Return to Miriam Ascarelli Profile & Portfolio
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FSB.com
By Miriam Ascarelli
Beating the Pink Slip Blues
Willem VanDooijeweert had one helluva ride on the Internet roller coaster. In December 1999, the 32-year-old former real estate manager earned six-figures (plus stock options worth $1 million) as vice president of real estate and business development for Kozmo.com in New York City. The online delivery service was rapidly expanding in major cities around the country. In a little over nine months, he set up 20 offices and warehouses. Then it ground to a halt. The dot-com ran short of cash and in August 2000 it laid off 250 employees, including VanDooijeweert. He didn't have a long job search though. Using his Internet experience to his advantage, he landed a higher-paying post three weeks later at Colliers ABR, an international real estate company in New York City. VanDooijeweert now runs a division that targets technology and Internet businesses as well as Old Economy firms that need properties in a hurry. VanDooijeweert's dot-com stint was the best thing that ever happened to his career. "You've got to live the entire life cycle of a company in a year," he says. "You learn a whole lot and get to leverage what you learned into opportunity.
New Jersey Monthly At 6 p.m., as the lights twinkle in the skyscrapers across the Hudson River, an exhausted Maria Barengan gets off the #101-L bus from Bayonne and arrives at the doorstep of New Jersey’s most celebrated urban reincarnation: the Jersey City waterfront. Carrying her dinner neatly packed in a clear plastic tote bag, Maria walks against the steady stream of well-dressed traders, attorneys and secretaries leaving the office towers that have risen from the ruins of a moribund waterfront and enters 15 Exchange Place, a stately stone building with a view of Manhattan and an A-list of clients that symbolize the swagger and clout of the new prosperity: Merrill Lynch, Deloitte & Touche, Tucker Anthony. Maria heads straight for the security desk and signs in, then takes the freight elevator to the ninth floor where she meets Jose S., the night supervisor, and gets the keys. Thus Maria, a 23-year-old Honduran immigrant who has already spent the day working in a sweater factory in Bayonne, begins her second job: cleaning offices. Welcome to the underbelly of the new economy. Maria is part of an invisible workforce, the unnoticed legion of laborers whose work begins after the high tech moguls and financial wizards who have turned the Jersey City waterfront into the poster child of post-industrial prosperity have gone home for the day. Doing the tasks of vacuuming floors, disinfecting toilets and emptying trash cans, the cleaners work in deserted offices that only a few hours before were bustling with the drama of high-stakes litigation and million-dollar deals. They are cheap labor: recent arrivals from Latin America, most of them women, who speak little or no English. As many as 40 percent, according to the organizers of Local 32 BJ of the Service Employees International Union, are undocumented, working under the table or with false papers. The jobs are mostly part-time. The going rate is $6 to $6.50. Benefits are rare.…
By Miriam Ascarelli
Jersey City’s Underground Economy
Old-House Journal It’s easy to dismiss northeast New Jersey as the great asphalt wasteland between New York and Philadelphia. But the region is more than just billowing smokestacks, toxic waste dumps and a string of uninspiring turnpike exits. After all, this is where Arts & Crafts pioneer Gustav Stickley spent some of his most productive years. The area nurtured inventor Thomas Edison and helped set the course of both the American and Industrial Revolutions. New Jersey has a split personality, home to urban factories that churned out locomotives, glass and steel to propel the industrialization of America, but also to farmers who helped it become the Garden State. Its northeast is especially full of history, but has been too long obscured by New York City’s long shadow. Get in your car, mind your turnpike exits and cruise down the highway for a peek at the underpinnings of America. New Jersey saw plenty of action during Revolutionary War battles to control the key ports of New York and Philadelphia. George Washington spent more than a quarter of the war on New Jersey soil, setting up winter headquarters, twice in Morristown and once in Somerville. New Jersey militiamen, at first ambivalent in their support of the Continental Army, eventually helped tip the balance in Washington’s favor. For an overview of the state’s role, begin at Morristown National Historical Park, about 30 miles west of the Big Apple. It’s the site of the Ford Mansion, the hip-roofed Georgian-style home of Col. Jacob Ford Jr. that served as Washington’s headquarters in the winter of 1779-80. His troops shivered through the bitterly cold season at Jockey Hollow, 600 wooded acres also within the park. Here you can see the Tempe Wick House, where another general billeted that winter, and log huts built by the Jersey Brigade in the week prior to Christmas 1779…
By Miriam Ascarelli
New Jersey: Revolution and Revelation
Jersey Journal We call our second daughter Battalin’ Madeline. I think it’s an apt name, considering all that Madeline has been through since coming into the world seven months ago with a limp left arm, the result of a nerve injury that occurred after a long day of labor. At first, because most of these kinds of injuries heal by themselves, my husband, Jim, and I weren’t overly worried. Besides, there were other things to obsess over, like the terrifying 103-degree fever that came out of nowhere when Maddy was 6 days old. That landed us in the hospital for a week. At the ripe old age of three weeks, we took Maddy to a pediatric neurologist to check out her arm. That was when we were confronted with the nerve injury we had never heard of: Erb’s Palsy. Erb’s Palsy occurs in about two in 1,000 births, mostly in vaginal deliveries involving difficult labors and large babies, according to doctors at Texas Children’s Hospital who specialize in the condition. The injury occurs because the baby’s shoulders get stuck in the birth canal. To get the baby out, the child’s head or arm is yanked, stretching or severing the nerves connecting the arm to the spinal cord and paralyzing the arm. Adults and children whose arms have been pulled with excessive force can also find themselves with the same condition. In our case, Maddy was a prime candidate – she had a hard time getting out and she was large: 10 pounds at birth. Thus we ended up in a non-descript examining room as a pediatric neurologist used a rubber mallet to test for reflexes in Maddy’s left arm. Nothing happened…
By Miriam Ascarelli
Lessons from a Little One
FSB.com-2
By Miriam Ascarelli
Beating the Pink Slip Blues
Willem VanDooijeweert had one helluva ride on the Internet roller coaster. In December 1999, the 32-year-old former real estate manager earned six-figures (plus stock options worth $1 million) as vice president of real estate and business development for Kozmo.com in New York City. The online delivery service was rapidly expanding in major cities around the country. In a little over nine months, he set up 20 offices and warehouses. Then it ground to a halt. The dot-com ran short of cash and in August 2000 it laid off 250 employees, including VanDooijeweert. He didn't have a long job search though. Using his Internet experience to his advantage, he landed a higher-paying post three weeks later at Colliers ABR, an international real estate company in New York City. VanDooijeweert now runs a division that targets technology and Internet businesses as well as Old Economy firms that need properties in a hurry. VanDooijeweert's dot-com stint was the best thing that ever happened to his career. "You've got to live the entire life cycle of a company in a year," he says. "You learn a whole lot and get to leverage what you learned into opportunity.
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FSB.com
By Miriam Ascarelli
Beating the Pink Slip Blues
Willem VanDooijeweert had one helluva ride on the Internet roller coaster. In December 1999, the 32-year-old former real estate manager earned six-figures (plus stock options worth $1 million) as vice president of real estate and business development for Kozmo.com in New York City. The online delivery service was rapidly expanding in major cities around the country. In a little over nine months, he set up 20 offices and warehouses. Then it ground to a halt. The dot-com ran short of cash and in August 2000 it laid off 250 employees, including VanDooijeweert. He didn't have a long job search though. Using his Internet experience to his advantage, he landed a higher-paying post three weeks later at Colliers ABR, an international real estate company in New York City. VanDooijeweert now runs a division that targets technology and Internet businesses as well as Old Economy firms that need properties in a hurry. VanDooijeweert's dot-com stint was the best thing that ever happened to his career. "You've got to live the entire life cycle of a company in a year," he says. "You learn a whole lot and get to leverage what you learned into opportunity.
New Jersey Monthly At 6 p.m., as the lights twinkle in the skyscrapers across the Hudson River, an exhausted Maria Barengan gets off the #101-L bus from Bayonne and arrives at the doorstep of New Jersey’s most celebrated urban reincarnation: the Jersey City waterfront. Carrying her dinner neatly packed in a clear plastic tote bag, Maria walks against the steady stream of well-dressed traders, attorneys and secretaries leaving the office towers that have risen from the ruins of a moribund waterfront and enters 15 Exchange Place, a stately stone building with a view of Manhattan and an A-list of clients that symbolize the swagger and clout of the new prosperity: Merrill Lynch, Deloitte & Touche, Tucker Anthony. Maria heads straight for the security desk and signs in, then takes the freight elevator to the ninth floor where she meets Jose S., the night supervisor, and gets the keys. Thus Maria, a 23-year-old Honduran immigrant who has already spent the day working in a sweater factory in Bayonne, begins her second job: cleaning offices. Welcome to the underbelly of the new economy. Maria is part of an invisible workforce, the unnoticed legion of laborers whose work begins after the high tech moguls and financial wizards who have turned the Jersey City waterfront into the poster child of post-industrial prosperity have gone home for the day. Doing the tasks of vacuuming floors, disinfecting toilets and emptying trash cans, the cleaners work in deserted offices that only a few hours before were bustling with the drama of high-stakes litigation and million-dollar deals. They are cheap labor: recent arrivals from Latin America, most of them women, who speak little or no English. As many as 40 percent, according to the organizers of Local 32 BJ of the Service Employees International Union, are undocumented, working under the table or with false papers. The jobs are mostly part-time. The going rate is $6 to $6.50. Benefits are rare.…
By Miriam Ascarelli
Jersey City’s Underground Economy
Old-House Journal It’s easy to dismiss northeast New Jersey as the great asphalt wasteland between New York and Philadelphia. But the region is more than just billowing smokestacks, toxic waste dumps and a string of uninspiring turnpike exits. After all, this is where Arts & Crafts pioneer Gustav Stickley spent some of his most productive years. The area nurtured inventor Thomas Edison and helped set the course of both the American and Industrial Revolutions. New Jersey has a split personality, home to urban factories that churned out locomotives, glass and steel to propel the industrialization of America, but also to farmers who helped it become the Garden State. Its northeast is especially full of history, but has been too long obscured by New York City’s long shadow. Get in your car, mind your turnpike exits and cruise down the highway for a peek at the underpinnings of America. New Jersey saw plenty of action during Revolutionary War battles to control the key ports of New York and Philadelphia. George Washington spent more than a quarter of the war on New Jersey soil, setting up winter headquarters, twice in Morristown and once in Somerville. New Jersey militiamen, at first ambivalent in their support of the Continental Army, eventually helped tip the balance in Washington’s favor. For an overview of the state’s role, begin at Morristown National Historical Park, about 30 miles west of the Big Apple. It’s the site of the Ford Mansion, the hip-roofed Georgian-style home of Col. Jacob Ford Jr. that served as Washington’s headquarters in the winter of 1779-80. His troops shivered through the bitterly cold season at Jockey Hollow, 600 wooded acres also within the park. Here you can see the Tempe Wick House, where another general billeted that winter, and log huts built by the Jersey Brigade in the week prior to Christmas 1779…
By Miriam Ascarelli
New Jersey: Revolution and Revelation
Jersey Journal We call our second daughter Battalin’ Madeline. I think it’s an apt name, considering all that Madeline has been through since coming into the world seven months ago with a limp left arm, the result of a nerve injury that occurred after a long day of labor. At first, because most of these kinds of injuries heal by themselves, my husband, Jim, and I weren’t overly worried. Besides, there were other things to obsess over, like the terrifying 103-degree fever that came out of nowhere when Maddy was 6 days old. That landed us in the hospital for a week. At the ripe old age of three weeks, we took Maddy to a pediatric neurologist to check out her arm. That was when we were confronted with the nerve injury we had never heard of: Erb’s Palsy. Erb’s Palsy occurs in about two in 1,000 births, mostly in vaginal deliveries involving difficult labors and large babies, according to doctors at Texas Children’s Hospital who specialize in the condition. The injury occurs because the baby’s shoulders get stuck in the birth canal. To get the baby out, the child’s head or arm is yanked, stretching or severing the nerves connecting the arm to the spinal cord and paralyzing the arm. Adults and children whose arms have been pulled with excessive force can also find themselves with the same condition. In our case, Maddy was a prime candidate – she had a hard time getting out and she was large: 10 pounds at birth. Thus we ended up in a non-descript examining room as a pediatric neurologist used a rubber mallet to test for reflexes in Maddy’s left arm. Nothing happened…
By Miriam Ascarelli
Lessons from a Little One
FSB.com-2
By Miriam Ascarelli
Beating the Pink Slip Blues
Willem VanDooijeweert had one helluva ride on the Internet roller coaster. In December 1999, the 32-year-old former real estate manager earned six-figures (plus stock options worth $1 million) as vice president of real estate and business development for Kozmo.com in New York City. The online delivery service was rapidly expanding in major cities around the country. In a little over nine months, he set up 20 offices and warehouses. Then it ground to a halt. The dot-com ran short of cash and in August 2000 it laid off 250 employees, including VanDooijeweert. He didn't have a long job search though. Using his Internet experience to his advantage, he landed a higher-paying post three weeks later at Colliers ABR, an international real estate company in New York City. VanDooijeweert now runs a division that targets technology and Internet businesses as well as Old Economy firms that need properties in a hurry. VanDooijeweert's dot-com stint was the best thing that ever happened to his career. "You've got to live the entire life cycle of a company in a year," he says. "You learn a whole lot and get to leverage what you learned into opportunity.