Filed under: Stories by Tomas Dinges
Scenes from a Brooklyn Pizzeria
by Tomás Dinges
“Where’s Mark?” I ask, and when I turn around a black woman with gold hoop earrings and light blue jeans says, “Mark’s right here.” She shows me a crude tattoo of her brother’s name on the top of her hand.
“Can I have the slice with the big bubble? … No … no … yeah, that one,” the woman says with a smile that turns up sharply at the edges. Her language is straightforward, like a child, and she has the tottering movements of a string-puppet. She bends down stiffly to pick up a dollar bill that falls to the floor. It is 3 o’clock.
Business is beginning to slow since the noon-start of the lunch-hour rush. There is another pizzeria in Red Hook but it is far away from this place. It also hasn’t been around for twenty-five years.
The early rush starts slowly. Two Latinos in Nikes and paint-splattered jeans sit at one of the three tables and talk in Spanish about their hometowns. They drink Pomegranate Snapple and wait, placidly, for their lasagna to get warm. There are no other customers in the shop.
A man suddenly dashes in to grab a takeout order. “Ese es mia,” he says in Spanish: “That’s mine.” He takes the hand-off. He is wearing a white “United We Stand” 9/11 commemorative shirt emblazoned with a bald eagle and unfurled banners. He rushes outside with no apparent exchange of cash and slides the box into the catering truck he has double-parked on Van Brunt Street.
Then the truck drivers come in. One wears camouflage pants, is short and speaks in a nasal voice. “I want the Sicilian from the corner,” he says. He sits with his friend Angel, a big guy, near the glass window at the front. Angel talks into the phone to his girlfriend. “Hurry up, I gotta go, I gotta go. I’ve only got a half-hour for lunch,” he tells her.
Now the customers come in a flurry.
“Next please, next please,” says Tony, who works the counter and the oven. He gets his customers in and out quickly and the line is never more than two or three deep. The phone rings with orders to go. “Hello, Mark’s Pizza. Hold on please,” says Tony. He has worked this rush for the last eight years. He is a short and squat Albanian who grew up thirty miles from the Italian border. Mark is not here.
Workers in paint and grease-splattered pants place orders, talk on yellow Nextel phones and, when Tony gives them their slices, eat silently. One of them has been on his back. His shirt is covered in dirt and debris that no one has tried to wipe off. It says “Brooklyn” in classic white script.
Just as quickly as it fills up the place empties. A Latino busboy wipes the tables clean for a second time. But soon it starts again. The housing coordinator from the local Red Hook Community Justice Center asks for a spinach roll. A pregnant woman waits for her slice with her toothy and smiling young daughter. The sharply dressed head of the Ikea furniture store’s employment initiative walks in looking for a “fresh pie.” At a table, an old lady watches the young girl seated in front of her eat a cheese slice. The old lady doesn’t take her eyes off her.
Faridun Tabarov was supposed to be helping Tony at the counter but is late for work. Three years ago he came from Tajikistan. Now, finally, he is coming from his English classes in Manhattan. The 23 year-old takes pizza orders. Tony isn’t angry. He greets Faridun with a high five and then barks out delivery instructions to Mario Silva.
Mario is 49 and delivers pizzas on a bicycle. The bicycle is gray and hard to ride. The tray is heavy and is welded to the handlebars. The tires are under-inflated and worn. The pedals rattle and the cranks creak.
Mario rides easily and can maintain a running conversation and salute the people he passes. He knows people. A tall black man calls out hello in Spanish.
“He married a Dominican girl and learned some Spanish from her,” Mario says.
Mario used to be afraid of black people when he first arrived. He prayed to the Virgin of Guadalupe to give him strength to pedal on. Then he was attacked and a black man saved him. Mario decided he could be friends with black people.
On the street people may not know Mario’s name but they do recognize him. They call out “Pizza Man,” or “Mexico.” Mario may not know their names, but he knows where they work. He pointed to the long warehouse that juts out into the Atlantic Basin.
“I know all these places,” he said. “Upstairs, downstairs, all the way down there.”
At 2 o’clock the kids start coming in to the shop. They are followed by a short man Tony calls, “big boss man.” The big boss man is the head of Added Value, a farm on the edge of Red Hook. He is relocating his office down the street. Tony teases him about being the big boss man.
“You’re the big boss,” the big boss man says to Tony.
“No, you’re the boss, man,” says Tony. They do this for a while longer. Then they talk about growing peppers and tomatoes. The big boss man orders a roll with anchovies, ricotta, spinach and tomato. Tony offers to have it delivered.
The man from the garage around the corner comes in. He wears a navy blue baseball cap with a smudged gold braid on the brim. He is in a lousy mood. “Things are slow,” he tells Tony. “I used to do 10 cars, and now its three, four cars, that’s it.”
He sits down alone reading a magazine and begins to talk as if he were having a conversation. “Black fish are out there,” he says. “They got lucky, they ran into a school of Bonita. Wow, look at that … ” He has no one to answer him.
It is getting late. The young men with the green Fairway hats come in. So does the woman with the tattoo on her hand and the dead brother named Mark.
She has eyes that smile and sometimes roll back. Her head nods and she does not seem to be able to control it.
“Mark got killed when he was 19,” she says. He got shot with stray gunfire on Wall Street. He was running away when he got shot in the back. Their mother died of grief several days later, the woman says.
Tony knew the woman. He knew that she got treatment around the corner at the methadone clinic. “She comes in all the time,” he says. She is not the only outpatient who comes for pizza at Mark’s.
“I see crazy stuff I don’t see in my neighborhood,” says Tony. He lives in Bensonhurst, but spends most of his time here. “It’s like a family, you work with these people for years and years and years, and you know what they want to eat, not just how they are.”
Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.
Filed under: Stories by Lauren Feeney
On a snowy December day, two men struggle against the bitter wind coming off the bay as they wander the desolate streets of Red Hook scouring for scrap metal. They take turns pushing a shopping cart filled with a random assortment of things—beer cans, car parts, even a kitchen sink.
Kevin and Martin, who didn’t want to give their last names, both live in the Red Hook Houses, the expansive public housing project that is home to almost 8,000 of Red Hook’s 11,000 residents. According to the most recent data, in the census tract that encompasses “the Houses” as people in Red Hook call them, 28 percent of the workforce is unemployed.
Problems in the Houses go beyond unemployment. Just last year, police arrested 153 narcotics dealers who had turned the Houses into what Commissioner Raymond Kelly called “a virtual drug bazaar.” “Drugs were sold at every corner of the development, day and night,” he says. Only 44 percent of Red Hook Houses residents graduate from high school, and 55 percent live below the poverty line.
This notorious neighborhood bulges out from Brooklyn into the New York Bay, offering views of the Statue of Liberty, the Verrazano Narrows Bridge, and the reflective glass towers of Manhattan’s Financial District. The stunning views have inspired many attempts to redevelop the Red Hook waterfront, which was once a thriving port but in recent decades has been all but abandoned. But with every new proposal, a debate ensues. And at the core of that debate is always the question of jobs.
So when representatives from IKEA came to Red Hook looking for support for their proposal to turn an old shipyard and graving dock into a new big-box store that would require about 600 employees, they found that support in the Red Hook Houses.
“I don’t usually agree so easily, but when they finished the presentation, I said, ‘Bring IKEA to Red Hook,’” says Dorothy Shields, president of the Red Hook Houses East tenants’ association. “They promised me 500 jobs,” Shields says. “Things would be much quieter around here if people had jobs.”
But Shields may have been misled. “Obviously we are trying to hire from the local population, but we never promised a percentage,” says Tyquana Henderson, who handles public relations for IKEA. Yet Shields remains confident that IKEA will provide jobs for people in the Houses. “They promised me 500 positions, and I’m still looking for 500 positions in the spring,” she says.
In fact, all IKEA promised was that residents of the 11231 zip code could submit applications two weeks before the general public. This process began on November 1st, when IKEA started recruiting for management positions through Red Hook Works, a job training organization which they agreed to fund as a way to give back to the community. At Red Hook Works, applicants can earn a certificate in customer service, which recruiter Shauna Wheatt says isn’t required by IKEA but will be looked on favorably. The certification basically means that the applicant has learned “how to deal with irate customers,” Wheatt says.
Red Hook Works also offers classes in computer skills, GED preparation, and resume writing, and helps place people in jobs at IKEA and elsewhere in the community. Wheatt says that one client came to her at the end of October without even a resume, and now has a job with waste management making $17 an hour. IKEA has not yet announced the starting rate for jobs in its new store, but it’s expected to be between $10 and $12 per hour.
Kevin and Martin, the scrap metal collectors, say that they would be interested in working for IKEA—but experience tells them not to get their hopes up.
Before Red Hook’s Fairway Supermarket opened last year, there was the same unwritten promise of jobs for locals. Kevin was hired as a night cleaner, earning minimum wage. He was told that after 90 days, his pay would increase to $9.50 per hour and he’d be invited to join the union. But just before the 90 days were up, Kevin was let go. “They said my performance wasn’t up to par,” he says. “A lot of people from the houses used to work at Fairway and don’t anymore.”
There’s been a lot of hype about IKEA and Fairway, but most gainfully employed Red Hook residents still work in the manufacturing and industrial jobs that are traditional here, and some people would like to keep it that way.
“Manufacturing and industrial jobs pay about $10,000 per year more than retail jobs, and 60 percent of them offer benefits, as opposed to 30 percent of retail jobs,” says Phaedra Thomas of the South Brooklyn Industrial Development Corporation.
Some industrial jobs can be menial and repetitive, but “even the ones that are less fulfilling are usually a stepping stone,” she says. Manufacturing and industrial jobs offer workers a path to climb, and at the top are “jobs like welding, plumbing, and contracting—high skill work that will lead to a family-sustaining career,” says Thomas. Former city planner Isabel Hill adds that these jobs have lower barriers to entry for ex-offenders or immigrants who don’t speak English, because employees don’t often work directly with the public.
Despite these benefits, most new waterfront development is either residential or retail.
City planner Dan Casey says that big developers regularly abuse the promise of jobs in order to gain support for their projects. “In America, the entire debate about whether or not to build something boils down to the number of jobs,” he says. “But what kind of jobs? Am I going to be selling pretzels outside of a new stadium?”
One resident of the Houses, who did not want to give his name, says that he made his living selling drugs until about two years ago, when his girlfriend convinced him to get out of the game. “I was a heroin dealer, so I could gross 50 grand a day,” he says. This might be an exaggeration, but after the major drug bust last year, District Attorney Charles Hynes said that the drug sales in the Red Hook Houses averaged $140,000 a day, or $50 million a year.
After bringing in that kind of money, it’s hard to imagine taking a $10-an-hour retail job. “Selling drugs is the worst kind of hustling, but people working that kind of job are hustling too,” says the former dealer. He’s got no interest in working at the IKEA. “I’m getting ready to move to Pennsylvania,” he says. “There’s nothing for me here.”
At the end of the day, Kevin and Martin will push their shopping cart to the scrap yard at the corner of 9th and Hamilton, where they’ll be paid 7 1/2 cents per pound for iron, 60 cents per pound for aluminum, and $1.90 per pound for copper. It may not sound like much, but it can add up—they say the average collector can earn about $150 per day. And the work isn’t bad.
“It’s easy and it’s legal,” says Kevin. “A lot of people in this neighborhood do this kind of work,” Martin adds.
Filed under: Stories by Lauren Feeney
Through the window of his office on Pier 41 in Red Hook, Greg O’Connell looks out over the New York Bay. The pale silhouette of the Verranzano Narrows Bridge looms in the distance. And on a parallel pier on the other side of a narrow slip, he can see the historic redbrick Beard Street warehouses, which he owns, jutting out into the calm waters.
But the view isn’t what drew O’Connell to Red Hook. An idealistic developer, O’Connell came to Red Hook to try to turn a depopulated, crime-ridden industrial wasteland into a vibrant waterfront community.
Developers are always looking for the next undiscovered neighborhood—places with untapped potential where property is cheap. O’Connell is no different.
“You have to go where no one wants anything, where they’re not even thinking about it,” he says. “You have to steal the property.”
In his worn polo shirt and denim overalls, O’Connell doesn’t look like a real estate mogul, but he owns about a million square feet of commercial property, plus some residential spaces. His buildings shelter nearly 100 businesses, including the giant Fairway supermarket, a set shop for The Blue Man Group, artists’ studios, new media companies and several non-profits that he gives a discounted rent. Many of his holdings are waterfront properties with views even more spectacular than the view from his own office—from the picnic tables behind the Fairway, customers can enjoy an ocean breeze and an unobstructed view of the Statue of Liberty while eating their lunch or drinking a morning coffee.
O’Connell has lived in Brooklyn since the 60s, but he grew up in a middle class neighborhood in Queens. “Mainly teachers, firemen and cops” lived there, he says. Fittingly, his mother was a schoolteacher and his father was a police officer. O’Connell tried both professions—substitute teaching for a few years after college, then joining the police force. But he wasn’t satisfied.
Three years later, still a policeman, he bought his first building, a four-family home in Cobble Hill. He fixed the place up, moved his young family into one apartment, and rented out the other three.
Throughout his career, he continued to buy and develop properties in Brooklyn, particularly in Red Hook, where he found abandoned or underutilized waterfront properties and bought them up for very little money.
Finally having found his true calling, O’Connell retired from the police force, but says his experiences as a cop and eventually as a detective helped shape the way he thinks about urban development. Working in Spanish Harlem in the violent 60s, he noticed that in the blocks where the houses were only a few stories high, there was less crime than in areas on his beat lined with imposingly tall brick buildings. He believes that stoops and benches help promote safe and lively communities, while high walls do the opposite.
Modern-day Red Hook was defined by urban planner Robert Moses who, in building the Brooklyn-Queens and Gowanus Expressways, created an artificial barrier between Red Hook and neighboring Carroll Gardens. On one side of highway, a brownstone community thrived; on the other, an isolated industrial community whose tenants live mostly in large public housing developments slipped into decline.
O’Connell found a clear articulation of some of his ideas in the work of one of Moses’ great critics, Jane Jacobs. In her influential book The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jacobs decries the large-scale construction projects of modernists like Moses, and makes the case for a more organic, preservationist, mixed-use vision of urban neighborhoods.
O’Connell also favors mixed-use development. He talks a lot about balanced communities, believing that in a small insular environment like Red Hook, people’s lives are all interconnected, requiring everyone to consider everyone else’s needs. That’s why he says he believes in creating affordable housing as well as businesses and jobs, why he has contributed renovations at the local elementary school, and why he offers lower rents to non-profit organizations.
O’Connell’s strategy for creating such a balanced community is to buy up space so that he can use it as he sees fit. “The way to control things is just to own a lot of property,” he says. “If you purchase a lot of property, you can create a balance. A little job creation, a little arts work, a little public access—you create your own little orchestra.”
Many laud his vision, but not everyone appreciates his methods. “People either love him or hate him,” says Heather White, a local artist and tenant of O’Connell’s.
Local activist and co-chairman of the Red Hook Civic Association John McGettrick refers to O’Connell’s purchasing habits as “land banking.” He accuses O’Connell of, among other things, conflicts of interest, environmental violations, and breaking promises to the community.
In 1992, O’Connell purchased 28 acres of Red Hook waterfront from the Port Authority for about half a million dollars (the bargain and sale deed signed by O’Connell and a representative of the Port Authority confusingly says “$4000,000” then spells it out as “four hundred fifty thousand dollars;” McGettrick remembers $500,000; O’Connell himself studiously avoided the question).
According to McGettrick, the community supported the purchase, which went through without public bidding, in exchange for promises of a half a mile public esplanade, a two-acre park, and mixed-income residencies in the building that now houses the Fairway market. Today, rents in the building range from $2600-4600 a month for loft-style live/work spaces, and, he says, “the promised two acre park is now a parking lot for the Fairway.”
McGettrick concedes that the Fairway itself is a useful amenity, but says that at 123,000 square feet, it’s far too big for such a tiny community. By comparison, he says that the Fairway store in Harlem is 35,000, and the one on the Upper West Side is only 20,000, though both Manhattan branches serve larger populations.
Big box stores tend to open in clusters, and one of the reasons residents objected to the controversial Fairway development was the belief that once you allowed a store of that size in the community, you would only attract other big box stores, which would alter the character of the neighborhood. “And sure enough,” McGettrick says, “Ikea showed up about six months later.”
Though not directly involved in the Ikea project, O’Connell supports it, mostly because of the jobs it will create for people in the neighboring public housing development. “There are always a few doomsayers,” he says. “You’re never going to keep everyone happy, but if you get 95%, you’ve hit a home run.
O’Connell doesn’t see room for much more development in Red Hook. “There’s no such thing as vacancies now,” he says. He recently had to turn away a major broker looking for a 150,000 square foot warehouse space for Christie’s, the famous auction house. “You look back, and if I had told someone 20 years ago that I got a call from Christie’s and turned them down, they would have told me to have my head examined,” he says.
So what next?
O’Connell likes to talk about Geneseo, the small town in Upstate New York, where he went to college. It used to be a lively town full of Italian immigrants and quaint little shops, but these days it’s home to a big prison, and is basically a dead town. “You could buy the whole town for a million dollars,” he says. O’Connell wants to finish what he has started in Red Hook, but he’s already thinking about what he can do for the small towns of Upstate New York.
He also talks about reviving bigger cities like Buffalo. With its reputation as a frigid rust-belt town, this may sound like a risky plan, but imagine what people must have thought 25 years ago, when he began purchasing property in Red Hook.
“We used to say that we could see around the corner,” O’Connell says of his time as a detective. As a developer, O’Connell is still trying to see into the future.
Filed under: Stories by Tomas Dinges
Quill Hyde, the owner of Hyde Power, a metal and theatrical engineering shop in Red Hook, needs to keep his 2-year-old business focused on the short term. Between June and August he blew all of his profits on a carousel, a post-apocalyptic carousel. He is only slightly repentant. “If I were to keel over tomorrow, the only thing I would regret is not having life insurance,” he says. Now he has a 10-month old daughter with his high-school sweetheart and is concerned about their future. “True Love” is tattooed in a Medieval font across his knuckles.
“I have unplumbed depths of optimism,” says Hyde, a 10-year veteran of the business. “It is just built into me, even if shit does come crashing down. Even if this company does go bankrupt it really doesn’t matter. You just re-incorporate and keep going.” He still owes American Express many thousands of dollars and wages for the small army of workers who worked night and day over eight weeks to build the 60 foot long, 45 foot high and 10,000 pound carousel, A Cavallo.
A Cavallo, which means “by horse” in Italian, is described on Hyde Power’s website as a group of “steel horses, Appaloosas back from hell, carouseling on a Coney Island pirate ship, with a stage on the back, shooting fire out the top.” It was to be shown at the annual Mad Max-like communion of avant-garde artists and their creations, Burning Man, held in Nevada’s gritty Black Rock Desert.
This is the second six figure investment in two years Hyde has yet to pay off. His first was gutting and remodeling his rented workshop in an old brick firehouse in Red Hook. Now, after a busy spring manufacturing scenery for Broadway theatrical productions and the custom machinery that moves it, business has dropped off precipitously.
“We are no longer diving towards the water anymore, we are kind of leveling off,” he said. He makes the sound of a propeller-powered airplane. “We are kind of like the Spruce Goose, 20 feet off the water, sort of flying, but really just hovering. And people on shore look at it and say, ‘What the fuck is that guy doing?’”
Hyde is 34. He is a tall, but unimposing, man with short blonde hair, an intense focus and plays in a band called the Betty Ford All-Stars. He is figuring out the way to pay for more time and money consuming fantasies like A Cavallo, which, he says, if given the opportunity he would create regularly. He credits part of his mechanical inspiration to his grandfather, a successful inventor and businessman whom he says designed the technology behind shower head faucets, single lever sink faucets and the garbage disposal system, the InSinkErator. Hyde has yet to match his feats, or official patents. And, despite having built the moving scenery for big productions like Blue Man Group, his business plan has yet to find its groove.
What he wants to do is sell the design and engineering involved in making the horses and the carousel they ride on, as well as everything else he thinks of. This includes the crane bearings that enable entire thing to be able to steer its wheels regardless of the weight and the placement of multiple cutoff valves on the isolated fuel tanks that generate the fiery effects. The carousel frame itself is based on a miniaturized, remote drive system ordinarily designed for remotely moving stage props, as in one case, a blue hippogryph (a mythological beast with wings like a raven and legs like a mare). Most of these technologies are derived from his theater engineering.
A Cavallo was to be a vehicle to promote this business. To some extent this has materialized. When he totes around a miniature steel horse to trade shows people call out in familiar recognition. But he needs help to explore markets, he says, like the luxury home market, for example. His $85,000 elevator-lift system could be used to conceal a pool table beneath flooring and future projects could have military applications.
“My problem actually is that I have so many interests, so many competing business models, it’s hard to get any one totally together and off the ground,” he said. “It’s because I’m also in the process not only of developing this theatrical market, but also this luxury home market. I gotta start selling stuff to all these luxury homes.” He is also trying to launch A Cavallo as a non-profit internship program crafting “mechanized art experiences,” which, through the collective process of creation aim to break down barriers between individuals.
But what he really wants to do is design. Hyde spends at least eight hours a day in front of two computer screens designing rainbow-colored three-dimensional schematics on Autocad and Solidworks. His long-term new projects seem to get larger and larger in scale and his short-term projects have yet to materialize consistently. In its place is idle creation. His lead welder and friend John Hannon, who was a screenwriter before joining with Hyde, was making little steel boxes for himself one week in the absence of work.
Hyde thinks of the accumulation of capital as “inherently bogus,” and useful only in that it spurs more creativity. “I look back and I’ve read a lot of books about inventors and history and scientists and visionaries and none of them were making money,” he said.
His wife doesn’t care. She was furious with the creation of A Cavallo, he says, although she eventually participated. She wants him to make money so the family is secure. Her profession, designing and making patterned silk dresses, may not assure great financial returns, but its operation doesn’t generate yearly overhead of $250,000 as does her husband’s. “She sees my development as an escalating series of toys,” he said. “Bigger and bigger toys.”
She knows his ways. They met for the first time in Oregon when he was 12, and have been in a relationship off and on since he was 16-years-old. Now it is stability she wants, he says, not toys that require teams of 50 to assemble. “She has hated it from the beginning and is like you are just wasting your time and money,” he said. “That’s been ongoing.”
Beyond the unlocked door of the 134-year-old former Red Hook Fire Department that is Hyde Power’s metal shop and office are the original painted wooden slats with street intersections posted on the wall. Music from the 1920s floats out of a stereo. Brass tear-drop chandeliers hang from the ceiling and different machine tools, some from the 1950s (the Hole Driller, the Length Cutter, the one for square stuff and the one for round stuff) occupy niches. Two carousel horses, one with a cut mirror and mosaics glued onto its snout, rest placidly on the concrete floor. A hooded welder hunches over the crackle and flash of his argon MIG solder. The welder draws out a fat 10 cm weld that joins a custom designed CNC, water-cut piece of steel to a four-foot high rectangular frame. Near the back, Hyde stoops over designs for a testing device of a computerized actuator system for a shipping container. When its walls are unfolded the ordinary container is transformed, in this case, into a coffee shop for the Illy espresso company to be displayed at 11 Columbus Circle. It is a project for Adam Kalkin, an artist and designer on the leading edge of converting shipping containers into useable spaces.
As it happened Hyde’s calculations for this step in the project were off. The resin that was thickly applied to the inside surfaces of the shipping container walls was surprisingly heavy and the seven-foot-long white cylindrical screw jacks he had fitted to lower the container walls couldn’t pull them back up. Now he was left to design a system to test the strength of his solution. It was going to require another 1000 horsepower.
He instructs a smaller, disheveled, young man who wears a loose jacket with a faded Hyde logo imprinted on the back how to drill through quarter-inch steel in a swift series of brief instructions.
This is the sort of business that Hyde needs in the short term. The woman who showed up unannounced off the street and wanted her iron gate welded is not. He took her business anyway.
Hyde’s next project is a big project, the kind that he likes best. Think the scale of the immense red banners of Christo and Jean-Claude in Central Park. He has designed on his computer a garden of a dozen 40-foot flowers, some of which release fire (they are on the outer ring), some of which display light shows and others have solar panels on their petals, follow the arc of the sun and power the whole thing. They move like a flower would move, with a 360-degree range.
And then there is the design of the Artificial Intelligence needed to make this mechanized ecology come alive. “That’s like a million dollar project,” he says. He hopes to show it at Burning Man in a year or two. He is bidding on a job in Las Vegas to see if it could help offset the research and development costs of the garden endeavor.
He has already redesigned the flowers once and recognizes that his flowers will not make money. He has not found a benefactor for his plan or time to develop his market niches. Nor is he afraid of bankruptcy.
But he is concerned for his wife and the future of their child.
“It’s just so frustrating,” he says. “Knowing what could be, seeing what could be, and trying to get there is one of your problems.”
Filed under: Stories by Tomas Dinges
The construction headquarters for Kel-Tech Construction lies enclosed in a dusty white patch of land surrounded by 15-foot-high chain linkfences and 16 red six-story publicly-subsidized apartment buildings in the heart of the Red Hook, Brooklyn. Kevin Gallagher, the burly head sub-contractor for the masonry project, has been working intermittently since 2003, when the New York City Housing Authority gave the green light to a $18.6 million dollar, multi-contract repair project. This project promised to clean the exterior surface of all the buildings, do brick-reconstruction work on damaged roof parapets, and conduct roof drainage repair and roof repair in the 26 buildings that make up the East and West wings of the Red Hook Houses.
Historically neglected by city services and skeptical about the competence or honesty of the New York Housing Authority, many of the 6000 plus residents, almost 70% of the total population of Red Hook, doubt the real objective of the repairs being done by Gallagher.
A 26-year-old former resident of Red Hook on parole for drug possession who refused to give her name says that the construction site is going to be turned into a holding cell, “to throw all us into.”
While the New York City Housing Authority did not respond to questions for this article, Dorothy Shields, the current and long-time President of the Red Hook East Tenants Association explains that the construction is a long overdue repair to buildings that were built in 1939. She dismisses people who distrust the New York City Housing Authority and the construction.
She emphasized that trust is vital in this situation. “Some people don’t trust nobody. In this world you have to trust somebody,” she exclaimed.
Vanessa Stanton, an office manager at a nearby community health organization, has reason to be distrustful. She is mystified by scaffolding that contractors put up outside her top-floor apartment a bit more than five years ago, only to take it down at the beginning of this year, without doing any apparent work.
The scaffolding began to accumulate urban detritus in the absence of workers: trash thrown from windows, leaves shed from trees as well as nests abandoned by families of squirrels.
Her roof still leaks, she says, even though she was one of the, “main complainers,” filing regular complaints at the New York City Housing Authority management office in Red Hook.
Shields, the tenant leader, admits discontent among tenants. “It’s true that a lot of people are unhappy with the construction,” she says, confirming an incident in which a woman she described as mentally disturbed, and the contractor described as a “crackhead,” poured boiling water on a bricklayer at 8:30 in the morning.
On any given day, drills loudly break apart old brick which is then thrown into metal dumpsters six-stories below. On the ground the gears of a fork-lift grind with effort and the pungent fumes of liquid tar float hot through the air.
For most people, the construction was not seen to be in their long-term benefit, even it was seen as effective.
Carmen Vasquez, 32, a four-year resident of the Houses, heard that the owners of the buildings, “…plan to take everybody out,” and offer an option to buy for currently employed residents.
“This is a lot of money they are spending on these building. They are cleaning the face of each and every building, each and every roof is brand new, and lot of the bricks with cracks in it,” are getting fixed, she said.
“I don’t think they are going to spend so much money if they are not going to have plans for it,” Vasquez said.
A couple walking their two pit bulls in an area normally covered in grass but now a spotty mess of tire tracks in dried mud declared their satisfaction with the roof repairs.
The 49-year-old woman readily ventured her opinion in Spanish, “They are doing a good job here.” She declined to give her name, citing current legal problems. “When it rained the water ran into my house and filled up my bedroom,” soaking all her belongings. Since the workers began, she has had no water damage.
But, despite the perceived good work of the construction crews, the couple doubts the end-motive for the construction. They have heard many rumors from acquaintances and even heard of the existence of a letter indicating that current residents would receive financial incentives, up to $3000 dollars, for vacating the apartments.
Jose Figueroa, 55, her partner, who has been coming to visit Red Hook from his home in Manhattan for the last six years, explains that the purpose of these repairs is to clean them up for rental to people who can afford the true market price of these apartments.
Publicly subsidized housing adjusts rental rates according to factors like monthly combined income and dependents.
Figueroa cited the skyrocketing value of the surrounding property, and last year’s heavily promoted New York City plan to restructure the remaining active piers of the Red Hook waterfront as evidence of the interest of the city to remove the current residents. Average home and condo values for the Red Hook zip code of 11231 is around $700,000, way above the New York City average of 259,000, and higher than three of four surrounding zip codes, according to 2000 census figures.
Speaking from the battered confines of his smoky, air-conditioned trailer, Kevin Gallagher estimates that his team has laid two and a half to three miles of brick walls. He is eager to finish by November. He is done with Red Hook.
Beyond the chain-link fences, the six-story buildings of the Red Hook Houses sprawl across the landscape interspersed by tall, wispy trees blowing in the breeze and evenly filtering sunlight below. Over the last four years the sounds of construction has given way when the workers leave at 3:00 pm to the omnipresent sound of children playing in the multiple courtyard playgrounds, and occasional gun shots later at night.
The rumors about eviction have been going on for a lot longer, says Jerome Davis, a former resident and sports coach who was raised in the Red Hook Houses.
“The people [in the neighborhood] were saying those same things ten years ago,” he said.
Filed under: About
Reporting Red Hook features original reporting and writing about the Red Hook neighborhood of Brooklyn, in addition to commentary by its reporters.
This is a collaborative effort of current students of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism covering the Red Hook neighborhood for their RW 1, boot-camp journalism course of the first semester.
We picked this neighborhood for various reasons, including the proliferation of healthy bar life, rich characters and storytellers and that it is surrounded on two sides by waterfront, among others. Like any other decision, the reasons involved in its formulation are often so subtle that they border on being imperceptible, and are profound.
That said, Red Hook is a fascinating neighborhood whose history reads like the tragic life of a child whose loving parents died early in life. This is where Capone cut his teeth and On the Waterfront was based…and Time Magazine said in the peculiar style of a 1927 article that, “In one of the more exclusive gangs initiates, usually aged about nine, have to drink twelve glasses of dago-red wine and have a revolver pressed into their temples while they take the pledge….and amuse themselves throwing rocks, shooting craps, fighting gang against gang with clubs, stones, bottles, telling jokes, holding a section of street against invasion by a rival gang, stealing, cop-baiting, hanging around poolrooms, attending cheap cinema shows, begging pennies, playing poker, drinking liquor, accepting the solicitations of older uptown girls.”
The streets were once thriving with longshoreman, sailors, suppliers and families. The ports on the waterfront were an integral cog of a thriving shipping industry in the New York area and generated employment and propelled community all the way through the advent of modern, containerized shipping of the 1960’s.
It was also the site of the one of the first Puerto Rican communities in New York City. Puerto Ricans currently make up the largest Hispanic population of the city.
It is also home to the first and largest public housing development in Brooklyn, the Red Hook Houses, which was built in 1939.
But, the construction of the Gowanus Expressway in the early 1970’s, planned by the infamous mayor of New York, Robert Moses, acted like a tourniquet and cut the area off from surrounding neighborhoods of Carrol Gardens and Gowanus.
The neighborhood became isolated and meanwhile the shipping industry died.
Modern day Red Hook began to take shape, a post-industrial landscape, with no train stop to stimulate real-estate development, and no local jobs for the local population.
The eighties and nineties made ‘The Hook’ notorious for crack cocaine and the murderous turf wars associated with it. Some people on the street credit the Guiliani administration for is attention to detail and petty crimes, like drinking in the street and loitering, for cleaning up Red Hook. Now, the Houses are walkable, and the parks are playable and the swimming pool swimmable, much to the disbelief of some visitors.
Where are the people who live there now, one could ask. Why aren’t the streets bustling with commerce and noise?
The remaining waterfront is being closed off to the public, with owners waiting for their moment to sell upon the greenlight from the current mayoral administration. No great change is coming soon, as a controversial plan to convert the remaining working waterfront into residential and industrial site lost steam and appearance dead…in the water, at least for the next five years.
But, the controversial Swedish furniture outlet Ikea, or Ikevil, as some clever wordsmiths have named it, has put on its blue skin. Plywood furniture heaven awaits visiting consumers from outside of Red Hook and the city has even extended bus service to accommodate them.
At the same time there are many in this neighborhood with intense and passionate feelings about their place.
Change is upon us, slowly but surely, but no one seems to know where its going.
We will try to report on this change.
