At 11th Street, the marchers suddenly turned east and began running in the roadway, some of them brandishing red and black flags. The police gave chase. At Avenue C and 12th Street, an officer tried to grab a black banner with the words “Never Work” from a man, who scrambled away.
At Second Avenue, the crowd turned north and a moment later a police commander wearing a white shirt began moving briskly toward a young man wearing a black hooded sweatshirt and walking on the sidewalk.
Then more than a dozen other officers, some uniformed and others in plain clothes, plunged into the crowd of marchers, grabbing and arresting at least three additional protesters, shoving others against a wall and pushing news photographers.
Name: Terry
Occupation: Factory Worker
Location: 6th Street and 2nd Avenue
Time: 12:15 on Monday, April 29
I’m coming from Social Tees [Animal Rescue]. I know the owner since it’s where I take my other four cats. Right now I have an apartment in Crown Heights and I heard [the kitten] crying there for three days. I thought he was a bird and I couldn’t find him at first.
He’s a baby. The mother left him. His eye was shut so I took him upstairs and flushed it with hot water and then I gave him some Amoxicillin. I don’t know why but something told me to give him that for the infection. And then I gave him some stuff for his eye.
My family is Basque. They come from the Pyrenees mountain from Spain and France. I'm from 7th Street and Avenue B. I’m 60 years old. This is where I’m from. I’ve been all around the Lower East Side. I‘ve lived in other places but this has always been home.
I mostly worked in factories. I put together costume jewelry. It was no big thing. I worked in publishing. I write and I used to write a lot of poetry. I even tried acting school.
My whole family was down here. They never left. This was my real family, but when I was young I was given to foster parents in the Bronx and I got raped and beat up and all of that by them. I’ve suffered.
I’ve been in the streets most of my life. I had my friends and my family around here, but I didn’t go to my family. I don’t know how I survived. I hardly ate. I wouldn’t ask anybody for anything. I was too traumatized. People would come and bring my food and I would shake in my boots because I didn’t want anybody to touch me. And I didn’t know how to ask for help.
So I started hanging out with gay people. They were accepting. But I was never gay. They just assumed I was. I was always very quiet or sad. I was never talkative. I don’t know how to tell you how I went through all that trauma and survived it.
I think it has a lot to do with being Basque. Our history is very interesting. When I say I’m Basque to somebody that knows what it is they go, “What?” We’re cavemen — all the way from the caves.
I tried drugs in my 30s. I started late. Before that I was just trying to get through my own trauma. I was lucky I started late or I would’ve been dead. I’ve never seen so many weird people in my life. I’ve seen rock stars; I’ve seen movie stars come here — all that stuff. I remember the lines around the block for drugs. People just didn’t care I guess. It was wild; it was a wild town.
The cat is fine. He’s fighting. If I let him walk, he’ll walk all over me, but I can’t yet because I don’t want him to get sick. I know what it’s like to suffer and that’s why I like to rescue things. It’s to be human.
He said that bikes will be in the end of May... and that it is a 1-year pilot program for Manhattan and parts of Brooklyn. If it is successful, then it will roll out in the rest of the city.
In an unusual blend of old and new New York, nine long-term tenants of two small buildings on Second Avenue struck deals to buy cooperative units in a new 12-story building, where they will share hallways with 51 mostly young renters — many new to New York and unfamiliar with the neighborhood's history.
The bulky new building will be known as Jupiter 21, and will feature a model of the planet Jupiter hanging in the lobby.
"I am grateful they didn't give us lowlifes apartments in the back," she said. "I feel hugely entitled to this luxury apartment, but I feel completely unworthy of it at the same time."
"There was nothing romantic about it," Ms. Legge said. "There were needle junkies in the basements. It stunk and it was all so over."
SLA & DCA Licensing Committee
Monday, May 20 at 6:30pm — University Settlement Neighborhood Center
189 Allen Street (btwn Houston & Stanton Sts) (north of main entrance)
In 1846, The Evening Post said that there were “two great avenues for elegant residences”: Fifth and Second Avenues. Construction on Second had already produced chaste Greek Revival houses like No. 110, built in 1838 and soon occupied by Ralph Mead, a merchant on Coenties Slip. The simple red-brick front is relieved only by a projecting portico with brownstone Ionic columns — the Greek was a movement of buttoned-up reserve.
By that time Isaac T. Hopper was famous in New York as an uncompromising reformer and abolitionist. On his death in 1852, The Liberator, an abolitionist newspaper, said that “the fugitive slave, the unfortunate criminal, the children of poverty, all commanded his warmest sympathy.” From his work evolved the Isaac T. Hopper Home, devoted to helping women who had been released from prison.
