Photo: John Whipple

Gabrielle Becker

Gabrielle Becker, 22, Albany, is the activist behind the nonprofit organization Mansion Community Arts, Inc., which is working to turn St. Anthony’s Church into a community center.

To Gabrielle Becker’s astonishment, the grassroots movement she started just 18 months ago has reached the point of critical mass: The effort to restore and reopen St. Anthony’s Church as a community center could continue on without her. That’s not to say the young Bard graduate is going anywhere; Becker is full of ideas on how to move forward with arts programs and community outreach. It’s just that what began with her and a few volunteers has grown into a formal organization with legal nonprofit status, and has earned the support of key elected officials like Albany Common Council members Carolyn McLaughlin (Ward 2) and Dominick Calsolaro (Ward 1)—not to mention Mayor Gerald D. Jennings.

When she was still at Bard College, Becker starting thinking about moving back home to Albany to do community work; this evolved into the idea of restoring St. Anthony’s, which is at the corner of Madison Avenue and Grand Street. Petitions in hand, Becker and a few like-minded neighbors went door-to-door in Albany’s Mansion neighborhood to see if there was interest in a community center. They collected more than 200 supporting signatures.

Since getting the keys to the church from the Albany Roman Catholic Diocese last summer, Becker and her small-but-dedicated army of volunteers have been busy. A regular series of “work parties” were held to clean the church, which has been vacant since the mid ’70s. An “Italian open house” was held, and the former parishioners of St. Anthony’s were invited to see the progress.

Although people were enthusiastic, Becker says, “everyone asked the same things: ‘What are you gonna do, and how are you gonna pay for it?’”

Becker says the answer to this lies in “calling people that know more than you, and saying, ‘What would you do?’” Now that the zoning issues have been resolved—Mansion Community Arts, Inc. was granted the zoning change allowing the reuse of the church—the MCA can really move forward in a tangible way, and Becker has enlisted Web site designers, architects and grant writers for the effort.

Becker is cool-eyed enough to know that work ahead will not be easy. Aside from the fund-raising, the church needs expensive infrastructure work that will take time to complete. She also knows, however, that the MCA can’t just “hold its breath” until the building is ready. That’s why she’s already planning a garden project, on a nearby vacant lot, to involve the neighborhood children this summer.

Asked what it’s like to see her idea becoming reality, Becker smiles: “I feel pretty good about the project.”

Photo: Chris Shields

Stephen Downs, 61, and Roger Downs, 32, Selkirk, decided to test reports that Crossgates Mall was asking shoppers to remove antiwar T-shirts or leave the premises. When the elder Downs was arrested for refusing to remove a shirt that read “Peace on Earth,” the mall became a poster child for the knee-jerk intolerance pervading the country just prior to the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

Photo: Chris Shields

Emma Dickson

Emma Dickson, 59, Guilderland, is a fourth-generation resident of the 70-year-old African-American community in the pine barrens bordering Rapp Road in Guilderland. Due to her efforts, and those of Jennifer Lemack of the New York State Museum, the overlooked neighborhood was recently elected to both the New York state and federal registers of historic districts.

Emma Dickson was once, she says, a little shy about telling the story of the African-American neighborhood in the pine barrens of Guilderland. Though she was proud of the community in which she grew up, and personally motivated to uncover and preserve its history, she found grand-scale public speaking intimidating:

“I was reluctant,” she admits, when describing her first engagement to speak in an auditorium full of schoolchildren. “That was the first time, the first time I had told the history to a group that large. I was used to telling it to family groups and gatherings.”

The story of Elder Louis W. Parson’s migration from Shubuta, Miss., to Albany’s South End, of his risky missions back to his hometown to retrieve the beleaguered sharecropping members of his congregation (one carload at a time), and of his 1930 purchase for them of a 14-acre plot of land in the “country” west of Fuller Road, is so compelling that it seems it would tell itself. Or, at the least, would provide grist for the mill of some high-priced screenwriter and a major motion-picture studio. But the community was, in actuality, long overlooked by everyone but the 23 families who settled there (18 of which are still represented among residents).

Dickson says that in high school, her Albany classmates were baffled when she explained to them where she was from: “‘Rapp Road? Rapp Road?’ They were so used to saying ‘street’ that when I told them they would just say, ‘Oh, you’re from the country.’”

Country ripe for development, as it happened—not the type of attention small and fragile neighborhoods can easily bear. In the years after the construction of Washington Avenue Extension in 1970, sprawl began its creep westward: The pine barrens suffered the intrusion of Crossgates Mall and Crossgates Commons, in addition to other commercial and residential development. The fate of the modest cluster of cottages and bungalows seemed uncertain.

Fortunately, Dickson’s investment in her community and her motivation to speak out caught another kind of attention: First, that of New York State Museum research fellow Jennifer Lemack, who joined Dickson in ferreting out the details of Elder Parson’s travels and the settlement of the Rapp Road community; and, then, of a representative of the New York State Department of Parks and Recreation, who helped guide them through the process of securing historic-district status.

It is far easier, Dickson says, to convince a panel viewing a slide of a Tiffany window of the historic importance of a single church than it is to impress upon them the significance of a living community—but they did it, perhaps saving the neighborhood from a future in an archeologist’s dustpan.

Dickson will continue to tell her stories to schoolchildren and other public gatherings of folks interested in the dramatic migration of Parsons and his congregation, but she’s now freer to focus on her favorite audience:

“We have these huge family reunions—over 300 people out here. We do a play or tell stories about the history, and there’s families all down the line; we have four generations out here. We are very hopeful that the history is as important to them as it is to us.”

Photo: Ellen Descisciolo

Jim Kunstler

Jim Kunstler, 55, Saratoga Springs, publishes Civitas, a monthly broadside of local politics and civic arts in Saratoga Springs. He’s also a well-known author of books on urban planning, and a novelist.

“You have to hack your way through a lot of lunchmeat in this world,” and Jim Kunstler is at the ready with a machete. This metaphor graces Civitas, Kunstler’s monthly newsletter, and to him it means, “It’s hard going as you navigate your way through the pitfalls, and troubles, and travails of life.” So he prints Civitas to help Saratoga Springs residents make sense of the place.

Kunstler, who gained national acclaim as proponent of new-urbanist design in the mid ‘90s with his books The Geography of Nowhere and Home from Nowhere, wrote a monthly column on urban planning and local politics for The Saratogian until about four years ago, when the paper started to object to his more political writing. “I was attacking the Republican establishment, for whom they are the unofficial protectors,” he explains. Rather than endure censorious editors, Kunstler set out on his own.

Civitas is essentially “a lone newspaper column unattached to any newspaper, but necessarily so,” he says, lamenting that The Saratogian is the only game in town. “It’s an odious rag.”

Kunstler spends about three days monthly putting Civitas together all by himself (not counting the copiers at Kinko’s). “It’s kind of a burdensome little sideline because I do have a regular professional life beyond it,” he says. Usually Civitas comes out every third Wednesday of the month, and the stacks of single 11-by-17 sheets disappear almost as quickly as they came.

Kunstler tirelessly scrutinizes Saratoga in every issue, often breaking stories. The latest edition (Dec. 3) is all politics: He blazes through seven examples of Mayor-elect Mike Lenz’s “deliberate, calculated lying,” decries the “monkeyshines” at Skidmore’s polling place, and exposes how The Saratogian’s publisher pressured the staff to endorse Lenz to keep the city Republican chair, who is not coincidentally a major advertiser, happy. “Saratoga has a particularly pernicious Republican machine that would sell this town down the river in five minutes for lunch if they could do it,” Kunstler says.

“Civitas is kind of a throwback to the sort of 18th-century broadsides that were published in pre- and post-revolutionary America,” Kunstler says. “Mine is done in the same spirit and with perhaps a similar revolutionary zeal, although I don’t consider myself a leftist revolutionary. I’m sort of a centrist.”

As for being a hero, he says, “You’re never a hero in your own town, you’re just another schmuck with an opinion.” He adds that he’s certainly not alone in this local underappreciation, but that it’s particularly ironic when he is paid to go to other towns to share his ideas.

“I don’t consider myself an indispensable figure in my town,” he says. “Saratoga did all right before I came along and it’ll probably do all right after I leave. While I’m here, I intend to make my voice heard.”

And like the motto implies, the “lunchmeat” is never-ending, and Kunstler’s not going anywhere any time soon. In the short term, the local elections are still on his mind. “There’s plenty of room for the victors to make some terrible blunders during their term in office,” he says. “And I expect they won’t disappoint me.”

Photo: Joe Putrock

Matto

Matt Laque, Albany, is a Scotia native who works tirelessly to promote local musicians and artists and the indie music scene.

Matt Laque, or Matto, as he’s better known, is an extremely busy guy. Between playing with his bands Kitty Little, John Brown’s Army and To Hell and Back, he finds time to organize huge shows like the Hawaiian Rawk Fest and smaller DIY shows. He encourages his fellow musicians and works hard to promote shows in the local media.

Right now, Matto is focusing on his work with Miss Mary’s Art Space, an inclusive arts collaborative that actually has no space right now, and its publication, Screed. He’s been helping to set up benefits to raise money for the organization to move into a new home on Central Avenue in Albany, but both money and work are needed to make that happen.

“The whole premise of the space is that it’s not curated or run by one person; it’s more or less whoever wants to do anything, and that kind of diversity is fun and it’s important. I think diversity is really important, and we had that with Miss Mary’s Art Space. I really appreciate that,” he says.

He adds, “I wish that the powers that be in the community like the mayor’s office and the business associations took a little more interest in the arts rather than having occasional token events [and] shutting places down like Miss Mary’s or giving places like that a hard time.”

When asked how he gets people to come out and support events, he shrugs, “If you do a show and it’s good and people have fun—that’s all I do. People come out.”

Matto is hesitant to take the credit for his arts organizing and promoting work: He repeats that he is by far not the only one who cares so much about the scene and that there are a lot of other people behind the events he organizes. He gives a lot of credit to online sources like the Hidden City and Bystander, and other collectives and venues. “There are a lot of good spaces—there’s the New Age Cabaret, which has a lot of good stuff, Changing Spaces. . . . Howard from Valentine’s is great, too—he cares about the music scene as much as anyone.”

There’s stuff happening every day, Matto points out, and there are enough people in the area who care enough to keep the music going. But among them Matto has been one of the most consistent and tireless in his everyday support of the Albany music scene, and he does it because he believes in it and wants to nurture it to the point where it’s a wholly united effort. All he gets out of it is the satisfaction of a job well done and a whole lotta fun. He grins, “If I were motivated by money, I’d have quit a long time ago.”

Photo: Shannon DeCelle

Erin O’Brien, 34, Albany, is the executive director of the Women’s Building on Central Avenue, where she has been expanding its programs and helping local organizations get started. In her “free” time she is involved with half a dozen local peace and justice groups, and in the lead-up to the war in Iraq, she organized against it around the clock.