She starts with what's known about the circumstances of each of her families, then quickly exits 97 Orchard and steps onto the city streets, where she strolls among the stalls and carts of the markets, dines at lunchrooms and cheap restaurants, and eyes the display cases at local food shops.
They have huddled together at the lunchroom tables, silently chewing and staring out the windows through metal gratings at wintry Jamaica Bay and at the tanker trucks that bring in the liquid chocolate to the 200,000-square-foot factory on Beach Channel Drive.
"Look at this lunchroom!" Jeffrey's friend, Steven Heyden, said, "I've seen a lot of changes, none for the better".
Spend one day a week volunteering at recess, or in the lunchroom, or at back-to-school night.
The other day, Mr. Reynoso worked the lunchroom at Swinging Sixties, a senior center in the Italian-American northern end of Williamsburg.
The boy scurried about the lunchroom at the adjacent school, near the rules that included "chew with your mouth closed" and "say 'excuse me' when you burp".
We see here a lunchroom at the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company's main office on Madison Avenue, which opened in 1909 and served more than 4,000 clerks a day.
Finally, Michael Strahan strode into the lunchroom at Giants Stadium, carrying all the frustrations of the day and the week with him.
The existing schools in which they set up shop suffer both in terms of resources (only so many kids can fit in the lunchroom at one time) and morale.
"We liked Roseland because it was a safe environment, with a good school district, and the taxes were reasonable," said Ms. Higgins, who works in the lunchroom at the elementary school in town.
