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SEAWRIGHT’S FIRST ORDER OF BUSINESS
45 Years and Counting
FEBRUARY - MARCH
26-4 2015
OurTownEastSide @OurTownNYC
In Brief GOOD NEWS, AND BAD, ON TRAFFIC SAFETY
NEWS New East Side assemblywoman introduces bill to stop the M.T.S. BY DANIEL FITZSIMMONS
Rebecca Seawright, the newly elected assemblywoman representing the Upper East Side, introduced her first piece of legislation at her inauguration ceremony on Sunday: a bill designed to stop the marine transfer station at East 91st Street. The legislation would require the immediate suspension of construction on the MTS if 2,500 New York City residents sign a petition saying they have serious health and safety concerns about the project. Construction could only resume after at least two public hearings and a supplemental environmental review. “It’s specifically drafted for the 91st Street MTS, but it can easily be amended to include other waste transfer stations in the city,” said Rebecca Graham, counsel to Seawright. Seawright, the first woman to represent the 76th District in the Assembly, said the bill delivers on her campaign promise to fight the MTS through legislation if elected. “It’s really personal to me to now see the potential of this going forward,” Seawright said of the MTS. “It’s just unconscionable that this could go through and I really felt strongly that this should be my first piece of legislation.” Several East Side politicians have sought in the last few years to highlight the health and safety issues inherent in building an access ramp through Asphalt
Illustration by John Winkleman
BOOKS FOR GENERATIONS Argosy Book Store has been selling rare and old books for the past 90 years BY PANYIN CONDUAH
Every week for the rest of the year, Our Town will celebrate its 45th anniversary by profiling a neighborhood business that has been around longer than we have. Know of a local business that should be on our list? Email us at news@strausnews.com. Tucked between commercial chain stores and big apartment buildings on East 59th Street lies an old and rare bookstore, an outlier in a city once known as “book
country.” Argosy’s Book Store began as the vision of Louis Cohan, who started by buying cheap books while in his 20s, eventually acquiring enough to open his own store. For 90 years, the bookstore has collected and sold various old and rare books, maps and prints. The family business has continued through three generations, and it’s now handled by Cohan’s daughters and nephew. While the few existing independent book stores try to appeal to customers through selling both new and used books, Argosy’s likes to keep itself vintage. “It’s another world,” said Naomi
Hample, one of the Cohan sisters, of the traditional bookselling industry. “It’s another business working with publishers and discounting books and so on which is not interesting. There’s not much romance in that.” Hample remembers as a child being drawn to the family business when she performed small tasks for her father and marveled over stories of quirky customers. She’s spent the past 60 years observing the awe in new customers’ faces when they first visit the store. People from all over the world browse
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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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