Upstate Girls: Unraveling Collar City

Table of contents :
Cover
Dedication
Foreword
Family Tree
Introduction: Welcome to the 518
Part One: Girls and Boys, Life and Death
Part Two: Good Bad Girls, Bad Good Girls
Part Three: Beastmode Tony
Part Four: Blood and Jelly: Grown Up In Love
Epilogue: Then and Now
Bibliography
Acknowledgments
Image Credits
About the Author

Citation preview

regan arts new york, ny c o p y ri g h t © 2 0 1 8 b y b re n da a n n k e n n e a l ly all rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this b o ok o r p o rt i o n s t h e r e o f i n a n y f o r m w h at s o e v e r . f i r s t r e g a n a rt s pa p e r b a c k e d i t i o n , au g u s t 2 0 1 8 library of congress control number: 2017937178 isbn 978-1-942872-83-2 isbn 978-1-942872-84-9 (ebook) cover design by richard ljoenes interior design by alisha petro and richard ljoenes

Cluett, Peabody & Co., one of Troy’s largest manufacturers, ca. 1931. (Previous Page) Rensselaerswyck was the largest patroonship, or private farming community, covering most of present-day Albany and Rensselaer counties. The map shows where animals were found in abundance for hunting and fur-trapping purposes.

Look at every path closely and deliberately. Try it as many times as you think necessary. Then ask yourself, and yourself alone, one question . . . Does this path have a heart? If it does, the path is good; if it doesn’t it is of no use. Both paths lead nowhere; but one has a heart, the other doesn’t. One makes for a joyful journey; as long as you follow it, you are one with it. The other will make you curse your life. One makes you strong; the other weakens you. — f r o m t h e t e a c h i n g s o f d o n j ua n , c a r l o s c a s ta n e da , university of california press, 1968

For all my Upstate family, past, present, and future. And, as always, my sons: Simon Peter, Andy, and Tony, who have led me on a path with the most heart.

CONTENTS FOREWORD FAMILY TREE INTRODUCTION

PART ONE

PART THREE

EPILOGUE: THEN AND NOW

GIRLS AND BOYS LIFE AND DEATH

BEASTMODE TONY

BIBLIOGRAPHY ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

PART TWO

PART FOUR

GOOD BAD GIRLS BAD GOOD GIRLS

BLOOD AND JELLY

CA. 2004–2006

CA. 2006–2009

CA. 2009–2010

CA. 2011–2013

FOREWORD Adrian Nicole LeBlanc The North Troy Peoples’ History Museum on Sixth Avenue opened its doors at the end of September 2016 with Brenda Kenneally’s Upstate Girls: Unraveling Collar City as its inaugural show. The exhibition site was, literally, the apartment of a building that was home to several of the people you will meet in these pages; others had lived upstairs, and down the block, and next door. For everyone in this book, this street was their neighborhood, the place where they were raised and considered home. Several years earlier, the families in this particular building had been forced to leave. Their most recent absentee landlord, perhaps impatient for the gentrification he’d anticipated, had stopped paying the mortgage, although he continued collecting rent until the city shut the water off and the bank started foreclosure proceedings. Notably, for well over a year, the father of one of the families continued to care for the building he’d been forced out of, returning regularly to make sure the fixtures of the building weren’t looted—until they were. Meanwhile, the creatives—having pushed northward after getting priced out of Brooklyn—began to lay claim to downtown Troy, mere blocks away. In 2010, a nonprofit bought the building, taking advantage of community and art redevelopment grants; six years later, they hosted the Peoples’ History Museum for Brenda’s show.¹ The exhibition spread into every corner of the apartment, but it was still only a portion of Brenda’s sprawling multimedia archive documenting the conditions of love and struggle for a group of twenty-first-century American teenagers with deep roots in the very neighborhood where the project was now displayed. This documentation, which began in 2004, shows Brenda’s voracious need to chronicle the lives of her young subjects as they attempted to carve out a place for themselves. There are so many bodies here, in this small part of a once vital city, from the children in orphanages and the crowded assembly lines on factory floors to those in cramped backyards and on mattresses; exhausted, sleeping, playing video games, dulled by pills, busting out, giving up, being born. So many bodies contained in physical spaces without enough light, or fresh air, or room to thrive. Brenda hungered to forge connections and transform the unnecessary suffering she saw; what she mapped in these pages constitutes an indictment of our times. It exists

simultaneously as her valentine to these teenagers and their families. The show’s artifacts and ephemera included letters and art from incarcerated loved ones, receipts from furniture leased from rent-to-own businesses, prescriptions for the medications dispensed—in formidable doses—to the kids. One bedroom housed a library of scrapbooks made by the children and teenagers we see growing up here; the books they made included Brenda’s photographs. Their images covered the walls. Above a handmade, five-volume set of Brenda’s photographs (later condensed into the book you now hold), hung what she named “The North Troy Quilt”—a plastic mattress protector held together with layers of duct and packing tape, bequeathed by an anonymous donor. In another room, five television monitors projected a tiny fraction of the more than one thousand hours of video Brenda recorded. A timeline hung in the living room, like a monstrous mobile, noting business innovations and successful marketing campaigns that foreshadowed their devastating impact on these North Troy residents—nicotine’s energizing properties, the introduction of the use of high fructose corn syrup in foods, or the release of Call of Duty, a first-person shooter video game all the children play. Brenda obsessively gathered the evidence of this period—what she calls “hoarding”—to make us see these lives as she saw them, and to memorialize them as part of our nation’s history. While Brenda hoped that Troy’s new hipsters and museumgoers might venture into a neighborhood they ordinarily avoided, she most wanted the kids she’d documented to get perspective on their own existence in the spaces where both she and they had lived. Brenda had left Troy at the same age that her subjects were when she met them. Art had then helped her create a saving distance from the pain. This book is personal—to Brenda, to the people in it—all of them changed by what they shared on Sixth Avenue in Troy, New York from 2004 to 2018. But the personal is only one layer of the book’s dense human archeology. The industrialization that originally distinguished Troy eventually contributed to its demise, as factories left their community to chase overseas deals. Abandoned factories meant that the empty single-family homes of the wealthy became converted into multitenant apartments for former laborers, and they now

1 A smaller version of Upstate Girls had been installed in a forty-foot cargo container in Brooklyn Bridge Park in 2015.

house the next generation of service workers—and the unemployed. The ordinary desires for opportunity and stability and freedom turn into resignation, and the need for comfort and escape. Video games and junk food have replaced the factory bar. The city of Troy is the other body in these pages. Its factories once embraced thousands of laborers, feeding their dreams until the owners abandoned them, banking on the people’s disposability. Once shuttered and neglected, the buildings are now stirring again, reviving hope, as they are gutted and reclaimed with gentrification. But is there a vision for the city sufficiently expansive to encompass both former residents and newcomers alike? Will the same possibilities be extended to those who never left? Brenda doesn’t want Troy’s next renaissance to be built on a foundation of denial. “We are here,” she said in an interview in response to the violent reaction some of these images generated online—attacks personally directed at the kids in her pictures. The young arrivals to downtown Troy want what the

people in these pages do—a job and a family, a home with a yard for the children, a safe neighborhood and a decent school, a place one can lay claim to. Deb Stocklas, the mother of Kayla, one of Brenda’s central subjects, wants that for her children, and now for her grandchildren. She wants it for her children’s friends too, for girls like Heather, whom she opened her door to when Heather was pregnant. Before Heather arrived, Deb gave the heavily-trafficked room a fresh coat of purple paint; she wanted Heather to have a fresh start in her new life as a mother, to give her a foothold, to pay forward help that decades earlier had been given her. Deb had found some crucial stability when she moved in with a common-law husband. On her Facebook page, Deb defines the heart of the practice of art when she addresses a lesson we all have a grave stake in learning, whether we own the ground our homes are built on or not: To live, is to suffer. To survive, well, that’s to find meaning in the suffer.

2. Deb Stocklas

FAMILY TREE

4. Robert 5. Kentriss and JJ

24. James, 25. Kayla, and 26. Tony

1. Wilhelmina 3. Robert Stocklas Sr..

7. Bob 30. Sabrina

13. Amanda 14. Joey 8. Katie 9. Lori

31. Heather

15. AndiLynne

10. Megan 16. Nate

17. Juliette

18. Gabe 6. Emily and Logan

19. Little Jon

22. Kandice

32. Jaeda 27. Pops

11. Chris

28. Breyanna

29. Chantelle

20. Little Jesse

12. Darien 33. Dale 23. Brayden

21. Christy

1. Wilhelmina—Deb Stocklas’s mother 2. Deb Stocklas—Daughter of Wilhelmina 3. Robert Stocklas Sr.—Deb’s 1st husband; father of Robert & Kayla 4. Robert—Son of Deb and Robert Stocklas Sr. 5. Kentriss and JJ—Girlfriend of Robert and their son, JJ 6. Emily and Logan—Girlfriend of Robert and their son, Logan 7. Bob—Son of Wilhelmina

8, 9, 10.—Lori, girlfriend of Bob, and Lori’s daughters from previous relationship, Katie & Megan 11. Chris—Son of Lori from previous relationship 12. Darien—Son of Lori from previous relationship 13. Amanda (Mimi)—Daughter of Deb and common-law husband, Poppa (not pictured) 14. Joey—Son of Amanda 15. Andi-Lynne—Stepdaughter of Robert Stocklas Sr.

16, 17, 18.—Children of Andi-Lynne 19. Little Jon—Son of Deb and Poppa 20. Little Jesse—Son of Deb and Poppa 21. Christy—Daughter of Deb and Poppa 22. Kandice—Daughter of Deb from previous relationship 23. Brayden—Son of Kandice 24. James—Kayla’s husband (separated) 25. Kayla—Daughter of Deb and Robert Stocklas Sr.

26. Tony—Son of Kayla 27. Pops—Kayla’s former boyfriend 28. Breyanna—Girlfriend of Heather 29. Chantelle—Kayla’s current girlfriend 30. Sabrina—Kayla’s first girlfriend 31. Heather—Kayla’s second girlfriend 32. Jaeda—Daughter of Heather and Dale 33. Dale—Former boyfriend of Heather

12. Dana

1. Terri Nixon

13. Elliott

25. Michelle

21. Roseanne Terry

26. Randy

22. Billie Jean

23. Dasaun

24. Patrick

27. Gary, Lexis 14. Azaiah

15. Ellie

16. Junior

17. KyLynne

30. Little Vic

28. Brianna, Elija, Jeramiah

29. D.J.

18. First-born daughter 2. Stacy

3. Nate

31. Dylan

4. Kyley

6. Steve

5. Big Jessie

20. Aliya

19. Ali

11. Terri Mason 9. Jackie

32. Afaviah 7. Conner

8. Londyn Marie

10. Jaylynne

1. Terri Nixon 2. Stacy—Daughter of Terri Nixon 3, 4.—Nate and Kyley, children of Stacy 5. Big Jessie—Daughter of Terri Nixon and Greg  Schubart 6. Steve—Boyfriend of Big Jessie 7. Conner—Son of Steve by previous marriage 8. Londyn Marie—Daughter of Big Jessie and Steve 9. Jackie—Former girlfriend of Big Jessie 10. Jaylynne—Daughter of Jackie 11. Terri Mason—Former girlfriend of Big Jessie 12. Dana—Daughter of Terri Nixon and Gregg Schubart

13. Elliott—Second husband of Dana 14. Azaiah—Elliott’s daughter by first marriage 15. Ellie—Daughter of Dana and Elliott 16. Junior—Elliott’s son by first marriage 17. KyLynne—Daughter of Dana and Ali 18. First-born daughter of Dana and Elliott   (given up for adoption at birth) 19. Ali—First husband of Dana 20. Aliya—Ali’s daughter by previous marriage 21. Roseanne Terry (Nanny Rose) 22. Billie Jean—Daughter of Roseanne 23. Dasaun—Son of Billie Jean

33. Destiny

34. Deanna

24. Patrick—Son of Roseanne 25. Michelle—Daughter of Roseanne 26. Randy—Boyfriend of Michelle 27. Gary, Lexis—Children of Michelle from first marriage 28. Brianna, Elija, Jeramiah—Children of Michelle & Randy 29. D.J.—Daughter of Deb and Roseanne’s childhood   friend 30. Little Vic—Daughter of D.J. 31. Dylan—Son of D.J. 32. Afaviah—Daughter of D.J. 33. Destiny—Daughter of D.J. 34. Deanna—Daughter of D.J.

A stereogram of mastodon bones discovered during the construction of Harmony Mills in Cohoes, New York in 1866. Mastodons thrived in marsh settings like the Hudson Valley until their extinction 10,000 years ago.

introduction

WELCOME TO THE 518 THE HISTORY OF TROY, FROM MASTODONS TO MOUNTAIN DEW AND MY FRIEND NANNY ROSE 10,500 BC–AD 2015

N

O B O D Y R E A L LY K N O W S for sure what happened to the mastodons. I have been haunted by this mystery since I was six years old and I visited the New York State Museum in Albany on a class trip. Entering the great hall, there was a mastodon amidst an eerily lit scene from a blue-gray world, so real that the only distance I felt between me and 11,000 years was three inches of glass, installed as a feeble attempt to keep the mastodon at bay. I locked eyes with the giant stuffed creature, imagining that if I never broke contact, I could will him to blink at me. When the museum lady told us all of the mastodons had been gone from the earth for a very long time, I began to cry. She explained that the discovery of their extinction was unthinkable—that an entire species could cease to exist might mean God was capable of making mistakes. We all raised our hands, wanting to know how the mastodons had died. The lady told us that many scientists and historians had spent their entire lives trying to figure that

out, but they could not agree on any one cause. Our teacher, Sister Helen, assured us that whatever happened, it was all part of God’s plan, and He would tell us everything about it when we met Him in heaven. The next year, when I was in the second grade at the Saint James Institute, I won a prize at the school-wide science fair. My entry, a cardboard-box diorama, presented a tiny orange plastic model of the majestic mastodon as he drank from a mirror lake made of my mother’s broken Estée Lauder pressed-powder compact. The pastoral scene was set against a neon green tissue paper background that I had layered to opacity and pieced together with massive amounts of glistening Scotch tape. The nuns did not care that the colors were not found in nature or that there were huge gaps in the background. For the sisters, it was the beginning and the end that mattered. The middle was a series of impermanent events to be suffered en route to the hereafter. The important thing at Saint James was that I accepted without question what I had been taught, and

Collar stitchers, Cluett, Peabody & Co.

that I would not jeopardize my faith by succumbing to the earthly distractions of fact and detail. Decades later, I learned that the bones of the mastodon I had seen had been found by construction workers in 1866 while they were digging the foundation for Harmony Mills, one of the Upper Hudson Valley’s many textile concerns. I was poring over images at the Rensselaer County Historical Society when I found a stereoscopic image of the giant bones of the famous Cohoes Mastodon being prepared to go to their permanent home at the New York State Museum. I saw these bones as a reminder of the absence that remains after a species has disappeared, and I realized the lives I had been documenting over the past dozen years in Troy were inescapably linked to all that we have shared the planet with. I knew then that the pictures I

had been making of the women in Troy would provide valuable answers for those willing to reconcile our past with its legacy.

T

H E M A N Y M A S T O D O N M Y T H S showed me the

importance of preserving and interpreting the evidence of our existence. Solving the mystery of the mastodon had even been important to the formation of our nation’s ideology. Before the discovery of the first mastodon fossil in the Hudson River Valley village of Claverack, New York, there was no evidence of prehistoric existence. But in the summer of 1705, before the idea of geological time and a hundred years before anyone learned that other creatures, such as dinosaurs, walked the earth billions of years ago, the mastodon inserted itself

The pictures I had been making of the women in Troy would provide valuable answers for those willing to reconcile our past with its legacy.

Me, age six.

into the American fable when a five-pound tooth surfaced on a deep bluff along an eroded bank of the Hudson. The tooth was thought to be from human giants and proof of the Bible’s great flood from the time of Noah. The fossil discovery came as the budding nation was struggling to emerge from the shadow of European culture. Thomas Jefferson spoke of the American incognitum, or unknown species, as being proof of a superior natural world that existed in America. Framing our country as a growing industrial giant whose great beasts were our own Greek ruins and whose ferocity and violence were to be as respected as the land where they dwelled became a basis for American exceptionalism, and fed into the myth of nature as something for man to conquer. Extinction as a concept was still young and a violation of religious beliefs. Thomas Jefferson, himself a collector of mastodon fossils, said nature was a never-ending cycle. Part of Lewis and Clark’s expedition, commissioned by Jefferson, was to find one of these “living elephants.” His fascination with the mastodon and what other mysteries could still

Sister Helen.

be discovered in the unsettled territories beyond the Mississippi River led to westward expansions and ultimately Jefferson’s domination over the native population. In 1806, the French anatomist Georges Cuvier established that the elephant-like bones found in the United States belonged to an extinct animal, which he would later name mastodon; he was the first to establish extinction as a fact. It is now widely accepted that since the time of the theorized big bang there have been five major extinction events. Since life first appeared on Earth some 3.8 billion years ago, it has been estimated that more than 99.9 percent of all species have gone extinct. The International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources has documented 875 extinctions occurring between 1500 and 2009. The last universal common ancestor, often called the LUCA, is estimated to have lived some 3.5 to 3.8 billion years ago. Many scientists agree that we are currently living in the sixth extinction event, the Quaternary extinction. It reaches back to when the mastodons in the Hudson Valley

died out, and continues into the twenty-first century—into the day that I met a group of young women who would connect me with my own past in many of the same ways the mastodon had been my link to Troy’s.

I

WA S B O R N I N A L B A N Y , New York in 1959. Albany is

in the state’s Upper Hudson Valley, together with Troy and Schenectady; the three cities make up the Capital District. The area has a history of commerce dating back to a rich fur trade that enticed the Dutch to settle the region in the 1600s. The proximity to both the Hudson and Mohawk Rivers and also the mighty Wynantskill Creek added waterpower to opportunity. By the 1800s, the newly named City of Troy became the prototype for the industrialization of America. Troy embodied the idea of America as a land where every person’s dreams were realized. The inventions of a few individuals became the foundation for Troy’s manufacturing economy. Hannah Lord Montague accidentally created a major textile industry when she cut the soiled collar and cuffs from her husband’s white business shirts so she could avoid the daily chore of washing and ironing the entire garment. When Orlando Montague began wearing the collar in public, it sparked a frenzy amongst his fellow entrepreneurs to mass-produce the items that would earn Troy its nickname, the Collar City. The waterwheel Henry Burden invented churned the power to fuel his factory, which produced two of his other inventions: horseshoes and hook-headed railroad spikes, which led to huge, lucrative advances in transportation and military production. The sales from Burden’s products reached $2 million, an astonishing amount for the 1800s. Burden is among a handful of wealthy businessmen and inventors

who are behind the 1840 census figures that list Troy as the fourth-wealthiest city in the nation on a per capita basis. The mass production of goods was fast and cheap, allowing Trojans to develop habits of consumption that are now considered characteristically American. It was a time of great prosperity, when the upper class acquired even greater wealth, and the new middle class was able to educate their children so that their social standing would be maintained or even rise with the next generation. Even some of the better-off working class, like merchants and store owners, began climbing the social ladder as industrial growth created thousands of new jobs and occupations, but the poorest laborers did not benefit. The labor force powering production was a largely immigrant population who had flocked to Troy for manufacturing jobs, but their great numbers ultimately kept wages low. Poor children were often kept out of school to work in factories, as even with the entire family employed, it was hard to make a decent living. But, without education, their chances for economic and social advancement were limited.

B

Y T H E T I M E I WA S F I F T E E N , it was the mid-1970s

and almost all the industry that had created wealth was gone from Upstate New York. The independent shopkeepers and businesspeople that provided our after-school jobs had gradually moved to suburban malls and then disappeared. Beyond my maternal aunt, who was a grade school teacher, no one in our family had achieved any level of higher education. Of the three kids in my immediate family, only my sister graduated high school. While many of my peers looked forward to punching the clock at the Tobin meatpacking plant that was across

the street from my mother’s house, I was looking for a different road to adulthood. In a neighborhood where teenage sons and daughters stepped with pride into the grown-up shoes of their fathers and mothers, resignation was like a muscle you began pumping up at birth. At school, I earned a reputation for being at best a “weirdo” and at worst a “traitor.” Everything I did got me into trouble. I talked loud and cursed a lot. I stayed out all night, smoked cigarettes filled with all kinds of things, ran naked in the woods with boys, and hated to go to school. Eventually, in the tenth grade, I quit and hitchhiked to Miami, where it was warm. I fell in love with Janis Joplin and even traveled with a carnival as a snake charmer for a while. In Miami, I met a woman named Maureen, who took me under her wing. She taught me to honor my desire to explore even if others thought I was headed nowhere. I managed to get my GED and find my way to college and photography. In 1996, I finally returned to New York State for graduate school at NYU studying art. In the spring of 2003, the New York Times Magazine gave me an assignment to photograph one of the families Adrian Nicole LeBlanc had written about in her book Random Family. My assignment included a trip to prison to photograph their father, who was incarcerated in Upstate New York. That is how I met Sabrina and began my journey back upstate to the place where I began.

S

A B R I N A A N D H E R FA M I LY had moved to Troy from the Bronx after her father had been incarcerated in upstate prisons for nearly a decade. Photographing them not only took me back to the Capital Region, but also reunited me with my own dad. While I was living in

Miami, he had been through a string of addresses in and around Troy. He battled with mental illness most of his life, so he often had to change apartments because of an extended hospital stay or after one too many loud, manic episodes. I always feared the worst when I couldn’t track him down, so I was happy to learn he was living in North Troy, right around the corner from Sabrina’s. I saw Sabrina a few times when I went to visit my dad. On one of these trips, Sabrina talked about Kayla, a girl that was with her on the day we first met. I had asked to take her picture, but Kayla had been too shy. Sabrina and Kayla had been dating since that time, and Kayla was now pregnant and about to deliver. Sabrina explained that she was going to be the father—her cousin was the biological father. He and Kayla had slept together when the girls were fighting. “Now he’s locked up,” Sabrina told me. Two weeks later, I brought my camera to Saint Mary’s Hospital. Kayla gave birth while Sabrina coached and cried and became a “baby daddy.” I knew I was witnessing a new kind of American family, one formed in response to social, economic, and legal divides that have existed for hundreds of years and continue to widen for America’s working class. The photographs I took that day began a twelve-year attempt to record that story and to insert these voices back into the rich history of Troy. We also made videos and did a series of scrapbook workshops. The scrapbooks became a place to preserve evidence of what Kayla, Sabrina, and the young people I would later meet through them deemed important in their lives. The landscape of their childhoods began to unfold to me through their court papers, pictures taken in juvenile detention, jail letters, mass cards honoring lost loved ones, school correspondence documenting the special education system,

Troy industrialists and prominent citizens:

Stephen Van Rensselaer, Amanda Cluett, George Tibbits, Joseph Mabbett Warren, and Henry Burden.

Emma Willard, John Augustus Griswold, Abraham Lansing, and Samuel Wilson.

My mother’s grandparents, who emigrated from Ireland in coffin ships, and their family at Saranac Lake, New York.

poems and letters written by young parents for their children to read in the future. It wasn’t until I saw the page in Sabrina’s scrapbook that held the New York Times Magazine cover of her father behind bars that I learned she had brought that article with her to prison for him to autograph: “To My Daughter Sabrina. Love, Daddy.”

I

M E T N A N N Y R O S E when I was in Troy photographing Kayla giving birth. Nanny and her daughter Billie Jean lived on and off in Kayla’s house. For the first ten years I knew Billie Jean, she was in and out of love about forty times, though the most tumultuous relationship she had was with her mother, Nanny Rose. Billie Jean loved Nanny fiercely, and the two fought, broke up, and made up often—more like lovers than mother and daughter. Billie Jean had a nomadic childhood that had bonded her to her mom through their experiences of surviving homelessness and hunger together. When Billie Jean served time in the county jail for selling drugs, she gave Nanny joint custody

of her son, Dasaun. Billie Jean would always say that Nanny wasn’t only Dasaun’s grandmother, she was Billie Jean’s “baby daddy,” too. Billie Jean talked often of owning her own McDonald’s so she could buy a house where Nanny, Dasaun, and she could live together. Nanny was born Roseanne Terry in 1961 in the Hudson Valley, where she lived out loud in its streets, worked at Dunkin’ Donuts, had three babies, once traveled with the carnival, and got her certificate at the Capitol District Educational Opportunity Center—just a downtown bus trip away from where she watched many a homegirl’s kid in exchange for whatever they could afford. Nanny was a hardworking, rough-and-tumble, no-nonsense woman who always had your back. She owned nothing and gave everything. She was part of the landscape of Sixth Avenue in Troy. Nanny Rose passed away in Troy, New York, on February 17, 2015. The next morning, I drove with Billie Jean to the crematorium inside historic Oakwood Cemetery, where Nanny would become ashes alongside the founding

I was witnessing a new American family, one formed in response to social, economic, and legal divides.

Nanny owned nothing and gave everything. mothers and fathers of Troy. Many who are buried there were alive back when the bones of the Cohoes Mastodon were dug up. On that last gray morning Billie Jean and I would ever spend with Nanny Rose’s bones, the snowy wind reached forth from the depths of Oakwood as if to cover her over with the blanket of time and claim her as one of its own.

H

U N D R E D S O F Y E A R S before Nanny’s death, Henry Hudson came from Holland to establish a fur trade with the Native Americans who lived in the valley. The same spot on the river where historians say Hudson anchored the Half Moon can be seen from the house where Nanny stayed. The same deadly consequences from partaking of liquor, like the brandy Hudson introduced to the Native Americans who climbed aboard his ship, eventually took their toll on Nanny and her liver. She became addicted, just as the Mohicans and the Mohawks had. In their day, the beaver was soon hunted to near extinction in exchange for alcohol, slaughtered by the firearms Hudson’s crew provided. In no time, the tribes were warring with each other, using guns instead of bows. Just like the guns that shot out the window where Nanny lived in the summer of 2014, during worst gang violence North Troy had seen in years. Some of the shooters had been in Vanderheyden Hall, a court-mandated juvenile placement facility named after Jacob D. Vanderheyden (1758–1809), the founding father of Troy. Vanderheyden and his children are buried in Oakwood near the chapel where two of Nanny’s children— both of whom had spent time in Vanderheyden Hall—said good-bye to their mom in 2015. Nanny Rose was now in the company of the wealthy and powerful past denizens of Troy, including Abraham Lansing (1835–1899), the founder of the white-picket Lansingburgh, separated from North Troy merely by crossing 101st Street. Lansingburgh is also where I went with Nanny every year to watch the parade in honor of Sam Wilson (1766– 1854). Wilson was a meat packer who became the symbol of the United States after marking US on the heads of packing barrels during the War of 1812. The soldiers joked that it stood for “Uncle Sam” instead of “United States”— and so began the legend. In 1787, before Sam and his brother went into the meat business, they started the brickyard that supplied bricks to build Troy’s first courthouse and jail. Three hundred years later, Nanny Rose’s

Nanny Rose with her children, Patrick, Billie Jean, and Michelle.

View of the Hudson River from Storm King.

My father, Fast Eddie.

son would be locked up many times in the Rensselaer County Jail and be summoned to the courthouse many more. In 1961, Troy was declared the official home of Uncle Sam by an act of Congress. Sam Wilson is the most famous interment in Oakwood Cemetery.

S

T A N D I N G W I T H B I L L I E J E A N at the crematorium I

remembered the day I stepped into this new world, the day I photographed the arrival of DeAnthony Stocklas, whom everyone calls Tony, on April 18, 2004, weighing eight pounds and measuring twenty-two inches. Tony was the reason I stayed in Troy. From the beginning,

Tony was special, and he would have given Nanny a run for her money if she had had any. He was Nanny’s youngest charge, and together she and I watched Tony grow. His physical state was a bellwether for the conditions in Troy. Just as Nanny could see that Tony’s second set of teeth was going to fall out from drinking too much Mountain Dew, paleontologists who studied the fossils from the Cohoes Mastodon say they can tell by the animal’s teeth how stressful his last winters were and how scarce food was before he died. They look to these conditions still to try to solve the mystery of what really happened to the mastodons. Tony was our mastodon.

Tony’s teeth.

I, like many in my upstate neighborhood, was born with the palpable sense that I am disappearing every day. This fear of disappearance bound me to the families in Troy that I hope will live forever in their pictures. These photographs are the new fossils. I think about what it means when something is called “prehistoric,” and it reminds me that, as a photographer, I hold a miracle in my hands, and with it comes the power to manufacture a record that future generations will consider fact. I, like

many in my upstate neighborhood, was born with the palpable sense that I am disappearing every day. This fear of disappearance bound me to the families in Troy that I hope will live forever in their pictures.

A Wal-Mart truck heading north on the New York State Thruway to Troy, spring 2006.

The first photograph of Sabrina, at age twelve, that I took while on assignment for the New York Times.

Sabrina and Kayla the week before Kayla’s baby (Tony) was born, April 2004.

PART ONE

GIRLS AND BOYS LIFE AND DEATH ca. 2004–2006

(Left) South Troy, ca. 1920. (Right) South Troy, 2008, looking toward the Rensselaer County Jail and the remains of the Burden Iron Works and Niagara Hudson Coke Plant.

DeAnthony Luis Stocklas, born April 18, 2004, was named after Sabrina’s close relative who was serving a nineteen-year prison sentence.

I

’ L L N E V E R F O R G E T that Sunday in late winter when Sabrina and I went to meet Kayla and her mom, Deb Stocklas, to ask permission for me to photograph the birth of Kayla’s baby. It was during the melancholy hours when the light in Upstate New York is both a color and a temperature—it reminds you that the new week will be pretty much the same as the last. If my cells have a memory, then the sadness of that sky is in them.

I felt bound to Kayla before I met her. I grew up one town over from Kayla. So many things about our lives were the same, though the things we pinned our hopes on were different. I was pregnant at fourteen, as Kayla was now. My mother saw no other option but to terminate the pregnancy. She said she was preserving my future, though she never told me for what. Kayla’s mother and family assured her the baby would be the one thing she could count on in life. I recognized in Kayla the same longing

when I was her age to pursue interests beyond our limited horizons. I also recognized her fear of being alienated if she explored the boundaries of her world. While I was able to find solace in my own rebellion, Kayla found one of her earliest safe spaces in Sabrina. Both girls were twelve when they shared their first kiss on a dare. Kayla was what the school called “social phobic.” She was in a small-sized class and had trouble mixing with people who she didn’t know. Kayla admired Sabrina’s large, flamboyant Puerto Rican family. Particularly all the sisters who danced in their bedrooms after school, and on payday Fridays went to the nail salon. Sabrina and I felt our way through a living room scattered with sleeping children to find Deb in bed. Her room had dark wood-grain paneling with deep blue curtains and matching navy wallpaper.

Newborn Tony comes home to Kayla’s room, which she shares with Sabrina.

The only light came from a console TV. Deb had one toddler in diapers curled around her, and Kayla sat propped up, nine months pregnant, at her mom’s side. Deb and Sabrina became locked in animated negotiation about the photographs while I tried to get Kayla to talk to me. She stayed quiet. Cartoon lightning bolts flashed across her face, bringing her in and out of view and punctuating our discomfort. When the ads came on, the light was more sustained and I was able to see Kayla’s eyes, blue-gray and receptive. I asked her how she felt about being pregnant. She answered, kind of low and to nobody in particular, “I don’t want to have a baby.” Her voice receded into the SpongeBob SquarePants theme song—“Absorbent and yellow and porous is he / SpongeBob Square-Pants”—as she mouthed the words a second time: “I don’t want to have a baby.”

Kayla’s mother and family assured her the baby she was to have would be the one thing she could count on in life.

I met Kayla and Sabrina during a time when the United States was breaking record numbers of incarcerations annually. According to the US Department of Justice, 1 in every 138 US residents was in jail by the end of 2004—1,142,911 inmates were in federal and state custody, and 713,990 were in local jails. Troy and the surrounding Upstate New York area were particularly affected by incarceration rates. Arrests for “quality of life crimes” happened with much greater frequency in lower-income neighborhoods like Kayla and Sabrina’s. Almost all Kayla and Sabrina’s male family members and some females served time in jail, prison, or juvenile detention. People from their neighborhood are locked up in the Rensselaer County Jail so often that everyone calls it RCJ for short and incarceration has become a community-building experience. Stepping in to fill the void left by someone close who is locked up comes naturally even to the youngest. Because Tony’s father was in prison when Kayla delivered, Tony’s birth was an occasion for bonding among Kayla, Sabrina, and a core group of friends who shared their block on Sixth Avenue. Two hundred years earlier, the bank of the Hudson, which houses RCJ, was a major site for heavy industry. The Burden Iron Works, built in 1809, took up a huge swath of Troy’s early industrial landscape.Burden’s famous horseshoe factory was among the upper works, and in the lower works was the blast furnace, which later passed through the hands of several companies, including the Niagara Hudson Coke Plant and Niagara Mohawk Power Corporation, before its final sale to King Fuels, who kept the furnaces going until 1968. Now, one of the biggest industries in Troy is the Rensselaer County Jail. An abandoned Burden Iron Works building, and the Rensselaer County Jail in my rearview mirror.

In 2009, the Rensselaer County Historical Society added the scrapbooks we made to their collection.

Big Jessie’s mementos of Tony’s birth and homecoming.

A photo of Big Jessie, Dana, Stacy, and Jackie in Dana’s scrapbook.

Commemorative postcards from the 1909 Hudson-Fulton Celebration show parade floats depicting four periods in New York’s history: The Native Period, The Dutch Period, The Colonial Period, and The American or Modern Period.

The Hudson-Fulton Celebration of 1909 marked the 300-year anniversary of Henry Hudson’s journey.

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n April 1609, the directors of the Dutch West India Company financed Henry Hudson and his ship the Half Moon to find a northeasterly route to the riches of China. Hudson’s unsuccessful attempt led him to his namesake river and to the eventual Dutch settlement of Troy and other areas of New York. Hudson’s crew saw a large beaver population along the banks of the river, leading to a robust trade with Native Americans in the Hudson Valley, who he reported were eager for goods, such as jewelry, cooking utensils, liquor, and guns. By all accounts, the European lust for beaver fur (they had already hunted the animal to scarcity in their own land) was the main factor in the settlement of the Hudson Valley (and the beavers being hunted to near extinction). The Dutch would wait to gather enough pelts to fill a ship before sailing back to Holland, so they eventually set up a permanent outpost, which became the first settlement.

By the 1800s, Troy was establishing itself as a city of growing wealth, with iron and steel as the earliest and most influential industries. Inventor and industrialist Henry Burden advanced the railroad industry with hook-headed railroad spikes and the first machine-

made horseshoes. To power Burden Iron Works, he erected a 60-foot waterwheel in 1851. At this time, Burden’s annual horseshoe sales were $2 million— more than $40 million today. Burden’s machine could make ten to twelve horseshoes per minute at peak

production, totaling 51 million shoes per year produced by 1,400 workmen. During the Civil War, Henry Burden became a forerunner of the military-industrial complex, manufacturing almost all the horseshoes for the Union Army. The Confederate Army had

a difficult time getting shoes for their horses, and historians conclude that Burden’s horseshoes were a real factor in the Union’s victory.

In addition to iron and steel, textiles were the other major manufacturing concern that shaped the identity and economy of industrialized Troy. Unique to Troy was the invention of the detachable shirt cuff and collar by Hannah Lord Montague in 1827.

The detachable collar business became a major economic and social force in Troy. Wearing a detached collar became a symbol of class distinction among many “white-collar” workers, who used the garment to differentiate themselves from “no-collar” or “blue-collar”

factory workers. By the early twentieth century, Montague’s invention had spawned an industry that employed 15,000 people. Troy became known as the Collar City. In 1901, there were twenty-six collar and cuff makers and thirty-eight laundries in Troy. By 1962,

only six of those companies were still making collars and cuffs, and by the 1970s, most had gone out of business or had moved south.

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R O M T H E T I M E it was discovered until the 1950s,

Troy and the Hudson Valley were able to stay on top of a wave of advances in transportation that supported the city’s economic and social growth. The 1915 Troy directory shows that the city was a stop along nine railroad lines and “the head of navigation on the Hudson River,” with three steamship companies traveling the

region’s waterways. From the 1930s until it closed in 1964, Troy even had its own airport. For almost 150 years, advances in industry and transportation supported a growing and prosperous merchant class made up of shopkeepers, accountants, and midlevel businessmen.

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Downtown Troy, 2010.

H E T H R I V I N G M E R C H A N T C L A S S that emerged as a result of the industrial revolution could not compete with cheaper big-box stores that had the power to purchase from a global market. Troy’s once-vibrant downtown began to fade. By the time Tony was born, it was where you went to appear in court, for your food stamps appointment, or to visit the Social Security office, not for shopping or leisure. All of Kayla’s family shop at big-box stores, where many of them also work.

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N 1 9 2 2 , H E N R Y F O R D opened a plant across the river from Troy. So taken with the area, Ford commissioned Norman Rockwell to create a commemorative poster celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of his automobile in 1952. Rockwell used a 1903 scene set on Fourth Street in South Troy as the model for The Street Was Never the Same Again. But the advances in transportation that had fostered the growth of downtown Troy eventually led to its decline, with the development of the highway system as one of the major contributing factors in the shift from cities to suburbs.

Kayla on her way to her first job interview at Dunkin’ Donuts, spring 2007.

The opening of the Collar City Bridge in 1981 also played a major part in the death of downtown Troy. The project was part of a federally funded program to address the decline of urban communities after deindustrialization. For Troy, this was compounded by the 1956 Federal-Aid Highway Act, which gave state and federal governments complete control over new high-

ways. These highways were often routed directly through vibrant urban neighborhoods, which were considered less desirable than the affluent suburbs. Most of the neighborhood and commercial districts where Collar City Bridge sits were destroyed; what remains commuters can bypass almost entirely.

The “urban redevelopment” and “urban renewal” under the Housing Acts of 1949 and 1954 allowed for the federal government to provide money to cities for the purpose of acquiring land deemed to be “slums.” Local governments condemned these properties, acquired them through eminent domain, and then gave them to private developers, who reshaped cities while displacing mostly poor and minority residents. Troy’s preparations for its new downtown shopping mall came in the late 1960s when the funding for these redevelopment

programs was drying up. After the demolition phase of the program had left a huge hole in the ground where downtown Troy used to be, interest waned, developers pulled out, and the city scrambled for help to rebuild. In 1979, the mall finally opened as the Uncle Sam Atrium Mall, with much less excitement than anticipated. The stores and movie theaters that had committed to lease space either backed out or operated only until a lack of foot traffic caused them to close. Today, the mall’s biggest retail tenant is a CVS Pharmacy.

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AY L A , S A B R I N A , and their families live in north central Troy. Since the late 1800s, the neighborhood has been comprised of working-class families who were primarily employed in the city’s factories. In 1986, the neighborhood was settling in to its first generation of solid postindustrial decline. Over the twenty years that followed, north central Troy was plagued by poverty, racial strife, gang violence, unemployment, and urban blight.

In 1915, directories that cross-referenced residents’ names, addresses, and occupations were published for the first time. North Troy’s residents were shown to be box makers, collar workers, and in certain years a heavy concentration of widows. Today, 56.6 percent of the households in north central Troy are headed by females, and 20.7 percent of the households in north central Troy have annual household incomes of $10,000 to $19,999.

Laundress at Cluett, Peabody & Co., ca. 1920s.

Collar ironing machine at Cluett, Peabody & Co., ca. 1920s.

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O L L A R W O R K provided employment for thousands of women, many of whom were Irish immigrants, laboring long hours under harsh conditions. Collar sewers, banders, runners, and turners stitched collars by hand or machine, working either at home or in factories. After the collars were made, they passed into the hands of laundresses to wash, starch, and iron the collars. Working in independently owned laundries or in large collar factories, they contended with boiling water, toxic starch and detergent, and hot, heavy irons.

Many credit Kate Mullany, a young Irish laundress, with forming the first all-female labor union in the United States, the Collar Laundry Union, in 1864. New York State Department of Labor statistics show that Albany and Troy had more than 400,000 people working in service jobs between 2015 and 2016. Service work accounted for the highest percentage of employment in Upstate New York’s Capital Region. In Troy, most of these are nonunion jobs.

Wrapping finished collars in paper packaging at Cluett, Peabody & Co., ca. 1920s.

(Above) Wilhelmina, ca. 1980. (middle) Wilhelmina and Deb at her first Communion at St. Patrick’s Church in Troy, 1970.(below) Deb, 2004.

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E B S T O C K L A S ; H E R M O T H E R , Wilhelmina; and her mother before her all worked as sewing machine operators at Standard Manufacturing Co. Inc. in North Troy. All three women were single mothers and struggled financially as the head of their households. Wilhelmina’s mother was one of seventeen children, and she never was able to escape the poverty she was born into. When Wilhelmina was a young girl, she was sent to live at Saint Colman’s Home, an orphanage that had a dubious reputation for mistreating children. Prior to the expansion of foster care in the 1950s, orphanages

Standard Manufacturing Co. Inc., North Troy, ca. 1920.

were among the main social welfare institutions to offer relief to desperate families. In the 1980s, Deb eventually left factory work for her first job in the service industry. Over the years, she worked in food service at Dunkin’ Donuts and a handicapped living facility, did housekeeping at the Marriott and several other hotels, and eventually got a government job driving a bus for the district’s transportation authority.

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H E N T O N Y C A M E H O M E , all the kids wanted to

help. This kind of intragenerational parenting is a tradition among extended families like Kayla’s. But in the 1900s it was linked to a soaring infant mortality rate—estimated as high as 30 percent—as more mothers went to work in factories and left their young children at

home to care for their infant siblings. In 1908, Dr. Josephine Baker founded the Little Mothers Leagues, which sought to educate girls aged twelve to fourteen in the proper ways of mothering in an attempt to reduce the infant mortality rate.

The health of children, particularly of young men, was a key focus of the Progressive Era (1890–1920). Boys would grow up to power the economy and fight wars, so the well-being of the nation’s children became a foundation for the growth and success of the nation. It followed that the well-being of mothers must also be important. The maternalist movement took hold at a time when poor women had almost no power over their own bodies or households. In 1912, President Taft created the US Children’s Bureau, whose study of the infant mortality rate linked poverty and unsanitary conditions to babies’ deaths. Reformers argued that problems associated with poverty—ignorance, laziness, and substance abuse— were also to blame. In the second decade of the twentieth

century, a crusade for health education targeting mostly poor women became a national focus. Maternalist reformers argued for mothers’ pension programs—if the family’s needs were adequately met, working mothers would be able to stay home with their children. These pension programs were the beginning of the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) programs that we have today. Though well intended, these programs held a superior view of European culture and espoused rapid assimilation of women from other ethnic backgrounds. And the programs ultimately were to support a mother’s role in raising a future generation of Americans, not to empower women themselves.

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V E N T H O U G H K AY L A and

Sabrina were a couple, Sabrina had a boyfriend named T. J. She thought it wasn’t fair if Kayla didn’t have a boyfriend too, so she picked out T. J.’s friend Robert for Kayla. The girls agreed never to do more than kiss with their boyfriends. After Tony was born, all four of the kids called him their “son.” Many of Kayla and Sabrina’s neighborhood friends were in a revolving cycle of jail or juvenile placement. Getting locked up could mean a breakup, or at least an understanding that exchanging letters did not guarantee the unwavering fidelity of your lover back home. It was also understood that whomever your sweetheart was spending time with while you were away would get kicked to the curb when you got released. When T. J. and Robert would accompany Kayla and Sabrina on shoplifting sprees or to the swimming hole, the talk was always about who was going away next—when, where, and for how long—and who was going to take care of their family while they were away.

(Next page) Kayla and Sabrina cool off in the swimming hole with their boyfriends, while Tony sleeps, summer 2004.

When the boys got locked up, their mothers were the only ones who remained consistent in their lives.

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H E N T O N Y WA S B O R N , his biological father and his great-uncle Bob were in prison, and his uncle Robert was in juvenile placement. Single mothers raised both Robert and Bob, and when the boys got locked up, their mothers were the ones who remained consistent in their lives. The boys depended on Deb and Wilhelmina for commissary money, as legal liaisons, and to visit them without fail.

Robert began his stints in juvenile placement when he was ten years old. He got in trouble at school and was diagnosed with ADHD and ODD (oppositional defiant disorder). He was eventually placed on Supplemental Security Income (SSI), prescribed medication, and sent to a string of placements before graduating to “big-boy jail.” As an adult, most of the trouble he landed in stemmed from fighting with a girlfriend or getting stopped for speeding while driving without a license. Bob was sent to juvenile placement for the first time when he was twelve years old and was in and out of prison for much of his adult life. After Bob got home from the prison bid that ended in 2000, he got locked up again several times, usually for parole violations.

Mother and son, ca. 1900.

Pages from Robert’s scrapbook. By age eighteen, he had been through several juvenile placements and stints in RCJ.

Orphanages were often the only option for poor families when bad got worse.

The first juvenile placement facility Robert went through, like many of the kids in his Troy neighborhood, was Vanderheyden Hall. Vanderheyden evolved out of the Troy Orphan Asylum, founded in 1833. The children, in the early days, were called “inmates.” The steady flow of immigrants from all over Europe and the fallout of the Civil War led to a staggering overload on Troy’s orphanages by 1865. With none of the social welfare systems that exist today, orphanages were often the only option for poor families when bad got worse. According to the asylum’s 1913 annual report, 23.5

percent of its inmates were admitted after being deserted by parents and 41.5 percent after the death of one or more parents. The children were to be taught reading, writing, and arithmetic, and receive instruction in the New Testament in order to be prepared to join the labor force when they came of age. With the Great Depression came changes in the social welfare system and more public assistance for families. The focus shifted to preserving the children’s home life or finding foster homes when needed. In 1943, the Orphan

Asylum changed its name to Vanderheyden Hall. Since then, Vanderheyden has housed young people mandated there by the court system or youth who need structural support while attending public schools. The bell that rang when orphans arrived is still on campus today—new arrivals are instructed to touch the bell, signifying they are part of a community of hundreds that have passed through the same walls.

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N J U N E 2 0 0 4 , while Sabrina finished middle school, Kayla stayed home with Tony. Sabrina thought the relationship was too serious, and soon arguing led to physical fights. That summer, the girls broke up and Sabrina moved back home with her family.

Kayla was supposed to start ninth grade at Troy High in the fall, but she was diagnosed with social phobia and was enrolled in School One, the alternative high school, instead. Although she was only fifteen and attendance was mandatory, Kayla only went enough to keep from getting in trouble with child protective services. She felt like the program was a waste of time—the work was too easy and the IEP (individualized education plan) she would receive upon graduation was not equal to a regular high school diploma. She would still have to get her GED.

With no one to watch her kids during the summer break, Deb had quit her housekeeping job at the Marriott. But in the fall, Deb’s friend Rose lost her apartment in the housing projects when the son she was living with went to jail. Deb gave Rose the basement room in her house in exchange for taking care of Deb’s kids not yet in school—Christy, Little Jon, Little Jesse, and Tony.

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H I L D C A R E H A S B E E N A P R O B L E M for poor women

since the time of industrialization, when mothers began to work outside their homes. In 1858, a group of wealthy women opened an industrial school for poor children in the Ladies’ Home Missionary Society. They wanted the school to be a safe place where working mothers could leave their children during the day. In 1861, the mansion of wealthy landowner George Tibbits

was purchased by the society and in 1865, the name was officially changed to the Troy Day Home. The Day Home had already been operating sixteen years in 1874, when education became mandatory in New York State. The attendance regulations for public schools were difficult for the Day Home’s students to meet. They often had to help at home in the morning or stay out of school several days of the week to care for younger brothers or sisters. The public schools would not admit a child after nine a.m., and a child would be refused admission for the remainder of the school year once they had a certain number of absences. The Day Home took children whenever they could come.

Childcare has been a problem for poor women since the time of industrialization, when mothers began to work outside their homes.

Tony watches Rose change his uncle Little Jesse’s diaper while Deb braids Kayla’s hair for school. Little Jesse and Tony were born less than two years apart and have always competed for the attention that comes with being the baby of the family.

Rose pours coffee into Little Jesse’s bottle to help him fall asleep, just as Deb did for all of her other children.

Rose and Kayla give Little Jesse and Tony their asthma treatments.

Tibbits Mansion housed the first Troy Day Home.

Page from Big Jessie’s scrapbook.

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U R I N G T H E S U M M E R of 2004, Dana and

Big Jessie’s half sister, Stacy, left home in Hancock, NY and came to Troy. Stacy became involved with a boy whose name appeared online as a registered sex offender. When Stacy didn’t keep a promise to meet up with Jessie one morning, Jessie went to the abandoned building where Stacy and the boy were squatting. She found it empty and became angry, setting fire to the couch

Page from Dana’s scrapbook with the first photo I ever took of her in 2004. Elliott later told me he fell in love with Dana from this picture.

where the couple slept. She hadn’t expected the fire to burn out of control. Terrified, Big Jessie ran away. She later turned herself in to the police and was charged with arson. Meanwhile, Dana was falling in love with a neighborhood boy named Elliott, whom she met while he was home on a visit from the group home he had been placed in.

Robert pouts about sharing the cake with Kayla.

o c t o b e r 2 3 , 2 0 0 4 b i r t h d ay s

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A L L 2 0 0 4 M A R K E D S I X M O N T H S I had been docu-

menting the kids in Troy. When October 23—my birthday—rolled around, I found out Kayla, Robert, and Big Jessie were all born on that day, too. My first year back in Troy was the last year I would ever celebrate my birthday on my own. Deb, always short on money, celebrated Kayla and Robert’s birthdays together. She always ordered one

Robert, DOB 10/23/1990, turns 14.

Kayla, DOB 10/23/1989, turns 15.

cake with both names on it and switched the candles to the appropriate number during the second verse of the birthday song. Robert used to throw tantrums about not getting his own cake and candles. One year he even smashed the cake into his face. This year, Robert celebrated his birthday while visiting from placement at the Children’s Home of Kingston and Big Jessie was on house arrest for arson.

Big Jessie, DOB 10/23/1985, turns 19.

I, DOB 10/23/1959, turn 45.

Big Jessie with her girlfriend, Jackie. Clippings from the Children’s Home newsletter and Robert’s Social Security disability evaluation that entitled him to special education classes and prescription medications.

Dana and Elliott.

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L L I O T T WA S S I X Y E A R S O L D when a fire in his family’s Troy home killed his younger brother, Eugene. Child welfare authorities and social workers suspected Elliott might have been playing with matches and accidentally started the fire. Their suspicions prompted a series of investigations and recommendations about what interventions Elliott needed. Elliott’s mother, Marjorie, was raising four children on her own. If she did not cooperate with Elliott’s evaluations by Child Protective Services, her other three children would be taken from her custody. Marjorie eventually allowed Elliott to be admitted to Four Winds psychiatric facility. Elliott was diagnosed with ADHD, PTSD, and depression, and was placed on heavy medication. Marjorie was unable to protest against the medication, even though she did not like the way it affected Elliott.

Elliott counts his trip to Four Winds as the first time he was ever locked up. After his stay there, he got in trouble at school and had scrapes with the law for stealing and breaking into buildings. When he was twelve, he was sent to juvenile detention. It was during a visit back home that he first saw Dana. Before he boarded the bus back to the facility, he handed his mother a letter and asked her to find the girl and give her the letter. It began a romance that lasted into adulthood. Soon after Elliott’s visit home, Big Jessie, Dana, and their friend Kayla stopped to smoke cigarettes in an abandoned school on the way to enroll in a GED program. They were caught by the police. Big Jessie was nineteen and sent to RCJ for violating house arrest. The other two girls, both minors, were released.

When the kids were locked up, letters were the lifeline that they structured their day with. Throughout her incarceration Big Jessie wrote to Dana. Big Jessie had been diagnosed with a learning disability and had spent most of her school years in special classes for vocational training. She had never been in jail before and had a very hard time adjusting. She was evaluated for depression and anxiety while at RCJ.

A page from Big Jessie’s scrapbook where she counts the days until her release.

Dasaun, Billie Jean, and Nanny Rose in the basement room at Deb’s.

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F T E R A F E W M O N T H S of living at Deb’s, all the kids

began to call Rose “the Nanny.” Rose embraced the name and took her new childcare responsibilities seriously. She loved to be needed, and at Deb’s she was at the center of a busy house where she felt capable and appreciated.

Though Nanny Rose still drank beer, she talked about how much she had changed since her days of hard drug use and “settling down.” All three of her own children were adults, but they were still processing their childhoods with their mom while she was “figuring it out.” Nanny’s oldest was her son, Pat, followed by Michelle,

and then Billie Jean. All of Nanny’s children struggled with depression, bipolar disorder, drug addiction, bouts of homelessness, and incarceration. In spring 2005, Billie Jean was arrested for selling drugs. Billie Jean was only locked up in RCJ for ten days, but the conviction resulted in her eviction, along with her four-year-old

son, Dasaun, from the Griswold Heights public housing complex. When Billie Jean was released on five years felony probation, she and Dasaun moved into Deb’s basement with Nanny, until Billie Jean could save up enough from her job at McDonald’s to get a new apartment.

When Billie Jean was in middle school, the Cohoes City School District Committee on Special Education diagnosed her with mental retardation. By the time she entered high school, Billie Jean was struggling with depression. A couple years after she got out of RCJ, she hit rock bottom. She began seeing a therapist and was approved for SSI disability. Pages from Billie Jean’s scrapbook.

Boy with a toy gun in the Griswold Heights courtyard, 2005.

Billie Jean and Dasaun in the Heights courtyard, 2005.

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H E G R I S W O L D H E I G H T S A P A R T M E N T S , or the Heights as everyone calls them, were named after Troy banker and steel mogul Augustus Griswold, who was also president of the Troy Lansingburgh and Troy Cohoes Railroads, mayor of Troy in 1855, and a US congressman.

received one dollar a week for each “inmate” and whatever work the inmate was capable of performing on the grounds. The poorhouse operated for almost 100 years before closing in 1918. Thousands lived, died, and were buried in the almshouse cemetery, in unmarked graves.

The area where the Heights now sit was county farmland until the Rensselaer County poorhouse was built there in 1812. Poorhouses were tax-supported residential institutions where desperate people went to request aid from the Overseer of the Poor, an elected official who determined if they were “worthy” of relief. The sick and elderly were sometimes allowed to receive relief in their homes; however, able-bodied unemployed men were contracted to the county superintendent, who

Griswold Heights Apartments sit away from the city on a high stretch of land that is difficult to reach without a car. It is a twenty-minute walk from the Heights to the nearest bus. When Billie Jean lived there, she would leave at four a.m. to catch the bus to get to her morning shift at McDonald’s. Winters were worse as the roads were dark, icy, and often not plowed. After they were evicted, she and Dasaun would sneak back into the projects and stay with friends. She said it still felt like home to her.

Griswold mansion. (Top right) Mrs. John Augustus Griswold. (Bottom right) John Augustus Griswold’s daughter, Sara.

Though Kayla and Sabrina were broken up, they still celebrated Tony’s first birthday together, April 18, 2005.

The summer of 2005 was the first time in two years Kayla was not with Sabrina and made plans on her own. Though she was only fifteen, having Tony with her all the time never slowed her down.

In this big teenage family, it was hard to tell which of the little ones tagging along were younger brothers and sisters and which were sons and daughters.

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H O U G H B I L L I E J E A N often stayed in the basement

room at Deb’s, she also had been granted a temporary welfare hotel room upon her release from RCJ. The hotel was fifteen miles outside Troy and the buses stopped running there after ten p.m. Billie Jean hated to be alone, so when she wasn’t at Deb’s she took everybody back to the room to keep her company. That summer, Kayla and her friends and their kids all went around together—and, now that Tony had turned a year old, he joined the pack. In this big teenage family, it was hard to tell which of the little ones tagging along were younger brothers and sisters and which were sons and daughters. But there was no other option when parents worked and there was no childcare. Part of the deal when you got to be a certain age was that you helped out with younger ones. It was expected that all the older kids would share everything. Time, material resources, and especially food were automatically community property. The slightest hand-to-mouth gesture that might suggest someone was eating something would have every set of eyes in the room fixed on it, and every crinkle of a plastic bag was assumed to herald a bag full of chips. The smaller kids always thought that whatever went into the older kids’ mouths was something they should have. Early in the summer the pack developed a routine. The girls hung out at Kayla’s house or on their block of Sixth Avenue between the corner store and Kayla’s front porch. They looked forward to the days when they could go downtown to see a friend who was locked up in RCJ make a court appearance. Throughout most of Tony’s childhood, his father was incarcerated, either for violating parole or for a new charge he racked up soon after being freed. Kayla would bring Tony to see his father during the brief periods he was out on the street.

This was also the summer Wilhelmina, Kayla’s grandmother, moved into Deb’s house after her cancer had progressed to its final stages. When it was too hot outside, the girls stayed in Kayla’s living room and sang along to music videos, while Wilhelmina lay dying on one of the couches across from them.

Wilhelmina and Deb, 2005.

After serving ten months in RCJ, Big Jessie was released on five year’s felony probation.

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I G J E S S I E H A D B E E N in special classes since she was

in middle school. She suffered from severe anxiety, especially when separated from her father, PTSD, and ADD. Throughout her childhood, various family members had applied for disability on her behalf, and the applications had been denied. When Big Jessie got to RCJ, the jail psychiatrist applied for her again, and the application was finally approved. Soon after the thrill of her release faded, Big Jessie was more anxious about being back outside than she had been when she was locked up. On the inside she knew what was going to happen every day, relieving a lot of her anxiety. She talked a lot about all the friends she made when she was locked up, but most of them had gone back to the lives they had before RCJ. Some of the girls Big Jessie ran into in RCJ, she had already been acquainted with on the street. Though they had not been close before being locked up, they sought each other out when they got home.

While Big Jessie was in jail, her sister Stacy became pregnant. To escape the neighborhood gossip about her boyfriend’s sex offender status, they moved to South Troy.

Big Jessie visits her old girlfriend Heather (center), Heather’s girlfriend Sarah (left), their newborn, Anayah, and Sarah’s sister, Jessica (top).

In September, Dana moved into Kayla’s room and Deb got her a job at the Marriott. Dana and her dad had been arguing a lot—mostly about her spending time with Elliott. Dana celebrated her eighteenth birthday just after finding out she was pregnant with Elliott’s baby. The church had become an important part of Dana and Big Jessie’s father’s life during his recovery from alcoholism. Dana was terrified of her father’s disapproval and of losing him again, so she held off telling him she was pregnant.

The doorway of the room where Heather was raped. She visited her great-grandmother’s house one last time before it was torn down.

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H E N H E AT H E R WA S L I T T L E , she lived with her great-grand-

mother Ethel a lot and she was the person Heather loved most in the world. Ethel’s boyfriend raped Heather, and Ethel married him after he was found guilty. When Heather was a teen, she was placed in the Saint Anne Institute for “troubled girls,” and during this time she told her mother she was gay.

When Heather and Big Jessie were locked up together, Heather would always give Big Jessie a letter to include in the envelope she was sending to Kayla. Kayla and Heather had never been close, but it was considered an obligation to respond to any letter you received from someone locked up, so Kayla always wrote her back. Heather had a rough childhood, so her adult relationships tended to turn into instant families. After Big Jessie and Heather reconnected outside of RCJ, Heather started visiting Kayla, and eventually they started dating.

His biggest fear was being sent to prison and forgotten.

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T T H E S A M E T I M E Heather had been writing to Kayla from RCJ, Kayla was falling for a neighborhood boy named James. James took pride in saying he was born and raised in Troy, as were his parents and their parents before them—he even had the area code 518 tattooed on the back of his hand.

James had a twin brother named Terrance, and both boys had been in and out of placements and jail since they were young. James said he and Terrance had to be tough because their dad was never around and they were raised by a single mother.

When he and Kayla started seeing each other, James was faced with a prison sentence if he failed to complete a mandated substance-abuse program. James had started drinking when he was very young and had been drinking the day he stabbed another neighborhood boy during an argument. After he fell in love with Kayla, James’s willingness to complete the program diminished. James had seen many relationships fade when someone got locked up, and the promise of love in the future couldn’t compare to waking up next to someone every day. His biggest fear was being sent to prison and forgotten.

James and his twin brother, Terrance, from a page of James’s scrapbook.

o c t o b e r 2 3 , 2 0 0 5 b i r t h d ay s

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O B E R T H A D B E E N R E L E A S E D from the Children’s

Home of Kingston and celebrated his fifteenth birthday at the LaSalle School, a residential treatment facility in Albany. Robert liked LaSalle better than Kingston because both his biological father and his uncle Bob had been in placement at LaSalle. Many of the older staff knew Robert’s family and made him feel accepted immediately, as if they had been expecting him for a long time.

Big Jessie settled into life with her family. She spent lots of time with her dad. Her mom visited, and Dana and Stacy were thrilled to have Big Jessie home. Kayla was falling in love with Heather because James had been mandated to residential treatment for his substance abuse.

Robert turns 15. Kayla turns sweet 16. Big Jessie turns 19. I turn 46.

In December 2005, almost three months after Dana learned she was pregnant with his baby, Elliott went to jail for violating probation. Dana would seal her letters with a lipstick kiss until RCJ refused to deliver them because the lipstick could contain contraband such as powdered drugs. They began writing SWAK (sealed with a kiss) at the seal instead.

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AY L A H A D F I R S T D A B B L E D with cigarettes when she

was fifteen. She only lit up when she talked about how much she was enjoying her freedom from Sabrina. In Kayla’s early relationship with cigarettes, she used them more like props to act like a different person, one who was not suffering the hurt of ending a relationship. The moment she raised a lighter to the cigarette between her clenched teeth, Kayla’s voice and posture changed, and her usual quiet gave way to tough talk about being a girl who didn’t need anybody, which sounded like whistling in the dark. Over the year that followed, cigarettes proved to be a safe space for Kayla when she wanted to declare her independence or get physical reassurance that she had control over her life even if only for the length of a smoke break. Kayla and cigarettes would grow to be inseparable, especially when Kayla entered the workforce.

Lady Liberty works at Liberty Income Tax Preparation Service in downtown Troy. Every year, Kayla’s family, along with most others in North Troy, anxiously awaits their W-2 forms in the mail. For most of the families, tax refund money is the only opportunity they have to make purchases beyond what their strict budget allows—many even defer their children’s Christmas gifts until “tax time.” In the past Kayla’s family has used tax refunds for home remodeling, medical expenses beyond what Medicaid allows (such as braces), a down payment on a vehicle, and to pay off their old Rent-A-Center furniture so they could lease a new kitchen, bedroom, or living room set. Tax refunds for low-income families in Troy mean momentary freedom, to feel empowered by the ability to make changes in their material lives.

In the united states education and income are main indicators of who smokes and who doesn’t.

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P U N T I L T H E M A S S P R O D U C T I O N of cigarettes

began in the early 1880s, cigarette smoking was uncommon in the United States. In these early days, smoking among women was considered a moral issue, rather than a health issue. The effects of this temperance movement were countered as increased immigration from Europe added numbers of women who commonly smoked cigarettes in their homes; women from American upper-class society who toured Europe also began smoking while abroad. Despite a 1908 New York City ban on women smoking in public, the sale of cigarettes quadrupled between 1918 and 1928. Researchers believe that factors such as milder tobacco, more women leaving home to go away to college, and higher wages for working women increased sales of cigarettes to women. The tobacco companies began using the concept of sexual equality to market cigarettes to women. In 1928, George Washington Hill, president of the American Tobacco Company, launched an all-out campaign to get women to smoke Lucky Strike cigarettes. Their first pitch was that because smoking dulled the appetite, it promoted weight control, dovetailing with the slim look of women’s fashion in the 1920s. The slogan was “Reach for a Lucky instead of a sweet.” Hill hired public relations pioneer Edward Bernays to help with the campaign. Bernays convinced a group of ten debutantes to smoke cigarettes while strolling with their escorts in Fifth Avenue’s Easter parade. He billed the stunt as women lighting a “torch of freedom . . . to combat the silly prejudice that cigarette smoking . . . is never seen on the sidewalk.” The association with equal rights for women and

then with the sexual revolution made cigarette smoking a powerful metaphor. By the 1960s, smoking in the United States was widely socially accepted, with about 42 percent of Americans being regular smokers. Over the next two decades, the evidence mounted that linked tobacco to serious health consequences. By 1970, the health hazards associated with smoking were widely known and the last cigarette ads appeared on television. Today, similar to the early days of cigarette smoking in the United States, education and income are main indicators of who smokes and who doesn’t. This time, however, the practice is in reverse. Just as the trickle-down from wealthy upper-class and erudite smokers of the early 1900s took decades to reach the masses, those with lower incomes and less education have been slow to quit. A 2008 Gallup poll of 75,000 Americans showed that smoking generally increases as annual incomes decrease. This hasn’t always been true. In the ’50s and ’60s, smoking was less common among the poor—they had less money and were more religious, but as awareness of the health risks of smoking grew, the wealthier were more successful at quitting. The Washington Post posits that there are three reasons this is true: 1) Lower-income smokers strengthen their addiction by taking deeper drags on each cigarette than their wealthier counterparts. 2) Smokers with lower incomes frequently try to quit while living alongside people who smoke; wealthier smokers usually do not. 3) Lower-income people have less access to effective treatments to help them quit smoking than middle-class people.

Deb turns forty, spring 2006.

Big Jessie and her father struggled to survive on her SSI disability.

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E AT H E R A N D K AY L A set up house in Kayla’s bedroom like a real couple. Heather took her new family responsibility seriously and applied for the army reserves. Heather was desperate to take care of Kayla and Tony, but she could not pass the entry test. Kayla helped Heather study, but Heather’s ADHD made progress impossible, and eventually Heather gave up.

Big Jessie was experiencing separation anxiety and was afraid to be away from her dad at all. Every time her father left the house, Big Jessie had to go with him to work and sit outside in his car all day. Her anxiety got so bad her dad eventually quit his job. They struggled to survive on her SSI disability. Andi-Lynne had been living between Deb’s house and juvenile placement. AndiLynne’s mother and Kayla’s birth father were a couple, and Andi-Lynne often got into fights with him when he got physical with Andi-Lynne’s mother. To keep peace at home, Andi-Lynne’s mother brought her to Four Winds pediatric crisis unit for evaluation. Andi-Lynne was prescribed Zoloft and Paxil for depression and was recommended to go into residential placement. Though Kayla’s stepdad worked long days at a tire shop, he made his presence known via the list of mandates he voiced to Deb. In the fall of 2005, he said there were too many people staying in the house—Billie Jean and Dasaun had to find a place to go. Billie Jean wanted Nanny Rose to get an apartment with her, but Nanny Rose liked the freedom of living at Deb’s where all her needs were met—cigarettes, beer, food, clothes. Billie Jean felt her mom always chose Deb’s kids over her and Dasaun and that living at Deb’s allowed Nanny Rose to drink more. Billie Jean loves the Stocklases but was conflicted about her mother living there—her mother was taking care of other children in a way she did not with Billie Jean and her siblings.

Billie Jean holds a cigarette lighter gun to her head in a mock suicide threat after she and Nanny Rose fought about Billie Jean moving out of Deb’s house.

While Billie Jean works her shift at McDonald’s, Nanny Rose babysits Dasaun and enjoys her favorite beer, which costs just one dollar a can.

Nanny Rose in her basement room at Deb’s house.

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N S P R I N G O F 2 0 0 6 , Deb’s friend Laurie showed up for

work at the Marriott with her four kids. The family had been evicted from their apartment after falling behind in rent. Deb invited Laurie and the kids to stay in the upstairs apartment at her house until they could get on their feet. Laurie has three baby daddies, all of whom remain part of an extended family that includes their new girlfriends as well as Laurie’s new relationships. Laurie’s kids go back and forth to their fathers’ homes— especially when money is tight.

Laurie’s youngest, Katie.

Laurie with her son, Darien (age seven), and daughters Megan (age six) and Katie (age three).

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Y D E C E M B E R 2 0 0 5 , Dana’s belly

was getting bigger and Elliott was still awaiting trial. Dana saw Elliott at RCJ on every visiting day, and the two wrote to each other every day in between. Dana was living back home, but she and her father were barely speaking. The pastor at their church had found a couple in the congregation who could not have children and desperately wanted to adopt. Dana’s father thought it would be best for Dana’s baby to be brought up in a Christian home with two parents. Her father threatened to take Big Jessie and move to Pennsylvania if Dana kept the baby. Dana did not consider giving her baby up for adoption until the day after her baby shower. Elliott had just been sentenced to two years in state prison, and she finally broke down and agreed. The prospect of raising a baby alone with no money was more than she could bear.

00:00:04;12

Dana on the day she would leave her daughter with the baby’s adoptive parents.

PART TWO

GOOD BAD GIRLS BAD GOOD GIRLS ca. 2006–2009

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H E H O U S E S O F T H E G O O D S H E P H E R D ’ S work of “reclaiming fallen women” dates back to England in the middle of the nineteenth century and expanded over the next century to Canada and the United States. The “wayward” women and girls who lived in these houses had all been deemed sexually promiscuous and most were from poor families. Many were involved in prostitution, some were pregnant, and others had been disowned by their families because they were unruly, incorrigible, or shameful. Most girls were sentenced to the house via the court, some were placed there by family, others who were destitute sought the Good Shepherd House’s shelter voluntarily. The church was in the business of separating the good girls out from the bad, relegating them to one of two groups—the penitents and the preservates. The preservates were “good girls from bad homes” and were often very young or considered at risk for “falling.”

There are conflicting reports about what happened once inside the House of the Good Shepherd. One focus that permeates the order as a whole is the practice of forcing girls to give their children up for adoption and the non-transparency around any records of such, even in some cases the lack of documentation around the death of a child. Also consistent are the reports of cruelty that surround the Magdalene Laundries run under the supervision of the House of the Good Shepherd. The laundries began 150 years ago as homes to rehabilitate prostitutes. But by the early twentieth century, their role had been expanded to caring for unwed mothers and other young women the church considered to be wayward. The choice of work was no accident. The women were called Magdalenes or penitents. By scrubbing, they were supposed to wash away their sins, and according to the Sisters, “the income from their labor put a roof over their heads, food on their plates.” Besides washing all day, every Magdalene needed to pray out loud for her sins. The Sisters said that the average stay for a woman at the laundries was seven months. Income from the laundries reportedly rivaled the trade unions and commercial laundries of the day to the point where these organizations publicly complained about the Magdalenes. In Troy, the House of the Good Shepherd was built in 1887 and operated a laundry in the building’s basement. It was assumed that the girls who attended would be blue-collar laborers and the best training they could receive would be “reading, writing, arithmetic, thrift, and cleanliness.” As the House expanded, the new buildings were connected by passageways so that the residents could move around the complex without having to go outside. Operating the House became too costly and the school and other aspects of the House were closed by 1966.

The House of the Good Shepherd, ca. early 1900s.

House of Good Shepherd, ca. 1900s

All words commonly found in accounts by the sisters, devotees, and scholars of the House of the Good Shepherd, and taken from printed articles and the survivors’ Facebook pages: Wayward Delinquent Bad Virtue Good Industry Incorrigible Punishment Inmate Fallen Weak Clean Loud Reform Women Sin

Lost Work Committed Asylum Shame Girls Magdalenes Penitents Illegitimate Promiscuous Soul Rehabilitate Prostitute Disown Virgin Moral

REFORMATORIES FOR WOMEN AND GIRLS Mount Magdalene School of Industry and Reformatory of the Good Shepherd People’s Avenue, Troy, NY Established June 1884 Objects—To maintain a charitable, industrial school and reformatory, to instruct the inmates thereof in such branches of industry and educate as may fit them for useful trades and occupations, to work for the reformation of fallen and the preservation of weak women, and to save, care, educate and correct wayward and corrupt children. Number of women and girls cared for during the year, 242 (174 supported by public funds, 68 by private funds) Terms and qualifications for admittance. —Women voluntarily applying, and disorderly, wayward and vagrant girls placed by parents or magistrates are received; charges, two to three dollars per week. Taken from the Annual Report of the New York State Board of Social Welfare and the New York State Department of Social Services

In 2015, the Emma Willard School’s annual tuition was $56,390 for boarding and $34,200 for day students. Its endowment was $97,048,641.

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H E T R O Y F E M A L E S E M I N A R Y was established in 1821

by Emma Willard, a former principal at the Middlebury Female Seminary in Vermont. Later renamed for its founder, the Emma Willard School was the first school in the United States to offer higher education for women. The boarding school was attended by the daughters of wealthy families from throughout the United States. By 1831, the school had enrolled more than 300 students and had a list of esteemed alumni that

ranged from Elizabeth Cady Stanton to Jane Fonda. Willard valued stimulation, the freedom to choose, and challenging intellectual rigor. The book The Emma Willard Plan of Education (Lay and Wellington, 1961) proclaims of the course catalogue at the school: “The variety of offerings is almost heady.” The 2016 course description from tenth grade history and social sciences class states:

Emma Willard School students do the historian’s work of analyzing primary sources and creating interpretive conclusions. Students adventurously seek out what the cultures of particular time periods reveal about a given era. Students take walking tours to scour the streets of Troy for clues from Victorian society, reading the cityscape as a document while looking for gender elements in the architecture. . . . For intellectually curious Emma Girls, the world is full of stories waiting to be uncovered.

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H E WA R R E N S W E R E A P R O M I N E N T family in Troy whose place in society dates back to the 1700s. Phebe Warren was among the inaugural class of the Troy Female Seminary in 1822. In addition to studying French and traveling abroad, she was an expert horsewoman. Her father, Esaias Warren, was president of the Troy Bank from 1811 to 1829, mayor of Troy from 1820 to 1828, trustee of the village from 1814 to 1816, and senior warden of Saint Paul’s Protestant Episcopal Church. Her mother, Lydia Warren (nee Scofield), was the daughter of an officer in the Revolutionary War. Together, Esaias and Lydia Warren had three other children.

After Phebe left the seminary, she married Benjamin Ogle Tayloe (May 21, 1796–February 25, 1868), an American businessman, diplomat, and political activist. Phebe went to live with her husband in Washington, DC, where they built a home that would come to be known as Tayloe House, an important meeting place for high-profile members of the Whig Party. Among those who frequented the house were Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, John Quincy Adams, John Marshall, Millard Fillmore, and Martin Van Buren. Phebe died November 6, 1884, when she was eighty years old.

Pages from Phebe Warren’s scrapbook and Paris diary.

The same way Kayla didn’t shy away from her own image of badness, Dana strove to be the good girl of the group. Beautiful and popular, trouble didn’t stick to Dana like it did to her older sister Jessie.

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Y T H E T I M E D A N A G AV E B I R T H , I had become a fixture among the girls on Sixth Avenue. I was there on the afternoons when one by one they walked into Kayla’s room and flung their bodies in a pile across her bed like rag dolls putting themselves away. The girls were a tangle of arms, legs, and conjoined giggle whines, punctuated with pinches and “Fuck yous” and “I love yous” and “Love you toos.” Kayla had always admitted to being the original bad girl of the pack. In a neighborhood where good girls were vulnerable and bad girls survived, Kayla having a baby at fourteen earned her distinction. It was Kayla’s badness that the other girls’ families measured their own daughters’ badness against. Kayla’s reputation seemed to cast a spell over Sixth Avenue. Everybody called Kayla a slut, yet everybody fell in love with her. Eventually they loved and hated her for the same reason, and she loved and hated them right back. She was torn between feeling satisfaction for the power it gave her and resentment that she had to make up for it. Kayla longed for the one person who didn’t make her choose between selves. The same way Kayla didn’t shy away from her own image of badness, Dana strove to be the good girl of the group. Beautiful and popular, trouble didn’t stick to Dana like it did to her older sister Jessie. It was Big Jessie who acted out when she and Dana bounced between aunts and cousins during the worst of their father’s alcoholism; and Jessie who had to take special classes because school was impossible for her; and Jessie who, despite her father’s wish for a traditional Christian household, had a tumultuous relationship with a girl named Jackie; and Jessie who got arrested when she accidentally set a house on fire. Though she felt like she lived in the shadow of Dana’s goodness, Jessie clung to Dana for security. Dana loved Jessie, even when she thought Jessie controlled everything with her bad behavior. At the shaky beginning of their father’s recovery, both he and the girls found stability in the doctrine of their church. At service every Sunday, Dana and Jessie sat on either side of their father as all three nodded in agreement to the pastor’s sermons about the goodness of family and the badness of homosexuality and premarital sex. The girls couldn’t risk losing the love of either their heavenly or

earthly father, so the sisters kept their secrets with each other. A year after Dana had given up her first baby for adoption, she was six months pregnant again, and Jessie was dating Kayla’s half-sister, Terri. Terri, who grew up in foster homes and juvenile placements after her bipolar disorder was mistaken for “just being bad,” often sat alongside Jessie in church. Terri bowed her head, shamed by the preacher’s words about how the thing she and Jessie were up to was no good, yet grateful for the family she had found at the church. When I met Kayla and her friends, I felt like most of my life had been preparation for that moment and all that came after. I had to tame the bad-girl self that had empowered me when I was coming up in Upstate New York in order to be taken seriously in the wider world. It was a compromise that never felt comfortable. My love for the girls was deepened by the gratitude I felt to them for returning the bad-girl part of me I’d had to abandon. By the time our third year was in full swing, I had grown obsessed with photographing the girls as they pushed their limits—the wild joyrides, the shoplifting sprees at Yankee One Dollar, and the whirlwind of activity that didn’t seem attached to a bit of progress. One day on the way home from an outing with them—car packed, radio blaring, windows down—I understood what was awakening in the girls now could show them who they really were and what they wanted from their lives. I also knew that right then, the girls might have been glimpsing for the first and last time the seed of who they could be. I wanted to tell them that the real bad is settling for less than who you are. Knowing the notion of self-exploration was at odds with the demands of their daily survival, I wanted to tell them how honoring the badass call of freedom saved me from a life that would have been less than I’ve had, but that I understood how frightening it was to choose a path that had not been traveled by anyone you had ever known. I wanted to tell them about all the years I’d wasted chasing good, and the years after that which I’d wasted trying to take the good picture, and how long it took for me to realize that what mattered was how I was changed by what I saw. I closed my eyes and bet on the possibility that none of us would be the same when this year was over.

Page from Dana’s scrapbook, which she began just before her daughter was adopted. Dana plans to give the book to her daughter when she is older, so she might understand Dana’s decision.

Everybody has an opinion about Dana’s decision to enter into the adoption. Dana was torn between her love for Elliott and their child, and her fear that her father would make good on his threat to move away with Big Jessie if she kept the baby. Dana’s father said that if he accepted this child, it would be the end of his Christian household,⎯his beliefs would be eroded, and he could no longer set a parental example. He had no choice but to be firm.

A month after Dana entered into the adoption, Tony has his second birthday on April 18, 2006.

WH E N K AY L A was in middle school,

she began having anxiety and struggled with attendance. She was evaluated by the school psychologist and met the criteria for social phobia, which came under the SSI disability classification “Other Health Impaired.” OHI included social and emotional challenges beyond physical disabilities, and was a classification Kayla shared with almost everyone she dated, many of her friends, several of her siblings, and eventually her son, Tony. The school placed Kayla on a PINS (Person in Need of Supervision) warrant through family court, which enabled a judge to put Kayla in residential placement if she did not comply with the mandated requirements. Kayla signed a schedule in front of a witness swearing to maintain a routine of attending school and helping out with her younger brothers and sisters at home. James had to be locked up in the house or risk going back to rehab or prison, and now Kayla would be locked up with him. James goes AWOL from rehab to be with Kayla, and Kayla breaks up with Heather to let James move into her bedroom.

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T A C Y ’ S B A B Y D A D D Y went back to prison after failing to comply with Megan’s Law when he did not register his address upon his release. He racked up an additional charge because he was not in compliance with the 2,000-foot distance sex offenders must maintain from schools. According to the Rensselaer County Sheriff, the distance requirement may be a civil rights issue as it effectively makes the entire city of Troy off limits to certain offenders.

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AY L A I N T R O D U C E D B I G J E S S I E to Terri, whom Kayla considered a sister because her birth father had dated Terri’s mother. Terri had been struggling, living in pay-by-the-week motels and working two food-service jobs, so Big Jessie’s father allowed her to move in. Terri began going to church with the family, and though she and Big Jessie were sharing a room and a bed, they did their best to keep their relationship secret from the church community.

Terri said she did not have any pictures to put into her scrapbook because during all the years she was in foster care, no one ever took a photograph of her.

On April 28, 1917, the cornerstone was laid for new Troy YWCA building at 21st Street— it is one of few alternatives for women who are physically or financially vulnerable.

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I G J E S S I E , S T A C Y, and Dana’s mother is

also named Terri. Terri worked on the cleaning crew at the Palisades Center mall in Nyack, New York, where she met her husband. They were married for ten years before he died from cancer. Lonely, Terri moved to Troy to be near her girls. A cancer survivor, Terri used her Social Security benefits of $600 per month to pay for a room at the YWCA, which eventually helped Terri secure Section Eight housing. Terri mostly spent her days at the library consumed by online dating. She had many brushes with men who tried to get her to send them money. One said he was a minister in Africa who needed money to get to the US so they could be together—the girls convinced her that a minister would not use the online name “thomashorney69.” After several years of disappointment, she met a man whom she has been dating for four years.

Albert and Deborah Powers manufactured the first oilcloth in 1817 in Lansingburgh. After her husband’s death in 1829, Mrs. Powers continued to run the company, amassing a large fortune from which she establish the Powers Home for Old Ladies. The Home’s mission was the “care, assistance, and support . . . of respectable, aged, indigent, or infirm women who are unable to support themselves.”

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N S E P T E M B E R 2 0 0 6 , Dana turned nineteen and

Elliott, now incarcerated, turned seventeen two months later. He had been sentenced to two years in Green County State Prison. Elliott’s head was shaved during intake and he sent his hair home to Dana. Dana visited Elliott as much as she could, but rides and gas money were difficult. Eventually, the pain they both felt over the adoption began to dissolve their relationship.

october 23, 2006 b i r t h d ay s

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H E K I D S A R E B O R E D a lot. They

are no longer in danger of going to placement or their parents getting in trouble with child protective services for truancy, but with no employment or other opportunities on the horizon, the fall precedes a long winter of being stuck inside. Big Jessie received a pellet gun for her birthday and she occupies her time with target shooting. She is stressed that her father will discover the truth about her relationship with Terri. Kayla and James are living together in her room. James is on the run so he cannot go outside and is intensely jealous when Kayla leaves. He’s afraid she will contact Heather, who has been in jail since her breakup and subsequent fistfight with Kayla. Kayla is sporadically attending School One (three blocks from the house), but Deb has to drop Kayla off and pick her up or James will not let her leave the house. Kayla celebrates her birthday on the back porch, as James is worried Heather might come looking for her if she is released. Robert is finally out of placement and is also attending School One. He has his first girlfriend, but other than fighting and making up, Robert is bored a lot. He makes model cars and shoots puffed rice with an air gun. Robert stopped taking medication as soon as he was out of placement and old enough to decide that he didn’t like the way it made him feel. Once Robert stopped the medication, he was no longer eligible for his SSI disability benefits.

Robert turns 16. Kayla turns 17. Big Jessie turns 21. I turn 47.

Kayla, Tony, and James settle down for a nap. James says his knife is “his son” because it’s the only thing he can depend on to “have his back.” In the spring of 2007, Tony starts to throw tantrums; everyone teases him about being bipolar.

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E B ’ S B R O T H E R B O B gets out of prison. He and Laurie start dating, and Laurie moves out of Deb’s house so her sons can come back to live with her. Bob is only out on the street for a few months before being sent back to prison. Laurie struggles to pay rent and now has all four kids living with her. Since Laurie is Bob’s official girlfriend, she is expected to share the responsibility of sending him packages while he is locked up.

By the time Bob comes home from prison, Laurie has been evicted and has moved into Deb’s, sharing the basement with Nanny Rose. Laurie’s kids come back to live with her at the beginning of the school year.

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N A P R I L 2 0 0 7 , a few days after

Tony turns three, Kayla quits school for good and gets her first job, working at Dunkin’ Donuts. Several months earlier Deb had left the Marriott to work in the kitchen at an assisted-living facility. Both women’s shifts start before seven a.m. Kayla is allowed to move into the upstairs apartment after she assures her father she will be able to pay him $400 rent.

october 23, 2007 b i r t h d ay s

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ames forbade Kayla from talking to Big Jessie and Dana, so Kayla celebrated her eighteenth birthday with Tony, her mom, and her little brothers and sisters. James grew more possessive the longer he remained a fugitive. Kayla told James she needed his trust because she needed friends. Big Jessie was still dating Terri, but since both girls remained friends with Heather, James did not want Kayla hanging around with them. Robert was trying to do what he called “get his life together.” He was still fighting on and off with his girlfriend and she would often call the cops on him when it got loud and physical. This was the first time Robert was in serious trouble with the law.

Robert turns 17. Kayla turns 18. Big Jessie turns 22. I turn 48.

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A M E S ’ S B I R T H D AY is a week after Kayla’s, on Halloween. They had a costume party to celebrate, though it was mostly friends of James’s who came. James dressed as a prisoner and Kayla as a cop. James was in his second year of being AWOL from his court-ordered rehab, so he was still trapped in the apartment. He watched Tony while Kayla went to work, joking that he was like a housewife. Kayla got up at four a.m., so James complained that she was always too tired to have sex and that there was “no spark.”

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N N O V E M B E R 2 0 0 7 , Elliott turned eighteen while

serving the second year of his two-year prison sentence. Kids from struggling families like Elliott’s had ways to get by with very little when they were on the street, but became totally dependent on their family’s limited resources when locked up. Families who would normally stretch the life of sneakers and clothing were now beholden to prison rules, which required items to be brand-new in original packaging to be accepted and

given to the inmate. This, compounded by the transportation cost to visit Elliott, put his loved ones in a bind. They loved Elliott, and knew the benefits of care packages and deposits in his commissary account went beyond their physical purpose. Having sneakers meant someone had your back—that feeling of connection could make your time easier and affect how the other prisoners treated you.

When Elliott and Dana broke up, not having someone to hold him down with packages or money made his time extra hard. His mother was raising three other kids and some grandkids on her own, so Elliott never wanted to ask her for help. He said he used to “eat a handful of salt” when he had no commissary money. When he did get money, Elliott would make a prison delicacy the convicts called chalupas, from ingredients that were all

available in the prison commissary. Years after Elliott’s release, he continues to make chalupas, flattening the potato chip tortilla under his couch cushion instead of sitting atop the government-issued pillow in his prison cell. Elliott can now go freely to any store day or night and buy unlimited amounts and flavor variations of the traditional prison recipe. And he does.

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O V I N G T O the apartment

upstairs was Kayla’s first step in establishing herself as the head of her own household, but the boundaries of the apartments were fluid. The hallway and porch became battlegrounds where Tony would throw tantrums for being locked in or out of one of the apartments. All the house’s resources—food, soda, toiletries, time, and attention— were heavily taxed, and Tony had learned to maneuver the land mines of scarcity as soon as he could waddle. The season of plenty he had experienced, when he was the baby of the family and on the receiving end of everyone’s share had ended. Tony now had to fight his way through the long line of his former benefactors, who showed no mercy for another “grown-assed” man. The benefits of being the youngest in the family set up an intense and ongoing rivalry between Tony and Little Jesse, Deb’s youngest. Tony had a dual citizenship in both households that he used to his advantage and that Little Jesse resented. When Tony couldn’t get what he wanted with Kayla upstairs, Tony ran downstairs to Deb’s. Little Jesse would make it clear who lived where and would try to kick him out. Tony responded by acting out with greater intensity. Tony’s meltdowns grew more frequent as he grew more desperate to feel he belonged in one place or the other.

Little Jesse, spring and summer 2008.

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A N N Y R O S E ’ S D A U G H T E R Michelle had been wrestling

with drug addiction and was in and out of rehab. Nanny had not heard from Michelle for months until she received a call from the hospital on Mother’s Day 2008. A nurse said Michelle was about to give birth to a little girl. Nanny made it to the hospital in time to see the birth of Brianna, whom Nanny would call her “miracle baby,” for bringing Michelle back to rehab and back into Nanny’s life. While in rehab, Michelle began dating a man named Randy. A few months after Brianna was born, Michelle was pregnant again, this time with twins. Michelle, Randy, and the twins moved in with Billie Jean and Dasaun, who had been renting an apartment in a house the girls’ dad owned. Michelle was doing so well that she regained custody of her two children from a previous marriage. Now there were three adults and five children living in the apartment. Nanny was happy to have all her family in one place, but even though she visited often, Nanny still would not give up her arrangement at Deb’s.

(Left) Michelle a couple weeks after the twins were born. (Top right) Nanny Rose holding Michelle’s baby, Brianna. (Center right) Michelle, expecting twins, with Randy and Brianna.

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F T E R A L O N G W I N T E R of arguments with Kayla, James

began to drink more heavily and be seen in the streets. In the spring of 2008, he was picked up and was sent to prison. Around the same time, Kayla’s ex-boyfriend Pops was getting out of prison. Pops was from the Bronx and was rich in the currency of street cred and urban swagger, which made him a kind of “catch.” During the winter of 2005, after breaking up with Sabrina, Kayla had been infatuated with Pops. He gave her presents, like name-brand sneakers, that her family could not afford. Eventually, Pops was arrested for selling drugs. Before he could be released, Pops needed to provide a parole address. Deb was happy to do him the favor and allowed him to move into her house. Kayla was leery at first, but soon they were dating again.

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AY L A’ S F R I E N D D J had a repu-

tation for being a wildcat. She had seven kids and four baby daddies. She was smart, fearless, and knew her way around the streets of Troy. She did whatever she wanted and didn’t care what anyone thought. Kayla looked up to DJ and admired her freedom, but James never wanted Kayla to hang out with her. As soon as James got locked up, DJ and Kayla were inseparable—until Pops moved in and forbade Kayla to hang out with DJ. DJ said she would never give up a friend “for a man” and was heartbroken that Kayla had not fought for their friendship. Because DJ was tough and a grown-up tomboy, people thought she wasn’t sensitive, and even her own mother teased her cruelly. But DJ has a fierce connection with her daughters. DJ says that she has had to teach them to be tough, because “they will have to fight for everything they get in life.”

DJ got a job at the Hess Mini Mart in order to pay child support for her two oldest sons, who lived with their fathers, and her oldest daughter, who lived with DJ’s mother. Most of DJ’s check from the ninedollar-an-hour job went directly to them. The four kids who did live with DJ helped with laundry, and Deana, who experienced crippling separation anxiety, went to work with DJ when there was no school. By the time DJ celebrated her thirtieth birthday, all seven of her kids were in school and she could more easily find a job during those hours.

(Previous page) DJ with her family. DJ comforting her daughters at a local Christian revival after the preacher talked about evil and sexual abuse.

DJ and her oldest daughter, Little Vic, on prom day in June 2009. DJ’s mother, Big Vic, raised Little Vic because DJ was not yet of legal age when she gave birth.

Laurie’s daughter Katie found her Spider-Man costume among the boxes packed for the family’s move from their last apartment in Troy. Beginning in 2008, Laurie went through a string of evictions and temporary housing arrangements. With each move came a deepening depression as her romance with Bob and her attempts at financial stability seemed hopeless.

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F T E R T H E A D O P T I O N of her daughter, Dana attended a semester of community college but took the next one off to babysit the daughter of a young single dad, Ali. Aliah was three years old and Dana fell in love with her. Aliah helped fill the empty space the adoption had left in Dana’s life. Soon, the biggest news on the block was that Dana was helping to raise a child after she had allowed her own to be adopted.

Dana still felt conflicted about Elliott— she loved him but was ready to move on. She feared that Elliott wouldn’t be different from the sixteen-year-old “bad boy” that went to prison. The biggest comfort Dana had was feeling like she had learned from her mistakes, and that she was deeply committed to a righteous path. Dana continued to see her daughter at church, and now Ali and Aliah joined Dana on Sundays. Dana had told her father that she and Ali were just friends because Ali was a Muslim and not the Christian relationship Dana’s father insisted on. Once again, Dana became pregnant and managed to hide the pregnancy from her father for six months. Neither her father nor the church would tolerate two mistakes, and Dana saw this as her only chance to redeem herself. Dana and Ali began counseling at the church, and Dana saw no choice but to marry and keep her baby. Ali agreed to convert to Christianity, and the church counselor set up a meeting between Dana, Ali, and Dana’s dad to tell him of the pregnancy and marriage plans. Dana recalls a huge weight being lifted after the meeting when everyone, including her dad, congratulated them. She also remembers that no one ever asked her if she loved Ali. When Dana and Ali were married in September 2008, she was eight months pregnant. The reverend who introduced Dana to her first daughter’s adoptive parents performed the ceremony. She purchased her wedding dress on sale for seventy-five cents—neither she nor Ali had the money on them so they paid with a credit card.

Dana’s mother, Big Jessie, Terri, and the reverend’s wife look on as KyLynne Marie Aftab, is born, November 9, 2008.

The reverend’s wife holds the phone while her husband prays with Dana.

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C O U P L E M O N T H S before Dana and Ali married, Elliott was released after serving two years in prison. He planned to visit his daughter but couldn’t bear the heartbreak of seeing her or meeting the adoptive parents. The adoptive parents now thought of Dana as an active member of their church. Dana was able to see her daughter with the adoptive parents every Sunday and received progress letters about her, many more than the two per year required by the terms of the open adoption. Elliott felt the only way he was allowed to connect to his daughter was through the church, which he was not part of.

Dana and Ali begin living as a Christian couple.

Baby KyLynne was christened at the family church in the spring of 2009.

Dana nursing KyLynne the day before she took her baby home.

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N T H E S P R I N G O F 2 0 0 9 , Robert found out he was going

to be a father. Though Kentriss was Robert’s cousin several times removed and they had met as little kids, she thought the grown-up Robert was handsome and developed an immediate crush. The two started dating, and several months later Kentriss became pregnant.

Turning five years old in April 2009 seemed to be a tipping point for Tony. The inevitability of kindergarten loomed large, and when Tony acted out the other kids no longer laughed or made excuses;⎯they fought back. In the years that followed, regular tantrums, which usually included his throwing himself on the floor, were a daily routine for Tony and Kayla.

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H AT S A M E S P R I N G , Pops was locked up again for violating parole. Kayla visited him for a while, but she also loved her freedom. As summer set in, she dated several girls and boys. It was the first time she did not immediately go into a live-in relationship. Her beaus seemed to lift the perpetual boredom and lingering depression that had been with her since she was a young teen. In the fall, James was released on parole.

Kentriss and baby JJ moved into Robert’s room. But, a couple months after JJ was born, Robert and Kentriss began arguing a lot. Kentriss’s father filed for custody and JJ went to live with him.

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N T H E S U M M E R of 2009, Billie

Jean and Michelle got evicted. The housing program that assisted with rent revoked their aid because there were too many children for the number of bedrooms in their apartment. Welfare paid for Michelle and her family to stay at the Super 8 Motel until they could get a bigger apartment. Billie Jean went to live in a temporary shelter at the Schuyler Inn. The depression she had battled with as a girl came back even stronger. She was prescribed medication and began the process of receiving SSI disability benefits for PTSD, among other things. Dasaun was very comforting to his mother—for most of his life it had been him and his mom against the world. (Previous page) Michelle and her twins at the Super 8 Motel.

I

N T H E FA L L O F 2 0 0 9 , James and his twin brother, Terrance, were both released from their incarceration in two separate prisons. Soon, James was staying at Kayla’s house past his parole curfew. At the same time, Heather was six months pregnant and Dale, who had dated Kayla during the summer, was her baby daddy. After Kayla found out that Heather was basically homeless, bouncing from place to place, and had lost weight, she brought Heather home to live at her house. For a while, Kayla, Heather, and James all lived together. James was still in love with Kayla, but trying not to get hurt again. Kayla was starting to fall for James again too, until Heather brought her friend Chantelle over one night. Chantelle and Heather had been in many of the same placements and had both been labeled with many of the same behavioral problems that Tony was beginning to have. Chantelle immediately identified with Tony and did not want to be too strict with him, because she knew how it felt to always be in trouble and labeled “bad.” Kayla and Chantelle fell in love at first sight. Chantelle moved in and, heartbroken, James and Heather moved out.

Heather, six months pregnant, poses with her BB gun.

october 23, 2009 b i r t h d ay s

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H I S B I R T H D AY everyone was

settled into a life routine. Robert was raising his son with Kentriss. Big Jessie was still living with her father. Chantelle becomes the love of Kayla’s life. They officially begin dating on October 27, 2009. My father passed away shortly after our birthdays. Many of the girls came to the funeral. This is one of the few birthdays where I did not photograph Kayla and Robert getting their cake.

Robert turns 19. Kayla turns 20. Big Jessie turns 24. I turn 50.

PART THREE

BEASTMODE TONY (AKA TROY’S NATIVE SON, AKA THE COD KING, AKA THE BOY FROM TROY) ca. 2009–2010

Tony at the Burden Iron Works Museum, with the Rensselaer County Jail in the background.

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O N Y B E G A N R A K I N G in a wad of cash immedi-

ately after the short yellow bus dropped him off from school. He spotted his mother, Kayla, on their front porch, hurled his Spider-Man backpack at her, and waited on the steps, making himself available to a random yet steady trickle of well-wishers. Tony breaking with his regular after-school routine was confirmation of how special the day was. On most afternoons, he would run upstairs to the TV, grab his controller, and immediately sign in with his video game screen name, Beastmode Tony. The name was inspired by Tony’s ability to hone his game play down to the pure animal instinct needed to attack and conquer his opponents. Tony had been a gamer since he was in diapers, and from Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas to Call of Duty: Black Ops I, II, and III, Tony had developed an inner beast that guided his survival, through screen time and beyond. But on this day, Tony was enjoying the spoils of victory in real life.  Ever since the birthday five years before that Tony spent in a high-security pediatric psychiatric facility, he never took his freedom or his birthdays for granted. Tony turned twelve years old that day. In the neighborhood, at milestones such as birthdays, funerals, or getting let out of jail, everyone is considered family and obliged to make an appearance. Jose, an old sweetheart of Kayla’s that had just got out of state prison on parole, passed by the stoop with a twenty for Tony. Tony’s great-uncle Bob, who was leaving again to serve sixty days in the county jail for lifting scrap metal, gave up a fistful of ones. Tony’s uncle Robert, who was on probation and had steady work cleaning out newly foreclosed-on houses, gave a ten toward the John Cena World Wrestling Entertainment action figure Tony wanted. Sabrina stopped off to give Tony a hug and reveal her birthday plan—she had ordered Yankees tickets for Tony and herself, and they would travel to the Bronx to see the game. Because Tony had spent time in treatment, he would not be too crippled with anxiety to travel away from home, like his mother and most of the other kids in his family often were.  Kayla sifted through Tony’s backpack in search of school correspondence and other evidence of how his day went. She read the daily log Tony’s teacher at the new day placement program sent home: “Tony was a little off today. He refused to stay in lunch because he wanted to go back to classroom. He started running around the building. When he became unsafe he was put in a restraint. After that, he turned it around and finished his day on a positive note. Have a nice evening.”

Kayla wrote her response to the teacher as the guys had their mandatory man-to-boy-without-a-father talks with Tony. These talks were expected of the men simply on the grounds that they were men and they were there. They knew what to say because they themselves had gotten these talks when they were boys, from other men who also were not their fathers. Tony, however, was a tough sell. He saw no need to take advice from anyone, so the end of the talks came quickly when Tony gave Robert the middle finger, punched Jose in the stomach, and called Bob a very grown-up name while running down the street with his pockets full of birthday bills. All three men yelled admonishments that seemed steeped in a deep sense of pride, calling him “bad” and “too grown for his age,” claiming that Tony acted just like they did when they were young.  Tony was suspended from school four times when he was in kindergarten, eight times in first grade, and for more than fifty days in second grade. During the last suspension, he received home instruction for an hour a day—the amount of time the board of education determined was equivalent to the focused work time his regular school day offered. The American Civil Liberties Union has reported that school suspensions of four- to ten-year-olds have increased more than 70 percent since 2003. In New York City, policy critics and social justice advocates note that black children and children with disabilities are the more likely to be suspended. There is no evidence to show that suspension corrects behavior, especially among children as young as Tony. Experts say that suspension is at odds with teaching the social and behavioral skills that these students often lack—a school would never send a student home for struggling with reading. And programs such as the No Child Left Behind Act, where teacher evaluations are tied to student performance, encourage the suspension or removal of underperforming students from regular classrooms.  Others say suspension at any age, especially in preschool, will set in motion a negative trajectory. A 2011 Texas study that followed 1 million students showed that students who are suspended are more likely to wind up in the criminal justice system. There is a direct correlation between school, suspension, special education, and the “school-to-prison pipeline.” More recently, the term has been revised to the “cradle-to-prison pipeline” to underscore the fact that the age at which students are getting suspended from school is getting younger. And once students are suspended from school, they are more likely to be suspended again. These

“zero-tolerance” educational policies are contributing in a major way to the increasing lack of economic mobility in the United States. Tony’s path is strikingly similar to that of working-class children in Troy’s Victorian times. These children lived in crowded conditions, ate the least expensive food, and had few luxuries. They were expected to work long hours for the survival of the family, at the expense of their own opportunity to progress out of the workhouse. Education and leisure were known only to the offspring of the wealthy. In the 1800s and 1900s, children who were born poor usually lived fewer adult years than those from wealthy families. A 2016 study by the Brookings Institution shows that the life-expectancy gap between social classes has widened since 1940. In that time, the number of years fewer that a person below the poverty line lives has doubled, while the wealthy have added almost twice as many years to their life span. I asked Tony why he thinks we are born, and he quickly replied, “To die.” Like in the first Gilded Age, when the privilege of being allowed the time of childhood was an extension of parents’ social status, the out-

look Tony has for his future is a manifestation of the lack of possibility that has been available to his family for generations before him.  People who have seen the pictures of Tony’s life over the last twelve years have asked me, “Is Tony happy?” It seems possible that happiness as a goal, like the notion of childhood, is an invention of modern times, and in many ways both these concepts are tied to class privilege. The years I have spent with Tony have made it clear that he has more in common with children who lived on his block 200 years ago than he might with kids who live in the comfortable suburbs today.

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H E N T O N Y S T A R T E D K I N D E R G A R T E N in the

fall of 2009, his behavior almost immediately led to out-of-school suspensions. By the end of the school year, the school district required that Tony be evaluated for possible social emotional disability. Deb says social phobia and anxiety run in the family and that her kids don’t like to be in places with a lot of people, especially people they don’t know.

Beginning in the 1800s, new child labor laws required sworn statements from guardians for children under the age of sixteen to work instead of attending school, in this case at the Burden Iron Works.

Kayla’s fridge with a daily schedule that Tony’s counselor made for him and a collage of evaluations and med trials that became a regular part of his life once he entered school.

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O N Y C E L E B R AT E D his sixth birthday on April 18, 2010. That year began a future of medication trials to adjust his ADHD, insomnia, ADD, bipolar, social phobia, separation anxiety, and PTSD. By the fall of that year, Tony was deemed eligible for SSI disability under the category of Other Health Impaired (OHI)—the same diagnosis Kayla and Robert were given when they had problems at school.

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C H O O L O N E was an alternative high school for school-aged mothers, students on probation or involved in the court system, and students who had special physical or emotional needs, many of whom received SSI disability. A large number of the students were from north central Troy and all were from low-income families. Many were children of parents who had attended the school when they were young.

A 2012 study by the American Civil Liberties Union concluded that students with special needs are more likely to be suspended from school and that these out-of-school suspensions increase the possibility that these students may spend time in a correctional institution in the future. School One is at the intersection of all these challenges.

Collage of kids from Kayla’s family and friends who attended School One (or other alternative learning programs in Troy) and were also at some point involved with the court system.

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O N I A N D R I T A G A R C I A have taught at School One for two generations. Both these teachers had Kayla and all her family and friends in their classrooms. The teachers made the connection between poverty, trauma, and the manifestation of PTSD in many of their students. They spoke about how fear shapes their students’ brains. They described fear as a double-edged sword—the fight-orflight response is necessary for survival in tough neighborhoods like North Troy, yet that same fear works against them in larger social settings like school and work.

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H E A C T O F T H E 8 7 T H Congress of the United States on September 15, 1961, officially declared “‘Uncle Sam’ Wilson of Troy, New York as the progenitor of America’s National symbol of ‘Uncle Sam.’” The Troy Chamber of Commerce and the Rensselaer County

Historical Society have made efforts to package Troy as a destination for “historic tourism,” most notably including the annual Uncle Sam Parade held on the Sunday closest to September 13, Sam Wilson’s birthday. In addition to Uncle Sam’s meatpacking fame, the construction

company he and his brother owned supplied the bricks to build Troy’s first jail. This could make Uncle Sam one of the first private contractors in the prisonindustrial complex.

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A E D A M O N I Q U E R E D C R O S S was

born on February 7, 2010. Heather took Jaeda home to her mother’s house—Jaeda had finally gained Heather the approval she’d sought from her mother. But soon they began fighting. One night, they fought so badly Heather left the house with Jaeda and ran to Deb’s. Deb painted a room for Heather and Jaeda to live in, but Heather had her baby daddy Dale’s family watch Jaeda for extended periods. Soon, Heather lost custody of Jaeda to Dale’s sister. Heather had left Jaeda with her one too many times and she was able to go to family court to gain temporary custody, claiming neglect using the fact that Heather smoked weed. By this time, Dale was already back in prison for a parole violation.

Heather at the end of a visit with her daughter.

Dana was determined not to let her love for Elliott escape her again.

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N T H E S U M M E R of 2010, Elliott

contacted Dana to tell her of the unhappiness in his life. They confided they had never stopped loving each other, admitting the lives they had built were a way to forget about the pain of their past. Elliott was breaking it off with a girl who was pregnant with his child. Dana had the greatest degree of material comfort she had ever known, yet depression and anxiety loomed over her. Dana told Ali she could no longer continue a marriage with a man she did not love. She was determined not to let her love for Elliott escape her again. Dana left with only her van and KyLynne, and moved into the apartment of a friend’s mother. Dana and Elliott immediately became inseparable, making up for the years they had lost. This time, though, they each had a toddler to include in the relationship— KyLynne and Elliott’s son Junior. By the fall, Dana learned she was pregnant with Elliott’s baby, and the two began building a home for the baby they both believed was their second chance.

october 23, 2010 b i r t h d ay s

K

AY L A A N D R O B E R T ’ S biological dad, Robert Stocklas Sr., comes to the birthday party. This is the beginning of an effort on his part to try to get to know them as he and they get older. Kayla’s birthday is also the anniversary of when she started dating Chantelle. They have been dating for a year now, and Kayla says she cannot live without Chantelle.

By her birthday, Big Jessie has gotten off her five-year felony probation and also ends her relationship with Terri. Terri threatened to tell Big Jessie’s dad about their relationship if they broke up, making Big Jessie’s anxiety worse. Big Jessie eventually ends things with Terri and tells her dad about her same-sex relationships. Big Jessie desperately wants to get her own apartment but cannot separate from her dad. Seeing Dana and Elliott makes Big Jessie realize she also wants children, leaving her conflicted about her sexuality, religious beliefs, and the kind of family she wants.

Robert turns 20. Kayla turns 21. Big Jessie turns 25. I turn 51.

Robert and Kentriss had a tumultuous relationship. They had developed a pattern: they would fight, Kentriss would threaten to end things, and Robert would go nuts and fall apart—crying, threatening to kill himself, and throwing things. On Robert’s twentieth birthday, they got into a physical fight and Kentriss called the police.

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Y S P R I N G 2 0 1 1 , Tony was in crisis—he was hyper, wouldn’t sleep or eat, and his medical trials had intensified. Playing video games was one of the only ways to quiet him down. When Tony was suspended from school, Kayla took away the games as punishment. Tony threatened to jump out the second-story window, and Kayla brought him to the hospital.

Kayla coping with the stress of Tony’s new medication regimen.

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O N Y S P E N T H I S S E V E N T H birthday and the two weeks leading up to it in a pediatric crisis unit. Tony was taken from the emergency room, where Kayla brought him, to an inpatient facility. When Tony reached the point in the crisis intervention program where he could call his mom, he would ask how long it would be before he could come home. She would tick off

the number of full days, as she had done for Tony when the family was waiting for Uncle Bob to come home from prison, and then she added the morning of his discharge. Uncle Bob had explained that the early hours of a prisoner’s release day are counted as a “wake-up.” Two days before Tony came home, he told Kayla, “I’ll see you in one day and a wake-up.”

We celebrated Tony’s birthday the day after he came home, and we didn’t tell him he had actually missed it. This birthday would be the first of several birthdays that would punctuate months of out-of-school suspensions, in-home tutoring, and many tantrums and medication reviews.

Tony spent his seventh birthday and the two weeks leading up to it in a pediatric crisis unit.

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The days drag on while a tutor continues to teach Tony at home and he has not yet found a spot in a day treatment program.

Tony during his intake interview at Saint Colman’s Home, January 2012.

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O N Y WA S F I N A L LY P L A C E D in a day program at Saint Colman’s Home and remained in treatment there for five years. Saint Colman’s once served as an orphanage for children of poor and vulnerable families and has evolved to serve the needs of a similar population of children who live in Troy today. Tony’s great-grandmother Wilhelmina lived at Saint Colman’s as a child when her mother could no longer care for her, and Kayla’s half sister Terri was also raised there.

In the fourth grade at St. Colman’s, Tony became out of control during class. The classroom aide attempted to restrain him, and Tony hit his head on a desk. He needed five staples for the head injury. There was little follow-up for incident as it was deemed an accident that occurred during a normal school procedure—all parents, including Kayla, acknowledged the school’s restraint policy as part of the application.

PART FOUR

BLOOD AND JELLY: GROWN UP IN LOVE ca. 2011–2013

They were young parents who still needed the shelter of their own parents in very real ways.

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N S AT U R D AY M O R N I N G S when my sister, brother,

and I were little, my mother would scrape the burnt parts from a stack of white toast before slathering on a thick coat of yellow margarine, followed by a knife full of Welch’s grape jelly. Saturday mornings followed Friday nights. With the start of the weekend came the excuse to get drunk for anybody who needed one. The breakfast hour was usually when our father would come home from an unscheduled all-nighter at the bar. The sight of his shadow in the doorway ignited the yelling. My mother’s salty anger and rage melted into thick syrupy sadness and sweet sobs as her unheard cries hardened into fists. Sometimes his were first, other times hers. Then he escaped into sleep as she consoled herself with the repetition of passing the knife over the bread, her knuckles often cut and dripping red. When she pushed the plate before us, it was heavy with the salty mingling of their blood folded into the sweet of the grape. We picked up the toast and silently ate. This was our first taste of love. The toast-with-jelly days were among Mom’s last attempts at preparing home-cooked meals for us. The divorce left her as a single mother with three kids and a full-time job at $1.60 an hour, minimum wage in 1971. Time and budget dictated our diet of packaged foods. With this ready-to-eat menu, we became totally self-sufficient. On visitation days, our father would take us to the grocery store—fifty-dollar child support check in hand. We were free to fill the cart with things that we could later prepare on our own. Frozen pizza, Swanson TV dinners, Hamburger Helper, and dozens of boxes of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese were the spoils of victory for having survived the chaos of living in our parents’ love. Every since then, PopTarts have always tasted like divorce to me. We moved to a two-family house where my mother could be independent and make mortgage payments with the rental income she got from the upstairs flat. The house was small and we doubled up in bunk beds and made extra rooms on the glassed-in front porch. In our teen years, we took over the basement for our bedrooms. We hung black light posters and carried our boxes of food down with us. The same way that sugar and salt always tasted better together than either one did alone, the sex that we wanted more of was always amped up with the rush of rock and roll. Led Zeppelin, Jethro Tull, Deep Purple, and Black Sabbath fed us courage and hope. Along with lovemaking and Velveeta, music and any kind of drug we could drink, smoke, or swallow were added to our list of reasons for living. We felt little allegiance to low-paying work or high lev-

els of school, so we depended on rock and roll to let us become part of its volume. We trusted rock and roll more than we trusted college or the college kids who would grow up to do the jobs that would eventually silence us, curb our appetites, and always keep us a little hungry. We grew up by making kids of our own. As I began my ninth year documenting teenagers in Troy, many had also grown up after falling in love and having children themselves. They were young parents who still needed the shelter of their own parents in very real ways. I watched as the rooms in Deb’s home came of age right along with the kids who lived in them. Kayla was fourteen when she began to move through all the bedrooms in her house, relocating each time she began or ended a romance. With each new life partner, she left a trail of empty Mountain Dew bottles. An array of colored walls, freshly painted to suit each budding relationship, was passed on to the younger kids as Kayla outgrew her loves. The walls were often pastels if she was in love with a girl, more earth tones if she had fallen for a boy. Forty years have passed since my siblings and I staked our claim for independence by trying to take control of what little we had, usually through our own bodies. There is now ample research about the addictive combination of sugar and salt, and how big food corporations use it to get us hooked. These processed foods stimulate the release of dopamine, the feel-good transmitter in the brain, making our bodies respond in the same way as it does to sex, addictive drugs, and rock and roll. Michael Moss, a New York Times reporter, wrote that Oreos are more addictive than heroin. Studies have also revealed that individuals who are addicted to any of these substances pair up and mate with others who have the same addiction, increasing the genetic possibility that their children will become addicts too. When we were kids, we avoided the disappointment of wanting the things we knew we couldn’t have by learning to fall in love with what we could. We grew up loyal to things that fed us. We fell in love with what was immediate, physical, and satisfying—our food, our music, our highs, and each other. The idea that there would be a time that I would stop documenting the kids in Troy became unbearable. No amount of time that I spent with them was ever enough. The anticipation of what would come next in their lives became like an addiction. I trusted their love and felt good when I was with them. The way their journeys were heavily coated with sugar and salt was like the familiar taste of blood and jelly—since the first time that I tasted it, I’ve craved it.

When Amanda Stocklas was ten years old, I asked her what she thought love meant. She disappeared into her room and came back with this note.

Propaganda photo of four food groups, ca. 1940s.

Mountain Dew, which was originally slang for moonshine, was invented in 1940 by the Tennessee Hartman Brothers. Its original slogan was “Yahoo, Mountain Dew! It’ll stick to your innards.” The brand was acquired by Pepsi-Cola in 1964. Also in 1964, Kellogg’s introduced Pop-Tarts, which contain a minimum of fourteen grams of sugar— two Pop-Tarts exceed the entire daily sugar allowance by the American Heart Association for children. DJ’s daughter Deana after Saturday morning breakfast. Beginning in the 1980s, the reality of single, working mothers with latchkey kids at home fending for themselves factored into the rise of the fast-food generation.

Sugar—sweeter, more powerful, and more deadly than gold. But unlike gold, sugar could be grown; it provided the possibility of unlimited wealth.1

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E F O R E T H E S I X T E E N T H C E N T U R Y, northern

Europe’s only local source of sweetener was honey. The demand for sugar, a rare and highly prized food item, led to production on sugar plantations, mostly in the Caribbean, where the tropical climate was ideal for growing sugarcane. Sugar production required a steady stream of labor, and by the early 1600s, Europeans satisfied this need through the purchase of slaves from West Africa. Between and 1508 and 1885, 12 million West Africans were forced into slavery, and became the cornerstone of the transatlantic slave trade. The journey of the slave ships across the Atlantic, known as the Middle Passage, was responsible for the death of roughly one million Africans. The life expectancy for an enslaved worker on early sugar plantations was seven years, with a 30 percent mortality rate. In 1787, 90 percent of the world’s sugar was produced by enslaved Africans. In 1720, ships transported 80,000 tons of sugar, growing to 200,000 tons in 1779, and 175,000 tons in 1800. As sugar production increased, the European demand only grew. New uses for sugar were found and Europeans craved its taste, especially as a sweetener for coffee and tea. Similar to alcohol, sugar provided pleasure and a swift feeling of satisfaction that was similar to the leisure time that only the wealthy experienced. Coffee, tea, and sugar became mainstays in the European diet along with another addictive substance, tobacco. In the eighteenth century, sugar, coffee, and tobacco were considered the equivalent of uppers. They were well suited to the labor of everyday life, and especially valued as stimulants by factory workers. Later, sugar also became critical in American-blended tobacco products. The blending of sugar and tobacco is credited with a mild smoking experience and the ability to take a long inhale of smoke, which facilitates nicotine addiction.

1 National Museum of African American History and Culture

During the US Great Depression, the sale of sweets continued to increase. The New York Times said, “The depression has proved that people wanted candy, and that as long as they had money at all, they would buy it.” This is because sugar induces the same responses in the “reward center” of the brain as nicotine, cocaine, heroin, and alcohol. Addiction researchers believe that behaviors required for the survival of a species—specifically, eating and sex— are experienced as pleasurable in this part of the brain, and so we repeat these behaviors. In a pattern similar to the triangular transatlantic slave trade, addiction and consumption fuel the modern sugar industry. Driven by the no-fault divorce act in the 1970s and a loosening of regulations on fast-food advertisements targeting children, the 1980s were the beginning of the fast-food culture. Single, working mothers began to buy boxed and frozen foods, infused with high-fructose corn. Because of its addictive qualities, when children are exposed to sugar at a young age, they will continue to consume it as long as there is a supply. With the sugar industry’s generous government subsidy, the price of sugar dropped, making these products readily available to low-income families. Families consumed excess amounts of these empty calories, because calorie-rich foods are cheap, and real food is expensive. From 1985 to 2000 soft drink sales rose 20 percent while the price of fruits and vegetables rose 18 percent. Today, the United States has the highest number of people living in poverty in its history. The poorest areas of the country also have the highest rates of obesity, diabetes, and premature death. Worldwide, there are now an estimated 1.1 million jobs in sugar manufacturing and tens of millions more in sugar farming. Sugar is considered by the World Bank to be the second-most protected agricultural commodity in the world behind rice.

Food advocate Michael Pollan says we should never eat packaged foods that list more than three ingredients. (Opposite page) History on the computer from summer 2013, when all the boys shared a bedroom.

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L I A N A W E L L S WA S B O R N June 10, 2011. Eliana’s name is the combination of Elliott and Dana’s names, the same name they had planned for their first daughter.

Eliana comes home after a stop off at Price Chopper.

Diagram of how the extended family on Kayla’s block moved between buildings and apartments, as if living in one big household.

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I G J E S S I E A N D H E R D A D were

forced to move from their house after an absentee landlord caused it to go into foreclosure. Up until a year after they moved, Big Jessie’s father returned regularly to the abandoned property to make sure no one broke in to steal the pipes or copper for scrap. Shortly after he stopped, the house was looted and fell into disrepair, remaining empty for almost two years. In 2008, a community arts group opened across the street from Kayla’s house and began to transform the neighborhood. They eventually bought Big Jessie’s old house and several other vacant lots on the block, planting gardens and starting beehives.

Chantelle stayed with Corrina until the end, and for weeks after, Chantelle carried Corrina’s ashes around with her.

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N FA L L 2 0 1 2 , Chantelle learned her aunt Corrina, Chantelle’s “real mother” who raised her, had terminal cancer. Chantelle stayed with Corrina until the end, and for weeks after, Chantelle carried Corrina’s ashes around with her. Corrina’s death was particularly hard on Kayla and Chantelle’s relationship. They have broken up numerous times, but Kayla says she cannot live without Chantelle and they will always come back to each other. Kayla knows that she is still “in love” with Chantelle. “When you love somebody, that ain’t shit. It’s when you are in love with somebody that you want to kill them.”

Advertisers were quick to target housewives, luring them with new time-saving appliances to free themselves from their daily drudgery.

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N T H E 1 9 2 0 s , manufacturers

realized they could expand profits by growing their markets beyond wealthy customers—who could afford to pay cash for big-ticket items like radios, fridges, vacuum cleaners, washing machines, pianos, and phonographs—by offering installment plans for payment. At the time, most working people who aspired to owning their own home saved up the full price in cash over many years, leaving them unable to furnish it. Installment selling profoundly changed American consumer practices, and had an economic and social impact both within the United States and internationally. The increased production volumes reduced the unit cost of items, making them more affordable. Easy credit terms made for easy sales. Advertisers were quick to target housewives, luring them with new time-saving appliances to free themselves from their daily drudgery. Creating and maintaining a steady flow of consumers was the key to revenue, and advertising that created demand was essential. Today, even the poor can shop online, paying in installments, or walk into traditional retailers, such as Kmart, that now offer in-store leasing. The most striking change in low-income commerce has been the proliferation of rent-to-own stores such as Rent-A-Center. In some ways, the business harkens back to the subprime boom of the early 2000s, when lenders handed out loans to lowincome borrowers with little credit history. But while people in those days were charged interest rates of 5 to 10 percent, rental centers today charge effective annual interest rates of more than 100 percent. Transactions are categorized as leases, so

When Chantelle’s mother died, the girls took over the Rent-A-Center contract for her flat-screen TV. Most of the furniture and electronics in Kayla’s house were acquired through rent-to-own contracts. stores can avoid state usury laws and other regulations. A number of consumer protection concerns have been raised about the rent-to-own industry, including accusations of predatory lending. Consumer advocates believe that rent-to-own transactions should be treated as credit sales, pointing out that the price of a product can be two or three times the retail price. An investigation by the New York City

Department of Consumer Affairs in 2001 found that local Rent-A-Centers’ “cash prices” were as much as 225 percent above normal retail, and that some of their long-term rental charges were equivalent to a 392 percent annual interest rate. In 2014, Fortune Magazine listed RentA-Center at number 711 on the Fortune 1000 list of the largest US corporations, based on revenues alone.

EPILOGUE: THEN AND NOW

Troy Is The New Brooklyn

Richard Florida’s Creative Class and the Writing on The Wall B Y T H E M I D 2 0 0 0 s , the population of New York State had become number one in the United States for wealth and income inequality. Over the decade that I photographed in Kayla’s North Troy neighborhood, the gap steadily widened, and by 2017 New York’s top 1 percent earned forty-five times more than the bottom 99 percent. Among the factors that feed the divide is the demographic shift forged by individuals with higher education and financial opportunities gravitating away from the suburbs and setting up shop in cities. This kind of reversal of ’70s and ’80s white flight, put New York City proper way ahead of the inequality curve (individuals with top incomes 115 percent higher than 99 percent of their fellows). A combination of depressed hourly wages for jobs that do not require a college degree, weakened labor unions, and reurbanization by an educated, entrepreneurial, creative class spread throughout New York City’s boroughs. In 2016, Bloomberg Financial Publications officially declared Brooklyn the most expensive place in the country to live. Brooklyn became a brand built on the premise that struggling communities provided opportunity for those poised to take advantage of it. By the mid 2000s, those opportunities had been mined so well that the urban pioneering sprit was pushed further up the Hudson River to more affordable, de-industrialized cities upstate. Cities like Troy, where failed 1950s and ’60s urban renewal policy had facilitated the decline and sustained disinvestment of the downtown area, became more attractive to a generation of young entrepreneurs who had spent time in major cities and were well versed in the growing culture of transformation and reclamation. In 2010, articles began appearing in the Troy Record and The Albany Times Union with the tagline, “Troy Is the New Brooklyn.”

I was in Troy throughout the years that this new Brooklyn was being built just twenty blocks from the households that my cameras and I had become part of. Even though the Brooklyn fever that has characterized Troy’s revitalization has become a regular hook in local newspaper headlines, I was slow to realize how much was changing. My life in Troy was with the kids, I went where they went and their interests directed mine. Downtown for us meant a beeline to the food stamp, social security, or Medicaid offices, or a drive through en route to visit someone in RCJ at the other end of town. We never stopped off for lattes made with coffee from sustainable rain forests or visited the wine bar, and we had not acquired a taste for kohlrabi

ragout. Though we might have liked some of these things, the young pack I traveled with had a clear sense of where they did and did not belong. They were hardwired to recognize boundaries. Money was a major factor—farm-to-table simplicity is expensive amid a world of cheap, processed convenience. They dismissed spots in the new Troy as places where “the white people go.” Though most of the kids and their families are white, everyone knew what this meant—these were places where the wealthy or middle-class shopped and dined, not themselves. By necessity, the kids had a different relationship to leisure, but no one felt what was on offer would be missed anyway. When we did stray from our normal haunts, we were often met with a polite reserve that the kids immediately determined as stuck-up or judgmental, inciting anger and reason to never deviate again. Politicians and regional stakeholders credit Troy’s phoenix-like rise from industrial ash to the area’s growing creative economy. Powered by the creative class, a term popularized by urban theorist Richard Florida, this growing social and economic movement now makes up about a third of the US workforce. Its 41 million members include knowledge workers in science, technology, innovation, engineering, business, healthcare, the arts, media, and entertainment, as well as legal professionals. The creative class, Florida explains, is what happened in an America where we no longer produced things. Creativity and ideas are the currency of industry’s current revolution. But the concepts of regional identity and branding that are central to the expansion of the creative economy, and the class of workers that power it, remain at odds with Troy’s economic reality. While the national average for people living in poverty in 2016 was 14.7 percent, Troy still had 26.1 percent of its residents living below the poverty line, the largest group being females ages eighteen to twenty-four. A 2014 publication by The Region’s Center for Urban Growth and The Alliance for the Creative Economy list these socio-economic divides as key challenges. Revitalization stimulated by the creative economy has been largely concentrated in the Capital Region’s urban centers, while deep pockets of poverty persist just blocks away. Compared with similar-sized metropolitan regions, the Capital Region had the second highest concentration of creative jobs, but the most common jobs in Troy were in the healthcare and social assistance industries. In Rens-

selaer County, income inequality was more than ten times that of the average worker in the bottom 1 percent: $415,981 to $38,843. None of the kids who shared their lives in these pages has patronized any of the thirty-fiveplus new downtown businesses that the mayor boasted about in a 2015 Troy Record article. Some destinations, like the Department of Social Services, that might have forced the kids to intersect with a reinvented urban center, have, as in the days of Troy’s Victorian grandeur, been shifted back to the working-class areas north of the Collar City Bridge. Troy’s creative midsection has been left to the vision of the creative class. The county probation office that was a regular stop for the kids is now Eco Baby Children’s Center—a “certified eco-healthy” and “shoe-free” daycare that is “cloth diapering supportive,” and is outfitted with an array of healthy furnishings including bamboo sheets and blankets. Though Eco Baby does accept payment through social services to qualified low-income families, restrictions on repayment deter many parents who work in the service sector from applying, even if they felt the green, nontoxic environment was worth the trouble.

The Knights of Columbus hall where Deb and her mother played bingo in Troy’s heyday is now a huge wedding and event space, with the basement bowling alley transformed into an indoor shuffleboard court and vintage arcade. A review of one prominent new restaurant lists dinner for two as four small plates, two entrees, and four beer or wine beverages. The bill, $190.76 with tax and tip, is an entire months’ food stamp allotment for a single person. The same restaurant’s bar offers a popular drink called “The New Brooklyn.” After ninety-four years, the Trojan Hardware store went out of business in 2009, yet its motto of “Work Hard and Be Humble” was repurposed by the building’s new tenant The Shop, a popular restaurant serving “quality comfort food” amid an earnest proletariat motif. The Quackenbush Building, where the department store of the same name was once a jewel of downtown Victorian Troy, now houses the Tech Valley Center of Gravity—15,000 square feet of “makerspace” for “a community of makers, innovators, and entrepreneurs to initiate creative collisions.”

Troy Farmers Market.

Harrison’s Corner Market, formerly the Trojan Hardware Store. The Shop in the former Trojan Hardware building.

Troy Farmers Market.

Peck’s Arcade.

Peck’s Arcade restaurant.

Whistling Kettle tea shop.

Every Saturday, the Troy Farmers Market sets up shop next to the Center of Gravity and during the winter months, the market brings life inside the lonely Uncle Sam mall, filling a hollow left in the city center from the failed ’70s urban renewal attempt. Three blocks down at Canvas, Corks and Forks there is even a reimagined landscape for mac ‘n’ cheese, which can be eaten in unlimited quantities while sipping wine and stroking a paintbrush across a canvas. The sign in the window says that they are hiring artists. There is a wine store with a tasting nook, a proper oyster bar, and it is not uncommon to see a Porsche or limo cruising through. Not unlike Brooklyn, theses signs of growth are already spilling over to downtown Troy’s more affordable “next” neighborhoods. Large institutional spaces even farther into Kayla’s North Troy neighborhood were bought up by developers looking to house the influx of new tenants lured by Troy’s pioneering creative spirit. Though, none of Troy’s new market-rate apartment buildings accept the Section 8 assistance that makes it possible for many of the families I know to keep consistent shelter. The Standard Manufacturing Building, where Deb and her mother had once

worked, is listed for $3 million as “one of the neatest historical buildings of the manufacturing age.” School One in North Troy, where most of the kids attended an alternative high school program, is now “School One Lofts.” The developers marketed the authentic character of the school building, showcasing the coat cubbies and chalkboards complete with felt erasers. One tenant showed off a rare artifact, which confirmed the intriguing urban folklore she had heard surrounding the previous inhabitants—that it had been a school for “really bad kids.” With cautious enthusiasm, she pointed out a persistent spot on her bedroom windowsill, despite the developer’s best efforts to buff it out, where a former student had deeply etched the words “Fuck the Police” into the metal. Throughout the years that I was documenting the young people in North Troy as they grew into lives that, in the best cases, differed only slightly from the lives of their parents, Richard Florida was lecturing about The Rise of The Creative Class. Traveling a seminar circuit through economically depressed postindustrial cities, Florida shared formulas for how they could attract creatives and jumpstart a cycle of revitalization. A main component of

The young pack I traveled with had a clear sense of where they did and did not belong. they were hardwired to recognize boundaries. these formulas is that creativity happens in cities where the social landscape is diverse, entertaining, and has an array of accessible and inspiring quality goods and services. In the creative economy, restaurants, coffee shops, markets, boutiques, and entertainment venues are artistic expressions central to an urban ecosystem of revenue and innovation that attract more of the same. Ideas, not just money, are a measure of wealth in the creative economy. The top tier of these economies attract critical masses of young knowledge workers who perpetually stimulate new intellectual and economic growth, leading to the rise of what Florida calls “Super Cities” and a “new urban crisis” of inequality. While the creative economy has had enormous impact on cities worldwide, the service economy has grown in numbers to keep pace—yet their wages have remained relatively stagnant. Deepening inequality has

become an unintended consequence of this second wave of urban renewal. America has nearly 60 million routine service workers who earn roughly half of the average salary of workers in creative fields. After fifteen years of incubation strategies designed to grow the creative classes, Florida now sees the rebirth of cities as having gone awry. In hindsight, he recognizes that this rebirth was built on the young, well-to-do, and (mostly) white individuals who rediscovered cities and in turn created rampant property speculation, soaring home prices, and mass displacement. The creative class was built by those with more money and higher education—a disparity that only deepened when butted up against their hourly wage–earning counterparts. All Florida had to do was visit School One in North Troy and he would have seen the writing on the wall.

Little Pecks cafe.

Eco Baby Children’s Center in the former Rensselaer County Probation Office. On the way to the Troy Farmers Market.

Franklin Alley Social Club VIP section.

Takk House event space in the former Knights of Columbus hall.

Superior Merchandise Company.

Franklin Alley Social Club.

Tech Valley Center of Gravity.

JJ in Robert’s kitchen sink, 2009.

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N FA L L 2 0 1 1 , after more than a year of back and forth

in his relationship with Kentriss, Robert met and fell in love with Emily. Emily briefly moved into the basement with Robert, until she learned she was pregnant with

Robert’s baby and moved back in with her parents. Emily gave birth to Robert’s second son, Logan, in the summer of 2012.

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N T H E S U M M E R of 2016, Robert was

in a serious motorcycle accident. It was a sobering reality check after years of being in and out of trouble for fighting with girlfriends or being chased by the cops for speeding. His fresh perspective only lasted until a new girl in his life began visiting him in the hospital and offered to help repair his motorcycle. In a more cheerful mood he joked, “Now I got females buying me motorcycles and wheelchairs!”

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Y E A R A F T E R Heather lost custody of her daughter, Jaeda, she met Breyanna, who had just aged out of the same juvenile placement that Heather had spent time in ten years earlier. Breyanna and Heather’s relationship was physically rough at times as both girls had difficulty settling arguments with words. Breyanna made a room for Jaeda in her apartment, and Heather began regular visitation.

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N 2 0 1 1 , Elliott gained full custody

of his two children from the relationship he had after he was released from prison. Dana continued to have full custody of KyLynne, with weekend visitation for KyLynne’s father. In 2013, Dana and Elliott were married and devoted to giving their kids the childhood they themselves never had. The adoptive parents of Dana and Elliott’s first daughter moved out of state, and now Dana only receives the two letters a year required by the terms of the adoption.

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N 2 0 1 0 , B I G J E S S I E completed her five-year felony probation. The following year, she started dating Elliott’s cousin Steve. Eventually, Big Jessie moved out of her father’s house and made a home with Steve and his son, Connor, from his first marriage. In February 2014, Big Jessie gave birth to Steve’s daughter, Londyn. Big Jessie was committed to breastfeeding; she was one of the first of the girls to do it for an entire year.

Jackie, 2006.

In 2014, Big Jessie’s old girlfriend Jackie gave birth to a daughter, Jaelyn Marie Riddick. Jaelyn’s father was shot and killed in neighboring Schenectady, where he and

Jackie, 2014.

Jackie lived. Jackie was four months pregnant at the time of his death.

Deb’s bedroom window.

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N T H E S U M M E R O F 2 0 1 4 , there was an increased tone

of violence for the whole neighborhood. Any argument would produce a gun or a knife. Robert got in a fight with a local kid over a bicycle, and Deb’s bedroom window got shot through. A young woman was killed by

her boyfriend because she became pregnant with his child and he didn’t want his other girlfriend to find out. A boy was stabbed to death at a birthday party over a small argument.

Vanessa Milligan’s memorial on Sixth Avenue in North Troy. Vanessa and her unborn child died on April 3, 2014. The Pizza Hut has since been demolished, and the memorial was moved across the street.

On August 25, 2014, the Troy Record reported, “It’s been a summer of fear and violence in Lansingburgh, just as it has been a particularly savage year citywide. That begs another question: What’s happening in Troy? The city

has had eight homicides this year, giving Troy a murder rate (roughly 24 per 100,000 residents) that is well above big cities such as Chicago and New York.”

Andi-Lynne, 2005.

In 2014, Andi-Lynne gave birth to her third child.

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N 2 0 1 4 , A F T E R Y E A R S of Uncle Bob being in and out of

jail, he and Laurie finally broke up. Laurie now lives in her sixth apartment in as many years. The girls have continued to live with their mom, though both of Laurie’s sons spent time in juvenile placement. In 2011, Laurie’s son Darien had a baby boy with a girl that he met in placement. In 2010, Megan got her first boyfriend. In 2012, Megan got her first girlfriend. Katie is still a kid.

Katie, 2009.

Laurie in the dress she wore to her dad’s funeral, 2008.

Katie in the dress Laurie wore to her dad’s funeral, 2012.

DJ’s daughters Deanna and Destiny, 2008 (opposite) and 2015.

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H E N K AY L A S T A R T E D D AT I N G Chantelle, she once

again dropped her friendship with DJ. Chantelle’s mother and DJ had some history and Chantelle pressured Kayla to stop hanging out with her. Though they

worked together for a while at Family Dollar, Kayla and DJ have never been as close as they used to be. DJ still lives around the corner from Kayla, and DJ’s kids are now friends with Tony.

DJ’s son Dylan, 2008 and 2015 (opposite).

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AY L A’ S S E C O N D - O L D E S T sister, Kandice, has always felt different from the rest of her siblings because she has a different father. Kandice lived with her father for most of high school, but when she graduated she moved back in with Deb.

Kandice desperately wanted to be in love. In 2012, she visited a friend who had moved to Tennessee—she was the first person in her family ever to fly on an airplane. While she was there, Kandice met a boy and got pregnant. She came home to have the baby and then after a long custody battle with the baby daddy, Kandice returned to Tennessee and married him. She has worked at Wendy’s, a Sharpie factory, and Wal-Mart. Kandice wants to come back to Troy when she saves up enough money.

Kandice, 2004.

Kandice, 2013.

Kayla’s little brother Jesse was diagnosed with social anxiety and prescribed with medication. He has been truant from school enough to land him on probation.

Christy Stocklas College Essay First Draft, October 2016

A L L O F M Y L I F E I’ve been told “no,” when I wanted to do

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AY L A’ S L I T T L E S I S T E R Christy is still the prettiest girl on the block and talks about leaving home to go to college. She is terrified of talking to anyone she doesn’t know and is already feeling guilty about leaving her parents behind. She still does not have a boyfriend.

Christy, 2005.

something. Whether it was walking home from school or going to my friend’s house, I was always told no. I never did understand my parents’ strictness until now. The reason wasn’t because I was a girl, the youngest girl at that, but because my parents were scared. Growing up, my parents weren’t very wealthy and didn’t do very much—to this day they have never been on an airplane. I honestly feel sorry for them because I thought there was always something holding them back. This probably started way back with their own parents, who never traveled very far from the place where they were born either. My mother is fifty years old and my father is forty-two, and they haven’t even had a glimpse at what the real world is made of. Fear has become a big issue nowadays and it might even continue to be if people don’t start to do what they really want to do with their life. For example, my sister had many talents. She could free-hand draw, style hair, and do makeup and nails perfectly. She loved to do them. After high school, my sister was all set on going to college, but when things became too real for her, she quit. It may have been out of the fear of not being good enough, but I think it was out of fear that people, including my family, would not support her goals. I’m not going to give that whole “follow your dreams” spiel but that’s exactly what everyone should do. Passion and determination is a force greater than any fear in the world. When you have your mind set on a specific goal, that should be a priority not a side job. At only sixteen years old, I have done and seen more than both of my parents. For instance, I took the risk and flew to Puerto Rico to attend the funeral of my brother in law’s mother. Before I left, my father looked me straight in the face and told me I couldn’t go. I started crying, not because I wouldn’t be going, but because I would have to defy my father. This was extremely hard because I love and trust my father with all of my heart. My father is even afraid for me to apply to colleges. Just the thought of college itself is foreign to him. None of my fathers’ kids have gone to college and honestly I don’t think anyone in his family has either. This is what my heart desires. How can I be true to myself and honor my family, when for years I have watched my father work his butt off at a mechanic shop to support us. He woke up at 5:00 am every day, put on his uniform, and went to work. My father wouldn’t get home until about 4:30 pm, covered

Christy, 2014.

I want to live, to have a purpose, and not just sit there and watch as everything exciting and cool happens around me. from head to toe in grease. He wore simple clothes but the thing that stood out to me was his nametag. His nametag stood for something only a man who worked his whole life providing for his family could understand. To me, it was actually a label, like a suit labels those who are “successful.” My father didn’t deserve to be labeled as a lower-class man, because in his eyes and our family’s eyes, he was just as successful and wealthy as a millionaire, rich in pride and happiness. I drove down to New York City with a friend’s family and decided to explore and figure out the subways all by myself. It made me want to travel more in the future, too. Seeing how people do things in other places is interesting to me. I begin to understand their culture and values, which seem so foreign to people like me. I say “people like me” because I’ve always been pretty antisocial and shy, but I have always had this creativity and interest in me; it just took time for it to shine and for me to realize who I really am. I haven’t figured myself out completely yet, but even the best take the majority of their lifetime to be content with their decisions and path of life. So many people don’t let themselves express their creativity and ideas because of the fear of rejection or because their ideas may seem “weird” to others. Well, I say weird is good and it’s okay to be different. Diversity is what makes the world whole. It’s completely okay if you have to leave home and your family behind to become an outcast (a good one), as long as you do it for a good reason. I want to live, to have a purpose, and not just sit there and watch as everything exciting and cool happens around me. I might not know what career I want to pursue in the future, but I do know what I don’t want. I don’t want to feel stuck like I do in my house. It seems like everyone gets a little older, gets a miserable job at Wal-Mart or some place, and then says they are happy with how their life is going. Hopefully college will help me see things that most people I know don’t understand, and to experience the unexplainable, and most of all, explore the possibilities that life has to offer. I want to leave this world being remembered for doing something to better this world, not being remembered as just an average citizen named Christy Stocklas from Troy, New York.

Little Jon, Little Jesse, Uncle Patrick, Tony, and Christy playing Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, 2004.

Tony, Christy, their friend Dale, Little Jesse, and Little John playing Minecraft, 2014.

Tony, 2007.

Tony, 2015.

T

O N Y S K I P S R O C K S on the

Hudson, with the old Ford Motor Company plant across the river. The boat launch is now a Superfund site with residual water pollution from a printing plant that manufactured all the dye for bills for the US Mint. The plant simply let the chemicals flow down the hill into the Hudson. Even back then, the working-class neighborhood had to tolerate less desirable practices. Tony turned eleven in 2015. Though he still gets angry and takes medication, he is more patient and can pay attention for longer periods of time. He talks a lot about going to “regular school” and even talks about girls.

After a series of low-paying part-time jobs, Deb worked her way up to a position as a Capital District city bus driver with full benefits and a guaranteed union salary. She passed her training and received her certificate the day before her fiftieth birthday.

O

N F E B R U A R Y 1 7 , 2 0 1 5 , Billie Jean’s mother, Nanny Rose, died at age fifty-three after a long stretch of failing health. Billie Jean was with her till the end, and took care of all the memorial arrangements and fulfilling

her mother’s two last wishes—that Billie Jean cut off Nanny’s ponytail and donate it to a charity that makes wigs for children with cancer, and that Nanny be cremated.

Billie Jean was present at the Gardner Earl Memorial Chapel and Crematorium to “push the button” that would ignite the flame of her mother’s cremation. Billie Jean stayed for the whole four-hour process—she held up her cell phone to the incinerator and played Nanny’s favorite song, “Ridin” by Chamillionaire, took selfies, and prayed.

Four months after her mother died, Billie Jean got her New York State–issued GED and graduated from the Capital District Educational Opportunity Center. This was the same GED program her mother graduated from when Billie Jean was a little girl. Billie Jean had spent a lifetime attending self-improvement programs to battle being diagnosed with mental retardation. Billie Jean was asked to give a speech at her graduation, and talked about how she was always told she could not do things and that her only regret was that her mother was not there to see her do those very things. Billie Jean is enrolled at Hudson Valley Community College, where she will study data processing.

D

E AT H H A S A WAY of bringing things together in a

way that life resists. Oakwood Cemetery is built on an escarpment that rises east of the fluvial plain surrounding the Hudson River, opposite the confluence of the Hudson and Mohawk. The Troy Cemetery Association claims the view offers the “most concentrated and complete overview of American history anywhere in America.” It shows evidence of Paleolithic rocks, Native Americans, the Dutch, the British, the French and

Indian War, the American Revolution, the industrial revolution, and the Way West movement, resulting in the creation of the Erie and Champlain Canals. As I stand in the cemetery among the dead, I can look down over the historic panorama to see Nanny Rose’s house and the houses of everyone she knew in life. Oakwood Cemetery was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1984.

Tony, October 2017.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Calvert, Karin. Children in the House: The Material Culture of Early Childhood, 1600–1900. Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press, 1992.

Greenberger, Ellen, and Laurence Steinberg. When Teenagers Work: The Psychological and Social Costs of Adolescent Employment. New York, NY: Basic, 1986.

Child, Lydia Marie. The American Frugal Housewife. Boston, MA: Carter, Hendee, & Co., 1833.

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Crenson, Matthew A. The Invisible Orphanage: A Prehistory of the American Welfare System. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998.

Isenberg, Nancy. White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America. New York, NY: Viking, 2016.

Dolin, Eric Jay. Fur, Fortune, and Empire: The Epic History of the Fur Trade in America. New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company, 2011.

Katz, Michael B., Michael J. Doucet, and Mark J. Stern. The Social Organization of Early Industrial Capitalism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982.

Dunn, Shirley. The Mohicans and Their Land: 1609–1730. Fleischmanns, NY: Purple Mountain Press, 1994.

Ketchum, Alton. Uncle Sam: The Man and the Legend. New York, NY: Hill and Wang, 1959.

Dunn, Shirley. The River Indians: Mohicans Making History. Fleischmanns, NY: Purple Mountain Press, 2009.

Lay, Clemewell, and Anne Wellington. The Emma Willard Plan of Education. Troy, NY: Emma Willard School, 1961.

Emma Willard School. Emma Willard School Alumnae Directory 1982. White Plains, NY: Bernard C. Harris Publishing Company, Inc.,1982.

LeBlanc, Adrian Nicole. Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx. New York, NY: Scribner, 2004.

Evans, Walker, and James Agee. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: The American Classic, in Words and Photographs, of Three Tenant Families in the Deep South. New York, NY: Mariner Books, 2001.

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Fancher, Irving E. History of the Troy Orphan Asylum: 1833–1933. Troy, NY: The Whitehurst Printing & Binding Co.,1933. Felt, Jeremy P. Hostages of Fortune: Child Labor Reform in New York State. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press,1965. Formanek–Brunell, Miriam. Made to Play House. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993. Frisch, Michael H., and Daniel J. Walkowitz, eds. Essays on Labor, Community, and American Society: Working-Class America. Chicago, IL: University of Illinois,1983.

Mink, Gwendolyn. The Wages of Motherhood: Inequality in the Welfare State, 1917–1942. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996. Mink, Gwendolyn. Welfare’s End. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002. Mink, Gwendolyn, and Rickie Solinger, eds. Welfare: A Documentary History of U.S. Policy and Politics. New York, NY: New York University Press, 2003. Norton, Thomas Elliot. The Fur Trade in Colonial New York: 1686–1776. Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1974.

O’Sullivan, Judith, and Rosemary Gallick. Workers and Allies: Female Participation in the American Trade Union Movement, 1824–1976. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1975. Rezneck, Samuel. Profiles out of the Past of Troy, NY Since 1789. Troy, NY: Greater Troy Chamber of Commerce, 1970. Riis, Jacob. How the Other Half Lives. Seven Treasures Publications, 2009. Rittner, Don. Troy: A Collar City History. Mount Pleasant, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2002. Seminon, Paul. American Monster: How the Nation’s First Prehistoric Creature Became a Symbol of National Identity. New York, NY: New York University Press, 2000. Sobie, Merril. The Creation of Juvenile Justice. Pace Law School The New York State Bar Association, 1987. Teachers of the Troy Public Schools. Our Community: Troy and Rensselaer County. Troy, NY: Whitehurst Printing & Binding Co., 1943. Tirado, Linda. Hand to Mouth: Living in Bootstrap America. New York, NY: Berkley, 2015. Turbin, Carole. Working Women of Collar City: Gender, Class, and Community in Troy, 1864–86. Chicago, IL: University of Illinois,1992. Vance, J. D. Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis. New York, NY: Harper, 2016. Zinn, Howard. A People’s History of the United States. New York, NY: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2005.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS How do I begin to acknowledge everyone who has been part of the obsession that is manifest in these pages? Whether you came along willingly or were enlisted, one of those who were in turns the object of all my attention punctuated by stretches of gross neglect, or worst of all maybe helplessly related by blood or kinship—­however it happened, if you were part of my life at all from 2004 to 2017 there is no way that you escaped the physical or emotional consequences of the making of this book. The irony is that I am growing older as your ranks continue to swell. I fear losing the name of even one of you to my seasoned memory. In my gratitude list I will evoke my love of a good timeline to guide me through the chronology of your love and patience, which infuse every page. I begin by thanking five who were my angels on earth and spread their wings to the heavens during the process. My angels: Fast Eddie, aka my dad; Alberto Guzman, my partner and baby daddy from 2000 to 2009; my grandmother Laura, who raised me and lived the 101 years that ended in 2010; Maureen Gallagher Brown, who guided me through a journey with twelve steps; Rick McKee Hock, my mentor, friend, and champion. My sons: Simon Peter Gonzalez, Andrew Velazquez, DeAnthony Louis Stocklas. My teachers: Michael Carlebach, David Kent. My comrades: Adrian Nicole Le Blanc, Laura LoForti, Daniel Portnoy, Andrew DeVigal, Gillian Laub, Steven Zeswitz, Murray Cox, Samantha Box, Beverly Brannon, John Barnabas Lake, Tate Shaw, Meredith Davenport, Andrew Meier, Carole Turbin, Christian Cahill, Nina Berman, Amy Yenkin, Jennifer Thompson, Lyndsey Addario, Branda Miller, Giselle Devera, Constance Collins, Kathy High, Jasper Kerbs, Don Shearer, Emily Shiffer, Julianna Beasley, Lelen Robert, Lorette Sternberg, William Snyder, Lisette Poole, the Sanctuary for Independent Media in Troy, NY. A singular and specialist of all thank yous to: The Rennselaer County Historical Society and research librarians Kathy Sheehan and Stacy Draper—they have unwittingly coauthored this book and I am so grateful for their knowledge and love and support through several difficult times along the way. And to the Burden Iron Works Museum and its founders and stewards P .Thomas Carroll and Michael Barrettt, who have been patient through countless hours of brain-picking interviews.

Editors who have supported Upstate Girls: Kathy Ryan, Ruth Eichorn, Jon Francois Le Roy, James Estrin, Paul Moakley, Kira Pollack, Jody Quon, Clinton Carill, Michael Itkoff, James Welford. Institutions that showed the project love: the Open Society Foundation, the Canon Female Photojournalism Prize, the Nikon Sabbatical Grant, the National Press Photographers’ Association, World Press Photo, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, New York State Council for the Arts, the Margulies Collection, the Girls Club of Fort Lauderdale Florida, the Mother Jones Documentary Fund, the Library of Congress, the Wave Farm Grant, American Public Radio, the Alicia Patterson Foundation, Visa Por l’Image, Rochester Institute of Technology, the Visual Studies Workshop, the MacDowell Colony, Facing Change, Brian Storm, Sarah Harbutt. Design and editorial assistance: Steven Zeswitz, Nora Belal, Ophelia Mangen, Johnny Simon, John Barnabas Lake, Sara Swaminathan, Sean MacDonald, Amanda Berg, Dave Hammond, Alexis Lambrou, Amanda Webster, Dan Jones, Sandy Hooper, Riley Bolender, Rebecca Midgal, Kevin Hagen, Kathryn Draper, Matt Cohen, Jacob Gervich, Brittany Collins, Deana Mitchell. Thank you to Judith Regan for her vision, courage, and just plain “getting it” when she gave this mess of a project a bona fide legitimate life by taking it on. It has made all of us Upstate girls feel heard and valued, and that alone is as big as the book. Thank you also to Judith for assigning Alexis Gargagliano and Mia Abrahams to the book. Alexis went above and beyond to transform a litany of ideas and squiggly lines into a book with a universal story of love that we all share. And Richard Ljoenes and Alisha Petro for their design, and Kurt Andrews and Lynne Ciccaglione for making the book real. And of most of all, there are no words to thank all of the individuals whose words and pictures make up the book. I thank you all and cry a bittersweet tear for all that the publication of this book means. I cry at the threshold of closure and rebirth and thank you not for allowing me into your lives but because you are now and forever part of mine.

IMAGE CREDITS Brenda Ann Kenneally: ii, ix–xi, 8–12, 17–23, 38–39, 42–43, 48–51, 57 (bottom), 58–59, 64–67, 74–83, 88 (top), 89 (top left and bottom left), 90–91, 94–95, 98–99, 102–103, 106–109, 111–127, 128 (top right), 129 (top), 130, 132, 134–135 (center), 136–137, 140–148, 150–157, 160–161, 163, 174–183, 187 (left), 192–234, 236–246, 248–251, 254–255, 256 (top), 258–267, 270–282, 283 (top), 284–305, 306–307 (center), 308–309, 314–315, 317, 318–330, 334–356, 358–399, 404–407, 411. From the collection of The Rensselaer County Historical Society, reprinted with permission: iii–viii, xviii–xx, 2, 4–5, 7 (bottom), 16, 26–37, 40–41, 44–47, 52–56, 60–63, 68 (top), 72–73, 84–85, 104–105, 138–139, 162, 164–171, 186 (top), 188–189, 253, 268–269, 312–313, 332. From The New York Times, January 12, 2003 © 2003 The New York Times. All rights reserved. Used by permission and protected by the Copyright Laws of the United States. The printing, copying, redistribution, or retransmission of this Content without express written permission is prohibited: 13. Library of Congress, LC-USZ62-34160: 316. Courtesy of Billie Jean Hill: 7, 99–101, 149, 400–401. Courtesy of Chantelle Secoure: 247 (bottom), 331, 333. Courtesy of Dana Wells: 24, 87, 92, 173. Courtesy of Dana & Elliott Wells: 93, 134–135 (except center), 158–159, 190–191. Courtesy of Debra Stocklas: 57 (top and center), 69, 311. Courtesy of Heather Redcross: 128 (top left and bottom), 129 (bottom). Courtesy of James Miles: 247 (top). Courtesy of James and Terrance Miles: 131. Courtesy of Jessica Schubart: 25, 86, 97, 357. Courtesy of Jessica Schubart & Dana Wells: 96. Courtesy of Kayla Stocklas: 256 (bottom), 257, 307 (bottom left and right). Courtesy of Robert Stocklas: 68 (bottom), 70–71, 88 (bottom), 89 (right), 133, 235, 283 (bottom). Courtesy of Sabrina Cardinales: 14–15. Courtesy of Terri Mason: 184–185. Courtesy of Terri Nixon: 186 (bottom), 187 (top and bottom right).

Brenda Ann Kenneally is a mother, teacher, multiplatform documentarian, Guggenheim Fellow, Pulitzer Prize nominee, and formerly incarcerated youth. Over the past thirty years, Kenneally’s long-form, immersive projects have produced visceral portraits of the personal experiences of disadvantaged children in America, as well as a ground-up historic record of contemporary social and political values in the United States. “I take pictures to remember what I’ve learned while I was busy taking pictures,” says Kenneally. It was Kenneally’s need to share what she had learned from both her own childhood in Upstate New York and the thirteen years she spent recording the current generation of Upstate Girls that led her to form A Little Creative Class. The non-profit arts organization’s mission is to address the obstacles that deter poor and low-income youth from participation in the emerging idea-based economy. One hundred percent of the author’s proceeds from the sale of Upstate Girls will be donated to A Little Creative Class. For more information visit www.alittlecreativeclass.org.