This Land

by Dan Barry

  From the balcony above this gladiator’s pit, photographers crouch to capture expressions of joy, of anguish, of bewilderment, that are then presented as clues to how we should feel—even though that broker’s frown may reflect nothing more than digestive disagreement with a wolfed-down fried egg sandwich.

  Not long ago, a floor broker named Danny Trimble cocked a finger to his head and placed it against his temple, for reasons unrelated to the market; soon an image of Mr. Trimble “shooting” himself made the newspapers. No matter that he is not a hedge fund manager, bank C.E.O. or fat cat; no matter that he is just a financial foot soldier from Jersey, hoarse from shouting at his son’s Pop Warner football games.

  Mr. Trimble, 41, works at the edge of the exchange’s main floor, shoulder to shoulder with six other men in a booth the size of an elevator car. Not everyone graduated from college, but all are resident scholars of the hurly-burly floor, educated in reading markets, hunting for matches and executing buy-and-sell orders. They are worth their commissions, they say, because they provide things a computer cannot, things like experience, intuition—a “feel.”

  Crammed into this booth with no place to sit are Mike Ackerman, Paul Davis, Billy Johnson and Nick Stratakis, of B and B Securities; Mr. Trimble and Chris Martin, of Greywolf Execution Partners; and Ralph Roiland, a clerk. Scrappy independents, all; no one works for Goldman Sachs.

  Still, when they step onto Broad and Exchange Streets to breathe the autumn air, they sometimes get blamed for the world’s economic crisis. “You walk out there and people think you’re what’s wrong with this country,” says Mr. Martin, father of three, of Morristown, N.J.

  With the opening of the market imminent, the men in the booth send instant messages to clients, asking, hoping, for interest in trading stock. But the volatile activity in recent weeks has unnerved many investors; some respond with noncommittal “Thanks” and “I’m away from my desk.”

  At 9:30 on the dime the opening bell rings, clanging off the century-old walls of white marble, the ornate ceiling of gold. Brokers rush to the center of the floor, where specialists in individual stocks track the last best data. Shouts of “Buy off 10,000, pair off 10,000,” and “How’s Marathon?” feed the low roar of business.

  After a while, though, quiet returns. Brokers study computer screens in their booths, some to monitor stocks, some to play virtual games. In one corner, a man is deciphering a crossword puzzle, while three beside him play cards. The stock exchange has a different rhythm now, its denizens say, because of technological advances and the shrinking of the once-dominant house firms. It’s not like before.

  Many of the men, and it’s still almost all men, remember the days when they stood several deep around the specialists, nudging, pushing, staying put for several straight hours, shouting “Squad!” for pages to hustle handwritten notes to clerks on the wings, jockeying at the banks of phones now hanging from hooks like relics.

  Those were the days when black humor and practical jokes helped to blow off steam and show affection for comrades. The one-liners would fly minutes after, say, the space shuttle Challenger went down. A trader would return to work, disfigured, after a serious car accident to find at his station a toy car, burned and crushed. And he would laugh.

  Billy Johnson, 48, a burly former firefighter from Oceanport, N.J., recalls how his floor colleagues helped him to toast his approaching marriage: by ripping his jacket and covering him with shaving cream, perfume and potato chips.

  The jokes and put-downs still go on, and lately someone has been beeping a horn concealed in his jacket. But the humor is not quite as black.

  “A lot of that stopped after 9/11,” says Doreen Mogavero, 53, an experienced floor broker who points out that ground zero is a couple of blocks away. “It wasn’t that funny anymore.”

  Gone too is the loud physicality. Headsets and hand-held computerized pads mean less running around, fewer clerks, softer voices, a smaller chance for error. Those technological advances have opened the market to just about anyone with a computer, making floor trading seem almost quaint. Many traders retired rather than change their ways; others were laid off, including one now walking through the exchange. Selling insurance, someone says.

  Of the 1,366 broker’s licenses available for an annual fee of $40,000, only 553 are being used. In 2006 there were 3,534 people working on the floor; today there are 1,273.

  “The stress now is the lack of business,” says Benedict Willis III, 48, a senior broker who started here in 1982. Moments later he is interrupted by applause. It is the sound of a lost job: A floor broker of 20 years has just been laid off from a major firm, and now his colleagues are showing their respect.

  “They’re clapping him off,” Mr. Willis says. “It’s the second one this week.”

  One of the brokers in that small booth, Mike Ackerman, leads a Scandinavian delegation on a brief tour of the exchange, past computer screens flashing red and green, past taped-up photographs of family members, closed baseball stadiums and the Lower Manhattan skyline when it was intact. As he takes them to the balcony, a delegate asks a question in halting English: Does Mr. Ackerman feel personally responsible for the collapsing economy?

  Good question, answers Mr. Ackerman, 39, father of three, from Basking Ridge, N.J. Good question. But—no.

  He and all the people down on that floor are executing trades on behalf of others, using a hybrid method that combines a computer’s technology with a human’s gut instinct. They do not deal in subprime mortgages; they do not get golden parachutes. But hey: Good question.

  These brokers make money whether the market goes up or down; their earnings depend on the volume of trades, and the floor averages 117 million orders received a day. Still, they prefer north to south. “It’s political economics,” Mr. Willis explains. “We want to reassure investors that it’s O.K. to come back.”

  Tomorrow the market will plummet in the very last minutes. Beaten brokers will repair to bars like Bobby Van’s across the street, where the bartenders know their drinks before they’ve ordered.

  But right now the market climbs with every tick toward the 4 p.m. closing, as though willed to rise by all the Lennys now eyeing the electronic board. Up, up, up.

  “Two minutes to go,” someone says at 3:58. “A lifetime.”

  At an Age for Music and Imagination, Real Life Is Intruding

  NEWARK, OHIO—APRIL 15, 2009

  Two days before their long-awaited trip to New York City, for many of them a foreign place, the members of the Newark High School Sinfonia noisily gather for rehearsal. The cacophony ends when the first of the first violinists, the best violinist, stands to lead others in tuning to an A.

  Her name is Tiffany Clay and she is 18, with light brown hair tied in a ponytail and large eyes that always seem at the edge of tears. She has been on her own, more or less, since she was 16, and the violin in her delicate hands was bought for $175 on eBay by her music teacher.

  She is a complicated young woman, says that teacher, and a gifted musician. Consistently at or near the very top of her class. Should be going to a top college, on scholarship. Should be, but won’t be, because she feels a need to make money more than music.

  Ms. Clay is a child of her age and place, worried about being laid off, uninterested in and maybe even afraid of imagining a life beyond central Ohio. Newark is what she knows: a pleasant, bifurcated city of 45,000, where concerns about unemployment temper the pride in local public art, and where affluence and poverty sit side-by-side in the classroom.

  She once explored the idea of going away to college to become a music teacher. But it just didn’t seem practical: spending four years studying the theory of music, which doesn’t interest her, while here in Newark, the school system is constantly adapting to real and threatened cuts.

  Music programs always seem among the first to go, she says. No job security in Tchaikovsky.

  So she is maintaining high grades, playing in the orchestra, working 35 hours a week as
a Sonic Drive-In carhop, paying $345 a month for the small apartment she shares with an unemployed boyfriend—and planning to study nursing for two years at a technical college in Newark.

  “Everybody gets sick,” she says, plotting her future.

  Right now, though, she and the other students are rehearsing their string instruments for a high school orchestra competition that will take place in Lincoln Center. Soon the chatter of teenagers in a mostly empty school auditorium surrenders to the music of the masters.

  “Listen,” says their teacher, Susan Larson, her baton paused in mid-sway. “Listen.”

  Ms. Larson, 43, the Newark school system’s music director for the past three years, faces challenges beyond those presented on sheets of music. The city’s voters keep rejecting raises in the tax levy, forcing cuts in school programs, including music. Parents now pay $55 for a child to participate in activities like this orchestra, and $200 to play sports; if next month’s proposed levy is defeated, Ms. Larson doubts that the orchestra, for one, will survive.

  When she struggles to pay for repairs to instruments, many of which are long-ago hand-me-downs from another school district, she recalls her 15 years as the music director in Bexley, a more affluent city where her budget was nowhere near as tight. She vividly remembers the Bexley student who celebrated graduation by smashing a $10,000 violin—his spare.

  She cried then; it hurts more now.

  Here in Newark, half the students are poor enough to receive lunch free or at a discount. The system also has one of the highest dropout rates in Ohio; nearly a third of the high school students do not graduate. That elevated percentage seems out of place given the Middle America setting, but officials have a theory:

  Back in the day, you could drop out and still get a good job at one of the many manufacturing plants in town. You could pay the mortgage, buy a car new, take holiday trips—all without a high school diploma.

  “Now those jobs have gone away,” says Keith Richards, the city’s schools superintendent. “But the mind-set has not.”

  Mayor Bob Diebold, 48, who grew up here, agrees. “You could walk out of school and get a job,” he says. “You can’t do that anymore.”

  Actually, you can—only those jobs are more likely to be at McDonald’s and not, say, at the Owens Corning fiberglass plant, for generations a vital part of the Newark economy. Nine years ago the plant employed about 1,500; now, fewer than 700.

  Rehearsal ends and the young musicians flee, a few in cars driven by parents. Ms. Clay, though, drives her 1998 Chevy Malibu to wash clothes for her New York trip at the Colonial Coin Laundry, then heads to her home in a weathered apartment complex—the unit, she says, “right next to the Dumpster.”

  The apartment contains little more than a bed, television and couch, now occupied by her boyfriend, Trevor Scanlon, who dropped out of high school but says he’s working on his graduate-equivalency diploma. Slinking about is their cat, Easy Mac, named after a macaroni and cheese that you microwave.

  The short life story Ms. Clay tells is of an adulthood come too soon, of parents splitting up when she was young, of a mother gone to another city, of a father, an electrician, dogged by employment uncertainties. She and her father clashed so often, she says, that she moved out at 16, got a job and tried to figure out life—rent, work, school, some health issues—on her own.

  She returned after a year but left again several months later, for good, though she is in touch with her parents, and talks often of wanting to be around in case they ever need her.

  While working full time at the Sonic, she has also maintained superior grades, taken several Advanced Placement courses and distanced herself from classmates. She bristles when some of them talk of what they have spent at the Easton Town Center mall—“That’s a month’s rent,” she wants to say—but at the same time she admits to feeling jealous: “I want—that!”

  Now wearing a yellow Sonic golf shirt and a Tiffany C. nameplate, Ms. Clay leaves to make $7.35 an hour, plus tips; it will be a long night. “Kids are in school during the week,” she explains. “They leave at 9, and I stay until after 11.”

  Soon she is gliding on roller skates beneath neon reds and yellows that grow more garish as dusk descends. Spinning, speeding, stopping with effortless grace, she balances plastic trays of sweet and greasy food with those delicate hands. Her mastery of yet another world, this Sonic world, means she is again employee of the month, entitling her to a month of free meals.

  And the lyrics of her night songs are:

  “All right, I’ve got your three junior chili cheese wraps, a B.L.T., chicken strip sandwich, extra long Coney and a mozzarella stick. And a kid’s hot dog meal and kid’s hamburger meal, one with a grape slush, the other with a Powerade slush.”

  Two mornings later, buses whisk the Newark High School Sinfonia and its entourage to New York: Austin Modesitt, 16, violinist, who has never left Ohio, but whose mother, a factory worker, contributed her tax-refund check; Jessica Kunasek, 17, violinist, whose older siblings chipped in to pay her way; other students, who sold chocolate, washed cars, held a spaghetti dinner—anything to cover the cost of $850 a student.

  Now it is Sunday. They have spent three days in a Manhattan wonderland, but the time has come to compete for something called the National Orchestra Cup. They file into the just renovated Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center and put on their school-owned tuxedos and gowns.

  A few of the invited high schools had to decline; the recession, organizers explain. But others, from Ohio and California, New York and Indiana, have made it, and their instruments, at least in Ms. Larson’s estimation, are of higher quality.

  Newark is the last to perform, following a symphony orchestra—with strings, brass, winds, percussion and a harp—from Carmel, Ind., where the median household income is nearly three times that in Newark. The Carmel students seem at home in Lincoln Center; they play exquisitely.

  The Newark students take the stage, led by concertmaster Tiffany Clay and trailed by director Susan Larson. First, a toccata by Frescobaldi. Then a cello duet by Vivaldi, sweetly rendered by juniors Bryn Wilkin and Alex Van Atta. Finally, the first movement of Tchaikovsky’s Serenade for Strings.

  Soon there come sounds just beyond articulation, of sorrow and joy and wonder, summoned from wood and string by the children of Newark, Ohio. And Ms. Clay, at the front of the stage, disappears into the music.

  Enchanted by Pachelbel as a child, given free lessons by a teacher who recognized her talent, blessed with the gift of musical sight reading, Ms. Clay has not been as fortunate with other parts of her young life. Her worries are not about prom dresses but about family, and rent, and employment.

  Soon, these students will be back in Newark, proud of tying for first runner-up, behind that orchestra from Carmel. And Ms. Clay will be back at the Sonic, spinning her wheels, singing her song of limeades and cheeseburgers, easy on the mayo. After that, nursing, probably.

  What role music will play in her life, she doesn’t know. But for now, at least, she is on a New York stage, wearing a borrowed black gown, playing a borrowed eBay violin, and Tchaikovsky holds her.

  EPILOGUE

  Tiffany Clay received a scholarship to Oklahoma City University. Her studies there and at Oklahoma State University centered mostly on nursing. She also became a mother.

  In 2014, she and her son, Leif, moved back to Newark, Ohio. She reconnected with family members and eventually got a job as an employment specialist at Licking Memorial Hospital, where she works at what she says is the very rewarding task of helping at-risk high school students.

  Music has taken a back seat in her life. Now she plays the violin—and, more and more, the piano—for enjoyment.

  “Overall, life has improved,” Ms. Clay said. “There are still moments, especially for people from lower-middle-class backgrounds. But that’s okay: You just roll with it.”

  In a City Under Strain, Ladling Out Fortification

  FALL RIVER, MASS.—APRIL 27, 2009
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  In the immaculate kitchen of an old social club now receiving the gray morning light, a deep silver pot has been filled with buckets and buckets of cold water. The cook measures not by the quart but by the heart, so if you ask exactly how much water, the answer is: exactly the right amount.

  With her navy beans washed, her beef shanks unwrapped, her kale and cabbage ready to be chopped by hand, the time has come to make another batch of restorative soup for ailing Fall River. She lights the stove.

  Her name is Ines De Costa, but the city calls her Vovó, familiar Portuguese for grandmother. She is 76, with salt-white hair and a small body transformed by spinal degeneration into the shape of a cupped hand. This means she must stand on tiptoe to stir.

  Among the many soups in Ms. De Costa’s oceanic repertoire are those with a specific purpose, including a chicken-and-potato concoction for pregnant women. But the soup she is making now, this Portuguese soup she learned from her mother, is for a working-class city with 16 percent unemployment, nearly double the average in Massachusetts and recently raised by the layoffs of dozens of police officers and firefighters.

  For $3.50, you get a heaping bowl of nourishing soup, a fresh Portuguese roll and some butter. “It’s a disaster in Fall River,” she says, her accent still strong nearly 60 years after leaving the Azores. “No work, everybody loses their jobs.”

  So this is what Vovó says: You want another roll?

  Ms. De Costa rises well before dawn from the hospital bed her children installed in her Somerset cottage several years ago. There, surrounded by portraits and statues of Jesus, the Blessed Virgin and a host of saints, including her beloved St. Teresa of Ávila, who suffered so, she begins her morning ritual of praying for you, me, everyone. Then a cup of coffee, decaf.