Flatbush Gardens, where landlord David Bistricer has over 8,000 outstanding housing code violations. (Richard Nieva/The Brooklyn Ink)

By Richard Nieva

John Gillick is engaged to be married. When asked if he would stay at his apartment in the Flatbush Gardens complex in East Flatbush after the big July wedding, his initial response was a simple laugh.

“This is not the kind of place I’d want to raise a daughter,” he said.

Gillick comes home to his fifth floor apartment, at 1352 New York Ave., only occasionally nowadays. The 29-year-old patent lawyer spends most nights sleeping in his office in downtown Manhattan, relegating his Brooklyn apartment to the realm of storage space.

When he does come home, he enters the building with a magnetic key he must swipe several times before the door opens. The smell of marijuana smoke lingers in the hallway as he gets on the elevator. To get the elevator to work, he must pull the door shut from the inside using plastic ties attached to the window grate. The jutting sound of the elevator cart hitting the plastic ties can be heard as it travels to the fifth floor.

Gillick’s plight—which he insists is tame—is a common one for Brooklyn renters. On a recent watch list of the city’s worst landlords released by the office of the New York City Public Advocate Bill de Blasio, apartment buildings in the borough of Kings appeared 154 times, comprising over 40 percent of the entire list. Buildings owned by Gillick’s own landlord, David Bistricer, appeared 32 times alone.

Bistricer’s over 8,000 building code violations—including the non-functioning elevator door—suggests a flaw in the system: How can a slumlord get away with so many violations for so long?

According to de Blasio, the problem is an administrative one. When a landlord receives a violation, there are no strict enforcement policies for letting them pile up unaddressed. “We need to change the way violations are issued,” said de Blasio. “So they are more akin to parking tickets: you get a fine for a violation, and if you don’t fix the problem, the fine goes up.”

This leads to cases like Bistricer’s—with his thousands of infractions, including one I-class violation. These are violations in which there is a court order from a judge to correct them.

The other types of infractions are listed as A, B, or C class, and have stringent deadlines of their own—ranging from 90 days for an A class, 30 days for a B class, and 24 hours for the “immediately hazardous” C class.

Still, with no way of enforcing landlord compliance short of housing court proceedings, tenants like Gillick have little faith in the system. He described writing letters to Flatbush Garden management when he first moved in, asking for little things to be fixed. “And to be honest,” he said. “It was stuff I knew I wasn’t going to get.”

A Complex and Troubled Complex

Gillick’s relationship with Flatbush Gardens started a month and a half before he even moved in his first piece of furniture in 2008. Looking for a place in the borough after leaving his previous apartment in Brooklyn Heights (the two buildings are like apples and oranges, he said), he found Flatbush Gardens. But to his chagrin, he found no reviews online of the newly renovated complex.

Its glossy Web site featured smiling, young, interracial couples hand in hand with the Brooklyn Bridge in the backdrop. The marketing was simple: a haven for young urban professionals. Gillick—a Tampa, FL, native who prefers his bike to the subway—fits this description.

He started a blog to document his experience there—more for future renters than for himself. “It was the story that I wanted told when I was looking at the place,” he said.

And recently, he’s had to tell some difficult stories in his blog.

Two men were murdered in two weeks this year in late September and early October. Akeem Stephenson, 18, was gunned down after he refused to join the Crips, and Kenroy Smith, a 27-year-old father, was shot in the back of the head, due to mistaken identity, according to the New York Daily News.

Bistricer still hasn’t left the news. The landlord has a lease with the city, in which it pays him over $10 million a year for two Brooklyn courthouse buildings—all despite the almost $150,000 in violations he owes the city.

In November, folding to public pressure from the Public Advocate’s office, Bistricer paid off the $150,000 debt, though the building violations remain uncorrected. “We can use city business to compel landlords to do the right thing,” de Blasio said.

The controversies continue to pile up for Bistricer. He then tried—and failed—to evict a group of senior citizen tenants for apparent raucous partying and noise violations. Late last month, his management company locked out 70 maintenance workers over contract disputes, due largely to a proposed 34 percent pay cut.

A hole in the building exterior behind the complex's security and management offices, filled with trash. (Richard Nieva/The Brooklyn Ink)

Amidst the picketing and rallying that has taken place in front of the buildings since then, mounds of garbage have piled up in front of the complex. The city’s sanitation union has refused to collect trash as a show of solidarity to the maintenance workers.

The number of violations reported to 311—the phone number that dissatisfied tenants call to voice their complaints—has skyrocketed from about 7,600 to over 8,000 since the beginning of the lockout.

“I don’t know if there’s a correlation. That would be interesting to see,” said Kwame Patterson, a spokesperson for 32BJ, the union representing the workers. “I think the tenants are calling the city and complaining even louder than they have been.”

A Matter for Albany

As loud as they may be, though, their complaints could be falling on deaf ears.

State Senator Liz Krueger believes the solution is changing the system: setting up administrative tribunals through the city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development to issue and enforce fines, instead of requiring lengthy and often toothless housing proceedings.

That means having landlords show up to expedited hearings in which they can make their claim—presenting evidence that the violations were inaccurate or have already been fixed. If they can’t do that, they are forced to pay the fines, said Sara Hale-Stern, Krueger’s district office director and main housing policy staffer.

“It’s a system with many, many loopholes,” said Hale-Stern.

Under the current law, a landlord gets a notice of violation from HPD, telling them the class of their infraction, and imposing a deadline to fix it. But after the notice is sent, that’s usually the end of it. Because housing court proceedings are so time consuming and expensive, very few cases actually make it to court.

“Landlords know that their chances of having to go to court or pay any fines are so small that the letters of violation are basically meaningless,” said Hale-Stern.

According to Title 27 of the New York City Administrative Code, class A penalties will cost a landlord between $10 and $50. Class B’s will cost $25 to $100, and $10 a day on top of the original price until the violation is corrected. Class C’s cost $50 per day until corrected.

Or, if conditions are bad enough, a building can be placed in the Alternative Enforcement Program, where the city takes on emergency repair work at the site. But only 200 buildings a year are eligible for the program, according to the Housing Maintenance Code.

But all of these numbers are theoretical, said Brent Meltzer, co-director for South Brooklyn Legal Services, which provides legal assistance to low-income individuals in the borough. A landlord can be issued these violations by the city, but there is no actual fine charged. A tenant must be taken to housing court in order for payment of those civil penalties to be enforced.

Still, de Blasio sees this as a problem. “Even when brought to court a landlord can still string out proceedings and argue down fines,” he said.

A landlord can owe millions of dollars on the books, and end up only having to pay a fraction, because the court usually settles for an “order to correct,” instead of enforcing the entire massive sum.

The tribunal system would resemble Chicago’s model, according to research by Benjamin Dulchin, executive director of the Association for Neighborhood and Housing Development, an umbrella association of city nonprofit housing groups. Dulchin has extensively explored the history of code enforcement in NYC, along with other major cities.

De Blasio said changing the system is about being able to go after those landlords truly determined to evade their responsibilities. “We still don’t have a sufficient number of tools,” he said.

A History of Resistance

Getting those tools is a perennial issue for Krueger, who introduces legislation to support this change every year, said Hale-Stern. The most recent bill proposal was the Tenant Rights Omnibus Act in 2009. The name refers to expanding the Omnibus Act, a series of legislation first enacted in 1954, which created government departments such as the Housing and Urban Development Department and the Urban Renewal Administration.

The bill faces consistent opposition from the Mayor’s office, which argues that the cost of initially setting up such a system would be too expensive. Hale-Stern said exact costs haven’t yet been analyzed, though she maintains the city would gain income in the long run, by having an effective system to collect housing code fines and saving money on emergency repairs done by the city.

Krueger took up the bill from former State Assemblyman and Environmental Conservation Commissioner—and then-Housing Committee chair—Pete Grannis, who first introduced the legislation in the late 1980s. Since then, mayoral administrations have opposed the upheaval of the structure.

Their closest advance in progress came in 2007, when Krueger’s office was in talks with then-Gov. Elliot Spitzer’s office. Language from Krueger’s bill made it onto the state budget, but after pushback from Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s office, the language was removed.

Standing water in the basement of one of the complex's 59 buildings. (Richard Nieva/The Brooklyn Ink)

Krueger is hoping that with the press attention, along with pressure from de Blasio’s office, the climate is right for another push. But Hale-Stern said the senator would not even bother trying to bring the bill to the senate floor without mayoral backing. She is open to compromise and tweaking the bill if it means getting support from the city.

Jon Furlong, a tenant advocate with the Pratt Area Community Council, said he supports the bill, but has reservations as to whether or not it would ever pass. “The landlord lobbyists are very powerful,” he said.

But others, such as Robert Rosenblatt, a Brooklyn landlord and tenant attorney, said the onus is on the tenants and that he thinks the law is fine as is.

“It may not work because people don’t know their rights and obligations under the law,” he said. “But if you know your rights and obligations it absolutely does work.”

Furlong agrees, but said he thinks the problem is deeper-rooted. He said the HPD is “well-intentioned, but understaffed,” and like de Blasio, calls for a streamlining of the enforcement process.

But even more deeply, he said the problem is internal for many tenants: “They’re resigned to the fact that this is just the way it is.”

Still Waiting

Michelle Williams is one Flatbush Gardens tenant who doesn’t settle for “the way it is.”

The 34-year-old tenant, originally from Trinidad, has lived in the complex for over 20 years, staying with her great-grandmother as a child before she died. She’s lived in three of the complex’s 59 buildings and recalls the pre-Bistricer era.

Williams, who has been the building captain in two of the three buildings she’s lived in, admits the environment is better than it was ten years ago, but she attributes it to the entire neighborhood’s growth and development.

“Management sucks either way,” she said. She remembers the shift from the old Vanderveer Estates name to Flatbush Gardens, and the external changes Bistricer made to make it look “pretty on the outside.”

“It’s just a change of hands,” she said, adding that the change between landlords was forgettable. About half of Bistricer’s violations were inherited from before he bought the building, according to de Blasio’s office.

Her biggest complaint is a large, dark watermark on her ceiling, presumably from a tenant’s leaking washing machine. The leak has also seeped and created damage to her wall. She fears the mold and paint chipping will harm her two small children, one of which is asthmatic.

Maintenance has addressed the problem many times, she said, but the mark keeps coming back. It’s been a year since she first noticed it.

“If you paint it and make it look pretty, eventually in a week’s time, it’s going to seep through again. And that’s what’s happening again,” she said, referring to the mark.

For her, it is an issue of pride in her home—unlike Gillick, who will begin looking for apartments in Manhattan as the wedding approaches. Williams, though, said it’s about feeling good in her home, and “in her own skin.”

“Be fair,” she said. “Give the people what they pay for.”

Cortelyou Road circa 1910/Courtesy of Ronald Schweiger, Brooklyn Borough Historian

By Idil Abshir

Cortelyou Road feels so self-contained that at times it resembles a small town. Like a residential Russian doll, Cortelyou Road has become a neighborhood within the broader neighborhood of Flatbush. A seven-block stretch from Coney Island Avenue to East 17^th Street, Cortelyou Road is home to over 85 businesses. On weekends the street is teeming with people at the farmer’s market. Patrons fill the many bars, restaurants and cafes, and children play in the playground at PS 139.

A decade ago, this stretch of Cortelyou was virtually abandoned. The street was lined with 99 cent stores and bodegas, and there were no businesses where residents could linger. Homes were poorly maintained, and when those who lived in the nearby Victorian houses wanted to rest or hang out somewhere besides their own homes, they had to leave the neighborhood entirely.

The story of Cortelyou’s transformation mirrors that of many other Brooklyn neighborhoods, both historically, as at the start of the 20^th century, and more recently as a trendy, upcoming area. It has developed commercially, and this has become as much a definitive aspect of the neighborhood, as the quality of its housing. For residents, and prospective residents, what is outside their house is as important as what is on the inside.

“Brooklyn has evolved,” said John Manbeck, former Brooklyn Borough Historian. Of the changes on Cortelyou Road, he said, “The same thing happened in Williamsburg, people who lived there years ago wouldn’t recognize it. Red Hook too.

Before the turn of the century Cortelyou Road was farmland, and a throughway for those making their way further south to the glamour and racetracks of Coney Island. T.B. Ackerson, an icemaker, quit his factory job in 1898 to develop the area into a residential neighborhood, building Victorian and Tudor-style homes. Victorian Flatbush, which Cortelyou Road is a part of, was the place to be: here Guggenheim bought a house for his soon-to-be-wed daughter; Nellie Bly, a groundbreaking journalist, lived on manor off Cortelyou; and Thomas Edison reportedly did some of his experiments in the basement of a house just off Cortelyou Road. Further into the 20^th Century, the neighborhood developed into a relatively middle class suburb, and stayed that way until there was a spike in crime in the 1960s. New York City was in the midst of a financial crisis, and Flatbush wasn’t spared. Welfare tenants were relocated to apartments in Flatbush and the middle class began to panic. Flatbush, like the rest of the city, was undergoing what was termed ‘white flight,’ in which the middle class white residents were fleeing the city. By the mid 1970s middle-class residents, both black and white, left Flatbush, not returning until a decade later. Manbeck described this as an “upheaval” for Cortelyou road.

Jan Rosenberg, who has lived here since 1986, says that the neighborhood was drastically different when she moved in. “The houses were more deteriorated and in need of repairs,” she said. “The main difference was that it was much more dangerous.”  Rosenberg was a sociology professor at Long Island University in downtown Brooklyn before she ventured in to the real estate business. She is currently a partner at Brooklyn Hearth Realty. In 2001, Rosenberg founded Friends of Cortelyou- a group that sought to attract business to Cortelyou Road.

There were no new businesses drawn to the area. Friends of Cortelyou tried to attract merchants, convinced that this could redefine the neighborhood. “Our commercial strip is so short. I strongly felt, after looking at other neighborhoods, that three or four new businesses would make an impact, ” said Rosenberg. “We had nice houses and nice apartments but no businesses.” Rosenberg clarified that while useful stores existed, like the delis and dollar stores, nothing was in place that neighborhood residents were drawn to. Rosenberg went on to say that her work developing Cortelyou Road, and her current job as a realtor was never a far departure from sociology. “I got into real estate as a function of what I was doing with Friends of Cortelyou- trying to change Cortelyou Road,” Rosenberg said. “It was kind of applied sociology.”

In an article she wrote about the neighborhood titled “Gentrification from the inside out in Brooklyn’s Ditmas Park,” for newgeography.com, Rosenberg writes that the quality of life collapsed, and that Cortelyou Road didn’t have it’s basic needs covered banking and eating establishments, for example despite the efforts of the Giuliani’s administration to clean up this and other neighborhoods. However, the city’s efforts to make the neighborhood more livable were only successful to an extent. Although there was a business void, the neighborhood was safer, there were more people investing in family homes.

Still, “there was a void,” Rosenberg said. “There were 99cent stores, and then a 97cent store opened. That was an indicator of a downward trend, we were competing downward.”

Charlie Hull, a recent Brooklyn College graduate, and server at the Purple Yam restaurant on Cortelyou, says he that although he has been living in the neighborhood he saw no point in visiting Cortelyou Road until establishments sprang up that he felt were worth visiting. “I never really ventured up to Cortelyou Road until things started opening,” Hull said. “Just because I didn’t really have a reason to.

Getting the businesses to initially invest Cortelyou was more difficult than the Friends of Cortelyou anticipated. The group found themselves with an unexpected obstacle. “People didn’t take this neighborhood seriously,” Rosenberg said. “People thought it was laughable that you would try bring business to Cortelyou Road.”

Unsure of where to start, but certain that a few business would make a big impact, the Friends decided to approach business owners in other parts of Brooklyn who had faced the same problems. “We recruited merchants who’d opened restaurants in a neighborhood that wasn’t developed,” said Rosenberg. “We took a cue from Fort Greene. We talked to several of the early restaurateurs- they had the same pent-up demand, and cheap rent.”

Susan Siegel, the creator of the farmer’s market at Cortelyou, and later the executive director of the Flatbush Development Corporation said the changes to Cortelyou Road were absolutely necessary, because the area was experiencing ‘economic leakage.’ Nobody was investing or spending in the neighborhood. “We liked that it’s not Park Slope, but at the same time there was so much missing. We spent more money outside the neighborhood than in it,” Siegel said. “If I needed to cook something with broccoli or arugula I had to leave the neighborhood.”

Siegel says that the farmer’s market is at the core of the neighborhood. “The farmer’s market is like the town square,” Siegel said. “It was a way that all diverse neighbors could come together for the first time ever. It was a real community builder.”

The challenges Siegel faced involved getting people to come to the market, and proving to existing businesses that the market wasn’t going to take away their business: something that was easily achieved since the market provided goods that resident had to leave Flatbush to find. Business owners faced different challenges. One of the current owners of Picket Fence, one of the first restaurants to open during Cortelyou Road’s renaissance, said that it was a huge risk for the original owner of the place. “He took the gamble and didn’t know if there would be a payoff,” said Roma Agarwal a joint owner since 2007. “But he saw the incentive, he saw the market here.”

Rosenberg said that merchants eventually saw that the opportunity outweighed the risk. “Business people saw it in Williamsburg and on Smith Street, “ she said. “They knew if you get a foothold in a neighborhood it pays off, because they can come in when the rents are still low. In 5-10 years that is a strong advantage.”

Siegel says that commercial overhaul is happening all over the borough. “It’s definitely a broader Brooklyn Story. Brooklyn is booming,” Siegel said. “Bed-Stuy is another neighborhood that’s changing.”

Siegel believes that the changes on Cortelyou have been for the best, but points out that not everyone has supported them. “A lot of people are against gentrification. People get priced out,” she said.  “We don’t want that to happen here but you can’t stop it, these things happen in waves. It’s progression.”

Rosenberg feels the changes on Cortelyou Road far superseded any of their expectations. “It’s amazing,” Rosenberg said. “Cortelyou road is like the little street that could.”

The student body at the Yeshivah of Flatbush in Brooklyn, N.Y. has shifted from an Ashkenazic to Sephardic majority. (Photo: Alexandra Hootnick/The Brooklyn Ink)

As Passover approached 25 years ago, Diane Chabbot’s daughter was finally ready to participate in the songs and prayers of the seder with her family. The first grader had been practicing them constantly in her Hebrew day school class at the Yeshivah of Flatbush in Brooklyn. But when the little girl realized the Ashkenazi prayer melodies she had come to know didn’t match the melodies sung by her large Syrian family, she began to cry.

The incident was subsequently brought before the school’s board of education by Chabbot’s family rabbi and current head of the yeshivah’s high school, Raymond Harari. It reflected not just one family’s experience but rather a major demographic change in the neighborhood and the yeshivah. The growing Syrian population in Flatbush was tilting the yeshivah’s student body from a historically Ashkenazi majority, descending from German or Eastern European Jews, to a Sephardic majority, descending from Spanish or Middle Eastern Jews. By 1989, three years later, the school had instituted an Integrated Sephardic Ashkenazic Seder and a school-wide Sephardic tefillah, or morning prayer, as an alternative to the Ashkenazi one. And those were only the beginning of the educational adaptations.

“We’re not completely different, the basic conceptions are the same,” said Chabbot, who adopted her Syrian husband’s Sephardic customs after being raised in an Ashkenazi household.  “But customs are different, melodies are different, shul is different, and so some of the things that have changed are just this awareness of the richness of the different cultures.”

Rabbi Lawrence Schwed became a principal at the Yeshivah of Flatbush’s elementary school in the late 1980s, and said the first thing that he did was create Sephardic tefillah groups so that both Ashkenazi and Sephardic children could pray according to their respective traditions. “What good does it do for me to teach you how I pray,” Schwed said, if “ your parents aren’t familiar with it and that’s not what you’re going to hear in your synagogue.”

Brooklyn’s Syrian Jewish population is currently estimated to be 75,000 and growing, and Schwed said that “the vast majority” of the school’s K-8 students are now Sephardic, compared to about half in 1989.

Ashkenazic Jews and Sephardic Jews vary in cultural practices and dietary considerations as well as religious prayers and customs. For example, Ashkenazi Jews, unlike the Sephardim, refrain from eating rice during Passover. In Sephardic culture, naming children after grandparents is common, even if they are alive, while Ashkenazim typically pass the names of deceased relatives to the next generation.

Founded in 1927, the Yeshivah of Flatbush is a coeducational, Modern Orthodox private school with roughly 2,100 students. According to the school’s executive vice president, Dennis Eisenberg, the school has always drawn from the Sephardic community, but in increasing numbers over the years. Eisenberg said this trend is even more pronounced in the elementary and middle schools because community demographics drive the student population, but that the school does not collect data on how many students enroll in either the Sephardic or Ashkenazic minyanim, or morning prayer meetings.

Still, Harari said the school doesn’t define itself as Ashkenazic or Syrian. “There was always a desire to have an integration of both traditions,” said the head of the Joel Braverman High School.

The first Syrian Jews came to America in the early 20^th century and initially settled in Manhattan, but moved to the Bensonhurst area of Brooklyn after the Eastern European Jews dominating Manhattan denigrated them as “Arab Jews.” In the 1980s, the Syrians who had accumulated a degree of wealth and success began to flow into Flatbush, where home values were rising.

Schwed said the school ran routine staff-development programs in order to train what was then a mostly Ashkenazi staff in becoming familiar with Sephardic culture. “The teachers had to retool, just like you have to technologically retool these days,” Schwed said, although the Yeshivah of Flatbush does not hire nor keep count of teachers based on their Sephardic or Ashkenazic backgrounds.

Other than the morning tefillah, Sephardic and Ashkenazic students attend the same classes. During the after-lunch prayer and holidays, the school either alternates between or observes both Sephardic and Ashkenazic traditions.

In the yeshivah’s preschool, however, Schwed said students are only taught the Sephardic tefillah, a change that was made several years ago when the student population tilted towards a Sephardic majority. Having separate tefillot “was too confusing for the children,” Schwed said. “So now everybody in the preschool learns Sephardic tefillah, and beginning in first grade we separate them based on what their parents choose.”

In 2008, the elementary school launched an updated Sephardic tefillah program that Schwed said has exceeded beyond the school’s wildest expectations. “Our students were always top academically, but we got killed on Shabbat because our kids couldn’t compete with the kids from the other schools in terms of prayers,” Schwed said. “Now our kids are flying on Shabbat.”

Alex Schindler, a 2007 graduate, wrote in an email that the elementary school’s efforts have allowed the Yeshivah of Flatbush to compete for Syrian students with nearby, exclusively Sephardic day schools like Magen David.

In the last few years, Harari said, the yeshivah’s Joel Braverman High School has offered a Sephardic history elective in addition to Sephardic-based independent study. The mandatory Jewish history class has also given increased emphasis to Sephardic history.

Schindler wrote that while he expected the amount of Sephardic programming to eventually increase in the high school, there currently wasn’t much.

“The mandatory Jewish history class, for example, is almost entirely synonymous, when dealing with the modern period, with Modern Ashkenazi Jewish history, though my teacher taught a little bit of Sephardic history,” Schindler wrote, adding that the exams students could take for Yeshiva University credit wouldn’t test for the Sephardic material.

Eisenberg said that in the high school a greater balance exists between Sephardic and Ashkenazi students, with students commuting from areas like New Jersey, Manhattan and Westchester. Schindler wrote that he estimates the proportion is now about 70 percent Sephardic, 30 percent Ashkenazic. When he was in high school, the Sephardic students’ minyan was moved into the auditorium previously occupied by the Ashkenazic students, who were relocated into classrooms as their numbers continued to fall.

Ashkenazi Jews have slowly trickled out of Flatbush and Midwood to enclaves in the tri-state area partly due to a growing affluence. Schwed said another reason was that during 1980s housing boom in Flatbush, some Ashkenazim decided to sell their homes and move to where their children had relocated. “Their kids were not coming back to Flatbush,” Schwed said.

Schwed also said more Modern Orthodox schools have sprung up in areas where Ashkenazim have relocated, and have improved in addition to being closer to students. While the school used to have two full buses of Ashkenazim coming in from Staten Island, Schwed said now they’re down to one van. “The Yeshivah of Flatbush used to be the only show in town in terms of what we offered,” Schwed said. “Now many, many schools have copied our model, and that’s very flattering.”

The remaining Ashkenazic population in Flatbush is predominately “black-hat,” or stringently Orthodox Jews, who are less inclined to engage in secular society or send their children to a modern, coeducational Orthodox school like the Yeshivah of Flatbush.

Ami Sasson, the president-elect of the Yeshivah of Flatbush’s Ladies Auxiliary and 1992 graduate, said she had many Ashkenazic friends while she was a student, and the groups’ outward trend was a loss to the diversity of Flatbush. “A lot of people in school, including my kids,” she said, “say they wish there were more Ashkenaz.”

Schwed said the yeshivah currently gives $9 million of its $36 million budget in tuition assistance. There has been some discussion about possible merit scholarships to the school in the future, but despite the high costs of a private religious education, Schwed said the school has been “bursting at the seams” with a rapidly growing student population. Schwed said more pupils want to come to the Yeshivah of Flatbush because they “want the mix of Ashkenazim and Sephardim, even though the shift has gone the other way.”

The boarded-up 480 Stratford Road among its Victorian neighbors. The house that originally stood on the property was demolished in 2006. Chris Haire/BI

With children on Big Wheels crushing piles of amber leaves and fashionably antique Victorian homes hidden behind lush gardens, Stratford Road is a postcard collector’s dream. Yet in the center of this hushed Victorian neighborhood in Flatbush sits a vacant lot guarded with eight-foot-tall plywood fences like some dilapidated fortress.

The lot did not always look that way.

One of those proud Victorians once stood there, but was purchased by a developer in 2006 and quickly demolished. The lot has been empty since and no new construction has started—a sign of what happens when a developer’s coffers run dry. The lot is overrun with weeds. Orange safety cones and pallets decorate the land.

“It’s horrible. There’s empty pallets, leftover construction material and trash,” said urban gardener Margaret Dunn-Carver, who rents a room in the house next to the lot. “It could be so much more.”

What a prospective new owner of the lot has in mind, though, isn’t likely to please Dunn-Carver.

The company interested in purchasing the lot at 480 Stratford Road, 10 Stratford Associates, is seeking approval for a legal maneuver allowing it to erect a seven-story building among the decades-old Victorians, setting up a fight with the residents of District 14, who insist such a building would violate a rezoning law passed in 2009.

This legal maneuver, known as common law vested rights, has become increasingly frequent since the end of the recession when a number of zoning changes occurred throughout the city, pitting developers against the communities that supported the rezoning. The Board of Standards and Appeals received 25 common law applications in 2009 and 2010, according to its Executive Director Jeffrey Mulligan.

One such zoning change was the 2009 Flatbush Rezoning, which changed the status of the lot from R6—a designation allowing multifamily dwellings—into an R3X, which permits only single-family homes to be built. The prospective owner of the lot on Stratford Road has filed an application for “common law vested rights,” which would allow the company to build according to the original zoning status of the property.

Community Board 14 unanimously voted Nov. 14 to send letters asking the BSA and the Department of Buildings to reject the buyer’s application.

The letters, copies of which were attained by The Brooklyn Ink, portray 10 Stratford Associates and the current owner in a negative light.

“Due to our concerns related to the non-owner applicant and our belief that the current owner has acted in bad faith,” says one of the letters, “Community Board 14 recommends that the BSA deny the application for common law vested rights.”

The community board’s concerns toward the buyer, according to the letter, is that the applicant does not own the property but is claiming financial hardship if the appeal is denied. The allegation of “bad faith” on the part of the current owner is not spelled out, but seems to be the result of five years of tensions between him and the community.

Jay Loeffler, the current owner according to Department of Finance records, purchased the land from Maurice Pinkster in April 2006. Loeffler surprised residents by quickly demolishing the Victorian, according to Henri Pinkster, Maurice’s brother, who has lived in the house next to 480 Stratford Road since 1988.

The demolition was the beginning of Loeffler’s plans.

A blueprint for the proposed structure that could rise above the Victorian houses on Stratford Road.

Blueprints of the proposed structure, drafted before the rezoning change, show that Loeffler planned to build the seven-story complex on the lot, which connects Stratford Road to Coney Island Avenue, and use floors three through seven for apartments. Floors one and two were to be leased to a business.

Two similar structures were built at the end of the street long before the zoning change. But the proposed apartment’s central location angered the community.

At the time, however, there was not much residents could do to prevent the high rise.

The area along Coney Island Avenue was zoned R6, which permits the construction of tall residential or community structures. So Loeffler began construction on the foundation, which cost approximately $160,000, according to documents filed with the BSA.

Then, the recession hit. The construction stopped.

“My client had some financial problems, as have a lot of people in the last few years,” said Jordan Most, the lawyer representing both Loeffler and 10 Stratford Associates.

That was the way things stood in 2009, when the Flatbush Rezoning changed the status of the area comprising his property in order to prevent new high rises.

“I wanted to make sure we protected the beauty of the neighborhood,” said Flatbush’s Councilman Mathieu Eugene, who supported the plan.

The statute, though, does provide a two-year grace period for owners to re-file with the DOB and retain the original permit.

That deadline expired this year—about the same time Loeffler agreed to sell the lot to 10 Stratford Associates, contingent on its ability to build the high rise on the now low-rise-only lot.

So Loeffler filed an application to allow the building’s construction under common law vested rights.

Under common law, a property owner is allowed to continue a project that defies new zoning laws if significant work had been done prior to the law’s passing. But under common law, “significant work” is ambiguous.

“The common law is a more liberal application [than the statutory law],” said BSA’s application examiner Toni Matias.

As long as the DOB finds the original permit valid, it will refer the matter to the BSA to decide, Matias said.

“[The applicants] have to pass a three-prong test,” Matias said. “We look at work done, expenditures and possible incurred costs [if application is not granted].”

That is where the debate with the community comes in.

Residents challenge the idea that 10 Stratford Associates can take credit for the work, expenditures and possible costs of a property it does not yet own.

Unfortunately for the community, the BSA allows future owners to file the application, Mulligan said.

Still, the community board seems determined to fight against the application, which could take months to resolve.

“We asked the community residents,” said CB 14 Chairman Alvin Berk. “They are for not having the building.”

“We are allowed to build there. I’m going to try to build an old-style building,” said Igor Zangranichny, co-owner of 10 Stratford Associates. He also contemplated what would occupy the bottom floors.

“Maybe a doctor’s office or a kindergarten, something good for the community,” he said.

Photo by Esteban Illades/The Brooklyn Ink

Competing arguments were furious today as the jury prepared to deliberate the verdict for a Florida man accused of brutally stabbing his victim to death at a Flatbush intersection.

The case, which originally appeared to be a simple drug deal gone bad, was turned upside down when defense lawyer, Doug Appel, asked jurors to question who was the real victim. The defendant, Nuri Hoxha, was 17 years old when he fatally stabbed Philip Realmuto, 25, in April 2008. Appel said in his final statement that Hoxha did so in self-defense.

“Who was taking advantage of whom?” the lawyer asked rhetorically.

In a trial at Kings County Criminal court, which started an hour late due to a tardy juror, both the prosecution and defense concluded their arguments in front of Judge Neil Jon Firetog.

The defendant had travelled to New York to sell $3600 worth of cocaine to the Staten Island victim, whom he had previously met in Florida. Four days after Hoxha arrived in New York, Realmuto was found at Avenue C and McDonald Avenue near his car, stabbed to death with 18 wounds.

In court, Hoxha appeared frustrated with prosecutor Tim Gough, who insisted that Hoxha repeat the timeline of his visit to the city, from his arrival at the Port Authority bus terminal to a few days later, on the evening when Realmuto was killed.

Gough presented Hoxha as a hotheaded drug dealer who became upset when the victim continued to postpone the drug deal over a few days. At 17 years, the defendant already had three drug related arrests in Florida. The prosecutor divulged into Hoxha’s criminal history, saying that Hoxha had already been robbed and shot at before coming to New York.

“You’re putting words in my mouth,” the defendant stuttered, when Gough bluntly asked him whether Hoxha had used weapons to protect himself because of his high-risk lifestyle.

Gough showed the jurors phone records that revealed numerous outgoing calls Hoxha made, particularly to a Suffolk County number, the day before the murder even though Hoxha claimed he didn’t know anyone in New York.

At one point, Judge Firetog asked the defendant to compose himself. “Just answer questions, don’t ask questions,” the judge said, after Hoxha, visibly agitated, began posing questions to the prosecution.

The police caught Hoxha after he was arrested for possession of cocaine in Clearwater, Florida, more than a year after leaving New York.

The defense didn’t dispute that Hoxha stabbed Realmuto. Instead, defense lawyer Appel asked the jurors to think about what happened between the two men that night in Realmuto’s car. Realmuto picked up Hoxha and drove to the quiet Flatbush intersection where the exchange was supposed to finally occur; three days after Hoxha arrived in the city.

The trial hinges on Hoxha’s intentions, which is important as the jurors prepare to decide if Hoxha is guilty of second degree murder. A second degree murder charge in New York carries a  sentence of 25 years to life.

Appel painted Hoxha as a young, foolish teenager who was only protecting himself from Realmuto, who sold illegal pills.

“I told you in the beginning you wouldn’t like anything about [Hoxha],” Appel said, during his final statement. Hoxha slouched down in his chair as Appel addressed the jury.

Appel suggested that Realmuto pulled out the knife from under his seat, causing Hoxha to panic and grab the knife in self-defense.

Appel, however, didn’t address why Hoxha stabbed the victim multiple times before running away to the nearest subway station.

The jury is currently deliberating the charges, and will likely arrive at a verdict later this week.

At the end of the school day, gaggles of excited students at P.S 139 burst out the doors, some to frolic in the playground, while others join waiting parents to walk home, usually hand-in-hand.

P.S. 217, one of the schools affected by overcrowding (Chika Okaneme/The Brooklyn Ink)

It’s a timeless American scene that warms the heart, but what it hides is something else.   P.S. 139, and many other schools throughout Brooklyn, are growing increasingly over-crowded—and the problem is likely to only get worse for the foreseeable future.

According to the New York City Department of Education’s 2010-2011 capacity report, about a third of NYC elementary school buildings are over capacity. Nearly a hundred of these schools are in Brooklyn. Out of the 5,003 new seats the department provided to schools this year, Brooklyn— the most populated borough—received only 343 of them. Yet, the borough continues to grow as a popular destination for young American and immigrant families looking for affordable housing and charming neighborhoods.

But as Mildred Decker, a young single mother with a child in P.S. 139, worries:  “If the school’s overcrowded, how is a kid supposed…to get the right amount of help?”

Her concern can be seen in spades in Community Board 14, which represents the Flatbush, Midwood, and eastern Kensington neighborhoods.  Three schools in CB14’s part of school district 22— P.S. 217, 139 and 315— are over-capacity, according to the department of education’s report. In October, the board completed its fiscal year 2013 capital and expense budget and recommended that a new elementary school be built.

“Overcrowding has been a persistent problem…for many, many years…and this has been a recommendation for consecutive budgets” stated Shawn Campbell, the community board’s district manager. “The biggest challenge in meeting this or any other capital need is the constraints on the budget in the City of New York in these difficult financial times.”

“It’s been a problem in Brooklyn and citywide” said Christopher Spinelli, president of Community Education Council District 22, the “budget is degrading year by year.” Recently, the state reduced its contribution to city education by $1.4 billion. There have been thousands of teacher layoffs and a series of school budget cuts.

Schools are having trouble finding room for incoming students. “Principals are having to do more with less. They’re not able to open up additional classes, so… they have to continue to fill a class until it’s at capacity” Spinelli said. “In some cases they wind up going over capacity since you really can’t turn a child away.”

Residents are growing increasingly restless. “We’re getting more complaints now than ever before,” Spinelli said, “because principals are not able to open up more classes and hire more teachers. So we’re definitely seeing more issues with overcrowding.”

Spinelli went to an overcrowded school as a child, and his children are now in the same situation.  “My children have always been in classes that are at the maximum capacity and I don’t think that is an ideal learning situation” he said. “You always want a smaller class size.”

Repeated research shows that class size has a major impact on learning, student-teacher relationships, teaching quality, and overall academic success. In the 1980s, the landmark Tennessee Project STAR study, for example, showed that a class size between 13-17 students, for grades K through 3, resulted in higher test scores. According to the U.S. Department of Education, these results were especially significant for minority children and those from economically disadvantaged backgrounds.

Subsequent research also supports the Tennessee findings.  In a study published this year by Switzerland’s University of Teacher Education St. Gallen and the University of London, reducing class sizes by even one student can improve learning. The study also suggested that a class of 17 students or less is ideal.

The city department of education has a set of target class sizes for different elementary school levels— 18 students for Pre-K, 20 for grades K-3, and 28 for grades 4-8. All of these numbers are lower than the city’s previous class size standards, but they are higher than what many researchers think is the best class size for optimal learning.

Deckard’s five-year old daughter is currently enrolled in one of P.S. 139’s kindergarten classes. “I was aware of [the overcrowding] that’s why I didn’t want her to go to that school” she said, but she felt as though she had no choice. She was told to send her daughter to a zone school. Before registering her child, she tried to contact the school board to see if there was any way for her child to enroll someplace else, but she was either shooed away or left without a response. “I just feel like it’s kind of messed up” she said.

Her child’s kindergarten class has about 21 students. Deckard says she was in a kindergarten class about that same size when she was little, but there was one major difference. “I remember when I was in kindergarten I had two teachers” she said.  If the school cannot reduce the class size, she wishes there was at least another teacher in the classroom so that her child could receive more attention and better instruction.

Beth Orchulli, a stay-at-home mother of two, never went to an overcrowded school— but because of P.S. 217 her children now do. Although her son’s pre-k class is a descent size, her second grade son is in a class with about 25 other students.

When her family moved into the neighborhood two years ago, she already presumed that her sons would go to an overcrowded school. “It’s unavoidable unless you can afford private school,” she said.

Nevertheless, she wants change. “I think the children suffer,” she said. “There should be a bigger commitment to building more schools.”

Leonie Haimson, founder and Executive Director of Class Size Matters, is determined to stop overcrowding in New York City public schools. For the past 15 years she has used her organization as a means to inform the public about large class sizes and to push government into using state funding more effectively. “The Department of Education is legally mandated to [reduce] class sizes in all grades and they have not done so,” she said. “Instead they have allowed class sizes to increase.”

Children at the school playground in P.S. 217 (Chika Okaneme/The Brooklyn Ink)

The Contract for Excellence has been providing state funding to the city department of education since 2007. Under contract, the money can only be used for certain purposes, which includes reducing class sizes. However Haimson believes officials are not doing enough.

Since 2002, Mayor Bloomberg has had control of the New York City education system, not the Board of Education. “The city has been neglectful and remiss for many years, and it has gotten much worse under the Bloomberg administration” she said. Mayoral control will stay in effect until 2015.

“Early grades [are] the largest in 11 years” Haimson said, “so [the administration is] violating the law and [is] in essence violating our children’s constitution rights to adequate education.”

Although people are troubled by the current overcrowding situation, the city’s education department does not provide them with much hope. Frank Thomas, a spokesperson from the city department of education, said that overcrowding in CB 14’s part of school district 22 is not severe enough to cause much concern. “We only have so [many] resources to do work with,” he said.

And so after receiving proposals from across the city, the department believes that other parts of New York are in greater need for new schools at the moment. It may be some time before the residents in the CB 14 area see that desired new school.

Rabbi Liberow of Chabad Flatbush calls the billboard "disgusting." (Vikram Patel/The Brooklyn Ink)

On the evening of March 7, the Jewish community in Brooklyn celebrated the start of Purim, a holiday commemorating the salvation of the Jews from destruction at the hands of a Persian ruler named Haman. But Wednesday night ushered in a bit of unwelcomed text as well: a large billboard along the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway that reads, in both English and Hebrew, “You know it’s a myth, and you have a choice.”

The provocative advertisement was put up by American Atheists, a Cranford, N.J.-based organization of non-believers that says it wants to target closeted atheists in what they call “insular communities.” The group has also put up an identical billboard in Paterson, N.J. – with Arabic replacing the Hebrew script – hoping to target potential atheists in the sizable Muslim population there.

Blair Scott, the group’s director of communications, said its goal is not to mock people for their beliefs, but to reach out to those in the Jewish community who fear they’ll be ostracized if they came out as atheists.

“If you don’t know it’s a myth, then you’re not the target audience,” Scott said.

The Hebrew billboard was originally slated to go up Monday on South Fifth Street in Brooklyn, next to the Williamsburg Bridge, but Scott claims the owner of the building, Kenneth Stier, was pressured by leaders in the Hasidic community to not go through with it. When contacted by phone, Stier insisted that he wasn’t pressured by religious leaders, but then declined to comment on any further questions.

Many Hasidic Jews find the billboard offensive, like Rabbi Zalman Liberow from Chabad Lubavitch, a Hasidic movement, in Flatbush.

Jews frown on spelling out "God" (left) because it is such a holy term (Photo courtesy: American Atheists)

“This is really disgusting,” he said, sitting in a large van called the Mitzvah Tank on 14th Street and Kings Highway in Brooklyn, which serves as a sort of mobile synagogue. “I can understand why Christians or other religions would want to convert people,” he added, “but why would an atheist want to make other people atheist?”

Jews traditionally frown upon spelling out “God” because it is considered so holy. And while Scott said the decision to write it in Hebrew on the billboard was not intentional, he has no reservations about American Atheists’ decision.

“We’re not privy to their rules,” Scott said. “We don’t have to follow their dogma.”

This is not American Atheists’ first provocative campaign. The group drew sharp criticism from Christians in late November 2010, when it posted a billboard depicting a Nativity scene that read, “You know it’s a myth. This season, celebrate reason.”

Moishe Friedman, a Williamsburg resident who thinks the billboards are a ploy to drive traffic to the atheists’ website, said that Jewish people don’t go around telling people from other religions that they’re wrong for their beliefs – and neither should a group like American Atheists.

“I think non-Jewish people will build up a bad perception of the Jewish community and Jewish people in general,” he said. “Keep it to yourself.”

The billboard now sits on Meeker Avenue, above the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, a little more than a mile-and-a-half north of the original Williamsburg location. Scott said the billboard company, Clear Channel Outdoor, was extremely apologetic, and has given the atheists five free days of advertising in its current location.

He said both billboards together cost around $15,000, which came from the group’s billboard fund, which is made up of individual donations and donations made directly to the billboard fund.

The advertisements come just a few weeks before the Reason Rally, a gathering of atheists, agnostics and other “free thinkers” schedule to take place on March 24 at the National Mall in D.C.

Rabbi Liberow believes campaigns like American Atheists’ are particularly dangerous for vulnerable youth whose faith may be wavering.

“It could give an extra push for people who are looking for freedom,” he said. “Obviously, a person would rather not have the burden of faith haunting him.”

In the trailer for Dan Sallitt’s “The Unspeakable Act,” a 17-year-old girl named Jackie bikes home. Once there, she confronts her brother about his feelings for another girl and reveals her own romantic feelings for him. What only a few astute viewers may recognize is the place. Sallitt, 56, set his fourth feature in a stately green house with yellow shutters in the Midwood Park section of Brooklyn.

“It was kind of crucial to the script that the character have a house that’s very important to her and is kind of a projection of her own mythology of herself,” said Sallitt, who wound up shooting the movie in a longtime friend’s home.

In so doing, Sallitt has joined a growing number of filmmakers and writers who utilize the tree-lined streets and verdant manors found in neighborhoods like Flatbush, Ditmas Park, and Midwood as movie sets. Sallitt said that these communities are “very inviting to the film industry” because their architecture and ambience can evoke small-town America.

Antique cars parked in front of the set of “Boardwalk Empire” in Ditmas Park, where the show filmed part of its pilot episode. (Melissa Howard/The Brooklyn Ink)

“The Unspeakable Act,” which Sallitt says is the first installment of a trilogy, was featured at the Brooklyn Academy of Music Cinema Fest this summer. At the film’s premier at the Sarasota Film Festival, Sallitt won the Independent Vision Award.

Another new film, Franklyn Strachan’s “Death is No Escape,” debuted earlier this summer in the supposedly haunted basement in Flatbush where it was shot. Strachan recently showed “Death is No Escape,” his fifth feature, at the Artisan Festival International World Cinema Festival, an event that says it celebrates cultural diversity, in Southampton on August 4.

Strachan, whose work has been featured in publications like The Huffington Post, The Brooklyn Voice, and Metrofocus, said he wrote the film’s script after experiencing a paranormal encounter.

“Basically, that idea of this fully manifested being, just being there, having a full consciousness from what I noticed, made me wonder what happens on that side and what happens that allows you to come through this side, and what happens if the person who was allowed to come through this side shouldn’t have been,” said Strachan, CEO of Cypher Productions. “That’s where this story starts.”

While the films by Sallitt and Strachan have dramatic themes, filmmakers who are more interested in other genres of film also consider neighborhoods in this area of Brooklyn as the perfect setting. Two New York-based comedians filmed several scenes in their web series, “It Gets Betterish,” in Ditmas Park last summer.

“It’s beautiful, it’s quiet, and it’s a very unassuming neighborhood,” said Eliot Glazer, co-creator of “It Gets Betterish.” “It’s very pretty, so why not take advantage of how beautiful the neighborhood is?”

Shows like “Gossip Girl” and HBO’s new series “Girls,” which is set in areas of Brooklyn and Manhattan, have received wide acclaim for their interpretation of being young and single in New York City. Glazer, 29, said he and the show’s other creator, Brent Sullivan, 28, felt it was important to show a different side of Brooklyn in “It Gets Betterish,” which he described as a web series that gives an “irreverent viewpoint on gay life in a really funny way.”

“It’s also nice to expand that view of Brooklyn outside of neighborhoods like Williamsburg and Park Slope, because you so often see, at least in comedies, films shot in the Williamsburg area,” said Glazer, who lived in Ditmas Park for many years. “You don’t often see representations of being young in Brooklyn elsewhere.”

Eliot Glazer and Brent Sullivan walk through the Cortelyou Road subway station in a scene from their web series “It Gets Betterish.” (Melissa Howard/The Brooklyn Ink)

“It Gets Betterish,” the most popular episode of which has been viewed more than 25,000 times on YouTube, received positive reviews from critics at blogs like Jezebel and The Frisky. In March, Glazer and Sullivan were also featured in The Huffington Post’s “Voice to Voice” series for their show.

The neighborhood culture and Victorian style of homes in some parts of Flatbush have a long history of attracting writers who want to develop their characters there. Sophie Zawistowski emigrates from Germany to Brooklyn in William Styron’s novel “Sophie’s Choice,” which was adapted into a full-length movie in 1982. Meryl Streep starred as Sophie in the film, which was mainly shot in Flatbush. The film “The Lords of Flatbush,” starring Henry Winkler and Sylvester Stallone, also takes place in this community.

Flatbush and Ditmas Park are often spotted in films and TV shows with large budgets. Two feature films scheduled to premiere in 2013 were filmed in Ditmas Park earlier this year, bringing several celebrities to the area. A romantic comedy called “A Case of You,” written by and starring Justin Long, filmed in Ditmas Park in February. “Blood Ties,” which stars Mila Kunis and Clive Owen, was also partially shot there.

One of HBO’s TV shows, “Boardwalk Empire,” filmed in the Flatbush Reformed Church many times in the past year. The crew returned to the area June 13, when they filmed in a house in Ditmas Park for several days. Antique cars were parked nearby, along with trailers labeled as dressing rooms for the show’s actors and actresses. “Boardwalk Empire,” the third season of which will premiere later this year, is actually set in Atlantic City, New Jersey, in the Prohibition period of the 1920s and early 1930s.

Bob Shaw, who was the production designer for “Boardwalk Empire” when the crew filmed part of its pilot episode in Flatbush, described some of the sets he designed as a representation of “a much more elegant time than the world we live in now.”

“You can’t always find a block of New York that looks like 1920,” explained Shaw, who said that “staying true to the period” was one of the toughest aspects of working as a member of this show’s crew.

When Jackie asks her brother “Do you really like her better than me?” in “The Unspeakable Act,” when Kristin says “There’s a woman staring at us,” and points to a floating figure in “Death is No Escape,” when Brent swigs from a flask in a bathroom at a dinner party in an episode of “It Gets Betterish,” these characters may seem worlds apart. Off screen, the distance can be measured in blocks.

On last Friday’s tour, Jeffrey Stirewalt took his group to Flatbush, where they visited Erasmus High School, Loews’ Kings Theater, and a Dutch Reformed Church.

To most tourists, New York City Manhattan, but Brooklynite Jeffrey Stirewalt wants to change that and bring visitors across the river.

His company, “Brooklyn Unplugged Tours,” which he launched early last year, takes tourists to explore Brooklyn’s off the beaten path from Flatbush to Sheepshead Bay, to ethnic and faraway enclaves that would otherwise not be seen.

“Brooklyn deserves more acknowledgements,” said Stirewalt on a recent Saturday as he led a group of curious tourists on a trek through Brooklyn.

First stop: Erasmus High School, the oldest high school in the state, which is located on the corner of Flatbush Avenue and Church Avenue. The school is well known for its famous alumni—singer and movie star Barbara Streisand, writers Bernard Malamud and Mickey Spillane, Nobel Prize winning researchers Barbara McClintock and Eric Kandel, cartoonist Joseph Barbera, football star Sid Luckman, builder Samuel LeFrak and the actor Eli Wallach.

The 70-year-old Barbara Streisand, who graduated in 1959 from Erasmus High, returned to her hometown last year to perform for the first time. “Brooklyn to me means the Loews Kings, Erasmus, the yeshiva I went to, the Dodgers, Prospect Park, great Chinese food,” she said last year before the concert which was held at the Barclays Center. “I’m so glad I came from Brooklyn—it’s down to earth. I guess you can come home again,”

Stirewalt talked about Streisand as tour members, like Veronica Manlow, a professor at Brooklyn College, looked at the school’s display case of trophies and newspaper clippings.

“She came back and embraced her roots here,” Stirewalt said.

The Erasmus High School visit is part of Stirewalt’s newly added weekly 4-hour tour, “Caribbean Food & Culture Adventure,” in Flatbush, where this 3rd generation Brooklynite was born and grew up.

A few blocks away from the school, Loews’ Kings Theater, where Barbara Stresiand and Sylvester Stallone worked as teenagers, is undergoing a $92 million restoration. This landmark building was open in 1929 and will be given a second life by next year. A Dutch Reformed Church first built by Governor  Peter Stuyvesant in 1654, is also in the neighborhood.

“This is the oldest neighborhood in the city,” he said. It “boasts magnificent architecture and history, and hosts a strong community of immigrants from the Caribbean.”.

To get a flavor of the Caribbean community, the tour, costing $39.9 per person, takes visitors to Flatbush’s Caton Market, where they get to sample West Indian food like jerk chicken and curry goat, listen to the beats of reggae and calypso, and meet local small business owners, like 51-year old Patrick Burrell, who migrated to this country from Jamaica 21 years ago and has been living in Brooklyn for the last decade. Burell sells woodcrafts and leather goods imported from Jamaica.

Jeffrey Stirewalt is taking his tour members to meet local business owners in the Flatbush’s Caton Market.

Participants in last Saturday’s tours seemed delighted by what they’d discovered. “I like the part that you actually spend a long time to know the history and meet people. That’s the most fascinating part of it. It’s different from going to a bus tour and rushing to those prepackaged sites,” said professor Manlow, who went on the tour with her 25-year old daughter, Laura.

“I’ve never been to this part of Brooklyn. You wouldn’t normally expect to see so many interesting things and people here,” said the professor’s daughter. “It’s like an adventure.”

Stirewalt believes only a native Brooklynite can show visitors the real Brooklyn

“Nobody knows Brooklyn like those that have lived their entire lives here,” he said. “If you had been in Flatbush 30 years ago, you would have seen Jews, Italians and Irish, but now the demographics and culture are very different. There are so many stories that need to be told.”

And his customers want him to keep telling them, apparently.  The latest request:  to add a tour about Brooklyn’s Russian culture.

For more information and tour schedules, visit Brooklyn Unplugged Tours

Fifteen-year-old Amira Ashfaq immigrated to the United States in 2006. (Aisha Asif/The Brooklyn Ink)

A couple of years ago, Amira Ashfaq got a dog. Her parents were angry, but not just because the dog would need to be walked and housebroken – dogs are seen in her family’s culture as being impure.

“He always says Muslims aren’t supposed to have dogs, but I don’t understand,” said Amira, now 15, of her father. “God made him, so why is he different?”

Amira had gone with her older brother to a shelter for a cat, a pet which is allowed, but ended up with a one-year-old white pit bull when they found out he was being euthanized. Out of pity they snuck the dog into their apartment in Flatbush. When he was discovered by their disapproving parents, the teenagers said he would only be staying for a few days until a friend adopted him. But that never happened, and two years later the dog, Lumiere, has become a member of the family.

“So, my dad he still doesn’t admit that he likes him, but at night we see him sneaking food to him,” the Amira said, laughing.

Amira is one of the 8.3 percent of New York City kids who have immigrated to the United States from a foreign country, according to a recent report by Citizens’ Committee for Children. And like her counterparts, she is straddling the line between two different worlds – the one which her parents come from and the one she is living in now. She has learned to cope with bullying, the prospect of discrimination, and tries to live up to the traditional values her mother tries to instill in her.

Born in Saudi Arabia to Pakistani parents, Amira and her family immigrated to the United States in 2006.  Her father, who worked as a driver in the American embassy in the country, received visas for his whole family as a gift.

Amira’s family spent a few months in Georgia with a family friend before moving to New York, a place she said they prefer because of better job opportunities, and because everything was open late and within walking distance. But in Brooklyn, unlike in Georgia, she was bullied.

“Kids would be like, you don’t know how to read; you’re in fourth grade and you read like the level of a first grader,” Amira said. It didn’t help that her mother would dress her in shalwar kameez, traditional Pakistani clothes consisting up a long shirt and loose trousers, she added.

Amira started school at PS 214 in the Little Pakistan neighborhood in Brooklyn, where more than 50 percent of the students are Asian, and many are Pakistani. Because of her English skills, she was two grades behind and took ESL classes for five years. She and her younger sister Quratulain, who is known as Queen, used to watch Dora The Explorer to build an English vocabulary. Amira now chuckles at the thought that they had no idea they were learning Spanish at the same time.

As her English improved, her mother and father, who don’t speak English, began to rely on Amira as well to translate for them when they went shopping, to doctor’s appointments, and during parent-teacher conferences.

“If I’m failing in school and [teachers] call or something, they don’t understand nothing and I have to explain,” Amira said. “I could lie to them, you know, say I’m passing but I don’t do that. I let them know because they trust me.”

Christina Ali heads the youth program at the Council of Peoples Organization, a community center in Little Pakistan, and deals with immigrant kids and their parents regularly. She said that because some immigrant parents do not speak English and had limited education in their home countries, their children become their guides in navigating life in America.

“The kids end up being like the parents and the parents end up being the kids,” she said because they need their children’s help. “So the parents rely on the kids to communicate and they rely on the kids to make the decision so it becomes a total vice versa of parents and children.”

Though Ashfaq’s English has now improved to the point where no one teases her, she thinks languages — whether English, Urdu, or even the little bit of Arabic she picked up while in Saudi Arabia — are a big challenge for her. She said she struggles with her English lessons in class.

“I’m not really fluent with English or Urdu,” she said confessionally. “It’s like I don’t have a language; I just know a little bit of both.”

Since moving to Brooklyn, the family has stayed close to the Flatbush/Midwood neighborhood because of its large Pakistani community. Her mother was able to find a job at a nearby pharmacy despite her limited English because the neighborhood is filled with so many Urdu speakers. Her father does not work because of complications arising out of a problematic surgery. But the fact that her mother worked outside the house is strange for Amira and her family, who take the idea that the man of the house is the breadwinner very seriously.

“I always try to ask her [about her working] but she’s like, we did everything and passed through those horrible times,” Amira said.

Now her eldest brother, who is 21, supports the family as a construction worker and her mother no longer works. The eldest son is expected to provide for his parents in Pakistan, and her brother is glad to help out, Amira said.

“My parents are very cultural and…our family stick together and so my brother is very helpful and supports the family, too,” she said adding that she wants to do the same for them when she grows up to becomes a doctor.

But for now the family follows the traditional route. “My mom always says it’s [my brothers’] job to look after you guys after they pass away,” she said.

Amira has expectations weighing on her, too. Her family are Sayyids, a group in Pakistan who trace their ancestry back to the Prophet Muhammad. Therefore, they must be on their best behavior because people look up to them. Living in a neighborhood with so many other Pakistanis makes it difficult to stay away from the scrutinizing gaze of gossipy fellow residents who might talk negatively of them if for instance, they stay out too late.

“[My mother] always says, ‘Don’t embarrass me in front of anybody,’” Amira said. “She says do whatever you want, but don’t embarrass me in front of family because we’re girls and especially because we’re Sayyid.”

Amira poses for a picture near Little Pakistan, the neighborhood she lives in, in Flatbush. (Aisha Asif/The Brooklyn Ink)

Ali said that because some parents are afraid their children might be negatively influenced by people or things around them, they are not as open to let their children just “hang out” with their friends in certain places. Amira mentioned that although she is allowed to do what she wants for the most part, she is restricted from activities such as sleepovers, because her parents don’t let her go because they don’t know her friends’ families and also find it rude to intrude in their homes this way.

“They feel alienated and because their parents have different expectations for them they also feel they don’t belong with the other kids,” Ali said.

When Amira starts high school in a few months, she might wear a hijab, or headscarf, like her mother. She said she has been mistaken for Mexican or Italian a few times, and it’s become increasingly important for her to identify herself as who she really is. She believes the headscarf will help.

Hearing the story of a friend who had a bottle thrown at her by a man who told her to “go back to your country you terrorist freak” gave her pause in the past, but not anymore.

“Before I used to be ashamed, but now I’m not. I always used to think, ‘Why can’t I be American?’ and then I realized I don’t want to be fully American. I liked that I’m mixed,” she said with a smile.

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Sixteen-year-old Safia Mahjabin was born in Bangladesh and immigrated to the United States with her family when she was one. Safia is a very active teen participating in numerous art and engineering competitions, is a member of her school’s Mock Trial Club and is president of the Drama Club. Recently, she played the part of Shakespeare’s Macbeth in a school play.