The local paper for the Upper er East Side SINATRA AT 100
WEEK OF OCTOBER
CITYARTS, P.12 >
15-21 2015
WALKOUT DURING HOLMES HOUSING MEETING NYCHA’s plan to generate revenue for budget deficit causes backlash on Upper East Side BY DANIEL FITZSIMMONS
LIFE IN RETIREMENT, AGAIN AND AGAIN GRAYING NEW YORK A series looking at growing older in the city
FIRST OF SIX PARTS STORY AND PHOTOS BY HEATHER CLAYTON COLANGELO/DIRECTED BY DORIAN BLOCK
It is the first week of 2015 and 84-year-old Hank Blum is officially retired. He’s said that before. His wife of 41 years, Patti, has thrown him three retire-
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ment parties, one for each of the times he packed away his phoropter, bid his colleagues goodbye and closed the door to his optometry practice, presumably for the last time. “I didn’t have the nerve to say we were having another retirement party,” says Patti. Hank is OK skipping the fuss, and a touch superstitious anyway.
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“I said, don’t make one this time. Maybe it will stick.” Hank has worked for six decades as an optometrist in New York City. For most of those years, he commuted by 5 or 6 train from his Upper East Side apartment to his office in the Bronx. His business, Henry Blum Optometrist and Associates on Southern Boulevard, served
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tens of thousands of people and was one source of stability in a neighborhood where properties sat vacant for years. He was president and on the board of directors for citywide optometric societies. He lobbied in Albany to grant optometrists, previously a
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Over 100 angry public housing residents on the Upper East Side walked out of a meeting with NYCHA officials in protest of a new plan to address the agency’s massive operating deficit by selling or leasing to private developers public land on which will be built a mixture of affordable and market rate housing. The program, called NextGen NYCHA, is being billed by the agency as a 10-year strategic plan to address a chronic operating deficit and $17 billion in unmet capital needs. At Holmes, that means partnering with a private developer to build 350400 apartments on playground space between the two towers, 175-200 of which will be affordable. The remainder of the apartments will be offered at market rate. After the announcement last month - which shocked public housing residents and elected officials, who said they had no advance warning or input on the plan – NYCHA released a statement to Our Town that said the
CONTINUED ON PAGE 18 Jewish women and girls light up the world by lighting the Shabbat candles every Friday evening 18 minutes before sunset. Friday, October 9 – 6:07 PM For more information visit www.chabaduppereastside.com
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