HONK FOR PEACE

Sustainably Empty No More-Plans Await Kingsbridge Armory

The Future of the Armory?

ONE MORE LAP AROUND THE ARMORY   10.19.07

To grasp the size of the Kingsbridge Armory in the Bronx is to remember that for two decades it was known as the Kingsbridge Armory Speedrome. Beginning in the late 40s, the cavernous armory held races on an oval track over the largest drill floor in the world, measuring 180,000 square feet.

To understand the contentious political debate over the future use of the Armory is to be reminded that the space, all 575,000 square feet, has been effectively vacant since the 258th Field Artillery Regiment moved elsewhere in 1994. Built between 1914-1918, the castle-facaded Armory has been a source of frustrated envy for city political leaders and developers for over a decade.

With the City expected to announce the winning proposal within weeks, the Kingsbridge community is turning on the heat once more to ensure the finished project anchors the community, instead of torpedoes it. The community was successful in defeating former Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s plan to transform the armory into a shopping mall.

The four square blocks of Armory are currently owned by the New York City Economic Development Corporation, who have been overseeing the development proposals. “I can’t speak to previous attempts under other administrations,” said Janel Patterson, vice president of public affairs for the EDC. “But I can tell you in the current undertaking, we have tried to include all the stakeholders and work together. It is a very complex project.”

The Request for Proposal was solicited the second time around by the Kingsbridge Armory Task Force, composed of the Bronx heavyweight politicians. While schools were originally touted as a necessary prerequisite of the proposals, the RFP finally released in September of 2006 called for schools to be built in adjacent buildings.

While the schools in the Bronx currently experience overcrowding at a significant rate, the community is now defending against losing the schools altogether. “The city is disputing the need to build more high school seats due to the high dropout rate,” said Ava Farkas, an organizer with Kingsbridge Armory Redevelopment Alliance, an umbrella organization charged with addressing the various community needs.

In a report commissioned by the New York City School Construction Authority and prepared by the Grier Partnership in January 2007, the report concludes that, “After 2010 there will be a sharp decline with a loss of 14,900 children over the next decade.” There has been a steady increase in population in the Bronx over the last decade,.

The community leaders are now more concerned in securing retail jobs paying over $10/hour and to get a strong commitment from the city that some construction jobs will stay in the community. There is a palpable sense of unease in regards to these projects after the Croton Filtration Plant has left promises unfulfilled, as Bronx Community Board 7 Chairman Gregory Faukner articulated.

Once the proposal is selected, the project will have to go through another public review, the Uniform Land Use Review Procedure, which involves community board, borough board, city planning and city council. The end is in sight. What that end looks like is still anyone’s guess.

Agents of Safety or Agents of Harm

October 11, 2007

The hope was to “get the most bang for our buck” by moving school safety agents out of desk jobs and into the schools, announced Assistant Chief James Lawrence in 1998 on the very first day the safety of the schools was handed over from the Department of Education to the New York Police Department. “Unless it’s an extreme incident or an emergency, an arrest won’t be made without consulting the principal. If we stick to that basic plan, things will go well.”

Two days ago, Mark Federman, the Principal of East Side Community High School in Manhattan, was arrested on charges of obstructing government activity and resisting arrest for intervening with school safety agents arresting a female 17-year-old senior. The student had been trying to get into school early and became engaged in an altercation with the officers when denied entry. Both student and principal were led out of the school at 9 am in handcuffs.

“Unfortunately it is not a unique situation. It is entirely predictable,” said Donna Lieberman, Executive Director of New York Civil Liberties Union at yesterday’s press conference during the City Council hearing into the conduct and training of the school security agents. By NYPD Commissioner Raymond Kelly’s account, there are more than 5000 SSAs and 200 armed police officers in the schools.

“Instead of giving us safety, they were harming us,” said Adolfo Peralta, a junior high school student who transferred from Roland Hayes School after he was allegedly struck in the chest and face by an officer when he was cutting class. Peralta spent the weekend in juvenile detention and served a month suspension after an assault charge was leveled by the same officer. His father, of the same name, said the officer was near 300 pounds, big enough to be a wrestler, “The officers should be there to protect and serve them.”

The transfer of the school’s security to the NYPD occurred after years of former Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s urging to bring his “broken windows” philosophy of policing, no crime too petty to ignore, to public schools. According to the 2006 financial plan for the city, Mayor Bloomberg requested $11,272,000 for SSAs within the education allotment from 2007 until 2010. Since 2002, the NYPD has received 2670 complaints about SSAs.

According to the report released earlier this year by NYCLU detailing “The Over-Policing of New York City Schools,” 82 percent of children attending high schools with permanent metal detectors were Black or Latino. “What are our jails filled with? They are filled with the same demographic,” said Jamaal Bowman, Dean of Martin Luther King Jr. High School. A 2006 report by the American Psychological Association Study found “under zero tolerance policies, African American students may be disciplined more severely for less serious or subjective reasons.”

Gregory Floyd, President of Teamsters Union Local 237, which represents the SSAs, said the NYCLU report was created without the SSA input and “lends itself to distortion and sensationalism.” Floyd agreed with the NYCLU on the divide of authority between the DOE and the NYPD. “Our members are sometimes caught up in a confusing division of authority between their NYPD superiors and school principals.”

Uni Ofer, the Senior Legislative Counsel of NYCLU said, “Many prinicipals told us in confidence they feel like they will be retaliated against if they push this issue too hard,” and therefore did not seek attention for models that were working without punitive, disciplinary methods.

By the time Felice Lepore, principal of Urban Assembly in South Bronx, testified on the methods working in his school, such as using SSAs as mediators and not using metal detectors: The chambers had cleared out. It was, after all, a school night.

From Behind Closed Doors

The lace and silk of the white dress that Cruceta Martinez wore as she stood on the steps of the Bronx Courthouse typified the trappings of a summer wedding. Martinez posed and adjusted her tiara as brides do, but it was to illustrate the reason there were fifty other women in wedding dresses: evidenced by the scars on her face, neck and arms from the battery acid her spouse threw on her seven years ago.

For the seventh time the New York Latinas Against Domestic Violence organized “The Brides March” to pay tribute to the victims of domestic violence including Gladys Ricart. It was nine years ago to the day, Sept. 26, Ricart was gunned down by her former boyfriend in her home as she posed for pictures with her bridesmaids. One hundred women, men and children marched for six miles from the Bronx to North Harlem to bring what normally happens behind closed doors into the light of day.

According to the Mayor’s Office to Combat Domestic Violence, there were 71 family related homicides citywide in 2006, 22 in the Bronx. “It’s important that people know what they can do to be free,” said Lucy Pizarro as she adjusted her gown to continue the march. Pizarro said that she had been victimized in Puerto Rico and seeing no other alternative had been planning to kill her husband to end the abuse.

“A woman doesn’t have to put up with it anymore,” said Emily Batista, who works at the Violence Intervention Program. Herself a survivor, Batista became involved she said because for too long she didn’t realize there was any help. Batista recounted a recent instance when a man tried to beat up his wife in the courtroom in front of the guards. “He was attempting to do this in public. He was arrested. He was not understanding the message.”

“This is a cultural problem, not an individual program,” said Kalima Desuze, an organizer at Voices of Women Organizing Project. “This is a patriarchal sexist problem and we need to raise our kids counter to that ideology to create a shift.”

Christian Tejada, 17, agreed. Tejada participated in a summer program for RAPP, Relationship Abuse Prevention Program. “Each of us has to speak out against it. Keep the communication open.” The students who participated in the training go back to their respective schools and act as peer counselors.

Bronx Borough President Adolfo Carrion met the marchers as they made their way on Grand Concourse. “This is not a woman problem. This is a community program,” Carrion said as he highlighted the borough’s commitment to break the cycle of domestic violence. One of the signs read, “Alza tu voz que no estas sola,” translated to “Raise your voice. You are not alone.”

Sitting on the steps next to a blown up photo of her sister Gladys, Yolanda Ricart looked tired as she ate her lunch on the courthouse steps. “Emotionally it helps me and my family,” she said through a translator. “We have more support from the community than we did seven years ago. The first time we marched, people laughed at us. Today people were clapping and cheering us on. It makes me feel much better and we need to continue doing it.”

As photographers swarmed to take her picture, Cruceta Martinez said very quietly she didn’t want other women to wait until something like what happened to her happened to them.

Bronx Art Museum

Modernization, Urbanization, Rejuvenation, Gentrification, the Yankees and Art

A Bronx Tale of Ruthian Proportions

From 1922 New York Times:
On this terrain there will be erected a huge stadium, which will surpass in seating capacity any structure hitherto built for the
accomdoation of the lovers of baseball.

Fervor Over New Yankee Stadium Still Burning in the Bronx

September 18, 2007

The new billion dollar Yankee stadium is under construction, but the organization who brought an injunction against the stadium being built on park lands is still railing against the politicians who backed the deal emphasizing how public funds being used could be better spent on the people of the Bronx versus the pinstriped clad Yankees.

The organization Save Our Parks, which had unsuccessfully attempted to halt the construction of the new stadium as it coupled with the destruction of 377 mature Oak trees and children’s athletic fields at John Mullaly Park and Macomb’s Dam, held a protest at the Kingsbridge Heights Park in the Bronx on Saturday to send a message to Congressman Jose Serrano.

The main organizer of the event Ernesto Maldonado, 49, said, “The new buildings are an insult when you know how much this community needs.” Maldonado grew up four blocks from Yankees Stadium and said the baseball club does very little for its community and neighbors. The 16th Congressional District Serrano represents is the poorest in the country.

As the 15 protestors lined up for the NYC 12 camera on 170th Ave and Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd. with their heavily worded poster board signs they chanted “Invest in children, not billion dollar franchises!” Behind them the song “Celebrate Good Times” blared from a health care fair sponsored by a long-term drug treatment facility.

Represenatative Jose Serrano, the 17-year veteran of the House and member of the House Appropriations Committee, was not in attendance as he was giving the keynote speech at the healthcare forum Saturday morning at the Lincoln Hospital in the lower Bronx.
Residents of the neighborhood including Marilyn Nelson, an HIV peer counselor, voiced their disapproval of 225 million dollars of taxpayer money being used to pay for subsidy of the parking garages. Nelson cited the cuts in the funding for treatment of low-income HIV/AIDS patients in the Bronx. The combined cuts for the city of New York due to the shift of money from urban areas to less needy rural areas are estimated at $17 million per year or the equivalent of Andy Pettite’s salary. The Yankees combined payroll for 2007 is $195,229,045.

It is hard to imagine the Yankees playing anywhere else outside of the Bronx, but during the legal battle over the park lands the city invoked the argument, “Yankees have often stated that if plans for a new stadium are not soon approved, and construction started, it will seek to move the Yankees baseball team to another city, which would enable immediate construction of a new stadium to commence.”

By the time the Yankee stadium hosts the All Star game in July of 2008, the new stadium and the parking will be nearly complete, along with $150 million of new recreation areas. John Mullaly Park, named after the father of the Bronx Park System, will have been turned into parking just 5 years after the city spent three million dollars to rejuvenate the park.

When the stadium was originally built in 1922 the 10 acres of lumberyard was bought for $600,000 from William Waldorf Astoria. During the early 1970’s, the Yankees were threatening to move and Mayor John Lindsay bought the stadium for $24 million and the city paid $160 million for the renovations, now being paid for by the state. The City’s Park department will retain ownership of the land under the new stadium, but will not charge the Yankees rent. Under the arrangement negotiated by the city and the Yankees, the new stadium will be paid for by the franchise as well as $800,000 to neighborhood non-profits over the next 40 years, as reported on by Metro New York.

Bronx resident Marco Quinones said the money should be spent on the neighborhood.
“Focus more on community and not billion dollar franchises. Housing, education, crime rate and the HIV positive community. Focus on humanity.”

New stadiums also are being built in the New York Metropolitan area for the New York Mets, the New Jersey Nets and the New Jersey Devils.

NEW OLD JOURNALISM

NYT Building Designed by Renzo Piano

“The basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter. But I should mean that every man should receive those papers and be capable of reading them.” –Thomas Jefferson to Edward Carrington, 1787. ME 6:57

New Old Journalism

It is no accident the brand spankin’ new CUNY Graduate School of Journalism rests in the shadow of The New York Times and the revered grand old tradition. The best of any new media is going to have the qualities that Adrian Holouaty espouses in his speech to the Missouri School of Journalism: Ethics, reporting, hustle, persistence, the importance of accuracy and fairness. The epitome of old world journalism is encased rather coyly in the modern Renzo Piano designed building, but traditions are as easy to dress up as a three legged elephant.
Bill Keller seems hip. (INTERNSHIP?) But the question is if Bill Keller were to wear the “Blog This” t-shirt and our distinguished professor were to attend such a meeting wearing the green eye shade and an apron, only emblazoned with a clever cursive anagram in the pattern of the familiar paper header: “yet emits hen work,” would Keller bang on the table and throw a tantrum. It is apparent from the conversation between Keller and Jarvis that they agree on the fundamental principles of how to get there.
In Glen Harlan Reynold’s review of Andrew Keen’s novel “The Cult of the Amateur-How Today’s Internet is Killing Our Culture,” he writes, “Power corrupts. Big media power corrupted big media, which is why the institutions Keen mourns have lost the preeminent positions in American society. No doubt “little media” power will corrupt the blogosphere and other amateur pursuits to some degree, though the diffusion of power there will likely make that corruption less potent.”
If we succeed as a generation of journalists it will be because we have created a smarter populous by putting the technology, and the breadth of information that comes with it, in the hands of people, by making truth and knowledge an essential goal of the media. And perhaps even making sure everyone is capable of reading the best of them.

Poverty and Wealth-A Tale of Two Cities

The Census Bureau released the report of the discrepancy between the poverty levels in Manhattan and the Bronx. The difference is the widest in the country as reported on in the new york times story.