P.S. 217, one of the schools affected by overcrowding (Chika Okaneme/The Brooklyn Ink)

It’s a timeless American scene that warms the heart, but what it hides is something else.   P.S. 139, and many other schools throughout Brooklyn, are growing increasingly over-crowded—and the problem is likely to only get worse for the foreseeable future.

According to the New York City Department of Education’s 2010-2011 capacity report, about a third of NYC elementary school buildings are over capacity. Nearly a hundred of these schools are in Brooklyn. Out of the 5,003 new seats the department provided to schools this year, Brooklyn— the most populated borough—received only 343 of them. Yet, the borough continues to grow as a popular destination for young American and immigrant families looking for affordable housing and charming neighborhoods.

But as Mildred Decker, a young single mother with a child in P.S. 139, worries:  “If the school’s overcrowded, how is a kid supposed…to get the right amount of help?”

Her concern can be seen in spades in Community Board 14, which represents the Flatbush, Midwood, and eastern Kensington neighborhoods.  Three schools in CB14’s part of school district 22— P.S. 217, 139 and 315— are over-capacity, according to the department of education’s report. In October, the board completed its fiscal year 2013 capital and expense budget and recommended that a new elementary school be built.

“Overcrowding has been a persistent problem…for many, many years…and this has been a recommendation for consecutive budgets” stated Shawn Campbell, the community board’s district manager. “The biggest challenge in meeting this or any other capital need is the constraints on the budget in the City of New York in these difficult financial times.”

“It’s been a problem in Brooklyn and citywide” said Christopher Spinelli, president of Community Education Council District 22, the “budget is degrading year by year.” Recently, the state reduced its contribution to city education by $1.4 billion. There have been thousands of teacher layoffs and a series of school budget cuts.

Schools are having trouble finding room for incoming students. “Principals are having to do more with less. They’re not able to open up additional classes, so… they have to continue to fill a class until it’s at capacity” Spinelli said. “In some cases they wind up going over capacity since you really can’t turn a child away.”

Residents are growing increasingly restless. “We’re getting more complaints now than ever before,” Spinelli said, “because principals are not able to open up more classes and hire more teachers. So we’re definitely seeing more issues with overcrowding.”

Spinelli went to an overcrowded school as a child, and his children are now in the same situation.  “My children have always been in classes that are at the maximum capacity and I don’t think that is an ideal learning situation” he said. “You always want a smaller class size.”

Repeated research shows that class size has a major impact on learning, student-teacher relationships, teaching quality, and overall academic success. In the 1980s, the landmark Tennessee Project STAR study, for example, showed that a class size between 13-17 students, for grades K through 3, resulted in higher test scores. According to the U.S. Department of Education, these results were especially significant for minority children and those from economically disadvantaged backgrounds.

Subsequent research also supports the Tennessee findings.  In a study published this year by Switzerland’s University of Teacher Education St. Gallen and the University of London, reducing class sizes by even one student can improve learning. The study also suggested that a class of 17 students or less is ideal.

The city department of education has a set of target class sizes for different elementary school levels— 18 students for Pre-K, 20 for grades K-3, and 28 for grades 4-8. All of these numbers are lower than the city’s previous class size standards, but they are higher than what many researchers think is the best class size for optimal learning.

Deckard’s five-year old daughter is currently enrolled in one of P.S. 139’s kindergarten classes. “I was aware of [the overcrowding] that’s why I didn’t want her to go to that school” she said, but she felt as though she had no choice. She was told to send her daughter to a zone school. Before registering her child, she tried to contact the school board to see if there was any way for her child to enroll someplace else, but she was either shooed away or left without a response. “I just feel like it’s kind of messed up” she said.

Her child’s kindergarten class has about 21 students. Deckard says she was in a kindergarten class about that same size when she was little, but there was one major difference. “I remember when I was in kindergarten I had two teachers” she said.  If the school cannot reduce the class size, she wishes there was at least another teacher in the classroom so that her child could receive more attention and better instruction.

Beth Orchulli, a stay-at-home mother of two, never went to an overcrowded school— but because of P.S. 217 her children now do. Although her son’s pre-k class is a descent size, her second grade son is in a class with about 25 other students.

When her family moved into the neighborhood two years ago, she already presumed that her sons would go to an overcrowded school. “It’s unavoidable unless you can afford private school,” she said.

Nevertheless, she wants change. “I think the children suffer,” she said. “There should be a bigger commitment to building more schools.”

Leonie Haimson, founder and Executive Director of Class Size Matters, is determined to stop overcrowding in New York City public schools. For the past 15 years she has used her organization as a means to inform the public about large class sizes and to push government into using state funding more effectively. “The Department of Education is legally mandated to [reduce] class sizes in all grades and they have not done so,” she said. “Instead they have allowed class sizes to increase.”

Children at the school playground in P.S. 217 (Chika Okaneme/The Brooklyn Ink)

The Contract for Excellence has been providing state funding to the city department of education since 2007. Under contract, the money can only be used for certain purposes, which includes reducing class sizes. However Haimson believes officials are not doing enough.

Since 2002, Mayor Bloomberg has had control of the New York City education system, not the Board of Education. “The city has been neglectful and remiss for many years, and it has gotten much worse under the Bloomberg administration” she said. Mayoral control will stay in effect until 2015.

“Early grades [are] the largest in 11 years” Haimson said, “so [the administration is] violating the law and [is] in essence violating our children’s constitution rights to adequate education.”

Although people are troubled by the current overcrowding situation, the city’s education department does not provide them with much hope. Frank Thomas, a spokesperson from the city department of education, said that overcrowding in CB 14’s part of school district 22 is not severe enough to cause much concern. “We only have so [many] resources to do work with,” he said.

And so after receiving proposals from across the city, the department believes that other parts of New York are in greater need for new schools at the moment. It may be some time before the residents in the CB 14 area see that desired new school.

Photo by Esteban Illades/The Brooklyn Ink

Competing arguments were furious today as the jury prepared to deliberate the verdict for a Florida man accused of brutally stabbing his victim to death at a Flatbush intersection.

The case, which originally appeared to be a simple drug deal gone bad, was turned upside down when defense lawyer, Doug Appel, asked jurors to question who was the real victim. The defendant, Nuri Hoxha, was 17 years old when he fatally stabbed Philip Realmuto, 25, in April 2008. Appel said in his final statement that Hoxha did so in self-defense.

“Who was taking advantage of whom?” the lawyer asked rhetorically.

In a trial at Kings County Criminal court, which started an hour late due to a tardy juror, both the prosecution and defense concluded their arguments in front of Judge Neil Jon Firetog.

The defendant had travelled to New York to sell $3600 worth of cocaine to the Staten Island victim, whom he had previously met in Florida. Four days after Hoxha arrived in New York, Realmuto was found at Avenue C and McDonald Avenue near his car, stabbed to death with 18 wounds.

In court, Hoxha appeared frustrated with prosecutor Tim Gough, who insisted that Hoxha repeat the timeline of his visit to the city, from his arrival at the Port Authority bus terminal to a few days later, on the evening when Realmuto was killed.

Gough presented Hoxha as a hotheaded drug dealer who became upset when the victim continued to postpone the drug deal over a few days. At 17 years, the defendant already had three drug related arrests in Florida. The prosecutor divulged into Hoxha’s criminal history, saying that Hoxha had already been robbed and shot at before coming to New York.

“You’re putting words in my mouth,” the defendant stuttered, when Gough bluntly asked him whether Hoxha had used weapons to protect himself because of his high-risk lifestyle.

Gough showed the jurors phone records that revealed numerous outgoing calls Hoxha made, particularly to a Suffolk County number, the day before the murder even though Hoxha claimed he didn’t know anyone in New York.

At one point, Judge Firetog asked the defendant to compose himself. “Just answer questions, don’t ask questions,” the judge said, after Hoxha, visibly agitated, began posing questions to the prosecution.

The police caught Hoxha after he was arrested for possession of cocaine in Clearwater, Florida, more than a year after leaving New York.

The defense didn’t dispute that Hoxha stabbed Realmuto. Instead, defense lawyer Appel asked the jurors to think about what happened between the two men that night in Realmuto’s car. Realmuto picked up Hoxha and drove to the quiet Flatbush intersection where the exchange was supposed to finally occur; three days after Hoxha arrived in the city.

The trial hinges on Hoxha’s intentions, which is important as the jurors prepare to decide if Hoxha is guilty of second degree murder. A second degree murder charge in New York carries a  sentence of 25 years to life.

Appel painted Hoxha as a young, foolish teenager who was only protecting himself from Realmuto, who sold illegal pills.

“I told you in the beginning you wouldn’t like anything about [Hoxha],” Appel said, during his final statement. Hoxha slouched down in his chair as Appel addressed the jury.

Appel suggested that Realmuto pulled out the knife from under his seat, causing Hoxha to panic and grab the knife in self-defense.

Appel, however, didn’t address why Hoxha stabbed the victim multiple times before running away to the nearest subway station.

The jury is currently deliberating the charges, and will likely arrive at a verdict later this week.

The boarded-up 480 Stratford Road among its Victorian neighbors. The house that originally stood on the property was demolished in 2006. Chris Haire/BI

With children on Big Wheels crushing piles of amber leaves and fashionably antique Victorian homes hidden behind lush gardens, Stratford Road is a postcard collector’s dream. Yet in the center of this hushed Victorian neighborhood in Flatbush sits a vacant lot guarded with eight-foot-tall plywood fences like some dilapidated fortress.

The lot did not always look that way.

One of those proud Victorians once stood there, but was purchased by a developer in 2006 and quickly demolished. The lot has been empty since and no new construction has started—a sign of what happens when a developer’s coffers run dry. The lot is overrun with weeds. Orange safety cones and pallets decorate the land.

“It’s horrible. There’s empty pallets, leftover construction material and trash,” said urban gardener Margaret Dunn-Carver, who rents a room in the house next to the lot. “It could be so much more.”

What a prospective new owner of the lot has in mind, though, isn’t likely to please Dunn-Carver.

The company interested in purchasing the lot at 480 Stratford Road, 10 Stratford Associates, is seeking approval for a legal maneuver allowing it to erect a seven-story building among the decades-old Victorians, setting up a fight with the residents of District 14, who insist such a building would violate a rezoning law passed in 2009.

This legal maneuver, known as common law vested rights, has become increasingly frequent since the end of the recession when a number of zoning changes occurred throughout the city, pitting developers against the communities that supported the rezoning. The Board of Standards and Appeals received 25 common law applications in 2009 and 2010, according to its Executive Director Jeffrey Mulligan.

One such zoning change was the 2009 Flatbush Rezoning, which changed the status of the lot from R6—a designation allowing multifamily dwellings—into an R3X, which permits only single-family homes to be built. The prospective owner of the lot on Stratford Road has filed an application for “common law vested rights,” which would allow the company to build according to the original zoning status of the property.

Community Board 14 unanimously voted Nov. 14 to send letters asking the BSA and the Department of Buildings to reject the buyer’s application.

The letters, copies of which were attained by The Brooklyn Ink, portray 10 Stratford Associates and the current owner in a negative light.

“Due to our concerns related to the non-owner applicant and our belief that the current owner has acted in bad faith,” says one of the letters, “Community Board 14 recommends that the BSA deny the application for common law vested rights.”

The community board’s concerns toward the buyer, according to the letter, is that the applicant does not own the property but is claiming financial hardship if the appeal is denied. The allegation of “bad faith” on the part of the current owner is not spelled out, but seems to be the result of five years of tensions between him and the community.

Jay Loeffler, the current owner according to Department of Finance records, purchased the land from Maurice Pinkster in April 2006. Loeffler surprised residents by quickly demolishing the Victorian, according to Henri Pinkster, Maurice’s brother, who has lived in the house next to 480 Stratford Road since 1988.

The demolition was the beginning of Loeffler’s plans.

A blueprint for the proposed structure that could rise above the Victorian houses on Stratford Road.

Blueprints of the proposed structure, drafted before the rezoning change, show that Loeffler planned to build the seven-story complex on the lot, which connects Stratford Road to Coney Island Avenue, and use floors three through seven for apartments. Floors one and two were to be leased to a business.

Two similar structures were built at the end of the street long before the zoning change. But the proposed apartment’s central location angered the community.

At the time, however, there was not much residents could do to prevent the high rise.

The area along Coney Island Avenue was zoned R6, which permits the construction of tall residential or community structures. So Loeffler began construction on the foundation, which cost approximately $160,000, according to documents filed with the BSA.

Then, the recession hit. The construction stopped.

“My client had some financial problems, as have a lot of people in the last few years,” said Jordan Most, the lawyer representing both Loeffler and 10 Stratford Associates.

That was the way things stood in 2009, when the Flatbush Rezoning changed the status of the area comprising his property in order to prevent new high rises.

“I wanted to make sure we protected the beauty of the neighborhood,” said Flatbush’s Councilman Mathieu Eugene, who supported the plan.

The statute, though, does provide a two-year grace period for owners to re-file with the DOB and retain the original permit.

That deadline expired this year—about the same time Loeffler agreed to sell the lot to 10 Stratford Associates, contingent on its ability to build the high rise on the now low-rise-only lot.

So Loeffler filed an application to allow the building’s construction under common law vested rights.

Under common law, a property owner is allowed to continue a project that defies new zoning laws if significant work had been done prior to the law’s passing. But under common law, “significant work” is ambiguous.

“The common law is a more liberal application [than the statutory law],” said BSA’s application examiner Toni Matias.

As long as the DOB finds the original permit valid, it will refer the matter to the BSA to decide, Matias said.

“[The applicants] have to pass a three-prong test,” Matias said. “We look at work done, expenditures and possible incurred costs [if application is not granted].”

That is where the debate with the community comes in.

Residents challenge the idea that 10 Stratford Associates can take credit for the work, expenditures and possible costs of a property it does not yet own.

Unfortunately for the community, the BSA allows future owners to file the application, Mulligan said.

Still, the community board seems determined to fight against the application, which could take months to resolve.

“We asked the community residents,” said CB 14 Chairman Alvin Berk. “They are for not having the building.”

“We are allowed to build there. I’m going to try to build an old-style building,” said Igor Zangranichny, co-owner of 10 Stratford Associates. He also contemplated what would occupy the bottom floors.

“Maybe a doctor’s office or a kindergarten, something good for the community,” he said.

The student body at the Yeshivah of Flatbush in Brooklyn, N.Y. has shifted from an Ashkenazic to Sephardic majority. (Photo: Alexandra Hootnick/The Brooklyn Ink)

As Passover approached 25 years ago, Diane Chabbot’s daughter was finally ready to participate in the songs and prayers of the seder with her family. The first grader had been practicing them constantly in her Hebrew day school class at the Yeshivah of Flatbush in Brooklyn. But when the little girl realized the Ashkenazi prayer melodies she had come to know didn’t match the melodies sung by her large Syrian family, she began to cry.

The incident was subsequently brought before the school’s board of education by Chabbot’s family rabbi and current head of the yeshivah’s high school, Raymond Harari. It reflected not just one family’s experience but rather a major demographic change in the neighborhood and the yeshivah. The growing Syrian population in Flatbush was tilting the yeshivah’s student body from a historically Ashkenazi majority, descending from German or Eastern European Jews, to a Sephardic majority, descending from Spanish or Middle Eastern Jews. By 1989, three years later, the school had instituted an Integrated Sephardic Ashkenazic Seder and a school-wide Sephardic tefillah, or morning prayer, as an alternative to the Ashkenazi one. And those were only the beginning of the educational adaptations.

“We’re not completely different, the basic conceptions are the same,” said Chabbot, who adopted her Syrian husband’s Sephardic customs after being raised in an Ashkenazi household.  “But customs are different, melodies are different, shul is different, and so some of the things that have changed are just this awareness of the richness of the different cultures.”

Rabbi Lawrence Schwed became a principal at the Yeshivah of Flatbush’s elementary school in the late 1980s, and said the first thing that he did was create Sephardic tefillah groups so that both Ashkenazi and Sephardic children could pray according to their respective traditions. “What good does it do for me to teach you how I pray,” Schwed said, if “ your parents aren’t familiar with it and that’s not what you’re going to hear in your synagogue.”

Brooklyn’s Syrian Jewish population is currently estimated to be 75,000 and growing, and Schwed said that “the vast majority” of the school’s K-8 students are now Sephardic, compared to about half in 1989.

Ashkenazic Jews and Sephardic Jews vary in cultural practices and dietary considerations as well as religious prayers and customs. For example, Ashkenazi Jews, unlike the Sephardim, refrain from eating rice during Passover. In Sephardic culture, naming children after grandparents is common, even if they are alive, while Ashkenazim typically pass the names of deceased relatives to the next generation.

Founded in 1927, the Yeshivah of Flatbush is a coeducational, Modern Orthodox private school with roughly 2,100 students. According to the school’s executive vice president, Dennis Eisenberg, the school has always drawn from the Sephardic community, but in increasing numbers over the years. Eisenberg said this trend is even more pronounced in the elementary and middle schools because community demographics drive the student population, but that the school does not collect data on how many students enroll in either the Sephardic or Ashkenazic minyanim, or morning prayer meetings.

Still, Harari said the school doesn’t define itself as Ashkenazic or Syrian. “There was always a desire to have an integration of both traditions,” said the head of the Joel Braverman High School.

The first Syrian Jews came to America in the early 20^th century and initially settled in Manhattan, but moved to the Bensonhurst area of Brooklyn after the Eastern European Jews dominating Manhattan denigrated them as “Arab Jews.” In the 1980s, the Syrians who had accumulated a degree of wealth and success began to flow into Flatbush, where home values were rising.

Schwed said the school ran routine staff-development programs in order to train what was then a mostly Ashkenazi staff in becoming familiar with Sephardic culture. “The teachers had to retool, just like you have to technologically retool these days,” Schwed said, although the Yeshivah of Flatbush does not hire nor keep count of teachers based on their Sephardic or Ashkenazic backgrounds.

Other than the morning tefillah, Sephardic and Ashkenazic students attend the same classes. During the after-lunch prayer and holidays, the school either alternates between or observes both Sephardic and Ashkenazic traditions.

In the yeshivah’s preschool, however, Schwed said students are only taught the Sephardic tefillah, a change that was made several years ago when the student population tilted towards a Sephardic majority. Having separate tefillot “was too confusing for the children,” Schwed said. “So now everybody in the preschool learns Sephardic tefillah, and beginning in first grade we separate them based on what their parents choose.”

In 2008, the elementary school launched an updated Sephardic tefillah program that Schwed said has exceeded beyond the school’s wildest expectations. “Our students were always top academically, but we got killed on Shabbat because our kids couldn’t compete with the kids from the other schools in terms of prayers,” Schwed said. “Now our kids are flying on Shabbat.”

Alex Schindler, a 2007 graduate, wrote in an email that the elementary school’s efforts have allowed the Yeshivah of Flatbush to compete for Syrian students with nearby, exclusively Sephardic day schools like Magen David.

In the last few years, Harari said, the yeshivah’s Joel Braverman High School has offered a Sephardic history elective in addition to Sephardic-based independent study. The mandatory Jewish history class has also given increased emphasis to Sephardic history.

Schindler wrote that while he expected the amount of Sephardic programming to eventually increase in the high school, there currently wasn’t much.

“The mandatory Jewish history class, for example, is almost entirely synonymous, when dealing with the modern period, with Modern Ashkenazi Jewish history, though my teacher taught a little bit of Sephardic history,” Schindler wrote, adding that the exams students could take for Yeshiva University credit wouldn’t test for the Sephardic material.

Eisenberg said that in the high school a greater balance exists between Sephardic and Ashkenazi students, with students commuting from areas like New Jersey, Manhattan and Westchester. Schindler wrote that he estimates the proportion is now about 70 percent Sephardic, 30 percent Ashkenazic. When he was in high school, the Sephardic students’ minyan was moved into the auditorium previously occupied by the Ashkenazic students, who were relocated into classrooms as their numbers continued to fall.

Ashkenazi Jews have slowly trickled out of Flatbush and Midwood to enclaves in the tri-state area partly due to a growing affluence. Schwed said another reason was that during 1980s housing boom in Flatbush, some Ashkenazim decided to sell their homes and move to where their children had relocated. “Their kids were not coming back to Flatbush,” Schwed said.

Schwed also said more Modern Orthodox schools have sprung up in areas where Ashkenazim have relocated, and have improved in addition to being closer to students. While the school used to have two full buses of Ashkenazim coming in from Staten Island, Schwed said now they’re down to one van. “The Yeshivah of Flatbush used to be the only show in town in terms of what we offered,” Schwed said. “Now many, many schools have copied our model, and that’s very flattering.”

The remaining Ashkenazic population in Flatbush is predominately “black-hat,” or stringently Orthodox Jews, who are less inclined to engage in secular society or send their children to a modern, coeducational Orthodox school like the Yeshivah of Flatbush.

Ami Sasson, the president-elect of the Yeshivah of Flatbush’s Ladies Auxiliary and 1992 graduate, said she had many Ashkenazic friends while she was a student, and the groups’ outward trend was a loss to the diversity of Flatbush. “A lot of people in school, including my kids,” she said, “say they wish there were more Ashkenaz.”

Schwed said the yeshivah currently gives $9 million of its $36 million budget in tuition assistance. There has been some discussion about possible merit scholarships to the school in the future, but despite the high costs of a private religious education, Schwed said the school has been “bursting at the seams” with a rapidly growing student population. Schwed said more pupils want to come to the Yeshivah of Flatbush because they “want the mix of Ashkenazim and Sephardim, even though the shift has gone the other way.”

Cortelyou Road circa 1910/Courtesy of Ronald Schweiger, Brooklyn Borough Historian

By Idil Abshir

Cortelyou Road feels so self-contained that at times it resembles a small town. Like a residential Russian doll, Cortelyou Road has become a neighborhood within the broader neighborhood of Flatbush. A seven-block stretch from Coney Island Avenue to East 17^th Street, Cortelyou Road is home to over 85 businesses. On weekends the street is teeming with people at the farmer’s market. Patrons fill the many bars, restaurants and cafes, and children play in the playground at PS 139.

A decade ago, this stretch of Cortelyou was virtually abandoned. The street was lined with 99 cent stores and bodegas, and there were no businesses where residents could linger. Homes were poorly maintained, and when those who lived in the nearby Victorian houses wanted to rest or hang out somewhere besides their own homes, they had to leave the neighborhood entirely.

The story of Cortelyou’s transformation mirrors that of many other Brooklyn neighborhoods, both historically, as at the start of the 20^th century, and more recently as a trendy, upcoming area. It has developed commercially, and this has become as much a definitive aspect of the neighborhood, as the quality of its housing. For residents, and prospective residents, what is outside their house is as important as what is on the inside.

“Brooklyn has evolved,” said John Manbeck, former Brooklyn Borough Historian. Of the changes on Cortelyou Road, he said, “The same thing happened in Williamsburg, people who lived there years ago wouldn’t recognize it. Red Hook too.

Before the turn of the century Cortelyou Road was farmland, and a throughway for those making their way further south to the glamour and racetracks of Coney Island. T.B. Ackerson, an icemaker, quit his factory job in 1898 to develop the area into a residential neighborhood, building Victorian and Tudor-style homes. Victorian Flatbush, which Cortelyou Road is a part of, was the place to be: here Guggenheim bought a house for his soon-to-be-wed daughter; Nellie Bly, a groundbreaking journalist, lived on manor off Cortelyou; and Thomas Edison reportedly did some of his experiments in the basement of a house just off Cortelyou Road. Further into the 20^th Century, the neighborhood developed into a relatively middle class suburb, and stayed that way until there was a spike in crime in the 1960s. New York City was in the midst of a financial crisis, and Flatbush wasn’t spared. Welfare tenants were relocated to apartments in Flatbush and the middle class began to panic. Flatbush, like the rest of the city, was undergoing what was termed ‘white flight,’ in which the middle class white residents were fleeing the city. By the mid 1970s middle-class residents, both black and white, left Flatbush, not returning until a decade later. Manbeck described this as an “upheaval” for Cortelyou road.

Jan Rosenberg, who has lived here since 1986, says that the neighborhood was drastically different when she moved in. “The houses were more deteriorated and in need of repairs,” she said. “The main difference was that it was much more dangerous.”  Rosenberg was a sociology professor at Long Island University in downtown Brooklyn before she ventured in to the real estate business. She is currently a partner at Brooklyn Hearth Realty. In 2001, Rosenberg founded Friends of Cortelyou- a group that sought to attract business to Cortelyou Road.

There were no new businesses drawn to the area. Friends of Cortelyou tried to attract merchants, convinced that this could redefine the neighborhood. “Our commercial strip is so short. I strongly felt, after looking at other neighborhoods, that three or four new businesses would make an impact, ” said Rosenberg. “We had nice houses and nice apartments but no businesses.” Rosenberg clarified that while useful stores existed, like the delis and dollar stores, nothing was in place that neighborhood residents were drawn to. Rosenberg went on to say that her work developing Cortelyou Road, and her current job as a realtor was never a far departure from sociology. “I got into real estate as a function of what I was doing with Friends of Cortelyou- trying to change Cortelyou Road,” Rosenberg said. “It was kind of applied sociology.”

In an article she wrote about the neighborhood titled “Gentrification from the inside out in Brooklyn’s Ditmas Park,” for newgeography.com, Rosenberg writes that the quality of life collapsed, and that Cortelyou Road didn’t have it’s basic needs covered banking and eating establishments, for example despite the efforts of the Giuliani’s administration to clean up this and other neighborhoods. However, the city’s efforts to make the neighborhood more livable were only successful to an extent. Although there was a business void, the neighborhood was safer, there were more people investing in family homes.

Still, “there was a void,” Rosenberg said. “There were 99cent stores, and then a 97cent store opened. That was an indicator of a downward trend, we were competing downward.”

Charlie Hull, a recent Brooklyn College graduate, and server at the Purple Yam restaurant on Cortelyou, says he that although he has been living in the neighborhood he saw no point in visiting Cortelyou Road until establishments sprang up that he felt were worth visiting. “I never really ventured up to Cortelyou Road until things started opening,” Hull said. “Just because I didn’t really have a reason to.

Getting the businesses to initially invest Cortelyou was more difficult than the Friends of Cortelyou anticipated. The group found themselves with an unexpected obstacle. “People didn’t take this neighborhood seriously,” Rosenberg said. “People thought it was laughable that you would try bring business to Cortelyou Road.”

Unsure of where to start, but certain that a few business would make a big impact, the Friends decided to approach business owners in other parts of Brooklyn who had faced the same problems. “We recruited merchants who’d opened restaurants in a neighborhood that wasn’t developed,” said Rosenberg. “We took a cue from Fort Greene. We talked to several of the early restaurateurs- they had the same pent-up demand, and cheap rent.”

Susan Siegel, the creator of the farmer’s market at Cortelyou, and later the executive director of the Flatbush Development Corporation said the changes to Cortelyou Road were absolutely necessary, because the area was experiencing ‘economic leakage.’ Nobody was investing or spending in the neighborhood. “We liked that it’s not Park Slope, but at the same time there was so much missing. We spent more money outside the neighborhood than in it,” Siegel said. “If I needed to cook something with broccoli or arugula I had to leave the neighborhood.”

Siegel says that the farmer’s market is at the core of the neighborhood. “The farmer’s market is like the town square,” Siegel said. “It was a way that all diverse neighbors could come together for the first time ever. It was a real community builder.”

The challenges Siegel faced involved getting people to come to the market, and proving to existing businesses that the market wasn’t going to take away their business: something that was easily achieved since the market provided goods that resident had to leave Flatbush to find. Business owners faced different challenges. One of the current owners of Picket Fence, one of the first restaurants to open during Cortelyou Road’s renaissance, said that it was a huge risk for the original owner of the place. “He took the gamble and didn’t know if there would be a payoff,” said Roma Agarwal a joint owner since 2007. “But he saw the incentive, he saw the market here.”

Rosenberg said that merchants eventually saw that the opportunity outweighed the risk. “Business people saw it in Williamsburg and on Smith Street, “ she said. “They knew if you get a foothold in a neighborhood it pays off, because they can come in when the rents are still low. In 5-10 years that is a strong advantage.”

Siegel says that commercial overhaul is happening all over the borough. “It’s definitely a broader Brooklyn Story. Brooklyn is booming,” Siegel said. “Bed-Stuy is another neighborhood that’s changing.”

Siegel believes that the changes on Cortelyou have been for the best, but points out that not everyone has supported them. “A lot of people are against gentrification. People get priced out,” she said.  “We don’t want that to happen here but you can’t stop it, these things happen in waves. It’s progression.”

Rosenberg feels the changes on Cortelyou Road far superseded any of their expectations. “It’s amazing,” Rosenberg said. “Cortelyou road is like the little street that could.”

Flatbush Gardens, where landlord David Bistricer has over 8,000 outstanding housing code violations. (Richard Nieva/The Brooklyn Ink)

By Richard Nieva

John Gillick is engaged to be married. When asked if he would stay at his apartment in the Flatbush Gardens complex in East Flatbush after the big July wedding, his initial response was a simple laugh.

“This is not the kind of place I’d want to raise a daughter,” he said.

Gillick comes home to his fifth floor apartment, at 1352 New York Ave., only occasionally nowadays. The 29-year-old patent lawyer spends most nights sleeping in his office in downtown Manhattan, relegating his Brooklyn apartment to the realm of storage space.

When he does come home, he enters the building with a magnetic key he must swipe several times before the door opens. The smell of marijuana smoke lingers in the hallway as he gets on the elevator. To get the elevator to work, he must pull the door shut from the inside using plastic ties attached to the window grate. The jutting sound of the elevator cart hitting the plastic ties can be heard as it travels to the fifth floor.

Gillick’s plight—which he insists is tame—is a common one for Brooklyn renters. On a recent watch list of the city’s worst landlords released by the office of the New York City Public Advocate Bill de Blasio, apartment buildings in the borough of Kings appeared 154 times, comprising over 40 percent of the entire list. Buildings owned by Gillick’s own landlord, David Bistricer, appeared 32 times alone.

Bistricer’s over 8,000 building code violations—including the non-functioning elevator door—suggests a flaw in the system: How can a slumlord get away with so many violations for so long?

According to de Blasio, the problem is an administrative one. When a landlord receives a violation, there are no strict enforcement policies for letting them pile up unaddressed. “We need to change the way violations are issued,” said de Blasio. “So they are more akin to parking tickets: you get a fine for a violation, and if you don’t fix the problem, the fine goes up.”

This leads to cases like Bistricer’s—with his thousands of infractions, including one I-class violation. These are violations in which there is a court order from a judge to correct them.

The other types of infractions are listed as A, B, or C class, and have stringent deadlines of their own—ranging from 90 days for an A class, 30 days for a B class, and 24 hours for the “immediately hazardous” C class.

Still, with no way of enforcing landlord compliance short of housing court proceedings, tenants like Gillick have little faith in the system. He described writing letters to Flatbush Garden management when he first moved in, asking for little things to be fixed. “And to be honest,” he said. “It was stuff I knew I wasn’t going to get.”

A Complex and Troubled Complex

Gillick’s relationship with Flatbush Gardens started a month and a half before he even moved in his first piece of furniture in 2008. Looking for a place in the borough after leaving his previous apartment in Brooklyn Heights (the two buildings are like apples and oranges, he said), he found Flatbush Gardens. But to his chagrin, he found no reviews online of the newly renovated complex.

Its glossy Web site featured smiling, young, interracial couples hand in hand with the Brooklyn Bridge in the backdrop. The marketing was simple: a haven for young urban professionals. Gillick—a Tampa, FL, native who prefers his bike to the subway—fits this description.

He started a blog to document his experience there—more for future renters than for himself. “It was the story that I wanted told when I was looking at the place,” he said.

And recently, he’s had to tell some difficult stories in his blog.

Two men were murdered in two weeks this year in late September and early October. Akeem Stephenson, 18, was gunned down after he refused to join the Crips, and Kenroy Smith, a 27-year-old father, was shot in the back of the head, due to mistaken identity, according to the New York Daily News.

Bistricer still hasn’t left the news. The landlord has a lease with the city, in which it pays him over $10 million a year for two Brooklyn courthouse buildings—all despite the almost $150,000 in violations he owes the city.

In November, folding to public pressure from the Public Advocate’s office, Bistricer paid off the $150,000 debt, though the building violations remain uncorrected. “We can use city business to compel landlords to do the right thing,” de Blasio said.

The controversies continue to pile up for Bistricer. He then tried—and failed—to evict a group of senior citizen tenants for apparent raucous partying and noise violations. Late last month, his management company locked out 70 maintenance workers over contract disputes, due largely to a proposed 34 percent pay cut.

A hole in the building exterior behind the complex's security and management offices, filled with trash. (Richard Nieva/The Brooklyn Ink)

Amidst the picketing and rallying that has taken place in front of the buildings since then, mounds of garbage have piled up in front of the complex. The city’s sanitation union has refused to collect trash as a show of solidarity to the maintenance workers.

The number of violations reported to 311—the phone number that dissatisfied tenants call to voice their complaints—has skyrocketed from about 7,600 to over 8,000 since the beginning of the lockout.

“I don’t know if there’s a correlation. That would be interesting to see,” said Kwame Patterson, a spokesperson for 32BJ, the union representing the workers. “I think the tenants are calling the city and complaining even louder than they have been.”

A Matter for Albany

As loud as they may be, though, their complaints could be falling on deaf ears.

State Senator Liz Krueger believes the solution is changing the system: setting up administrative tribunals through the city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development to issue and enforce fines, instead of requiring lengthy and often toothless housing proceedings.

That means having landlords show up to expedited hearings in which they can make their claim—presenting evidence that the violations were inaccurate or have already been fixed. If they can’t do that, they are forced to pay the fines, said Sara Hale-Stern, Krueger’s district office director and main housing policy staffer.

“It’s a system with many, many loopholes,” said Hale-Stern.

Under the current law, a landlord gets a notice of violation from HPD, telling them the class of their infraction, and imposing a deadline to fix it. But after the notice is sent, that’s usually the end of it. Because housing court proceedings are so time consuming and expensive, very few cases actually make it to court.

“Landlords know that their chances of having to go to court or pay any fines are so small that the letters of violation are basically meaningless,” said Hale-Stern.

According to Title 27 of the New York City Administrative Code, class A penalties will cost a landlord between $10 and $50. Class B’s will cost $25 to $100, and $10 a day on top of the original price until the violation is corrected. Class C’s cost $50 per day until corrected.

Or, if conditions are bad enough, a building can be placed in the Alternative Enforcement Program, where the city takes on emergency repair work at the site. But only 200 buildings a year are eligible for the program, according to the Housing Maintenance Code.

But all of these numbers are theoretical, said Brent Meltzer, co-director for South Brooklyn Legal Services, which provides legal assistance to low-income individuals in the borough. A landlord can be issued these violations by the city, but there is no actual fine charged. A tenant must be taken to housing court in order for payment of those civil penalties to be enforced.

Still, de Blasio sees this as a problem. “Even when brought to court a landlord can still string out proceedings and argue down fines,” he said.

A landlord can owe millions of dollars on the books, and end up only having to pay a fraction, because the court usually settles for an “order to correct,” instead of enforcing the entire massive sum.

The tribunal system would resemble Chicago’s model, according to research by Benjamin Dulchin, executive director of the Association for Neighborhood and Housing Development, an umbrella association of city nonprofit housing groups. Dulchin has extensively explored the history of code enforcement in NYC, along with other major cities.

De Blasio said changing the system is about being able to go after those landlords truly determined to evade their responsibilities. “We still don’t have a sufficient number of tools,” he said.

A History of Resistance

Getting those tools is a perennial issue for Krueger, who introduces legislation to support this change every year, said Hale-Stern. The most recent bill proposal was the Tenant Rights Omnibus Act in 2009. The name refers to expanding the Omnibus Act, a series of legislation first enacted in 1954, which created government departments such as the Housing and Urban Development Department and the Urban Renewal Administration.

The bill faces consistent opposition from the Mayor’s office, which argues that the cost of initially setting up such a system would be too expensive. Hale-Stern said exact costs haven’t yet been analyzed, though she maintains the city would gain income in the long run, by having an effective system to collect housing code fines and saving money on emergency repairs done by the city.

Krueger took up the bill from former State Assemblyman and Environmental Conservation Commissioner—and then-Housing Committee chair—Pete Grannis, who first introduced the legislation in the late 1980s. Since then, mayoral administrations have opposed the upheaval of the structure.

Their closest advance in progress came in 2007, when Krueger’s office was in talks with then-Gov. Elliot Spitzer’s office. Language from Krueger’s bill made it onto the state budget, but after pushback from Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s office, the language was removed.

Standing water in the basement of one of the complex's 59 buildings. (Richard Nieva/The Brooklyn Ink)

Krueger is hoping that with the press attention, along with pressure from de Blasio’s office, the climate is right for another push. But Hale-Stern said the senator would not even bother trying to bring the bill to the senate floor without mayoral backing. She is open to compromise and tweaking the bill if it means getting support from the city.

Jon Furlong, a tenant advocate with the Pratt Area Community Council, said he supports the bill, but has reservations as to whether or not it would ever pass. “The landlord lobbyists are very powerful,” he said.

But others, such as Robert Rosenblatt, a Brooklyn landlord and tenant attorney, said the onus is on the tenants and that he thinks the law is fine as is.

“It may not work because people don’t know their rights and obligations under the law,” he said. “But if you know your rights and obligations it absolutely does work.”

Furlong agrees, but said he thinks the problem is deeper-rooted. He said the HPD is “well-intentioned, but understaffed,” and like de Blasio, calls for a streamlining of the enforcement process.

But even more deeply, he said the problem is internal for many tenants: “They’re resigned to the fact that this is just the way it is.”

Still Waiting

Michelle Williams is one Flatbush Gardens tenant who doesn’t settle for “the way it is.”

The 34-year-old tenant, originally from Trinidad, has lived in the complex for over 20 years, staying with her great-grandmother as a child before she died. She’s lived in three of the complex’s 59 buildings and recalls the pre-Bistricer era.

Williams, who has been the building captain in two of the three buildings she’s lived in, admits the environment is better than it was ten years ago, but she attributes it to the entire neighborhood’s growth and development.

“Management sucks either way,” she said. She remembers the shift from the old Vanderveer Estates name to Flatbush Gardens, and the external changes Bistricer made to make it look “pretty on the outside.”

“It’s just a change of hands,” she said, adding that the change between landlords was forgettable. About half of Bistricer’s violations were inherited from before he bought the building, according to de Blasio’s office.

Her biggest complaint is a large, dark watermark on her ceiling, presumably from a tenant’s leaking washing machine. The leak has also seeped and created damage to her wall. She fears the mold and paint chipping will harm her two small children, one of which is asthmatic.

Maintenance has addressed the problem many times, she said, but the mark keeps coming back. It’s been a year since she first noticed it.

“If you paint it and make it look pretty, eventually in a week’s time, it’s going to seep through again. And that’s what’s happening again,” she said, referring to the mark.

For her, it is an issue of pride in her home—unlike Gillick, who will begin looking for apartments in Manhattan as the wedding approaches. Williams, though, said it’s about feeling good in her home, and “in her own skin.”

“Be fair,” she said. “Give the people what they pay for.”

Hectic times for the staff of Michael's Meats. (Vegas Tenold/The Brooklyn Ink)

By Vegas Tenold

Savarese, the last in his family’s line of butchers, barely has time to explain that the shop has been in his family for 80 years, before he ducks into the storage room and returns with the leg of an animal.

A holiday week like this one, roughly 8,000 pounds of meat will arrive at Michael’s Prime Meats on Nostrand Avenue in Flatbush – the equivalent of 10 fully grown cows. About 6,000 pounds will leave, cut, trimmed and neatly rapped in wax paper.

Michael’s Meats is crowded. The small space in front of the counter is packed with customers. Behind the counter, a handful of workers rush to cut, slice and wrap. It is fast and, owing to a large bone saw in the back, loud.

“The week leading up to Thanksgiving is by far the busiest for any butcher,” Savarese says. “A lot of people buy turkey but they really buy all sorts of meat.”

He explains that Michael’s Meats is one of dwindling number of traditional butcher shops left in New York, before he interrupts himself again and vanishes into the throng of workers and customers filling the tiny space. He comes back holding an old family photograph. He points to his dad as a young child, to his grandfather, and on the far left to a young girl who, he says, is the only one in the picture still alive. “That’s my godmother,” he says. “She’s 100 years old. Let me show you the storage room.”

Savarese is middle-aged. He has grey hair under his baseball hat and a short cropped grey beard. His face is open and friendly and he engages with his customers in a way that makes it look like he’s known them all for years.

The walls in the storage room are lined, floor-to-ceiling, with shelves filled with meat. Three men with knives sit in the center of the room working the blades through various animal parts. From the ceiling hang giant chunks of beef that Savarese describes as “neck.” With a loud slap he pushes the neck along a rail that runs along the ceiling throughout the shop.

“This is what we get,” he says, inspecting the slab of meat in the bright light outside the storage room. “This is what arrives and then we cut it up for our customers. The best meat you can get. We get customers who have come here for years. One woman drives up here all the way from Virginia, then she turns back and goes home.” He gives the slab another push, sending it careening back into the storage room to the men with the knives.

Most meat shops get their meats pre-cut from large abattoirs. It’s cheaper and faster. Michael’s cuts the carcasses themselves. Doing things the way Savarese’s family has done it for 80 years is not only time consuming, but harder than it needs to be. But it makes for better meat, Savarese says.

He is the only one left in his family who’s a butcher. His son is training to be an executive and Savarese says he would never let him touch a knife. “It’s hard work,” he says. “In the morning my bones make more noise than the alarm.”

By Richard Nieva

Vox Pop, a cafe at 1022 Cortelyou Rd., officially closed on Sept. 7. The neighborhood landmark has also been described as a book publisher, music venue, and center for activists. (The Brooklyn Ink/Richard Nieva)

Like most businesses, the Vox Pop café in Flatbush stayed closed last Thanksgiving. Its mostly young staff was able to spend the day with their families. But for many of the café’s regulars, the day off was more like a day with nowhere to go.

So instead of meeting at the store, they met at CEO Debi Ryan’s house to celebrate the holiday.

“It ended up being this wonderful collection of Vox Pop people,” Ryan said. She uses the term “Vox Pop People” like a formal identifier, almost like a last name. The 6-year-old café has been described as a book publisher, music venue and center for political activists.

Now the Vox Pop People will have to find another place to spend the other 364 days of the year.

It officially closed for good on Sept. 7 when a committee of board members from the community voted to dissolve the company.

“We tried,” said Ryan. “Nobody could have tried harder, I promise you that.”

***

It isn’t the first time the Vox Pop People have had to look for other places to spend their time. The business has been shut down four times before—the first time by the Department of Health and the last three times by the state of New York for back taxes.

“The glory days were, I guess, any days it was open,” laughed Tim Olsen, chairman of the board.

The café, at 1022 Cortelyou Rd., was originally established in 2004 by Sander Hicks and his then-fiancé Holley Anderson. Hicks, a leftist writer and “truther” with the 9/11 Truth Movement, started the café as a response to the “blind war on terror mentality that taught fear instead of first amendment rights,” he said. The café had a publishing arm which produced a newspaper until 2008, going after New York City corruption, said Hicks.

Olsen remembers emptiness on Cortelyou Road at the time the café began.  The Picket Fence restaurant opened around the same time, and more businesses,  like the Sycamore and the Solo bar, came after.

The startup money, about $80,000, came largely from an inheritance Anderson got from the sale of a family farm after her mother passed away. The children’s nook in the back of the café was built with original wood from the farm’s barn.

Ryan described the cafe as a safe haven, not just figuratively.

“That was a long walk from the train station, all the way down there, in the dark with nothing in between,” she said, referring to the Q line, about four blocks away. “Getting to that corner, you knew it was going to be busy and safe and sort of a beacon.”

Kati Duncan, shareholder and secretary of the board, said Vox Pop—which literally means “voice of the people”—was about its customers.

The business’s mantra, “Books, Coffee, Democracy,” resonated with its customers, said William Cerf, a 64-year-old regular.

The store’s icon was  a six-foot Statue of Liberty. The statue stood in the storefront until it was destroyed by vandals in summer 2009. People were distraught, said Cerf. A West Village restaurant donated a replacement, and a group of about fifty customers hauled it to Vox Pop over the Brooklyn Bridge on foot by hand cart.

He likened the café to where the real statue stands on New York Harbor. “It’s a place for a new beginning,” he said.

The café had regular, eclectic, evening programming: Open mic night was on Sunday. Monday was jazz night and Tuesday was blues. Wednesday was indy film night, organized by Rick Menello, co-screenwriter of the 2008 film “Two Lovers,” starring Joaquin Phoenix and Gwyneth Paltrow. Thursday showcased local musicians and Friday and Saturday were for produced concerts. Every third Saturday of the month was reserved for comedy, karaoke and all-ages shows mainly for teens. Alcohol was not served on those nights.

The daytime was for children’s programming, including drum circles and sing-alongs for kids and parents.

It also was the catalyst for many a relationship.

Greg Di Gesu met his future wife Nancy Campbell the first night he walked in. Di Gesu, a 45-year-old singer-songwriter from Jersey City, was sitting at a table with a full pitcher of beer and empty glasses after performing, waiting for some friends.

He offered Campbell, a manager at the time, a glass of beer. She accepted. Six years later, last July, they were married. “I had finished my set, so it wasn’t even like I wooed her with my music,” he laughed.

***

But unlike that couple’s happy narrative, other parts of Vox Pop’s story aren’t so neatly wrapped up.

The store has been physically closed since Aug. 24, when the state seized all of Vox Pop’s assets for over $133,000 in IRS and New York State back taxes, according to an email sent to shareholders. Agents padlocked the doors so the staff couldn’t take anything out of the store. The state auctioned those assets publicly on Sept. 15.

Vox Pop had 211 shareholders who owned a piece of the company, most of them from the community, investing $100 to $200. The money gone, and little sentiment in favor of putting in more money to reopen Vox Pop, the shareholders on Sept. 7 overwhelmingly voted in support of “Option 4,” to declare Chapter 7 bankruptcy and dissolve the company.

Hicks said he was great at raising money—he mentioned his record as raising $50,000 in one night, $25k from two investors—but bad at managing debt.

Hicks admitted that the business didn’t take city agencies and regulations too seriously when first starting out.

“We just got off on the wrong foot with the Department of Health, so there was always a debt there to manage,” he said.

In one day in 2008, the Department of Health levied fines totaling $14,000. That was just when  the café established itself as a radical  independent voice in the community, and Hicks suspects there was a connection.

He brought Ryan aboard to help fix the financial situation. She took over as CEO in early 2009, when Hicks left the company for a job offer in sustainable investing.

When management changed hands, Vox Pop was around $184,000 in debt from back sales taxes, Department of Health fines, and employee back debt, said Ryan.

Prices were kept intentionally low, said Ryan. Bottled beer was $3 while drafts were $5. “We know the economy is hard. We know that you need to go out, too,” said Ryan. “So we’re going to try our best to keep it affordable as possible.”

Maybe too affordable, she admitted.

At one point, in 2008, Hicks explored the idea of franchising Vox Pop. He leased a space to sell food and coffee in the lobby of the Bowery Poetry Club, nearby the now-defunct legendary punk club CBGB in Manhattan. The venture closed within a year.

“Oh, my Waterloo,” said Hicks, referring to the Bowery location. “Next question,” he laughed.

Ryan’s goal was to tailor Vox Pop to the Ditmas Park community. When she took over management, she tempered down the leftist political tone. “What you had to say, to me, was not as important as the fact that you had something to say.” Ryan said. “Every opinion was valid.”

She joked that the state shut them down every quarter.

They would close for two weeks at a time when they got shut down—meaning two weeks without revenue, and restocking two weeks worth of food and drinks, all the while interest and penalties growing, said Ryan.

But when the state came knocking the last time on Aug. 24, she gave up.

“No more,” she said. “How many times are we going to do this? Nobody invested in Vox Pop to become rich.”

Ryan said employees and vendors at the Cortelyou location have been paid. Hicks said he could have tried to raise money to save Vox Pop again, but he was not asked.

The final debt at the time of closing was $246,647.

The Vox Pop People are now looking for another place to call home. Cerf said a few of the customers are working on a new project, tentatively called the Cortelyou Community Center. They held a meeting Monday night at the Qathra café at 1112 Cortelyou Rd.

While they are looking for a building to gather in, Ryan said that is not as important as the spirit of the people. She recalled Vox Pop’s last open mic night in early September, held outside the store after it had already been padlocked.

Amidst all the singing and dancing, it was like “being at your own funeral,” she said.

“We realized what we’d succeeded in doing was, even without the brick and mortar to hold it together, we’d built a community,” she said.

By Jack Mirkinson and Yepoka Yeebo

At the far southeastern edge of Brooklyn sits Dead Horse Bay. The name is an evocative, and quite literal, one. It harkens back to the 1800s, when dead horses from around New York City were sent to a lonely, remote place called Barren Island to be processed and made into things like glue and fertilizer. Because of this, the water that surrounded the island was called Dead Horse Bay.

It was not just horses that were processed on Barren Island. It was a clearinghouse for all sorts of muck, filth and grime. From the 1850s onward, trash from Brooklyn, Manhattan and the Bronx was sent to the island, as were many kinds of dead animals. The island housed a community of around 1,500 people, who lived, worked in factories and went to school there.

Follow the arrow to Dead Horse Bay.

Not surprisingly, though, the mixture of animal corpses and all that trash created an almighty stench. As far back as 1899, the state legislature was debating how to curb the smell—and the processing facilities that produced it. In the late 1920s, the city shut down the factories and filled in the water that separated part of the island from the mainland with trash and turned it into Floyd Bennett Field, New York’s first airport.

In the 1950s, a cap on one of the containers for the landfill burst, sending trash flowing onto the beach that had been created when the land was filled in. Trash, both old and new, has continued to cascade onto the sands of Dead Horse Bay ever since.

—

Dead Horse Bay in the News

A selection of articles from the New York Times that testify to the wild and wacky place that was Barren Island. Go to Underwater New York for more information.

Legislators try to remove the stench from Barren Island.

The mystery of the cursed knickerbockers.