Reading articles in recent weeks about the impending sale of one of few large-scale working and middle income housing sites in Manhattan makes obvious the level of unawareness of what it means to create and sustain a vibrant viable city.
For those of us who have lived in any neighborhood for any length of time, the idea that you can solve the low and middle income housing crisis in Manhattan by building in other boroughs, as the Bloomberg administration proposes, speaks volumes about what is not understood about what it actually takes to make a neighborhood.
For those of us who have lived in and built the communities in Manhattan for decades, this is our home. And while we are grateful for the offer to build housing for poor/working/middle income New Yorkers in the other boroughs, we find the idea of locating or relocating the inconvenient poor, working and middle income out of Manhattan to be astonishingly arrogant.
For many of us, Manhattan is our only home. We don’t have vacation home(s). Our loyalties are here. We live here, we work here, and we tackle all the details in our neighborhoods to insure that they function well. We are the solid ground that stays here year in and year out. We keep our neighborhoods safe, we keep them interesting, and we keep Manhattan from turning into the pretense of a city. We’ve built networks that can’t be transplanted when our housing becomes the envy of the wealthy.
As to who owns it (“MetLife owns it, and they have the right to sell it,” - Bloomberg), well that is a big question harkening back to the Lanape Natives, but suffice it to say that these projects were built by the use of eminent domain and with the help of public money. That, and the whole notion of a city having the right to plan itself, entitles the city to be involved in what happens: including insuring that the MetLife site be maintained into the future as a middle and working income-housing site in Manhattan. We may expect a developer to be self-serving, but our city officials don’t have to support that view.
October 12, 2006
Thursday, October 12, 2006
Thursday, November 10, 2005
Preservation of Liz Christy
Preservation of Liz Christy
As a resident of the Bowery near the Liz Christy Garden, I and my family have enjoyed its beauty for many years of our life in this neighborhood (all thirty of them!). We were greatly dismayed when we first heard of the Avalon Bay construction project on the corner. We knew it would bring unforeseen changes that were not going to be thought about sharply enough to take into account the whole fabric of this community.
Sure enough we find that aspects of the Avalon Bay plan will involve dismantling signature pieces of the Garden (like the oldest trees, the turtle pond, etc.). I’ve already noticed that the new building blocks the sun in the afternoon which will change what can grow there. These may seem like small things, but life is made up of small decisions that affect the future ever after.
I get the feeling that this developer has no respect or notion of what this garden represents to the wider community (world- wide in fact). As example: I remember after 9/11 watching parades of dazed and dust covered people walking up the Bowery. As they passed the garden they paused to catch a glimpse of what I assumed to be something tangible to hold onto to counter the horror they had just escaped. People wept.
Compare that history with a developer who wants a picture window into the garden for high end restaurant goers as an “amenity”. No matter that that would completely destroy it as a place of refuge for everyone else.
We are facing rapid and unthought through building in this neighborhood. It is increasingly clear to those of us who have lived and worked here for decades that no one is at the helm of community planning. It has never been more evident that the thinking of this developer and others is guided only by greed.
Preservation of Liz Christy
Many of us vigorously support Parks in carrying out its mandate to protect and preserve Parks land from encroachment by the short sighted aims of for-profit builders.
Not unlike the events on Fifth Avenue, where a group of inwardly focused co-op owners underestimated the value of a hawk to an entire city (and beyond!), the developer of Avalon Christy Place will face enormous grassroots opposition if it attempts to so disrespect the work of long time community residents.
Now more than ever New Yorkers need the reminder that life is still good, hopeful, vibrant with creatures and beauty AND that all of that matters to the people who are charged with the protection of such things. A hawk, a turtle pond, a space of quiet, and a tree that existed before you were born. These are the “little” and correctly humbling antidotes to a city increasingly filled with the confused and the greedy who can forget that they too are temporary residents on an island that had a history before us and (hopefully) a real future ahead of us.
As a resident of the Bowery near the Liz Christy Garden, I and my family have enjoyed its beauty for many years of our life in this neighborhood (all thirty of them!). We were greatly dismayed when we first heard of the Avalon Bay construction project on the corner. We knew it would bring unforeseen changes that were not going to be thought about sharply enough to take into account the whole fabric of this community.
Sure enough we find that aspects of the Avalon Bay plan will involve dismantling signature pieces of the Garden (like the oldest trees, the turtle pond, etc.). I’ve already noticed that the new building blocks the sun in the afternoon which will change what can grow there. These may seem like small things, but life is made up of small decisions that affect the future ever after.
I get the feeling that this developer has no respect or notion of what this garden represents to the wider community (world- wide in fact). As example: I remember after 9/11 watching parades of dazed and dust covered people walking up the Bowery. As they passed the garden they paused to catch a glimpse of what I assumed to be something tangible to hold onto to counter the horror they had just escaped. People wept.
Compare that history with a developer who wants a picture window into the garden for high end restaurant goers as an “amenity”. No matter that that would completely destroy it as a place of refuge for everyone else.
We are facing rapid and unthought through building in this neighborhood. It is increasingly clear to those of us who have lived and worked here for decades that no one is at the helm of community planning. It has never been more evident that the thinking of this developer and others is guided only by greed.
Preservation of Liz Christy
Many of us vigorously support Parks in carrying out its mandate to protect and preserve Parks land from encroachment by the short sighted aims of for-profit builders.
Not unlike the events on Fifth Avenue, where a group of inwardly focused co-op owners underestimated the value of a hawk to an entire city (and beyond!), the developer of Avalon Christy Place will face enormous grassroots opposition if it attempts to so disrespect the work of long time community residents.
Now more than ever New Yorkers need the reminder that life is still good, hopeful, vibrant with creatures and beauty AND that all of that matters to the people who are charged with the protection of such things. A hawk, a turtle pond, a space of quiet, and a tree that existed before you were born. These are the “little” and correctly humbling antidotes to a city increasingly filled with the confused and the greedy who can forget that they too are temporary residents on an island that had a history before us and (hopefully) a real future ahead of us.
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