The New York Times - USA (2020-07-28)

THE NEW YORK TIMES NATIONALTUESDAY, JULY 28, 2020 Y A

Kathy Mendez did not think
twice on Sunday when her
teenage son, Kleimer, asked if he
could go play basketball near
their home in Brooklyn’s Cypress
Hills neighborhood.
The sun was still shining and it
was a sweltering summer day. So
Ms. Mendez, who had just re-
turned from her job at a hair salon,
gave Kleimer, 16, her blessing.
Less than an hour later, Kleimer
lay dead on the sidewalk about a
half-mile from his home, the vic-
tim of a drive-by shooting that
also killed a second teenager, An-
tonio Villa, 18, and wounded a
third.
The shooting was one of 15 to
take place on an exceptionally
deadly day in New York City: Sev-
en people were fatally shot and
one was stabbed to death on Sun-
day, a brutal 24 hours that came as
New York City has wrestled with a
spike in violence unlike anything
it has seen in decades.
The trend has not shown signs
of slowing, even though for weeks
the police, community leaders and
elected officials have vowed to
confront the rising tide of vio-
lence.
“When we have a day with 15
shootings in New York City, that’s
not a success,” Police Commis-
sioner Dermot F. Shea said Mon-
day in an interview on NY1.
“There’s no other way to put that.”
Through July 26, the city had re-
corded 745 shootings, an increase
of 73 percent from last year, when
there were 431 in the same time
period, the police said.
Homicides rose by 29 percent,
up to 227 from 176 last year. The

victims included a 1-year old boy, Davell Gardner Jr., who was fatally shot when gunmen attacked people at a late-night cookout in Brooklyn on July 12. The surge in New York City has been part of a larger trend of shootings in big American cities. The spike has since become en- tangled in a fractious debate over the future of policing, which was sparked by the killing of George Floyd in May while in police cus- tody in Minneapolis. In New York, gun violence typi- cally does increase in the summer months, when warmer weather lures more people outside and tempers are rankled by sweltering temperatures. But experts have said the violence has been especially brutal this year as the coronavirus pandemic has exacerbated the socio- economic problems that often contribute to gun violence. Senior police officials and May- or Bill de Blasio have also blamed the spike in shootings on a slow- down in the court system caused by the pandemic. On Monday, Mr. de Blasio again called for the courts to fully re- open as soon as possible. He said the city had seen a “huge backlog” of cases, with only half of firearms charges reaching the indictment stage. “We can solve our problems,” Mr. de Blasio said at a news brief- ing on Monday. “We have the ability to do it, but everyone has to come to the table.” Lucian Chalfen, a spokesman for the state Office of Court Ad- ministration, disputed the may- or’s contention that the courts were to blame for the rise in shootings, noting the courts were working to resume full operations. Commissioner Shea, joining Mr. de Blasio, said that the Police De- partment was sending resources

to areas of the city that had seen outbursts of gang violence. More than half of Sunday’s shootings took place in Brooklyn, he said. Earlier on Monday, in his NY interview, Mr. Shea said the Police Department had been taxed by both the rise in gun violence and continued protests against sys- temic racism and police brutality that have filled city streets this summer. Over the weekend, the protests again brought hundreds of people to the streets in Brooklyn and Manhattan, many of them march- ing to support demonstrators fac- ing off against federal law enforce- ment officers in Portland, Oregon. “Every available resource is be- ing used to quell this gun violence,” Mr. Shea said on Monday. “But there’s a lot of balls up in the air that we’re balancing.” In Cypress Hills on Monday, neighbors gathered to pay tribute to Mr. Mendez and Mr. Villa at the site of the shooting, placing can- dles and writing their condo- lences on a poster set up on the

sidewalk. “I’m scared for my kids’ safety every day,” Maxine Rodriguez, 39, who helped set up the memorial, said. “It’s hard to come out of the house and see the kids that your kids hang out with passed away.” That afternoon, Ms. Mendez, escorted by friends and relatives, came to the spot where her son had died and broke into tears The police said the two teen- agers and the third victim, identified by his mother as Leswin Campbell, 17, had been playing basketball at the George Walker Jr. Park in Cypress Hills before the shooting took place on Sunday. At around 6:40 p.m., the three young men were standing on a sidewalk when a gunman fired out of the moon roof of a sport utility vehicle and sped away. Detectives said they believed that the gunman had gotten into an argument with at least one of the victims before the shooting. Both Mr. Mendez, whose nick- name was “Curvy,” and Mr. Villa, who friends called “Tone,” were shot in the head. Mr. Mendez was pronounced dead at the scene. Mr. Villa died on Monday at a hospital, the police said. Mr. Campbell was hit in the leg. His mother, Nicola, said that he underwent five hours of surgery. Ms. Mendez declined to speak with reporters on Monday, and her employer, Roma Lopez, said that the mother was devastated. “She has no words,” Ms. Lopez said. Ms. Lopez, who has known Mr. Mendez since he was born, described him as a kind and re- served boy who was not known for causing trouble. He was an obedi- ent child who loved playing basketball and often babysat his two younger brothers. Mr. Mendez often confided in

his mother, Ms. Lopez said. “She did not know of any problems,” Ms. Lopez said. “We don’t even think that bullet was intended for him.” The violence on Sunday began shortly after midnight on Staten Island, where Grashino Yancy, 32, was shot in his right leg, the police said. The wound was fatal. Less than an hour later, the police were called to an apartment building in the Bronx, where they found Kemar Soloman, 32, stabbed to death in a third-floor hallway. More violence would come in the Bronx before sunrise. At around 3 a.m., the police found a man, 37, who has not been identified, fatally shot in the head in the Allerton neighborhood. Then, at about 5:42 a.m., officers responding to an assault in the Bronx’s Belmont section found two shooting victims, both men, 24 and 20. The older man, Juancarlos Ortega, was hit in the head and died, while the younger man, shot in the groin, was in sta- ble condition. The police arrested Joam Casado, 39, and charged him with murder and weapon possession in the attack, officials said. The afternoon brought a fifth homicide, this one in Queens. Just before 2:15 p.m., Shaka Ifill, 40, was shot in the back in a house in Woodhaven. Mr. Ifill, a Bronx resi- dent, was taken to the hospital, officials said. He died four hours later. Less than an hour after the shooting that killed Mr. Mendez and Mr. Villa, the police were called to an apartment building in Brooklyn’s Flatbush neighborhood, where they found a man, 32, outside who had been fatally shot in the face and the chest, officials said. The man has not yet been identified.

2 Teens Among 7 Dead in 15 Shootings on Sunday in New York

By MICHAEL GOLD

Reporting was contributed by
William K. Rashbaum, Sean Pic-
coli, Alan Feuer and Emma G.
Fitzsimmons.

Kleimer P. Mendez, 16, had been playing basketball in Brooklyn before he was shot.

VIA KATHY MENDEZ

It features a Native American in a breechcloth and an early Ameri- can settler holding a long rope with what appears to be a loop on its end, and for more than a century, it has served as the official seal of New York City — but perhaps not for much longer. Like the rest of the country, New York is engaged in a heated discussion about race and societal bias, a discourse that has spilled onto the streets in the form of protests, graffiti and, for a while, an encampment next to City Hall. Earlier this month, Mayor Bill de Blasio helped paint “Black Lives Matter” on Fifth Avenue in front of Trump Tower. He has ap- pointed a commission that will re- consider some of the city’s stat- ues. And last week, Planned Par- enthood of Greater New York re- moved the name of Margaret Sanger, a founder of the national organization, from its Manhattan health clinic because of her con- nections to the eugenics move- ment. Now the mayor said he would favor re-examining New York City’s seal. “It’s the kind of thing a commission should look at carefully and decide if it still makes sense for the 21st century,” Mr. de Blasio said on Monday. New York City’s seal dates to a 1914 city commission charged with choosing a seal and flag for the newly unified five boroughs. The beavers on the seal repre- sent the fur trade, and the barrels of flour nod at the city’s “early, short-lived monopoly on milling in the 17th century,” according to the New-York Historical Society. Windmills were a common site in early New York City. The official New York City web- site describes the long rope with the loop at its end as a “plummet,” or a tool used to measure the depth of water. In some depictions of the seal, the loop looks more like a stone. It bears little resemblance to the former seal of the village of Whitesboro, which featured a depiction of a white man throttling a Native American. Joe Baker, the co-founder and executive director of the Lenape Center and an enrolled member of the Delaware Tribe of Indians, finds the depiction of both the settler and the Native American “cartoonish.” He said the seal ig- nores the violence and destruc- tion the settlers visited on the re- gion’s pre-existing inhabitants, adding that it was “very ster- eotypical.” “It has the little Dutchman and the little Indian, and everyone is standing there in a very erect pos- ture with the eagle above,” said Mr. Baker, whose organization promotes a better understanding of Lenape culture and history. “And the Indian has two eagle feathers and the breechcloth.” The mayor addressed the seal on Monday in response to a question from a WCBS radio reporter who had been waiting for Mr. de Blasio’s daily news conference to begin and noticed the city seal. “This is a little bit out of left field here,” the reporter, Rich Lamb, said, as he described the seal. “It’s a man in pantaloons holding a rope with a loop at the end of it, presumably a trap or something, and then on the other side of the windmill and a couple of barrels, you have a Native American who’s holding a bow. “I’m just wondering whether you or your commission or some- body is taking a look at that seal and wondering how relevant it is these days.” “From time to time, I’ve looked at it. It’s a good question,” Mr. de Blasio responded. “It’s something of an unclear image, what it’s say- ing to us.” Robert Snyder, the Manhattan borough historian and professor emeritus of American studies at Rutgers University, said it was important for New Yorkers to criti- cally examine historical artifacts, so they could “gauge the distance between the past and the present.” But he was skeptical of the need to alter the city seal. “I don’t think we always need to change every inherited symbol from the past to learn something about ourselves,” Mr. Snyder said. “By erasing the old seal, we lose the ability to understand the simi- larities and the differences between the past and the present.”

Mayor Bill de Blasio favors re- examining New York’s seal.

RICHARD DREW/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Are the Images

On a City Seal

Created in 1914

Still Relevant?

By DANA RUBINSTEIN

A few weeks into the coro-
navirus pandemic, Steve Maing,
his partner and their 2-year-old
daughter, Rosie, discovered the
spot that would make their life in
locked-down New York bearable.
Steps from a busy street in
Queens, a trail in Forest Park
leads down through thick woods
to a pond fringed with reeds. It
used to be deserted most days, but
now New Yorkers in search of un-
crowded green space are ventur-
ing deeper and more often into the
natural areas — forests, wetlands
and grasslands — that make up a
third of New York City’s parks.
“It’s like walking through a se-
cret door,” Mr. Maing said one re-
cent morning as he and Rosie
watched a wading heron.
Across the country, park work-
ers say that more and more vis-
itors, restless from a spring spent
mostly indoors, are exploring
wilder segments of cities, like old-
growth forest in the Bronx, a salt
marsh in Manhattan and wood-
lands in Minneapolis and Balti-
more.
But the rise in foot traffic is
putting stress on both well-trod-
den parks and traditionally under-
used areas at a time when the eco-
nomic impact of the pandemic is
also threatening them. Budget
cuts are chipping away at upkeep
and educational programs, and
park workers are wondering how
long it will be before erosion, trash
and neglect cause damage to
ecosystems and landscapes that
could take years to reverse.
Perhaps nowhere are these dy-
namics more evident than in New
York City. Park advocates are de-
lighted that new visitors are ex-
ploring tidal flats, ponds and
forests, but dismayed that the
wilder areas are disproportion-
ately losing resources.
The city, which is mired in its
worst economic crisis since the
1970s, slashed $84 million in parks
funding in the yearly budget
adopted this month, a cut of 14 per-
cent from last year. For natural ar-
eas alone, the budget eliminated
47 seasonal jobs added just last
year — workers who were respon-
sible for planting 30,000 plants, re-
moving garbage and invasive
species, and restoring trails. Also
cut were 50 of the city’s 95 urban
park rangers, who help visitors
learn about and engage with natu-
ral areas.
“There’s a lot more space in the
city than people realize,” said Sar-
ah Charlop-Powers, executive di-
rector of the Natural Areas Con-
servancy, an organization that
works with the city’s Department
of Parks and Recreation to care for
10,000 acres of natural areas and
more than 300 miles of trails.
“We should be increasing the fo-
cus and resources for caring for
and promoting the parks in gen-
eral and the natural areas specifi-
cally as a healthy response to
Covid-19,” she said. “Instead we’re
going to have this sharp decline.”
Natural areas in the country’s
100 biggest cities cover more
ground than Yellowstone National
Park or all of Delaware, according
to the conservancy, which re-
cently surveyed organizations
caring for natural areas in 12 of
those cities, including New York.
More than 80 percent of those

groups reported increased visits to natural areas after the pandemic hit their cities. Most of them said that cuts in city, state and pri- vate funding had already forced reductions in staff or programs. In Austin, Texas, electronic counters recorded a 25 percent increase in walkers on trails around Lady Bird Lake in March, said Leslie Lilly, conservation director of the Trail Foundation, which maintains the area. The jump was even more nota- ble, Ms. Lilly said, given the can- cellation of the South by South- west festival, which usually brings a spike in visitors to the trails, and the implementation of rules requiring one-way foot traffic on some paths. “People went to the green space that they know provides emo- tional, physical, mental support,” she said. Cutting park budgets also raises racial and economic equity issues. In New York, where less than half of households own cars,

around half of park users get their time in nature exclusively or pri- marily from city parks, a 2013 sur- vey by the conservancy and the National Forest Service found. “One of the misconceptions is that city parks are about fitness, hopscotch, basketball, and if you really want pristine experience in nature you get in a car and drive somewhere outside the city,” Ms. Charlop-Powers said. One of the conservancy’s mis- sions is to make urban natural areas welcoming for all by keeping them safe, mapped and main- tained, and by sending the mes- sage that urban natural spaces are for people of all ages, physical abilities and backgrounds. Gabriel Cummings, the conservancy’s citywide trails project co- ordinator, said that while some city dwellers may hear “trails” and think of “crunchy-granola types” on strenuous hikes, the paths also work for the walking, relaxing and contemplation many people do in parks.

“Call it strolling, or dog-walking,” he said. “This space is for all of us. Let’s just get out in the woods.” The enthusiastic use of the 15 miles of trails in Forest Park in Queens was evident on a recent weekday morning. As Mr. Cummings walked on a dirt path beneath a canopy of oaks, a shirtless, middle-aged man jogged up a hill carrying a watermelon-size boulder on his back. (“I have no idea what we just saw,” Mr. Cummings re- marked.) A younger runner passed by in a turban and sweat- suit. An older man in a Mets cap trudged steadily with a cane. Before the pandemic, Mr. Cum- mings said, “You could spend a day working on a trail and maybe see one or two people. Now we might see a dozen or two.” New wear and tear was evident. Mr. Cummings pointed out a makeshift shelter made of branches and recalled finding a sturdy gazebo with a porch, built of trees cut down nearby. And he identified places where feet had crushed vegetation or eroded earth along the trail. Such impacts can disrupt forest growth and animal species, and — much like broken asphalt in a playground — give visitors an un- easy sense that an area is ne- glected. During her childhood in the Bronx, Ms. Charlop-Powers said, wooded park areas were widely considered unsafe for recreation. Keeping trails orderly and holding programs wards off those dangers and perceptions, but takes money. In another wooded part of For- est Park, a half-dozen small groups walked around Strack Pond, a glacier-carved depression known as a kettle pond.

“There’s nothing else to do,” said Jonathan Zhirzhan, 27, a car- penter from the adjacent Wood- haven section of Queens, who was walking with Juan Cisne, 29, a UPS driver. The two men said they had been ranging far from their usual haunts, finding “new parks” — new to them, they meant — to re- lax and socialize in. Javier Alvarez, 43, a teacher, and his wife, Melissa Marra-Alva- rez, 40, a curator, were birding. They watched a pair of red- winged blackbirds peck at the knees of the heron, presumably, they explained, because it waded too close to their nest. Up the hill, Tommy Kender, 72, collected trash in a plastic bag as a freelance volunteer, something he said he had done every day for years. But Yomeri Batista, 33, and her 5-year-old son, Jacob, had ventured to these woods for the first time. They were planting trees with a local pageant winner, Nalicia Ramdyal, 27, who wore her victory sash as they worked on a project she organized as New York’s candidate for Miss Earth USA. Rosie, the toddler, was half-hid- den in rushes, poking in the mud with a stick. “She’ll go fishing for whales. She’ll say hi to the baby turtles,” her father, Mr. Maing, said. “Especially right now with the lockdown and Black Lives Matter, it seems important as a New Yorker to stay in New York,” he said. “The only thing missing was exposure to really healthy natural environments, and here it is.” Then in true New York fashion, he grew concerned that a mention in an article would blow the rela- tive secret of the pond. “It’s hard to find a quiet place,” he said.

Stir-Crazy New Yorkers Find an Idyllic Spot. Will They Trample It?

Steve Maing and his daughter, Rosie, 2, watching wildlife in Forest Park in Queens. “It’s hard to find a quiet place,” he said.

PHOTOGRAPHS BY CHANG W. LEE/THE NEW YORK TIMES

By ANNE BARNARD

On a recent day, visitors to Strack Pond in Forest Park watched red-winged blackbirds peck at the knees of this heron.

The New York Times - USA (2020-07-28)

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