Patrick Kennell, president of his co-op board on John Street and a member of Community Board 1, is organizing a neighborhood association to help give the new residents of the Financial District a unified voice.
BY KYLE CAMPBELL |
Like any adolescent, the newly residential area of Downtown’s Financial District is getting taller by the day and experiencing new developments in unexpected places.
Also like a teenager, the growing neighborhood is going through some changes it’s not quite ready to handle. To ease these growing pains, a group of Fidi residents have formed something unheard of in an area once exclusively filled with office buildings that emptied out and went dark every night: a neighborhood association.
“The idea of the neighborhood association is to become a grassroots tool for the neighborhood,” said Patrick Kennell, one of the founding members of the group. “We want to come together and form a collective voice for the community.”
The Financial District Neighborhood Association will hold its inaugural public meeting on Thursday, Feb. 11 at the Pine Street School at 25 Pine St. At the town hall-style meeting, which runs from 6:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m., the half-dozen organizers will introduce themselves and outline the group’s goals before opening the floor for attendees to share their concerns and suggestions about improving the neighborhood.
“What we don’t want it to be is just a place for people to complain,” said community activist Luis Vazquez. “That’s not what we want. We want people who really care about living in the neighborhood.”
Likely topics of discussion include overcrowding in the schools, infrastructure, construction, and most notably, refuse on the streets. As new residential towers rise on the streets of the Financial District, so too do piles of household garbage. The problem is exacerbated by the trend of converting the area’s existing office buildings to residential use. Offices must hire private carting companies to carry away their trash — which is mostly paper.
But when those buildings are filled with condos — and kitchens — the resulting household garbage becomes the city’s problem — and a smelly one at that. “It is clear to everyone living Downtown that garbage collection is falling behind, with garbage bags in huge piles that are easily taller than me,” said Councilmember Margaret Chin.
Chin said she’s working with the Department of Sanitation and building owners to establish a strategy to prevent trash from piling up, but offered few specifics. Kennell suggested that the piles could be reduced by changing the trash collection times, but he said he’d like to flesh out that idea during next month’s meeting. He also noted that, to some degree, problems with trash pickup and overall traffic congestion — another major issue in the neighborhood — are somewhat inevitable because of the layout of New York’s oldest neighborhood.
“These streets were built for horses, not cars,” Kennell said. “It’s an old colonial street map, so that’s always going to present problems.” But beyond the antiquated layout, most residents agree that the real driving force behind Fidi’s growing pains is simply that people are moving into the neighborhood faster than city services can keep up.
With more than 72,000 residents as of last year, the population of the Financial District has increased by 18 percent since 2010, and more than 100 percent since 2000, according to a report by Community Board 1. Citing 2,739 new residential units set to open in the neighborhood this year alone, that same report predicts a population surge in 2016 of 7 percent — roughly 5,300 new residents — the largest single-year jump in recent history.
Kennell, who is president of his co-op board on John Street, as well as a member of CB1, said that kind of increase could be crippling for area schools that are already struggling to find space for students. Kennell said the city has addressed overcrowding so far with “Band-Aids” — such as shifting students from the Battery Park City School to Tribeca’s PS 234, and holding regular classes in art and music rooms — but is short on permanent solutions.
Chin agrees that, despite the opening of Peck Slip School at the South Street Seaport last year and recently announced plans for another, 476-seat elementary school on Greenwich St., more space is necessary to meet the needs of the Financial District’s growing residential population.
She recently teamed up with Borough President Gale Brewer and other elected officials to revive the School Overcrowding Task Force originally formed by former Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver after its fate was thrown into doubt by his conviction last year on federal corruption charges. “As is the case almost everywhere in Manhattan, available space downtown is precious,” Chin said. “But I am still determined to find a way to get another school built.
Even with two new elementary schools at Peck Slip and Spruce Street opening in the last few years, along with another one at Trinity on the way, it is clear that the [School Overcrowding] Task Force still has much more work to do.” Kennell said the new neighborhood association is also interested pushing the storm-resiliency projects coming to Lower Manhattan. He said that organizing the voices of people who actually live in the area can amplify and humanize the call to action.
“The residents of the Financial District and their Neighborhood Association can louden the chorus and provide deeply personal viewpoints on the importance of resiliency hardening measures,” he said. “We know there is more work to do.” For Kennell, the resiliency debate proves an old adage: with a great neighborhood comes great responsibility.
“One of the many great features of the Financial District is our neighborhood’s access to the waterfront.” he said. “But that comes with a responsibility to advocate for the protection of all of our investments in this great neighborhood in the case of another major storm surge.”
