Humans of the Heights: A Conversation with Ebenezer Smith
For the fifth installment of my series, sharing the stories of the people of the Heights, I spoke with Ebenezer Smith, the District Manager of the Washington Heights and Inwood Community Board.
A cornerstone of the Washington Heights community, Ebenezer is a committed and passionate individual who works tirelessly to provide services for the neighborhood. Having overcome much adversity in his life and with decades of experience working in city government, Ebenezer is as insightful as he is thoughtful about his own life and those of the people he serves.
This is his story:
Avraham Frohlich: So, tell me a little bit about your background.
Ebenezer Smith: Well, I was born in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. My family was a middle-class family. My father was an engineer, and my mother was a secretary in a court. My last name is Smith, and you might say, how come your last name is Smith, but you are Dominican?
You see, my grandfather was born in Tortola, a British island in the Caribbean, and his father was a captain from England who was in service there. He went to the San Pedro de Macorís in DR because the sugarcane industry was booming in those times. There, he became a mechanic and fixed the machines.
When I was younger, I went to university at the Universidad Autónoma de Santo Domingo.
AF: What did you study?
ES: I went to one year of college and six years of law school. And when I was in law school, I met a young woman, and we fell in love. She lived here in New York and was in DR temporarily to finish law school. So after we got engaged and married, she returned back to New York and requested a Green Card for me. I arrived in New York on Jan. 3, 1988, in the middle of the night.
AF: What do you remember about that night?
ES: It was so cold. Cold and windy. I had never been out of the Dominican Republic before. And it was dark. I remember the streetlights were very yellow.
AF: How were you feeling at the time?
ES: A little sad and a little scared because I left my family behind. I left my house and my room behind. Everything.
But I came here with one purpose, and that purpose was to revalidate my degree and become a lawyer here. I didn’t want to come here just to be one more immigrant. I wanted to be somebody.
AF: Why did you study law?
ES: Well, I told you my mother used to work as a secretary in the courts, and I saw that the lawyers in the Dominican Republic were respected. They knew everything. They had good positions in the government, and many of the presidents were lawyers. And I have a passion for constitutional law. Later, I went to law school in the U.S. as well, and I am now the District Manager of Community Board #12, which covers the Heights and Inwood.
AF: What's the role of the community board?
ES: Well, not too many people know about us. You tell people about the community board and they say, “What the hell is that?” They don't know that the city charter divides the city into 59 districts and requires each to have a community board with 50 board members.
We are responsible for the delivery of service in the district. We need to make sure that all the agencies—the Department of Transportation, the Parks Department, Sanitation, the Police Department, etc.—provide the services needed here. The community gives us complaints and we call the agency to resolve them.
AF: What does being the district manager entail?
ES: The district manager is the one who runs the day-to-day in the office. The administrator of the office. I am responsible for having meetings with all the agencies once a month. I prepare the calendar and make sure that the necessary information goes out to the community.
AF: What did you do after arriving in the states?
ES: My sister-in-law offered me a bed in the living room, and I started looking for a job immediately. And that was very difficult for me. I did law school, but what kind of job could I get now?
My first job was in a Burger King, assembling sandwiches. Then my cousin said, 'You know, I can get you a job where you can practice your English,’ so I got a job as a security guard. From there, I became a janitor, cleaning a dialysis center.
In the summer, I started working at the Parks Department at a pool downtown. We raked all the garbage from the pool. We scraped it. We put the primer. We painted the pool. Then we needed to go there every day to clean the area. I was still a janitor, so I had two jobs at the same time to support my family.
In 1989, I became a permanent city park worker and was in lower Manhattan cleaning the parks. Raking the leaves. The snow. Everything.
I also got my Hack license and drove taxis for a few years. But I still had my vision. I’m going to law school. And every time I saw a job in the law department of the Parks Department, I sent my resume. But they never gave me an opportunity.
AF: Was it hard for you to start over and do these jobs when you really wanted to be a lawyer?
ES: Yes. At the beginning, it was, oh my God. I remember I went there at 7 o'clock in the morning. We worked all day long cleaning the parks, and finally, we had lunch. Then they said, ‘Okay, now, after lunch, we're going to clean over there.’ And I said, oh my God, it's like we’re doing another job.
At the beginning, it was very hard just to lift the shovel.
AF: How did you move from there to Law School?
ES: Well, at that time, I was a member of the American Society of Dominican Attorneys, which helped foreign lawyers to become lawyers here. And this professor from Touro Law School came to one of our meetings to tell us about their LLM program for foreign lawyers. I bought a second-hand car and started going to Touro in the morning and working in the park in the afternoon.
AF: What brought you to the community board?
ES: One summer, I applied to the Manhattan Recreation Division of the Parks Department, and the Chief of Recreation saw my resume. He was a Jewish guy. He told me, ‘Would you be interested in working with me?’ So, then, I had a Borough of Manhattan-wide role to supervise all the playground sites in the city. And I worked for the Department of Transportation (DOT), fixing parking meters in the Bronx.
Little by little, I started learning how the government works.
While I was in DOT, I applied for a position in the Bronx Borough Commissioner's office. And I started learning the district manager job because I was dealing with all the district managers in the Bronx.
So, I applied to be the district manager in the Heights and interviewed in front of the whole board. The next day, they called me and said, ‘Congratulations, you got the job.’ And I’ve been here since 2007.
AF: What do you see as the biggest challenge for a place like the Heights?
ES: Well, the population of Washington Heights is the population of a city by itself. Over 200,000 people. And then you have Broadway that divides the community in two. You have a very mixed community with different cultures and different goals. So, to make all those differences work together is difficult.
AF: How can we work together better?
ES: On your part, Yeshiva should be open for the community to go there for programs. More opportunities. Because right now, in the way it is, you see how Amsterdam is? When you speak with some people in the community, they think that that area belongs to the Jews. The people in the community should be invited there more.
AF: What’s your experience with the Jewish community?
ES: In the Dominican Republic, there is a province called Puerto Plata, and in it, a town that is called Sosúa. During the Holocaust, one ship was allowed to come to DR full of Jews, so Sosúa has had an enclave of Jews for many years. So, in my case, I am aware of the community, and I know the benefit that the entire world receives from the Jews and Israel.
As a matter of fact, the altar of my church has three flags. The Israeli flag, the American flag and the Christian flag.
And Rabbi Kalinsky is a member of the community board. He helped a lot and did a lot for the community. I remember Rabbi Kalinsky helped many people during the tax period, helping grocery store owners do the taxes.
AF: What advice would you give to Yeshiva University students?
ES: Do not be afraid of us. You don’t have to be a fool, but you don’t have to be afraid. You can say hola.
AF: It was wonderful to talk to you.
Photo Caption: Ebenezer Smith
Photo Credit: Ebenezer Smith
