Working to Make the Neighborhood More Livable

By Alan Krawitz

Few people in the city have had the type of abiding positive impact on a community and its residents as longtime neighborhood activist Batya Lewton has had on the West Side.

Lewton, now 80, has been an activist for nearly seven decades. She helped found the nonprofit Coalition for a Livable West Side back in 1981 as a way to help protect the community from overdevelopment. She says that as the West Side’s leading non-government voice, the coalition works with community, neighborhood and environmental groups to educate, inform and move people to act as advocates for the environment as well as rational city-wide planning.

“What we do is hire experts to analyze complex documents such as environmental impact statements in order to tell people in the community how their environment might be affected by new developments and changes to the local infrastructure,” Lewton said.

Batya Lewton, who founded the Coalition for a Livable West Side 30 years ago, is still active in the community.

Lewton said the work of the coalition is accomplished through frequent newsletters, public forums, meetings, preparation of briefing materials and flyers. Current issues of key concern to the coalition include making the West End Avenue Historic District a reality, researching and advocating for greater pedestrian safety and making certain that an elevator that is supposed to go down to Riverside South Park is indeed built.

“Neighborhood pedestrian safety is a major issue,” Lewton explained, citing dangerous conditions near West 70th Street and Riverside Boulevard.

Lewton’s effort and dedication have not gone unnoticed by local politicians. “For many years, they have dedicated themselves to improving the West Side, making it a safer, healthier, more diverse and vital community,” Rep. Jerrold Nadler wrote of Lewton and coalition co-founder Madeleine Polayes’s efforts. “They have helped advocate on a range of issues that affect local quality of life, including development, environmental issues and housing.

But perhaps most noteworthy about Lewton, a retired teacher and librarian from school District 5 in Central Harlem, is the impact she had on students decades ago.

“I remember teaching kids how to think and question,” recalled Lewton. “I must have had an impact.”

Decades later, some still write to say complimentary things.

A former student praised Lewton in a letter to The West Side Spirit in 2009. “I was an elementary school student at P.S. 197 in Harlem back in the late 1950s and early 1960s and had the privilege of having Batya Lewton as the school librarian,” wrote the Rev. Dr. Bernard R. Wilson.

“Ms. Lewton turned me on to the love of books,” he wrote. “After I left elementary school, this woman would meet me on Saturday mornings to take me to the New York Public Library on 42nd Street and teach me how to use the library and do research,” he recalled. “Today, I am a minister in Weston, Conn., with a doctoral degree.

“I recall going to Ms. Lewton to find out what blacks were doing during the Civil War,” Wilson continued. “I learned from her what was happening during the Civil Rights struggle in the South that we were living through at the time…As a Christian family, we learned more about our faith from this Jewish woman who taught us so much about the divine possibilities for our lives.”

Reflecting on her neighborhood, Lewton says some of the changes are not exactly for the better. “There used to be small mom-and-pop stores here, but now the landlords only want chain stores,” she lamented.

“I miss the ebb and flow of diversity that was here before,” she said. “This community used to be racially and economically diverse, but no more. I think we’re much poorer for it.”