The sidewalk ramp improvement — under a city contract via the Department of Design and Construction — continues in the neighborhood, with workers on Second Avenue now.
Yesterday, while workers were on the southeast corner of Second Avenue and 10th Street, one of the fragile plaques from the Yiddish Theatre Walk of Fame, was damaged...
This plaque in question was already missing part of its border and looked to have been patched up previously.
This development was particularly upsetting to the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation, who has been working to have this Walk of Fame preserved and relocated. (You can read about their campaign here.)
In 1984, Abe Lebewohl, who owned the Second Avenue Deli in this corner location, installed this Yiddish Walk of Fame to commemorate when the area was a vibrant Yiddish theater community in the early 20th century. In recent years, many of the stars in the double row have become worn down or broken and are mostly illegible. Higher rents forced Second Avenue Deli to vacate the premises in 2006. A Chase branch is here now.
As we understand it, Community Board 3 District Manager Susan Stetzer was here yesterday and spoke with the owner of the contracting company. He said that his crew will fix the cracked piece and the remaining work will not have an impact on the other five-pointed gold stars.
"Moving forward, we will continue to work with a variety of stakeholders to ensure the long-term preservation of the Walk," said Harry Bubbins, East Village & Special Projects Director, at the GVSHP.
Updated 6:30 p.m.
The work crew patched up the star on the sidewalk...
Previously
Oh for God's sake. What barrel bottom did they scrape to find these hammer and tong specialists?!?
ReplyDeleteThese contractors are doing some laughably sloppy work. Take a look at the lamp post on the nw corner of 9th st & first ave (outside the bean) and that will tell you all you need to know. if they were working in my home I'd kick them out and lock the door. Let's see how they repair the plaque.
ReplyDeleteIt's a shame the walk was damaged. Hopefully, it will be restored. Honestly, though, this repair work/road work on all the corners around here is slopply as fuck.
ReplyDeleteThis shows a lack of respect for anything that's not new & shiny in this area.
ReplyDeleteI hope I'm wrong, but this feels like utter disrespect for what this neighborhood has been over the past 100+ years. It's not like the contractor failed to notice the double row of custom-made, brass-edged plaques.
I hope this delivers some improvements for neighbors with mobility impairments, folks with strollers etc, although I never realized that all those curbs lacked proper cuts before? (They may have; as an able-bodied person, I may have simply failed to pay attention before - that's a privilege I do recognize).
ReplyDeleteAgree that a lot of the work seems sloppy though. Is it really necessary to dig up such big chunks of every corner to do this, like a third of the block in each direction? With all the noise, among others from construction, in this neighborhood, I feel like I'm going borderline mad when I can't even walk the dog at 8am without running away from construction machinery & jackhammers at every corner. And I appreciate that some of the workers have been making an effort to keep pedestrians and cyclists safe, but often these work sites lack proper, safe arrangements for the walking and cycling public. We don't all get around in Ubers you know!
hey the fix looks pretty good! thanks, work crew!
ReplyDeleteThey also did all the corners on 12 th and B except the worst one that has been cracked up for years and is very dangerous .
ReplyDeleteSame on 9th and C in front of Wayland. The only corner they missed? Also left a mail box in the middle of a sidewalk on C and 10th. WTF??
Deletethis outfit seems like a bunch of escapees from the clown car and they are doing a laughably sloppy job on this. it's become a neighborhood joke. fwiw they also suck at directing traffic around blocked streets, machines, etc.
ReplyDeletenot to sound ungrateful for infrastructure work being done in the nabe but i feel like i'm taking crazy pills or i'm seriously missing something cause it seems like all of these new curbs require a messy plop of cement to meet the street to achieve what the old ones did without it, did they not take measurements before doing any of the work on the curbs? will these "settle" if they don't or wont' what a sloppy inefficient waste of funds and so ugly, gonna require constant maintenance more money wasted on what could have been done right the first time
ReplyDeleteGreat to see that people are monitoring the walk of fame. Still think of the deli every time I walk by. They are important and should be preserved.
ReplyDeleteI'm going to assume this was just a careless accident but I also can't help but think we're looking at another example of unconscious (?) anti-Semitism, going hand-in-hand with the rise of nationalist sentiments we're seeing all over the globe.
ReplyDeleteEveryone take a deep breath, look around at most of the newly restored curbs, the sloppy cement ramp have been replaced by a paved one. The pavers and the curb crews are two separate groups the first is putting the cement ramp so there is something there until the pavement crew comes to the spot.
ReplyDeleteGlad they repaired the star tile.
I don't understand what all the furor is about! I mean, sure, it is nice to remember the past and all, but these kids these days, they don't even know what "Yiddish" means. They probably can't even spell it to look it up on their smartphones.
ReplyDeleteIt is sloppy work if they were leaving it this way. I understand from a worker that the next phase of the project is for an asphalt crew to come by and cover all the sloppy ramp concrete with fresh smooth properly poured asphalt. We'll see how long it takes for that to happen....if ever.
ReplyDeleteIt's like these contractors curb their enthusiasm for competent paving.
ReplyDeleteWhy do they have to do it in 2 phases? Why do a sloppy job first, and a better job later? Who's paying for this nonsense?
ReplyDeleteHow about hiring a contractor to do it right the first time?
Oh, the joys of life in De Blasio land...
I wonder if they'll ever fix the base of the statue of Peter Cooper that got chewed up in Cooper Square - the subcontractors seem to have gotten away with that one...
ReplyDeleteThis is the greater efficiency of the private sector at work! Anytime a conservative says that government is inherently inefficient, what they mean is they prefer nepotism to actually doing the job. It's insane that the city doesn't have its own construction crews.
ReplyDeleteThis is like bad 70's mob work: someone's getting paid to do this shit? Nobody told them that the stuff they're putting as the "ramp" is going to be eroded to nothing by spring??!
ReplyDelete@1:39pm: If the city had its own construction crews, you can bet they'd be every bit as incompetent as what we're seeing in the private sector. It seems to me that lately many people want to be paid full price for doing a cut-rate job.
ReplyDelete