Steven Thompson and his studio's color (Alexander Abnos / The Brooklyn Ink)

I | Art, To Start

Locust Hill, South Carolina is not a town. The small community on the outskirts of Greenville has a population barely large enough to register on a Google map. There are two roads and one lake. There are houses, but not many of them. Steven Thompson spent his first 18 years along these winding narrow roads, where everybody knew everybody, and nothing seemed to change.

Then one day he opened his front door and walked out. Destination: Clemson University. There were massive libraries there – appropriate, for someone intent on majoring in literature. They had a football team – Thompson was a huge fan. But one month in, still fresh in his dorm, his journey began to slow. Feelings obscured. Anxiety set in. On his own for the first time, Thompson broke down.

“Everything just became so bizarre to me…things were fundamentally without understanding,” he says today, fiddling with the wheels of a toy skateboard in his cluttered Williamsburg studio. “I don’t think I’m an artist BECAUSE of the nervous breakdown, but it definitely helped.”

Indeed, it took Thompson five years (and a transfer to the College of Charleston) before he took his first studio art class – a one-month short course on printmaking. He spent those five years as a pendulum. Sometimes a recluse, sometimes gregarious. Always, though, with a deep, unabiding, and simply unexplainable internal pain.

Slowly, tentatively, Thompson applied oil paint to plexiglass for his first project. His inner dialogue, still turbulent years after his Clemson episode, began to calm. Each brush stroke brought Thompson closer to secret places in the deep recesses of his person. Each color sang to him. In art, he could get lost in discovery. Thompson took a deep breath.

“You could say ‘I’m going to walk out this door and go into the city. I plan to go to a bar. I hope to meet my friend.’ But when the day comes around, you never know,” he says. “You could walk out the door and get smacked down by a car, and you’re gone forever.”

“When I sit down to make a work of art, it’s kind of like I’m stepping out of my door. I don’t really know what is going to happen. I have an idea of where I want to go, but I don’t know exactly where I’m going to end up.”

20 years after his first class, and it’s others who discover Thompson. They see him at galleries in New York City. In Georgia. In North Carolina. And on a cold December day, a former exotic dancer from Austin, Texas will walk into Oslo Coffee Roasters in Brooklyn and discover Thompson herself.

Merget, Ben, and the bean machine (Alexander Abnos/The Brooklyn Ink)

II | Brooklyn’s Roaster

Downtown Williamsburg may be a brick-and-mortar neighborhood, but glass and metal are beginning to loom large. Their smooth, silvery surfaces provide the facade for many an upscale condo building popping up in the area, monuments to gentrification for a community in flux.

Things begin to change to the north and west of McCarren Park. Here, glass shards powder the streets, lined with nothing but warehouses. A faint rumble emerges from one building on the corner, with chipping grey paint and a creaking front door. Motorcycle logos plaster the outer wall, appearing faded in the afternoon sun. Inside, mountains of dead metal and tools lie scattershot throughout the concrete floors. The rumble loudens. It smells like morning. In a side room, a door slides open, and within a single step you find yourself at the epicenter of one of Brooklyn’s most successful independent coffeehouses.

“Coffee always changes. It’s never the same,” says J.D. Merget, the founder and owner of Oslo Coffee Roasters. He has to raise his voice to be heard above the din of the roaster, currently cooking beans from a far away land. “It has a life at each stage. It has a life when it comes to us, it has a life when it’s roasted, and it has a life when it’s been brewed. It’s constantly evolving…or devolving, as the case may be.”

One thing that hasn’t changed is the roaster itself. The model in Oslo’s partition of this warehouse was made in the early 1980s, but the design has not been fundamentally altered since the early 20th century. Encased in dark red metal, a giant barrel rhythmically revolves. The coffee beans inside tumble like laundry, visible only through a tiny porthole on the front of the machine. Temperature and timing are paramount here. Cook the beans one second too long, one degree too hot, and the taste will suffer. Merget periodically removes a small metal bar from the front of the machine. It contains a sample of the beans within. Placing it near his nose, he inhales deeply. Not quite time yet.

Merget tuned in to this process some time ago. Formerly head of quality control and roasting at Kobricks Coffee in New Jersey, he started Oslo in 2003 at the insistence of his wife Kathy. The rationale for their shops location – on Roebling and Metropolitan in Williasmburg – was simple. It was cheap. Soon they found other advantages.

“It used to be you couldn’t get me to cross the bridge and visit my friends in Williamsburg. Now you can’t get me to cross the opposite way and go to Manhattan,” he says. “That happened pretty quick. Once we opened the store it was just like ‘What were we doing? This is such a great neighborhood.’”

Merget takes a sip of a new brew. This time, from the tiny African country of Burundi. Placing his nose inside the small glass tester cup, he inhales a sweet, floral bouquet. Taking a sip, the sensation turns to tart grapefruits, a short pause, and a finish of burnt sugar and tobacco. He nods approvingly, sets the cup down, and waits. In five minutes, he says, this same cup of coffee will taste noticeably different.

“The neighborhood is constantly changing, too,” he says. “It’s not what it was 10 years ago. It went from a sleepy little town that swelled on the weekends with visitors to the hustle and bustle of New York City.”

What has always remained, though, are the residents and their stories. When he started Oslo, Merget worked behind the counter all day, six days a week. He met customers from all walks of life, all pursuing their passions just like him. He got to know them. What they do. How they think. Where they’re going, and where they’ve been.

“At some point,” he says, “Brooklyn became this machine that attracts more and more and more creative people.”

The time has come. In one fell swoop, Ben (Oslo’s roaster operator) opens the door to the machine’s barrel, allowing an avalanche of steaming hot coffee beans to land on the platform below. Through air holes on the surface of the sifter, steam is sucked out while mechanical arms stir and jostle wave after wave of beans.

Merget observes this and takes another sip of the now-lukewarm Burundi coffee. The grapefruit is still there, but less pronounced. The pause between start and finish extends at least twice as long as it did previously. The taste experience ends with a new, flowery finish. In short, it tastes like a completely different cup of coffee.

“Ultimately, [the community] is simple,” he says. “It’s like-minded people coming together because we have passions and Brooklyn has the facilities for us to do what we want to do.”

A lever is pulled, and the now-cooled beans fall through a trap door in the roaster and into a grey plastic trash can. Another machine will sift through the beans to remove any rocks or debris that could ruin the grinders. Within a day, they’ll be up for sale in brown paper bags.

Brown bags and business (Alexander Abnos / The Brooklyn Ink)

III | Fashion and Function

The acid-washed denim vest needed some spicing up. That’s all Nayantara Banerjee knew. It needed flash. Pizazz. Style. Something feminine and eye-catching. Something fit for a Barbie doll. Because that’s exactly what the vest was.

“It was basically just a tube of fabric,” Banerjee says of the doll’s garment, the subject of the first sewing project she ever completed. Using a needle, thread, and advice from her mother, Banerjee added lime green lace trim to the collar and arm holes. She was six years old.

“I was not a prim and proper type of kid,” she says now, at 27. “My little brother, a little boy, thought I was disgusting.” She places special emphasis on “I,” as if her brother had no room to talk.

“He used to make me wash my hands before I played his Nintendo.”

So Banerjee’s hands turned to sewing instead. Her personal wardrobe expanded to include custom creations – constructed by herself, still with the help of her mother. Even with a bigger canvas, the Barbie doll aesthetic remained.

“I started getting really particular about what I wanted,” she says.” I wanted really girly things like huge full skirts and puffy sleeves.”

She wore them all with sneakers, to run around in.

Banerjee says this seated on a chair in the middle of her studio apartment in East Williamsburg. She sips at a cup of Oslo coffee. Banerjee glances around and apologizes for the haphazard look of her front room. “I used to live across the street…I only moved in here a month ago,” she says. There is nothing to apologize for. Her apartment is well-kept, outside of the pins, needles, thread spools, and scissors that smatter the surface of a wide wood table pressed against the wall.

But those things are to be expected in the home of a door-to-door seamstress.

“As friends started to be bridesmaids, they would ask me for alterations, then friends of friends started asking and I got requests for custom made things. Then one day on a whim I was just like ‘I’m gonna quit my job and see if I can make this work.”

Her job at the time involved posting instructional sewing videos and managing the web site of a fashion design start-up. Before that, with the ink still drying on her degree in fashion design (Syracuse), she worked for a company making women’s suits. In both jobs, marketing and trends directed the work. Banerjee’s mailbox became stuffed with magazines, their smooth pages dominated by advertisements and the smell of various perfume samples. Her Twitter feed became a tangled web of “what’s hot now” and “the next big thing.” It became too much to handle. Banerjee cancelled her subscriptions, and embarked on a simpler path.

“I get fed up with the branding and marketing of clothing sometimes,” she says. “We live in a world where people want something new, something more, and somebody’s going to give it to them. But a lot of times they’re just expressing that they want to look a certain way, not that they are a certain way.”

Today she trades under the title “The Williamsburg Seamster” – a play on the “scenester” title bestowed on so many of North Brooklyn’s more fashionable, event-attending types. When she started the business six years ago, Banerjee was a bartender, too. Now, she is the same as when she was six. She sews garments, and runs around.

“I don’t know that I could do it in another neighborhood,” she says. “There’s something about this North Brooklyn area. People are open with their homes, I offer a unique service…it just fits in with everything this neighborhood is about right now.”

Banerjee hasn’t left the design game completely. But now she plays it on her own terms. Just after quitting her job and before The Williamsburg Seamster matured, Banerjee began custom-making garments again. This time, for her friends. This time, it needed to be simple. Functional. The antithesis of everything the fashion and design industry was marketing towards.

Within a year, she nearly sold out her batch of customized aprons.

“They’re like giant pockets,” she says.

Banerjee and the tools of her trade (Alexander Abnos / The Brooklyn Ink)

The Ehlers adjustment (Alexander Abnos / The Brooklyn Ink)

IV | To Learn To Turn

At one point, Barb Ehlers greeted her clients in full rock climbing gear. Rugged boots, thick pants, and, sometimes, jackets with untold amounts of pockets. Ehlers, 5 foot 11 inches with fiery red hair and relentlessly focused expressions, had climbed Mount Everest on a whim. People paid her to get them in top shape now, and with no company dress code to follow, she would wear whatever she damn well pleased.

Today, in a studio on the 16th floor of a Manhattan high-rise, Ehlers dons a light blue tank top and black tights that cling to her slim, toned frame. Hair up, her expressions remain focused, even while laughing at the scene she finds herself in. She stands well over 6 feet now, the extra inches courtesy of a pair of black patent leather platform heels that lace up nearly to the top of her knees. It’s Wednesday night – time for her stripper class.

“I’ve been a jock all my life,” she says. “I know how to use my body. I know the muscles. But there’s this sexiness to using your body that I was never taught.  I can do push ups and pulls ups with a guy. I can dead-lift 205lbs, but to do a little sexy turn? That’s work for me!”

Ehlers, a personal trainer living in Williamsburg, takes this class each week with seven other women. Their instructor, Kimberly Smith, leads them through an array of moves that involve gyrating hips, slow leans forward, and dipping tooshes. Ehlers’ partner sits on a low-lying wicker chair while Ehlers uses the back of it to lift her body up with her arms. Carefully, Ehlers places her knees across her partners lap and shifts the weight from hand to hand. The goal here is to bob enticingly over the subject, lift up with the arms, extend legs, place toes on the ground, and slide the torso down slowly. Very slowly. And very, very close.

This is a bicycle, into a James Brown, into a full body slide.

“It’s just like a mountain climber!” Smith says as she demonstrates for the class.

“Yeah, I know,” says Ehlers. “That’s what I’m good at!”

Born in Bremen, Germany, Ehlers came up in a family where even her grandmother biked from place to place. Time passed by with roughhousing sessions from her sister. Eating took place at regular intervals, in controlled amounts. Breakfast. Big lunch. Something small in the evening.

At six, she moved to Queens. The transition was easy, but the kids seemed…different.

“It was like ‘Why aren’t you rolling around in the mud? Why aren’t you riding your bike around like a race car?’,” she says. “I felt tomboyish. There’s more of a gender difference here than there was there.”

There’s an atmosphere difference as well. In Queens, the Ehlers lived close by JFK airport, where the roar of passing jets (and their resulting pollutants) imbued the air. Just after moving to a new country, Barb developed a severe case of asthma.

“It hit me like a truck,” she says. “I couldn’t play, and I loved playing. I loved being outside, and I couldn’t do it. It takes your childhood life away.”

Soon, regularly scheduled pills went along with her regularly scheduled meals. A new character – an inhaler – added itself to the cast in her pockets. By 12, Ehlers had enough. She would breathe when she damn well pleased. She became a vegetarian, and her mother enrolled her in a karate class. At the beginning, she couldn’t make it through without reaching for her inhaler.

“I just couldn’t breathe,” she says. “Every time I got active, it got worse.”

Her sensei, an imposing man named Lee Ireland, would have none of it. Even as Barb gasped for air on his mat, the message rang firm.

“Breathe it out,” he commanded steadily, regularly.

“Just breathe it out.”

She did. Ehlers has not touched an inhaler since.

“A good teacher can show you a vision of yourself that you didn’t know was possible,” she says. “That’s something that I try to do with my clients, too, as a personal trainer. It’s the gift that [Ireland] gave me.”

Today, Ehlers trains so much, so vigorously, and in so many different ways that she needs to have clothes adjusted twice a year to account for her constantly changing body shape. TRX training, for example, has taken in her abdomen a couple inches. This is good. But now her little black dress poofs out at the sides. This is not good.

So at 10 a.m. the morning after her stripper class, Nayantara Banerjee pays a visit to Ehlers’ cozy one bedroom apartment in one of the last-remaining old style walk-ups by McCarren. Standing in front of a mirror in her living room, Ehlers lifts her arms up over her head as Banerjee carefully marks her body’s outline with safety pins.

A series of dead weights lie neatly on the floor next to the mirror, ordered according to size.

Kimberly Smith at work (photo by Halston Bruce / courtesy StripXpertease) and Thompson's work at rest (Alexander Abnos / The Brooklyn Ink)

V | The Cycle

The man carried stacks of money. Each stack contained one hundred dollars. All in ones. He sat in a low-lying chair in dim light, throwing bills on the strip club’s stage for whichever dancers he liked the most. Swigging vodka, the man leaned back in his seat. It creaked under his considerable girth. He liked Kimberly Smith. So when she came around to collect her tip, he told her a few things.

Smith looked at the man with wide brown eyes. She smiled with disarming grace. Then she walked away toward the manager of the club, demanding that the man be thrown out immediately. The manager remembered the stacks of money, and where his customer was currently spending it. He declined. The man would stay right where he was.

“Every single night there’s so much – you’re groped, you’re touched, you’re talked dirty to – there’s too much happening in one night to remember one situation,” Smith says, struggling to recall exactly what it was the man said that drove her to quit after 10 years of being a stripper. “That’s when I felt like I should move on. Nobody was on my side.”

Smith went home early, and angry. Sleep evaded her. At 3 a.m., she called the club, and told them to find a new dancer. Five years later, with StripXpertease, she teaches women from all walks of life the moves she learned.

There is an important caveat, though. Nobody is ever, in any way, encouraged to strip professionally.

“I get calls all the time from people saying ‘I want to be a stripper’ and my response is ‘Well, we can’t help you,’” she says. “I’m turning away money, but I just can’t justify helping some naive girl get into that industry, and then lord knows what happens to her. I don’t want that on my conscience.”

She knows all too well the cyclical, absorbing nature of the profession. Smith was in 6th grade in Austin when her drug-abusing mother moved them into a halfway house. Both of their housemates worked as strippers. One was still using. Both frequently strutted the hallways fully topless, as if it was the most normal, natural thing in the world. After all, they were just breasts.

“Looking back, it was bizarre to be living in that situation,” Smith says, emphasizing that she suffered no abuse or wrongdoing during her stay there. “I mean, they were strippers. It just wasn’t an ideal situation for a child to be in.”

But even as the women around her toiled in search of a better life, Smith couldn’t help but admire them a bit. These women were confident. They were in control. They had amazing bodies and exuded potent sexuality. In the comfort of the gaze of others, they could be the stars of their own intimate stage. For Smith, who long aspired to be an actress, these were significant qualities.

At the age of 18, she got a job as a dancer at a local club. Her 10-year journey through the seedy underbelly of strip clubs began.

“Girls are constantly getting evicted, getting their phones turned off, not being able to pay their bills, and they’re in this constant cycle,” she says. “That’s why girls dance to really sad music or really hard music. They’re angry. It’s just a horrible job. You’re getting paid to rub your crotch, your butt, your boobs on his penis. Nobody really wants to do that.”

Smith’s StripXpertease lesson plan simply removes money from the equation. Women, she says, want to know how to move, feel, be sexier. Victoria’s Secret rakes in countless millions based on that very concept. So do make-up companies. And hair salons. Buy this bra. Apply this mascara. Take on this expensive style. Even pole dancing classes, popularized by actress Sheila Kelley, market themselves as a physical fitness regime. There are tangible, physical results.

Smith’s aim is entirely mental. In the eyes of many, this makes it all the more dangerous. StripXpertease has been kicked out of multiple studios and received negative press, while pole dancing flourishes (despite the fact that most women do not have a pole in their homes). A YouTube video of Smith performing a routine with annotations explaining how she was moving and why was taken down by site administrators. Meanwhile the exact same video, without annotations, remained live.

“Apparently it’s more offensive to teach people how to do this nasty stuff than just doing the nasty stuff,” she says.

The solution would seem to be to open her own studio, but it’s easier said than done. The two main ingredients – money and time – are in short supply for Smith at the moment. In Williamsburg, though, she has a liberal, open neighborhood more likely to accept her enterprise with open arms.

“When I first moved out here I didn’t like it at all,” she says. “It’s like…everyone’s white. Everyone has a decent amount of money. Everyone’s ‘cool.’ It just seemed so pretentious. I said ‘If I’m going to live in the white suburbs, I’m going to go back to Texas where it doesn’t snow.’”

“It’s grown on me, though. I like the small, mom and pop feel here. I think a studio would do really great.”

Smith lives with her boyfriend in an apartment just off the hustle and bustle of Bedford Avenue. On a cold December day, she walks through the light drizzle into Oslo Coffee Roasters. The barista greets everyone who enters, including Smith, with a pleasant, familiar “hello.” Several pieces of art hang on the walls of the cafe, including one large web of wood and plastic suspended across from the front counter.

Smith’s eyes squint as she examines the sculpture. At first, it looks like little more than a series of translucent plastic bags suspended by planks. She inches closer.

“Oh!” She exclaims. It has become clear that inside the plastics are countless small woodcut figures, with intricate swooping patterns drawn in pen on top of them. Smith’s eyes settle back into their wide gaze. Her raised cheeks begin to relax with understanding.

“That’s a lot of work right there,” she says. “That’s so cool.”

There is a pause.

“What’s the artist’s name?”

Seven developers are in the running to obtain sole possession of building 180 luxury condos units, and a hotel with 225 rooms. The developer has not been named as of yet, but the Post reports that construction would begin in 2013 and finish by 2015.

BookCourt is something of a visual aberration for anyone walking down the northern part of Court Street. Sandwiched between a deli, a UPS store and a Starbucks, the bookshop stands out against the background. It’s too indie to be there, only blocks away from Barnes & Noble – and too nice.

The store was already quite the oddity when Henry Zook and Mary Gannett opened it in 1981. Not because it was surrounded by chain businesses: it simply was one of the only shops on the street.

“The number of people walking by was nothing of the order of today,” Mary says. “People told us we were crazy when we opened BookCourt. But then people came in and bought our books.”

They still do.

In theory, the business model behind independent bookstores is flawed: the product they sell isn’t anything different from what chains – and Amazon.com – provide. Places like BookCourt, three decades and still standing, appear to be an anachronism. So why – how are they still there? Oran Teicher, CEO of the American Booksellers Association resorts to quoting Mark Twain: “the reports of our death have been greatly exaggerated.”

A less literary answer would point to the fact that some people actually prefer buying their books from small brick-and-mortar stores. It’s called localism – a community’s hostile response to “the corporatization of economy,” according to Prof. David Hess, a sociologist at Vanderbilt University.

Brooklyn would seem an ideal place for reading – and buying — local. But this alone doesn’t explain BookCourt’s success, given that so many other stores in the borough (including their former Smith Street neighbor Heights Books) have failed. The shop has expanded three times. When it opened, its gross income was $75,000; now Henry says it’s “in the millions: let’s say I’d like it to be three million someday.” The staff has increased from the two original founders to 20 employees, including their eldest son, 27-year-old Zack. Although the couple is separated now, they still run the place together.

While selling books isn’t a lucrative enterprise – if anything, it only provides single-digit profit margins, Henry says – the store has found a way to endure, and prosper.

Hess says that a bookshop needs to differentiate itself for localism to function. This means three things: selling products that can’t be found elsewhere; offering lower prices than the competition; and most importantly, turning the business into what sociologists call “third spaces” – public gathering spots that function much like bars or barbershops. What independent shop owners need to sell is a sense of identity.

And that’s precisely what BookCourt set about trying to do.

From the start, Henry and Mary had an eye toward selecting books that would grab the attention of an already literary Brooklyn. The couple wasn’t entirely new to the book business: they’d moved to New York to go into publishing, and had previously worked at the Wordsworth bookshop in Boston. After a year and a half in the city, they realized they missed “the excitement of all the books as opposed to one publisher’s books,” Henry says. They rented an old barbershop near their Cobble Hill apartment and made the transition to bookselling.

It was a bold move for two 27 year-olds. BookCourt was on the wrong side of Atlantic Avenue, closer to Smith Street’s crack dealers than to wealthier Brooklyn Heights. But the couple didn’t see it that way: though some places were “sketchy” at night, they say, the neighborhood was otherwise “friendly” and “solid.” It had a strong community of publishers and literary people who started going to BookCourt. Some never left.

Tom Jory, now a close friend of the family, walked past their door on the day of the opening. He says he was immediately “struck by the quality of the stock: literary, current and important non-fiction.” For him, Henry’s and Mary’s strength always lied in their ability to adapt to their customers’ tastes and provide them with titles from small and university presses difficult to get from other places, especially from chains.

Zook and Gannett, though, explain their success in a more pragmatic way: they’ve owned the building since 1984.

“The ‘biggie’ is the rent,” Henry says. “That’s what kills a bookstore.”

He’s right. St Mark’s bookshop, in the East Village, just went through months of negotiation with Cooper Union to get its rent reduced and avoid closure. Yet Henry and Mary wouldn’t have been able to purchase the store in the first place had they not managed to pay off their initial investment in merely three years. Granted, the cost had nothing to do with current real estate: they bought BookCourt for $160,000.  Still, Henry says they had to “work like dogs” to get there.

***

Zack Zook with Michael Moore

It was more than a clever business decision. Replacing the rent with a mortgage sheltered the family from the sharp increase of housing in Cobble Hill. It also anchored them in the community as they moved above the store. The situation came with more advantages than drawbacks.  While the demands of work never slackened, regular customers became friends. Mary says the bookshop became the place where her two sons’ friends “always gravitated.” Zack remembers the “terrible influence” the staff had on him as a nine year-old; he enumerates early reads: the Cursed Poets – Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Lautréamont.

BookCourt grew with the area. In 1990, it added space in the basement. Six years later, the store expanded to the contiguous flower shop as their neighbor moved away. Meanwhile, the neighborhood grew wealthier. Families who’d been there for generations could no longer afford the rent. “Wall Street people,” Zack says, moved in. And so did Barnes & Noble, on Court Street — Zack and his friends went to throw eggs at it. The family thought their time had come, but it was the customers who kept coming.

“People made it a point to tell us: ‘we’re here, we’re not there’,” Mary says. “That Christmas was one of our best ever.”

By the late 1990s, BookCourt had built a community of loyal customers, both for its general stock and for the children’s section built by Mary. But competing with a chain remained a challenge. Mary says they pushed back where they could: customer service and special orders. “Special” meant that Henry could hand deliver the 20 volumes of the Oxford English Dictionary to a client’s house.

While Barnes & Noble made them work harder, having their son enter the business made them more creative. “When Zack decided to join us, that was a big thing,” Henry says.

Before Zack started managing BookCourt in 2005, the store did host the occasional event. He pushed to make the readings regular events and brought in famous writers like Don De Lillo, filling the store to capacity. At the beginning, the readings took place twice a week; now, they happen every day. The store has become so quintessentially “Brooklyn” that it was featured in the third season of the HBO series “Bored to Death” written by Brooklyn author Jonathan Ames. When the series premiered at BookCourt at the beginning of October, the shop was packed. A week earlier, Michael Moore had “occupied” the place to give a reading in front of a crowd of nearly a hundred.

Zack and his parents do not charge for events – even as some bookshops have resorted to selling seats. Publishers cater for the readings; customers can buy the books.  On a good evening, they manage to sell a hundred copies.

Zack has also created a literary magazine, “Cousine Corinne’s Reminder,” where he publishes Brooklyn authors, poets and photographers. Some of them, like Emma Straub, the author of “Other People We Married,” work at BookCourt, too.  Future plans include building a new website for the store, where events will be live streamed, and opening a café if Zack gets his way. Henry and Mary aren’t convinced.

“We didn’t open a bookstore to sell coffee,” Henry says. “Zack is more of a social animal than his parents.”

The truth is that BookCourt has already turned into a social hub. For the space it has grown to offer, for the authors it attracts, for the community it has built along the years. During the readings, Zack isn’t the only one who shakes the hands of regulars – the whole family does. But success is not taken for granted: their last extension opened the day the stock market collapsed in 2008. “It’s ironic,” Mary says, “ Our most successful time is also the most unsettling: we don’t know where the economy is going.”

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Praise for the Good Book (Store)

Over $1,000 is spent every day on food for over 5,000 people at Occupy Wall Street (Ravi Kumar/ The Brooklyn Ink)

Peter Dutro, 36, of Brooklyn is one of the members of the finance committee at Occupy Wall Street. Dutro, a business technology management undergraduate at the Polytechnic Institute of New York University, has been helping the protest since September 20. He is well-built and wears reading glasses. He works part-time as a tattoo artist in Queens. He spoke with The Brooklyn Ink’s Ravi Kumar last night at Zuccotti Park.

The Brooklyn Ink: How much do you receive in donations daily?  

Peter Dutro: In the boxes, we have been getting $7,000 a day. And a lot of online donations. But there are some issues with the accounts, we are waiting (for funds) to be released by our fiscal sponsor.

The  Ink: How much have  you received overall so far?  

Dutro: We have a little over $100,000.

The Ink: And where does the money go?

Dutro: Food is our biggest expense. We spend roughly $1,000 every day.

The Ink: Are there any plans for the future and what you will do with the money?

Dutro: There is a lot of thinking about long-term sustainability in the minds of a lot of people. We haven’t made any decisions. We are trying to figure out a way to have a body that deals with financial decisions.

The Ink: Do you have an official title?

Dutro: We have no leader, so we really don’t have titles.

The Ink: How did you get involved in the finance committee?

Dutro: Basically Victoria Sobel (one of the members of the committee) started a finance committee. I heard her plead day in, day out for help. I felt so bad for her. Finally, I felt morally compelled to help her.

The Ink: How many people are there in the finance committee?

Dutro: There are six people.

The Ink: How are duties assigned in your committee?

Dutro: Well, we use responsibility assignment metrics, a tool that is used to assign tasks. Very often, we need to report to a legal or fiscal sponsor. We define tasks and we put in the time frame.

The Ink: Who is your fiscal sponsor?

Occupy Wall Street, the newspaper: The Numbers (Source: KickStarter)

Dutro: The fiscal sponsor is Alliance for Global Justice, a 501c3 organization.

The Ink: How do you get funds?

Dutro: The money comes through the donations. We have been getting lots of online donations.  Although we’ve been having some trouble with our online accounts.

The Ink: What kind of trouble?

Dutro: When we were first trying to organize and figure out the banking aspect, it was very ad-hoc. People were just doing things. We have now got our paperwork in order and are organized. It’s really chaotic, really hard to do something like accounting.

The Ink: When do you have meetings?

Dutro: It’s been a little hard for us to meet at the same time because most people in finance committee have a job. Usually, we have been meeting after general assembly meetings at night.

The Ink: How are you going to make sure you are spending responsibly?

Dutro: That is why we have budget proposals.

The Ink: Are your transactions public?

Dutro: We are in the process of making it public. In the next couple of days, we are going to post it online.

The Ink: There has been a concern that the issue of sanitation has been ignored in the park. Given the large donations, why are there no portable restrooms here?

Dutro: We are not allowed to have structures in the park. Talk to Mayor Bloomberg about this, and give us the permit.

 

 

***

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The Williamsburg design on promotional Camel Blue packs (Image courtesy The Ballast NYC)

By Elisabeth Anderson

Some Brooklyn residents and politicians have had—forgive us—smoke coming out of their ears the past two months over a promotion involving Camel Blue cigarettes.

The reason?  The pack included an illustration of the brand’s iconic camel on what looks to be Kent Avenue, in front of a Williamsburg Bridge backdrop, with Williamsburg itself as a selling point.  “Some call it the most famous hipster neighborhood,” the package copy begins.  “But it’s not about hip.  It’s about breaking free.”

City officials, echoing perhaps the toughest-on-tobacco mayoral administration ever—the City Council voted last week to expand the city smoking ban to parks, beaches, and Times Square—were furious, citing yet another attempt to make smoking seem cool in the eyes of the young and impressionable.   Health Commissioner Thomas Farley led the charge to block the cigs from city stores, telling the Daily News “I am particularly disturbed that this effort to recruit young smokers exploits the name and image of Brooklyn’s vibrant Williamsburg neighborhood.”  The packs did live to see the light of bodega shelf days, however, although the promotion itself ended at the end of the January.

But one question remains unanswered: Why Williamsburg?

The Williamsburg packs, it turns out, were born of a larger promotional campaign by R.J. Reynolds, the nation’s second-largest tobacco company.  The campaign, known as The Break Free Adventure, was built around the notion that the camel had left the pack and gone of a journey around the country.  The promotion was launched exclusively online in September, behind the wall of the Camel consumer website.  The Ink tried to gain access to poke around, but was denied.  In the increasingly-regulated world of consumer-facing tobacco marketing, Camel requires third-party age verification from any consumer who opts in to joining the virtual Camel community.

Consumers with access, meanwhile, were encouraged via e-mail and direct mail—there was no point of sale or print advertising for this particular campaign—to guess the camel’s destinations.  Each guess, right or wrong, represented an entry into a sweepstakes for one million airline miles, the winner of which was announced in November.

“The primary driver of the promotion was to drive traffic to the site,” David Howard, a spokesman for R.J. Reynolds, explained to The Ink. “Which it did, successfully.”

R.J. Reynolds then expanded the promotion to the product side, announcing ten locations that would be featured on packs of Camel Blues, formerly Camel Lights.  The Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act, which was signed into law last year to give the Food and Drug Administration regulatory oversight in the industry, bars tobacco companies from using words like “light,” “mild,” and “medium” to describe their products.

Packs of Camel Blues featuring locations were shipped nationally in December and January.  All the locations—including Austin, Tx., Las Vegas, and Route 66—had an element of ‘cool.’ They’ll remain on shelves until they sell out, but distribution has ended.  The goal, Howard said, was to pick “culturally unique locations that we thought would be entertaining for adult tobacco consumers.”

To Howard’s knowledge, R.J. Reynolds did not send scouts to the selected locations to conduct research.  No matter.  The Williamsburg pack copy tried to capture the neighborhood’s mood: “It’s about last call, a sloppy kiss goodbye and a solo saunter to a rock show in an abandoned building.  It’s where a tree grows.  It’s Camel in the Williamsburg corner of Brooklyn.”

That copy was cringe-worthy to some Williamsburg residents.  “I don’t know whether to be offended as a smoker, a Williamsburger, or a human being,” wrote The Brooklyn Paper’s Andy Campbell last month.  It’s “…as if Camel marketers went to the Wikipedia, looked up ‘hipster,’ and then hired my grandfather to design a cigarette box.”

The packaging also angered those who care about kids.  Yes, they say, Camel was within its rights to create the Williamsburg pack.  But to some there was no denying that the packaging would have a visual appeal to any child who saw it in a store, or any teen whose friend had a pack. “I don’t like it,” Jeff Ewusi, A high school guidance counselor, told NY1. “Not around this neighborhood, with plenty of schools close in this area and students flooding this neighborhood everyday, hitting the corner stores.  It’s definitely not a positive.”

It’s a concern that resonates in a particular way at a time when statewide anti-tobacco spending is down, Mayor Bloomberg’s efforts notwithstanding.  According to Tobacco Free Kids, an advocacy group, New York will only be spending $58.4 million on tobacco prevention in fiscal year 2011, a paltry 23 percent of the $254.3 million the Centers for Disease Control are allotting to the state this year.  The funds are the result of the 1998 Master Settlement Agreement, whereby the tobacco companies agreed to settle with the states in the form of annual funding toward anti-tobacco initiatives, especially youth smoking prevention; states have only used a portion of their funds in the years since toward the ends they were intended.

Meanwhile, smoking has declined in the United States in the past ten years.  The reported smoking rate has hovered around 20 to 21% since 2005 according to the Centers for Disease Control, a drop from as high as a Gallup-reported 28% earlier in the last decade.  The Bedford Report, which provides analyst research on equities, reported last week that American demand for cigarettes is down 4.7% from last year; still, revenues have stayed flat as tobacco companies continue to increase their product prices.  Camel held 19 percent of the coveted “ASU30” bracket, or adult smokers under 30, in 2010, according to the publicly available ReynoldsAmerican Investor Day presentation from November 2010.  Forty-four percent of its buyers were under 30, and the brand saw 10% of tobacco consumers in that category switch from another brand to Camel.

As far as the Break Free Adventure is concerned, the remaining packs are selling out as we speak, and the campaign will likely fade from the Brooklyn consciousness over time.  The camel has left the borough.

Juhea Kim, designer for local fashion line LIBER New York (Courtesy of Juhea Kim).

By Faaria Kherani

Juhea Kim, Fort Greene designer of the new fashion line LIBER New York, makes her trip from Brooklyn to New York City’s Garment District. Her list of stops includes fabric stores, trim stores, where she buys zippers and buttons, and patternmaking factories– stops other designers can and often will skip. So why does she bother?

Kim is part of an emerging trend of New York designers. She gets personally involved in the making of her clothes to keep their production ethical and local.

Among the dozens of designers following this trend are Brooklyn designer Georgia Varidakis, whose jewelry is handcrafted in New York,  and Miss Lonelyhearts, with a line of handbags, outfits, and accessories—all locally designed and produced. These designers, along with Kim and a group of others, recently showed off their local products at a sample sale at the Ace Hotel.

Before starting her fashion line, Kim became disillusioned with the “cheap-chic” way many retail giants produce clothing. H&M, for example, is a popular brand that does not own any factories and outsources its goods from approximately 700 independent suppliers, mostly in Asia and Europe.

This past January, chopped and slit H&M clothes were found in a dumpster on 35th Street in Manhattan. The clothes, many of which were produced in the Far East and Africa according to the IBS Center for Management Research, did not sell. They were cut, supposedly by store managers, so that the patterns could not be reused.

Kim tries to keep her business local and to bring value to her clothes by supervising quality control – both of her clothing and the production environment.

Kim admits that from a business perspective, keeping production local is difficult.

“You’re basically killing your margins, and how much it costs to produce clothing here is much higher [than abroad].” Kim spends $30 to produce a t-shirt she sells for just under $60, while most large retail companies will spend $5 to produce the same priced t-shirt abroad.

The international fashion industry is beginning to catch on. In a recent lecture at the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum, Tone Tobiasson, co-founder of Nordic Initiative Clean and Ethical (NICE) in Norway, cited the H&M incident as evidence of the devaluation of clothing produced cheaply in developing countries.

“Local is the new organic,” says Tobiasson, who believes local production can help solve problems with fashion production. “I’m so sick of looking at labels and getting no information whatsoever other than ‘Made in China’ and how to wash it!”

Kim is willing to make the financial sacrifice for her ethically conscious line. She speaks of factories in China where it is so hot that factory employees can barely work.

“Where is the beauty in that kind of thing?” says Kim. “What is the beauty in buying a piece of clothing if that’s how it’s made?”

But Kim admits that she has to be a part of the larger industry to keep her line economically sustainable. She says she makes a marginal profit from her clothes, and has financial support from an investor. “I can’t be completely separate from what’s going on out there. We’re all drinking the same water.”

Source4Style textile provider CEO Summer Rayne Oakes has started a business to make finding ethically produced textiles easier for designers like Kim.

“New designers are always afraid to drop their toes in the water,” Oakes says. She wants to help designers make the transition to ethical fashion production worldwide, and she says larger, well-established designers are interested as well.

Tobaisson thinks addressing ethical issues is often too complicated for smaller, investor-dependent companies, either because of their size or their restricted budget.

But Kim has proved herself a confident designer that retailers in search of an ethical and sustainable business model will be looking to in the future.

Many of the pastries offered at La Table Exquise in Bedford Stuyvesant are sugar free in response to the neighborhood's high diabetic rate. (La Toya Tooles/The Brooklyn Ink)

The outside of Ms. Dahlia’s Café on the 440th block of Norstrand Ave in Brooklyn is a sign of changing times. There are wicker and metal benches nestled in the nook of bay windows with colorful cushions placed around.  It’s an unusual sight on the otherwise bustling but often grimy street.

“There’s curb appeal with the pillows on the bench,” said Margo Lewis, co-owner of the one-year-old café. “Nobody is doing that around here.”

She’s right. On this short block, located in Bedford Stuyvesant, there is the inevitable corner convenience store, an African hair-braiding salon and apartment buildings built in the 1920’s. What could have been thriving storefronts are often just grates of past businesses. Trash is common along the sidewalk and in the gutters.

Ms. Dahlia’s outside benches and cushions are a novelty in Bed Stuy, her carefully swept sidewalk an island of cleanliness.  And no other business can match Ms. Dahlia’s cucumber lemonade. These once rare cafés and coffee shops have now become commonplace.

Walk along any major street in Bed Stuy and chances are there is a café or bakery that wasn’t there five years ago. One theory is gentrification.

Bed Stuy has seen a drastic increase in its middle and upper class residents, many of them young black professionals, says Michael Rafferty, economic development officer at Bedford Stuyvesant Restoration.

The new and wealthier arrivals “create a demand for services that weren’t asked for five years ago,” Rafferty said.

The recent increase in new businesses is also a surprising byproduct of the listless economy, which has depressed rent prices for commercial real estate in Bed Stuy, creating opportunities for a new crop of budding entrepreneurs.

“It’s been really hard for folks to find jobs. And most people take one of two options: go back to school or start a business,” Rafferty said.

In the last three months several bakeries and café’s have opened in the area, particularly around the Clinton Hill boarder to the west and a few blocks off of Fulton Street in the south.

Among the newcomers is Brooklyn Stoops at 748 Myrtle Ave, a cafe where costumers can enjoy breakfast or brunch.

Rafferty, who runs the Business Improvement District of Fulton Street, is excited about the new businesses.

“People definitely want to see bakeries,” he said, “there’s a substantial amount of purchasing power here.”

However, starting a new business isn’t the same as maintaining a successful one.

“Once the buzz wears down,” said Rafferty, “there are a lot of systemic challenges. I’ve seen a lot of businesses open and close pretty quickly.”

The economy that makes it possible for these businesses to be open, Rafferty said, is also what keeps them struggling.

“Consumer confidence and consumer spending is a major hurdle for every industry,” he said. “Spending isn’t as good as it used to be.”

For every store that opens in Bed Stuy, it’s possible that another is closing.

Take for instance Tiny Cup. Lisa Bayer opened the store three years ago at 279 Nostrand Ave, just a few blocks from Ms. Dahlia’s. Located right in the center of Bed Stuy, Tiny Cup was a popular attraction, serving Seattle-style coffee and offering free wireless internet access.

A few weeks ago, Tiny Cup patrons were greeted with a sign on the door announcing a change in management.

“This has been a personally difficult year for me and the decision to move my life in a different direction has been a challenging one,” wrote Bayer. “After much reflection, I have made the choice to turn over the management and ownership of Tiny Cup.” According to Bayer’s letter, the owners of Izzy’s Coffee Den, a store in North Carolina, will be taking over.

Other local bakeries are struggling but they aren’t out of the game yet.

Sebastien Chaqui and Mylene Mirande added their store, La Table Exquise, to the line-up of confectioners in Bed Stuy in November 2009. But unlike other stores, La Table Exquise offers a twist that Chaqui and Mirande hope will make their store unique: it is the first and only sugar free bakery in Bed Stuy.

From chocolate croissants to fresh mixed-berry tarts, 90 percent of what Chaqui makes is sugar free—a conscious response to the high number of diabetics living in the community.

Despite the beauty of Chaqui’s pastries, he and Mirande have been struggling to develop a solid clientele. In September, they briefly considered closing.

“I lose money every day,” said Chaqui. “Sometimes you have to do what you have to do. You can’t lose money everyday like this for years and years.”

La Table Exquise was featured on the Bed Stuy Blog last week to encourage neighbors to patron the store.

“Everyone who tried their pastries loved them and it looked like the business would be a favorite spot for Bed Stuy residents,” posted the blogger. “Instead, business during the summer months was slow, and after an increase in business in the early fall, things are slowing down again. We really need to give them our support.”

Rafferty says a lot of the problems with small businesses like La Table Exquise is that the owners seem to be short on actual business acumen.

“They’ve got a great product. It’s attractive but they don’t spend enough time on advertising and marketing, “ he said. “Often times the creativity needed to keep a business sustainable isn’t thought about.”

First time costumer, Jamilah Lemieux, wasn’t even aware that her fresh berry tart was sugar free and was shocked to learn of the store’s specialty.

“That changes the game,” she said. “I’m a lot more impressed.”

When asked why there is no sign to indicate his bakery’s unique offerings, Chaqui says it is not to deceive sugar lovers but simply because he forgets.

Lemieux thinks that while La Table’s sugar-free treats are unique, they are not in line with the neighborhood’s expectations.

“I really enjoyed my tart. It’s cute and different for the neighborhood,” said Lemieux. “I appreciate that he has a specialty but I’m not sure if it’s sustainable yet.

La Table Exquise from La Toya Tooles on Vimeo.

Exterior rendering of BioBAT (Courtesy of HOK)

By Faaria Kherani

Sunset Park’s Brooklyn Army Terminal, the embarkation point for 3 million soldiers and massive, ocean-going vessels in years past, is carving out a future as the centerpiece of Brooklyn’s commercial biotechnology boom.

The New York City Economic Development Corporation (EDC) and the State University of New York (SUNY) Downstate Medical Center are spearheading the ambitious biotechnology development. Until now, however, the local community itself has had little involvement in the large-scale development happening in its own backyard.

New York City and New York State have put up $12 million and $48 million, respectively, to fund the new center, called BioBAT, after its Brooklyn Army Terminal location on Sunset Park’s western waterfront between 58th and 63rd streets.

BioBAT will occupy the massive, nine-story Building A of the terminal, which has been sitting vacant for years.

According to BioBAT President Dr. Eva Cramer, the building will provide 486,000 square feet of commercial space for companies engaging in biotech research. The project is slated for completion in 2011, although the recession has slowed the process. The anchor tenant, International AIDS Vaccine Initiative (IAVI), occupies 36,000 square feet – approximately 7 percent – and has 40 employees working at the still mostly empty BioBAT facility.

Though the army terminal project promises to become a crucial part for local neighborhood development, Jeremy Laufer, district manager of Community Board 7 (CB7), said the Sunset Park community has been woefully left out of the process. He said the EDC did not explain the project to the community board at any point, and CB7 Chair Randolph Peers said neighborhood representatives were “not even invited to the Mayor’s announcement, or the ribbon cutting.”

BioBAT’s Cramer says not inviting any community board representative to the opening ceremonies was an oversight. “I apologize. I am extremely anxious to work with the neighborhood because I think there’s wonderful opportunity for everyone to grow together,” she said. Cramer noted that Councilwoman Sara Gonzalez, who grew up in Sunset Park, was asked to speak at the Mayor’s announcement.

To further integrate future employees into neighborhood businesses, Cramer said she is working to arrange a local van service to shuttle between the Army Terminal and Fifth Avenue, one of Sunset Park’s most lively streets. Employees will be able to eat, shop, and relax on Fifth Avenue during breaks.

Despite the recent communication gap between the developers and the community leaders, all parties involved said they fully support the project’s overall goal of developing Brooklyn as a center for biotechnology research. Laufer stressed that the community board “supports improving the economic climate in the community and bringing jobs to the community.” This will involve initiating a connection between the expectations of Sunset Park’s residents and the high hopes of biotech developers.

The development is expected to create over 1,000 well-paying jobs, according to Mayor Bloomberg. Most newly created jobs will be for scientists and researchers, but blue-collar jobs will also need to be filled.

“They would be more the secretarial type jobs,” says Cramer. “One of the wonderful things [about BioBAT] is that you can ship from there. Obviously we would need help in loading, shipping, and trucking.”

According to Cramer, the army terminal in Sunset Park was chosen because it sits on 97 acres of land and is close to the N subway line, which provides direct access to main transportation lines in Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Queens. The terminal also has it’s own ferry landing with water taxi service to lower Manhattan. Researchers and employees will have the option of living in Manhattan or will be able to commute to BioBAT from Downstate Medical Center in East Flatbush.

BioBAT is the final step in Downstate Medical Center’s three-phase project for biotech development. Downstate already has an incubator, a smaller-scale facility for young companies in their nascent stages, and an accelerator facility, where larger biotech research companies can move in order to grow more quickly.

Downstate’s investment in the project allows them to find jobs and internships for students with top biotech companies without leaving New York City. Four Downstate students are currently working with IAVI at the BioBAT location.

Cramer sees BioBAT as a potential global center for biotechnology development. “My goal is to have all that space turn into an enormous science park.” According to Cramer, science parks around the world want to collaborate and establish satellite offices worldwide.

Read more stories about Sunset Park:

Brooklyn Pingpong Champ—Age 11

The Dilemma of Highly Educated Illegal Immigrants

Sunset Park School’s Scores Are Among City’s Highest

(Photo credit: Matt Rodigheri)

By Vinnie Rotondaro

On Wednesday I met with Russian billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov, the recently minted owner of the New Jersey Nets, at the Clover Club, a bar in Carroll Gardens. Prokhorov is the first-ever foreign owner of an NBA team. He never drinks. “Maybe a glass of red wine sometimes,” he said, “with dinner.” So we sipped cups of English Breakfast tea instead. Below is our conversation, which has been edited down for the sake of brevity, and clarity.
_______________________________________________________________________

Mr. Prokhorov, I want to get a better sense of who you are and where you come from.

(Prokhorov fools as if the question is out of line. He pretends to get up and leave)

Interview over?

(We huff and smile)

Where were you born?

I was born in Moscow.

What was your home like? Was it an apartment? A house?

It was a very small flat. For more than 30 years, maybe 35 years, I lived in 500 square feet. It was very small.

You, your mother, your father and your sister?

Yeah.

What was your mother’s name?

Tamara.

What was she like?

She was a chemistry engineer and she was very good at it. And I was very far from that. If we needed something repaired at home, my mother, she was the best.

And your father?

My father [Dmitri Prokhorov] he was one of the key bosses in the Soviet Sports Committee at the time of the Red Machine—the sports red machine. And he was in charge of international relations for the sports committee with other countries.

I’ve read that he traveled quite a bit.

My father traveled a lot. Maybe six or eight times a year because it was part of his job. I was lucky. He was very Western minded. He pushed me a lot to make my own decisions.

Did he ever travel to the States?

My father traveled a lot here.

Brooklyn?

I don’t know. Maybe.

Did he ever tell you anything about America? Or did he ever bring you back anything from America?

You need to understand that the Soviet Union was a very specific country. We lived in a very deep contradiction. In public we supported the communist Soviet ideology. But in the kitchen we listened to the Voice of America. And we read a lot of books…a lot of things that were completely prohibited. And this was our life.

Was that the culture of your family, or…?

No, it was not the culture of the family. It was very specific to socialist society. For example, my grandmother, she was a great scientist. But for many years she kept her suitcase near the door because a lot of her colleagues in the Stalin times, they were rounded up and sent to the Gulag. And she was sure she could have followed them. Can you imagine the fear in the society?

I want to move on to Brooklyn. Is this your first time in Brooklyn?

No.

When were you here?

The first time was maybe 15 years ago. We were in Brighton Beach, and we tasted the local food. It was great fun because we tasted the Soviet cuisine. Like the Soviet cuisine of the 70s. And even at that time it was quite a problem to find such quality of food and such taste in Russia. Now it’s completely vanished.

What brought you there?

A lot of people from the Soviet Union came to visit Brighton Beach. You can’t even imagine. When the Berlin Wall was broken, all these people with a great fear in their hearts, they feel liberty and democracy inside them. And can you imagine coming to America? “Look, there is a Brighton Beach. You need to visit. It’s very special.” A lot of people came who had relatives there. “You need to visit this restaurant. You need to visit that restaurant.” It was very popular in the 90s to visit Brighton Beach.

Do you plan to live, or buy property, in Brooklyn?

I haven’t decided yet. Will I buy property in the future or not? (Shrugs) My first priority now is to build a championship team. And I’m very concentrated on my goal. First I need to spend a few months to invite all the best free agents. We need a new coach, etcetera. Afterwards it will be high time to make a decision about the property. But not now.

Have you read about Brooklyn?

Yes. I know a lot of celebrity people come from Brooklyn. Like Neil Diamond, like Jay-Z of course, like Barbra Streisand, like Robert De Niro (Who was actually born in Manhattan). And some infamous heroes, like Al Capone.

So you’ve put effort into figuring out the history.

I keep an eye out.

Is that part of business for you or is that pure interest?

It’s curiosity.

Any places you want to eat?

Frankly speaking, one of the passions of my life, I like good food.

Brooklyn’s a great place then.

I’m a slave of my stomach.

Do you like pizza?

It depends on the pizza. If it’s great, I like it.

What’s good pizza for you?

OK. Next time I come we will have a pizza together.

Ha. I’ll take you up on that. What’s your plan to win Brooklyn over? How are you going to sell this arena and the team?

I think Brooklyn is a really unique and exciting place. It was the place for many years where nations were mixed from all over the world. Now we have another circle. I’m talking about globalization. It’s practically the same, but on another level. To have the first truly global team, it will be in Brooklyn.

Do you think Brooklynites are going to be attracted to that aspect of it?

I hope so.

You hope so?

I think it’s very natural, from what I hear, for Brooklyn. It’s very natural for the people. Because it’s practically their fortune (as in their destiny). But on another level. It’s their personal fortunes. They came to Brooklyn from different countries many, many years ago. Now the world is changing. But they saw this. They moved from the other countries. And now we have a global world. There are no borders.

You really think that?

There is a local culture and global culture. And in between, something will mix…Maybe the best from local culture and the best from global culture.

So that’s a hunch that you have: that there’s something in between you can work with in terms of winning the borough over.

Yes. But you need to have a backbone. And for the future, the backbone is Brooklyn.

Explain that.

Before it was a small global world. [Immigrants] came to the United States, to live in Brooklyn. And as far as I know, more than 30 million people have passed through Brooklyn, and now they live all around the United States. It’s the same with the Nets fan base. We are creating this franchise with fans all over the world. We need all our fans from New Jersey to Brooklyn, to Moscow to Europe to China. Brooklyn is a home for everyone from everywhere. And this is a part of the global world.

A lot of Brooklynites are excited about this. They want a professional team. They think back to the days of the Dodgers. But other Brooklynites don’t like this. How aware were you of this when you were thinking about the project?

I know that nobody likes changes. I am very conservative with my social activity. I’m very flexible in my office and my businesses. But very stubborn in my social life. I think as soon the team comes, it will be a really fascinating story.

But how much attention did you pay to the resistance? Locals fought it for years. Whole groups formed against it.

I understand their concerns. But I think Bruce [Ratner] did a great job to reach a good agreement with the tenants—

I’m just asking how much it was on your radar.

My priority is the team. And I’m a minority shareholder in the arena. (Prokhorov has a 45 percent interest in the Barclay’s Center.)

I understand that. Many of these questions should be directed at Bruce Ratner, and not you. But people want to know, because you were big part of the project coming through in the end.

I’m a minority shareholder in the arena. But my personal opinion is that it will add a lot to the community. Its offers affordable housing, new jobs, excellent opportunities for the small and middle-sized businesses.

There’s definitely a debate. For example, the Verizon Center in Washington, D.C. completely revitalized Chinatown. Chinatown was kind of a dump. And then the arena came in and the neighborhood was completely transformed. Still, some people still don’t like the idea of there being a downtown, Manhattan-esque part of Brooklyn.

It’s best to keep a balance. On the one hand we need to change, but on the other hand we need to protect local culture. Local heritage. We need to be in between. That’s my goal.

Some of your critics, especially those who fought against the project, brought up the issue of Zimbabwe and sanctions busting. (In April, news reports surfaced that an investment bank Prokhorov owns, Renaissance Capital, may be doing business in Zimbabwe, which the United States has issued sanctions against.) Can you comment on that?

Yeah, sure. I think all these allegations have no basis in reality. Renaissance Capital has a light presence in Zimbabwe. Just a couple of people for stock market research.

So it’s just research?

Yes, exactly. And if you look through the rules, these sanctions refer to some individuals and some companies. And they are saying that you can’t do business with these particular individuals and these particular companies. For example, a lot of companies like Coca Cola, BP, Shell—they’re doing business there. We have no branches there, no offices, just a group of people looking at the local stock exchange.

Ultimately, is this about producing a winner? Do you think if you win, the borough’s going to be behind you?

I have only one place. It’s first place.

(Later, Prokhorov said: “But it’s normal. It’s natural. Some people are for the project and some people are against it. We’re human beings. We have the right to make mistakes. We’re allowed to have personal opinions.”)

Are you going to try to do anything to incorporate Brooklyn into the Barclay’s Center. For example, serve Brooklyn beers or serve food from Brooklyn, as opposed to McDonalds?

I think first I need to know Brooklyn better. It’s very important to know small details.

So you need to put more thought into it. But it’s something you’re considering?

For sure. But we have 26 months before the construction’s finished.

There was an editorial in the New York Daily News in which the writer argued that you should move to Brooklyn, because that would show that your serious about Brooklyn and not just about the team and the investment. He also mentioned this idea of bringing Brooklyn into the arena, so that it’s not out of place with the community—so that it champions Brooklyn and puts it on a pedestal. What do you think about that?

Don’t tempt me.

Ha. Don’t tempt you? What do you mean by that?

I need time. When you know the situation better, you have a professional opinion. I am a newcomer. I need to be really black and white. My passion is to develop the local community.

Have you ever encountered a situation where your success hinges in large part on the public’s support?

It’s an interesting question. I am a specialist for difficulties. I like to manage risk. It’s more difficult. And sometimes I’m good when most people don’t want to touch the problem.

Can you give a specific example?

When I was CEO of Norilsk Nickel, there was a very strong local community (at the site of the nickel and palladium mine in the northernmost reaches of Siberia). Very strong. The people there lived in a crazy condition. It’s very tough nature. It’s far north, not far from the polar center. They have three months of polar night and three months of polar day. It’s crazy. I don’t know what is worse, dark all the time or light all the time. The people had a special sense of respect for their community. And I had to explain to them that, “Look, we’re a great local Russian company. But we need another strategy. We need to compete globally, not only here. We need to spend money to be all over the world. We need to buy from different countries. We need to invest in other regions of Russia.” At first the majority of the people were completely against it.

Why? Because were cuts involved?

Because they said, “You use our money. We create the value.” It took me five years to change their minds. Fifty percent of the population was shareholders in the company. And when I came, the market price for Norilsk Nickel was $2.5 billion. When I sold the company, it was $60 billion. Can you imagine these people? They are the shareholders, and they got a 25-time rise in their shares.

So that’s how you convinced them?

It was a part of it.

How else did you convince them, in terms of communication?

It would take us maybe a few days of discussion.

Better for a book maybe. But what was the most important thing you did to change their mentality?

I needed the trust of the majority.

And how did you get it?

For example, I trained specially for three weeks. I asked my people to create me a room. A miner room. And I trained myself in order to work with them for eight hours.

Down in the mines?

Yes.

You were down in the mines?

Yes. Once. I trained for three of four hours every day for three weeks. And afterwards I was a part of their miner brigade. My goal was to reach their requirement…They were absolutely shocked. They said, “You are a man, we will follow you.”

Back to basketball. You say you want to turn Knicks fans into Nets fans. Seriously?

Who knows?

You think you can pull that off, honestly? That’s a big thing to say.

Who knows?

A team of six reporters spent four months investigating the New York housing system through the prism of one landlord, his buildings and his tenants in Brooklyn and the Bronx. Read on for our findings.

After 18 months of rehabilitation for a broken hip, all that Eta Eckstein wanted was to go back home to her Brooklyn apartment. The 92-year-old Holocaust survivor had lived at 8750 Bay Parkway for 40 years, but when her son visited her apartment while she was still at the Shore View Rehabilitation Center, he found a red eviction notice on the door.

Her son, Zvi Eckstein, continued to pay her monthly rent, but the landlord, Moshe Piller, evicted the long-time resident, claiming she had vacated the apartment. The building superintendent had told the neighbors she was dead. But according to her son’s affidavit, his mother could instead not move back in because the apartment was in such disrepair.

With the help of her family, Eckstein fought the eviction all the way to Housing Court. Piller settled the case after Judge Candy Gonzales warned him: “You’re playing with fire.”

Along with the right to live in her apartment, Eta Eckstein won the right to reclaim belongings that had been stored in an unlocked basement or scattered on the building’s landing. But she also won the right to live with faulty wiring in the living room, a collapsed ceiling in the bathroom, and clogged plumbing, according to her son’s affidavit. Victory for Eta Eckstein meant being allowed back into a building that currently has 99 open Housing Preservation and Development Department (HPD) violations.

Why would anyone fight so hard to get back into 8750 Bay Parkway? Since Piller took over the building in 2005, tenants say that conditions have deteriorated. But five years of decline do not matter as much to a 92-year-old woman as a lifetime of familiarity. “It’s been her home for over 40 years,” said her grandson, Idan Eckstein.

Like Eta Eckstein, tenants all around the Bronx and Brooklyn live in buildings that have rodents, collapsing ceilings, no heat in the winter and windows that don’t open in the summer, and unlocked security doors that allow people in to urinate and do drugs in the stairs. The system makes it almost impossible to demand better.

They are afraid to make trouble because they lack the language skills to make sense of the complaint process or because their work schedule makes it impossible to go to housing court during the day. The city’s housing bureaucracy struggles with a system that makes aggressive enforcement difficult. And landlords learn how to fly under the radar, paying fines or making minor repairs rather than making expensive improvements.

Eckstein is hardly an isolated victim, and her landlord, Moshe Piller, is not unique. In fact, there are far worse landlords: Piller does not appear on the Village Voice’s list of “10 Worst Landlords,” nor do any of his holdings appear on the HPD’s list of the 200 worst buildings in New York City. Piller, who occupied a berth on the HPD’s 2003 “Major Problem Landlords List,” with 7,313 open violations at 29 buildings, now escapes the agency’s sanction, and his current violations are down to over 1,700.

In an effort to understand how landlords like Piller work the New York housing system, The Brooklyn Ink and The Bronx Ink spent several months following the same process that many tenants do. Like them, reporters from the two websites talked to the Housing Preservation and Development Department, the Department of Homeless Services, the Department of Buildings and the district attorney’s office. They all provided different versions of the same answer: He hasn’t broken the law; there’s not much we can do about the condition of housing for many tenants.

Also like many tenants, we went to Piller’s office to talk to the landlord himself. We made several trips and finally spoke with his property manager, Mike Ross. Ross said they constantly making improvements to the properties, including beginning renovations in three apartments at 119 East 19^th Street in the last month since we began investigating the building for this story.

“We’re trying our best,” said Ross. “There’s always more, more and more work.”

***

When a faucet is leaking or the oven is broken, the first step for tenants is to phone the landlord or superintendent and ask him to come fix it. But if residents wait and remind him and nothing is done, the next step is to complain to the Housing and Preservation and Development Department.

Under New York law, a landlord is not fined—even if a violation isn’t fixed—unless a tenant or the HPD takes the landlord to housing court. But often tenants cannot take time off work to go to court, according to Legal Aid chief litigator Judith Goldiner, who represents tenants in housing cases. Legal aid can only represent about one in eight tenants who come to complain, due to a lack of resources. For those who go to court unrepresented, the success rate is low.

Numbers don’t tell the whole story of what it means to live in a Piller building, but they do tell a compelling part of it. The Piller apartment buildings we identified in Brooklyn have 829 open HPD violations . Of those, 219 are Class C violations, which include lead paint and a lack of child safety bars. The buildings in the Bronx have 995 violations, with 297 Class C violations, the most serious violations.

(To see the violations by building, click here)

http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=tugGSNIeE0fzd5q6hN3O8vg&output=html

Piller’s tenants have taken him to court more than 95 times in Brooklyn and the Bronx since 1989. Many of these cases settled, with the landlord agreeing to perform repairs.

Still, the extent of the landlord’s holdings, and therefore the number of violations in his buildings, is impossible to determine, even for city officials. New York City keeps records of all the buildings in the city, but not of the individuals who own them. One of the problems that organizations like HPD face in regulating a landlord like Piller is that he registers his holdings under a corporation, not individual, name. He registers most of his holdings under separate corporations. Eckstein’s building, 8750 Bay Parkway, for example, is registered as “8750 Bay Parkway  L.L.C.,” which we confirmed by checking the sign in the lobby.

The Brooklyn Ink identified 14 buildings that Piller owns in Brooklyn and seven in the Bronx. The buildings that are listed under his name were purchased in the early 90s. Most of them are small two- or three-story brick homes in the Borough Park area. They have no violations, and tenants we spoke to generally said he’s a good landlord.

But after the early 2000s, Piller stopped registering buildings under his own name. We searched the names of Piller’s family and his employees, but nothing came up. The only way to know for sure is to visit the buildings themselves, where the registration on the wall says the name of his company, “MP Management,” and his name, Moshe Piller.

After hours of searching city records, old news clippings, and reports by city agencies we found as much as we could about the buildings he might own. Then we went to the boroughs to confirm which buildings are still his, and to find out what it’s like for the people who live there.

***

From the outside, nothing seems amiss at 119 East 19^th Street, in Prospect Park South, Brooklyn. The railing protecting the flowerbeds outside is freshly painted and the building’s light brown facade has been redone recently, according to the building’s manager, Mike Ross.

Inside the lobby, on white paper with black marker is noted the name of the landlord for the building: “Moshe Piller.”

In the stairwell, the smell of urine is overpowering and at the bottom of the stairs, there’s a rat hole, just one variety of the vermin—such as bedbugs, cockroaches and mice—that crawl throughout 119 East 19th.

The elevator had been out of order for a month when we visited—not for the first time, according to residents. When we came back two weeks later it was still not working.

The building on 19th Street has 152 open violations as of this week, according to the Housing Preservation and Development Department or HPD. Of those, 52 are Class C, the most serious violations. This is more than twice the number of violations in any other building in the neighborhood, and three times the majority of buildings in general.

Piller purchased the building for $218,000 in 1995. He currently has over $9,000 in Department of Buildings’ fines, mostly for the broken elevator. He charges most tenants between $900 to $1,200 in rent. He pays some of his fines, enough to stay out of trouble with the department.

The first thing that’s noticeable when entering Desmond Fontenelle’s small one-bedroom apartment 6J is a chair placed awkwardly in the middle of the room, which conceals a gaping hole big enough for a person’s foot. “I don’t wanna break my neck walking to the bathroom at night,” said Fontenelle, a gregarious man in his early 40s, with pale brown eyes and a St. Lucian accent.

In the bathroom, a broken faucet has been dripping water into a bucket for years. The floor is soaked and a towel has been placed over the wet patch where the bath leaks. When Fontenelle showers, it floods the apartment of the neighbor below him, so he tries to bathe as little as possible.

The bedroom windows are barred with a locked metal gate and the smoke detector does not have a battery. The stove has also been out of order for years. “I eat mostly at mother’s place these days,” said Fontenelle.

But for other problems, such as the disarray in the apartment and rotting food in the refrigerator, Fontenelle also bears responsibility.

Fontenelle has been living at 119 East 19th for 20 years, before Moshe Piller purchased it 15 years ago. He said he has confronted the landlord numerous times about the repairs. In the last week, men have brought paint buckets up to his apartment and the building manager, Ross, has arranged for someone to come fix the broken oven door.

Fontenelle has tried withholding his $900 rent to pressure Piller to fix the apartment, but this has led to numerous court cases and eviction notices in the mail. Piller has taken him to court 16 times in 15 years for late rent payments – although Ross said they only do this once the rent is at least three months overdue. Fontenelle always agrees to pay, but also uses the opportunity to complain to the judge about the lack of repairs in his apartment, according to court documents we read.

Finally, at the beginning of this year he contacted HPD, which gave Piller a month to do some of the repairs. More than a month later, nothing had changed, so Fontenelle took the landlord to housing court.

“He’s gonna keep taking you to court until you move out,” said Fontenelle. “Then he’ll fix up the place a little bit for the next people and jack up the rent.

“I mean the man deserves his money, but he’s got to give me some services.”

In a phone interview, Ross said that keeping on top of all the repairs in a building with 50 units is a challenge, but that they are constantly working to make conditions better for their tenants. Since we began working on this story, management has renovated two of the units. They’ve arranged for workers to come and paint Fontenelle’s unit and fix the broken stove door.

But the need for repairs is ongoing. Since these problems were fixed, the number of HPD violations in the building went from 148 to 152 this week.

The building has 50 units. Three complaints per unit is standard for buildings around the city, said Ross. But of the buildings in the neighborhood of similar size, most we found had around one-third of the violations in Piller’s buildings.

***

At 2654 Valentine Ave. in the Bronx, men loiter in front of the grilled gate that closes off the front courtyard. The front door of the building gapes open, as if by a strong wind.

Many windows in its upper floor windows are broken and what glass remains is covered with blue-ink graffiti. Rodent feces are visible on the ground floor. On a recent Saturday, a woman sat on the steps leading up to the fourth floor with a syringe beside her, bobbing her head and mumbling, too lost to notice the disdainful look a tenant shot at her as he climbed down the stairs.

Inside the apartments, tenants complain of mold, caving ceilings, crumbling walls, mildew and sinking floors. The building has 164 open HPD violations, of which 44 are hazardous Class C violations. These include rodents, lead wall paint, cascading water from a seventh floor bathroom leak, and lack of heating, among others.

Piller owns 2654 Valentine Ave. and the adjacent 237 E 194th St., registered under Valentine Apartments L.L.C. He owns more buildings under different company names—2860 Grand Concourse and 2874 Grand Concourse, five blocks away, and 2501 Davidson Ave., on the other side of the Grand Concourse. But of all the buildings Piller owns in North Fordham, Valentine Apartments is the most visibly distressed.

William Plasenia and his wife have lived in apartment 4D for the past 13 years. A corner of the ceiling in one bedroom has burst open. The adjacent wall bulges with the weight of water pushing down. The kitchen floor slopes towards toward the center, like an upturned roof pitch. Plasenia says it is sinking. The bathroom ceiling sags and its peeled plaster flails mid air.

Plasenia, who hails from Cuba, speaks little English. He gestured to say that he fears the bathroom ceiling will collapse on his head soon. None of the violations in his apartment, however, show up in HPD files because he doesn’t know enough English to understand the system so said he does not file complaints.

At the buildings we visited, many tenants were non-English speakers who were unwilling to open their doors to strangers. In other cases, tenants were confused about the process for filing violations. Many said they simply call 311, which does not keep track of the number of complaints.

***

Even if tenants complain to HPD—Piller’s tenants have made thousands of complaints—there is nothing the Housing Preservation and Development Department can do to bar a landlord from owning or renting property out to tenants.

Under HPD’s Alternative Enforcement Program, introduced in 2007, the HPD can enforce repairs on buildings it deems “distressed” or “hazardous.” Failure to comply could result in a lien being placed against the building. Of the 200 buildings on the most recent list, published on Feb. 15 of this year, none were Piller’s.

HPD can also refer buildings on this list to the district attorney for prosecution. The Kings County DA’s office could find no record of Moshe Piller in their referral files. The HPD declined to comment on whether they had referred Piller to the prosecutor.

In the meantime, the city continues to send some tenants to buildings we identified as Piller’s as part of its housing program for the homeless.

“You know, it’s very bittersweet sometimes as we send people into these buildings,” said Juanita Fernandez, a housing specialist at The Concourse House Shelter, who sent tenants to 2860 Grand Concourse, a Piller building, as recently as four months ago.

“We have no choice but to move people out after six months,” she said. “But yes, some of the places we send them to. I wouldn’t want to live there.”

***

In the absence of a clear enforcement mechanism, some tenants have organized to put pressure on Piller to fix the buildings.

In 2006, tenants drove two school buses to Piller’s home in Brooklyn and picketed there for a day, according to Xiamara Mejias, 40, who lives in apartment 3B at 2654 Valentine with her husband and three daughters. She’s the tenant organizer for the building and has been fighting the landlord for the past 10 years, relaying tenants’ grievances to authorities and the mortgage holder.

When they went to Piller’s house, his neighbors poked out of their homes to ask what was going on. “We told them your neighbor is a slumlord,” Mejias said. “And they started throwing eggs on us. Eggs!”

Since tenants took their paperwork and pictures to the building’s mortgage holder, the New York Community Bank, Piller has gotten better at repairing violations, according to Mejias. The open violations listed at the HPD today are half what they were in 2006.

Mejias said her bathroom still leaks and the hair salon beneath her apartment has complained. “This has been broken for a year,” she said pointing to her front door, which looks like someone had broken in. What is worse, the front door still doesn’t lock.

But Mejias also sometimes makes it impossible for repairs to get done. The piping in her bathroom is so old and rotten that it needs to be replaced. But when the super agreed to repair it, she told him, “I got three daughters who need to bathe every day. You can come in this morning … you can dig whatever, but when I come back home. I have to find a bathroom in there.’”

The hair salon eventually installed a ceiling to remedy the problem, but full repairs were never done.

Other tenants also get in the way of keeping the building in good repair. A week ago, all the hallway walls were painted a fresh round layer of brown yellow but someone has already sprayed graffiti on the fourth floor walls.

“It is like [the tenants] see this disrepair and they add on it,” said Mejias.

***

Moshe Piller was once one of the city’s most notorious landlords and has now become one of dozens that the city’s agencies just don’t have the time or resources to deal with. But though he may have receded from the public gaze in the last few years, for his tenants the problems in his buildings are real and unlikely to go away any time soon.

More shocking is that these problems are common in far too many buildings in Brooklyn and the Bronx. Like Eta Eckstein, many of the city’s residents have decided that for reasons of financial necessity and fear they’d rather make due than make trouble. Thanks to the weaknesses in a system that was meant to protect them, a place doesn’t have to be comfortable, clean or even safe to call it home.