Thursday, May 30, 2013

A subway station and an industrial canal

From Brooklyn Daily Eagle, May 2013
The other day, I took a trip to Carroll Gardens, and since I had some time to kill, I took the F train one more stop to the newly renovated Smith-9th Streets station, which reopened about a month ago. Not only is Smith-9th Streets one of only two elevated stops on the IND division of the transit system, it’s the highest elevated rapid-transit system in the city, and by some accounts, in the world.
The station looked very impressive, just as it did in the photos released the MTA.  The outdoor part had an impressive ironwork design of alternating half-circles above a chest-high concrete barrier. The original mosaics, darkened by years of neglect, have been restored, and futuristic new lighting fixtures have been installed overhead.
The “main” part of the platform is made of completely new concrete, with plastic windows that contain a wire mesh. Many years ago, all elevated stations had glass windows. But over the years, the windows grew cracked and dirty and were eventually covered up with an aluminum surface. This restores the windows, and they are a welcome edition.
Going down to the mezzanine, there are more windows, these of just clear plastic. While the escalators are brand new, I was a little disappointed that they only come up to the mezzanine, and people have to walk the one flight of stairs to the platforms. Still, the new escalators are a great improvement over the old ones – in the old days, at least one of them always seemed to be out of service.
One word about the complaint that the renovated station isn’t disabled accessible. There are varying degrees of “disability” – not every disabled person needs to use a wheelchair. Some are able to walk, although slowly and with a cane. While it’s somewhat unfortunate that the new station was built without an elevator, there are many other people (including me, who often gets out of breath while walking up many flights of stairs because of my asthma) whom the new escalator banks will help substantially.
My only real complaint about Smith-9th Streets concerns not the station, but what you see from it. The new windows are a double-edge sword – you can see outside, but what do you see? In some places, mainly the western, open platform area, you indeed can see north to Downtown Brooklyn and Lower Manhattan. But if you look out the window almost everywhere else, you’ll see that the Gowanus Canal needs a LOT of work!  The day I was there, it was raining, and the water in the canal was covered with a layer of floating, yellow-green sludge. If the “flushing tunnel” was doing any flushing that day, I sure didn’t see it.
The view of the banks of the Gowanus wasn’t much better. Sure, Lowe’s is a nice store. But elsewhere, the view mainly consists of oil containers, a huge scrapyard where a crane was moving scrap metal in and out of a barge, a group of low-rise industrial buildings, and an almost-empty concrete factory, where several trucks and some outdoor fixtures were still visible. The much-talked-about “Public Place” was visible, too, but at this point it still resembles a huge, overgrown vacant lot.
Yes, the subway station has now been restored to its full glory. Very soon, the cleanup of the Gowanus Canal itself will begin. Let’s hope that all this work will result in a more attractive scene on the banks of the canal as well.

Monday, May 20, 2013

If You're Not Part of the Solution......

From Brooklyn Daily Eagle
The recent wave of indictments of elected officials seems to encompass everybody. Democrats and Republicans (although not the Brooklyn Republicans, at least so far), members of all ethnic groups have been named indicted or are the subjects of investigation. 
Vito Lopez, who recently said he would resign from his seat in the state Assembly and who by all accounts acted like a “Little Caesar” in his district, is only the most extreme example. More typical is the low-key politician who takes bribes in exchange for pushing a new housing development or other “perk.”
Of course, this is nothing new. For many decades, Tammany Hall ruled in Manhattan and many other parts of the city. Like the old mob, Tammany’s way of operating was “I do you a favor, you do me a favor.” There’s nothing wrong with this per se, unless that “favor” happens to be illegal.
In fact, one 19th century state legislator, George Washington Plunkitt, drew a line between “dishonest graft,” or graft that lines the pockets of one person exclusively for his own personal gain; and “honest graft,” in which the spoils to into the coffers of the party, campaign workers and others who are on the ballot for the same party.
Graft didn’t extend only to the legislature. In one highly suspicious episode, during the early 1940s, Abe Reles, a government witness in a mob case, supposedly leaped to his death from the Half Moon Hotel in Coney Island, where he was being held by police. Incredibly, all of the police officers who were assigned to guard him testified that they were asleep when Reles supposedly tried to escape. I personally find Lucky Luciano’s account of the incident – that the mob paid off these particular cops – more believable.
Until recently, many New Yorkers were led to believe that these types of shenanigans had come to an end with the rise of Reform-minded Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia in the 1930s and the fall of Carmine de Sapio, the last Tammany Hall boss, in the early 1960s. What happened?
In Brooklyn, part of the problem might have been that the Reform Democratic movement was never as strong here as it was in Manhattan. While in Manhattan, the Reform Democrats had more or less supplanted the Regular Democrats by the end of the 1960s, in Brooklyn, we still had figures like Meade Esposito and Mel Miller into the 1970s and ‘80s. Reformers were strong in Carroll Gardens Park Slope and similar areas, but in places like Canarsie and Midwood, Bed-Stuy and Brighton Beach, the Reform movement was weak indeed.
How do we get out of this mess? What happens to the politicians who have been investigated or have been forced to resign is a matter for the legal system to decide. But if you want good government, what I would say is to paraphrase the well-known 1960s saying attributed to Eldgridge Cleaver: “If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.”
If you decry corrupt politicians, but aren’t registered to vote, saying, “They’re all thieves anyway,” then you’re part of the problem! If more people decided to be part of the solution – volunteering in political campaigns, going to community board meetings, joining political clubs, volunteering to be on the county committee – then those “rotten apples” would have less of an opportunity to dominate the process because they would be far outnumbered. If you want to do away with corruption, it’s not enough to walk the walk, you have to talk the talk. Volunteer for your local organization today!

Saturday, May 11, 2013

Charter Schools: A Skeptical Look


In his third term, Mayor Bloomberg is increasingly showing his true colors. Nowhere is this more evident than in his advocacy of charter schools. Bloomberg has constantly pushed for more charter schools, and unsuccessfully lobbied for the state to raise the cap on the number of charter schools that are permitted.
On the surface, charter schools seem like a good idea. At least in most cases, they are established in areas where “regular” schools have performed poorly for years.. Charter schools are operated by many types of organizations with many different orientations. But many tend to espouse a “boot camp” type of ideology, offering long days, lots of homework, intense studying, and tests, tests, tests. Among some kids, this can produce results. But it may cause other kids and parents to transfer out.
Even if charter schools are the greatest thing in the world, there’s no excuse for the preferential treatment they get from the city. This newspaper has detailed how charter schools are shoehorned into buildings housing “regular” schools. In almost every case, the non-charter school loses something, whether a library, a lunchroom, or something else. In one example detailed by Eagle writer Mary Frost, one charter school paid to have its lighting ballasts, which contained dangerous compounds, removed from its portion of a school building– while the hazardous ballasts still remained in other parts of the building.
Indeed, the Bloomberg administration is so gung-ho for charter schools that one wonders whether the mayor’s successful push to do away with the independent Board of Education and replace it with a mayoral-controlled Department of Education was mainly done to make it easier to push charter schools.
Who is really behind the push for charter schools? Well, Juan Gonzalez of the Daily News pointed to the fact that under the federal New Markets tax Credits, investors in certain types of projects can make big profits, including charter schools. The bonds used to fund charter schools, according to this argument, have higher yields than the “regular” bonds issued by state and city government.
 Gonzalez also discussed this on the radio program, “Democracy Now.” “What happens,” said Gonzalez, “is the investors who put up the money to build charter schools get to basically or virtually double their money in seven years through a thirty-nine percent tax credit from the federal government.”
The Eagle, at one time, received emails from an organization called “Democrats for Education Reform,”  Well, who are these Democrats? When you click on “About Us,” you find out who they are: The members of their board of directors boast affiliations like “Eagle Capital Group,” “Columbus Hill Capital Management,” “T2Partners LLC,” and so on.
 It’s very difficult for me to believe that these people are in the charter school game just out of the goodness of their hearts. Of course, there is a place for Wall Street – offering stocks and securities to the public. But it makes no more sense to me for Wall Street to try to run schools than it would for a chemistry teacher to go to the Stock Exchange and start trading on the floor.
 I’m not the one to give the definitive answer on what’s going on. For all I know, Bloomberg’s trying to “pay back” his former colleagues in the financial industry for their support with these lucrative charter-school “plums.” But in general, it’s best to leave the management of schools to educational professionals – not to hedge fund managers, corporate counsels, investment bankers, real estate appraisers and so on.