Author Archives: chrislombardi

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About chrislombardi

Journalist, novelist, educator.

Luxury [boring] City

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At Chelsea Now I often feel like I’m writing a subtler version of one of those blogs chronicling the loss of old New York in the crush of New York’s new development, like Lost City or Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York. Roughly a quarter of my stories feature efforts to Save something, whether it’s Save the Garment Center, Save [Historic] Chelsea, or — this week — Save Saint Vincent de Paul, a historic church that served former slaves among its congregants back in the pre-Civil War Gangs of New York days.

All of them fear the future envisioned by Mayor Bloomberg and his aspiring-Robert-Moses deputy, Daniel Doctoroff, which was illumined beautifully by my J-school classmate David Freedlander in Thursday’s AM New York. David ended his article with a quote from urban scholar Fred Siegel; “”You can sum up the Bloomberg legacy in two words: luxury city.”

I found myself quoting Siegel, and by extension David, on Friday to some folks in Philadelphia, the city I’ve always thought of as a second or third home. For a journalist, I speculated, their town might offer much more interesting terrain than the latest $2-million condo or yet another elegy for a historic church/concert hall/bookstore. It was enough, I added, to make like John Cusack in this movie, telling his editors from a wild and woolly Savannah, Georgia: “New York is boring!”

Of course, I may just not be taking the long view; there’s no doubt that at least some of the new building is Ozymandian. Brooks at Lost City warns:

I still think the big wake-up call is yet to come, long after Bloomberg has left office and taken up his new job in Albany, when the City wakes up and realizes it has no working class, no artistic class, no small-business culture, no middle class to speak of, no younger generation that didn’t come out of law school or business school, or clings to a trust fund.

But by the time that happens, I’ll be collecting Social Security. And I wonder if I will be in New York or some other, more little-engine-that-could town.

the machine that goes ping!

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Like a lot of people, I’ve been thinking a lot about the upcoming primaries in Pennsylvania. On a separate stream, I’ve watched in train-wreck fear the wave of voting-machine failures, from Florida to Ohio. Thus, this report from the Star Ledger (ht: Raw Story) is particularly unsettling. The voting machines just subpoenad in New Jersey, which failed frequently on Super Tuesday and have no paper trail, are the same scheduled for use in the PA primary in two weeks.

All the more reason to pay attention to Dan Rather this time.

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UPDATE: Election Day in PA, and as it turns out, there’s ample cause for concern. No conspiracy theories necessary now, just the inertia of stupidity + money to be made….

the kid gets an award

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Just got word from colleagues ar Community Media that my series on illegal hotels (see Selected Articles, or just google my name and “illegal hotels”) was given an award for “in depth reporting” by the New York Newspaper Association. The citation read: “These stories were well written as well as rich and
informative–putting a consistently human face on a pattern of official indifferences to the illegal hotels.”

Not sure how significant that is in the outer world, but what makes me happy: I know this year the awards were judged by a similar association in North Carolina. I would never have thought that an only-in-New-York dilemma like illegal hotels would speak to readers from that far away, where NYC’s fragile web of tenant protections might feel like a dream.

And OK, I know I’m not so much a kid. But journalism keeps me feeling like a third-grader.

“we ground troops still exist”

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As some of you know, I was kind of devastated to miss Winter Soldier week before last. And the glimpse I got yesterday reminded me why, in the presence of a half-dozen members of Iraq Veterans Against the War. Some I’ve written about, like Garett Reppenhagen; some I’ve always wanted to meet, like Garett’s buddy Jeff; and other were new to me, like this active-duty sergeant, who demonstrated that you can be both warm, gorgeous and a kick-ass, totally disciplined organizer at the same time.

In a way, yesterday’s event was more important for the narrative of this book, even if I’d had to choose. While they talked a little about Winter Soldier, they offered yesterday not testimonies of Iraq atrocities but of their own resistance —starting with something as simple as Jeff placing anti-war stickers on signposts on his Iraq base, so that their command would know that their troops were serving under protest.

I wrote last time about being impressed by this generation, when they were my students: I’ve also been convinced from the beginning of this war that the White House didn’t know what it was in for when it sent people like this — smart, self-aware kids who believed deeply that they were doing something important — to fight a war that violates many of their core principles.

The other highlight yesterday was meeting Richard Boyle, perhaps best known as the guy played by James Woods for his exploits in Reagan’s first war. Before then, Boyle tooled around Vietnam as a super-freelancer, and in 1971 witnessed first-hand the GI resistance that was pivotal in ending the U.S. war against Vietnam. Back then “the peace movement back home was OVER,” Boyle bellowed yesterday. “They’d marched, and petitioned, and written to Congress — and they were ignored.”

Boyle then described the famous mutiny at Fire Base Pace, up ner the Cambodian border. “They were still saying in the [official briefing, nicknamed by soldiers] Saigon Follies, that there were no U.S. troops up there.” Meanwhile six men on the base were refusing to go on night patrols they deemed suicidal – and sending with Boyle a secret petition, to be delivered to Ted Kennedy. As Boyle writes in his book Flower of the Dragon, the petition read:

We the undersigned of Bravo Company, First Battalion, Twelfth Cav, First Cav Division, feel compelled to write you because of your influence on public opinion and on decisions made in the Senate.

We’re in the peculiar position of being the last remaining ground troops that the U.S. has in a combat role and we suffer from problems that are peculiar only to us. We are ground troops who are supposedly in a defensive role (according to the Nixon administration) but who constantly find ourselves faced with the same combat role we were in ten months ago. At this writing we are under siege on Firebase Pace near the city of Tay Ninh. We are surrounded on three sides by Cambodia and on all sides by NVA. We are faced daily with the decision of whether to take a court-martial or participate in an offensive role. We have already had six persons refuse to go on a night ambush (which is suicidal as well as offensive), and may be court-martialed. With morale as low as it is there probably will be more before this siege of Pace is over.

Our concern in writing you is not only to bring your full weight of influence in the Senate, but also to enlighten public opinion on the fact that we ground troops still exist. In the event of mass prosecution of our unit, our only hope would be public opinion and your voice .[Signed by Sp4 Albert Grana and 64 other men — listed in Boyle’s book.]

After we finished the tape, Al Grana handed me the petition with the sixty-five signatures. It was two-thirds of the company, more than anyone had expected. Time was running out. If I was ever to get out of Pace, it had to be now.

Grana shook my hand the way grunts shake hands, clasping the thumb.

“I hope you can make them listen,” he said

As Boyle recountes it, Kennedy initially refused to meet with Boyle, and then refused to do more than “”request an investigation” of the events at Pace. He also advised John Kerry, whose stirring speech before the Senate wasn’t six months old, not to do so either. All of which explains better, to me, why Kerry was AWOL from the new Winter Soldier, as vivid a presence as he was in 1971. I hadn’t realized that Kerry had already begun, so early, to distance himself from what some consider his finest hour.

rashomon, via NYC schools

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This past Tuesday, I sat in a windowless classroom on my beat, getting yelled at by a principal, four assistant principals, and a handful of teachers and students from a local high school. Many of their sentences began: “Do you even know..?”

Did I know that their math team had done well? That their media school produced numerous magazines and books? That their fine arts academy’s music and art teams had worked together on a concert, the latter painting the sets till all hours? And one young teacher hissed at me, “Do you even know what you’re doing?”

They were responding to one of four articles I’d written about their school, which like other large high schools in New York has been undergoing rapid changes under Chancellor Joel Klein: breakup of its student body into small “learning communities,” shifts in curriculum, and its first “report card.” These teachers and students felt I had stigmatized the school, that I had written a borderline racist way about the changes in the school’s demographics “without writing about the amazing things that happen here every day,” as the director of their business school put it. And their principal accused me of “twisting the facts to suit your (my) agenda.”

Now I know why education reporters burn out.

I’ve spent close to six months now trying to sort out fact from rumor on both the overall citywide reforms and on what’s going on in the local schools, to the extent possible when my beat isn’t Chelsea schools but all of Chelsea. I get letters and emails challenging this or that point as well as giving me tips about where to look. The stories told by each vary hugely, both in simple facts and in the mood about the schools themselves. Especially this one. I began to work more slowly, to examine each claim and to prepare to ask for an official response from the school.

Then news broke: a kid at the school had been shot a block away. With three bullets in his body, he had run around the corner to the lobby of the school and collapsed. Suddenly it was front-page news (for us), and a followup to the first story these teachers had hated, about rumors that swirled about gang activity after three of their students were stabbed.

After months of looking into it (to the extent possible while writing other news stories every week), I feel like I’ve been part of a 2000’s NYC version of Kurosawa’s Rashomon. The school blames the community, with its out-of-town partyers and public housing complexes. The community blames the school — most of whose students live in less affluent neighborhoods, like the South Bronx or my own ‘hood Washington Heights. A longtime expert on NYC schools tells me that many parents from those neighborhoods likely chose it partly because it’s in a rich neighborhood, and they figure the kid will be safe there. OR they only send them reluctantly aftet their child begs, “because she wanted to take a chance on Manhattan,” as one parent in the room said on Tuesday.

Meanwhile, a kid is recovering at St. Vincent’s Hospital. The school is trying to recover, the Tuesday group said, from the damage my articles have done. And I’m still turning the crystal around and around, hoping to distinguish between objective fact, personal testimonies, and the bigger picture, if there is one, while pulling out an actual story by deadline.

It’s a journalistic truism that if all your sources feel equally maligned, you’re doing something right. But as a sometime educator, I did feel bad that the kids felt I’d ignored their heroism. Because much of their work as I’ve seen it is indeed brilliant, like the short films and newspapers I’ve seen, a testimony to both students and the teachers who shepherd them. These kids’ writing sure beats the pretentious drivel I produced in high school.

If there’s one thing I learned from my time teaching at CUNY, it was that many of the students struggling to learn paragraph structure had already done things I’d never have the strength for — like living with alcoholic parents, or crossing over from Mexico in the dark of night. (I don’t remember the latter guy’s name, Department of Homeland Security, should your Google-enabled software find this entry. I do remember that he was a cook in a fancy Manhattan restaurant, and a hell of a poet.)

Time to shake off the dragged-to-the-principal’s office feeling from Tuesday, and finish my piece (deadline this afternoon). Most of the investigative stuff will have to wait for another week. If I succeed in describing one facet of the crystal with accuracy, I’ll be happy. I don’t expect them to be.

“these people are a part of me”

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Unlike the last time I blogged, I’ve kept these posts away from election campaigns. But reading Obama’s speech today, a passage struck me that could have been written for my entire family:

I can no more disown [Rev. Wright] than I can my white grandmother – a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe. These people are a part of me. And they are a part of America, this country that I love.

As an ex-boyfriend once told me about my family, it’s people like that who teach you to live in the space between who someone is and who you want them to be. And that, my friend, is what we call maturity.

(p.s. I swore I would post daily from Winter Soldier: but I have severe illness in my family, and could barely get away to do my job.)

international development mit schlag

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I’ve been sick, on top of everything else, which is why I’ve not posted in the past two weeks.  I’ll make up from it this week, by blogging daily from Winter Soldier.

Meanwhile, stop by Jina‘s shop: you’ll be hooked. She’s doing important, groundbreaking work in Rwanda, documenting a country’s recovery from a very dark place. But that makes it sound like her blog is preachy or sad, and it’s not.  Like all good writing, it goes down  like whipped cream, not Vegemite.

Today’s posting, for example, starts out:  “3 kegs of Mutzig, a DJ with speakers that throbbed like a dance club, and a goat on a spit. Jack Kerouac crossed with Samantha Power with a dash of Angelina Jolie.

That’s how you save the world.

…..the more they stay the same

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Since almost no one reads this blog (unless they’re looking for term-paper help), I’ll reward those of you who do — by sharing some historic tidbits,  jewels meant to be embedded in the story-cloak I’m weaving.

Now we know for sure: military doublespeak has always sounded just like that.

First, as the War of 1812 began and rumors surged through the military town of New-York that young men stationed at Staten Island would be deployed in the invasion of Canada, a pro-government newspaper scoffed:

We are authorized to state that no troops stationed on Governor’s Island have proceeded or are ordered to proceed to the North. The rumour that such an order is to be given is false and groundless.

Read that carefully for what it doesn’t say.

Then, once those same troops had been bloodied in Montreal, news came that the British had set fire to Washington, D.C. Leave it to the recruiters to see a silver lining, according to a young infantryman:

Now, says the orderly sergeant, the British have burnt up all the papers at Washington, and our enlistment for the war among them, we had better give in our names as having enlisted for five years.

At least they hadn’t yet invented stop-loss.

the things we stumble on looking for something else

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 From Peter Doyle, a train conductor who came across  a New York poet named Walt Whitman one evening:

“He was the only passenger; it was a lonely night, so I thought I would go in and talk with him. Something in me made me do it and something in him drew me that way. He used to say there was something in me had the same effect on him. Anyway, I went into the car. We were familiar at once–I put my hand on his knee–we understood. He did not get out at the end of the trip–in fact went all the way back with me….From that time on we were the biggest sort of friends.”

And his habit of bold talk rubbed off on you, sir.

500 words

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Everything old is new again.

When did I first hear that Graham Greene wrote 500 words a day? Long before I thought I might try to emulate his multifaceted career:

Graham Greene had a reputation for prophecy; as early as 1955 he published “The Quiet American,” a book about the perils of American meddling in Vietnam. What seems like foresight actually came from his knack for cutting down to the heart of the matter — to appropriate the title of another of his novels, this one about Sierra Leone. It was less that he saw things coming than that he recognized the same scenarios of human foolishness and venality unfolding over and over again. If anything, his was a gift for timing, and it’s still in operation, even now, 13 years after his death. His centennial (Greene was born in 1904) arrives just as some of his most barbed political observations have acquired a brand new — and simultaneously all too familiar — relevance. Greene wrote steadily (500 words a day, every day) and as a result produced a large body of work: journalism, travel writing, novels and stories, plays, memoir, criticism. There are several fat veins in his fiction alone: the “Catholic” novels, thrillers, comic fiction like “Travels With My Aunt” and “Our Man in Havana” (also a spy novel); and harder to categorize works like “The Quiet American,” the book that more than any of his others has stamped itself upon the American imagination.

Those years ago, I mostly was impressed by his daily output — a quota I used steadily during the fiction writing days. Of course, back then I also fantasized about spending my days like Babbo: starting in a cafe, working from 11-5, and going to the theatre every night (if not, perhaps, the riotous drinking after, which ultimately killed him).

But lately, amid the press of Chelsea Now angst and other assorted disasters, that 500-words -a-day rhythm has felt impossible. Until this morning. Now I’m back where I began, albeit maybe a touch wiser (no more fantasies about some millionaire admiring my work so much that I needn’t ever work again). Just focusing on that number 500, setting it as a daily can’t miss,, as a way to amass the marble I need to get this book underway whatever happens.

Many thanks to yesterday’s commenters, who helped me acknowledge my terrified block, and reminded me how to end it. Meanwhile I’ll let myself stay inspired by Greene, who shared Joyce’s capacious Catholic sensibility if not his optimism.