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Vivid Portrait of Syrian Rebel Fighters Outside Homs

September 10, 2012, 6:42 pm
By ROBERT MACKEY

The French photojournalist who reports from behind rebel lines in Syria using the name Mani has produced another striking video report for Britain's Channel 4 News, an intimate portrait of the Free Syrian Army's Farouq Brigade first broadcast on Monday.

The report shows rebels fighters who withdrew from the city of Homs six months ago battling forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad less than 10 miles north of the city, in the town of Talbiseh.

For the past three months, Syrian opposition activists have been posting video online showing rebel fighters and civilians fleeing from heavy shelling on the streets of Talbiseh and huge clouds of smoke rising over the town after airstrikes.

Video broadcast by the Saudi-owned satellite channel Al Arabiya in June showed rebel fighters and civilians taking cover as the town of Talbiseh was bombed.

Video posted online by Syrian activists, said to show the aftermath of a July airstrike on Talbiseh.

In one part of the French filmmaker's report, he shows rebel fighters scattering as a helicopter gunship attacks, and then shooting back with a captured antiaircraft weapon.

In a previous report for Channel 4 News, Mani captured in vivid detail the desperate struggle of rebel fighters to hold on to the Homs district of Baba Amr under intense shelling in February. In his new report, he watches as the fighters from Homs plot an attack on a Syrian Army checkpoint that they hope will open the way for them to return to the city.

The filmmaker also found evidence of the increa singly sectarian outlook of some of the Sunni Muslim fighters in the brigade. “We want to open the road to Homs,” one fighter told him. “Our families are there. They're being butchered by the Alawites, the Shia and their militia. It's not about the army anymore or toppling the regime. It's a sectarian conflict.”

As my colleague David Kirkpatrick reported last week, the Farouq Brigade, one of the largest rebel brigades, is led by Lt. Abdul-Razzaq Tlass, “a relative of Mr. Assad's former defense minister, Mustafa Tlass, whose family members were early defectors.”

Christoph Reuter of the German magazine Der Spiegel interviewed Lieutenant Tlass during a visit to Rastan, near Talbiseh, two months ago and found him extremely confident of victory:

When we encountered Tlass in the Baba Amr neighborhood of Homs last December, he was leading a small band of pitifully armed defectors. An attempt to meet him again this summer turns into a searc h for a phantom. Everyone knows his name and his Farouq Brigade is now the largest in Syria, with 7,000 men fighting under its banner in devastated Homs alone. But where is Tlass? First we are told he is in Homs, then in Rastan and then in Talbiseh, always in a different place. After a week, a messenger arrives and tells us to be ready that evening.

At the appointed time, a car arrives and takes us across the city to a house located hardly a hundred meters below a military tank position. No one would expect him to be here, says Tlass, probably the most wanted man in Syria. He sits down in the middle of the room. It will only take a few weeks more to bring down the government, he says.

And then? Will he return to the new army as a lieutenant? He smiles briefly. “I will go where the people want to have me,” he says. He has immense power, and he knows it. He also insists that the revolution is not an end in itself, “but it's a fight for our rights. We want dem ocracy, not the next dictatorship!”



On the Runway: Von Furstenberg Gives Google Glasses a Spin on the Runway

September 9, 2012, 7:50 pm
By ERIC WILSON

Look there, in the front row of Diane von Furstenberg's runway on Sunday afternoon. Isn't that Oscar de la Renta? And Valentino? Ooh, and Bravo's dapper Andy Cohen sitting with his bestie Sarah Jessica Parker? And Barry Diller, Ms. von Furstenberg's husband was there, as usual. And then, wait a sec, Sergey Brin from Google?

What's he doing here?

Well, the line between artistic statement and marketing opportunity became blurry a long time ago at Fashion Week, especially at Lincoln Center, where the event is named after a car (Mercedes-Benz, if you need ask). So Ms. von Furstenberg did not seem to have a problem with putting Google products on her runway, specifically the Glass by Google. That would be those weird pseudo-glasses thingies that Google is developing to take us into the future and turn us all into walking surveillance systems. They look like something from “Star Trek,” with a tiny camera built into the frames and a little bitty monitor in the corner for all those people who are not satisfied looking at the world solely through their hand-held devices. Supposedly, they can give you directions to the nearest Starbucks.

Mr. Brin was wearing a pair with a turquoise stem that made him look as if he had stabbed himself in the eye with the straw of some tropical frozen cocktail. But that was not all. Some of the models wore them, in pink or white variations, and even Ms. von Furstenberg, who had nothing to do with the design of the glasses or the color choices, wore a pair when she took her bow, pointing at audience members to let them know that she could see them through her magic glasses. What's more, that footage will be turned into a short film that wi ll be shown online next week.

Given the hubbub over the glasses (the entire front row was trying to simultaneously tweet images of Mr. Brin), some of us barely noticed the clothes. Some pink caftans went by and a shorts and blouse combo in watermelon colors, I think, and insanely tall platforms that were presumably big enough to accommodate a global positioning system.

Model: In 25 feet, turn left at the end of the runway. Turn left. Turn left!

Recalculating.

My colleague, Cathy Horyn, stopped backstage and asked about the glasses and had a chance to try them on.

“We're super excited,” Mr. Brin said in the crammed backstage area, which was more frenzied than usual. He said he and Ms. von Furstenberg met at a conference this summer, and having the glasses in her show was a good marriage of fashion and technology. Her clothes, like the ultralight frames, were about style and comfort.

At least one onlooker seemed perplexed by the fuss.

“What are you supposed to see?” asked Fran Lebowitz.

Cathy had to admit she wasn't really sure.



Syrian Filmmaker Leaves Haunting Record of the War That Killed Him

September 10, 2012, 5:18 pm
By CHRISTINE HAUSER

Tamer al-Awam, a Syrian filmmaker and activist, was killed over the weekend in the city of Aleppo, where he was filming the bombardment of civilian neighborhoods in the ongoing war between opposition forces and the Syrian Army.

The Syrian Journalists Association said in a Facebook statement that Mr. Awam was one of 69 media activists or journalists to have been killed covering the fighting in Syria. (While the journalists association said Mr. Awam died on Sunday, a Web site that tracks the fighting in Syria, Syrian Center for Documentation, said Mr. Awam died on Saturday while working on a film about the Free Syrian Army.)

One of Mr. Awam's most recent projects on the war was a 24-minute, Arabi c-language documentary called “Memories at a Checkpoint.”

Tamer al-Awam's “Memories of a Checkpoint.”

In one of the first sequences of the film, in which he introduces his work in northern Syria with an Austrian journalist, the camera moves hauntingly up a stairwell to show the walls of a home blackened with the residue of smoke. The slogans “Down with Bashar” and “Freedom” are scrawled on the walls. “Here, the camera conveys the image, without the death and the fear,” the filmmaker says simply.

In another scene, a family with children peering out of the gloomy room in darkness, Mr. Awam says he is giving a voice to people who only want one thing: “To tell the world: stop the killing. We are a people who love life.”

Throughout the 24-minute documentary, Mr. Awam goes from the intimacy of households, where he interviews women and children, to the secret workshops of the rebels, where they manufacture homemade rockets and then test-fire them from the back of a red Toyota pick-up truck. “We made it with our own hands,” says a fighter.

Some of the film's most gripping moments come from the filmmaker's proximity to battles - one moment, under fire with rebels on rooftop, then filming a helicopter attack on a nearby building. Some of the most moving are Mr. Awam's interactions with civilians, whose support for the Free Syrian Army put them in the line of fire. “There is shelling everywhere,” he says at one point, hurrying through narrow, rubble strewn streets with the crack of gunfire nearby. “This is Syria,” he says.

He frequently pauses to ask civilians basic questions. “Where is your father?” he asks a little boy, Mahmoud, at a graveside. “Paradise,” the little boy answers, “Who killed him?” Mr. Awam asks. “The army,” the boy replies.

He asks a little boy, standing in a doo rway, how he is sleeping. He struggles to be heard from the street as he questions a man standing at an open window, the sounds of battle nearly drowning out their voices. “No electricity, no water!” the man shouts back.

Mr. Awam's death was mourned by opposition bloggers and celebrated by supporters of President Bashar al-Assad's government.

The end of his film shows the rebel fighters taking control of a Syrian Army checkpoint in Maaret Al-Noman after a 9-hour battle. The fighters celebrate, raising their weapons high, and residents follow them in the street by motorcycle. In th e final scene, Mr. Awam appears to be sitting in a peaceful courtyard garden, smiling, with a pair of white doves on either shoulder.

That image is posted on a Facebook page set up in his memory, where people have uploaded more of his video work and photographs. “We are all the martyr, filmmaker Tamer Al-Awam,” reads one of the titles on the page.

Mr. Awam, 34, lived in Germany, but traveled back and forth to Syria to work as a reporter and filmmaker with German and international media, the journalists association said. He organized many demonstrations and activities in support of the Syrian revolution in Europe.

Last year in Germany, as the uprisings in the Middle East gained momentum, Mr. Awam was a visible, outspoken critic of the entrenched Arab governments and called for change, according to videos showing him at protests.One video posted on the Facebook tribute page shows Mr. Awam sending a direct message to Mr. Assad during one demonstration.

Mr. Awam speaking at a protest in Germany against the Syrian regime in 2011

“This is a message to the Syrian authorities, and personally to President Bashar al-Assad,” he said, speaking in Arabic. “Enough killing of civilians, enough corruption, enough repressing people. We want freedom in Syria. Freedom.”

“Bashar al-Assad, you are more than 40 years old,” he continued, in another part of that video. “Cancel the emergency law. Give political detainees in Syria their freedom, immediately.”

“The time for dictatorship has passed.”



William Moggridge, Design Innovator, Dies at 69

Just after he had presciently opened a product design business in Silicon Valley in 1979, William Moggridge was hired by a start-up firm, Grid Systems, to design a new type of computer - one that could fit into a briefcase.

Mr. Moggridge's ingenious solution was a clamshell case, roughly 15 by 12 inches, which popped open to reveal a luminous screen on top that folded over the keyboard on bottom. The Compass, as this groundbreaking laptop was called, went on sale for about $8,000. Although the price was too high for the average consumer, the Compass was popular with the military and made trips aboard the starting in 1983.

Mr. Moggridge, who died on Saturday at 69, was not only the designer of that first laptop; he is also widely viewed as a father of the field of interaction design, a discipline that focuses on improving the human experience of digital products.

Mr. Moggridge advanced this field through IDEO, the influential product design firm he co-founded, and, most recently, as director of the in New York.

He died at a hospice in San Francisco. The cause was cancer, said Jennifer Northrop, a spokeswoman for the museum.

Several portable computers had been built before technological advances allowed Grid to try to create a computer that could be easily toted around. Mr. Moggridge had designed one the size of a sewing machine in 1972, but it was never built. He got the work with Grid after a chance encounter with its founder, John Ellenby, an engineer, who was sitting on the steps of a neighbor's house waiting for the neighbor to come home.

In his book “Designing Interactions” (2006), Mr. Moggridge wrote: “I had the experience of a lifetime developing a design that was innovative in so many ways. I developed the way that the screen was hinged to fold down over the keyboard for carrying. This geometry accounted for only one of the 43 innovative features in the utility patent that we were awarded.

“Most of these innovations are taken for granted today, but they were new at the time: for example, the flat electroluminescent graphic display, the low-profile keyboard, bubble memory and the enclosure in die-cast magnesium. The metal housing offered a combination of strength and lightness, creating an amazingly tough machine.”

In fact, almost every laptop since has used some form of Mr. Moggridge's design. Mr. Moggridge's name is on the patent, but the rights to the patent were assigned to the client. Grid was bought by the Tandy Corporation in 1988.

Mr. Moggridge would later say that when he tested the prototype in 1981 it was the first time he had used a computer, and that it was the software, not the box, that captivated him. It opened his mind to the idea that for the rising digital era, design could be more than merely creating beautiful, utilitarian objects but could also be about the user's experience.

“I realized,” he said in an interview recorded to accompany “Design Interactions,” “I would have to learn to design the interactive technology instead of just the physical object.”

In 1991, Mr. Moggridge merged his own design firm with those owned by David Kelley, a Stanford professor, and Mike Nuttall, another British designer, to form IDEO. That company gained international renown by creating forms for technology as well as products ranging from portable heart to the Palm V, a sleek hand-held personal digital assistant. IDEO's clients over the years included Procter & Gamble, Apple, Microsoft and Eli Lilly.

At IDEO, Mr. Moggridge focused less on specific projects and more on building a process for design that had teams of not just engineers and designers but also anthropologists and psychologists. To encourage employees to brainstorm without fear, he would often break out in song.

“He wanted to build empathy for the consumer into the product,” Professor Kelley said. “At the time he started, it was very innovative, but now it is the dead center of the profession.”

He also began writing and teaching to advocate the importance of humane design in everyday life, and broadening the services the firm would provide. In addition to products, IDEO branched into, for example, designing environments like the lobbies in Courtyard by Marriott hotels.

Mr. Moggridge took the helm of the Cooper Hewitt design museum in 2010, only a year after it awarded him a lifetime achievement award. Soon after, he also won the Prince Philip Designers Prize, Britain's most prestigious design award.

William Grant Moggridge was born in London on June 25, 1943, to Helen and Henry Weston Moggridge. His mother was an artist and his father was a civil servant. He studied industrial design at the Central St. Martins College of Art and Design (formerly Central School of Design) in London and founded Moggridge and Associates there in 1969. He opened a new design firm called ID Two in Palo Alto, Calif., in 1979.

He is survived by his wife of 47 years, Karin; their sons, Alex and Erik; and his brother, Hal.



Signing Up for Google Internet Service Becomes a Civic Cause

Steve Hebert for The New York Times

Margaret May, left, led a drive in the Ivanhoe area of Kansas City, Mo., to preregister people for Google's new Internet service.

KANSAS CITY, Mo. - With Google's promise last year to wire homes, schools, libraries and other public institutions in this city with the nation's fastest Internet connection, community leaders on the long forlorn, predominantly black east side were excited, seeing a potentially uplifting force. They anticipated new educational opportunities for their children and an incentive for developers to build in their communities.

But in July, Google announced a process in which only those areas where enough residents preregistered and paid a $10 deposit would get the service, Google Fiber. While nearly all of the affluent, mostly white neighborhoods here quickly got enough registrants, a broad swath of black communities lagged. The deadline to sign up was midnight Sunday.

The specter that many blacks in this city might not get access to this technology has inflamed the long racial divide here, stoking concern that it could deepen.

“This is just one more example of people that are lower income, sometimes not higher educated people, being left behind,” said Margaret May, the executive director of the neighborhood council in Ivanhoe, where the poverty rate was more than 46 percent in 2009. “It makes me very sad.”

For generations, Kansas City has been riven by racial segregation that can still be seen, with a majority of blacks in the urban core confined to neighborhoods in the east. Troost Avenue has long been considered the dividing line, the result of both overt and secretive efforts to keep blacks out of white schools and housing areas and of historical patterns of population growth and settlement, said Micah Kubic, with the nonprofit Greater Kansas City Local Initiatives Support Corporation.

Nearly three in four people living east of Troost in Kansas City's urban center are black, according to an analysis of 2010 Census data by Andrew Beveridge, a sociology professor at Queens College in New York City.

 As recently as 15 to 20 years ago, black residents said, they did not venture west of Troost for fear of harassment from the police. Today, they complain that their schools are failing, crime is rampant and infrastructure is dilapidated.

“See all this filthiness?” Vic, a 47-year-old lifelong resident of the east side who declined to give his last name, said as he stared at hip-high brush in a vacant lot. He expressed doubt about how much of an inroad Google Fiber would make. “You can't get the neighborhood to come together to get this cleaned up,” he said. “How you going to get them to care about that?”

Convincing residents of the importance of Internet access - to apply for jobs, do research, take classes and get information on government services - was one of Google's primary challenges here. The service is currently being offered only here and in Kansas City, Kan. About 25 percent of homes in both cities do not have broadband, and 46 percent of blacks do not use the Internet.

Qualifying neighborhoods will get Internet service with speeds of up to a gigabit per second - 100 times faster than the average broadband connection - for $70 a month. Google is also offering a television service along with Internet for $120 a month. Schools, libraries, hospitals and other institutions in areas that qualify would receive gigabit connections for free.

But the feature most attractive to low-income areas is Google's offer of a free 5-megabit Internet connection for 7 years, but which requires a one-time $300 construction fee.

As of Sunday evening, only about 32 percent of people in the neighborhoods that qualified for Google Fiber were black, while just over 54 percent were white, according to Mr. Beveridge.

With almost all of Kansas City, Kan., including low-income areas, achieving their sign-up goals, Google's focus over the weekend was here in Missouri, where it worked with community groups to register people.



Link by Link: Travel Site Built on Wiki Ethos Now Bedevils Owner

LIVE by the wiki, perhaps die by the wiki.

When the California company Internet Brands bought the Web site Wikitravel in 2005 for $1.7 million from the two developers who had created it, the company got the site and the name, as well as a community of thousands of volunteers who generated the travel guidance that brought the audience.

Soon, with the introduction of advertising to the site, a nice business began to take shape, maybe even an ideal business: volunteers lovingly created the content; readers visited the site and clicked on the advertising. There was work to be done by the owner, certainly, like making sure the software functioned properly, but mainly this was a media site that ran itself.

There were some catches, however, that made for an unusual business proposition, starting with the fact that Internet Brands had not bought the exclusive right to the material on the site. The articles are governed by a Creative Commons license, which means they can be copied and republished by anyone as long as a mention is included of where the material came from.

Another catch: workers who do not expect a paycheck may find it easier to leave.

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Soon after the purchase of Wikitravel, in 2006, contributors to the Italian and German sites simply left, not wanting to be part of a commercial site. They “forked” the site, meaning that they copied all of the content to a new site they named Wikivoyage.

Wikitravel is again facing a fork, this time by the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation, which operates Wikipedia among other projects. On Thursday, the board of Wikimedia, the biggest wiki publisher, approved the creation of a travel guide after an extended online comment period that found support for the idea.

The project will seed itself with the tens of thousands of articles on Wikitravel, and already as many as 38 of the 48 the most experienced and trusted volunteers at Wikitravel have said they will move to the Wikimedia project, according to Dr. James Heilman, a Wikipedia contributor who said he had acted as a liaison between Wikitravel writers and the foundation.

On Aug. 24, Internet Brands filed a lawsuit in Superior Court of California for Los Angeles County against Dr. Heilman and a longtime Wikitravel volunteer, Ryan Holliday. The suit did not challenge the right to copy the material; instead it focuses in particular on the efforts of the two men to encourage Wikitravel contributors to consider forking.

Certainly, when Wikimedia enters a field, it has the potential to overwhelm its competitors - just ask Encyclopaedia Britannica. But other wiki-based businesses have moved into niches Wikipedia has left open. There is Wikia, for example, which was co-founded by Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia, and digs even deeper into popular culture than Wikipedia. Or a site like WikiHow, which offers practical advice on how, for example, to set up a terrarium for a toad.

In its statements, the Wikimedia Foundation has emphasized it is hoping to join a community of online travel guides. But even though it is a nonprofit, the foundation represents a serious threat, and Internet Brands, which operates more than 200 Web sites, is treating it as such.

In a statement, an Internet Brands spokesman outlined the company's complaint: “Internet Brand's claims are not about properly licensed content, but about how certain individuals have violated I.B.'s rights as they pertain to trademark, intellectual property and unfair business practices.”

The Wikimedia Foundation filed a separate complaint last week in a different California court on behalf of the two men and itself, asking a court to rule that forking has and remains a legal activity.

In a blog post, Kelly Kay, deputy legal counsel for the foundation, described the lawsuit as an attempt to intimidate. “Our actions today represent the full stride of our commitment to protect the Wikimedia movement against the efforts of for-profit entities like Internet Brands to prevent communities and volunteers from making their own decisions about where and how freely usable content may be shared,” she wrote.



Amateur Mapmakers Redraw Boundaries of New York Neighborhoods

Reshaped and renamed by generations of developers and gentrifiers, the borders of New York City's neighborhoods are often hazy at best. Yesterday's Chinatown is today's east TriBeCa; a resident of Bedford-Stuyvesant may, after some real estate alchemy, morph into a citizen of Clinton Hill.

These distinctions, with status, self-identity and resale values at stake, can often lead to heated disputes, so much so that a state assemblyman, Hakeem Jeffries of Brooklyn, introduced a bill, the Neighborhood Integrity Act, in 2011 to tamp down the tension. (The bill failed.) And City Hall offers little help: the city has never codified neighborhood boundaries, leaving profit-hungry brokers and civic activists to fight it out.

But now, thanks to the democratizing force of the Internet, dozens of amateur cartographers are reshaping these lines themselves, taking advantage of malleable Web sites - including Google Maps and - to provide their own definitions for where, for instance, Park Slope ends and Gowanus begins.

Their judgments are far-reaching: Google Maps, which provides user-generated outlines for every city neighborhood, is consulted much more often than any Rand McNally atlas. A result is a new class of unsung urban arbiters, empowered to turn one's uber-hip NoHo apartment into just another East Village walk-up, for all the world to see.

“It is a lot of responsibility,” said Matthew Hyland, 31, a chef who lives in Downtown Brooklyn.

In his spare time, Mr. Hyland rejects or approves dozens of changes to Google's online map of New York City, which received more than 2,000 proposed revisions last month from users of Google Map Maker. He consults city documents, community boards and local blogs before making any changes to a neighborhood's boundaries, viewing himself as more umpire than activist. He avoids upstart terms peddled by brokers, as when he overruled a user who tried to relabel a swath of Brooklyn waterfront as “Rambo” - for Right Around Manhattan Bridge Overpass.

“I like my maps accurate,” Mr. Hyland said.

Ask the professionals, though, and they will question the very notion of a formal, down-to-the-intersection neighborhood grid, like the one presented by Google.

“Anyone who says there is a defined neighborhood is off his rocker,” said Lisa Keller, executive editor of The Encyclopedia of New York City, a meticulously researched tome of five-borough facts.

When she set out to define neighborhood borders for the book, Ms. Keller contacted dozens of local experts and historians for each entry. “I talked to 20 people and got 12 different answers,” she said. In the end, she relied on a rough consensus for the borders she used in the book.

Once, at a lecture, Ms. Keller asked the attendees which Brooklyn neighborhood the old Ebbets Field had been in.

“I thought there was going to be a fistfight in the audience,” she recalled. Google Map Maker, which became available in the United States last year, lets users submit revisions to any component of Google's map. The changes are reviewed by a Google employee or an outside “regional expert reviewer,” like Mr. Hyland, who was selected by Google for his frequent and accurate contributions.

The position is unpaid, though Mr. Hyland said he had received a T-shirt. And his authority is not unlimited. “I'm not allowed to do something like delete the Lincoln Tunnel,” he said.

For online editors, some demarcations are easy. Few Brooklynites, for instance, would dispute that DeGraw Street marks the boundary between Cobble Hill and Carroll Gardens. (Those areas, however, are of recent vintage: until the 1950s, the brownstone blocks below Atlantic Avenue were simply called South Brooklyn.)

But a neighborhood that is still forming, or changing in complexion, can pose a challenge. Last year, Mr. Hyland extended the border of Gowanus, an industrial Brooklyn neighborhood gaining some residential traction, from Bond Street to Hoyt Street, a one-block incursion into neighboring Carroll Gardens.

Craig Hammerman, district manager at the community board that covers the area, which is home to a notoriously foul-smelling canal, said that he thought Bond Street would be a more appropriate boundary, but that he would defer to residents. “We don't put up a fuss if someone wants to call themselves by a different name,” Mr. Hammerman said. “A rose is still a rose.”

But Mr. Hammerman, a 24-year resident, said he was alarmed that Google's Gowanus did not include the Gowanus Houses, a housing project, which instead was in nearby Boerum Hill, where Wikipedia also put it. And Mr. Hyland, for his part, already claims restraint - he said he had so far resisted the impulse to eliminate Gowanus from the map altogether.

With its vast audience, Google's online map has already caused some consternation. This summer, a Google contributor added the label “soccer field” to a portion of Fort Greene Park in Brooklyn, despite community efforts to banish soccer games there. The park's conservancy called the label “definitely misleading.”

And the comment threads on Map Maker can turn hostile. In Manhattan, the borders of Hudson Square, around the Holland Tunnel, and of Turtle Bay, by the United Nations, prompt fierce debate. TriBeCa keeps creeping eastward, from the traditional Broadway to Lafayette or Centre Street. “That's real estate people doing that kind of thing,” said Mr. Hyland, who rejects those proposed changes. “They want to sell a loft in TriBeCa instead of a loft in Chinatown.”

Barry F. Hersh, a professor at the Schack Institute of Real Estate at New York University, said online maps were only the latest tool in a long line of technology influencing geography. “The telephone company once decided which neighborhood you were in,” he said.

Mr. Hersh, who grew up near the Brooklyn Navy Yard, scoffed at that area's relatively new name, “Vinegar Hill.”

“I can tell you, growing up there, I never heard that,” he said. Mr. Hersh suggested that an enterprising broker had simply decided the area needed a better name than what he used to call it: “Next to the sewage plant.”



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