Oyster shell dresses and green grass suits raise awareness of the city’s community gardens

Michael Leete, who works at the Museum of Reclaimed Urban Space (MoRUS) in Alphabet City, showed up for last weekend’s “anti-fashion” show dressed as a sparkly orange tree. Leete, 28, and fellow acts were decked out head-to-toe in all recycled and organic material.

“We’re exposing a different side of fashion,” Leete explained of the show’s mission. “We’re showing how it can be used in protest to make the act more interesting.”

While high-end fashion is invading New York City for February Fashion Week, MoRUS and its partner organizations had something a little different, something a little earthier, in mind for their show, which took place at the museum’s C-Squat on Avenue C.

Another volunteer, Barbara Ross, came strapped with dangling oyster shells.

“New York City once had oysters in the Hudson River that were wiped out,” she said of her costume’s purpose. “There’s talk of bringing them back to help with storm surges.” Ross’s oyster shell costume was meant to shed light on the potential environmental benefits of mollusks.

“All these costumes have a green message,” she said. “They show what people can do.”

“Fashion can also be functional,” Leete said, adding that costumes like his, a part of the Earth Celebrations series, were intended to raise awareness of the city’s prolific community gardens and plans to demolish them.

Earth Celebrations is a nonprofit organization directed by activist Felicia Young that aims to preserve these gardens through art and performance.

In addition, the show had a broader mission of bringing attention to how costumes and props can be used to promote positive change in the face of social, environmental and political issues—including the use of puppets to support the Occupy Wall Street movement.

Prior to the show, Young took the stage to talk about the group’s work.

“New York City has the highest concentration of community gardens in America, and Earth Celebrations helped save them,” Young said. “People didn’t even know these gardens existed.”

Young said the gardens grew out of rubble-filled lots of the 1970s, cultivated by individuals who helped transform neighborhoods previously considered slums. Real estate developers then began targeting those very spots.

“These gardens should not be a temporary stopgap on the way to luxurious neighborhoods,” Young said. “These are not vacant lots.”

Over time, since the organization’s founding in 1991, politicians like former Gov. Eliot Spitzer and Mayor Michael Bloomberg got involved in helping preserve the gardens by providing grants and helping raise awareness.

Volunteers Isabelle Garcia, 31, and Lauren Mittelman, 24, walked the recycled runway in suits made of grass, which was grown directly onto the costumes by Bill Di Paola, a MoRUS co-founder and staunch activist in the city with the environmental organization Time’s Up!

Mittelman said the suits represented how easy it can be to grow something no matter the context. “If you can grow grass on a suit in a week, you can grow sustainable stuff anywhere,” she said.

Amanda Buckley, a 30-year-old painter in the city who works a variety of odd jobs, was in the audience on Saturday. Buckley heard about the museum’s show on Facebook and decided to check it out.

“I’m interested in how political activism can exist in an artistic context,” Buckley said.

Another audience member, Jerry Trudell, said he used to squat nearby in the 1990s and helped start the transformation of vacant lots into gardens that brought Earth Celebrations into being. He said a garden procession went around every year to support and bring visibility to the garden coalition by uniting garden activists from different areas.

MoRUS’ “anti-fashion” show also included a brassy performance by the Rude Mechanical Orchestra, a volunteer-run band, complete with dancers, which regularly shows up at a variety of protest events, rallies and benefits throughout the city. The band first formed to protest the Republican National Convention.

Hanna Kyle Moranz, 31, a dancer who’s been with the band since 2008, said the orchestra, like MoRUS and its partner organizations, “strongly believes in the power of spectacle for positive change.”

Photo by skeddy in NYC, courtesy of Flickr Creative Commons.

By Paul Bisceglio

If a new mother in the city happens to challenge you to guess her baby’s name, you now know your safest bet: Isabella or Jayden.

On Wednesday, mayor Michael Bloomberg announced New York City’s most popular baby names of 2011. The results were gleaned from the Health Department’s birth certificates, which identified 623 girls named Isabella and 851 boys named Jayden out of the 123,029 babies born in the city last year. Both names now have retained their number one position for three years in a row.

The survey included rankings of the top 10 names for boys and girls in the city, both overall and by race, as well as notes on celebrity inspirations, spelling variations and babies named after places. Sofia’s in, Sophia’s even cooler and, according to the New York Times, Brooklyn’s not nearly as popular as it used to be.

“A baby born in New York City has a life expectancy 2.5 years longer than the national average, in no small part due to our bold public health initiatives,” Bloomberg proclaimed. “This means we can expect to see many of the very popularly named Isabellas and Jaydens – like these two little ones with us today – more than 80 years from now.”

Check out the official press release for more stats and rankings.

Photo by ericrichardson, courtesy of Flickr Creative Commons.

By Paul Bisceglio

Bill Bratton served as New York City’s Police Commissioner from 1994 to 1996, when he was forced because of disagreements with former Mayor Rudy Giuliani over credit for the city’s decrease in crime. Now, he is interested in returning to the position.

The Wall Street Journal reported that Bratton has met with mayoral hopefuls Public Advocate Bill de Blasio, former Comptroller Bill Thompson, Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer and media executive Tom Allon to talk about the job.

“I’ll be quite frank, if that position were to be offered, I’d have to seriously consider it,” Bratton told WSJ. “I fully intend, at some point in time, to return to the public sector.”

The city’s current Police Commissioner, Raymond Kelly, is expected to step down when Mayor Michael Bloomberg leaves office in December 2013, though Kelly has not announced officially whether he would consider serving under Bloomberg’s successor.

Bratton has been Police Commissioner in Boston and Los Angeles in addition to New York, and was even considered for the position as head of Scotland Yard. He currently works as chairman of Kroll, an international intelligence and information management company.

“Bill Bratton is recognized as one of the finest and most respected people in law enforcement in the country and around the world,” Thompson’s campaign said in a statement. “He did an exemplary job as police commissioner of New York City and Los Angeles and his innovative strategies produced a significant reduction in crime.”

Some mayoral candidates have told WSJ that they are speaking with numerous law-enforcement professionals about the position, including John Timoney, who has served as Commissioner of Philadelphia’s and Miami’s police forces, and Garry McCarthy, Chicago’s Police Commissioner.

Eugene O’Donnell, a professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, told WSJ that Bratton is greatly admired, but there is a “strong case” to bring in an outsider with a “fresh set of eyes.”

“No knock on Kelly, no knock on Bratton,” he said, “but there’s more than a couple of people who can run the police department and run it well.”

Downtown was buzzing with excitement yesterday for the prospect of free vibrators. Trojan announced that it would be distributing 10,000 Tri-Phoria and The Pulse devices — $40 and $30 retail values, respectively! — from two hot dog carts in different neighborhoods throughout the day, so New Yorkers lined the streets of the planned locations in anticipation.

Most people left disappointed, though, because a City Hall rep stopped the popular condom brand from delivering the goods shortly after they set up shop.

Citizens were not shy to express their frustration with the city’s interruption to media on the scene. “There’s a lot more important things the city should be worried about than a free-vibrator giveaway,” bar owner Melody Henry told New York Post. “Bloomberg doesn’t want anyone to have fun. You can’t have a giant soda. You can’t have a vibrator.”

Bodegas, you see, are some of the New York City businesses that will clean up at the expense of the “little guys,” like pizza parlors and McDonald’s, if, as expected, Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s new soda policy goes into effect in September. That was just one of several hollow arguments opponents made at last week’s Board of Health public hearing.

The argument, advanced by Council Members Melissa Mark-Viverito and Letitia James, among others, is that because the limit to large sugary drinks applies to restaurants but not many bodegas, supermarkets and candy stores, it sets up an unfair advantage.

Here’s the apparent theory. You go into a shop for a pizza slice. You’re desperate for more than 16 ounces of soda—not so desperate that you’ll buy two or three sodas at the parlor, which would still be permissible, but just thirsty enough to take the slice into the bodega next door and wait on line again to buy a large amount of soda in one container. Or you are so determined to have a Big Gulp that you’ll choose your meal based on the available drink size.

Jimmy Alix, who works at an East Harlem candy store barely wide enough to squeeze in two-liter bottles of soda, is not expecting a rush of business from the pizza shop across the street or the other two a block away from his shop on Lexington Avenue and 124th Street.

“I don’t think so,” he said. “People are going to buy whatever size they have there.”

At least three other nearby places would be permitted to sell large sodas: a small grocery, another candy store and a Pathmark. Large soda consumption would undoubtedly continue, but some people would clearly drink less and, perhaps as important, the debate has likely made many people more aware of how many empty calories they drink.

Former Gov. David Paterson tried to talk truth to powerful bodegas and others a few years ago with a soda tax, but Big Sugar beat him. An industry ad back then showed a small grocery owner saying his customers calculate their food bills down to the penny. It was meant to trigger outrage that working-class people would pay more, but it really showed that the tax would lead to healthier choices.

Another of the absurd arguments by lobbyists and opponents is that it limits free choice. Although not a goal of the Bloomberg plan, it would actually expand choice in places like movie theaters.

The misnamed group leading the opposition backed in part by movie theater chains, New Yorkers for Beverage Choices, didn’t have anything to say about their effort to keep limits on consumer choice.

At least one opponent “expert” said there’s no proof that people will take in fewer calories. It shouldn’t take an Ivy League professor to point out the obvious—people tend to drink all that they are served—but it did.

“The science on this is quite clear:  As people are served larger portions, they generally consume more food,” said Kelly Brownell, director of Yale’s Rudd Center for Food Policy & Obesity.

The Council members do care about the problem—James said she sees obesity in her Central Brooklyn district every day and it sends her to too many funerals. They’re right that the policy is not a complete solution, and other measures, like youth fitness programs, may be more helpful. But it seems they’re saying that if you don’t do everything you can to battle obesity, don’t do anything.

David Jones, a plan supporter and CEO of the Community Service Society of New York, said he has spent too much of his career trying to improve social services to wait for the perfect idea.

“I have to do something now,” he said at the hearing, “because this is really ripping through poor communities.”

Josh Rogers, contributing editor at Manhattan Media, is a lifelong New Yorker.

The Fastrack program replaced the old system of closing down subway stations for several weekends at a time in order to make repairs. Now the MTA will partially close a line during four consecutive weeknights from 10 p.m. to 5 a.m., keeping it fully operational during the day and over the weekend. The change is partly in response to a 5.3 percent boost in weekend ridership since 2007, according to MTA figures.

The survey, conducted between mid-June and July of this year and answered by 990 people, also found that locals are clamoring for Upper East Side ferry service. Seventy-one percent of respondents said they’d use the East River Ferry if it stopped nearby. Seventy-two percent said they support a new City Council proposal to give letter grades, much like the Department of Health currently gives to restaurants, to each subway station.

Columbia Jumps Into Tech Ed
Earlier this week, Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Columbia University President Lee Bollinger announced that the city will be partnering with the school to create a new institute for data sciences and engineering as part of the city’s Applied Sciences NYC initiative.

The city will give $15 million in funding and financial assistance to Columbia to create the new school, a figure that includes discounted energy transmission costs and partial debt forgiveness. The school will create 44,000 square feet of space on the campus by 2016 and hire 75 new faculty members over the next 15 years as the applied science and engineering programs grow. The program will be located at Columbia’s Morningside Heights and Washington Heights campuses and will fall under the umbrella of the Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.

“We are proud of Columbia Engineering’s ascent among its peers over the past decade and the impact of its constant stream of innovations on our economy,” said Bollinger in a statement. “We know from experience that the creativity and dynamism of this new Data Sciences Institute will be ignited by collaborations that are possible because they are part of the wide diversity of intellectual excellence that defines not just a great urban research university like Columbia, but the genius of New York City itself.”

The mayor and other politicians praised the deal for its potential to create jobs and boost the local economy. According to a study conducted by the city’s Economic Development Corporation, the project is expected to generate $3.9 billion in overall economic activity over the next 30 years, including 4,223 permanent jobs and 285 construction jobs, as well as the creation of 170 spin-off companies in the city.

Columbia’s proposal was also hailed for its focus on data science in ways that will impact the city in the near future. The new institute will have five specific departments: new media, smart cities, health analytics, cybersecurity and financial analytics.

“New York City is quickly becoming a national epicenter for tech innovation,” said Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer in a statement. “The new Center…is an exciting new initiative that will support advances in the promising technologies of tomorrow and will continue to attract the best and the brightest to the city. The city’s investment in the project is a forward-thinking use of capital resources to promote continued growth in these fields.”

Columbia had previously put in a bid to receive a hefty chunk of city funding and access to city-owned land to develop a new applied sciences campus; that $100 million deal was awarded to a partnership between Cornell University and Israel’s Technion Institute to build a 2 million-square-foot tech campus on Roosevelt Island. Bloomberg has consistently said that the city would be open to awarding funding and making deals with more than one of the 17 schools that initially applied. In April of this year, the city reached an agreement with an NYU-led consortium to create an urban science and progress center in downtown Brooklyn as part of the Applied Science program.

East Side Access Tunnel Finished
The giant underground construction project that will eventually connect the Long Island Railroad to Grand Central Terminal hit a major milestone this week, though it still has a long way to go before it’s operational. Construction crews for the East Side Access project finished boring the tunnel that will make the rail connections possible. The MTA’s 200-ton boring machine, nicknamed “Molina” after a group of sixth graders chose the moniker, finished its journey on Monday and will now be scrapped as the next phase of the project gets underway.
“We’re literally starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel on completing East Side Access, the largest mass transit project under construction anywhere in the country. There’s still a lot of work to be done, but it’s worth taking a moment to celebrate this important milestone. I congratulate all the sandhogs, MTA employees—and Molina!—for completing this difficult and grueling task,” said East Side Rep. Carolyn Maloney.
The project is located almost entirely in Maloney’s district, and she has pushed for federal funding to keep it going.

Night Out Against Crime
The Upper East Side’s 19th Precinct will participate in the National Night Out Against Crime this Tuesday, Aug. 7, from 5–8 p.m. Police officers will be on hand to talk to community members about crime prevention and the issues that are of concern to the neighborhood. There will be activities for kids and adults, including live music from the French Cookin’ Blues Band and refreshments from Manny’s on 2nd, Butterfield Market, Pintaile’s on York, Maz Mescal, Le Pain Quotidien and Shake Shack. The event will be at Carl Schurz Park at East 86th Street and East End Avenue, weather permitting. For more information, contact the 19th Precinct’s Community Affairs liaison at 212-452-0613 or lynch19ca@aol.com.

Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Council Speaker Christie Quinn announced on Tuesday that a study by the City Clerk’s office  and NYC & Company, the city’s tourism agency, estimated that same sex-marriages have contributed $259 million to the city’s economy since New York passed the Marriage Equality Act one year ago on July 24.

“Marriage equality has made our City more open, inclusive and free – and it has also helped to create jobs and support our economy,” Bloomberg said in the statement. “New York has always been a great place to get married and since the passage of the Marriage Equality Act, we’re welcoming more and more couples, their families and friends from around the country and the world.”

According to the survey, over 201,000 same-sex wedding guests visited from outside the city. They booked over 235,000 hotel rooms at an average rate of $275 a day, as well as paid for dining, celebrations, gifts and various other wedding-related purchases. Add this income to at least 8,200 gay-marriage licenses that were purchased in the last year (couples are not required to disclose their sexes) and $16 million in tax revenue from the marriages, and you start to get a sense of the same-sex wedding business’s size.

“Thirteen months ago our legislators did the right thing and voted to make same-sex marriage a reality, ensuring that New York State was among the leaders in equality,” said City Comptroller John Liu in a statement. “Today’s announcement is simply the icing on the wedding cake.”

In addition to New York, same-sex marriage is legal in Connecticut, Iowa, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont and the District of Columbia. Massachusetts led the charge in 2004, and found similar economic growth: gay marriage added an estimated $111 million to the state’s economy in five years.

Via Citi Bike

By Paul Bisceglio

Where are all the bikes?

New Yorkers expected to see 7,000 more of them at this point in the summer, but now Citi Bike, the city’s new bike share program, has been delayed for unspecified reasons.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg confirmed in a radio interview on Friday that the city was unsure of when the new fleet of bicycles would be available to the eager public for rent.

“Still working, trying to get it done,” he said. “With any big system there’s always things that you’ve got to make sure work before you turn it on. We’re not going to turn it on until it’s ready.”

Department of Transportation spokesman Seth Solomonow echoed Bloomberg in a statement. “We’re working on the launch plan and will update the public as soon as we finalize all the details,” he said.

The Citi Bike initiative aims to have 10,000 bikes on city streets with 600 moveable docking stations by the end of next summer. Users will pay a daily, monthly or annual fee to have 24-hour access to the bikes, which they can ride of up to 45 minutes per session without additional charge.

Citi Bike’s website, which previously said “Citi Bike is launching in July!,” now promises that the program is “coming soon to a street near you.” The program’s Twitter feed said earlier in the month, “look for the launch in August,” but an official date remains to be set.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg and the City Council reached a budget agreement on Monday that increases city funding for child care and after-school programs, but it may not be enough to help the Bloomingdale Family Program’s Head Start program on the Upper West Side, which is projected to shut down in the fall.

The budget agreement adds about $150 million in combined funding to the Administration for Children’s Services’ (ACS) child care program and the Department of Youth and Community Development’s Out-of-School Time program, a significant increase from the levels proposed in the executive budget released in May. Instead of losing 6,500 child care spots and 30,000 after-school slots as originally projected, the city will actually have more child care spots in the new fiscal year than it did this past year.

“Working parents need to have their children protected and cared for while they are at work,” said City Council Speaker Christine Quinn in a statement from the mayor’s office. “Children need to receive a high-quality educational experience at an early age. We are creating a program that responds to both of these needs.”

But it is not yet clear how the budget will affect the ACS’ EarlyLearn NYC program, which ACS says will increase quality standards for children enrolled in the city’s subsidized centers, home-based programs and Head Start and expand the capacity of infant and child care programs.

ACS tentatively determined which programs would be awarded seats through EarlyLearn, most of them located in “targeted ZIP codes”—low-income areas—while those located in non-targeted ZIP codes—wealthier areas such as the Upper West Side—could lose seats. Bloomingdale’s Head Start program, located at 171 W. 107th St. is one program at risk, set to shut down in the fall.

Julissa Borday, whose 4-year-old daughter, Skylar, attends the program, said that EarlyLearn’s ZIP code-based funding distribution is unfair.

“You can’t generalize,” Borday said. “That’s a logical fallacy right there. You can’t assume that everyone who lives here is high-income. That’s not the case.”

José Velilla, Bloomingdale’s executive director, agreed, noting that he doesn’t know if this week’s budget agreement will help at all.
“There are still major funding issues with EarlyLearn in and of itself,” he said. “It’s a good thing for those parents who were concerned about losing those slots in after-school, but how the restoration dollars affects EarlyLearn is still unclear.”

Tia Waddy, ACS director of communications, said that the matter is still under consideration.

“The Administration for Children’s Services is grateful for the funding added to early care and education by Mayor Bloomberg and the New York City Council,” Waddy said. “Once the budget has been finalized and voted on by the Council, we will review how the additional resources will be distributed among centers eligible to receive EarlyLearn NYC funding. The City Council will also be allocating money to centers of their choosing via their own discretionary funds.”

Adriana Carrera hopes to enroll her 2-year-old son, Ismail Abuzaid, in the Bloomingdale Head Start program in the fall. If the center closes, however, she won’t be able to afford another day care for her son and will have to care for him at home during the day. The news of potential closure startled her.

“I was thinking, what are we going to do now?” Carrera said. “To look for a place for him is so expensive.”
“They’re being hypocritical,” added Paola Padilla, whose 4-year-old son, Jaden, is in the program. “They’re saying that they’re helping when they’re actually cutting seats.”

EarlyLearn will also not fund half-day slots at city-subsidized child care centers—only full-day slots will be available. But Stephan Russo, the executive director of child care programs at the Goddard Riverside Community Center, said he is not too concerned about tit.
“It services less families, but those Head Start children will have a full-day experience,” Russo said.

Other programs on the Upper West Side that could face cuts are the West Side Montessori School, the Mabel Barrett Fitzgerald Center located in the Lincoln Square Neighborhood Center and the Polly Dodge Day Care Center.

Yesterday, Mayor Michael Bloomberg and the City Council passed a $68.5 billion budget for 2013, which will help to save some children’s programs and 20 fire companies, the Huffington Post reports.

“Working with our partners in the Council, we’ve again produced an on-time, balanced budget for our city that doesn’t raise taxes on New Yorkers, and that preservers the essential services that keep our city strong,” Mayor Bloomberg said regarding the budget.

“These actions… have allowed us avoid the severe service cuts that many other cities are facing.”

Mayor Bloomberg - photo by Flickr commons

According to Bloomberg’s press release, the budget increase will allow the city to add about 1,000 teachers to the school system and will add about $150 million to after-school programs.

Public Advocate for New York City Bill De Blasio agrees.

“We are immensely relieved that working families will not face the worst cuts to child care and after school programs in memory. This is a hard-earned victory for the thousands of parents and advocates who stared down the Mayor’s attempt to dismantle the system so many kids rely upon,” De Blasio said.

The Huffington Post says saving the fire companies will cost roughly $59 million.

In his address, Bloomberg did not identify what exactly was cut to make room for the spared programs.

Other topics addressed in the budget were cultural institutions and taxi medallions.

Funding for cultural institutions will be increase by roughly $50 million, slightly more than in 2012, with the city citing the institutions’ effect on tourism as a large reason.

The city also expects to see $635 million in taxi medallion revenue in 2013.

“We face a significant challenge again next year, but given the effective and fiscally responsible partnership we’ve had with the Council – and the leadership we know we can rely on from Speaker Christine Quinn – I’m confident we’ll meet any challenges that arise,” Mayor Bloomberg added.

–Nick Gallinelli