Michael Wilson and Michael Brick: The 11-month-old girl stood in the tub, playing in shallow water with a 2-year-old girl, both looked after by a teenage mother home alone. The last moments of normal life in the third-floor apartment on Classon Avenue in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, ended that way, with one young mother, a pot of rice on the stove down the hall and two children in shallow water that would not be shallow enough.
And Cassi Feldman with The Days And Nights Of Maurice Cherry: AS his bus exited the Garden State Parkway, Maurice Cherry gazed out the window, waiting for the precise moment when the gleaming silhouette of Atlantic City would swim into view. Suddenly there it was, lit up like noon even at midnight.
Most of the passengers seemed unimpressed. They woke up slowly from their naps, massaging their necks and groping around for their belongings. But Mr. Cherry, a diminutive 37-year-old wearing a baggy black Atlantic City sweatshirt, was thrilled.
"We're here," he said, flashing a jack-o'-lantern smile. "It's going to be a beautiful night."
Mr. Cherry had no plans to gamble. He is what is known as a rider, one of dozens of New Yorkers — often homeless or nearly homeless — who travel back and forth between Chinatown and Atlantic City or Connecticut each day, and sometimes twice a day. They sleep through the two-and-a-half-hour rides and make a quick buck off the casinos without handling so much as a single chip.
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