The local paper for the Upper East Side
WEEK OF DECEMBER - JANUARY BLACK DESIGNERS GET THEIR DUE < P. 12
29-4 2017
Marcie Chase, who served time at the former Bayview Correctional Facility, worked at the recent Annie Leibovitz portrait exhibition held there and shared stories related to the images. Pointing to a photo of Elizabeth Warren, Chase said the U.S. senator from Massachusetts could have been the first woman president of the United States. Photo: Diamond Naga Siu
FROM PRISON TO EMPOWERMENT IN CHELSEA The former Bayview Correctional Facility is being transformed into an activist Women’s Building BY DIAMOND NAGA SIU
Marcie Chase believes in transformation. She is a transgender woman and a former inmate of Bayview Correctional Facility in Chelsea. Chase has now dedicated her life to social change for women. One part of her advocacy is helping to transform the onetime prison on West 20th Street and 11th Avenue into a Women’s Building, a structure symbolic of women’s potential and accomplishments. “It was really a dark place for women to be — the amount of sexual abuse that was happening with the correctional officers and the women,” Chase said. “I was there in the 80s, and it was really horrible.” Transforming the Bayview Correctional Facility,
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Conservatory Water, Central Park’s boat pond, in November. Photo: Carl Mikoy, via flickr
FIGHTING CLIMATE CHANGE ONE TREE AT A TIME “No other American metropolis matched the scale of New York City’s efforts,” says author Jill Jonnes BY MADELEINE THOMPSON
Jill Jonnes wants New Yorkers to know they may be planting trees incorrectly. Jonnes’ recent book, “Urban Forests: A Natural History of Trees and People in the American Cityscape” (Viking), presents a comprehensive study of city trees that spares
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few details, except that the way they are planted on streets is doing more harm than good. “That’s the one thing I didn’t get in [the book],” Jonnes said. “A very common thing that you see in New York is that people think they’re doing a huge favor to their beloved street tree by building a box and filling it with dirt, when actually they’re slowly suffocating their tree.” Instead of piling dirt around the flared bottom of a tree, she suggests that arborists leave
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more of the tree above ground so it can breathe. “Urban Forests,” which came out in September, is the product of eight years of off-and-on research Jonnes conducted out a desire to lend her writing skills to a topic she cares greatly about: climate change. “Most people live in cities, and I thought ‘what could you do if you’re living in the city and you’re just an ordinary mortal?’” she said. “It seemed to me that the thing people could do
is to plant trees or care more for trees, or even just be aware of
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Jewish women and girls light up the world by lighting the Shabbat candles every Friday evening 18 minutes before sunset. Friday, December 30 – 4:20 pm. For more information visit www.chabaduppereastside.com
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