Good morning. Today is Friday. We’ll see why an alliance from across the city is challenging the street journeys. We will also be looking at a program that makes the arts accessible and are settling into a new home in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn.
The coronavirus pandemic has pushed restaurants and their customers out, onto sidewalks and onto the streets. Should they stay there?
This is not a new question. But a coalition of opponents is trying a different approach, accusing Mayor Eric Adams of overreacting in keeping outdoor dining open.
The coalition – Cue-Up, a coalition of community groups whose full name is the United Coalition for Equal Urban Policy – argues that the city’s open restaurant program is the only initiative of its time. pandemic is still being carried out by executive order from City Hall.
Michael Sussman, an attorney for Cue-Up, said the original order was issued in mid-2020 when Bill de Blasio was mayor. It expires after a few days. De Blasio issued one extension after another until the end of his term at the end of last year. Adams, de Blasio’s successor, followed suit.
But Sussman said there is “no longer a public health emergency,” because the city dropped other pandemic provisions mentioned in the original and renewed order, including vaccine requirements. , mask rules, and Covid tracing and testing program. Each renewal currently only serves outdoor dining warehouses, he said.
On Monday, Adams described himself as “a big advocate of outdoor dining”. “Anything I can do to help our restaurant industry employ dishwashers, waiters, bus boys and girls – this is an important industry and it’s a sign of our city,” he said at a news conference. “And so the lawsuit will play out on its own.” He did not mention the issue of executive power; A City Hall spokesman did not respond to that element of the lawsuit on Thursday.
City allows restaurants and bars to move out as an emergency measure to help a devastated industry that employed 340,000 people before the pandemic broke out and restaurants closed , many people as well. The restaurant industry currently employs about 290,000 people, said Andrew Rigie, chief executive officer afterward New York City Hotel AllianceA trade group has pressed to make the outdoor facilities permanent.
Adams acknowledged at Monday’s briefing that “some outdoor dining venues have become hazardous” and “inappropriate”. He said the outdoor canteen structures “cannot be used for storage” or other purposes. “And I think there is a way to modify, to standardize, what the structure should look like,” he said.
Cue-Up’s lawsuit, filed in the State Supreme Court in Manhattan, is the group’s second attempt to block the city’s attempt to build permanent food warehouses. The first ended with an order from Judge Frank Nervo of the State Supreme Court in Manhattan ordering the city to conduct a thorough environmental assessment, which Cue-Up had requested. The city appealed his order.
Filing the second lawsuit is more than 30 affidavits from residents in every county but Staten Island, who say street vendors have compromised the quality of life in their neighborhoods.
“Where I used to be able to smell the trees while walking the dog, now it smells like feces and urine,” says Angela Bilotti, who has lived in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn since 1994.
She also complained that walking the streets made the neighborhood noisy. “A restaurant owner told a neighbor she was in business, so just closed their windows,” says Bilotti.
“That neighbor moved somewhere else” because of the noise, she said.
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New home for community-based arts activities
Ris Wilson started looking for a laundromat, but not for the love of laundry. She had an idea about making art accessible to neighbors in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn.
“I found this laundrette in this incredibly democratic de facto democratic community,” she said Our writer Hilarie M. Sheets.
She founded her nonprofit in 2005 called Project Laundromat to support art projects in underserved areas, “not just for delight and fun, but also for a political tool,” she said. “Art has always been part of the Negro liberation movements.”
But the subsidy she received was not enough to buy a laundromat, so the LP, as the organization is known, turned to decentralized mode, supporting artists in communities of color across the globe. five boroughs of the city. Projects are held at local cultural venues, in parks and squares and on the streets, as well as in laundromats.
Wilson transferred the leadership of the LP to Kemi Ilesanmi in 2012, and since then, LP has directly invested in more than 80 public art projects and over 200 multidisciplinary artists. And, after working from temporary offices on the Lower East Side and later Harlem and the South Bronx, LP is back in Bedford-Stuyvesant, a ten-year lease for a store on Fulton Street. It will inaugurate its first public space with an open house on Saturday.
There is an artist’s celestial landscape based on Bed-Stuy Destiny Belgrave, the first artist selected through LP’s open call for a new annual commission. There is also space for exhibitions and public gatherings, as well as a communal administrative office for about a dozen employees decorated with limited edition prints by artists including Nina Chanel Abney, Derrick Adams, Xaviera Simmons and Mickalene Thomas.
Last year, LP received a surprise gift, $2 million from a benefactor MacKenzie Scott – as much as the LP’s annual operating budget. Ilesanmi and LP deputy director, Ayesha Williams, decided to immediately donate $200,000, making $10,000 prize to five former partner organizations around the city and give $500 each to current and former LP artists and staff and employees.
Ilesanmi and Williams have established an investment policy for the remaining money with financial institutions such as Brooklyn Cooperative, a credit union serving local black-owned small businesses and homeowners. Based on Census figures for 2020Bed-Stuy has lost more than 22,000 Black residents in the last decade and gained 30,000 more white residents.
“One of the things that happens with evolution is that POCs are displaced along with the people,” says Ilesanmi. “So being part of a community, having a 10 year horizon on this space, and an intergenerational wealth-building gift to the organization just helps you to rise in a different way.”
METROPOLITAN . Diary
Rebuttal question
Dear Diary:
I just moved to New York from Texas, and I love going to the grocery stores in the city’s small neighborhood. They were so different from the big suburban ones I was used to.
I went to Grace’s Market on the Upper East Side one day and overheard a customer questioning the man behind the counter.
“Do you have fresh escargot?” customer said.
“No,” said the bartender. “But we have snails in a can!”
– Kate Marcus
