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Published on The Huffington Post.
by Eliot Caroom
This year’s unusually competitive presidential primary has led some of Brooklyn’s own media elite to an unusual decision: for the first time, some local news outlets made endorsements in the national race.
“I don’t know how much difference it makes,” said Ed Weintrob, who publishes The Brooklyn Paper, a weekly. “But we felt collectively we should let people know what our thinking is. Hopefully they’ll consider our points.”
The paper frequently endorses local candidates, but never in Weintrob’s memory has it endorsed a presidential prospect.
“People had different levels of emotion,” Weintrob said, “but we all agreed.”
The endorsement sites Senators John McCain and Barack Obama as the candidates “most likely to restore America’s position as a shining beacon to the world.”
Other local media, including the blogs “Only the Blog Knows Brooklyn,” and “The Brooklyn Optimist,” also endorsed Obama.
Louise Crawford, author of “Only the Blog Knows Brooklyn,” has been blogging about the borough for four years.
For Crawford, endorsing Barack Obama was as much an attempt to make up her own mind as influence others’. She said that writing down her thoughts “organized her thinking.”
Crawford doesn’t believe she’ll single-handedly convert legions of Brooklynites to Barack, but said “it’s going to influence people, one way or the other.”
“People want to pick my brain just like I want to pick other people’s brains,” Crawford said.
Brooklyn has 1,150,000 registered voters; The Brooklyn Paper publishes 52,000 copies weekly. “Only the Blog Knows Brooklyn” gets between 2,000 and 3,000 hits a day.
An unscientific exit poll on Super Tuesday found no awareness of the endorsements, and a broader antipathy to the practice.
Williamsburg voter Nathan Ewing said that he was “not even remotely” aware of the local endorsements. “I try to find out about the candidate based on my own information,” Ewing said. “Not what someone else tells me.”
Both The Brooklyn Paper and “Only the Blog Knows Brooklyn” cited intangibles over policy for choosing Obama over Sen. Hillary Clinton.
“We don’t want to go through another four or eight years of antagonism,” Wentrob said. “The viciousness of the opposition to the Clintons is known, we lived through it. The Clintons feel the same antagonism towards their opponents. It’s a mess. With Obama there’s hope.”
Jesus Charriez, left, and Luis Bermudez.
by Eliot Caroom
Published in: The Hunts Point Express
Bronx -
Three young men followed 18-year-old Jesus Charriez and 21-year-old Luis Bermudez for several blocks, as they walked through Longwood on an October afternoon, the pair told police. The attackers yelled “faggot” and spit on the pair. Then, at 5 p.m. in front of a hair salon on the crowded corner of E. 163rd St. and Intervale Ave., they beat their victims, uninterrupted, for several minutes and stole a gold necklace and a cell phone.
Both Charriez and Bermudez ended up in the hospital with minor injuries. The police on the scene classified the crime as a robbery, with no mention of the anti-gay slurs that marked the incident.
The attack highlighted anti-gay feelings in the Bronx, where many gays hide their orientation out of fear. Although Bronx Borough President Aldolfo Carrion and U.S. Rep. Jose Serrano have condemned the incident, gay leaders called on more Bronx politicians to speak out against intolerance.
The attack changed the way Charriez views the neighborhood where he and Bermudez volunteer as a peer counselors at the Hispanic AIDS Forum, just a few blocks from where the assault took place.
“I call it my safe zone,” Charriez said. Since the attack, though, he has a hard time sleeping, and says it will be “a little bit difficult” to go out in the area.
Violent attacks are just one symptom of widespread anti-gay attitudes in the borough, Bronx gays say.
Alberto Antomnarchi, a 43-year-old Bronxite, has lived in all of New York’s boroughs except Staten Island, and he identified the Bronx as being particularly homophobic and closeted.
In the black or Puerto Rican community, being gay means “you lose your family; you lose respect in the community,” said Antomnarchi, who is Puerto Rican.
Family support is an issue for Mosey Diaz as well. “Even in my family, they make fun of the LGBT,” Diaz said, using the term for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people.
Diaz, who is 18 and a lifelong Bronx resident, worked for the Bronx Community Pride Center at a gay pride rally in Barretto Point Park.
“‘Oh, I like what you’re doing here,’” a man said to her, reading her “Bronx Pride” sign. “When he found out that it was LGBT,” Diaz said, “he was like, ‘That’s disgusting. I didn’t come here for that.’”
Still, Diaz said progress is being made in the Bronx: “It’s hostile, but the times have changed. It’s getting better.”
Diaz, who describes herself as “out” but not “open,” said that younger LGBT Bronx residents are increasingly willing to stop hiding their sexual orientation.
Reverend James Dusenbury is the pastor of In the Life Ministries, an interdenominational church on Commerce Avenue near Westchester Square that caters to LGBT parishioners. He agreed that coming out in the Bronx can be dangerous.
“Most people feel their safety is at risk, so they’ve got to live a closeted lifestyle,” Dusenbury said. “The only reason why I’m so openly gay is I want people to see I’m a regular person.”
The last time he reached out to another Bronx church, Dusenbury said, “They were not happy to hear from me.” Members of a neighboring church have called his church “the faggot church.”
As more gays live more openly in the Bronx, they’ll face increased aggression from straights, gay leaders believe.
“You will probably see an increase in homophobic language, in aggressive and sometimes violent behavior towards gay people,” said Heriberto Sanchez Soto, the executive director of the Hispanic AIDS Forum in New York.
When violence does occur, it often goes unreported by the victims, Soto said. Convincing victims to come forward is a challenge for gay advocates and leaders.
The Bronx’s rate of reported hate-crimes is almost three times lower than in the rest of the city. According to the NYPD hate crimes unit. Since January 1, 2006, only five anti-gay hate crimes were reported in the Bronx compared with 91 anti-gay hate crimes in the rest of New York.
Soto said that hate crimes go unreported more often in the Bronx because violence is seen as a normal part of life in the borough.
“It’s like New York City in the 70’s. We were all accustomed to all the violence, to the garbage in the streets,” Soto said. “‘Hey, this is New York City.’ Well, no, this should not be New York City; it should be better than this.”
Gay leaders also say that some politicians and members of the clergy share responsibility for widespread anti-gay sentiment.
“There is no tolerance in the borough for LGBT people,” said Lisa Winters, executive director of the Bronx Community Pride Center, an advocacy organization and gathering place for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender residents.
“We’ve begun to change that, but we have lots of work to do,” she continued. “We need our friends in the pulpit and elected and appointed officials to join with us in that effort. It’s embarrassing for the Bronx. The Bronx should be ashamed of itself.”
Winters named state Senator Ruben Diaz as one politician who could do more. Diaz opposes gay marriage, sued in an effort to prevent the city from financing a school for gay students, and tried to prevent the Gay Games from coming to New York, saying they could spread AIDS.
“He’s been very hateful and spiteful towards the LGBT in the Bronx,” Winters said. “He’s whipped people into frenzies.”
Diaz said that he is not anti-gay, and condemned the attack on Charriez and Bermudez, which he said he had not heard of.
“We need to protect people from hate crimes,” Diaz said. “I believe that anyone who does something like that should be subject to the maximum weight of the law. The police should spend any resource to go after them.”
After issuing his statement condemning the attack, Serrano said in an interview, “I don’t do any of this because it’s politically sound. On the contrary, some people think the politically sound thing to do is keep away.”
The congressman said his constituents understand that gays deserve to be able to walk down the street without being “picked on for their sexual orientation,” but added, “The problem is that so many elected officials get nervous about having to explain it, and so they’d rather not get involved. The biggest crime you can commit is the crime of silence.”
For their part, Charriez and Bermudez have refused to be silent.
They convinced police to reclassify their case as a hate crime after the initial police report made no mention of the slurs or the spitting. They also spoke out at a press conference held by the Hispanic AIDS Forum, which led to coverage on the evening news. Their experience has been reported by newspapers in Detroit and Nashville, putting a face on the debate over federal hate crime laws.
They say they spoke out for their own sake, but not just for themselves.
“We want to spread the word and make sure it doesn’t happen to anyone,” Charriez said.
Franklin Genao, Hilton concierge
by Eliot Caroom
The job of a concierge is to keep hotel guests happy, and the recent Broadway shutdown hasn’t made that job any easier.
“No matter what we recommend, the guests are disappointed,” said Franklin Genao, a 31-year-old concierge at the Hilton. “They can’t see what they had tickets for.”
The Hilton Times Square prepared a crib sheet for guests in search of theatre. The impromptu playbill features the nine Broadway shows still performing, as well as a list of off-Broadway productions.
According to Genao, tickets for the remaining Broadway shows are scarce: “they’re scrambling for shows that aren’t on strike . . . off-Broadway has seen an incredible jump in ticket sales, I’m sure.”
On the positive side, Genao pointed out, New York “has so many other things to do as well.” He’s steered guests to comedy and jazz clubs. These other options have always been there, Genao said, but now they are “forced alternatives.”
Francisco Andeliz, 30, is the concierge at the Westin New York at Times Square, where theatre tickets and tours are booked through a separate desk. For the first two days of the strike, he said, that desk was swamped by guests with tickets and questions. He was busy with tourists looking for alternatives. Now both desks are quiet.
“A lot of people cancelled the whole trip into the city because of this,” Andeliz said.
Those who have remained are looking for alternatives, and not all of them are in the city.
“We had a lot of people wanting to go to New Jersey to the Prudential Center to see Bon Jovi,” said Andeliz.
Back at the Hilton, Franklin Genao works the phones, but the strike is an ongoing problem he must face.
“What’s really sad is not being able to tell them the strike will be over on this date,” Genao said. “We’ve had a few cancellations, and guests calling, and we don’t have much to tell them.”
“It’s just a sad scene, the faces of all the tourists,” Genao said.
The SIMS/Hugo Neu site in Hunts Point.
Published in the Hunts Point Express.
By Eliot Caroom
Hunts Point Riverside Park is a pristine patch of green surrounded by rusting metal: train tracks line one side of the park, and mountains of scrap metal another. But the salvage yard where the Sims Metal recycling company collects discarded metal will soon include its own patch of green: a wall covered in moss and ferns, and a wet meadow with native plants.
The plants are part of a $2-3 million water treatment system aimed at keeping pollutants out of the Bronx River by imitating natural wetlands.
“It will have a huge impact on how the site behaves,” said Paul Mankiewicz, executive director of the Gaia Institute, a Bronx-based non-profit environmental engineering firm that designed the project.
In the past, the company has relied on machinery to separate oil from rainwater in an effort to keep contaminants from the river. Once the green wall is in place and the marsh plants take root, they will capture rainwater and filter pollutants, explained Mankiewicz, who is also a member of the board of the Bronx River Alliance.
Sims Metal and its predecessor, the Hugo Neu company, have already won praise for sharing waterfront access with local youth groups from The Point and Rocking the Boat.
“Hugo Neu is making efforts to be a good neighbor,” said Maggie Greenfield, communications director for the Bronx River Alliance. “They’re very reasonable and flexible, and very willing to work with . . . folks who are trying to use the river for recreation and enjoyment.”
The idea for the water filtration project came when Hugo Neu President John Neu and Mankiewicz were riding a ferry to a clam-bake hosted by Andy Willner, executive Director of Baykeeper, an environmental organization devoted to protecting New York and New Jersey waterways.
“They’re really green-oriented people,” Mankiewicz said of Neu and his wife Wendy. “I told them, ‘If you want to make your site work, you’ve got to catch storm water,’ and they said, ‘Tell us how to do it.’”
After the project began, Hugo Neu’s recycling division merged with Sims Metal, another major recycling company. Sims Metal continued to support the project.
“Both companies share a commitment to the environment and our communities,” said Dan Strechay, a spokesman for Sims Metal. “Taking care of the waterfront has always been a priority for our company.”
Storm water runoff is an important factor in the water quality of the Bronx River, the city’s only freshwater river. A century ago most of Hunts Point was marshland. Rainwater was filtered naturally: soil acted like a sponge, absorbing and cleaning the water, and evaporation returned the moisture to the air.
Now that most of the surface is paved, polluted storm water runs into the Bronx River.
When construction at the salvage yard is completed, the water will be pumped into a “wet meadow,” sponge-like ground that seeks to recreate the marshy land that bordered the river before it was filled in.
The new system is complex and expensive. It will include 240 underground chambers, at a cost of $2-3 million, according to Mankiewicz. By the time it is complete in early 2008, the underground array will have a capacity of almost half a million gallons, enough to hold 5-6 inches worth of rainfall for the entire site.
Specially created drainage ditches called “swales” will direct rainfall towards this series of artificial wetlands. From the wetlands and an underground holding well, groundwater will be pumped to the top of the green wall by an array of eight solar-powered pumps.
The green wall, which will border Edgewater Road, will be constructed from recycled materials. Wetland plants like liverworts and ferns will grow from the wall, allowing evaporation rates of 1-2 inches a day.
Once the wetlands are built, some 30 different native plants including Atlantic White Cedar will grow there. Students at Rocking the Boat will help to maintain the wetlands.
In addition to helping to clean the Bronx River, “this project will also beautify and green the face” of the recycling yard, Greenfield said.
Mankiewicz believes that if more companies follow Sims and Hugo Neu’s lead, they could literally change the climate of New York, lowering temperatures year-round.
“If you had a 10 percent increase in green space, you could notice an effect across the city,” Mankiewicz said.
“Everybody in this country is going to have to comply with storm water regulations some day,” John Neu said. “My attachment is not to the water; it’s to the globe. People have to understand, if we don’t take a proactive stand, everything is about to change.
“That’s the way a lot of people feel, and I guess we just have more time and money to pay attention to it.”
