At-grade F.D.R. viaduct a bad idea
To The Editor:
The article, “The other waterfront becomes a contender” (news article, Nov. 12), references Harvey Epstein, the chairperson of Community Board 3, as saying that although Community Board 1 supports taking down the F.D.R. viaduct in its district, Board 3 hasn’t taken a position whether the F.D.R. in its district should be lowered to street level.
In fact, last year Community Board 1 and the Downtown Alliance, Lower Manhattan’s business improvement district, issued an East River Waterfront Plan that supports maintaining an elevated F.D.R. Drive and transforming two outboard lanes into an elevated park. We believe that lowering the F.D.R. to street level would severely reduce Downtown’s connectivity to the rest of the region, as well as between the west and east side of Lower Manhattan. Moreover, it is a prohibitively expensive and lengthy project that may increase barriers to the waterfront rather than reduce them. Successful waterfront development can be achieved with a series of less expensive, faster initiatives that create more public open spaces and integrate Downtown’s waterfront into the surrounding community.
Waterfront development has long been a priority of the Downtown community and we believe it can happen in an expedited way without dismantling the F.D.R. Drive.
Madelyn Wils
Wils is chairperson, Community Board 1
Carl Weisbrod
Weisbrod is president, Downtown Alliance
Will mayor push Mitchell-Lama bill?
To The Editor:
You could be making a mistake to reject at this point the proposal by Mayor Bloomberg to place Mitchell-Lama and Section 8 tenants under the protections of rent stabilization, if the owners of such buildings leave those government-subsidized and supervised programs (“Bloomberg’s plan for housing falls short,” editorial, Nov. 18).
Certainly the mayor, and tenants, face an uphill struggle to enact his bill in the state Legislature. While Bloomberg’s pals George Pataki and Joe Bruno will be under pressure to help him get reelected in 2005, they will both resist expansion of rent stabilization. Senate Majority Leader Bruno in particular is likely to be a hard sell.
The $64 question is whether Mayor Bloomberg will really work to win passage of his bill. If he postures, or even if he makes a genuine effort and fails, he damages his chances for reelection.
If the mayor’s bill turns out to be worth supporting, tenants should take advantage of the politics involved. This would mean endorsing the mayor’s bill and helping to create a groundswell under it, organizing and mobilizing, writing letters and other lobbying activities.
While the bill is still being drafted and no one has yet seen it, descriptions by administration officials give rise to hopes that it will be a decent proposal. The central provision is to put apartments under rent stabilization if landlords take project-based Section 8 or post-1973 Mitchell-Lama developments out of those programs. Instead of staring the market in the face as at present, tenants would end up with basic rent and eviction protections. Landlords would be limited to authorized rent increases, unable to charge market rents and unable to carry out arbitrary or unjust evictions.
Rent stabilization is not a panacea, but it would be far more protective than anything the City Council could possibly do, since its home-rule power over rents and evictions is severely curtailed by state law.
For many years Tenants & Neighbors has advocated legislation to prohibit Mitchell-Lama landlords from buying out before the expiration of their government-subsidized below-market mortgages, usually 40 or 50 years. We have also advocated to “bring back Mitchell-Lama” — to resurrect this program and provide financing to produce more affordable housing.
Unfortunately, both these goals seem unrealistic at this time. Rent stabilization would seem to be within reach — if Mike Bloomberg really wants it, and if tenants work for it.
Michael McKee
McKee is associate director,
NYS Tenants & Neighbors Coalition
Create a Seward Park task force
To The Editor:
Letters in the Nov. 26 issue of The Villager by Grand St. residents opposing low-income housing in the Seward Park area were badly misinformed. First of all, the city’s preliminary plan does not call for “public housing.” The city plans to sell the land to a private owner, who will build on it pursuant to a set of programmatic and design requirements yet to be determined.
No one in this community wants to ghettoize the poor in the Seward Park Urban Renewal Area. However, opponents seem intent on repeatedly using terms like “public housing,” “projects,” “crime-ridden ghetto” and other racially charged code words to discredit any effort to build economically and racially mixed housing near overwhelmingly white enclaves like Hillman Houses and Grand St. Houses. Many longtime residents were shocked to see the ugly display of race baiting and shouting down of speakers at the Nov. 18 Community Board 3 meeting.
Community Board 3 has wisely endorsed the idea of forming an inclusive task force to develop a plan for the Seward Park area. Such a plan should ultimately create housing for community residents of all income levels and a substantial amount of commercial space in order to create much-needed jobs. Opponents of low-income housing claim they want economic development on the five urban renewal sites to create jobs, but again they are misleading the public by presenting this as an either/or proposition. The zoning for the sites allows them to sustain 400,000 sq. ft. of commercial development AND over 1,000 units of housing.
People of goodwill in this community are not that far apart in terms of what they would like to see built in Seward Park, but unfortunately some people want to sabotage any efforts to develop these long-vacant sites by stirring up division and miseducating the public. I urge Councilmember Alan Gerson, Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver and other elected officials to come forward and express their support for the formation of an inclusive task force that can work together on an acceptable plan for mixed-use, mixed-income development in Seward Park.
Steve Herrick
Herrick is executive director, Cooper Sq. Committee, and a member of SPARC (Seward Park Area Redevelopment Coalition)
Murder at the Abbey-ngdon
To The Editor:
Re “Two trees removed for Abingdon renovation project” (news article, Nov. 19):
The murder of Abingdon Sq. Park is proceeding apace. Trees are brave, and loving, but it is improbable that they will survive the deliberate mistreatment they are experiencing daily now. This includes the decision of Judge Kibbee Payne two weeks ago on a request to stop work until the impact of the changes could be estimated — after all, public money is being spent.
Judge Payne had neither a court stenographer nor a tape in his court to record the extraordinary, perhaps even unprecedented, denial of due process to the complainants — people in wheelchairs who will not be able to use the park on mobility and health grounds if the present plan is completed. He would not allow their attorney to speak, but invited the defense to speak first. For the Parks Department, city lawyers — paid by public funds — argued that although the contractors have violated every precaution they were required to take to protect the trees during work on the park, it did not matter that their procedures were the way all work is done in the parks, and that if the trees died they could plant others. Judge Payne remarked there was nothing special about the trees and denied the stop-work order.
There was no way Judge Payne could have known whether or not there was anything special about the trees, since a tree specialist and experienced expert witness the complainants had retained to give evidence at the trial was not allowed to speak. Nor would Judge Payne even cast an eye over the photographs documenting the long ongoing torture to death of the remaining 13 London plane trees. They must be got rid of by slow death to please all those avid gardeners who persuaded our Councilperson, Christine Quinn; their need to have a garden was superior to that of everyone else who has until now freely used the park.
But the murder was planned months ago. And can be demonstrated from a look at dates alone. The binding report from the Landmarks Commission, which constitutes the permit, was issued on the strength of a design dated in July last year. However, the design being followed is dated Oct. 12 last year. George Vellonakis knew these later design details but did not divulge them either to the second round of hearings with Landmarks and the Art Commissions, or C.B. 2’s Parks and Art Committees, which took place in November.
The plan was always presented as inserting more green, only. No wonder the permit, which is required to be prominently posted at the site while work is going on, is nowhere to be seen. However, our George says, “The mayor wants this, The vets want this” (which mayor, which vets?) Could this plan have been adopted if Henry Stern still were commissioner?
Working to do as much destruction before the court date, on Nov. 24 and 25 an earthmover removed earth and lowered the floor of the former park by 11 inches, cutting down past roots and within just inches of the tree trunks. I asked the man driving the huge machine, “Did someone tell you to do this?” His answer, “Yes. There’s roots all over the place.” The solution to introducing more green into the park is an engineer’s plan, not a human plan.
Jessie Mc Nab
Good paper; wretched bourgeoisie
To The Editor:
Good issue of the paper this week. Keith Crandell’s piece was fine (“The real issue: Where are all the young people?” talking point, Nov. 26).
Re Patricia Broderick (obituary, Nov. 26): In 1956, James Broderick, father of Matthew, husband, of course, of Patricia, played the leader in Paul Greene’s “Johnny Johnson,” mounted by Harold Clurman and Stella Adler, at the Carnegie Hall Theater — it now has another name — below the main hall, and he was a sweet and gentle man and a fine and generous actor. (I didn’t know Patricia.)
But then there was that wretched piece about too much low-rent housing on the Lower East Side (“Tensions explode at meeting on Seward Park housing plan,” news article, Nov. 26): The piece wasn’t wretched, just those who want only more upscale housing because they don’t want to live in a ghetto, but are soggy from being marinated in reactionary Bush-vomit! There can never be too much low-rent housing — ever, certainly not in the U.S.A., that powerhouse of the counter-revolutionary Molloch of capitalist-Christendom-dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. No ghettoes? We have ghettoes of upscalery on Central Park S. and W. and Beekman Pl. and Sutton Pl. and now the Village is being swamped. Where are we supposed to live?
I refer of course to the Jessica Mintz piece, lead story, front page, on Seward Park. This here Steven Danenberg — can he possibly be the son of Ben Danenberg, now unfortunately dead, a great Marxist and Socialist? — dares say, “We don’t want to create more ghettoes.”
Then Juda Engelmayer dares to say that more low-income people who need low-rent housing are a blight, driving out or down businesses. He should be ashamed! “Businesses are starting to thrive …” low-rent proles will menace their prosperity … not progress.” He is a monster of depravity. Is the U.J.A. proud of him? He sounds like a brigadier of the Bush-ite army of the Class War, a war on the deliberately deprived classes.
The junta of the haute bourgeoisie who were so insulting and so revolting are part of the tradition of the land-grabbers who have caused so much suffering, pain and death to whomever was here before them. They’ve grabbed this part of the Village, which, when I arrived here in ’54, was a working-class, Irish-American longshoremen’s ghetto, and it’s now just about been completely conquered by upscale market-renters who brag about the high rents they pay, and have driven 90 percent of the working class to the winds or to their graves.
Workers/tenants of the world unite/You have nothing to lose but your chains/and your flats. (Taken from Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, London, 1848.)
John Stanley
