At the Louis Calder Center, scientists explore ecological mysteries and study society’s impact on the natural world.

To the casual observer, Fordham’s Louis Calder Center might seem to be just another quiet tract of Hudson River Valley forest. But for natural scientists, it abounds with opportunity. Explore the 113-acre biological field station in Armonk, New York, and you’ll find a bounty of ecosystems and animals, from the four-legged to the microscopic. At the heart of the preserve is a 10-acre temperate lake teeming with a diversity of aquatic life. Go high enough and, way off in the distance, you can see another big player in the preserve’s ecology: New York City, which begins only 16 miles away.

Its proximity has never been more relevant. “Humans and our cities are the most dominant forces of contemporary evolution now,” says Jason Munshi-South, Ph.D., a Calder-based biology professor who recently co-authored a paper in the journal Science on how species are evolving within cities. Other scientists at Calder study invasive species that arrive via big-city commerce. And they tackle many other mysteries: why some animals survive new threats while others don’t, how nutrients flow beneath the soil, or how insects transmit disease.

The center was born 50 years ago when the land was given to Fordham by the Louis Calder Foundation, named for the paper and pulp magnate who maintained a summer home on the property. Today, that home is Calder Hall, one of several buildings in which students and professors analyze DNA samples, inspect plant and animal specimens, hold classes, and generate knowledge.

Among many other public services, the Calder Center supports the nation’s longest-running study of ticks and Lyme disease, and its scientists work to illuminate society’s impact on nature at a time of growing concern about biodiversity and climate change.

It is also a crucial training ground: “The most important thing we do here is make scientists,” says Thomas Daniels, Ph.D., an expert in tick- and mosquito-borne diseases who has served as the center’s director since 2014.

On a sparkling autumn day late last October, FORDHAM magazine tagged along as undergraduates, graduate students, professors, and visiting scientists went about their work—gently probing, collecting samples, and explaining the science behind their work and its potential impact.

Evolution in the Big City

In recent years, Fordham biologist Jason Munshi-South, Ph.D., and his team of graduate and undergraduate students have become known for their studies of urban wildlife and pest species, most notably rats.

“The initial idea was to understand what a New York City rat is, from all ecological and evolutionary angles,” he says of one project, which grew to a global scale and has public health implications. “We’re using DNA to understand how they move around the city and how they’re related to other rat populations.”

In a first-floor lab in Calder Hall, doctoral student Carol Henger uses similar methods to study coyotes, animals that only recently moved into the city for the first time, Munshi-South says. She’s looking at DNA markers from coyote scat collected in Pelham Bay Park and elsewhere to infer how individual coyotes are related, what they’re eating, and how they’re dispersing.

Meanwhile, Nicole Fusco, another doctoral student in Munshi-South’s lab, sequences DNA to study gene flow among populations of salamanders.

Biodiversity and Climate Change

In the Calder Center’s Lord & Burnham greenhouse, constructed on the property nearly a century ago, doctoral student Stephen Kutos has been growing pairs of potted trees and studying how they pass water and nutrients back and forth via subsoil networks of fungus.

“Tree stumps have been found that are still alive hundreds of years after the tree was cut down, quite possibly because surrounding trees send them nutrients,” he says. With further study, he adds, it may be possible to restore the wild population of one type of tree he’s growing, the American chestnut, which was eradicated from the wild 100 years ago by blight.

Restoring the tree could help combat climate change, scientists believe, because the American chestnut can absorb and store carbon quickly.

In an adjacent greenhouse, several researchers work on an evolutionary study initiated by Fordham biologist Steven Franks, Ph.D., and focused on Brassica rapa (field mustard). As Franks demonstrated in an earlier study, the annual plant evolved earlier flowering within just five years to cope with drought conditions in California.

The Mystery of the Red-Backed Salamander’s Survival

Late in the morning, undergrads Dan Khieninson and Erin Carter and doctoral student Elle Barnes enter Calder forest in search of red-backed salamanders.

“You can find them anywhere in the forest as long as the soil’s moist,” Barnes says before the group navigates a steep decline to the forest floor.

She indicates several flat, weathered pieces of wood she’s left behind. “You’re more likely to find them under here.” The three researchers crouch down and soon locate several specimens.

They’re trying to discover why red-backed salamanders are not affected by the chytrid fungus that is devastating other amphibian populations.

“It’s not enough to just study the ones that are going extinct,” Barnes says. “There are solutions in the ones that will survive. What do they have that other amphibians are lacking?”

The answer lies in their microbiome, Barnes says. She, Carter, and Khieninson use cotton swabs on the salamanders’ bodies to collect samples of microorganisms that they can test against chytrid fungus in the lab. The impact of their research could extend beyond conservation biology, Barnes says: “The discoveries we make about disease and microbiomes can be applied to multiple systems, including humans’.”

A Closer Look at a Ubiquitious, Ecologically Valuable Species

Michael Kausch, a doctoral student in aquatic ecology, rows a boat out on Calder Lake to take some water samples he can later test for cyanobacteria at the lakefront McCarthy Laboratories. Meanwhile, inside the lab, his fellow doctoral student Stephen Gottschalk is working with their Fordham supervisor, John Wehr, Ph.D. Gottschalk is studying green algae in the Characeae family.

“They’re an important food source for birds, a habitat for insects, and they support fisheries,” he says.

So far Gottschalk has collected samples in nine U.S. states, and he’s been working at the New York Botanical Garden under the supervision of Kenneth Karol, Ph.D., to examine his samples on a molecular level.

He’s finding that what scientists once thought were just subtle differences among green algae are in fact ecologically important distinctions. “They’re designated as one species,” Gottschalk says, “but what it looks like to me so far is these are very regionally distinct.”

Mosquitoes, Ticks, and the Pathogens They Carry

Insect-borne diseases are a big part of the research focus at Routh House, the vector ecology lab at the Calder Center that’s jointly run by Fordham and the New York state health department. Inside the lab, scientists study samples of various species, such as the aggressive and potentially disease-carrying Asian tiger mosquito. Outside, they collect specimens and conduct surveillance projects.

“We set up mosquito traps all around the lower Hudson Valley,” says Marly Katz, a state employee and Fordham doctoral student. “All the mosquitoes end up here, where I identify them, and then we send a bunch [to the state health department]for disease testing.” She and her colleagues are also collaborating with Columbia University scientists to “map the Asian tiger mosquito,” she says, and determine if changes in climate are affecting its migration patterns.

While Katz checks a mosquito trap, research technician Richard Rizzitello collects ticks by dragging a white cloth across the ground and then pulling them off with forceps (he uses a lint roller to collect any larvae).

One Calder scientist, Nicholas Piedmonte, displays egg-to-adult samples of the blacklegged tick, which can carry the bacterium that causes Lyme disease.

“These are great for education and outreach,” he says, particularly in central New York, “where ticks are kind of a new problem.”

View a timeline of the Calder Center’s history. And watch a July 2017 video celebrating the center’s recent golden anniversary.

He goes on: “I’m going to tell you what the right answers should have been, and you will take the test again,” he says of the deliberately tough exam, laughing gently. A student raises her hand. “Should I step out? Because I missed it and I’ll be making it up?”

“No, don’t,” says Mankoff, who joined Esquire magazine last spring after two decades as the cartoon editor at The New Yorker. “For you, I’ll make a completely different exam—with the same questions but a different font.”

Last fall at Fordham, Mankoff taught Humor as Communication, a course that allowed him to draw not only on his experiences as a longtime practitioner of the art (he sold his first cartoon to The New Yorker in 1977) but also on his deep knowledge and curiosity about what makes something funny.

During the early 1970s, he began pursuing a doctorate in experimental psychology. “When, after two years in the program, my experimental animal died (and not from laughter, I might add), I took it as an omen to quit,” he wrote in his charming 2014 memoir, How About Never—Is Never Good for You?: My Life in Cartoons.

But in the past decade, he redeveloped an interest in the subject. “I discovered that the field I’d abandoned could help me better understand the field I was in, and vice versa.”

In the classroom, Mankoff mixed entertainment with academia, bringing in guest lecturers like Laura Little, a professor at Temple University law school and the author of the forthcoming book Guilty Pleasures: Comedy and Law in America. He also encouraged his 30-odd students to consider the social psychology of humor, how it “unites and divides, teaches and taunts, attracts and repels,” he says. What are the consequences of racist and sexist humor? What kind of jokes can be made, and who can make them?

“The idea is for everybody in the class to have the idea that humor is this interesting topic, that it’s complicated,” he says. “I want them to take away an experience that will inspire their curiosity and get them to question their attitudes. I think that’s a really interesting discussion to have. And it’s in line with this Fordham idea of doing good in the world.

“Humor can be used as a force for good or evil,” Mankoff adds. “I’ve chosen evil, but that’s just me.”

Mankoff in Conversation with Jim Jennewein

Early last fall, Bob Mankoff sat down with screenwriter and Fordham lecturer Jim Jennewein to talk about cartoons, the history of stand-up comedy, and comedians delivering hard news.

Jim Jennewein: Tell us about your course.

Bob Mankoff: We’re exploring this idea of how we all use humor, not just for entertainment but to communicate in personal relationships, in advertising, in persuasion, in all the ways we use humor in addition to entertainment. I think that’s actually the most important part of humor.

Jim: So, humor is a communication tool?

Bob: Sometimes humor is used to say things we ordinarily couldn’t say. Because in humor we can say, “Hey, I was only joking!” Often people have different agendas. You don’t know the other person’s agenda, and they don’t know yours. So, one part of humor is social probing. Are you playful? Is your mind flexible? If you tell a joke on a certain topic, I can tell pretty quickly if you are liberal or conservative by who you’re making fun of. So there are all these dynamics that go into the use of humor in life and in communication.

Jim: Has stand-up created a new lexicon in comedy?

Bob: Yes, it has. And it’s one of our strongest forces now in comedy: standup as a means of communication, as a means of expression, and as an art form. The history of stand-up probably comes from [monologues that were done in]vaudeville.

Jim: There were ethnic comics in vaudeville who did accents of the immigrant classes.

Bob: Oh yeah, there was all of that. This is terrible, but I have to say there was the Jew routine: the hebe; the Irish routine: the mick; and Italian: the wop. These are all obviously ethnic insults. But that’s what these routines were called. And there were worse that I won’t go into, but it was partly a heterogeneous society’s way of dealing with its own immigrant conflicts rather than killing each other. Epithets aren’t good, but they are much preferable to extermination.

Jim: Right, it was a way to process the dissonances and the conflicts of having a hundred different ethnicities in one city or in one country.

Bob: One of the classes I’d like to teach somewhere is just called the History of Comedy, the comedic thread that goes from Greece to Rome to commedia dell’arte to music hall to vaudeville, and as you see all of its forms, [you realize that]a lot of the routines go back a humor have changed in that we want to feel more participatory. You know, in vaudeville, in Henny Youngman’s “Take my wife—please” routine, you’re not really participating.

Jim: You’re letting the jokes wash over you.

Bob: And he took that form to its extreme, like, “I’ve got an encyclopedia of jokes. Just sit back—if you don’t like one, I’ll give you another, and another.”

Jim: And we knew that the persona was a construct.

Bob: Right, right. We knew none of it was true. But there has been an evolution of the form, and what I say about cartoons is true about everything, I think, and it’s that quality comes out of quantity. Is most stand-up comedy good? No. Is some stand-up great? Yes. Because of the huge number of people who do it, the heterogeneity of the groups who do it. Originally it was sort of a Jewish and Irish tradition. Back in 1979 a study found that 80 percent of the people in professional comedy in the United States were Jewish—80 percent . Now I think it’s actually one of the gifts that Jews gave to the world. Besides persistent anxiety.

Jim: We’ve become increasingly reliant on comedians to deliver very serious truths, like what’s happening in the news. What are your thoughts on that?

Bob: We now have people getting serious content through comedy: Jon Stewart, and now John Oliver, Stephen Colbert, Trevor Noah. And, you know, that is definitely a real shift, but it goes back a little ways. There was Mark Twain and Will Rogers, for example. What we have now is humor as a kind of rhetoric. And to some extent the politicians are doing the work for you, because you have them on video contradicting themselves.

But what this means is that humor has become part of the armamentarium of argument. And this is where we come to persuasion and the question of how much does it persuade? In the end, I think you can only really persuade through real argument, although humor can be a way in to let you do that.

The default condition in life is seriousness. Serious argument, logical argument, that’s how we have to live our lives. Humor is the icing on the cake. And the truth is, cakes without icing are lousy.

Watch a video of Mankoff in conversation with Jennewein

For decades, Cristóbal de Villalpando’s Adoration of the Magi had been hiding in plain sight at Fordham. This year, it was part of a major show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

When visitors to the Metropolitan Museum of Art took in the exhibition Cristóbal de Villalpando: Mexican Painter of the Baroque from late July to mid-October this year, one of the paintings they likely saw for the first time was The Adoration of the Magi. For more than a century, it had been seen only by visitors to the Fordham president’s office in Cunniffe House.

The 1683 painting depicts the famous scene from the Gospel of Matthew when kings, or magi, visited the infant Jesus. It was given to Fordham during the mid-19th century, shortly after the University’s founding, and likely first put on display at Fordham sometime around 1900.

Villalpando, who lived from 1649 to 1714, emerged in the 1680s as a leading painter in viceregal Mexico and one of the most innovative and accomplished artists in the Spanish art world. During his lifetime, he exported paintings widely throughout Latin America. The Adoration of the Magi, which was based on an early 17th-century engraving of the same title by Peter Paul Rubens, was touted as one of the highlights of the Met show, along with Moses and the Brazen Serpent and the Transfiguration of Jesus, a 28-foot-tall masterpiece Villalpando also painted in 1683.

Ronda Kasl, curator of Latin American art in the American Wing at the Met, said The Adoration of the Magi is significant because it reveals Villalpando’s capacity to envision the divine. “The subject itself is fundamentally concerned with the revelation of divinity. The holy child’s humanity is manifest in his nakedness, while his divinity and his mother’s is revealed in the illumination of their idealized features,” she said.

A Chance Rediscovery

The painting had hung at the Rose Hill campus long before Barbara Mundy, Ph.D., professor of art history and Latin American and Latino studies at Fordham, stumbled upon a mention of it in the University archives while researching several other paintings in the Fordham collection.

“It must have been in 1999 or so,” she said, “when the president’s office asked me to look at four paintings in the council room that somebody thought might be from Latin America. It turns out they were not particularly good or notable paintings, but in doing a little research on them I found mention of a painting by Cristóbal de Villalpando. That intrigued me because he’s an immensely important Mexican painter. He’s like a Michelangelo of Mexico in the 17th century,” she said.

The document she found, an inventory of art at Fordham that was taken during the 1940s, described the Fordham Villalpando as being more than eight feet tall. But when she tried to determine its whereabouts, nobody seemed to have any information—until she mentioned the subject matter.

“That’s when someone said, ‘You know, there’s a big painting of the Epiphany in the president’s office.’ So people understood its imagery and the subject matter, although they had no recognition of the painter himself,” Mundy said. “Of course, Villalpando’s not exactly a household name, so it wasn’t until the Met show that people realized, ‘Oh my gosh, this is really important.’ I almost hit the floor when I first I saw the painting.”

The show, Mundy said, was years in the making. After seeing the Fordham Villalpando, she contacted Clara Bargellini, Ph.D., an academic in Mexico who would go on to serve as a co-curator of the Met exhibit. “We had the painting photographed, and I would bring people in to see it, so word got out about this painting among specialists.”

An Extensive Restoration

Getting The Adoration of the Magi from Rose Hill to the Met was no simple task, however. “The painting was literally nailed into the wall, at least since the 1940s,” Mundy said. So in September 2016, the Met sent a team of specialists to Fordham, and they worked closely with Fordham’s carpenters to make sure the painting could be removed safely, without damaging either the 334-year-old artwork or the wall itself.

Because of its size—78 inches wide and 99 inches high—the painting was Met conservator Dorothy Mahon’s primary focus for nearly 10 months, during which time she traveled to Mexico to see other examples of Villalpando’s work during the same period in his life.

Before she could begin, however, she had to determine how best to proceed. “What’s varnish? And what’s an old paint? It’s a technical examination to be sure that we can separate the original from the later restoration, and that process takes some time,” she said. “Then we began the restoration work: cleaning the picture and cleaning off the old repairs, most of which were terribly discolored.”

Mahon said that the varnish coating the painting had to be delicately removed and replaced, and although the structure of the painting was in good condition when she received it, the backing holding the canvas taut needed to be replaced. “It’s a big picture, so it had lots of varnish and lots of discoloration,” she said, noting that every step of the restoration was painstakingly done by hand with custom-made tools and adhesives.

A Broader Perspective

At a July 24 preview of the Met show for members of the media, Diego Gómez Pickering, consul general of Mexico in New York, said the exhibit could not come at a better time for the estimated 1 million Mexican Americans living in the New York metropolitan area, many of whom, like Villalpando, hail from the state of Puebla.

“The Hispanic community is a founding community of this country. We cannot understand the fabric of American society if we do not mention these important roots,” he said, calling the exhibition “a chance to build … bridges that connect peoples, cultures, societies, and nations.”

Mundy said she’s pleased that the exhibition has called greater public attention to the “extraordinary quality and beauty and richness of Mexican painting.” She said she sees the show as part of a trend in which big U.S. museums are looking beyond traditional subject matter.

“Before, maybe 20 years ago, people thought Europe had it all. But there’s been a growing sense that art history and art heritage doesn’t just come from Europe,” she said. “And this of course reflects the changing demographics in the United States, where more people, American citizens, are coming from Spanish-speaking countries.”

As an example, Mundy cited the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s 2016 show Paint the Revolution: Mexican Modernism, 1910 to 1950, which the museum described as the most comprehensive exhibition of modern Mexican art in the U.S. in 70 years. Mundy was teaching a course on modern Latin American art at Fordham at the time, and she decided to give her students the opportunity to see the show. “We hijacked a Ram Van and went down there on a Saturday,” she said. “This was a class that had a lot of art history majors in it, so they were really jazzed about being able to go.”

One of those students, Peter Vergara, called the exhibition a “cornerstone show for the Latin American art scene as a whole,” and he said seeing it and the Villalpando exhibit at the Met have been formative experiences for him.

“Seeing these enormous exhibits of Latin American and Mexican art in the U.S., and how they are promoting dialogue and cross-cultural interaction between American visitors and Mexican art, and also between Mexican tourists and American cultural centers, is exciting,” he said. “It makes the gaps feel a little smaller.”

Vergara, a Fordham senior who is writing his final seminar research paper on the Fordham Villalpando painting, knows firsthand the value of cross-cultural experiences. He was born in Washington, D.C., but moved with his family to Spain as a toddler when his father took a job in Madrid. He grew up speaking English and Spanish, and spent countless hours at the Prado Museum.

“As a child, I was there all the time. My parents and I would go together in the morning. We would stay for an hour or two, and then they would go to lunch or to see other things, and I would stay for hours,” he said. “My earliest memories are of just lying on the floor of the gallery.”

Vergara moved to the U.S. to attend Portsmouth Abbey School, a Catholic boarding school in Rhode Island, and enrolled at Fordham in 2014. As a first-year student, he developed a passion for art history through two courses in particular, including one on colonization in Latin America, and with support from Mundy and other Fordham professors, landed a string of internships—at the Hispanic Society, the Cloisters, and Sotheby’s.

“I was aware of this world of Latin American art from freshman year, and now it’s shaping where I want to go with my career,” said Vergara, who has applied for a Fulbright study grant to Mexico, where he has been accepted into a master’s degree program at Universidad Iberoamericana.

A Painter and an Inventor

Vergara said his research paper would focus in part on the complex exchange of influences in Villalpando’s art. “While Mexico is heavily tied to Spain through the viceroyalty in Villalpando’s time, how much is European and how much is newer? How much are these artists breaking away and how much are they staying with tradition?”

He’s also focusing on the iconography in the work. “Some of it is very clear,” he said, “like we have wheat on the floor next to Mary and Jesus, and that’s a clear reference to the Eucharist.” But the meaning of other elements in the painting is less clear. For example, he said, “We might have a self-portrait of Villalpando near the back, where he’s looking around the column,” near the figure of Joseph, who is depicted wearing a green robe. “That’s a classic pose for a self-portrait,” he said, and it was common at the time for artists to include themselves in paintings of the Epiphany, to show themselves as “witnesses to the incarnation, among the very first.”

Vergara said that although the painting is “a big, big nod to Rubens,” an argument can be made that Villalpando is also staking a claim not simply as an imitator of the day’s European masters but as an artist in his own right. “He signs this one ‘Villalpando invento ipinto,’” Vergara said. “So he invented and he painted.”

Mundy called the inclusion of The Adoration of the Magi in the Met exhibit a long-overdue recognition for a masterpiece that for many years was hidden in plain sight. She’s especially taken by Villalpando’s ability to “paint the emotion in scenes,” she said. “You can see the response of all of the figures to the Christ child. You can see the awe and the adulation that the magi are feeling, and you can see the wonderful, calm serenity in Mary’s face.

“What’s also fabulous is the big crowd scene behind them,” she added. “Every member of the crowd who is peering in to see the Christ child has their own distinct personality and response to this event.”

—Ryan Stellabotte contributed to this story.

You have been treating HIV and AIDS patients for more than 25 years. What was it like in the early days?
In my second job as a PA, I was working at Beth Israel in the chemical dependency unit. Our role was to detox patients but also address their medical problems. So, early ’80s, what are we seeing? Fevers. We’re asking, why are these lymph nodes enlarged? Why is this person short of breath? Little did we know, this was the only the beginning of the HIV epidemic.

And how has treatment changed?
In the old days, we would say that a CD4 count (T-cell count) below 200 was full-blown AIDS. But that doesn’t really mean anything anymore. With advances in treatment, patients can have the same lifespan as someone who is HIV negative. Now we are more concerned with what diseases they develop as they age, like bone disease, heart disease, liver disease, kidney disease, and cancers. They may happen sooner for people with HIV.

What impediments to treatment do you see for communities of color?
There are layers of challenging obstacles, including poor access to care, misinformation, stigma, and mistrust of the system. For HIV in particular, stigma is big. Also, sometimes people in communities of color don’t feel like they have a doctor, or they wait until they are symptomatic, when it’s often too late.

How do you help your patients advocate for themselves?
As I diagnose and treat them, I also educate them. So they know what medications they’re on. They know their CD4 and their viral load. When they see a specialist, they know how to be very assertive, and if they need to, they can call me. I can’t take anyone dismissing a patient.

You have said your mother inspired you to go into medicine. How?
My mother is my biggest inspiration. She had diabetes and hypertension and was often weak but remained strong and resilient for her children. She was always supporting and encouraging, no matter how badly she felt physically. I witnessed firsthand the impact of health disparities in my community during her illnesses and as I found my passion in medicine, I was by her side. She didn’t always take her medications, because of side effects and because she was busy raising seven children. And she didn’t always keep doctor’s appointments because she didn’t feel great. When she started going more regularly, the damage was done, in terms of her diet. She eventually succumbed to complications of stroke.

So is nutrition part of the community education you provide?
Yes, I’m a member of Harlem Docs, which provides nutrition workshops in conjunction with Harlem’s new Whole Foods. And I do a lot in terms of wellness and overall health, usually around HIV and AIDS. I also founded the Taylor/Moses Institute, a mentoring program for students interested in the health professions.

Tell me about your involvement with MOSAIC, Fordham’s new affinity group.
There used to be a black and Latino alumni association, but it died out. So a group of younger and older alumni got together to establish this new organization embracing the blended mosaic of all cultures and our shared Jesuit values. Right now I’m an unofficial co-chair. We’ve had some networking activities and we’re hoping to have more cultural events open to all alumni. At Homecoming, younger alumni were excited that there was a place they can give back and support Fordham’s mission.

“I made pizza for months on end, to the point where my friends said I was totally crazy. I would have dozens of different types of tomatoes and dough samples and try recipes that affected the flavor profile,” he said.

The pressure was on, because Burke wasn’t planning on opening just any pizza place. He was going to serve deep-dish pizza. From Chicago. In New York.

It had to represent.

“When I got to a taste that reminded me of back home, I thought, ‘People would pay for this,’” said the Windy City native. It was only then that he started looking for a location.

The cozy MacDougal Street spot he opened in 2013 offers diners some serious Chicago eats. In addition to the seven varieties of deep-dish, there are also seven types of Chicago thin crust pizza (yes, it’s a thing), a Chicago-style hot dog, and an Italian beef sandwich.

FORDHAM magazine’s staff stopped in to Emmett’s for lunch on a recent Friday in October. The pies, made to order, can’t be rushed. No matter, though. The sunlight pouring in from the front windows, the fall breeze, and the ladies lingering over wine at the bar with their shopping bags reminded us that we weren’t in a rush, either. We sampled a couple of draft brews from Chicago, though the extensive beer and wine lists offered plenty of domestic and imported options.

The Food

The pizzas arrived on a silver pedestal accompanied by a small hourglass—warning  us to give the thick, substantial pies two minutes to settle. Topped with bold, chunky tomato sauce that was pleasantly tangy, and filled with plenty of oozing-yet-chewy mozzarella, these 10-inch pies were admirably contained by a sturdy, slightly crunchy, two-inch-at-the-edge crust.

The Italian beef sandwich and the Chicago hot dog—totally foreign to us Northeasterners—were both piled with all sorts of flavorful accoutrements. The beef came with giardiniera, a pickled blend of hot peppers and other vegetables, topping the almost pillowy bed of slow-roasted meat, which had a kick of its own. And the dog was covered with (organic) tomatoes, onions, and neon green relish.

It’s easy to tell that Burke takes care with his ingredients; the basil was fresh, the spices robust, and the sausage in our Meat Lovers pie was something worthy of your grandmother’s Sunday sauce. He gets it from Teitel Brothers on Arthur Avenue. “I spent time there in my days at Rose Hill and loved their cheeses, loved their sausage. When you walk in it feels like a real Italian food purveyor. It was fun to revisit the place.”

The Idea

Burke had the idea for Emmett’s while he was a Fordham student. As a newcomer to New York, he was surprised at the city’s lack of authentic deep-dish. “I thought that was crazy, because growing up in Chicago, it’s quite common for people to eat it on a regular basis,” he said. In his sophomore year at the Gabelli School, he was charged with designing a company for a marketing class, and he came up with Emmett’s. “Looking back, the idea hasn’t really changed much,” he said. “It’s a neighborhood-style restaurant that serves foods I grew up with and missed.”

The Rivalry

So does Burke get ribbed about bringing deep-dish to a city that lives and dies by its New York slice? Sure. But it’s all in good fun.

“You have to have fun with it, because it’s a constant thing. You have to play it up and embrace it. I love New York. I’ve spent almost half my life here. … And Chicago is who I am and it is a city I’m very, very proud of. I really don’t feel that the city gets as much respect as it deserves, whether it’s culturally or in the culinary world. … I think a lot has to do with this Chicago-New York rivalry.”

Two years ago, when the Mets played the Cubs in the National League Championships, Burke made a bet with pizza maker Mark Iacono, owner of Lucali in Brooklyn, a favorite of Beyoncé and Jay-Z. If the Cubs lost, Burke would have to make pizza at Lucali, and if the Mets lost, Iacono would have to try his hand at some deep-dish. The Mets won, but Burke has yet to make good on the bet. “We haven’t done that yet. He doesn’t want me to disrespect the oven,” he said, laughing. “But it’ll happen.”

Burke delivered pizzas in high school, but that was about as much culinary experience as he had before his pizza experimenting. At the Gabelli School he studied finance, interning at Merrill Lynch. “I really kind of cut my teeth in New York City at a young age, and that was really fun,” he said. After Fordham, he worked for a hedge fund then a bank in Chicago that transferred him back to New York when the financial crisis hit. They proposed a promotion in San Francisco, and Burke realized his heart wasn’t in that world anymore. So he took some time off and decided to pursue his pizza idea.

“I would say the first thing that really helped me was that I didn’t know anything. It was humbling in the sense that if you want to learn something, you have to start from zero and learn all the steps,” he said.

The Vibe

Burke’s buddy Brett Danahy, a friend from his Fordham days and a fellow restaurateur, has watched Emmett’s progression from endless pizza tinkering to a successful restaurant with up to a two-hour wait on weekend nights. He said he’s impressed with his friend’s execution of his college idea.

“The void in the marketplace, he’s not the first to see that,” said Danahy, a sports agent and an owner of Ledger restaurant in Salem, Massachusetts. “To be able to grow and focus on improvement—that’s the real magic.” Burke was “always pretty good at not being satisfied,” he said.

Danahy gets to Emmett’s about a dozen times a year. “It’s what I miss about New York, the little neighborhood spots,” he said. “Emmett’s is truly a community. People know him and ask for him and Dillon [Burke’s brother who bartends and helps manage the restaurant]. That is the core of that place.”

Burke cultivates a friendly café vibe and decorates the place with charming curiosities. He’s covered the bathroom doors with stickers from ’80s concerts and classic old slogans. And hanging behind the bar are pink, blue, and green bills of foreign currency—some given to him by customers, including travelers from South Korea and India.

And he’s still tinkering with his recipes, trying new ingredients all the time.

“It’s still constantly trial and error, because you are never going to make the perfect pizza or have the perfect golf swing,” said Burke, an avid golfer who played at Fordham, “but it’s a process, which is really fun.” Though he lives just a few blocks from the restaurant, he’s also got a place in Westchester with a garden and a greenhouse. He wants to start canning his own tomatoes and try his hand at an heirloom tomato sauce.

But for as much heart as Burke puts into his pizza, he’ll be the first to say it’s not all about the food. “Some people come in, they won’t even eat pizza,” he said. “They may have a glass of wine or a beer and just chat with their friends. We have really fostered this nice, local, neighborhood gathering.”

The Cornucopia Destiny is chartered to float around Manhattan for the Young Alumni Yacht Cruise, a three-hour dinner party for nearly 300 recent graduates. But that can’t happen until everyone is on board, and one grad, who shall remain nameless, is not yet here.

Waiting on the pier, LaCoursiere looks off at the Manhattan skyline. “You can see my office!” he points downtown. “The one with all the lights!”

The Starrett-Lehigh Building looms on the Chelsea waterfront, bigger than any cruise ship, a marvel of Manhattan. In his day job, LaCoursiere is the social and digital director for RXR Realty, one of the biggest commercial landlords in New York City. At 26, he’s already conquering his corner of Manhattan, sharing stories about parties with Derek Jeter and a rooftop spin class with Ralph Lauren designers—but his day job isn’t what brought him to this yacht on a Friday night in September.

This is the Fordham cruise, and he’s the chair of the Young Alumni Committee this year. The group serves as a bridge to Fordham for graduates from the past 10 years, helping to organize social justice activities, coordinate alumni giving, and plan social events. The cruise is the committee’s first big event of the year, and the chair decides he’s not boarding the yacht until the last guest makes it up the gangway—top-deck partying be damned.

But then she appears, the one missing alumna, wearing a brown leather jacket and a sky blue silk scarf tied around her neck, chic enough that the slight delay is forgiven and forgotten.

Later, on the top deck, LaCoursiere shows off his own style, fitting of a Fordham fanatic: maroon slacks.

“I dig them,” he says, “and I try and wear them to Fordham events because I think they’re fun!”

That attire paid off when LaCoursiere was touring London as a member of the University Choir in 2013. His maroon pants caught the eye of Jeffrey Cipriano, FCLC ’14, who was studying at the Fordham London Centre at the time. “He was begging his friend to introduce us,” LaCoursiere recalls, beaming. They hit it off, and, after a date where Cipriano cooked—“he’s a phenomenal baker,” LaCoursiere says—they’re still dating, four years later.

Last fall, they and several other alumni helped found the Rainbow Rams, Fordham’s first affinity group for LGBTQ alumni. In June, approximately 30 of them marched under the Fordham banner in the New York City Pride Parade—a first for the University.

Given the demands of his job and his involvement with Fordham—not to mention training for the New York City Marathon, which he plans to run in November—calling LaCoursiere motivated is an understatement. But tonight, he’s allowing a quick break for nostalgia. Talking on the upper deck of the yacht, he stops mid-sentence when the DJ puts on the Killers’ “Mr. Brightside.” LaCoursiere grabs a friend by the shoulders with a huge smile. “I sang this song in high school!”

Behind him, dozens of alumni sing along. Some swing dance. Others jump. But most stand still, drink in one hand, other hand stretched out toward the sky. In the distance, the Statue of Liberty strikes the same pose.

—Jeff Coltin, FCRH ’15

View a gallery of images from the 2017 Young Alumni Yacht Cruise. (Photos by Dana Maxson)