This is the second of our five-part “What’s for Dinner?” feature series about Brooklyn meals.

by Alessia Pirolo and Katerina Valdivieso

On Willoughby Avenue in Bushwick a modern white building stands out from a line of look-alike old families houses. Number 979 is an eight-unit building of glass and cement. Large windows cover the façade that looks to the southwest. Inside, the apartments are new, furnished with modern kitchens and stairs made of steel.

979 Willoughby Ave. in Bushwick. Photo: Pirolo/Brooklyn Ink

They were ready to occupied in April 2007, but for the last two years, they have been empty. After construction, a long series of problems blocked the release of the certificate of occupancy. Last month, New York City Department of Buildings gave its final approval. The eight apartments are now officially on the market. The owner, Harold Tischler, who invested in Bushwick in 2005, remains confident that buyers will arrive quickly. But while the building awaited the certificates, the market drastically changed.

Only four years ago, Bushwick was at a turning point in its history. In December 2005, the Brooklyn Public Library held a forum entitled “Brooklyn’s Next Real Estate Hot Spot: Bushwick.” The area was rebranded as East Williamsburg, in an effort to hide a legacy of decades of crime, poverty, and decline that had begun in the 1960s. In the first years of the new millenium, the city and state began pouring resources into the neighborhood, to improve housing conditions. Between 1990 and 2006, crime dropped 72 percent.  Rents were cheaper than in Manhattan and other areas of Brooklyn. The L-line brought subway riders into the city in 20 minutes and fashionable Williamsburg was nearby. Bushwick wasn’t yet a fashionable neighborhood – the poverty rate never dropped under one third, especially in the majority Hispanic population. But after decades of neglect, the transformation into the new Brooklyn hot spot had begun.

Young residents and artists moved in. And after the hipsters, the developers arrived. During the last quarter of 2006, there were 32 sales transactions of condos, co-ops and single-family houses. This was the highest number in four years, according to the data from PropertyShark.com, a website that provides real estate professionals, investors and homebuyers with real estate information. The median sale price per square foot was $409.

It was in this period that Harold Tischler, like many others, decided to invest here. His Vintage Builders, a real estate company with 16 years of experience, moved to Bushwick after the company’s first new development in Bensonhurst. He saw an opportunity: between Willoughby and Evergreen avenues a warehouse had been empty for a decade; it was pulled down by Vintage Builders to make space for the first modern building on the street.

“I liked this site and it was cheaper than other places,” Tischler says. He believed in the area in 2005, when the work started, and he says that he still believes in it now. “Twenty years ago here you could have been killed walking on the road. In the next ten years it will be the new Williamsburg.”

But data is not so reassuring. After a peak of 23 transactions in the second quarter of 2008, the number of sales dropped to ten in each of the following quarters.  And in the first nine months of 2009 the number of transactions was 13 – five between January and March, just one between April and June, and seven from July until September. The last registered median sale price for square foot was $360, after having dropped to $229 in the second quarter, according to PropertyShark.com. But even if there is an increase, it is not consider particularly significant by Bill Staniford, chief executive officer of PropertyShark.com.

At the end of November, the Department of Buildings registered six building sites in Bushwick where construction activity has come to an abrupt halt. But according to organizations working in the neighborhood the number should be higher. In October, Right to the City, a national network of grassroots organizations fighting against gentrification, released a survey about Brooklyn’s vacant condos. “We identified 60 residential buildings that appeared to contain a significant amount of empty units and 48 that appeared to be stalled in construction,” says Jose Lopez, of Make the Road, a non-profit organization based in Bushwick, and a member of Right to the City alliance.

979 Willoughby Avenue was one of those buildings. But Tischler refuses to define it as a vacant building. “There are no vacant buildings in Bushwick,” he says. “People are always looking for new places and want to move here.” The real trouble, he adds, is the bureaucracy that slows down development. In April 2007, his building was almost complete. Each apartment had a private garage, utility room and roof-deck access. The eight apartments were on sale. An 834 square foot studio was on sale for $399,000, two 1,883 square foot four decks penthouses listed for $668,000. But new inspections found several faults in the chimney, the boiler, and the elevator. Every new problem meant more money lost for Vintage Building which had already invested $1 million for the land and $1.2 million for the building. Tischler says that they were all minor faults, and he blames the inspectors for having stopped his job – “Next time I’m going to build in New Jersey,” he says. But now the building faces a harder market.

“I already have some offers,” Tischler says. In three months, he adds, he’s sure that all the apartments of the building will be sold. He’s dropped the prices for the two penthouses’ price to $ 600,000. But even if the other prices stay the same, Tischler’s cost will barely be repaid. The investment did not work as expected. Still, Tischler remains confident in Bushwick.

But Staniford is not. “I think that all new developers in Bushwick are in trouble,” he says. “Most in New York City are in trouble, I don’t really see a recovery anytime soon.” His general view is that the prices will drop again 10-15percent over the next six months.

Bushwick has been characterized by a high number of foreclosures. In 2007 the neighborhood had the third highest rate of housing foreclosures in New York City: 57.8 per 1,000 of 1-4 family properties. The number has nearly tripled since 2000, according to New York University’s Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy, an academic research center devoted to the public policy aspects of land use, real estate development and housing. In 2008 they totaled 379, according to Right to the City alliance. In an average week of last November, ending on Thursday the 20th, PropertyShark.com registered 14 lis pendens, the formal notice that starts the foreclosure process. A sign of a high amount of future foreclosures, according to Staniford.

“Developers in distress won’t be able to pay their mortgage and they’re going to be no new developers in the future,” says Staniford. In his gloomier forecast, what once made Bushwick an interesting new neighborhood could play against it. Investing on an area “not as well established,” as he says, could seem too dangerous. “It could fall further,” he adds. “The decrease of services provided by City of New York due to budgets cuts will affect poor neighborhoods. It could cause a potential collapsing in prices in Bushwick.”

Still, some developers see a chance to get through the recession. Castle Braid, a former factory at 114 Troutman St., was opened last October and 75 of its rentals units are already occupied. Even if analysts like Staniford consider going into renting another sign of distress, the developer, Mayer Schwartz, is satisfied with his results and confident he can fill all the units in the next two or three months.

“I would not develop a big project now,” he says. Without loans from the banks to buy or to develop thinking big seems impossible. But Schwartz is confident in smaller family houses and rentals. And the area still seems to appeal to his customers, young artists and professionals. “I think that switching to rent in Bushwick is not as devastating as in Williamsburg,” he says. “Here the prices are cheaper.” That is what people are looking for in a recession. Moreover the area in the last five years is improved. “There are café, artists, people want to live here. Bushwick is picking up,” Schwartz says.

Still, he doesn’t hide the fact that times are hard. “Condos are dead,” he admits. But the rental market still covers the expenses, and perhaps provides hope for that once-imagined brighter future for Bushwick.

Diego Sucuzhanay has a choice to make. He can try to go back to life as it was last year, when he would wake up every morning, drive to his real estate office in Bushwick, spend his day selling apartments and return home to his wife and his new-born child. Sucuzhanay can try to be the man he was until one year ago. Or he can continue being the witness for his brother Jose, killed in a hate crime on December, 7, 2008.

Attack

That day, at 3 in the morning, Jose, 31, was coming home to Kossuth Place, Bushwick. He was walking, arm in arm, with another one of his brothers, Romel. It was cold and they were tired. Two men emerged from a car, shouting slurs against gays and Hispanics. Then, they attacked. Jose was hit over the head with a bottle, kicked and beaten into unconsciousness with a baseball bat. He died five days later at Elmhurst Hospital Center in Queens, one day before his mother, Julia, who was flying in from Ecuador, could reach him.

Diego Sucuzhanay, four years younger than Jose, lost his brother, his business partner, and the person he trusted the most. From the very beginning he felt that that crime wasn’t just against his brother, or his family. Rather, it was a crime against an entire community. “I understood immediately,” he says.

A few weeks before Jose’s death, Sucuzhanay had read about the attack against Marcelo Lucero, a 37-year-old Ecuadorian, who was stabbed to death, in Patchogue, Long Island, by a group of teenagers who were looking for a Latino to beat up.  “I told my brother that it was unacceptable,” he said. They spoke about the violence against Hispanics. They considered attending some rallies against hate crimes; they thought it was necessary to act. But they never followed through; they had their busy lives, and their business to take care. “I couldn’t believe it was something that could happen to my family,” said Sucuzhanay.

From Ecuador to New York

The Sucuzhanay brothers were born in the region of Canar, a rural area of Southern Ecuador. Their father, Florentino Hidalgo, and their mother, Julia, were farmers. The land didn’t feed all their 13 children. In the Nineties, Florentino moved to New York in the 1990s. His sons would soon join him. Diego left his hometown on 2001. “I came looking for a better life,” he said.

For six months he worked as a bartender while also attending the Borough of Manhattan Community College’s Degree Program in Computer Science. “Time goes fast and sometimes you can’t accomplish all the things you wanted to do,” he said. “Education has been one of my priorities. It has always been in my family. But I didn’t have the opportunity to finish. I dropped out of college because I had to work and this is how I ended in real estate.”

He was then living in Bushwick with his brother Jose, who was working as a waiter also. They saw other immigrants struggling with salaries as low as $12,000 a year, sometimes even less. They wanted something more.

Jose Sucuzhanay. Photo courtesy of the family

Sucuzhanay replied to an announcement for a real estate agent agent at Kings County Reality in Bushwick. He was hired. It was the period when everyone wanted to buy and the bank credit seemed unlimited. “It was just a matter of finding the right houses,” he said. And he was good. He quickly doubled his income. He enjoyed the flexibility of the new job. He also had the opportunity to study again. He attended courses in order to understand the market.

The younger brother’s example inspired the elder who decided to follow in his foot step. Jose Sucuzhanay was hired at Kings County Realty too. The clients and the money started to roll in quickly. He specialized in the Brooklyn market, while the younger brother worked in Queens.

Jose had even much more ambitious plans than Diego. In 2007, they opened their own company, Open Passport Realty. Jose decided to bet on Bushwick; Diego however, didn’t like it. “I lived in Bushwick for the first three years with Jose and I didn’t feel safe,” he said. “But Jose strongly believed in this area.”

“Danger,” Jose would say, “is an opportunity.”

At the beginning, it was just the two of them, in the basement of Jose’s house. Both 2007 and 2008 were good years for the Sucuzhanay brothers. New investors arrived, and Bushwick was considered a hot market. In August 2008 they were able to open a real office. Furnished in white and green, it was new and it was theirs. It was located at 320 Linden St., near Myrtle and Knickerbocker Avenue, two of the busiest streets of the neighborhoods. It was face to face with the Kings County Realty where Jose had started his real estate career only a few years before. The Ecuadorian farmers’s sons had become businessmen. Other brothers, Pedro, Marcelo and Romel, joined them.

Diego’s wife gave birth to their first child that August. He had everything he had worked for.

The grief

Diego was at home with his family, in the early morning of December  when the phone rang in the early morning of December,7, 2008. Their brothers had been attacked. He ran to Kossuth Place at 5 in the morning. Romel was there, speaking with the police. Jose was already at the hospital. Diego went to work, as usual. He reassured the employees. He was sure that Jose would survive. “We tried to be optimistic about him getting better,” he said. “He was a fighter, he could always overcome all the problems.”

When the doctors spoke to his family about brain injuries, he didn’t want to listen. It was impossible. He had always thought that Jose was able to do everything. Sucuzhanay remembered when the owner of a six family home in Bushwick asked them to manage his property, because he wasn’t able to collect any rents. “As soon as Jose covered it, he collected 100 per cent of the rents,” Diego said. “He was persuasive, able to speak and to provide the service. Jose was able to fix fast things that weren’t working.”

Diego Sucuzhanay in his office. Photo: Pirolo/Brooklyn Ink

On Tuesday 9, Jose was declared brain death. The family had to face the decision of whether to take him off life support. That day, Sucuzhanay spoke publicly on a press conference outside the hospital, saying that was necessary to act on behalf of victims of hate crime. “Today my brother is the victim,” he said. “But tomorrow it could be your brother, your mother, your father.”

Two days later, Jose died. City Council members, civil rights groups and state officials condemned the assault and expressed condolences. His family brought Jose back to Ecuador, where he was buried in a funeral attended by hundreds of people.

Meanwhile in Bushwick, Sucuzhanay tried to make the business work even without Jose. At the beginning he and his other brothers, tried to work with his clients. In February they closed temporarily the office of Linden Street. “I didn’t have the strength to work,” admitted Diego. “And even if I would had wanted, I couldn’t. In those moments you just can’t focus on work.” Before December 2008, business was Sucuzhanay’s priority. Then, he had to deal with his brother’s legacy, to take care of his investments. He had to think about Jose’s children. Brian, 10 years old, and Joanna, 5, live in Ecuador with their grandmother, Julia, an energetic 53 year-old woman who had raised 13 children alone, after her husband had left to the U.S. But now they needed all the family’s help.

Hate crimes

At the beginning Sucuzhanay spent himself completely in taking care of the family’s business. “I was out, I didn’t have time to work, I couldn’t focus on anything,” he said.

At the end of last winter he finally had time for himself, he surfed the Internet where he discovered expressions of solidarity: posts remembering his brother, organizations speaking about hate crimes and Jose’s murder. He felt that he could not forget. He remembered all the times he had seen Latinos discriminated against in the job hunt. All the people he knew who were suffering discrimination and were just too scared to talk.

“I wanted to understand why this happened.” He said “Latino didn’t even exist before. Latino is a multicultural and multiethnical expression. I educated myself about the problem, started to think about possible solutions.”

On February the police arrested two Bronx men, Hakim Scott and Keith Phoenix, in connection with Jose’s murder. Their trial is set to begin on January 19. “Of course I want the killers of my brother TO spend the rest of their life in jail, but we also have to do something so it doesn’t repeat again and again.” Sucuzhanay said.

During the last year he has met other families, and shared his experience when attending rallies against hate crimes. “If you don’t get through you don’t understand. You think that this is only happening to one family, it is just another death,” he said.

Last fall, another attack was reported in Bushwick. On September 23, Mario Vera, a 37-year-old Mexican immigrant, was riding his bicycle near Broadway and Lafayette Avenue, one block away from Kossuth Place. Three men stopped him. They shouted anti-Hispanic insults. They hit him on the head, the police said. Vera survived. He was able to reach his home, but was later brought to the hospital with traumatic brain injuries. His wife Ana Maria Gallardo only reported the attack to the police on October 9. Vera has still not completely recovered from the assault and the police have offered a $12,000 reward for anyone with information that could lead to the arrest and conviction of his attackers.

Sucuzhanay met Gallardo. “She was confused, and this is exactly how you feel. I advised her to stick with a person she trusted and with just one organization that could help her.”

Sucuzhanay is sure that these attacks are not isolated cases. “The problem is that most of the victims are new comers and don’t have legal status. Therefore they are afraid. So we don’t really know how many victims there are.”

Last November 23, the FBI released its 2008 reporting on hate crimes. In New York 570 hate crimes were reported through the year, while just 493 were reported in 2007. Nationally 792 attacks against Hispanics were reported, while they were 775 the previous year. But Sucuzhanay is sure that the numbers are much higher.

“It is like a disease. The only way to solve it would be by offering the victims a chance to legalize their status if they have been victim of hate crimes. It would be a motivation to denounce” such violence, he said.

Last month, Sucuzhanay was among the 500 people who gathered at Saint Francis de Sales Church, in Patchogue, to remember Marcelo Lucero, on the anniversary of his death. He listened to many speeches, but he thought that speaking isn’t enough anymore. “I don’t see a big change. There has not been a big change in the legislation that could have an impact. It needs a long-term solution, to prevent the crimes. Now there is an attack, they put someone in jail and then the next thing you know it is that there has been another attack.”

The choice

The office on Linden Street reopened last August. As it is for everyone in real estate, business is much slower, but Diego Sucuzhanay is always busy. His phone rings constantly. Every other call is related to his brother. He donates his experience to a long list of local-based organizations: Make the Road, International Ecuadorian Alliance, Latinos Americanos Unitos, New Immigrant Community Empowerment. He meets other victims, and he is planning for the anniversary of his brother’s death. Saturday 12, at 11 in the morning, a gathering for Jose’s death anniversary will be held in the office of Make the Road, at 301 Grove St., Bushwick. For Sucuzhanay it won’t be just a moment to remember Jose, but also to reconsider the choices in his own life.

“I understand clearly that I have to make a decision,” he said. “A decision whether I have to be more involved, showing my ideas, working to solve the problems, coming up with solutions. Or being something else, as a witness for the families that have suffered the same.”

He has a third option, “I could forget about this and go back to work as I did before.” He silenced just a moment. Then he spoke again, “But I already know that to forget is impossible.”

The heart of Bushwick beats between Dekalb Avenue, Myrtle Avenue, and Knickerbocker Avenue. This is the geographical and commercial center of a neighborhood that, for a while, was considered the potential new hot spot in Brooklyn. After a long decline that started in the sixties, hipsters and developers began moving in over the last five years, bringing hope of economic revival to follow. It was a neighborhood with high potential, at the border of Williamsburg and connected to Manhattan by the L-train. But the recession put a stop to all that, reminding everyone that this remains an area in which poverty rate has not dropped under 32 percent. Historical stores that cater to long time residents, as well as newcomer, are struggling. Bushwick has its hopes but at the moment they are tentative at best. The Brooklyn Ink walked the triangle formed by the three Bushwick central streets to take the economic pulse.

Albert Palma, Owner of Turrbo Fashion Innovators. Photo/ Brooklyn Ink

Turrbo Fashion Innovators, 369 Knickerbocker Ave., sells trendy men clothes. But this year many of its leather jackets and embroidered shirts have remained unsold. The owner, Albert Palma, said that in 2009 sales have dropped more than 40 percent compared to the previous year. It is the worst crisis in the 25 years life of the shop, he says. Cuban-born, Palma moved to the United States when he was 7 years old. Before getting into retailing he was an auto mechanic. When his father retired they opened the shop and since then the business has expanded to a second store. But there are no further expansions planned for the coming year, said Palma. “I didn’t even take vacations,” he said. “I was supposed to go to Europe, than Dominican Republic, but I had to cancel. It has been a very bad year in sales.”  For the first time, he had to take money out of his savings to pay for merchandise he bought on a 30-day credit line.

The story gets even gloomier if one walks a block down on Knickerbocker Avenue towards Myrtle Avenue. Here the landscape changes. Rincon Musical is a music store that has been carrying CDs, movies and music instruments since 1997. “It is the only store where you can find music instruments around the area,” said Luis Estevez, the manager, “the next store is in Queens and you have to take like three trains to get there.” But soon, Bushwick musicians will have to travel to another borough to get a replacement for a broken guitar string. Rincon Musical is closing its doors for good in January.

Estevez has been working there for the past 9 years. He has seen a constant decrease in sales, in part, due to the creation of portable music devices and more people buying online. However, this year has also been the worst for Rincon Musical, said Estevez. “Sales dropped more than 60 percent for us this year alone.” The store has for rent sign outside. Estevez said that they barely make enough in sales to pay a monthly rent that amounts to $14,000 including taxes. “And the landlord wants to raise the rent for next year. We can’t afford it anymore,” said Estevez. The store is currently looking for another location but Estevez assured us that it will not be in Bushwick.

Rising rents are a serious problem in Bushwick. People out of work, or facing financial struggles, cannot afford them. That leads to foreclosures for the owners and landlords. In 2007 Bushwick already had the third highest rate of housing foreclosures in New York City, 57.8 per 1,000 of one to four family housing units. Today, just in the central triangle of Bushwick, 582 and 1369 Dekalb Ave. have been recently foreclosed. In the same street, at number 1209, there is a stalled building. The works stopped before it was finished.

Between 2005 and 2007 the area’s unemployed civilian labour force was 9.8 percent, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Last October, the average Brooklyn unemployment rate rose to a 16-year-high of 11.1 percent, the New York City labor department reported.

Mercedes Ramos does not need to read the statistics to know these things. She has been living within the perimeter of this commercial triangle for 30 years. Her son and her son-in-law both lost their jobs in 2009. “My son-in-law was working for DHL for 20 years and my son was working for the same company- for 15 years, and they both got laid-off at the same time,” she said. Neither of them has found a steady job. Ramos’s son is freelancing in several gigs and her son-in-law is collecting unemployment. Without a sure income the family has to sacrifice. They can no longer afford to pay for their younger daughter the Catholic school attended by her two elder siblings. “My youngest grandchildren has to go to public school,” Ramos said. “But that’s not what my daughter wanted, she wanted a good education for her three kids.” Ramos said that her daughter has made strict cuts in the family budget, such as paid extracurricular classes, been replaced by free classes. “My 12-year-old grandchild was going to ballet but it was too expensive so now she is going to free basketball classes,” said Ramos.

Some families cut their budget, others move away. This is one of the main reasons for the imminent downsizing of another historical store in the area. About 30 feet north of Rincon Musical, in the corner of Knickerbocker Avenue and Stanhope Street, Ira Levy has owned a party supplies store called Party Fair for the past 22 years. For several generations, Bushwick children bought their Halloween costumes, toys, and birthday decorations in his 7,500 square feet. At the end of November, the shelves were filled with Christmas lights, and Santa Claus, Virgin Mary and Jesus costumes. But after the holiday, two thirds of the space will turn into a bank.

Levy, as well as Palma and Estevez, has not seen any signs of recovery since this economic recession started. “It’s been hitting us for more than a year. I say it’s been hard for the past three years,” said Levy. Each year, Levy has seen his sales dropped 18 to 20 percent without any improvement.

The changes of the neighborhood have contributed to a decrease in sales, Levy said, “A new kind of people have been moving here, younger people who have recently graduated from college or are still studying.” Party Fair’s main customers are families with kids. But many are moving away. “Young guys don’t have money to spend, they are just starting their lives,” said Levy.

Despite of the financial hardship, business owners and neighbors in Bushwick have not lost their hope. Levy will reduce his store, but he won’t leave the neighborhood. Instead he will keep his smaller store and see how it goes next year. Palma, from Turrbo Fashion Innovators, foresees a better future a year from now. Bushwick’s recession, he says, “can’t last much longer.”

By Alessia Pirolo

Kendall Morrison is surrounded by garbage, food waste, spores of fungus.  He is a happy man.  The director of the nonprofit organization Earth Matter cannot avoid smiling when he says that he will fill one the few green oasis in Bushwick with his beloved rubbish.

Food and dead leaves remains are the basic ingredients for compost, a natural substance for adding to houseplants or enriching garden soil. One year ago, Morrison created Earth Matter, which is dedicated to studying, developing and applying the organic fertilizer.

Morrison is a 46 year old man with a greying goatee and childish blue eyes behind round glasses. Like a child, he does not mind putting his hands in the dirt. Actually he seems to enjoy it. “Everything has is place in nature,” he said.

He spent the last weeks building three compost basins in the back corner of the “Secret Garden” between Broadway and Linden Street. The entrance, behind the rail of the J and Z subway, leads to a 19,000 foot green area surrounded by grey, old buildings. Here, residents and volunteers who work with the Linden-Bushwick Block Association, the leaseholder of the garden, plant cabbage, salads, tomato and red pepper in their 26 vegetable plots.  After an agreement signed on September 15, Earth Matter has started its own compost production, on a piece of land under the leaves of ten trees.

Kendall Morrison. Photo Pirolo/Brooklyn Ink

Morrison can already figure out what it will be here by the winter. The basins will be filled with layers of food waste and dead leaves. “We build a lasagna,” he said. “Brown and green. Brown and green.” The decomposing substance has to be kept warm and to rest for at least nine weeks. At the end the waste will be become nourishment for the vegetable plots.

“Life is like the Chinese Tao: there is always a negative and a positive side,” is Morrison’s philosophy. He likes the hidden quality of things that most of the people loath. Waste, bugs, even recession. His main activity is an online shop of journals and books.

“The business is slow right now,” he said. “But it is an opportunity, I can spend my time here, I can do other things. It is a kind of temporary blessing. It’s when times are uncertain that you have the most opportunity.”

He said he used to work 40 hours a week at his own job, and another 40 hours on his volunteer activities in another Bushwick garden, where he does workshops with children. Every Wednesday he volunteers at the information stall of one of the two local green markets, just in front of the Secret Garden, on Broadway.

By next year, he hopes to sell in the market one of the first production one-hundred percent from Bushwick. Near the compost basins he is experimenting with a new mushrooms production. He is arranging pile of logs. “You have to drill a hole in the logs and inoculate the spores,” he said, with the excitement of someone discovering a new passion. The process will take between six months and two years. But at the end he hopes to produce shitake, maitake, and reishi, medical chinese mushrooms. There will be also oyster mushrooms, chicken of the woods, lions maine, that will be ready to eat. And also to sell. “The idea is to sell them in the local market,” Kendall said. He imagines producing 6 pounds of mushrooms from every log, and to sell them for 3 or 4 dollars a pound. “Economically speaking the local production doesn’t make sense, but for the big picture it does,” he said. In the local gardens people can meet, learn together, and discover how to respect the environment in their local backyard.

“Farming is one of the major causes of global warming,” he said. “We can’t feed all the city with local production, but it’s a start. If the mass production started to use local systems, compost instead of fertilizer, it would be useful for everyone.”

In the garden a group of students of the local Harbor High School worked their plot. Just outside the fence, a group of fat ladies asked in Spanish about the tomatoes sold in the first of the six stalls of the little green market. “More important, the gardens activity is a way to put people together,” Morrison said.

A prayer in the Court of Justice during a break of the trial against six members of the Jewish Patrol Shomrim. Photo: Pirolo/BrooklynInk

Six members of the Orthodox Jewish patrol Shomrim were back in the Brooklyn Supreme Court yesterday, on trial for allegedly attacking yeshiva students in Crown Heights two years ago.

But among the spectators were those from the ultra-Orthodox community who believed that it was one of their victims who instead should have been on trial – for making his accusation public.

Joshua Gur, known as Shuki, had a long black beard that made him look like older than his 23 years. He wore a skullcap emblazoned, in Hebrew, with the words — “Long life to Rebbe Messiah, he never left the world.” Gur is among those Lubavitcher Hasidim – which is based in Crown Heights – who believe that their late Rebbe, or spiritual leader, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Scheneerson, who died in 1994, was, in fact, the Messiah. Believers keep an eternal vigil at his grave.

It was the question of the Rebbe’s sacred place that apparently led to a December 2007 fight in a yeshiva dormitory at 749 Eastern Parkway. The Shomrim were summoned to break up the melee. But, argued assistant district attorney David Weiss, they only worsened the violence, beating the students “indiscriminately.” Several Meshichists were taken to the hospital. One suffered a broken eye socket, another a broken finger.

During yesterday’s testimony, one of the defense attorneys, Israel Fried, asked Gur to watch a video shot during the alleged attack. One of the Shomim could be heard saying, “I’m trying to mediate with you.”

“So Shomrim came to calm things down?” Fried asked.

“I don’t think so,” Gur replied.

Among the spectators was Yosef Lifshitz, father of the defendant Benjamin Lifshitz. “He is lying, he is lying,” he said. The seats, in fact, appeared filled with friends and supporters of the defendants; a handful of Gur’s supporters sat together, off to the side, a small pocket of support in a room filled primarily with those who saw his testimony as a betrayal.

“We are not allowed to bring a dispute in a secular court,” said Lifshitz. The matter, argue the defendants’ supporters, should have been taken to a religious court, a Bet Din. In fact, he argued, in ancient times a Jew who testified publicly against a fellow Jew did so at the risk of his own life. “It’s even allowed to kill him,” Lifshitz said. “But we live in this world and of course we don’t do it.”

He was not alone in his disapproval of Gur’s testimony.

“This guy is not even part of the community, they come form the outside,” said Mayer Hershkop, whose three sons are among the defendants.

The risk of being exiled from the community has apparently given several other potential witnesses pause. On Sunday the yeshiva students came before rabbinical authorities in Crown Heights and agreed to not testify. Last Monday, at the opening of the trial, the prosecution asked to the judge to warn the defendants against tampering with the witnesses.

Meanwhile, Hershkop, mixing Yiddish and English words, said that he wished that the case could have been heard by a Bet Din.

But in criminal court, the defendants, if convicted, face up to15 years in prison.

In Crown Heights, the punishment for the witness could be banishment.

Photo: Pirolo/Brooklyn Ink

Union workers from National Grid use a giant rat to protest the use of non-union workers by the corporation to remove asbestos from its building on Jay Street.

Photo courtesy of Diana Markosian

By Alessia Pirolo

Where the Brooklyn Bridge reaches Brooklyn, just before the sunset of a perfect October day, a man put his arms around a woman’s waist. They looked at each other. They smiled.

“Stop. Stop. Don’t look at her,” shouted a photographer, who stared at the couple through the lens of a professional camera. The man, in a suit and purple tie, sighed and moved away from the stylish, woman, dressed in purple, who wore a two-carat diamond on her left hand.

Around the small photo set, tourists and people coming back from work crowded the platform. Together, they looked through their Canon, Nikon and small digital cameras at the sky turning pink and red over Governors Island. On Thursday the temperature was 75 degrees. The sky had been perfectly blue all day. The sunset looked as perfect as in the postcards sold in the stalls on the Manhattan side of the bridge.

While the photographer shouted new instructions to the betrothed, a gray-bearded man stopped his bicycle. He stood just few feet outside of the photographer’s camera range of vision. The man wore a new sweater twice his size, a white cap, short white socks and old sneakers. He moved his round glasses on his nose, and glanced at the sunset. Then, he slowly opened the fanny pack that he wore around is waist and took out a green ice cream pop.

The groom-to-be had turned his back to the red sky. He hugged his fiancée from behind. Next to her tanned face, he looked pale. The photographer shot the couple.

The gray-bearded man unwrapped his ice cream pop. He kept the packaging in his hand and read intently the list of the ingredients.

“Smile, smile again,” the photographer yelled to the couple. The woman moved her perfect black, long hair to her back and looked professionally at the camera. The man grinned.

In the background, the sun moved behind the Statue of Liberty. The light turned more and more red.

The gray-bearded man sucked noisily his ice cream pop.

The photographer snorted. He ordered the couple to look again at each other. The man happily hugged the woman. She raised her right leg, in precarious equilibrium on a 6-inch stiletto heel.

Behind her, the gray-bearded man sucked the last bite of the ice cream pop. He put the packaging in his fanny pack. He took out a digital camera, hunched over and pointed it at the sunset.

As the last ray of sun disappeared over the East River, the photographer shot the couple kissing.

The gray-bearded man snapped a shot of the sunset. Then he scratched his bottom, and pedaled away.

Revelers in the Bushwick Boat. Alessia Pirolo

By Alessia Pirolo

One of the best-kept secrets in Bushwick is a former ferry boat from the Massachusetts island of Martha’s Vineyard. It is anchored on English Kills, a smelly canal in the industrial area on the border with Williamsburg. Where Morgan Avenue meets Stagg Street, hidden by anonymous warehouses, there is an equally anonymous courtyard filled with old walls, parked vans, and, on the left corner, a dying tree. In front of it, a 4-feet wide corridor links the courtyard to English Kills channel. The tiny passage turns left, and brings you to the “Bushwick Boat.”

The former ferry serves as a home for three men in their late 20s – Jonathan Yaney, Bruce Bees, and Jason Menders – who were living down to earth existences on dry land until the boat entered into their lives. Two years ago, Yaney ran a real estate company in Manhattan with his brother, Max. On a web site, www.yachworld.com, he found an old ferry boat on sale. He thought about converting it into offices. And he bought it.

The boat could barely sail, but Yaney pictured in his mind a minimal space, modern furniture, with two elevators. The economy halted his ambitious project. The Yaneys brothers had a fight, and split up: Max kept the real estate company. Jonathan kept the boat.

He decided to live there, and called his two lifetime friends. Bees had just broken a long relationship and lost his job as a consultant. Menders was bored of being a builder in Montana. In the fall of 2008 they moved to the boat. The three men had met 20 years before, when they lived with their families in Gardiner, Montana, in a commune affiliated with the new age movement, Church Universal Triumphant. “I guess we live in a sort of commune even now,” said Bees. “Minus the religious aspect.”

On an ordinary Saturday afternoon this fall, Bees, Yaney and other occasional members of Bushwick boat crew, camped on the deck. A girl, wearing a long hipster skirt, tried to saw a piece of wood. She wanted to put it in the storage room where she had spent the night. Raimondo, a half Mexican, half Italian young man who wore a dandy outfit, with an old style waistcoat and a tie, drank a beer. He asked if someone had seen his hat, mixing English, Spanish and French words. “Now I’m studying Farsi,” he said. A long haired man who wore three rings on his fingers was working on a Mac. He pulled out a business card that read “Desmond Beirne – Program associate at Columbia University Center for Environmental Research and Conservation.” “At the next party I’ll give a lecture on astrobiology,” he said.

Three men were carrying vodka boxes on board. Another installed a DJ mixer in the lower deck. Yaney, who had yellow-tinted-hair and redded eyes, yelled orders. Bees, who had curly blond hair and was taller and bigger than everyone else, explained softly where to put things. By night, they were waiting for someone to install a screen, for a group of performers of a not well-defined show, and for almost a thousand guests.

Since last summer, parties are their new business. When Yaney, Bees, and Menders moved to the boat, which was anchored in a hidden corner of the East River, near the Pulaski Bridge, almost nothing worked. “During the winter we lived quite a rough life.” Bees said. In the morning, they had to fill a generator to prepare their first coffee. Then, their job began. They changed the engines, fixed the hull, furnished the cabin. After a season of hammering, screwing, painting, the boat was in a better shape. But the three friends were not. They were out of money. That is when they came up with the idea of organizing party. “We had a lot of friends in the business of the underground parties,” said Bees. “And everybody wanted to party on the boat.”

The three friends found a creek in Bushwick for an affordable rent, and without neighbors to complain. Last June, they gave their fist party. The invites were sent by e-mail, with the direction to a bar or an art center. From the meeting point, every 15 minutes, vans brought the guests to the hidden boat. On board, every other weekend there was a new themed party, with DJs who played electronic music, or trapeze artists, or documentaries. Drinks and music lasted until the morning. It worked well. The Bushwick Boat has become the new hidden hotspot for Brooklyn partygoers.

On a Saturday this fall, around midnight, at the entrance of the Bushwick Boat, three trumpet-players played a nostalgic song for a couple who wore a casual outfit and looked lost. “I didn’t know there was a theme,” the man complained, observing a girl wearing a plumed hat, and high heels. A flyer in her hand read “Hobo theme party.” People in suspenders and bowlers danced to old rock on the lower deck. On the bridge, a performer twirled above her head an umbrella on fire. On the bow, an accordion band played a French waltz. The dressed up crowd of young professionals, artists, and filmmakers arrived from Brooklyn and Manhattan. Almost everyone had known about the party through friends. The feeling of being part of an underground, exclusive event, cost just $20, plus $5 a drink, cash only. At the moment, it is a much more profitable business than real estate.

The coffin of Kevin O. Hill at a funeral home in Flatlands. Photo: Baynes/BrooklynInk

Army Specialist Kevin O. Hill was laid to rest at Cypress Hills Cemetery on Saturday morning, the day after his family, friends and fellow soldiers gathered at a quiet ceremony to bid him farewell.

Kevin, who was 23, was killed on patrol in a remote section of Afghanistan on October 4. His remains were transported to Delaware, and then on to Brooklyn where, on Friday night, visitors gathered in a cold room at John J. McManus & Sons Funeral Home in Flatlands. At the front of the room stood Kevin’s closed casket, draped in the American flag. On one side, a portrait of Kevin in college cap and gown rested on an easel. On the other, a photo of Kevin in his army uniform.

At the back door, Kevin’s older sister, Chinyere, hugged guests and thanked them for coming. She and her younger sister, Shantel, wore Kevin’s dog tags around their necks, occasionally holding them. Chinyere passed out yellow ribbons with the gold embossed writing: “Spec. Kevin Hill, 6-14-86 to 19-4-09,” for guests to pin on their lapels.

As 7 o’clock approached, his immediate family took seats in the front row of arm chairs. His parents, Oslen and Mahalia Hill, sat directly in front of the coffin. “I never thought I’d bury one of my kids,” Oslen had said a week earlier. He served as a paratrooper in the 82^nd Airborne Division during the First Gulf War. He hung his head down. Next to him, his wife Mahalia sank into her chair.

Behind them, a tall man in a navy blue uniform sat erect, his gray head jutting above the crowd. Army Brigadier General Thomas Cole was the only person in uniform to sit near the family section.

Uniformed men and women who never knew Kevin stood at the room’s perimeter. Firefighters, in thick black pants with suspenders and metal carabineers, gathered in one corner. Two police officers looked on from the back of the room. Men in blue shirts from the Transportation Security Administration faced each other on opposite sides of the room, feet apart and arms folded behind their backs. Kevin had worked for the TSA at Kennedy Airport throughout his four years at Monroe College.

The service opened with a reading from the Bible by a woman in the audience: “To everything there is a season.” It was the verse Pete Seeger used in his Vietnam-era song, “Turn! Turn! Turn!” The reader continued with “A time to be born and a time to die.” She slowed down for: “A time of war, and a time of peace.”

Late arrivals trickled in until almost all of the hundred chairs in the room were filled.

Kevin’s grandfather, Oslen Hill Sr., delivered a eulogy to his grandson in his Jamaican accent. He described Kevin as a “quiet, well-beloved and respectable young man.” He recounted a day the family had spent on Coney Island. On the way back, a group of teenagers were making a commotion on the train. He stood up and yelled at them, hoping the teens would pay attention to an older man. But his voice drowned in the mayhem. When Kevin yelled, “Knock it off; knock it off,” the crowd hushed immediately. “Kevin didn’t speak much,” said Hill Sr.. “But when he did, it made a difference.”

Hill Sr. described Kevin as an ambitious young man, “committed to a goal.” Kevin wanted to work for the Secret Service and believed experience in the Army would help him to advance his career. Hill Sr. also suspects Kevin wanted to follow in his father’s and grandfather’s footsteps. Both had served in the military.

After several family tributes, General Cole took the podium to speak on behalf of the Army. Cole, who never knew Kevin personally, described him as “a leader by his actions and by his kind heart.” He was quiet, not one to promote himself, but “a source of inspiration to the unit,” Cole said. He explained that Kevin had a “very dangerous job.” He worked for the Engineer Battalion doing route clearance work, searching for and disabling roadside bombs and IEDs. “I can tell you that Kevin saved a lot of lives,” said Cole. “And he sacrificed his life.”

Confusion lingers over how Kevin died. According to the Department of Defense, Kevin died from wounds suffered when enemy forces attacked his unit. Army officials informed the family that he was shot while out on patrol on a road near the Pakistan border. A friend from Kevin’s platoon called the family from Afghanistan to say that there were several explosions. Cole reported, after the service, that he did not know exactly what happened on the day Kevin died but that the Army will conduct a full investigation.

During his tribute, Cole thanked Kevin’s family and friends for their own sacrifice. “You too are paying the price for our freedom, for security, for a better world,” he said. He praised Kevin as an American hero.

“He was my hero,” said Kevin’s mother, Mahalia Hill, after her daughter, Chinyere, helped her to the podium. “When I’m down, he pull me up; he hold me. When I say no, he say, ‘Yes, you can do it.’ No man was better to me.” She said that Kevin looked cold, standing at the door before he returned to Afghanistan. But he insisted he would be alright.

On the right side of the room, a group of 10 middle-aged men and women stood at attention throughout the service. They wore no uniforms, but when they moved, they moved as a group, almost in formation. The shortest and possibly the oldest was Marlowe Fletcher. He had the face of a general, a stiff jaw and fixed eyes surrounded by wrinkles. He wore a black leather jacket with an American eagle on the back and the phrase: “The nation which forgets its heroes will itself be forgotten.” He wore a cap of the 173^rd Airborne Brigade—his son Jacob’s unit.

Jacob Samuel Fletcher died in Iraq on November 13, 2003 when a roadside bomb exploded his bus. Since then, Marlowe Fletcher, an Air Force veteran of the Vietnam War, has been a member the Gold Star Fathers. For the past six years, he has attended the wakes, funerals, and memorial services for every fallen soldier from New York and Long Island. “It’s our job to support the families,” he said. “It’s what we do.”

At the end of the ceremony, servicemen and women filed past Kevin’s coffin to pay their final respects. Some rested a hand on the foot of the casket.

When it was Fletcher’s turn, he paused in front of the coffin. He turned to Oslen Hill, who was bent over, his head hanging almost between his knees. Fletcher reached for Hill’s hand and helped him to stand up. The two veterans looked at each other and then at the coffin. They stood shoulder to shoulder, Hill’s dreadlocks hanging over his suit; Fletcher wore his son’s cap. Fletcher barked a command and the men saluted. Their salute hung in the air for a few seconds. Then the two fathers collapsed into each other and hugged.