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CENTURIESOLD TEXTS ON DISPLAY < CITY ARTS P.12
FEBRUARY
19-25 2015
OurTownDowntown @OTDowntown
CAN YOU HEAR ME NOW? DEPENDS ON WHERE YOU LIVE
In Brief THE RETURN OF THE NEW YORK ECONOMY
As a Verizon outage lingers on, Upper West Siders fume BY DANIEL FITZSIMMONS
Some Verizon customers on the Upper West Side are in the third week of a phone and internet outage that has businesses and residents wondering how a chunk of Manhattan can simply be knocked off the grid. “I heard the entire east side of Columbus Avenue between 87th Street and 89th Street has had a Verizon cable problem,” said Andrew Albert, executive director of the West Manhattan Chamber of Commerce. “Council member Helen Rosenthal’s offices, as well as Goddard-Riverside [Community Center], have been without phone service for several days.” Rosenthal sent an email to constituents on Wednesday, Feb. 4, informing them that phones were down in the district office, which is located at Columbus Avenue and 87th Street. Rosenthal believed the problem would be fixed in a matter of days, according to the email. The following Monday, Feb. 9, she and her chief of staff, Marisa Maack, decided to discontinue their service with the company and began using a digital phone service through the city council (the district office phone number was not changed). “We abandoned Verizon,” Maack said. “There was a real lack of responsiveness, and it turned out to be a more major problem. But to be honest with you I could never really get a real answer from them on what exactly the problem was.”
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FUTURISTIC HUDSON RIVER PARK WINS APPROVAL NEWS Park moves forward thanks to a $113 million Barry Diller donation Plans are now in place to remake Pier 55 along the Hudson River, thanks to the largest-ever private donation to a public New York City park.
Do you know where this is?
Media mogul Barry Diller and his fashion designer wife Diane von Furstenberg won Hudson River Park Trust approval for the plan, after pledging to commit $113 million toward the $130 million cost of the project. Construction is expected to be completed by 2019, and will completely transform what is now a deteriorating Pier 54 across from the
West Village. According to architects’ renderings, the park will be bult 186 feet off the shoreline and will float above the water on 300 mushroom-shaped columns. Plans now call for gardens, paths similar to the High Line and a 700-seat amphitheater, which will be programmed with the help of Oscar-winning producer Scott Rudin and playwright George C. Wolfe.
That hum you’re hearing? It’s the sound of New York’s economy clicking on all cylinders. New data from City Comptroller Scott Stringer shows nearly every corner of the New York economy revving back. Unemployment, while still higher than the national average, is at a six-year low; city tax revenues are the fourth-highest ever; venture investment in the city last year surpassed $5 billion, nearly 60 percent higher than in the previous year; now office leasing activity is the hottest since 1998. And, as the Times pointed out this week, the very solid gains in the city economy came despite a relatively weak contribution from Wall Street, which has historically tended to lead New York out of its doldrums. In official circles, it’s considered good news that the city is recovering, job-wise, while Wall Street hiring has remained nearly flat. Of course, the generally good economic news doesn’t hide the fact that the wealth gap in the city -- the divide between the extremely rich and the rest of us -- is bigger than at any other time in history; the Times’ recent series on the absentee landlords at the luxury towers on Central Park has brought that point home. The second caveat, highlighted by Stringer, is that even though 2014 was strong, things dipped a bit in the fourth quarter, a point that bears watching. “While our economy lost momentum late in the year, most indicators are trending in the right direction,” he said.
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