The local paper for the Upper East Side BATTLING FOR THE SOUL OF SAKS <P.16
WEEK OF AUGUST
10-16 2017
Number of deaths
1400
19.9
20.0
1200 1000
13.6
800 600
10.9
11.6
15.0
11.7
9.4
10.0
8.2
400 5.0 200
541
630
730
788
800
937
1374
0
Age-adjusted rate per 100,000
Unintentional overdose deaths, New York City, 2000-2016
The original Waldorf Astoria Hotel, site of today’s Empire State Building, dominates this 1903 photo. Two blocks to the south (center left, with sign on top) stands the 1902 Kaskel & Kaskel Building, at 316 Fifth Avenue. Its fate is now the subject of a pitched battle. Photo: New York Public Library collection
0 2010
2011
2012
Number of deaths
2013
2014
2015
2016
Age-adjusted rate per 100,000
*Data for 2015 and 2016 are provisional and are subject to change.
Graphic: Caitlin Ryther Sources: NYC Office of the Chief Medical Examiner and NYC DOHMH Bureau of Vital Statistics, 2010-2016
COMBATING NEW YORK’S OPIOID CRISIS PUBLIC HEALTH City hopes data-driven approach will reduce overdose deaths BY MICHAEL GAROFALO
There were 1,374 drug overdose deaths in New York City last year, over 80 percent of which involved an opioid. And NYPD officials said during City Council testimony earlier this year that preliminary data for the first quarter of 2017 showed opioid-related deaths outpacing last year’s record-high rate.
Fatalities stemming from the use of heroin, fentanyl and prescription pain medications have skyrocketed in recent years, a trend that has proven stubbornly persistent. Since 2010, the city has seen a 143 percent increase in the rate of overdose deaths. In Manhattan, 244 residents died of overdoses in 2016, up 50 percent over the previous year — the largest increase of any borough. “It started with the over-prescription of opioid pills,” said Chauncey Parker, executive assistant district attorney for the Manhattan District
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Attorney’s Office. “That then expanded into a heroin market where dealers started to provide high purity heroin cheaper than pills so that people addicted to opiates switched over to heroin and the user base expanded. The latest trend is that they’re cutting it with fentanyl.” Fentanyl, a synthetic opioid 50 to 100 times more powerful than morphine, is chief among the drivers of the spike in overdose deaths in the last two years, experts say. Fentanyl
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RACING THE WRECKING BALL ARCHITECTURE Preservationists campaign to save a once-proud Fifth Avenue charmer – as a developer tries to reduce it to rubble BY DOUGLAS FEIDEN
Preservation or hyper-luxe development? Continuity with a century-old streetscape or an in-your-face, skyline-defining tower? The quirkiness of old Manhattan or modernity’s embrace of the shiny, glitzy and sleek? While those stark choices reflect nothing less than the future of the city itself, they are now playing out in a pitched battle over the fate of the celebrated Kaskel & Kaskel Building at 316 Fifth Avenue at 32nd Street. At issue is a developer’s proposal
to knock down the six-story, whitemarble, Beaux-Arts treasure, which was built in 1902 for Kaskel, one of the city’s premier custom shirtmakers serving the carriage trade. A 40-story, 535-foot sliver tower – housing just 27 high-end condos – would rise in place of the small-scale, showroom-and-headquarters space where President Theodore Roosevelt once bought his shirts.
CONTINUED ON PAGE 5 Jewish women and girls light up the world by lighting the Shabbat candles every Friday evening 18 minutes before sunset. Friday, August 11 – 7:41 pm. For more information visit www.chabaduppereastside.com.
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