Looking Ahead

LOOKING AHEAD by Wally Dobelis

This should be cause for excitement – we are electing a virgin Assemblyperson, choosing between two well-liked community activists who are not previous officeholders, running on low budgets, uncontaminated by major donations and not treating this office as a steppingstone. May whoever wins succeed in lending a reformer’s hand in curing the Albany legislature, found by the NYU Law School’s Brennan Center to be the most dysfunctional in the entire country.

The resignation of Steve Sanders has left the 74th Assembly District without a representative. To fill the vacancy, the Board of Elections has opened the usual polling places on Tuesday, February 28, 6AM to 9PM, for a special election. Democrat Sylvia Friedman and Republican Frank Scala are the candidates for the interim term. The primary for the next full term will be in September.

By now you should have received the announcement notices from the Board. and party stalwarts will be receiving mailings from both candidates, to acquaint you with their programs. The time for campaigning has been short, and the literature is limited. I will try to condense some of it for you,

Sylvia Friedman, a former schoolteacher, joined the Gramercy Stuyvesant Independent Democrats in 1976 as a campaign volunteer, rising to the presidency of the club. For the past eight years she has been a representative of the district in the State Democratic Committee, and chairs its Reform Caucus. This work, as well as being an ombudsman in the office of the Public Advocate (providing apartments for families, getting streets repaired and garbage collected, resolving issues with city agencies), has brought her valuable contacts with state legislators and city officials. Early on she became a member of Community Board 6, at times chairing its Homeless Committee (she has been since1986, the chair of Friends Seminary’s Homeless Shelter Program), Parks & Landmarks Committee (working on the Stuyvesant Cove Park project), and Housing Committee (proposing a new Mitchell-Lama type program for low and middle income families). As a member of the Union Square Community Coalition board she worked toward the opening of three playgrounds (she opposes the proposed restaurant expansion.
Sylvia Friedman’s program also includes saving rent regulation, putting an end to MCI rent increases, providing housing for the disabled (she is on the boards of the 504 Democratic Club, a citywide organization for the disabled, and the Center for the Independence for the Disabled); keeping the height of the Con Ed site buildings to match the UN building; expansion of the Stuyvesant Square Park and Gramercy Park Historic Districts, and, let’s not forget, return of local school control.

Frank Scala, a Stuyvesant Town resident and a local businessman for 34 years (owner of the Murray Hill barbershop La Scala) is the president of the Vincent F. Albano Republican Club. He has been endorsed by former State Senator Roy Goodman, Mayors Bloomberg and Giuliani, as well as the New Era Democrats, a crossover group.

Appointed to Community Board 6 by Democrats Eva Moskowitz and C. Virginia Fields, he serves as the Vice Chair of Business and Government Affairs, and a member of Parks, Recreation and Landmarks Committee, where he helped secure major funds for the creation of the Stuyvesant Cove Park (on whose board he serves). He also presides over the venerable 13th Precinct Community Council, and is a graduate of the NYPD Citizen’s Police Academy. Frank Scala ran for State Assembly once before, in 2001, against Steven Sanders, and, although losing, received a formidable 35% of the vote.

As to a program, Frank Scala is an independent moderate reform Republican. He is an active member of the community and a believer in the community above party line. He believes one needs to serve our District independently and as an elected official, needs to get to answers, not to debate or fight political parties. He will work to maintain and extend rent stabilization and bring back NYC Home rule.

He has presented to Assemblymen and the Minority Leader in Albany the Scala Amendment, to impose stiffer penalties to anyone that commits a crime against our seniors or the disabled, an unprotected class, and anyone who commits such crimes should be registered and treated as they do for child molesters. Scala supports the Bloomberg administration's effort on reforming New York City's public schools. It is time for everyone to be accountable. He also believes something must be done to provide college-bound high schools for the district (his wife Melanie is a school teacher). He wants a program to coordinate all of the city's responder teams, police, fire, office of emergency management, and to educate all the citizens in the district on what to do in the event of a disaster. A more business friendly NYC is also desirable, decreasing the cumbersome regulations and providing tax incentives for new businesses. We need initiatives to make sure new businesses come and stay in New York City. Scala wants to solve the noise level problems in the district (bars, car alarms) through regulations and enforcement. He would retain term limits, “we do not need career politicians.”

LOOKING AHEAD by Wally Dobelis

The long-awaited An American Tragedy has had its debut at the Metropolitan Opera, and it works. Theodore Dreiser’s 1925 masterpiece of a poor hotel bell boy who gets introduced into wealthy society, has a rich woman fall in love with him, and decides to murder his poor pregnant betrothed, a factory girl, has had a fairly sympathetic treatment in the hands of librettist Gene Sheer and composer Tobias Picker. They have been working for half a decade or more, reducing the 900-page novel of events that happened a hundred years ago to a two-act 2 ½ hour opera that rolls along like a tawdry story in yesterday’s New York Post.

This novel of social criticism was a sensation in its day, and resulted in a Broadway play by Patrick Kearney, and two movies, An American Tragedy in 1931 and the Academy Award- winning A Place in the Sun in 1951. [Woody Allen’s Match Point, released in December, treats the same theme with a nihilistic twist.] Dreiser hated the 1931 version, originally adapted by Sergey Eisenstein and Ivor Montagu and reworked by Joseph von Sternberg, apparently because the latter’s version turned the charismatic Clyde Griffiths into a calculating sex and money driven villain rather than a drifting lover, forced by circumstances into deep waters. Theodore Dreiser (1877-1945), a Lothario himself, had for a while a studio in the then Guardian now Hotel W building, and was well known to the book dealers of the Book Row on 4th Avenue.

The production, collaboration of Picker, Sheer, the conductor James Conlon, producer Francesca Zambelli and the design team, is structured on a two-tier stage (a third one serves to identify the environment – rooftops, church steeples, trees and night) in 16 scenes, with the action flowing seamlessly from tier to tier, using the three openable thirds of each stage singly or together

Thus, the prologue of young Clyde collecting donations as his missionary mother sings starts in the leftmost third and expands to the entire stage, as passersby appear. Some scenes are two-level split-action. In the second act, while poor pregnant Roberta in her parents’ house, bottom right third, is waiting and singing of her desires for Clyde to come to her, the villain, in an antique tricot swimsuit, is courting Sondra at a lakeside, upper left (the role, excellently sung by athletic Nathan Gunn, also requires a bare-chested seduction scene). Sondra’s song of desiring Clyde intertwines with Roberta’s, turning this operatic device into a most dramatic duet.

Thomas Picker’s music is melodic but not tuneful, not unlike most present day operas. The recitatives, duets, trios and quartets are businesslike and convey the sense of the modern action. Expressions of emotion are subdued; Roberta’s outcries threatening Clyde with telling his employer are the loudest. There are few noble sentiments that make classic opera an upbeat experience. The “old warhorses’” techniques that offer setting, development and resolution with redemption in equal measures do not apply, it is dark and downhill all the way. The crises pile one problem upon another, revelations of deceit and lies follow in quick succession.

If you think that an English-language opera is easy to follow, not so. You still have to read the subtitles, and split your attention. A new work really requires two viewings, one to understand the action and another to interpret the nuances. The long first act was particularly demanding, with unexpected stage actions and clues, easy to overlook while one is peering at the words. Hardly anybody ever stands still. With all that, it was also somewhat drowse provoking, all those parties of rich people Clyde attended. Never mind, it was probably me. Anyway, Roberta’s admission of her pregnancy closing Act One woke me up, completely.

The second act was a breathholder, from the get go. The listener was stirred by the Roberta/ Sondra duet, then an Eucharist service in Sondra’s family’s church, with Roberta appearing and indirectly threatening exposure, Clyde’s musing over the murder and whether it is really him and not another man who is planning the deed, but moving ahead with the planned excursion in a canoe, during which Roberta accidentally, or maybe not so, falls overboard, while Clyde runs away. When arrested, Clyde claims innocence and pretends the boat trip was Roberta’s idea, and that darkness inhibited his search for the drowning girl. But his story comes apart, item-by-item, despite more lies and Clyde’s saintly mother insisting on her son’s truthfulness. The District Attorney explodes his last alibi, and the Greek chorus of spectators cries for justice. The jury condemns him, and a death sentence is announced

Clyde’s last moments produce a sort of redemption, his prayer for peace and courage to face death, before the curtain falls over the scene of the murderer strapped in an electric chair.

Compliments to Nathan Gunn, and to Patricia Racette as Roberta and Susan Graham as Sondra, although the best applause was reserved for Dolora Zajick as Clyde’s mother, a sympathetic minor role.

LOOKING AHEAD by Wally Dobelis


Despite the legend that New Yorkers don’t drive, the people of East Midtown are car users. Our cars are housed in five gigantic garages in Stuyvesant Town, with the overflow on the ST/PCV access roads and other side streets. We are also energy and environment conscious, with many buying Prius-type non-gas-guzzlers, purchased at extra cost, well before the increase in prices made everybody gasoline conscious. We have many neighbors who insist on paper bags in super markets, or bring their own, to limit the use of petroleum products.

It is disingenuous of the President of the United States, in his State of the Nation speech, to speak of the Americans’ addiction to petrol. Let’s put the burden where it belongs. American industry will not make products or produce services that are low-cost, although consumer-beneficial. Consequently, we lost most manufacturing to the Japanese and Chinese, and only recently GM and Ford voiced a shift to efficient cars, with give-backs from unions, to keep the factories from migrating to China.

Conversely, ExxonMobil, proving that high prices bring out the greedy, have shown a $36B profit for 2005, but the vultures will not be able to duplicate it, because their reserves, yeah, reserves that these people have claimed for years (check out the deniers of the Hubbert Peak theory in the Petroleum Institute), do not support production. That will push the prices even higher. The spin doctors now put the blame on the “addiction of America to oil.” If we pursue the comparison, who are the pushers that foster and feed the addiction? One sees the unbridled growth of SUVs, the unwillingness of the Congress to reduce the use of oil by demanding cars with improved mileage per hour, the exemption of passenger vehicles built on the bodies of trucks from the rule. Gas sultans and automobile giants are the Abramoffs of the energy environment that have corrupted the government, with oilmen installed in the highest positions pushing their case. And now the denial – Americans, all by themselves, have become addicted to gasoline. It is not just a farce, it is felonious.

This column, since the late 1990s, has assembled world-wide oil reserve figures, supplied by the Oil & Gas Journal and the US Geological Survey, and compared them against consumption, at the time claiming that oil reserves will be exhausted in 37 years. Exhausted means that the energy expended in extracting the product will become equal or higher than the energy generated. The oil industry spokespeople have pooh-pooed these numbers, except for British Petroleum, whose annual surveys support the scenario. A London Economist seminar suggested an even shorter term, a decade or less, for the continued practical availability of oil.

Once more, the shortsightedness of the government is surfacing. President Bush is offering to increase the funds for research of alternate products - ethanol, product of corn, sugarcane and switchgrass, hydrogen, wind and hydroelectric power. It is already proven that corn ethanol costs more in energy outlay than the gain. Hydrogen is also costly and dangerous to store and use. The others are low output. Nuclear energy – probably the unspoken resource of last resort – will require huge outlays and risks for humanity.

As for oil, US uses 20M barrels a day, 25% of the world’s production, of which we import 60% - more when our oil refineries of the Gulf of Mexico are knocked out by hurricanes. Why such limited refining capacity? Because the oil magnates are cheap, and enemies of the consumer, using refinery shortages to push up prices. The President wants to cut our dependence of MidEast oil by 75% come 2025. We are currently getting 17% of oil from these parts to which he wants to bring democracy. The 22 countries of the Arab League are dictator ruled, and overthrowing their rulers will leave them in the hands of the only other powerful organized popular groups, namely radical Islam. Will they sell oil to us, the enemy? Yeah.

How about closer to home? Venezuela’ s Hugo Chavez, in alliance with Fidel Castro and the new Bolivian coca ruler Evo Morales, is moving Latin America away from us. Washington’s calling him a Hitler helps a lot. Now Chavez has Hamas leaders visiting, and condemns Israel as an American stand-in. Sending in the marines will not fly, guys. Ditto for Iran; meanwhile the Iraqi independence has produced a government that will make a coalition with Iran, as soon as we withdraw, and we can forget about their oil. The East Saudi oil area Shiites could also break away, taking their resources out of our influence. The carefully built American oil empire, started by President FDR, is not stable. Thank goodness for Mexico, and particularly Canada, supplier of 40% of our oil imports, although their biggest reserves are the oil sands of Athabasca, in Alberta, with high extraction costs, partly locked-in by resource-hungry China.

That leaves the US, manufacturer of aircraft, agricultural products and movies, with its $400/ yr trade deficit and a flush stock market based on booming real estate prices (about to flatten out) in an unenviable position. “Americans should not fear our economic future, because we intend to shape it,” claims President Bush. One has no doubt that we will do it, but it will take some stretch.

For more, see my blog.

LOOKING AHEAD by Wally Dobelis


The contentious efforts for a renewal of Union Square, called the final phase of the 20-year effort on part of the Department of Parks and Recreation to revitalize the Union Square Park, have taken another turn, with the unveiling of a New Plan (dated 1/19/2006) for the North (Greenmarket) end of the park

The Plan is to increase the North end playground, from 5,100 sq. ft to 14,687 sq. ft., produce improved space for the Greenmarket and create a restored Pavillion. It will be officially unveiled at the meeting of the Parks Committee of the Community Board 5, a public meeting on Monday, January 30, at 6 P.M. at the Fashion Institute of Technology “A” Building, 227 W. 27th Street near 8th Avenue, too late for the deadline of this issue of T&V. The issues are covered here, the committee meeting will take evidence for presentation, with recommendations, to the full CB5, and the conclusions will appear in a subsequent issue of T&V.

Opponents of the Plan, which include six major local legislators, several local activist groups and their preservationist allies, are mainly opposing the use of the North end Pavilion for a restaurant. It is the feeling here that it would be important to subdivide the Plan and proceed with the playgrounds, letting the Pavillion issues play out through the review process.

To flesh out the Parks Department proposals, the two existing small playgrounds will become one large one, ranging from the one on the West of the Pavillion, across what is now the central, Luna area, to the East of the Pavillion, with varieties of equipment (there are names I have never seen) and its own bathrooms on the East side. A playground unlike any other in the city, a treasure for the neighborhood children is some of the Parks hype that takes me aback.

The general lack of restrooms has been a problem, and three new ones – one each for Greenmarket visitors, the restaurant patrons and the kids – are in the plan.

The Greenmarket plan has been redesigned in collaboration with the group's governing body. T the plaza will be repaved, and new water and electric hookups will assure the patrons of freshest produce. The map does not indicate whether the obstructive trees once intended along 17th Street side are still part of the plan.

The 80-year old Pavillion will be restored to have an unenclosed seasonal café, presumably upstairs, with reasonably priced takeout service, and a space for the Parks staff downstairs.

The predecessors of this Plan have run into severe criticisms, over the years, on part of local activist organizations and local legislators. The most recent major summary of objections on record, signed by State Senators Thomas K. Duane and Liz Krueger, Assemblymembers Steve Sanders (now retired), Richard N. Gottfried, Deborah J Glick and Scott Stringer (now Manhattan Borough President), addressed to Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, was dated November 30, 2005. Some of the concerned associations include the Union Square Community Coalition, Citizens for Union Square, Save Union Square Coalition and Fifteen Street Block Association. These topics will be up for discussion at the CB5 meeting.

Most objected to was the use of the Pavillion for a seasonal café. As before, the Parks Department wants a private restaurant to help defray the costs of the park improvements. The opponents ask whether this treatment of parks as a burden, a resource that must pay for itself, is correct. Is a park not a creator of value for its neighborhood, whether it is well-being, health or recreation?

If, nevertheless, redesign for commercial use is desired, the new design needs to be approved by Community Board 5 (first step is the meeting on January 30) and the Art Commission of NYC, and the utilization should be subject to the Uniform Land Use Review Process (ULURP), and an approval by the State Legislature, since it involves park land use for non-park purposes.

The opponents also suspect that the $5M anonymous donation towards the plan creates an impression that apecial interests are involved, a suspicion that this column does not share, and would like to see cleared. Any donor for park purposes, particularly of this magnitude, is a rare person, to be honored and celebrated.

The opponents’ alternate use proposals include a public staging area, a children’s pavilion, a facility for programs and activities, or just more park space, and a small snack bar in conjunction with all of the above. As seen here, this argument could stand more depth.

Other concerns cover the Landmark status of the North end of the park, the historic site of the country’s first Labor Day rally, on September 5, 1882.

Finally, the opponents are concerned that the most desirable change, the construction of the playground space, is being held up pending the reviews of the restaurant matter, and should be prioritized.

Let us hope that this matter can be put to rest soon, with the least damage to our environment.