Our second episode focuses on Haven Green, an affordable housing development for older adults who have experienced homelessness proposed for the current site of the Elizabeth Street Garden. How can communities
balance the need for housing with the need for green space when both are at a premium? How does New York City’s urban land use review processensure, or not, that the city takes many perspectives into account? Do wealthy neighborhoods like Soho have the duty to welcome new development and share their amenities with lower-income households?

Additional Reading:

• Neighborhood Defenders (Katherine Levine Einstein)
• The Effects of Exposure to Better Neighborhoods on Children (Raj Chetty, Nathanial Hendren, Lawrence F. Katz, Opportunity Atlas)
• Strategies to Boost Housing Production in the New York City Metropolitan Area (Citizens Budget Commission)

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Soho was torn apart as police and firefighters struggled to keep up with crowds breaking into high-end stores and setting fires in the streets. 

Police presence was virtually nonexistent, officers greatly outnumbered unable to leave their vehicles to apprehend individuals leaving stores with bags full of designer clothes, shoes and handbags.

Cars were smashed, garbage-strewn across streets and windows bashed in indiscriminately throughout the night, only dying down after seemingly every store in Soho was either empty or at least damaged.  

Protesters and police face off, May 31, 2020. Photo by Thomas Hengge

Protesters gather on the Lower East Side, May 31, 2020. Photo by Thomas Hengge

A protester holds their hands up toward police, May 31, 2020. Photo by Thomas Hengge

People stand in front of destroyed businesses, May 31, 2020. Photo by Thomas Hengge

Police douse a fire with water in Soho, May 31, 2020. Photo by Thomas Hengge

A person takes a photo of a smashed window in Soho, May 31, 2020. Photo by Thomas Hengge

FDNY respond to a fire in Soho, May 31, 2020. Photo by Thomas Hengge

People enter Dolce & Gabbana in Soho, May 31, 2020. Photo by Thomas Hengge

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As if preparing for a hurricane, plywood covers store windows on just about every block. With retail stores deemed nonessential, and high-end shopping being Soho’s main draw, the streets are now eerily empty. 

This is a look inside Soho during the shutdown.

12 Prince Street boarded up, April 22, 2020. Photo by Thomas Hengge

A sticker depicting cartoon ducks wearing gas masks reads, “Keep your ducks in a row safely…Apart!” April 22, 2020. Photo by Thomas Hengge

A person passes Kate Space in Soho, April 22, 2020. Photo by Thomas Hengge

A person cycles through empty streets in Soho, April 22, 2020. Photo by Thomas Hengge

A person hoists a grocery delivery to the roof using a hook and string to avoid in person contact, April 22, 2020. Photo by Thomas Hengge

Postal workers pause to chat, April 22, 2020. Photo by Thomas Hengge

A t-shirt depicting Gov. Andrew Cuomo hangs in a window, April 22, 2020. Photo by Thomas Hengge

A crossing guard monitors an intersection, April 22, 2020. Photo by Thomas Hengge

A person walks down Broadway, April 22, 2020. Photo by Thomas Hengge

Louis Vuitton boarded up, April 22, 2020. Photo by Thomas Hengge

The post Soho on pause appeared first on Pavement Pieces.

Sikh leaders say they do not have it easy. They face bigotry and many other forms of discrimination, but the optimism and hope the community shares is on display in the photo exhibition, Sikh: Turban & Identity.

Presented by the Sikh Coalition, whose mission is to fight bigotry aimed at this South Asian religion. The Soho pop-up exhibit features 40 men and women in turbans and was photographed by British photographers, Amit and Naroop.

One of the photography subjects, Raghuvinder Singh, was born in India and has lived in New Jersey for the last decade with his wife and two children. In the photo, his smile is of pure happiness. But his life was not as joyful as he looks in the photo. Four years ago, a gunman walked into the Sikh Gurdwara (Sikh house of worship) in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, killing six Sikhs and injuring several including Raghuvinder’s father, Baba Punjab Singh, who was left paralyzed and unable to speak. He e can only communicate by blinking.

Lathan Dennis-Singh, aerospace engineer of Fairfax, Virginia, was also photographed for the exhibit, He became homeless at 13 and came to the United States in 1967 on a scholarship to study at the University of Michigan. It is at college where he became involved with and finally adopted Sikhism. He faced discrimination at the workplace.

“There was no group like the Sikh Coalition that could come forward and stand for me,” he said. “Today, it’s a little bit different. There are more laws to protect the victims of Sikh discrimination, bullying, and hate crimes. This is why the exhibition is so important. It can reach the wider society.”

With a spirit of Chardi Kala (eternal optimism) in mind, he believed that the power of love, the kindness to help others, and public awareness could eventually combat the hate Sikhs were facing.

Growing up in a small town of North Carolina, Jagmeet Singh, now the Media and Communications Manager at the Sikh Coalition, said that he had experienced bullying as a child because of his long hair, turban and beard.

He joined the Sikh Coalition last year and has been using his communication and media skills to work for Sikhs’ civil rights.

“Besides legal aid that we provide for Sikh individuals experiencing harassment, discrimination, and violence, we also help to change policies so that there is less systematic discrimination,” he said. “We work to educate the public about Sikhism. We are also trying to track where the violence against Sikhs is happening. Soft discrimination is also included, like you walk down the street, and someone calls you a terrorist. But that’s much harder to track.”

Satjeet Kaur, the development and communications director for the Sikh Colaition believes education is the key to resolve their problems. The public should not only be told what the Sikh faith is, but also be able to find similarities over differences and to have a positive association through story sharing.

“When you see the turban and beard, there’s nothing to fear,” said Kaur. “Our vision is that when you walk through this photo exhibition, you can connect with people on a very basic human level. Instead of just seeing an image of person with turban and beard, I saw somebody that was a survivor; I saw somebody that was resilient; I saw somebody that has the best smile I’ve ever seen. And that’s what we want people to walk away with.”

The exhibit closes on Sunday.

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Greg Spielberg and Craig Warga admire a photo of a young couple on a ferris wheel. Photo by Kait Richmond.

Selected as some of the year’s best photojournalism, pictures that captured the major and minor events of last year are on display at the Openhouse Gallery in NoHo, as part of the New York Press Photographers Association’s annual exhibit, The Year in Pictures 2010.

Photojournalist Craig Warga, 36, from Jackson Heights, Queens, looked at a group of pictures taken in Haiti last year, after the earthquake which ravaged the country and reflected on the nature of his profession.

“Photojournalism is a funny thing,” said Craig Warga. “Good work can sometimes come from horrible things.”

The exhibit showcases the best pictures from 2010, taken by press photographers in the New York Metro area. From 2,000 entries, a panel selected 200 pictures to be shown.

“I think it was a pretty tight contest,” Warga said. “There was big news last year that produced some interesting photojournalism.”

Many of the photos were of the Haitian earthquake. Warga, who works for the New York Daily News, said he was there three months after the earthquake as the country attempted to pick up the pieces and return to normal.

He photographed a cockfight, an assignment he called “brutal,” but captured a significant part of Haiti’s culture, “like a baseball game.” The Haitians, he said, were excited to show off their pastime and gave him a front row seat. His photos from the experience are featured in the exhibit.

While the Year in Pictures has a heavy focus on 2010’s biggest news stories, it also concentrates on life in New York City. Aristide Economopoulos, one of the most featured photojournalists in the show, photographed a cab driver parked next to a tourist bus. The cab is overtaken by the images on the bus of the Statue of Liberty and the American flag.

There are many New York Yankees photos, including one of Derek Jeter excitedly leading the team to the field. Another photo shows New York Mets player Ike Davis upside-down as he goes over a railing trying to catch a foul ball.

A favorite of Openhouse Gallery employee Anna Pankevich, 17, of the Upper West Side, is an elated Phillip Jackson Benson just after he knocked out his opponent at a boxing match at the BB King Blues Club and Grill in Times Square.

“There’s just so much emotion and happiness,” Pankevich said.

The big, white gallery was desolate on yesterday, but Director of Content, Greg Spielberg, 30 of the Lower East Side, said there aren’t a lot of visitors during the week. He said a lot more people will stop in over the weekend, a typical city trend.

Warga said he hopes that the exhibit can raise “a couple thousand” for the Chris Hondros Fund. The NYPPA is collecting donations in honor of Hondros who was killed in April while on assignment in Libya. The money raised will go towards supporting young photojournalists.

Warga knew Hondros and said that his death was a huge blow to the photojournalism community.

“If I had to choose one guy to represent all photojournalists, it would be him,” Warga said.

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Life Always anti-abortion billboard in SoHo targeting African-Americans drew criticism last month. The billboard, which has since been taken down, is part of a growing national campaign to deter Africans-Americans from having abortions.

For some anti-abortion groups, the new target is the African-American community—and they’re using billboards to get its attention.

The organization Life Always put up a billboard in SoHo last month featuring a young African-American girl and the words, “The most dangerous place for an African-American is in the womb”—part of a growing national campaign to deter Africans-Americans from having an abortion.

“Our goal, our ambition is to go across America with these messages and to go into the large urban areas where there are sizable black populations and communicate our message to them,” said Life Always board member Stephen Broden.

Lamar Advertising took the sign down two days after it went up amid concerns for public safety. Yet Broden said the campaign still stands by its message.

“I am disappointed that those who made the biggest squawk about it, who made the largest protest against the sign, did not capture the essence of our message and that is abortion is decimating our community,” he said.

According to a 2007 Center for Disease Control’s Abortion Surveillance report, African-American women have the highest rate of abortion in the United States, with about 32 abortions per 1,000 women 15 to 44-years-old; Caucasian women have about 9 abortions per every 1,000, making African-American women three times more likely to have an abortion.

In New York City, the rates are even higher. According to the city’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene Bureau of Vital Statistics report for 2009, more than 40,000 induced abortions were among African-American women—almost twice the number of live births within the black community.

But a report released in January by the Guttmacher Institute says the majority of abortion clinics are not necessarily in African-American neighborhoods. The report found that “less than one in 10 abortion clinics are located in predominantly African-American neighborhoods, or those in which the majority of residents are black.”

Ryan Bomberger, co-founder and creative director of the Radiance Foundation, which also uses billboards to promote an anti-abortion message, said the organization does not focus “solely on the black community; but when it comes to abortion, it is unavoidable to address where the most damage is being done.”

Bomberger developed the “Blacks are an Endangered Species” campaign, which began in Atlanta last year with 80 billboards. The signs displayed the face of an African-American baby and the message “Blacks are and Endangered Species, Toomanyaborted.com.”

The campaign is now in California with 70 billboards in the Los Angeles area, mostly in predominantly black neighborhoods.
The foundation has had similar campaigns in Arkansas, Texas and Wisconsin.

The billboards are funded through partnerships with local anti-abortion groups. Bomberger said the cost of each sign depends on the market where it is placed; the first campaign in Atlanta cost $20,000 and $6,000 in Los Angeles.

Several black public officials who spoke out against the SoHo billboard, including Rev. Al Sharpton, called its messages racist.

“The billboard was offensive, especially during Black History Month, and I had intended to hold a press conference Friday in front of the billboard to protest the message of racial profiling and against a woman’s right to choose,” Sharpton said in a press release.

Tolbert.mp3
Laverne Tolbert on how she became an anti-abortion activist.

La Verne Tolbert, the first African-American to serve on the Planned Parenthood board in the 1970s, supports the Radiance Foundation’s ad campaign. She initially believed in a woman’s right to choose. Yet as soon as she learned more about the practice of abortion, Tolbert said she became an anti-abortion supporter.

“Are black women targeted for abortion? Absolutely, yes,” Tolbert said.

During her time on the board, she said that tactics were used to sell the idea of abortion to the women. However she did not encounter any specific conversations about where to locate the health centers.

“I don’t recall any discussion about white vs. black communities,” Tolbert said. “It was always a discussion about the poor, and that is a catchall phrase for black.”

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Customers enjoy pastries and gelato at Ferrara, a pasticceria and espresso bar in Little Italy. Despite the neighborhood's identity crisis and shrinking size, Ferrara has managed to keep customers coming in for 118 years. Photo by Jessica Bell

Adeline Lepore-Sessa sat behind a paper-covered desk on the third floor of Ferrara, the pasticceria and espresso bar her family has owned for 118 years.

As she chatted about the history of her beloved family business, her phone rang and she signed off on her employees’ paperwork.

“The job is the job,” she said in her thick Brooklyn accent, referencing the lack of glamor involved in owning a business.

Despite a changing neighborhood and what some see as a growing lack of faith in the authenticity of Little Italy, Ferrara is still thriving in its role as a long-lasting, family-owned business.

Lepore-Sessa’s great-uncle and great-grandfather opened Ferrara in 1892 on the corner of Grand and Mulberry Streets. At that time, New York was inundated with Italian immigrants coming to the United States to find work and fulfill their American dreams.

After she started a family of her own, Lepore-Sessa, 46, came back to work permanently for the company 19 years ago.

“You know, it’s an ego thing. At first you want to try to make it on your own, but then you realize you want to work with the family,” she said.

Lepore-Sessa’s great-uncle Antonio Ferrara opened the café so Italians could have a place to get authentic Italian espresso. Ferrara officially became known as America’s first espresso bar, a slogan the company still uses today.

“We’ve been incorporated longer than New York,” Lepore-Sessa said.

Lepore-Sessa, a self-proclaimed daddy’s girl, can’t remember a time when she wasn’t coming into the shop with her father.

Her grandparents lived in Little Italy, but Lepore-Sessa and her three siblings grew up in the Dyker Heights and Bay Ridge areas of Brooklyn. Still, her constant visits to Ferrara made it feel like a second home — and a job.

“Well, I mean, it depends on what you mean by work,” she said with a laugh. “I would consider it work long before my father did. I was behind the counter from 8 years old.”

Just as Lepore-Sessa did in high school and college, many of Ferrara’s employees’ children work there in the summers, starting out serving gelato and moving up to serving pastries and working the cash register.

“We really are all like family around here,” said Enza Gambino, 39, a manager who has worked at Ferrara for 10 years.

During the peak of the recession in 2008, Lepore-Sessa said it was that sense of family that determined how they ran their business.

“You know, when times are tough, people have to decide — it’s either dinner or dessert. And, I mean, you have to eat,” she said of the change in business. “But we made it a point to not fire anyone. This is our family here.”

Lepore-Sessa also attributes a familial devotion to the business and its employees as the reason Ferrara has been able to thrive in a changing Little Italy.

Modern-day Little Italy is not what it once was. Now the community spans east to west from Elizabeth Street to Baxter Street, and north to south between Spring and Canal Streets, with the main action happening on Mulberry Street.

Even though the neighborhood has become much smaller, several businesses remained.

“When I was a kid, Little Italy was blocks long and blocks wide. It was a big neighborhood, and it was all Italian,” Lepore-Sessa said. “Tenants, business owners — everyone spoke Italian.”

Lepore-Sessa blames the expansion of SoHo and Chinatown for the shrinking of Little Italy.

“You have a younger, yuppier crowd moving in with the boutiques in SoHo, and Chinatown coming up from the south,” she said.

But Joseph V. Scelsa, president and founder of the Italian American Museum, says the reason SoHo and Chinatown were able to expand was because Italian-Americans wanted to leave.

“They moved out to the suburbs; it’s the American dream,” Scelsa said. “At the time, Little Italy was considered a ghetto. It’s not anymore, but then it was, and they wanted to leave. It was a goal.”

The majority of Italian-Americans started leaving Little Italy in the 1960s and 70s, but it wouldn’t have been noticeable until at least the 1980s, according to Scelsa.

“Now it’s not a neighborhood anymore. Some people call it a theme park,” Scelsa said. “There are probably less than 200 Italians living in Little Italy right now, and they are all in their 60s, 70s, 80s. In about 10 years there won’t be any Italians left living in Little Italy.”

For Lepore-Sessa, however, this doesn’t seem like the end of an era. Her café is surrounded by other authentic Italian, family-owned businesses. Across the street is Alleva, the first cheese shop in America, and right next door is E. Rossi & Co., a souvenir shop. Both establishments are more than 100 years old.

Despite an overwhelming number of tourists who pass through Ferrara on a daily basis, Gambino says the store still has a group of regulars — mostly people who work in Little Italy rather than live there.

Like many Italian-Americans, Lepore-Sessa moved away from the city to Manalapan, N.J.

“Me and my husband, we wanted our kids to have that suburban lifestyle,” she said.

Still, in her eyes, what remains of Little Italy is Italian tradition. She notes that all the business owners are still Italian-American and she doesn’t think that will change, especially at Ferrara.

Her son works at a desk just a few feet away from her own and will be the fifth generation to someday own and operate the family business.

“We’re Italian — it’s all about family for us,” she said.

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