The local paper for the Upper er East Side
OURTOWNNY.COM
BACK ON THE STREETS, THIS TIME BY CHOICE
MARCH
12-18 2015
15 MINUTES, P.36 >
OurTownEastSide @OurTownNYC
HONORING THE BEST OF THE EAST SIDE
In Brief SENTENCE IN DEATH OF A 4-YEAR-OLD PEDESTRIAN
OTTY AWARDS Firefighters on the front lines of the Ebola crisis among the awardees
2015 OTTYS Our Town Thanks You
AWARDS FDNY Engine Company 44 and EMS Station 10
Chris Adams
Ellen Appleby
Caroline Baumann
Rob Byrnes
John Jay Park on E. 76th Street, among the Upper East Side parks mentioned in a city report on playground injuries. Neil Calman
Dimitres Pantelidis
Gregory Fryer
Daniel Ribaudo
Claudia Gould
Nancy Taylor
Julian Niccolini
John Tweddle
Arlene Virga
The groundskeeper at Carl Shurz Park. A principal in East Harlem. The director of the Jewish Museum. For more than a decade, Our Town has honored the people who make the Upper East Side work, through its annual OTTY Awards. This year’s crop of honorees is broader, and more impressive, than ever, ranging from cultural and business institutions to unsung heroes like the EMS and FDNY crews from the East Side who transported, at great personal risk, Ebola patient Dr. Craig Spencer to the hospital. We are proud to celebrate this year’s winners. Read their stories in this week’s special section, and join us in saluting an extraordinary group of neighbors. Our Town thanks them, and thanks you for reading. The Editors
SHARP JUMP IN PLAYGROUND INJURY CLAIMS NEWS Upper East Side playgrounds included in report from comptroller Playgrounds on the Upper East Side aren’t all fun and games. A new report from Comptroller Scott Stringer shows that playgroundrelated personal injury claims have risen sharply
over the past decade, including on the Upper East Side, even though the number of kids in the city over the same period has dropped. Stringer’s report tracks 577 claims against the city for playground injuries -- about one a week over the past decade. Annual claims have rosen 53% over the last 10 fiscal years -- from a low of 45 in 2005 to a high of 69 in 2014.
Most of those claims were settled, at a cost to the city of about $20.6 million. Causes for injuries to kids include defective or broken surfaces, including several claims where children burned their feet on matting in summer months; improper playground design; insufficient maintenance of equipment, including swings and slides; and protruding nails or other debris. In his report, Stringer urges the Parks Department to use the data to to fix problem areas. As an example, the report states that in 2013, at least five children suffered broken legs while playing on the same swing at Slope Park in Brooklyn. That swing apparently had been installed too close to the ground, and was ultimately removed
by the city. But if the data was more closely tracked, some of the injuries could have been prevented. “By analyzing claims in real time, we can identify potential weaknesses in our city’s playgrounds and fix problems before children are injured and taxpayers are held liable,” he wrote. On the Upper East Side, a number of local playgrounds have resulted in injury claims against the city, including Carl Shurz Park and John Jay Park. Stringer’s report sees little progress from the Parks Department. He notes that in the first four months of the current fiscal year, the percentage of play equipment rated as “acceptable” fell from 93% to 91% in the same period a year ago, and the percentage of safety surfaces also
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Three to nine years. That’s the prison sentence Franklin Reyes Jr. received in a plea bargain deal last week after fatally running down 4-year-old Ariel Russo with his car in June 2013 while she crossed the street holding her grandmother’s hand. While the sentence will be seen as progress by some traffic-safety advocates, who have grown frustrated by how few pedestrian deaths end up getting prosecuted at all, the fact that Reyes was able to strike a plea deal is remarkable. This, after all, is a driver who was driving without a license. Who dragged a cop 100 feet feet while fleeing a traffic stop – a year after Russo had been killed. Who was trying to avoid the police because he was out on bail after being accused of looting a dead woman’s Chelsea apartment in a building where his dad was the super. (A trial for that charge is slated for later this month.) Perhaps not surprising, Ariel’s parents said they felt little in the way of closure after the hearing. “Three to nine years is absolutely not enough for what he did,” her mother, Sofia Russo, told the Daily News. “His reckless actions killed my daughter, maimed my mother and has shattered our lives. We’re never going to be the same again. There has been no remorse, no apologies.” Three to nine years -- a moment in time in the long war against pedestrian deaths in New York.
Jewish women and girls light up the world by lighting the Shabbat candle every Friday evening 18 minutes before sunset. Friday March 13 – 6:42 pm. For more information visit www.chabaduppereastside.com.