IT WAS A GOOD YEAR FOR CHRISTMAS TREES
Crain’s has a profile of Greg’s Trees, the tree seller on Chambers who clearly did well this season, judging by the fact that most of the trees are gone. In fact, I think it had to be a banner year. (Whole Foods sold out.) Turns out Greg Walsh is a special education teacher from Queens who opened his first stand there in College Point after college, and now has several around the city. He had five this year, and ordered 5000 trees in the spring to supply them, he told Crain’s. Last year he sold 6000, worth about half a million. This year, he said, “we went back and forth, thinking about not doing it, maybe doing fewer locations,” Walsh said. “We ended with five locations and I’m really happy about it—because they have never been so busy.”

CUNY PROFS SHOULD STRIKE
In what I think was an opinion piece in The Nation, a writer calls for CUNY profs to strike, as tuition increases and drastic cuts have been made to staffing, including the firing of 2800 adjuncts (that would have been me!). The author also manages to make a dig at the neighborhood while doing it: “The Borough of Manhattan Community College’s library occupies the fourth floor of its TriBeCa campus. It has a beautiful view in the middle of a neighborhood that was long ago ceded to the elite by way of inflated property values, and it belongs to students whose families are likely to make less than $20,000 a year.”

SOHO REZOING X COUNCIL RACE
New York County Politics predicts that the Soho Rezoning proposal will be the critical issue for the race for Margaret Chin’s seat, with Sean Sweeney of the SoHo Alliance noting of the candidates: “Do they know that it will permit big box retail stores, Home Depot, Target – do they know that?” he asked. “Do they know the value of the air rights that it has given developers? What are we getting back? Do they know what the community is getting back in return for this bonus giveaway to the developers? Because we don’t, because there’s none; we’re getting nothing.”