March 24, 2010
by Tihti Meiret
The face of the Fulton Street BID is poor. Four black men share the face. They sweep Fulton Street in bulgy, baggy, dirty, dark, hooded jumpsuits that say “FAB” in great big bright green letters on the back. That’s what the BID calls itself.
"...are now easily identifiable by their uniforms that have them looking... FAB!" Source: FABAlliance.org
Councilman Charles Barron has long objected to Fulton Street’s being named for the racially hopeless 19th Century
steamboat inventor and has tried more than once to rededicate it to Harriet Tubman. “FAB” is good enough for Councilwoman Letitia James, though, and also for Deb Howard, whose celebrated civic sensitivities snagged her the top spot at Pratt Area Community Council (PACC), the onetime tiny volunteer group now the largest real estate holder in Clinton Hill. James and Howard sit on the FAB Board alongside a large number of other parties with interests in Fulton Street beyond those of diversity.
The FAB sweepers, from Africa, arrived on Fulton’s shores last year, sent over by Atlantic Maintenance, a firm that jobs out indigents mostly to BIDs. The FAB four are on schedule to make $11, 927.58 this year — that’s $7.41 an hour, seven hours a day (four on Saturday), six days a week — no breaks. On January 18, for example, the country, the City and the 60-odd employees of PACC and FAB got the day off in honor of an African-American who famously marched with garbage workers for equal rights. The FAB sweepers collected and bagged garbage all day.
The much esteemed Myrtle Avenue BID gets their sweepers from The Doe Fund, which specializes in ex-cons. The gratification that comes from transforming criminals into street sweepers is obvious, so naturally FAB wanted to team up with The Doe Fund, too, but backed off when it came under surprise attack from malcontents and BID-bashers who took to denouncing Doe’s low pay ($15-a-week to start) and forced-rental group housing as 21st Century indentured servitude.
Which goes to show how hard it can be to be the new BID on the block. The mighty Myrtle isn’t bothered by vendor scruples and besides, how ironic is it that FAB’s sweepers look (and act) like convicts in their stained, shapeless, padded onesies while Myrtle BID’s actual convicts look comfortable and move with ease in their royal blue coordinated Doe Fund Dockers-type separates with the famous three-tone muscleman logo, “Ready, Willing & Able.”
The Brooklyn Paper ran an article a couple of weeks ago about the effort to form a BID on Seventh Avenue in Park Slope. In a sloppy aside, it slurred FAB as “the Fort Greene BID;” said it had been voted in by a majority of merchants; and the backlash against it had blown over. Letter to Editor:
1. It’s “the FAB,” stupid!, not Fort Greene.
2. An overwhelming majority of merchants voted against it. (PACC refuses to release the votes it says it holds as the “winning 51%” on grounds of “Council/client privilege.”)
3. The bitterness toward the FAB runs deep, especially in the immigrant-owned stores that don’t fit FAB’s plans (think Myrtle Ave.) for Fulton Street’s future.
BIDs didn’t start out part-government/part-not like Public Authorities, but that’s how they’ve ended up. The first BID was formed in the 1970s when the City was broke and services at an historic low. A group of corporations in Midtown came up with the idea of hiring their own security and cleaning crews for the crunch, but while the crisis would pass, the BID would stay. The City took the BID out of its corporate big box, humanized it, “A tax for everyone!” and took it wide: Today there are BIDs in every borough, and in neighborhoods like Fort Greene/Clinton Hill where all the businesses are small and all the shops are Mom-n-Pops.
Of course the Mayor loves BIDs; they take the wear and tear off NYPD (unarmed guards walking around a couple of days a week) and Sanitation (incessant sweeping) yet leave the agencies free to punish as usual. Under FAB, in fact, a number of stores have been ticketed more than ever. FAB District Manager Phillip Kellogg is unconcerned, possibly unaware, because he ignores these unMyrtle-like places even though their struggling owners pay his $70,000 salary by the linear Fulton foot.
Mr. Kellogg doesn’t thank them because according to the BID their earnings are his due. Never mind he has no idea how you run a little shop, PACC doesn’t either, therefore it doesn’t matter. On issues like designating committees, having fun events, writing and editing important studies, however, Kellogg has to dazzle or he’ll get kicked out of PACC’s big house on Fulton Street where they’ve been living together since October. Kellogg had been out there single for a long time, looking, and wants the relationship not just to feel good but to mean something — which augurs well, PACC being in the meaning business.
PACC opened its Fulton Street mission about ten years ago when it sent a 20-something novitiate over from the motherhouse on DeKalb Avenue to teach families on Fulton Street how to run businesses they’d been running for years, in many cases for generations. She came with the title of Director for Economic Development, which made no impres-sion on the Fulton merchants, but a big one on the Ford Foundation, which hired her away after a couple of years. The next Director came and went (to work for the Mayor) without anyone even noticing. Her successor has made a definite impact shilling for vendor friends and hustling assorted improvements and amenities that don’t materialize. She had her eye on FAB District Manager until word leaked and a nasty backlash dashed her chances. Whatever…she’s still dealing the street, still Director for Economic Development, still very important; in fact, she holds the highest rank of many in the PACC/FAB office at 896-900 Fulton and she sits (if as a “D”) on the big FAB board.
That old joke about a great big board with a little bitty BID applies to FAB: There are four tiers of directors, “A” through “D.” The “A”s are your property owner overlords, including a lawyer, a developer, a Realtor, a daycare operator, and non-profiteer Deb Howard (whose Brooklyn Area properties have accumulated with time and tax dollars.) The “B”s are mostly tenants of the “A”s; the “C”s elected officials, staff and other City prefects; the low-grade “D”s, from Community Board 2, Brooklyn Academy of Music and PACC don’t get to vote. The meetings are closed. Once, the President invited two guests from the neighborhood. The appalled board quickly took a vote and expelled them within minutes. What the directors caucus on and decide among themselves, while necessarily guesswork, can be gauged to some degree by the crappy lights haphazardly hung for the non-eventuating Christmas shopping crush, the facetious name “FAB,” the blowsy (yet invisible) banners on every other lamppost, and promotional materials and website of punitive blandness.
The board’s work being of such seriousness as to be done only in secret, anyone wishing to transmit a thought, word or idea has to go through District Manager Kellogg. But the merchants don’t trust him and don’t talk to him; so the entertaining Mr. Kellogg recently packaged up a show, “21 Blocks in 21 Days,” and took it on the road, playing shop after shop with a mimeographed sheet of marvels and miracles in the near and far FAB future.
It is true that FAB regards itself as transformational, but so far has not advanced much past the wishing stage. After Thanksgiving, “FAB”-emblazoned cardboard boxes appeared in all the stores, often in the owner’s absence. Upon investigation, they turned out to be the containers for a sweepstakes to win tickets to the December 23 Radio City Christmas Show. Unfortunately, the boxes were left unguarded and a number of them got stuffed with names like Ivana Trump, Judge Judy, Tiger Woods, Queen Elizabeth, Hulk Hogan, Bernie Madoff — and other boxes disappeared entirely. The pranks, the boorishness they laid bare, shocked Phillip Kellogg, and disappointment followed when no one showed up for the Grand Drawing. — The rules stipulated the winner must agree to picture and information for “posting on the websites and any other publicity purposes,” but the winner remains anonymous, possibly because the little-visited FAB website could have run the picture without anyone seeing it. — It hurt, too, that everyone was calling the Christmas lights schlock. Phillip Kellogg said he had talked to “a lot of people who like them,” but wouldn’t say who (and anyway claimed he came after the lights, even though he came before Halloween.)
Around the time of “21 Blocks in 21 Days” there was also, suddenly!, “FABulous Friday,” an emergency program for a couple of blocks in the BID’s Ninth Ward (Vanderbilt to Classon). Stores were asked to offer bargains for the evening and FAB would bring out the crowds with targeted advertising. The stores reported “F. F.” came and went like any Friday, not the result the board was hoping for, or Phillip Kellogg. The relief effort will continue. To find out how you can help, go to www.faballiance.org.
Monday is another day…and the BID springs eternal. To his credit, Phillip Kellogg admits FAB isn’t hitting all its marks yet, and does try to “get down” with the silent majority storekeepers when he can. On the other hand, when called upon to speak at brownstoner associations worried about Fulton Street (“When will it be Myrtle?”), his message is strong and persuasive and listeners leave pumped having learned Fulton Street is responding to remediation and is already safe to stroll before dark.
Brooklyn’s attractiveness as “the borough of churches” has not been lost on the FAB marketing department, hence the program, “Rolling Back the Gates,” with its powerful evocations of Easter, hope, starting over. On a given day, all the lockedup storefronts are made available for looking over by potential renters. On a sunny mid-March Saturday “Rolling Back the Gates” featured yellow balloons, sunny skies, shorts and shirtsleeves and a confectionary “New York Trolley” bus to schlep happy lookers up and down the 21 blocks FAB deems to be raising from the dead.
“Rolling Back the Gates” makes the immigrant merchants uneasy because they see themselves being rolled right out of their nail salons, bodegas, takeouts and 99c stores. These owners let it be known last year that the BID tax would hit hard, especially coming after two years of sales lost during DOT’s brutal sacking of the street (sidewalks, too). Talk about no business. Councilwoman James and PACC’s Howard extended a $500 bailout, but the deadline has closed without a single application because their “distress fund,” with its intrusive questions, came off as a vehicle for gathering proprietary information for a FAB/PACC data base.
Two Saturdays before the sunshiney “Rolling Back the Gates,” the scariest nor’easter in thirty years slammed New York. 70-mile-an-hour winds lashed the beaches, whipped up huge waves, peeled off rooftops, blew down utility poles, and split and uprooted more than 1,000 trees. The subways flooded, cars stranded. 500,000 homes lost power. 65,000 calls blitzed 911; emergency crews couldn’t keep pace. Non-stop radio and tv PSA’s telling everyone “Stay home!” didn’t reach FAB, which sent its slickered sweepers out to “calm” the garbage. The corner cans they fitted with fresh plastic bags filled with the four inches of rain that fell in 24 frightening hours. Six people died in the storm. The sweepers survived. And were $29.64 richer at the end of the day!
