Since the '60s, a Place on the Ramparts.

WHEN a former community organizer named Barack Obama began his bid for the presidency, it cast a spotlight on an uncelebrated profession. In New York, the history of community organizing is long, and Luis Garden Acosta has been around for much of it. Born in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, to a Puerto Rican mother and a Dominican father, Mr. Acosta, 63, started out in the 1960s as a Catholic antiwar organizer and then as a member of the Young Lords, a militant Puerto Rican activist group, before founding El Puente, a community organization in Williamsburg, where he now lives. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]