Their convenience store, the Green Ale Market, a nondescript one-story cinderblock building just east of downtown Syracuse, is located in a crime-ridden neighborhood.

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The HELP Shelter, it turns out, is situated in desolate section of East New York, marked by cinderblock buildings, trash-strewn lots and razor wire.

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The only hills in sight composed of a cinderblock sprawl of informal settlements built on top of one another, many fortified with only cardboard and laminate.

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In the cinderblock bowels of Building 37 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Daniel Bush put in four months of hard work on his senior thesis.

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Yet off the highway, one quickly passes through cinderblock villages through open fields and into El Yunque, the tropical forest that dominates the eastern part of the island.

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Once the worst had passed, she called her family in Adairsville and was relieved to hear they'd all made it to a cinderblock storm shelter under her grandparents' home.

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