This just in:
Save St. Brigid’s! Emergency call to action!!!
Tuesday, August 30th
At 2:15 pm
60 Centre Street
Your presence is needed to help save St. Brigid’s Church from demolition!
On Tuesday, August 30th at 2:15 pm, 60 Centre Street, court 1a, part 12, In the courtroom of Justice Barbara Kapnick — arguments will be heard by the lawyers from the NYC Catholic Archdiocese and our lawyer, Harry Kresky.
The archdiocese wants to have the temporary restraining order removed so they can immediately begin to demolish this historic 160-year old East Village landmark, living parish, and sacred site.
Our lawyer has requested that we pack the courthouse to show Judge Kapnick just how strongly we care about this building and the parishioners.
Please make the time to attend—the hearing should not last much longer than 1 hour. The presence of the entire community is absolutely critical. If the restraining order is voided the church will be destroyed and another monstrous tower will most likely be erected in its place!
For more on this struggle and the history of this church, please click this link: http://www.savestbrigidsnow.netfirms.com/
Call: the EVCC office 212-979-2344 to RSVP. It will be helpful if we know how many people to expect. The courtroom can hold about 200.
Thank you for your support!
East Village Community Coalition
http://evccnyc.org
This article details a meeting that was held on Tuesday about saving the old PS 64/CHARAS building… and this part details why developer Gregg Singer is such a bad man:
“In 1998, developer Gregg Singer and his partners paid $3.1 million for P.S. 64 at a public auction conducted by the Giuliani administration. They agreed to maintain it as a ‘community facility.’ The chairman of Community Board 3, David McWater, recalls that residents of the East Village assumed the deed restriction would protect cultural and community groups that had been using the building. Instead, Mr. Singer immediately moved to evict them.”
I know this is all the dirty games of politics, but something about this article on the District 2 race strikes me as very funny… it’s all so, mid-1800s/Tammany Hall…
(cross-posted from AlterNet)
And now, a short break from our regularly scheduled national politics…
I found out Friday through some local gossip rags — Gawker and Curbed — that the fourth horseman of the Apocolypse is riding into the Lower East Side of Manhattan (that’d be my neighborhood): Starbucks is coming.
There have been rumors since I moved to the neighborhood four years ago, every time another vacant lot opened up, every time another construction site went down. When Collective Unconscious, an indie/underground performance space, and Barramundi, a neighborhood-friendly bar, lost their leases to make way for a new high-rise development on Ludlow Street, locals made their fears known by spraypainting the former signs to read “The Gap” and “Starbucks.” Most of us never thought it would really happen, though. The nearest Starbucks is a cluster phenomenon on Astor Place in the East Village, where one can stand and see three within eye shot. New Yorkers are resilient, though — the infamous Mud Truck set up shop in between them.
Panic set in when I found out about the monstrosity at Allen and Delancey. Some may chalk this up to histronics and hysterics, but let me explain. New York City, since the early ’90s, is slowly being turned into a shopping mall. Soho, once well-known for its galleries and interesting art spaces, is nothing but Bloomingdales (!) and Old Navy. At least three new megaplexes have opened, and there’s of course the Disneyfication of 42nd Street. People like Reverend Billy have been crying out for years, sure. But the steamrollers have moved on, and now it’s not just Manhattan, with its expanding universities and strip malls, but even the safe-haven of Brooklyn is under attack as well.
The Lower East Side has been gentrifying for at least the last ten years, but there is something particularly sinister about gentrification happening here. Most people don’t know that the LES is the home of many radical political movements and events — labor riots of the early 1900s, Jewish indie publishing, the Tompkins Square riots of the early 1990s, squatter’s rights, popular higher education, the Beats, American punk rock, and environmentalism all found a place in the heart of this neighborhood, just to name a few. (For more radical history, check out Bruce Kayton’s Radical Walking Tours. Here’s some highlights.) The LES has been a safe haven for anyone outside the mainstream — not rich, not yuppie, not white, not straight, not capitalist, whathaveyou — since its inception, and it’s why I moved here. Longtime neighborhood residents are proud of the history, and it’s now celebrated (as it disappears) at the annual Howl Festival, itself a source of contention for many, but I think it does a good job of covering the ground.
So, back to Starbucks and why it’s a devastating blow for the LES, and what we’re doing about it. I’ve been working with a number of local organizations to address the serious problem of hyperdevelopment here; not only are the people being removed, but the physical character of the neighborhood is being destroyed. Just Saturday night, I wandered over to my former place of employment for a show to discover that one of the last holdouts against a new development had finally been demolished. Erased. Cease to exist. We’ve been working on campaigns and joining forces with other struggles against hyperdevelopment to address zoning, the City Council selling out the residents, etc. So far, load of energy has poured in — I never thought I’d see the day where radicals from the Tompkins Square riots would be hosting zoning forums, but it’s important and it’s actually happening. L.O.C.O. has been battling the violations on Orchard and Ludlow. P.S. 64 is being saved, and folks are fighting for St. Brigid’s Church. The Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation is stepping into the fray. It’s mind-blowing!
Starbucks is the urban Wal-Mart, and is a powerfully nasty symbol and metaphor for the homogenization of America. To have it arrive at the home of counterculture is just plain unacceptable. I can’t stand the thought of losing Guss’ Pickles, or the Santo Domingo Bakery, or having to pay for wifi access because the Lotus Lounge closed up shop.
So, I sat down today to start a new campaign. I’m going to help people make a better coffee decision when it opens in four weeks — I’m going to stand outside every day and hand out cards that I’m printing up:
(click images for larger view; download a hi-res PDF here to print your own)
The fact that there’s ten other places to get coffee signals to me that there’s no demand for Starbucks here, ya know? And I left some places out — these are just my own personal favorites. I plan on being there pretty often, and I’m taking offers for shifts if anyone’s around and interested. Plus, some folks from the cultural production company I belong to are working on a flashy dispenser for cards when we’re not there.
Bottom line is, regardless of what happens next, I still refuse to take this lying down. Where will the people go, if New York really does become the whitewashed upscale utopia — all the comforts of home included! — that the developers imagine it to be? What will happen to the unique perspective on history from the Lower East Side? What will the poor folks do if affordable housing becomes a distant memory of better days? Where will artists find cheap spaces to live and create? The social misfits, the political radicals, the indvidualists, where will they call home? They won’t come to NYC anymore, not if it looks just like where they came from.
Above the entrance to the Bowery Poetry Club, it says in enormous letters: “EVERYTHING IS SUBJECT TO CHANGE.” Believe me, this isn’t just a reference to the madcap schedule the Club maintains. If this island is going to keep changing, I’m going to keep working on making sure that it retains some semblance of history, and that there’s a place for all the freaks, geeks and otherwise unfit-for-homogeny. Who’s with me?
The Villager has the scoop on the near-destruction of St. Brigid’s church:
State Supreme Court Justice Michael Stallman issued a temporary restraining order against the demolition pending a July 25 hearing.
The lawsuit is the latest effort by the Committee to Save St. Brigid’s to preserve the 1848 church building at 119 Avenue B, which was closed in 2001 because of a dangerous crack in the east wall, and to revive their parish, which the archdiocese dissolved in 2004.
I went to a community development forum not too long ago where one of the representative’s of St. Brigid’s spoke. It’s horrific what the congregation has had to deal with. Long story short, the arch diocese told them they had to close because it was going to cost too much to repair a crack in the wall. The members of the church got together and got their own estimate of the damage, which was something like 1/3 of what the diocese had estimated.
They then raised money to have the repairs made, around $100,000, but still fell short; the diocese kept the church closed, AND kept the money raised. They want to destroy the building and sell the land — to residential developers for a killing.
Greed + God — two great tastes that go great together. In the meantime, actual believers are out on the street with no place to worship or have a sense of community.
