What you need to know for Monday.
The Legacy of the Willowbrook Scandal |
Weather: Expect a sunny morning and a high in the upper 50s. |
Alternate-side parking: In effect until Ash Wednesday. |
 | | Demetrius Freeman for The New York Times |
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In 2014, state officials investigated a group home in the Bronx and found signs that some residents had been abused by staff members. One resident, Migdalia, appeared to have been kicked so hard that she had a “big purple blotch” resembling a shoe imprint below her navel. |
Migdalia is developmentally disabled and nonverbal. |
And it was not the first time she appeared to have endured abusive conditions. |
The problems at Willowbrook |
When Migdalia was 7 years old, in 1964, her parents placed her at the Willowbrook State School in Staten Island. The next year, Senator Robert F. Kennedy visited and said the children there “live in filth.” |
In 1971, The Staten Island Advance reported on the problems there. The next year, Willowbrook drew national attention after the television reporter Geraldo Rivera aired graphic footage from inside the children’s ward. |
As part of a landmark legal settlement, the state agreed to place Willowbrook alumni in smaller residential facilities, and pledged to provide all of the former residents with high-quality care for the rest of their lives. |
One of those people was Migdalia. |
In 1980, Migdalia was sent to live with her mother and thrived at home for more than 20 years, relatives said. She was friendly and cooperative, and responded to people who were familiar to her. |
After Migdalia’s mother died in 2004, she was placed in the Bronx group home. It was there that, a decade later, a whistle-blower contacted state officials and relatives with accusations of abuse and neglect. |
The state found evidence that about a dozen residents at the group home had been mistreated. Of them, five, including Migdalia, were Willowbrook alumni. |
Willowbrook alumni were supposed to be protected |
Many of the 2,300 Willowbrook alumni alive today still endure mistreatment, a New York Times investigation found. Last year alone, there were 97 allegations of physical abuse against alumni, according to internal state records. |
The Times’s Benjamin Weiser found that in one case in 2019, for example, a woman in a Long Island group home had part of her finger amputated after it became caught in a wheelchair wheel. An employee had failed to ensure the woman’s hands were in her lap. |
A new beginning for Migdalia |
New York State recently gave up control of the Bronx group home as part of a settlement with three families who had sued, alleging that their relatives were abused. A nonprofit provider now runs the group home and said it had hired all new workers. |
For Migdalia, the changes were overdue. |
Residents at a Bronx housing development for older adults may see their nearest bus stop moved three-tenths of a mile away. [Norwood News] |
A man walking to work at a bakery in Brooklyn was killed in a hit-and-run. [amNew York] |
Protesters in Washington Heights criticized voting glitches in the Dominican Republic’s elections. [News 12] |
Black Food Folks’ All About Pop-Ups event, at 204 Parkside Avenue in Brooklyn, has panels on how to create, promote and manage the businesses. 7 p.m. [$20] |
Events are subject to change, so double-check before heading out. For more events, see the going-out guides from The Times’s culture pages. |
And finally: Inside New York’s TikTok bodegas |
The Times’s Aaron Randle reports: |
The rule is simple: Answer a math question correctly, and you get five seconds to pick up anything you want, free. Everything, except one item. |
“Not my cat!” Those are the rules, according to Ahmed Alwan, a clerk at his family’s Lucky Candy Deli in the Bronx. He gives the math challenge to customers, records it and shares the clip on the short-form video app TikTok. One video (in which he yells “Not my cat!”) has been viewed more than five million times. |
Because of videos like that one, New York’s bodega culture is being introduced to a wider audience. Mr. Alwan has close to a half-million followers on TikTok. Overall, there are more than two million videos on the app under the “bodega” hashtag. |
As for Mr. Alwan, he said math contestants had grabbed more than $400 worth of goods in the past month alone. The money comes out of the $350 paycheck he gets every two weeks. He has created a GoFundMe page to pay for groceries won during the game. |
It’s Monday — visit your bodega. |
Metropolitan Diary: Postal service |
I had left work for the day, and I had a letter to mail. I headed to the old-school mailbox on the corner near my office, on Sixth Avenue in Midtown. |
I pulled down on the handle, and the mailbox door squeaked down with it. I slid my letter into the narrow slot and closed the door. I opened the door again to confirm that the letter had slid down and was not stuck in the slot. |
I was about to walk away when a woman approached the mailbox. She had a stack of letters in one hand and multiple bags hanging from each of her arms. |
The woman tried to grab the door handle with her free hand, but the bags she was carrying limited her reach. I could see she was not going to be able to open the mailbox while she was holding the bags. |
Without a word, I lowered the door. With her arms tucked to her sides, she got onto her tiptoes and extended her hand until she was able to slide the letters into the slot. |
I closed the door. The woman just stood there, staring at the mailbox. I opened the door once again. She looked in to make sure her mail had slid down, then turned and walked off. |
New York Today is published weekdays around 6 a.m. You can also find it at nytoday.com. |
We’re experimenting with the format of New York Today. What would you like to see more (or less) of? Post a comment or email us: nytoday@nytimes.com. |
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