City Limits articles from April 2003

City Limits archives from April 2003

War games. (Editorial).(protests against the war in the big apple)(Editorial)
April 1, 2003... BY THE TIME YOU READ THIS, the massive antiwar protests of February 15 may already be replaying themselves, with thousands of demonstrators taking to the streets of New York to show-again--their objections to the war in Iraq. And perhaps, newly...

Letters.
April 1, 2003... SCABS! Wendy Davis' puff piece on the Bronx Defenders, "Keeping Close Counsel" [January 2003], buries the most salient fact about the emergence of Giuliani's replacement attorneys for striking Legal Aiders. Near the end Davis finally...

Clarification.
April 1, 2003... In our January 2003 review of Michael Gecan's book Going Public, we should have noted that the organization Gecan works for, the Industrial Areas Foundation, and the group reviewer Margaret Groarke is active in, the Northwest Bronx Community...

Neighborhood defense. (Frontlines).
April 1, 2003... KARIM LOPEZ SEES the Bush administration's call for war as a double threat: An invasion of Iraq, he says, would also be an attack on his Washington Heights neighborhood. "[Military] recruitment is aimed at poor communities of color around...

Brownfield blues: city fines threaten to shipwreck a new Bronx boathouse. (Frontlines).
April 1, 2003... LAFAYETTE AVENUE ROLLS down off of the heights of Hunts Point, ending abruptly at the shores of the Bronx River. On a recent morning, the cloudy waters lapped at sunken tires and a submerged radiator. Once home to a fur-dyeing factory, these...

Home base. (Urban Legend).
April 1, 2003... SEVEN YEARS AGO, Damaris Reyes thought of nothing but making enough money at her cozy telecommunications job to get out of the public housing project she'd lived in her whole life. She wanted to achieve the American dream of "striking it...

Fast trash: local groups have a year to prove reducing garbage pays. (Frontlines).
April 1, 2003... JUST OFF OF HUNTS POINT Avenue in the Bronx, in a warehouse the size of a football field, Morgan Powell and Tom Morgan pore over bins full of old motherboards, cracked monitors and defunct graphic scanners. "That's sure an antique," Morgan...

Off the map. (Uptown).(neighborhoods want to be a part of the city)
April 1, 2003... RESIDENTS OF WASHINGTON HEIGHTS and Inwood are accustomed to tourists and other fellow New Yorkers thinking that "uptown" means the stretch between 96th and 125th streets, as if anything further north is part of upstate New York. After...

Bush's taxing idea. (Housing).(George Bush, and his tax plan for dividends)
April 1, 2003... "I ASK YOU TO END the unfair double taxation of dividends," President Bush said to congressional applause during his State of the Union address in January. Under the president's proposal, the Internal Revenue Service would allow corporations to...

Off the waterfront: a thriving seaport may get downsized--and take New York's shipping industry with it. (Inside Track).
April 1, 2003... "THIS IS MY WATERFRONT! You mess with it, I break your legs!" This is the public statement of a cheerful black-and-white dog, wearing sunglasses and clamping an unlit cigarette in his mouth. The man moving the dog's jaw and speaking on his...

Shelter games: they take millions in government housing dollars. Transfer loads to their private ventures; House the homeless? For the executives at Praxis, that's the mission--not the bottom line.
April 1, 2003... They were down in Texas on business, walking through historic San Antonio, when the call about King Tone came on the priest's cellular phone. Tone, born to the world Antonio Fernandez, was then leader--or "Supreme Inca"--of the Almighty Latin...

Green and lean: a Harlem developer makes high-performance housing affordable.(Interview)
April 1, 2003... Behind a cluttered desk in his central Harlem office, Carlton Brown is rapping his knuckles against a piece of material that has characteristics similar to those of high-end oak flooring, but it's even harder and smoother, and only about...

Material world: a West Coast recycler hauls New York into the housing deconstruction movement.
April 1, 2003... When Nicole Tai was growing up in San Francisco, she tried repeatedly and to no avail to convince her grandfather's construction company to go green. By the time Tai had earned her master's degree in community development at University of...

Energizing money.(New York Energy Smart program)
April 1, 2003... For low-income tenants and co-op owners, affordable housing can quickly become unaffordable when the utility bills come in. In the five years following Governor George Pataki's push to deregulate the state's electricity industry in 1996, power...

Housing next: Mayor Bloomberg has big plans for how we'll live tomorrow. He's counting on the real estate market to make it happen. Could this be the end of affordable housing as we know it?
April 1, 2003... 1. New Waterfront Vistas: How's the View? Put on a pair of old shoes and go find derelict waterfront land. It won't be too tough--there are plenty of rotting piers and abandoned junkyards to choose from. Checkout the East River in...

Up in arms: why today's antiwar activists should be willing to fight for the military instead of against it. (Intelligence the Big Idea).(recruitment of minority youth)
April 1, 2003... IT WAS A LANDMARK moment in the history of American liberal politics: As the White House frothed up public support for war, one of black America's most radical activists dared to challenge the president's call for national unity, issuing an...

Striking differences: what really happened at Ocean Hill-Brownsville? (Intelligence City Lit).(The Strike That Changed New York: Blacks, Whites and The Ocean Hill-Brownsville Crisis)(Gathering Power: The Future of Progressive Politics in America)(A Community of Many Worlds: Arab Americans in New York City)(Black-Brown Relations and Stereotypes)(Book Review)
April 1, 2003... The Strike That Changed New York: Blacks, Whites and The Ocean Hill-Brownsville Crisis By Jerald E. Podair Yale University Press, 276 pages, $35 WHEN STATE LEGISLATORS handed New York's mayor full control of the city's 1,100...

A house of our own: drag balls spark a movement to create safe spaces for queer youth of color. (Intelligence Making Change).
April 1, 2003... I REMEMBER SITTING on the Christopher Street piers one Friday evening in 1999, the last summer they were open. A Latino youth--about 15 years old, his straight black hair cut into a bob and tucked just under his ears--darted through the West...

Learning from labor: both providers and pols should study unions' job-training successes. (Intelligence NYC Inc.).
April 1, 2003... FOR YEARS CRITICS have sniped that the only employment job-training providers guarantee is their own. But in New York, at least one group of providers has been offering high-quality training and successfully moving workers up career ladders for...