Killing Trees to Save Them
What about the effect of printing environmental impact statements?
By Josh Rogers
Any green activist worth his weight in flowers has spent hours reading environmental impact statements (EIS). Even though the reports are typically prepared by agencies anxious to start work, they still have info that may derail or kill a project. Read more
Our Town Goes Downtown
To the Readers:
Hello, uptown residents of Manhattan! Manhattan Media, our parent company, announced last week that they are bringing back Our Town Downtown, a newspaper focused on all of the arts, news and culture happening below 14th Street.
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Yellow Fever in Manhattan
We are pleased that Mayor Bloomberg and his Taxi and Limousine Commissioner David Yassky have finally solved the outer borough taxi problem. Kudos to them and the state legislature for supporting them.
Now, can we please try to figure out how to solve the perennial problem of Manhattan residents and workers who find it near impossible to hail a cab from 4:30 to 6:30 each afternoon and early evening?
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Rep. Crowley’s Correct Priorities
When Bronx State Sen. Ruben Diaz Sr., the vocal loser in the historic Marriage Equality battle, criticizes you, you know you must be doing something right.
That is the case with the recent non-story in the New York Post about Queens Congressman Joe Crowley’s decision to have his wife and three young children live with him in Washington, D.C, rather than his home district.
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The Son Also Rises
What a difference six months makes.
Late last year, the words “dysfunction” and “Albany” were so often intertwined, we thought they were a compound noun.
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Like Mother, Like Son
West Side Spirit extends its condolences to Mayor Mike Bloomberg, who lost his beloved mother, Charlotte Bloomberg, last week.
The 102-year-old matriarch lived a full and fruitful life in Massachusetts, raising a son and a daughter who have become public servants and who were, even more importantly, great children who respected and cared for their elderly mother.
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Helping Our Schools
The Department Of Education (DOE) has announced plans to replace 26 low-performing schools in New York. Of those, five are in Manhattan. These 26 schools have long struggled with low graduation rates, test scores, attendance and safety issues.
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An Open Debate About Teacher Staffing
Every parent knows that the most important aspect of a child’s education is the teacher who heads up the classroom.
That is why we are very concerned that, with the state budget gap, there is talk of laying off public school teachers. East Side Assembly Member Jonathan Bing, one of the good guys in Albany, is trying to refine the state’s approach to layoffs. His proposal would allow a panel of teachers, principals and administrators to decide whom to downsize. Although Bing would still allow seniority to factor into any decision, his plan has come under attack because that aspect would no longer be the central factor in cutting staff. Read more
Lift the Cap And Help Our Public Schools
How to educate our children is an incredibly complex and controversial issue. One of the few things that almost everyone agrees on is that the more choice parents have, the more likely there will be a better educational outcome for their child.
In the more affluent neighborhoods of Manhattan, there are numerous very good schools, both public and private. Unlike some suburban areas and rural parts of America, where the local public school is the only choice, in Manhattan parents get to research and choose from a wide variety of educational settings to match the needs of their child. Read more
An Oscar Sweep For Our Town’s Former Staffer
You’ll have to indulge us this week while we proudly boast about a native New Yorker who has taken Hollywood by storm with his brave story about the Iraq war and the bizarre ways men find flirting with death sometimes more exciting than flirting with women.
Mark Boal, a 37-year-old journalist who graduated from Bronx High School of Science and was the editor of Our Town in the late 1990s, had an amazing night at Sunday’s Academy Awards ceremony. Boal won an Oscar for his screenplay for The Hurt Locker, which also netted top honors as “Best Picture” in a field of blockbusters that included the overly-hyped Avatar, and other, much better-financed productions. Read more
