And If You Think This Is Bad, Imagine What It’s Like North Of 14th Street

“Virulent racism” hits Tribeca:

I am still shaking. I, perhaps naively, thought the blatant racism, which I know exists elsewhere, had ceased to flourish in the enclave where I live. Tribeca has become a haven to those of us who formed it in our wild, youthful artist days and to those who cherish what we created and now have the bucks to buy in. Either way I believed we were a community of Blue State beliefs. I am wrong.

I went to my local bike store, a place I have frequented for over a decade. I needed a little spring tune up and since the sun was shining and the bench outside was empty, I took my 1968 Raleigh in for a new gearshift. I left the “Greenie” and settled into the spring sun.

A gray haired employee, a man who never really chatted with me, came out to do some work on the rental bikes. I was seated next to one of the old time guys and we were talking about kids, divorce, you know the conversation that connects us in middle age.

Let’s call the guy working on the rental bikes Mike, because he reminds me of too many of the angry, bigoted Irish uncles I grew up with. Mike began a tirade about seeing “a Chinese delivery boy” who was “seriously doored by a car the other night. If it was going to be anyone, I am glad it was some Chinese delivery boy and not me. He had no helmet and not even a basket for his bags, I mean what did he think.”

I waited not wanting to release my quick draw temper, but when Mike’s rant continued, “Now my taxes are gonna pay to fix this guy up, can you believe it.”

It gets worse:

I just wanted to retrieve my bike and get out of there. It was a sensation akin to the desire to flee a burning building. So when Jeremy, the manager, came out to announce the steed was ready to roll, I ran in to pay.

When I entered the store there was a youngish African-American man looking at bikes and inquiring as to the price. Under his breath, as he rolled another rental bike out the door, Mike muttered, “Why ask, he won’t buy anything anyway.”

I exploded.

“You are a terrible racist,” I said. “It is awful to speak about Chinese people, black people, anyone the way I just heard you rant in the last ten minutes.”

“What me? I didn’t say anything,” Mike countered sheepishly.

I firmly believe he is unaware of the hatred that spewed from his mouth and spirit. I continued, “In 2006, after everything this city and country have been through, it is unacceptable to espouse this kind of racism. And if you have those thoughts, you should, at the very least, learn to keep them to yourself. This is an outrage.”

I began to cry. I was burbling over with anger, hurt and disbelief that there are still people out there, working on my bike, or wandering my streets who are thinking like that. They are conspiring under their breath with hatred toward my family, my friends, the tapestry of diversity that makes me downright adore this city.

. . .

I am still shaking and perhaps that is a good thing. We all need to have our cores rattled until virulent racism is eradicated.

Sounds Like A Deal!

The City Council overwhelmingly approved a new Yankees Stadium yesterday:

The new stadium for the Yankees would represent the culmination of a long quest by the team, which had pushed for a new home in Manhattan but ultimately decided to remain in the Bronx as the borough’s fortunes improved.

Under the financing plan for the stadium, the Yankees will pay for the construction through $930 million in bonds issued by the city, of which $860 million will be tax-exempt. Taxpayers will also bear some of the costs because the team will pay back the bonds through payments in lieu of taxes to the city.

In their current home, the Yankees pay rent to the city but only after deducting the cost of maintenance. The team pays no capital expenses. While the Yankees will not pay rent for the new stadium, the team will be responsible for the maintenance and operation costs and any capital improvements. The state’s share would be $70 million of the $320 million cost of building four parking garages that could be used by local residents throughout the year; the remainder would come from private developers.

Under the deal, the city would spend at least $138 million to demolish the old stadium, create new parkland to replace the 22 acres being used for the stadium in Macomb’s Dam and Mullaly Parks, and to make improvements to other nearby parks.

. . .

[Yankees president Randy] Levine said construction on the new Yankee stadium could begin as soon as this spring. When completed it will seat slightly fewer people than the current one, but will offer 42 more luxury sky boxes, which are lucrative for teams, and 3,000 more parking spaces. In another change, the new stadium will have standing room for another 1,000 people.

The Perverted Chess Match And Its $600,000 Stake

Until recently zoning laws in Staten Island allowed for two 15-foot-wide two-story houses to be built on one lot, leading some to wonder what to do with that giant pleather sectional:

Horrified Staten Island residents are living next to two homes under construction that are just 15 feet wide, but twice as tall as most houses in the neighborhood.

The two-story structures — jammed onto one lot — are strikingly out of place on a suburban Jefferson Ave. block in Grant City dotted with low-rise homes, neighbors gripe.

It’s also the latest example of what critics call the overdevelopment of the boroughs.

“Most of the houses here are ranches. Then you have these huge monstrosities built on top of us,” said Susan Fontano, an unhappy neighbor of the two new houses.

“We’re suffering. This has to come down,” said next-door neighbor Ivan Valic. “They built their bay windows on the side facing our house. I feel like I’m in a sardine can.”

The city agrees the houses are wildly inappropriate.

Even so, because the plans met zoning regulations when they were submitted in October, they were approved and are legal. Zone rules that would have prevented the buildings from going up went into effect in December.

. . .

“This is a perverted chess match,” said City Councilman James Oddo (R-S.I.). “This is a very ingenious industry. They’ve made money, and they are always looking to maximize their profits.”

The developer of the Jefferson Ave. homes defended the structures — and himself.

“I’m not doing anything wrong,” said builder Ely Reiss. “If they want to change the zoning, that’s what they should do.”

Reiss said the homes will likely be listed for more than $600,000 each.

I’ve Been Crushing Aggregate, You Little Punk While You Were Still Swimming In Your Daddy’s Balls

Contractors bemoan the closing of Red Hook Crushers (another great band name), which means they’ll be forced to travel to Maspeth (gasp!) to dump concrete detritus from Brooklyn construction sites:

The “new” Brooklyn is being built, stoop-by-stoop, gut-rehab-by-gut-rehab, bluestone-by-bluestone, in neighborhoods like Boerum Hill, Prospect Heights, Gowanus, the South Slope and Clinton Hill.

But a big problem has emerged: Where will the “old” Brooklyn be thrown out?

In Queens, actually.

Last month, the city shut down Red Hook Crushers, a company that played a vital, and often-overlooked, role in the borough’s surging construction industry.

For two decades, the company’s crushing equipment along the banks of the Gowanus Canal have taken in broken up cement, demolished brick walls and other debris and churned it into base material to be used again in roads, runways and sidewalks.

But since Red Hook Crushers closed on Feb. 8, hundreds of small-time contractors — the thick-calloused guys who rip up an old concrete stoop and turn it into a Yuppie’s bluestone dream — are now being forced to truck that unwanted cement all the way to the closest similar facility in Maspeth.

And all that driving is driving them nuts.

. . .

“I work in all these up-and-coming neighborhoods, fixing sidewalks, rebuilding stoops, renovating backyards,” said John Kiamie, owner of Sure Foundation.

“Now I have to drive to Maspeth — it’s two hours, back and forth on the BQE! — to dump the old stoop or sidewalk after I fix it. If I make two trips, I lose half a day on the road while my workers just sit around waiting for me to get back.”

Kiamie said he’s now turning down the small jobs that were his bread-and-butter.

“They shut this guy down without a contingency plan!” he said. “What am I supposed to do?! It’s clinical insanity! It’s a good thing it’s not our busy season or I’d never be able to stay calm!”

And don’t pretend like thick-calloused guys don’t have a keen sense of irony:

The reality is that the Crushers once-desolate Gowanus site has become very desirable. Whole Foods, whose first Brooklyn supermarket is being slowly built next door, is said to covet the space, and new apartment buildings are springing up in an area once written off as a waste land.

“The irony is that Whole Foods dumped plenty of concrete with us,” said Crushers co-owner Tom Saccomanno Jr., a copy of Pit & Quarry magazine on his desk.

Like Saccomanno, Kiamie said he certainly welcomed newcomers.

“If they want to turn the Gowanus Canal into a new Venice, God bless ’em,” he said. “It’s great. They’ll need us to do the work. But I need a place to dump the garbage or else the BQE will be a parking lot all day and all night.”

The Department of Sanitation, for its part, says that contractors will just have to “deal with it.”

I Can’t Tell You Why But I’m Trapped By Your Love And I’m Chained To Your Side

Astorians Coming Together to show that they are interesting, too:

While taking a ride on the N or W trains to Astoria these days, one is likely to notice a musician hauling a guitar or an actor reading a script or maybe a young artist sketching the city views from the elevated tracks.

With proximity to Manhattan, public safety, good cuisine and still-affordable rents, Astoria and neighboring Long Island City have been seeing a migration of newcomers in recent years — many belonging to the creative set.

Now these artists have a place to congregate in the form of a monthly gathering that kicked off last week.

The idea is “to give people a nice chance, in an intimate setting, to meet each other and get to know each other,” said Andrea Reese, a writer, performer and one of the founders of the group B-QUACK, which stands for Borough of Queens United Artists Collective Kum-Ba-Ya.

The first meeting was held last Thursday night at Waltz, an artistic-minded coffee shop on Ditmars Blvd. More than two dozen artists, playwrights and musicians mingled at the inaugural event.

“There was a feeling of a lot of excitement,” said Reese, an actor in a one-woman show about Jackie O. “It was really a lot of fun.”

B-QUACK is the brainchild of five locals: Reese, performer Jen Ryan, director and theater editor Leonard Jacobs, designer Rik Sansone and David Gibbs, a publicist.

. . .

“We’re a little tired of hearing about Brooklyn,” said Jacobs, who moved to Astoria from the Theater District three years ago after the notion of artists being able to afford Manhattan rents turned into “a laughingstock” and after many Brooklyn neighborhoods became nearly as expensive.

“It is time for us to say we are here, we are interesting,” Jacobs said.