Kristy Arroyo cooks with a pounding heart. She races around her kitchen from one hot plate to the next, unplugging the one that boils hot dogs so that she can start the one for potatoes. She has not forgotten the time when she left too many of the electric burners on at once, and smoke poured out of the wall’s outlet, as her three children played on the floor.
“I have to be cautious,” Arroyo, 33, said. “It’s not easy.”
Arroyo is forced to assemble dinners for her family every night using temporary electric burners, because the building where she lives, 454 Bedford Avenue on Williamsburg’s Southside, has been without cooking gas for over a year. Taped to Arroyo’s apartment door, a poster reads in black and red marker: “Turn on our stoves!”
