Beatrice Mobley holding her Brooklyn Navy Yard Hospital I.D. (Photo courtesy of Beatrice Mobley)

Beatrice Mobley, believed to be one of the oldest surviving workers of the Brooklyn Navy Yard Hospital, sits at her dining room table in the Vinegar Hill area of Brooklyn, surrounded by mementos from various stages of her life. She picks up of her 66-year-old Brooklyn Navy Yard Hospital I.D. badge with its sepia-colored distressed picture, looks at it and smiles.

“I feel like I’m the only one left,” she says, adding that she was only 19 when she worked at the hospital.

The 85-year old’s memories are now part of the Brooklyn Navy Yard Oral History Project, an effort put together by the Brooklyn Historical Society (BHS) and 2011 Pulitzer Prize author and Brooklyn resident, Jennifer Egan.  The oral history project is part of the newly established Brooklyn Navy Yard Center at BLDG 92, which is an exhibition and visitors center. Its mission: to capture the stories of women and others who filled trade positions at the Brooklyn Navy Yard during World War II.

“These women paved the way for all of us in skilled professional fields today, and their oral histories are important records of personal experience that will be preserved to inspire future generations of innovative young women,” said Daniella Romano, vice president of BLDG 92 Exhibits and Programs-Brooklyn Navy Yard Development Corp.  Full-length oral history interviews are available at the BLDG 92 Resource Center and at the BHS Othmer Library by request.

Mobley, wearing a jade-colored jersey shirt and emerald green skirt and vest, is feisty, fashionable and full-of-faith. Her zest for life began in the rural enclaves of Savannah, Ga.  Although the climate of racism was strong in the 1940s, Mobley says she had a supportive family, great life and got along well with everyone.

“Some people came [to the north] from the south because they had it bad there,” she said. “But I didn’t come for that, because I had a job when I come from the south.  I always had good jobs.”

Mobley had been curious about Brooklyn, though, so in 1945 when she was 19-years-old, she left her 2-year-old son James, behind with her parents and abandoned her husband— whom she’d married when she was 15, but has never divorced, and headed north.  She immediately found work as a cook at the Brooklyn Navy Yard Hospital.

After more than six decades, despite her age, Mobley has vivid memories of that time. Since there were no buses then, she said she used to travel by trolley from her apartment in Bedford-Stuyvesant to the Navy Yard to work the 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. shift.  She chuckles now as she recalls how inexpensive things were.

“Carfare was five cents. That’s right, five cents to ride the trollies and the train,” she said.  She enjoyed working with the diverse staff. “The naval hospital was very friendly, you would never know it was segregated,“ she added.

From a young age, Mobley learned how to cook from her mother and found the Navy Yard as a suitable spot to show off her skills. “There was a big dining room, big kitchen because all the navy boys come from the ship.” Mobley didn’t have a signature dish but she helped to prepare foods like potatoes, string beans and roast beef for the hundreds of people who ate in the cafeteria.

After working for the Navy Yard for a year, Mobley, however, felt the call of her southern roots, so she returned to Georgia and also spent time in Florida where she worked as a cook for a local judge and his family.  But after a while, she missed Brooklyn, so in 1948 she returned, this time with her son, and has lived there ever since.

Mobley has lived in Farragut public housing for over 50 years. Sparsely furnished and neat, her apartment is decorated with silk roses and lace curtains with floral embroidery.

A professed loner, Mobley doesn’t have a lot of visitors except for a church member who checks on her weekly. Her son, who lives in Maryland, and other family members from other states, visit her periodically.   But she says that she’s not lonely and despite the poverty and crime that is prevalent in her neighborhood, Mobley says she’s never had any problems.

“I don’t live in fear,” she said boldly.  She attributes her fearlessness to her unwavering Christian faith. “Knowing God is with you, you don’t have to worry about nothing.”

Religion was a core part of her upbringing and the morals that were instilled in her as child resonated even thousands of miles away.  “My mother told me the do’s and don’t’s: never drink, never smoke, never party,” she recalled. “It’s a shame I’d never been to the movies because I wasn’t that type. I just went to church, come home and go to my job.”

But she does watch a little bit of television and listens to the radio occasionally but she’s not a fan of either.  She prefers spending time sewing, praying and reading the Bible.

Mobley has been a member of St. John’s Holiness Church in Bedford-Stuyvesant since she moved to Brooklyn and has served as a deaconess for over 50 years.  She used to drive all over the country but today she only drives her 1970 mint green Impala to church on Sundays or when she visits a friend at a nursing home.

After she returned to Brooklyn, Mobley worked as a cook, chauffeur and hairdresser for her Pastor at St. John’s for over 20 years until she passed away.  She then worked as a cook for different schools within the New York City Department of Education for close to 40 years.

“I was very faithful on my job,” she said. It was difficult for her to retire in 2010, because of a heart condition, from P.S. 287 where she served at for 30 years; she was affectionately called “Grandma” by students. To keep them close to her heart, she occasionally reads the dozens of handmade cards that students sent when she became ill.  “I love them too. I love my babies.”

Mobley has 21 grandchildren of her own so opening her heart to others came naturally. She has a special wall adorned with photographs of her family and a box full of photo albums, which she eagerly pulls out for a visitor.

“All the things I’ve been through, I still have my joy,” she said.  “My life is beautiful. I’m happy and satisfied.”

Moses Fried's unoccupied building in Bedford-Stuyvesant. (Keldy Ortiz / The Brooklyn Ink)

The Lefferts Hotel in Bedford-Stuyvesant was built as a pleasant place for guests to rest. There are no guests today, and it is hardly pleasant. The five story Lefferts building sits vacant and dreary, chains wrapped around its door handles.

The building’s history has been troubled in recent years. In 2006, the New York Sun reported that police were investigating prostitution there. The building owner, Moses Fried, told the newspaper at the time, “I’m a Jewish religious man. I would never permit to run prostitution there.”

No charges were filed and the hotel remained open, only to be closed in March 2010 by the Building Department because of unpaid building violations. According to department records, 127 Lefferts alone has accumulated $90,500 in unpaid fines since 2006. Most of the violations grow out of 125 and 127 Lefferts Place having been combined into one building “60 years ago,” Fried said, leaving insufficient “fire separation” under current codes.

And so it is that the neighborhood is now left with an empty building with signs on its roof and its side advertising for a hotel that is not taking in guests.

“It’s an eyesore now, the fact that it’s closed,” said three-year resident John Martinez, who lives on the same street as the closed building. “Ideally, [the building owner] would give up the home, and let someone fix it.”

The Lefferts is just one of scores of empty buildings in Bed-Stuy. Kendall Jackman, a homeless advocate involved in a citywide land-use study that is soon to be released,  said that the neighborhood “has the highest density per square mile of vacant property buildings and lots” in the city.

Such buildings are like a plague on a community. They run down surrounding property values by being unattractive and making the neighborhood feel dangerous.

Some are foreclosed homes awaiting buyers, a result of the ongoing real estate crisis. But others are the result of a more controversial practice called “warehousing,” in which the owners are merely sitting on the property, waiting, usually for years, for an opportunistic sale at a steep price when someone really needs or wants the property.

Fried said that that he is not warehousing the Lefferts Hotel. “I am trying to open the building as soon as possible,” he said. “I’m losing a lot of money to keep that building that way, but the city does not want to let me open it up. The city is still giving me violations worth thousands of dollars while the building is closed.”

An unoccupied building on Lefferts Place. (Keldy Ortiz / The Brooklyn Ink)

The city usually requires that all violations are paid up before it will give a permit to do almost any improvement on a building, or to rent or sell it.  Landlords faced with high fines or back taxes often sell buildings precisely because they need the income to pay up before the city seizes the building.

According to building department records reviewed by The Brooklyn Ink, the uninhabited building of 127 Lefferts Place has received 16 violations since 2009. Fried, nonetheless, insists that he intends to fix the building.

Derrick Catley, an 11-year resident of Bed-Stuy, stared up at the Lefferts from his nearby brownstone on a recent day. “I can’t imagine this building sitting there not (generating) money,” he said. “Why should it stay vacant?”

Exact numbers of vacant buildings and lots are hard to come by, but Jackman’s advocacy group, Picture The Homeless, plans in January to release a study it has done of the five boroughs. She said that the study will pinpoint places and numbers. The group’s interest is to find more housing for the city’s homeless.

Many factors have contributed to warehousing. One is that New York’s rent laws strongly protect the renter, even when they don’t pay the rent. The amount of rent a landlord can charge is also often regulated. Some of the oldest buildings are subject to stringent rent control laws, while many of those built between February 1947 and January 1974 come under more flexible but still limiting rent stabilization. The rent on many New York City apartments is thus less than market prices.

Specializing in tenant and landlord court disputes, attorney Serge Joseph said owners often just do not want to deal with tenants as a result. “Some landlords do not want to be restricted,” he said. A building owner can just decide to pay taxes and avoid the tenant headache, he said.

But sitting outside his home just a few feet from the empty building, 14-year resident Jimmy Holloman said that someone should live there. “It would be nice if the house is rented out to the homeless or something,” said Holloman. “It’s [in] a nice neighborhood.”

Bedford-Stuyvesant has been growing and gentrifying as new residents have been pouring into the neighborhood for more than five years running. “It’s an up and coming area,” said real estate agent Rosetta Allen, who has been selling buildings in the community for 16 years. “Before people wanted to be away from Bed-Stuy, but now there is more of a desire to be in Bed-Stuy.”

Property values in the area have ballooned with the demand.  According to various real estate websites, recent values of homes in the area range from $500,000 to upwards of $3 million.

This run down building on Fulton Street remains empty. (Keldy Ortiz / The Brooklyn Ink)

To Allen, it’s difficult to understand why owners let buildings like the Lefferts sit empty. “I don’t see why,” she said. “They don’t make any money just having it there. They are hoping that the value goes up, but the problem is that when it goes up, there will not be any buyers” because people will would have found other places, she added.

Michael Slattery, senior vice president of the Real Estate Board of New York, however, believes the opposite. Slattery said that an owner “can hold it as an asset.”

But that’s not to say that he opposes the idea of trying to make money by occupying and renting the building. “If you have a place that can generate some income and bring some tenants, it’s better,” he said. “It’s better to make some money than not.”

The city does provide enticing incentives for owners. Through the Department of Housing and Preservation exists the Housing Asset Renewal Program (HARP), which focuses on converting vacant buildings into affordable housing.

Then there is Habitat for Humanity NYC, which buys properties and places families from the neighborhood into those homes. The problem executive director Josh Lockwood says he faces is that “the owner is resistant” to sell to him. Lockwood’s response: “You can hope that property values will come back. But, it might be that this recession drags out. By selling this building, they take the risk out of the equation.”

An extreme measure to free property can be through eminent domain, said Tom Angotti, a former city planner, and currently chairman of Hunter College Center of Communities, Development and Planning. However, he said that Bedford Stuyvesant is “not on a high scale” when it comes to real estate.

Until then, Jackman hopes that once elected officials are made aware of the number of vacant properties in Bedford-Stuyvesant, they will force owners to up warehoused buildings. As a homeless person herself, and currently living in a shelter, she hopes that the city can provide homes to those who need them.

“There’s enough housing that there doesn’t need to be a homeless shelter,” said Jackman.

Brooklyn's Bed-Stuy neighborhood. Local residents feel overburdened by homeless shelters. (Michael Copley / The Brooklyn Ink)

Henry Butler talks like a man who’s at the end of his rope: Neighborhoods like his in central Brooklyn, which historically have struggled with poverty, are oversaturated with homeless shelters while more affluent parts of the city are spared the burden.

“That’s it for me,” said Butler, chairman of Community Board 3 in Bedford-Stuyvesant, which claims to have one of the highest concentrations of homeless shelters in the city and where 45 percent of residents are on some kind of public assistance.

“The [facilities] that are there existing, fine. But as far as new ones, I’m not approving any,” said Butler. His problem, however, is that he can’t stop the city from opening more shelters; the most Butler can do is speak out against them.

The lasting effects of the recession and record numbers of homeless people in New York City have heightened tension between the city’s Department of Homeless Services (DHS) and neighborhoods that feel overburdened by shelters and excluded from conversations about development in their own communities.

When residents call Butler to complain that homeless men just moved in across the street, all he can do is listen: typically he doesn’t know any more about DHS’s plans than his neighbors do.

The large, long-established shelters that sleep hundreds of homeless adults are a separate matter. Butler’s problem is with the smaller transitional houses—facilities that can spring up overnight when the need for shelter outpaces DHS’s supply.

DHS insists those rapid-response shelters—“per diem” arrangements designed to quickly house a family or individuals in need—are essential to its mission: When a family of four shows up at 3 a.m. asking for a place to stay, there isn’t time to notify the public.

“This is one of the hottest topics for the community,” said Butler. “The community of Bedford-Stuyvesant makes no apologies because we’ve done and are doing our fair share when it comes to assisting those who need help.”

“We don’t want to become a community of transitional housing,” he said. “Every program does not have to be in Bedford-Stuyvesant or Crown Heights.”

The financial downturn, which dashed so many people’s livelihoods, forced thousands from their homes and into city shelters in recent years.

Between 2009 and 2010, there was a 17 percent increase in the number of families with children seeking shelter, according to Seth Diamond, commissioner of DHS.

On one night in December, 8,523 families with children stayed in a variety of DHS facilities, including transitional houses run by contracted businesses and non-profits, as well as those that operate under the per diem arrangement, in which the city pays landlords for the temporary use of apartments and hotel rooms.

“I don’t think any of us could have predicted the severity of the economic recession that first gripped the nation, including New York City, in fiscal years 2009 and 2010,” Diamond said at a City Council hearing last year, according to a transcript.

Separate from DHS’s stock of transitional houses are independent facilities—gutted one- and two-family residences known as “three-quarter houses” that can sleep up to 40 adults and often violate city health and building codes. Increasing numbers of three-quarter houses exacerbate the tension between the public and DHS.

From the outside DHS facilities and three-quarter houses can be indistinguishable from one another, a fact that one City Council aid blamed for most of the local pushback against DHS.

The majority of three-quarter houses are located in neighborhoods like Bedford-Stuyvesant—historically low-income and predominately black and Latino, according to a 2008 report by Coalition for the Homeless.

That report charged the Bloomberg administration with “fueling” the market for three-quarter houses by ignoring documented health and safety hazards in shelters the city worked with until at least 2008. Diamond said DHS now inspects all facilities where its clients are housed.

On Putnam Avenue, Sumpter Street, and Marcy Place in Brooklyn in 2008, Coalition for the Homeless found three-quarter houses where the floors had collapsed, the walls were crumbling, and where there wasn’t any heat.

“We have our share of illegal operations,” said Butler. “We get calls constantly. Somebody’s got a bunch of homeless men living up here, and they’re out there fussing and cursing and fighting and drinking and drugs, and I can’t go to my backyard.”

Edna Johnson, head of Bed-Stuy’s health and social services committee, said landlords “get the rent, they throw [the homeless] in there and then they spill out into the community and they cause a lot of problems.”

“People are scared for their property. People are scared for their children. People are afraid for themselves,” Johnson said.

“This is a constant battle day in and day out,” said Butler. “So even when a [legitimate] program comes along, there’s apprehension about it because people are like, ‘Oh god, another one.’”

Transitional housing—be it a contracted facility, per diem shelter, or three-quarter house—is a weight around Bed-Stuy’s neck, according to Butler.

“You have people who are homeowners; we want our property values to go up just like any other community,” he said. “And my property value can’t go up if I’ve got a bunch of transitional housing on my block.”

“What [leaders] are referring to are quality of life issues,” said Michael Corley, of Corley Realty Group in Brooklyn.

He said transitional housing doesn’t necessarily “sway [property] valuation.”

DHS tries to house families near their home community. In April 2010, the agency reported placing 88 percent of families in the same borough as the youngest child’s school.

Nina Kaminsky, a director at Housing Plus Solutions, a not-for-profit that operates supportive housing facilities in Brooklyn, said transitional housing tends to take root in lower-income neighborhoods where the rent’s cheaper.

Almost 39 percent of DHS’s transitional houses were located in the Bronx in 2010, according to the agency. Nearly 30 percent were in Brooklyn; about 21 percent were in Manhattan; 15 percent were in Queens, and less than one percent was on Staten Island.

Most of the facilities go through a review process before opening, which includes notifying affected communities and evaluating shelter saturation in the area.

Roughly 1,600 shelters, though—about a quarter of the City’s inventory of family housing in 2010—operated under the per diem arrangement, which doesn’t require a contract, public notification, or consideration of the number of shelters already in the neighborhood.

A City Council report states, “The lack of a contract raises questions about how DHS controls payments to providers, and therefore whether such arrangements are fiscally sound…”

An audit released in November found that DHS made “significant improper and questionable expenditures” totaling $913,949 to an agency, Aguila Incorporated, for per diem shelters it operates. The audit’s accusations are two-fold: DHS failed to inspect the company’s monthly invoices, and it failed to ensure clients were housed in safe and sanitary conditions.

DHS “generally disagreed” with the audit’s findings, but Diamond said last year that his agency is moving the bulk of per diem facilities into contracts.

“There are times,” however, “when, for largely emergency reasons, we do have to open sites without going through the formal [contracting] process,” said Diamond. “We have to be somewhat nimble in being able to move when we have unanticipated demands.”

Diamond added that notifying communities before a contract proposal is submitted, “may [give] an incomplete or inaccurate picture to the public.”

Last year the City Council’s Committee on General Welfare took up a bill requiring DHS to notify communities before it opens shelters—including those that spring up under the per diem arrangement. The legislation died amid opposition from DHS.

The bill’s sponsors adjusted their approach and returned this year with legislation requiring DHS to catalogue the locations of its various facilities. DHS and some City Council aids note concerns about the safety and confidentiality of the homeless who reside in them.

“Notification, be it an emergency or not, is a basic process issue,” Councilman Al Vann said last year. “Every city agency has the obligation to be transparent. And I want it to be known that I do not accept a declaration of emergency as a way to get around [the] process.”

“Whatever the circumstances, what’s the problem with notifying?” he asked Diamond. “Even when we, community boards are notified, they don’t have the power to make it not happen, but at least they can plan, they can arrange, they can do something.”

In written testimony submitted last year, Theresa Scavo, a local leader in southern Brooklyn, stated, “The Community at large is best known by those who reside there. The locations of specific places unsuitable for homeless housing must be identified by the Community Board. The Community Board could then work with Homeless Services to find a better fit for the needed housing.”

Diamond maintained throughout the hearing that his agency has a “good” process for notifying the public before shelters open: “The proof is not really so much the process before,” he said, “although again I think we do have to have a transparent process. But the real proof of whether we’re making good siting decisions comes after, when we open the facilities.”

Councilman James Vacca accused DHS of wanting “to do what it wants to do, when it wants to do it, and where it wants to do it.”

For related story see: Next Step Shelter Program Uses Punitive Measures

For related story see: Fort Greene Shelter: One of the Worst in New York, Some Residents Say

22-year-old Kyle Decoteau was shot and killed in Bed-Stuy in July. (Picture courtesy of the Kyle Decoteau Foundation)

Kyle Decoteau, 22, was shot and killed in Bedford-Stuyvesant in the early hours of July 20, 2011.

His death and its aftermath, which saw a wave of anti-crime sentiment ripple through the neighborhood, highlighted two facts about Bed-Stuy: though safer than in the past, it’s still plagued by crime; and its residents are fed up with the plague.

“It is time for community members to speak out,” said Kurtis Miller, who tutored Decoteau in math, reading, and writing for six years. “Criminals need to be made to understand that their actions have an effect on people, and themselves as well, in time.”

Bed-Stuy’s reputation as a dangerous neighborhood had even seeped into pop culture. Billy Joel’s 1980 single “You May Be Right” used the phrase “I walked through Bedford-Stuy alone” as evidence against the singer’s own sanity. Jay-Z, who grew up in Bed-Stuy’s famous Marcy Houses, raps about rising from the mean streets of Brooklyn to superstardom, “from Marcy to Madison Square.”

NYPD crime statistics corroborated the gist of the performers’ words and the reality of Bed Stuy’s violent past. There were 120 murders in 1990 in the neighborhood, which is comprised of the 79^th and 81^st precincts. There were also 3,886 robberies—more than ten per day.

But over the course of the next decade, crime rates fell dramatically. In 2001, Bed-Stuy’s precincts reported 43 murders and 1,046 robberies. Between 1990 and 2001, total instances of the “seven major felonies”—murder, rape, robbery, felony assault, burglary, grand larceny, and grand larceny auto—fell by 66 percent.

Ten years later, crime rates are hovering in an uneasy spot: much lower than in the 90’s and still declining, but still too high. Last year, there were 29 murders in the neighborhood. That was enough to give Bed-Stuy, with a population of 161,290, an intentional homicide rate of nearly 18 per 100,000 residents, almost four times the national rate of 4.8 per 100,000, according to FBI statistics.

The rate is more or less on track to remain the same in 2011.

According to Kim Best, president of the 79^th Precinct Community Council and chairperson of Bed-Stuy’s Civic Safety Committee, community concern has been a key factor in the fight against crime.

“It’s very important that the community has taken safety into their own hands,” she said.“The NYPD can’t be everywhere: they can’t put a police officer on every block.”

One way that has been effective has been the establishment of action groups and block associations.

“I oversee more than 200 block associations,” she said. “At night on streets where a lot of crime happens, we have block watches. Certain people will be assigned to monitor the block at night, usually from inside their home. And if anything happens, they have the police on the phone right away.”

According to Best, the number of block associations in the area has grown dramatically since she first became involved with the Civic Safety Committee a decade ago.

Still, 23 people have been killed in Bed-Stuy this year.

One of them was Kyle Decoteau, shot twice on a stoop while trying to cool off on a hot summer night.In the wake of his death, his friends and family set out to galvanize the people of Bed-Stuy.

Ann Decoteau, Kyle’s mother, founded a nonprofit public charity, the Kyle Decoteau Foundation, in the aftermath of her son’s death. It represents just the sort of community-born resistance to crime that Best described as crucial.

The group organizes rallies and is raising money to provide counseling for kids and young men that have participated in or fallen victim to gang-related crime. At a march against violence organized by the foundation and held on Nov. 25, members of Kyle’s family, his friends, and people who had never met him walked through Bed-Stuy, shouting and chanting, their intolerance for crime on full and powerful display.

Decoteau’s tutor, Kurtis Miller, was also moved by his former pupil’s death. He wrote an open letter to the community, published in late August by local media outlets, pleading for peace and sensibility.

“Peace,” he wrote, “is a spiritual rest from within us, an unexplainable feeling far from our own conscious understanding that conquers the very circumstances which cause us to treat one another unkindly.”

Miller is no stranger to people treating each other unkindly. His brother was murdered in Harlem in 1996. He now considers it his duty to use his intimate knowledge of loss and tragedy as a weapon against crime.

“It’s too late for Kyle,” he says. “But there will be so many more like him if we [community members] don’t speak up.”

More Stories on The Brooklyn Ink:

Soccer Inspires Kids in Crown Heights

Brooklynites Cautious as Subway Theft Rises

Brownsville Street Gangs to Attempt Peace Talk

(Photo: Chika Okaneme / The Brooklyn Ink)

The Interfaith Medical Center, a major health provider in the Crown Heights and the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhoods is experiencing an increase in uninsured patients using the emergency room as their main source of healthcare. Administrators at the hospital attribute the trend to the sluggish economy and say a pool of federal funds intended to pay for the uninsured is running out.

“You see it in cycles” said Diane Porter, Vice President of Interfaith’s Board of Trustees, “with whatever’s going on in the larger society and with recessions and high unemployment.”

Unemployment for Kings County, which encompasses Brooklyn, is 9.6 percent. According to the NY Department of Labor this percentage is higher than the national average of 9.1 percent, and the rate for the city as a whole, which is 8.7 percent.

Interfaith treated over 60,000 emergency room patients in 2010. A pool of money received from the federal government this year, called the charity pool, is nearly exhausted after just nine months, Porter said. By the end of December she predicts that the expenses the hospital will be forced to incur, to treat the increased numbers of uninsured, will have well exceeded the money left in the charity pool, forcing the hospital to cover the uncompensated costs. With no guarantee for more funding, Porter is concerned about the increase in the number of uninsured emergency patients they have to treat. “It’s growing and it’s not going away,” she said, “that’s the point.”

“It’s a burden” Porter said, “because we’re consuming goods, labor, equipment, [and] supplies, for which we are not going to be reimbursed.” Uninsured patients only add to the Medical Center’s negative cash flow, she said. “For every dollar we spend, we are reimbursed 45 to 50 cents,” she said, so servicing people who can pay little or nothing puts a further strain on Interfaith’s finances.

Federal law requires hospitals to treat patients who arrive seeking help, even if they are uninsured or unable to pay. “If a person presents themselves at the emergency room for care, by law you are required to treat them” Porter said.

Because they know they will receive treatment without paying, some people use the emergency room for routine medical care instead of going to a primary care physician, who are not required to treat patients who cannot pay.

Angela Roper (49) was a recent patient at Interfaith’s emergency room. She grew up in Crown Heights and now lives in Bedford-Stuyvesant. She said had been unemployed and uninsured for three and a half years, until finding a job this January.  Before she was laid off she had been working at her previous job for eighteen and a half years.

She received unemployment compensation, but did not qualify for Medicaid. “I felt vulnerable,” she said.

In June 2009, she started experiencing painful swelling in her hands. She felt that she had no choice but to go to the ER because “one option is better than no options”. Having no existing heath conditions, she went to Interfaith’s emergency room three consecutive times in one week as the pain escalated. Doctors at the ER were finally able to diagnose her condition as rheumatoid arthritis.

“Maybe once I gave them 5 or 10 dollars but after that I didn’t give them anything… I had nothing [more] to give,” she said.

She has gone to Interfaith’s emergency room several times in addition to this incident. She knew that there were clinics available to patients who were uninsured but she often felt her arthritis pain and other health worries could not wait for a doctor’s appointment.

One Sunday, she was in so much pain that she could not wait to see a Rheumatologist on Tuesday. Her arthritis flared up so badly that she could barely walk into the emergency room, she said. Just a few days later, she was finally approved for Medicaid.

New York City has a variety of other health facilities, such as clinics or community health centers, that serve people who cannot afford private insurance or are not eligible for public health insurance.

The increase in uninsured patients is a rising problem in the City. According to the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, 32.5 percent of Central Brooklyn residents are unemployed and uninsured, and 13 percent of the uninsured population uses the emergency room for health care.

The New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation, which is dedicated to providing health services to people without insurance, has seen an increase in uninsured patients and a decrease in funding. Last year the corporation reported a 14 percent rise in the number of uninsured patients over the past four years at the same time the system was experiencing budget cuts.

“This is just getting started,” Michael O’Neil, Occupy Brooklyn activist, told Patch, saying protesters were further motivated “every time the police overreach and criminalize the 99 percent.”

Read more on the Bed Stuy-based site here.

Unable to find a job upon graduating from the Pratt Institute in May, the 33-year-old decided to work as her own interior designer. She thereby constructed a 17-foot-tall treehouse on a raised platform — she couldn’t suspend it from the tree’s trunk —  anchored to a mulberry behind her apartment building. What’s even more impressive is that she completed the task with less than $400.

Her cozy abode is covered with a collage consisting of pages from fashion magazines, strings of lights and pink decorative bats. What more could anyone ask for?

Photo Courtesy of Trevor Tondro / The New York Times

The attack allegedly occurred around noon at the woman’s workplace, where she fought the perpetrator off and escaped without harm. Police have released camera footage of the incident.

Eric Bullen was honored as an “economic development trailblazer” during the seventh annual Bed-Stuy Alive (Photo Credit: Michael Copley.)

There was a time when Eric Bullen couldn’t keep thieves out of his clothing store in Bedford-Stuyvesant. Delivery trucks were raided when their drivers walked into his shop, and a particularly daring thief once broke in through his store’s skylight window.

“They were coming from the front and the back,” said Bullen. “I was a nervous wreck.”

Al’s Men’s Shop, the business Bullen has owned in Bed-Stuy since 1977, stubbornly survived through decades blighted by drugs and poverty. Long-time residents say the explosion of crack and heroin during the 1980s and 90s was especially vicious.

“I stuck here all during that time,” said Bullen. “The neighborhood was like a ghost town. People would come in the neighborhood and get mugged.”

The skylight caper was the last straw for Bullen. Rather than flee the neighborhood, however, he moved his business to the other side of Fulton Street in 1989 and reopened.

From there he’s watched the decline and resurgence of a neighborhood.

On Oct. 8, Bullen, 68, was honored as an “economic development trailblazer” during the seventh annual Bed-Stuy Alive, a weeklong festival celebrating the neighborhood’s culture and history. The award, one of nine given out this year in categories ranging from arts to business, is a tribute to Tohma Y. Faulkner, a former member of Community Board 3 who died in 2008.

“The award means a lot to me,” Bullen said in his shop in early October. “It’s people in the community recognizing longevity in an individual that actually saw changes and stuck in the community in bad days and good. That, to me, was worth all the trouble I’ve had.”

Bullen immigrated to the United States from Grenada in 1968 after several years in the West Indian Regiment in Jamaica and later in the Trinidad and Tobago Defense Force.

With professional experience limited to military service and a short stint as a teenager at Everybody’s Department Store in Grenada, a placement agency sent Bullen to Al’s Men’s Shop, which at the time was owned by Jerome Friedman. Bullen bought the store in 1977 when Friedman moved to another part of the city.

“The neighborhood was changing,” said Bullen. “There was no business and a lot of drugs” – there was “a drug infestation,” he clarified.

Other long-time business owners describe a similar scene. Vinnie Moreno, who owns a pizzeria on Nostrand Avenue, said that for years the area in front of his restaurant was a violent drug market. “It’s crazy,” Moreno said pointing out his shop’s front window, “it was like Baghdad.”

Those years were hard on businesses. “There were days when I couldn’t pay my rent,” said Bullen. Al’s Men’s Shop shutdown at one point because he couldn’t pay his sales tax, and he frequently had to rely on Friedman, who by then was operating another clothing store, for merchandise on consignment.

Despite the struggle, Bullen stayed in the neighborhood – “To go elsewhere, I would have had to have money. Where would I have gone?” he asked – and serviced a “loyal” clientele. “I have a good relationship with people,” he explained. “It’s how I deal with [them].”

But his resoluteness also grew out of a sense he had that the shop created a kind of permanence that Bed-Stuy lacked. He talks of men released from prison who would walk into his shop to say hello because his was the only business left that they remembered from before they went away.

“As long as they can see someone they recognize, it brings back memories,” he said.

At the award ceremony last week, State Assemblywoman Annette M. Robinson, who handed out the awards, called Bullen a “reflection of the deeply diverse roots of Bed-Stuy,” and praised Bullen and the other award recipients for their “endurance and perseverance” through “trials and tribulations.”

“I love what I do with a passion,” Bullen said a few days before the ceremony. “It’s all I know… I think business is my gift. It’s so much easier for me because I love what I do. I feel so comfortable here.”

But the energy and time it took to maintain the business left little for his family. “It can go both ways,” he said. “I couldn’t be there with them and here at the same time.”

Bullen’s daughter, Erica, who accepted her father’s award because he wasn’t able to attend the ceremony — he was working — told the crowd that growing up, she and her siblings resented their father’s absence from family events. They “childishly” didn’t appreciate his efforts to provide for his family, she said, or his larger significance to the community.

Looking back, she said, “He taught us lessons in selflessness.”

Through his shop’s front doors, Bullen has seen Bed-Stuy swing “from one extreme to the other,” he said. For one thing, “more white people are back” in the neighborhood. There was a time not so long ago, he said, when “it was unheard of for white people to come here.”

During the past decade, Bedford-Stuyvesant absorbed upwards of 10,000 new residents, census data show. White people are reportedly moving in while the neighborhood’s black population has experienced a “dramatic decline,” according to Joseph Salvo of New York City’s Planning Department.

Salvo told NewYork1 that that kind of transformation – what he has called a “tremendous change” for the historically black neighborhood – is “the story of New York.”

Bullen and other business owners say there’s also much less crime in the neighborhood. According to police data, the number of robberies reported in Bed-Stuy is down 75 percent since 1993, and the number of murders during the same period has fallen as much as 75 percent in some areas. 

“I was privileged to see this,” Bullen said. “People just see [things] one way, but I’ve seen it from bad to good.”

Today Bullen’s shop deals almost exclusively in hats – “headwear” as he calls it. Other clothing is available, but it’s hidden in cabinets behind hat racks. As a practical matter, focusing on hats made the business less overwhelming, he said.

But it’s also a matter of style.

“You’re not completely dressed until you have a hat,” he said. “I’m from that old school. I like to see the response, the facial expression of comfort and happiness. That makes my day.”

And now, “if the economy could just get a little bit better, a lot of stores [in Bed-Stuy] could do better,” said Bullen. “It would be good for all of us.”

Al’s Men’s Shop will once again relocate in the coming months to another spot on Fulton Street in Bed-Stuy. With the building Bullen rents in up for sale, he decided to move rather than hang around to see what a new owner might do – increase the rent, which is happening to commercial property throughout the neighborhood, or use the space for another other use. 

“I don’t know who would come in and what would happen,” said Bullen. “I made up my mind to go. I can feel a little bit better.”

“I still feel there are better days to come.”

The Bedford-Stuyvesant Family Health Center, on Fulton Street, offers family planning services. Shane Hunt/ The Brooklyn Ink

More than half of pregnancies in Bedford-Stuyvesant end in abortion, one of the highest ratios in the city and more than double the ratio for the United States as a whole, according to data from the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene.

The neighborhood statistics were obtained from the health department by the pro-life Chiaroscuro Foundation through a Freedom of Information Law request. According to the data, broken down by ZIP code, the highest abortion ratios in Brooklyn were for Brownsville and Bedford-Stuyvesant, with 59 percent and 52 percent respectively.

The data represent the so-called Guttmacher abortion ratio, which is induced terminations as a percentage of all pregnancies excluding miscarriages. The Guttmacher Institute is a nonprofit focused on sexual and reproductive health.

The ratios for the two neighborhoods are strikingly higher than the Guttmacher ratio for the nation as a whole, which has been hovering in the low twenties for several years. They are also significantly higher than the 41 percent average in New York City as a whole.

“Numbers for the whole city are sort of abstract,” said Greg Pfundstein, executive director of the Chiaroscuro Foundation, of his organization’s decision to seek hyper-local data. “If you can look and see that in your own neighborhood the abortion ratio is so high, it brings the reality closer to you. So if you live in Bed-Stuy, for instance, you can look and realize: wow, that’s high, I should talk to my kids.”

Nationally, abortion has been on the decline for decades. A 2008 study conducted by Guttmacher researchers found that 30 percent of viable pregnancies were terminated in 1980. The number dropped to 28 percent in 1990 and 22.4 percent in 2008.

But the ZIP code statistics reveal that certain communities are still seeing a significant number–even a majority–of pregnancies end in abortion. According to Pfundstein, this is a reality either overlooked or misunderstood by many.

“People think of abortion as something that should exist because every once-in-a-while, people make mistakes. But when you see rates [like Bed-Stuy’s], it doesn’t seem like a once-in-a-lifetime mistake anymore. People’s idea … of abortion and the reality of abortion don’t line up so well.”

A Bed-Stuy community board official, however, said the ratio was not excessive.

“If the abortion rate is high, that’s because it should be high, because it needs to be high,” said Edna Johnson, chair of Community Board 3’s Health and Hospital Committee.

“These kids need to be in school, not on the streets trying to feed a child,” she said, referring to Bedford-Stuyvesant’s large number of poor, uneducated, and sexually active young people.

The abortion data published by the Chiaroscuro Foundation also included various other categories of information, much of which is concerned with racial demographics.

The data show that the fifteen ZIP codes with the highest abortion ratios were, on average, 67 percent black, whereas the 15 ZIP codes with the lowest abortion ratios had a black population of only 4 percent.

Emphasis on race can be misleading, Pfundstein said, because it is not the factor most closely correlated with the abortion data.

“We found that the only really good indicator of a neighborhood’s [abortion] numbers was the percent of female householders with no husband present,” he said.

According to the 2010 Census, single-mother households significantly outnumber husband-wife units in Bedford-Stuyvesant.

Other studies show evidence that such indicators are themselves mere proxies for the underlying cause of high abortion ratios: poverty.

“Poor women are more likely to get pregnant when they didn’t want to, and, in turn they have more abortions and more unplanned birth,” explained Rachel Jones, Senior Research Associate at the Guttmacher Institute. “Rates of poverty are higher for Black (and Latina) women, and this partially explains why they have higher abortion rates and ratios and higher levels of unplanned births.”

Analysis of the data shows a discrepancy in the way Brownsville and Bed-Stuy ZIP codes were defined.

The Chiaroscuro Foundation allocated to “Bedford-Stuyvesant-Crown Heights” data for ZIP code 11212, which actually belongs to nearby Brownsville. The designation was consistent with the way the New York State Department of Health assigns ZIP codes to neighborhoods. But in fact that postal code falls entirely outside of the borders of Bed-Stuy’s Community Board 3.

Bedford-Stuyvesant’s four principle ZIP codes had a Guttmacher ratio of 52 percent, with 4,606 live births and 4,931 abortions.

In addition to Brownsville, with 59 percent, other Brooklyn ZIP codes with abortion ratios over 50 percent included East New York, Canarsie, Flatbush, and East Flatbush. The ratio for the borough as a whole was 39 percent.

Earlier press reports about the data focused attention on the Manhattan neighborhood of Chelsea, which had a city-high 67 percent abortion ratio. However, with only 39 live births and 80 abortions, that neighborhood’s numbers were low in absolute terms, particularly relative to the many postal codes reporting over 1000 abortions, including Bed-Stuy and Brownsville.

Editor’s Note: An earlier headline indicated that these abortion rates were boroughwide. The Ink regrets the error.