In a small storefront in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Brighton Beach, a tiny television is tuned to ‘Judge Judy.’ The no-nonsense judge yells at the plaintiff from behind her desk in typical stern fashion, “She has to get a job! She’s LAZY!”
Behind a similarly large wooden desk—with the addition of a “herd” of decorative elephant figurines—sits Pat Singer, the founder and director of the Brighton Beach Neighborhood Association.
“She’s my idol,” Singer said of Judge Judy. “I like how she’s tough. I hate the court shows where they’re talking back to the judges.”
Pat Singer is an equally tough woman in a velour tracksuit, with short, fiery orange hair and shocking blue eye shadow. She started the BNA in 1977, when the neighborhood was, as she puts it, “going down the tubes.”
“There were problems with drugs, problems with prostitution,” Singer explained. So, after the twelfth mugging on her block, she gathered hundreds of residents to march in protest. “We circled, like covered wagons, and held traffic for four hours,” she said. “And being a drama queen, I played ‘Exodus’ over the loudspeakers.”
One witness—current U.S. Senator Charles Schumer—approached her soon after and asked, “Would you like to do this for a living?” Next came a $25,000 grant, a small office inside of a bank, and the Brighton Beach Neighborhood Association was born.
“They had to move us to another room because we were too noisy,” Pat said with a smile.
Thirty-three years later, the BNA is still making a lot of noise. Pat’s new office on Brighton Beach Avenue is covered literally wall-to-wall with photographs, posters, and knick-knacks collected over the years. One ornament decorating Pat’s shelf reads “51% Sweetheart, 49% Bitch…All Woman.” Her daughter gave her that one.
The two other desks, equally cluttered, are the homes to Pat’s part-time employees. Most of the time it’s Christina, who deals with finances, and Russian-speaking Janet Veksler.
Local residents come to the BNA for any number of reasons. Daily, people come bearing problems with rent, food stamps, or landlords. Russian and Spanish-speaking people come here simply to have their mail translated. “We never know what the next problem will be,” Pat said.
Their current problem is Irving.
Irving is an 82-year-old man and a long-time client of the BNA. He just got out of a nursing home, after apparently being mistreated by the staff, and needed a place to live. “No phone, no kids, no wife—he’s all alone,” said Janet Veksler. “Eighty-two years old and he has practically nothing.”
So the BNA set him up with a first floor, rent-frozen apartment, a bed, and some second-hand furniture. The problem is, his television set has yet to arrive. “That’s still a saga in progress,” Janet said.
A small typo on the delivery forms had been haunting Pat for days, as a UPS truck was now driving around looking for a Brighton L5 Street. “Anybody who knows Brighton Beach knows there’s no such thing as Brighton L5 Street!” Pat yelled.
“Cross your fingers,” she said as a brown truck passed the store window. No such luck.
The BNA deals with these kinds of tedious issues all the time. Pat says she gets backaches from the stress. “It’s stressful because we’re working with human lives,” she said. “If I could leave it at work, it would be fine, but I don’t. I take it home with me. I live with Irving in my head all weekend.”
Added to the daily pressures of their jobs, the ladies now have to deal with a broken toilet. A man from Roto-Rooter does the dirty work behind them in the office bathroom.
The day before, a different plumber caused a veritable sewage explosion. A “river of crap,” as Janet put it, flowed out the bathroom and almost reached Pat’s desk. The office still smells like sewage. “This story’s not gonna have a happy ending,” Janet said forebodingly.
But the BNA team is used to happy endings. From the mundane, everyday problems of residents to larger issues like tenant rights, Pat and her team know how to fix almost everything, except maybe that toilet.
In an apartment just across the street from the office, one landlord refused to grant his tenants Section 8, a subsidized program that pays most of the tenants’ rent. The BNA took him to court, and fixed that problem.
When one Brighton Beach resident went to visit his wife’s grave and found that her tombstone had been knocked down, he called Pat. She called the cemetery and the grave was fixed, good as new.
One particular memorable landlord tried to kick everyone out of an apartment building, to perhaps, as Pat believes, build a condo. “Some tenants were even Holocaust victims,” she said. They fixed that one too.
And when a woman needed to bury her mother, but didn’t have enough money, the BNA paid for the funeral and arranged a service in Richmond, New Jersey. Another situation fixed—another sad story with a happy ending.
To lighten the mood, Pat is planning the BNA’s annual holiday party, and everyone’s invited. It cost around $2,000 for the venue, food, and DJ. There are 200 gift bags waiting for the first 200 guests—New York Lottery donated t-shirts and hats, while Optimum sent over travel coffee mugs. There are also twelve donated bottles of vodka waiting to be raffled off.
“This party’s become my little Macy’s Day Parade,” Pat said with a wink.
She knows how to plan a party—the BNA is also in charge of the annual Jubilee Festival held in the summer. It’s one of the biggest events in Brighton Beach, as well as the BNA’s main source of funds outside of what the government allots them.
Pat also knows the value of a certain favorite Russian drink. “One year we got donated little tiny bottles of vodka,” she said. “So everyone went home a little happier!”
The goal of the holiday party is to bring everyone in the community together. “Every ethnicity,” Pat said.
Pat loves the neighborhood’s Russian heritage—she fondly remembers childhood visits to her grandmother. But the fact is that Brighton Beach isn’t just for Russians anymore. The neighborhood now swells with large Spanish-speaking and Muslim communities. So a feeling of togetherness has been hard to cultivate.
“Even though they were under Communism,” Pat said of the Russian immigrants, “they don’t understand the word community!”
In addition, Pat believes that some Spanish-speaking residents are “timid” because they live here illegally. But for Pat, the hardest group to include has been the Muslim population. “I don’t know how to deal with them yet,” she said. “I don’t want to just go walking into their mosques. I’m minding my P’s and Q’s.”
Although many appreciate the Russian signs that give the neighborhood its signature look, Pat believes they can make people feel unwelcome. They should be bilingual, she believes, to “celebrate diversity” and create an “international community.”
“We need to work together,” she said. “Like Star Trek!”
Janet Veksler doesn’t think this is likely. “Not gonna happen,” she said flatly. “We are who we are, and that’s it. Period.”
Although Brighton-ites will come together for the holiday party and enjoy themselves, Janet—who moved here from Ukraine 28 years ago—sees a united community as an impossible dream. “They don’t speak the same language,” she said. “They come from completely different places. They have different goals in life, different views in life. Just different.”
Added to this, Janet believes that in general, Russians are never fully happy. “They’re just not happy people,” she said. “Something’s always off. They always find something to complain about.”
As if on cue, a woman then walked in complaining in Russian about the elevator repairs in her building. “It’s like a full moon in here!” Janet said as she grabbed her pack of cigarettes and stomped outside for a quick break.
Although she gets frustrated at times, Janet truly enjoys helping people, especially the elderly, who she feels are often mistreated. “Just because someone doesn’t understand the full extent of the law and what their rights are, doesn’t mean they should be taken advantage of,” she said.
Despite their good intentions, the BNA has made enemies as well as friends over the years. “I’m sure a lot of developers don’t like me,” Pat said. “Especially after I pushed for down zoning. Some of them came to meetings and booed me! Yes, I’ve been booed.”
Mike Cesario, who sometimes helps out at the BNA for a little extra cash, has known Pat for almost a decade. “She will give you the shirt off her back,” he said. “But if you piss her off, well, that’s one thing you don’t wanna do.”
Pat’s actions in court have gained her one particular enemy. “I’ve had a stalker for the past ten years,” she said—a man who she once testified against in housing court. And thirty years ago, a gunshot hole in her window made her wonder if perhaps she was biting off more than she could chew.
Pat’s enemies would be pleased to know that state budget cuts may be affecting the BNA more than expected. “I worry about the future,” Pat said. “It’s like cutting the baby in half. What happens, do I quit? I’m the breadwinner here. I’ve got to keep these peoples’ lives going.”
And that budget isn’t only keeping them going—it’s also Pat’s source of income. But Pat’s daughter Laura offered her some familiar words of motivation. “Never let them see you sweat, right mom?” she said.
While thoughts of budget cuts and gift bags and Irving’s TV loom in the office, it looks like there won’t be a happy ending after all for the case of the bad plumbing. “You have to get a new toilet,” said the Roto Rooter man.
“I need to relax,” Pat said, more frustrated than ever. “Turn the TV louder. Let me hear Judge Judy yell at somebody.”
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