Reporting Red Hook

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.

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.

This year, for the first time since the 1960s, young women in New York City public schools who become pregnant while still in high school won’t have the option of enrolling in special schools for pregnant students, commonly known as P-Schools. The P-Schools closed their doors for good at the end of the last academic year, and many people were happy to see them go. But others say that the city shouldn’t have closed them without better alternative for pregnant teens in place.

Most administrators, students and advocates agree that the P-Schools were failing the young women who attended them. The four schools did have some valuable offerings, including women’s health classes and flexible schedules that allowed for doctor’s appointments and morning sickness. But the schools had abysmal records. Daily attendance rates hovered at around 48 percent. The P-Schools were considered transition schools, which means that they did not graduate students, and the majority never transferred back to a diploma-granting school. Students that didn’t return to regular high schools either tried to pass high school equivalency tests or simply dropped out.

Representatives from the city’s Department of Education say that new programs created to serve all “over-age, under-credited” students offer better options for pregnant and parenting teens, who often fit into this category because they get behind in school when they miss days due to pregnancy-related sickness and giving birth.

There are about 7000 pregnant teenagers in the city, according to heath department estimates. In recent years, the P-Schools only had around 300 students per year.

The P-Schools were often used as a repository for students who were pushed out of their home schools when they became pregnant, according to Benita Miller, founder of the Park Slope-based Brooklyn Childcare Collective, an organization that offers counseling and advocacy for pregnant and parenting teens.

Samora Coles, now the reproductive health coordinator at the Red Hook Health Initiative in Brooklyn, attended a P-School herself. She says that students often turned to the P-Schools because they were made to feel unwelcome in regular high schools. “Some teachers look at them like ‘oh, you disgusting little thing you’,” she says.

Brooklyn resident Jelysa Roberts attended a P-School from 2004-2005, because at the time, she thought it was her only option. “My school convinced me that that would be the best thing for me, and I didn’t know that I could choose to stay in my home school, so I just went,” she says.

Pregnant girls have the right to attend their regular local schools, according to a 2004 Department of Education regulation. According to Miller, however, teachers and administrators would often encourage students to transfer to P-Schools or drop out, especially if the students were low performers. “The schools deliberately decided not to support them,” Miller explains. “They’re afraid of looking like they’re promoting teenage pregnancy by doing anything to help these girls.”

“There are a lot of things we’ve done to help these students,” says Debra Wexler, a spokesperson for District 79, which administers alternative high school programs. “One of them is recognizing when programs are not succeeding and closing them down,” she says.

While few regret the demise of the P-Schools, advocates such as Donna Lieberman of the NYCLU are concerned about the lack of an alternative. “The Department of Education has a legal obligation to ensure that pregnant and parenting students are provided with full and equal access to both the educational opportunities and the support services that these students need to succeed,” she says. “The city’s ‘pregnancy schools’ provided neither—but in closing them the DOE has not solved the problem and may have made it worse.”

The education department counters that pregnant and parenting teenagers can attend transfer schools designed for all “over-age, under-credited” students, since 75 percent of these students fall into that category. These programs offer smaller classes and more personal attention for students who have gotten off track and are at risk of dropping out. Wexler points out that these schools have a 56 percent graduation rate, compared to only a 19 percent gradation rate for students who stay in their regular schools after falling behind.

But when considering only pregnant or parenting students, it’s difficult to measure the effectiveness of the transfer schools, because no one tracks the educational paths and graduation rates of these students. “We don’t flag students for being pregnant or parenting because of privacy considerations,” Wexler explains.

Advocates for pregnant teenagers see this as a major problem. “The real issue is, they don’t track cause that would mean they’d have to take responsibility for it,” says Miller.

Both Miller and Coles say that the education department still fails to offer pregnant and parenting students sufficient counseling, support, day-care services and assistance in navigating the system. They also criticize the reproductive heath education curriculum, which, if effective, could help prevent teenage pregnancy in the first place. “Right now, the first class about reproductive health—which they call hygiene—is taught in 11th grade,” says Coles. “By that time, they might have had sex thousands of times.”

Coles and Roberts are both success stories. Coles dropped out of high school after her baby was born, but passed the high school equivalency test three years later. Now, at age 33, she expects to graduate from the College of New Rochelle in the spring. She tells young women who come to her for advice to make education a priority. “You can’t support a family on the money you earn from the kind of job you’ll get without a high school diploma,” she says.

Coles was raised by her grandparents, who instilled her with old-fashioned values yet supported her during her pregnancy. She credits them for her success. As for the schools, “they are negligent, and at the same time, they point the finger at the kids,” she says.

Roberts, who turned 19 this past Sunday, now juggles college, work, and caring for her 2 1⁄2 year-old son. “Every girl that has a baby would be able to do that if she had the support,” Roberts says.

It’s a clear and cool August morning, and a pickup match is underway at the Red Hook Recreation Center soccer field.  Dressed in mix-matched t-shirts and shorts, employees of the Queen Marie Italian Restaurant on Court Street face off against workers for a local construction firm.  As the game nears its end, players hurl insults and call out victory cries in Spanish.  The restaurant workers win, 5-3.  

On the sidelines, men hang blue plastic tarps over grills and picnic tables while women husk corn and slice limes.  Hand-painted signs advertise tacos, empanadas, ceviche and horchata. Smells begin to emerge—smoldering charcoal, deep-fried starches, grilling meat. The scene has a very improvised feel, and yet, nothing about it is new. “Some of them have been here for 35 years,” according to Waldemar Ceballos, Vice President of the Guatemala Soccer League.  “They are here every weekend in the summers.”  Originally, the food vendors came because the soccer players were there, but now it seems that the players are here, at least in part, for the food. “Everybody comes to play and eat,” says Ceballos.

Unlike the players in the early-morning pickup match, members of the Guatemala Soccer League wear team uniforms, and their games are refereed. The league has been around since 1974, and was, according to Ceballos, the first Latino soccer league in the city. “It’s just for fun, not professional,” he says, though a few players claim to have played professionally in their home countries.  Ceballos himself is originally from Guatemala—he emigrated in 1974 to escape his country’s long civil war—but the league’s players are from all over the world.  In the early days, almost all the players were Hispanic; now a wider variety of nationalities are represented. Most teams have a predominant ethnic identity that sometimes doubles as a team name, but they’re all mixed.

Earlier this summer, the Parks Department informed the league’s beloved Latin food vendors that their temporary permits, expiring September 8^th, would not be renewed.  This sparked the fury of adoring locals and made waves among foodies citywide.  Sen. Chuck Schumer even stepped in, calling the vendors a “Brooklyn treasure,” and asking the department to let the vendors remain. Parks officials agreed to allow the stalls to stay open until the end of this season—October 28^th—after which the city will open bidding on concessions and the vendors will have to compete for the right to sell their delectable goods.  Even this uneasy respite was short-lived. On August 8th the Department of Health got involved, issuing a list of requirements that the vendors say could prove too expensive to implement.

Passions run high and speculation is rampant in the park.  “They want to bring in big chains so they can get their tax money” said Ceballos.  “This is going to be a problem for our players.”

As the games get underway, representatives from the health department wander from stall to stall, opening and closing coolers, poking under aluminum foil covers, asking questions and taking notes.

The first official match of the day is played between Team Yugoslavia, comprised of immigrants from the Balkan countries, and Club Deportivo, which is “about half Spanish and half North African,” according to Sami Ameur, a Deportivo player who came to Brooklyn from Algeria four years ago.  Ameur says he’s always been a fan of the Spanish football team Real Madrid, but now that he lives in the U.S., he follows American football and baseball more than soccer.  “I’m a Yankees fan,” he says.

Yugoslavia scores the first goal in game one, but the end result is a win for Club Deportivo.  The next match, between Mexican and Egyptian teams, is somewhat tense.  “There’s a lot of resentment on the part of the Egyptian team because the referees are mostly Hispanic,” a fan explains. The match ends with a Mexican victory but the hint of tension dissipates as Ecuadorian and Salvadorian players take the field.  The players seem to appreciate the inter-ethnic camaraderie that the league engenders. “That’s the thing about football,” says Ernest Garcia, a former Guatemala League player who is watching from the crowded stands. “Like they say at the World Cup, ‘one round ball unites the world.’”

Though the games enthrall audiences, most people seem to have come for the food.  “I’m from California, and I’ve been really struggling to find good Mexican food, so a friend told me to come here,” says Boerum Hill resident Chris Michael.  “You gotta try the pupusas—second blue tent from the left,” Ceballos advises.

The food vendors’ saga seems likely to have a happy ending.  With lines up to 40-people long waiting for huaraches, the vendors have ample support in the community. After the barrage of questions, Health Department representatives offer a few simple tips and move onto the next stand.  According to an official statement, “The Health Department is working with the Department of Parks and Recreation and Red Hook food vendors to help assure the safety of the food prepared and sold at the Red Hook soccer fields.”

“We are okay!” said Reina Carrillo, while flipping tortillas at her family’s stand. “She asked us some questions, but we had no violations, no nothing.  It’s okay for now, but we don’t know what will happen next year.”  

Across from the Red Hook Container Terminal on Columbia Street, two elderly men sit at a card table that’s been set up out on the sidewalk. One is slouched over, asleep in his folding chair, a Spanish-language newspaper crumpled in his lap. The other is eating rice and beans from an aluminum take-out container and smiling widely at the passers-by. They look a bit out of place amidst the upscale restaurants and trendy cafes that line the block, but they seem to feel right at home.

“I came here from Puerto Rico in 1959.  I was one of the first!” said Ocasio Figaroa, the more alert of the two.  “We lived in an apartment on Amity Street, and I went to P.S. 29.”  Figaroa is a relic—a member of the first Puerto Rican community in Brooklyn and one of the first in New York, a community that was once thriving but is now mostly vanished or invisible. “I had all my adventures on Columbia Street,” he said, “there were bars with happy hours; music, dancing, beautiful women.  This was all Boriqua.”

“The first Puerto Ricans ended up on Columbia Street because the boat that brought them landed here,” said Manuel Ortiz, a Puerto Rican-American and director of the Carroll Gardens Association.  They stayed in the Columbia Street District—defined as the area between Atlantic Avenue and the Gowanus Expressway, the BQE and the waterfront—to work in the docks. When containers and hydraulic lifts began replacing manpower in the 1960s, most of the jobs moved to New Jersey, where there was more space for large container ports. “They used to pick us up from here and bus us to Jersey,” Figaroa explained.  “I worked on the ships in Bayonne until I left for Vietnam.” With few jobs, the neighborhood experienced a long period of neglect and decline. “Columbia Street became a real abandoned neighborhood,” said Ortiz. 

A recent article in the New York Times laments the fact that Columbia Street has yet to see the level of revival visible on neighboring Smith and Court Streets in Carroll Gardens.  The waterfront is still occupied by the container terminal and is inaccessible to the public; the promises of a Columbia Street Urban Renewal Plan remain unfulfilled.  But the neighborhood, alive with restaurant goers and young couples pushing baby carriages, has changed enormously in the past decade or so. 

“There used to be something called Puerto Rican village—it was an empty lot on Columbia Street where people would build their shacks,” according to Jerry Armer, a former chairman of the local community board. Locals recall a shantytown of hand-built wooden and tin-roofed structures that stood in the neighborhood for decades. No one seems to remember exactly when the settlement appeared, but around a dozen people still called it home until 1994, when it burned to the ground in a blaze that killed two people.

“When I first bought by house here, my dad really discouraged me. He was like, ‘That’s Red Hook!’ It was considered a tough neighborhood.” That was 8 years ago.  Now, Maritsa Beltre owns a restaurant on Columbia Street and sends her daughter to P.S. 29. “Some of the old Puerto Rican men come by and tell me how this used to be a bar where they met their sweethearts,” she said.  But asked if she’s noticed any remnants of the Puerto Rican community she said, “I don’t think there’s really anything—on this street, everything is pretty much new.”

The Iglisia Cristiana Pentecostal on Summit Street just off Columbia still holds bi-lingual services.  Reverend Rene Baez said that the church used to be almost all Puerto Rican, but that now it’s a mix of Hispanics and African Americans who come over from the Red Hook housing projects.  According to Baez, the Puerto Rican community hasn’t vanished, it’s just become less visible.

“We’re assimilated now.  My own kids speak Spanish, but some of the kids who grew up in this church don’t even speak a word of it,” Baez said. “We’re not really immigrants; we were never immigrants, we’re patriotic U.S. citizens,” he said.

Some Puerto Rican-Americans prefer to embrace their dual identity. “We are Americans of course, we serve in the military and everything, but generally a Puerto Rican will tell you that he’s a Puerto Rican first,” said Ortiz.

According to Reverend Baez, many Puerto Ricans in the Columbia Street District bought their homes decades ago, so they aren’t affected by increasing rents spurred by the gentrification of the neighborhood.  But that’s not true for everyone. A sign in the window of a local real estate agency offers a one-bedroom apartment for $1800 per month. Ocasio Figaroa, the man eating his lunch at the card table, has suffered from seizures ever since he went to Vietnam, and the $910 a month that he receives as a disabled war veteran is not nearly enough to afford a place to live the neighborhood where he grew up.  He usually sleeps at his brother’s house in Staten Island, but still spends his days on Columbia Street.  “God put me in Brooklyn,” he said, “that’s where I had all my good times, all my loves.  They’ve been fixing it up and it’s even better now, way better.”