New York Led Region in Population Growth Since 2011, Census Shows

New York added more people since 2011 than all the other cities in the metropolitan area combined, according to a new analysis of census results released Thursday.

The city gained 67,000 people between 2011 and 2012, or .81 percent, a higher growth rate than all but two cities in the region with a population of 100,000 or more: Jersey City, 1.12 percent, and Stamford, .84 percent. But those cities grew by only 2,800 and 1,000, respectively. For the second consecutive year, the city grew faster than its suburbs.

New York’s gain of 147,000 since 2010, to more than 8.3 million, approached the 178,000 increase recorded in the entire decade from 2000 to 2010.

Like Boston, Los Angeles and Philadelphia, New York grew faster annually since 2010 than the annual rate during the previous decade.

Kenneth M. Johnson, senior demographer at the Carsey Instititute of the University of New Hampshire, attributed the spurt to fewer people leaving the city because of the lingering effects of the recession.

Among the region’s bigger cities, Buffalo, Hartford, Paterson, Rochester, Syracuse and Waterbury recorded declines in population.

An Artist’s Most Dynamic Creation Is a Place

Eric Michael Johnson for The New York Times The yard outside a warehouse in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, that has been transformed into housing and work space for artists.

Kellam Clark did not set out to build an artist colony. He set out to build a boat.

Mr. Clark was just out of college and filled with ambition when he planned to buy a dilapidated sailboat with five friends, find a warehouse big enough to repair it in, then become a famous artist, sail around the world, and teach schoolchildren philosophy and art via a satellite transmission along the way. That was supposed to happen in the span of a couple of months between 1999 and 2000.

Mr. Clark never became a famous artist, or sailed around the world, but he did manage to find a warehouse.

For the past 13 years he has poured his passion and ambition into a sprawling complex on Dean Street in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, transforming it from a moldy abandoned assembly shop into a hot spot for creativity.

“Everyone just assumed I knew how to build a loft, which I didn’t,” he said. “So it took forever, and I just lived in it.”

The industrial space Mr. Clark now calls home became a piece of art in itself, providing inspiration to the dozens of transient musicians, writers and creative types who drift through its vast and varied spaces every day.

Dean Street, as the building is called, is not a legal residence, according to city regulations, but that has not stopped its four bedrooms from filling up each night with friends and acquaintances of Mr. Clark, as well as a number of artists and travelers passing through New York.

On a recent Monday a small contingent gathered around the long, home-built wood kitchen table, smoking cigarettes, drinking gin and tonics and listening to 1920s-era jazz.

Eric Michael Johnson for The New York Times Roommates in the kitchen of the warehouse that has become an artist colony.

“The nature of most of the things I do are creative, and there’s something about being in four white walls that really puts a huge damper on trying to get in that mind-set,” said Tim Young, a 26-year-old songwriter who frequents the space. “Here you’re living in exactly the frame of mind you try to get to when you need to create something.”

The frame of mind cultivated at Dean Street did not come easily. Mr. Clark spent years living without heat and water, slowly fixing up the rented space. What he lacked in knowledge, he made up for in resourcefulness.

After landing a job as an exhibition installer at the Guggenheim Museum 12 years ago, Mr. Clark figured out a way to source many of the materials that now make up Dean Street: With a little finesse and a few free cups of coffee, he persuaded museum workers to help divert the museum’s trash to rental trucks he hired.

Now, many of the walls and shelves at Dean Street are made from the museum’s discarded wood pedestals. Mr. Clark’s most prized possession from the Guggenheim is the mesh wall separating the bathroom from the kitchen - it was part of a Frank Gehry sculpture that the museum parted with after an exhibition closed.

Dean Street toes a fine line between an artist’s and a hoarder’s paradise. One room is made entirely from the contents of a Dumpster Mr. Clark found down the street a few years ago. But according to its residents and frequent guests, the messiness of the space is what makes it so remarkable.

“We’re in a place with the inside of an artist’s brain across each wall,” said Foster Mickley, 27, a writer and photographer.

As Mr. Clark and his friends transformed the industrial space over the years, a transformation happened outside its walls as well. Crown Heights went from a crime-ridden, industrial neighborhood to a rapidly gentrifying area. Several similar warehouses on the same block as Mr. Clark’s have been converted into condominiums and offices, and now Mr. Clark predicts he will be evicted in the next few years.

But no one seems worried about leaving. To those who live in and pass through the complex, Dean Street has become more a state of mind than an actual space.

“No one can stay in one place forever, but this will be something I’ll never lose,” Mr. Young said. “I’ll be able to take a piece of Dean Street with me and keep that inside.”

Mr. Clark is less sentimental about his seemingly inevitable departure. He believes that with all the skills he learned from rehabilitating the warehouse, he will simply create a new Dean Street somewhere else.

“I’m a very project-oriented guy,” he said. “And I’ll be able to do the work faster next time.”

Eric Michael Johnson for The New York Times Kellam Clark has spent 13 years transforming the building into a haven for creative people.

Saturday Night Benefit Planned for Coney Island Mermaid Parade

Deidre Schoo for The New York Times The Coney Island Mermaid Parade in 2010.

What do Amanda Palmer, Abel Ferrara, Alt-Variety Magazine and Insectavora, the fire-eating tattooed lady, have in common? All of them will join forces on Saturday night at a fundraising benefit to support this year’s endangered Mermaid Parade in Coney Island.

Since 1983, the parade has transformed the Coney Island boardwalk into a honky-tonk beauty pageant of bikini-clad sea-females (of various genders). This year, it is scheduled for June 22 but because of rising costs and because the headquarters organizers, Coney Island USA â€" the folks who run the local circus sideshow â€" were badly damaged by Hurricane Sandy, the event is in jeopardy of being canceled.

At the beginning of May, the sideshow started a Kickstarter campaign with the hope of raising $100,000 for the parade. By the end of last week, they had received more than 80 percent of that sum.  To help them reach their goal, Ms. Palmer, a multi-media artist formerly of the punk-cabaret band the Dresden Dolls, announced that she would host the Saturday night benefit from 7 to 11 p.m., on May 25, at the Bowery Ballroom on Delancey Street.

“This parade means so much to the NYC performer community, and I’d be devastated to see it defeated and washed away,” Ms. Palmer wrote in a press release. “This night will be a beautiful collision of helping and celebration and I can’t wait to be among the people.” She added that she planned to show up in a mermaid outfit and “hopefully learn some mermaid-appropriate songs on the ukulele.”

Tickets are available at coneyisland.com. For more on the Kickstarter campaign, go to savemermaids.org.

Op-Doc: ‘Ode to Bike Sharing’

In this animation, a New Yorker looks forward to the city’s bike share program and reminisces about riding his bike when the city was very different. The back story of the video can be read here.

Zoo Chief’s First Tweet Stars a 650-Pound Tortoise

Hi everyone, here’s my first tweet to celebrate World Turtle Day! I am with our giant Aldabra tortoise Rocket. http://t.co/tNNY7r7qq4

â€" Jim Breheny (@JimBreheny) 23 May 13

James J. Breheny, director of the Bronx Zoo, is a self-described “dinosaur” when it comes to technology. “I’m an animal guy,” he said. “I’m not a techno guy.”

Yet as he makes his rounds of the zoo, the flagship institution of the Wildlife Conservation Society, Mr. Breheny often makes observations of mammals, birds and reptiles - both on public view and behind the scenes - that he would like to share. And so, on Thursday (World Turtle Day!) at noon, he sent his inaugural tweet, a photograph of one of his favorite animals, a 650-pound Aldabra tortoise named Rocket that the public will not get to see until early next year.

“We do a lot of conservation work with turtles and tortoises all over the world,” he said in a phone interview before his foray into the world of Twitter. “They’re really neat animals, but they are under enormous pressure from the pet trade and from hunters for food. ”

Mr. Breheny, who also oversees the management and exhibition of animal collections at the Central Park Zoo, Prospect Park Zoo, Queens Zoo and New York Aquarium, said he believed that social media like Twitter could enhance the public’s understanding of the conservation society’s programs and mission. “As I go around the zoo, everybody seems to be really connected electronically and digitally,” he said. “I realized that it can be a valuable tool.”

Once he gets used to expressing himself in 140 characters, Mr. Breheny, using the handle @JimBreheny, hopes to post a couple of times a day. While he insists that he has no favorites in the collection, he hinted that coming tweets are likely to include vignettes from the giraffe exhibit, which he said “looks spectacular right now,” as well as the eagle aviary.

As for his first tweet, Mr. Breheny, a lifelong lover of tortoises and turtles, said that Rocket was a natural subject. Rocket, who joined the Bronx Zoo about two months ago from the Tulsa Zoo (Aldabra tortoises are native to the Seychelles Islands in the Indian Ocean), is thought to be between 80 and 100 years old. He will make his debut next spring in a new komodo dragon exhibit scheduled to open in the fall.

“He’s a big boy,” Mr. Breheny said of Rocket. “He’s intelligent. And he loves to be scratched.”

Bronx Tour Company Drops Pitch to See a Real Ghetto

Screengrab An archived version of a page from Real Bronx Tours’ Web site that offers tourists “a ride through a real New York City ‘GHETTO.’”

A company called Real Bronx Tours is no longer offering adventurous visitors to New York “a ride through a real New York City ‘GHETTO’” - at least on its Web site.

On Monday, after an article on Sunday in The New York Post depicted a tour guide inviting passengers to gawk at people waiting outside a church food pantry and marvel at a park once famous for crime, the reference on the company’s site to ghetto tourism (see archived 2012 version) instead promised “a taste of the real Boogie Down Bronx.”

The Post’s article described the guide on the $45-a-ticket tour, Lynn Battaglia, pointing out St. Mary’s Park in the South Bronx to her audience of mainly white Europeans and Australians and advising them, if they entered it, to “walk with a New Yorker” because even though it had been cleaned up, “maybe someone would pick your pocket” there.

The fallout from the article continued on Monday, as the Bronx borough president, Ruben Diaz Jr., and City Councilwoman Melissa Mark-Viverito wrote an open letter to the man listed as the company’s owner, Michael Myers, informing him, “We are sickened by the despicable way in which you portray the great borough to tourists.”

The letter continued, “We strongly urge you to stop profiting off of a tour that misrepresents the Bronx as a haven for poverty and crime, while mocking everything from our landmarks to the less fortunate members of our community who are availing themselves of food assistance programs.”

A call and an e-mail to the offices of Real Bronx Tours were not immediately returned.

Over the years, the tours, which also go past landmarks like Yankee Stadium and the Edgar Allan Poe Cottage, have received mixed but largely favorable reviews - an average of 3.5 stars out of 5 â€" on Trip Advisor.

“A good and safe way to discover the Bronx,” Belgian_couple_2011 wrote in 2011.

Last year, Lawrence G. of Silver Spring, Md., wrote: “This tour really gives you a treat. It exposes you to a different part of the city. We had Lynn as our tour guide and she ROCKED it. Thank you for a great tour.”

Killing of Gay Man Spurs Rally

Protesters of antigay violence held a march in Greenwich Village on Monday that ended at the site where Mark Carson, 32, was fatally shot early Saturday.

The police filed murder and weapons charges on Sunday against Elliot Morales, 33, who was arraigned in Manhattan Criminal Court, also on Sunday. The police commissioner, Raymond W. Kelly, has characterized the shooting as a hate crime.

Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times A rally against antigay violence was held on Monday in Greenwich Village, with a march ending at the site where Mark Carson was shot and killed early Saturday.

Robert Stolarik for The New York Times Jacqueline Bumpars said on Monday that her son Mark Carson, 32, “was smart, funny, came through when you needed him.” Ms. Bumpars, with Lonnie Barber, Mr. Carson’s stepfather, said, “Mark wouldn’t hurt a fly, but he can fight like a lion.”

Victor J. Blue for The New York Times Marchers went from the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Community Center, on West 13th Street, to the site where Mark Carson was fatally shot, on Avenue of the Americas and West Eighth Street. Elliot Morales, 33, has been arrested and charged with murder in Mr. Carson’s death.

Friends in a Harlem Bar

Dear Diary:

We perch on barstools. A young man in a baseball cap approaches.

“What’s your name?” he asks.

“Pearl,” my friend purrs in her Southern drawl.

The man glances at her neck. “How come you’re not wearin’ one, then?”

She flutters a hand to her chest and leans in. “Honey, I don’t need no pearl. I am the Pearl.”

He walks away and I smile. My friend is a Texas transplant who survived the segregated South of the 1950s. She’s lived in West Harlem for more years than I’ve been alive and, boy, has she seen changes. I’m certain the sass she packs has remained a constant and it’s what moved me to call her my “Harlem Mama” in the Christmas card I sent.

The clock strikes 2 a.m. My roommate and I each grab an arm of our Southern belle and escort her out of the bar. It’s begun to rain and we huddle close together. We slosh down Frederick Douglass Boulevard, two white girls sandwiching a former Black Panther.

“Girls,” she says, “I’m going to tell you what my mama never told me. You are sitting on a gold mine and you don’t let anyone take that away from you.”

She knows her value and wants us to recognize ours. Black gold or white, it shimmers the same on foggy city streets.

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Rescue Team at a Beach Tries to Save the Summer

Michael Nagle for The New York Times Stephen Arthur, left, and Manjari Doxey cleaned up at Fort Tilden on Sunday.

All along the Rockaway Peninsula in Queens, where Hurricane Sandy had laid waste, workers and officials are rushing to restore beaches in time for Memorial Day weekend. But while Rockaway Beach and Jacob Riis Park are slated to reopen for swimming on Saturday, one of the peninsula’s most remote - and, lately, most beloved - beaches will remain closed.

It is Fort Tilden, an expanse of sand west of Riis beach set among abandoned World War II-era fortifications, dilapidated barracks, winding paths through thickets of black pines and tall dunes topped with thick tufts of beach grass and seaside goldenrod.

The storm destroyed the dunes and left detritus scattered across the beach, leading the National Park Service, which controls Fort Tilden, to announce in February that it would not reopen this summer at all.

But those who feel a strong connection to Fort Tilden were not giving up. On Sunday, about 20 of them gathered for a volunteer cleanup effort that they hoped might lead to a speedier reopening. Some arrived by bicycle, others on a rented school bus. As a chilly rain misted across the beach they pulled on work gloves and plastic ponchos, then spread out to pick up debris.

The trip was organized by Manjari Doxey, 30, from Williamsburg, Brooklyn, who said that she spent little time at the beach while growing up in San Diego but fell in love with Fort Tilden, which she called “sacred,” the first time she visited, about three years ago.

“In New York City, it’s so hard to get close to nature,” she said Sunday morning as she rode the school bus to the beach. “But this beach is a wild, natural space.”

Michael Nagle for The New York Times Unlike some other Rockaway beaches, Fort Tilden is not to open for swimming this summer.

After Ms. Doxey heard that the beach was not expected to open, she said, she contacted park officials and found them amenable to assistance. So she spread the word that she was looking for people to join a series of trips to help clean the beach or move sand in an effort to restore the protective dunes.

Ms. Doxey said she hoped that her efforts might result in at least part of the beach opening at some point this summer. But Daphne Yun, a spokeswoman for the National Park Service, said Fort Tilden would not open again until 2014 because the dunes must be replaced and pieces of rebar and concrete had to be removed.

“There is some major cleaning that has to happen there,” she said.

On Sunday, the volunteers were greeted by a ranger who cautioned them not to try to move anything that looked dangerous. Below a gray sky, whitecap waves surged against the sand. Some familiar features of the beach remained. Old wooden pilings were still rooted in the sand and jetties of jumbled rock still extended into the Atlantic, like skeletal fingers pointing toward distant shores.

Many of the volunteers, however, found it difficult to orient themselves without the dunes.

“Before, they were like walls of sand that you walked past,” said Jason Maas, 33, an artist from Red Hook, Brooklyn. “Now all of that is gone; it’s a little bit of a shock.”

Mr. Maas and the others began combing the beach and picking up the flotsam that had accumulated, including roof shingles, beer cans, nail-studded beams and pieces of bright blue plastic foam encrusted with barnacles.

Michael Nagle for The New York Times As the whitecaps surged and the rain fell, Paige Teamey hauled away debris.

Lloyd Hicks found an orange laundry basket and turned it into a trash container. Paige Teamey had a similar idea, using a frayed piece of white fabric to haul a squarish black tub.

A walk along the shoreline showed the extent of the storm damage. Parts of a concrete roadway that had run behind the dunes was shattered into slabs that formed a patchwork path alongside a tangle of bent and uprooted trees.

But the storm also revealed parts of the park’s military past that had previously been obscured. A concrete pillbox that had been screened by trees stood visible. Further along the shore, a tunnel festooned with faded splashes of graffiti ran beneath an eroded hillock.

Down the beach, Ms. Doxey hefted an odd piece of debris, a long bamboo pole topped with a hook. Someone called it a harpoon. Somebody else likened it to Neptune’s trident.

In midafternoon, the volunteers made their last debris run, pushing a wheelbarrow weighed down with beams and boards through the sand and helping to load their cargo into the back of a pickup truck operated by rangers. Several volunteers said they would return to continue the cleanup.

“This place has been totally transformed by the storm,” said one of them, Stephen Arthur. “We can’t let it end this way.”

Michael Nagle for The New York Times Joshua Benzwie carried a broken-off traffic sign.

This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: May 22, 2013

An earlier version of this article misspelled the given name of a volunteer at Fort Tilden. He is Stephen Arthur, not Steven. The error was repeated in a picture caption.

A version of this article appeared in print on 05/22/2013, on page A22 of the NewYork edition with the headline: Trying to Save a Beach From a Lost Summer .

Landmarks Commission Votes to Preserve Bialystoker Building

Christopher D. Brazee/Landmarks Preservation Commission The Bialystoker Center for Nursing and Rehabilitation building.

The city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission voted unanimously on Tuesday to preserve the Bialystoker Center for Nursing and Rehabilitation, a nine-story Art Deco building on the Lower East Side at Clinton Street and East Broadway.

In 1929, when the neighborhood teemed with Jewish immigrants, the Bialystoker building was erected to provide the aged a place to receive care. It served that function from its completion in 1931 until it closed in 2011.

The stone-carved lettering above the entrance is done in a faux-Hebrew font and bears the name of the town in Poland from which its original tenants came. Two-tone masonry decorates the stepped tower that was once among the tallest structures on the area’s tenement-clustered blocks.

Christopher D. Brazee/Landmarks Preservation Commission The carved lettering above the doorway is one of the building’s most distinctive features.

Hearings on whether to protect the building drew large, emotional crowds, with many speakers testifying to its cultural significance in the neighborhood.

“It’s one of the most significant reminders of the Jewish community on the Lower East Side,” the commission’s chairman, Robert B. Tierney, said in a statement. “It’s as important culturally as it is architecturally.”

The building’s future use remains to be decided, although developers have expressed interest in converting it into condominiums.

Many City Voters Say Weiner Shouldn’t Run for Mayor

An increasing number of New York City voters do not support the prospect of former Representative Anthony D. Weiner jumping into the election for mayor, according to the latest survey from the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute.

The poll, taken before Mr. Weiner’s candidacy was announced by video early Wednesday, found that his possible candidacy was given a thumbs-down by 49 percent of voters, while 38 percent approved. White voters were especially critical, with nearly 2 to 1 saying he should not run. Women were also turned off by the idea, with 52 percent saying he should not run and 35 percent saying he should.

Just a month ago, the same question yielded more-mixed results, with 44 percent of voters disapproving of the general idea and 41 percent approving.

Since Mr. Weiner resigned two years ago amid a scandal over his lewd online behavior, he has been carefully trying to orchestrate a return to politics, but the polling numbers suggest that he has not been as successful as he might have hoped. He has spent the last month or so dominating much of the coverage about the mayor’s race, thanks to a long and intimate profile of him in The New York Times Magazine and a series of television interviews.

In a crowded field of Democrats, Mr. Weiner had the support of 15 percent of registered Democrats, followed by William C. Thompson Jr., a former comptroller, and Bill de Blasio, the public advocate, each with 10 percent.

The front-runner remains Christine C. Quinn, the City Council speaker, but her support has eroded steadily in recent months, from a high of 37 percent at the end of February (when Mr. Weiner was not included in the list of possible candidates) to 25 percent today.

A candidate must win 40 percent of the primary vote in order to advance to the general election; if not, a run-off would be held for the top two finishers.

Of course, the primary is still four months away, and most of the candidates are not expected to start running television advertising for several months, which could change the dynamic significantly.

One positive sign for Ms. Quinn is that most New Yorkers still strongly approve of her performance as speaker, as well as of several initiatives supported by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, with whom she has sought a close alliance. By contrast, John C. Liu, the comptroller, has seen his job disapproval numbers shoot up to 33 percent in the latest poll from 22 percent just a month ago, following the conviction of two former associates in a campaign fund-raising scheme.

Quinnipiac conducted the telephone poll of 1,082 New York City voters â€" including 701 registered Democrats â€" between May 14 and 20. The margin of sampling error is plus or minus three percentage points for all respondents, and plus or minus four percentage points for Democrats.

The Clothesline Towers of Bushwick

Nicole Gates Anderson

Dear Diary:

I stretched out on a hammock in a friend’s backyard in Bushwick. Music and voices crackled from the streets, and a tattered American flag rippled just beyond the fence. The hammock was secured to a wall on one side and a clothesline tower on the other. Ivy crept up in and around the metal bars of the tower.

Backyards in Brooklyn are still populated with these tall, latticed structures, even though clotheslines rarely extend from them now. Those new to the borough often ask what purpose these towers serve.

In Carroll Gardens, where I grew up, clotheslines stretched from the back of nearly every house to these free-standing towers. I would come home from school and watch pants, shirts and socks dangle in the air above lawn chairs and flower beds until one of our neighbors would eventually stick her head out the window, extend her arms and reel in the line.

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What Do You Think About Weiner’s Mayoral Run?

In a video announcing his mayoral run, Anthony D. Weiner acknowledged that “I made some big mistakes, and I know I let a lot of people down.”

His lewd online behavior and his initial denial to voters eroded trust and led to his resignation from Congress in 2011. In the video, Mr. Weiner asked for a second chance, saying he had “learned some tough lessons.”

Does Mr. Weiner’s Twitter scandal affect your opinion of him as a New York mayoral candidate? Share your thoughts in the comment box below or post on Twitter using the hashtag #NYTMayor.

Brusque Manners in the Jewelry Department

Dear Diary:

When I first moved to New York from the Midwest, I was a little taken aback by the city’s pace and slightly rude demeanor, but I quickly learned that brusque manners are merely a disguise for efficiency.

To illustrate, soon after my arrival, I found myself in the jewelry repair department on the eighth floor of Macy’s, where several customers were awaiting service. When my turn finally came around, I explained to the harried clerk that I needed a battery replacement for my watch.

Without looking up, he barked, “Name?” I started to spell my last name, but he abruptly cut me off before I could finish, saying with exasperation, “Too long!” and handed me a ticket for pickup.

The letters “MARQ” were written on the top of the ticket.

Now I know how the immigrants at Ellis Island must have felt.

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