Amanda Goris, a pudgy 11-year-old from Queens, sucked down honey from a squeezable plastic jar. “It helps the melody come out all beautiful,” she said. The teenage girls from Fully Focused, a dance group from Brooklyn, were putting on their “door-knockers” – massive triangle-shaped fake-gold earrings – and neon yellow and pink Reeboks, squealing with excitement and lip-syncing in front of full-length mirrors. “Fully focused!” one yelled, jumping in the air. In the back, Shaniece Ford adjusted the padding in her strapless turquoise dress, singing along to a portable CD player, her eyes closed.

Abruptly, a voice and music cracked through the large, white-walled room’s speakers, a live feed from the stage. “Welcome to Harlem USA! The world famous Apollo Theater!” a voice boomed over a band and applause. “It’s show time baby!”

Upstairs, that meant near pandemonium. Capone, the comic host, had the 1,500-person audience rollicking, dancing and clapping to the house band.

Downstairs, it was prayer time.

“Lord, we all join together,” a producer said, all the Amateur Night contestants holding hands in a circle, heads bowed. “We are all special, Lord. We are all winners in your name. Amen.”

***

Every Wednesday night at 7:30 p.m., since 1934, aspiring performers have stepped on the Apollo Theatre’s stage hoping for fame. The 125th Street venue is “where stars are born and legends are made,” they like to say. On stage, confidence is critical in front of bright lights, a merciless crowd and talented competition. Backstage, the make-up looks overdone; the braggadocio is subdued; frustrations come out; and camaraderie between contestants is normal.

“Performers form a certain bond. If you were booed, everyone will try and console you,” said Billy Mitchell, the Apollo’s resident historian and an on-and-off staffer since 1964, describing the Green Room’s atmosphere over the decades. “Everyone’s sitting there, nervous, wondering what’s next.”

Some of those who wondered “what’s next” include Sarah Vaughn, Cab Calloway, Jackie Wilson, Stevie Wonder, Nat King Cole, Buddy Holly, Michael Jackson, Jay-Z, Mary J. Blige and dozens more who were amateurs on a Wednesday night at the Apollo. Alternatively energizing and intimidating, every performer in the Green Room knows the musical icons who were cheered to winning the contest and, later, fame.

“To know James Brown, Billie Holiday, Lauryn Hill have all been here, it’s amazing to share in that history,” said Ché Los, 26, a spoken word artist and teacher from the Lower East Side, and a recent Amateur Night contestant who was booed off stage. “You’ve already won by being on this stage.”

The Apollo uses Amateur Night as its anchor event. In January 2008, the theater launched a $44.5 million fundraising drive as part of a multi-year, $84 million expansion and renovation plan. Once bankrupt and closed from 1975 to 1984, the Apollo’s resurrection since the mid-1990s has mirrored that of Harlem. As the neighborhood became safer, the local economy was reinvigorated, and tourism began in earnest, with the Apollo as a key attraction.

Tourism has helped the Apollo become financially viable, but it has changed the character of Amateur Night, which was once primarily attended by African-Americans. Today, approximately three-quarters of Wednesday night audiences are tourists, many of them international. Still, the crowds continue their famous booing and cat-calling, and there are long lines every week to audition for the weekly show.

“The talent is different today,” said Mitchell, who is known as “Mr. Apollo.” “Some of the performers think they have talent and don’t. Years ago, people didn’t think they had talent and did.”

In 1934, a 15-year-old name Ella Fitzgerald was the first female to win Amateur Night. Fitzgerald was scheduled to dance, but she was so intimidated by another dance group that she refused. Ralph Cooper, the creator of the event and its Master of Ceremonies, asked if she could do anything else. She purportedly responded: “I can sing a little bit.”

***

Towards the end of the night, Goris, the honey-sucking 11-year-old, was not happy. She had come in second place in the Stars of Tomorrow amateur competition (which takes place just before the main performers begin) to a 12-year-old from the South Bronx, Jamila Velazquez, and was now sitting backstage, alone in a blue dress dotted with fake diamonds.

“Do I have to stay here the whole time?” she asked no one in particular.

Marcia Barrow, 25, decided to play to role of the old pro. The Yonkers native, heavy with make-up, sat down next to Goris in the Green Room.

“I never let the competition discourage me. I was once your age too – when I lost, I practiced harder,” Barrow said, her voice plainly showing she was from New York City. Then Barrow, who had now appeared on Amateur Night three times, gave more specific advice: “You should’ve sung gospel – sang for God.”

Goris, who sang a slow, syrupy love song – “Believer” by Christina Milian – was not convinced. “But I pick the songs I want,” she said, her well-groomed stage confidence starting to crack. She sat in a folding chair, chewing on a blue bead necklace.

Instead of debating her would-be mentee, Barrow stood up. “Let me give you a hug.”

Soon, Goris disappeared to find her aunt Bridget in the crowd. As the clean up-crews began to make their ways through the aisles, the Green Room slowly emptied. The girls from Fully Focused, who had won the night’s contest, took off their fake-gold necklaces and cut-up white sweatshirts, a few of them singing to their dance music or texting on their cell phones.

Still wearing a shiny silver dress and glistening red lip-gloss, Barrow packed her roller bag, saying good-bye to the dance girls and the rapper Potential, the second-place winner. She was going home to sleep, to change, and then to her job at a K-Mart in Poughkeepsie, the night shift.

Barrow forced a smile. “I’ll be back.”

Then there were the repairs the landlord wasn’t making. “I have mushrooms growing out of my walls. Instead of a shower head, there is a hole in my wall where the water comes out.”

One day last spring she heard about a meeting being organized by tenants of her building on East 116th Street. She went to the meeting and has been fighting ever since.

That meeting, one of dozens organized throughout the neighborhood by a group called Movement for Justice in El Barrio, has spurred a wave of political activism that is working to help residents of East Harlem fight what they say are greedy landlords who take advantage of poorly-enforced housing laws. Movement for Justice in El Barrio has organized protests against Sanchez’ landlord, the Dawnay, Day Group, and also plans to sue the company for deceptive business practices.

East Harlem has become the darling of the real estate market in recent years, attracting middle class professionals looking to find relatively attractive deals without leaving Manhattan. Residential developers have moved in and dozens of condominiums are in the works with names like Park Hill East and Observatory Place. But some activists and longtime residents worry landlords eager to charge higher prices may be taking advantage of rent-stabilized tenants.

“If they get us out they could double or triple the rent,” said Sanchez. Sanchez pays $600 a month for a rent-stabilized studio. She said a similar apartment in the same building now rents for twice that amount.

“All these developers want to take over Manhattan—whatever piece is left,” said Juan Haro, the president of Movement for Justice in El Barrio. “We consider ourselves a community in resistance… in red alert. Our intention is to resist and not allow it to happen.”
         
In 2006, Movement for Justice led protests against Steven Kessner, who until last March owned 47 buildings in East Harlem. The group accused him of failing to make repairs to apartments and led rallies against him. Kessner was named one of the city’s 10 worst landlords by the Village Voice in 2006. At the time, Kessner said he wasn’t making repairs because the apartments were overcrowded. Last March, Kessner sold his portfolio of buildings to Dawnay, Day Group, a privately-held investment firm based in London. 

Movement for Justice in El Barrio believes Dawnay, Day is continuing the practices of the previous landlord. Haro believes the letters from Dawnay, Day demanding late fees and back payments are an effort to intimidate tenants and ultimately push them out. He also points out the company’s buyback program, which offered some tenants $10,000 to vacate an apartment. “That is a concrete example of the fact they are trying to get rid of the tenants to jack up the rent,” said Haro.  

Juan Vasquez lives on the second floor of a rent-stabilized apartment on East 117th Street owned by Dawnay, Day. The hallway is lined with posters alerting tenants of pest control and housing department regulations. Inside his two-bedroom apartment, a curtain separates a cluttered kitchen from a living room that doubles as a third bedroom. Vasquez, a cook at an Italian restaurant in the financial district, pays his part of the $940 rent on time every month and has several stacks of documents that he says back up his claims.

Vasquez heard about Movement for Justice from a flyer posted inside his building. He came across the flyer a few months back and has been attending meetings.

Until a month ago, Vasquez was being charged more than $7,000 in back rent, legal fees and other charges. In September, a lawyer working with Movement for Justice wrote to the landlord asking for an explanation for the charges. Vasquez’s charges have since been reduced to $1,900. But Vasquez still thinks it’s too much and wants the company to clear his balance.

A Dawnay, Day representative says the company has done nothing wrong. Michael, a company representative who declined to give his last name, said the back charges were carried over from the previous landlord. He said the company was no longer obligated to bill for them and has readjusted tenant balances. Any additional balances are the result of pending litigation between tenants and the previous owner, he said. He also said the buyback program is standard practice in New York real estate and that the company had received calls from interested tenants.

“This is a business and we do try to maximize profit within our legal limits,” said Michael.

New York’s rent stabilization laws allow for regular fixed increases in rents for long-term tenants. Once a tenant leaves, the landlord can charge the open market rate for apartments and ultimately increase the capital value of the building.

For Haro, the problem is bigger than landlords like Dawnay, Day. He alleges that the Department of Housing Preservation and Development is not doing enough to enforce existing rent laws. “The housing legislation that has been passed doesn’t really do much because HPD has no real teeth,” said Haro.
   
Last month, the group held a protest outside the Department’s assistance center on 7th Avenue.

Neill Coleman, a spokesperson for HPD, said the agency protects tenants in a variety of ways.  “Every landlord in New York City has a legal obligation to maintain their buildings in good repair and up to code,” he said in an email statement. If landlords do not fulfill that obligation, tenants can take them to housing court. If that fails, HPD will make emergency repairs and bill the building owner.  “New York City’s emergency repair program is by far the largest in the nation,” Coleman wrote.

Since its founding in 2004, Movement for Justice in El Barrio has operated on a belief that renters need to fight their own battles. The group works with tenants and holds workshops on public speaking and communications strategies. Haro points out that the group rarely uses lawyers and tries to get tenants to represent themselves in housing court.  “In order for East Harlem to survive there needs to be numerous leaders that come from these buildings—the people that are directly affected by the problems,” said Haro.

Dawnay, Day reduced Carmen Sanchez’ account balance from $4,000 to $1,100 this fall. But she isn’t satisfied. Sanchez will continue to push for the repairs to her apartment and to have her remaining balance cleared. “We need to fight for our rights,” she said.

“Asthma rates [among children] are one in four now. They used to be one in six to one in seven,” said Dr. Kiran Shah, an allergy immunologist at East Harlem’s Metropolitan Hospital Center. That was only five or six years ago.

The reasons for the sharp increase, Shah said, are complex: “Better reporting, better diagnosis, children are more exposed to allergens, and smoke, and smog. It’s multi-factorial.”

Asthma is a chronic respiratory disease triggered by allergens, exercise, or changes in temperature. Asthmatics can have sudden attacks that cause chest pain, coughing, and make breathing close to impossible.

It’s an ugly disease. Thania Acosta, a chronic asthmatic, wheezed painfully as she struggled to breathe in her apartment at the James Weldon Johnson Houses in East Harlem.

“It feels like someone’s holding you down under water. You can’t breathe, but they’re not letting you get up,” she said. Acosta was, essentially, drowning on dry land. She headed to the emergency room. It would be her 15th time that year.

Asthma can run in families and Acosta’s 13-year-old son Damien has the disease. Her 9-year-old daughter Krislynn has developed it too.

New York City tracks asthma by the number of people who, like Acosta, are admitted to the hospital in crisis. But not everyone with asthma ends up there. Some have less severe cases; others have better managed their disease. Only 40 percent of adult asthmatics in New York City used an emergency room in 2003. No one knows what causes asthma, but with good control of the disease and its symptoms, asthmatics can lead normal, healthy lives.

Experts do, however, know what can trigger the disease. A noxious cocktail of asthma triggers like mold, vermin, plaster dust, and diesel fumes, along with poverty, smoking, obesity, and poor medical access, have made East Harlem the asthma capital of New York. Taken together, these factors make East Harlem a dangerous place to live. Despite an overall drop in hospitalization rates, a child living in East Harlem is still three times more likely to be rushed to the emergency room, gasping for air, than a child from any other neighborhood in New York City.

Local hospitals, advocacy groups, New York City and the state are tackling the problem on multiple fronts, hoping to bring those numbers down.

The multilayered approach does seem to be working. More asthmatics in East Harlem are getting their disease under control through intervention at the preschool level, referrals from emergency rooms to clinics, home maintenance, and environmental action.

Rosemary Obiapi, health coordinator for Union Settlement Association, East Harlem’s largest social services agency, has found that identifying asthmatic children early and getting them into treatment helps keep them out of the hospital. “Asthma doesn’t start from school age, it starts from preschool,” she explained.

Working with Dr. Sebastian Bonner at the New York Academy of Medicine, Obiapi developed a system to identify asthmatic children at the organization’s six East Harlem preschools using a brief questionnaire, an asthma action plan, and a computerized health tracking system.

The organization’s preschool will not admit a child unless parents answer a few simple questions that screen for asthma. If there is cause for concern, parents must have their child diagnosed and an asthma action plan completed by a physician.

An asthma action plan turns parents, doctors and educators into a team, outlining which medications to administer, and how to adjust them as needed. The school tracks the children, monitors their treatment, and helps parents solve problems as they arise.

“We’ve achieved such tremendous results in East Harlem day care centers that asthma is basically off their radar,” Bonner said in a statement.

Last year, the New York City Department of Health and Hygiene decided to fund the expansion of the program to 90 day care centers across the city. Other centers have since modeled their program after Obiapi’s. “We have reached out to 200 day care centers so far throughout the city, reaching about 20,000 kids,” she said.

Some health care providers, like Metropolitan Hospital Center, have been taking a different approach to controlling asthma, contacting people who use emergency rooms and referring them to clinics for more consistent medical care.

Dr. Shah heads one such clinic. Shah and his team work individually with each patient, with their families, teachers, and at home, to craft a self-managed plan. “With any chronic disease,” Shah said, “you have to give enough empowerment to the patient.

Patients are provided with and taught to use specialized medication and equipment like AeroChambers. They know “which is the controller medication, which is the rescue medication, when to use the rescue medicine, when to call us,” Shah explained. “They become their own provider.”

Patients who do need attention can reach Shah via the internet. A special program called eHealth Coach allows him to answer patients’ questions remotely and intervene before a crisis develops. But if one should, the patient goes to Shah’s clinic, not the emergency room. “An ER doctor is probably not as good at knowing the patient and knowing about asthma,” he explained.

As a result of their specialized attention to asthma, the hospital had 2,000 fewer pediatric emergency room visits and at least 600 fewer hospital admissions in 2006.

Local organizations like Little Sisters of the Assumption Family Health Service believe controlling asthma starts at home. Much of the housing in East Harlem is old and poorly maintained, harboring known asthma triggers like peeling paint, mold, roaches, and mice.

The organization spends a full year with a family, teaching them to use safer cleaning products and vermin repellants, special vacuums and bedding. Many of these families are also contending with construction dust, which can land asthmatics in the hospital.

The median value of housing in East Harlem rose 165 percent between 1990 and 2000, according to an Institute for Children and Poverty study. As a result, the area has seen a flurry of new construction and redevelopment, ranging from large-scale projects like the East River Plaza shopping center, to landlords renovating individual apartments.

“Sometimes you walk in a building and you can taste the plaster,” Sister Susanne Lachapelle, nursing coordinator for the organization said. “The place will be full of dust and the kids will be back in the emergency room.”

The plan is simple and cost effective. Ray Lopez, the program’s environmental coordinator, taught Acosta to filter grit from construction on a nearby community center through her air conditioner. “What we spend per year, with one family in one apartment, is equal to one night in the intensive care unit,” Lopez explained.

A preliminary evaluation has shown a 75 percent reduction in emergency room and hospital use among families who completed the home program, Lachappelle said.

Those battling asthma on the environmental front have been working to reduce diesel exhaust, which has been shown to lodge deep in the lungs and trigger asthma attacks.

“There is an extremely disproportional amount of environmental hazards in northern Manhattan that contribute to poor air quality,” Laurel Turbin, environmental health coordinator for WE ACT for Environmental Justice, said.

East Harlem is home to one-third of Manhattan’s eight bus depots, one of two sewage treatment plants, and both a garbage truck depot and parking lot. There are seven local truck traffic routes from 96th to 125th streets alone. An estimated 25 percent of the thousands of trucks rumbling through the area each day violate state emissions standards. These vehicles, Turbin said, are often left with engines idling.

East Harlem is primarily a low-income, minority neighborhood. Thirty-eight percent of residents live below the poverty line and 88 percent are black or Hispanic. The concentration of pollution-generating city infrastructure, local activists maintain, amounts to environmental racism.

In 2000, the organization filed a lawsuit against the Metropolitan Transportation Authority under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to call attention to the issue.

Some relief may be in sight. As of September, under New York state law, school buses are no longer allowed to idle on school grounds. In November 2007, city and state officials began ticketing owners of trucks and boilers in East Harlem for emissions violations as part of the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation’s new Stop Smoking Initiative for Trucks and Boilers.

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and Borough President Scott M. Stringer are both pushing “green” initiatives like Bloomberg’s Million Trees NYC and Stringer’s Go Green East Harlem to clean the neighborhood’s air. They have also joined forces to create the new East Harlem Asthma Center of Excellence, a meta-center that aims to cut hospitalizations in half by 2010. Details for the center are still sketchy.

It took decades for the asthma rate to build and it could be decades more before residents can breathe easy. But Shah is optimistic. If everyone continues to work together, he said, in five years from now we could be hearing “not only a different story, a better story.”

Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer organized the event, called Go Green East Harlem. It included architects, designers and elected officials who spoke on the importance of using environmentally friendly construction to clean up East Harlem’s air.

“With the flood of development and redevelopment taking place in New York City, the challenge is to overcome the myth that green construction is too costly or impractical for anything but luxury buildings,” Stringer said a statement.

Stringer announced the Go Green East Harlem initiative last May as an effort to improve the local environment through more parks, sustainable businesses that limit their impact on the environment, green building and transportation alternatives. The initiative is also aimed at improving the health of people who live in East Harlem, which has one of the highest asthma rates in the city.

“We want to end environmental racism in Northern Manhattan,” said Stringer.

Just because East Harlem isn’t a rich area doesn’t mean it doesn’t deserve the same advantages wealthy neighborhoods enjoy, one city council member said. “To green our city, we have to change the community regardless of the economic realities in order to improve the quality of life in East Harlem,” said City Council Member Melissa Mark-Viverito, who spoke at the conference at the New York Academy of Medicine on East 103rd St.

The event included a keynote address from City Planning Commissioner Amanda Burden. The morning conference was followed by a series of smaller workgroups focusing on public and private partnerships and ways to reduce the environmental impact of existing buildings.

Stringer said his office had already made progress in achieving the initiative’s goals, including organizing a steering committee of business and community members that will make recommendations on individual projects. He said his office had also arranged to plant 3,000 trees in East Harlem to absorb pollution in the area.

“Look what we’ve accomplished,” said Stringer. “When you bring together the community anything is possible.” 

Panel speaker Carlton Brown said sustainable building can bring jobs to the manufacturing sector. He said the nature of green building means that much of the construction is done in factories before being installed on site. His real estate development company, Full Spectrum of New York, is developing a green apartment complex in Harlem. Brown said residents of the new complex should expect an average annual savings of $800 a year because it will use alternative energy. 

The event also included exhibits from companies in the green building business, including manufacturers of green roofs, which trap rainwater for use in the plumbing system.

The Go Green East Harlem initiative is a smaller scale version of the PlaNYC sustainability plan announced by Mayor Bloomberg last spring. The citywide effort aims to reduce pollution over the next 30-years.

A single mother of three from the St. Nicholas Houses in Harlem, her benefits have nearly been cut off several times despite her continuing city-approved training to be a Licensed Practical Nurse. Last month, however, Ayee, 42, got the unlikely opportunity to take her grievances to the top.

On Sept. 18, Ayee testified before Human Resources Administration (HRA) Commissioner Robert Doar during a meeting organized by Harlem advocacy group Community Voices Heard, urging for more flexibility and oversight of welfare-to-work programs.

“It is difficult…to keep a job if I’m not properly trained. This is why I am pushing so hard to stay in school,” Ayee said in her testimony. “[But] I am constantly being threatened with sanctions, WEP [Work Experience Program] assignments and having my childcare cut off.”

“There was pressure to take a job that’s not sustainable,” Ayee said later in a telephone interview. “You have to fight to be trained…[otherwise you are] in and out and tossed around.”

New York City tells a different story.

To the Bloomberg Administration, welfare reform is an overwhelming success. After national political outcry over people languishing on public assistance, federal “work-first” overhaul in 1996 placed a five-year limit on aid and required most beneficiaries to work. Under Giuliani, city public assistance rolls declined substantially. At its peak in 1995, 1,160,593 New Yorkers were on welfare; as of August, the number was 357,473, the lowest level since 1964.

“We promised to move New Yorkers to self-sufficiency,” Mayor Bloomberg said in 2006, announcing the record lows. “We are delivering on that promise in a historic way.”

While the reduction is undeniable, most who leave welfare remain impoverished, either by returning to public assistance, or working low-wage, short-term jobs that have little opportunity for career advancement. Additionally, frustrations with a sometimes complicated and ineffectual system cause people to avoid it all together. More New York City residents are off welfare, but the overarching goal of lifting people out of poverty is largely failing.

Fitting the trend, Central Harlem has a small welfare roll despite widespread poverty. As of 2006, 9,748 people receive public assistance in Community District 10, or 8.2 percent of 118,143 residents. However, 39.8 percent of families with children under 18 live below the poverty line ($20,650 for a family of four), according to the Census Bureau’s 2006 American Community Survey, an update of Census figures.

At Central Harlem’s St. Nicholas Job Center, only104 people had found work between January 1st and September 23rd, well short of HRA’s 2007 site goal of 1,401. The center’s 7.4 percent fulfillment of its 2007 goal is the lowest rate of all New York City job centers, which are on average 64.2 percent of their way towards the overall goal of 80,000 jobs (51,316).

“With very few exceptions, these are not positions that get people from public assistance to self-sufficiency,” said David Jason Fischer, Project Director for Workforce Development and Social Policy at the Center for an Urban Future, an advocacy group. “[The poor] are cycling from unemployment to menial jobs,” he said, describing most post-welfare employment as a “revolving door” back to public assistance. “These are not jobs that people hold for a long period of time…you remain poor.”

Here’s how welfare in New York City is supposed to work: down on your luck, HRA gives you enough money to live on, while providing job training and helping you search for something steady. For a few months, you go to a job center two days a week to get training and look for work and you do an unpaid job for the city – the Work Experience Program – the other three days. Soon, armed with job skills and experience, you land a job, and you’re off the dole, back on your own two feet.

Those in the training programs tell a different story.

“They were supposed to train you for jobs and how to get one,” said Tanya Worrell, 40, standing outside the Arbor Career Center on Adam Clayton Powell Boulevard, one of Harlem’s main sub-contracted work search and preparation sites. “All we did was sit around all day…people just leave the program because they don’t like it,” she said, echoing the views of multiple recipients who are required to go to the center. Arbor did not respond to a request for comment.

That is not how Mayor Bloomberg saw it in 2006. “People are leaving the welfare rolls in record numbers,” he said. “They are getting – and keeping – jobs that allow them to live independently and enjoy the dignity of work.”

The statistics disagree.

Last year, HRA data showed that only about 23 percent of people who leave welfare each month have work. The rest simply stop showing up for appointments. And, 67 percent of new public assistance cases each month are returnees.

“It’s not clear they are terribly good and secure jobs,” said John Krinsky, an Associate Professor of Political Science at City College of New York-CUNY who studies the politics of welfare and work in New York City. “Living at 125 percent of the poverty line…they aren’t officially impoverished, but they are bloody poor.” Krinsky did note that separate subsidies for things like childcare and healthcare help, but are still not enough.

Despite welfare-to-work’s challenges, some in the city said they were content with the program.

“It has served me well,” said Travis Marshall, 50, who entered the system two months ago after being in and out of work for years. After an assessment, Marshall was placed with the Metropolitan Transit Authority for his “work assignment,” where he cleans subway cars three days a week, and spends the other two at Arbor, searching for jobs in case he is not hired by the MTA full-time.

“You have to follow the rules and regulations [of welfare] until you get self-sufficient,” Marshall said while selling a “loosie” cigarette to a passerby for 50 cents.

Malcolm Cassell, 24, said he was pleased with the job training at Arbor, where he has been coming for two weeks. “If it wasn’t for this program, I’ll be just like everybody else – unprepared for the workforce,” he said.

The Parks Opportunity Program (P.O.P.), a six-month position in New York City parks, receives better reviews than W.E.P. Unlike W.E.P., P.O.P. pays, but it is limited to 4,000 people.

Jennifer Lopez began public assistance in June and was placed in POP in August. She said she makes $339 every week – $8.49 per hour – through POP instead of the $120 per week she received in public assistance. “It gives you good experience,” Lopez said, explaining that using leaf blowers, weed-wackers and pickup trucks could serve her well if she works as a building superintendent or landscaper after the six-month program ends. “It’s working for me.”

Still, those that believe the current welfare-to-work system is preparing them for living-wage jobs are in the minority.

A 2005 report by Community Voices Heard, “The Revolving Door,” the most comprehensive on the issue, concluded that “many recipients are still stuck in a welfare system that pushes them to move to work, even if they do not yet possess what they need to get and keep a job and move beyond the public assistance system.”

Like Karen Ayee, the mother from Harlem, Maimuna DesVignes, a 49-year old homeless mother from the Bronx, got to explain her frustration to Commissioner Doar last month. Despite listening attentively, Doar made no promises following Ayee and DesVignes’s testimony.

“[HRA] sends people to short term jobs and then people come back to the program,” said DesVignes in a telephone interview. She recently found a job – on her own – as a part-time administrative assistant at the Harlem Children’s Zone, a local non-profit, but her welfare benefits end in December, long before her finances will be stabilized, she said.

“A revolving door is an excellent description,” she said.

Two of her four sons, aged 13 and 17, were killed as a result of urban gun violence-the first, twenty five years ago, on 122nd St. and 7th Ave., outside a bodega in Central Harlem, and the second, nine years ago outside an apartment building in downtown Baltimore.

Both were killed in the month of February.

“It’s a tough month for me, every time, but by the grace of God, if I didn’t have a great support team, I wouldn’t have been able to make it,” she said.

An employee of the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation for the past 23 years, Jackie has since found a unique way to translate her grief into an important community cause: gun prevention in Harlem.

“At first, I didn’t know where to turn, and, with the grace of God, all these years, I know something was missing, and I know I needed help, but I didn’t know what kind of help,” she said.

In late 2005, a friend told her about Safe Horizon, an agency that promotes justice for victims of crime and abuse by providing them with support services such as counseling and court advocacy.

But after a series of deadly shootings on Labor Day in Harlem last year, Jackie decided on a whim that the time for mourning was over.

“That night, no lie, two in the morning, I jumped up, I started screaming and I said I can’t take it no more. Somebody have to do somethin’ about this,” she said.

After gathering some of the other mothers who have lost sons and daughters to gun violence, she marched into Assemblyman Keith Wright’s office in the Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. Building.

They talked about how they were interested in channeling their energies in the pursuit of drug and crime prevention programs in Harlem. “We was five mothers and he cancelled all his appointments and he end up cryin’ with us,” she said. “We asked the Assemblyman, ‘Are you scared to say or do something?’ He said, ‘hell no!’”

The meeting took just over an hour, but the mothers left with a group mandate and name-Harlem Mothers Stop Another Violent End (Harlem Mothers SAVE)-and even established a date for a press conference at City Hall.

Today, Harlem Mothers SAVE is a visible force in the New York City anti-gun coalition. The group focuses on activism, education, and victim services, including an active political lobby for stricter local, state, and national legislation that will limit the availability of handguns. “What we try to do is prevention and education. We do outreach, workshops, resource guides-that sort of work,” Jackie said.

And, so far, the response has been very positive. Jackie has conducted more than 20 workshops with local schools and community groups. The programs encourage peaceful methods of conflict resolution and encourage children to stay away from or report friends who have guns.

Still, gun violence remains a major issue on the minds of law enforcement officials in Harlem. Crime statistics show that, in 2006, 41 murders took place in the three precincts that cover Harlem. [According to Jackie Kuhls, executive director of New Yorkers Against Gun Violence, the majority of these murders were carried out using illegal guns.

“In New York City, we know that 90 percent of illegal guns come from out-of-state, primarily southern states with weak gun laws. Virginia is our key source state and then North Carolina, Georgia, and Florida follow,” said Ms. Kuhls.

Her group has identified under-employment as a major cause of gun violence in New York City. “In Harlem in particular, some of the after-school and youth programs age-out at 15 or 16. A lot of kids tell us that they don’t get jobs. Furthermore, if you want a job, some of the young people need to go through employment readiness program to prepare, but it’s not always easy to find them,” she said.

For Jackie, the biggest fear is losing her two remaining sons. “This is what keeps me hard at work. People are listening,” she said. “By God, we are singing, telling it, and shouting it.”

Inside, over 80 staff members work hard on finalizing community service programs for the Church’s most recent real estate purchase: a 50,000-square-foot property on 125th St. in East Harlem.

Valued at more than $13 million, the new property is intended to restore Harlem as a center for African-American culture and provide drug and literacy programs to a population in dire need of these services, said Rev. John Carmichael, president of the Church in New York.

“Some churches invest in real estate and so on; we don’t,” he said. “We buy buildings, and congregations buy buildings, to deliver more and better services to people.”

Area residents and business owners, however, said they are skeptical that the Church’s programs will have any effect. They feel that the Church, which derives its revenue from course offerings and book sales, is just as predatory as other corporations that have recently expanded into Harlem.

The Church of Scientology is a body of rehabilitation beliefs and techniques created by American author Ron L. Hubbard in 1952. The Church engages its members in “auditing” tests, which helps determine one’s spiritual and emotional weaknesses. These results allow a Scientology auditor to specify to the subject an applied program of texts and lectures towards a path of spiritual health with oneself and all other forms of life.

The Church states that the number of people coming to their first Scientology service increased by a factor of four in the past year alone and that the Church expanded more in the past five years than it has in the previous 50-now totalling 7,500 missions and centers in 163 countries.

The “cultural movement” of Scientology in Harlem, Carmichael said, is more a response to the interest that resident Harlemites have shown to the Church’s “mental health” teachings.

“We aren’t the Catholic Church, you know,” he said. “We don’t start churches independent of interest and demand.”

The present Scientology complex in Harlem, a 5,000-square-foot building located at 2250 3rd Ave., boasts a 70-member staff and a 200-member congregation comprised of residents from the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Harlem.

The three Harlem buildings involved in the recent purchase -228 through 232 E. 125th St. – will house a new Scientology complex and a state-of-the-art community center that will offer the Church’s programs in drug counselling and literacy, Carmichael said. The drug therapy program derives from Hubbard’s book, “The Fundamentals of Thought,” which advocates two stages: “detoxification” and “rehabilitation,” combining a daily regimen of specific vitamins and minerals, and exercise followed by long sauna sessions.

“There are communities elsewhere where we have been able to apply these programs and really change the statistics markedly,” he added, citing examples in Atlanta, Georgia and San Diego, California.

Near the grounds of the future building, however, the Church’s promise of new social assistance programs was met with skepticism by business owners and local residents.

John Patane, the owner of a printing shop that has operated in Harlem since 1956, is among the last of a dying breed of small business owners on the block. He, too, has been courted for the purchase of his property by the Church of Scientology.

“Yes, I’m being pressured to leave,” he said, “But that doesn’t mean I’m prevented from negotiating with the highest bidder.”

“I want to stay in Harlem,” said Patane, who has not yet reached a deal with the Church of Scientology. He is confronted with the dilemma of having to choose between remaining loyal to a committed local clientele and making a prudent business decision.

If he does accept an offer by the Church, Patane said, it would still be difficult to find a reasonably priced property in Harlem-which means he would have to relocate the business elsewhere in New York City.

For Domingo Rexach, 43, a lifetime Harlem resident and community activist, the changes in his neighborhood are consistent with the kind of corporate land-grabs that have taken place over the past few years, which he feels is a threat to small businesses.

He pointed to the lot directly across the future Scientology complex, and said that small businesses had been thriving in that area only a few years back.

“They were all bought out to make way for a big K-Mart, which we haven’t seen yet, either,” Rexach said. “This same neighborhood industrialization happened in Williamsburg in about three years, and, in Soho, it took about six years. Same thing is happening up here in Harlem, except it’s a little slower.”

Back at the Church of Scientology’s offices on 46th Street, Carmichael disagreed. “This gentrification thing; this is not where we’re at,” he said.

Two of the properties purchased were formerly occupied by St. Samuel Church of God in Christ, he said. “We made sure the Christian congregation had a better place, and we helped them buy a better Church.”

Unaware of the changing face of Harlem in recent decades, including the recent rise in white and Hispanic populations, Carmichael was vague in describing the role that the Church would play in the development of African-American identity and culture.

“Look at the number of black people in prison,” he said. “Is that helpful to the expression of people’s cultural desires?”

“People want something practical, something that works, and Scientology delivers it,” Carmichael said.

“I don’t understand why people are walking around hungry,” Finney said. “There are services all over…they give you crates of stuff.” FoodChange, a Food Bank of New York City subsidiary agency that has worked in Harlem for 25 years, used the 116th Street center to distribute 387,540 meals of pantry items and 102,000 hot dinners in 2006, according to the organization.

A life-long Harlem resident, Finney lives with her granddaughter and grandson who, like her, depend on free food. Every month, she visits pantries in her neighborhood nine times, including the Community Kitchen once. She even shares her stocks with needy neighbors and, occasionally, the church next door. “There’s no excuse to go hungry,” Finney said.

According to research by the New York City Coalition Against Hunger, the Food Bank for New York City and city government statistics, Central Harlem residents should be hungry. In Manhattan last year, 32 percent of all residents had difficulty affording food; 71 percent of food kitchens and pantries in the borough reported feeding more people and 43 percent said they could not meet demand. Central Harlem, one of Manhattan’s poorest neighborhoods – 35 percent of the 118,00 people who live there are existing below the poverty line – is likely to be even worse; indeed, approximately two in five residents get food from emergency providers (the federal poverty level is $20,650 for a family of four). Like other inherently under-documented statistics, hunger in the community is practically impossible to calculate. According to anecdotal evidence, however, supply meets demand, at least for those willing to come and get it and for those who have the patience and will to deal with the Food Stamps bureaucracy.

FoodChange is not alone in helping to combat neighborhood hunger. One in five Central Harlem residents receives federal food stamps (as of 2006) and every major New York City food program is active locally, supplying or complementing the work of at least 24 pantries and soup kitchens operating in Community District 10.

The Emmanuel AME Church on 119th Street operates a twice-weekly food pantry, distributing some 240 hefty bags a week, plastic sacks of staples like rice, tomato soup, canned tuna and sweet potatoes. “Most people in Manhattan who go hungry don’t need to,” said Pastor Albert Turk, who leads the Emmanuel congregation. “There is always someplace where you can go find a meal.”

Sonny Morris agreed. “I don’t worry about food,” the 69 year-old-Harlemite said, sitting in a wheelchair in front of the Cecil Hotel on 118th Street, a homeless shelter.

A staffer at the Canaan Senior Service Center on Lenox Avenue, which provides bags of groceries to approximately 1,500 people each month, feels the same way. “People are still hungry in Harlem,” he said. “[But] you can go a whole month on pantry food…if you’re smart about it.” The staffer, who asked not to be named, said people only go hungry because of pride or preference for panhandling.

Emergency food providers like Emmanuel, Cecil and Canaan get help – both dollars and foodstuffs – from New York City’s major anti-hunger organizations: the United Way of New York City, City Harvest, and the Food Bank for New York City.

They have a different take on hunger in Central Harlem.

Rosario Valenzuela, United Way’s Director of the Hunger Prevention and Nutrition Assistance Program (HPNAP), a state effort, said that people are still hungry in the neighborhood, blaming recent cuts in the Federal Emergency Food Assistance Program (TEFAP). HPNAP will give $235,000 worth of food to 20 providers in West and Central Harlem this fiscal year, which compliments the independent non-profit’s local efforts to increase food stamp enrollment and additional emergency food provision.

City Harvest and the Food Bank for NYC also are worried about growing hunger in the city. A joint 2007 study found that 300,000 city residents accessed emergency food providers as budgets shrank and demand for food rose. City Harvest, a non-profit that collects and distributes unwanted food from restaurants, supermarkets and other sources, brings such groceries to Central Harlem, including Emmanuel, Cecil and FoodChange. Additionally, the Food Bank provides more than 250,000 meals every day, an unspecified amount of which come to Community District 10.

Some at pantries and kitchens also worry about local hunger, even though they are keeping up now. Daniel Hoose, 34, Director of FoodChange’s Harlem kitchen, said the list of clientele “grows more than it shrinks” and estimates the center has 30 to 100 new applicants a week. Sara Tinsley, Assistant Director of the Emmanuel pantry, is also concerned. “It seems like our lines are getting longer, not shorter,” the 71-year-old lifetime church member said. “People are still hungry [in Harlem].”

Central Harlem’s emergency food providers all supplement the most important federal hunger assistance: food stamps. One in five in Community District 10 receive the vouchers, which average $28 a week per person. However, many choose not to sign up; 46 percent of New York City residents who receive emergency food do not receive food stamps, according to a 2007 Food Bank study.

“I don’t even bother with it,” said Sue McDonald, a 57-year-old home attendant from Harlem who has gone on and off of food stamps. “It’s too much of a hassle.”

According to the NYC Coalition Against Hunger, roughly 700,000 in New York City are eligible to receive food stamps but do not. The main reason, they say, “is the complex bureaucracy involved in applying, which is frustrating and humiliating.” While Mayor Bloomberg has recently made the process easier by expanding office hours and filing some applications without paper, enrollment continues to stagnate.

For most people receiving food, hunger exists in Central Harlem, but it need not be. Elliott Carter, a sometimes-homeless 45-year-old, gets six to eight meals a week from various local kitchens and pantries.

“I’m hungry right now,” he said, waiting in line for a bag at Emmanuel. “As soon as I get home, I’m going to put something together,” referring to the friend’s apartment he has been staying at recently. Carter clutched a small black pamphlet in his left hand, “Community Services Booklet 2007,” which lists the Emmanuel pantry and all the others. “I’m thankful for this book…it pretty much keeps me afloat.”

When Martha Anaya was eight years old, she was toiling away in the fields under a Mexican sun hotter than the chilies she was harvesting.

When she asked her mother why she couldn’t go to school like her friends, she was told it was more important for a girl to be tending to the home and cooking for her 15 siblings than learning to scribble numbers and letters.

Today, more than 30 years later, Anaya is in an English as a Second Language (ESL) class learning to read and write English. But her road to English literacy has not been simple. Over the last six years, she first had to learn how to read and write her native Spanish.

“Never in my life did I imagine I could do this,” she says in Spanish, carefully dabbing the tears rolling down her cheeks.

Anaya is one of many illiterate Spanish-speaking immigrants in New York who are learning English by learning how to read and write in Spanish first. The center where she is learning, Little Sisters of the Assumption in East Harlem, is one of 15 agencies across the city offering classes in basic education – reading, writing, and math – in Spanish. It may seem like a circuitous route to learn English, but according to many educators, it’s necessary.

“It’s too hard to take a second language if you don’t know the first,” says Flor de Maria Eilets, Director of the Community Life Program at Little Sisters of the Assumption, where Anaya takes her classes. She says it’s key to understand grammatical structures and word associations in a language they speak before learning them for a new one.

She knows from experience. Several years ago, Eilets and her colleagues were perplexed when they started teaching ESL classes to Mexicans. “Once they were accepted in the English classes, they couldn’t learn,” Eilets says, mimicking her initial shock. “We were asking ‘What is going on? What did we do wrong?’”

Their mistake, they found, was trying to get students to bypass becoming literate in Spanish before learning English.

It’s with this in mind that Plazas Comunitarias was launched in 2006. The city-wide umbrella network connecting Little Sisters with other agencies teaching Spanish and ESL is a joint initiative between the Department of Education, Metropolitan Center for Urban Education at NYU, and the Mexican government. When students graduate, they are awarded with a certificate of grade six education.

Four years after starting their Spanish literacy classes, Little Sisters of the Assumption saw its first class of seven graduates in July. Anaya was one of them. Like six of her fellow graduates, she has just started ESL classes.

She’s a role model for the 40 students enrolled in the Spanish literacy program – and there are 35 on a waiting list wanting to follow in her footsteps. The students have anywhere from a grade one to five level of education, and are grouped with peers of similar ability.

At one table, a tutor helps students read with greater ease. At another, a middle-aged woman in her first week of grade one carefully grips her pencil, copying out the phrase “1 – uno” down the page. Next to them, a whiteboard fills up with drawings of pies cut into quarters and halves as Guadalupe Martinez teaches her students about fractions.

Some have been in America for only two years; others, like Anaya, for over 15. Almost all of them have no legal immigration status. They come from rural parts of Mexico, where women in particular–about 85 percent of students – rarely experienced a world beyond their village and daily chores. “These moms didn’t know the earth was round,” Eilets describes. “Some didn’t even know they were going north to come here.”

A growing number of students in the class –almost half – are Mixteca, an indigenous group from Mexico that tends to speak little or no Spanish. Because of that, they tend to be socially isolated. “They want to learn Spanish because that is the way they can socialize with other Mexicans,” says Eilets.

But Eilets admits there’s far more to it than that. Not knowing how to speak, read, or write Spanish, let alone English, severely limit a person’s job prospects. Finding better work is one of the main reasons students take classes, Eilets says.

There’s also the day-to-day navigation of life without literacy, like dealing with forms at schools, hospitals, and other things taken for granted by literate people.

“It was like I was blind,” Anaya says about her life before reading. “I saw the letters but I didn’t know what they meant.” Today, Anaya describes the satisfaction -and relief – of being able to understand the “Uptown” and “Downtown” signs on subway platforms. “Now I can go wherever I want without getting lost,” she says.

But according to Martinez, 48, the students’ motivation to take classes is driven by far more than everyday practical considerations. Being parents, many “want to be able to help their own kids learn,” says Martinez.

Eilets emphasizes that teaching parents literacy and language skills doesn’t just impact their future, but that of their children. “These are the parents of American children,” she says, “and there’s a lot of evidence that a child’s education is a reflection of your parents’ education.”

Anaya only wishes she could have helped her daughter, now 27, with her homework. Instead, her daughter helped her learn how to read in Spanish. “She became the mother, and I became the child,” says Anaya.

Now, Anaya teaches her seven year-old son how to write in Spanish, and he’s teaching her English. But despite all the progress she’s made, she hasn’t forgotten the taunts of her childhood friends and brothers who told her she was ignorant for not knowing how to read and write.

When that changed, the first thing Anaya wrote was a card to her mother, the woman who had said she didn’t need to go to school. “I’m not ignorant, because I’ve learned how to write,” Anaya wrote. “I know I’m older, but if I decide to learn English, I’ll do that too.”

In November, it’s Our Lady of Divine Providence. December is saved for Lady Guadalupe. January celebrates Santo Niño. And so it goes at St. Cecilia’s Church in East Harlem, where barely a month goes by before the congregation is celebrating another holiday for a revered saint.

As churchgoers from countries such as Ecuador, Mexico, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic and the Philippines fill the pews of this Roman Catholic church, their patron saints are filling every altar top and inch of available wall space.

“We used to joke we were looking forward to Lent coming because the parties would end,” said Rev. Francis Skelly who was the priest at St. Cecilia’s until 2005.

But recognizing the many saints at this church isn’t just about statues and feasts and dances: it’s a way for the members of this diverse congregation to express their faith and cultural identity at the same time.

Rev. James Gilmour, who rejoined the parish as their priest in 2005 after serving in Baltimore and Paraguay, hopes to encourage his largely-immigrant congregation to participate in the church by embracing the customs of their home countries. That means giving their saints wall space in the church and airtime in the services.

“We’re honoring each culture who makes up the mosaic of the church…Their spirituality and devotion broadens the spirituality of the community,” said Gilmour.

If the number of saints revered are any measure, St. Cecilia’s church can’t handle much more devotion.

There’s Peruvian-Dominican St. Martin de Porres, revered by African-Americans. The Dominicans put flowers at the foot of the Virgin of Altagracia. Mariachi bands gear up for the celebration of the Virgin of Guadalupe Today, the church carries about 10 big celebrations for the saints worshiped by the church’s various cultures.

It wasn’t always that way.

When St. Cecilia’s church was founded in 1873, it served a primarily Irish and Italian community. By 1950, the neighborhood had become defined by its Afro-American and Puerto Rican residents. When the waves of Mexican immigrants started arriving in the 1990s, so too came their desire to celebrate their patron saint, the Virgin of Guadalupe.

Soon enough every group wanted their saint to have a space in the church, and a calendar date devoted to their worship, remembered Skelly, who now runs retreats at the San Alfonso Retreat House in New Jersey.

He wanted to show that “we were one church, but many people.” But he became faced with a surprising problem: “We’re running out of wall space… I don’t think we can afford to have another ethnic group in here,” he recalled joking.

The emerging competition between the devout was revealed through more and more expressions of their faith and their culture.

“Ideas built upon ideas,” Skelly explained. When, following a saint’s celebration, the Ecuadorians blocked the street with folkloric dancing, the Puerto Ricans decided they too wanted to fall into step come their celebration of the Lady of Divine Providence. Another time while celebrating Mass, Skelly noticed out of the corner of his eye that the baby Jesus had – by miracle or a determined group of Filipinos – landed himself by the front altar.

Today, the good-natured rivalry of the faithful makes for an active parish. Honoring patron saints is one way to help make newcomers “feel like it’s their church,” Gilmour said.

He looks after the service, but lets each group plan their celebration, often a feast rounded out with dancing.

The events can be a draw to St. Cecilia, like this month’s celebration of San Lorenzo, the first Filipino saint. “If you want to convene Filipinos in New York, invite them to a Catholic Church for a celebration,” said Tess Cerna, a Filipino parishioner attending the Mass.

Half of the packed church was filled by Filipinos, who make up only about 40 of St. Cecilia’s 900 or so parishioners. Many devotees came from other boroughs to walk down the church’s aisle and lay flowers down at the altar of San Lorenzo.

But the Filipinos weren’t the only ones in line. African-Americans, Hispanics and others joined them. And they were quick to follow the scent of a simmering feast into the basement.

The feasts not only satisfy the appetites of parishioners, but help bring together a diverse congregation. Churchgoers from various cultures and different neighborhood blocks and even boroughs find themselves seated at the same table.

Carmen Vizcarrondo, 63, began coming to St. Cecilia’s when she was just a 10-year-old girl growing up in a Puerto Rican family. Her favorite part of any saint’s celebration? “The eating of course!” she said over a plate of Filipino stew. “That’s why we do it anyway, to come and enjoy and see how each other celebrates their fiesta, as if it was in their country.”

The relationship between religious and cultural expression is an important one for many of St. Cecilia’s parish.

“I certainly think the kind of practice of honoring patron saints is an effort to link their identity as Catholics with their identity as an Ecuadorian, Peruvian or Mexican,” said Margaret Steinfels, co-director of the Fordham Center on Religion and Culture.

St. Cecilia’s church has managed to strengthen the connection between their members’ faith and their culture without isolating one group from another. And in fact, celebrating that link has taken on a contagious fervor.

Skelly recalled his surprise when he noticed many African-American church members at a special mass at St. Cecilia in honor of the Mexican Virgin of Guadalupe.

“Why are you here?” he asked, knowing they couldn’t understand the Spanish service.

“Oh,” they answered, “we like the mariachi.”