One of the two buildings that still sit under the Metro North rail tracks, taking up three blocks instead of five as they used to in the 1930s. (Photo by Cecile Dehesdin)

On a regular weekday, the stretch of Park Avenue between 111th and 116th Streets in East Harlem is all but deserted, with four passers-by at most. Blocks away from the newly opened Costco, two brightly painted buildings sit under the Metro-North railroad tracks. Only one is open, welcoming visitors with a sign spelling La Marqueta in joyful letters. Inside, the two first stalls are rented and open, plus a few more next to them, but that’s all. The rest of the building consists of empty stalls barred by iron gratings, some of which can only be seen from afar, because a huge grid blocks half the building. The only noise is the soft humming of Latino soap operas watched by some vendor waiting for customers to serve, and every so often a discussion with those few customers.

Shopping at La Marqueta used to be a real bustle. “In the ’60s you couldn’t even come through here because it was so busy,” butcher José Cintron fondly remembers. “It was packed from 6 to 6 Monday to Saturday, it was loud, and there was a fish stink like hell!” He pauses. “It was the good days.”

The good days passed in the late ’70s, when La Marqueta started slowly dying. Since then, the city has tried various times to revive it, without success. Today, a new plan is in place: part of the market is to become a kitchen incubator, where food entrepreneurs will rent kitchen space to get their businesses started at a low cost.

It was the city that first created La Marqueta, East Harlem Chamber of Commerce President Henry Calderon explained. “It started with Mayor La Guardia in the ’30s,” he said. “There were vendors all over the place,” and so the idea was to regulate the activity of all these street vendors by putting them in one place. Merchants quickly filled the five buildings, and evolved with the neighborhood. It was the place to find food impossible to spot in New York. “The food in the rest of the city catered to the majority” of its residents, said Calderon. And so as Puerto Ricans settled in East Harlem, La Marqueta “became a place where you could find food that your recognized. So La Marqueta became a symbol of El Barrio.”

Yuca, yautia, bacalao, malanga, morcilla, chorizo, longaniza were among the specialties at La Marqueta. “Everyone came here, from the Bronx or Brooklyn too, especially those who didn’t have the staples of their diet,” said Pedro Pedraza, a longtime resident of East Harlem and a researcher at the Center for Puerto Rican Studies. “And since you were here you might eat here too, since on the West Side you couldn’t find Puerto Rican restaurants, unless you went farther up.”

Marina Ortiz, founder of the advocacy website East Harlem Preservation, said, “That was the shopping district.” Goods would be “pouring down on the sidewalks, blocking the access,” she said. “It was just a trip. You could spend a day there and buy cheap. We didn’t have chain stores or as many bodegas.”

It’s hard to pinpoint the exact moment of and reasons for La Marqueta’s slow death. According to Pedraza, the East Harlem community started changing in the late ’70s, diversifying. As he and the few merchants still at the market explained, some vendors died, some retired, and no young generation came to replace them.

At the same time, supermarkets and bodegas started carrying the ethnic food that used to only be found at La Marqueta. “Before, people came from all the boroughs and all over the city because they couldn’t find it elsewhere. If you can, then why make the trip?” Calderon said. Ortiz added, “It became a place where people didn’t go, and even avoided.” The downhill slide “culminated in a fire that destroyed most buildings,” she said. Today only two buildings are still standing: the one with the market, and a large empty one. A third lot has become a gated outer plaza, while the two last ones are empty.

With fewer and fewer shops, La Marqueta stopped being that giant open air market, and “people like to shop in places where they can buy everything at the same time,” fishman Bernard Lifschultz said. At 90 years old, Lifschultz, who goes by Benny and is affectionately nicknamed “the old man” by some customers and vendors, has been working at La Marqueta for 63 years. He came at the end of World War II, and hasn’t left since. He still remembered the time when “there was a long waiting list to have a stall here, because it was very lucrative.”

Today business is not as profitable, but Benny and the handful of current vendors are not ready to leave. “It occupies my time,” said Benny, whose savings from the glorious days of La Marqueta help carry through his older years. “I doubt a newcomer would do very well.”

Jose Cintron watches a Latino soap opera while waiting for potential clients. (Photo by Cecile Dehesdin)

His colleague of 40 years, José Cintron, said: “I’ve got two more years before I retire. I don’t need to get rich, I don’t want to die rich. I make enough to have fun now.” Cintron, Benny and the few other vendors benefit from low rent since the building is owned by the city. Cintron pays $600 a month, utilities and insurance included. He said he had enough to live with around $5000 a month after expenses, 60 to 70 customers a week.

“Forty years ago, I had 1,000 customers a week,” Cintron said. “I don’t think this place is going nowhere.”

Throughout the years, city administrations have tried to revive the space but one plan after another fell through. Calderon said, “The plans to revive it have been mislaid because they were trying to recreate something that was there in the ’50s.” Ortiz added: “People are very nostalgic. They don’t want to let go of the heart of El Barrio, it’s a landmark.”

For the New York City Economic Development Corporation, one of the reasons previous attempts failed was their large scope, spokesperson Janel Patterson explained. So at the beginning of August, the group decided to take another, smaller approach, by announcing the construction of a kitchen incubator in the market’s building. The fully equipped shared kitchen will take over a little more than a third of the 10,000 square foot building. Young food startups or food businesses looking to expand will be able to rent a kitchen space and equipment to cook at a cheaper rate than elsewhere in the city.

Contractors sent out proposals to undertake the construction at the beginning of September. They are now being reviewed, Patterson wrote in an email. Construction is expected to begin by the end of the year, and the incubator should be completed by the end of summer 2010. Ultimately, the group hopes to revive the whole La Marqueta area, but for now the focus was on the market building and the empty building, which could be used for storage. The city has budgeted $1 million, allocated by Speaker Christine Quinn for the outfitting of the incubator, Patterson said.

For the vendors, it’s a simple case of being burnt one time too many. “I went to so many meetings,” Cintron said. “We sit down there like dummies hearing those people say, ‘We’re gonna do this and that’, and then they get the money and they vanish. Promise, promise, promise, yeah, promise in your pocket!”

Patterson wrote that the vendors have been “informally informed,” and that the kitchen’s construction and operation should not affect them. Cintron said he learned about the plans from a reporter in September. “I got to see this to believe it,” he said. As for Lifschultz, he said he may have heard of it, but that “it sounded so ridiculous to me that it slipped my mind.” La Marqueta’s veteran thinks the area will not support the initiative. “People come here to buy food cheaper than elsewhere, they’re struggling to subsist. See those tails I cut off the fish to put in the garbage? Yesterday someone asked me to give it to them to make soup. Times are bad, and they are making fancy projects.”

Calderon said: “To me, it’s a sad ending. Having a commercial kitchen sounds good because it creates these jobs in this economy, but the symbol is lost.” While agreeing that nostalgia was not going to help La Marqueta, he would have preferred it to be turned into a destination for tourism, something with local restaurants and ethnic cuisine, but also local artists creating crafts. “Something that brings tourism, money, and jobs for the people who live there, while keeping the name of La Marqueta,” he said.

Deciding to start small might not necessarily be the best answer, said Kathrine Gregory, who started working with kitchen incubators seven years ago. As a consultant for kitchen incubators with her company “Mi kitchen es su kitchen,” she was in touch with the New York City Economic Development Corporation over the plans for La Marqueta. She said though kitchen incubators were a good solution for food start-ups since they reduced costs drastically (renting a kitchen space means not having to buy a $50,000 bread oven for example), they couldn’t be sustainable by themselves. “No incubator without other streams of revenue is financially viable,” she said as she was touring the kitchen incubator she runs in Long Island City, Queens, because without them “you can’t keep prices low enough.”

Ovens like this one, lit up by Kathryn Gregory in her Queens kitchen incubator, can cost up to $50,000. (Photo by Cecile Dehesdin)

The Queens kitchen was built into the Consortium for Worker Education building, and is used for a culinary certification program as well as for the incubator. Those classes, as part as numerous other classes the consortium provides, are the reason the incubator can survive, Gregory said.

“To be sustainable in and of itself, an incubator has to be 75 percent occupied,” she said. If the 4,000-square-foot incubator in La Marqueta was broken into four kitchens, available to rent for three shifts seven days a week, like the one in Queens is, that would amount to 336 shifts. The incubator would need to rent 252 shifts out of those 336 a month in order to be sustainable. “That’s why an incubator as a stand-alone project will not work,” Gregory said, arguing that side projects could help pay for utilities, maintenance and managing fees, especially at the start.

Gregory, who did not answer the city’s requests for a proposal but would consider working with whichever contractor wins the request, said she had tons of ideas for La Marqueta, “to create something that becomes like a Mecca” for East Harlem. She thought side projects should include renting small stalls in the market to incubator users or other food merchants, as a way to create a buzz. “More stalls equals more excitement equals more people coming and more chance of them buying!”

When asked about the possibility of incubator users renting stalls in the market to sell their products, Patterson said that those were still early days, and that “lots of decisions will be made by the manager.”

City forester Coleman Frick shows a mutilated tree on 137th Street. (Photo by Cecile Dehesdin)

There’s a canine tree killer on the loose in *Harlem.

Forester Coleman Frick is walking along 137th Street in his dark green City Parks poncho on a rainy Wednesday morning, pointing out several mutilated Japanese pagoda and pin oak trees. The city foresters have been planting trees on 137th and Lenox over the past two years. But when they came back to survey the area this summer, they noticed damaged trunks. Asking around, they quickly learned that a resident’s dog was attacking the trees, biting off and sometimes clawing off the bark.

“We could plant so much more trees in this street,” Frick said, touching the harsh scrapes on a tree trunk. “But we won’t if people have dogs attacking them.” A few blocks away, foresters are filling up East Harlem with trees.

The Million Trees Program has targeted El Barrio as one of its “public health neighborhoods.” Launched by the Parks Department and the non-profit New York Restoration Project, the program aims to plant a million trees in the city, 220,000 of which will be street trees, over the next ten years.

The program gave East Harlem priority because of its high asthma rate among children. East Harlem has consistently had the highest rate of asthma hospitalization for children under 14 among all Manhattan neighborhoods, according to data the City Health Department collected from 1994 to 2004.

The other factor was the neighborhood’s low “tree stocking level,” explained senior forester Michael Vacek. The area could accommodate a lot more trees, a characteristic of uptown compared to downtown Manhattan.

Trees absorb a lot of particles, Vacek said, and in doing so “they are sort of cleaning the air so that we are not breathing the pollution.” His team surveyed East Harlem throughout the summer to mark spots for potential trees by painting big white dots on the sidewalks.

The planting process can take weeks. Utilities mark gas and electricity lines to avoid damaging them. Then the contractor cuts the sidewalk, then uses a jackhammer to excavate the pit and put new soil back into it. Finally, the team comes back to actually plant the trees. “There are so many steps in the process that we run into residents several times,” Frick said. He finds it hard, when residents excitedly call to ask when a tree will be planted, to answer, “in the next couple of months…”

Vacek and Frick recently attended a 32nd Precinct community meeting and a meeting held by Harlem Congregations for Community Improvement to educate residents on the benefits of street trees, and to warn them about the dog tree killer. They hoped that the community members would alert the dog owner if they stumbled upon him or her. “Pastors told us they would take that message to their congregation as well,” Vacek said.

While the 137th Street example is extreme, not everyone is delighted by street greenery. Some people are concerned that tree pits will encourage dogs to relieve themselves on their streets, said Frick, or that trees will block sunlight in their apartments. He responds that it’s illegal not to pick up dog waste, and that “this is your community, your neighborhood, so hopefully if you see someone do that, you’ll let them know.” As for other concerns, he argues with them that “it’s for the greater community good,” and that as the street is actually city property, locals can’t stop him from planting.

That doesn’t mean people won’t try. Across Marcus Garvey Park, which separates Harlem from East Harlem, some residents refused to have a tree planted in front of their building. “They protested by getting into the pits,” remembered Vacek, “so we had to stop.” The foresters talked to the protesters, he said, but in the end had to come back another day to plant.

But having spent a lot of time walking the streets of East Harlem, Vacek said, “people are generally excited. They come walk around with me and I tell them what kind of tree we’ll be planting where.” A lot of thought goes into the types of trees, the foresters explain. For example, Frick plans honey locusts and pin oaks in the harshest areas, usually on avenues, because these are some of their toughest species. As Frick watched contractors plant trees on a recent morning, a man walked up and asked why, since there was a park across the street. “I explained to him we were not worried about having too many trees!”

Later in the day another resident who had heard the exchange told Frick he was happy; he hadn’t seen trees planted in his neighborhood since the ‘70s. “I feel like some people see it as ‘We care about their neighborhood’,” Frick said.

*The story originally misstated the location of the mutilated trees. They are in Harlem, not East Harlem.

A voter approaches P.S. 72, an East Harlem school turned polling station for a day. (Photo by Joshua Tapper)

The Uptowner staff caught up with residents of Harlem, East Harlem, Inwood and Washington Heights on Election Day. Some chose to vote; some declined. They explain why, and which mayoral candidate they favor, in this audio slideshow.

Nov. 3, 2009: Uptown votes. Or not. from cecile d on Vimeo.

A portrait of Marine Sgt. Riayan A. Tejeda welcomes customers to the Washington Heights post office renamed in his honor. (Photo by Cecile Dehesdin)

For Cesar Lora, the post office on 180th Street in Washington Heights means much more than a place to buy stamps or mail packages, because in 2004 Congress renamed it for his stepson, Marine Sgt. Riayan A. Tejeda.

Tejeda died on April, 4, 2003, the first Dominican killed in the Iraq war. But since spring, the post office has been in jeopardy; its lease was about to expire and the Postal Service and the landlord could not agree on new terms. After protests led by Lora and community leaders, the U.S Postal Service (USPS) reached a deal to extend the lease temporarily.

The post office’s future remains uncertain, however. Though its new manager, Stanley Jong, said “the lease was renewed for another year at least,” New York USPS spokeswoman Darleen Reid-De Meo said she could not confirm that. While an agreement might have been reached locally, she explained “it would have to be confirmed through the northeast area office first, and then by the headquarters.”

So the Tejeda Post Office operates on one month-long extension after another. Reid-De Meo said discussions were underway to extend the lease after its current Oct. 30 expiration date. “When we set up in a community, we want to stay,” she said, adding that the USPS would like to negotiate a long-term lease, but eventually wanted to move the post office to another location in the same neighborhood.

Even if it moves, the post office dedicated to Tejeda will stay close to 180th Street, where Tejeda grew up, a street now also renamed for him. It’s a victory for his stepfather. “I feel very happy and proud, for me and my family, my sons and the community, especially the people who cannot walk” — to a far-off location — “because they are old or sick,” he said.

His stepson’s life was deeply linked to his community. “He grew up here and he was very famous around here. He had lots of friends — and girlfriends,” Lora said. He showed where Tejeda and his friends used to play basketball, hanging a pierced milk case on the streetlight at West 180th Street and Saint Nicholas Avenue, right under the plaque now dedicating the street to him.

“I know that no matter where he is, my son is very happy,” Lora said. “He was always hanging out in front of the building,” he added, “I believe this is the first reason to keep it around here.”

He recalled Christmas 2002, the first time in several years the extended family could celebrate it together, in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. Right afterwards, his son received a phone call from the Army.

“He locked himself in a room,” Lora said. “Then he told us he had to leave with the first plane to New York and get to California, but he wouldn’t tell us why.” At the end of March 2003, Tejeda called his stepdad and said “I only can talk to you for one minute. Take care of yourself, take care of Mommy. I love you.”

“And that’s it,” said Lora. “I didn’t hear from him after that.” On April 12th, two Marine officers knocked on the family’s door. “My wife opened and she said, ‘My son got killed and that’s why you’re here’, and then she collapsed,” Lora said. “I ran from my room and the officers were saying they were sorry, and I told them, ‘Do me a favor, leave the house. I saw you, OK? Now leave and come back tomorrow’.”

Only after his death did his family learn Tejeda was in Iraq, Lora said, “because he was in special forces, so I knew nothing.” Two months before he was killed, Tejeda had signed up for another four years in the Marines, “because he wanted to finish school to become FBI.”

Tejeda was a resident, not a citizen, “but he felt part of the United States,” his stepfather said. Tejeda was posthumously granted U.S citizenship.

The building’s door still says “Washington Bridge Post Office,” but inside there’s a plaque with Tejeda’s name and dates of birth and death. A framed picture shows him looking serious in his uniform, in front of American and Dominican flags.

Rep. Charles Rangel was part of the effort to rename the post office for Tejeda. “We got assurance by the USPS that any new facility would have the same name, the plaque, and would remain in the same area,” Rangel’s spokesperson Elbert Garcia said.

The post office’s next location remains as unclear as its move-out date. Reid-De Meo said the USPS was considering many options. Temporarily relocating in mobile postal units, or “post offices on wheels,” as the Postal Service discussed this summer, remains the last resort.

Census materials are published in both English and Spanish. (Photo by Cecile Dehesdin)

Though the 2010 Census is still six months away, community organizers are already starting to mobilize Latinos uptown, relying on their secret weapon: pastors.

“Our community is very rooted in church,” the Rev. Raymond Rivera of the Latino Pastoral Action Center said at the kickoff of the “Ya es hora ¡Hagase contar!” (It’s time, make yourself count!) campaign in New York this month. “The average Latino is going to go to his pastor before anybody else.” Rivera said the campaign could count on his network of 1,000 local churches for support.

Latinos have traditionally been undercounted because of the high number of undocumented immigrants who fear that answering the questionnaire will bring a visit from a U.S Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent.

And Uptown is one of the hardest-to-count areas: on average all neighborhoods from Harlem to Inwood received “hard-to-count scores” of 73 to 117, on a scale from 0 to 117. In plain English, explained a census worker, a number that high says no one lives there because no one sent the census forms back in 2000. Although some groups are actively opposing compliance with the census, several community leaders launched the campaign to get a complete count of Latinos in the 2010 Census.

According to the Census Bureau, New York City’s net undercount in 2000 was close to zero. But this average means that parts of the city were well counted while others were overcounted or undercounted.

The NALEO Educational Fund, a national non-partisan organization of Latino elected officials, spurred the national coalition, joining with Spanish-language TV and radio outlets and community groups focusing on justice, immigration and politics. All the organizations in the coalition raise money on their own, and can take advantage of New York State’s Complete Count Grant Program, which has made $2 million available. The media partners provide editorial programming, campaign spokesperson Julissa Gutierrez said.

The campaign supplies bilingual information through its web site, a hotline and all its local partners. It hopes that a community-based effort independent from the Census Bureau or any other governmental agency will prove more effective in achieving a complete count.

But the campaign faces opposition from the National Coalition of Latino Clergy and Christian Leaders. Its New Jersey leader, the Rev. Miguel Rivera, has called for a boycott of the census. “Before you count, you have to legalize” is his motto. He asked that Latinos around the United States not fill in the census forms, in an effort to pressure the federal government into immigration reform.

In New York, the Rev. Raymond Rivera called that strategy “misleading, naive,” and said, “it won’t serve our community.” He added that the boycott drew more attention from the media than its actual impact deserved.

Which viewpoint persuades Latinos is crucial for the next 10 years in uptown New York. The federal government awards more than $400 billion to states and communities every year, in part based on census data. Census numbers also help determine where to build hospitals and schools, set the boundaries of legislative districts and determine how many seats each state has in the House of Representatives. In short, it affects communities’ financial and political resources for the next 10 years.

Even if the boycott isn’t as widespread as the National Coalition of Latino Clergy and Christian Leaders would like it to be, not all pastors endorse the census. The Rev. Dominick Reyes of A New Beginning International Ministry Inc. in East Harlem said that in recent months many illegal Mexican immigrants have started attending his church. “They ask me: ‘Pastor, why do they want to know the census? Is immigration after us? Do we sign?’ They’re scared.”

Reyes felt very ambivalent toward the census and was uncertain about its ultimate purpose. Nevertheless, when people asked him, he told them not to worry and to fill in the form. As a pastor, he felt his job was “to take away fear from people who walk in my church.” He said he wasn’t against the census because he wasn’t against the government. “The Bible says we have to be under authority,” he said, “and Obama is our governing authority.”

On a recent Sunday, around 30 parishioners listened to Reyes in the cool first-floor room that serves as his church. “I am pro census, and I think you should write your name, and whether you’re a citizen or not,” Reyes said between prayers and songs. As it happens, the new census form doesn’t ask about citizenship. While the last questionnaire was 53 questions long and went to 1 in 6 households, the new simplified form is 10 questions long. For the first time, it will go to every household in the United States, and in a bilingual Spanish-English form to more than 13 million households. It does not ask about residents’ legal status.

Reyes was not yet aware of that fact, but “Ya es hora” intends to change such misconceptions. “We need to meet people where they are,” New York Secretary of State Lorraine Cortés-Vázquez said at the campaign’s launch. “We have to counter the incredible fear that has increased.”

Unofficial guardian D. Eroll Cayard paints the Michael Jackson tribute fence. (Photo by Cecile Dehesdin)

Gone is the sky-blue plywood fence on which grieving fans wrote or pasted tributes to Michael Jackson next to the Apollo Theater last summer. Instead, laminated posters on a rusty iron fence announce, “The Michael Jackson tribute wall has been donated to the Apollo Theater for preservation as part of the Apollo Theater Archive Project.”

On the day of Jackson’s death, fans from all over the United States and the world began flocking to the theater, where the Jackson Five performed and won an Amateur Night competition in 1969. The Apollo held memorial events on June 30, including a service and a temporary tribute wall. But fans had already started writing all over the 100-foot long blue wood wall encircling the empty lot next door. “RIP Michael.” “On t’aime Michael.” (We love you Michael) “Forever King.” The tributes, written in blue, black, orange or green, shared space with stencils of the star moonwalking.

Two weeks ago, “We took it down in pieces and labeled them to have their order in case we put the fence up together again,” said the theater’s tour manager Billy Mitchell, nicknamed “Mr. Apollo.” “Then we trucked it to a warehouse where our archives are.” The fence was donated by lot owners Harlem USA, said spokesperson Nina Flowers, adding that the Apollo was still considering where to display the fence. The first piece will go to the Hip Hop Cultural Center in Harlem, she said.

A rusty fence now replaces the sky-blue one. Posters announce the tribute wall was donated to the Apollo Theater. (Photo by Cecile Dehesdin)

In line for an open house at the Apollo this month, dancer Loretta Abbott said she approved of the move. “This is history,” she said, gesturing towards the Apollo Theater, “and he was history. Where else would it go? They created a lot of stars here, and he’s a legend”.

Most passersby pay scant attention to the fence now, except for admiring the portrait of Jackson someone painted on the sidewalk. But only a few weeks ago, the blue fence had its own guardian. “I remember the man who used to guard the fence,” Abbott said. “We talked once for a bit, but I don’t remember much about him, except he idolized Michael Jackson”.

“The man who used to guard the fence” was D. Eroll Cayard, 53, a Haitian-American who could be found every day protecting the tribute and quickly becoming a part of the landscape of 125th Street.

An artist from Miami, Cayard was painting in Brooklyn when he heard on BET that Jackson was in a hospital in critical condition. Cayard’s first thought was, “Oh my God, what a publicity stunt for the tour!”

But it was no stunt. A few days later, when a friend drove him to the fence, Cayard saw hundreds of people stopping by to write tributes or draw farewells for Jackson. “That made me very emotional,” Cayard said. He started painting abstract portraits of Michael Jackson, which drew other mourners’ attention. “They told me ‘Keep it up, man!’ So I decided to start taking leadership of the shrine.”

For weeks, Cayard camped around the corner, under a makeshift tent concocted from a huge multicolored beach umbrella and tribute-covered bed sheets he collected from the wall. Several times a day, he walked from his tent to the fence, wearing a black fedora and a Michael Jackson T-shirt, with a can of paint, or glue, or string in his pocket. “If I see offensive words written in big letters over somebody else’s words, I paint over it,” Cayard explained in an interview at the time. The glue was for repairs, the string to attach flowers or notes left by fans. He also supplied new bed sheets for them to write on without covering previous visitors’ words.

“I’m not the only artist here,” Cayard used to say. “It’s the biggest art piece made by people of the world.

Cayard left for Brooklyn in September and has been staying there since. He had intended to return to Miami, but wanted to stay in New York for a while, “spreading the word about the Michael Jackson fence.

That the Apollo Theater had stored the fence in its archives was “a great thing”, Cayard said, but he still hoped the Smithsonian could acquire part of the fence and exhibit it around the world, making it the “United Nations Wall for Michael Jackson” he always dreamed of.