Second Avenue Met Foods Threatened by NYU Rent Increases

Posted by Duncan Meisel at 3:14 PM, April 9, 2008

East Village residents are circulating a petition to ask NYU to keep the Met Foods grocery store in its current home on 2nd Avenue.

Word of the store’s potential closure has been making the online real estate blog-rounds — it began with Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York, then made the rounds at the Curbed network . Community Board 3 has the issue on it’s April 15th agenda, and judging by the tone of recent NYU-Community meetings, tensions will be running high. NYU and other large institutions have been the target of community outcry for a variety of projects that will transform the skyline and street life of the East and West Village.

Residents are worried the grocery store's displacement would remove a low-cost food source in a neighborhood sandwiched between the Union Square Whole Foods/Trader Joe’s twosome, and Whole Foods on the Bowery. According to a spokesperson from the school, NYU has made an offer to relocate Met Foods as well as replace the current tenants with another grocer. Rising rents seem more threatening considered along with rising food prices, and NYU’s history in the nabe. Met foods is only a few blocks away from the under construction 12th street dorm, which remains a sore spot for preservationists and community members alike. This isn’t the first time NYU has run into foodie problems– the Morton Williams supermarket at Bleeker and LaGuardia has been on the chopping block for years as a prime site for new university building, becoming the target of preservationists seeking to label the site a landmark and slow new building in the West Village.

Just one more sign of the times in a rapidly changing city.

Lawsuit: Columbia Expansion Poses 'Biohazard' Risk

Posted by Duncan Meisel at 4:28 PM, March 27, 2008

The largest landowner threatened by Columbia’s Manhattanville expansion has filed a suit against the school and city, alleging that the environmental review process for the expansion was insufficient. The process may have even ignored the risk for potential biohazard threats to the West Harlem community, the plaintiff's lawyer said.

“I think it’s selfish for Columbia, it shows a level of uncaring for the people of West Harlem” said Nick Sprayregen, the owner of Tuck-It-Away Storage, the lead petitioner in the suit, which was filed Wednesday afternoon.

At issue is the construction of a massive underground "bathtub" structure that would extend about seven stories below ground throughout the development, a planned expansion that would include a research facility that the university calls a "biosafety" center, while the plaintiff calls it a "biohazard" center . According to the plaintiffs, the placement of such a structure on a geological fault in a flood zone poses a risk to the surrounding community. But according to Columbia, the research facilities will be built above grade and pose no risk.

“The rim of the bathtub is barely above the Hudson river, we believe it poses a risk of catastrophic failure” said Norman Siegel, Sprayregen’s lawyer. He cited global warming and its connected risks as an issue of serious concern.

“There exists a likelihood of a storm surge that would come over the bulkhead and flood the bathtub” and “hazardous materials from these facilities could be washed out into the West Harlem community” he said.

The suit challenges whether the City Planning Commission took the required “hard look” at environmental hazards for the site. The suit claims that the planning commission "provided that the engineering issues raised during the environmental review process would be resolved at some later unspecified date.”

However, “Neither the engineering consultants… nor Columbia University consultants outline in any detail what those solutions are, what the impact of carrying out those approaches might be” the suit claims in a quote from Jordi Reyes-Montblanc, the chairman of Community Board 9.

Columbia declined to comment on the pending litigation, but said in a statement: “We are confident that the extended public land use and environmental review processes were rigorous and comprehensive. They underscored that thriving universities are essential for New York City to remain a leader in attracting the talent that pursues new knowledge and creating the good, middle-income jobs for people who seek to improve their lives here.”

A Columbia spokeswoman clarified the nature of the research facility, taking issue with the plaintiff's use of "biohazard. " “There are no plans to put biosafety facilities below grade,” said the spokeswoman La-Verna J. Fountain.

Sprayregen’s concerns extend beyond the bathtub to the facility itself.

“It just boggles the mind why Columbia, supposedly an altruistic institution, would but a biohazard research center in Manhattan” he said. “I question the wisdom of placing, particularly after 9/11, a biohazard facility that sticks out like a sore thumb for any potential terrorists” in the city center.

“These are bio-safety rooms” Fountain said. “These are not whole buildings, just rooms.”

No matter the result of this current suit, litigation about the Columbia expansion seems bound to continue. The suit filed yesterday is the fifth which Siegel has been involved in, and he sees the potential for at least one other suit. “If eminent domain is used, transferring private property to a private university, we will litigate that issue” he said.

The activist group Coalition to Preserve Community announced a protest for Monday at Columbia. Continued community resistance to the Manhattanville plans has been a driving force for the ongoing legal battle between landowners and the school, and both Sprayregen and Siegel cited community activists as a key factor in their decision to file suit.

“You need the community behind you on this” Siegel said. “Property owners have standing, but the community members were the heart and soul of this lawsuit.”

More from around the web:

[Mom and Pop NYC]

[NY Sun]

[Columbia Spectator]

[Crain's New York Business]

Hunter Students Turn Away FBI-Sponsored Corporate Meetup

Posted by Duncan Meisel at 1:26 PM, February 26, 2008

The New York Post ran a little fast and loose with a story last week on the cancellation of a meeting of an FBI-affiliated business group at the Hunter College School of Social Work, and we here at Runnin’ Scared thought it would be nice to fill in the backstory.

According to the Post, the New York Metro chapter of InfraGard, a public-private venture of the FBI partnering with infrastructure businesses, canceled their meeting because of fears of public controversy resulting from planned student protests.

Scrutiny of InfraGard has heated up after the publication of an article in The Progressive claiming that members of the group had secret authorization to ‘shoot to kill’ threats “when—not if—martial law is declared.” Since then, Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! has covered the group, and the FBI has been forced to issue an official public response to the magazine’s claims. The story also got coverage in a few blogs, both left and right.

The Hunter School of Social Work students organized against InfraGard after hearing about their upcoming meeting through Democracy Now!, and thought that hosting an FBI-affiliated group violated the basic principles of an education in social work.

“We felt that InfraGard was expanding government and corporate surveillance on individuals, and that was a violation of our civil liberties, and the FBI has a history of undermining social justice, which is a part of our history at the school of social work” said Lauren Mariotti, an organizer with the students objecting to the event. Despite the Post’s claims that the students were motivated by the Progressive’s (admittedly sensational) story, Mariotti said that they were driven by the FBI’s “long history of undermining social justice movements.”

InfraGard and Hunter gave conflicting stories about the reasons for the event’s cancellation, but the students seem pleased with what looks like a win for the organizers.

“Everything’s not so clear right now, all that we know is that we came together to prevent them from coming specifically to the School of Social Work. We’re happy that our democratic efforts were successful” Mariotti said.

Six Students Go On Hunger Strike at Columbia

Posted by Michael Clancy at 5:05 PM, November 7, 2007

Six Columbia University undergrads went on hunger strike Wednesday to protest the university's expansion into Manhattanville, the lack of a resources for ethnic studies, and the administration's response to recent hate crimes on campus.

The student won't reveal their names but have launched a blog to publicize their cause and explain why they've taken such strong measures.

Part of their manifesto states:

We strike because we have inherited a world in which racist, gendered, and sexualized hierarchies dominate the way power flows. We strike because the administration consistently resists implementing structural changes that will allow us to challenge these hierarchies. We strike because the university does not recognize that the lack of space for the critical study of race through Ethnic Studies, the lack of administrative support for minority students and their concerns, the lack of engagement with the community in West Harlem, and the lack of true reform of the Core Curriculum are harmful to the intellectual life of its students. We strike because we want the administration to understand that these needs are as fundamental to students’ intellectual lives as food is to the human body.

University health officials will be checking on the hunger strikers each day, according to the Columbia Spectator. The strikers told the Spectator that they see the recent hate crimes as not isolated incidents but the byproduct of a "pervasive climate of racism and insensitivity on campus."

The Spectator reports:

The announcement follows a string of bias incidents that have occurred on campus this semester, including the hanging of a noose on the door of a black Teacher’s College professor, the spray-painting of a swastika on a Jewish TC professor’s door, and the discovery of anti-Semitic, racist, and Islamophobic graffiti in Columbia restrooms.

“I think that the fact that all of these things happened so quickly in succession is kind of shocking to the student body at large and so it’s impossible to ignore,” Desiree Carver-Thomas, CC ’09 and a member of the coalition’s negotiation team, said. “It’s kind of forced the student body to take a long hard look at the way the University allows these things to happen.

'Superbug' Hits NYU

Posted by Michael Clancy at 11:09 AM, November 5, 2007

An NYU student has been diagnosed with the kind of "superbug" staph infection that felled a Brooklyn middle-schooler last month but NYU health officials say freshman has made a full recovery and poses no threats to fellow students.

NYU officials say they thoroughly cleaned the student's dorm, Third North Residence Hall, on Third Avenue and 10th Street, and the methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, also known as MRSA, has not spread, the Washington Square News reported Monday.

Last month, Omar Rivera, a 12-year-old from Brooklyn, died after contracting MRSA. A Centers For Disease Control report issued last month said that more than 90,000 Americans contract the infection each year. A Westchester elementary school student, three students in Long Island and 10 members of an Iona College athletic team have also been recently diagnosed with the infection, Newsday reports. But the CDC report said that fatalities from the infection are not likely if the patient is otherwise healthy. The CDC published answers to frequently asked questions here.

Another Teacher Busted for Sleeping with Students

Posted by Michael Clancy at 1:07 PM, October 30, 2007

Another day, another teacher gets caught sleeping with a student.

This time around, according to authorities, Mario Quinones, a 58-year-old teacher at Robert F. Wagner Jr. Secondary School for Arts and Technology (“RWSSAT”) in Long Island City, slept with students, both male and female, and current and former.

Quinones cannot be prosecuted for his actions but Special Commissioner of Investigation Richard J. Condon, who conducted the probe, recommended that the social studies teacher be terminated.

From Condon's report:

The investigation substantiated that Quinones engaged in sexual intercourse and other sexual activities with a female RWSSAT student which continued after the girl had graduated from the school. In addition, Quinones engaged in sexual acts with a male former RWSSAT student after the boy had graduated from the school. We also found that Quinones, the girl and the boy engaged in sexual acts together.

These sexual encounters, which occurred at Quinones’s Manhattan apartment, began when the girl was 17-years-old and continued for several years after the girl had graduated from RWSSAT.

Quinones admitted to engaging in sexual acts with the girl and also to participating in sexual activity with the girl and the boy together.

The Special Commissioner has recommended that Quinones’s employment be terminated and that he be made ineligible for work in the New York City school system. Although Quinones cannot be prosecuted for the aforementioned actions, the matter has been forwarded to the Queens County District Attorney’s Office and the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office for their information.

Cops Investigate Second Columbia Bias Incident

Posted by Michael Clancy at 7:15 PM, October 11, 2007