A victory for Hip Hop’s birthplace

2 posts in one day???  It’s been a while since i’ve done that……

Anyway, good news for housing activists and hip hop historians today.  Allhiphop reports the following:

Efforts to save the birthplace of Hip-Hop culture proved successful as the New York Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) rejected a proposed sale of 1520 Sedgwick Avenue to a developer Mark Karasick. According to Sen. Charles Schumer, the HPD cited the fact that current rents could not be sustained if the sale of the property had gone through. The decision is the latest chapter in the struggle for Sedgwick Avenue tenants to preserve their building. Tenants enlisted Hip-Hop co-founder DJ Kool Herc last year to help save the property after word got out that the 100-unit apartment building’s owner planned to leave an affordable housing program. The building has also been deemed eligible to be listed on national and state registers of historic sites.

article appears here.

Welcome to the NEW (york)

It has been a while since I have been able to post, and though there has been a great deal happening throughout the world, I wanted to ease back into the game with something closer to home. A recent article in New York Magazine touted the history, progress and virtues of the soon-to-be realized Highline – a brand new park being built atop an abondoned elevated railway that will turn these ruins into an oasis floating a couple stories above the fray, snaking it’s way through 20 or so blocks of Manhattan’s westside. It’s an amazing concept, a first in public spaces, and something everyone is looking forward to next summer. More importantly, like everything involving land/real estate in this town, it will change the character of the neighborhood. The existing tracks, though, are too decrpit to be built on, so they will have to be removed and replaced with new material. A passage describing the consequences got my wheels turning:

What you’ll get, in other words, is a thoughtfully conceived, beautifully designed simulation of the former High Line—and what more, really, do we ask for in our city right now? Isn’t that what we want: that each new bistro that opens should give us the feeling of a cozy neighborhood joint, right down to the expertly battered wooden tables and exquisitely selected faucet knobs? And that each new clothing boutique that opens in the space where the dry cleaner’s used to be—you know, the one driven out by rising rents—should retain that charming dry cleaner’s signage, so you can be reconnected to the city’s hardscrabble past even as you shop for a $300 blouse? And that each dazzling, glass-skinned condo tower, with the up-to-date amenities and Hudson views and en suite freaking parking, should be nestled in a charming, grit-chic neighborhood, full of old warehouses and reclaimed gallery spaces and retroactively trendy chunks of rusted urban blight? Isn’t that exactly what we ask New York to be right now?

There were 2 great places I used to go to all the time, and they were both the kind of lovable shit-holes that drew me here in the first place. One of them was called Smalls. It was a tiny, basement Jazz club in the West Village that had sets running from about 6pm to 6am. The only people I knew who “worked” there were the 2 guys who took your cover charge – $10 for as long as you felt like stayin – the bands that set up their own equipment and sound before each set, the owner who cruised around chatting up the crowd and the musicians, and his white dog named Snow who was usually relaxing by the stairs. All the mix-n-match furniture was most likley drug in off the street, but was worth it’s weight in gold on the weekends when lines regularly wrapped around the block to get in – the place was the size of a closet, and people crammed into every crevase of the place, so to keep distractions to a minimum they only allowed people in before or after each set. Best of all, they didn’t have a liqour license so it was all BYOB. Most of the bands who came and played their sets were exceptional, but the real shit came during the jam session between the hours of 2-6am, when everyone was runnin off of alcohol and balls. The crowd, too, was something special. Jazz-holes are typically arrogant, pretentious fucks, but most regulars at Smalls were inviting and intellectual, but God help you if you decided to carry a loud, drunken conversation or make some other type of noise during one the sets. I often thought this is what it must’ve been like when the jazz greats of old roamed the streets, ducking in and out a smoke-filled stages, pushing their craft to the break of dawn in front of attentive and demanding crowds.

The other was a dive on 7th Street called “Bar 81”, but the real name was “Verchrovnia”, and it was one of the many Ukranian places in that part of the East Village. Walkin by it on the street, it looked just like anywhere else, only dirtier. I ventured in one night because the bar adjacent, Blue & Gold, was full of annoying fucks – including the bartender – and I felt like a change of pace. This new bartender was excellent and attentive, giving buy-backs every 4th drink and doin the whole small-talk thing they’re so good at. The crowd was all locals and their friends, some lived in the building upstairs, but most on the block or the surrounding ones. Like Blue & Gold, they had a pool table with questionable flatness, except here it was respected in a way that every bar table in the city should’ve been. No one put a drink near the thing, no matter how drunk; the crowd waited for the shot before walking in front of/behind the shooter, and they always gave enough room to make a comfortable shot regardless of the crowds in the rest of the bar; and most importantly, the sign-up list was law. Playing a game of pocket billiards in any other bar usually involves heated, tedious, and ultimately futile discussions on who is next to play with everyone getting pissed and no one getting to play, but not here. You sign your name, the whole place knows and anyone trying to jump in gets the treatment. At midnight on Mondays they locked the door, took buy-ins and played a long, tournament-style money game called Killer that went until god knows when, and anyone who got knocked out got a free drink. All the regulars were exceptional players, even the semi-crazy guy D-Mon, and I took great pride the one time I beat the reigning master, Al, at a game of 8 ball. The money you saved with the cheap drinks was always swallowed up by the juke-box which had one of the finest selections I’ve ever seen anywhere, and no matter how crazy it got, you could somehow always hear the music.

Bar 81 took it on the chin a few years ago when their rent doubled. The last time I walked by, the place was something of a posh bistro, though Blue & Gold – and it’s asshole bartender – have stayed strong. Smalls had a much more complicated couple of years. They got shut down just before the smoking ban for “underage drinking” and the jazz moved down a couple blocks to pool hall/venue/ping-pong joint the owner had called Fat Cat. It reopened about a year or so later, but got cleaned up, charged $20 at the door, $6 a drink at the shiny new bar, and they cut their early mornin jams. Just a few months ago, Fat Cat was forced to close, I guess theres only so much room for jazz in this town these days.

I am obviously romanticizing the shit outta these memories, and there are places like these in cities all over, I’m sure. But the fact remains that reliable, affordable, and experimental live music is in decline, and East Village dives are turning into lounges and clubs, destination hot spots with velvet ropes and bouncers with attitudes. As an NYU alumn, I can’t help but blame myself for some of this. I helped feed the insatiable monster that is NYU’s board of directors – the majority of whom are, you guessed it, real estate developers. They’ve been driving up rents and building over history for years, and have, without question, changed the character of the neighborhood by letting stupid kids from the suburbs like myself run around with their parents’ money. But now they are being joined by fleets of cranes erecting gleaming glass and steel condos on every corner. Bowery is a sight to see these days, and it’s merciful that CBGBs got out of there. Could you imagine if that place stayed? 3 years from now it’d probably be wedged between a Whole Foods and a Jamba Juice.

And yes, I wasn’tborn here, so I really have no right to speak on what is and what isn’t New York. When I go back home to Virginia, I’m regularly refered to as “The New Yorker” despite my many objections. Firstly, one has to live here 10 years to get that moniker – I’m going on 7 at the moment – and even then, I don’t think it’s something any transplant can really earn, no matter how long you live here. “New Yorkers” to me are the one’s who were born, raised, and continue to live in the 5 boros, any transplant can attest that city kids are different and locals have something about them that can’t be gotten in any other fashion. That being said, I have been here for a long enough to develop attachments and loyalties, deep ones at that, and have grown old enough to begin shitting on the coming generations.

I went to places like Small’s and 81 because they were authentic places, dedicated to the services they provided, and were bereft of attitude, judgement and – for lack of a better word – bullshit. I find it quite confusing when these places are driven from our neighborhoods to make way for some newer, more expensive joint trying to imitate their personalities and become what they used to be. I feel no desire to trudge out to the latest over-crowded IT lounge that has been christened by the Hipster scene becuase Hillary Duff threw up there, nor do I want to spend $15 to hear another band trying to channel the rebellious and pissed off soul of NYC’s grand old punk scene with their $150 haircuts and impeccibly pre-stressed, nut-hugging jeans. “Isn’t that exactly what we ask New York to be right now?” No. No matter how good the impression is, no matter how hard they try to replicate what New York was, it’ll never be that again, and that sucks.

The city – like the country it represents – has an amoebic identity that shifts with the tides of prosperity and immigration, and I guess we’re seeing the water drift further toward the horizon. Progress – read: gentrification – is unstoppable to some extent, look at Williamsburg for God’s sake, things inevitably must change with the passage of time. But with each step towards a new and better future, we run the risk of turning our surroudings into simulacrum, a theme park based on a dead fantasy, a copy with no original. My home town in Virginia is going through a similar transition now. With the promise of more jobs and better pay, more and more people flood into an area unpreppared for the consequences of its own success. People came for the trees and the solitude only to find strip malls and townhouses, stacked one atop another like some never-ending lego land. We sit in a sea of traffic and breath the exhaust. Some people are drawn to New York by the myth of the artistic, bohemian lifestyle that engenders individuality and creativity beyond all else. But it’s difficult to hone your craft and make your share of a $2500 a month rent and even harder to fight the tide of homogeonization that it comes with. The city has always been drenched in exorbidant prices, and it would be a shame if Manhattan – after such a storied and singular history – ends up in the hands of a single class of people. New York has become safer and cleaner than ever, standard of living is exceptional, public services are effecient(ish), and it is still one of the greates, most diverse places on the face of this Earth. More than anything, I hope that last part never changes. The Highline will be a beautiful, beautiful park. One wonders, though, what kind of a city it will be overlooking.

“Overactivism” is a Beautiful Phrase

“Overactivism” is a beautiful phrase that is being lobbed from the lobbyists towards consumer advocates, fair lending advocates, and economic justice activists becausethe “subprime” or “nonprime” mortgage market.  Subprime loans are made to borrowers with lower than average credit; the loans, largely due to historical barriers to credit, are made disproportianatly to low-income, non-white, and female borrowers.

 

The subprime lending market has made years of irresponsible and predatory mortgage loans to these borrowers and now the cat is out of the bag beyond the activist community — the loans are unsuitable and unaffordable to many borrowers. The Center for Responsible Lending estimates that 20%, or one of every five, subprime loan made in recent years will end in foreclosure, a process thta not only causes the homeowner to lose their home, but also causes neighborhood instability in terms of abandonment and gentrification.

 

The “overactivism” they refer to is the push by these advocates and activists to ensure that common sense regulations are in place requiring lenders to simple ensure that loans are suitable and affordable to the borrower through the life of the loan.

Countrywide, the biggest U.S. mortgage lender, originated $468.2 billion in home loans last year, including $40.6 billion in “nonprime” products to the riskiest borrowers. Regulators, including the Federal Reserve and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, on Friday issued proposed guidance to encourage tighter standards by lenders facing a sudden surge in delinquencies. Loan quality is falling because borrowers, perhaps ill-informed about how fast and far their payments can rise on a 2-28 loan, sustain a “payment shock” and can no longer meet the obligation, the regulators said.

But Countrywide and industry lobbying groups, including the Mortgage Bankers Association, said the guidance would restrict lending to the portion of the economy that need it most… Half of the hybrid ARMs issued by Countrywide are for purchasing a home, he said. Half of those borrowers refinance into prime loans, showing that customers are improving their credit scores and not “hitting the end of the road,” he said.

“The worst thing would be over-activism,” Sieracki said. “There is a market here that needs to be served.”

Redistricting Prisoners

Another one that isn’t a new conversation, but good to see Schneiderman keeping it on the table…

Where prisoners are counted as population for redistricting purposes is an urgent issue for New York to deal with before 2010 Census redistricting, especially considering the Community Service Society of New York reports that,

“Approximately 80% of New York State’s prison population consists of Blacks and Latinos from New York City’s predominately Black and Latino communities, including Harlem, Washington Heights, the Lower East Side, the South and East Bronx, Central and East Brooklyn, and Southeast Queens. When released, the majority of the former prisoners return to these communities.”

This, from today’s Albany Times Blog,

Eileen Markey’s article in City Limits alludes to another parallel. The majority of our state’s prisoners come from downstate (New York City), but virtually all the state’s prisons are upstate. More importantly, those prisoners are counted as “residents” of upstate towns in the decennial census, but they are unable to vote. Thus, for the purposes of reapportionment and redistricting in NY, prisoners are like seat fillers at the Oscars: they give districts the appearance of being full, but they have absolutely no clout.

This practice has meaningful economic and political consequences. The resources diverted to districts upstate do little to aid prisoners, while the actual residents get a disproportionately large slice of the pie. In turn, less money is directed to downstate districts that already lack resources and support returning prisoners upon their release. Politically, this method has favored Republicans, who are heavily concentrated upstate. By allocating prisoners up north, redistricters respecting one-person/one-vote doctrine must create more districts upstate; these puffed-up districts have tended to elect GOP candidates.

There are simple ways to change New York’s method of counting prisoners. Some states simply do not count prisoners when redistricting. Others, including Sen. Eric Schneiderman have proposed creating a database with the last known addresses of prisoners, and counting them there. Either proposal would bring more fairness to the system and help end the current practice in NY which heaps insult onto injury: not only are prisoners being used for partisan gain, but their home districts suffer as well. Or, put another way, not only are they little more than nominees with no chance at a statue, they’re left without the coveted swag too.

Some Brooklyn News

Being a Brooklyn resident, I thought that I would share some information that I received from the Develop Don’t Destroy Brooklyn newsletter.  It’s a good website for keeping up with Brooklyn development (i.e. Atlantic yards/Ratner), so go check it out.

First is a report about a recent court hearing:

Federal Judge Hears Eminent Domain Oral Arguments; Case Could Derail “Atlantic Yards”
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An overflowing crowd of Brooklyn residents and reporters (some late arrivals had to watch the proceedings on closed-circuit TV in the courthouse’s cafeteria) filled the courtroom of Federal Magistrate Robert Levy on February 7th, as the judge listened to initial oral arguments in the eminent domain lawsuit filed by property owners and tenants whose homes and businesses lie in the footprint of the proposed “Atlantic Yards” development.

The hearing, in the Brooklyn Federal Courthouse, was held in response to a motion to dismiss the case, brought by the defendants, who include the Empire State Development Corporation, Forest City Ratner, former Governor George Pataki and New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg. The defendants are fearful of the case going to trial in Federal court, where the fate of Bruce Ratner’s “Atlantic Yards” project would rest solely on the law – and with a politically independent, impartial judge.

If the case proceeds to trial – and many courtroom observers believe that Judge Levy’s demeanor and his line of questioning indicate there’s a good chance it will – it would derail Ratner’s plans to erect an arena and a superblock of high-rise buildings in Prospect Heights. If the plaintiffs win, the project will have to go back to the drawing board, or be scrapped altogether, because the arena cannot be built, nor can streets de-mapped, without the plaintiffs’ homes and businesses.

During the nearly four hours of sometimes-fascinating, sometimes-technical courtroom back-and-forth, Judge Levy seemed largely unmoved by the defendants’ arguments; at one point, he interrupted ESDC lawyer Douglas Kraus to tell him “you and I have very different ideas about the law.” For more on the courtroom blow-by-blow, we recommend the coverage at the always-excellent Atlantic Yards Report, and this story from The New York Sun.

Judge Levy is expected to make a recommendation to presiding Judge Nicholas Garaufis on the defendants’ motion in the next few weeks. If he denies the motion (and we’re optimistic he will), the discovery process will begin, leading to a trial some time in the next few months.

 

Secondly, here are some screening dates and locations for a movie about the proposed development projects and the “antics” behind them.  I haven’t seen the movie, but it looks good, and i might go try to check it out.  It’s definitely an issue that people need to understand more about.

“Brooklyn Matters,” local filmmaker Isabel Hill’s documentary chronicle of the shenanigans behind Bruce Ratner’s full-court press to erect his massively scaled, massively subsidized “Atlantic Yards,” is a must-see – and it’s coming to a location near you.

“Of all the protesting voices and hundreds of thousands of words in opposition to the proposed Atlantic Yards development, nothing is as convincing as Isabel Hill’s excellent film.”
– Stuart Pertz, FAIA, former member of the New York City Planning Commission

“Brooklyn Matters is a remarkable film that slowly, quietly, calmly reveals the extreme ugliness at the heart of one of the most ill-conceived mega-developments in New York history.”
– Francis Morrone, architectural historian and author

The next two Brooklyn showings are as follows:

February 21st, 7:30 p.m.
Bishop Loughlin Memorial High School, Auditorium
357 Clermont Avenue (between Lafayette & Greene)
Fort Greene
Presented by the Fort Greene Association & The Society for Clinton Hill
Complimentary refreshments will be served beginning at 7:00 p.m.

February 27th, 7 p.m.
Fifth Avenue Committee
621 Degraw Street (between 3rd & 4th Avenues)
Park Slope
Presented by the Fifth Avenue Committee

Both screenings are free and open to the public. The running time of the film is approximately 55 minutes.

For up-to-date information on additional screenings, and to view a trailer, please visit www.brooklynmatters.com.

Urinal cakes don’t let friends drive drunk

New Mexico is taking its fight against drunken driving to men’s restrooms around the state.500 talking urinal cakes that will deliver a recorded anti-DWI message to bar and restaurant patrons who make one last pit stop before getting behind the wheel.

“Hey there, big guy. Having a few drinks?” a female voice says a few seconds after an approaching male sets off a motion sensor in the device. “It’s time to call a cab or ask a sober friend for a ride home.”

Picture the Homeless, Longest Night of the Year

NYC’s Picture the Homeless will be hosting a great event tomorrow night.

We wanted to remind you that tomorrow, on the longest night of the year, we will be holding our annual Homeless Memorial Service, to come together to remember homeless New Yorkers who passed away in 2006–and stand together to promote justice for homeless New Yorkers still living! This is a powerful, deeply moving event, and we encourage all friends and allies to come join us!
Thursday, December 21 at 6 p.m.

Judson Memorial Church

55 Washington Square South (SW corner of Washington Sq Park)

After this amazing event readers are welcome to join two of LiftWhileClimbing’s moderators and many of our allies at downtown’s M1-5 for a party, which will be collecting food for NYC’s City Harvest.

Brookings’ 10 Noteworthy Trends for 2006

Brookings Inst:

For the first time in 2005 there are more poor residents of suburbs than central cities.

Six percent of the population of large U.S. metropolitan areas lives in exurbs.

More than one-third of the nation’s loss of manufacturing jobs between 2000 and 2005 occurred in seven Great Lakes states: Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

America’s older, inner-ring first suburbs make up 20 percent of the nation’s population and are more diverse and older than the nation as a whole.

The average U.S. household spends 19 percent of its budget on transportation, rendering household location a key component of housing affordability.

Nationwide, more than 4.2 million lower income homeowners pay a higher than average APR for their mortgage.

The leading refugee destination metro areas have shifted away from traditional immigrant gateways, like New York and Los Angeles, over the past two decades to newer gateways—such as Atlanta, Seattle, and Portland.

The fastest growing metropolitan areas for minority populations from 2000 to 2004 now closely parallel the fastest growing areas in the nation.

Middle-income neighborhoods as a proportion of all metropolitan neighborhoods declined from 58 percent in 1970 to 41 percent in 2000, disappearing faster than the share of middle class households in these metro areas.

Of the $109 billion in federal appropriations dedicated to Gulf Coast funding In the first year after Hurricane Katrina, only $35 billion, approximately, went toward the long-term recovery of the region.

Detainee Transport Funds Violate Regulations?

From GovExec:

The Immigration and Customs Enforcement bureau may have violated federal funding regulations when it transferred employees and funds to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, its sister agency in the Homeland Security Department, for a detainee transportation program, according to an internal ICE document obtained by Government Executive.

A February 2006 memorandum from ICE field managers to Julie Myers, the head of the bureau, and John Torres, then-acting director of ICE’s Office of Detention and Removal Operations, expressed concern that the agency broke the law in its haste to provide CBP’s Border Patrol with the transportation services. An ICE official testified last month that the bureau shifted $50 million worth of resources, including employees, to CBP in fiscal 2006 for the services.

“Legally, there is a concern… that ICE [employees who] provide transportation services to CBP without reimbursement for such services is an improper augmentation of CBP’s appropriations,” the Feb. 2 memorandum stated…

NYC’s domestic partners face unfair choice – be cold or be alone

Send an e-postcard to NYC Dept. of Homeless Services because Commissioner Hess can change this.

Selling Candy: The Urban Job Market of Tomorrow

From Working Life:

More than a month ago, I posted a short item about the mad scrum that erupted in Times Square when a few thousands people lined up for 65 jobs–at M&M’s new store. Well, actually, it turns out I underestimated the insanity. According to the Daily News yesterday, 12,800 people filled out applications for the 198 jobs (beats me why the difference in numbers on the jobs…I’ll chalk it up to bad reporting but I also didn’t check up on this independently so bad on me, too).

Anyway, these jobs pay $10.75 an hour “plus health and other benefits,” according to the article–but there’s no description of the health benefits. Mark me down as skeptical that the benefits are anything more than a bare-bones plan with high deductibles and skimpy coverage. As for the store:

M&M’s World offers themed clothing, dishware, piggy banks, watches and of course, chocolate. New York’s largest candy store has a two-story wall of M&M’s with 22 different color choices.

Hey, I have a real bad sweet tooth so I’m not dissing the great societal benefit that M&M represents. But, these are the jobs that thousands of people are going bonkers to grab.  This is the great economic miracle we can look forward to.

Hey, what happened to the food theme?

This month we originally planned on bringing you articles about food justice, access to food, and healthy eating. However, certain incidents (1, 2, 3)  have slightly shifted our direction over recent weeks.

While that other stuff is more important, and very worthy of the distraction that it brings, I thought I could lighten the mood a little this morning by returning to food for a minute.

I found the following article in the NYTimes about a food market that I never knew existed on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Based on what I learned from this article, it sounds similar to the Chelsea Market in that it rents space to small independent vendors, including farmers from upstate NY. It is also interesting due to the fact that it is quite large (15,000 square feet) compared to most stores in the area, and that it caters to people from a variety of social backgrounds (not just to the gentrifying population). Here is some of the article:

Some months ago, a friend told me about the Essex Street Market, the 15,000-square-foot enclosed food hall on the lower East Side of Manhattan, and I felt as if I were a soprano hearing the name Donizetti for the first time.

The market has been in continual operation for the past 66 years. But it is thriving today as it never did, making available both the world of the bodega and the universe of the gourmand…That the market itself is shaped like a giant shoebox only adds to the sense that it has become a diorama of the city in demographic miniature. Hasidic men and Latina women come, as they always have, and they are joined now by young people of indeterminate sexuality, vocation or coiffure.

Five years ago the market was only 60 percent full, said Jose Figuereo, one of its overseers. But because of low rents and an influx of more prosperous neighbors, 26 vendors now occupy every square foot of selling space.

The city’s Economic Development Corporation, which runs the market, receives applications for new tenants on a weekly basis and, in a change from the past, will now rent only to food vendors. It leases space to vendors at $27 a square foot on average, less than a third the standard price food retailers pay in Manhattan and parts of Brooklyn….

While the market has welcomed purveyors like Ms. Saxelby, it has not given itself over entirely to epicurean gentrification. The indoor stalls are a good place to encounter yautia, a root vegetable that looks like the love child of a soup can and a coconut.

In addition to yautia, and its cousins batata and apio — all root vegetables used in Hispanic cooking — it is still possible to find kosher wine here, at Schapiro’s, which has kept a presence on the Lower East Side since 1899.

“There are people from the housing projects across Delancey who come in for milk religiously,” she said. (Ms. Saxelby’s comes from a small dairy in upstate New York and she sells it for $2.99 a quart.) “This tosses out all your assumptions about who people are and what they are going to like,” she added. “You don’t know who anyone is, really. Some people who you’d think are young hipsters, artist types, show up with E.B.T. cards,” she said. Ms. Saxelby sells Trillium, a Vermont cheese made from hand-ladled goat curd for $24.99 a pound, and she advertises her acceptance of electronic benefits transfer cards, the replacement for food stamps.

The Essex Street Market exists as an urban planner’s vision of commercial utopia — the sort of retail space now all but non-existent in New York, where increasingly segregated social classes come together to share if not the actual experience of affluence, then the readily purchasable signifiers of it….

While the market has welcomed purveyors like Ms. Saxelby, it has not given itself over entirely to epicurean gentrification. The indoor stalls are a good place to encounter yautia, a root vegetable that looks like the love child of a soup can and a coconut….

In addition to yautia, and its cousins batata and apio — all root vegetables used in Hispanic cooking — it is still possible to find kosher wine here, at Schapiro’s, which has kept a presence on the Lower East Side since 1899….

If Fiorello La Guardia arrived at the market today though, one imagines he would be quite pleased with what greeted him. Mayor La Guardia established the enclosed market — along with La Marqueta in East Harlem and the Arthur Avenue market in the Bronx, both still running — to eliminate the street peddler culture he found so odious. About half the pushcarts in the city were on the Lower East Side, said Suzanne Wasserman, director of the Gotham Center at the CUNY Graduate Center and a scholar of lower Manhattan history.

La Guardia sought to regulate the markets rigorously. Among the rules stipulated by the Department of Markets, in the 1930s, was a ban on shouting, hawking and the “use of abusive and lewd language.”

The point of the markets, Ms. Wasserman explained, was to sanitize mercantile life in New York and divorce it from immigrant folkways.

“La Guardia was half Italian and half Jewish, and he had a thing about explicit displays of ethnicity,” she said…..

The Essex Street Market opened on January 10, 1940 with 475 stalls and 1,000 applications for them. Initially it did not do well because the Jewish and Italian immigrants to whom it catered preferred to shop on the street. It began to thrive as pushcarts disappeared and flourished in the 1950s with the arrival of a Puerto Rican population to the Lower East Side. For years before the current real estate boom though, the market was largely derelict.

Jeffrey Ruhalter is a fourth-generation butcher who has spent the better part of the last four decades observing the changes in the market and the shifting demographics of the neighborhood surrounding the intersection of Essex and Delancey Streets. Mr. Ruhalter’s great-grandfather Aaron Ruhalter opened a butcher shop on Orchard Street in 1923, one his grandfather moved to Essex Street Market when it opened….

His father, he said, used to buy pigs’ feet in 100-pound buckets. “We were a poor man’s butcher for a very long time, because this was a very poor neighborhood,” he said. “In the ’80s if it had not been for food stamps we would have been out of business.”

Though Mr. Ruhalter carries some hormone-free beef now, and strip steak and duck sausages to cater to customers who come to him from all over the city, he makes his living, he said, from the less glamorous offerings of a carnivore’s table: chicken, sirloin, stew meat.

While I can’t say that I agree with LaGuardia’s sentiments of “Sanitizing mercantile life in New York and divorce it from immigrant folkways,” I must say that it’s great to see places like the Essex Street Market in existance. Not only are they interesting in terms of urban planning, they also provide great economic opportunities and access to good quality food, both of which are increasingly lacking (at least for those that can’t afford high priced grocers or don’t have grocery options available in their neighborhood).

Read the entire article here.

Happy Thanksgiving – No thanks to Ratner

 

For Thanksgiving Day, the folks over at NoLandGrab made up a list of things to be thankful for.  The one that caught my the most was the last on their list – Bruce Ratner being listed as the #1 most loathsome New Yorker on the New York Press’ list of the 50 Most Loathsome New Yorkers.  That most definitely is something to be thankful for!  Here is what the NYPress had to say:

1 Bruce Ratner

Nets Owner & Developer

Where’s Jackie O. when you need her? The Atlantic Yards project and the rest of the properties this comb-over-mini-Donald’s got his greenbacked mitts around aren’t exactly Grand Central Terminal, but bear with us. Think of all the upper-middle-class homeowners who will be displaced after long, hard years of work carving a viable neighborhood out of a once-desolate area of Brooklyn. Then there are the many working-class people living in Prospect Heights, and the small businesspersons in the area. Aren’t their homes and businesses worth saving? The Empire State Development Board, Mayor Bloomberg, Governor Pataki and Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz don’t think so. The centerpiece of the proposed development is a 19,000-seat arena that will house the Brooklyn (née New Jersey) Nets, in which Ratner has a major stake. Also on the table are 17 high rises, which will be as high as 55 stories, 628,000 square feet of commercial space and residences. The housing bit is a ruse to assuage the masses. The “affordable” residential buildings will, however, remain out of reach for a single mom of four surviving on a sub-poverty-line paycheck. Ratner’s attempts to evade official processes for major real estate projects and the use of Supreme Court-endorsed eminent domain have been met with challenges from underfunded groups like Develop Don’t Destroy. What really pisses us off is the imminent razing of Freddy’s Bar and Backroom, which is in the 22-acre footprint. With the Freddy’s gone, where will we get our $4 beers when that’s all we have in our wallet? Oh, and don’t look for criticism in the Newspaper of Record: Ratner’s building the Times’ gleaming new headquarters building west of Times Square.

 

UN: Pro-poor mortgages to curb growth of slums

From the UN late last month:

Mortgages that allow poor people to buy housing will soon be needed to curb the worldwide growth of slums and improve living standards, the head of the United Nations agency charged with promoting socially and environmentally sustainable housing has warned, saying that her organization has already begun testing various financing methods… But she said that there were some signs of progress, noting in particular that new rules, effective since August, meant that UN-HABITAT could finally act as a catalyst, enabling countries to meet the slum upgrading and water and sanitation targets of 2015.

First off, has there been a sudden crisis in the world’s urban slumdwelling population that is in such an emergent need for an innovative tool, but only in need of this tool “soon?” I guess the living standards are deteriorating, but at a slowth enough speed that they’re not needed now… soon will do.

I agree that the expansion “pro-poor” financing options will be useful to the “poor,” but enforcing contracts/mortgages can also be a dangerous tool.

Let’s pull this string through:

Living in a slum, oftentimes on squatted land, and then, as this articles alludes to, water and utility infrastructure improvements shift people off squatted land and onto land where they will be formally recorded and deeded. If they’re not shifted, they are at the very least recorded and deeded. (Here’s a post about utility work and land displacement.)

This deed is then exchanged for a mortgage, be it a “pro-poor” mortgage or what seems under this framework to be an “anti-poor” or perhaps “pro-wealthy” mortgage. Times get tough though because, say, unfair subsidies artificially deflate the prices of the goods these “pro-poor” borrowers can get for their crops. These “pro-poor” homeowners fall behind on their mortgage and while they are unable to sell their goods in an open economy (due to maladjusted subsidies) they are certainly going to tossed from their home, which will then be sold on an open market.

“Pro-poor” mortgage means nothing unless the strongest protections are reserved for the homeowner, not the lender. Shift the “pro” in “pro-poor” to be short for “protection.”

And don’t think this call for protection is paternalistic… it’s actually self-serving.

We all need protections brought back a bit more to the borrowers of the world; the scales are tipped too far in favor of “investors’ rights” at the expense of human rights, in my not-so-modest opinion.
If this were in fact for the urban poor the alarm for this innovative tool would have sounded to have it developed NOW; the call was made for this tool to be developed “soon.” This is for investors, not for the world’s “pro-poor” urban slumdwellers.

Where they reaaally belong…

Thanks again, Matt Wuerker!

Killed for the Truth, Paid for the Lies, and Impunity for the Murderers

LiftWhileClimbing ally Josh Breitbart has just posted a quality boil-down of the situation.  Below is the first bit of it.

Here are two small but important details about Brad’s death:

He was wearing an Indymedia t-shirt when he was shot. One bullet must have gone right through the (((i))). Maybe that shouldn’t matter to me but it does. I have that t-shirt, as do many people I love.

Second, Brad lived for nearly an hour after he was shot. The initial photos made it seem like he died on the spot. Other reports suggest he died minutes later on the way to a hospital. In fact, protesters carried his body for a long distance, drove a car until it ran out of gas, unsuccessfully tried to wave down a couple of trucks – it started to rain – and then, about five blocks from the Red Cross station, he died. I don’t know if this should matter either, but it does.

Brad’s Friends Shut Down the Embassy

Sorry for the single-mindedness of my posts this week, but it’s what’s on my mind. Also apologies for the delay in posting on this action. Please watch the linked video, and read www.FriendsOfBradWill.org for actions and updates.

And above and beyond all else, be sure to follow what is going on down in Oaxaca.

Mexican President condemns “assassination” of Brad Will

MSM is still calling it a shootout (there are no guns used on theside of the popular uprising), but they’re referring to Brad’s death as an ‘assassination‘ now. If you doubt the claim that no guns were used, please watch the final, graphic, and painful minutes of Brad’s life – he films his own shooting. I have avoided linking to it until now because it is too difficult for me to watch, but this “shootout” business is just getting to be too much. Please note, when you’re not in a shoot out, you’re simply being shot at.

Oct. 30 (Bloomberg) — Mexican federal police, who occupied the southern city of Oaxaca yesterday, will remain “as long as necessary” to establish order after five months of protests, presidential spokesman Ruben Aguilar said.
…

Aguilar read a statement from Mexican President Vicente Fox condemning the “assassination” of U.S. journalist Bradley Will. Will, who worked for Indymedia in New York and had entered Mexico on a tourist visa, was killed Oct. 27 during a shootout between protesters and police, the U.S. Embassy said.

For a happier video of Brad, watch this (I recommend skipping to the second song at 3:30 into it).

“Momma’s Gonna Help Build a Wall”

Thank you, Matt Wuerker, for the great cartoons.

LA’s Homeless Are Like LA’s Old Nikes

I hate the terminology used in these stories. They discuss the “dumping” of the homeless.

The frame gets across the mentality of those doing the “dumping,” though, and that may be for the best. Those doing the dumping see these people the same way Nike sees their unsold extra shoes — expendable goods that should be dumped into undesireable locations at the going rate.

Los Angeles police have launched a criminal investigation into the dumping of homeless people on a rundown area in the city after ambulances were spotted dropping off discharged hospital patients there. The practice had long been suspected but police say they now have evidence, releasing pictures and video to the media on Tuesday of five hospital patients being left in the downtown area commonly known as skid row. “We cannot allow the dumping of the most needy … into that environment, and shame on those who do,” Los Angeles Police Chief William Bratton told reporters on Tuesday…

The investigation will focus on possible violations of federal laws that require medical facilities to screen and stabilize patients before releasing them. It comes as Los Angeles city council seeks a compromise on a policy that attempted to ban people from sitting, lying or sleeping on the streets. It was ruled unconstitutional in April on the grounds of cruel and unusual punishment.