Author Archives: kp153956

The Struggle to Be Heard: How a Community Overcame a City Agency’s Intrusion

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The Bayside Jewish Center now sits closed, waiting to be sold once again.

The Bayside Jewish Center now sits empty, waiting to be sold once again.

They fought the law, and they won—or rather, they fought a city agency and won.

Residents of Bayside, Queens certainly had an extra reason to be thankful when the news broke just two days before Thanksgiving that the New York City School Construction Authority (SCA) would not be moving forward with its plan to build a 730-seat high school on the site of the former Bayside Jewish Center.

In a formal statement on November 24, SCA president and CEO Lorraine Grillo said, “Unfortunately, we have been unable to reach a consensus with Bayside residents and local elected officials on our proposed development site for a new high school in their neighborhood.”

Grillo’s statement, while accurate, makes it sound as if the whole thing were a simple disagreement, as if the biggest challenge was deciding what type of school ought to go on the site. In reality, the six-month battle between the SCA and Bayside called to mind the age-old question: what happens when an unstoppable force meets and immovable object?

As it so happens, the unstoppable force isn’t so unstoppable after all.

The Brewing Storm

In February 2015—after 77 years of serving the religious and social needs of Bayside’s Jewish community—the Bayside Jewish Center closed its doors for good, citing rising maintenance costs and plummeting membership as the impetus for the decision. It didn’t take long before they had a buyer. Armed with $114 million, the SCA approached the Center with an offer, and a plan to put a high school on the site that would help alleviate overcrowding in the area.

Overcrowded public schools have long been an issue in New York City—in March 2014, more than 7,000 students citywide were learning in a trailer classroom outside of the main school building. Bayside’s two high schools, Bayside High School and Benjamin N. Cardozo High School, are attended by 3,300 and 3,600 students respectively—putting them approximately 160% over capacity.

Susan Seinfeld, district manager for Community Board 11, says that overcrowding in Bayside schools can be attributed to the high level of achievement of its school district. District 26 has an exceptional performance rate, with 85% of students meeting state reading standards and 95% meeting state math standards. Because of the Department of Education’s open enrollment policy, students can apply to attend any school in the city rather than be restricted to their zoned school—and with such high performance rates, district 26 is very attractive to parents wanting to make sure their kids succeed.

“People flock to Bayside,” Seinfeld said. “The district performs better than most districts in the city.

David Solano, a Bayside resident and vice president of alumni group Friends of Bayside High School, agreed with her. “We looked at the numbers and the reason district 26 schools are crowded is because the schools are successful.”

Despite the apparent need to relieve overcrowding in district 26—a need expressed in Community Board 11’s statement of needs for 2016—the community does not want another school in the neighborhood. Parking in the largely residential area around Bayside High School is already a game of chance, and driving is a test of patience as people try to maneuver around the hordes of parents and buses that swarm the streets on a twice-daily basis to move kids in and out of the area.

Narrow 204th Street runs right between the Bayside Jewish Center and Bayside High School's athletic field.

Narrow 204th Street runs right between the Bayside Jewish Center and Bayside High School’s athletic field.

Solano said that with the Bayside Jewish Center being located directly across the street from Bayside High’s athletic field and only blocks away from the school itself, a high school on the property would add about 700 students and 100 staff to the area and throw approximately 10% more cars into the vehicular fray.

Public transportation would suffer as well. Five bus lines pass through Bayside; two of them, the Q28 and Q31, make stops right by Bayside High and the three other schools located within five miles of it: Cardozo, Francis Lewis High School, and World Journalism Preparatory School. When classes are in session, anyone waiting for a bus at a stop that comes before one of the schools often has to watch in despair as multiple buses pass by without stopping. The addition of another school would exacerbate the problem and require the Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) to add additional buses along each route, which in turn could create further traffic problems.

“The students who attend Bayside High are so overcrowded on [public] transportation that I can’t get on buses,” Solano said. “Buses are full several stops before they even get to the school.”

Seinfeld stated, “Not all kids are walking from home…so the MTA would need to increase the number of buses. Often with high schools, they’ll dedicate certain buses to handle the volume.”

Other reasons are often given for opposing the construction of a new school—after traffic, decreased residential property values is the next biggest complaint, and with Bayside already being home to 15 schools at varying grade levels, residents feel that the town is oversaturated with schools anyway.

It’s clear that Bayside wants a solution to overcrowding that doesn’t entail building a new school. That much was evident back in 2013, when the SCA locked horns with the community over an elementary school it wanted to build on a former garden supply center that was located between a busy main road and a public middle school. Extreme backlash against the plan ensued; complaints about traffic and decreasing property values abounded. But Bayside lost that particular battle, and the SCA pressed forward with the plan, prompting the suggestion that the agency’s failure to collect community input on the proposed school signified that it didn’t care about the community and its desires.

In May 2015, it became apparent that 2013 had taught the SCA a few lessons on keeping its plans quiet until it’s too late to stop them.

An Outpouring of Outrage

State Senator Tony Avella was a decidedly unhappy man on the morning of May 21 when he, like the residents of Bayside—which is part of his congressional district—learned for the first time that the SCA had decided to purchase the Bayside Jewish Center in order to build a high school. According to a statement, when his office contacted Lorraine Grillo, they were told that the agency had purposefully kept him and other elected officials in the dark because they “didn’t want to give him time to organize” against them.

“Too many times, SCA has been allowed to barge into a neighborhood and construct a monstrous school wherever they choose,” said Avella, who held the first of numerous rallies outside of the Center the same day the SCA announced its plan. “Though at least one City Council member is carelessly supporting this plan, the residents of Bayside will not tolerate this proposal and are prepared to put up a fight.”

That City Council member was Paul Vallone, who had seemingly been involved in early discussions between the SCA and the Center. In a statement that appeared in the Times Ledger, Vallone gave his support for the proposed project. “There is no denying the overwhelming demand facing our district with regard to a long overdue high school for our students and community, but there is also never going to be a perfect place to build one.”

He was the only elected official to support the SCA, and there were very few community members who sided with him.

“The Board was very upset that the SCA hadn’t reached out to us first to discuss the purchase,” Seinfeld stated.

A petition that Solano started up shortly after the SCA announced the proposal garnered approximately 3,500 signatures from parents, students, and local residents who all agreed that another high school was neither wanted nor needed. Solano sent copies of the petition to the SCA and the Department of Education, neither of which responded.

Senator Avella, meanwhile, introduced a bill in the State legislature that would mandate that the SCA contact elected officials and community boards before making a final decision about where it will build a new school. It would also require the agency to provide a detailed explanation about why it needs a new school, what other properties it had considered, and why it felt that the one it had chosen was best.

The fight over what ought to be done with the Bayside Jewish Center’s property heated up even further as the summer rolled on. Once it became apparent that the SCA was going ahead with the purchase and would not back down from it, debates began over what type of school should go on the site.

One proposal was to move World Journalism into the new building from its current location one mile away, which would provide the school a bigger space but would leave behind an empty building and create more traffic problems in Bayside. A second proposal was to create an annex for Bayside High, to which the principal of the school responded by stating that he didn’t need it and that an annex would only let the Department of Education worsen overcrowding by continuing to admit students from distant districts into Bayside High. Finally, a third proposal was to create a specialized high school for Bayside.

“Bayside students have to travel for specialized schools,” Seinfeld said, noting that the closest specialized high school to Bayside is in Jamaica, Queens and is still a seven-mile and hour-long commute by bus. “York College only has 500 seats.”

The downside of a specialized high school would be that it would cause the performance rates of the district’s regular high schools to drop by funneling the best students into the specialized school and leaving the other schools with average and failing students.

“The three schools have to service the whole community. They can’t pick and choose,” Solano said, pointing out that specialized schools have the option of choosing which students to admit that public schools do not. “If they were to put in, say, ‘Townsend Harris North,’ they would skim the better students off the top [of the class.]”

Though the debate was framed as a discussion over what kind of school Bayside residents would prefer, it was really a discussion about what sort of school they would mind the least. The simple fact was that the community didn’t want any kind of high school on the site at all.

“The community wants it to go away,” Seinfeld said. “They’ll always think there’s a better place for a school.”

By September, it was obvious that the school wasn’t going away. On the eve of September, just a week before classes would be back in session and the streets would once again be teeming with slow-moving vehicles, the SCA announced that it had signed a contract with the Bayside Jewish Center finalizing the sale of the property. Once again, the agency failed to notify elected officials.

“It is an act of bad faith to sign the deal without hearing the concerns of local Bayside residents,” said Senator Avella, whose legislation had by now been passed by the State Senate and was being carried in the Assembly by Assemblyman Edward C. Braunstein. “This is a perfect example of why a law is necessary for including residents into the decision making process on where to build their schools.”

“We had an idea it’d get there—we knew it was coming, we just didn’t know when,” Seinfeld said of the SCA’s agreement. “We wanted the SCA to be more upfront. We didn’t know until after it happened.”

The Best Laid Plans

Of course, the fight didn’t end with the contract signing. Residents continued to rail against the project, and parents made their frustrations known at a meeting with Councilman Vallone in late October. Though he still supported the school, Vallone conceded that the SCA’s site selection process was flawed and lacking in transparency; a week later, he introduced city legislation that would require the agency to allow communities greater input in the selection process.

At its monthly meeting in November, Community Board 11 voted almost unanimously against the school, with only a single board member out of 32 voting in favor of construction. Community boards, which are made up almost entirely of volunteers, lack actual legislative power, but carry significant political clout as liaisons between the community and government agencies. CB 11’s landslide vote proved to be a wake-up call to Councilman Vallone.

“The councilman realized the tides were changing,” Solano said of Vallone’s change in stance. “He succumbed to saying, ‘Okay, my community has spoken. I don’t want the school here and I’ll tell the [City Council to vote] no.’”

Two weeks after the vote, Vallone penned a letter to Lorraine Grillo asking her and the SCA to withdraw its petition for the school. He wrote, “Our community remains united in opposition to the site selection process…as evidenced by the most recent vote at Queens Community Board 11. Additionally, my fellow Council Members have already expressed their support to our opposition and remain ready to stand with me at any future committee hearings.”

“A more rational siting policy would have taken this opposition into consideration before the SCA entered into a contract with the Bayside Jewish Center,” reads another official letter to Grillo co-signed by Assemblyman Braunstein and U.S. Representative Grace Meng, whose district includes Bayside.

On November 23, Senator Avella held his fifth and final rally against the project, this time calling on Mayor Bill de Blasio to strike down the proposal.

“You campaigned in our neighborhoods. You campaigned on having community involvement and more transparency,” Avella said in a statement printed by the Queens Courier. “Throughout this entire process it’s been the reverse. Well, now you have the chance to do the right thing and in effect do what you campaigned upon.”

On November 24, six months of protesting, rallying, and petitioning came to a fateful boiling point with a statement from Lorraine Grillo that came at around 3:00 p.m.

The community had won. The SCA was withdrawing its petition to build the high school.

Looking Ahead to the Future

Now what?

Overcrowding, both in Bayside and in the city as a whole, still remains a problem without an easy solution. In a February 2013 report showing enrollment projections for the city’s public schools over the next decade, the SCA estimates that Queens will have approximately 20,000 more K-12 students in the public school system by 2021 than it does in 2015; it also expects district 26 in particular to have about 1,000 more K-8 students in the same six-year time period. What needs to be done?

David Solano feels that instead of sinking more and more money into an overcrowded district, the SCA should use its funds to provide more resources to failing schools in districts that have plenty of empty seats.

“It would’ve been a travesty to waste $114 million of our education money when it was needed in other areas. There are 3,000 empty seats through the borough,” he said, adding that the community has repeatedly called for the Department of Education to “beef up” low-performing schools. “Bayside’s percentage of kids from the neighborhood is 29%. Everyone else is from outside the community. Why can’t they build a school in a [failing] neighborhood to serve those students and give them a real choice?”

Susan Seinfeld felt that, because seats in district 26 are highly sought-after, the Department should institute a cap on the number of students it admits there.

“If they could accept fewer students at Bayside, Francis Lewis and Cardozo, it would relieve overcrowding,” she said.

For now, the SCA has to deal with the matter of reselling the property it purchased for an undisclosed portion of its $114 million. That matter, too, feels like it could be the next fight waiting to happen—doubtless, the community will want a say in who the property is sold to, and for what purpose. Solano says that he would like to see the property be converted into a community center that would also provide services specifically for senior citizens. At the moment, Bayside only has two senior centers.

“A senior center is badly needed, but I’d like it to be a bit more accessible,” he says, noting that the community at large would benefit from such a center as well. “It could be a common area for reading, afterschool [programs,] and tutoring too. It could be a lot of things, and it’s going to take public money.”

Conflict story – paragraphs

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A school is a double-edged sword. More schools means more children and teens are receiving an education—no one can reasonably deny that that’s a positive thing, particularly in a society in which the job market demands increasingly higher levels of education for entry-level positions.

The challenges arise in actually building the school. There’s the matter of deciding on which lot, in which neighborhood, in which district to begin construction. There’s the question of acquiring the property, obtaining approval from the City Council and permits from municipal agencies, and securing enough funds to see the project through.

Then there’s the problem of working with the community that will have to rearrange itself to accommodate this major addition to the area.

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What is the theme of Ta Nehisi-Coates’s profile?

The theme of Coates’ piece seems to be a general examination of the neighborhood Michelle Obama grew up in and the history thereof. It’s a look into how her upbringing has impacted the woman she is today.

Is there an overarching narrative?

There’s a narrative of a sort of egalitarian existence within Chicago–within her community, Obama was able to “forget” that she was black in the sense that she was not constantly told she was an “other.” Everyone around her looked just like her, so there was no sense of otherness till she stepped outside her community. This aspect of Obama’s early life, with a working father and stay at home mother, stands in contrast to many stereotypes about black families.

What surprises Coates about Michelle Obama?

Coates notes that he almost took Obama for white the first time he saw her, and was surprised at the ease and fondness with which she recalled her childhood and old neighborhood.

How does Coates contextualize Michelle in the context of his own background growing up in Baltimore?

Coates contrasts his early upbringing, where he was keenly aware of his blackness and of blackness as a culture, to Obama’s, who was only aware of this when she stepped into the outside world. Both had very different perspectives on themselves in early life.

Battle in Black and White

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Both Fox’s piece and Bagli’s piece deal with the problem of the Stuyvesant Town housing complexes being inaccessible to certain groups of people.

Fox’s piece is more focused on how initially, the Stuy Town complexes were closed off to black families, even though the complexes were meant for families of average means and for war veterans–groups which included black families. Bagli’s piece is an examination of how the rent prices have skyrocketed and have all but excluded the families for whom the apartments were originally meant for. Though the two pieces look at it from different angles, Bagli’s shows how Stuy Town housing still remains largely inaccessible to the people for whom it was meant.

Liebling

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I agreed that Back Where I came from was like a love letter to New York. What really struck me most–as with other New York-centric readings we’ve had–is that I couldn’t tell when the book was written. I was really shocked when he mentioned his father working in the early 1900s, and when I found out the book was published in 1938; I could’ve sworn it was written at least two decades later.

I think that’s what makes most like a love letter. A love letter is something that transcends the centuries–even if it was written 200 years ago, most people reading it in 2015 can probably understand it and the sentiment behind it. Liebling achieves this same timelessness with his book because the people he profiles and the places he writes about really capture the spirit of New York City, and illustrates that the city remains the same at heart even as the years go by.

Bayside conflict proposal

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The most glaring conflict in Bayside at the moment involves a proposed high school at 203-05 32 Ave., the site of the former Bayside Jewish Center.

There is a strong opposition to the proposed school and its location. One is that it is located in a congested area and too close to an existing school, Bayside High School, which will cause parking and public transportation problems. The chief complaint, however, is that the community was not consulted before the School Construction Authority decided on the site. The general sentiment seems to be that the SCA was underhanded in its acquirement of the site, since the news didn’t come out until contracts were being drawn up. This is not the first time that the SCA has clashed with the Bayside community. In 2014, it acquired a former plant nursery and began constructing an elementary school despite similarly massive backlash and vocal opposition. At this point, the fight seems to have become less focused on the school and more focused on improving the relationship between the SCA and the community, in order to avoid these conflicts in the future.

I’ve written about this before, but it really is the big current issue in Bayside. I think I’d have a chance to go more in depth on this story and the factors that make it such a big deal, and I’d perhaps have a chance to explore its actual impact on residents in the area around the former Center.

An Escapist’s Dream Come True

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Left to right: Chris Purcell, Janice Galizia, Lauren Galizia

Left to right: Owners Chris Purcell, Janice Galizia, Lauren Galizia

Waking up in a darkly lit room is unsettling enough. But it’s downright horrifying to wake up with the realization that you’ve been shackled to the wall, and that you were kidnapped while on your way home. Your kidnapper is nowhere in sight, but you know that it’s only a matter of time before he returns to do unspeakable things to you.

It’s a nightmare come true—or is it?

Normally, no one would want to be trapped in a murderer’s dungeon–unless, of course, they had decided to play “Killer Countdown,” an escape room presented by Challenge Escape Rooms for the Halloween season. Halloween has come and gone, but the company will continue offering Queens residents a chance to experience this increasingly popular, interactive game.

Escape rooms, which have only recently begun cropping up in the United States after widespread success across Europe and Asia, are a simple concept: players are locked in a room for a limited amount of time (typically one hour) and must use clues and puzzles riddled throughout the room to find the key and get out before the clock runs out.

Schoolteacher Chris Purcell, who co-owns Challenge Escape Rooms with his wife Janice Galizia and his sister-in-law Lauren Galizia, says that he and Janice had their first experience in an escape room in March of this year.

“I was trying to figure out a fun, unusual thing that we hadn’t done ever, for a birthday,” he said. “We always talked about going to these escape rooms, so I bought a couple tickets to one.”

The experience had such a profound impact that afterward, Chris and Janice bought tickets for a second room, this time bringing Lauren along.

“The first escape room we did I honestly was very nervous. Is this scary? Is there an actor? I am claustrophobic, so I was like, ‘How big is this room?’” she said. “As soon as we got in, I loved it. I’m someone who’s always loved these riddles and puzzles and math problems. That’s personally something that I enjoyed.”

The ball had been set in motion. By June—only two-and-half months after their first visits—Chris, Janice and Lauren had secured premises for their fledgling enterprise, created two uniquely-themed rooms, and were ready to bring this thrilling new game to Queens.

~*~

For anyone looking for a good drink or a great meal, Bell Boulevard, a lively street in Bayside, Queens, is the place to be. The Bayside Village Business Improvement District, which services Bell Boulevard, lists 62 different food-serving establishments in its online business directory. About 30 of those are restaurants and bars; the rest of the street is interspersed with retail shops, professional and health services, tutoring centers, and the odd psychic or two.

As far as entertainment goes, though, there are few options—in fact, the only traditional option available for a date or a night out on the town is to catch a movie at the theater in nearby Bay Terrace. On a purely local level, this made Bell Boulevard an ideal spot for Chris, Janice and Lauren to open their business.

“Usually people go to bars or restaurants as part of a night out,” Chris said. “I think what we provide here is that second part of the day. Instead of going to a movie, which is probably the usual for a lot of couples or groups, you could do this. This is something that’s much more social, a different form of entertainment than people are probably used to.”

“I think it’s really fulfilling to bring something new to the area, to have a new activity or something new to look forward to,” Lauren added.

Demand for this specific type of entertainment isn’t just limited to Bayside. According to listings on Yelp.com, New York is home to ten escape room venues, seven of which are in Manhattan. Of the other three, one is in Mineola, Long Island and the other is in Williamsburg, Brooklyn; Challenge Escape Rooms is the only company operating in Queens. Chris says that he, Janice and Lauren wanted to open their business on Bell Boulevard, but kept their options open to Queens as a whole.

“The demand was there, in Manhattan, but the people…were coming from Long Island, they were coming from Queens,” he said. “We needed an extra place that was going to accommodate all those people going into Manhattan that would rather not go to Manhattan. If it wasn’t going to be here on Bell Boulevard it was going to be somewhere relatively close.”

“We also are very close to transportation,” Lauren said, referring to the Long Island Rail Road station across the street from Challenge Escape Rooms, as well as the three MTA bus lines that make stops along Bell Boulevard. “We often get people that aren’t coming from the local [area] that ask, “Is there a train station or a parking lot?’”

The increasing demand and expanding market for companies providing escape games also played a key role in the speed with which the three owners opened their business. In any small, but steadily growing industry—particularly one as peculiar as this—getting in early is crucial.

“If we didn’t open something here, the way that the trend was going, someone else was going to do it,” Chris said. “We had to strike pretty quickly because there was potential for another place to open before us.

“We went to our first [room], and it was such a great experience that it didn’t take us very long to think, ‘Will other people like this?’” Lauren said. “I think that knowing that this was an activity that so many people could enjoy made the process of starting it much easier.”

~*~

Since opening on June 19, Challenge Escape Rooms has provided three different thrilling scenarios to choose from. For the first three months, players could choose “The Unsolved Case,” in which they were locked in the office of the lead detective investigating a horrible crime committed against the players’ families. The objective was to find enough evidence to prove the suspect’s guilt and then escape.

Alternatively, players could opt for the still ongoing laboratory-themed room, “The Virus.” After an experimental drug trial goes wrong and leaves everyone in the lab infected with a deadly virus, players have to race against time to find the vaccine and escape before the hour is up.

“Killer Countdown” is the latest room to be offered, and will soon give way once again to “The Unsolved Case,” as well as a Santa’s Workshop room planned for December.

For a non-holiday room like “The Unsolved Case,” one can expect to pay $28 for the hour, though groups of 8 or more get a 10% discount. Rooms like “Killer Countdown” or “Santa’s Workshop Escape” run slightly higher, typically between $30 and $35 per person.

Chris explained—in brief detail, so as not to give away anything that might spoil any future experiences—that the types of clues and puzzles found in the rooms included lighting tricks, math clues, repetition clues, and even a literal jigsaw puzzle. Chris credited Janice and Lauren as being the driving forces behind the rooms’ designs.

“They think of the initial blueprints of ideas for escape rooms,” he said. “They’ll throw out ideas to each other and it’ll usually spitball from there.”

“It’s definitely a collaborative creation,” Lauren said. “Sometimes it happens all in one sitting; me and my sister will sit down and we’ll go back and forth. And sometimes it comes together over a period of time. We started The Virus [with the thought], ‘We really would like a lab.’ And over time we came up with the story. That was something we really wanted with our rooms, a full story.”

Lauren says she and Janice—who has experience in live theater—enjoy the theatrical aspect of the escape room. Chris, on the other hand, loves the cooperative nature of the game.

“I’m a teacher, and I love the idea of collaborating and working with groups,” he said. “I think that’s a really important element of the education system that’s not usually emphasized on, but it’s really a skill that’s needed throughout the workplace and throughout your personal life.”

Expounding further on that point, he added, “If you’re not going to collaborate with other people, you are going to fail this game. It’s not like, one smart guy who figures everything out. You can’t rely on that guy throughout your 60 minutes or you’re not going to do well in this. Everyone’s going have an important role.”

It’s precisely that collaborative element, coupled with its location, which has made Challenge Escape Rooms attractive as a team-building activity. Chris and Lauren both explained that numerous companies have reached out to them about hosting team-building nights, and often ask whether there are restaurants nearby to top off the night. The largest and most recent group came from Hertz car rental, which brought in a team of forty people in four groups of ten.

Clearly, being locked in a room with a time limit and a looming threat is an excellent way to encourage cooperation—all four groups from Hertz made it out of their rooms before the hour was up.

~*~

How does a company like Challenge Escape rooms—which is both new and part of an emerging industry—market itself? Both Chris and Lauren said that the power of social media, particularly targeted, regional Facebook advertisements, has helped a great deal in drawing customers. Articles in local papers such as the Queens Courier and the Times Ledger, which have widespread readership throughout Queens, have also helped their business grow. Running a fundraiser for breast cancer awareness in October got them a spot on the Verizon FiOS-exclusive program “Push Pause,” which covers local, in-depth community stories.

“Killer Countdown” also provided an excellent opportunity to advertise themselves specifically to people looking for a haunted house or other scary activity for Halloween by listing themselves on sites like Long Island Haunted House. Most noteworthy is the fact that they were chosen as one of AM New York’s top 8 Halloween attractions in New York City, an honor Chris says they were lucky to get.

“We’ve also worked with local businesses within Bayside,” said Lauren. “Several of the restaurants [on Bell Boulevard] have our postcards and we’ve also advertised in materials. We have postcards and flyers that have gone up at some local colleges.”

However, Facebook remains their biggest method of selling the game. Whether a group escapes or not, they get to take a photo together after the hour’s over, which Chris says is a key aspect of advertising on their Facebook page.

“What’s convenient for this business is that escape rooms before us have always used Facebook as a resource to post pictures, [and] you’re always seeing people fooling around in those pictures, smiles on their faces,” he said. “And to throw that on Facebook and to show that people are having a great time I think has certainly helped attract people to come here because it seems like people enjoy what we’re selling.”

Chris says that the business has been doing better and better each month, so much so that it has necessitated offering additional time slots on Mondays for groups that are unable to come in during normal hours Thursday through Friday. He also expects that their policy of offering a new room theme every three months will be a reason people keep coming back.

“It provides a challenge, but it also accommodates the people that have really enjoyed their experiences here and are introduced to totally different experiences,” he said. “I think people will keep coming as long as the product’s good.”

Apart from the Halloween room, which is more intense in its theme and story than the rooms normally offered, Lauren says they were especially interested in making their game family-friendly and attractive to people of all ages.

“You could come with your kids, you could come with your friends who were younger,” she said. “It didn’t have to be an event that only adults could come to. That is definitely something that we wanted to incorporate when we started our own escape room: it could be family friendly and everyone could enjoy.”

From a Teacher’s Desk to an Editor’s Office

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Robert Pozarycki’s corner office is not very big, but it is full of personality. Maps of Manhattan and of Bayside, Queens hang from the walls. An MLB poster of American League baseball teams speaks to his love of the sport, while a pen cup emblazoned with the Mets logo declares his devotion to the team. Two photos of his wife and son smile up from his desk.

Of all the personal touches Mr. Pozarycki has added to his office, there is one that could easily get overlooked. At first glance, it appears to be just a blue, glass paperweight set with the seal of Archbishop Molloy High School, which Mr. Pozarycki graduated from in 1998. However, a closer look at the back of it reveals the words, “Excellence in Journalism,” an award granted to students who showed outstanding achievement in Molloy’s journalism class.

Photo Oct 02, 3 44 51 PMIt seems natural, now, that the editor-in-chief of the Queens Courier, the Courier-Sun, and the Ridgewood Times—three of Queens’ top community newspapers—would’ve been recognized for journalistic talent at an early age. At the time, however, Mr. Pozarycki was flummoxed.

“I was like, ‘How did I get this?’” he recounted. Though he had been interested in journalism from a very young age, the outbreak of the first Persian Gulf War dissuaded him from pursuing it as a career for fear that he would be sent to cover a war zone. As he grew older, he began considering a career in education, with the goal of becoming a high school history teacher and even someday a professor.

“I had a lot of great teachers that I learned from at Molloy,” he said. “I thought that going into teaching would be a really fulfilling thing.”

After graduating in 2002 with a bachelor’s degree in history from St. Joseph’s College in Brooklyn, Mr. Pozarycki began a full-time job as a seventh grade teacher at a private school in Queens. This, however, was a far cry from what he had originally wanted to do, and he had a terrible experience.

“I just don’t think I was prepared for it,” he said. “Kids were rather unruly and I had a hard time managing the class. I had a hard time also educating [them] in areas which I was weak in.”

Although dismayed that his contract with the school wasn’t renewed, Mr. Pozarycki continued searching for work in education. In September of 2004, he came across a job advertisement in the Ridgewood Times, which was looking for a part-time reporter. Still interested in writing and reporting, Mr. Pozarycki decided to apply for the position. The same day that he dropped off his resume at the Times’ office, he met with managing editor Bill Mitchell, who gave him a test run reporting on a community meeting.

“The experience itself was great. I had my notebook out, I was there talking to people, getting a feel of what was going on in the community, and I liked it,” Mr. Pozarycki recalled. Mitchell, impressed with the report he turned in, brought him on as a part-time reporter shortly after.

Mr. Pozarycki continued reporting part-time for the next several months, taking on another job in the meantime as a permanent substitute teacher at a Catholic school in Queens. The experience was the same as it had been the first time around, and when Mitchell called him with an assignment on an evening that he stayed at the school for parent-teacher conferences, Mr. Pozarycki says he came to a moment of truth.

“The Yogi Berra-ism, ‘When you come to the fork in the road, take it’? I thought, ‘Okay. I’m doing teaching, it’s not working, I don’t like what I’m doing. But here’s this other job that I really like doing, and it’s part time, but I’m sure I can get something out of this.’”

Mr. Pozarycki finished the school year, and then never looked back. Recalling the award he received in high school for journalism, he says, “I guess it was a sign. I should’ve seen that before.”

In October 2005, John Walthers, the publisher of the Ridgewood Times, offered him a full-time job. In the beginning, Mr. Pozarycki covered just about everything, and learned on the job.

“When I started full-time, I was doing articles in the office, phone interviews, covering meetings at night. If they had a photo event, I was there. If they had a press conference, I ran out. I’ve done block party photos, parades, gone to Memorial Day events and covered those,” he listed. “Then eventually I wound up doing layout—feature sections, sports sections, and eventually the main section. So I was doing practically everything except selling ads. It was a heck of a time.”

Meeting a tight deadline was one of the many challenges Mr. Pozarycki faced in his new job. Building sources was another. It was particularly challenging to build relationships with officers in the New York City Police Department, as they needed to know he could be trusted with sensitive information. He also learned the hard way that city agencies found it easy to brush him off since, in their view, he was just a reporter from a small weekly newspaper.

However, with guidance from Bill Mitchell, John Walthers, and Walthers’ mother Maureen Walthers—who was publisher emeritus—Mr. Pozarycki refined his craft and really established himself as a journalist. As the years passed, he rose through the ranks to senior reporter, then associate editor, and finally, editor-in-chief.

In the decade that Mr. Pozarycki worked there, the Ridgewood Times fell into rough economic circumstances, having been hit hard by the 2008 recession. By 2014, downsizing had reduced the staff to just Mr. Pozarycki and two other reporters; together, they were responsible for writing, editing, and processing every article, caption, and press release. After John Walthers’ sudden death in June 2014, the management of the paper returned to his mother Maureen, who was in her 80s then and unable to keep up with all the changes the paper needed to stay afloat.

In late 2014, Victoria Schneps, President and CEO of Schneps Communications, which owns the Queens Courier, made connections with Ms. Walthers. In January 2015, the announcement was made that the Ridgewood Times would be sold.

“The Schneps have been very good to us. They kept everybody on board,” Mr. Pozarycki said.

After the sale, he remained editor-in-chief of the Ridgewood Times. In February, after the previous editor-in-chief of the Queens Courier left the paper, co-publisher Joshua Schneps approached Mr. Pozarycki with an offer to add the Courier to his editor’s duties.

“I’m not going to mince words; it was overwhelming at first,” Mr. Pozarycki said of his new responsibilities juggling three papers. “It’s a lot of responsibility, but you learn quickly. What made it easier was the fact that we’re a daily online and everything’s done every day. It doesn’t make everything seem so daunting.”

Bob Brennan, associate publisher at the Queens Courier, says that one of Mr. Pozarycki’s challenges has been adapting to having a larger staff among which to delegate responsibilities.

“Rob is used to writing the stories himself, doing a lot of the work himself. [At the Ridgewood Times] he was almost an editor and a reporter at the same time,” said Mr. Brennan. “Now what he has to work on is being a true editor, and pulling back a little bit, and doing less of the work himself, and learning how to delegate and getting his staff to do the work, which he has to oversee.”

“I think he’s working towards that,” Mr. Brennan added. “To be able to run the show and really understand his role as being the person that has to coordinate everything, as opposed to doing the work himself.”

Mr. Pozarycki says he is happy reporting on Queens at the community level, following the neighborhoods, getting to know the borough, and getting a chance to do really good journalism.

“People always tease me, ‘Oh, when are you gonna go to the Daily News? When are you gonna go to the Times?’” he says. “I look at the Daily News or the Post and I open the pages and I see fluff. And then in the margins on the side are all the really important stories. And I feel that in a community paper you’re not marginalized, literally and figuratively. Every story is important and every story gets its own space, everybody gets a chance to speak, and reporters get a chance to report. I like that mentality.”

When asked what quality he looks for in the potential hires he interviews, Mr. Pozarycki immediately answered, “Enthusiasm. That to me is one big trait I look for with people coming in. Obviously, talent comes with it—you can be talented but not have enthusiasm, and it shows. It shows in the work.”

Enthusiasm is something Mr. Pozarycki himself certainly has in abundance. In giving his first impression of his colleague, Mr. Brennan said, “He seemed to be a person who really wanted to grab this opportunity and make the most of it. So I like his enthusiasm for the business. Once you have that good attitude and enthusiasm, the rest is going to come. That’s the most important part. We’re very happy with him and the work he does.”

“I think reporters should not be discouraged by what they hear about print journalism,” Mr. Pozarycki added. “They should be willing to tackle every challenge that comes their way. It’ll make them better for it.”