The View

"Daddy, I don't really sleep at night night time. I just look out the window at the beautiful city." Kendall, age 4

What you see to the left is the view from Kendall's bed. The girls window faces east and during the winter you can see the river through the tall buildings across Avenue D.

These tall buildings are the Jacob Riis Houses.

The 19 red-brick towers of the Jacob Riis Houses lining Avenue D look much as they did when they opened in 1949.

1768 apartments make up those 19 buildings.

..."the beautiful city."

These are the projects. New York City Housing Authority low income housing.

Our girls have a view of the projects. But to Kendall, this is the beautiful city.

Here is what the New York Times says about this strip of Avenue D.

"Capped at the south by the bustle of Houston Street and at the north by the soaring smokestacks

of Con Edison's East River generating station, the 12-block artery remains largely a relic of the neighborhood's pre-hip past.

There is nary a bar in sight. Not a single boutique. The handful of restaurants serve tostones and chicharones, not goat cheese tapas or tuna tartare. Tough-looking boys hold tough-looking pit bulls at the end of steel chains, mothers push shopping carts to coin laundries, and wrinkled old men in newsboy caps putter in front of the grocery store, keeping a cagey eye on the street.

Avenue D may be the East Village's final frontier; the only thing further east is the river. The sprawling Jacob Riis and Lillian Wald housing projects, which house a total of nearly 9,000 people, have long acted as a sort of break-wall, toppling approaching waves of gentrification and keeping them pooled back near Avenues A and B."

To many, Avenue D is not where you want to live. To others it is where they have to live.

To us...

This is our neighborhood. This is our city. Our beautiful city.

This is our prayer:

LORD, I have heard of your fame;
I stand in awe of your deeds, LORD.
Renew them in our day,
in our time make them known;
in wrath remember mercy.

Habakkuk 3:2