[NYtenants-online] NY Tenants - Bike Lane to be Named after Housing Reporter
Julie Lobbia
Tenant
tenant@tenant.net
Thu, 21 Aug 2003 12:10:27 -0400
NYtenants Online/TenantNet 8/21/03
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IN THIS ISSUE ...
1. Remembering Julie Lobbia - Bike Lane Dedication Fri. Aug. 22nd
2. Community Resists Columbia Expansion
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REMEMBERING JULIE LOBBIA
It's hard to believe that it's been almost two years since the Village
Voice's 'Towers & Tenements' columnist J.A. (Julie) Lobbia passed away from
cancer at the relatively young age of 43. In a town where journalism is
often noted for its mediocrity, Lobbia stood out with her exposés of city
slumlords, dirty politicians and developers hoping to ransack New York
neighborhoods.
At the time we, her colleagues at the Voice and many others remembered her:
http://tenant.net/pipermail/nytenants-online/2001-November/000117.html
http://tenant.net/pipermail/nytenants-online/2001-November/000120.html
http://tenant.net/pipermail/nytenants-online/2001-December/000125.html
http://tenant.net/pipermail/nytenants-online/2002-January/000134.html
http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/oursister.html
http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0148/barrett.php
http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0150/letters.php
http://www.riverfronttimes.com/issues/2001-11-28/ray.html/1/index.html
http://julies-garden.com/about.html
http://www.julies-garden.com/articles/stlouis/stlouis.html
We knew her as a journalist and a housing advocate. And like many of us
(contrary to the impression that landlords and developers often try to
create in some laughable attempt to shift blame), she had a life apart from
her work. A large part of that was her husband Joseph Jesselli, reporter at
www.thesmokinggun.com and, of course, her passion for bicycles.
About Julie, Alfredo Garcia of the Five Borough Bike Club said:
"When Julie did morning weekday laps in Central Park,
she would ride down that Broadway bike lane to work. I
have personally witnessed her dauntless cycling on
that lane, amidst double parked cars, bulky trucks,
annoying potholes, even the dangerous Herald Square
intersection. She was truly fearless.
At her memorial service in February, 2002, her family and friends welcomed
the idea to name a bike lane in Julie's memory. It took some time, but City
Council finally approved a sign designating the northwest corner of West
33rd St. & 6th Ave as the "J.A. Lobbia Bike Lane."
The dedication of the sign will take place on Friday, August 22nd at 9AM.
If you can't come for the unveiling, then don't forget to look up when
you're walking by -- or preferably riding by -- near Herald Square.
To read more about Julie's work, see the website her family and friends
have created, www.julies-garden.com
While the bike lane dedication is a wonderful tribute, we continue to be
saddened by the inexplicable decision of the Village Voice to discontinue
her column. For a few months in early 2002, Andrew Friedman picked it up,
but it stopped. While there have been a few Voice articles since then
covering housing and neighborhood issues, for the most part the paper has
abandoned such coverage.
The best tribute, in our view, would be for the Village Voice to recognize
the value of Julie's work by continuing it. To express your views to Voice
Editor Donald Forst, call 212-475-3300.
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Community Resists Columbia Expansion
By Kenny Schaeffer
Met Council Tenant/Inquilino
August 2003
Columbia University, whose main campus occupies the area between Broadway
and Amsterdam Avenue from West 114th to 120th streets, has announced its
intention to expand in all directions as part of a new 30-year plan. The
community —including many veterans of battles with Columbia in decades
past—is rising to the challenge.
Columbia executive vice president Emily Lloyd frankly told a packed
Community Board 9 meeting in June that the university has a permanent push
to expand. “When we start teaching biotechnology, we don’t stop teaching
Spanish,” she stated.
The problem, from the community’s point of view, is that Columbia wants to
expand indefinitely into a finite and very dense urban environment that is
already at the breaking point due to loss of jobs and affordable housing.
And the university is now violating long-held understandings that it would
not move below 110th Street or above 125th Street, and that it would not
directly encroach on Harlem.
Last year, Columbia overcame considerable opposition to construct a private
school/luxury residence at the southeast corner of 110th Street and
Broadway, and has already implemented plans to construct a new school of
social work and a law-school dormitory on Amsterdam Avenue between 121st
and 122nd streets. Its next big plans are to construct two towers on the
grounds of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, and to create an entirely
new arts campus west of Broadway and north of 125th Streets, where it
already owns considerable land as it is pleased to display with colorcoded
maps at community meetings. The university has also hand-picked a
“community advisory board,” to make suggestions which it may or may not heed.
Area residents—some with over 30 years’ experience in Columbiacommunity
relations—have organized a group called Coalition to Preserve the
Community, which has been engaging local elected officials and Community
Boards 9, 10, and 12, to raise technical issues including zoning variances,
landmarking, and historic districts, as well as broader concerns such as
the need to preserve and expand jobs and affordable housing. While CPC has
taken advantage of every opportunity to negotiate these issues with
Columbia, they also know that the university has a long history of putting
its own interests first. The group’s open letter says they are determined
that the public debate “address the destructive consequences of Columbia’s
continued unrestrained expansion at the expense of our community.”
Without Struggle…
In 1968, Columbia’s plans to build a gymnasium in Morningside Park that
would not be open to the Harlem community sparked one of the biggest
confrontations of the 60s student-radical movement, with the university
dropping the plans after protesters occupied several campus buildings. In
the 1980s, Columbia aggressively bought up large rent-stabilized buildings
and single-room-occupancy hotels, in order to replace the tenants with
students and faculty to facilitate university expansion. It backed down
after a civil-disobedience campaign in which several groups of people were
arrested for blocking city marshals from evicting long-term tenants. But
the blue-and-white Columbia lion is stirring again.
One of the chief areas of concern to community members is the threatened
loss of jobs if Columbia is successful in getting the area from 125th to
133rd streets west of Broadway rezoned from manufacturing to “mixed use.”
That would open the way for campus expansion and luxury towers. According
to Prof. Ron Schiffman, director of the Pratt Institute for Community and
Environmental Development, the area holds a large number of jobs, including
a doll factory and automobile-repair shops, which would be endangered by
the proposed change in zoning. Schiffman has been hired by Community Board
9 to develop a plan to address the community’s needs . He has stated that
the loss of jobs is one of the biggest problems currently afflicting the CB
9 area, which covers Morningside Heights and Harlem from 110th to 155th
streets and has also stressed the need for an organized tenant presence.
Columbia has recently acknowledged that it will own 50 of the units in a
17-story residential tower to be constructed on the Teachers College
campus, after claiming for months that Teachers College is a separate
corporation over which it has no control. The university is also
considering purchasing units at Donald Trump’s Riverside South, and it
provided needed capital to bail out the 27- story luxury condo on the site
of the Towers Nursing Home on 106th Street and Central Park West.
The university has also long been rumored to want to create a “corridor”
from its 116th Street main campus to the Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital on
168th Street, home of its medical school. The communities surrounding the
campus, including Harlem to the north and east, Manhattan Valley to the
south, Manhattanville to the immediate north, and Washington Heights beyond
that, are mostly low-income neighborhoods where relentless gentrification
is threatening the residents. Rents for some apartments, especially in
Manhattan Valley and Washington Heights, have risen above the $2,000
vacancy-decontrol level.
Columbia is also in the early stages of constructing a residential tower at
the northeast corner of 103rd Street and Broadway, site of a former Lucille
Roberts gym that the university acquired last year. As the New York
Observer noted in June, Columbia has pressured the MTA to remodel the 103rd
Street IRT subway station, which remains shut and unavailable to local
residents while the construction goes on.
“It’s like the Hundred Years War,” says state Sen. Eric Schneiderman. “It’s
about power. The community won’t get anywhere relying on Columbia’s good
intentions alone.”
To paraphrase Frederick Douglass, without struggle there is no negotiation.