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Community Environmental Center Receives $3 Million DOE Grant for Innovative Weatherization Project
Wednesday, September 1st, 2010

Jay Ackley of CEC: A Minnesotan in Gotham
Monday, August 30th, 2010

Lack of Will on Cap & Trade Undermines Recovery and Hurts Climate, But Is There a Future for HomeStar?
Thursday, July 29th, 2010

Donna Parris: Woman of Many Lives
Monday, July 26th, 2010

Community Environmental Center and other agencies receive $12.9 million from DHCR for affordable housing weatherization
Friday, July 23rd, 2010

Community Environmental Center leads a state-of-the-art solar thermal project for the Ridgewood Bushwick Senior Citizens Council
Thursday, July 15th, 2010

Community Environmental Center is installing solar thermal systems in New York City
Thursday, July 8th, 2010

Community Environmental Center Welcomes JetBlue Airways to the Cool Roofs Movement
Monday, June 21st, 2010

21-year-old Spring Creek Towers resident is learning to weatherize homes
Tuesday, June 15th, 2010

Spring Creek Towers: A City Within The City
Monday, June 7th, 2010

Alvin Pettway: A Unique Heritage

         
Tuesday, February 2nd, 2010


It was a highlight in Alvin Pettway’s life: in 2002 he walked into an art exhibit called “The Quilts of Gee’s Bend” and there on the walls of the Whitney Museum hung vivid quilts created by generations of Pettways, and photographs of his ancestors, including his grandmother.

Alvin Pettway, who always makes a fashion statement. “The only simple explanation I have to offer for my sense of fashion is that appearance is important to me. And I like style – always have.

But perhaps even more rewarding was the day he took his mother, Melerway Pettway, to the retrospective as a surprise. “I stood back,” recalls Alvin, “to watch her reaction, and that was one of the greatest gifts I gave her. My mother was a strong woman – she ordinarily did not cry. But I could actually see a tear drop.”

Co-workers often do not know the background of the man or woman sitting at the desk across from them or working side-by-side on a crew.

Alvin Pettway, CEC’s administrator of technical services, has a particularly unique heritage.

His mother and grandmother were born in Gee’s Bend, Alabama, a knob of land about 30 miles from Selma, where the Alabama River loops among swamps and underneath hanging tendrils of greenery. The area takes its name from a planter named Joseph Gee, who staked his claim to more than 6,000 acres early in the 19th century.

The Gee family eventually sold their plantation and slaves to a relative named Mark H. Pettway, and after the Civil War a number of freed Pettway slaves – who had either adopted the name or, Alvin surmises, had been born to the Pettway family — became tenant farmers.

The Pettway slaves and their descendents became the renowned quilt-makers of Gee’s Bend, expressing themselves and their community through the painstaking piecing-together of bits of cloth, to create vibrant art. When Alvin married, in fact, his aunt Nazarath Major made him and his wife, Melinda, two quilts in the black-and-white color scheme of their wedding.

Alvin Kirk Pettway inherited the quiet determination of his forbears. Born and raised in New York, where his mother had moved from Gee’s Bend during the 1950s and met Alvin’s father, he went to Fordham Preparatory School in the Bronx and then graduated from Fordham University at Lincoln Center with a degree in economics.

He has been at CEC since before the beginning: his first job was at the Urban Coalition, as the assistant to the purchasing director. “Not that economics and purchasing go hand-in-hand,” says Alvin, with a good-humored smile, “but there’s a correlation there. And being fresh out of school, I just wanted a job.”

The purchasing director left, and Alvin took over her responsibilities. When the Coalition dissolved, Richard Cherry, then President of the Urban Coalition Housing Group, invited certain staff to move with him to the newly formed CEC (initially at Queens Plaza North). “I had no idea I would be among those people,” Alvin says, “but thankfully I was. And I’m still here.”

At CEC he started in the purchasing department, rose to purchasing manager, and in 2004 transferred to technical services. “I track all the work that we do,” says Alvin, speaking with the quiet precision he brings to his job. “I make sure that the reporting is being processed the proper way and is getting to the persons it needs to get to.

“For weatherization, we’re responsible for submitting our reports to DHCR [Division of Housing and Community Renewal]. I’m responsible for making sure the reports get to our field rep and get done, so that Thelma Arceo, who is Manager of Technical Services, can review them and give them back to me, so that I can release them to DHCR and, if DHCR isn’t responding, send them an email.

“One thing hinges on the next. My job is to make sure that all those steps fit together in a nice, neat puzzle.”

Alvin’s peak experience at CEC? “I’d have to say I had fun working in purchasing,” he grins. “From pencils to company cars, I had the best job. Because I love to shop.”

But he adds, “The satisfaction that carries over to the position I have now is in knowing that CEC does good work for many people. Knowing that a senior citizen or a child now has heat, or can close their window and not have air come through the cracks.  I know that we make a difference.”

As someone at CEC since its birth, Alvin has witnessed changes small and large. “Mr. Cherry called an impromptu staff meeting at Christmastime, and I’m looking at the people gathered around Larina’s desk and I did not recognize many of them, because we’ve hired so many new people.” He pauses. “We have definitely branched out.”

There has been change, too, in Alvin’s personal life since starting at CEC. Not only did he marry, but he also became a father. His daughter, Christyn, now 10, keeps both parents busy shepherding her to karate lessons and piano lessons, and choir rehearsals at Macedonia Baptist Church, on 147th Street between Amsterdam and Convent avenues.  Alvin has been a member there for 31 years: he sings tenor in the choir and is on the Board of Trustees.

Alvin’s mother died in 2008 and was buried in Gee’s Bend.

“It feels as though she’s still here,” says Alvin. “I’m still dealing with her loss. She was my role model. She was the kind of person who just liked helping any and every body, and I’ve adapted that and made it my own mantra. I’m not one for the big spotlight. I’m one for being behind the scenes, quietly getting in, rolling up my sleeves and getting the job done.

“When she passed, I had several people come to me and say, ‘I’m sure you miss her, but know that while she was here, you did for her.’ And I cherish that.”

–A. Greene