With their coaches watching, Team Taino players practice a proper defensive stance. After three months of basketball practice in the gym at Taino Towers, organizers plan to expand the program. (Photo by Jason Tomassini)

Conclusion of a four-part series. For previous installments, visit here.

Ikay Henry is sitting on a stage at the north end of the Taino Towers gym, leafing through a manila folder and smiling. He’s perusing 13-year-old Daquan Clarke’s math homework, several worksheets of word problems and complex fractions, adorned by near-perfect scores.

Henry has known Clarke most of his life. He coaches Clarke in Taino Towers’ embryonic youth basketball team; in the past, he’s worked at Clarke’s junior high school and at a YMCA where Clarke took acting classes. Both grew up at Taino Towers.

Henry is smiling because Clarke never used to earn grades like this; in fact, he never seemed to care about school at all.

“Just the growth that I see now is amazing,” says Henry, 28, a tall, broad man with a thin mustache.

Clarke acknowledges the transformation, too. “Before my grades were terrible,” he says at the end of practice. “Now it’s a B and up.” Clarke shrugs off the improvement, noting that he brought his homework to practice because he wants to show it to his parents later, in hopes of landing an improved Christmas bounty.

To Henry, though, that a kid would even think to show his coaches his homework means that, at least in one case, the basketball program—after a rocky start—is paying off.

It began in September after a particularly violent year at Taino Towers, a federally-subsidized apartment complex in East Harlem that houses about 3,000 residents and became the site of frequent fights between rival youth gangs over the spring and summer. Basketball, every Tuesday and Thursday in the gym beneath the complex, marks the start of a larger effort at Taino, to offer classes, leadership training and other sports like football, baseball and skiing. Some of the educational programs were supposed to begin by now in a new learning center that has been delayed, but is slated to open by the new year.

Team Taino also serves as a case study in the complexities of starting a program that targets at-risk kids in urban neighborhoods. As a holiday break approaches, its organizers are simultaneously reflecting on the impact they’ve already made and considering how to expand into the future.

“So far it has been able to maintain itself on the strength of the participants,” says William Thomas, a technology entrepreneur from Vermont who helped organize the team. “The long-term planning and financing will be a challenge.”

Aris Martin, a volunteer basketball coach, runs a drill during Team Taino’s recent practice. With more funding, Martin hopes the team can soon enter more tournaments around the city. (Photo by Jason Tomassini)

Its ambitious future plans will require money, but so far Team Taino hasn’t needed much. The gym is rent-free, reopened after being empty for years due to vandalism and misuse. Thomas and the team’s five volunteer coaches are unpaid. Basketball is a sport that requires only a hoop and a ball.

Still, for the team to survive, it needs to expand beyond Taino, the coaches say. That means tournaments, jerseys and transportation for a consistent roster of players.

“It’s about looking presentable and putting the resources together,” says Sherrod Kersey, 25, a coach from the Bronx who, like all the coaches, was a classmate of either Henry or his childhood friend Aris Martin, another team coach. “We need to look official. We go to tournaments and it’s embarrassing sometimes.”

White and gold jerseys are on the way, thanks to donations from Midtown Elevator Company and the Magic Johnson Foundation, housed in Taino Towers. Arco Management, the complex’s property manager, kicks in some money and several of Arco and Thomas’ corporate connections—the publisher of a high-end golf magazine plans to run a golf clinic; a scout from the New York Yankees has promised baseball training—have offered time and equipment.  But there’s no actual budget yet, says Thomas who, along with Taino Towers property manager Maria Cruz, handles most of the program’s financial and organizational responsibilities.

In all, the program so far has amassed “a couple thousand dollars” for an expanding roster of 40 kids aged 6 to 18 years, Thomas says, and organizers are actively looking for more money.

At a similar neighborhood program, the Children’s Aid Society’s East Harlem Center, the annual budget is about $90,000, about 80 percent of which comes from government grants, says the center’s director, David Giordano. Children’s Aid Society is larger than Taino, serving about 120 kids, but they are of comparable age and organized similarly, with younger kids there from 3 p.m. to 6 p.m. and the older kids from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. Like Taino, it has a basketball gym—but kids have to enroll in educational and “personal development” programs before they can play. One difference, to date, is that $90,000 gives Giordano’s kids opportunities, from traveling the country for youth conferences to participating in UPS-sponsored driving safety initiatives.

Money helps. As a boy, Henry was selected for Merrill Lynch’s Scholarship Builders, which guaranteed full tuition to any child in his first-grade class later accepted by a college. Along the way, Henry met with personal mentors, visited far-flung locales on college tours and interned on Wall Street before studying business management at Hampton University in Virginia. About 15 of the 25 students in the program attended college and 20 graduated high school, according to a 1999 report by The New York Times. In his own work—at Taino, the YMCA or his own nonprofit, Harlem Mentors—Henry knows he will never have such substantial resources.

Some funding comes with a catch, Giordano says; most grants must be used in very specific ways, often restricting his autonomy. But without resources, there’s scant incentive for volunteers and participants to stay with the program through the inevitable tribulations. “It becomes a little limited, what you can ask of people and what you can’t,” says Giordano, who has worked with teens since 1980. “When you’re paying people, that adds another level.”

But Henry insists money isn’t everything. Merrill Lynch paid Henry’s college bills but, more importantly, his mentors taught “manners and how to act,” he says. “That’s what I’m trying to do here.”

His childhood friend, Aris Martin, wasn’t involved with Scholarship Builders but did attend prestigious Rice High School along with Henry. Martin didn’t enjoy the same perks and didn’t go on to a university. However, he says what he’s learned from his mistakes—he’s now working for Arco Management and, after some initial doubts, is perhaps the most omnipresent and enthusiastic of the team’s coaches—is just as valuable to teens.

“I see them doing better than me,” he says.

There is no magic formula for starting a youth program—at a basic level, the youth workers must relate to the kids. It’s unclear whether Team Taino will do enough to have a long-term effect on children, but perhaps its most valuable capital is the goodwill building between its coaches and players.

“I see them on a daily basis so they get more out of it,” says Martin, who lives at Taino. “When they see me in the streets they pick their head up.”

And that’s what Team Taino is banking on, Thomas says. “You can have all the money in the world; if you don’t have the right people, the money won’t be utilized in the right way.” Though even with the right people, the children of East Harlem face many pitfalls.

Both Giordano and Taino Towers’ basketball coaches have found the distractions of the digital age a barrier in reaching teens. “The attention span is very small,” says Norman Anderson, a 28-year-old coach from Brooklyn. “You have to keep on reminding them and reminding them until it eventually sticks.”

On cue, Anderson stops to yell at Clarke, who tried unsuccessfully to outmaneuver an opponent in a drill, took a bad shot and missed. “If you had used the move we just taught you, you would’ve scored!” Anderson reminds him loudly. Clarke nods sheepishly.

Giordano blames the recession, which shuttered or cut back many local youth programs, for an increase in teen crime at housing projects like Taino Towers. As of mid-December, the 25th police precinct, which includes Taino Towers, has seen an increase from last year in murders and assaults and is on pace for an increase in robberies.

In school District 4, which includes East Harlem and parts of the Upper East Side, 67 percent of students graduate, compared to 74 percent statewide and 59 percent citywide.  In 2008, 35.6 percent of local families with children under 18 were living below the poverty line. It’s under those conditions when gangs become most attractive, Giordano says.

“That coach in the street they grew up with can give them something, but not everything,” Giordano says. From the child’s perspective, “if I’m not finding the security in a space or program that’s open, I find it in a crew,” Giordano continues. “There’s hierarchy and structure.”

At Taino Towers, structure developed slowly for the basketball team. Early practices suffered because its coaches didn’t show up consistently, because drills were less organized, and because misbehaving kids were allowed to disrupt practices. At one point, a tiff between a player and a coach escalated to a fight involving the player and a relative. That incident served as a wake-up call for the coaches.

Since then, the coaches have “weeded out the bad seeds,” as Kersey puts it, and focused on organizing a team, rather than wrangling disorganized loiterers looking for a pick-up game.

“You got to crawl before you can walk,” says Devin Johnson, an 18-year-old who had the potential to be one of Kersey’s “bad seeds,” but now attends every practice and helps coach the younger players. Johnson scored a team-high 18 points in Team Taino’s first game at a midtown YMCA recreation league. “At first it wasn’t really organized, but now everyone knows how to play with each other.”

Sherrod Kersey, a volunteer basketball coach, watches as a teen lays the ball in during a drill. “We need to look official,” Kersey says of the team as it looks to expand beyond twice-weekly basketball practices. (Photo by Jason Tomassini)

By the new year, Thomas vows,  a learning center and lounge will open above the Taino Towers gym, a place for team members to hang out after practice and a site for educational programs and video game tournaments. A teen theater production, run out of Taino Towers’ Red Carpet Theater, is slated to start by the end of January. In February, the teens will go on a ski trip and, in the spring, have a choice of baseball, golf and football clinics. A potential partnership with the Ron Brown Scholar Program would provide various classes, including leadership training that features Skype conferences with business leaders. These, however, still remain plans. And Cruz, the property manager, has even more planned. During a recent trip to her native Puerto Rico, she discussed bringing Team Taino down to play in a tournament there.

Meanwhile, architects have completed blueprints for a new $3 million fitness center at Taino, another space for youth programs, built around the complex’s pool. Eventually, Cruz hopes Taino Towers can be become a hub for teens in East Harlem.

Henry and his fellow basketball coaches are thinking more short-term. They want to enter Team Taino in upcoming basketball tournaments in the city. Their model is the Amateur Athletic Union, the top level of non-scholastic basketball; New York City boasts some of the best AAU teams in the nation. Besides basketball, Henry would like every Taino teen to have a mentor, just as he did. Martin wants to start a financial literacy course.

Whatever the future holds for Team Taino, its players don’t seem to think much beyond each Tuesday or Thursday, when they can play basketball with their friends and the worst consequences for a bad decision are running extra laps around the gym or watching an opponent put the ball through the net.

After all, it’s simple, Daquan Clarke says: “Everybody in this neighborhood likes basketball.”

For more information on Team Taino, visit www.tainoyouth.com or e-mail info@tainoyouth.com. For more information on Harlem Mentors, contact Ikay Henry at 347-756-0742 or visit www.harlem-mentors.org.

After more than two months of practicing against each other in the below-ground gym at Taino Towers, the East Harlem housing complex’s basketball team is finally getting its chance to size up against other teams. The team has entered a recreational league at the Vanderbilt YMCA in midtown, where its coach, Ikay Henry, works as a youth specialist.

“These kids want to play, these kids want to compete against other kids,” Henry says. “They want to show people that they’ve worked on something and that it’s actually working.”

For 18-year-old Devin Johnson, the YMCA league wasn’t just his first chance to play with Team Taino outside East Harlem, it was the first organized basketball game of his life. He made the most of it, ending up the star of the game.

“I’m playing for the team from the ‘hood,” he says. “It’s about our team.”

Next: As the program prepares to expand, what the future holds for Taino Towers’ youth

The Yankees’ season may be over, but in the city’s parks, you can still hear the occasional crack of a bat. At J. Hood Wright Park, though, this may be the last inning for baseball.

On an unusually warm Sunday afternoon, a half dozen boys dragged garbage cans into a diamond. Around them, neighbors filled playgrounds, ball courts and game tables. Technically, baseball is already prohibited here, according to posted signs, but the park is in such poor condition that no one objects.

That may change next summer when the park closes for an $800,000 renovation that will include a new lawn, improved drainage, better lighting and dog run repairs. To protect the grass, baseball players will have to play on blacktop instead, sharing space with basketball.

Hear the ballplayers’ own ideas for the park makeover in this slide show from The Uptowner.

For the full article, visit here.

“They hire anybody that’s real well-spoken in the interview and from there, it’s like a tryout,” says Davila, 25, an East Harlem resident working at Ricky’s for the month leading up to Halloween on Sunday. “If you do good here, they’re like, ‘He’s good so we’ll put him in the other stores, we’ll keep him.’”

In this case, “doing good” comes down to getting noticed. So Davila, who works up to five-hour sidewalk shifts, devises the weirdest costumes he can and bellows over the dozens of equally aggressive street vendors and leafleteers lining West 125th. Employees can more than double their pay with a strong performance, he says.

On the last weekend before Halloween, Davila found two blow-up dolls–an infant and a decrepit old lady–and attached one to his torso and one to his back. He then donned an adult baby costume himself, creating the illusion, sort of, that an oversized baby was riding piggyback on a grandma.  The mission, Davila says, is to entice customers into the temporary storefront near Adam Clayton Powell Jr.  Boulevard.

If they take him up, what are the most popular costumes this year?

“Right now it would be ‘Avatar,’ ‘Jersey Shore,’ people like Fidel Castro, ” he says. “For women that like to dress sexy: light-up costumes, fairies, skeletons that have LED lights.”

Dressed as a giant baby riding a grandmother, Nelson Davila, 25, promotes Ricky's Costume Superstore on West 125th Street in Harlem. Temporary employees are trying to sell costumes and earn a full-time position before Halloween on Sunday.

Throughout the day, pedestrians stop to gawk and ask about Davila’s costume. At one point a double-decker sightseeing bus pulls up and the guide asks him to turn toward the street, at which point several tourists stand up to snap photos.

After Halloween, Davila will spend a few days hawking clearance costumes at Ricky’s, known the rest of the year for its cosmetics. Then, Davila will learn his fate. Ricky’s will select one temporary employee to work year round at a permanent store. During Halloween, Ricky’s occupies more than 40 storefronts, permanent and temporary, in Manhattan.

Davila hopes his creativity, friendliness and thick skin will earn him that position. Ironically, the campaign may derail his own Halloween celebration.

“If I’m going to be working all the way through Halloween,” he says, “I may not even get a chance to go outside.”

“He shot her when she was giving a bouquet of flowers to her niece and that’s how everything started,” Juan Ricart said recently. “I wasn’t more than five inches away from him.

“I never thought he was going to shoot.”

But since that day, Juan Ricart has realized the shooting might have been prevented. As revealed during his trial, Garcia was abusive during his relationship with Gladys Ricart and harassed her after they broke up, yet neither she nor her family reported his conduct to police. As a result, she has become the unfortunate face of domestic violence in New York, a cautionary tale of a woman caught in a culture of abuse and unwilling to speak out.

Every year since her death, New York Latinas Against Domestic Violence has kicked off Domestic Violence Awareness Month — October — with the Brides’ March, in which Juan Ricart joins crowds of women honoring Gladys Ricart. About 100 chanting demonstrators walked this year’s seven-mile route, women in wedding dresses and men in black. The march proceeded through East Harlem for the first time, along with parts of the Bronx and Washington Heights, where Gladys Ricart lived after moving to the United States from the Dominican Republic in 1983. Garcia, a prominent Washington Heights businessman and one-time grand marshal of the Dominican Day Parade, was convicted of murder in 2001 and sentenced to life in prison.

The city continues to increase efforts to curb the cycle of domestic violence. Its 2,144 emergency shelter beds for domestic violence victims represent a 35 percent increase since 2002. The police Domestic Violence Unit made 69,188 home visits last year, a 79 percent increase since 2002. This month, police will commemorate Domestic Violence Awareness Month with purple ribbon decals on marked police vehicles, in addition to information stations staffed by trained domestic violence police officers in each borough. Last year, police responded to reports of about 250,000 domestic violence incidents, including 61 family-related homicides, according to police statistics.

The actual number of incidents is likely higher, advocates say, because so many women are afraid to report abuse. So maximum volume is a major theme of the march, the participants chanting their way through the streets, eliciting cheers from pedestrians and honks from passing cars.

“I want to empower other women not to become a victim and to recognize the symptoms of domestic violence and not fall into the same trap,” said Anna Palmer, a domestic violence victim from Queens marching in an ankle-length gown.

“My significant other wouldn’t allow me or my daughter to leave the house,” Palmer recalls. “He locked us in the house and wouldn’t allow us out. It got physical at times.”

Unlike many victims, Palmer obtained an order of protection and now, through her social work studies at Hunter College and her job at Urban Woman’s New Beginnings, a victim’s advocacy group in Brooklyn, she is teaching others to do the same.

Guadalupe Perez is following a similar path. Abused by her husband of 12 years, Perez sought services through Harlem’s Violence Intervention Program, including free therapy for her and her daughter, as well as clothing and food.

“I don’t want her to suffer the same problem as me,” Perez, now divorced, said of her daughter.

Many of the event’s sponsors were advocacy groups for minority women, 28.6 of whom experience domestic violence, compared to 24.8 percent of white women, according to U.S. Department of Justice statistics. Upper Manhattan receives additional funds for domestic violence programs due to its high number of incidents.

But the march’s message is meant for all women, said City Councilwoman Melissa Mark-Viverito.  She’s pushing for better reporting practices at local police precincts, which don’t single out domestic violence incidents in their publicly reported monthly statistics.

“If we aren’t seeing that information in our face all the time, we can’t really be alarmed by it,” said Mark-Viverito, who represents East Harlem and marched in and sponsored the event. “And I want us to be alarmed by it.”

Juan Ricart hopes that with more information and services, other women won’t lose their lives the way his sister did.

Video of the wedding preparations — hectic footage that ends in gunshots and images of Gladys Ricart’s blood — first portrays a woman on one of the happiest days of her life.

That’s the image Juan Ricart wants people to remember, an image seen during the march on placards held by women in wedding dresses and screened onto t-shirts of the men beside them.

“This is a message we are sending to everybody who has any mind to do these actions against women,” Juan Ricart said. “We won’t stop until we don’t have to read or see in the news that women have been beaten, hurt or killed by loved ones.”

For more information on New York City Police Department’s Domestic Violence Awareness Month campaign, and examples of the multi-lingual pamphlets that will be provided at the information tables, visit here.

For more information on the Mayor’s Office to Combat Domestic Violence and its campaign, visit here.

Services for victims of domestic violence:

Northern Manhattan Improvement Corporation 212-822-8319

Nuevo Amanecer 212-568-6616

Violence Intervention Program, Inc. 1-800-664-5880

NYS Spanish Domestic Violence Hotline 1-800-942-6908

Mayor’s Office to Combat Domestic Violence- Statistics and Resources; Services.

For those who have committed acts of domestic violence and are seeking help:

Alianza Dominicana 212-795-4226

New Start Batterers Intervention Program 212-252-2298

Click here to view a low-quality version of footage from Gladys Ricart’s wedding day, including the shooting, as originally broadcast on the A&E television channel.

East Harlem has one of the highest rates of diagnosed diabetes in the city.  The Nourishing Kitchen*, a soup kitchen with a difference, is helping local residents eat well and lower their risk.

* Correction: This story originally included an incorrect link.

The new holiday tree in St. Nicholas Park shines against the hillside after a community lighting festival with cookies and holiday music on St. Nicholas Day. (Photo by Lisa Waananen)

The crowd at St. Nicholas Park looked into the dark expectantly, counting down.

“Ten, nine, eight, seven, six –”

Parents clutched cups of cocoa and hot cider and children danced around to keep warm.

“Five, four, three, two –”

Glittery paper snowflakes fluttered against the plaza fence, sparkling under the street lights.

“One!”

Hundreds of tiny lights leaped out of the darkness and the crowd cheered. It might not be Rockefeller Center, but the small tree donated by City College earlier this year glowed against the dark hillside.

The tree is permanent, symbolic of the increasing community involvement taking root in St. Nicholas Park since the days when most lights seen there flashed from police cruisers. Community members first got together as the Friends of St. Nicholas Park in 1995, their hope to reclaim the park from crime has grown into community priority.

“We though it would be a perfect opportunity to have a permanent tree and see it grow over the years,” Friends leader William Mullin told the crowd.

Longtime resident Fred Jordan, collecting winter clothes at the tree lighting for Blessed Trinity Baptist Church’s holiday coat drive, remembers when the park became a haven for criminals once the sun set. He looked around at the plaza, where an impromptu round of carols was beginning. “Five years ago or so we didn’t have this kind of thing,” he said. “You probably wouldn’t have even come to this park 10 years ago.”

The first snowflakes of the season fell the previous morning as dogs ran around the dog run up the hill overlooking the holiday tree. Their owners chatted about upcoming events and issues with the park. At this casual monthly gathering with coffee and doughnuts, they pick up trash and check for damage – little things that can add up if no one cares.

Mullin’s black lab, Guffman, chased a stick past rocks that used to be a hub for drugs and anonymous sex. The entire area was overgrown and scattered with garbage, Yasmin Lauz said. Even old cars had been dumped there.

While walking her border collie, Nina, on a previous weekend, Lauz met a woman who remembered when the path along the dog run was an arena for dog fights and lined with crack dealers. “This area that the dog park is in used to be like their little needle alley,” Lauz said.

The park wasn’t always an overgrown urban wilderness sheltering drug deals and other shady activities, said Sybil Ward, who grew up on Sugar Hill. She remembers it as a spotless place where families strolled after church when she was young. But sometime in the ’70s the park started attracting a different crowd. Parents learned to keep their children away. Cautious citizens stopped walking through. “Nobody came to this park, nobody in their right mind,” Ward said. “And now you can walk through it. You see people coming in with their children and dogs to play.”

The turnaround began in the late ’90s, as the city’s overall crime rate was dropping and the city parks department hired a gardener. “It became more pleasant, and more people came in,” said park manager Mark Vaccaro, who made sure the lights were working properly at the tree festival.

The dozen people who form the dedicated core of the Friends of St. Nicholas Park are mostly dog owners, who started walking through as the park got a little better; their presence accelerated the park’s improvements. “A lot of the activities that were going on started moving out,” Lauz said. “Part of it is just having the foot traffic.”

This month marks three years since the Friends mustered more than 50 volunteers for a day of fence-erecting to finally build a dog run. The Friends raised the money and gathered hundreds of signatures to show community interest, and the parks department followed through by providing the land and a project manager.

The improvements since rely on the same collaborative effort: The parks department donated benches for the dog run; the Friends paid for the installation. Parks dumps a small mountain of wood chips a few times a year, and volunteers to spread it around the dog run.

“The dog run has brought people in and dog owners – as all police tell me at every meeting I go to – are the eyes and ears of the park,” Ward said. “They report every little incident and indiscretion that goes on.”

Drug activity and robberies have decreased, particularly in the past few years, said Officer Jason Harper of the 26th Precinct. He credited the dog run and programs like summer movies in the park for deterring loiterers.

The holiday tree is not the only addition to the park this year; notice boards were installed, new paths constructed and long-crumbling sidewalks replaced. July brought the official ribbon-cutting at the renovated basketball courts near 140th Street.

“We’ve put a lot of capital money into the big Harlem parks, including this one,” Vaccaro said. “Especially this one.”

Tourists will start flocking to Alexander Hamilton’s historic home at the north end of the park when it reopens next summer, and Mullin said the Friends are hoping visitors will stick around to explore. The group is thinking of ways to mark the historic Point of Rocks at the park’s south end, where George Washington’s army kept watch during the Revolutionary War. “We’re trying to find reasons to have all these tourists use the park fully,” Mullin said.

The holiday tree also represents City College’s increasing involvement with the park. Monthly operations meetings held there draw parks department and local law enforcement representatives to discuss any park problems. “We get updated on any type of crime or crime patterns,” Mullin said, “which – knock on wood – has not been a lot in the past few years.”

But most students still don’t bother coming into the park, Mullin said, after generations of City College students learned to simply avoid the park downhill from campus. City College’s public safety and security director, Lt. Douglas White, warns against venturing into the park after dark. “They’re doing a great job,” he said, “but you always discourage people from walking through parks at night.”

Some illegal activity continues, said Harper of the 26th precinct, and the park is technically closed from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. “I’d recommend that people adhere to those guidelines,” he said.

Plenty of neighborhood residents don’t visit the park often, either, and that’s part of the reason the Friends have hosted a St. Nicholas Day tree ceremony the past few years. This year 13-year-old Kimani Emmanuel, a student at the Harlem School of the Arts, played flute and a choir from P.S. 129 sang carols.

Actress Tamara Tunie, who plays the medical examiner on “Law and Order: SVU,” has made a tradition of reading “The Night Before Christmas” – otherwise aptly known as “A Visit from St. Nicholas.”

“I think the more people we get involved in the park, the more they’ll demand that the park is kept up,” Mullin said.

With the tree lit and the cocoa packed away, volunteer Annette Wilcox was ready to head home after a chilly afternoon outside helping with the snowflakes. Investing time into the park – whether with glitter or a shovel – makes a noticeable difference, she said. “When you volunteer, you see a little effort brings a lot,” she said.

Source: New York State Department of Labor (Graphic by Tim Kiladze and Lisa Waananen)

By Andrew Keshner and Joshua Tapper

Widespread unemployment in uptown Manhattan is forcing people to find new careers or juggle several jobs, while touching off concerns that those lost jobs might not come back, local business leaders say.

Elbagina Bonilla, deputy director of the Northern Manhattan Coalition for Economic Development, sees rising unemployment rates weighing heavily on local residents. A particularly hard-hit demographic is young heads of household from their 20s to their 40s, she says.

As the economy dives, a way of life becomes tougher for low-income individuals and families, says Ernest Johnson, senior director at Strive, an East Harlem-based agency that assists the chronically unemployed nationwide. “It’s difficult,” he says. “People are having it pretty rough. A lot of people are hurting.”

Looking at the numbers, it’s not hard to see why: The unemployment rate has essentially doubled since last year. As of October, the unemployment rate in Manhattan was 9.2 percent, says Jim Brown, labor market analyst for the New York State Department of Labor. In October 2008 – the month after Lehman Brothers imploded – it was just 5.5 percent citywide. Unemployment rose from 6.3 to 10.3 percent citywide during the same period.

Unemployed Inwood woman sells her belongings from Shane Snow on Vimeo.

But the unemployment rates of uptown Manhattan neighborhoods are drastically higher than the borough or citywide numbers. Historically, neighborhoods with a high concentration of African Americans have been hit harder by labor market shocks than the rest of the population, explains Kevin Foster, a City College economist. Typically, African Americans work jobs susceptible to layoffs, like personal care and food preparation, Foster says. The black unemployment rate is 15.7 percent nationwide, and it’s especially dire among 16-to-19-year olds, nearly 40 percent of whom are without work. Even before the recession, African Americans had an 8 percent unemployment rate. “It started at a level the country would have called a recession,” Foster says. “Now it’s at a depression level.”

In East Harlem, for example, unemployment climbed from 16 percent in 2005 to between 18.3 and 19.2 percent so far this year, according to Johnson. Johnson believes the East Harlem unemployment rate will peak at 19 to 20 percent over the next two or three months. The neighborhood represents a “microcosm for the rest of the country,” Johnson said.

Bonilla sees some people taking on two or three small jobs to make ends meet; others look to change careers or improve their computer skills. Her organization offers training for child care and security jobs and she reports increased interest in both. Between 20 and 25 people have taken the security training course this year, says Bonilla, compared with 10 to 15 who took the course last year. Last year, the organization offered six classes aimed at helping people open childcare businesses; this year, the organization may offer eight, owing to higher demand. Both Johnson and Foster says green collar jobs are becoming popular in low-income neighborhoods, a result of President Obama’s economic stimulus package. Strive, for example, offers training in green construction.

Henry Calderon, executive director of the East Harlem Chamber of Commerce, has seen some businesses cut back on employees as local consumers trim their own budgets to necessities like rent and food. Though some well-established businesses are still getting by on lower volumes, others, like restaurants, are feeling the pinch.

Foster, the economist, believes many unskilled labor jobs will return once the economy rebounds, simply because they don’t require much training or education. But Calderon, heading an organization representing almost 230 businesses, says there is still a lot of pessimism about the economy improving anytime soon.

And when it does improve, he worries that businesses won’t rehire the same number of workers they let go and will try to do more with less. “The net result,” he says, “is a loss of jobs even if it picks up.”

Teaching New York’s Mariachis from Rebecca Huval on Vimeo.