Angry protester chanting outside the Cornell Club. Photo: Mohamed AlShaaban/NY City Lens

As many New Yorkers rushed home to escape the 30 degree weather Tuesday night, Juan Pagan stood on the sidewalk on 42^ndstreet between Madison and Fifth Avenue, chanting in anger.

The target of Pagan’s ire:  Michelle Rhee, the founder and CEO of the “Student First” movement, which pushes for better education by getting rid of teachers that aren’t good enough and redirecting funds from schools that aren’t making the cut.

Over 40 parents, teachers, and students joined Pagan outside the Cornell club in a protest organized by New Yorkers for Great Public Schools (NY-GPS), a city wide coalition, to protest a private book signing for Michelle Rhee’s new memoir ‘Radical, Fighting to Put Students First’, which came out earlier on Tuesday.

“Rhee is very right-winged,” said Porsche Armstrong, one of the protesters. “Her money making-policies are harmful to our children in the public education system and she continues to push for failure.”

The former chancellor for Public Schools in D.C., Rhee brings together her personal life story and her plan for improving America’s public schools in single manifesto. But, according to the Washington Post reporter who covered her tenure as D.C. school chancellor, Bill Turque, the book fell short of mentioning some of the stories used by Rhee in her campaigns that were challenged as misleading or untrue.

The demonstrators in Midtown were angered by the book launch and signing. “This issue impacts real people,” said Josh Hyman, a NY-GPS member. “A few people get to go to an invite only book signing in private club and ignore this gathering.This is evidence that those behind StudentsFirst continue to push for failure”

Protester holding a sign saying “Radical Right Winger” outside the Cornell Club on Tuesday Night. Photo: Mohamed Al-Shaaban/NY City Lens

According to NY-GPS, Mayor Michael Bloomberg has closed down more than 140 public   schools in the last 12 years. The same survey showed that 60 percentof the new elementary and middle schools he replaced them with were actually performing worse.

In a statement to NYC Lens, Erin Shaw, the spokeswoman for StudentsFirst said, “It’s unfortunate that union bosses spend their day attacking Michelle instead of having a constructive conversation about why our current education system is failing our kids.”

The Parent’s Rhee-port card, as organizers dubbed the protest, was an open mic night for concerned parents and teachers to vent out. They were cheered on with the crowd’s signature chant, heard from blocks away: “Rhee, Rhee,Rhee get out of NYC.”

Kilgannon pauses for a second outside Harry Theodore’s apartment building. Photo: Bethan McKernan/NY City Lens

Corey Kilgannon used his knuckles to rap out a tune on the door of a first floor apartment near Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx. “Harry!” he called, to no answer. As other residents appeared in the hallway of the building, Kilgannon peppered them with inquiries. But no one knew whether Harry Theodore was still in the hospital, or if he’d moved out of the apartment altogether. “Oh, the dog man?” One woman replied. “I haven’t seen him in a while.”

This isn’t a usual workday for Kilgannon – but then, no day really is. As the writer of the New York Times’ Character Study column, he can end up on different sides of the city every day, tracking down the people who make New York the capricious, dynamic city it is. Glamorous Brooklynite funeral directors, 52-year old prostitutes still in the game, and the infamous man who wanders around Union Square with a cat on his head are among those who have been featured over the years. Today Kilgannon is looking up Harry Theodore, the subject of a story back in 1999.

“He was this amazing guy. He was homeless, but he had something like 15 little pointer dogs, you know, worth a lot of money. You’d see him down on 7th Avenue going through the garbage of restaurants looking for the finest ham hocks for these beautiful dogs, barking stuff at them in Greek,” Kilgannon said. “He resurfaced a few weeks ago. He was old and ill then, and I heard he was still alive, and he still had the dogs, and I couldn’t fucking believe it. I needed to know.”

Today was not a lucky day; Harry was not around. “Every day is a possible success, every day is a possible failure,” Kilgannon said. On the way here from the New York Times building in Times Square he admitted that he was in a bad mood. He doesn’t go to the offices very often, but it was not the office that was bothering him. “It’s the guy I wrote up yesterday,” he explained. Sunday’s column featured Isaiah Richardson Jr., a saxophonist specializing in songs and anthems from around the world who makes a lot of money playing for tourists outside the Metropolitan Museum. Richardson was unhappy that his profile hadn’t featured, among other things, his classical clarinet training in France. “I was completely straight with him about the story. It’s really frustrating,” Kilgannon said. “I don’t think about people in column inches but not everyone’s a book.”

Older folks make for better profiles, he said, but finding good people for the column can be difficult, even in a city of eight million people. “It’s hard. Hard to engage someone properly. With characters it’s about what they say.”

Kilgannon, 45, is from tiny Massapequa on Long Island, but has been in the city long enough to know a unique New Yorker when he meets one. He moved to the city as a Columbia freshman and has been here ever since, settling on the Upper West Side with his wife and daughter. “The city was different back then: it was more dangerous, less friendly. “When I moved here, New York wasn’t where middle class people wanted to be. It was a place ruled by the streets,” he said. Now, questing after stories in a grubby dark blue LT Malibu, Kilgannon is the one in control. He navigated the trip from Harry Theodore’s building to the Whitestone Bridge with ease, no GPS system on the dashboard or iPhone in his lap (“Do you have to automate everything?”).

Kilgannon describes himself as old-school: he started out in the mailroom at the New York Times in his mid-twenties, getting to know the staff and the paper bit by bit until he could pitch stories and was eventually entrusted with reporting as a staff writer. “I used to do day stories. I made my living doing front page stories,” he said. “There used to be a lot more deaths to report then. There was a buzz to it. These days I would probably say fuck that; those stories, sometimes they’re full of air. The lead is sexy but the story isn’t there. Journalism is all-consuming and with my personality, it’s never enough.”

Sitting in the basement food hall of Golden Mall on Flushing’s Main Street, Jeffrey Singer, a friend of Kilgannon, described him as “amphibious” in pursuit of stories: in a literal sense, the pair of them almost ended up stranded in Far Rockaway during Hurricane Sandy. Kilgannon shrugged off the praise, claiming he has always thought of himself as miserable.

Kilgannon’s sense of humor is certainly dark. He said, grinning, that he likes to pretend the embroidered detail on the pocket of his thrift store jacket, featuring a bloody-beaked mother eagle and her brood, is a family crest. But in more than 2,000 articles for the paper, you’d be hard pressed to find a trace of cynicism in his writing. “I don’t think it hurts to be emotionally honest with your subject,” he said.  “What I write is an indicator to whole lives.”

A lot of Kilgannon’s day is spent reporting on the road. Photo: Bethan McKernan/NY City Lens

On the way to meet Singer in Flushing, Kilgannon eased off the gas pedal to detour through the iron wilderness of Willets Point. There are no sidewalks here and the space between the auto repair shops and scrap yards is nothing but muddy potholes; the car bounced violently as he waved to acquaintances. He pointed out one woman inspecting the open hood of a car. “I fucking mined this place to the hilt,” he said. “See her over there? I profiled her. Is that… look at that! Kilgannon slammed on the brakes. “They’re cooking tortillas on a carburetor. I gotta take a photo of that,” he said as he jumped out of the car, the rest of his sentence muffled by the noise of the engine and his bright white sneakers a blur beyond the still-open car door.

Mission accomplished, Kilgannon clambered back into the driver’s seat, chuckling to himself. He thrust his camera into a pants pocket before balancing a BlackBerry between his ear and shoulder, fastening his seatbelt and performing a left hand turn onto the Van Wyck Expressway, all at the same time.

Speeding past the yachts on the waterfront, Kilgannon recalled sailing his father’s boat from Long Island to Manhattan last summer. For a week he spent the long summer days mooring up in search of stories, and nights on deck in a sleeping bag.  “I’m an outdoors kind of guy,” he said. “I grew up not far from here but it’s a whole different place.”

But for Kilgannon New York is organic in its own way. “This city is like a big tree. You have to grab it and shake it to do my job,” he said. “You don’t know what you’re going to find, but you shake it until something falls down.”

Slideshow: Manna of Life Visit on Jan. 5, 2013 from Jefferson Mok on Vimeo.

VIDEO:ProfilePalombo from NY City Lens on Vimeo.

By Pierce Gibson Crosby   Ι    Updated January 14, 2013

There are common tactics for Wall Street traders to pass the latest headlines to their cohorts – whether it is an underreported quarterly earnings statement or the Federal Reserve’s latest round of liquidity puts in the mortgage markets.

The problem for the average Main Street consumer is that this information loop stops in the hands of those few powerful traders, CFO’s or hedge fund managers.

But could the information game be changing? Imagine you, a small time day-trader had real-time access to over 140 thousand people who – chances are – know more than you do about the particular options market for the Euro to US Dollar.

As far as ‘going pro’ is concerned, platforms are now opening new avenues for the small time trader to maximize his or her returns, by following the moves of the professionals who they trade alongside. These portals lower barriers to entry exponentially compared to ten years ago when a professional third-party broker was responsible for executing each trade.

Cyprus-based eToro is one such an online trading brokerage that boasts this precise volume of users, with 305K active users in 2012, and 2.5M registered total on the platform.

“Our goal is to reach 1 million active investors within in the next 18 months.” Said Alon Lavitan, Head of Strategic Marketing for eToro.

So what? Well, imagine Facebook, but instead of the everyday dog picture postings, news feeds are replaced with real-time positions being placed by 305K traders.

Now that, is a community.

The eToro platform is just one of the notable standouts in a handful of new “social investment network” communities. Others exist in similar size, such as Ayondo, ZuluTrade, Tradeo, Convestor, Currensee, and FX Junction which all boast over 2M in registered users.

Diversifying Social Portfolios

Not all platforms provide responsive technology and user-friendly interfaces, but generally speaking, they are as easy to navigate as a Facebook newsfeed.

Like Twitter, eToro users follow individuals they see as successful – eToro calls these highlighted traders “Gurus.” Much like LinkedIn, users judge traders based on their portfolio and their history with the markets – which documents each position made by the trader going back to the opening of his or her account. Once the user feels confident in the “guru,” the user copies positions that the trader executes, thus leaving a portion or the entire portfolio in the traders hands. Any trade the successful trader makes, the user account is programed to make the same.

Said Alon Lavitan, “The big advantage of copy trading is the ability to quickly identify and add the best performing traders to [users] portfolio.”
Such popular traders or “gurus” like Malsolo (or Julio) from Spain has over 65,000 followers on the platform and 7,500 copiers. This means that 7,500 users entrust part of all of their assets with his technical skills. While the company refused to disclose the net value of total assets held by some of these top traders like Julio, he suggested most of large market share of copy trading is by Premium Members, who hold a $20,000 USD minimum balance in their accounts.

At a low estimate then, even if only half of Julio’s copiers are Premium Traders, Julio would be commanding $75M in his asset profile. The average size of trades made by the top 20 portfolio managers, is $100K+ per trade.

In December of 2012, the profitability of the ‘CopyTrader’ function on eToro was plotted by Operations Manager Dara Sandow showing the significant payouts and increased volatility of the tool for Premium Members.

For non-Premium Members (anyone with less than $20,000 USD in their accounts).

“This [copy function] automatically diversifies users investment portfolio,” said Lavitain. “As they instantly include all the [copied] trader’s  attributes (risk appetite, investment strategy, portfolio breakdown, etc.) into their own portfolio. It is a great tool to start trading instruments that they may be less familiar with and allows to expose their portfolio to more opportunities without the needed knowledge.”

Brokerages Undermined

The DIY approach to risk-based investing could very well become more feasible than a traditional trading desks for beginning investors. With the widespread speed of economic data delivered through community blogs and aggregators, traders will likely have a closer compedtive edge to floor traders at the NYSE.

Conversely, these new cloud-based brokerage platforms and networks will play a direct role in disrupting traditional third-party brokerages like ETRADE, TD Ameritrade, Scottrade, OptionsHouse, or Charles Schwab.
The low cost online brokerages compounded with the business-savvy outlets like StockTwits, SeekingAlpha and Twitter, may leave both media and technology in the dust.

“Blogging, Tweeting and aggregators like StockTwits are becoming the new Bloomberg Terminal,” said Roger Nachman, a retired analyst and contrubtor. “The volume of data out there lets many tech-savvy investors cut right though the middle-man [broker].”

“The reason the financial markets were chosen is because finance is an industry where banks and large institutions shrouded pertinent knowledge with secrecy and closed doors to the average investor.” Said Lavitain. “It was eToro’s vision to disrupt that line of practice and make as much financial information as possible available to the average person, thus giving everyone an equal opportunity to profit from financial investments.”

Impacting Media

While common US investment audiences still refer to traditional publications like Bloomberg, WSJ, Reuters or CNBC for their daily digest, open source trading communities like eToro and StockTwits may chip further into the profitability and viewership of the business cornerstones.

ZeroHedge – an anonymous-tip-driven finance blog – logged a complaint last fall about traditional business media, putting forward, “…perhaps CNBC’s viewers have gotten tired of getting just one side of the news flow: the always rosy, and over the past 5 years, always wrong one.”

CNBC’s eight year veiwer ratings. (Courtesy of ZeroHedge)

In 2012, CNBC’s viewership declined by 14%, bringing Total Day Average down from 198,800 to 171,000. Though they still represent the strongest business news network in the US, the company suffered consistent declines in viewership. (see below)

Against this trend, eToro Operations Manager Sandow reported a 20% increase in new accounts in 2012, expecting upward of that number in 2013 with the popular launch of their CopyTrader platform.

eToro also debuted their “Social Index” at the Finovate tech conference last fall. The new index allows users to gauge the market sentiment based on fellow traders positions in aggregate. As an example, for the EUR/CAD pair, 92% of the traders in this currency pair are buying, whereas for the USD/JPY pair, only 54% are buying. Such physical data has indeed helped novice and experienced traders beat the markets for 2012.

Meat Hook – AMH_AudioSlideshow from Amelia Martyn-Hemphill on Vimeo.

Thomas Williams, 51, came full circle at the shelter. He was once a
client, then he got approved for housing. He now volunteers here twice a week.

It’s not-too-cold, not-too-warm in Yorkville this Thursday night. Inside the kitchen of the homeless shelter in the Church of The Holy Trinity’s basement, Thomas Williams is preparing for tonight’s group of men. He says the food is just right.

“A lot of good stuff. Sandwiches, salad, you got rice and beans. Wow, they’re going to be happy tonight,” says Williams, unwrapping the tops of several tinfoil trays in the kitchen. Some food was donated; most came from church members who made a feast earlier to deliver to the elderly. “Thanksgiving? Wow, can’t get any better than this.”

There’s cranberry sauce, rice, some turkey, bread. All that was missing was the pumpkin pie. Williams is not surprised.

“You’ll never starve on Thanksgiving and Christmas in New York. That’s the beauty of it all,” says Williams, a 51-year-old monitor of the shelter. “The people that are hungry, some people, they can’t get to the food. We can get to it. I learned that a long time ago.”

Many clients and volunteers at the shelter consider Williams the glue that holds this community together. He is a prime example of a success story, having gone full circle from shelter client to a volunteer with his own housing.

“Thomas is a beautiful human being. More people got to get to know him like I did. He’s one of the few people I really trust in here since I’ve been here because he used to be one of us — he’s still one of us,” said Christopher Whitfield, 44, a former client of the shelter who visited for the holiday. “He’s one of those types of people if you’re down and out he’ll give you his heart if he has to. You don’t find too many good, decent human beings left like that in the world ever. He’s one in a million.”

Williams was a client of the shelter four years ago. He had been living on the street on and off for a decade. He slept in the doorways of stores, subways and station platforms — “I’ve been everywhere I could get a bit of rest,” he says now.

Christopher Whitfield, a former client of the shelter, says Williams is “one in a million.”

It’s a contrast with the “nice life” he says he previously lived, which included a family, home, and job. He worked as a professional football player, playing in the minor league and also the NFL as backup player in ’87 for three weeks. He made a “nice living with that” while working security as an offseason job.

But then he says he “completely lost it.” His son died after crashing the motorcycle he got for his high school graduation his first night riding it. Williams says his grief led to divorce and his two children moving away.

“I was completely alone here and I didn’t want to live no more,” he says.

The native New Yorker stopped working and soon found himself homeless, first sleeping at friends’ homes until living completely on the streets. He befriended other homeless people who helped him build a list of soup kitchens and shelters.

“You learn pretty fast. You learn how to survive,” he says. His income came from lugging cans and bottles to recycling stations. He bought a membership to a recreation center to shower.”Sleeping in doorways on Madison Avenue and some of the fashionable places, getting tapped on the leg by the police to move on,” Williams recalls what he considers his lowest moment.

It took the death of a homeless friend to push him to seek a better life.

About 15 beds are used every night at the shelter.

“He froze to death one night. After that happened, I decided had to get some help and I found this place,” he said.

Holy Trinity’s homeless shelter was where he got a bed every night as he waited for to get approved for housing.

At 7:15 p.m. on Thanksgiving eve the bus that transports the homeless men to the shelter arrives. About 15 men enter the dining room, the usual number of people — “It can get up to 19 if it gets really cold. We’ll make room for them.” There are some new faces tonight.

“If you wasn’t here that other night, sit right here at the table,” Williams tells the group. He explains the rules and operations of the shelter as the regulars wheel their cots into the cafeteria-like adjacent room.

“These are sheets. Pillowcase, blanket,” he says, passing the items to a man. Just then the doorknob to the room where the cots are stored pops off and lands with couple of loud bangs on the ground.

Over a century old, the church, an Episcopal parish, doesn’t permeate much in the shelter. The lone cross in the shelter hangs about a foot above an old radio sitting on a microwave next to the sinks. The shelter is open every night and takes in homeless men in programs that provide them with job skills training. On Saturday, the shelter moonlights as a thrift shop.

Williams got housing in the Upper East Side just as the global recession kicked into high gear. “I met people from all over the country from all walks of life here. I got guys that were former traders on Wall Street that made millions and it’s all gone now.

“You’ll never starve on Thanksgiving and Christmas in New York,” says the former professional football player.

“At least that’s what they tell me,” he says with a chuckle.

He started volunteering here two days after getting his housing four years ago. He says he can’t work fulltime due to high blood pressure. Instead, he volunteers twice a week from 5:30 p.m. to 5:30 a.m. when the bus picks up the men.

“When I do this, I see myself,” he says. “A lot of people who come here for the first time, this is traumatizing for some people. I’m here to give them advice: ‘Don’t get scared. It’s going to be alright. You’re going to make it, you’re going to get a place to live eventually.’”

As the night winds down — lights out at 10 p.m. — many have already gone to bed; each cot spread about 5 feet apart. In one corner, a 26-year-old’s face is illuminated by his iPad as he scrolls thorough job websites. In the kitchen, two men are listening to Williams’ late night entertainment: football play-by-plays on the radio. A few others sit at the dining table and watch the film, “I Am Legend,” on the TV.

There wasn’t any pumpkin pie or a couch to sink into after all that turkey, but the Thanksgiving spirit wasn’t lost here.

“I am thankful that I have friends that I can help here,” says Williams. He doesn’t need to use soup kitchens anymore, but he still had dinner with some of the church volunteers. “It was nice. I met all the volunteers there; they were great. And I’m just happy that there’s places like that open so that we can eat, so we all can eat — who needs to see people. I need to see people. I need to be around people. So it helps.”

Anthony Womack stuck out among the men he dined with last Thursday evening. He wore a vertically-striped blue and white shirt buttoned to the top, a patterned tie, black vest, along with creaseless black pants. He may have looked like he could fit in on Wall Street, but Womack spent his Thanksgiving in a homeless shelter.

“I ain’t used to dress like this a lot. So by doing this, it’s doing something different for me,” said the 27-year-old in the basement of the Church of The Holy Trinity in Yorkville.

Something different is why he and thousands of others move to the city. In his case, it was to get away from years of homelessness, drug abuse and “getting in and out of jail, in and out of jail since juvy.” As he’s finding, escaping the life he had back in Baltimore isn’t as simple as moving here. Many other people in the city are facing similar hardships — and it’s gotten worse.

Statistics released by the Census Bureau via the American Community Survey show that the number of people living in poverty in the city increased nearly a percentage point to 20.9 percent — over one in five New Yorkers. At nearly 1.7 million people, that’s over three times the population of Staten Island.

Holy Trinity is part of an effort to help those in need find a way out. In collaboration with Mainchance Drop-In Center (a facility by Grand Central Neighborhood Social Services Corporation), the church offers its basement as a year-round shelter for homeless men part of a program to get them housing and work. Roughly 15 men are bussed to the 88nd Street and Second Avenue location each night. Lights are out by 10 p.m. but first comes dinner — Thanksgiving dinner tonight.

“These guys are in for a big surprise when they come in here tonight. They’re going to think there’s nothing here,” said Thomas Williams as he unwrapped trays of Thanksgiving leftovers church members prepared hours earlier and delivered to elderly people.

Anthony Womback moved from Baltimore to the New York for a better life. The Church of The Holy Trinity homeless shelter provides him with a place to sleep.

Williams, 51, has come full circle with the program, starting off as a client a few years prior and now volunteering his time here. Previously, he lived a “nice life” with a family, a home, and professional football career. But following a divorce and the death of his oldest son, Williams eventually became homeless.

He spent his nights sleeping on subways and station platforms, and selling cans and bottles for income for a decade. It took the death of a friend, a homeless friend who froze to death on the streets, for him to seek shelter at Holy Trinity where he stayed for five months until getting approved for housing.

Now he volunteers two nights a week as a monitor to “help other people who are just trying to find a way home.”

As the men filled the basement, which moonlights as a thrift shop every Saturday, Williams began his usual routine: “If you wasn’t here that other night, sit right here at the table,” he said to the new faces in the group, explaining the operations of the shelter as the regulars wheeled their cots out from storage and took their sheets and pillows.

The night’s meal consisted of Spanish style rice, and nearly all the essential Thanksgiving trimmings imaginable minus the pumpkin pie. As the men began to eat, one of them played the raunchy comedy “Road Trip” on the CRT TV. Nearby, the entire “Austin Powers” series on VHS was stacked between other donated movies, including “The Silence of The Lambs” and “Shakespeare in Love.”

One man’s Thanksgiving dinner at the shelter. Thomas Williams, the shelter’s monitor, said the food that night was excellent.

The sharply-dressed Womack filled half his plate with turkey and stuffing. This was the first shelter he slept in when he arrived four months ago. Back in Baltimore, he grew up living foster home to foster home since age 14. He says the types of people he surrounded himself with contributed to a life of crime and drug abuse.

“They say, ‘Young, dumb, full of come.’ Yeah, I was one of them,” he said.

“I hit rock bottom. Waking up sometimes crying standing outside in the cold — snowing, raining. Sleeping in your homeboy’s truck. Sleeping in one of your friend’s car. Sleeping outside in the park hoping that you’ve got somewhere to go the next day,” said Womack.

After the four-hour ride to New York, Womback stepped off the bus with high hopes, hopes which haven’t paid off yet: “I used to work at McDonald’s and even McDonald’s won’t hire me right now.”

He’s not the only one having trouble securing employment, according to the latest city statistics. The unemployment rate was at 7.1 percent in 2007 before the global economic downturn; it has stagnated the past two years at 11.2 percent.

Womback’s big problem is not having his high school diploma, he says, but there’s a more significant issue to employment.”I can’t blame the economy for that. I got to blame myself because how are you going to hire someone when you’re still smoking weed,” he said. “It was my choice. Nobody put a gun to my head and told me, ‘You’ve got to do this, you’ve got to do that.’”

A couple of the shelter’s clients watch “I Am Legend” Thanksgiving
night on Thursday, Nov. 22, 2012.

As of Thanksgiving day, Womback said he was one day clean. While he’s quit multiple times before, he says he’ll maintain it this time because he recently got approved for housing and he starts a GED program next week.

Another visitor to the shelter this Thanksgiving, South Bronx native Luis Vasquez, returned to the city five months ago after living in Cobb County, Ga. for decades. He tried sleeping on the subway but found it too uncomfortable. “I had to start from the bottom,” he said.

Vasquez, 53, found employment in Georgia within a few weeks making machines that produce oil drums and eventually started paying a mortgage on a house. In every practical sense, he conquered the American dream. That dream collapsed in 2009 when the company he worked for downsized. Out of a job, and with unemployment insurance payments winding down, he lost his mortgage and came to New York to start anew.

“How does it feel to go from having a house and a good-paying job, to now? It feels bad, it feels terrible. And the only thing you can do is hope they don’t cut these programs because these programs are important,” said Vasquez.The programs have helped lead him to a couple of jobs which both didn’t work out. Still, that’s not slowing him down.

“When I see a person laying on the street, to me, in my mind, he’s given up. He’s given up on life, and I tell myself, I know it sounds kind of harsh, but I would rather be dead than to be laying on the street giving up on life. I just prefer to keep trying,” he said.Vasquez said he’s thankful that he’s “doing pretty good” all things considered, but most importantly: “I’m thankful this Thanksgiving day to actually have a place to sleep.”

Visitors walk beside the original train tracks along the High Line on Oct. 12, 2012.

Few places in the city exemplify how earnestly Manhattan tries to develop harmony with nature. Yes, there’s Central Park, but that’s its own beast entirely, and buildings just hug it. The High Line, a former elevated freight line stretching multiple districts, literally encases nature with a concrete counterpart. Apartments and other buildings stand just feet away from the park.

The journey begins via any one of nine staircases and four elevators. Many tourists enter through the posh comfort of the Meatpacking District’s Gansevoort Street just above the earflap of the West Village.

Up the stairs, visitors are at the southern tip of 29 blocks-long public park. The railings here are made of glass. From a distance, buildings bleed into the trees, bushes, and neatly maintained plants on the structure.

The High Line opened in 1934 in response to many accidents between trains and other traffic, according to the official website. Increase in trucking diminished the need for the trains; the last transport happened in 1980.

Over the decades, local activists successfully convinced City Council to refrain from demolishing the structure, and to support their efforts to develop it instead as a public park.Today, the park snakes through, under, and around several buildings up to West 30th Street. Much of the original train tracks remain, implemented into the design. The expansion (phase 3) will continue three more streets into Hudson Yards.

Over the decades, local activists successfully convinced City Council to refrain from demolishing the structure, and to support their efforts to develop it instead as a public park.

Local residents Bob Smith and Mary Smith-Corilla, hands locked, were seated on a wooden lounger on the structure, around 20-30 feet above W 15th Street, on Friday, Oct. 12.

“We’re around greenery, fresh air, beautiful sunsets,” said Mary, 35, a special education teacher. “I don’t feel like a tourist here. I feel like this is a place that’s for me to enjoy. I’ve come down here many times with a book in the summertime as an alternative to Central Park.”

Bob, 47, a tour guide, often tells his customers about the High Line. “It’s in the category of a cool New York thing to do that isn’t touristy, but tourists will be here anyways,” he said.

And that they were. Based on completely unscientific ‘dads wearing sweater vests and fanny packs taking pictures of absolutely everything with their family’ calculations, around 60 percent of visitors there that night were tourists.

“It’s really brilliant. It’s modern but it’s also in the past,” said Ortal Buhnick, a 28-year-old psychology student vacationing from Israel. She said her favourite part of park is the 10th Avenue Square, a theatre of sorts for the avenue right below. The sectioned off portion features benches on several levels that face floor-to-ceiling windows. Here, cars are the thespians.

Ortal Buhnick and her boyfriend visited the city from Israel for their vacation. They recreate the photo they just had taken with their camera at the 10th Avenue Square.

The infusion of art and public space dots practically every section of the park. There’s the Whitney Museum of Art’s downtown location, which is currently being constructed and will directly connect to the structure. A 15-foot bronze sculpture of a headless body lying down pops through some bushes just before the Highline tunnels through the Standard Hotel. Further north, a monotone voice on repeat says random animals — “The dog… The turtle… The platypus” — through a hidden speaker.

David Carlson, 56, provides the most interactive art. He’s been sitting in a corner in the Northern end of the park in his cardboard box most days of the week for the past three months inviting passersby to paint one of his palm-sized cardboard squares. His setup, which is allowed to run without a permit or vendors licence because it falls under a first amendment business, is donation-based.

“This is turning a mirror on the city itself. People are seeing things in a different way,” said Carlson of the structure and his art project. “It’s solitude in the middle of the city.”

David Carlson has been inviting people to paint at the High Line for three months. He says the park is like “turning a mirror on the city itself.”

Carlson, who formerly worked in advertising, divides his time between freelancing and his art project at the park. He was stationed in several parts of the city, at Zucotti Park during the Occupy Movement’s peak more recently. He says nothing compares to the High Line.

“The idea of walking above and looking at everything from just a level up changes your experience,” he said.

By around 8 p.m. that evening, Carlson decided to call it a night. He packed up his supplies, boxes, including a sign that read: “Yes, I have legs!” Then it’s 42 steps down to the sidewalk.

Back to the city.

After more than 10 years working as a journalist in East Africa, Sambira is now a staff writer for the United Nations’ Africa Renewal magazine, a publication that departs from the stories of poverty and suffering that dominate headlines about Africa. She fits into a growing group of journalists who want to present a more affirmative vision of life in an African nation. In her writing, she tries to bridge geographical, cultural and even historical gaps to show the socio-economic advances all over the African continent. In the latest issue of Africa Renewal Sambira penned two articles: one about educational advances in Burundi and another about the destruction of relics in northern Mali. Two regions of Africa, two very different nations, but Sambira unified the writings under one question: how can African nations move forward?

Jocelyne Sambira edits an article for the United Nations “Africa Renewal” magazine. (Jefferson Mok/NY City Lens)

“The vision for Africa Renewal is to also write the untold stories of Africa that you won’t see in mainstream, where things are working or things are being built,” she said. “A lot of Africans feel that there is only one story (about Africa) that’s being told.” That story is the one about poverty, famines, wars and genocide. It’s also the story that first drew Sambira toward journalism – by nearly killing her.

On April 5, 1994, Sambira traveled to Kigali, the capital of Rwanda, to visit her pregnant sister. One day later, the heads of state of both Rwanda and Burundi were assassinated in a plane crash, setting off genocidal killings throughout Rwanda that would claim over 800,000 lives. Sambira and her sister barely escaped.

“(My sister’s) husband stayed behind. We never saw him again,” she said. After a month in a camp for displaced persons, Sambira made it back to Burundi to continue her studies. There was only one problem: a lot of people assumed she had died.

The experience profoundly touched an impulse in Sambira to investigate and observe how people handled that (mis)information. “I was curious to see the different reactions,” she said. “Apparently there was one student, the first thing when she heard that I died was she tried to get my room at the university.” She did not know it then – her ambition had been to teach – but that brush with her reported death would slowly pivot her toward a career in journalism to reveal people’s motivations in shaping events during a turbulent time in Burundi’s history.

The months after returning to Burundi gave Sambira a chance to reflect on the forces that pushed Rwanda into violence. For her, the explanations always led back to the power of information – or crucially, who controls it. “I felt that giving people accurate and reliable information gave them power – and the power to choose. Many people derive power from withholding important information or keeping it to themselves. Whether it is during war or peace, being able to access information empowers,” she said.

Sambira saw that dynamic firsthand when she reconnected with one of her best friends in Burundi, but one difference complicated the situation: her friend belonged to the country’s other major ethnic group. The same ethnic division had been at the heart of Rwanda’s genocide. Even worse, her friend’s brother was a militant activist. “I had people telling me you shouldn’t trust her, her brother is a killer,” she said. “There was a lot of hate media in the region at the time.” She pressed on with the friendship. Despite engaging in political arguments and holding conflicting political beliefs, they remained such good friends they searched for jobs together. When only one opportunity finally came up to translate for an American non-governmental organization (NGO) working in refugee camps, they agreed to split the assignment – and the pay.

Working with refugees, Sambira finally got her chance to influence the channels in which information flows, and she loved its influence in building communities. The media work to inform refugees of their legal rights and protections quickly captivated her. She learned how radio could be an effective inexpensive medium to spread information quickly, even with low literacy rates. She grew especially interested in a project to preserve camp residents’ oral histories.

However, as her passion for journalism grew, she found few openings at the NGO to advance. She pushed for better access for journalists into the refugee camps but when approval finally came, she was passed over for the assignment. She knew it was time for a change. “If you really believe in something,” she said, “if you can’t do it where you are, maybe you can do it somewhere else.” She decided to pursue a fellowship in South Africa instead. It would lead to a chance offer to work on a new U.N. radio project in Kenya for displaced Burundians in refugee camps.

A flag of Burundi adorns Sambira’s desk at the United Nations Headquarters building in Manhattan. (Jefferson Mok/NY City Lens)

She spent the next seven years in Kenya and three more in South Sudan working with northern and southern Sudanese, continuing to promote peace amongst divided populations co-existing in common lands. She recalls training journalists from different regions or ethnic groups to adopt a shared vision to help the entire population, not just their own factions. Her work became an advocacy tool to help leaders “experience accountability” and share a vision that could help heal past wounds. It has not been easy.

“I think when guerilla warfare has happened, it’s because people have been hurt and they’re passionate and I understand that,” she said. “But once you’re out of that and you want to lead a country, manage a country, you have to step away from the hurt and the pain.”

In 2009, she, too, decided to step back. She accepted the position with Africa Renewal so she could write stories about policy changes and social trends from a wider perspective. The switch from South Sudan to New York did not go smoothly. “My first impression of New York was brown. Everything was brown, brown, brown,” she said. “I started to think maybe I should have stayed in Africa.”

The extreme physical and cultural contrasts in Sambira’s life – New York’s dizzying skyscrapers versus the lush undeveloped hills of Burundi, her U.N. desk job vs. working in refugee camps, dealing with rival ethnic factions – have often lead Sambira to seek a workable middle space. She talked about the view from the Empire State Building, which she thinks is just ok, and how she has no love for the subway, which makes her claustrophobic and queasy. “I think most Africans will relate because most of the movies we watch in terms of American life, there’s always something bad happening in the subway station,” she said. Now she is less fearful, but she knows perceptions can linger.

Sambira’s parents live in Montreal, but she still considers Burundi home. She knows that she has a lot of work to do to change perceptions, both of African nations and also of Africans’ perceptions about the world. Friends and relatives sometimes call up asking if she works with Ban Ki-Moon, the Secretary General of the U.N. They wonder if he and Sambira work in the same room, if she has his ear. At first she tried explaining that the U.N. is a large organization, that she never sees him, but people thought she was just being modest. She sighs. Walking down a cavernous hallway in the U.N. building, passing people of all nationalities, she said, “Sometimes people believe what they want to believe.”

For someone who has worked with so many refugees and knows the precious meaning of home, Sambira felt she needed to leave the sunny landscapes of east Africa to tell its story better. It might seem like a step up – “the United Nations headquarters in New York” has a crisp ring to it, and for many in the development profession, it is the pinnacle. But it is also an institution with layers and layers of bureaucracy and unfamiliar assignments. It is a trade, she hopes, that has afforded her a wider perspective, and a marble-tiled stage to tell the stories of people she has met along the way.

“There are people on the continent who have lives similar to the rest of the world, who work hard, are innovative and have dreams for their future. Even those stuck in conflict zones work hard to put food on the table and educate their children and keep them safe. It’s a story that is rarely told,” she said. “And I feel honored to be given that opportunity.”