One of the time-honored delights of New York is the so-called street food offered by all manner of vendors. Tourists welcome the novelty of these rolling mini-kitchens on so many corners, and often go back to Peoria or Dubuque talking about the crusty hot pretzel or Hebrew National hot dog or roasted nuts they bought and consumed on the street. What many visitors don’t realize is how much everyday New Yorkers depend on street vendors near their homes or offices.

Sometimes it’s worth a subway trip — even to the outer boroughs — to try a local food cart that offers a menu far beyond the routine fare in touristy areas of Manhattan. In the Bronx, for example, Fauzia Abdur-Rahman’s regulars know the only guarantee is that there won’t be hot dogs or pretzels. Of the 10 or so items on her menu every day, she promises to include rice, some sort of chicken dish and at least one vegetarian option.

Everything else is up in the air.

“Today I have a spicy stewed chicken,” said Abdur-Rahman recently. “I just bought a case of mushrooms, so tomorrow I might make stew with that.”

“I live in Manhattan, and her vegetarian food is some of the best I’ve ever had, anywhere,” said Diane Donato, a high school teacher who frequents the cart. “She has a very fine hand with spicing and flavoring.”

Although she typically only serves lunch, Abdur-Rahman arrives at her corner every morning around 8:45 a.m to begin cooking. A basic outline of the day’s menu is planned the night before, based on whatever ingredients the 51-year-old mother of three has available.

All but two dishes are made from scratch in the next two and a half hours or so; Abdur-Rahman serves cake from Lloyd’s Carrot Cake, a North Bronx institution, and every once in a while, she makes Jamaica’s national dish, ackee and saltfish, using canned ackee — the national fruit of Jamaica.

Born and raised in Kingston, Jamaica, Abdur-Rahman first came to New York City 34 years ago. In the nearly two decades before getting her street vendor’s license, Abdur-Rahman worked for myriad employers — her jobs ranged from grocery store cashier to secretarial positions — but said her family ultimately convinced her to take the risk of entrepreneurship.
“One day my grandmother just pretty much told her that, you know, ‘this is pretty much the only way that you can do what you want to do,’” said Ibrahim, Abdur-Rahman’s 25-year-old son.

Abdur-Rahman’s unique cooking style developed through on-the-job experimentation, and a blending of the divergent culinary interests of her mother and sister.

“When I was younger, my mom was not that good of a cook,” Ibrahim said. “My grandmother had taught her to make some Jamaican foods, like codfish cakes, and we sold them at fairs for extra money.”

As Abdur-Rahman mastered her mother’s Jamaican classics, she and her sister, Gay-Marcin Smith, began experimenting with diverse tastes. Smith recalls learning about the ethnic foods while attending weekly potluck dinners with her college’s multi-cultural club.

“Every Friday night you’d have an abundance of food from Ghana, Morocco and all over,” said Smith. “I started sharing with (Abdur-Rahman) the types of things I learned… but you can’t just throw it all together, you have to really understand different seasonings.”

Soon Abdur-Rahman assimilated her favorite flavors from New York.

“New York is such a melting pot and people are very open to different flavors and tastes, said Abdur-Rahman. “You’ll find, you know, somebody from Ireland, and they want jerk chicken!”

“I play with different flavors and tastes,” said Abdur-Rahman. “You would never go to a Jamaican restaurant and get butternut squash, or green beans and corn. But as long as the flavors are balanced, it’s good.

Abdur-Rahman gives credit to the city’s heterogeneous culinary landscape, with contributing to the success of her food.

“I love Indian food, the flavors and the spices, so I incorporate that. And I love Iranian food; you know, I love how they use lemon. So I incorporate a little of that, too.”

By 11 a.m., Abdur-Rahman is usually finished preparing her food, but people often start checking to see if she’s ready well before.  While the menu varies from day to day, customers say the quality is reliable.

Bronx prosecutor Jamie Moran regularly makes time for Heavenly Delights’ long lines. “Even though it takes a long time, everybody stands here and waits. Even if it’s cold,” said Moran.

At the height of the midday rush, as many as a dozen people at a time wait in front of Heavenly Delights – a trend that local competitors have noticed

“There’s a new place in the mall selling fried fish and they have a guy who hangs around,” Abdur-Rahman said. “Then there’s another Jamaican restaurant, and his guy sometimes actually comes on my line to hand out his stuff.”

Managers at both restaurants, Shrimp Box and Sa Lena West Indian Restaurant, confirmed that they hand out flyers nearby.

As he left the Bronx County courthouse recently, Michael Thomas, a sales trainer for Research in Motion, said he was drawn to Heavenly Delights by scents that reminded him of his own Jamaican heritage.

“Originally, I was just looking for coffee, but then obviously I smelled the spices and the food,” said Thomas. “Those are the things. It’s the smell that tantalizes you. That’s what draws you.”

 Soon after Nicholas Donaldi-Subero, the 18-year-old son of a Metropolitan Opera singer, was fatally stabbed in Queens, New York in January, some self-declared members of the Latin Kings gang took to the internet to boast about their prowess.

“We shut plenty of clicks down in the past and Corona Queens is not even an exception,” someone named ‘Farrocking’ from Far Rockaway wrote on the site thehoodup.com.

More and more social networking users like Farrockking are boasting about gang exploits, making threats about future activities and posting photos of themselves in gang colors. And increasingly those sites have become helpful tools for law enforcement officials who have used this material to prosecute alleged gangbangers. States like Ohio and California have introduced online evidence to link suspects with street crimes. Meanwhile, Florida has made it a felony offense to post gang-related material online. But this increased presence of both gang activity and law enforcement surveillance online raises questions about how to determine the line between youthful braggadocio and true bad behavior.

 ”If you’re a kid who wants to look cool by posing in gang colors and flashing a sign on your MySpace page it’s pretty chilling that the government can go after you,” said Rebecca Harrison Steele, the Regional Director of the ACLU Foundation of Florida.

Richard “Richy” Figueroa-Santiago has experienced the chill. Sheriff officers in Lee County, Florida, arrested Figueroa-Santiago and 13 others last November on charges that  they were violating a new state law against online gang activity. Figueroa-Santiago has pleaded not guilty.

In an interview, Figueroa-Santiago, 22, said that police singled out one image out of 200 pictures on his MySpace page. He described it as a cartoon of a car with the words “Kings drive-by” (for Latin Kings) written on the body of the car. A spokesman for the Lee County Sheriff’s Office, John Sheehan, said that Figueroa-Santiago was targeted for online gang recruitment as part of the office’s Operation Firewall program.

A Florida law passed in May 2008 makes it a third degree felony for someone to post electronic communications “furthering the interests of a criminal gang.” One of the ways he or she can do this is “to advertise his or her presence in the community” or to “intimidate or harass other persons.”

“It’s nonsense because I’m not in a gang,” said Figueroa-Santiago. “I was just having fun.” He claims he used to befriend members of the Latin Kings but was never involved in their crimes. Sherriff officials, in the record of his November 2008 arrest, listed his aliases as King Taco and King Richy.

Florida lawmakers passed this online statute and other gang measures in response to a growing presence of street gangs—a trend also seen nationwide. The 2009 FBI National Gang Threat Assessment report said that 58 percent of state and local law enforcement agencies reported that criminal gangs were active in their jurisdictions in 2008, compared with 45 percent in 2004.

Lee County Court records show Figueroa-Santiago had no prior charges against him besides traffic and vehicle code violations. Unlike some of the other arrestees who have other pending charges such as cocaine possession, he is only being tried for his online materials. His case and the cases of the others arrested in Operation Firewall are working their way through the court system. At least four have plead not guilty; six of the arrestees were juveniles so their cases are sealed.

Figueroa-Santiago faces up to five years in prison if convicted. Additionally, Florida is one of only three states where convicted felons lose their voting rights for life, even after they complete their sentences.

Police in other states have successfully investigated gang crimes with clues gathered online and provided prosecutors with web-based evidence for their trials. Cincinnati police last November arrested over 20 members of the Northside Taliband gang after tracking its members’ activities on Facebook and MySpace. The suspects were implicated in robberies, burglaries, assaults, firearms and drug trafficking, and at least one homicide, police said.

In 2006 a Northern California judge ruled that two teens charged with beating a boy into a coma could be tried as adults, after prosecutors showed MySpace.com photographs of them flashing local gang hand signs.

MySpace has a law enforcement team that works with police departments and prosecutors to identify gang members, according to a confidential MySpace law enforcement training presentation viewed by the NYC News Service.

One example from the MySpace training materials is about a member of the “Rollin 20’s” gang from Los Angeles who was suspected of murdering a rival. An expert witness needed evidence to prove gang association (which usually carries a harsher sentence). The prosecutor found photos on the suspect’s page in which he was flashing gang signs, holding weapons and hanging out with known gang members, the training materials say.

“It used to be, if you were threatening a rival, it had to be on the street, at a club or, some way or another, in person,” said Professor David Kennedy, the director of the Center for Crime Prevention and Control at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City. “The net just lets it come out in different ways…in websites, rap exchanges and still photos of them brandishing guns.”

Identifying gang members through social networking sites is one of the main responsibilities of the modern gang officer, said Louis Savelli, a retired 21-year veteran of the NYPD gang unit who now trains officers in online investigating. He said law enforcement personnel troll these sites for intelligence on gang activity and to gain corroborating evidence to bolster criminal prosecutions.

“You hear something happen like a stabbing, first thing you do is hit the street, then you hit the Internet,” said Savelli.

New York gang members aren’t online as much as those in other cities, said Savelli, because they’re more focused on drug-dealing than in other parts of the U.S. and avoid this attention. “The real hardcore guys who have a business to run don’t want the pressure,” he said.

Most of the kids at the Queens Police Athletic League are not hardcore. They attend a youth employment training program coordinated by Larry Green, who at 37 is dismayed by gang violence in his hometown of South Jamaica. Green hears about street fights started by online rivals, like the one that claimed Nicholas Donaldi-Subero’s life.

Many teens claim affiliation with a gang just for their own safety, even if the group’s not known for its violence or crime, said Green. “It’s rare to find a kid who’s not part of a clique or a group.”

The band was playing on the L train platform in the station at 6^th Avenue and 14^th Street.  They weren’t using any sort of amplification.  They huddled together near one of the white-tiled staircases, allowing people to pass easily around them.  A guitar case displaying homemade CDs sat open in front of the singer.  People bought the CDs for a suggested donation of five dollars, or dropped in singles or loose change as they saw fit.  The band did not directly solicit money.

So when the police officers approached them and told them to leave, they pointed out that they had broken no laws.  It wasn’t the first time they’d been told to get off a subway platform, but they always argued the legality of their presence before acquiescing.  This time, however, one of the officers had an unusual reaction.  Rather than simply repeating the order to leave at a higher volume, as usually happened, he told them that he knew they were right.  That they were doing nothing wrong.  And that it didn’t matter.  The officers were told to periodically chase out anyone busking on the platform, and that anyone who didn’t move would be issued a summons.  Even if it was thrown out by a judge, even if they knew it was going to be thrown out, they’d write one anyway.  The law may be clear, but orders are crystal.

“It was the first time someone had told us the truth,” Russell Holland, the singer, said later on.  Realizing that they would always be targets, the band members decided to appeal to the one force in the subway ostensibly higher than the NYPD: the MTA.

Music Under New York, or MUNY, is a program sponsored by the Metropolitan Transit Authority that issues licenses to play in the subway system to musicians.  Depending on the quality of the auditions, MUNY will issue up to 25 of these permits per year.  Musicians get an official MUNY banner to hang, may use amplifiers, and can schedule to play in specific locations, eliminating the chance that another act will grab their spot or a police officer will tell them to vacate the premises.

The MUNY auditions were still some months away, so the band knuckled down, learning more songs, rehearsing more often, and, occasionally, busking in the subways, hoping that they could get a good set in before they were asked to move along.

It takes a couple of minutes to figure out the gimmick.  The songs are famous, but the arrangements unfamiliar, and the context odd.  But by the time Russell Holland starts to sing, a couple of people have stopped to listen.

“Please could you stop the noise, I’m trying to get some rest/From all the unborn chicken voices in my head,” he wails over a banjo, carefully plucked by bandmate Drew Pitcher.  Radiohead.  Paranoid Android.  Acoustic.  In the subway.  And in truth, it’s kind of perfect.  By the four minute-mark, when Holland wails out, “God loves His children” and the band crashes through the bridge, there are two crowds.  One on each platform.  As the uptown N train clatters into Union Square station, one man sprints across to the downtown platform where the band is continuing its set of covers, grabs one of the homemade CDs, drops a five into the open guitar case and runs back, jumping onto the express train just as the doors issue their familiar double tone.

The band is Storyship, a four-man ensemble that takes Beatles tunes, Radiohead jams and the best of E.L.O., among others, strips out the electricity and plays the results for donations and CD sales in the subways, parks and public hubs of New York City.

Russell Holland, Drew Pitcher, Tom Blancarte and Andreas Pichler have been performing together for a little over a year, and their ease with one another is apparent.  Throughout the subway set, the band spoke only a few sentences, all to one another, all short.

“Pass the accordion, please.”  “Ready?”  Not even a “one-two-three-four,” Holland tapping his foot or Pichler brushing his drumstick over a tom to start the next song.

Subway performers are nothing new, and many have the ability to stop commuters for a moment of recognition or pleasure, but holding and monopolizing the attention of New York’s commuters is rare.  By the time the band launched into its uber-bluesy rendition of “Boy Blue,” all but three of the people on both platforms were knotted together, swaying and head-bobbing at the southern end of the station.  The three abstainers were all wearing headphones, listening to their own music.

The band didn’t seem to notice the crowd, though.  During “I’m Only Sleeping,” John Lennon’s ode to laziness from Revolver, Holland’s eyes were closed, and it fell to Pitcher to nod thanks when someone made a donation or purchased a CD.  Inspired by the performance, a teenager mock MCd in front of the band, though the lyrics he mouthed into his fist never matched those Holland sang.  None of the musicians said anything or looked askance, though Pitcher had to scoot his stool back when the young man stumbled, overcome by either the music or something else.

When a Q train rolled in, Brooklyn-bound, a couple hesitated.  “We can take the local,” the woman said, and they continued to hang out as the band kicked out Tom Petty’s “Free Falllin’.”

Holland, who bears uncommon resemblance to the actor Paul Dano, allowed a small smile to break as the Q train departs and the crowd, only slightly diminished, shot the train dirty looks as its noise interfered with the concert.

Storyship was ready.  The more they busked, the better they played.  Once winter began to break, they started hitting Central Park, where the crowds were enthusiastic, much more willing to listen than commuters.  There was also more competition.  On a recent sunny day, Storyship planted itself among the photo hawkers, hot dog stands and caricaturists surrounding the grand staircase of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  The band showed up early, got set, played well.  And then another band, an a cappella doo-wop group that plays the Met often, set up nearby, poached the audience and sent Storyship wandering around to find a new pitch to play.

“We found a little open grassy place nearby, so it worked out in the end,” Pitcher said.  “But there’s so much competition over just a few spots.”

A bit of background: Buskers, or street performers, are found in high-traffic spots in major cities across the United States.  Jackson Square, New Orleans; Union Square, San Francisco; Millennium Park, Chicago.  All boast healthy busker populations.  But New York, as it is for so many things, is busker central.  Central Park, Times Square, Washington Square and Battery Park are all busker havens.  Busking can be pretty much anything: miming, caricature drawing and break-dancing all fall under the general term.  It’s simply a performance for an audience that doesn’t know there’s going to be a show.  The spot where a busker sets up is the pitch.

The improvisatory nature of busking has many good traits.  There is no boss.  There is no set schedule.  There’s not even a workplace.

The drawbacks to busking are closely related to its pleasantries.  Without a boss, there’s no one to complain to if things go sour.  With no schedule, it’s easy to show up to a favored spot and find it claimed by another performer.  Not having a workplace means that, more often than not, one has to be created.

In addition to protection against over-zealous police officers, the other huge advantage to the MUNY permit is the protection against other buskers intruding on Storyship’s pitch, as MUNY gigs are booked in advance.

Busking was not what the members of Storyship had in mind when they moved to New York.  Holland, Pitcher and Blancarte all trained as jazz musicians at the University of North Texas, though they did not play together during their college years.  After graduation, they all played on separate cruise ships, an experience that Holland describes as “an easy way to get stuck,” and Pitcher remembers as “where I saw ‘Along Came Polly.’  What else was there to do on a cruise ship?”  The money was decent, though, and the three decided to move together to New York.

Day jobs were uninspiring, naturally.  Pitcher and Blancarte worked together in a mailroom that didn’t get much mail, so they spent time playing chess, learning how to play the harmonica and talking about music.  When the company folded, Pitcher went to work in another, far busier, mailroom – Columbia House, the CD-by-mail company.  The job wasn’t any more inspiring, but the fringe benefit – lots of CDs – was substantial.

The turning point was still a year away, but the cause was already in the apartment, wrapped in plastic.  It took a year before Pitcher got around to opening one of the many CDs he’d brought home with him, an old ELO album.  But one night, one of the many sit-around-drinking-beer-and-listening-to-music nights that Pitcher and Holland and Blancarte have had, the CD went into the player and, as Holland puts it, “the holy shit moment,” happened.

“It was like, ‘How have I been on the Earth this long and not known about this,’” Holland said.  “Why didn’t anyone tell me?”

Frustrated by the New York jam sessions they’d participated in and unhappy in their day jobs, Pitcher and Holland threw themselves into picking apart pop music, figuring out how the harmonies worked and how to re-arrange the music for the instruments they were teaching themselves: harmonica, banjo and accordion.  In addition to ELO, the two gorged on massive helpings of Beatles, Radiohead, Paul McCartney and Bruce Springsteen.

“But it all goes back to Jeff Lynne,” Pitcher said.

The third roommate, Blancarte, was finding steady work as an avant-garde jazz bassist, but he enjoyed the process of prying tunes apart to see how they worked and then reassembling them to see if they could still run.

Pichler came from Austria on a tourist visa to play drums in avant-garde jazz groups and connected with the others through Blancarte’s girlfriend.  The Bruce Springsteen song “The River,” which his American friends introduced him to,  haunted him.

“He’d just walk around, picking at a banjo and singing ‘The River’ softly to himself for hours,” Pitcher remembered. “He’d be in his room late at night and we’d hear him at it.”  He joined up and the quartet was complete.

They swear it’s not about money.  They make some money with Storyship busking gigs, but there are outside revenue streams, including what Pitcher calls a “Bossa Nova Christmas album thing” on iTunes that sold well last year.

They played together for a year, until just before the MUNY audition, when Pichler had to return to Austria and Blancarte left to tour Europe.

“Andreas had a banjo shipped back to Austria,” Holland said.  “He’s probably playing the Boss on it right now.”  Pichler wasn’t happy about leaving the States.  He’s told Holland and Pitcher that he wants to return as soon as possible and get back to busking with them.

Those departures left Pitcher and Holland as the only members of the group who would actually be present for the audition that would make busking so much easier for all of them.

The two men, long-time friends, waited with two men they knew less well at Grand Central Station for their audition time.  They had gone to college together back in Texas, where they trained to be jazz musicians.  They had not anticipated this audition when they moved to New York City.  Stability is not something that any musician relies on, but if chosen from among the 57 acts trying out, a small amount of stability would be theirs.

The song they were going to play was easy, a crowd-pleaser, but the two old friends had played it together hundreds of times, while the two they were relying on today had played it once.  If the two guys they usually played with could have been at Grand Central, it would be a lock.  As it stood, they felt confident, just less so.

When their time came, Russell Holland took up his guitar, Drew Pitcher his accordion, the two fill-ins their bass and drums.  Then the foursome stood before the judges and belted out “Free Fallin’” by Tom Petty, hoping to win their license to busk.

“We just want to be able to play the music that we like to hear,” Holland said later on over a plate of chili fries (actually an order of chili poured on top an order of potato wedges) in a downtown bar.  Pitcher nodded and sipped his pint of Brooklyn Lager.

Unfortunately, MUNY disagreed with their taste, or their interpretation, and turned them down for a permit.

Back to bannerless busking, but so long as the beer is cold, the boys in the band will abide.

More than two decades after the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency designated a section of the Hudson River a polluted Superfund site, barges finally began scooping toxic sediment from the riverbed last spring.

Miles away, residents of Brooklyn are wondering how long they might have to wait before the government begins cleaning up the Gowanus Canal, their own severely contaminated strip of water.

Since the EPA announced earlier this year that it was considering placing the Gowanus on its Superfund National Priorities List, those with dollars and principles at stake have begun to debate the merits of the EPA’s involvement.

The Bloomberg administration and developers say the Superfund process would take too long and could prevent redevelopment along the canal’s banks, while the EPA, the state and some environmentalists say it’s the only viable way to fully remediate the site. They are all fighting over what is the best way to accomplish what everyone wants: a clean canal.

Many local residents, meanwhile, are left wondering what to believe and where to turn for unbiased information.

“It’s a hugely complicated issue, and as a layperson, I hardly know what I’m talking about,” said Maria Pagano, president of the Carroll Gardens Neighborhood Association. “It’s taken me quite a long time to understand the right questions to ask.”

Superfund, or officially the “Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act of 1980,” forces polluters to pay for cleanups of the most hazardous waste sites in the country. If the polluters cannot be found, then the EPA is able to use some of its own funds.

In the case of the 1.8-mile long Gowanus Canal, a former industrial waterway from the 1870s to the 1960s, many polluters, past and present, have contributed. Manufactured gas plants dumped coal tar and other industrial byproducts into the water. The city’s sewer system still spews untreated wastewater into the canal. Today, both toxic and organic pollutants contaminate the water and are embedded in the underlying sediment.

Besides coal tar sludge, contaminants include PCBs, pesticides, heavy metals and volatile organic compounds. Some of these toxins are being measured in parts per hundred, indicating much higher levels than what the EPA usually measures in parts per million or billion.

Pete Grannis, the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation commissioner, requested last December that the canal be nominated to the Superfund list. While conducting its own investigation, the state discovered coal tar sludge several feet deep and realized a more comprehensive approach was needed than it could provide, according to DEC spokesman Yancey Roy.

Also, its leaders wanted the EPA to coordinate the hundreds of polluters, land and business owners who could be deemed responsible for the contamination. Under the Superfund system, these are known as potentially responsible parties, or PRPs. There are about 150-200 PRPs who have operated along the canal, according a spokesman from Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s office.

Often, the EPA finds itself in court defending challenges from PRPs. This likely adversarial process is what rankles city officials, developers and others who want the banks of the canal to be built upon quickly. They say the uncertainty would deter or delay hundreds of millions of dollars in private investment.

“The Superfund is a very comprehensive cleanup, but it’s not necessarily a very fast cleanup,” said Michael Catania, an environmental consultant and former deputy commissioner of the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection.

Before the EPA announced the potential listing, developers had planned two significant residential projects and the city had drafted a new, residential-friendly zoning plan for the canal area.

Toll Brothers, a luxury homebuilder, was poised to build 460 apartments, retail space and a waterfront esplanade. Gowanus Green, a consortium of developers, plans for 770 residential units, 70 percent of which would meet city affordable housing standards. “If it gets listed we probably would walk,” said David Von Spreckelsen, a vice president at Toll Brothers.

As an alternative, the city is developing a plan that it says would cleanup, or “remediate” the canal to the same level as the Superfund program. “Our proposal will be to bring potentially responsible parties to the table voluntarily rather than going through the long litigious process of suing them under Superfund,” said Cas Holloway, a special advisor to Mayor Bloomberg. “People who do things willingly tend to do them more quickly.”

Holloway said a voluntary process may work because the city intends to have a smaller cleanup bill for the polluters than the EPA. If the city can secure federal cleanup dollars under the federal Water Resources Development Act, as Holloway speculates, it would only ask the responsible parties for a portion of the cost. Under the Superfund program, the EPA seeks the full amount from responsible parties, and pays the amount it cannot secure through its own budget.

Also, Holloway emphasized that any city plan would still need its environmental standards to be approved by the EPA and the state DEC.

Thus far, the city’s approach has been to remediate specific sites along the canal when a developer proposes a project. These cleanups fall under the state or city “brownfield” programs—where developers receive tax credits for cleaning up polluted sites. Cities favor these projects because they can be completed more quickly than they would in the Superfund framework, according to those familiar with the process.

“I don’t know why anybody would go into Superfund if they want to develop within their lifetime,” said Tom Murphy, the former mayor of Pittsburgh, who developed numerous former steel mills into housing and commercial developments. He is now a senior fellow at the Urban Land Institute. Murphy used brownfield programs and deliberately avoided Superfund. “Think of the lost economic value,” he said.

But the brownfield program can fail to address the greater area’s environmental problem and can lead to a patchwork of cleaned up sites, said Brent Carrier of O’Connor Capital Partners, which is developing a brownfield site in Long Island City. (His company has no vested interest in land along the canal). “It’s very property specific,” he said.

The city could lose the ability to negotiate site-specific remediation with potential developers if the project is listed under the Superfund program. This may be one reason the city is resisting a designation, said Dan Herlihy, an environmental waterways consultant in California who has worked on Superfund-listed projects. “The EPA really holds all the cards,” he said.

As it stands, the city is already mandated by the state to clean the canal’s water quality – a related, but separate issue from the underlying contaminated sediment. To fulfill an administrative agreement with the state, the city Department of Environmental Protection currently has a $160 million plan to upgrade the “flushing tunnel” which circulates cleaner water from the East River into the otherwise stagnant canal, and to renovate a sewage pumping station so that more storm and wastewater can be diverted to other parts of Brooklyn.

Also, the city has set aside $15 million to dredge a shallow amount of material from the head of the canal to 750 feet downstream—a project that would help satisfy the state water quality requirements, but would not necessarily remove all toxic sediment. This dredging is scheduled to begin in September 2009 and take four years to complete.

“I’m not a scientist, but skimming the surface doesn’t seem like enough to me,” said Lisanne McTernan, who supports the Superfund listing and is a member of Friends and Residents of Greater Gowanus, a community organization advocating for canal cleanup.

A more thorough dredging plan was being considered before the Superfund discussion, said Holloway from the Mayor’s office. The city DEP and the Army Corps of Engineers had started a $5 million feasibility study to assess what’s needed to clean the underlying chemical-laden sediment, he said.

A complete understanding of the health risks and the expenses of the cleanup required are the dual goals of such studies. But Von Spreckelsen of Toll Brothers believes that people will have such little contact with the sediment it wouldn’t be worth the cost to remove it. “It’s a lofty goal to take that out, but what’s the purpose?” he said.

State Sen. Velmanette Montgomery, one of the few local politicians to come out in favor of the Superfund listing, said that development is only possible in a sustainable, healthy environment.

“The senator came out in front on this because she’s a big believer in science and until people can prove that they can legislate the physical laws of hydrology and metallic leaching, you pretty much have to clean up contaminated areas before you put families with children on them,” said Jim Vogel, the senator’s spokesman. Other politicians, such as Assemblywoman Joan Millman and Councilman Bill de Blasio, whose districts include the canal, have waffled on the issue. They, like the residents, aren’t sure who has the right plan.

Meanwhile, the more visceral problem, many generations have complained, is that the canal stinks. George Washington Plunkitt, a Tammany Hall leader from the early 1900s, wrote that, “Once let a man grow up amidst Brooklyn’s cobblestones, with the odor of Newtown Creek and Gowanus Canal ever in his nostrils, and there’s no place in the world for him except Brooklyn.”

A major source of the odor is the organic material that is washed into the canal from the sewer system and the streets. When it rains heavily, the city sewer system overflows with a combination of storm runoff and wastewater (from sinks, showers, toilets, etc.). The amount that the sewer cannot hold pours out into waterways at low points in the city, such as the Gowanus, which sits in a valley between Carroll Gardens and Park Slope. These events are known as combined sewer overflows, or CSOs, and have been an inherent infrastructure problem for over 70 years.

The Superfund process would not address the CSO problem, and when the canal’s nomination was announced, the city was initially unsure if it might actually inhibit its current plans to dredge the canal and fix the sewer system. The city is concerned, Holloway said, that it could be held liable under Superfund if its CSO renovation work disturbs some of the sediment. Recently, the EPA has met multiple times with the city to explain that sewage cleanup plans would not be impeded, according to Walter Mugdan, the director of the Division of Environmental Planning and Protection at EPA’s Region 2, which covers New York and New Jersey.

Mugdan is clearly the most vocal proponent of listing the site. He points out that the Superfund process includes community involvement, while the brownfield program does not. The public could submit comments until July. Over the following months, the EPA must respond to the public comments, which would clear the way for listing the Gowanus. Also, the EPA will provide what are known as technical assistance grants to independent groups that wish to do their own studies of a polluted site.

“The benefit of the superfund program is that the EPA can act as an overall project manager, not to stop activities that are being planned by municipalities and other interested parties, but in order to coordinate them,” said Vogel, of Senator Montgomery’s office.

While the Bloomberg Administration is still developing an alternative plan, Holloway maintains the city is not actually opposing the Superfund program.

“This is a question of what’s the most effective way to get this canal remediated and also try to preserve the best of what’s already happening in the Gowanus neighborhood,” he said. “Since everybody wants to get it clean, the plan that can get it clean the fastest is the best plan.”

In March 1996, a bodega clerk scanned a lineup of suspects at a police station in Astoria, a neighborhood in the New York City borough of Queens. Two armed men in ski masks had robbed his nearby store. The clerk recalled glimpses of light black skin behind one mask, though he hadn’t seen either robber’s face.

He picked out John Scott, a construction worker. Scott later testified he was nowhere near the store. The clerk conceded at trial he was uncertain Scott was one of the robbers. Despite the clerk’s reversal, Scott was sentenced to 25 years in jail.

Scott languished in jail four years before an appeals court threw out the conviction.

For his troubles, Scott sued the state under a special law for those wrongfully convicted—a statute written to fulfill a “moral demand” to compensate those who needlessly lost years of their lives behind bars.

It took Scott 6 years to prevail under the law after he was released. He got $25,000 in compensation for each year he lost in jail.

A review by the New York City News Service shows that the state’s legal system shortchanged Scott and that there is a wide disparity in payments for the wrongfully convicted.

In the past ten years, 22 people have been compensated under the state’s law. Lawyers who have handled multiple cases in the system said they believed it doled out payments at an even rate.

But state records show Scott got more than ten times less per year in jail than the person at the upper end of the scale.

Then there are those who fared even worse than Scott—and got nothing.

The wrongful conviction compensation law, passed in 1984, includes several complex provisions so that at least one man exonerated by DNA testing was deemed ineligible for payments.

In another case, a wrongfully convicted woman spent 25 years in prison before key evidence against her was discredited. Her wrongful conviction compensation claim was denied.

And in some cases, the wrongfully convicted got compensation by circumventing the state system altogether.

But despite its drawbacks, the New York State law has some advantages over other state laws.

THE JOHN SCOTT CASE

To best understand the system and its problems, it pays to look closer at the details in the Scott case.

On March 21, 1996, two men wearing black ski masks entered a Queens bodega. Guns drawn, the taller robber demanded cash from William Vizcarrondo, who was working the register.

The robber demanded Vizcarrondo’s jewelry and a pack of cigarettes, and then left with his partner.

John Scott was brought in a week later to the 114th Precinct in Queens as a suspect in an unrelated investigation involving a shooting. He was acquitted on that charge. While there, police asked Scott to be part of a lineup in the bodega robbery investigation. Scott consented.

Vizcarrondo looked at the men arrayed against the wall. He recalled glimpses of the taller robber’s light black skin and his deep voice. Scott fit the man he remembered.

But Scott, a part-time construction worker, wasn’t the taller robber. He wasn’t even in Queens at the time. He was watching television with friends in Manhattan.

During the trial, Vizcarrondo conceded that because the men wore masks, there was no way he could be sure Scott was one of them; witness misidentification is not uncommon in wrongful conviction cases. Still, the jury convicted Scott.

Four years into a 25-year sentence, Scott’s case was reopened before the Second District Court of Appeals.

“The chief witness for the People in this case made no visual identification of the defendant at trial, and conceded his inability to do so,” Judge Lawrence J. Bracken wrote. “This witness also made no in-court identification of the defendant based on his presumed ability to recall the supposedly distinctive voice of the tall robber.”

Scott was free.

Scott then made a wrongful imprisonment compensation claim, something that is possible in 26 states.

“The whole reason that this wrongful conviction statute was enacted in New York was to try to make it quicker and easier, and more certain, for people who it’s quite clear have been wrongfully convicted, and have been exonerated, to get some money,” said Adele Bernhard, a law professor at Pace University who has studied New York’s wrongful conviction compensation statute.

Under the statute a judge reads the facts in the case and, if the lawsuit is appealed by the state—many are—the judge determines whether the facts fit the law’s criteria. If it does, the state tends to settle the claim rather than proceed with a potentially lengthy trial.

In Scott’s case, instead of going to trial, the sides settled for $100,000—an average of $25,000 for every year Scott spent in jail.

Bernard and other attorneys said that while the state law has no explicit provision for evenhanded payments, considering such factors as a person’s income and potential career trajectory, they believe the payments have been about the same—around $100,000 per year of incarceration.

But at $25,000 per year incarcerated, Scott got one of the lowest average payouts in the past ten years.
James O’Donnell, for instance, was wrongfully convicted in the late 1990s of sodomy and spent two years in jail, half the time of Scott. Yet in 2006 he settled to get $150,000 for each year in jail.

Robert McLaughlin, wrongfully convicted of murder and robbery in 1981, spent six years in jail before he was exonerated. In 1989 he was awarded $1.9 million—more than $300,000 per year he spent in jail.

Settling out of court tends to result in slightly less money. Settlements resulted in a median of about $82,000 per year of incarceration for the 29 cases in which the number of years the wrongfully convicted person spent in jail could be determined.

Awards—where the case goes to trial and a judge decides the final amount—resulted in a median of just over $86,000 per year of incarceration.

Yet in the past decade only one case has gone to trial. The other eighteen cases during that period have been settled out of court.

Lawyers interviewed said that if a claim has merit, settling is simply less time consuming and less costly for the claimant and for the state, and that there was once a cap on settlements.

BIRTH OF A WRONGFUL CONVICTION LAW

Before 1984, most wrongful conviction claims were nearly impossible to secure. They required special legislation signed by the governor. From 1947 to 1984, five wrongfully convicted people received awards from the state, ranging from $7,000 to $1 million.

Then came the case of Isidore Zimmerman, which captured headlines and spurred public debate.

Zimmerman, a Columbia student convicted of killing a police detective in 1947, filed one of the state’s most well known unjust conviction claims during that time.

After serving 25 years in prison, an appeals court ruled in 1962 that prosecutors suppressed evidence pointing to Zimmerman’s innocence, and he was freed.

Zimmerman then made several unsuccessful attempts to recover damages. Finally, Governor Hugh Carey signed special legislation in 1981 that allowed Zimmerman to sue the state.

Zimmerman was awarded $1 million by the Court of Claims in 1983, an average of $40,000 for each year he was incarcerated. A year later, Zimmerman died of a heart attack at age 66.

His case, among others, led Governor Mario Cuomo to request that the New York State Law Review Commission draft a wrongful conviction compensation law. The resulting report says “morality demands” that the state compensate the wrongfully convicted, but it does not say much a year in prison might be worth.

“Few occurrences are more tragic than the conviction and imprisonment of a person for a crime he did not commit,” the report says. For a wrongfully convicted person, money is, “the most viable method of assisting him to recoup what he lost.”

“By imposing financial liability upon the State, recognition is given to a proposition that would seem to be self-evident, namely that it is the State’s obligation, and no one else’s, to do what justice and morality demand when an innocent person is convicted of a crime he did not commit,” the report says.

The commission identified four basic criteria for wrongful conviction claims: a person must have been convicted and incarcerated; that conviction must have been overturned or vacated; the convicted person must be able to prove his innocence; and, he must not have contributed to his conviction by his own conduct, for instance, by confessing to police.

Since the law was enacted in 1984, at least 250 compensation claims have been filed, resulting in 15 awards and 27 settlements totaling nearly $24 million in payments.

HOW AWARDS ARE MADE

Many of the cases that went to trial are not easily available, but one case that is available provides some insight into the judge’s thought process.

Terrence Ferrer filed a claim after he was exonerated of a Bronx murder in 1984. He spent about 12 years in prison.

“I tried Ferrer because you couldn’t settle for more than $50,000 in those days,” said Ferrer’s attorney, Irving Cohen, who has represented people in roughly a dozen wrongful compensation claims.

At trial, Cohen called an economic expert to estimate Ferrer’s foregone earning potential. Ferrer was awarded a Master’s degree in prison and expressed interest in getting a law degree. The expert found Ferrer would have earned a total of $1.58 million in past and future wages alone.

Judge Robert Abrams disagreed. He mentioned Ferrer’s past employment at fast food restaurants, though not how much Ferrer earned. The judge said there was no way of knowing whether Ferrer’s employment goals would have been met.

But Abrams was much more sympathetic to the stigma attached with a prison term.

“It is as if a man’s life has been terminated at one point and then resurrected later; yet with all the intervening traumas, dangers and injuries that will endure, linger and become a permanent part of his life,” Abrams wrote.

For past wages, the judge awarded $135,000, roughly $11,250 per year incarcerated. For the loss of future earning capacity, Abrams awarded $225,000, without explaining how he arrived at the amount.

The remainder of Ferrer’s $1.56 million award was for mental anguish and loss of reputation.

At age 43 Ferrer died of a heart attack.

THE NATIONAL LANDSCAPE

New York’s compensation law does have some distinct advantages compared with the rest of the country. The Court of Claims may award any amount—there is no floor or ceiling.

Federal claims, meanwhile, are capped at $100,000 per year of incarceration for plaintiffs sentenced to death, and $50,000 per year of incarceration for all others.

In Montana, people wrongfully convicted of a felony who served time are entitled only to financial aid toward education at state colleges.

In Missouri, only those who are found wrongfully convicted by DNA evidence may apply for restitution, at a limit of just over $18,000 per year of incarceration. A wrongfully convicted person is barred from civil lawsuits if he makes a claim under that law.

The New Jersey law creates a floor of $20,000 for each year incarcerated, making it one of the few states that has a minimum award. The maximum is twice the yearly salary of the person the year before he was convicted.

Awards in Massachusetts are limited to $500,000, but the court may also order the state to provide physical and emotional health services, and half-off tuition at state universities.

And in North Carolina, awards are capped at $750,000, but job training and tuition reimbursement may also be awarded.

In New York, innocence must be shown by clear and convincing evidence—not the lowest burden of proof, but also not the highest. In contrast, claimants in Connecticut need only show a preponderance of evidence, the lowest burden of proof.

Once a New York claimant proves his innocence he has a good chance of winning an award or reaching a settlement. In a way, the case is decided before it is accepted by the court.

“It’s an odd statute that way, but I understood why they did it,” Cohen said. “But, I think if the case is reversed or thrown out on any ground you should be able to bring the lawsuit and let the judge decide early on.”

“There are going to be people prevented from suing,” he added.

UNABLE TO SUE

In 1973, Betty Tyson was a 25-year-old drug addict and prostitute working the streets of Rochester.

In December that year, a consultant to the Eastman Kodak Company soliciting prostitution was found strangled in an alley.

Tyson was convicted of the murder based on two eyewitness accounts. There was no physical evidence linking her to the crime.

After more than two decades in prison, Rochester media and activists took up Tyson’s case. By 1998, Betty Tyson was free—but her $12.5 million wrongful conviction claim was denied.

That’s because her conviction was reversed based on police misconduct. The police had withheld evidence that showed to her innocence. But prosecutors did not retry her case, and Tyson was never acquitted.

Even as he upheld the state’s appeal of Tyson’s suit, Court of Claims judge Donald Corbett wrote that her case highlighted problems with the New York law.

“The Legislature, in its wisdom, has placed a high threshold upon those seeking recompense under this statute, and unfortunately for Betty Tyson, her claim cannot surmount that limitation,” Corbett wrote. “So, unfortunately for Betty Tyson, there can be no recovery here, and no opportunity for her to prove her innocence, perhaps her ultimate goal. Regardless of whether this decision survives appellate scrutiny, the Legislature may wish to revisit this ‘structurally complicated statute.’”

There has been only one legislative update to the statute since it was passed. “Anthony’s Law” named for Anthony Capozzi, a wrongfully convicted man who was exonerated by DNA evidence after more than 20 years in prison, gives docket priority to compensation claims in which innocence is proven through DNA evidence.

WHEN SCIENCE FAILS

Deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) contains the genetic code that convicts criminals and sets the innocent free.

But when New York’s compensation law was passed, DNA technology was in its infancy. If a person confessed to a crime, he probably did it, the thinking went.

“One of the things we’ve learned is that people can be innocent and still confess,” said Adele Bernhard, the Pace professor.

That’s exactly what Douglas Warney did when he confessed to a stabbing murder in Rochester in 1996.

Warney’s knowledge of the crime scene ultimately led to his conviction. He knew the layout of the murder victim’s house, according to court papers. He knew what the victim was cooking. When an officer asked how he was doing, Warney said, “not good…I got a body.”

He was convicted on the strength of his unrecorded confession—though blood found at the scene did not match his, or the victim’s.

Ten years later, DNA testing matched that blood and other physical evidence to Eldred Johnson, who was already in prison for a similar murder. Johnson confessed to the crime, and Warney was freed.

Earlier this year, Warney sued the state for wrongful conviction compensation. Despite the DNA evidence, his $10 million claim was denied.

“There is no doubt that this confession contributed to [Warney’s] conviction,” Court of Claims Judge Renee Forgensi Minarik wrote. “[Warney] argues, however, that because his confession contained information that [he] could not possibly have known, his confession was obviously the product of misconduct and coercion on the part of the police officers that secured it.”

Judge Minarik decided that Warney did not provide substantial evidence of coercion. She decided that Warney had contributed to his own conviction and that, by law, he was not entitled to compensation.

When Warney was released in 2006, news reports elaborated on his psyche and pointed to a different conclusion. They pointed to a man who was, at the least, confused when he confessed.

Warney had AIDS-related dementia, an eighth-grade education, and an IQ of 68, according to the news reports. He claimed he was ill when he confessed. Several points in his confession were patently untrue—at one point he said he’d used his brother’s car that day, a car the brother gave up six years before the murder.

THE CIVIL ROUTE

But compensation through the state law is not the only means for the wrongfully convicted to recover money. If there is evidence of a civil rights violation the wrongfully convicted may successfully file a civil rights lawsuit.

Although the Court of Claims process is streamlined compared to the civil route, attorney Joel Rudin complained that in the Court of Claims, “you have a trial in front of a single judge paid by the State of New York.”

Awards in civil suits are decided by a jury, and damages tend to be higher than in the Court of Claims, Rudin said. The burden of proof in civil cases is also lower—the claimant does not have to clearly and convincingly prove his innocence.

In 2003, Rudin helped secure a $5 million settlement for Albert Ramos, who spent seven years in jail on a rape conviction that resulted from prosecutorial misconduct. That settlement is far higher than any of the settlements or awards under the state’s wrongful conviction law.

Betty Tyson, the former prostitute and drug addict, got $1.2 million in 1998 by filing a civil rights suit against the City of Rochester.

In 1989, five teenagers from Harlem admitted to beating and raping then-Salomon Brothers employee Trisha Meili in Central Park. The teenagers, aged 14 to 16, were all convicted and sentenced to prison.

But the confessions, four of which were videotaped, were coerced, and DNA evidence found at the scene matched none of the boys’.

The confessions were secured using, “force and trickery, sleep deprivation and isolation from their families,” according to court documents.

The DNA evidence matched that of Matias Reyes, who was in jail for a separate rape and murder. The boys were not fully cleared until Reyes confessed to the crime in 2002.

The wrongfully convicted men and their families have since filed a $250 million federal civil rights lawsuit against the police and prosecutors who arrested them and tried their case.

At least one of the exonerated men, Yusef Salaam, has also filed a compensation claim with the Court of Claims. His lawyer, Myron Beldock, said it would “complicated” to win damages under the state’s wrongful conviction law because Salaam and the others made false confessions.

“We decided to bring both cases,” Beldock said. “There are a lot of reasons why, but that is something I would consider confidential.”

He added, “If we recover full damages in the civil rights case there is no reason to go back,” to the Court of Claims.

LEFT WANTING

For more than a decade, Michael Clancy’s life was reduced to confinement and routine. He was convicted in 1999 of a murder in the Bronx that witness testimony would later show he didn’t commit.

“Every morning I woke up and I saw those bars, and that was my greeting every morning,” Michael Clancy said. “Every morning I’d wake up, I would sit up, I would look up—and there they are. And that’s what I went through for 11 years.”

Clancy didn’t know what to do when he was released. He didn’t know how to establish credit. He didn’t know how to get a state ID.

“Thank God” his lawyer was waiting for him outside, Clancy said, because he didn’t even know how to use a Metrocard.

State-funded programs to help ex-convicts readjust to life outside of prison were unavailable to him. Their money was reserved for people who had actually committed crimes, Clancy said.

Indeed, no social services, such as job and readjustment training, were awarded to those wrongfully convicted in any of the cases reviewed for this article.

“They didn’t have a system for a person who was found innocent,” he said.

Clancy is doing well for himself now. He has an apartment, owns an Ipod, and says he bought an $8,000 bed.

But in a way, Clancy was lucky. His sister was able to support him after his release, and his union, the International Union of Elevator Constructors, offered him work immediately.

“They welcomed me with open arms,” Clancy said. “They said, ‘listen, you’ve been through so much the least we can do is at least give you an opportunity to prove yourself.’”

“People in my position, I hate to say, usually don’t get a break. A lot of these people, even though they’re found innocent, there’s always a question in the back of an employer’s mind, you know? This guy’s been in jail for this amount of time, you know? What did that do to him?”

On the advice of his lawyer, Clancy wouldn’t say whether he would file a claim under New York’s wrongful conviction law.

Additional reporting by Steven Bronner, Joshua Cinelli, Dan Macht, Rosaleen Ortiz and Matt Townsend.

Many gay and lesbian bookstores followed, all over the country, as the movement grew in the following years. Many of those bookstores have closed recently, however, including the Oscar Wilde. Many see the disappearance of the stores as a sign of success growing out of the wider acceptance of gays and lesbians throughout society. They don’t need their own special bookstores any more because so many general bookstores carry gay and lesbian books.

The doors at Oscar Wilde closed in the spring of 2009, only weeks before Amazon.com accidentally pushed all books deemed gay and lesbian to the pornography section, a sad reminder of the days when a gay and lesbian bookstore was necessary due to discrimination. It’s worth taking a look back on those days.

Forty years ago, Christopher Street was the center of the Stonewall Inn riots. Today, the street still has problems with theives and vandals, but it still lies in one of the pricest areas of real estate, even for New York. Those riots of the 1960s and ‘70s, when Greenwich Village was the heart of a revolution seem like a long time ago in an age when gay marriage has been passed in Iowa, and when the Oscar winner for Best Picture played gay politician Harvey Milk, who was frequent visitor to the store and, for a time, a boyfriend of Craig Rodwell, the founder.

“You could say it’s really good because it means we don’t need segregated facilities but at the same time there’s something about going to a queer space that gets lost,” said Sarah Chinn, the executive director of the Center for Gay and Lesbian Studies at CUNY Graduate Center.

In 42 years, however, Rodwell’s tiny shop became packed with not only books and DVDs, but also people. Located on Christopher Street in Greenwich Village—just one block from the infamous Stonewall Inn—the bookstore became an information center, intellectual hothouse gather place and a home for the gay and lesbian movement.

When the Oscar Wilde Bookshop first opened its doors, the nearby Christopher Street park was home to homeless gay youths, now a statue stands in memory of the Stonewall Inn riots. The Christopher Street Liberation Parade, organized at the Oscar Wilde, is now known as the Gay Pride Parade.

While there was a once a network of gay and lesbian bookstores in New York, the Oscar Wilde was the first and now the last to fall. Other famous institutions such as Creative Visions on Hudson Street and A Different Light in Chelsea all closed their doors in the last decade. The website for Oscar Wilde suggests only three stores for patrons looking for gay titles: Lambda Rising in Washington D.C., Giovanni’s Room in Philadelphia and Common Language Bookstore in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Martin Duberman, the author of the book “Stonewall” and a professor emeritus at Lehman College and the City University of New York Graduate Center, suggested this is part of a trend of gay bookstores closing.

“I’m always sad when a bookstore closes, especially a gay bookstore,” Duberman said.

Rodwell died in 1993, and the neighborhood surrounding his store is no longer the revolutionary one it once was. While up and down Christopher Street, from its western edges near the Hudson to the eastern end at Sixth Avenue, gay pride flags still wave proudly outside many of the stores and the Stonewall Inn still stands, instead of having a notorious reputation, the old articles about the Stonewall riots are framed in the window in order to attract tourists. A Starbucks is now at the corner of Sheridan Square, where young homeless gay youths used to sleep because they had nowhere to go. Christopher Street has become one of the priciest areas of real estate, with tree-lined streets and old buildings that were once dilapidated have been fixed up and for sale for high prices.

In the last few weeks before the store closed, the shop filled with regulars, tourists and reporters.

Cecilia Martin, 39, working the register, called the store a “safe place” for the gay community. She herself remembered her first time visiting the store, which she loved so much she later applied for a job.

“I didn’t even know what being gay was—when I was 16, I thought I was the only one that was,” said Gary Merston, 46, of East Orange. “Since I was 16, I’ve been coming to this store. I love this place.”

Merston stopped by with one his 14-year-old son, one of two children he adopted with his partner. Merston and his son said were saving souvenirs from the bookstore, right down to the shopping.

“When I saw Channel 7 broadcast, I couldn’t believe it,” Merston said. “I said, this is not really happening. We must have watched it 10 times, and repeated the news over and over again.”

Both Martin and the last owner of the bookstore, Kim Brinster, a former manager who bought the place after one of the store’s near-death experiences in 2003, said they felt the store is a victim of the current hard economic times, and the increasing presence of on-line retailers.

“Unfortunately, we do not have the resources to weather the current economic crisis and find it’s time to call it a day,” Brinster said.  “So thanks to all those who have been a part of the Oscar Wilde family over the years, you have truly been a part of the global community.”

Rodwell had been one of the more militant members of the homophile movement in the early 1960s, but by 1966, he was fed up with the Mattachine organization, the leading group fighting for gay rights across the country. Rodwell wanted to open a bookstore that would be an intellectual gathering place for gay people, and in fact, he banned the sale of any pornography in the early years. In order to save up the money for the bookstore, he worked summers at a motel at the Fire Island Pines, the popular vacation spot for gays on Long Island.

After two summers, Rodwell had saved enough money to rent space at 291 Mercer Street, the first location of the store. It moved two years later to its famed home on Christopher Street. The Mercer Street location, according to Duberman, was the cheapest place Rodwell could find.

Duberman profiles Rodwell in his book and wrote Rodwell struggled in those early days—and even had to ask his own mother to help set up the store the night before it opened due to a lack of resources. Rodwell later relented on the pornography ban in order to make some money, Duberman said.

When the bookstore first opened, the mainstream press either ignored it or attacked its existence. According to Duberman, a columnist for the New York Post compared it with see-through dresses and topless flicks, despite Rodwell’s hatred of pornography. Some gay activists were not happy with the store because it did not stack pornography, and other claimed it was stinted more toward men. Still, Rodwell put in 70-hour weeks and ran the store by himself for the first 18 months.

In addition to the bookstore, Rodwell also began his own gay and lesbian organization, called the Homophile Youth Movement—later amended to Homophile Youth Movement in Neighborhoods, so the acronym would be HYMN and less gender-specific—and used the store as the headquarters. He published a newsletter called The New York Hymnal, where he called for homosexual law reform in New York State. Rodwell even hung a banner in the front window proclaiming “Bookshop of the Homophile Movement.” He would later replace it with a bumper sticker proclaiming “Gay is Good.”

During the early morning hours of June 28, 1969, the police attempted to raid the Stonewall Inn, located at 51 Christopher Street, only a few doors down from the new location of the bookstore. But the raid did not go as planned and turned into a full-scale riot. Rodwell, who personally hated the Stonewall Inn because he thought it was unsanitary, could see the riot going on from Oscar Wilde and called the newspapers and three New York papers—The New York Times, the New York Post, and the New York Daily News—all covered the siege. For the next few nights, people gathered on Christopher Street to protest—and Rodwell printed leaflets from the bookstore to help organize. From the back room of the bookstore, Rodwell encouraged a boycott of the Stonewall Inn, which closed only a few weeks after the riot.

One year later, Rodwell organized “Christopher Street Liberation Day” from Oscar Wilde, now celebrated each year as “Gay Pride Day.” The gay rights revolution had been born.

Rodwell died of stomach cancer in 1993, and one of the store’s managers, Bill Offenbaker, bought the store. After Offenbaker struggled to keep it afloat, Larry Lingle took over in 1996.

But Lingle could not save it either, and he announced he would have to close its doors in 2003. At the last minute, Deacon Maccubbin, the owner of gay bookstore Lambda Rising in Washington D.C., bought the store and rescued it at the last minute. Three years later, Brinster, then one of the store’s managers, took over.

While rents in Greenwich Village have increased over the years, Brinster said the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop paid only $3,000 a month, well below market value. But that was still too much.

Sarah Chinn, the gay and lesbian center director at CUNY, said she thought the world around Oscar Wilde had changed too much for it to survive.

“Now you don’t have to schlep all the way to the Village to buy a gay book—you can just go on-line and order it,” Chinn said. “I think someone could see it as a good sign. That we’re not totally marginalized, but at the same time, community-run institutions have a place and they have a value beyond what’s available. It’s essentially a shame that it’s the oldest gay bookshop in the United States and it’s closing.”

Martin said the full force of the bookstore’s closing hadn’t hit her yet.

“I think it’s definitely a loss,” Martin said. “It’s like, you may realize someone is dying, but you don’t understand the real impact…and they won’t until they don’t have us as a resource—the regulars who come in every week.”

One month before the scheduled closing date, the last meeting of the Lesbian Book Club still met. Instead of Rodwell’s famous “Gay is Good” sticker in the front windows, they were covered in “Final Sale” stickers. The club was meeting to discuss “Aimee and Jaguar” by Erica Fisher.

On the last day, the store officially closed at 7 p.m. The doors were locked, but the club members lingered in the trailblazing store for just a little while longer.

Sometimes, the bus will lurch forward as you make your well practiced bargaining pitch. You find yourself scrambling to reach your prize– goat meat on a stick, golden and dripping with grease, throwing coins down to your seller’s hands, while your neighbor pulls a loud, distressed chicken through the window.  It’s awkward, but the bounty is worth it.  Even as I write on my laptop in New York, thousands of miles away, I still feel hungry thinking about it.  Goat meat is fairly easy to get in my Queens neighborhood, but it just doesn’t taste like it did on a bumpy, late-night bus ride along a dirt highway in East Africa.

It was not a likely place for a girl from Long Island to be going, that’s for sure.  Most of my classmates from high school were probably speeding along the Long Island Expressway, or going out to Jones Beach.  But I was making my way to northern Uganda.  I had visited the country several times over the past year and a half, and had been working as a journalist for a daily newspaper in the capital, Kampala.  But I had never spent more than a couple of days in the north.  When you live in Uganda, the north feels like a different country—as if you might need a visa stamp to drive the five or six hours from Kampala to Lira or Gulu, the major Northern towns.  The rest of Uganda is generally perceived internationally as stable, democratic, a loyal friend of the U.S.  The north is a historical and present-day landmine, where more than a million people have been displaced by two decades of civil war.  Even though there is a ceasefire now, and a peace treaty is being negotiated, the region is devoid of almost any effective government, cut off from many services.  Among all its other crises is a world-class killer: northern Uganda is the deadliest malaria zone in the world.

I had been assigned to go to Lira and interview children who had been traumatized by the recent war.  The war in northern Uganda was different than most conflicts, because it relied heavily on child soldiers.  Almost ninety percent of the soldiers in the rebel army were children abducted from Ugandan families, forced to fight against their communities and the Ugandan government.  The use of child soldiers made fighting against the rebel group, called the Lord’s Resistance Army, difficult—any battle against the LRA was often considered a massacre, since most of the casualties were children who didn’t want to be there in the first place.

Although there was a ceasefire now in Uganda, many of the children had not been freed yet, and those who had came home to communities that had been attacked by the very army they had been forced to join.  Boys and girls were both captured by the LRA, and the girls, despite their young age, were often forced to serve as ‘wives’ of the LRA commanders, basically sex slaves.  Many became what are called ‘child mothers’ in Uganda, or young girls who became pregnant by rape when they had barely reached puberty.  The child mothers were still forced to fight against the Ugandan government, and they carried the babies on their small bodies from battle site to battle site.  When the government was really cracking down on the LRA, the rebel army forced them to flee to the Sudan, where the Sudanese government, angry with Uganda for supporting Sudanese rebels, gave them a base from which to launch attacks against Uganda.

Many international journalists have gone to Lira or Gulu to interview and catch glimpses of the child soldiers.  Those who have escaped present compelling stories- their reunions with communities they thought would reject them, child mothers escaping on foot for hundreds of miles to reach home, and complex, difficult ways of learning to forgive those who had abducted them.  But New Vision, a national daily paper, gave me a unique story assignment—I would interview both child soldiers and children not captured but affected by the war, and tell their stories through the newspaper’s pullout on children so other Ugandan kids could get a glimpse into their lives.

I was eager to tell the silent stories of war-affected children, who might not have been abducted but lived one evening at a time, not sure if they would survive another year without being abducted, or their family’s fields or store looted by rebels.  Although many journalists wrote about child soldiers, no one really wrote about the kids who weren’t abducted, but were afraid.  Those children had to cope with the fact that the rebels looked just like them: small, afraid, living evening by evening.

I didn’t know what to expect.  I had been to northern Uganda so briefly before, and if I hadn’t known the history of the region, it would have looked like any other part of the country.  Cassava, coffee, and peanut farms, farmers living in huts made of mud and wattle.   Kids who waved excitedly when they saw you.  One-story homes and the smell of charcoal from cooking stoves.  This time would be similar, since I was still just going for two nights.  But this time, I planned to immerse myself in the place where I would be going: Lira, a devastated farming town trying to rebuild after decades of terror and violence.

I was nervous going on the bus ride, unsure how the interviews would go.  What if I couldn’t find any child soldiers, or children who had been impacted by the war, who wanted to talk? What if I re-opened memories that were better left unsealed? After all, many of the kids, as well as the adults, suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder.

Of course, there were other worries, too.  The one that felt the most intimate had to do with the slight itching on my left leg.  I feared the anopheles mosquito, which spread malaria.  Rumor had it that it hit foreigners twice as hard as Ugandans, since we lacked centuries of immunity built through our family blood lines.  Even with some immune resistance, malaria is the number one threat Ugandans face when it comes to their safety- not rebel armies, or HIV.

Malaria is the top killer of Ugandan children, and a major killer of refugees from other countries, as well as internally displaced people.  If you walk into a major hospital in Uganda, twenty percent of their admissions are malaria-related.  Every year, between 70,000 and 110,000 Ugandan children die from malaria, according to the health ministry—or between 190 and 300 deaths a day on average.

Unfortunately, I knew this intimately.  About two weeks before I left the United States to work in Uganda as a reporter, I called my boyfriend, who lives in Kampala, and he told me that his six-year-old stepsister had died from the disease.  When I called his mother later that day, she told me that his sister developed a rare form of the disease called cerebral malaria, which can kill almost instantly.  The malaria went straight to her brain, and she died shortly after.  That type of malaria was rare, but not rare enough for most Ugandan families.  Cerebral malaria is the number one cause of malaria deaths, and is any Ugandan mother’s worst nightmare.

In Kampala, where I had been working, the malaria rates were significant, but not as high as they were in northern Uganda.  Many of the districts within northern Uganda are part of significant water basins, which attract mosquitoes in drove, and the whole region lacks basic health infrastructure.  In one district in northern Uganda, called Apac, residents suffer a breathtaking 1,568 bites from malaria-infected mosquitoes a year.

As an ivory-skinned, wimpy American with virtually no immunity to the disease, I often felt like a beacon in Uganda, calling all mosquitoes to deposit their deadly parasites into my bloodstream.  I had been wimpier than my American colleagues when I studied abroad in Uganda the first time around, picking up as many as twenty mosquitoes bites when we went hiking.  That time, I took medicine daily to prevent malaria.  The other college students would get one bite here, one bite there.  We would walk through eerily beautiful forest landscapes, and while other students would take pictures of waterfalls on their digital cameras, I would be scratching my legs.  Even as I write this, I still have faint scars on my legs from mosquito bites I really shouldn’t have been scratching.

While I was attracting mosquitoes working and studying in Uganda, many of the Ugandans around me were less worried about the disease than about the latest campaign against malaria – a national program to wipe out the mosquitoes by spraying the indoor walls of people’s homes with a pesticide, DDT, which was banned in the United States. Which was a greater danger, many of my friends wanted to know, the disease or the possibly carcinogenic cure?

I would put my fears aside, play the situation by ear, and call my editor if I encountered problems.  The newspaper had been surprised that I even wanted to go.  Wouldn’t it be better to stay in Kampala, where things were safe? But I wanted to cross the boundary between what felt like two countries, and see what Uganda was like when you crossed that invisible line between north and south. It’s why I hopped on the bus from Kampala to Lira.  Now, who knew what good stories were waiting for me?

****

On my way north, I had sat next to a young man who was unusually quiet, almost New York City subway-passenger quiet.  He looked about seventeen or eighteen, and who knows, maybe he was actually a New Yorker, because he didn’t greet me or glance my way, even though we were crammed into two seats by the window. He was a skinny guy, but he seemed to need two seats, because with each turn, he would slam his body weight against mine. He kept quietly shoving me against the bus wall, until I gave up half of my seat and he stretched over one and a half. Definitely, I thought, a secret New Yorker. I could easily picture his slender frame, jeans and cotton t-shirt on a subway in Manhattan, perhaps the 2 train.

I declared defeat, silently of course, and looked out the window, watching the sun set into Uganda’s dark green hills in the distance. Our bus left Kampala around four p.m., and around six, the sun went down peacefully over the endless acres of farms and hills, and I wondered how the bus driver could see the dusty road without street lights. Some questions, of course, are better left unanswered.

I was going to see my friend Zack, whose work in northern Uganda had given me a news peg to get a reporting assignment upcountry. Zack was an unusual guy. He had graduated from a private high school in Los Angeles, a school that the Olsen Twins had gone to, and then headed off to college in Colorado, where he developed an interest in Africa through some classes he took.

Most people would stop there, but Zack boarded a plan to Ghana and then Uganda, feeling as comfortable in places like Lira as he would at an upscale neighborhood in L.A. The year before, we had attended the same study-abroad program in Uganda, and during our visit to rural eastern Uganda, Zack had built a mud-wattle cottage by himself, slaughtered chickens, talked about politics, and had drunk from a grainy, communal alcohol pot with about twenty men, each with their own straw. The boy was far from L.A., and he didn’t want to go back. The next summer, after a year of fundraising using his family’s connections, he raised about $30,000 and decided to hold a three-day conference for former child soldiers in Lira.

By the time the conference was held, I’d be on a plane back home, but I wanted to see how his preparations were going.  I thought the work he was doing was both important and gutsy.  The twenty years of civil war killed between ten and twenty thousand people, and also displaced hundreds of thousands of peasant farmers. They were tired of being attacked and abused by the government and rebel forces, each of which accused the farmers of collaborating with the other side.  For Zack to pick up his bags in L.A. and move to Northern Uganda, I thought, was pretty shocking.

Both of us had entered Uganda at a time when the government was stirring up more resentment when it started spraying inside people’s homes with DDT, a program supported by the U.S. Agency for International Development and the World Health Organization. Environmental groups and organic farming organizations had sued the Ugandan government, and a court injunction had temporarily stopped the spraying, but the region, as well as the country, was locked into a fierce debate over whether it was safe to spray the pesticide, even in small doses. Some Ugandans, paranoid after decades of living under dictatorships, thought the government might be attempting to wipe out the ethnic groups of northern Uganda through the allegedly carcinogenic chemical. Others wondered why the United States would fund the spraying of DDT after the chemical had been banned in America in the 1970s.

Dichloro-diphenyl-trhichloroethane, or DDT, remains one of the most controversial chemicals in existence. The synthetic pesticide became popular during the second half of World War Two, used to fight malaria and typhus, and caught on during peacetime as an agricultural insecticide. DDT wasn’t always a dirty name; in fact, a chemist from Switzerland won the Nobel Prize for his work in using DDT as an insecticide.

Othmar Zeidler, a German-Austrian chemistry student at a university in France, first created DDT from a mixture of alcohol, chlorine, and sulfuric acid. However, Zeidler didn’t realize the potential that the compound had as an insecticide, and DDT was largely unused until a Swiss chemist created the same compound on his own when trying to create a pesticide. The chemist, Paul Müller, found the chemical to be effective in killing house flies during the first chemical trial, and DDT products were soon developed to target mosquitoes, lice, and some other pests.

In the 1940s, DDT was celebrated internationally as the super chemical that would wipe out everything from malaria to bedbugs, cockroaches, and the common household fly. It was also believed that DDT would protect the world’s crops from debilitating insects.

After World War II, the U.S. government used DDT to control pests on crops and forestlands, and people used the chemical in their own homes and gardens. In 1955, after Europe and the United States used the pesticide to eliminate malaria from their own countries, the World Health Organization started a program to eradicate the disease worldwide, relying mostly on DDT. The WHO eliminated malaria in Taiwan, most of the Caribbean, northern Africa, and much of the South Pacific. It also had some significant successes in reducing malaria mortality in Sri Lanka and India. WHO did not really attempt to wipe out malaria from sub-Saharan Africa, however, stating that the lack of public health infrastructure on the continent was too limited, and the life cycle of mosquitoes too long, to make DDT effective.

Eventually, the United States came to have second thoughts about DDT. In 1962, Rachel Carson published Silent Spring, a book that launched the modern-day environmental movement by triggering public interest in pesticides and pollution. Carson said she did not advocate banning the use of pesticides domestically, just using them in a well-managed way. Her book generated a public uproar, however, and DDT was banned in the United States in 1972.

Many other countries also decided to ban DDT, sometimes with critical health consequences. Zanzibar, an island that is part of Tanzania, had used DDT to bring rates of malaria drastically down to 5 percent, but after its ban, the malaria rate in Tanzania rose, until between 50 and 60 percent of the population suffered from malaria for at least a year.
When I first started traveling to Uganda in 2007, the government hadn’t started spraying inside of people’s home yet, but newspaper editorial pages and radio talk shows were debating the proposal.

Malaria was constantly on my mind, and my parents were even more worried about my decision to visit a malaria zone. After all, the disease hits hardest those – like me – who have not developed a resistance to it.

I already had habits that drove my parents crazy. I rode the subway late at night, I forgot to carry cash on me, I would always lose my keys and wallet.  How could I be trusted to take precautions against malaria? My father became addicted to Google, and he read about the ins and outs of the disease, the proper prophylactic treatment (the nasty drugs that make you sick from the side effects, but keep you disease-free) and the mosquito nets.

During that first trip to Uganda during a college study abroad program, I took an expensive little drug called Malarone, which cost $6 a day to keep me malaria-free.  The drug gave me weird, eerie dreams, but those were nothing compared to the dreams that my colleagues on Larium, a much more toxic drug, were having.  For Americans interested in traveling to major malaria zones, Larium can be tempting.  It is much cheaper than other malaria drugs, and doesn’t need to be taken every day.  One dose of Larium every 7 days is all you need.  But the side effects are notorious: visual disturbances, vivid dreams, and anxiety attacks.  In the long-term, Larium can damage both your liver and your eyes.

Although I stuck with the Malarone when I was in Uganda the first time, when I came back to work for a daily paper, I knew there was no way I was taking any anti-malaria drug.  If I got malaria, I decided, I would go to a clinic, take a couple of shots, swallow some tablets, and take a day off from work.  This is more than what most Ugandans would be able to do if they came down with a malaria spell, and I figured I would be okay.  However, as I sat on that bus to northern Uganda, I knew that the region had the worst malaria rates in the world, and that the mosquitoes would be more intense.  The one good thing was that I was traveling during the dry season. If it had been the rainy season, the road could have been washed away, and thirty to forty bites could have been easily waiting for me.

As I sat on the bus, watching the sun set over Uganda’s dark green hills, I thought about my first week in Uganda, and my first night with my homestay family.  Living them had changed my attitudes towards malaria, how it could be viewed almost in the way colds and flus were seen in the U.S.  Even if the disease was a deadly killer.  During that first night, I was navigating both the time change, anti-malaria drugs and cultural shock.  I was a twenty-one-year-old New Yorker, a coffee-drinking, 1-train hating, fast-talking, skittish female. I was in a Kampala suburb called Kanyanya, a semi-rural town that juxtaposed cell phones, American hip-hop fashion, and bootlegged Indian movies with roosters, cows, and red-brown dirt roads that turned into tiny, messy rivers during the rainy season. My home-stay family had volunteered to adopt me for three months and teach me how to survive, to bargain, to speak in conversational Luganda, and to learn the polite decorum of the society.

My Ugandan family was initially skeptical. I had been told to dress up for my first meeting with them, and when they saw my business attire and huge suitcases, I later learned, they predicted I would head back to the United States in less than a week. They were, of course, wrong. As I was trying to absorb my introduction to Uganda, learning new words and seeing new things, my Ugandan family became more relaxed – and my American family more nervous. At night in Uganda, I would collapse as soon as my mosquito net was tucked into my mattress. At night back in the States, my parents lay sleepless.

I was living in a typical home of a middle-class Ugandan family. The unpainted walls were covered with colorful newspaper pages. The furniture was simple. I slept in a guest room with two beds. Bright light emanated from an energy-saving light bulb dangling from the ceiling. There were two trunks filled with school papers and saved writings on one side of the room, and I had stacked my own green suitcase on top of the trunk. The family I had temporarily joined offered me four coat hangers, which I had to use as efficiently as possible.

I could dimly hear the sound of the TV coming from the room of my home-stay mother, Justine, an accountant working in Kampala’s city center. She still volunteers to host American students when they attend a grassroots development studies program at Makerere University. The houses in Kanyanya are built close together, and I could hear the sounds of conversation in Luganda coming from the neighbors’ houses nearby. I could also faintly hear the sound of the woman sleeping in the bed next to mine.

In Ugandan families, it is bad luck to sleep alone. Many Ugandans grow up with six to ten or even twelve brothers and sisters, and rarely spend time alone. Some feel anxious at the thought of being by themselves, and if guests visit, it is considered rude to give them a room for themselves. After all, wouldn’t your guest be lonely? The cultural differences made me smile; as an only child of divorced parents, I was used to my own company. On my first night with them, my family had the mother’s niece come and sleep in the bed next to mine, so I could have a roommate who also was my agemate.

The next night, I shared the room with the family’s oldest daughter, a ten-year-old girl named Jaliah. Both Jaliah and the niece were experts at using mosquito nets. They knew how to tuck their nets in, or re-hang them from the ceiling if the net slipped from its hook. Like most Ugandans, they had had malaria countless times; the symptoms usually begin within four weeks of infection, when the sufferer develops high fevers, shaking chills, muscle aches, and tiredness. The nets offered some protection from the potentially life-threatening mosquitoes, and saved the family’s pocketbook from a treatment that would take any money they had planned on using for groceries or transport that week.

Once, I made the mistake of putting down my mosquito net when there were already two mosquitoes circulating around my bed, and I trapped them both inside my net. I had been exhausted, and fell asleep almost before my head touched my pillow. I awoke two hours later, covered with swollen bites, and attempted to chase the mosquitoes away from my bed, lifting up the net. The family’s electricity had gone out, so I swatted my hands aimlessly in the dark.

That first night in Uganda, my mouth was dry. I didn’t like the taste of the family’s drinking water. They collected rainwater in a large, rusty, blue-red bucket that came up to my waist. They then boiled the rainwater on a charcoal stove in the kitchen, the room next to the guest room. There was a vague scent of charcoal in the guest room. I reminded myself to buy some bottled water the next day.

The blanket was wool – hot and itchy. The net kept me sweating, trapping hot air over my bed. I kicked off the blanket and slept under only the sheet. I had to go to the bathroom, but I was scared of using the latrine, where there was no light and just a small hole that went down 20 feet into the ground. It was very dark. What if I dropped something by accident, and it rolled into the hole? Where, exactly, did I put my flashlight? The last time I had tried to use the latrine in the dark, earlier in the evening, I had missed the hole and peed on my feet. Plus, going to the latrine at night meant I might get bitten by more mosquitoes. I was learning quickly: during my time in Africa, the threat of malaria would accompany me everywhere.

In Uganda, poverty and malaria are inextricably linked. Many poor, tropical countries suffer immensely from malaria. Poverty both causes and is caused by malaria. Poor countries are less able to devote precious public resources to the disease, and spending money on disease treatment can wipe out a family’s savings, or put it into debt. In one year, a poor family in Uganda can spend as much as 25% of its income on malaria treatment. The rainy season in Uganda, a critical time for agriculture, often causes higher rates of malaria, and farmers lose time they might spend working recovering from the disease.

Malaria also causes absenteeism from school, since children suffer six cases of malaria a year on average in Uganda, and affects school performance when children make it to the classroom. For pregnant women, malaria becomes an even more serious disease. The health ministry estimates that malaria causes 60% of miscarriages that Ugandan women experience, and the disease frequently causes low weights in newborns, as well as stillbirths.

Malaria is spread by anopheles mosquitoes, but the root of infection are the malarial parasites that feast on their victims’ red blood cells. When a mosquito bites an infected person, it consumes a blood meal full of malarial parasites. It will take a week for the mosquito, now infected, to be able to transmit the disease to another human being. If the mosquito lives another week, it becomes capable of transmitting malaria to everyone it bites.

Let’s say it bites my Ugandan home-stay sister Jaliah, when she gets up in the middle of the night. She lifts up her mosquito net, picks up the kerosene lantern next to her bed and goes to use the latrine. As she walks to use the toilet, a mosquito could bite her. If the mosquito carried the malarial parasites, they would be passed through the mosquito saliva into her body. About ten days later, Jaliah could wake up with a high fever, terrible chills, and nausea. If she was already malnourished or suffering from HIV, the disease could be lethal, particularly if her family could not raise the money in time for her to get treatment.

The best solution, of course, would be to remove the mosquitoes from Jaliah’s path.  In 1998, the World Health Organization, many African governments, and charities launched a campaign called “Roll Back Malaria,” which planned to halve the number of malaria deaths worldwide by 2010, through a combination of mosquito bed nets, insecticides, and medicine for patients when they did fall sick.  However, in 2007, a million people died of malaria, and 500 million people were infected with the disease.

Five years into the program, malaria deaths were actually increasing worldwide, though countries like Rwanda and Eritrea had made significant strides in fighting the disease.   Roll Back Malaria struggled with four major leadership changes in five years. Also, it was difficult to find a baseline measuring how many malaria deaths occurred each year. A misestimate in 1998 could make it appear that malaria was on the rise, when actually doctors, scientists, and public health advocates were simply recording deaths more accurately.

Another critical problem with Roll Back Malaria was that donors gave tangible commodities, such as bed nets or medicines, when many countries lacked the public health systems to effectively deliver either.  During British colonialism, the Ugandan colony had invested in the health infrastructure of the central Buganda kingdom for decades, but had neglected many other regions of the country, such as northern Uganda.  The Buganda kingdom was considered pivotal to the success of British colonialism in East Africa, and its people had more access to education and civil service jobs.  On the other hand, northern Ugandans were restricted to only joining the military or working in agriculture.

The neglect in infrastructure, resulting in everything from lack of jobs to poor education and health facilities, caused people to migrate to Kampala, where the poor built huge slums in swampy, low-level parts of the city. This rush to Kampala, particularly during the war in northern Uganda, overwhelmed the public health systems that had been relatively strong.

In April 2008, the Ugandan government began a new strategy. Coordinating with and using the funds of the World Health Organization (WHO) and USAID, it began spraying DDT in Oyam and Apac districts, two districts in the north. Once again, all did not go smoothly. Three weeks after the spraying began, the government began to squabble with exporters of organic products in Uganda, which sell organic crops to Europe and the United States. A group of organic companies filed a lawsuit against the government, arguing that Uganda had violated the WHO guidelines for indoor residual spraying, doing the spraying in a way that could contaminate the Ugandan food chain.

Although the European Union had said it would continue to accept Ugandan exports as long as the standards of WHO were met, organic companies were afraid that they would lose their market, worth about $500 million a year, if traces of DDT were found. Even British American Tobacco joined the group, stressing a potential health risk if traces of DDT were found in its tobacco products.

On May 30th, the Ugandan High Court called for a temporary halt to the use of DDT in the districts that had been scheduled for spraying, even though the WHO and Ugandan Health Ministry reported significant drops in both malaria cases and deaths in the communities they sprayed.

The Ministry of Health has been trying to have the DDT ban overturned, but faces strong opposition, particularly from Ken Lukyamuzi, a popular environmental and political figure in Uganda. The DDT spraying has been halted. More expensive, but less effective insecticides are being used for indoor spraying.  USAID continued to support the spraying, stating that DDT had now been endorsed by the World Health Organization as an important tool in the fight against malaria.

My journey to northern Lira took me into the center of this bitter debate.  And when the bus pulled into Lira, I didn’t know what to expect.  It was almost midnight, and there were almost no streetlights in the town.  All I could think about was the recent war, and how it had affected Lira.  I remembered a BBC article I had read about a massacre in Lira in 2004, when the rebels attacked a refugee camp outside the town, and the government fought back.  The civilians were the ones who suffered, with 200 people dying in the crossfire.  Many people died in their grass, homes at the camp when rebels lit the makeshift structures on fire.  The name of the camp was Barlonyo, and it had suffered the most devastating attack in northern Uganda in ten years.  Now, the war was over, but I wondered how much the memory of the attack on Barlonyo lingered.  It had only been four years ago.

As I checked into a hotel after leaving the bus, I couldn’t help but realize how far I was from the refugee camps where the displaced Northerners lived.  Not in terms of physical distance, but in the emotional distance between the hotels that had started to spring up in the wake of the ceasefire as people began to travel again, and the million people who would never go on vacation, or even just return to the simple homes they left.  The hotel was called the White House Hotel.  Though it would have been a modest motel in the United States, it felt like a small castle within the small, farming town.

I entered the small room I had booked for two nights, and was relieved to see that it had a mosquito net already hanging from the ceiling. I thought of the time I went to a shopping mall in Kampala, and saw a worker who had been mopping a floor drop her mop and collapse against the wall.  Sweat dripped down her forehead, and she held her hand to her forehead limply.  When I asked her if she was okay, she told me she had malaria, and indicated that she had a terrible headache.  And I knew it hit foreigners much worse than Ugandan.  Just thinking about the disease made me shudder.

I thought about this as I turned on the shower handle, and watched steam come from the water.  Forget malaria, I thought, I have hot water! I had been living in an apartment in Kampala for several months with only cold water, which had had a tragic effect on my hygiene.  I had started to bathe every other day, and my showers lasted about thirty seconds.  Sometimes, I would heat water in a small percolator I bought at Uganda’s version of Wal-Mart, fill a bucket, and take a hot shower that way.  But this, an overhead shower? All thoughts of malaria were gone, and I was overjoyed.  I stood under the hot water for over thirty minutes, feeling the tension of the bus ride eased from my body.

When I got out of the shower after flooding the bathroom, I hung my mosquito net over the bed, climbed underneath, and reviewed my questions for the next day.  I had general questions about Lira that I could ask anyone I talked to, whether they were a farmer or shopkeeper, and questions that were specific to children who had been kidnapped and forced to serve in the LRA.  But soon, I closed my eyes and fell asleep instantly.  Outside of my mosquito net, there was a faint buzz, but whether it was part of a dream or the Lira experience, I wasn’t sure.

The next morning, I joined a mixed group of middle-class Ugandans and expatriate American charity workers for a breakfast of white toast, passion fruit juice, and scrambled eggs.  “Where is the coffee?” I asked the kitchen staff, trying not to sound too anxious.  I was a terrible coffee addict.

“Over there,” a cook said, and she pointed to a small container of Nescafe instant coffee.  I pounced on it, dumped a huge spoonful into the boiling water they had given me to make tea, and asked for some milk.  Most Ugandans drank their coffee black, with about four to five spoonfuls of sugar, so the staff was a bit puzzled.

“Do you want a glass of milk?” they asked.  I gave up and drank the coffee black, which gave me a little bit of a stomachache, but I felt relaxed and happy to finally be out of Kampala.  I loved the capital, but sometimes you needed a break from the pollution, crowdedness, and traffic jams.  In Kampala, when I would sneeze, I would fill a tissue with black specks of dirt from the pollution and smog.  As I knew from health reporting, the city was a nightmare for asthma patients.  But in Lira, at least, the morning air seemed perfectly clear, as if a car or truck had never passed through.

My friend Zack met me out front, and he agreed to give me a tour of the town.  “I’m really happy you’re here,” he told me.  “Sometimes it gets really lonely.”  He told me about the preparations he was making for the child soldier conference. The children would attend workshops and talk about transitioning to life back home, but a major point of the conference was for the kids to have fun.  Most of them had missed out on their childhoods, forced to work as sex slaves if they were girls, or to fight their own families and communities, regardless of their gender.  There were stories of kids forced to kill their own parents, and loot the stores of their parents’ neighbors.  When it was over, they were told by the rebel commanders that they would never escape—their communities could never forgive them.

Zack and I headed over to a charity where he had worked as an intern when we studied abroad together, a charity started by a Ugandan who came to Europe as a refugee after being tortured during the former President Obote’s regime. The man, Nicholas, named the center after his wife, whom he met in Belgium when he fled Uganda, and the two resettled in Lira, where they work with disabled children, war-affected children, child mothers, and child soldiers.

As we walked to his charity along a dirt road where men offered bicycle rides around Lira for a low cost, we stopped in a small, tidy market full of vendors selling red groundnuts, cassava and mangos. Zack bought some groundnuts for his Ugandan “mom” in Lira, a friend he made during his first trip up there. We then stop at a vendor who sold a cheap meal of fried dough; called chapatti, eggs, and tomato slices, wrapped together to create what is called a “Rolex.” Not a watch, but a cheap, fattening dish, delicious because it’s a combination of fried dough and a lot of oil.

We then passed a large field full of homeless children, skinny and wearing ripped t-shirts and pants, who were kneeling near a tree, sniffing plastic glue containers for a high.  The field was mostly empty, but at the end there was a water pipe, where children came to fetch water and carry it back to their homes in large plastic containers.  Although I was used to seeing extreme forms of poverty in Kampala, which has been stripped of any semblance of social welfare from years of economic structural adjustment, I wasn’t used to seeing overt drug use by kids, who were looking for a moment of relief from a cheap high.  I wondered if any of the kids had been abducted by the LRA, or if they were suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.  One thing was for sure, though, they had all been impacted by the war.

We visited the charity where Zack had worked, a rehabilitation center for disabled and war-affected children, and then went to a nearby school that had been created for former child soldiers.  The school looked like other high schools in Uganda, but a little nicer.  It wasn’t as crowded as other schools, and the facilities looked clean and new, though modest.  On a wall surrounding the school, the children had painted a mural of how they saw themselves as adults, and what they wanted their lives to be like.  Pictures of smiling lawyers, judges, and nurses decorated the wall.  Some of the children, of course, were already young adults in their twenties, trying to finally go to school after spending so many years abducted in the bush.

Zack had been to the school frequently to organize his conference, and he explained the kind of reporting I was interested in doing to the school’s headmaster.  The school was called Rachele, named after an episode in 1996 when 139 girls from a girl’s boarding school in northern Uganda were kidnapped by the LRA.  The college’s vice president, Sister Rachele Fassera, an Italian nun, offered her life to the LRA in exchange for the girls’ release.  The LRA decided to spare Rachele and gave her 109 of the abducted girls, but kept 30 of them hostage.  Five of the girls died in captivity, and 21 eventually escaped.  The Rachele School was set up, coincidentally, by the editor in chief at the newspaper I worked for, a Belgian journalist who wrote a book about the incident, called the Aboke Girls.   Sales from the book, and my editor’s fundraising, helped her put thousands of former child soldiers through school.

That day, visiting both the rehabilitation center and Rachele, I interviewed about ten children for my newspaper, and more than half had been abducted by the LRA.  The children at Rachele were very open in talking about their experiences with me, and used to having international visitors come to the school.  I interviewed a former child soldier named Bunny, who gave me his e-mail address so we could stay in touch, told me about his attempts to reconcile his former life with his current life.

The LRA had broken into Bunny’s home when he was a child, stolen his family’s few possessions, and abducted him and his brothers.  In order to be initiated into the LRA, they were whipped and beaten extensively, and forced to travel on foot for hundreds of miles to attend the LRA’S military training camps in Congo, Uganda, and Sudan.  Bunny and his brothers eventually escaped, but Bunny never prepared himself emotionally to run into the soldier who had kidnapped him.

Bunny had been in Lira when he saw the kidnapper, a young adult in his twenties. All the memories of his capture came rushing back.  I thought he would tell me then that it had been traumatizing for him to see his former captor, or that the encounter gave him nightmares.  But he didn’t.  Instead, Bunny told me that he went up to his former captor, and told him he was glad that he had escaped.  His captor, like him, was not an enemy—he was another child who had once been kidnapped and forced to serve under the LRA.  Seeing his captor in town, watching him attempt to build a life again in Lira as well, was a turning point for Bunny, who still remembered each detail of his capture vividly.

When I would go back to Kampala, Bunny’s story resonated with me, as did the story of a boarding school matron named Margaret.  Born and raised in Lira, she now worked for a rehabilitation center.  Like most northern Ugandans, she loathed the LRA and the Ugandan government in equal measure.  Both had been attacking the people in towns like Lira for two decades, each accusing them of collaborating with the other side.  But to Margaret, neither the LRA nor the Ugandan army was the largest threat to her children’s safety.  What Margaret feared was malaria.  A mother of ten, she had lost her four-year-old daughter many years ago to the disease.

We had sat in a small office room at the rehabilitation center, which had a map of Uganda neatly taped to the wall, and two large benches for guests to sit on.  Initially, Zack had had to convince her that I was not, well, a spy.

“She really doesn’t like me,” Zack whispered before he introduced me to her.  He also told me that the charity had basically run out of money three months before after Christopher, the founder of the center, got in a fight with their donors, and Margaret hadn’t been paid in three months.  Christopher and his wife had just opened a bar in Lira, planning to fund their operations by selling drinks to charity workers and farmers in the small town.  Donors be damned.

Margaret didn’t like me at first, either.  She scowled when she saw us, and reminded Zack that she hadn’t been paid by Christopher in months.  Zack responded sympathetically, then asked if I could interview her for a story I was writing about the recovery of northern Uganda, and the impact that the war had had on children.   A journalist.  Margaret gave me a disgusted looked after seeing that I had been stupid enough to wear my New Vision t-shirt around Lira—why not just wear a gigantic sign, that says, I’m a spy? After all, New Vision was partly owned by the government.  But she gave in, and told me what it was like to live in LRA in the 1980s and 1990s, when your children might be abducted, and you could never travel at night.

As we talked, Margaret told me that she hated the DDT spraying, and didn’t want them to spray her home.  She was worried that it was dangerous, or that the government knew it was dangerous and did not care.  She didn’t understand why the UN, after two decades, couldn’t round up the LRA, which consisted of about two thousand soldiers, most of them abducted children.

Even though she was against the DDT spraying, Margaret told me in detail about how the disease had killed her daughter, and how her other daughter suffered from a case of cerebral malaria, which didn’t kill her but left her physically and mentally retarded.  She blamed herself for the impact malaria had on her family, for not having enough money at the time to get treatment for her children, and told me she always kept malaria drugs in her home now, just in case.

“I feared that disease for so, so long,” she told me.  However, the DDT frightened her just as much, and she was afraid the chemical would hurt the children she still had.
I did interviews with Ugandans throughout the weekend about the effect the war had had on them, and how those who had been abducted by the LRA had attempted to rebuild their lives.  On Sunday, I caught a bus back to Kampala, and wondered what stories the other passengers carried quietly with them.  Were they like Bunny, making peace with their escape, as well as their captors? Or Margaret, afraid that the government would poison the Ugandans who had survived the decades of war?

I stayed in Uganda for a few more weeks, working as a reporter, but none of the stories compared to those that I encountered in northern Uganda.  I wondered if Margaret had ever been paid, and thought about her daughter, wasting away in Margaret’s village, unable to do basic activities at the local primary school.  The twenty mosquito bites that I had picked up in Lira faded into my skin, and I never developed a fever or chills.  I hadn’t been taking prophylactics, but I was lucky.  The mosquitoes that bit me were malaria-free.

Soon, it was time for me to head back to New York and finish a master’s degree in journalism that I had started at the City University of New York in Times Square.  I came back in August, and moved to a small room in Queens while I finished my degree.  Zack eventually came back to the United States in November, but he felt unfocused, still thinking about what would happen to the child soldiers that attended the conference he organized.  The rebel government was unable to sign a peace agreement with the Ugandan government, but they didn’t begin attacking Uganda either.  News from Uganda in the international press was dwarfed by the conflict that began to explode in Congo, Uganda’s neighbor.

But at night, when I tried to imagine my future, I couldn’t see myself working at a paper or news website in the U.S.  I had started an internship with the Queens Tribune, a weekly paper in New York City, but I checked Ugandan news websites more frequently than I did my own paper.  Somehow, I knew, I had to get back North, and I didn’t care about the threat of malaria.  I had dodged the malaria bullet, and I could do it again.  I had to go back, and chase those stories in Uganda.  All I needed was a notepad and a good mosquito net.

You are going to die. Of the more than 8 million people now alive in New York City, all will be dead, eventually. That’s a lot of bodies:  44 million feet of cadaver when laid end to end, assuming average height. And in New York City, where space is always at a premium, there’s not enough earth to grant them all eternal rest.

Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn has interred almost 600,000 bodies in its 171 years of operation.  As its graves have filled, it has followed one of the tenets of good planning, build up, and developed large community mausoleums, which it markets on its website as “a choice once reserved for the wealthy, is now available to our families at prices comparable to that for in-ground burial.”

The price for in-ground burial has gone up, too.  A single, non-premium grave at Green-Wood now lists at $11,000.  The miscellaneous charges for burial, the foundation for the stone, having the funeral after 4 p.m. or on a Saturday will add an extra $2500 or so.  Gravestones, which the cemetery does not supply, cost anywhere from a few hundred to several thousand dollars, depending on the size and intricacy of the marker.

Richard Fishman, the director of the New York State Department of Cemeteries, said that the prices reflected more than supply and demand.  The cemeteries are heavily regulated non-profits and have to charge more as their capacity shrinks in order to keep themselves financially solvent in perpetuity.

“It costs $5 million a year to keep Green-Wood going as it does,” Fishman said.  “And it’s not as though those being served with that money can be charged.”

No, indeed.  So those now dying have to pay more for the upkeep of those who died before, just as those to die in the future will pay a premium for the upkeep of those now paying.  The similarities to a pyramid scheme are stark, though necessity rather than criminality is the source of the creativity.

While the department only has jurisdiction over non-denominational graveyards, those run by religious organizations have many of the same concerns.  St. Patrick’s Cathedral runs Mount Calvary Cemetery in Queens, the most populous cemetery in the city with over 3 million permanent residents.  They’re almost done, said Lyndon Roche, a spokesman for the diocese.  He said that St. Raymond’s, another Catholic cemetery in the Bronx, would have room for at least another 20 years.

“You look on either side of the Cross-Bronx, because St. Raymond’s is all around you, and there’s still plenty of space,” Roche said.

The nightmare scenario can be found in Ozone Park, at Bayside Acacia, a small Jewish necropolis.  The Upper West Side congregation, Shaare Zedek, doesn’t have enough money to pay for proper maintenance, and the cemetery has gone to seed.

Vines grow over tombs, headstones are toppled and broken, crypts and even coffins have been opened.  Calls to the Rabbi were not returned.

At Mount Olivet Cemetery, which has been pressed for space for a number of years, there haven’t been any issues of abandonment, nor have they dramatically increased their rates, nor are they completely full.  It’s just more of the same at Mount Olivet, said David Gigler, the superintendent.  They have been tearing up roads to make room for more graves and, like Green-Wood, has developed a large community mausoleum, which includes more and more niches for cremation urns.  Gigler said that there weren’t other reform options available.

“Maybe in 25 years, they’ll come up with something,” he said.  “But by then, I’ll be retired.”

In some crowded places around the world, they have come up with a broad array of somethings.  In Great Britain, where burial grounds are most often small, ancient churchyards, the government has permitted the reuse of graves that have been untended for more than 75 years.  The tiny nation-state of Singapore allows interment for 15 years, followed by mandatory exhumation and cremation.

Cremation is not allowed under Islamic law, which is why burials are still in demand, despite their impermanence.  The Italian Catholic Church, which had long opposed cremation as heretical, recently began allowing Mass for people whose remains were to be burned.  But cremation can be dangerous to the environment, as mercury from fillings is borne on the smoke.  So Sweden has permitted the use of a new method, promession, wherein the body is frozen in liquid nitrogen, shattered and then thawed, allowing the body’s water weight to evaporate and leaving a small amount of residue that can be safely recycled into the earth.

Will New York City allow these, or other new developments in the disposal of dead bodies like burying coffins upright?  Absolutely not, said Fishman, from the Department of Cemeteries.  He said there were plenty of cemeteries in Westchester County, Connecticut, New Jersey and Long Island that had room and land to expand.
As in life, so in death: when the city gets too crowded, move to the suburbs.