The OTTY Awards have become an annual tradition anticipated by many in the Upper East Side community as a celebration of what makes the neighborhood great. (See the Letter to the Editor by Betty Cooper Wallerstein on page 14.) OTTY stands for Our Town Thanks You – they are an opportunity to show the entire community’s gratitude to the people who work tirelessly, selflessly and often thanklessly to improve the lives of their neighbors and the character of their neighborhood. Our group of honorees this year includes the City Council members whose districts combined cover the entire Upper East Side, as well as a people who have contributed to the neighborhood in less visible but incredibly important ways. It’s sometimes easy to forget that when you talking about a city the size of New York, you’re really talking about distinct neighborhoods that make up its unique fabric. For years Our Town has proudly focused on covering the important local news and community feature stories that matter to New Yorkers who call the East Side home. We’re incredibly excited to continue that tradition and expand the coverage of this great neighborhood.

Check out our winners below:

East Siders of the Year: Dan Garodnick & Jessica Lappin

John Muniz, The Hospital’s Doctor

Father Witt, S.J., Revamps the Upper East Side

Rabbi Deborah Hirsch Keeps Her Congregants Close

The Man Helping Build Homes New Yorkers Will Love

Hospital CEO Gives His All for His Patients, Staff

Gracious Savior Revamps Iconic New York City Home Store

The Woman Keeping Yorkville Alive

A Humble Tarik Hunter Exemplifies New York City’s “Bravest and Finest”

Mike Beck is a Friend to Everyone

An Artistic Director Gives Kids and Families a Lift

Cathy Dove Oversees a Bold New Experiment at Cornell

Barbara Coffey Continues to Help Carnegie Hill Flourish

Ann Cook Is a Champion for Education Reform in the City

Matt Baney Makes Giant Strides for Community Health

Sol Adler Praises 92Y’s Activist Commitments

A Nurse with a Passion for Her ER Patients

The OTTYs are a wonderful idea to encourage and recognize New Yorkers who take pride in what they do, how they work and their achievements, whether paid for or volunteered. And we can express our pride in them by supporting their names for OTTY awards.

Each and every year of the 29 years since I co-founded and have led the East 79 Street Neighborhood Association, I have met and admired a number of people whom I felt proud to nominate for an OTTY; and this year is no exception. I send names for each OTTY category of people who stand out from their colleagues in the way they think, relate, and demonstrate that they truly care about the business or residential community in which they participate. These are people who work the extra mile, take that extra challenge, do that unexpected, generous and often anonymous action that benefits many others.

So it is important at a time when the media is overwhelmed with reporting of daily, horrific news, that there be an OTTYs opportunity to recognize and publicize positive, inspirational efforts and behavior. I thank Our Town for continuing its OTTY Awards each year.

- Betty Cooper Wallerstein

Essential Crime Coverage

 I follow crime news on the Upper East Side in both Our Town and DNAInfo.com, which is not easy to do because it is only sporadically covered. I was intrigued by your article, “76 Percent of Stop and Frisks are Minorities in 19th Precinct” (OT, February 14th, 2013) .As a member of the 19th Precinct Community Council and the East 79th Street Neighborhood Association, I support the NYPD’s Stop, Question and Frisk Policy because it deters crime and saves lives. Without this policy the crime rate in the city would sky rocket. Who wants crime to go up? Nobody!
Stop, Question and Frisk is based upon the descriptions of perpetrators provided by crime victims. It is a tragedy that such a marked percentage of persons stopped by the NYPD are people of color. The Upper East Side is not necessarily safe for women: iPhone theft, purse snatchings, sexual violence, burglaries, auto larcenies, and cyber crime are fairly commonplace here. We often hear that crime is down but I think that crime information is not fully reported to the public (dare I say suppressed by the Bloomberg administration) because of an economic fear that newcomers and tourists to the city would stay away from New York.

Whatever the case, there should be more, not less, crime information published in Our Town and on the six o’clock news. By doing so, the community can develop defensive strategies on how to avoid becoming a crime statistic.

-Andrea K. Zimmermann

]]> http://nypress.com/letters-to-the-editor-3/feed/ 0 http://nypress.com/the-first-annual-downtown-otty-awards/ http://nypress.com/the-first-annual-downtown-otty-awards/#comments Thu, 13 Dec 2012 17:37:44 +0000 Megan Finnegan Bungeroth http://nypress.com/?p=59783 Our Town Downtown thanks the people who make life in lower Manhattan spectacular

Council Member Margaret Chin, Downtowner of the Year

When we decided to start a tradition of presenting awards to outstanding community members who live and work in downtown Manhattan, the one thing we knew would be easy was finding recipients. We weren’t disappointed.

The inaugural Downtown OTTY (Our Town Thanks You) Awards honor a diverse group of amazing people from all neighborhoods, professions and backgrounds, but the one thing they have in common is their commitment to making downtown an incredible place. Whether it’s a school chef getting kids excited about kale chips, a longtime block association president dedicated to preserving local history or a yoga instructor who gives back, each of our winners brings their specific brand of vision, passion and talent to their community.

We hope you enjoy reading about the people who make your neighborhood great, and we know that they’ll all continue to impress us in the coming year.

Sincerely,

Megan Bungeroth

Editor-in-Chief, Our Town Downtown

2012 Downtown OTTY Award winners

Council Member Margaret Chin – Downtowner of the Year

Susan Henshaw Jones – Culture

Derrick Komorowski – Real Estate Royalty

Kit Yuen – Healthcare Pro

Liz Berger – Community Builder

Dr. James Cooper – Religion

Officer James Rudolph – Bravest & Finest

David Garza – Downtown Recovery

Barbara Warren – Healthcare Pro

Jenny Gensterblum – Culinary Excellence

Tricia Donegan – Entrepreneur

Christopher Kui – Downtown Recovery

Richard Blodgett – Community Builder

Emily Rafferty used to roller skate by the Metropolitan Museum, where she is now president.

By Paulette Safdieh

Visitors come to the Upper East Side from all over the world for a bite to eat at Serendipity 3 or a carriage ride through Central Park, but most of all to spend some time visiting Museum Mile. Our famed museums along 5th Avenue keep our neighborhood bustling with culture and give our children some of the greatest educational opportunities outside of the classroom. Our biggest museum, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, dates back to 1866.
Current president and OTTY Award winner Emily Rafferty makes sure The Met continues to thrive and contribute to our community.
Raised on Park Avenue, Rafferty, 63, developed a love for The Met at a young age.
“I would roller skate by it on my way home and it was a part of my life to come to the museum,” said Rafferty. “I remember going to The Cloisters for the first time and being overwhelmed by its beauty. It was part of my neighborhood and I definitely embraced it.”
Rafferty attended grade school at the Convent of the Sacred Heart on East 91st Street, where she later served on the board for 15 years, four of those as chairwoman. While there, she fundraised and worked with city agencies to have the building’s façade restored. She attended high school at the Chapin School on East 84th Street and graduated from Boston University in 1971. During her college years in Massachusetts, she returned for a summer to work at the Lenox Hill Neighborhood House. She moved back to Manhattan for good in 1975.
“I’ve been very involved in the community,” said Rafferty. “My siblings and I are all very, very tied to the neighborhood.”
Rafferty started working at The Met at just 25 years old as an assistant director in the development office. Museum executives noticed her hard work and knack for fundraising and she continued to gain responsibilities. She became the first female vice president of the museum in 1984 and became president 20 years later. She now manages the over 2,000 employees and volunteers who serve 5.6 million annual visitors and take care of 2 million pieces of artwork.
“The greatest challenges are just the scope of what goes on at the museum on a day-to-day basis—everything from activities to visitors and what happens beyond the walls of The Met,” Rafferty said about her job. “It’s establishing priorities and making sure that problems get solved.”
Beyond her work at The Met, Rafferty chairs NYC & Company, the city’s tourism office, and serves as a member of the board of directors of the National September 11 Memorial and Museum.
To get some breathing space, Rafferty walks through Central Park each morning to get to the museum from her West 77th Street apartment, where she lives with husband of 25 years, John Rafferty, a partner at Ernst & Young.
Since she moved from the Upper East Side over 20 years ago, Rafferty said the area has changed greatly with regard to its popularity and increased tourism industry. However, she said that the same core values of family and community from her childhood still characterize the neighborhood.
“There were a lot of very qualified people nominated for this award and I feel honored to receive it,” said Rafferty. “I don’t quite know why I emerged out of everyone else.” n

Maloney on the roof of the Azure building. Photo by Andrew Schwartz.

Some politicians get themselves noticed for the things they say. Others work quietly, hoping to gain attention for the things they do. The rare breed of national legislator is able to land in the spotlight both for their pithy turns of phrase and for their hard-won accomplishments. Rep. Carolyn Maloney is that kind of lawmaker.

The Upper East Side congresswoman has been enjoying national attention lately for her mantra “Where are the women?” a non-rhetorical question posed first to fellow Rep. Darrell Issa when a panel he chaired on religious freedom and birth control was devoid of female speakers and subsequently to every media outlet that would listen as a general indictment of Republican-led policy that seeks to legislate women’s rights.

It’s a catchy and of-the-moment question, but it’s one that Maloney has been asking for decades, as a chief sponsor and continual champion of the Equal Rights Amendment, as the author of the Debbie Smith Act, which allocates $151 million in federal funding a year to process DNA evidence in sexual assault cases and as a reliably unyielding proponent of women’s rights on the national stage.

Maloney has proven she can walk the walk (often in heels) and talk the talk (often with wry jabs at right-wingers and the few political opponents who have challenged her). In her almost 20 years as a congresswoman, she has also been able to strike an impressive balance between advocating for national issues and supporting local ones.

One of her signature measures has been fighting to get federal transit dollars pumped into the overcrowded East Side public transportation system.

“I am very proud of finally finishing the Second Avenue Subway,” Maloney said in reference to funding the first phase. “For those of us who ride the good old Lexington Avenue line, one of the most overcrowded in the nation, there really is a limit to how many people you can stuff into that subway car.”

Over the years, she’s helped secure $4 billion in federal funds for the project, which has generated approximately 38,000 jobs, and she said that when she first began pushing for it, she faced an uphill battle.

“I got $5 million to do a study and then another $5 million for an engineer’s report, and then I just kept pushing it,” Maloney said. “Then we finally broke through, and every day I worked on it.”

She said one of the efforts of which she is most proud is her work on the Anti-Terrorism Intelligence Reform Act, the law that changed the structure of the intelligence system in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, and on the 9/11 Health and Compensation Act.

“I think it’s an example of how this government can really get things done when we’re determined to get things done. We completely reorganized our government and made homeland security our No. 1 top priority,” Maloney said. She also isn’t shy about insisting that New York deserves the lion’s share of anti-terrorism funding.

Maloney, originally from North Carolina, got her first taste of community leadership when she became president of the 92nd Street Block Association, representing the street she has lived on since 1976. In 1982, she was elected to the City Council and in 1992, she ran for Congress, shocking many by ousting incumbent Republican Bill Green and becoming the first woman to represent the 14th District.

She’s been re-elected nine times and recently kicked off her 10th re-election campaign, this time for the renamed and redrawn 12th District, encompassing parts of north Brooklyn (which she used to represent) as well as the Upper East Side and eastern Queens. Maloney doesn’t bat an eyelash at the potential challenges inherent in representing both Williamsburg and Park Avenue.

“I have to study the area and work with the other elected officials, and my work is really a result of what the needs are,” Maloney said of her 100,000 potential new constituents. “When I represented that area, they had an incinerator and I called for the first federal hearing on the incinerator and literally closed it down, so that was a major environmental victory.”

Recently named Public Official of the Year by Earth Day New York and the New York office of the Natural Resources Defense Council, Maloney doesn’t back away from issues she sees as vital for the environment. She’s currently embroiled in battling against the Marine Transfer Station planned for East 91st Street, citing concerns for the East River as well as about public health conditions in the surrounding neighborhood.

“Sometimes it’s not what you do, it’s what you stop. When they tried to close the veteran’s hospital on 23rd Street, that became a goal and a passion of mine to keep it open,” Maloney said—and she succeeded. She also successfully lobbied against the closure of several post offices in her district.

She’s been heavily involved in creating new schools for the Upper East Side, working to form the East Side Task Force on education that led to the formation of several local schools.

“I can remember meetings where I said, if you can’t give us a school, I’m going to have to open up my home and move the kids in, because we really need it,” Maloney said.

Maloney lives near her office on East 92nd Street, a fact she said she relishes because she loves that part of the Upper East Side. She spends as much time in the neighborhood as she can.

She has two daughters, Virginia and Christine, with her late husband Clifton Maloney, a wealthy investment banker who died in 2009 pursuing one of his passions, mountain climbing, in Tibet. Now that her children are out of the house, she focuses even more on her career—though she admits she takes time for gardening and is even planning to get back on a bicycle this spring to promote new bike lanes—and seems undaunted by the premise of a three-borough campaign in a contentious election year. She credits her staff for helping her maintain a local focus.

“One of the reasons I ran for office was that after 12 years of Bush and Reagan, federal aid to the city was cut by 74 percent,” she said. “It got so that we could hardly do anything. You could see the importance of the federal government for doing anything local, particularly big projects such as housing, transportation, major investments…

“To this day, we do send more in tax revenue than what comes back, and it’s my job to try to get every penny of it,” she said.

The hundreds of commendations lining the walls of her office and her obvious pride in her work clearly speak to the seriousness with which she takes her job in Congress, but Maloney admits that she relishes creating legislation and finds it, well, fun.

“It’s sort of like a game to me,” she said, explaining how she can introduce so many bills (70 in the last full session, tying her for the most from any representative). “There’s a problem and I just sit in front of a fire or a pretty view and I think of a legislative fix.”