City Limits articles from September 2002

City Limits archives from September 2002

Under the influence. (Editorial).(Brief Article)
September 1, 2002... THERE'S NOT A LOT that can persuade more than 4,000 people to forego the diversions and obligations of a summer Saturday But there they were at the Javits Center on July 20, willingly knee-deep in the geeky minutiae of urban planning, attending...

Letters.(Brief Article)
September 1, 2002... DON'T TREAD ON MY ROAD Thank you for your feature about the work of some extraordinary individuals who are engaged--as I am--in the struggle for justice and opportunity for immigrant New Yorkers ["Truth, Justice and the American Way," May...

Correction.(Brief Article)
September 1, 2002... We neglected to credit Sune Woods for her photography, which accompanied "Dubious Benefits" [July/August 2002].

How will our gardens grow? (Frontlines).(Brief Article)
September 1, 2002... A DELEGATION FROM PARIS' parks department recently visited the Big Apple to study how New York does community gardens. "Right now there are very few collective gardens in Paris," says Antoine Cassard of Paris-Nature, which coordinates...

The whistleblower's dilemma: city claims wider protections put workers at risk. (Frontlines).(Brief Article)
September 1, 2002... WHEN CHRIS ROBERTS got a face full of herbicide while on the job as an assistant gardener in a West Harlem playground, his managers at the New York City Parks Department laughed. When he dropped our of the herbicide applicator training program...

Trust a bust for New York. (Housing).(Brief Article)
September 1, 2002... THE NATIONAL AFFORDABLE housing movement took a step forward in July, when a Congressional committee voted to double the funding that state and local housing trust funds currently spend to create affordable housing. But as things stand now, New...

Fountain of youth. (Urbanlegend).(Brief Article)
September 1, 2002... NAIROBI SHELLOW IS A MASTER of disguise. The 23-year-old Flatbush native certainly does not look like he's been an organizer for nearly a decade. His tall, slender frame is draped with the trappings of youth: a trendy sleeveless shirt, baggy...

Home wiring. (Technology).(Brief Article)
September 1, 2002... "ARRIBA LAS MUIERES," Yolanda Torres cheers--"Women arise"--as she and four other women haul huge Dell computer boxes up onto their shoulders and up the stoop into their apartments on West 140th Street. Torres and many of her neighbors are...

Chinatown's bus wars. (Business).(Brief Article)
September 1, 2002... THE WHITE BUS PARKED by the Citibank on Canal Street has been sitting there since Memorial Day weekend, when Dejian Chen tried to use it to run over a driver from a rival bus company. In the early morning of May 26, Chen sat behind the...

Educating the schools. (Education).(Brief Article)
September 1, 2002... WITH A NEW WEB SITE scheduled to launch this fall, the organization Advocates for Children hopes to help parents of children in public schools teach the Board of Education some urgent lessons. The site, www.insideschoolsnyc.org, will...

A cold welcome. (Firsthand).(Brief Article)
September 1, 2002... COMING TO NEW YORK FROM GUYANA was a dream that came through in January 2000. My wife and daughter came with me. We arrived at JFK airport around 10 p.m. It was snowing and I had on a T-shirt and jeans and was braving the cold standing...

No picnic in the park. (Frontlines).(Brief Article)
September 1, 2002... Forget your salon dinners--how about a picnic? About 150 city parks workers on welfare hauled their thermoses and paper plates to the doorstep of Mayor Bloomberg's Upper East Side townhouse in late June to extend him this invitation. Their...

Neverending stories. (Housing).(racial discrimination in housing)(Brief Article)
September 1, 2002... IN THE LATEST CHAPTER of a 26-year legal saga challenging racial discrimination in south Williamsburg housing projects, the city Housing Authority and Hispanic and Hasidic advocacy organizations recently reached a settlement that will toughen...

Pregnant pause: facing abysmal test scores and worse attendance, should five mom-and-baby schools shape up or shut down? (Inside Track).(Brief Article)
September 1, 2002... JASMIN LOPEZ IS A POPULAR, feisty redhead, half-Cuban, half Puerto Rican. She likes her jeans extra snug, wears her hair up in a tight rabbit-tail bun and doesn't care if she is late to class. At her old high school, Park West in Manhattan, she...

These dems want to run New York. We want to know more: what Andrew Cuomo's HUD history tells the city.(Brief Article)
September 1, 2002... For a man with the political ambitions of Andrew Cuomo, his four years as HUD secretary (after four more as assistant in charge of community planning and development) might have seemed like an ideal opportunity. TV appearances, ribbon cuttings,...

These dems want to run New York. We want to know more; Dov Tale: how Carl McCall helped bail out a political ally.(Brief Article)
September 1, 2002... After Representative Jesse Jackson Jr. announced his support of gubernatorial candidate Andrew Cuomo in early May, Cuomo's opponent, State Comptroller H. Carl McCall, called on his good friend, Assemblymember Dov Hikind, to denounce the...

Political consciousness: this fall, Liz Krueger faces a bitter battle to hold on to her east side state senate seat. Her seven months as an idealist in the depths of albany force the question: why would anyone want her job?(Brief Article)
September 1, 2002... ALBANY--At 9:30 a.m. on a Tuesday, the Alcoholism and Drug Abuse committee of the New York State Senate is wasting no time in attending to public business. On the agenda this May morning are nominations for new members of the Advisory Council...

Sold out: what happens to the neighborhood when street vendors disappear?(Brief Article)
September 1, 2002... Haggling on his cell phone with Citibank over exorbitant fees, straddling a pile of bills, and helping customers all at the same time, David Ramnauth holds court outside his parents' hardware store. He constantly nods hello, and gets patted on...

Squatters' rites; loisaida's last outlaws are about to make their most revolutionary move yet: legal occupation.(Brief Article)
September 1, 2002... This is the story of a housing war, and an unexpected victory for some of the city's most maligned activists. On one side were the Lower East Side's squatters, ordinary people who illegally occupied some of the city's most decrepit...

Tax the street: Hong Kong does it. So does London. Why don't we? (Intelligence the Big Idea).(Brief Article)
September 1, 2002... HIGH FINANCE DOESN'T have the prestige it had a year ago. As the city prepares to invest billions in rebuilding Wall Street, new financial scandals joust for front-page space with New York's looming budget gap. New Yorkers might be excused for...

Citizens Housing and Planning Council. (New Reports).(latest on brownfield development)(Brief Article)
September 1, 2002... With land for new housing rapidly dwindling, nonprofit developers and others are warily eyeing the city's roughly 5,000 brownfields--formerly industrial or commercial sites, many along waterfronts, with moderate contamination--as virtually the...

Community Reinvestment Act. (New Reports).(Brief Article)
September 1, 2002... While the Community Reinvestment Act has certainly succeeded in promoting lending and investment in poor neighborhoods, its provisions cover fewer than 30 percent of all home purchase loans. That's because the primary activity that the law...

Graduated from Foster Care in California. (New Reports).(foster care children and employment)(Brief Article)
September 1, 2002... To label this study as depressing is an understatement. Of the thousands of 18-year-olds who "graduated" from foster care in California, Illinois and South Carolina in the mid-1990s, only 45 percent of the youth ever worked at any time during...

Out of Africa. (Intelligence City Lit).
September 1, 2002... Money Has No Smell: The Africanization of New York City By Paul Stoller The University of Chicago Press, $18,232 pages FROM 1992 TO 1999, I worked as a book vendor on Sixth Avenue at 8th Street in Greenwich Village. It was there...

Capitol Offenders: How Private Interests Govern Our States. (Now Read This).
September 1, 2002... By Diane Renzulli and The Center far Public Integrity Public Integrity Books, $14 Creating this must have been hell. CPI, a good government group, brought its Beltway-sharpened investigative skills to state capitols, compiling campaign...

Making Work Pay: America After Welfare. (Now Read This).
September 1, 2002... Edited by Robert Kuttner The New Press, $18.95 The 18 American Prospect stories here take two seemingly contradictory approaches: While chastising local governments for heedlessly pushing welfare recipients into the unforgiving...

Grounds For Play: The Movement that Built Playgrounds for the People of New York. (Now Read This).
September 1, 2002... By Justin Krebs New Yorkers for Parks, Donation requested Playgrounds don't just happen, this brief but engaging history argues; they exist because of the hard work of activists who have prioritized safe recreational spaces for youth....

Poverty 3.0: could free software and computers wire a grassroots revolution? (Intelligence Making Change).
September 1, 2002... THE IDEA SEEMED so simple, yet so powerful. First, rake a bunch of old, decrepit computers nobody else wanted. Install bare bones software--an operating system, a word processing program, email and an Internet browser. Finally, distribute the...

Doing our marketing. (Intelligence NYC Inc.).
September 1, 2002... ONCE UPON A TIME, back during the dot-com labor shortage, I heard the chief operating officer of a major Internet company address a Crain's breakfast--a regular event at which readers of the weekly business publication and others socialize, and...