There are three neighborhood institutions in peril. One, the Long Island College Hospital is on life support, and only a miracle will save it now. Barring a major miracle, LICH is gone.
The second is the Red Hook library. There is a plan to subdivide the library to provide rehearsal space for city artists.
The third is our working waterfront – namely the Cruise Terminal and the Containerport. The terminal operator is faced with declining revenues and is forced to seek additional ways to bring income in from the containerport. This is why they have rented space to garbage trucks alongside Degraw Street, and also why they are allowing a promoter to hold a two day concert on Pier 9A. For now, the concert is a one-shot affair, and the garbage trucks will be moved to a less annoying place, but unless something changes, there will be more and more non shipping uses made of the piers.
The Cruise Terminal is down to 17 days where a ship is in port each year. This is hardly enough to support the operation, and a waste of the $20 million capital expense invested to allow the ships to plug into the electric grid rather than run their engines while in port (Shore Power).
A lesson can be learned from the LICH experience. When the state announced plans to shut the hospital, the unions who employ nurses and other hospital workers mounted a campaign to save the hospital. They were joined by the leaders of local neighborhood associations in a much reported series of court cases.
Protests were held on a pretty regular basis, and we spent many days running down to the hospital to take pictures and report. Things heated up when the public advocate used the issue to boost his mayoral campaign, and many local politicians showed their faces as well.
As it turned out, neither the mayor, nor our city council or state legislatures had the power to change the LICH game plan. That power centered at the head of NY state, which is why you might have seen a number of posters around town asking where the hell is Governor Cuomo.
Our governor would love to be US president, and the only way he would have changed his mind about the hospital was if the closing would have caused him some political damage.
There were very few neighborhood people at the LICH protests, hardly anybody from Red Hook, which probably has the most to lose. With few protestors, the major media choose to cover things elsewhere, and thus the governor got away unscathed.
Carlos Menchaca likes to tell audiences that community involvement is the most important aspect of a democracy. An office holder is emboldened to act when he knows that the people he is elected to represent are behind an issue. Showing up at neighborhood meetings, and following up with letters and phone calls and more meetings is more important than anyone realizes.
It took a bit of a while, but even a president who had won a landslide victory was brought down by public opinion back in 1974.
Just because a bunch of us gave the library bigwigs a piece of our mind last month doesn’t mean that the library executives will give up on their plan. They have professional strategists working for them, figuring out ways in which to turn us around and inside out.
BerlinRosen is the public relations firm that gave us Dante’s hair. They advise the mayor on all his major initiatives, including UPK and paid sick leave. They are representing the Brooklyn Public Library in their endeavor to allow Spaceworks to start chopping up the system. Red Hook is their guinea pig. They are learning from us, and what they learn here they will start using in bigger Brooklyn libraries.
At this point it is most important to let the City Council know how we feel. This means writing letters and calling Councilmember Menchaca. Some of our readers are in the districts of Levin and Lander – they should know about this as well.
The choice is to sit back and let things happen, or to take an active part in the world around us. The phone numbers of our elected representatives are printed on page four of every issue of the Star-Revue. Carlos Menchaca reads his emails. You can reach him at menchaca@me.com.
Some of us look at Brooklyn Bridge Park and think that’s what we should have. While the park is a wonderful looking thing, especially the new basketball courts on Pier 2, the space is shared by luxury housing, much of it still planned or just going up.
The advantage of maintaining maritime activity in our neck of the woods is that luxury housing is at least delayed. In the meantime, there are some well paying union jobs and there remains the opportunity to develop Brooklyn as a port of call, bringing us tourist dollars as well as a convenient departure point for some of us wanting to take a cruise.
The Red Hook Containerport is the last working facility in Brooklyn or Manhattan. It has the ability to reduce truck traffic. Goods meant for the city can be unloaded here instead of having to be trucked in from New Jersey or elsewhere. The nascent barging operation, sending containers from Brooklyn to Elizabeth and back also has the potential to cut down on trucking.
At one point, the Federal Government subsidized barging just for this reason. When that stopped, the Port Authority stepped in with financial help.
The PA is under pressure to cut subsidies, which then puts pressure on the stevedore to increase revenues. The best way to increase revenues is to increase the number of container ships coming here to unload.
This is something else that our politicians should know about from us. Do we want luxury condos on our shores, or do we give a working waterfront another, and a better, shot.
Congresswoman Nydia Velazquez, and State Senator Velmanette Montgomery are advocates of working waterfronts. Tell them to put their money where their mouths are… email Dan Wiley who works for Nydia at daniel.wiley@mail.house.gov. To let Velmanette know how you feel, contact James Vogel, jvogel@nysenate.gov
