By Sachi Shah

In the midst of all the Halloween festivities at Getty Square, no one notices the large, scruffy white man walking in circles with a slight limp, who seems to have worn his costume a day too early; clad in light blue scrubs stamped, at random intervals, with the phrase ‘St. John’s Hospital’ in big bold letters, there is something eerie about the vacancy in his eyes. He strolls, unaffected by what is around him, intermittently stopping to take a swig of his moonshine. No one heeds to him, no one sees him. He is the ghost of Halloween.

“Guessing what people’s costumes are, who they are dressed up as is my favorite part of Halloween!” explained a little girl shopping for her princess costume at Getty Square. There is something in human nature that makes us want to be all-knowing, seek intrigue – perhaps this is why Halloween appeals to so many of us. This holiday seems to inculcate skills of deduction within us as children. Yet, we often seem to fall short when it comes to actively thinking about other people’s plight.

The man stops in front of a construction site to tell the workers who he is – the son of a union leader seeking to shut them down. A little while later, he stops at the Saw Mill daylighting to carefully instruct the kids on the physics of a skateboard. The man is Pete Salva. He is the brother of a Yonkers PD officer. Pete has been in and out of hospitals and homeless shelters for quite a while now – so long that his presence is not perturbing at all. In fact, he has seamlessly blended into the scenery of downtown Yonkers. While he wears his many made-up hats, few know the reality behind this masked-man, what circumstances led him to become who he is today, and how he and his brother walk such different paths.

By Phoebe Temkin

When I was a little kid, my dad used to take me to the racetrack that was about a 40 minute drive from my house. Often we'd stay all day, shuffling from the indoor paddock where the horses were readied to the track itself. My dad was not a gambler by any means, and I never understood why he would laugh about taking me to the track. I didn't realize the seedy reputation they held at all. I just really loved horses.

I haven't been to a racetrack since those days. Today was my first time returning, and I was a little excited. I knew that the horses weren't running in the middle of the day, but I was curious as to what Yonkers Raceway was about anyways. I've passed it many times, and it felt pretty grand when it was all lit up at night. I have fond memories of the track, and felt that maybe one day I should see what Yonkers had to offer.

But Yonkers Raceway is more than just a track. These days, it goes by another name: Empire City Casino. Boasting 5300 gambling machines, the facility is huge. While the track is only open five days a week starting at 7 pm, the casino is open all week from 10 am to 6 am.

I have never been inside a casino. When I first stepped in, I wandered around feeling like I was in some kind of dream. The lights are dimmed, with thousands of flashing lights coming from the machines. The sounds were incredible: try to imagine 5300 electronic beeps, whirrs, yells, and indistinguishable music forming a steady background hum. There were slot machines of all different themes, ranging from ethnic stereotypes to popular TV shows to Michael Jackson. I felt like I'd entered another world entirely, maybe some sort of alien planet. And the aliens were all people over the age of 60.

It was obvious that I stuck out like a sore thumb. Not only because I was bare minimum thirty years younger than the majority of the people there, but also because I was not glued to a slot machine. As I wandered the floor, weaving in and out of the maze of machines, I saw barely anyone else on their feet besides the casino workers (who were wearing astonishingly ugly vests and earpieces exactly like the ones you see affixed to the ears of the Secret Service). Mostly alone, sometimes in pairs, the patrons of the casino sat transfixed, their eyes glued to the screens, their faces eerily illuminated. My exposure to casinos is so minimal that all I kept thinking about was that one terrible episode of the Twilight Zone where the guy becomes addicted to slot machines and eventually the slot machine comes to life to try and kill him—something like that, anyways.

It felt wrong to assume that these people were addicts, of course. My fetus-like reporter instincts prodded at me to sit down, strike up a conversation, try and talk to someone about their experience at the casino. How was this place different than it was back in the day when it was a thriving racetrack? That sort of thing. But it seemed like some kind of invisible barrier separated me from these people. Most stared past me, barely giving me a look. I was worried about being brushed off, or offending someone. The ones who truly reminded me of how out of place I was were the cops.

When I first saw the cops that peppered the casino here and there, I thought maybe something interesting was happened. I later learned from one of them that it is New York state law that cops must be present when money is changing hands in a casino. This particular cop, who had a long Italian last name that I felt awkward copying down in front of him, was the one who stopped me to talk to me, obviously suspicious. “Are you looking for someone? Did you get carded at the door? You look very young,” he said. I assured him that I had been carded and that I was over 18, but he didn't seem very satisfied. I told him why I was at the casino, and he talked a little bit about the history of the place. He enlightened me to the cop rule, as well as to the law that casinos must be part of racetracks. Beyond that, he had little to add, but he made me feel uncomfortable enough to want to leave soon after.

I kept wandering. I walked past the bar, past the lost and found, past the claims booths, past the entertainment stage and past the food courts. I was feeling more and more like I was in some kind of dream, but also as if it was one that did not belong to me.

Sometimes working on assignments in Yonkers felt like being in the casino: I was out of my element, oftentimes noticeably so, and I struggled with feeling like I could talk to whoever I wanted to. For the people at the casino, I felt like I had no business to be prying into theirs. Obviously hitting the slots at 3 pm on a weekday is not an ideal, especially with a Miller Lite in hand. Or maybe it was no big deal, but in any case, I did not feel as if they needed the peppy intervention of a Sarah Lawrence student. Often when I told interviewees what school I went to, they commented on the expense. Some asked what my parents did for a living. I was acutely aware of how I was perceived, and it was not always a position that I felt comfortable asking for people's time, especially on a personal level. Now in the casino, I was intensely aware of all of the issues I have felt, and we have discussed in this program. To be sure, journalism can shine lights in socially enforced darkness, illuminating the lives of people we may never have gotten a chance to meet otherwise. Their struggles are translated to a larger audience, and perhaps some good comes of it. But does it always? Where is the line drawn for voyeurism, tourism? I cannot answer these questions, but I can say that at the Empire City Casino, I felt as if I had no right to these people's lives. They were their own. Writing a research paper on the history of the casino, I could have done; to try and form a narrative from real peoples' lives, perhaps marked by struggle, just felt wrong.

I left the Raceway feeling defeated from a journalist perspective, but with an interesting story at least to tell my friends over the pizza we ate for dinner. This class has given me a lot to chew on, and this outing was no different. In some ways, the Raceway echoes Yonkers as a city: with the decline of horse racing, and harness racing in particular, the glory days of the Raceway are long gone. Now it is struggling, and added on a casino only eight years ago to try and improve its standing. Just as Yonkers is rebuilding and striving for some kind of urban renewal, so the Raceway chugs along, hoping to come back out on top. Is it my place to jump in and out of this complex and sometimes painful narrative, searching to craft something that is utterly my own? I believe I will be grappling with that question for a long time coming. Sometimes I wish it was easy, like when I was a kid: ignoring all else around me, blinded by a girlish love for horses.

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October 27th 2014

By Blair Mason

There’s a giant mess of cardboard and trash bags in the hallway of Andrews House, a small dorm at Sarah Lawrence, and it is not these ladies’ jobs to clean it.  

Women like the one who cleans Andrews House form the invisible backbone of the College.  Sarah Lawrence has a reputation for rigorous coursework and high academic difficulty, but that “mental” work would be literally impossible without the physical work campus workers perform.  They clean professors’ toilets, mop down muddy hallways, and remove unsanitary trash.  In order for the elite world of Sarah Lawrence to keep spinning on its axis, this work has to get done.

Unfortunately, Sarah Lawrence students sometimes seem to think that any and all cleaning jobs fall under the job description of ABM janitorial services, the company that holds a contract with Sarah Lawrence.  As one woman, a middle-aged grandmother with a quick smile and bright red hair, told me, “They must have girls in the house.  They must have girls in the house who do the cleaning for them, and they never learned themselves.”

Every ABM worker has horror stories about Sarah Lawrence clean-up jobs.  (Note that, although the College administration was adamant that workers would not get into trouble for talking with us, the editorial staff still decided to remove all names from this article.)  One woman came into a communal bathroom one day to find a lobster in the trashcan along with sanitary napkins.  Students don’t clean up their vomit after all-night parties, leaving it to stink up the entire room.  Or take the recent case of Andrews House:  students left a pile of cardboard boxes in a common room that was so large it threatened to block the staircase up to the dorm rooms.  ABM does not have a mandate to clean that room or to take away boxes, but students kept piling on trash in the hopes that someone who wasn’t them would take it out.

It’s easy to spot the differences that act as a barrier between the workers and the students.  The Sarah Lawrence student body is made up of overwhelmingly white students with college-educated parents, while ABM employees come from immigrant families or are immigrants themselves.  There’s a spatial difference between the two groups, too.  Although the College is technically in Yonkers, official College letterhead and popular student opinion all say Sarah Lawrence is in Bronxville.  When they orient themselves towards Bronxville and Manhattan instead of Yonkers or Mount Vernon, students are effectively removing themselves from the surrounding community.  Students and campus workers eat at different restaurants, visit different movie theaters, and altogether disassociate themselves from Yonkers spaces.  

They disassociate themselves from the campus workers, too, treating them as invisible.  A woman and I were chatting in a hallway about a male student who consistently walks in and out of the restroom without flushing or washing his hands.  “One time I was there,” she says, “I had just finished cleaning the toilets when he walks in, urinates, and leaves without flushing.”  Not two minutes go by before this very student walks straight past us, not making eye contact.  She giggles and whispers, “That’s him!  That’s the boy who doesn’t flush!”

There are exceptions, of course, where the two worlds merge. A small group of Sarah Lawrence students offer one-on-one ESL tutoring to campus workers.  A worker in food services gets called “Mama” by a young man who broke his arm his first year and needed a hug.  Students will offer water to workers who come to clean their apartments.  Resident Advisors know workers’ names.  A group called SLC Workers’ Justice uses the political power of tuition-paying students to support the demands of the two unions on campus.  According to Mo Gallagher, Assistant Vice President for Facilities at the College, “Many of our ABM employees have been here a long time. I’ve seen their children grow up.  We’re lucky."  She says RAs will sometimes collect money for gifts at Christmas or if someone has had a baby.  

Meanwhile, a simple threatening email was all that was necessary for the residents of Andrews House to clean up their act.  The threat now gone, student-worker relations have fallen back into their familiar patterns:  students absorbed in their studies as workers hover at the edges of campus society, quietly ensuring that the campus is a safe and clean space to learn.