News

Join the local community and the 5th Precinct for this important  event! Ask questions, let the officers know your concerns.

Current Neighborhood Issues

with the MTA project:

We appreciate the MTA’s coming to meet with the neighborhood and with other affected agencies. It helps to struggle through together on this very disruptive and difficult project with some sort of cohesive effort. We thank Council Member Chin’s Gigi Li for her stalwart efforts to organize these meetings.

And.. the Coalition was very grateful for the MTA’s permission for a local high school to chalk for the UN Climate Summit week and the MTA even had the contractor repaint it for us – very much appreciated.

Despite the best of intentions however, the  MTA project has been hugely disruptive and even dangerous at times.

• The fencing used near Delancey Street on Forsyth Street created a blind alley in which two attempted assaults took place, hard drugs were sold and used, sex acts performed (not great for the families with small children finding them in progress!)
• Elders were threatened and buildings doors and a small business’ windows were smashed.
• That small business is struggling due to being hidden behind a wall and the unsavory goings on in front of it.
• The community garden adjacent was overrun with rats because the contractor/MTA didn’t abate (as legally required) before the project began. (And, the rats will get far worse when they do the dig alongside the garden) – planting beds had to be smashed and rebuilt and rat abatement is now constant – no one wants to be in the garden in late afternoon.
• The MTA was forced to remove all the trees alongside the park to great upset from the neighborhood some were saddened by the loss of “transplantable” trees.
• The community has to constantly harp on the unsafe traffic conditions the MTA job has set up.
• A plywood wall was put up a few months ago that abuts Sara Roosevelt Park as a barrier for the MTA’s staging area for their new ventilator for the subway. The wall creates another ‘alley’ between the street and the fences enclosing the park’s soccer fields across from housing for our deaf neighbors and the NYCHA housing complex. We’ve asked for a safety plan that might include gating that area.

This park’s neighborhood is already struggling: one murder last year in the park, assaults in the park and on Forsyth/Chrystie Streets, a homeless population that numbers 40-60 a night in summer (many of whom help us out but some very troubled). The lighting is too dim.

We’ve been extremely “understanding” as a community because we know this needs to be built, but it has been a lot of unpaid hours and effort for very slow and messy results.

We are looking for solutions to help answer (or at least mitigate?) the neighborhood’s understandable upset and anger over the start of this projected four year undertaking.

Neighbors expressed their thoughts:

• “It’s very hard to watch!  Why they didn’t wait for the leaves to fall is beyond me!” 
• “Here is documentation of the trees cut. We will never forget these trees and who cut them with no need. – speaking in behalf of other members of this community”

• “This is hard. There were two London Plane tree limbs near Rivington that are dead and should have been pruned ages ago. We have a lot of other London Planes whose limbs are dead and need removal.”

• “Since we’ve lost these (including a wonderful mulberry inside the garden) we now need to look at the necessity of more diversity in trees here – ones that were better for birds and beneficial insects – and that can withstand draught, heat and flooding.”

“the poor person does not exist as an inescapable fact of destiny. His or her existence is not politically neutral, and it is not ethically innocent. The poor are a by-product of the system in which we live and for which we are responsible.”

– Theologian Gustavo Guitterez

Bob spoke of his decision to care about all the people in the park and asked us to mark a moment of silence, Michele quoted James Macklin “the only time you should be looking down on someone is when you are bending over to help them”, One man reminded us that the police have helped him, Steve played duduk,  many cried quietly on the bench.

Bob asked anyone who wanted to, to place one stone as we create a garden to remember all who have died here and nearby due to homelessness and to celebrate their lives.

People stayed and talked and remembered community.

Prep work to build the garden: Omar, Kate, Rob, K, Bob

NYTimes:

“We’re Living Act 1 of the Disaster Films We Grew Up With”

“It’s one thing to see images of glaciers cracking apart and to understand, journalistically, the gravity of rising sea levels, longer droughts and frequent extreme weather events. It is quite something else for this thing, this term, global warming, that we’ve talked and written about in the abstract to now be palpable in such a terribly quotidian way. As 11,000 scientists recently explained in an article for the journal BioScience: “The climate crisis has arrived and is accelerating faster than most scientists expected. It is more severe than anticipated, threatening natural ecosystems and the fate of humanity.”

The Villager:

NYCHA tenants launch petition to stop current East Side flood plan

“A group called NYCHA Speaks is behind the petition, which demands that local officials…reconsider the current plan, which would raise the park by 8 to 10 feet along 2.5 miles of the park along the East River.

“Our homes are next to the East River Park,” the petition reads, “and we are concerned about the impact that the full-scale destruction of the park will have on our health and quality of life.”

Concerns about the city’s plan, according to Yvette Mercedes and Curtis White of NYCHA Speaks, include pollution from contaminants being released into the air, and the loss of green space, including nearly 1,000 trees. The group said it has sent the petition to local officials, including all City Council members, state senators, assembly members and Mayor Bill de Blasio.”

On Nov. 4, the current plan passed the City Council Subcommittee on Landmarks, Sitings and Dispositions. The next vote is scheduled for Nov. 12 in the Land Use Committee, and then a full vote in the City Council on Nov. 14.

East River Park ACTION, has recently presented its own petition against the plan, which collected around 2,000 local signatures.

Read more here.

Ecological Cities event to focus on East Side waterfront

“Artists, dancers, singers, musicians and performers of all stripes are invited to join a free panel discussion and planning meeting of Earth Celebrations Ecological City Climate Solutions Action on Wed., Nov. 13, from 6:30 p.m. to 8 p.m., at the Loisaida, Inc. Center, at 710 E. Ninth Street, between Avenues C and D.”

“Featured climate solution presentations will be by Aziz Dehkan, NYC Community Garden Coalition; Wendy Brawer, Green Map System; DeeDee Maucher, MoS Collective; Howard Brandstein, Sixth Street Community Center; and Felicia Young, Earth Celebrations.”

Don’t Kill East River Park for a Bad Flood Plan

From the Lo-Down: Op Ed by East River Park ACTION founder Pat Arnow.

“Troubling Questions, Vague Promises

There are deeply troubling unanswered questions as this plan races toward passage in the City Council Nov. 14. The city has promised to look into interim protection and timelines that have not been worked out. For instance, there is still no report on how long it will take the eight feet of fill to settle before a new park can be built or how to deal with contaminated soil that will be dug up when ConEd works with their underground lines. We have no written guarantees that the city will deal with these or any other problems with the plan.”

Read more here.

From Reasons to Be Cheerful:

“Baltimore has focused on monitoring and maintaining the [trees] it already has—and is one of the few cities whose urban forest is expanding”

By: Christine McLaren

As good as tree-planting makes us feel, maintaining a truly productive tree canopy means it’s important to do just that: maintain it..we need to keep the trees we already have alive…especially in cities, where trees are a crucial bulwark against heatwaves and the heat island effect. Big, old trees are cities’ sprawling parasols. Yet, over the last decade, cities in the US have actually lost an average of 175,000 acres of urban forest—36 million trees per year.

Baltimore’s urban forest has actually gotten bigger…

..Baltimore’s secret to keeping its streets green is surprisingly simple: they monitor their trees more closely than almost any other city in the country.

“U.S. Forest Service teamed up with researchers from the University of Vermont’s…to develop a new type of land cover map…it uses high-resolution aerial imagery and a… 3D airborne laser-guided data detection method known as LiDAR. The map…let city officials look at Batimore’s trees more closely than ever before…[combined] with other city data, like health and crime records, property values and census figures.”

“…in places where the tree canopy increased, both temperature and crime declined. The city…put a dollar value on each tree—about $57,000—in order to treat it like an investment, and use the technology to monitor the health of that investment. City arborists now use that information to determine if trees are sick, for example, or in need of pruning or maintenance.”

“[The concern was] how many [of the new trees were] still alive 4 or 5 years later,” Baltimore arborist and head of forestry Erik Dihle…”

The remarkably simple monitoring approach, and the technology that enables it, have since been made available to cities everywhere by the U.S. Forest Service. Known as the Urban Tree Canopy Assessment, it has been applied in at least 30 communities in the U.S. and Canada, and is available as a suite of tools on the U.S. Forest Service website.

According to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, strategic placement of trees in cities can help to cool the air between two and eight degrees Celsius, & can reduce the need for air conditioning by 30% & heating bills by 20-50%, if placed correctly.

A mature tree also sops up about 150 kg of CO2, a whack of urban air pollutants and more than 15,000 liters of water per year, which, for those concerned with flooding and stormwater management, is a huge deal in our concrete jungles. Plus, they’re pretty.

Read more here.

US Forest Service: “Despite millions of dollars spent each year by federal, state, and local governments on remote sensing datasets, decision makers sometimes still find that they lack basic information about their community’s tree canopy because these datasets have not been converted into practical, readily interpretable information. In the Urban Tree Canopy (UTC) Assessments Program, NRS scientist Morgan Grove, with a partner from the University of Vermont’s Spatial Analysis Laboratory, has developed advanced processing techniques that to help fill this information gap. They have provided new land-cover maps that are 900 times more detailed than existing datasets. These assessment have been completed for over 30 communities in the United States and Canada. The UTC Assessment Program has been recognized for its outreach activities by the Association of Natural Resourced Educational Professionals and for its use of advanced image processing algorithms by Nobel Laureate Dr. Gerd Binnig.”

Tree Canopy Assessment Tools available from US Forestry.

And another November 14th at 1pm.

EV Grieve:  Someone placed memorial ribbons commemorating the life of East River Park:

‘We will miss your breeze, your trees, your plants and flowers and your birds and bees.”

The Guardian:

“But it is not too late.”

They set out a series of urgently needed actions:

• Use energy far more efficiently and apply strong carbon taxes to cut fossil fuel use
• Stabilise global population – currently growing by 200,000 people a day – using ethical approaches such as longer education for girls
• End the destruction of nature and restore forests and mangroves to absorb CO2
• Eat mostly plants and less meat, and reduce food waste
• Shift economic goals away from GDP growth

“A broader set of indicators should be monitored, including human population growth, meat consumption, tree-cover loss, energy consumption, fossil-fuel subsidies and annual economic losses to extreme weather events,” said co-author Thomas Newsome, of the University of Sydney.

“The climate crisis has arrived and is accelerating faster than most scientists expected. It is more severe than anticipated, threatening natural ecosystems and the fate of humanity.”

“The good news is that such transformative change, with social and economic justice for all, promises far greater human well-being than does business as usual,” the scientists said. The recent surge of concern was encouraging, they added, from the global school strikes to lawsuits against polluters and some nations and businesses starting to respond.