Check it out here.

Lahore, the Pakistani city, is the second most populous after Karachi. Lahore, the SoHo deli, is one of the thousands scattered across New York City, and probably among the hardest to spot. A green and blue construction scaffolding buries the deli’s tiny storefront. Boxes of soda cans and water bottles packed in a narrow hallway obscure the view from outside.

But Lahore isn’t lost on cabbies. Because of its one-dollar samosas and gulab jamuns (a coconut ball dipped in honey syrup), four-dollar chicken patties with chick peas and lentils, 24-hour service and a BP gas station in front, South Asian taxi drivers have made the place their own.

During the month-long Ramadan, Lahore provides more than “the taste of East,” as a sign below the American flag promises at the door. In a low-ceiling room, cabdrivers find a place to pause before the night shift and connect with their community. Maghrib, the fourth prayer at sunset when Muslims break the fast, becomes the high point of the deli’s daily life.

At 10 to seven, yellow cabs start crowding Crosby Street and Pakistani drivers wearing hands-free headsets flood into the deli. Warm exchanges of “Salam Aleykum” and conversations in Urdu soon fill the small room. Excitement rises during the moments preceding the break of fast.

“I feel very healthy, very energetic during Ramadan,” confides Mohammed Masoor, a hefty 30 year-old taxi driver, who turns down fares after 6:40 to make sure he can break the fast on time. “You have to sit down, pray, eat and celebrate.”

By two minutes past seven, eight men huddle around the three small white-tiled eating counters and four bar stools. They first grab a full cup of fruit salad, then move on to yellow rice with lentils and chicken. A hush falls; the focus is now on food, handled with fingers, flat bread or plastic spoons. In times, the place sounds eerily quiet as the men recover from 14 hours without food.

A cup of sweet tea with milk, and it’s back to business.“Night Driver Wanted,” scribbles a man on a half paper plate posted on the wall.

By 7:30, most of the drivers have vanished.

An couple comes in, stares at the food displayed in the glass counter. The woman wonders if she wouldn’t prefer sushi. Outside, the cabs scatter in all directions. They are gone already, swallowed by the New York night.

Born to a Jamaican mother and an American father from Cameroon, Erinn Smart, 28, became the first black female fencer ever to climb an Olympic podium on the US foil team. She earned a silver medal in August in Beijing. Her brother, Keeth Smart, 30, also grabbed silver with the sabre team. Out of the six US medals in fencing and the 10 reaped by New York City athletes, two belong to these Flatbush natives.

A third top-tier fencer was missing from the picture. Ivan Lee, 27, the first African-American to claim a world fencing championship with the Junior US sabre team in 2001, did not qualify for Beijing -a rare breach in the tightly interwoven careers of the three athletes.

Together, they have spent hundreds of hours commuting to the Upper West Side where they learned the art of lunging, parrying and riposting at the Peter Westbrook Foundation. From an immigrant, working-class neighborhood where basketball is king and foils unknown, to the WASPy traditions and gentlemanly rules of what Erinn Smart calls an “old-money sport,” the three black kids helped each other navigate two worlds and ultimately changed the face of American fencing.

“They became the best fencers of the world,” Westbrook sums up, not without pride.

It all started with a father willing to set his sports-gifted daughter on a path for a college scholarship. A production manager at Sports Illustrated, Tom Smart asked colleagues which sport would increase her daughter’s chances. “Fencing,” he was told.

That was in 1991. Peter Westbrook, winner of the 1984 Olympics bronze medal in sabre, was inaugurating with much publicity (including a piece in Sports Illustrated) a non-profit fencing school. The foundation would offer to inner-city kids training and equipment for $20 –just enough to pay for the cleaning of each kids’ jackets, Ivan says.

Erinn Smart then 11, showed up on day one, along with a dozen kids. Keeth Smart, her 17-month older brother soon joined her as their mother began spreading the word.

“One family tells another family tells another family: ‘Hey my kid is doing fencing and it’s great opportunity for college scholarship!’,” Keeth Smart recounts.

Within several months, around 10 children and teenagers from Flatbush and East Flatbush had picked up fencing at the Foundation, Keeth Smart says. One of them was Ivan Lee, whose mother taught 4th grade at the same Crown Heights school as the Smarts’ mother.

“I started to get my mother off my back,” Lee remembers. “But I was hooked.”

For Erinn Smart, fencing offered a unique combination between the endurance required in track running, the adversarial component of tennis, and the precision and esthetic found in ballet, three sports in which she participated.

The two boys had a simpler appreciation of fencing.

“I could hit somebody in the head and not get in trouble!,” rejoices Lee.

The sword mythology and Star Wars analogy won Keeth Smart over.

In addition to fencing, the three bonded while commuting to Manhattan more often every week that their friends did in a year.

“It was so cool to get to leave Brooklyn so often!,” remembers Erinn Smart. “That was an experience no one else got to be a part of.”

Together they could also think of comebacks to the jokes from friends and, sometimes, stand up to the stares.

“When we first started branching out, some people would look at us and say: ‘You guys are fencers?’” Erinn Smart recalls. “They always think of fencing as an aristocratic and elitist sport, but my brother, Peter, myself and many of our teammates have proven them wrong.”

The Flatbush fencing trifecta rapidly came to excel, and subway rides gave way to journeys for tournaments in Europe and Latin America.

Medals started pilling up and with them scholarships offers from universities. Erinn Smart won three gold medals in the Junior Olympics in 1996, and studied at Barnard College. Lee and Keeth Smart, who became in 2003 the first American fencer to be ranked number 1, both attended St. John’s University on full fencing scholarships.

After outperforming their father’s original plan, Keeth and Erinn Smart decided to retire. So did Lee. Erinn Smart is returning to her finance job at Lord Abbott, Keeth Smart just started Columbia University School of Business, and Lee will graduate in December from New York Police Department Academy.

The Flatbush fencing trend has “slowly died down,” Keeth Smart admits, but might build up again because of the publicity surrounding their medals in the neighborhood.

The three still call Flatbush home -Keeth Smart included, although he recently moved to Harlem for convenience and resorted to put his condo on Argyle Road on rent. He confesses he regularly endures 90-minutes subway rides just for the pleasure of Caribbean food and the camaraderie of the barber shops in the neighborhood.

“I always find myself going back there,” Keeth Smart says.

Another place they keep visiting is the Peter Westbrook Foundation. The school remains their anchor to fencing and friendship, and the trio reconvenes on Saturday mornings as they volunteer to teach their moves to the younger generation.

Toward the end of the interview, Ivan’s blackberry goes off. Keeth wants to know more about next Saturday’s first class at the Foundation, but can’t find its phone number.

Ivan takes the look of someone bemused by an old friend.

“After 20 years training there…Go figure!,” he says with a large smile.

Keeth and Erinn Smart with Brooklyn Borough President Markowitz at the West Indies Parade on Labor Day. Photo: Jonah Engle

slideshow

A minute-by-minute schedule discovered in plain view of the farmers' market.

I was wandering around on campus this afternoon, taking pictures of the warm-up for tomorrow’s McCain-Obama conference at Columbia, when I spotted a minute-by-minute schedule of the event. Apparently, it wasn’t supposed to be for everyone to see… But here it was. The photo story was published on the Columbia J-schoolers’ blog (See link on the left).

 Check out the story:

slideshow

ice cream truck audio story

Khady Kayes, the manager of an African hair breading parlor, says zero-customer days have become more common lately.

With customers keeping a closer eye on their spending, the economic downturn is threatening the once-thriving hairdressing industry on Flatbush Ave. But it’s allowing hair suppliers to gain an edge.

Immigrant women who own or manage the plethora of hair salons say business has been down by 20 to 50 percent for the past year. Some hair suppliers, however, are seeing opportunity in the slowdown as people turn to cheaper hair weaves and wigs.

“In Flatbush, every hair station used to be full,” recalls Claudette Simon, a Jamaican woman and manager since 1993 of Hair Expose on Flatbush Ave.

Walk down the “hair-mecca” avenue on a regular weekday afternoon, and you will see more empty booths and idle hairstylists. Customers patronize hair parlors less often and show a growing habit of negotiating prices as they try to cut everyday-life expenses, hairdressers complain. From the set-price of $40 for a permanent, Simon and other hair professionals say they could lower it to $30, even $25 whenever customers come in with a take-it-or-leave-it deal.

“People are crying that they don’t have money, don’t have jobs, so you have to drop the prices,” says Simon.

Meanwhile, the cost of some professional hair products has increased. “I used to pay $45 for a case with products for perm,” explains Simon. “Now, it costs $55.”

Luinn Ramsey, a Trinidad native who owns a tailor-made human hair store says that the cost of raw hair has doubled within the last three years, mainly because of the inflation in China where hair come from. Growing expenses aggravate her perception of economic predicament.

“Realistically, I’d say [my business] is down 50 percent,” Ramsey says. “But I feel like I’m down 125 percent.”

In best cases, the squeeze leaves hairdressers no room for profit. In worst ones, it turns paying monthly bills and rents into an impossible feat for the many Caribbean women who work in the black hair business.

The influx of Haitian, Jamaican and Trinidadian women skilled in the crafts of braiding, straightening, and sewing in hair extensions in the eighties and nineties revitalized and expanded Flatbush hair industry. The two dozens hair salons and eight hair suppliers crammed on a one-mile stretch from Nostrand Ave. junction to Cortelyou Road have earned Flatbush Ave. the nickname of “Hairdresser Lane.”

Some hairdressers now consider closing down, even leaving the country.

Two or three days can unfold without bringing in a single customer, which rarely happened a couple of years ago, says Khady Kayes. An immigrant from Mali who came in the US in 1994, Kayes has been managing a small African hair braiding parlor for 10 years. The single mother of four explains in French that she has no savings left and struggle to make ends meet.

Kayes says she can’t leave the country because her children don’t speak French, but admits she has thought about it.

“When you have worked so hard to earn so little, it makes you want to go back home.”

The recent economic downturn does not evenly hurt Flatbush hair industry. Suppliers, who sell artificial and natural weaves, wigs and other hair extensions, might even benefit from the hairdressing slowdown.

Because it takes less time, less money and lasts longer to get a wig than a perm, economical customers are inclined to visit hair supply stores rather than hair salons, explains Andrea Powell, supervisor of Hair and Wig.

Robert Lindell from Lindell’s Beauty and Barber Supplies confirms that his business has been up, not down.

“Poor people still want to feel good!,” he said. “Buying weaves is always cheaper than going to the hairdresser.”

This is what is called the “establishing shot” of a narrative photo story. “Work” was the theme of the assignment of my first photo training class.

Click on the link for the slideshow. 

ice cream man slide show

Here is my class picture, I am not easily identifiable, but I swear I am somewhere!