WSZIO Column by Sandi Lusk
"On January 7, the Pastor of St Peter's Avenue came before Community Board 10's Land Use and Zoning Committee to tell them that St Peter's Church had leased adjacent land from Westchester Avenue to Butler Place to the Bluestone Group to develop into an 11-story affordable housing megabuilding. She assured the committee that the area to be developed was neither landmarked nor a graveyard, which the community had always believed.
Since then, we, with the help of concerned community activists and great help from the East Bronx History Forum (thank you all!) have discovered that: The lot (designated Lot 6, next to Lot 18, which is St Peter's itself) was indeed landmarked in 1976 (we have a copy of the designation), and appears as far back as 1868 and before on maps of the area as Friends Cemetery, the cemetery for the Orthodox Friends Church across the street, a very early Quaker cemetery, with at least 74 bodies, possibly including family slaves as well, interred there.
The property, which belonged to the Society of Friends and dates back to the early 1700s, was acquired by St Peter's Church in 1925 because there was some space for more burials, as St Peter's had run out of room, and also so that St Peter's could maintain the Friends burials already there. Yes, the large grassy "field" has no visible head stones. The Quakers, especially the earliest Quakers, did not believe in headstones, and such that were allowed would be barely visible. Yet for centuries the sacred nature of the area has been known and respected by the church and the community. Now, of all things, this very church seeks to desecrate these burials to raise money by leasing to Bluestone as an HPD building site. It may be that St Peter's needs money to maintain itself. It is unfortunate that such an historic church and congregation dating back to the mid-1600s is in poor financial straits. However, to get money by leasing land that contains historic burials, which is landmarked, of such historical importance, and that they were to "maintain" in exchange for their acquisition in 1925 is simply unconscionable.
WSZIO has reached out to the NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission for guidance on how to stop this sacrilege. We will keep you posted.
On another note: Community Board 10 joined Community Board 11 in voting down the zoning change for Blondell Avenue from M1 to R7A. In their presentation to the board, the developers and their lawyers stated that it would be a good thing for the entire street to be developed into huge apartment blocks. Oh, great for business. Thankfully, the Board did not agree and voted it down. There are more hearings coming up for Blondell Commons, and we will keep you posted on the WSZIO page on FaceBook.
Stay warm. TTFN.
The trouble with paternalists is that they want to make impossibly profound changes, and they choose impossibly superficial means for doing so."
"There is no logic that can be superimposed on the city; people make it, and it is to them, not buildings, that we must fit our plans."
- The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs
When Mayor De Blasio came in he seemed to understand certain major issues that the Bloomberg administration has created or made worse: the homeless issue, the education debacle, and the dire need for affordable housing. These issues are huge and very consequential for everyone who lives in our city. Unfortunately, as the Jane Jacobs quote above explains, often the easiest, most superficial response is all we get. As far as the homelessness issue the Mayor's response was more homeless shelters along the same lines of before: dangerous and inadequate shelters, more money funneled to landlords, and not much else. As for education, well not much was done about dealing with those major issues either. And now, to the affordable housing issue. Once again, only the superficial, albeit profitable to landlords, is being done.
For affordable housing, first let me make very clear that affordable housing is needed in this city, as the previous administration concentrated exclusively on building luxury housing. However, from a community perspective, are huge affordable housing units to be dropped like UFOs onto any location where a landlord wishes to make a profit? Where is the planning for these ready-made communities. Where is the context to make them welcome and sustainable? There already are several affordable housing units in the area, and they look like any other buildings and fit in with their surroundings and can easily access neighborhood amenities. That is not so in several projects proposed to be built in the near future.
Example one: Blondell Commons, a 9-story affordable housing complex with 220+units and parking for 220+ cars has been proposed for Blondell Avenue, a building that will span 4 blocks on this narrow 1-way already congested street. The project came before Community Boards 11 (on which side it is actually on), which voted it down, and 10 (CB10 public hearing is on January 17 at 7 at the Jean Jugan Residence, 2999 Schurz Avenue) in order to request approval for a zoning change from the current M1 (light manufacturing) to R7A, a residential rezoning that would open up the entire street to such development. We also attended a public hearing at the Borough President's office about this, during which many of the questions asked by the officials of the project's lawyer and architect were not answered satisfactorily concerning the cost of the project (including remediation) and the fact that the location is a brown field contamination site (it used to be an automotive junkyard) and a flood zone with a 5-8 foot water table. There are other reasons that this is not a good site: all school children will be bused to a school 1.5 miles away adding school busses twice a day, delivery trucks to their proposed stores on the ground floor, and 220+ cars going in and out of a parking garage all added to the current traffic and congestion on Blondell Avenue every day. Also the fumes from the auto repair shops across the street and the fact that it backs on to the Water Street 6 train repair shops and yards. The project representatives themselves said certain windows would be "inoperable" due to this. This site is not hospitable or suitable to a development like this, it does not fit the context of the street (it will literally tower over everything else for blocks around), there is no nearby school, and the traffic congestion will make it a nightmare for those ambulances and emergency vehicles that routinely use the street to get to the hospitals on Eastchester Road, not to mention the people who already live on Blondell. But for this one, it is the zoning issue we really are debating, a change that will almost guarantee developments like this lining the street within a few years no matter what contextual problems (and there are many) this will cause. We had to ask ourselves where is the planning for this? Example two: Proposed 11-story affordable housing unit at 2500 Westchester Ave, next to and adjacent to St Peter's churchyard and Foster Hall (leaving aside for the moment the issue of whether this is a Quaker burial ground as we have always been told [apparently they scanned and said they found nothing]). This will also have approximately 200+ units, and the artist's rendering makes it look like a hospital in its massive scale.
This got me thinking. Why is the city warehousing people in affordable housing? It reminds me of the 1960's urban "renewal" low income housing projects. Whole neighborhoods were wiped out to make way for vertical tower blocks of low income housing, and this did not work out as planned. It created isolated islands of poverty culture that bred crime and other issues (I know, I lived in a public housing project in Brooklyn before my marriage), and isolated the residents from the community at large. It was stigmatizing and made the problem worse, not better. It seems to me that this administration, in its haste to attempt to deal with the affordable housing crisis on such a superficial level is doing the same thing with these affordable housing "projects". Why can't affordable housing be integrated into the community? Why not put up a neon sign saying "affordable housing for people who can't afford market rates" (and given the rent quotes we received from the developers, just how much below market rate is debatable)? We know there is BIG money to be made in this housing market from HPD, etc, for landlords and developers (just as in the homeless shelter game), and I have no doubt that the bigger the project, the more money to be made. But please, can we think a little about PLANNING? Adding 600+people to an area is creating a whole new community in the middle of an existing one.
This approach has not worked in the past, and I ask: why can't affordable housing be created as part of the existing community and not apart from it?
TTFN.
"On January 7, the Pastor of St Peter's Avenue came before Community Board 10's Land Use and Zoning Committee to tell them that St Peter's Church had leased adjacent land from Westchester Avenue to Butler Place to the Bluestone Group to develop into an 11-story affordable housing megabuilding. She assured the committee that the area to be developed was neither landmarked nor a graveyard, which the community had always believed.
Since then, we, with the help of concerned community activists and great help from the East Bronx History Forum (thank you all!) have discovered that: The lot (designated Lot 6, next to Lot 18, which is St Peter's itself) was indeed landmarked in 1976 (we have a copy of the designation), and appears as far back as 1868 and before on maps of the area as Friends Cemetery, the cemetery for the Orthodox Friends Church across the street, a very early Quaker cemetery, with at least 74 bodies, possibly including family slaves as well, interred there.
The property, which belonged to the Society of Friends and dates back to the early 1700s, was acquired by St Peter's Church in 1925 because there was some space for more burials, as St Peter's had run out of room, and also so that St Peter's could maintain the Friends burials already there. Yes, the large grassy "field" has no visible head stones. The Quakers, especially the earliest Quakers, did not believe in headstones, and such that were allowed would be barely visible. Yet for centuries the sacred nature of the area has been known and respected by the church and the community. Now, of all things, this very church seeks to desecrate these burials to raise money by leasing to Bluestone as an HPD building site. It may be that St Peter's needs money to maintain itself. It is unfortunate that such an historic church and congregation dating back to the mid-1600s is in poor financial straits. However, to get money by leasing land that contains historic burials, which is landmarked, of such historical importance, and that they were to "maintain" in exchange for their acquisition in 1925 is simply unconscionable.
WSZIO has reached out to the NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission for guidance on how to stop this sacrilege. We will keep you posted.
On another note: Community Board 10 joined Community Board 11 in voting down the zoning change for Blondell Avenue from M1 to R7A. In their presentation to the board, the developers and their lawyers stated that it would be a good thing for the entire street to be developed into huge apartment blocks. Oh, great for business. Thankfully, the Board did not agree and voted it down. There are more hearings coming up for Blondell Commons, and we will keep you posted on the WSZIO page on FaceBook.
Stay warm. TTFN.
The trouble with paternalists is that they want to make impossibly profound changes, and they choose impossibly superficial means for doing so."
"There is no logic that can be superimposed on the city; people make it, and it is to them, not buildings, that we must fit our plans."
- The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs
When Mayor De Blasio came in he seemed to understand certain major issues that the Bloomberg administration has created or made worse: the homeless issue, the education debacle, and the dire need for affordable housing. These issues are huge and very consequential for everyone who lives in our city. Unfortunately, as the Jane Jacobs quote above explains, often the easiest, most superficial response is all we get. As far as the homelessness issue the Mayor's response was more homeless shelters along the same lines of before: dangerous and inadequate shelters, more money funneled to landlords, and not much else. As for education, well not much was done about dealing with those major issues either. And now, to the affordable housing issue. Once again, only the superficial, albeit profitable to landlords, is being done.
For affordable housing, first let me make very clear that affordable housing is needed in this city, as the previous administration concentrated exclusively on building luxury housing. However, from a community perspective, are huge affordable housing units to be dropped like UFOs onto any location where a landlord wishes to make a profit? Where is the planning for these ready-made communities. Where is the context to make them welcome and sustainable? There already are several affordable housing units in the area, and they look like any other buildings and fit in with their surroundings and can easily access neighborhood amenities. That is not so in several projects proposed to be built in the near future.
Example one: Blondell Commons, a 9-story affordable housing complex with 220+units and parking for 220+ cars has been proposed for Blondell Avenue, a building that will span 4 blocks on this narrow 1-way already congested street. The project came before Community Boards 11 (on which side it is actually on), which voted it down, and 10 (CB10 public hearing is on January 17 at 7 at the Jean Jugan Residence, 2999 Schurz Avenue) in order to request approval for a zoning change from the current M1 (light manufacturing) to R7A, a residential rezoning that would open up the entire street to such development. We also attended a public hearing at the Borough President's office about this, during which many of the questions asked by the officials of the project's lawyer and architect were not answered satisfactorily concerning the cost of the project (including remediation) and the fact that the location is a brown field contamination site (it used to be an automotive junkyard) and a flood zone with a 5-8 foot water table. There are other reasons that this is not a good site: all school children will be bused to a school 1.5 miles away adding school busses twice a day, delivery trucks to their proposed stores on the ground floor, and 220+ cars going in and out of a parking garage all added to the current traffic and congestion on Blondell Avenue every day. Also the fumes from the auto repair shops across the street and the fact that it backs on to the Water Street 6 train repair shops and yards. The project representatives themselves said certain windows would be "inoperable" due to this. This site is not hospitable or suitable to a development like this, it does not fit the context of the street (it will literally tower over everything else for blocks around), there is no nearby school, and the traffic congestion will make it a nightmare for those ambulances and emergency vehicles that routinely use the street to get to the hospitals on Eastchester Road, not to mention the people who already live on Blondell. But for this one, it is the zoning issue we really are debating, a change that will almost guarantee developments like this lining the street within a few years no matter what contextual problems (and there are many) this will cause. We had to ask ourselves where is the planning for this? Example two: Proposed 11-story affordable housing unit at 2500 Westchester Ave, next to and adjacent to St Peter's churchyard and Foster Hall (leaving aside for the moment the issue of whether this is a Quaker burial ground as we have always been told [apparently they scanned and said they found nothing]). This will also have approximately 200+ units, and the artist's rendering makes it look like a hospital in its massive scale.
This got me thinking. Why is the city warehousing people in affordable housing? It reminds me of the 1960's urban "renewal" low income housing projects. Whole neighborhoods were wiped out to make way for vertical tower blocks of low income housing, and this did not work out as planned. It created isolated islands of poverty culture that bred crime and other issues (I know, I lived in a public housing project in Brooklyn before my marriage), and isolated the residents from the community at large. It was stigmatizing and made the problem worse, not better. It seems to me that this administration, in its haste to attempt to deal with the affordable housing crisis on such a superficial level is doing the same thing with these affordable housing "projects". Why can't affordable housing be integrated into the community? Why not put up a neon sign saying "affordable housing for people who can't afford market rates" (and given the rent quotes we received from the developers, just how much below market rate is debatable)? We know there is BIG money to be made in this housing market from HPD, etc, for landlords and developers (just as in the homeless shelter game), and I have no doubt that the bigger the project, the more money to be made. But please, can we think a little about PLANNING? Adding 600+people to an area is creating a whole new community in the middle of an existing one.
This approach has not worked in the past, and I ask: why can't affordable housing be created as part of the existing community and not apart from it?
TTFN.
