This is about dealing with the realities of living in New York City and dealing with them whether we see and understand them or even care about them.
Suddenly the vital business center of New York City – 42nd Street and Second Avenue – is stunned by the possibility of a major office building collapse.
Surrounding streets and avenues are cordoned off. Traffic is rerouted.
Four major office buildings surrounding the damaged building are totally evacuated.
Police cars, fire engines, ambulances, TV news trucks appear.
Panic is fierce as onlookers stop and stare.
The involved building is the former national headquarters of Pfizer Pharmaceuticals.
The office building is being rebuilt to house apartments – the largest such re-formation effort in the nation.
Hours before the alarm was sounded, construction workers had found bent steel beams and columns and a dangerous tilt forward in a new addition under construction.
How could such an event take place in the center of Manhattan? Wouldn’t such a major building effort demand the constant concern of building inspectors? Where was the watchful eye of New York City’s building department? Wouldn’t inspectors be regularly assigned to such a project?
What was going on? The answers are revealing.
THE REAL ESTATE BOARD OF NEW YORK
Every major city and many smaller ones, are generally controlled by some group of people…often business leaders representing a major industry. For instance, in Chicago it is the financial community. The same is true in many other cities. Yet in Philadelphia, it was once the Police Department. At one point the Chief of Police was elected Mayor.
In New York many people think Wall Street is that influential power group – but it is not.
New York City is controlled by REBNY – the Real Estate Board of New York. Its efforts are assisted by several independent businessmen including Ken Langone of Home Depot fame … who carry the ball for REBNY as often as they can. Langone often represents REBNY’s leaders – the Rudins, the Silversteins, the Dursts, the Speyers etc. in political maneuvers to keep NYC under their control.
It was Langone who just several years ago convinced former Giuliani Mayoral aide Joe Lhota to run against John Catsimatidis in a primary for the Republican nomination against Democrat Bill DeBlasio for Mayor. Langone knew that Lhota, who did become the candidate, didn’t want to be Mayor. He preferred to have what he got by losing to DeBlasio in a terrible campaign: a $1,500,000 job at NYU Medical Center – grown massive with the help of Langone’s real estate friends. Its name, NYU Langone Medical Center, speaks for itself.
After four years of his first term, REBNY had learned that DeBlasio was “manageable” and New York began to see the construction of pencil buildings even though the building code of NYC did not permit them. Today they give the great NYC skyline the look of giant, skinny smokestacks.
Politicians? No, they don’t run the cities – they are the stage actors reading from written scripts that helped get them elected. They don’t finance the “play or movie”… they don’t bring them to theaters. They just play the characters in the script – reading the lines meaningful to the “producers” … the real management. In NYC that’s REBNY.
THE WAY IT IS
In our second personal visit with Donald Trump, we sat across the desk from him and asked him to fix a roof in the New York Housing Authority’s (NYCHA) buildings just across from his newly built golf club in the Bronx.
And then seeing that look on his face changing… switched dramatically and said quietly and respectfully “But not you Donald, you are still a Queens guy and have done some wonderful things for the city and will again.”
Hearing that his face changed to that look where he pursed his lips in a way that comedians copy all the time and said “You know I could make it beeyouteeful” with his Queens pronunciation. And we said “You don’t have to make it beautiful, just make it good”.
And that was it. He did not defend REBNY, never denied our charges about them because although he was never included in that group he knew all about what they did and how they did it.
RESIDENTIAL MAKEOVERS
There is no question that NYC – and the country as a whole – needs more affordable housing for those who cannot deal with the stunning price increases for housing – buying or renting – here and all across the country.
But, we wonder, who are the people who will be moving into the redone Pfizer building when it is completed?
What will the rents be or will those apartments be for sale?
And where will the residents come from? The boroughs? Out of town?
Who will want to live or can afford to live on 42nd Street and Second Avenue? Certainly not those who can’t afford it.
And what about all the talk about office building remakes?
Is this the kind of housing that middle and low income people of New York need or is it the kind that will be built by the real estate developers who see money as the obvious result?
That possibility disappeared with him.
You hear the suggestion that it would be cheaper to tear empty office buildings down and rebuild them as apartment houses instead of trying to redevelop them.
And when we question why the bent steel beams and columns and concerns about the collapse of the new Pfizer addition, and begin to wonder where the city’s building inspection department was in all of this, here is what we learn: real estate developers select their own building inspectors to keep track of developments and so there is no independent building inspection.
And knowing that about new building construction, we now learn of the failure to inspect building water towers in a relatively large number of apartment houses on the East Side of uptown Manhattan causing a significant outbreak of Legionnaires Disease.
New legislation passed recently demands that these water towers be inspected and cleaned MONTHLY. But given the problem and its spread nobody is inspecting. Is that because landlords have hired their own inspectors? Or because the city itself is paying no attention to its own legislation? Or because city inspectors came and left without doing their job after receiving a quiet remuneration by landlords?
We know that can happen in neighborhoods across the city where something outrageous is going on as a new house is being built and city inspectors are notified of trouble and yet there are no changes taking place.
It is clear that when certain situations exist that need a city inspector to change them – and no changes take place – something has happened. Is that understood or need we say more?
CALL IT CORRUPTION
We know now that both the Manhattan District Attorney and the NY State Attorney General are investigating the Pfizer Building situation as a criminal activity.
No reason has been given for this type of investigation.
Corruption exists in many forms …always where there is money or power involved.
In just depends on your point of view.
For instance, several years ago, the New York City Council voted overwhelmingly to recognize two city-wide votes on term limits which said overwhelmingly that the entire New York City government must be governed on the basis of just two consecutive terms of office. Such term limits had not formerly existed before those votes.
Then he paid a visit to the man who was about to run for the Mayoralty – John Catsimatidis – and told him he wanted another term so John would have to wait – and promised him a steak dinner.
John had little choice – and never got that dinner.
Now was this corruption? Would it have been corruption if money had not changed hands?
Those are questions you may answer…but you see the point.
To paraphrase Winston Churchill that democracy was the best approach to government when you considered the others – one could say the same thing about the power of money in a capitalistic society.
When it works well and fairly, it can be superb.
And then there is the rest of the time.
Given the endless opportunities for corruption, should the real estate developers continue to run New York as they do?
What do you think?