On Decision Day, Editor Looks Back -- and Ahead -- at Armory Battle

By Jordan Moss
Bronx News Network Executive Editor

The fate of the Kingsbridge Armory redevelopment will likely be decided on Monday (the 14th). The City Council could kill the plan because of the lack of a living wage requirement, or members of the Bronx delegation could agree to a watered-down wage deal with the developer, The Related Companies, and the Bloomberg administration.

As it decides, the Bronx delegation should keep in mind that redeveloping the armory would never have even gotten this far without a massive investment of time and energy by local residents over the last dozen years.

I wrote my first armory article for the Norwood News as a free-lancer in 1993 (and the paper has published dozens since – here’s a link for 67 of them) when the National Guard was poised to vacate the facility and transfer ownership to the city.

At that time, District 10 Superintendent John Reehill had a vision of turning the whole darned landmark, which was at the epicenter of the overcrowding crisis, into a complex of public schools. That plan went nowhere. It was the time of Giuliani and solving the crowding crisis in the Bronx wasn't exactly tops on the new mayor's to-do list. Nothing Bronx was. One of the new mayor's first acts of office after all was to kill the new police academy long planned for the borough by the Dinkins administration. 

Oliver Koppell, then an assemblyman, secured $150,000 from the state for a study but the Bronx Overall Economic Development Corporation returned the money when little was accomplished.

In 1998, the Northwest Bronx Community and Clergy Coalition, a main force behind the Kingsbridge Armory Redevelopment Alliance (KARA), began organizing residents and translating community ideas into architectural blueprints, with the assistance of Joan Byron and the Pratt Center. The plans included 2,400 school seats, a movie theatre, a green market, restaurants and a sports complex.