The I.F. Stone of Sunset Park
Local blogger keeps close track of major waterfront development
If you go to a community board or other public meeting in the Sunset Park section of Brooklyn, chances are that you will see John Santore. Sometimes you will find him sitting on the front row of a school auditorium, scribbling fiercely as residents make their emotional pleas for or against development. Other times he will be at the back of the room, sitting on his heels, listening intently as members of the community board express their worry about the looming rezoning process. No matter the issue, John will be there, and he will most likely have more information than anyone else in the room. This information will then go on his blog, Sunset Park Reports.
Santore’s outfits rarely vary: khakis, a button-down shirt, hiking boots, and an old green puffer jacket. Although he is only 38 years old, he is balding a little, giving him the looks of a tired professor. And tired he must be. By day, he teaches history in a Bronx high school, and in order to make these early meetings in Sunset Park he must rush to get on a train right after school: the commute takes over an hour.
At one of the latest public forums, on October 3rd, residents gave their opinions about the ongoing Industry City controversy. This developer-led high-end office space, retail, and food court from the same people who did Chelsea Market came to the neighborhood in 2013, taking over several old warehouses, and is now asking the City Council for a rezoning to continue converting former industrial spaces into offices.
It was an emotional meeting. One local activist, Marcela Mitaynes, started crying after telling the story of an elderly lady in Sunset Park who got kicked out of her apartment when her landlord, excited by changes in the neighborhood, decided he wanted higher-paying tenants. “The reason people are yelling, the reason people are shouting, is because they are one step away from being displaced,” she said. “There is only so much I can do. I am only one person.”
Another community member, Randy Peers, a supporter of Industry City, raised his voice when it was time to speak: “Do not let a small group of activists determine what jobs we can create or cannot create in the community,” he said as half the crowd broke out in applause. But the next speaker, a long-haired young activist named Jeremy Kaplan, mocked him. “Oh, wow, very angry… why so angry?” he said.
Soon it was Santore’s turn to speak. His approach was very different. “I have never taken a public position on rezoning,” he said, “I never felt like I could take an educated position on it because I think that they are many structural questions that we have not gotten the answers to.” He proceeded to list some of these questions: Why did Industry City need to rezone for its expansion when it still had, according to a document he’d been able to retrieve via a FOIA request, 28 percent unutilized space? Why did they send a letter to Councilman Menchaca and the Community Board 7 threatening to go a hundred percent commercial office if they were refused a rezoning? Did people know that in 2017, Industry City privately proposed turning over four million square feet to Amazon for its corporate office project, according to documents sent to the New York City Economic Development Corporation?
He concluded his remarks by saying that he thought Industry City should come address the neighborhood’s concerns directly. He added that he bore them no ill will. “It’s not personal,” he said, “it’s business.” Then he politely thanked everybody for listening, quietly put down the mic, and went back to his seat in the front row. After sitting down he continued to scribble quotes from the meeting, which the next day were up on his blog.
Santore was not always a local blogger. After graduating from Georgetown with a BA in Government, Santore became Communications Director for Democratic NY State Representative Louise M. Slaughter, who was also head of the House Rules Committee.
After almost three years on the Hill, Santore became a field organizer for the first Obama campaign, managing volunteers and canvassing for the future President all over the country. Santore then joined Media Matters for America, a non-profit working to “monitor and correct conservative misinformation.”
Santore then went back to school and received a Masters of Science from Medill Journalism School at Northwestern University. After graduating, he moved to New York City and began working for local outlets such as NY1 (where he was a camera operator), The Press of Atlantic City, DNA Info, and Patch. But he soon grew tired of this work and in 2017, he left journalism and took a job as a high school history teacher.
“I stopped being a reporter because for me reporting was very difficult emotionally,” Santore told me. “I felt like I was judging people a lot and deciding who is right and wrong and engaging in transactional relationships with people, in order to get quotes or info. That doesn’t mean that all of reporting is like that. But I was doing daily breaking news, which tends to be more transactional.”
He also stopped because he felt like he could not dig deep enough into the topics that he cared about. For Patch, he was a general assignment reporter, covering Community Board 7 in Sunset Park, but also Bed-Stuy, Community Board 6 which serves Carroll Gardens, Cobble Hill, Columbia Waterfront, Gowanus, Park Slope and Red Hook. This made him feel like he could not spend enough time investigating the issues of development on the Sunset Park waterfront.
Sunset Park Reports was created in 2017, when Santore moved to Sunset Park. He sees it as a way of using his reporting skills to help the community make informed decisions.
John says only ten or twelve people read his blog regularly, yet that small number does not discourage him: “I don’t look at the numbers at all, I try to not look at them,” he says. He also explains that his goal was not to have a lot of readers, but rather to put information out for activists and experts, who make up the majority of his following. For instance, John is not active on social media, and his Twitter is private. “I could have been a better reporter if I used social media more,” he says. “Who knows what I’m missing on there?”
His limited reach is seen when talking to people in the community. At the latest community board meeting, my seat neighbor Mo commented, “Yeah this guy is often at the meetings.” When asked if he reads the blog, he said, “No. I don’t really follow blogs.”
Bloggers like John can be placed in the tradition of I.F. Stone, the famous investigative reporter of the 1950s, who made a name for himself as a constant critic of then-FBI director Edgar Hoover and Senator Joseph McCarthy. In 1953, after being pushed out of traditional media, I.F. Stone, whose real name was Isidor Feinstein Stone, decided to publish an independent four-page newsletter named I.F. Stone’s Weekly.
For Stone, it was important to use his reporting tools in a way that was accessible to all: “I made no claim to inside stuff,” he wrote in the introduction to an anthology of his work, “obviously a radical reporter in those days had few pipelines into the government. I tried to give information which could be documented so the reader could check it for himself. I tried to dig the truth out of hearings, official transcripts and government documents, and to be as accurate as possible.”
Like John, Stone had been a traditional reporter before becoming independent. He started on the copy desk of the Philadelphia Enquirer, where he would work after class and at night during his college years.
Stone then followed the traditional route, working for small local outlets in the Philadelphia area at the Camden Courier-Post and the Philadelphia Record. After proving himself on the local scene he moved to New York and joined the New York Post and then the New York Daily Compass. In 1940, he moved to Washington to become the editor of The Nation. At the height of his prominence, he was a columnist for the PM, the New York Star and the New York Compass. When the Compass closed in 1952, Stone decided to change course and create his own media.
He was critical of what he called “the absence of news in newspapers,” and thought that the American media had become more interested in selling newspapers and advertising than in transmitting the truth. He also felt that the bureaucracies of traditional media were restricting reporters, who were at the mercy of powerful press relations offices able to control and shape the news: “Should a reporter resist the pressure, there are many ways to get rid of him,” he stated, explaining that punishment could come in the form of an angry phone call to the editor of the dissident reporter or by passing future stories to his competition, leaving him in the terrorizing state of being “out-scooped.”
“But a reporter covering the whole capital on his own — particularly if he is his own employer — is immune from these pressures,’’ he said, adding, “No bureaucracy likes an independent newspaperman. Whether capitalist or communist, democratic or authoritarian, every regime does its best to color and control the flow of news in its favor.”
Stone described himself as a “radical journalist,” and as such, he had many enemies, from the FBI director, whom he accused of racism and anti-semitism in their vetting methods of job applicants to the Atomic Energy Commission, whom he forced to admit their error in the range of detection of their first underground test — it was felt 2600 miles away, not 200 miles as they claimed. According to the Washington Post, Stone had an open file at the FBI, trying to link him to espionage activities, the dossier was not closed until he ended his newsletter, in 1971.
The spirit of I. F. Stone lives on in today’s independent local bloggers. They consider themselves activists who use reporting as a tool to expose abuse and tell the truth on the topics that they care about the most. In most cases for New York City bloggers, that cause is development.
Norman Oder can be seen as one of the first in this modern tradition of hyper-local reporting focused on the issue of development. Oder started his blog, Atlantic Yards/Pacific Park Report, in 2005, shortly after the massive Atlantic Yards-Barclays Center project was announced for Brooklyn’s Prospect Heights neighborhood.
The blog has a no-nonsense feel to it. One recurrent series is called “The Culture of Cheating” and exposes lies and failed promises from the developers behind the Atlantic Yards project. In a recent post titled, “The Culture of Cheating: What happened to Atlantic Yards/Pacific Park jobs?,” Oder wrote: “Forest City has even used a questionable job count to leverage more than $200 million in low-cost financing via a federal program that gives immigrant investors visas in exchange for purportedly job-creating investments”
Such specific information was found through numerous FOIL requests to the New York Economic Development Corporation and the Empire State Development Corporation as well as presentations made by the developer to the Community Board.
Before he started his blog, Oder was a traditional journalist, working as a daily reporter, and freelancer for The American Lawyer, Columbia Journalism Review, and the Village Voice. He then became the executive editor for news of the trade magazine Library Journal. In 2010, he left his job to work full time on a book about the Atlantic Yards project, as well as focusing on his blog.
I.F. Stone was covering the entire capital, and wrote for a readership of over 70,000 at the height of his glory. His witty tone and harsh criticism of McCarthy created a sense to his readers that he “got them.” Similarly, Oder is talking about issues that touch people directly, but are often not covered in a personal, ground level way.
Oder nailed the essence of the issue in an interview with the New York Observer in 2010: “The New York Times has a reporter assigned to cover the Nets, and one or two to cover the borough of Brooklyn. That’s a structural imbalance.”
This is true, for the major national newspapers rarely cover hyper-local issues, and most Brooklyn newspapers that used to cover the topics Oder cares about are now close to nonexistent. The Brooklyn Paper, one of the oldest papers covering all of Brooklyn in some details, regularly relies on Oder’s blog as a source of information.
Oder believes that his coverage is necessary, and more effective than what traditional media does.
Responding to a question in The Observer, Oder said: “I think that I would be less of a mad overkiller if we lived in a city with a daily devoted to Brooklyn. Can you imagine that a project of this size received just one op-ed in the Times? So, if I write versions of op-eds, does that make me the mad overkiller or does that mean I am filling a vacuum that should be filled?”
Although Norman Oder was one of the first local New York City citizen bloggers, there are now dozens of them, such as EV Grieve in the East Village, Queens Crap in Jamaica, Tribeca Citizen, The Uptown Collective in Harlem, Greenpointers, Brlyner and Free Williamsburg in Brooklyn, and many others. Some are Wordpress blogs, some are on Medium; some are focused on food, others on sports. But many focus on local politics and development.
These blogs sometimes go beyond their hyperlocal nature. In 2017, Katia Kelly, a stay-at-home mom who started Pardon Me For Asking, a blog reporting on her neighborhood of Carroll Gardens, accidentally stumbled upon story of intense national interest.
I met Kelly this fall. She turned out to have a thick German accent; she grew up in Karlsruhe, close to Alsace. Kelly also speaks perfect French, after living in Clermont-Ferrand for five years, while her father worked for the French tire company and national treasure, Michelin. At 14, she moved to the US with her family. She was trained as a fashion designer at the Parson’s School of Design, and started her own brand of children’s hand-knitted clothing in Brooklyn. By then, she was living in Carroll Gardens and married to Glen, who had a business selling office furniture. At no point did she think she would become a reporter.
A couple decades and two children after moving to the neighborhood, in 2006, Kelly started writing a personal blog, “mostly for fun,” she says. At first, she saw the blog as an opportunity to post news articles from the U.S. for her German and French friends to read, and vice versa. But this dialogue between Europe and America didn’t really resonate: “my friends weren’t really interested in that,” she says.
The blog then transitioned to recounting her thoughts and observations on her changing neighborhood. Traditionally an old Italian enclave, Carroll Gardens was being transformed by young couples fleeing Manhattan’s real estate prices to raise their children in the quiet and charming neighborhood. Kelly would walk around documenting the changing storefronts, the closing of retail spaces, and the slow gentrifying change.
Then big development came to the neighborhood, and the nature of Kelly’s blog took a turn. “For the first 20 years there were barely any changes in the neighborhood,” she says, explaining that gentrification and the changes in the neighborhood suddenly accelerated in the mid-00s.
As a homemaker, she says she had more time than most others to go to community meetings, and used her blog as a way of transmitting information to her neighbors. “I was busy raising a family, renovating an old brownstone, and I had time to go to meetings,” she says. “My neighbors mostly don’t have the time, don’t go to these meetings, and I thought I would start writing about this to help them get educated.”
This is also where her activism started. A strong critic of development, Kelly does not claim to be impartial when discussing those issues. On her blog, a massive headline states: “The Gowanus development is dirty politics.” She and her husband, who joined the community board after retiring from his job selling office furniture, both work on the issue: “We kinda attack from both sides,” she said, laughing.
Kelly was not trained as a journalist, and she refuses to be called one, yet she uses reporting techniques worthy of investigative reporters. She’s no stranger to FOIL requests, property record searches and court filings. She also receives regular tips from the community. She says that the community used to be served relatively well by two local papers, The Brooklyn Paper and The Carroll Garden Courier. But in 2009, they were brought up by NewsCorp, Rupert Murdoch’s media company, and made one. Now, Kelly says no one reads this paper, even though it’s free. “It’s a waste of paper,” she says. According to her, the paper is only looking for controversy, in a constant game of “he said, she said.”
She feels that not being a traditional journalist gives her the freedom she needs to be both a reporter and an activist. “What is so great about it is that they [the developers and local politicians] can’t stop me — they can’t call my editor and disagree,” she says. She has had conflicts with Bloomberg, who was Mayor for most of her blog’s life, and Bill de Blasio, when he was Councilman in Carroll Gardens. She called him out regularly for being too lenient to developers, and voting in favor of rezonings.
There is a specific tone that Kelly uses on her blog, a way of interacting directly with her readers, while at the same time providing them with well-reported, thorough investigations. She likes in particular to open her blog posts with a leading question. “Pardon me for asking,” she wrote on February 16, 2017, “but could it be that Paul J. Manafort, Junior, the veteran Republican strategist and former national chairman to the presidential campaign of Donald Trump, owns a brownstone in Carroll Gardens?” What she didn’t know then, was that this simple question would soon put her at the heart of one of the biggest political scandals of the year.
While walking around her neighborhood on a February afternoon, Kelly had noticed that a massive brownstone on Union Street appeared to have been left to deteriorate. It seemed like no one lived there, the windows were broken, the front door closed by a chain. Kelly asked a neighbor what was happening, and the neighbor said that Paul Manafort owned the house. Kelly was intrigued; why did this DC big shot own a home in Carroll Gardens (and why was he taking such poor care of it)? She looked up records for the property, and found a mortgage for $6,803,750, well above what the value of the house should have been. She posted all this information on the blog, asking her readers: “What do you make of this?”
Soon after, the news was picked up by local media, then national media. The New York Post contacted Paul Manafort about it, then The New York Times picked it up. What they found was a whole money-laundering set-up, which would eventually lead to the indictment of Manafort nine months later by Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance. That indictment would eventually be part of the 12 counts of conspiracy to launder money brought by Robert Mueller in Virginia and DC. Soon Katia was profiled in Vanity Fair, and featured in The New Yorker, The Daily Beast, and CNBC.
The takeaway from this story is simple for Kelly: “If you cover local issues you can understand the country better,” she said, “every story is local.”
Although she says about 1000 people read her posts everyday, Kelly is not paid for her blog, aside from a couple Google ads that she says barely cover the cost of the server hosting the blog, and some picture.
She calls it a “labor of love,” and is not stopping anytime soon. She recently made a huge FOIA request for correspondences between the city councilman, the Department of City Planning and some developers, including Jared Kushner, who owns an entire block near the Gowanus Canal under an LLC, and has been trying to have the area rezoned to turn it into a housing complex. A lot of it came back redacted, she says, “but I’m not at the end of it, I will continue pushing.”
She also takes personal satisfaction from how much her blog has helped her get to know her own neighborhood. “I got wrapped up in community affairs and development and found an audience in my community,” says Kelly. “And I found my voice.”
John Santore decided to start his blog after covering Community Board 7 and Sunset Park as a reporter for Patch.com. He was especially motivated by the development of the Sunset Park waterfront, led by Jamestown Properties. In 2013, this group had bought some abandoned manufacturing buildings, previously known as Bush Terminal, between 32nd and 38th Street between Third Avenue and the East River .
Santore has followed and documented all developments related to Industry City since starting his blog in 2017. He is constantly using FOIA requests to show what the initial plans and proposals were for Industry City, contrasting them to what is actually happening now.
No less than 28 FOIA/FOIL requests can be found on Sunset Park Reports. This is a tool that most private citizens do not know about. Freedom of Information Requests (FOIL is the NY State version) can be made to any government agency, publicly traded company or any public organization that benefits from taxpayer money. But these requests are technically complicated and time consuming. They are only fruitful when made to the right government agency, have to be specific enough for clerks to locate the appropriate document, can take a really long time to be fulfilled (the average time is about 45 days), and sometimes even cost money. Needless to say, this is not everyone’s hobby.
But Santore says he enjoys sending FOIA requests, and tries to always have a few in progress, to “keep the ball rolling.” Recently on his blog, he reminded the community that in a 2016 presentation, obtained through a FOIL request to the New York City Economic Development Corporation, Industry City pledged to create 20,000 jobs by 2025; he then described his frustration at not being able to get Industry City to tell him or anyone else how many jobs they had actually created.
In addition to the lack of transparency, citizens are disadvantaged by the sheer volume of paperwork that these questions entail. At the latest community meeting, John Fontillas, chair of the Community Board’s Land Use Committee, joked that Industry City’s proposed rezoning application weighed in at 3,000 pages. “In case you are a masochist and wanted to read it,” he said.
But once again John came to the rescue. In a blog post titled, “Tips for keeping track of Industry City’s rezoning application,” he went through the entire application and explained what was in it. In a later, lengthy post, he explored and analyzed three possible pathways:
Pathway 1: Approve or reject the rezoning as offered by IC, without modification
Pathway 2: Negotiate a modified rezoning proposal with IC
Pathway 3: Reject IC’s proposal and negotiations, and pursue a publically-initiated rezoning process.
Santore concluded: “After following public reporting, speaking to community members, and attending public forums, I believe it is logical for community members to negotiate a potential rezoning with IC in order to see where the process leads.” Pathway 2 it is.
But his heart was not in it. He admitted that he would rather see the community reject the rezoning proposal. However, that was not the most logical option to him: “Because I do not at this time know if it is legally possible or politically sensible to pursue [this pathway], I do not feel comfortable advocating for it exclusively,” he wrote.
At the latest community board meeting on November 20th, Santore arrived 45 minutes late, and sat at the back, on the floor of a cramped room in the Sunset Park branch of the Brooklyn Public Library.
Nominations were happening for the committees that were going to oversee the Industry City rezoning application. Amidst cries of “We can’t hear anything in the back” and “Who was nominated?,” John sat quietly listening. When the community board chair Cesar Nunziata asked for members of the press to identify themselves, John did not raise his hand.
After a while he left, seemingly uninterested when State Senator Kevin Parker showed up as a special guest, to urge people to register for the 2020 census . He picked up a bunch of flyers and notes on his way out.
But a couple of days later, he hit publish on a very lengthy post, outlining 34 questions that he feels he still does not have the answer to regarding the rezoning process. He asked for the developers to speak directly to the community regarding their economic plan for the future of Industry City, citing a specific sentence on page 6 of a 58-page-long document stating that Industry City would have to invest “$638 million towards capital upgrades for existing buildings and the construction of new facilities.”
He also referenced news articles, and letters and official documents, including a 2016 PowerPoint presentation Industry City made at the Brownfields Conference, in Connecticut, obtained through a FOIL request.
John asked a lot of simple questions that still remain unanswered such as: “Is the Industry City complex currently profitable?” he wrote. Santore wanted answers. If he did not get them, he would file a FOIL request.
