“You have put our backs to the wall,” said Ethel Walsh. “We are living on fixed incomes that don’t go up.” Walsh has been retired for nearly 12 years. Reliant on Social Security benefits, she says the increase will take even more money out of her purse. Housing expenses increase by an average of 3 percent every year. The proposed increase in water rates would add much more to that rate.

With nothing but glasses of cool clear New York City drinking water as a distraction, Mehul Patel and Alan Moss listened intently and took notes. Both were appointed as voting members of the Water Board, and along with four other members, they will decide whether the increase will be implemented by the Department of Environmental Protection. The Water Board sets the water and sewer rates for the city.

Walsh says her bill has gone up every year, so much so that she doesn’t even look at it anymore. Her husband, James, refused to attend Thursday night. “He says this is a done deal,” Walsh said. Walsh thinks her testimony won’t really change the panelists minds, still she wanted to make sure the Water Board understood her anger. “Shame on you, shame on, shame on you,” Walsh shouted, jabbing her pointed finger at the panel.

Voting members of the water board, Mehul Patel and Alan Moss listen to residents complaints against the proposed water rate increase(Lynsey Chutel/The Bronx Ink)

“You are the group of guys who do the voting,” Tony Cannata said. “I’m asking you to really listen, to consider what people said.” As president of the Waterbury-La Sale Community Association, Cannata attended an earlier hearing in April and was skeptical that the voting members would pay attention to community needs.

Michael Vivian waved his bill at the panel. He received it on the same day he received the notice of the public hearing. With a water bill of $80.86 for his 47.32 cubic-foot water consumption, the increase will make his bill just under $90 a month in 2011.

Water rates are already high in the Bronx because homes are larger in the borough, according to the University Neighborhood Housing Program, a non-profit affiliated with Fordham University. The group surveyed 919 housing units in the mainland borough and found that the average water bill was $934.20 per unit per year. The average water bill in the city was just over $700 annually.

Johanna Kletter, financial director of the housing program, reminded the panelists that she had submitted alternative strategies to the DEP, with little feedback. “Two years ago we released a study calling for reform and asking the important question: Can NYC achieve affordable water rates, promote conservation and control capital costs” Kletter said at the hearing. “No, no, no has been the answer to this question for far too long.”

In a press release the Department of Environmental Protection said that the 12.9 percent increase was an improvement on the 14.3 percent increase that was projected in 2009. “Clearly it is hard on customers to pay more, especially during tough economic times,”  Cas Holloway, commissioner of environmental protection, said in the press release that first announced the proposed increase. “Still, we must continue to fund critical projects that protect our drinking water and effectively treat the 1.3 billion gallons of wastewater that New Yorkers produce every day. New York City’s water is safe, healthy and high in quality. Keeping it that way requires substantial investments.”

The DEP intends to complete three plants by 2011. The Croton Filtration Plant will cost households $33 a year, the Ultraviolet Disinfection Plant $18 a year and the Newtown Creek Treatment Plant $48 a year. As of 2011, these plants and other federally mandated investments, will account for $177 of the household water bill every year.

But many in the audience felt that the DEP was using the rate increases to raise its revenue. “Bluntly, water rates are now just one more revenue stream for the city’s general budget,” Frank Vernuccio Jr. said. “The board itself admits to a $194 million straight transfer of funds to the general city budget.”

Vernuccio argued that New York City had seen harsher economic climates and that a water rate increase was unnecessary because residents had already tightened their belts to save money. New Yorkers had decreased their daily water consumption from 200 gallons per capita in the 1990s to 155 gallons in 2001, Vernuccio said. Currently, he said, New Yorkers consume four gallons less than the national average. “New Yorkers have done all that was asked of them,” Vernuccio said amid applause from the audience.

This story was corrected to address the following errors and clarifications:
Cas Calloway is the commissioner of environmental protection, not the executive director. A water bill of  $80.86 would be about $90 with a 12.9 percent increase;  and the Water Board sets the water and sewer rates for the city.

“I cry, I pray, but it’s tough,” Addy said. Along with her business partner, Addy opened the store, less than a block away from the intersection of White Plains Avenue and 233rd Street, almost three years ago. She said her rent began at $2,080 and has increased to $2, 165. Hit hard by the economic recession, her business has suffered, and she has yet to record any gains from the store. In the last few weeks she said she has tried to negotiate, but  her landlord, has taken her to court instead.

“I called him, I pleaded with him to come down a little bit,” Addy said. “I said to him, ‘It’s not your fault nobody knew the economy would be like this.’ ” She said her debt to her landlord has climbed to more than $8,000, including costs of maintenance and taxes, which are divided among the five other store owners in this commercial building.

The landlord, Jeffrey Cohen, declined to comment. “That’s between myself and my tenant,” he said when asked about rent disputes with Addy.

Last week, City Councilman Robert Jackson introduced the Small Business Survival Bill, which if passed, would  give business owners like Addy the right of arbitration to more effectively negotiate their leases.

“Small businesses right now have no say whatsoever in the terms of their lease, so when the lease term comes up, the landlord has total say,” said Robert Bieder, chairperson of the Bronx Merchants Coalition and a member of the Coalition of Small Businesses. “Simply put:  It is the right to arbitration in the commercial lease renewal process,” Bieder said of the bill’s potential power.

Addy said she wished there had been such a program in place when she signed her five-year lease. Instead, she said, she took the word of her landlord, who ran the shop before her, and convinced her that she would be making a profit that would cover her expenses. With four rows of shelves cramped into just about 120 square feet, the narrow store stocks everything  from underwear to detergent and even traditional clothes from Addy’s native Ghana.

Addy said she had taken out more than $50,000 in loans to keep her business afloat. She works night shifts as a hospital nurse technician so that she can pay her debts.  “My pay was five hundred and forty-something dollars, ” she said of her most recent paycheck. “I took $500 to pay for the merchandise. I don’t have money in the bank. It’s about time we were helped, we put money into this economy.”

Cohen also declined to give his opinion on the new bill or what it might mean for his commercial properties.

Local activists are  already trying to mobilize small businesses to gather enough support for the bill. But this is not the first time the bill has been up for debate.  Last year, District 7 Councilman Robert Jackson brought it to the floor. By the end of  the City Council cycle in December, however, the bill had not been voted on and withered away in the political process.

New York City Council Speaker Christine Quinn argued that she could not support a bill that she felt was fundamentally illegal. Last year, Quinn said that forcing landlords to binding arbitration would encroach on their property rights, according to the Downtown Express. At the Bronx Chamber of Commerce’s monthly luncheon in early April, Quinn’s position had not changed. “I can’t say I’ll pass a bill that so many of our staff and our highest lawyers say cannot be legal,” Quinn said. Instead, Quinn said that the council was looking into alternative legislation to protect small businesses in the city.

Jackson said he believed that opposition from the mayor’s office and pressure from the real estate lobby prevented the bill from being passed last year, even though 34 out of 51 council members  supported the bill. “In the last cycle, when push came to shove, there were not enough votes to move it,” said Jackson. “There [was] a lot of pressures put on a lot of people.” This time Jackson intends to build support “from the ground up.”

Steve Null, a former business owner and activist for the Small Business Survival Bill, said the stalling was political. “Our attorney thinks it’s a red herring,” Null said. “It was a last-second move to stop the bill.”

Null said his attorneys had provided Speaker Quinn’s office with the necessary documentation to prove the legality of the bill. He said his calls for a forum to assess legal issues surrounding the measure were ignored.  “They stopped the bill because she does not want to regulate the landlords,” he said.

Some sources alleged that Speaker Quinn may have rejected the bill because it is in her own political benefit to maintain the real estate lobby of landlords. Speaker Quinn’s office responded to this  by reiterating her December 2009 position. “Council Member Jackson’s legislation before the council, while well intentioned, is not within the council’s power,”  Quinn’s office said in a written statement. The statement suggested alternative legislation that would create a unit within the City’s Small Business Services that would assist in lease negotiation.

In an effort to bring attention to the need for such a bill, the U.S.A Latin Chamber of Commerce surveyed 937 Latino-owned businesses in New York City from November 2008 to January 2009. More than half of all businesses surveyed, both professional services, such as attorney and accounting offices, and smaller “mom and pop stores,”  like corner bodegas and hardware stores, complained that their businesses ran the risk of closing because of high rents and operating costs.

Almost three quarters of the small business owners in the survey said they would have to cut back their workers’ hours because renting their storefronts was too expensive.

“The mom and pop stores are at the heart of those communities; they support your Little Leagues, they support your church groups,” said Bieder, who owns Westchester Plumbing Supply with his two younger brothers. “We need to help them stay in business. There are tenants that have been here for 40 or 50 years,” Bieder said. “Now there is a vacancy problem due to lease negotiations. We’re losing about 8,000 a year.”

For now Addy is determined to keep her store open. “It has become a burden on us, but we are going to pay him for five years,” she said.

Bollella, the owner of Globus Cork, a flooring factory in the South Bronx, is cork’s biggest booster, and quick to recite a litany of its uses, from sandals to the space shuttle – it’s used as a heat shield in the rocket boosters, according to NASA. It’s also found in gaskets, baseball cores, platform shoes, shuttlecocks and bedding for pet lizards.

Seated on a stool, with long black hair, reading glasses, and a long-sleeve T-shirt, the heavyset 58-year-old entrepreneur looks more like an aging drummer than the cork impresario who heads “the premier U.S. manufacturer of colored cork tiles,” as his website proclaims. He sells cork in 38 colors, and judging by the paint cans strewn across his desk, is concocting more.

Bollella laid out his vision while burning through cigarettes wrapped with a cork-colored filter. As Bollella sees it, cork’s time has come.

Fifteen years ago, Ken Bollella wondered, why does cork tiling only come in beige? Bollella, who now heads a cork painting factory, says, "Nobody's ever done what I do." (Sam Fellman/The Bronx Ink)

Cork, in his estimation, may be the perfect material: light, durable, quiet under foot, resistant to insects and fire, good insulation, and easy on the feet. Bollella, who suffers from severe sciatica, said he can stand on it for hours. And it’s environmentally sustainable.

Cork comes from the bark of cork oak trees grown predominantly in Spain and Portugal. Wine corks are punched out of the bark, with the excess processed into cork sheets. Bollella once made a pilgrimage to a Portuguese forest and watched lumberjacks shear off the bark with axes. Afterward, he touched one of the skinned trees.

“It feels like elephant skin – amazing,” he said with a touch of reverence in his thick Bronxese.

Everything can be corked. Take the yoga mat – wouldn’t that be better with cork? Bollella rummaged behind some boxes and pulled out a large spool, spun with thin cork, the raw material for Korq Yoga and Pilates Mats, based in Brooklyn.

Music, not cork, was Bollella’s original muse. After growing up in Washington Heights, Bollella studied liberal arts at Manhattan Community College, but his main focus was rock guitar. When a rock career didn’t pan out after the better part of a decade, he learned carpentry – “Something had to pay the bills; rock ‘n’ roll wasn’t,” he said – and eventually wound up in flooring.

His cork odyssey began in 1995, when he owned a flooring shop in Manhattan, which sold cork tiles – brown, square, straight-edged and to his mind, boring. So he started dabbling with colors and designs in his apartment. By 2001, when he closed his store, he was ready to launch a colored-cork factory.

To drum up business for his launch, he fixed up his Manhattan apartment with a cork floor of brown mahogany (“Scotchwood,” as he named it) tiles in a herringbone layout, and hosted a wine and cheese party.

“I even got dressed in a suit. I hate suits,” Bollella said. Then the guests began to arrive. Many couldn’t believe what they were seeing.

“People would stare at the floor and say, ‘That’s not cork!’” Bollella said. “Trust me, it’s cork,” he would reply.

At first, no one recognized colored cork. Especially not the competition. At that point, big manufacturers like the Portuguese company Amorim still sold cork tiles exclusively au naturel with a wax finish; in appearance, their products seemed unchanged since cork flooring was invented more than a century ago. So when Bollella’s colored tile hit the market in 2001, it baffled his competitors, who either saw him as a Young Turk or a small-time kook. They even mocked the name of his company – Globus, a combination of the words global and U.S., which Bollella dreamed up over a vodka martini.

“Nobody’s ever done what I do,” Bollella mused for a second, while recalling those heady days. “In the beginning, it’s like I’m sitting on top of a goldmine, without a pick or a shovel.”

Globus Cork opened in 2001, when he rented a large basement on East 136th Street in the Bronx, hired a salesperson, and then set to work. Bollella became a one-man cork tile assembly line, placing orders for processed cork from Portugal, then sawing, painting and shipping it to designers and home owners. He remembers working 105-hour weeks. To avoid the trek back to Manhattan on the really late nights, he’d set up an air mattress on the finishing counter – the floor was always off-limits, he explained, because of all the rats.

Those sacrifices are paying off as his company’s sales rise year after year. Even in 2009, amid a deep downturn in new construction and remodeling, Bollella said his sales grew by 12 percent. He sells his tiles for an average of $7.25 per square foot and expects to sell more than 250,000 square feet this year. Sales are on target so far, he said.

Most of his recent business is institutional. The government of Barbados bought 18,000 square feet of mahogany tiles for a courthouse and the housing authority in Little Rock, Arkansas is remodeling the hallways of a 12-story apartment building with tile, courtesy of stimulus money. While he’s processing the Arkansas order, Bollella is trying to win a contract to floor three galleries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. But after each sample he’s sent, the museum has replied they want something “grayer.”

Globus Cork has grown over the past three years to occupy large swaths of three buildings. A recent tour of his mostly subterranean empire began at East 136th Street and ended at the loading dock on East 137th Street, spanning an entire block. His company now has three salespeople – one based in Missouri – and a production team of seven. That frees Bollella for chain-smoking and big thinking.

Haiti is his latest idea. After the devastating earthquake in January, the country needs to rebuild everything from government palaces to countless homes, requiring acres upon acres of new flooring. Bollella is avidly following the reconstruction effort, and pointed out that termites are a huge problem in the Caribbean. Of course, he added, “They don’t eat cork.”

Part of his success comes from seeing every situation or exchange as a possibility to push cork. When firefighters, heavy boots on and all, stepped into his cork-tiled office recently on a fire inspection, he asked them how the floor felt. Good, they replied.

Before the firefighters left, Bollella asked them a question that he’d long wondered about, “What’s the worst type of floor?”

One of the firefighters replied, “‘Vinyl – that stuff is nasty,’” Bollella recalled.

Bollella is now designing a new flooring scheme – red tiles with their ladder number inset in marigold – to retile their burnt kitchen floor.

From his vantage point, Bollella sees a flooring arms race mounting around the world. The latest threat is China, namely its bamboo – another environmentally friendly flooring material. Over the last few years, the bamboo trust has spent so much on advertising that “people know more about bamboo than cork,” Bollella said.

His epiphany came a few years ago, while watching the scene from “The Godfather” when the dons of the five warring families gather to air their grievances and leave resolved to bury the hatchet. That is exactly what the corkmongers need to get past all the “my cork is better than yours” infighting, he realized.

So Bollella founded the North American Cork Association three months ago. Although no other companies have contributed to the non-profit yet, Bollella has big plans: cork kiosks in bus stops, billboards, mention in a TV show like “Flip This House,” and ads “just to get people thinking about cork,” he said.

Already, Bollella has sold cork to clients in Canada, Hong Kong, Macau, the United Kingdom, Romania and Australia, where he hopes to open a factory in a few years – to “feed the Japanese market,” he said. So even with renewed competition and a slow economy, Bollella sees cork’s future as bright.

“It’s a perfect time for me. People are a little choosy and green isn’t going to go away,” he said.

“You can’t get greener than [expletive] cork.”

Thousands of workers and community activists marched to Wall Street on Thursday, bringing Main Street’s anger with bank bailouts to the doorstep of the country’s financial industry.

“We’re hoping to show that Americans are angry at the way the financial industry has abused its power,” said Jordan Estevao, an organizer for the National People’s Action network in an interview after the rally. People who oppose regulation of the banking industry, he said, “are on the wrong side of the fight.”

Estevao estimated they exceeded their goal of 5,000 people for the afternoon’s event. Protestors lined both sides of Broadway and some of the side streets, stretching from Chambers Street to City Hall.

One of the protestors, Eugene Hammond, 65, a resident of the Bronx, said he came out to express disgust after seeing the boarded up stores and scores of people out of work in the neighborhood while big banks got billions in bailout money.

“Working people have been screwed over enormously,” said Hammond, a retired government employee. “People have lost jobs, houses, futures.”

The Showdown on Wall Street was a joint effort of the NPA and union the AFL-CIO. The NPA brings together 25 community organizations from 16 states and has been organizing rallies against banks all over the country, most recently a protest by over 400 people in Kansas City.

On Thursday, many of the protestors came from New York City and upstate New York, and others from surrounding states, such as Connecticut, Massachusetts and Wyoming. A number also came from Brooklyn and the Bronx, linked to organizations such as Brooklyn Congregations United, the Northwest Bronx Community and Clergy Coalition and Make the Road, as well as local unions and public schools. Members of the Brooklyn-based mock protests group Billionaires for Wealthcare were also in attendance in fake pearls and suits.

The protestors convened in the late afternoon for speeches by religious leaders, union officials and ordinary people affected by banking practices and foreclosures.

“The poor person is poor because the rich person is rich,” said Rabbi Ellen Lippman, of Cholot Elaiyanu synagogue in Brooklyn. “I see those who have been seeking work for months.”

The loudest cheers were reserved for AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka, who led the crowd in a chant challenging bankers to “fix the mess that you made.”

After the speeches, and just in time for the five o’clock rush hour in the Financial District, the protestors made their way down Broadway towards Wall Street. They filled the barricaded streets for blocks, issuing calls for “real jobs now.” Workers in suits emerged the Chase Bank building, but brushed past the crowd with eyes averted. Other passersby stopped to give the protestors the thumbs up sign.

“We’re spending billions for nothing,” said another protestor, Justyn Brown, 29, an Iraq war veteran who lives in Brooklyn. “Obama should be spending the money he’s spending on the war on veterans. No one is taking care of their well-being.”

Another veteran agreed, “Bank bailouts are like leaving the fox in charge of the henhouse,” said William J. Gilson, 74, because we’re giving them the money to make the same mistakes again.

Many echoed his calls for more regulation, citing the financial regulation bill currently before Congress.

“We’re sick of greed,” said Buzz Roddy, 50, a resident of the Bronx and member of the Actors’ Equity union. “[Greed] has become institutional in America. It’s time for the government to step up and regulate the way things are.”

The next march will take place in Washington in May.. Estevao calls it the “showdown on K. Street.”

“We want to show it’s about people,” he said, “Not fat cat lobbyists.”

Morton is one of thousands of New Yorkers who are at risk of losing their homes since the city announced, late in 2009, that it would terminate its Section 8 voucher program, a federal assistance program for low-income families that subsidizes housing in the private market. On Thursday, she was one of a handful of women with similar stories, taking their plight to a public hearing with New York Senators Daniel Squadron, Pedro Espada and Tom Duane. Thursday was the third hearing since the vouchers termination was announced, but the first to involve state officials.

“My rent is $900 a month and my social security is $873,” Morton said, barely holding her tears.

Had the vouchers program not been canceled, she would have had to pay $241 and the rest would have been subsidized by the state. Though Medicaid and food stamps cover many of her other expenses, Morton said she can’t make ends meet. She went to the hearing wearing an “I Love The Bronx” T-shirt, accompanied by her elderly mother and Legal Aid lawyer.

Lachonnz Morton does not want to leave the South Bronx, her home for the past 33 years. (Speri/Bronx Ink)

“My rent is more than my check, what am I supposed to do?” Morton told the legislators.

Morton said she was forced to quit her job in a nursing home for health reasons. She spent years waiting for her Section 8 applications to be approved then years fighting a legal battle against her landlord, who she said refused to take the vouchers even though the law mandates it.

Already $7,000 in debt on her rent, Morton had finally won her battle with her landlord when on December 30, 2009, she received a letter from the New York City Housing Authority notifying her that money had run out and the vouchers she held in her hands were no longer valid. If the program were to start again, she could reapply, she was told.

Morton accumulated debt in the years she spent applying for the vouchers and then trying to convince her landlord to take them. She says her landlord wants her out because he could earn much more from the rent-controlled apartment if she moved out.

“I’m not denying that I owe, I just don’t have it,” she said, adding that all her savings won’t amount to more than $1,500. The vouchers would have helped turn things around, she said.  Morton is still trying to grasp the bitter irony of her situation having lost a hard-fought battle at the end.

“Do you know how long it took me?” she said.

Some 2,589 families who already held vouchers were immediately affected and many of them are at risk of joining the lines of New Yorkers without a home, speakers said.

“I know a girl in the Bronx who had just moved into an apartment and immediately had to move out,” Morton added.

More than  8,000 more families who would have been eligible for the vouchers could also lose out, as the New York City Housing Authority announced it is not processing any new applications. The vouchers were especially aimed at  helping the elderly and the disabled, and they were often the only opportunity for women victims of domestic violence to move out of abusive homes.

The state senators were sympathetic to the tenants, calling the termination of the vouchers an unacceptable shortcoming by government officials.

“The fiscal crisis is not a reason to fail people,” said Bronx-raised Senator Espada.

New York Senator Pedro Espada (right) listened to testimony and called for "creative solutions" to the housing crisis. (Speri/Bronx Ink)

The senators questioned representatives of the state Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance (OTDA) and  criticized them for what they said was a slow and inefficient response to the fiscal crisis. However, OTDA officials pointed to the city as holding the  ultimate responsibility for the outcome.

“Every time we lose a housing program it’s a struggle for all of us,” OTDA Deputy Commissioner Russell Sykes said, admitting to some shortcomings on the part of his office but generally eluding questions.

“I have no idea if you care or not, all I know is what you haven’t done,” Squadron responded, calling the OTDA “evasive” in its responses and stressing that the hearing was not meant to be a stage for finger pointing between agencies but to try and work together to find a solution.

“Your government has made a promise to you and then it has taken it away,” Squadron then told the women who had shared their stories. “We will do all we can to make good on that promise.”

The program is currently $46 million short, though some suggest that resources could be more efficiently reallocated from other housing programs.

“This is not acceptable in the richest state, in the richest country in the world,” said Judith Goldiner of the Legal Aid Society, who spoke at the hearing and advised on a number of possible solutions.

Goldiner also criticized the New York City Housing Authority for its failure to intervene in the issue and invited the present elected officials to exercise their leverage at the city level.

Morton says that without Legal Aid and her family’s support, she would have been homeless. She remains skeptical as no specific promises came from the meeting.

“They are talking a good game, but I need answers,” Morton said. “They are saying they are sorry but that’s not solving my problem.”

Morton said she lives  in fear of being evicted. Though she said her family is supportive, she doesn’t want to impose on her daughter, who is married with a child.

“I’m scared to go anywhere else, this is all I know,” she says of the place she has called home for two thirds of her life. “I’m just waiting for that knock on my door.”

On April 2, U-Haul released its 2009 report showing that 17 percent more rental trucks had been turned in than checked out at the 20 U-Haul centers in the Bronx — far surpassing the rest of the nation’s cities.  Demographers responded with disbelief.

“It’s completely crazy,” said Andrew A. Beveridge, a sociologist at Queens College. “There’s no way the Bronx is going to be a high-growth area.”

U-Haul has rescinded its April 2 report that said the Bronx was America's fastest growing city. (AP Photo/Charlie Neibergal, file)

After the Ink requested Bronx-specific data on Monday, U-Haul realized its official report was incorrect. The new information shows, instead, that a staggering 20.8 percent more rental trucks left the Bronx than entered it, most often bound for Brooklyn, Queens and Philadelphia, and up from 14.5 percent the year before.

This brought the U-Haul trend report more in line with the U.S. Census Bureau, which estimated that 13,596 more people moved out of the Bronx than moved in from July 2008 to July 2009.

Just like that, the Bronx unceremoniously plunged off U-Haul’s top 25 list while Manhattan—with only three U-Haul centers—leapt up to third place.

So what is America’s new growth capital? Santa Monica, Calif.

Bronx residents lined up outside a Workforce 1 job center in February. (Zabaneh/Bronx Ink)

Story by Shreeya Sinha, Lynsey Chutel and Sunil Joshi

While the national jobs figure for March indicated that the country is on the path to economic recovery, the employment picture in the Bronx was not so sanguine. Unemployment in the borough remains several points above the national average, and thousands of residents are still unable to find work.

For more coverage of Bronx job hunters, click here.

Above the bustling business hub of 149th Street and Third Avenue, rows of almost 50 people sat on Thursday in a cordoned-off waiting room in the Workforce 1 office, looking for help from the Bronx branch of the citywide employment agency.

This was Veronica Eaddy’s second time at the “one-stop employment center.” With a soft round face under thick waves, in a casual jeans and T-shirt, Eaddy, who asked that her full name not be used, doesn’t look her age at 42. But the string of jobs she has tried her hand at reveal a long struggle with unemployment. “I’ve been through many systems where a job has been promised and nothing happened,” Eaddy said.

Nationwide, there may be reason for optimism after the jobs report revealed that the depressed economy may be turning around. The U.S. Department of Labor announced on Friday that 162,000 jobs were added to the national economy, though the nationwide unemployment rate remained steady at 9.7 percent. But an increase in the national jobs number does not necessarily correlate to an increase in the number of jobs in the Bronx, said James Brown, an analyst with the New York Department of Labor. “There’s not a one-for-one increase,” he said. For Bronx job-seekers like Eaddy, economic struggles are still festering.

“You pretty much need a master’s degree to pick up the garbage,” said Eaddy, who feels that living in the Bronx has been a disadvantage for her. She’s spent the last seven years looking for a full-time job. Unemployment in the borough soared to 14 percent in January, well above the national average. Hunger and poverty are stark realities in the borough that is already struggling to compete with a higher-skilled workforce.

“That doesn’t bode well for the Bronx, which has a pretty high percentage of the local workforce that doesn’t have high levels of educational attainment,” said Jonathan Bowles, director of the Center for an Urban Future, a research firm.

About half of Bronxites work outside the borough, Brown said. Many of these jobs in the hospitality and retail sectors are not only low-paying but largely dependent on consumer spending, which has sunk deeply in the recession. Analysts are hopeful that consumers will grudgingly start spending. Consumer spending picked up for the sixth month running in March.

“A lot of establishments are closing,’’ Eaddy said. “There aren’t many jobs that you could get if you come straight off school, like low-skilled jobs. And most of them can be pretty crap.”

Arthur Merlino, manager of Workforce 1, has worked in the labor market for 48 years, crisscrossing labor offices across the city’s five boroughs. After two years managing the Bronx branch, he admits that the borough poses a specific challenge. “This is a real serious time,” said Merlino, his eyes closing as he spoke. “I’d say, experientially it’s been a very difficult couple of years.”

Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz, Jr. has made economic development and job creation a priority but critics have accused him of costing the Bronx thousands of jobs at a mall he opposed at the Kingsbridge Armory. Diaz opposed the project on the grounds that it would not provide Bronxites living wages. The City Council voted against the mall.

Franck Strongbow, associate director of the James Monroe Senior Center agreed with Diaz. After he spent eight months living “between a rock and a hard place,” Strongbow lived paycheck to paycheck when he was 25 years old trying to make ends meet. For him, a job is all about dignity. “What the borough president was saying was, “Let’s start with affordable living range because people should be paying an honest day’s labor.” According to the Center for Urban Future, 42 percent of the Bronx workforce is making less than $10 an hour.

The payroll company Automatic Data Processing said this week that U.S. employers cut 23,000 jobs in March, dampening expected forecasts ahead of Friday’s job report. Much of the nationwide growth in March was in temporary government jobs, particularly by the Census Bureau, which hired 48,000 temporary employees, according to the Department of Labor, including enough staff for four Census offices in the Bronx.

Elsewhere, there are signs of life in the borough’s jobs market. A coalition of construction workers in the Bronx said it has seen employment opportunities tick upward in March, with more activity on job sites. While the overall number of new building permits issued in the Bronx during the first three months of the year is down from 2009 — 44 to 18 — there were eight new building permits issued in the Bronx in March (up from four last year), according to the Department of Buildings. Richard Rodriguez, an administrator for United Hispanic Construction, said that his labor coalition was able to connect more workers with jobs in March, particularly with a new development on 163rd Street in Morrisania.

Despite the real-estate market’s more than two-year struggle, prices in Manhattan remain high, fueling new development in the outer boroughs, said Ken Margolies, director of organizing programs at the Cornell School of Industrial Labor Relations. But while Margolies noted the signs of improvement, he cautioned against unbridled optimism. “The key thing about the news,” he said, “is that, by and large, the new jobs that are being created pay less than the ones that are being lost.”

The manufacturing sector is another industry that saw accelerated growth in March, according to the Institute for Supply Management, a private trade group. In February about 11,000 jobs were created, the largest increase in almost four years. Other sectors like health care have also done well, especially after President Obama’s health care plan passed. In March, 27,000 new health care jobs were added to the national economy, according to the Department of Labor.

That’s where Eaddy hopes to try her luck. She’s optimistic that the health care reform will revitalize jobs in this sector. “Since there was such a push going on in public health, I think that a lot of jobs are going to start that I want to get into while the getting in is good,” she said. Eaddy is trying to secure a voucher from the New York State Department of Labor that will cover a six-month-long Medical Billing and Coding course at Hostos Community College. Waving a manila folder on Thursday, with the college brochure inside, she checked that she had all her documentation. She had been waiting for move than an hour for her 4 p.m. appointment.

While she waits for a steady job, Eaddy decided to start her own business. “Splendidly Me,” a cosmetic business that she runs out of her East 180th Street apartment, supplements her income. When she is not teaching customers how to make coconut oil or twist their hair, Eaddy is pinning her long-term hopes on the health care industry.

“Now I have to come back,” she said, “but this time I’m doing something smart with a marketable skill so that I can have some leverage.”

At the Morton Williams in Kingsbridge, people lined up to apply for an entry-level job. (Fellman/Bronx Ink)

Atavia Scott dreams of being a chef. Nicole Garcia wants to write about travel. And Sophia Pritchet wants to work at the retailer Forever 21. But each has had to put these dream jobs aside for now, and search more widely for that increasingly elusive commodity in the Bronx: the job.

Read more about umemployment in the Bronx here.

On a recent morning, they joined the line of some 40 job applicants at the Morton Williams in the Kingsbridge section of the Bronx, where the supermarket chain holds weekly interviews for openings at its 12 stores in the city. A manager laid out the application guidelines to the job seekers while a few shoppers strolled by.

“Again, you must know the name of the company and the address of the company” you use as a reference on the application form, explained Valerie Sloan, a vice president at the supermarket.

After explaining other aspects of the hiring process and twice stressing that those without proper identification should leave, Sloan, who declined any comment, returned to the small office perched in a corner above the store exit and called the first applicant.

Those near the front of the line sat down on the ledge running along the storefront window. The line snaked along the wall past the checkouts and the nine-foot-high stack of Malta India soda bottles until finally coming to an end half-way down aisle three just before the Stella D’Oro cookies. Since the supermarket chain holds their applications for six months, most of the job seekers were new.

Even as the national economy added 162,000 jobs nationally in March, according to the latest Department of Labor estimate, in the Bronx, where the unemployment rate is now at 14 percent, the employment market is becoming cutthroat, forcing experienced workers to apply for entry-level positions and others to vastly expand their job search.

Supermarket work wasn’t Atavia Scott’s first choice, but she lost her job as a health aide in January and has applied for over a dozen others without luck. In the last two weeks alone, Scott, who is 27 and lives in Soundview, has applied to more than 15 places—everything from health care to Rite Aid.

“Right now, I’ll work anywhere,” Scott said. “I’m not being a chooser.”

Scott said her interview with Sloan “went OK.” The manager told her that the supermarket was hiring five applicants to work as cashiers or in the deli, and that she’d get a call next week if they had a position for her. They were minimum wage jobs, Scott said, but at least there was a union and some benefits. Still, Scott wasn’t content to wait a week. Afterwards, she left to inquire at a home health agency in Mott Haven.

In many respects, Ben—who declined to give his last name because he feared it might hurt his prospects with the supermarket chain—has had a harder time. He said he had spent 30 years working in supermarkets, until he lost his job managing a food market in Queens in 2007. Ben, now 56, can’t find a job fitting his experience level.

“Some tell me I’m overqualified, some tell me I don’t have enough experience for the position that available,” he said. “All those fast food places—they’re all hiring. But it’s part time work at a minimum wage. They don’t require experience because they do on-the-job training.”

He’s applied to Macy’s, the Restaurant Depot, Sears. “I’ve gone so far as to apply for a job as a secretary,” he added.

Meanwhile, the pressure to stay solvent has been mounting, Ben said. Unable to afford his rent, he had to move his wife and two children to a shelter and now supports them on only $41 in food stamps and $1,720 in public assistance a month.

“It’s really hard to make ends meet when you don’t have much coming in each month,” he said. “I’m out here every day looking for a job. Even on Sundays.”

At the interview, Ben told Sloan that he was applying for a department head position at Morton Williams. Sloan said that no positions were available, but that she’d forward the application to her supervisor. Ben said the supermarket’s benefits were good—medical, dental, raises every six months—and hoped to hear back if a position opened up over the next few months.

Ana Pena, meanwhile, needed a job now. The 56-year-old Dominican immigrant has been out of work for nearly a year after she lost her job cleaning at a McDonald’s. Although she is living with a niece, she said that she wasn’t on Medicaid and needed to get a job as much for the pay as for the health insurance. She was attracted to Target for the employee benefits.

“I was trying to get a job with Target, but they never called me,” she said. “I wish I could get me a job making $8 an hour.”

Pena’s niece suggested she try Morton Williams. But Pena arrived at 9:30 am—15 minutes after they stopped accepting applications. Sloan told her to come back next week.

“It’s ok,” she said. “I’ll be here next time at 8 o’clock.”

Saltfish, also known as cod fish, served with rice and sweet plantains is a breakfast staple in Jamaica, said head cook Beryl Barclay of Sa Lena West Indian Restaurant in the Bronx. (Astrid Baez/The Bronx Ink)

In Jamaica, salted cod is enjoyed at breakfast with fruit.  Dominicans and Puerto Ricans add adobo to the pungent fish for a twist on a traditional recipe that dates to colonial times.  Italians serve cod, often called baccalà, served in tomato paste with potatoes.  With so many dishes gracing menus across the Bronx, the one thing cooks agree on is that the fish tastes best when it preserves some of its saltiness.

“You soak the cod in water for as long as three days, changing the water everyday, but it’s still going to keep some of the salt used when it was cured,” said John Cosenza, a fourth-generation owner of Cosenza’s Fish Market on Arthur Avenue. It’s that briny quality that could get cod yanked from menus if a proposed salt-ban is passed in New York state.

Brooklyn Democrat Felix Ortiz introduced new legislation on March 5 prohibiting the use of salt in food preparation by restaurants and forcing authorities at the federal, state and municipal levels to brand the savory seasoning a health and economic threat.

The announcement comes on the heels of Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s attempt at encouraging New Yorkers to cut back on sodium consumption.  If passed, the bill would impose a civil penalty of up to $1,000 per incident on restaurants caught adding even a pinch of salt to their dishes.  The mayor’s more mild-mannered approach aims at reducing the amount of salt in pre-packaged and restaurant food by a quarter in the next five years.

Ortiz claims that banning the use of salt entirely in the preparation process will give consumers the option of whether to add it to their meals. Ortiz did not respond to calls for comment.

The potential ban on salt has many of the city’s chefs concerned.  In an interview for the Daily News, just days after the announcement was made, celebrity chef Tom Colicchio expressed his concern for the restaurant industry in New York City.  “If they banned salt, nobody would come here anymore,” Colicchio said.  And what of cod, the salted fish?

“It’s a popular fish to use in Italian recipes during the holidays,’’ Cosenza said. The market sells as many as 20 pounds a day during Lent and well over two tons a month in December alone to individual consumers and restaurants.

Any good cook in New York City will tell you that the staple ingredient in seasoning is salt.  Ethnic cuisine is specially known for a piquancy and zest that is not easily achieved without this controversial mineral.

“You just cannot fix a meal without it,” said Beryl Barclay, top chef at Sa Lena West Indian Restaurant in the Bronx.  Barclay has worked in the food industry for nearly 25 years in Manhattan and the Bronx.  Her best selling dish, cod, comes pre-salted.

Customers coming in for a morning meal at the eatery situated on a slope in Grand Concourse can be treated to the official dish of Jamaica.  Ackee and saltfish, otherwise known as codfish, is the most popular breakfast item on the menu, Barclay said.

She prepares the cod days in advance, soaking the fish in cold water for up to two days before actually cooking it to remove most of the salt.  The cod is then sautéed using a little oil, onion, tomatoes and black pepper.  If not with ackee, Barclay often serves the meal with a side of rice and peas adding fried sweet plantains for a taste that’s close to home for many Caribbeans in the Bronx.  The subtle spice of pepper and mellow tang of cooked onion are discernible, but there is no mistaking salt as the more superior flavor note.

“If we can’t use salt, what then?” Barclay asked.

The New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene estimates that 1 in 4 adult New Yorkers have high-blood pressure, and the agency’s most recent Health Bulletin suggests limiting salt intake to decrease the risk of hypertension, and by extension, heart disease and stroke.  The Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee, a team of expert medical and scientific researchers appointed by the Departments of Agriculture and Health and Human Services, concluded in a 2005 report that the relationship between salt consumption and blood pressure is “direct and progressive without an apparent threshold.”

In November, the committee advocated an incremental reduction of the daily sodium intake to 1,500 milligrams for all Americans.  The current limit is set at 2,300 milligrams daily for the general adult population.

On a Friday night in March, salted dry cod or bacalao, as it’s known throughout Latin America is a particularly popular dish.   At El Valle Restaurant on Fordham Road, the Catholic tradition that originated in Spain of serving cod with the meal is still faithfully observed during the Lenten season.  “We offer bacalao a la criolla, for lunch or dinner every Friday during Lent,” said Angela Damascino, a waitress at El Valle Restaurant.  That’s cod with tomato sauce, for the uninitiated.

At El Valle, similar to other ethnic restaurants, bacalao is soaked in water, shredded, and finally cooked in garlic, tomato sauce, pepper and adobo.  With salt being one of the main ingredients in adobo, it’s practically inevitable in the Latin rendition of this seasonal favorite.

If you call any other day of the week, you’re not likely to find bacalao on the menu.  “It’s most popular during religious holidays and that’s mostly when we serve it,” Damascino said.

The 18-year-old restaurant serves the largely Hispanic community of Fordham with typical Dominican and Puerto Rican cuisine.  Here you’ll find bacalao is served alongside white rice.

At this place and others like it, the disappearance of cod, chefs say, would be met with no small amount of bitterness.

“Salt is an important dietary element in our culture,” Barclay said, “and we’ve come a long way from home to share that here in the U.S.”

The day after Valentine’s Day is recovery for most florists — replenishing arrangements and cleaning up the shop.
For Harry Nicolaou, owner of Rainbow Florist on Westchester Avenue, Monday was spent reorganizing after the business from the weekend.

Flowers left over from Valentine's Day were peddled on East 167th Street in the Bronx on Monday afternoon. Photo by: Alec Johnson

“It was a little off,” Nicolaou said, “not as good as previous years, but it was good.”
Although the months after Valentine’s Day can be slower, he said, people always want to buy plants, roses and other flowers all year long.
“There are birthdays and anniversaries,” Nicolaou said, “and weddings and unfortunately funerals.”
He said Mother’s Day is the next big holiday for florists, because business from Easter has decreased over the years.
However, a number of Bronx flower shops were still busy Monday, delivering bouquets from Valentine’s Day that hadn’t reached their rightful recipients. Several owners told The Bronx Ink they couldn’t even talk because of the deliveries and the lack of staff due to Presidents Day.
Jennifer Santana, an employee at Erica’s Flower Shop on Castle Hill Avenue, said the delivery truck drivers have been out all day making post-Valentine’s Day deliveries.
“It does get slow usually after Valentine’s Day,” Santana said. “But everything picks up around May when Mother’s Day comes around.”
She said the shop posts fliers and hands out business cards to promote business during the lag time.
Flower shop owner Karl Makris just celebrated his 29th Valentine’s Day at Rainflorist, and he’s only 46 years old. He said that the recession was obvious this holiday, adding that it could have been worse.

“Valentine’s Day used to be a grand slam for us,” said Makris, whose described this year’s profit as “still not nearly where it’s supposed to be.”

Nicolaou agreed, saying the street vendors sell flowers for less because they don’t have to charge for overhead.

“It concerns me a bit,” he said. “They sell them in the street and on my block. I know everyone has a right to make money, but it’s still bad for business.”

Thing are looking up, though. Rainflorist saw better sales than it did last year, and Makris thinks flowers will continue to be big sellers. “I think we’re the lesser of the evils,” he said, comparing flowers to more expensive romantic gifts like jewelry and fancy dinners. “And the women still love it, so we’re OK.”

Even the day after Valentine’s Day proved a pleasant surprise. A few amorous slackers showed up at Rainflorist today to buy the bouquets they’d forgotten about on Sunday.

Nicolaou said tulips, lilies and irises are popular purchases during the spring so he hopes business keeps increasing through the season.

Within a span of fewer than 10 blocks, three buildings on Courtlandt Avenue tell the South Bronx’s version of New York City’s housing crisis.

On the corner with 161st Street, construction workers complete the last floor of a new, nine-story building. Between 152nd and 153rd, a set of elegant, newly built condos lays vacant, but boarded up to avoid squatters. A block away, a crumbling building is covered in notices to vacate due to perilous conditions, but some windows are open and the premises seem occupied nonetheless.

Eviction notices posted on this vacant Courtlandt Avenue building say the place is perilous. Photo by Alice Speri

Much like other stretches of New York City, this section of Melrose has recently turned into a construction site. Within a few blocks, longtime residents can no longer afford to pay rent, high-rise buildings wait for the cash necessary to complete construction, and brand new condos remain unoccupied, waiting for tenants turned away by the economic downturn.

In the South Bronx alone, 93 buildings are empty, according to the group Right to the City, which is slated to release in the spring the full findings from a survey it did of unoccupied and incomplete developments throughout the city.

With the housing market nearly frozen by the recession and growing numbers of Bronx residents without a home, some city officials and community organizers are considering converting these empty constructions into affordable housing, that is, if they can agree on what affordable means.

The Housing Asset Renewal Program (HARP), a $20 million pilot initiative launched last August by the city Department of Housing Preservation and Development, offers financial support to developers to complete or convert their buildings on the condition that some of the units are put on the market at lower prices.

Experts, however, say the incentive to developers may not be enough to generate interest. Community activists, on the other hand, fear the program won’t benefit those most in need.

The program calls for rents that are affordable to households with incomes at or below $99,800 for a family of four, or $69,900 for an individual. The average household income in the Bronx is less than $34,000.

“HARP won’t benefit folks of low income,” said Nova Strachan, the housing justice director for the Hunts Point-based group Mothers on the Move. The group is one of 15 community organizations that joined Right to the City in conducting its survey of vacant properties. Strachan compared the initiative to the construction of the new Yankee Stadium. “They spent over $300 million to build this stadium, they put a Hard Rock Café right next to a McDonald’s, ” she said. “That’s beautiful, but for the folks that live here and struggle every day, how does that benefit us?”

In the six neighborhoods Right to the City surveyed, it found 601 vacant buildings, a stark difference from the approximately 400 the Department of Buildings estimates for the entire city.

Right to the City’s member organizations are calling for the conversion of the vacant buildings into housing for families with lower incomes than what the HARP guidelines call for.

On Courtlandt Avenue, between 152nd and 153rd Streets, new apartments lay vacant and boarded up to discourage squatters. Photo by Alice Speri

In short, the city’s definition of what is affordable needs to be rescaled.

“It’s outrageous, $20 million directed at the middle class and upper-middle class is not really an ideal use of funds,” said John Tyus, a Bronx native and spokesman for the group Families United for Racial and Economic Equality. Tyus added that the money appears to be a bailout of irresponsible developers.

To be eligible for financing through the Housing Asset Renewal Program, a project must be a completed or partly constructed, unoccupied, residential building where the owner is unable to either complete construction or sell or rent a sufficient number of units. The money available is intended to convert market-rate units to affordable units and enable the owner to complete construction. A minimum of 50 percent of the dwelling units must be put on the market at affordable rates for at least 30 years.

“This program holds out the promise of addressing the unintended blight caused by vacant sites, while transforming what would have been market-rate buildings into affordable housing for working class New Yorkers,” Mayor Michael Bloomberg said when he launched the program.

As many as 400 units could be converted as part of the pilot program, Department of Housing representatives said. Preference will be given to projects in neighborhoods that have been hit particularly hard by the downturn in the housing market and projects that need less subsidy to be completed.

Though the initial deadline for applications was set for the end of December, no contracts have been announced yet, and the deadline was extended to April 1, leaving many in the community believing that the program was unsuccessful.

In Riverdale, a Bronx neighborhood where vacant luxury condos are a common sight, not one developer had signed up for the program, Bronx Borough Director Mike Lugo said at a Community Board 8 meeting last November. Several people at the meeting said they had never heard of the program.

Instead, faced with a stall in sales, the developers of the Solaria luxury high-rise in Riverdale opted to auction off the 54 condos in the complex, for prices as low as 56 percent of the original listings.

Many think the city’ s program does not offer enough of a financial draw for developers, who have made huge investments into these properties.

“Many of the bigger developers are financially stable and can warehouse their properties until things get better,” said Tyus, of Families United for Racial and Economic Equality.

But Tyus added this was an opportunity policy makers should take advantage of.

“The city is in an excellent position to negotiate with the developers and the banks,” said Tyus. “To have them all take a little bit less and provide a great deal more.”

Carlos Martines is a regular at the Department of Labor “Workforce 1” job center in the Bronx, and he’s desperate to find some work to support his family.

“I’m late on my rent, bills. It’s hard, its very hard,” he said. “You know my son depends on me, you know it’s hard, very hard right now. There are no jobs.”

The Bronx has the highest unemployment rate in New York City.

Arthur Merlino, the community service manager at the Department of Labor in the Bronx, says certain factors have made the Bronx extremely vulnerable to the recession.

“I think that in the Bronx approximately 40 percent of the population is at the lower income standard,” he said. “And I think there are a good number of them who have various kinds of employment barriers including a lower level of education than prevails in the rest of the city. And I think that’s a major factor.”

Another hopeful statistic in the jobs report is in the manufacturing sector. About 11,000 jobs were created, according to the report, the largest growth in almost four years.

But Ken Margolies, director of organizing programs at the Cornell School of Industrial Labor Relations, said that job creation in manufacturing might not affect New York City as much. “One of the reasons why manufacturing has been leaving New York City for years is that the real estate is more valuable for other things,” he said.

National statistics also showed that construction continued to suffer, as businesses grappled with the recent crisis in the commercial estate market. In an effort to find a sector that might create jobs, Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz Jr. recently secured a $4 million federal grant to create green jobs in the community.

This comes after the borough president opposed the now-defeated re-development of Kingsbridge Armory on the grounds that the proposed mall would not create living-wage jobs.

“In order for our borough to get out of this long slide of unemployment, we need to fight against poverty, to educate and train our residents to become a skilled work force, to ensure that when companies come to do business here, those new jobs are offered to Bronxites,” he said in an emailed statement.

But Margolies, who worked with the community organization, is cautious about the green-job approach. “It’s really kind of early to know whether it will be a bigger boom or not,’’ he said. A lot depends on whether the government would subsidize it to create a lot of work in those areas.”

Even Americans who have jobs are feeling the slump. The underemployment rate, which counts people who have given up looking for work and part-time workers, has steadily risen over the past year to almost 16.5 percent nationwide, according to the Labor Department’s report.

Francis Ayalah works in part-time retail and says she works the hours of a full-time employee. “There’s nobody hiring full time,” she said.

State Senator Ruben Diaz, a Bronx Democrat, says he sees people like Ayalah every day. “In my office here in the South Bronx, I have people coming in daily looking for jobs,’’ he said. “I’m pretty sure the economy will recover, but how do I tell that to someone who doesn’t have a job?” He breathed a deep sigh on the phone.

“President Barack Obama promised to create jobs, and he has failed” he said. ” If the president doesn’t create jobs, I’m sure us Democrats will lose seats because the nation is turning away from Democrats.”

Daniel Martin hung out on the street corner of East 175th Street and Eastburn Avenue, explaining that he lost his job last year as a window installer. Friday he was searching for better prospects. “I filled out applications at McDonald’s and Wendy’s, without any luck,” he said.

Eddie Marrero and Evelyn Rivera still keep a package of union-made Stella D'Oro breadsticks. They say they'll never buy Stella products again. Photo by Connor Boals

There is only one difference: the unmistakable scent of baked goods in the oven.

“I used to get that aroma here,” said Eddie Marrero, a 30-year veteran of the plant, who lives blocks away in an apartment on Bailey Avenue. “When I’d go out on my terrace, I could tell what they were baking.”

On October 8, 2009, the employees of Stella D’Oro went to work for the last time. About 140 employees, including Marrero, lost their jobs when the 78-year-old plant closed down for good. The closing came in the wake of a protracted dispute between the unionized workers and the current ownership that led to a lengthy labor strike. It left many workers–who felt like Stella D’Oro was family–unmoored in the weeks before the holiday season.

Marrero, 50, said he started with Stella as a production packer in 1979. By the time the factory closed, he was a foreman baker who oversaw the ovens, the production lines and checked for quality control.

“It’s not like a chocolate chip cookie,” Marrero said of the challenge of baking quality Stella D’Oro treats. “One day the breakfast treats can come out looking like crap.”

Marrero’s live-in girlfriend Evelyn Rivera, got a job as a table packer two years ago, after she was laid off from her position as a clerk on Wall Street.

Rivera began by working the overnight shift, packing snacks into trays alongside five to 10 other women from 11 p.m. to 8 a.m.

“I was used to paper work,” she said of the aches that came with manual labor. She pulled her finger back as if squeezing a gun to demonstrate how the muscles in her hand would freeze up from the “trigger finger” she developed packing up to 10,000 cookies a day.

“It’s an art,” she said, “It’s not like “I Love Lucy” when they got jobs at the candy factory.”

Marrero said that a Stella D’Oro job was one of the best jobs to be had in the Bronx.

“Nobody is going to find a job like Stella D’Oro,” he said. “It was the only job in the Bronx that started you off at $14 an hour.”

Marrero said he was making $21 and hour when the factory closed, coming out around $65,000 a year. Rivera, who began at $14 an hour, was on her second raise, making $16 an hour.

Now, Marrero is “semi-retired,” still waiting for $7,000 owed to him from a National Labor Relations Board ruling against Brynwood Partners, the company that purchased Stella D’Oro two-and-a-half years ago. His son, Eddie is 23 and attends John Jay College where he studies criminal justice. Marrero covered his tuition until this year, now his son is taking care of his education through loans.

Rivera’s daughter, Rosa, is 19 and a senior at John F. Kennedy High School. Come January, both mother and daughter will be students when Rivera goes back to school to get study medical coding in pursuit of a job in a medical billing department.

For nearly 80 years the Stella D’Oro Cookie factory churned out its trademark cookies, breadsticks and pastries that are distributed nationwide.

The bakery’s iconic treats trace their heritage to Joseph Kresevich, who emigrated to the United States from Trieste, Italy in 1922. Ten years later, he and his wife Angela established Stella D’Oro, Italian for “gold star,” in a small shop on Bailey Avenue in Kingsbridge.

Although Stella D’Oro’s cookies were based on the Italian pastries that Kresevich remembered from his homeland, they quickly became cross-cultural snacks.

The Stella D'Oro factory at the corner of 237th Street and Broadway has been empty since the brand was purchased by Lance, Inc. and moved to an Ohio factory

The factory’s neighborhood was largely filled with Jewish families, and the fact that the pastries were often made without eggs or butter meant that they were suitable for kosher customers. A particular favorite was the company’s Swiss Fudge cookies, which many Jewish consumers dubbed “shtreimels,” after the round fur hats that are traditionally worn on the Sabbath by Hasidic Jews.

In 1992, Stella D’Oro was purchased by Nabisco, which subsequently became part of Kraft foods. In 2003, Kraft began experimenting with cheaper ingredients, ultimately dropping the “pareve” kosher designation from its label. This led to an immediate uproar among the Jewish consumers who formed the bulk of the company’s customer base. Kraft quickly changed back to the original recipe and re-instituted its kosher certification.

In 2006, Kraft sold Stella D’Oro to a private equity firm, Brynwood Partners for $17.5 million, a significant reduction compared to the $100 million price tag Kraft paid for the brand. Soon thereafter, Brynwood attempted to cut employee health and retirement benefits and proposed ending pensions in exchange for establishing 401(k)s.

“A 401(k) can go in a blast,” Marrero said. “That ain’t no pension. If I live up to 100, I’m going to be getting that.”

Marrero said that the pension plan he is on was a “golden eighties” plan which a worker qualified for after 15 or twenty years of service and then it paid out double the amount for every year worked.
On August 13, 2008, 135 employees, all members of the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International Union Local 50 went on strike because of the demands the new owners had brought to the table. The Local 50 is a small union, with membership around 1,000 workers, so the a support group, the Stella D’Oro Solidarity Committee, consisting of community members, labor activists and union members

According to the committee, Brynwood’s wanted to slash wages as much as 25 percent, impose “crushing” premiums to the health insurance plan, eliminate holidays, vacation and sick pay and do away with extra pay for working Saturdays.

Marrero said the message he was hearing from Brynwood was that they didn’t have the money to pay for these things anymore. This confused Marrero because he never saw any cutbacks on production.

“As soon as we were baking them, they were going into the trucks.” He said. “There was always work, we could work as long as we wanted.”

Marrero said he would often work 40 hours a week, plus 11-12 hours in overtime where he was paid time-and-a-half.

The union, which had represented the workers since the early 1960s, rejected the new company’s demands and began picketing. Brynwood immediately replaced them with backup workers that they had already gathered.

Every day when the replacement workers emerged from the factory for a shift change, they were met with angry heckling.

“Scabs!” the crowd roared.

“I was going to get into a fight with a few of them,” Rivera said.

This was Rivera’s first strike. Marrero had previously been through four during his tenure at Stella D’Oro.

“I learned so much from it,” she said. “I never thought I would go on strike.”

Rivera said that she is thankful to have been on strike. It was a pivotal experience, where she gained knowledge and friendship.

“When I was out there in the strike, I got to know everybody. We got to know each other much better. It was a friendly atmosphere.” She said.

“The strikers figured it would be two weeks,” said Micah Landau, a community supporter and graduate student at CUNY. “Then it started getting cold and it went from August 13 to October 13.”

Landau said that Brynwood Partners intentionally created unreasonable demands to bust the union.

“These guys, they provoke the strike, and its because they weren’t interested in negotiating,” he said. “It was like a siege. They were trying to starve people out.”

The plight of the workers attracted the attention of many in the world of New York City politics and activism. Marrero said that nearly every New York City politician came out and show support at one time or another, all except for Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

“You have all these politicians but you only have one emperor,” he said of Bloomberg. “He’s still ignoring us.”

The tiny factory sparked a reaction from labor groups across New York, the country and even beyond the borders of the United States. On the day the factory closed, US Senate candidate Jonathan Tasini, Assemblyman Michael Benjamin, Assemblyman Jose Rivera and Billy Talen all marched with about 50 former employees outside the factory on the day it was finally closed

Talen, better know as “Reverend Billy” is a bouffant-adorned performance activist who runs the Church of Life after Shopping, a performance group dedicated to fighting the evils of capitalism. Reverend Billy performs “exorcisms,” preaches revival-style sermons and pops up on cable news with color commentary any time that capitalism is under examination. The Reverend, who was also the Green Party candidate for New York City mayor, dedicated his latest sermon to the plight of the Stella D’Oro workers.

“The Stella D’Oro factory bakery was the backbone of this community,” Talen said. “It’s very sad.”

Talen wasn’t the only anti-capitalist rabble-rouser to come to the aid of the workers. In September, the union workers asked Hugo Chavez, president of Venezuela, to purchase the factory and fund a Kingsbridge worker’s cooperative through Venezuela’s own oil and gas supplier, CITGO. Chavez took them seriously.

Chavez, who was in New York City for the 2009 United Nations General Assembly, told the UN, “One of [the workers] said to me, ‘Why don’t you buy the company?’” I said, ‘I’m going to look into it.’”

“We could turn it into a socialist company if Obama authorizes me,” Chavez said. “The company can be bought and handed over to the workers.”

Chavez was no stranger to the Bronx. In the winter of 2005, according to the New York Times, he provided 8 million gallons of discounted heating oil to thousands of low-income residents in the South Bronx.

Brynwood rebuffed Chavez’s offer. The company never answered any calls made on his behalf.

With only 135 union members from a small union that only had 1,000 members total, the workers needed help from outside the union to have any chance, Landau said.

Landau was working as a staff reporter for the United Federation of Teachers when he traveled to Kingsbridge to cover the strikers in December 2008.

“They’d been on strike since August,” he said. “They were like starving to death on the picket line. It was like watching people die.”

Soon he went from writer to community organizer, steering the community outreach and working to make sure the plight of the Stella D’Oro worker was getting attention from the media and the rest of the labor world.

“I had just wanted to write about this thing,” he said. “I ended up getting involved to the point where the newspapers wouldn’t let me write about it anymore.”

Landau has since moved to Chicago, passing the torch to Rene Rojas, 37, a PhD student at New York University.

“The support committee itself is no longer functioning,” Rojas said. “I don’t think there will be a set of demands for Stella D’Oro anymore. The fight has shifted to getting the right severance package.”

After the strike was ended by a National Labor Relations Board ruling, Rojas said, the court ordered a new severance package for the workers. Now, Brynwood Partners is trying to revert to an older, less generous package that existed before the ruling.

“Right now I would say I’m too old to go look for a job,” said Emelia Dursu, 58, who worked at the factory as a table packer, placing cookies in trays for 20 years. She said she began working at the factory in 1979 after she immigrated to the New York City from Ghana. She has three children, all of them grown. “I’m going to wait and live on the little bit that I have and depend on my children to survive until my pension is around 2012 or 13.”

Mike Filippou, who worked as a lead mechanic at Stella for over 14 years and orchestrated much of the rally efforts is taking classes to become a certified mechanic so that he can pursue work at a Wonderbread factory in Queens which is a member of the Local 50 Union.

“I would say the majority of workers still have not been placed in jobs,” said Rojas. “It’s easier for those like Mike who have a certain skill, but the more unskilled workers will have a lot of trouble.”

While losing the security of a full-time job in an economy where opportunities for work are not bountiful is a hard blow to suffer, many of the workers mourn the loss of the family atmosphere at the plant.

“It was a job you were able to live off of,” Marrero said. “But it was also family-oriented.”

Marrero has the scar to prove it. Beneath his faded blue New York Giants t-shirt is a faint 6-inch scar running up his left side from when he donated his kidney in 2000 to Jerry Fleck, a fellow Stella worker who had worked with Marrero since 1983. Fleck is godfather to Marrero’s son.

“This is how we were at Stella D’Oro,” Marrero said.

Marrero said that losing his job didn’t affect him greatly as he had qualified for his pension and had already been planning to retire at 55. For now, he plans to get his commercial driver’s license with hopes of driving a school bus, giving him plenty of time for fishing, a favorite hobby of his.

As for the future of Stella D’Oro in their new home, Rivera is confident that Lance will get its comeuppance for moving the factory.

“It’s not going to work out for them,” she said. Stella D’Oro can only be made in New York. It can only be with New York water.”

High achieving JHS 123 eighth graders credit incentives for the student's motivation to excel. Photo by Maia Efrem

Stuffed toys, colorful pencils and stickers tempted the sixth grader in a pony tail at the ZONE store located in the cafeteria at the James M. Kieran Junior High School 123. Her turn was next. She deliberated for awhile, then picked the pink pencil with yellow smiley faces and hearts.

Pulling out a Monopoly-sized bill, the girl handed over $5 and walked out, quickly showing off the pencil to the students still on the line.

Principal Virginia Connelly, now in her 12th year at JHS 123, instituted the ZONE incentive program in the fall of 2006 to reward children for good behavior, attendance and high test scores. Teachers hand out fake $10, $20, $50 bills to deserving students use to buy pens, stickers, stuffed animals, Yankee hats, and other novelty items.

“We did $1,200 worth of business today,” said Kellyanne Royce, the school’s guidance counselor in charge of the store. ZONE stands for “Zest for learning, One for all and all for one, No excuses, Exercise daily.”

Junior High School 123 on Morrison Avenue and Bruckner Boulevard has had a long history of low academic scores. Its students are predominately minority and poor — with 35 percent of the population black, 64 percent Latino, 1 percent other. Two years ago, 90 percent of students came from families receiving public assistance. Today that number is 98 percent.

This year, for the first time, the scores went up high enough to remove the school from the state’s Schools Under Registration Review (SURR) list for under-performing schools.

In the spring of 2009, JHS 123 received an “A” on the Chancellor’s Progress Report. About 56 percent of the students read on grade level, up from 22.2 percent the year before.  Math scores were 66.7 percent, an increase from 41.8 percent. In addition, 267  out of its 567 students finished the semester on the honor roll–up from 148 the year before.

The principal, Virginia  Connelly, called this a  ”staggering success.” She credits the progress to a series of initiatives, including lower class sizes for math and English, a new program the builds in parent participation and federally  mandated tutoring, paid for by city and state dollars that will dry up now that the school has shown so much success.

But by far, the most controversial program has been the new and varied ways kids can now earn extra privileges. For example, teachers decided to allow the best-behaved homeroon to eat in the plush ZONE Lounge for a week. Formerly a teacher’s cafeteria, the large room has comfortable sofas and armchairs, a television, and video games for the students.

Assistant Principal David Rodriguez said the lounge idea is one of the most popular. “The kids go nuts for it,” he said, laughing. “Every homeroom competes with another to see who will be the best behaved and get use of the lounge.”

Students can also earn cash for taking the practice tests leading up to the state tests. The students receive $10 for taking the exam and an added $50 for scoring 100 percent. “It’s difficult to get them to come to school to take the test,” said Connelly. By the end of the year some of the students had earned upwards of $450.

Some said they used their test money to buy medication and other household necessities. But most spent it on themselves.  One particular student had to hide the money from his drug addicted mother. Connelly worked with Washington Mutual Bank to help students open a secret savings account where he could keep the money safe.

Another student, with dreams of attending Brooklyn Tech High School, saved every penny of his earnings for a new laptop and supplies for school. He put aside money for transportation as well allowing himself a weekly splurge on an express bus from Bronx to Brooklyn.

Wearing a black cardigan, star-shaped earrings, and heavy black eyeliner, eighth grader Karen Cruz, a member of the student council, said she has seen the gradual change in her three years at the school. “It’s like we all started to care and wanted to do better. It’s an amazing feeling when you do well, and you know that you did it,” she said

Attendance was also in the mix of behavior that could earn students rewards. Each eighth grade homeroom was thrown a pizza party for raising attendance rates — now at 93 percent for the eighth grade. This is an incentive 13 year-old Tiffany de Losangeles thinks works. “Why shouldn’t we get prizes and rewards? We work so hard it’s the least that we could get,” said de Losangeles. “Clearly it works, our school is doing so well.”

Her brother, Tommy de Losangeles, 15, was left back twice before, but is now treasurer of the student council. He won an Xbox 360 last year, one of the many raffle prizes the school gives out. “We get excited. For the prizes, pizza parties, and school,” he said.

“Find me an adult who does work without a thought of compensation. Why do people think kids don’t think like that as well?” said Connelly.”If I say to them being a good citizen, studying well, being on the road to college is going to be rewarded,”she said. “It’s difficult for them to see that here.”

JHS 123 also received Supplemental Education Services to hire outside tutoring companies. Schools qualify for free tutoring if their school failes math and readings tests two years in a row.

Four to five tutoring programs set up in classrooms after school and hired teachers from within the school, paying them $50 an hour. The companies — Failure Free Reading, Kaplan, Princeton Review, Education

“The going rate two years ago was $1,800 a child for 10 kids,” she said. “The most the company spent on tutors and supplies is $7,000. But they made a profit of $8,000 in six months in just one school. It’s a sweet deal.”

Schools that increase their grades are removed from the eligible list for the next school year, a measure that bothers Connelly. “The schools are hit hard by the sudden lack of funds,” she said, suggesting an extra transitioning year of funding “so it doesn’t feel like we are being punished for doing well.”

Besides increasing award-based motivation, the school reduced class size from 25 in reading and 28 in math down to 15 students per teacher. The faculty introduced a workshop model where teachers use visual aid to help the students understand complicated concepts. And the school introduced the Mastery Grading method that increased the passing rate to 75 percent, a move that alarmed teachers at first, but has raised the

As a means of promoting reading JHS 123 introduced a new emphasis on authentic reading, or reading real books, not excerpts and short stories written for student textbooks. “Our students have become avid readers, something we hope they will take away with them when they leave,” said Connelly.

Two years ago, science teacher Tabitha Hargrove and American history teacher John McSorley helped introduce TeacherEase, a web-based interactive grade book. The program allows teachers to enter grades and comments about the students, as well as the homework assignments. Parents have their own login information and can check on the status and development of their child at any time.

TeacherEase has increased parental participation and awareness, an factor teachers believe is behind much of their students’ success. “Nothing is a surprise at parent teacher conferences and report card days anymore,” said Hargrove.

“The system logs which parent visited the site, and I’ll tell you, these parents are on it every day, it’s fantastic. As a teacher you don’t feel like you are doing this alone anymore,” said McSorley. “The parents are doing their part at home.”

In most public schools every year the students change teachers. In JHS 123 the students stay with their respective teachers from sixth to eighth grade. “When I first started teaching here two years ago I thought it was odd, but now I think it is the best way,” said Hargrove, standing in her science classroom. “This allows the teacher to get to know the student and approach them in a way that will produce the most results.”

The successful programs have been the catalyst to the school’ success, but some questions linger about the school’s rewards method and what it means in the long run.

Programs based on reward motivation have sprung up in Baltimore, Atlanta, and recently in New York City. In 2008, Maryland provided $935,000 to programs aimed at increasing state test scores. The program, Learn and Earn, was successful and increased student marks on state standardized tests. But some experts argue these quick fixes do more harm than good.

Writer and former teacher Alfie Kohn, claims students lose their interest in learning for its own sake when they are rewarded for behavior. “Rewards motivate students to get rewards for the sake of rewards,” said Kohn. In one study, children who were expecting to receive a prize for completing a task successfully did not perform as well as those who expected nothing.

This poses the question of what will happen to JHS 123 students once they are no longer offered a reason to do well. Kohn predicts they will lose interest in their work and return to the habits they had before they were motivated by prizes.

The administration argues that incentives work when they are coupled with other curricular innovations.  JHS125 decided to turn the school’s successful American History concentration into an all-school program in association with the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American Studies. It now has one of the strongest American History and Government curricula in the city.

For the first time this year, 80 eighth grade students have signed up to take the 11th grade Ameican History and Government Regents test. “We’re very excited, this is when we show how advanced we are in what we teach,” said Connelly.

Government teacher McSorley has altered how he teaches his class, allowing the students to choose their one homework assignment each week. Eighth grader Jovan Cook, 13, enjoys the freedom the system affords. “If I feel like it, I can write an essay or just define words, it’s all up to us,” he said.

At four in the afternoon, long after other seventh graders had left for the day, Ryan Persaud and Gabriel Milligan, both 12, sit with math teacher Christopher Gooding building a robot. Members of the Robot club are preparing to represent their school in the citywide competition in January.

Gooding has been teaching at JHS 123 for 11 years and has seen the changes over the last two as a sign of a promising future. “These kids are remarkable, and they definitely have a lot on their plate,” he said. “Many of the students live in shelters, and we try to be as understanding as we can.”

“I enjoy doing this,” said Persaud, not looking up from the plastic pieces he was putting together. “I memorized the manual so I never need to look in for help.”

Behind him Milligan, or “Gilligan” as he is called, demonstrated the route the robot would have to make in less than three minutes. Looking up at Gooding, Milligan points out that every school he has ever attended “has been chosen for an award or something special.”

“This is a special school, right Mr. Gooding?”

“Yes it is Gilligan,” said Gooding.

For Sarah Delany, this semester at Hostos Community College was looking good. She had been elected as the student senate representative, accepted into the highly competitive nursing program, and would continue to be part of the university sponsored Student Leadership Academy.

The Student Leadership Academy holds workshops weekly that might be canceled due to budget cuts.

But professors delivered a shock to the  nursing students on the first day of classes. Students would have to pay for their own course materials this year, which included interactive textbooks, access to an online instructor, online practice exams, a DVD lecture review system and eight review books.

The package  distributed by Assessment Technologies Institute, LLC would cost them $430. A grant covered the cost for last year’s students.  There was no grant for this year.

Delany didn’t have the  money.

Most students at Hostos live in households that make less than $30,000 per year. Adding material costs to a $350 tuition hike for the semester, many wondered how they could afford to stay in school.

City University of New York cut $44 million in state and city aid for the 2008-2009 school year, and proposed to cut $10 million to community colleges for the upcoming year. To offset the budget cuts, tuition has increased this year (and is expected to increase another 15 percent next year). Programs are being cut and students are left without the financial means to support a higher education. With all these budget pressures, even Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s pledge to infuse $50 million in the CUNY system would not be enough to help students like Delany.

Programs for CUNY’s brightest, like the Student Leadership Academy and Registered Nursing program, are feeling the cuts. But, Councilman Charles Barron, who serves as chair of the Higher Education Committee, claims the money is there.

“How can they say there’s no money when CUNY has a $2.6 billion budget?” he said. “They are just not spending it on community colleges.”

Barron urges students to demand the money they deserve.

“No generation has ever progressed without a student movement,” he said. “It has never happened.  The money is there. You have to show that you are a priority.”

Armed with skills she learned at the Student Leadership Academy in the past year, Delany did just that. She became an advocate for nursing students at Hostos. She wrote a petition to the Student Senate asking for funds, and gained support for other initiatives from students and faculty.

Although the administration has yet to come to an agreement on the proposed increase, Delany said her experience with the Student Leadership Academy gave her the confidence to advocate for the nursing students.  Through workshops and conferences, Delany learned how to make effective arguments.

The director of the Student Leadership Academy, Jason Libfeld, said hurdles like the one Delany is facing as a nursing student are commonplace at Hostos.

A graduate of Columbia University’s Master of Fine Arts program, Libfield left his career as a teacher two years ago to establish this program that would help develop the highest achieving students into leaders through workshops, conferences and community service.

To be an ambassador with the Student Leadership Association students had to demonstrate academic excellence with a grade point average above 3.4, commit to at least 40 hours a semester of community service and be willing to participate in conferences upstate and New Jersey.

Most important, he hoped to create a sense of community otherwise missing at Hostos.

“The first thing I asked for is mailboxes,” he said. “I wanted to make sure they came back to the office. If they had email I would never see them.”

Despite being tucked away in what they call the broom closet, Libfeld and his students have created one of the most successful student associations in the CUNY system.

Major achievements include providing a student representative at the World Trade Center Memorial with President Barack Obama, and with Mayor Bloomberg during a memorable trip upstate at the Mock Student Senate meeting.

The Model Senate provides a forum for students to discuss real issues currently being raised in the State Senate. The annual conference is held in Albany, and requires hours of preparation. Students who do well can carve a path towards a political career.

Sandra May Flowers, whose motto is “opportunities quickly diminish,” secured an intership with Councilman Barron after her first year participating in the  mock senate.

The professional workshops cost an average of $2,000 per  month and may be the first program Libfeld is forced to eliminate.

Samantha Jackson’s experience shows how important the workshops can be. She worked hard to earn the grades she needed in high school to be accepted into a four-year college. But her mother could  not afford the tuition, which forced her to attend Hostos.

“At first, it hurt to go to Hostos with the grades I worked so hard for,” said Jackson, a Jamaican immigrant..

But she reached out to the Academy and learned about the Jose E. Serrano Scholarship for Diplomatic Studies, a program that moves students from Hostos into Columbia University for a Bachelor of Arts followed by a two-year graduate program at Columbia Unviersity’s School of International and Public Affairs.

Jackson was accepted to the program, which requires students to maintain a 3.0 GPA.

Jackson, now finishing her degree at Columbia, attributes her success to the Hostos programs that are facing budget cuts in the coming year. She says the Student leadership Academy’s emphasis on community service was what she was looking for, training in the field and insight from professionals.

During her time in Hostos, Jackson was one of many students who supported a small increase to the cost of tuition in an effort to attract a desirable faculty with promise of higher pay.

“The school could not keep educators because they could not pay them enough in today’s bad economy,” said Jackson. “A small tuition hike could have resolved a lot of issues. We could have raised the money that the city and state were not providing the school.”

However, according to Barron, students are fooling themselves if they think a tuition hike would mean more resources for students.

“They bought the Kool-Aid from the administration,” he said. “They believe that if they increase tuition the school will then invest that money back into the programs.”

Barron points to the $60 billion city budget and $131 billion state budget, claiming that it is up to the city to allocate appropriate funds for community colleges.

“We can build Yankee Stadium?” he said. “We can build the Mets a new stadium, but we can’t provide money for CUNY students?”

Despite the proposed budget cuts, and the continued financial stresses the students of the Student Leadership Academy are facing, they remain optimistic about the program’s future.

Libfeld says one of his proudest moments with the Student Leadership Academy was planting 900 trees in one day at St. Mary’s park in the Bronx. He also remembers the day he took the students to Isabella Nursing Home. One of the students was so excited to be there, she talked until one of the senior citizens fell asleep.

He and the students are resigned to continue on even if they lose workshop and field trip money.

At least outreach would be saved. It costs nothing.

Something Libfeld and his students don’t mind.

“If we have to go back to bare bones, then we’ll do that,” he said. “No matter what we will always have community service.”

The Riveras share their 18th floor apartment with three chihuahuas, birds and a small aquarium. Photo By Mustafa Mehdi Vural

The elevators break down at least twice a month in the Murphy Houses, a 20-story, low-income complex at 1805 Crotona Ave. in the Bronx.

Disrupted service is an inconvenience for all its 714 residents. But a broken elevator poses an extra burden for Francisco Rivera, 31, from Puerto Rico, who lives on the 18th floor with his wife and two children.

Francisco Rivera’s right leg was amputated 13 years ago when doctors found a cancerous tumor on his knee in Puerto Rico. At that time, Rivera was an 18-year-old boxer in high school, and also a husband and father of one daughter.

Doctors at Jacobi Hospital in the Bronx found and removed another tumor in his brain last May, bringing his total number of tumors to 18. After numerous operations, he has lost half of his right lung and part of his groin.

“There are no hospitals in Puerto Rico like in the U.S., there is no such technology,” said Rivera’s 29-year-old wife, Elizabeth, in Spanish. She was 13 when she met Francisco and 15 when she first gave birth to their daughter, Franshely.

“Doctors told me that I had a year to live,” said Rivera recounting their ordeal in Puerto Rico. His cane leaned against the couch. And the walls in the living room were covered with the Puerto Rican flag.

The Rivera family immigrated to the United States in 2000 in search of better medical treatment.

"I am a fighter, I have always been fighting for my life and for my family's well being," said Francisco Rivera. Photo By Mustafa Mehdi Vural

“The doctors say I am a miracle,” said Rivera. “I tell my husband you’re a living miracle, because I’ve seen cases like yours and they just don’t make it,” said Elizabeth.

Francisco survived brain surgery in May, but it has left his vision impaired in his left eye, and visible scars in his skull, which was reconstructed with metal implants.

“I have small memory problems. Right now I’m taking pills to prevent epilepsy,” said Rivera.

On a Monday afternoon in late October, the elevator was out of service again in the Murphy Houses. So the Rivera family had to make it down the stairs to go to Old Navy department store in Co-op City, in the Bronx.

They were not going shopping. They were going to collect a $1,000 gift, along with new clothes as part of Old Navy’s nation-wide project called “One in a Million.”

“It is inspiring to know that such a huge fashion store is interested in helping people like us,” said Rivera. “I think they are recognizing my own efforts to overcome the cancer.”

This project is meant for each store manager to invest $1,000 in his or her community. The company reserved $1 million in total for this nationwide project that hopes to reach out to 1,000 families in need.

“Anything that they can get is a help during this tough economy,” said Jenira Lopez, the store manager of Old Navy in Coop City.

Early in October, Lopez reached out to Ivine Galarza, the District Manager of the Community Board 6, to identify a needy family in East Tremont.

She had many residents to choose from.

More than 40,000 people receive public assistance in East Tremont, which comes to over 50 percent of the population. In the Bronx, overall, 41 percent of the population is on welfare, 10 points more than the citywide average, according to 2008 district profile data.

“Anyone of these families would have been candidate for this award that Francisco Rivera got,” said Galarza.

“I immediately thought of him,” said Galarza. “I know of him and of his family and of his conditions for years. The situation that they are going through is terrible.”

Galarza noted that the city does not do enough to take care of the poor in her district.

“This is unrealistic–$4 a day for a person to have lunch,” said Galarza, pointing to the figure in the official city document called “Guide to Cash Assistance Budgeting.” “At least in this holiday season, we are making one family happy out of 175,000 families that live in the confines of the Community Board 6.”

The Rivera family’s yearly income is approximately $20,400 a year, $1,000 below the poverty line for a family of four. The average household income in the Bronx is $34,031 compared to $53,448 citywide.

The Riveras have been married for 16 years and have spent 13 of those in hospitals. Photo By Mustafa Mehdi Vural

Francisco’s wife is the family’s main income provider. She works 30 hours a week as home health care attendant for Gotham Per Diem. “I take care of patients with cancer,” said Elizabeth. She earns $9 per hour, providing 60 percent of the family’s income – almost $1,000 a month. The rest comes from the Supplemental Security Income, a federal welfare program for disabled people.

“I just can’t work. It wasn’t a decision I made,” said Rivera. He spends half of his time at home and the other half in the hospital. “I cook, clean the house and take care of our kids.”

It is not easy for Francisco Rivera to execute his daily routine tasks without taking a morphine derivative to fight pain.

Nor is it easy to make ends meet.

The Riveras pay $510 a month for a two-bedroom apartment, which means that each of the family members live on approximately $10 a day.

Elizabeth and Francisco know how to be economical and can now pay their bills without problem. But they realize their family’s expenses will increase as the kids grow up.

Franshely Rivera, 14, is a 9^th grader in Wings Academy in the Bronx. She is also taking ballet classes. Miguel Rivera, 10, is a 5^th grader in CS 92 and he plays Little League baseball in “Caribe Little League,” the biggest league for the kids in the Bronx.

But difficulties over the years have not kept the Riveras away from making long-term plans for the future.

“The only thing I want, I dream of, is that my children finish undergraduate school and raise a family if they want,” said Rivera.

College tuition will be difficult to manage. “We are going to save for the kids’ education,” said Rivera about the $1,000 gift from Old Navy.

Miguel, however, would prefer a plasma TV and Nintendo Wii, the latest model video game.

“My children are respectful, obedient and studious,” said Rivera. He loves to spend time with his kids, who takes Miguel to baseball practice and to school. He even taught his son how to ride a bike with his amputated leg.

“In the next three years I would like to take my family to Puerto Rico, I want my children to know their country and to meet our family,” said Rivera.

Though Francisco has spent his entire adult life in hospitals, it is not a cause for disappointment for him. He said he sees hope in operation rooms, consultations, and the pills that he takes.

“I am still alive, thank God. He has given me the strength to go forward and fight for my family which I adore,” said Rivera.

“I haven’t surrendered.”

The day after losing their jobs when the factory closed, about 50 former employees of the Stella D’Oro cookie manufacturer in the northwest Bronx were back at work, not yet ready to end the labor battle that they have been waging for over a year.

A crowd of about 75 former employees, local politicians, union leaders and community supporters congregated inside a ring of police barricades on the eastern sidewalk at the factory’s entrance on the corner of 237th Street and Broadway Avenue on October 9. The tears of yesterday were replaced by determination to hold onto a Bronx icon that began here 77 years ago.

“Right now I would say I’m too old to go look for a job,” said Emlia Dursu, 58, a former table packer who placed the cookies into their packaging. She began working at the factory in 1979. “ I’m going to wait and live on the little bit that I have and depend on my children to survive.”

Some protestors stuck to the perimeters, leaning lazily against the barriers and making small talk with fellow strikers. Others marched in a slow circle, chanting and holding handmade signs scrawled with slogans of protest. They spoke disparagingly about the factory’s former owner, Connecticut-based private equity firm Brynwood Partners that sold Stella D’Oro to North Carolina-based snack manufacturer Lance, Inc., known for its assortment sandwich crackers and cookies, potato chips, nuts and candy.

“We’re still going to stay strong,” said Mike Filipou, who worked as a lead mechanic for over 14 years and is orchestrating much of the rally efforts on the behalf of the workers. “We’re still going to fight Brynwood and Lance because they are union busters.”

Lance and Brynwood Partners did not answer multiple calls made over the two weeks following the plant’s closing.

Filipou and the rest of the former workers at the factory in the Kingsbridge neighborhood in the Bronx are members of the Local 50 of the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International Union. There were more than 130 people who lost their jobs, most likely for good, on Thursday.

“There’s no jobs around here anymore,” said Filipou who worked at another Bronx fossil, Farberware, which was bought up and moved from the South Bronx in 1996. “We’re going to have to move out of the Bronx, there’s no jobs anymore, no manufacturers.”

The union-busting accusation stems from a long labor battle with Brynwood Partners that purchased the brand from Kraft Foods, Inc. in 2006 for $17.5 million. In August of 2008, the workers went on strike because of concessions that Brynwood brought to the negotiating table. Among the negotiations, were a lowering of wages and higher premiums for the workers’ health insurance. The strikers picketed for months and eventually Brynwood conceded last June after a National Labor Relations Board judge ruled they had negotiated in bad faith. But the battle was far from over.

“We started more than a year ago with negotiations and we went on strike,” Filipou said. “The judge forced them to take us back and as soon as they took us back, they announced they were going to close the place.”

Lance, Inc. announced its interest in the brand in June 2009. With the purchase of the brand this week, Lance is planning to move the machinery and the brand–but not the workers–to a nonunion factory in Ashland, Ohio.

Many at the rally spoke of the repercussions that will reach beyond the employees and into the rest of the Bronx.

“The Stella D’Oro factory bakery has been here 75 years it’s the backbone of this community,” said Bill Talen, known as “Reverend Billy,” a bouffant-adorned activist costumed as a revivalist preacher who ran as the Green Party candidate in this year’s mayoral election. ”It’s a very sad day, especially because we would think that we would know better by now because of the economic downturn that was caused by this kind of attitude toward human labor.”

Talen pledged support to the freshly unemployed by providing publicity and holding fundraisers for them.

“As we say when we are out here on the sidewalks, ‘we are all Stella! Stellallujah!’” he said.

Walking alongside Talen in the circle was Jonathan Tasini, a labor activist and 2010 Democratic Party candidate for U.S. Senate. He said that Stella D’Oro was an example of corporate recklessness that has plagued the U.S. for over 30 years.

“When a plant shuts down that’s been the lifeblood of the community, it affects the entire community, it affects every single person that lives in the community,” Tasini said. “Businesses have to make a profit but we also have to value the community and value the workers that make this company work.”

Dursu said that the workers “were like family” at Stella D’Oro and remembered the compassionate approach the original owners brought to the negotiating table in the past. The current owners, she said, lack the compassion that she once expected from the company.

“Brynwood partners don’t care about their workers,” she said. “It makes me feel very angry that they can be human beings and not care about other human beings.”

In a last-ditch effort, the workers and local politicians tried to pressure the city’s finance department to put a restraining order on the removal of the equipment to the Ohio factory because the equipment was purchased with hundreds of thousands of dollars in tax abatements from the city.

The department has already said there is no provision regarding this type of situation in its abatement program and will not attempt to pursue holding onto the equipment.

As the future of the Stella D’Oro workers looks more hopeless, Filipou said they will do what they have been doing for so long: continue to fight.

“We have a lot support from a lot of unions and a lot of politicians and we still hope something is going to happen,” Filipou said. “Stella D’oro is like a landmark in the Bronx.”

by Alec Johnson

Novelia Jackson, 64, Morrisania, leaves the Back to Jerusalem food pantry on Oct. 21 with bags of food. She has relied on the pantry for almost nine years. Photo by Alec Johnson

A small sign written in purple marker hung next to the door of the Back to Jerusalem Pentecostal Church food pantry last week. It told people to come back another day. The Morrisania food pantry, which has given meat, canned vegetables and potatoes to the needy almost every Saturday morning for the past 10 years, was empty.

By Wednesday, the church had received a meager shipment of food from the Food Bank of New York City, bagged it up and was ready to hand it out. The food, however, was gone by the end of the day.

Each week, more than 1,000 food pantries and soup kitchens in New York City give food to the city’s hungry. According to the Food Bank for New York City, 1.3 million people rely on these pantries and soup kitchens because they cannot afford to provide food for their families.

A survey released in September by the Food Bank – which provides most of the food distributed in emergency food sites like the Back to Jerusalem Church –  reports that demand for food was up considerably in 2008. Ninety percent of the city’s food sites showed an increase in the number of people in line for food in last year.  Volunteers in Morrisania say the situation has become even worse this year.

The Bloomberg administration has tried to curb food shortages. In 2007, the city hired Benjamin Thomases, a 2003 graduate of the Social Enterprise Program at Columbia Business School, as the food policy coordinator. The position was part of anti-poverty programs begun by the city’s Center for Economic Opportunity.

A recent analysis by the New York City Coalition Against Hunger, however, found that Bloomberg’s poverty effort assisted just three percent or 42,000 of the 1.5 million New Yorkers living in poverty.

Denise Acevedo-Strong, who orders food from the city food bank for the Morrisania church’s food pantry, speculates that a reduction in donations caused by the poor economy coupled with increased demand has led to food insecurity.

“A whole lot of donors that donated before to the Food Bank aren’t donating anymore,” she said.

Acevedo-Strong said she has little choice in the amount or type of food available for her to order. This week, she said, she might have a few cases of only six types of food she can order, such as beans, peanut butter or canned spaghetti. Meat, she said, is not on the list.

“It varies from week to week,” she said. She said that last year, there was twice the choice.

“We just got a shipment yesterday,” said Debora Bovain,  a volunteer at the Back to Jerusalem Church, while sorting potatoes Wednesday morning. The shipment, she said, included jars of peanut butter, cans of northern beans, string beans and cartons of milk, hardly the makings for a meal.

Bovain and other church volunteers scraped together enough food between the shipment and their meager reserves, which included the potatoes, to provide 140 bags of food to hungry patrons.

Until October, the pantry would hand out about 150 bags a week, which would include meat (usually frozen but occasionally canned),  a starch such as potatoes, vegetables and extras such as juice or peanut butter. But this month meat  would be a great luxury for the food pantry.

“There is no meat—period,” said Bovain’s mother, Pastor Lurena F. Sutton, 70. “We ran out two weeks ago.”

Ricardo Rosado, 45, who lost his construction job a year and a half ago, waited in line to pick up food for his five children, the youngest of which is 11 .

“Coupons are not enough,” said Rosado. He said that high food prices combined with his inability to get a job make his trip a necessity by the end of the month. “Welfare promises to get me a job,” he said. “But they don’t.”

Last week, about 140 families like Rosado’s received food from the Back to Jerusalem Pentecostal Church; this week if the food doesn’t come in they may have to find somewhere else.

On East 169th Street, the Morrisania branch of the New York Public Library’s red brick façade shines in comparison to the surrounding sandy brown brick apartment buildings. Inside the 100-year-old building, book-lined walls surround clusters of tables frequently filled with children  and adults reading.

A teamwork-oriented staff at the library has bolstered circulation significantly this year by reaching beyond the bookshelves and engaging the community.

“We are a beacon in this community,” said branch librarian Colbert Nembhard, about the library, which has loaned 86,547 books since 2008, a circulation increase of about 20,000 for the year.

Because of the staff teamwork, Nembhard says he is not overly worried about losing one of his five, full-time professional staff at such a busy time because of budget cuts to the entire New York Public Library system.

“Everyone takes turns going out in the community, said Nembhard, who has been working in the city’s libraries for 30 years. The staff  juggles visits to shelters, schools, senior centers, and hospitals with regular in-house programming at the branch.

“On a weekly basis we do at least five programs,” Nembhard said. “Outreach gets more people to come. We are very busy.”

Ramon DaSilva has worked as an information assistant at the branch for four years. He helps people use computers and the library’s on-line card catalogue. While in Morrisania, DaSilva has led many outreach programs along with the team. He will be transferred to the High Bridge branch when it re-opens this winter after a two-year renovation.

The outreach programs — which include library card registration for sick children in hospitals and Nintendo Wii tournaments in senior centers, adult computer classes, story times and class visits in the library — may need to be cut slightly when DaSilva leaves.

“We might not be able to do as much,” Nembhard said, “but we will try our best to do what we can.” He is more concerned with what would happen if additional staff members were unable to work. “If we’re only left with four people and one calls in sick, that could be a problem,” said Nembhard.

The public libraries are experiencing $57 million in cuts across the board this year. However, Nembhard said, staffing is a priority for the library system, which is why DaSilva will be transferred. “By taking from one branch to the next, they aren’t getting laid off,” he said.

When not out on outreach, DaSilva mans the information booth on the ground floor of the library and assists patrons in signing up for computers and finding materials. The branch has 20 public computers. According to DaSilva , the computers are almost always in use and people sign up and wait in line for their turn. “They are almost never open,” he said.

Recently, Leon Wentt, 27, spent the afternoon at library because he needed to use a computer. Wentt said that he took advantage of the hour wait for a computer by reading. He appreciates the “good community environment” fostered by the library and said the greatest appeal is its “affordable convenience,” as he pointed to printers, scanners and the copy machine.

DaSilva believes that outreach programming is instrumental in bringing so many people into the library. Each year, library statistics are tabulated by fiscal year, July 1 to June 30. The programming and classes doubled from 401 in 2008 to 853 this year and 138,718 individuals walked through the library door.

Nembhard is working on innovative ideas to get around the staff restructuring. Although he is not exactly sure what those will be, he knows they will get around it.

“We are committed to the community and are striving for service excellence,” he said. “We may not be there yet, but that is what we’re striving for.”

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