Sunday Times articles....
Jul. 31st, 2005 12:43 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
conuly
One about the past, and segregation in schools
A New Hope for Dreams Suspended by Segregation
By MICHAEL JANOFSKY
FARMVILLE, Va. - Warren Brown was about to enter first grade in 1959 when officials chained up the public schools in Prince Edward County rather than allow black children to sit beside white children in a classroom.
Without the resources to send him away, his mother kept him at home for four years, until she found a local church offering classes to black children.
Mr. Brown graduated from high school in 1972, winning basketball scholarships from three colleges, only to turn them down because he feared the academics would have been too challenging.
"I didn't get a proper foundation," he said. "If you're not prepared, what good is the school going to do for you?"
This fall, however, Mr. Brown, at the age of 51, plans to go to college to study criminal justice.
Five decades after Virginia ignored the actions of Prince Edward County and other locales that shut down their public schools in support of segregation, the state is making a rare effort to confront its racist past, in effect apologizing and offering reparations in the form of scholarships.
With a $1 million donation from the billionaire media investor John Kluge and a matching amount from the state, Virginia is providing up to $5,500 a year for any state resident, like Mr. Brown, who was denied a proper education when public schools shut down. So far, more than 80 people have been approved for the scholarships, and the number is expected to rise. Several thousand are potentially eligible, many of them now well into their 60's.
Rita Moseley, 58, was about to go into the sixth grade when the schools were closed. Her mother sent her more than 120 miles away to Blacksburg, Va., to live with an elderly woman and her daughter - "total strangers," she said - just to attend a public school willing to accept black children.
Currently a secretary in the high school she would have been barred from attending, she plans to use her scholarship to study business management.
"A lot of us still feel hurt, anger and bitterness," Ms. Moseley said. "I've talked with grown people, now 50, 60 years old. Some have been able to move on. Some haven't. Some are still trying to figure it all out."
And many, she said sadly, will never have the chance.
Most of the applicants who have come forward still live here in Prince Edward County, deep in the Bible belt of southern Virginia, where an important chapter of America's struggle with civil rights played out. A 1951 lawsuit challenging segregation was consolidated with four others to become the 1954 landmark case Brown v. Board of Education, which said separate but equal education for blacks and whites was unconstitutional.
Officials here largely ignored the decision, emboldened by state law passed in 1956 known as "massive resistance" that created a voucher program to allow white children to attend private schools. The Farmville Herald, the local newspaper, said in a March 20, 1959, editorial, describing efforts by outsiders to enforce Brown, "It is all part of the diabolical Communist plan to disrupt American life and reduce the white race to impotency."
In June 1959, the Prince Edward County Board of Supervisors withdrew all financial support of public schools as a way to close them and skirt the order of the Brown decision. Intended for black children, it was a decision that affected white families as well. Even with the state vouchers, not all of them could afford tuition at the private schools, which makes whites eligible for the scholarships as well.
Over the next few years, opposition to the county's segregationist policies gained strength, leading to a Supreme Court decision, Griffin v. Board of Education of Prince Edward County, in 1964, in which the court declared that every American child had a Constitutional right to a public school education. That ruling forced local officials to reopen their schools for all children.
In the void, however, lives were shattered, families were split, dreams died. While local leaders tried to maintain quality education for whites, black families were left to fend for themselves. Some shipped their children to relatives and strangers in distant counties and states so they could attend public schools or learn from tutors. Others kept their children at home, even if it meant years without instruction.
On a recent night, five black children of the 1950's, all of them now well into middle age, met at a reporter's request to share their memories and contemplate what the Brown scholarships mean. They talked about lives that could have been and lives that yet may be, now that the state has officially recognized their disrupted pasts.
While they did not seem bitter, many of their words rang with sadness and pain for what was denied them and for the psychological damage of a second-class status imposed upon them by the times.
Mr. Brown, now a deputy sheriff who works in the Prince Edward Middle School as a resource officer, has grappled with his anger for years, trying to keep it in proper context. "You've got to find a way to move on," he said. "The anger is something you're going to have with you as long as you live. It's never going to go away. You just have to deal with it."
The group had mixed views on whether they could ever forgive the state for what happened, scholarships notwithstanding.
Barbara Spring, 53, a retired firefighter, said she sat at home for four years after the schools closed. She said the scholarships enabled state officials to deal with their guilt. "It's a way to make up for what took place, and, in part, that's good," Ms. Spring said. "I believe in education, but it will never heal the wounds and scars of the past."
Leola Bailey, 52, who lost two years of school before she found classes to attend in a local church, agreed. "I feel like it's never too late to learn," Ms. Bailey said. "They have apologized for what they have done, but I don't know if they really mean it. I think they're doing it just to say they've done something."
But Alda Boothe, 55, a lab technician whose parents sent her to live with relatives during the years the schools were closed, was more willing to let it go. It was unfair, she said, to blame contemporary elected officials for the sins of their predecessors.
Ms. Moseley, too, is willing to forgive, saying she does not feel as bitter as others. "I'm the kind of person who thinks it's never too late," she said. "To do it now is better than not having done anything at all."
Even so, images of rejection still haunt her after several decades. "I lived behind one of those schools; they were closed with chains," she said. "I looked at it every day of my life. If I close my eyes, I can still see those doors chained up."
The idea for the scholarships began on Feb. 18, 2003, a day the General Assembly was debating a resolution to express "profound regret" for the Prince Edward school closings and the state's unwillingness at the time to get involved. But the scholarships were not a lawmaker's concept; they came from Ken Woodley, the current editor of The Farmville Herald, who was all too familiar with his newspaper's past and, as a white man, felt ashamed of it.
Contemplating the resolution, Mr. Woodley decided the people of his community deserved something more tangible. "At the end of the day, it's just a piece of paper, and it doesn't empower anybody to do anything," he said in an interview at his office, one room away from the yellowed, bound volumes of old Heralds that promoted segregation. "It doesn't give back anything that was taken away."
Mr. Woodley started a one-man campaign to create scholarships for those affected by the school closings. He wrote columns and called state lawmakers. He lobbied for additional support from Gov. Mark Warner and a handful of his predecessors.
Later, he found sponsors in the State House and Senate, and by last year, bills were passed and signed by Mr. Warner, who announced the first scholarship recipients in June.
"We can't rewrite history, and we shouldn't," said Mr. Woodley, who began working at The Herald in 1979 as a reporter. "But we can make history, and it needs to be made. The scholarships are a piece of goodness in a world that wasn't there before. As an educational opportunity, they're a chance to give back as best we can and teach a lesson that we can never do anything like we did again."
One about a Jewish children's museum
Museum Shows Children the Faith of Their Neighbors
By ANDY NEWMAN
The Red Robins and the Bluebirds took a trip the other day. They took the subway to the new Jewish Children's Museum in Brooklyn.
The Red Robins and the Bluebirds are from the Alonzo A. Daughtry Memorial Day Care Center. They are all 4 and 5. They went to the museum to learn what Jewish children do and believe. The day care center is in Park Slope, but the children who go there are from mostly poor families from throughout Brooklyn. Most are black and a few are white or brown, but none are Jewish.
"We want them to have a new experience," said their teacher, Metika Francis. "To see something that's outside their usual world."
The museum, which opened in April on Eastern Parkway in Crown Heights, is a tall shiny building with a 10-foot-high steel dreidel in front of it. Museum officials say it is the world's only Jewish children's museum.
It is run by the Lubavitcher Hasidim, a sect of Orthodox Jews whose headquarters are in Crown Heights. Crown Heights was the site of rioting in 1991 after a Hasidic driver ran over a black boy.
Since then, people in Crown Heights have worked hard to get along, and the museum is part of that effort, said Yifat Russ, a spokeswoman for the museum. "A lot of our tour guides often hear, 'Oh, this is why you do this or that,' " she said. "It gives a sort of calming effect, so that when kids see Jews outside the safe environment of the museum, they understand."
At the museum, the 20 Red Robins heard the story from Genesis of how God created the world in six days. Fish and birds one day, elephants and giraffes the next. Everyone liked the elephant. Then their tour guide, Mushkie Wilhelm, took them to a room with a loaf of challah, a Jewish bread, so big the children could crawl through it. They did, over and over again.
"Do you know that Jewish people have their own special holidays?" Ms. Wilhelm asked. "Does anyone know any Jewish holidays?"
"Valentine's Day," one boy said.
Ms. Wilhelm said that Valentine's Day was for everyone. But a talking tree told the children that Jews celebrate a special new year's day for trees. They even have a holiday for their Bible, the Torah.
"Imagine reading a book over and over again," she said. "As soon as you finish it, you start again."
She took the children down the hall to a supermarket filled with toy food. "Does anyone know anybody that went on a diet?" she asked. Everyone did.
"Well, did you know that all Jewish people that are observant are on a diet?" Ms. Wilhelm said, explaining that there are foods that Jews are not allowed to mix together, and others they cannot eat at all.
Kayla Jackson, 4, made a sandwich from an egg, a can of olives and a cherry Danish. Under Jewish law, all those foods can be eaten together.
Before the museum opened, some Jews worried that the Lubavitchers would show only their version of Jewishness and try to make people think that was what all Jews were like. Others thought the Lubavitchers might use the museum to recruit people. That would not be allowed. Most of the money to build it came from the city and state governments, and groups cannot use government money to spread their religion.
The day before the Red Robins went to the museum, Samuel C. Heilman, a professor of sociology and Jewish studies at Queens College, toured the exhibits.
Professor Heilman said that the Lubavitchers had tweaked the story of the Jews a bit, though not in ways that a 4-year-old would notice. None of the rabbis in the pictures on the walls were women, even though some Jewish movements permit female rabbis.
Some Lubavitcher touches were not so subtle. In the lobby was a big photo of a man with a hat and a gray beard, the Lubavitchers' leader, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson. Rabbi Schneerson died in 1994, but many Lubavitchers think he will return soon. They call him Moshiach, which means messiah.
Below the photo, on a television monitor, children chanted, "Nation of Israel, have no fear, Moshiach will be here this year." On the museum's ticket counter were subscription fliers for a Lubavitcher children's newspaper. "Kids love to read the Moshiach Times," the fliers said.
"It's as if you went to a church of evangelicals and their version of Christianity was the only version there is," Professor Heilman said. The executive director of the museum, Rabbi Yerachmiel Benjaminson, said the museum's mission was education, not evangelism.
"The city and the state gave us big money for this project because they agree that it's all about tolerance and understanding," he said. "Nothing is done so that a kid should feel, 'They're trying to indoctrinate me.' If not for the rebbe's picture here, you wouldn't know it's a Lubavitch museum."
In any case, Rabbi Benjaminson said, the museum has been a smashing success. In its first three months, he said, it received more than 25,000 visitors, mostly groups: schools, Orthodox Jewish summer camps, church groups.
On the fifth floor, the Bluebirds puttered around the Six Holes of Life miniature golf course, perhaps the only course in the world where duffers hit the ball past a fringed prayer shirt, through a synagogue and under a Talmud. The sixth hole had a statue of an old man in a rocker reading to a child, and a tombstone. When the children hit the ball into the sixth hole, it disappeared.
"Where's the ball?" one Bluebird asked.
"It didn't come back!" another complained.
Their tour guide, Miriam Gourevitch, explained. "In life," she said, "you have only one chance."
The visit was done. The children repaired to the museum gift shop to stock up on kosher jelly beans, Shabbat activity books and Frisbees with dreidels on them.
Jabari Blake, 4, said he had learned a lot about Jews.
"I learned about singing and praying," he said, "and I learned about talking, because they've got a lot of words."
One on bookbags and terrorism
Accessory to Murder
By BRUCE WEBER
ON Monday, a sightseeing bus in Times Square was boarded by armed police officers. They herded 60 tourists into the street with their hands in the air, and forced five of them, innocent men it turned out, to kneel in the gutter, with their hands handcuffed behind them.
Each of the men was wearing a backpack, which, along with dark complexions (the five were South Asian) is what drew the attention of a bus company employee, who considered the men suspicious and informed the bus driver, who in turn alerted the police.
A backpack! Has a more ordinary, more benign, more ubiquitous accouterment of modern life ever taken on such a sudden connotation of darkness?
Until recently, probably the most subversive items associated with the contents of a backpack have been Baggies of marijuana and dog-eared copies of "Slaughterhouse Five." And the dangers inherent in carrying them have largely been endured by undersized and overworked students who felt compelled to carry pounds and pounds of textbooks back and forth to class every day.
But now in the age of terrorism and especially during this sweltering July, after the London bus and subway attacks and the institution of the New York Police Department's random search policy - events that led no less a social critic than Jon Stewart to christen this the summer of the backpack - the signature luggage of 1960's flower children and 1990's schoolchildren has been marked in nefarious colors.
It's almost preposterous that something so familiarly non-malevolent is part of such a grotesquerie, like the kindergarten teacher who turns out to have a Nazi paraphernalia collection in the basement. Indeed, as the backpack grew more ubiquitous, it became considerably more geeky, considerably less threatening. "Although the knapsack implies a certain boyish free-spiritedness, the wearer is infrequently a free spirit," Ginia Bellafante said in this newspaper in 2002, using the throwback term for backpack. "He may be riddled with ambivalence about everything from whether to buy an apartment in Dumbo to how many slices of turkey to have in his sandwich for lunch. At worst he is emotionally inert and commitment-averse."
Up to maybe a half-century ago, the backpack was an accessory only for Boy Scouts and mountaineers. Its evolution from hiker's specialty item to urban, suburban and exurban fashion staple probably began with Dick Kelty's invention of the aluminum frame pack in the mid-1950's.
Suddenly easier to handle, they became such a universal symbol of independence and freedom of movement (if not outright happy rootlessness) that by 1970, even The New York Times was forced to take note of the backpack as a badge of fashion, sending a reporter deep into Greenwich Village to discover that, as the caption on the accompanying photo revealed, "for some, the knapsack" - ! - "epitomizes an entire lifestyle."
Through the 70's and 80's, designers of outdoor equipment like North Face and JanSport adapted them for everyday toting, and they became a part of a lot of lifestyles, stand-ins for briefcases, suitcases and even purses in places as diverse as campus and Wall Street. Leather backpacks appeared. By the 1990's, backpacks were being designed by Alexander Julian and Donna Karan.
There were occasional signs of trouble; in 1996, a New Jersey school district, moved by teachers' complaints that they kept tripping over backpacks left in the aisles, banned them from school, a ruling challenged in court by one 14-year-old who told a judge, "I don't feel I should be punished for someone else who misuses backpacks."
And two years later, a 26-story building in Newark was ordered evacuated when a suspicious-looking backpack was discovered in an F.B.I. office. It turned out to contain dirty laundry.
Perhaps events like that - the comedy of serious business - is what keeps backpacks from going the way of, say, thalidomide. Happily, or perhaps merely obliviously, backpackers continue to swarm Times Square, and in random midday interviews, New Yorkers said their attitudes hadn't changed one bit.
They're wary, yes; they feel as though anything can happen at any time. But is it the sight of a backpack that puts them on edge? Not really.
Andrew Soebroto, an olive-skinned, 30-year-old bartender from Brooklyn, who carries a backpack, said he often felt scrutinized. But he doesn't seem to mind.
"I've been wondering about that," he said, "because not many people carry big backpacks like I do. I don't know if it's the size of the pack, or the color of my skin, but I do notice, when the SWAT teams are out, they're looking at me."
In any case, the world is home to more backpacks than ever. A decade ago, manufacturers sold more than 8.5 million; last year, the number was 18.1 million. Such a vast sea of backpacks. It is both consoling and alarming, no?
One on the city's defunct ice industry
The Dawn of New York's Ice Age
By EDWARD T. O'DONNELL
IT was, in the words of one reporter, "a precious commodity," and to the great consternation of the city's masses, its price was once again on the rise.
The president of the city's Board of Health deemed the situation "an outrage." A Lower East Side doctor, Theodore F. Heller, called it "disgraceful" and predicted that thousands would perish.
It was the spring of 1896, and the city's ice barons were at it again.
In an age of ubiquitous air-conditioning and refrigeration, it's hard to comprehend just how much 19th-century New Yorkers depended on ice. By the 18th century, icehouses were standard features on most estates in Europe and even Colonial America, but for the common man and woman, especially in cities, ice in warm weather was as rare and expensive a commodity as caviar.
That began to change 200 years ago this summer when, on Aug. 5, 1805, an ambitious Massachusetts man named Frederick Tudor set out to single-handedly create the world's first commercial ice industry. A charismatic scion of a wealthy family, a tall, balding man with a gaze of hawklike intensity, Tudor possessed an almost evangelical commitment to the enterprise. "People believe me not when I tell them I am going to carry ice to the West Indies," he confided in his diary the following winter. "Let those laugh who win." Seven months later, a ship filled with 130 tons of ice cut from a Massachusetts pond arrived in the Caribbean island of Martinique.
Plagued by what he called "a villainous train of events," Tudor struggled for nearly three decades, but his perseverance finally paid off. Along with his workers, the man who became known as the Ice King developed equipment and techniques that would allow ice to be harvested, transported and stored for commercial sale; by the 1830's, Tudor was shipping his product to the West Indies, India and even Australia.
He and his followers soon discovered, however, that the largest single market for ice was New York. "I do not imagine," the English novelist and travel writer Fanny Trollope observed in her 1832 treatise, "Domestic Manners of the Americas," referring to a recent stay in Manhattan, "there is a home without the luxury of a piece of ice to cool the water and harden the butter."
Demand for ice grew so rapidly that by 1855 New Yorkers of all classes were consuming 285,000 tons annually. That same year brought the incorporation of the Knickerbocker Ice Company, an enterprise that quickly became the city's largest supplier. Knickerbocker developed a massive ice harvesting operation at Rockland Lake in Nyack and along the banks of the upper Hudson River, and during the winter months it employed thousands of men to cut huge blocks of ice and haul them to scores of large ice warehouses. When the warm weather set in, barges carried the product to the Manhattan docks, where it was transferred to icehouses dotted around the city and then distributed to customers via ice wagons.
The availability of cheap and plentiful ice meant more than cool drinks in the summer; it changed New Yorkers' basic diet. Butchers, fishmongers and dairymen began to use ice to preserve their stocks, leading to significant improvement in food quality and public health. Ice also greatly increased the diversity of culinary offerings available to New Yorkers as importers found ways to preserve previously exotic delights like freshwater fish. Ice cream, once the rarest of treats, became so popular that in 1850 a leading women's magazine declared it a basic necessity.
Ice had the additional effect of transforming New York into the nation's first beer capital by allowing for year-round brewing; in 1879, 121 breweries were operated in Manhattan and Brooklyn. But as much as the city's beer makers and drinkers applauded these innovations, not everyone was equally pleased, to the extent that in the summer of 1880, temperance advocates established a "Moderation Fountain" at City Hall Park, providing free ice water as an alternative to the offerings of the city's countless saloons.
Ice also delivered an impressive array of medical benefits. Doctors at Bellevue and other hospitals soon discovered that ice could save lives and began prescribing it as a means of lowering the body temperature of fever victims, especially the young. During the summer, city hospitals issued free ice tickets to the poor, and crowds often grew so anxious outside free ice depots during heat waves that free-for-alls known as ice riots erupted. According to an account in The New York Times of one incident in July 1906, "a woman pulled a man's mustache and another woman hit a man with a dishpan," and within minutes, "the ice was scattered on the sidewalk and hundreds were engaged in a rough-and-tumble fight."
By the 1880's, about 1,500 ice wagons plied the city streets every day, with Knickerbocker's bright yellow wagons one of the most recognizable vehicles. The burly, typically Italian iceman, a huge block of ice slung over his back and gripped with a pair of tongs, became as familiar a fixture on the urban landscape as the beat cop.
During a typical week in the 1880's, an iceman might deliver as much as 80 tons of ice, much of it carted up multiple flights of narrow and rickety stairs. The iceman's daily interactions with housewives gave rise to countless bawdy jokes, an occurrence immortalized in Eugene O'Neill's drama "The Iceman Cometh," set in 1912.
WHILE New Yorkers clearly loved their ice - Manhattan and Brooklyn consumed 1.3 million tons in 1879, more than a quarter of the national market - they loathed the companies that provided it, and in the 1880's and 1890's, a rising chorus of critics charged these firms with price gouging and monopolistic practices. In response, Knickerbocker and its competitors blamed the summer price increases on mild winters that produced insufficient stocks - "ice famines," in the parlance of the day.
In 1896, anger turned to alarm when Knickerbocker and most of the city's other firms were absorbed into a massive national ice trust called the Consolidated Ice Company. Prices jumped 33 percent that spring, and more than doubled by midsummer. Hardest hit were the poor, who could afford to buy their ice, like their winter coal, only in small quantities.
Popular outrage reached new heights four years later when investigative journalists revealed that Mayor Robert Van Wyck and other city officials had conspired to create a virtual monopoly for Consolidated. As the price of ice doubled, new revelations showed that the mayor and his brother had been given $1.7 million in Consolidated stock. The investigations produced no convictions, but the mayor, hounded by catcalls of "Ice! Ice! Ice!" whenever he appeared in public, was soundly defeated by a reform ticket in the election of 1901.
New York's ice age, however, was brought to a close not by reformers but by inventors. In the spring of 1916, the city's newspapers began carrying large ads for the Domelre electric refrigerator. Promoted as "The Electric Iceman," it promised to deliver "no ice - just cold." Domelre and its successors would not become a basic feature of most New York homes for several decades, but by 1950 the iceman had been become as much a relic of a long-ago age as the blacksmith and the lamplighter.
On the history of a house
Home, Interrupted
By KATHARINE GREIDER
FOR five years, my husband, David, and I lived in the top two floors of an uncomely three-story brick co-op at 239 East Seventh Street, between Avenues C and D. We faced south, the tulip-ringed playgrounds of Tompkins Square Park at our right hand, the East River at our left.
When we arrived on that sweet, tree-lined block of old row houses and tenements, real estate in the far East Village was less contested; there was room for roaming chickens and rose bushes, for impromptu sidewalk markets where you could purchase, say, a half-full bottle of baby oil or a pair of old pumps. The neighborhood's rhythms were Latin; salsa music poured from windows. In the summer, children stayed up well past dark as their parents sat talking on the stoops.
In 1997 and 2000 we took a daughter and then a son home from the hospital to that apartment. We had it firmly in mind we would raise them there, and launch them into the world from there. I imagined that one day many years hence I would look down on Seventh Street through eyes like my grandfather's before he died, brimming with inexpressible mysteries he'd witnessed from one stone house.
Well. No sooner had we finished paying for a new roof - we being us and the owners of the first-floor and basement apartments, former brothers-in-law now joined by an intimate hatred - when cracks began to appear on the facade. To appear and, indeed, to widen. We hired an engineer, who crept into the malodorous crawl space beneath the basement floorboards, and re-emerged with unwelcome advice: everybody out. Given the state of certain critical beams, he said, "catastrophic collapse" was within the realm of possibilities. We broke camp in a day, leaving a crib, a couch, a litter of abandoned toys.
So began two years of drifting. We moved in above a bar across the street, took up at my in-laws' in Virginia, then rented a tiny but neat apartment on Eighth Street near Avenue C. Our most valuable asset abruptly became a liability. We hemorrhaged money, borrowed more. One of the former brothers-in-law defaulted on his mortgage and was foreclosed on. The other sued us as "officers" of the co-op. Our insurance company didn't pay; in fact, it canceled our policy, since the building was now vacant and subject to vandalism. The city issued citations and threatened worse. With this vessel that was to have carried us into some distant future now pronounced rotted, bulging and out of plumb, I dreamed of incontinence, of teeth gone loose in my head, as if the vital structure itself were failing.
And as endings have a way of doing, our building's unexpected slide into decay drew my attention to the darkened tableau of the past: What happened here? At first, I was poking into Buildings Department files in the hope of righting the mess our lives had become. (Might we, for example, sue the daylights out of someone?) But as I explored the building's past, like reaching back to some ancient myth of origin, I began to suspect that its condition was a natural one for which there would be no compensation. Instead, I found consolation in the imagined company of others like us, whose days and nights at No. 239 time had erased.
Daniel Hahn, a month old when the census taker visited in 1880, probably opened his eyes to the world in those rooms. And a few reached the end of life at No. 239. There, a servant girl came of age. A son made his parents proud. Somewhere inside each of them had been a map like the map in my own heart - featuring a park, a river, an Avenue C more prominent than Broadway. Exiles from there, we are in the same boat now.
In Search of Lost Worlds
Once, the salt tide swept in and out over what is now the corner of Seventh Street and Avenue C. During the early 19th century, with commerce and population booming riotously, New Yorkers filled the marshy lowland to make ground for housing. They laid Avenue C in the 1820's, and divided the western half of our block into lots for development. In an atmosphere of excited speculation that makes today's East Village real estate market seem lackluster, a certain lot No. 68 changed hands no fewer than 13 times between 1827 and 1860.
Our little building, with its wooden joists and masonry bearing walls, was quite likely the first human habitation ever to occupy that patch of earth. A spanking new but otherwise undistinguished tenant house, No. 239 was by 1851 home to three households headed by E. W. Barnard, a "house agent" or real estate broker, a machinist called John Ogden, and a locksmith by the name of J. C. Cooper.
This was a world of skilled workers whose livelihood depended on the brackish waters the East River brought nearly to their doorsteps. The neighbors, mostly native New Yorkers and New Englanders, included mariners and sea captains, ship carpenters, pattern makers and fashioners of rope. At the foot of Seventh Street, the shipyard of William H. Webb sprawled over two city blocks, employing hundreds. How many mornings did I jog, oblivious, across the lonesome place where in 1852 the 278-foot Central America made ants of the men who labored to build it?
Nor is there any monument to the losses, shocking as a biblical plague, endured by parents who lived in the few blocks around our building at this time, just the dry pages of the 1855 state census, which counts 56 young children among that year's 95 dead. Their mothers no doubt visited one of the druggists that occupied three corners of our block, and carried home some palliative or nostrum - an opiate, a purgative, a pretty bottle of empty promises. Those mothers knew what it was to rock a glassy-eyed child in the arms and await, in helpless ignorance, the terrible parting.
There were good times, of course. Just around the corner from No. 239, outside a police building at Eighth Street and Avenue C, a display of chipped and dusty objects unearthed by city-commissioned archaeologists recalls simple pleasures of long ago. Pipe, flask, the leavings of a few festive meals, pig's jaw, goose sternum, fish spine, pits of cherry, peach and plum, oyster shells. (How those early New Yorkers loved oysters! They finished them off!) And among the rubbish found in a buried cistern were the carefully made playthings they gave their children: glass marbles and tea sets and porcelain dolls.
My years at 239 were the years of my early motherhood, so for me its long-gone children stand out as though brightly lit: 4-year-old Emma Metzker; the Livingston girls, Mary, 3, Fanny, 5, and Delia, 7. All were among the offspring of three German-born couples who lived at No. 239 around the time of the Civil War. At 12, Isadore Metzker and Caroline Weinstein, daughter of the well-off clothing merchant who owned the building, would have been old enough to tend the little ones.
In my mind's eye, I see the girls having tea parties and eating cherries on the stoop. I see them lifting their skirts above the stinking detritus of the cobbled street as they ventured down from the stoop into what had become, seemingly overnight, a world of their countrymen, of beer halls and workingmen's clubs, of church picnics, and, during hard times, gatherings in Tompkins Square to cry for "Work! Arbeit!" This was Kleindeutschland, the city's Little Germany.
Building a Home
Two names - Phillips and Wieder - reappear insistently in the census records, sketching the stories of two families who lived at No. 239, Tompkins at their right hand, the river at their left, for more than 30 years. Each made a home there, with all the permanence that word implies.
Clara and Levy Phillips, Bavarian immigrants, owned and occupied our building during the waning decades of the 19th century, as the great shipyards gave way to lumber yards and immigrants funneled copiously into Lower Manhattan. Phillipses loaded No. 239 from stem to stern, until, counting tenants, boarders and a young servant, there were 24 Kleindeutschlanders in all to share the cost of maintaining space in the roiling metropolis, more than double the peak occupancy during our time.
Although the Phillipses weren't rich people - Levy is listed as a glazier and later a retired merchant - they built the kind of home we wanted at No. 239, a familiar embrace to which their children could turn in time of need. Two grandchildren grew up under their roof with their mother, Rachel, Clary and Levy's daughter.
By 1900, another daughter, Isabella Solomon, who lived with her parents at No. 239 as a teenager, had returned to the family home as a 45-year-old widow with her own children, including a daughter and a son old enough to pull their weight as lacemaker and clerk. At 25, Isabella had been a new mother living uptown with her husband and his brother, paper box makers who probably worked at home and for a pittance. Before returning to her parents' house, Isabella bore nine children, and saw four of them die.
By 1900, the Phillips matriarch, 85-year-old Clara, was also a widow. The census lists her as owner of No. 239, but even she was uprooted in the end. In 1903, the house went on the block, where it fetched $12,100 for Clara's heirs.
As the curtain rose on the 20th century, the enormous German enclave in which the Phillipses had made their lives passed, like Clara herself, into history, punctuated by a communal cry of anguish over the 1904 burning and sinking of the ferryboat General Slocum, which carried as many as 1,300 picnicking Kleindeutschlanders to their deaths in the East River. At their Tompkins Square memorial, a lion head spitting water, my children filled brightly colored buckets on a summer's day.
An Ending, a Beginning
The Germans gradually left, and the Jewish community of the Lower East Side spread north of Houston Street. This would be the Wieders' era at 239, their tenants and neighbors hailing from Russia, Austria, Hungary, Poland - many of them Yiddish-speaking, some of them poor clothing "finishers" or clerks, others doctors, teachers or storekeepers. In this world, you bought egg creams on Avenue D and went for Papa Burger's Hungarian food on Avenue C; you read about the union guy shot to death by a Lepke henchman at Garfein's on Avenue A and sent the children to play in Tompkins Square Park with orders to be home in time for dinner.
Simon and Katy Wieder raised five sons, the eldest three born in their native Hungary, the youngest two in New York. In 1930, when the family had been at No. 239 more than 20 years, Max, a 45-year-old lawyer, Michael, 38 and also an attorney, and Morris, a 34-year-old proprietor of a clothing store, still shared a modest-size apartment with their parents. I imagine Max donning a three-piece suit and heading to court, where as assistant district attorney during the 1930's he helped prosecute the likes of Albert Fish, a child killer.
Almost all I know (or think I know) about No. 239's past inhabitants, I teased from old newspapers and population records. But between us and them there occurred one point of live contact, the chain of time folding in on itself. In 1945, two brothers sat on the stoop banging spoons on pots, joining in the happy noise that rose all around them: the appalling Nazi dominion in Europe was at an end. Fifty years later they strolled back to our stoop, two fit, agreeable middle-aged men, and spoke with my husband about their memories of the place. Who were those long-gone children? Wieders? Could be. If David asked their names, he doesn't remember them.
And what about Ah Dong Fu, Han Ding Hung and M. Kling? Did they utter the names Weinstein or Phillips or Wieder in 1965, when No. 239 was their home? The little cosmos that surrounded them, never more diverse, was a mix of Jewish, Chinese and Puerto Rican families, hippies at the right hand, and at the left, the fruits of urban planning: the Jacob Riis Houses, the F.D.R. and East River Park.
Final Days
In the 60's and 70's, a Spanish-speaking world rose like a sun over East Seventh Street, the Loisaida that would attract us with its warmth, the neighbors who blessed our children in their strollers and fed the strays in community gardens. But these were increasingly dark days for the block and the city. In 1973, in one of a series of transactions among investors, our building sold for a mere $12,250 - $150 more than it brought at the turn of the century. No. 239, jeopardized by a fire and demolition next door, according to neighborhood lore, was ordered vacated by the city in 1980. Six winters it sat empty.
Then this tired old house was resuscitated and pressed into service, this time as a co-op at the vanguard of 1980's gentrification, with floors graded up to cover sagging joists, new fixtures, and a rooftop addition that made the top floor into a duplex. In moved the brothers-in-law with young wives they wouldn't keep. They had good years there, too.
When, in 2002, the building finally gave us to understand it was ailing, one of numerous building-doctors we consulted was a structural engineer named Richard, a dark-eyed man with a quiet, resolute air. Richard never faltered in his insistence that the building could be fixed. But one day, as we sat around our table on Eighth Street, he remarked that if we were offered a fair price, we might consider selling.
"The thing is, it's our home," I protested. Richard shrugged. "Home is where you turn the key," he said. "The last place I was in, I thought I'd die there. But my wife wanted to move, so we moved."
In the end we cast our votes to dissolve the co-op and sold the building to a restaurateur who has undertaken the reconstruction we couldn't manage. By all appearances, scarcely a beam or brick of the original structure remains. Because of the escalation of real estate values in the East Village, my family didn't lose as much as we might have in the sale. But neither could we afford to return to the sweet, tree-lined block we once called home. No place for us chickens among the chic watering holes of Avenue C. As if to emphasize the point, the spring we moved out, an excavator clawed up the daffodils my daughter, Lucy, and I planted one autumn in the lot next to No. 239: When the yellow trumpets appear, I'd told her, so will your baby brother. A four-story building marks the spot.
What of it? In New York, not just buildings and people but whole ways of life pass quickly in and out of existence. My family found a new foothold, on Grand Street where the East River sweeps around Corlears Hook. The place has a solid balance sheet and, as David and I like to say, "good bones." I hope we'll live there together for a long time. But the city is an impatient teacher whose lesson is this: Everything is borrowed. Even home is a provisional place. It's where you turn the key.
On universal pre-school
All My Children
By DAVID L. KIRP
The Lab School, a Gothic pile across the street from the University of Chicago, is a hothouse for the imagination, a place where preschoolers engage with their teachers to construct a universe of knowledge. The school was founded over a century ago by John Dewey, and its guiding philosophy remains Dewey's belief that "the object and reward of learning is continued capacity for growth."
Carla Young, principal of the Lab School (or, more formally, the Laboratory Schools), acknowledges that sometimes teachers must take the lead, that "there's a need to give kids information - to read to them, to concentrate on the letter of the day." But much is left to the children's imagination. "Families that choose the Lab School like the emphasis on inquiry, social-emotional development, autonomy," she says. "The teaching comes out of the organic life of the classroom."
This is as good as prekindergarten gets. But most of these children are the offspring of faculty at the University of Chicago, and they live in a world where thinking is as instinctive as breathing. What if children in Middle America - for that matter, children in the direst straits - got a Lab School-quality education?
That's the dream of a growing number of people who are working to make preschool available to all.
From Brookline, Mass., to Beverly Hills, Calif., well-to-do parents spend upward of $15,000 a year to secure a place in crème de la crème preschools, for they have long appreciated the value of nursery schools that pique the curiosity of their offspring. At the opposite end of the social spectrum, for the last 40 years, tens of millions of 3- and 4-year-olds from families with below-poverty-line incomes have attended Head Start, the $6.8 billion federal program that delivers everything from know-your-letters drills and playground etiquette to hot meals and dental checkups.
Now middle-class families are insisting on first-rate, publicly supported prekindergartens. From magazines for parents, they have absorbed the findings of neuroscience: the first few years of a child's life offer unmatched opportunities for learning, and prekindergarten is the best investment they can make in their children's future.
Out of this understanding a movement has emerged. "I've been in the field my whole adult life," says Samuel J. Meisels, president of Chicago's Erikson Institute, a graduate school specializing in child development. "Suddenly everyone is talking about universal prekindergarten."
Still, talk is easy. Will states commit the money needed to guarantee quality or try to do preschool on the cheap? A year of good prekindergarten education costs about as much as a year of primary or secondary school, but that's still much more than most states now spend. Equally important is the kind of education - Lab School or skill and drill - that's delivered to 3- and 4-year-olds.
a third of a century ago, richard nixon vetoed legislation that would have underwritten preschools nationwide. "No communal approaches to child rearing," Nixon insisted, playing to his constituency, but how times have changed. The Census Bureau estimates that in 2003 nearly 60 percent of all eligible children were enrolled in preschool, more than double the percentage in 1980. A recent survey found that 87 percent of voters support using public money to send every child to a top-notch preschool. By more than 2 to 1, they favor investing in universal prekindergarten before improving K-12 education.
The states are getting the message. New York, Florida, Georgia and Oklahoma formally guarantee prekindergarten for all children, and about three dozen other states provide programs for poor children. More than three-quarters of a million youngsters are now in state-financed pre-K classes - that's nearly as many as are in Head Start - and their numbers keep growing. This policy change, and the deeper shift in public attitudes, is especially remarkable in an era when the prevailing aspiration is the "ownership society," not the social compact.
A generation ago, Bruce Babbitt, then the governor of Arizona, made children's issues the centerpiece of his state-of-the-state address - and the press ridiculed him for focusing on "quiche" instead of "meat and potatoes" issues like dams and development. Today, politicians across the red-blue ideological divide are borrowing from the Babbitt playbook because they see the issue as a positive. "In another generation, preschool for all will likely be a reality," says Edward Zigler, Head Start's first director and a professor emeritus of psychology at Yale.
Quality requires money. Research shows that well-educated teachers who know how to use research-based approaches rather than winging it can be the make-or-break factor. Classes need to be small, with a teacher and an aide for no more than 20 youngsters, and there has to be vigorous outreach to parents.
But in some quarters, the sentiment persists that preschool is just a fancy term for baby-sitting. Consider what's happening in Florida. In 2002, 59 percent of the voters supported a state constitutional amendment requiring that by this fall "high quality" preschool be available to every 4-year-old. But not until last December did the Legislature provide any funds, and that delay has schools scrambling to provide for an estimated 150,000 youngsters.
The $400 million that the Legislature approved means schools will receive only $2,500 for each youngster they enroll, about a third of what Head Start spends. And while Florida has adopted tough standards for seemingly every aspect of preschool life, including the requirement that 4-year-olds be taught how to floss their teeth, enforcement will be woefully inadequate. Still, David Lawrence Jr., the former publisher of The Miami Herald who led the campaign for the amendment, describes what has transpired thus far as "an honorable start."
In other states, too, promises have not been matched by policy. New York passed legislation eight years ago that guarantees preschool for all 4-year-olds by 2002. But with Gov. George E. Pataki notably lacking enthusiasm - on several occasions he has proposed axing the program - the money has not kept pace with the mandate. As a consequence, there is space for only about a quarter of the eligible children. California's voters overwhelmingly favor universal preschool - as long as someone else pays for it, which is why a measure on next year's ballot proposes financing prekindergarten by taxing only the superrich.
"ever since sputnik went up," recalls professor Zigler, decision makers have vacillated between emphasizing cognitive skills "and focusing on the whole child." The skill-and-drill mentality fostered by the federal No Child Left Behind Act, which represents the most recent swing of the pendulum, has reached preschool. Many prekindergartens now stress reading readiness. And because there are only so many hours in a preschool day, they devote less time to encouraging creativity or motivating 4-year-olds to work and play well with others. It is in Head Start that this shift - away from social-emotional development and problem-oriented learning, toward decoding language and numbers - is most fiercely contested. The stakes are high. The outcome will not only mold Head Start but also affect the nature of states' prekindergarten initiatives.
For Wade F. Horn, assistant secretary for children and families in the Department of Health and Human Services, the rationale is simple: from kindergarten on, literacy and numeracy are the essence of what school is about, so it's vital to focus on letters and numbers in preschool.
The Bush administration professes to be agnostic about which teaching methods work best: "I don't believe in scripts for teachers or flash cards or restricting the vocabulary that teachers use in the classroom," says Dr. Horn. But program administrators know that the quickest way to teach children how to recognize letters and numbers is what's called direct instruction - what critics deride as "drill and kill." In direct instruction, children, much like chicks, are fed morsels of information by their teacher. It's an approach reminiscent of Mr. Gradgrind, the schoolmaster in Dickens's "Hard Times" - "Teach these boy and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life."
From John Dewey to Jean Piaget, educators have generally agreed that while didactic teaching has its place, small children learn mainly from interacting and not passive listening, understanding and not memorizing, reading for fun and not simply decoding. "The good news," says Deborah Stipek, dean of the School of Education at Stanford University, "is that children can be taught basic academic skills - fundamentals of reading, writing and mathematics - in a way that uses, rather than destroys, their natural desire to learn. Vocabulary can be taught by conversation, awareness of print developed through reading and talking about books and mathematics learned with games like a pretend restaurant."
Drill-and-skill is not how middle-class children got their edge, Dean Stipek says, so "why use a strategy to help poor kids catch up that didn't help middle class kids in the first place?"
Still, in this age of testing, preschool is no exception. After a 1969 Head Start evaluation seemed to show that achievement gains quickly "faded out," the program emphasized social skills rather than academics. Some centers went so far as to prohibit displaying the letters of the alphabet. But 1998 federal legislation reversed this pattern. It established new academic standards for the program, including the expectation that all Head Start children learn at least 10 letters of the alphabet.
In the last year, nearly half a million youngsters in the Head Start program have been tested, at a cost of $30 million. "Point to B," the tester might ask, or "point to nine." The range of tested skills is narrow, with a focus on reading and math readiness.
In a generally harsh critique published this spring, the Government Accountability Office notes that the Bush administration contemplates - inappropriately, in its judgment - using the test results to hold Head Start centers accountable for improving their children's scores. "While Head Start is trying to hang on to what is developmentally appropriate," says Kathy R. Thornburg, former president of the National Association for the Education of Young Children, "the testing requirements drive teachers' behavior. Kids can regurgitate what you teach them. Can these kids be social beings who want to learn or have we already squelched their creativity?"
The person at the center of this controversy, Dr. Horn, points out that the scope of the test will eventually be expanded to assess social and emotional development. But he's not troubled that Head Start teachers are emulating Mr. Gradgrind. "Sometimes teaching to the test is really important," he says. "You have to teach the alphabet by teaching the alphabet."
But that's dubious science, says Richard Rothstein of the Economic Policy Institute in an American Prospect article. "There is no evidence that memorizing alphabet letters out of context" - instead of being exposed to books - "predicts later reading skill."
Tensions among the key players came to light in June, when the first nationwide study of Head Start's impact was released. The findings were mixed. On the positive side, Head Start sharply cuts the gap between the scores of the disadvantaged and the average national scores on such preschool skills as recognition of letters, numbers and words. Head Start also increases social and emotional skills and improves the children's health. Results are especially positive for children who enter Head Start when they are 3 years old, rather than waiting another year. But a sizable reading gap remains, and the program has no effect on premath skills.
Dr. Horn's reaction was inoffensive: "While this program has some benefits for kids, it can still be improved." Sarah Greene, president of the National Head Start Association, who has often quarreled with Dr. Horn, says that "those who have resolved to trash Head Start at every turn will twist this data to their ends."
Florida has adopted high-stakes testing with a vengeance. Its 2004 legislation requires that all children be tested at the beginning of kindergarten to determine their readiness. Any preschool whose children don't perform well on the exam risks being put into receivership or losing its financing entirely. The law doesn't take into account the prekindergarteners' background, so it ignores crucial differences. By age 4, a landmark study has found, children from poor families will have heard more than 30 million fewer words than their counterparts from professionals' households. Small wonder, then, that they come to preschool well behind. These are the children who can benefit the most from a word-rich environment, but because they may do poorly on the exam, the legislation gives preschools a powerful incentive to skim off the most advantaged, leaving the neediest out in the cold.
preschool advocates find that what's happening in Chicago is much more encouraging. Important state and city officials are ardent supporters of universal preschool. Gov. Rod Blagojevich was recently praised by Pre-K Now, a national advocacy group, as a "hero": he has successfully pushed to increase state financing 30 percent in each of the last three years. Mayor Richard M. Daley has made the value of a preschool education a theme of his administration. "He really gets it," says Barbara Bowman, who runs Chicago's preschool program, is a founder of the Erikson Institute and has been working with young children for more than half a century. Still, Chicago has a long way to go before quality prekindergarten is a fact of life for every 3- and 4-year-old.
At their best, the state-financed preschools, which serve more than 12,000 Chicago children, offer an education that is comparable to the University of Chicago's Lab School. To walk into Laurence Hadjas's preschool classroom in the William H. Ray Elementary School, a few blocks from the Lab School, is to enter a world of wonders. Ms. Hadjas is a master at mixing traditional instruction with adventuring. In one corner, children are building a bridge with Legos. Seeds are beginning to sprout in the plant box. In another nook, a girl leafs through a picture book. Two boys are feeding a bottle to a doll in the doctor's office. There's a folder full of menus from neighborhood restaurants, and the prices for pizza help teach about numbers. Amid this buzzing activity, the room is a picture of order. The children have learned to take turns, to put their things away, not to mix up the pieces from different games. If I were a 3-year-old, this would be heaven.
Ray is a magnet school that attracts motivated families from miles away, as well as those from the neighborhood. The children constitute a Noah's ark of racial and ethnic diversity. "This is a developmental program," the principal, Cydney Fields, tells parents anxious about how their toddlers will fare in the testing regimen they will soon encounter. "If you want heavy-duty academics, this isn't the place." But, she adds, "it's the way of the world that kids have to test," and so the school has tempered its developmental approach.
Test scores of children at Ray Elementary School do not support the contention that children from poor families require direct skill-and-drill teaching to succeed. Certainly children need a scaffolding of language: How else can they overcome that 30-million-word deficit? How else can they expand their vocabulary beyond sad, mad or glad? But interactive teaching is the best way to do this, Professor Bowman says, and she has research on her side. Several major studies show that when preschool children from poor backgrounds are taught in a problem-oriented way, they do as well academically as those who have been taught mainly by skill-and-drill. They are also more motivated to learn, and later, as teenagers, they're less likely to run afoul of the law.
The Lorraine Hansberry Child-Parent Center, attached to the Daniel Webster School, is just a few miles but a social light-year from Ray Elementary. Situated in a dicey neighborhood on Chicago's West Side, it has no hope of attracting students from afar. More than 90 percent of the children are black, most come from poor families and many are being raised by a single parent. Elsewhere, these children might already be lost, but here they seem to thrive.
For nearly 40 years, the Chicago public school system has been operating Child-Parent Centers like Hansberry in some of the city's poorest neighborhoods. These centers, which over the years have enrolled more than 100,000 youngsters, educate children from preschool through third grade in small classrooms with well-trained teachers. They bring parents, and sometimes grandparents, into the school, provide instruction in everything from cooking to computers - and enlist them as allies in their children's education.
There's considerable variation in pedagogy among the Child-Parent Centers, and Hansberry stresses direct instruction. Its textbooks teach reading by repeating a limited number of words in successive lessons, adding a few new words with each lesson. In Lilian McAfee-Jackson's preschool classroom, the children are singing the alphabet song: "Now I know my ABC's, I'm as happy as I can be."
"We have a great track record," says Sonia Griffin, longtime manager of the early childhood program. "Our children are succeeding, and not just in school." It's essential that children learn to read, of course, and at Hansberry, as elsewhere, the direct instruction technique has improved test scores in the early grades.
Yet if children are going to realize their potential, they need freedom to explore. A 2004 study of the Child-Parent Centers, carried out by Arthur Reynolds, a professor of social work, and his colleagues at the University of Wisconsin, reaches that conclusion. While preschoolers whose teachers took a didactic approach did better at the end of kindergarten, the reverse was true later on. Children who were in preschool classrooms that emphasized child-initiated learning had higher eighth-grade reading scores and higher rates of high school graduation. Professor Reynolds's research shows astonishing long-term effects for the program as a whole. Compared with youngsters who attended typical preschools like Head Start, children who went to the Child-Parent Centers in the early 1980's were nearly 30 percent more likely to have graduated from high school and 40 percent less likely to have repeated a grade.
The latest results, yet to be published, show that they are significantly more likely to have enrolled in a four-year college and significantly less likely to have seen the inside of a jail.
What makes these findings especially significant is that this is a large, publicly run program with a long track record. It's a program that could be adopted anywhere. But despite the school district's commitment to preschool, Chicago is having a hard time supporting it. It costs about $8,000 a year for a child to attend a Child-Parent Center. When measured against the results, that's an amazing bargain - for every dollar invested, there's a $7.10 return to society, according to the Reynolds study. Yet most preschool models are cheaper, and public financing is scarce.
"These centers should be a model for the city," Professor Bowman says, "but when fewer than half of all eligible low-income kids have any program at all, it's a tough call." Citing costs, Chicago has closed some of the centers.
The price tag for partly subsidized, year-round centers for children from birth to age 5 is $50 billion, according to a recent Brookings Institution estimate. If these centers were free for everyone, the cost would nearly triple. Such public generosity seems inconceivable, but it's how things are done in France, where almost every child attends an école maternelle and the poorest children get the most support, including the best teachers. Imagine the Lab School changing places with Hansberry.
Nearly a century ago, John Dewey declared that we "should want for every child what a good and wise parent wants for his child," and "anything else is unlovely and undermines democracy." Surely this is true of preschool.
A New Hope for Dreams Suspended by Segregation
By MICHAEL JANOFSKY
FARMVILLE, Va. - Warren Brown was about to enter first grade in 1959 when officials chained up the public schools in Prince Edward County rather than allow black children to sit beside white children in a classroom.
Without the resources to send him away, his mother kept him at home for four years, until she found a local church offering classes to black children.
Mr. Brown graduated from high school in 1972, winning basketball scholarships from three colleges, only to turn them down because he feared the academics would have been too challenging.
"I didn't get a proper foundation," he said. "If you're not prepared, what good is the school going to do for you?"
This fall, however, Mr. Brown, at the age of 51, plans to go to college to study criminal justice.
Five decades after Virginia ignored the actions of Prince Edward County and other locales that shut down their public schools in support of segregation, the state is making a rare effort to confront its racist past, in effect apologizing and offering reparations in the form of scholarships.
With a $1 million donation from the billionaire media investor John Kluge and a matching amount from the state, Virginia is providing up to $5,500 a year for any state resident, like Mr. Brown, who was denied a proper education when public schools shut down. So far, more than 80 people have been approved for the scholarships, and the number is expected to rise. Several thousand are potentially eligible, many of them now well into their 60's.
Rita Moseley, 58, was about to go into the sixth grade when the schools were closed. Her mother sent her more than 120 miles away to Blacksburg, Va., to live with an elderly woman and her daughter - "total strangers," she said - just to attend a public school willing to accept black children.
Currently a secretary in the high school she would have been barred from attending, she plans to use her scholarship to study business management.
"A lot of us still feel hurt, anger and bitterness," Ms. Moseley said. "I've talked with grown people, now 50, 60 years old. Some have been able to move on. Some haven't. Some are still trying to figure it all out."
And many, she said sadly, will never have the chance.
Most of the applicants who have come forward still live here in Prince Edward County, deep in the Bible belt of southern Virginia, where an important chapter of America's struggle with civil rights played out. A 1951 lawsuit challenging segregation was consolidated with four others to become the 1954 landmark case Brown v. Board of Education, which said separate but equal education for blacks and whites was unconstitutional.
Officials here largely ignored the decision, emboldened by state law passed in 1956 known as "massive resistance" that created a voucher program to allow white children to attend private schools. The Farmville Herald, the local newspaper, said in a March 20, 1959, editorial, describing efforts by outsiders to enforce Brown, "It is all part of the diabolical Communist plan to disrupt American life and reduce the white race to impotency."
In June 1959, the Prince Edward County Board of Supervisors withdrew all financial support of public schools as a way to close them and skirt the order of the Brown decision. Intended for black children, it was a decision that affected white families as well. Even with the state vouchers, not all of them could afford tuition at the private schools, which makes whites eligible for the scholarships as well.
Over the next few years, opposition to the county's segregationist policies gained strength, leading to a Supreme Court decision, Griffin v. Board of Education of Prince Edward County, in 1964, in which the court declared that every American child had a Constitutional right to a public school education. That ruling forced local officials to reopen their schools for all children.
In the void, however, lives were shattered, families were split, dreams died. While local leaders tried to maintain quality education for whites, black families were left to fend for themselves. Some shipped their children to relatives and strangers in distant counties and states so they could attend public schools or learn from tutors. Others kept their children at home, even if it meant years without instruction.
On a recent night, five black children of the 1950's, all of them now well into middle age, met at a reporter's request to share their memories and contemplate what the Brown scholarships mean. They talked about lives that could have been and lives that yet may be, now that the state has officially recognized their disrupted pasts.
While they did not seem bitter, many of their words rang with sadness and pain for what was denied them and for the psychological damage of a second-class status imposed upon them by the times.
Mr. Brown, now a deputy sheriff who works in the Prince Edward Middle School as a resource officer, has grappled with his anger for years, trying to keep it in proper context. "You've got to find a way to move on," he said. "The anger is something you're going to have with you as long as you live. It's never going to go away. You just have to deal with it."
The group had mixed views on whether they could ever forgive the state for what happened, scholarships notwithstanding.
Barbara Spring, 53, a retired firefighter, said she sat at home for four years after the schools closed. She said the scholarships enabled state officials to deal with their guilt. "It's a way to make up for what took place, and, in part, that's good," Ms. Spring said. "I believe in education, but it will never heal the wounds and scars of the past."
Leola Bailey, 52, who lost two years of school before she found classes to attend in a local church, agreed. "I feel like it's never too late to learn," Ms. Bailey said. "They have apologized for what they have done, but I don't know if they really mean it. I think they're doing it just to say they've done something."
But Alda Boothe, 55, a lab technician whose parents sent her to live with relatives during the years the schools were closed, was more willing to let it go. It was unfair, she said, to blame contemporary elected officials for the sins of their predecessors.
Ms. Moseley, too, is willing to forgive, saying she does not feel as bitter as others. "I'm the kind of person who thinks it's never too late," she said. "To do it now is better than not having done anything at all."
Even so, images of rejection still haunt her after several decades. "I lived behind one of those schools; they were closed with chains," she said. "I looked at it every day of my life. If I close my eyes, I can still see those doors chained up."
The idea for the scholarships began on Feb. 18, 2003, a day the General Assembly was debating a resolution to express "profound regret" for the Prince Edward school closings and the state's unwillingness at the time to get involved. But the scholarships were not a lawmaker's concept; they came from Ken Woodley, the current editor of The Farmville Herald, who was all too familiar with his newspaper's past and, as a white man, felt ashamed of it.
Contemplating the resolution, Mr. Woodley decided the people of his community deserved something more tangible. "At the end of the day, it's just a piece of paper, and it doesn't empower anybody to do anything," he said in an interview at his office, one room away from the yellowed, bound volumes of old Heralds that promoted segregation. "It doesn't give back anything that was taken away."
Mr. Woodley started a one-man campaign to create scholarships for those affected by the school closings. He wrote columns and called state lawmakers. He lobbied for additional support from Gov. Mark Warner and a handful of his predecessors.
Later, he found sponsors in the State House and Senate, and by last year, bills were passed and signed by Mr. Warner, who announced the first scholarship recipients in June.
"We can't rewrite history, and we shouldn't," said Mr. Woodley, who began working at The Herald in 1979 as a reporter. "But we can make history, and it needs to be made. The scholarships are a piece of goodness in a world that wasn't there before. As an educational opportunity, they're a chance to give back as best we can and teach a lesson that we can never do anything like we did again."
One about a Jewish children's museum
Museum Shows Children the Faith of Their Neighbors
By ANDY NEWMAN
The Red Robins and the Bluebirds took a trip the other day. They took the subway to the new Jewish Children's Museum in Brooklyn.
The Red Robins and the Bluebirds are from the Alonzo A. Daughtry Memorial Day Care Center. They are all 4 and 5. They went to the museum to learn what Jewish children do and believe. The day care center is in Park Slope, but the children who go there are from mostly poor families from throughout Brooklyn. Most are black and a few are white or brown, but none are Jewish.
"We want them to have a new experience," said their teacher, Metika Francis. "To see something that's outside their usual world."
The museum, which opened in April on Eastern Parkway in Crown Heights, is a tall shiny building with a 10-foot-high steel dreidel in front of it. Museum officials say it is the world's only Jewish children's museum.
It is run by the Lubavitcher Hasidim, a sect of Orthodox Jews whose headquarters are in Crown Heights. Crown Heights was the site of rioting in 1991 after a Hasidic driver ran over a black boy.
Since then, people in Crown Heights have worked hard to get along, and the museum is part of that effort, said Yifat Russ, a spokeswoman for the museum. "A lot of our tour guides often hear, 'Oh, this is why you do this or that,' " she said. "It gives a sort of calming effect, so that when kids see Jews outside the safe environment of the museum, they understand."
At the museum, the 20 Red Robins heard the story from Genesis of how God created the world in six days. Fish and birds one day, elephants and giraffes the next. Everyone liked the elephant. Then their tour guide, Mushkie Wilhelm, took them to a room with a loaf of challah, a Jewish bread, so big the children could crawl through it. They did, over and over again.
"Do you know that Jewish people have their own special holidays?" Ms. Wilhelm asked. "Does anyone know any Jewish holidays?"
"Valentine's Day," one boy said.
Ms. Wilhelm said that Valentine's Day was for everyone. But a talking tree told the children that Jews celebrate a special new year's day for trees. They even have a holiday for their Bible, the Torah.
"Imagine reading a book over and over again," she said. "As soon as you finish it, you start again."
She took the children down the hall to a supermarket filled with toy food. "Does anyone know anybody that went on a diet?" she asked. Everyone did.
"Well, did you know that all Jewish people that are observant are on a diet?" Ms. Wilhelm said, explaining that there are foods that Jews are not allowed to mix together, and others they cannot eat at all.
Kayla Jackson, 4, made a sandwich from an egg, a can of olives and a cherry Danish. Under Jewish law, all those foods can be eaten together.
Before the museum opened, some Jews worried that the Lubavitchers would show only their version of Jewishness and try to make people think that was what all Jews were like. Others thought the Lubavitchers might use the museum to recruit people. That would not be allowed. Most of the money to build it came from the city and state governments, and groups cannot use government money to spread their religion.
The day before the Red Robins went to the museum, Samuel C. Heilman, a professor of sociology and Jewish studies at Queens College, toured the exhibits.
Professor Heilman said that the Lubavitchers had tweaked the story of the Jews a bit, though not in ways that a 4-year-old would notice. None of the rabbis in the pictures on the walls were women, even though some Jewish movements permit female rabbis.
Some Lubavitcher touches were not so subtle. In the lobby was a big photo of a man with a hat and a gray beard, the Lubavitchers' leader, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson. Rabbi Schneerson died in 1994, but many Lubavitchers think he will return soon. They call him Moshiach, which means messiah.
Below the photo, on a television monitor, children chanted, "Nation of Israel, have no fear, Moshiach will be here this year." On the museum's ticket counter were subscription fliers for a Lubavitcher children's newspaper. "Kids love to read the Moshiach Times," the fliers said.
"It's as if you went to a church of evangelicals and their version of Christianity was the only version there is," Professor Heilman said. The executive director of the museum, Rabbi Yerachmiel Benjaminson, said the museum's mission was education, not evangelism.
"The city and the state gave us big money for this project because they agree that it's all about tolerance and understanding," he said. "Nothing is done so that a kid should feel, 'They're trying to indoctrinate me.' If not for the rebbe's picture here, you wouldn't know it's a Lubavitch museum."
In any case, Rabbi Benjaminson said, the museum has been a smashing success. In its first three months, he said, it received more than 25,000 visitors, mostly groups: schools, Orthodox Jewish summer camps, church groups.
On the fifth floor, the Bluebirds puttered around the Six Holes of Life miniature golf course, perhaps the only course in the world where duffers hit the ball past a fringed prayer shirt, through a synagogue and under a Talmud. The sixth hole had a statue of an old man in a rocker reading to a child, and a tombstone. When the children hit the ball into the sixth hole, it disappeared.
"Where's the ball?" one Bluebird asked.
"It didn't come back!" another complained.
Their tour guide, Miriam Gourevitch, explained. "In life," she said, "you have only one chance."
The visit was done. The children repaired to the museum gift shop to stock up on kosher jelly beans, Shabbat activity books and Frisbees with dreidels on them.
Jabari Blake, 4, said he had learned a lot about Jews.
"I learned about singing and praying," he said, "and I learned about talking, because they've got a lot of words."
One on bookbags and terrorism
Accessory to Murder
By BRUCE WEBER
ON Monday, a sightseeing bus in Times Square was boarded by armed police officers. They herded 60 tourists into the street with their hands in the air, and forced five of them, innocent men it turned out, to kneel in the gutter, with their hands handcuffed behind them.
Each of the men was wearing a backpack, which, along with dark complexions (the five were South Asian) is what drew the attention of a bus company employee, who considered the men suspicious and informed the bus driver, who in turn alerted the police.
A backpack! Has a more ordinary, more benign, more ubiquitous accouterment of modern life ever taken on such a sudden connotation of darkness?
Until recently, probably the most subversive items associated with the contents of a backpack have been Baggies of marijuana and dog-eared copies of "Slaughterhouse Five." And the dangers inherent in carrying them have largely been endured by undersized and overworked students who felt compelled to carry pounds and pounds of textbooks back and forth to class every day.
But now in the age of terrorism and especially during this sweltering July, after the London bus and subway attacks and the institution of the New York Police Department's random search policy - events that led no less a social critic than Jon Stewart to christen this the summer of the backpack - the signature luggage of 1960's flower children and 1990's schoolchildren has been marked in nefarious colors.
It's almost preposterous that something so familiarly non-malevolent is part of such a grotesquerie, like the kindergarten teacher who turns out to have a Nazi paraphernalia collection in the basement. Indeed, as the backpack grew more ubiquitous, it became considerably more geeky, considerably less threatening. "Although the knapsack implies a certain boyish free-spiritedness, the wearer is infrequently a free spirit," Ginia Bellafante said in this newspaper in 2002, using the throwback term for backpack. "He may be riddled with ambivalence about everything from whether to buy an apartment in Dumbo to how many slices of turkey to have in his sandwich for lunch. At worst he is emotionally inert and commitment-averse."
Up to maybe a half-century ago, the backpack was an accessory only for Boy Scouts and mountaineers. Its evolution from hiker's specialty item to urban, suburban and exurban fashion staple probably began with Dick Kelty's invention of the aluminum frame pack in the mid-1950's.
Suddenly easier to handle, they became such a universal symbol of independence and freedom of movement (if not outright happy rootlessness) that by 1970, even The New York Times was forced to take note of the backpack as a badge of fashion, sending a reporter deep into Greenwich Village to discover that, as the caption on the accompanying photo revealed, "for some, the knapsack" - ! - "epitomizes an entire lifestyle."
Through the 70's and 80's, designers of outdoor equipment like North Face and JanSport adapted them for everyday toting, and they became a part of a lot of lifestyles, stand-ins for briefcases, suitcases and even purses in places as diverse as campus and Wall Street. Leather backpacks appeared. By the 1990's, backpacks were being designed by Alexander Julian and Donna Karan.
There were occasional signs of trouble; in 1996, a New Jersey school district, moved by teachers' complaints that they kept tripping over backpacks left in the aisles, banned them from school, a ruling challenged in court by one 14-year-old who told a judge, "I don't feel I should be punished for someone else who misuses backpacks."
And two years later, a 26-story building in Newark was ordered evacuated when a suspicious-looking backpack was discovered in an F.B.I. office. It turned out to contain dirty laundry.
Perhaps events like that - the comedy of serious business - is what keeps backpacks from going the way of, say, thalidomide. Happily, or perhaps merely obliviously, backpackers continue to swarm Times Square, and in random midday interviews, New Yorkers said their attitudes hadn't changed one bit.
They're wary, yes; they feel as though anything can happen at any time. But is it the sight of a backpack that puts them on edge? Not really.
Andrew Soebroto, an olive-skinned, 30-year-old bartender from Brooklyn, who carries a backpack, said he often felt scrutinized. But he doesn't seem to mind.
"I've been wondering about that," he said, "because not many people carry big backpacks like I do. I don't know if it's the size of the pack, or the color of my skin, but I do notice, when the SWAT teams are out, they're looking at me."
In any case, the world is home to more backpacks than ever. A decade ago, manufacturers sold more than 8.5 million; last year, the number was 18.1 million. Such a vast sea of backpacks. It is both consoling and alarming, no?
One on the city's defunct ice industry
The Dawn of New York's Ice Age
By EDWARD T. O'DONNELL
IT was, in the words of one reporter, "a precious commodity," and to the great consternation of the city's masses, its price was once again on the rise.
The president of the city's Board of Health deemed the situation "an outrage." A Lower East Side doctor, Theodore F. Heller, called it "disgraceful" and predicted that thousands would perish.
It was the spring of 1896, and the city's ice barons were at it again.
In an age of ubiquitous air-conditioning and refrigeration, it's hard to comprehend just how much 19th-century New Yorkers depended on ice. By the 18th century, icehouses were standard features on most estates in Europe and even Colonial America, but for the common man and woman, especially in cities, ice in warm weather was as rare and expensive a commodity as caviar.
That began to change 200 years ago this summer when, on Aug. 5, 1805, an ambitious Massachusetts man named Frederick Tudor set out to single-handedly create the world's first commercial ice industry. A charismatic scion of a wealthy family, a tall, balding man with a gaze of hawklike intensity, Tudor possessed an almost evangelical commitment to the enterprise. "People believe me not when I tell them I am going to carry ice to the West Indies," he confided in his diary the following winter. "Let those laugh who win." Seven months later, a ship filled with 130 tons of ice cut from a Massachusetts pond arrived in the Caribbean island of Martinique.
Plagued by what he called "a villainous train of events," Tudor struggled for nearly three decades, but his perseverance finally paid off. Along with his workers, the man who became known as the Ice King developed equipment and techniques that would allow ice to be harvested, transported and stored for commercial sale; by the 1830's, Tudor was shipping his product to the West Indies, India and even Australia.
He and his followers soon discovered, however, that the largest single market for ice was New York. "I do not imagine," the English novelist and travel writer Fanny Trollope observed in her 1832 treatise, "Domestic Manners of the Americas," referring to a recent stay in Manhattan, "there is a home without the luxury of a piece of ice to cool the water and harden the butter."
Demand for ice grew so rapidly that by 1855 New Yorkers of all classes were consuming 285,000 tons annually. That same year brought the incorporation of the Knickerbocker Ice Company, an enterprise that quickly became the city's largest supplier. Knickerbocker developed a massive ice harvesting operation at Rockland Lake in Nyack and along the banks of the upper Hudson River, and during the winter months it employed thousands of men to cut huge blocks of ice and haul them to scores of large ice warehouses. When the warm weather set in, barges carried the product to the Manhattan docks, where it was transferred to icehouses dotted around the city and then distributed to customers via ice wagons.
The availability of cheap and plentiful ice meant more than cool drinks in the summer; it changed New Yorkers' basic diet. Butchers, fishmongers and dairymen began to use ice to preserve their stocks, leading to significant improvement in food quality and public health. Ice also greatly increased the diversity of culinary offerings available to New Yorkers as importers found ways to preserve previously exotic delights like freshwater fish. Ice cream, once the rarest of treats, became so popular that in 1850 a leading women's magazine declared it a basic necessity.
Ice had the additional effect of transforming New York into the nation's first beer capital by allowing for year-round brewing; in 1879, 121 breweries were operated in Manhattan and Brooklyn. But as much as the city's beer makers and drinkers applauded these innovations, not everyone was equally pleased, to the extent that in the summer of 1880, temperance advocates established a "Moderation Fountain" at City Hall Park, providing free ice water as an alternative to the offerings of the city's countless saloons.
Ice also delivered an impressive array of medical benefits. Doctors at Bellevue and other hospitals soon discovered that ice could save lives and began prescribing it as a means of lowering the body temperature of fever victims, especially the young. During the summer, city hospitals issued free ice tickets to the poor, and crowds often grew so anxious outside free ice depots during heat waves that free-for-alls known as ice riots erupted. According to an account in The New York Times of one incident in July 1906, "a woman pulled a man's mustache and another woman hit a man with a dishpan," and within minutes, "the ice was scattered on the sidewalk and hundreds were engaged in a rough-and-tumble fight."
By the 1880's, about 1,500 ice wagons plied the city streets every day, with Knickerbocker's bright yellow wagons one of the most recognizable vehicles. The burly, typically Italian iceman, a huge block of ice slung over his back and gripped with a pair of tongs, became as familiar a fixture on the urban landscape as the beat cop.
During a typical week in the 1880's, an iceman might deliver as much as 80 tons of ice, much of it carted up multiple flights of narrow and rickety stairs. The iceman's daily interactions with housewives gave rise to countless bawdy jokes, an occurrence immortalized in Eugene O'Neill's drama "The Iceman Cometh," set in 1912.
WHILE New Yorkers clearly loved their ice - Manhattan and Brooklyn consumed 1.3 million tons in 1879, more than a quarter of the national market - they loathed the companies that provided it, and in the 1880's and 1890's, a rising chorus of critics charged these firms with price gouging and monopolistic practices. In response, Knickerbocker and its competitors blamed the summer price increases on mild winters that produced insufficient stocks - "ice famines," in the parlance of the day.
In 1896, anger turned to alarm when Knickerbocker and most of the city's other firms were absorbed into a massive national ice trust called the Consolidated Ice Company. Prices jumped 33 percent that spring, and more than doubled by midsummer. Hardest hit were the poor, who could afford to buy their ice, like their winter coal, only in small quantities.
Popular outrage reached new heights four years later when investigative journalists revealed that Mayor Robert Van Wyck and other city officials had conspired to create a virtual monopoly for Consolidated. As the price of ice doubled, new revelations showed that the mayor and his brother had been given $1.7 million in Consolidated stock. The investigations produced no convictions, but the mayor, hounded by catcalls of "Ice! Ice! Ice!" whenever he appeared in public, was soundly defeated by a reform ticket in the election of 1901.
New York's ice age, however, was brought to a close not by reformers but by inventors. In the spring of 1916, the city's newspapers began carrying large ads for the Domelre electric refrigerator. Promoted as "The Electric Iceman," it promised to deliver "no ice - just cold." Domelre and its successors would not become a basic feature of most New York homes for several decades, but by 1950 the iceman had been become as much a relic of a long-ago age as the blacksmith and the lamplighter.
On the history of a house
Home, Interrupted
By KATHARINE GREIDER
FOR five years, my husband, David, and I lived in the top two floors of an uncomely three-story brick co-op at 239 East Seventh Street, between Avenues C and D. We faced south, the tulip-ringed playgrounds of Tompkins Square Park at our right hand, the East River at our left.
When we arrived on that sweet, tree-lined block of old row houses and tenements, real estate in the far East Village was less contested; there was room for roaming chickens and rose bushes, for impromptu sidewalk markets where you could purchase, say, a half-full bottle of baby oil or a pair of old pumps. The neighborhood's rhythms were Latin; salsa music poured from windows. In the summer, children stayed up well past dark as their parents sat talking on the stoops.
In 1997 and 2000 we took a daughter and then a son home from the hospital to that apartment. We had it firmly in mind we would raise them there, and launch them into the world from there. I imagined that one day many years hence I would look down on Seventh Street through eyes like my grandfather's before he died, brimming with inexpressible mysteries he'd witnessed from one stone house.
Well. No sooner had we finished paying for a new roof - we being us and the owners of the first-floor and basement apartments, former brothers-in-law now joined by an intimate hatred - when cracks began to appear on the facade. To appear and, indeed, to widen. We hired an engineer, who crept into the malodorous crawl space beneath the basement floorboards, and re-emerged with unwelcome advice: everybody out. Given the state of certain critical beams, he said, "catastrophic collapse" was within the realm of possibilities. We broke camp in a day, leaving a crib, a couch, a litter of abandoned toys.
So began two years of drifting. We moved in above a bar across the street, took up at my in-laws' in Virginia, then rented a tiny but neat apartment on Eighth Street near Avenue C. Our most valuable asset abruptly became a liability. We hemorrhaged money, borrowed more. One of the former brothers-in-law defaulted on his mortgage and was foreclosed on. The other sued us as "officers" of the co-op. Our insurance company didn't pay; in fact, it canceled our policy, since the building was now vacant and subject to vandalism. The city issued citations and threatened worse. With this vessel that was to have carried us into some distant future now pronounced rotted, bulging and out of plumb, I dreamed of incontinence, of teeth gone loose in my head, as if the vital structure itself were failing.
And as endings have a way of doing, our building's unexpected slide into decay drew my attention to the darkened tableau of the past: What happened here? At first, I was poking into Buildings Department files in the hope of righting the mess our lives had become. (Might we, for example, sue the daylights out of someone?) But as I explored the building's past, like reaching back to some ancient myth of origin, I began to suspect that its condition was a natural one for which there would be no compensation. Instead, I found consolation in the imagined company of others like us, whose days and nights at No. 239 time had erased.
Daniel Hahn, a month old when the census taker visited in 1880, probably opened his eyes to the world in those rooms. And a few reached the end of life at No. 239. There, a servant girl came of age. A son made his parents proud. Somewhere inside each of them had been a map like the map in my own heart - featuring a park, a river, an Avenue C more prominent than Broadway. Exiles from there, we are in the same boat now.
In Search of Lost Worlds
Once, the salt tide swept in and out over what is now the corner of Seventh Street and Avenue C. During the early 19th century, with commerce and population booming riotously, New Yorkers filled the marshy lowland to make ground for housing. They laid Avenue C in the 1820's, and divided the western half of our block into lots for development. In an atmosphere of excited speculation that makes today's East Village real estate market seem lackluster, a certain lot No. 68 changed hands no fewer than 13 times between 1827 and 1860.
Our little building, with its wooden joists and masonry bearing walls, was quite likely the first human habitation ever to occupy that patch of earth. A spanking new but otherwise undistinguished tenant house, No. 239 was by 1851 home to three households headed by E. W. Barnard, a "house agent" or real estate broker, a machinist called John Ogden, and a locksmith by the name of J. C. Cooper.
This was a world of skilled workers whose livelihood depended on the brackish waters the East River brought nearly to their doorsteps. The neighbors, mostly native New Yorkers and New Englanders, included mariners and sea captains, ship carpenters, pattern makers and fashioners of rope. At the foot of Seventh Street, the shipyard of William H. Webb sprawled over two city blocks, employing hundreds. How many mornings did I jog, oblivious, across the lonesome place where in 1852 the 278-foot Central America made ants of the men who labored to build it?
Nor is there any monument to the losses, shocking as a biblical plague, endured by parents who lived in the few blocks around our building at this time, just the dry pages of the 1855 state census, which counts 56 young children among that year's 95 dead. Their mothers no doubt visited one of the druggists that occupied three corners of our block, and carried home some palliative or nostrum - an opiate, a purgative, a pretty bottle of empty promises. Those mothers knew what it was to rock a glassy-eyed child in the arms and await, in helpless ignorance, the terrible parting.
There were good times, of course. Just around the corner from No. 239, outside a police building at Eighth Street and Avenue C, a display of chipped and dusty objects unearthed by city-commissioned archaeologists recalls simple pleasures of long ago. Pipe, flask, the leavings of a few festive meals, pig's jaw, goose sternum, fish spine, pits of cherry, peach and plum, oyster shells. (How those early New Yorkers loved oysters! They finished them off!) And among the rubbish found in a buried cistern were the carefully made playthings they gave their children: glass marbles and tea sets and porcelain dolls.
My years at 239 were the years of my early motherhood, so for me its long-gone children stand out as though brightly lit: 4-year-old Emma Metzker; the Livingston girls, Mary, 3, Fanny, 5, and Delia, 7. All were among the offspring of three German-born couples who lived at No. 239 around the time of the Civil War. At 12, Isadore Metzker and Caroline Weinstein, daughter of the well-off clothing merchant who owned the building, would have been old enough to tend the little ones.
In my mind's eye, I see the girls having tea parties and eating cherries on the stoop. I see them lifting their skirts above the stinking detritus of the cobbled street as they ventured down from the stoop into what had become, seemingly overnight, a world of their countrymen, of beer halls and workingmen's clubs, of church picnics, and, during hard times, gatherings in Tompkins Square to cry for "Work! Arbeit!" This was Kleindeutschland, the city's Little Germany.
Building a Home
Two names - Phillips and Wieder - reappear insistently in the census records, sketching the stories of two families who lived at No. 239, Tompkins at their right hand, the river at their left, for more than 30 years. Each made a home there, with all the permanence that word implies.
Clara and Levy Phillips, Bavarian immigrants, owned and occupied our building during the waning decades of the 19th century, as the great shipyards gave way to lumber yards and immigrants funneled copiously into Lower Manhattan. Phillipses loaded No. 239 from stem to stern, until, counting tenants, boarders and a young servant, there were 24 Kleindeutschlanders in all to share the cost of maintaining space in the roiling metropolis, more than double the peak occupancy during our time.
Although the Phillipses weren't rich people - Levy is listed as a glazier and later a retired merchant - they built the kind of home we wanted at No. 239, a familiar embrace to which their children could turn in time of need. Two grandchildren grew up under their roof with their mother, Rachel, Clary and Levy's daughter.
By 1900, another daughter, Isabella Solomon, who lived with her parents at No. 239 as a teenager, had returned to the family home as a 45-year-old widow with her own children, including a daughter and a son old enough to pull their weight as lacemaker and clerk. At 25, Isabella had been a new mother living uptown with her husband and his brother, paper box makers who probably worked at home and for a pittance. Before returning to her parents' house, Isabella bore nine children, and saw four of them die.
By 1900, the Phillips matriarch, 85-year-old Clara, was also a widow. The census lists her as owner of No. 239, but even she was uprooted in the end. In 1903, the house went on the block, where it fetched $12,100 for Clara's heirs.
As the curtain rose on the 20th century, the enormous German enclave in which the Phillipses had made their lives passed, like Clara herself, into history, punctuated by a communal cry of anguish over the 1904 burning and sinking of the ferryboat General Slocum, which carried as many as 1,300 picnicking Kleindeutschlanders to their deaths in the East River. At their Tompkins Square memorial, a lion head spitting water, my children filled brightly colored buckets on a summer's day.
An Ending, a Beginning
The Germans gradually left, and the Jewish community of the Lower East Side spread north of Houston Street. This would be the Wieders' era at 239, their tenants and neighbors hailing from Russia, Austria, Hungary, Poland - many of them Yiddish-speaking, some of them poor clothing "finishers" or clerks, others doctors, teachers or storekeepers. In this world, you bought egg creams on Avenue D and went for Papa Burger's Hungarian food on Avenue C; you read about the union guy shot to death by a Lepke henchman at Garfein's on Avenue A and sent the children to play in Tompkins Square Park with orders to be home in time for dinner.
Simon and Katy Wieder raised five sons, the eldest three born in their native Hungary, the youngest two in New York. In 1930, when the family had been at No. 239 more than 20 years, Max, a 45-year-old lawyer, Michael, 38 and also an attorney, and Morris, a 34-year-old proprietor of a clothing store, still shared a modest-size apartment with their parents. I imagine Max donning a three-piece suit and heading to court, where as assistant district attorney during the 1930's he helped prosecute the likes of Albert Fish, a child killer.
Almost all I know (or think I know) about No. 239's past inhabitants, I teased from old newspapers and population records. But between us and them there occurred one point of live contact, the chain of time folding in on itself. In 1945, two brothers sat on the stoop banging spoons on pots, joining in the happy noise that rose all around them: the appalling Nazi dominion in Europe was at an end. Fifty years later they strolled back to our stoop, two fit, agreeable middle-aged men, and spoke with my husband about their memories of the place. Who were those long-gone children? Wieders? Could be. If David asked their names, he doesn't remember them.
And what about Ah Dong Fu, Han Ding Hung and M. Kling? Did they utter the names Weinstein or Phillips or Wieder in 1965, when No. 239 was their home? The little cosmos that surrounded them, never more diverse, was a mix of Jewish, Chinese and Puerto Rican families, hippies at the right hand, and at the left, the fruits of urban planning: the Jacob Riis Houses, the F.D.R. and East River Park.
Final Days
In the 60's and 70's, a Spanish-speaking world rose like a sun over East Seventh Street, the Loisaida that would attract us with its warmth, the neighbors who blessed our children in their strollers and fed the strays in community gardens. But these were increasingly dark days for the block and the city. In 1973, in one of a series of transactions among investors, our building sold for a mere $12,250 - $150 more than it brought at the turn of the century. No. 239, jeopardized by a fire and demolition next door, according to neighborhood lore, was ordered vacated by the city in 1980. Six winters it sat empty.
Then this tired old house was resuscitated and pressed into service, this time as a co-op at the vanguard of 1980's gentrification, with floors graded up to cover sagging joists, new fixtures, and a rooftop addition that made the top floor into a duplex. In moved the brothers-in-law with young wives they wouldn't keep. They had good years there, too.
When, in 2002, the building finally gave us to understand it was ailing, one of numerous building-doctors we consulted was a structural engineer named Richard, a dark-eyed man with a quiet, resolute air. Richard never faltered in his insistence that the building could be fixed. But one day, as we sat around our table on Eighth Street, he remarked that if we were offered a fair price, we might consider selling.
"The thing is, it's our home," I protested. Richard shrugged. "Home is where you turn the key," he said. "The last place I was in, I thought I'd die there. But my wife wanted to move, so we moved."
In the end we cast our votes to dissolve the co-op and sold the building to a restaurateur who has undertaken the reconstruction we couldn't manage. By all appearances, scarcely a beam or brick of the original structure remains. Because of the escalation of real estate values in the East Village, my family didn't lose as much as we might have in the sale. But neither could we afford to return to the sweet, tree-lined block we once called home. No place for us chickens among the chic watering holes of Avenue C. As if to emphasize the point, the spring we moved out, an excavator clawed up the daffodils my daughter, Lucy, and I planted one autumn in the lot next to No. 239: When the yellow trumpets appear, I'd told her, so will your baby brother. A four-story building marks the spot.
What of it? In New York, not just buildings and people but whole ways of life pass quickly in and out of existence. My family found a new foothold, on Grand Street where the East River sweeps around Corlears Hook. The place has a solid balance sheet and, as David and I like to say, "good bones." I hope we'll live there together for a long time. But the city is an impatient teacher whose lesson is this: Everything is borrowed. Even home is a provisional place. It's where you turn the key.
On universal pre-school
All My Children
By DAVID L. KIRP
The Lab School, a Gothic pile across the street from the University of Chicago, is a hothouse for the imagination, a place where preschoolers engage with their teachers to construct a universe of knowledge. The school was founded over a century ago by John Dewey, and its guiding philosophy remains Dewey's belief that "the object and reward of learning is continued capacity for growth."
Carla Young, principal of the Lab School (or, more formally, the Laboratory Schools), acknowledges that sometimes teachers must take the lead, that "there's a need to give kids information - to read to them, to concentrate on the letter of the day." But much is left to the children's imagination. "Families that choose the Lab School like the emphasis on inquiry, social-emotional development, autonomy," she says. "The teaching comes out of the organic life of the classroom."
This is as good as prekindergarten gets. But most of these children are the offspring of faculty at the University of Chicago, and they live in a world where thinking is as instinctive as breathing. What if children in Middle America - for that matter, children in the direst straits - got a Lab School-quality education?
That's the dream of a growing number of people who are working to make preschool available to all.
From Brookline, Mass., to Beverly Hills, Calif., well-to-do parents spend upward of $15,000 a year to secure a place in crème de la crème preschools, for they have long appreciated the value of nursery schools that pique the curiosity of their offspring. At the opposite end of the social spectrum, for the last 40 years, tens of millions of 3- and 4-year-olds from families with below-poverty-line incomes have attended Head Start, the $6.8 billion federal program that delivers everything from know-your-letters drills and playground etiquette to hot meals and dental checkups.
Now middle-class families are insisting on first-rate, publicly supported prekindergartens. From magazines for parents, they have absorbed the findings of neuroscience: the first few years of a child's life offer unmatched opportunities for learning, and prekindergarten is the best investment they can make in their children's future.
Out of this understanding a movement has emerged. "I've been in the field my whole adult life," says Samuel J. Meisels, president of Chicago's Erikson Institute, a graduate school specializing in child development. "Suddenly everyone is talking about universal prekindergarten."
Still, talk is easy. Will states commit the money needed to guarantee quality or try to do preschool on the cheap? A year of good prekindergarten education costs about as much as a year of primary or secondary school, but that's still much more than most states now spend. Equally important is the kind of education - Lab School or skill and drill - that's delivered to 3- and 4-year-olds.
a third of a century ago, richard nixon vetoed legislation that would have underwritten preschools nationwide. "No communal approaches to child rearing," Nixon insisted, playing to his constituency, but how times have changed. The Census Bureau estimates that in 2003 nearly 60 percent of all eligible children were enrolled in preschool, more than double the percentage in 1980. A recent survey found that 87 percent of voters support using public money to send every child to a top-notch preschool. By more than 2 to 1, they favor investing in universal prekindergarten before improving K-12 education.
The states are getting the message. New York, Florida, Georgia and Oklahoma formally guarantee prekindergarten for all children, and about three dozen other states provide programs for poor children. More than three-quarters of a million youngsters are now in state-financed pre-K classes - that's nearly as many as are in Head Start - and their numbers keep growing. This policy change, and the deeper shift in public attitudes, is especially remarkable in an era when the prevailing aspiration is the "ownership society," not the social compact.
A generation ago, Bruce Babbitt, then the governor of Arizona, made children's issues the centerpiece of his state-of-the-state address - and the press ridiculed him for focusing on "quiche" instead of "meat and potatoes" issues like dams and development. Today, politicians across the red-blue ideological divide are borrowing from the Babbitt playbook because they see the issue as a positive. "In another generation, preschool for all will likely be a reality," says Edward Zigler, Head Start's first director and a professor emeritus of psychology at Yale.
Quality requires money. Research shows that well-educated teachers who know how to use research-based approaches rather than winging it can be the make-or-break factor. Classes need to be small, with a teacher and an aide for no more than 20 youngsters, and there has to be vigorous outreach to parents.
But in some quarters, the sentiment persists that preschool is just a fancy term for baby-sitting. Consider what's happening in Florida. In 2002, 59 percent of the voters supported a state constitutional amendment requiring that by this fall "high quality" preschool be available to every 4-year-old. But not until last December did the Legislature provide any funds, and that delay has schools scrambling to provide for an estimated 150,000 youngsters.
The $400 million that the Legislature approved means schools will receive only $2,500 for each youngster they enroll, about a third of what Head Start spends. And while Florida has adopted tough standards for seemingly every aspect of preschool life, including the requirement that 4-year-olds be taught how to floss their teeth, enforcement will be woefully inadequate. Still, David Lawrence Jr., the former publisher of The Miami Herald who led the campaign for the amendment, describes what has transpired thus far as "an honorable start."
In other states, too, promises have not been matched by policy. New York passed legislation eight years ago that guarantees preschool for all 4-year-olds by 2002. But with Gov. George E. Pataki notably lacking enthusiasm - on several occasions he has proposed axing the program - the money has not kept pace with the mandate. As a consequence, there is space for only about a quarter of the eligible children. California's voters overwhelmingly favor universal preschool - as long as someone else pays for it, which is why a measure on next year's ballot proposes financing prekindergarten by taxing only the superrich.
"ever since sputnik went up," recalls professor Zigler, decision makers have vacillated between emphasizing cognitive skills "and focusing on the whole child." The skill-and-drill mentality fostered by the federal No Child Left Behind Act, which represents the most recent swing of the pendulum, has reached preschool. Many prekindergartens now stress reading readiness. And because there are only so many hours in a preschool day, they devote less time to encouraging creativity or motivating 4-year-olds to work and play well with others. It is in Head Start that this shift - away from social-emotional development and problem-oriented learning, toward decoding language and numbers - is most fiercely contested. The stakes are high. The outcome will not only mold Head Start but also affect the nature of states' prekindergarten initiatives.
For Wade F. Horn, assistant secretary for children and families in the Department of Health and Human Services, the rationale is simple: from kindergarten on, literacy and numeracy are the essence of what school is about, so it's vital to focus on letters and numbers in preschool.
The Bush administration professes to be agnostic about which teaching methods work best: "I don't believe in scripts for teachers or flash cards or restricting the vocabulary that teachers use in the classroom," says Dr. Horn. But program administrators know that the quickest way to teach children how to recognize letters and numbers is what's called direct instruction - what critics deride as "drill and kill." In direct instruction, children, much like chicks, are fed morsels of information by their teacher. It's an approach reminiscent of Mr. Gradgrind, the schoolmaster in Dickens's "Hard Times" - "Teach these boy and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life."
From John Dewey to Jean Piaget, educators have generally agreed that while didactic teaching has its place, small children learn mainly from interacting and not passive listening, understanding and not memorizing, reading for fun and not simply decoding. "The good news," says Deborah Stipek, dean of the School of Education at Stanford University, "is that children can be taught basic academic skills - fundamentals of reading, writing and mathematics - in a way that uses, rather than destroys, their natural desire to learn. Vocabulary can be taught by conversation, awareness of print developed through reading and talking about books and mathematics learned with games like a pretend restaurant."
Drill-and-skill is not how middle-class children got their edge, Dean Stipek says, so "why use a strategy to help poor kids catch up that didn't help middle class kids in the first place?"
Still, in this age of testing, preschool is no exception. After a 1969 Head Start evaluation seemed to show that achievement gains quickly "faded out," the program emphasized social skills rather than academics. Some centers went so far as to prohibit displaying the letters of the alphabet. But 1998 federal legislation reversed this pattern. It established new academic standards for the program, including the expectation that all Head Start children learn at least 10 letters of the alphabet.
In the last year, nearly half a million youngsters in the Head Start program have been tested, at a cost of $30 million. "Point to B," the tester might ask, or "point to nine." The range of tested skills is narrow, with a focus on reading and math readiness.
In a generally harsh critique published this spring, the Government Accountability Office notes that the Bush administration contemplates - inappropriately, in its judgment - using the test results to hold Head Start centers accountable for improving their children's scores. "While Head Start is trying to hang on to what is developmentally appropriate," says Kathy R. Thornburg, former president of the National Association for the Education of Young Children, "the testing requirements drive teachers' behavior. Kids can regurgitate what you teach them. Can these kids be social beings who want to learn or have we already squelched their creativity?"
The person at the center of this controversy, Dr. Horn, points out that the scope of the test will eventually be expanded to assess social and emotional development. But he's not troubled that Head Start teachers are emulating Mr. Gradgrind. "Sometimes teaching to the test is really important," he says. "You have to teach the alphabet by teaching the alphabet."
But that's dubious science, says Richard Rothstein of the Economic Policy Institute in an American Prospect article. "There is no evidence that memorizing alphabet letters out of context" - instead of being exposed to books - "predicts later reading skill."
Tensions among the key players came to light in June, when the first nationwide study of Head Start's impact was released. The findings were mixed. On the positive side, Head Start sharply cuts the gap between the scores of the disadvantaged and the average national scores on such preschool skills as recognition of letters, numbers and words. Head Start also increases social and emotional skills and improves the children's health. Results are especially positive for children who enter Head Start when they are 3 years old, rather than waiting another year. But a sizable reading gap remains, and the program has no effect on premath skills.
Dr. Horn's reaction was inoffensive: "While this program has some benefits for kids, it can still be improved." Sarah Greene, president of the National Head Start Association, who has often quarreled with Dr. Horn, says that "those who have resolved to trash Head Start at every turn will twist this data to their ends."
Florida has adopted high-stakes testing with a vengeance. Its 2004 legislation requires that all children be tested at the beginning of kindergarten to determine their readiness. Any preschool whose children don't perform well on the exam risks being put into receivership or losing its financing entirely. The law doesn't take into account the prekindergarteners' background, so it ignores crucial differences. By age 4, a landmark study has found, children from poor families will have heard more than 30 million fewer words than their counterparts from professionals' households. Small wonder, then, that they come to preschool well behind. These are the children who can benefit the most from a word-rich environment, but because they may do poorly on the exam, the legislation gives preschools a powerful incentive to skim off the most advantaged, leaving the neediest out in the cold.
preschool advocates find that what's happening in Chicago is much more encouraging. Important state and city officials are ardent supporters of universal preschool. Gov. Rod Blagojevich was recently praised by Pre-K Now, a national advocacy group, as a "hero": he has successfully pushed to increase state financing 30 percent in each of the last three years. Mayor Richard M. Daley has made the value of a preschool education a theme of his administration. "He really gets it," says Barbara Bowman, who runs Chicago's preschool program, is a founder of the Erikson Institute and has been working with young children for more than half a century. Still, Chicago has a long way to go before quality prekindergarten is a fact of life for every 3- and 4-year-old.
At their best, the state-financed preschools, which serve more than 12,000 Chicago children, offer an education that is comparable to the University of Chicago's Lab School. To walk into Laurence Hadjas's preschool classroom in the William H. Ray Elementary School, a few blocks from the Lab School, is to enter a world of wonders. Ms. Hadjas is a master at mixing traditional instruction with adventuring. In one corner, children are building a bridge with Legos. Seeds are beginning to sprout in the plant box. In another nook, a girl leafs through a picture book. Two boys are feeding a bottle to a doll in the doctor's office. There's a folder full of menus from neighborhood restaurants, and the prices for pizza help teach about numbers. Amid this buzzing activity, the room is a picture of order. The children have learned to take turns, to put their things away, not to mix up the pieces from different games. If I were a 3-year-old, this would be heaven.
Ray is a magnet school that attracts motivated families from miles away, as well as those from the neighborhood. The children constitute a Noah's ark of racial and ethnic diversity. "This is a developmental program," the principal, Cydney Fields, tells parents anxious about how their toddlers will fare in the testing regimen they will soon encounter. "If you want heavy-duty academics, this isn't the place." But, she adds, "it's the way of the world that kids have to test," and so the school has tempered its developmental approach.
Test scores of children at Ray Elementary School do not support the contention that children from poor families require direct skill-and-drill teaching to succeed. Certainly children need a scaffolding of language: How else can they overcome that 30-million-word deficit? How else can they expand their vocabulary beyond sad, mad or glad? But interactive teaching is the best way to do this, Professor Bowman says, and she has research on her side. Several major studies show that when preschool children from poor backgrounds are taught in a problem-oriented way, they do as well academically as those who have been taught mainly by skill-and-drill. They are also more motivated to learn, and later, as teenagers, they're less likely to run afoul of the law.
The Lorraine Hansberry Child-Parent Center, attached to the Daniel Webster School, is just a few miles but a social light-year from Ray Elementary. Situated in a dicey neighborhood on Chicago's West Side, it has no hope of attracting students from afar. More than 90 percent of the children are black, most come from poor families and many are being raised by a single parent. Elsewhere, these children might already be lost, but here they seem to thrive.
For nearly 40 years, the Chicago public school system has been operating Child-Parent Centers like Hansberry in some of the city's poorest neighborhoods. These centers, which over the years have enrolled more than 100,000 youngsters, educate children from preschool through third grade in small classrooms with well-trained teachers. They bring parents, and sometimes grandparents, into the school, provide instruction in everything from cooking to computers - and enlist them as allies in their children's education.
There's considerable variation in pedagogy among the Child-Parent Centers, and Hansberry stresses direct instruction. Its textbooks teach reading by repeating a limited number of words in successive lessons, adding a few new words with each lesson. In Lilian McAfee-Jackson's preschool classroom, the children are singing the alphabet song: "Now I know my ABC's, I'm as happy as I can be."
"We have a great track record," says Sonia Griffin, longtime manager of the early childhood program. "Our children are succeeding, and not just in school." It's essential that children learn to read, of course, and at Hansberry, as elsewhere, the direct instruction technique has improved test scores in the early grades.
Yet if children are going to realize their potential, they need freedom to explore. A 2004 study of the Child-Parent Centers, carried out by Arthur Reynolds, a professor of social work, and his colleagues at the University of Wisconsin, reaches that conclusion. While preschoolers whose teachers took a didactic approach did better at the end of kindergarten, the reverse was true later on. Children who were in preschool classrooms that emphasized child-initiated learning had higher eighth-grade reading scores and higher rates of high school graduation. Professor Reynolds's research shows astonishing long-term effects for the program as a whole. Compared with youngsters who attended typical preschools like Head Start, children who went to the Child-Parent Centers in the early 1980's were nearly 30 percent more likely to have graduated from high school and 40 percent less likely to have repeated a grade.
The latest results, yet to be published, show that they are significantly more likely to have enrolled in a four-year college and significantly less likely to have seen the inside of a jail.
What makes these findings especially significant is that this is a large, publicly run program with a long track record. It's a program that could be adopted anywhere. But despite the school district's commitment to preschool, Chicago is having a hard time supporting it. It costs about $8,000 a year for a child to attend a Child-Parent Center. When measured against the results, that's an amazing bargain - for every dollar invested, there's a $7.10 return to society, according to the Reynolds study. Yet most preschool models are cheaper, and public financing is scarce.
"These centers should be a model for the city," Professor Bowman says, "but when fewer than half of all eligible low-income kids have any program at all, it's a tough call." Citing costs, Chicago has closed some of the centers.
The price tag for partly subsidized, year-round centers for children from birth to age 5 is $50 billion, according to a recent Brookings Institution estimate. If these centers were free for everyone, the cost would nearly triple. Such public generosity seems inconceivable, but it's how things are done in France, where almost every child attends an école maternelle and the poorest children get the most support, including the best teachers. Imagine the Lab School changing places with Hansberry.
Nearly a century ago, John Dewey declared that we "should want for every child what a good and wise parent wants for his child," and "anything else is unlovely and undermines democracy." Surely this is true of preschool.
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no subject
Date: 2005-07-31 01:24 pm (UTC)Seriously a pain in the butt - I take the bus everywhere, always need to have stuff with me and just can't be *without* the backpack or tote bag.
Strangely, I notice in Antioch, California (where I'm presently living) there's a huge backpack stigma - there are signs on grocery stores saying backpacks are not allowed/must be checked; they are not allowed in any movie theaters, and *cannot* be checked.
However, there was never a problem for me with the backpack in San Diego. San Diego had other issues - for example, many places don't accept California ID as identification, only a driver's license. Irrelevant to me as I have a driver's license, but I always found it peculiar all the same.
That said,
My STBX (soon to be ex) husband decided that 1) the theater in Davis didn't allow backpacks, 2) there was only one theater in Davis to his knowledge, 3) not allowing backpacks is *major discrimination*, 4) Davis must be "that kind of place", 5) therefore he wouldn't ever want to live in Davis. (This came up because I'm transferring to UC Davis.)
no subject
Date: 2005-08-01 01:59 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-08-01 03:09 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-08-01 01:19 am (UTC)Thank you.
no subject
Date: 2005-07-31 01:24 pm (UTC)Seriously a pain in the butt - I take the bus everywhere, always need to have stuff with me and just can't be *without* the backpack or tote bag.
Strangely, I notice in Antioch, California (where I'm presently living) there's a huge backpack stigma - there are signs on grocery stores saying backpacks are not allowed/must be checked; they are not allowed in any movie theaters, and *cannot* be checked.
However, there was never a problem for me with the backpack in San Diego. San Diego had other issues - for example, many places don't accept California ID as identification, only a driver's license. Irrelevant to me as I have a driver's license, but I always found it peculiar all the same.
That said,
My STBX (soon to be ex) husband decided that 1) the theater in Davis didn't allow backpacks, 2) there was only one theater in Davis to his knowledge, 3) not allowing backpacks is *major discrimination*, 4) Davis must be "that kind of place", 5) therefore he wouldn't ever want to live in Davis. (This came up because I'm transferring to UC Davis.)
no subject
Date: 2005-08-01 01:59 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-08-01 03:09 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-08-01 01:19 am (UTC)Thank you.