The Buzz

Volume 2, Number 13 | The Weekly Newspaper of Chelsea | Dec. 28, 2007 - Jan. 3, 2008

"Support businesses and organizations that support Chelsea Now"

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The Buzz

TAME TIMES SQUARE, AND YOU CAN MELT A HIRING FREEZE: Much as we love Gary Parker, the NYU public affairs maven who in October left the CB 5 district manager post, we were beginning to wonder whether CB 5 administrators who were filling in for him, Kim Rodney and Cindy Perez, would ever get a break. Then in October we learned why Parker’s post had not been filled: Parker left just as a citywide hiring freeze was imposed by Mayor Michael Bloomberg, cutting all agency budgets including those of community boards. At the Nov. 12 general board meeting, the board decided to drastically shift its budget priorities to replace Parker. They ultimately settled on writer, Chelsean and longtime city employee Wally Rubin. By the December general meeting, Rubin sat beside CB 5 Chairperson David Siesko, listening to the long list of liquor-license and street-fair discussions with a smile. “I love this district,” Rubin told Chelsea Now on Tuesday, when we called to congratulate him. “I know its affairs really well,” added Rubin, who served on the staffs of Congress members Ted Weiss and Ruth Messenger, and as Director of Theater survived the administrations of former mayors David Dinkins and Rudolph Giuliani, and helped in the creation of the new, bright Times Square.

IT PAYS TO PATROL: Residents in housing developments have a new incentive to monitor their buildings for illicit activity: The New York City Housing Authority just announced that volunteers in the agency’s Tenant Patrol program would receive $45-per-month stipends for their work in maintaining building safety. Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, together with Vito Lopez, the Assembly’s Housing Committee chairperson, and Tino Hernandez, NYCHA’s chairperson, recently unveiled the pilot program aimed at compensating tenant volunteers for building patrols. The funds were made available thanks to $1.5 million in state aid for the program, which asks tenants to promote building safety by discouraging vandalism and loitering, and reporting suspicious or criminal behavior to the authorities. A part-time NYCHA Tenant Patrol supervisor will schedule patrol shifts and coordinate the paid volunteers. Silver and Lopez helped secure funding for the stipends, which will also be offered to tenants who commit to work 10 hours each month in NYCHA community and senior centers. But Miguel Acevedo of CB 4 and the Fulton Houses Tenants Association, thinks the money is being spent in the wrong place, especially in light of recent cutbacks due to NYCHA’s big budgetary woes. “It’s unfortunate that it takes money to get parents and kids to do what they should be doing anyway,” said Acevedo. “The money should be going to small nonprofits that offer give job training and other services to these kids and parents, and on keeping these buildings clean. Maintenance workers have been laid off, and we’ve only got one guy covering our building now.”

THANKS FOR THE MEMORIES: Some recent blasts from the past, though not so far past as to induce nostalgia. First, among the hordes at the Hudson Guild looking at the Hudson Yards plans was former City Council Speaker and mayoral candidate Gifford Miller, now a well-heeled consultant and Friends of the High Line board member. Miller, who told Chelsea Now that “I love my life” now that he has time to actually see his family, had come in support of the Brookfield Properties development team, whose popular-among-the-masses proposal is considered by real-estaters to have no chance. (We didn’t ask if he was reminded of his own underdog campaign for mayor in 2005.)

And speaking of mayors and the High Line, we were also reminded last week that our passionate editorials on behalf of saving the High Line might have been impossible if former mayor and current presidential candidate Rudolph Giuliani had had his way. “One of his last acts as mayor, on New Year’s Eve 2000, was to sign the demolition order,” CB 4’s Anna Hayes Levin told Chelsea Now; she added that the order was quietly, immediately reversed by then brand-new Mayor Michael Bloomberg. We wonder what other “Aud Lang Syne” orders Bloomberg might have also had to quietly put away. And we wonder if that could be the same Bloomberg who recently blamed the canceled expansion of the Javits Center on stadium opponents like Levin, telling the New York Sun: “If a handful of people hadn’t been so selfish, we could have had a privately paid for, wonderful, big convention center that would have created opportunities for lots of people in this city who otherwise can’t find jobs.”