A new program at the Tenement Museum

“What have you always wanted to know about your ancestors?” educator Adam Steinberg asked his tour group, at the Tenement Museum on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. It prides itself on being a fun, lively, interactive experience, while other museums host stuffy show-and-tells. It has educators, not tour guides. And now its new program, “Getting By: Past and Present”, combines tour and a roundtable discussion where everyone’s history is involved.

A recent “Getting By” started at the museum’s red-bricked building at 97 Orchard St. Visitors introduced themselves as being from Baltimore, Philadelphia, and London. Some had ancestors from Russia and Poland: Ashkenazi Jews who all immigrated to America. First the group talked about what life must have been like for great-grandparents. Then, everyone went off to the preserved apartments of the museum.

The 150-year-old tenement building showcases snapshots of immigrant life in apartments from two different time periods – 1870, with German Jewish residents, and 1930 with Italian Catholics. During the walk-through, Steinberg continually posed questions to the group.

“The Baldizzis were illegal, but received welfare from the city,” he said. “Do you think they should have received government help? What about immigrants in the same situation today?”

Lokki Chan, the museum’s Education Associate for Program Coordination, and a manager of “Getting By,” talked about the program’s relevance today.

“According to the 2006 American Community Survey, immigrants and their children now account for more than 60 percent of New York City’s population, the highest portion of the city’s population comprised by immigrants since 1901,” she said. “The need for building understanding among people of vastly different backgrounds is more urgent than ever.”

Engaging the group has always been a staple of the Tenement Museum. But on Oct. 29, it started the two-hour long, daily program “Getting By” as a revamping of its “Kitchen Conversations”, an optional visitor and educator discussion post-tour.

Now, “Getting By” offers in-depth discussion throughout the tour, and a mandatory roundtable discussion with the same educator afterward.

When “Kitchen Conversations” was receiving mixed feedback, the museum introduced “Getting By” to facilitate an easier transition from tour to talking. “After the tour, people would become uncomfortable and leave rather than stay and talk,” said Steinberg. “Now, with open-ended discussions integrated into the tour, feedback is excellent.”

“It was more like taking a short course than a museum tour, “ said David Solomons, a visitor from Sunday’s group who had Jewish ancestors living in London’s West End.

After the tour of the apartments, the group returned to the front room and sat around a table for oolong tea, cookies, and a post-visit chat.

“I got to speculate what my ancestors experienced coming from Europe, and what they had to deal with,” said Peter Swanson, a graduate student from Oregon.

“Learning with experience seems the most effective way, and this tour was experiential,” Solomons said. “It was very fulfilling and enjoyable.”

Outside the borders

Last Friday, Dec. 4th, I went to Philadelphia with my Point of View class, organized by our teacher James McBride. The whole semester McBride has been giving us writing exercises that defy the norm, some revolving around bowling alleys, chewing tobacco, and McSorley's Irish Pub on 7th Street. But taking a trip to Philly topped everything. A train ride, a walk around the city, and a lunch date at the wonderful Foodery (which boasts 800 kinds of beer) was organized for the sole purpose of a good essay. And I can't wait to write about it.

When I visited Philly a few years ago on college tours, I wasn't exactly impressed. And compared to New York, it might as well have been the Alaskan tundra. But coming here by myself, exploring alone, showed me a new, beautiful side of the city that I never knew existed.



Some of the more interesting and beautiful row houses I saw.



There is so much history here. Since I'm from Boston, it's kind of funny to see how both colonial cities fight it out for tourists. Revolutionary stuff is fascinating.



Former home of James Madison.

There was even something to remind me of my favorite beat.



That's right LES-ers. Another Delancey in cheesesteak city.

Being partial to NYC, I didn't think I would be all that interested in Philly. But every city has such quirks and beauties to offer. I was proven wrong here!

The little post office that could

At the beginning of October, I wrote an article for my The Beat: Reporting Downtown class at NYU about a tiny post office on the Lower East Side that was on the United States Postal Service's list for closure.

Because of massive losses (due in large part to the internet!) the USPS is trying to scale back its services. The Pitt Street Post Office is special because it sits in a NORC (Naturally Occurring Retirement Community - with at least 50 percent of residents 60 and over) on Clinton Street, and the elderly is the one of the biggest snail mail demographics.

My teacher, who has connections at the Daily News, submitted my article and it was published on Nov. 18.

Daily News article from Nov. 18

Then Gothamist, a prominent NYC blog, picked it up:

Gothamist's Extra Extra

I was already excited about the attention the story was getting, until Nov. 20, when the USPS announced they were reducing the list of closing P.O.s in NYC from 14 to five.

Gothamist: Post Office Death Count Down to 5

The Pitt Street Post Office is staying open!

The decision of the USPS was due in part to community activism (and there has been a lot around Clinton Street) but I was so happy that my article may have had influence, no matter how little or how much.

Vegan Treats at BabyCakes NYC

When one thinks of cupcakes, eggs, milk, and sugar usually figure into the list of ingredients. But BabyCakes NYC, a vegan bakery on the Lower East Side, defies the standards and you won't know the difference. Seriously.

When I approach BabyCakes, the bright interior stands out on a city block pockmarked with dim, swanky bars and shadowed, crumbling tenement buildings.

Inside the air is warm and sweet, and everything from the walls to the bakers’ outfits is a light, pastel pink. It feels like walking into a Hollywood baby nursery, with signed photos of Chevy Chase and the Golden Girls adorning the space. At first glance, BabyCakes looks like any other bakery in New York: tiny – with only seven chairs - and quirky, exuding a pleasant, sugary atmosphere.

But a glance at the menu reveals the hidden treat: all of its pastries are free of dairy, eggs, refined sugar, soy, and most are also free of gluten. And they are delicious.

“I always had a hunch everyone who knew me thought I was crazy when I announced I was quitting my job in fashion to open a bakery,” says Erin McKenna, owner of BabyCakes, on the bakery’s blog.

McKenna opened BabyCakes in 2005 to satisfy her own sweet tooth. “She was inspired to open the bakery because of her own dietary restrictions,” says Emily Woesthoff, general manager of BabyCakes NYC. “An intolerance to wheat, dairy and sugar left her on an endless quest for really delicious desserts.”

When McKenna couldn’t find suitable treats at other bakeries, she decided to bake her own. After a year of experiments, using ingredients such as agave nectar syrup (to replace refined sugar), garbanzo beans (instead of wheat flour) and coconut oil (known for heart benefits), McKenna opened BabyCakes and started selling her creations.

Since then, BabyCakes has received glowing reviews from The New York Times and Vanity Fair, and has celebrity fans including Martha Stewart and Natalie Portman. This vegan treat-seller attracts a young crowd, but also older generations who want to eat their sweets in a healthier way.

The bakery is unique in making vegan goodies – including cookies, cupcakes, breads, and even donuts - that don’t taste vegan, or like they are missing ingredients. I ate two red velvet cupcakes, one gluten-free, made with garbanzo beans, and one made with spelt (wheat). One cupcake is $3.95, with breads (such as banana and pumpkin spice) at $5 a slice, and cookies $1.50 each.

The gluten-free one was creamier and smoother than its counterpart, which was grainy and a bit more “healthy-tasting.” However both were unbelievably delicious. If I had gotten these in a blind test I would never have guessed they were dairy-free and sugar-free. The frosting was rich, sweet, and had a great cream cheese flavor that red velvet is famous for. The cupcakes themselves had the right amount of crumble and stickiness.

In May, Babycakes came out with a cookbook called “Babycakes: Vegan, (Mostly) Gluten-Free, and (Mostly) Sugar-Free Recipes from New York’s Most Talked-about Bakery”, bringing non-New Yorkers access to this wealth of unconventional treats.

The bakery is also opening another outpost in Los Angeles, where veganism, like in New York, is a growing trend.


A very special cupcake

An Interview with Carey Pulverman, Worm Lady

Carey Pulverman, 24, is known as the “worm lady.” She earned this nickname as the project manager of the Manhattan Compost Project at the Lower East Side Ecology Center. The Center was founded in 1987 to jumpstart recycling, composting, and environmental awareness in New York neighborhoods.

A resident of the East Village, Pulverman has always maintained an active interest in the environment. The worm lady got her start at NYU, where she majored in Metropolitan Studies and found an internship at the Ecology Center. The experience combined her two passions: a love for cities and a mission to save the earth. Pulverman teaches kids how to compost at home in worm bins and community gardens, in an outdoors classroom in East River Park. Pulverman spoke about her job that literally has all the dirty details.

How did you get into composting?

I started in college, by bringing my food scraps to the LESEC Compost Drop Off at Union Square, when I lived in an NYU dorm. When I got my own apartment, I got a worm bin.

What made you want to major in Metropolitan Studies?

I grew up in the suburbs of Southern California, and so I had an interest in cities, and how the organization of life is different from where I lived before.

Why New York in particular?

I wanted to live on the other side of the country, because staying in California would be too similar to being in high school.

I read that you studied abroad in Panama. What did you do there?

I studied the social sustainability of a really small seaweed farming project in the Caribbean off of Colón, Panamá. I looked at how the employees felt about their jobs and if they cared about the environmental impact.

How do you feel about your job?

What’s great is that my job is outside, in the East River Park, as opposed to being inside in an office building. My office is in the park, in an old fireboat house on the river. I ride my bike here; it’s a nice balance of city and nature. During the winter, we have more indoor workshops on composting, but it’s an all-year round program and students from neighboring schools come here to learn.


What are your students’ favorite things to hear about worms and composting?

They really like to hear about how the worms have babies, it is one of their favorite topics.

How do you use composting in an apartment setting – how does it compare to composting in a backyard?

I compost at home in a worm bin in my closet, as well as at my community garden, La Plaza Cultural. I don't think either is more difficult, it just depends what kind of space you have.

What is your favorite thing about your job being outdoors?

Not staring at a computer all day!

How do you see the future of the Ecology Center?

We are pretty small, with only six staff members, so we can’t really expand until we have more office space. But our compost drop-off program at the Union Square Greenmarket has doubled every spring for the past three years. We get up to six-seven tons of food scraps a week!



The cycle of composting

Where political extremes come together in the weirdest of ways

Leave it to the Lower East Side to have the ultimate architectural paradox: a statue of Vladimir Lenin gracing the top of a luxury apartment building. What a way to bring old-school immigrant politics and current gentrification together.

The LES is all about the smallest quirks, the tiniest details that can escape your eye if you keep your head down and your I-pod earbuds in. There's street art everywhere, ancient 19th century advertisements peeling off tenement walls, and Stars of David engraved on buildings that now house Chinese bakeries and Hispanic hair salons.

One of my favorite oddities of this neighborhood can only be glimpsed if you lift your eyes skyward at the corner of Avenue A and East Houston Street, to the top of a 13-story apartment building called Red Square.

It was built in 1989, the same year as the fall of the Berlin Wall, by urban developer and former NYU professor of radical sociology Michael Rosen. Atop it stands Lenin, hero of many Eastern European immigrant workers who started promising, but underpaid/overworked lives in this neighborhood. Paradox much? Check out Lenin's stance. He is raising his right arm in the direction of Wall Street, a "**** you" to the triumphant capitalists of the late 1980s. Such defiance becomes more confusing with the building's purpose as a luxury apartment complex. I love this part of town.

Veggies - A-hoy to the East River docks!

Since becoming a vegetarian almost a year ago, I've been on a constant mission to find a great veggie-friendly restaurant on the Lower East Side, but the neighborhood is surprisingly empty of one.

I've found plenty in the East Village where I live - Curly's Vegetarian Lunch at 14th Street and 1st Avenue (my personal favorite - try the crabfakes and "chorizo"!), Caravan of Dreams at 6th Street and 1st Avenue, Kate's Joint at 4th Street and Avenue B, and Lula's Sweet Apothecary at 6th Street and Avenue A (vegan ice cream that everyone has to try to believe).

BabyCakes, on Broome Street on the LES, is a great vegan bakery that tempts me every time I'm walking in the neighborhood. But aside from that, below Houston Street restaurants that aren't steak and fish-heavy seem hard to find. In such a thriving, modern, and youth-centered neighborhood, it's odd that the restaurants aren't following the nationwide trend of young people taking vegetables and tofu over meat. Maybe I'm just not looking hard enough...






LES, you need more of this goodness! Delicious burrito property of Curly's Vegetarian Lunch.

Guss' Pickles - Why are they moving to Brooklyn?

It seems like Guss' Pickles will be out of the Lower East Side around the end of the year. It will be the end of a 99-year tradition, and another LES mainstay to join the list of mom-and-pop shops that can't pay the new, ridiculously high rent of the neighborhood.

The LES used to be the place for pickles. Guss' dates back to the 1900s, when a Polish immigrant named Isidor Guss opened up a stand. There were vendors all over the place. But with Guss' up and moving to Brooklyn, one of the traditions of Jewish immigrant life is that much closer to disappearing.

Apparently the rent has become too high for Pat Fairhurst, the owner, and the space just isn't big enough for her to brine the way she wants. The other day when I was down there I bought two pickles: a three-quarter sour, and a spicy pickle. Other varieties are half-sour and full-sour. They were both delicious, even though the spicy pickle was so hot my ears started burning. It was a wonderful taste experience.

The gentrification of the Lower East Side has brought along many wonderful eateries, including Il Laboratorio del Gelato, a homemade ice cream stand on Orchard Street, and the Roasting Plant, also on Orchard, a cafe that roasts its coffee beans freshly every day. But what about the shops of immigrant life that have survived the years? There are still a few knisherys and delis scattered throughout the neighborhood, but it seems like the loss of Guss' is just the continuation of an old-world exodus.



Probably the spiciest pickle in New York - maybe on earth.

Are the Lower East Side tenements really gone?

For many, the Lower East Side of Manhattan has become completely gentrified - swanky bars and organic coffee shops mark dozens of street corners. The rent can match that of apartments on the Upper East Side. But walk far, far east, and the 19th century tenement slums the LES was known for seem reincarnated in sky-high public housing buildings.

Walking south on Allen Street, I noticed that park benches and greenery are starting to pop up on the median of the two-way street. According to a podcast tour I took of the LES a few months ago for my NYU Beat Reporting Downtown class, Allen Street used to have another row of tenement buildings right down the center. It's hard to imagine squeezing in an entire block of buildings, even though this street is technically a wide boulevard. But now, instead of smelly, dirty, unsafe apartments, the median on Allen Street is just another place to sit and drink your shade-grown coffee.



In fact, the dilapidated tenements of the 19th century are now swanky high-priced apartments, or historical sites. The devastation and poverty that plagued this area 100 years ago seems to have disappeared completely. There's even the Tenement Museum, for the majority of us who can't imagine the LES as the former home of the worst slums on earth.





But is this LES poverty really gone? If you walk east, and I mean so east that you almost hit the river on Grand Street, you see a New York that feels forgotten. It is not in the guidebooks, retail stores are few and far between, and I saw street names that I didn't recognize, far beyond Orchard, Norfolk, and Clinton. The housing projects on the East River rise to staggering heights, but their poverty can seem as low as that of the old Lower East Side, the filth and despair that used to pervade the wealthy streets of today.



Down here, far east, streets are named after important Jewish people. There's a Rheba Liebowitz Square, and an Abraham Kazan Street. But most of the Jewish families have left, replaced by low-income Hispanic, black, and Asian families. In this area below Houston Street and east of Columbia, 38-49 percent of families are below the poverty line, with the median income as low as $11,963, according to the census profile of the district in 2000.

Maybe the dirty windows and ancient air conditioning units of the housing projects down here cannot be rightfully compared to the tenements of the past, but walking through this neighborhood, then circling back on Orchard towards home amid the fancy boutiques and gourmet food stores, makes it hard to ignore the "history repeating itself" feeling. Many people say that the Lower East Side has become completely gentrified, but this Lower East Side, just a few blocks from the river, is completely removed from this renewal.

A Trip to the WTC Tribute Center, 10/28/09

Last Wednesday I went to Tribute WTC Visitor Center on Liberty Street with my NYU Beat: Reporting Downtown class. The war ideology that developed behind 9/11, and that eventually engulfed it, has always felt so over-analyzed and drawn out to me. Before the field trip I felt rather ambivalent about going.

Although that feeling did stick with me during several parts of the visit - the melodramatic music on the audio tour didn't help - I realized there is a point to the center, to the plans for the new World Trade Center buildings and memorial. It is to make sure that no one will forget what happened that September, over eight years ago, when two planes hit the Twin Towers and killed 2,749 people. It seems like the meaning of that day can be distorted by war and xenophobia. However, the center did a great job of sticking to what was pure, inspirational and literal: keeping the memory of those who died alive.

Wednesday was rainy, and my 14 classmates and I splashed through the streets to reach the World Financial Center. Looking through the windows towards Ground Zero, we listened to an audio tour given by a father who lost his son on 9/11, a firefighter. After hearing that only 174 whole bodies were recovered from the wreckage, and that it only took 10 seconds for one 110-story building to fall, the damp, disordered construction site was truly impacting. It was the most emotional and disturbing field trip I have ever been on, but also one of the most important.

"Sept. 12 was the worst day, because Sept. 11 we still had hope," said a woman on the audio tour whose husband was never recovered. After our return to the center, we saw images and video of what we had merely heard about. A collage of hundreds of "Missing" signs was plastered on one side of the room. Videos of the WTC before 9/11, and then the devastation of that day in 2001, play again and again on flatscreen TVs on the other side.

After absorbing gruesome photos of the wounded, and items retrieved from the catastrophe (including a piece of one of the jetliners), we went downstairs to hear a truly emotional speech. Tracy Gazzani, a volunteer docent, spoke about the loss of her 24-year-old son Terri, who worked on the 104th floor of the North Tower. "He was cut off from all exits," said Gazzani. "Terri was never recovered." She spoke about the process of grief and why she decided to volunteer for the tribute center. "It's my way of giving back, because people from all over the world came to help us. 9/11 was like dropping a pebble onto a piece of glass and having it spider out. It affected so many people."

When the tour was over, I walked to the World Trade Center subway stop, which has never changed its name even though the buildings are gone. I realize now how important this is, because sometimes a name is all we need to remember something so vast and tragic.

An Interview with Pete Hamill at NYU's Journalism Institute

As novelist and newspaperman Pete Hamill reads from his 2004 book “Downtown: My Manhattan,” a cultural and personal history of New York below Times Square, his voice comes out heavy and sincere, as if every detail is the most important one in existence. Hamill visited my The Beat: Reporting Downtown class at NYU on Wednesday, to be interviewed by 15 students. He slowly and lovingly sounds out his written words like it is his favorite book to read, although it seems that he feels this way about every book he has written, or has ever read. I want to love what I write as much as he does.

“How full of marvels was the world!” Hamill reads from the last chapter of “Downtown,” and after interviewing him, it’s clear that this is how he views life. He has a warm, easygoing manner, and delivers grand pauses between his sentences that make me think. Every interest in his life refers back to his greatest passion: writing. Whether he speaks about sports (“Basketball is beautiful- you see Michael Jordan and you say ‘Wow, I wish I could write like that”) or jazz music, it all ties in to being a writer (what he says is “being guilty with an explanation”).

Hamill is 74 years old, but looks very youthful, like he has never lost his intense curiosity and compassion that according to him, come with the best reporters. He says he will not stop writing until he is carried off to his grave. However, writing was not the first profession that appealed to him. He went to college in Mexico City on the GI Bill, and was so intimidated by the Mexican artists of the time that he says he “failed into writing.” He was attracted to writing because of “the sense of possibility of seeing the world,” which led to him choosing the navy instead of the army in his younger years.

Hamill is currently working on a novel, a mystery revolving around the current recession in New York City, that is due to come out in late spring of 2010. He has been a Distinguished Writer in Residence at NYU for four years now, and says he loves meeting out-of-town students who are seeing New York “for the first time in a real way.” Undergrads recount these experiences in Street Level, a publication that Hamill runs.

Pete Hamill has had an exciting life, and in the way he describes the joy of sports (as an “unscripted drama”), one sees his passion for spontaneity and surprise that comes with reporting and writing.



Pete Hamill's 2004 book "Downtown: My Manhattan"

Trip to the Fales Library at New York University's Bobst

I saw something a few days ago that changed my life. On Wednesday in my Beat reporting class we visited the Fales Library & Special Collections, NYU’s accumulation of rare books, artifacts, and other unique literary objects at Bobst Library. I’ve never found libraries boring, and this field trip renewed my desire to work with books. Apparently there are at least 15,000 rare titles or editions!

The head librarian at Fales who talked with us about the library’s most interesting (I think) asset, the ”Downtown Collection,” has my dream job. His name is Marvin Taylor and he gets to wear Converse sneakers to work. Fifteen years ago he started this collection of art, music, and literary materials created during the '70s, '80s and '90s, all coming out of downtown New York. Apparently no one else was taking this scene seriously, as something important to preserve.

Marvin has collected Patti Smith’s diary, original photos of the Ramones, and this wooden orange box full of writer David Wojnarowicz’s oddities, including a monkey skull painted Klein blue. He made sure we knew punk rock was invented in New York, not England, and had a few of us read excerpts aloud from punk diaries and artists’ screenplays.

I haven’t seen someone recently so completely passionate about his job, and so tender with the materials that he works with. He quoted someone, I forget now who, saying, “A thing (as in an artifact) is just a really slow event.” I think that’s pretty amazing.



The many floors of NYU's Bobst Library

A free podcast tour of Lower East Side

I'm always a little iffy about walking tours with guides - it can be hard to hear them, to catch up with them, and taking the tour at a leisurely pace is next to impossible. So finding a free podcast tour of the Lower East Side, that I could download onto my iPod, might have been less personal, but it was definitely more satisfying.

Although the Lower East Side runs east from Bowery all the way to the Williamsburg Bridge, it starts for some at the Eldridge Street Synagogue, fitting for the neighborhood’s rich Jewish immigrant history. Imposing and beautiful, Eldridge’s Star of David engravings contrast sharply with Chinese bakeries across the street. It’s what the Lower East Side, nicknamed the “gateway to America”, embodies: a mélange of cultures just a few sidewalk steps apart. This is what the tour provided by the Lower East Side Business Improvement District emphasizes. Different cultures, time periods, and creeds are all explored with equal depth and clarity on this fascinating walking tour.

From Eldridge, the tour takes a right on Canal and crosses Allen, an eight-lane street that used to have an extra row of tenements - cheaply made housing for immigrants - through the middle. It turns left on Orchard Street and goes north. A street wealthy with the new and old, Orchard houses almost everything the LES has to offer, starting with surviving tenement buildings.

During the late 19th century, this area used to be the world’s most populated: there were 240,000 people per square mile. Now, Orchard is quiet in many parts, peaceful. The street is closed on weekends for pedestrian traffic, and storeowners lug their wares outdoors. This is the Bargain District, where garment sweatshops used to rule; now fancy boutiques stand next to mom-and-pop shops.

Further up, the tour suggests a spicy pickle at Guss’ on the corner of Orchard and Broome. And the few Jewish delis that remain require a visit, with the menu at Katz’s still partially in Yiddish. When the tour gets to Houston, the LES has officially ended, but one can still find fresh knishes at Yonah Schimmel’s a few blocks west.



The Eldridge Street Synagogue