Julia Jacobs

He was interested in one that had appeared in the film “American Gangster,” a long set of steps that would convey the hopeless, 1980s urban feel he wanted for his new movie, “Joker.” The movie’s protagonist, Arthur Fleck, would trudge up them on his way home from work.

So a location scout, Aaron Hurvitz, 41, did his research and tracked down the “American Gangster” stairs in a South Bronx neighborhood.

But when he got there, he found the steps weren’t quite right. New York wasn’t Gotham City anymore.

“As with many stairs in the city, they’re getting a makeover,” Hurvitz said. “They’re getting repaved; they’re getting beautified. It wasn’t going to work for the aesthetic.”

So, he drove around looking at various staircases, sometimes called “step streets,” that Bronx residents use to get from higher-altitude roads and sidewalks to lower ones. The right staircase would be a little bit dramatic but also unmistakably gritty, the kind that no one would confuse with a tourist destination.

That is how a humble staircase rising up from Shakespeare and Jerome avenues became the city’s newest tourist destination.

Almost every day since the movie’s release in early October, dozens, sometimes hundreds, of visitors have traveled to the staircase Hurvitz found to visit and take selfies on the same steps Joaquin Phoenix’s character hikes up, and later descends in one of the movie’s memorable scenes as he celebrates his transformation into the Joker.

By Wednesday, Instagram had more than 2,000 posts associated with “#JokerStairs,” many of those photos of people prancing on the steps in Joker attire and makeup, mimicking Phoenix’s extravagant dance moves. There are so many posts that it’s getting hard to tell them apart, but fans are trying to make their shots stand out: In one Instagram video, two Jokers played table tennis on a landing.

Even on a weekday afternoon, with a constant drizzle making the 132 steps slick and a bit precarious, a steady stream of visitors took turns this week posing and playing photographer.

A young woman wearing a Joker-esque red jacket and black shorts improvised some jazzy dance moves for a video camera. She paused to empty some water from a bottle onto her head for effect, then she kicked and twirled and gyrated as the cameraman followed her.

A group of tourists from Moscow sang romantic Russian songs with guitar accompaniment partway up the stairs. (“Our friend told us this was an atmospheric place,” one musician said.)

In less than a month since the film’s release, the Bronx site has joined a list of iconic stairs from movies and television. Its company includes the “Exorcist” stairs in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington; the Rocky Steps at the Philadelphia Museum of Art; and the “Law &amp; Order” stairs at the State Supreme Court in Manhattan.

To the people who live in the Highbridge neighborhood and see the steps as simply the quickest way to get up the steep hill from the 4 train stop, it has all been a little amusing and occasionally irritating.

“Excuse me!” said a woman wearing a backpack as she pushed through a gaggle of tourists crowding the bottom of the stairs.

Habib Thiam, 48, a chef who lives on the fifth floor of an apartment building overlooking the staircase, said he remembers peering out of his bathroom window to see a film crew and Phoenix as the Joker. Now, while he brushes his teeth, he can watch Joker wannabes and Instagram influencers in the same spot.

Frankie Rivera, who has lived there for about 30 years, watched the loose crowd of picture-takers and performers from across the street, where a deli, tax preparation service and beauty salon were relatively isolated from the frenzy.

When Rivera ran marathons, he said, he trained by running up the 7-1/2-foot-wide steps, which come in groups of 12 before leveling out into a landing. “Those were my stairs — that was my exercise,” he said. “I used to go up and down, up and down, 25 times.”

The step street is one of dozens in the city, primarily in the jagged terrain of upper Manhattan and the Bronx, that were created for pedestrian use because they were deemed too steep for cars. In theory, anyway: Rivera, who does maintenance work and lives just across the street, said about a year and a half ago, someone drove a car from top to bottom.

“I thought that was going to make the stairs famous,” Rivera said. “But nobody said nothing about it.”

There have been upsides to all the attention. A few months ago, Rivera said, the stairs had been littered with garbage. So much so that he felt that some walked around the block to avoid it. “Containers of milk, all kinds of garbage — house garbage,” he said. Now, Rivera said, he’s noticed they’ve been much cleaner.

In fact, about a block south, on Jerome Avenue, there’s another staircase largely identical to the now-famous one. It was littered with items including an orange juice carton, a Goldfish bag, a dog food can and a blue Anthora coffee cup. (Asked about the relative cleanliness of the staircases, a spokeswoman from the city’s Department of Sanitation said that some step streets may be cleaned more often because of heavier pedestrian traffic.)

Despite some sentiments, expressed in the Instagram comments sections, that the neighborhood was being invaded by interlopers, most residents did not seem too perturbed. Walking by the scene, some chuckled, then pulled out their phones to take pictures of the tourists taking pictures.

Jhonathan Valencia and Dangelyn Vargas, two 25-year-old actors who both live nearby, stopped at the base of the steps to take in the scene of chattering tourists. They liked that travelers were flocking to the neighborhood where they grew up.

“You know how people say the Bronx is a bad area?” Valencia said. “Now people from all over the world are coming here to look at the stairs, the famous stairs!”

Still, most said the stairs’ newfound fame wasn’t something they were going to let get into their heads. It was still, under all that Hollywood and Instagram hype, just a long set of stairs.

“Murder on your legs,” said Tyrell Black, a neighborhood resident who walked his children down the stairs Tuesday afternoon, warning them to be careful not to slip.

The Bronx staircases are so formidable that when Hurvitz, the location scout, found the one that would ultimately show up in “Joker,” he only walked halfway down. He had been touring staircases all afternoon, and a person can only take so many steps in a day.

This article originally appeared in

In the Bronx, Tourists Find 'Joker' Stairs Are No Joke

NEW YORK — Director Todd Phillips was looking last year for a particular grimy outdoor staircase in New York City.

In less than a month since the film’s release, the Bronx site has joined a list of iconic stairs from movies and television. Its company includes the “Exorcist” stairs in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington; the Rocky Steps at the Philadelphia Museum of Art; and the “Law &amp; Order” stairs at the state Supreme Court in Manhattan, which the show’s attorneys often climb.

Vargas said it was strange to see tourists as far north as West 167th Street, which connects to the top of the staircase: “Before, they would never go past 161, which is Yankee Stadium. At 167 and Shakespeare? That’s unheard of.”

'Joker' Stairs Become a Bronx Tourist Draw. Hope You're in Shape.

The lawsuit includes McGowan’s account of attempts to interfere with her plan to publish a memoir, “Brave,” including sending an undercover agent to befriend her and then steal a copy of the manuscript. It also describes efforts to derail the reporting by The New York Times and The New Yorker that ultimately exposed decades of accusations against Weinstein and triggered the #MeToo movement.

The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles, said that Weinstein tapped into a team of professionals whose goal was to “ensure that Ms. McGowan’s story never saw the light of day, and — if it did — that no one would believe her.”

Besides Weinstein, Boies and Bloom, the lawsuit names the lawyers’ firms as defendants, as well as Black Cube, an Israeli private intelligence firm that used undercover agents to approach women who had accused Weinstein of sexual misconduct.

McGowan, 46, had reached a $100,000 settlement with Weinstein after accusing him of raping her at the Sundance Film Festival in 1997. Since 2017, when the The New York Times and The New Yorker published their first articles, McGowan has been vocal in her support of women who stepped forward to reveal that the producer had sexually harassed them or worse. Weinstein has been criminally charged in Manhattan with sexually assaulting two women and has pleaded not guilty.

In a statement Wednesday, Phyllis Kupferstein, a lawyer for Weinstein, said that “Rose McGowan will be shown to be what she is: a publicity seeker looking for money.”

McGowan’s lawsuit says Weinstein offered her $1 million to stay quiet and drop the publication of her book. Kupferstein said McGowan asked for $6 million.

“From the moment she sought a multimillion dollar payout in return for not making these baseless allegations, which we rejected, we knew that she was waiting for an opportune time to begin this,” Kupferstein’s statement said. “We will demonstrate that this case has no legal merit.”

Bloom and Boies have said in the past that they made mistakes in agreeing to work for Weinstein. Edward Evans, a spokesman for Boies’ firm, Boies Schiller Flexner, said in a statement that the “progress of the #MeToo movement is essential” but that McGowan’s lawsuit “inappropriately includes our firm and we have no choice but to defend ourselves against allegations that are simply untrue.”

A lawyer for Bloom, Eric George, said in a statement that it was “inexcusable” that McGowan included Bloom as a defendant. “There is simply no credible factual or legal basis for her claims against my client,” he said.

Representatives for Black Cube did not respond to requests for comment on Wednesday.

More than a year before the first articles appeared, McGowan made it publicly known that she was writing a memoir and in Hollywood, it was widely rumored that the book would include accusations against Weinstein. According to the lawsuit, that is when Weinstein and his lawyers began springing into action.

In late 2016, Boies and his firm hired Black Cube to help Weinstein, according to the lawsuit. In 2017, the suit says, a former Israeli intelligence officer employed by Black Cube started posing as an executive from a London-based wealth management firm interested in paying McGowan for speaking engagements related to women’s rights. The undercover agent gained McGowan’s trust and then covertly recorded McGowan reading the agent excerpts from her book, which the firm later shared with Weinstein and his lawyers, the lawsuit said. McGowan said she believes the agent stole her unpublished manuscript during a meeting between the two during which the agent had access to her laptop.

According to the lawsuit, a British freelance journalist working for Black Cube was directed to interview McGowan under the guise of writing a story about men in Hollywood, when he was actually trying to glean information about the memoir she was writing. McGowan’s book was published in January 2018, and in it she described the alleged rape by Weinstein in detail.

The lawsuit bases some of its factual allegations on reporting in the recently published books “She Said,” by the Times reporters Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey, as well as “Catch and Kill” by Ronan Farrow, the New Yorker writer. The three shared the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for public service for their reporting. Farrow has extensively reported on Black Cube’s work and “She Said” recounts how Bloom, a prominent victims’ rights attorney, was working behind the scenes with Weinstein to thwart his accusers and quash the journalists’ investigation.

The lawsuit accuses the defendants of racketeering, fraudulent deceit, and inflicting emotional distress. It said Weinstein and his team engaged in a “diabolical and illegal” effort to silence McGowan that had negative effects on her life.

“Her book sales suffered; her expenses mounted; her job opportunities vanished; and her emotional health cratered,” the lawsuit said. “She has experienced trauma and depression from defendants’ actions, and the deep betrayal will have lifelong effects.”

Actress Sues Weinstein and Lawyers, Claiming They Tried to Quiet Her

Actress Rose McGowan on Wednesday sued Harvey Weinstein and lawyers David Boies and Lisa Bloom, accusing them of directing a campaign of covert and illegal measures meant to discredit her and prevent her from going public with her rape accusation against him.

Are they Heath Ledger’s Joker from “The Dark Knight?” Are they Mark Hamill’s cartoon villain? Or Jared Leto’s, or Jack Nicholson’s? Or have they hearkened all the way back to the 1960s to portray Cesar Romero’s merry prankster version?

At this weekend’s convention at the Javits Center in Manhattan, there was a new Joker character to consider. The “Joker” movie opened in theaters this weekend, and this rendition of the comic book character, played by Joaquin Phoenix, has drawn scrutiny for exhibiting psychological traits of real-life mass shooters.

The chilling twist to the Joker’s past has been criticized for having the potential to inspire young men with similar inclinations. At Comic Con, some costumed Jokers clung instead to the characters of the past, while others embraced Phoenix’s tortured portrayal.

The New York Times spoke with several Jokers at Friday’s convention about their costumes and how they feel about Hollywood’s latest interpretation of the Joker.

Andrew Santos, 32

Occupation: Manager at American Airlines

Hometown: New York City

Santos hasn’t gotten a chance to watch the “Joker” movie yet, but all he needed to see was the trailer to decide that he was going to dress like Phoenix’s Joker at Comic Con. He loves the DC Comics version of the character, but Phoenix’s performance looked like it was going to be special.

“The movie is going to be something dark that you shouldn’t take children to,” Santos said. “But I like movies where you see it from the other side, the villain’s side. You don’t necessarily sympathize with them, but it’s a different view.”

He said he considers the definitive origin story of the Joker to be his falling into a vat of chemicals that turns his hair green, his skin a chalky white and his mouth blood red. But he appreciates the filmmaker’s attempt to add depth to the character’s background — even if it’s a disturbing narrative.

Mei Velasco, 30

Occupation: Medical assistant

Hometown: High Point, North Carolina

Velasco describes her costume as Ledger’s Joker from “The Dark Knight” — but “girl-ified.” (Her husband dressed up at Harley Quinn, the Joker’s frequent accomplice and love interest who fell for him while treating him at a psychiatric hospital.)

She said the costume was easy to throw together: She found the jacket at Target, the neon green wig on sale and for the makeup, she found an online tutorial for Joker-style face paint.

Velasco said she considers the true-to-life angle of the “Joker” film to be potentially instructive to audiences rather than harmful.

“I feel like what he’s trying to say is that our society looks like it’s going toward that way, so this is like a warning,” she said, “It’s like, ‘Hello, everybody, wake up!’”

Andrew Rancy, 31

Occupation: Employed at a tile distribution business

Hometown: Marlboro, New Jersey

Rancy didn’t want to choose just one Joker to portray, so he took pieces of several versions of the character to incorporate into his outfit.

He kept his mustache as an homage to Cesar Romero, who left his own facial hair for the television adaptation of the Batman comic book. The green dreadlocks were inspired by the Joker’s hair in the Batman cartoon. And the royal purple coat came from Ledger’s Joker.

Rancy said he was impressed by the new movie but he could see the possibility for some viewers to interpret Phoenix’s character as a figure worth emulating, something that relatives and friends of those killed in the Aurora, Colorado, movie theater shooting expressed concern about in a letter to Warner Bros.

“It does delve deep into mental illness and how, in some areas of society, not a lot of people understand or know how to handle it,” Rancy said.

“You can’t really predict these things,” he continued, “But I can see some people taking it too far.”

Julio Cruz, 25

Occupation: Wrestler and fitness center employee

Hometown: Rahway, New Jersey

Cruz was so set on playing Phoenix’s version of the Joker that he bought the movie-specific costume on Amazon just for the occasion.

“I was the ‘Dark Knight’ Joker previously,” Cruz said. “I’m just a Joker-head. This is one I wanted to take on.”

He committed to getting the makeup right, too. When the first set of face paint he purchased didn’t look right, he went to the store at 1 a.m. to find the right stuff. He decided to apply the makeup the night before the convention, which meant that he had to make himself fall asleep on his back in order to not mess it up.

Cruz said he planned to see the movie Friday night in his costume. He said he considered it important that the film takes on issues of mental illness. Cruz doesn’t think filmmakers should shy away from that subject.

“It’s art,” he said. “The way you perceive it is how you perceive it.”

Krystal Valle, 27

Occupation: Phone technician

Hometown: New York City

Valle doesn’t just know which Joker character she’s dressed up as. She knows the exact movie scene she’s portraying: In “The Dark Knight,” Ledger’s Joker dresses up in a white nurse’s outfit as part of a scheme to blow up Gotham General Hospital.

“I’ve already done Harley. Harley had her time,” Valle said. “I wanted to do nurse Joker.”

It’s a particularly evil version of the Joker character. But Valle said it’s ultimately just a character in a movie, and that if a person does something violent, they should be blamed — not the movie.

“It’s just like the whole ‘video games are causing violence’ thing,” she said. “It all depends on who the person is.”

Vincent Giacalone, 21

Occupation: Student at Stony Brook University

Giacalone’s Joker cosplay is a bit more relaxed than his Comic Con counterparts. He said it was just the easiest option after he procrastinated on his costume. Giacalone already had the velvet jacket and vest lying around, and he could buy inexpensive white gloves online.

He didn’t really know which particular Joker he was playing, though someone had suggested to him that he looked like a steampunk Joker. He plans to see the film — but not in costume. While riding the train Friday morning in his get-up, Giacalone said he sensed some of that concern. He was carrying an overnight duffel bag, and some other passengers looked worried.

“I felt like I was getting looks from people,” he said, “so I tried to do normal things like take out my granola bar and have a snack.”

Jokers at Every Turn at Comic Con, but They Were on Their Best Behavior

NEW YORK — At Comic Con, where attendees show off meticulously prepared costumes inspired by their favorite fictional characters, one generally does not dress up as the Joker without knowing which Joker they are.

The former employee, Chase Robinson, filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Manhattan accusing De Niro of asking her to perform such duties as scratching his back, buttoning his shirts, doing his laundry and vacuuming — making her effectively an “office wife” even as she was promoted. Robinson’s suit also said that he berated her, often while intoxicated, calling her names, and that he underpaid her compared with a male aide doing similar work.

“When he was verbally abusive he would be cursing and calling me names,” Robinson, 37, said, “he would hang up just to call back and do it all over again.”

De Niro’s lawyer did not immediately respond on Thursday to the countersuit. It comes more than one month after De Niro’s company, Canal Productions, accused Robinson of enriching herself by charging hundreds of thousands of dollars of personal expenses on a company credit card, spending, for example, more than $12,000 at a restaurant on the Upper East Side over two years and about $32,000 on Uber and taxi rides. It accused her of reimbursing herself or receiving direct payments for unauthorized purchases like a Louis Vuitton handbag and a dog sitter.

But the accusation that dominated the headlines was that Robinson had spent “astronomical” amounts of time watching television on the company’s Netflix account, including 55 episodes of “Friends” over four days in January. According to that lawsuit, such behavior was common for Robinson. It said that she “loafed” during work hours, streaming shows like “Schitt’s Creek” and “Arrested Development.”

In presenting her own account of her falling-out with her ex-boss, Robinson shifts some of the focus onto De Niro, 76, an intensely private actor who has been in the public eye lately because of his role in the new film “The Irishman,” and his obscene denunciations of President Donald Trump.

Robinson’s lawsuit denies the claims in Canal’s suit, filed Aug. 17 in state Supreme Court in Manhattan, and asserts that it was meant to intimidate Robinson after her lawyer warned De Niro’s lawyer that she had legal claims.

Robinson’s lawsuit asked for at least $12 million, double what her former boss’ lawsuit demanded.

In 2008, De Niro hired Robinson, then 25, as his executive assistant at Canal Productions. The company “contracts the services of Robert De Niro to third parties,” its suit says, and is separate from Tribeca Enterprises, an entertainment company that De Niro started with others in 2003. At Canal Productions, Robinson said, she assisted De Niro on films.

It is common for celebrities to hire people to handle personal matters, but Robinson said some of what she was asked to do crossed into inappropriate territory. Several times, she said, De Niro would ask her to scratch his back, sometimes requesting that she do so in a bathroom adjoining his office.

Robinson said that several times when they were on the phone together, she could hear him urinating. Once, when he had asked her to buy a television for his bathroom, she said he asked her to imagine him sitting on the toilet so that she could figure out a good place for the television. She did not say his behavior ever rose to the level of groping or sexual propositioning.

Her lawsuit alleges gender discrimination, asserting that De Niro’s treatment of Robinson, including his name-calling, was gendered and that she was paid less than a male counterpart.

In an audio file of a 2012 voicemail message posted on the website of the firm representing Robinson, De Niro can be heard berating her, calling her a “spoiled brat” and saying “you’re history,” with an added expletive.

Robinson said that even as she took on new job titles throughout her 11 years at the company, eventually becoming vice president for production and finance, De Niro required that she do domestic work, such as vacuuming the floors and setting the table in his private home. She said that she complained to De Niro about his behavior and that, at times, things would improve temporarily.

Twice, Robinson’s lawsuit mentions an unnamed “paramour” of De Niro’s who is described as “disparaging” Robinson and assigning her “demeaning job duties.” De Niro is currently in divorce proceedings with his wife, Grace Hightower.

Robinson said in an interview that, in April, she decided to resign over email because the work environment had become “so unbearable.”

De Niro’s lawsuit painted a starkly different picture of Robinson’s time at Canal Productions. The lawsuit described her as a once-trusted employee who used her operational knowledge to benefit herself. Robinson’s salary climbed to $300,000 in 2019 from about $175,000 in 2017, the lawsuit said.

Robinson said that the detailed expenses documented in De Niro’s lawsuit were made at the direction of the actor himself (the Louis Vuitton handbag was a gift for one of his employees, she said) or allowed under company policy. She said that other employees at the company, and sometimes De Niro’s family members, made use of her company credit card and that not all of the charges were hers.

As for the accusations about binge-watching, Robinson said that she and her colleague put on “Schitt’s Creek” in the background while they were working on a monotonous task in the office. She said she would sometimes turn on “Friends” for “white noise” as she was falling asleep but that she has “never binge-watched during working hours.”

NEW YORK — Robert De Niro is in a legal battle with a former employee after his company filed a lawsuit accusing her of running up expenses and binge-watching Netflix during working hours. On Thursday, she fired back with her own accusations that the actor subjected her to “gratuitous unwanted physical contact” and saddled her with domestic tasks that male employees were not asked to do.

De Niro and Ex-Aide Trade Lawsuits

“They’re missing a lot of stuff,” Knight, who was raised Muslim in the East Flatbush neighborhood, thought. “There were hardly any images of Muslims in their archives. They didn’t have that many images of black people.”

“The archive of Brooklyn isn’t necessarily representing Brooklyn,” she concluded.

Recently, that has changed drastically.

Oral historians associated with the Brooklyn Historical Society spent last year traversing the borough, recording interviews with dozens of Muslims. The intention was to preserve the conversations to fill what the institution admits was a gaping cultural hole in its famous archives.

They collected 54 oral histories, which amount to over 100 hours of audio, publishing the conversations online for public listening. Many interview subjects were born and raised in Brooklyn. Others immigrated here from countries that include Pakistan, Morocco, and Trinidad and Tobago.

They come from a variety of religious sects, including Sunni, Shiite and the Nation of Islam. They discuss everything from the social dynamics in their families, marriages and mosques to the repercussions after the Sept. 11 attacks and the most recent presidential election.

On Saturday, the Brooklyn Historical Society opened a sound-and-art exhibition drawn from the oral history project that includes a series of black-and-white geometric prints by Brooklyn artist Kameelah Janan Rasheed. The installation is titled “An Opening,” a reference to the first chapter of the Quran, called Surah Al-Fatiha.

But engineering a space for viewers to explore the exhibition independently while listening to intimate interviews posed a technological challenge, Rasheed said.

Their solution was to provide visitors with headphones and iPod Touches that attach to lanyards around their necks. The iPod Touches have a newly created program that recognizes 11 of Rasheed’s larger prints. When visitors walk in front of a print, the program sets off an oral history chosen by the artist. As they walk between the prints, they hear a patchwork of overlapping voices.

“It’s like you’re tuning channels on a radio,” Rasheed said. “The goal is to invite people to linger in some places, but to give people the option of doing a survey of the space.”

Rasheed, 34, chose stories that drew her in. At one print, a Brooklyn-born man in his 40s discusses the uniquely African American Muslim tradition of the bean pie. At another, a woman recalls a childhood in which everyone in her social circle was Muslim, making her feel as if she grew up in a “Muslim country.”

Because the storytelling in the oral histories is anything but linear — the narratives tend to stop and start and jump around throughout the person’s life — Rasheed reflects that concept in her exhibition, which often travels off the frame and into the space in between the prints.

Rasheed, who grew up in East Palo Alto, California, was raised by parents who converted to Islam. She is particularly drawn to narratives about Muslim history and identity that don’t often get mainstream attention, like the story told by Knight, who was ultimately interviewed for the project, and spoke of celebrating the Eid festivals, two important Muslim holidays, in Prospect Park as a child.

“There’s an assumption of a homogeneous Muslim identity,” Rasheed said. “As a person who grew up in an African American family and who is also Muslim, people forget that we exist at all.”

The exhibition is a piece of a broad effort by the Brooklyn Historical Society to create an archival presence of Muslims, who are about 4% of the borough’s population, according to a 2016 analysis by the Public Religion Research Institute.

Deborah Schwartz, president of the Brooklyn Historical Society, said that the institution was established in 1863, and for over a century the archives mostly reflected the backgrounds of the white men who founded it.

“Before this project, if you had come to the Brooklyn Historical Society to do research about Muslims or any topic related to Muslims, you basically would have found next to nothing,” Schwartz said.

Throughout the last two decades or so, she added, the organization has made a concerted effort to fill those gaps.

The idea for this project came from Zaheer Ali, a scholar of Muslims in the United States, who was hired as the society’s resident oral historian in 2015 and drew on his ties to Muslims in Brooklyn to compile an extensive list of potential interview subjects.

There was a point where Schwartz said she and other staff members questioned whether the project was still viable. It was when President Donald Trump won the 2016 election after proposing to ban Muslim immigration to the country. Schwartz said some Muslims in New York City had serious concerns about surveillance in their communities; others were worried about losing their immigration status.

But after consulting the board of trustees, she said, “We all agreed it was perhaps more important than it even started out as.”

“We wanted to make sure that people felt some sense of trust,” Schwartz said, “that if they were going to lend us their stories, that they understood this was a responsible, safe place to talk about their lives.”

The “Muslims in Brooklyn” project became much more than a collection of interviews that would be tucked away in the institution’s archives. The historical society organized community listening sessions for the interviews and developed a free educational curriculum for schools. A second art exhibition at BRIC House, opening on Friday, presents the work of eight artists (including Knight) and focuses on “multiple dimensions of the contemporary Muslim experience.”

Baseera Khan, another artist in the BRIC exhibition, also recorded a two-hour interview recounting her upbringing in Denton, Texas, by Muslim parents who immigrated from India. Khan said she grew up “afraid of being Muslim,” until she moved to Brooklyn in 2007, where there were Muslim residents all around her.

“Religion and spirituality and the acknowledgment of ancestry and all of this — it’s a thing now,” Khan said in her oral history. “But when I was in school, if you even had an inkling of interest in religion, people would shut you out.”

In different interviews, a man talked about the New York City Police Department’s targeted surveillance of Muslims after the Sept. 11 attacks. A woman spoke about the work that she had done to build interfaith relationships between Muslims and Jews in Brooklyn, and another about designing clothes that embrace religious modesty.

Rasheed drew inspiration from the oral histories while digging into her own family background. Hers is an interdisciplinary art that often juxtaposes scraps of academic text photocopied from books and reordered to give it new meaning. (Reviewing her work in a group show in April in The New York Times, Jillian Steinhauer wrote that the work formed “different permutations, suggesting a refreshing inquisitiveness.”)

To compile those disparate parts into something whole, Rasheed arranges shapes and text on the bed of a Xerox machine, manipulates and enlarges the compilation digitally and prints it out on large sheets of archival inkjet paper. (She has two Xerox machines at her apartment in Crown Heights.) When she visits her parents’ home in California, she often goes through her father’s decades-old notes on the Quran and other Islamic books, taking home material that could one day fit into her art. Her father, who converted to Islam in the early 1980s, photocopied pages from the books and pasted them on white paper so he could annotate them without sullying the actual pages. Text from those notes, as well as Rasheed’s own Arabic study book from when she was a teenager, found places in “An Opening.”

Ali, the oral historian, said in an interview with a Brooklyn Historical Society curator that he and Rasheed had imagined an aural experience that was reminiscent of overhearing snippets of conversation from the surrounding tables in a cafe.

People who grew up in similar communities in one borough but who had never met had their voices overlaid, as if they were under one roof.

“We had created a community of people by forming this collection who didn’t know each other, who never said they identified with each other,” Ali said. “We did it to expand what people understood as being Muslim in Brooklyn.”

‘An Opening’

Through June 30 at the Brooklyn Historical Society; 718-222-4111, brooklynhistory.org.

A Sound-and-Art Show Fills a Void for Muslims in Brooklyn

NEW YORK — Nsenga Knight, a 38-year-old artist, recalls visiting the Brooklyn Historical Society archives after receiving a research grant, curious to explore what sort of material she could find about Muslims in Brooklyn. She didn’t find much of anything.

Last month, Judge Michael P. Toomin of Cook County ordered that a special prosecutor be appointed to examine whether local prosecutors properly handled Smollett’s case, and to reopen the case “if reasonable grounds exist.”

In court documents filed Friday, Smollett’s lawyers wrote that Toomin’s order should be scrapped and that a new judge should consider whether a special prosecutor should be appointed, arguing that Toomin was biased against Smollett.

If a judge asks for a special prosecutor again, the court filing said, that investigator should not have the power to prosecute Smollett, whose felony disorderly conduct charges were dropped by the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office in March.

Toomin’s decision to appoint a special prosecutor was based on his conclusion that State’s Attorney Kim Foxx, who should have been in charge of prosecuting Smollett, failed to properly recuse herself from the case.

Foxx appointed her deputy to handle the case in February because she had had contact with representatives of Smollett when the police considered him to be a victim rather than a suspect. Foxx denied having a conflict of interest, but said she wanted to avoid the appearance of one.

In a sharply critical ruling, Toomin wrote that if Foxx wanted to formally recuse herself, she should have asked for a special prosecutor rather than keep the case inside her office.

Smollett’s lawyers argued that Toomin’s order unfairly assumed Smollett’s guilt and improperly used “inaccurate” media accounts in doing so.

“This case has been a travesty of justice and an unprecedented deprivation of Mr. Smollett’s constitutional rights, including the presumption of innocence and right to a fair trial,” Smollett’s lawyers wrote in the court filing.

A representative from Toomin’s office said it had not yet heard about the court filings and could not immediately comment. Although he ordered almost a month ago that a special prosecutor be appointed, he has not yet named anyone to fill that role.

His ruling was a response to a petition from a retired judge, Sheila O’Brien, who has said that she wants to get the “whole truth” of what happened in the case.

O’Brien said in a statement Friday that Smollett’s filings were “short on substance but big on flash and delay.”

It has been more than five months since Smollett, an actor on the Fox television show “Empire” who is black and gay, reported to police that two men had attacked him near his apartment in downtown Chicago. Smollett said that they shouted racist and homophobic epithets at him, poured bleach on him and placed a noose around his neck. Two acquaintances of Smollett’s, Abimbola Osundairo and Olabinjo Osundairo, later told police that Smollett paid them $3,500 to orchestrate the attack.

The Police Department said it had used security camera footage, text message communications and GPS location data to establish that the attack was a hoax. Smollett maintains his innocence, and his lawyers say that any contact he had with the brothers had to do with a fitness regimen they were putting him through.

The State’s Attorney’s Office dropped the charges after Smollett agreed to do some community service and to forfeit the $10,000 bond paid for his release from jail. The decision prompted outrage from the police superintendent and Rahm Emanuel, the mayor at the time, who contended that the outcome was too lenient given the many hours of detective work expended on the case.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/19/arts/television/jussie-smollett-special-prosecutor.html" id="a0296304-c79a-3dc5-a05b-ffb1b6aad0a6">The New York Times</a>.

Lawyers for Jussie Smollett asked a Chicago court on Friday to reconsider a decision to appoint a special prosecutor to re-examine the case against the actor, who was accused of staging a hate crime before prosecutors abruptly dropped the charges.

Jussie Smollett Fights Appointment of Special Prosecutor

Kyoto Animation, known by fans as “KyoAni,” was founded by Yoko Hatta and her husband, Hideaki Hatta, in 1981. Most of the studio’s production has taken place in the building that was the site of Thursday’s fire, which killed 33 people and injured dozens more. The Kyoto police said a 41-year-old man was believed to have set the fire by igniting a flammable liquid around the studio.

Stevie Suan, a professor at Hosei University in Tokyo who has a doctorate in Manga Studies, said in a phone interview that Kyoto Animation is known for high quality, meticulously detailed works — some of which have become hits among anime fans. From their artful scenery to the precise design of characters’ eyes and hair, Kyoto Animation is considered a standout studio with international appeal.

In an industry that often relies on contractors and freelancers to execute projects, Kyoto Animation has been lauded for hiring much of its staff full time, Suan said. It is often cited as an example of a company that offers its employees a dependable work environment to develop their artistry.

“It’s a horrendous shame how much talent is being lost,” he said, “These are the top of the top in their industry.”

Some of the series created by Kyoto Animation can be streamed on Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime Video and Funimation, a major distributor of anime. Here are four of the studio’s most popular works:

“The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya” (2006)

One of Kyoto Animation’s early hits was a series called “The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya,” a high school drama that turns into an elaborate science fiction story. The series is based off a Japanese light novel, a genre similar to young adult fiction in the United States.

The series featured a dance in its ending theme song, called “Hare Hare Yukai,” that quickly became an internet meme, inspiring parodies and performances at anime conventions.

As it rose in prominence, Kyoto Animation became known for its intimate storytelling and character interactions, said Patrick Macias, the editor-in-chief of Otaku USA Magazine, a bimonthly title about anime.

“They’re really stories about people and the relationships between people,” Macias said. “It’s everyday life through the filter of anime.”

“Lucky Star” (2007)

The “Lucky Star” series follows a group of girls attending high school outside Tokyo, including an intelligent female protagonist who is distracted from her studies by anime and video games. It’s a classic example of the “slice of life” genre, Suan said, which centers on everyday scenarios, lighthearted humor and lovable characters, in contrast to heavier and darker anime dramas.

“Lucky Star” became an early example of an anime series that inspired “sacred pilgrimages,” a trend in which fans travel to landmarks depicted in the series, Suan said. One popular site is the Washinomiya Shrine, a Shinto landmark that was reproduced in “Lucky Star.” A more recent series by Kyoto Animation, called “Tamako Market,” galvanized fan pilgrimages to a shopping street in Kyoto, where they could imagine walking the same paths as their favorite fictional characters.

Certain scenes in Kyoto Animation shows are so treasured by fans that the studio publishes books with detailed drawings of the frames, according to its website.

“Free!” (2013)

A more recent Kyoto Animation phenomenon is “Free!,” a series that has also spawned films, one of which was released this month. The initial anime series, released in 2013, centers on a group of boys who swam together in elementary school and reunite in their high school years to form a swimming club. The plot follows the ups and downs of the boys’ friendships and sports careers.

Ian Condry, a professor of Japanese Cultural Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said in a phone interview that “Free!” stood out in the anime world because of its visual focus on the male body rather than the female body. Criticism is sometimes directed at anime studios for their focus on sultry poses by female characters that are shot with the “male gaze” in mind, Condry said, but “Free!” sparked a discussion about male bodies being the focus of the lens.

"A Silent Voice” (2016)

The recent Kyoto Animation film “A Silent Voice,” showed that the studio was skilled not only at telling lighthearted “slice of life” stories, but ones that deal with heavy human emotions as well, Suan said. The film centers on a deaf girl and a boy who bullied her when they were younger. The boy, Shoya Ishida, now in high school, wishes to make amends with the girl, Shoko Nishimiya, who was once his victim.

“A Silent Voice,” showcased the storytelling range of a studio beloved for its skill in animation, Suan said.

“They’re generally known for animation that is quite intricate, and usually on female characters,” he said. “But they have a range.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/18/arts/kyoto-animation-fire.html" id="fa91880d-e3eb-3d3e-af9c-59a008adae22">The New York Times</a>.

The Japanese animation studio that police say was targeted by an arsonist in Kyoto on Thursday has long been a fixture in the anime world, known for its “slice of life” stories and detailed scenery that entices fans to visit the locations depicted onscreen.

The Kyoto Studio Set on Fire Is Revered by Anime Fans

Spacey, 59, had been accused of fondling an 18-year-old man at a Nantucket restaurant three years ago. But in recent weeks, there had been signs that the case was in jeopardy. Last month, the accuser’s lawyer said that a smartphone being sought as evidence had gone missing, and this month, the accuser dropped a lawsuit against Spacey only six days after having filed it.

Problems for the prosecution came to a head last week when Spacey’s accuser invoked the Fifth Amendment after being warned that he could be charged with a felony if he had deleted phone evidence. When the young man refused to continue his testimony, a Nantucket District Court judge said the prosecution might no longer be viable.

In a court filing Wednesday, Michael O’Keefe, the Cape and Islands district attorney, wrote that the office was dropping the prosecution “due to the unavailability of the complaining witness.”

O’Keefe’s office elaborated in a news release that the accuser and his family had met with prosecutors on Sunday to determine his willingness to cooperate through the rest of the case.

“The complaining witness was informed that if he chose to continue to invoke his Fifth Amendment right,” the district attorney’s office wrote, “the case would not be able to go forward.”

Once the accuser decided to keep invoking his right against self-incrimination, the office wrote, the only way to continue prosecuting Spacey would be to grant the accuser immunity from prosecution and force his testimony. But that would have ramifications, including damaging the accuser’s credibility.

Prosecutors in Massachusetts on Wednesday dropped a sexual assault charge against actor Kevin Spacey, bringing an abrupt close to one of the few criminal cases of the #MeToo era.

Julia Jacobs

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