Owner Takes a Chunk Out of an Unofficial Community Garden

Colin Moynihan for The New York Times Workers on Wednesday erected a fence around a privately owned lot inside a community garden on the Lower East Side as police officers, in the background, ensured order.

For years, the Children’s Magical Garden de Carmen Rubio on the Lower East Side has been known for the peach and nectarine trees that grow there and the roosters that roam the lot. Although the garden is not recognized by the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation, it has existed since 1982 with little official objection.

But on Wednesday morning, a group of workers accompanied by private security guards and a photographer erected a metal fence around roughly 2,500 square feet in the middle of the garden. They said that they were acting at the direction of a company that owns the center lot of the three that make up the garden, which stands at the corner of Norfolk and Stanton Streets and is named for a community organizer. The garden’s other two lots belong to the city.

Stan Weichers, 42, said that he was walking by the garden just before 9 a.m. when the workers and the guards arrived and used a power saw to cut through a lock securing the garden’s gate.

Soon, a crowd gathered, shouting that the workers had no right to enter the garden. But police officers who showed up said the workers had a permit to erect a fence inside. The workers carried in metal posts and rolls of fencing into the garden, as guards in suits stood by. A photographer who had arrived with them captured images of some of those objecting.

One gardener, Kate Temple-West, said the gardeners had been working with the local city councilwoman, Margaret S. Chin, to arrange a land swap with the owner of the third lot, in an effort to make the garden permanent.

“This is a community garden that is specifically for children,” she said. “It’s a very special place.”

A man who would not identify himself by name but said he worked for Norfolk Street Development, the company that controls the privately owned lot, told the gardeners that the fence was being erected to satisfy a request from an insurance company.

“We’re putting up something that ensures safety,” he said.

As the police stood guard, the workers began fencing off a rectangular area, roughly 100 feet by 25 feet. Dozens of gardeners and their supporters gathered, crowding into the city-owned sections of the garden. The group included 11th and 12th graders from the Lower East Side Preparatory School, which is opposite the garden.

Their teacher, Teresa Devore, described the garden as “a green place, a place for fresh air,” and said the students had participated in a program that involved planting tomatoes, peppers and eggplant there.

In 125 Years, Much Has Changed, but the Pastrami Is the Same

“I’m from out of town, and I like a good pastrami sandwich,” said Jeffrey A. Devore, a lawyer from West Palm Beach, Fla., who was sitting in Katz’s, the Lower East Side delicatessen that, like the neighborhood itself, has become a study in contrasts.

Mr. Devore had driven into Manhattan in his rental car after a court hearing in Newark and had taken a seat amid what a critic once described as the “terrazzo-and-Formica ambience, with a cafeteria counter along one side and signs instructing you, as of yore, to ‘Send a salami to your boy in the Army.’”

Beneath the long, bright fluorescents that illuminate that comfortably old-fashioned backdrop, Mr. Devore opened his iPad and began reading The Wall Street Journal.

It was enough to make one wonder how to say “plus ça change” in Yiddish.

But even Katz’s, at 205 East Houston Street, at Ludlow Street, has adapted as the landscape has been remade.

In the very next block is an apartment building with a Web site that says two-bedroom apartments start at $5,500 a month; a gelato store and a nail salon occupy the first-floor storefronts. Katz’s is now open 24 hours a day on weekends, in part to accommodate younger, hipper customers who are out later than late. In the old days, no one risked being on the street on the far side of midnight.

“It was a very tough neighborhood,” said Alan Dell, 65, one of the owners of Katz’s since 1988. “Drugs and that kind of thing. You felt nervous about coming.”

His son, Jake, 25, added: “You ran in from the car and ran out. This was a safe place, always, but not the neighborhood.”

Now, Alan Dell said, the neighborhood has multimillion-dollar condominiums.

“Who’d have thought?” Jake Dell said.

The pickle barrels no longer line Ludlow Street (they now occupy a storage room inside Katz’s). The corned beef and the pastrami are still cured the same way they always were, using airtight barrels and a salt solution with a formula that remains a secret (as do the formulas for the wood chips in the smokehouse where the pastrami is cured and the rub that is applied to it).

But Katz’s has served Reubens for a decade â€" corned beef, sauerkraut, homemade Russian dressing and melted Swiss cheese. Reubens have become best-sellers at Katz’s, but when Alan Dell was young, it was unthinkable that a Jewish deli would serve meat and cheese together.

“Enough people started asking for it, customers, regulars, people we know and liked,” Jake Dell said. “It’s not like we were going to take away the old stuff, but we could add a Reuben. The same thing happened with a pastrami Reuben. For some reason, everyone wants a pastrami Reuben now. We’re in the business of pleasing.”

In a typical week, the counter staff goes through 20,000 pounds of meat, half of it pastrami; 3,000 to 4,000 hot dogs; and 12,000 pickles. But the makeup of the staff has changed over the years. “It used to be Eastern European Jews, mainly from the neighborhood,” Jake Dell said.

Now, he and his father said, the employees behind the counter and in the kitchen tend to be from the Dominican Republic.

Katz’s has become a survivor in a neighborhood that had long-established delis. It began 125 years ago under a different name, Iceland Brothers. They took in the first Katz, Willy, as a partner in the early years of the 20th century. Eventually, he bought out the brothers and changed the name from Iceland & Katz to Katz’s.

The Dells, who bought into Katz’s in 1988, say the first big change came in the mid-1940s, when the restaurant, originally on Ludlow Street, expanded, taking the corner storefront at Houston Street. The new storefront needed a new sign. “The sign maker asked Harry Tarowsky” â€" one of the owners at the time â€" “what he wanted on the sign,” Alan Dell explained. “He said, ‘Katz’s Deli. That’s all.’” The sign arrived with those four words on it, and has been in the front window ever since.

Nowadays, the crowd at Katz’s includes tourists who have discovered the Lower East Side â€" Jake Dell says that New Yorkers “don’t necessarily eat in the store. They take it with them or they get it delivered.” And as the neighborhood has changed in recent years, one refrain at Katz’s has the rumors that it was for sale. “It’s not,” Alan Dell said. “It’s history. You don’t sell history.”

Another refrain has come from what Mr. Dell calls “re-enactors,” people who recognized Katz’s as the setting for the scene in the film “When Harry Met Sally” in which the punch line is “I’ll have what she’s having.”

It was probably no surprise that Katz’s made a cameo appearance. “Billy Crystal and Rob Reiner are regulars,” Mr. Dell said, referring to one of the stars of the film and its director.

“But our name was not listed in the credits, and unless you knew, unless you recognized it, you wouldn’t know,” he said. “We didn’t see a measurable increase” in business as soon as the movie was released, he said, but later articles that mentioned Katz’s “put us on the map.”

But perhaps not the way he expected. Consider a segment he videotaped with Sherri Shepherd, a co-host of the daytime talk show “The View.”

“She starts recreating the scene,” Alan Dell recalled. “The director, who was sitting out of range, said, ‘Look surprised.’ He really didn’t have to say that. I don’t get uncomfortable easily, but that one…”

His voice trailed off, uncomfortably.

A version of this article appeared in print on 05/15/2013, on page A23 of the NewYork edition with the headline: Neighborhood Changed, But the Pastrami Hasn’t.

A Window Concert in Brooklyn Heights

Dear Diary:

On my bike, downhill on Henry, no jacket, trees in full bloom. There is no turning back from spring. It can’t possibly get any better than this.

I turn onto State Street. In front of a brownstone, the sidewalk is lined with rows of people sitting in white folding chairs. I recognize my friend Erica. The driver waiting for the light to change is leaning out his car window.

Across the street, a small crowd has gathered. Some hard-core bike riders are off their seats, legs straddled, feet planted. A woman is leaning against her boyfriend. Nestled in his arms, she looks blissful. An old man with oddly long and oddly blond hair isn’t moving. A Nordic hippie in a polo shirt. Does he live in the Heights? Why have I never seen him before?

Everyone is staring raptly into an open window.

Suddenly, it all clicks. They’re looking at the back of a piano. Halting chords register. Something familiar, defiantly not classical. A pop song, but I can’t place the era.

A recital?

I spot a sign taped to the glass: “The 4th Window Concert.”

The piece comes to a rollicking finish and the crowd applauds. A young boy appears in the window. He bows, so quickly that I barely see him, then disappears.

Sarah Hocevar Brooklyn Heights, April 28, 2013. Photo via Flickr.

Read all recent entries and our updated submissions guidelines. Reach us via e-mail diary@nytimes.com or follow @NYTMetro on Twitter using the hashtag #MetDiary.

A Black Nurse, a German Soldier and an Unlikely WWII Romance

Andrew Sullivan for The New York Times Elinor Powell Albert was a nurse who tended to German P.O.W.’s at a camp in Arizona during World War II. She met her husband, Frederick Albert, while he was a prisoner in the camp.

Andrew Sullivan for The New York Times Chris Albert, a trumpet player in the Duke Ellington Orchestra and a son of Elinor and Frederick Albert, said his parents had a hard time being accepted after they married.

The nurse and the soldier may never have met - and eventually married - had it not been for the American government’s mistreatment of black women during World War II.

Elinor Elizabeth Powell was an African-American military nurse. Frederick Albert was a German prisoner of war. Their paths crossed in Arizona in 1944. It was a time when the Army was resisting enlisting black nurses and the relatively small number allowed entry tended to be assigned to the least desirable duties.

“They decided they were going to use African-Americans but in very small numbers and in segregated locations,” said Charissa Threat, a history professor at Northeastern University who teaches race and gender studies.

Ms. Powell was born in 1921 in Milton, Mass., and in, 1944, after completing basic training at Fort Huachuca, Ariz., she was sent, as some other black nurses were, to tend to German prisoners of war in Florence, Ariz.

“I know the story of how they met,” said Chris Albert, 59, the youngest son of Elinor and Frederick Albert. “It was in the officers’ mess hall, and my father was working in the kitchen. He kind of boldly made his way straight for my mother and said: ‘You should know my name. I’m the man who’s going to marry you.’”

Frederick Karl Albert was born in 1925 in Oppeln, Germany. “He volunteered for the paratroops to impress his father, who served in WWI,” Mr. Albert said. “His father was an engineer and not really interested in his children. My dad ended up getting captured in Italy.”

He joined many other German prisoners who were detained in camps across the United States. With millions of American men away in combat or basic training, P.O.W.’s became a solution to the labor shortage. “Under the Geneva Convention, enlisted criminals of war could work for the detaining power,” said Matthias Reiss, a professor at the University of Exeter, in England, who has researched the history of German P.O.W.’s. “So the idea was, bring them over to America and let them do the unskilled work.”

In the camp in Arizona, Frederick Albert worked in the kitchen, where he prepared special meals for Elinor. A romance between the two blossomed but not without consequences. “My dad was severely beaten by a group of officers when they found out about my mom,” Mr. Albert said, referring to American soldiers.

At Camp Florence, as well as other camps, the environment for black nurses could be particularly humiliating. The nurses were forced to eat in separate dining halls, apart from white officers on the base.

“My mother mentioned that she was in a bar or some place that had food or drink and they refused to serve her,” said Stephen Albert, 66, Elinor and Frederick’s oldest son.

The discrimination blacks encountered was not lost on the German P.O.W.’s.

“You’d be hard-pressed to find a German soldier who was held captive in America who didn’t speak about African-Americans,” Professor Reiss said. “They were quite aware there was a major discrimination problem and that the Americans weren’t really allowed to occupy the moral high ground on that matter.”

By war’s end, about 500 black nurses had served in World War II. All German P.O.W.’s, including Frederick Albert, were eventually sent to Germany.

The American military officially ended segregation after WWII, but for the Alberts, the issue of race would resurface throughout their lives. Their unlikely romance resulted in Stephen’s birth in December 1946. After Frederick was able to return to the United States, he and Elinor married on June 26, 1947, in Manhattan.

“I would say the first 10 years for my parents were a struggle to find some kind of economic security and a safe haven for an interracial family,” said Chris Albert, who plays the trumpet with the Duke Ellington Orchestra.

“They moved to Boston and my father worked several jobs,’’ he said. “At some point, he decided it was best if they moved to Göttingen, Germany, where his parents lived. He could work for his father’s cement manufacturing business.”

But Kristina Brandner, 70, a niece of Frederick Albert, said life in Germany was difficult. “Göttingen is a small town,’’ she said. “My grandmother never had contact with black people so it was strange and uncomfortable for her with Elinor. Kids used to ask me how come there was a black woman living with us, and why is your cousin another color. Sometimes, I saw Elinor in the kitchen crying.”

In less than two years, Frederick, Elinor, Stephen and Chris, who was an infant, returned to the United States.

“We came back and moved to Morton, Pa. And then they went through the school issue,” Mr. Albert said.

That issue was the rejection of Stephen’s attempt to enroll at a local public school after being told that the school was not open to black children.

“My mother pitched a fit,” Mr. Albert said, who still has a copy of the letter Elinor wrote to the school superintendent and a local branch of the N.A.A.C.P.

In 1959, Mr. and Ms. Albert settled in Village Creek, an interracial neighborhood in Norwalk, Conn., where Elinor became an avid gardener and Frederick became a vice president at Pepperidge Farm.

“We always had great music at home,” said Mr. Albert, who resides in his childhood house in Norwalk. “My dad had this affinity for New Orleans jazz. I think it was a much larger representation for him. That lack of warmth he felt growing up, he found it in jazz and when he saw my mother.”

Mr. Albert’s father died in 2001, and his mother in 2005.

“I now ask myself how come I never questioned my dad about Hitler or what he thought about the Nazi movement,” said Mr. Albert, who will perform along with his band mates at the Blue Note Jazz Club in the West Village this month.

“My mother didn’t talk about it either,’’ he said. “They didn’t bring up the past. But what I do know about my parents, their story is a remarkable one.”

A Politician’s Disclosure Offers a Lesson in Eating Disorders

Christine C. Quinn, the City Council speaker and a Democratic candidate for mayor, revealed in The New York Times on Tuesday that she battled bulimia for over a decade, from her midteens until she entered a rehabilitation program at age 26. Though other public figures have discussed their struggles with bulimia - Katie Couric and Jane Fonda are two examples - it’s a rare disclosure for a politician. Ms. Quinn also said she considered herself a recovering alcoholic, which is a less unusual distinction.

I’ve written about my own experience with anorexia, and edited a book of essays about anorexia and bulimia. Because of that, much of what Ms. Quinn told me in the course of two emotional interviews, including her shame and denial about her illness and how important it was to finally accept that she needed help to deal with it, was familiar. My experience also made me it easy for me to understand that Ms. Quinn’s bulimia was about much more than wanting to lose weight.

In the last year or so, as Ms. Quinn has been gearing up for her campaign for mayor, she has talked about how she has lost 25 pounds through healthy eating and exercise. Her bulimia was something quite different, though, and quite a bit darker.

A frequent and understandable misconception about eating disorders is that they are simply an extreme and slightly dysfunctional form of dieting. Bulimia â€" which is characterized by bingeing and purging, usually by self-induced vomiting â€" is particularly misunderstood. When it’s invoked on television or in movies, it’s often a joke and a marker of superficiality: A character who is a model or an actress eats a normal meal and then disappears to the bathroom to throw it up. In real life, many people respond to the idea with disgust.

Bulimia, like anorexia, begins with an effort to lose weight, but it only takes hold and becomes a serious illness if bingeing and purging start to fulfill an emotional need. In Ms. Quinn’s case, when she was 15, her mother was dying of cancer, and she shouldered more and more responsibility in her family. Her description of her family during the two interviews suggested that they had trouble talking about her mother’s illness and its consequences, including her mother’s heavy drinking.

In a typical case of a child’s magical thinking, Ms. Quinn believed that if she were more perfect, her mother would get better. As her mother’s health deteriorated, she heard girls at her Catholic high school talking about purging to lose weight. This was the early 1980s, when eating disorders were just starting to be talked about. Ms. Quinn said this weight-loss trick sounded like “the greatest idea I had ever heard.”

As it turned out, purging didn’t help Ms. Quinn lose weight, she said, but it did something more powerful: It gave her a sense of control over her out-of-control life and brought her a momentary relief from pain and stress. As she explained, though, the relief got briefer and briefer, which caused her to binge and purge more and more often, in an effort to recapture the feeling.

Although the physiology is not well understood, researchers have compared the experience of bulimia to that of drug addiction. Some research suggests that people with bulimia have brain abnormalities similar to those of people who suffer from cocaine or alcohol addiction. What Ms. Quinn described about the feeling of relief becoming briefer is what is known in drug addiction as building tolerance.

In my book, “Going Hungry,” one writer, Latria Graham, traced her bulimia in part to her parents’ fractious marriage. She was also a cutter. Cutting herself, she explained, offered her a form of relief from her roiling emotions like the relief from bingeing and purging.

(Interestingly, the family story in one of the book’s essays, “Hunger Striking,” by Maura Kelly, bears a strong resemblance to Ms. Quinn’s past: Irish Catholic family, mother dying of cancer, parents not telling daughter that mother is dying, daughter feeling to blame for mother’s illness and death.)

My own anorexia arose in a much less gothic context, out of more mundane conflicts. I first developed anorexia when I was 10. I had changed schools and was lonely and unhappy, and putting myself on a diet - though I was not fat - seemed like a sensible way to improve myself and perhaps fit in better. With the help of a doctor and a therapist, I regained weight by the time I entered high school (though not before missing my chance for a growth spurt).

I relapsed in my freshman year of college. The immediate trigger was performing in a play in which I was to appear in my underwear. But, on a deeper level, I was struggling with adapting to college and with my inchoate ambitions, for which I had not yet found a productive outlet. So the outlet I chose was starving myself. Being hungry sharpened my concentration and made me feel capable of great intellectual feats; soon I was addicted to it. In the long run, though, as my body wasted, the high gave way to depression. As in Ms. Quinn’s case, the decision to seek inpatient treatment in my junior year of college, as difficult as it was, was critical in helping me recover. Now, at 33, I have been healthy for many years. Although therapy helped, I feel as if my career as a journalist played as important a role, since it finally gave me the outlet that I had been seeking.

Ms. Quinn said that her need to be perfect drove her professionally, as well as contributing to her bulimia - and while she was still suffering from bulimia, her professional success was a solace.

“My mother had a clear message to Ellen and I that we were to succeed as women,” she told me, referring to herself and her sister. “And in the times in my life when I thought that the extent of my personal happiness might not be what I would have wanted, I always knew that I could be professionally successful.”

Over a long period, beginning with her time in rehab, she said, she let go of her need to be perfect, along with her guilt about her mother’s suffering and death. She said the final step in her healing was meeting Kim M. Catullo, who is now her wife.

Asked how that changed her professional life, she said: “It made my work more fun. It made me most of the time ease up on myself, not in how hard I work but in my frustration when things don’t work all the time.”