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1239 of 1258 DOCUMENTS

The New York Times
January 7, 2007 Sunday

Late Edition - Final

Hidden Stories and Unsung Songs, All for $8
BYLINE: By JOSEPH BERGER.

E-mail: joeberg@nytimes.com

SECTION: Section 14WC; Column 3; Westchester Weekly Desk; Pg. 1
LENGTH: 816 words
DATELINE: WHITE PLAINS
SOME write every day, others at spare moments. Some have braved the sting of rejection. Others have squirreled prose away in notebooks they thought the world would never see. All have felt that overpowering impulse to etch on paper the stories that shaped or unhinged their lives, their reveries and their regrets.

Ruth Obernbreit-Glass wanted to set down the story of her father, a Jew who fled Nazi Austria as a young man and appears to have wound up in the arms of a woman named Carmen in the ''paradise'' of a farm in the Dominican Republic, the only country that would take him in. Amy Ralston Seife wanted to concoct a restless suburban wife -- ''shallow, superficial, narcissistic, despicable,'' as she said -- who is threatening to divorce her husband, though Ms. Seife has had to remind more than a few people that her story is fiction. Ruth Seldin lived with her twin sister's suicide for 30 years and needed to set that Sunday in May on paper. Her reminiscence, with passages addressed directly to her dead sister, is called ''Defying Gravity.''

''If she had asked,'' she writes of the matter-of-fact morgue clerk, ''I would have said that your misery was a part of you, a second skin, that you emerged from the womb we shared for nine months already wearing it.''

These writers are contributors to a new literary journal hatched in a Cheeveresque county better known in literature for its hollow-souled conformity than for its capacity for invention and whimsy. But John Cheever flourished here, and Cynthia Ozick and Billy Collins, a former poet laureate, flourish here now, and Westchester is home as well to hundreds of weekend and weekday writers whose careers, family obligations, twists of destiny or not quite fashionable voices mean they are, in the words of Gray's elegy, ''born to blush unseen.''

No longer. The inaugural Winter 2007 issue of The Westchester Review has 188 pages of poems and stories from 45 writers representing 21 towns and villages, and it is now available for $8 at nine county bookshops as well as on Amazon.com. The editors hope to turn out one issue a year as a collection of the county's literary gems, or at least those that do not make it into The New Yorker.

''I think people have a lot of unspoken songs in them,'' JoAnn Duncan Terdiman, The Review's publisher, said. ''We're multifaceted human beings. We have a lot inside us that doesn't get tapped.''

When those songs are heard, it is particularly sweet when neighbors do the listening. After all, the journal evolved out of a long-running workshop taught by Louise Albert in her White Plains home. One member is Judith Naomi Fish of White Plains, a onetime librarian and teacher.

''For me, what writing is about is taking something that intrigues me, maybe bothers me, and being able to construct something new around it, something with elements I feel I can have some control over,'' she said. Her story, ''Philo 205,'' is about a college student who watches two friends being seduced by a Casanova of an ethics professor yet holds herself back. It is a reconstruction of an experience at Brooklyn College.

Several workshop members wanted to gather their writing in a magazine, but not much happened until an entrepreneur, Ms. Terdiman, a manager of estate sales, lent her spark.

''Writers are very interior people, and they don't always have the skills to go the next step,'' she said.

The founders posted fliers and received almost 300 submissions, including from published writers like Kevin Pilkington and Stephanie Kaplan Cohen. They raised $5,000 to cover printing 3,000 copies.

One of the more comic entries came from Ms. Seife, a mother of three who worked on Wall Street. Her bratty narrator, Maxine, mangles expressions, saying it takes ''two to tangle'' and longing for ''Ben and Jeffrey's'' ice cream. As Ms. Seife said: ''Her carelessness with language reflects her carelessness with other people's feelings.''

Rod Carlson, a Vietnam veteran, submitted a story about a hardened former gunnery sergeant from White Plains, Tom McCabe, who confronts Robert McNamara, the former defense secretary, as he is signing books in a bookstore. The veterans in his story suffer from flashbacks to battles they fought in.

''Flashbacks aren't dreams or nightmares,'' Mr. Carlson writes. ''In a flashback you are really there. You feel it, taste it, see it, hear it, the rounds and explosions, the yells and the screams.''

Ms. Obernbreit-Glass, a former hospital art therapist, said the key to unlocking her father's story came when she discovered love letters in Spanish after his death. Taking a Spanish course allowed her to translate the letters, and she learned there had been a Carmen in her father's life. Hence ''Paradise 1943.''

''When you write about sex, it's a good way to start something -- that gets people's attention,'' she said.

Spoken like a seasoned craftsman.

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SUBJECT: WRITERS & WRITING (90%); POETRY (89%); LITERATURE (88%); SUICIDE (77%); BOOKSTORES (72%); TWINS & MULTIPLE BIRTHS (76%) Magazines; Poetry and Poets
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PERSON: MICHAEL MCMAHON (50%) Joseph Berger
GEOGRAPHIC: NEW YORK, USA (79%) UNITED STATES (79%); DOMINICAN REPUBLIC (77%) Westchester County (NY)
LOAD-DATE: January 7, 2007
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
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Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

1240 of 1258 DOCUMENTS

The New York Times
January 7, 2007 Sunday

Late Edition - Final

As Prices Rise, Housing Groups Face the Need To Alter Tactics
BYLINE: By JANNY SCOTT
SECTION: Section 1; Column 1; Metropolitan Desk; Second Front; Pg. 21
LENGTH: 1344 words
Much of the rebirth of New York City neighborhoods in recent years can be traced to a force that many New Yorkers barely know exists: a sprawling network of community-development corporations and other homegrown nonprofit groups, which developed some 100,000 moderately priced apartments out of the ashes and abandonment of places like the South Bronx, central Brooklyn and parts of Harlem.

Now those neighborhoods are flourishing; private developers are back, and rents are rising. The city has exhausted its supply of properties taken in tax foreclosure, which were passed on to nonprofits to make into apartments that people of modest means could afford. As a result, the country's largest network of community development organizations is at a crossroads: The groups can retool themselves or fade away.

''The question is, what are the groups going to be doing over the next five years?'' said John Warren, first deputy commissioner of the city's Department of Housing Preservation and Development. ''The number of groups doing development is by necessity going to be smaller; there isn't that much land available, public or private, for the large-scale program we ran in the past.''

The shakeout comes at a time when the Bloomberg administration has embarked upon what it calls ''the largest affordable-housing plan in the country's history,'' promising to create or preserve 165,000 units of lower-cost housing by 2013. As city officials seek inventive ways to generate inexpensive housing in a high-priced market, the future of this proven engine for low-priced housing development is unclear.

Some groups have already entered into joint ventures with private developers, marrying their neighborhood knowledge and connections to the private developer's equity and expertise. Some have broadened their geographic boundaries in search of land. Some are likely to merge or be swallowed up. Others have diversified into areas like job training, youth services and economic development.

Mary Spink, executive director of the Lower East Side People's Mutual Housing Association, a group that has renovated or built several dozen rental buildings in lower Manhattan since 1990, is now courting aging landlords in the neighborhood, hoping to use her local roots to persuade them to sell to the association or bequeath buildings to the association in their wills.

''It's a hard sell,'' Ms. Spink said.

Elsewhere in the country, community development groups in cities including Boston, Cleveland and Seattle have begun extending their activities beyond their traditional focus on housing. A recent report by the Urban Institute found that some have moved into activities like helping neighborhood businesses line up financing and working with employers to bring welfare recipients into the labor market.

''The terrain has changed so much,'' said Thomas A. Bledsoe, president of the Housing Partnership Network, a Boston-based alliance of regional nonprofit housing organizations that are much larger than the community development organizations. ''The affordability problem has gotten much bigger. Rather than being a redevelopment problem exclusively, it has grown into a more widespread affordability gap that affects middle-class communities.''

There are now at least 60 community development corporations and other nonprofits involved with housing development in New York City. The oldest grew out of federal antipoverty programs in the 1960s; later came church-based groups like the Abyssinian Development Corporation in Harlem and neighborhood-based organizations that sprang up initially to address specific local issues.

Many of them flourished in the late 1980s and early 1990s under Mayor Edward I. Koch's $5 billion, 10-year housing plan, which offered properties taken in tax foreclosure for sale to nonprofits to create low-cost housing. Two national groups, the Local Initiatives Support Corporation and Enterprise Community Partners, have worked closely with many of the local groups, providing capital, technical expertise and training.

Through that system, nonprofits bought city-owned properties for as little as $1 and received city funding as well as support and financing from L.I.S.C.or Enterprise, using the federal low-income-housing tax credit program. That financing included developers' fees of thousands of dollars per apartment -- money that enabled the community development corporations to stay afloat.

''In the early stages of the redevelopment of these communities, the anchor in these communities was the community-based organizations,'' said William R. Frey, executive vice president of Enterprise, who started its New York office in 1987. ''They were the only entities that did not abandon these neighborhoods. They really were a critical engine behind the rebuilding.''

The Fordham Bedford Housing Corporation, in the northwest Bronx, was founded in 1980, at a time when arson and abandonment were eroding neighborhoods in the borough. Tenants in buildings that had been abandoned by their owners needed help managing the buildings. The group now manages, owns or works with 75 buildings in a half-dozen neighborhoods; it also operates a shelter.

The Lower East Side People's Mutual Housing Association has a $2 million operations budget, an office staff of nine, and 15 superintendents and porters. Ms. Spink, a former heroin addict who says she served three years in state prison in the early 1970s on charges involving drugs and guns, recently received the Andrew Heiskell Community Renaissance Award from Enterprise at its annual fund-raising gala.

Some groups, however, ran into trouble. The Banana Kelly Community Improvement Association, a South Bronx group, came under investigation by the state attorney general's office over questions about its management and financial practices. Others lost properties through foreclosure or closed down after turning over their buildings to bigger and better managed nonprofits.

Now, there is widespread agreement that some groups will be unable to continue to develop housing in the future. They will not be able to compete with private developers to cover the rising cost of land; and they will lack the expertise to navigate the increasingly complex world of housing finance.

Those groups in a position to continue developing are being forced to become more entrepreneurial and creative.

Walter Blenman, a former community organizer who runs Beulah Housing Development Fund Company, a group in the Morrisania and Crotona neighborhoods in the South Bronx, said he is going to have to focus on fund-raising. His last two projects were joint ventures with a private developer, under which his group gets a share of the developer's fee and the developer increases his chances of getting tax credits by allying himself with a nonprofit.

''We had to purchase the actual vacant lot,'' Mr. Blenman said, reflecting on the irony that the success of groups like his in spurring neighborhood revival is now working against them. ''It was private land. We had never anticipated having that issue. The flip side is we did our job well. People are investing in these communities. But now we suffer the brunt of our success.''

John Reilly, executive director of the Fordham Bedford group, said he had applied for a $20 million loan from the $200 million New York Acquisition Fund, a new city program aimed at enabling nonprofits to compete for land in the private market. The group, which would use the money to buy six buildings it hopes to renovate, must put up equity of its own -- a step that some smaller nonprofits would be unable to take.

''I wouldn't say it's a crisis-- but it's difficult,'' said Mr. Blenman, whose group is relatively small, with a staff of four and an annual operating budget of $350,000 that in the past came mostly from developer's fees. ''There will be some attrition. There'll probably be some merging along the way. If all you're doing is developing, it might get to a point where you're going to have to shut that part of your operation down.''

URL: http://www.nytimes.com
SUBJECT: PRICE INCREASES (90%); PRICE CHANGES (90%); RENTAL PROPERTY (89%); RESIDENTIAL PROPERTY (89%); REAL ESTATE DEVELOPMENT (89%); HOUSING AUTHORITIES (88%); CITIES (78%); CITY GOVERNMENT (78%); LOW COST HOUSING SCHEMES (77%); HOUSING ASSISTANCE (77%); ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT (77%); NONPROFIT ORGANIZATIONS (77%); FORECLOSURE (75%); HISTORY (67%); LABOR SECTOR PERFORMANCE (66%); FRIENDLY & PROVIDENT SOCIETIES (66%); JOINT VENTURES (63%) Housing; Prices (Fares, Fees and Rates); Foreclosures; Housing
PERSON: Janny Scott
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LOAD-DATE: January 7, 2007
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
GRAPHIC: Photo: Mary Spink of the Lower East Side People's Mutual Housing Association. Her group is among the nonprofits struggling with rising property costs in once-blighted areas. (Photo by Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times)
PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

1241 of 1258 DOCUMENTS

The New York Times
January 7, 2007 Sunday

Late Edition - Final

Paid Notice: Deaths

HUNTER, THOMAS C. JR.

SECTION: Section 1; Column 3; Classified; Pg. 27
LENGTH: 105 words
HUNTER--Thomas C. Jr., 73, of Stamford, CT died January 4. Beloved husband of Mary Bernstein Hunter, devoted father of Thomas III (Rita), William and Andrew (Alison) and doting grandfather of Valeria Hunter. Entrepreneur, patent holder, engineer, member Stamford Board of Reps, antique boat aficionado. His greatest legacy is his loving family, who will hold his memory dear in their hearts. Service Saturday, January 13, St. Johns Church 11am, 628 Main St., Stamford. Calling hours Friday January 12, 4-8pm at Gallagher Funeral Home, 2900 Summer St, Stamford, 203-327-1313. In lieu of flowers, donations can be made to St. Johns.
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LOAD-DATE: January 7, 2007
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
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PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

1242 of 1258 DOCUMENTS

The New York Times
January 7, 2007 Sunday

Late Edition - Final

BYLINE: By MATTHEW PRICE.

Matthew Price is a critic whose reviews have appeared in Bookforum, The Boston Globe and other publications.

SECTION: Section 7; Column 2; Book Review Desk; Nonfiction Chronicle; Pg. 20
LENGTH: 1364 words
PIGEONS: The Fascinating Saga of the World's Most Revered and Reviled Bird. By Andrew D. Blechman. (Grove, $24.) Consider the pigeon. Rather not? Well, reconsider, and do yourself a favor by reading Blechman's charming book. For once, a subtitle that doesn't exaggerate!

For many of us, pigeons are just nuisances who foul the ground with their copious droppings. Yet the pigeon also inspires cults of rabid admirers who race them, breed them and show them off in pageants as bizarre as any snooty dog show. Blechman wittily traces the history of this gentle, intelligent, misunderstood bird -- pigeon hatred, he shows, is a recent phenomenon -- and journeys into its obsessive subcultures. He hangs out on Brooklyn rooftops with a die-hard who breeds ''homers'' (as racing pigeons are known) as if they were thoroughbreds, prepping them for a West Virginia-to-New York race called the Main Event. Then there is the world of dandified show breeds: Jacobins, among the oldest and most stylish, sport ''a regal-looking mane of soft feathers, like Greta Garbo snuggled in a fur coat.'' Blechman gives equal time to the haters, from avian exterminators to a pigeon-shooting club in Pennsylvania. Along the way, he offers plenty of revelations about pigeon habits. In fact, they're rather tidy birds -- it's we pesky humans who make the urban poop problem worse by feeding them white bread, as processed flour makes for ''rock-hard droppings.'' Even those in the business of killing pigeons don't think they're that bad: ''They're pacifists,'' an exterminator concedes. ''They don't mean any harm. They just want to eat and hang out.''

MONOPOLY: The World's Most Famous Game -- and How It Got That Way. By Philip E. Orbanes. (Da Capo, $26.) Here's a real estate tip: Next time you're playing Monopoly, don't make like Donald Trump and snap up the coveted Boardwalk and Park Place. Much better to build a portfolio of cheaper properties, which will give a better return on your investment. So observes Orbanes in his spirited pop history of the classic board game. An unabashed fan, Orbanes is also a historical consultant to Hasbro Games, which owns Parker Brothers, the manufacturer of Monopoly. This trivia-heavy, sometimes gushing book is at its best when chronicling Monopoly's early 20th-century precursors. Interestingly enough, the game that celebrates entrepreneurial cunning had its roots in the populist, anti-monopoly theories of the economist Henry George, which inspired a high-minded actress named Elizabeth Magie Phillips to create the Landlord's Game in 1903. The game was designed to educate players about an unequal property system, and handmade versions passed from friend to friend. By the early '30s, one version, imprinted with Atlantic City street names and shorn of its rule that properties be sold at a fixed price, made its way to an unemployed Philadelphia plumbing repairman, who added the now familiar brightly colored bands and graphic icons. Parker Brothers bought the game in 1935, and it became a global Depression-era smash, with versions tailored to various markets. Italians of the Mussolini era, for example, enjoyed ''Monopoli,'' which featured a ''Via del Fascio,'' while the British could bid on Bond Street. Today, custom editions abound, from Harvardopoly to Elvisopoly to Dog-oply.
SEX AND THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY MAN: Massachusetts and the History of Sexuality in America. By Thomas A. Foster. (Beacon, $28.95.) In this plodding if occasionally saucy book, Foster -- a historian at DePaul University -- argues that our view of colonial America is much too chaste. You might not know it from reading those blockbusting biographies of the founding fathers, but sex was everywhere, ''regulated, controlled, discussed and crafted as part of an effort to create social stability and define racial, class and gender social boundaries.'' Foster's lethally earnest style is anything but sexy, and his convoluted argument often takes maddening turns, but his research shows real archival flair. Zeroing in on the Bay State, Foster uses sermons, newspapers and court testimony to uncover a frank, often viciously witty discourse on male sexual behavior. Not surprisingly, marriage was ''the only legitimate site for male sexual expression,'' Foster writes. Giving pleasure was a male duty: in addition to making an honorable living, a husband had to keep things interesting in the bedroom. Sexual failure was grounds for divorce. (One wife complained that her husband was ''naturally and incurably so defective in his body, that he is utterly incapable of Procreation.'') Bachelorhood was deeply suspect, and one tract warned that even single men who were celibate would ''fry in the Grease of their own Sensuality.''
PORTRAIT: The Life of Thomas Eakins. By William S. McFeely. (Norton, $26.95.) Unfortunately for McFeely, his book arrives in the wake of two major books on Eakins published in the last few years. Specialists and competitors may sniff, but McFeely -- author of a Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Ulysses S. Grant -- has written a brief, solid introduction, more an essay than a full-blown biography, to one of the 19th century's great realists. If he skimps on Eakins's later years, McFeely sensitively chronicles the maturation of this enigmatic Philadelphian, who died in 1916. After the Civil War, Eakins made the obligatory trip to Paris. But it was Spain, McFeely contends, that ''held the key to Eakins' greatest paintings,'' with Velazquez proving a decisive influence. On the vexed matter of the artist's sexuality, McFeely generally accepts that Eakins, who married in 1884, had homosexual leanings. And McFeely's account of Eakins's work is provocative. Taking his cues from photography and from careful study of anatomy -- ''The Gross Clinic'' (1875) is, among other things, an homage to medical science -- Eakins excelled at painting naked flesh, perhaps nowhere more so than with the male divers of ''Swimming'' (1884-85). While acknowledging its homoeroticism, McFeely sees something more profound in this summer scene: it is an ''appeal for freedom, for something truly natural.''
THERE GOES THE NEIGHBORHOOD: Racial, Ethnic, and Class Tensions in Four Chicago Neighborhoods and Their Meaning for America. By William Julius Wilson and Richard P. Taub. (Knopf, $23.95.) Like many of America's big cities, Chicago has been transformed by white flight and immigration. In the decade after 1990, the Latino population surged by some 38 percent, while whites continued to trickle out into the suburbs. In this compact study, the esteemed sociologist Wilson and his colleague Taub gauge these changes in an effort to highlight ''a major national challenge: the development of intergroup harmony in an era of rapid ethnic change.'' It's a noble goal, but their findings aren't terribly encouraging (and their academic prose -- these are essentially research papers -- can be a bit mind-numbing). Assisted by a platoon of ethnographers, Wilson and Taub surveyed four mostly working- and lower-middle-class neighborhoods -- ones they felt ''best represented ordinary Americans'' -- on the South and West sides of Chicago, where fierce competition prevails for safe schools, parks and playgrounds. In Beltway (all neighborhoods are given pseudonyms), working-class whites -- many of them municipal employees who by law must live within the city limits -- bemoan the city's racial mix. (''If we leave there'll be nothing in this goddamn city,'' an electrician complains.) In Dover, a former Polish neighborhood that is now a haven for Mexican-American strivers, the authors find an entirely negative instance of ''intergroup harmony,'' as white and Latino parents lobby to keep their children from being bused to schools in poor black neighborhoods. Indeed, from the recently arrived Mexican immigrants of Archer Park to the middle-class blacks of Groveland, anxiety about poor African-Americans is nearly universal. Still, the authors place their hopes in ''local coalition building that would bring together diverse communities to identify common goals and concerns'' -- though their own data suggests this is but a remote possibility.

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