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3 Nudie Bars Get Shuttered By MICHAEL O. ALLEN and FRANK LOMBARDI, With Mike Claffey, Daily News Staff Writers

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Sunday, August 02, 1998

The city’s crackdown on sex shops officially got under way this weekend with the padlocking of three topless bars, Mayor Giuliani announced yesterday.

The three were closed Friday as part of at least a dozen enforcement proceedings the city launched against live-sex entertainment premises and book and video stores.

The padlocked bars are: El Coche, 904 Hunts Point Ave., the Bronx; Wiggles, 8814 Avenue D, Brooklyn, and Sharks Go Go Bar, 589 Lincoln Ave., Staten Island.

The closure of Sharks, a topless club in residential Midland Beach, was greeted with relief by neighbors and parishioners of St. Mary Margaret Catholic Church, which is a block away.

As young children rode bikes on the quiet street, a woman who lives next door to the bar said that patrons sometimes had sex with dancers in cars on the street. She requested anonymity.

Mario Pisciottano, 74, a neighborhood resident on his way to Mass last evening, said, “It’s about time they closed that place. We’ve been fighting to get them out of here for a long time. The only ones complaining are the patrons who have got to hunt for a new place.”

Pisciottano said the brick building had housed a neighborhood bar until its owners converted the place into a strip club almost 10 years ago.

Two bright orange stickers on the bar’s metal gate announced that the place was “closed by court order.”

The orders were obtained from state Supreme Court justices under the city’s nuisance-abatement procedures a civil process that allows a premise to be padlocked after three separate violations of various laws, including the 1995 sex-shop zoning law.

Under that statute, sex shops are prohibited within 500 feet of residential areas, schools, churches, day care centers and other X-rated businesses.

Though the sex zoning law was enacted in 1995, opponents managed to block enforcement until now through numerous constitutional challenges and appeals that were finally resolved in the city’s favor.

Judges granted temporary closing orders against the three topless bars based on evidence city inspectors and plainclothes cops gathered by posing as customers, according to the mayor and his criminal justice coordinator, Steven Fishner.

Fishner said the sex-enforcement inspectors either saw dancers in a prohibited “state of undress,” or dancing in forbidden ways, such as simulating sex acts.

The city’s enforcement action will now trigger protracted case-by-case litigation that will revolve around specific provisions and definitions in the zoning law, rather than the law’s constitutionality.

For instance, the law covers book or video stores that devote “a substantial portion” of their stock to material featuring “specified sexual activities” of a graphic sexual nature. Lawyers for padlocked shops plan to squabble over each definition.

Giuliani was confident yesterday that the closures marked the beginning of the end of most of the 146 sex shops originally targeted for closing under the sex-zoning law.

“The race here will go to the steady, not the quick,” Giuliani said of the expected court fights triggered by the crackdown.

Herald Price Fahringer, a lawyer who represents most of the endangered X-rated businesses, said the three closed bars are not among his clients. All he would say was, “When they start with my clients, I’ll be ready for them.”

Closing orders against one of his clients, Show World in Times Square around the corner from a Catholic church are to be argued tomorrow.

August 2, 1998
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Bus slams, kills father & son, 11: Witnesses say driver ran red light By MICHAEL O. ALLEN, JAMES RUTENBERG and TARA GEORGE with Ruth Bashinsky

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July 29, 1998

A father and his 11-year-old son were struck and killed by a charter bus yesterday that plowed into them at a notoriously dangerous Broadway intersection.

Scores of work-bound commuters watched helplessly as Peter Dennison, 55, and his son, Morgan, were hit crossing 22nd St. at Broadway on their way to the boy’s school.

The father and son were carried a half block on the front of the bus before it could screech to a stop.

Witnesses told cops that bus driver Cornelius Still barreled through a red light before striking the Dennisons at 7:45 a.m. But Still insisted the light was green and was not immediately charged.

“There was a deadly thud,” said Glenn Hutcherson, 44, a motorist who witnessed the accident. “The next thing I know, they were lying on the street, their legs were intermingled, and the father was under the son.”

They were lying a half block from their hats a baseball cap and floppy fishing hat which were knocked from their heads.

“It was a horrific visual scene,” said Max Sabrin, 45, who works nearby. “My heart goes out to them.”

The Dennisons, just blocks from the subway stop where they caught the No. 6 every day to Morgan’s upper East Side school, were dead on arrival at St. Vincent’s Medical Center.

Their wife and mother, Jeannette Kossuth, a massage therapist, was working at New York Downtown Hospital when she was told about the accident.

“I hope you understand this is my husband and my only child,” said Kossuth, 45, her voice quivering, as she returned to the family’s small W. 21st St. apartment with a priest and a friend. “I’m in shock.”

The site of the accident is part of a tangle of streets around where Broadway and Fifth Ave. crisscross. From 1991 to 1996, 51 pedestrians and bicyclists were injured in the area, according to statistics compiled by Transportation Alternatives, a pedestrian advocacy group. One person was killed.

“This is a very dangerous area,” said Elizabeth Ernish, the Transportation Alternatives campaign coordinator. “Ten injuries per year is very high.”

Said George Esthimiagis, manager of Zoop Soups on E. 23rd St. and Broadway: “All the streets crisscross, so no one knows what’s going on until they get to 23rd St. It’s a really bad light.”

Morgan, who suffered from mild autism, was a fifth-grader at Reece School. Friends called him a sweet kid who loved dinosaurs and often visited museums with his father.

Peter Dennison taught kindergarten and pre-school at Park Avenue Christian Church Day School and had a passion for sculpting.

“He was a gifted teacher and talented human being,” said Nancy Vascellaro, the school’s education director. “He was loved by everybody.”

A spokesman for the bus company, Premier Coach, said they’d never had any problems with Still, and were cooperating with the authorities.

July 29, 1998
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HERO, BROTHER, EVERYMAN: BRONX MONUMENT IS ONE ALL OF US CAN EMBRACE By MICHAEL O. ALLEN, DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER

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nullSunday, May 24, 1998
The monument to Cpl. Walter J. Fufidio, which has come to serve as memorial to those who served in World War II and the other wars that have followed, stands almost nondescript most of the year in the square named after him.
It will be spruced up in time for Memorial Day, for those who want to remember.
But for the surviving Fufidio brothers, the monument is a shimmering beacon to the good old days, to the values of sacrifice, family and community that typified that old Hunts Point neighborhood in the Bronx, something current and future generations can take lessons from.
Arthur, the oldest, went into the Air Force. Walter came next and he couldn’t wait to join up. He was in the Marines. Michael followed, joining the Navy in August 1945, but the war ended three weeks later. And George, the baby of the family, was too young to fight.
“We belonged in World War II and everybody knew it,” Michael Fufidio, now 71 and a resident of Melbourne, Fla., said. “A lot of us volunteered and for a small neighborhood, we sent a lot of people off to that war.”
In scenes that were probably repeated in every neighborhood, block, or corner in the city, kids played seemingly endless games of stickball in the streets one day and the next day their families were seeing them off to go fight in a distant war.
Michael Fufidio, their father who himself fought in the World War I a few short years after arriving in America from Italy in 1914, would take three of his sons over the Spofford Avenue hill to go to the Longwood Ave. station.
Walter Fufidio, an artilleryman, would participate in the campaign that came to symbolize the United States Marine Corps: The bloody invasion of the volcano island of Iwo Jima and the planting of the America flag on Mount Suribachi.
Nearly all of the 21,000 Japanese soldiers defending Iwo Jima were killed. Among the 6,821 Americans killed was Cpl. Walter Fufidio. In the waning days of that campaign, Marines undertaking a mop-up operation were pinned down by shattering shell fire from a fortified Japanese position.
As his posthumous Navy Cross Medal, second only to the Medal of Honor in American military honors, described, Walter was without cover when he delivered a steady stream of neutralizing shell fire against the enemy position, enabling his infantry unit to charge and wipe out the resistance.
“He galantly gave his life for his country,” the citation read.
George Fufidio said his mother took the loss very hard. Anna Fufidio, now 96 and living in a Throgs Neck nursing home, visited her son’s grave at St. Raymond Cemetery on Tremont Ave. for many years afterward.
“She’d go up there and she’d wipe the snow off the grave,” George Fufidio, who is 62, said.
In the years after the war, Michael would serve 20 years in the New York City Police Department and Arthur and George each served 20 years with the city Fire Department.
Arthur Fufidio was reflective when asked what lessons should be drawn from his brother’s monument. Government officials make wars and call on regular folks like him, his brothers and the other boys they grew up with to fight, he said.
“We were meant to serve and that was it,” Arthur Fufidio said. “It doesn’t seem like the world is in any different position now. That was supposed to be the war that ended all wars but we seem to live under a constant threat of war.”

May 24, 1998
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FENFLURAMINE STUDY HURT BOY: Single Dose of Controversial Drug Altered Personality, She Says By MICHAEL O. ALLEN

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Sunday, April 26, 1998

The Brooklyn woman said she got a letter telling her to bring her 8-year-old son to the state psychiatric institute for a survey on children whose older brothers had been convicted in Family Court of crimes as juveniles.

“They wanted to do a study on my son to find out if he had any behavioral problems,” said the woman, who spoke to the Daily News on condition that no one in her family be identified.

Last week, she was in tears after reading in The News that the study was steeped in controversy, with critics blasting the use of fenfluramine on children and questioning the use of only black and Latino boys. The Food and Drug Administration last year banned fenfluramine, the offending half of the prescription diet drug fen-phen. The researchers, meanwhile, issued statements denying wrongdoing, but refused to discuss their studies.

In all, the parents of 34 boys ages 6 to 10 made the trip to the New York State Psychiatric Institute in Washington Heights in 1994 and 1995. The boys fasted for 12 hours, were given psychiatric and psychological tests, then a single oral 10 mg. dose of fenfluramine. Then, while hooked to a catheter, they had blood drawn each hour for about five hours.

The Brooklyn woman said she and her son were given $ 230, plus a $ 100 Toys “R” Us gift certificate for their participation, then were sent home.

But that is no solace to the Brooklyn woman.

Her son was happy-go-lucky, did well in school and never had a behavioral problem. But she figured she had to cooperate with the letter because an older son was incarcerated on a robbery conviction.

Her son ceased being his happy-go-lucky self soon after the experiment, she said. The boy, now 11, suffers anxiety attacks, has severe headaches, has developed a learning disability and is about to be put in special-education classes.

Claudia Bial, a spokeswoman for the psychiatric institute, expressed surprise at the symptoms the boy’s mother described.

“A single dose of fenfluramine poses no risk,” Bial said. “I’m sorry that the child suffered these things, but I don’t think it has anything to do with that one dose.”

But critics of the studies disagree with Bial. Vera Hassner Sharav, the head of Citizens for Responsible Care in Psychiatry and Research, cited a study published in 1996 in the journal Society of Biological Psychiatry that said a single dose of fenfluramine had been shown to cause headaches, lightheadedness and difficulty concentrating in 90% of adults who took just one dose of the drug.

“Since there is no study to show the drug is safe for children, but there is plenty of evidence to show that it is unsafe for adults and it is unsafe for animals I mean it causes brain damage in animals you would think that little children would never be exposed to it,” she said.

Mount Sinai School of Medicine and the Queens College Psychology Department conducted a study about the same time, experimenting on a group of boys diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactive disorder. That study and the one that tested the Brooklyn woman’s son were trying to determine: Were these boys predisposed to violence or crime?

Some criminologists and psychiatrists increasingly use fenfluramine in studies to stimulate and measure serotonin in the brain. The more serotonin a person has, the less likely he or she is to engage in anti-social behavior, they hypothesize.

Evan Balaban, senior fellow in experimental neurobiology at the Neurosciences Institute in La Jolla, Calif., is a leading critic of the fenfluramine behavioral genetic studies. The studies have become more prevalent in the past 10 years.

“What people were trying to say beforehand which I believe I’ve shown is not true is that they [those prone to violence] are not releasing enough serotonin and that for some reasons, which are not specified very well, this predisposes you to violent behavior,” he said.

Irving Gottesman, a professor of psychology and genetics at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, defended fenfluramine studies, saying they help researchers understand individual differences in human aggression, He said the studies could lead to interventions that are ethical and based on science.

April 26, 1998
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HIS CAUSE His Spirit Moved Them by MICHAEL O. ALLEN, Daily News Staff Writer

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nullSunday, April 5, 1998

Children were raising innocent voices in freedom songs in church basements as adults braved firebombs, water hoses, dogs and jails for full rights as American citizens.

As a 5-year-old, Suzan Johnson joined the other children singing at Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem. Now 41, the Rev. Suzan Johnson Cook is pastor of the Bronx Christian Fellowship Baptist Church and a
member of President Clinton’s race-relations panel.

“Those were the wonder years for us,” say Johnson Cook, whose mother taught public school in Harlem for 22 years and whose father was one of the city’s first black trolley car drivers. “I remember the energy of our
community, as if we were all moving as one wave, not waves clashing against each other. We had a common purpose, a common cause, and we worked toward making it happen. And there hasn’t been in my lifetime
another movement like that. It was a spiritual movement.”

Virginia Fields was 17 in 1963 when a bomb exploded in Bethel Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, while she was worshiping there. She was primed for activism when the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. came through town months later for his first march on Birmingham.

Fields, 52, now Manhattan borough president, was swept up in the mass arrest that ended the march and spent five days in the Birmingham City Jail, where King wrote his now-famous “Letter from Birmingham Jail.”
“We all believed so much in his leadership,” she said. “We felt that he was going in the right direction, and after so many earlier attempt to desegregate the schools and the lunch counters had failed. With his leadership and his mass action, we just felt a renewed sense of excitement, of energy.”

African-Americans had endured the horrors of some 300 years of slavery to arrive at the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 free, but with few rights of citizenship. But by the end of World War II, black patriots returned from their service with the sense of a rightful place at the table as members of the American family.

In the years that followed, a migration of blacks from the rural South to the cities gave birth to a sizable black middle class—and the civil rights movement.

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, established in 1909, attracted funding from new members made up largely of educated blacks in the North. Many of these included young lawyers who, through the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, methodically waged court challenges that clarified and expanded the rights of African-Americans.

In one such case, the 1954 Supreme Court allowed Linda Brown to attend Summer Elementary School, an all-white school near her home in Topeka, Kan., paving the way for desegregated schools and many of the civil rights gains to come.

Resistance in the South to the Brown vs. Board of Education ruling would propel the fledgling civil rights movement in its struggle to bring down many of the barriers to black participation in American life.

The battle gave the nation generations of African-American leaders, including King, who as the head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference would go on to captivate America and the world.

Percy Sutton, who in 1966 had been elected Manhattan borough president, marched with King a week before he was killed.

“He was a quiet and effective revolutionary in bringing about changes in the human condition here in America,” Sutton said.

Julian Bond and the group he co-founded, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, joined other young people from the SCLC, the Congress of Racial Equality and the NAACP to stage sit-ins, boycotts,
marches and freedom rides to test the enforcement of desegregation. Weeks ago, Bond was elected chairman of the NAACP.

Bond said he is old enough to know that things are better now, but he also admits, “There are some indices of black life in America that are abysmal.”

Sutton said the battle to solve current problems of black life would have to be waged without a towering figure like King.

“Dr. King was the last of the singular civil rights leaders.” Sutton said. “The day of the singular leader is gone.”

“Now in every city, or every town there is a man or a woman who stands up for the rights of minorities who is that leader in that town in that factory, in that bus line, in that community. They are all leaders,” Sutton said.

Johnson Cook carries on the struggle in her work in the church, in her community and especially on the President’s race-relations panel.

“What I’ve seen in the two short years I’ve been here (in the Bronx) is a complete transformation of a people who are reclaiming our sense of community that we all learned as kids but lost,” she said.

Johnson Cook said the discussion on race has also changed from the time of the civil rights movement, when the issue was largely getting social justice for black Americans. Today, 33 years of immigration have changed the face of America.

“We are always wrestling with the issue of whether we should forget the black-white struggle and move on to the diversity question,” Johnson Cook said.

She said the chapter is not closed yet on that struggle because blacks are still fighting for justice in this society. At the same time, other minorities have their voices in the debate now, she said.

“The question we are asking is, ‘Can we be one America in the 21st century?’ And the strong implication in that question is that, in many ways, we are not,” Johnson Cook said.

April 5, 1998
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Five Points Had Good Points By MICHAEL O. ALLEN, Daily News Staff Writer

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THE FIVE POINTS ARCHAEOLOGY PROJECT

In the early 1990s, a group of archaeologists began an excavation in Five Points. Their research revealed that there was much more to Five Points than the filthy, poor, and crime-infested area that early visitors had described. On February 22, 1998, the Daily News published an article by Michael O. Allen that described some of their findings.

February 22, 1998

Even today, nearly 100 years after its demise, much of what is known about the old Five Points neighborhood in lower Manhattan is legend and lore. This crossroads of Old New York came to be known as a refuge for Irish immigrants, where vice, crime and unspeakable poverty prevailed. But according to a report to be delivered soon to the U.S. General Services Administration, the neighborhood was much more complex and diverse-like today’s New York.

The Daily News has obtained portions of the report based on an excavation completed in 1992 by John Milner Associates, a Philadelphia archeological and architectural firm. Archaeologists, before work could begin on the construction of the Federal Courthouse in Foley Square, dug up 14 lots in the neighborhood and looked through garbage and other buried belongings. They unearthed 850,000 artifacts, 100,000 alone from a tenement that housed 98 tenants at 472 Pearl St. Their findings challenged all known assumptions about the area.

They found expensive Asian and European porcelain, gilded bone china, household ceramics, elaborate tea sets and glass, tobacco pipes, textiles, jewelry and other household items that showed people had disposable income. They also found evidence-in the form of professionally butchered beef, lamb and pork bones-that people consumed expensive meats.

Using census data and bank records, especially those of the Emigrant Industrial Savings Bank, founded by the Irish Emigrant Society of New York, they were able to show that lawyers, doctors, teachers, bankers and politicians lived in the neighborhood. Many people were drawn to Five Points because of its cheap housing and ready jobs, said Rebecca Yamin, the project manager on the excavation. But there were also many well-to-do families who owned property and businesses.

“When we look at this collection, we got this sense that life was very difficult, unspeakably overcrowded and unsanitary, but there was also this sense of exuberance,” Yamin said. “This was the period that New York became what it is today, which is this phenomenal thing.”

The artifacts also show clearly the city’s ability to contain vast wealth in proximity to abject poverty, said Heather Griggs, an archaeologist involved in the project. “It was a neighborhood of poor people and people who were living the American Dream,” she said. “Each apartment held a different family with a different dream. Some made it. Others didn’t. That’s the American experience.” Five Points, named for the intersection of Anthony (now Worth), Orange (now Baxter), and Cross (now Park) Streets and a small park, Paradise Square, sprouted at a low, marshy spot northeast of City Hall. Artisans and other tradespeople came, as did tanneries, breweries and slaughterhouses next to 46-acre Collect Pond. But the pond became so polluted that by 1803 the city’s Common Council ordered it filled. It was this landfill area that became known as Five Points.

The neighborhood grew to be overwhelmingly Irish, although there were a sizable number of East European Jews, Germans, blacks, Italians, Poles, East and West Indians and a smattering of Prussians. Most Irish lived in rooms, cellars and garrets of buildings along Park and Pearl Streets, Griggs said.

No sooner had the neighborhood taken shape than its image as a dangerous place began to set in. Residents worked a variety of skilled and unskilled jobs, such as construction, carpentry, masonry and dressmaking. But concerns over street peddling of fruit, oysters and sexual favors caught the attention of outsiders. In 1842, a terrified Charles Dickens said he would not venture into the neighborhood without a police escort, noting “ruined houses,” a “world of vice and misery” and “all that is loathsome, drooping and decayed.”

In recent years, Caleb Carr used Five Points as backdrop for dark doings in The Alienist, and Luc Sante offered lurid tales in Low Life: Lures & Snares of Old New York.

Social reformer Jacob Riis, through his book, How the Other Half Lives, persuaded the city to undertake slum clearances that in 1894 began to spell the end for Five Points. By 1919, remnants of the neighborhood were swept away with construction of the New York County Courthouse, now the state Supreme Court, as Worth and Baxter Streets.

But experts say there are vibrant, living examples of what Five Points may have been. “Chinatown is a perfect modern example of what the neighborhood may have been like,” Griggs said. “I love walking through Chinatown today because I can imagine what it was like 150 years ago when the Irish and Jews and Germans lived at Five Points. That’s what this project is about, dispelling myths of the immigrant slums.”

“Life is always more complicated than caricature makes it out to be,” Sante said. “This archaeological dig was very important. People will write interesting books about why there is this disparity between the way these people lived and how the legend got reported.”

The archaeologists also created a website that gives much more information on Five Points and includes a virtual tour of the artifacts they found.

http://schools.nycenet.edu/csd1/museums/fivepoints/points4.html

http://r2.gsa.gov/fivept/fphome.htm

February 22, 1998
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Rudy Backs Regents Requirement

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Sunday, November 16, 1997

by MICHAEL O. ALLEN, Daily News Staff Writer

Mayor Giuliani yesterday supported the state Board of Regents’ new foreign language requirement for high school graduates, setting up a possible showdown with Chancellor Rudy Crew.

“The system should introduce more languages,” Giuliani said at a Bensonhurst news conference. “It’s an excellent idea. This whole movement toward higher standards is exactly what the city public school system should be challenged to do.”

Crew had said he had “grave reservations” about the added requirement, included in a new package of reforms for students entering ninth grade in 2001.

The board’s plan would have high school students take two to three years of instruction in a foreign language, then pass a Regents examination to earn a diploma. But Crew said the requirement would be hard on kids in lower-performing schools, reasoning that they would have less time for remedial work. Board officials said that only 7% of city high school students take Regents exams in foreign languages.

J.D. LaRock, a spokesman for the city Board of Education, said yesterday that although the chancellor supports students who want to take foreign languages for advanced Regents diplomas, he has deep concerns about the costs of the new requirement.

“I don’t want to draw distinctions between the mayor and the chancellor’s positions. I just want to highlight the chancellor’s concerns,” LaRock said, adding that more than 1,000 additional teachers would be needed if the requirement is instituted systemwide.

Original Story Date: 11/16/97

November 16, 1997
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DOROTHY DAY Life of a Saint?

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Sunday, November 16, 1997

By MICHAEL O. ALLEN, Daily News Staff Writer

In the clatter of spoons on soup bowls and excited voices absorbed into murmurs in the smoke-filled first-floor kitchen of St. Joseph House last week, it was hard to tell the poor from their helpers.

The house was not unlike a home, its inhabitants restless siblings in an uncommonly large family, which was as Dorothy Day would have it.

They are, after all, her children continuing her life’s work.

A couple of dozen people had taken shelter for the night in the five-story hostel on First St. in the heart of the Bowery, and another couple of hundred poor and homeless, society’s derelicts and rejects, had just been fed that day.

It has been 100 years, almost to the day, since Dorothy Day was born in Brooklyn Heights, and 17 years since she died at her movement’s Maryhouse for women at 55 E. Third St.

Her life encompassed a breathtaking pilgrimage, including a period of fast living that gave way to an ascetic, intellectual and spiritual quest that seared generations of Roman Catholics.

By 30, she had run with the suffragettes and had drunk intellectuals under the table in Greenwich Village. After the birth of her daughter in 1927, Day converted to Catholicism.

In 1933, with mentor Peter Maurin, she started The Catholic Worker movement and the newspaper of the same name.

Reared an Episcopalian, she practiced a brand of Catholicism leavened by her earlier radicalism that scorched the Church’s leaders with its purity.

She took to heart the Sermon on the Mount, living among and as one of the poor, as the Bible said Christians should.

But it was her pacifism, social activism and philosophy of nonviolence that often brought her in conflict with the Church’s hierarchy and with governments everywhere. It would lead to her being jailed and fined numerous times in New York and elsewhere.

Supporters like Jesuit priest the Rev. Daniel Berrigan, a friend of Day and an ardent peace activist, said the Church eventually adopted some of her pacifism, but it never was an easy fit.

“They couldn’t sleep at night with Dorothy around,” Berrigan said.

“The Church was very uncomfortable with her. The Church was officially silent all during the Vietnam War and approved the Second World War. She said no war.”

In the very same Catholic Church she drove to distraction with her radicalism, the air now is filled with talk of sainthood for her.

Day’s ‘Children’

Such talk sets the teeth of Day disciples such as Carmen Trotta and Joanne Kennedy on edge.

Day’s granddaughter Kate Hennessy, in a rueful reminiscence in a recent issue of The Catholic Worker, explained the wariness in her own way.

She said her grandmother turned the life of poverty into something dynamic, full of richly simple moments. But the “impulse to send her off into sainthood, which can be as lethal as complete rejection,” risks placing her beyond the reach of average folks, she said.

In Trotta and Kennedy and countless other young people of conscience who continue to commit to the movement, Day could not have found more faithful followers.

Kennedy, who aspired to be a criminal defense attorney, bagged law school after completing the first year at the University of Missouri in Kansas City.

“I was starting to lose faith in that, anyway,” she said.

As others tidied up after a meal at St. Joe’s, as the movement’s unpaid staff calls the place at 36 E. First St., Trotta sat sharing smokes and enduring good-natured ribbing from Kennedy.

At another table, next to a stack of recent issues of the movement’s 1-cent newspaper, The Catholic Worker, Gerry Howard talked to a couple of indifferent companions.

Kennedy, 29, was chatting about the movement’s work with the poor and an ideal of personal responsibility.

“I believe that each person takes care of the other,” she said. “It is not about evangelization, not about making people feel like they are getting a handout, or even about me feeling good about myself because I’m doing this thing. It is about the dignity of every human being.”

Kennedy came to the New York City Catholic Worker community seven months ago from another one in Des Moines.

About 125 hospitality houses, farms and communes inspired by Day are now spread across the nation and seven countries.

Howard, 48, lived in the abyss of homelessness for nine years, including six in the subway tunnels near the St. Joseph House. Transit police officers roused him from sleep daily in time for him to get on the soup line at the hospitality house, where he found his salvation.

Walking down First St. one day 2 1/2 years ago, wracked with the pain of his myriad sufferings, Howard said he burst into uncontrollable sobbing.

“I was trying to figure out why my life was going the way it had gone for so long and wanted a way to turn it around,” he said.

A staffer beckoned him inside and allowed him into the basement, where he spent a couple of hours crying and begging God and pleading with his parents, long dead, to forgive him for the shame that was his life at the time.

Six months later, he walked back into the life of a son that, because of his addiction to crack, he had never seen. He has been clean since and now has a job at an antique shop. He continues to live at the house as he puts back together pieces of a life shattered by addiction.

The movement does not consider the assistance the shelter shared with Howard as charity.

Trotta decries the practice in some churches in the city where they set aside a few cots a night for the poor and homeless only to turn them out in the morning.

“The coat that hangs in your closet belongs to the poor,” Trotta said. “Someone said, ‘You must pray that the poor forgive you the charity you give them,’ because in reality all that the Earth contains is meant for us to share.”

The ideal that Dorothy Day lived, and which The Catholic Worker movement continues to practice, Trotta said, is that “each Christian conscious of a duty in the Lord . . . should take in one of the homeless as an honored guest into their homes.

She Urged Action, Duty

Trotta, behind the desk later in the day at the Mary Gearhart Gallery at 252 Mott St., where an exhibit of Day’s photographs and writings are on display through Dec. 7, railed against the American government, the World Bank, the greed of American corporations and society’s complacency in the face of injustices everywhere.

Reared a Catholic and a rock-ribbed Republican in Inwood, L.I., Trotta came to the movement disillusioned with the lies of American history and the Church. Private studies, he said, allowed him to shed his “mindless conservatism” and led him to The Catholic Worker movement.

Some visitors to the exhibit, devotees of Mother Teresa, departed, and Trotta mentioned how someone called Day “The Mother Teresa of Mott St.” in a recent article on Cardinal O’Connor’s assertion that he would begin the formal process to declare Day a saint.

Trotta did not take the comment as a compliment to Day.

“I am not speaking against Mother Teresa . . . ” he said, “but I have a devotion to the sort of sharpness of Dorothy Day, that doing of charity that didn’t come at the expense of justice, of speaking out about justice.”

Making Dorothy Day a saint could allow people to shirk this duty that she expects of them, some of her supporters say.

“I don’t care to be dismissed so easily,” she had said when during her own life people thrust sainthood on her.

Patrick Jordan, the managing editor of Commonweal magazine, who lived at St. Joseph House from 1969 to 1975, said making her a saint would be good if it meant that her whole life would be taught, not just the part that the Church finds comfortable.

“When the lives of the saints are recounted, often you only hear certain aspects of those lives,” Jordan said.

“If you study more deeply, you find out that some of these people were very challenging, not only to individuals and society, but to the Church itself.”

Day’s pacifism, her real attempt to love her neighbor, sacrifice herself for just causes, place herself in God’s hands and pray for her persecutor, were all a real part of her legacy.

“If those aspects of her life were forgotten because of her canonization,” Jordan said, “then that would be a loss to the whole Church.”

Said Berrigan: “Anyone who knew Dorothy or has done any reading of what she wrote would say she is already a saint. She doesn’t need this official kind of mark on her life.”

The Road to Sainthood

A long-time friend of Dorothy Day’s likened the Catholic Church’s canonization ritual to shooting someone out of a cannon.

Some of the early Christians did come by sainthood in a sudden and violent fashion, but today the Catholic Church puts candidates through a complex, decades-long saint-making ritual.

  • The process begins with a local bishop, in this case, Cardinal O’Connor, confirming the local fame of a servant of God for good works or martyrdom after examining evidence gathered by an informal guild of supporters. That examination, even before the process moves to Rome, can take years. O’Connor is about to embark on that process.
  • A bishop then will argue the person’s cause before a Congregation of the Causes of Saints, which will investigate the candidate’s heroic practice of virtues in a trial-like setting. Success at this level would lead to the candidate being declared “venerable.”
  • The candidate would be deemed “blessed” when two provable miracles occur in his or her name after death.
  • A third miracle would allow the person’s cause to be taken up again so he or she could be canonized as a saint.
November 16, 1997
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ISLAM ON THE RISE; Converts, a Boom in Births Help Swell Rank of Muslims

By Homepage, New York Daily NewsNo Comments

nullSunday, November 09, 1997

by MICHAEL O. ALLEN

NADIA BARNES RECITED the shahada, or central principle of Islam.

“La ilaha illa Allah, sa Muhammadun rasulu Allah,” Barnes said after Imam Muhammed Salem Agwa: “There is no god but Allah, and Muhammed is the messenger of Allah.”

The 23-year-old fashion designer and finance student descended from the balcony, where women pray apart from men, into the main hall of the Islamic Cultural Center of New York for a ceremony as old as time itself.

Under the copper dome of the nation’s most resplendent mosque, a gilded crescent pointing to Mecca as she was encircled by a dozen men, Barnes pledged belief in eternal life and hellfire, that “Jesus is a prophet, not a god,” that Muhammed is the “last prophet” of Allah and that Islam is the one true religion. Also, she vowed to give alms to the poor, pray five times a day and one day go to Mecca.

With that, Agwa welcomed her into the umma, or community.

“Good,” Agwa said. “Now you have faith; now you are a Muslim.”

Barnes is part of the dramatic rise for the religion of Islam in New York and in the nation.

Fueling the growth is immigration from predominantly Islamic nations, a high birthrate in Muslim families, and conversion to the religion by African-Americans and women, such as Barnes, who marry Muslims.

Immigration from countries with large Muslim populations, including India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, has been rising.

And, more recently, Muslims have come here from Indonesia, Africa, and, with the breakdown of the former Soviet Union, new nations like Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. Many of the newcomers are highly skilled workers doctors, engineers, pharmacists who have been able to come because of less restrictive immigration laws.

The impact of Islam on New Yorkers’ lives is hard to miss, from the mundane changes, like alternate-side-of-the-street parking rules, to the most heartfelt.

The star and crescent moon now are displayed alongside Christmas trees and Chanukah and Kwanzaa candles during the winter holiday season.

Eid Al-Fitr, a feast that follows the Ramadan month of daylight fasting, was added to the 29 holy days of various religions for the estimated 100,000 Muslim students in city schools.

Mosques and traditional Muslim modest clothing now are commonplace in many city neighborhoods.

As Nadia Barnescompleted forms in a basement office of the nation’s most resplendent mosque at 96th St. and Third Ave., she spoke about the spiritualism of Islam and the calm and peace it has brought to her.

“I just felt the most strength of my life, that I was doing the right thing, that I was meant to do this,” she said.

Not only was Barnes converting to Islam, she was bringing a stray back to the flock: her husband, Muhammed Gundel, 33, a Pakistani immigrant who said he allowed his faith to lapse about 21/2 years ago.

As their ranks have grown, Muslims have done like other religions and established parochial schools for religious and cultural education.

At the Al-Iman School at the Imam Al Khoei Islamic Center in Jamaica, Queens, Masooma Hussain, 13, and her 11-year-old sister Fatima typify the emerging generation of Muslims.

Now of Elmont, L.I., they came to New York from Pakistan with their parents seven years ago.

The girls, wearing scarves to cover their hair, were outspoken about their place here, belying the stereotype of Muslim women as docile, compliant and oppressed.

Fatima, who wants to be a doctor, said she feels at home in New York.

“It’s not like I’m from another planet,” she said.

Marc Ferris, who teaches in the general studies program at New York University and has written about the city’s Muslim communities, said mosques bring a welcome brand of tolerance.

“In New York City, we’ve got the most international and cosmopolitan Muslim community in the world,” Ferris said. “Africans, Guyanese, Asians, Americans.”

And Muslims from countries that are mortal enemies somehow find a way to worship together in the same mosque when them come to New York, he said.

“At an Albanian mosque in Brooklyn, Turks and Albanians, who are historic enemies, pray side by side. The same with Pakistani and Bangladeshi Muslims. They seem to be more united here in religion because they are minorities. A lot of the Old World stuff gets buried,” Ferris said.

A source of anguish to them is when Islam is equated to terrorism. They complain that the phrase “Islamic terrorist” unfairly taints their religion for nationalistic acts by groups and individuals who happen to be Muslims.

Numan Okuyan, 42, owner of Metropolitan Graphic Art, a gallery on 82d St., notes that no one referred to Timothy McVeigh as a Christian terrorist when he bombed the federal building in Oklahoma.

And, like many Muslims interviewed by the Daily News especially non-Arabs Okuyan, who was born in Turkey to Uzbek parents, blames the media for defining his faith by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Okuyan pointed out that his mosque has worshipers from all over the world; others note that Arabs make up just 20% of the faithful.

Dr. Abdul Rehman, who immigrated here in 1968 from Pakistan, recalled some of the early struggles finding a place to worship or the proper food to eat. Today, he is chairman of the board of trustees for the Al-Noor Mosque in Staten Island, which was started by Pakistani immigrants like him but now has a largely African-American congregation.

By far the largest number of Muslims in the United States are African-American converts.

The Chicago-based Nation of Islam opened a temple in Harlem in 1946 and saw membership soar when Malcolm X arrived eight years later as the imam. But its emphasis on black empowerment and exclusion of whites has been controversial.

M.T. Mehdi, secretary-general of the National Council on Islamic Affairs, said members of the Nation of Islam are not genuine Muslims because they are in a political movement, not a religious movement.

Traditional Islam is a color-blind religion, and the Nation of Islam is reacting to white racism in this country, Mehdi said. Of special concern to Muslims, he said, is the baggage Louis Farrakhan brings in his history of statements that have been deemed anti-Semitic.

But Nation of Islam leader Farrakhan reacted angrily to that characterization of his movement.

“I’m a Muslim,” Farrakhan insisted. “Don’t try to make me a politician. When we say that the Nation of Islam will be more political, it is out of our spiritual underpinning, our faith in Allah that we challenge the forces of evil in this society.”

GRAPHIC: MARK BONIFACIO JON NASO DAILY NEWS JON NASO DAILY NEWS MARK BONIFACIO BENEATH DOME of Manhattan’s Islamic Cultural Center, worshipers, including Nadia Branes and her husband, Muhammad Gundel, pray and study (photos opposite and top). Dr. Abdul Rehman and daughter Naheed (above) worship at Al-Noor Mosque in Staten Island, where he serves as chairman of the board of trustees.

November 9, 1997
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Rudy Won’t Return 10G Gift From Abe

By Homepage, New York Daily NewsNo Comments

Sunday, November 9, 1997

by MICHAEL O. ALLEN and RICHARD T. PIENCIAK, Daily News Staff Writers

Mayor Giuliani said yesterday that he has no intention of returning developer Abe Hirschfeld’s $10,000 campaign contribution, even though the gadfly politico and one-time newspaper publisher is being investigated for allegedly plotting to kill a long-time business partner.

“Generally, the rule that I follow here is if someone gives me a contribution and it turns out they are alleged to have done something, I either return it or not, depending how the allegation works out,” Giuliani said. “Right now, it’s an allegation.”

Daily News columnist Mark Kriegel reported yesterday that Hirschfeld, 78, a failed candidate for Manhattan borough president and one-time candidate for the Democratic nomination to the U.S. Senate, is being investigated by the Manhattan district attorney’s office in a possible murder-for-hire plot.

The News identified the alleged victim as Hirschfeld’s long-time real estate associate, Stanley Stahl, 72.

The two moguls have been partners in several major real estate transactions over four decades, but their relationship has grown acrimonious in recent years.

Sources told the News that investigators are trying to determine whether Hirschfeld contracted through a third party to have Stahl murdered, then changed his mind.

Hirschfeld, who declined yesterday to comment on The News story, is free on $1 million bail on charges he cheated the city and state out of $2.2 million in taxes.

He claims the 123-count indictment is part of a political conspiracy to prevent him from gaining public office.

DA Robert Morgenthau’s murder-for-hire investigation grew out of the tax fraud prosecution, according to the sources.

Hirschfeld, who served briefly as publisher of the New York Post, has not been asked to appear for questioning, the sources said.

When asked about the murder-for-hire allegations earlier last week, Hirschfeld told The News: “I have no idea what kind of bulls— you’re talking about. I am stunned.”

Stahl, who has been accompanied by bodyguards since early this year, declined to comment.

When the tax indictment was returned in May, Giuliani declined to return $10,500 in contributions his campaign had received from Hirschfeld and his wife.

In keeping the money, the mayor reversed a long-standing policy of refusing donations from those under indictment.

The mayor was asked yesterday about keeping the contribution “now that [Hirschfeld] is a murder suspect.”

Giuliani avoided answering directly, responding instead about Hirschfeld’s outstanding criminal charges.

He said returning the contribution now wouldn’t be fair to Hirschfeld’s reputation: “He is going to go to trial. Let’s see what the outcome of his case is.”

Original Story Date: 11/09/97

November 9, 1997
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