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Gillian Reagan - Making the City: Selected stories from Capital New York

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A Palestinian food-cart vendor with a secret recipe and a Chinese family struggling to earn its living with a takeout restaurant in the South Bronx; an ambitious young politician with a knack for working the press and a police chief whos better at politics than his boss; a character actor trying to break into opera and a Queens rapper navigating the shoals of high art, pop stardom, and industrialized sexism; a famous woman who would challenge the supremacy of The New York Times and a self-deprecating man who would be its shining knight; the street hustles of the perennially homeless and the street photography of a fashion icon.

These are some of the characters weve covered at Capital New York over the last three years, since we began publishing from a cluster of white melamine Ikea desks in a windowless room in Soho in June 2010. The story subjects are a diverse group, but they have in common a desire to fix their fates against the roiling reality of life here. Theyre...

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Making the City: Selected stories from Capital New York
Edited by Gillian Reagan, Tom McGeveran, and Josh Benson
Capital New York Media Group, Inc.
New York, NY

Capital New York Media Group, Inc.
333 West 39th Street, Suite 902, New York, NY 10018

2013 Copyright Capital New York Media Group, Inc. All rights reserved.
These materials may not be reproduced, republished, redistributed, or resold in any form without written permission from the author.

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This book was produced using PressBooks.com.

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For Peter W. Kaplan

Contents
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A Palestinian food-cart vendor with a secret recipe and a Chinese family struggling to earn its living with a takeout restaurant in the South Bronx; an ambitious young politician with a knack for working the press and a police chief whos better at politics than his boss; a character actor trying to break into opera and a Queens rapper navigating the shoals of high art, pop stardom, and industrialized sexism; a famous woman who would challenge the supremacy of The New York Times and a self-deprecating man who would be its shining knight; the street hustles of the perennially homeless and the street photography of a fashion icon.

These are some of the characters weve covered at Capital New York over the last three years, since we began publishing from a cluster of white melamine Ikea desks in a windowless room in Soho in June 2010. The story subjects are a diverse group, but they have in common a desire to fix their fates against the roiling reality of life here. Theyre famous, infamous, unknown, or invisible, but theyre all part of the same messy project of New York City.

This place is both hard to describe and endlessly describable. Its a city of disparate instances, and its in the disparities that the engine of the city becomes, barely, visible.

E.B. White, that inescapable and comforting shadow under which anyone who wants to think or write about New York City must work, knew only some of these varieties of the New York experience, in fact. But he in turn knew what he didnt know, as he wrote in his 1949 book, Here Is New York:

A block or two west of the new City of Man in Turtle Bay there is an old willow tree that presides over an interior garden. It is a battered tree, long suffering and much climbed, held together by strands of wire but beloved of those who know it. In a way it symbolizes the city: life under difficulties, growth against odds, sap-rise in the midst of concrete, and the steady reaching for the sun. Whenever I look at it nowadays, and feel the cold shadow of the planes, I think: This must be saved, this particular thing, this very tree. If it were to go, all would go this city, this mischievous and marvelous monument which not to look upon would be like death.

Its a city of stories. Telling them in their specificity, and smashing them all together without an overweening concern for their comfort or compatibility, is the only real way to tell the story of New York. Its an endless project thats so rewarding because its a project that can never go away. Its what weve tried to do with this website: To tell some of these stories, in their utter specificity, as a way of getting at the big stories that defy the keystroke.

This is a selection of articles weve published over the last three years, and not a collection, because with writers like ours, as passionate about their subjects and as determined to get the story right in its utter specificity, there cant be a final anthology. Which is why we are so thankful for the last three years of Capital, and for the time to come. And which is why we hope, if you find these stories as compelling and immersive as we do, there will be ample occasion for more selections like these ones.

I
City Life
Takeout story: Behind bulletproof glass and out on a bike for a Chinese restaurant in Mott Haven
By Kevin Heldman | 12:47 p.m. Oct. 24, 2011

This is a story about the experiences of a family of Chinese immigrants running a restaurant business in New York. Its by Kevin Heldman, a real investigative journalist whose reporting speaks for him more powerfully than anything I can say here.Josh Benson

You live in Manhattan below 125th Street, or gentrified Brooklyn, or a quiet part of Queens. You want Chinese food. Youre not following some recommendation from an old Sam Sifton column or a food blog, though. You just want some chicken lo mein, sweet and sour chicken, egg drop soup and fortune cookies.

You go to that drawer full of menus with dragons or pandas or bamboo on them, and the random Chinese characters, and the obligatory promise of fast and free delivery. And in 25 minutes or so a Chinese man on a bike will come to your door and youll maybe drop him a xie xie with your tip and hell give you a bye bye and hes gone. End of story.

But theres a different version of that story that goes on in many parts of this city. And that version is about money, class, race, and education. And in that version people are robbed, assaulted and killed, and people live in fear, constantly on guard and under threat over Chinese food.

Nancy Lin, 30, and her family own and run Lok Hin, a Chinese takeout restaurant on Brook Avenue in the Mott Haven of the Bronx. Just recently, in August, Nancys younger sister, Lynn, was assaulted on a delivery. She was screaming on the streets while two men punched her and stole her food. The men were about to get her money, too, but she was saved when someone in the neighborhood opened their door and got her inside. The same thing almost happened again to Lynn even more recently, but her brother showed up and scared her attackers off.

Nancy has also been attacked. An armed robber came into their kitchen at lunchtime, pulled a gun on her father and cousin and called out, Dont move.

Nancy, who was making fried rice, ran to the phone to call 911. The robber grabbed her by the hair with one hand as she was screaming into the receiver and with his other, free hand looted the register.

After the robbery, Nancy rode with the police around the neighborhood in a patrol car, but didnt see him. She said she was so scared she couldnt remember much anyway.

Shes been to the precinct more than once to look at mug-shot books. Her mother has had a gun and bat pulled on her, her father has been beaten, and her brother has been robbed.

For Chinese restaurants in many parts of the city, this is the normal course of doing business. Its been going on for years and its going on right now. I know about it because I have some familiarity with this world, through personal connections. And I know about it because Nancy Lin let me in, behind the bulletproof glass.

Over the course of several days, I talked to the people who work there, rode their bikes to deliver their food, walked up the project stairs with their customers orders, ate with them at the end of the night sitting around in the back of the kitchen on MSG barrels, talked to their customers and to the teenagers whose friends rob them.

Stories about these incidents make the papers sometimes, in the form of a few quotes, a crime statistic, and maybe a follow-up on story on an emergency visa application for a heart-broken relative in China. The incidents are written about in the ethnic pressWorld Journal, Sing Tao Dailyand maybe those stories contain a few more quotes than the usual American-paper specimen because the reporter speaks the same language as the victim and the victims colleagues.

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