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Seen & Heard: Another Store Closed at the World Trade Center Mall
••• Here’s a petition against the de Blasio administration’s plan to plop a 40-story jail complex in the landmark building at 80 Centre, which will be gutted. “Our neighborhood roads are congested enough with traffic negotiating routes between the Manhattan & Brooklyn bridges and the Holland & Brooklyn Battery tunnels. In addition, this project would undoubtedly exacerbate air, noise & environmental issues we already endure. Residents of Chinatown, Tribeca, Little Italy, Soho, BPC, FiDi & The LES should not be made to suffer more. We support the call for real prison reform but feel a jail in residential areas is not the best way to approach it.”
••• New signage for the RazzleDazzle barbershop coming to the southeast corner of Church and Duane confirms that it’s part of the South Florida chain. “A Dazzler (girl in costume) gives guests a hand and neck massage with their RazzleDazzle Haircut,” says the website. She does it with her boobs, if the photo is any indication. (The gallery is a thing to behold.)
••• Another shop at the World Trade Center has closed (or is about to), says the reader known as Hudson River: Kingkow, the children’s clothing shop on the passageway to Brookfield Place. Also, “the french fry place [Underground Potato] that opened recently in the Fulton Center hasn’t been open for several weeks.”
••• What would seem to be “Ray Donovan” is back shooting in Tribeca again, in the Church/White area. One of the nice things about being away was not having to keep track of these shoots—such as “Happy” yesterday and “Leave Not One Alive” here for four days last week. (Is it just me, or does every other TV show involve a wayward former cop?)
••• Press release: “A new location of the Kati Roll Company on 22 Maiden Lane opens this weekend, with plans to expand to 40 locations. The new FiDi location of the Kati Roll Company will also be offering a giveaway of kati rolls between Noon at 2pm today (Friday, August 17) to mark the grand opening.”
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I signed the petition and have forwarded it to everyone I know who may be affected by this.
I don’t know much at this moment about the plan to put a corrections center down the street from the courts, so I don’t feel qualified to comment on that. But based upon your link to the gallery photos for the Razzle Dazzle haircut spa place, I’m more immediately put off by the arrival of that. Thanks for providing images that I can never more un-see, try as I may.
Good news about the petition.
Also anyone who cares about this please attend the hearing and voice your concerns:
Manhattan:
Sept. 27, at 6 p.m.
Manhattan Municipal Building
1 Centre St., lower Manhattan
Info here in new article on AM New York:
https://www.amny.com/news/closing-rikers-island-explained-1.20505335
The 40-story traffic-congesting violence-non-stopping question: Do our opinions, and those of our community leaders, even make a difference?
The article oddly ends with this statement, which sounds like the hearings are just perfunctory and the city plans to bulldoze ahead, wasting money and resources with no clear justification, no matter what:
“After the public hearings and environmental review are complete, the city will present site plans for all four jails in one land use application, which is expected to be voted on by the City Council next summer.”
Nevertheless, since City Council has to vote on this, write to your councilmembers!
https://council.nyc.gov/districts/
What in the HELL is going on Downtown/Tribeca. First a detention center being planned and now a burlesque hair cutting place. Excuse me do they know Tribeca is a family friendly neighborhood!!! Who’s getting paid under the table at city hall and CB1
It’s safe to say that the folks at Community Board 1 are not happy that the de Blasio administration is pushing the jail plan through in August, when CB1 doesn’t meet. As for the barbershop, CB1 doesn’t regulate which businesses are allowed to move into the area—a good thing, all in all. I have my issues with CB1, but accusing them of taking bribes strikes me as wildly unfair.
Maybe CB1 should call an emergency August meeting!
The hearings are not until September, but the sooner CB1 gets actively involved the better.
Finally a rub and tug men’s barbershop! Its about time we have a place to be “taken care of”
Stop commenting under other names. It violates the policies of this site.
By the way, what would happen to the marriage bureau under this plan? So many couples have tied the knot there….That building and its functions should be preserved, not vandalized with a 40-story hybrid shopping mall-jail monstrosity.
If someone can provide a link that will explain the objection to the corrections facility, I’d like to learn more. I saw Erik’s first post on it, and I know that he object, for one thing, to the architectural plan, and for another, to the mayor’s strategy of implementing it without public review. Apart from that, that entire series of blocks, running nearly to Canal, is corrections facilities and courts, so it doesn’t seem like a completely anomalous idea to me. And the stated intention of ending the blight of Rikers is admirable.
https://www.cityandstateny.com/articles/policy/criminal-justice/new-york-city-replace-rikers-new-jails.html
80 Centre St., Manhattan
City Councilwoman Margaret Chin: [Blah blah blah …]
Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer: “80 Centre Street could be a good location for the new facility, but the community deserved to have a lot more input on the plan before the mayor’s office put it forward. Neighborhood organizations had good ideas for affordable housing, community facilities, and more that can’t be built in later in the process. If we’re going to build a massive new facility that will stand in the heart of lower Manhattan for decades, we ought to take the time to fully involve the community and get it right.”
Assemblywoman Yuh-Line Niou: “Time and time again, we have seen the Mayor completely ignore the voices of our community. A whole new site was selected without any prior notice to our community. The draft scoping released today, locks down the site and the use with no community engagement. As the plan to close Rikers Island proceeds, I am enraged by the fact that once again we are left in the dark as critical decisions are made behind closed doors.
Our community has been erased from the conversation over and over again like in the closure of Rivington House through the lifting of a deed restriction, the controversy around Elizabeth Street Gardens, Extell Towers, Two Bridges developments, and now for the Manhattan Detention Center. The Mayor’s disregard of our asks to discuss the plan, and his arbitrarily tight deadlines while Community Boards are out for the summer, make it nearly impossible to adequately assess the proposal. There is little indication of a clear plan showing they can and will change their current operations and address the community’s concerns about garbage piles, parking usage and traffic congestion. The Mayor has failed to make the process fair, transparent, or responsive to the community.
We deserve to have our voices heard. The people who live here, work here, and built this city, our city, matter. We have heard the stories in the Bronx, Brooklyn and Queens. We stand with our neighbors in our complaints about the lack of community engagement in this process. We were the only site which had a completely different location proposed and the only proposal that did not include the community in any of the conversations when making that decision. This is unacceptable and we will not stand for this.”
State Sen. Brian Kavanagh: “[…] So the City’s broad goal is admirable, but, to date, the process has been a fiasco. Key decisions that clearly have been in the works for a while were made in secret; there has been very limited community outreach; and what little communication the City has attempted has been highly selective, excluding many relevant stakeholders. This approach is already making the process unnecessarily divisive and diminishing the chances that they will achieve meaningful reform. It is my hope that the City will do better going forward and include all stakeholders in an open dialogue that includes a wider range of options for achieving the critical goals of justice system reform and gives due consideration to the concerns of the communities in which our jails will be located.”
“We deserve to have our voices heard. The people who live here, work here, and built this city, our city, matter.”
Agreed. However, we deserve more than merely to be heard; we deserve to have the community’s opinions and interests be among the deciding factors regarding such a massive, expensive, risky, project.
After all, the powers that be are finally giving in and granting us a public “hearing” (see above about September 27 hearing)…but if all they do is let us speak, and ignore what we are saying, then the hearings will are just empty gestures to distract and pacify.
According to New York City Government’s official website for 80 Centre Street:
“William Haugaard, state architect, designed 80 Centre Street under a height restriction so that it would not overshadow the nearby courthouses and symmetry of Foley Square.”
http://www.nyc.gov/html/dcas/html/about/man_louislefkowitz.shtml
Another factor: the cost (which is sure to spiral far beyond the estimate, as any government project inevitably does): $13.9 billion. Hilariously, the project is being promoted as a way to save money! True DoubleSpeak.
Then there’s the bizarrely arbitrary number goal of 5000 inmates. Is this another way to spin the crime numbers? Even if certain crimes are re-categorized to less severe non-arrestable infractions, how can we just set a number like this? Doesn’t the number of inmates depend on the actual crime rates? Or do we just stop arresting once we hit 5000?
More criticism:
Investigation chief: Moving Rikers inmates won’t stop jail violence
https://nypost.com/2018/03/26/investigation-chief-moving-rikers-inmates-wont-stop-jail-violence/
(stopping the violence problem at Rikers was supposedly one of the motives of this project; isn’t it more likely that the violence will just be re-located closer to where people work and live?)
Rikers Island closure a ‘land grab’ for developers: union headss
https://nypost.com/2018/01/14/rikers-island-closure-a-land-grab-for-developers-union-head/
Bizarre doesn’t begin to describe what some people want.
“We demand City and State-level transformation. In our analysis, New York City is part of the problem, and certainly not off the hook. At the City level, programs diverting people away from the criminal legal system at the point of arrest must be increased and reach all at-risk populations leaving no one behind. There is no reason for kids, or people suffering from a range of mental health conditions or anyone with drug-related charges to be on Rikers today or at any facility managed by the DOC. Medical, mental health, and dependency treatment, including prenatal and maternity care as well as gender-affirming treatment for transgender and gender non-conforming people, must happen outside the system. Programs for young people, homeless people and veterans must also happen outside of the system.
“We demand that Mayor de Blasio end the policy of broken windows policing, as it harms communities and contributes to unnecessary confinement of people on Rikers over petty infractions that have virtually been decriminalized in white communities. The City must become invested in ending socially constructed crimes of poverty and in severely reducing its over-bloated NYPD and COBA budgets. #CLOSErikers demands include: ending broken windows policing, dismantling NYPD gang databases, expanding alternatives to incarceration, and investing money saved by decarceration to #buildCOMMUNITIES. The Administration must also meet a set of the Lippman Commission’s recommendations to decriminalize four offenses: fare evasion (NYPD’s second-most-common arrest), marijuana possession, sex work, and gravity knife possession. Instead, Mayor de Blasio continues to enforce fare evasion and marijuana policies that explicitly target people on parole or probation in direct opposition of the goal of closing Rikers.”
http://www.closerikers.org/media/news/statement-from-brandon-j-holmes-closerikers-campaign-coordinator-on-mayors-refusal-to-closerikers-before-10-years/
Thank you James Bogardus!!! Close Rikers.
The quality of life issues are complex. I lived in NYC during the Dinkins administration and the laissez-faire attitude of the then mayor’s office helped lead to an unpleasant and unsafe city. I reluctantly left for the suburbs and did not return.
Somehow we must balance the needs of all people. I am not sure if the mayor’s attack on the quality of life in neighborhoods such as Tribeca are motivated by hostility to certain groups or he just has a complete ignorance that people that pay high taxes also would like a pleasant quality of life.
The Mayor does not seem to care that “taxes are the price we pay for a civilized society.”
The other problem is Mayor DeBlasio’s disregard and possible disdain for the Chinese community. One of my Chinese friends believes that much of DeBlasio’s recent actions, Including the proposed jail and the restructuring of NYCs elite schools to limit the number of Chinese students reflects the deep animosity that the mayor has for the Chinese community.
This is just a run up for the national stage. This is DeBlasio posturing to be on the democratic ticket in 20XX. He is killing the top public schools, turning schools into soup kitchens and bankrupting the city. But by the time any real measurements of failure comes to light, he’ll blame it on the next guy.
Update on Kingkow: After selling out everything in the store, they have managed to renegotiate and will reopen when new stock arrives, possibly a couple of weeks (or at least whatever’s happening is still in flux).