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Recent Interviews with Obama's Neighbors, Obama's Memoir
Notations, and More Observations - During Obama's time at Columbia
University
While no residents, current or past, who were contacted by The Times
remembered Mr. Obama, they shared tales of a building with low rents and
dicey circumstances during the early 1980s.
Frank Neubauer, 73, who has lived all his life in the building except
for two years in Brooklyn, confirmed Mr. Obama’s account that it was a
rough place back then. “They had a lot of drug users in the building,
everybody knew it,” he said. (Three generations of his family have
lived in the building, including his son, who now lives on the same
floor.) “Nobody paid any attention. People knew it was going on and
that was it, and eventually the cops came and cleaned up the
building.”
Violent crime was also rampant. “I had a gun put to my head in the
lobby,” said David W. Burns, who lived in the building for two years
in the early 1980s. “It was pretty late, 3 a.m. in the morning, I
passed this guy on the street, but for some reason I forgot about
him,” he said. “He just followed me into the vestibule. Between two
doors you’re pretty vulnerable.” The man took only his money.
“Thank God.”
Another resident was stabbed in the hall one evening by people who
followed him home from the supermarket. “It was just in his thigh,”
Mr. Burns recalled. “He was lucky.”
The landlord in the early 1980s was Jay Weiss, a real estate mogul
who was then the husband of the actress Kathleen Turner. Mr. Burns, who
now works in the media industry and lives in Wilton, Conn., said Mr.
Weiss left behind hard feelings, because the building often had no heat
and the front door was often unlocked. Mr. Burns went after Mr. Weiss
for overcharging for rent-stabilized apartments, eventually winning a
judgment.
“I actually used that money to pay for business school,” Mr.
Burns said.
When Mr. Neubauer was a child before World War II, the building was
occupied by predominantly Austrian immigrant families with some
Hungarians and German thrown in. “Back then everybody knew everybody
in the building,” he said.
As those families moved out, the inexpensive but relatively spacious
apartments enticed working-class immigrant families, students and young
professionals who needed cheap apartments in New York City. (Mr. Burns
and his wife, both struggling artists, paid $450 for a two-bedroom
apartment.) The building was a solution, he said, for “when you are
just getting out of college and you have no money, and you want to live
in Manhattan.”
In his memoir, “Dreams From My Father” (Three Rivers Press,
1995), Mr. Obama described his Yorkville apartment, on East 94th Street
between First and Second Avenues, as “part of the shifting border
between East Harlem and the rest of Manhattan.” He described a scene
that will sound familiar to undergraduates and others who scraped by in
the seedy and dangerous New York of the 1980s.
He said that he would chat with Puerto Rican neighbors and stop to
talk to the boys on the stoop about the Knicks or the gunshots heard the
night before. An old neighbor died on the third floor landing with
$1,000 in small bills rolled up in his refrigerator. Mr. Obama was
living in the building when he received a phone call about his
father’s death from a car accident in 1982.
The six-story walk-up at 339 East 94th Street has seen much over the
decades: generations of mostly white and Hispanic immigrants, nests of
mice, drug deals, a police bust, at least one stabbing, a recent influx
of young professionals, and a future presidential candidate: Barack
Obama.
(Click on photo below to enlarge)
It was an uninviting block, treeless and barren, lined with
soot-colored walk-ups that cast heavy shadows for the rest of the day.
The apartment was small, with slanting floors and irregular heat and a
buzzer downstairs that didn’t work, so that visitors had to call ahead
from a pay phone at the corner gas station, where a black Doberman the
size of a wolf paced through the night in vigilant patrol, its jaws
clamped around an empty beer bottle.
At Columbia University in New York City, Barack Obama majored in
political science with a specialization in international relations.
Barack Obama will not release any information about his days at Columbia
University, as to what organizations he belonged to, but Obama’s first
known public speech takes place at an Occidental College event,
sponsored by the Students for Economic Democracy (SED) which is a branch
of the Campaign for Economic Democracy (CED), a group that was founded
by radical, anti-American, Marxist activist Tom Hayden who was also
active with the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in the 1960's.
William Ayers’ subsequent radical group, the Weathermen Underground,
was comprised of many former SDS members; in 1969 the Weathermen
Underground - then called simply “Weatherman” - declared “war on
Amerikka.”
Obama graduated with a B.A. from Columbia in 1983, then worked for a
year at the Business International Corporation and then at the New York
Public Interest Research Group. Dan Armstrong, who worked with Mr. Obama
at Business International Corporation in New York in 1984 and has
deconstructed Mr. Obama’s account of the job.
Mr. Armstrong’s description of the firm, and those of other
co-workers, differs at least in emphasis from Mr. Obama’s. It was a
small newsletter-publishing and research firm, with about 250 employees
worldwide, that helped companies with foreign operations (they could be
called multinationals) understand overseas markets, they said. Far from
a bastion of corporate conformity, they said, it was informal and
staffed by young people making modest wages. Employees called it “high
school with ashtrays.”
After about a year, Obama was hired by the New York Public Interest
Research Group, a nonprofit organization that promotes consumer,
environmental and government reform. He became a full-time organizer at
City College 160 Convent Ave at West 135th Street in Harlem NY, paid
slightly less than $10,000 a year to mobilize student volunteers.
Barack Obama admitted in his first book that he would
"carefully" seek out radical and Marxist friends while at
Columbia University through 1983.
Original Post - Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn: Cold Case File
Obama's
Early Years in New York Finally Revealed
Obama Before Columbia University
http://tobuds.com\blogs/full-story/at-columbia.htm
Four People who Remember Obama at Columbia University
http://tobuds.com/blogs/full-story/oxy-to-columbia.htm
NYC Neighbors Who Remember
http://tobuds.com/blogs/full-story/neighbors.htm
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