Community members gathered late yesterday afternoon for the 28th annual Tompkins Square Park tree lighting.
The hour-long event included the Carolers of Olde New York from Theater for the New City, music from the Mandel & Lydon Trio and refreshments courtesy of Veselka and C&B Cafe.
EVG contributor Stacie Joy was there for the festivities...
[Albert Fabozzi, founder of the lighting ceremony]
[Professional sinkhole expert. Please do not attempt.]
6 comments:
Ali!
A Merry Christmas to us all; God bless us, every one!
Ms Joy must be one of Santa's Elves because she delivers the goods every year.
Thank-you!
I seem to remember that Antonio Pagan was also a founder of this with Fabozzi and that it was a celebration of the riot cop removal of poor and homeless people from the park before Christmas ? One thing for sure, Antonio Pagan is not celebrating with the baby Jesus now he went the other way !!!!
@John Penley, you remember incorrectly; while Albert Fabozzi was a supporter of Antonio Pagan's, this Christmas tree idea was his and his alone, although then-Councilman Pagan helped to make it happen. And it had NOTHING to do with "a celebration of the riot cop removal of poor and homeless people from the park before Christmas", that is you rewriting history, as usual, because why let a little thing like facts stand in the way of your scurrilous inference, right? The first demolitions of Tent City were in February 1987 and in July and December 1989, years before the first tree lighting ceremony. It was finally shut down permanently in June 1991, when the park closed for renovations; the first tree lighting took place in 1992, the year Glenn Barnett, Albert's partner, died of AIDS. But trust you, class act that you are, to jump at any chance you can get to take swipes at a long-dead political opponent who had the temerity to oppose you and your anarchist buddies; that just shows what kind of person you really are. Pagan has been dead for 10 years now, let it rest, willya?
(And just as an aside, here's a little-remembered fact - the first tree that was planted was sickly and never took, so it was replaced after several years by the current specimen, which has flourished in the intervening decades.)
I was there in the park for all of this and FYI most of the main tent city activists were dead from AIDS in less than a year after the eviction. I know because I was one of the few people who visited them in the AIDS wards as they were dying. In fact Barbara Henry who carried the homeless Christmas tree out of the park during the riot cop eviction died of AIDS around the next Christmas and it was the most depressing day I have ever spent during the holidays in her AIDS ward. None of them ever got homes. As to my "Anarchist Buddies" I was closer to tent city and was there when they made the decision to start camping in the park. I met many of them in the 3rd St. men's shelter long before the park encampment started because I also stayed there after returning to NYC from federal prison where I did a year for protesting nuclear weapons. Look at my photo archive and you can see photos of a shelter Christmas party I did with my wife Nozomi and Norman Siegel. As to the tree and the first event Pagan sure made a lot of statements at it the seemed to take credit with Fabozzi for the tree and also for the eviction. Anyway Christmas is all about a homeless Jesus and the poor and absolutely none of than is part of this tree party or the original one. Peace on earth goodwill to men was not something Pagan and company ever celebrated in connection to the TSP Christmas tree.
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