Save the Lower East Side!

Mary Spink

2012-01-22T19:31:00.000-08:00

During the rezoning of the East Village, many supporters of the plan expressed their disagreement with me, often caustically. Mary only once confronted me on it.

She didn't defend her view, she didn't attack mine. She didn't mention the rezoning at all. Taking a step back, turning to me, she tossed her head up, staring right at me as if accusing, "I know what you're doing" she said. I braced for the worst. "You're standing for what you believe," and, as if she were ordering me around, "you're going to fight, you're going to fight for your principles. That's what you're doing."

We all already knew the issues. We all already knew our differences. We all already knew where we stood, and we all already knew why. What else was there to say?

Those were the best and smartest words anyone ever said to me during the rezoning of the East Village.
****
After the rezoning was implemented, I went to the Community Board in support of a social service building that Mary was planning on my block. I was the only local person who spoke. A few weeks later, she told me that that support was useful at the Borough President's review. She was immensely happy about it, and I was gratified to have played some part, however small. So she invited me to her annual award ceremony. And that's how I got to see a bit of what she had created. It was kind of wonderful -- especially the educational awards, encouraging young adults to succeed in college -- what Mary accomplished.

At the memorial, held at the Great Hall of Cooper Union, with a good few hundred in attendance, it was clear that she inspired many with the same sentiments as mine: I respected her, I admired her, I liked her a lot, and I will miss her.

NYU opposition without a plan

2012-01-06T22:28:00.000-08:00

The opposition to NYU's current plan to build on its own campus works well for Community District 2, but not so well for the East Village and the Lower East Side. Most of Community District 2 is landmarked by varioius historic district designations and can't be developed, so if NYU's plan is defeated, NYU can't then turn to other sites around the campus to build. But they could build in Community District 3, the Lower East Side, the East Village and the Bowery, even in Chinatown. Although the recent EV/LES rezoning limits development in much of the area, the Bowery is open, and there are generous bulk allowances on Houston Street, Avenue D and Chrystie Street.

The opposition to the NYU plan points out that the financial district, Community District 1, would welcome NYU development. But no one has identified any specific sites, and no money or incentives have been offered.

To prevent NYU development in Community District 3, there must be more than just vague gestures towards the financial district. Community District 3 leadership has got to go up the ladder of authority and broker a deal with Albany -- the state legislature gives large sums for private universities, so the legislature has some leverage already, and the state can offer all kinds of incentives as well. That goes for the city too, in the form of real estate tax breaks.

Defeating NYU's plan won't curtail NYU's growth. NYU, unlike Columbia, doesn't have a huge endowment. It relies on tuition. In order to maintain the quality of its faculty and its research facilities, they draw an increasing student tuition base. So opposing any particular NYU plan is futile. It's setting a cat for every mousehole or pressing on every bubble only to watch it pop up nearby. The only solution to NYU is finding a solution for NYU.

Having said all that, I find the railing against NYU surprising. Hasn't NYU already transformed the commercial character and the residential demographic of the EV? Is there anything left to lose to NYU? NYU has already wrought its worst on real estate values and rents. What is the complaint against them? They are, on the whole, much more agreeable than the yuppies. They party less and they have more intellectual curiosity. What are East Villagers protecting? Look around. Even the hipsters are gone.

There remains in the LES some affordable housing. That's the only piece of the community worth fighting for. Beyond that, there's only landmarking, and landmarking is just memorializing the past, not the present of the community. It's the museum of the LES.

Back tenements

2011-12-07T08:20:00.001-08:00

Andrew Berman, Executive Director of the Greenwich Village Society for Historical Preservation, has posted a wonderful piece about back tenements on the GVSHP blog. There are a lot of these back houses throughout the LES, from the EV all the way to Chinatown. You can view a couple on the corner of 13th Street & Avenue B, where the corner building was cleared and replaced with a community garden, so you can look into the interior of the block, unobstructed. Right there in front of you you'll see a row of back tenements. It was common practice to build a front tenement about 50' deep (the depth of a row house or townhouse of the day) leaving about 50' of unused back yard. To maximize the rental space, the owner would build a second structure behind the front tenement.

Why the original owners didn't build one deeper structure, rather than two shallower ones, is, as Mr. Berman points out, the great mystery. If the back tenements were built later, there would be no mystery: the owner built the front structure on the current model of row house coverage, then as the market for housing grew, simply built a second structure rather than the more immediately expensive effort of demolish-and-build-larger. But, as Andrew also points out, many of these back tenements seem to have been built simultaneously with the front tenement. Why build two structures when one structure would have saved one stairwell and maximized the rental space? After all, tenements were built solely for rental profit.

Absent a memoir of an 1850 property owner, one can only speculate. Two considerations over the years have occurred to me: the shallow row house allows front-to-rear window ventilation; deeper structures would have required new and challenging design. As we know, when interior subdivisions without windows appeared, the city had to respond with the 1867 Tenement House Act specifically including a window in every room.

So it's my guess that owners built on the rational, shallow model that allowed rational window inclusion and ventilation. It was only when the housing market stepped up after the Civil War that owners viewed the extra stairwell as a serious economic liability, especially for single-lot owners who were stuck with only one space to maximize. Money is the father of invention: owners figured out a design to eliminate the second stairwell and the second entry and maximized the lot coverage for maximal rent.

So I view the back house as a holdover from row house design. That design made sense; it worked well enough; why change it -- why sacrifice rational ventilation just to save a little stairwell space? Only when the market upped the profit potential did the two-structure begin to look inadequate and the old methods were rethought. Until then, the back house had been a marriage of rationality and complacence.

But that's just one guess to file in the drawer of idle historical speculations on NYC architecture, social history and its interaction with the real estate economy and development practice. Mr. Berman speculates in his post, "Perhaps the conventional expectation that these still-relatively rare (and generally looked down upon) structures would at least look like a house pushed builders to use this two-building form...". I suspect there's a lot of truth to that speculation as well. It's difficult to break social conventions of acceptability, whether in development or fashion or human behavior.

Bizarro New York City

2011-10-31T10:22:00.000-07:00

Remember Superman comics' Bizarro world where everything is backwards? Well, I visited Bizarro New York City a couple of days ago. Here's what I saw:

The police are the criminals. They commit crime everyday as part of what they consider their job duties.

Kirsten Luce for The New York Times

Instead of arresting those criminals, the police support criminality; they gather in big protests to demand more criminality.

Viorel Florescu

When Bizarro police see law-abiding citizens, protected by law, they promptly beat them and arrest them.

http://www.youtube.com/v/xpOMlDVaXzc?version=3&feature=oembed

Bizarro mayor, concerned about the health and sanitation of these law-abiding citizens who live outside, confiscates their heat generators the day before a predicted snowstorm, so the citizens, for their own benefit, will freeze and disappear.

Lucas Jackson:Reuters

Bizarro mayor, elected by the people, sits in a mansion holding posh galas for the wealthy 1%.

FilmMagic

The people of Bizarro New York City, who elected him, sit in a park, unemployed, homeless and cold.

Reuters

Bizarro mainstream media don't inform the people, they try to deceive and divert them, which seems kind of pointless, since the people already know the truth. Bizarro.

The coming war over Tompkins Square Park

2011-10-17T15:23:00.000-07:00

It'll be middle-class parents against the homeless, indigents & winos. All over a rodent. The winner? Guess.

The outcry on EVGrieve's comment box against Occupy Tompkins Square Park is only the latest sign of a gathering battle over turf that will likely gentrify the park beyond recognition. It is coming in increments, and the first struggle will likely play out over the rats.

The parents who use the Avenue A playground have organized to rid the park of rats. Sounds harmless -- no one likes rats, and there sure are a lot of them throughout the park and particularly near that playground.

But there's a problem with rat control. Rats reproduce really fast, so killing rats doesn't make a dent, unless every last rat is dead and no outside rats move in. There are only two ways to control rats effectively. One way is removing their food source. If you do that, you'll see at first the overpopulated community eating everything in sight, then eating their own new litters of young, and finally, a reduced population.

But how to limit their food source? Well, one way is to remove the soup kitchens around the park. The kitchens create a steady flow of discarded food on the lawns and over the garbage lids. But remove the soup kitchens, you remove their clients, an entire demographic in the south west corner of the park. The resolution of the rat problem will lead to a cultural and ethnic cleansing of the park, leaving it to the yuppies and the middle-class families in the park.

For now, the city administration wants to keep the local indigent population on site in the park. They are easy to observe and control in the park. Equally important, there are many social services that can minister to them conveniently in one place. So for now the city supports the soup kitchens in and around the park. But parents are adamant, narrow in their interest, focused, active and communal -- they network effectively and regularly and give each other mutual encouragement. If they don't see results to their satisfaction, they will press their interests until they win, regardless who is hurt. Parents don't mess around, especially parents with a sense of entitlement.

The local indigents are not organized, they have no clout, and they have no support beyond themselves and the missions, which have their own institutional commitments in their relations to city administration. In other words, the locals at the southwest corner are at risk. And you know where it will end.

The other way to control rats is introducing feral cats to drive the rats off their turf. This was effective for many years prior to gentrification on my street, when we accepted cat waste on the steps as the price to pay for a rat-free building and street. But park users will object to the cat waste on the lawns, and neighbors around the park would lose sleep to their high-pitched cat-screeching. Feral cats are an effective solution, but it'll never happen in the park.

I didn't like having rats in my apartment, when about ten years ago gentrification spurred my landlord to turn the basement into apartments and drove the rats there up into the rest of the building. But I don't have any trouble with the rats in the park. I see them every night by the parkour course and handball courts. I don't bother them, and they don't bother me.

For my part, I'd rather have either rats or cats in the park than the parents: the parents are dangerous to humans.

OWS Disturbs the EV Comfort Zone

2011-10-12T23:18:00.000-07:00

A Voice reporter contacted me to ask me about the neighborhood comments on Penley's Occupy Tompkins Square Park at EVGrieve's blog, and what it means for the EV. I won't bother to rehearse the lamentable loss of historical memory over the illustrious history of TSP protests from the 1850's to the 1990's and their significance. What I find particularly telling is that the comments appeared on Grieve. Who reads and comments on Grieve now, and why? Here's my personal, angry take on them (disclaimer: none of this applies to the many thinking, socially aware newcomers to the EV) --

This new breed of Lower East Sider comes to enjoy a sense of urban authenticity in Manhattan. Of course, it's not authentic at all, but a kind of faux authenticity, pretend authenticity: the EV feels like it's hip, it imagines itself to be hip, it has lots of youth who style themselves as hip, but in reality, they are just children of wealth seeking $700 a month more hipness and urban pretend-authenticity than they would get in Queens. It's that measured thrill (the oxymoron is intended) they seek -- just enough for them to congratulate themselves for not living in a forgettable neighborhood like Kips Bay, but not too much to lose sleep over the noise of a late-night drum circle.

The mere suggestion of being arrested for a principle of justice arouses such unconscious fear that they respond with political condescension and smug personal disdain. Note how they fail to understand the OWS movement itself: they attribute to it whatever they disagree with, so that, conveniently, they can dismiss it, don't have to be bothered with it and don't have to confront its potential. It is, if you forgive another oxymoron, aggressive apathy. Call it proactive apathy, to use one of the redundant and useless epithets of their generation.

They read Grieve because reading some local foodie restaurant blog would show themselves in their mirror as exactly themselves, mere gentrifiers -- but Grieve is cool, Grieve is hip, Grieve is an insider, so they can feel insiders without ever getting inside anything in this place. That's who reads Grieve today. Bob Arihood died just in time. He'd have seen it as every good deed's punishment. Grieve has, no fault of his own, become the entertainment for the gawkers of authenticity.

Grieve's readers consider themselves East Village old-timers if they've lived here for six years, long since gentrification settled in. They have no conception of the meaning of this once unique place, not a clue. It is beyond their capacity to imagine, let alone understand. They have lived all their lives with property values and social control. They have no sense of the freedom that follows property abandonment and its vacation of all ownership control, often described as anarchy. They are the children of entitlement. The great difference between the trustfund babies of the EV and the overeducated campers in Liberty Plaza is that the latter are unemployed and drowning in student-loan debt, while the former enjoy mixology at Death & Co.

The campers have been successful at keeping momentum and visibility by holding new events each day or so. The occupation of TSP sounds like a useful part of that program. I don't see it as unduly disruptive. If OWS has the potential to shift the balance of politics in this country, issues of local noise, garbage and crowding hardly seem worth mentioning in the broad narrative arc of history. Maybe we have become too accustomed to complaining about bars. But, seriously, barflies are not making history; they're just making noise. I mean, here is an opportunity to change the voice and profile of our polity, and the news media and the local residents are worried about noise? What happened to these poor rich people's values? What kind of sorry excuse are they for humanity? Are they so comfortable and jaded that they can't care about anything but their own comfort? Is this neighborhood truly no more to them than the latest ice cream parlor tasting? Is this what the LES has come to?

OWS has stepped into the muddy stream of American democracy, pronounced it a river of shit, which it is, and have called for a dam: enough. They have pointed to the naked emperor -- the wide disparity in both our politics and economy. They have as yet no program, no solution except the goal of obtaining a more equitable distribution of democratic power. They are not exculpating Obama by targeting Wall Street. They are not supporting any party. Unlike the Tea Party which began as an knee-jerk revolt against the color of the president, finding its libertarian justification after the fact to legitimize its acid racism, OWS started with principles. You can tell the difference by their resistance to any political party, while the Tea Party jumped quickly into Republican habit. Theirs was never anything but partisanship. OWS is, as many have suggested, something new. It's not a demonstration; it's not a third party. It's a social movement focused on the failure of American democracy itself.

I have no expectations, nor any predictions for its success, but I am not so ironic as to view every honest effort as naive, silly, childish or risible. Irony is the privilege of the abstract, the distant, the uninvolved. It suits the comfortable, the secure, those who can afford to be indifferent. If we all regarded our political process with irony only, there'd be no place for democracy at all. The OWS process is all about participatory democracy. It is so pure and purged of irony that its principled participation cannot close on its demands. That's one reason why it hasn't gotten involved with any party or against any party, why it hasn't projected any specific solutions. It is a movement discontented with our democracy.

The only campaign poster I've seen at Liberty Plaza is for Ron Paul. Now, several of Grieve's commenters seemed to think that OWS should attack gov't rather than Wall Street. Well, that's Paul's message, and it's there at OWS, along with many other messages. You won't see any Obama posters there, that's for sure. So I think the commenters, as most ugly commenters are, uninformed, biased loudmouths. The content of their comments are of little merit but of revelatory sociological curiosity. Look at who they are, or what they are. I take them very seriously, but not what they think, if they think. It looks to me more like avoidance, complacency and self-congratulations than thought. And it's all so close to the sentiment summed up in Let them eat cake.

Le yuppie

Trustfund-baby hispter wannabe

Hope for Bialystoker Home for the Aged and its residents

2011-10-12T04:14:00.000-07:00

Photo: Julia Manzerova

A new group has formed to save the Bialystoker Home for the Aged, which is slated for closing, eventual demolition, and the displacement of its aged residents, scattering them to distant and unfamiliar neighborhoods as a result of one of the shadiest deals in the LES. Hoping to save the building and prevent dispersal, Friends of Bialystoker Home has applied to the Landmarks Preservation Commission for designation. Landmark designation would end all plans to demolish and would obviate the Board's need to vacate the residents in the home.

The building itself is an art deco inspiration, integrating futuristic modernism with Jewish history. If you are at all susceptible to the romantic idealism of the art deco movement, its bold reinvention of all images and designs shedding classical traditions for the experimental, the medieval and the mythical, on the one hand, and on the other its aspirations for a utopian, amalgamated new-world-without-class, then you'll appreciate the Bialystoker.

The Friends are asking LESers to write to the Landmarks Preservation Commission, cc to Councilmember Chin (an opportunity for her to heal the wounds with the preservation community) urging the LPC chair to designate the structure as a city landmark.

Here's historian Joyce Mendelsohn, with details of where to send below:

Friends ofthe Bialystoker Home is a new group organizing a campaign for landmark designation ofthis important building constructed between 1929-31 to house the largest andmost prominent of all the “landsmanschaftn” (mutual aid societies) on the LowerEast Side. The building survives as a major visual element on East Broadwaysymbolizing and recalling the Jewish history of the Lower East Side. Designed in the Art Deco style with a golden brickfaçade, the ten-story structure features a unique arched entrance framed bytwelve medallions representing the twelve tribes of Israel. [The Bialystoker Center for Rehabilitationand Nursing (formerly the Bialystoker Home for the Aged) is located at 228 EastBroadway at Clinton Street.]

We needyour support in our drive for landmark designation of this irreplaceablestructure. Please contact the NYC Landmarks Preservation Commissionto urge them to calendar the Bialystoker Center as a first step in the processof landmark designation. Time is of the essence, since it has been reported that the building is currently upfor sale and the Bialystoker Board intends to vacate the Center by the end ofOctober.

Send yourletter to:

Hon. Robert B. Tierney, Chair
NYCLandmarks Preservation Commission
One Centre Street, 9^thfloor north

New York, N.Y. 10007 OR e-mail: rtierney@lpc.nyc.gov

Please copy all written messages to: FriendsOFTheLES@gmail.com and Council Member Margaret Chin: mchin@council.nyc.gov

Photo: LuciaM

The relevance of the Bowery, the dishonesty of the NYTimes

2011-10-10T11:47:00.000-07:00

The Times, reporting on efforts to preserve the Bowery, quotes Arun Bhati, the developer who demolished 35 Cooper Square, the 1825 townhouse, "Not all in this neighborhood are looking to preserve the past. Cities need to grow and make some changes to be relevant.”

Quite right, some just want to get rich on the destruction of history and character of New York. In quoting him, the NYTimes carefully hides the fact that he demolished a historical townhouse. Here's the full passage:

“Not all in this neighborhood are looking to preserve the past,” said Arun Bhati, a developer who owns a vacant lot at 35 Cooper Square, where an 1825 Federal house built by a descendant of Peter Stuyvesant was torn down this year, despite protests from preservationists. “Cities need to grow and make some changes to be relevant.”

Note the passive voice, "was torn down this year," not mentioning that Bhati himself tore it down turning it into that vacant lot he now owns.

To assess his quote, the reader needs to know that he demolished it himself for himself, not for the relevance of the city. Was he overwhelmed with petitions to "please demolish this 1825 townhouse so New York will be relevant"? Commercial developers demolish buildings with no regard for the relevance of the city, for its past or its future. The comment about relevance is a post factum excuse to pour perfume over his waste. He demolished the building for himself.

Meanwhile, the NYTimes turns him into a spokesperson for "the relevance of the city" by hiding his personal financial interest. Is this journalism, objective reporting, accuracy, information? It's journalistic fraud, and plain deceit. That's the New York Times I know. It's the Times acting as lickspittle for a developer. If you didn't already know this about the Times, now you do.

Am I the only person disgusted by it?
Compare the Bowery Alliance of Neighbors. They have no financial interest in the Bowery whatsoever. They want to preserve the Bowery because they know the history, appreciate it, and they love their New York. Even if you don't share their principles, you can't but recognize that their position is a principled position beyond any personal gain. It's not a self-serving motive, and they are not trying to hide their motives with lies and BS.

Which comes to my point. The neighborhood is now drawing people like Mr. Bhati, people who are there to prey upon the neighborhood for their personal, selfish gain, not for the benefit of anyone or anything else, relevant or irrelevant. They are there for themselves. They are not there to save the relevance of the city and certainly not for its history or its long-term commercial viability or its future. They are there for a fast buck today. What happens tomorrow? What do they care?

Same for the First American International Bank about to demolish 135 Bowery. In that case, the bank led Councilmember Chin by the nose who didn't even try to find a better deal for their air rights. This was a marriage of convenience -- for the bank, not for the neighborhood or for affordability. She could have gotten much more affordable spaces with the air rights shifted onto Chrystie Street if she exercised her vision, did her own work instead of doing the bank's work. Such a blatant case of the bank leading the elected official. This one belongs on a poster in Occupy Wall Street's Liberty Plaza. It's exemplary. That's relevant.

no words

2011-10-01T13:59:00.000-07:00

bob arihood is gone.
his incomparable blog

The personal is the political

2011-09-23T22:04:00.000-07:00

When I first saw this short film, I wondered if I too would end a relationship over differences of opinion about overdevelopment. Probably. Anyway, this filmmaker has made overdevelopment and gentrification as personal as it will ever get.

I'm not sure why he cast a guy in the role of hero and his erstwhile girlfriend as villain, but I'm guessing it was just easier for him to identify with the situation than if the gender roles had been reversed. It is, after all, a personal short, first person, self-narrated. But that poor girl really gets read for trash.

I'll bet the ex would think it's a sentimental expansion on Chase Manhattan Master Card commercials. Well, those ad folks create beautiful stuff, as here, but here it's not whoring for money, just serving beauty and truth. Now it's got me sentimental.

If you watch, wait til you get to the images accompanying Whitman. It's beautiful New York, in black & white. If you like Ric Burns, enjoy. To object to beauty for its familiarity or sentiment is to allow cynicism too far a rein. Anyway, I'm a sucker for black & white.

Phil Vasquez' Song of Relations
10 minutes

135 Bowery: going, going, GONE! -- to the lowest bid

2011-09-16T18:04:00.000-07:00

Yesterday the City Council Landmarks subcommittee voted to deny legal landmark status to an 1817 townhouse on the Bowery, deferring to the local councilmember, Margaret Chin, who says the owner, First American International Bank, will provide a little affordable business space if he's allowed to demolish it and redevelop the site into a new seven-story building.

But Chin didn't get a written agreement from the owner or a community benefits agreement, and she didn't research the surrounding sites, particularly the ones on Chrystie Street, where the landmark's air rights could have produced much more affordable space than in situ on the Bowery and without destroying a historical site.

The councilmember didn't do her homework to find and secure the best deal. Instead, she took the first offer of the owner, without obtaining any guarantee that the community will get anything. We're in a recession. In a moment of trouble, the bank might flip the site to someone else. How long will the affordable business space remain affordable? She can't tell us.

Merely having a good relationship with a supportive bank (for the creation of futureaffordable housing, e.g.) is not enough for process and accountability. Now she'll never know what opportunities were lost. But we know what we'll lose -- yet another piece of the historical Bowery. The Bowery is a hot property right now. The new building will further raise the real estate values of the entire strip. We can see where this is going. She needs to raise the bar on her land use staff. A lot more work could have been done.

Chin has a long and distinguished career as a local affordable housing activist. But as councilmember, so far she's succeeded with this bank's development and with the BID, which happens to be promoted prominently by the same bank. Both accomplishments benefit business and development. Many, perhaps most, business owners in Chinatown don't actually live there or even have their headquarters there, so any indirect benefits for residents remain to be seen -- and indirect harm or secondary displacement also remain to be seen. This affair will tarnish her within her own neighborhood. That's a shame. It was unnecessary: all she needed was the homework.

Fast and furious

2011-09-13T18:47:00.001-07:00

St. Mark's Bookstore may close, and 135 Bowery, a historic landmark, may be demolished (more below).

Petition to save St. Mark's Bookstore. The owners negotiate their rent tomorrow, Wednesday.

Petition to save 135 Bowery. To testify or attend the hearing: Thur., Sept. 15 at 11am at 250 Broadway, 16th floor conference room. Agenda:
http://legistar.council.nyc.gov/MeetingDetail.aspx?ID=158922&GUID=FD347715-58F4-49AA-887F-B0E706AB8C15&Options=info|&Search=

Why is another landmark on the Bowery being threatened with demolition? 135 Bowery is a townhouse from around 1817, one of the oldest in New York. The Landmarks Preservation Commission has already designated it as a historical landmark. But the local councilmember, Margaret Chin, has reversed her support for the landmark on the grounds that the owner, a bank, wants to replace it with a taller structure promising a bit of affordable commercial space. Without the councilmember's support, the City Council will likely not vote the designation into protective law.

The bank that owns 135 Bowery hasn't submitted its affordable intention in writing. The bank hasn't shown any affordable rent rates; the bank hasn't produced any legally binding contract for this promised affordable commercial space or any indication how long the leases would remain affordable, or even any binding document whatsoever showing their intent. All we have is the word of the bank. (What do you think that's worth?)

I would be happy to see, for example, an SRO hotel on the Bowery for recent immigrants to live in cheap but safe quarters. But I would be a great fool if I sacrificed a historic site for an SRO promised to me by a bank without any documentation or plan or legally binding contract or even any detailed information.

So I wonder who is being fleeced by this bank? Is the Councilmember being fleeced? Or is it the public?

I will testify at the Council hearing on behalf of 135 Bowery, because I know that the owner-bank, far from intending to give back to the community, wants to get the most out of his investment regardless of the community, history, the Landmarks Preservation Commission, the City Council, the Councilmember, or anyone but themselves. They've made no commitment, let's be real. The only commitment has been verbal to the Councilmember, and we don't have a binding document of that discussion.

The Bowery Alliance of Neighbors say they want to fill the chamber with support. They also ask for more signatures on their petition. The 135 Bowery petition again.

St. Mark's Bookstore

The great used bookstores of New York, with their overstuffed chairs, chatty patrons and patiently listening bookdealers, were places to hang and enjoy, not just for browse-and-buy. The ones in this neighborhood were truly worth saving, and they are all truly gone. Should St. Mark's Bookstore be saved?

I have made my peace with the twenty-somethings that are the present and future of this neighborhood. For better or worse, like it or not, they have transformed this place in their own image and it now belongs to them, from their dorms to our tenements to their BMW Lab. But the young are mostly transient, so they are mostly unequipped to restrain the powerful market force they themselves have brought here. Yes, they want nightlife, but they probably would also like to have a good bookstore, and the monster real estate market they've fed now won't allow it. It's about to swallow up the bookstore and leave, well, you know the story.

Cooper Union owns the site of the St. Mark's Bookstore, one of the few interesting bookstores in town. CU is raising its rent beyond the store's capacity to pay. CU, of course, can afford to give back to the community. Peter Cooper himself was all about giving back to the community. Peter must have long ago tired of spinning in his grave over what has become of his life's dream, free higher education for the working class. How many ways can Cooper Union spell "betrayal"? Surely they're not hurting for this little commercial space: they own the land on which the Chrysler building stands and the glass building on Astor Place. Seems to me they ought to buy up shares of the store and expand it as a university-community bookstore. But they'd probably betray that as well.

Frankly, I'm not convinced this neighborhood deserves to have a great bookstore. The NYU students have their own bookstore, filled with all the books they need and more than they can handle. As for the rest of the neighborhood, this place is a youth destination for children of means, not an intellectual or countercultural destination anymore. Its heart is commerce now, not anarchy. Freedom must be purchased, and it exacts many prices.

Maybe saving St. Mark's Bookstore is an exercise in anachronism or sentimental nostalgia. But if you'd like to try to preserve St. Mark's Bookstore for the benefit of the future transient youth of this neighborhood, here's a petition for you.

Memorial for Janet Freeman May 22

2011-05-10T16:19:00.000-07:00

Janet Freeman was the salt of the earth, the New York salt, from way, way deep in the mine.

From CoDA:

We are saddened to tell you of the death of Janet Freeman, on April 29. Janet was a long time member of Coda, a passionate, tireless and effective community activist, especially on housing issues, and an unforgettable friend. Many of us probably think of her as a truly pure and uncorruptible Lower East Sider. A Memorial Service, arranged by Janet's sister Pixie, and her close friend Enid, will be held on Sunday, May 22, at the Chinatown Head Start School (which Janet was closely involved with), 180 Mott Street, at 2:00. All of you are invited.

Once more with feeling

2011-03-26T10:58:00.000-07:00

Rent deregulation, believe it or not, raises market rate rents. The conservative Manhattan Institute, in their study of deregulation in Boston, showed that, following deregulation, landlords invested in improvements to attract market-rate renters. Landlords always seek their highest rent that the renter is willing to pay. Where there is any competition, the result of deregulation is better quality housing but higher market rents.

Market rates only go down if demand goes down -- if people leave the city or excess housing is built. Rent regulation in NY doesn't hinder construction -- new units are typically unregulated anyway. And the city's population increases, not decreases. It's not even certain that in a tight market like NY, landlords would even invest widely in improvements.

Regulated rents actually help to depress market rates, although renters who pay exorbitant rents wish it weren't so. We'd all like to be able to blame the regulated renters because it seems so unfair. But the source of exorbitant rents is not regulation, but the profit motive of landlords and NYers' own desire to live here -- we are the market that sustains those rents.

The market value depends on three general factors: demand, supply, and the aggregate available funds for rents. If regulated renters are paying less than their available rent funds (the excess of which presumably goes into the goods and services economy), when they are forced to pay more, they will increase the aggregate funds available for rents, since most of those renters are tied to the metropolitan area by work or family. Once deregulated, they will raise rents wherever they go in the area and that trickles up to the luxury rents.

Paul Krugman some years ago blamed regulation on San Francisco's tight rental market. He was clearly unaware that inclusionary housing was mandated in San Francisco, hindering construction. Krugman admits in his article that his judgment was cursory and immediate and not a result of any investigation. Had he known that inclusionary housing was mandated there, he would no doubt have come to a very different conclusion.

Inclusionary housing is not mandatory in NYC. I hasten to add that mandatory inclusionary housing in a super-high market like NYC would probably not unduly hinder construction.

Rent regulations good for New Yorkers?

2011-03-20T09:07:00.000-07:00

Market-rate renters in New York complain that they pay exorbitant rents because their regulated neighbors underpay. In their justifiable anger, they imagine that if regulated neighbors paid more, market rates would ease down.

Unfortunately, markets depend not on cost, but on demand. When an entire neighborhood destabilizes and goes market rate, demand actually increases. Market rates increase. All rents go up.

Rent deregulation doesn't lower market rates with a housing flood, it just displaces a whole lot of long-time community residents, upscaling the neighborhood and spreading present and future transiency. Renters also lose their legal protections against landlords and landlord harassment, which also adds transiency. Deregulation is the landlord's wet dream. Landlords get all the cards, renters none.

It's been studied by no less a deregulation advocate than the conservative Manhattan Institute, summarized here. The study itself here.

More regulation means less investment, not higher market rents. Real estate disinvestment in NY? Not likely. Not a worry. Increased investment raising rents? That's a true worry for anyone who isn't in real estate.

Want to save communities and affordability for all New Yorkers? Tell the governor to include stronger rent regulations in the state budget. You can call his office at 212-681-4580

When a city deregulates, the aggregate money available for rent actually increases. Those who were underpaying now will pay more they were paying with few exceptions. If they squeeze into lower-income neighborhoods, they raise rents there. Meanwhile, those who now see an opportunity to live in tonier neighborhoods, pay up the exorbitant market rates, which keeps the market rate rents up. The aggregate demand increases all over the city, unless people stop liking the city and leave. When the aggregate money for rent increases, rents increase, as long as people stay in the city. Why do you think landlords so much want to deregulate the market? To ease your market rate rents? Wake up!

The future of Chinatown?

2011-03-20T05:05:00.000-07:00

Detailed account of what's happening in Chinatown from Roland Li of Real Estate Weekly.

Lots of perspectives included, but Jones' comment about affordable housing advocates being against commercial incubators requires unpacking. On the one hand, her "commerce" is a misleading euphemism for development. Anti-gentrificationists in Chinatown do not oppose all commerce, they oppose the out-of-scale development that will transform and gentrify Chinatown, displacing the current community. On the other hand, affordable housing advocates are not at all opposed to development: they are the most enthusiastic proponents of development in Chinatown, aside from the developers themselves. Cross subsidies for market-rate development provide the only means of new affordable housing units. That's the debate in a nutshell. Wisest comment: CWG chair Mae Lee.

Momentous vote last night

2011-02-23T07:43:00.000-08:00

A momentous vote last night at Community Board 3: they voted, in effect, to curb the trend of commercial real estate speculation that has been decimating local-serving businesses and speeding up yuppie gentrification, which, unlike family-gentrification, creates neighborhoods of upscale transients displacing community without replacing any community at all. CB3 voted to phase out automatic liquor license transfer approval. It may be the most significant policy vote they've ever made.

Under the old dispensation, when a bar owner decides to sell the business, a new owner of that business can 'buy' the liquor license. The CB, treating the bought license as if there were no change in management, effectively guarantees the financial value of the license. That sends a message to prospective bar owners everywhere that a license is guaranteed -- insured -- in this community district. You don't have to face the community, you don't have to face the Board members. If the street on that business has over time filled with new bars, you don't have to worry about increased community objections. You are guaranteed, as long as you don't violate the law by selling to minors or sell cocaine there (sorry, I mean get caught selling cocaine) or, say, murder the residents above you.

Of course, bar owners on the CB lobbied for automatic transfer so that they could sell their licenses at the highest value to new owners. It was a kind of municipal corruption: the CB would insure the value of the license against change in the community, in particular, against the proliferation of local bars. The State Liquor Authority recognizes that bar density (defined as more that three within a 500 foot radius) is a reason to deny a new license, if the bar can't demonstrate some public benefit. So guaranteeing transfer approval was a way for the bar owners to get CB approval despite greater density.

You can see the effects in our neighborhood. The 500-foot rule is flaunted all over the EV/LES. And because bars can pay higher rents than most businesses, this bar program has choked out local-serving small businesses in favor of non-local-serving trendy bars. The bars in turn bring a transient young, single, professional clientele to the local residential stock. They gentrify the neighborhood, raising local rents; gentrification in turn encourages landlords to harass older, stable, more long-term lower-rent tenants, and the new upscale transients don't create any new community of their own.

The CB vote last night will eventually pull back that trend. If prospective bar owners know that they must face the community to get license approval, they will be less likely to buy that business, especially here in areas of bar density, where there will be the most community objection. If bars are reluctant, landlords can't count on high-rent bars for their commercial spaces, and will have to settle for lower-rent businesses. That will lower commercial rents and bring commercial diversity.

The next battle is to prevent chain stores and banks from filling in the place of the bars. That's a difficult struggle, though not impossible: special zoning can limit types of commerce, though with chain stores it can be tricky.

One note: the vote last night was a compromise. The policy doesn't apply to current bar owners. Their licenses will be guaranteed for their sale (as long as they don't violate the law). It's only the new buyers who will not have that guarantee. In other words, the bar owners on the Community Board will be protected, insured and underwritten. Such is the virtue of being a community board member. Makes me almost want to become a CB member so they can guarantee my personal rent against any local raises.

More on the Bowery

2011-02-21T15:29:00.000-08:00

Candlelight vigil for 35 Cooper Square
Tuesday, Feb. 22 from 5:30 to 6:30pm
(btwn 5th & 6th Streets where the Bowery meets 3rd Avenue)

Bowery History exhibit at the Whole Foods at Houston Street & the Bowery
on the 2nd floor free public space, Chrystie side
CLOSING THIS WEDNESDAY

On The Bowery
Lionel Rogosin's 1957 groundbreaking documentary/drama
"Rogosin is probably the greatest documentary filmmaker of all time." - John Cassavetes
Back again for a third engagement at IFC
Fri, Sat, Sun 11am

and...

The Bowery: a history of Grit, Graft and Grandeur
Eric Ferrara's latest book with new and surprising research and many archival illustrations
at Amazon

Save 35 Cooper petition

2011-01-24T18:59:00.000-08:00

From the Bowery Alliance of Neighbors

The information below explains why
several community and preservation groups
are having a press conference & rally to
support landmarking 35 Cooper Square .
Also, please sign the petition:
"Designate 35 Cooper Square a NYC landmark"
http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/landmark35coopersquare/

Designate 35 Cooper Square a NYC Landmark!

Event: Press Conference & Rally
Date: Jan 28 (Friday) at 4:30
Place: 35 Cooper Square (btwn 6th & 5th St .)
Participants: Historic Districts Council,
Greenwich Village Society for Historic
Preservation, Lower East Side Preservation
Initiative, Bowery Alliance of Neighbors,
Two Bridges Neighborhood Council,
East Village Community Coalition,
East Fifth Street Block Association,
6th and 7th Street Block Association...

Tell the Landmarks Preservation Commission to:

Landmark 35 Cooper Square !

The oldest building on Cooper Square , and one of the oldest
buildings of the original Bowery, this charming Federal style
building with the traditional gambrel roof, twin-pedimented
dormers, and large end chimneys also boasts historical and
cultural associations ranging from a direct descendant of
Peter Stuyvesant to much later habitation by Diane DiPrima,
the most influential woman of the Beat Generation.

“…when I first laid eyes on 35 Cooper Square , I knew it was
the fulfillment of all those fantasies of art and the artist’s life,
la vie de boheme. . .it was my dream house.”
--Diane DiPrima, Memoirs of a Beatnik

This much-beloved little building has been both a significant
participant and a surviving witness to New York City history
for nearly 200 years! Under the stipulations of the
Landmarks Law, it qualifies on architectural, historical and
cultural criteria for designation as a NYC individual landmark.
For both historical and cultural reasons, losing this house would be a
significant loss for the East Village/Lower East Side.

Why the need for a rally and press conference?
Responding late last year to rumors that 35 Cooper might
soon be demolished, four community preservation groups
(Historic Districts Council, Greenwich Village Society
for Historic Preservation, Lower East Side Preservation
Initiative) jointly wrote to the Landmarks Preservation
Commission Chair Tierney urging a NYC landmarks
designation. Accompanying our appeal was a strong
support letter from City Council Member Rosie Mendez,
who also met on site with Mr. Tierney.
Despite our efforts, we were denied even a public
hearing on the issue. The stated rationale was that
the building’s facade has undergone too much
alteration, but as historian Joyce Mendelsohn points
out in her reasonable, well-researched response,
many Federal style buildings have been
landmarked despite significant alterations.
She points out that when the much altered 511 and 513
Grand Street were designated, Mr. Tierney stated that
“These Federal-style treasures recall an important period
of New York city ’s development,” an argument that
Mendelsohn rightly suggests may appropriately be
applied to 35 Cooper Square .

Needless to say, under the circumstances a press conference and
and rally are the logical, democratic response in defense of
such an important historical resource.

Please sign the online PETITION:
http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/landmark35coopersquare/
Designate 35 Cooper Square a NYC Landmark!

Photographs of 35 Cooper Square and information about
our other efforts to preserve, protect, and celebrate the
Bowery and Cooper Square are available at:
www.boweryalliance.org

Sincerely,
David Mulkins, Chair/Co-founder
Bowery Alliance of Neighbors
184 Bowery, #4
New York, NY 10012
631-901-5435 mulbd@yahoo.com

Rally & press conference to save one of the most historic buildings on the Bowery

2011-01-23T09:19:00.000-08:00

From the Bowery Alliance of Neighbors:

35 Cooper Square Press Conference and Rally
Friday, 1/28
4:30 p.m.

35 Cooper Square

There will be a rally and press conference in front of 35 Cooper Square to save this wonderful Federal-style house from demolition and to push for landmark designation. It is one of the oldest houses left on the Bowery. In addition to its architectural significance, its important historical and cultural associations range from a direct descendant of Peter Stuyvesant to the building's much later habitation by Diane DiPrima, the most influential woman of the Beat Generation. This much-beloved little building has been both a significant participant and a surviving witness to New York City history for 200 years! Under the stipulations of the Landmarks Law, it qualifies on architectural, historical and cultural criteria for designation as a NYC individual landmark. Losing this house would be a significant loss to the history of the East Village for both cultural and historical reasons.

Read more about the rich history of 35 Cooper Square here at Jeremiah's Vanishing New York. Plans for demolition here (link via EVGrieve).

Express support for affordable housing in Manhattan

2011-01-10T12:38:00.000-08:00

Tuesday Jan. 11 is the deadline for community comment submissions (send to spura@cb3manhattan.org) on SPURA -- the largest vacant land area south of 96th Street -- a rare opportunity for the creation of affordable housing, and a part of Bloomberg's plan to create or preserve 165,000 affordable units, including 60,000 new units to be created. How many of these 60,000 new units SPURA will contribute depends in part on what our community says.

CB3 is currently working towards a plan of 800 affordable units, and a total residential ratio of 50% market-rate to 50% non-market-rate. The non-market-rate housing will comprise

20% low-income housing,
20% moderate (<$100,000 income) & middle income (<$130,000 income) housing, and
10% senior housing.

In other words, the CB plan, if built, would result in at least 1,600 residential units, about the size of one EV block of six story tenements.

Whether the city will respect the community agreement is an open question. Look at what happened to Atlantic Yards. SPURA stands in Sheldon Silver's district, and he has not yet commented.

The city, however, seems strongly committed: the city needs the revenue from the sale of the land, the residential and commercial taxes and residential disposable income that development will bring, as well as add to the legacy of the mayor, who has made affordable housing a goal. But before the city can move forward, it needs an agreement from the CB, as a first step. So now is the moment to express support for affordable housing in Manhattan.

View the current CB3 plan so far at CB3's website.
Send your comments to spura@cb3manhattan.org

Chinatown's BID Roars

2010-12-08T05:47:00.000-08:00

Into the complex relationships of Chinatown's political economy has entered a new and powerful player: the Chinatown BID.

Last night Community Board 3's Economic Development Committee, following a long public hearing on both sides, approved a proposed Chinatown Business Improvement District (BID), supported by Councilmember Chin. A Chinatown BID will significantly enhance Chinatown's commercial clout, and it will also enhance Chinatown's powerbrokers, both within Chinatown and in Community District 3 as well as in the broad city political landscape.

Because a BID is paid for in part by a tax on property owners, several property owners questioned last night why they should have to pay for services that the city itself should supply. Their objection is not so much a financial complaint, but an issue of inclusion. These property owners do not see themselves or their interests reflected in the promoters of the BID. The BID did not originate with them, they feel the BID progressed without them, and they anticipate that the BID will commercially develop and direct Chinatown without their voice.

The BID maintains that it will be open to all voices. However, its primary promoter, Chinatown Partnership, is a creature of Asian Americans for Equality, the most politically powerful organization in Chinatown. Both are close to the councilmember -- a founder and former board president of AAFE and Chinatown Partnership. In other words, the vote last night was a consolidation of political strength in Chinatown.

A couple of observers outside the BID area raised concerns about the effects of the BID on small businesses, which will bear a burden of cost, and the focus of the BID, which seems more concerned with tourism and upscaling commerce than labor and local residential community. Will the BID promote gentrification in Chinatown as the LES BID did, overseeing the gentrification of the LES and transformation of it into a nightlife strip and construction and hotel zone for overdevelopment?

The consequences of the Chinatown BID remain to be seen. I don't see how it will solve the deeper troubles within Chinatown -- the evaporation of the garment industry that sustained Chinatown throughout its expansion, and the threat of overdevelopment and the burden of real estate taxes on the old tenements. The BID's easiest goal will be tourism, which will help some local businesses, may drive out others, and could radically transform the local character. It will be a shame if in ten years Chinatown blogs have names like "ChinatownGrieve" and "Vanishing Chinatown" routinely complaining about the invasion of outsiders. Those are my worst-case scenario worries.

Howbeit, the vote last night is a great and unequivocal victory for the councilmember. She will say, of course, it is a victory for Chinatown, and in fact, she will now have an opportunity to make good on that claim. Political strength is a relation between leader and power base, whether commercial or residential. For my part, I don't believe there is one Chinatown. There are many. This was a victory for one aspect of Chinatown. It is Margaret Chin's task to play this card into a victory for all of Chinatown. If that play will begin, it will begin with healing.

Most of the meeting was remarkably respectful and orderly. The meeting was chaired by CB3's model committee chair, Richard Ropiak. Amidst the most controversial meetings, Ropiak always manages a smooth meeting. He assiduously avoids interjecting himself into the discussion (even when you can see he would like to), yet he keeps order firmly when necessary. As a result, everyone gets heard, everyone feels the hearing process is fair.

The BID has a few remaining hurdles to clear before it is made law, but the vote last night all but assures its success.

NYU NIMBY musical chairs

2010-11-29T19:22:00.000-08:00

While the West Village is hosting a town hall meeting on the future of NYU expansion at Our Lady of Pompeii, basement, Carmine & Bleecker, 6:30, East Villagers ought to be alarmed by NYU's decision not to build on its own campus. All voices at the town hall will ask NYU to build in the financial district, but NYU may be looking for closer locations more attractive to their students. That's would be our neighborhood.

Although the EV and the 3rd & 4th Avenue triangle have been recently rezoned to cap heights, there are still plenty of available development sites here. 3rd Avenue still allows the same bulk as prior to the rezoning, and it allows more bulk than the NYU dorm that already stands on 3rd Ave at 10th Street. (It's only 5.31 FAR. Under the new zoning, 3rd Ave allows 6.5 FAR for dormitories!) And they can build as high as 12 stories on 3rd Ave -- the current dorms there are only two stories taller than that.

And then there's El Bohio, the old P.S. 64. It's already standing, requiring minimal construction, and it is a huge lot. A dormitory there would end all hopes for a community center. So there's plenty to worry about.

When NYU unveiled its plans to build on its own campus, it seemed to me a great relief. The I.M.Pei site is already high-rise, full of wasted, unused, inhospitable concrete plaza space that feels like and looks like a wind tunnel. But NYU's ambition overreached with a plan of excessive height, including a hotel, that riled the locals.

The underlying problem for NYU is its limited endowment. Unlike universities with huge endowments, NYU depends on tuition. So it thrives more like a corporation than a university. It needs more students -- it needs expansion in a way that some other universities don't. So the problem of NYU expansion is not likely to go away. The question is, where will it go?

Chinatown Partnership bypasses the Chinatown planning process

2010-11-24T22:35:00.000-08:00

Chinatown Partnership presented its Chinatown Business Improvement District (BID) proposal to CB3 Tuesday night without going first to the Chinatown Working Group (CWG), the community-wide planning process for Chinatown's future.

Setting aside whether the BID is a good or bad idea -- like most planning ideas, it is a mix of both, and judgment depends on perspective and interests -- going to the CB without going to the community seems a premature and unwise choice for three reasons:
1. it by-passes and ignores the ongoing community process in Chinatown
2. it undermines the viability and effectiveness of that community process
3. it risks dividing the community by promoting the BID without full discussion within the community.

Chinatown Partnership has been promoting a Chinatown BID to clean Chinatown streets and promote tourism and economic development. But the small businesses, who will pay for the BID, are not all in favor. Some small businesses don't see why they should have to pay for services that the city ought to supply. They also worry that a BID will create a quasi-governmental bureaucracy that will formulate policy that will not serve small businesses, but may serve big capital or power-brokers in Chinatown. Increased taxes from the BID will be passed onto small landlords who would be compelled to pass these increases to small businesses whose profit margins are already narrow. Yet these small businesses have historically been providing low prices that have benefited the local community. The increased push for tourist dollars over the small business economy that has long dominated Chinatown is not without controversy. And once a BID is created, it is almost impossible to dismantle, even if the BID turns out to be harmful to small businesses.

Tuesday night at the CB3 meeting, Margaret Chin repeated several times that the BID should be an issue of self-rule. I agree. CB3 should follow the will of the Chinatown community on this, including the local small business community and the Chinatown Working Group.

The Chinatown Working Group represents a moment of great potential for Chinatown. Members are drawn from businesses, residents, labor, social services, arts organizations, parks organizations, parents of school children -- you name it, CWG includes it. CWG is also completely open to any organization in the community. Even Chinatown Partnership is a member.

At this critical moment of great hope and expectation, Chinatown Partnership's choice to take an end run around CWG would be ill-considered. The right and fair place for the discussion and planning of a Chinatown BID should be in the CWG, where all of Chinatown interested parties can speak equally and freely to hash out the issues.

In addition, CB3 or CWG or some independent source should try to discover which kinds of businesses (large, small, restaurant, produce, boutiques, pharmacies, hair salons, wholesale supply, lumber, sidestreet, avenue, neighborhood location, etc.) support the BID and which oppose. The same should be evaluated for residents (owners, renters, neighborhood location, income, immigrant, native, working within Chinatown, working outside, salaried, temporary). A study of the consequences for all those sectors should be drawn up as well. Without full information, the BID is a shot in the dark, and many could get hurt.

Bowery efforts and events

2010-11-13T15:10:00.000-08:00

Two Bowery townhouses from around 1800 are immediately threatened with demolition, 206 Bowery and 35 Cooper Square. I've included a letter to the Landmarks Preservation Commission from an advocate for 206. Most of its content applies to 35 Cooper Square as well: they are both townhouses, both have been reviewed by the Commission, neither has been landmarked yet, both are in imminent danger of demolition. Send a letter, if you can.

ALSO
three Bowery events upcoming:

Tenement Talks, November 16, 6:30pm
Bowery: Past, Present & Future with David Mulkins
at the Tenement Museum Visitors Center 108 Orchard,
An illustrated talk on the legendary street by the chair of the Bowery Alliance of Neighbors co-sponsored by Bowery Boogie

Lionel Rogosin's 1957 On the Bowery
return engagement at the Film Forum Nov. 19-25
"Rogosin is probably the greatest documentary filmmaker of all time"
--John Cassavettes
(Susan Wasserman, Dir. of the Gotham Center, will speak at the Friday, Nov. 19, 7:40 screening and I'll be speaking at the 7:40 screening on Saturday Nov. 20)

Bowery History: a celebration
at Dixon Place, Nov. 30, 6pm cocktails, 7pm showtime
161 Chrystie Street
An evening of cocktails, music, performance, film and speakers
for the Bowery Alliance of Neighbors

AND
On the Bowery: an historical exhibit
at Whole Foods, Bowery & Houston, 2nd floor
by LESHP for the Bowery Alliance of Neighbors

Here's the letter to the LPC from Ralph Lewis:

November 5, 2010

Hon. Robert B. Tierney, Chair
Landmarks Preservation Commission
Municipal Building
1 Centre Street, 9th Floor
New York, NY 10007

Re: Landmark Status for 206 Bowery

Dear Chairman Tierney and Commission Members:

As a community leader who cares deeply about New York City and the community histories that make it such an incredible city, I am very concerned about the preservation of the legendary Bowery. At this critical time of change along this avenue, I want to thank the LPC for putting the Federal-style rowhouse at 206 Bowery through your rigorous landmark process. I understand that its case was recently closed, so I urge you to designate this house a NYC landmark as soon as possible.

Built in the early 1800s, 206 Bowery is one of the oldest buildings in the City not currently landmarked. A rare, actual house in Manhattan, its architecture appears today almost exactly as it was built 200 years ago; and its Federal style design is both unique and finite. This house has participated in many waves of NYC’s cultural and commercial growth, and its very existence tells an essential New York story of survival and resilience. It is extremely important to me and my community that structures of this age and character are preserved, so that future generations can understand The Bowery’s heritage through the landmark designation of buildings like this one.

I’m sure that the Commission is aware of the unplanned development currently taking hold on The Bowery with a speed not seen in other neighborhoods. The community is grateful to the LPC for equally protecting its historic character. 206 Bowery is a wonderful example of the intimacy that once was downtown Manhattan, and it stands in stark contrast to new, bigger buildings where both large and small, new and old, make each other look better by comparison. This architectural diversity will insure that The Bowery remains one of NYC’s most unique avenues.

Lastly, I want to thank you for recently designating 97 Bowery as an NYC landmark. Its addition to the growing list of landmarked Bowery buildings continues to create an historic district, making The Bowery an economic and educational destination for residents and tourists alike. 206 Bowery can only contribute to this success.

206 Bowery needs and deserves the immediate attention of preservation laws to ensure its survival, so that its special house-ness will continue to reflect the irreplaceable Bowery. With so much at stake, it is vital that the Commission act with urgency to landmark 206 Bowery.

Respectfully submitted,

chop chop buzz buzz - oh what a beautiful tree it wuzz

2010-11-12T11:21:00.000-08:00

EV Grieve posts a story close to home -- condo owners on my street want to cut down a willow tree in their back yard. The heading above comes from one of the comments there.

Events

2010-11-06T20:10:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow, Sunday, the Asian American Writer's Workshop is holding its Page Turner Festival
PowerHouse Arena, 37 Main St Brooklyn DUMBO
http://pageturnerfest.org/schedule/

At 3pm, I'll be moderating a panel with Richard Price, inspirer and writer of HBO's award-winning "The Wire" and novels Lush Life and Clockers, and Henry Chang, author of the Detective Yu Chinatown Trilogy, including this year's Red Jade. We'll be discussing the impact of gentrification in the streets of the community from their writer's perspective.

ALSO

On the Bowery, the groundbreaking 1957 realist film directed by Lionel Rogosin (founder of the Bleecker Street Cinema) IS BACK at the Film Forum, November 11 through Thanksgiving (and beyond?). It played for a week in September and was so packed they held it over and now brought it back. The newly mastered, beautiful B&W movie is accompanied with a documentary about its historic significance and the remarkable story of its making. (I'll be speaking about the documentary and the Bowery at the November 20 7:40 screening, in case you hadn't had enough of me.)

ALSO

Our exhibit on the history of the Bowery is still at the Whole Foods (yes, at Whole Foods, you don't have to tell me the irony of it) in the public space (hey, it's public space -- I say use it!) on the second floor. It's about raising awareness of the truly astonishing history of the Bowery and encouraging people to get involved in protecting the Bowery. Here's an intro youtube packed with history
http://grandstreetnews.blogspot.com/2010/11/bowery-exhibit-at-whole-foods-with-rob.html

The exhibit flyer and the exhibit card (see how many faces and places you can recognize)

An exchange on community preservation

2010-11-04T05:42:00.000-07:00

I'm posting an exchange between me and a commenter on this blog about landmarking and community preservation, addressing the question of whether landmarking in all contexts gentrify and raise real estate values, and to what extent landmarking can be successful in preventing eviction and preserving affordable housing. It begins with "Can the Bowery be preserved?"

Rob wrote:
If you've gone to the city's Oasis map [below, with my comments] and looked at the historic preservation in community district 2, you've seen that about three fourths of CD2 are protected by landmarking [including the soon-to-be South Village District not yet shown in the map], including the west side of the Bowery, some of which was protected only recently.

So it's possible to protect. It takes organizing and political maneuvering. But it's possible.

The Bowery is particularly sensitive: it runs deep into Chinatown, so what the city does with the Bowery has reflexes there. In contrast to CD2, there's virtually no protection in the LES/EV (CD3). Why has CD3 had so little preservation? It's not the buildings themselves: tenements were constructed during one of the most fertile moments of façade design in New York. You can see it everywhere here.

Can the community be preserved? That's much tougher. But if Chinatown is stabilized as an immigrant destination, and grows, parts of the Bowery may also be protected from rampant gentrification.

Commenter responded:
I think you're right with regard to landmarking. That is the one element of preservation that may actually succeed, not least because it's driven by wealthy people, and benefits wealthy people. It's exactly the aspect of preservation that does the least for poor/middle class people, and arguably even hurts them. Older, scenic buildings that give a neighborhood charm are valued first and foremost by residential property owners who have invested in the neighborhood. As their number goes up, landmarking goes up too. People holding down two full time jobs don't have time to attend community board meetings. I don't have the numbers, but I'd wager that the West Village has some of the highest incidence of landmarked buildings. Doesn't prevent Marc Jacobs from renting storefronts, or landlords from rolling inventory into market rate, as soon as they are able to do so. Ironically, as ugly and noncontextual as new developments can be, they actually increase the supply of housing and therefore make rents lower than what they would be otherwise. A place like Avalon Chrystie, which is 80/20 I believe, actually contributes a chunk of apartments that are "affordable" (for lack of a better term.) In other words, preserving the buildings is exactly what the gentrifiers want, and it's unclear to me that doing so has any positive effect on economic diversity in the long term.

I'm all for it, by the way, because I think they look pretty, and new buildings are mostly crap, but I don't see how it will ultimately "save" Chinatown.

Rob:
It's true that landmarking increases property value of the existing building if it's a house, like a townhouse. I'm not sure the effect on a tenement. Studies I've seen compare landmarked houses with non-landmarked houses, not tenements. More to the point, I've not seen a comparison between a landmarked house and a non landmarked house that was demolished and redeveloped into a 23-story hotel. My off-the-top guess is that the latter appreciated far more than the former.
;-)
That's the rational for landmarking a tenement: the tenants, being regulated, won't be evicted regardless of the appreciation of the tenement's landmarking designation (if tenements appreciate as houses do) as long as the owner doesn't demolish, and landmarking prevents demolition.

The most affordable housing is current affordable housing. So preserving tenants where they are has that advantage over 80/20 which brings additional gentrification/displacement pressures as well. It's hard to imagine that the tenements of Chinatown would appreciate much in their narrow streets.

In any case, the issues you address, anon, are exactly the right issues to address. We had this debate in the EV rezoning: should we welcome development for the sake of 20% "affordable" housing, or hold out for no development at all (or minimal development).

Commenter:
I think you are absolutely right that the 23 story hotel will create greater returns for the owner of that particular property, but it will likely depress values in the surrounding properties, which would benefit from a uniformity in pre-war architecture. Landmarking is almost always a burden for the owner, but a benefit to the surrounding owners who will benefit from the fact that the restricted owner will not be allowed to cash in by maximizing his asset.

The thing about affordable housing in tenements is that is only moves in one direction. People do relocate, even when they have amazing, way below market rents. People die. An apartment that was once controlled/stabilized and then brought to market rate will never go back. So it's just a matter of time, given external pressures in the neighborhood, that the tenement apartments will shift over to newcomers who pay market. It happened above Grand, and it will happen below too.

What I don't really understand is why people would want to live in a neighborhood where none of the amenities cater to them. If I were immigrant Chinese and were being priced out of peripheral Chinatown by LES gentrification, wouldn't I just rather move to Sunset Park or Flushing? I mean, what value do I get from being surrounded by hipster boutiques and oyster bars? Clearly this is far from the case in core Chinatown, and I believe core Chinatown will continue to survive in some form. But when the writing's on the wall, what's point of fighting market forces?

More on our blogs

2010-10-31T19:26:00.000-07:00

I owe EVGrieve an apology -- Grieve posted the Bowery exhibit with its poster and without irony.

Still, I don't see in our neighborhood the kind of policy broadsides that thrive in other neighborhoods: QueensCrap, DevelopDon'tDestroy, AtlanticYardsReport. We have only Suzannah B. Troy -- often a lone Cassandra turned from every door.

When the local blogs began to appear, I expected, unrealistically, they would represent a face of resistance or at least alterity, an East Village Otherblog, as if they would all be written by Penley and Flash. It's not the bloggers' fault -- not everyone has the resistance pathology, identifies with it or has a taste for it. Maybe this blog is supposed to be the resistance blog. I wish I had a taste for blogging.

LES bloggers complain, missing the action

2010-10-30T03:09:00.000-07:00

None of the local bloggers have bothered to draw attention to the Bowery Alliance of Neighbors' effort to preserve the Bowery with its historical exhibit On the Bowery. Instead, they focus on the easy, appealing, fun irony of the exhibit's venue. Irony and complaining or action, which is the value? The former are the easy choice. Isn't irony the yuppie generation's favorite mode and complaining their favorite voice? I grew up in the crude 60's, when activism had no irony.

Having complained about and ridiculed in writing the Chrystie-Avalon complex in which Whole Foods is housed, I am sensitive to the irony of curating an exhibit promoting Bowery preservation in the very place where Bowery gentrification began. The venue was not my choice. I consented to design it because it was a benefit for the Bowery Alliance of Neighbors, the only group that was active in preserving the Bowery, as distinct from the many who complain about gentrification and do nothing. (Recently other community organizations have joined BAN actively, notably Two Bridges.)

I've been working with BAN since its inception, surveying the Bowery, researching, schmoozing political office-holders, writing documentation, and now, creating an exhibit. A show at Whole Foods, with it high volume of local patrons, makes it an ideal venue for exposure. And it's in a public space that is frequented by Bowery locals -- not just shoppers (though the complainers won't know that because they are too caught in their own political correctness to recognize the urban nature of public space that real, ordinary, truly local people use). The irony of the venue seems so much less significant to me than the fact that so many people will see this exhibit and will learn not just the forgotten history of the Bowery, but also the preservation struggle, which is the thrust of the exhibit.

So while I am conscious of irony in the choice of venue, I am amused and disappointed in the unanimous blog response to the exhibit, focusing on that irony while completely ignoring that the exhibit is an important step in raising awareness of the Bowery to protect it. I appreciate that local news media concern themselves with maintaining their profile before their audience, and the hook of an irony has a much higher profile than the dull fare of asking the audience to get active -- it's so much easier to complain about gentrification than actually do something about it.

If any one of the EV bloggers had bothered to investigate the Bowery exhibit at Whole Foods, that blogger would have found that the direction and point of the exhibit is preservation. Sure, there's a grand historical narrative, and lots of intriguing characters and surprising stories, but the preservation point is doubly reinforced, clearly explained in text and graphic image.

This SaveTheLowerEastSide blog has always been focused on action and policy information, to give people the information needed to act. There have been digressions on history and occasional complaints, mostly about obstructive local politics, and occasional complaints about losses to the neighborhood. But it's mostly been about getting active -- going to a CB3 meeting, signing on to an open letter or legislative testimony -- or information explaining the technicalities of zoning or the liquor license laws. (It has been quiet on this blog lately, not because I have been inactive, but because I've been working closely on the Chinatown process, and I don't feel it appropriate to kiss-and-tell, on the one hand, and on the other, I don't want to jeopardize such an important community process.)

To me, the bloggery 'irony' response to the Bowery exhibit seems cheap -- superficial and irrelevant, self-serving and masturbatory. If the designer of the exhibit has to be the only blogger out there to tell people that BAN IS STRUGGLING TO PRESERVE THE BOWERY with, among other events, an exhibit at Whole Foods for the preservation of the Bowery as part of BAN's work to preserve the oldest and most richly historic street in New York -- then I'll be that only blogger.

The lament has a distinguished literary precedent. I admire it and appreciate it as a record. But I'm an activist. Maybe that makes me blunt, even crude. My repertory of tactics is limited to vocal criticism. It always gets me in trouble. So here it is: our LES bloggers are full of complaints that aren't helpful.
We're trying to save the Bowery,
while you are playing with yourselves,
:-)
my dear friends.

Dept. of Blatant Self-Promotion

2010-10-28T13:56:00.001-07:00

I wrote and designed the exhibit.
(Grateful thanks to Mike Geyer, Honey Millman and Andrea Coyle, without whose generosity and resources it would never have happened).
Go take a look. Flyer and card below.

Whole Foods, whatever you think of it, provides a public space on the second floor at a time when there are fewer and fewer public spaces in NYC. A lot of Bowery locals -- people who live on the Bowery, work there, people from the Mission -- hang out at the public space at Whole Foods every day. So I kind of like having this exhibit in this public space where local people can happen on it and enjoy it and learn about the history of the Bowery.

Reminds me of the spread of MacDonalds and Burger King. We all complained about fast-food chains coming to New York (this was in the 1970's). But if you actually spent time in the Burger Kings (not MacDonalds which was family oriented, even in its decor), you'd see circles of working-class recent immigrants hanging out there together, with a cup of coffee three hours old. Nobody bothered them. And soon enough, Burger Kings became a local working-class site.

The Whole Foods gallery space has this feeling of being a little like a park bench. It doesn't belong to anyone, no one bothers you. And, unlike a park bench, even the police aren't around.

ON THE BOWERY
a Lower East Side History Project exhibit
for the Bowery Alliance of Neighbors

ON THE BOWERY: An Historical Exhibit

At Whole Foods Market
95 East Houston St at Bowery (2nd Floor, east wing)
Open daily, 8:00 AM to 11:00 PM
October 29, 2010 through Winter 2011
FREE

Location information: http://wholefoodsmarket.com/stores/bowery/
Subway: F to "2nd Avenue/Lower East Side", 6 to Bleecker

Opening Event & Reception:
Thursday, October 28, 7:00 PM - 8:30 PM.
Light food and drink plus presentations
Come and mingle with LESHP and community friends.

Permanent memorial for Michael Shenker

2010-10-17T07:53:00.000-07:00

"Michael Shenker was the greatest man I ever met," said Seth Tobocman at last night's memorial. I can only copy his words: Michael Shenker was the greatest man I ever met. He was also a big piece of this neighborhood and its character.

People are considering a permanent memorial for Michael -- naming a garden after him, for example. This doesn't even remotely approach the significance of Michael Shenker. Someone coined the verb "to shenker" -- maybe for 'illicitly jimmying electricity', or 'opposing all authority flagrantly and fearlessly'. That's getting closer. Fly announced the first Saturday of October as Illumination Saturday for his electricity, literal and figurative. That's a start. There has to be more, much, much more.

Michael was not famous, not a self-promoter, not a national name nor a headliner. He was bigger than fame. Michael's life has something deep to give, and it would be a shame if that were lost to the history of a few brief moments in a corner of the city. His life had something important to say not just to us here in the LES, but for everyone in this city today and (I believe this) for humanity. The funeral banner motto sets it just right,"Would you rather be safe and live in the darkness, or take a chance and live in the light?"

As Seth Tobocman said several times last night, Michael was free and fearless. That's what should be memorialized, not just among ourselves, but everywhere, as a demonstration of the possibilities of life. Everyone should know what the LES was all about, what the LES can grow and create, what kind of courage we aspire to, what kind of independence and commitment and passion. Everyone should know who he was, how he lived and where.

At the memorial last night Seth Tobocman added that he didn't get to walk with Martin Luther King, but he did get to walk with Michael Shenker. I have the same feeling about Michael, but not because of what Michael did or accomplished, or his aspirations or his beliefs, but because he knew how to live, freely and intrepidly, and because he so comprehensively understood his intentions and motives, and expressed those intentions so brilliantly.

I admired Michael not as those who participated in his struggles, by the way. I didn't share with him one of his basic positions and I didn't participate in two of his most important occupations, the squatter's movement and the 'community' gardens. I wasn't a squatter, so I didn't get involved with the movement, and I didn't (and don't) join the garden movement, partly because gardens are not truly public, and partly because the gardens were by the time of the movement, already a sign of gentrification. I've seen many gardens lead to disputes and divisions in a small community -- disputes over space, because the space is quasi-private, not truly public. I believe open space should be wholly public, and while I don't subscribe to any ideology, to me the public parks are one of the few instances of unalloyed success of the socialist ideal: the government keeps it open to all and no one can dispute its space.

Don't get me wrong -- I admire the garden movement as a community movement, and I appreciate its work to keep green space. But by the time the garden movement had begun, most of the gardens in the neighborhood had been transformed from their original Loisaida craziness into a kind of self-gentrification of its own: conventional landscaping made to look pretty in conventional ways; carefully circumscribed plots of tomatoes and vegetable patches, assigned to this or that member. None of this was the character of the gardens when I moved here when locals were beginning to claim the empty lots left by fire and demolition.

Those early 80's gardens were each unique, crazy, original as only the LES could be. Pretty they weren't. The gardens reflected the apartments of the weird tenants: packed with the stuff of some odd mind's obsession, freely spread around. The walls of one apartment flowed with fine copper wires hanging in broad reams like a bright orange waterfall; another piled with furniture to its ceiling, unused and unusable, crowding every inch of space save a narrow passageway to the bed. The people here, their apartments and their 'gardens' had character. It was not about reproducing the comfortable or attractive spaces of the middle class, or the amenities of the suburbs. It was uniquely New York and uniquely LES.

So I didn't share a lot of the struggles that Michael passionately led, or his aspirations. In the 90's I stayed away from community activity entirely, disillusioned after participating in demonstration after demonstration through the late 80's only to watch the fight against gentrification develop into nothing more than a pointless and self-defeating rage against policemen-on-the-job -- police, the lowest arm of government lacking any policy-making, and policemen, working men with little or no understanding of the issues, faced with an ugly task, to stand against the citizen. I gave up any hope for this community's ability to organize beyond its own personal anger. I spent the 90's instead fighting for public higher education against Giuliani's intent to downsize CUNY and limit access to it. I believe in public institutions that benefit all the public. Bob Arihood rebukes me that college is pointless. If he's right, then my efforts were foolish. So who am I to cavil over others' struggles?

At the memorial last night there was a moment of difference between the audience and a speaker. I thought at first it was a blemish, but then rethought. A memorial that is nothing but blandishments and encomiums is not the truth. Michael got involved and that's staking a position. We should remember honestly the real man -- that was the extraordinary man. No one wants to remember the undertaker's make-up.

Besides, you didn't have to share Michael's beliefs to appreciate that this man had grasped the meaning of life, that by guarding his freedom, he'd let loose his passion -- in all directions. Everyone who was in contact with him felt it, judging by the accounts at the memorial last night. He made a difference; he helped a lot of people; he led a lot of struggles; he accomplished something. And he did it out of his freedom and his passion and his brilliance. That's the greatest person I've known in my time. Everyone should know about Michael Shenker. Everyone should have known him. I envy to no end all the squatters and garden folks who got to work with Michael regularly. Once he became a squatter, I didn't get to see him much anymore -- and every single time I walked through the park I hoped to encounter him. I loved to listen to his talk when I did. He should have lived longer. Long live Michael.

Michael Shenker 1955-2010

2010-10-07T19:05:00.000-07:00

Here is a list of memorials, thanks to EV Grieve. There are many testimonials in the comments section in Colin Moynihan's fine NY Times City Room piece.

Friday
Musical program in honor of Michael
7 p.m.; music starts around 8 p.m.
At 5C Cafe, Fifth Street at Avenue C
Burt Ekoff, Michael's piano teacher, and friends will be performing.

Sunday, October 10
Time's Up Garden Party
3:30 p.m. at El Jardin Del Paraiso
Located on Fourth-Fifth Streets between Avenues C and D
Michael was a co-founder of the More Gardens Coalition and a force behind saving NYC gardens. Reverend Billy and the choir will be at this event.

Saturday, October 16
March Around the Neighborhood
Meet in the middle of Tompkins Square Park at 5 p.m.
Friends will march around the neighborhood and arrive at his funeral.

Funeral for Michael at Mary House (Catholic Worker)
7 p.m. at 55 E. Third St.

Sunday, October 24
Celebration of Michael with Eric Drooker and Eden and John's East River Strong Band.
6-10 p.m. Location TBA

I first met Michael in the early 80’s at Hunter College in the music department. He stood out not only because he seemed to be the sharpest and most knowledgeable musician among the students, but because he seemed at once to own the department and the department couldn’t quite contain him. His natural brilliance didn’t belong in the confines of the classroom or within the distinctions of faculty and student. His character fluently spanned such lines of propriety. It was an unusual environment to see him in — college is intellectually friendly but also orderly and proper, so he was welcomed, but wouldn’t stay long: he was too independent.

Later I saw him in the neighborhood where he would overwhelm me with that outpouring of political eloquence — an irresistible river let loose. I know very few who could speak so well as Michael. That’s what I really loved about him — he could speak expansively with knowledge and resonance. I always hoped to encounter him in the street or in the park just to hear him talk again.

The neighborhood back then drew many extraordinary independent spirits who thrived in this place that was so completely abandoned by money and mainstream interests. Michael was one among the brightest lights here.

For those who didn't know him, here's Chris Flash's comment from the NY Times article to give just one aspect of his significance (he was also a key motivator and tactician in the garden movement as well as the squatters movement):

[...] Michael was an intelligent caring person who put himself on the line repeatedly — he was a real doer. Thanks to Michael’s efforts, more than a dozen abandoned buildings were opened, made habitable and ultimately “legalized” under an agreement with the city that put an end to countless HPD raids and court battles.

[...] The squatters did not steal housing from anyone. Rather, it was phony poverty pimp organizations holding buildings vacant until public financing was forthcoming and the city itself, which allowed buildings to remain vacant and crumbling rather than continue the successful homesteading (sweat-equity) program that ended just before the squatters took direct action in the 1980s.

Instead of following the so-called “housing” groups’ model of creating taxpayer-subsidized units with years-long waiting lists for “moderate-income” tenants, the squatters created immediate housing for “zero-income” tenants, all at NO cost to the city. The squatters did their own labor at their sole cost. Each member paid housing dues to cover the costs of materials and all members participated in “work days.”

The squatters did not pave the way for the subsequent gentrification on the Lower East Side that was coming anyway — for close to a decade, the squatters stood in the way of yuppie ghetto developments, ultimately winning their fight for their right to remain in their homes.

Michael was in the middle of all of this, from the earliest days of squatting in the early 80s through the present. His contribution and his wonderful presence in our lives can never be fully expressed, but those of us who knew him knew and appreciated that he was special.

Commitment

2010-07-17T09:18:00.000-07:00

The conflict between preservationists and the Russian Orthodox Church on 2nd Street, the history of duplicity and distrust aside, comes down to two simple issues:

1) the church cannot guarantee that they can preserve the building in perpetuity (the congregation and administration might change in ten or twenty years -- it could fold entirely),

2) the preservationists cannot guarantee help with the burden of effort and financial expense implied in landmarking.

There is no question that landmarking is a burden to the owner: repairs to the façade require approval from the Landmarks Preservation Commission in addition to any normal Department of Buildings permits. Those approvals require applications and, in some cases, hearings. The Landmarks Commission receives several thousand applications each year, each must be treated individually. The Commission is underfunded. Applications can take time, and complex applications may not be clearly understood by a strapped and overworked commission. Where there is ongoing damage, say, water damage, delay for approval may occasion irreparable damage meanwhile. A simple air conditioning system could be prohibitively expensive, if LPC won't allow the units face the street where they are most convenient.

Both the Landmarks Preservation Commission and the Landmarks Conservancy offer grants to relieve the burden. Preservationists urge that landmarking should be viewed as an opportunity for the church.

But LPC grants would not be applicable to the church. LPC grants are intended for restoration of seriously degenerated façades. But the church façade, as it happens, stands in almost pristine state.

The Conservancy's Sacred Sites grants offer more:

"Priority will be given to essential repairs to the primary worship building. Highest consideration is given to projects such as roofing and drainage system repairs, masonry repointing and restoration, structural repairs, and stained glass window repair and restoration. The Sacred Sites Fund also provides grants for professional services, including conditions surveys, plans and specifications, project management, engineering reports, stained glass surveys, and laboratory testing of materials and finishes. Sacred Sites grants may be considered for barrier-free access construction, if it is done in conjunction with a larger preservation project. Grants cannot be used for pipe organ restoration, interior work, mechanical upgrades, or routine maintenance.

"Grants will not be considered for work that has been started or completed at the time of the application.

"The maximum grant amount for the Sacred Sites Fund is $10,000. In the most recent, January 2010 grant round, Sacred Sites grants averaged about $3,000, and we project similar grant averages through 2011. No grant shall exceed half the project cost."

The church would still need assistance with the effort of applications. Sometimes a simple application to succeed can require community and political support. That takes organizing, writing, meeting, as well as grant-writing and researching. The existing administration may not have time to devote to those efforts and the work of ministering to the congregation, and may require the additional financial burden of hiring someone just to handle the landmark burdens.

And financial grants do not mitigate the sheer length of the application process to remediate an ongoing problem.

Landmarks are routinely designated in opposition to the owner. My sense is that if the community preservationists pursue this designation, it will succeed. Few buildings in this neighborhood are as eminently landmarkable as the church building: designed by a significant architect (he built the original Natural History Museum, the stone south side of which can still be seen), an attractive building, an almost unchanged façade, an unusual example of Richardsonian design in a church, and a significant social history in the neighborhood.

If the preservationists could commit financially to the church and commit to helping with applications, the conflict might be partially resolved. Maybe that should be the goal of the mediation to which both sides have agreed. But how can preservationists be bound to any agreement to commit? All in all, it looks like the church is going to have to endure an additional burden and hope that it can thrive despite.

There is a lesson in it all: preservationists would not have pursued this particular building were it not that the church proposed and considered an eight-story condo expansion above the building. The lesson cuts both ways: if you own a historic and architecturally significant structure, either treat it with respect and not draw attention of preservationists, or illegally demolish it before anyone ever knows.

For all the finger pointing towards the church, at least they didn't try the latter. Many others have.

Another historic loss on the Bowery, and an illegal demolition?

2010-06-10T10:21:00.000-07:00

206 Bowery, a Federal row house from the early 1800's -- maybe as early as 1800 -- is being prepared for demolition. The residential tenant has been given 6 days' eviction notice, the commercial tenant has already left and the boiler has been shut off. And there are no filings with the Department of Buildings to demolish.

photo:curbed.com

Another illegal demolition to pre-empt any effort to landmark the building, like the Henry Street demolition February? We've already lost the Germania Bank building on Bowery. History is losing fast. The barbarians are here.

The Emperor's clothes

2010-05-30T16:01:00.000-07:00

Look carefully at the 3rd&4th Avenues rezoning:
current zoning
proposed zoning

Clearly, the 3rd&4th Avenue rezoning will not serve its purpose. The voluntary middle-income provision lacks incentive: it won't be built. The 120-foot height cap will continue to encourage development, and the huge 57% increase in residential density will target every small old building for demolition -- eviction -- and redevelopment.

In the craze for contextual zoning, no one seems to understand that under the old zoning, huge overdeveloped towers were typically built by purchasing air rights from smaller buildings. Those smaller buildings, once having lost their development rights, have no room to develop. That protects them and their tenants.

In the rezoning, the old commercial allowable floorspace (6 FAR) is unchanged. The 6.5 community facility (dormitories) is unchanged. The only change is the huge increase from 3.44 residential FAR to 5.4, a whopping 57% increase. Instead of a few towers protecting its smaller neighbors, this rezoning will eventually replace every old building with 57% larger ones rising up to 12 stories. This is an improvement? Who is benefiting besides developers and their minions?

The EV/LES rezoning balanced upzoning with downzoning, development with preservation. But this 3rd&4th Avenues rezoning includes only upzoning, no downzoning, more development, zero preservation. And the voluntary middle-income housing has no incentive: developers get only an additional 5% market-rate if they develop the 20% affordable units. Why would a developer build affordable housing just to get 5% more market-rate space when he just got 57% for free, no strings attached? Not without a kickback.

gratuitous travesty

2010-05-23T05:47:00.000-07:00

P.S. 122 has renovated with a pristine surface of white poured stone. It's clean and new, but undistinguished. Dull in its glaring brightness, fawning and monkeying the commercial success of the clean edge, it proudly flaunts banality. Sadly, it covered one of the most poignant, beautiful and resonant façades in all Manhattan, including its crumbling brownstone Romanesque-Dutch influenced entryway.

Ruins can't be made: they become, despite themselves. That's their essence and their point. They tell us that we cannot control our world, that time and nature rule, that human genius is an ambition not an accomplishment, that foiled hubris can be noble and admirable and beautiful because it is an attempt at the infinite in a finite world. Ruins have pathos. And ruined hubris too: otherwise it would be oppressive triumphalism, like glass and steel.

Whenever I walked past P.S.122's, I always thought immediately of the painting in the early Flemish room at the Metropolitan Museum, variously attributed over the years (I think it's now Petrus Christus, but I can remember when it was a Hubert van Eyck, or school of van Eyck, and who knows next) strangely depicted from an aerial and oblique view showing a pristine church surrounded by the green, natural world. Between the constructed and the earthy sward lies a single step, degrading. The painter has taken great effort to render the details of this step, its smooth, worn-away surface as well its cracks and clefts and its exfoliated layers. Stone chips lie scattered on the earth before it.

It seems the painter wants to show a contrast between the fallen world of human fashioning and the perfect world of god's kingdom embodied in this perfect church building. But the church is much less interesting and appealing than this one stone step. The church is pretty enough, so is the surrounding foliage and the angel and Mary there, but the step is mesmerizing. The more you look, the more you think: about human frailty, human failure, about history and inevitability, time and loss. And while you think and muse, you also feel, more and more, that this step is familiar, welcoming and warm. It holds no pretensions, it demands no expectations. It's where we live; it's where we die. It's most us.

P.S.122 could have protected the public from its flaking sandstone with a modest awning or eave, but instead, it swallowed it up forever. Demolishing an old townhouse to build a hotel will at least benefit someone -- the owner, with personal profit. But covering this ruin of over a hundred years, benefits no one. It's a completely gratuitous act.

It's not a humanitarian disaster, but if we provide for basic needs of humanity without providing a human environment, what have we accomplished? A while back I took a group of inner city 19-year-olds from a prison halfway house to tour the neighborhood, showing them how history, economy and social structure explain the form of the buildings. They ate it up and assimilated the knowledge instantly, but when I pointed out an old tenement covered with terra cotta, they went bananas. "Look at the detail!" "That's MAD detail!" I couldn't get them away from it. Later, at the end of the tour, talking with one of the kids, I asked him what he wanted to do with his life. The answer: "I think I want to be an architect."

Don't tell me only the rich care about architectural beauty, the plebs don't. That's just bigotry and the true snobbism of paternalism.

Only in New York

2010-05-12T09:59:00.000-07:00

A request for evaluation (RFE) had been submitted to the Landmarks Commission for these two historic buildings, 22 and 24 Henry Street in January. On February 4, the owners filed for a construction shed. Now the buildings are gone.

The old town houses were much smaller than the zone allowed, which means that the owner can build a much larger structure now. It is common for a developer to demolish an old structure to avoid a landmarking designation.

This happened on the Bowery only a couple of months ago. The developer, intending to build a large hotel or condo complex, bought three adjacent parcels, on one of which stood a historic structure. Of the three buildings on those parcels, only the historic structure (an early Germania Bank building) has been demolished:

In the world of real estate development, history and aesthetic value must be destroyed, otherwise it stands in the way of "progress" (defined as personal gain). But crap is okay. Crap is great. Crap doesn't threaten money. There's no protection for crap or against it. One piece of crap can easily be transformed into another piece of crap for profit. As long as the city is full of crap, developers can play freely. So it's important for them to build as much crap as possible, and leave as much crap as possible, their own or their predecessors, producing a great, expansive, comprehensive and complete heritage of megalopolictic crap. This is the architectural second law of developodynamics: all value tends towards crap.

More on 24 and 22 Henry

2010-05-10T07:27:00.000-07:00

The two buildings were both listed on the National Register of Historic Places as part of the Two Bridges Historic District. Unfortunately, the National Register does not protect buildings as the city Landmarks Preservation Commission can. The owners filed in February for "minor alterations" with "no change of use, occupancy or egress." There is no filing for demolition at the Dept. of Buildings.

Justin Ferate, the renowned urban, social and architectural historian, supplies this photograph to give a better sense of the period (these are landmarked in Brooklyn Heights):

Zella Jones, founder of the NoHo Alliance, provides this recent photograph of 24 Henry, the older of the two buildings demolished:

For structures largely ignored for two centuries, they were in remarkably good shape, and because they eventually were surrounded by a slum -- part of New York's oldest slum -- they were neglected and so largely unaltered. But the neighborhood -- Henry, Madison and Monroe Streets around Catherine and Market Streets -- has seen newly built developments.

Too late

2010-05-09T19:39:00.000-07:00

Two of the oldest structures in New York were just demolished on Henry Street, 22 and 24: a four story row house and, next to it, a diminutive, narrow town house. Both must have dated at least as back as the 1820's; the town house may have dated back further. I did not have time to inquire about what is replacing it, but there is a girder structure up already.

The screen caps attached, cut from google street maps, don't do justice to them. They were a striking little piece of the early 19th century, unusual because of the pairing of a town house-with-dormers adjacent to a row house with a fully built fourth floor covered by a unique wood awning in lieu of a cornice. I always took visitors to see them on the Chinatown/Five Points tour. After the Mooney House, they were the oldest buildings around, and almost unaltered.

The demolition of a town house in Greenwich Village would spark a protest, an outrage and an angry movement, but far to the east in Chinatown, no preservationists seem to notice or care. And yet, these two small buildings were probably older than anything in the Village, and in a neighborhood with a much longer and complex history.

NYU strokes the EV with massage, fantasies and sweet-talk

2010-04-14T18:55:00.000-07:00

NYU tonight opened its expansion plan with three parcels of feel-good massage: 25th Street & 1st Avenue next to Bellevue hospital, well away from the East Village; the MetroTech center in downtown Brooklyn, an area so empty of community that no one would even notice a new skyscraper there if it fell over on it; and Governor's Island, the sole impact of which on Manhattan is a ferry landing next to another ferry landing and a helicopter landing. And throughout their presentation, no plans for the East Village at all. Sounds good?

BUT if you look just a little more closely, you see that the the presentation is fantasy designed more for propaganda than genuine plan. The site south of Bellevue is already occupied and owned by Hunter College. Although Hunter announced a bid for the land two years ago, it hasn't followed up for a variety of reasons which will not likely change for quite a while, if ever. NYU, if prodded, admits that these 1mil. sq.ft. are mere speculation on a wish of a shadow of a building complex they can't control at all. (They're actually planning a Nursing School building across the street, but it's quite small in the scheme of things: 140,000sf).

The Governors Island plan requires a huge commitment that they are not yet prepared for, and also requires other entities to make that isolated island palatable to any but the most reclusive academics hermits. Until there's something there there, there's no there there besides the nothing that isn't there, and NYU, the university of the "New York Experience" is all about being here, not there. The Mayor would like to see it happen, but governments have been wanting to see something happen there for over a decade, and the only thing that has so far happened is a recreation area that's become so popular that the public wants to keep it for themselves unchanged. NYU claims with one tongue that their buildings will be set away from the recreation area untouched, but with the other tongue admits that there will have to be attractions elsewhere on the island before anyone is willing to reside, teach and learn all on that little military campground. When everyone finally gets all excited about Governors Island, of course that's when NYU shows up and drags in its entourage as well.

The MetroTech center is the only parcel that NYU could build tomorrow with no strings. But they don't need or want all that space way off in Brooklyn (all they own there is the little PolyTechnic school) so they'd have to rent out a piece of it, and in this economy, that won't happen.

Altogether that's several million square feet of feel-good fantasy that will probably end up as real concrete and students in our neighborhood, sooner or later.

Scarier still is their silence on the East Village. Looking at the fantasies-afar, you know it's going to pop up here, but they don't give a clue as to where.

The vocal anger of East Villagers prompted the creation of this NYU Expansion Task Force and all these open house presentations. It's good to know that NYU is still so afraid of the East Village that they don't want to tell us where they are looking for East Village real estate. Unfortunately, little else is good.

Purple Plans

2010-03-22T12:29:00.000-07:00

NYU will present its
2031 Expansion Plan
Wednesday, April 14th, 5:30 to 8pm
Kimmel Center, 10th floor,
60 Washington Square South (at LaGuardia Place)

At the last presentation, they informed us that their campus will expand 6million gross square feet within the next two decades. And they showed us their lovely new neighborhood:

words fail me

New liquor bill: a wash

2010-03-14T08:41:00.000-07:00

The State Senate has passed a bill to add requirements to the liquor licensing process. It's a mixed bag, and reason for concern. The Assembly will consider it next.

If passed by the State Assembly, the State Liquor Authority would necessarily consider the public convenience and advantage of the license, and would necessarily determine that the license is in the public interest before awarding a license.

So far so good. But the "public interest" is no longer tied to "the community." So the public interest would include, for example, state revenue from liquor, or commerce generally beyond the community's local benefit.

The current law considers the "public interest of the community." Deleting those three words allows a revenue-starved government to bypass community concerns. And once a bar strip is installed, it doesn't disappear when the recession ends and the government no longer needs its revenue. The strip remains, displacing local commercial diversity, local services and community character.

Scroll down to see the exact language of the bill. Its first line is a step advancing towards commercial diversity and community protection. The last line, unfortunately, voids it.

The law has always had a list of "public convenience and advantage" clauses, but they were optional considerations. This bill changes the "public convenience and advantage" clauses from
"may consider any or all"
to
"SHALL consider ALL"
problems of noise, traffic, density of bars, among others.

The bill still does not define the public interest, and weakens it by deleting "of the community." So the public interest loophole remains in this bill, and now it's even wider.

Almost anything might be in the public interest. For example, if the bar includes a toilet, the success of the bar might be in the public interest, since the public might use the toilet, say, to vomit in, the public having drunk too much liquor at the bar.

More typically, bars argue that the jobs they create are in the public interest. Even more pertinently for the State, the SLA might find that the license renewal fee itself might be in the public interest since that money goes to the government, and the government by definition is, of course, the public interest.

It is impracticable to list every instance of public interest relative to each context. In a depressed neighborhood, jobs might be in the public interest. But in a blue-collar family neighborhood near local workplaces, nightlife might not be the optimal replacement for those local workplaces.

In a recession, government desperately needs revenue and, since nightlife survives a recession better than almost any business, the government may consider liquor licenses very much desirable as a revenue flow, despite no local community interest is served.

So this bill is a mixed bag and there's work to be done. Here's the bill itself. I've highlighted the important changed clauses in red [brackets in brown are the old law being deleted, UPPER CASE red are new words]:

6-a. The authority [may] SHALL consider [any or] all of the following
in determining whether public convenience and advantage and the public
interest will be promoted by the granting of [licenses and permits for
the sale of alcoholic beverages at a particular unlicensed location] A
LICENSE PURSUANT TO THIS SECTION:
(a) [The] THE number, classes and character of licenses in proximity
to the location and in the particular municipality or subdivision there-
of[.];
(b) [Evidence] EVIDENCE that all necessary licenses and permits have
been obtained from the state and all other governing bodies[.];
(c) [Effect] EFFECT of the grant of the license on vehicular traffic
and parking in proximity to the location[.];
(d) [The] THE existing noise level at the location and any increase in
noise level that would be generated by the proposed premises[.];
(e) [The] THE history of liquor violations and reported criminal
activity at the proposed premises[.]; AND
(f) [Any] ANY other factors specified by law or regulation that are
relevant to determine the public convenience and advantage [and public
interest of the community] AND NECESSARY TO FIND THAT THE GRANTING OF
SUCH LICENSE SHALL BE IN THE PUBLIC INTEREST.

Good news and bad

2010-02-23T05:06:00.000-08:00

The good: Bloomberg has seen the light that new affordable housing wedded to market-rate development leads only to net upscaling and displacement, whereas preserving affordable housing preserves communities as they are.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/22/nyregion/22housing.html?ref=todayspaper

The bad news: MTA plans to discontinue the M8 bus on weekends. A hearing will be held on cuts in Manhattan at FIT (Fashion Institute of Technology), Haft Auditorium, 7th Avenue, Thursday, March 4, at 6pm. Further details:
http://www.mta.info/news/stories/?story=11

Tom Angotti teaches on community control and the real estate crisis

2010-02-15T22:39:00.000-08:00

Tom Angotti, one of the great urban planning analysts, is teaching a course on The Housing Question: Real Estate Crisis and Community Control of Land at the Brecht Forum. He will be addressing, among other issues, "how many seemingly progressive housing reforms end up reproducing instead of solving the problems." It's the quandary of the Giuliani-Bloomberg era.

The Housing Question: Real Estate Crisis and Community Control of Land
a 4-session class starting Thursday, February 18, 2010 from 5:30 to 7:30 pm
taught by Tom Angotti
at the Brecht Forum
451 West Street
New York City

The latest burst in the financial bubble left our neighborhoods with
abandoned construction sites, bankrupt slumlords, struggling tenants,
foreclosed homeowners, and more homeless people. The Housing Question by
Friedrich Engels, though written in the late 19th century, helps us
understand how these problems are endemic to capitalism and, more
importantly, how many seemingly progressive housing reforms end up
reproducing instead of solving the problems. Four workshops look at The
Housing Question and its relevance to community organizing today, ending
with a review of strategies for gaining community control of land.

1. Engels and The Housing Question

2. Finance capital and real estate in the neoliberal city

3. Anti-capitalist community struggles for land

4. New strategies for community control of land

Tom Angotti teaches at Hunter College in the Department of Urban Affairs
and Planning. He is the author of New York for Sale: Community Planning
Confronts Global Real Estate, Metropolis 2000: Planning, Poverty and
Politics, and Housing in Italy. He is a Fellow at the American Academy in
Rome, co-editor of Progressive Planning Magazine, and participating editor
for Latin American Perspectives and Local Environment.

Tuition--sliding scale: $45/$65
Pre-register online at
http://brechtforum.org/civicrm/event/info?id=11560&reset=1

Benefit for Ray's

2010-02-03T17:36:00.000-08:00

Ray's on Avenue A just north of 7th Street is the heart and soul of this place. It used to be the gathering spot for all the local anarchists and squatters, every evening, spilling out onto the street. It was so much a unique part of the EV. Ray's still is, just the crowd is thinner.

EVGrieve has the lineup set for DAY OF RAY, Saturday, Feb. 6, from noon to 6pm at Sidewalk Cafe, 6th&A.

Meanwhile, check out a bit of the authentic Ray's in photos at NietherMoreNorLess.

Town Hall on the Future of Chinatown

2010-01-30T15:36:00.000-08:00

This Monday evening, the Chinatown Working Group, a group open to all stakeholders in Chinatown, will hold a town hall on its plans for the future of Chinatown. The Group has not decided on the boundaries of Chinatown, so their plans may include and affect areas far beyond narrow, antiquated notions of Chinatown of the last century, and may be relevant to your own neighborhood.

The question for the Working Group is: how can Chinatown both preserve itself and thrive. The latter usually implies gentrification, adverse, typically, to the former. So there's a challenge to face.

There are many threats to Chinatown: hotel development, exorbitant commercial and residential rents, loss of industry; congestion of traffic, parking, parks; need for improved education, arts and cultural spaces, among others. These have all been treated by the Working Group in their Preliminary Action Plans. Their documents are available at www.chinatownworkinggroup.org.
Town Hall
Monday, February 1, 7pm
PS 130, 143 Baxter Street
translation will be available in English, in Chinese and in Spanish
Please distribute and post these, too.

More privatization of public park

2010-01-13T19:51:00.000-08:00

Basketball City, a private gym, is installed on Pier 36 on the East River, city property. Will Basketball City serve the community as public land should? Will it hire locally?

Thursday, January 14, 6:30, the Community Board will be voting on a community benefit plan at 30 Delancey Street (BRC senior Center inside Roosevelt Park at Forsyth Street). The Community Benefit Plan includes local hiring and low prices for drop-in play for the community.

Thursday, January 14, 6:30
CB3 Parks Committee
30 Delancey Street
BRC senior Center
inside Roosevelt Park at Forsyth Street

The sacred and the profane

2009-12-01T18:37:00.000-08:00

I read a book today that I probably should have read forty years ago -- Eliade's The Sacred and the Profane, not the first book you'd think of in considering gentrification, but surprisingly relevant. It's mostly about the sacred, but he likes to insist that the non religious experience is -- well, he thinks it's informed by the religious, but I think that's a bit contentious; I'd settle for "analogous to" the religious.

Among his examples: no matter how secularized you are, the place where you grew up holds a special significance for you, distinct from other, more mundane, spaces. It's akin to a sacred space. Eliade goes on to describe the religious experience of the home village as a kind of holy space; those who attack the home village appear to the religious as demons.

In Manhattan, although the place where you grew up may be sacred -- or, at least, specially significant -- it's most likely either not there anymore, or if still there, transformed beyond recognition. Eliade doesn't attempt any analysis of the forces of the profane, but in the city you don't need to be a prophet to see them. They are developers, their political support, and all their minions from landlords on down, tagging along and swaggering around our mayor like the devil's entourage in The Master and Margarita, eager to ride the golden calf for a good buck.

So many outside devils are invested in the sacred and profane ground of the city, it's hard to imagine keeping them at bay. And the spirit of the city, even that ground itself, seems to reject roots. It's not enough to preserve the sacred places -- brash new renters rush to fill old, storied buildings here. It's not enough to preserve the community -- communities themselves transform occupationally, educationally, economically and culturally in this fluid ecology.

What needs preserving in a city is the sense of place. Later on in his book, Eliade describes initiation rites through which adults enter into a sacred relation with their environment and learn the true names of the deities. In the city, even these names are easily hidden. They are the names of the families who lived here, of the communities who built here, of the artists who created here, of the children that grew up here. Who remembers them? History in Manhattan wanders the streets like a phantom unseen, unheard, unnoticed, except by the occasional flaneur, the ghost-seer who posts on his blog the latest loss of yet another sacred place, unnoticed by the armies of the profane.

I am continually impressed with the sense of place among the residents and former residents of Chinatown. Of all Manhattan, Chinatown may retain the strongest sense of place. It is a world apart from the rest of New York, not because it is an ethnic enclave, but because it is a space that still belongs to the community that lives there. But it's a community divided between ownership and labor. I wonder how long it will last.

Critical moment for Chinatown

2009-11-21T21:54:00.000-08:00

Upscale nightlife locations serving a non local patronage are popping up in the heart of Chinatown; local businesses, having trouble keeping up with rising real estate values, are giving way to chain stores; swank hotels are replacing residential and office space, displacing the local community.

Can the Chinatown Working Group come up with a plan to protect Chinatown from real estate speculation? Can the group forge a coherent vision for the future of Chinatown that doesn't repeat the failures of every other Chinatown in the U.S.?

The question may be answered on Monday when the business and development interests meet with the preservationists to figure out how to keep the economic investment engine that has driven Chinatown from bulldozing Chinatown. The future of the Chinatown Working Group process and of Chinatown itself depend on whether the conflicting needs of economy and of community and culture can be addressed.

Monday, Nov. 23, 7pm
Joint Working Team Meeting,
Zoning, Cultural/Historic Preservation, Economics & Transportation
Community Board 1, 49-51 Chambers St, Rm. 709

-- a joint meeting of the Economic & Transportation Teams with the Zoning & Cultural/Historic Preservation Teams to discuss their respective goals and vision and to share their expertise in preparation for a town hall on CWG plans for Chinatown.

Seducing Shelly Silver

2009-11-19T16:18:00.000-08:00

Following up on the this little comment exchange in the Lo-down's article about CB3's ongoing troubles planning for the Seward Park Urban Renewal Area --the large tract of undeveloped land along the south side of Delancey Street that has been left vacant for forty years while Sheldon Silver, who lives nearby among his most loyal constituents, continues to block any development:

the way to Sheldon Silver's heart is through his loyal voters. Bring the Grand Street community to the table and you may be able to sway the old man's mind. He'll still be wary of building housing that will bring to his district new voters with no loyalty to him, but if you give him a leadership role in creating the housing in SPURA and spin him as the hero, he might feel ready to go for it.

The Grand Street residents want to add a little spice to their neighborhood, a little action. A movie house, a theater, a sports complex, a few cafes, a couple of bars and restaurants would add value to their real estate. Right now the place has all the charm of a sprawling assisted living facility. Find out what they want and see if you can create it for them and still get what you want too in the deal.

Books Through Bars Bingo

2009-11-05T15:46:00.000-08:00

Books Through Bars (no, not local bars -- prison bars) is holding Bingo Night to pay its way: ABC No Rio (156 Rivington St), Friday Nov. 6th at 8pm.

Remember that a huge number of kids from this neighborhood were carted off to prison under Giuliani in the 90's to serve draconian prison sentences just when educational tuition assistance for prisoners was ended. Our prison system no longer even pretends to rehabilitate. Long-term incarceration under the Rockefeller Drug laws was just a convenient and politically expedient means to feed a dead upstate economy with prison construction and maintenance -- political patronage, while our neighbors' kids still languish in cells.

Read more about the state of education in prison and its importance from the Village Voice and the Correctional Association report here (scroll down the CA page) and press release here.

Here's Books Through Bars' announcement:

Books Through Bars is out of money, so we're playing cheap/fun/awesome Bingo to pay for postage and keep sending packages full of books to folks incarcerated in America's broken prison system.

It's free to get in, cheap ($1!) to play, and we'll have beer from the Brooklyn Brewery for sale. Plus you'll be playing for totally rad prizes from places like:

NY Adorned Tattoo Shop, Bluestockings Bookstore, Le Poisson Rouge, St. Marks Bookshop, NYC Hall of Science, the Angelika, IFC Film Center, the Beehive Collective and much more.

Dope beats from DJ No Flag, color commentary from the loudest nun you know - basically, you should be there:

Books Through Bars Bingo
ABC No Rio (156 Rivington St), Friday Nov. 6th at 8pm.

The big picture

2009-11-05T08:54:00.000-08:00

The NY Times election analysis map shows that the Lower East Side still retains its distinctive spirit in a city elsewhere divided by race even more than by income.

The Times comments: "The mayor did well in high-income white areas of Manhattan and Queens, and also in election districts dominated by immigrants, like Flushing and Brighton Beach."

Add Chinatown to that list.

"But his vote fell sharply in black neighborhoods, especially southeast Queens, where the black middle class has been hard-hit by foreclosure."

Article: Matthew Bloch, Ford Fessenden and Archie Tse/The New York Times
Source: Andrew Beveridge, Queens College sociology department

Police relations and safety

2009-11-04T12:18:00.000-08:00

Tagging on the last post, if the police cabaret units are, as one bar owner described them, "a bunch of goons going around harassing people" (quoted in the Lo-down), that's something the community board ought to address. But the way to address it is not to lower the priority of funding the enforcement of laws designed to protect the public from an industry that disturbs the local public. The officer who drops by to ask a bar to lower the speaker volume has no effect. As soon as he's gone, the volume ups. Fines are the only disincentive.

One commenter notes that having crowds (well, to be fair, she said "people") on the streets enhances the safety of the neighborhood. Good point. But there are, aren't there, safe neighborhoods without bars? My street has none and people seem to feel safe. The safest neighborhoods in the city have none (5th-MadAve-ParkAve; Shelly Silver's hood on Grand Street; suburban spreads in Queens and elegant enclaves of Brooklyn).

Clearly the question is how to have a safe neighborhood that's also interesting. I'm not convinced there's any answer to that. When this neighborhood was most interesting, it was, sadly, most unsafe. That was true when it was the home of punk rock, the graffiti generation, the beatniks, the German anarchists.

Surely the ideal answer to crime is not transforming your neighborhood into a bar destination, driving out all the old local businesses, drawing in an upscale crowd that raises rents and incentivizes landlord harassment of tenants. That's selling the farm to save -- what, the path to the front door?

I set aside the question of whether the streets are truly safer in the wild nightlife zone or only appear safer. Bob Arihood thinks the bar scene brings violence, and Bob should know: he documents it. There's a difference between an unsafe street and a scary street. Scary isn't necessarily unsafe. Unsafe might not look scary.

For me the bar question is about gentrification, rising real estate values, displacement; about creating a community that has some depth and interest beyond the mainstream blandness that Jeremiah burlesques so mordantly on his blog.

Bars have always had a place down here. But the scene was so different. And that's the real problem and the reason the re-election of Bloomberg is so unfortunate. Most of the young people I know here have no idea of what life was like in the LES thirty years ago. They can't imagine the fluidity of the spaces, the freedom, the intimacy of the neighborhood. All they can imagine is the danger, the craziness and the hardship. But it was also easy to live here. It was cheap. There were no roof alarms; missing your rent by a few months was no big deal. That's a life that has disappeared with the density of the new city.

It's too bad. Manhattan always had pockets of alterity. South of Washington Heights, there's only Chinatown left.

CB3 supports deregulation of bars

2009-11-04T06:41:00.000-08:00

I don't blame bar owners for wanting the police to quit ticketing them. But how could the Community Board buy the argument that ticketing bars threatens the economic viability of the Lower East Side? How many bars have been closed by excessive ticketing? Any?

From the Lo-Down

http://www.thelodownny.com/leslog/2009/11/cb3-member-on-nypd-nightlife-squads-a-bunch-of-goons-harassing-people.html

CB3's priorities support deregulating bars -- police enforcement was the only tool regulating bar excess. CB3's capitulation doesn't protect a needed business, it merely adds profit to an already profitable business of questionable value to the community and of known harm. Is that the CB's role -- to hand more money over to a business that isn't in trouble, at the expense of regulation and the well-being of residents?

No doubt the bars have raised real estate values in this neighborhood, both commercial and residential. In fact, the creation of destination nightlife has skyrocketed real estate values and undermined commercial and residential stability. What have bars done for our community but gentrify it into an overpriced, overhyped destination for transient children of wealth? Does that build community or destroy it?

The tax revenue generated by the bars does not come back to the neighborhood. It goes to the city. And the reason the bars are "the only industry we have down here" is because the bars have driven out everything else.

CB3 members, you have brains. Use them.

Missing Miriam

2009-11-04T05:45:00.000-08:00

Every Sunday afternoon, returning from Chinatown, I pass through the southwest entrance of Tompkins Square Park and there, always and reliably, seated at the edge of the first row of benches, often alone but often accompanied by Phil Van Aver, another long-time resident from around the corner, would be Miriam Friedlander, every Sunday afternoon. She was slight and a bit frail but seemed happy. I'd join them for a while, shooting the breeze about politics in the present and the past, on which she always had much to say and much worth listening to. And always radical, surprisingly radical.

Her seat is now unclaimed though not unoccupied. Each week another face appears there, young or old, no doubt unaware whose seat it was, or that it was anyone's, or that someone passing by might expect to see anyone there but themselves. As if she'd never been there at all.

A critical moment for the city

2009-11-01T06:28:00.001-08:00

A glimpse at Bloomberg's New York -- sent to me by a worried tenant who is currently being harassed by her landlord -- tells me what the future holds when the economy revives:

2005 or 2010?

The harassment of tenants by landlords is widespread in New York. It is encouraged by city agencies under the mayor's direct control. The Department of Buildings no longer enforces its own regulations, the city does not collect DoB fines; meawhile Bloomberg continues to defund it. Without funding or the ability to levy and collect fines, the DoB is helpless to prevent developers from abusing tenants.

With no city agency standing in the way of developers and landlords, harassment of tenants has become easier and more frequent. When the economy was booming, harassment was rampant. It is the mayor's goal to return to those golden days of development evictions. That's what he means by 'reviving the local economy.'

New York is all about real estate speculation. If you want to know who this mayor is and what he's all about, look at the DoB, the department of development oversight. It is a bankrupted agency. It bears the true profile of our mayor.

Tenants have been evicted and are in the process of being evicted on my block through landlord harassment encouraged by the failure of the DoB. I hear similar stories from all over the city. I'm sure you have too. I can think of no better reason to vote on Tuesday.

Cartoon from BloombergWatch.com

Labor, at last

2009-10-19T13:23:00.000-07:00

Thursday, after nine months boycotting the Chinatown Working Group (CWG) meetings, local labor finally showed up. Hester Street's National Mobilization Against Sweat Shops (NMASS), appeared and read a statement that was a bit over the top -- they called the CWG racist, complaining that the projects had been excluded from the planning -- and stayed through most of the meeting.

Apparently NMASS doesn't know that CWG hasn't defined its borders precisely because some of us wanted the projects included. If NMASS had appeared at earlier meetings, maybe this would have been settled to their satisfaction. The single greatest obstacle to the effectiveness of CGW has been the absence of labor representation.

Meanwhile, CWG still operates without any clear sense of the borders of Chinatown, although, to be quite honest, there's been less and less discussion about the projects, since no one has been around to speak for them -- until Thursday.

So, it was good to see them there, and I hope they return to participate and not just to level mistaken criticisms at the group for failings which are largely their own responsibility for boycotting so long. I am puzzled as to why they showed up now rather than earlier.

But what was important was that they were there and that they had their say, even though they upset several members by calling the plan "racist." Thomas Yu, the CWG chair, had the wisdom and presence of mind to allow them to read their entire statement, epithets and all, avoiding the kind of bitter shouting match and animosity that might have been.

The CWG came into existence because the East Village/LES rezoning process excluded Chinatown. As Victor Papa of the Two Bridges Neighborhood Council has several times warned, it would be a foolish repetition of history for the CWG to then exclude from its process another piece of the neighborhood.

Unfortunately, not much can be planned for the projects if the projects are not represented in the planning process. Who in the projects would want outsiders to plan their future?

End of a era for the LES

2009-10-05T12:28:00.000-07:00

Miriam Friedlander, 1914-2009
Representing the LES in the City Council, 1973-1991

Which side are you on? Look who's on your side.

2009-09-08T06:58:00.000-07:00

Campaign contributions draw a profile of a candidate more telling than public speeches. Contribution information is easily accessible. Go to
http://www.nyccfb.info/searchabledb/?sm=candidates_sdb

Although campaign contributions don't show you the candidate's principles, they do provide an inside snapshot and a partial answer to the question, "Which side are they on?" by naming who's on their side -- whom they asked for support, who their friends are, where their roots reach and what kind of money their supporters wield:

P.J.Kim's campaign is studded with dozens and dozens of hefty contributions from individuals in finance and banking.

Margaret Chin's campaign is broadly financed by hundreds upon hundreds of modest contributions -- many as small as $2, $5, $10, $20 -- from individual constituents.

Rosie Mendez' largest contributions come from unions and affordable housing advocates.

Check out Gerson, Gleason and the rest for yourself. (My favorite page is Norman Siegel's list of contributors. Reads like a city-wide roster of legal advocates for good government. Exactly what you'd expect for Norman.)

Information for the DA's race does not appear to be available on the city site, but it is available at the state's site
http://www.elections.state.ny.us/ContributionSearchA.html

Unfortunately, the state site omits contributors' employment information.

Hearing on retail diversity

2009-09-01T06:04:00.000-07:00

State Senator Squadron will hold a hearing on retail diversity.
http://www.nysenate.gov/press-release/squadron-cities-hearing

Unless we want every neighborhood in New York to look alike, local businesses will need support, non local businesses regulation and restriction.

The latter can include the former. A zoning that restricts businesses -- there are zonings that exclude banks and airlines, for example -- can drive down commercial rents, preserving local stores that serve the local community: if big payers like banks or nightlife destinations are excluded from a neighborhood, landlords must settle for the humble low renters like the store that's already there and been there eighty years.

I'd want to warn the Senate that big money is more accomplished than small business at exploiting government programs. Unless carefully crafted, government assistance to business can easily spread the harm it was intended to contain. And big business will lobby to craft any measure to its benefit.

I'd also warn that no narrowly-bestowed assistance or focused regulation can alone save small businesses from the onslaught of the sweeping rush towards money. Loss of local business belongs to a larger social and economic trend towards the upscale in New York that includes both local residents and businesses. Residential upscaling endorses commercial upscaling in the advancing spiral towards generic mainstream culture of no particularity, no flavor, no difference, no identity, leaving chain stores and non-local upscale nightlife where a neighborhood once was. Even old stores in situ cannot resist the transforming allure of new money. There's no frog wouldn't prefer being prince.

So the force of that current in a metropolis can't be reversed with a narrow focus on retail, but preserving retail is one good place to start the dam. Without regulation, the real estate marketplace -- both the purveyor profiteers and their limitless hosts of consumers -- will efface the entire city and all its neighborhoods.

The blight continues in the East Village and the Lower East Side, and is infecting Chinatown now.

A dormitory at El Bohio

2009-07-27T20:21:00.000-07:00

About a dozen suits from educational institutions met today at P.S. 64 (formerly El Bohio, site of Charas), all prospective tenants. Is Singer moving ahead with a dormitory? What happened to all the community plans for the building?

...was next door

2009-07-09T22:17:00.001-07:00

The 27-story hotel will rise on the site of the old Atlantic Garden, a respectable German beer hall built in 1858, part of which appears to remain standing on the Elizabeth Street side (The Bowery Theater was next door where Jing Fong now stands). Like the Bowery Theater, the Atlantic Garden became a Yiddish theater, according to the Times, in 1910. The front facing the Bowery was torn down in 1916. (Photos NYPL)

27 stories on the Bowery

2009-07-08T21:24:00.000-07:00

Curbed and the Real Deal report plans for a 27-story hotel/condo complex on the Bowery just south of Canal Street, next to the old Citizens Bank (now HSBC).

http://curbed.com/tags/50-bowery

http://therealdeal.com/newyork/articles/peter-poon-chinatown-hotel-and-condo-plans-filed-alexander-chu-eastbank-na

The historic Bowery Theater once stood on this site, the city's largest and most influential theater, where T. Daddy Rice introduced the blackface character Jim Crow in 1832, where Frank Chanfrau created Mose, the Irish gang-hero, where Thomashefsky first performed Hamlet in Yiddish. Now it's a Duane Reade. What will this 27-story hotel do to the Chinatown neighborhood? Look at what the 22-story hotels in the LES did to Orchard and Ludlow.

Muste Institute Conference

2009-06-22T14:05:00.001-07:00

I'll be speaking at the Muste Institute this Saturday on how recent city administrative policy has divided neighborhood activists, undermined resistance to gentrification, and weakened legal recourse and government protection of the public interest from private incursion.

Other speakers at the event include:
Jonas Sjostedt - Swedish Left Party
Bill Weinberg - WBAI's Moorish Orthodox Radio Crusade
Bola Aribidesi - Elderly Rights Activist
Zelig Stern - New School Occupier and Single-payer activist
a speaker from Domestic Workers United
a speaker from the striking Stella D'oro Workers Union

12pm, Saturday June 27
A. J. Muste Institute
339 Lafayette Street (corner of Bleecker) Buzzer #11
The event is free and open to the public. Children are welcome. Light refreshments will be served.

The event is part of a joint NYC/Northern NJ Socialist Party Organizing Conference: “Our Future is Unwritten”
Contact Billy Wharton – (718) 869-2279

BAN's town hall to save the Bowery

2009-06-22T13:00:00.002-07:00

BAN's town hall on the future of the Bowery drew a large crowd of eighty or more -- impressive for a community meeting. Everyone, both from the dais and from the audience, spoke in favor of BAN's plan to save the east side of the Bowery by simply extending the current zoning protections of the west side of the Bowery over to the east side.

Councilmember Alan Gerson, who is running for re-election in the district, helped BAN set up the meeting and co-chaired it with local zoning expert Doris Diether. Gerson made clear his support for preserving the Bowery and, pressed on the issue by a member of the Little Italy Neighborhood Association (LINA), committed to coordinating the effort at the political level. Margaret Chin, once again running against Gerson, also appeared in support of the BAN plan, as did a senior aid of Pete Gleason, the dark horse in the campaign who is garnering attention and interest as the candidate with the least political baggage and obligations.

Community Board 3 did not attend the meeting even though the area of the Bowery in question lies in Community District 3. Jim Solomon, however, of Community Board 2 and the Chinatown Working Group co-chair, did attend. The director of the East Village History Project was there, the JASA residence was represented and the Bowery Mission, among a wide array of local residents and community organizations.

Councilmember Gerson will be instrumental in the upcoming meeting with City Planning. It's fair to say that the future of the Bowery depends on the work Gerson can accomplish between now and that meeting.

Public meeting to save the Bowery

2009-06-13T05:53:00.000-07:00

From the Historic Districts Council Newsstand:
NYC Council Member Alan J. Gerson invites you to a Stakeholders’ Meeting to consider a plan being put forward by the Bowery Alliance of Neighbors, which would create a zoning text change to protect the diversity and heritage of the east side of the Bowery.

Gerson’s office has worked together with the Bowery Alliance of Neighbors to bring together the Bowery Community–residents, building and business owners, and community groups–to determine how best to preserve the integrity of this important crossroad of New York City history. We invite you to join in this process by coming to the meeting, learning about the plan and offering your input.

We are holding this stakeholders’ meeting in advance of a meeting with the Department of City Planning, where the future of this historic area will be discussed.

Bowery Stakeholders’ Meeting
WHEN: Tuesday, June 16, 2009
TIME: 6:15 p.m.
WHERE: MS 131, 100 Hester Street (at Forsyth)

Please RSVP if you are planning to attend.

Since the Department of City Planning has excluded the east side of the Bowery from the East Village/Lower East Side Rezoning, the low-rise, historic character of this district is being replaced by high-rise dormitories, boutique hotels and luxury buildings, which are out of scale with the surrounding residential community. The current overbuilding impacts the communities of Chinatown, Little Italy, the East Village and the Lower East Side. We, as a community, must come together to protect the east side of the Bowery. A big turnout will help to ensure that this issue will gain the attention needed to protect our community. We look forward to seeing you at the the meeting.

Summary of BAN’s Proposed East Bowery Preservation Plan
The Bowery Alliance of Neighbors (BAN) is proposing that the east side of the Bowery, from 9th Street to Canal Street, should be rezoned to ensure that it is in line with the rest of the community–the Special Little Italy District, the NoHo Historic District, and the East Village/Lower East Side. Since the buildings on the east side of the Bowery are comparable to those on the west side, it is logical to have the same regulations that are already in effect on the west side. This would limit the height of the buildings to 85 feet, or eight stories, and would protect buildings of special significance to prevent their demolition.

This plan will protect the current residents and businesses on the Bowery and ensure that the restaurant supply, lighting and jewelry districts will continue to be a presence in New York City.

CB3 priorities

2009-06-06T21:01:00.000-07:00

Our Community Board has sent around a notice asking for help in getting themselves more funding. But CB3 did not send around a notice announcing the Chinatown Town Hall, an extremely important community event held in CB3's district.

It has been eleven months that the Chinatown Working Group has been meeting, yet CB3 has not sent even a single notice of even one meeting. I get my notices of Chinatown Working Group meetings from CB2, even though I live in CB3's district and the Town Hall was held in CB3's district.

No doubt the community boards need funding to accomplish their goals. But those goals must include the entire community, not just the sector of the community that makes the CB look good or that is friendly to the CB.

Advertising the Chinatown process would have improved CB3's image. Continuing to undermine the process by not sending out notices will just earn CB3 more enmity. I hope CB3 will rethink its approach to the Chinatown Working Group and begin sending notices of the meetings through their e-mail list. Then I might be happy to advocate for more CB funding.

Save Ray's: Come one come all!!

2009-06-05T08:24:00.000-07:00

C-Squat is holding a benefit for Ray's
Sunday June 7, 5:30 to 10:30
to help Ray pay his fines and do some renovations.
If you love Ray and want to help him, come over.
10 dollar donation
C-Squat
155 Avenue C
Please Come and help.
There will be live music.

Last installment and regretful apologies (more slum history)

2009-06-02T04:27:00.000-07:00

A while back I was asked to write an introduction to a book on LES history. Unfortunately, after it was all written, the publisher asked us to cut out several thousand words, so now there's a very brief published intro and a much longer unpublished one.

I thought I'd serialize the original introduction here. It's a romp through the history of Manhattan from the perspective of its slums, a rich and surprising story, with great significance for the history of the city, the nation and, in fact, the world: the New Deal welfare state emerged from the slums of New York, and the welfare state has become the socio-economic foundation of industrialized nations the world over.

If you've read the standard texts, Anbinder, Burroughs & Wallace, Riis, Sante and Shorto, you'll recognize many of the details. It's an intro essay designed to entertain, not a piece of original research. The book itself, by Eric Ferrara, contains a wealth of original research which cannot be found all compiled together anywhere else: Gangsters Murderers and Weirdos of the Lower East Side.

So here's the opening section of the original intro:

"I can lick any man in the House" thumped a braying John Morrissey, twice holder of the American bare-knuckles boxing championship, Dead Rabbits gang leader and the man who, after losing a humiliating fight to Bill the Butcher, ordered him murdered.

The "House" he mentions was not a local saloon. It was the United States House of Representatives, a gang to which Morrissey -- boxer, gangster, murderer -- had been elected, not once, but twice.

Politics was a violent affair back in the mid 19th century, especially in New York, which was a violent place. The country was expanding into lawless frontiers and fighting over them in the hills and fields and in the halls of Congress too. The country was itself a kind of frontier, learning to define its laws and learning to abuse and subvert them once defined. Even more astonishing than the scale of 19th century corruption – government is always corrupt on the largest possible scale -- was its acceptability. In his half-serious distinction between honest graft and dishonest graft, as if graft itself were no wrong, only lying about it, Tammany Hall's George Washington Plunkitt offers a blunt clue: "I seen my opportunities and I took 'em…What's dishonest about that?" Politics was unabashedly criminal, and unabashed criminals became politicians. In New York, it was not uncommon for candidates to rise from the ranks of the gangs.

"The history of the gangs of New York has never been written. Could it ever be told with a tolerable degree of accuracy, it would make a thrilling chapter in the history of Manhattan. It would be a tale of bold and lawless deeds, of affiliation with more or less corrupt public officials, of protection … and of the evolution of some of the abler members of the ruffian class into "honest" gamblers, high-class sports, or even influential politicians." The New York Times, 1912

The relationship of the 19th century gangs to the city's politics reflects the broad history of post-Revolutionary New York and its emergence in the 20th century, after a hundred years of struggle, as a progressive vanguard for the nation. Early 19th century New York was a world in rapid transition towards industrialization, succumbing to the depressed wages and social instability that industrialization brings. Pre-Revolutionary New York had been a wealthy port with a stable, if uneven, social fabric of lavishly aristocratic landowners surrounded by modest artisans and "mechanics," the highly skilled laborers who, through the traditional artisanal guild systems, regulated prices and wages. It wasn't always smooth, but it was a kind of communal society -- albeit with an extravagant top end --tacitly governed by a communal ethic, with a grousing recognition from the heights that no part of an integral society could be entirely neglected.

When industrialization arrived, it marched over Manhattan with little regard for its quaint integrity. Industrialists quickly saw the advantage of unskilled labor over these high-cost craft masters supporting their live-in apprentices. Industry needed a limitless source of such labor to replace the artisan and drive wages down. That source was handily offered by the tens of thousands of impoverished and desperate immigrants flooding the New York port in search of a start at the very bottom. And that's exactly what those immigrants got, although the bottom had dropped much lower than anyone had ever thought possible.

This was a perfect marriage of convenience for industry, the well-appointed groom, although it did little for the underpaid immigrant labor force wedded to him, less for the jilted out-of-work artisans. For society as a whole it was a disastrous union, unstable and antagonistic from the start, eventually ripping apart that precarious communal social balance, finally throwing the city's politics into confusion of spite, brutality and rapine.

In a true oligarchy, labor has little recourse against wealth in power: wealth rules. But in a democracy, the industrialist is not the only card sharp looking for a good game. Politicians play too, and often deal. Their game, moreover, is indispensable to the industrialist. The government builds infrastructure – like the Erie Canal -- that can send young industries into boomtime. The politicians are suitably positioned to speculate on the future they are themselves creating, and take a kickback as well. There's not quite as much money in politics as industry, but there's plenty. All the politician needs is a limitless source of voting support.

And so New York became a battleground between wealth and political power; on the one side the industrialist, intent on immiserating the immigrant to keep wages low, and on the other side, the political clout of the sheer numbers of immigrants cultivating their local favorites as candidates.

Wealth had created its own worst enemy, a vast working class. Industrialization, without intending it, had pushed New York into political transformation. It played out at first in Tammany Hall graft and deadly riots, but eventually gave us a successful labor movement and the New Deal. It all started with the gangs and the gangs all started with Five Points.

The Five Points

No place on earth perhaps has had so bad a reputation as Five Points. Considered both unreformable and unworthy of reform, it was razed to the ground in the mid 1890's, and, as if eliminating it were not enough, all the streets leading into it were renamed over the years erasing every evidence of its existence from the map of New York. Today, finding the site of Five Points requires either a bit of preparatory research or a good tour guide.

The neighborhood got off to an inauspicious start. It was first an undesirable marshy spread to the east of Manhattan's largest lake, called by the Dutch the Kulch and bastardized by the British as The Collect. Today Foley Square and Collect Pond Park cover the lake site. You can still see the water's outline: nothing tall is built where the lake was; the municipal skyscrapers, defining its solid-ground shoreline, stand hovering over the empty square.

The British name was unwittingly prescient. The lake, originally 60 feet deep, rife with fish – it was a favorite Dutch recreation area – began to collect waste as tanneries and slaughterhouses sprouted around its shores. It grew so polluted that it was used as a local dumping ground with garbage, according to at least one account, rising fifteen feet above the water level.

The exaggerations of the contemporary appalled aside, the putrid mess became an issue for the city, not because it was unsanitary, stinking and infested with vermin, but because it drove surrounding real estate values down, real estate being a matter of genuine municipal concern in a city owned and run by its landed gentry. Digging a canal to drain it (today's Canal Street), did nothing to quell the aquifers that fed the lake, and so a nearby hill, New York's Bunker Hill which rose over Broome Street, was shoveled into the watery pit, creating a landfill, though not what you could call dry land. It was more marsh.

Undaunted by the challenge of constructing over waterlogged land, real estate speculators, among them John Jacob Astor, wealthiest man in America, bought pieces of this worthless swamp for a song, renting it out to contractors who built ramshackle shacks there, not for themselves to live in – who would choose to live in muck and slime – but for those who could not choose to live elsewhere, the greenhorn immigrants clambering off the boats with not a penny in their pockets.

The immigrants were perfectly suited both to fill the shacks and work the factories, enriching both landlord and industrialist. They should surely have been welcomed for all the wealth they brought their superiors, but they were despised instead, as if keeping them in penury were easier to conscience if it were viewed as a sort of punishment and just desert. The German immigrants were deplored -- and feared -- as dangerous revolutionaries, the Catholic Irish reviled as subhuman brawlers. Newspaper cartoons – the news industry was Protestant-run -- consistently draw the Irish with simian features.

Rents, you'd think, would have to have been cheap, since these immigrants earned so little. Such an assumption woefully underestimates the robust vigor of irrepressible American entrepreneurial spirit. Rents outcharged the immigrants far beyond their capacity to pay. It was up to the renter to take in boarders -- whole families of boarders, and, if there was a tiny windowless closet of a backroom, as many as would fit who had a penny to pay. It is a tribute to this great American spirit that a once empty, worthless swampy dump could be transformed into a rich source of regular revenue, nevermind that it was dense, diseased and desperate beyond anything anyone had ever seen or imagined.

Exploitative real estate in the slums was so lucrative that the shacks were built with upper stories to expand rental space. Thus was the multiple dwelling conceived, profit being the mother of invention. Tenements couldn't be built high enough. At the time, the standard of housing elsewhere in the city was the town house. All the wealthy lived in them and the artisans too, along with their apprentices. Apartments wouldn't come along until the French made them fashionable later in the century. Boarding houses there were, but the tenement apartment belonged to the slum, considered unfit for any but alien laborers below the level of social inclusion. They were built taller than the standard townhouse, almost twice as tall, among the tallest structures in the city. The oldest tenement still standing, on Mott Street, is no less than seven stories tall, and no elevator. In an age without the mechanical lift, well-heeled businessmen would not consider climbing more than a few flights of stairs. The great business establishments and the great businessmen's great mansions were broad and expansive, not tall. But no thought was given to immigrants living even seven stories up, taking those flights several times a day, since without refrigeration, merely eating required a trip downstairs to the street carts.

This was the context of immigrant life: housing without running water or toilet facilities – the toilet was a ditch in the back yard – no sewage system, streets piled with garbage, pigs the immigrants couldn't afford to feed running wild in the streets alongside the thousands of abandoned children the immigrants also couldn't afford to feed, and the prostitutes, prostitutes walking the streets, prostitutes waiting in the doorways, prostitutes reclining on the steps, prostitutes everywhere. It was estimated that a third of the female population of New York in 1840 was or had been engaged in prostitution. And no surprise: a seamstress might earn between one and two dollars a week, working sixteen hours a day seven days a week; a prostitute could earn nearly twice that in a day. Every second or third house in Five Points had an accommodation for prostitution of some kind. Nearly every building on Anthony Street between Centre and Orange housed a bordello.

If prostitution was nearly everywhere, alcohol was absolutely everywhere. Every building had an accommodation for whiskey. All the early renditions of Five Points show groceries, a euphemism for groggeries, in every house. Whiskey was the cheapest drink on the street, cheaper than tea, cheaper than coffee. Drunkenness was a genuine and pervasive problem for the slums, contributing to child abandonment as well as compelling children to runaway, no longer able to endure the abuses of irascible parents unhinged by liquor. This backdrop of whiskey pouring into every corner of the neighborhood softens the image of the temperance movement. Teetotalers might have been extreme, but they were responding to a genuine reality.

The saloon became one of the two centers of social life in the slum. The saloon owner, a man of the people, though a few steps above in income, became the local leader, trusted, respected and relied-upon. He was equally connected to a powerful industry, liquor, and to a broad constituency, the neighborhood. He could hide a local gang member in trouble with the law; he could help him out with a small loan in a pinch. The slum invested its political strength in the saloon owner and the list of saloon-owner power brokers in New York is a long one.

The collusion of politics, saloons and gangs was evident from the beginning. Political ringleaders, like theatrical impresarios, staged gang riots as today's activists stage demonstrations. The source of their influence was not in the low-level offices they occasionally held, alderman or district leader. They typically operated out of a saloon, the center of gang activity.

To appreciate the influence of the saloon owner, just walk over to New York's civic center. Surrounded by the palaces of municipal authority and splendid marble courthouses lies Foley Square, named after "Big Tom" Foley, a saloon owner. Big Tom's greatest gift to New York was promoting his protégé Al Smith, New York's greatest governor, through the ranks of Tammany Hall into Albany. It is a testament to the power of the saloon that while the impressive civic center square bears Foley's name, the monument to the great Al Smith is shunted far to the east on Oliver Street amidst a nondescript affordable housing project, the Al Smith Houses, built over what was once the worst slum complex in the city, Gotham Court. Scarcely a New Yorker has not walked through the saloon-keeper's square; scarcely a New Yorker knows where to find Al.

The political influence of this gang-and-saloon working class cannot easily be overestimated. Tyler Anbinder, in his study, The Five Points, describes the old caucus method in New York's primaries: candidates appeared at the party hall with their gang of choice; they fought; whoever was left conscious after the brawl took the nomination, all possible objectors having fallen silent for the evening. Candidates employed gangs to scour the graveyards for the newly inscribed tombstones of the recently interred: they would be the voters in the next election. In one election in the Tenth Ward, there were no fewer than 2,000 more voters than living inhabitants. Sly critics liked to say that Fernando Wood, the controversial Democratic mayor and champion of the working class and Irish, was elected by the unanimous vote of the dead. Repeat voting was another familiar scam. There was little risk of being caught: the polls themselves were guarded by the gangs. Wood, running for a second term, gave his police a furlough on election day, advising them not to visit the polls except to vote, and promptly drew out his Irish gangs to keep out Protestant Republican voters.

Politics was a central concern among the gangs. The gang member of old New York may have been violent, but he wasn't a criminal, or, just as important, didn't imagine himself a criminal. The gang was a kind of social-civic organ. Gangs of the mid-19th century share fighting bravado and territorial pride with our contemporary notion of a gang, but little else. New York's volunteer fire departments were filled by local gang members, intent on demonstrating in as heroic and masculine way as possible the mettle of their civic virtue, their protective dedication to their own community and their indispensability to the city's welfare. They dressed up proudly too, in flashy outfits with ostentations hair-dos – permanent locks drawn forward around the cheek bones and held in place with soap, "soaplocks." They imagined themselves young men-about-town (though their bright-hued gear drew frowns of disapprobation from the rich, dignified and colorless). They were proud of themselves, of their ethics, their civic devotion, of their brotherhood. When they went to the theater they cheered the character of Mose, gang member, fireman, defender of the innocent and helpless from the predatory rich, and nemesis of thieves and lowlifes. Mose, the noble working man hero, was their self-identity.

In the case of the Five Points gangs, these were Irish Catholic immigrants anxious to prove themselves every bit as American as the native-born Protestants who hated them, who hated their presence and who hated their damaging effect on wages, on the decline of skilled labor and workplace conditions. The Protestant gangs formed their own party – the Know-Nothings – while the Irish stood behind Tammany Hall's Democratic machine. It is the remarkable legacy of the gangs of New York that a city entirely owned by industrialists and landlords whose wealth and power drove a nation, became a working class Democratic town.

Entertainment in the slums

The other center of working class social life was the theater. The wealthy had their parlor pianos; the working class had theater. The halls built to house the stages were immense, holding thousands. The Bowery Theater was built for 3,500. No other indoor spaces in the city could accommodate such crowds. Theater took the place of the town gathering, an alternative to the town hall; the gangs flocked to the theaters and rallied there. At a time when life was far more social than we, sitting in front of our computers, can imagine, the theater was the bonfire that drew all around it.

Theater was so popular that even the abandoned slum children formed their own theater on a little strip of Orange Street (now Baxter Street) just south of Little Anthony Street (now Worth Street), today covered by a pristine post-Modern courthouse. It was no mean entertainment. Eventually one of the city's hottest tickets, it was visited by the Grand Duke of Moscovy on his American tour, and called thereafter "The Grand Duke Theater." Legendary performers of early vaudeville got their start at the Grand Duke. Harrigan and Hart, fathers of the American musical, held annual benefits there.

Theater back then had little in common with theater today. You didn't buy your ticket to sit in your seat attentively, waiting until the end of the first act to applaud. Theater was a form of self-expression for the audience every bit as much as for the actors. Catcalls, cheers, jeers, howling, booing, jumping onto the stage, sometimes crowding onto the stage -- even fights and riots -- were all a part of the evening. Peanut shells or rotten food were thrown onto the stage and the actors, often drunk themselves, played to the audience for cheers. The noise and mayhem must have been thrilling and frightening, with such large, unwieldy crowds stirred up into excitement and often anger. No wonder some of New York's most violent riots occurred in, at or around theaters.

Nor was the stage the only focus of attention in the theater. In the recesses of the uppermost balconies, the prostitutes plied their trade. Theater owners encouraged whorehouses to open nearby – good for business. The intertwining of the red light district and the theater district is no coincidence. It's all entertainment for the evening in a male-oriented society; the owners and purveyors of popular distractions aimed to please.

For the wealthy, the Five Points itself became an entertainment, a curiosity. The slum was so shockingly poor and the people so far from the dignified standards of propriety, that the genteel were given to junkets in among the slum dwellers to see for themselves "how the other half lives," the phrase reformer John Griscom coined in describing Five Points in the 1840's. No one had ever before seen or imagined such sordid loathsomeness, such moral abandon, such anarchic criminality, such filth, and perhaps most disturbing of all, such uninhibited racial mixing. White women could be seen in the arms of black men in the African quarter, a little alley known as Cow Bay between Centre and Orange (today's Baxter) Streets where the Lefkowitz office building now stands. Although slums are typically self-segregating, and Five Points was no exception – there were streets divided between the counties in Ireland from which the immigrants came – there is also mixing around the margins of slum society. In Five Points it was Irish with African, Chinese with Irish, later Jew with Italian, leaving the erect Protestant elites to choose their careful unions amongst each other, while still allowing themselves the occasional titillating thrill of peeking at the slum.

The neighborhood's renown as a human freak show was not merely local. Five Points was known throughout the country; word had even spread abroad. Guidebooks devoted whole sections to its dangers and dark crimes, its unsavory natives and to the noxious place itself, with titles like "The Nether Side," "Sunshine and Shadow," "Lights and Shadows," and "The Dark Side."

From afar and abroad, the great and famous, expected by their audience and fans to pass judgment on this extraordinary American city -- overflowing with wealth and holding the financial and industrial reigns of power in shipping and railroads and trading and banking, this metropolis so important to the country and so bluntly different from it -- the great and famous could not fail to take in the slum on their tours of New York. Davy Crocket came to visit – the country boy was appalled – and Charles Dickens, more familiar with desperate slums in London, came to compare. Dickens, whose literary responses leaned towards the colorful extremes of denunciation or enthusiasm, found fare for both in Five Points. His response to the slum dwellers is damning. He imagines that the pigs in the slum must wonder "why their masters walk upright" and "talk instead of grunting." But he also visited Almack's Dance Hall on Orange (Baxter) Street near Bayard, roughly where the Columbus Park pavilion now stands. There he saw the greatest dancer of his time, William Henry Lane, known as Master Juba, who invented a dance so fast, wild and electric that, as Dickens writes, it brought "new brightness in the very candles." It was tap dance.

Attempted reform and revolution

Despite its curiosity and color, conservative Republicans still deplored the slums, blaming poverty on the slumdwellers themselves, while progressive Republicans tried their best to reform the poor, as if Catholicism were a disease and Protestantism its cure. The Children's Aid Society even cooked up a plan to wean the children away from their Catholic parents, sending them as unpaid labor to the age of eighteen in the Midwest, where the agrarian economy was starved for cheap labor and, equally important, there were no Catholics. It was a great success, from the reformers' point of view, and set forth a persuasive argument against the eugenicist insistence that the poor were doomed by nature. Stealing children from their parents seems barbaric today, but by 19th century standards, it was radically progressive: simply taking the child out of the slum will suffice to take the slum out of the child. Having completed their service to the frontier economy, the children were freed to pursue their lives, often achieving success. Today, New York City, under the draconian Rockefeller Drug Laws, sends its unwanted slum youth into permanent, life-long incarceration upstate, where the depressed economy depends on prisons. What success is theirs remains behind thick walls, steel bars and slamming doors. Not all change is progress.

From the 1840's on, the battle raged between the Protestant industrialist owners of the city and the immigrant – and largely Catholic – working class gangs. The immigrant cause advanced with the election of Tammany Hall Democrat and working class champion Fernando Wood, only to see the jealous Republicans, in control of the state government, undermine him from Albany. In 1857, while Wood was impressing both the downtrodden in the slums and wealthy progressive reformers with his programs to fight poverty and provide respectable employment – eighty years ahead of the New Deal – Albany conspired to shorten his mayoral term and replace his entire police force with a new one of their own. Standing firm on his city support and refusing to disband his municipal police, Wood forced a riot between the two police forces on the steps of City Hall. The military intervened to issue the mayor a summons at bayonet point and arrest him for inciting the riot.

The rest of the summer saw these two police forces engaging and subverting each other, turning the city into a lawless battleground. Tension broke into mass violence on July 4th, always a testy moment in the sweltering heat of midsummer New York. Responding to an incident in a bar on the Bowery, the city's busy commercial entertainment district, police and Protestant gangs attempted a full-scale assault on the Five Points, the Irish residential quarter, where the gangs and their families lived. Entering at Bayard Street, they attempted to push through the center of the neighborhood. Pelted by brickbats thrown from the rooftops, the invading Protestants were held at a stand-off. They piled up makeshift barricades out of carts and barrels, and brought out their firearms. By the time the military arrived the next evening, at least twelve were dead (perhaps many more dead had been carted away by family and neighbors), and both sides had exhausted themselves. The Times called the Protestant's invasion a riot and blamed it on the Irish.

Worse riots were on their way. When, during the Civil War, Lincoln imposed a draft and allowed the wealthy to evade it for a fee (intending both to assuage the rich and raise funds for the war effort), the bitterly oppressed New York working class revolted. The draft riots of 1863 unleashed a fury of retribution expressing, especially among the long-abused Irish, decades of rage, lashing out in all directions. Four days of rioting, looting, lynching and arson shoved the mirror close to the city's face.

Towards the end of the century, political clout shifted from within the residential wards to the Bowery itself, lined now with flophouses, burlesque 'concert' halls, saloons, gambling parlors, beer halls, restaurants, pool rooms, theaters and sensational curiosity museums cheek by jowl with prosperous immigrant banks and insurance companies, radical labor union halls and early Marxist workingmen's associations. In its bars Tammany sachems rubbed elbows with their working-class support while unions organized in Bowery halls for the eight-hour day. The gangs fought over turf.

Following the Panic of 1873, the suppression of workmen's rights in the Gilded Age and reactionary fears of a rising immigrant labor force in New York, Bowery culture and business suffered. The erection of the elevated train, the "El," in 1878, casting the entire street into the shadows, sealed its prospects. The street declined. Meanwhile, the neighborhood to its east, known as the Lower East Side, became the new immigrant slum as millions of Jews and Italians filed into its tenements. Their gangs now took the place of the old Irish and Protestant gangs as they fought over control of illegal rackets. Legitimate political control of the city now belonged to the Irish, the underworld to the new immigrants, and the role of the gang evolved closer to the Prohibition-era bootlegger and racketeer we know so well.

New arrivals: Italians and Jews

In the 1880's the neighborhood underwent a sweeping transformation. Italians filled the tenements of Five Points while Eastern European Jews swept over the wards east of the Bowery. The slums expanded all the way up to 14th Street and new slums emerged in Harlem. Violence took on a new shape and a new role reflective of the new immigrant cultures.

Unlike previous immigrant groups, the Italians maintained a close connection with the home country. It was common for Italian men to spend only a few years in the New World before returning to the Old with a bit of good American cash. Where the Germans, here for the long haul, built union halls and social halls to protect and promote their community, the Italians established no-interest "banks" where immigrants could store their money temporarily for the purchase of a return ticket home, one of the staple services these "banks" offered.

This close tie to southern Italy and Sicily extended to the extortionist societies of both regions. The Neapolitan Camorro, Sicilian La Cosa Nostra and the Black Hand were not neighborhood gangs so much as hermetic gangster rings that preyed on their own people. Economic abuse of Italians by Italians pervaded the character of their slum existence. The padrone lorded over the Italian children with Dickensian brutality, dictating their labor and collecting their earnings. The Black Hand had no compunction about attempting to extort from even the most famous national heros: Enrico Caruso, the greatest living opera singer of his day, a symbol of Italian pride, received the paper notes stamped with a black-ink hand demanding $15,000, a fortune at the turn of the century. Whether this model of internal violence reflected a fear of outside authority, alienation from their new home or merely the convenience of the nearest and most familiar target, the gangsters of the prohibition era seem to have preserved it in their motto, "we kill only each other" which prevented the mob from rubbing out its non-Italian political enemies. The worst violence of the Mafia has always been reserved for Italians, often for its own members.

Jewish immigration was even more transformative. Following the anarchist assassination of Csar Alexander, blamed on Jews, pogroms spread through Russia and the Ukraine, spurring a mass exodus of unprecedented numbers. Poverty in close quarters breeds gangs and the Jews were no exception. At the turn of the century half the prisoners in Sing Sing were Jews. The German Jews, who had migrated long before during the German immigration of the 1820's and who had long since assimilated into American life, were so alarmed at this new face of Jewishness -- it cost them their welcome at the city's elite clubs and socials -- that they embarked on a crusade to educate these new arrivals, eradicate their slum language, Yiddish, and assimilate them into mainstream middle-class society. Their program succeeded in identifying Jewishness with education and the professions, and in nearly exterminating the only uniquely Jewish literary language.

The Jewish and Italian gangs clashed on the Bowery not over politics but over illegal rackets. The earlier battle between American-born and immigrant labor gave way to turf battles between two equally recent arrivals. They fought over every enterprise available to them, perhaps the biggest and most available, the unions, with their sisters and brothers and fathers and mothers all members. Gangsters infiltrated the unions turning the already violent labor movement into a criminal racket replete with gang warfare. By the time Prohibition rolled in, the scene was set for rampant murder.

Our image of the gangster today benefits from decades of prohibition-era costume dramas and latter-day mafia soap operas both fictional and real. It's the image of a blunt and arrogant suit, surrounded by minions, for whom no problem is so complex that it cannot be simply and effectively -- and permanently – solved: for whom conflict resolution is a bullet through the head. The Prohibition gang member was a gangster – a criminal who kills to maintain personal control in a kill-or-be-killed underworld. The bootleggers were engaged in crimes for personal profit, not political battles for the benefit of a party and a class interest. The gangster was an extortionist who thrived by subjugation. His proximity to murder lends him a mystique at once deplored and envied, admired but feared. One observer, watching Lucky Luciano stand motionless in the midst of a gunfight, called it "the coolest thing I ever saw." He meant cool-nerved, but one can hear, in his admiration of the outlaw, the modern sense of "cool" emerging. But that admiration had its limit. Outmaneuvering, outwitting and generally out-suckering the law, the gangster might be cheered as a working class hero, but he was never a working class leader. Gangs and politics had parted ways.

Despite the pervasive presence of criminality in the slums, the ghetto was far from a depressed neighborhood. The most densely populated two square miles on the face of the earth, it was overflowing with culture and politics. At a time when New York was still a colonial backwater, its elites deeply conservative, the slums were a hotbed of the avant-garde, the recent immigrant arrivals from Europe bringing new European ideas and new European culture. It was a world center of anarchism, with the great Johan Most and Justus Schwab and their protégé, Emma Goldberg speaking and demonstrating in the streets and in the union halls, writing and plotting in their apartments and prison cells.

Culture was irrepressible. Yiddish Theater, Lincoln Steffens pronounced, surpassed Broadway. All the radical new plays of Europe were eagerly mounted in Yiddish. Oscar Wilde's Salomé, too risqué for conservative Protestant Broadway, became Bessie Tomaschevsky's signature role. The first American school of painting, the Ashcan School, found a home in the free anarchist "Modern School," with George Bellows and Edward Hopper's teacher Robert Henri on the faculty, Man Ray and John Sloan attending as students.

Last installment

[In posting these, I see how much of importance I've left out. It was meant to be a mere brief forward to a book focused on criminality in the slum, but still, I wish I had dealt more effectively with the arc of history that led from the draft riots to the New Deal -- the working class asserting itself first through violence, later through Tammany Hall corruption and finally through the good-government principles of Al Smith and Belle Moskowitz that FDR inherited. It was the irony of New York that, owned by conservative Protestant elites, it came to be run by a reformist non Protestant working class, Catholic and Jewish. That working-class heritage endured until the last two mayors, whose election reflects a profound shift in New York's historical character and trajectory. With the disappearance of industry, the working class reform ethic has been replaced with middle-class aspirations. The city's political base has gentrified.

And there's no mention of Boss Tweed, whom I find the most unjustly maligned figure in all American history. No question he was corrupt and his corruption lined his own fat pockets, but he was no more corrupt than countless industrialists and financial speculators of his day, and less corrupt than many. The difference between him and them: he didn't make his fortune abusing labor with an indifferent, calculated cruelty and bigotry almost unimaginable today, nor did he throw the entire country into depression and cause foreclosures ruining lives coast to coast as speculators did then and do now.

Yet Tweed became America's icon of corruption because he was in the public eye as a public servant and because his voting base was Irish and Catholic and working class. His fiercest critics were Protestant conservatives who despised the Irish. Thomas Nast, author of all those cartoons reproduced in every child's history textbook, by all accounts was an anti-Catholic bigot, a fact that never accompanies the reproductions. If history is written by the victor, there's a deep lesson that we still haven't learnt in Tweed's national image, while our children still read a slanted text. Who won? The iron heel.

Also no mention of the most underappreciated American, Peter Cooper, purest of principle, generous, brilliant, compassionate, visionary. Why isn't he in the textbooks? He's too good for them.

And no mention of the almost comical progress of housing reform: the First Tenement House Act, requiring a window in every room without requiring that the window face outward -- the landlords cut windows in every room facing the dark hallways so the tenement dwellers lost their privacy without gaining light or fresh air; the twelve years it took for government to add the simple provision facing fresh air and natural light; the Second Tenement House Act giving us the air shaft, a worse disaster than no window. The enclosed pit gathered stinking garbage that led the thoughtless to believe that garbage was what the air shaft was meant for, although, in fact, removing garbage from an air shaft is a herculean and prohibitive task. The stench kept the windows closed. They were opened only to throw garbage out.

Real reform came only with the 1901 New Law and the political correctness of its authors (the first instance of PC I've seen in the record). Rather than complain about the garbage, which would have been to blame the tenement dwellers themselves for their misery, the authors of the New Law emphasized the danger of the air shaft as a flue in fire. This seems to be an invention, although many secondary sources don't question it. Fires in my tenement -- the entire rear was burnt out when I moved in -- never went up the air shaft. Remember, the windows were kept closed because the garbage stank. The writers of the reform wanted the public to believe that the fault lay not in our immigrants, but in ourselves for building them such fire-prone structures. Political correctness, 1899, led directly to genuine housing reform, 1901.

Those are just a handful of the more important omissions; there are countless more, countless. My sincerest apologies. Anyway, for better or worse, here's the end of this brief "foreword." Eric's book should appear in the fall.]

In 1921, the federal government imposed quotas on European immigration. With no new immigrant arrivals, and the second generation looking for any avenue out, the slums emptied quickly. Rents plummeted. Only marginals and artists found the neighborhood still attractive. St. Mark's Place in particular, with its proximity to long-haired, intellectual Greenwich Village, became a Mecca to the Beat Generation, jazz musicians, abstract expressionists and countercultural activists of every stripe. Eventually the hippies arrived, the Yippies, and Weathermen, and off off Broadway radical theater, experimental theater and transvestite theater; later squatters, punk rockers and skinheads alongside the Puerto Rican immigration that gave us the poetry slam, graffiti art and the urban mural.

Throughout all this demographic shift, the anarchism and avant-gardism of the immigrant ghetto survived, not only in the political and social radicalism of the 50's and 60's but in the arts as well. It is no coincidence that murals, graffiti and blacksmithing grew and thrived in this slum where the owners of private property were absent and indifferent. Scrawling and painting on an abandoned wall, welding trash into fences, arches and canopies in an abandoned lot – all these are expressions of the fundamental anarchy that is the soul and spirit of the slum, the one space in the urban environment where the rules of property and propriety don't apply, the free space of expressive liberation for the have-nots who have only this space, the space that belongs, not to its owners, but to the people who live in it. Anarchy in its streets, anarchy in its art, anarchy in its rants, anarchy in its tenements and abandoned lots, anarchy is the slum. And the gangs, the organic order in anarchic chaos, played the crucial role, once again: it was ex-gang members who turned a Loisaida schoolhouse, abandoned by the city, into a center of the arts, Charas/El Bohio.

Since 1912, when the Times observed that the story of the gangs had not yet been told, many versions of 19th century gang history have appeared. Asbery's Gangs of New York, popularized by Martin Scorcese's movie, Luc Sante's Low Life and Anbinder's Five Points, all have opened up the history of gangs to public view and influenced our thinking about them to the extent that it is hard to describe the slums of New York without reiterating their stories and their perspectives. Much of what I've described here can be found in greater detail in their narratives (and in Burroughs and Wallace's Gotham, a book that, long as it is, you'll wish never ended). Books on Mafia crimes and internal warfare, hits and rackets, investigations and trials, are too numerous to list in this space.

[The final paragraph is about Eric's book itself.]

Next to those, [Gangsters, Murderers and Weirdos of the Lower East Side] is distinctly different. Not a narrative, almost a reference, it comes close to being an objective account, skewed only by its focus: violence. Ferrara's compilation of disruption and murder in the slum will immediately bring to mind, to those who have seen it, the photographic work of Weegee, the freelance crime photographer who recorded, without bias or propagandistic intent, the murdered, mangled, stifled, stabbed, brutalized and bullet-ridden. Weegee's is a shocking body of images, tough and real, without the amelioration and soft filter of explanations and justifications, the diversion of armchair social theories or nods to the latest in political correctness. Like Weegee's work, Ferrara's is a cold, hard drink of fact, straight from the bottle. Grit your teeth.

Exclusive vigilantism

2009-06-01T19:29:00.000-07:00

In response to the recent wildings of a pack of adolescents, someone has anonymously created a website calling for action designed, it appears, to arrest any and all involved. The website address: abcneighbors.blogspot.com

I'm all for crime prevention and community participation, but note the omission of "d" from the list of avenues. The flyer they propose to post all over the neighborhood concludes with "We will NOT tolerate street crime in OUR neighborhood."

I guess I can understand and accept the preference for anonymity, but the omission of "d" from the e-mail address, "abcneighbors" raises implications that don't sit well with me. The emphasis in the poster on "OUR" neighborhood underlines that concern. Couldn't they find anyone from Avenue D to work with them, and if not, why not?

There are many ways to handle adolescent group wilding and I'd like to be confident that the vigilante group's means of choosing are not a) based on an exclusion and b) an insult to part of OUR community. There is enough divisiveness here; no need for a crime prevention program to add to it.

It seems to me that the first step would be to hold an open, local meeting which residents of all the avenues of Loisaida could attend. That could be the beginning of meaningful community action and dialogue.

Ray's shut down?

2009-06-01T12:07:00.000-07:00

Looks like the city has it out for Ray's on Avenue A. DOH has posted a shut-down notice on the window. Apparently they don't like the authentic look of the place and want it cleaned up and yuppified. What a world.

Upcoming

2009-05-31T06:21:00.000-07:00

1) Urge Albany to pass new rent laws before the end of the session June 22
2) Town Hall on the future of Chinatown, June 1

Urge Albany to pass new rent laws before the end of the session June 22
The key phone numbers are:
Gov. Paterson: 212-681-4580
Majority Leader Smith- 212-298-55-85
Housing Committee Chair Espada-518-455-3395

Phone numbers for other holdouts -- if you know anyone in these districts, ask them to call to urge their state senator to vote for the ten bills now before the Senate:

Jeffrey Klein(D) -1-800-718-2039 -34th Distict Bronx/Westchester
(ThrogsNeck, Weschester Sq. Morris Park, Pelham Parkway,
Eastchester-Bronx, New Rochelle, Mount Vernon, Eastchester-Westchester,
North Riverdale, Woodlawn, Norwood, Belmont Park

Carl Kruger(D)-718-743-8610-27th District Brooklyn(Midwood,
Gravesend, Flatlands, Sheepshead Bay, Ocen Parkway, Mapleton)

Martin Golden(R)-718-238-6044- 22nd District Brooklyn ( Bayridge,
Dyker Heights, Bensonhurst, Bath Beach, Gravesend, Ocean Parkway South,
Sheepshead Bay, Gerritson Beach)

Martin Malave Dilan(D)-718-573-1726-17th District Booklyn
(Williamsberg, East Williamsberg, Greenpoint, Bushwick, Clinton Hill,
Wyckoff Heights, Broadway Junction, Highland Park, Cypress Hills)

Diane Savino (D) 718-333-0311- 23rd Distict Brooklyn/Staten Island
(Sunset Park, Bay Ridge, Coney Island, Grasmere, Rosebank, Grymes Hill,
Clifton, Stapleton, New Brighton, Livingston, Port Richmond)

Craig Johnson(D)-516-746-5923 7th District Nassau County( Great Neck,
Port Washington, Floral Park, Bellrose, Mineola, Carle Place

Chinatown Town Hall flyer:

TOWN HALL: The Future of Chinatown
Hosted by the Chinatown Working Group

Monday, June 1
6:30 p.m.
PS 124
40 Division street
Between Bowery and Manhattan Bridge
Translator will be available.
(Please see attached flyers in English and Chinese.)

The Chinatown Working Group Town Hall will cover a number issues regarding the future of Chinatown including jobs, affordable housing, traffic, parking, parks, funding schools and concerns about history and culture. Help decide the future of Chinatown!

The Chinatown Working Group is a newly formed democratic and open community-based planning initiative on the future of Chinatown. Our goal is to support the community's residents, workers, businesses and visitors. Chinatown Working Group's members are Chinatown's stakeholders -- LIKE YOU!

English Flyer: http://www.chinatownworkinggroup.org/cwg%20town%20hall%20flyer%20EnglishJune1.pdf
Chinese Flyer: http://www.chinatownworkinggroup.org/cwg%20town%20hall%20flyer%20ChineseJune%201.pdf
CWG Web Site: http://www.chinatownworkinggroup.org

New arrivals: Italians and Jews

2009-05-31T06:01:00.000-07:00

A PSA -- New affordable housing available

2009-05-29T14:40:00.000-07:00

Applications are available for 197 affordable apartments under construction in the Chelsea/Clinton/Midtown area of CB4 and 73 affordable apartments in Fort Greene Brooklyn. Details below.

*** Applications are available for 78 affordable, studio, 1- and 2-bedroom apartments under construction at 312 Eleventh Avenue. Rents for these units will range from $449 to $740. To be eligible, applicants must have incomes between $19,920 and $38,400 depending on family size and the unit requested. Applications will be selected by lottery. Current and eligible residents of Community Board 4 will receive preference for 50 percent of the units. Applications may requested by mailing a postcard to:

312 Eleventh Avenue Apartments

303 Park Avenue South

PMB 1047

New York, NY 10010

Applications may also be downloaded at www.phippsny.org/housing_app.html. Completed applications must be returned by regular mail only (no priority, certified, registered, express or overnight mail will be accepted) to a post office box number that will be listed with the application, and must be postmarked by June 14, 2009. For more information, visit http://www.nyc.gov/html/hpd/downloads/pdf/chelsea-area-manhattan.pdf.

*** Applications are available for 119 affordable, studio, 1- and 2-bedroom apartments under construction at 320 West 38th Street. Rents for these units will range from $383 to $631. To be eligible, applicants must have incomes between $17,294 and $38,400 depending on family size and the unit requested. Applications will be selected by lottery. Current and eligible residents of Community Board 4 will receive preference for 50 percent of the units. Applications may requested by mailing a postcard to:

38th Street West Towers

One Penn Plaza

Box 6108

New York, NY 10119

Completed applications must be returned by regular mail only (no priority, certified, registered, express or overnight mail will be accepted) to a post office box number that will be listed with the application, and must be postmarked by June 19, 2009. For more information, visit http://www.nyc.gov/html/hpd/downloads/pdf/38th-Street-West-Towers.pdf.

***DOWNTOWN GREENE APARTMENTS is pleased to announce that applications are now being accepted for 73 affordable housing rental apartments now under construction at 80 Dekalb Avenue in the Fort Greene section of Brooklyn. Rents from $489 to $803 for incomes between $17,259 and $38,400.

Applicants will be required to meet income and additional criteria. Completed Applications must be returned by Regular Mail ONLY (no priority, certified, registered, express or overnight mail will be accepted) to a post office box number, or its equivalent, that will be listed in the application, and must be postmarked by July 5, 2009. Applications postmarked after July 5, 2009 will be set aside for possible future consideration. Applications will be selected by lottery; applicants who submit more than one application will be disqualified. Preference will be given to New York City residents. Current and eligible residents of Brooklyn Community Board #2 will receive preference for 50% of the units.

No Broker’s Fee or Application Fee Should Be Paid At Anytime in Connection With These Applications.

To request an application, mail a post card to:

DOWNTOWN GREENE APARTMENTS

303 Park Avenue South

PMB 1122

New York, New York 10010

Click to Download

(Why regular mail only? Seems like a convenient way to 'lose' an application. -- RH)

Attempted reform and revolution (more slum history)

2009-05-27T17:35:00.000-07:00

Despite its curiosity and color, conservative Republicans still deplored the slums, blaming poverty on the slumdwellers themselves, while progressive Republicans tried their best to reform the poor, as if Catholicism were a disease and Protestantism its cure. The Children's Aid Society even cooked up a plan to wean the children away from their Catholic parents, sending them as unpaid labor to the age of eighteen in the Midwest, where the agrarian economy was starved for cheap labor and, equally important, there were no Catholics. It was a great success, from the reformers' point of view, and set forth a persuasive argument against the eugenicist insistence that the poor were doomed by nature. Stealing children from their parents seems barbaric today, but by 19th century standards, it was radically progressive: simply taking the child out of the slum will suffice to take the slum out of the child. Having completed their service to the frontier economy, the children were freed to pursue their lives, often achieving success. Today, New York City, under the draconian Rockefeller Drug Laws, sends its unwanted slum youth into permanent, life-long incarceration upstate, where the depressed economy depends on prisons. What success is theirs remains behind thick walls, steel bars and slamming doors. Not all change is progress.

From the 1840's on, the battle raged between the Protestant industrialist owners of the city and the immigrant – and largely Catholic – working class gangs. The immigrant cause advanced with the election of Tammany Hall Democrat and working class champion Fernando Wood, only to see the jealous Republicans, in control of the state government, undermine him from Albany. In 1857, while Wood was impressing both the downtrodden in the slums and wealthy progressive reformers with his programs to fight poverty and provide respectable employment – eighty years ahead of the New Deal – Albany conspired to shorten his mayoral term and replace his entire police force with a new one of their own. Standing firm on his city support and refusing to disband his municipal police, Wood forced a riot between the two police forces on the steps of City Hall. The military intervened to issue the mayor a summons at bayonette point and arrest him for inciting the riot.

The rest of the summer saw these two police forces engaging and subverting each other, turning the city into a lawless battleground. Tension broke into mass violence on July 4th, always a testy moment in the sweltering heat of midsummer New York. Responding to an incident in a bar on the Bowery, the city's busy commercial entertainment district, police and Protestant gangs attempted a full-scale assault on the Five Points, the Irish residential quarter, where the gangs and their families lived. Entering at Bayard Street, they attempted to push through the center of the neighborhood. Pelted by brickbats thrown from the rooftops, the invading Protestants were held at a stand-off. They piled up makeshift barricades out of carts and barrels, and brought out their firearms. By the time the military arrived the next evening, at least twelve were dead (perhaps many more dead had been carted away by family and neighbors), and both sides had exhausted themselves. The Times called the invasion a riot and blamed it on the Irish.

Worse riots were on their way. When, during the Civil War, Lincoln imposed a draft and allowed the wealthy to evade it for a fee (intending both to assuage the rich and raise funds for the war effort), the bitterly oppressed New York working class revolted. The draft riots of 1863 unleashed a fury of retribution expressing, especially among the long-abused Irish, decades of rage, lashing out in all directions. Four days of rioting, looting, lynching and arson shoved the mirror close to the city's face.

Towards the end of the century, political clout shifted from within the residential wards to the Bowery itself, lined now with flophouses, burlesque 'concert' halls, saloons, gambling parlors, beer halls, restaurants, pool rooms, theaters and sensational curiosity museums cheek by jowl with prosperous immigrant banks and insurance companies, radical labor union halls and early Marxist workingmen's associations. In its bars Tammany sachems rubbed elbows with their working-class support while unions organized in Bowery halls for the eight-hour day. The gangs fought over turf.

Following the Panic of 1873, the suppression of workmen's rights in the Gilded Age and reactionary fears of a rising immigrant labor force in New York, Bowery culture and business suffered. The erection of the elevated train, the "El," in 1878, casting the entire street into the shadows, sealed its prospects. The street declined. Meanwhile, the neighborhood to its east, known as the Lower East Side, became the new immigrant slum as millions of Jews and Italians filed into its tenements. Their gangs now took the place of the old Irish and Protestant gangs as they fought over control of illegal rackets. Legitimate political control of the city now belonged to the Irish, the underworld to the new immigrants, and the role of the gang evolved closer to the Prohibition-era bootlegger and racketeer we know so well.

Next: Italians and Jews

I'm making a list

2009-05-26T12:42:00.000-07:00

of Bloomberg's moves to help developers ignore, violate or avoid the law, starting with
1) the stealth development rule that allows illegal developments (details here),
2) curtailing public review of private developments (more here),
3) planning a charter revision that will allow developers to bypass community boards, eliminate the borough presidents and the public advocate and generally downsize government (article here -- this one he seems to be keeping on the back burner until he gets re-elected),
4) failure to collect fines for Department of Building and Environmental Control Board violations.
Want to add to the list?
Susannah B. Troy and Phil De Paulo both point out that illegal developments have been the cause of several Fire Department fatalities. The city doesn't even review all architectural plans anymore. It's collusion between development and government. And who is government supposed to serve?

Entertainment in the slums (more LES history)

2009-05-23T08:06:00.000-07:00

End of public review?

2009-05-22T19:33:00.000-07:00

The NYC.Gov questionnaire on Environmental Review ("environment" here includes all impacts of a development on communities and includes public review) invites developers to provide reasons for dismantling ("streamlining") the review process. Once again, I urge you to go to the NYC.Gov Environmental Review questionnaire and explain why public review is important and should be strengthened.

Here's what I posted on the questionnaire (for an explanation of Environmental Review see the post below)

In answer to the question, "What contributes to the length and cost of the environmental review?":
What contributes to the length and cost of the environmental review is the government's essential responsibility to protect the public good, the indispensable need for public oversight, the public's need for protection from harmful development, and the responsibility of government to ensure that the public is not only protected, but informed and empowered against private interests that are not concerned at all with the public good or with sound urban planning.

In answer to the question, "How can City agencies communicate more effectively with the public concerning public hearings and meetings?" (the only well-meaning question there):

Community Boards and the city administration should provide the means for local organizing, with neighborhood websites and street-by-street blogs devoted to community issues where local residents and business owners can read press releases and post on issues of concern.
Community Boards should be required to publicize hearings at least one month in advance.
Developers should be required to post their building plans on the construction site as soon as they apply for plan approval.

And in answer to the question, "We want to know where you see opportunities for improvement. Which aspects of the process are successful and could be used as models to improve more problematic areas? Why?":

1) Including alternatives in the review enhances the value of the process and takes best advantage of resources. More alternatives should be included to afford the process greater flexibility and allow better planning directions and ideas a chance to be considered.
2) The independent research firm that conducts the reviews should be assessed and vetted by independent public interest urban planning groups including The Municipal Arts Society and the Historic Districts Council.
Currently, zoning EIS's have the uniform look of a rubber stamp for DCP. a) The independence of the public review must be ensured. It should not respond to developers' needs, but to the public's needs. b) The objectivity of the process must be protected. The Environmental Review must not become a rubber stamp for development.
3) The comprehensiveness, detail and thoroughness of the Review must be ensured and expanded. All aspects of impact on the community and surrounding communities must be carefully and objectively assessed by an independent party.
4) Public hearings and public outreach must be expanded.
5) Means of informing and educating the public must be enhanced.

2009-05-22T01:59:00.000-07:00

East Broadway and Allen/Pike Street are still closed, a week after the fire at the Hong Kong Market. The building next door to the fire has already been demolished and 107 is in process of being torn down. 105, 103 and 99 will be assessed for demolition next, according to councilmember Gerson's office. Meanwhile the businesses on that cordoned-off block are dying and there appears to be no effort to shore-up these buildings to save them. 109 and 107 were small 150-year-old 4-story row houses. But 105, 103 and 99 are much younger 6-story buildings with many more units in them. In what other neighborhood would land be cleared with so little interest in protecting residents and small businesses?

The end of public review?

2009-05-22T01:48:00.000-07:00

The mayor is planning to undermine government regulation and the public voice yet again.

The public's most powerful protection against destructive development is called the "Environmental Review" process. It's not about ecology. It's intended to be a public assessment of the impact of a proposed development on the entire community -- on population density, traffic, housing, services... And it includes crucial public hearings.

Developers hate this process. It's an obstacle in their way. They prefer to avoid public review or eliminate it entirely. And now the mayor wants to help them. Take a look.
http://www.nyc.gov/html/misc/html/2009/environmental_questionnaire.html

The mayor's Economic Development Corporation is seeking to "streamline" the process to "reduce the costs and delays" specifically for "property owners." The questionnaire is designed as a first step towards making it easier for developers to bypass Environmental Review.

Note the wording of the first topic: Topic 1 - Obstacles and Roadblocks
"We are interested in understanding the obstacles and roadblocks that may be experienced by applicants for projects subject to environmental review...."

I urge you to go to the questionnaire and explain why public review is important and should be strengthened. Let the EDC know that
1) The independence of the public review must be ensured. It should not respond to developers' needs, but to the public's needs.
2) The objectivity of the process must be protected. The Environmental Review must not become a rubber stamp for development.
3) The comprehensiveness, detail and thoroughness of the Review must be ensured and expanded. All aspects of impact on the community and surrounding communities must be carefully and objectively assessed by an independent party.
4) Public hearings and public outreach must be expanded.
5) Means of informing the public must be enhanced.

Remember that this is the same mayor who came up with a plan to restrict legal challenges to illegal developments. Without public review, residents and small businesses have no protection against development, against demolition, bulldozing, eviction, gentrification. It's giving the entire city over to developers whose interest is not the public good. It undermines government regulation and public oversight of destructive private interests. It's taking the city away from the public and handing it over to the few who just want to make a killing off your city and your lives.

The Five Points (more history of the slums)

2009-05-20T05:21:00.000-07:00

No place on earth perhaps has had so bad a reputation as Five Points. Considered both unreformable and unworthy of reform, it was razed to the ground in the mid 1890's, and, as if eliminating it were not enough, all the streets leading into it were renamed over the years erasing every evidence of its existence from the map of New York. Today, finding the site of Five Points requires either a bit of preparatory research or a good tour guide.

The neighborhood got off to an inauspicious start. It was first an undesirable marshy spread to the east of Manhattan's largest lake, called by the Dutch the Kulch and bastardized by the British as The Collect. Today Foley Square and Collect Pond Park cover the lake site. You can still see the water's outline: nothing tall is built where the lake was; the municipal skyscrapers, defining its solid-ground shoreline, stand hovering over the empty square.

The British name was unwittingly prescient. The lake, originally 60 feet deep, rife with fish – it was a favorite Dutch recreation area – began to collect waste as tanneries and slaughterhouses sprouted around its shores. It grew so polluted that it was used as a local dumping ground with garbage, according to at least one account, rising fifteen feet above the water level.

The exaggerations of the contemporary appalled aside, the putrid mess became an issue for the city, not because it was unsanitary, stinking and infested with vermin, but because it drove surrounding real estate values down, real estate being a matter of genuine municipal concern in a city owned and run by its landed gentry. Digging a canal to drain it (today's Canal Street), did nothing to quell the aquifers that fed the lake, and so a nearby hill, New York's Bunker Hill which rose over Broome Street, was shoveled into the watery pit, creating a landfill, though not what you could call dry land. It was more marsh.

Undaunted by the challenge of constructing over waterlogged land, real estate speculators, among them John Jacob Astor, wealthiest man in America, bought pieces of this worthless swamp for a song, renting it out to contractors who built ramshackle shacks there, not for themselves to live in – who would choose to live in muck and slime – but for those who could not choose to live elsewhere, the greenhorn immigrants clambering off the boats with not a penny in their pockets.

The immigrants were perfectly suited both to fill the shacks and work the factories, enriching both landlord and industrialist. They should surely have been welcomed for all the wealth they brought their superiors, but they were despised instead, as if keeping them in penury were easier to conscience if it were viewed as a sort of punishment and just desert. The German immigrants were deplored -- and feared -- as dangerous revolutionaries, the Catholic Irish reviled as subhuman brawlers. Newspaper cartoons – the news industry was Protestant-run -- consistently draw the Irish with simian features.

Rents, you'd think, would have to have been cheap, since these immigrants earned so little. Such an assumption woefully underestimates the robust vigor of irrepressible American entrepreneurial spirit. Rents outcharged the immigrants far beyond their capacity to pay. It was up to the renter to take in boarders -- whole families of boarders, and, if there was a tiny windowless closet of a backroom, as many as would fit who had a penny to pay. It is a tribute to this great American spirit that a once empty, worthless swampy dump could be transformed into a rich source of regular revenue, nevermind that it was dense, diseased and desperate beyond anything anyone had ever seen or imagined.

Exploitative real estate in the slums was so lucrative that the shacks were built with upper stories to expand rental space. Thus was the multiple dwelling conceived, profit being the mother of invention. Tenements couldn't be built high enough. At the time, the standard of housing elsewhere in the city was the town house. All the wealthy lived in them and the artisans too, along with their apprentices. Apartments wouldn't come along until the French made them fashionable later in the century. Boarding houses there were, but the tenement apartment belonged to the slum, considered unfit for any but alien laborers below the level of social inclusion. They were built taller than the standard townhouse, almost twice as tall, among the tallest structures in the city. The oldest tenement still standing, on Mott Street, is no less than seven stories tall, and no elevator. In an age without the mechanical lift, well-heeled businessmen would not consider climbing more than a few flights of stairs. The great business establishments and the great businessmen's great mansions were broad and expansive, not tall. But no thought was given to immigrants living even seven stories up, taking those flights several times a day, since without refrigeration, merely eating required a trip downstairs to the street carts.

This was the context of immigrant life: housing without running water or toilet facilities – the toilet was a ditch in the back yard – no sewage system, streets piled with garbage, pigs the immigrants couldn't afford to feed running wild in the streets alongside the thousands of abandoned children the immigrants also couldn't afford to feed, and the prostitutes, prostitutes walking the streets, prostitutes waiting in the doorways, prostitutes reclining on the steps, prostitutes everywhere. It was estimated that a third of the female population of New York in 1840 was or had been engaged in prostitution. And no surprise: a seamstress might earn between one and two dollars a week, working sixteen hours a day seven days a week; a prostitute could earn nearly twice that in a day. Every second or third house in Five Points had an accommodation for prostitution of some kind. Nearly every building on Anthony Street between Centre and Orange housed a bordello.

If prostitution was nearly everywhere, alcohol was absolutely everywhere. Every building had an accommodation for whiskey. All the early renditions of Five Points show groceries, a euphemism for groggeries, in every house. Whiskey was the cheapest drink on the street, cheaper than tea, cheaper than coffee. Drunkenness was a genuine and pervasive problem for the slums, contributing to child abandonment as well as compelling children to runaway, no longer able to endure the abuses of irascible parents unhinged by liquor. This backdrop of whiskey pouring into every corner of the neighborhood softens the image of the temperance movement. Teetotalers might have been extreme, but they were responding to a genuine reality.

The saloon became one of the two centers of social life in the slum. The saloon owner, a man of the people, though a few steps above in income, became the local leader, trusted, respected and relied-upon. He was equally connected to a powerful industry, liquor, and to a broad constituency, the neighborhood. He could hide a local gang member in trouble with the law; he could help him out with a small loan in a pinch. The slum invested its political strength in the saloon owner and the list of saloon-owner power brokers in New York is a long one.

The collusion of politics, saloons and gangs was evident from the beginning. Political ringleaders, like theatrical impresarios, staged gang riots as today's activists stage demonstrations. The source of their influence was not in the low-level offices they occasionally held, alderman or district leader. They typically operated out of a saloon, the center of gang activity.

To appreciate the influence of the saloon owner, just walk over to New York's civic center. Surrounded by the palaces of municipal authority and splendid marble courthouses lies Foley Square, named after "Big Tom" Foley, a saloon owner. Big Tom's greatest gift to New York was promoting his protégé Al Smith, New York's greatest governor, through the ranks of Tammany Hall into Albany. It is a testament to the power of the saloon that while the impressive civic center square bears Foley's name, the monument to the great Al Smith is shunted far to the east on Oliver Street amidst a nondescript affordable housing project, the Al Smith Houses, built over what was once the worst slum complex in the city, Gotham Court. Scarcely a New Yorker has not walked through the saloon-keeper's square; scarcely a New Yorker knows where to find Al.

The political influence of this gang-and-saloon working class cannot easily be overestimated. Tyler Anbinder, in his study, The Five Points, describes the old caucus method in New York's primaries: candidates appeared at the party hall with their gang of choice; they fought; whoever was left conscious after the brawl took the nomination, all possible objectors having fallen silent for the evening. Candidates employed gangs to scour the graveyards for the newly inscribed tombstones of the recently interred: they would be the voters in the next election. In one election in the Tenth Ward, there were no fewer than 2,000 more voters than living inhabitants. Sly critics liked to say that Fernando Wood, the controversial Democratic mayor and champion of the working class and Irish, was elected by the unanimous vote of the dead. Repeat voting was another familiar scam. There was little risk of being caught: the polls themselves were guarded by the gangs. Wood, running for a second term, gave his police a furlough on election day, advising them not to visit the polls except to vote, and promptly drew out his Irish gangs to keep out Protestant Republican voters.

Politics was a central concern among the gangs. The gang member of old New York may have been violent, but he wasn't a criminal, or, just as important, didn't imagine himself a criminal. The gang was a kind of social-civic organ. Gangs of the mid-19th century share fighting bravado and territorial pride with our contemporary notion of a gang, but little else. New York's volunteer fire departments were filled by local gang members, intent on demonstrating in as heroic and masculine way as possible the mettle of their civic virtue, their protective dedication to their own community and their indispensability to the city's welfare. They dressed up proudly too, in flashy outfits with ostentations hair-dos – permanent locks drawn forward around the cheek bones and held in place with soap, "soaplocks." They imagined themselves young men-about-town (though their bright-hued gear drew frowns of disapprobation from the rich, dignified and colorless). They were proud of themselves, of their ethics, their civic devotion, of their brotherhood. When they went to the theater they cheered the character of Mose, gang member, fireman, defender of the innocent and helpless from the predatory rich, nemesis of thieves and lowlifes. Mose, the noble working man hero, was their self-identity.

In the case of the Five Points gangs, these were Irish Catholic immigrants anxious to prove themselves every bit as American as the native-born Protestants who hated them, who hated their presence and who hated their damaging effect on wages, on the decline of skilled labor and workplace conditions. The Protestant gangs formed their own party – the Know-Nothings – while the Irish stood behind Tammany Hall's Democratic machine. It is the remarkable legacy of the gangs of New York that a city entirely owned by industrialists and landlords whose wealth and power drove a nation, became a working class Democratic town.

Next: Entertainment and politics

A brief history of the slums

2009-05-18T23:09:00.000-07:00

(-- Dont forget to sign the petition to save the Bowery --)
http://www.PetitionOnline.com/BAN62007/petition.html

I was asked to write an introduction to a book on LES history which will be coming out soon. Unfortunately, after it was all written, the publisher asked us to cut out several thousand words, so now there's a published intro and a longer unpublished one.

While waiting for the Chinatown Working Group's June 1 Town Hall, I thought I'd serialize the original introduction here. It's a romp through the history of Manhattan from the perspective of its slums, a rich and surprising story, with great significance for the history of the city, the nation and, in fact, the world: the New Deal welfare state emerged from the slums of New York, and the welfare state has become the foundation of industrialized nations the world over.

If you've read the standard texts, Anbinder, Burroughs & Wallace, Riis, Sante and Shorto, you'll recognize many of the details. It's an intro essay designed to entertain, not a piece of original research. The book itself, by Eric Ferrara, contains a wealth of original research which cannot be found all compiled together anywhere else. Gangsters Murderers and Weirdos of the Lower East Side, coming soon.

So here's the opening section of the original intro:

"I can lick any man in the House" thumped a braying John Morrissey, twice holder of the American bare-knuckles boxing championship, Dead Rabbits gang leader and the man who, after losing a humiliating fight to him, ordered Bill the Butcher murdered.

The "House" he mentions was not a local saloon. It was the United States House of Representatives, a gang to which Morrissey -- boxer, gangster, murderer -- had been elected, not once, but twice.

Politics was a violent affair back in the mid 19th century, especially in New York, which was a violent place. The country was expanding into lawless frontiers and fighting over them in the hills and fields and in the halls of Congress. The country was itself a kind of frontier, learning to define its laws and learning to abuse and subvert them once defined. Even more astonishing than the scale of 19th century corruption – government is always corrupt on the largest possible scale -- was its acceptability. In his half-serious distinction between honest graft and dishonest graft, as if graft itself were no wrong, only lying about it, Tammany Hall's George Washington Plunkitt offers a blunt clue: "I seen my opportunities and I took 'em…What's dishonest about that?" Politics was unabashedly criminal, and unabashed criminals became politicians. In New York, it was not uncommon for candidates to rise from the ranks of the gangs.

"The history of the gangs of New York has never been written. Could it ever be told with a tolerable degree of accuracy, it would make a thrilling chapter in the history of Manhattan. It would be a tale of bold and lawless deeds, of affiliation with more or less corrupt public officials, of protection … and of the evolution of some of the abler members of the ruffian class into "honest" gamblers, high-class sports, or even influential politicians." The New York Times, 1912

The relationship of the 19th century gangs to the city's politics reflects the broad history of post-Revolutionary New York and its emergence in the 20th century, after a hundred years of struggle, as a progressive vanguard for the nation. Early19th century New York was a world in rapid transition towards industrialization, succumbing to the depressed wages and social instability that industrialization brings. Pre-Revolutionary New York had been a wealthy port with a stable, if uneven, social fabric of lavishly aristocratic landowners surrounded by modest artisans and "mechanics," the highly skilled laborers who, through the traditional artisanal guild systems, regulated prices and wages. It wasn't always smooth, but it was a kind of communal society -- albeit with an extravagant top end --tacitly governed by a communal ethic, with a grousing recognition from the heights that no part of an integral society could be entirely neglected.

When industrialization arrived, it marched over Manhattan with little regard for its quaint integrity. Industrialists quickly saw the advantage of unskilled labor over these high-cost craft masters supporting their live-in apprentices. Industry needed a limitless source of such labor to replace the artisan and drive wages down. That source was handily offered by the tens of thousands of impoverished and desperate immigrants flooding the New York port in search of a start at the very bottom. And that's exactly what those immigrants got, although the bottom had dropped much lower than anyone had ever thought possible.

This was a perfect marriage of convenience for industry, the well-appointed groom, although it did little for the underpaid immigrant labor force wedded to him, less for the jilted out-of-work artisans. For society as a whole it was a disastrous union, unstable and antagonistic from the start, eventually ripping apart that precarious communal social balance, finally throwing the city's politics into confusion of spite, brutality and rapine.

In a true oligarchy, labor has little recourse against wealth in power: wealth rules. But in a democracy, the industrialist is not the only card sharp looking for a good game. Politicians play too, and often deal. Their game, moreover, is indispensable to the industrialist. The government builds infrastructure – like the Erie Canal -- that can send young industries into boomtime. The politicians are suitably positioned to speculate on the future they are themselves creating, and take a kickback as well. There's not quite as much money in politics as industry, but there's plenty. All the politician needs is a limitless source of voting support.

And so New York became a battleground between wealth and political power; on the one side the industrialist, intent on immiserating the immigrant to keep wages low, and on the other side, the political clout of the sheer numbers of immigrants cultivating their local favorites as candidates.

Wealth had created its own worst enemy, a vast working class. Industrialization, without intending it, had pushed New York into political transformation. It played out at first in Tammany Hall graft and deadly riots, but eventually gave us a successful labor movement and the New Deal. It all started with the gangs and the gangs all started with Five Points.

Next: The Five Points

The Bowery

2009-05-13T08:00:00.000-07:00

Every Thursday at 2, the East Village Visitors Center will be offering a tour of the Bowery.

Although the street has come to have a reputation as New York's skid row, it was once the liveliest and most important street in the city, the Broadway of the 19th century. New York's entertainment, commerce, politics and crime mingled there along the whorehouses, theaters, curiosity museums, hotels and Tammany Hall saloons. Gangs fought over the Bowery, New York's first fortune tellers arranged secret liaisons there, the city's transvestites lifted their skirts for gay patrons there. Back further in the 18th century, it was the city's first free African village. The oldest surviving brick building in New York stands on the Bowery. And even at the nadir of its fortunes in the 1960s when its commercial buildings were all but abandoned, it housed hundreds of artists at home among the marginals and derelicts.

The EV Visitors Center (308 Bowery) has also mounted an exhibit on the Bowery. You can take a look at our architectural/historical survey of the east side of the Bowery (the side that has no protection from development) at our website eastvillagevisitorscenter.com Here's the introduction to the survey:

The Bowery is not just the oldest thoroughfare in New York or just an odd and resonant place-name deeply entrenched in our city's collective myth and lore, not just Whitman's haunt and Crane's, Foster's and Burroughs', not just the birthplace of New York's original theater traditions of minstrelsy and Jim Crow, Irish Mose and Yiddish Shmendrick, vaudeville and burlesque. It's not just the turf of the B'hoys and the gangs, shoulder-hitters and Tammany pols who ran New York from their saloons, nor just the skid row of flophouses, whorehouses and dives. Along with its colorful and influential past, the Bowery is also the single most architecturally and historically diverse street in the city, comprising buildings from nearly every decade between 1780 and 2000, residential and commercial: warehouse by flophouse, bank by union hall, theater by tenement and townhouse and whorehouse and saloon. It is an indispensable resource of two centuries of American architectural design as well as a repository of social, economic, political, immigrant, labor, underground, criminal, deviant, marginal, counter-cultural, literary, musical, dramatic and artistic history.

The legacy of the Bowery is long. The pre-1830 town houses at 135, 141, 151 and 173, among the oldest structures in New York, offer a rare glimpse of early post-Revolutionary New York. Klein Deutschland survives in the Germania Fire Insurance building, German meeting halls like Stouben House, and the Germania Bank's several locations. Labor unions met in halls all along the Bowery and labor history was made at 263, the Journeyman Bakers' International Union, which organized in 1869 one of the largest union demonstrations the city had seen.

There were political halls -- Horace Greeley delivered a powerful speech in support of U.S.Grant's candidacy at a 17th Ward Republican meeting at 327 in 1868 – and political saloons: Farley's, at 133, poured ale to Tammany from 1885 until 1915. There were curiosity "museums" (Worth's at 101), burlesque "concert halls" (197) and notorious gangster dives (Geoghegan's, 105), all of which still stand; only the theaters, once the Bowery's hallmark, are gone, some of the greatest only recently demolished.

The turn-of-the-century decline towards skid row, hideaway of the destitute, the criminal and the estranged, is reflected in the missions, Salvation Army and the Bowery Mission still operating, and the flophouses, slowing disappearing. Yet despite its decline, the Bowery still boasts old buildings of dignity, grace and beauty in every American style: Federal, Greek Revival, Italianate, Neo-Grec, Romanesque, Renaissance Revival, Queen Ann, Beaux Arts, Art Nouveau and Art Deco, and even rarities unique to the Bowery that defy category.

This rich fabric cannot be replaced or reproduced. Until recently it survived largely through neglect. Renewed interest in the Bowery, far from protecting its treasures and its unique context, threatens to erase them forever, replacing them with a single new, uniformly twenty-first century ahistorical context.

The cultural strength of immigration

2009-05-06T17:54:00.000-07:00

I don't know of any successful anti-gentrification policy measure. Turning Greenwich Village into a historic district saved the buildings from demolition, but didn't save the neighborhood from gentrification. Zoning might help Chinatown if it could bring locally-hiring manufacturing jobs into the neighborhood.

Affordable housing construction has been a success in Chinatown. Unfortunately, the city's current affordable housing programs bring more luxury housing than affordable housing, and very little of the affordable housing is low-income affordable.

One organic social factor has prevented gentrification of several New York communities. Neighborhoods that continue to receive new working-class immigrants and retain them tend to keep their cultural character and resist gentrification. Chinatown has that in its favor.

But many local residents and business owners have interests that do not prioritize new immigrant needs.

The issues before the Working Group are both complex and difficult, and I haven't seen them fully hashed out. The CWG principles are all well-intentioned, but there has been no definitive analysis explaining how to get from principle to practice.

Hunter College's Urban Studies Department is producing a study of Chinatown which I hope will address these issues and conflicts. The consequences of policies need to be fleshed out clearly on paper so that all parties know what is at stake. Right now the teams seem too splintered and narrowly focused. It might be helpful for an outside, disinterested academic institution to consider the consequences of each possible policy decision.

Chinatown arch

2009-04-25T02:01:00.001-07:00

I guess everyone involved in Chinatown affairs has an opinion on whether Chinatown should build a gateway arch. I guess knowing a few of those opinions is a sure mark of contact with Chinatown discussions. Perhaps there already is a gateway arch in Chinatown. It is intellectual and interactive, and you don't know that you have walked through it until you find yourself on the other side of it. Chinatown's gateway arch is a discussion: the discussion of the arch. Once you find that you have an opinion on it, you suddenly discover that you've walked into a place you hadn't been before, or if you'd been, you hadn't quite seen it from this angle.
:-)

People disagree on where this arch -- I mean the physical one, now -- should be located and what it should look like. The benefits of proximity to the arch might unfairly favor near businesses over far, and there's little agreement on whether Chinatown's image should recall old-country traditions or the uniqueness of the new or both. There's even disagreement whether it will be good for Chinatown at all: all the dying Chinatowns in the US have arches; Manhattan's live Chinatown alone doesn't. If it aint broke...

Of the proposals I've heard, one of Wellington Chen's is most appealing and smartest: a hologram arch. It would create a tourist attraction that will draw commerce to Chinatown, won't consume space and could even span the entirety of Chinatown itself, encompassing all its locations. I can imagine that such a hologram arch -- maybe even a transforming hologram taking traditional features and melding into modern features in turn melding into futuristic possibilities, with elements drawn from the whole immigrant history of Chinatown: African, German, Irish, Jewish and Italian -- I can imagine that as a worldwide tourist attraction. It would be a financial bonanza for Chinatown, feeding cash every day in perpetuity, like the Eiffel Tower, as Wellington likes to say. It's an irresistible proposal.

But I have qualms about tourism. It's not monolithic, tourism. Tourists who come to Chinatown for Chinatown's authentic living character are different from tourists who come to see an urban technological marvel. The latter expect to eat American fare, preferably MacDonalds, but Wendy's will do too. They might venture into a local restaurant, but only if the menu isn't too threatening. I'm fine with Empire State Building tourists at the Empire State Building, or Statue of Liberty tourists at the ferry -- there are no neighborhoods to destroy there. Chinatown has to consider which tourists it wants and how to get them.

If the goal is to attract tourists to Chinatown for its authentic living character, and not for a convenient concentration of MacDonaldses and Wendy'ses and a handful of Americanized "Chinese" restaurants, why have any arch at all? How does an arch enhance the lived character of the place?

I feel the lack of a symbol for Manhattan's Chinatown. Is there one? Its landmarks are urban and American -- rows of tenements built for Irish, Italians and Jews, a park with a Calvert Vaux pavilion, a bridge entry with a grand and grimy Beaux Arts Carrere & Hastings entrance, a bank designed to match the classical Beaux Arts bridge, minus the grime. There's Confucius and there's Lin Ze Xu, but neither one is specifically Manhattan's Chinatown nor expresses the relation of Chinatown to Manhattan. Kim Lau comes closer and should be better known, but to try to make it better known would be a task akin to lecturing a class of students who just want to get out and play.

The most distinctive image of Chinatown for me is the bright chaos of flying banners posted along Pell Street. They are a favorite among photographers. Flickr is rife with Pell Street shots. Go look. It says so much about Chinatown: that it is lively, busy, commercial, bright, welcoming, distinct from the rest of the city yet distinctively urban and New York in character.

All the most memorable images of Chinatown are of its streets and streetlife. It has no Chrysler Building, or Upper West Side grand hotels or Upper East Side marble museums, or East Village Tower of Toys (and now the EV has lost that too) or lamppost mosaics, or Greenwich Village townhouses. It does have roast ducks in picture windows, sunday-in-the-park ensembles of erhu, flute and yangqin surrounded by trees, their low branches hung with the cages of exotic song birds, and a narrow, winding street dour in its presence and darker in its past.

The discussion of the arch seems like a red herring to me. The image of Chinatown surely should be sought in what Chinatown is, not in creating what it isn't or conforming it to other places. If character shall be destiny, that creation or conformity can only lead away from the true path. But what do I know? I'm an outsider.

Maybe the funds for the arch should be devoted to finding an image for Chinatown drawn from Chinatown itself. A fauvist silkscreen of Pell Street banners?

Instead of a Chinatown arch...

jBlough flickr

...Chinatown banners.

Gentrification and Chinatown

2009-04-25T01:04:00.000-07:00

The Chinatown Working Group has addressed itself well to a variety of interests and issues, but has not adequately, clearly, fully and definitively discussed the ten ton elephant in the room: there's a tension within Chinatown's future between promoting a thriving Chinatown and preserving its character; the danger of gentrifying Chinatown out of existence.

Chinatown gentrification is already evident in rising commercial and residential rents. The Chinatown Working Group can help to direct gentrification, control it or increase it. A lot depends on who attends their meetings.

The CWG understanding of and position with regard to gentrification is, I think, the most important first task before it. Without an unambiguous stance on gentrification, without clearing the air of the conflicting interests that have a stake in gentrification for or against, I don't see how the group can move forward coherently.

If there's a town hall, I'd like to see it address the effects of the gentrification that is coming to Chinatown --

on business
(increased commercial rents are tough on local business, gentrified neighborhoods attract big-capital businesses from outside that locals can't compete with and that alter the character of the neighborhood),

on jobs
(gentrification does not necessarily mean more jobs and gentrified jobs are not necessarily opportunities for local residents),

on residential character and affordability
(higher rents bring increased landlord harassment and change in residential character),

on immigrant housing and opportunities
(gentrified neighborhoods do not accommodate new working-class immigrants, and it is likely that the character of Chinatown immigration protects Manhattan's Chinatown from the sterility that has affected Chinatowns everywhere else in the US).

The Chinatown Working Group Town Hall

2009-04-16T06:29:00.000-07:00

The Chinatown Working Group plans to hold a Town Hall meeting on the future of Chinatown and its self-determination, hoping to attract more of the local grassroots into the process. I don't see how it'll work. If the grassroots don't attend the meetings now, which are all open and public, what will attract them to a Town Hall based on the same broad mission?

Maybe if they chalk all the sidewalks of Chinatown De La Vega-style with

唐人街的未來:
誰將決定?
Chinatown Working Group

People come out for specific issues that affect them. If a Town Hall addressing some such specific issue can offer steps toward problem resolution, the Working Group will acquire a following in the community.

To draw the broad range of the grassroots, they'd have to hold several town halls each on a different issue, and in each case offer the hope of effective change so that attendees don't leave discouraged with the process. Finding those issues is a challenge.

Alternatively, the Working Group can present a range of proposals. Proposals always spark controversy.

I am afraid that if a town hall on "The Future of Chinatown and its Self-Determination" fails to attract any but the usual suspects who already attend Working Group meetings, it will serve only to discourage the Working Group itself.

A sure solution: install a series of really huge, ugly pieces of temporary art in central locations where they obstruct pedestrian traffic. Place the title prominently on them: "The Future of Chinatown -- Chinatown's Self-Determination" and the sponsor: "Chinatown Working Group." Then the only problem for the town hall on Chinatown's Self-Determination will be finding a venue large enough for the crowd.

Years ago my landlord placed an alarm on the door to our roof. Some recalcitrant tenant set it off three nights in a row, keeping everyone in the building up all night. I announced a tenants association meeting and got 100% attendance with only two days' notice.

El Bohio for Open House New York

2009-04-09T19:56:00.000-07:00

Friends and neighbors,

El Bohio (formerly P.S.64) has been closed to the public for at least seven years now. In that time it's been landmarked, its terra cotta façade has been defaced and pigeons have moved in where artists, dancers and musicians once entertained audiences.

Open House New York for one weekend opens buildings and landmarks that are normally closed to the public. OHNY is looking for sites of architectural and historical significance to include in its weekend of public access.

I've suggested to OHNY that they ask Gregg Singer, the owner of former P.S.64, to open its doors so the public may once again see it. I doubt Mr. Singer will oblige them, but I believe he should be asked nonetheless.

Would you join me in recommending to Open House New York that the former P.S. 64 (El Bohio) be an Open House site? Let's raise the community voice together.

I think it's time that the public see how much damage has been done to the interior of the building. If Mr. Singer has protected the building from harm, as the landmark law requires, then he will have nothing to hide. If he has something to hide, he will find an excuse not to open the building.

We have a voice. Let's use it. Send a note to
info@ohny.org

For more info, visit their website
http://www.ohny.org/

Fight the cuts!

2009-03-26T08:45:00.001-07:00

There's only one week left to state budget negotiations in Albany. Now's the time to write letters to the papers about the need for tax reform, sign the fightthecuts.org petition and call Governor Paterson and State Senate Majority Leader Smith (the State Assembly is already on board).

Proposed cuts to schools, hospitals, and the social services will not only harm ordinary New Yorkers but will impair our already hurting local economy, increase unemployment, stifle spending, close small and vulnerable businesses and force a downward spiraling crisis just when New Yorkers and the New York economy most need support.

There is immense wealth in this state, yet those who have it pay the same tax rate as those who don't, and actually pay a smaller share of their income than working families. We need New Yorkers who can afford to share, who have seen their taxes cut over and over throughout the last thirty years, to begin giving just a little bit more. Will the rich flee if taxed more? Not according to studies quoted in the Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/19/nyregion/19leave.html?_r=2&ref=nyregion

Sign the petition here:
http://www.fightthecuts.org/

If you earn over $200,000/yr United for a Fair Economy needs your voice:
http://faireconomy.org/issues/responsible_wealth/new_yorkers_sharing_in_the_solution

Call:
Senate Majority Leader Malcolm Smith
(212) 298-5585

Governor Paterson
518-474-8390

Send letters:
letters@nytimes.com

http://www.nypost.com/postopinion/letters/letters_editor.htm

(Bear in mind that papers like the Times, News and Post don't print letters longer than three or four sentences.)

from Picture the Homeless

2009-03-26T08:43:00.001-07:00

HOMELESS PEOPLE TAKE OVER VACANT BUILDING IN EAST HARLEM/EL BARRIO
Claim property for low-income neighbors, demand action from city government

El Barrio/East Harlem, NYC. —Homeless people have taken over an empty building in East Harlem, as part of a coordinated push-back against city policies that let buildings stay empty. The building, which is owned by the city, has been completely vacant for decades.

Deborah Dickerson, a homeless woman who is one of the organizers of the takeover, says “This building is dead. The city killed it. We're going in there to revive this building, and there are many more. We're not going to stop until all of these buildings have people in them. Let these buildings go!”

A massive banner hanging from the roof says THEY SAY GENTRIFY/ WE SAY OCCUPY. Community support for the takeover is high, with neighbors rallying on the sidewalk in support of the event. Neighborhood resident and community leader Gloria Quiñones says, “In my forty years of community activism on this issue, I have never seen things get so desperate. Families are doubled and tripled up while there are vacant city-owned properties and no plans to use them to house low-income folks. This is disgraceful! We know the Mayor is a great businessman and he's one of the richest people in the world, he can do much better than having poor people living on the streets.”

Local elected officials are also signaling their support for the takeover. East Harlem City Council Member Melissa Mark Viverito stated “Today's action is an exciting development and should send a message that the situation has grown too serious to ignore; that low-income New Yorkers are becoming more frustrated as they wait for the city to solve the housing crisis and that we must not hesitate in our search for creative solutions to our most pressing housing challenges.”
Organizers of the building takeover are demanding that the City Council pass new legislation to turn vacant city-owned buildings into housing for the homeless, and a commitment from city officials to conduct an annual citywide count of all vacant buildings and lots.

Dickerson adds, “Being homeless is one of the most degrading things that can happen to any human being. And for too long, people have presumed to speak for the homeless. We have a voice, we are human beings, and we deserve to live. It's too long that the warehousing has gone on. We want housing. Let the warehousing stop. We want to live in a home like everybody else. The city has made enough money on us. We want our legislation to go through. We want the city to count up all these empty buildings and lots. And we want truly-affordable housing for low-income and homeless people.”
Press Rendezvous: Meet at the corner of 116th & Lexington at 12:45PM, Thursday March 19th

For interviews with homeless people and neighborhood residents on the inside of the building, call 718-593-1979. In addition, leaders of the building takeover will be Twittering from the inside. Follow http://twitter.com/pthny and hashtag #bldgtakeover.

Lessons from the future

2009-03-04T16:44:00.000-08:00

Picture the Homeless is hosting a "Report Back from Miami: Take Back the Land," at the Graduate Center, Monday, March 16th from 5-7pm, 365 Fifth Avenue, Manhattan, Room 9206 (9th floor), (6 train to 33rd Street, BDFVNQRW to 34th Street/Herald Square). Take Back the Land is liberating foreclosed and vacant houses in Miami, and moving in freshly-homeless families. Applications in NYC? There are a lot of warehoused apartments here...
Read more at their site

Correction

2009-03-02T18:59:00.000-08:00

Acting chair of the Chinatown Working Group Jim Solomon points out to me that the zoning team didn't actually vote on their list of guiding principles, but left them open to further refinement. At this point, he says, "all work product coming from the Working Teams is still very much a work-in-progress."

That's good, if the future discussion of those principles is guided by people who actually live in Chinatown, not just the outside voices, expert or otherwise.

He emphasizes "the success of the Chinatown Working Group will ultimately depend on the active participation of Chinatown's stakeholders. Outreach continues to be a CWG priority, as it is seeking input from a broad cross-section of the community."

It may be that many of the few Chinatown residents attending the zoning meeting were journalists, not participants. If that's so, that's not so good. Leaving a possible rezoning of Chinatown to outsiders, expert or not, courts disaster.

If it's zoning jargon that stands in the way of participation, it shouldn't. Once past a few measures like FAR (floor area ratio), the rest is easy, though not without an occasional complication. The most important part of zoning is deciding what you want for your neighborhood. No acronyms there: it's just expressing your views and listening to others.

Check out Zoning for Dummies on this blog for an introduction. It's geared towards the EV/LES rezoning, written early in the process before changes were made in the plan and in tax law, but the basics are all there. City Planning (DCP) has a glossary and other good stuff on its site. You can even download the whole zoning text there, if you're looking for a real page turner.

Chinatown working teams

2009-03-01T10:44:00.000-08:00

I've been to three meetings of Chinatown Working Group 'teams' (euphemism for "committee," word that stifles all hope). Pleurisy, the devil's own invention, prevented me from attending a fourth team.

The cultural preservation team and the affordability team devoted their time to discussion, raising important issues and observing the challenges to resolving them. Wisely, no decisions were made. Instead, the teams took their first meeting as an opportunity to gain a sense of the group and a sense of direction.

The zoning team, by contrast, immediately drew up and voted on a list of desiderata without first gaining any sense of group direction. The result was a laundry list of items some of which seem to me to conflict, if not contradict one another.

I noticed that Chinatown residents participated fully at the cultural and especially at the affordability team, where the discussion seemed to me deepest. Chinatown residents participated least in the disappointing zoning team discussion. Perhaps there's a lesson to be learned there.

Full disclosure: I don't live in Chinatown (though I work there) and I did participate in the discussions.

The argument for bringing in outside meddlers seems to rest on the diversity and lack of consensus within Chinatown. Several members of the cultural team cited plans for a Chinatown arch that have gone nowhere although the City Council long ago designated funds for it, the moral being, you can't even get consensus in Chinatown on a free arch.

Hell, I don't know whether this whole enterpise will succeed, but I wouldn't be discouraged by an unbuilt arch! It may seem a paltry and easy task, but building an arch is actually just the kind of project that courts controversy: it's public, symbolic, supplies no need directly yet can favor one area over another and alters the experience of the common space for everyone in a seemingly gratuitous, authoritarian, paternalistic way. Of course it hasn't been built!

Not all projects court controversy. Creating and supporting a space for a cultural center, for example, supplies a need directly and daily, doesn't have to be seen by any but those who use and love it and doesn't force anyone to accept its symbolism, if it has any symbolism; it provides without taking. Where's the controversy?

Ah, Chinatown leaders sound like East Village activists: "it can't be done here, we're too factious." Well, if pessimistic complaints must precede accomplishment, so be it. I have confidence in this process...if only we outsiders can listen more and talk less.

A March through Chinatown

2009-02-21T03:06:00.000-08:00

From CAAAV --

Dear friends and supporters,

Tomorrow will mark 100 days since the residents of 81 Bowery were forced out of their homes by the City's Department of Buildings.

The landlord, Donald Lee, is supposed to submit new plans to the Department of Buildings with the violations corrected. 100 days later, he has still not done so. Telling lie after lie, Donald Lee is playing the blame game and delaying the process of ensuring tenants safety and return.

Join us this Sunday, February 22nd, at 12:30 in front of 81 Bowery for a vigil and march against displacement and gentrification throughout Chinatown. The event will last less than an hour, and we will be moving throughout Chinatown, so please come on time if you plan on supporting! Bundle up, it will be cold. But if the tenants are out there, we hope to see you too!

If you have questions, email Helena at hwong@caaav.org.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
More info. on the building below.
The 81 Bowery Tenants Have A Right to Return!
Our demands:
1) Donald Lee, the landlord, immediately submit plans to the Department of Buildings that correct the safety violations and ensure the return of all tenants to 81 Bowery
2) The Department of Buildings only approve plans submitted by the landlord that ensure the return of all tenants to a safe and healthy home
JUSTICE FOR 81 BOWERY TENANTS!

On the evening of November 13th, the City evicted all of the tenants at 81 Bowery Street (an SRO building located in the heart of Chinatown) without notice-- citing safety issues that were the landlord's legal responsibility to correct. Over 50 people were forced out their homes, many of whom lived there for more than 20 years. It took SEVEN City agencies to properly vacate the building that night, and as of today NO agency has held the landlord responsible.

The Landlord wants you to believe that the tenants created the conditions for the vacate order, and that this eviction was the tenants' fault. Don't believe the LIES! What is ironic is that the tenants have been calling the City for YEARS to get the City to enforce its own housing code. The City finally came to the building to inspect and deemed it uninhabitable. In reality, the tenants of 81 Bowery are being punished for the landlord's failures to meet his legal obligations.

This is a clear example of the gentrification and displacement that is happening throughout Chinatown – more and more low-income residents are being forced out of their homes during a time when services throughout the City are being cut. SROs (Single Room Occupancy) are the most affordable housing that exists for low-income individuals. Losing them would mean more overcrowding in Chinatown and a loss of truly affordable housing that will not be replaced.

For more information contact CAAAV's Chinatown Tenants Union at: (212) 473-6485 or hwong@caaav.org

The Villager once again mistakes politics for morality

2009-02-20T09:47:00.000-08:00

It's discouraging to see a newspaper preach ungrounded judgments of right and wrong ("Pagan was right that Tompkins Square Park shouldn’t have been a “Tent City.” ... putting a park off limits to families with children and to seniors, among others, was unacceptable and untenable.")

Political office holders do sometimes base their decisions on perceived principles of human "rights" -- life, liberty, protective shelter, access to health care, a pretty park for sun-bathers and strollers -- but more commonly they represent specific constituent interests.

The interests represented in the eviction of the homeless from the park are too obvious to require mention. Obvious too, the homeless were no one's voting constituency.

The reason the 'homeless' were evicted from their often elaborate park homes and shelters -- "tents," as the Villager calls them -- is that political office holders, Pagan included, acted on behalf of the interests of a particular constituency, not on what is "right."

The questions of "right" emerge only in the definition of "park" and "park use" or in consideration of the greatest good for the greatest number. But the answers to these questions also reduce to specific constituency interests, not to "right." By what measures are conflicting goods and interests compared? Whose interests define the best use of any public space?

The homeless chose Tompkins Square Park, not because it was the only open space available. There were whole blocks of empty abandoned space immediately to the east where no one would have bothered them.

They chose TSP because they, like all true New Yorkers, all possessed in their bones by the metropolitan spirit, hankered to be at the heart of things.

More desperate than their need for shelter itself, they desperately needed to be in a somewhere, not a nowhere. And, like authentic East Villagers, they recognized Tompkins Square Park as itself possessed by the spirit of marginality, irreverence and rebellion. They knew they belonged there, and they did belong there, not by right but by the spirit of the place.

Throughout New York, local gentrification is marked by renovation of the local park in preparation for strollers, dog-walkers and sun-bathers. Marcus Garvey Park will be getting the treatment in the wake of Harlem's recent rezoning.

The interests of strollers, dogs, and sun-bathers were well served by the eviction of the homeless from TSP and the park curfew. Tompkins Square Park, really the entire neighborhood, has become their world, their idea, their playground.

The interests of the homeless in creating their own world in a park that had long welcomed them, have not been so well served.

Oh, the interests of the homeless may have seemed extreme -- a park all to themselves! But there is nothing definitionally wrong with "extreme." Abstract Expressionism was extreme. Ginsberg was extreme. Emma Goldman was seriously extreme. Bebop, extreme. Graffiti art, extreme. Punk rock, extreme. The whole damned neighborhood east of A was extreme.

All that neighborhood extremity, in both senses of the word, was good and bad. To those of us, like the homeless, who chose to be here, it was good.

Extremely good.

Bloomberg's order invites illegal development

2009-02-05T04:59:00.000-08:00

On Feb. 2, Mayor Bloomberg, without any legislative process, ordered a time limit on challenges to developments. Ordinary citizens will now have only and exactly 30 days to challenge the legality of a development once a permit has been issued.

Prior to the mayor's order, there was no time limit on challenges. Since the city allows developers to self-certify their plans (yes, approve their pans themselves), the only oversight lies in citizen challenges.

This time limit sends a clear message to developers: plan developments without regard for the law. The thirty-day window severely decreases the chance of any challenge being brought at all, and if challenged, the development will be only at most thirty days into construction. At worst, the developer will merely have to alter plans (and borrow less money). So developers will never have to remove a story -- or thirty stories -- of construction no matter how egregiously those stories violate the zoning and violate the neighborhood.

It's a call to any unscrupulous developer to submit self-certified illegal plans.

Here's the mayor's press release. Notice the headline, spun as procedural improvement. Scroll down to the last two paragraphs before the bullets to learn the underlying motivation: to streamline illegal development. Think about it: as long as the plans are legal, developers have no worries about challenges at any point in the process of construction. Challenges are only a burden to development if the developer is banking on illegal plans.

This is government administrative sponsorship of activity in violation of government legislation; government sponsoring criminality. It's a deft brushing aside of the laws that protect this city and its neighborhoods, and handing the city itself to developers for their fastest buck, no urban planning, no community voice, no legislative process. Just thirty days. Let's close the city council down and let Boss Bloomberg rule in the great tradition of Mussolini and Tweed. (That's an insult to Tweed. Tweed, for all his corruption, responded to his voting base, the Irish working class.)

If developers generally submitted legal plans, this order would never have been. The mayor's order is a response to a problem of excess illegality. His response: make it easier to commit fraudulent and illegal activity and increase the likely profit. Forgive me, it's just so unbelievably outrageous.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

February 2, 2009

No. 55

www.nyc.gov

MAYOR BLOOMBERG AND COMMISSIONER LIMANDRI ANNOUNCE ONLINE DIAGRAMS OF PROPOSED BUILDINGS AND A NEW DEVELOPMENT CHALLENGE PROCESS

Fulfills State of the City Commitment — Increasing Transparency, Compliance and Certainty about Neighborhood Development Projects

First City in the Nation to put Development Diagrams Online

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, Deputy Mayor for Operations Edward Skyler and Department of Buildings (DOB) Commissioner Robert D. LiMandri today announced reforms to the development process that will give New Yorkers a stronger voice in the development of neighborhoods, create greater transparency, and clarify the process for the public and for developers. New York City will become the first city in the nation to put diagrams of proposed new buildings or major enlargements online so the public can view the size and scale of a proposed building. A new 30-day formal public challenge period will be implemented to give the public a greater voice in the development process and provide clarity for developers about when and how a project can move forward. The Mayor was joined at the announcement by Deputy Mayor for Economic Development Robert Lieber. The new measures, which fulfill a commitment the Mayor made in his State of the City address last month, will go into effect starting Monday, March 9th.

"The reforms we are detailing today will inject a much-needed dose of transparency and accountability into a critical area of construction and development – zoning compliance," said Mayor Bloomberg. "The reforms center on the public's right to challenge any approved development if they think it violates local zoning regulations. For too long, this process has been too onerous for most New Yorkers. The reforms will make sure people have a stronger voice in the development that's taking place in their neighborhoods, while also giving developers more certainty about their projects."

"Until now, knowledge of development approvals has been limited to a small group of insiders with expert knowledge. This puts the public at a disadvantage and creates uncertainty for developers, who could be subject to a challenge long after a building is out of the ground," said Commissioner LiMandri. "This new process will give the public a chance to see what a building will look like before the first shovel hits the ground and developers certainty that once the public has had an opportunity to comment and any compliance issues have been resolved, their project can move forward. These reforms increase transparency and raise accountability across the board."

Architects and engineers filing applications for new buildings and major enlargements will be required to submit diagrams, which will be available at www.nyc.gov. The diagrams will detail critical information that can be used by the public to determine whether a project is in compliance with required zoning regulations. The diagrams will include the size of the project, drawn to scale, and where a building will sit in relation to the street.

The 30-day public-challenge process establishes a defined and organized means for the public to challenge zoning decisions by DOB that they believe are incorrect, and will provide clarity and certainty for developers about when a project can move forward, and when changes to a proposed development need to be made. The current process, which has no formal timeframe, produces confusion and unnecessary and unintended costs for development in New York City .

The online diagrams and new challenge process will streamline the review of the thousands of challenges DOB receives each year – at no additional cost to the City.

New Formal Public Challenge Process

* Initial Public Challenge Period: When DOB approves plans for any new building or major enlargement, the building diagrams, called ZD1 forms, and other associated documents will be uploaded to the DOB website. In addition, once a permit is issued builders will be required to post the permit at the location within three days so the public is aware of the proposed development. New Yorkers will have 30 calendar days to review and challenge the development approval.

* Initial Zoning Challenge Review: After the initial public challenge period ends, the DOB Borough Commissioner will address every challenge by conducting a full review of the construction plans and rendering decisions that will be posted online. If a challenge is determined to be valid, appropriate enforcement action will be taken, including issuing Stop Work Orders, revoking of permits, and requiring redesigns of the proposed construction.

* Community Appeals Period: If the Borough Commissioner determines that a challenge is invalid, the public will be given an additional 15 calendar days to appeal to the First Deputy Commissioner.

* Final Zoning Challenge Review: Once the First Deputy Commissioner issues a determination, the decision may be appealed to the Board of Standards and Appeals for a final determination.

-30-

Contact: Stu Loeser/Marc LaVorgna (212) 788-2958

Tony Sclafani/Kate Lindquist (DOB) (212) 566-3473

Something urgent from CAAAV

2009-01-30T19:18:00.000-08:00

The Committee Against Anti-Asian Violence

We Need YOUR Help to Send Out 100 Letters in 100 Hours!

Dear friends and supporters,

Many of you have been supporting the residents of 81 Bowery, who were evicted by the City's Department of Buildings on November 13, 2008 for safety violations the landlord failed to correct. Since then, four more buildings in Chinatown have been vacated leaving more than 100 residents homeless.

In these harsh economic times and cold weather, the City should not be forcing people out of their long-time homes. There are other alternatives the City can adopt that will require landlords to fix the violations while at the same time ensuring that residents can remain in their homes safely.

The Department of Buildings has not agreed to a meeting with the displaced tenants and CAAAV. We need YOUR support to hold DOB Commissioner LiMandri accountable by meeting with us. No longer should they be allowed to hide behind closed doors and bureaucracy.

We hope you support the Alternatives to Mass Evictions (AME) Campaign.
Our demands are simple:

1) For the displaced tenants to be able to return home immediately

2) In the future, for DOB to put in place a policy of having landlords correct violations instead of evicting whole buildings in the name of safety, leaving people homeless.

Here is how you can support:

Send a letter to DOB. We are doing a push to send 100 letters to DOB in 100 hours via fax and email beginning 9am on February 2nd until 1pm on February 6th. The more the merrier! We appreciate letters sent on organizational letterhead and as individuals. Below and attached is a sample letter. Please cc Helena once this is done so we can keep track!

Come out with your members to actions. We will be doing actions at DOB and in Chinatown in the coming months. If you are interested, let Helena know.

Spread the word! We cannot allow this to happen to anyone else. And we need all the support you can give in order for DOB to change their practices. As this campaign goes on, there will be periodic updates, and we hope you will talk to others about this campaign and all other efforts to fight gentrification and displacement in New York City!

For more information, contact Helena Wong at hwong@caaav.org or (212) 473-6485.

SAMPLE LETTER TO DOB

FAX to: (212) 566-3785
Email to: rlimandri@buildings.nyc.gov
Subject: Housing Justice for Chinatown Tenants

February ___, 2009

Robert LiMandri
Commissioner
Department of Buildings
280 Broadway, 7th floor
New York, NY 10007

Dear Commissioner LiMandri:

I am writing in support of CAAAV Organizing Asian Communities and the approximately 100 long-term Chinatown residents – from 81 Bowery, 32 Market Street, 15 Catherine Street, and 103 East Broadway (a FDNY vacate that was assisted by DOB) – who are left homeless because of vacate orders issued by your agency between November 13 and December 16, 2008.

In all four buildings the issue was secondary egress, which is a hazardous violation that should be corrected by their landlords immediately. I do not question that secondary egress is a fire hazard and that your agency has an obligation to ensure all tenants' safety. However, there is a more viable policy the Department of Buildings can and should adopt to address safety violations that do not lead to forcing people out of their homes during the coldest months of the year with no notice whatsoever. For example, the DOB can require that landlords hire fire guards at their own cost while they correct the violations. These vacate orders penalize residents who are paying rent, when the DOB ought to hold the landlords responsible for not complying with the law. The landlords allowed these violations to exist for years, putting tenants' lives in danger. The DOB should work to ensure that tenant safety issues are addressed in ways that protect tenants and ensure they live in safe and habitable homes. By issuing vacate orders that penalize the tenants, the DOB is in fact condoning these landlords to continue to violate the laws of the City.

It is in times of economic crisis that the DOB should take even more care to ensure that no one is forced out of their homes, yet current cuts to social services essentially guarantee that residents' need for these services will exceed what can be provided, adding more strain on scarce and valuable resources.

I urge that you meet with CAAAV to discuss the following:

1) The DOB allow all residents from 81 Bowery, 15 Catherine Street, and 32 Market Street to return to their homes immediately.

2) The DOB require the landlord to hire fire guards at all buildings until the landlord has corrected the violations.

3) The DOB should not approve any new Certificate of Occupancy applications for these three buildings that do not allow for current residents to return to their homes.

4) The DOB puts into place a policy that allows for landlords to fix violations at the landlord's expense, rather than issuing vacate orders that penalize tenants and make them homeless.

Thank you for your attention to this matter.

Sincerely,
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Politics as usual

2009-01-27T16:54:00.000-08:00

In the wake of Chinatown's deadly accident that took the lives of two small children, State Senator Danny Squadron's press conference on the reopening of Park Row was postponed.

However, never one to miss an opportunity regardless how callous, Borough President Scott Stringer jumped in, taking political advantage of local tragedy to promote his "comprehensive traffic safety plan" that he apparently threw together the night before.

He presented the plan, needless to say, without first consulting the Chinatown community, the community that has been living and dealing for years with the most dangerous crossings in Manhattan. I guess there's no time to consult with the community when the press you've called are waiting for you with pens ready.

Yet Stringer did apparently have time to consult with Transportation Alternatives (quoted in his press release and mentioned in his speech), which just happens to be the only citizens' group in favor of the Chatham Square redesign, the redesign that all of Chinatown, including CBs 1,2 & 3 have rejected. Remember Stringer ran on a platform of community empowerment?

You'd think Transportation Alternatives would have asked Stringer, "What does the community think of your plan?" before signing on. A little more community sensitivity, TA.

Danny Squadron, the newly elected state senator who had planned the press conference before the accident occurred, and several Chinatown organizational spokespersons from CCBA, CCRC and former AAFE director Margaret Chin among others, managed to make the best of a sad and difficult moment. There was plenty of criticism for the Department of Transportation (a mayoral agency) and Squadron mentioned the continuing problem of the city's refusal to reopen Park Row.

Will the city return Park Row to the discussion? Does the city care what happens in Chinatown?

Park Row press conference

2009-01-22T09:35:00.001-08:00

Press Conference on reopening Park Row
Friday, Jan. 23, 12:15
Park Row at Worth Street

Our new state senator Danny Squadron is holding this press conference on the city's unwillingness to reopen Park Row, a crucial route connecting Chinatown to downtown. Please attend if you can.

The closing of Park Row following 9/11 has been a problem for Chinatown ever since, impeding traffic, slowing business and endangering pedestrians trying to negotiate the tortuous traffic detours.

Park Row was closed in order to protect Police Headquarters at 1 Police Plaza from terrorist attack. The transfer of this putative terrorist target away from the immediate vicinity of one of the most densely populated neighborhoods in the city -- in the world -- does not seem to be a concern for this administration.

Rather, the neighborhood remains under attack by the city administration itself, as residents are evicted from their homes by the Department of Buildings following years of neglect by landlords and city agencies whose responsibility it was to have ensured proper living conditions. Soon the city plans to dig up Chatham Square in a traffic-rerouting construction mayhem, spread over years, that will bury yet more Chinatown businesses in the midst of this recession when businesses will be most vulnerable.

The city's priorities are clear. They do not include the residents and businesses of Chinatown.