Those connections begin with Anthony Pastore, a Fordham faculty member who teaches construction project management courses in PCS’s Real Estate Institute (REI). Outside of the classroom, Pastore serves as a senior vice president at AECOM Tishman, a company that has managed construction for some of the world’s most iconic buildings, including One World Trade Center. 

While teaching at Fordham, he met several students who left a deep impression on him, including Arthur Arbaje, a student in the master’s program in construction management, and Timothy Fazzinga, a student in the advanced certificate in construction management program. After they completed their programs this year, Pastore hired them to work on design and construction for the $9.5 billion renovation of JFK Airport Terminal 1. 

The airport, which opened in 1948, currently has six terminals. Terminal 1 is the third oldest of the terminals. The revamped terminal, which is expected to be fully completed by 2030, will become the largest terminal at the international airport. It will expand its number of gates from 12 to 23, upgrade its technology and security, and add new amenities with a focus on sustainability.

A ‘Full Circle’ Moment Between a Professor and His Student 

The team working on the terminal includes several members of the Fordham community, said Pastore. This year, he hired Arbaje and Fazzinga to work on the project as an assistant project manager and a project engineer, respectively. Pastore said his team has also worked with other Fordham REI graduates and students on the renovation, including Gian Maxino, PCS ’18, an analyst in risk and operations construction management; Yoselyn Torres, PCS ’20, previously an assistant project manager; and Anthony Diodato, PCS ’23, a 2022 summer intern.

‘Fordham Opened the Doors’ 

Fazzinga said he chose to study at Fordham’s Real Estate Institute because of its affordable, flexible, and comprehensive programs. 

“My program helped me to understand how the industry and business is run,” said Fazzinga, who completed his advanced certificate in construction management this summer. “It pretty much covers every aspect: reading construction drawings and documents, project management, estimating and bidding, planning and scheduling, budgets and costs, and field operations.” 

Like Pastore, he had previously worked as a carpenter, as well as an assistant project manager for another construction company. In October, he was hired by Pastore to work as a subconsultant for the airport renovation, where he assists managers with building the terminal’s roadways. 

“There are a lot of great opportunities in New York,” said Fazzinga, 25, who lives in Somers, New York. “Fordham opened the doors to them.” 

Looking for People with ‘That Same Drive’

Pastore said that his students in the Fordham Real Estate Institute remind him of his younger self. He began working in construction as a carpenter who didn’t know much about the industry, so he decided to take a certificate course at New York University’s School of Professional Studies. There, he met an instructor who also served as an AECOM Tishman executive and told him about the company’s projects.

“I thought, ‘Wow, this is pretty cool. I want to work on projects like that.’ So I sent my resume to Tishman and ended up getting an interview,” Pastore recalled. “When they asked me, ‘Why Tishman?’ I told them about the course I took at NYU and how I was inspired by the executive who taught my class.” 

Pastore got the job. Now, more than a decade later, he can relate to his recent hires from Fordham.

“I remember my background, working through the trades, being a superintendent, and going to school in the evening, and I respect anyone who does the same. I’m always keeping an eye out for talent and people who have that same drive and interest in the construction industry,” Pastore said. “Now I’ve come full circle. It’s been great to provide that same opportunity that someone else had given me years ago.” 

Slavery’s Descendants: Shared Legacies of Race and Reconciliation

Dionne Ford was 12 years old in the 1980s when her grandfather revealed a surprising fact: Her great-great-grandfather was a white man, a pecan farmer named W.R. Stuart, and her great-great-grandmother Tempy was a black woman who “worked” on Stuart’s Mississippi plantation. Decades later, while researching her family history, Ford, a veteran journalist, met descendants of her great-great-grandmother’s enslavers.

The experience led her to join Coming to the Table, an organization that unites people seeking to “heal from … slavery and from the many forms of racism it spawned.” In Slavery’s Descendants, Ford and Jill Strauss present essays by Coming to the Table members—including descendants of both enslavers and the enslaved—that “uncover truths that challenge our understanding of history,” they write, and provide a bridge “to engage in the more thoughtful conversations these topics require.”

Mafia Spies: The Inside Story of the CIA, Gangsters, JFK, and Castro
by Thomas Maier, FCRH ’78 (Skyhorse)

Longtime Newsday investigative reporter Thomas Maier describes one of the most unsettling spy stories in U.S. history: In the early 1960s, the CIA enlisted Hollywood and Las Vegas gangster Johnny Roselli and Chicago mob boss Sam Giancana in an effort to kill Cuban leader Fidel Castro.

Using sources including recently declassified files related to President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, Maier provides a fresh account of this “unholy marriage of the CIA and the Mafia.” It’s a vivid, sometimes stranger-than-fiction tale that ensnares Kennedy, Cuban-exile commandos in Miami, and entertainers like Frank Sinatra and Marilyn Monroe. And it’s a tale that resonates today, Maier writes, “when the difference between truth and lies is never so apparent,” and when “Americans fear their trusted institutions could again go astray.”

Standing for Reason: The University in a Dogmatic Age
by John Sexton, Ph.D., FCRH ’63, GSAS ’65, ’78 (Yale University Press)

Growing up in the 1950s, John Sexton knew Catholicism as a set of simple rules that “guaranteed eventual eternal life in heaven,” he writes. This reductive view changed after the Second Vatican Council, which prompted greater understanding among Catholicism and other faiths. Civic discourse, however, has moved in the opposite direction, with a close-minded “secular dogmatism” taking hold—and posing a challenge for higher education, he argues.

In Standing for Reason, Sexton, president emeritus of New York University, describes how universities can lead the way back toward reasoned dialogue. “If even in the realm of religion, where division has run so deep for so long, a spirit of union can be forged,” he writes, “surely it must be possible to bring together citizens united by a common flag, and perhaps someday even by a common humanity.”

Freedomland U.S.A.: The Definitive History
by Michael R. Virgintino, FCRH ’79 (Theme Park Press)

“Mommy and Daddy, take my hand, take me out to Freedomland!” So went the promotional jingle for the “Disneyland of the East,” a theme park built in 1960 in the Baychester section of the Bronx. Conceived by C.V. Wood, an engineer who had helped build Disneyland, the park was shaped like a map of the United States and designed to tell the country’s mythic history. There was even a futuristic Satellite City, with its Moon Bowl, where Louis Armstrong and many other musicians performed. The park was ultimately doomed: Developers’ “overriding objective,” Michael Virgintino writes, was to use the site “to build Co-op City, the largest cooperative housing development in the world.”

New York moved forward with that plan after the park filed for bankruptcy in 1964. In Freedomland U.S.A., Virgintino offers a breezy look at this little-known piece of New York City history.

David Zelaya, UGE ’64, was in a theology class at Fordham’s 302 Broadway campus when he learned that President Kennedy had been shot. Fifty years later, after reading “The Kennedy Legacy,” an interview with Michael Latham, Ph.D., dean of Fordham College at Rose Hill, Zelaya composed the following reminiscence. “For me,” he wrote by way of introduction, “the names of the 35th president of the United States and that of my beloved alma mater will be forever linked.”

In the mid- to late 1950s, my parents, my sister, and I fell under the spell of the Kennedy family. Like legions of our coreligionists across the country, we were proud of the prominent, attractive Catholic couple: the charismatic John F. Kennedy, his charming wife, Jacquelyn, and their lovely children, Caroline and John-John. We were beguiled by the young senator’s winning personality, his erudition, his oratorical skills, and his war hero status. We followed his career as senator, published author, presidential candidate, and commander in chief, and we regularly watched his televised press conferences—many of which my sister taped on a reel-to-reel tape recorder. To this day, I can recite from memory lengthy snippets of his famous inaugural address.

True, in later years we would learn of the man’s flawed character, of his illnesses, of his reliance on steroids, painkillers, and stimulants, and of his often risky behavior. In our innocence, however, for the all-too-brief “Camelot” period, we basked in the sunshine of President Kennedy’s radiant smile. He was a hero to millions at home and abroad.

I was a Fordham senior in the fall of 1963, and almost all of my classes were taken at 302 Broadway. That year, the renowned Father Ralph Tapia had designated me as the “beadle” of his theology class. One of my responsibilities in that capacity was to lead the class in prayer at the beginning of each session. So it was that just before 2 p.m. on Friday, November 22, 1963, I entered the classroom to find my distraught classmates nervously mulling over rumors that the president had been shot. It was the first I had heard of it. I mounted the podium and led the class in a Hail Mary “for a special intention.” Once the students were seated, an ashen, visibly shaken Father Tapia entered the room, said a few words to comfort us, informed us that he had no reliable information to pass along, and promptly dismissed the class.

The subway ride home was an eerie experience. The car I was in was crowded but no one spoke. The only sounds to be heard were the screeching of the wheels and the squeaks of the cabin. Some people had glazed looks in their eyes while others were openly weeping. It was during the hour I spent on my way home that the president was officially declared dead.

Once home, I joined my disconsolate family. We embraced, tried to comfort each other and tried to hold back tears. Like millions of Americans, we were glued to the television for three consecutive days. As if the events of that awful Friday were not enough, we returned home from Mass on Sunday to learn—and to see videotape—of Jack Ruby walking up to Lee Harvey Oswald in a Dallas police station and shooting the president’s assassin in full view of police and other law enforcement personnel. That three-day period has been described by CBS’ Face the Nation moderator Bob Schieffer as “the weekend we lost our innocence.” Others have declared that the events of that awful period marked the end of the 1950s and the beginning of the tumultuous ’60s.

It has become a truism that members of a rapidly diminishing generation remember where they were when Pearl Harbor was attacked in 1941. Most of us remember where we were when terrorists attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. My contemporaries remember all too well exactly where we were when we learned of the assassination of President Kennedy. I was in theology class at my beloved Fordham University.

—David Zelaya, UGE ’64