City Limits toured New York City, Yonkers and Newburgh with Community Voices Heard, to see where the stimulus money went and hear where advocates for low-income families believe it should go.
The Port Richmond Water Pollution Control Plant is designed to handle 60 million gallons of sewage per day. Photo by: Marc Fader
Projects to upgrade a sewage plant and construct a cement facility open the next chapter in a complex—and controversial—industrial history. By: Jake Mooney
The Port Richmond Water Pollution Control Plant has stood on Staten Island’s North Shore, purifying the sewage of about half of the island’s residents, for 57 years. Soon it will get a $29 million upgrade, thanks to a citywide infusion of federal stimulus funds. It will also get a new neighbor, a transfer station about a mile down bumpy Richmond Terrace where cement will arrive from South America by boat and head to local construction projects by truck.
Richmond Terrace, the bumpy former cow path that is the main road along Staten Island’s North Shore, starts at the St. George Ferry Terminal and winds past dozens of storage lots, old factories, transfer stations, high sheet-metal fences and, occasionally, a park. Six miles later, just east of the Goethals Bridge, it reaches its end among heavy trucks and stacked shipping containers at the Howland Hook Marine Terminal.The port, operated on public land by New York Container Terminal, a private company, is one of Staten Island’s largest businesses. The company, officials said, has a $53 million payroll and more than 550 employees, unloading around 400,000 shipping containers a year. But that, company officials and their allies in government say, is not big enough.
Once, 170 years ago, there was a factory on Staten Island, and the factory made lead. Some of the lead got into the ground. In the 1920s the factory caught fire and burned down. The lead stayed. 60 years later, people from the Environmental Protection Agency came to see about cleaning the lead up, but they couldn’t find it; the property owner had given them the wrong address.
An advocate says too many new Yorkers are still living in toxic housing and too many environmental laws are still being broken without consequence.
Opportunities to celebrate, learn, and recycle with the community through May 1
During four decades of debate over the causes of black-male joblessness and unemployment, there have been two broad schools of thought. There were those who blamed the problem on the way the economy works, especially its racial contours and barriers, and those who attributed it to the way black men behave, to their culture.According to New York University political science professor Lawrence Mead, black joblessness is about a failure of low-skill black men to choose to work or live up to their employers’ standards when they do get jobs. “The immediate problem is work discipline, a willingness to cooperate, to be a reliable employee,” says Mead. “It’s collective psychology. It’s attitudes, and this is characteristic of poverty, where people want to work in principle.
A photographic survey of the city’s parkland reveals verdant, untamed places most New Yorkers don’t know are theirs.
New York’s public housing has suffered years of federal divestment, putting its future viability in doubt. When a team of urban designers explored the Lower East Side projects’ open spaces, they found potential for NYCHA to not merely survive, but thrive.
There’s just one real contest in the races for borough president this fall, but next year could see a debate over whether the city still needs the post.
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