“Carol Robles was a dynamo her entire life,” U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor said in a statement. “She devoted herself to public service and made a noteworthy difference both in the lives of Latinos and all New Yorkers. Her passing is a tragedy for her family and all of us.”

A 1983 graduate of Fordham College at Lincoln Center, Robles-Román served as deputy mayor for legal affairs during Michael R. Bloomberg’s three-term tenure as mayor, from 2002 through 2013. She was the highest-ranking Latina in city government at that time and the first woman ever to serve as counsel to a New York City mayor.

From City Hall, she oversaw more than a dozen agencies. Her accomplishments include launching the city’s Family Justice Centers to provide free, confidential, and comprehensive assistance to survivors of domestic violence. She also expanded the city’s language-translation services to better meet the needs of non-native English speakers. And she was instrumental in creating the Latin Media and Entertainment Commission to help “bring the best in Latin media and entertainment productions, businesses, and jobs” to the city.

After serving in the Bloomberg administration, she led two national civil rights organizations: Legal Momentum—the Women’s Legal Defense and Education Fund, and the Equal Rights Amendment Coalition/Fund for Women’s Equality. In recent years, she had been general counsel and dean of faculty at Hunter College. She also was a longtime member of the City University of New York Board of Trustees.

“Carol Robles-Román dedicated her life to public service and to making our city and country more equal and just,” Bloomberg wrote in a statement, citing her “groundbreaking work to make the city more accessible to our … immigrant and disabled communities, and to stop domestic violence and human trafficking.”

In a 2015 profile in Fordham Magazine, Robles-Román described her approach to identifying societal problems and mobilizing both the political will and the means to fix them.

“Part of my ethos is being a disruptor—in a nice, good way,” she said. “It’s about creating strategic partnerships to make change happen.”

‘Women Can Have a Powerful Voice’

Robles-Román was born in East New York, Brooklyn, on August 27, 1962. Her parents, Emilio and Inéz Robles, owned an insurance brokerage and travel agency, and they were engaged with multiple local civic groups focused on voter registration, housing, and health care, among other issues. They had migrated to New York City from their native Puerto Rico in the mid-1950s, and in the early 1970s, they moved the family to Howard Beach, Queens.

“My mother raised six children—five girls—so it was particularly important to her to teach us, as women of color, that women can have a voice and can have a powerful voice,” Robles-Román once said. “Many women never learn that. That’s the gift she gave me.”

A Puerto Rican Power Couple

After graduating from Stella Maris High School in 1979, Robles-Román enrolled at Fordham College at Lincoln Center, where she majored in political science and media studies.

“I felt very, very comfortable speaking in my own voice and being assertive, and in pursuing my joint passions: civics issues and writing,” she told Fordham Magazine in 2002.

In an international law class, she introduced herself to Nelson Román, FCRH ’84, a fellow student of Puerto Rican descent who would become her husband in 1991. Román, who is now a federal judge in the Southern District of New York, worked as a police officer in the Bronx while he was enrolled at Fordham. He told her what he witnessed while responding to domestic violence calls, and the stories he shared left her bothered but determined to help. She researched best practices for handling such incidents and published her work in a Fordham pre-law journal.

“Ever since then, domestic violence and the treatment of women has been an issue that she’s held very close to her soul,” Román told Fordham Magazine in 2015.

A Champion of Sonia Sotomayor

After graduating from Fordham, Robles-Román worked as a paralegal and eventually earned a J.D. from New York University. In the mid-1990s, she met Sonia Sotomayor, then a federal district court judge, through the Puerto Rican Bar Association. Like many young lawyers in the bar association at the time, she came to regard Sotomayor as a mentor.

“She’s a very warm woman, she’s a very nurturing woman, and she also shared her substantive legal intellect with us very early on,” Robles-Román told CNN in 2013.

In the late 1990s, when Nelson Román was president of the Puerto Rican Bar Association, he and Robles-Román helped lead a grassroots campaign to get a Latino justice on the Supreme Court. Sotomayor was on their short list.

A decade later, in May 2009, when President Barack Obama nominated Sotomayor to serve on the nation’s highest court, Robles-Román helped prepare Bloomberg to speak at a congressional hearing in support of her nomination. Three months later, she became the first Latina Supreme Court justice in U.S. history.

“I felt like this is the message Judge Román and I had been sending our whole lives,” Robles-Román said in 2010. “We have excellent Hispanic judges and attorneys, and it feels like it’s been our job to shine a light on that.”

Prior to joining the Bloomberg administration, Robles-Román served as a senior attorney to a family court judge and as special counsel and eventually director of public affairs for the New York State Unified Court System, where she focused on bias matters, among other issues. She also served as a New York state assistant attorney general in the state’s civil rights bureau.

A Mentor to Young People

During her tenure as deputy mayor of New York City, Robles-Román created what she called her Girl Power School talk, which she presented primarily to middle and high schoolers. She encouraged them to focus on the steps—like writing a resume, finding mentors, and developing a network—that will lead them from the classroom to careers of influence.

“Many young women think that people walk around with tags on them that say, ‘I’ll be your mentor.’ I help them empower themselves to say, ‘Hey, I like that teacher. … I’m going to make an appointment and ask that teacher to mentor me … and to give me advice and to help me as my career proceeds,” she told CNN.

In the 2015 Fordham Magazine interview, she added another piece of advice she often shared with young people: “Don’t be shy,” she said. “Do. Not. Be. Shy.”

Robles-Román is survived by her husband, Nelson; their two children, Ariana and Andrés; four sisters; and four nieces and nephews.

A TV producer covers Brexit, OPEC, the French elections, and Vladimir Putin

As Bloomberg TV executive producer for Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, Annmarie Hordern oversees a team of about a dozen producers from Dubai to London, where she’s based. They’ve produced programming on a wide range of topics, from Brexit to OPEC to the French elections.

“Last night we did four hours of breaking news with the numbers coming out,” she said by phone the day after the first round of the French presidential vote. She enjoys the fast-paced work. “You’re thinking as quickly as you can on your feet about how you’re going to tell that story.”

The Long Island native said it’s an “amazing time” to be in Europe. “It just seems like there are never-ending interesting stories to cover that will really have an affect on our future.”

Last November, Hordern was at the OPEC meeting in Vienna when the group decided to cut its oil production for the first time in eight years. OPEC is one of her favorite stories to cover, she said, in part because of the major potential impact of the work. “Any news we end up reporting,” she said, “could move the price of oil or other assets.”

Perhaps Hordern’s biggest story was Bloomberg’s exclusive interview with Vladimir Putin in September 2016, just before the U.S. elections. As the producer, Hordern handled the many logistical issues that come with producing content for several outlets, including Bloomberg Businessweek. “It’s about trying to work as one global team,” said Hordern, who also went to Tehran to cover Iran’s elections in May.

This year, Hordern was named to Forbes’ “30-Under-30 Europe” list for media. When she was under 20, she got her start as student reporter at WFUV, Fordham’s public media station.

“When I went to Fordham I wanted to be a lawyer. That was before I stepped foot into [WFUV News and Public Affairs Director] George Bodarky’s office,” she said. She realized she’d been bitten by the journalism bug “the first time they sent me out with a mult box and a mic.”

Bodarky said Hordern “was on a path to greatness from day one. It’s just who she is.” He recalled her first feature, about a couple that exchanged vows in a shark tank. “She won two feature awards for that piece.”

While at Fordham Hordern interned for Charlie Rose, which proved fortuitous. “He tapes at Bloomberg TV,” she said. With a little help from an FUV alumna at Bloomberg who passed on her resume, Hordern started working at Bloomberg TV in New York the summer after graduation. “I was a production assistant. … Slowly they would give me more responsibility, and I said yes to everything.”

Read more “20 in Their 20s” profiles. 

But on Dec. 7, he delivered a talk to the larger Fordham community.

Walcott, perhaps best known as the former chancellor of the New York City Department of Education, spoke on how to manage nonprofits, including managing an agency’s public face.

The day after his nomination for public schools chancellor was announced, and with most of New York City’s media watching, Walcott walked his grandson to school at one of his other alma maters, PS 36 in Queens.

“I still get comments about that,” said Walcott.

The instance was one of many examples of using media-savvy messaging, he said, but one that must be backed up with planning, substance, and integrity. He said that no matter the distractions, the message must always remain focused on an organization’s mission.

“One thing you can’t do is lose the perspective of why we’re in this business,” he said. “Whether you’re on the government or nonprofit side, you must maintain your moral compass, because that’s how you will relate to people.”

Walcott started his career as a teacher, where he was one of very few African-American men teaching kindergarten at the time. He later founded the Frederick Douglass Brother-to-Brother mentoring program to focus on kindergarten and grade school-age boys.

Walcott said that in order to to get press coverage for his new organization. He contacted a reporter from the Daily News. The reporter wrote a full-page article. Walcott also asked the director of community affairs at Channel 5 WNYW to place a public service announcement on Saturday morning before Soul Train. The response was overwhelming—too overwhelming.

“It was too much publicity too soon,” he said. “I didn’t know what I was doing when it came to raising funds, or how to set up an organization.”

It was Walcott’s first real brush with nonprofit management and rapid growth, he said—a theme he returned to repeatedly in his talk. He said that nonprofits should be strategic in the way they raise funds, combining both government grants with private dollars.

“You need to know when to say ‘no,’” he said. “If you’re totally dependent on government grants, then you’re setting yourself up for failure. That’s how a lot of agencies collapse.”

He said that in order to accept performance-based grants, agencies must have the infrastructure to deliver results. But these are not lessons learned easily, he said, recalling difficulties he had when he was the president of the New York Urban League.

“You have to anticipate that bullish times don’t last and you’re going to have to deal with a recession at some point,” he said. “You should operate from a very lean point of view and make sure you’re able to carry out the purpose of each grant.”

Walcott served with the New York City Board of Education in the David Dinkins administration, and later served as deputy mayor under the Bloomberg administration. Under Bloomberg’s leadership, he helped dismantle the Board of Education to create the New York City Department of Education, which became far more accountable to the mayor. Then he was promoted to chancellor.

“That was a definitely the game changer, getting immersed in New York City’s complexities and getting involved in the decisions you want to make and sometimes don’t want to make,” he said.

With money being a perennial distraction for governments and nonprofits alike, one must not lose sight of the common goal of both institutions—to serve the people.

“Fordham’s field of social work brings that humanized discussion back to the conversation,” Walcott said.

“They’re my gender justice warriors,” Robles-Román says of the dolls and bobblehead figures that stand guard in her downtown Manhattan office. “I’ve been a gender justice warrior in my heart.”

After only 18 months at the helm, Robles-Román and her team have added to Legal Momentum’s accomplishments. The nonprofit, launched in 1970 by the National Organization for Women to advocate for women’s civil rights, recently won pregnancy accommodations for all New York City employees. It also joined forces with New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, FCRH ’79, on the “Enough Is Enough” bill signed into law last summer to combat sexual assault on college campuses.

These headline-generating achievements are the latest results in a career spent recognizing problems and then finding the political will and the means to fix them.

“Part of my ethos is being a disruptor, in a good, nice way,” says Robles-Román, who served as deputy mayor for legal affairs and counsel to Mayor Michael Bloomberg for 12 years before leading Legal Momentum. “It’s about creating strategic partnerships to make change happen.”

Crusading for social justice comes naturally to Robles-Román, the daughter of Puerto Rican migrants who moved to the New York area in 1956, raising her and her five siblings in Brooklyn and Queens. She remembers watching her mother, Ines, transform the family’s travel agency into an informal legal services outfit, assisting neighbors in battles with bureaucracy, whether the problem was translating a form from English to Spanish or getting a child enrolled at public school. “She was a lawyer without a law degree,” Robles-Román says of her mother, who died in 2012.

The first time Robles-Román began looking for solutions to complex social justice issues was during her senior year at Fordham. She was dating a fellow Fordham student who would later become her husband, the Hon. Nelson S. Román, FCRH ’84. At the time, he was a police officer in the Bronx and had told her some harrowing stories about responding to domestic disputes. Her interest piqued, she did some research into best practices for handling domestic violence calls, publishing her work in Fordham’s pre-law journal. “Ever since then, domestic violence and the treatment of women has been an issue that she’s held very close to her soul,” says Román, who is now a federal judge in the Southern District of New York.

While good grades and test scores are important, networking is just as critical, says Robles-Román, who counts U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor among her mentors and role models. She met Sotomayor, a Bronx native, through the Puerto Rican Bar Association in the mid-’90s. “When I’m in a heated negotiation trying to get that extra $3 million for [a] project and nobody else in the room is advocating for it, I try to channel her,” Robles-Román says.

Like Sotomayor, Robles-Román is generous with her time when it comes to mentoring young people. Though she has a high-profile job and is the mother of a 17-year-old girl and a 10-year-old boy, she still carves out time to help the next generation. Four years ago, she created what she calls her “Girl Power School” talk, which she presents primarily to teens. She focuses on the steps that lead from the classroom into a profession, like writing a resume, getting letters of recommendation, and finding mentors. “Don’t be shy,” she often tells young women. “Do. Not. Be. Shy.”

Robles-Román has never been shy about pursuing initiatives to help the city’s most vulnerable citizens. In late 2001, after overseeing large operations at the New York state court system, she was tapped by Mayor Bloomberg’s transition team to lead legal affairs. The first woman to serve as counsel to a New York City mayor, Robles-Román thrived in the hard-charging Bloomberg administration.

She was a force behind the city’s language translation policy and the multimedia “Let’s Call an End to Human Trafficking” campaign. The accomplishment in which she takes the most pride is the creation of four Family Justice Centers, where victims of domestic violence have access to law enforcement and other social services under one roof.

The opening of the first Family Justice Center in Brooklyn 10 years ago was prompted by city data that found nearly three-fourths of women killed in family-related homicides hadn’t made a prior domestic violence report to the police. The goal is to make the process less frustrating and overwhelming by providing comprehensive services in one location. A 2014 report by the city’s Fatality Review Committee showed that family-related homicides dropped 36 percent since the center opened, and 57 percent of the victims had contact with at least one city agency.

As the end of Mayor Bloomberg’s third term loomed, Robles-Román began thinking about her next act. When she learned that Legal Momentum—which tackles a wide range of gender issues, from violence against women to workplace equity to poverty—was looking for a new CEO, it seemed like the perfect fit. The Hon. Judith Kaye, former chief judge of the State of New York, agrees. “Women of strength, that’s what Legal Momentum stands for,” she says. “They couldn’t have a better representative than Carol.”

Robles-Román aims to build on Legal Momentum’s recent victories. She’s determined to see the “Enough Is Enough” legislation—which requires affirmative assent before students engage in sexual activity—spread to the other 49 states. And she’s looking to build on the pregnancy accommodations victory, won as a result of a discrimination case brought by pregnant New York City police officer Akema Thompson. With support from Legal Momentum, Thompson sued the city after she was denied a chance to take a makeup promotional exam, despite the fact that the exam day coincided with her due date. Thompson will get to take the test—and she won the right to reasonable pregnancy accommodations for all city employees.

As she spoke about the courage Thompson showed in challenging the city, Robles-Román glanced over at Wonder Woman and Princess Leia and had a thought: “I’m going get one of these made in the shape of Officer Thompson!” she said, with an eye toward growing her collection of gender justice warriors.

—Mariko Thompson Beck is a freelance writer based in New York City.

“That was a failure of the policies, but in the end, we won. Consumption of sugary drinks during that time period has fallen dramatically in New York City,” he said at Fordham’s Lincoln Center campus on Sept. 29.

Farley, the New York City Health Commissioner from 2009 to 2014, noted that annual surveys have found that the amount of sugary drinks that people say they drink daily has dropped by a third. The nation of Mexico and the city of Berkeley, California, have also instituted soda taxes similar to the one that was defeated in New York in 2012.

Farley’s appearance, with moderator William Baker, PhD, journalist-in-residence and Claudio Acquaviva Chair at the Graduate School of Education, marked the third in a series of Fordham’s Oral Archive on Governance in New York City: The Bloomberg Years.

In a lengthy Q&A with Baker and audience members, Farley lamented that too much attention is lavished on ways we can protect ourselves individually, even though we benefit more from group efforts.

“I saw a headline the other day, ‘What you can do to protect yourself from getting an antibiotic-resistant infection.’ And the answer is really, nothing. There’s almost nothing you can do individually,” he said.

“But there’s a lot we can do as a society to prevent that.”

Reminiscing about his time in office, Farley praised the former mayor for making decisions based on data and not asking him what the political ramifications might be. That isn’t to say that Bloomberg gave the thumbs up to every idea Farley and his team proposed: Farley said he shot down an idea to ban the sale of cigarettes at pharmacies—which he noted have a “halo of health” around them that conflicts with cigarettes—and to ban their sale within a certain distance of schools.

“He listened and gave it a fair hearing, but at the end he said no. Because while he’s a public health guy, he’s also a businessman who kind of chastens at the idea of government interfering with business,” he said.

Farley said he was most proud to have put the issue of sugary drinks on the map, and to have extended the smoking ban to parks and beaches. He said his only regret was not paying closer attention to politics to get a better idea of what opponents were doing.

He detailed many of the stories of New Yorkers whose lives were saved in his book, Saving Gotham: A Billionaire Mayor, Activist Doctors, and the Fight for Eight Million Lives (W. W. Norton & Co., 2015)

Ultimately, public health should go beyond fighting pandemics, inspecting restaurants, and controlling pests, he said. It should tackle bigger problems like obesity, smoking, or designer drugs, which he said are the real challenges of the future.

“Public health needs to be in the service of dealing with modern-day stress. To do that, it needs to reinvent itself, and it needs an entirely different set of skills: communication skills, people skills, politics skills, things that are more relevant,” he said.

“This is an oral history from the Bloomberg administration’s key players and it can be used for research,” said Tom Dunne, Fordham’s vice president for administration.

On May 28 at 8:30 a.m., the latest installment of Fordham’s Oral Archive on Governance in New York City: The Bloomberg Years will feature William Cunningham, the former communications director, and Haeda Mihaltses, FCRH ’86, GSAS ’94, the former director of intergovernmental affairs. William Baker, PhD, the Claudio Acquaviva Chair in the Graduate School of Education, will moderate the conversation at the Corrigan Conference Center on the Lincoln Center campus.

Cunningham helped shape the media outreach of Mayor Bloomberg’s office and of more than 50 city agencies. Mihaltses coordinated the city’s relationship with the federal, state, and city governments.

The two will discuss some of the most significant moments of the Bloomberg administration, including: the 2001 election, the post-9/11 residential tax hike (as well as its eventual retraction), mayoral control of schools, the cigarette ban, citywide rezoning, overturning of term limits, and the responses to Hurricane Sandy.

The event is free and open to the public.

“Bloomberg’s New York: A Retrospective,” a conference held at Fordham Law School on Nov. 14, attracted many of the billionaire mayor’s administration officials, who positively put into perspective the post-Bloomberg New York.

Joseph M. McShane, S.J., president of Fordham, called his tenure, “something in the realm of miracles, it was miraculous.” He said that the mayor was an “outcomes and data driven guy” who took the helm shortly after the September 11 attacks.

“The city had not been as distressed and disturbed, since the Draft Riots of 1863,” said Father McShane, “But Bloomberg led with a creative verve that transformed the city from devastation back into one of the world’s great metropolises.”

Even one of the mayor’s biggest defeats, the failed 2012 Olympic bid, was recast as one of his greatest accomplishments. Gary LaBarbera, president of the Building and Trades Council of Greater New York, said rezoning for the bid allowed for some of the city’s biggest developments, including Hudson Yards, the new Mets Stadium, and the new Yankee Stadium, to name a few.
“The ancillary effects are still being felt,” said LaBarbera.

Seth Pinsky, former president of NYC Economic Development Authority, which oversaw many of the developments, said that while the larger projects garnered most of the attention, the less glamorous infrastructure projects in outer boroughs made the city livable for the working and middle classes. Casting the mayor as Manhattan-centric was unfair.

“Because of improved infrastructure and public safety, our middle class and younger people can move to areas that weren’t an option before,” he said.

Public safety was the focus one panel featuring Loretta Preska, LAW ’73, chief judge of the U.S. District Court for New York’s Southern District; Robert Keating, former vice-chairman of Mayor Bloomberg’s judiciary committee; and Cyrus Vance, district attorney of New York County.
Preska said crime dropped 32 percent under Bloomberg, “despite the added demands of terrorism.” Vance noted that Bloomberg and former police chief Ray Kelly created a world-class antiterrorism force, which Daily News’s Arthur Browne dubbed “equal to the FBI or the CIA.”

“The news here is not what happed, but what didn’t happen,” said Vance.

The panel’s moderator, Richard Aborn, of the Citizens Crime Commission, said that it would be remiss for the panel not to mention the stop and frisk policy.

Vance called stop and frisk “an essential police tactic.”

“You have to have the officer be able to stop and frisk and that shouldn’t be taken away,” said Vance. “Under Mike and Ray the tactic was sound, but it began to work against police and community relations.”

Keating said that the mayor took a multipronged approach toward crime, including his judicial appointments, hoping to help alleviate the constant recidivism of those committing crimes. Bloomberg viewed judges as “thinkers and change agents” and thought they could help reform aspects of the justice system.

And yet the mayor’s connection to the poor was perceived as distant, panelists said.

“The flipside of his uber-rationality, social standing, and money was that there was a lack of connection to regular New Yorkers,” said Browne.
Many of the panelists took issue with the perception, including Father McShane, who said that the mayor’s work with the poor was the administration’s great-unsung accomplishment. Two educators—CUNY Emeritus Chancellor Matthew Goldstein and New York State Board of Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch—agreed.

“Bloomberg’s antipoverty program was education,” said Tisch.

While Bloomberg may best be known for the many charter schools he supported, he was also responsible for opening several public schools, she said. Such changes should have implications for the entire state.

“You cannot proceed into a world economy without our people, and New York City cannot be the lone engine in New York,” said Tisch. “We have to leverage the changes that took place under Bloomberg for the entire state.”

Panelists repeatedly returned to the mayor’s management style.
“Mike didn’t operate at the detail level, he was macro,” said Peter Madonia, former City Hall chief of staff.

Several speakers said that the mayor picked talented people and handed over the reigns with the dictum, “Don’t mess it up.”

Though all agreed the language was a bit more direct.

An overarching theme, members of his administration suggested on Nov. 27, will be helping New Yorkers live longer, more enjoyable lives.

“He thinks that if we have extended the lives of New Yorkers, giving them an opportunity for a long and healthy life, then he’s done a good job as mayor,” said the Hon. Thomas Farley, New York City commissioner of health and mental health.

Farley was one of five experts from the fields of law, public health, and policy to weigh in on the mayor’s legacy at “The Bloomberg Administration’s Legal Legacy,” a two-night symposium co-sponsored by Fordham Law School and the New York City Bar Association.

Panels on safety and public health were part of the symposium, the inaugural event of the new Fordham Urban Law Center.

Farley discussed the range of high-profile public health initiatives the administration has implemented, including bans on smoking and trans fats, calorie labeling requirements, and the recent prohibition on the sale of large sugary drinks.

Referencing changes in health and social norms particularly with regard to smoking, Farley said the policies have been both socially and economically beneficial for the city.
“This is the perfect example of how policy can be effective, but also cost effective,” he said.

But Peter Zimroth, partner at Arnold & Porter LLP, who represented the restaurant industry in its battle against New York City’s calorie count requirement, challenged Farley on the efficacy of the Bloomberg health initiatives related to obesity.

“There’s a serious cost to be paid with initiatives like calorie labeling if, in the long run, they don’t work. There’s a limited amount of capital that government has to engage in coercive measures,” Zimroth said.

While the use of policy to affect public health is nothing new, Farley said that the mayor has been particularly innovative in using it to address obesity.

“The biggest legacy of the Bloomberg administration is the use of laws and policies to promote health in a modern era when …our biggest killers are things that can be seen as specific behavioral choices,” Farley said.

Nestor Davidson, professor of law and director of the newly launched center at Fordham Law, said the school created it to coalesce the already strong urban law resources in place at Fordham.

“It is our hope that the center will help foster conversation about the role of law across a range of policy questions that cities are grappling with,” Davidson said.

The symposium continues on Dec. 4 with panels focusing on education and land use and sustainability.

-by Jennifer Spencer

“This used to be a neighborhood where everyone did what my grandmother did,” Madonia says. “In the morning she went out and she bought whatever they were eating that night: fish or meat, vegetables, bread, whatever else they needed, and then she came home to prepare the meal. And that went on for years here, up through the ’80s.”

Nowadays, the Italian-American population of Belmont is small, but the community’s old-world flavor remains rich and strong as espresso. People flock here for the quality, variety, and value of the food available. And not least for the authenticity and tradition: Belmont is home to a remarkable number of businesses still run by the families who started them, in some cases more than 90 years ago. “It’s all the pieces of it that make it special,” Madonia says. “It’s the neighborhood, it’s the history, it’s the milieu.”

Although he grew up working in the bakery, Madonia didn’t always appreciate the value of the family business. “I hated it when I was kid,” he says. “I wanted to break out.” So after graduating from Fordham University in 1975 with a B.A. in anthropology and political science, he earned an M.A. in urban studies at the University of Chicago.

When he returned to New York in the late 1970s, he went to work as chief of staff for Deputy Mayor Nat Leventhal and before long advanced to deputy commissioner of the New York City Fire Department. In 1988, however, his older brother, Mario, who had been running the family bakery, was killed in a car accident. Amid the grief, Madonia decided to help his father keep the bakery alive. “It was hard,” he says. “It’s not the way you want to wind up in a business.”

The bakery thrived nonetheless, and by the mid-1990s he had taken in a partner. He also kept in touch with his former colleagues in city government and, in 2001, became a policy adviser to Michael Bloomberg, who was running for mayor. Following Bloomberg’s election, Madonia was named chief of staff, a position he held till late 2005, when he left City Hall to accept a new job, as chief operating officer of the Rockefeller Foundation.

As gratifying as Madonia finds his work these days, the 13 years he spent running the bakery on a daily basis taught him to recognize “the intrinsic value of a family business and an institution that has history.” He especially relished the daily exchanges with customers. “What a positive thing it is for people to say, ‘Thank you, I love your product. I put this on my dinner table.’ That’s their house,” he says. “You go home with them.”

Time is elastic on Arthur Avenue, and it doesn’t take Madonia long to get back into the old-world rhythm of the place. He meets Frank Franz, FCRH ’75, president of the Belmont Small Business Association. They walk and talk with Gil Teitel, third-generation owner of Teitel Brothers, the gourmet grocery that’s been selling imported olive oil, tomatoes, cheeses, and other goods on the corner of Arthur Avenue and 186th Street since 1915.

Two storefronts down is Coseza’s Fish Market, where imported branzino and orata rest on ice among local bluefish and croakers. “He has to be half an economist in order to buy and price,” Madonia says of John Cosenza, son of the store’s current owner. At Biancardi Meats, Madonia looks in on his friend Sal Biancardi, who, like Madonia, has worked both on and off the avenue. He returned to the family-run butcher shop in 1997, after 11 years as a currency trader for Morgan Stanley.

From Biancardi’s it’s on briefly to Madonia Brothers Bakery. The pungent, savory smell of house-cured sausage and sopressata is replaced by the warm aroma of freshly baked bread and cookies—the traditional pane di casa and the onion and olive breads; the biscotti, pignoli, and cannoli “filled while you wait.”

Next stop is the famed Arthur Avenue Retail Market, a landmark in Belmont since 1940, when Mayor Fiorello Laguardia sprearheaded the construction of the building as a shelter for the pushcart vendors who had been selling their goods out in the street. One door down from the market is Mario’s Restaurant, which started as a pizzeria in 1919 but offers a broad range of classic Neapolitan dishes. Chef and owner Joseph Migliucci greets Madonia. “I’ll make a pizza. You want some pizza?” Ten minutes later, the perfectly cooked pie arrives: The crust is pleasantly chewy, the tangy sauce blending with the fresh mozzarella and basil in a remarkable balance of flavor.

Madonia walks off the late-afternoon snack by heading to the Casa di Mozzarella, on 187th Street, just east of Arthur Avenue. His friend Orazio Carciotto is in the back of the store making the house specialty. He forces a hunk of curd through a sieve into a stainless steel bowl. After a little hand-mixing, he adds several small pots full of boiling water and thrusts his hands back in to knead the mixture until the mozzarella begins to form. Using a wooden paddle, he tears and stretches the cheese till it shines and, in a series of deft movements, folds the product into a ball or braids it into knots. “People ask, ‘How much water?’” he says. “I tell them I know when it’s right.”

The last stop of the afternoon is Borgatti’s Ravioli & Egg Noodles, which has been making fresh pasta cut to order for approximately 75 years. There’s a hand-operated pasta machine behind the counter. “When we opened the store in 1935, it was already used,” says Mario Borgatti, 92. He taps the wheel. “Still works. Even in blackouts.”

Madonia says goodbye and walks across 187th Street toward Our Lady of Mount Carmel Church, the spiritual and cultural center of the neighborhood since 1907.

“In a city like New York, there are lots of ethnic neighborhoods, but very few that have kept the heritage even after the people moved to the suburbs. We were able to do it both through the church and the commercial venue.

“People might say, ‘You’re stuck in a time warp,’” he says. “Maybe. I don’t know. Somebody likes it.”