Page 6 - Demo

Page Six, PHOENIXAtlantic ProjectNeeds Leone OKThe vital signs of an old community can be measured by the quantity and quality of its re-development; during the past year our area of Brooklyn has seen considerable progress.The downtown project has moved ahead faster than any project of its size in the country, and the brownstone movement continues to attract new, young, active people to the community. The announcement that the Atlantic Terminal Urban Renewal Project is ready to move is another sigh of vital ity.The Atlantic Terminal Project has been under discussion for twenty years, and officially designated an urban renewal area for ten years. Plans now have been completed for construction of more than 500 units of moderate income cooperative housing, a day care center, off street parking and new low-rent public housing. The only remaining step prior to actual construction is favorable action by the Board of Estimate.Borough President Leone has expressed displeasure at the outrageous delay in moving ahead with the project, and to show his anguish, last month requested still another delay. We agree with Mr. Leone that the city has once again treated Brooklyn as a stepchild, but can find no reason to further delay this small piece of progress.Brooklyn needs all the housing it can get, low and moderate income housing, (especially cooperative), is necessary simply to keep pace with families who are being forced to relocate due toWindow onBrooklyn HeightsB y BERNARD HUGHES ATKINSMost weddings and Bar Mitzvahs today are a practice in loneliness. You go, if you%u2019re invited, to a fabulous affair replete with flowers billowing and liquor flowing in profuse and overflowing proportions. The food is more ample than a Roman orgy. Everything is provided for your pleasure, everything to please the eye and palate. But you lose half the pleasure because true pleasure comes from sharing and today%u2019s celebrations are do-it-yourself affairs.Why? Well, today%u2019s affairs are like the old man married to the beautiful young girl%u2014he can%u2019t use it all, but it advertises that he has made it. In other words, the purpose of most sumptuous affairs is to show off and one of the more impressive ways to brag is to have %u201ccontinuous music.%u201d This continuous music is the great isolator.You sit at a table with nine other people all dressed up and nothing to say because the damned orchestra is all brassed up and overlaid with some loud, swinging vocalist screaming too close intothe microphone making the chandeliers chatter on their chains, to say nothing of knocking your eye balls together.As each couple arrives, quickly appraising who would be best to sit next to, they mumble a lost-in-thenoise introduction and sit down. Conversation is carried on at a throat tearing level and finally, in despair, ceases. You sit and smile at the others waiting for a break in the never ending cacophony of sound. The only surcease you get is in going to the john and hearing the peaceful flushing of the water.As if the noise isn%u2019t bad enough, they turn on a flashing strobe which bounces coins of light off the reflector ball spinning on the ceiling. Five minutes of these lights in concert with the hard rock rolling and roiling around the room once gave me a bout of nausea that no liquor ever did.But don%u2019t get me wrong, I%u2019m gregarious and I love parties and people, but I don%u2019t like to be dumped into a social vortex over which I have no control, get spun around and around for three hoursand then spewed out into my carother developments.The time has come for a massive public demand to move this project ahead now. We urge Borough President Leone to quit putting more roadblocks in the way of the project and to take leadership in the Board of Estimate to achieve swift approval.At tHe same time that we urge Leone to get this portion of the project moving, we also think he should be working to make the city keep its promise to place major new educational facilities in the area.Vandals at WorkJust before Christmas, the Brooklyn Heights Board of Trade and some of the civic minded merchants placed planters along Montague Street. The addition of this greenery on a commercial street is most welcome, and the merchants who paid the bill are to be congratulated.Last week two of the planters were overturned and the little trees all but killed. The concrete pots must weigh 1,000 pounds or more and must have required a great deal of work to tip over.Why anyone big enough to move them would want to go to such lengths to be mischievous is a puzzlement. One can only wistfully think that there must be more constructive ways to work off excess energy.Speculators Use ArtistsTo the Editor:I lived in Westbeth for nearly three years and liked it, but the management didn%u2019t like us. Artists living in Wesbeth are being manipulated into higher rents and, soon, cooperative housing because of mismanagement. (Westbeth has never rented its 84,000 sq. ft. of commercial space which would have paid one-third of the operational costs of the building.Now comes the latest artists%u2019 project planned for the Fulton St., Brooklyn Bridge section of Brooklyn. I have as mixed feelings about this project as I have had about Westbeth. One of the artists%u2019 projects to be sponsored by the Fredrick W. Richmond Foundation (Westbeth was sponsored by the J. M. Kaplin Foundation). The Brooklyn project will be financed by a city loan under MitchellLama.Arts and artists%u2019 communities in New York City have proven to be of great value and worth over the past few years, especially for speculators of property value. For instance, Westbeth, the %u201clow income%u201d artists residence on the lower side of Manhattan sprang up in an area of the city thought too industrial for housing. But now, three years after the first artists moved into Westbeth, the whole lower west side of Manhattan is being rebuilt. It%u2019s clear now that the artists of Westbeth were used as, shall we say, %u201cthe first team%u201d for rehabilitating an area, to make it attractive for more housing and business. However, Westbeth is having problems. There have beensubstantial rent increases and the management now plans to turn Westbeth into cooperative housing which will force out, and is now forcing out, less affluent artists from this %u201clow income project.%u201dWe also see SoHo being exploited by speculators now that it%u2019s an attractive and livable place. Ao n n r f c O _ T T _w p i a m i w i u i O U 1 1 Ubegins, push up property values, cause rent increases, and force out poor artists and long-time residents of the area, all in the name of progress.The latest scheme for an artists%u2019 community at Fulton St.-Brooklyn Bridge is in trouble befooe it has become a reality because plans have already been announced for a giant rebuilding of Downtown Brooklyn and vicinity. One wonders just how long the %u201cattractive%u201d artists%u2019 colony will last before the speculators move in?It%u2019s time for the foundations, the City, federal government and others who are into building %u201cartists%u2019 communities%u201d to be honest, honest enough to let the public, whose tax money is being invested, in on the greater plans and the real interests of these speculators instead of pretending to be philanthropists, matrons and patrons of the arts. It%u2019s time to stop using artists as the %u201cfirst team%u201d for the rehabilitation of unlivable industrial areas in order to open up the area for speculators.Sincerely,Sheldon Ramsdell Dean St.Fence Is InTo the Editor:In your December 21st story on the Landmarks Law I am quoted as saying that the Long Island College Hospital has not built thef f l n O O f K o f t k r t T n n / O m n w l r n.v**vw %u00bbuv xjuuvtitiui noP re s e rv a tio n C om m ission specified that the Hospital build to screen off its pre-fab temporary library.This was true enough six or eight weeks ago%u2014whenever it was that your reporter called me up, and of course we had no way of knowingif ...1----- ---- f -------- -------1J11 U l W 11C 11 Ct 1 C M I . C W U U 1 U Jurewhich will, when the building built. But if your reporter hadsuffering from over-eating, overnoise and loneliness, unfulfilled. So I say %u201cTo hell with continuous music.%u201d Cut the decibels of %u201cmusical%u201d sound and let%u2019s hear the melody of the human voice in conversation no matter how innocuous or plebian. A party without conversation is like sex without love, a physical expression without the joy of snaring.Needless to say I try to avoid these affairs, but to you who must go I suggest you take along my emergency kit%u2014a pair of ear plugs and the latest lip reading manual. But then, just like the guy walking down the street with a radio plugged into his ear, or the young people in a room listening to ear drum destroying decibels of sound, maybe the partygoers have nothing to say to one another in which case, if that%u2019s true, then I%u2019m really alone.To me a party should have good food, but not the outpourings of conspicuous and wasteful display. The smorgasbord spreads most caterers set up are a disgrace. They do it because they know it%u2019s what you want. You overeat until you%u2019re full, drink %u2018til you%u2019re joyful and then first go in to a full dinner with 10 courses and fine desserts, all to the accompaniment of noise, noise, noise. So, either have the dinner or the smorgasbord, but damn it, not both. Have music and lots of it, but let them shut up every 10 minutes for 10 minutes. At least for 10 minutes.SO DON%u2019T INVITE ME!bothered to check again before submitting her story, which seems to me like an elementary precaution, she would have seen that, lo, the Hospital has indeed constructed a quite appropriate and attractive redwood fence.The real and continuing differences between the community and the Hospital are awesome enough. Please let%u2019s not perpetuate those that get resolved as completely and satisfactorily as this one has.In fact, that is news itself.Sincerely,Robert Sowers Congress St.Editors Note: As a matter of fact, we not only knew the fence had been constructed, but we also had a picture of it with a cutline beginning %u201cBehind this expensive, but nonetheless inappropriate fence...%u201d The article had been set for several weeks and due to an oversight, its text was not updated.W here%u2019s Rooney?The PHOENIX received a copy of the following letter toCongressman Rooney:Dear Congressman Rooney,Are you enjoying a Happy New Year, Mr. Rooney, while Mr. Nixon murders even more Vietnamese men, women and children?How can you sleep peacefully, Mr. Rooney, while Mr. Nixon%u2019s bombers continue to blast hell out of a country which never attacked our own?Did you have a happy 69th birthday on November 29th, Mr. Rooney, when the peace Mr. Nixon promised us disappeared into thin air, like almost all of Mr. Nixon%u2019s promises?When you think fondly of your five children, Mr. Rooney, and of your grandchildren whom you love, do you ever think of Vietnamese as grandfathers, mothers, fathers and children who have a right to live%u2014 or are they all %u201cGooks%u201d to you?Continued on Page 9