Whether you’re thinking of visiting classic attractions in Manhattan or exploring a new borough this holiday season, we’ve got you covered.

Please note: All events and activities here are outdoors or virtual. Those that are outdoors are subject to COVID-19 rules and changes. Please take the proper precautions, follow city and state guidelines, and visit the sites’ individual websites to get more information.

Manhattan

The Winter Village at Bryant Park
Lace up your skates and enjoy some free ice skating at Bryant Park’s 17,000-square-foot outdoor rink, just a few blocks from Grand Central. Surrounding the rink are more than 170 shops and food stands where you can grab local gifts or try something new to eat.

Explore Rockefeller Center
There’s nothing that screams the holiday season more than the legendary tree at Rockefeller Center. This year’s 79-foot-tall Norway spruce will be up and lit until Jan. 16, so there’s plenty of time to stop by and grab a photo or two. Visitors can also reserve time to skate at the Rockefeller Center ice skating rink for $20 and up, or head up to the Top of the Rock and take in 360-degree outdoor views of the city, with tickets starting at $34.

New York Public Library for the Performing Arts
Go behind the scenes of The Nutcracker thanks to a new virtual exhibition from the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. “Winter Wonderland: George Balanchine’s The Nutcracker” aims to take viewers through the early years of the classic holiday ballet’s life.

Bronx

New York Botanical Garden: GLOW
Just across the street from the Rose Hill campus, the New York Botanical Garden has an outdoor exhibit called GLOW, a 1.5 mile outdoor illuminated light spectacle and a holiday night market holiday featuring diverse vendors and booths. Tickets for GLOW are $35 for adults and $20 for children under 12.

Bronx Zoo: Holiday Light Show
An immersive light display, more than 260 lanterns of animals and plants, and animated light shows, are just a few of the features of the Holiday Light Show at the Bronx Zoo. Ice carving demonstrations and competitions, a holiday train, wildlife theater, and seasonal treats are also available. Tickets are $39.95 for adults, $34.95 for seniors, and $24.95 for children 3-12.

“Chill Out” at Wave Hill
Enjoy the outdoors at Wave Hill, a public garden overlooking the Hudson River and Palisades in the Bronx that aims to “connect people to the natural world in meaningful and lasting ways through myriad programs.” During “Chill Out,” visitors are encouraged to explore the winter gardens with the help of expert naturalists, gardeners and wellness guides. Tickets are $10 for adults and $6 for students.

Brooklyn

Dyker Heights Christmas Lights Tour
Walk around the Dyker Heights, Brooklyn neighborhood to see some of the most extravagant decorations in the city. The breathtaking displays feature ground to roof lights, life-size Santas, and Christmas carols coming from the houses. They can be seen from 11th to 13th Avenues (also known as Dyker Heights Blvd) from 83rd to 86th St in Dyker Heights, Brooklyn.

Brooklyn Botanic Garden: Lightscape
Explore more than 1 million illuminated lights along an enchanting trail that also features a holiday soundtrack. Displays include the Winter Cathedral Tunnel, Fire Garden, and Sea of Light. There will also be displays from local artists, such as a series of poems by author Jacqueline Woodson. Tickets are $34 for adults and $18 for children 3-12.

Queens

Queens County Farm Museum: Illuminate the Farm
More than 1,000 lights in hand-crafted lanterns have taken over the Queens Farm as a part of the NYC Winter Lantern Festival. About six acres of the historic farmland are now a field of illuminated farm animals, vegetables, flowers, holiday delights, and more. Tickets are $24.99 for adults and $16.99 for children 3-12. From Dec. 24 to Jan 2, adult tickets are $29.99.

Queens Botanical Garden
Step outside and take in an outdoor exhibit by artists from Kew Gardens called “Here, There, and Everywhere.” The exhibit was “was born of the COVID-19 pandemic and the economic stress and political division it engendered,” and aims to remind visitors of the “beauty of the world, its strangeness and its transience, and employ the power of imagination.”

Staten Island

Winter Lanterns at Snug Harbor Cultural Center and Botanical Garden
As part of the NYC Winter Lantern Festival, seven acres of the Snug Harbor Cultural Center and Botanical Garden will be lit up with 27 LED holiday installations. Along with the lights display, a variety of holiday vendors will be on hand to create a festive experience. Admission is free.

Laura Auricchio, Ph.D.
Dean, Fordham College at Lincoln Center 

On a warm August night as the sun drooped down toward the New Jersey skyline, Auricchio walked her dog, Charley, in Riverside Park. Nearby, a jazz trio of drums, guitar, and flute was playing outside Grant’s Tomb. She snapped a shot and posted on her Instagram (@lauraauricchio), “I NY – impromptu concert at Grant’s tomb. #nyc #jazz #grantstomb #nytough.” The last hashtag encapsulated the born-and-bred New Yorker’s sentiment toward her hometown.

“I’ve lived through the Summer of Sam, the public-school strike, the transit strike, and the sanitation strike,” said Auricchio, who frequently posts photos of unique New York scenes to her account. “I sincerely believe that New York is at its finest when we are facing a challenge together.”

She said Riverside Park is a favorite spot to enjoy the outdoors while keeping social distance.

“If you’re a New Yorker you’re simply used to the fact that you have to be mindful of people’s needs—we’re never really in isolation, so that awareness makes respecting others’ space second nature to us,” she said.

Justin Rivers, FCRH ’01
Chief Experience Officer, Untapped New York

Shortly after Rivers graduated from Fordham in 2001, he started teaching social studies at a middle school on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. On his fourth day of work, the World Trade Center was attacked. He said that he recalls hearing the same fatalist rhetoric about the city back then.

“When I read that now, I’ll throw the paper across the room. I’m so sick of reading ‘New York is never gonna recover,’ or ‘Crime is through the roof,’ or ‘New York is toast,’” said Rivers. “We may have a tough time, but we’re New York and we’ve been through a lot of tough times. We always bounce back. I’m not going anywhere.”

When Rivers taught middle school, he took students on neighborhood tours. Alongside his teaching duties he wrote a play about the infamous destruction of the New York’s Penn Station, which led to a gig with Untapped New York, a website celebrating unsung New York treasures. Today, he manages tours for the site, which offers virtual and socially distanced tours. He shared a few of his favorite spots:

• Prospect Park: Rivers suggests that friends meet at the less crowded Nethermead meadow in the park that that Central Park designer Fredrick Law Olmsted preferred over its more famous sibling.
• Green-Wood Cemetery: Take a stroll through one of the city’s most pastoral and architecturally significant landscapes. Rivers advises grabbing a bite to go at the Israeli eatery Batata
• Domino Park: The popular East River park made national press with its “ingenious circles” that define contained areas for small groups to gather while remaining socially distant.
• The Elevated Acre: Nestled between two towers in Manhattan’s Financial District, this one-acre park is a quiet respite from the action that’s bubbling up again downtown, he said. “It’s lower Manhattan’s High Line, but it’s hidden and with only one entrance on South Street.”

Edward Kull 
Interim Director of Athletics

Born in Brooklyn, raised in Queens, and now living in Long Island, Kull likes to take his 8- and 9-year-old boys cycling in Flushing Meadows Corona Park. With its mostly level surface, this Queens park, designed for the 1939 World’s Fair, is perfect for an easy weekend ride. Kull said he likes to show his boys memorable places from his childhood, particularly Citi Field (“Go Mets!). They also bike past the Billie Jean King National Tennis Center, site of the U.S. Open, which is happening now, though only on TV.  On the way out of the park be sure to drop by the Queens Museum, Kull said, which is set to reopen on Sept. 16, and make the Lemon Ice King of Corona the last stop. Flavors range from the tropical (piña colada, coconut, mango) to the creative (spumoni) and the classic (lemon).

Maria Aponte
Assistant Director of Diversity and Inclusion
Career Services

An indefatigable champion of the Bronx, Aponte said she’s thrilled to hear that the Bronx Museum reopens this week and also suggests a walk through the New York Botanical Gardens. So far, she said she and her husband Bobby Gonzalez, a Bronx-based community organizer, have limited their ventures out to South of France, the South Bronx Puerto Rican restaurant and community hub. Owner Mirabel Gonzales spent the last six months delivering food to Bronx residents affected by the COVID-19 virus.

“Maribel has outdoor dining, very nice, with the bright red umbrellas and of course the food is excellent,” said Aponte. “We know the restaurant industry is really hurting now, and South of France is iconic for Orchard Beach groups, salsa and freestyle lovers, comedy lovers, and people who love fresh Latin food.”

Andrew Kent
Professor of Law

Kent grew up in Marblehead, a small town on the northern coast of Massachusetts, and started visiting New York City in the 1980s as a teenager. Back then he explored record stores and hung out at the infamous punk club CBGBs. While he still loves the noise, he also loves the serenity of Central Park.

“One of my favorite places is the Ramble in Central Park, a hilly wooded area in which you can forget for a moment that you are in the middle of 8.5 million people,” he said. “People say it’s a great spot for bird watching, but I go for the shady calm that the lovely trees there give us.”

Andrea Marais
Associate Dean of Strategic Marketing and Enrollment
School of Professional and Continuing Studies

Born in Poughkeepsie and raised in Stamford, Connecticut, Marais moved to New York “immediately” after college. She’s lived on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, Brooklyn’s Carroll Gardens, and Brooklyn Heights before moving to Bronxville in Westchester County, just north of Fordham’s Rose Hill campus. Though she misses the bustle of Brooklyn’s Montague Street and the view from the Promenade, she said she’s loved visiting Arthur Avenue since the street was closed to traffic on weekend nights as part of the Phase 2 reopening of the city.

“It’s lovely because they’ve opened the street and it has a very Old World feel to it,” Marais said of the new Piazza di Belmont. “Just about every single restaurant is open and it’s the most beautiful time of year. It’s like Paris meets the Bronx.”

Kirsten Swinth, Ph.D.
Professor of History 

Swinth grew up in Montana and came to the city in the 1990s. She lives on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. To escape the constant din of traffic, she said she walks a few blocks east and enters what feels like a world away on Randall’s Island, one of the city’s main recreation hubs, with 60 athletic fields for baseball, softball, and soccer; courts for tennis; greens for golf; an urban farm; event spaces; a salt marsh, and other city facilities.

“It’s fantastic, it’s everything there is in New York City, including a mental health facility and a jail,” said Swinth. “There are so many flowers and fields. Walking by the water, that’s my favorite thing to do.”

Swinth suggests crossing by way of the 103rd Street “flyover” and packing a lunch, as there are few venues for food on the island.

Bob Dineen
Director of Public Safety

Dineen lived in the Bronx until high school, when his family moved upstate to Orange County, where he still lives. He said he loves his daily commute to and from the city.

“I have been working in New York City since 1984. So that means I have been driving back and forth from Orange County to New York City for the last 36 years,” he said. “What I truly enjoy and what is very therapeutic for me is driving north on the Westside Highway after work and taking in the magnificent Hudson River, particularly as the sun sets at the end of the day.”

Dineen noted that Hudson River Park, a short walk from Lincoln Center, is at its peak during sunset.

“In the end, I love everything about New York City—the greatest city in the world—and don’t let me forget, the New York Yankees!”

A man answered the knock at the door. The agents didn’t know that this was their suspect. After a tense exchange with the agents, he pulled out a revolver and shot and killed two of them, Anthony Palmisano and Edwin Woodriffe, GABELLI ’62. He fled the apartment through a window, and city police and FBI agents captured him a few hours later. The murder of the two agents still resonates. Both were under 30, part of a tight-knit cohort of young agents in the FBI’s Washington field office, some of whom vividly recall the events of that day, January 8, 1969. And the killings were shocking for another reason. Woodriffe, 27 at the time, became the first black FBI agent to die in the line of duty.

For burial, he was brought back to his native Brooklyn, back to the city he loved, where he had worked his way through Fordham before launching his career in government service.

This April, the story of the earnest, witty agent who died too soon came back into the spotlight as the city honored him by making his name a fixture on the urban landscape. In a well-attended ceremony on a Brooklyn street corner, in the heart of the neighborhood where Woodriffe grew up, his immediate family spoke in remembrance of a radiant young man whose spirit seemed, somehow, to be present still.

A Child of Immigrants

Like so many New York stories, Edwin R. Woodriffe’s begins with immigration—his parents came to America from Trinidad when they were either in their teens or barely out of them, said Woodriffe’s daughter,  Lee Woodriffe, of Lithonia, Georgia. They  ran  a  dry  cleaning  shop   in the struggling Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, getting up early every day—“no time off, no sick days, no nothing”—and instilling  a  strong work ethic in their children, she said.

The youngest of three boys, Woodriffe helped out at the dry cleaner’s after school and doted on his parents, Lee Woodriffe said. He was an altar boy at nearby St. Peter Claver Church, where he met his future wife, Ella Louise Moore, during Christian confraternity classes.

After graduating from Brooklyn Preparatory School, he earned a degree in accounting at Fordham’s City Hall Division at 302 Broadway, where he was vice president of the philosophy club. He paid his  way by working as a police cadet and as an elevator operator at Macy’s, his daughter said. Upon graduation, he and  Ella were married, and they had two children, Lee and her brother,  Edwin Woodriffe Jr. Lee was only 5 when her father was killed, but learned from others what he was like. He was a jazz lover who would sometimes play his saxophone on the roof of the building where the family lived, she said. A voracious reader interested in religion and philosophy, he was a deep thinker, which was apparent from his conversation and his humor, she said.

The idea of working in law enforcement had taken hold when he was young; he admired his older brother for being a New York City police officer. After working for the Treasury Department in enforcement, he joined the FBI in 1966. Sometimes he would sign letters “Eliot Ness,” Lee said, describing her father as “really good-natured, and just always cracking a joke.”

In the FBI’s Washington, D.C., field office, he was low-key and decisive, “a very classy individual” who was courteous toward crime suspects, said Ed Armento, a retired agent who trained under Woodriffe for a week.

Lee Woodriffe said her father was one of only a handful of black FBI agents. Retired agent Robert Quigley, GABELLI ’62, recalled working with three black agents besides  Woodriffe in the Washington field office. Given Woodriffe’s talents, “there is no doubt in my mind that [he]would’ve been one of the top FBI executives had he lived,” Quigley said.

He recalled a story of solidarity against racism that  was  told  to  him: When Woodriffe was an FBI trainee in Washington, D.C., he and his classmates went to suburban Maryland to rent apartments, but they all pulled out of a pending housing contract when told Woodriffe would be barred. “The other agents were aghast,” Quigley said, so they sought housing elsewhere.

A Tragic Day

Quigley remembers the day when agents learned of a bank robbery by Billie Austin Bryant, an escaped federal prisoner. Woodriffe, Palmisano, and another agent went to the apartment where they had heard  Bryant’s  wife or girlfriend lived, said  Quigley,  citing reports  prepared  afterward. The agents couldn’t have known it was Bryant who opened the door when they knocked—“They have no photograph, no idea what he looks like,” Quigley said. “Back in those days, all we had were radios in the car. There was no way to send a photo.”

Bryant told the agents the woman they were seeking wasn’t there. When they asked to come in and wait for her, he refused and started to close the door. Woodriffe put his foot in the door to stop him, and Bryant pulled out his revolver. Woodriffe and Palmisano never got a chance to pull their firearms, said retired agent Charles Harvey, who tried to revive the two agents soon after.

Bryant surrendered to a police detective six hours later, after being tracked down to an attic in a building where someone had reported noise, said Quigley, who was there when Bryant was captured. Bryant was sentenced to two consecutive life sentences with no chance of parole.

The 50th anniversary of the two agents’ deaths was commemorated  in Washington in January by the bureau’s Washington field office and the Society of Former Agents of the FBI. Harvey spoke at the event. “Our job is to never forget,” he said.

Meanwhile, in Brooklyn, another remembrance had taken root.

A Street Renamed

St. Peter Claver Church sits at the intersection of Jefferson Avenue and Claver Place in Bedford-Stuyvesant. Lee Woodriffe spearheaded the two- year effort to have the City Council co-name the segment of Jefferson Avenue starting  at  that  intersection  in honor of her father, hoping to keep him present in a part of the city that was important in his life, she said.

“I did not want his final resting place in people’s minds to be in Cypress Hills Cemetery,” she said. “It’s very important to me that [his story]come full circle, but come full circle in the right way.”

The co-naming sends an inspiring message, she said. “Here is somebody who came from an impoverished area, odds stacked against him, but through perseverance and diligence and having integrity and wanting to do  better, rose up through the ranks and really made something of himself. It’s a story of hope, and what you can become.”

On April 26, FBI Special Agent Edwin R. Woodriffe Way was formally christened in a ceremony attended by FBI agents, New York City police,  city  officials,  clergy,  and  friends   and members of Woodriffe’s family, including his widow, Ella Woodriffe.

“There’s a saying that hatred corrodes the vessel it’s carried in, but today I  have  no  hatred,”  she  said.  “I speak with heart-filled joy and thanking God for allowing all of us to be here in attendance as a testament to my husband’s memory.

“His  story  began  right  here   at  St. Peter Claver Church,” she said. “Edwin went to school here. He went to church here. He was an altar boy here. We met as teenagers  here.  …  We were married here, we had two children, and lastly, he was funeralized here. He will be forever remembered in our hearts.”

Edwin R. Woodriffe Jr., who was 6 when his father died, lacks vivid memories of him. “There are photos and stories from friends and family, but the nuances are lost,” he said at the ceremony. “What was his favorite color? I don’t know. I have one of his high school essays on basketball. Were the Knicks his favorite team? I don’t know, and if I did, I don’t remember.

“But he got a B+, by the way, on the paper,” he said, to laughter.

“The thing I  remember  most  is the idea of  him  represented  inside  the family,” said Woodriffe, whose mother got help from extended family in raising him and Lee. “I feel blessed that my father’s sacrifice was a part  of inspiring my sister and I to be the adults that we are today. And on the 50th anniversary of his passing, I’m honored to see his name on this corner, where his story can continue.”

Auxiliary Bishop James Massa of the Diocese of Brooklyn also spoke at the ceremony. He said the newly unveiled street sign is a reminder “that a great New Yorker once lived among us and overcame racial barriers in order to serve, in order to protect the vulnerable and contribute to the common good of our nation.”

With the Nets having capped off a successful regular season that led to a first-round playoff series against the Philadelphia 76ers, Love spoke with FORDHAM magazine about her game night responsibilities, her passions and pursuits, and what was special about the education she received at Fordham.

How did you first come into the Nets hosting gig?
I fell in love with on-camera work, so I started taking hosting classes. When I finished, I emailed the class reel to everyone in my contacts, most of whom I didn’t even know, letting them know I was open for hosting business. Next thing I knew, I got an email offer to host the Brooklyn Nets!

What does a game night look like for you? Can you walk us through the process and timing from when you get to the arena to when you leave?
I get to Barclays Center two hours prior to tip-off, and we have an entertainment meeting, which includes going over the “run of show” for that evening’s game. Afterwards, I get ready for the game and review my lines. My first hit happens around 7 p.m. if it’s an evening game. Then, I welcome everyone to the game and introduce the teams around 7:10 p.m. From then on, I am on pretty much every timeout during the game. I’m on court and in the stands doing fan interactions, on-court games, interviews, and marketing plugs. I leave at the end of the game.

With the team having such a successful season and now being in the playoffs, have you noticed a change in the atmosphere at Barclays?
Leading up to [and during the] playoffs, the energy is always taken up another level. Brooklyn has something so special about it, as a borough, community, and team, and that energy always spills into the arena. As we got closer to the postseason, you could feel the grit and energy of our team taking it to the next level.

You are also a Peloton instructor, model, and the founder and CEO of Love Squad. How do you balance all that in your day-to-day? And what are your plans for the future in these different areas?
Well, I love all the things I do, so they fuel me. The thing that all of these platforms have in common is the opportunity to affect my community positively by utilizing live, on-camera interaction. I plan to continue to create content that will inspire communities across the world.

I also have big hopes for my company. Love Squad is a big part of who I am and reflects what I stand for, which is diversity, empowerment, and love. I founded it on my own a few years ago and want to continue to grow it into the platform I know it can be. Love Squad creates a space that champions inclusivity and diversity, and deconstructs the disparity in who is able to receive information that could change people’s personal and professional lives. If you have the network, you learn and you’re exposed to more, which offers a chance at a better opportunity in life. So the more we grow, the more people we can help. That’s what my main focus is right now.

You earned your B.F.A. from Fordham through its partnership with the Ailey School. How has your training there impacted your career?
I think it gave me discipline. It afforded me an opportunity to establish a personal metric for success safely, within the construct of school, while experiencing a big city. It also encouraged me to immerse myself in elements that allowed me to be creative, and to use that as a conduit for production beyond basic utility.

What first attracted you to the program at Fordham?
I loved that it was in New York City, specifically right in midtown. I also felt like it was the perfect hybrid of arts, culture, and academics while offering independence, which were very important characteristics.

What did you get out of the combination of a high-level dance program and a Jesuit core curriculum?
I was able to find myself. I was always dancing (pun intended) between the arts and religion. Fordham provided the foundation and opportunity to explore both simultaneously, and it opened my mind to the fact that they were not mutually exclusive. There was room for me to merge both, and it ultimately molded me into the woman I am today.

Fifty years ago, three FBI agents came calling at an apartment in southeast Washington, D.C., during a hunt for a bank robbery suspect. Only one of the agents would survive what happened next.

A man answered the knock at the door. The agents didn’t know it was the suspect they were seeking. After exchanging some tense words with the agents, he pulled out a revolver and shot and killed two of them, Anthony Palmisano and Edwin Woodriffe, GABELLI ’62. He fled the apartment through a window, and city police and FBI agents captured him a few hours later.

Today, the murder of the two agents still resonates—both were only in their late 20s, part of a tight-knit cohort of young agents in the FBI’s Washington field office, some of whom still vividly recall the events of that day, January 8, 1969. And the killings were shocking for another reason. Woodriffe, 27 at the time, became the first black FBI agent to die in the line of duty.

For burial, he was brought back to his native Brooklyn, back to the city he loved, where he had escaped his impoverished neighborhood by working his way through Fordham and launching his career in government service. In April, the city will unveil a remembrance of the polished, thoughtful agent with a sharp sense of humor, ensuring that his memory will remain very much alive.

A Child of Immigrants

Edwin R. Woodriffe was the third child of immigrants from Trinidad who lived in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood. They owned a dry cleaning shop, getting up early for work every single day “without fail” and instilling a strong work ethic in their children, said Woodriffe’s daughter, Lee Woodriffe, of Lithonia, Georgia.

Woodriffe graduated from Brooklyn Preparatory School, a Jesuit high school in nearby Crown Heights, and earned an accounting degree at Fordham’s City Hall Division at 302 Broadway, where he was vice president of the philosophy club, his daughter said. He paid his way by working as a police cadet and as an elevator operator at Macy’s. Upon graduation, he married Ella Louise Moore, whom he had met in a Christian confirmation class when they were teenagers, and they had two children, Lee Ann and her brother, Edwin R. Woodriffe Jr.

Growing up, Woodriffe had admired his older brother for serving as a New York City police officer; after graduating from Fordham, he worked for the U.S. Treasury Department in enforcement before joining the FBI in 1966. Sometimes he would sign letters “Eliot Ness,” Lee said, describing her father as “really good-natured, and just always cracking a joke.”

Much of what she knows of him was related by others, since she was only 5 when he was killed. He was a jazz lover who would sometimes play his saxophone on the roof of the building where the family lived in Brooklyn, she said. A voracious reader interested in religion and philosophy, he was a deep thinker, which was apparent from his conversation and his humor, she said.

In the Washington, D.C., FBI field office, he was a low-key and decisive agent, “a very classy individual” who was courteous toward crime suspects, said Ed Armento, of Prospect, Kentucky, a retired agent who trained under Woodriffe for a week.

Retired agent Robert Quigley, GABELLI ’62, recalled working with three other black agents, in addition to Woodriffe, in the Washington field office. A story of solidarity in the face of discrimination was recently passed along to him, he said—when Woodriffe was an FBI trainee in Washington, D.C., Woodriffe and his classmates went to suburban Maryland to rent apartments, but they all pulled out of a pending housing contract when they were told Woodriffe would be barred. “The other agents were aghast,” Quigley said, so they sought housing in D.C. or Virginia instead.

A Tragic Day

Quigley remembers the day when agents learned of a bank robbery by Billie Austin Bryant, an escaped federal prisoner. Woodriffe, Palmisano, and another agent went to check out the apartment where they had heard Bryant’s wife or girlfriend lived, said Quigley, citing reports prepared afterward.

It was Bryant who opened the door when they knocked, but they weren’t sure it was him. “They have no photograph, no idea what he looks like,” Quigley said. “Back in those days, all we had were radios in the car. There was no way to send a photo.”

Bryant told the agents the woman they were seeking wasn’t there. When they asked to come in and wait for her, he refused and started to close the door. Woodriffe put his foot in the door to stop him, and Bryant pulled out his revolver.

Woodriffe and Palmisano never got a chance to pull their firearms, said retired agent Charles Harvey, who tried to revive the two agents and later removed the weapons from their bodies at an area hospital.

Bryant was captured about six hours later, surrendering to a local police detective when he was tracked down to an attic where someone had reported noise, said Quigley, who was there when Bryant was captured. Bryant was sentenced to two consecutive life sentences with no chance of parole.

Commemorations in D.C. and Brooklyn

The 50th anniversary of the two agents’ deaths was commemorated in Washington in January by the bureau’s Washington field office and the Society of Former Agents of the FBI. Harvey spoke at the event. “Our job is to never forget,” he said.

Another commemoration is coming up on April 26 in Brooklyn, when the corner of Jefferson Avenue and Claver Place will be formally co-named Special Agent Edwin R. Woodriffe Way. The City Council approved the co-naming within the past year after Lee Woodriffe petitioned for it. She is also writing a book on her father’s life, the shooting, and its aftermath.

Her father “loved Fordham,” along with all things New York, she said, and the renaming keeps him present in a part of the city that was important in his life, when he was an altar boy at St. Peter Claver Church.

“I did not want his final resting place in people’s minds to be in Cypress Hill Cemetery,” she said. “It’s very important to me that [his story]  come full circle, but come full circle in the right way.

“Here is somebody who came from an impoverished area, odds stacked against him, but through perseverance and diligence and having integrity and wanting to do better, rose up through the ranks and really made something of himself,” she said. “It’s a story of hope and what you can become.”

America, as Seen on TV: How Television Shapes Immigrant Expectations Around the Globe

In her latest book, Clara Rodríguez examines the “soft power” of American television in projecting U.S.-centric views around the globe. She analyzes the strong influence TV exercises on both young Americans and recent immigrants with regard to consumer behavior and their views on race, class, ethnicity, and gender.

The book is based on two studies: one focused on 71 immigrant adults over 18 who had watched U.S. TV in their home country, and one focused on 171 U.S.-born undergraduates from the Northeast. Many in the foreign-born group were surprised to find that their experience of the U.S. proved more racially and economically diverse than the mostly white, middle-class depictions of American life that they had seen back home on TV. And substantial majorities of both groups shared the sense that American TV is flawed in that it “does not accurately represent or reflect racial and ethnic relations in the United States.”

Still, Rodríguez notes, TV is “a medium in flux; it has changed greatly in the past decade, and the only thing we can be certain about is that it will continue to change.”

Back from the Brink: Saving Animals from Extinction by Nancy F. Castaldo, MC ’84 (Cornell University Press)

In Back from the Brink, Nancy Castaldo recounts the survival stories of seven species—whooping cranes, alligators, giant tortoises, bald eagles, gray wolves, condors, and bison.

“All of these animal populations plummeted,” she writes, “and yet, all of them survive today.”

She describes how each species got in trouble; relates the often controversial restoration efforts and their results; explains the need for apex predators; offers calls to action for young readers; and pays tribute to a group of “eco-heroes” (including President Richard Nixon, who in 1973 signed the Endangered Species Act) who “look out for the needs of creatures that cohabit this planet, even when these needs may conflict with our short-term economic goals.”

Feminism’s Forgotten Fight: The Unfinished Struggle for Work and Family by Kirsten Swinth, Ph.D., associate professor of history and American studies at Fordham (Harvard University Press)

From failed promises of women “having it all” to the contemporary struggle for equal wages for equal work, Kirsten Swinth exposes how government policies often undermined tenets of second-wave feminism during the 1960s and 1970s.

She argues that second-wave feminists did not fail to deliver on their promises; rather, a conformist society pushed back against far-reaching changes sought by these activists.

“My focus is on the story of a broad feminist vision that wasn’t fully realized,” Swinth notes. “There were a lot of gains generally, but the movement also generated an antifeminist backlash so that most of the aspirations, like a sane and sustainable balance for work and family, were defeated.”

She examines activists’ campaigns and draws from them “a set of lessons that we need to inspire us” to continue the fight “with a new energy.”

Ramp Hollow: The Ordeal of Appalachia by Steven Stoll, Ph.D., professor of history at Fordham (Hill and Wang)

To better understand the history of the United States, one should include the people who were displaced from lands they once called home, argues Steven Stoll. That story includes not only Native American tribes evicted by English and later American settlers but also poor whites who once called the mountains of Appalachia home.

In Ramp Hollow, he visits an area just outside of Morgantown, West Virginia, to explore how the people who once lived there were pushed out and forced to surrender a self-sustaining, agrarian life in exchange for a wage-based living tied to coal mining companies and lumber mills.

Brooklyn Before: Photographs, 1971–1983 by Larry Racioppo, FCRH ’72 (Cornell University Press)

New York City photographer Larry Racioppo honed his art and craft during the 1970s by taking pictures of family, friends, and kids in his working-class South Brooklyn neighborhood.

This collection of his early work highlights families—most of them Italian American, Irish American, and Puerto Rican—as they go about their daily lives, celebrating Catholic sacraments and holidays, playing stickball and congas on the sidewalk, hanging out on stoops and fire escapes, posing with boom boxes in front of graffiti-tagged walls, and taking part in patriotic parades and religious processions.

“I did not know it at the time, but I was recording a part of Brooklyn that would soon be remade by gentrification,” Racioppo writes.

“I did it because I liked the feel of it,” he says. “There was something about having a camera that made me think, made me feel more alert and more aware of my environment.”

Few days made Racioppo feel more alert than Halloween.

As a kid, he’d go trick-or-treating with cousins and friends, and they’d have make-believe fights with shaving cream and “chalk bags”—old socks filled with pieces of chalk crushed to dust. By nightfall, they’d head indoors to bob for apples, carve jack-o’-lanterns, and enjoy the sweet loot they’d foraged from friendly neighbors. “I loved the activity, the crazy costumes, the theatricality of it,” he says.

By the mid-’70s, he was in his 20s, a recent Fordham graduate working at a high-end Manhattan photo studio. He’d long since stopped trick-or-treating, but the spirit of the holiday still called to him.

“I started leaving work early on Halloween to get back to Brooklyn. I photographed kids from 3 o’clock, when they got out of school, until it got too dark to shoot with available light,” he says, noting that he’d start near Park Slope and wander south to Sunset Park. “That first year, I came out of my house and the kids charged me—they ran up to me full speed for me to take their picture.”

“It became a yearly thing,” he says, “so from ’74 to ’78, I had all these fabulous photographs. And the kids and costumes were terrific. There’s the classics—the ghosts, vampires, angels. And every year there’s a movie that’s the big movie. One year it’s Planet of the Apes, then it’s Jaws, then Star Wars, and sometimes those cultural costumes would linger a year or two. But they have a shelf life—I mean, when you look back and see the Fonz costumes. These days, who even knows who the Fonz was?”

Ever since 1974, Racioppo says he’s had an easy rapport with the neighborhood kids, who took to calling him “Picture Man,” a nickname he says he took as a great compliment.

In October 1979, the Village Voice featured eight of Racioppo’s Halloween images, and the following year, Scribner’s published Halloween, his first book.

“That was really my first notch up,” he says, noting that it helped launch his decades-long career in photography. From the late 1980s until 2011, he was a staff photographer for the city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development, and he has earned several grants, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, for his own work documenting the urban landscape.

“Part of what I do is about stuff disappearing,” he once told The New York Times. That’s an explicit theme of his latest book, Brooklyn Before: Photographs, 1971–1983, published last month by Cornell University Press.

The book highlights working-class families—most of them Italian American, Irish American, and Puerto Rican—as they go about their daily lives, celebrating Catholic sacraments and holidays, playing stickball and congas on the sidewalk, hanging out on stoops and fire escapes, posing with boom boxes in front of graffiti-tagged walls, and taking part in patriotic parades and religious processions.

“I did not know it at the time, but I was recording a part of Brooklyn that would soon be remade by gentrification,” Racioppo writes in the book’s preface. “Slowly but surely, the residential ‘gold rush’ expanded south from Park Slope … toward Green-Wood Cemetery,” driving up rents and home prices, and driving out many working-class families.

Brooklyn Before features a handful of the Halloween photos that helped launch Racioppo’s career. Today, he lives in the Rockaways, where he has continued photographing trick-or-treaters on Halloween. This year, however, he says he may head back to Brooklyn to meet up with his grandsons in Park Slope, where, although the times have changed, the spirit of the holiday is still strong.

“They’re 8 and 6 years old now. They won’t just get a chalk bag and run around till dark by themselves. They’ll go to supervised play or an after-school Halloween celebration,” he says, like the annual children’s parade. “Halloween is always fun. There are so many great things about it.”

Halsey Street touches on a lot of themes, like mothers and daughters, racial and cultural identity, and gentrification. How did you decide to write this story?
While I was at Fordham, I got a short memoir published in The New York Times. It was called “Remembering When Brooklyn Was Mine,” about a fading Brooklyn and one that was being remade. That made me want to spend more time figuring out what it’s like to feel stuck between two Brooklyns. I invented Penelope [Halsey Street’s protagonist] and knew the story would be about her resistance to her homecoming, and about her finding her place—in her old Brooklyn neighborhood and within herself. Then I started writing her mother’s point of view, and it also became about these two women trying to find their way back to each other.

Did you always see yourself as a writer?
I did, but in college at Yale I was premed. Because I was a smart girl of color, I wanted to be helpful to society, and being a doctor would be something my family understood as having made it. I got into med school, but I deferred. And I deferred again. Then I went to Fordham for my master’s in English. So it’s been nice to have the book come out and reassure my family that I’d be OK, even if there’s still uncertainty. And of course it feels like a huge victory for me too.

What’s been the reaction to Halsey Street?
The reception I’ve experienced overall has been really positive. But I have also been made really aware of how some basic facts of my characters’ lives can be seen as controversial or troubling. Like my use of Spanish when it would be natural for the characters, or to show the trouble with communicating across generations and languages. Or the fact that Penelope is someone who is attentive to color and race. I get frustrated when I read literature and there’s no mention of race or ethnicity until a black character comes out. So for me as a writer, if we live with the powerful fiction of race, I want to be honest about rendering that for various people, not just people of color.

Do you identify with Penelope?
I identify as both black and Latina, like Penelope. And as a scholarship kid since middle school, I also feel like I’m in this bubble, stuck between two worlds. But I don’t always agree with Penelope. The points of view [around gentrification]in the book are deeply flawed. I don’t like the terms gentrifier or gentrified; they’re flattening and not true to nuances. And they don’t acknowledge how gentrification is driven by structural forces and not just individual agency. But when people talk about gentrification, partially what they’re talking about is a sense of erasure, or theft, or appropriation. It’s a complicated position, which is why I wanted to have people on different sides of it and not have the narrative comment directly.

Is that idea of leaving open questions something you teach your students at Wake Forest?
Yes. I think some people teach writing like it’s this mysterious thing, or you’re just kind of born with it or not, which I don’t believe. I teach a first-year writing class and one about American identity, race, and belonging. I think that one really challenges students because it’s one of the first times they’ve been instructed to ask questions about what it means to be American. By the end of the semester, they’ve deepened their thinking and have more questions. I think it’s unsettling for some of them, in a good way.

Do you want to continue teaching?
I definitely want to continue working to cultivate young writers. Teaching is a way for me to remain connected to the value that fiction has for readers, and the value the practice of writing has for writers.

What are you working on right now?
I’ve got two book projects that are cooking right now; they’re both novels. One is a quest story, and the other is about a community in North Carolina, which is inspired by a short story I published about my time in Durham. I think they both build on the work of Halsey Street, but I don’t know which one I’ll finish next.

Interview conducted, edited, and condensed by Alexandra Loizzo-Desai.

On March 23, Colin Cathcart,  associate professor of architecture, led a dozen students through a two hour-long jaunt that touched on graffiti and street art, an active freight line, the oldest standing Dutch Colonial stone home just across the border in Queens, and finally, a tortilla factory-turned-restaurant serving some of the best tacos in the city.

This different view can be seen in Brooklyn and the Bronx, where congregations were listening to something more than authority figures’ dictates when they set out to make their communities better during the past five decades, argues Bradford Hinze, PhD, the Karl Rahner, SJ, Professor of Theology.

His book, Prophetic Obedience: Ecclesiology for a Dialogical Church (Orbis, 2016), advances a creative understanding of obedience by examining both local church life and grassroots democratic action.

“In the way obedience has traditionally been understood, you obey the person in authority, whether in your family, in the government, or in the church,” Hinze said. “Prophetic obedience calls for responding to the aspirations and laments of the community around me in my own situation.”

“Prophetic obedience is not blind obedience to higher-ups on the one hand, and it’s not following the mob on the other hand,” he said.

The book tells a story that began a half-century ago with the Second Vatican Council and its emphasis on dialogue rather than obedience to hierarchical authority. What emerged from the council was the idea of the church as the people of God, all of whom are empowered by the Holy Spirit to share in the prophetic office of Jesus Christ, Hinze said.

Around 1980, this idea became eclipsed in many sectors of the church by a re-emphasis on  centralized authority around the pope and the Roman curia. But the idea of a dialogical church had taken hold in the Archdiocese of New York, where parish pastoral councils—not always supported by the archdiocese—branched out into local issues like housing, crime, and education, working with lay leaders and with people of other faiths and worldviews.

To illustrate, Hinze explores the founding of South Bronx People for Change at St. Athanasius Parish in the 1980s, as well as efforts by Jesuit scholastic Paul Brandt. In addition to teaching philosophy at Fordham, he organized local pastors to challenge the threat of encroaching fires from the South Bronx, which led to the formation of the Northwest Bronx Community and Clergy Coalition.

In the book, Hinze relates parishes’ grassroots engagement to the concept of prophetic obedience, or the act of heeding a “prophetic sense of the faith.” Through baptism, every Christian is invited to cultivate this prophetic sense as they discern how to live out the Gospel.

“A prophet emerges by heeding, hearing, and responding to the laments and the aspirations in the community and in the world,” Hinze said. “But prophets also need to be attentive to their own laments and their own aspirations, to exercise their own consciences, to discern, to take a stand.”

“It’s common … for Christians to emphasize that Jesus obeyed his heavenly Father,” Hinze said. “But Jesus also obeyed the voice of the Spirit that he heard in all of the people around him who were suffering and lamenting about how restricted their lives were, how marginalized they felt. Responding to these voices animated Jesus’ prophetic mission.”

Further, while typically God the Father is described as the authority and Jesus as the obedient son, scripture discloses that “the Father is obedient too,” Hinze said. “The Father heeds and hears and responds. We find God in the Hebrew scriptures heeding and hearing and responding to suffering humanity, but also to the wailing created world.”

The book’s themes echo some of the central convictions expressed by Pope Francis, which was pleasantly surprising for Hinze, who wrote it during the pontificate of Pope Benedict XVI.

“It was disorienting at first,” Hinze said. “You’re hearing a voice ‘out there’ that you’ve been hearing ‘in here’ for quite some time.”

The book, which detailed the challenges faced by two men—a police officer and a teenager—in Brownsville, Brooklyn at the height of New York City’s crack epidemic, has been republished this month by Fordham University Press, along with a new epilogue by Donaldson. The book follows a year in the life of the two men from the opposite sides of the street.

Mark Naison, PhD, professor of African-American Studies and history at Fordham, who wrote the forward for the book, said the re-issue couldn’t come at a better time, given the racial climate in the United States and the friction between police and members of the African-American community.

Naison, who knew Donaldson while he was researching the book, said the bravery that Donaldson exhibited in immersing himself in a dangerous neighborhood was noteworthy. In his forward, Naison described working in the 1980’s for the United Community Centers of East New York. The group promoted an anti violence campaign called “Shield the Children,” a name they chose after a drug dealer picked up a 3-year old from a stroller and used him as a shield in a gun battle.

Most impressively, Naison said, Donaldson, who is now an associate professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, humanizes everyone caught up in a tragic situation, from neighborhood kids who are involved in drug dealing, to police patrolling the area’s public housing projects. He called it a journalistic and anthropological version of the album Illmatic, by the rapper Nas—considered one of the greatest chronicles of life on the street.

“I can’t think of another book that does that. And it’s especially important now, where police issues are on the front of public consciousness after the deaths of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and now Sandra Bland in Texas,” he said.

“This (1993) is really the early stages of the drug war, and to some degree, it’s the drug war that creates the police practices that have created all of these racial tensions in our society.”

In the 20-odd years since the first publication, crime has plummeted in New York City (328 murders last year compared to 2245 in 1990), and in a newly written epilogue, Donaldson explores how Brownsville has changed, too. The persons who are the focus of the book—Gary Lemite and Sharron Corley—have since moved away, and the neighbors they left behind now face very different challenges, said Naison.

“There’s less violence. There’s a lot more police. The communities have been rebuilt, there’s lot of new housing, and the business districts are revived. But what you don’t see are all the people who are in jail, and all those who’ve been pushed out of the community by rising rents,” Naison said, pointing out that Ferguson, Missouri, is not central but is a suburb of St. Louis.

Naison said he was glad the book was available again, and plans to use it in his courses.

“People trying to understand where we are, and how we got to this point will benefit from it.”