Brooklyn Journalist

Start-up Boom Has Started in New York City

Video: Councilman Jumaane Williams and Immigrants Protest Stop-and-Frisk Policy

Brownsville is the Stop and Frisk Capital of New York City: A New York Times Video

Wall Street Protesters Vow to Win - Despite Lack of Media Coverage

[photo by Hubert Lau]

By Hubert Lau

Amid the bustling streets of downtown Manhattan lies Zuccotti Park, which has been transformed over the past two weeks into the hub and staging area for the Occupy Wall Street movement.

Organized with a designated medical center, an area for food distribution and even a media center to handle press, it is clear that the protesters of Occupy Wall Street are in it for the long haul. The hundreds that have descended upon this 33,000 square foot park call themselves “The 99 percent.” Drawing inspiration from Arab Spring style protests, although lacking uniformity in their goals, they are united in a common thirst for social change.

“The 99 percent,” which encompasses people of broad backgrounds, seek to challenge the power of the corporate businesses, banks, mortgage and insurance industries that make up the  fraction of one percent of the nation who have a strong foothold in the Wall Street area.

“I will do anything in my power to change the system because it is corrupt and too many people in the world have suffered because of it,” said 82-year-old socialist and Brooklyn College graduate, Paul Gershowitz.

Brooklyn College Journalist Becomes Star of Patch News Site

By Natalie Musumeci 

(of the Carroll Gardens Patch)

When Vincent Pampillonia opened Vinnie’s Italian Art Iron Works on Bergen Street in 1963, he was the area's lone manufacturer of custom, ornamental iron.

“There was no iron work in this neighborhood. I was the only one doing it and everybody would come. But now I got a lot of competition,” said Pampillonia, 75, a native of Italy who developed his unique iron skills at a young age as a blacksmith under the teachings of his father, uncle and grandfather.

“Now everyone copies my father because he was the first one who started this type of work here,” said Dominic Pampillonia, 19, Vincent’s son who has been working in the shop with his father and two brothers for as long as he can remember. 

Pampillonia’s architectural metal art comes in the form of structural and ornamental window guards, railings, fences, gates, steel iron doors, room dividers, lamps, porches and even furniture.

“You can’t just buy out over 40 years of experience,” said Dominic.

“Everything we do is custom and we will do anything you need,” said Alfredo Pampillonia, 22, Vincent’s oldest son. 

For 48 years, Vinnie's Italian Art has been specializing in the restoration and recreation of ironwork that can mostly be found in countless brownstones and landmark buildings throughout Brooklyn and Manhattan. 

“I take something very old and make it like new again,” said Pampillonia. 

Click here to watch a video of the Pampillonia family inside Vinnie's Italian Art Iron Works. 

Pampillonia made the decision to leave his hometown of Palermo, Sicily when he was 27-years-old. It was 1963. 

“My country can’t give me what I want – I come here for the future to make more money,” said Pampillonia in his thick Italian accent. 

Pampillonia boarded an Italian vessel that exported wine to America with barely two pennies to rub together; he brought with him only the clothes on his back and a few other small possessions. Pampillonia and others like him searching for a “better” life spent 27 long days aboard the ship and slept on the dozens of crates of bottled wine on the bottom decks of boat. “I was drunk off the smell,” he said. 

“When I went out on the top of the ship it was beautiful, but we suffered because we didn’t know where we were,” he said. 

Pampillonia and others like him reached their destination at Ellis Island, the historical gateway for millions of emigrants traveling to the United States from the late 19th Century into the 20th Century. After passing through inspection, the first thing on Pampillonia’s mind was where he was going to find work.

The first three months that Pampillonia spent in the United States he utilized his skills and worked as an ironworker in Long Island while living on First Avenue and 12th Street in Manhattan. He was earning a wage of $1.20 an hour, or about $75 a week, which doesn’t seem like much now, but for Pampillonia in 1963, it was a lot of money. 

To start up what would become Vinnie’s Italian Art Iron Works, Pampillonia partnered with two men who were working with him in Long Island. He bought 38 Bergen Street for $15,500 and paid a mortgage of only $57 a month. In 1964, he moved to Hicks Street to be closer to his shop.

Quickly, Pampillonia became Brooklyn’s top dog iron specialist and took the neighborhood by storm.

“Basically at one point my father owned Bergen Street,” said Alfredo who has memories as a 2-year-old child painting rails at Italian Art. 

“It’s like my father is a landmark in this neighborhood,” added Dominic.

During the 1960’s, Pampillonia owned close to a dozen properties on Bergen Street, and used them for storage. He eventually sold them for a higher price than he bought them for. 

The Brooklyn that Pampillonia experienced over 40 years ago is certainly not the Brooklyn that it is today. Smith Street, today one of the hottest spots in New York City, stretching a mile long and lined with rows of eclectic restaurants, bars and boutiques, was once a dangerous region. 

“Smith Street was very bad,” said Pampillonia who remembers hearing the sounds of guns firing during the night. 

“The neighborhood used to be very different – before you had to watch because if you had something out somebody would steal it from you one, two, three,” he said. “There was a lot of problems and there was a lot of danger, but everybody respected me because everybody knew me,” he said with a sigh of relief. 

Pampillonia said when he came to Bergen Street in 1963 it was a two-way street lined with cobblestone. 

“There was a lot of factories on this block – it was very commercial and now it’s changed a lot because it’s so residential,” he said. He even remembers a building on the corner of Bergen Street where prostitution was operated. 

Even Alfredo, Pampillonia’s eldest son, remembers Bergen Street full of trucks bringing in various products to warehouses that lined that street. 

Today, at 75-years-old, Pampillonia wakes at 6 a.m.and begins his workday along with the handful of employees he has at the shop. When asked why he does this type of work at his age he responded, “Because I love to do this – this is my life.”

For about 20 years, Pampillonia has been telling his sons that he will retire “soon.” 

“He’ll probably be doing this until the day he dies,” said Alfredo. 

“If my dad stops working he’ll get sick,” added Dominic.

And it seems as though Pampillonia is not slowing down. Recently, he  thought up an innovative idea "to make New York City beautiful." Although the job would create about 200 jobs, he said, he will not yet disclose what it is.  

Pampillonia’s success would have given him the opportunity to retire decades ago, but it’s the love of his work that keeps him going. 

“Today I got no money, but I got a lot of brick,” said Pampillonia laughing. By that he means he owns a multitude of properties including his luxurious villa in Dominican Republic where Pampillonia’s sons Alfredo, Dominic and Vincent Jr., live with their mother. 

“We’re like the Trumps of Dominican Republic,” said Alfredo. 

“We grew up here, but we don’t live here – at the end of the summer we gotta go back to a tropical country where it’s hot everyday – it’s just totally different from here,” said Alfredo. 

“We live in paradise,” said Dominic. 

Pampillonia lives comfortably a few doors down from Italian Art and he and his wife of 27 years travel back and forth to see each other as much as they can. All three of his sons were born in Dominican Republic and along with additional extended visits they have been spending every summer for as long as they can remember working with their father at Italian Art. 

“I remember when I was just a little blonde child I was walking around this shop with fire all over the place and I didn’t care – I used to paint and do whatever I wanted here. I even used to take the company trucks and just crash inside the garage; I think I did that about two or three times,” said Alfredo laughing as he reminisced. 

The legacy of Vinnie’s Italian Art Iron Works may very well end with Vincent Pampillionia. 

“It would be a great generation-type dynasty thing to keep this business going, but me and my brothers are studying different careers," said Alfredo. 

And what about the statue of St. Joseph that stands so proudly on the roof of Vinnie's? 

A month after Pampillonia had open-heart surgery this summer, he fixed up the St. Joseph’s statue. A gift from St. Paul's Church on Congress Street, St. Joseph has been in a glass case perched up above Italian Art since 1974. 

Pampillonia did all the ironwork on St. Paul's Church, which is why St. Joseph, the patron saint of craftsmen, was given to him. 

“Look at where I am – I died and came back to life again,” he said as he lifted up his shirt to show the vertical scar down his chest from the surgery. “I decided to fix up [the statue] because maybe it will help me out – who knows?”

(Watch video here.)

 

 

Pacific Standard’s Ongoing Open Mic

[Photo: Readers at the Open Mic share not only from their own writing but from classic works by authors such as Tolstoy.]

This article was published in the Spring 2011 semester in Excelsior

By Angelica Berry

Pacific Standard, a bar in Park Slope, offers a stable dose of poetry for months to anyone willing to listen. A space beyond the bar with the look of a retired classroom, behind a black velvet curtain atop a few wooden steps, welcomes literary guests every other Thursday night from September through June.

Pacific Standard is home to the Chin Music Reading Series, led by Bryan Patrick Miller. It’s free and features poets that Miller finds admirable. “I read widely and solicit poets whose work I love,” he said. Miller has had the pleasure of choosing the reader lineup for the past year after taking over for Colin Cheney, the creator of Chin Music who is away in Thailand. The series has been running as long as the bar, four years, and the plan is to keep it going indefinitely.

Once-Dying Art of Tattooing, Vibrantly Alive Around the City

BY NATALIE MUSUMECI

[Brooklyn College student]

In the early 1950’s when he was just 13 years old, Mike Bakaty, 74, got his first tattoo for only 50 cents of his name on his arm, basically “out of boredom.” When he was in the Navy he got even more tattoos because “that’s what sailors did.”

In 1970 he moved to New York City – the birthplace of modern tattooing. “Tattooing in New York City in the 70’s was essentially a dying art,” said Bakaty. The fact that this tattoo culture was dying out is primarily what got him interested in the world of tattooing.

Bakaty opened Fineline Tattoo in 1976 during the midst of the underground atmosphere of New York City’s ban on tattooing, which was in effect from 1961 to 1997. The New York City Health Department ordered that all city tattoo parlors had to close down due to an alleged series of blood-borne hepatitis B cases linked to tattooing in the late 1950’s.

Instead of closing down, New York City tattoo artists began to operate underground for 36 years, in secret backrooms and loft apartments until the ban was lifted in 1997.

“Tattooing wasn’t as out in the open as it is today – I was aware of probably six to eight tattooists working in New York City, Brooklyn, the  Bronx, and Queens and they all worked underground,” said Bakaty. “When I started tattooing in 1976 there were probably 500 tattoo artists in the whole country,to tell you the truth,” he said.

Today tattooing has developed into an art form as opposed to a stigma that was once associated with those in the realm of macho male drunken sailors, outlaw bikers, thugs, and criminals. People who are inked agree that some stereotypes associated with tattooing still persist, but because of the exposure that tattooing has gotten through the media, Hollywood, rock stars, celebrities ranging from Johnny Depp to Lady Gaga, and kitschy tattoo television programs like LA Ink or Miami Ink, it no longer is considered taboo or deviant to get a tattoo.

But when Bakaty started tattooing in New York City, the tattoo taboo very much existed. Bakaty recalled that from the 1940’s up until the mid 1960’s there was virtually no sterilization, hygiene, or running water in tattoo shops – they were referred to as “bucket-shops.” The artist would tattoo next to a bucket of water with a sponge in it, and that same bucket of water and sponge were used to wipe down every tattoo the artist did that day.

In those days tattoo artists had to have a sense of how to make tubes and needles. They had to have knowledge of how the tattoo machinery worked and an understanding of the different types of pigments because tattoo supply stores were just not available the way they are today.

But these tattooists never thought about sterilization, wearing gloves, changing the needles, or even changing the cups of ink after every client. Bakaty said that when the tattoo was finished the artist would swipe a glob of Vaseline over the fresh ink and stick a piece of newspaper to it – when the newspaper fell off the tattoo was considered healed.

It was later discovered that although there was indeed a lack of sterilization in the tattoo industry, hepatitis was actually never linked to tattooing. “When tattooing started becoming popular people got concerned and they got the perception that because there is blood involved people are getting diseases – it’s that perception that drove all of this hysteria,” said Wes Wood, owner of Unimax Tattoo Supply and former tattoo artist. Wood, along with Clayton Patterson, was involved in the effort to legalize tattooing. “We just represented the interest of the tattooist,” he said.

In 1990 Wood opened up Sacred Tattoo on Broadway, right between Chinatown and SoHo, even though it was still illegal to tattoo within city limits. He held meetings every month in his fairly spacious 3000 square-foot tattoo shop in the 90’s and everyone from tattoo artists to tattoo enthusiasts attended.

Wood and Patterson were voted to be the representatives of the tattoo community and they did all the negotiating with the Health Department. Wood and Patterson also played a significant role in the organization of New York City’s first tattoo convention in May of 1997, three months after tattooing became legalized. “The Health Department didn’t put up a fight when it came time to sign the law legalizing tattooing,” said Wood.

On March 27, 1997 Mayor Giuliani signed into law the bill lifting New York’s 36-year ban on tattooing. On that day Spider Webb, a known tattoo artist during the prohibition days, stood on the steps of City Hall with a top hat and long feather plume machine ready to ink the city’s first legal tattoo in over 36 years.

Wood said that Kathryn Freed, former Lower East Side City Councilwoman and coordinator in the effort to legalize tattooing, found out in the 90’s that the Health Department knew in 1961 that tattooing did not cause any spread of hepatitis. The so-called deviant tattoo world was easy to peg for the spread of blood-borne disease.

One opposition that the Health Department had to the re-legalization bill was that they just did not have the budget or staff to carry out the licensing and inspection provisions, which were mandated by the new legislation.

“[Hepatitis] was just all over the place across the country. People didn’t know where it came from, but the popular view by the general public was that tattooing was a savage barbaric practice – it had to be that there was something psychologically wrong with you to do that to yourself,” said Wood. “The only tattooing people saw was when you went to the circus to see the freaks,” he said.

Wood first got into tattooing in 1985. After learning to tattoo he became interested in how the tattoo machinery was made. “I got a couple of tattoos – there is no reason why – it just popped into my head – I had the desire. It’s like asking why you fell in love – you don’t ask why you fell in love because that wouldn’t be a valid question – it just happened,” said Wood sternly. Today his forearms, legs, back, and chest are covered in tattoos.

The tattoo meccas of New York City during a significant portion of the 19^th century were established in the Bowery of Chatham Square and in Coney Island. The rebellious tattooists that survived in New York City during the ban had to build up their clientele solely through word of mouth.

Up until the ban was lifted Bakaty of Fineline Tattoo originally operated out of a private loft in the infamous Bowery and ran ads in the Soho Weekly News even though tattooing was a violation of the health code. He relocated Fineline to 1^st Avenue on the Lower East Side where he stills tattoos today alongside his son, Mehai Bakaty.

Fineline Tattoo is a small tattoo parlor with its walls lined with the Bakaty boys’ original flash art of dragons, eagles, tigers, panthers and Celtic knots. Fineline Tattoo, in business for over 30 years, is the longest continually running tattoo shop in Manhattan.

Midwood High at Brooklyn College

Jessica Durham, Brooklyn College student, went around asking what fellow degree-chasers think about Midwood High students having access to the campus.

Some of her mates expressed surprise that high schoolers can roam fairly freely on the grounds. Some also were less than pleased.

[Brooklyn College's Web site says: "Midwood High School is the affiliated campus high school of Brooklyn College. The campus high school project reflects the College's continuing concern for strengthening public secondary education and building professional working relationships between its faculty and teachers in the city's schools." See the BC Web page.]

Brooklyn Dem Leaders: By Whatever Name, the Game is the Same

By Simon Garron-Caine

[photo is of Brooklyn Democratic Party leader Vito Lopez]

Former City Councilwoman Margarita Lopez-Torres’ 2004 lawsuit against the state Board Of Elections challenging the quid pro quo selection method of Supreme Court judgeships in the city could have been a wake up call.

U.S. District Court Judge John Gleeson, ruling in her favor, declared the state’s system was unconstitutional and unworkable. In his decision, which could have been a siren-like warning, Gleeson made it clear that the State’s unique method of appointing trial judges by closed, partisan convention essentially robs New Yorkers of their right to democratically elected judges.

So former Democratic Party Chairman Clarence Norman’s arrest and conviction for selling Supreme Court judgeships, for the whopping sum of $25,000 a piece, shouldn’t have been a surprise, but it should have been signal that something was rotten in the land of Brooklyn. 

In lieu of a discussion about the strong-arm politics that pervasively define the machine that is Brooklyn’s local Democratic party, a new rat- this one named Vito Lopez- merely jumped to the head of the ship and kept driving it in the same direction, using the same processes and stacked decks that Norman employed for years. At this point, one can hardly hope that corruption indictments for Don Vito will act as a wake up call.

Although young idealists like the New Kings Democrats seem to offer a hopeful vision of the future of the Democratic Party in Brooklyn, the most likely outcome of this looming Party decapitation is that a similar quantity rises in Lopez’ place and recycles the same processes and stacked decks that Lopez inherited from Norman.

After all, local political mechanisms were created to serve late 19^th century New York City, and have merely been tailored over the next century to strengthen the entrenchment of the group in power.

Take for instance, the Judicial Nominating Convention, a low-key body of elected officials who theoretically vet the best candidates for the bench, but in reality rubber-stamp the decisions of their party bosses and appoint judges to the ballot (who then run unopposed). It’s group most New Yorkers have never even heard of, but also the very same organization Justice Gleeson railed against as anti-democratic and based on patronage. A 2006 NY Times Op-Ed, on the heels of Gleeson’s decision, said of the Convention and its method of selection: “[it’s] the last bastion of the clubhouse. Judges ascend to the bench as a result of loyal work for a party or friendship with a political powerbroker.”

But to get a completely circular picture of how poor the system is, we’ve got to take a look a look at the mechanism by which the Party bosses ensure their people win the Judicial Nomination Convention seats (theoretically, that is, as the convention’s obscurity, and the fact that its members don’t do anything but rubber stamp the party’s choices for judgeships keep it almost entirely off the radar): the system of petitioning to place candidates on various ballots.

A hundred years ago, it made sense that someone running for local office would have to first pass their neighbor’s smell test. Today, in many, many ways, the signature requirements act as a restrictive barrier to grassroots campaigns, favoring the already organized political machines and their armies of petitioners (many of whom, not-so-coincidentally, also work election-day jobs doled out by the parties).

Even when upstart challengers do hit the street and accrue enough signatures to get themselves on a ballot for a City Council seat, a District Leader/County Committee position, or even in the powerful-but-quiet Judicial Nominating Convention, the usual outcome is the challenger being tripped up, or at least heavily challenged, in court by the incumbent’s party bosses.

Those being the same party bosses who appointed the very judges before whom they’re arguing their technicality-based cases to get an opponents’ signatures invalidated!

Just this past primary election, Lopez went to court to get New Kings Democrat Esteban Duran tossed off the ballot. In perhaps the clearest signal yet that the writing is on the wall for Lopez, he failed miserably, although the tactic has often been successful.

But hey, don’t worry if organizing a petition-drive against a standing local party and their team of lawyers seems daunting. In local politics you can always just buy your way in via what’s known as a Wilson Pakula: a unique to New York method of a political party’s authorizing (read: selling) a non-party member to run on the party line.

A source who was at the meeting in which the Brooklyn Republican Party gave a nod to Mayor Bloomberg’s Wilson Pakula to run as a Republican recalls several party members openly asking some form of the question: “What do we get out of this?”

(The answer was $125,000; the Brooklyn Republican Party sells itself cheap).

So while the news is periodically dotted, as it has been during this election season, with feel-good stories of grassroots campaigners trying to reconnect ordinary citizens with the local political machine that roars around them, it’s not hard to see that these young idealists will meet only sporadic success as long as the rules in place continue to tilt the playing field in favor of the establishment. Until the archaic system that’s been tailored to protect the strength of the Parties by solidifying the power of the Party Chairmen is fundamentally changed, the leaders of the establishment will remain in place…at least until criminal probes turn into federal indictments.

Atlantic Avenue ChipShop is a Bridge Between Brits and Brooklynites

The English themed Atlantic Avenue ChipShop is winning over Brooklynites, says Angelina Tala.

Tala does a walk-through of the four-year-old eatery and drinkery.

“It’s better than many of the fish and chip shops that I find when I go back to England these days,” a Brit, Kenneth Kerr, told multimedia studentTala.

Read Tala's Web report here. Then kick back for a couple of minutes and enjoy her video.