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The Paper of Record for Greenwich Village, East Village, Lower East Side, Soho, Union Square, Chinatown and Noho, Since 1933
February 5, 2015 • $1.00 Volume 84 • Number 36
Silver resigns as speaker and, in a hasty process, Heastie takes the reins BY LINCOLN ANDERSON
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SPEAKER, continued on p. 15
C.B. 3 O.K.’s East Village gardens district; 38 green oases would be saved BY ZACH WILLIAMS
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ocal activists moved one step closer to realizing their ambitions of establishing a community gardens district when Community Board 3 voted 28-1 in support of the plan last week. Activists are calling on the city to make 38 gardens on
municipally owned property into parkland permanently protected from development. Community volunteers, as they do now, would continue to manage these gardens, just as they do in eight other privately owned gardens included within the proposed district. City Councilmember Rosie GARDENS, continued on p. 29
PHOTO BY ZACH WILLIAMS
heldon Silver is out as speaker of the New York State Assembly, and Carl Heastie is in. Silver’s 21-year reign as one of the state’s top Democrats — one of the “three men in a room” cutting deals with the governor — came to a crashing end Monday,
as his resignation became official at 11:59 p.m. Tuesday, the assemblymembers unanimously voted in Heastie to take Silver’s place. The beginning of the end for the powerful Lower East Side politician came early on the morning on Thurs., Jan.
Jimmy McMillan, founder of the Rent Is Too Damn High Party, hoping to avoid eviction from his East Village apartment, displayed a cashier’s check covering two-thirds of his back rent, but his landlord wants him evicted. See Page 4.
Mayor calls affordable housing the tonic for ‘Tale of Two Cities’ BY LINCOLN ANDERSON
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ffordable housing was the centerpiece of Mayor de Blasio’s State of the City address at Baruch College on Tuesday. The mayor, who campaigned on a platform of fighting income inequality in what he called the “Tale of Two Cities,” said much work remains in order to close the gap. On Tuesday, he said the city continues to be perilously close to becoming “a
gated community” and that such a sense of “exclusivity” has no place here. More than half of New Yorkers currently pay more than 30 percent of their income toward rent, which means they are, by definition, “rent-burdened,” he stressed. Addressing that problem is the best and most-direct way to address the affordability crisis, he said. “How did we get here?” he asked rhetorically. “For decades, we let the developers write their own rules.
That meant a bias toward luxury housing. This administration is taking a totally and fundamentally different approach.” The centerpiece of his affordable housing plan — which he likened to the original mission of Stuyvesant Town — was a scheme to build 11,250 units of affordable housing on the Sunnyside Yards rail yards in Queens. In fact, that is the same number of units as DE BLASIO, continued on p. 6
Developer to fix up final two squats...............page 2 C.B. 2 is onboard with ‘Diller Island’..............page 12 Editorial: Silver: The good, bad & ugly...........page 16 Fashion Lust...............................page 23
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