The press release came in even before The Observer had seen the initial report that prompted it.
“We have not had any talks with Walmart about a location at Willets Point and we have absolutely no intention of discussing this site with them,” the email statement read.
Who knew! And yet it made perfect sense, as the company has been looking for any opening imaginable in the city. Read More
You can still see traces of the Occupy Wall Street encampment that once stood in Zuccotti Park—a contingent of police officers by the plaza’s entrance and an NYPD watchtower standing guard on Zuccotti’s
northern edge. However, the protesters who made this park their home before being evicted by the police last November are largely gone and the news trucks that formerly stationed themselves outside have departed in favor of a Chabad Mitzvah Tank.
On a recent afternoon at Zuccotti, The Observer encountered handful of tourists and businessmen on lunch breaks but there was nary a demonstrator in sight. At nearby Federal Hall, there were about 11 Occupiers holding signs and sitting on the steps. On the street below, workers were seemingly oblivious to the Occupiers in their midst.
“You’re a Republican?” a suited man asked his friend as they briskly passed by. “Good man!”
Seven months into the movement, the Wall Street that protesters are ostensibly trying to occupy has become inured to the spectacle of carnivalesque protests, demonstrators sleeping on sidewalks and mass arrests. And it seems the rest of the city has too. The protesters are in danger of becoming just another discordant note in the daily din that New Yorkers are so adept at tuning out, like panhandlers, street performers, sidewalk preachers and the other distractions of urban life. Read More
The City Council’s approval of the so-called “prevailing wage” bill was not a surprise. The Council remains a bastion of the old politics of government grandstanding and job-killing mandates, and the “prevailing wage” bill gave members the opportunity to pander to unions and other special interests.
So it wasn’t the vote itself that was interesting. But a maneuver that took place before the vote spoke volumes about the bill’s recklessness. Read More
Governor Cuomo has assigned himself a new task, that of chief lobbyist and advocate for the state’s public school children. Good luck, Governor. If you’re serious about the new assignment—and we hope you are—you have lots of work ahead of you.
As Mr. Cuomo noted himself, there is no shortage of lobbyists seeking to influence the state’s educational policy. The teachers’ union, most notably, has plenty of political muscle, but so do principals, superintendents, janitors and every other stakeholder in the public school system. So who represents students? Mr. Cuomo says he will. Read More
For nine years now, Bruce Ratner has talked of transforming Brooklyn with his Atlantic Yards project. Bringing professional sports back to the borough, creating a new skyline, “a neighborhood practically from scratch,” as architect Frank Gehry once described it. There would be union jobs and affordable housing for all to enjoy.
As of now, only basketball and a handful of those jobs are guaranteed, all of which took three times as long as originally planned. Mr. Ratner and his partners like to blame the economy and the holdouts who sued to save their property, but the fact remains, they are running well behind schedule, possibly even in violation of previous commitments made to the state when the project was approved.
To catch up, Forest City Ratner has come up with a novel solution for myriad problems with his project: modular construction. More than transforming Brooklyn, Mr. Ratner may transform the way the entire city, even the world, builds. At least that is his hope.
“It’s taken us a while to get there on the architecture,” Mr. Ratner told The Observer last month on the day he unveiled his new plans for a modular approach at Atlantic Yards. “We did a lot of work to make sure it was something appropriate, in fitting in with the arena and a good reflection on Brooklyn, the city and our country.”
He is not alone in his optimism, either. Read More
It’s a beautiful Friday, and Zuccotti Park looks… different. Sure, there are the protesters we’ve come to know and expect, and the media is still there, full force. But something seems off.
“A lot of people are unhappy that the Libertarians are joining up,” one General Assembly member told us on the condition of anonymity, “and there are some Tea Party people here too.”
Well… right. Isn’t that what Occupy Wall Street is all about? Giving everyone a voice? Not having a distinct list of demands or qualifications besides a general sense of anger at Big Banks and government bailouts?
Not anymore. This is what Democracy now looks like: Anarchy at war with its own internal organization. Read More
Yesterday afternoon it was sunny and warm. By this point, we almost knew the way to Zuccotti Park by heart. But the huge Megamarch planned for Wednesday didn’t start in the recently renamed Liberty Plaza: it began (for us at least) at Foley Square, right across from the steps where they filmed Law & Order. In the tiny park, union workers and students streamed in from either side of Worth Street and Broadway; history in the making. Their numbers were in the thousands. It was epic. Read More
As real estate prices in the city, or at least in Manhattan, approach pre-Lehman levels, and the wider economy teeters back from the brink, the guys who built the apartments are still suffering. According to a quarterly report from the New York Building Congress, employment for construction workers fell to its lowest level Read More
At some level, it’s not exactly a huge surprise to learn that there are people in New York who can make certain kinds of tickets disappear. Doesn’t everyone know somebody who claims to know somebody who can take care of these annoyances?
It shouldn’t be that way, because it’s not fair–most of the time, anyway. Read More
The Chief-Leader captures some good vitriol at a recent UFT protest aimed at reversing Mayor Bloomberg’s proposal to lay off thousands of teachers.
Democratic City Councilman James Sanders said “we need to take this surplus” and “make sure we save the teachers.” The surplus, as I and other people have noted, don’t really Read More
