Fire in the Ashes (39 page)

  
4
FOUR OR FIVE FIRES IN A WEEK
: Fires in the Prince George, as reported by Bob Herbert, occurred with “astonishing regularity.” The three-year-old boy was killed in a fire that took place in October 1985. See
New York Daily News
, March 20, 1986.

  
5
VICKY AND HER CHILDREN LEAVE THE PRINCE GEORGE HOTEL AND MOVE TO THE BRONX
: Families were moved out of the Prince George during the last months of 1989 (
New York Times
, September 5, 1989)

  
6
POOREST NEIGHBORHOOD IN POOREST BOROUGH OF NEW YORK
: Nearly twenty years later, this remains unchanged. According to
the City of New York’s “Community District Needs” report for the Bronx, Fiscal Year 2011, “The Mott Haven area has the highest percentage of people in poverty, 65.3 percent more than in the entire City of New York.”

  
7
$8,000 FOR A YEAR’S SUBSISTENCE
: The
New York Times
gave the median household income of Mott Haven two years earlier as $7,600 (
New York Times
, November 5, 1991).

  
1
CHILDREN IN THE MARTINIQUE PANHANDLING IN TRAFFIC
: The Martinique was on the corner of West 32nd Street and Herald Square. Broadway and Sixth Avenue were the major thoroughfares.

  
2
“APARTMENT FIRE KILLS BRONX BOY” AND OTHER HEADLINES
:
New York Daily News
, April 6, May 4, 5, 6, 1994.

  
3
CHRISTOPHER SENT TO JUVENILE DETENTION, HIS SUBSEQUENT SENTENCES AT RIKERS ISLAND
: Children in New York younger than sixteen are brought before a family court and, if the judge so determines, may be sent to juvenile detention. On rare occasions, children thirteen to fifteen years of age who commit very serious and violent crimes may be tried as adults, but Christopher’s early offenses never warranted his being tried in adult court. Christopher was eighteen, or nearly so, before he began the first of his several sentences at Rikers Island. (Information on court disposition of youthful offenders according to their ages and severity of the offense is provided, under the heading of “New York City Family Court,” on the website of the New York State Unified Court System, in a posting dated January 31, 2008.) Attorney Steven Banks, at Legal Aid in New York City, verified my understanding of this information. Also see note for chapter 4, p. 97.

  
4
PRISON WHERE CHRISTOPHER SERVED THE LONGEST PORTION OF HIS SENTENCE
: The prison, in the town of Alden, which is called Wende Correctional Facility, is nearly 400 miles west of New York City. He had also served a briefer part of his sentence at a prison called Great Meadow in Comstock, New York, which is about 200 miles closer to the city.

  
5
DEMOGRAPHICS OF NEW YORK PRISONS AND FINANCIAL BENEFITS TO AREAS WHERE PRISONS ARE SITED
: There have been no significant changes in the racial make-up of the prison population in recent years. According to the New York Department of Corrections and Community Supervision, in a document titled “Profile of Inmate Population Under Custody,” dated January 1, 2011, the state’s male prison population is 22.4 percent white, 50.5 percent African-American, and 24.9 percent Hispanic. See the New York State Department of Corrections website for a list of prison facilities and their locations. For a troubling examination of the economic value these penitentiaries have held for the communities in which they have been built, see “The Prison-Industrial
Complex” by Eric Schlosser in
The Atlantic
, December 1998. New York State has closed many prisons since 1999, when Christopher’s sentence was nearly at an end, and is now attempting to create new employment opportunities for those sections of the state that have long depended upon prisons as the main support for their economies. This, at least, is the recently declared intention of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo, according to a press release from his office, June 30, 2011.

  
6
“A SCENE OUT OF DICKENS”
: Former New York Governor Mario M. Cuomo used this term in speaking of the Martinique in his book,
The New York Idea: An Experiment in Democracy
(New York: Crown, 1994).

  
7
“SO MANY PEOPLE COMING THERE”
: Pietro was referring to groups or individuals who might have been bringing food or clothes or other gifts for children, most commonly in the weeks preceding Christmas. These visitors, in general, were not permitted or encouraged by the management to go up to the floors on which the residents were living.

  
1
RESTRICTIONS ON VISITORS
: See note regarding journalists for chapter 1, p. 10.

  
2
DIEGO-BEEKMAN HOUSING
: See
New York Times
, March 25, 1973, May 7, 1978;
New York Daily News
, November 11, 1993, February 4, 1993. Also see notes for Epilogue, p. 311.

  
3
DIEGO-BEEKMANS OWNED BY OUT-OF-STATE CORPORATION
: The Boston-based company was Continental Wingate (
New York Times
, March 31, 1999). Its primary owner was Gerald Schuster (see below).

  
4
GERALD SCHUSTER’S NOTORIETY IN BOSTON AND HIS POLITICAL CONTRIBUTIONS AND FUNDRAISERS
:
New York Times
, March 31, 1999;
Village Voice
, December 14, 1999;
Boston Globe
, May 9, 1998; July 1, 2011; March 10, 2012.

  
5
BERNARDO RODRIGUEZ’S DEATH
:
New York Daily News
, January 16 and February 4, 1994.

  
6
AVERAGE INCOME IN MOTT HAVEN, 1993
: See note for chapter 2, p. 19.

  
7
A BOY OF TWELVE OR THIRTEEN BROUGHT BEFORE A FAMILY COURT
: As explained to me by Legal Aid attorney Steven Banks on April 6, 2011: “There is always a pre-petition hearing or a remand/parole argument prior to detention, where a court hears ‘evidence’ and makes a determination regarding detention (unless it’s a situation in which the police have taken the child into custody after court hours and the child is admitted to a detention facility overnight,” in which case the hearing is held the following day). “It is not common for a child to go into detention; more kids go home than to detention.”

  
8
FOUR OUT OF EVERY FIVE KIDS DID NOT COMPLETE MONROE HIGH
: The school had a well-earned reputation for violence and for consistently abysmal graduation rates at the time Armando attended. Over the next decade, the high school was divided into six smaller schools with student populations of 375 to 490. Figures from the New York City Public Schools Annual School Report for 2002–3 showed no signs of improvement; in all but one of these schools, no more than forty-five students who started in the ninth grade remained there long enough to enter the twelfth grade.

  
1
ALICE WASHINGTON WAS FORTY-TWO YEARS OLD WHEN I GOT TO KNOW HER
: Alice told me she was thirty-nine when she became homeless. I met her three years later.

  
2
EMBARRASSING STORY ON HARVARD CLUB
:
New York Times
, April 23, 1994.

  
3
“IT WASN’T MUCH OF A WEEK TO BE A HORSE”
:
New York Times
, July 18, 1993.

  
4
“NEEDLE EXCHANGES”
: As this book goes to press, the needle exchange is still there on the sidewalk outside of St. Ann’s.

  
5
NEARLY 4,000 PEOPLE IN MOTT HAVEN WERE KNOWN TO BE INTRAVENOUS USERS
: New York City Department of Health, cited in unpublished memorandum (August 27, 1993), by the Hunter College Center on AIDS, Drugs, and Community Health; New York State Division of Substance Abuse Services, cited in “Reaching Low-Income Women at Risk of AIDS,” by Nicholas Freudenberg and other staff members of the Hunter College center, in
Health Education Research
, Vol. 9, No. 1 (1994); author’s interviews with staff members of the center. Some estimates of intravenous users in Mott Haven exceeded 7,000.

  
6
REMEMBERING ALICE WASHINGTON
: In earlier writings, I have described how Alice and I got to know each other in the Martinique Hotel and how our friendship deepened in the years that followed after she had moved to the South Bronx. As with other people who had reason not to want to be exposed to public scrutiny—the punitive workings of the welfare system, for example, were a persistent factor of concern—I disguised her heavily. Now that she has passed away, I have told her story with less inhibition. I have followed the same pattern in other sections of this book that touch upon the lives of those who had the same concerns, or other reasons to avoid exposure, at the time when I initially described them. All these adults and their children, nonetheless, remain disguised to some degree, as I have said, to defend their privacy or, in the case of those who are deceased, that of their family-members.

  
1
THE EMERGENCE OF WHAT THEOLOGIANS TERM “A SENSE OF CALLING”
: Many others who are not theologians, such as the psychiatrist and author Dr. Robert Coles, use this term in speaking of the search for moral values and the pursuit of useful purpose on the part of young adults as they move into maturity.

  
1
MEDICAL WASTE INCINERATOR IN MOTT HAVEN
:
New York Newsday
, October 16, 1991 and September 8, 1993;
New York Times
, November 2, 1991, September 8, 1992, September 5, 1995, May 11, 1997, June 27, 1997, and May 6, 1999;
Riverdale Press
, May 13, 1993;
New York Daily News
, May 14, 1996, September 18, 1998, and May 6, 1999;
City Limits
, June/July 1996 and July/August 1999.

  
2
AT LEAST 6,000 CHILDREN RESIDED WITHIN CLOSE PROXIMITY OF THE WASTE INCINERATOR
: As many as 4,000 children lived in the Diego-Beekman Houses. At least 2,000 more lived in other privately owned buildings, as well as in large public housing towers in the area.

  
3
“WASTEFUL PROTEST IN THE BRONX”
: The editorial condemning neighborhood activists and parents who opposed construction of the medical incinerator appeared in the
New York Times
, November 11, 1991.

  
4
ASTHMA HOSPITILIZATIONS IN MOTT HAVEN AREA IN 1995 WERE FOURTEEN TIMES HIGHER THAN ON EAST SIDE OF MANHATTAN
:
City Limits
, April 1998. Also see notes for chapter 1, p. 11.

  
5
BROWNING-FERRIS CORPORATION’S VIOLATIONS OF ENVIRONMENTAL AND AIR-POLLUTION LAW
: A partial summary of the legal violations committed by the owners of the medical incinerator, and penalties provisionally imposed upon them, is provided in a consent order drafted by the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation on July 22, 1998. The document, which was distributed to people in the nearby neighborhoods, recorded 100 violations of environmental law and proposed, among other penalties, that the owner of the incinerator, Browning-Ferris Industries, Inc., contribute money for asthmatic children to go to asthma camp. The
New York Daily News
(February 24, 1998) noted that the operators of the waste facility had, in fact, violated air-pollution laws more than 500 times. Browning-Ferris finally paid $250,000 in settlement of the dispute (
New York Daily News
, May 6, 1999). Also see
New York Daily News
, February 4, 1996, June 4, 1996, and March 11, 1999.

  
6
LEONARDO’S MOTHER BELIEVES THAT HIS RELIEF FROM ASTHMA IS CONNECTED WITH THE SHUTDOWN OF THE BURNER
: The waste incinerator was shut down when he was eleven, in 1997 (
New York Daily News
, April 1, 1997). Over the course of the next three years, asthma hospitalizations in Mott Haven declined by 56 percent. (See “Asthma Facts,” a report by the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, May 2003.)

  
1
THE DIEGO-BEEKMAN COMPLEX
: See notes for chapter 4, p. 84ff.

  
2
LARA’S CLASS ESCAPED THE RUN OF SHORT-TERM TEACHERS PINEAPPLE HAD HAD
: In spite of this advantage, Lara had to pay a price for one of the irrational and arbitrary practices that were put in place at P.S. 65. New examinations that had no connection with the content of the courses that her class was taking were imposed upon the school when she was in fifth grade. Like several others in her class who were receiving good grades up until that time, she was suddenly informed that she wouldn’t be promoted because her test scores were too low. She was obliged to stay at P.S. 65 for an extra year. Fortunately, she did not permit this to undermine her appetite for learning and went on to do extremely well in secondary years.

  
1
A LAWYER IN PROVIDENCE WAS HELPING PINEAPPLE’S FATHER TO FILE AN APPEAL
: This appeal, according to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, is technically a “motion to reopen or a motion to reconsider with the same office that made the unfavorable decision.” The applicant for reconsideration is not permitted to go to a higher level of appeal.

  
2
MOST OF THE PEOPLE IN RHODE ISLAND WERE TOO ENLIGHTENED TO DENY PINEAPPLE AND HER SISTERS THEIR AUTONOMY OR DEMEAN THEIR FATHER
: Among the people who have been most supportive and most sensitive are a woman named Kim Anderson, who remains a stalwart friend and ally to Pineapple and her sisters, and several members of the church that brought Pineapple to Rhode Island in the first place.