Neufeld Playground

“This playground was originally built in 1937,” Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe said at the ceremony. “By the 1990s it had fallen into disrepair, and [Henry Neufeld] stepped forward, and as one of his last acts of philanthropy, he funded the reconstruction and provided the endowment. That was 20 years ago; it’s amazing what can happen to a playground that gets heavy use in 20 years, and it needed another fix-up.”

The biggest change to the playground was the installation of new play equipment, which has already proven popular with local kids. There are separate sections, designed for toddlers and for older children, as well as a space in the middle with benches that surround the park’s iconic elephant statues that spray water from their trunks, allowing parents and nannies to keep an eye on both areas of “Elephant Playground.” The department added a ledge surrounding the giant sandbox so kids and parents can sit on it, as well as a handicap-accessible sand table so that disabled children can get into the sand too. There is also an ADA-accessible swing on the new swing set, new safety surfacing, and new plantings in the gardens surrounding the equipment.

Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer, whose office allocated $500,000 in capital funds for the renovation, praised Benepe and the Riverside Park Fund for pushing for the revitalization of the park and getting it done.

“I went this past weekend to P.S. 199 to the playground with my wife and my little guy, 8-month-old Max, and for the first time put Max on the swing in the park, and it was this overwhelming experience,” said Stringer. “It really is an amazing experience when you realize that this really matters to kids and parents, because, let’s face it, we live in this big urban center.”

Council Member Gale Brewer, who channeled $400,000 of funding to the renovation, hailed the project’s landscape architect, Margaret Bracken, for designing such a beautiful new play area.

“Every dollar of your money … that we can allocate to Riverside Park is well spent, because it is thoughtful, it has soul and commitment and it’s something that we can be proud of for generations to come,” Brewer said.

Bracken said that when she was redesigning the playground, she wanted to preserve some original elements like the giant leafy trees that shade the toddler area, and pay homage to long-lost parts of the original design.

“In the early designs from the 1930s and 1940s, those Moses-era playgrounds, they actually had little playhouses in them,” Bracken said, explaining why she decided to include a modern playhouse in the toddler section.

For the older kids, parent feedback drove her to create a more inventive structure.

“The unit that was there before wasn’t really challenging enough,” Bracken said. “Parents now become very involved in the selection of the units, and they wanted something that had a lot more climbing, swinging, upper body components, as well as, of course, good slides and all the traditional elements.”

Benepe, who paused frequently during speaking to joke with the kids at the playground, is leaving his post as commissioner to become the Urban Programs Director at the Trust for Public Land. He acknowledged this was most likely his last ribbon cutting as parks commissioner and said he’ll miss events such as this.

“What I do love about this job is that I have a great excuse to go hang out in playgrounds,” Benepe said.

By Paul Bisceglio

“When you see banners that say ‘luxury housing,’ you know something has gone wrong.”

City Council member Dan Garodnick delivered this message in a news conference last week to a crowd of tenants in front of Independence Plaza North (IPN), a three-tower apartment complex along Greenwich Street in Tribeca. Garodnick was one of several city officials gathered to confirm their support of the tenants’ struggle to keep rents stabilized at the plaza, which was built as affordable housing in 1973 but now is leasing one- and two-bedroom apartments for up to $4,500 and $6,500 per month.

“We want the people who have made this neighborhood great to be able to stay in this neighborhood,” Council Speaker Christine Quinn told the crowd.

The long-term tenants cheered in agreement. After decades of petitioning for paved streets, traffic lights and schools in a neighborhood once full of empty factories, these residents say they ended up with a community so vibrant and popular that they can no longer afford to live in it.

The officials—who also included Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer, state Sen. Daniel Squadron, Councilwoman Jessica Lappin, former Community Board 1 Chair Julie Menin and others—announced their filing of three amicus briefs (unsolicited court documents) to convince the state’s Court of Appeals to consider the request by the Independence Plaza North Tenants’ Association (IPNTA) to return the complex’s 1,349 units to rent stabilization.

The Tenants’ Association has battled the complex’s landlord, Laurence Gluck of Stellar Management, for years. Gluck removed the buildings from the state-subsidizing housing initiative Mitchell-Lama in 2004 to pursue market rates for some apartments, but received tax breaks from the Department of Finance’s J-51 affordable housing program for two more years. He eventually repaid the amount he received in tax cuts plus interest, but the tenants argued that he could not forsake their rents’ stability after he had received benefits to secure them.

A lower-court judge ruled in the tenants’ favor in 2010, but the State Supreme Court’s Appellate Division reversed the decision last May on the grounds that Gluck actually should not have received J-51 tax breaks in the first place. The benefits were “merely the erroneous result of the [Department of Finance’s] failure to adjust IPN’s tax liability,” the judges said. “That error did not create rent stabilized status for a development that was not otherwise subject to the rent stabilization law.”

IPN’s tenants and the politicians supporting them see a dangerous precedent in this reversal. “By essentially making rent regulation optional for J-51 landlords,” said a conference press release, “[the court’s decision] may jeopardize the tens of thousands of New York City residents living in post-1973 buildings that receive J-51 benefits and are currently in any temporary, income-based program.”

Stephen B. Meister, a lawyer for the plaza, though, argues that this worry is unfounded. “The Appellate Division correctly held that IPN became ineligible for J-51 benefits upon exiting the Mitchell-Lama program, and therefore never became rent stabilized,” he told DNAinfo in a recent article.

If the Court of Appeals agrees to consider the tenants’ case, it would be their last chance to change the ruling. While some tenants will be affected differently than others if they fail, because some pay market rates while others’ rents remain protected, all would benefit from stabilized rents, argued the tenants’ lawyer Seth Miller at the conference.

IPNTA President Diane Lapson, a longtime resident of the complex, encouraged her fellow residents to be strong. “We built Tribeca. And we’re still building Tribeca,” she said. “Every great story has a great struggle.”

She said in an interview, “We made the neighborhood so great that other people wanted to move in, but now IPN is the diversity of Tribeca. Without it, this would be white-bread land. Without it, young people no longer have a choice of where to live [in the city] like I did.”

Caroline Bragdon, a research scientist with the Department of Health’s Division of Veterinary and Pest Control Services, came to the meeting at the community board office armed with more rat photos and information than most people would care to absorb in a lifetime. But part of the whole problem, she explained, is that people make incorrect assumptions about how to deal with rats instead of learning the facts.

Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer came by to express his solidarity—he lives among the rats too—and seriousness in combating what he said is the number one complaint his office receives, Manhattan-wide.

“The rats on my block, they don’t scurry anymore, they walk upright. They greet me and say, ‘Hello, Mr. Borough President, how are you this morning?’ ” Stringer said to knowing chuckles. “Part of what we have to do is think strategically about how to deal with this, because obviously no one wants to see rats scurrying around the community. It frightens senior citizens, it poses a danger to children, and it doesn’t give a lot of confidence in the city to see rats running rampant in the neighborhood.”

What makes the rat problem so intractable is that they love living in close proximity to people, who unwittingly provide all the food a family of the critters could ever want just in our garbage.

“Rats eat everything, and they especially enjoy things that we eat,” Bragdon said. And, confirming many people’s worst fear, “they usually live outside, but if you have food right on the other side of a non-pest-proof door, they will go inside, if you make it that easy for them.”

The recent warm winter has also exacerbated the issue, since it allowed the rats to continue breeding without the usual slowdown that comes with the extreme prolonged cold.

Along with learning that a full grown rat is mostly fur and can squeeze through any opening the size of its skull—roughly as big as a quarter—attendees at the Rat Academy learned how to prevent and exterminate the rodents, as well as how not to.

The basic lesson is that rats are attracted to food and are good at finding it. They can gnaw through almost anything. Poison, while an option, is itself problematic. For one thing, it needs to be applied strategically and by a professional. For another, some of the options that might work best, like tracking powder, are illegal and could easily also poison children, pets and other animals. The biggest hurdle, however, is getting the rats to actually eat the poison (Bragdon said it’s like “dry granola” to rats), which they won’t do if there is other, more delicious, food in the vicinity.

Simple tactics like putting the garbage out later or spraying down sidewalks to rid them of the urine paths rats follow to communicate with each other can help, Bragdon said. Plugging up holes and keeping litter off the streets is essential. Armoring all trash in lidded steel, just about the only thing that rats can’t chew through, is the best option, but more easily said than done.

On the East Side, the biggest problem area in the past has been Tramway Park, according to Council member Lappin’s office. The Parks Department has been acting to keep that area cleaner, however, which seems to be working.

“I find that if your block does the right thing, your building does the right thing, the problem is seriously abated,” Coucil Member Gale Brewer said. “The workings of the building managers really doing everything properly really gets rid of the problem.”

Some rat academy students asked if the folk remedies they’d heard, like sprinkling cayenne pepper or using mint-scented trash bags,would be effective, but Bragdon dismissed each desperate theory with a grim shake of her head.

“Remember,” she said. ‘This is the most successful mammal on Earth.”

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.”

Photo by iheartfishtown, courtesy of Flickr Creative Commons.

When the Department of Homeless Services (DHS) announced in July that it would soon move 200 homeless families into two residential West 95th Street Buildings, community members, elected officials and Community Board 7 (CB7) objected. The buildings were designed as single room occupancy units for low income residents, they argued, and were not equipped to provide treatment for the homeless’ large population of addicts and the mentally ill.

Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer, City Council Member Gale Brewer, Assembly member Linda Rosenthal and Community Board 7 chair Mark Diller sent a letter to DHS Commissioner Seth Diamond at the time asking him to suspend efforts to place the homeless families in the two buildings, 316 and 330 West 95th Street.

Yesterday, DHS decided not to listen. The Department moved 10 of the families into the former building, with plans to add the remaining 190 – a total of over 400 new residents – to both buildings over the next few months, according to Diamond.

“We’re absolutely furious about it,” one of the buildings’ 71 existing residents told New York Post. “No one was told anything at all.”

Now, Stringer, Brewer and Rosenthal are joining with State Senator Adriano Espaillat, Community Board 7 and Upper West Side residents in calling on DHS again to suspend immediately all efforts to refer clients to the buildings.

“[T]he proposal to house 200 adults, who are currently homeless, in 100 tiny rooms at 316 and 330 West 95 Street on a temporary basis is poor planning, poor policy, and includes little if any transparency,” said Brewer in a statement. “The process should have included a substantive planning discussion with Community Board 7, elected officials, current residents of the two buildings, and responsible neighborhood leaders to find a solution to the need for shelter for homeless individuals.”

Stringer agreed. “New Yorkers understand that all neighborhoods share in the responsibility to provide housing to those in need,” he said in a statement. “But abruptly moving a 400-person shelter into a residential neighborhood in the dead of summer with no community consultation, no contract and no long-term plan only creates bad will and sets back the cause of fighting homelessness.”

“By failing to conduct a dialogue with the community and the elected officials who represent it,” said Rosenthal, “DHS and its former commissioner Robert Hess have disrespected thoroughly this neighborhood.”

By Paul Bisceglio

Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer recommended conditional disapproval of the sale of three city-owned buildings in the Civic Center area last week. The Department of Citywide Administrative Services (DCAS) proposed the sale as part of the City’s 21st Century Civic Center plan, which aims to relocate municipal agencies out of the partially vacant and under-utilized buildings so they can be consolidated with other agencies elsewhere.

Relocation would reduce the city’s operating and maintenance costs, saving the city an estimated $100 million in the next 20 years.

Stringer endorsed the goal of consolidation, but argued that financial considerations should not be the sole motivation for the disposition of the three buildings, which are located at 22 Reade St., 49-51 Chambers St. and 346 Broadway.

“Lower Manhattan is one of the nation’s premier central business districts, but it is also experiencing a boom in its residential population,” he said in a statement. “I believe the city should strive to provide the infrastructure necessary to support this new population.”

Stringer stressed that vacant city-owned properties provide an opportunity for the city to meet this growing Lower Manhattan need. Rather than selling to commercial developers, he said, the city could provide community-related infrastructure like public schools, affordable housing, cultural space or space for nonprofit organizations, none of which are included in the current plan. Stringer noted that these spaces would be difficult to create in privately owned properties without significant cost to New York City taxpayers.

Stringer’s review suggested several conditions for the city to meet, including the modification of the proposal to include publicly oriented uses and the creation of a community and elected official task force to review future applications.

“The Civic Center plan offers great potential benefits to our city, and I look forward to discussing it further with the administration,” said Stringer. “By working together, I believe we can simultaneously advance the goal of consolidation, realize significant taxpayer savings and consider a variety of ways to meet the needs of Lower Manhattan.”

UWS Residents Want Their Trees Skirted
As New York enters the lazy days of the end of the summer, Upper West Side residents have not been idle. Recently, Council Member Gale Brewer has received so many calls about tree skirts that she was compelled to take action. Brewer heard from constituents on Columbus Avenue that several trees and lampposts had been summarily stripped of their coverings. According to a letter that Brewer sent to Department of Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan, demanding answers to the perplexing case, the tree skirts and lamppost collars have been removed from the four corners of West 75th Street and Columbus Avenue, as well as from two corners of West 74th Street and Columbus Avenue. The Upper West Side community is normally quite vigilant about maintaining pleasant and historically correct streetscapes, so it should come as no surprise to the DOT that locals are calling for answers. Brewer politely asked the DOT to return the swiped skirts as well as inform the community why they disappeared in the first place.

Free Summer Concerts Continue
The Lincoln Square Business Improvement District is hosting free outdoor concerts for the lunch crowd every Wednesday in August, from 12-2 p.m., in Richard Tucker Park. On Aug. 15, the Opera Collective will be bringing some classical fare to the park with an Opera in the Square afternoon. The Aug. 22 concert will be “Pop to Beatlemania” with Andy Suzuki & The Method and The Meetles, and the series will wrap up Aug. 29 with The Brotherhood of the Jug Band Blue and the Ukuladies playing early American tunes. The park is on West 66th Street from Broadway to Columbus Avenue. Music lovers are encouraged to bring their lunch and something to sit on to watch the show.

Locals Rally Against Homeless Shelters
The Department of Homeless Services (DHS) is plowing ahead with its plan to house 200 homeless families in single room occupancy (SRO) buildings on the Upper West Side. Despite the strident objections of the community board, City Council Member Gale Brewer, Assembly Member Linda Rosenthal, State Sen. Adriano Espaillat and Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer, DHS announced earlier this week that they will begin moving homeless residents into the buildings at 316 and 330 W. 95th St.

The buildings are serving as emergency shelters, meaning that DHS doesn’t have to adhere to normal regulations governing where shelters can be placed. The buildings operated as illegal hotels until recently and the owners were fined $600,000 by the city. Instead of returning the SRO units to their originally intended uses, to house low-income residents in small, cheap apartments, the landlords have turned to DHS to offer the buildings as emergency shelters. In return, DHS pays $111.99 per unit per day. Residents and local pols aren’t happy with this choice.

“New Yorkers understand that all neighborhoods share in the responsibility to provide housing to those in need,” said Stringer. “But abruptly moving a 400-person shelter into a residential neighborhood in the dead of summer with no community consultation, no contract and no long-term plan only creates bad will and sets back the cause of fighting homelessness.”

Officials have repeatedly asked DHS to address the neighborhood’s concerns—chiefly that the sudden influx of residents who may have substance abuse or mental health problems will tax the local police and safety resources to the breaking point—but say that they haven’t gotten any satisfactory answers.

“While we all support helping those seeking shelter, it is unjust and unwise to oversaturate one neighborhood through these emergency provisions, especially when it already has its fair share,” said Espaillat. “From the beginning of this process, DHS has failed to communicate with community leaders, enable a public process and notify neighbors.”

One of the biggest criticisms has been of the secrecy of the plan.

“The process should have included a substantive planning discussion with Community Board 7, elected officials, current residents of the two buildings and responsible neighborhood leaders to find a solution to the need for shelter for homeless individuals,” said Brewer.
On Tuesday, residents and politicians came out to protest the move and ask the city to halt the process, but so far there has been no indication that DHS will be heeding those calls.

Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer (photo by Thomas Good / NLN), courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer recommended conditional disapproval for the sale of three city-owned buildings in the Civic Center area on Tuesday. The Department of Citywide Administrative Services (DCAS) proposed the sale as part of the City’s 21st Century Civic Center plan, which aims to relocate municipal agencies out of the partially vacant and under-utilized buildings so that they can be consolidated with other agencies elsewhere.

Relocation would reduce the city’s operating and maintenance costs, saving the city an estimated $100 million in the next twenty years.

Stringer endorsed the goal of consolidation, but argued that financial considerations should not be the sole motivation for the disposition of the three buildings, which are located at 22 Reade Street, 49-51 Chambers Street and 346 Broadway.

“Lower Manhattan is one of the nation’s premier central business districts, but it is also experiencing a boom in its residential population,” he said in a statement. “I believe the City should strive to provide the infrastructure necessary to support this new population.”

Stringer stressed that vacant city-owned properties provide an opportunity for the city to meet this growing Lower Manhattan community’s needs. Rather than selling to commercial developers, he said, the city could provide community-related infrastructure like public schools, affordable housing, cultural space, or space for non-profit organizations — none of which are included in the current plan. Stringer noted that these spaces would be difficult to create in privately-owned properties without significant cost to New York City taxpayers.

Stringer’s review suggested several conditions for the city to meet, including the modification of the proposal to include publicly oriented uses and the creation of a community and elected official taskforce to review future applications.

“The Civic Center plan offers great potential benefits to our City, and I look forward to discussing it further with the administration,” said Stringer. “By working together I believe that we can simultaneously advance the goal of consolidation, realize significant taxpayer savings and consider a variety of ways to meet the needs of Lower Manhattan.”

Residents, politicians, activists envision impact of NYU’s long-term expansion plan

New York University scored a key victory last week as the City Council approved a slightly scaled back version of the school’s controversial 2031 expansion plan. While the project was pared down, it will still add close to 6 million square feet of academic space throughout the city. Nearly half of the expansion, equal to about the size of the Empire State Building, would be concentrated on two Washington Square-area superblocks located near the school’s main campus in Greenwich Village.

The NYU plan calls for four new buildings on the two large blocks bordered by LaGuardia Place and Mercer, West Houston and West 3rd streets. The buildings will be used for both academic and residential purposes.
The plan has generated an enormous amount of discussion and controversy both for and against since it was unveiled by NYU officials in 2010. Moreover, the Council’s approval comes at a time when residents uptown are waging a battle of their own against Columbia University’s mammoth, long-range plan in West Harlem that includes a 17-acre, $6.3 billion campus expansion.

Opponents of the NYU plan, including village residents, activists, NYU faculty members and others, have already vowed to continue the fight, including an expected legal challenge, to get the plan sent back to the drawing board and significantly revised. The plan has the support of the mayor and is unlikely to be vetoed.
But what if the current incarnation of the plan is upheld and remains largely unchanged? What will Greenwich Village look like in 2031? Will it be congested, overcrowded and largely unlivable, as many naysayers suggest, or will the plan usher in a new chapter of peaceful coexistence between NYU and its Village neighbors?

“When I ask myself what the Village will look like in 20 years, the first thing I see is large, concrete, functional-looking buildings casting long shadows over the neighborhood; absorbing all the light. The only outdoor space for people to congregate will be Washington Square Park, and you know how crowded that gets now!” said Janet Hayes, who lives in a high-rise co-op at 505 LaGuardia Place near Houston.

A longtime resident of the Village and a local Republican leader, Hayes predicted that NYU’s plan, if allowed to come to fruition, would greatly affect life in the Village and not in a good way.

“Take grocery shopping, using the dry cleaner or going out to dinner, for example—full-service restaurants will be replaced with beer halls, pizza places and other fast-food sources,” Hayes predicted.

She added that more stores would cater to NYU and transit would be a “nightmare”; subways and buses would be overcrowded all day long, and “forget catching a cab.”

In support of NYU’s plan, Borough President Scott Stringer, who most recently helped to broker concessions from the school, cited substantial economic benefits for New York City, which include the creation of 9,500 permanent jobs and as many as 18,200 construction jobs over the next 20 years.

Andrew Berman, executive director of the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation, has been one of the plan’s most outspoken critics and has worked to help mobilize village residents, activists and like-minded politicians in opposition to a project he has called a “grandiose scheme of a private university’s super-rich board and its president.”

Immediately following last week’s Council vote, Berman said in a press release, “The NYU expansion plan will turn a residential neighborhood into a company town and subject it to 20 straight years of construction.”
Robert Yaro, president of the Regional Plan Association, a nonprofit planning organization that serves the tri-state area, however, said NYU’s expansion is important to the city for many reasons.

“NYU’s continued success is vital to the economy of New York. The university is among the city’s largest private employers,” Yaro noted. “NYU can continue to attract top students and scholars only if it is able to modernize and expand…By emphasizing density, the NYU plan will avoid harming any of the Village’s historic fabric.”

Asked about possible loss of open space and congestion resulting from NYU’s plan, Council Member Margaret Chin seemed confident the issue has been addressed. “Under this plan, the open space on the superblocks will be improved and it will be fully accessible by the public for the first time,” Chin said in an emailed statement.
“The padlocks and fences around the Sasaki Garden will finally come down, and this park—which few New Yorkers know about—will finally be open to the public. We will also gain a pedestrian walkway, or ‘greenstreet,’ behind the new Zipper Building, which will connect the Village with Soho,” she said.

The Council member added that the walkway would be lined with cafés and restaurants and would have an indoor atrium open to the public year-round.

A spokesperson for Chin also noted that the university would be “bound” by a 500-page restrictive declaration document that specifies what the school can and can’t do with regard to construction, building and other logistics related to the plan.

For example, the school has committed to limit construction to the hours between 8 a.m. and 4:30 p.m. and to limit weekend construction. In addition, the school has promised to assist with construction mitigation issues related to air quality and noise by equipping affected apartments with soundproofing materials.

“This plan is a way to start over. It is a pathway forward,” Chin said. “This plan integrates the Greenwich Village community and NYU in ways that have never been done before.”

Terri Cude, co-chair of Community Action Alliance against NYU 2031 and a member of Community Board 2 (CB2), isn’t so sure of the plan’s integration into the neighborhood.

“If NYU builds everything that is in the current plan, we will have a very dark neighborhood,” Cude said.
Asked about the various committees that were formed by NYU to address community concerns and incorporate residents’ needs into the plan, Cude said, “They attended all the meetings and listened to everything we had to say. The only thing they didn’t do is modify the plan at all based on the input.”

But the concessions brokered by Stringer in early April did in fact include a significant overall density reduction, preservation of public space as parkland, elimination of a temporary gymnasium on the site of two community playgrounds, elimination of proposed dormitories on the Bleecker Building and an affirmation of NYU’s commitment to provide space for a K-8 school.

Brad Hoylman, former chair of CB2 and candidate for state Senate in District 27, testified before the City Planning Commission back in the spring that the NYU plan would “forever alter the character of the neighborhood, bring in thousands of new people into the area [estimates suggest up to 12,000 people daily] and cause decades of construction disruption for local residents.”

Village residents and community garden members Marcia Lawther and Bob Hirschfeld moved to the neighborhood in the mid-1970s. “It’s invasive. It’s crowded enough as it is,” said Lawther when asked about the expansion.

“In the ’70s, things were much quieter, there was not much going on,” recalled Hirschfeld. “NYU was a separate world. It wasn’t elbowing its way into the community.”

However, signs of hope for the future of the project were evident on Tuesday as legislators lauded a new agreement between NYU and the residents of 505 LaGuardia Place in an effort to maintain long-term affordability at the Mitchell-Lama development.

“I am pleased a deal has been reached and much-needed affordable housing has been preserved in Greenwich Village,” said City Council Speaker Christine Quinn in a prepared statement.

“This agreement guarantees that 505 LaGuardia can maintain affordability and that the working-class families that currently reside there will be able to continue to live in a neighborhood they have long called home.”

In keeping with the tradition of New York City firefighters saluting the fallen, attendees heard the bell ring in four sets of five rings. The historic St Paul’s Chapel, part of the Parish of Trinity Wall Street, is directly across the World Trade Center site.

Manhattan Borough President Endorses Hoylman
After State Sen. Tom Duane announced his retirement in early June, many have been speculating about who will replace him. If you don’t have a clue, Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer does.
Last Tuesday, Stringer announced his full endorsement and support for Greenwich Village-based candidate Brad Hoylman.

Hoylman was previously the chair of Community Board 2. In addition, he is serving his fourth term as the District Leader of the 66th Assembly District. Hoylman also works as a trustee of the Community Services Society of New York, an anti-poverty organization.

“We have worked together to preserve Lower Manhattan’s open spaces and schools,” said Stringer of Hoylman’s time on CB2. “Brad has been involved in the fights to preserve the historic nature of Greenwich Village and the surrounding neighborhoods for his entire professional life. I am confident he is the right choice to represent our neighborhoods in Albany.”

“It is great to see that this campaign is receiving overwhelming support from elected officials from across the city and especially that of our borough president,” said Hoylman.

Motorcycle Theft Ring Busted After 17-Month Investigation
Those who have had their bike stolen or worry for their motorcycles stationed on New York City streets can ease up just a little, as police have caught the people responsible for more than half of the motorcycle thefts in the city last year.

The daring bike theft ring would steal motorcycles in areas around Lower Manhattan, Queens and Brooklyn during the night, place the bikes in stolen vans, take them apart and ship the parts in boxes labeled “household goods” to countries in the Caribbean and Africa.

The 17-month investigation led by the NYPD and the Manhattan district attorney’s office began after a Yamaha motorcycle was stolen from Tribeca last spring. Investigators say they soon realized a large organized group of criminals were behind the theft.

According to Deputy Inspector Edward Winski, Lower Manhattan was primarily targeted mainly due to the abundance of bridges and tunnels that serve as good escape routes. Some of the robbers also sold guns and a few bikes to undercover cops. Additionally, they bought pricey electronics with stolen credit cards.

Three People Rescued from Capsized Boat Near Liberty Island
A sailboat flipped over near Liberty Island last Tuesday morning while three people were inside it.
According to the NYPD and witnesses, the boat flipped at 11:50 a.m. The cause is unknown. The passenger swam out of the boat and were rescued by emergency crews from the National Park Service; reportedly, none of them suffered any sever injuries.

Local Soccer Games for Charity Held in Lower Manhattan
There’s no need to wait for the London Olympics to see a soccer game when residents of the Lower East Side can take a front row seat at a local one in the neighborhood.

Street Soccer USA, an organization that aims to keep the homeless off the streets in 20 cities, held a charity soccer game in the Lower East Side’s Sara D. Roosevelt Park last Thursday afternoon.
Compiled by Adel Manoukian