Quietly working at a Manhattan hospital is a small group of women doing what even those who advocate for abortion might wince at: guiding women through late-term abortions.

In the midst of yet another round of abortion wars in Congress, the Doula Project operates in purposeful obscurity to support women who choose to have abortions, when they have abortions.

Lauren Mitchell, a petite redhead from Williamsburg, is one such doula, a Greek term meaning a woman — in antiquated times, a servant — who provides non-medical assistance during childbirth. Mitchell performs the typical doula tasks with her patients: she holds women’s hands, strokes their hair; talks to them about nothing in particular. Those who come to this hospital “probably don’t have health insurance or don’t know they have options under the law,” Mitchell says (the doulas interviewed for this article requested that the hospital, which specializes in late-term abortions, remain undisclosed). Many of the women are under familial pressure. Many of them are forced to go through the procedure alone.

That’s where the abortion doulas step in, widening the scope of the doula world as they work. Traditionally, doula communities are largely devoid of controversy and provocation. Doula work is considered the business of birth, and most would never contemplate their jobs in the context of abortion. But Miriam Perez, 25, an editor at Feministing and author of the blog Radical Doula, found that some people like herself felt isolated in their doula communities because they were queer, pro-choice or uninterested in making a full-time career of doula work. For Perez, it was also an issue of reconciling her reproductive rights work with being a doula.

And so the Doula Project was imagined when Perez met the Mitchell and the project’s co-founder, Mary Mahoney, at a meeting of The New York Birth Coalition in 2007. The idea of installing a doula unit at a local hospital or clinic became a passion project that Mitchell and Mahoney eventually carried to fruition (Perez had relocated to Washington, D.C.). And it continues to grow. Besides the partnership with the Manhattan hospital, the project appoints abortion doulas on an individual basis to women undergoing abortions at other hospitals and adoption doulas to Spence Chapin Adoption Agency. It’s also set to open a chapter in Atlanta.

There are 20 active abortion doulas in New York, mostly women under 30, and they work in shifts on a volunteer basis, serving up to 25 patients a week. To become doulas, they must complete 20 hours of clinical training, but the bulk of the job is intuitive — being present with the patient before and after the abortion, responding to her cues and providing necessary support. The intimacy of the experience can be wrenching. “What you get very used to is this weird mix of tragedy and relief and sex and death — this wild variety of emotions,” Mitchell says. “There’s always this interesting mix of remorse and relief.”

Even with the success of the project, though, working radical doulas remain a rare breed. “A lot of people are interested in this politically, but don’t have the warmth,” Mitchell says. “You need more than just your conviction to do this.” Mitchell remembers feeling “sick with her own privilege” during her first abortion doula experience. “I was sitting between two women — one was a cashier at a 99-cent store and the other worked at a dry cleaner. Neither spoke English,” she says.

But it’s a strong sense of purpose and ardor that buoys doulas during the most intense situations. In one instance, Mitchell was with a woman undergoing a late-term procedure in which the woman’s fetus was given a shot of KCL, the same substance used in lethal injections. The woman, lying on a medical bed with her hands behind her head because her bottom half had to be kept sterile, could either look left and see an array of syringes or right and see the ultrasound monitor with her dead fetus on it. Mitchell, standing in the space behind the woman’s head, had met her only moments before. The woman turned her head and buried her face in Mitchell’s arms.

The project as a whole has assisted in 500 abortions. It is still in essence a side job for Mitchell and Mahoney — they both work; Mitchell as a health educator at the same hospital in which the doulas are stationed, Mahoney an assistant director at the Pro-Choice Public Education Project. But they spend a great deal of time with the project as it evolves, making sure to keep its foundation intact. They are doulas first, after all, to give women support that they might not otherwise get. “You’re not going to take this person’s pain away,” Mitchell says, “But you can help guide them through it.”

The Starlite Lounge prepares for the holidays. Finnegan/ The Brooklyn Ink

By Jack Mirkinson and Leah Finnegan

On a blustery Wednesday night, Willie, a slight man in a candy-striped shirt and denim cargo pants, teetered on a rickety ladder draping tinsel from the rafters of the Starlite Lounge. The place was already decked out with felt wreaths and small trees of poinsettia that glowed in the bar’s soft yellow light. Willie’s 66th birthday is Saturday; the lounge is having a party to honor him. He’s worked at the lounge for 39 years.
In its own words, the lounge is Crown Heights’s oldest black-owned, non-discriminating club. Since 1960, it has been a safe haven in the neighborhood — a place for a motley crew of regulars to gather. Ownership has been passed from family hand to family hand. But it now faces the threat of closure from new landlords who say they want to tear out the club.

Tim La’Viticus, 48, runs the lounge and tends bar. He lives in the Bronx, but makes the 90-minute commute to Crown Heights five times a week. On Wednesday, he greeted each customer who entered and put out baskets of potato chips for patrons to snack on.

He also bantered with his co-bartender, Karen Covergirl. “How long have I been working here?” he asked her.

“Nineteen years,” she replied.
“Shut up, girl,” he said. He’s only worked there five. He asked her if she had to jump from a second-floor window to fit into her body-hugging jeans.

While it draws a sizeable gay crowd, the bar’s employees are careful not to call it a gay bar. It is an alternative bar, they said, open and accepting but not geared specifically toward gays. Covergirl is transgender; she came to work at the lounge after La’Viticus gave her an opportunity that many other bars would not.

The building, La’Viticus said, used to be owned by the Brown Funeral Home next door. It was sold earlier this year with the expectation that all the tenants would leave. But the community — a term that encompasses everyone from elected officials to the bar’s regular stable of crotchety seniors who take the place over in the afternoons — is trying to find a way to keep the Starlite Lounge in business for another 50 years.

So far, they have a petition with more than 1,000 signatures. They also have the support of community activist Debra Griffin-Daza, 50. “I used to be a gang leader back in the 70s. I love a good fight,” she said.

Griffin-Daza’s cousins own the lounge. She’s lived in Crown Heights for 41 years. Her entrance into the bar was heralded by hugs and cries of “Debbie!” She happily received the attention, then slid onto a barstool and ordered a vodka with cranberry and pineapple.

“It’s an epidemic of people being bought out,” she said. “You look up Nostrand Avenue you see nail salons, Chinese restaurants. There’s no place for people to go.”

The lounge, she added, has been a constant in a neighborhood that has seen ups and downs.

Wednesday night’s clientele was redolent of the varied crowd the lounge draws. Among the patrons were a woman named Kim who said she had been coming there for 20 years, two men who had had jobs at the lounge before and had now transitioned to being regulars, and two young women who had just begun coming to the bar. Kate Sarrantonio, 23, played a video game called Erotic Photo Hunt with her friend. They are experts, racking up hundreds of thousands of points. A recent graduate of Hampshire College, Sarrantonio moved back to Brooklyn from Austin a few months ago. “We kind of just rolled in and really liked it,” she said. “We try not to bring our friends. Not our space.”

Griffin-Daza said that local officials have been bombarded with e-mails in support of the lounge. “It looks like we have a very, very good chance of keeping this open,” she said. But the building’s new owners declared that the lounge must vacate by Jan. 15, or they will be forced to leave. La’Viticus said that the club’s owners had been looking for a new space to house the bar, but were intent on staying put if possible.

Tonight, Griffin-Daza and supporters of the bar will rally at Community Board 8’s meeting, where they have secured a special slot on the agenda. Afterward, they’ll gather at the lounge for karaoke night, traditionally the wildest event of the week. “I even sing,” Griffin-Daza said. “Rockin’ Robin’s my favorite.”

The set of Martin Scorcese's new film in Park Slope. (Finnegan/Brooklyn Ink)

Film grips have a universal, if unofficial, uniform: Layers of hardy, drab clothing in shades of black, brown and gray. Denim is acceptable. Shoes must be rubber-soled. Hoods recommended (in canvas a plus).

A group so dressed swarms the corner of Lincoln Place and 8th Avenue one recent raw morning, eating fried chicken sandwiches and breakfast burritos stuffed with unusually yellow eggs. They sport fleece jackets and baseball caps decorated with the badges of past projects, “Nurse Jackie” and “Law and Order” among them.

Lights the size of oil drums illuminate the exterior of the Montauk Club. Inside, Steve Buscemi and Michael Pitt are holed up rehearsing for “Boardwalk Empire,” a Martin Scorcese-directed HBO series about Prohibition-era gangsters in Atlantic City. Crew members ferry piles of tweed vests and blazers into the building. An antique car sits on the street in front of the craft services truck, in which a lone cook putters.

The grips plod around the building. There’s gear to be rolled places, about seven semi-trucks full of it. Thick, grey industrial carts brim with monitors, cords, cord guards, lights, scaffolding, tripods, rods of various heights and tape in every color of the fluorescent rainbow. The stairs at the front entrance of the Montauk Club are far too steep to navigate such cargo, so the grips must chaffeur the cumbersome carts up Lincoln Place to the back door. One by one they exhale and push, leaning forward so their chests are parallel to the ground. They create a logjam at the rear entrance: its hairline walkway cannot accommodate them all. A line of carts begins to snake around the block, each with its respective grip on guard. The grips are always working, even when they’re not. Their belts drip with appendages: pliers, clothespins, monitors that cackle indecipherable commands.

It begins to rain. Middle school students on lunch break walk by, hands in bags of Doritos. More engaged passersby inquire as to what’s going on. Is it a movie? Who’s in it? What’s it for? The show’s not set to debut next year, a grip tells them, straightening his posture slightly. The gawkers nod. They photograph the prop car, which looks especially conspicuous among all the semi trucks, and continue on their way. The grip re-assumes his position, leaning on the Montauk Club’s ornate fence. The day has barely begun.

Rick Kadlub in Brooklyn. Photo: Finnegan/Brooklyn Ink

I.

Brooklyn is home to 62,000 Italians, 65,000 Dominicans, innumerable pairs of skinny jeans and 4.5 million tourists. The travelers come from all over the globe, searching for a Brooklyn that doesn’t necessarily exist.

The idea of Brooklyn is one that artists love to explore. Writers tend to wax semi-poetic about a number of well-worn topics related to the borough. For one, the light: James Agee called it “the lordly, idiot light”; William Styron the “pollen-hazy light.” Walt Whitman, in his poem “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” described seeing “red and yellow light over the tops of houses” created by “foundry chimneys burning high and glaringly into the night.”

They also write about Brooklyn’s food, or objects that double as food. Anatole Broyard, “A Sunday Dinner in Brooklyn:” “On the corner squatted their church — a huge casserole, fat, heavy and plain as the women who prayed in it.” Woody Allen, in “Side Effects:” “Because the family is too poor to afford fresh rolls, he spreads marmalade on the News.”

But most tellingl­­y, they write about Brooklyn’s streets. The novelist Carson McCullers described her Brooklyn Heights street as a place that had “a quietness and sense of permanence that seem to belong to the nineteenth century.” Betty Smith, in “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn,” said the borough had “beautiful names for ugly streets.” Henry Miller, who was “born on the street and raised on the street” in present-day Williamsburg, put it best. “To be born on the street means to wander all your life, to be free,” he wrote in 1959. “In the street you learn what human beings really are; otherwise, or afterwards, you invent them.”

So it could be that these millions of tourists are looking for a feeling unique to the borough — some hazy, idiotic, godly sensation, scented by marmalade-dressed newsprint. Or, in other terms: the absurdity of real life in Brooklyn. Guidebook in hand, I went there to find out.

II.

I’ve never met Rick Kadlub in person, but he offers to pick me up off the side of the road in his beat-up silver Mitsubishi Eclipse one Sunday morning in Park Slope. He’s 47, burly and completely bald, save a pair of thick black eyebrows. He navigates the roads like he mapped them.

We’re driving so he can get cigarettes, and then to meet Hector and Vivian Garcia so Rick, a self-employed Brooklyn tour guide, can take them on a three-hour sightseeing jaunt around Park Slope and Prospect Park. Rick was born in this neighborhood, but the area he shows to his customers differs from the one he grew up in — he used to carry an ax in his coat when walking to pick up his grandmother at the subway stop on Union St. The corner today is home to a charming diner and apartment buildings with fluorescent-colored doors.

Most of Rick’s clients are from overseas, looking either for physical proof of a Park Slope coffee-and-stroller army or to see where parts of their family migrated. One-fifth — or maybe it’s one-seventh — of America can trace their roots to Brooklyn, Rick says; he’s not sure on the exact figure. Regardless, he once had a woman from Atlanta on a tour who broke into tears when she saw her childhood home.

The Garcias meet us at a sunny bagel shop. They’re an hour late. Vivian is petite and expressionless, Hector tall and younger looking than his 65 years in shorts and a baseball cap. They own a website in Florida that sells essential oils and materials to make soap. They visit New York often, but have never made it to Brooklyn. “We were afraid of where we might end up,” Vivian says.

Rick leads us up and down the neighborhood’s lush, brownstone-laden blocks. The Garcias are impressed. This is not the dingy Brooklyn they expected. Hector feels the groove of the place. “You come here and you get energized,” he says. Vivian tries to prove herself wrong. She says that some of the brownstones could stand to be pressure-cleaned. She asks if it’s safe to walk around at night.

We walk by the Montauk Club, Rick making sure to point out the building’s intricate moldings and quatrefoil windows. The Garcias squint to see the Native American heads carved into the balcony. The building has received such dignitaries as Grover Cleveland and Mark Twain. Today it hosts a Weight Watchers meeting.

A few blocks over, Prospect Park fully placates the Garcias. A string trio plays at the gates to the verdant pasture. Nuzzling couples stumble by. Families bike in packs. We turn our heads away from Richard Meier’s glass castle to soak in the scene. Our two-mile tour is almost over, and this is a good note on which to end. Rick tells us that sheep used to graze the park’s lawn, and it’s not difficult to imagine.

Over gloppy post-tour slices of pizza at Pinos, the Garcias nod emphatically when I ask them if their opinion of Brooklyn has changed. They’re not much for talking anymore, though, with their focus narrowed in on their slices. They say it’s the best pizza they’ve ever had. It might be why Hector slips Rick a $5 bill when we all part.

III.

A few Saturdays later I’m at the Brooklyn entrance to the Brooklyn Bridge, intent on stalking rogue, tour-guideless tourists. I want to walk over the bridge with them, chart their reactions as we cross boroughs in the gray air above the East River.

Immediately, I bump into Jean Ruane, Marie Baxandall and Shirley Carr puzzling over the large map of the adjacent area mounted next to the stairway leading up to the bridge. They’re from Manchester, England, in town to run the marathon the next day. They’re looking for Williamsburg.

Marie, a tiny woman with dark curls and a necklace of multicolored beads that looks like a string of elfin Christmas lights, shows me an address on her cell phone. Her husband wants a Joy Division shirt done in “reggae colors” from an obscure screenprinting shop in Williamsburg — do I know of it? I don’t. They decide to push their visit to Williamsburg to Monday, after they’ve run their marathon. Today is about the bridge.

Even though the women have only been in New York for a day, they are quick to appreciate the idea of Brooklyn as an oasis of authenticity. “It’s nice to get away from the tourist attractions and see where the indigenous peoples live,” Marie says. Meanwhile, Jean’s conception of the borough springs from an episode of “Sex and the City” in which a character moves to Brooklyn and is derided for skipping town to a less glamorous locale. She’s nonplussed. “I’m going to write to the producers,” she says. “There’s nothing wrong with Brooklyn.”

Jean, a petite schools inspector with cropped blonde hair, leads the pack over the bridge. The thin walkway is clotted with people coming from the other direction. It’s Halloween, and some of them are wearing costumes. There are witches, fairies and pirates. There’s a man in an emerald green bodysuit that covers even his head — it doesn’t even have eyeholes. The women pay him no mind. They’re more surprised that people in New York dress up their dogs.

Marie darts ahead of us to take pictures with her 90s-era film camera. She runs her hands over the bridge’s steel girders and metal suspension cables as if she were showcasing a Camaro on “The Price is Right.” Like Jean, Marie’s withstanding notion of Brooklyn is mired in pop culture — shows like “Law and Order” and “The Sopranos,” the introductions to which can give a better tour of the city than a chartered helicopter. But now that she’s actually here, she chatters excitedly about what she sees. She especially likes Williamsburg for “taking over from where Greenwich Village left off.”

Toward the middle of the bridge, we’re pushed into the bike lane by the excess foot traffic. A man in full cyclist regalia, presumably not dressed as Lance Armstrong for the holiday, yells at us. “Bike lane!” he barks. “Wake up!”

The women giggle and hustle to the walking lane. Marie takes a picture of Jean posing as the State of Liberty. Shirley breathes in the smog. We’re not in Brooklyn anymore. The main island is more serious. The sky threatens drizzle. The ladies ache to put their feet up, but they decide to visit Ground Zero first.

IV.

I decide it’s time to talk to a Brooklyn expert — or at least someone who embodies the borough on a near-cellular level — to synthesize what I’ve seen. I meet Eben Wood, an English professor at Kingsborough Community College, at a muffin shop in Fort Greene, near a bookstore advertising a Jonathan Lethem reading and with titles like “Where The Wild Things Are” and “Veganomicon” displayed in its front window.

Wood says he’s dismayed by the hipster infiltration of Brooklyn, even though he admits he’s a hipster himself. Dressed in a checkered oxford shirt, jeans and heavy brown boots, sporting a full beard and moustache and carrying a messenger bag, it’s difficult to argue with his self-identification.

In early October, Wood organized Dreamland Pavilion, an academic conference on Brooklyn that hosted 90 presenters on topics ranging from the Atlantic Yards to the borough as a gastropolis. More than 150 people made the trek to Kingsborough’s campus on the borough’s south coast to take part in the examination. As far as Wood knows, it was the first academic conference to focus solely on Brooklyn.

When I ask him what people look for when they look for Brooklyn, he points in the direction of the Greene Grape grocery store up the block, built to evoke an old Italian market. It’s a symbol of the old and new of the borough, awkwardly meshed together. Inside, “you expect a white ethnic guy in an apron with his sleeves rolled up, smoking a cigar and cutting you a delicious dry ham,” he says; that’s the old Brooklyn people yearn to feel when they come here. The ethos of new Brooklyn — rooted in notions of idealized utopian corporatism — is evidenced by the fact that you can’t buy a slice of dry ham at the Greene Grape unless you have $20 to kill. In his academically minded conclusion, Wood determines that the borough’s attempt at progression through simulated regression lodges it between the two extremes, making it impossible for tourists to find truth in their expectations.

Wood was born in Michigan. Drawing on his graduate work and his position at Kingsborough, he thoughtfully analyzes Brooklyn’s deeper social issues from a historian’s perspective. He purports himself to be fully enmeshed in the battle to save the area’s ethnic enclaves from developers’ malfeasant hands. He believes in Brooklyn’s obstinate pluckiness — and that it will fight against mindless gentrification, to preserve what’s left for future history-seekers and those who desire affordable rent.

But perhaps Wood’s own experience of hosting visitors best illustrates the core certainty of what outsiders think of the borough. He recalls a visit from his German friend a few years ago, after he first moved to Brooklyn. She was taken aback that she could not step out of his Bed-Stuy apartment, hail a cab and jet to the Museum of Modern Art. She summed up her feelings toward Brooklyn succinctly. “What a fucked-up place for you to move to,” she told him.

By Leah Finnegan

Had the New York Senate passed a landmark bill to allow same-sex marriage Tuesday, Brooklyn couple Mark Nayden and Richard Kennedy might have finally made plans to legalize their union. Instead, the bill was shelved and the partners, together for 19 years, will have to wait – not that they were surprised by this outcome.

“It’s going to take time. I don’t think disappointed is the right word. I’m realistic,” Nayden said at the popular Park Slope bar Excelsior, which he owns with Kennedy.

“Legal rights should be a given,” Kennedy added. “I just wish it was over.”

Still, Nayden retains hope that more time will positively affect the bill’s chance of passing. “I’d rather them do it properly, so if it takes a little longer that’s okay,” he said. “I don’t want a situation like we had in Maine.” Earlier this month, a similar referendum in Maine was heralded with gusto by lawmakers and gay rights groups, only to fail by a significant margin when it came to a popular vote.

Ralliers in Albany earlier this year. Photo courtesy of Chocolatepoint/Flickr Creative Commons.

Gov. David A. Paterson put the bill on the agenda during special sessions Monday and Tuesday but a vote was delayed due to extended deliberation over budget cuts. Sources said there was not enough support in the Senate to bring the bill to the floor. Paterson has pledged that it will be voted on before the end of the year, and as soon as next week.

Todd Erickson, a 32-year-old environmental sculptor, said gay men could use more time to define their relationships and strengthen the force behind the bill. “Many gay men are still not quite clear with what it means to have a life partner,” he said. “When more gay people are wanting to get married, the political movement will grow.”

Erickson does not see the value in a political sanction for same-sex marriage. “The politics are not going to make it more real,” he said. “They’re not going to make it happen for us in a way that it needs to happen for us.”

The momentum behind the bill in Albany remains cautiously strong. Alan Van Capelle, Director of Empire State Pride Agenda, the leading advocacy group for the bill, stood behind Paterson during a press conference yesterday as the governor promised to make the bill a top priority next week. Van Capelle said that he was confident that Paterson and Democratic senators will honor the commitment they made to passing the bill this year.

But Kensington resident David Ayres, 35, is not so optimistic about an imminent resolution. “I think like a bunch of sheep, everyone sits,” he said. “It’s a very typical American cycle.”

By Leah Finnegan

The phalanx of Tupperware-clad students crowded around the microwave in Brooklyn College’s cafeteria either doesn’t notice or tries to ignore what’s scrawled on the wall above the machine, with an arrow pointing downward: “It’s very nasty.”

The cafeteria is technically titled the Metropolitan Food Café, and is decorated in shades of the ‘80s – black accents abound. Most everything edible there has some element of beige: khaki-colored pizza crust, off-white rice and beans, ecru pasta salad punctuated with square jewels of red pepper. Individually-packaged slices of carrot layer cake have both the color and plushness of a foam mattress pad. Archetypal pieces of fried chicken are tinted a radioactive shade of orange only because of a heat lamp’s protective glow.

The Brooklyn College cafeteria. Photo courtesy of Hayes Peter Mauro/Flickr

Some diners choose to avoid the cafeteria’s colorless offerings and bring their own lunches. An older man sits by himself at a table loaded with books and binders. He alternates between taking gloppy spoonfuls of strawberry yogurt with one hand and bites of an apple wrapped in foil with the other. He drinks Seagram’s Ginger Ale from a can.

Behind him, a man in a black skullcap eats beef with his fingers from Tupperware. He uses a spoon to eat the accompanying rice, moving the grains around the container several times before taking a bite. He drinks orange Powerade.

A young woman behind the apple man takes timid bites of an oatmeal raisin cookie while reading a thick textbook. She has two types of tea on her table, iced and hot. She wears a sweatsuit.

Plastics are the cafeteria’s lifeblood. All food items are served on, or come encased in, plastic. At minimum, a table has three elements of plastic on it: a bottle full of liquid, a plate of food and utensils. Students dining alone at least keep their cell phones on their tables, which are plastic. The chairs are plastic. Salisbury Steak Wellington, the featured dish of the day, resembles plastic play-food found in a child’s miniature kitchen.

On the back wall of the dining area is an impressionistic mural of students sitting in the college’s main quad, its iconic buildings in the background. They have no faces. The women sitting in front of the mural suck daintily on chicken bones until every last shred of meat is gone.

It had been two weeks since Brian Scott was shot and killed when on Sunday the friends who knew him as Cozmik, the peerless inline roller blader, gathered to raise money for his tombstone.

They had not wanted to come to his wake. They were not really connected to Scott in the outside world, only through the realm of skating. So instead, they came from across the city to the Coleman Skate Park under the Manhattan Bridge to honor his memory in the element in which they knew him best.

In the skating world, friends know each other through the way they move across concrete. You are what you can do. And so between laps of the park, Scott’s friends remembered with awe how he navigated from ground to ledge to rail to air and back on his skates.

They were a disparate bunch. There was Adonis Taylor, 25, a muscled architecture student. Layla Ferrer, 18, an amateur magazine editor with blonde streaks in her hair. Brandon Llanes, 14, wearing a sweatshirt on which he drew Scott’s name.

They all wore their requisite chunky inline skates, ripped jeans and slack hoodies, flannels and beanies. They slapped each other’s backs and high-fived and watched each other show off. When one of them wiped out, they crowded around him to make sure he was okay.

The skaters at the memorial session. Photo courtesy of Cesar Macay

Skating is a safe sport, in that it leaves you no time do anything else, no time to get into trouble. So when Scott was shot and killed at a Flatbush coffee shop earlier this month, the skating world was rocked. Scott was 18. Police say his murder was a case of mistaken identity.

Scott made a name for himself doing things on roller blades that set him apart from the other skaters. He nailed true top souls, where a skater speeds up to a ledge, turns into it blind and grinds across it with one foot turned inward. He could do a Barani flip, a treacherous front flip with a 180-degree turn. He could spin. His prowess earned him widespread respect.

Ramelle Knight, a successful skater in his own right, was one of Scott’s mentors. He had recently sponsored Scott through a skating group called Gentlemens’ Klub, the junior league of DipSkate, his larger operation. Knight foresaw a promising future for Scott. “From the first time he came around I knew there was something special about him,” Knight said.

He teared up remembering Scott’s blading skill, particularly when it came to a trick known as the porn star – a complicated move that ends in a full spin off of a ledge. “He could do it, eyes closed,” Knight said.

Scott’s friends remembered him as good-humored and driven. He wanted to be an actor, one said, and go to a performing arts college. Many of them had not seen Scott at their usual skating haunts in the weeks preceding his death because of school. He was a straight-A student at Satellite Academy High School in Manhattan.

On the night of his death, Scott had gone to Parkside Coffee and Donut shop to get food, said a neighbor, Newton Hallal. By all accounts, he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. He was standing in front of two other men, believed to be the intended targets, when a gunman in a green jacket blazed by the store and opened fire. Scott was hit in the back and went down. The two other men were shot but survived.

News of Scott’s death spread quickly. Some took the early MySpace status updates and Instant Messenger away messages acknowledging the loss to be a joke. But then the messages began to multiply. “I turned off my Xbox and started crying,” Suki Davila, 25, a short, wiry man swimming in baggy clothes said. He used to watch skating videos with Scott at his Lower East Side apartment.

Adonis Taylor arrived at the site at 4 a.m., almost eight hours after the shooting.

“They had just finished washing the blood up so the sidewalk was full of water,” Taylor said. He left a pair of skate boots at a makeshift memorial next to the restaurant. He had had written “Why?” on them. Over the course of the next day, the memorial grew to include pictures of Scott, prayer messages, skating paraphernalia and more than 40 flickering candles.

But his friends did not linger at his place of death. Instead, they remembered Scott through what first made them notice him. They made T-shirts and finger skates to sell to raise money. They dug into their own pockets. Altogether, they raised $649 for his tombstone. As night fell on the skate park, the crowd lingered strong, laughing and skating as they would had Scott been there.

Sheryl Oliver in her Lefferts Gardens shop. Finnegan/Brooklyn Ink

Sheryl Oliver, tall and slim with short brown hair tinted red, is spry on her feet retwisting Loretta Hargrove’s dreadlocks one gray Saturday morning. Her approach is methodical: apply a mix of jojoba and Vitamin E oil to each thin coil of hair, rub, twist, comb and repeat. Her fingers move quickly, as if she were playing a harp.

Oliver, 54, is from St. Vincent. She came to Brooklyn 37 years ago. She has owned and operated Hai Stylz, her Lefferts Gardens salon, for three years.

As long as there are customers, Hai Stylz is open. Sometimes, clients keep Oliver’s light on until 1 a.m., which means she’ll get home to Flatbush at around 2, only to reopen the store at 10. She is a one-woman show, operating the shop by herself six days a week.

The block of the neighborhood Hai Stylz sits on is a rough one. Oliver’s first order of business each day is tidying up her sidewalk area, which becomes littered with trash–cigarette butts, joint wrappers, Heineken bottle tops–overnight. She calls the area a garbage can.

Oliver has nightmares about her shop being robbed. She says the African braiding salon down the street keeps its doors locked at all hours. In the morning and at night, she uses a long crowbar to lift the metal shades that guard her store when she’s not there. She fears leaving it and coming back to nothing.

Inside, the shop is open and bright. Random vases of silk flowers–orchids, lilies, zinnias–rest on the front desk, the window ledges, the cabinets at the back of the room. The perimeter of the shop is lined with chairs: four styling chairs, two hair-washing chairs, four hair-drying chairs and two patio chairs. A large poster of Marilyn Monroe looks down on the room.

The salon fell into Oliver’s hands three years ago. Her childhood friend owns the building, and when he couldn’t rent the room Hai Stylz occupies, he gave Oliver a deal. She was looking to go back to work anyway and had dreamed of owning her own shop, but never thought it possible. Her friend did everything to get the salon ready–hung the mirrors, installed the cabinets, set up the sinks. On the first day it was open, Oliver brought in a preacher to pray in the space.

Business has been slow, if steady. It has aged Oliver, even if she’s usually too busy to notice. “It’s only when I’m working really hard, and my feet hurt, and I’m too tired to get up that I realize I’m old,” she says.

Oliver grew up in Barrouallie, St. Vincent, where her mother was a seamstress, her father a barber-turned-grocer in a store that had a pump stove before it got wired for electricity. Oliver grew up working in the family business. Her main task, as delegated by her father, was to wrap sugar cane in paper to sell. She would go through several reams of paper per day. When she came to America, she enrolled in hairdressing school almost immediately. “I always wanted to do something with the arts,” she says. “But this is what I did.”

It took Oliver a more than eight years to get through beauty school. She was seized by culture shock, and took time off to learn English and better acclimate herself to Brooklyn.  She became a housewife, doing hair only sporadically.

The shop has allowed Oliver to become the doyenne of the block, although she senses that some of her neighbors don’t appreciate her role as a neighborhood watchdog. “They’re trying to impress everybody on the block not to like me,” she says. Though she often stops styling to greet passersby through the salon’s open door, she sees herself–and her shop–as an island on the street. “I am a black woman all by myself out here. And I am trying to make a living,” she says.

If anything, the inside of her store is a refuge. People hang out. On average, a client spends three hours in the salon. Oliver knows how to entertain them all. She talks to one customer about St. Vincent nightlife. She talks to another about eyelash threading. She talks to a one woman, home on break from Berklee College of Music, about Billy Joel. All the while she’s tugging, twisting, molding and sculpting hair, not skipping a beat unless to sneak off to the shop’s back room to smoke a cigarette.

Oliver does some of her most intricate work on Ayanna Brown, who lives next door to Hai Stylz. Oliver applies white relaxant paste to Brown’s scalp, readying the hair to be smoothed back for a weave. After a wash and a turn at the dryer, Oliver pulls her hair back and pins in into two tight knots. She trims a foot-long piece of artificial hair, then twists it around the knots and cuts it to fit, creating two ponytails. Then she blends the plaits of hair and sculpts them with a flat iron. The finished product is spritzed with olive oil spray.

Brown is pleased with her hair. “Remember how I came in?” she asks. “And they say there are no magicians.”

Oliver doesn’t stop to absorb the compliment. She moves on to tidying up the area, sweeping hair and folding towels, never stopping to rest. She dreams of the day when the shop runs without her, and she can sit back and watch it go.

If Wal-Mart had a quirky great-uncle, it would be Bobby’s Department Store in Flatbush.

Bobby’s has everything, and for cheap. Glue traps, chandeliers, ten-gallon pots. Bath mats, microphones, hair straighteners. Oriental rugs. Toilet seats. Oil paintings of a man and a woman, both blindfolded, walking off separate cliffs with the hand of God between them.

The Flatbush version of Bobby’s (there are two others in Brooklyn; one of them across the street from this one) stretches for a city block. Its façade is weatherworn; the red letters that once spelled out the store’s name in fanciful script have faded to a dirty mauve. But cars still line up across the street from it, double-parked so customers can easily transport their wares.

Bobby's other Flatbush store location. Photo courtesy of Lucius Kwok/Flickr Creative Commons

Bobby’s is the closest thing Flatbush — or Brooklyn, for that matter — has to an international bazaar. The store sells everything from curry powder to bone marrow hair treatment. Practically the only English spoken is the pop music blasted from the radio, but one can barely hear it above the din of hundreds of customer cell phone conversations. (“I’m at Bobby’s!” a woman yells into her neon-cased BlackBerry, before slipping into Spanish).

The store is not a place to linger — it’s too frenetic. But people do it anyway, especially when there are sales. On this day, twin sets of 400-thread-count sheets are on special for $13.99 and kitchen mats are going for $6.99. Two women station themselves at the kitchen mat bin. The one in need of a mat fancies a half-moon creation, emblazoned with pineapples and other tropical fruit. Her friend prods her to look at the striped maroon ones. “Something more abstract?” she asks, inspecting the more demure mat. Ten minutes later, the women are still at the mat bin, brows furrowed. The tropical fruit mat-inclined friend has moved onto one with impressions of grapes and apples.

Things for sale at Bobby’s are presented in one of three ways: heaps, rows or hangings. The floor merchandise is organized by troughs, if organized is the right word. There are troughs of everything from comforters to stuffed lions to forks. It’s unclear where anything is within this system. Dusty packages of licorice sit beside a pile of makeup cases full of nail polishes. Inflatable swimming pools dangle from the ceiling. Two women in burqas inspect a towering display of shower curtain rods. One woman pushes a shopping cart of golden bedsheets through the aisles. Another has a cart of glass jars.

The store’s decorating scheme reflects the chaos of products. The floor is an amalgam of mismatched linoleum tiles, done in by years of heavy traffic. Each section of the interior could also be classified by scent, corresponding to what is for sale in a given area. Upon entering, the overwhelming scent is of perfumed artificial flowers, which gives way to laundry detergent and then maple syrup, which comes from Martha Stewart Living Brand maple-syrup scented candles.

As exhibited by the haphazard placement of Martha Stewart items, the store’s business model is: quantity reigns. Sales associates — all of whom wear red vests embroidered with “How may I help you?” — use old fashioned pricing guns to tag products. They do not smile. Eighties-era security cameras, in all their boxy glory, watch the store from on high.

This branch of Bobby’s has two levels. According to a sign posted above it, the basement is a new department. “Dear, customers,” an adjacent sign reads. “Please do not take shopping carts down the stairs” — as if they could. The stairwell leads to a less frenzied room of suitcases and bedroom furniture. It’s a kind of oasis. One can clearly hear The Fugee’s “Killing Me Softly” over the radio, the slap, click of the price gun and the buzz of the fluorescent lights. The merchandise is picked over. A Russian man complains to a manager about a broken office chair, and the manager refers him to a third-party repairman.

Upstairs, at least, sunlight is shining through the sparkling row of chandeliers at the store’s southern entrance. The kitchen mat women are still there, too. They’ve moved to place mats. Standing before a floor-to-ceiling display of lacy white mats, they take in the scene. “Lord have mercy,” one says.