Out of the Shadows

As immigrants once again redefine what it means to be a New Yorker, we should avoid any policy that drives newcomers--legal or illegal--into legal and economic shadows beyond the reach of the law. That's why Governor Eliot Spitzer's policy of making illegal immigrants eligible for drivers' licenses makes good sense.

Despite the claims of critics that the new license policy will undermine security, the safeguards built into his plan should be enough to maintain our safety. At the same time, they'll expand the pool of insured drivers on our roads.

Most important, licensing drivers is a healthy effort to end the social isolation of illegal immigrants. As the New York City police recognized long ago, they need the help of immigrants--legal and illegal--to keep order. They won't get tips from people who are worried about someone uncovering the state of their immigration status. The logic of that observation led the police to encourage even illegal immigrants to become as much a part of our legal mainstream as possible. The same holds true on drivers' licenses.

Given the Bush Administration's failure to enact any kind of reasonable immigration policy, and concerns about terrorism, the licensing issue is ripe for fearmongers.

But labor unions and the state's Catholic bishops support the plan. It is also likely to gain support from the growing number of immigrant voters, who see attacks on illegals as part of a politics of hostility toward all immigrants.

Finally, Spitzer seems to relish a fight on this one for all the right reasons. Here's hoping that he wins.

Changing Tides in Long Island City

Look out to sea and you behold a timeless vista. Turn around and look at where the sea meets the shore, as the historian John Stilgoe reminds us, and you'll often see a deeply historic scene. This principle holds not just for the ocean, but for the tidal strait that is the New York City's East River--especially in that part of Queens called Long Island City.


Once an industrial neighborhood sandwiched between Astoria to the north and Greenpoint, Brooklyn to the south, in the last ten years Long Island City-particularly the Hunters Point area--has become the site of new, high-rise developments on the east bank of the East River. New buildings, and the parks opened with them, have transformed the shoreline in a kind of microcosm of recent changes all around New York's waterfront. The results are mixed.

On one hand, the new, green shoreline of Long Island City--with public parks and excellent views of Manhattan--has reclaimed the riverbank for public uses. Affluent newcomers to the neighborhood have brought economic development and a range of stores, cafes, bars and restaurants unimaginable seventeen years ago, when I discovered Long Island City as the home of the excellent Italian restaurant, Manducati's.

In 1980, Long Island City was still a working-class, industrial neighborhood. It had a patchwork quality to it, with simple row houses and small apartments adjoining machine shops and factories. The new shoreline high rises, which lie at the western edge of the old neighborhood, aren't really integrated with the old community. To walk from the subway stop at Vernon and Jackson is to start in the world of working class New York and wind up in an enclave of affluence.

I talked to one woman from the neighborhood, who grew up there and now plans to go to Italy to attend graduate school. She recognizes the pluses and minuses of the recent past, but laments that the population growth brought by the new buildings has made her old neighborhood a more anonymous place. "I don't want my neighbors to be strangers," she said.

Advertising Makes a Subway Car Surreal

On a recent trip aboard the subway shuttle between Grand Central Station and Times Square, I was transported to an alien environment of larger-than-life television stars and outer-space imagery inspired by the NBC series "Heroes." Blame it on the advertising strategies of the MTA.


The interior of the car--walls and ceilings--was decked out entirely to make me think of the show, which depicts our world in the aftermath of a solar eclipse that leaves ordinary people with extraordinary powers. On the ceiling was fiery outer space imagery. On the walls were a dark, handsome fellow with wavy hair and stubble on is chin; a blonde woman in sparking earings; and two intense-looking Asian men. Everywhwere slogans exhorted me to tune in: "New purpose." "New adventure." "New quest."

The all-ad car that I rode in is part of the "brand car" strategy adopted by the MTA and advertisers. Although the concept goes back to at least around 2001, according to the New York Sun, I'd never seen anything so all-encompassing on the Lexington Avenue line, which I ride regularly to work. There, the typical ads tout subway security, the virtues of education and English lessons.

Balancing the demands of big, lucrative clients and less-wealthy small businesses in subway advertising is an old dilemma. In a article published in 1997, the Times described how the MTA was then backtracking from a big-money ad strategy to seek ads from smaller businesses.

Out of such strategies came subway cars with a range of ads--some of them for businesses, some for public institutions. A trip on the IRT brought you face to face with Roach Motel, personal injury lawyers and the City University. These ads weren't always elegant, but their juxtaposition on the walls of a subway car always reminded me of the splendid cacaphony of New York. At the very least, they were good for a laugh. And the best of them--the short poems of the Poetry in Motion series, the biographical blurbs of City University students and faculty, and the AIDS awareness telenovela of Julio y Marisol--were interesting, even inspiring..

I don't pine for the days of subway graffiti, which I always saw as vandalism no better than scribbling in a library book.

But I do like to see my subway cars, like my fellow passengers, reflecting the diversity and energy of the city.

Getting off the shuttle, I checked to see if the car next to mine extolled "Heroes." Instead, it was devoted to the show "Journeyman;" The slogan inside the car read, "Time changes everything." Indeed.

Tragedy and Inspiration

When Frank Carvill of the New Jersey National Guard was mortally wounded in an ambush in Baghdad in 2004, one of the men who tried to save him was an Iraqi interpreter attached to his unit. Today, that interpreter and his family are living safely in New Jersey. For that, you can thank the good men of the Jersey Guard---and Frank's own inspiring example.


Suhaib Abdulwahab is the interpreter's name. I met him, and his wife, at a dinner-dance last Saturday night in honor the men from the outfit (3rd Battalion, 112th Field Artillery) killed in two bloody days in Baghdad: Frank, Christopher Duffy, Humberto Timoteo, and Ryan Doltz.

Capt. Don Kennedy, who admired and commanded Frank, told me the story of the ambush and Suhaib's efforts to save Frank's life. Standing with Don, in the back of a crowded VFW hall in Saddle Brook, NJ, it wasn't easy to listen.

I had always consoled myself with the belief that Frank died instantly in an explosion. To learn that he was initially conscious, and that he told his comrades to look first to another man, was difficult to hear--and fully in character for Frank, who always put others first.

Don explained how the men from the outfit, who appreciated Suhaib's willingness to accompany them on dangerous missions, worked to bring over him and his family. (Mike Kelly told the whole story beautifully in today's Record.)

Then he told me something that I'll never forget.

Frank was a major activist in New York and New Jersey for Irish Americans and immigrant rights. And as Don worked against all sorts of bureaucratic obstacles to bring over Suhaib and his family, he thought about Frank and all the work he did for immigrants. Frank became an inspiration.

Frank's death will always be a tragedy, but the great example that he set for so many people will enrich the world for years to come.