Mentor on a Mission
By early April, calmness had replaced the strain in Orah Chaya Bitton's voice. She no longer needed to look over her shoulder as she spoke of the conflict that would eventually force her out of her job. After six years dedicated to rescuing teenage girls before they abandoned their Hasidic community in Crown Heights, she now, albeit involuntarily, was unemployed and working from home as an independent consultant and researcher.
Everybody Can Learn
Betanzos, at age 75, with thin dyed red hair framing her stern but elegant face, exudes calm and compassion when she talks about the Wildcat school, the awards her students reap and how well they perform on standardized tests. "The school is really my baby," she said. The school is part of Wildcat's mission is to provide a variety of programs of last resort.
Band-Aid on a Shotgun
Dr. Rob DeSalle, curator of the invertebrate collections, also directs the Ambrose Monell Cryo Collection, a biological repository of frozen tissues harvested from plants and animals in places as exotic as Africa to places as local as New Jersey. It's a well-preserved swath of current biodiversity, and because the tissues it contains can be thawed, in a sense it's far more alive than any of the growling taxidermy encountered by the afternoon field trips. The Ambrose facility and others like it are quickly making relics of the museum's static, stuffed collections.
Putting 'Neighbor' Back in the 'Hood
Browse the Black Studies section of your local Barnes and Noble, and you'll see why Clifford Simmons takes his job seriously. "Countering the Conspiracy to Destroy Black Boys," "Living to Tell About It: Young Black Men In America Speak," and "Kill Them Before They Grow;" the titles range in tone from pedantic worry to downright hysteria. Apparently, Simmons isn't the only one who thinks there is a war on for the souls of Black America's youth.
They Know Me
Inside the police station, glossy blue paint smoothed every metal surface. Upstairs, Officer Brad Herrschaft hosted more than 50 parents and teenagers packed inside the Youth Council squad room, everybody mingling like cheerful relatives in a precinct family reunion. Instead of mug-shots and police reports, motivational posters cover the concrete-block walls of the office.
Pastor Yu
I am the fifth person to arrive on this cold Sunday morning in January, the sixth if you include Andrew Yu, the 77-year-old pastor of the church. Pastor Yu looks up when I arrive. He looks around at the sparse congregation, then nods slowly to himself. Speaking softly in Mandarin, he decides, "I suppose we'll begin now."
Dictionary Man
In a musty, fluorescent-bulb lit school library, impatiently turning the pages of a dictionary, I was doing what third graders have secretly done for decades: looking for the naughty words. Yet on page 285 of the 1969 American Heritage Dictionary, there was no entry for the word "fuck."
The Perimeter Is Mine
After 30 years on the New York City Police force, Smolka is in charge of the event of his career. Now 51, he has jockeyed up through the ranks of the force, shifting boroughs, precincts and serving as the Commanding Officer of the Street Crimes Unit during the Guiliani administration. This August, while the Republicans straighten their ties and the protestors sketch their signs, he and his staff will be securing the space that divides them. "Whether there are demonstrators or not, the perimeter is mine," he says...
The Most Important Organization in the Country
"It's just that the opportunity to be the head of the most important organization in the world," and she pauses for a qualifying statement—"well, I shouldn't say that because I don't know every organization in the world, but certainly the most important organization in the country," and then continues, "it's a unique position. I can accomplish much more from my ACLU position than I can accomplish from being one of hundreds or probably thousands of people around the country who teach constitutional law."
It's Just Food...
Balanced on a swivel chair in her bright, airy Chelsea office, Ruth Katz sorts files between mouthfuls of soba noodle soup. As executive director of Just Food, the nonprofit organization she co-founded in 1994, it is her fundraising skills that keep salaries paid and the lights on. Katz owes her accountant a budget and her most generous donors a report on a recent conference. Only the hundreds of vegetable seed packets spilling from two giant sacks just outside her office door signal that Katz's real ambition is to reinvent the New York City food system, one neighborhood at a time...
The Fixer
Francine Cournos is a fixer. She fixes patients. She fixes mistakes made by
student interns. She fixes errors in the studies she reviews for 14
psychiatric journals. And now, as interim director of the New York State
Psychiatric Institute, Cournos, 58, is trying to fix both the acute and
chronic problems that plague one of the country's largest psychiatric
institutes, or the "PI" as Cournos likes to call it...
Pied Piper of the Tour Guides
In the cinnamon-colored lobby of the Chrysler Building, eight adults are running at full speed in a single file, holding their hands up as though they were clutching invisible steering wheels. Occasionally pausing to admire the ceiling, painted with garish images of a bustling construction site, they snake through the orange marble-paneled halls. Alarmed bystanders jump out of their way. At the center of the lobby, the group of pretend-drivers stops, smiling sheepishly at their leader, Justin Ferate, one of New York City's most respected and idiosyncratic tour guides.
Rockin' Tradition
On a freezing January afternoon, 30 shivering friends and family stand on the banks of the Bronx River to watch 16 young boat builders launch Spartina, the dark green 18 foot flat-bottomed skiff they built at Rocking the Boat over the last four months. The river is frozen and there are several inches of snow on the ground. But this does not stop Adam Green, the organization's founder and executive director, from launching the boat. "We don't do much in the traditional sense at Rocking the Boat," Green says and holds up a chunk of ice...
