Hung up in a hospital bed just before Thanksgiving with a newly replaced knee and a wealth of reasons to nap, 77-year-old Marcella Brown took it upon herself to figure out a way to feed 45 families. Holiday season without holiday food baskets isn’t much of a holiday for New York’s needy, she knew — and there was no good reason to let a surgery stop Thanksgiving, especially when it wasn’t even her first new knee.

“Ain’t nothing in the world you can’t do,” said Brown, a veteran organizer in the South Bronx.. “I stayed active in every movement in the Bronx. I never was tired to say no. It was always yes.”

Brown, indomitable and decisive and utterly devoted to her community, is a singular character — but she is not the least bit unique. The city, and the city within the city that makes up the largest public housing authority in North America, is built on the brick spirit of many Marcella Browns. Though the Bronx-proud Brown is formally the tenant association president of a small New York City Housing Authority development known simply as 1162-1178 Washington Avenue — and also happens to be the founder of the association, and the founder of the 1162 Community Center for Children, and a former chairwoman of Community Board 3, and the head of a pantry, and the founder and namesake of a non-profit organization dedicated to youth mentoring and scholarships — she is unofficially something perhaps even more important: one of the thousands of elder women who serve as NYCHA’s righteous backbone.

“Women over 65?” laughed Reginald Bowman, president of the  Citywide Council of Presidents, when asked about the makeup  of the NYCHA resident organizations that form his constituency. Though there is no accurate measure, a significant number of New York’s most stalwart public-housing community activists are older women.  “That’s all of them,” offered Brown. “Most of them are.”

That’s in part because women head up most of NYCHA’s families and households. “I think we have always been the backbone,” said Delores Sylvester, 69, who heads the residents association at Glenmore Plaza in Brownsville, Brooklyn. As of 2009, there were 173,484 total households in NYCHA buildings, and 133,033 — or nearly 77 percent — of those were headed by women. They were overwhelmingly women of color. Women over 62 helmed about 42,886 of NYCHA’s households in 2009, the last year for which such information is available. That means that more women over the age of 62 head households in NYCHA properties than do men of all generations.

Like Sylvester and Brown, the majority of NYCHA residents over 65 years of age are women of black and Latina heritage. Women on average tend to live longer than men, and among the oldest NYCHA residents — those 85 years of age or above — 75 percent are women.

“I don’t know what they’d do if they didn’t have women,” said Cornelia Taylor, 91, a wheelchair-bound born-again bustler who helms her residents association in Far Rockaway, Queens. “Most of the people on my board are women. I don’t think the men are interested in that stuff that much.” Taylor says her world has always been rich with women, from her divorced single mother to the Depression-era schoolteacher who bought her replacements for her cardboard-soled shoes. There were women throughout the resident leadership when she served as Queens chair of the Citywide Council of Presidents, and there are female-fronted families all over the Ocean Bay Apartments Oceanside development where she has lived for 40 years.

There was Mary Jane Maultsey, the grandmother who took Taylor in after her mother’s death in 1935. “She was born the third day of freedom — three days after when the slaves were freed,” said Taylor. “Her sister was a slave, brother was a slave. She was never a slave.”

But though Taylor honors the resilient array of women across history — and how women of color form the foundation of New York’s public-housing communities — she doesn’t necessarily see the elder women of NYCHA as a self-conscious force. Like her mother and her grandmother, Taylor explained,, “I think they’re doing what they think needs to be done.”

That’s an attitude Susan Stall, chair of the Sociology Department at Northeastern Illinois University, came to recognize and admire in her work documenting the community activism of one group of women in Chicago’s public housing system. “They would say, ‘We’re just doing what needs to be done,’” said Stall, whose book on the grassroots women of Wentworth Gardens, The Dignity of Resistance, has been made into a play and featured in a PBS telecourse. For the women whose 40-year legacy of organizing Stall documented, spending too much time thinking about their own accomplishments or collective power could seem like “unnecessary boasting,” she said.

As Taylor puts it: “When you get an attitude like that you ought to be fertilizer. You got to have your heart in what you do.” People, Taylor believes, should simply “reach out” to one another — and she will gladly pay another’s rent if that rent needs paid. Though she has accolades to hang on her walls — and the bullet-proof glass of the tenant-patrol office she often sits in surveying the neighborhood is covered with thank-you notes — Taylor’s mission is not to get noticed. When she points to a holiday card from Assemblywoman Michele Titus, it’s not to boast of her own influence but to pay tribute to another of District 28’s women.

“Women politicians, they are the ones that care,” said Taylor. “Whether they’re right or wrong, they will keep themselves involved.” Titus paid for the first year of college for one of Taylor’s five grandchildren simply because he could not afford it, she said — and he’s now making $87,000 a year.

Claudia Coger of Astoria, Queens, connects her community devotion to the anchorage of home. “Public housing has been a great resource for my family,” she said. “When I came to Astoria Houses it most certainly was home.” Coger, 76, has lived at the development since 1955 and intends to see it nurture the next generations. “That’s been my drive. To keep it that way and to make sure that the people have the same opportunities my children had,” she said.

Coger draws on a life lived in the thick of history. “I grew up in segregation time, where our schools were segregated,” she said. “I basically went to an all black school — all black teachers in the south of Florida. Early on, I realized we were in a struggle, fighting for equality.”

Stall sees the arc of such history in the community work of low-income women of color, and she also recognizes cultural traditions at work. “In these communities older people are respected,” she said. “There’s a history of respecting your grandmother, great-grandmother, and that stems also from the churches. I think that’s different from my community, the professional white middle class where we’d just as soon dump older women in the ocean, in the lake here.”

But Stall also connects the power of elder women in public housing to the long tradition of “municipal housekeeping.” Before women fully entered the public sphere, she said, they “became active in sanitation issues, restoration of neighborhood and safety issues, and it was considered okay even for the post-Victorian women to be involved in these issues because they’re related to the home.” Women even outside the home still do society’s primary childcare and housekeeping duties, “so if you expand that housekeeping out to the public sphere,” it becomes a bedrock of community organization, she said.

And as men increasingly disappear from the equation — a complex problem Stall connects to everything from welfare reform to men being less likely to join “unsexy” causes, from public-housing leasing policies to a justice system that locks up a disproportionate number of black and Latino men — it is where politics, whether the mainstream recognizes the work as political or not, is headed.

“I call it ‘woman-centered organizing,’” said Stall.

It’s not just a phenomenon in public housing, however — Sylvester points out that the legacy of increasingly female-fronted households is one the entire society must consider. “It’s not only in NYCHA,” she said. “It’s everywhere in the nation. There are single homes everywhere.”

Brown and Taylor recognize this, but they don’t exactly celebrate the many ways their communities have changed since their formative years. Jobs are scarce, frustration is high and it’s no small task to marshal forces to fight. “The grassroots community people at that time were very active in the community,” said Brown. “You didn’t have to run behind them to come to a meeting.”

“Times has changed,” said Taylor. “Young people, they don’t have no dreams. Years ago they had dreams.”

There are those in the next generations who draw their strength from the towering elders of their brick blocks.

“There are so many, so many of those women,” said Harlem’s Neal Shoemaker, who grew up in Martin Luther King, Jr. Towers near Lenox Ave and 115th Street. His mother, Leona Shoemaker, 69, is among those redoubtable older women who keep King Towers a community. Like Brown and Coger and Taylor, she is a force of memory for her neighborhood — and one of America’s rare few who can claim to have seen the Jacksons sweep Amateur Night at the Apollo in 1969 and be telling the truth.

“I used to sweep the floor just to be there,” said Shoemaker of the Apollo. She says that as the women of her generation age, they must “build the younger ones.” It’s a mission passed down like an heirloom. “Legacy most be known. Legacy must be told. Legacy must by flexible,” she said.

Leona Shoemaker, like her elder peers across NYCHA, has passed that  memory and her mettle on to her son — he has created a career for himself as one of New York’s most exuberant historians. As the head of Harlem Heritage Tours, he leads tours of his home turf seven days a week, teaching the even newer generations about those that came before — and seeing women like his mother everywhere he goes.

“I could walk around the corner and spot like three of them in a matter of 10 minutes,” he said, laughing.

At King there is Ruby Kitchen and Leslie Martin, known to some as Grandma – for years she’s been preaching at the humble Church of the People on West 130th Street, a small brownstone pulpit with a cheery yellow sign. In the South Bronx, 74-year-old Joanne Smitherman is second in command, and in Brooklyn, 70-year old Leora Keith heads the residents of the Tompkins Houses. Everywhere there is a set of brown brick shoulders standing watch over the neighborhood, one of these women is standing within.

Except for Cornelia Taylor, who has to do her work sitting. She’s back in the glass-walled tenant-patrol booth, and while keeping a vigilant watch she’s also on the phone and handling paperwork, and fighting to get heat turned on for a woman of 102. The lady in need lives in public housing, but not in Taylor’s development — she’s in South Jamaica, Queens. “They call me from all over,” said Taylor. If you call me and want something done, I have a way of getting it done.”

Wong Tim and Wong Zhou Hung enjoy an evening in their Seward Park Extension apartment.

Wong Tim and Wong Zhou Hung have lived in New York City Housing since they immigrated to the United States in 1981. Their 14^th-floor apartment in the Seward Park Extension development – located just a few blocks south of the Williamsburg Bridge – has a spacious living room and a view of the Lower East Side. Their walls are decorated with colorful Chinese calendars and posters and a collage of family portraits.

Thirty years ago, Tim and Hung were very happy to have a home so close to Chinatown. Seward is located less than a mile from the area, so they could do their grocery shopping and errands and see their doctor every two months.  However, as they got older and lost mobility, they started to wish there were more activities closer to home.  “There’s no senior center here and no English classes or other things like that,” said Hung. “We talk to other Chinese-speaking residents sometimes, but it can get boring to stay at home.”

One would think there would be more for the Wongs to do.  Seward serves as a home to a uniquely high amount of Asian families, with 26 percent of Seward’s approximately 800 residents being of Asian descent, according to NYCHA’s Resident Data Book, published in January 2011. Of that 26 percent, more than a third are seniors.

These numbers compare drastically to the percentage of Asians within all NYCHA developments, where out of approximately 400,000 residents, only 4.5 percent are of Asian descent. Out of more than 73,000 senior residents in NYCHA, Asians only total 6 percent of that population, according to the Data Book.

Yet in the Queensbridge Houses in Long Island City, where Asian residents also only make up 6 percent of the population, residents have access to the Jacob A. Riis Neighborhood Settlement House, which serves all of Western Queens.  Run by private management, but primarily funded by NYCHA contracts, there is a senior center that is open every day and serves free lunch.  An immigrant program offers free legal counseling to help Asian immigrants obtain U.S. citizenship.

In sharp contrast, Seward does not have such programs, nor does the development have a senior center.  A senior center was located there more than 10 years ago, according to Seward Tenant Association President Carmen Orta, but it was shut down due to NYCHA budget problems.  “First thing they [NYCHA] say is they have no money,” she said.

NYCHA spokespersons did not respond to email requests for comment, but as of now it appears the authority has enough money to pay Settlement House’s contractors.  With free translation services, free English language courses and weekly recreational activities such as tai chi, the unusual problem the center faces is that not enough Asian seniors take advantage of its programming: It serves an average of only 10 a year.

“The challenge is they [Asian seniors] are not coming on a regular basis and others have not been here in a long time,” said director of senior services Robert Madison.  “We just had a Chinese person come today to have a walk around the facility. He came last week for a meal and now wants to do more,” Madison said.

Seward Park Tenant Association member Nidia Cruz felt this made no sense, as Seward has an obviously high number of Asian seniors due to its proximity to Chinatown. “We have a lot [of Chinese] in this building,” she said. “[Because] we have a lot of Chinese in this neighborhood.”

Orta said that while there are neighboring NYCHA developments with senior centers – some of which are frequented by Asian seniors – these are still blocks away from Seward, which creates an unnecessary hardship.  Hung understands: She recently walked to Chinatown in the cold to purchase groceries, and even though Chinatown is less than a mile away, walking back and forth took her an hour.  Tim rarely goes outside because he cannot walk very well anymore at all.

Seward Park does have a community center that Orta feels would make sense to use as a senior center in the mornings, as it only serves as a daycare on weekdays from 2 to 10 p.m.  “We can open the center from 8 [a.m.] until 2:30 [p.m.],” she said.  “They [NYCHA] just need a sponsor.”

Geraldine Phillip, the director of Seward’s Community Center, said an arrangement like that is certainly a possibility, and she is working on initiating programs for seniors for next year.  As of now, there is a private senior group that utilizes the center in the mornings once in a while through NYCHA.  “They sometimes hold health screenings here,” Phillip said.

The language programs offered at the Riis Settlement House at Queensbridge would seem to be the most beneficial to Seward’s residents.  Recently, one person of an elderly Asian couple passed away, and Orta originally did not know if it was the husband or the wife.  “He’s alive, she died,” Orta mumbled.  “I didn’t know but I find out later.  Beautiful person.”

However, Cruz mentioned that in a diverse development such as Seward – where there are just as many Hispanic families as Asian – sometimes speaking the same language is irrelevant. “You can communicate without speaking,” she said with a smile.  “They point out and we point out.”

To its credit, NYCHA has been good about promoting relevant events to Chinese residents of Seward.  Chinese interpreters will usually attend meetings and “sometimes they [NYCHA] put the flyers down here in their [Chinese residents’] language,” according to Cruz.

Nonetheless, the Wongs do not plan to relocate anytime soon to take advantage of programs like the ones at the Settlement House in Queensbridge.  Luckily, Tim and Hung have a big family – six daughters and three sons – and four daughters live in New York. One daughter lives in Seward as well, in one of the development’s other buildings.  Their daughters often bring their families to their parents’ apartment on Saturdays to play mahjong and have dinner together.

“When we moved here 30 years ago, we got so comfortable that we didn’t want to live anywhere else,” Hung said.

As for Seward’s senior center, Orta said the fight would continue, with or without the specialized programs.  “We want a senior center here, [Seward’s] a big place.  Why don’t we have one?” she asked.

To contact the reporters about this story, email Joanna Chiu (jkc2137@columbia.edu) or Travis Irvine (tmi2103@columbia.edu).

Click on individual images for captions (Photo: Sarah Alvi)

Grey hair, to be exact. More than 200,000 residents living in NYCHA-controlled properties are seniors, age 62 or older, according to the agency’s data. That’s 35 percent of NYCHA residents, more than double the citywide percentage of seniors recorded in the last census. With older residents  more likely to suffer from health problems, impaired mobility or isolation, the financially-stretched agency must struggle to cope and provide services, community activities and classes, all with an ever-dwindling budget.

“Growing Old,” a collaborative project involving 18 NYC in Focus reporters, tells the stories of seniors in public housing and those who serve them across the five boroughs. From deteriorating senior centers and grandmothers raising great-grandchildren to HIV and the sex lives of seniors,  “Growing Old” details the unique challenges of public housing and this population.

Select a story from the “Growing Old” project below, and please check back as we will be adding new stories in the coming weeks.

A natural place to retire
By Nicholas Stone

With the population of NYCHA’s housing developments growing older, one of the challenges faced by the authority is how best to provide the services they need. Naturally Occurring Retirement Communities are one of those options.

A tale of three centers
By Edward Small, Lorenzo Franceschi Bicchierai and Ryan W. Neal

The recent economic downturn has caused many senior centers to fall on hard times. James Monroe, South Jamaica, and Drew Hamilton are examples of three different senior centers facing three very different sets of issues.

Grandparents raising a younger generation
By J. Ben Bradford and Alessandra Potenza

One grandmother did not know what disposable diapers were when her great-grandson moved in for the year. Another had only Social Security to live on. Raising a child is always a challenge, but for the 65,000 New Yorkers raising their grandchildren, the trials of aging compound the difficulty.

Making her garden grow
By Qainat Khan

Leticia Ramirez left her idyllic childhood in the Puerto Rican countryside for New York City when she was 11. She moved to Rutgers Houses in 1971 and started her family and garden. A story of being transplanted, laying roots in a concrete jungle, and growing one’s garden far from home.

Remembrances of six decades in public housing
By Marc Georges and Ben Sales

NYCHA residents have seen public housing and New York City grow and change since the first development opened in 1934.  In this story, six seniors remember life in NYCHA–from the birth of television, to the civil rights movement, the HIV/AIDS epidemic, and September 11th.

Asian seniors have uneven access to programs
By Joanna Chiu and Travis Irvine

Across NYCHA, there are several unique programs for immigrants that are popping up at different senior centers. However, at the development with the highest concentration of Asian residents in New York City, Seward Park, immigrants do not have access to a senior center or immigration center.

Leticia Ramirez transplants some of her plants to save them indoors for the winter.

It’s a brisk day in early October, and Leticia Ramirez’s box in the Rutgers Community Garden is at the peak of its beauty. Purple impatiens. Red snapdragons. The marigold named for its deep yellow.

Ramirez, 69, has a stack of leafy potted plants in her red wire cart, along with a half- full bag of potting soil. She has been transplanting some of her plants from the garden into pots, in preparation for the winter. She’ll save them to her indoor garden of potted plants, while letting the flowering plants run their course once winter sets in.

Fast forward to December. The last of Ramirez’s marigolds hang on and dead stems and twigs from the other plants litter the dull gray soil. On the windowsills of Ramirez’s tenth-floor apartment, her plants are still doing well, despite a recent infestation of an aphid-like insect. Ramirez sits in the fluorescent glow of her building’s lobby playing dominoes with her neighbors. She would rather be crocheting, she said, but looking down for long periods of time strains her neck and her physical therapist has forbidden her to do it. Dominoes allows her to pass the time and maintain a level head.  “My bones remind me I’m not as young as I used to be,” she said.

The door to the lobby opens and closes as residents come home, letting in a cold draft. As the seasons change, Ramirez has been spending less time in the Rutgers Community Garden, which she helped to re-organize in 1992 during her tenure as Tenants Association President. Even though she is getting older, Ramirez plans on gardening “for as long as I’m able to bend down and lift up,” she said.

Ramirez was born in Puerto Rico in 1942, and lived on her grandfather’s farm on the island of Vieques until she was 11. The family grew sugarcane as a cash crop, owned livestock, had a garden and planted enough food to feed themselves.

She remembers her mother tending roses—pink, red, white and yellow bushes—something she wasn’t allowed to help with until she was older. However, Ramirez didn’t get her chance to help her mother with the roses, or grow food, or collect eggs on her family’s farm. When she was 11, she left her grandfather to join her mother and extended family in New York City. At 11, Ramirez didn’t have much say in moving, or really know the reason for the family’s move. Children didn’t ask questions then. But she found herself whisked away from the great open spaces of the Puerto Rican countryside to the looming buildings and concrete tangle of New York City.

“I never liked the city,” Ramirez said of moving to New York. She remembers living in the fifth-floor apartment as a girl and only seeing other buildings from her window. Her family all but stopped gardening, saying simply, “When you’re overcrowded in an apartment, you don’t have the time.” But the impulse to grow things never left. “It’s something that stays with you….and you get into doing what you grew up seeing,” she explained.

It wasn’t until 1971 when Ramirez moved into Rutgers Houses with her husband, Herbert, that she started getting her hands dirty in soil. It started with geraniums from Woolworth’s (geraniums remain her favorite plant, and a staple of her indoor garden) and ferns from her in-law’s home in Puerto Rico. They lined the living room window sill, the window that had the best light.

When Ramirez moved to Rutgers, there was a community garden, though that was a bit of a misnomer, since it had been taken over by only one person. The garden was instated as part of NYCHA’s beautification, and residents didn’t question one person taking over the garden. However, when the resident who took charge of the garden died in 1992, Ramirez reorganized and brought the garden under her own management.

When Ramirez took over as Tenants Association president, she split the garden up into 12 smaller plots, which she assigned on a first-come, first-served basis. Along with her husband and two sons, she laid the foundations for the new garden. They made the elevated wooden boxes and filled them with soil. Herbert, Ramirez’s husband, used to help her with all the heavy lifting—carrying out the garbage, hauling bags of soil, but she remained in charge of the planting in her own plot. “He didn’t have a green thumb,” she said good-naturedly.

Leticia Ramirez started her garden again this past year.

She had her plot from 1992 to 1998, when she gave it up because of what she perceived as a conflict of interest:  Every year, the Housing Authority holds a competition for community gardens. When Ramirez began working at the Rutgers Community Center, she decided it wasn’t fair for her to have a registered garden for judging and a job at the Center, so she gave her plot to a friend. She remained involved as the garden supervisor, and found herself doing the daily caretaking–raking leaves, replenishing tools, and watering the gardens whose owners might not be mobile enough to tend their plot.

People who still have their plots have had them for years, and have grown old with them. Ramirez said a resident in her 90s still manages to visit her plot, if not tend it. “[She can] barely walk or move, but she still comes down with a walker,” she said.

In the early days, Ramirez said the owners of the plots would come down and socialize together in the garden. There used to be chairs inside the garden, where the residents would garden, sit and talk in the summer time. “We had a good group,” Ramirez said. But as they’ve grown older, they see less of each other in the garden.

When Ramirez retired in 2004, she could have gotten her place in the garden back. However it was also the same year her husband died. The memory of the garden was painful to her. “I couldn’t get myself to go back in, my husband was always [there] with me,” she said. “We knew each other a lifetime.” Ramirez’s familiar presence in the garden all but ended that year, she even gave up her position as the supervisor.

One of the potted plants in Ramirez’s house started out as a cutting of a plant her husband brought home from work. He worked for an agency that delivered homebound people their meals, and one of the clients gave him a cutting from her plant. It has grown into a big plant since then, through careful pruning and by propagating cuttings, and now hangs from her ceiling. Sometimes gets in the way. “We took it down for Thanksgiving [so people] didn’t hit their heads…I was a nervous wreck,” Ramirez said laughing at herself. “I didn’t know how protective I was of my plants.” She has three cuttings from the plant in water now, waiting for the roots to sprout.

This year was the first time since 2004 that Ramirez has been back in the Community Garden, acquiring a plot from a resident who died in 2010. She had her grandkids over the summer, and they helped her with the weeding, watering and planting.

With the trees now bereft of leaves, Ramirez thinks of the chores ahead. She has already transplanted some of her leafy plants to take indoors. She needs to rake and save the fallen leaves for mulch the next year. And then it will be winter, and there won’t be much reason to go into the garden. “I just hate to see things die, boxes full of snow,” she said. “It’s part of nature, from one season to another. That’s how it’s going to be.”

Dec. 20 - When Kenneth Edwards borrowed 25 dollars from his childhood friend, Jason Ford, he had no idea what it would cost him.

The two boys had grown up only two blocks away from each other. They rode their bicycles together and played on the same baseball team. A resident of Bedford Stuyvesant, and later Crown Heights in Brooklyn, Edwards grew up in a sheltered home. His parents made sure that Edwards was kept away from the lifestyle that existed on the streets– one that often introduced kids to drugs and guns.

Kenneth Edwards lived a sheltered childhood in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn. (Photo credit: Kenneth Edwards/Facebook)

But it all changed by the time he was 14, when he got the chance to see what the “guys on the corner” were really about. “The cars, the jewelry, the girls,” Edwards remembers. “Once I got a taste of it, once I found out about it, it wrapped me up.”

Edwards quickly fell in with the “in crowd,” a group of older boys who were selling drugs, shoplifting, and carrying weapons. He was making more money than ­his father, who worked as a mechanic. The more money he made, he says, the meaner he became. His childhood friend, Ford, was also drawn to the streets. At first, they were working as partners selling drugs. “But the drug game will turn you into enemies.” Edwards said.

It was August of 1990 when Edwards borrowed the 25 dollars from Ford. But when he hadn’t paid Ford back after two months, Ford came to find him and threatened to kill him if it wasn’t returned. “It was either I get him first, or he get me first,” Edwards recalled.

On October 28th, Edwards told Ford that he would take him to a house to get drugs and money. As his friend Pepe drove, Edwards climbed into the backseat of a van next to Ford. “We got into an argument,” Edwards remembers. “I pulled my gun and he pulled his gun, and my gun went off first.” He fired the first shot at Ford’s left temple. The sound of the gun startled him, and he fired twice more. His friend fell on the ground, but was still moving, so Edwards pulled the trigger for the fourth and final time. Then he and Pepe drove until they could see water. They stopped on Gold Street near the East River, and left Ford’s body on the street near an underpass.

The police did not have any witnesses when they found a John Doe at the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge. But Edwards knew he ultimately had to pay for his crime. “That wasn’t the life I wanted to live anymore,” he said. Two days later, he turned himself in. He took a plea deal, and was sentenced to 15 years to life.

In 1990, murders were occurring at an alarming rate. Forty-nine murders were reported in the local 79th police precinct. An increasing number of youth were participating in these murders. The same year, almost 8 percent of murders reported nationwide resulted in juvenile arrests, according to the FBI. Some of these youth ended up on Rikers Island with Edwards, whose life took a sharp turn in jail.

Edwards was placed in Sheila Richard’s GED class at the on-site educational facility. Richards was a new teacher and was hesitant to teach in a jail. But after visiting the men’s ward and seeing the number of youth that were behind bars, she says she felt she had to do something about it.

Kenneth Edwards was placed in Sheila Richard’s GED class at the on-site educational facility on Rikers Island.

At first, Kenneth Edwards seemed like every other student in her class. But one thing stood out to Richards. “He was very quiet, and he was one of the kids that didn’t really participate in the madness going on there.” Just three months before Edwards arrived, a bloody uprising on Riker’s Island had left more than 130 guards and inmates injured. Edwards says that what he saw in jail when he arrived was no different than the streets of Brooklyn. “You have your drugs, you have your homemade, jail made weapons, you have gambling.”  Edwards says he had to make a choice- whether he was going to be a part of that crowd, or not.

Edwards chose the latter. With the help of his teacher, he earned his GED and worked several jobs inside of jail. By the time he was released in August of 2007, Edwards had spent almost as much of his life inside of prison, as he had outside. He says he was disappointed to find that the same things were happening. “The only thing that changed was certain language they [were] using,” he said. “Still [you] have people selling drugs and people with guns and using the gun.”

Today, Edwards is back on the streets where he grew up, but in a different role. He works as a violence interrupter for an anti-gun violence program called Save Our Streets (S.O.S.) in Crown Heights. Edwards goes out into the community to hand out educational materials about gun violence, forms relationships with community leaders, including the clergy, and mediates potentially violent situations.

Kenneth Edwards works for an anti-gun violence program called Save Our Streets in Crown Heights, Brooklyn.

Edwards was hired by Sharon Ife-Charles, the Deputy Director of the Crown Heights Mediation Center, which runs the S.O.S. program. Ife-Charles says that Edwards was searching for redemption when he applied for the job. “It was as though he and God had this agreement that what he did, he knew was wrong,” said Ife-Charles. “He’s gonna pay the time for it. He paid a time for it.”

Although crime rate in Crown Heights has gone down significantly over the past 18 years, residents still complain about disturbances in the community. Brower Park, located between Kingston and Brooklyn Avenues, has become a safe haven for a notorious gang called the Brower Park Gang, also known as Brower Park Boys. The gang has sparked fear in the neighborhood since they started calling the park home during the summer.

Edwards says that he will always feel guilt for what he did. Although he has a full time job at a window manufacturing company, he says his work with the S.O.S. program is his priority. He says that he hopes that through his work, he can keep others from making the same mistake that he made 21 years ago. “I get people to understand, the kids, that when you commit a crime, regardless of what that crime is, you are hurting someone else, not just yourself.”

Dec. 21 – Ask anyone in ‘P-ville’ about Kevin Freeman and those who remember him have nothing but positive things to say. Words like “good kid”, and “charming” come up over and over again. His image is immortalized on a 15-foot mural on the bricks of a bodega in the South Bronx. But Freeman, though loved, led a darker life than those closest to him are willing to acknowledge.

Freeman was 25-years old the day he was killed. On a summer afternoon in July 2004, he saw three friends arguing inside of one of the courtyards of Patterson Houses. He tried to stop the fight, and he was shot in the neck. Two others were injured in the incident. Court records would later show that the initial altercation that led to the shooting may have been drug related.

Friends of Kevin Freeman stand outside the Patterson Houses. Choosing to remain unnamed, the residents of Building 338 repaint Freeman's mural every other year.

The murder of Kevin Freeman was one of the 548 homicides that took place in New York City that year. A third of these homicides occurred in the Bronx itself. Those who witnessed Freeman’s murder say the bullet was not meant for him.

However, David Kennedy, a criminologist at John Jay College, explains that most of the violence caused in communities like Patterson Houses are committed by a very small group of young men. While they tend to be involved in the drug trade, he says, most of the violence is in fact not drug related.

“The violence is personal. Its about respect and disrespect, and standing vendetta between groups”, he said. Freeman, it seemed, had earned the respect of his peers early on by establishing that he was a good fighter. He got his nick name ‘K-O’ for ending several bouts in a knock out.

Herbert Brian, a childhood friend of Freeman with whom he said he sometimes exchanged clothes, remembers that Freeman belonged to a couple of different gangs. “He was well respected and he was liked by a lot of people…he was down with a couple crews. You got the TRE-8, mob, and the bloods”, he said.

It was the members of the TRE-8 mob that donated almost $1500 to have a mural painted in Freeman’s memory. It is the only one that still remains in the housing development. Veswan Robertson a resident of Building 338 for which the mob is named said that there were two sides to Freeman. “The charming baller” who everyone loved, and the recluse “who didn’t let anyone know about his money”, hinting that Freeman sold drugs. He was also outside in the projects the day ‘K-O’ was killed. He ran home when he heard the gun shots. It was only later they knew one of his friend had been hit

Freeman’s aunt, Rodley Dozier, says that anyone could have died that day. Dozier believes that as long as there are communities like Patterson Houses, African American males like Freeman remain at risk. She said, “being at wrong place at the wrong time” is the reason so many end up dying.

K-O’s friend, Herbert Brian, says the murder was a wake up call for him. Today, Brian is in his early thirties, the same age his friend Kevin would have been, had he lived.

When Freeman was murdered, Brian was serving a prison sentence himself after a stabbing. He said K-O’s death made him want better for himself. But he knew that in order to change, he had to leave the public houses.  So he moved from the Patterson houses and is living with his family elsewhere in the Bronx.

Freeman’s friends gather every year on his birthday to repaint his mural. They drink, smoke, and put candles in front of it. While Freeman may not have been a “good kid”, they say, he was one of them, and so they want to keep his memory alive.

Dec. 20 – Malik Sheppard spent a total of 15 years in prison on an armed robbery charge, nine of them in solitary confinement. The experience turned him into a spoken word poet.

Why do most ghetto dreams die stillborn?
Could it be the vision is blocked by the immense mental barriers of project walls?
In which reality seldom inspires
Often appalls
Leaving kids’ hope forlorn

As a teenager in Queensbridge Houses, he was in and out of high school. This is common in Queensbridge, where almost half of the students drop out before graduation, according to the East River Development Alliance (ERDA), a not-for-profit organization working with public housing neighborhoods. “The major challenge in working in this type of area is that it’s very difficult to reach the most at-risk student because most of them are not seeking out help,” Bethany Goldszer, ERDA College Access Coordinator, said.

“I really didn’t enjoy my childhood because I was doing things that even grown men weren’t doing,” Sheppard remembers. “I grew up very fast. I shouldn’t have.”

Sheppard with his mother, Patricia.

Growing up with a father imprisoned for murder, Sheppard says he had few role models. He practiced eating a full meal with two razorblades in his mouth in case he needed to defend himself in a prison cafeteria. By the time he was 12 years old, he had mastered the task. While other boys in his neighborhood talked about sports, he and his friends often had conversations about whether they were bound for Rikers Island, Attica or Auburn.

“If you are running in the streets, it is death or jail,” Kasim Alston, Malik’s older brother, said. “There is no in between.”

When he was a teenager,  Sheppard was charged with armed robbery after carjacking a New York City correctional officer in a McDonalds drive-thru. Sheppard was also charged with assault and robbery from a separate incident earlier that evening, according to court documents. The night before the armed robbery, Sheppard — along with three others — burglarized an apartment. When the victim reported the incident to the police, Sheppard beat him up. A few hours later, he was arrested. “During the arrest, only thing I could think of was: how the hell did I get into this situation?” Sheppard recalls. “I sort of kept asking myself that. How did we end up here?”

It was not Sheppard’s first encounter with the law. He had been in and out of a juvenile detention center in North Carolina since he was 13 years old. His mother, decided to move him down south to “slow him down,” but Sheppard ultimately found his way back to New York City.

“When I found out what he did, I really can’t say that I was surprised,” Fredo Alston, Malik’s cousin, said, speaking of the carjacking. “The way of life back then, and at our age, that was pretty much par for the course.” Malik Sheppard, then 16,  was sentenced as an adult, and sent to Attica Correctional Facility. He remembers getting increasingly aggressive in the early years of his sentence. “My main focus was on survival and getting through it unharmed and coming home alive, if I even made it home,” Sheppard explains.

After being caught “promoting prison contraband” (drugs and weapons) Sheppard was sentenced to nine years in solitary confinement, and transferred to Auburn Correctional Facility. He refers to his time in solitary as his “cocoon stage” because that is when he felt he really found himself. He became obsessed with reading, particularly “The Destruction of Black Civilization” by Chancellor Williams, an Afrocentric examination of American History, and “Spirit of a Man: A Vision of Transformation for Black Men and the Women Who Love Them” by Iyanla Vanzant.

“[Solitary] kind of saved my life. Had it not been for nine years of solitude, I probably never would have made it out of prison,” he said.

The first thing Sheppard did when he left prison was take a 2-mile hike to this waterfall.

Sheppard also took classes through a Cornell University extension offered at Auburn. He was released in July of 2010. Now 33 years old, he is applying the credits he received toward his civil engineering degree at City Tech in Brooklyn.  If he gets a bachelors degree, he would be among the five percent of people at Queensbridge Houses with a college degree, according to ERDA.

Goldszer points out that preparing, applying and paying for college can be challenging for many low-income students who have not grown up with a lot of information or motivation to be highly educated. “They are very isolated from a lot of the opportunities that the mainstream community offers,” Goldszer explained.

She also has a personal reason for helping young people with academic aspirations. “I came from similar circumstances: a low-income, single-parent household and my ticket out was college,” she said.

Sheppard says he’s just grateful for a second chance to pursue his dreams. “It hasn’t been easy at all. This transition from prison to society is a daily struggle, but I know that as long as I continue to do something positive, I’m going to get wherever I want to be.”   

Until then, Sheppard will pursue his spoken word poetry and hopes to graduate in 2014.

Dec 20 – John Roman loves guns. It’s what cost him ten years of his life.

He first felt the cold metal of a gun in his hand at 13-years old. It gave him power, he said, and the feeling that he could do anything. “That’s a dangerous, dangerous feeling in a young boys head,” admitted Roman.

The obsession for guns has always stuck with him. He asked NYC In Focus to not use his full name – so we are calling him John Roman.

Roman, 43, was raised in the Johnson Housing Development in the Bronx. There he lived with his parents and sister until he was 10 years old.  He recalls having a troubled childhood plagued by various violent incidences.  He was sexually and physically abused, and witnesses multiple murders. Roman said he was beaten by his father whenever he forgot to eat. “He took me by the neck and started punching me,” he said, punching his right hand repeatedly on a beat. “I called it the staple gun.”

Roman taking a walk near his Bronx apartment.

When Roman was 18, he began robbing, collecting and selling firearms. It’s what he did for almost 15 years. Former Assistant District Attorney John O’Rouke oversaw the undercover operation that eventually brought Roman down. Roman was arrested on April 1st 2001. O’Rouke still remembers the case ten years later. He said Roman’s eyes “lit up like a Christmas tree” when he talked about his guns. Roman was proud of his collection, said O’Rouke. That’s what he found most disturbing. “It was that twinkle in his eyes and that fascination that frightened me because he, in my opinion, was then and probably still is now a dangerous individual” O’Rouke added.

Court documents show that Roman had explosives stashed in his kitchen and his bathroom closet. He also had 444 rounds of ammunition and two Israeli machine guns.  But Roman asserts he isn’t a violent guy. He said his gun collection is identical to other collections. And says, it’s not the violence of the weapon that he finds interesting, but the technology behind the firearm. At his peak, Roman said he owned 270 guns.

He claimed that most of his guns sold were to Albanians and Hasidic Jews who, he said, needed weapons to protect their stores. The court indictment showed that Roman sold 12 guns to undercover cops. He thought they were drug lords. O’Rouke says that the guns Roman sold to gangs likely caused harm.  “There is no doubt that he contributed and probably caused a significant amount of violence in the city of New York.”

Roman expresses remorse for selling weapons to gang members. “You don’t know where the guns went” he said, “You don’t know if the guns were used to harm someone.”

Roman faced 46 counts including criminal possession, selling of a weapon, burglary and grand larceny.  After pleading guilty and accepting a plea bargain, Roman served ten years of a 28 year sentence. O’Rouke believes Roman got off easy. “Nobody, I don’t even think the judge believed that he parole board would release him so soon.”

The Johnson Houses where Roman grew up

Sociologist and Professor at New York University, Pedro Noguera said gun obsessions are common. The gun culture can be seductive and not just for delinquents he added. “Guns represent power. You can feel that power when you hold a gun in your hand.”

After learning all he could about guns though books and Internet research, Roman moved to explosives. Roman says he built an explosive ammunition that would puncture a bulletproof vest. And before his arrest, Roman was engineering a type of silent explosive.  “If you were wearing a bulletproof vest, when it hits the vest it explodes and the rest of it goes in. Not that I would go around shooting anyone, but your mind starts clicking and clicking.”

Roman now faces 11 years on parole – that means a 9 p.m. curfew, checking in with his parole officer once a month and refraining from drugs and alcohol. He’s not allowed to possess any firearms, so the gun tattoos on his forearms are all that’s left of his love of guns.

He lives with his mother in a Bronx apartment one block from where he was arrested. In his free time, he loves to draw. He said he’s trying to get his life on track. But he said he doesn’t want to tempt himself by putting himself in social environments. “I don’t want to put myself in that kind of environment where I know something can go wrong because I’m not the most calm person in situations like that.”  That’s why he works 60 hours a week installing cable.

Noguera said fitting into society after spending a decade incarcerated may be a struggle for Roman.  “He may have difficulty functioning and developing positive relationships with other people because he’s been in an institution where he’s been regimented and controlled.”

Drawings of women by John Roman

Roman says doing time in some of the state’s maximum security prisons – like Attica, Clayton, Sullivan – straightened him up.

It taught him to accept the mistakes and decisions he made. But it all came at a price to those closest to Roman. “My mom and my sister and my dad. I can honestly say, that’s what it cost me.” Although Roman said he is not close with his sister, and rarely talks to his dad, he acknowledges the struggle and pain they have endured. “I don’t know if I could have forgiven my son for doing something like I did,” he said. Whether or not Roman is able to resist his passion for guns and gun mechanics remains unknown.

Now that he is out of prison and putting the pieces of his life back together, Roman hopes to rekindle the relationship with his sister, spend more time with his 21-year old daughter and stand by his father’s side as he battles cancer.

Dec. 18 – For Ernesto Villalobos, playing the violin is a way of life.

“It’s like learning a language you don’t even notice when it happens and all of a sudden you speak that language. And it’s like magic. You just know how to do it, you don’t question it”

Ernesto was just three years old when he first picked up the violin in his hometown of Xalapa in Veracruz, Mexico. He started classes at about five, and by the age of ten he was performing in competitions and recitals.

Ernesto Villalobos plays the violin (Photo Credit: Hema Parmar)

His younger brothers, Luis and Alberto, soon followed in his footsteps.

At 19, Ernesto won the prestigious Fulbright Scholarship to attend the Manhattan School of Music.  The brothers soon reunited in New York and settled in Marble Hill, the Bronx. That’s where this trio of violin virtuosos formed The Villalobos Brothers.  Their music combines their Mexican roots, classical training and jazz inspiration.

They have developed their own signature sound, they call ‘fast-chatting violin’ which mimics the way people in their Mexican hometown speak.

Their Mexican tradition is a central theme in their music. It’s something Ernesto and his brothers weave into their pieces at every opportunity. Ernesto credits his grandmother for teaching them the importance of their culture.

“She was our musical connection with the Mexican roots” he said, “She would pick up the guitar [or] sit down at the piano and just play and sing. She really carried the tradition in a beautiful way.”

Water, for example, is a very special theme for those living in the coastal-state of Veracruz. “There’s all sorts of ocean references and that we also carry a lot of that in our music. We’re thinking of making a music video by the ocean.” Ernesto says.

Ernesto, Luis and Alberto Villalobos began to make a name for themselves.  In 2005, they were invited to perform at Carnegie Hall, where they performed an all-original program.  They’ve also performed at the Latin Grammy Awards, the United Nations and with Dolly Parton. Among their more solemn performances was performing at a concentration camp in Auschwitz – something Ernesto will never forget.  “That was also one of those moments that really transform you and change your life forever” he says. “We did a candlelit vigil at the children’s barrack. We spent the whole night playing in the children’s barrack. That was amazing.”

The Villalobos brothers are a staple in Marble Hill, the Bronx.  Their house, located at 52 Marble Hill Road, has become a community hub.  Every so often they throw free musical parties, where they invite other local musicians and artists to display their skills.

“A lot of their music and concerts have been a meeting ground” says neighbor Khary Marshall, who lives across the street from the Villalobos house. “Lots of times, you can be over there listening to them rehearse, and conversation will come up about what happened around the corner last week. I think it’s also given to a lot of people meeting that otherwise would not have met.”

In 2009, they released their self-titled Album, Villa-lobos. The brothers are now working on their second album called “Aliens of Extraordinary Abilities”.