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Even at age seven, Ripton Rosen was obsessed with baseball. So he was thrilled when a group of 12-year-old boys in a Lower East Side Manhattan park allowed him to play right field in their game one steamy summer evening in 1998. His teammates, like most of the residents in the neighborhood at the time, were black or Latino. Ripton's parents and five-year-old brother, Morgan, were white and lived in the penthouse of a renovated upscale building across the street. At game's end, flushed and exhilarated, Ripton shouted out, "Who wants to come play Nintendo 64?" It was the hot game system that year, and about a dozen sweaty boys quickly followed him across Avenue B. Michael Rosen, a Wall Street CEO at the time, and his wife, Leslie Gruss, a physician, were momentarily startled but then warmly welcomed the kids into their 16th-floor penthouse. "We had moved to the neighborhood for ethnic and economic diversity," says Rosen, "and you don't say no when diversity walks in the front door."Years later, Will Torres can recount his first moments in the penthouse in detail. "In we come, and the first thing I see is Leslie standing in the kitchen like a mother on a television show," he says. "She's smiling and asking, 'Do you guys want some cookies?' And I'm not even believing it. I'm thinking, Wow, these people are so white!"
None of the young players, who had all grown up in cramped, overcrowded apartments, had seen anything like the Rosens' condo, with its sprawling floor plan spanning five levels. Terraces offered breathtaking views of the East River and the Empire State Building, as well as a place to grow strawberries in the spring; at night, the New York City skyline lit up the rooms. Inside were four aquariums teeming with tropical fish, a huge refrigerator packed with gallons of milk and juice, and kitchen shelves spilling over with jumbo boxes of Honey Smacks, Fruity Pebbles and multiple snack choices. "It was like a dream to me," says Kindu Jones.
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