A heartwarming story of human goodness for Thanksgiving

From Projects to Penthouse, It’s One Family -- by COREY KILGANNON/NY Times

The weather was as unlike today’s as can be imagined: summer, sweaty, a humid evening on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Teenagers played pickup baseball on the steamy blacktop in Tompkins Square Park, sharing the water fountain with homeless men washing themselves.

A couple and their two sons watched through the fence. They were white and lived in five-level penthouse in an upscale building on Avenue B that overlooked the park and the projects. The players, black and Latino boys, were from those projects.

The couple were Michael Rosen and Leslie Gruss, with their sons, Ripton and Morgan. Ripton wanted to join the game; the boys on the blacktop let him play right field.

When the game was over, everyone laughing and drenched in sweat, Ripton invited his new friends over to play video games. His parents were surprised by the invitation, but the players quickly accepted, and soon this crew of raucous boys filed past a wary doorman and into an elevator in the ritziest building in the neighborhood.

The “PH” button was pressed and the elevator lifted the young ballplayers up to the top, where they gazed down upon their shabby brick buildings.

That was 1998. The group of five black and Latino boys — Carlos, Philippe, William, Kindu and Juan-Carlos — would return to that penthouse thousands of times over the next eight years. They would undergo an unlikely assimilation into the Rosen family, beginning a pairing that would traverse the gaping divides of race, class, culture and wealth that exist in a single neighborhood.

And today, as families of all types across the city and the country sit down for Thanksgiving dinner, the Rosen Family Extended will give thanks to that serendipitous meeting on a blacktop ball field.

In the Rosen penthouse, in a neighborhood much changed from 1998, they will be celebrating a milestone: those five boys were able to surpass the stumbling blocks of street life and land in college, with the assistance of baseball and of the Rosens, who became, essentially, their adoptive parents.

“When we started going to the penthouse, it was like a dream,” said one of the boys, Kindu Jones, now 21. “They had everything you needed, boxes of cereal, snacks, milk and juice, always there in the fridge. My mom raised nine kids, and things weren’t like that for us.”

He added: “I grew up around a lot of drug dealing and a lot of deaths in my family. And there I was looking down on it all from their terrace. ”

The friendships evolved as many do, from visits to sleepovers.

Several boys lacked baseball gloves. Mr. Rosen fixed that, and then provided other needs: school clothes, winter jackets, sneakers. No doubt, the boys liked living the good life. But their friendships deepened with the two Rosen boys, and they began to lean on the Rosens emotionally. They seemed increasingly dependent on the structure provided by the Rosen home.

The parents themselves were strangely smitten by this brood of cocky, noisy, streetwise and ultimately charming street kids. In time, all five came to live under the Rosen roof at one time or another.

The Rosens, who adopted their own sons in infancy, never legally adopted the five boys. And they never formally asked the boys’ mothers to take them in, although the mothers, in brief phone conversations, seemed to appreciate their children’s new benefactors.

Nevertheless, the boys came to call Mr. Rosen, who is 50, and Ms. Gruss, 49, their mother and father and called the sons “mis hermanitos,” my brothers.

The boys, Kindu Jones, Philippe Medina, Carlos Suarez, Juan-Carlos Robinson and William Torres, grew up mostly fatherless in an area plagued with crime and poverty. One boy said he saw his father stabbed to death. Two others said their mothers told them they were products of date rapes.

“We all really grew attached to each other, but Leslie and I also feared for how their lives were going to turn out if we didn’t help out,” said Mr. Rosen, an Ivy League -educated real estate developer with degrees in anthropology and business.

Ms. Gruss, a gynecologist who grew up on the Upper East Side, said, “We knew there would be sacrifices, but we felt they would be outweighed by the benefit to Ripton and Morgan.”

The five boys were welcomed into a new world that included, along with rooftop greenhouses and bountiful pantries, strict homework and reading sessions, cleanup regulations, curfews and wake-up times. They found out what a synagogue was and began calling themselves half-Jewish.

For the Rosens, there were salsa lessons and attempts to cook rice and beans. Ripton began favoring hip-hop styles, like baggy shirts and Air Jordan sneakers. He also started lifting weights and idolizing Latino ballplayers.

On vacations and at restaurants, people would often stare at the multiracial family and ask what charity the group was from. Big Brother? The Fresh Air Fund ?

Many onlookers — relatives, friend and strangers — disapproved. At times, the Rosens second-guessed themselves: Why were they sacrificing their family’s intimacy and privacy? Belongings disappeared. The five boys’ favorite insult, an antigay epithet, offended the Rosens’ two gay baby sitters.

There were constant arguments and crises — fights in school, teenage pregnancies, run-ins with the law — and the Rosens wondered if by parenting five more sons, they were shortchanging Ripton, who is now 16 and attends the Brooklyn Friends School, along with Morgan, 13.

The strain of the newly expanded family was one reason Mr. Rosen and Ms. Gruss separated for two years. The five boys blamed themselves.

Mr. Jones now attends college at the State University of New York at Morrisville and plans to try out for leagues in the Dominican Republic — if Mr. Rosen approves. Mr. Rosen jokes that the boys will become big leaguers and wind up supporting him.

When Mr. Suarez was 17, the Rosens learned he had habitually been avoiding high school and had amassed only one credit. He moved into the penthouse. Pressured by Mr. Rosen and Ms. Gruss, he joined a baseball league and earned a high-school equivalency diploma. He eventually landed a baseball scholarship at St. Charles Community College in Missouri.

As for the others, Mr. Torres and Mr. Robinson, both 21, attend the Borough of Manhattan Community College, and Mr. Medina, 20, is at Mohawk Valley Community College in Utica, N.Y.

“A lot of rich people don’t want to even see kids like us, much less hanging out at their house, eating their food,” said Mr. Suarez, 20, who was one of five sons raised by his mother in housing projects and shelters.

He saw his father stabbed to death by his mother’s boyfriend. He lived in the Jacob Riis Houses, which is near the Rosens’ building, the Christodora House, a high-rise luxury building that was seen as a symbol of white gentrification during the 1988 Tompkins Square Park riots. The Christodora House was built in the late 1920s as a settlement house, providing services to needy immigrants, and in the 1980s was renovated into luxury condominiums.

Mr. Suarez’s mother, Evelyn Velez, 49, said she was grateful to Mr. Rosen and Ms. Gruss. At the same time, she admits she barely knows them. She said she raised five boys and was burdened with chronic health problems.

“I went through a lot of trouble raising Carlos but the Rosens helped him change a lot,” she said.

Mr. Rosen capitalized on the Lower East Side housing boom by buying and developing buildings locally. He also did stints running Wall Street companies. He quit Wall Street after Sept. 11, 2001, and focused on raising seven boys; he calls all of them his sons. He dresses shabby chic and rides his bicycle to community meetings to fight what he sees as insensitive development.

Mr. Rosen frequents local cafes where he sits among the young and stylishly disheveled and writes a book about this extraordinary family adventure, and its context within the social dynamics of race and class and wealth on the Lower East Side.

Today should be a typically chaotic day at the penthouse. With staggered visits from friends, relatives and the sons that joined their team after a pickup baseball game one summer, there is no single sit-down time for dinner. Instead, turkey is served throughout the day: typical protocol for the Rosen Family Extended.

“We’re not very conventional about it,” Ms. Gruss said.