It is nearly freezing out, but Robert Johnson and Bill Adelman are sweeping Times Square clean one block at a time. They’re here as part of punishment handed down by the Midtown Community Court, and aside from their electric-blue court-issued vests, the two have little in common.

“I shoplifted, I tried to take 11 pairs of jeans,” baby-faced Johnson pauses, reconsiders. He’s young, good-natured and swaggering. “Twelve, no, 13 pairs of jeans, out a store.” Rather than serve jail time, “I can clean this up instead. I’m doing this on the outside; I ain’t doing this on the inside. I can walk clean, look at the girls goin’ past, talk to the sound wave [reporter’s recorder], feel the fresh breeze. I be cleaning up, as well.” Johnson steps around a pile of horse manure. “Look, watch the doo-doo! You guys wanna pick that up?”

 Adelman doesn’t hear him; he’s across the street sweeping alongside other vest-clad workers. Surrounded by a throng of camera-toting tourists, he scuttles cigarette butts into a bin. The middle-aged divorcee violated an order of protection, entered his former home while his ex-wife was there. She called the cops. “I had a chance to leave, but I refused to leave,” he says. “Do I prefer this to being in jail? Of course, I mean, that’s a no-brainer, right?” As to the attention-drawing vests and hovering court supervisor, he smiles and says, unconvincingly, “I’m not easily humiliated.” 

Humiliation is part of the punishment. Adelman and Johnson are part of the court’s restitution crew, which puts low-level offenders to work cleaning streets and painting over graffiti in midtown. From public urination to disorderly conduct and open-container violations, the crimes are minor but offensive; the sentences brief but befittingly public.

 Today, the streets the crew sweeps are walkable, its avenues bulging with tourists, its towering glassy condos fetching some of Manhattan’s higher rents. But midtown looked very different for the majority of its history; in the early 1990s, some might even say it looked like hell. Back then, trash piled up on the corners, hookers combed the streets for johns. Squeegees cleaned windshields with dirty rags and filthy water while cars were held up at stoplights, forcing drivers to pay for the unwanted service—bills only, or risk having their insufficient spare change thrown right back through the window. 

Jeff Hobbs remembers the old neighborhood. As deputy project director at the Midtown Community Court, he “like[s] to think the court has played a role” in its transformation. The first community court in the U.S., Midtown was founded in 1993 in response to these quality-of-life crimes, as a trial in community justice. No longer experimental but established, today it hears misdemeanor and summons cases and issues community-service sentences as an alternative to prison time.

 “Small problems can erode the quality of life,” Hobbs says, “and make it miserable for families” to live here. Worse, crime “creates a domino effect”: one minor incident leading to a larger one until the entire community is ravaged by offenses small- and big-time alike. The bright blue vests offenders wear as they pull weeds, paint sawhorses and scrub public furniture make justice visible, and hammer home Midtown’s simple, tough-love philosophy: Pay back the community. 

In Times Square, restitution crew supervisor John Pettiford eyes the sweepers. A stocky 23-year-old from Brooklyn, he uses his size to daunt the defendants, and his people skills—a medical-school hopeful, he speaks Spanish, Portuguese, a little Arabic and some Swedish—to connect with them. He says the program is “a mutualistic [sic] thing… it’s not about how laborious the work is. You’re not only rehabilitating your community but yourself as well.”

 Pettiford’s crew is constantly rotating—the average sentence consists of two six-hour days—and is usually comprised of first-time offenders who are stable enough to be trusted in public, drug-free enough to respond to his humor and watchful eye. They are  “the least of all evils… These are generally good people; they’re out here, trying to fix a mistake. It’s a humbling experience to be outside in Times Square, helping out the community that you disturbed.”

 But the regulars who file through the court’s metal detectors are often plagued by greater demons, and require greater support. Prostitutes, drug addicts and homeless people who commit low-level violations within the court’s jurisdiction—from 14^th Street to 86^th Street, between the Hudson River and Central Park—find themselves here. The court offers a range of programs to address underlying problems: a parenting class for incarcerated fathers, a job-placement program, GED classes and volunteer work. Treatment includes drug rehab, sex-worker therapy and health education and a homelessness partnership.

 Director Hobbs walks through a typical scenario. Take a drug addict, a familiar figure in this courtroom. The team “doesn’t want to send him back out there to commit a crime and get drugs. Send him to a clinic and get help. Send him back downstairs to the court and get resentenced. Because sometimes people are afraid to admit in the courtroom, ‘The reason why I’m stealing is because I got this big drug habit’.” When the court’s counselors meet one-on-one with the defendant “and he says, ‘To be perfectly honest, the reason why I did this was XYZ,’ we can say ‘Hey, guy, it’s not going to help you by cleaning the streets. What you need is some type of intervention. You need a drug-treatment program, and maybe we can help you.”

 Judge Richard Weinberg, a tank of a man with a mass of thick graying hair and a boyish grin, presides. Warm and low-lit, his courtroom is filled with defendants awaiting arraignment, police officers dotting the exits, guns swinging idly at their hips. This particular afternoon, a scruffy homeless man, murky eyes filled with cataracts, shuffles towards the stand. He has been arrested for trespassing and is here for his arraignment.

 The counsel and Midtown’s resources coordinator—a position nonexistent in traditional courts but necessary here, she recommends in-house programs based on defendants’ problems—approach the bench and whisperingly inform the judge that the defendant is nearly blind. The judge has already consulted the man’s criminal history and background, as he does for every defendant, from a printout.

 Across the bench, the defendant leans on the stand, a court-appointed attorney at his side. After reviewing the case, Judge Weinberg hands down the decision: one day of community service and a strong recommendation for the Court’s homeless-outreach program. Almost tangentially, he says that if the defendant fails to serve his sentence, he will face fifteen days in jail. The goal is, Weinberg says, “to get [defendants] some help.”

 Still, as Hobbs says, Weinberg is “a law-and-order judge” who is not afraid to issue jail time, especially for repeat or violent offenders. During that afternoon’s arraignments, a defendant on parole for another crime approaches the stand. Weinberg reviews his history—he had previously been arrested for robbery and kidnapping—sets bail and issues him a court date downtown. Weinberg turns, out of everyone’s earshot, and recalls the words of his mentor, a conservative, Republican judge: “It’s nice to be nice, but who pays the price?”

 The road to hell is paved with good intentions. In the Court’s early days, sentences included work at We Can Recycle, a neighborhood program that offered cash in exchange for bottles and cans. Drug addicts and dealers soon realized that, as Hobbs says, “There was cash to be made,” and users began collecting cans to be redeemed for drug money while dealers waited nearby. Prostitutes followed the money, in search of clients. We Can Recycle in effect created an “insane asylum,” Hobbs says, and the Court stopped including it in sentencings.

 Today, the court works with other environmentally-friendly organizations to both punish defendants and help them find jobs: NYC Community Cleanup, a citywide organization that, with the Department of Sanitation, puts 15 defendants to work daily cleaning abandoned lots, littered public spaces and buildings. Times Square Alliance, a business improvement organization, hires former defendants at minimum wage to clean streets and answer tourists’ questions. And Action Carting, a “green” waste-management plant, this year alone hired ten recycling workers from the court’s programs to sort paper, plastic and glass for processing.

 Midtown operates differently from the NYC Criminal Court downtown, where the average arrest-to-arraignment time is 30 hours. Midtown’s turnaround time averages 17 hours, and defendants usually begin sentences on the same day as arraignment. Defendants downtown often are sentenced to “time served,” meaning that their time in jail awaiting arraignment is the extent of their punishment. Additionally, traditional courts don’t have the resources, specialists and internal programs at their disposal that Midtown has.

 An integral part of the court’s mission is its relationship with the neighborhood’s resident watchdogs. Victoria Watkins is one of the most rabid. She trolls the neighborhood and offers street-by-street recommendations for restitution projects. “There is civic pride in putting a fresh coat of paint on a rusty, graffiti-covered fire hydrant. Public safety is improved… the environment looks cleaner and safer,” she says in an email. Watkins’ suggestions have resulted in the crews painting over 30 mailboxes and 25 fire hydrants. “Graffiti cleanup is dirty work and an activity most citizens would not do unless mandated. Would you want to paint a gritty mailbox in hot, humid weather while pedestrians and cars pass by?”

 Back in Times Square, Adelman and Johnson might argue that cleaning the streets, one by one, in the cold is just as punitive as painting in New York’s oppressive summer heat. But both of the men finish their assignment, return their supplies and remove their vests, and, eventually, head home. It is unlikely that they’ll meet again outside of this little, now swept-clean, patch of Times Square.

 Despite Midtown Community Court’s many missions—arbitration, environmentalism, counseling—regardless of the defendant, regardless of the crime, the court’s staff insists community justice boils down to just one essential. “It’s all about engagement. The big word, the flavor of the month, the crème de la crème, is ‘engagement,’” says director Hobbs. “Because you have to meet people where they are.”

Councilman James Gennaro enjoys a Newtown Pippin on the steps of city hall.

As City Councilman James Gennaro took to the microphone at a crowded public hearing last month to argue against natural gas drilling near New York’s upstate water reservoirs, the rowdy auditorium that had just mauled the deputy mayor during his remarks grew quiet. This man they let speak.

The tall, salt-and-pepper-haired Queens native proceeded to read a statement off a printed script, eyeing every word studiously through a pair of thick spectacles he put on just for the occasion.

Shortly after he finished speaking, Gennaro took a seat on a bench in the lobby. There, in between conversations with supporters and journalists, he pored over the speech, marked up with blue ink, and pondered aloud what he could have done better. “What word couldn’t I say?” he thought out loud. “I had to make a change on the fly. ‘Ironic’ worked. ‘Iconic’ was a no go,” he added, concluding: “I did ok.”

The younger James Gennaro might well have disagreed. Both he and his older brother John suffered from a stuttering problem growing up. And though John will freely admit that Jim’s stuttering was much worse, his little brother has nonetheless thrived in a career where public speaking is as important to him as a hammer to a carpenter or a violin to a violinist.

Now in his seventh year as the chairman of the New York City Council Environmental Protection Committee, Gennaro has become an outspoken champion of some of New York’s most important environmental initiatives, including the 2007 act that mandated a 30 percent reduction in the city’s carbon footprint by 2030. He’s done so by campaigning long and hard both in the legislative chambers as well as in the streets to make sure he got every vote he needed. He’s made countless speeches and given innumerable interviews, in each one trying to balance his concern over the patterns of his speech with the passion he feels for the environment.

He hasn’t always succeeded, but the competitive spirit has helped him overcome numerous obstacles just as he has managed to tame his speaking impediment. It’s also landed him in some trouble and caused some who know the geologist-by-training to question his temperament.

Gennaro says he inherrited his competitive nature from his father Lou – a jeweler by trade who also loved baseball and once tried out for the Brooklyn Dodgers. He used to play the game with his sons on family outings up in the Catskills. “We were playing for blood. It was really, really serious,” Gennaro recalls. “To go back to the dugout and face him, that was not pretty.”

Renee Lobo, a Queens community activist who challenged him for his seat in 2005, considers him a tough, all-or-nothing competitor. “We sparred,” she says. When she called to congratulate him after losing the primary, she says he asked her, “’How dare you run against me?’”

“I definitely thought he had anger issues at the time,” Lobo recalls. “I think down the road he learned how to manage his anger.”

Lobo says she admires Gennaro’s environmental record and now sees him as a friend and ally. After a long post-election silence, the two met again at a city council hearing in 2008. Lobo then suffered a broken leg while Gennaro was hobbled by a broken ankle. Gennaro recognized her and initiated some small-talk over their injuries, she recalls, and the two bonded and have been on good terms ever since. Lobo even supported him in his ultimately unsuccessful bid to unseat State Senator Frank Padavan (R-Queens), who’s held the 11th senate district seat since before Gennaro was a freshman geology major at Stony Brook University in 1975. The race triggered a recount since only a few hundred votes separated the two men.

“It was courageous to go up against someone like that. And to get that close was nutty,” says his brother John. He credits the near-win to his brother’s all-or-nothing attitude: “He has no ‘plan B.’ He just plans on winning.”

In previous campaigns, his competitive attitude ignited controversy. In 2007 the New York City Conflicts of Interest Board fined Gennaro $2,000 because an aide who volunteered for his 2003 re-election campaign used his government office computer, printer, and paper for the campaign, the board said. Gennaro took responsibility for not having known about it. “The lesson learned is that I am responsible and accountable for everything and anything my people do. The buck stops with me no matter what. This episode etched that credo into my bone marrow,” he wrote in an email.

In the legislative chamber, Gennaro can also be a formidable competitor, doing everything he can to get serious consideration for his bills – no matter how big or small. On a rainy Monday morning in November, for example, he called a news conference to hand out dozens of Newtown Pippins, sour green apples native to Queens, as an effort to urge city council members to pass his resolution naming Pippins the official apple of the “Big Apple.” Boxes of apple muffins destined for the city council also quietly piled up, prompting a reporter to ask whether he is attempting to sweet-talk his colleagues into backing the bill. Gennaro smiled, bit an apple and demurred. But he stuttered a bit when asked why the seemingly innocuous proposition hasn’t passed city hall months after being introduced.

“You know, it’s just there’s a lot of very important business that the city council has to do and something like this is something that is never going to be, you know, [a] front-burner issue,” he answered.

Among the “front-burner” issues was a proposal before City Hall this year to force building owners in New York City to audit and re-fit their buildings for energy efficiency. Also sponsored by Gennaro, the bill faced intense opposition from the city’s real estate industry, which has argued that the measure would force them to make expensive upgrades but not realise any of their benefits. “You want the entity that bears the cost to get the benefit. And in some cases that just wasn’t the case and that’s just patently unfair and we’re not going to pass a bill that’s not fair,” says Gennaro. Ultimately, he stood next to City Council Speaker Christine Quinn at a City Hall press conference triumphantly announcing the bill’s passage. But it ostensibly lacked the initial re-fit language.

Despite these setbacks, Gennaro has had more than his fair share of legislative successes. He chuckles as he points out he needs an intern just to compile his record, which includes committing the city to green building principles, the 2030 carbon reduction targets and standing firm against any encroachments on New York’s upstate water supply.

“He really has been in many ways the conscience of the city council on a broad array of environmental issues,” says Eric Goldstein, an attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council who has known Gennaro for 20 years. Most notably, says Goldstein, “he’s really been the ‘Paul Revere’ of drinking water protection in New York.”

The sentiment was echoed by some of those who attended the public hearing at which he spoke last month. As he sat on the bench outside the auditorium, a visitor from West Virginia, a former commissioner of the New York Department of Environmental Conservation, and one of Goldstein’s colleagues from the Natural Resources Defense Council all paid Gennaro a visit to thank him for protecting the city’s water resources.

He hesitated over a word here or there. But he did not need a script to keep the lively conversation going well after other city council members had already left.

“Congress and Mr. President, hear our call for responsive legislation,” Ms. Flynn urged, clutching an old microphone and peering out over black, thick-rimmed glasses. “Take responsibility for this continuing public health disaster.”

It is a scene that Ms. Flynn, a one-time actress, plays out across the city in community meetings, rallies and hearings. Her script – demanding proper clean-up, recognition and treatment of illnesses that appeared in the wake of 9/11 – holds the words she has come to live by. In the years since that September day, lower Manhattan has embarked on an arduous recovery, rebuilding new office towers, businesses and lives. Still, Ms. Flynn insists, the recovery is far from over.

A decade ago, Ms. Flynn worked as a dramaturge, alternating as an actress, drama professor and theater consultant. Between work on projects like Anna Deveare Smith’s Twilight: Los Angeles 1992, Flynn volunteered with ACT UP New York, an AIDS social justice coalition. It was only New York’s aggressive 1999 pesticide campaign against the West Nile virus that sparked Flynn’s initial foray into environmental activism.

That evening began like any other. Ms. Flynn finished up dinner and left her Upper West Side apartment for a nightly stroll along Riverside Drive. But as she walked through the park, she paused at the odd sensation of a tightening in her chest. “I’d been keeping track of the spray schedule, and I thought to myself, ‘are they supposed to spray Riverside Drive?’” she recalls. “Then I thought, ‘no, they weren’t.’”

Joggers got drenched in the pesticide, she said, and parents and nannies pulled their kids from the sandboxes and fleed the park. Shocked, she called the city’s office of emergency management. She says all she heard was “Sorry, sorry, sorry,” followed by: “What are you gonna do about it? Sue us?”

She did. Ms. Flynn joined the No Spray Coalition, a group opposed to the pesticide campaign, as a paralegal and research assistant in its lawsuit against the city. By September 2001, Ms. Flynn had gotten a strong-enough introduction to the nuances of environmental justice that she began to set her sights on other issues. She worked with colleagues from the No Spray Coalition to order private lab tests of the World Trade Center dust. When those tests revealed toxic levels of asbestos, Ms. Flynn and her colleagues sprang into action, educating the community about the dangers of the dust through fliers and meetings.

Even without any close personal ties to the disaster, Ms. Flynn says she simply reacted as many New Yorkers did. “I feel like there was such a dire need to step in and offer whatever skills we had,” she says. “I would have been useless removing rubble from the pile. But what I did know how to do was to organize the community.”

Eight years later, Ms. Flynn remains at the front of an environmental movement facing dwindling funds and shrinking ranks. Now a petite 53-year-old with fading, gray-streaked brown hair, Ms. Flynn readily acknowledges these challenges. She blames them on what she calls “compassion fatigue.”

But her own fatigue is something else entirely. Asked to estimate the number of hours she devotes to 9/11 each week, Ms. Flynn draws an anxious pair of hands to her temples. She runs through a list of roles at 11 different community groups and settles on 40 hours. Her days are filled with phone calls, meetings, research, drafting fliers and legal testimony and planning outreach, events and agendas. When pressed, she admits the workweek often creeps upwards of 50 or 60 hours.

“She lives and breathes this fight,” says Esther Regelson, secretary of the 9/11 Environmental Action committee that Flynn founded in 2002. “She’s given up quite a lot to do this, and she will see it that way if you point it out to her, but she tries not to stop and look at that, because it will interfere.”

Ms. Flynn balks at any discussion of her sacrifices because she believes they will never compare to those of individuals directly affected by 9/11. Still, the ones she will discuss are hardly trivial. Nearly all of her 9/11 work is done on a voluntary basis, meaning she’s lived without a steady salary for over eight years. So as the money from her theater days has been running out, she’s taken on debt and adjusted her standard of living.Recently relocated from the Upper West Side to an apartment building blocks away from Ground Zero, Ms. Flynn lives on her own and admits her dedication has left little time for social life.

Despite Ms. Flynn’s dogged commitment, the question of what, exactly, her efforts have yielded remains. Rob Spencer, who co-chairs a community advisory committee with Ms. Flynn, calls her “a pivotal player” in the fight for environmental justice.

“There’s no doubt about that,” he says. “I think she’s ensured that the struggle will move forward in ways very few other folks have.” He points to her role in the successful battle to ensure a safe demolition of the Deutsche Bank building. Ms. Flynn, he says, was instrumental in raising awareness of the dangers standard demolition posed and convincing key community players to get involved in the issue.

But Mr. Spencer also acknowledged that tangible victories seldom emerge in her chosen causes. “It’s very difficult in some of these struggles to look at the victories as ‘We won this,’ “ he says. Instead, Mr. Spencer contends that the victories are in the process, and largely about raising awareness and strategizing the most effective ways to demand change.

And by Ms. Flynn’s own admission, victories are rare and nearly always fleeting. They are the times when a protest outside a taping of the David Letterman Show caused the talk show-host to cross-examine former Environmental Protection Agency head Christine Todd Whitman on the agency’s post-9/11 policies. Or the release of the 2003 Environmental Protection Agency Inspector General’s Report, which reflected the inadequacies of the agency’s response to 9/11 that Flynn and others had pointed to for nearly two years. “But she definitely won’t stop and take a breath,” says Ms. Regelson. “She’ll be celebratory, but she’s always ready to move on to the next thing.”

Ms. Flynn is now focusing the bulk of her attention on the launch of the 9/11 Pediatric Outreach Project. Flynn’s goal is to increase awareness of 9/11’s impact on the health of children and adolescents, and the resources WTC’s Environmental Health Center at Bellevue Hospital can provide for pediatric patients. She’s hoping they’ll be able to secure grant money for the initiative, which would provide her with some kind of income, no matter how small or temporary.

If not, there will be more debt to incur and new sacrifices to be made. But Ms. Flynn is undeterred. “I don’t know whether you can still call it an obsession,” she says. “People still have that fire in their bellies from the first flame of outrage. It’s not hard to ignite that again.”

The Consumer Electronics Association, along with other trade groups, filed a suit against the city and the sanitation department in United States District Court in July, saying the law, and the way it was implemented, restricts interstate commerce and places an undue burden on the manufacturers the groups represent.

At issue is the Electronic Equipment Recycling and Reuse Act, which requires electronic manufacturers to collect and recycle nearly any discarded digital device by 2011. It was passed by the city council in 2007, overriding a veto by Mayor Bloomberg.

In the lawsuit, the CEA claims that the program requires manufacturers to “build an unprecedented waste management infrastructure and deploy personnel and resources to directly collect electronic waste.” The city has agreed not to enforce the law until after a hearing on the lawsuit.

That hearing, which was scheduled for last month, was postponed after other city and state governments filed amicus briefs with the court, siding with the city. Among those were San Francisco and Portland, both of which have similar e-waste laws.

“The lawsuit is so broad based in nature, it would threaten to undermine similar laws in 19 other states, as well as future laws in other cities,” said Kate Sinding, a lawyer for the Natural Resources Defense Council. The NRDC is an advocate for the law in New York, as well as similar laws in other municipalities, and has joined the lawsuit as a defendant.

Rules created by the Department of Sanitation require manufacturers to file electronic waste management plans that include residential collection of electronics over fifteen pounds.

“The requirement is unprecedented, disastrously expensive, and will harm the environment by putting hundreds of additional trucks on City streets,”  Jennifer Boone Bemisderfer, an electronics association representative,  said in an email.

Ms. Sinding disagrees that the law is unprecedented, saying that the manufacturers “are relying on overly burdensome interpretations of the regulations.”

According to the rules, acceptable waste management plans would require manufacturers to set up at least one collection point in each community board district for devices under fifteen pounds, and schedule residential pickup of larger items. Companies could be fined for not filing or implementing approved plans.

In rules published by the sanitation department, companies are encouraged to work together to create recycling plans. However, Ms. Sinding said the department has not offered to contract with manufacturers to pick up the electronics through the city’s existing waste and recycling collection infrastructure. The sanitation department would not comment on the lawsuit.

The hearing in federal court is scheduled for January 19, 2010. If the judge rules for the city, manufacturers will have 30 days to submit their waste management plans.

Judge Lee Mayersohn of the Queens Supreme Court denied the Juniper Park Civic Association’s motion for an injunction to temporarily suspend construction of Maspeth High School, writing that “there is not a likelihood of success of plaintiff’s claim.”

Although the case is still open, the lawyer for the association, Thomas Oginbene said that without the injunction, the case will most likely fail. “That was 90% of the case,” Ognibene said, “The likelihood of success is rather slim now.”

The Juniper Park Civic Association and Citizens of Maspeth and Elmhurst Together sued the New York City School Construction Authority in June to block the construction of the school at 54-44 74th St. in Maspeth, a site that formerly held a Restaurant Depot.

According to Robert Holden, the president of the civic association, the expert hired to review the environmental data on the site found that the levels of exposure present could lead to cancer and other health problems for students later in life.

The construction authority proposed a plan to bring the site up to state environmental standards that included precautions during construction, design measures to prevent migration of vapors, and a layer of clean fill to be placed over contaminated soils.

But the expert the association hired, Dr. James Cervino, argued that the state standards are not stringent enough to protect the students’ health.

The association also argued that the authority did not disclose the results of their environmental assessment until after the city council had already approved construction of the school, according to Holden.

“We didn’t even know that there was a toxic problem at the site,” he said.

Ognibene said that the school construction authority will most likely now file a motion to dismiss the case and even if the judge allows the case to move forward, the community groups do not have the resources necessary to continue to fight.

Both Ognibene and the environmental expert who reviewed the data donated their time to help with the case, and he said that the expert witnesses and other resources needed to win would simply cost too much money.

Two-year-old William Sanchez picks up his asthma machine, a daily presence in his life

East Harlem—Signs of life are appearing at the once dusty construction site in the heart of East Harlem. Inside, cubicle desks and water fountains are in place awaiting staff. After a two-year delay, the East Harlem Asthma Center of Excellence—a free educational and referral facility—is scheduled to open in a few weeks.

It’s not a moment too soon for a community that suffers from the worst asthma rates in the city. One in four children in East Harlem has the respiratory condition, according to authorities.

Two-year-old William Sanchez is one of them. At his home 10 blocks south of the center, William is a typical toddler, except for a 60-year-old man’s cough that erupts from his chest. Asthma has become a part of everyday life in his family’s small apartment across from a bus depot, a hub of fumes and air pollution. He misses an average of two days of school per week and his mother, Carmen Sanchez, frightened by his constant wheezing and inability to catch his breath, frequently rushes him to nearby Mt. Sinai Hospital’s emergency room.

Medicating kids is just one step to combating asthma. Understanding how the medicine works and what triggers an attack is another vital component. When the center opens, staff will not disperse or prescribe medicine like the neighborhood hospital. Rather, they will educate community members about the condition and explain what negative impact environmental factors—like living next to a bus depot—can have.

Mayor Bloomberg announced plans for the center in 2007. “The asthma rate among our city’s children is unacceptably high and the Center of Excellence and the PlaNYC agenda will take steps that we know will reduce it,” he said. Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer followed, saying the Center “will set the bar for comprehensive coordinated services and provide the children of El Barrio with the support they need and deserve.”

City permits taped to windows indicate long overdue activity at the Asthma Center of Excellence in East Harlem

Fast forward two-and-a-half years and the community continues to wait. The 10,000 sq. ft education center was scheduled to open in 2008, according to Mr. Stringer’s website.

The reason for the delay is unclear. “Unfortunately, we’re not going to comment on this issue,” said Joan Vollero, Deputy Press Secretary for Mr. Stringer’s office, when pressed for explanation. “The center is under construction and will open soon,” was the comment Jason Post, press secretary to Mayor Bloomberg, relayed through an assistant.

Some say “soon” isn’t good enough. “We need it open now,” said Robert Rodriguez, East Harlem Community Board Chairman, at a recent meeting. The city moves with “a little fatigue” when it comes to this neighborhood, he says.

“They’re slower to address our issues. We’re always frustrated,” said Anthu Hoang, Director of Environmental Health and General Counsel at WE ACT, a non-profit organization focused on environmental justice. “East Harlem is probably not the highest on the city’s priority list.”

Meanwhile, resident families seek treatment at other neighborhood options, like Mt. Sinai Hospital, which offers free half-day chest clinics twice a week. On one of William’s recent visits, doctors conducted a routine check-up and provided Ms. Sanchez with a sheaf of re-fill prescriptions. They also pressed her to stop smoking and urged her to remove any pets—both triggers that can exacerbate William’s condition.

Although Ms. Sanchez knows the home environment is crucial to keeping asthma under control, she insists that her three parrots are part of the family and that her smoking habit—a pack a day between her and her husband—is hard to quit.

Once the facility opens, Ms. Sanchez and other parents in the neighborhood will have a forum to learn how triggers affect their children’s conditions and what the various prescriptions mean. Among its programs will be themed workshops, like “understanding the difference between a rescue medication versus a quick-release medication,” explains Priscilla Toral, asthma social worker at Mt. Sinai, who is optimistic about the center’s potential impact. “It’ll be an amazing resource to help translate what doctors say to (patients).”

Ms. Sanchez is just now learning about the center’s services and she’s optimistic it may help her deal with William’s medical problems. For now, his play activities are restricted to the indoors, where his mom is on standby with a five-pound breathing machine to regulate his breathing in case of a flare-up. “As soon as he goes outside, forget it,” says Ms. Sanchez. “I feel bad for him. So many kids are playing in the park and he can’t go. His lungs are so weak.”

Gathered at Hostos Community College, a group called the For the South Bronx Coalition – who have, since May, been trying to raise awareness of environmental and economic issues surrounding the building of the new Yankee Stadium – decided they need to rally more community support around the cause.

“Listen, the Bronx has to wake up,” South Bronx resident Alex Coss told fellow members. But to mobilize people around the issues, the coalition’s roughly 15 members will have to find a way to communicate their message to South Bronx residents and grab media attention.

Their main focus: A 2006 Community Benefits Agreement the coalition says failed to deliver on the jobs promised to the community, and did not replace the parkland displaced when the new stadium was built.

The group will try to recruit more members at a meeting hosted by a South Bronx anti-gun coalition, held at 1 p.m. Nov. 14 at the Betances Community Center in Mott Haven.

“We don’t have the millions,” member Hector Soto said, referring to financing, “but we’re going to have to get the millions of people.”

The Applied Research Center, a California-based think tank focused on justice issues, has selected PlaNYC one of five programs to serve as case studies of how local community activists can successfully promote racial, economic and gender equality in green job creation.

“Hopefully, it’s a story we can tell about how labor and community activists won equity in PlaNYC,” Yvonne Liu, the project’s coordinator, told The Green Standard.

One of the reasons the Center chose New York is “because there’s not a lot of community input and participation right now in the planning process,” Liu said. However, many community groups are now beginning to organize to give their input, she added.

The case study will examine what campaign tactics, policies, equity measures and principles they are using to make their voices heard.

“New York City is a compelling case study because, if it works in New York, just like if it works in Los Angeles, there’s real implications that it has for [it] to work in another place as well,” Liu said.

A Los Angeles case study will be unveiled on November 18th. New York’s case study is due out in late December or early January, Liu said.