Honoring Those Who Served at Their Sides

Joshua Bright for The New York Times American Legion members on Northern Boulevard in Queens on Monday in the Little Neck-Douglaston Memorial Day Parade.

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After Chronicling History, SoHo Artist Is Losing a Vantage Point

In 1990, James Wentzy â€" a 38-year-old struggling artist, darkroom wizard and self-described SoHo homesteader â€" learned he had H.I.V. Faced with his own mortality, he decided reluctantly to do something he hated. Work.

“I’ll be dead real soon,” he figured. “No later than the end of ’90. I’ll work real hard so that when I die, it’ll be a relief.”

David W. Dunlap/The New York Times Some of Mr. Wentzy’s tapes.

With that, he began videotaping members of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, or Act Up, and others as they fought popular indifference and official neglect in the face of the AIDS epidemic. He recorded artists who were living with H.I.V. and AIDS. He produced more than 150 AIDS-related programs for public-access cable television and was the subject of a documentary, “Books of James.”

What Mr. Wentzy didn’t do was die. So his tape collection grew and grew and grew into an archive about 600 hours long, or 25 entire days from beginning to end. There were incendiary moments, like when protesters hurled the ashes of AIDS casualties over the White House fence, and quiet ones, like when the poet Jaime Manrique recalled visiting with the writer Reinaldo Arenas, who was suffering from AIDS, the day before Mr. Arenas killed himself.

“James Wentzy has been the great, tireless chronicler of the grassroots response to the AIDS crisis for over 20 years,” Jim Hubbard, a co-founder of MIX, the New York Queer Experimental Film Festival, wrote for an exhibition at the Fales Library of New York University.

In Mr. Wentzy’s basement apartment at 12 Wooster Street, where he has lived since February 1982, he created a wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling video library, editing suite and impromptu museum of gay life in New York City, just outside a darkroom and processing room that would have been the envy of many black-and-white photographers. Almost all the construction materials were salvaged from within the building, which was once the headquarters of the Durbrow & Hearne Manufacturing Company, makers of sewing and embroidering machines and needles.

James Wentzy The basement of 12 Wooster Street as Mr. Wentzy found it in 1982

Three things pushed him to keep going, Mr. Wentzy said. One: motivating others to get active in the movement. Two: educating the public about why Act Up and its allies were so angry and impatient. Three: preserving a living history of the often-tumultuous campaign against AIDS.

“I had no control over the first two,” he said, but added that he knew he had that third one nailed.

The future of Mr. Wentzy’s archive seems assured, with its recent acquisition by the New York Public Library. “James Wentzy has made a major contribution as an activist and director,” said Jason Baumann, the library’s coordinator of collection assessment. “His materials in the library’s collections are essential for scholars and documentarians studying AIDS activism.”

Mr. Wentzy’s own future, however, is anything but certain.

David W. Dunlap/The New York Times Mr. Wentzy in his living room.

He has depended for 31 years on the kindness of his landlord, D. James Dee, a photographer of fine art who does business as the SoHo Photographer. They struck a deal in 1982 under which Mr. Wentzy would process and print Mr. Dee’s large-format black-and-white negatives in return for rent-free quarters in the basement. The arrangement has persisted, long beyond the near-obsolescence of film, to this day.

But Mr. Dee is retiring to Florida. And though he will still own the ground floor and basement of 12 Wooster Street, he has leased it to the jewelry designer Melissa Joy Manning, as an office, design studio and wholesale showroom, for 10 years, beginning Aug. 1. “They want to use the space they’re paying for,” Mr. Dee said, not an unreasonable position for a tenant to take.

So Mr. Wentzy, 60, must move out. And soon. He does not know yet where he’ll land â€" Germany, Thailand, Japan, Jersey City, Oakland, Calif., or out in the woods. He’ll be leaving a city much different than the one that welcomed him in 1976 from Brookings, S.D., with a seeming promise that he could do anything if he stuck to it long enough.

He will be dismantling a place suffused with memory, smelling of old wood, darkroom chemistry and cigarette smoke. (Mr. Wentzy rolls his own). He’ll be packing up tools of long-ago trades, like a sample book of Durbrow & Hearne needles and a glass case full of dead videotape cameras, along with posters, leaflets and buttons that called people to long-ago battles.

“Act Up was one of the few communities that got down to fight,” Mr. Wentzy said. “I haven’t used the word community without putting quotes around it since the mid-’90s. I think we lost the war on AIDS. There is no community. Now it’s, ‘Good luck, you’re on your own.’ ”

Unlike many tales of real estate displacement, Mr. Wentzy’s story has no villain. In a way, it doesn’t even have a victim, he acknowledged. “After 31 years, I can’t start crying, ‘Oh, I’ve been so lucky and now I’m not,’ ” he said.

“And I can’t jump out the window with any satisfaction.”

David W. Dunlap/The New York Times A photo of the artist Tehching Hsieh at the front door of 12 Wooster Street in 1982, next to a tag from Durbrow & Hearne.

Farewell, Sammy the Deli Man

Victor Kerlow

Dear Diary:

My heart is broken. How could he have done this to me?

His name is Sammy and I met him two years ago. Each weekday morning I would leave my apartment and take the subway to 28th Street. Like all good New Yorkers, I would avoid eye contact. I speak to no one. No one speaks to me.

When I surfaced, I would walk to the corner cafe. It has a buffet, multiple racks of snacks, a soup bar and a deli department. That is where I met Sammy â€" standing behind the deli counter, dressed in snow white, eager to serve.

Shortly after I entered the cafe, we would make eye contact (my first of the day). His dark brown eyes and my light brown would connect deeply for a nanosecond before I got my coffee. After pouring myself a cup of Colombian coffee, I would walk back to the counter and Sammy. He would hand me my whole-wheat toast lovingly wrapped in foil, and would smile. I would say, “Thank you,” my first words of the day. Sammy and me â€" five days a week for two years.

Until last month. On a Monday morning, I entered the cafe as usual. I searched behind the deli counter for Sammy’s eyes. I walked around the cafe looking for him. I went back to the deli and ordered whole-wheat toast with peanut butter, and went to get my coffee. When I returned, I asked the man where Sammy was.

“He doesn’t work here anymore,” he said.

I asked where had he gone. He didn’t know.

Exhausted by all of this early-morning social interaction, I walked unsteadily to my office. My equilibrium had been shaken.

Sammy â€" you could have left me a note.

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.

Farewell, Sammy the Deli Man

Victor Kerlow

Dear Diary:

My heart is broken. How could he have done this to me?

His name is Sammy and I met him two years ago. Each weekday morning I would leave my apartment and take the subway to 28th Street. Like all good New Yorkers, I would avoid eye contact. I speak to no one. No one speaks to me.

When I surfaced, I would walk to the corner cafe. It has a buffet, multiple racks of snacks, a soup bar and a deli department. That is where I met Sammy - standing behind the deli counter, dressed in snow white, eager to serve.

Shortly after I entered the cafe, we would make eye contact (my first of the day). His dark brown eyes and my light brown would connect deeply for a nanosecond before I got my coffee. After pouring myself a cup of Colombian coffee, I would walk back to the counter and Sammy. He would hand me my whole-wheat toast lovingly wrapped in foil, and would smile. I would say, “Thank you,” my first words of the day. Sammy and me - five days a week for two years.

Until last month. On a Monday morning, I entered the cafe as usual. I searched behind the deli counter for Sammy's eyes. I walked around the cafe looking for him. I went back to the deli and ordered whole-wheat toast with peanut butter, and went to get my coffee. When I returned, I asked the man where Sammy was.

“He doesn't work here anymore,” he said.

I asked where had he gone. He didn't know.

Exhausted by all of this early-morning social interaction, I walked unsteadily to my office. My equilibrium had been shaken.

Sammy - you could have left me a note.

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.

An Urban Farm Thrives Again in Lower Manhattan

Ángel Franco/The New York Times Some 2,000 students from more than 30 schools have now signed up to plant, water and tend crops.

“It's hard for first-grade fingers,” Camilla Hammer explained. “We tell them it's like putting sprinkles on a cupcake.”

The first-grade fingers in question were about to plant “lettuce mix” seeds - mustard, kale and arugula - at the urban farm at the Battery, a carefully tended acre in the shadow of tall office buildings in Lower Manhattan. All of the children had their own space in a bed of dark, rich-looking soil, but the remarkable thing was that the farm was there at all. Hurricane Sandy did not wash it away.

The storm flung the topsoil this way and that, and what was not blown away was soaked in salty floodwater. The Battery Conservancy, the nonprofit group that runs the farm, called horticulturists in New Orleans to find out what they had learned during Hurricane Katrina in 2005. “They said, ‘Soak, soak, soak,'” recalled Warrie Price, the conservancy group's founder and president. “They said: ‘Turn the water back on. Get the salt at the roots.'”

The sprinklers had been shut off for the season, but plumbers were called in to make them function again. Even so, Ms. Price said on Tuesday that about 50 percent of the plant material had been lost. She said that replacements (and new topsoil, where it was needed) were purchased with $50,000 in donations raised during the winter.

So the farm, on the State Street side of the park, is once again home to organic vegetables, fruits and grains.

And Zelda, the wild turkey who has lived there since 2003, still toddles by. The storm did not do her in, either.

This is small-scale agriculture, bigger than growing plants in a window box, big enough for wheelbarrows, but not big enough for a tractor. And the look is not that of “American Gothic.” Battery Conservancy staff members wear T-shirts and jeans, not coveralls. If anyone posed beside an upside-down pitchfork, there would be skyscrapers in the background, not a small white house.

Soon, there will be bicyclists in the background; the conservancy plans to have bicycle paths through the park.

Ángel Franco/The New York Times Schoolchildren from Public School 397 planted greens.

The urban farm opened in 2011 with Ms. Price's group describing it as the first serious planting at the Battery since the 17th century. The idea for a modern-day farm began with the environmental club at Millennium High School on Broad Street, a short walk from the park. Education has become a focus for the conservancy: some 2,000 students from more than 30 schools have now signed up to plant, water and tend the crops.

“For the families of those 2,000,” Ms. Price said, “we are not just a tourist park, as we are for the thousands who walk by during the day. The continued residentialization of Lower Manhattan means there are people in a live-and-work environment here.”

As the temperature soared last week, some urban farmers were planting, and some were already harvesting. On Tuesday, students from Public School 3, the Charrette Elementary School on Hudson Street, planted bibb lettuce. Students from Public School/Intermediate School 276 in Battery Park City harvested turnips, radishes and pea tendrils.

And the first graders, from Public School 397, also known as the Spruce Street School, prepared the soil with watering cans made from yogurt cups with holes they had punched in the bottoms. “We told them they're rainmakers,” Ms. Hammer said. “We used to use a watering can, but they'd fight over who got the watering can. And this uses less water.”

Anna Ellis, the conservancy's farm educator, said that digging and planting makes an impression on schoolchildren. She said one class that had been to the farm was later assigned to do a how-to guide. The children could choose any object they wanted.

“They all did how to plant a carrot,” she said - something they had learned at the farm a few days earlier.

And how do you plant a carrot? On this farm, children are taught to use their fingers as measuring tools, she said. “They have to know how far down to dig the hole - down to the knuckle in your pointer finger,” she said, “and every carrot is three fingers apart, using their fingers as a ruler.”

What\'s Your Favorite Joke From the New Season of ‘Arrested Development\'?

Sam Urdank for Netflix Jason Bateman, right, with Jeffrey Tambor in the new season of “Arrested Development.”

“There's always money in the banana stand.”

“You're gonna get some hop-ons.”

“I've made a huge mistake.”

Self-referential one-liners like these three uttered by various “Arrested Development” characters are some of the show's most powerful currency. Since its debut in 2003 on Fox, fans of the cult comedy have been repeating these and others like secret passwords required for admission to a select club. When a person is quick with a “banana stand” joke, it can be presumed they're a fellow traveler. It also probably doesn't hurt if the phrase is mounted in their hallway on a needlepoint.

The return of “Arrested Development” early this morning on Netflix is likely to provide new one-liners for the show's army of aficionados to repeat to one another, transform into Internet memes and print on T-shirts. The New York Times wants to know: Which jokes on the new season of “Arrested Development” will become one-liners that you can't resist using in quips at friends or writing apropos of nothing on Twitter and Facebook?

Share your favorite new “Arrested Development” one-liner in the comments section below, or send us a message on Twitter using the hashtag #TellNYT. We'll gather up some of the results and share them here in the days ahead.