Brooklyn Teacher Is Accused of Abusing Girls for 3 Years

 ELIZABETH A. HARRIS and COLIN MOYNIHAN   

 

(It is a never ending challenge to keep predators away from children DF)

The investigation began with one explicit picture, sent by a teacher at one of New York’s elite public high schools to one of his female students through a messaging app.

That soon led the police to search the teacher’s phones and computers, where, law enforcement officials said, they unearthed a much larger trove: thousands of text messages to students, many of them inappropriate, and a video of the teacher, Sean Shaynak, having sex with a teenager.

Through interviews and the material on those devices, a portrait emerged of a teacher who befriended certain students when they were sophomores and juniors, offering them cigarettes and alcohol. Prosecutors said he sent them indecent photographs of himself, invited them to his apartment, took one to a nude beach and took another to a sex club. He had forcible sex with one of them when she was 18, the Brooklyn district attorney’s office said.

On Tuesday, Mr. Shaynak, 44, who taught math and science at Brooklyn Technical High School, was arraigned in State Supreme Court in Brooklyn on 36 charges involving six teenage girls, including sexual abuse, forcible touching, kidnapping, endangering the welfare of a child and disseminating indecent material.

Mr. Shaynak, who pleaded not guilty to all of the charges, was jailed after the hearing. He faces up to 25 years in prison if convicted of the most serious charges.

He had taught for about five years at Brooklyn Tech, one of the eight selective public high schools that admit freshmen based on a single exam. Mayor Bill de Blasio’s son, Dante, is currently a senior there.

The charges, brought by District Attorney Kenneth P. Thompson, outlined a frightening pattern of behavior that the authorities said took place from 2011 to 2014 and, until recently, had apparently gone undetected. There was no indication Tuesday that any of it had been reported to officials at the school or the Education Department.

The photograph that first brought Mr. Shaynak to the attention of law enforcement officials was sent to a 16-year-old student at the end of June, officials said. Mr. Shaynak, they said, sent it using Snapchat, which sends messages that disappear after a few seconds, but the student captured it by taking a photograph of the message with her cellphone. She told an adult, who alerted the authorities. That led to Mr. Shaynak’s arrest in August on charges including disseminating indecent material to a minor.

After that arrest, investigators seized three computers and two phones, and used text messages — which they said included inappropriate conversations about nude beaches and threesomes — as well as videos and photographs to identify six additional victims, ranging in age from 13 to 19.

Joseph Mancino, a Brooklyn prosecutor, told Justice Martin P. Murphy on Tuesday that Mr. Shaynak had "looked to groom these students" with the text messages, trips, alcohol and cigarettes. He gave one student perfect scores on classroom quizzes, though she routinely left questions blank, Mr. Mancino said.

Mr. Mancino said that Mr. Shaynak had a four-month sexual relationship with one of the six students, whom he once took to a sex club in a different state, where he had sex with other patrons. He also took her on what the prosecutor called a "terror ride" from Queens to Brooklyn, when the student became so frightened that she ran from the car and hid from Mr. Shaynak in some nearby bushes while he was "screaming and banging on the car." Mr. Shaynak also threatened to tell the girl’s parents about their relationship, Mr. Mancino said.

Another student accompanied Mr. Shaynak to a nude beach in New Jersey, after Mr. Shaynak told her they were going to pick up school supplies, law enforcement officials said. They exchanged 10,000 text messages, in which he repeatedly mentioned the nude beach. She also visited his home, where he gave her so much hard liquor that she passed out, officials said. Mr. Shaynak encouraged that student to have sex with another female student, Mr. Mancino said.

The sexual encounters occurred after the two students reached the legal age of consent, 17 in New York, but in one instance, he forced one of them to have sex against her will, prosecutors said.

While law enforcement officials recited the details of the new charges in court, Mr. Shaynak stood silently. His lawyer, Kimberly Summers, told the judge that her client denied any wrongdoing and that he had no previous criminal history. Mr. Shaynak had worked on special projects with certain students, she said, adding that one of those students "was routinely contacting him."

Justice Murphy set bail for Mr. Shaynak at $1 million bond or $600,000 cash, which he had not posted Tuesday afternoon.

A Maryland court issued a six-month restraining order against Mr. Shaynak in 2005, but attempts to contact the woman who requested the order were unsuccessful on Tuesday, and details of why she had it were not immediately available.

After his arrest in August, Mr. Shaynak was removed from Brooklyn Tech, though he continued to receive his salary of $52,744 per year, as is common before a teacher goes through the formal disciplinary or firing process.

On Tuesday afternoon, as students flooded out of Brooklyn Tech onto a picturesque brownstone street, some said that rumors of inappropriate contact between Mr. Shaynak and female students were not uncommon, though none had specific knowledge of any relationships.

In a statement, the Education Department deplored Mr. Shaynak’s alleged conduct.

"These alleged actions are completely unacceptable, and have no place in, or outside of, our schools," Devora Kaye, a department spokeswoman, said in an email. "The DOE took swift action to immediately reassign Mr. Shaynak following his initial arrest. He is not, and will not be, in contact with students."

Before August, the only complaint lodged against Mr. Shaynak with the department came in June 2012, when he was accused of berating a student. The claims were substantiated and he received a letter of discipline.

The Vice Effect: 30 years after the show that changed Miami

By Andres Viglucci Miami Herald

It’s the very first Miami sequence in Miami Vice, the TV show that radically reconfigured the city’s shattered image. Don Johnson, resplendent as undercover narc Sonny Crockett in white suit, sockless espadrilles and turquoise T-shirt, rides to an ill-fated drug deal in the back seat of a burgundy Eldorado convertible along a sunbleached Ocean Drive.

Exactly 30 years ago, the eeriest thing about the scenery is probably not the shabby state of the Art Deco hotels, but the emptiness. There’s no one around: hardly anyone on the sidewalk, not a soul at the Clevelander, not a cafe umbrella in sight.

Crockett could have fired a TEC-9 up Ocean Drive and not hit a thing.

The rolling set-piece is a telling reminder of just how far Miami and Miami Beach have come since Vice made its NBC-TV debut in September 1984, at a moment when the cities’ fortunes — reeling from a devastating race riot, the Mariel boatlift, a Haitian refugee influx, white flight, the rise of the drug cartels and an explosion in violent crime — seemed about sunk for good.

"Miami Vice" used The Carlyle Hotel on Miami Beach as a set for the television show in the 1980’s. Here is the hotel as it was in 1985. The show helped save South Beach by broadcasting the architectural charms of its long-neglected Deco hotels to millions around the globe at a time when city fathers wanted nothing more than to tear it all down for condos. | MaryLou Foy/Miami Herald file

But it also provides an early gleaning of the magical Miami Vice formula, which left a lasting effect not just on TV and films, but also, indelibly, on its downtrodden hometown. The show’s producers cannily recast a hyper-Miami as a principal character in their cops-versus-drug-lords melodrama — a sizzling cool, sexy, multiethnic, multiracial, exciting place, at once gritty and gorgeous — that even locals had trouble recognizing.

It’s a remarkable trajectory, from South Beach flophouses to $1,000-a-night rooms at the Setai, that Miami Vice played no small role in launching. The show not only helped save South Beach, broadcasting the architectural charms of its long-neglected Deco hotels and apartment houses to millions around the globe at a time when city fathers wanted nothing more than to tear it all down for condos, Miami Vice practically invented the idea of South Beach.

Producers and art designers created decadently luxurious dance clubs, bars and restaurants in the bare lobbies and basements of Deco hotels where none of that existed. Obeying producer Michael Mann’s famous edict — "no earth tones" — they painted over the beige-and-brown that dulled some Art Deco trophies, revealing splendid facades. They decorated beaches and hotel pools that hadn’t seen anyone under 70 in two decades with crowds of attractive young extras in abbreviated swimsuits.

They recut the familiar Miami film reel of water, flamingos, palms and sky to include the previously unseen or unappreciated, and not just those old Deco buildings, but also picturesquely seedy warehouses, the ultra-modern mansions where drug lords invariably dwelled, and — here was something new — the glass skyscrapers that had started popping up along Brickell Avenue.

All of this they saturated in subtropical colors and set to pulsating music a la MTV. They dressed the good-looking, multiracial cast in dazzling tropical shirts and Versace silk and linen jackets, in Crockett’s case draped in devil-may-care fashion over T-shirts and unbelted slacks. Thus attired, Crockett and sidekick Ricardo Tubbs were then sent out in a Ferrari or a cigarette boat on high-speed chases that almost always ended in a fireworks of gunfights and explosions.

No one had ever seen anything like this on TV before. It was a new cinematic way of making television, and definitely not your grandfather’s Miami. It didn’t matter that this TV-Miami did not quite yet exist — it would continue to seduce millions of people around the world long after Miami Vice ended its U.S. network run in 1989.

"There was before the Miami Vice premiere, and there was after, and everyone said, ‘Wow.’ It just happened," recalled journalist T.D. Allman, who was researching his seminal book, Miami: City of the Future, when Vice became the hottest TV and fashion influence in the world. "It showed me I was really on the right track."

Before long, said Vice creator Anthony Yerkovich, middle-aged dentists started wearing pink T-shirts and, once the show went into European syndication, German and Italian fashion photographers and photo agencies began booking shoots on South Beach with the architecture as backdrop. Then, he said, came the next critical step in the South Beach re-emergence: the New Yorkers.

"The hip New York fashion crowd and nightlife entrepreneurs and people that like to hang around models went down here, saw the buildings and said, ‘Heck, this would make a good restaurant, this would make a cool nightclub, or a cool boutique hotel,’ and by 1990 SoBe was off and running," Yerkovich said.

Of course, Vice was not solely responsible for the Beach renaissance.

By then, determined activists in the Miami Design Preservation League, led by Barbara Baer Capitman, had been pushing recognition and protection of South Miami Beach’s Deco treasure trove for years. In the face of considerable opposition, even derision, they had managed to get the neighborhood listed on the National Register of Historic Places, the first 20th century district to be so recognized.

In 1980, no less a figure than Andy Warhol had given the Deco District his public blessing, pronouncing it "delightful" after getting a personal tour from Capitman. Film director Brian de Palma had started filming Scarface on South Beach before strident political opposition caused him to decamp for L.A.

Just the year before Vice came to town, artist Christo’s Surrounded Islands project had put pink skirts around islands in Biscayne Bay, creating an art-world sensation that bled into the mainstream. Christo’s crew stayed in Ocean Drive hotels because they were dirt cheap.

When the show began production, elected leaders were wary, so much so that they asked Mann to remove the word "vice" from the show’s title.

But Miami Vice’s instant popularity changed everything. Tourism to the Beach, especially by Europeans, shot up. Capitman, who embraced Vice and its producers, was vindicated, cementing political support for enacting legal protections for the district’s buildings. The assurance that Deco buildings would not be torn down in turn persuaded those first investors with real money to begin renovating hotels, said Michael Kinerk, an MDPL co-founder.

Mann even helped sponsor an early edition of Art Deco Weekend, Kinerk said.

"Miami Vice helped politically, economically and artistically," Kinerk said. "I have absolutely no doubt. It certainly put the Art Deco district on the world map."

If the Beach was then on life support, Miami had a lot more going on — the condo and office tower boom that was transforming Brickell, for instance, and a growing cultural diversity — but as far as mainstream America was concerned, it was all a mess or just passe. To much of the rest of the country, Miami meant only the Dolphins, and even their best years were behind them.

In episode two of Miami Vice, after getting lost on the Don Shula Expressway and ending up halfway to the Keys, Tubbs complains: "What kind of town names an expressway after a football coach?"

The Beach backgrounds in those early Vice episodes were desolate for a reason, Kinerk recalled, and not because streets were closed for filming by the city film office. There was no city film office. There simply weren’t many people on the street. Ocean Drive’s hotels were filled with elderly, mostly Jewish retirees, many of them frail, subsisting on meager Social Security payments.

"God’s waiting room," more than one caustic wag called it.

There were no models in bikinis poolside at the Delano, just a dive merengue club in the basement. So unbusy were South Beach streets that Miami Vice producers often didn’t bother with permits, Kinerk said.

"They were filming all over Miami Beach," he said. "They could film in the middle of the street. There was literally nobody there. There were no cars parked in the street."

When the producers needed a crowd, they usually had to wrangle one up, paying drama majors, models or musicians to mill around in the background of a shoot, said Fabio Arber, a production assistant and location manager for the show.

But Mann and his location scouts had an eye for buildings, places and details no one else noticed, including faithful Miamians. And they depicted those details with an obsessive care unusual for the typically fast-paced production of television.

"They made everything look fabulous," Kinerk said.

Kinerk recalls a scene he watched being filmed in the basement of the Waldorf Towers on Ocean Drive. The basement would later be the site of Sempers, one of the earliest velvet-rope clubs. But on that day, Vice producers had to create a chic club from scratch.

They filled the basement with tropical fish aquariums and a purple, blue and green color scheme. There was a purple tulip in a vase on every table, each individually spotlit from above. The set designers had ordered purple fish and were flying them in from South Africa. But the fish were hours late, delayed by street closures because of President Reagan’s meeting at Vizcaya with Pope John Paul II.

The scene’s director was blowing his top because the delay was costing tens of thousands of dollars. The fish finally arrived, but, stunned from the long trip, sank to the bottom of the tank. The director jammed a tulip, complete with vase, into the bottom of the tank, which roused the fish.

When a hotel phone rang in the middle of the scene, the director yanked it out of the wall and smashed it to bits, Kinerk said.

When the show aired, Kinerk said, the effect was seamless as the camera panned through the purple fish and the focus shifted to the characters in the background.

"I always said art reflects life and life reflects art, but in this case the art came first," said architecture critic Beth Dunlop, who has written about the influence of Miami Vice on its hometown. "In the late ’70s, there were few painted buildings. And then Michael Mann came to town and all of a sudden all these buildings were yellow and blue and aqua.

"The colors made people able to see the details and beauty of buildings that had been obscured by dirt and peeling paint and dreary colors. They allowed people to see the place, the Art Deco and Miami as it could be seen, and not as it was."

The show did something else, too, she said. It also "glorified" the vernacular Miami — the bakeries, the marinas, the Miami River and neighborhoods like Little Havana — no less than the sleek new modern villas of the new rich, many of them Latin American, just then moving to Miami.

After Vice, Miami was suddenly something people had to experience for themselves, Dunlop said.

"Miami Vice became of consummate importance in making people want to come here, want to visit, want to live here," Dunlop said.

And it also pointed to the city’s future.

Early in the first season, after filming a scene at the new Atlantis condo tower on Brickell — the one with the hole, the palm tree and the red spiral staircase in the middle — the producers spliced its glassy facade into the soon-to-be-famous opening title montage.

That one momentary glimpse of the Atlantis, week in and week out, turned it into the symbol of an increasingly global and cosmopolitan Miami.

It also made Arquitectonica, the rising young firm that designed it, a household name. An entire episode early in the first season was set in the Pink House, the groundbreaking Miami Shores home that Arquitectonica’s husband-and-wife partners Bernardo Fort-Brescia and Laurinda Spear had designed for her parents. (The episode starred a then-unknown Bruce Willis as a thuggish arms dealer.)

Fort-Brescia said he quickly discovered it was one thing to be on the cover of Architecture magazine, and another thing entirely for millions around the world to recognize the Atlantis.

"I could go anywhere in the world, and people knew that building," Fort-Brescia said. "People would come to me and say, ‘I’ve never seen a building like that.’

"It was the power of television. These guys knew how to synthesize a message in seconds, and it was a good message for Miami. It was a different city that was evolving. It was a quick snapshot of the new Miami, and it said everything. It was tall, it was glass-covered, it was downtown. It made us look like we were doing something different from the rest of the world."

Fort-Brescia says the shot also helped implant a new vision of Miami, one that was urban, high-rise, utterly modern in design — a vision that only now, 30 years later, is finally and fully reaching fruition. Mann and his producers had picked up on the fact that Miami was changing, becoming an international city with international money and lots of glitz — even if much of it was the profits of drug trafficking.

"The show started to see Miami in a different way," Fort-Brescia said. "It was more than the conventional wisdom held it to be. We were a bigger place and a more important place."

In fact, with predecessors like Saturday Night Fever and Blade Runner, Allman said, Miami Vice was a key influence in helping make cities cool again among young Americans whose parents had decamped for the suburbs.

Like those films, Miami Vice did so in part by embracing the city’s multiethnic demographic, a cause of much of the anxiety surrounding the city’s future. Vice just turned it into a virtue.

To be sure, Vice could indulge in stereotypes, with drug-dealing Colombians and Jamaicans often at the end of the short stick, and horror-show depictions of Jamaican Rastafarianism and Santeria, the Afro-Cuban religion.

But the good guys were also black and white and Hispanic. It was all presented in matter-of-fact fashion, without apology, simply a new, polyglot American reality. It foretold — as did Miami — the country’s demographic shifts, Allman said.

"They made no excuses and no explanations. It came right at you, and that’s the way it was," he said. "That show would have been nothing without the Hispanic detective, the blond cop and the black detective. The custodians of official Miami were still trying to make it like a nice town in the Midwest or something. But that’s not Miami."

For all its theatrical grittiness, Miami Vice was an escapist vehicle. A fantasy. But it was successful because it picked up something real and made it vibrant and alluring. That little edge of danger, which was certainly real — there had been a shootout between drug cartels in the parking lot of Dadeland Mall not long before, after all — made it all seem authentic.

"We always complain about Hollywood, but Hollywood is very perceptive. Miami Vice was a reflection of what was happening. It pushed along the idea that Miami was this fascinating place. So had Barbara Capitman. So had Christo," Allman said.

"If it had simply a fun cop show and not reflected these underlying changes and trends, it would not have been as good. People’s fundamental attitudes towards Miami would not have changed."

Even without Vice, Allman and Fort Brescia believe, Miami would have come back, sooner or later.

"Miami is a great survivor. Miamians have the most amazing resiliency," Allman said. "Miami would still be the hottest city in America today."

It just might have taken just a bit longer.

Miami Herald staff writer Howard Cohen contributed to this report.

 

 

 

 

 

 

　
 
　

　

　

　

　

Earth Has Water Older than the Sun

Not all water in the solar system today could have formed in our solar system

|By Elizabeth Gibney and Nature magazine

The Sun did not wipe out all of the water contained in the interstellar cloud from which it formed, scientists say.
As much as half of the water in Earth’s oceans could be older than the Sun, a study has found.

By reconstructing conditions in the disk of gas and dust in which the Solar System formed, scientists have concluded that the Earth and other planets must have inherited much of their water from the cloud of gas from which the Sun was born 4.6 billion years ago, instead of forming later. The authors say that such interstellar water would also be included in the formation of most other stellar systems, and perhaps of other Earth-like planets.

The dense interstellar clouds of gas and dust where stars form contain abundant water, in the form of ice. When a star first lights up, it heats up the cloud around it and floods it with radiation, vaporizing the ice and breaking up some of the water molecules into oxygen and hydrogen.

Until now, researchers were unsure how much of the 'old' water would be spared in this process. If most of the original water molecules were broken up, water would have had to reform in the early Solar System. But the conditions that made this possible could be specific to the Solar System, in which case many stellar systems could be left dry, says Ilsedore Cleeves, an astrochemist at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, who led the new study.

But if some of the water could survive the star-forming process, and if the Solar System’s case is typical, it means that water "is available as a universal ingredient during planet formation", she says.

To find out, Cleeves and her colleagues modelled the conditions soon after the Sun lit up. They calculated the amount of radiation that would have hit the Solar System, both from the young star and from outer space, and how far that radiation would have travelled through the cloud.

Those conditions determine how new water molecules form from hydrogen and oxygen, and in particular the odds that the molecules include deuterium, an isotope of hydrogen whose nucleus contains a neutron, in addition to the usual single proton. The model predicted an abundance of deuterium-containing water, also known as heavy water, that was lower than that in the Solar System’s water today.

But the interstellar clouds where Sun-like stars are currently forming — and thus, presumably, the material from which the Sun formed — have a higher proportion of heavy water compared to the current Solar System. This is because these clouds are subject to the continuous bombardment of cosmic rays, which tend to favour the inclusion of deuterium. Therefore, the authors concluded, the young Sun’s radiation was insufficient to account for the amount of heavy water seen in the Solar System today, and some must have existed before. They estimate that somewhere between 30% and 50% of the water in Earth’s oceans must be older than the Sun.

"If the disk can’t do it, that means we must have inherited some level of these very deuterium-enriched interstellar ices from the birth environment of the Sun," says Cleeves. The study was published in Science on 25 September.

Ewine van Dishoeck, an astrochemist at the Leiden Observatory in the Netherlands, says that the study’s conclusions are based on good arguments but are still only theoretical. But confirmation could come next year, she adds, when the Atacama Large Millimeter Array, a radio telescope in Chile’s Atacama Desert, begins to study the chemical processes underlying the proportion of heavy water in protoplanetary disks.

Even if the formation of typical stellar systems does not destroy all of the pre-existing water, it does not mean that water-drenched planets need to be the norm throughout the Universe. Venus and Mercury have no water, and Mars seems to have lost most of the water it once had — and it is still unclear what determines whether a planet gets to become wet and to stay that way, says Cecilia Ceccarelli, an astronomer at the Institute of Planetology and Astrophysics in Grenoble, France.

The Swimmer: Manhattan Edition

By Carolyn Kormann The New Yorker

Swimmers at the Dry Dock Playground pool, in Manhattan’s East Village, on June 27, 2013. Credit Photograph by Mario Tama/Getty As fall begins, I’m remembering my best summer stunt. It was one of those late-summer Sundays when the only thing to do is swim. I had a particular swim in mind. I got the idea for it during the bleakest days of last winter. When things seemed like they couldn’t get worse, I started to think about swimming across Manhattan—about plowing through every pool on the island. I would be like Neddy Merrill, the protagonist of John Cheever’s story "The Swimmer," who swims across the suburbs, from one back-yard pool to the next. He swims because he’s lost everything—his social status, his home, his family. He’s delusional and drunk. Actually, I wouldn’t really be like him. My predicament wasn’t comparable. My drinking was under control, for the most part. My swim would be investigative, maybe healing. I spent my childhood in pools: they were like a second womb. A day spent swimming in each of Manhattan’s pools seemed like an obvious move.

In Cheever’s story, Merrill is forced, at one point, to cross a public pool. "It stank of chlorine and looked to him like a sink," Cheever writes. "A pair of lifeguards in a pair of towers blew police whistles at what seemed to be regular intervals, and abused the swimmers through a public-address system. Neddy remembered the sapphire water at the Bunkers’ with longing, and thought that he might contaminate himself—damage his own prosperousness and charm—by swimming in this murk." My pool marathon would take place almost entirely in Manhattan’s murk—that is, in public pools. I love outdoor public pools. As I marked the locations of Manhattan’s pools on a map, a constellation emerged: the people’s moat, a secret waterway, a liquid realm. Among the honking taxis, flashing lights, and fretful pedestrians, I would swim.

I started at the bottom—the most downtown pool—which is in Vesuvio Playground, on Thompson Street, in SoHo. There were ginkgo trees, a pretty iron fence. It looked to be a tiny pool. As I reached the deck, a stout woman in a khaki-green uniform stopped me. "Do you have a child?" she asked. I did not. I do not. "This is only for kids!" Now I could see: it was a wading pool. There were children splashing, a couple of dads. Noting my disappointment, I think, the guard said, "But we have a lotta pools for adults around here." The nearest one, she said, was on Varick and Carmine.

I headed northwest. Three old men were sitting on a stoop across from Father Fagan Park. Orange morning glories climbed toward the hot sun. On Varick Street, a promising-looking three-story brick building appeared, wrapped around the corner at Carmine. The Parks Department’s leaf logo was stencilled on one wall. Three women sat at the entrance. One asked me whether I had my lock. I did not. All I had was a notebook, pens, a map, a MetroCard, and some cash. Nothing is allowed on the pool deck, they said, not even notebooks. Everything must be locked in the changing rooms. I said I’d be quick—just a lap or two. One of the women, a guard, sighed and said she’d stash my little cloth bag under her chair.

The changing room smelled of rubber and chlorine. A frail, very old lady sat in front of a locker in her bathing suit, cocooned in a raggedy white towel. Her hair stuck out from beneath a purple nylon cap, which covered only the top of her skull. I hurried past and walked out to the pool. The cerulean water sparkled. I crossed the concrete deck and threw myself in.

"He had an inexplicable contempt for men who did not hurl themselves into pools," Cheever wrote. I felt the same way. The water was cool and silky. My arms clasped above my head, I dolphin-kicked underwater, turning my two legs into one strong tail. "Being embraced and sustained by the light-green water seemed not as much a pleasure as the resumption of a natural condition, and he would have liked to swim without trunks, but this was not possible, considering his project." I pulled my arms down by my sides, then brought them around and out of the water, breaking the surface with a butterfly stroke. I took another stroke, ribboning across the surface, and kicked until I touched the wall. A Keith Haring mural—painted in 1987, three years before he died—danced on a wall above me. A waving figure rode a dolphin, which kissed the shadow-puppeting hand of a king. A fat fish ate a swimmer. A merperson gyrated.

I swam back underwater, and when I came up a lifeguard with curly blond hair was eating a blue ice pop and flirting with another guard in mirrored aviators, who was twirling his whistle around his index finger. A man and his son were lying on a bench set against the brick of the main building, a converted public bathhouse. Two scraggly pigeons cooed.

　

Back in the locker room, the old woman hadn’t moved. I grabbed my bag from the guard. "You were quick!" she said. I pulled on shorts, found a Citi Bike, and headed east on Houston. A posse of tatted and tanked boys sauntered past, looking like they had something to prove.

The Hamilton Fish Park Pool, which is on Houston Street just below where Avenue C begins, was one of eleven pools to open across the boroughs in the summer of 1936. Eleven! Robert Moses, who swam at Yale, had just become the city’s Parks Commissioner, and he and Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia worked closely with the federal Works Progress Administration. Some of the W.P.A. pools are magnificent. The Hamilton Fish pool is colossal; it was used by the U.S. Olympic swim team for a training session in 1952, before they headed to Helsinki. A sign there says that the W.P.A. pools changed "the way millions of New Yorkers spent their leisure time."

I left my bag with the guard ("no problem, no problem") and, yes, hurled myself into the water. I followed a black line that ran across the bottom for fifty metres—nearly a hundred and sixty-five feet—lengthening my stroke as I swam. Across my path, there were underwater legs running in slow motion, as if the beat of the world had slowed. Girl legs chased boy legs. The sounds of shrieking, laughter, and lifeguards’ whistles were all muffled. The water refracted the light. A woman with a snorkel dived in front of me. I dodged her and continued, stretching out, settling into an easy freestyle. The water was refreshing, cool but not cold. At the wall, I flip-turned, swam back, and got out. Two lifeguards in orange shorts were leaning against a fence. One exhibited the usual tic, twirling her whistle around her index finger. A teenage boy with a scruffy beard and a tattoo of a heart over his heart was peppering her with questions while his friend stood by silently. "It seems like it’s a good job for a young person, right? How far can you swim underwater? Where do you train? How much do you get paid?" (First-year guards get $13.57 an hour.)

Citi Bike returned, I walked north up Avenue C. Cold air wafted out of an Associated Market. Sixth Street smelled like fried chicken. On East Tenth Street, I found the Dry Dock Playground pool. (This neighborhood was known as the dry-dock district in the nineteenth century, when it was filled with bustling ironworks and shipfitters.) Trees and grass were sparse. Fence, concrete, water. I swam a lap in ten seconds. The Jacob Riis Houses towered to the north. Lifeguards blew their eternal whistles, one after another, in a circular, comforting way, the sound of soccer games ending, thunderstorms arriving, marching bands parading, a summer night. "Everyone out!" they yelled. It was their afternoon break. Outside the pool fence strolled an old man with his pocket radio tuned to a baseball game.

I ran to catch the M14D up and across town. The driver looked like Robert DeNiro, who swam and swooned at the Carmine Street pool in"Raging Bull." No one seemed to mind that I was sopping wet, wearing a bathing suit and shorts. At Union Square, I transferred to the subway. Underground, cops threatened a group of dancers. At Times Square, everything turned red. Kids were draped in flags. It was the Dominican Day Parade, and the crowds swelled and pulsed, overflowing from Sixth Avenue.

Midtown is a public-pool wasteland. But I wanted to keep swimming north, and hotel pools abound there. I tried the Parker Meridien, on West Fifty-seventh, following a group of tourists into an elevator. On the forty-second floor, I found the entrance to an indoor pool bordered by a wall of windows. I used, depressing to say, my white-person-with-a-suntan visa and swept past the attendant onto a sun deck. Silent people lay on chaises longues. The view to the north encompassed all of Central Park. Helicopters flew up and down the Hudson. A girl in a black ruffled bikini read "War and Peace." A middle-aged woman did the Times crossword. A young man read "Vie et Destin," by Vasily Grossman. I did a lap. The pool was small and overchlorinated, pathetic after the grandeur of Hamilton Fish.

On the Upper East Side, I swam across the John Jay Park pool, another W.P.A. production. It sits above the F.D.R. on Seventy-seventh Street. Then I hailed a taxi and asked the driver to take me to Thomas Jefferson Pool, on 112th Street and First Avenue. I mentioned, casually, that I was swimming through Manhattan—every public pool on the island, more or less.

"I have to be honest," he said. "My friends all make fun of me. I have a fear of the water. Sharks and stuff."

I told him that he didn’t have anything to fear in a pool. He laughed and said he was from Queens.

What he meant, I concluded, was that New York City’s public pools have sometimes been scenes of gang violence. I shut my mouth. We pulled up alongside the park.

"Keep dedicated," he said. "What you’re doing is a real inspiration."

I couldn’t see how it was anything of the sort, but I appreciated the encouragement.

Thomas Jefferson Pool: yet another souvenir of the W.P.A. It opened on June 27, 1936, with a ceremony attended by ten thousand people. I asked a guard if she’d watch my bag.

"I’m just going to do one lap," I said.

"I feel you," she said.

I swam across the Olympic-size pool, catching the smell of grill smoke when I took a breath and hearing the shouts from a nearby soccer game. The pool was full of kids but, as elsewhere on my pilgrimage, not too crowded. I swam around a group of teen-agers, boys and girls. They moved like a unit back and forth across my path, magnetized to one another. I reached the wall and looked around.

The New York City public-pool deck is a strange expanse of nothing but people and water. There is none of the detritus common to private facilities, because nothing is allowed: no food or beverages, no newspapers, and no clothes except bathing suits and trunks. If you must wear a shirt, it has to be white—to avoid, I was told, gang representation (as well as color dyes running in the water). Electronic devices are also forbidden, making the city pool one of those rare places outside the smartphone’s dominion. There’s nothing to do but swim.

Further up First Avenue, at 124th Street, I hit a small pool built in the nineteen-seventies, next to the Robert F. Wagner Houses, where Mayor Bill de Blasio held a press conference, in July, announcing a plan to reduce violent crime in the city’s public-housing developments. It was a quiet, peaceful scene on the pool deck. A few kids played in the water. I swam across and did the backstroke on my return lap, admiring the dozy clouds and the milky-blue sky. I got out and strode toward the exit.

"That’s it?" a lifeguard called. "No more lap swim?"

"That’s it. I’m going to another pool now."

"You don’t like this one?"

"I do," I said. "I really do. But I’m swimming every pool in Manhattan."

"By the end of the summer?"

"By the end of the day."

"Oh, word? Good luck!" He, too, was twirling his whistle around his index finger. They must teach that.

Now I had to hurry. I took a taxi to Jackie Robinson Park, on 146th and Bradhurst Avenue. The pool was my fourth W.P.A. colossus. It opened in August, 1936, to a crowd of twenty-five thousand. Bill (Bojangles) Robinson, the tap dancer and actor, sang "The Battle Hymn of the Republic." Three years later, a group of Jehovah’s Witnesses asked to use the pool for a mass baptism. The Parks Department denied their request, saying that it couldn’t abandon its first-come, first-served policy. I stroked across the shallows of clear blue. The paint was peeling on the bottom. In the old brick fortress at the entrance, there was a girl in a wet bikini playing a piano under a bronze bust of Jackie Robinson.

I took the A train to Highbridge Park, at Amsterdam and 173rd. Dominican families were picnicking. Dominican teens sat around hookahs, puffing. The pool was another sparkling acre of water and symmetry—W.P.A., Class of ’36—perched high above the Harlem River, with a view from the deck of the old Croton Aqueduct, which crosses there from the Bronx into Manhattan. "That he lived in a world so generously supplied with water seemed like a clemency, a beneficence," Cheever wrote. The color of the water mirrored the sky. I had reached the northernmost point on my map.

The supervisor of the Highbridge Pool, whose name is Corey, told me that, in 2008, he would not have gone to this pool with his family. But now he would. "When I started working here, there were mini-riots on the pool deck," he said. People—teen-agers, mostly—would wear jewelry of certain colors to signify gang affiliations. The Parks Department cracked down: no colorful shirts, no jewelry, nothing but a bathing suit. Corey said that the police had made progress in breaking up the Inwood gangs. The Parks Department guards pools vigilantly. From the moment water goes into a pool, he said, even if it’s just a thimbleful, there has to be someone guarding it, not only all day but also all night. He mentioned that the Trinitarios, a Dominican gang, were known to wear lime green.

I sprinted across Highbridge Pool and back, a hundred metres total, kicking and pulling hard, feeling my heart pump. The air was getting cool. It was getting late. I jumped out, breathing hard, and left. I jogged to the 1 train and rode south, to 125th Street.

Sheltering Arms Pool, another relic of the seventies, was much like the little one next to the Wagner Houses. It was tucked into a quiet corner of West Harlem, off Amsterdam. The low sun silhouetted the neighboring church’s bell. The pool is built on the site of a nineteenth-century free asylum for homeless kids, or "children in the midst," as the institution called them. Now the sound of sloshing and splashing muted the thwack of the handball game on the other side of the fence.

As I got in the water, a girl in a black one-piece approached, flailing, spinning, kicking off the bottom, not really swimming. She surfaced next to me. "Do you know how to swim?" she asked.

I said that I did.

"Could you teach me?"

Five more kids gathered around, bobbing and ducking and jumping. They had just had a swim lesson, they said. One boy showed me how he had learned to breathe to the side while swimming freestyle. I showed them how to lift their elbows high, and how to kick with their legs straight. I swam across the pool. When I stopped, I saw that they were all following me.

"Can you do butterfly?"

I ribboned across the water, demonstrating butterfly. The girl in the black bathing suit followed. At the wall, I hauled myself onto the deck and said goodbye. The kids went back to their playing. In the locker room, a grandmother was trying to dress two small, cranky children.

From the C train on 110th Street, I jogged into Central Park, following a path up a hill to the entrance to Lasker Pool. It was 6:45 and the pool closed at 7. The sharp chemical smell of chlorine made my mouth water, weirdly. I was feeling triumphant. Buoyant. Then, at the gate, a guard stopped me. But there were still people in the water! He wouldn’t budge. No one went in after 6:45. I told him that I was swimming through Manhattan’s public pools. This would be my tenth! (Vesuvio and the Parker Meridien didn’t count.) He didn’t care. I considered charging past him, but I knew I wouldn’t make it. My swim was finished.

Whistles began calling to one another around Lasker Pool, which is set in a small valley formed by wooded hills. I watched through the fence as the last swimmers kicked and hopped and stroked to the ladders. A woman next to me called down to her young son. He was dripping and beaming as she snapped a photo with her phone. Lifeguards shuffled across the deck in flip-flops. One twirled his whistle around his index finger.

Although the pool was empty, the dappled blue water was still moving, almost vibrating. A big pond, known as Harlem Meer, lies just north of Lasker. Covered by large patches of algae, it looked alive, fertile, earthy, bottomless. Kids in a nearby playground screamed on the tire swings, endlessly circling. The sun turned parts of the pond gold. Bubbles popped on the surface. The leaves of a tree on the other side of the pool were already the color of rust.

On a Shoestring, India Sends Orbiter to Mars

By GARDINER HARRIS  NY Times

NEW DELHI — An Indian spacecraft affectionately nicknamed MOM reached Mars orbit on Wednesday, beating India’s Asian rivals to the Red Planet and outdoing the Americans, the Soviets and the Europeans in doing so on a maiden voyage and a shoestring budget.

An ebullient Prime Minister Narendra Modi was on hand at the Indian Space Research Organization’s command center in Bangalore for the early-morning event and hailed it "as a shining symbol of what we are capable of as a nation."

"The odds were stacked against us," Mr. Modi, wearing a red Nehru vest, said in a televised news conference. "When you are trying to do something that has not been attempted before, it is a leap into the unknown. And space is indeed the biggest unknown out there."

Children across India were asked to come to school by 6:45 a.m. Wednesday, well before the usual starting time, to watch the historic event on state television.

The Mars Orbiter Mission, or MOM, was intended mostly to prove that India could succeed in such a highly technical endeavor — and to beat China. As Mr. Modi and others have noted, India’s trip to Mars, at a price of $74 million, cost less than the Hollywood movie "Gravity." NASA’s almost simultaneous — and far more complex — mission to Mars cost $671 million.

Scientists and engineers of the Indian Space Research Organization celebrated after the historic event. Credit Jagadeesh Nv/European Pressphoto Agency

Success was by no means assured. Of the 51 attempts to reach Mars, only 21 have succeeded, and none on any country’s first try, Mr. Modi noted. In 2012, China tried and failed, and in 1999, Japan also failed.

But Mr. Modi, who was elected in May with a once-in-a-generation majority in Parliament, has been on something of a roll. And the Mars achievement, which he had almost nothing to do with, will only add to that.

Mr. Modi leaves Friday for New York, where he will address the United Nations General Assembly as well as a sold-out, largely Indian-American crowd at Madison Square Garden before heading to Washington for a meeting with President Obama.

The Indian Space Research Organization has always had a small budget, and for years it largely worked in international isolation after many countries cut off technological sharing programs in the wake of Indian nuclear tests. It has launched more than 50 satellites since 1975, including five foreign satellites in one June launch. As other countries have rethought their pricey space programs, India’s low-budget affair has gained increasing attention and orders.

Its success has long been seen as a fulfillment of the kind of state-sponsored self-sufficiency that former Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru cherished but that, in the main, left India impoverished.

More recently, India’s technological isolation in defense and other areas has been due in large part to the country’s restrictions on foreign investments, its poor infrastructure and its infamous bureaucracy. India is now the world’s largest importer of arms because of its inability to make its own equipment and its refusal to let foreign companies open plants owned entirely by them.

The country’s most important export is the cheap brainpower of its engineers, based in technology centers like Bangalore and Hyderabad, who provide software and back-office operations for corporations around the world.

"Our success on Mars is a crucial marketing opportunity for low-cost technological know-how, which is what we do really well," said C. Uday Bhaskar, an analyst with the Society for Policy Studies, a New Delhi research center. India’s space program "spent peanuts, and they got it done."

India’s decision to launch Mangalyaan, the name of its spacecraft, resulted after China’s own mission to Mars failed in 2012. In almost every sphere, the Chinese have outpaced the Indians over the past three decades, but Indian scientists saw an opportunity to beat them to Mars.

In just a few months, they cobbled together a mission to send a 33-pound payload of fairly simple sensors to Mars orbit. They used a small rocket, a modest 3,000-pound spacecraft and a plan to slingshot around the Earth to gain the speed needed to get there. A mission that began with a November launch in Sriharikota has been flawless ever since.

"In this Asian space race, India has won the race," Pallava Bagla, author of "Reaching for the Stars: India’s Journey to Mars and Beyond," said in an interview.

The triumph was well timed. Thousands of Indian and Chinese soldiers have been engaged in a standoff for more than a week on disputed land in Ladakh, in the Indian-controlled portion of Kashmir, and President Xi Jinping of China recently held a three-day visit to India that was overshadowed by the border disputes.

Mangalyaan, which is the Hindi word for "Mars craft," is slated to remain in an elliptical orbit around Mars, sending back information about Martian weather and methane levels in its atmosphere to controllers in Bangalore from sensors powered by three large solar panels.

Fence-jumper makes it into the White House

By JOSH LEDERMAN Associated Press

A man jumped over the fence of the White House on Friday and made it through the front door before officers managed to apprehend him, the Secret Service said. President Barack Obama had departed the White House just minutes earlier.

The rare security breach was likely to renew intense scrutiny of the Secret Service, an agency whose storied history has been marred in recent years by multiple allegations of misconduct by officers. It was unclear whether a fence-jumper has ever made it into the White House before.

After scaling the fence on the north side of the White House, the intruder darted toward the presidential residence, ignoring commands from officers to stop, said Secret Service spokesman Ed Donovan. He was ultimately apprehended just inside the North Portico doors — the grand, columned entrance that looks out over Pennsylvania Avenue.

Donovan said the man appeared to be unarmed to officers who spotted him climbing the fence, and a search of the suspect turned up no weapons. The suspect was transported to a nearby hospital for examination after complaining of chest pain. He was charged with unlawful entry into the White House complex.

The Secret Service identified the suspect as Omar J. Gonzalez, 42, of Copperas Cove, Texas. Attempts to reach Gonzales or his relatives by phone Friday evening were unsuccessful.

The incident prompted a rare evacuation of much of the White House. Inside the West Wing, White House staffers and Associated Press journalists were rushed into the basement and out a side exit to a nearby street by Secret Service agents — some with their weapons drawn.

Although it's not uncommon for people to make it over the White House fence, they're typically stopped almost immediately and rarely get very far. Video from the scene showed the suspect, in jeans and a dark shirt, sprinting across the lawn as Secret Service agents shouted at nearby pedestrians to clear the area.

"This situation was a little different than other incidents we have at the White House," Donovan said. "There will be a thorough investigation into the incident."

Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, who chairs the House Oversight Committee's subpanel on national security, said it was "totally unacceptable" that the fence-jumper made it inside the White House. Chaffetz said he's been investigating the Secret Service for more than a year and that there have been many security breaches that were never publicly reported.

"Unfortunately, they are failing to do their job," Chaffetz said in an email to the AP. "There are good men and women, but the Secret Service leadership has a lot of questions to answer."

The incident occurred shortly after 7 p.m., only minutes after Obama and his daughters, along with a guest of one of the girls, left the White House aboard Marine One on their way to Camp David, the presidential retreat in Maryland where Obama and his family were to spend the weekend. First lady Michelle Obama had traveled separately to Camp David and was not at home.

The Secret Service's elite reputation has suffered a succession of blows in recent years, and Friday's breach marked yet another setback in the agency's efforts to rehabilitate its image.

In 2012, 13 agents and officers were implicated in a prostitution scandal during preparations for Obama's trip Cartagena, Colombia. The next year, two officers were removed from Obama's detail after another alleged incident of sexually-related misconduct. And in March, an agent was found drunk by staff at a Dutch hotel the day before Obama was set to arrive in the Netherlands.

Obama appointed the agency's first female director last year as a sign he wanted to change the culture and restore public confidence in its operations. An inspector general's report in December found no evidence of widespread misconduct.

The Secret Service has struggled in recent years to strike the appropriate balance between ensuring the first family's security and preserving the public's access to the White House grounds. Once open to vehicles, the stretch of Pennsylvania Avenue in front of the White House was confined to pedestrians after the Oklahoma City bombing, but officials have been reluctant to restrict access to the area further.

Evacuations at the White House are extremely rare. Typically, when someone jumps the White House fence, the compound is put on lockdown and those inside remain in place while officers respond to the situation. Last week, the Secret Service apprehended a man who jumped over the same stretch of fence on the anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, prompting officers to draw their firearms and deploy service dogs as they took the man into custody.