ARTS and CULTURE

Tough Love In The Big City

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For young people born without that proverbial silver Spoon in their mouths, New York City has never been An easy place to grow up. It’s a tough love kind of city.For every person who has described a rather idyllic Childhood in old New York, there are many more who Remember a harsher one, going as far back as the days of Jacob Riis, the social activist and photographer who chronicled The lives of poor young people in Lower Manhattan in The late 19th century. What he saw and showed the world influenced attempts at making their tenement lives better. In How the Other Half Lives, he observed:“Bodies of drowned children turn up in the rivers right along in summer whom no one seems to know anything about. When last spring some workmen, while moving a pile of lumber on a North River pier, found under the last plank the body of a little lad crushed to death, no one had missed a boy, though his parents afterward turned up.”A contemporary of Riis’ in the late days of the 19th century did even more.

Government

Sewage, Cement And Staten Island's Future

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The Port Richmond Water Pollution Control Plant is designed to handle 60 million gallons of sewage per day. Photo by: Marc Fader

Projects to upgrade a sewage plant and construct a cement facility open the next chapter in a complex—and controversial—industrial history. By: Jake Mooney

The Port Richmond Water Pollution Control Plant has stood on Staten Island’s North Shore, purifying the sewage of about half of the island’s residents, for 57 years. Soon it will get a $29 million upgrade, thanks to a citywide infusion of federal stimulus funds. It will also get a new neighbor, a transfer station about a mile down bumpy Richmond Terrace where cement will arrive from South America by boat and head to local construction projects by truck.

Justice

Churches On Front Lines Of Immigration Battle

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Ruskin Piedra is the founder and director of the Juan Neumann Center, an organization tied to the Basilica of Our Lady of Perpetual Help church, which provides low-cost legal services to immigrants, many of whom are Latino and hail from the surrounding Sunset Park area. Piedra is a busy man. He manages about 3,000 cases, including undocumented immigrants seeking to adjust their status or who are facing deportation or seeking asylum.Piedra is not an attorney, but he has taken many courses in immigration law and procedure that qualify him to appear in immigration court. In New York, many nonprofits and charitable organizations employ representatives like Piedra who often charge less than an attorney.”These poor people have no clue and most of them don’t speak English,” Piedra said. “They have no other recourse but to come here.

Bronx

Immigrant's Choice: Family Separation Or Child Mutilation

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People on the street in Saint Louis, Senegal. The U.S. State Department says femal genital mutilation is widely practiced in Senegal. Photo by: Alexandra Pugachevsky

Some deportees must choose whether to leave their citizen children behind or bring them back to the ancestral land. That choice is even harder when genital mutilation is a threat. By: Kateryna Stupnevich

After undergoing female genital mutilation as a child in Senegal, Fatoumata thought that her days of hardship were behind her once she settled in the United States.