Thursday, October 27, 2011
Union Square, no drama
LOOKING AHEAD by Wally Dobelis
With Ocupy Wall Street somewhat off the front pages, it may be of interest to come back from the now famous Zuccotti Square news to our own Union Square news. The name of that downtown property brings back memories – it was the realtor John Zuccotti, former City Planning Commission chair and first deputy mayor, who in 1986 recommended that the NYC Police Academy be upscaled to the quality of the FBI Academy in Quantico, VA, and be moved from East 20th Street to the Bronx, a cheeky extravaganza that caused a betrayed community to protest until budget considerations made Mayor Edward I. Koch back off. People were reasonable, and the City Council listened to citizenry presenting cost comparisons.
There is a faintly comparable strife between the community and the Parks Department that has been going on for at least five years (seems like 15) between the Union Square Community Coalition and city planners , who want to convert the beautiful Palladian style Pavilion at the north end of the Union Squire Park into an upscale seasonal restaurant. USCC has sued the city and Union Square Partnership Business Improvement District for breach of the rules that protect a landmarked property (the north end was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1997.)
The park was part of the grandiose city plan of 1811, that gave Manhattan its geometric avenues and side streets pattern, The park, at the meeting point of Bloomingdale and Broadway, was a concourse and trading area, with fashionable stores of the era contending for space with theatres, all dominated by a 1856 statue of George Washington. As the city moved uptown, the real estate values declined, and the north end Plaza became a rallying point for political activities and meetings; in 1861 there were rallies and parades in support of Union troops, and labor union meetings were held; on September 5, 1882 it marked the starting point for a labor union parade that gave birth to Labor Day, and May Day rallies became an annual socialist event.
The pavilion, first built in the mid- 1800s, was dedicated as a Women’s and Children’s structure. Its current fine form stems back to a 1931 reconstruction and elevation, as a bandstand, and in my memory it has mainly served as a Parks Department storehouse and office, with a major public restroom, occasionally sharing labor union election campaign pulpit and gathering functions with the former Tammany Hall, near northeast corner of the park, on 17th Street. Historically, the Pavilion was important as the pulpit for May Day and other political rallies/ The Rosenbergs’ support meetings of 1953 were the most memorable, with half of the square’s population on its knees, as I recall seeing on my way to the IRT. They were waiting for the verdict.
As Union Square deteriorated in the mid-1900s, so did the Pavilion building, until the park’s renewal in the 4th quarter of the century, initiated with the arrival of the Zeckendorf Towers building at the southeast corner, the coalition of local merchants that resulted in the 14th Street-Union Square Local Development Corporation /Business Improvement District (now Union Square Partnership), and, particularly, the Farmers Market, aka Union Square Greenmarket, in 1973. With the shrinking of the City’s funds, the Parks’ budgets had diminished, and pay-for-itself thinking started to prevail at the Arsenal, Parks headquarters. Volunteer groups arose in major parks areas (Central Park in lead), offering donated and street- market- raised funds, and stoutly objecting to excessive commercialization of the shrinking public spaces. In Union Square the Parks Departmnt /USP thinking prevailed and a restaurant contract for the Pavilion was offered to eatery enterprises, presumably prompted by the use of the Pavillion’s parkside courtyard (or amphitheatre for the bandstand) as the casual Luna Café, a pleasant interlude, before the struggles began. The park spaces were converted to expanded playgrounds, to meet the needs of the neighborhood, and the pavilion’s interior rooms were offered and , seemingly, tentatively accepted by an entrepreneur at aimpossibly huge investment and $400K annual rental. Alas, the recent economic crisis, coupled with the threat of continued USCC law suits, sent everybody back to Square One.
Looking at Union Square and the park today, the upscale restaurant in the pavilion seems financially unfit and physically out of place, and the proponents should give up.There is a surfeit of elegant fulltime restaurants in the pertiphery, and a seasonal food shed would be more than adequate. The area has been Bloombergized (not a bad thing), with partial street closings, patio furniture here and there , flower pots with gian tropical red plants on the periphery, a total tourist destination. Admirers are lured by a serious Mahatma Gandhi memorial on the west edge of the Park, and a silvery pop Andy Warhol statue temporarily placed north of it, something for every taste. Besides the Greenmarket, on the edges of the park there are sellers of prints, books, tee shirts and offerers of giveaway pets. Tango fanciers practice their art to Latin rhythms on the Pavilion’s main open floor in good weather, and here are other community uses of the building(USCC wants a small Museum of Protest) . We may be a bit banal but we are peaceful, no troublemakers are wanted. Let’s leave it that way. For a postcript: the Occupy Wall Street people, with the arrival of cold weasther and hundreds of hungry homeless people clamoring for OWS people's food, have activated Union Square as a major assembly point.More to come.
Wally Dobelis thanks Jack Taylor.
With Ocupy Wall Street somewhat off the front pages, it may be of interest to come back from the now famous Zuccotti Square news to our own Union Square news. The name of that downtown property brings back memories – it was the realtor John Zuccotti, former City Planning Commission chair and first deputy mayor, who in 1986 recommended that the NYC Police Academy be upscaled to the quality of the FBI Academy in Quantico, VA, and be moved from East 20th Street to the Bronx, a cheeky extravaganza that caused a betrayed community to protest until budget considerations made Mayor Edward I. Koch back off. People were reasonable, and the City Council listened to citizenry presenting cost comparisons.
There is a faintly comparable strife between the community and the Parks Department that has been going on for at least five years (seems like 15) between the Union Square Community Coalition and city planners , who want to convert the beautiful Palladian style Pavilion at the north end of the Union Squire Park into an upscale seasonal restaurant. USCC has sued the city and Union Square Partnership Business Improvement District for breach of the rules that protect a landmarked property (the north end was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1997.)
The park was part of the grandiose city plan of 1811, that gave Manhattan its geometric avenues and side streets pattern, The park, at the meeting point of Bloomingdale and Broadway, was a concourse and trading area, with fashionable stores of the era contending for space with theatres, all dominated by a 1856 statue of George Washington. As the city moved uptown, the real estate values declined, and the north end Plaza became a rallying point for political activities and meetings; in 1861 there were rallies and parades in support of Union troops, and labor union meetings were held; on September 5, 1882 it marked the starting point for a labor union parade that gave birth to Labor Day, and May Day rallies became an annual socialist event.
The pavilion, first built in the mid- 1800s, was dedicated as a Women’s and Children’s structure. Its current fine form stems back to a 1931 reconstruction and elevation, as a bandstand, and in my memory it has mainly served as a Parks Department storehouse and office, with a major public restroom, occasionally sharing labor union election campaign pulpit and gathering functions with the former Tammany Hall, near northeast corner of the park, on 17th Street. Historically, the Pavilion was important as the pulpit for May Day and other political rallies/ The Rosenbergs’ support meetings of 1953 were the most memorable, with half of the square’s population on its knees, as I recall seeing on my way to the IRT. They were waiting for the verdict.
As Union Square deteriorated in the mid-1900s, so did the Pavilion building, until the park’s renewal in the 4th quarter of the century, initiated with the arrival of the Zeckendorf Towers building at the southeast corner, the coalition of local merchants that resulted in the 14th Street-Union Square Local Development Corporation /Business Improvement District (now Union Square Partnership), and, particularly, the Farmers Market, aka Union Square Greenmarket, in 1973. With the shrinking of the City’s funds, the Parks’ budgets had diminished, and pay-for-itself thinking started to prevail at the Arsenal, Parks headquarters. Volunteer groups arose in major parks areas (Central Park in lead), offering donated and street- market- raised funds, and stoutly objecting to excessive commercialization of the shrinking public spaces. In Union Square the Parks Departmnt /USP thinking prevailed and a restaurant contract for the Pavilion was offered to eatery enterprises, presumably prompted by the use of the Pavillion’s parkside courtyard (or amphitheatre for the bandstand) as the casual Luna Café, a pleasant interlude, before the struggles began. The park spaces were converted to expanded playgrounds, to meet the needs of the neighborhood, and the pavilion’s interior rooms were offered and , seemingly, tentatively accepted by an entrepreneur at aimpossibly huge investment and $400K annual rental. Alas, the recent economic crisis, coupled with the threat of continued USCC law suits, sent everybody back to Square One.
Looking at Union Square and the park today, the upscale restaurant in the pavilion seems financially unfit and physically out of place, and the proponents should give up.There is a surfeit of elegant fulltime restaurants in the pertiphery, and a seasonal food shed would be more than adequate. The area has been Bloombergized (not a bad thing), with partial street closings, patio furniture here and there , flower pots with gian tropical red plants on the periphery, a total tourist destination. Admirers are lured by a serious Mahatma Gandhi memorial on the west edge of the Park, and a silvery pop Andy Warhol statue temporarily placed north of it, something for every taste. Besides the Greenmarket, on the edges of the park there are sellers of prints, books, tee shirts and offerers of giveaway pets. Tango fanciers practice their art to Latin rhythms on the Pavilion’s main open floor in good weather, and here are other community uses of the building(USCC wants a small Museum of Protest) . We may be a bit banal but we are peaceful, no troublemakers are wanted. Let’s leave it that way. For a postcript: the Occupy Wall Street people, with the arrival of cold weasther and hundreds of hungry homeless people clamoring for OWS people's food, have activated Union Square as a major assembly point.More to come.
Wally Dobelis thanks Jack Taylor.
Labels: death sentence, Ethel Rosenberg, May Day, occupy wall street, Rosenberg, Union Square, Union Square Community Council
Friday, October 14, 2011
Et tu, NY Yankees, and other betrayals
LOOKING AHEAD by Wally Dobelis
The 3-2 score in the final Yankees’ playoff game with the Detroit Tigers was a real downer. Our power team is gone, as are the Mets and the Red Sox, there’s nothing’s left for the East Coast liberals to watch. I have nothing but admiration for the year-round Yankee fans, as well as pity for their neglected families and employers, as the fans doggedly follow all the wrinkles of the regular season. I’ve always been a post-season playoffs watcher, thrilled by the tense competition where the best meet the best.
The normally talkative Yankees had little to say after the loss, except for Derek Jeter, who stated that “Detroit has the pitchers, that’s where the game is won.” Come on Jeter, we saw the games. Their pitchers were inspired, yes, but our hitting? We left 11 men on bases in the final game. And Alex Rodriguez the guy who between slacks in hitting makes his name known by dating all the babes of renown, maybe he should think of changing his main focus? There is a certain obligation towards your audience that comes with big paychecks, it is in your social contract (remember Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau and such), to make the rest of us feel upbeat, if not actually good, at least for the moment. It is important in this period of upheaval, where disturbing news threaten our equanimity every time we open the news media, be it dangers to personal life (e.g., tomorrow’s job), family, social, economic, national politics, or events of international unrest (Israel, ah) and outrageous strange crimes. And the stock market: one neighbor quips that “ 200 points one day, 400 the next, and soon it might become real money,” while another admonishes that the Dow has nothing to do with real life—but tell that to a fixed income retiree!
In politics, one wishes we were back to the 1980s, when bankers made only a few times more money than their employees. Practical politicians of both parties argued in public, but in private they drank together, made alliances and developed compromises, and always acted in the interests of the country. Thus, the democratic politicians were signing in behind President Bush in 2003, in effect trusting him and his facts, in authorizing the Iraq action. They did not “destroy the U in USA,” as the hate-spewing Republican pols do in 2011. There is actual rage towards the President of the USA on part of the makeup of the new thick-headed pols in search of a fantasy demon, a single enemy to destroy and miraculously return the world to normal, something that a seasoned practical politician or lawyer would not express.
I note, that regarding another search of an enemy, that of the Occupy Wall Street walkers, some of it comes through the Vancouver-based Adbreaker crowd, a publication that sent the 90,000 invitations resulting in the protest marches from Union Square area, starting on September 17. Adbreaker has a naïve anti –recession philosophy of stopping consumerism (“Don’t shop on Thanksgiving… no Nike…Coke… bank the savings.”) Micah White, their leader, issued a “to the barricades” call, echoing the Toronto and Vancouver riots against G8 and G20 meetings, and hoping for a Tahrir Bridge effect, as in Egypt, that resulted in the downfall of the Mubarak regime. That is revolutionary hooha.
Fortunately the sophisticated NYC angries converted the call to orderly walks , carrying provocative signs against the “one percent,” the greedy bank manipulators, and singing a few choruses of Solidarity Forever, accompanied by customary NY banjo sounds. The marchers made sure no NY property was broken.
Why bankers, now? Until the 1980s the bankers’ greed was limited by the 1940s Glass-Steagall law restricting banking functions; then in the 1990s the great Texas Senator Phil Gramm broke that restraint and opened the doors to derivatives, swaps and subpar mortgages, with low taxes . Add free trade, and no encouragement was needed for the emergence of the bonus-oriented top executive who does not mind swindling the stockholders and ruining the business, or the country, or world economy for the sake of short term personal gains, bonus or market or both. That’s the class of businessman that the tea party innocents protect from a slightly more proportional taxation (until 1986 the high earners were hugely taxed and accepted it). They are the manipulators, the one percent that the Occupy Wall Street 99 percent innocents attack. I’m with the marchers, but what jobs are produced by standing and walking with placards? The point is to get jobs, and the union participants see to it.
Just to remind us, stripping the “one percent” of some excess incomes is to help produce a jobs program of infrastructure repairs (roads, bridges), school buildings, education , less taxation for small businesses who hire and who do not lay off, and developing of new technology, particularly energy, where we can hope to catch up with our $800B annual import imbalance. We must develop agreements with the Chinese and the Little Tiger countries not to push in their state-subsidized product and destroy our new industries, a la the heat panel firms (Solyndra, First Solar etc; we have a complaint since Dec 2010, with World Trade Organization).
Next time I’ll try to be more cheerful. Send me good news, mcdobelis@gmail.com
The 3-2 score in the final Yankees’ playoff game with the Detroit Tigers was a real downer. Our power team is gone, as are the Mets and the Red Sox, there’s nothing’s left for the East Coast liberals to watch. I have nothing but admiration for the year-round Yankee fans, as well as pity for their neglected families and employers, as the fans doggedly follow all the wrinkles of the regular season. I’ve always been a post-season playoffs watcher, thrilled by the tense competition where the best meet the best.
The normally talkative Yankees had little to say after the loss, except for Derek Jeter, who stated that “Detroit has the pitchers, that’s where the game is won.” Come on Jeter, we saw the games. Their pitchers were inspired, yes, but our hitting? We left 11 men on bases in the final game. And Alex Rodriguez the guy who between slacks in hitting makes his name known by dating all the babes of renown, maybe he should think of changing his main focus? There is a certain obligation towards your audience that comes with big paychecks, it is in your social contract (remember Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau and such), to make the rest of us feel upbeat, if not actually good, at least for the moment. It is important in this period of upheaval, where disturbing news threaten our equanimity every time we open the news media, be it dangers to personal life (e.g., tomorrow’s job), family, social, economic, national politics, or events of international unrest (Israel, ah) and outrageous strange crimes. And the stock market: one neighbor quips that “ 200 points one day, 400 the next, and soon it might become real money,” while another admonishes that the Dow has nothing to do with real life—but tell that to a fixed income retiree!
In politics, one wishes we were back to the 1980s, when bankers made only a few times more money than their employees. Practical politicians of both parties argued in public, but in private they drank together, made alliances and developed compromises, and always acted in the interests of the country. Thus, the democratic politicians were signing in behind President Bush in 2003, in effect trusting him and his facts, in authorizing the Iraq action. They did not “destroy the U in USA,” as the hate-spewing Republican pols do in 2011. There is actual rage towards the President of the USA on part of the makeup of the new thick-headed pols in search of a fantasy demon, a single enemy to destroy and miraculously return the world to normal, something that a seasoned practical politician or lawyer would not express.
I note, that regarding another search of an enemy, that of the Occupy Wall Street walkers, some of it comes through the Vancouver-based Adbreaker crowd, a publication that sent the 90,000 invitations resulting in the protest marches from Union Square area, starting on September 17. Adbreaker has a naïve anti –recession philosophy of stopping consumerism (“Don’t shop on Thanksgiving… no Nike…Coke… bank the savings.”) Micah White, their leader, issued a “to the barricades” call, echoing the Toronto and Vancouver riots against G8 and G20 meetings, and hoping for a Tahrir Bridge effect, as in Egypt, that resulted in the downfall of the Mubarak regime. That is revolutionary hooha.
Fortunately the sophisticated NYC angries converted the call to orderly walks , carrying provocative signs against the “one percent,” the greedy bank manipulators, and singing a few choruses of Solidarity Forever, accompanied by customary NY banjo sounds. The marchers made sure no NY property was broken.
Why bankers, now? Until the 1980s the bankers’ greed was limited by the 1940s Glass-Steagall law restricting banking functions; then in the 1990s the great Texas Senator Phil Gramm broke that restraint and opened the doors to derivatives, swaps and subpar mortgages, with low taxes . Add free trade, and no encouragement was needed for the emergence of the bonus-oriented top executive who does not mind swindling the stockholders and ruining the business, or the country, or world economy for the sake of short term personal gains, bonus or market or both. That’s the class of businessman that the tea party innocents protect from a slightly more proportional taxation (until 1986 the high earners were hugely taxed and accepted it). They are the manipulators, the one percent that the Occupy Wall Street 99 percent innocents attack. I’m with the marchers, but what jobs are produced by standing and walking with placards? The point is to get jobs, and the union participants see to it.
Just to remind us, stripping the “one percent” of some excess incomes is to help produce a jobs program of infrastructure repairs (roads, bridges), school buildings, education , less taxation for small businesses who hire and who do not lay off, and developing of new technology, particularly energy, where we can hope to catch up with our $800B annual import imbalance. We must develop agreements with the Chinese and the Little Tiger countries not to push in their state-subsidized product and destroy our new industries, a la the heat panel firms (Solyndra, First Solar etc; we have a complaint since Dec 2010, with World Trade Organization).
Next time I’ll try to be more cheerful. Send me good news, mcdobelis@gmail.com
