Olga Tello worked hard to rid her neighborhood of pesky problems but she says the 34th Precinct did little to help. (Photo by Tim Kiladze)

Bridget Best loves her Inwood apartment on the second floor of 1 Arden Street that overlooks the building’s front entrance. Not only is it a beautiful space with “absurdly cheap” rent, it is close to the No. 1 subway line she rides to the Manhattan School of Music.

Best looked at the apartment last fall when the roads were empty and the neighborhood noise was minimal. She saw nothing suspicious. But as the temperature rose this past spring, she fell victim to the cacophony created by teenagers who took to the streets. Over one two-week period, Best says the noise was nonstop between 4 p.m. and 3 a.m, something she couldn’t handle despite growing up in urban Toronto and living in New York for three years.

The situation quickly escalated. A few fights broke out in front of her building, then a 50-person brawl another night – the two sides distinguished by their white and black beaters. On a different evening, people threw bricks from her building, smashing a car window. Best called for police in both cases, but no one responded.

Many residents of the 34th Precinct, which covers Inwood and Washington Heights, complain of the same thing. At community meetings this fall, they voiced their frustration with inadequate responses from the people who are supposed to serve and protect their communities. Although murders have declined, three last year versus 103 in 1990, quality of life issues bother these residents – problems they say the police don’t care about because a body isn’t on the ground.

Best thinks social demographics plays a role. “You see these kids,” she says, “They have no future and nothing to do. And nobody cares about them because they’re poor and Dominican. If these were white kids from a good neighborhood, you’d have police there every night.” Taking matters into her own hands, she befriended the people she says deal weed and crack on her street so they would know her when she walks home from the subway at 2 a.m.

After a few months, however, they stopped talking to her. Best soon discovered someone started a rumor that her boyfriend, a 6-foot-6 opera singer, was a cop. She isn’t worried. “Truthfully, I’ve never feared for my own safety,” she says. “They don’t want to hurt me; they want to kill each other.” She simply wishes she did not have to put up with the resulting noise and the drugs.

Olga Tello has similar problems. She lives in 640 Fort Washington Avenue and constantly complains about noise and nuisances like drunks sleeping in her building’s lobby, something new tenants have to adjust to when they first move in. “We pay too much rent” for that, she says with a thick *Argentinian accent.

Her battle, which she has been fighting since 1997 when she first moved in with her husband, Tom, is akin to a war of attrition. Before moving uptown, she was a live-in housekeeper for a family on 72nd Street. She was excited to have her own place and her new building looked nice from the outside, but she soon found out it was full of parties and drugs, and the elevator was in bad shape. She and Tom often complained to the superintendent and eventually held tenant meetings. Tello also asked the landlord if she could make a small garden; he obliged and contributed some money. He also fixed the elevator.

But some tenants didn’t appreciate the changes. They heckled Tello and played games with her. One night when Tom was away driving a bus to North Carolina, she came home to glue stuck inside her keyhole, preventing her from getting inside. In another incident, someone dumped bleach in her garden.

She turned to the police but she says they offered little assistance. Despite her constant calls to the precinct, officers rarely showed up. “Tommy went so many times to talk with Inspector Monaghan,” the previous commanding officer, she says. “They were not helping us.”

Tello turned into a community activist, morphing her building meetings into community gatherings in 1998. Her efforts proved successful. “We cleaned the buildings, but it was not easy,” she says.

These community meetings have become popular uptown, drawing the interest of public officials. Once a year, Tello manages to bring together officers from the 34th Precinct, Councilman Robert Jackson, representatives from transit and sanitation, and Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer.

She also attends the 34th Precinct’s monthly community meetings, which she says are especially ineffective because the police listen to public complaints but rarely follow up on them. She thinks the meetings are all for show. “I see people complaining over and over about the issues, and they don’t fix them,” she says.

She urges neighborhood residents to make Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly aware of their concerns. “Write to the mayor, write to Kelly,” she says. “Let the officials know that we’re not going to put up with this nonsense no more.”

Her frustration has reached a tipping point. “There are wonderful police officers who do their job and are nice,” she says, “but I cannot say that about the 34th Precinct… They never helped me with the problems I had here.” On the rare occasion they responded to one of her calls, she says “the police would come, and they would always have an attitude. And they would never do anything.”

Deputy Inspector Andrew Capul, the 34th Precinct’s commanding officer, sat on the panel at Tello’s Oct. 26 community meeting. Most residents voiced problems outside his jurisdiction (overflowing garbage cans, for example), but he briefly addressed quality of life issues, acknowledging noise complaints and such problems as a flurry of vehicle break-ins on Cabrini Boulevard (15 autos were stolen in a 28 day period this fall).

Capul tried to assuage the crowd by citing his officers’ efforts. For the vehicles, the precinct now parks a car with an embedded camera on the street. He also said the police try to respond to all noise complaints but have trouble doing anything because the volume often dies down before they arrive.

He used the same defenses at the 34th Precinct’s monthly meeting just before Thanksgiving. Unlike Tello’s community gathering, this night focused on police issues and a slew of officers attended, including Executive Officer Jose Navarro and traffic Officer Steven McManus.

On this occasion, Capul addressed quality of life issues first, noting a rise in complaints and growing community outrage. Upfront, he said: “If I had to give us a grade, I wouldn’t give us an outstanding. We can do better.”

Elizabeth Porter certainly believes that. She lives with her daughter on West 181st Street across from Cabrini Boulevard in an apartment she calls the “investment of my life,” but is constantly bothered by noise late into the night. Her living room, complete with VHS movies like “My Cousin Vinny,” overlooks 181st, a popular thoroughfare.

Mexican restaurant Agave Azul and cigar shop Fumee, both owned by the same man, are directly across the street from Porter’s living room window. Fumee offers valet service on several nights, which blocks parking spaces available to area residents, forcing people – often the shop’s patrons – to double-park.

This wouldn’t be a problem on a side street, but 181st connects to the West Side Highway. When cars are blocked, drivers honk incessantly and yell for people to come out and move their vehicles. When someone appears, a war of words ensues. It gets so loud that “it sounds like people are standing in your living room,” Porter says.

Fumee’s patrons also drink on the street and leave the shop drunk late at night, she charges, even though Fumee doesn’t have a liquor license. Porter has logged many complaints about the noise and the illegal drinking, of which she has photos.

Just as with Best and Tello, Porter complains that the police rarely respond to her calls. She is convinced they don’t respond because they themselves are Fumee’s patrons and sometimes double-park their squad cars – something she also has photographed.

Porter is fed up. Inspector Capul speaks to her personally at meetings but does little to follow up. “For many years he was treating me as a crazy old lady,” she says, adding that he listens to her and then throws out statistics proving the police are doing a good job. “He has a pitch,” Porter says. “He uses the same words to pat himself on the back.”

She’s also fed up with 311. When she calls, she gets a reference number to track the complaint’s status online and will check hours later only to find the complaint is closed, yet the cars remain double-parked or Fumee’s patrons continue to make noise. In some instances, she waits for the police to arrive and finds the complaint closed even though no one responded.

When officers do show up, they do very little. In one complaint she filed on July 21, 2008, at 8:37 p.m. because Fumee’s patrons were drinking outside and making noise, an officer wrote: “IT’S A FRIGGIN’ RESTAURANT BAR WITH A SIDEWALK EXTESION.”

The 311 complaint line also baffles Best. “I would always call 311 and they would rarely come,” she says. “And when they come, they shut the guys up for two minutes and then they get loud again.”

Porter feels like she has nowhere to turn. Calling the precinct is futile. “There is nobody that you can get connected with at the precinct that is going to give you a straight answer.” In the rare occasion someone says they will put an officer on her problem, she has no way to track the complaint like she does on 311.

Porter used to vent at Community Board 12 meetings, which includes the 34th Precinct, but she worries she can’t trust them considering Chair Manny Velazquez recently resigned because of shady liquor license negotiations. Community and precinct meetings are the only other outlets, but they sap her morale. “You go, you let your heart out, you get your heart going, and nothing comes of it,” she says.

Inspector Capul promises to take action on unanswered 311 complaints; he publicly vowed to sit down with two key officers before year-end to discuss how they can do a better job, focusing on chronic problems like noise complaints, which make up about 75 percent of 311 calls.

Capul says improving 311 response times and making sure the police show up are his priorities, but cautions that each precinct has around 50 fewer officers than five years ago. Cars dispatched to 311 calls sometimes get diverted to more pressing issues.

Capul also says the police are doing well in some areas. In 25 burglaries this year, the police traced fingerprints or DNA at the scene and tracked down the invaders; in a recent shooting on Sherman Avenue, the suspect was caught within a block and a half.

Tello doesn’t deny that some officers and precincts do a good job, but she wants accountability on the issues that constantly affect her. She’s also sick of hearing crime statistics cited at public gatherings because she has nothing to compare them to, something she fears makes the police look unjustly good.

Best would also like to see accountability. The 34th precinct meeting was her first, but she attended because she’s had enough.

“I used to think people who complained at community meetings were losers,” she says. “Now I’m one of them.”

*The story originally misstated Tello’s former nationality: she comes from Argentina, not Venezuela.

Nursing students draw blood at the CoSMO clinic in Washington Heights. (Photo by Tim Kiladze)

Quisqueya Lora immigrated to New York in 2006 all by herself. Because she was unfamiliar with America’s health system and unable to afford health insurance, she expected to live without access to doctors.

After six months in the United States, a priest told Lora about a free health fair in Washington Heights, where she learned about CoSMO (Columbia Student Medical Outreach), a primary care clinic on Audubon Avenue that treats patients who don’t qualify for Medicaid but also can’t afford private insurance.

Unaware that she had any health problems, Lora, 57, waited three months for an appointment. At that first meeting, doctors diagnosed diabetes and high cholesterol in her and prescribed medications.

Speaking through an interpreter, Lora says she is now taking three medicines – one for high cholesterol, two for diabetes – that she could not afford because infrequent babysitting provides her only income. Reflecting on her experience with CoSMO, she smiles widely and calls the doctor who treated her when she first arrived her “guardian angel.”

In Washington Heights, where Lora lives, the majority population is Dominican, and most uptown immigrants are unaware of their subsidized or free health care options. The statistics are consistent nationwide: 28 percent of Latinos are uninsured, compared with 17 percent of the U.S. adult population, according to the Pew Hispanic Center.

To its 450 uptown patients, CoSMO is something of a savior. Housed in one of New York-Presbyterian’s Urgicare clinics, it is staffed entirely by volunteers, mainly Columbia University medical and nursing students.

CosMO is open on Saturday mornings and the occasional Thursday evening; its co-chairs, typically fourth-year medical students, often alternate weekends. A rotating volunteer physician is also always on hand, sees every patient and writes prescriptions, if needed.

CoSMO will see 8 to 10 patients on an average Saturday; walk-ins are rarely accommodated because patients must first meet with a health care facilitator to ensure they do not qualify for Medicaid. Initially, Alianza Dominicana, a community development organization, referred most patients, but many now hear about the clinic through family and friends, said Magni Hamso, one of last year’s co-chairs who still volunteers.

CoSMO is one of the main reasons Hamso attended Columbia for medical school. She wanted to get in-depth primary care experience and to learn how a clinic operates. In her first year, before she had any practical medical experience, she volunteered as an interpreter and secretary; now that she has been a co-chair, she has sat on the governing council and managed the entire operation, including the executive committee and the fundraising and finance sub-committees.

Because its patients can’t afford health insurance, let alone pay for medicines, CoSMO absorbs most prescription costs. (Patients are asked to pay if the price is under $10.) These costs are crippling the clinic: while New York-Presbyterian Hospital absorbs most operating expenses (and some hospital departments, like radiology, shoulder costs incurred by CoSMO’s patients), the hospital can’t pay for medication. Most of the drugs CoSMO prescribes are generics but some, like Actos, used for diabetes treatment, can cost as much as $4 a pill.

CoSMO's main office, the center of activity on Saturday mornings. (Photo by Tim Kiladze)

The clinic got a $20,000 startup grant from the Association of American Medical Colleges, but volunteers have since asked family and friends for donations. Strapped for cash, CoSMO held a fund-raiser last year featuring a talk by Pulitzer Prize winning author Junot Diaz; a similar event will be held this year. But these fundraisers take a lot of time to organize, something the volunteers struggle to find on top of the hours they spend at school and in the clinic. After four hours at the clinic on a Saturday, one first year medical student hit the library to study anatomy for the rest of the day.

CoSMO also runs into problems with wait times. Because students run the clinic, a regular checkup can take three hours, says Hamso.

Francisco Liz knows all about it. He had an appointment at 8:30 a.m. on a Saturday and didn’t leave the clinic until noon, even though he had to be at work at 11. He spent some of his waiting time dozing off in one of CosMO’s four patient rooms.

Still, Liz, a native Peruvian who has lived here for 14 years, didn’t complain. Though he used to work in a restaurant, he hasn’t had a full-time job in eight months and can’t afford the private health insurance he needs to take care of his diabetes and high blood pressure.

Liz, like Lora, doesn’t mind that CoSMO is student-run. “It’s good because they treat us very well, and I know the last step is for the doctor to go over everything,” he says in Spanish through a student nurse acting as an interpreter.

The excessive wait is almost inescapable in a student-run clinic, which serves as both a teaching environment and a fully operational clinic. Something as simple as drawing blood can be lengthy because the patient must wait as the senior nurse reviews the procedure with the student who wields the needle.

Amelia Lo, a senior nursing student completing her master’s degree, used her four years of experience as a bedside nurse to improve the clinic’s workflow last year. Lo says CoSMO gets bogged down because a new team shows up every Saturday and the volunteers often do not know who is in charge of which patients. But she didn’t let the inefficiencies get to her – she reminded herself that all the people involved volunteer their time so getting angry would only diminish the learning experience. Because of her work, the clinic now has a patient flow chart kept in the main office and continually updated throughout each session.

Despite the wait times, CoSMO offers a quality of care comparable to that of commercial HMOs and superior to Medicare and Medicaid, based on an internal evaluation that assessed screening for hypertension, Type 2 diabetes, and cancer.

African-American and Hispanic households, the majority uptown, lack basic financial education and services. (Graph by Tim Kiladze. Source: Pew Charitable Trusts, 2009)

On a sunny autumn Friday, Bader Bahmad and fellow members of a financial education seminar at the Fort Washington Public Library branch were discussing rudimentary principles, such as the difference between needs and wants.

In a run-down conference room on the library’s deserted second floor, they talked about saving money. Asked to give examples of items they should save for, one woman mentioned a $7.99 blouse she saw earlier in the week and another said a pack of cigarettes. A talkative blonde said she has never saved for anything.

Cheryl Hines of Cornell University’s Cooperative Extension community program led the discussion. She provided handouts that explained the difference between short, medium and long-term savings goals; she offered tips for tracking money, like using a notebook to record expenditures.

Bahmad, 39, found the seminar a bit basic, but she liked the reminders because she and her three children are supported solely by her husband’s earnings as a taxi driver. She strictly limits spending on discretionary goods. “In every hour of the day, if I don’t need it, I’m not doing it,” Bahmad said.

Badmad’s struggle is complicated. In Washington Heights where she lives, families are lucky to have a bank account. While 12 percent of Manhattan households don’t have a standard checking account, 25 percent of African Americans and 27 percent of Hispanics in Manhattan – the majority populations uptown – live unbanked, according to a survey last year by Pew Charitable Trusts. In effect, they pay an average $1,042 annually in check cashing fees.

Bahmad has been trying to make ends meet in the U.S. for close to 15 years. An immigrant from Lebanon, she used to sew scarves and dresses for stores in Brooklyn and Manhattan. When she returned to her home country three years ago to be closer to her family, leaving her husband behind in New York, she sold her sewing machines.

But the distance strained her marriage, and Bahmad returned to New York after two years. “Here you’re missing something, over there you’re missing something,” she said.

Now back in America without a job, Bahmad is looking for financial advice. As a start, she attended the free seminar at the Public Library.

Instructor Milly DuBouchet, who teaches similar classes in Washington Heights, finds it hard to address intricate financial problems because her audience has never had the means to save money. “It’s hard for them to save 10 percent of their income monthly when they can’t necessarily pay their phone bill every month,” she said. “Financial literacy is at a bare minimum in our community.”

To help, the Bloomberg administration created the Office of Financial Empowerment, where DuBouchet also works. It offers personal finance workshops and free private counseling.

Lower-income people may lack a basic understanding of credit ratings and the principles of debt, according to DuBouchet. Many of her clients have been denied loans and “they want to see why,” she said. Moreover, “A lot of people consider credit cards quote unquote free money.” She tries to tell her seminar members and private clients how FICO scores are compiled and reminds those in debt, “If you stop paying it, they don’t forget about you.”

Workshops offering basic financial information can be found all over upper Manhattan. Friends Jenny Gil and Angela Ariza attended one specifically for women at City College. Both women, immigrants from Colombia, readily admit they know little about personal finance.

Gil, 27, is lucky to have less than $5,000 in debt, which she described as “not impossible.” She works in a restaurant office and is trying to repay what she owes so that she can start saving and investing – only she doesn’t know how.

She blames her financial illiteracy on Colombian cultural norms. She was raised with the belief that women don’t handle finances because they are too complex. “It’s the new days and now women take care of their own business,” she said.

Gil has done some reading on her own, like “Rich Dad, Poor Dad” by Robert Kiyosaki, but still has trouble grasping certain fundamental financial concepts. To remedy the problem, she thinks personal finances should become part of the high school curriculum.

Donny Lynn Burton agrees. A vice president at the Harlem office of the non-profit Operation Hope, which offers seminars in credit and money management as well as individual credit counseling, she constantly meets people in similar situations.
Her clients live very differently from the middle class. “They live paycheck to paycheck,” Burton said. “They don’t understand the benefits of having an account” in a bank. She shows them how to create budgets and has them come in regularly to stay on track.

But often they start much too late, which she blames on pride. It frustrates her that most people in foreclosure know what lies ahead but don’t take action. ‘They never try to call their bank to work something out,” Burton said. She spends a lot of time assuring her clients that they can negotiate because the bank is better off if they stay in their homes.

She, too, would like to see financial education begin in high school, before people wade into major financial decisions.

Just a few years ago, Tonnie Rozier ran a Boys and Girls Club in Jersey City while baking cakes at night for wholesale clients. Demand for his products grew quickly, pushing him to open his own bakery, Tonnie’s Minis Cupcake and Coffee Bar, in 2006—but its West Village storefront was so small that cakes took up too much space. To adjust, Rozier switched to cupcakes.

Tonnie’s Minis became an NYU hot spot. Celebrity awareness soon followed, catching the attention of people like Jay-Z and Kimora Lee Simmons. Now, Rozier is expanding with a bigger Harlem location on Lenox Avenue.

The new store had its grand opening last week. It is a precarious time for small businesses to expand, but the new Harlem location has had a steady stream of customers since it opened. Rozier still has some technical glitches to smooth out—hiring enough staff, training—and he occasionally runs out of certain flavors because he is gauging demand, but the customers don’t seem to mind.

Baptist Temple Church under construction to save its roof from collapsing. (Photo by Tim Kiladze)

Baptist Temple Church on 116 Street in East Harlem is under dramatic construction after the Department of Buildings deemed the building unsafe because of a cracked front façade and worn-out trusses hanging off a bearing wall.

The church has been closed since Sept. 19 and no one is allowed inside for safety reasons, forcing the congregation to meet elsewhere. The construction left a gaping hole in the church’s exterior, covered only by a tarp.

After an inspection, the Department of Buildings “determined that the defective section of the roof and the front masonry needed to be removed to a safe level,” Carly Sullivan of the department’s press office wrote in an email. The construction forced the brief closure of 116 Street between Malcolm X Boulevard and Fifth Avenue as large cranes dismantled the highest part of the roof and removed a portion of the stone façade, and the city issued a vacate order.

The Department of Housing Preservation and Development completed the construction and will bill the church for the work, according to an email from Miriam Solis of the department’s press office. Her note explained the department is not responsible for the building’s repair.

The Department of Buildings filed a violation against the building’s owners for failing to repair the church before they stepped in. The Rev. Shepherd Lee, the pastor, declined to comment on the violation and would not explain how the church is responding. “I have to be cautious in this society that we live in,” he said.

Neighboring businesses, mostly small retail outlets, said they had not been drastically affected by the construction, other than the street’s initial closure.

Baptist Temple Church, a former synagogue, was built in 1906 by a growing Jewish community that moved to Harlem between 1870 and 1930. Aside from the Lower East Side and Warsaw, Harlem was once the world’s third largest Jewish settlement, The New York Times reported in a 2002 profile of Harlem churches.

Kevin Walters owns Creole Restaurant in East Harlem. He wants help with growth so he enrolled in a free, specialized small business program at Columbia Business School. (Photo by Tim Kiladze)

After years of impressing his bosses at financial institutions, Neil Caesar said he was “used to being a superstar.”

Then he left the corporate world, where he worked under established business plans, to run a small business, where he has minimal structure.

Caesar is now the chief financial officer and general manager of Digiwaxx LLC, a Harlem-based music marketing and promotions agency founded in 1998. Despite success in such corporations as State Farm and MetLife, where career progression follows a defined path, Caesar admits that he was ill prepared to be an entrepreneur. “You get in this environment and there’s not a lot of training for it,” he says, adding that he doesn’t have an experienced boss to consult for difficult decisions.

To help people like Caesar, professors and administrators at Columbia Business School last year created the Columbia Community Business Program.

It’s run out of the school’s Eugene Lang Entrepreneurship Center and provides a group of small businesses in upper Manhattan with free advice from both professionals at the school and a seasoned small business coach. The group meets 10 times a year but has unlimited access to Columbia’s professors who can connect participants to professionals in other faculties, like law and engineering.

The participants include 11 businesses and one not-for-profit organization that have been around for at least three years and bring in annual revenues of at least $250,000. This peer group represents one of the program’s key features; typically, business schools deploy their relatively inexperienced students into communities to work with organizations that need business advice. In this program, participants learn from peers going through similar problems and are in constant communication with seasoned professors.

Each of the organizations agreed to a two-year commitment. For Caesar, this requirement was one of the biggest lures. “It forced me to carve out time and drill down on how I’m going to improve the business,” he said.

For participants, like Princess Jenkins, the minimum annual revenue was a major attraction. Jenkins owns the Brownstone, a clothing and accessories store on 125th Street just east of Fifth Avenue. The Brownstone has been around for 10 years and is well known in Harlem, but Jenkins wants help “growing the business and taking it to the next level.” She runs the store by herself (she used to have two business partners), and is trying to launch a mail-order catalogue.

Jenkins treats everyone who enters the store like a friend, ending many of her sentences with “baby” – “thank you, baby,” “told you, baby.” She is well connected in the community, but her network lacked people running businesses of the same size, making it hard to find advice.

“A lot of the time, small business development information is developed toward startups or businesses making over a million,” she said. While she has cleared the hurdles new businesses face, she can’t yet relate to big firms’ problems.

Princess Jenkins owns The Brownstone on 125th Street in Harlem. (Photo by Tim Kiladze)

She applied to the program after hearing about it at a Harlem Business Alliance meeting. Entering with almost no expectations, she simply assumed that she would learn a great deal because of the business school’s reputation.

Looking back on the project’s first year, marked by the greatest economic disruption since the Great Depression, Jenkins acknowledges that she learned a lot – particularly such small, concrete skills as online social networking.

A year ago, the Brownstone wasn’t on Facebook. The program changed that. It also set her up with Google Analytics, which allows her to track who visits her web site and how often, and connected her with Columbia engineering students who will help improve the Brownstone’s search engine results.

Jenkins also praises Columbia’s flexibility. “They’re not trying to give you a road map for success,” she said. “They’re saying, ‘What’s your map and how do we get there?’”

Kevin Walters owns Creole Restaurant in East Harlem; he has spent the past few years finding nightly entertainment and connecting with local artists exhibited in the restaurant, and is only now focusing on promotion.

Aside from learning from his peers, who run the gamut in age, gender and ethnicity, Walters is particularly appreciative of working with the business coach, Barbara Roberts.

“She has academic training,” he says. “She also has tons of hands-on experience, so she’s in it. She’s hot. She’s a rainmaker.”

Roberts’ resume includes being the first woman on the board of Dean Witter. She also ran Acoustiguide, offered in museums and galleries, and FPG International, which sold for $80 million and became part of Getty Images.

Roberts’ experiences have taught her that small businesses drive economic growth and that helping them expand “is a lot easier than sorting out GM and would be a much quicker fix for the economy.”

She agreed to join the program at the height of the economic boom last year, but altered her advice when the economy turned sharply downward last fall.

“The first half of last year was very much on survival: cutting costs, making sure you didn’t lose a client, cash flow,” she said.

But she isn’t surprised to hear that most participants made few references to the recession — she says they’re typically so overwhelmed with detail that they tend to be myopic and “don’t appreciate their own evolution.”

This year, Roberts said, the program will focus on growth in the recovering economy.

Not everyone finds the advice useful. John Lowy runs the River Room, a restaurant and jazz bar in West Harlem, and has been an entrepreneur for 30 years, much more experience than most participants. He learned a few things from his peers, but nothing substantive. He would, however, advise other entrepreneurs to jump at the free opportunity.

The program also failed to keep all of its participants afloat. The Morningside Bookshop closed after the group meetings started last fall. Still, the project earned rave reviews from most business owners interviewed.

Columbia Business School has committed to running two more two-year program sessions, the next round starting in fall 2010.

Terran Delaney picks up her niece Toccara Chabos from P.S. 194. Had the school closed, Chabos would have started kindergarten elsewhere. (Photo by Tim Kiladze)

Students arriving at P.S. 194 in Harlem on the first day of school this year encountered an unusual banner hanging on the front fence: “Believe. Achieve. Succeed.”

Beside it, administrators welcomed eager students and spoke with parents who wondered what time the school day ended. Inside, newcomers and their parents gathered in the cafeteria to meet their teachers.

None of this was supposed to happen – not at P.S. 194. Last winter, the Department of Education announced the school’s closure, a result of failing grades on the previous two years’ progress reports: an F, then a D. The department told parents of incoming first graders to find new schools and advised students already enrolled that they would be transferred out over the next few years.

Plans were so advanced that Harlem Success Academy 2, a charter school, was poised to take over the lower-level floors P.S. 194 occupies in the expansive building they share on 144th Street, west of Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard.

Less than a year later, P.S. 194 is flourishing; it earned an A on its most recent progress report.

And its reputation has spread. Boubacar Dialo and his wife transferred their fourth and fifth grade daughters to P.S. 194 this fall. “My wife checked here and saw that this was the best school in Harlem,” he said after dropping the girls off.

Actions by families and by the United Federation of Teachers have kept the school alive. The union objected to the expected job cuts and filed a lawsuit in March in conjunction with the New York Civil Liberties Union, charging that the Department of Education was closing the school without proper approval from the community education council. The Department didn’t offer a “fair process to allow parental input into decision making,” said David Eisenberg, one of the Civil Liberties Union’s lead lawyers on the case.

The Department backed down in the spring. Had the lawsuit not been filed, Eisenberg firmly believes that P.S. 194 would not have gotten a second chance.

Parents were also outraged: they saw progress under principal Charyn Koppelson Cleary, who was only four months into the job, and thought she deserved more time. In protest, they wrote letters to Chancellor Joel Klein and turned out in droves for a public hearing in March.

“They brought the new principal and she was really running the school the way it is supposed to be,” said Samka Cekic, whose children are in the third and fifth grades at P.S. 194.

Cleary’s work was cut out for her – 13 percent of the school’s students were classified as English Language Learners last year, meaning English is not their native tongue, and P.S. 194 had four principals in five years – but she was intent on succeeding. “I didn’t come here to maintain status quo. I came here to turn a building upside down if necessary,” she said in an interview, adding, “If for whatever reason we just don’t get the job done, you ruin a kid’s life.”

Her plan started with staff training. So many teachers had come and gone over the past few years that she felt the staff lacked a cohesive vision and failed to follow curriculum guidelines.

For help, she hired Philomena Nortey from P.S. 111, whom Cleary describes as an expert in leadership and curriculum mapping. She also hired other teachers who have what she labeled “a level of tolerance and understanding.”

This staff started a mentoring program called the P.S. 194 Jewels, in which teachers provide help with homework after school; Cleary often contributes her time.

She also emphasized tracking student performance. Teachers and administrators have online access to student assessments going back to kindergarten, but parents rarely see the data. Cleary encouraged parents to follow their kids’ performance. To assist families without Internet access, P.S. 194’s parent coordinator, Clara Pena, sat outside the school with a laptop to catch parents walking by.

After a grueling year, Cleary was ecstatic at the results. “We let out such screams in this building when we saw that preliminary A that the people downstairs thought something had happened,” she said.

Parents noticed the changes. “Now you have teachers who go beyond the call of duty to do things for the kids,” said parent Shanequa Gadson, who attended P.S. 194 herself.

Dettering Hamilton, whose daughter transferred from P.S. 200 last January because he felt its teachers were ineffective, found that after a few weeks at P.S. 194, her attitude and performance turned around.

He fought the school’s scheduled close, feeling that Harlem Success Academy 2 was “pushing in and pitting parents against one another,” and he took offense at what he thought was a disregard for the public school system.

Despite its recent success, P.S. 194 faces an uphill battle. Like principals throughout the city this fall, Cleary had to cut her budget – by $450,000, enough to have hired several teachers or to start a music program, she said.

She also knows test results must continue to improve. “You’re only as good as this year’s scores,” she said.

Nurys Escano helps uptowners apply for subsidized health care. (Photo by Tim Kiladze)

Stationed in the Boriken Neighborhood Health Center in East Harlem, Nurys Escano meets with patients who need to see a doctor but have no health insurance. She works for Healthfirst, an HMO; other representatives at the clinic work for MetroPlus, Neighborhood Health Providers, and WellCare.

Escano has heard every possible reason that patients remain uninsured: worries that children will be taken away, confusion about how much income they can earn, fears of deportation.

Such stories are common in low-income neighborhoods like upper Manhattan. Last year, 14.4 percent of New York City’s population was uninsured, according to the Census Bureau. Yet many of these people qualify for subsidized insurance. Unaware of their options, they never apply.

The Bloomberg administration targeted this group shortly after the mayor took office in 2002. “We’ve created numerous opportunities so that anyone who could be eligible can at least explore their health insurance options,” said Barbara Brancaccio of New York City’s Human Resources Administration. The city developed a new web-based tool allowing residents to shop for and compare insurance plans, for example.

Still, about 1.2 million New Yorkers remain uninsured. Nationally, the disparities are glaring: 28 percent of Latinos are uninsured compared to 17 percent of the total population, according to the Pew Research Center.

Boriken does its part to help: its doctors see anybody who enters, regardless of coverage, but people who are uninsured must sit down with Escano or another HMO representative to go over subsidized options, often applying for insurance on the spot. Escano first assesses whether patients qualify for Medicaid; most don’t because the required incomes levels are so low. Of those she helps apply for private insurance, eight of 10 are approved for subsidies or free care, she reported.

“If they become eligible, usually the insurance company will go back 30 days and pay for the clinic visit,” added Elizabeth Sanchez, the Center’s executive director. Those who make too much money to qualify but not enough to afford private insurance pay for their care on a sliding fee scale, as little as $30 or $60 a visit.

Patients often simply don’t know about their subsidized options, Sanchez said. “Newspapers and the political leaders put the information out there,” she explained, “but very few people in this community read or speak English.” Even when brochures and flyers are available in Spanish, “it’s not the day to day usage that the client may use.”

Sanchez also stressed the community’s workload. “The last thing on their minds is health care,” she said. Many residents are single mothers and “their first priority usually is taking care of their children and putting bread on the table.”

Elizabeth Sanchez runs the Boriken Neighborhood Health Center in East Harlem. Her clinic sees all patients, including those with no insurance. (Photo by Tim Kiladze)

Andy Nieto, director of community health at New York-Presbyterian Hospital, also works with low income people who often qualify for subsidized care: upper Manhattan’s taxi drivers.

For the past five years, his hospital has sponsored a drivers’ health fair that provides free screenings for glaucoma, prostate cancer, hypertension, and diabetes.

Taxi driver Juan Payano visited this year’s health fair on a crystal clear fall day. A native of the Dominican Republic, he was uninsured, and had spent 13 hours in the emergency room earlier this year because he was feeling sick. The hospital ran tests but found a simple virus – a costly expense the hospital absorbed.

It’s difficult for fellow drivers to afford coverage, Payano said. “We are self-employed. It’s hard for us to buy insurance.” Besides, Payano added, arriving immigrants are often confused about insurance options. “You’re kind of lost. The doctors are expensive. It’s complicated,” he said.

Instead of trying to work through the system here, “sometimes when people go home, they check their teeth and their health because it’s less expensive.” But that doesn’t help if they get sick when they return.

Nieto added lack of time to Payano’s list. “These guys work six to seven days a week, so often these guys don’t have time to take care of their health care until it’s too late,” he said.

Nieto also runs a spring health fair for bodega owners, a group that faces similar barriers to health care. HMO’s offering subsidized care are invited to both events – Healthfirst showed up for the taxi drivers’ fair – to promote affordable insurance plans.

But even those who apply and get coverage may forget to re-certify each year. “Some patients are just irresponsible,” said Dr. Danielle Milano, who works at Boriken. She added that the HMOs’ mailed documents don’t always reach low-income patients, who move quite often.

Payano is a prime example. He previously applied for insurance but moved before finding out if he was approved. He was, but the documents were mailed to the wrong address. Too busy to follow up, he has had to re-apply and is awaiting a decision – but the stakes are now higher, because his wife and daughter finally joined him in New York last month.

Milano was sympathetic, acknowledging that poverty creates uncertainty. “Today they have a phone, tomorrow they don’t,” she said.