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Residents fear a 790-unit luxury tower will upend a historic slice of the L.E.S. BY PANYIN CONDUAH
Residents of the Two Bridges housing complex on the Lower East Side sit down with developers this week to air their concerns about a 68-story luxury building slated for construction in their neighborhood. Extell Development bought the
former Pathmark Supermarket site at 250 South Street for $150 million and plans to build 790 units of market-rate housing. The project has raised a host of gentrification-related issues, including concerns about where residents in the area will be able to buy affordable groceries, now that Pathmark is out of the picture. Once Pathmark closed, other nearby supermarkets raised their prices, prompting complaints from the neighborhood. Some residents say they now are forced to go as far as East Harlem to get
Trever Holland, one of the residents concerned about Extell’s new tower. Photo by Panyin Conduah
DE BLASIO IN ALBANY, WITHOUT THE HELP OF SPEAKER SILVER NEWS The mayor pushes rent control, public education to a wary Albany BY DAVID KLEPPER
Rent control. A higher minimum wage. The Dream Act. Greater investments in public education. Mayor Bill de Blasio headed to Albany with a sprawling agenda and no shortage of political challenges. De Blasio’s visit comes at an unusually turbulent time in the Capitol, one that could prove pivotal to
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the same quality of food at the same price. Victor Papa, president of the Two Bridges Neighborhood Council, created the NeighborFood grocery guide last year for residents to help them find smaller affordable stores around the area. But affordable food is only one of the concerns residents cite about changes in a neighborhood that has proudly embraced its status as an often-popular, if gritty,
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26-4 In Brief
OLD CLASHES WITH THE NEW IN TWO BRIDGES DEVELOPMENT
FEBRUARY - MARCH
the always fractious relationship between City Hall and the Capitol. Democrat Sheldon Silver - long the city’s key advocate, particularly for residents of the Lower East Side - is out as Assembly speaker, consumed by a corruption scandal. New Speaker Carl Heastie of the Bronx could be a formidable ally for de Blasio, but his leadership is untested. While they profess their friendship, the mayor and Gov. Andrew Cuomo often don’t see eye to eye. De Blasio’s relations with Senate Republican leaders are even frostier, with many in the GOP linking de
Blasio to an agenda that they see as too liberal, too expensive and too urban. The tension isn’t new. Albany has long been the arena for bruising sparring between mayors, lawmakers and governors contending for power, influence and budget allocations. The stakes this year may be especially big - not only for the city but for de Blasio, Cuomo and Heastie. The state laws governing the city’s rent stabilization rules are set to expire in June. The rules regulate the rents of 1 million apartments occupied by more than 2 million city residents. Lawmakers could vote to strengthen, weaken, or simply renew the rules _ which to progressives like de Blasio represent a key way of ensuring the city
City officials rolled out an unusually ambitious plan to tackle pedestrian traffic deaths in the city. The plan, outlined by Transportation Commissioner Polly Trottenberg and Police Commissioner William Bratton, targets dozens of areas and intersections that account for a disproportionate number of fatalities, and proposes street sign, enforcement and engineering solutions to make them safer. The hope is that by zeroing in on trouble spots -- similar to how the NYPD used data to focus its efforts on highcrime areas -- some progress can finally be made. That’s the good news. What’s depressing is that, in laying out its plan, the city is forced to chronicle the scale of a problem that is worse in Manhattan than in any other borough. Nationwide, for instance, pedestrians account for about 14 percent of all traffic fatalities. In Manhattan, the number is 58 percent, and as high as 73 percent in walking-centric areas like midtown. Even worse: while seniors account for only 14 percent of Manhattan’s population, they represent 41 percent of its pedestrian fatalities, an astonishing disparity. “Over the past 30 years, we have made tremendous progress in traffic safety,” Trottenberg and Bratton write in their introduction. “Motor vehicles, however, continue to seriously injure or kill a New Yorker about every two hours.”
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