The Buzz

ANGELIC TROUBLEMAKERS: Jeremiah Moss, whose engaging blog “Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York” mentions Chelsea Now from time to time, gave us a great image this week: urban youth keeping it real in the face of developers’ glass and slate luxury condos. Now that the iconic 18th and 8th café has been replaced by a six-story condo tower with a Valley Bank at ground level, it seems that some students at Bayard Rustin High School are engaging in their own form of nonviolent resistance to gentrification: “For weeks they’ve been flocking to the condo’s comfy slate ledge, where they perch, preen and agitate the afternoon away, smoking cigarettes and spilling sticky cola onto the slate,” he writes admiringly. “Recently, a hysterical little fence of yellow caution tape went up. I can only assume that the tape is meant to keep these kids off. How long do they think that will work? These kids are a force to be reckoned with.” At first read, we could only think about Rustin’s phrase, “We need, in every community, a group of angelic troublemakers.”

But then we called Miguel Acevedo, coordinator of Fulton Youth for the Future, who told us some Rustin kids have taken to wandering over to Fulton Houses during the day to smoke dope and throw their weight around. Calling for “more police protection from PSA 4,” Acevedo said: “The little old ladies don’t want to come out and sit on the benches now.” Now, we wonder if the kids Moss noticed and admired are engaging in satyagraha (Sanskrit for “soul force”) or delinquency, but we’re pretty sure that things are going to get interesting, between Rustin Principal John Angelet, who’s not afraid to go to the police, and whoever was able to pay the upwards of $15 million per unit for the condos. We hope the spirit of the school’s namesake prevails, and that the only people being made nervous are the hedge-funders.

MAKE THE CITY GREEN…OR MAKE GREEN: “When you do things in a rush, that’s when we have problems,” CB 4’s Transportation Committee co-chair Jay Marcus warned Josh Benson of the Department of Transportation last week, interrupting the DOT’s rapturous presentation about bike lanes on Ninth Avenue between 16th and 23rd Streets during a committee meeting. An example of what Marcus meant occurred this week, when overzealous traffic enforcement officers, we hear, started to heed the newly erected NO PARKING and NO STANDING signs and started issuing summonses immediately, even though the parking meters are still functioning and the ordinances are not scheduled to take effect till next month. When CB 4 district manager Bob Benfatto was informed, he said he had no idea, while the neighborhood source who told us about it simply said, “That’s what it is. You put in the bike paths to go green—but what you get is, the city wants to make green.” Well put.

Stormin’ Berman: Speaking of elections, Andrew Berman romped in the 75th Assembly District (Chelsea, Hell’s Kitchen/Clinton, the Flatiron District, Madison Square, Murray Hill and Midtown), leading the Chelsea Reform Democratic Club’s slate of judicial delegate candidates and alternates to victory. Berman was the number-one vote-getter among the 24 candidates. He garnered 1,628 votes, topping the likes of veteran C.R.D.C.’er Democratic State Committeewoman Doris Corrigan, who came in third with 1,363 votes, and well ahead of longtime Chelsea politico Gene Glaberman, who was 22nd with 674 votes. Berman, the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation’s director, was typically coy when we asked whether the resounding win signals his intention to run for the seat of Speaker Christine Quinn, who will be term-limited out of the City Council at the end of 2009. Asked why he wanted to be a judicial delegate in the first place, he replied, “I was nominated by my club, the Chelsea Reform Democratic Club, to run. Ensuring that we have strong, qualified, progressive judges on the bench is definitely very important to me.” Councilmember Rosie Mendez assessed Berman’s awesome tally thusly: “It means the district’s voters know who he is and they like him.”