Crown Heights - Post all News here
By E.B. Solomont
March 18, 2005
The Forward
A convicted felon has been elected leader of a government-funded
Chabad-dominated community council in the Crown Heights section of
Brooklyn.
Despite serving a 15-month jail term for bank fraud, Rabbi Moshe
Rubashkin captured 71% of the 1,208 votes cast in the recent election
to head the Crown Heights Community Council. The council, a nonprofit
group, receives $1.9 million per year in public funds to provide social
services, including food stamps and affordable housing.
Some voters told the Forward that they hoped Rubashkin, a popular TK,
would help bridge divisiveness in their community.
"I voted for Moshe Rubashkin," said Chanina Sperlin, a longtime
committee member. "Moshe Rubashkin is a fine man. Moshe Rubashkin loves
to help Jews, and more than a Jew, a Jew who needs help."
Rubashkin pleaded guilty to bank fraud in July 2002, according to court
records obtained from the Eastern District Court of Pennsylvania. He
served a 15-month jail sentence, and is currently serving a five-year
probation term.
Rubashkin's victory was first reported last week in Newsday. The vote
took place January 31.
His supporters praise him for clothing Israeli yeshiva students and for
welcoming needy Jews to his annual Purim celebrations.
In a statement to the Forward, Rubashkin wrote, "The community leaders
and residents were fully informed of all issues and honored me with
their trust to lead us into a brighter future."
City councilwoman Letitia James, whose Brooklyn jurisdiction represents
parts of Crown Heights, was one of several elected officials who
attended a Sabbath dinner at Rubashkin's home following the election.
"I believe in the democratic process, and he received the overwhelming
support of the Crown Heights community," she said.
James noted that convicted felons may legally run for government-funded
groups and that Rubashkin's past had been disclosed to voters. "Who am
I to judge?" she said.
At least one observer of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement, which controls
the secular Crown Heights group, said that Rubashkin's election could
bridge the gap between those who believe that the sect's late spiritual
leader, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, was the messiah and those who
do not.
"Moshe Rubashkin served his time and is moving on in society," the
observer said. "The real story is that he is a practical guy who wants
to heal internal divisions in Crown Heights."
Still, the community group is taking pre-emptive measures. According to
a spokesman for Rubashkin, the new community council head "will not be
involved in the dispersement of checks out of an abundance of caution."
The spokesman, who asked not to be identified, said that Rubashkin is
"related to the family" that owns the AgriProcessors meatpacking plant
in Postville, Iowa. He declined to elaborate.
The plant has been the target of a recent advertising campaign launched
by the animal rights group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.
The group, known as Peta, has claimed that the plant was employing
inhumane slaughtering practices.
AgriProcessors has denied the allegations.
By JENNIFER BLEYER
New York Times
Published: March 27, 2005
SITTING at her dining room table in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, Henya
Laine put on her reading glasses and opened to a fresh sheet in a
wirebound notebook. She gazed at Ettie, a 24-year-old woman with blue
eye shadow and a trace of hesitation who was sitting across from her,
offered a dish of hard candies, and said: "First of all, you look
lovely."
With that, Mrs. Laine got down to business.
"Where did you go to school?" she asked, the first in a series of
rapid-fire questions. "Who was the principal of your yeshiva? What is
your parents' phone number? Who are a few of your friends?"
"And," she added, "would you mind leaving a picture with me, in case a
young man wants to see a photo?"
As Ettie responded, Mrs. Laine energetically took notes. When asked
what type of man she was looking for, Ettie, who did not want her last
name used because of the private nature of her search, said she wanted
someone with good values. Very religious. And a full beard.
"In other words," Mrs. Laine said, smiling and peering over the top of
her glasses, "you're looking for a Lubavitcher."
A sunny mother of eight ("seven are married, thank God,"), Mrs. Laine
is a matchmaker in the community of Lubavitcher Hasidim, who number
about 11,000 in Crown Heights. While deeply traditional, the
Lubavitchers differ from some other Hasidic sects in which marriage is
essentially arranged by parents. Young Lubavitchers make the choice
themselves, although they are forbidden to initiate contact with the
opposite sex. That is where people like Mrs. Laine enter the picture.
Her work combines extensive research with a kind of mysterious
intuition. Another component, she said, is being a gentle but firm
nudge. And she is not above offering beauty tips.
"When girls come to me and look drab," she explained, "I tell them,
'Listen, God created men and God created women. And God created men who
love beautiful women. So girls, wear nice shoes. Wear makeup.' "
And the guys? "They have to look and smell good. You don't have to wear
a million-dollar suit. But you have to be presentable."
Mrs. Laine pulled out some photographs that had been sent to her by
young spouse-seekers, who commonly start looking for their mates at 21.
She pointed to a note written in tentative hand by a girl who specified
her height as 5 feet 4 inches, and hoped that her husband would be a
bit taller.
Height is important, Mrs. Laine conceded, but not for everyone. Just
that morning, she had two sisters at her home. "Their other sister,"
she said, "is 5-7 and got engaged to a guy who's 5-3. I would never
have put her with a guy so short. But they said she absolutely loves
him.
"So you see," she added matter-of-factly, "height is in the eye of the
beholder."
In a community where extended dating, let alone touching before
marriage, is shunned, decisions must be made quickly. Very quickly. So
another thing Mrs. Laine offers is advice in making them.
"When a girl goes out with a boy and comes back to me saying she can't
decide how she feels," she said, "I say wait a week. At the end of the
week: Do you miss him? Do you want a phone call? Yes? That's the one."
This is essentially what happened to Rochie Sudak, a girlish
24-year-old. Last summer, a married friend had a feeling about a friend
of her husband's and mentioned it to Mrs. Laine, who took on the role
of liaison and coach.
"I would ask her every question under the sun," Ms. Sudak said of Mrs.
Laine, "all before I even met him. You want to be 99 percent sure
before meeting, so once you meet, you just have to see if you're
compatible." At her first meeting with her future husband, Bentzi, 25,
she was impressed by his work as an editor of the Lubavitcher Web site
www.chabad.org. Both were tickled to discover that many years ago,
their grandparents knew each other in Russia. After six weeks, they
were engaged. In December, they married.
Back at Mrs. Laine's house, Ettie was concluding her interview. "I'm
ready to start a life," she said, "and by us, a life is to get married
and have children."
Mrs. Laine noted that she had a few people in mind, then set her
reading glasses on the table. "I suggest them to each other and they
trust me," she said. "But I'm not God, you know."
Lubavitcher
By NANCIE L. KATZ
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER
Sunday, April 10th, 2005
http://www.nydailynews.com/front/v-pfriendly/story/298464p-255357c.html
Fourteen tumultuous years have done little to heal the hurt of Fay
Rosenbaum, whose son Yankel was stabbed to death in a 1991 race riot
that came to symbolize a dark and angry period in the city's history.
Rosenbaum's family, including the 71-year-old matriarch, is back in the
city from Australia, once again seeking justice in the Hasidic
scholar's death. This time, they want to show that Yankel Rosenbaum got
shoddy treatment from city doctors after Lemrick Nelson left him dying
on a Crown Heights street.
"I don't forgive and I don't forget," Fay, 71, told the Daily News in
an exclusive interview Wednesday, just before the Brooklyn Supreme
Court judge hearing the family's civil case against the city issued a
gag order.
"Nobody's ever been made accountable. This is a scandal."
It was about 11:30 p.m. on Aug. 19, 1991, when Yankel Rosenbaum, 29, a
doctoral student, left his Crown Heights apartment to get a haircut
from a neighbor. He had no idea that riots had broken out in the
predominantly black neighborhood after a Hasidic driver accidentally
struck and killed Gavin Cato, 7, an African-American boy.
When an angry mob rounded a corner and saw Yankel Rosenbaum, his
yarmulke made him a target. Shouting, "Kill that Jew!" they chased him
down and beat him. Then Nelson, 16 at the time, plunged a knife into
Rosenbaum four times. Rosenbaum fingered Nelson as he lay dying.
But his family - which filed the civil suit in 1991 but had to wait for
the criminal case to be resolved - believes Yankel did not have to die.
They blame botched medical care at city-run Kings County Hospital. A
scathing 1991 state report concluded that Rosenbaum probably wouldn't
have died if he had been treated properly at the hospital, where the
staff missed a stab wound.
With the city denying any medical malpractice, the Rosenbaum clan has
once again come over from Melbourne.
It's a familiar story line for the family that refused to forget what
happened to one of its own. Yankel's outspoken older brother, Aussie
lawyer Norman Rosenbaum, led the family's epic and ultimately
successful battle to see Nelson jailed.
When Nelson was acquitted of murder in 1992, the Rosenbaums pushed the
U.S. attorney to pursue a civil rights case, leading to a 19-year
federal prison term in 1997. That conviction was overturned in 2002; a
year later another jury found him guilty and he was sentenced to 10
years, most of which he had already served. He was freed last year.
Only in the 2003 retrial did Nelson finally admit he stabbed Yankel,
though his lawyers claimed he was motivated by a mob mentality - not by
Rosenbaum's religion.
According to Fay Rosenbaum, a retired school bursar, the family wanted
to stay in the shadows, assuming American authorities would find
justice for Yankel. But friends in New York began calling them, telling
them to get involved.
"You've got to come here," Fay Rosenbaum remembers them saying. "If you
don't do anything, nothing will be done."
"We were hicks from Australia. We didn't know what was going on."
Wiser this time, the Rosenbaums intend to prove that Yankel should have
survived the stabbing attack.
"I may look stupid, I'm not young, but don't treat me like the village
idiot," Fay said. "[At the hospital] he was alert, he was lucid.
"People don't understand the feeling inside, that there hasn't been
justice anywhere."
Jury selection in the case, in which the Rosenbaums are seeking
unspecified damages, resumes tomorrow.
Lubavitcher
by REBECCA MEAD
Marty Markowitz-the man, the plan, the arena.
Issue of 2005-04-25
Posted 2005-04-18
Brooklyn's Borough Hall, a Greek Revival building with an Ionic
colonnade clad in fine Tuckahoe marble and a roof topped,
incongruously, with a Victorian cupola, is a monument to diminished
expectations. The first plans for a City Hall-Brooklyn still being
independent, at the time-were drawn up in 1802, and the imagined
building was intended to rival the grander City Hall rising at that
moment in downtown Manhattan. The boldness of that gesture was somewhat
undermined by the fact that construction didn't begin for another
thirty-four years, and the building was not completed until 1848. When,
fifty years later, Brooklyn merged into New York City, the building was
downgraded from City Hall to Borough Hall; and this decline in
importance has grown more pronounced in the subsequent hundred-odd
years-right up to the present, when the building's highest profile
is, arguably, attained by the occasional appearance of its imposing
courtroom in the television series "Law & Order."
The Borough President's office, in the southeast corner of the
building, has recently undergone its own transformation. In the time of
Howard Golden, who was Borough President from 1978 to 2002, the desk
was positioned at the far end of the room, so that visitors were
obliged to make a processional approach to the seat of influence. Under
occupation by the incumbent, Marty Markowitz, the office looks less
like a sober place of government than like Santa's workshop. On every
surface-shelves, tables, window ledges, and cluttering the
desk-there are Teddy bears and toy trucks, balls and bats, dolls
dressed in the regalia of the Caribbean parade that takes place on
Eastern Parkway every Labor Day. The room has been painted a vivid
teal; and at the many windows hang curtains of satiny teal fabric,
printed with the seal of the borough of Brooklyn. There are enough
logo-bearing baseball caps to outfit both major leagues, including a
vintage Brooklyn Dodgers cap. Above one doorway hangs a plastic
basketball hoop, and a store-window mannequin in a corner wears a
basketball jersey bearing the numeral 1 and a name: the Brooklyn Nets.
These last are testament to Markowitz's enthusiastic embrace of the
developer Bruce Ratner's plan to build a $2.5-billion arena and
housing- and-commercial-development complex, known as Atlantic Yards,
in downtown Brooklyn, and to move the New Jersey Nets, which Ratner
bought last year, to Brooklyn. Markowitz's support of the Ratner
project has been his most visible act as Borough President; depending
on your political outlook, the plan is either a thrilling instance of
Brooklyn's economic and cultural resurgence or a shocking
capitulation to the interests of Ratner's multibillion-dollar
development company, Forest City Ratner.
Markowitz was elected to the office of Borough President in 2001, after
spending twenty-three years as a state senator representing first
Flatbush and then Crown Heights and Midwood. (He is up for reëlection
later this year but seems unlikely to face serious competition.) In the
past three years, he has become Brooklyn's most indefatigable
promoter. One of Markowitz's earliest stunts was the installation of
signs at entry points to the borough saying "How Sweet It Is!" and
"Believe the Hype!" and, on the Gowanus Expressway, approaching the
Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, another sign, reading "Leaving
Brooklyn-Fuhgeddaboudit!" (A subsequent attempt to install signs on
the Manhattan-bound side of the Williamsburg Bridge reading "Leaving
Brooklyn-Oy Vey!" was rejected by the city's Department of
Transportation as distracting and uninformative.) Markowitz has also
attracted attention less by design than by blunder. After his election,
he announced his intention to take down some of the portraits of "old
white guys"-former mayors and such-that hung in Borough Hall and
replace them with portraits of blacks or women. One of the old white
guys was George Washington, and Markowitz's gesture was taken by some
to be unpatriotic; others thought it was merely silly, particularly
since he had not felt obliged to surrender his own Caucasian electoral
ambitions to Jeannette Gadson, the black, female runner-up in the
primary for Borough President.
Markowitz has made an art of trading in a familiar nostalgia for better
times as a means of promoting the future of what he usually refers to
as "the city of Brooklyn." Ken Fisher, a former City Council member
who was another of Markowitz's opponents, says, "Marty can make
people nostalgic for the Dodgers who weren't even born when they left
Brooklyn." Since his election, Markowitz has attained a degree of
omnipresence in the seventy-two-and-a-half-square-mile borough: if
there's a parade, he'll be marching in it; if there's a street
fair, he'll be eating at it. If there are Brooklynites to be
honored-such as Cake Man Raven, a Fort Greene confectioner who
replicated Borough Hall in sponge cake and frosting for Markowitz's
inauguration-Markowitz will be there, issuing a proclamation or a
citation printed with gilded, archaic lettering. Markowitz, who is
sixty and short and portly, can barely make a public appearance without
cracking mournful jokes about his personal failings: his weakness in
the face of Brooklyn's multiplicity of ethnic restaurants and his
inability to con-trol his weight; his remaining single until the age of
fifty-four, when he married Jamie Snow, a graphic designer about a
dozen years his junior, whom he met at a beach while handing out
leaflets for a concert series (the Markowitzes have no children); his
incapacity, on a salary of a hundred and thirty-five thousand dollars a
year, to enter the Brooklyn real-estate marketplace. ("Blessed are
they who bought early," he told participants at one street fair in
Park Slope.) It is possible that he makes an occasional public
appearance without mentioning Junior's cheesecake, but very
infrequently; and his references to a desire for Brooklyn's secession
are legion, if unsupported by any policy papers or economic analyses.
"An elected official, in my opinion, has to serve in several
different capacities," Markowitz said one morning not long ago in his
office, sitting in a leather armchair in the half-cross-legged position
he favors, with one foot balanced high on his opposite thigh. "Policy
is very important; issues are very important, of course. But there is a
spirit-making people feel good about themselves and where they
live." Markowitz's commitment to keeping his constituents amused
was illustrated by his launching of an annual "Lighten Up,
Brooklyn" weight-loss campaign, for which he stripped to his shorts
at Borough Hall for a weigh-in. He has since more than regained the
eleven pounds he lost, perhaps in part because that fervent health-care
initiative was followed, in subsequent months, by an official "How
Sweet It Is! Sweet Potato Pie Scholarship Contest," a bake-off among
forty-nine groups.
Markowitz's office, like that of New York's other borough
presidents, combines a grand governmental title with a slight portfolio
and a very modest budget. (This year, Markowitz has an operating budget
of five million dollars; the city's over-all budget was fifty-one
billion dollars.) The five borough presidents were not always the
neutered beasts that they are now: for decades after Brooklyn became
part of New York City, the occupants of Borough Hall, at 209 Joralemon
Street, retained considerable political clout. They had the power of
patronage; and, along with the presidents of the other boroughs, they
sat on the eight-member Board of Estimate, which exercised oversight of
city budgets, land use, and zoning. But in 1989 the United States
Supreme Court ruled that the Board of Estimate was unconstitutional;
the board was abolished after a new city charter was adopted. The
Times, in endorsing Markowitz against his two primary contestants in
August, 2001, acknowledged the comparative impotence of the office that
he was seeking. Indeed, that was what made Markowitz, whom the paper
described as "an ebullient public servant who could provide a
refreshing boosterism for the sometimes beleaguered borough," the
right man for the job.
Markowitz's ebullience is such that, among other city officials, he
tends to be treated less as a political peer than as a cheery mascot
for his borough. In mid-December, Markowitz shared a platform with
Mayor Bloomberg at an event announcing an investment in the neglected
Restoration Plaza, on Fulton Street in the Bedford-Stuyvesant area of
Brooklyn, and the Mayor introduced him with an air of amused
condescension.
"When they write the book on city government and say, 'What does a
borough president look like?' I'm going to show you Marty
Markowitz," Bloomberg said. Markowitz bounded to the podium to
announce the addition of five hundred thousand dollars for Restoration
Plaza from his own office's capital budget to the Mayor's pledge of
seven hundred thousand. "Only in Brooklyn, and only in New York, can
two Jewish boys make this Christmas present to you tonight,"
Markowitz bellowed, while Bloomberg stood to the side wearing a
well-worn grimace, as if he were an audience member at a borscht-belt
comedy show who had been dragged onstage and obliged to endure a few
humiliating moments of audience participation.
While the borough is still beleaguered in many ways-more than twenty
per cent of its two and a half million residents live below the poverty
line-Brooklyn has also begun to serve as an overspill for Manhattan
wealth, with development proposed for many formerly neglected stretches
of territory, from the old Brooklyn Navy Yard, which now houses movie
studios, to the industrial waterfront between Williamsburg and
Greenpoint, where the city would like to see luxury apartment towers
rise, to the piers below the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway just south of
the Brooklyn Bridge, where new parkland has been proposed. Markowitz
revels in a borough-based chauvinism: he claims not to see the point of
leaving Brooklyn and has no interest in travel, although his wife
insists on a cruise to the Caribbean once a year. "I never get off
the ship," he says. "I appoint myself Homeland Security chief, and
watch to make sure all the food comes out on time." But his
self-appointment as Brooklyn's chief nostalgist deflects attention
from the surprising fact that, if the Atlantic Yards development gets
built, he will have wielded far more influence over the shaping of
Brooklyn's future than anyone expected of him.
Markowitz was one of those Brooklyn children who rarely went to
Manhattan: he grew up in Crown Heights, where his father worked as a
waiter in a kosher delicatessen; his main entertainment was hanging out
on the streets with other kids. His father died when he was nine, and
several years later Markowitz's widowed mother moved to public
housing in Sheepshead Bay with Marty and his two younger sisters. He
was educated in the borough, too, taking night classes for nine years
at Brooklyn College. Markowitz got his start in politics by organizing
tenants' and senior citizens' groups in Flatbush in the early
seventies. He was elected to the State Senate in 1978, and held on to
his seat through two redistricting processes, during which his
constituency went from being fifty-five per cent white to ninety-two
per cent black and Latino. He first ran for Borough President in 1985,
against the incumbent, Howard Golden, who, he contended, was more
beholden to Democratic Party powers than to Brooklyn at large. ("How
long will the future of our neighborhoods be sliced up like a
Junior's cheesecake?" Markowitz said on the stump.) That bid for
office resulted in Markowitz's being charged with failing to disclose
a campaign contribution from a local businessman: he pleaded guilty to
a misdemeanor, paid a nearly eight-thousand-dollar fine, and performed
seventy-five hours of community service.
Markowitz has always used his office in unusual ways: as a state
senator, he organized free summer concerts featuring mostly
crowd-pleasing, B-list bands and performers, at which he would appear
as the m.c., dressed in a white tuxedo. (When in 1991 riots broke out
in Crown Heights, part of Markowitz's district, Markowitz was hosting
B. B. King at a concert a few blocks away.) In Albany, he was better
known for bringing bagels, dyed green for St. Patrick's Day, to the
Senate chamber than for any legislative innovations. In some respects,
though, Markowitz's actions as Borough President have revealed the
reflexes of a parochial politician. To the New York City Panel for
Education Policy, formerly the Board of Education, Markowitz named
Donald Weber, a longtime schools superintendent, a decision that drew
controversy on two counts: the position on the board, which had been
newly restructured, was intended for a representative of Brooklyn
parents, rather than for an education bureaucrat; and Weber's school
district had been investigated in the late eighties and mid-nineties by
the Brooklyn D.A.'s office for cronyism. (Weber later resigned
anyway, citing the panel's impotence.) Another embarrassment occurred
when it emerged that Dolly Williams, a co-founder of a construction
company in Brooklyn, and Markowitz's appointee to the New York City
Planning Commission, had also invested a million dollars in Bruce
Ratner's Nets.
Markowitz's public image of well-meaning haplessness is so refined
that what might be seen as a calculated step by another politician is,
in his case, taken to be misguided folly. Markowitz shrugs off some of
his errors of judgment, such as backing Brooklyn's candidate for
leader of the City Council, Angel Rodriguez, who was defeated by
Gifford Miller and some months later found guilty of bribery and
extortion charges. "If anyone knew he was a crook, they wouldn't
have supported him," Markowitz says.
When it comes to Democratic Party influence, Markowitz could not have
ascended to the borough presidency at a worse time. "The peak of
Brooklyn's power was in the mid-nineteen-seventies," says
Markowitz's electoral rival, Ken Fisher, whose father, Harold Fisher,
was the chairman of the M.T.A. in the seventies. "Mayor Beame was
from Brooklyn. Governor Carey was from Brooklyn. Tom Cuite, the head of
the City Council, was from Brooklyn." So, in Albany, were Mel Miller,
Stanley Steingut, and Stanley Fink, all onetime speakers of the State
Assembly; and all looked out for their home borough. The once-famed
Brooklyn Democratic machine may be in abeyance; Markowitz has responded
by turning his office into a public-relations machine instead.
On a bitterly cold Tuesday in December, Markowitz's schedule took him
to Kings Highway, where he attended a party hosted by an organization
called the Federation of Employment and Guidance Services, which
provides support to recent immigrants from the former Soviet Union.
Sixty partygoers crowded into a conference room. Markowitz showed up
just fifteen minutes behind schedule. Many in the audience, mostly
elderly, appeared not to know who he was. He told the crowd that it was
important to learn English and to stay young; and that he loved
Georgian food, because it had a little spice; and that Brooklyn has
always welcomed immigrants. He hoped that tourists would discover the
variety and ethnic wealth that the borough had to offer. "Only in
Brooklyn can you go from China to Russia in fifteen minutes," he
said, his enthusiasm overruling any memory of geography class, where he
might have been taught that those two countries share a border for more
than twenty-two hundred miles.
Markowitz's car was waiting for him on Kings Highway, and he leaped
in. (Having a driver is one of the perks of the job, and Markowitz uses
his a lot; last year, one of his three drivers earned thirty-four
thousand dollars in overtime pay, on a base salary of forty thousand
dollars, while another driver was on a lengthy medical leave.) He met
next with a group from Boerum Hill, the residential district of
brownstones and town houses near downtown Brooklyn. The residents were
campaigning for street plantings at the site of a recently restored
subway kiosk dating from 1908, at the corner of Flatbush and Atlantic
Avenues. Markowitz's driver approached the intersection from Fourth
Avenue, heading down what was formerly an industrial strip that was
recently rezoned to permit the construction of apartment buildings.
The gilded cupola of the Williamsburgh Savings Bank was gleaming in the
late-afternoon sun. The tower, built two years before the Empire State
Building, is Brooklyn's most magnificent skyscraper from New York's
golden age of construction and, at the time it was erected, the tallest
four-sided clock tower in the nation. Just south of the tower lies the
proposed site of Atlantic Yards. The project, designed by Frank Gehry,
is slated to include several towers, the tallest of which, at six
hundred and twenty feet, will loom more than a hundred feet above the
golden cupola. Markowitz claims to be confident that the older building
will not be overshadowed-"From what I understand, there are ways in
architecture to design a building in a way that enhances the view of
the Williamsburgh building," he says. (Forest City Ratner has
provided few details of what the larger housing development will look
like, though an architect's model of the arena displays Gehry's
signature wavy metallic walls and a roof garden overlooking Flatbush
Avenue.)
In the car, Markowitz's cell phone rang, and the voice of a female
assistant announced that "Bruce" was on the line.
"Yes, sir, how are you doing, Bruce?" Markowitz said, picking up
the handset and falling silent as he listened. Bruce Ratner, it
appeared from Markowitz's responses, had some urgent questions about
the way discussions concerning waterfront development in Williamsburg
and Greenpoint might affect his own project. Markowitz, whenever he
could get a word in, tried to be both conciliatory and upbeat. "I
understand," he said; and then, "I wish I knew, but I don't
know"; and "It's hard for me"; and "That's absolutely
right." Finally, he told Ratner to call someone in his
office-better yet, he would have that someone call Ratner.
Across the street, a small huddle of Boerum Hill residents handed
Markowitz a sheaf of plans showing an arrangement of planters and
greenery they would like to see in front of the restored subway kiosk.
Perhaps, a resident suggested, Forest City Ratner might be persuaded to
contribute the funds.
"Does Ratner want to prove he cares?" someone asked.
"I haven't asked him," Markowitz replied testily. Then he went to
look at the other side of the kiosk, which, another member of the group
was telling him, would be a perfect place for a Christmas tree next
year.
Last year, Markowitz went to a basketball game for the first time in
his life, at the Meadowlands, with Ratner. "He bought his own ticket,
as he is required to do," Ratner says. "He might even have nodded
off now and then. But he does call me when the Nets win. He is very
encouraging." When he was campaigning for the borough presidency,
Markowitz said that he wanted to bring an N.B.A. team to Brooklyn, and
the idea was taken about as seriously as his appeals for Brooklyn's
secession. But in the fall of 2002, when it became clear that the New
Jersey Nets were likely to come on the market, Markowitz picked up the
phone. He had done that before: during his first few weeks in office,
he called Peter O'Malley, the son of Walter O'Malley, who had moved
the Dodgers to California in the nineteen-fifties. "I heard that the
team was up for sale, and I said, 'Mr. O'Malley, it would be great
for your family name and everything if you would consider moving the
L.A. Dodgers back to Brooklyn,' " Markowitz says. "I must tell
you, that conversation was very brief."
Markowitz said of his Nets-related scheming, "I thought to myself,
Who can I call who has a dedication to Brooklyn, and that has got the
economic ability, because, let's face it, someone who builds
two-family homes is not going to be in a position to buy a team and to
build an arena." He considered Donald Trump, but feared that Trump
might move the team closer to Atlantic City and his casino investments.
Markowitz did, however, call Bruce Ratner, whose company, over the past
two decades, has built the massive Metro Tech development-more than
two million square feet of office space-not far from the proposed
site of the arena. "Bruce had no interest, absolutely no interest,"
Markowitz said. "It doesn't take a rocket scientist to look at this
fella and know that he's not a jock." (Ratner, who is sixty, looks
more like the Consumer Affairs Commissioner he was during the Koch
administration.) "But I was very persistent with him, and didn't
take no for an answer."
"He called every two to three weeks," Ratner says. "I would make
up little white lies, and I would wait a day or two to call him back. I
am sure I said to my assistant, 'Oh, my God, it's Marty.' "
Eventually, Ratner was convinced of the wisdom of the notion, but not
before augmenting the Borough President's ambitions with his own
calculations-"the recognition that there is an opportunity to do
what my business is, which is real estate and large-scale economic
development."
Thus the arena imagined by Markowitz became only part of a much larger
development, which will stretch six blocks along the border of Prospect
Heights. Ratner says that he had looked at the site years ago, but
dismissed the idea as unworkable. In the past five to seven years,
however, the neighborhood's profile changed, as the handsome
brownstones attracted new residents. "A lot of it stems from the
safety, and security, and resurgence of Brooklyn," Ratner said.
Markowitz believes that the Atlantic Yards development will provide
jobs for thousands of Brooklyn residents, particularly those for whom
the much discussed rebirth of the borough has meant little more than
being priced out of apartments they once could afford. But the proposal
has strong opponents, too, including Letitia James, the council member
whose district encompasses Prospect Heights, and who, while commending
Markowitz for his general efforts on behalf of the borough-"If I
had a party, the first person I would invite is Marty," she says-is
skeptical that Ratner's project is in the borough's best interests.
"This arena is really for the executives who are employed at Metro
Tech, and it is across the street from the largest transportation hub
for Long Island in the borough," she says, referring to the L.I.R.R.
station at Atlantic Avenue. "It has nothing to do with
Brooklynites."
Neighborhood opposition to the project has ranged from anger at the
suggestion that the state may invoke powers of eminent domain to the
argument that a privately owned real-estate development is not the best
use of the land, a large chunk of which is owned by the M.T.A., and
will alter the character of the neighborhood. But the right of the
gentrifying class to preserve its property values in blocks close to
the arena is not one around which much mass support can be rallied in
Brooklyn; and, meanwhile, Forest City Ratner has demonstrated a keen
understanding of community politics in lining up support among
representatives of the neighborhood's less affluent populations.
While fifty per cent of the housing will be for the luxury market,
Ratner says, the rest will be set aside for residents whose incomes are
between eighteen thousand and a hundred thousand dollars a year. (There
have been similar promises that minority-owned and women-owned
businesses will get priority when it comes to applying for construction
contracts.) "I never want to see a time in Brooklyn when there are
multimillionaires and there are those who live in public housing, and
nothing in between," Markowitz says. He does not mention that the
wealthiest new property owner in the neighborhood will be Bruce Ratner.
One Saturday morning not long ago, Markowitz attended a
coffee-and-dog-biscuits gathering, held by a group called fido, which
stands for Fellowship for the Interests of Dogs and their Owners and
meets once a month in Prospect Park. Later that day, he was due at the
Christian Cultural Center, a mega-church in southern Brooklyn, where
the houses are faced with plain brick or vinyl siding rather than with
brownstone. After dropping in at a few community-group meetings on the
way, he'd be rounding out his evening with dinner in Bay Ridge,
courtesy of the Borough President of Staten Island, James Molinaro, to
celebrate a victory over the Staten Island Yankees by the Brooklyn
Cyclones, the immensely popular Mets farm team for which a stadium
opened at Coney Island in 2001, and which regularly sells out its
sixty-five hundred seats.
I joined Markowitz and his driver during a break between these
appearances. We started out on Fulton Street, which, like so many
stretches in Brooklyn, offers a patchwork of commercial activity: a
pizzeria; a Chinese take-out; a row of Afrocentric stores and boutiques
that have grown up over the past decade; and signs of more recent
arrivals, such as a wine store and a bistro with windows that open to
the street in summer.
Next, we drove a couple of blocks over to Forest City Ratner's newest
development, the Atlantic Terminal shopping mall, which is adjacent to
the proposed site of Atlantic Yards. The mall is an unlovely
green-and-brown hulk bordering streets of brownstones, the shape of
whose sloped roofs its own much taller roof grotesquely mimics. It
houses gleaming national franchises like Target, Starbucks, and Chuck
E. Cheese. Shoppers scurried by.
The car looped west and turned up Pacific Street, into the footprint of
the proposed arena. "Just take a look at what's coming down,"
Markowitz said. "I want you to look at this and tell me in any
manner, shape, or form that this has historical significance." On the
block where we were, there were a few warehouses and row houses looking
shabby and forlorn, as if they had resigned themselves to their fate.
"You can see this is gorgeous-just a beautiful, beautiful sight,"
Markowitz said, with undisguised sarcasm.
The car proceeded up Pacific Street, alongside the rail yards, and
Markowitz said, "When you take a look and you close your eyes you can
envision beautiful housing, and retail, and some commercial space, and
an arena, and activity, and people here, and people excited about
living here. . . . " He trailed off into urban reverie. Developers
like Bruce Ratner, he said, were necessary to bridge the housing gap,
given that the government wasn't going to do it. "The developers,
unlike me, are not in the business of being public servants or social
workers or do-gooders," he said. "I hate to say it, but they are
businesspeople, and they should be businesspeople."
We drove up to Prospect Park, and continued into Crown Heights, where
Markowitz grew up. "Good Shabbos!" he called out the car window to
a passing Hasidic family, and muttered, "I'm not supposed to be in
the car. But they'll forgive me, they know I'm not religious."
Soon we were heading up Empire Boulevard, and at the intersection with
Rogers Avenue Markowitz asked his driver to stop. He pointed to a small
restaurant, Toomey's Diner, on the corner of the block.
"It's hard to believe that there used to be lines to get into this
place," he said, and he gestured in the other direction, toward a
series of apartment towers a block or two away. "This place is also
hard to envision," he said. "This was our beloved Ebbets Field,"
where the Dodgers once played, and where the Ebbets Field Apartments
now stand. His father, he said, used to take him down Empire Boulevard
to see games, and as a boy he and his friends would sneak into the
grandstands.
"This had more seats, and played more games, than our proposed indoor
arena," he said. "It is in the middle of an urban area, and it
worked. And there was less public transportation here than there is at
Atlantic and Flatbush." I asked Markowitz if the Ebbets Field
Apartments-characterless postwar tower blocks that rose bleak against
the cold sky-were public housing, and he explained that they had been
built under the Mitchell-Lama program, launched in 1955, and named for
a state senator, MacNeill Mitchell, and an assemblyman, Alfred Lama.
Mitchell-Lama was the state's effort to create housing specifically
for low- and middle-income residents, and more than a hundred and five
thousand apartments were built before construction under the program
ended in the late nineteen-seventies. A nostalgia for that aspect of
Brooklyn's past was not, though, one in which Marty Markowitz, for
all his egg-cream soliloquizing, could afford to indulge, and the car
drove on.