Queens, Bronx and Manhattan civic groups continue their battles against borough tower prisons

Patch

  A group of homeowners in Kew Gardens, Forest Hills and Briarwood is planning to sue the city in a last-ditch effort to stop a new jail from going up in their neighborhood and get the mayor's office to return to the drawing board.

The group, which calls itself the Community Preservation Coalition, is preparing to file an Article 78 lawsuit over the city's decision to approve building a new jail in Kew Gardens, part of a $9 billion plan to replace the detention facilities on Rikers Island with a new jail in every borough except Staten Island by 2026.

Article 78 refers to a civil law that empowers New Yorkers to challenge decisions made by public agencies or officials on the grounds that it was unlawful, arbitrary or capricious.

"We really want them to do a meaningful review," Kew Gardens Civic Association President Dominick Pistone told Patch in an interview. "We don't think they've fulfilled their obligations under the City Charter."

The New York City Charter lays out a series of design and funding details that officials must include for a capital project to be approved by the mayor. 

Members of Queens Community Board 9, which voted unanimously against the Kew Gardens jail plan last year, previously accused the mayor's office of failing to meet those requirements in a Sept. 27 letter to the City Council. 

The Kew Gardens Civic Association, which is helping spearhead the legal effort, sent a letter to homeowners Wednesday soliciting contributions to fund the lawsuit, pitching it as "an investment in preserving your home," according to a copy obtained by Patch.

NY Post

A group of South Bronx residents is suing the city in a bid to block a new jail from coming to their neighborhood as part of Mayor Bill de Blasio’s larger efforts to shutter the Rikers Island prison complex.

The suit, filed Tuesday in Bronx Supreme Court on behalf of the Diego Beekman Mutual Housing Association and other parties, seeks to halt construction on a 19-story, 886-bed jail planned for the site of the NYPD’s tow pound in Mott Haven — a neighborhood located in the nation’s poorest congressional district.

It alleges the de Blasio administration and City Council broke the law by snubbing alternative sites for the jail, failed to reveal the true environmental impact of the project to residents and snubbed the entire public-review process.

“The Mayor and Council Speaker broke the law and rigged the process to saddle a low-income community of color with a jail, plain and simple,” said Arline Parks, CEO of Diego Beekman Mutual Housing Association, which represents 5,000 residents in 38 buildings.

NY Daily News

 The city’s plan to construct a jail in Chinatown routinely neglected community input, including 
Native Americans concerned about the possibility of large amounts of human remains in the area of the planned facility, a lawsuit set to be filed Friday claims.

The suit, which will be filed by Neighbors United Below Canal and American Indian Community House, claims the city’s plan will cause “irreparable damage to indigenous lands” and that the city failed to adequately reach out to neighborhood organizations and affected residents.

“The work and outreach that’s gone into this lawsuit is work the city should have been doing in the first place," said Jan Lee, who runs Neighbors United Below Canal. “It’s a robust case because we did meaningful outreach to our neighbors and came to realize just how deeply negligent the mayor’s plan was from the very beginning.”

The suit, which was shared with the Daily News, also alleges the city violated its own land use procedure, in which the City Council must approve projects before they can be built, by changing the proposed location of the Manhattan facility from 80 Centre St. to 124-125 White St. at the last minute. The White St. location is where the borough’s current jail , known as “The Tombs,” stands.

“Although the community was not pleased with the initial proposal to build a new jail structure at 80 Centre Street, the change of location was even worse,” a draft of the lawsuit reads, noting that the new plan puts the jail near residences, small retailers and a senior center.

The city also identified that there is a “moderate to high” possibility of Native American remains at the site of the proposed Chinatown jail, but still failed to reach out to the indigenous community, neighborhood advocate Christopher Marte told the Daily News.

Wilpons thought casino idea was a home run

(Click on image to enlarge) Photo By Geoffrey Croft/NYC Park Advocates

From the NY Post:

The Mets’ owners want to roll the dice on building a Las Vegas-style casino next to Citi Field to recoup some of the $162 million for which team brass are still on the hook following the Bernie Madoff Ponzi-scheme debacle, plans obtained by The Post reveal.

While team owners Fred Wilpon and Saul Katz are still having trouble opening their tight pockets for high-priced free agents, that didn’t stop their development arm, Sterling Equities, from betting on a proposal that called for bringing a massive casino with gaming tables and slots, a 500-room, full-service hotel, 1.8 million square feet of retail and other amenities to the Willets Point development site in Queens.

The Southampton-based Shinnecock Indian Nation signed on to operate the casino, and the Wilpons and partners even offered the city $100 million for the 62-acre site, according to the development team’s proposal, which was first obtained by project opponents Willets Point United and NYC Park Advocates.

With live-dealer casino gambling currently illegal in New York, except on tribal lands, the Wilpons and partner Related Companies were awarded a consolation prize.

In June, the Bloomberg administration handed them 23 of the 62 acres of city-owned land they sought in the September 2011 casino proposal — most of which is now used for parking — to build a $3 billion retail and entertainment complex without a casino.

City officials pulled the casino from the Willets Point plan partly because they thought the government-approval process would take too long, sources said. However, a city spokesman declined to comment when asked if the city would push for a casino there if the state Legislature eventually backs it.

More from NYC Park Advocates and Willets Point United.

Basically, the City was and is willing to condemn Willets Point for parking lots.

Martins Field now "Olde Towne of Flushing Burial Ground"

From the Times Ledger:

Bayside community activist Mandingo Tshaka said he was pleased after the city renamed Flushing’s Martins Field to honor the remains of African Americans and native Americans who had been buried there more than 100 years ago, but he has also called for the site to be locked up at night to prevent vandalism.

The city Parks Department changed Martins Field’s name to the Olde Towne of Flushing Burial Ground in mid-December. The site, between 164th and 165th streets along 46th Avenue in Flushing, had originally been a cemetery for 19th-century blacks and American Indians who had died of small pox and cholera.

Several new signs at the burial ground have been put up to notify community residents of the site’s historical significance.

The city had paved over the burial ground more than 70 years ago to build a playground and pool at the site, which had violated city law. In 2006, the city performed $2.7 million in renovations at the burial ground, such as adding a steel picket fence, new sidewalks and a playground with a commemorative plaque.

The burial site, which dates back to the 1840s, was originally known as the Colored Cemetery of Flushing. More than 1,000 people were buried at the site between 1840 and 1898.

Tribal chief vs. Bloomberg

From NY Magazine:

Mayor Bloomberg, along with Representative Peter King, wrote an August 4, 2008, editorial arguing that cigarette sales on reservations should be taxed—one line insinuated that cigarette-smuggling money might go to terrorists. Chief Wallace is still riled about it. “We got blamed for the MTA deficit! Phenomenal, man. Supporting terrorism. It upsets me because this is our land, whether we occupy it or not. It’s still our land, and we defend our homeland against all enemies, domestic and foreign.”

On August 25 of this year, a federal-court judge in Brooklyn handed down a verdict addressing the Unkechaug’s motion to dismiss. Federal Judge Carol Amon denied the motion and ruled that the state appellate court had misinterpreted the law in question. She ruled that regular tax law indeed applied to the tobacco trade on Indian reservations, as it does everywhere in the state. She issued a temporary injunction banning all further cigarette sales at four stores identified in the city’s suit. Chief Wallace and the Unkechaug appealed. On September 25, the court announced that though the appeal would be heard, the injunction would continue. But that leaves ten other smoke shops in the Poospatuck reservation, and the cars are still backed up around Squaw Lane. “The city will go after every dollar that is owed to city taxpayers,” said Bloomberg in a statement.

Wallace is far from ready to smoke the peace pipe, however. He says it’s the same as it was with whaling in the seventeenth century. “The goal here is not to stop us from selling cigarettes,” Chief Wallace said. “It’s to try and destroy us as a people, because every effort that we made to resolve these things has met with resistance. They don’t want to do it. They want to take it as far as they can to try and kill us.

“They need a scapegoat for not blaming his friends on Wall Street,” said the chief, his tone slowly rising. He began pacing in circles, literally hopping mad. “Who is a convenient scapegoat? The smallest tribe in New York, selling a demonic product—that’s a good scapegoat.”