An Adobe Flash-based project for NYCInteractive.org. As seen on the web at NYCInteractive.org.

How an ultra-orthodox Jew rose through the ranks of New York’s toughest sport.

Click the image to access the project.

An Adobe Flash-based project for Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. As seen on the web and at Online News Association’s Interactive Narratives.

[THE ATHENS OF AMERICA]

Philadelphia used to be different.

It was proudly America’s anti-city city, one that provided the innovation and achievement that attracted thousands. An urban experiment that seemed to happily bathe in the waters of the “afflictions of worldliness.” A cosmopolitan city that boasted the nation’s best museums, hotels and institutions. A melting pot of language and social and cultural trends. A model metropolis teeming with a young nation’s best and brightest that played host to both the nation’s top political luminaries and the young literati of the day, who gathered at Asbury Dickins’s bookstore opposite Christ Church in the mornings. French botanist André Michaux described it as “the most extensive, the handsomest and most populous city in the United States,” and for awhile, people believed it – never mind the social stratification, marshes and latrines hidden behind the red-brick houses of the wealthy. For an era, there were no limits in Philadelphia: on space, wealth, tolerance – and above all, creativity.

“At the beginning of this century,” Albert H. Smyth, an editor of Ben Franklin’s writings, wrote retrospectively as the nineteenth century came to a close, “Philadelphia was the most attractive city in America to a young man of brains and ambition.”

But somewhere along the way, Philadelphia lost its focus. As fast as Philadelphia grew, other cities grew faster, and the once Utopian city ceded its superiority – in population, in economic superiority, in political sway, as a successful example of urban planning – to other cities, most notably New York. So began the decline of painter Gilbert Stuart’s “Athens of America” – the progressive urban experiment that was outpaced in its own pursuit of modernity and allure.

Generations have watched Philadelphia slowly lose its grip on itself and slide down the ladder of national prominence. The final slip came in 2006, when Philadelphia exploded in a crime wave that claimed the highest homicide rate of any big city in the country, with 406 killings — more per capita than even New York City, which has six times the population. Since then, Philadelphia has fixed itself atop the big city homicide ladder, and recently rang in the New Year with 392 murders in the books.

Since the outbreak of gun violence, Philadelphia’s attractive features have become considerably less appealing. Most of what made Philadelphia an alluring and charming city now seems to disappear in the shadows of more menacing realities. Its affordable real estate has been overvalued by 14 percent, according to The Philadelphia Inquirer. The previous mayor, John F. Street, has been called passive, corrupt and one of the worst big-city mayors by TIME magazine. The magnetism of the city’s 80-some institutions of higher education has weakened because of a dearth of jobs for its newly-minted graduates. Above all, the “City of Brotherly Love” proved that there’s a not enough love between neighbors and a little too much tolerance when it comes to illegal guns on the streets. According to a 2005 article in USA Today, more than half of gun violence in the city starts with an argument.

But if the atrophying city’s health looks bleak on paper, it is an even worse view from the asphalt. Accelerated by the nationwide housing slump, “For Sale” signs are appearing in windows and on front lawns, but there’s no one to hand over the keys to. Philadelphia is hemorrhaging population – as it has been doing for half a century.

Increasingly, it seems Philadelphia is the brother no one wants anything to do with.

[OPERATION TOURNIQUET]

It’s Sunday, December 30, 2007, an overcast, drizzly day that’s warmer than usual for one week after Christmas. Well-dressed churchgoers are spilling out on to the streets, having just finished attending services. Vendors tend to their goods. Passerby stroll the sidewalk. On the horizon, a black hearse appears, rolling in silence down Diamond Ave. in the Lower North section of the city. Each revolution of its wheel is deliberate and slow over the weathered asphalt. The words “Living is a choice – choose life” are scrawled on the roof of the hearse, but the message is hard to see on street level. Still, the churchgoers stare in silence. Some shake their heads. Some avert their eyes. Some just walk away.

Just another funeral in Philadelphia. Or is it? Behind the hearse, a cavalcade of vehicles follows it. But something’s different. Behind the lead coach, 28 more hearses follow, in matching black and silver trim. End to end, they stretch more than 500 feet. But there aren’t any corpses in these cars. The motorcade of morticians was arranged by the Quaker State Funeral Directors Association, a local chapter of the largest and oldest association of African-American funeral directors. The purpose of the mock procession is to remind neighbors that the last stop is in the back of a Lincoln with tinted windows. The 29 hearses represent only 7 percent of the city’s 392 homicide victims in 2007. Even those that deal in the business of death lament the city’s homicide rate.

“People tend to think we benefit from this – ‘oh, your business must be doing well, all these homicides’ – no, not really,” said Gregory Burrell, president and CEO of Terry Funeral Home on Haverford Ave. and 42nd St. in West Philadelphia. Burrell organized the mock procession through the National Funeral Directors and Morticians’ Association, where he is vice president, as a show of respect to the families of victims.

“It is not exciting for us,” Burrell said. “We’re not thrilled at the fact that we’re losing young people at this alarming rate.”

“Some of these kids are so young, and the first thing you think about is your own children.”

On the other side of the gurney, the view isn’t much better. David Quain, chief medical examiner for the city of Philadelphia, said his office stays busy year-round.

“We have at least a murder a day,” Quain said. “If we went a week without somebody murdered, that would be remarkable. And that’s sad. That’s truly sad. We can’t even go a week without somebody getting murdered. Somebody’s going to get murdered this weekend, there’s no question about it.”

Quain said the murders have gotten more brutal since he first joined the medical examiner’s office decades ago.

“In the late ‘80s, there really weren’t people carrying semi-automatic weapons,” Quain said. “Now they have 17 or 18 shots to pump into somebody. In the last four years, it’s been .40 caliber. You should see the size of a hole it makes in a car.”

Like Burrell, Quain faces the same criticisms of being in the business of death. Does he reap a bigger paycheck from the wave of murders? Does anyone profit from gun violence?

“This is a very, very strange profession,” Quain said. “If somebody gets murdered, that probably means overtime for somebody here… [but] most people are fed up with it. They’d rather not have the overtime.”

But the effects reach beyond his office and spill out onto the streets, Quain said. Quain, who was born in the Olney neighborhood of North Philadelphia, said the trance the gun violence has on the city is palpable.

“If you ride around this city, you can feel the tension and the hostility in the air in the cars next to you, besides you, behind you,” Quain said. “There are a lot of angry young people out there, and some of them have guns.”

[KILLADELPHIA.]

Kimberly Carter Ford is familiar with black hearses. The state employee watched one pull away with the body of her baby brother’s youngest child, Casha’e Rivers, 5, who was shot and killed in her mother’s car in front of an auto detailing shop in the Strawberry Mansion neighborhood of North Philadelphia. As an aunt, Ford spent considerable time taking care of her brother’s daughter after he was imprisoned on her first birthday. She said she felt cheated by her premature death.

“I took her to a wedding down South three months before she died and I remember her asking me, ‘Auntie, when I get married, are you going to buy me a dress like that?’ and I said yes. That’s why when she died…I was going to make sure I bought my baby the prettiest dress I could get. Because this was the only dress I would ever be able to buy her anymore.”

If there’s one question a family member of a Philadelphia homicide victim can answer, it’s what number homicide the victim was that year. Casha’e was No. 287. Ford said the process of confirming Casha’e’s killer nearly destroyed her. It took nearly a year before the right man was arrested, she said.

“For a long time we were angry, hurt and bitter because we were trying to tell the city that they had the wrong guy,” she said. “I told the commissioner myself. I told Deputy [Police Commissioner Richard] Ross [Jr.] myself. I called the FBI myself…everybody was trying to tell them they had the wrong person, but they didn’t believe me.”

Ford said the neighborhood where Casha’e was killed is plain evidence of municipal neglect.

“I think I felt like the neighborhood needed more help,” she said. “I can’t tell you where the nearest gym is, the nearest playground is, any type of community center. There is no police station for miles…that neighborhood is really ignored and is just left to deteriorate. Sometimes, a part of me feels like the city is waiting for it to fall apart so they can come in and build up. But you’re leaving people there like they’re on a desert island and they’re left to fend for themselves.”

[COMMENCEMENT EXERCISES]

A month ago, Ashley Simpson, a graduating senior at the University of Pennsylvania, had a dilemma. She loved the city she spent the last four years studying in, but the Ivy League graduate-to-be was tempted with comparable paralegal jobs in Philadelphia and New York. Simpson studied international relations, and it’s widely-known that if she wants a job in corporate law, the Big Apple is the place to be.

“I went with a staffing agency and they found me this opportunity,” Simpson said. “I have to admit, there was one job in Philadelphia that, had I seriously went after that, I think I would have taken it… [but] there was no opening. Other than that, I didn’t really look at any jobs in Philadelphia…I basically only looked at New York.”

According to a 2004 student by Greater Philadelphia’s Knowledge Industry Partnership – a coalition of local industry leaders that promotes the impact of the region’s “knowledge industry” of colleges and universities – 29 percent of non-natives stay in the Philadelphia region after graduation. In contrast, Boston hangs onto 42 percent of its grads. Of the non-natives who don’t return where they’re from, 30 percent head to the Big Apple. That’s almost twice as much as the next city on the list, Baltimore/D.C., at 17 percent. The phenomenon is called “brain drain,” and it has educators up in arms.

Pat Rose, director of career services at the University of Pennsylvania, said the partnership surveyed graduates of local institutions twice, and both times, Penn was on the low end of those who stayed.

“The problem we have here is not that people don’t like Philadelphia…the problem is there aren’t jobs here,” Rose said. “Penn students, as a group, are very interested in the same things that students at Columbia are interested in, the students at Harvard and Princeton and Stanford, and those things tend to be – the largest single thing – is financial services, specifically investment banking, with offshoots in private equity and hedge funds. And those jobs are not typically in Philadelphia. They’re in New York. There’s some in Chicago. There’s some in the Bay Area. But there isn’t much here.”

If a city’s health can be measured by any one factor, it’s the power it holds to retain its people – to keep them happy, entertained, even in anticipation of things to come. Yet it seems the only thing most Philadelphians anticipate is the arrival of a moving service. Once a social, economic and professional powerhouse, Philadelphia’s economic prowess has waned in recent years – and both the students it educates and the natives it nourishes are packing up to leave.

In both situations, the numbers are the proof. Philadelphia is popular among those in IT, engineering, health sciences, the arts – yet only one in four business majors, the area’s most popular course of study, stay.

“So if you want to work in investment banking as our students do in droves – literally in droves, as it’s approaching for our entire undergraduate group 30 percent,” Rose said, “very few of those jobs are in Philadelphia.”

The problem extends to retaining the city’s native population. Gary Jastrzab, acting executive director of the Philadelphia City Planning Commission, said Philadelphia has been hemorrhaging population since World War II – to its own suburbs.

“Population is an easy scorecard by which to measure success or failure,” Jastrzab said. “We’re a much smaller share of the regional population than we were immediate post-war…that concentrated population is dispersing.”

“I remember seeing a statistic showing that Lower North Philadelphia lost half, if not more, of its population between 1950 and the year 2000. North Philadelphia was a very densely-developed, row house, manufacturing-based kind of economy where people lived close to where they worked. That area went through a racial transition in the ‘50s and ‘60s – you know, the proverbial white flight.”

Much, much smaller in fact – the city of Philadelphia has lost more than half a million people since its heyday in the 1950s, but the metropolitan area has grown by more than two million. Last year, Philadelphia slipped one spot to sixth on the list of the nation’s cities, bowing to Phoenix.

“The city’s population is always churning, always moving,” Jastrzab said. “People are always moving in, moving out.”

But the slippery slope is easing. Jastrzab said net loss estimates have been declining since the turn of the millennium, and closer inspection of the numbers reveals that Philadelphia is finally bottoming out – with nowhere to look but up.

“There are some areas of the city that are probably gaining population, and we’re not going to know this until the next complete census in 2010,” he said. “The Center City area and some of the reinvestment neighborhoods around Center City are probably gaining population. Other parts of the city are still losing population.”

Jastrzab said developers have been showing up in his office regularly looking to build along the long-neglected waterfront and Center City and surrounding neighborhoods such as Kensington and Fishtown. It’s an example of the momentum that will eventually transform Philadelphia into one-half of a future megalopolis with New York City, he said.

“Cities are probably the most sustainable kind of forms of human settlement that we can have,” he said. “I think we have a good future here in Philadelphia.”

[BLAME DUCK]

John F. Street is sweating. He’s standing at a microphone in the White Rock Baptist Church on Chestnut Ave. in the city’s 18th District in the midst of delivery an impassioned speech about how gun violence reaches beyond Philadelphia’s borders to the whole nation. Street’s wringing his hands, having just delivered the kicker, “It isn’t just Philadelphia” and hoping that the crowd buys it. In July 2006, almost exactly a year before his speech here at the church, Street begged young Philadelphians for a ceasefire in a televised address: “Lay down your weapons,” he pleaded then. “Do it now. Choose education over violence.” A year later, Street’s position on his city’s gun problem has changed from managing the crisis to simply dodging it.

At the pulpit, Street continues. “The commissioner and I say it all the time: we can’t have a good year in homicides.” He licks his lips. “We cannot have a good year.” He pauses, his elbows bent and his hands pointed inward towards his chest. “But…” He pauses again. His hands turn, facing each other as if trying to shape an intangible idea. One second passes. Two seconds. Three. The Seventh-Day Adventist’s eyes turn upward, toward the church’s ceiling, God, or both. “…you could report these things so that people think there’s something special going on that isn’t going on. The reporting is such that if you didn’t know any better, you would think the violence is unprecedented, and it’s not.”

Like any big city in the U.S., Philadelphia has seen its share of characters in City Hall – but few have had such a politically destructive career as the disconnected John F. Street. He banned skateboarding from Love Park after hosting the X-Games in 2001 and 2002. He presided over the privatization of the city’s public schools due to poor performance. It took the title of “Fattest City in the Nation” by Men’s Fitness for Street to create the Office of Public Health and Fitness. In 2005, he caved in to pressure to ban public smoking after failing to support the initiative earlier. The same year, the FBI bugged Street’s office during an investigation into corruption. In June 2007, Street made national headlines waiting in line for an Apple iPhone instead of handling the city’s crime crisis. And on his way out of office, he quietly took a retroactive pay raise he denied himself during his eight years as mayor.

“Let me tell you, the brothers and sisters are running the city,” he said at an NAACP convention in 2002. “Oh, yes. The brothers and sisters are running this city. Running it! Don’t you let nobody fool you, we are in charge of the City of Brotherly Love. We are in charge! We are in charge!”

The comment, taken out of context, was met with sharp criticism. But for the man who campaigned as the guy who would keep the ball rolling after the departure of “America’s mayor,” Ed Rendell, it didn’t look like John F. Street was a man in touch with all of the streets of Philadelphia.

“He could motivate and lead people when he felt like he was talking to people who already understood him,” said Wendy Warren, assistant managing editor of the Philadelphia Daily News. “He really had a problem talking to people who he felt didn’t understand him, or were prejudging him.”

It’s a problem that goes back a long way, said Dan Pohlig, a producer for WHYY and Warren’s colleague on The Next Mayor blog. “For the longest time, mayors in Philadelphia have been content to just move enough of the people that they need to hold on to their base of power,” Pohlig said.

If you ask anyone who grew up in Philadelphia who the last great mayor was, you’ll more often hear “Frank Rizzo,” Philadelphia’s top dog for most of the 1970s. There’s a reason there is a statue of Rizzo standing in front of the Municipal Services Building in Center City, and it’s not just because he died in 1991. The former Police Commissioner’s reputation as a bare-knuckled, iron-fisted, sometimes racist leader of 7,000 men is the polar opposite of Philadelphia’s latest crop of leaders – the kind of love-him or hate-him leader that had enough gall to say “I’m going to make Attila the Hun look like a faggot” as a public statement. No politician since Rizzo has made such an impact – except maybe Rudy Giuliani in New York.

As Philly’s problems multiply, many residents simply ask: What would Frank Rizzo do?

On Monday, January 7, 2008, Michael Nutter had the answer. Newly sworn in as mayor, the former city councilman with a history of sparring with Street appealed to just one part of the city – and dropped the hatchet. “We are going to change the mentality of those who think that it is OK to run our streets with illegal weapons and use them at random whenever they want,” he said. “Today. Today. Enough is enough. Enough is enough.”

Nutter looked up from his notes at the crowd. “To the law-abiding citizens of this city – I say we are the great majority. And to the law breakers – you are a small minority.” He raised his voice over the applause. “This is our city – and we’re taking it back. Every day, every block, every neighborhood, everywhere in Philadelphia.” His voice thundered. “Because I’ve had enough, and I’m not playing around about it.”

Nutter was not supposed to be this kind of politician. He’s a technocrat, a business-savvy city native who was supposed to appeal to those who have the city’s economy in mind, not its social issues. But as time passes, “‘the Seabiscuit of this year’s urban politics” has become Philly’s apparent remedy.

“He’s setting the right tone. Sending the right signals,” said newly-elected city councilman Bill Green. Green’s father was the city’s mayor through the early ‘80s. “People are excited, and now it’s up to the mayor and the city council to work together to deliver it. Hopefully, the time for small, petty and divisive politics is over and we can focus on the public good.”

Yet the hardest challenge Nutter may face is one that he can’t control, Pohlig said.

“The guy’s basically expected to cure cancer at this point,” Pohlig said. “The question is: what does he do when the times get tough? When a close associate has an ethical lapse?”

[ALWAYS SUNNY?]

Do we still need Philadelphia?

On Feb. 6, 2006, Comedy Central personality Stephen Colbert facetiously opened an interview with Dem. Congressman Chaka Fattah with the above question, and for a moment, it didn’t seem like he was kidding.

Fattah, a member of Philadelphia’s old political guard, didn’t hesitate and countered with a quick “yes.” But when Colbert pressed him for a reason, Fattah went right to referencing Philadelphia’s colonial and political history and the contributions of its native sons. “We have a rich history of the beginning of the country: the writing of the Constitution, the president’s house – the first house for George Washington…” There was nary a word of Philadelphia’s relevance in the 21st century.

Without a doubt, the fight to stay relevant is arguably Philadelphia’s greatest challenge.

“I’m asking you to join me in the greatest American city turnaround that anyone has seen in the last 50 years,” Nutter said on his inauguration night.

But if, as urban activist Jane Jacobs wrote, that “designing a dream city is easy” and that “rebuilding a living one takes imagination,” Philadelphia is in desperate need of a double dose of creativity. Buoyed by its fine colonial pedigree but weighed down by its modern identity as a Rust Belt casualty, Philadelphia is once again at a crossroads. With a little help from “rock star” Nutter, as ABC World News Tonight anchor Charles Gibson has called him – as well as the city’s greatest modern rival, New York – the “city in trouble” may be on a better track than is immediately apparent.

A recent interactive feature by the BBC detailing the effects of the vast increase in urban living during the last half century showed Philadelphia reclaiming the title of America’s fourth largest city. The projection, based on data from the United Nations, shows the Philadelphia metropolitan area reaching 5.8 million people by 2015 – the direct result of New York-Newark’s ballooning projected population of 19.8 million people.

In other words, Philadelphia’s greatest asset for its future might not be its colonial heritage, its hip factor, its housing stock or even Nutter – rather, it is the city’s physical proximity to America’s greatest success. The mayor’s greatest challenge is to bring the city’s mindset just as close. Or as Nutter said himself at a South Philadelphia Town Hall meeting in October, getting Philadelphians excited to hail from the City of Brotherly Love.

“I’m asking you to do your part to turn Philadelphia into the great city that we know it can be, that we know we deserve,” he said. “This is our time, this is our place…join with me in turning the city around to create the rebirth of a great American city.

“The renaissance period of Philadelphia: let’s get to work.”

As seen on the web at coveringreligion.org.

Click to view site.

An Adobe Flash-based project for NYCInteractive.org. As seen on the web at NYCInteractive.org.

Urine, garbage, rats and influenza. Can the New York City subway affect your health?

Click the image to access the project.

This is an unpublished, original beat story written for the Covering Religion class of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.

Echoes of applause from the rousing conclusion of a concert of Mannerist music still lingered on the vaulted ceilings of the chapel as twelve visitors from different places entered the room together to see a piece of art barely discernable from its doorway.

“See that fresco, way in the back?” asked the group’s tour guide, Claudia Nahson.

Twelve necks crane and 24 eyes squint to see the faded wall painting in the shadows, set deep in the apse of Fuentidueña Chapel. Mary the Virgin and a Baby Jesus dominate the scene in the center, flanked by the winged Michael and Gabriel on each side. Beside them stand the Three Magi, bearing gifts.

“This is the typical use of pagan iconography in Christian themes,” Nahson said.

The group of tourists gaze, mouths shut, with blank looks on their faces. They seem to be waiting for an explanation.

“See how they’re dressed?” Nahson asks the group, right arm extended toward the fresco. “See the colors of their skin? This was really used as a type of propaganda.

“This type of theme was used to bring pagans into the church.”

On the left side of the group, a middle-aged man lets out an audible “hmm” through pursed lips. An elderly woman to his right involuntarily releases an “ohhhh,” her mouth slacked as she stares above.
It’s as if someone has pulled back the curtains and let in the light in this dark chapel in Upper Manhattan.

It’s easy to forget about the pagans here in this room of The Cloisters museum. Crosses, reliquaries and nativity scenes line the ancient walls of this place. Jesus feels omniscient, because he is portrayed every room. Shielding visitors from the gale winds recklessly blowing snow around outside in Fort Tryon Park, The Cloisters feel like the sanctuary they were intended to be. Nature is only accessible beyond three feet of solid stone, carved in Gothic and Romanesque excess. The archway above the door marks the end of the outside and the beginning of the inside.

With only a few words, it’s as if Nahson suddenly threw the wooden door wide open.

“The Three Magi represent the three parts of the world known at the time,” Nahson said. “Look at the way they are dressed. They’re pagan. It’s a theme that connects to paganism.”

The group stayed quiet, peering at the fading kings on the stone wall. The depiction marks a turning point in the Middle Ages when Christianity took over paganism as the reigning European faith, but the pagan influence still shows in the Christian fresco.

“This is a late example from 12th century Spain, so it’s almost irrelevant at this point,” she said. “[But] the earlier you go, the more they look like pagans.”

The wind howled against the glass panes in the tiny windows in the walls of the chapel. Bits of snow smacked against the clear barrier. Some members of the group shifted their weight from one foot to the other as they stood on the stone floor, thinking.
Nahson looked down at the watch on her wrist.

“Any questions?”

Almost in unison, twelve heads returned to level. Nahson stepped in between the group to lead them out of the chapel and into another room – one draped in textiles depicting scenes from the hunt of a unicorn. It was almost four o’clock, and Nahson wanted to fit in one more stop on the tour before the museum closed for the day. Twenty-four shoes shuffled on the stones behind her.

The wind howled outside, but it seemed distant.

This is an unpublished, original beat story written for the Covering Religion class of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.

It’s pouring rain outside, but all Christy Tomacek can think about is the sun shining.

It’s a dreary Friday evening in downtown Manhattan. Cracks in the asphalt, a blackened stretch flecked with irregular depressions and patches, fill up and expel rainwater in a perpetual cycle. Residents in thigh-length black felt peacoats shield themselves with a myriad of objects as they shuffle into the lobbies of their high-rise apartment buildings. An old woman takes shield under the newly-constructed stone awning of the New York City Family Court building, her reflection a blurred facsimile in the enormous glass panes that make up the building’s façade. Another man, caught without cover by the fountain in Foley Square, irritably makes his way toward the barren but enclosed Chambers St. subway entrance, his head down, defeated.

Three blocks below a hushed Canal St. and 17 floors high in the sky, shielded from the rain that falls on so many others, 19-year-old Tomacek is sitting in her windowless kitchen preparing to celebrate.

Tomacek is happy. Spring has arrived. For her, that means it’s time to cast a spell.

That’s because Tomacek is a witch. More precisely, she is Wiccan, a nature-based branch of Paganism, the umbrella term for a number of spiritual faiths derived from pre-Christian religions. Tonight marks the beginning of Imbolc, one of the four fire festivals (or “Sabbats”) in Wicca, midway between Yule, the winter solstice, and Ostara, the spring equinox. In the northern hemisphere, the midway point is marked when the sun reaches fifteen degrees of Aquarius. (With consideration to the inclement weather outside, it seems as if Aquarius has decided to use Lafayette St. as the starting point for his deluge.)

There are many ways to celebrate Imbolc, and most Wiccans use the first full day of the holiday – in this case, Saturday – to gather in meetings called “open circles” to celebrate with food, drink and music. Since Tomacek is a college student short on cash and community contacts, she’s decided to kick off Imbolc her own way: by charming a cup of tea.

“I’ve always been a water person,” Tomacek said. “Water has to do with emotion – creative energy. I’ve always been there. That’s why I like tea.”

As she pours the boiling water from the teapot over the tea in the earthenware mug, a blood-red hue emanates from the metallic cube submerged inside. Tonight, Tomacek has chosen to make vanilla berry cream tea, which consists of bits of hibiscus, apples, raspberries, and vanilla. It’s a strong tea, one that she chose because it’s seasonally appropriate and one of her favorites. As the water flows over the lumps and flakes inside the cubic tea parcel, tiny clouds of red shoot out of the perforations in each metal side of the box.

“This is one of my best teas, so it seems appropriate for a ritual,” she said. “I’m not going to use my crappy Celestial Seasonings. I think it’s very evocative of spring, and this is a higher holy day than most.”

Once the hot water inside the mug has been suitably darkened, Tomacek opens up a hard-bound notebook in front of her to where she has written words for this occasion. She places her right hand over the mouth of the mug, palm down. Steam escapes through the gaps between fingers and rises over her fingernails, which are painted a glossy black. She takes a breath, looks to her passage, and begins reading aloud.

The earth warms,
The sun strengthens,
Leading us to new life.
The Goddess watches
As her son grows,
The God giving his light.
May this light bless us
As new breath thaws us all.
So mote it be.

She wraps both hands around the mug – covered in a sunflower design, incidentally – and takes a timid first sip. The locks of her once-blonde hair, now dyed purple, curl around one of the sunflowers on the mug. The liquid is still hot, but she perseveres, then places the mug back on the table.

“The basic idea is that you want the god and goddess to bless your workings in a way,” she said. “I wrote this out to be appropriate for the season.”

Since Tomacek is marking the beginning of Imbolc, the goddess in her recitation is Brigid, Celtic goddess of poetry, healing and smithcraft. Much of Wiccan practice derives from Celtric tradition. Like many witches, Tomacek wrote her own words for the occasion.

“It’s more personable that way,” she said. “What I say changes every year. I usually make it up as I go along. It feels right because you’re sharing your work with the gods. You’re sharing your feast with the gods.”

It has not even been 30 minutes since Tomacek spoke her words aloud, and already the rain outside has slowed to a drizzle. People are still shielding their heads with newspapers and briefcases, but the man in the park is gone and the woman by the court house has disappeared. In her place, the moonlight is reflected off the building’s glass panels, giving the falling droplets an extra glimmer. Inside Tomacek’s apartment, all of the lights are on. She said it’s to welcome the coming light of spring.

Tomorrow’s a new day. So mote it be.

An Adobe Flash-based project for NYCInteractive.org. As seen on the web at NYCInteractive.org.

Think it takes just a nice navy suit, a red power tie and a pair of shiny shoes to play president? Not anymore. If a candidate wants to claim his (or her!) place atop Capitol Hill, he or she had best take note of the clothing brands and fashion trends that already rule Washington.

Click the image to access the project.

Design and layout of the Flash-based shell for the six projects of NYCInteractive.org’s inaugural issue. As seen on the web at NYCInteractive.org.

Click the image to access the project.

This is an unpublished, original feature story written for the Reporting and Writing I class of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.

ARTHUR WOOD remembers that he wanted to be president.

Not the kind that runs a nation and lives on Capitol Hill, but the kind of visionary president that runs a university of his own design and lives on a different kind of hill – Clinton Hill, Brooklyn.

Wood and I are sitting on the third floor of the library at the Pratt Institute, and I’m desperately trying to steer our conversation toward the subject of his own life. For a man with a neighborhood reputation as an outspoken rebel artist who has remarkable incompatibility with the status quo – and at times, the law – Wood really knows how to deflect questions about his private life. I begin to ask him a question about his childhood, but he abruptly cuts me off, the way the crack of a ruler against a desk straightens up a classroom full of slouching children.

“Listen,” he says, repositioning his plastic magenta sunglasses on the bridge of his nose. “A problem has three major steps. You know what you want to start with. Edison wanted to make electric light, and the end result was a light for everyone. But in between, he didn’t know how to do it.”

I can feel my conversational grip on Wood slipping again as he redirects the topic of our conversation toward his notorious home, Broken Angel. Over decades, the radically-designed four-story brick tenement of his construction became a neighborhood attraction and a City Hall irritation. But this is the way 76-year-old Wood speaks – in extended metaphor. I listen silently.

“Charlie Pratt, who designed Pratt Institute, made his money in kerosene and he wanted to establish an educational facility similar to Cooper Union,” he says. “So, this building was his main building, and it was designed to be a shoe factory if it failed. From the very beginning, he generated his own power. They still produce about a third of their own power right now.

“On the other hand, Peter Cooper, who started Cooper Union, was a visionary. For instance, he knew that someone would invent the elevator. Cooper Union has a round elevator because Peter Cooper thought it’d be round … the main hall at Cooper Union, where Abraham Lincoln gave a major address, the hall is filled with pillars, and the roof is held up with steel – the first use of steel in a major building. You could take every one of those pillars out and the roof wouldn’t fall down. He was cautious.”

At this point, I’m wondering how far Wood is going to take me off track. With a smirk, he continues.

“Cooper Union is free, and one thing I like about it is if you don’t maintain an 80 average, you’re out of there. Okay?” he says, slamming his notepad down on the table. “So what I wanted to do with Broken Angel was establish a post-graduate educational facility. So after you finish college with all of your beers and parties and drinking and carousing and wasting your parents’ money, you go out in the world, and you encompass the major problems in developing anything you’re trying to develop. So what you do is, you come to Broken Angel, and we will solve your problems.”

Now I’m starting to get it. Wood had previously mentioned over the phone that the Broken Angel house was just the beginning of something greater. Now, that something greater was his own alternative art school. But at this point, the fact that he recently had to dismantle his headline-grabbing house hasn’t even come up. At least not yet.

“I have methods of education and also my own personal methods, because I’m entirely self-taught, and I’ve invented a lot of things,” he says, gesturing toward a metal contraption sitting on the table between us that, inside, is a pocket-sized art studio, complete with tungsten carbide pencil, a 50 ft. roll of quadrille paper, watercolor and brush. “The process that I use is very logical. The best place to hide anything is right in front of you.”

I reach for solid ground. “So now we’re talking about Broken Angel.”

He looks up. “You said this wasn’t going to be about Broken Angel!”

FALLEN, BROKEN ANGEL

WOOD AND I are standing outside his hulking home at 4 Downing St., five blocks south of the Pratt campus. The Army veteran gestures toward his ramshackle “estate” – he owns the building next door, too – and tells me he’s been living in Clinton Hill since his days as a student at Pratt, class of 1953. Long before the crack epidemic that swept the Eighties and the gentrification boom that’s been sweeping the neighborhood since the Nineties, Wood moved in. A self-taught builder and designer, Wood had just quit working as a designer-for-hire so that he could become a full-time artist. Broken Angel, now draped in scaffolding and construction grime, was his studio.

“I took an ordinary, ghetto building – it was a little different, but it was still a ghetto building – and … I set out to build a building that was a little out of the ordinary,” Wood said.

Downing St. is unlike most streets in this area of Brooklyn, sandwiched between the neighborhoods of Fort Greene and Bedford-Stuyvesant, because it doesn’t seem to stretch endlessly beyond the horizon. In fact, in an area where streets are snapped to a massive, invisible grid, Downing St. is only 1,000 ft. long, with Wood’s particular block spanning less than 250 ft. It’s Brooklyn’s quaint answer to Manhattan’s Gay St.

Rising from the dead-end, right angle intersection of Downing St. and Quincy St. is the Broken Angel house, a hive of intricate masonry and geometric ecstasy built upon the dilapidated former headquarters of the Brooklyn Trolley. The building’s positioning, towering above the rest of the buildings that line the street, serves as a pedestal for its radical style – one that Brooklyn borough president Marty Markowitz once described as “a Rubik’s Cube of a spaceship.”

At one time, a five-story web of glass and lumber grew from Broken Angel’s red brick base, reaching toward the sky. But earlier this year, the city ordered Wood to dismantle his contraption. All that’s left of the original is its signature arched, blood-red wooden door, tattooed with a human-sized number “4” and the name “Broken Angel” across its top in snaking white letters. It’s as if Wood took the Feng Shui concept of a welcoming red door and twisted it in a demonic gesture.
“The ongoing joke with my father is that the house is a chick magnet,” said his son, Chris, 32, a stone carver for B&H Art-in-Architecture who spent his childhood in Broken Angel. “There are always beautiful women standing out in front of the house wondering about it. More so than any Lamborghini or Ferrari.”
Broken Angel is, arguably, in command of the entire street – and Arthur Wood is at the helm.

The crude building that gave Wood his home for 28 years – and his relative fame – has received its fair share of celebrity. Its bottle-glass windows have previously appeared in articles in city newspapers and its sculptures have made a cameo in a short documentary in the Sundance Film Festival. Its exposed framework even served as the backdrop to comedian and native son Dave Chappelle’s concert film “Block Party.” But when an Oct. 2006 fire charred much of the building’s upper structure, his architectural efforts drew the ire of the city.

City officials cited numerous building code violations. Wood and his wife, Cynthia, were ordered to vacate. The pair refused. They were taken from their home in handcuffs.

Wood had to dismantle his creation or face demolition.

The war over Broken Angel erupted.

“Broken Angel is again broken, and I’m putting it back together again,” Wood said.

Earlier this year, Wood struck a deal with local developer Shahn Andersen to reconfigure the madcap manor and adjacent building – “The Sunflower House,” Wood calls it, after the sunflower that adorns the building in his blueprints – into condominiums draped in the angular lines and spirit of the original Angel. He’s been hard at work ever since.
“He just said, I’m going to build something ‘great, beautiful and insane,’ ” Andersen, 32, said. “It’s my job to make ‘great, beautiful and insane’ shoehorn into the building code.
“He’s great to work with. He keeps challenging me. He tries to outdo me in the crazy department.”
If it’s a ground-breaking alternative art school Wood wants, then he can at least say that he’s starting with a dormitory.

“There’s a possibility that it can be grander than it was before, within the code,” Wood said. “The idea is to figure out how to do it.”

Wood could say that Brooklyn has high expectations for him.

BIG MAN ON CAMPUS

ARTHUR WOOD is not exactly a picture-perfect example of a university president.

His worn fingernails are caked with dirt and graphite, his oversized sweatshirt hangs off his diminutive frame, and his wiry white hair looks as if it is desperately trying to escape from the woven skullcap restraining it. The press has called him a “mad scientist,” and seated in the Pratt Institute library, studiously scrawling his vision for a Brooklyn art school on a scrap of lined notebook paper, you might be inclined to believe them. Wood is laying out the land that surrounds his tucked-away Downing St. home on a bleached piece of paper, digging into its fibers with the tip of his ballpoint pen in his nervous excitement.

On the sheet’s rudimentary map, a series of boxes, indicating plots of land, surround 4 and 8 Downing St., the two properties that Wood owns that make up the Broken Angel compound. Wood has marked off nearby properties on Quincy St. and Lexington Ave., which parallels Quincy St. to the north. Blue-ink X’s are scattered across the page. Several indicate properties that “Ritchie” and “Myron,” decades-old friends, own. Others mark properties like the enormous, long-standing Salvation Army depot that occupies most of the block.

Wood said he sees these properties as possible lots that, in his opinion, he can expect to make successful offers for in the future. The purpose? To create the campus that Broken Angel could potentially occupy.

He just hasn’t said anything to his neighbors yet. And none of the properties are currently up for sale.

“[Many neighbors] refuse to sell anything,” Wood said. “But [some] certainly would over market value.”

If Wood were to somehow, in some way procure these patches of Brooklyn earth – steadily rising in value as gentrification sweeps past Classon Ave. – he would have the very beginnings of a brick-and-mortar institution.

“There’s a potential for a campus,” Wood said.

But it all begins with the Broken Angel house – the keystone to the project, and an “Old Main” for a school that he said would take tradition, thrash it to pieces and weld it together into cobbled-together structures that signify a new way to study art, architecture, science and music. Wood said the school’s application would be a single, Mensa-style visual puzzle, challenging aspiring artists to slice a round layer cake in six pieces with only three cuts. He also said he wants the crowning monument of the school’s principal building to be an actual Sikorsky Sea King helicopter, repurposed as a glorious, campus-topping sculpture called the “Spining Whale.”
“My reactions to my father are often, ‘Oh my God, you’re crazy,’ ” his son, Chris, said. “But then he actually makes it happen. He constantly amazes me with what he’s able to do and accomplish.”
“If he had $30 million in his pocket, a lot of people would take his school consideration more seriously.”
Wood said he wants the six ton chopper to represent the ability to fly high and achieve. But really, the helicopter is a vehicle into the life and times of a man who’d rather fly a bit differently than the rest of the world around him.

BEGINNINGS

NINETEEN-YEAR-OLD Arthur Wood made his first appearance in New York City much like many of his fellow New Yorkers: without papers. The Saratoga Springs, N.Y. native – “It’s a gambling town, and we considered New Yorkers yokels,” he said, chuckling – showed up on the Pratt Institute campus in 1950 without any invitation to step foot on its lush, brick-lined lawns. Just weeks earlier, Wood had been flat-out rejected from the private art school, but he was determined to take the advice of his father – an interior decorator who said not to “mess with lower beings” – and make his case to whoever he could. He chose to take the trip to Brooklyn and start the appeal process in the dean’s office – without an appointment.

“He says, ‘You’ve been rejected.’ I says, ‘How unfortunate,’ ” Wood said, noting his younger self’s sarcasm. “He says, ‘You know? I like you. I’ll tell you what. I’m going to override this and put you in a class. Don’t let me down.’ And I says, ‘That’s inconceivable.’ ”

Three years later, Wood walked away from Pratt a graduate, a bronze dean’s medal in hand. While the ink was still drying on his diploma for illustration – and the Korean War simmered overseas – Wood made the impulsive decision to take an Air Force test to be a jet pilot.

“I just took it to see if I could pass it,” he said. “I got a hundred.”

Wood was admitted to the Army as an engineer for the Air Force, and sent to Missouri and California to train in disarming high explosives. At just under 5 ft. 2 in., his ultimate mission was to crawl under machine gun fire to dig up mines in South Korea. With little to gain from coming back in pieces, Wood said he did everything he could during training to disrupt progress that would lead to a trip overseas.

“The object [of the training exercise] was to disarm them, and what I did was, I set them all off,” he said. “My unit came in last [place]…a hundred men came up to me one by one and thanked me,” noting that many of his fellow soldiers didn’t want to go to Korea, either.

But the war overseas was losing steam. A plane crash at the base killed the majority of his fellow trainees before deployment. Wood was assigned to a deactivated company.

He would never go to Korea.

“I did as much as I could to stay safe,” he said. “Maybe I should have gone and have had my head blown off. I didn’t trust someone else’s ability to dig up mines right next to me.”

If the armed forces nearly killed Wood while he served, it would nourish him with a college education afterward. Freshly released from service in California in 1955, Wood made his triumphant return to New York City and the arts behind the force of the G.I. Bill. Wood enrolled to study lithography at Teachers College of Columbia University and signed on as a staff designer for Wedgwood, the British pottery firm, at $140 per week. It was there, and not Pratt, where he really learned how to draw, Wood said.

“I learned to draw with a pen as an engraver,” he said. “I did commemorative plates of colleges, so I drew approximately 500 buildings. Each building was reproduced at least 3,000 times, so there’s five million pieces of my drawings [in] china, which is going to last longer than my paintings anyway.”

Wood said he also made models for Tiffany and Co., including a footing for a Paul Revere bowl that became one of the longest in-stock items the company ever had.

“I wasn’t allowed to sign it, but I did,” he said. “I signed that, and I signed everything at Wedgwood, too.”

Wood’s son, Chris, said Wood left more than just a name engraved in his work.
“He would etch little love messages in the plates to my mother,” he said. “Those are probably not even known by Wedgwood to even exist.” The couple married in 1959.
But underneath it all, the unsettled Wood really wanted to become a full-time painter, so he quit his job and began assembling a scheme that would help him subsist without an income. Wood said he went to the Pratt and Columbia cafeterias for food, dumpster-dived at Pratt for discarded oil paint tubes, made rounds at mailboxes and newsstands for rubber bands and wire and asked the New York Daily News press boss for newsprint end-runs that he could cut up and use as pads.

“I spent the next 46 years without spending any money,” he said. “I could tell you how to live in New York without money.”

Moving into an $8-per-week studio apartment on Seventh Ave. between 54th and 55th streets, Wood began an early trial run at pushing the limits, literally, of a New York property. Wood said he built the apartment out over the roof of his building for more space, without permission from his landlord. When his building superintendent finally inquired a month later, noticing darkness coming from the attic window that Wood had covered up, Wood was quick to come up with a reason: that a bulb had blown out.

“What I did was I had to associate it with maintenance, so it would become a maintenance problem,” he said, adding it could be months before the maintenance staff fixed anything. “I took over the entire roof of the building ‘cause nobody else was up there.”

Meanwhile, Wood started to sell his paintings by the bunch to galleries, such as the Louis K. Meisel Gallery on Prince St.

“The first year alone, I made $10,000,” he said. “I painted approximately 7,000 paintings, and then I decided I wanted to become a ‘painter’s painter’…so alternately, I’m either very rich, or very poor.”

With extra time on his hands, Wood spent his hours at Cedar Bar in Greenwich Village, observing his contemporaries of the day: Jackson Pollack, who always came into the bar with paint-splattered shoes; Franz Kline, who regularly a ring of smoke around his head; and Willem de Kooning, who was never far from a buxom blonde, he said.

“I used to go there with a red scarf like a bohemian,” Wood said. “I was mainly checking out the scene, seeing what happens and what artist life was about.”

Motivated by his competition – Wood said he liked to challenge others that the backs of his paintings were more attractive than the fronts of theirs – Wood soon moved his business to art dealers, who took his paintings 25 or 30 at a time – or as many as he could carry, Wood said. “I once had a one-man show in Cannes without even knowing it,” he said.
“Some old movies, you’ll actually see his paintings in them,” his son, Chris, said. “Flop houses bought them. One of his posters for an art show showed up at the Salvation Army.”
But the industry soon became tiresome. A daughter, Elizabeth, was born in 1968. His son Christopher was born seven years later. Wood said he decided to put down his paintbrush and pick up a camera, regularly shooting models in his studio through the Seventies and Eighties, including a then-unknown Madonna Ciccone.
“He was a bit of a womanizer,” his son, Chris, said. “I used to ask him what was going on in a picture, and he used to say, ‘Oh, art project.’
“[His life] kind of reminds me a lot of the movie ‘Big Fish’ – it’s kind of half-true, but in the end, it’s all true.”
By 1979, Wood and his family went searching for a new home in Clinton Hill. They found it at 4 Downing St.

DRAFTING BLUEPRINTS

It’s 4 a.m., and Brooklyn is asleep. The G train rumbles deep underground, a gale of wind softly blows a page from the Village Voice down Grand St., and the sun has not yet begun to stretch beyond the horizon. But Arthur Wood is awake. A moment ago, he came inside his temporary residence, having fed and taken out the dogs, and now he’s treating himself to bacon, eggs, toast and coffee. Usually, Wood eats oatmeal with banana stirred into it, but every fourth day, he likes to make the change.

By 6:30, Wood’s construction boots are laced and his hardhat is in hand. He’s back at Broken Angel, looking over the building before the twelve construction workers that he’s hired will arrive to begin their day’s work. His day is hectic, and while workers paint and hammer and grunt with sweat, Wood is busy scrawling furiously on a piece of paper. As a part of the renovation deal, he’s been asked to design one of the apartments, and he’s hard at work putting the final touches on his signature contribution to Broken Angel’s new life.

“I want people to come to the head of Quincy St. and say, ‘Wow,’ ” he said. “They’re going to do that when the building is finished.”

Wood is anxious to see progress. He gets a unit of his choosing in the new Broken Angel and the entire building next door, a two-family unit at 8 Downing St. that sits atop what he’s planned as a “Broken Angel museum.” Wood said it will display memorabilia from the house and his artwork.

“If I don’t ever get to do what I want to do,” he said, noting his age, “[the museum] will be there.”

In the meantime, Wood isn’t watching the clock. He’s moving forward at breakneck speed, eager to return to living in his rehabilitated creation and plan his next move toward creating an alternative art institute that would be known only as “Broken Angel.” Wood has drafted the blueprints in his head. All he needs is a little momentum.
“I think he’s really courageous,” said neighbor Danny Simmons, brother of hip-hop mogul Russell and arts philanthropist who lives and owns a gallery on Grand St. “It was his heart and soul in a piece of art. That kind of dedication to the arts is very rare.”
And if the possibility arrives that Wood may not see his college to completion, he’s prepared to cede control of his vision to a successor – with one caveat, of course: a bronze bust of himself to be placed in a conspicuous place on campus.

“I’d be shown pointing my finger in the sky,” Wood said, chuckling. “Pointing to another bust of me.”

A multimedia package for NewMediaNewsroom.com. As seen on the web at NewMediaNewsroom.com.

Click the image to access the project.

New York just isn’t New York anymore – at least not in Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant.

Long strongholds for the American black, these Manhattan and Brooklyn neighborhoods have become fertile ground for immigrant families to take root and pursue the American dream. On each block, new faces are appearing outside to get the morning mail, and the faces of the original American-born blacks, it seems, are steadily disappearing.

The catch? Those new faces are black, too.

To some, New York City’s West Indians appear as black as the rest of the U.S. Census-designated population of “African-Americans” in the city. But to others, including many residents of New York’s black meccas, West Indians are really “ethnic blacks.” They share a skin color with their neighbors, but hold vastly different cultural traditions and customs, much like the Irish, Italians, Poles and Jews before them.

The U.S. Census Bureau defines black or African American as “a person having origins in any of the black racial groups of Africa,” and includes people who identify as Afro-American, Kenyan, Nigerian, and Haitian.

Yet an unprecedented struggle faces immigrants from the West Indies living in Bed-Stuy and Harlem: As black immigrants, they must combat not only racism and immigration prejudice from other ethnic groups, but from the native-born African-Americans that Bed-Stuy and Harlem are known for, said Carolina Bank Muñoz, an assistant professor of sociology at Brooklyn College.

“This is the first immigrant group where being an immigrant is an asset over being American,” Muñoz said. “It’s just trickier, because of how skin color is associated.”

“When you lose your accent [in the U.S.], you basically just become black, and face all of the stigma associated with it.”

West Indians have been arriving on American shores since the turn of the 20th century, but their numbers have grown considerably since 1965, when immigration laws were eased for people from the Caribbean.

During the peak years of their first migration – from 1913 to 1924 – the majority of those bound for New York City settled in Manhattan and Brooklyn. In fact, almost a quarter of black Harlem was of Caribbean origin by 1930, according to the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.

As recently as 2003, the U.S. Census Bureau estimates that 24,219 of Manhattan’s total population of more than 1.5 million people identify as having West Indian ancestry. In Brooklyn, the bureau estimates that 248,190 people – the largest of any reported ancestral group in the borough – of a population of more than 2.4 million identify as having West Indian ancestry, according to the bureau’s 2003 American Community Survey.

Since the tightening of visa regulations in the late 1980s, however, West Indians have faced increasing odds to enter the U.S., particularly after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Still, Muñoz said West Indians are highly sought after for labor once they arrive. Employers often prefer immigrants to native-born blacks, she said.

“There’s definitely a lot of resentment. I see it in my students,” Muñoz said. “I see a lot of tension between the two groups, in part because there’s a fundamental lack of understanding between them.

“One group comes to the U.S., is working really hard, and says, ‘See, I’m making it, I’m achieving the American dream, what the hell’s wrong with you? You’re just lazy, you have your citizenship.’ But that group is saying, ‘There’s a legacy of Jim Crow laws, slavery, and legally-institutionalized racism into the Sixties. That inequality is supposed to go away? That’s just not the case, that’s not how these things work.’ ”

– with additional reporting by Lauren R. Harrison