Alex Traub

It had been around a decade since Chesson had blown an opportunity with Local 79, New York’s biggest laborers’ union. But his parole officer had a suggestion for how to get a second chance in the field — enrolling at the Center for Employment Opportunities (CEO), a nonprofit that helps ex-convicts join the workforce.

CEO connected Chesson to Trade Off Construction Services, a nonunion firm. He was taken aback by the offer he received: $15 an hour and no benefits. Credentialed workers of Local 79, called journeymen, can make up to $69 an hour with benefits.

“I really had to lower my standards,” Chesson said.

After a few months, he got a raise. Chesson, now 38, said he still doesn’t receive health insurance or vacation pay, but he’s proud to earn $17.50 an hour. “What I did in six months at Trade Off — I’m with people, I know people, it took them three years. I’m not trying to sit here cocky, but I worked for that.”

Whether Chesson has been supported or exploited is at the center of a brewing fight between nonprofits like CEO, nonunion firms and major developers against New York’s influential but embattled construction unions. At stake is the future of an industry worth $84 billion.

Re-entry nonprofits like CEO, which find jobs for people coming out of prison, have in recent years helped fuel the rise of nonunion companies like Trade Off. These companies provide construction workers who do clean up and heavy lifting for major building projects around the city.

CEO would consider Chesson a success story. By adjusting his expectations and embracing work, Chesson went from a repeat offender with a risk of recidivism to a law-abiding member of society with a steady job.

But union officials see something darker.

“You’re cutting pay, cutting benefits, and you’re using an easily exploitable model — which is the re-entry population — to do it,” said Chaz Rynkiewicz, director of organizing for Local 79.

Unions have reason to be concerned. Membership in the Building and Construction Trades Council, a union umbrella group, has slid from around 250,000 in New York City in the 1980s to about 100,000 today.

After controlling the industry for decades, unions now receive only 20% of permits for new private construction and renovation jobs in the city, according to Brian Sampson, president of the New York chapter of the Associated Builders and Contractors, a nonunion trade association.

Representatives of the building trades — carpenters, bricklayers and plumbers, among other workers — counter these figures by saying their members are still employed on the largest public projects and private developments.

The conflict has been playing out in the ongoing Hudson Yards project, often described as the biggest private development in the city since Rockefeller Center. The group behind it, Related Cos., traditionally used union workers almost exclusively. It’s just the kind of project the building trades depends on.

Initially, unions supplied nearly all the construction workers for Hudson Yards. But a feud arose between late 2017 and early 2018, when Related accused the building trades of violating labor agreements, while Local 79 and other unions learned that Related would be expanding its use of nonunion firms like Trade Off.

Trade Off is the “poster child of exploitation,” said Mike Hellstrom, president of the Mason Tenders District Council, which oversees Local 79. In 2017 and 2018, a Local 79 campaign to organize workers at Trade Off helped bring to light allegations of sexual harassment and unsafe working conditions.

This development helped to spur on the building trades’ fiery protests against Related last year. During one rally, Gov. Andrew Cuomo spoke glowingly of the building trades and workers chanted, “We just punched Related in the face.”

The protests stopped in March of this year. Construction has continued mainly at a single building on the site, 50 Hudson Yards. Trade Off and Local 79 are waiting for Related to announce who will get work in the next phase of building. Joanna Rose, an executive vice president at Related, declined to comment on when that announcement would likely occur.

Ron Lattanzio, Trade Off’s president, did not comment on the allegations against his company. Instead, he pointed to a suit Trade Off filed against Local 79, which claims that the union is conspiring to put his company out of business. Lattanzio said his company lowers construction costs, increases opportunities for formerly incarcerated people, and provides them “a great standard of living.”

Some Trade Off workers agree. Jose Bonilla, 47, spent 10 years in federal prison after being convicted of dealing heroin. Today, he’s one of four field supervisors working at Trade Off.

Bonilla said he makes around $82,000 a year and gets two weeks’ vacation. He recently bought a five-bedroom house in Poughkeepsie for his large and growing family.

But interviews with 15 current and former workers — all of them previously incarcerated — at Trade Off and two other large nonunion laborer providers, Spacious Living Group and Construction Staffing Solutions, revealed that many workers struggle financially.

They make too much money to receive food stamps but feel the loss of food stamps keenly. They cannot afford health care. They ration nights out.

To make ends meet in New York, they work as much overtime as possible and seek off-the-books side gigs. Nine people — several with experience at each of the three companies — stated that some of their colleagues on the average work site have dealt drugs to supplement their income.

Tamir Rosenblum, the general counsel of the Mason Tenders, said nonprofits that work with companies like Trade Off put “the veneer of good works on a system of exploitation.”

But officials at CEO, which makes around 1,000 job placements for formerly incarcerated New Yorkers each year, see value in the nonunion construction jobs they find for their clients.

“Half the people at CEO have never worked before,” said Sam Schaeffer, the nonprofit’s chief executive officer. “When they’re being sent here, it’s principally because there’s a need for immediate income.”

In 2016, CEO named Trade Off its employer of the year. Lattanzio said Trade Off struggled to retain workers until it started working with CEO.

“Those people became incredibly reliable, showed up and were looking forward to actually having the ability to change their lives,” he said.

The CEO and Trade Off partnership represents a broader trend. Officials at the Fortune Society and the Osborne Association, two other large nonprofits that do re-entry employment in New York, said that in recent years they, too, began to find more laborer openings for formerly incarcerated people. According to data provided by each nonprofit, nonunion firms account for roughly 95% of placements they make in construction.

The appeal comes partly from accessibility. While new hires at Trade Off can start in a matter of days, Local 79 opens its membership rolls only once or twice a year. Available slots get taken in around two minutes.

Unions are aware of the problem. To help disadvantaged New Yorkers join the building trades, members of Local 79 created an organization called Pathways 2 Apprenticeship, commonly known as P2A, in 2013. Since then, 226 people have joined construction unions through the program.

By contrast, CEO and Fortune together make over 300 placements in nonunion construction every year.

Conventional re-entry nonprofits make a much wider impact than P2A, but studies of their effect on employment have produced a mixed record. A recent government report found that 36% of those enrolled in CEO, Fortune, and Osborne remained in some kind of employment after three years, which was 11% higher than a control group.

P2A, the Local 79-affiliated program, puts fewer people to work but seems to yield longer-lasting employment: 80% of those who joined the union through P2A remain members today, said Lavon Chambers, the program’s director.

Michael Cleland, 40, who spent over 13 years in prison on an armed robbery charge, is now one of P2A’s most dedicated spokesmen.

After being released in January 2015, Cleland lived in a halfway house. To spend time together while staying warm, he and his children would wander around Macy’s.

“Give me a chance,” he’d say. “I’ll get on my feet soon.”

P2A at the time was a tiny and informal group, so Cleland had to navigate, on his own, Local 79’s complicated and lengthy application process. He managed to join that fall.

It was only then that he learned about P2A. Since 2016, he’s worked as a peer mentor, visiting parole offices across New York to explain what P2A does and providing guidance to enrollees in the program.

Last year, Cleland took his daughter out to dinner at a restaurant near Macy’s. They remembered what it was like when he got out of prison, back when Cleland seemed like “a question mark,” he said.

“‘You kept your word,’” Cleland recalled his daughter saying to him.

These days, Cleland plans for the future. He thinks about buying real estate, opening a seafood restaurant in Canarsie, taking vacations, retiring with a pension. The most valuable thing he’s attained since joining the union, he says, is a state of mind: “Something to work toward every day.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/09/nyregion/construction-union-hudson-yards.html" id="0dce8354-5433-38bb-a4f2-59e03a4decc3">The New York Times</a>.

Nonprofits Are Helping Ex-Convicts Get Construction Jobs. Unions Are Wary

NEW YORK — After his second stint in prison — two years on possession of drugs with intent to sell — Andre Chesson needed a job.

This enchanted world has largely vanished. Cabaret persists, but mostly as a passion project or side gig, and often with quite a different musical repertory. Only a handful of performers still make a career out of interpreting the Great American Songbook on a small stage in a smoking jacket or a sequined dress.

But if anyone can still conjure cabaret’s glory days, it’s Steve Ross. Now 80, Ross remains devoted to playing Cole Porter and wearing bow ties. He continues to accompany himself on the piano, the same way he did every night at the Algonquin Hotel’s Oak Room from 1981 to 1984.

This was the era when Ross was known as “the Crown Prince of Manhattan’s piano bars.” His act has drawn the likes of Stephen Sondheim, Tennessee Williams, Ethel Merman and Lauren Bacall. “He sings songs we’ve known all our lives, but he makes me listen to them as though I’ve never heard them before,” Gavin said.

Ross’s next gig will be at Birdland, in midtown Manhattan on Dec. 17 and 18. He will perform songs from his new holiday album, along with some standards.

This is an edited and condensed version of a recent conversation with him.

Q: You probably play more music from the 1930s, when you were born, than from the ‘50s and ‘60s, when you were young and rock ‘n’ roll became popular. What drew you to cabaret instead of rock?

A: I started off with one of my great loves, which is ragtime. Ragtime had a big vogue in the early ‘60s. Then I worked in cocktail lounges and nice hotels. I played standards and show tunes. You’re looking at someone that time passed by. The ‘60s with all the turmoil — I was aware of them but I didn’t play much of The Beatles or Dylan. It just wasn’t my style.

The ‘30s was the gold mine. I will always play “Always.” I think it says something perfectly. When I play “Night and Day,” I still get a little frisson.

Q: How did you get established in New York?

A: I went into the seminary for a couple of years. That didn’t work out. I was in the army. Then I was in Washington, playing at a couple of bars, not particularly focused. I was going to therapy. When I noticed the therapist was dozing off, I thought perhaps the time had come for me to make a move in my life. So I took my $200 or whatever it was and found a room on West 76th for $35. That was in 1968.

I gave myself a minimum. I said, “If I go below this money in my hand, I’ll have to go and work as a clerk or something.” I signed up for a temp agency job. And I was going to a gay bar called the Candy Store on West 56th Street, which served very bad Italian food — a lot of the gay bars in those days had Mafia connections — but it had a wonderful pianist. The guy running the bar said, “Would you like a job?” Because I had sat in for the pianist a few times. I said, “Yeah!” The next day I was supposed to go down to Wall Street and file in as a clerk. I just nicked it, and never had to do anything but music.

Q: Your first big job was at a club called Backstage. It is revered among cabaret aficionados. What made it so special?

A: The guy who ran it was very flamboyant but a very canny businessman, Ted Hook. He had danced in Vegas and in the movies. He wanted to open this theatrical restaurant. He knew everybody. This was the late ‘70s. Many of the great stars were still around. He had the very clever idea to meld the public and the stars — everybody wants to see stars and celebrities and all that. He was very lavish in giving drinks to all the people who were in the shows.

It was a big, big step for me, because all these stars would come up and sing.

Q: Would you accompany them on the piano?

A: Oh, yes. I remember Ginger Rogers coming up. She was there for the 50th anniversary of “Girl Crazy.” She still looked great. I said, “Oh, Mrs. Rogers, what would you like to sing?” She said, “Well, I think I should sing ‘Embraceable You,’ don’t you?” I said, “Yes. What is your key?” All I can remember is this beautifully manicured finger. “You know, I don’t know my key, but this is my high note.” Bong! She played it. “You figure it out.”

Q: What does it take to master the Great American Songbook?

A: Well, you know Mabel Mercer always said, “I look at the lyric first.” And that’s what I do, too. If the lyric is a strong one, or if I can connect with the ideas in that lyric, then even if the music is not up to it, you can kind of make the music work.

These lyricists — you have Yip Harburg and Ira Gershwin and Cole Porter — they wrote with great meticulousness, with great art and great craft. And I am honored to serve them. That’s how I really feel. I am a song ambassador.

Q: Was there someone in New York who took you under his or her wing?

A: I found my own way. I played in these bars. I met people, they suggested songs and little by little my repertory got better.

I realized that the personalization of the song was the key. If I sing “Over the Rainbow,” it’s my singing with my life and my voice and my experience. I’ve never been intimidated by that.

There was, however, a rather tense moment in one of these bars. I love Janis Joplin because I love funky blues. I thought she was just so raw and terrific. So I said, “I guess if I sing it truthfully, I could sing a Janis Joplin song.” That was my theory. I tried and got halfway through “Piece of my Heart.”

The audience looked around like, “What are you doing?” So I went back to Cole Porter.

Q: Are there new cabaret performers you admire?

A: I heard a fantastic cabaret act two nights ago at 54 Below. It was Christian Holder. He was a dancer and then became a singer and cabaret act. The chances that he took — he sang a lot of songs we all know — and he made those songs totally part of his story. I continue to be impressed and inspired by audacity.

Q: Are there popular misconceptions about traditional cabaret music among young people?

A: If I do a college class, I’m always tickled by the fact that young people have never heard someone sit at a piano and sing a funny song. They know about scabrous humor, and they know about really funky humor from the comedy clubs, and the shock humor. But to hear someone with wordplay and situational, non-X-rated humor — they are delighted that they are amused by it.

When I perform in London, I’m always gratified to see that there tends to be a younger crowd, because there’s a sense of occasion in the culture. And it’s a verbal culture, which is why I was drawn to England in the first place.

Q: What are your favorite spots in New York?

A: There is some fantastic urban lighting of skyscrapers in midtown. Have you noticed that? When you light all their details, these buildings become temples.

The Landmark Tavern is a great place. You’ll want to visit it — the wood-burning fireplace. It’s from the 1860s.

Of course one laments some changes, but you have to be careful about that. There’s a wonderful line in a Noël Coward song called “I Went to a Marvelous Party”:

“We talked about growing old gracefully

Said, ‘A) It’s a question of being sincere

And B) if you’re supple you’ve nothing to fear

Then she swung upside down from a glass chandelier.”

There is a great kernel of truth in that.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/13/nyregion/the-last-of-the-old-school-cabaret-artists.html" id="9830fed4-3eb1-3628-a9d2-6955eb4beb6c">The New York Times</a>.

The Last of the Old-School Cabaret Artists

NEW YORK — In the mid-20th century, cabaret clubs in the city made glamorous interiors, virtuosic singers, and beloved standards available to anybody with pocket money. Before they were stars, performers like Barbra Streisand and Harry Belafonte played rooms of just a few dozen tables. Cover charges were infrequent, so middle-class couples could make up much of the audience, according to “Intimate Nights: The Golden Age of New York Cabaret,” by James Gavin.

But on J’ouvert, the daybreak celebration of Caribbean culture traditionally held in Brooklyn before the West Indian American Day Parade, “I am always a queen,” Herbert declared.

Herbert, along with tens of thousands of other performers, dancers, flag-wavers and musicians, refused to allow the gray weather, or the presence of more than 300 light towers and large numbers of police officers, to dampen their exuberance.

The roots of J’ouvert lie in mocking slave owners and celebrating emancipation in the Caribbean. Monday’s event showed how the contemporary street-party version of the holiday retains a subversive, liberating edge.

Some revelers, completely covered in motor oil, came to shine. Others came to wine.

For the uninitiated, wining is a butt-shaking, pelvis-rubbing Caribbean dance.

“It’s like one step away from sex,” said Molli Piitcha, 29.

The police presence ramped up after four people were shot and two killed in 2016, and Carey W. Gabay, 43, a lawyer in Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s administration, was killed in 2015.

Rupert Hewitt, 74, said some restrictive security measures were necessary, but he also complained about an exaggerated sense of threat.

“We need the police here,” he said. But “one person alone could throw a bottle and cause pandemonium. Then they’ll say, ‘There’s violence in the Caribbean community.’ ”

Fear of violence seemed far from revelers’ minds Monday morning. Floats with steel drum bands took center stage, with pranksters and costumed eccentrics acting as a side show.

One man lifted a large jug as if to drench unsuspecting strangers in paint, before revealing the container was empty. Others sprayed passersby with clouds of baby powder and party string, or dabbed them with paint.

One woman had $100 bills sewn into her bikini cups and a painted handprint on her backside.

Roland Guy, 76, a Vietnam War veteran who said he used to sneak out of Fort Dix, the military base in New Jersey, to go to J’ouvert, was dressed as Little Red Riding Hood.

“It’s comedy,” he said. Guy was pushing around a stroller that contained a wolf dressed in a flannel shirt and skinny jeans. He had invented a story for his characters. “The wolf fell in love with Little Red Riding Hood,” he said. “They now live in Prospect Park.”

This article originally appeared in

NEW YORK — A queen with devil horns, dressed in a rainbow of satin and shimmering gold tulle, sat on a throne along Brooklyn’s Empire Boulevard. Soon, Karen Herbert, 50, would return to being a retired company supervisor.

The Subversive Beauty of J'ouvert

There was a picture of Lenin tacked on the wall, a shelf of books about Che Guevara and a cafe serving avocado toast.

The young true believers and rickety old militants in attendance were learning history and strategy from Frances Fox Piven, a distinguished professor of political science at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

“Since the 1970s, everything has gotten worse and worse,” said Piven, 86. There were very clear reasons for this. “Poor people,” she said, had been “humiliated” and “shut up.” Those in power now are “crazy.”

“But they’re also evil,” she continued. “And they will be evil because they are greedy.” Only one thing would stop them, she said. “We have to be noisy, and difficult and ungovernable.”

Piven has been making this argument for over half a century. While Democratic veterans like the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, seek to build consensus, Piven praises its opposite: “dissensus.”

Trying to work within the system is terribly misplaced, Piven argues, since it’s rigged by elites against the poor. What’s needed is a sense of crisis that will force change. And that, she insists, can be achieved only by the “mass defiance” of a disruptive protest movement.

These revolutionary ideals long made Piven infamous to some, heroic to a few and unknown to everyone else. But with the rise of a youthful radical left, her admirers are growing in influence for the first time since Piven entered politics in the 1960s.

Bookish political operatives and labor organizers in the Democratic Socialists of America — whose membership has increased by nearly 50,000 since 2015 — revere Piven.

According to David Duhalde, 34, formerly the Democratic Socialists’ deputy director and now the political director of Our Revolution, a group aligned with Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, the “ideological leadership” is full of Pivenites.

Micah Uetricht, 31, managing editor of the socialist magazine Jacobin, is also devoted to Piven’s work. He said he has read “Poor People’s Movements,” Piven’s venerated 1977 book, at least three times.

“She’s someone whose body of work shows that you don’t have to drift off into this la-la land of intellectualism,” Uetricht said. “People should be going on strike. People should be withdrawing their labor power or causing chaos in society. That’s where their power comes from.”

Probably the most influential vector for Piven’s ideas is the social-justice incubator Momentum, a training program for progressives that formed in 2014.

Trainees include members of the Sunrise Movement, whose occupation of Pelosi’s office with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez sparked conversation about the Green New Deal. It was just the sort of disruption Piven advocates.

“What tactics we use is exactly the question that Piven is addressing,” said Lissy Romanow, 35, Momentum’s executive director. Part of Piven’s appeal, she said, came from her view that social movements are required for big left-wing victories — a perspective suited to a generation disillusioned with liberal business as usual.

Piven takes an active part in spreading her own ideas. In July, she will be headlining the 2019 Socialism Conference, to be held in Chicago and sponsored by Jacobin magazine and the Democratic Socialists.

For decades, no event has struck her as too small.

Before the Democratic Socialists of America had its resurgence in 2016, the organization would hold summer youth retreats in upstate New York. A few dozen college students would attend lectures and discussions, taking breaks for games of whiffle ball and bonfires. Piven always came. “She was a celebrity showing up to these embarrassing meetings,” Duhalde said.

“I’ve seen Fran at organizing meetings, I’ve seen her at protests, at Occupy, at conferences, retreats and planning sessions,” said Sarah Jaffe, 38, a left-wing journalist and author. “She’s obviously one of the most influential people I can think of.”

Piven was born in Canada in 1932 and grew up in Queens. Her parents both emigrated from Uzlyany, a shtetl near Minsk.

It’s a background shared by other great polemicists of the 20th century. Sociologist Nathan Glazer, historian Howard Zinn and writer Vivian Gornick also were born between 1920 and 1935 to Jewish immigrant parents from Eastern Europe and grew up in outer-borough New York. The same goes for socialist critic Irving Howe, whose father, like Piven’s, struggled to run a deli.

Secular to the point of not celebrating birthdays, nostalgic for the culture of Russia and bitterly conscious of their poverty, Piven’s family found a source of meaning in politics. This was most true of her father.

“He told me a little bit about capitalism, how it’s a dog-eat-dog society, and that you couldn’t believe the capitalist press, it was all full of lies,” Piven said. “I said, ‘Why do you read the newspaper, Daddy?’ Because he read it — he really read it. And he said, ‘I read between the lines.’ Being literal-minded as little kids are, I tried to do that. I tried and tried.”

Rebelliousness came to her early. In elementary school, she refused to say the Pledge of Allegiance, even after being forced to stand in a corner with her face to the wall. “I said I could only pledge allegiance to the Maple Leaf,” Piven recalled. “I was a Canadian.”

In 1962, she started working at Mobilization for Youth, the New York anti-poverty program that became a model for President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty. Soon, she was observing rent riots and watching speeches by figures such as Malcolm X. She said that once, while standing guard outside a student-occupied building at Columbia University, she was attacked by police.

During the welfare rights movement of the late ’60s and early ’70s, Piven repeatedly stormed welfare centers with other activists to demand benefits — including on her birthday, which led to her arrest. “Know what he said?” asked Piven, recalling her talk with the policeman. “‘You must be a very nice person to do this on your birthday.’”

All of these experiences showed Piven the art and power of political confrontation. “The streets of New York, the streets of the Lower East Side, the streets of Harlem — you could feel the energy almost crackling,” she said of her early days in politics. “That assertiveness came with anger, and a certain violence.”

Following the crucible of the ’60s and early ’70s, Piven’s academic career flourished. Her books, particularly “Poor People’s Movements,” were assigned in college classes. She received awards and held prestigious posts: honorary chairwoman of the Democratic Socialists of America; vice president of American Political Science Association; president of the American Sociological Association.

At the same time, politics no longer fully accommodated her desire for fiery activism. Piven helped lead a successful drive to reform voter registration, but it was a campaign that rested on tactics tamer than “mass defiance.” During academic conferences and at least one televised debate of the 1990s, Piven became a lonely advocate for welfare rights as much of the country turned against the welfare system.

Her public profile came to rest, perversely, on attempts of right-wing commentators to tar moderate liberals with her brand of radicalism. Television personality Glenn Beck repeatedly identified Piven and her husband and collaborator, Richard Cloward, who died in 2001, as a secret, dark force, “fundamentally responsible for the unsustainability and possible collapse of our economic system.”

This style of condemnation continues. A recent article on the political news site RealClearPolitics claimed that “all social policy innovations since the 1960s have been incremental steps in the Cloward-Piven plan to bankrupt America.”

Without quite thinking she is a wicked witch of the left, liberals have still strongly objected to many of Piven’s views. John McWhorter, a writer and linguist, for example, argued that Piven and Cloward’s work on welfare rights led African Americans to become dependent on welfare.

The division between Piven and other supporters of the Democratic Party comes in part from the fact that while most changed their views over time, Piven did not.

Sean Wilentz, a professor of American history at Princeton University, was once a radical in the vein of Piven. As a young man, he attended the tumultuous protests surrounding the 1968 Democratic National Convention and felt pushed toward militancy. Then, like many other members of his generation, he grew disillusioned with what he saw as dogma and destructiveness and found there was greater power in America’s tradition of liberal reform.

In an interview, Wilentz said he disputed the moral implications and efficacy of Piven’s tactics.

Piven’s promotion of mass disruption rests on the idea that it deserves credit for the biggest progressive achievements in American history. Abolitionists, she argues, brought about emancipation, while jobless protesters and striking workers forced the most progressive legislation of the New Deal.

“It’s not true that social movements are everything and politicians are just these ciphers,” he said.

When disruption has become divisive or violent, Wilentz said, it has invited backlash. “The legacy of the more riotous protests we’re talking about is Donald Trump,” he said.

Moderate Democrats worry a strident style will similarly doom today’s ascendant left.

Piven responds to such criticism by arguing that backlash is an inevitable consequence of righteous political campaigns. Most violence associated with protest, she observes, comes from authorities suppressing demonstrators.

“People do get hurt,” she acknowledged matter-of-factly. After continued probing, Piven finally found a movement she could describe as going too far. “I think the French Revolution was awful,” she said.

Today, Piven lives in a spacious, simply furnished apartment near Columbia University, where she moved with Cloward in 1983. She still ventures out to meet with activists and to deliver public speeches as often as possible, but she recognizes she is growing frail. Piven often prefers to see friends and students in her apartment, where she likes to wear a cozy sweatshirt of the Green Bay Packers — the football team whose public ownership some consider quasi-socialist.

Young people seem drawn to Piven, and she occasionally writes with younger colleagues, deploying the edgy imagination of what she once called “the strategist of dissensus.”

In a recent interview with Jacobin, she wondered about the possibility of disrupting supply chains by closing truck depots along the New Jersey Turnpike. She frequently mentions her wish for a mass movement to renege on debt payments. Perhaps people would be inspired to protest the unjust economic conditions that force them into debt, she thinks, if school boards challenged exploitative loans they’d received from banks.

“You can’t be Frances and sit quietly in an armchair,” said Barbara Ehrenreich, the distinguished left-wing author, who is an old friend of Piven’s. “When people are marching in the streets, Frances has got to be out there with them.”

Much as Piven upholds defiant protest as the path to leftist victory, she also clearly takes pleasure and pride in the act of confrontation itself. She happily remembers, for instance, the campaign she was part of in the 1970s and ’80s to remove John Silber, the controversial president of her former employer, Boston University. So what that the movement failed?

“Working on any political project is enormously fun,” she said. “You don’t have to win for it to be really terribly satisfying. You get good friends. You do the right thing. You test your courage.”

On a recent afternoon, a crowd had gathered in the auditorium of the People’s Forum, a new event space in midtown Manhattan.

The unlikely revival of a '60s radical

<h1>NEW YORK — Before he died at the age of 100 in December, James Galuppo, founder and owner of Etna Tool &amp;amp; Die, urged his only child, Flavia, not to sell the company headquarters.</h1>

She might have considered that a significant sacrifice. New condos surround the building, 42-44 Bond St., a chic block in Manhattan. A triplex is going for $13.5 million in one of them. The other is home to both Chuck Close and Warren Beatty.

In contrast to these cool glass and granite residences, 42-44 Bond is a tawny brick loft building. Its arched windows represent a classic feature of the late 19th century Renaissance Revival style. Some would say it could use an update.

But at a glass-top desk in Etna’s office, underneath yellowing maps and black-and-white photographs, Flavia Galuppo, 55, pledged to preserve this history and honor her father’s wish, whatever the financial loss.

“I want to protect her for him,” Galuppo said, attributing a gender to her building like an old sea captain discussing a ship. “She’s also a member of the family who’s withstood a lot of history and seen many things.”

Aside from D &amp; D Salvage, the scrap metal dealer across the street, Etna Tool &amp; Die seems to have been the last business in the NoHo neighborhood still doing the light industrial work that long gave the neighborhood its identity.

The shop closed two years ago. Since her father died, the factory space is Flavia Galuppo’s to use as she wishes, but she is not rushing to rent it out. Before seeking a new commercial tenant, she wants to find the right way to dispose of all the old equipment, file cabinets and other workplace detritus.

Etna remains frozen in time. An alarm clock continues to ring, usually to an empty room, during the designated coffee breaks. The smell of grease and sawdust lingers. Decades of spilled oil has seeped into the floorboards, forming dark pools around each of the machines and workstations.

From 1945 to 2017, the business was a force for manufacturing and product design in architecture, interior decoration, film, museums, restaurants, city infrastructure, and an array of other facets of life in New York. A study of its dies, molds, and copious thingamajigs provides a behind-the-scenes view of everyday habits and beloved monuments in the city.

“All the objects have a story,” Galuppo said.

Tool and dies perform custom metal fabrication, giving many of them a wide range of customers. “If it is in metal,” Etna’s advertising copy read, “we will be happy to supply your needs.” According to Galuppo, her father’s favorite words were “why not?”

Perhaps the most eccentric item in the shop is a mold for lead shoes, used by a personal trainer and his clients. “A very, very peculiar fellow,” Galuppo said. “I tried putting one on. It’s not feasible to move with those.”

Such projects required James Galuppo to be inventive. He and his partner, Guy Angiolino, who died in the 1970s, registered a number of patents, including one for a “binding and stemming machine,” which they used to fabricate silk and wire flowers.

Many of these were purchased by the American Museum of Natural History for display in their dioramas. The shop is still littered with barrels of plaster molds whose meticulously carved patterns made magnolias, orchids and hundreds of other flowers.

Some items in the shop illustrate larger historical trends. Custom-made strike plates and threaded spindles for the doors of housing projects and public schools, for instance, indicate the jury-rigged nature of city infrastructure. Etna, a relatively small independent machinist, continued doing work for public housing until around the time it closed.

Seeing any of these products outside the shop, you’d never know Etna made them. James Galuppo did not use a signature or identify his clients, a tradition his daughter continued in conversation.

Some customers wanted to prevent the competition from learning about their suppliers. Others, especially the “big architects” — “You would know their names,” Flavia Galuppo said — might have suggested they made products in-house that actually came from Etna.

As a result, the business was more influential than widely known. Consider the tattoo industry. Michelle Myles, the co-owner of Daredevil Tattoo and its Tattoo Museum, along with employees at Fineline Tattoo and Fun City Tattoo, two of the oldest parlors in New York, all said that the city’s largest supplier of tattoo equipment was Unimax Supply Co. and that they had never heard of Etna Tool &amp; Die.

But Wes Wood, 77, the founder and owner of Unimax, said that as his business grew, he started to get 90 percent of his equipment from Etna — all of the tubes, frames, grips, springs, and needle bars that make up a tattoo machine, the remains of which still litter 42-44 Bond.

By the 1980s and ‘90s, industry was vanishing from NoHo. The neighborhood became associated instead with artists and punks, represented most famously by CBGB. Tattooing remained illegal until 1997, but that did not scare away Etna, which adapted to the times. At one point, Wood said, every tattoo parlor in New York was using gear made by Etna.

Some businesses and individuals still rely on Etna, even in its afterlife. Just last month, Con Edison called to ask if they could buy pans Etna manufactured for workers to carry their tools in. Flavia Galuppo said yes. “Why junk it when you can sell it?”

Two of the machinists who worked at the shop, Juan Familia, 51, and Zhi Fen Liang, who estimated his age as “70-something,” continue to visit, still punching in and punching out their timecards using the old time clock. Both learned English through working at Etna.

Familia, now the super of 42-44 Bond, uses the shop for maintenance work. Liang simply likes to come by. “This is my second home,” he said after a cup of tea at his desk. As for what he does now at the shop, Liang explained, “I take a look at machines.”

The morning also brought a reminder of Flavia Galuppo’s difficult task ahead — three flyers announcing liquidations of tool and die plants, which are being wiped out across the United States by a combination of new technology and outsourcing. Soon, Galuppo will have to figure out what to do with Etna’s many old machines.

“I almost feel like they’re being orphaned,” she said. “I want to make sure that these machines eventually find themselves a good home.” In South America, she’s heard, there’s still a market for old but reliable tool and die equipment.

When Galuppo disposes of everything, there will, actually, be one piece of evidence left testifying to Etna’s glory days. After 9/11, when 10 firefighters at the nearby Great Jones Street firehouse were killed, its captain asked James Galuppo to make a miniature of the Twin Towers. He fabricated two aluminum pillars and a die to stamp them with thousands of replicas of windows.

One copy remains at 42-44 Bond. Others were distributed among New York’s firehouses. At the fire captain’s insistence, it was the only object James Galuppo signed: “Made in New York City by Etna Tool &amp; Die.”

This article originally appeared in <a id="19191395-1d17-42ce-940e-4bf4436f5d97" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/08/nyregion/etna-tool-die-noho-real-estate.html">The New York Times</a>.

She Could Get Millions for Her Factory. She Won't Sell.

A triplex is going for $13.5 million in one of them. The other is home to both Chuck Close and Warren Beatty.

She could get millions for her factory, she won't sell

<h1>“The items in the museum are very sensitive,” Mezhburd said. “To go in there, you have to get rid of the microbes that live on us.”</h1>

This is how Mezhburd’s cleansing process works: Wielding a fire extinguisher, he instructs his visitors to open their mouths and say, “Ah.” He then sprays Russian Standard vodka into their mouths. More drinks follow from a series of other visual gags, including an IV drip bag, a radio and a pair of binoculars, all of which conceal vodka.

At the start of a recent tour, Mezhburd, 69, leaned into his bar like a professor resting on a lectern. He came up with a poetic association for each vessel in his disinfection collection. While pouring vodka from a light bulb, for example, he recited a poem about love and light by Russian symbolist writer Innokenty Annensky.

In case you haven’t picked up on this yet, Mezhburd believes vodka ought to be celebrated, not vilified.

“When you’re talking about alcohol, it’s always just drunken driving or breaking up families,” he said. “Nobody talks about how many people are getting relaxation, how many people are getting enjoyment from drinking alcohol, how many people are getting together because of alcohol.”

The museum takes up about 500 square feet in two rooms of Mezhburd’s home on the East Shore of Staten Island. Since moving there in 1998, he has collected over 1,000 artifacts. The basement is a jumble of signs and statuettes. The bar is plastered with hundreds of different Russian liquor labels. A gallery upstairs is more orderly, with 10 glass cases of booze-related bric-a-brac.

Mezhburd hasn’t done much to publicize his museum, but he said he would consider requests to visit sent through Facebook. Usually his guests have heard about the tours, which occur roughly every month, through word of mouth. They tend to be people like Mezhburd: Jewish refugees from the former Soviet Union.

Tours are usually conducted in Russian, and they frequently turn into larger celebrations of Jewish and Russian culture, with musical performances and potluck buffets.

“This is our tradition,” said one visitor, Olga Komarova, 56, who attended similar events during her youth in the Soviet Union. “The main thing is to create a very warm environment, to socialize, to fit together, to sing together, to share some ideas.”

The museum, however, extends far beyond Jewish and Russian drinking culture.

Mezhburd’s gallery features display cases organized geographically. They prompt him to tell stories about Omar Khayyam, the 11th- and 12th-century Persian polymath who exhorted his readers to drink wine, and eighth-century Chinese poet Li Po. “He never was sober. Never in his life,” Mezhburd said. “And he was a genius.”

Some items on the shelves, such as Prohibition-era licenses to drink for medicinal purposes, have real antiquarian value. But Mezhburd prefers to focus on kitsch. He proudly describes his figurines of grinning clergymen as “the largest collection in the world of drunk monks.”

Other items only look serious. Mezhburd pulled out a leather-bound book called “How to Develop Courage and Self-Confidence.”

“This is how,” Mezhburd said, opening the book to reveal a hidden cavity holding a bottle of vodka and pouring it into shot glasses. “And now, this is what we will do.”

Breaks in the tour offer visitors the opportunity to banter in Russian. One guest, who declined to share her name, quoted satirist Mikhail Zhvanetsky on why it’s a good idea to drink in the morning: “So the sun comes up quicker.” Igor Primak, a high school math teacher, replied to a toast with an old Russian saying: “The toaster drinks to the dregs!”

Toward the end of the tour, Mezhburd produced the very first item he collected: a ceramic figurine of a man with shabby clothes and a stubbly beard, leaning against a street clock and clutching a bottle of booze. Flip a switch atop the figurine, and the man’s head moves from side to side while he whistles a mournful tune. Mezhburd declared the drunkard his “soul mate.”

After the tour, visitors moved to a second-floor living room for a concert by singer Elmira Galeeva, who interprets poems by the likes of Osip Mandelstam, American rock standards and songs from a genre of Russian folk known as “bard” music.

“The poetry — it was part of our lives,” Primak said, reminiscing about his Moscow University days. “I used to read, and remember, most of those poems she’s singing. It’s something that I miss right now very much.” Other attendees said they’d come mainly in anticipation of the concert. “The most important thing was Elmira Galeeva,” said Komarova, a devoted fan of the musician.

NEW YORK — Upon arrival at the Booze History Museum in Staten Island, visitors are treated to what Lev Mezhburd, the museum’s founder, director, curator and tour guide, calls a “disinfection.”

Alex Traub

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