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Downtown Express photo by Milo Hess
Rocking Rocky Park
Chuck Brown and his Soul Searchers had the Rockefeller Park crowd grooving and moving last week.
BY JULIE SHAPIRO
The agreement to extendrent-stabilization at GatewayPlaza has hit a series of roadblocks, which couldleave the building withouta deal when the previousrent-stabilization agreementexpires next week.In April, AssemblySpeaker Sheldon Silverannounced a handshakeagreement betweenthe Battery Park CityAuthority and The LeFrakOrganization, which ownsthe building, to extend rentprotections for current ten-ants until 2020. Tenantshailed the deal as a victory,but more than two monthslater, the lawyers are stillwrangling over the details.“There are a lot of littlesticking points, and we areslowly addressing them oneby one,” Jim Cavanaugh,president of the authority,said Monday. “It’s startingto remind me of Whac-A-Mole — every time youthink you’ve nailed it down,another one pops up.”Cavanaugh still expectsto have a final agreementsigned by the June 30 dead-line, but if July arrives with-out an official deal, LeFrakwill legally be allowed toincrease rents to marketrate.Cavanaugh said hedid not think it likely thatLeFrak would raise rents onthe complex’s 1,705 units if a deal is not signed by nextweek.“It would be extremely
BY LINCOLN ANDERSON
“Not happy” at all thatan appointee of his on theHudson River Park Trust ledthe state-city authority’s sur-prise move to seek a longerlease for Pier 40, BoroughPresident Scott Stringerresponded strongly duringthe past week — both withwords and action.“That’s on my watch. I’mnot happy about it,” Stringersaid, addressing CommunityBoard 2’s full-board meetinglast week. “That’s on mywatch — It will not happenagain. It was unacceptable.”On Tuesday, Stringerwent even further, takingdisciplinary action, strippingthe appointee, former StateSenator Franz Leichter,of his voting privileges onthe Trust’s board of direc-tors. The borough presidentappoints three of the board’s13 members, and the gov-ernor and mayor appointthe rest. Under the Hudson
Gateway rent talkslike ‘Whac-A-Mole,’authority says Stringer takes poweraway from Leichter
BY JULIE SHAPIRO
The Statue of Liberty is in BradHill’s blood.His grandfather opened the firstprivate concession on Liberty Islandfor tourists in 1931. His father wasborn on the island. And Hill has spentmore days in the shadow of the Statueof Liberty than he can count, especiallysince he joined his family’s concessionsbusiness full-time 28 years ago.But no matter how many times Hill,53, has stood at the base of the Statueof Liberty looking up at the sea-greenarm stretching skyward, the sight nevergets old.“I’m not jaded at all,” Hill said as hewalked the island’s breezy perimeter ona recent afternoon. “It’s still a specialplace to me.”Hill’s concession business, calledEvelyn Hill, Inc. after his grandmother,has come a long way in the 78 yearssince it started as an outdoor tablecovered in small statue replicas andletter openers.Today, the 3.25 million people whovisit the statue annually shop at EvelynHill’s indoor gift shop, stacked floor toceiling with memorabilia, and eat inEvelyn Hill’s cafe, which serves T.G.I.Fridays-style food. Hill has put a greenspin on his family business’s opera-tions, diverting over 75 percent of the
Keeping Lady Libertyin the family business
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VOLUME 22, NUMBER 7 THE NEWSPAPER OF LOWER MANHATTAN
JUNE 26 - JULY 2, 2009
BLURRING THE LINE BETWEENFANTASY AND REALITY, P. 24
June 26 - July 2, 2009
2
downtown express
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NEWS
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .1-15 Transit Sam . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 Mixed Use . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
EDITORIAL PAGES
. . . . . . . . . . . .16-17
YOUTH
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ARTS
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23-27 Listings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .25-27
CLASSIFIEDS
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .26-27
C.B. 1
M
EETINGS
The upcoming week’s schedule of Community Board1 committee meetings is below. Unless otherwise noted,all committee meetings are held at the board office,located at 49-51 Chambers St., room 709 at 6 p.m.
ON TUES., JUNE 30:
Community Board 1 will holdits monthly meeting at 6 p.m. at Southbridge Towers at90 Beekman Street, in the Community Room.
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After Mayor
Michael Bloomberg
made a private cam-paign stop in Chinatown last Friday, the mayor’s staff andthe residents he met with had very different accounts of what happened.
Justin Yu
, president of the Chinese ConsolidatedBenevolent Association, said Bloomberg made a ground-breaking promise to help the community reopen ParkRow, closed to traffic after 9/11 because it runs beneathOne Police Plaza.Bloomberg told Chinatown leaders that the decisionto reopen Park Row is not his alone, and Bloombergsuggested that residents lobby the federal government,which also has a say, Yu said.“His hand is pretty limited,” Yu said. But if Yu andothers contact federal agencies about reopening thestreet, “He will in some way back us up,” Yu said.Chinatown residents who have been fighting foryears to reopen the street were surprised to hear of Bloomberg’s commitment — and, as it turned out, so wasBloomberg’s staff.“That’s not at all what he said about Park Row,” said
Marc La Vorgna
, spokesperson for the mayor. “The city’sposition is that it is a security concern due to the locationof the Police Dept. We don’t have a change of position. We’re not advocating for the reopening of Park Row.”Yu did not back off his account, but he clammed upafter we called the mayor’s office, referring all questionsback to Bloomberg’s press office.The dinner took place at a small restaurant on BayardSt. called the New Yeah Shanghai Deluxe Restaurant. Yusaid Bloomberg also chatted with the other patrons, andthe cooks rushed out of the kitchen to catch a glimpse.“The mayor said the food tasted very well,” Yu said,“and next time he would bring his girlfriend, just to eat.”
K
EEPING
SCORE
Margaret Chin
was the first City Council candidate toproduce a statement based on our report last week that thecity wanted to build school seats in 26 Broadway (though shemanaged not to credit us, even while she referred to quotesfrom our article).But another Council candidate,
Arthur Gregory
, mayhave been the first person to think up the idea of usingthe former Sports Museum of America space for a school.Gregory, a member of Assembly Speaker
Sheldon Silver
’sschool overcrowding taskforce, first mentioned the idea tous a couple of months ago, and he told Silver’s office aboutthe space as well.“I’m not taking any credit,” Gregory told UnderCover thisweek. “They (Silver’s office) did the work.”Gregory said he got the idea as soon as he heard inFebruary that the Sports Museum was closing.“I’d been in the space, and I said perfect — all the infra-structure was there already,” Gregory said. “It made sense.”The Dept. of Education still hasn’t signed a lease on thespace, which will provide an additional 1,000 seats to LowerManhattan, but spokesperson Will Havemann assured us lastweek that a deal is near.Though the D.O.E. is looking to carve up the SportsMuseum space,
Philip Schwalb
, the museum’s founder,hasn’t given up on reopening. Schwalb said the city was onlylooking to lease one of the museum’s floors, a 45,000-square-foot raw space that Schwalb used to host private events. The45,000-square-foot exhibit space and 10,000-square-footground-floor space would remain intact, and could still beused as a museum, Schwalb said.Schwalb has an uphill battle to convince a new operatorto take over the museum, since it went bankrupt earlier thisyear. But although the artifacts have been returned to ath-letes and other museums, all of the museum’s technology andinfrastructure is still in place, which could make it attractiveto a buyer, Schwalb said.Schwalb guessed that The Chetrit Group, which owns thebuilding, could be looking to reopen the museum, becauseChetrit bought the gift shop memorabilia in a bankruptcyauction. Schwalb is also contacting the big names who ini-tially supported the venture, like
Donald Trump
.
S
HOWDOWN
WITH
D
ODGE
Councilmember
Rosie Mendez
does not have a strongprimary challenger, but she is nevertheless starting to gear upfor the race, or at least we think she is since we got a “test”email from her Wednesday with a “reelectrosie” handle (we’lltry to save her from a little spam by not giving a free plug toher internet service provider).Mendez faces 18-year-old high school student
DodgeLandesman
in the Democratic primary. A few weeksago she joked to us that she was looking into whetherLandesman is permitted to simultaneously hold office inYork Preparatory Academy’s student government and sit inthe City Council.
D
EPARTURE
At the end of this week,
Mike Murphy
is leaving his job at the Lower Manhattan Development Corp. to joinComptroller
Bill Thompson
’s campaign for mayor. Murphyhas worked as spokesperson for the L.M.D.C. for a year anda half, and he said it was time for something new.“He’s a great guy,” Murphy said of Thompson. “He’s whatthe city needs right now.”The L.M.D.C. has not picked a replacement, but
JohnDe Libero
, an L.M.D.C. project manager, will take overMurphy’s role for now.
S
UPERSTAR
Congratulations are in order for
Elan Halpern
, 10, theDowntown Little Leaguer who was profiled in our coverarticle last week: The star pitcher was just picked up for theleague’s summer tournament team. We also hear that lastweek’s story made quite an impression on Elan’s coaches —her mother tells us that eight of them asked her to autographa copy of the paper.
downtown express
June 26 - July 2, 2009
3
Duetsche investigation finds many more to blame
BY JULIE SHAPIRO
The Fire Dept. disciplined seven officers Wednesday fortheir failures before the fatal 2007 fire at the former DeutscheBank building.The F.D.N.Y. permanently removed two officers from theircommands and reprimanded five others after the city Dept.of Investigation issued a report last week chronicling thoseofficers’ mistakes.“This is a case of missed opportunities,” the D.O.I. said inthe report. “Everyone had tunnel vision.”The report describes the disregard firefighters and officershad for inspections, and the report also reveals new informationabout missteps at the city Buildings Dept., where an inspector’splea for emergency testing went unanswered.Firefighters were supposed to inspect the Deutsche Bankbuilding every 15 days as it was being demolished, but theynever did. Inspections could have revealed the dangerous con-ditions in the building that led to the deaths of two firefightersAug. 18, 2007 during the blaze.“Inspections are a critically important function of theDepartment and the failure of company officers to performthem — and the failure by supervisors to ensure they are beingcompleted — is a serious breach of their responsibilities,”Fire Commissioner Nicholas Scoppetta said in a statement,announcing the censure of seven of his officers.Scoppetta reassigned three officers shortly after the fire, andone of them has since retired. On Wednesday, the other twoofficers — Deputy Chief Richard Fuerch and Capt. Peter Bosco— were permanently relieved of their commands. Feurch, adivision commander, told investigators he was aware of the rulethat required inspections but he never enforced it. Bosco, thecommanding officer of Engine 10, next to the Deutsche Bankbuilding, ignored several warnings about the building.Scoppetta also disciplined three other deputy chiefs and twobattalion chiefs.At the time of the fire, workers were simultaneously cleaningand demolishing the Deutsche Bank building, which was con-taminated on 9/11. When firefighters entered the skyscraper,they met with a maze of containment barriers that blocked off stairways, and they found no water to fight the blaze, becauseof a 42-foot gap in the standpipe, which supplies the buildingwith water.These hazards contributed to the deaths of the firefighters— Joseph Graffagnino Jr., 33, and Robert Beddia, 53 — butneither D.O.B. nor F.D.N.Y. picked up on the problems inadvance.“That’s ridiculous,” Joseph Graffagnino Sr. said of the city’sfailures. “Part of you getting that job in the first place, you haveto be trained.”Had the Buildings and Fire inspectors examined the buildingas they were supposed to, they would have noticed “the contrac-tors’ cavalier disregard for public safety,” D.O.I. CommissionerRose Gill Hearn said in a statement. “As long as developerstolerate and employ irresponsible contractors, we must rely onour inspectors to keep us from harm.”The Manhattan district attorney already issued indictmentslate last year to subcontractor John Galt Corp., along withtwo construction supervisors with Galt and one with contrac-tor Bovis Lend Lease, but the D.A. decided not to charge thecity. The D.A. is separately investigating the Lower ManhattanDevelopment Corp., which owns the building, for approvingthe hiring of Galt, a company with no experience and reputedmob ties.Graffagnino Sr. said the new D.O.I. report does not getto the heart of these issues, because it focuses on the city anddoes not even mention the L.M.D.C. Graffagnino has filed acivil lawsuit against all the involved parties, including the city,L.M.D.C., Galt and Bovis. While there is plenty of blame to go around, the newD.O.I. report highlights the lack of city communication andoversight, using words like “remarkably” and “astoundingly”to describe the city’s many mistakes. The D.A. mentionedsome of those failures in his indictments, but this is the firsttime the city’s role has been so thoroughly scrutinized. TheD.O.I. reviewed thousands of pages of documents and inter-viewed nearly 80 people.In addition to the F.D.N.Y. officers who were disciplinedthis week, at least one D.O.B. employee is facing disciplinarycharges as a result of the inquiry. He has since retired. While the D.O.I. report details many missed opportunities,one that had never been reported and arguably one of the mostsignificant came on June 25, 2007, when D.O.B. inspectorAaron Williamson sounded an alarm on unsafe conditions atthe building. Williamson was part of the Buildings Dept.’s LowerManhattan Taskforce, a group of inspectors that staffed theDeutsche Bank building full-time in 2007 under the supervisionof Robert Iulo.On June 25, 2007, just under two months before the fire, Williamson noticed a gap in the standpipe on the 28th floor of the building. A piece of wood was propped between the discon-nected sections of pipe. Williamson reported the standpipe breach, a safety hazard,to Iulo. Iulo should have immediately issued a stop-work orderto Bovis, but instead he instructed Williamson to give Bovis twohours to fix the standpipe, according to the report. The D.O.I.noted that it was common practice for the Buildings inspectorsto give Bovis time to correct violations before issuing them,which goes against the city’s rules in hazardous situations.On June 25, Bovis fixed the pipe, but Williamsonremained concerned and suggested to Iulo twice that Bovisdo a full test of the entire standpipe system. Unbeknownstto Williamson and Iulo, that test would likely have revealedthe 42-foot gap in the standpipe in the basement, whichcontributed to the fire’s deadliness two months later. Thestandpipe test never happened, Williamson told investiga-tors. Williamson also said Iulo instructed him not to includethe standpipe incident in his daily report. Williamson com-plied, but he wrote up the incident in a separate report thathe kept to himself.Iulo told investigators he had no memory of the June25 incident.Investigators also unveiled other new charges against Iulo,faulting him for not setting clear inspection guidelines for theDeutsche Bank building and for not assigning qualified inspec-tors to the job. None of the inspectors had any experience ondemolition jobs, and at least one inspector could not recognizea standpipe and did not know how it worked, the report said.The D.O.B. served Iulo with disciplinary charges on Feb. 17,2009 and he retired three days later. The charges are pending.The D.O.I. report also censured the Fire Dept., from thelowest level on up. In particular, the D.O.I. revealed detailedcriticisms of Capt. Bosco, the Engine 10 officer who was per-manently relieved of his command on Wednesday.Before Bosco took over Engine 10 at the end of 2006, hispredecessors were inspecting the Deutsche Bank building onaverage once every other month, and they left a file behindrecommending weekly surveillance of the building. Bosco toldinvestigators he never looked at that file.Bosco thought firefighters were never supposed to go intothe Deutsche Bank building, because it was contaminated, andhe took no steps to learn about the building, the report said.That remained true even after Bosco received a memo shortlybefore the fire from Battalion Chief Robert Norcross, whichreminded Bosco to take extra precautions with the DeutscheBank building. The memo concluded with a bolded statement:“THE ONLY SAFE ASSUMPTION IS TO ASSUME THE WORST.”Norcross was reprimanded Wednesday for poor supervi-sion.After receiving the memo, Bosco told investigators, “Iread it and then, I mean, we were all aware the building wastoxic and that’s it. I don’t know if I told the lieutenants. Imust have left it on the desk.” The D.O.I. report continues,“Less than two weeks before the fire, Capt. Bosco missed anopportunity to discuss the site, and perhaps inspections, withthe men he supervised.”The problems continued up the chain of command. As theD.A. previously reported, no one at F.D.N.Y. enforced whatwas known as the 15-day rule, which required the Fire Dept.to inspect buildings under construction or demolition every 15days. Many officers told city investigators they had never heard of the 15-day rule, even though it is in the “Fire Prevention Manual”that firefighters study for promotion exams, the report said.Even after a pipe fell off the Deutsche Bank building in May2007 and crashed through the roof of the Engine 10/Ladder10 firehouse, injuring two firefighters slightly, no one fromF.D.N.Y. took a closer look at the Deutsche Bank building.Manhattan Borough Commander Michael Weinlein visited thefirehouse twice after the accident, but “he focused only on howthe accident happened, how to avoid a similar occurrence inthe future, and what needed to be done to fix and protect thefirehouse,” the report states. “Unfortunately, he did not use thisopportunity to ask whether the building was being inspected.”Commissioner Scoppetta visited the 10/10 firehouse afterthe accident as well, and he also did not raise concerns aboutthe Deutsche Bank building, but the D.O.I. report does notmention that. Instead, the report focuses on Scoppetta’s actionsafter the fire.The city has made many changes since the fire to improveoversight and cooperation, but the D.O.I. report recom-mends that the agencies go further. The Fire Dept. shouldallot even more time for inspections, and if firefighters arecalled away from inspections for an emergency, they shouldmake up the time later, the report states. Also, the D.O.I.recommended that the Buildings Dept. improve its trainingof supervisors and create a uniform site-safety log that con-tractors fill out daily and Buildings inspectors examine.Both Scoppetta and D.O.B. Commissioner RobertLiMandri said last week in statements that they wouldreview the report’s advice.
Julie@DowntownExpress.com
Downtown Express file photo by Lorenzo Ciniglio
The damaged former Deutsche Bank building.
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Downtown Express June 26, 2009
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