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1243 of 1258 DOCUMENTS

The New York Times
January 5, 2007 Friday

Late Edition - Final

Turkmen Leader Proposes Vast Change to Lift Isolation
BYLINE: By ILAN GREENBERG
SECTION: Section A; Column 1; Foreign Desk; Pg. 9
LENGTH: 579 words
DATELINE: ALMATY, Kazakhstan, Jan. 4
Turkmenistan's acting president, Gurbanguly Berdymukhammedov, who had promised only continuity with the severely authoritarian policies of his predecessor, on Thursday proposed measures that would help lift the nation from its fortresslike isolation.

Mr. Berdymukhammedov promised a laundry list of changes affecting agriculture, social assistance programs, education and the economy. The proposals, outlined in a speech in Ashgabat, the capital, included giving students access to foreign universities -- including those in the United States -- sending doctors to Western hospitals to acquire modern skills and extending primary schooling to 10 years. Mr. Berdymukhammedov also vowed to create a culture of entrepreneurship, suggesting that he would encourage private ownership of some residences and businesses. Almost all economic activity in Turkmenistan is tied to the government.

He also promised to allow universal access to the Internet. Turkmens are allowed almost no contact with the outside world. In recent years, even foreign newspapers and cable television from Russia were prohibited under the mercurial rule of Saparmurat Niyazov, the ''president for life,'' who died on Dec. 21. Simply receiving a telephone call originating in a foreign country can arouse the interest of Turkmenistan's feared security apparatus, said Turkmens who had spoken to journalists.

Mr. Berdymukhammedov's public comments underscored the fluidity of the nation's opaque politics as it prepares for a presidential election on Feb. 11, foreign analysts said.

''I think there is a much more deeply rooted struggle for power in Turkmenistan than we originally thought,'' said Martha Brill Olcott, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, in a telephone interview.

As acting president, Mr. Berdymukhammedov, a former deputy prime minister, was prohibited by the Constitution from seeking the presidency. But the national legislature simply changed the rules to allow him to run and then approved a slate of colorless, midlevel bureaucrats and politicians as false opposition candidates.

But Mr. Berdymukhammedov may fear that such tactics are backfiring, Dr. Olcott said, strengthening the opposition in exile and increasing the chances that his opponents will gain support from Western governments.

''Berdymukhammedov is seeking ways to appease the foreign community in order to get support for a very nondemocratic constitution modified in a very nondemocratic way, and to validate an election in which the electoral process was flawed from the beginning,'' she said.

The government trumpets its policy of geopolitical neutrality, but Turkmenistan's dependence on customers for its enormous natural gas deposits has given outside powers, especially Russia, Europe and the United States, significant influence.

But few signs of outside pressure have been seen.

The ''Turkmenistan government is going to have to moderate their own political process,'' Sean McCormack, the State Department spokesman, said Wednesday, when asked by reporters how the United States would respond to recent lobbying from Turkmen opposition figures for support of the country's exiled political opposition.

In his speech, Mr. Berdymukhammedov also promised to double state pensions, student stipends and government salaries, to build resorts on the Caspian Sea and to continue Mr. Niyazov's popular program of distributing water, salt and gasoline free.

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SUBJECT: POLITICS (89%); ELECTIONS (89%); INTERVIEWS (78%); PRESIDENTIAL ELECTIONS (78%); LEGISLATIVE BODIES (78%); LEGISLATORS (78%); PRIMARY & SECONDARY EDUCATION (77%); EDUCATION (77%); LOBBYING (77%); ENDOWMENTS (76%); STATE DEPARTMENTS & FOREIGN SERVICES (76%); ENTREPRENEURSHIP (76%); ELECTION LAW (75%); CAMPAIGNS & ELECTIONS (75%); STUDENTS & STUDENT LIFE (72%); FOUNDATIONS (71%); POLITICAL CANDIDATES (70%); HUMAN RIGHTS (59%); JOURNALISM (73%); PRIME MINISTERS (74%) Freedom and Human Rights
PERSON: Ilan Greenberg; Gurbanguly Berdymukhammedov; Saparmurat (Pres) Niyazov
GEOGRAPHIC: TURKMENISTAN (96%); UNITED STATES (94%); KAZAKHSTAN (79%); EUROPE (79%) Turkmenistan; Turkmenistan
LOAD-DATE: January 5, 2007
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

1244 of 1258 DOCUMENTS

The New York Times
January 5, 2007 Friday

Late Edition - Final

2 Miles in Newark That Run From Long Decline to Rebirth
BYLINE: By ANDREW JACOBS
SECTION: Section A; Column 1; Metropolitan Desk; Pg. 1
LENGTH: 2558 words
DATELINE: NEWARK, Jan. 2
Carolyn Whigham stood on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard and took in the landscape of tattered brownstones, trash-strewn lots and skinny addicts by the front door of the funeral home that has been in her family for three generations. Then she closed her eyes and a vision of the street in the 1950s took hold, a reverie of mansions, graceful oak trees and the reassuring roar of a bustling industrial city.

''I can see Lawyer Tate, Dr. Shelton, Old Lady Ruffin and all the beautiful buildings,'' Mrs. Whigham said, ticking off the people who once filled the granite-and-marble Victorians. ''It was a gem. For a black family, it was a dream to be living here.''

In the summer of 1967, the Whighams huddled on their rooftop as rioters burned neighboring buildings; then the Whighams helped bury a dozen victims of the violence. In the decades since, they have witnessed the flight of the professional class and the onslaught of drugs and despair, planning countless funerals for teenagers killed by gunfire and young mothers felled by AIDS.

''To see all that happening to my street, to my city, has been very traumatic,'' Mrs. Whigham, 57, said.

But now, across the street from where she grew up, workers are laying sod in front of 100 crisp Georgian-style town houses that replaced a forbidding housing project. A few blocks north, a new dormitory for 800 students is to be finished by fall. To the east, the steel bones of a hockey arena are filling the horizon. Throughout Newark, even on the most ragged blocks, new three-family homes are selling for $400,000.

''This city is coming back,'' Mrs. Whigham said. ''It's finally happening, and I believe it's going to happen in my lifetime.''

After 30 years of decline and a decade of sporadic renewal efforts, the two-mile boulevard through Newark's Central Ward -- known as High Street until 1983 -- is showing signs of progress. So is the entire city.

More than 2,500 private homes are being built, Barnes & Noble is looking downtown, and hundreds of suburbanites and New Yorkers are moving into the city's first luxury high-rise in a generation.

Though these projects began under his predecessor, Sharpe James, Cory A. Booker, Newark's ambitious young mayor, has revved up the momentum since he took office in July. He has made lofty promises to recast his struggling city as a national model for urban revitalization, and dismantled bureaucratic impediments to development. His administration plans to lift the more stringent zoning rules to encourage downtown residential construction, create building trade apprenticeships for jobless young people and develop a municipal loan pool for minority business owners.

''It feels like all the pieces are finally coming together,'' said Dennis M. Bone, president of Verizon New Jersey, one of the few corporations to keep its headquarters here as Newark lost many of its blue-chip employers and almost half its population.

Yet Newark faces steep obstacles to prosperity. Real estate taxes are onerous, the public school system is in shambles and any new businesses Mr. Booker may bring in will find a largely unskilled work force: of those 25 and older, 58 percent lack a high school diploma and 9 percent have a bachelor's degree, according to the 2000 census.

As it stands, more than three-quarters of the city's 150,000 jobs are held by out-of-towners. For Mr. Booker, already tarnished in the eyes of some as an outsider for his suburban upbringing and criticized for hiring too many aides from New York, the true challenge will be to spread change beyond a few shiny spots in the business district downtown into the struggling neighborhoods.

''All my life, the politicians have been calling this place the Renaissance City,'' complained Latonya Edwards, 28, a part-time security guard who is raising three children in a decrepit apartment building on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard. ''I think the renaissance is for suburban people who go downtown. If they have their way, people like me would just disappear.''

Even some of Newark's biggest civic boosters worry about outsize expectations after Mr. Booker's public pronouncements of the city's potential. (The mayor, a vegetarian, often talks about luring a Whole Foods market to the city.) And while Newark's overall crime rate dropped last year, homicides recently reached a 10-year high, hardly helping to improve its reputation.

''The edge is so thin right now,'' said Alfred C. Koeppe, president of the Newark Alliance, a consortium of business leaders working to improve the economy and schools. ''All it takes is one kid who recently moved here to get shot on the way to the PATH train and it could be all over.''

Still, urban experts say Newark, population 278,000, has an edge over other midsize cities still stumbling from the loss of their manufacturing bedrock. Just 10 miles from Manhattan and surrounded by wealthy suburbs, Newark is blessed with an expanding seaport, an international airport and a skein of highways and commuter rail lines.

Quietly and with little fanfare, high-tech entrepreneurs have set up shop over the past decade at a 60-acre science park that is growing alongside the city's five colleges and professional schools. In October, the hockey arena is scheduled to join a decade-old performing arts center that has proved successful in drawing visitors to a downtown that otherwise feels like a disused Hollywood set after dusk.

''The one thing that New Jersey lacks is a premier city,'' said Thomas K. Wright, executive vice president of the Regional Plan Association, which has helped formulate redevelopment plans for a number of struggling cities in New York's orbit. ''This is Newark's moment to become that city. It's going to happen in the next few years. Or it won't.''

Directing Mr. Booker's economic development efforts is Stefan Pryor, a friend from Yale Law School who led efforts to revive Lower Manhattan after 9/11. Now, as one of Newark's three deputy mayors, Mr. Pryor has been hawking Newark to national retailers, streamlining the way City Hall doles out licenses and building permits, and trying to create a new Planning Department to replace a politicized, fragmented one that developers say often stymied projects.

''In the past you had to do back flips and jump through rings of fire,'' Mr. Pryor said at a recent Chamber of Commerce breakfast where he gave a presentation of the streamlined permit process. ''This is a new era. We're going to be the new high-integrity folks at City Hall who you can talk to with intelligence.''

Mr. Pryor, 34, recently moved from Manhattan to an Art Deco tower a few blocks off Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard that has become a highly visible symbol -- and test -- of Newark's aspirations. Vacant for 20 years, the building at Raymond Boulevard and Broad Street is being transformed into 317 apartments, and will feature valet parking, a mod bowling alley and a yoga studio. The average rent for a two-bedroom is $2,500; the building is still under renovation, but half the finished apartments have been rented.

A year from now, the landlord, Cogswell Realty Group, plans to break ground nearby on a project that would bring 2,900 units to a stretch of Broad Street now dominated by abandoned department stores. The company sees its markets as college students who currently commute to Newark, young professionals priced out of Manhattan and empty-nesters seeking an urban experience without depleting their savings.

''When we started this 18 months ago, there were plenty of people who thought we wouldn't sign a single lease or that we wouldn't get the rents we're getting,'' Arthur Stern, Cogswell's chief executive, said during a tour of the health club in the Art Deco building. ''I think we've proven everyone wrong.''

Mr. Pryor was among the first to move in, as much to make a statement about the area's viability as for the five-minute walk to work. Unpacking boxes in his 15th-floor apartment one recent evening, he gazed out at City Hall's gold-leaf dome and the fast-rising arena. Then his eye settled on the darkened 19th-century mercantile buildings in the foreground. ''I'm hoping we can inject these buildings with some life,'' he said.

To that end, Mr. Pryor soon plans to ask the City Council to eliminate stringent zoning rules that have made it difficult to get approval to renovate the upper floors of commercial buildings. Another major goal is revamping the city's master plan, which has not been updated in 50 years. In a city with no bookstores and just two supermarkets, he spends most of his days on the phone with retailers and restaurateurs, talking up the untapped spending power of Newark residents.

Business leaders and politicians alike say such retail -- and residential -- development depends in part on the 50,000 students and teachers whose lives revolve around Seton Hall Law School, Rutgers University, New Jersey Institute of Technology, Essex County College and the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey.

Once largely commuter schools, their academic buildings walled off from the surrounding city, these five institutions have been building furiously, constructing new dormitories that, by the fall semester, will house 4,000 students in and around downtown.

''People don't think of Newark as a college town, but I think that's about to change,'' said Gene A. Vincenti, executive vice provost at Rutgers-Newark, at the school's new $50 million administrative building, part of a $210 million capital improvement plan.

Up the hill from Rutgers, in a futuristic, four-story building, a biophysicist was busy working on a new ultraviolet system to treat psoriasis and purify drinking water, while a former telecommunications executive plotted the rollout of software that uses a computer-generated voice to read e-mail messages over the phone. Others in the so-called Newark Innovation Zone were creating facial recognition software for security firms and technologies that can detect biological agents in luggage.

Started 10 years ago, the zone -- also known as University Heights Science Park -- is one of three technology incubators in the state, with 60 start-ups and scores of lone entrepreneurs who enjoy cheap office space, free business advice and monthly networking lunches. There is a waiting list of several months, so this year organizers plan to build another 100,000-square-foot building, christened the Digital Century Center. A separate stem-cell research center is on the drawing board.

The lofty dream, those running the incubator say, is to turn the surrounding area into a high-tech manufacturing zone that could employ thousands of people. ''The idea is to make these things here, and create more than just jobs for a bunch of Ph.D.'s and their secretarial and janitorial support staff,'' said Donald H. Sebastian a vice president of the New Jersey Institute of Technology, the center's main sponsor.

But with almost a third of Newark's residents living in poverty, and the city's unemployment rate at 10 percent -- more than double New York City's rate and more than double New Jersey's average -- cynicism about such ideas abounds.

Ronnie Addy, who said he never finished high school and spent a year in jail for gun possession more than a decade ago, said he would ''love to work in an office'' someday, but has more or less given up looking for a job and survives on public assistance. ''I can't make ends meet flipping burgers and making minimum wage,'' said Mr. Addy, 44.

An associate professor of management and global business at Rutgers, dt ogilvie, said many of the chronically unemployed here needed the most basic training: how to dress for an interview, how to speak to an employer and how to handle disputes without storming out the door. ''We have plenty of willing workers in Newark,'' he said; ''a lot of them are just not equipped to work.''

Indeed, down at the waterfront, where the business of unloading and loading cargo has doubled in the past decade, producing about 1,000 new jobs a year, nearly 80 percent of the 28,000 stevedore and truck driving positions are held by people who live outside the city. At Newark Liberty International Airport, the airlines hire hundreds of baggage handlers, flight attendants and reservation agents every month; few are from Newark.

Mayor Booker insists that City Hall will not ignore the city's poorest residents and frequently says he is trying to make the rehabilitation of former offenders like Mr. Addy a top priority.

With 1,500 to 2,000 parolees returning to Newark each year -- and 60 percent of them ending up in handcuffs again within three years, according to city officials -- the Booker administration plans to unveil a program next month that would provide ex-felons with job training and help them expunge their criminal records.

During a recent City Hall meeting, when Mr. Pryor gushed about a flood of calls from potential investors, his counterpart in charge of minority economic empowerment, Michelle Thomas, flashed an expression of concern.

''I'm worried people in the Central Ward will be upset if we emphasize downtown housing,'' Ms. Thomas said of the neighborhood that took the most damage from the 1967 riots. ''It's semantic, but people will care and there's potential for a backlash.''

Nodding, Mr. Booker said, ''We don't want to gentrify people out of the city,'' but he added that ''creating a 24/7 community means providing retail and jobs and these will be opportunities for Newark residents.''

From the antiseptic hush of the high-tech park on its northern tip to the Hotel Riviera, where $10 buys a room for an hour, two miles south, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard is a jagged montage of Newark's grand history, nightmarish depths and nascent revival.

Not far from the Riviera, and an abandoned housing project occupied by a small army of squatters, sits Hopewell Baptist Church, a 3,000-seat behemoth known to another generation as Temple B'nai Jeshurun. The Rev. Jason C. Guice struggles to keep the rain from destroying Hopewell's organ and to stop the termites from chewing the cherry-wood pews; last year, the sanctuary's huge Star of David chandelier shattered on the floor. The congregation runs a soup kitchen that feeds 300 people every Saturday, a nursing school for young women and a day care center for their children.

''We haven't really arrived yet, but we're on our way,'' Mr. Guice said of both Newark and his church.

Mrs. Whigham, the funeral home owner, left Newark a few years ago for Livingston, an affluent suburb nine miles northwest.

Yes, she said, she has appreciated the tranquillity of sleeping behind windows without bars. But she misses the energy and rich history of her High Street.

''This place is in my blood,'' she said.

Mrs. Whigham plans to turn one of the four brownstones her family owns on the boulevard into a mortuary-science school. And, this month, she plans to sell her house in Livingston and move back into the apartment above the funeral home.
The Hard Part

This is the third article in a series chronicling Mayor Cory A. Booker's first year in Newark City Hall.

ONLINE: Previous articles, and a multimedia walking tour of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard with Clement Price, a local historian:

URL: http://www.nytimes.com
SUBJECT: CITY GOVERNMENT (89%); MAYORS (86%); RESIDENTIAL PROPERTY (77%); ADOLESCENTS (77%); FAMILY (77%); CITIES (76%); CONSTRUCTION (75%); MINORITY BUSINESS ASSISTANCE (74%); TAXES & TAXATION (74%); STUDENTS & STUDENT LIFE (72%); RESIDENTIAL CONSTRUCTION (72%); ECONOMIC NEWS (71%); URBAN DEVELOPMENT (71%); TRENDS (70%); MINORITY BUSINESSES (70%); AIDS & HIV (69%); RIOTS (68%); LODGING CONSTRUCTION (64%); APPRENTICESHIPS & INTERNSHIPS (70%); PROTESTANTS & PROTESTANTISM (78%) Surveys and Series; Area Planning and Renewal; Economic Conditions and Trends; Taxation; Education and Schools; Unemployment; Labor
PERSON: Andrew Jacobs; Cory A (Mayor) Booker; Sharpe James; Stefan Pryor
GEOGRAPHIC: NEW YORK, USA (92%) UNITED STATES (92%) Newark (NJ); Newark (NJ); Newark (NJ)
LOAD-DATE: January 5, 2007
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
SERIES: THE HARD PART: Rebuilding the Boulevard
GRAPHIC: Photos: PAST AND FUTURE -- Looking north on King Boulevard, Georgian-style town houses rise in place of a forbidding project. Beyond is the Krueger-Scott mansion, a rundown relic of the Gilded Age.

CUTTING EDGE -- Looking downtown from University Heights, where a science park also known as the Newark Innovation Zone is a technology incubator.

INTERFAITH TRANSITION -- The Rev. Jason C. Guice of Hopewell Baptist Church, formerly Temple B'nai Jeshurun.

SLATED FOR DEMOLITION -- The boarded-up Brick Towers. Mayor Cory A. Booker moved out of the project in November.

HER STREET -- Carolyn Whigham, whose family funeral home, right rear, is an institution on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard. (Photographs by Richard Perry/The New York Times)

(Image by Sanborn via Google Earth)(pg. B2)

Krueger-Scott mansion is empty, but new houses are nearby. (Photo by Richard Perry/The New York Times)(pg. A1)Chart/Map:1. Essex County Courthouse Designed by Cass Gilbert, the architect of New York's Woolworth Tower, the building's rich interior has Tiffany glass skylights and vivid murals.2. St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church The first Greek Orthodox church in the state, this 106-year-old building was once the heart of Newark's Greek community.3. Arts High School opened in 1931. Graduates include Sarah Vaughan, Melba Moore, the saxophonist Wayne Shorter and the tap dancer Savion Glover. Every year 2,000 students compete for 150 slots.4. Cottage Place A mixed-income housing development on a site that had been a drug haven.5. Spruce Street and M.L.K. Blvd. A dangerous intersection that has seen four shootings since October, three of them fatal.6. Riviera Hotel Father Divine, a charismatic religious leader, bought the city's biggest hotel in 1949 for $500,000, a sum that was paid with boxloads of singles and five-dollar bills, according to local lore.Map of Newark highlighting the places listed above and other points of interest. (pg. B2)

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