Baghdad Syndrome

Although none of the 102 vessels launched at the 37th Roth Regatta were seaworthy, many proved themselves to be mostly pondworthy.

Since the first handmade boat left the shores of Roth Pond in 1989, the race has gone like this: Undergraduates at Long Island’s Stony Brook University launch their boats into the water with the simple goal of rowing 200 yards to the other side. Many, if not most, end up capsizing or sinking, their crews splashing and laughing in the pond.

The high wreck rate is due to a core tenet of the beloved and award-winning campus tradition: All qualifying boats must be built from nothing but cardboard and duct tape. This reliably proves to be a humbling yet delightful test for the school’s many budding engineers.

“It's always fun to see people actually make it across and be like, ‘Wow, what did they fortify their boat with to do that?’ But the wipeouts are just as fun as well,” Stony Brook student Mark Owen said on race day last Friday.

Groups of grinning students marched past him, carrying their vessels aloft.

“A little tape and a little cardboard will get you a long way, apparently,” he said.

This year’s theme was video games, so all the ships were painted with various game characters and themes.

To build crowd-favorite "God of War’s" Viking ship, teammates and rugby players Brendan Wisniewski and  Jamal Merck estimated they used about 30 rolls of duct tape, and “a lot of time and tears, arguing about how we should tape stuff and how stuff should get cut,” Merck said.

They also trashed their dorm’s garage.

Participants repeatedly reported that engineering majors and assorted creative thinkers were the most valuable teammates, but both Wisniewski and Merck agreed that the biochem major on their team “was the micromanager.”

Several feet away, on a grassy mound serving as the pre-launch area, a white rabbit was let out of a carrier into a Pokémon-themed boat.

“We have a bunny to bless our boat today,” said senior Charlotte Seid, as the bunny, Remy, hopped about their buoyant, liferaft-shaped Pokédex, which had a rampart of carpet tubes affixed to its front.

Remy did not participate in the race.

Next to them, in the same shady corner of the mound, Team Kirby gathered around their pink, star-covered vessel, which was adorned with the pink, round Nintendo character’s face.

“We stayed up until like 3 taping up the boat,” Kazi Abthahi said. “But it’s rewarding though, cause it looks really cool.”

The annual Roth Regatta draws hundreds of onlookers to Stony Brook University’s campus, which is the largest public university campus in New York state. But it began as a very small affair.

“One day, my friends and I are just coming back from the library studying, back to Roth Quad where we all lived, and I just said, ‘We should do something with this pond,’” Stony Brook alum Curt Epstein said in a phone interview.

Epstein and his friends were inspired by a Mountain Dew commercial on TV at the time that featured a cardboard boat race, and decided to create their own: The Roth Quad Yacht Club.

Next, they set about creating a proof-of-concept boat, collecting what eventually amounted to $200 from various dorms for materials, and securing the school’s blessing.

The first Roth Regatta took place in 1989, and involved 10 boats and a handful of onlookers.

“The most improbable thing in my mind is not that we did it, but that the university actually allowed this,” Epstein said. “ That still to this day boggles my mind. There's any number of reasons and any number of people that could have just said no, and that would have been the end of it.”

Nearly four decades later, the Regatta has become a quirky point of university pride. The rules drawn up by the Roth Quad Yacht Club in ’89 remain largely the same, including that there are still two-person “speedster” boat races and four-person “yacht” boat races.

But other elements have changed: The pond is much cleaner, and the event has grown enormously.

Today, the school also maintains a stash of waders for the students who help get the boats out of the shallow pond after each heat. The boats are then promptly thrown into a sanctioned dumpster.

Also, there’s merch, while it lasts.

“We had over 2,000 pieces, all of it gone in under an hour,” said Alleyna Charoo, a member of Stony Brook's Undergraduate Student Government, while firing a T-shirt gun across the pond at a gaggle of jumping undergrads. “People were lining up three hours before it started for it.”

There was also a waitlist to compete this year after last year’s race dragged on a bit too long.

The race's competitive aspect, though, is almost an afterthought.

“I think it brings everybody together, you know? Everybody's cheering each other on,” said Ronkonkoma resident and Stony Brook alum June Grippo, who loves the Regatta so much she returns to campus to watch it. “They're, you know, excited for each other and everybody laughs at their mistakes. It's just a good time.”

Many Regatta attendees began wandering off before the winners were even announced. After all, it was finals week.

Spring has brought a renewed sense of urgency for one family in the Rockaways: With more people out and about around New York City, they’re hoping to garner more information about their missing teenage son.

Jafet Jemmott, 15, has not been seen or heard from in more than five months. Police said he left his parents’ house on Burchell Avenue and Beach 72nd Street in Arverne early on the morning after last Thanksgiving.

“We have the sense and the belief that he is alive and somebody has him,” his father Federico Jemmott said in an interview this week. “We're going to continue the search until he is found. We're not going to give up on him, ever.”

Federico Jemmott said he was at work early on the morning of Nov. 28 when he received a surprising alert from Life360, a popular app many parents use to help keep track of their children. It showed Jafet Jemmott at a local bus stop on Beach 73rd Street and Rockaway Beach Boulevard, with his phone battery at 7%.

The app continued to report Jafet Jemmott's location as he apparently rode the Q52 bus over the Cross Bay Bridge over Jamaica Bay, his father said. But the teen’s phone died shortly after, he said.

“That was the last information that we have of his location,” Federico Jemmott said.

He added that his son never told anyone he was leaving the house and did not reach out to say where he was going. It was the first time Jafet Jemmott ever did something like that, according to his father.

The 15-year-old is one of about 120 kids currently in New York state’s Missing Persons Clearinghouse, which works with local organizations and law enforcement agencies to issue public alerts. He falls within the 1%-2% of teens NYPD officials estimate go missing for more than a few weeks. Many turn up or return home in just a few hours or days.

Police officials from the NYPD's Missing Persons Squad said Jafet Jemmott’s disappearance is unusual because of how thoroughly he vanished — leaving behind few indications of where he could have gone. They said the last possible image they have of him is a silhouette of someone standing on the Cross Bay Bridge, captured by a camera on a passing MTA bus.

The officials said Jafet Jemmott’s phone last pinged a local cell tower from that location, but went silent shortly after that — and there’s been no trace of him anywhere since.

Federico Jemmott said he believes his son may have met someone online who lured him away from home, based on conversations the family has since had with Jafet's friends, and interactions with the teen leading up to his disappearance. It’s a phenomenon experts say is increasingly common among missing youth.

“There's so much technology now, they could easily fool a 15-year-old into believing that they're actually talking to the person that they see,” said Michael Alcazar, a professor at CUNY’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice who spent years as an NYPD detective.

NYPD investigators said they have not yet confirmed whether Jafet Jemmott was talking to anyone online before he vanished, and so far do not suspect any criminality in his disappearance.

Jafet Jemmott's family said he doesn’t fit their impressions of a kid who would run away from home. His teachers at Midwood High School in Brooklyn, where his family says he’s still enrolled, know him as a top student, according to his father. Federico Jemmott said his son also has many friends and would often meet them in local parks to play soccer.

But weeks before Jafet Jemmott went missing, Federico Jemmott said, his mother noticed he was staying up unusually late on his phone, often for hours after he’d finished his homework.

The couple sat him down and warned him about the perils of meeting strangers online, the father said.

“He was just quiet. He sat down, he listened. He smiled sometimes, like he acknowledged that what we were saying is true,” Federico Jemmott said.

He said he and his wife went to the local police precinct just a few hours after the teen left their home on Nov. 28. Officers there told them to wait until that evening to call 911 and report him missing, so the couple followed those instructions, and police came to their home that night to start the investigation.

“They checked the footage. They did everything they were supposed to do, and that was it,” Federico Jemmott said.

The NYPD follows specific protocols in missing-persons cases, according to officials. The local precinct handles such cases for the first seven days, interviewing witnesses, reaching out to city hospitals, searching social media, canvassing for surveillance footage and conferring with local schools and the city Administration for Children’s Services.

As precinct officers pursue those efforts, the department’s Missing Persons Squad begins to build its own case, officials said. If the preliminary weeklong investigation uncovers no signs of criminality, as in Jafet Jemmott’s case, the Missing Persons Squad takes over.

A spokesperson for the Administration for Children’s Services said that by law she could not comment on whether a family is involved with the agency. She added that, in general, the agency becomes involved only when it has to investigate a case of suspected abuse or neglect, and works with the NYPD when a child in such a case is missing.

Federico Jemmott said the detective in charge of his son’s case interviewed some of his friends from school, and he contacted T-Mobile to check if his son’s phone had made or received any calls since he disappeared. Both efforts came up nearly empty.

At some point, one of Jafet Jemmott’s friends pointed the family toward a possible online profile of someone they think he may have been talking to before he left home, but the account was no longer active, Federico Jemmott said.

The father said he busied himself with media interviews and outreach to missing-persons organizations into the fall and winter. He hung flyers around the Rockaways until the frigid temperatures made his hands freeze.

Federico Jemmott said police have been helpful in looking for his son, but his own motivations to find him run deeper.

“For them, it's a case. For me, it's much more,” Federico said. “If they will go 10 miles, I will go 100.”

As the search for Jafet Jemmott continues, his father said, he misses so many of their habits and interactions, like car rides to school together, coaxing him out of bed in the morning and sharing meals as a family.

”At the beginning, it was so hard to even go into his room. We waited months before we went in there and started putting things away and clearing up, because he had his clothes on the bed,” Federico said.

The teen’s dumbbell set now sits untouched, and his desk is eerily quiet. Federico said he eventually decided to put on his son’s gold-cross chain.

“I said to myself, ‘I'm not taking it off until Jafet comes home.’”

The New York City board that sets the rent for roughly 1 million regulated apartments voted to consider a rent freeze on Thursday in a move that, if enacted, would fulfill a key campaign pledge of Mayor Zohran Mamdani.

New York City’s Rent Guidelines Board convened for an annual hearing that establishes the parameters for the panel’s final binding vote. It will consider a range of 0% to 2% on one-year leases and 0% to 4% on two-year leases. Board members voted 7 to 1 in favor of the range, with one abstention.

The board has only considered a 0% increase for one-year leases on two other occasions in the past decade. It’s also the first time board members have considered freezing rent on two-year leases.

Two tenant representatives on the board proposed taking the unprecedented step of decreasing rent by 3% on new one-year leases and by 4.5% on two-year leases, essentially nullifying the board’s rent increase last year. Their landlord-sided counterparts proposed raising rents by 3% to 5.5% on one-year leases and 6% to 8% on two-year leases.

The nine-member panel will hear public testimony at a series of upcoming hearings before casting a final vote on June 25, but board data shows members typically use the preliminary figures as a framework ahead of an ultimate decision.

The divisive annual event Thursday at LaGuardia Community College drew hundreds of tenants and advocates, but took on a more subdued atmosphere than in past years, when attendees banged noisemakers, drowned out board members and, in one instance, even stormed the stage.

The night marked the first test of Mamdani’s now-famous campaign promise to “freeze the rent” for tenants in rent-stabilized apartments — a slogan that galvanized many renters confronting a deep affordability crisis, but infuriated landlords who say they need a rent hike to offset their own rising maintenance and operating costs.

On the campaign trail, Mamdani took specific aim at the board under his predecessor, Mayor Eric Adams, which voted to raise rents by a combined 12% over four years, including the 3% increase last year.

“New Yorkers are being crushed by the cost of living, and they need real relief," Mamdani said in a statement on Thursday night. "I’m encouraged to see the Board taking seriously the data around affordability, operating expenses, and the pressures facing both tenants and small property owners as it sets this preliminary range."

But the mayor does not have the power to set rent levels on stabilized apartments. That’s up to the board, whose members are appointed by the mayor but are supposed to function as an independent body.

In February, Mamdani named five new members and reappointed a sixth, saying only that he expected them to “take a clear-eyed look at the complex housing landscape and the realities facing our city’s 2 million rent-stabilized tenants, and help us move closer to a fairer, more affordable New York.”

“Politics has pitted the two groups against each other as if they’re not all New Yorkers who are investing in their communities and seeking the same thing: the means to live,” New York Apartment Association CEO Kenny Burgos said in a statement after the vote. “This threat of a rent freeze nearly guarantees our owners and tenants will live in declining conditions for years to come."

The mayor has stopped publicly voicing his support for a rent freeze since taking office in January amid legal questions around mayoral intervention in the board’s process.

He has instead created a new City Hall office tasked with mobilizing New Yorkers to testify at upcoming Rent Guidelines Board hearings, an effort he said will engage tenants and landlords alike and isn’t intended to encourage a specific outcome, though landlord groups are skeptical of the new office’s mission.

Joanne Grell, a hospital legal assistant and tenant activist, said regulated apartments provide stability and opportunity for low- and middle-income renters who might otherwise be subject to dramatic hikes they could not afford.

She said she was able to raise two children in a two-bedroom Pelham Bay apartment for which she pays $1,800 a month.

“I could have never let them dream as big as they did unless it was for our affordable apartment,” Grell said before the vote.

She said she hoped the board would consider keeping current rent levels flat for the next two years.

The nuances of New York City’s rent regulations, established by the state more than half a century ago, reveal the complexity and diversity of the housing stock in a city of more than 8 million.

Most rent-stabilized apartments are located in buildings with six or more units constructed before 1974 — though tens of thousands of units that meet those criteria were lifted out of rent stabilization, often legally, before new laws ended the practice in 2019.

Apartments in newer buildings, many of them considered luxury accommodations, are also subject to rent regulations if their owners receive government financing or property tax breaks.

Tenants in rent-stabilized apartments have a median household income of $60,000 a year, while tenants in market-rate units earned a median income of $90,800, according to a 2023 city housing survey. But rent-stabilized apartments are not income-targeted and about 30% of households earn at least $100,000 a year – an amount approaching the area median income for single adults.

The city housing survey also revealed the depths of the city’s affordable housing shortage, with less than 1% of units priced below $2,400 available to rent.

Other recent data considered by the board shows an increase in the city’s unemployment rate and number of residents receiving cash assistance benefits — two indicators of deep economic trouble.

But landlords say they too are hurting financially and are struggling to keep up with their own rising costs for insurance, materials for maintenance and fuel without a significant increase in revenue from rent.

Board data shows owners of buildings with at least one rent-stabilized apartment have enjoyed a roughly 6% increase overall in their net operating income, but landlord advocates say the rosy picture citywide obscures financial distress in places like the Bronx and in older buildings where all units are rent-stabilized.

Ahead of the vote Thursday, groups representing owners of rent-stabilized units began calling on the board to approve a larger increase for apartments in older buildings than in newer complexes due to their rising maintenance and insurance costs.

The board has in the past approved such split increases based on how long a tenant has held a lease, but not based on the age of the building.

Small Property Owners of New York Board President Ann Korchak said such a move is necessary to stave off worsening financial problems.

“The disparate operational realities between aging and newer buildings call for separate rent adjustments for older, majority rent-stabilized properties,” Korchak said in a written statement.