Fire in the Ashes: Twenty-Five Years Among the Poorest Children in America

by Jonathan Kozol

  000 when these hotels were finally closed in 1988 and 1989: In the last few weeks of 1988, according to the New York Times (December 27, 1988), families were “hurriedly moved out of the Martinique … as the Koch administration rushes to empty one of the largest and most troubled welfare hotels in the city by the end of the year.” Conditions at the Martinique, as in the other large hotels being used to house the homeless, were, by this time, “a national scandal,” according to the Times, and “the city had been threatened with an imminent cutoff of Federal funds to pay the hotel bills.” Also see New York Times, March 9, 1988, September 5 and November 11, 1989.

  000 among the highest rates of pediatric asthma in the nation: I was told this repeatedly by pediatricians and family-practice specialists familiar with the most impoverished sections of the Bronx. I was also given evidence that the rate within these neighborhoods was by far the highest in New York. According to a zip-code breakdown of hospitalizations statewide in New York shown to me by Dr. Robert Massad of Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx, the rate of admissions for asthma at the start of the 1990s was 2.5 per thousand for New York City as a whole but 6 to 7 per thousand in the South Bronx neighborhoods in which much of this book takes place. In the same neighborhoods, hospitalizations for asthmatic children were fourteen times as high as in the wealthy East Side of Manhattan by 1995, while the rate of death from asthma for people in the Bronx was nearly nine times higher than in Staten Island, which is the whitest borough of New York. See City Limits, April 1998. Also see “Poverty, Race, and Hospitalization for Childhood Asthma” in American Journal of Public Health, Vol. 78, No. 7, (July 1988); “Inner-city Asthma,” Chest, June 1992; “Variations in Asthma Hospitalization and Deaths in New York City,” American Journal of Public Health, Vol. 82, No. 1, (January 1992); Newsday, October 10, 1993; New York Times, October 10, 1993.

  000 poor conditions, needless deaths, loss of accreditation at South Bronx Hospital: New York Times, October 28, 1988. For more discussion of conditions at this and other public hospitals in New York City, see New York Times, October 7 and 11, 1986, April 7, 1991, May 6 and September 23, 1994, March 5, 6, 7, 1995; Healthweek, November 1, 1991. Also see my book Amazing Grace (New York: Crown, 1995).

  CHAPTER 2: ERIC AND HIS SISTER

  000 Prince George Hotel ownership: According to information I was given at the time by the Coalition for the Homeless, the family that owned the Martinique Hotel owned the Prince George Hotel as well. Another source told me that Sal Tuccelli, manager of the Martinique, also claimed to have a share of ownership in the Prince George, while a third source stated that the hotel at one point was owned by South African investors. To add to the confusion, documents filed in 1985 with the New York City Register—an agency that records ownership of properties—bear the signature of a man named Monty Hundley, a general partner in a corporation to which the property apparently was leased a year or so after Vicky moved there. Hundley is known to have made a large fortune as part-owner of more than a hundred hotels, the purchase of which was financed by loans that he did not repay. In 2005 he was sentenced to eight years in prison for bank fraud (New York Times, April 20, 2005). For more information on the ownership of the Prince George and its surreptitious change of hands, see Village Voice, April 1, 1986. Also see Rachel and Her Children, cited above.

  000 Martinique manager’s role at the Prince George: New York Daily News, March 20, 1986.

  000 on-site manager of Prince George Hotel: Kumar Singh was employed at the Prince George after having been convicted of child neglect in 1984, according to journalist Bob Herbert (New York Daily News, March 20, 1986). Singh’s daughter, reported Herbert, “who had been abused before, was placed in a foster home.”

  000 four or five fires in a week: Fires in the Prince George, as reported by Bob Herbert, occurred with “astonishing regularity.” The three-year-old boy was killed in a fire that took place in October 1985. See New York Daily News, March 20, 1986.

  000 Vicky and her children leave the Prince George Hotel and move into the Bronx: Families were moved out of the Prince George during the last months of 1989 (New York Times, September 5, 1989).

  000 poorest neighborhood in poorest borough of New York: Nearly twenty years later, this remains unchanged. According to the City of New York’s “Community District Needs” report for the Bronx, Fiscal Year 2011, “The Mott Haven area has the highest percentage of people in poverty, 65.3 percent more than in the entire City of New York.”

  000 $8,000 for a year’s subsistence: The New York Times gave the median household income of Mott Haven two years earlier as $7,600 (New York Times, November 5, 1991).

  CHAPTER 3: PIETRO AND HIS CHILDREN

  000 children in the Martinique panhandling in traffic: The Martinique was on the corner of West 32nd Street and Herald Square. Broadway and Sixth Avenue were the major thoroughfares.

  000 “Apartment fire kills Bronx boy” and other headlines: New York Daily News, April 6, May 4, 5, 6, 1994.

  000 Christopher sent to juvenile detention and subsequent sentences at Rikers Island: Children in New York younger than sixteen are brought before a family court and, if the judge so determines, may be sent to juvenile detention. On rare occasions, children thirteen to fifteen years of age who commit very serious and violent crimes may be tried as adults, but Christopher’s early offenses never warranted his being tried in adult court. Christopher was eighteen, or nearly so, before he began the first of his several sentences at Rikers Island.(Information on court disposition of youthful offenders according to their ages and severity of the offense is provided, under the heading of “New York City Family Court,” on the website of the New York State Unified Court System, in a posting dated January 31, 2008.) Attorney Steven Banks, at Legal Aid in New York City, verified my understanding of this information. Also see notes for chapter 4, p. 000.

  000 prison where Christopher served the longest portion of his sentence: The prison, in the town of Alden, which is called Wende Correctional Facility, is nearly 400 miles west of New York City. He had also served a briefer part of his sentence at a prison called Great Meadow in Comstock, New York, which is about 200 miles closer to the city.

  000 demographics of New York prisons and financial benefits to areas where prisons are sited: There have been no significant changes in the racial make-up of the prison population in recent years. According to the New York Department of Corrections and Community Supervision, in a document titled “Profile of Inmate Population Under Custody,” dated January 1, 2011, the state’s male prison population is 22.4 percent white, 50.5 percent African-American, and 24.9 percent Hispanic. See the New York State Department of Corrections website for a list of prison facilities and their locations. For a troubling examination of the economic value these penitentiaries have held for the communities in which they have been built, see “The Prison-Industrial Complex” by Eric Schlosser in The Atlantic, December 1998. New York State has closed many prisons since 1999, when Christopher’s sentence was nearly at an end, and is now attempting to create new employment opportunities for those sections of the state that have long depended upon prisons as the main support for their economies. This, at least, is the recently declared intention of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo, according to a press release from his office, June 30, 2011.

  000 “A scene out of Dickens”: Former New York Governor Mario M. Cuomo used this term in speaking of the Martinique in his book, The New York Idea: An Experiment in Democracy (New York: Crown, 1994).

  000 “so many people coming there”: Pietro was referring to groups or individuals who might have been bringing food or clothes or other gifts for children, most commonly in the weeks preceding Christmas. These visitors, in general, were not permitted or encouraged by the management to go up to the floors on which the residents were living.

  CHAPTER 4: SILVIO: INVINCIBLE

  000 restrictions on visitors: See note for chapter 1, p. 00. />
  000 Diego-Beekman housing: See New York Times, March 25, 1973, May 7, 1978; New York Daily News, November 11, 1993, February 4, 1993. Also see notes for Epilogue, pp. 000 and 000.

  000 Diego-Beekmans owned by out-of-state corporation: The Boston-based company was Continental Wingate (New York Times, March 31, 1999). Its primary owner was Gerald Schuster (see below).

  000 Gerald Schuster’s notoriety in Boston and his political contributions and fundraisers: Boston Globe, May 9, 1998; New York Times, March 31, 1999; Village Voice, December 14, 1999.

  000 Bernardo Rodriguez’s death: New York Daily News, January 16 and February 4, 1994.

  000 average income in Mott Haven, 1993: See note for chapter 2, p. 00.

  000 a boy of twelve or thirteen brought before a family court: As explained to me by Legal Aid attorney Steven Banks on April 6, 2011: “There is always a pre-petition hearing or a remand/parole argument prior to detention, where a court hears ‘evidence’ and makes a determination regarding detention (unless it’s a situation in which the police have taken the child into custody after court hours and the child is admitted to a detention facility overnight,” in which case the hearing is held the following day.) “It is not common for a child to go into detention; more kids go home than to detention.”

  000 four out of every five kids did not complete Monroe High: The school had a well-earned reputation for violence and for consistently abysmal graduation rates at the time Armando attended. Over the next decade, the high school was divided into six smaller schools with student populations of 375 to 490. Figures from the New York City Public Schools Annual School Report for 2002–3 showed no signs of improvement; in all but one of these schools, no more than forty-five students who started in the ninth grade remained there long enough to enter the twelfth grade.

  CHAPTER 5: ALICE WASHINGTON: THE DETAILS OF LIFE

  000 Alice Washington was forty-two years old when I got to know her: Alice told me she was thirty-nine when she became homeless. I met her three years later.

  000 embarrassing story on Harvard Club: New York Times, April 23, 1994.

  000 “it wasn’t much of a week to be a horse”: New York Times, July 18, 1993.

  000 “needle exchange”: As this book goes to press, the needle exchange is still there on the sidewalk outside of St. Ann’s.

  000 nearly 4,000 people in Mott Haven were known to be intravenous users: New York City Department of Health, cited in unpublished memorandum (August 27, 1993), by the Hunter College Center on AIDS, Drugs, and Community Health; New York State Division of Substance Abuse Services, cited in “Reaching Low-Income Women at Risk of AIDS,” by Nicholas Freudenberg and other staff members of the Hunter College center, in Health Education Research, Vol. 9, No. 1 (1994); author’s interviews with staff members of the center. Some estimates of intravenous users in Mott Haven exceeded 7,000.

  000 remembering Alice Washington: In earlier writings, I have described how Alice and I got to know each other in the Martinique Hotel and how our friendship deepened in the years that followed after she had moved to the South Bronx. As with other people who had reason not to want to be exposed to public scrutiny—the punitive workings of the welfare system, for example, were a persistent factor of concern—I disguised her heavily. Now that she has passed away, I have told her story with less inhibition. I have followed the same pattern in other sections of this book that touch upon the lives of those who had the same concerns, or other reasons to avoid exposure, at the time when I initially described them. All these adults and their children, nonetheless, remain disguised to some degree, as I have said, to defend their privacy or, in the case of those who are deceased, that of their family-members.

  CHAPTER 6: SURVIVORS

  000 the emergence of what theologians term “a sense of calling”: Many others who are not theologians, such as the psychiatrist and author Dr. Robert Coles, use this term in speaking of the search for moral values and the pursuit of useful purpose on the part of young adults as they move into maturity.

  CHAPTER 7: THE BOY WHO ATE A GIANT BAG OF COOKIES WHILE HE WALKED ME ALL AROUND THE NEIGHBORHOOD, AND HIS VERY INTERESTING MOM

  000 medical waste incinerator in Mott Haven: New York Newsday, October 16, 1991 and September 8, 1993; New York Times, November 2, 1991, September 8, 1992, September 5, 1995, May 11, 1997, June 27, 1997, and May 6, 1999; Riverdale Press, May 13, 1993; New York Daily News, May 14, 1996, September 18, 1998, and May 6, 1999; City Limits, June/July 1996 and July/August 1999.

  000 at least 6,000 children resided within close proximity of the waste incinerator: As many as 4,000 children lived in the Diego-Beekman Houses. At least 2,000 more lived in other privately owned buildings, as well as in large public housing towers in the area.

  000 “wasteful protest in the Bronx”: The editorial condemning neighborhood activists and parents who opposed construction of the medical incinerator appeared in the New York Times, November 11, 1991.

  000 asthma hospitilizations in Mott Haven area in 1995 were fourteen times higher than on east side of Manhattan: City Limits, April 1998. Also see notes for chapter 1, pp. 000 and 000.

  000 Browning-Ferris Corporation’s violations of environmental and air-pollution law: A partial summary of the legal violations committed by the owners of the medical incinerator, and penalties provisionally imposed upon them, is provided in a consent order drafted by the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation on July 22, 1998. The document, which was distributed to people in the nearby neighborhoods, recorded 100 violations of environmental law and proposed, among other penalties, that the owner of the incinerator, Browning-Ferris Industries, Inc., contribute money for asthmatic children to go to asthma camp. The New York Daily News (February 24, 1998) noted that the operators of the waste facility had, in fact, violated air-pollution laws more than 500 times. Browning-Ferris finally paid $250,000 in settlement of the dispute (New York Daily News, May 6, 1999). Also see New York Daily News, February 4, 1996, June 4, 1996, and March 11, 1999.

  000 Leonardo’s mother believes that his relief from asthma is connected with the shutdown of the burner: The waste incinerator was shut down when he was eleven, in 1997 (New York Daily News, April 1, 1997). Over the course of the next three years, asthma hospitalizations in Mott Haven declined by 56 percent. (See “Asthma Facts,” a report by the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, May 2003.)

  CHAPTER 8: PINEAPPLE COMES OF AGE

  000 the Diego-Beekman complex: See note for chapter 4, p. 000ff.

  000 Lara’s class escaped the run of short-term teachers Pineapple had had: In spite of this advantage, Lara had to pay a price for one of the irrational and arbitrary practices that were put in place at P.S. 65. New examinations that had no connection with the content of the courses that her class was taking were imposed upon the school when she was in fifth grade. Like several others in her class who were receiving good grades up until that time, she was suddenly informed that she wouldn’t be promoted because her test scores were too low. She was obliged to stay at P.S. 65 for an extra year. Fortunately, she did not permit this to undermine her appetite for learning and went on to do extremely well in secondary years.

  CHAPTER 9: PINEAPPLE IN ALL HER GLORY (AND STILL BOSSING ME AROUND)

  000 a lawyer in Providence was helping Pineapple’s father to file an appeal: This appeal, according to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, is technically a “motion to reopen or a motion to reconsider with the same office that made the unfavorable decision.” The applicant for reconsideration is not permitted to go to a higher level of appeal.

  000 most of the people in Rhode Island were too enlightened to deny Pineapple and her sisters their autonomy or demean their father: Among the people who have been most supportive and most sensitive are a woman named Kim Anderson, who remains a stalwart friend and ally to Pineapple and her sisters, and several members
of the church that brought Pineapple to Rhode Island in the first place.

  CHAPTER 10: A LIFE OF THE MIND

  000 Jeremy’s classmate raped and strangled: New York Daily News, April 11 and 16, 1997; New York Times, April 11, 1997.

  000 children and teenagers who had died of violence near St. Ann’s in the preceding years: See Amazing Grace, cited above.

  000 Jeremy’s quotation from “The Tell-Tale Heart”: He got it pretty close. Poe’s exact words: “It is impossible to say how first the idea entered my brain; but, once conceived, it haunted me day and night.” “The Tell-tale Heart,” first published in 1843, is included in Complete Stories and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe (New York: Doubleday, 1984).

  CHAPTER 11: NO EASY VICTORIES

  000 book that prompted Jeremy’s question: Ruby Bridges, by Robert Coles (New York: Scholastic, 1995).

  CHAPTER 12: THE KILLING FIELDS

  000 Angelo’s third middle school: The school was known as ACES, an acronym around which the full name of the school (“Academy for Community Education and Services”) had been awkwardly constructed. A report in February 2003 from Insideschools.com confirms that most of the teachers there were new and that class size averaged thirty. Orlando Ramos, the principal of ACES when I visited in November 2002, has since left the New York City schools.

  000 Angelo swipes a stranger through the turnstile: It’s possible, according to Martha Overall, that Angelo’s Metro card was the kind that’s called an “unlimited pass,” good for either seven days or thirty days, but only for the purchaser. She noted, however, that this is often overlooked by transit officers unless they have some other reason to suspect a person of wrongdoing.