Town Hall

April 15, 2023

It was a veritable Who’s Who of Uptown honchos on Thursday night at the Amber Charter School on W215th Street. The event, a “Town Hall,” was sponsored by Congressman Adriano Espaillat (NY-13) who invited agency reps, local officeholders, and the community to discuss conditions and safety.

Espaillat started things off with an overview of some Big Issues in Congress (e.g. Women’s Right to Choose; Guns) and some locally important Mega Projects (2nd Avenue subway extension; Kingsbridge Armory; Rangel Institute at CCNY). He spoke about ‘ghost guns’ and said people can buy kits online and build these untraceable weapons at home without going through any background check.

Public Advocate Jumaane Williams discussed crime in context. For all the hype about out of control violent crime, he said the number one reason people leave NYC is something else: housing affordability. He proposed taking an holistic approach to crime and not limiting policy to police and incarceration.

NYPD Inspector Aneudy Castillo pointed out that overall crime is down by 17% this year. By this time last year there’d been 70 shootings compared with 1 this year.

Borough Chief James Leavy

Department of Sanitation Manhattan Borough Chief James Leavy deadpanned that we somehow made it through Winter before allowing that it was the actually the lightest snowfall he’d seen in his 23 years with DSNY. He went on to talk about rats and the Department’s goal of minimizing the amount of time garbage bags await pickup (and hungry rats) on the sidewalk. They hope to accomplish this by introducing new trash hours that are being phased in already.

Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine

Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine talked about sidewalk sheds, those unsightly scaffolds that are everywhere you look. There are 4,000 of them in Manhattan alone and, on average, they’re a year old. More than 200 of them are more than five years old, and some have been around for ten or fifteen years. These things are ugly and a safety problem, he said. There’s a plan that would include enforcement and, in the extreme, have the City repair the building’s facade and send the owner a bill.

Levine also cited parking as a problem that’s likely to get worse if nothing is done about it. Already, many suburbanites drive into the area and then park here for free before heading downtown on the subway. We don’t have residential parking stickers so they’re allowed to do that. But it causes increased traffic as hundreds of Westchester and Jersey drivers circle the block looking for parking. He predicts it’ll only get worse when congestion pricing makes driving downtown infeasible for more drivers.

Finally, he said the City is trying to address the lack of public bathrooms. NYC is almost last in the Nation on this metric. He wants one new one per zip code for starters.

Audience participation.

The floor was then opened for a Q&A segment that touched on topics ranging from the Allen Pavilion’s status as a Community Hospital to the seemingly endless dirt bike rallies that practically define Summer around here. Inspector Castillo said the 34 seized 160 bikes last year and it remains a priority. He suggested that big fines work better than arresting people. In addition, he said that his officers keep an eye on the bridges that connect to the Bronx because those are sometimes used by people fleeing after committing crimes up here. A group of tenant activists held up handmade signs denouncing slumlords.