"Small businesses and low-income New Yorkers keep getting pushed out"

Juan Gonzalez checks in on the LES rezoning plan in the Daily News today in a piece titled Lower East Side rezone plan another Mike Bloomberg boondoggle:

Wah Lee, a slight, middle-aged factory worker, stood in front of the Municipal Building Tuesday vowing a long fight to save her Chinatown neighborhood.
All around her were dozens of Chinese and Hispanic residents of the lower East Side. They held up placards with words like: "Stop Racist Rezoning" and "Chinatown/Lower East Side Are Not For Sale."
They brought a box of petitions with the signatures of some 10,000 of their neighbors - all opposed to the City Planning Commission's new rezoning proposal.
Theirs is a story that has become all-too familiar during the Bloomberg era: another stable neighborhood turned upside down by a massive rezoning.
The sheer number of these rezonings - from Columbia University to Hudson Yards to Greenpoint-Williamsburg to Willets Point, boggles the mind.
City officials routinely claim it's for the good of the neighborhoods, but in the end a handful of well-connected developers and Big Box stores end up the big winners.
Small businesses and low-income New Yorkers keep getting pushed out.

[Downtown Express photo by Shoshanna Bettencourt]

Jimmy Carter, Jesus and the Lower East Side

The Sep. 17, 1984, issue of Time magazine included this brief:

After three days of hammering and sawing, Jimmy Carter, 59, looked more like a seasoned construction worker than a former President, with good reason. While most Americans were using Labor Day to putter around the house or relax, Carter and about 40 members of a Georgia volunteer group spent their holiday renovating a six-story tenement building in downtown Manhattan. "I'm liking the work," said Carter, who was joined on the second day by former First Lady Rosalynn, 57. "I've done a lot of carpentry before, but not like this. The tallest building in Plains, Ga., is two stories high." After work the former Chief of State read from the New Testament at a local Baptist church, whimsically relating his group's good deed to the Bible: "If Christ came to New York he would probably spend lots of time on the Lower East Side -- before it's gentrified that is."

So much potential for a smartass reply.

At the Bowery Wine Co. protest Friday night -- in pictures

Here are a few photos from last night's protest that started in front of the Bowery Wine Co. I was only able to stay for the first leg of the protest, which, as Jeremiah reports, continued on to CBGB/Varvatos, the Bowery Hotel, 47 E. 3rd St., then down to Avenue A, through Tompkins Square Park, and finished at the Christodora House. His Flickr pool is here. Bob Arihood was also with the group the entire time. He took many compelling photos, as usual. (Check out my videos from the Bowery Wine Co. here.)

A little back story here.

At the Bowery Wine Co. protest Friday night

Here are a few videos from the Bowery Wine Company protest tonight. (Apologies if they look as shaky and grainy as Cloverfield. Still learning the ways of the camera.) Not sure how much narrative you need, though I'll likely add some later...The fellow in the first and third video was the lone dissenter. He kept yelling "pussies go home." He also repeated, "We're republicans, and we're here to stay!" No word yet whether he was an official representative of the New York Young Republican Club.













As I note in the post above this, I was only able to stay for the first leg of the protest, which, as Jeremiah reports, continued on to CBGB/Varvatos, the Bowery Hotel, 47 E. 3rd St., then down to Avenue A, through Tompkins Square Park, and finished at the Christodora House. His Flickr pool is here. Bob Arihood was also with the group the entire time. He took many compelling photos, as usual.

LES home of the week

From this week's real estate section in the New York Post. One of the "dream" homes of the week (descriptions are written by Victor Wishna):

$3.475 MILLION

A century ago, you might have found two or three families squeezed into one tenement apartment along this stretch of Norfolk Street. Today, you'll find the 16-story Blue, a sparkling new condo of "pixelated" blue glass, and at its top, this roomy 2,494-square-foot penthouse duplex. It features two bedroom suites, three full bathrooms, a designer kitchen, a large private terrace and "stunning" city, river and bridge views through 40 windows. My how times (and prices) have changed.

Meanwhile, go here to feel a little more Blue.

Is this really fiction?

The Wall Street Journal yesterday ran an excerpt from the new novel by Julie Salamon titled "Hospital." This passage caught my eye:

He traveled on the overnight flight from Phoenix, landing bleary-eyed in New York on a cold morning in December Sunday. He spent the day in Manhattan, staying with a friend on the Upper West Side. She showed him Times Square, Central Park, the usual tourist stuff. On Monday morning he took the subway to Borough Park, crossing the East River, away from the Manhattan skyline toward Brooklyn, once described by another transplanted midwesterner, Ian Frazier, as having "the undefined, hard-to-remember shape of a stain"—in other words, a place you wanted to be from, not head toward. In recent years, however, the real-estate craze in Manhattan had given the borough new definition, no longer stain but hot spot for the disenfranchised young people who couldn't afford the East Village or Lower East Side and for cramped, growing families looking for bigger spaces, more sky, yards.