City Beats

 

Pablo Armijo looks intently at the nail.  He places it exactly where it needs to go and, taking care not to put his fingers in the way, hammers it into place.  Armijo is standing in a 2700 square-foot room that is about a third of the size of a neighborhood supermarket.  This is the future home of the Greene-Hill Food Co-op, a group of 500 that aims to prove the Fort Greene-Clinton Hill neighborhoods in Brooklyn with high quality, affordable  food.

The food co-op at 18 Putnam Ave , nestled between a warehouse and a gas station, is scheduled to open for business by mid-November, after a year of planning and about three months of construction.

“If you look around you will see great food but it is in restaurants that are too expensive for people to go to everyday and you will see affordable stuff but it really is not very good quality,” said Pablo Armijo, 30, the co-op’s co-chair of Building Design and Operations.  “We want to be bridge that gap and provide the best food at the right prices.”

When it opens, the co-op will begin by selling organic or locally grown meats, produce, dairy products and staples such as dried beans, spices, fair trade coffee and chocolate, flour, and breads.  Eventually, as the co-op grows larger, the store will offer fresh fish and specialty products.  Prices for co-op items are not yet official but the store will markup items only 10 percent from their wholesale price, said co-op President D.K. Holland.

The lack of groceries and other stores that provide high quality foods at prices locals can afford has been cited as problem in the Fort Greene-Clinton Hill area, according to Alfred Chiodo, 60, the Public Relations Director at the district office of City Council member Letitia James, who has been supportive of the co-op.

The co-op was inspired by Park Slope Food Co-op, which was founded in 1973 and has grown to 12,000 members.  While similar in many ways to its Park Slope sibling, the Greene Hill version will be different in two important ways: it is intended to fill a void in an underserved area and it will be a 100% working co-op where all members vote on decisions and must put in hours every month to shop at the store.

The Greene-Hill version was first imagined in 2008 but has grown exponentially in the last 12 months.  Membership has risen from just under 150 members in October 2010 to nearly  500 today.  Outreach chair Renee Renata Bergan, 37, said it costs $150 to become a member and, since all except a $25 administrative fee is refundable if a member chooses to leave, the co-op is gaining significant traction in the neighborhood.

“People in the community feel they can come by, walk in, ask us questions, and become part of this,” Bergan said.

The community’s reception to the co-op’s efforts has become increasingly positive.  Local residents cited the co-op’s open door policy and aggressive neighborhood recruitment as signs of inclusiveness.

“I think the new co-op will improve the food diversity in this community if they keep their prices low and continue recruiting lots of members from the area,” said Mark Hennegan, the owner of a local restaurant, Madiba.

Others in the Fort Greene-Clinton Hill area acknowledged that they were unaware of the co-op existence.  But, many said that if the co-op was recruiting new members and the fee was refundable, they would look into it.

“It seems like it would be good for the neighborhood,” said Wilhelmena Norman, 30, the branch office administrator of the Edward Jones Financial Services office nearby.  “This is a neighborhood in transition and new people are moving in who will be interested.”

“Goal!” The word echoes across the field as St. Joseph’s College men’s soccer team’s players gather around female star Shannon Rom, who has just scored the team’s first goal of the game.  It is Thursday September 29^th, 2011 and St. Josephs is playing rival Medgar Evers College on an old, neighborhood soccer field.  Rom is one of the team’s budding stars and her goal illustrates what makes the group unique: it is St. Joseph’s first year in NCAA Division III, the squad has six female players, and three of them are starters.

Read More At:

The Daily News

At St. Joseph’s Roman Catholic Church on Pacific Street in Prospect Heights, Sundays include not only prayer and worship, but, now, Mexican food.

On Sunday, Sept. 18, parishioners of St. Joseph’s began a weekly custom by selling traditional Mexican cuisine outside the church from 10 a.m. until 2 p.m. Painted bed-sheets on the north and south sides of the church announce the new initiative, which was started to raise money for the congregation’s observance of the feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe – a traditional Mexican feast day celebrated in the second week of December.

Dating back to the 16^th century, the feast day commemorates the Blessed Virgin Mary’s appearance outside Mexico City to a native peasant, Juan Diego, upon whose cloak her image later appeared.

Last year, for the first time, the church, held a celebration in its basement to observe the feast day. Approximately 300 people attended the donation-funded festival, replete with customary Mexican food, a mariachi band, and Mexican folk-dancing.

But some of the church’s Mexican parishioners approached the Rev. Jorge Ortiz-Garay, 40, a native of Mexico himself, about raising more money for this year’s feast, which the priest predicts will draw a much larger turnout – and require more funding.

Just a few years ago, the church struggled due to physical deterioration and dwindling Mass attendance.  But now St. Joseph’s congregation is growing as Mexicans from throughout Brooklyn and Queens occupy its pews and invite other immigrant families to join them.

Ortiz-Garay, who has served the parish since 2009, attracts most of the new worshipers.

The priest says he hopes that the weekly smorgasbord of tacos, flautas, guacamole, tamales, and other traditional Mexican foods will raise money for the feast in December and draw people to the day’s three Masses – the most crowded of which is said in Spanish. Another of Ortiz-Garay’s goals is to entice passersby of all faiths to eat and spend time interacting with his mostly Hispanic 300-person congregation.

“Everybody loves Mexican food. It’s cheap. It’s good,” he explained.

For the first week of cooking, four Mexican families volunteered to prepare two dishes each. They charged nominal prices – three tacos for $4 and two tortillas for $3, donating all proceeds to the church.

Their generosity raised more than $900 from approximately 200 patrons, said Ortiz-Garay.

In the coming weeks, about 20 families will contribute on a rotational schedule.

“Me and my wife and my children, we love to help,” said Martin Ramos, 40, a native of Puebla, Mexico, whose family cooked for the first sale and has attended St. Joseph’s since November 2010. “You donate whatever you got. You have to put your hand on your heart.”

The Ramos family prepared “pozole” – a soup made with corn and pork – as well as “horchata” – a traditional Mexican drink. They began cooking at their Jamaica, Queens home on Saturday night, and rose at 7 a.m. on Sunday to finish preparing the food and transport their dishes to Brooklyn.

They and the other volunteer families prepared enough food to bring home leftovers.

The following Sunday, however, a new group of families prepared less food, and nearly sold out by before the day’s last mass began at noon. As a result, the church netted about $600 in revenue.

Last week, revenue bounced up to $800, putting the three-week total at $2,300.

But even after December’s celebration is over, Ortiz-Garay is already planning to initiate a new campaign of volunteer cooking for next Spring. He wants to send the parish’s teens – mostly the children of immigrants – to Brazil in 2013 for World Youth Day, a biennial gathering of Catholic teens from across the world.

What would you do if you were called to serve?

Each evening for two weeks, Lori Sikorski, 52, a Brooklyn artist, has asked that question of pedestrians on Dean Street in Prospect Heights.

She has invited them to don U.S. Army combat gear, have their pictures taken, and write their thoughts on a strip of translucent paper beneath their Polaroid photos, which then become part of an ever-growing collage on the exhibit’s walls.

Sikorski conducts her interactive exhibit, “Drawing Attention,” out of The Soapbox Gallery, an open-to-the-street venue, created by sculptor Jimmy Greenfield out of his studio, for other artists to display work and champion causes to the public.

Sikorski, who teaches anatomy drawing at Pratt Insitutue, said she wants to create art that presents a more complete image of American sacrifice.

“9/11 is history. The war right now, 10 years later [after 9/11], is very abstract, very far away,” she said. “And while it is tremendously important to remember those who died on 9/11, it’s equally, if not more, important to remember those for whom this is a continuing event – a present tense event.”

On 9/11, Sikorski, who then worked as a freelance nurse to support herself through graduate school, spent the day flushing firemen’s eyes at Stuyvesant High School on the lower east side of Manhattan. Seventeen months later, she immunized soldiers preparing for deployment to Iraq.

These experiences inspired her current exhibit, with its emphasis on the “individual, the soldier, our fellow citizens,” rather than on statistics or grand strategy.

“In the end, the common denominator that cannot be eliminated from this equation – and is actually the base number of the equation – is the soldier,” she said. “I felt they were being lost in a very large picture.”

Thus far, her participants have come from every station of life and have expressed the full spectrum of responses.

“If I were called to serve, I would not,” wrote one man whose long-grey beard covered the camouflage field-jacket that Sikorski provided. “I would be a consciensious [sic] objector. I will not serve, fight, kill or die for corporate profits and the industrial military complex.”

An 18 year-old Marine recruit recently graduated from Prospect Heights High School scrawled had a different perspective: “I look awesome and I’m an awesome soldier. Plus, I’m a future Marine, too.”

Some who tried on the $80 Kevlar helmets and other military accouterments said they would fear service, while others wrote they hoped they would conduct themselves with courage and honor.

Each response reaffirms the original intent of Greenfield, 56, who created the Soapbox Gallery four years ago “to challenge people to make pieces about the world.”

Greenfield allots the space to artists for two-week intervals at no cost.

“I’m happy to show whatever just to support the muse of art,” Greenfield said. “The muse needs to be fed. Good and bad, it needs to be fed.”

And Sikorski’s project fulfills that criterion. Good or bad, she welcomes any opinion on her wall, all in the name of dialogue.

“If I could put each one of us for a minute in the soldiers’ shoes, to really go into the moment and see, ‘What would it be like if I were a soldier?’,” she said, “then maybe we can bring it back to them.”

 

After 67 shootings and three killings in New York City within 72 hours on Labor Day weekend, community and police organized a forum in East Flatbush, Brooklyn on Sept. 20 to reduce local crime. Four of the shootings and one of the fatalities took place in Flatbush and many others were in surrounding areas but community residents seemed more concerned about police behavior than about the violence in their midst.

“They should come around to the blocks and talk to people,” Janet Bagot, a retired school counselor who attended the forum, said the day after in a telephone interview. “There is no serious trust. We don’t trust them because we don’t see them a lot and we don’t know them.”

Council Member Mathieu Eugene organized the meeting at Parkside Academy Middle School’s auditorium and invited panelists including high-ranking police officers, members of the clergy, and one state senator.

Council Member Latitia James was one of the first to speak from the panel. Her message was brief: In order to discourage violence and make more arrests, she said, community members need to “snitch on one another.”

This message, although simple, became complicated when the floor was given to residents who were less concerned with climbing crime rates than with police misconduct and negligence.

Colin Moore, a private attorney and senior editor at the Caribbean American Weekly newspaper, said search and seizure procedures are particularly concerning.

“It’s a site that you see almost on a nightly basis, a police officer conducting a search and seizure on a young black man,” said Moore. “Obviously these encounters must create a lot of tension in the community.”

The same Labor Day weekend that the 67 shootings took place, a well-liked council member, Jumaane Williams, was arrested for crossing a police barrier at the West Indian Day Parade, leading to questions about racial profiling within the central Brooklyn precincts. The Williams arrest was brought up several times throughout the meeting as an example of police misconduct. The police representatives apologized to the crowd and assured them that they had filed an internal investigation.

Bagot, the retired school counselor, said that crime wasn’t the real problem. Lack of programs that keep children off the streets is the real issue, she said.

“I do not know that it’s a serious issue in this community,” Bagot said “I’m not saying that it should not be addressed, but 15 years ago, young people were going around to stores and sticking people up.”

The list of crime statistics given by all three precincts confirmed Bagot’s belief that crime was not a new issue. Deputy Chief Inspector Steve Bonano, who manages all three precincts, said homicide rates this year were three percent lower than last year.

But those numbers made no difference to one woman who told Captain Schiff that when her son was robbed after school, she reported the incident twice but officers refused to file the report. The woman did not identify herself at the meeting, but said that her son, who is in elementary school, no longer goes outside after dark and refuses to take out the trash. In response, Schiff offered to conduct a personal investigation.

Underscoring some of the concerns of the residents, as well as that of the police, three days after the meeting police shot and gravely wounded a 30-year-old man, Jerry Benoit. Police said Benoit shot first.