John Liu gets a hug from a longtime supporter at a recent fundraiser. (Photo: Stella Chan)

An F.B.I. investigation into New York City Comptroller John Liu’s fundraising practices has had a chilling effect on Liu’s ability to raise money for a potential 2013 mayoral run. As revealed this week in his campaign filing report, he’s also been forced to spend thousands on legal fees related to the investigation. But John Liu remains a role model for New York’s Asian American community and still embodies the political aspirations of this growing segment of the city’s population. 

In this podcast, Fi2W executive producer John Rudolph interviews Sing Tao Daily reporter Stella Chan about her recent article for Fi2W concerning the conversations taking place about Comptroller Liu among Asian Americans. We also hear from Korea Daily Senior Reporter Danny Shin. Listen:

Subscribe to the Fi2W Podcast using Podbean or iTunes ¦ Download this episode

Reporter’s Notebook: “Scandal” vs. “Issue”

Chinese vs. English Language Media and the Subtlety of Words. By Stella Chan.

When the F.B.I. investigation unleashed a flood of news about City Comptroller John Liu, I saw that the stories in New York’s English-language and Asian-language media were as different as day and night. In contrast to the mainstream English-language press which uses the word “scandal” to refer to Liu’s situation, Chinese newspapers were terming it a “fundraising issue,” while the Korean press used the word “allegation.”

On October 11, 2011, the New York Times ran a front page article titled “Doubts Raised on Donations to Comptroller.” The investigative article uncovered irregularities in Liu’s donor lists, and subsequently, the F.B.I. began a probe into whether Liu’s campaign was illegally bundling donations. Immediately, the Chinese media began to run articles concerning the negative impact of the investigation on Asian American political participation. Several community leaders expressed their concerns about the investigation and some of them wondered if Liu was singled out because of his race. These angles were muted in the English-language press until the recent NY1 report, “Asian-American Community Struggles with Liu Controversy,” on Jan 5, 2012.

Meanwhile, the English media was reporting that Liu may be involved in several irregularities apart from his fundraising scandal, including his appointment of John Dorsa, his decision on a pension fund contract and his own office renovation. The New York Post even called upon Liu to resign, writing that “John Liu was never suited for public office,” in a November 21, 2011 editorial.  An Asian reporter, off the record, told me that some English press were running negative stories in order to damage Liu’s reputation.

The different approaches of English and Chinese media were clearly shown in the reporting on a press conference hosted by Liu’s Chinese supporters on December 22, 2011. The New York Post, Daily News and New York Times joined a number of Chinese media outlets at the Chinatown meeting. The following day, The Post and The Daily News came up with the headlines “Liu in FBI cross hairs” and “Liu insists he’s still running for mayor despite probe,” while the Chinese media wrote articles about supporters calling for a united community to back up Liu.

After the press conference, Lotus Chau, Chief reporter of Sing Tao Daily, (where this reporter is on staff) wrote in a side bar that because Liu is the first Chinese American who holds a city-wide office in New York City, when the New York Post refers to Liu as a “Liu-ser,” it is seen as a personal attack and makes many Chinese supporters uncomfortable.

“Innocent until proven guilty,” said Danny Shin, senior reporter for The Korea Daily who wrote an exclusive report about the FBI investigation of Korean donors. According to Shin, Korean supporters had donated $100,000 to Liu as of July 2011 and Korean supporters hosted a big fundraising event this month.  Shin says while the mainstream English-language media has their own take on the scandal, “We are neither reporting it negative nor positive.”

Listen to Stella Chan speaking about John Liu on our partner WNYC Radio.

Stella Chan is a reporter for Sing Tao Daily and a Feet in Two Worlds reporting fellow. Her work, and that of the other Feet in Two Worlds fellows, is supported by the New York Community Trust and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation with additional support from the Mertz Gilmore Foundation. Fi2W podcasts are also supported in part by WNYC Radio and the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism.

Takis Vassos, owner of Pegasus Travel, a travel agency in Astoria. (Photo: Ewa Kern-Jedrychowska/WNYC)

This story originally aired on WNYC.

With Greece’s economy reeling and its unemployment rate about 18 percent, some Greeks are trying their luck in the U.S. — especially true in the stronghold of Astoria, Queens, where Greek stores, restaurants and travel agencies dot Ditmars Boulevard and 31st Street.

Maria, a waitress at a trendy Astoria café, came to New York from Athens 1-1/2 years ago when Greece’s financial problems started taking their toll. Though the U.S. economy is also struggling with just shy of 9 percent unemployment, she said prospects in the U.S. seem better than in Greece.

“I want to stay here and maybe bring my family from Greece — my parents and my brother,” she said.

Maria, who didn’t want to give her last name because she did not want to be identified, was born in the U.S. and moved with her Greek parents back to Greece when she was a child.

After Greece restored democracy and joined the European Union in 1981, the country experienced remarkable economic prosperity. Many Greek families who had been living in the U.S., including Maria’s, decided to return to their homeland. Now the situation has shifted again.

But it’s not only those who have U.S. citizenship that come to America. It’s been easy for Greeks to travel to the U.S. since Greece joined the Visa Waiver Program in 2010.

Antonio Meloni, the executive director at a non-profit immigration outreach center Immigration Advocacy Services. (Photo: Ewa Kern-Jedrychowska/WNYC)

Antonio Meloni, the executive director at a non-profit immigration outreach center Immigration Advocacy Services, has noticed an increase in Greek clients in the past two months.

He says many ask him questions like: “How do you stay? Can I go to school? Can I get married? Can I get a job?”

“Now they’re coming back because of the economic situation,” he said, “and a lot of them have ties here, and of course in Greece, and they coming back wholesale. The whole families are coming back. …  So that is very unusual but it is definitely happening.”

Astoria’s Greek-American school is trying to accommodate a small but growing group of students who have recently relocated from Greece.

“We try to offer some remedial classes for these students because a lot of them come here without any background in English language,” said Helen Hartofilis, the middle school coordinator at St. Demetrios School, where students can also learn Greek history and the Greek Orthodox faith. “They find a transition from Greece to here easier for them because of our culture, because of our religion.”

Because it is a relatively small school of predominately Greek students — about 600 total in pre-K through 12th grade — it is easy to see when recent Greek immigrants enroll in the school.

Helen Hartofilis, the middle school coordinator at St. Demetrios School in Astoria. (Photo: Ewa Kern-Jedrychowska for WNYC)

It’s hard to know exactly how many Greeks have come to the U.S. in recent months. The city planning department has data on the number of immigrants in the city, but the data is not up-to-date enough to show recent trends.

But Dean Sirigos, a senior writer at the National Herald, a Greek-American paper based in Long Island City, Queens, expects the numbers to increase as the situation in Greece becomes more difficult under the government’s austerity program.

“The major impact of the austerity has not hit yet; the major layoffs from government have not hit yet,” he said. “The greatest pain might be experienced in the next year or two.”

Sirigos said the situation also affects Greek-Americans who are approaching retirement age and had planned to spend their golden years in their homeland.

“That dream is in hibernation because at this point they would be going back to a country in crisis,” he said.

Meanwhile the New York Greek community wonders what they can do to help their homeland. Greek-American organizations and business leaders have reached out to the Greek government to discuss potential investments.

Promoting tourism — which contributes 15 percent to Greece’s Gross Domestic Product — is one initiative. Local travel agents are working on it.

“If somebody comes to my office and wants to go to France let’s say I’m trying to convince [them] to go to Greece. And everybody likes to go to Greece,” said Takis Vassos, who has owned a travel agency in Astoria since 1966.

Vassos also said many Greeks in Astoria try to directly help their relatives in their homeland by sending them dollars.

But the pool of jobs in the U.S. has shrunk too and it’s clear the Greek diaspora has been dealing with its own problems. World Bank data indicates that remittances to Greece went down from $2.7 billion in 2008 to $1.5 billion in 2010.

“We had our own financial meltdown in the United States. The job market in New York is not very stable, many people are losing their jobs, there are many people on unemployment, who have been on unemployment for over a year now,” said Assemblywoman Aravella Simotas (D-Astoria) who sees Greek immigrants of all professional backgrounds dropping by her office to ask about finding work, even those who were doctors or architects in Greece.

Feet in Two Worlds is a project of the Center for New York City Affairs at The New School, supported by the New York Community Trust and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation with additional support from the Mertz Gilmore Foundation.

The memorial to flight 587. (Photo: priskiller/flickr)

Saturday, November 12, 2011 marks the tenth anniversary of the crash of American Airlines Flight 587.  The second most deadly aviation disaster in U.S. history claimed 265 lives, the majority of them Dominicans en route from New York’s Kennedy Airport to the Dominican Republic.  The following article by Annie Correal was originally published in Spanish by El Diario/La Prensa.  For more visit El Diario’s multimedia special on the crash of Flight 587 .

NEW YORK—Five years after they lost their father on American Airlines Flight 587, Patrisel and Josmel LaFontaine faced another crisis. The teenagers’ mother had died after a botched plastic surgery in Santo Domingo, leaving them at the mercy of their mother’s family, which immediately stepped in. But not everyone was there to help – some relatives were after the Flight 587 compensation money.

“It was a hot mess,” says Patrisel, who is now 22 and living with her 19-year-old brother in the Bronx. “A few people got involved. They tried to bribe [a family friend] to give them my mom’s bank account information. They asked us personally for our mother’s pin numbers.”

Flight 587 was bound for the Dominican Republic when it crashed on November 12, 2001 in Belle Harbor, Queens — just minutes after taking off from John F. Kennedy Airport. In addition to five people on the ground who were killed in Belle Harbor, all 260 people on board the flight perished.

Listen to Annie Correal talk about the Flight 587 anniversary on today’s Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC.

For the LaFontaine family and dozens of others, the crash of Flight 587 meant the loss of a loved on — and in some cases several — but it also meant an end to peace in the family, as relatives waged long battles over who would get the settlement awarded by American Airlines and the aircraft manufacturer, Airbus Industry.

Under the law applied to all of the victims on board — general maritime law — compensation money was determined based on a victim’s earnings and how many people depended on them, and it went to the victim’s spouse and children. If the person was unmarried and childless, it passed to their parents. In other words, siblings, girlfriends, boyfriends and extended family were not entitled to any settlement money—and in large Dominican families this tended to create serious issues.

“Compensation created a lot of problems,” said Belkis Lora, who assisted a large number of victims’ families. “Instead of becoming more united after the crash, many families were torn apart.”

Lawyers interviewed for this piece would not reveal how much families received in compensation. But Lora said that the average settlement was around $1 million dollars. “As far as I know, there was not a huge range,” she recalled, “There was a balance.”

Lora is a thin woman in her early forties who lives in Ozone Park, Queens and works for Jet Blue at JFK. She lost her only brother José Francisco Lora when the flight went down and has since dedicated all her free time to advocating for families whose relatives died on Flight 587 – especially poor, non-English speaking families in New York and the Dominican Republic. She estimates she has met 200 of these families and now presides over the Committee in Memory of Flight 587.

While most families received similar pay-outs, Lora noted that poor families were at a disadvantage when it came to compensation—the poorer the family, the more quickly they tended to settle their cases, often settling for smaller amounts than they deserved. “The people who weren’t so needy could wait longer – and get a little more,” said Lora.

While several families declined to be interviewed, Lora and other sources in New York’s Dominican community recalled around 20 cases in which compensation caused a family rift. The most common problem encountered was extended families — especially siblings — fighting over money they weren’t legally entitled to, as happened in the LaFontaine family.

Romantic relationships also created problems. In one case, in which the names were withheld, a man had been separated from his wife for years and was living with a new partner, but the wife received the compensation money when he died in the crash—instead of his current partner. In another case, a victim’s compensation money went to a spouse that they had married for a green card—over the protests of the victim’s family.

The laws governing compensation also affected children.  In several cases, children had been living with different parents and had to file separate claims for their parent’s compensation, creating disputes. In one case, a crash victim had been raising his wife’s children, but because they were not legally his children, they received nothing when he was killed in the plane crash.

Ironically, many families struggled against poverty while they waited for settlements approaching one million dollars. After José LaFontaine died on Flight 587, the widow of the beloved music producer, Patria, had to depend on food stamps and welfare to support her children. In 2004, her lawyer reached a settlement with American Airlines and Airbus for an undisclosed amount, which was divided between the widow and his children.

When Patria suffered an embolism while getting a tummy tuck, fell into a coma, and died a year later, her siblings felt entitled to the compensation funds.  “Nobody knew where it was, it was scattered between all kinds of bank accounts,” Patrisel recalled. “To this day I don’t know how much there was.”

Josmel, who was 14 at the time, recalls his relatives fighting over what was left behind. “They even came and took blankets, curtains, pots and pans and decorations,” he said, “It was like, ‘We’re family, we can take whatever.’”

Today the LaFontaine children share the house in Parkchester where they were raised and where their father José once recorded albums in the basement. Patrisel is now 22 and a full-time student at John Jay College and she works at a cell phone store in Manhattan. Josmel is a freshman at Hunter College.

The two of them can go to college thanks to a scholarship created for the children of Flight 587 victims—and they are able to pay rent thanks to the compensation money their family received after their father’s death, which their mother had put in a trust fund. And yet the bitter struggle over compensation money that tore through their family after their parents’ deaths has left them virtually alone.

“It was damage to the family — some people came out of left field,” said Patrisel recently.

“That was our family,” added her brother, Josmel, “We didn’t expect them to do that to us.”

Henryk Siwiak, a Polish immigrant, was fatally shot on September 11, 2001

This story originally aired on WNYC Radio on September 7, 2011.

NEW YORK—At around 11:45 p.m., on September 11th, 2001, the streets of Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, were nearly empty as most residents were transfixed by TV screens, trying to comprehend the magnitude of the terror attacks that had shaken the city earlier that day.

But Mona Miller who lives at 121 Decatur Street just off Albany Avenue, was taking care of her ailing mother, and she suddenly heard an argument and then a gunshot.

“I heard a couple of men talking, arguing and I heard a shot,” she recalled. “I don’t know if I heard a shot or couple of shots but I didn’t come to the window because I don’t dare come to the window.”

After the police arrived, she peered out the window and saw a man in a military fatigues lying on the sidewalk in front of the building next door: It was Henryk Siwiak, a Polish immigrant, who had been fatally shot in the chest.

It was the only homicide in New York City recorded on September 11, 2001. And it remains unsolved.

Listen to Ewa Kern-Jedrychowska’s radio story about Henryk Siwiak:

Ten years later it’s hard to reconstruct Siwiak’s last day and even harder to find a motive for his killing. Police recovered seven shell casings from across the street, but only one bullet that came from 0.40 caliber handgun hit him.

The 46-year-old father of two was in the midst of looking for a job. Work was the reason he had come to the U.S. 11 months earlier.

In Poland he worked at the railroad, but didn’t earn much and had little prospects of improving his family’s situation.

His sister, Lucyna, had been living in the U.S. for six years. When he made the trip and decided to stay for a while — even though he didn’t have legal documents — he lived with her in Far Rockaway, Queens, and then moved only a few blocks away.

He did all kinds of jobs: construction, cleaning — whatever brought in cash.

Every month he sent a few hundred dollars to his wife Ewa and two children, Gabriela, then 17, and Adam, 10, whom he left in Cracow, his sister said. He was quiet, she said.

“He never drank alcohol and didn’t have many friends,” Lucyna said.

On the morning of September 11, 2001, he went  to Lower Manhattan.

According to his sister says he worked there at a construction site, but after the attack on the World Trade Center his workplace was shut down.

So he walked to Brooklyn and sometime later went to a Polish employment agency. There he was offered a job: to clean a Pathmark supermarket in Flatbush. The pay was around $10 an hour and he would start that same night.

Read the rest of the story at WNYC.

The band Wiener Tschuschenkapelle, is made up of immigrants from the former Yugoslavia living in Austria. (Photo: Wiener Tschuschenkapelle's MySpace page.)

Feet in Two Worlds Reporter Jelena Kopanja produced this story for PRI’s The World about the Viennese group “Wiener Tschuschenkapelle.” It is a band that is fighting some common stereotypes that migrants from the former Yugoslavia face in the Austrian capital.

Listen to the story which aired August 24 on PRI’s The World.

Watch a performance by Wiener Tschuschenkapelle:

The first story, by Martina Guzman, is about Detroit’s belly dancing scene.  Martina, a reporter for public radio station WDET, discovered that the Motor City is one of the few places in America where you can actually make a living as a belly dancer, thanks to the area’s large Middle Eastern population. Martina produced the story for our radio partner Studio 360.

In the second story, reporter Diego Graglia explores New York’s mysterious world of tango, a dance from his native Argentina.  Diego, who currently works for the Associated Press in Mexico City,  produced the story for WNYC, New York Public Radio.

Listen to the episode:

Subscribe to the Fi2W podcast on iTunes or Podbean ¦ Download this episode

Fi2W podcasts are supported by the New York Community Trust and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundationwith additional support from the Mertz Gilmore Foundation and the Sirus Fund, and are produced in association with the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism and CUNY-TV.

The real estate developer Sharif El-Gamal is spearheading efforts to build a mosque near Ground Zero. (Photo: Mohsin Zaheer)

Listen to Sade-e-Pakistan reporter Mohsin Zaheer speak about the efforts to build a mosque near Ground Zero with WNYC’s Marc Garber.
[Visit post to listen to audio]

Sharif El-Gamal is determined to build a mosque near Ground Zero.  Despite the worldwide controversy that erupted last year over Mr. El-Gamal’s plan to develop a mosque and Muslim cultural center near the World Trade Center site, he is spearheading a new effort to make the proposal a reality.

Mr. El-Gamal, the chairman and CEO of Soho Properties, a real estate development company, has launched a campaign to raise $7-million to support the mosque project.  The deadline for raising the money is September 10, just one day before the tenth anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks.

Referring to 9/11 in a speech at a fundraising dinner Friday night at the site of the proposed mosque in lower Manhattan, Mr. El-Gamal said, “Two blocks from where we are today our identities were stolen from us, and our faith was defaced.  And through this project we have an opportunity to show the world who we are, and what we believe in, and what our practice is, and what our faith is.”

Mr. El-Gamal denied that the September 10 fundraising deadline has any connection to the tenth anniversary of 9/11.  He called it a “motivational deadline” for people who want to support the project.  Another project supporter suggested that the date – 9/10/11 – may have been chosen for its numerological significance.

Watch El-Gamal’s remarks at a fundraising dinner on July 29, 2011:

Plans for the building at 49-51 Park Place include a space to accommodate 2-thousand worshipers and an adjacent community center that Mr. El-Gamal said would be like a YMCA.  The building, which is owned by Con Edison, is leased to Mr. El-Gamal’s group and already houses a small mosque.

Less than 75 people attended the kick-off dinner, which had been advertised in ethnic newspapers and on foreign-language TV channels aimed at Muslim immigrants.  Among those who showed up were a half dozen imams from around the country and representatives of the Nation of Islam, a sect mainly composed of African-Americans who have converted to Islam.  Some at the event speculated that many supporters of the project were scared to show up because of the negative publicity it received last year.

Noticeably absent were Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf and his wife Daisy Khan, who were the spokespeople for the project when it was originally introduced last year under the name Park51, and who became lightening rods for criticism by the project’s opponents.

Mr. El-Gamal said Imam Rauf and Ms. Khan are no longer associated with the project, and its name has been changed to PrayerSpace.

Mr. El-Gamal acknowledged the difficulties in getting the project off the ground. “There is no skirting around the issue, the story of this project and what the media has made of it,” he told supporters.  He said the mosque proposal is a response to “a specific need” in lower Manhattan’s Muslim community.   He said it will be “open to call, promote community relations, trust, goodwill and have a sense of neighborhoodlyness.”

Another speaker, Imam Abdul Malik of Panama City, Florida was among the few who directly addressed opponents, including conservative Republicans and some 9/11 family members who say it’s wrong to build a mosque so close to the site destroyed by Muslim terrorists.  “Islam is not responsible for what happened on that day,” he said, “we have to stop apologizing.”

According to an unofficial estimate, the fundraiser netted more than $200-thousand, including a $100-thousand loan from a mosque in Midtown Manhattan.   That was on top of $1.5-million organizers said they had raised previously.

Mohsin Zaheer of Sade-e-Pakistan contributed reporting to this story.

Fi2W is supported by the New York Community Trust and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation with additional support from the Mertz Gilmore Foundation.

Adrielle Grant, a 19 year old immigrant from Guyana, is homeless in New York City. (Photo: Maria Watts)

This story originally aired on PRI’s The World on June 30,2011.

Adrielle Grant recalls the day his mother kicked him out. That’s when she told me “‘you can’t live in this house, cuz I don’t want no gays in this house.’ Then she said she would kiss her mother’s grave if she if she knew I was gonna be gay.”

Adrielle is a 20-year-old immigrant from Guyana. For the past year he’s been living on the street and in temporary housing. We spoke in his bedroom at Green Chimneys, a program that provides housing and services for homeless youth.

Listen to the story:

[Visit post to listen to audio]

He moved to the US five years-ago with his sister. They initially lived in Atlanta with an aunt.

A year ago, Adrielle moved to New York to be with his mother. He was there only two weeks when his mother learned he was gay. A cousin in Atlanta revealed his secret. Adrielle’s mother confronted him in the street, shouting painful insults at him in public.

“And she should have had an abortion of me … and she would have never had these problems … and she would never forgive me for being gay,” he said.

And if he had stayed in Guyana, she probably never would have found out.

Adrielle says he’d known for years that he was gay, but he never told anyone until he came to the US. Back in Guyana, his family often made homophobic comments. Adrielle says he would never have come out if he had stayed there.

“It would be very dangerous for me to do that,” he said. “Especially the time right now, there’s a lot of violence.”

When he moved to Atlanta and started high school, he met other gay teens of Caribbean descent. And he began to feel more comfortable being open about who he was.

That’s typical for gay immigrant youths, says Carmen Quiñones, program director at Green Chimneys.

“They were raised and taught that it was so taboo to be out, and to be themselves, or to feel that,” Quiñones said. “Now, here in the states, they see that, and they are able to express it and show it, but at home they are rejected, or in their country. And, so, here they are trying to navigate that, and the feelings behind it.”

But their parents often feel unprepared and overwhelmed, says Quiñones.

That was experience for one Mexican couple. They agreed to share their story if I didn’t use their names. Last November their 19-year-old son came out to them.

“[Translated] it was a Sunday, we came home from church [and] our daughters told us,” the mother said. “‘Sit down, we want to talk to you.’ And then they said, ‘Jesse is gay.’”

She said, it was the end of the world.

“After they told us, I said, ‘Let’s move away from here, where no one will know us. We’ll sell the houses, and we’ll leave,’” the mother continued.

The mother said in her native Jalisco, people are not openly gay and that it’s never discussed.

Although the couple was devastated by their son’s revelation, they didn’t throw him – like Adrielle’s mother. They just never talked about it.

Then four months later, their son became very ill. He was diagnosed with meningitis, and fell into a coma. When his condition didn’t improve, the mother says she finally revealed to the doctors that her son was gay.

“I asked them to test him for HIV,” she said. “And my son is positive. At age 19.”

Their son came out of coma four days later, and his health is steadily improving. These parents say since that time, they’ve come to terms with their son’s sexuality.

“[Translation] well for me it was very strong, because he is my only son, the only son that God gave me,” the father said. “And so with him ends my name. I don’t applaud my son, but I also don’t punish him, because God made him the way he is. And, anyway, you can’t abandon your blood relations. He is our son.”

But the couple still isn’t ready to tell the family back home.

Related article: Gay Immigrant Youth in New York Struggle With Homelessness

Von Diaz is a Feet in Two Worlds LGBT reporting fellow.  Her work, and the work of other Fi2W fellows, is supported by the New York Community Trust and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation with additional support from the Mertz Gilmore Foundation.

Celebrations after the passage of same-sex marriage legislation in New York. (Photo: Zach Roberts/flickr)

As a guest on the Michael Eric Dyson Show, Fi2W’s Erwin De Leon talked about the historic passage of same-sex marriage legislation in New York and what it means for gay immigrants. Until the federal definition of marriage is changed (DOMA is officially removed from the books), bi-national gay marriages will not receive the same rights as heterosexual marriages, despite any state legislation.

Listen to the show.

Related Fi2W podcast: Gay Immigrant Couples and the Defense of Marriage Act

Pigeons are hated by some and loved by other New Yorkers. (Photo: Mohsin Zaheer)

Pigeon Tending on the Rise aired Monday on PRI’s The World. The story is about Pakistani and Eastern European immigrants who are bringing back the practice of keeping pigeons on New York City rooftops.

To listen to the story click here.