Photos Document a Drug-Tainted Life in Bushwick

By JAMES ESTRIN

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Though he didn't think so at the time, it's fair to say that Andy Velazquez had a difficult childhood. He grew up poor on Dodworth Street, near Malcolm X Boulevard in Brooklyn. It was a block that even in the best years of the latter part of the 20th century was no garden spot. The neighborhood, Bushwick, had never recovered from the looting triggered by the 1977 blackout. And by the time Andy came along, the violent and unrelenting crack trade had commandeered the stoops and sidewalks.

His mother, Rosa Rossy, was an addict, first heroin then crack, and Andy spent more time playing in the abandoned buildings and empty lots on Dodworth Street than he did in school. “We just made everything on the block our playground,” Andy, now 25, said last week. “It was very tough, but being kids we just looked at it that everything we would do was going to be fun.”

ShowcaseBrenda Ann Kenneally

In 2009, Brenda Ann Kenneally documented the coming of age of five troubled young women in her hometown - women whose adolescence recalled her own.

It was indeed tough. It was a block that few people walked down unless they had to.

“If you weren't from there, you shouldn't walk through there,” Andy said. “Somebody would rob you or beat you up for no apparent reason or make the dogs on the block chase you.”

Brenda Ann Kenneally moved to Bushwick from Miami in the mid-90s, across the street from Andy's family, so she could com plete a master's degree in art education at New York University. She had a 2-year-old son, a failing marriage and “no money.” Brenda had grown up poor in difficult family circumstances in Troy, N.Y., and struggled with drug and alcohol problems when she was a teenager and young adult.

She wasn't looking for an exotic place to photograph when she moved to Brooklyn - she was merely trying to find an affordable apartment. Few places were cheaper than Bushwick.

After a few days unpacking and hanging curtains, Brenda went around the corner from her apartment to Dodworth Street. “I introduced myself to one of the boys who seemed like he had a big presence in the neighborhood,” she said. “He was about 8. Blonde hair, kind of a wild child, always with dogs, always playing with the abandoned kitchen appliances.”

Brenda, then 36, tried to imagine what Andy's life was like. In the beginning the best she could figure was that Andy, the youngest of four boys , was in charge of taking care of his mother. He seemed to be going out in the middle of the night to score drugs with her, either to make sure that she had company or that she was safe.

She took her first picture of Andy, with his dog, in 1996 (below). Andy was 8.

Andy remembers meeting Brenda for the first time. “Brenda was like the outcast at first,” he said. “It was just Hispanics and blacks on the block, and then this white lady just appears. Everybody was wondering what's this white lady doing walking around with a camera.”

Andy says that his mother, who knew everybody on the block, told their neighbors that Brenda was O.K. and wasn't bothering anybody. He also introduced her to his friends' parents and “soon everyone started getting along.”

Brenda remembers Andy being very nurturing as a youngster. He was kind and gentle with her son, Simon, and took it upon himself to feed, care for and shelter all the abandoned dogs in the neighbo rhood. “He was incredibly innovative and motivated, but within a very, a very small world,” she said. “He never seemed bored. He was kind of like a grown man even though he was much shorter than the other kids.”

Andy would hang out at Brenda's house and play with Simon like an older brother. Often he would sleep over, and he eventually split his time between Brenda's and his mother and father's apartment across the street. Brenda took Andy to the beach and to her own mother's upstate house for Christmases.

His mother, who was known as Tata, supervised her four sons and her daughter from the street corner in front of Broadway foods. At times she sold crack. Often she was her own best customer.

When Brenda moved in, Rosa had just returned from a stint in prison for selling drugs. Over the next decade she went in and out several times - once for three years. It was difficult for Andy.

“I knew what she was doing and it hurt me because me and my friends used to joke about other people's parents who were crackheads,” he said.

For the next five years Brenda photographed Andy, his mother and several other neighbors.

She made extraordinarily intimate, gritty photos that reveal the devastating effects of the crack drug trade from the inside. The photographs were published in The New York Times Magazine in 2002 and eventually, in 2005, in the book “Money Power Respect: Pictures of My Neighborhood” (Channel Photographics). Andy went to the book publishing party with Brenda and Simon and remembers some people asking him for his autograph.

A year after she moved to Bushwick, Brenda separated from her husband. In late 2001, Brenda moved into a house, in the same ZIP code but a 10-minute walk away from Dodworth Street. Andy continued to spend time with Brenda and Simon, sometimes sleeping over. She continued to photograph him.

When Andy was 13, he started to sell crack. He says he had “learned e verything he needed to know about hustling drugs by watching my mom.”

She gave him a few tips as well. He didn't use crack himself, sticking to “smoking weed and drinking too much.”

It took a lot of street smarts just to survive and not get caught by the police. There were, however, some scary moments.

“We were staying in an abandoned building and there were three of us who had been drinking,” Andy said. “I woke up and this guy had a big butcher's knife to my neck, saying, ‘Give me all the drugs and all the money or I'll slit your throat.' ”

Andy responded, “No problem, take it all.” Two months later, it was a different “stick-up guy” - with a .357 Magnum to Andy's head.

Brenda tried to persuade him to go to school and not sell crack, but Andy made it clear he wasn't looking for another parent.

“The only thing I was advocating was like, go to school, read a book, take some music lessons,” Brenda said. “Not, yo u know, anything beyond that.”

But he rarely went to school.

In 2000, Andy talked with Brenda about his mother's arrest. “One day I came home from school and my mom was gone,” he said. “After that I was afraid to go to school.”

Eventually, he spent more than a year in a heavy security juvenile detention center in Johnstown, N.Y.,  because of chronic truancy.

Brenda had been in the family court system herself. In 1971, at the age of 12, she was declared incorrigible and drifted in and out of group homes and temporary placements. Her father was a sometimes violent, alcoholic and manic depressive and her parents divorced when she was 8. Brenda began drinking and doing drugs and left home, and New York, at 16.

Looking at her later project, “Upstate Girls,” on pregnant teenagers and young single mothers in her hometown, it's clear that could have been her fate as well. (It was published on Lens in 2009.) She didn't become clean and sob er until she was 26 - about Andy's age now. But she found photography in her late 20s.

While Brenda and Andy stayed close, they agreed that when he was 16, she would stop photographing him for a while. But then in 2004, his father, Andres Velazquez, died of a heart attack and Andy's brother Jose - nicknamed Pepe - was shot four minutes before midnight on Dec. 31 of the same year. He collapsed on the street right outside the family apartment and died a few hours later. After the deaths, Andy began drinking pretty much nonstop.

He says he didn't care any more after his brother was murdered. Brenda said everything that had happened to him to that point made him “feel and act hopeless. And he lost a lot of that ingenuity. He became bored and sort of laconic.”

But his girlfriend became pregnant, and when she gave birth to his daughter, Jelena, he swore off selling drugs and says he hasn't since. It was Christmas 2006.

For a while things looked better. Andy worked as a laborer and was living with his brother in Queens, so he wasn't on the block as much, though he would still visit. Then last year he lost his job.

“He was pretty much back on the block all the time, living in his friend's basement,” said Brenda, now 52. “Kind of just the way I met him, except for now he was grown and he was drinking. He can't seem to get away from the block, it's like he's tethered.”

On July 8 of this year, Andy was with some friends and got into an argument with a neighbor over a bottle of liquor. Andy was shot in the back. The bullet is still lodged near his spine and he has some nerve damage. He recently left his wheelchair, but struggles to stand using a walker.

He's back living with his brother in Queens, without any income or job prospects. He uses Access-a-Ride, a sort of group taxi for disabled people, to visit Brenda, or she drives out to visit him. He's waiting to be approved for Social Security disability payments

When he first saw the book “Money Power Respect,” it was a source of pride. He enjoyed the recognition. Now, when Andy looks at the photographs of him as a child, he mainly thinks of his daughter: “I see all the troubles my family went through,” he said. “I don't want my daughter to go through that.”

Andy is injured and doesn't have a meaningful education, and most of the friends he played with in the abandoned buildings on Dodworth Street are dead or in jail. For Andy, the gravitational pull - of the world he grew up in - to Dodworth Street has been inexorable.

Brenda somehow escaped the fate of her upstate girl subjects - though many of her childhood friends did not. She left at 16 and didn't really return until a New York Times Magazine assignment took her there more than 25 years later.

When Andy gave up selling drugs, the Christmas his daughter was born, he also gave up playing video games. For him the two were intertwined.< /p>

“I looked at selling drugs as if it were a video game,” he said. “To end the game - to win the game - you had to be the last one standing.”

Brenda Ann Kenneally's photographs and videos of her old neighborhood can be found on a blog she co-founded with the producer Laura Lo Forti, The Raw File. New work includes a video that follows a drug-addicted mother whose three children were placed in the foster care system. Additionally, these photographs of Andy and Dodworth Street are featured on the Web site of the documentary project, Facing Change. Facing Change was featured on Lens in 2010 and again last year.