Lisa Biagiotti | multimedia journalist

• Remembering the bonbon bombers of Berlin
• In Brazil, no excuse not to vote

NYC24: From Shelter to Office

NYC24: From Shelter to Office, A New Class of Homeless Grows on Staten Island
By Lisa Biagiotti and Tom Davis
May 2008, multimedia story

On Staten Island, homelessness hides behind shelter doors, walks in designer clothes and carries cell phones. Homelessness has blended into Staten Island communities that still hold on to the image of the drunken or mentally ill nesting in the ferry terminal.

Growing up, Joe Wallinger had a distinct image of homelessness: drunks shuffling through the Staten Island Ferry Terminal begging for money and turning benches into beds. But that image changed in 2005. Wallinger, a 56-year-old accountant and former resident of Tottenville, now counts himself among the homeless on Staten Island.

Homelessness now hides behind shelter doors, walks in designer clothes and carries cell phones. Many homeless people are working-class, college graduates, parents or the elderly, according to Project Hospitality, a private nonprofit organization that operates the borough’s homeless shelters and many food assistance programs.

Homelessness has blended into Staten Island communities that still hold on to the image of the drunken or mentally ill nesting in the ferry terminal and don’t “see” the new image.

Dennis Dell’Angelo, longtime resident of southern Staten Island, said homeless advocates and city officials manipulate the image of homelessness so they can justify expanding their services.

“If all the city agencies say we have a rise in the homeless, then the people who have facilities that deal with this will build them,” said Dell’Angelo, 64, president of the Pleasant Plains/Princes’ Bay/Richmond Valley Civic Association, a neighborhood watchdog group.

But Staten Island now has the second-highest percentage of homelessness in the city, and the number of people seeking shelter has doubled since 2001. Fewer homeless people are living on the streets, but approximately 311 people crowd into Staten Island’s seven emergency shelters every night and wait in long lines for soup kitchens and food pantries.

“We’ve had people come in who’ve had condos and because they lost their job, they lost their condo and all their means of income,” said Mamie E. Daniels, 76, who has run a soup kitchen at the Stapleton Church since 1987. “Before you knew it, they’re in a shelter.”

Contrary to the worn image of chronic homelessness, today many people are either close to finding a home, or on the verge of losing one.

Almost 62,000 Staten Islanders eat at emergency food programs–up 300 percent since 2004, according to Hunger Safety Net 2007, a report produced by the Food Bank for New York City.

Staten Island’s nine soup kitchens serve 4.8 million meals a year. Lines for the island’s 30 food pantries wind down church steps, and still, 70 percent of these food pantries and soup kitchens run out of food.

“The food pantry or soup kitchen is the last step of desperation,” said the Rev. Will Nichols, director of Project Hospitality’s communications and community outreach. “People who are coming here are homeless next.”
It’s not always obvious who is homeless unless they are walking into the Central Avenue “drop-in” center.

On a near-freezing April night, men and women wearing dark-blue Levi’s, velour jumpsuits and sports jerseys signed-in to the center as “clients,” before sitting upright in plastic-covered chairs. They covered themselves with thin, white blankets.

The city rejected Project Hospitality’s application for a permit to convert the facility into a full-scale, sleep-away shelter under pressure from local officials and residents.

Wallinger, an accountant with 72 credits toward his master’s at Baruch College, calls the Central Avenue shelter home.

Wallinger left his apartment three years ago when he couldn’t feed himself, pay his rent and the $440 a month he owed in child support.

“This is what I have to do to make a living,” said Wallinger, who lost his accounting job less than a year ago.

Wallinger was clean-shaven and wore an “Izod” brand pull-over and a clean pair of jeans when he fell into his “bed” — a chair that resembled an airplane seat. He closed his eyes behind wire-framed glasses.

At 11 p.m., the lights went out and the cell phones popped open, glowing and bleeping amid the chatter of the dark room.

NYC24: The Image Issue

NYC24: The Image Issue

May 2008, edited 11 multimedia stories

Executive Editor

NYC24.com, in its fifth issue, shows how New York City is obsessed with image - both personal and public. In 11 stories, our reporters uncovered the places where perception and reality conflict. We probed the boundary between where a person’s image ends and identity begins.

NYC24: Nerdy Games Rock Bars

NYC24.com: Nerdy Games Rock Bars April 2008, multimedia story

If you’re longing to re-do the time you were ousted in that grade-school spelling bee, pulverized in debate class, or left in outer orbit in Solarquest (my childhood favorite). Now is your second chance. And you can play games while sipping cocktails in bars!

Adults compete with cocktails and kid games
By Lisa Biagiotti & Lauren Feeney

“Hijinks is the only word in the English language with three consecutive dotted letters,” said Tim Harrod, who sat drinking a draft beer at Freddy’s Bar & Backroom in Park Slope.

“Fiji” also has three consecutive dots, said Rose Martin, 29. But because it is a proper noun, it’s no threat to hijinks’ status.

Such are the conversations that unfold the first Sunday of every month at Freddy’s when the board games come out. Harrod, 39, a writer who was playing Trivial Pursuit as he talked about the dotted letters, has been playing board games in the back of Freddy’s for the last year and a half.

Board games, spelling bees, debates and quiz nights are already standard fare during off-peak nights in New York City bars, but attendance to bar games has become more popular with the rise of online game playing. Web sites like Pogo.com and Yahoo Games, which feature online versions of classic board games and new online gaming applications like Scrabulous, have revitalized interest in playing games in real life, or at least made them cool enough to headline nights at local city bars.

According to Erik Arneson, expert and editor of board and card games at About.com, the “golden age,” the “renaissance” and the “rebirth” of these games are now here.

“The Internet has reminded people that games are fun,” said Arneson, who has seen an uptick in traffic to the gaming column he has written since 1999.

But while Arneson said playing a game on the Internet is “lovely,” the experience is not comparable to playing in person. “You holler, you cheer, you groan,” said Arneson, adding that playing in bars promotes a sense of camaraderie that is more personal than playing over the Internet.

Nerdy games have become hip. Pete’s Candy Store in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, sometimes has to turn away contestants for its packed bi-monthly spelling bee.

“A lot of people like to go out and socialize with some interesting framework,” said Andy McDowell, owner of Pete’s. “People like to do what they did when they were kids.”

Susan Tansil, 26, a medical student who lives in Park Slope, took home the spelling bee championship title, a dictionary and a $25 bar tab. She came to Pete’s haunted by the time she was eliminated in the first round of her fifth grade spelling bee.

“That traumatized me ’cause I didn’t think I was a good speller,” Tansil said. “Mozilla Firefox has built-in spell check now, so I thought I’d be crippled by that, so like, thanks Firefox! You didn’t cripple me!”

Michael Evanchik, one of the organizers of the popular debate night at Lolita Bar on the Lower East Side said people like to be challenged, even while hanging out with friends. “We were sick of having inane conversations in bars,” he said, explaining how debate night got off the ground, “so we thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be great to go out and actually talk about interesting things?’”

Gary Marcus, a psychology professor at New York University, said the games not only open up social situations, but represent a longing for the familiar of presumably happy childhoods and create a sense of accomplishment.

“The real world is hard, there are lots of things we are up against all the time,” said Marcus, the author of the new book Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind. “Board games and video games are both designed in the same way, which is to give you a little kick, a little sense that you are making progress in every moment.”

“If I play scrabble and I get a double word score, I feel it right now,” Marcus said. “The brain is all about right now, and what feels good at this moment.”

Junction BLVD: Flux Factory flaunts final show in LIC

Junction BLVD: Flux Factory Flaunts Final Show in LIC

Last night, Flux Factory, an artist collective in Long Island City, unveiled its final exhibition,”Everything Must Go.” Art installations spread out across bathrooms, bedrooms, and even the laundry room of this 7,500 square-foot space, which is set to be demolished to make way for MTA expansion.

Lisa Biagiotti and Kenan Davis produced and edited the following video on Flux Factory’s opening night, which marks a month-long goodbye to 38-38 43rd Street.

Flux Factory began as an art community in Williamsburg in 1994. The community moved to Long Island City in 2002 and currently has 18 artists-in-residence. The building will be demolished to make way for the MTA’s East Side Access Project. While this is the last exhibition, artists are scheduled to move out sometime during the summer.