This is an unpublished, original beat story written for the Covering Religion class of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.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

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.”

This is an unpublished, original beat story written for the Reporting and Writing I class of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.

If you happen to receive an invitation to celebrate the Thanksgiving holiday in Bedford-Stuyvesant with Catherine Lewis – better known as “Miss Catie” by the neighborhood – by all means, take it. Her animated personality and jovial laugh will keep you slapping your knee well into the night. But when you finally sit down at Miss Catie’s table for the evening’s meal, try not to appear alarmed when your eyes survey the table and can’t locate the candied yams, cranberry sauce and pumpkin pie that make up the usual trimmings of the most traditional of American meals.

Instead, you might find a bowl of leafy greens tossed with diced green bananas to your left, a steaming bowl of plush rice flecked with green peas and doused in coconut juice to your right and, directly in front of you, a hearty fish stew whose main ingredient goes by the less-than-flattering name of “cacabelly.”

That’s because Lewis, 53, is an immigrant from Grenada, one of the many English-, French- or Dutch-speaking Caribbean islands collectively referred to as the West Indies. Since Lewis moved to her quiet, tree-lined street in brownstone Brooklyn in 1994, more than 27,000 West Indian immigrants have settled in the area. Together, they are changing the face of Brooklyn’s premier black neighborhood – and redefining the associations of the word “black” by instilling a healthy dose of calypso, Toussaint L’Ouverture and Pirates of the Caribbean in a neighborhood better known for hip-hop, Malcolm X and Do the Right Thing.

“I don’t really keep the American Thanksgiving,” Lewis said, adding that she also holds a “spiritual service” that includes prayer, candles and Bible readings. “We do it in our way.”

To some, Bedford-Stuyvesant’s West Indians appear as black as the rest of the 75 percent of U.S. Census-designated “African-Americans” in the neighborhood. But to others, including many residents of Bed-Stuy, they are really “ethnic blacks” – sharing a skin color with their neighbors but holding vastly different cultural traditions and customs, much like the Irish, Italians, Poles and Jews before them.

Yet an unprecedented struggle faces immigrants from the West Indies living in Brooklyn’s black mecca: 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 is 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.”

West Indians have been arriving on American shores since 1965, when immigration laws were eased for people from the Caribbean. 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.

For Lewis, who works as an airport security guard, that means continuing the tradition of the self-starting, opportunistic American immigrant. If you offer a West Indian immigrant $10 to clean an entire building, they’ll do it so that they can send money home to their family, Lewis said.

“We’re like scavengers. They should welcome us,” she said. “We do the jobs people don’t want to do. We have a quarter to catch.”

Muñoz said this usually results in an employer’s preference toward immigrants rather than native-born blacks.

“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.’ ”

Landlord and union construction worker Eric Byam, 43, said West Indians should respect their native-born neighbors for fighting for the right to work for pay. Byam was born and raised in Bedford-Stuyvesant, and owns a brownstone on Greene Ave. His father was from Trinidad, his mother was from the southern United States, and he identifies himself only as an “African-American.”

“A lot of immigrants come over here and forget that African-Americans opened up the jobs that they are working,” Byam said. “The Caribbeans slide on in there on the backs of the African-Americans and say they got the jobs on their own. No – you got the jobs that the African-Americans fought for. A lot of people in the community forget that.”

“A lot of us have to crawl before we walk. [But] a lot of us expect to walk before we crawl.”

Unlike the current generation of West Indians, the first generation hasn’t yet come to terms with the fact that the n-word can apply to them, too, Byam said.

“Some of them think they’re better, because they’re from the island,” he said. “They say, ‘I’m not the n-word.’ They don’t think they’re niggers…they don’t want to accept it.”

Though the community is vastly accepting of her and her family, Lewis said she occasionally feels tension from the rest of the African-American community.

“They say, ‘You dirty stinking immigrant, you go home,’ ” Lewis said. “And I say, ‘God bless, you are my black sister,’ and I pay no mind.”

Being black in the U.S. is a really different thing that being black in the Caribbean, Muñoz said.

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

Lewis’ daughter, Techia, said the racism she experiences overrules any island ties she has. Techia is a 30-year-old nursing student at Queensborough Community College.

“Every day, I have to wake up as a black woman,” she said. “It doesn’t matter if I’m West Indian or not.”

Lewis said it’s all in how you carry yourself.

“I’m proud, black and beautiful,” Lewis said. “I shouldn’t let nothing stop me.”

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

The night for mischievous tricks may have passed, but a horde of Halloween costumes will be on parade to treat visitors to Brooklyn this weekend – from beautiful ballerinas to “notorious” gangster rappers and every Cinderella in between.

All you’ll have to do is look down at your feet to see them.

Dozens of four-legged friends will strut to scare at the first annual “Bed-Stuy Pet Stuy Horror Haunt,” a Halloween fashion show for dogs and other pets in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. Both owners and pets will show off their originality and creativity to compete for prizes in three categories: best human/pet costume combo, scariest/weirdest pet costume and cutest pet costume.

Longtime neighborhood resident Madeline Smith said she first conceived the outing after watching Animal Planet’s television coverage of Pet Fashion Week in New York.

“I like to watch the Dog Whisperer and all those types of shows,” she said. “I thought, ‘You know something? Why can’t we do that in Brooklyn too?’ ”

Smith said she came up with the Halloween idea after a successful pet fashion show in June.

“I heard people calling people on cell phones, ‘You gotta come down here and see this!’ ” she said. “As a matter of fact, we had to start turning people away for the competition because they kept coming after it started.”

Though Smith herself doesn’t own a dog – just “a big, furry cat” – she took it upon herself to appeal to the neighborhood to support the event, which will include gift certificates, gift baskets and sing-alongs.

“I put up flyers from Fort Greene to Bed-Stuy,” she said. “I went through a bag of 250 and I’m working halfway through another bag. We’re encouraging people to come out in costume. I tell people, ‘No naked pets. Come out dressed.’ ”

Sixty-three-year-old Clinton Hill resident Barbara Abrams said she’s so excited for the event that she’s convinced her friends in the Bronx to attend.

“”I love dogs, but I don’t own a dog,” she said. “But I told all my friends that do have pets and they plan to be there.”

Abrams said her friends are dressing their dogs as skeletons, pink hooded-sweatshirt thugs and even mini-motorcycle-riding Harley Davidson bikers. It’s really all a reflection of the owners, she said.

“I think people do it because it’s an extension of themselves,” she said. “I think dogs take on people’s personalities and vice-versa. They get a kick out of an animal portraying what they can’t.”

It’s also good relief for cooped-up, “mentally abused” dogs in tiny New York City apartments, Abrams said.

“It gives them a chance to linger with other dogs,” Abrams said. “They get lonely and want that exchange.”

Bedford-Stuyvesant resident and social worker Patty Turlowicz said she’s definitely participating in the event, and has already cooked up what her two dogs – an enormous Collie/Labrador/Chow mix and a mini Chihuahua – will be for the show.

“I’m doing a Batman theme,” she said. “I’m gonna be the Joker and Sophie’s gonna be Catwoman – the Halle Berry, updated sexy version of Catwoman. Yeah, cute that she’s a dog, dress her as a cat.

“For the little one, big bat ears – for a little dog.”

Turlowicz, a lifelong New Yorker, said the breeds of dogs on the streets reflect the gentrification of the neighborhood.

“Dogs don’t have to be attack dogs,” Turlowicz said. “Just ‘cause they’re big doesn’t mean they’re nasty. They don’t just have to be for security purposes – they can be your buddy. I really don’t think it would have been possible like 10 years ago.”

In fact, petite dogs have virtually taken over Bedford-Stuyvesant streets, Turlowicz said.

“To tell you to truth, I’m seeing more little Poodles and Shih-Tzus and cute little furry dogs,” she said. “I think it is changing. It’s not just the people moving in, it’s the people that have been living here. People want to have a stylish dog.”

Smith said such change is “long overdue.”

“I want people to know that everybody in Bed-Stuy is not training Pitbulls and is not treating their dogs viciously,” she said. “People love their pets. I love my pet. They are part of the family. If people can get the opportunity to show them off, yes they will.”

At least 20 dogs are expected to stroll the catwalk, Smith said.

“It doesn’t matter who you are,” Smith said. “In the end, just come. You’ll laugh and smile and have a good time. That’s what I want. To get people to look at pets and animal education.”

And as for a dog?

“This has made me so tempted to get a dog,” Smith said, chuckling. “I grew up with dogs, we always had a dog. I don’t know how my cat is going to react. I don’t think it’s going to work.”

The event will be held in Fulton Park this Saturday from 2 to 5 p.m.

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

Like any three-year-old, Jayla Taylor has a fondness for candy. But an evening trip to fulfill her craving at a Brooklyn candy store a week ago nearly ended her life.

Little Jayla and her cousins were crossing the courtyard in front of the Kingsborough Houses, where her great-grandmother lives, when a stray bullet grazed the toddler’s head. Though the bullet – an errant shot of a 25-year-old man firing at another person near the public housing complex on the border of Bedford-Stuyvesant – left Jayla with a scar and an overnight stay at the hospital, it was a sinister warning sign that violent crime is far from eliminated in the troubled neighborhood.

“It’s combat, every day, and no one is helping us. Nobody,” said Jayla’s mother, Nekisha McClain, to reporters from her daughter’s room in Kings County Hospital. “It takes my daughter, three years old, to get shot for somebody to come out here. Come on, help us. Help us. That’s all we need is help.”

While the number of murders in Bedford-Stuyvesant today is far less than the “Do or Die” days of the early ‘90s – when the neighborhood had one of the fastest-growing murder rates in the city and area precincts counted more than 100 homicides between them in a single year – the neighborhood is once again deviating from the steep city-wide decline in violent crime by keeping steady pace with last year’s figures, to date 27 murders across the 79th and 81st precincts.

But for residents, the stories tell a considerably more harrowing tale, reading like a police blotter from 1992:

In early January, a male customer of the Happy House Chinese takeout restaurant on Malcolm X Blvd. leapt over the counter and shot a cashier in the face before fleeing. For months, the main walkway of the Tompkins Houses public housing project was spray-painted with the words “WELCOME TO DEATH ROW” in foot-high red letters. Three weeks ago, 15-year-old Fort Hamilton football team lineman Christopher Williams was shot nine times inside his housing project, leaving him with an amputated right leg. And only two weeks ago, a 16-year-old and a 25-year-old were charged with attempted murder after police saw someone squeezing off shots on Fulton St., leading to a wild chase that ended with a flipped car near Lewis Ave. and Decatur St.

The Bedford-Stuyvesant-Brownsville-Crown Heights triangle is still a haven for gun-related violence, said Jackie Kuhls, executive director of New Yorkers Against Gun Violence.

“That’s certainly an area where we see a high number of shootings,” she said. “Like the rest of New York City, it’s mostly illegal guns involved.”

Many guns land in the hands of people that are too young to possess them, Kuhls said.

“Kids in neighborhoods with high shooting rates feel afraid and feel they need a gun for protection,” she said. “It’s a deadly, vicious cycle.”

Police officer William Jenkins said little can be done to combat random violence once shots are fired.

“There’s really no way to stop gunfire,” said Jenkins, a community affairs officer in the 81st precinct. “In general, there’s really nothing you can do. Gun violence is a random thing.”

Jenkins, who has been on the force for ten years, said his precinct uses plainclothes officers who stop and frisk people and detectives who question suspects as the primary tools to battle street violence. However, the precinct’s effectiveness is limited by the day-to-day availability of officers, he said.

“There are less officers since last year,” Jenkins said. “Just less people signing up for the force.”

Kuhls said the gun problem is beyond one precinct or one city and crosses state lines.

“We need to look at where the guns are coming from,” she said. “If young people can run out and buy an illegal gun in a half an hour — which most kids in the city are able to do — you’ve got a problem.”

Preventing gun violence in Bedford-Stuyvesant starts on Capitol Hill, Kuhls said.

“There’s no one solution to gun violence,” she said. “The thought that you can put everyone in prison together and stop it is a fantasy. We need to go to the source.”

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

On radiant, sunlit afternoons, Wilma Atwell – or “Bee,” as she’s known in her neighborhood – likes to go out in front of her colonial-style house and water her garden.

Each afternoon, just as the sun starts winking over the plaster and stucco facades of her neighbors’ brownstones, Atwell unravels her coiled hose and gives the sea of yellows, purples, reds and green that flow forth from her periwinkle-sided house a good soaking. When she’s finished, the retired children’s wear designer takes a seat on the red-bricked steps in front of her porch and deeply breathes in the evening air.

“It’s so nice here,” she said. “I’ve been living here 21, 22 years. I love it.”

Eleven blocks west and 14 blocks north of Atwell’s “farm house,” as she likes to call it, a man dressed head-to-toe in black rifles through a plastic trash bag, four feet long and stuffed with the castoffs of the college students that live in an adjacent building.

Surrounding him are more than 30 bags of a similar shape, stacked haphazardly on the curb alongside splintered wood furniture and two worn-out mattresses. Together, they impede the sidewalk and take up an entire loading driveway, rising as high as the roof of the tan Volvo station wagon parallel-parked next to it. The man has torn a hole in one of the bags, and is pulling out the half-eaten bagels, tattered sneakers and crumpled cereal boxes inside and scattering them on the sidewalk, presumably searching for something salvageable.

For the next five days, the pile and the surrounding debris will remain on the curb, exposed to two more rummaging men and a heavy overnight downpour before sanitation workers make their rounds. Twelve hours later, another pile reappears, ready for the next pickup.

Though a little over a mile apart, Atwell’s home on Macdonough St. and the pile of refuse on Taaffe Pl. have something in common: they are both in Bedford-Stuyvesant.

For Atwell, the foliage on her street is the result of the collective effort to keep up Brooklyn’s “Greenest Block” of 2007, a stretch of brownstone Brooklyn so lush that it has been awarded distinction almost every year since Bill Clinton left office. Atwell said she and her neighbors take pride in keeping their streets polished, which is probably why Bedford-Stuyvesant is a recurring player in the Brooklyn Botanic Garden’s annual competition.

On the other hand, the Taaffe Pl. garbage heap is frank evidence that confirms statistics from the mayor’s Office of Operations rating Bedford-Stuyvesant as the trashiest neighborhood in all of New York, with the lowest percentage of “acceptably” clean streets in the city in 2006. That’s worse than Spanish Harlem, the South Bronx and Chinatown – all areas known for their commercial foot traffic.

This is the juxtaposition in Bed-Stuy: a largely-residential neighborhood known for its historic housing stock but plagued with a history of illegal dumping and out-of-control litter. Residents say they agree that the neighborhood is neglected equally by the city and its own inhabitants, and they’re tired of picking up after someone else.

What they can’t agree on is how to fix it.

Atwell says she’s experienced the effects of the litter habits of passerby right in front of her home, with crumpled Doritos bags and flyers from nearby Lewis Ave., peppering her cherished block.

“In the winter time, the flower pots become garbage cans,” she said. “We try to keep perennials in there to combat them. People must be too lazy to follow the rules. It’s ridiculous.”

Many people make matters worse by putting household trash – like small appliances – in corner trash containers, Atwell said.

“If there is a can, it’s a target,” she said.

Leo De Leon, owner of De Leon Realty and founder of the Bedford-Stuyvesant Business Alliance, said commercial areas of the neighborhood have “a severe rat infestation” thanks to the potent combination of ongoing construction and exposed trash.

“Last night I’m driving down the street, and running right next to me is a big rat, and people are screaming,” he said. “They’re running up and down the streets. Literally you can stand out there and count them sometimes. One day I was out there on Fulton St. and I counted 19 rats, and then I stopped counting.”

A lack of trash cans on the neighborhood’s main thoroughfares is partly to blame for the litter overflow from commercial zones, De Leon said.

“The containers are not there,” De Leon said. “Fulton [St.] and Nostrand [Ave.] is probably one of the densest intersections with the highest amount of commerce in the city. They would need four litter baskets on every intersection. There’s not one on every corner, and there should be.

“Commercial areas usually have a basket on every corner. Here in Bed-Stuy, whether it be commercial or residential, you can’t find a litter basket.”

Charles Atwell, Wilma Atwell’s 75-year-old brother-in-law who is the landlord of several buildings in Bedford-Stuyvesant, said the Department of Sanitation’s inconvenient schedules are to blame.

“They take the garbage Sunday, but residents take their garbage out Monday morning on their way to work. Then it sits until Wednesday,” he said. “That rat-feeding schedule takes the incentive out of people.”

Atwell, who also owns a realty business on Stuyvesant Ave., said there’s a fundamental flaw in removing bagged trash from metal, critter-proof trashcans to put on the curb for pickup.

“They tell you to put your trash out in rat-proof plastic bags,” he said. “Problem is, there are no rat-, dog-, bird-proof bags.”

Rev. Darryll Young, the pastor of Siloam Presbyterian Church on Jefferson and Marcy avenues, said he believes the current procedure for putting out trash can be improved.

“I think part of it might be that they don’t have a single accepted container in Bed-Stuy,” Young said. “In some cities, like Rochester, they give you a container. They need a more sophisticated system. It would be a lot easier [for sanitation workers] not having to lift bags if they had a standard container.”

But even though Bedford-Stuyvesant is on the upswing, year-to-date data from the mayor’s Office of Operations tells a different tale: that Bed-Stuy, despite improvements, is still the trashiest neighborhood in the city, with 86.8 percent “acceptably clean” streets in the first three quarters of 2007.

De Leon said looting within the neighborhood has undermined local and city efforts.

“I spoke to the Sanitation Department, the supervisor for this area, and he told me he put out some 200 receptacles,” De Leon said. “Quite a significant percentage of what he put out was stolen. So that would leave many of the intersections without receptacles.”

Back on Atwell’s block, the sun finally sets, obscuring the street’s luminous flower display from view. For only a few hours, Brooklyn’s “Greenest Block” has turned to shades of midnight gray, but it’s just enough of a window for a single, untied plastic trash bag, gleaming under the streetlights, to appear beside an already filled-up city trash can on the corner of Atwell’s street and Lewis Ave.

Three blocks south, at Fulton St., 50-year-old Joe Grant is shuffling down the sidewalk, armed with a broom and rolling bin and clad in a blue jumpsuit stamped with “Ready, Willing and Able” on the back. Grant is a street cleaner for The Doe Fund, Inc., a non-profit organization that provides assistance to the homeless and the incarcerated after they are released from prison, and he and his band of men are assigned to clean up the Fulton St. commercial strip, picking up litter, re-bagging trash cans and installing new ones before city sanitation workers service the area in the early morning hours.

Grant said his thankless job is necessary because the area is always plagued by garbage, even if sanitation workers follow through with every scheduled pickup.

“Individuals who got nothin’ better to do, they might just tear the bags up and spread it all around,” he said, picking up a wet Burger King wrapper and dropping it in his plastic bin. “We clean it up.”

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

New York City police officer Ruslan Matdiip couldn’t remember much of anything about what he did on Nov. 28, 2005.

On that day – the same day that fellow officer Dillon Stewart was gunned down on the job for making a routine stop in the Flatbush neighborhood of Brooklyn — Matdiip knew he had looked for evidence at the scene of the crime. He was sure that he followed department procedure, and he knew that eventually, a spent Luger nine-millimeter shell casing was found at the scene, three short blocks away from Prospect Park.

He just couldn’t remember exactly what happened in between. And it couldn’t have made defense lawyer John Burke happier.

“I do not recall that,” Matdiip said after nearly every question about his activity that day. “Not that I recall.”

In fact, Burke seemed so pleased by the officer’s sudden absence of memory that the cavalier attorney chose to pose the rest of his questions from behind the courtroom bar – among the police officers, family and public in attendance at the State Supreme Court of Brooklyn. The irony of the defense attorney examining a witness among “the people” the prosecution is tasked with representing was striking, and the trial judge, Justice Albert Tomei, tried to appeal to Matdiip directly in an effort to keep his courtroom in order.

“What, you can’t remember anything?” Tomei asked.

“Not that I remember, no,” Matdiip said.

“Do you have a prior history of memory problems?” Burke asked, to laughter in the courtroom.

But in the rest of the day’s proceedings of the trial of Stewart’s murder, little spectacle was to be had. Without a witness willing to place the 29-year-old defendant, Allan Cameron, at the scene of the crime and firing the shots that killed the 35-year-old police officer, prosecutors Mark J. Hale and Thomas C. Ridges had to rely on a combination of forensic evidence and circumstance to prove their case of first-degree murder.

With only a day remaining, however, it looked as if the defense was the side working to soften the blow.

Earlier in the day, forensic science technician Kecia Harris all but concluded on the stand that Cameron’s DNA matched that found on the trigger of the gun found on the scene, prompting defense attorney Edward Friedman to vigorously cross-examine her for loopholes in the testing results.

“Can DNA be manually placed?” he asked.

Harris responded, “Um, I’m not quite sure I understand what you’re—”

“Yes or no,” Friedman demanded. “You don’t go out and pick it up off the street?”

Harris responded again, exasperated. “Look, I really think—”

“Yes or no,” Friedman said.

Harris replied, her brow furrowed. “Well, it’s poss—”

“If you don’t know, that’s OK,” Friedman said.

“Well no, then,” Harris said.

The defense tried every angle in an attempt to prove that it was inconclusive that Cameron fired on Stewart from his car in the early hours of Nov. 28 before fleeing to a garage on East 21st St. and closing the door as the police gave chase. The charge carries a maximum penalty of life in prison.

But yesterday’s testimony from Harris, Matdiip, Det. Michael D’Arbanville and Det. Keith Reccardi offered few revelations about the evidence – which ranged from spent shells to a piece of chicken – and intense discussion about the inner-workings of the human genome left more than a few jurors puzzled, with some trying to stifle an occasional yawn.

When asked by Hale what the odds were of finding a duplicate DNA type in the world, Harris said they were about 1 in 1 trillion each for whites, blacks, Hispanics and Asians.

“What is the probability of seeing this DNA profile recur in nature?” Hale asked.

“You’d need approximately 166 planet Earths to see this DNA profile again,” Harris said.

The defendant, Cameron, didn’t flinch. But from the somber look on his face, you’d think he thought his odds were similar.

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

Kate Cranston and Emily Post would be pleased.

A centuries-old culture is returning to Brooklyn, and it’s bringing its pinky finger with it.

Deep in the heart of Bedford-Stuyvesant, tucked behind the stairs of a historic brownstone, a little bit of Britain quietly resides in Le Chateau de Frenche day spa and private tearoom. Despite the Gallic name, Queen Victoria reigns inside the lace-curtained retreat, where locals can stop by in the afternoon for a spot of Harney & Sons tea, a scone with Devonshire cream or a cucumber sandwich.

Just make sure to mind your manners. Don’t dip your scone. Please, no slurping. And NEVER leave your spoon in your tea cup.

Oh, and pinkies up, of course.

But for visitors who haven’t recently brushed up on their conduct at the dinner table, the owner, Trinidad native Nikima Frenche, is bringing something to Bedford-Stuyvesant that is arguably a first for the neighborhood: formal etiquette classes, for both children and adults.

Starting at about $200 for six two-hour sessions, the classes were a direct response to her spa clients’ apprehension during formal events for work and special occasions, Frenche said.

“A lot of adults are saying when they go out to corporate dinners they don’t know which fork to use or that they’re a little loud,” she said. “There’s a part of it that sells itself. People know what they need.”

Frenche said she discovered the neighborhood’s preference for politesse after she invited etiquette expert and Positively Poised founder Vanessa White to host a dozen local girls aged six to 11 for their own private tea party this summer. To much parental praise, the girls learned – dressed up, of course – how to place heart- and star-shaped sugar cubes in passion fruit and mango tea and talk with each other respectfully, Frenche said.

“It was one hell of an event,” Frenche said. “The children appreciated it. They were really, really good at it.”

At the end of the party, the girls were given personal teacups and saucers, a diary and a blank thank you card to fill out and send back, Frenche said.

“All of them brought it back,” Frenche said. “They were all asking, ‘Would you invite me to tea again?’ ”

Frenche originally opened the spa and tearoom in her home neighborhood of Fort Greene in 2004 as a natural extension of her roots in the former British colony, where she said tea and proper manners were a part of the culture. When she opened in Brooklyn, many people saw her establishment as more appropriate in Midtown or the Upper East Side, Frenche said.

“I didn’t know what to do,” she said. “People said, ‘You should go to Manhattan. It’s something for Manhattan.’ ”

After she was pushed out of Fort Greene by rising rents, Frenche looked east, settling on the ground floor of a Bedford-Stuyvesant brownstone in June 2006. Since then, she’s firmly entrenched herself in the neighborhood, which she says is entirely underrated as a neighborhood for classic style.

“I drove over here and I was floored,” Frenche said. “I had no idea that this was what Bed-Stuy really was. Tree-lined streets, beautiful brownstones…none of the negativity that people always talk about.”

Though the business is still running in the red, Frenche said she’s trying to convince the neighborhood that etiquette can be useful for them, too.

“Some people think etiquette is for stuck-up people,” she said. “I don’t think it’s that at all. It’s a way to carry yourself in society.”

White agreed, adding that practicing etiquette helps immediately boost one’s social standing.

“When I’m out and people know that I’m a certified etiquette consultant, all of a sudden people act differently,” she said. “So that tells me that there is a need for adults to have this type of training. As long as we plant the seed, I believe that we can definitely carry it through.”

As one of the invitees to the girls’ tea party, Wendyann Charles’ six-year-old daughter Jada still respects the rules she learned during the soiree, her mother said.

“Every morning for school I give her her milk in that same teacup they gave her,” Charles said. “Even now, when I give her her milk in the morning, she always remembers how they taught her to hold the tea cup.”

Jada said she enjoyed practicing how to pour real tea into a teacup.

“My favorite part was pouring the tea and sitting down, because I like it,” she said. “I had fun and I loved it.”

Learning etiquette could be beneficial for helping kids meet on equal social terms even when they do not in other ways, Charles said.

“You see some of the kids today and they’re walking in the street and they really don’t know how to talk to people,” she said. “They have no idea of these things, especially in the neighborhood.”

Charles said a structured activity like etiquette classes is desperately needed in Bedford-Stuyvesant, adding that she once brought a two-year-old child home to its mother after seeing it wandering around in the street in front of her house.

“I think they need to be offered a lot of programs and things that will better them in the long run so they won’t have all this time to waste, like the gangs,” she said. “We need things that will help them look at life in a different way.”

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

It’s a hot summer’s day, and Francine Dixon is sitting outside her Brooklyn café watching customers enter. Among the passersby, a middle-aged woman wearing a plastic hairnet and smeared magenta lipstick walks across Malcolm X Boulevard toward the entrance.

“You see that one right there?” Dixon says, motioning toward the woman. “I’ll bet you a quarter she’s gonna go in and ask for food.”

Thirty seconds later, the woman walks out, visibly disappointed in the café’s light fare, and makes a beeline to the Chinese takeout restaurant kitty-corner to Dixon’s café. She emerges five minutes later chomping on half an eggroll.

“I get asked every day, ‘Ya got steak? Ya got eggs? A menu? Takeout? Do you have breakfast? Is this all ya got?’ ” she said. “People don’t really understand what we’re trying to do here. I want the people that get it.”

It’s been two weeks since the grand opening of Dixon’s establishment, TwoFiftyEight Café, and some of her Bedford-Stuyvesant neighbors still don’t quite understand the need for a place that serves only gourmet coffee, smoothies and baked goods. Steps away from Bushwick, Dixon’s coffee shop is on the very edge of a neighborhood that was only recently anointed the “Next Hipster Enclave” by New York magazine, and it’s readily apparent that there exists a divide between the locals that see value in her newborn business – one that some say goes hand in hand with gentrification – and those that would rather have a Crown Fried Chicken (one’s being built a block away anyway).

“There’s not supposed to be two different worlds,” Dixon says, waving hello to a passing customer. “People didn’t know how to walk on this street. Look at it, it looks scary. It was filthy, it was horrible, but I had a vision. I’m probably making history without even knowing it.”

Named and styled with chalkboards and desks after the nearby junior high school that Dixon attended, P.S. 258, TwoFiftyEight Café is just the newest member of an increasing number of locally-owned coffee shops in Bedford-Stuyvesant – a growing family of independent ventures that distinguishes themselves from bodegas with smiles, remembered names, support of local events and artists, and the resolute goal of cleaning up a community that never leaves its own block. Yet café owners say the neighborhood’s budding coffee circuit reveals the need to persuade locals that some brews are worth more than a dollar a cup – and can help give the community a facelift, too.

David Williams, a longtime server at Fulton Street favorite Bushbaby, said the void for gourmet coffee existed to be filled when the café opened in 2005. Once patrons tried it – and Bushbaby’s signature homemade iced tea – they were hooked, he said.

“Coffee was just as much a learning experience for people in the neighborhood,” said Williams, who was born and raised in Bedford-Stuyvesant. “The mentality is changing.”

Williams said the low light, carved mahogany and warm colors of the café was unusual on the Fulton commercial strip when it opened.

“People say this looks like it should be in the Village,” he said. “My response is, ‘It looks like it should be right here. Why should all the nice stuff be in the Village?’ ”

Hillary Porter, a baker by trade who has co-owned neighborhood stalwart Bread Stuy on Lewis Avenue with her husband Lloyd since 2004, said she sees her store as an amenity in a neighborhood that sorely lacks them.

“We can’t compete with 50-cent bodega coffee,” she said. “We provide coffee that’s fresh and not sitting on the burner all day.”

It took a show of trust between her establishment and the surrounding neighborhood to convince that a cup of coffee can be worth more in some places, Porter said.

“I have a no Plexiglas rule,” she said. “If you treat people like they’re going to do something terrible, something terrible might happen. Just greeting people when they came in surprised them.”

Efia Crandon, a business student at Nyack College who frequents Common Grounds café on Tompkins Avenue, said confused Bedford-Stuyvesant residents who are used to an overload of liquor stores and bodegas will soon wake up and smell the coffee for different kinds of establishments in the neighborhood.

“Sometimes I think some people don’t know what they need until it’s there,” she said. “It’s hard for people to adapt to change.”