Diaz Calls Economic Development Fight at Armory ‘A New Civil Rights Movement’

Bronx B.P. Diaz delighted the crowd with his demand for living wage jobs at the Armory.
(All photos by Adi Talwar)

Speaking before a crowd of at least 1,000 people who mobbed the gym floor at St. Nicholas of Tolentine School last Sunday, Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz, Jr. said the battle for living wages jobs at the Kingsbridge Armory was the beginning of a movement for economic justice in the borough, calling it “our new revolution here, our new civil rights movement.”

The Northwest Bronx Community and Clergy Coalition organized the forum, called “A Blueprint for the Bronx,” to lay out their agenda on a broad range of issues at the federal, state, and city level, including immigration reform, universal healthcare, vacancy decontrol, and overcrowded schools. But most of the crowd said they were there to support community efforts to ensure living wage jobs and school space at the Kingsbridge Armory.

People came from all over the Bronx, and many came straight from church. They arrived singing hymns in English and Spanish and carrying homemade signs and banners with the name of their congregations. Many arrived on buses organized by their church.

"We're protesting about the armory. We want to make the decision about what goes in the armory," like a school, said Greg Miller, who came on a bus with, he estimated, 60 other people from Walker Memorial Baptist Church on East 169th Street. "We have enough stores around here," he said.

"We don't need any more stores in the Bronx," agreed Idrena Adams of the East Bronx, who came with members of her congregation from St. James Church nearby. "We want better jobs, better pay."

A group from University Heights Presbyterian Church arrived and stood outside singing hallelujah and clapping as they waited to sing in and enter the gym. Rev. Brenda Berry said they had come "In support of the Armory project, to fight for full-time jobs for the Bronx and a whole new focus on what the Bronx needs." She was expecting 100 members of her congregation to show up.

The Tolentine gym was filled to capacity.

Inside, people packed the gym in the basement of the Tolentine Church, filling folding chairs, bleachers, and standing along the walls, waving small flags that read "Blueprint for the Bronx." Signs on the walls said, "Say no way to poverty pay!" and "Save our jobs! Vote No!"

Up on stage, elected officials and clergy members sat facing the audience, and for two hours, NWBCC organizers, local clergy, and local elected officials spoke, interspersed with music, dance, and a poetry recital. Members of the NWBCC pulled elected officials up to the microphone and asked them to answer straight on the coalition's agenda, ranging from banking reform to, of course, the armory.

Switching back and forth between Spanish and English for the benefit of the crowd, Diaz focused on the Armory, and what he called, "our new revolution here, our new civil rights movement."

"I want to do business in the Bronx,” Diaz said, [but] “it is not radical to simply say, a) we should protect surrounding businesses and b) we should have jobs and living wages," Diaz said. ""You want to do business, we can do business. But business has to be good for everybody. "

‘Bronx has my back!’

Diaz added that the political pressure on him to support the deal with Related before a community benefits agreement has been signed has been intense. "But I know the Bronx has my back!" he shouted, bringing the crowd to its feet in a din of cheers and whistles.

After his speech, Diaz told the Bronx News Network he didn't yet have the support of the full Bronx delegation in the City Council, which will vote on the project next month. "If Related does not want to negotiate, I will ask the City Council to vote no," he said, adding that he had a three-hour breakfast with the Bronx delegation on Saturday. But, he said, "I'm not willing to guarantee that the entire delegation is together" right now.

Diaz said the vote earlier this month at the City Planning Commission, in which two other borough presidents directed their representatives to vote with him against the plan, was encouraging: "I think the tone is changing,” he said. “I think they [Related] realize we have a lot of support outside the borough."

As for the Council members present at the forum, Joel Rivera, the Council’s majority leader who represents the 15th District, promised to vote no on the project unless Related negotiates with KARA. Asked about her position when she left the meeting, Melinda Katz of Queens, who chairs the Council’s Land Use Committee, was noncommittal. “I’m here to support the Coalition,” she said.

[We were not able to approach Councilman Oliver Koppell, who represents the northwest Bronx and has long taken an interest in the Armory, and Robert Jackson of Manhattan for their positions before they left.

Council Member Maria Baez, who was defeated for reelection in the September primary and will leave office at the end of this year, was not in attendance, even though Tolentine and the armory are in her district.]

March to the Armory

After the forum, the remains of the crowd marched to the Kingsbridge Armory, breaking into intermittent shouts of "Si, se puede!" and "Yes, we can!"

Queens councilman Tony Avella, chair of the City Council's Zoning & Franchises committee, turned up to tell the crowd, "Until you get what you want, I'm voting no."

Councilman Tony Avella of Queens spoke to the crowd at the Armory.

As the crowd dispersed, NWBCC organizers passed out small 'prayer cards' with residents' wishes for the armory written on them, for protesters to tie to the armory fence.

As she fastened a string of the prayer cards to the fence, Anne Gibbons, a Kingsbridge resident who came with members of her congregation at New Day Church, said she was hopeful that momentum was building around the issue. "This could be the start of a new direction across the city," she said, when elected officials "take a political risk in favor of the people for a change."

--This story was reported and written by Rachel Waldholz.

'New' School Seats a 'Flimflam'

An article in the Daily News today revealed that 300 'new' seats in the northwest Bronx were actually reclaimed seats, meaning the city is still not adding additional seats to ease the borough's chronic overcrowding problem.

City Council education chairman Robert Jackson said, "It seems to me that they're trying to do a flimflam on us." (For those unfamiliar with the term, the word "flimflam" means "a swindle." Thanks Webster's. Yes, we looked it up.)

Others, including Councilman Oliver Koppell, were equally unimpressed. The city is "trying to placate everybody, trying to make it seem like they're doing more than they're really doing."

In September the Norwood News wrote a story with similar miscalculations from the Education Department about a new building being constructed on the PS 94 campus in Norwood.

If you don't want to read through the whole article, here's the important part:

"Feinberg wrote in an email that the SCA scoured the district to find places to build on existing DOE property and, as a result, chose PS 94, PS 95 and PS 79 to receive permanent annex buildings. It's all part of the DOE's plan, she wrote, to alleviate overcrowding by adding 2,500 K-8 seats to District 10 in the city's revised Five-year Capital Plan. The new Early Childhood Center at PS 94 will 'provide 420 additional seats' in District 10, according to DOE calculations.

But after a closer look at the numbers, those calculations appear optimistic at best. The new building, which the DOE says will be part of PS 94 when it opens (but even that is subject to change once it's built), will contain 515 seats. Currently, PS 94 houses 1,050 students; 600 in the main building, 325 in the portables on campus and an additional 125 at a satellite building on Gun Hill Road four blocks away. As it stands, the DOE says all 450 students housed outside of the main building will move into the new Early Childhood Center. That leaves just 65 additional seats, not counting the new Pre-K students who will arrive as part of the DOE's citywide push for more Pre-K classes."

Coalition pushing for school S.E.A.T.S

Wednesday morning, organizers and youth from the Northwest Bronx Community and Clergy Coalition (aka the Coalition), lamenting chronic overcrowding and its effects on education, stormed City Hall to demand more school seats in the Bronx and citywide.

In the process, the Coalition announced its S.E.A.T.S (Schools Exploding at the Seams) initiative, which is designed to pressure the education department, using the City Council as a lobbying arm, into adding more school seats for the current Five-Year Capital Plan, set to be revised in November. The City Council has an opportunity to weigh in on any capital plan revisions when it approves the city's budget in April.

The overcrowding issue has festered in the borough since last fall when the DOE announced it would be eliminating 1,700 Bronx seats from the capital plan, which many activists, parents, students and local politicians considered a slap in the face. For more background check out this story from the Norwood News.

The Coalition spent the morning pitching council members and then gathered on the steps of City Hall for a press conference where Coalition leaders, with a backdrop of 30 slogan-chanting students, laid out the case for more seats.

The goal, Coalition vice president Ronn Jordan said, is to make overcrowding a citywide issue. Jordan added that they were already getting a very positive response from council members, many of whom have already pledged their support for S.E.A.T.S.

Upper Manhattan's Robert Jackson (head of the education committee) and Brooklyn's David Yasky (looking like a math teacher in khakis and a pink button down) joined the Bronx's Oliver Koppell and Joel Rivera in speaking during the press conference.

Here's some video from the event.

Stay tuned, this will be an issue the Norwood News will be all over in the coming year.

News Roundup for July 9

In the News...

Friday's NY Times checks in with the city's "noise police"--environmental agents and police officers enforcing the new noise code--and the Mr. Softee drivers they're confronting. We'llhave a story in this week's Norwood News about all this.

In a somewhat related story, Dalton Walker looks at an innovative program at Montefiore Medical Center, where they created a quiet floor to reduce patient stress.

Coverage of ESPN's "The Bronx is Burning" miniseries dominates the entertainment sections. The series is based on Jonathan Mahler's book that intertwines the stories of the Yankees, the Son of Sam murders, the hotly contested mayoral race and the massive blackout in the 1977. Here's Newsday's review. Appropriate that this comes out on a day that the Bronx is apparently suffering its second blackout of the summer. We just heard about this from the borough president's office, but we'll get more details on the blog soon.

City Council Education Committee Chair Robert Jackson and education activists said the city's proposal to reduce class sizes by hiring an additional 1,300 teachers is insufficient, according to Metro New York.

And Liz Benjamin examines the heated debate over congestion pricing in the Daily Politics. The post includes a video sent by anti-congestion pricing lobbyists to all 212 state legislators about our overcrowded subways. The editorial in the current issue of the Norwood News makes a similar point.