Collection of NYTimes articles.

[conuly]

On being a refugee as filtered through whether or not you have money.

In Tale of Two Families, a Chasm Between Haves and Have-Nots
By JODI WILGOREN

KENNER, La., Sept. 4 - It was moving day for the families of Gaynell Porretto and Tracy Jackson, the first page of the next chapter in their Hurricane Katrina horror stories.

Mrs. Porretto's four-car caravan crammed with a lifetime of photo albums, a few changes of clothes and coolers of drinks pulled up to a yellow house with a wide front porch that she had just rented for $600 in the humble hamlet of Arnaudville, La.

It is 125 miles from her storm-sacked home in the New Orleans suburb of Metairie, half the size for twice as many people, but she can see the church steeple from the yard, and her son is signed up for football at the nearby high school.

"I have a ZIP code!" she said, exulting. "It's the happiest I've ever been."

Outside the New Orleans airport here, Ms. Jackson's four sickly and hungry children, ages 1, 3, 5 and 7, were sprawled on a skycap's cart as she slogged through the sweaty, snail-like line, the baby atop a blue plastic bin filled with what they had scrounged from strangers.

It is all they have, their $2,000 cash savings burned up with their belongings - including birth certificates - in a post-flood fire at their apartment in uptown New Orleans. Even as they waited to board a plane, they did not know where they were taking it.

"I'm just hoping it's a better place," she whispered. "I've never been on an airplane before, I'm afraid of heights."

Two families displaced by the same disaster, both facing uncertain futures as they moved forward on Saturday, but in completely divergent circumstances.

Just as it ripped through levees to send water pouring through New Orleans, the storm cleaved a harsh chasm among the region's refugees, providing a stark portrait of the vast divide between America's haves and have-nots.

The more than 100 members of Mrs. Porretto's extended family have cars that carried them out last Sunday morning, well before the hurricane hit.

Ms. Jackson, who does not know how to drive, escaped on foot only after the floodwaters started filling her apartment on Tuesday, walking first to a bridge, then to the squalid Superdome.

Mrs. Porretto, 51, has an American Express card that covered her $564.26 bill at the Hilton in Lafayette, La., where a cousin who works for AT&T secured a low corporate rate when she booked a block of rooms days before of the storm.

Ms. Jackson, 24, does not have a bank account, and her husband, Jerel Brown, spent their last $25 to buy fish and shrimp from men grilling on the street in the chaos, so now there is nothing in the pockets of his baggy jeans but a crushed pack of Benson & Hedges someone gave him to calm him down.

The Porrettos have cellphones and connections in city government and churches that not only helped them find one of the last available rental properties anywhere around here, but also let them sneak back into their neighborhood early this weekend to grab televisions and furnishings for their new house.

Mr. Brown, in tears, has no recourse but to ask a reporter to look for his missing brother, Wallace, and if he turned up, find out how they could get back in touch.

John Edwards, the former senator whose presidential primary campaign last year was based on the theme that America is a country torn in two by race and class, sent an e-mail to supporters last week, saying that the hurricane's destruction exposed "a harsher example of two Americas."

"Every single resident of New Orleans, regardless of their wealth or status, will have terrible losses and life-altering experiences," Mr. Edwards wrote. But poor people, he added, "suffered the most from Katrina because they always suffer the most."

Mrs. Porretto, a court clerk, and her husband, Joel, a retired police officer, are hardly rich. But as they embark on life in exile, they look like royalty compared with Mr. Brown, Ms. Jackson and their children, wandering to a destination unknown with little more than the clothes they have worn for a week.

"We don't know where we're going, we don't know how we're going to survive when we get there - we're starting all over," Mr. Brown said as he stood in line for three hours in the airport's heat. "I never been out of this city. I'm going to be a stranger."

Nearly one in four of New Orleans' 445,000 residents live in poverty, many of them in neighborhoods like the one where the Jackson-Brown clan huddled in a $350-a-month two-bedroom apartment across from a dilapidated and dangerous housing project; 69 percent of the city is black, and the median household income is $31,369. To the west in Metairie, where Ellen DeGeneres grew up, the median income is $41,265, just below the national average, 87 percent of the 145,000 residents are white, and fewer than 1 in 10 are poor.

But in the hurricane's wake, the poorest have turned desperately destitute, while the well-to-do make do with what they have left.

For the past week, the Porrettos and their many cousins converged at the Hilton, Lafayette's finest hotel, drinking red wine late into the night as they laughed in the lobby. The teenagers put a dollar on a string in front of the elevator, watching guests lunge for it as they yanked it away. The adults stayed up until 2 a.m. daring the dozens of dogs among the evacuated to strut their stuff.

"Every dog that did a trick, we drank a beer," Mrs. Porretto explained.

But some days, she stayed in bed depressed through the afternoon, or burst into tears out of nowhere. Their house has roof damage, and they do not yet know what the water has wrought inside. A Ford Taurus full of prized possessions that her husband parked outside Macy's to ride out the storm has been ravaged. The court where she has worked for 25 years is closed indefinitely. Her sister Kathy Skeins, whose family of four will share the little house along with Mrs. Porretto's 78-year-old mother-in-law, is worried about how her boys, 15 and 11, will fare in public school for the first time, and what will happen to the $3,500 tuition she already paid at the Catholic school back home.

"It hit us Monday that we were homeless," Mrs. Porretto said. "We have meltdowns. You just have nothing to look forward to."

Until they found the shotgun-style house in Arnaudville, a town of 1,400 down a long country road north of Lafayette.

On Saturday, as the two sisters unpacked the storm-survival arsenal they had amassed at the hotel - pounds of ham for sandwiches and a new toaster oven, all manner of snacks and condiments, even a bottle of olives to ease Mrs. Porretto's arthritis - a neighbor stopped by with a box of cleaning supplies.

The landlord, who is lending an air mattress and queen bed, drew a map to the nearby restaurant and movie theater. The women debated whether they need a land line, but agreed cable television was a must, and set out shopping to stock their new shelves.

"We need to make a list, Gay," Mrs. Skeins said. "We need a mop and a broom, so we can keep up the kitchen."

Mrs. Porretto propped a photo collage of her son's first year on a bedroom windowsill, and imagined the morning sun streaming in through the living room. The sisters stocked the refrigerator with bottles of Coors Light they had brought.

"Gotta relax some way," Mrs. Skeins said. "We'll sit on the porch and have a cold beer."

"We've got a porch, Kathy, I can't wait!" Mrs. Porretto said, forgetting the hurricane for a minute. "We grew up with a porch!"

On moving day, Mrs. Porretto wore a clean T-shirt and fresh lipstick. Two hours' drive away at the airport, Ms. Jackson was braless under her soiled shirt and had a blue bandana covering her unwashed hair.

The Skeins' 125-pound Rottweiler, Buster, galloped across the grass in Arnaudville to drink from a spigot, after a week squished in a hotel bathroom; the Jackson children are without their mutt, Max, last seen as their apartment began to burn.

"We heard the dog barking," Ms. Jackson said. "I think he's dead."

Like the Porrettos, Ms. Jackson, Mr. Brown, their children, a nephew and a friend they call Auntie left New Orleans last Sunday morning, to stay with a friend. But they went back on Tuesday, and as the water rose to waist level, they fled with no provisions. After two nights shielding the baby's eyes from dead bodies at the feces-infested Superdome, they set out for the convention center, where rumors of rapes and worse left them taking turns sleeping on the floor in fear for their children's safety.

"Last night I heard a baby screaming, 'Stop, stop, get off me, don't touch me,' " Ms. Jackson recalled.

Their blue plastic bin is filled not with family treasures, but with scraps that other refugees and relief workers have handed out: three rolls of toilet paper, a box of Teddy Grahams, toddlers blue plastic sandals, two apples, a gallon of milk.

Mr. Brown was barefoot until a friend gave him a pair of sneakers that remain unlaced because they are too small; he has no socks. An elderly lady gave Ms. Jackson a quilted handbag to hold diapers and the pink pills the triage nurse gave to 7-year-old Waynenisha, who suffers from febrile seizures.

"It has some perfume and some body spray," she said thankfully. "I'm a lady. I can't walk around smelling like a grown man."

Now, Ms. Jackson is wondering whether she will be able to enroll her children in school without identification - even her own Social Security card is gone. Mr. Brown, who had been making do washing 18-wheelers and running errands for a convenience store, said he will "go there and get a job if they let me," though he is still unsure where there might be.

"We just started life's journey together," he said, gesturing at the little ones on the luggage cart. "As we're building, it just all fell apart at one time."

Standing in the sweltering line, Mr. Brown occasionally lashed out, slapping the leg of a child on the move or barking at others in line for pushing. When an older woman passed out on the curb, he pushed through the crowd to pour water down her head and back. "Where's the help?" he called out. "We need help! Give her some air, please."

A few minutes later, the Rev. Jesse Jackson turned up with three buses. The Jackson-Browns leaped out of line to rush aboard with their blue plastic bin and grabbed the last row in the air-conditioned coach, leaving the skycap's cart behind.

An article about stupid people and libraries and non-English languages...

Bilingual Material in Libraries Draws Some Criticism
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

DENVER, Sept. 4 (AP) - On a rainy Saturday, Miereya Gomez thumbed through a book while her two young sons carried comic books to their father in the children's section of this city's Central Public Library.

"We come here mostly for the kids, for books and movies - educational and entertainment - in Spanish and English," Ms. Gomez said.

As the Spanish-speaking population has grown in the United States, libraries have tried to keep pace by stocking up on books, magazines and movies in Spanish.

In some places, however, critics say taxpayer money should not be spent on a population that can include illegal immigrants or on proposals that promote languages other than English.

In Denver, where the foreign-born population tripled between 1990 and 2000, largely because of Mexican immigrants, the public library system is considering reorganizing some of its branches to emphasize bilingual services and material.

Similar efforts have been taken by libraries across the country, from the Queens Library in New York City, whose Web site is offered in English, Spanish, Chinese, French, Russian and Korean, to the large Chinese-language collection at the San Francisco Public Library.

And it is not just the nation's biggest cities.

"The interest is in rural areas and cities that aren't the usual Spanish areas, like New York or Miami, but in North Carolina, Illinois and the Midwest," said Carmen Ospina, editor of Critica, a magazine for librarians that highlights Spanish-language material.

Ms. Ospina said questions about starting Spanish-language collections have come from librarians in Belton, Mo.; Nashville, Ga.; and towns she had never heard of.

"It's definitely a growing trend," said Carol Brey-Casiano, former president of the American Library Association.

But the trend is drawing scrutiny in Denver.

Representative Tom Tancredo, Republican of Colorado, sent a public letter to Mayor John W. Hickenlooper of Denver this summer asking if the library was considering Spanish-only branches or converting to Spanish-language material at the expense of English material. Mr. Tancredo, an outspoken critic of American immigration policies, said he had been contacted by concerned librarians and patrons.

"When you have a strong cultural identity and there aren't set incentives to become American, it creates a lot of tension and divides the community," said Mr. Tancredo's spokesman, Will Adams.

Those concerns were echoed by Michael Corbin, a radio talk show host who helped organize a protest outside Denver's central library after sexually graphic content was found in some Spanish-language adult comic books, which were later removed.

Denver library officials say they are not considering Spanish-only branches in their reorganization plan but are simply trying to accommodate a city where 35 percent of residents are Hispanic.

Janet Cox, adult services supervisor at the Pueblo Library District, said: "We provide material to meet the needs of the people in the area, whether that be in English or Spanish or another language. That's important. That's what libraries do."

On getting ready for Christmas

In the August Air, a Feeling of Christmas
By GLENN COLLINS

"New York City: A Winter Wonderland."

This was the actual headline last week on the first holiday-season press release from NYC & Company, the city's convention and visitors bureau.

Officially, in our summer of humid discontent, it is Christmas in August.

"In the dog days of summer when it's reaching 100 degrees, many of us in the hospitality industry are planning for the holiday season," said Cristyne L. Nicholas, the agency's president, adding that all this cold-weather anticipation "is the alternative to air-conditioning."

Yes, Virginia. A sweaty army of New Yorkers is already toiling to deck the halls.

Retailers are ordering their fixin's and trimmin's. Macy's is racing to complete a construction miracle on 34th Street, preparing for the onslaught of 300,000 visitors to Santaland on its eighth floor in Herald Square. Workers are making way for new displays at North Pole Town Square, including the animated teddy-bear marching band. The one with eight teddy-bear musicians.

Currently, Santa is helper-challenged. "We're sending out letters to elves who've worked in the past," said Bob Rutan, the director of event operations. He needs 140.

Paul Olszewski, whose title is director of windows, is coordinating the efforts of 65 workers to fill said space at Macy's with "something no one has ever seen before in the city," he pronounced ominously. Not space aliens or even Parson Brown, he insisted, but that's about all he would reveal, save that the team started working to fill the 40 windows in February, "and we feel as if we're behind schedule."

In the heavy air, there's a feeling of Christmas at Rockefeller Center, bracing itself for the invasion of 400,000 to 500,000 visitors per day from late November through the first week of January. "It's fourth quarter here with six minutes left in the game," said Thomas A. Madden Jr., a managing director of Tishman Speyer Properties, owners of Rockefeller Center.

About the Christmas tree hunt (by helicopter, throughout the metropolitan region): "We're down to several finalists," said Mr. Madden, who refused to say how many, or where. After all, the felling of the lucky pine cannot be breathlessly announced until November.

As for the imperishable Zamboni machine: it's getting a tuneup in a subterranean garage beneath the ice rink. Restaurant Associates, which is planning to serve more than 100,000 meals in the month of December at its Sea Grill, Rock Center Café and Cucina & Company restaurants, is currently intensively filling in corporate-celebration reservations.

"That old reliable indicator, Champagne sales, has been quite good," said Nick Valenti, the company's chief executive.

On a recent morning, Ed Brown, the executive chef at Sea Grill, was testing new holiday menu offerings with his eager kitchen team. They sampled a whole grilled barramundi fish from Australia, presented so resplendently that you could even say it glowed. "Good, Sorrento lemon oil," Mr. Brown said judiciously, taking another bite.

Naughty or nice is also very much a preoccupation of the executive chef Antonio Prontelli, who is finalizing menus for the decades-old "Breakfast With Santa" ritual at Rock Center Café (families are welcomed to dine, and then skate with Santa and friends). "The elves say hello to little kids at the table, so Santa can greet them by name," said Steve Low, the restaurant's general manager. "They're always flabbergasted."

Four full months in advance, Christmas was also nigh in the fourth-floor photo studio of Gourmet magazine overlooking West 42nd Street. On a recent afternoon the photographer Romulo Yanes was training his camera on a tableau of 102 Christmas cookies arrayed before lavender snowflake wallpaper. Cookie crumbs had been carefully situated by Nanci Smith, one of the art directors.

"The cookies have to look accessible and not intimidating - they can't be super perfect," Mr. Yanes said.

Ruth Reichl, the magazine's editor in chief, explained that "it's a cover try," adding that readers would find the cookies out front in December if all went well. In the frame were fig twirls with cream-cheese filling, grasshopper squares with brownie bases, peanut-brittle tuiles, sugar-cookie stars and mini black-and-whites ("ours are trans-fat free," Ms. Reichl said).

The editors noted that Christmas in August - not to mention Hanukkah or Kwanzaa - can diminish the magic of silver bells. "No one is more entitled to say, 'Bah, humbug,' when Christmas finally rolls around," said Zanne Stewart, Gourmet's executive food editor.

But the flip side, Ms. Reichl said, "is that in the middle of winter, when you just wish it could be warm, we're working on spring."

Daily newspapers don't plan this far in advance, although every fall The New York Times warns its staff to avoid holiday clichés in print. (The memo hasn't come out yet.)

Recent weeks have been a time of nail-biting uncertainty for Mitchell Modell, chief executive of Modell's Sporting Goods, with headquarters on Seventh Avenue and 37th Street, because holiday gift sales of football, hockey and basketball jerseys with players' names and numbers on them "are very important to us."

"The value of our inventory varies by teams' performance," he said. "You live and die by each win or loss each Sunday." Modell's had to commit in advance to ordering stacks of players' jerseys that are already waiting in warehouses of the chain of 127 stores in 11 states, "so when Eli Manning sprained his elbow, it was not one of my better days," Mr. Modell said, referring to the Himalayas of blue-and-white Giant quarterback jerseys with the number 10 on them. "We are staring at a huge markdown exposure."

Over at the Bronx Zoo, preparations for the annual Holiday Lights Festival have reached the negotiation stage with Brandano Displays Inc., which will create new - but as-yet-undisclosed - critters to join the light-bulb rattlesnake shaking its rattle, the monkeys swinging through vines, and 150 other giant light sculptures that will decorate part of the park's 265 acres. (Hint: think turtle doves, French hens, partridges?)

Meanwhile, in a small, ornament-filled office on the cafeteria level of the American Museum of Natural History, Jan Polish, treasurer of Origami USA, is helping to organize the volunteer efforts of 80 paper-folders across the country and indeed the world, who are already creating some 800 origami stars, 75 mobiles and 250 multicolor models for the 14-foot-tall Origami Tree. "The theme this year is flight," Ms. Polish said.

Debbie Wecker, a party planner for Imagine Party and Events, is overseeing the undeniably fancy printing of 1,500 invitations for an early-December bash at Crobar, while interviewing musicians to fill the 31,000-square-foot club on West 28th Street near 11th Avenue. She mused: "Possibly a starry sky? But no Santa Claus. This party is nonsectarian."

But ho, ho and ho haven't been banished from Jamaica Avenue, which could just be Santa Claus Lane in Richmond Hill, Queens. There, at the 54-year-old Rubie's Costume Company, elves in its Development Office are rushing to finish the design for a high-end new Santa suit - satin-lined, with zipper front - so it can be sold by the thousands at Sam's Clubs for more than $100 per jolly old St. Nick.

"It will have deluxe quality red plush with heavyweight fur trim," said Rubin Beige, the company's vice president of operations. It is, he swears, fake fur.

The customer must provide his own little round belly that shakes when he laughs, like a bowlful of jelly.

On Antibiotics

Antibiotics Aren't Always the Answer
By DEBORAH FRANKLIN

It's hard not to wheedle.

Your throat feels as if you've swallowed broken glass, your sinuses have been clogged for a couple of days, you're coughing up green stuff and you're slated to fly in a week.

Never mind that your doctor thinks you're suffering from a viral infection that antibiotics won't touch. Why not start a prescription of some powerful bacteria-busting drug immediately, just in case?

Dr. Alastair D. Hay, who teaches medical students at the University of Bristol in England and also treats patients, says that until recently, even he may occasionally have succumbed to the pressure to hand over a prescription.

"As a personal policy, I don't get into heated arguments with my patients," Dr. Hay said.

And giving the standard lecture about how antibiotics will not stop a virus but may contribute to the growing, worldwide problem of drug resistance rarely convinces sick people that they don't need the drugs. "Unless you can tell them that there's an immediate downside for them personally," Dr. Hay said, "the message just doesn't sink in."

Now, though, Dr. Hay can quote direct evidence of a downside. An increasing number of studies, including his own work, suggest that even a properly prescribed antibiotic can foster the growth of one or more strains of antibiotic-resistant bacteria for at least two to six months inside the person taking the pills.

"Carrying" a microbe inside you that is resistant to drugs also means that, during that time, you're likely to "share" the resistant bug with family, co-workers and others in your path.

That particular strain may not make you sick. But if you find yourself one day immune-suppressed after chemotherapy, cut open by a car accident or surgery or especially vulnerable to bacterial pneumonia after a bad flu, those resistant strains of bacteria living inside you increase the odds that any infection will be hard - or even impossible - to beat.

In a study published in the July 2005 issue of The Journal of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy, Dr. Hay and nine colleagues solicited urine samples from a broad cross-section of generally healthy people throughout southwest England.

They then checked the samples for E. coli, a common intestinal bacterium that can invade the urethra. Published surveys estimate that roughly 25 to 35 percent of women ages 20 to 40 in the United States have had a urinary tract infection, and E. coli is the most frequent cause.

Of the 618 men and women from whom Dr. Hay and his colleagues were able to isolate E. coli and also get extensive medical records, 39 percent carried a bacterial strain that was resistant to one or more of the first-line antibiotics commonly used to treat urinary infections.

More significantly, Dr. Hay said, a patient's likelihood of carrying a resistant organism was doubled if the patient had taken "any antibiotic for any reason within the previous two months, when compared with those who had not taken an antibiotic."

The findings dovetail with results from other studies that found a strong, though temporary, link between drug-resistant urinary tract infections and antibiotics taken in the previous six months.

"A lot of women have had the experience of having a urinary infection that doesn't seem to be treatable, or of going through more than one drug," said Abigail A. Salyers, a microbiologist at the University of Illinois and a co-author with Dixie D. Whitt of the new book "Revenge of the Microbes: How Bacterial Resistance Is Undermining the Antibiotic Miracle."

"Having to go through a number of drugs magnifies the time that you're miserable," she said.

But the implication of the research goes beyond urinary infections. Doctors are beginning to realize that any oral or injected antibiotic they prescribe to fight a particular infection also cuts a wide swath in bacterial neighborhoods throughout the body, mowing down microbes that are susceptible and leaving room, temporarily at least, for resistant bugs to colonize the empty real estate and thrive.

Bacteria differ in their ability to fend off antibiotics, and in the methods they use. The most worrisome are those that quickly and easily trade genetic material across species. A bacterium that was once vulnerable to any one of several drugs can overnight become impervious to all of them. It does this by picking up an extra loop of DNA - essentially a highly portable genetic suitcase containing several different resistance genes - from a passing microbe.

Public health officials used to assume that these sorts of superbugs arose mostly in hospitals, where a variety of conditions - including a concentration of seriously ill patients, open wounds, hands-on care and the wide use of powerful antibiotics - made the buildings incubators of drug resistance.

But just because hospitals are incubators doesn't mean that's where the problems start or stay.

"Many hospital infections walk in the front door, on the patient, or the patient's family, the doctors, or the guy in the next bed," Dr. Salyers says. "It's the opportunistic bacteria that we all carry around with us that are causing the trouble in hospitals."

Which brings us back to you, with your nasty sore throat, throbbing sinuses and cough, waiting in the exam room, hoping for a prescription from your doctor.

Dr. Ralph Gonzales, an internist at the University of California, San Francisco, is one of a growing cadre of researchers dedicated to improving the way antibiotics are prescribed and taken in community clinics.

Dr. Gonzales hopes to preserve the drugs' powerful benefits while minimizing resistance. Several years ago, he worked with medical associations and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to devise evidence-based guidelines for doctors to use in telling which patients need antibiotics for their respiratory infections and which patients do not.

But increasingly, Dr. Gonzales thinks it is the patients - particularly the 30- or 40-year-old professionals with bad colds and overwhelming deadlines - who need to be persuaded, as much as other doctors.

Studies have shown that when patients come into the clinic expecting a drug, Dr. Gonzales said, doctors are more likely to prescribe one.

"Very few ask directly for an antibiotic," he said. "Instead you'll hear, 'I have a wedding coming up - my wedding - and my cold won't go away.' "

To nip patients' expectations of receiving antibiotics before they see the doctor, Dr. Gonzales is putting up posters in exam rooms that, for example, help explain which symptoms suggest a bacterial infection and which indicate a viral source.

And at what looks like an automated teller machine in the lobby of the hospital's acute care clinic, patients waiting to see a doctor can now view video clips and answer questions aimed at guiding them to a better understanding of why antibiotics aren't always the answer.

Will such measures help? It's too soon to tell. But the last bit of advice that the modified A.T.M. dishes out on its touch screen will certainly reduce infections. Immediately find the nearest restroom, the machine advises, so you can wash your hands.

On Emigration museums

The Emigrants' Story: Where It Began
By RICHARD BERNSTEIN

BREMERHAVEN, Germany - The slogan at the entrance to the new museum of emigration says it all: "Over seven million people departed from here to an unknown world."

Well, maybe not completely unknown, at least probably not for those among the seven million who departed in the 20th century and had some inkling of where they were going.

Still, here in the age of discount air fares and Hotmail and 24-hour news channels, the motto serves as a reminder just how wrenching, how much of a risk, a break from a familiar life, emigration was for earlier generations, and how much grit and stamina were required to undertake it.

Why so many did undertake it is one of the questions that the museum, known in German as Auswanderer Haus, or Emigration House, which opened in this busy port city a few weeks ago, is intended to answer. The spacious, modern building, framed in latticed wood, overlooks Bremerhaven's Old Port, created in 1837 in large part to take advantage of the wave of emigration to America that began around then.

"We want young people to know about people who took this step, to leave their homes for the unknown world," said Andreas Heller, the architect who designed the Bremerhaven museum, describing emigration as "a long journey, and maybe a journey with no coming back."

If the Ellis Island Immigration Museum in New York Harbor tells the story of arrivals, the museum in Bremerhaven tells the story at the opposite end of the experience: the departure, not just to the United States but to Canada, Brazil, Argentina and Australia as well. But why a museum just now, so many years after large-scale European emigration to North America stopped?

The question is all the more pertinent because Bremerhaven is not the only German city to have the idea of an emigration museum, though it is the first in Germany, and in Europe as a whole, to open one. In Hamburg also, two hours by train from here and the other major German point of departure for the "unknown world," another emigration museum is planned for 2007.

"In our global village, people are looking for their roots," said Lisa Kosok, the museum director in Hamburg.

While people look for roots - not a simple matter in Germany, where the search for roots, at least until recently, meant almost exclusively the roots of the country's Hitlerian disaster - cities look for identities. So for Bremerhaven and Hamburg, the emigration theme provides a catalyst to revitalize run-down districts and lends to the quest for something normative in the German past, something not associated with aggression and genocide.

The brochure for the Hamburg museum has a picture of a man on horseback, wearing a 10-gallon hat and jeans, with the caption, "Perhaps it is also his history, or the history of his parents or grandparents."

A couple of pages later comes a sepia-toned photograph of people in long coats and felt hats getting ready to board the ship that will take them, unexpectedly, toward cowboyhood. The contrast between the worlds, and the transition from one to the other, are what the German emigration museums aim to illustrate.

In all, some 12 million people departed from Bremerhaven and Hamburg for the Western Hemisphere between the mid-19th century and 1974, when seaports as points of departure were entirely replaced by airports. Many of them were Germans, motivated by poverty, ambition, adventure, family quarrels and, especially after the Nazis came to power in 1933, by persecution. But many millions more were from the East - Russia, Poland, and the Baltic States - lured to Germany by what could be called entrepreneurs of emigration.

Bremerhaven in this sense largely came into existence as a major port to satisfy the emigration demand. Hamburg, a far more ancient city, was already Germany's major port in the 19th century, but the emigration business resulted in a major expansion there, too, largely because of the activities of one man.

He was Albert Ballin, almost unknown in the United States, but a major figure in the peopling of North America. Mr. Ballin was a Jew who took over his father's ticket-booking business and built up an island in the middle of the Elbe River intended to provide transit services to emigrants, especially those from the East.

Eventually, Mr. Ballin became the general director of HAPAG, now called Hapag-Lloyd, which remains one of Europe's biggest shipping companies.

The complex Mr. Ballin built on Veddel Island in Hamburg, now an area of warehouses and itself a neighborhood for recent Turkish and other immigrants to Germany, once contained some 30 buildings, including dormitories, a hospital, a bathhouse, churches and a synagogue, most of which have been demolished. But parts of one building, a one-story former sleeping barracks, remain, and it is there that the future BallinStadt, or Ballin City, Museum, will be built.

Old photographs, which are available at the planned museum's Web site, www.ballinstadt.de, show a kind of self-contained village, where thousands of people could stay for a few days waiting for their ships to leave.

Hamburg is behind Bremerhaven in the emigration museum race because, as Ms. Kosok explained, something in the neighborhood of 9 million euros, or $11 million, out of a total of about 18 million euros for the whole project, has not yet been raised.

Meanwhile, Bremerhaven's Auswanderer Haus is already taking visitors through a sort of reproduction of the emigration experience - waiting on the quay on a cold November morning, climbing up the gangway, settling into a third-class cabin - and introducing them to a specific immigrant.

Each visitor gets a magnetic card with the story of one of 15 such people - from Johann Nikalaus, an 18-year-old farmer who left from Bremerhaven in 1848, to Hertha Nathorff, the niece of Albert Einstein, who fled the Nazis in 1939.

The idea is to remove the emigration experience from the abstract, to make it as tangible as the collection of old suitcases that passengers took with them containing the few items from the old world that they took with them to the new.

On running the marathon while blind

The Blind Trusting Their Stride
By CHRISTINE HAUSER

It was a beautiful day for a run in Central Park. The sun glistened on the surface of the reservoir, the baseball fields seethed with players in bright jerseys and cool air rustled the trees shading the six-mile loop. But on a summer afternoon of color and light, Nooria Nodrat, in training for the New York City Marathon, saw only black.

"Physically I did not see a thing," said Ms. Nodrat, 44, a blind college student. "But I had an image of people passing me from the sound. And I felt like Central Park was very wide. I keep a picture in my mind of hills and grass."

Since July, Ms. Nodrat and about a dozen other blind and visually impaired runners have been intensifying their training along Central Park's four-, five- and six-mile loops with a 16-week program to prepare for the New York City Marathon on Nov. 6.

Over all, more than two dozen blind and visually impaired runners from the United States and 19 other countries are expected to take part in the 26.2-mile race, which ends in Central Park. Some want to improve their marathon times, while others, like Ms. Nodrat, simply want to finish. They will be tethered to a sighted runner who will help them avoid collisions, find toilets and water, pick their way through discarded, sodden cups without slipping or to stay upright if a well-meaning fellow competitor pats them on the back for encouragement.

The blind runners must fortify themselves in ways that athletes with sight do not. Placing one foot in front of the other, at speed, is like stepping into a void, and they must learn to trust the ground beneath their feet.

They do this by holding the end of a shoelace, elastic band, scarf, washcloth or bungee cord with a volunteer guide runner, forming such a close bond that they sometimes forget that one of them is disabled. But the blind and visually impaired athletes also develop an internal world in which they use memory and their senses of touch, smell and hearing as cues to read their position in the park.

"This is the time when they need to start putting in their long runs," said Richard Traum, the founder of Achilles Track Club, a nonprofit organization that supports and trains disabled runners. "One of the things they do is recognize different scents in different parts of the park."

Their landmarks are also the din of traffic, the curve of a road or the gradual rise of a path. The number of turns on a steep hill tell them when they are near the summit. Others navigate by the sound of water in the pool in the north, or by the tinny music of the carousel in the park's south, and pace themselves accordingly.

They must also interpret key textures and details in the terrain that those with vision do not always discern.

In her run last week, for example, Ms. Nodrat used a tether and guide, and she also checked her position by feeling with each step for the thick line of paint that marks the running lane. But at intersections the painted line ends, and by trust, she strides on until she picks it up again on the other side of the road.

Ms. Nodrat also adjusts her pace when she hears a street musician playing a stringed instrument, a cue that tells her she is at the Central Park Boathouse and close to the end of her lap. Sometimes, when she concentrates deeply, she picks up the sounds of water and fowl.

"She has noise cues, and she noticed that we were on a hill, whereas I would not consider it much of a hill, it's a little of an incline," said Ms. Nodrat's guide, Staci Alziebler, 36.

Central Park's foliage can also serve as olfactory mile markers. When Ms. Nodrat picks up the scent of trees "that smell like garbage," perhaps from the putrid stench of gingko tree fruit, she knows where she is. "If I am with a new volunteer and they don't know where to go, I say we are close to 72nd Street now because the tree is there," Ms. Nodrat said.

"I would not have thought about it unless she said something," said another one of her guides, Nicole Meyer, 44, who accompanies Ms. Nodrat on speed-walking laps.

But a marathon on unfamiliar terrain among tens of thousands of other runners can be chaos for disabled runners. They are offered an early start on marathon day unless they want to join the "real essence" of the race and start with the pack, said Bob Laufer, coordinator of the race's disabled athletes.

Richard Bernstein, 31, a blind lawyer who has speed-walked a marathon but will be running his first in New York, said that being with the pack "is like the sound of galloping horses."

He added, "My biggest fear about this marathon is there is no way to have orientation."

In training, as well, it is not enough to memorize features. Disabled runners and guides must dodge the unpredictable movement of other runners, cyclists, dogs, pedestrians, skateboarders, in-line skaters, horse-drawn carriages, equestrians, cars, gardeners with carts and pedicabs.

That is when the sighted guides step in. "It's not flawless," said Mr. Bernstein, the lawyer. "We hit a lot of people."

Some blind runners have calibrated pace and distance so precisely that they announce landmarks that would otherwise go unacknowledged by their sighted companions.

Leol Williams, a 47-year-old blind runner, has clocked hundreds of miles in the park. On a recent run, he pointed out the 102nd Street transverse before he and his guide reached it and later alerted a newcomer to a water fountain.

"I am using my sense of hearing and my ability to conceive images when people describe them to me," said Mr. Williams, who wants to improve his 4:18:50 marathon time. "I make a picture of what they look like in my mind."

His guide, Tarry Chung, 30, said: "We see the park differently. He has a map of the whole thing in his head."

For some visually impaired runners, honing other senses is a race against time. Artie Elefant, 60, is blind in his left eye and his vision in his right is "like looking through a keyhole," he said. The prognosis of his condition, retinitis pigmentosa, is that he will lose vision completely. So Mr. Elefant is weaning himself from his remaining sight, which he now uses to follow the lines of the running lanes, by training with a tether.

He recently tried this for the first time on an early morning 11-mile run, guided by five women he refers to as "Artie's Angels," who will accompany him in the marathon.

"I sometimes have more problems than a person who is totally blind because I have some vision that I still rely on," Mr. Elefant said. "The totally blind have learned to use their other skills, like smell, touch, hearing and memorization."

Blindness and visual impairment also affect form. Mr. Elefant said he ran with his head down, straining to see the white line. With the tether, he looks up, which he said made his breathing more efficient.

Some runners cock their heads to hear better or mimic their guide's arm through the tether, letting their other arm hang. Both habits need correction, said James A. Vargo, who trained blind marathon runners for the 1996 Atlanta Paralympics.

Descriptions of scenery are also important for the spirit. When Mark Lucas, the executive director of the United States Association of Blind Athletes, ran in Colorado with Tim Willis, a blind distance runner, he dutifully alerted him to inclines and tree stumps. But when the trail went flat and there were fewer safety features to be noted, Mr. Lucas described the scenery. "I would tell him, 'You should see the Ponderosa pines in the forest,' " he said.

Ten years later, Mr. Willis still remembers Mr. Lucas's description: The Colorado trails, he said, have "mountains off in the distance."

An editorial about class and money

Life in the Bottom 80 Percent

Economic growth isn't what it used to be. In 2004, the economy grew a solid 3.8 percent. But for the fifth straight year, median household income was basically flat, at $44,389 in 2004, the Census Bureau said Tuesday. That's the longest stretch of income stagnation on record.

Economic growth was also no elixir for the 800,000 additional workers who found themselves without health insurance in 2004. Were it not for increased coverage by military insurance and Medicaid, the ranks of the uninsured - now 45.8 million - would be even larger. And 1.1 million more people fell into poverty in 2004, bringing the ranks of poor Americans to 37 million.

When President Bush talks about the economy, he invariably boasts about good economic growth. But he doesn't acknowledge what is apparent from the census figures: as the very rich get even richer, their gains can mask the stagnation and deterioration at less lofty income levels.

This week's census report showed that income inequality was near all-time highs in 2004, with 50.1 percent of income going to the top 20 percent of households. And additional census data obtained by the Economic Policy Institute show that only the top 5 percent of households experienced real income gains in 2004. Incomes for the other 95 percent of households were flat or falling.

Income inequality is an economic and social ill, but the administration and the Congressional majority don't seem to recognize that. When Congress returns from its monthlong summer vacation next week, two of the leadership's top priorities include renewing the push to repeal the estate tax, which affects only the wealthiest of families, and extending the tax cuts for investment income, which flow largely to the richest Americans. At the other end of the spectrum, lawmakers have stubbornly refused to raise the minimum wage: $5.15 an hour since 1997. They will also be taking up proposals for deep budget cuts in programs that ameliorate income inequality, like Medicaid, food stamps and federal student loans.

They should be ashamed of themselves.

Another article on New Orleans, and race

What Happens to a Race Deferred
By JASON DePARLE

WASHINGTON

THE white people got out. Most of them, anyway. If television and newspaper images can be deemed a statistical sample, it was mostly black people who were left behind. Poor black people, growing more hungry, sick and frightened by the hour as faraway officials counseled patience and warned that rescues take time.

What a shocked world saw exposed in New Orleans last week wasn't just a broken levee. It was a cleavage of race and class, at once familiar and startlingly new, laid bare in a setting where they suddenly amounted to matters of life and death. Hydrology joined sociology throughout the story line, from the settling of the flood-prone city, where well-to-do white people lived on the high ground, to its frantic abandonment.

The pictures of the suffering vied with reports of marauding, of gunshots fired at rescue vehicles and armed bands taking over the streets. The city of quaint eccentricity - of King Cakes, Mardi Gras beads and nice neighbors named Tookie - had taken a Conradian turn.

In the middle of the delayed rescue, the New Orleans mayor, C.Ray Nagin, a local boy made good from a poor, black ward, burst into tears of frustration as he denounced slow moving federal officials and called for martial law.

Even people who had spent a lifetime studying race and class found themselves slack-jawed.

"This is a pretty graphic illustration of who gets left behind in this society - in a literal way," said Christopher Jencks, a sociologist glued to the televised images from his office at Harvard. Surprised to have found himself surprised, Mr. Jencks took to thinking out loud. "Maybe it's just an in-the-face version of something I already knew," he said. "All the people who don't get out, or don't have the resources, or don't believe the warning are African-American."

"It's not that it's at odds with the way I see American society," Mr. Jencks said. "But it's at odds with the way I want to see American society."

Last week it was how others saw American society, too, in images beamed across the globe. Were it not for the distinctive outlines of the Superdome, the pictures of hovering rescue helicopters might have carried a Somalian dateline. The Sri Lankan ambassador offered to help raise foreign aid.

Anyone who knew New Orleans knew that danger lurked behind the festive front. Let the good times roll, the tourists on Bourbon Street were told. Yet in every season, someone who rolled a few blocks in the wrong direction wound up in the city morgue.

Unusually poor ( 27.4 percent below the poverty line in 2000), disproportionately black (over two-thirds), the Big Easy is also disproportionately murderous - with a rate that was for years among the country's highest.

Once one of the most mixed societies, in recent decades, the city has become unusually segregated, and the white middle class is all but gone, moved north across Lake Pontchartrain or west to Jefferson Parish - home of David Duke, the one-time Klansman who ran for governor in 1991 and won more than half of the state's white vote.

Shortly after I arrived in town two decades ago as a fledgling reporter, I was dispatched to cover a cheerleading tryout, and I asked a grinning, half-drunk accountant where he was from, city or suburb. "White people don't live in New Orleans," he answered with a where-have-you-been disdain.

For those who loved it, its glories as well as its flaws, last week brought only heartbreak. So much of New Orleans, from its music and its food to its architecture, had shown a rainbow society at its best, even as everyone knew it was more complicated than that.

"New Orleans, first of all, is both in reality and in rhetoric an extraordinarily successful multicultural society," said Philip Carter, a developer and retired journalist whose roots in the city extend back more at least four generations. "But is also a multicultural society riven by race and class, and all this has been exposed by these stormy days. The people of our community are pitted against each other across the barricades of race and class that six months from now may be last remaining levees in New Orleans."

No one was immune, of course. With 80 percent of the city under water, tragedy swallowed the privilege and poor, and traveled spread across racial lines.

But the divides in the city were evident in things as simple as access to a car. The 35 percent of black households that didn't have one, compared with just 15 percent among whites.

"The evacuation plan was really based on people driving out," said Craig E. Colten, a geologist at Louisiana State University and an expert on the city's vulnerable topography. "They didn't have buses. They didn't have trains."

As if to punctuate the divide, the water especially devastated the Ninth Ward, among city's poorest and lowest lying.

"Out West, there is a saying that water flows to money," Mr. Colten said. "But in New Orleans, water flows away from money. Those with resources who control where the drainage goes have always chosen to live on the high ground. So the people in the low areas were hardest hit."

Outrage grew as the week wore on, among black politicians who saw the tragedy as a reflection of a broader neglect of American cities, and in the blogosphere.

"The real reason no one is helping is because of the color of these people!" wrote "myfan88" on the Flickr blog. "This is Hotel Rwanda all over again."

"Is this what the pioneers of the civil rights movement fought to achieve, a society where many black people are as trapped and isolated by their poverty as they were by legal segregation laws?" wrote Mark Naison, director of the urban studies program at Fordham, on another blog.

One question that could not be answered last week was whether, put to a similar test, other cities would fracture along the same lines.

AT one level, everything about New Orleans appears sui generis, not least its location below sea level. Many New Orleanians don't just accept the jokes about living in a Banana Republic. They spread them.

But in a quieter catastrophe, the 1995 heat wave that killed hundreds of Chicagoans, blacks in comparable age groups as whites died at higher rates - in part because they tended to live in greater social isolation, in depopulated parts of town. As in New Orleans, space intertwined with race.

And the violence? Similarly shocking scenes had erupted in Los Angeles in 1992, after the acquittal of white police officers charged with beating a black man, Rodney King. Newark, Detroit, Washington -all burned in the race riots of the 1960's. It was for residents of any major city, watching the mayhem, to feel certain their community would be immune.

With months still to go just to pump out the water that covers the city, no one can be sure how the social fault lines will rearrange. But with white flight a defining element of New Orleans in the recent past, there was already the fear in the air this week that the breached levee would leave a separated society further apart.

``Maybe we can build the levees back," said Mr. Carter. ``But that sense of extreme division by class and race is going to long survive the physical reconstruction of New Orleans."

And one on the Astrodome

In Houston Astrodome, Safe but Restless Refuge
By RALPH BLUMENTHAL

HOUSTON, Sept. 3 - Sleep did not come easily to the orphans of the storm.

Deep into the wee hours of Saturday, five days after they had lost their homes and all their possessions to the ravages of Hurricane Katrina, thousands of exhausted evacuees from New Orleans bused to the Astrodome here lay on green cots staring numbly, playing cards, reading the Bible or aimlessly pacing the vast arena, as if after all the sleepless nights they had forgotten how to sleep.

Or maybe it was the stark stadium lighting that dimmed but never quite faded to dark.

Some milled with a purpose, seeking rides to Austin or news of the missing with cardboard signs in grim shorthand. "Blanca Ducree." "Jinfeng." High above the crowd in the 62,000-seat arena, which could swallow an 18-story building, electronic signs that in happier days flashed baseball and football scores were only slightly more elaborate: "Donsha looking for Billy Parker."

Well after midnight, high time for an 8-year-old in braids to be tucked into bed, Yolanda Paul circled the Astrodome hoping to find lost relatives, including her daddy, Larry Paul. "In my heart, I believe they got out," said her mother, Rainee Grant, who had driven in from St. Louis with Yolanda and her baby sister to search the shelters, so far in vain.

In contrast with the mayhem in the New Orleans convention center and the squalor of the Superdome that many evacuees evoked with horror, the Astrodome radiated security and services.

Dozens of Houston police officers patrolled the floor and concourses. There were a few arrests for fights but nothing worse, the officers said.

A clinic staffed by dozens of volunteer doctors and nurses from Houston's huge medical establishment dispensed medication and treated a range of ailments and needs that included rashes and infections from contaminated floodwaters, seizures, dehydration, dialysis, chest pains, drug and alcohol withdrawal and psychiatric disorders. There were 85 showers and hundreds of toilets. The entire fourth tier was given over to hot food service - beef tips and Cajun rice on Friday night - augmented by boxes of apples and bags of baby carrots available throughout the night. The telephone company SBC set up dozens of phones for free long-distance calls. Legions of volunteers roamed the aisles and concourses mopping floors, emptying trash bins and handing out clothing, diapers, toys, water, juice, soft drinks and snacks.

Some gestures seemed even more generous than others. Bob Chrane, a Houston lawyer, posted his calling card and telephone numbers with the offer: "take 1 wheelchair + 1 attendant; smoker and dog O.K."

Karen Wakefield, a volunteer for the Red Cross, handed Henry Becker, a contractor who had escaped the flood with a neighbor, some stomach medication but had disappointing news on his request for reading glasses. "I looked high and low and couldn't find any," she said.

Gloria Brown, minister of the House of Joy Fellowship in Houston with, she said, a diploma in clowning, walked among the cots handing out plastic crucifixes and promising to return, if officials approved, with her clown act to cheer up the crowd.

Shawande Graps, 25, and two other mothers evacuated from New Orleans with 10 children among them were on cots on an upstairs tier when Martha Hicks, 24, a volunteer majoring in criminal justice at Sam Houston State University, passed by with a carton of clothes. "You like Spider-Man?" she asked Ms. Graps's son, Shondell, 3. He nodded gravely. Ms. Hicks pulled out a Spider-Man T-shirt and handed it to him.

Ms. Graps seemed overwhelmed. "When we were home, he watched Spider-Man all day," she said. "I just thank the Lord. This is a nice spot to go to sleep."

Mayor Bill White and other Houston officials who vowed Friday to throw open the city's arms to the victims of Hurricane Katrina said that the Astrodome, which pioneered the domed stadium in 1965 but had lost its teams to more modern arenas, could shelter as many as 18,000 storm survivors. But with other emergency centers opening up at the newer Reliant Park next door and the George R. Brown Convention Center downtown, considerably fewer than that bedded down in the Astrodome on Friday night.

Still, the green concrete arena floor was chockablock with cots, and several hundred people who gave up waiting for more cots to arrive ended up sleeping in the padded red seats.

That led to some grumbling.

Robin Gail Petit, 51, who is diabetic and takes nine medicines, fell on some steps, which required a trip to a Houston hospital. When she got back several hours later, she said, someone had taken her cot. She timidly repossessed it, hoping the new claimant would not return.

But many of the visitors seemed too absorbed in the grim circumstances to complain.

Covil Joseph, 58, a video director wearing a castoff T-shirt, said that he and his sister and their 81-year-old mother in a wheelchair had been plucked from their house by a boatman, then were refused refuge by a hospital and spent seven hours tied to a bridge while being lashed by the storm. They were rescued but he said he had no idea where his mother and sister were taken.

Chanelle Jones, 31, with three boys and a girl and four months pregnant, said her back was so hurt from sleeping on the ground that she had trouble standing. Her husband, a temporary worker, had barely been able to support the family before the storm.

"I lost everything I ever worked for," Ms. Jones said through tears. "All my children's clothes, their birth certificates, everything - everything is gone except us.

"My children are always asking me: 'Why are you crying?' "

Ivory Joyce, 62, who had worked for the city on a garbage truck, said he was missing important medicine. "I'm a suicide patient," he said. "I've talked to a psychiatrist."

Arthur Mack, 64, tried to read "Death Squadron," a World War II novel, but it appeared to have been in a war zone of its own, pages falling apart as he turned them.

Cecile Conway, 44, who swam to safety but lost track of family members, sat reading the Bible, marking Psalm 6 with green pencil for emphasis: "O Lord, do not rebuke me in Your anger, nor chastise me in Your hot displeasure. Have mercy on me, O Lord, for I am weak. O Lord, heal me for my bones are troubled."

Yong Han, a doctor at Texas Children's Hospital who volunteered at the clinic after a full shift at work, said a woman unable to locate her family members had been left to care for 11 grandchildren. And, he said, two women in the shelter, unable to cope with their stress, had given up their children to foster care. "I do missionary work in the poorest part of Mexico," Dr. Han said, "but I got to tell you, this is pretty bad."

As in the days after the Sept. 11 attacks, some of the most poignant testimonies were those pinned to a message wall and taped to surfaces throughout the arena. "Kentrell Hyams and Shawntrel Hyams," read one anguished appeal, "I'm looking for y'all. I'm staying at Reliant Arena. Your mom, Cheryl. I love y'all. I'm staying on cot. I have cot ready for y'all all the way in back."

On rats in the city

Cats and Rats, and the Cats Are Losing
By DAN BARRY

A BROKEN bottle of a man sat on the hot sidewalk Thursday afternoon, lips wet from the beer he had just tossed under a car. With leaden hand he stroked the head of an abandoned baby bird in his lap, and it was a tossup as to which of the two looked more lost. But for now he would have to do as the sentry for the awful apartment building behind him, 305 West 150th Street.

Two days earlier, the four Democratic candidates for mayor had stood in the same place to use the building as their backdrop while denouncing the state of some housing in this increasingly unaffordable city. Then they drove off to the next photo op, which is understandable, but it is not as though their visit had blocked even one rathole inside.

Now, with politicians and cameras gone, the seven-story building had returned to its natural state of lead-based paint hazards, of ceiling leaks and vermin, of everyday despair. It is neither the worst in the city nor even the worst in Harlem, just consistently, persistently bad, a point that an advocacy group called Housing Here and Now was trying to make by inviting the mayoral candidates here in the first place.

How bad is it?

So bad that you would not want to live here.

So bad that the city's Department of Housing Preservation and Development has spent nearly $50,000 on emergency repairs that the owner - Hoshia Realty, 2304 Nostrand Avenue, Brooklyn - has failed to address. The city is seeking civil and criminal penalties against the owner for what it says is a pattern of flagrant noncompliance, as evidenced by more than 350 outstanding code violations.

So bad that Hoshia Realty's two principals, Jacob Finkelstein and Manny Stein, should be required to live in their own building, where they would be forced to look into the eyes of the young girl upon whom a rat fell from a hole in her ceiling earlier this summer.

Since this is unlikely, and since messages left for Messrs. Finkelstein and Stein were not returned - hinting at what life must be like for their tenants - let us provide them with a virtual tour, led by Rosa Navarro, a tenant, and Peter Santiago, a supervisor for Acorn of New York, an advocacy group for low-income families.

The hallways in 305 West 150th Street all slant to the west, toward Bradhurst Avenue, giving one the sense of walking aboard a foundering ship. A back wall is separating from the rest of the structure. Mounds of debris fill the bottom of a stairwell. And the small and jittery elevator stops working every night around 7; the superintendent has told tenants that it just happens to break down every day at the same time. One of those strange coincidences.

Ms. Navarro, short, tattooed, and angry, shares a one-bedroom apartment with her partner, three children, two tiny dogs, and a cat named Misty. Cats are the pet of choice in this building, and Ms. Navarro points to one reason: the gaping holes behind the radiator and around the bathtub fixtures.

"Mouses and rats," she said.

On the second floor, a young mother named Maribel said that she had not allowed her 10-month-old daughter to sleep alone because of roaches and mice. On the fourth floor, Altagracia Diaz showed off her unusable bathtub and broken stove, then swept one arm across the immaculate kitchen, like a model on "The Price Is Right."

"Muchas ratas," she said. "Muchas ratas."

Down the hall, Leslie Guadalupe led the tour through the miseries of her own apartment: the broken doors, the kitchen cast in darkness, the hole in the bathroom ceiling. Here, she said, is where a rat fell from that hole and onto my daughter, Denise.

DENISE, 13 and ballerina-thin, nodded when asked if this was true. But she looked away at the sound of other questions about the incident, as if mortified by the very thought of it. Too bad Messrs. Finkelstein and Stein were not here to see this look; Messrs. Finkelstein and Stein, of Hoshia Realty, 2304 Nostrand Avenue, Brooklyn.

Out in the hallway could be heard the heavy steps of three grim-faced police detectives coming up the stairwell. Last weekend a livery driver delivered a fare to this building and was paid with a bullet to the face. Now the police were knocking on doors, in a building that itself was a crime.

The tour ended, and Ms. Navarro returned to her apartment, with its rodents and a cat to chase them. Outside, that broken-bottle sentry had disappeared, and one could only hope that baby birds and children would survive the rats.