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.

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!

Charter Schools: A Skeptical Look

This building on Baltic Street in Cobble Hill houses both Success Academy Cobble Hill, a charter school, and the School for International Studies, a more traditional public school. Eagle file photo

Originally in Brooklyn Daily Eagle

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.

Never Mind the Bikes, Let's Have Subways to Staten Island!

By Raanan Geberer
From Brooklyn Daily Eagle

A few weeks ago, my wife and I went to a concert at Historic Richmondtown in Staten Island. I thought this would be a simple matter: take the subway from our home in Chelsea to South Ferry, take the ferry, then take a bus. The last time, I had rented a car and gone via the Gowanus Expressway and the Verrazano Bridge, but this time I thought I could do it more cheaply.
My flaw, however, was to think that the ferries came about once every 10 minutes. When we got to the ferry terminal, we found, to my chagrin, that the ferries came only once every half hour, at least on the weekend. Moreover, one had just departed. When we got to the ferry terminal in Fort George, there was no time for a bus. We ended up taking a cab to Historic Richmondtown, for $25. So much for saving money.
When Staten Island joined Greater New York, it was expected that a rapid transit connection to the island would be built. Since Brooklyn is much closer to Staten Island than Manhattan is, it was expected that the connection would be through Brooklyn. Indeed, in the early 1920s, the BMT (Brooklyn-Manhattan Transit, one of the ancestors of today’s city-owned subway system) began digging a tunnel from Bay Ridge to Staten Island, where it was expected to hook up with the Staten Island Railway (now also a part of the city’s transit system).
However, then-Mayor Mike Hylan stopped the BMT in its tracks, to use a poor pun, by refusing to provide funding. The mayor was a former BMT motorman who was fired during a strike, and he hated the BMT ever since. Mayor Hylan also stalled the 14th Street-Canarsie Line (today’s L train), and it wasn’t finished until 1928, when Hylan was out of office.
Later during the 1920s, the Port Authority of New York was formed. One of its first projects was supposed to have been a freight railroad tunnel under the Narrows. This tunnel would possibly have had tracks for rapid transit as well. For whatever reason, the Port Authority sat on the proposal, and it was eventually forgotten.
During the building of the Verrazano Bridge in the early 1960s, there were some people who wanted space for a subway connection, but builder Robert Moses ignored them. In fairness, most of the bridges of that era, such as the Throggs Neck Bridge and the Tappan Zee Bridge, were also built with no provision for public transportation. In the 1950s and ‘60s, rail transit was thought of as being so “yesterday.”
In today’s budget crunch, there seems very little opportunity for any type of rail connection between Bay Ridge and Staten Island. The bridge is already there, and there is no provision for subway or light rail, so it would have to be through a new underwater tunnel. But things do change. Bay Ridge and Staten Island do share a lot in common – both are family-oriented, both are somewhat conservative. In all probability, at least a third of the people living in Staten Island either once lived in Brooklyn, have parents or grandparents who lived in Brooklyn, and/or have close relatives who still live in Brooklyn.
Yes, a bike lane on the Verrazano would be nice. But it would benefit a limited number of people. Rapid transit across the Narrows? Bring it on!

Why Does Bloomberg Stress the Soda Ban Above Everything Else

 

Originally printed in Brooklyn Daily Eagle

New York City certainly seems to have its share of problems.
Take homelessness. According to the Coalition for the Homeless, in February 2013, there were an all-time record 50,100 homeless people, including 12,000 families with children. And that’s only the number of people who were sleeping in the city’s homeless-shelter system, as opposed to the many “street homeless” whom we see every day.
We also have unemployment. Nationwide, the percentage of people who are unemployed is a little over 7 percent. In New York, it’s a little over 9 percent. While the financial industries are booming, for years, the Bronx and Brooklyn were the counties with the highest unemployment rates in New York State. Brooklyn has now gotten better, but the Bronx is still suffering.
Now, we get to crime. Street crime, happily, has been decreasing for 20 years, and we are nowhere near the bad old days of the 1980s and ’90s. But now, some crimes are beginning to increase again. According to the Wall Street Journal, what’s behind these figures is a wave of cell-phone thefts.
Mass transit is another problem. After 40 years in which the Lexington Avenue Subway on the East Side of Manhattan was severely overcrowded, the MTA, about 10 years ago, finally started to build the Second Avenue Subway—or at least one segment of it. But its “completed” date keeps being pushed into the future—now, it’s 2016. By contrast, it took four years between the time ground was broken for the original IRT subway in 1900 and its opening in 1904.
Then, we have the problem of continuing police-community unrest. As we can see in today’s issue of this paper, more than 40 people were arrested in Flatbush on Wednesday night when protests over a police shooting of a 16-year-old boy got ugly. The shooting of Kimani Gray follows other well-publicized incidents of the past, such as the Abner Louima incident and the shooting of Amadou Diallo.
And let’s not forget education. The percentage of public-school students who graduate high school in four years is now about 60 percent. While I personally don’t think it’s a terrible thing if someone graduates high school in five years, 60 percent is a little low, despite the fact that these numbers have risen steadily. Also, class size is increasing. You don’t hear talk about 20 or 25 student per class anymore—in some schools, that number is back up to 40.
With all of these problems, what does Mayor Bloomberg choose to focus on? He chooses to focus on soda (or “sugary drinks”). And he’s so obsessive about his large-size soda ban that he intends to appeal it all the way to the higher courts.
With all these problems in the city, how can Mayor Bloomberg give center-stage priority to banning large-size sugary drinks? True, it’s unhealthy to drink a 20-ounce bottle of soda. And no one disagrees that too much sugar leads to diabetes and other problems.
But the fact that Bloomberg spends so much effort on issues like the large-size soda ban, more and more bike lanes, banning smoking in public parks and the like seems to indicate that to him, the city’s image is what counts. And the city’s image for whom?
I suspect that what really matters for Bloomberg is the city’s image for wealthy tourists. That’s just a thought—but it seems to make sense.

Pelham Parkway—an Old Friend Fades Away

 

My first encounter with the Pelham Parkway neighborhood took place in my mid-teens, around 1970, when my grandparents moved to a building at Lydig and Wallace. Most of the Jews in the Bronx  were moving to Co-op City or the suburbs, but Pelham Parkway was very likely the last of the old-fashioned Jewish immigrant neighborhoods in the borough.

By that time, most of the residents were seniors, but you still had a good number of families and a few young single people. Jewish refugees from what was still the Soviet Union were also moving in.

The area was characterized by huge 1920s apartment houses with courtyards and a few private houses here and there. The main shopping streets, White Plains Road and Lydig Avenue, had many old-fashioned stores that warmed the heart of my parents and others in the older generation – a bakery where one could buy black-and-white cookies and hamentaschen, the Zion Kosher Delicatessen; and a dairy restaurant that served blintzes and noodles-and-cheese. White Plains Road had a small musical instrument store, a big plus for aspiring young rock musicians like me, and a tiny mom-and-pop health food store that had nothing in common with the chains that later dominated the industry.

Pelham Parkway itself was the area’s main attraction, a green ribbon through the neighborhood. The parkway was anchored by the subway station, two gigantic synagogues, and Bronx House, a big community center with a swimming pool. In the summer, you saw hundreds of seniors on the benches. 

Grandpa died in ’76, Grandma in ’77. I thought of moving into their apartment after she passed away, but at the time, I was working only part-time and couldn’t afford the rent. And in my early 20s, I knew nothing about leases, rent increases, or the fact that you couldn’t just move into a relative’s apartment as if you owned the place.

After that, however, I still found myself in the area a few times a year. My visits increased after 1980, when I met Mike Tannenbaum, a young guy my age who was an electronic-music freak, a stereo and computer whiz, and a brilliant science-fiction writer. He lived on Barnes Avenue with a roommate who soon moved out.

Mike told me that one of the other tenants, a woman in her 90s, was one of the building’s original tenants from 1927. “At that time, there wasn’t much but trees and grass around here,” he said. “She decided to move here because her other choice, the Concourse, was only for rich people!” We had a good laugh, since the Concourse had become very rundown by the ’80s.

Because Mike lived in the North Bronx, he was somewhat isolated from his peers. In his apartment, however, he was king. He had two computers when most people didn’t even have one, two VCRs, a huge fish tank, and thousands of dollars worth of stereo equipment. When a would-be-girlfriend rejected him, he consoled himself by saying, “She doesn’t know a damn thing about stereo!”

Throughout the 1980s and early ’90s, I kept visiting the Pelham Parkway area from time to time. The neighborhood was like an old friend that didn’t change much, even though it was becoming a little rundown around the edges. I had fights with friends (including Mike, who became enraged when I bought a stereo without asking for his advice), problems on the job, and breakups with girlfriends. But Pelham Parkway was still Pelham Parkway.

After I got married in ’94, I took fewer walks around the city. A few years later, my wife suggested we take a trip to the Bronx Zoo. After walking around the zoo and having a great time, we came out on the White Plains Road side. I eagerly took her on a walk, but to my shock, Pelham Parkway was no longer Pelham Parkway.

On Lydig Avenue, Olinsky’s supermarket and Carvel were gone. Several Albanian social clubs, food stores, real estate offices and coffee shops had moved in. While I have nothing against Albanians, it made me sad to realize that people like myself, the grandson of Russian-Jewish immigrants, were now a small minority.

Walking over to White Plains Road, I found it dominated by big 99-cent stores with displays spilling onto the sidewalk and generic chain stores. The diner on the north side of the parkway had become a Dunkin’ Donuts, and the Six Brothers diner where Grandpa used to take the family was gone. The tiny health-food store had disappeared, and although there was a GNC on the street, it wasn’t the same.

We eventually found a small coffee shop with wooden tables and a limited menu. Most of the customers were shabbily-dressed older people who had been sitting there for hours, talking to each other and watching the overhead TV set. You could tell this was the highlight of their day. We vowed that the next time we went to the zoo, we would leave on the side nearer to Arthur Avenue, which had many good Italian restaurants.

Today, I have a more balanced view of Pelham Parkway. The neighborhood as it once existed failed to hold most of its children and grandchildren – possibly because it was so far from Manhattan. Mike Tannenbaum had confidently predicted that the parkway itself would make the neighborhood “hip” in the same way Prospect Park spurred gentrification in Park Slope. He was wrong.

Today’s Pelham Parkway, rather than being the province of one ethnic group, as it was in the old days, is extremely diverse. You see Albanians, Russian Jews, Pakistanis, Latinos, Arabs and even one or two Hasidim. Many, if not most, are immigrants, just as most of the people who originally moved into the neighborhood in the 1920s were immigrants. The people are busy living their lives, having their dreams. They’re making their own memories, which will be as important to them as my memories of smoking grass with Mike Tannenbaum, while listening to The Who, Yes or Kraftwerk, are to me.

It’s no longer my Pelham Parkway, but it’s still Pelham Parkway. And the next time we go to the zoo – I’m sorry, but we’ll still opt for those Arthur Avenue Italian restaurants!

No, not everyone has to like sportts

From Brooklyn Daily Eagle

Not everyone has to like sports.

I recently read an article on Wikipedia about “childhood gender nonconformity” as a possible correlation with homosexuality, among other things. Childhood gender nonconformity is described as a phenomenon in which “pre-pubescent children do not conform to expected gender-related sociological or psychological patterns.”
I would assume that for boys, one of the greatest “expected gender-related sociological or psychological patterns” has to do with sports. Well, I am not gay, nor have I ever been gay. However, as a child, not only was I terrible in sports, I didn’t even like sports!
There were times when my father and brother (or once, my Hebrew school class) took me to Yankee Stadium, and I found myself bored after one or two innings. Sure, I tried to fake it, flipping baseball cards with the other kids and pretending to listen when they talked about baseball players, but I’m sure I didn’t fool anybody.
The fact my actual interests at that age – trains and cars – were also so-called “masculine” interests didn’t win me any friends. Neither did those physical activities I did do well in – for example, gymnastics. Eventually I won a bronze medal in gymnastics, but that didn’t impress anyone compared to someone who, for example, was able to pitch a winning game.
What I needed was to connect with other kids who were into trains and cars. The internet would have helped me in that, but the internet, at that time, was years away.
Now, I’m able to watch an entire baseball game, and I can even enjoy it. I can enjoy watching basketball, although for shorter periods of time, say, 15 minutes or so. As for football, it leaves me cold – the type of people who play football are presumably the same big, tough, aggressive guys who I had nothing in common with then, and probably have nothing in common with now.
But still, I cringe when fathers load their 6-year-old boys up with football jerseys, hockey sticks, baseball bats, whatever, and just expect that they’ll really be into sports.
Just once, I’d like to see just one of those kids say, when their father asks them to go to a game, say, “No thanks, Dad, I’d rather play with my model trains, and look at my picture book of classic cars!”