replaced the "Bing"-the
decades-old isolation wing, which was permanently closed three
months ago following well-documented allegations of violence by
guards against inmates.
_._ erry Fitzsimmons spent nearly a decade
in Canadian prisons during the late 1980s
and early '90s. At fust he was incarcerat-
ed for petty thievery, but after he lOlled a
fellow inmate in a brawl his sentence was
extended and he was placed in secure
segregation. He was 22 years old at the
time, and prison officials apparently had
second thoughts about just throwing him in the hole-records
show they believed Fitzsimmons was "in desperate need of psy-
chological care, educational upgrading and some form of trades
training," according to an article in the Toronto Globe and Mail.
Even so, he ended up in solitary for more than four straight years.
Fitzsimmons went to prison a thief, but in the space of eight
months following his release he became an armed bank robber
and murdered three people. Ultimately he turned himself in to
authorities. In interviews with Globe reporter Cynthia Amsden, he
said four straight years in secure isolation had left him unable to
cope with other people. "I spent a lot of time back in the hole," he
told her. "I couldn't deal with people when I got out.... It was fuck-
ing me up to have more than one person around me." He died
soon after the interview, having already committed himself to an
agonizing, slow suicide, stabbing himself with a hypodermic nee-
dle fIlled with one of his murder victim's HIV-tainted blood.
Whether he started out psychotic or not, isolation provided no
rehabilitation or treatment for Terry Fitzsimmons.
"You're looking now at people who are adapting to solitary as
a lifestyle," says University of California at Santa Cruz professor
of psychology Craig Haney. "A great number of people are going
to fmd it very hard, if not impossible, to adapt to a social envi-
ronment" when they emerge from isolation. The inevitable result,
he says, is not a safer society but a more violent one.
Grassian's research at the Pelican Bay prison in California, a
maximum security lock-up, found that the men "who became
most [mentally disturbed] in solitary confmement were those with
preexisting neurological dysfunction, such as seizures, retarda-
tion, illiteracy, hyperactivity and so on."
Problem is, he adds, these are also the men most likely to end
up placed in isolation in the fust place.
''Those capable of maintaining control of their behavior rec-
ognize there's no point to disruptive acts," says Grassian. People
who are less able to control themselves-extremely disturbed,
mentally impaired or learning-disabled individuals-are the ones
thrown into the most punitive parts of the prison system.
Grassian found that a third of isolation-unit prisoners he inter-
viewed at Pelican Bay reported visual and auditory hallucinations,
more than half experienced severe panic attacks, and over 50 percent
"reported a progressive inability to tolerate ordinary stimuli," such as
the sound of water rushing through pipes or the smell of toilets. The
prisoners told Grassian of an inability to concentrate, of severe and
violent paranoid episodes and of "the emergence of primitive aggres-
sive fantasies of revenge, torture, and mutilation of the prison guards."
Grassian concludes that, as a package, these symptoms repre-
sent a syndrome that combines the effects of a brain tumor, a bad
psychedelic trip, the disembodiment experienced in conditions of
pure sensory deprivation and the disorientation seen in cases of
severe schizophrenia. Grassian says that many of these symptoms
may persist for decades.
_ . ~ se of solitary confinement as an
every-day prison policy for more than
just the most violent inmates became
common in the mid-1980s. "Until
1983, long sentences in solitary were
pretty much unheard of," says New
York attorney Elizabeth Koob.
"Maybe you would get a year if you
escaped. But in the mid-1980s suddenly everyone was getting
two years for a fight. " Koob and her law partner Joan
Magoolaghan flIed a class-action lawsuit against the state for its
failure to screen mentally ill inmates in the isolation unit at
Bedford Hills women's prison. The case was settled in 1987, with
$350,000 paid out primarily to women whose mental condition
had deteriorated while cooped up in solitary.
Grassian testified in a similar lawsuit against New York State
concerning treatment of men at Attica, where cells in the box are
only eight feet long by six feet wide. A preliminary injunction
ordered the state to remove men who show signs of mental illness
from solitary confinement and get them appropriate treatment.
CITVLlMITS
The class-action case is due to come to trial later this year.
"Formally, they are complying with the order," says Joseph
Gerken of Prisoner's Legal Services in Buffalo, an attorney on the
Attica suit. He says the mental health staff interviews prisoners
and is able to remove them from solitary if they see signs of psy-
chotic behavior. "But there are quite a few people falling through
the cracks."
sizes expanded. There are no longer any shop classes for would-
be plumbers, carpenters or electricians. Prison vocational training
now means working in a manufacturing shop or learning a trade
on-the-job, fixing the prison's toilets and wiring.
"It's not a decrease in the program," argues department
spokesman Jim Flateau. "Why spend three months in an electrical
course in a vocational shop? We train them in the field."
The rapid growth in use of isolation is too recent a phenome-
non for there to have been any solid research on the post-release
history of inmates. There is no way to say for sure that these men
and women are more likely than other ex-offenders to commit
new crimes and return to prison. There is considerable anecdotal
evidence that this is the case, however.
n New York, State Senator Catherine Abate recently
released a report estimating that Governor Pataki's
proposed sentencing reforms could siphon as much as
$8 billion from education and social spending.
In the box, education is beside the point. You can't
even talk to your neighbor unless you don't mind hav-
ing your shower rights taken away. If you're not sleep-
ing, and you feel all right, you bang your fist on the
Unlike the 19th century, when German and American prison offi-
cials first dreamt up modern isolation units for imprisoning common
criminals, officials today are under no illusion that isolation is
remotely rehabilitative. '1t's to get guys out of circulation, out of the
general population," says Gerken. 'That's the explanation."
wall to bother your neighbor. If you feel bad, you bang your head.
Rehabilitation itself has become less of a priority in the New
York prison system in recent years. Millions of dollars for voca-
tional training, education and substance abuse treatment have
been cut from the corrections budget even as the inmate popula-
tion rises. More than 20,000 inmates in maximum security state
prisons no longer have access to drug or alcohol abuse treatment,
although more than 3,600 of them were convicted of drug-related
felonies. And education programs throughout the state prisons
have been cut back, with teaching positions eliminated and class
"I did four years. It felt like ten," says David Tufmo, who was
arrested at age 16 on the Upper West Side for a drug deal turned
violent, and was released last fall. "I did nine months in the box at
Southport. There's always something to do. Singing. Screaming.
Drawing on the walls. In the box, you think. You get mad. You
think about the people who messed you up. I got to where I want-
ed to kill my daughter's mother.
'That's how people get violent.".
Sasha Abramsky is a Manhattan-based freelancer.
KIDS LOCKED DOWN
K
ream began having flashbacks
after his release from Hikers:
he'd have an almost uncontrol-
lable urge to fight with strangers,
to stand his ground when someone failed to
respect his space. "You ever been on a train
at nJSh houri' You know how tight that gets,
to the point people try to push themselves
inside a train. A woman was trying to get in,
pushing me, and I turned around and grabbed
her throat and threw her out or the train."
Once, not long ago, when he was walking
down 42nd Street, and he was jostled by a
crowd on the sidewalk, he turned around
and punched a man. Kream now walks in the
street
He was incarcerated when he was 14, held
for four years, released, aJTeSted again on a
technical violation or his parole and served
six months on Hikers Island. He came out a
little over a year ago. "It's hard to make the
transition when you've been locked up for flYe
years. When you're released, you can't sur-
vive with a mentality like that, " he explains.
In New York State prisons, almost 4,500
young men and women are between 16 and
20 years old. Another 2,100 teenagers live in
residential facilities operated by the
Division for Youth (DFY).
JUNE/JULY 1996
If Governor Pataki has his ~ with pro-
posals under consideration in Albany, the
size or both systems is likely to grow-and
many more teens will be incarcerated in
state prisons with adult oft'enders. Youth
development advocates and juvenile justice
researchers think it's a bad move.
"Do you want kids who are still very
impressionable to be locked up with your
worst adult offenders?" asks Melissa
Sickmund, senior research associate at the
National Center for Juvenile Justice.
"Unless you put them in for life or death,
they are going to get out."
Pataki's plan would enable prosecutors
to try kids as young as 13 as adults if they
are arrested for violent crimes, or for
weapon sales or possession. He would also
transfer every 16 year old in a DFY facility
into the adult system (culT8ntly, they can be
transfelTBd only at age 18 or later). And he
would increase sentences for 15, 16 and 17
year olds convicted of felonies. New York is
already considered one of the toughest
states in the nation on juvenile offenders.
"It's just a way to fill more prison beds
and expand the population," says Elie ward
of Statewide Youth Advocacy, based in
Albany. "It's a very effective ~ to ensure
that they are more hostile to society when
they get out," she adds.
Research shows that young people react
badly when they are treated as adults in the
criminal justice system. A study by Jeffrey
Fagan of the Columbia University School of
Public Health found that kids charged with
robbery and tried as adults were much
more likely to be re-arrested and reincar-
cerated than their peers who were sent into
the juvenile justice system. However flawed
the state's juvenile courts and reform
schools are, the studies indicate they do
more to promote rehabilitation, education,
and respect for authority than the state's
prison system. A recent study in Rorida
produced equally stark results.
Why the move toward tougher treatment
of teensi' Fear of violence prompted by
reports of soaring teenage homicide rates,
for one thing, even though overall teen vio-
lent crime rates have not gone up much in
two decades. Economics is also an issue: it's
about $20,000 a year less expensive to
house a person in an adult prison than in a
residential youth program.
Most Ii aI, says SicknuId, "It jist satis-
fa some need we have for Joc:kq people up. "
SA andAW
-
Six years
on the inside,
six months out:
. ,
one Inmate s
journey back
to the streets.
By Amanda Bower
ichael Marvin Jackson was
absolutely sure of himself. He had
seen two. Everyone else in the
room was sure there were three,
except me.
I counted six.
The letter F. See how many
you can find in the following sen-
tence: "Finished ftles are the result of years of scientific study
combined with the experience of many years." The surprise exer-
cise was given to six convicted felons in a career development
workshop at the Fortune Society, a support group for ex-offend-
ers. According to the daily schedule, they were supposed to learn
how to write a resume, and when the sheet of paper with the "F"
sentence was handed around there was a collective rolling of eyes.
What on earth would the F exercise teach them?
When staffer Diego Gonzalez nodded and smiled at me and
my six Fs, I felt the stares of six people who later admitted to
being angry at that moment-angry with me for getting it right,
and angry with themselves for getting it wrong. Jackson was
angry he had to count the Fs at all . But Gonzalez explained it was
a lesson in patience. "Try to concentrate on everything that's
handed to you, everything that you're engaged with," he said.
"Try to leave everything else at home."
The participants in Gonzalez' three-day workshop were among
some 2,000 people released on parole from New York state prisons
in November 1995. About half can be expected to return. New
York's rate of recidivism is one of the highest in the country-<lf the
23,000 people released from state prisons in 1991,42 percent were
back by 1994. The rate of return to city jails is even higher. A lot of
these people commit another offense or violate parole-especially
if they went to jail as Michaellackson did, on a drug-related rap.
According to the most recent state statistics, more offenders
were returned for drug crimes than any other offense-48.5 per-
cent. Alice Layton Taylor, until two months ago the director of pro-
grams at Fresh Start, another support group for released inmates,
says the rate for New York City is much higher than the rest of the
state-around 85 percent, including city and federal inmates. The
major problem is that offenders' addictions are usually not
addressed in prison.
"Prison is not going to change the life of a drug addict," she
says. "They may stay clean while inside, but when they get off the
CITY LIMITS
bus [from Rikers], the crack dealer is standing there, on Queens
Boulevard, in front of the Chemical Bank, waiting for them."
Taylor says released inmates need to know that quality drug treat-
ment is immediately available to them on the outside, "[But] you
can't force somebody to change and grow."
"When I try to imagine how I would feel if I were released
with $40, no clothes, no place to live, no friends, no job, no edu-
cation, no work experience and a black skin in a racist society, I
just think about suicide," says the Reverend Stephen ChinIund, an
Episcopal priest who has worked with prisoners for 35 years, five
of them as chairman of the state's corrections commission. Post-
release pressures drive parolees to drugs, he says. Drugs drive
JUNE 1996
them back to prison.
The day of the Fs was the first time I met Michael Jackson. His
approach to the exercise illustrates what has been happening in his
life since his release on November 9, 1995. Jackson is in a hurry.
After six years inside and now fmally free from the guards and set
routines, he is rushing to assume control of his life. As a 40-year-
old drug addict with no job and no home of his own, he is by no
means in control. His confident and authoritative announcement
of the existence of only two Fs reflects a similar pose with his fam-
ily, friends, parole officer and me. At the time we met, Jackson did
not take the blame for his arrest, prison sentence, marriage break-
down and subsequent downfalls while on parole. He saw them as
the failings of other people and of "the system," which he felt was
trying to defeat him.
In conversation, Jackson can be like a pendulum, swinging to
extremes. One minute he would tell me the day of his release was
one of the happiest moments of his life, the next he would say the
whole world was a prison cell, and he wasn't afraid of going back
inside. One day he said he was an addict who made his bed and
had to lie in it, the next he said he was a recreational drug user who
was framed. In the morning he told me he needed money, in the
evening he forced bus fare into my hand. He alternated between
trying to make me admire him, to trying to make me feel sorry for
him. From wanting to succeed, to wanting to fail.
ife when you get out of prison is like a three-
legged stool. To survive, all three legs need
to be in place before you sit down-a job,
somewhere to live and addiction counseling.
If even one leg is missing, a precarious life
tumbles again.
This is the analogy John Rakis used when
.. _ .. ~ he explained to me why he thought Jackson
was in trouble. Rakis has more than 20 years' experience with
felons. Once a prison guard, he worked his way up to deputy exec-
utive director of the New York Board of Corrections, and is now
~ executive director of the South Forty Corporation, a support group
~ for ex-offenders. "There's no thinking in prison," Rakis told me.
"If you do think and question authority, then it could work against
you. Prison guards are into control. You learn to keep your mouth
shut and follow instructions." When release day comes, Rakis
said, most parolees are hell-bent on taking control of their lives,
but only concentrate on getting ajob and somewhere to live. They
deny their addictions-to drugs, alcohol, gambling, spending
money, or the high of committing a crime.
My first conversation with Jackson was at the Fortune Society,
after he had been out of prison and using his real name for four
weeks. Before November 9, 1995, he was known as 9OA3385, an
inmate at Camp Gabriels minimum-security prison. He had been
there for just over a year. Before that, he had been moved to three
medium-security installations in one year. Before that, Green
-
-
Haven maximum security for two-and-a-half years. Sing Sing,
nine months. Rikers Island, three months. Queens House of
Detention, 10 days. Awaiting trial on bail, nine months. Arrested
for selling crack to an undercover cop, April 24, 1989.
In Jackson's case, his drug addiction and six years upstate cost
him his house, his job as a Transit Authority bus driver, his two
sports cars, his wife of 16 years and custody of his two youngest
children. Since his release, he has been living with his mother in
Jamaica, Queens, riding the subway, sporadically employed and
borrowing money. "I have to sit there every morning as my step-
father goes to the breakfast table with the newspaper and circles
all the jobs and asks me what job interviews I am going to," he
complained to me a short time ago. "How much longer is he going
to do that? How long am I expected to keep asking people to do
things for me and not doing anything for myself?"
Finding work when you have a record is tough, and Jackson is
a man motivated by money and material objects. Once, when I
asked him what the best moment of his life was, he could not
decide between the day his fIrst child was born and the day he
bought his Trans Am. His eyes sparkled when he spoke about
nightclubs and clothes. When I asked him about his arrest, he
answered by describing what he was wearing. "I had this French
designer coat, brown cashmere, with a silk lining," he said lov-
ingly, and looked disdainfully at the bright blue and white Dallas
Cowboys jacket he now wears. "If you ever get one, you will
know. They have a lot of pockets hidden in the lining, and I used
to keep my money in different pockets. There was the pocket for
change for people on the street, and the pocket for my twenties
and fifties. Man, was that a great coat."
The longer he is unemployed, the more depressed Jackson
becomes. His cousin Frances told me in January that he was get-
ting desperate. "He's trying to make up for lost time," she said.
"He wants to get everything back that he had before."
In his impatience, Jackson has come dangerously close to land-
ing back in prison. His conditions of release stipulate that he attend
regular drug screenings and drug counseling and abide by an 11
p.m. curfew. His parole officer told him not to work until he had
completed at least three months of drug counseling at the Samaritan
Village in Queens. She was concerned that if Jackson started work-
ing' he would have money to spend on drugs. But he defied her.
When a night job became available, he took it. Without telling his
parole officer, he worked every weeknight from 5 p.m. to at least I
a.m. during the three-month strike by two building maintenance
workers' unions. This meant he was violating his curfew and miss-
ing drug counseling sessions because of his job commitment.
His parole officer knows her client is depressed at not having
work and his own money. "I would be too," she tells him. But
Jackson resents her suggestions that he take long walks or go run-
ning to enjoy the outdoors. He spends a lot of time sitting in his
mother's basement watching television. The officer has noticed
that Jackson has begun to live in the past. "Those were the good
days, and now these are the bad days. For him, the highlights of
his life were being on the streets and getting high," she told me in
January. "I'm going to have to keep a closer eye on him."
The parole officer says she is reasonable, but if a parolee
breaks curfew continuously, she would send him back upstate.
She knew nothing of her client's night job. Jackson claims to be
unfazed by the threat of going back to prison. "I'm not scared," he
says. "I'm leading a law-abiding life, I'm trying to get back into
society and do the things I'm supposed to be doing. I'm trying to
fulfill my obligations to my children," he adds. "They're setting
me up for a let-down. But no, I ain't afraid [of prison]."
"Michael hated prison," counters Jackson's counselor at the
Fortune Society, Rickey Thomas. ''There are people who can sur-
vive in prison, people who have half their family in prison. Going
inside is like coming home. But he hated it."
He may have hated prison, but Jackson has failed as a parolee
and gone back inside once before. Back in August 1993, after he
had been inside for four years, he was considered eligible for
work release and went to live with his wife in Manhattan and
work at a fire extinguisher company. He lasted nine months. In
April 1994, Jackson tested positive for drugs.
It took him three months to admit this failure to me, and when
he did, his defense was ready. "It was only limited freedom any-
way," said Jackson. "You come out on work release or parole, and
you're put into a situation that's worse than in prison. You could
work, but they took your money. They budgeted you out. I had
always had a dominating control with my wife, and there was very
little I could do when they gave me $50 a week. I was constantly
reminded of whose house I was in. She didn't want me there. I
actually wished that I would go back to prison and do my time up
until fIve years." Jackson said he consciously chose to use crack
while on work release, so that he could be sent back inside.
To me, it sounded as if Jackson was still denying his addiction.
ichael Jackson was born on
October 9, 1955 in Sumter, a
town of 70,000 in South Carolina.
Jackson's mother and father split
up soon after he was born and
when he was two years old, his
mother left him and his two older
brothers with their grandparents
and headed for New York with a new husband. ''The crime and
violence in New York made Mama decide to leave me in South
Carolina," is how Jackson explains her decision. He says he
admires his mother's determination to get a higher paying job and
move to the city, and harbors no resentment about seeing her only
four times a year while he was growing up. Jackson's biological
father died when he was 15, and he does not speak about him, say-
ing only that they had "no relationship."
He did not have a favorite subject at school and didn't have any
idea of what he wanted to be when he grew up. But before he
turned 19, he had married his high school girlfriend, Loretta
Glisson, and became a father. Soon after baby Michelle Jackson
was born, Michael and Loretta moved to New York City. "I want-
ed to be close to my mother," Jackson said, "and I wanted better
employment." Loretta told me that Jackson's obsession with mak-
ing money was the beginning of his downfall. "[By the early
1980s] he was working two and a half jobs," she said from her
Brooklyn home. "Then someone introduced him to something that
keeps him awake, and he just had a taste for it and got addicted."
Jackson tells the story somewhat differently. He says he first
experimented with drugs when he was 16 or 17. He tried marijua-
na with school friends, then moved onto Quaaiudes, uppers and
downers which he and friends got from soldiers at a nearby army
base. "Things got bad when he got into cocaine," said Loretta. "It
changed him .... He was more into himself. He was always in the
CITVLlMITS
basement. I worried about what I would do if something happened
to the kids and Michael was out getting high somewhere." She
told me that at the end of 1984, Jackson had gotten "very aggres-
sive." But she gave no further details, saying only that it made her
pack her bags. "I took the kids on vacation," she said, "and we
never came back."
After his wife left, Jackson continued to work as a city bus dri-
ver and use crack. He initially told me he had never driven while
high, but months later, when I asked the same question, he sighed
and admitted he had.
He got busted on April 24, 1989. Jackson worked the day
shift, parked his bus and clocked off at 6:58 p.m. He drove home
to Queens and immediately went to buy some drugs off the Van
Wyck Expressway. For $250 he bought about 50 "bottles," as
the small glass vials that hold pebbles of crack are known.
Jackson said he used two, gave about seven bottles away to
friends, then went into a bodega on the corner of 133rd Street
and Rockaway Boulevard to buy an orange juice and a chicken
hero sandwich. When he came out, undercover officers from the
112th Precinct had lined 10 people up against the bodega wall.
Jackson was the eleventh.
At his trial in February 1990, Jackson did not deny the pos-
session charge, but pleaded not gUilty to intending to sell crack,
and to the sale itself. He insisted that the courtroom was the first
place he ever saw the "Indian chick," an undercover police officer
who testified she bought $15 worth of crack from him. He was
convicted and received five to 15 years. He served six.
JUNE 1996
Jackson, who can be very talkative, fmds it difficult to discuss
those six years in prison. The stories he does reluctantly tell are all
positive ones-about the computer courses he took to get his
Associate's degree from Dutchess Community College and his
election to the presidency of the Camp Gabriels Narcotics
Anonymous group. Less pleasant details, like the fact that his
grandson DaWck was born while he was serving his final year in
prison, are barely mentioned.
Jackson's attitude about drugs is equally hard to nail down. His
stories change as our relationship changes. The first time I bring
up the subject, he is defensive. "I was always in control," he says.
"I never let it interfere with my responsibilities." But I have
already heard Jackson tell participants at the Fortune Society's
career development workshop that he had used drugs for more
than 20 years.
Later, when I know Jackson better, I ask him if he smoked
crack as a way of escaping other problems. Sitting in his mother's
basement, he leans forward from his chair, lights a cigarette and
spends a few seconds staring at the basketball players on the tele-
vision screen. "Suppose a person just looked at life honestly and
said 'Hell, this isn't a place I want to be in. I prefer death over
going through the endeavors of this lifetime here. ' That person is
not necessarily depressed. That person might be very well in con-
trol of life, but they go and they choose to do this. What makes
one man happy the next individual might call foolish, or stupid, or
fantastic. For him to single it out and say why a lot of people go
to drugs? It's a book of reasons why."
"The Strip on
Rockaway
Boulevard in South
Ozone Park. Seven
years ago,
Mi chael Jackson
was arrested here
for selli ng crack.
--
-
A few hours later, he describes the way he smoked cocaine,
the rush he got from a hit and, with a grin, the "comfort zone" that
he reached when he was high. He says he bought large quantities
of crack so that about 20 minutes after smoking the first "hit,"
when he started to come down from the comfort zone, he could
get back up immediately.
"Once you become an addict, that never leaves you. It's one
thing for the body to exist, but it's another thing for it to want to
exist with foreign substances that control the body itself. It's not
something that I want to do."
The conversation breaks off when Jackson's long-limbed 14-
year-old son, Michael Junior, lopes down the stairs, climbs onto
the exercise bike and starts slowly pedaling. He asks his father for
permission to go to a friend's house. Jackson agrees but tells him
to be home at 5 p.m. "You don't want to be bringing me out in this
weather to come looking for you, do you Junior?" he says, laugh-
ing. They joke about basketball, about who beat who in one-on-
one games, and Jackson begins ragging the boy about his expen-
sive taste in clothes. "Now the younger boy, he be happy with a
$60 coat, but this one, he settle for nothing less than one of them
Bear coats. How much you think it cost?" Michael Junior gives
me a broad grin and parades a thick black $160 down jacket.
When his son leaves for his friend's house 10 minutes later,
Jackson explains to me why Michael Junior lives at his grandpar-
ents' house and not with his younger brother and mother. "Junior
got in some trouble while I was inside, and they wanted to send
him upstate," he says. "My Moms took it to court and got cus-
tody." The trouble consisted of skipping school, failing classes,
and acting up in class. I ask Jackson what he would do if his son
got involved with drugs.
"I would break his fucking neck," Jackson fires back. "I would
break his neck, point blank, period.... I brought him into this
world, he's my son, and I can very well take him out of here. I
would rather for him, at this stage here in his life--God forbid,
and it's bad to say-I would rather for him to be dead th.an for him
to be drug-addicted."
But the father can't quite shake his glamorous memories of the
drug world. One wintry Sunday, at my request, we strolled down
"the strip," the stretch of Rockaway Boulevard from 127th to
152nd streets where Jackson had bought the crack that sent him to
prison. There were people who knew Jackson, and acknowledged
him with a nod of the head or a smile. It was cold, but there were
a few clockers-young men who keep watch for drug dealers-
standing at the front of bodegas in preparation for the night's
trade. Jackson flagged down a group of three men and began talk-
ing to one of them. The man never once looked at me.
When we walked away, Jackson told me his friend's name,
and said the man robbed drug dealers and then sold the "prod-
uct" himself. Obviously the friend was suspicious of me-after
all, Jackson had been in prison for six years and then shown up
on the streets with a stranger. Years ago, Jackson says, his friend
had asked to borrow Jackson's car and used it to hunt down a
rival, whom he shot. The victim's own friends came back, found
Jackson's car parked outside his house and shot it up. Jackson
punctuates the telling of this story with a nostalgic smile.
After a meeting with his parole officer, Jackson and I left
Queens and caught the A train into Manhattan and Jackson used
the opportunity to tell me about a drug dealer friend of his who
lived in Washington Heights and sold her wares down in Harlem
and Greenwich Village. She made tens of thousands of dollars a
day, he said, and the police were keeping a close eye on her. Years
ago, Jackson had volunteered to be her courier, driving drugs and
money up and down Broadway. Jackson made it sound like fun-
the trips after dark, the excitement of dealing with Colombian
middlemen, the adrenaline rush when a police car appeared in the
rear view mirror. His friend rewarded him with gifts of up to
$4,000 worth of crack.
"He's romanticizing that life because the new life is hurting
and getting really hard," says JoAnne Page, executive director
of the Fortune Society. "There's a lot of romance in these sto-
ries, and it's a big risk factor for him .... We lose a lot of people
that way."
ronically, Jackson gets some of his best advice dur-
ing his sessions at the Fortune Society, from anoth-
er ex-offender, Rodney T., who didn't want his last
name used because, he says, he is an active drug
dealer. "You clean now, they know you clean,
because you just came home, right?" Rodney asks
Jackson. "But what they want, they want you to get
proper guidance and proper counseling on the drug
problem to find out what the problem was that made you go to
drugs. When you got the drug problem completely locked, you got
it under control, then you can start climbing up."
Jackson looks down at his copy of The New York Post as
Rodney T. continues. "I guess you got to understand too, a parole
officer been going on for years now, watching over people," he
says. "I guess everybody that be coming in there be saying 'I
know what I'm talking about, it ain't going to happen to me.' ...
We think we know what we're talking about but there's stuff there
we don't see."
The day after his grandson's first birthday on March 11, I
asked Jackson if he thought he would be at home or in prison for
Datrick's second birthday. "They say never say never," he said.
About an hour later, I got a call from one of Jackson's coun-
selors. "I have some very disappointing news," she said, and
sighed. Jackson had tested positive for cocaine in a urine sample
taken at the Samaritan Village drug rehabilitation unit in early
March. Although only tests administered by the Department of
Parole are admissible before the parole board, the counselor told
me this was an indication of where Jackson was headed. "He's
picked up again," she said. "He'll test positive there, too."
o far, Jackson has proven her wrong. In the
intervening months, he has not tested positive
again, and he has started a new business doing
handyman repairs for people in the corrections
field. In April, his son Michael Junior made
student of the month at his intermediate school.
Jackson says he and his wife Loretta are getting
along better, and their dream is to open a
restaurant together within the next couple of years.
"I'll be well on my way as long as I have people to take a
chance on me," he says. "I need to do it for me. I had a lot of
money on the streets. But that was another lifetime." .
Amanda Bower is the New York correspondent for The West
Australian, a daily in Perth.
CITVLlMITS
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EQUAL OPPORTUNITY LENDER
-
Gospel Choir
from Brooklyn
Methadone
Center Singing
AIDS Memorial,
Brooklyn, New
York,1987
hen people ask him about Brian Wei!, Bruce Stepherson
likes to teU this story: one late Friday afternoon a few
years ago, Weil , who was helping to run a needle
exchange program in the Bronx, had gotten a desperate
phone caU from a woman who said her AIDS-stricken
sister was getting improper treatment at a troubled
Bronx hospital. "Calm down," Wei! told the woman.
''I'U see what I can do."
:.*.:.. ...
~ ... -
.. ~ ..
Unable to contact a doctor who could authorize a transfer to a
better hospital, Weil settled on a simple solution: he posed as a
physician and, over the phone, ordered an unsuspecting hospital
administrator to immediately deliver the woman to a well-regarded
private hospital in lower Manhattan. The ruse worked, recaUs
Stepherson, who met Weil in the 1980s when they both began hand-
ing out needles and bleach kits to junkies in poor neighborhoods.
After the hospitals caught on, however, Weil faced the wrath of the
CITY LIMITS
Perhaps too close. Now he's dead of a heroin overdose at 41.
By Dylan Foley and Glenn Thrush
Photographs by Brian Wei!
-
Weil's death has only added to the mystery of his life. Even the
people who knew him best still describe him as a "private," "intense,"
"obsessive" man who entered other people's lives with ease, but kept his
own life to himself. At the time Weil died, many of his fellow AIDS
activists didn't even know that he was among the most highly respected
photographers to document the AIDS epidemic. Fewer people knew he
had been battling persistent lung problems for nearly a year, even as he
was trying frantically to both provide for the needs of hundreds of home-
less drug users and raise money for a new needle exchange program.
Most of all, hardly anyone suspected he had been quietly taking
heroin for more than a year and had tried several times to kick his
habit. "He had tried heroin in high school and had been doing it again
for about a year and half," says Kevin Hurley, an actor who was one
of Weil 's oldest and closest friends. "I imagine it gave him relief from
what was going on in his life, but it was something he never really
shared with anyone.
"I guess that's the incredible irony," he says. "He was all by him-
self. Here was a guy who spent his life doing things for other people
and he wouldn't ask anyone for help."
evin Hurley fIrst met Weil when the two of them were
high school sophomores in Glencoe, an affluent Chicago
suburb. They were both looking for a little excitement
and a ticket out of suburbia. Hurley remembers his fIrst
impressions: "He was very quiet, sort of a loner, and very,
very smart." Weil, who lived with his father after his par-
ents divorced, had just begun to experiment with a cam-
era. That summer, the pair decided they would hitchhike cross-coun-
try through Canada, but border guards stopped them because they did-
n't have the proper identifIcation. Instead, they made their way south
and found themselves in Salt Lake City, where they were arrested for
illegal hitchhiking, separated and thrown into juvenile hall.
"It was a little frightening," Hurley says. "But Brian thought it
was funny. Us hitchhikers being thrown in with kids who shot their
mothers to death." Brought back home by his father, Weil began vol-
unteering at a residence for mentally retarded adults and was soon tak-
ing their pictures. Intrigued by what he had seen in Utah, he began to
hang out at reform school and made friends with the kids there, emerg-
ing with a collection of pictures that echoed the raw style of his idols
Diane Arbus and Robert Frank. In 1976, after a stint in art school and
a trip to Europe, Weil packed up his belongings and headed for New
York with Hurley.
For cash, Weil painted walls in art galleries, but his off-hours
were spent on seedy streetcorners, gay sex clubs and S&M bars, feed-
ing his fascination with the fringes of the late-1970s downtown
scene-the drag queens, the bathroom-stall junkies, the wizened old
timers watching the city disintegrate from their barstools. He taught
himself all he could about photography and obsessively studied what-
ever topic happened to interest him: medicine, boxing, pool.
As a photographer, Weil eschewed voyeurism and one-day
shoots. His technique-his lifestyle-involved immersing himself in
whatever New York City subculture aroused his insatiable curiosity. In
1985, when he decided to do a series on the Hasidic Jews of
Williamsburg, he grew a beard and curled forelocks and donned the
traditional hat and clothes of the ultra-orthodox sect. Weil, whose
father was a Holocaust survivor, wandered among the Hasidim for six
months before pulling out his camera.
Yet just as quickly as he got involved with the Hasids, Weil
withdrew, severing his relationships when he felt the insular world
smothering him. "He found the Hasidim to be an angry people liv-
ing in an enclosed community," Hurley recalls.
"When he got into something, he got into it so deeply that at
some point he OD'd himself and he'd have to get out," says Augie
Tjahaya, who took courses Weil taught at the International Center for
Photography and later became his photography apprentice. "I remem-
ber working in his darkroom and seeing all these boxes of jazz tapes-
Miles Davis and Coltrane and Sarah Vaughan. I asked him about them
and he said he was really into this music a year or so before. Then he
OD'd. He didn't listen to it anymore. He just got sick of it."
The one thing he never got tired of was volunteering to help the
poor and sick. By the mid-1980s, many of the friends he had made in
the city had begun to die of AIDS. Frustrated and angry that the epi-
demic was widely ignored, Weil joined the fledgling Gay Men's Health
Crisis. In 1985, he heard about nurses ignoring AIDS babies at an
uptown Manhattan hospital. "He organized me and some of his other
friends to go up there, just to hold them," Hurley recalls. It was the
beginning of a commitment that would dominate the rest of Weil 's life.
That same year, Weil volunteered to be a GMHC home-care vol-
unteer and met Maria Barcellos, a dark-eyed Brooklyn graduate stu-
dent who had contracted HIV from her Brazilian husband, Fernando.
Maria's two-year-old daughter Flavia had begun to die of AIDS about
the time Weil began helping the family cook, clean and take care of its
mounting medical problems.
Then Maria, who was just beginning to cope with the imminent
destruction of her family, found out she was going to have another
baby. Five months into her pregnancy, she suffered a nearly fatal bout
with AIDS-related pneumonia. "Flavia was suffering from severe neu-
rological disorders that made her unable to even sit up in her stroller,"
Weillater wrote. Fernando, deathly ill, returned to Brazil for treatment
and died there. Throughout the ordeal, Weil never exposed a single
frame of fIlm.
Then, as Flavia was placed in the intensive care unit for what
proved the last time, Maria asked him an unexpected question: "Could
you take my baby's picture?"
The fIrst picture he took of the family was of dying Flavia, her
sleeping face blurred by the cupola of a hospital machine. Later, he
captured the image of the little girl, arms crossed, wearing a tiara made
of baby's breath in her coffin. Several months after the funeral, he took
a shot of Maria, groping in pain as she gave birth to Adrianna, the one
family member to test negative for HIV, and the only Barcellos who
remains alive today.
The pictures became the heart of Weil's 1992 book, "Every 17
Seconds," a collection of AIDS pictures published by Aperture. The title
is meant as a reminder that someone in the world is infected with AIDS
every 17 seconds. He dedicated the book to the Barcellos family.
The last picture of the series shows Adrianna playing on her moth-
er's Sloan-Kettering Memorial Hospital death bed. "On August 28,
(1991) at 7:30 a.m., Maria died," Weil wrote. "She was 38 years old."
The book also includes photos Weil took with the help of a grant
from the World Health Organization, which allowed him to explore
places where the epidemic was out of control yet largely undocument-
ed. He traveled to the Dominican Republic to take pictures of trans-
vestite prostitutes distributing condoms in the fIrst stirrings of a safe-
sex consciousness outside the U.S. In Haiti he encountered a voodoo
healer dispensing anti-AIDS potions out of old Campari bottles to
gullible customers. He cultivated friendships with teenage boys and
girls who were contracting the disease in Bangkok's sex industry.
Back in New York, Weil continued to work with children who
had full-blown AIDS. He bathed them, took their pictures, told them
jokes, arranged for their birthday parties. He held their hands as they
CITY LIMITS
-
"The one thing people need to know is that despite the way he died I needle exchanges are a tremendously
important thing that saves people's lives,
"
Ann Philbin says, IIThat's what his life's message is, Period, II
tools to help people prevent the spread of the ill-
ness rather than browbeating them to completely
change their lifestyles. As he was helping Maria
and her family, Wei! began worldng with a group of
activists illegally handing out condoms, sterile
hypodermics and bleach kits to heroin addicts. By
1989, he was one of 20 volunteers distributing more
than 4,000 needles during Saturday expeditions to
streetcomers in Harlem and the South Bronx.
Technically, the group was violating state
drug laws. Wei! always confrontational and thor-
oughly committed to the cause, was arrested sev-
eral times. Yet, faced with solid evidence of suc-
cess in the campaign against the spread of AIDS,
politicians were eventually forced to admit that
needle exchanges ought to be legitimized. By
1992, when the state [mally granted the Bronx-Harlem Needle
Exchange a waiver to operate legally, Wei! had emerged as one of the
most vocal and recognizable needle exchange activists in the country.
"He was stubborn and arrogant," says Patty Perkins, an epidemi-
ologist who directs a TB program at Beth Israel Medical Center and a
friend of Wei! 'so "But he had a vision of the way the world should treat
IV drug users and he would rail against people who treated them with
anything less than respect or dignity."
lf he was building a reputation, he was also growing dissatisfied
with the levels of bureaucracy and political infighting that were a nat-
ural result of the organization's growth in stature. So, in March 1995,
Wei! decided to split off and start his own harm reduction program,
Citiwide Harm Reduction.
"His basic principle [in founding Citiwide] was to give as many
needles to as many addicts as was humanly possible," Kevin Hurley
says. "Blanket the city in needles if necessary."
Using the contacts he made among drug users, Wei! also decided
it was time to bring needle exchange into places where users lived-
primarily, the single-room-occupancy hotels the city uses to house
homeless people with AIDS. With a small crew of volunteers, he
began to show up in the dark hotel hallways, doing what he did best,
talking quietly to people, listening to what they said, giving them
information and the tools to protect themselves.
But, for the first time, Wei! was bearing full responsibility for an
entire organization and its clientele. Forced to seek another waiver
from the state, he had to operate as an outlaw exchange until govern-
ment approval came through. Financial support from foundations was
slow in coming. And always there were the clients. He bought them
food, arranged for their medical needs and helped them deal with the
sluggish city bureaucracies, which he loathed almost as much as the
disease itself.
"He had no money. Zero," recalls Ann Philbin, a Soho art cura-
tor and Wei! 's longtime girlfriend. "He had 1,400 clients, people who
depended on him, and very little money. That's an amazing situation
to be in. A lot of the cash for the exchange came out of his own pock-
et. It was an incredibly stressful time."
The pressures began taldng their toll. Patty Perkins remembers
thinldng that Wei! wasn't taking care of himself. "I used to kid him about
living on a diet of Ramen noodles and peanut but-
ter'" she says. "When he was stressed, he would not
eat.... He also seemed incredibly sad sometimes,
which was probably a reflection of the work he was
doing."
About six months before he died, Wei!
developed a slight cough that developed into a
severe hack, largely because he never took time
off to recuperate. Repeated trips to the doctor
yielded handfuls of new prescriptions--even an
asthma inhaler-but no relief. "Part of the prob-
~ lem was he was driving himself too hard," Philbin
says. "Part of it was that he was hanging out in an
environment that wasn't healthy. He was always
around sick people and he was the kind of guy
that wouldn't think twice about going into some-
one's apartment and giving them a bath."
"One day he came to me and said 'I' m sick. I try everything, but
still I'm sick," recalls Smiley Cruz, a former heroin addict who was
one ofWei!'s most trusted volunteers at Citiwide. "He was really wor-
ried about it. II'
he International Center for Photography is planning a
memorial show of Wei!'s work for September. As his
friends prepare for it, they talk about his overdose like a
sick joke that won't go away. "It's not something you ever
feel comfortable talking about," Philbin says. They can't
stop talking about it, not when the New York Post hypes the
story so: "Needle Exchange Big Dies in Drug O.D."
The headline was heartless, but it was truthful. None of We iI's
friends, not even Philbin and Hurley, are sure they know what was
going on in Wei!'s mind at the time he died. They are left with stacks
of the huge, 40-inch-square prints he made of his photographs, and
with the still-struggling Citiwide needle exchange.
"The one thing people need to know is that despite the way he
died, needle exchanges are a tremendously important thing that save
people's lives," Philbin says. "That's what his life's message is. Period."
Last month the money came through on a Robin Hood
Foundation grant, pumping a much-needed $40,000 into the program.
But the board of directors has yet to appoint a new executive director,
although Rod Sorge, who worked with Weil at the Bronx-Harlem
exchange, is overseeing day-to-day operations. Still, Citiwide is doing
many of the things its founder wanted it to do: handing out needles,
referring addicts to treatment programs, befriending the friendless.
Yet even if the new organization is in competent hands, Weil's
loss is crushing. It was his brainchild, an offspring of his obsession to
get inside other people's lives.
A close friend put it this way: "I can't help thinking he started
taldng heroin because he wanted to know what it was like to be addict-
ed. You understand?
"Maybe he needed to know what is was like to be one of the peo-
ple he was helping."
Dylan Foley is a Manhattan-basedfreelance writer.
CITVLlMITS
D
id you know the City of New York, for more than
two decades, has been trying as hard as it can to
keep manufacturing jobs in the five boroughs?
This may come as a surprise to those of us
who have observed the archipelago of empty fac-
tories in Bushwick, Greenpoint and Red Hook. Or noted that
the longshoremen's hall in Brooklyn was just sold to the
Church of Latter-Day Saints-because there are now more
Mormons on the waterfront than stevedores. Or read about the
frequent multimillion dollar tax packages offered to banks
threatening to leave town, while small manufacturing firms are
allowed to go out of business without so much as a nod.
But don't tell any of this to New York Times reporter Kirk
Johnson, whose April 21 front page "special report" wove the
tender tale of the city's noble-but-doomed 1974 attempt to pre-
serve its manufacturing base by zoning 14 percent of the city's
land exclusively for industrial use. According to the Times,
administration after administration has been striving futiley to
halt the exodus of blue collar jobs. "There was a vainglorious
tion, government leaders have instead devot-
ed extraordinary quantities of political and
fmancial capital in incentives for the insur-
ance, financial services and real estate indus-
tries-and now even those businesses are
__ .III.I! . .--... ... . .,;"., .. ,,,._.
PRESS
abandoning the city by the baker's dozen.
"From the ashes rose opportunity," effuses Johnson of the
Times. Yet the opportunities of which he speaks occurred only
in Manhattan neighborhoods with built-in advantages, includ-
ing wealthy clients and consumers, central locations and good
access to transportation. Areas like Tribeca now thrive with film
production and computer software firms, but many Queens,
Bronx and Brooklyn neighborhoods have never recovered from
the loss of blue collar jobs.
The lessons Johnson offers are familiar ones: government
. cannot stop the exigencies of the free market; manufacturing in
this city is dead; gentrification is good.
Industrial Noise
But planners who have long been in the struggle to preserve
manufacturing jobs have a very different view of things. The
government didn't expend an ounce of effort keeping manufac-
turers here by improving infrastructure and transportation or
providing technical support services, says Tom Angotti of the
Pratt Institute Center for Community and Environmental
Development. "All the city did was maintain the zoning."
By James Bradley
At least the city is now seeking to preserve the newer high-
tech and film production jobs that have sprung up in
JUNE/JULY 1996
Manhattan. On May 1, Johnson reported that Giuliani wants to
poignancy to the blanket declaration that the tides of time and spend $49 million a year in tax breaks and incentives to keep
industrial relocation should somehow be halted by whim of city them from decamping to New Jersey. But even this seems like
bureaucracy," Johnson writes. a token gesture, considering Giuliani offered $50.5 million to
The zoning policy has failed, but the reporter says it accom- one fmancial furn-First Boston-in exchange for remaining
plished something unexpectedly positive in the process: it in its city headquarters.
spurred a renaissance in retailing and high-tech "Silicon Alley" In the big-time press, anyone that has problems with govern-
businesses while gentrifying much of lower Manhattan's pic- ment's anti-manufacturing bias is still classified as a moth-
turesque post-industrial space. City government was directly bitten eccentric. Manhattan Congressman Jerry
responsible for this emblem of urban resurgence-and, pre- Nadler is routinely depicted as a flake or
surnably, the proliferation of $2 million Soho lofts. "And a gadfly because of his propos-
almost none of it would have happened ... if New York had vig- als for boosting ship- "eS: t.
orously enforced its own [industrial zoning] laws." ping and rail .,ot 0 O .. \te ,
Maybe so, but what if New York had enforced the law? Isn't j I'Y\' , '" '
it possible we'd be better off if mayors Beame, Koch, Dinkins .. e 0'" "'e f t ee .l
and Giuliani had made more than a halfhearted 0' f t,,} . nOO"'
attempt to preserve the half-million manu- 0 e, eS O} ,,\ S
facturing jobs that have fled since ",''SO" e"t\ ottO .
the early 1970s?Theydid- '0" tt' \(; freight. John
n't, of course, O"S J the .l. ne" . McHugh, the trans-
which "'e 'eS
S
.leO"" portatton expert who sought
1" ot . 'S '" to ensure that the Harlem River Yard
r 0 " " becomes a major freight transfer center is described
e
"t \I t\l'S in the Times and the New Yorker as a "train buff" and "Choo-
.. " '" n \" Choo McHugh"-as if he sits in his room in an engineer's cap
nOVe, ,.t, , t' was too polishing his playtime caboose.
"fO"'''''' bad for companies Perhaps Johnson and his Times editors should read their
I'Y\O" '" ) like American Bank Note in own articles a little more carefully. As Fran Reiter, the new
". the Bronx, Topps at Brooklyn's Bush Deputy Mayor for Economic Development, told them: "The
Terminal and the Long Island City-based mak- financial sector was where we really concentrated our
ers of Chiclets gum. They all left New York in the last resources. The city made a conscious decision that that's the
decade with nary a wave goodbye from City Hall. For a genera- kind of economy we wanted. It was foolish."
WI
..... - - - - . . - ~ ...... ..
CITYVIEW
W
hen Mayor Giuliani announced last month
that he wanted to reorganize the city's
school system following the model of
Chicago's recent reforms, education advo-
cates in New York couldn't believe what
they were hearing.
Was this mayor, who drove a chancellor out of the city for
failing to hand over power to City Hall, actually serious about
giving control of individual schools to teams of parents like
they did in Chicago? As it turns out, he wasn't. He wants con-
Chicago Hope
I
ByfonKest
Jon Kest is the
founder of the
New York branch
of the Association
of Community
Organizations
for Refonn Now
(ACORN).
trol of the city schools from the top, with powers at least as
strong as those wielded by Chicago Mayor Richard Daley,
without the headache of influential, Chicago-style school-
based councils in the communities.
ACORN agrees that the current system of 32 scandal-rid-
den, inefficient school boards should be done away with. To
tum the schools around in New York, however, there need to be
school-based local councils that are parent- and community-
controlled. And there have to be resources available to organize
and train parents to take advantage of this vehicle for power.
Since the reforms of 1988, Chicago schools have been gov-
erned by grassroots Local School Councils (LSCs) which have
the power to control a portion of the budgets in their schools, set
curriculum goals and hire or fire teachers and the principal. The
councils are comprised of
six parents, two non-parent
community members, two
teachers and the princi-
pal-a model that guaran-
tees a parent majority no
matter how the other mem-
bers vote.
Some of this influence
was weakened last year
when the illinois state leg-
islature undermined the
autonomy of the LSCs by
giving Mayor Daley the
power to appoint all mem-
bers of the central school
board as well as a chief
administrator for the system, authority that had previously rest-
ed with delegates chosen from the local councils. Daley was
also given unlimited power to bid out all contracts or even tum
individual schools over to private educational management
companies.
This new consolidation of power is the part of the "Chicago
Experiment" that Giuliani seems to like best, not the flowering of
school-level democracy. The mayor is supporting a state Senate
education reform bill that would eliminate the Board of
Education altogether and give much of its former power to a
chancellor he would appoint. His motives? If Giuliani controls
the board, the budget and the cash flow to the central bureaucra-
cy, he could continue to reduce spending on the schools.
The Giuliani plan also contains a pale commitment to
school councils, but these bodies, unlike Chicago's, would
have severely limited budget-making power, no authority in
hiring and very limited say over what's taught in classrooms.
Although the mayor's plan provides for a parent majority in
the councils, the version that passed the Assembly in May
gives school staff a six-to-four advantage over parents. This is
not good enough. And giving councils busywork like drafting
school improvement plans and forcing LSC members to fight
each other over small discretionary budgets doesn't add up to
school empowerment.
The New York legislature needs to create real school coun-
cils with real power.
Of course, legislating power isn't enough unless adequate
training and organizing resources are included. In Chicago,
parents with a majority frequently end up deferring to princi-
pals and teachers. For parents to set their own agenda, they
need to be connected and accountable to independent organi-
zations that ensure their allegiance to the community. They
need a vision and an agenda for turning the schools around.
They need to know how to work as a team. Were all this to hap-
pen, we might see real changes in how the schools work.
In Chicago, ACORN has 85 elected members of LSCs and
has a majority at six schools. We have demonstrated that it is
possible to take some power, yet at roughly 500 other schools
there is little organized parent presence and the school staff
largely dominates. This could be an even bigger problem in
New York, which has the strongest teacher's union in the coun-
try and twice as many schools.
The answer is to make money available to community-based
organizations to train and organize parents. For years, the gov-
ernment has been paying full-time salaries to teachers who
spend all their time working as union officers. Parents deserve
no less. Govemment-not just private foundations-needs to
allocate funds to a consortium of local groups that can have an
impact on citywide issues like budgeting and funding equity.
Parents are not professional advocates. They need a support
network so they can become an effective force. If we focus our
efforts instead on lobbying the powers that be in a structure
controlled by City Hall, advocacy groups will fail just as they
have for years.
Madeline Talbott, head organizer of ACORN Illinois, also
contributed to this article.
o ~ ____________________________________________________ ~
-
CITY LIMITS
"They Only Look Dead," by EJ. Dionne Jr. ,
Simon & Schuster, 1996,352 pages, $24.
F
or all you liberals who believe that Progressivism
has gone the way of George Burns, Washington
Post columnist EJ. Dionne is here to reassure you
that "America is on the verge of a second
Progressive Era."
As the presidential candidates scramble to the rhetorical
right, Dionne's prediction might seem like a particularly bad
case of leftist self-delusion. But it isn't. In a work that is one part
socioeconomic analysis, one part political critique and one part
sermon, Dionne goes a long way to convincing us that the
"Republican Revolution" of 1994 will be mercifully short-lived.
In doing so, he first gives a history lesson on the roots of
Progressivism, the early 1900s movement that established the
basic course of American government for an entire century.
Then, as now, the battle was sharply drawn between advocates
.............. .,;..., ....... -
REVIEW
had good reason to be truly anxious about
the future. At the root of all the anxiety,
Dionne argues, are four crises facing
America: a lack of economic direction and ,...-... .......
declining real wages, an unresponsive central government, the
perception of moral malaise and profound questions about the
nation's role as the sole remaining global superpower.
Yet despite all the talk about "voter rage" over these issues,
the truth is that the electorate gets very nervous when their lead-
ers deviate mildly from the standard course-much less the
ISO-degree shift proposed by Gingrich and his allies. America
may be angry, but how willing are we to give the reins to a true
outsider? As Harper's magazine recently reported, half of the
people who cast ballots for Ross Perot in 1992 have trouble
today remembering who it was they voted for.
For good or ill, that American fondness for staying within
the range of existing options is what keeps most incumbents in
office, term limits or no. Self-styled revolutionaries may cap-
ture the moment, but they won't survive the long hau!' Political
The Ungrateful Dead
parochialism-localism-is a moderat-
ing force and the seeds of the new pro-
gressive epoch Dionne predicts. Alfonse
D'Amato's recent verbal war with
Gingrich stems from his own instinctive
By Norman Adler
opposition to government-bashing. The
senator may be a Republican, but he did-
JUNE/ JULY 1996
of the unfettered market and proponents
of government as a tool of good.
At the beginning of the century, GOP
President William McKinley advocated
policies that would fit neatly into the
"Contract with America": low taxes,
social Darwinism, the sacrifice of the
lower economic classes to the formation
of an "individualistic" elite. On the other
side were the "progressives" championed
by Teddy Roosevelt, who took office
upon McKinley's assassination. Their
THEY ONlY
LOOK o fAD
n't get re-elected by turning off the spig-
ot of federal cash to New York. In the
fmal analysis, big government is good
for D'Amato--and for Newt Gingrich,
whose Georgia district receives far more
in federal aid than it sends to Washington
in taxes.
, .... "
D' Amato understands that people
don't really want government to get off
their backs. They want it to do more for
them at a cheaper cost, a philosophy that
is an outgrowth of Ralph Nader's pro-
gressive consumerism movement. Can-
didates who don't want government to do
anything can never survive in politics
because they won't deliver the goods to
the folks back home.
, 1>"
. . ..
... .. ' ",' , .. ,..... .
.. . .
credo consisted of "involving the careful
but active use of the government to tem-
per markets and enhance individual
opportunity." Roosevelt's side won and
his nephew Franklin would create the
core of the Washington-centered system
that surmounted the Great Depression,
beat Hitler and won the Cold War.
WHY PROGRESSIVES WILL DOMINATE
* * THE NEXT POLITICAL ERA * *
But Bill Clinton-Dionne's appointment as Teddy's heir-
gave it all back to New Age McKinleyite Newt Gingrich. After
their watershed election in 1992, Clinton and the Democratic
congressional leadership heightened voter cynicism by failing to
move forward with grandiose campaign promises to create a
national health care program, cope with the deficit and push for
the reform of welfare and campaign funding. Instead they got
mired in sectarian battles over crime and the minutiae of health
care reform. They appeared to have lost direction and the elec-
torate was more than willing to give a chance to the bushy-tailed
GOP bombthrowers.
Dionne concludes with a rallying cry
for progressives to reaquaint themselves
with the mounting economic anxieties
felt by middle class people across the country. Progressives
need to do more than re-elect a President. They need to adopt a
concrete plan to prevent the massive redistribution of wealth
away from the middle class, to strengthen families and revital-
ize the political process through reform. But for the moment,
that isn't happening. Instead of grabbing the agenda, Neo-pro-
gressives are living up to Will Rogers' apt aphorism: "I belong
to no organized political party. I'm a Democrat."
Which means liberals may have a long wait between heart-
beats .
Americans gave Gingrich & Co. their mandate because they Norman Adler is a political consultant.
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AIR ASSAULT continued from page 15
says spokesman Bill Hewitt. "We are here to ensure that
environmental laws are enforced. That's what we are doing."
Yet if these laws and regulations are being enforced, res-
idents charge, how come they can smell anything at all?
Under city law, the odor should be undetectable, says city
Department of Environmental Protection spokesman David
Golub. But sanctions imposed by DEP have had no lasting
effect. Over the last three years, the agency has cited the fer-
tilizer company for six air quality violations because of its
offensive odor, levying fmes totaling only $3,000. The com-
pany has promised to fix the problem, and Golub says the
fmn recently completed $1.4 million in renovations. Yet as
City Limits went to press, residents report they still smell
the odor now and then.
The controversy illustrates a common problem in trying
to pin down and solve environmental problems in industri-
al neighborhoods, says Larry Shapiro, senior attorney for
the New York Public Interest Research Group. For one
thing, it's often cheaper for companies to flout environmen-
tal laws and pay small fines than to permanently solve their
pollution problems, he says. "If a police commissioner
enforced regulation the way the Department of
Environmental Protection does, he would be fired after the
first day on the job," Shapiro adds.
Mildenberger and others on the Hunts Point Awareness
Committee are pressing for tougher monitoring of the fer-
tilizer plant. The group also acknowledges that indoor air
quality is an important health concern and has persuaded a
home air filter company to test its units in a few homes free
of charge.
Meanwhile, members are pressuring city agencies to
clamp down on the rampant illegal burning and dumping
that goes on in the area, and they are trying to get trans-
portation officials to ensure that trucks stay on designated
truck routes. This last effort has met with some success. The
Department of Transportation put up new signs to divert
truck drivers away from residential streets and declared the
area around the local elementary school a "play zone" to
reduce truck traffic there. For about a month, city workers
were handing out tickets to truck drivers found traveling off
the designated routes, although Mildenberger says enforce-
ment is sporadic and remains a problem.
Dft.rmln.
After listening to stories of Hunts Point residents at an
April community forum cosponsored by the Awareness
Committee, Dr. Philip Landrigan, chief of the Department
of Community Medicine at Mt. Sinai Medical Center, pro-
posed a study to determine if, indeed, there is a connection
between high asthma rates and outdoor air pollution in the
neighborhood.
"One of the reasons I' m inclined to take this seriously is
a lot of people recount episodes where they don't [experi-
ence asthma symptoms] outside of the community,"
Landrigan says. "There are people who never had asthma
but developed it two or three years ago after moving here."
Even more promising is the federal Environmental
Protection Agency study that recently collected air and
breath samples to determine the levels of "volatile organic
compounds," carbon-based chemicals released by industrial
plants-the fertilizer company in particular-in the normal
course of operation. At high levels, these compounds can
aggravate respiratory problems and trigger asthma attacks.
And certain compounds, Like benzene, are carcinogenic.
Using a dozen air canisters supplied by the EPA, residents
captured air samples at times when fertilizer plant odors
were strongest. The agency also collected data from an air
monitoring station and a mobile air sampling unit.
This data will supplement information already collected
on ozone levels and particulate matter, says spokesperson
Mary Mears. If testing reveals problem levels, the EPA will
try to determine where exactly the origins are, she adds.
Serious Study
Committee members, excited by the environmental
detective work, have become almost intoxicated by the
hunt. At a meeting last month, Charles White wondered
aloud if the committee could test the material that's
absorbed in-home air ftlters. Another study is born! The
group laughed and clapped.
The problem itself remains serious, however. "Those
toxins are out there. We can feel it," San Jurjo says. "I just
hope to God we can do something." .
The E. F.
Schumacher Society
DECENTRALIST
CONFERENCE
Human Scale / Community Renewal
Respect for the Land / Mutual Aid
June 28-30, 1996
Williams College, Williamstown, Massachusetts
KEYNOTE SPEAKERS
Kirkpatrick Sale
author of Rebels Against the Future
John McClaughry
co-author of the Vermont Papers
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Innovative holistic program with homeless seeks caring, creative pro-
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FIELD COORDINATOR. The Development Leadership Network seeks expe-
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PROJECT DIRECTOR, EMPLOYMENT TRAINING AND PLACEMENT. LEAP, Inc.
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NY 11201. Fax to (718) 243-0312.
PROPERTY MANAGER. Community-based organization seeks highly-orga-
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Experience with rental subsidies and information systems helpful.
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JUNE/JULV 1996
NYC, seeks a full-time Development Associate with experience and
demonstrated success working in a development team. Experience in
writing promotional materials and the ability to implement annual
fund raising plan are necessary. $35K and generous benefits. Resumes
to: North Star Fund, 666 Broadway, NYC 10012, (212) 460-5511.
People of color, women, lesbians and gay men are encouraged to apply.
EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR. Chicago tenant advocacy group seeks an execu-
tive director. The organization has nine staffers and a $250,000 annu-
al budget. Community organizing, management and fundraising experi-
ence required. Send resume and writing sample to Search Committee,
MTO, 2125 W. North Ave., Chicago, IL 60647 by June 14. Fax: (312)
292-0333.
POSrTION WANTm: COMMUNITY ORGANIZERIPOLICY PRACTICE. Long-time
activist, experienced in anti-racist, solidarity, union and community
movements, recent MSW, seeks challenging position in agency, orga-
nization or government office with strong commitment to social justice
ideals. Field of practice flexible; must include belief in importance of
organizing. Call (718) 859-9437.
FAIR LENDING SPECIALIST for Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation,
New York Regional Office. Duties: Researching controversial and/or
complex topics related to the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA)
and other fair lending issues; aSSisting in establishing and/or imple-
menting policies and procedures on consumer and community groups,
financial institutions, other government agencies and the general pub-
lic. Qualifications: Knowledge of laws relating to fair lending, such as
the Community Reinvestment Act, the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act,
the Fair Housing Act, and the Equal Credit Opportunity Act; ability to
conduct training on issues related to fair lending laws and regulations;
outstanding communication skills; bachelor's degree in related field or
equivalent experience. Candidate must have at least one year of spe-
cialized experience which is in or directly related to the pOSition (one or
more years must be at or equivalent to the next lower grade in the
Federal Service) Salary: Depending on qualifications, $45,854-
$66,559 annually, plus regional differential, if applicable. Send appli-
cations to: FDIC 550 17th Street, NW, Room PA-1700-5124,
Washington, DC, 20429-9990. (202) 942-3540.
SECRETARY (Typing)-(2 positions) for Federal Deposit Insurance
Corporation, New York Regional Office. Duties: Serve as a personal
assistant and performs supportive administrative tasks. Receives and
screens telephone calls and visitors; maintains miscellaneous records
including files of confidential correspondence. Draft routine correspon-
dence, types into final form material from rough draft. Qualifications:
Skill in the use of personal computers, skill in controlling correspon-
dence, maintaining a system of files and records, and locating and
assembling information; skill in composing routine correspondence to
ensure proper grammar, punctuation and format; good interpersonal
skills. Candidate must have at least one year of specialized experience
which is in or directly related to this position (one or more years must
be at or equivalent to the next lower grade in the Federal Service).
Salary: Depending on qualifications, $25,010-$30,296 annually, plus
regional differential, if applicable. Send applications to: FDIC 550 17th
Street, NW, Room PA-1700-5124, Washington, DC, 20429-9990. (202)
942-3540.
GIBBONS
COMMUNITY VENTURES
Catherine A. Gibbons
'MI 148 Sadre" S""'. Suitd
Brooklyn, New York 11231
(718) 625-2538
FAX (718) 875-5631
email: cgibbons@pipeline.com
Community Economic Developement Consulting
-
ners
By Camilo Jose Vergara
ccording to a history of Newark, 280,000 people were counted passing through the intersection of
Broad and Market streets on one day in 1915. Local boosters, predicting that Newark was growing
__ ... faster than any other American municipality in the Northeast, declared the intersection the "busiest
comer in America" and narned it "The Four Comers of the
World." Today one can still get a "Four Comers" sandwich at
a nearby Jewish deli, but that's about the only lingering echo
of the city center.
At this intersection, Newark's fust skyscraper, 786 Broad,
was erected in 1910. Its lightness makes it seem much taller
than its 16 stories. It is a slender, soaring structure, with the
most elaborate decorations at the top: a Corinthian colonnade
spanning two stories, balustrades following the perimeter of
the 15th floor and the roof, and individual balconies attached
to the windows \It the top. The balconies suggest the building
was designed as an observation post for the magnificent views
of the city and Manhattan's skyline. If the last three stories
were separated and placed on a hill, they would resemble a lit-
tle palace. Postcard manufacturers made it one of their favorite
subjects. Still, like many of Newark's great buildings, it is
missing from the National Register of Historic Places.
When it opened, number 786 was headquarters of the
Fireman's Insurance Company. It was a temple of commerce
whose merchants moved elsewhere. For well over a decade the
building has been almost completely vacant. Today, only the
ground floor is used by a Korean-owned business selling gold
chains, a corner eyeglass store and an electronics outlet
promising the city's best deal on beepers. The facade is fllthy.
A few windows are shuttered with plywood.
Inside, I walk over the tracks left by my shoes on
prior visits. Along the hallway leading to the eleva-
tors, hundreds of colorful plastic beeper carcasses
lie in a huge cardboard box. I make my way upstairs.
Most of the upper floors housed city offices in
the 1970s: the Municipal Security Service was on
the fourth floor. The city's parole, administration
and personnel offices were on the fifth. Official
signs near the reception desks warn employees
against selling real estate, insurance, leather goods
or Avon products during work hours. Large stacks
of official documents lie in "temporary" storage
boxes waiting for their movers.
Looking through the papers, I read about the
1973 fuing of Alma, a librarian. She insulted the
staff by declaring the library's technical collection
insufficient and the workers inadequate, and she
frequently came to work late. Berenice, a woman
who had a telephone job, was fued in 1974
because she had a propensity for losing her voice. A knife
attack involving Deborah, Helen and an unnamed man is
described in short sentences: "Grabbed arm to keep from hit-
ting." "Threaten to call boss if he didn't leave." "Went to the
kitchen and got a knife." Three weeks later the account ends
with "an annoying phone call." In a podiatrist's office I find the
outline of Lucia from Nutley's aching foot.
The offices of Real Property were on the eighth and ninth
floors. I remember going there in 1981 to get copies of the
"Bright Future Property Auction" book. Inside, hundreds of
pages are illustrated with abandoned and semi-abandoned
buildings-some selling for as little as $150--and maps
showed the locations of vacant lots.
The flapping wings of startled pigeons clashing against win-
dows announce the upper floors. Near the top, 786's presence
becomes overwhelming as does my sense of isolation. I climb the
rusted iron ladder leading to the roof above the elevator machin-
ery. Looking out towards the east and north, I see universities and
a new downtown of glassy boxes. To the west are the rows of
new townhouses that announce another round of the "Newark
Renaissance." Across the street, to the south, my eyes follow the
flight of a falcon towards the top of a column on the Kinney
Building, another derelict beauty. Lying here on the roof, the
sounds of the city seem remote. Looking up, nothing but sky.
But recently there have been new signs of life. In the
16th-floor lobby I saw tools and a flashlight. Elevator
mechanics have been working here. In the past, I was
fortunate that my heavy camera bag made me
look like one of the workmen, affording me
easy access to the bUilding. Now, to go inside,
I need the permission of a real estate agent.
Someone, it seems, wants to do something with
the property.
Until they do, Newark's first skyscraper is a
time capsule telling more, and in a more candid
way, about the local inhabitants and the city than
any official source. For me, the Fireman's
Insurance Building has been my own private
mountain top, my cherished piece of America, a
place to learn about the endurance and frailties of
people, and to fmd tranquillity.
Camilo Jose Vergara is the author of"The New
American Ghetto," Rutgers University Press, 1995.
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..................................... B
CITVLlMITS
JUNE/JULY 1996
mBankers1rust Company
Community Development Group
A resource for the non-profit
development community

Gary Hattem, Managing Director
Amy BrusHoff, Vice President
280 Park Avenue, 19West
New York, New York 10017
Tel: 212,454,3677 Fax: 212,454,2380
LET US DO A FREE EVALUATION
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c G RATUL ATI 0 N S
,

The New York Savings Bank is pleased to announce that the following
commun ety organizations in our service area (Brooklyn, Queens, Manhattan and
Nassau) have been chosen to receive Community Action Assistance Grants from
the bC:fnk for their neighborhood preservation and improvement endeavors:
Abyssinian De elopment
Accion New Y rk
Action for Corrlmunity Empowerment
Allen A.M.E NlJighborhood
Preservation
Asian Americars for Equality
Association fo Neighborhood Housing
and Developm nt
Astella Development Corporation
BEC New Compmnities HDFC
Bedford Stuyv sant Restoration
Corporation
Black United und of New York
Bridge Street I evelopment Corporation
Brooklyn Neigrrborhood Improvement
Association
Central Harlell Local Development
Corporation
Church Avenue Merchants Block
Association
Citywide Task Force on Housing Court
Community A sociation of Progressive
Dominicans
Community 1'1 aining and Resource
Center
Cooper SquarE Committee
Cypress Hills Care Corporation
Cypress Hills L.ocal Development
Corporation
East Brooklyn Congregations
East Harlem F enewal Agency
East Harlem l/utorial Program
East New Yor Urban Youth Corps
Ecumenical Cpmmunity Development
Erasmus NeigP.borhood Federation
Fifth Avenue
Flatbush Dev lopment Corporation
Flushing Cou cil on Culture and
the Arts
Flushing Local Development
Corporation
Good Old Lower East Side
Greater Jamaica Development
Corporation
Greenpoint Manufacturing and Design
Center
Habitat for Humanity-NYC
Harlem Textile Works
Hempstead Hispanic Civic Association
Hope Community
Housing Conservation Coordinators
Hunters Point Community
Development Corporation
I AM Corporation
Institute for Community Development
Inwood Preservation Corporation
La Fuerza Unida de Glen Cove
Lawyers Alliance for New York
LEAP
Long Island Housing Partnership
Los Sures
Manhattan Borough Development
Corporation
Manhattan Neighborhood Renaissance
Manhattan Valley Development
Corporation
Metro-Forest Chamber of Commerce
MFY Legal Services/Lower East Side
Enforcement Unit
Mutual Housing Association of New
York
National Federation of Community
Development Credit Unions
Neighborhood Coalition for Shelter
Neighborhood Housing Services of
East Flatbush
Neighborhood Housing Services of
Jamaica
Neighborhood Housing Services of
Bedford-Stuyvesant
New York Landmarks Conservancy
New York State Tenant and
Neighborhood Information Service
Nontraditional Employment for Women
Northern Manhattan Improvement
Corporation
Oceanhill Brownsville Tenants
Association
Oceanhill Bushwick Bedford
Stuyvesant LDC
Parkway Stuyvesant Community and
Housing Council
People's Economic Opportunity Project
Pratt Area Community Council
Pueblo Nuevo Housing and
Development Association
Queens Citizens Organization
Queens County Overall Economic
Development Corporation
Roosevelt Assistance Corporation
Roosevelt Neighborhood Advisory
Council
St. Nicholas Neighborhood Preservation
Corporation
St. Paul Community Baptist Church
South Brooklyn Local Development
Corporation
The Wilson M. Morris Community
Center
Transportation Alternatives
Thrning Point Housing Development
Union Settlement Association
Urban Homesteading Assistance Board
Washington Heights and Inwood
Development
Women In Need
Youth Action Homes
We salute the achievements of these exemplary organizations and appreciate and
! upport their continuing commitment to making our communities better places in
rvhich to live and conduct business.
THE EAST NEW YORK SAVINGS BANK MEMBER FDIC
THE EAST NEW YORK SAVINGS BANK Community Action Assistance Plan Grants Program
350 Park Avenue . New York, New York 10022