If everything goes on schedule, sometime next August flatbed trucks will haul the first of some 930 modular units from a fabrication facility at the Brooklyn Navy Yard to a staging area next door to the Barclays Center, Brooklyn’s new 19,000-seat arena. Along the two-mile drive, the units — steel-encased fragments of a skyscraper with pre-installed plumbing, wiring and insulation — will pass the Raymond V. Ingersoll housing project, which sits in the second poorest census tract in Brooklyn. Then, after a left on Flatbush Avenue, they will cut through New York’s largest business district outside Manhattan and cruise down a corridor newly adorned with luxury high-rises (like the oscillating glass- and aluminum-paneled Toren and the borough’s tallest building, the equally luxurious Brooklyner).

At Dean Street, cranes will lift each module, some as long as 50 feet across, and attach them together, creating B2. When finished, it will be the tallest modular building in the world and the first residential part of the contentious Brooklyn megaproject, Atlantic Yards.

One of these modules will presumably belong to Kassoum Fofana.

When we spoke in November, Fofana hadn’t yet been to the Barclays Center to see the Brooklyn Nets. In fact, he said he preferred the Chelsea Football Club to the newly relocated basketball team. For someone who will soon have a home in the arena’s backyard, it’s perhaps surprising. But Fofana, 48, straddles both sides of Atlantic Yards history.

Read more at Next City! (Subscription Required)

Places similar to the Wild West:

• Arizona
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• Nevada
• Oakland, California
• Northeast British Columbia
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• Wildomar, California
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• Cloud Computing
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• The Internet
• The Oceans

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(Originally published by Capital New York, 3/13/12)

Look out for “bioswales”: Measuring about five feet wide and 20 feet long, these small patches of plants, trees and rocks will soon be making appearance all over New York as part the city’s sustainable-planning efforts.

The bioswale, or bioretention swale, is essentially a street tree, but recontextualized with plants and low curbs, the better to absorb rainfall.

If other investments in the city’s green infrastructure plan like solar panels and green roofs are more celebrated causes among urban planners and sustainability advocates, swales will be doing their work more quietly, at the street level. They’ll be anchored by mostly locally grown plants with pastoral-tinged names like Swamp Milkweed, New England Aster and Summersweet Clethra. Their job is to prevent city sewers from overflowing by absorbing rain.

“I love bioswales,” said Nette Compton, a landscape architect who heads a small but growing green infrastructure division within the city parks department.

(Real more at Capital!)

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(As published in the Mott Haven Herald, June 4, 2011)

A tradition that started in the Bronx’s deadliest days, when homicide was an everyday occurrence, still marks the borough’s streets. As blood fell on the pavement, paint rose on the walls.

Beginning in the early 1990s, memorial murals began to appear in Mott Haven and other South Bronx neighborhoods as vibrant reminders of those lost in the community and to honor the lives of neighbors who died.

There are brightly painted murals on many Mott Haven blocks, memorials of people like Manuel Contes, who died in 1994, or Kevin Freeman, 25, who was killed in a shootout at the Patterson Houses in the summer of 2004.

“In a way, it’s like still having a person still on the block,” says Hector Nazario a member of the mural painters Tats Cru who signs his work Nicer.

The tradition grew from the graffiti painters who bombed subways and walls in the late 1970s and early ‘80s. The South Bronx, and particularly Mott Haven, has a storied past in the history of graffiti, according to Eric Felisbret, who painted as DEAL CIA, and who has dedicated countless hours to documenting graffiti tags, street art and murals across New York, culminating in the book “Graffiti New York” published in 2009.

The subway station at Third Avenue and 149th Street was once the center of the South Bronx graffiti scene, Felisbret recalled in an interview. There, painters would meet up, network and decide where to go.

Around 1989, as the city began to crack down on graffiti in the subways, the messages came up from underground and began spreading in the sunlight. Felisbret traces the earliest memorial murals to that time, when artists like Anthony “Chico” Garcia began painting them on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.

(Please visit the Mott Haven Herald for more!)

(Origially posted at Capital New York, 5/21/12)

At this weekend’s Great GoogaMooga music and food festival in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, comedian Patton Oswalt made an analogy between food and music culture.

“In a weird way,” he said, “the one parallel between food and rock and roll is that, it seems that food—and the foodie industry and the exploding restaurant industry—it’s the way rock and roll was in the early ’70s, when it was big, giant: Kansas, Boston, Yes, Emerson Lake and Palmer. Huge, bloated stage shows. And then suddenly the Ramones and the New York Dolls and the Sex Pistols come along and strip it all down. And it seems like that’s sort of happening with all the food trucks.”

He was sitting with two bona fide rock stars of the cooking world, Tom Colicchio and Baohaus’ Eddie Huang. Oswalt asked their thoughts and got an agreement from Huang.

“There’s a lot of powder in both industries,” he said and laughed.

“I get what you’re saying,” Colicchio said to Oswalt. “I think what’s happened [is] more and more people are into food now and they don’t want the pretense, they want to strip down. They don’t need the big show. So you can get great food without the white tablecloth and the tuxedos.”

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Visit Capital for more!

(Originally Published in the Jersey Journal/NJ.com, 12/22/11)

Though she’s spent decades working with hair, Rita Lyons-Henry said she doesn’t like to cut things short.

But after this month, Lyons-Henry will close her beauty salon, ending nearly 50 years in the same store on Harrison’s busy Frank E. Rodgers Blvd.

“It’s about time for me,” said Lyons-Henry, 70.

Rita’s Beauty Salon has outlasted nine presidents and a town that’s changed considerably over time. The salon’s picture windows frame a panorama of a changed town: What was a funeral home is now a gold and silver store. A bank has vanished and the skyline of Newark, visible through tree branches on down Cleveland Avenue, has filled in.

“You could see anything here,” she said. “This is quite a corner.”

It was there on a Friday night in 1961 when Lyons-Henry, at the time a recent graduate from the American College of Cosmetology in Newark, passed by a storefront being cleaned out by its owner. On a whim, she asked about the space and after paying a $10 deposit and committing to $80 a month rent, she began to build her salon.

“He took a shot on me and it worked,” she said.

At the time, there wasn’t much competition in town. She said her appointment book was soon booked for three to four weeks and even with standing appointments, customers might have to wait hours to sit down.

Some still return, like her oldest customer, a 96-year-old woman who comes every other week. And some of the police officers who sit in her chairs are grandchildren of police officers who came decades ago. To keep her older customers happy, she still keeps a drawer of traditional hair curlers and four hair dryer chairs sit from her early years in the business.

“I always wanted to make women look 20 years younger,” she said. But business is down to less than a third of what it was at her peak, when the store had nine barbers and afforded her new cars and two homes. Much of her aging clientele moved outside of town. Some died.

And over the previous decades, there has been an influx of Latin American immigrants, accompanied by newer hair and nail salons that target the new population.

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Read the rest at NJ.com!

(Originally posted at Capital New York, May 25, 2012)

A month before the voters in Charlie Rangel’s district vote in a primary that pits him against (among others) State Senator Adriano Espaillat, the two candidates held competing Washington Heights rallies six blocks away from each other.

Rangel’s event was meant to showcase his support from Assemblyman Guillermo Linares, and to endorse Linares’ bid to take over Espaillat’s Senate seat. Linares was one of the first Dominican-Americans to win elected office.

Espaillat, who hopes to become America’s first Dominican-American congressman, was accepting neighborhood support from the “Quisqueyanos,” or the area’s Dominican population.

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(Read more at Capital!)

Filmed and edited by Dan Rosenblum, November 2011, for CUNY Graduate School of Journalism

In the outer boroughs, the yellow-choked arteries of Manhattan give way to black Lincoln Town Cars and decidedly non-yellow cars. Along stretches outside of Manhattan, from Coney Island to Tremont, the livery car industry serves a vast population of auto-free and often less wealthy New Yorkers. And though people are free to call for rides, many enjoy the convenience of hailing a cab. Even if it is illegal.

But soon, with a little help from Albany, the right to hail will extend across New York City.

Jesus Rodriguez is a dispatcher at New Elegante Car Service in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. Working from a crowded and small room there, dispatchers respond to dozens of phone calls an hour and walk-ups from people who need rides.

In neighborhoods like Sunset Park, yellow cabs never come. So, it’s up to community car services (liveries, as they’re known) to offer rides. They’re much more expensive than the subway, but are still popular among residents especially in bad weather.

• America
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• The UK Biobank
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• The film “CornerStore”, described by the Detroit News as “‘Clerks’ meets ‘Barbershop’ at the ‘Car Wash’”
• The Milk Bottle Restaurant in Spokane, Washington
• Iraq

(Originally posted in the Kearny Weekly/NJ.com on May 10, 2012.)

Though the modern vases of Multiservicios Latinos and the grand opening banner already added some color to the shops of Kearny Avenue, inside the price tags were still being put on the inventory of the store, which opened the first day of May.

Business owner Victoria Zavala recently opened the store to share Peruvian heritage by selling decorations, clothing and accessories that range from the strikingly modern vases to traditional accessories.

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(Read more on NJ.com!)