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Broken Promises
The American Dream Fades Away in Roosevelt
The Long Island Press, June, 2003
The sign in front of the Western Beef supermarket that anchors the shopping plaza at 322 Nassau Road in Roosevelt is very clear. It reads: “No Soliciting.” But in order to enter the supermarket, customers must run a gauntlet of enterprising young men whose folding tables teem with incense, mix CDs and bootleg DVDs, and who fight for the patronage of every customer. Should a customer make their way through the scrum on the way in, another salesman is standing in the parking lot, hawking CDs out of an open trunk as patrons load groceries into their cars. When public outcry grows too loud, these vendors are chased across the street to an empty lot on the corner of Nassau Road and Whitehouse Avenue, where they continue to peddle their wares. They survive for a simple reason: In Roosevelt, there is nowhere else to purchase CDs.
The first thing one sees after crossing Roosevelt’s northern border from Uniondale is blighted buildings, abandoned lots and a ridiculous number of delis. Right in the center of town, across the street from Western Beef, the building that once housed the European American Bank has been torn down, replaced by a McDonald’s. Work-age men traipse around town aimlessly and gather on street corners. On the side streets, school-age boys ride around on bicycles with no particular place to go.
This is the stereotypical image of Roosevelt—created largely by its main point of entry, Nassau Road, a disconnected thoroughfare where cars zoom through at unsafe speeds. The swap-meet-like strip mall that houses Western Beef is also home to a laundromat, a florist, a foot-care concern and the only financial institution in town, Citizen’s National Bank. Tellingly, it’s considered the most stable commercial development in the mile-square hamlet. For more than 30 years, Nassau Road has been the signifier of Roosevelt’s myriad issues. “There are no stores in Roosevelt,” explains longtime community activist Diana Coleman. “There’s no economic development in Roosevelt. That’s our dilemma.”
In the last 30 years, Roosevelt has become synonymous with educational underperformance and financial mismanagement. As an unincorporated hamlet in the town of Hempstead, Roosevelt has no mayor and is, essentially, just a school district and library district. And while there is an entrenched middle class here, there is another Roosevelt, home to poor people without cars who have just one bus route in and out of town and don’t have the money to send their kids to private school. “Roosevelt in suburban, affluent Nassau County is as close to a colonial Third World country as one could find,” says Don Shaffer of the New York Civil Liberties Union. “The poverty level is high, the unemployment rate is high, the rental rate is high, the rooming rate is high... Roosevelt has all the ills of an isolated community.” Alongside Coleman, Shaffer has filed two lawsuits against Nassau County of behalf of Roosevelt. The first lawsuit, currently on appeal, charges that Roosevelt has cheated children out of a quality education; the second, which they won, charged that property taxes had not been reassessed since 1938. They are as high as in neighboring Garden City, which spends roughly $3,000 more per pupil annually.
STATE OF CRISIS, AGAIN
Last April, recognizing that Roosevelt was in a state of crisis, Huntington-based smart-growth nonprofit Sustainable Long Island, along with Nassau County Executive Thomas Suozzi and former Hempstead Town Supervisor Richard V. Guardino Jr., convened a four-day conference and “visioning process” to seek solutions. Residents of all ages envisioned their dream community: a leafy, “walkable” village where shoppers stroll from shop to shop, aided by “bulbed” sidewalks jutting out into the streets to slow the flow of traffic, which would hum along at no more than 27 miles per hour.
It was perfect timing. A month later, the long-underperforming school district hit rock bottom. After six probationary years on the state watch list for troubled schools, Education Commissioner Richard Mills removed the school board and installed a new one. The previous board, helmed by the embattled Darren Conor, had been through six superintendents in seven years and was plagued by financial scandals.
But if there was a forward momentum, by the time the Sustainable Long Island report was finally released earlier this month, it began to feel like another broken promise. The report was completed in January 2003 but it took Suozzi more than three months to sign and release the document. Although David Chauvin, Suozzi’s deputy press secretary, maintains the time that elapsed between the document’s completion and its signature don’t represent Suozzi’s priorities, Coleman thinks otherwise. “I still have confidence in Suozzi,” she says. “I just don’t think we’re in his top 10 hit parade. How does Roosevelt figure in his political future? Right now he’s trying to save the county without raising taxes.”
AMERICAN DREAM
Roosevelt is a difficult place to figure out if you don’t know where to look. The housing stock here mostly consists of tidy single-family homes with neatly trimmed lawns. While there are a few boarded-up homes sprinkled throughout the town, the majority just need a little TLC, the exterior bricks are worn, the roof shingles are faded. Some home-improvement loans could really benefit this town. A couple of blocks up the street, however, on North Brookside Avenue on the Baldwin border, the homes are stately. “These could be Garden City,” Coleman says. But like all homes in this community, she explains, the property values are lowered because they are within the Roosevelt school district. On the north side of town, which borders Merrick and North Merrick, there is the world-renowned Cerebral Palsy Center and a park with a pond, surrounded by well-maintained mid-’50s suburban tract homes on streets like Lincoln Avenue. And Lincoln Avenue in Roosevelt, like other streets named after dead presidents in towns named after dead presidents, provide what they advertise: a little piece of the American dream.
This is the side of town that politicians love to publicize. “Most people don’t know that the majority of Roosevelt is composed of solid middle-class families that play by the rules,” says Suozzi. “They are concerned with their schools and their taxes getting paid. The commercial space when you drive through there does not give you the proper image, but people define the community by the downtown.”
SHOPPER’S DILEMMA
In Nassau County, where virtually every ZIP code has its own school district that relies on the industrial tax base, Roosevelt’s downtown poses a conundrum for its middle-class residents: Do they patronize the businesses on Nassau Road, which don’t offer goods and services of the caliber they demand? Or shop in neighboring white communities, depriving their own school district of its tax base? This dilemma plays out in the Haughton household on a quiet block on East Centennial Avenue, on a tranquil Sunday morning after church. “I do not go to the Western Beef,” says 28-year-old Lorraine. “I don’t like it. It’s not clean. I shop at Waldbaum’s in Merrick.” Her sister, Laverne White, 38, who worked on the Sustainable Long Island report, understands Lorraine’s point of view but feels it necessary to patronize Western Beef: “We need to support the building up of the community. If they leave, who’s going to come? Are we going to be the only community without a supermarket?”
For a community that still identifies itself as middle-class, the Western Beef is problematic. While there are some culturally specific products like Salvadorian soda, West Indian seasonings and collard greens, there is a dearth of fresh foods. Discolored, rancid turkey breast hangs unappealingly from hooks above large packages of neon yellow and orange cheese marked “imitation mozzarella” and “imitation cheddar.” The filthy, crammed aisles resemble a storehouse more than a retail establishment. In back, shoppers walk through heavy plastic curtains to a refrigerated room containing the butchery. The air is thick with the smell of slaughtered animals and the floor is sticky. Even the parking lot is not designed for middle-class residents with cars. “It’s not inviting,” says 68-year-old Ronald Johnson. “They have [barriers] that prevent you from bringing the cart to the car. Other places have personnel to bring the cart back to the store. They have no evidence people are stealing carts.”
Like Lorraine Haughton, Johnson favors Waldbaum’s in Merrick or Pathmark in Baldwin, spotless suburban superstores with well-arranged aisles of produce, ethnic foods and upscale condiments. The deli counter has pre-made salads and specialty items. Even Coleman, who has spent most of her adult life fighting for her community, only visits Western Beef in emergencies. “It seems to be the leftovers from their store in West Hempstead,” she says disgustedly.\"
WHITE FLIGHT
Roosevelt was not always so troubled. For a town that’s roughly one square mile, it has produced an extraordinary number of superstars: Julius “Dr. J” Erving, Howard Stern, rap group Public Enemy, Eddie Murphy and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Halberstam all grew up here.
To black families fleeing overcrowding in New York City, Roosevelt seemed like a dream come true. Unlike Levittown and other communities, Roosevelt had a non-restrictive policy towards black home ownership. By 1957, the hamlet was 20 percent black. There was a bowling alley, a movie theater and several banks. Scores of new housing was built in the ’50s and ’60s.
But when black home ownership reached critical mass in the late 1960s, Roosevelt quickly tipped. Coleman vividly remembers the period between 1965 and 1968. “Once white flight happened, it was very quick and very nasty,” she recalls. “It wasn’t like it took months or years to happen, one day you almost woke up and you could see the color rising.” o avoid resistance, her family was instructed by their real estate agent to move into their house at 2:00 in the morning.
SCHOOL DAZE
Roosevelt’s decline has been a gradual process of neglect and financial mismanagement. The signs were there. There were also many press conferences to announce proposed solutions that either never materialized or never ended up being the panaceas advertised. History bodes ill for the latest “visioning” that came out of last April’s conference.
In 1969, directly after the massive white exodus, the student body at Roosevelt Junior-Senior High was 80 percent African-American and 33 percent poor. State Education Commissioner Ewald Nyquist warned that Roosevelt and its Suffolk County demographic equivalent, Wyandanch, would not have the revenue to sustain a school system. He was jettisoned for his views, but his predictions came to pass: At the same time Roosevelt was taken over by the state, Wyandanch’s schools were put on a watch list for severely under-performing schools.
A year later, the census revealed that Roosevelt’s population was actually 67 percent black, and the average age of whites was far higher than blacks. Whites were already beginning to pull their kids out of the school system. As in other communities, this foreshadowed the black middle class’ withdrawal from the schools too. In the tenth grade, Coleman herself began attending neighboring Freeport High using a bogus address.
In the early ’70s, as whites continued to leave and the nation endured a recession, the situation worsened. “When they left they carried the tax base with them,” recalls Hempstead Town Councilwoman Dorothy Goosby. “That’s one of things that I’ve found with the influx of minority homeowners.” With the construction of nearby malls like Roosevelt Field in Garden City and Green Acres in Valley Stream, shopping shifted away from the already decaying business district on Nassau Road. The movie theater, bowling alley and other large businesses had already left.
By 1976, when Nassau County first examined ways to improve Nassau Road, a survey conducted by the Roosevelt Businessmen’s Association and New York State Department of Commerce of Roosevelt residents feelings about their downtown area was telling: “Eighty-eight percent of Roosevelt residents said they shopped away from their homes, compared to 64 percent in 29 other Long Island communities.” The qualitative section of the survey was even clearer. None of the respondents rated the goods and services in Roosevelt “good,” only “fair” or “poor.”
IMPROVEMENT
The County decided to encourage development on Nassau Road by widening it. During the widening process, between 1976 and 1978, many small businesses were uprooted. Many business owners accepted buyout packages; others just disappeared.
The cornerstone of this new development was supposed to be an industrial park. But midway through the construction, the project was abandoned due to political infighting. More than 20 years later, the large, windowless earth-toned building still sits uncompleted on the east side of Nassau Road, a fitting metaphor for the oft-promised development. Shortly afterwards, in 1983, a popular roller rink was shuttered.
Leafing through newspaper clippings about Roosevelt from the last 30 years, there is always some hopeful news. “The revitalization of Roosevelt, despite a decade of doubts, is gaining ground with a new shopping center and plans for an office building,” The New York Times cooed on September 23, 1984. The office building, of course, was the same abandoned building from the 1976 revitalization project, but the article told of “reflective glass and more than 24,000 square feet of office space.” In the late ’80s, a young girl was raped there. Just recently, plans to convert the building into a radiology practice failed. “There were people who qualified for that building but it seems like when they get to the last square, something falls through,” says Yvonne Simmons of New Life Realty. “Right now, it’s on the rolls again. This couldn’t happen anywhere else. The people are disgusted and disillusioned.”
There’s almost a chicken-and-egg aspect to Roosevelt’s troubles. The 12-store shopping center was to be anchored by a Foodtown Supermarket, which received a 10-year tax waiver for locating in Roosevelt. But as soon as the mandated 10 years ended, the store moved to Freeport. The tax breaks used to draw businesses deprived the town and its troubled schools of revenue. This problem was compounded by the Department of Social Services, which was relocating the poor to homes in Roosevelt. Many of these became multi-family dwellings, some havens for drug abuse. For the schools, it meant more kids using the system, without any increase in property-tax revenues to offset the greater enrollment.
THINGS FALL APART
In the mid- to late-’80s, as in most of Black America, hip-hop hit big and crack hit hard. Rapper Keith Murray’s remembrances demonstrate the community’s duality. “Public Enemy in the air everywhere you went,” recalls Murray, who grew up in Central Islip but frequently stayed with family in Roosevelt. “Centennial Park was packed to capacity with people standing around selling drugs, there was basketball tournaments [and] black people playing tennis. [Public Enemy-affiliated gang] the 98’s were ruling the block; Nassau Road had the roller-skating rink. There was a lot of reefer going on.” It was also a very violent time. Murray specifically recalls one deli owner slicing off a man’s hand for attempting to steal a can of soda.
Coleman remembers the social disorder of this era. In one two-year period, her house was robbed 24 times. She took to sleeping with a shotgun under her bed.
In the late ’80s, Roosevelt also began absorbing large numbers of immigrants from South and Central America. They came in waves: first Colombians, then Salvadorians and finally Nicaraguans. Many of them found shelter in the illegally subdivided houses. As Roosevelt’s immigrant population grew, the tax base remained low.
CROWDED HOUSES
Things have calmed significantly since the ’80s, but riding through town, Coleman shows the community’s current problems. Her own street, Whitehouse Avenue, illustrates the hamlet’s issues. “He had eight cars parked up and down the block,” she says, pointing to one house, which has five dilapidated cars in the driveway. “So he was running a car repair shop right on the street, which was really helping property values.” Then, pointing to the adjacent blue house, she continues: “That’s a rooming house there. She takes in roomers because she can’t afford the tax but she still lives there so I put that in a different category. That’s owner occupied.” Like many of the people in Roosevelt, the owner is struggling to make the payments on the house and keep up with the taxes.
The illegally subdivided houses aren’t hard to spot with a trained eye. “I know the telltale signs,” Coleman continues. “Multiple entrances, wide paved driveways, several gas meters.” She laughs heartily at how obvious it seems. “Then what happens is that these houses have children and those children go into the Roosevelt school system. So instead of two children coming out of one household, you may have 20.”
However, according to Ray Schwarz, an assistant supervisor with the Town of Hempstead Building Department, stopping illegal housing is challenging. “We do react to complaints,” he maintains. “Every case is investigated. It’s not as easy as some people think. We have to go in there and find [violations]. [Only in] situations where the tenant calls [can we investigate].”
The main reason, says Simmons of New Life Realty, is supply and demand. “I don’t deal with apartments and rooming houses,” she says. “In Nassau County, they are not building any apartment buildings. I get four requests per day for apartments and rooming houses. Roosevelt is overcrowded already.”
DISTRUST
Nowhere are these issues more obvious than at the cash-strapped Roosevelt Junior and Senior High School. The Roosevelt Union Free School District spends slightly more than $10,000 per pupil, among the lowest on Long Island. The students consistently perform poorly on the Regents Exam: 34 percent of seniors passed the English Regents and 24 percent passed in math. For comparable schools, the figure is 62 percent for both subjects. The percentage of eighth graders passing the state English test rose 11 points this year—and was still the lowest on LI. Even new Board President Edward L. McCormack, admits, “We have to improve the learning environment.” But he adds, “If you build a quality school, the image of the community improves.”Inside Amira’s, a bright, seven-month-old Halal soul-food restaurant opposite Western Beef on Nassau Road, it’s obvious the school board has lost the trust of the people. “The administration doesn’t have their priorities straight,” explains Linwood Lilley, the 42-year-old proprietor, a large, gregarious kefir-wearing man with prominent, expressive eyes.
His partner and nephew, DeJuan Myricks, 21, concurs. “I never graduated [from Roosevelt High School],” Myricks says. “The school needs more people who care. You’ve got Joe Vito. That football coach, he cares. But the teachers promote a lot of bad behavior. Nobody respects the security. The biggest problem is we have new security each year and a new principal each year.”
Troubled as Roosevelt is, it has already been squeezed by state and federal aid cuts, with more to come. Coleman showed the results of budget cuts at the Roosevelt Equal Opportunity Commission (EOC), which sits on a bleak stretch of Babylon Turnpike close to the drug-addled Centennial Park. In the middle of the center, a room with a clean linoleum checkerboard floor that used to have weights and board games is now bare. The county cut funding for the outreach program 10 years ago. “What did they think was going to happen?” Coleman asks. “Immigrants were ill prepared and dumped into this community. People don’t wake up in the morning and say I’m going to start a gang.” Back in the late ’80s, Public Enemy used to conduct music seminars there, across the street from the park where their music filled the air. But that, like anything else, takes money. “It would take two weeks to hire staff and get it going,” says EOC head Eric Poulson. Outside the center, school-age youths hang out on porches, looking for something to do.
Much as residents are willing to criticize their school board, the media circus that followed the state takeover has created a deep distrust. “The media takes one situation and they blow it up,” Lilley says. Inside his restaurant, two patrons, a 19-year-old woman and a 21-year-old man, spoke freely but refused to provide their names. Outside the high school, a female student responded to an interview request with a curt “no.” When a reporter approached a woman outside of her house, she seemed suspicious. “I don’t know you,” she said, rapidly retreating into her home.
CASH CRUNCH
The Sustainable Long Island report was chock full of great ideas. Unfortunately, that same report has few suggestions on where the funding is supposed to come from. “Funding needs and opportunities could be identified,” the report says. “Strategies for seeking public and private investment could be outlined.” Vanessa Pugh, the Sustainable Long Island program director in charge of the report says it will cost approximately $20 million to develop Roosevelt into the verdant, pedestrian-friendly village described in the report. But it’s doubtful that cash-poor Nassau County will have $20 million to spare in the near future.
Pugh is still optimistic about achieving the goals outlined in the report. “The plan in Roosevelt was conceived by the community,” she says. “More than 500 people gathered. They didn’t ask for pie in the sky. The idea is to develop a destination. We know that people are traveling from Riverhead to Jamaica, Queens to buy ethnic products. In Roosevelt, you have the opportunity to capture the business from Nassau and Suffolk.”
Roosevelt was very much a destination when 68-year-old Catherine B. New moved to Roosevelt in 1968, when people flocked to jazz and blues clubs like Mr. Hicks, Sonny’s and the New Way Lounge. “I’d like to see what I saw when I first moved here: shoemaker, bakery, diner, a theatre, the Cloverleaf Dairy and a pet shop,” she says. “When I look down Nassau Road, I would like to see the same stores I see in North Bellmore.”
In order to accomplish this, the report recommends narrowing Nassau Road back to two lanes.
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