Something is Rotten in the Neighborhood of East Harlem

Posted on December 15, 2011 by Minty Grover

Restaurant owners in East Harlem say that rain can be hazardous for their business. The issue is that the sewers are not properly maintained, and this causes them to flood and back up when it rains on major streets.

Orlando Plaza, owner of Camaradas El Barrio, says that he has had an ongoing problem with a sewage back up that occurs below the building that houses his restaurant. Since he opened seven years ago, he noticed the pungent smell of raw sewage that would emanate from the back of his restaurant every so often.

“We call it the mystery smell,” says Plaza. “Who’s going to want to sit down and pay ‘x’ amount of money for that kind of smell?”

Kartik Chandran, an assistant professor at the Department of Earth and Environmental Engineering at Columbia University, says that the root cause of flooding is the combined sewer system that New York City is built on. This means that both rainwater and sewage together are conveyed through the same pipes.

“During times of severe rain it’s a big problem,” says Chandran. “This is a problem where the sewer capacity is exceeded. It happens quite often.” When the capacity is exceeded, water can’t be conveyed quickly enough and the streets flood, according to him.

East Harlem’s problem with flooding might be comparatively more severe than the rest of the city because parts of it are on low-lying land, Chandran says. “I can see the streets going down towards the East River,” he says.

However, for Plaza, it’s emblematic of the city’s disregard for poorer neighborhoods like East Harlem, which he why he never contacted them in trying to solve his problem.

“That the sewage problem doesn’t receive the attention it should from the city agencies doesn’t surprise me,” he says. “That’s always the way it’s been in this neighborhood.”

Youth Violence on the Rise in East Harlem: Survey Results

Posted on November 22, 2011 by Minty Grover

Last week, on Nov. 16, a meeting was held by the East Harlem Chamber of Commerce that included the 23rd Precinct speaking about whether there was a need for a curfew, as gang violence in this neighborhood in on the rise. It is clear that the rising levels of youth and gang violence in East Harlem are a major concern for members of the community.

To find out more about what people’s thoughts on the issue is, I conducted a survey on “stop-and-frisk” in East Harlem. The sample size was fairly small, at eight people, so it isn’t exhaustive. However, it can at least be an insight into what a few people think of this issue, even if it can’t be much of an authority in terms of the numbers. Below is an analysis of the results.

Who do you think should be in charge of taking care of this issue?

As can be seen from the pie chart of the responses, “government or city agencies” had the largest number of votes, though this was still less then half of the respondents at 37.5 percent. This suggests to me that the spread of responses could have been more diverse had the sample size of the survey-takers been larger.

None of the respondents picked the option “the youth themselves” in answering this question. So at least of the people who took the survey, the respondents seem to feel that the issue isn’t one that can simply be solved by young people in the community attempting to mitigate the situation by organizing themselves, and that it is more complicated and needs the attention of people from the outside this section of the community.

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Restoring Pedro Albizu Campos and Che Guevara

Posted on November 10, 2011 by Minty Grover

On 105th Street and Third Avenue is a mural that was first painted by a collective of Hispanic activist-artists in 1998. It is of Argentine revolutionary Che Guevara and Pedro Albizu Campos, a Puerto Rican nationalist and activist for independence. After 13 years the artists who originally painted got together with Luisa’s Liberation Artists Making Action (LLAMA) to restore the mural and remove the graffiti and tagging that had collected over the last decade.

One of the artists, Vagabond, feels that mural represents a number of things to the large Hispanic population located in East Harlem. He says that often, even in Puerto Rico itself, Hispanic children get taught a large amount of Western or American history in school. With the restoration of the mural, he hopes to reignite a dialogue between residents about their own history and culture.

The Ups and Downs of Selling Leather Jackets

Posted on October 27, 2011 by Minty Grover

Abraham Mussafi, an Israeli turned New Yorker, has been making and selling leather jackets and other leather products, for the last few decades. Before he started selling leather products, he was the owner of a clothing store. He decided to move to selling leather products because he found that selling clothes wasn’t fulfilling enough.

After decades of experience selling leather products, Mussafi says the market has changed quite a lot in the last few years. He explains why he thinks that customers in East Harlem are no longer buying luxury products like leather jackets as much as they used to a few years ago.

Click on the play button below to hear Mussafi’s thoughts on the leather jacket business.

[audio:http://cdn.journalism.cuny.edu/blogs.dir/383/files/2011/11/111105_Grover_LeatherStore.mp3|titles=111105_Grover_LeatherStore]

Slide Show: One of the Last of the East Harlem Community Gardens

Posted on October 20, 2011 by Minty Grover

On Lexington Avenue, between 104th and 105th Streets, is a little green oasis behind a gate with painted letters that read, “Modesto Flores Garden.” A little Puerto Rican flag is tucked behind the word, “garden.”

The Modesto “Tin” Flores community garden in East Harlem was born in 1981, according to Yvonne Pacheco, 56. She has been volunteering to run it for the last 10 years for Hope Community, an organization that owns around 75 affordable housing buildings and around eight community gardens including the Modesto garden.

Roger Cabán is 75 and sits on Hope’s Community’s board of directors. He says that the 50-feet wide, 100-feet deep garden was started by the Puerto Rican superintendent of the building adjoining the garden. Cabán says his name was Modesto Flores, and he was known by his nickname, “Tin”. When he passed away, the garden was named after him.

A few decades ago, East Harlem’s community gardens were buzzing with activity. Puerto Ricans would build a caseta in each one, Spanish for “little house.” According to Jordan Dyniewski who works with New York Restoration Project, helping to restore some of these gardens, these were once extremely prevalent in the community.

These days, most of them are falling into disrepair, according to many older Puerto Ricans who’ve lived in the community for a while. As it is a block away from the Hope Community offices, “in the heart of East Harlem,” according to Cabán, the Modesto garden is like “the old guard” of community gardens, he says.

[Show slideshow]

Survey: “Stop-and-frisk” in East Harlem and is it Affected by Youth Unemployment?

Posted on October 13, 2011 by Minty Grover

Some advocacy groups and community organizers in East Harlem feel that there might be a connection between the rising level of youth unemployment and the NYPD’s “stop-and-frisk” policy.

The issue of “stop-and-frisk” in East Harlem has been a point of contention for some time. It’s when the police stop people they think are suspicious for one reason or another and, very simply, frisk them. The New York Daily News wrote last year, “The most likely neighborhood in New York where you’ll get arrested or hit with a summons if cops “stop-and-frisk” you is East Harlem, records show.”

Chair of Community Board 11 Manhattan, Matthew Washington, says of “stop-and-frisk,” “A lot of the time it’s without cause.”

To make matters worse, the black youth unemployment rate is 30 percent and the Hispanic youth unemployment rate is 21 percent, according to the U.S. Department of Labor – much higher than 9.1 percent – the national rate. Looking at the census data for this part of Manhattan, the majority of the population is either black or Hispanic.

“If the kids are out of a job and they’re hanging out on the corners, they’re going to be subjected to “stop-and-frisk”,” Yolanda Sanchez, President of the National Latinas Caucus.

“The police have to do their job,” says Nina Saxon, Vice President of National Alumni Council of Youth Build, “but what we have to do is hold our leaders responsible.”

Whose problem should this issue be? And what should they do about it? Take just a few minutes to do the survey below (click “continue reading”) and voice your opinion on this subject.

Continue reading →

Social Media Diary: Does Rejection Make You Stronger?

Posted on October 6, 2011 by Minty Grover

I used Facebook and Twitter to try and promote my last blog post as well as solicit opinions for my next blog post. It is clear to me after all my attempts, despite the fact that this was already painfully obvious anyway, that the most effective way to get people to respond to questions is to already have a big following.

Question Blog Post Promotion

Below is what I tweeted a couple of weeks ago to promote my question blog post.

Being as I only have 29 followers, I’m not certain how helpful this tweet was in gaining responses. Seeing as the only people who commented on my post were in this class, I’m going to guess that I probably didn’t get anyone to respond to my post because of Twitter.

On Facebook, to promote my post, I tried to use more specific questions to drive people to comment on my post. My tweet didn’t really contain any questions for people to ponder over as they debated clicking on my blog post link, so I thought perhaps it would help to try and get everyone thinking about the topic before they read the post.

In this situation, I realize that most people only click on links that interest them as Facebook tends to be over-saturated with links already. Despite the fact that I have many more Facebook friends than Twitter followers, it would probably be better next time to target the ones who are actually interested in the topic I’m asking questions about, rather than just posting it on my wall and hoping for the best.

Survey Blog Post Research

The topic I’m doing for my survey blog post is the effect youth unemployment has had on the issue of “Stop and Frisk” and arrests in East Harlem. I chose a topic that I felt would get different opinions because it seemed like this would make a good survey. To solicit responses, I posted a public Facebook note with a few statistics and quotes to try and get people thinking about the issue before they answered the questions.

Below are the responses.

This worked a lot better in gaining responses, despite the fact that there were only four. I was also pleased that the comments were clearly very thoughtful and had got at least few people thinking about the topic. I also tagged people I knew who lived in East Harlem in this note, to try and target it to people who might be interested in the topic for personal reasons.

Additionally, I promoted this note in two groups on Facebook (here and here) as well as on Twitter. I also tweeted the question with a hashtag to see if people using that hashtag might respond. Below are the two tweets and one of the Facebook group promotion posts (the other one didn’t get any responses).

Again, on Twitter, I probably didn’t get anyone to read the note and comment for the same reasons as with my previous Twitter promotion campaign that I detailed above. The Facebook group I promoted my note on, however, is the group for people in my building which is in East Harlem (it’s the CUNY GC Housing building). It’s a group of 57, so I wasn’t really expecting many responses, and I was surprised to get a comment, frankly. Not that the one comment the post got was eloquently waxing on about the issue exactly, however he did have an interesting question to ask about the unemployment rate data of the arrested, which is something I can look into for my survey blog post.

Conclusion

Despite the fact that I was mostly rejected in all my various attempts to get people to respond to me on Facebook and Twitter, I did learn from it. Other than targeting the questions appropriately and using hashtags effectively, I honestly believe the one biggest factor that helps the situation is to have a large following. It seems to me that this is probably one of the most important things to work on, by constantly posting insightful and thought-provoking things on these various forms of media.

Small Stores in East Harlem are Feeling the Pinch

Posted on September 22, 2011 by Minty Grover

Small, local stores in East Harlem are suffering. One of the big ones reasons why is that rent in East Harlem has been on the rise for a while.

Seema Gul, 35, is the owner of Star Electronic Discount, Inc. between 110th and 109th streets, on Third Avenue. She bought the store with her husband two years ago.

“We were making $2000 a day. Now I can’t pay the rent. I have to borrow,” Gul says. They make about $200 a day now, and their rent is $5500, according to her.

According to a report by MNS, a real estate broker in Manhattan, while rent there is still low compared with any other area, when you scroll down to the very bottom and look at Harlem’s price trends, rates there are clearly rising as well.

While the rent prices going up has definitely affected local business owners, there has been a sharp drop in the bottom line of most local stores in the last two to three years specifically because of the opening of the East River Plaza.

As more people of middle income moved there, it made sense for stores like Target, Best Buy, Marshalls and Costco to to open as these people would be more inclined to buy a lamp from, say, Target than the 99 cents store. Unfortunately, local businesses like Gul’s electronic store cannot compete in terms of pricing.

“Sometimes people come in and say, “It’s cheaper in Best Buy,” and I say that this is not Best Buy. We are a small business, we can’t afford to have such low prices,” she says.

On the other hand, the competition might be good for the local community, specifically for people who live in Public Housing or are struggling to make ends meet as their rent goes up.

What do you think? Is the East River Plaza opening up a good thing for the community? Or do you feel that it’s not worth it due to way it affects local businesses?

SEO Headline – Before and After

Posted on September 15, 2011 by Minty Grover

Original Post: How Politically Polarizing is the Jobs Crisis?

New Headline: How Polarized is the Media in Reporting on the Recession?

link: Post.

A Simplification of Mystifying Economic Numbers