Eric Adams' gaffe exposes media hypocrisy

Surely by now you all have heard about the controversial remarks that Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams made on MLK Day about wealthy white transplants. If not, here's a summary:

Now, of course, Adams was going to feel blowback from this, and it has gone on for a week now. But for the wrong reason! As my friend Miss Heather succinctly pointed out:

Now THIS is what the media should have been focusing on in their criticism. Instead, they tried to make the issue about foreign immigration and people coming here for work, which is not who Adams was talking about. We have all been affected by the latest trend of prom queens and bros that have infiltrated NYC and turned it into chain store heaven. These folks leave lily-white suburbs and come here to remake NYC into an urban version of what is familiar to them, and do it with general disdain for the people who were born and raised here. They don't contribute anything to the city's culture except upzonings, gentrification, virtue signaling politics and shitty, overpriced pizza.

So why has the media gone so apeshit over Adams' comments? Well, if you recall, back in 2009, the newspapers were tripping over themselves to endorse - for money - billionaire media mogul Michael Bloomberg for a third mayoral term, aka the grand wizard of forced gentrification and pimp daddy of corporate welfare for real estate companies. So the reaction from the press now is pure defense. They helped gentrify this city with not only this, but by framing any and all opposition as kooks standing in the way of progress and basically printing developer press releases word for word. Can't piss off your advertisers!

Check out this "rebuttal" opinion piece in today's Daily News:

I loved my childhood here but also see again reflected in my kids’ eyes what a profoundly unnatural place it is to grow up in. It’s a way station for people and money coming in or out of America, and everyone building a life in the midst of the tumult and transit and trade knows it.

Hmm. It may be a way station for some people. But everyone reading this knows scores of native New Yorkers who don't feel this way. If this reflects the media's opinion of NYC, then it's no wonder they cover it the way they do, like everything politicians propose is inevitable. Sad. Just sad.

Yes, Adams deserves criticism for his remarks because of his hypocrisy, but the media deserves the same. And that's a big reason why this blog and others, like Jeremiah's Vanishing New York, exist. - QC


And mine too,
JQ LLC ,Impunity City

DeBlasio working on $325 million ferry debacle

From the NY Times:

With New York City’s subway trains jammed to capacity and more people than ever pouring into neighborhoods outside Manhattan, Mayor Bill de Blasio is embarking on an ambitious and expensive plan to create a fleet of city-owned ferryboats that would crisscross the surrounding waterways and connect all five boroughs.

At a cost of more than $325 million, Mr. de Blasio’s expansion of ferry service would be one of the biggest bets any city in the world has made on boats as vehicles for mass transit. The mayor predicts that the ferries would carry 4.5 million passengers a year, about twice as many riders as San Francisco’s ferry system handles.

Mr. de Blasio has promised New Yorkers that ferries will start running on three new routes, serving South Brooklyn, and Astoria and the Rockaways in Queens, by the end of June 2017, four months before he would stand for re-election. Additional routes to the Lower East Side of Manhattan and to Soundview in the Bronx will be added in 2018.

“Our aim is to make this thing as big as possible,” said Alicia Glen, the city’s deputy mayor for housing and economic development. “No guts, no glory.”

“We’re still living with the footprint of an early-19th-century transit map that didn’t contemplate the kind of job growth we’re seeing along the waterfront,” Ms. Glen said. The administration, she said, is trying to create a transportation network for “the new New York.”

Job growth along the waterfront? All I see there are giant residential towers filled with yuppies. That's who this is really for. Everyone else will have to do train-ferry-bus or some combination like that, which is impractical.

A look at what will replace 5 Pointz

From PIX 11:

As a construction team prepares to tear down 5 Pointz, renderings of what will replace the graffiti mecca have been released.

The two giant towers will be built in the next three to five months.

Together, the buildings will have 1,000 rental units, including penthouses and affordable housing.

There will also be a pool, a courtyard and an art wall.

One of the towers will also have retail stores.

The permits to build the towers were filed last week.

Tower people must settle for library van

From LIC Post:

The Queens Library will be starting a mobile library service in Hunters Point this Saturday, which is expected to operate until a physical library is built on Center Boulevard.

The mobile library will be parked next to Gantry Plaza State Park (Center Blvd at 48th Avenue) each Saturday starting May 31 and will operate between 8:30 am and 5:30pm. The service will offer books and materials for all ages, as well as two computers for public use.

Residents will be able to borrow and return books in a similar fashion as if they were going to any other Queens Library.

The plan is to have the mobile library operate all year round– although it will not be in service July 5. “We are likely to keep it there until the [Hunters Point branch] library is built,” said Joanne King, a library spokeswoman.

The Hunters Point Community library should have been completed by now. However, the project continues to face delays as builders have been unwilling to erect it for the $28 million on offer—and it could still be years before it is completed.

LIC loses more character

From Lost City:

A reader wrote in to tell us that The Shannon Pot, the reliable old tavern and grill in Long Island City, not far from the Court Street subway stop, will be razed, along with the building it's in, in the next months. Taking its place will be, yes, another condo tower.

I can find no history of the building prior to its incarnation as The Shannon Pot. But the whole look of the building tells me its probably been a tavern for many years, and probably functioned under many names. The disused side door tells of an old-fashioned "Ladie's Entrance" that once existed. And there are tin ceilings and a room in back that looks like it may have been a kitchen or part of someone's former apartment.

There's no "there" there

From the NY Observer:

Is Long Island City the next Murray Hill? Or the next Williamburg? Or has it gone straight from being like the old industrial before-it-was-cool Williamsburg to the future no-longer-cool because it’s all I-bankers living in luxury towers Williamsburg?

Will the neighborhood that has long felt like the middle of nowhere, despite being close to everywhere, finally feel like somewhere? And most importantly, what will that somewhere be like?
The problem with Long Island City is that it isn’t the industrial, taxi-cab, commercial-bakery filled hub that it used to be, but it can’t figure out who it wants to be. It is neither cheap, nor charming, nor particularly gritty anymore, which means that no one is willing, or able, to claim it as their own.

Its “rebirth” at the hands of developers, rather than the usual artists and creative types, has put the neighborhood in a strange position. Unlike nearly every other patch of ground in New York, whose identity is constant battleground between the old-timers and the new-comers, Long Island City is a no man’s land.

But in a larger sense, yes, it really does matter. A safe neighborhood with abundant housing and an easy commute that is grudgingly accepted because it offers “value” is, if not a total failure, then at least a huge disappointment. It’s wasted potential, a missed opportunity and something that, from an urban planning perspective, we should look to avoid.

As a recent editorial in the Architect’s Newspaper argued, the mega-projects rising around the city lack quality of place; their scales are vast, their public spaces uninviting, their surfaces too sleek. The city cedes control to developers with the resources to build these neighborhoods from scratch, willfully ignoring that while developers know how to physically transform a landscape and make money doing it, they know almost nothing about building a community or a sense of place.

Vallone, Sr. vs Vallone, Jr.?

From the Daily News:

An isolated swath of Astoria that has largely been ignored by developers and businesses could soon undergo a major facelift under a proposal to erect seven waterfront residential towers and a supermarket.

The Lincoln Equities Group wants to create a project dubbed Hallets Point, with roughly 2,300 units of housing and a waterfront park along the East River near the Astoria Houses.

The public review process is expected to begin next year, city officials said.

“If done properly, it could provide new affordable residences to meet the growing demand of the neighborhood,” said state Sen. Michael Gianaris (D-Astoria). It could also provide “services that that part of the neighborhood desperately needs.”

About 1,900 units would be market rate, city officials said. Another 400 will be reserved for affordable housing.

But not everyone expressed such enthusiasm for the project.

City Councilman Peter Vallone Jr. (D-Astoria), whose father, the former Council Speaker, is a consultant for the developer, said he is on the fence about it.

Vallone said he would like to see more businesses and amenities move into the community. But “something that big is going to put a drain on the resources of that neighborhood,” he said.

Wow, has that boy found religion? He's suddenly against 40-story towers along the shore? Does anyone really think he's going to battle his pop?

I'll leave the last word to Curbed:

I can't imagine who the *hell* would want to live in that miserable desolate neighborhood. There's a lot more crap there than they're planning to build over. The projects are, well, the projects, and some 5-year-old was shot there a week or so ago. And if that water taxi doesn't pan out, it's a long, miserable, infrequent ride on the Q102 bus to get back to civilization.

Fan is silenced by pols' money

From the Daily News:

Silence is golden for noise-addled residents of Hunters Point.

Noise abatement equipment recently placed on a large fan that exhausts fumes from a nearby subway tunnel has muffled its ear-splitting racket, according to state Sen. Michael Gianaris.

“The normal street ambient noise level is around 61 decibels,” said Gianaris, who is set to discuss the reduced noise levels at a news conference on Friday. “When the fan was operating it was around 80. Now with the muffler it’s around 62. This is a huge relief.”

MTA East River ventilator, located at 50th Ave. between 5th St. and Center St. ventilates the subway tunnel under the East River and is used during periods of construction.

Residents had complained the fan’s screeching wail led to headaches and sleepless nights.

Gianaris, along with Assemblywoman Cathy Nolan and City Councilman Jimmy Van Bramer, cobbled together $700,000 in funds to pay for the noise abatement equipment.

Complaints about the noise have dropped dramatically, Gianaris said.

But he pointed out that it’s only one of the problems that has emerged as the Long Island City area continues to morph from a neighborhood of factories and warehouses to luxury apartments.

Congratulations, LIC!

From the Wall Street Journal:

...East Coast is an exercise in taking a neighborhood with very little residential identity or context to build from and building it into an area so grand in scale, so modern and sterile in feel, and so unlike anything that could be said be evocative of New York City, that it is still fumbling to find an identity.

The builders built tall, statement-making buildings on small footprints, surrounded by as much green space as possible, giving the whole community a classic Corbusian feel of towers in parks surrounded by highways (the Queens-Midtown tunnel roars open onto I-495.

The statement is one of underdog, pioneer indignation: There was nothing here, no roadmap to follow and little in the way of traditional context to respect, so we've built towers that are just as sleek as the latest glazed-over, thumbshaped behemoths in the city.

Hear that LIC? Your neighborhood didn't exist before the towers were built. And even though the developers allegedly had a blank canvas, they ended up building uninspired crap on land given away to them for nothing.

Oh no! Not enough pre-K in LIC!

From the Daily News:

Parents and elected officials in Long Island City are blasting the city for failing to plan for a population boom that has put a strain on the only public school in the area with a prekindergarten program.

Recent housing developments have forced parents to sweat through the pre-K enrollment process. The deadline to submit applications for a child to enter the citywide pre-K lottery was Friday.

There were 91 applicants last year for the 36 full-day pre-K seats available at Public School 78 - the only program in the 11101 zip code.

Officials at the Department of Education said limited funding has stymied its ability to tackle the problem, even though the issue is on the department's radar.

Welcome to Queens, tower people!

5 Pointz may be history

From the Daily News:

The iconic graffiti-caked Long Island City factory known as 5Pointz has been tagged for development, likely ending its run as a street-art mecca.

The building's owner, developer Jerry Wolkoff, said he met recently with city planning officials to discuss replacing it with two high-rise residential towers and up to 1,300 rental units.

Wolkoff wants to dramatically remake the entire block along Jackson Ave. that surrounds 5Pointz, where the No. 7 train rumbles past.

He plans to formally submit a proposal to the city within the next two weeks. The size and scope of the project are still being worked out.

Artists fear that Wolkoff's vision for the factory's future would snuff out one of the city's unique creative communities.

He told The News in an exclusive interview that his plans include a mix of shops and restaurants, a supermarket, an open-air concourse between the towers and a park. There would also be studio space for artists.

The city rezoned the block in a 2001 plan to spur redevelopment around Queens Plaza.

The change allows large-scale redevelopment. But Wolkoff's plans call for the taller of the two towers to rise some 40 stories, which will require a special permit and likely a zoning change.

That means the plans must be approved through the city's zoning and land-use review process.

Wolkoff said his $300 million project would revitalize the area and provide for thousands of construction jobs.

Example of "green" living in LIC

From the Times Ledger:

After complaints from residents and calls from the community board, the city is removing the “no standing” signs it installed along Court Square in front of the Arris Lofts about a month ago.

The signs, which went up across the street from the historic Long Island City Courthouse without any notification to residents or Community Board 2, were slated to be removed Wednesday after the TimesLedger’s publication deadline.

Seth Solomonow, a spokesman for the city Department of Transportation, said that in addition to altering the no-standing signs to allow street parking on nights and weekends when the court is not in session, the agency would work to remove parking spaces reserved for district attorney employees who rarely visit the court.

This whole time we were told that the City was encouraging the newcomers to scorn cars, live green and be dependent on public transportation and bikes which is why the parking requirements for the new developments should be waived. So why would they need street parking? And why did the City give it to them?

Atlantic Yards = more tower people

From WNYC:

At 11:30, guest Nicole Gelinas says the following:
I think if the mayor really wanted development, he would concentrate on public transportation. All the mayor and the governor really want are warehouse apartments for people to live, pay very high personal income taxes for awhile, in their young 20, 30 years - and then move out of the city before they require public services, use the school system, and so forth. These are just going to be one bedroom "luxury" capped warehouses, and to knock down historic prewar buildings to build cheap construction warehouses for single people with roommates who'll be living here for a few years is just ridiculous. This is not free market. Free markets do not create this.

As transcribed by Atlantic Yards Report:

"When you look at the affordable housing component of this, we have hundreds of thousands of privately-owned affordable housing, out in Coney Island, out in the farther reaches of Brooklyn and the Bronx, but we have no reliable, fast transportation to get there," she said. "If the mayor and governor want affordable housing, build the infrastructure and the affordable housing will build itself. For people who say, oh no, the city has to build affordable housing directly. Well, we've been trying that, for a century, and we still don't have enough of it. Why don't we try it my way, just once, and see that it works."

Miss Heather returns to Purves Street

This is a nasty accident, mugging and/or homeless encampment waiting to happen.

Views from Purves Street

I'm including this one (from across the street) because I think its funny.

H

LIC not a fan of subway fans

From the NY Times:

The fans have been there since long before the shuttered factories and vacant warehouses of Long Island City began giving way to schools, restaurants and homes. They sound like a giant rattle shaken at great speeds, they are unrelenting and they follow no set pattern, running for an hour one weekend and for an entire night the next.

At River View Gardens, a subsidized housing complex for the elderly that sits right next to the fans, Osvaldo Cordero, the superintendent, said that at one time this month when the fans were on for 24 hours straight, “I had people coming up to me crying because they couldn’t get any sleep.”

It's despicable that the elderly are being warehoused in a place located in a spot that makes their life hell.

For the rest of the complainers - caveat emptor.

Sorry, I'm just jealous...

LIC residents express frustration with MTA

From Fox 5:

Frustrated and angry New Yorkers packed a restaurant in Queens Wednesday night for an emergency town hall meeting about the service disruptions on the 7 subway line.

One after another they vented to local Councilman Jimmy Van Bramer as well as staff members from the MTA/NYC Transit.

They said that the weekend service changes on the 7 train are way too disruptive and that the MTA did not do a good enough job to inform riders of the changes and how to cop with them.

Some residents also complained about the noise created by MTA construction equipment.

"NYC Transit apologizes for the inconvenience to our customers," the agency said in a statement when the changes were announced in January. "These service upgrades are essential to operating a safe and efficient service. The 7 line presents a special challenge in that we have a short window of opportunity to perform this work, essentially between late September and April."

The die is cast

From the Newtown Pentacle:

At 46th avenue, the brick horizon opens, and a glimpse of the shining city is offered. Soon, this viewpoint and vantage will be occluded by yet another high rise spire, a warehouse offered to white collar laborers.

What will happen to the fragile infrastructure of 19th century streets, where wounds to the modern asphalt reveal victorian cobblestones? Why is the municipality not requiring the construction of new subway stations and schools, or at least sewers, from these Oligarchs for the rapacious profits they will garner from these grand projects?

Not bad folks these Tower People, on the whole, despite being a denigrated group referred to with smirks and winks by long time LIC’ers. Degreed and lettered professionals on the whole, they are a legion of bankers and lawyers who exist in the warren shadows of Manhattan’s financial district and turbulent midtown by day, but they turn Long Island City from a neighborhood into a dormitory.

A narrow enough lensing of the past can create causality from coincidence, but if you think that Battery Park City or Jersey City is city planning at its best, you’re going to love the new Long Island City.

From Part 3:

It is the end of a year of change - but all years are “years of change”. New York, and the United States on the whole, continue their trend toward apathy and quasi-fascism.

Ceasar is just a few years away now, and will choose to reveal him or her self shortly - and offer clarity and purpose to the masses - who will love their Ceasar, along with the bread and circuses.

And all the poisons in the mud will leach out.

News flash: Tower people's whining fails to close LIC trainyard

From the Times Ledger:

Two months after starting a petition drive to deal with the noise of idling Long Island Rail Road locomotives, residents of some of the newer residential buildings in Long Island City are not getting any relief.

“I work at nights most of the time and the idling is so loud and unbearable during the day that I cannot get any rest,” resident Andrea Modica wrote on the online petition to the LIRR. “Also, when I come home in the early morning there is constant idling, making it hard to get to sleep. It is a residential area and this needs to stop.”

The century-old railyard is the terminus of the non-electrified Montauk, Oyster Bay, Port Jefferson and Greenport lines because diesel locomotives are not allowed in the tunnels under Manhattan, much to the chagrin of residents of the 12-story, 132-unit condo tower One Hunters Point, which opened its doors at 549 Borden Ave. in late February just across the street.

Many of the 75 petition signatures came from residents of that building, though other signers said they lived in the Citylights building. There are now at least seven major residential developments either completed or under construction within three blocks of the railyard.

Did they think that after 100 years the railyard would just pick up and leave? Did they not notice it when they came to look at their luxury condo?

You folks now have something in common with residents of Maspeth & Glendale. Welcome to Queens, neighbors! Duane Reade sells earplugs.

Why don't you folks write to Amanda Burden and ask her where she developed her piss poor city planning skills. Who zones for high rises across the street from a diesel train yard?