Good morning. We get an update on the new 5G towers that have risen in the city. We also follow Raul the peacock’s night out and his return home to the Bronx Zoo.
But the Federal Communications Commission said last week that each was subject to environmental and historical assessments that had not been conducted before CityBridge, the consortium behind the project, began work. “We expect CityBridge to take steps to make these tower structures compliant by conducting a post-construction assessment,” the agency told CityBridge officials in a letter.
CityBridge said the towers had already gone through assessments to obtain city permits and the company did not expect the assessments required by the agency to delay the project. Jack Sterne, a spokesperson for CityBridge, said the company “worked with the FCC” to ensure it followed federal, state and local regulations and that “we are building 5G infrastructure in line with other cities across the country .”
Kayla Mamelak, a spokeswoman for Mayor Eric Adams, said City Hall was “committed to enforcing provisions in our telecommunications franchise agreements” to ensure that municipal franchisees like CityBridge adhere to all relevant regulations, “including those of the Federal Communications Commission.”
“Better late than never,” said Peg Breen, the president of the New York Landmarks Conservancy, who, along with seven other officials, wrote a letter to City Hall in January saying the towers were “poorly designed and massive and ruined the streetscape of the city will cluster.” She added in an interview this week that it was “obvious that this review should have happened.”
The FCC letter, previously reported by The Daily News, came a week after Representative Jerrold Nadler urged the agency to review the towers under the National Historic Preservation Act, the 1966 law that established the National Register of Historic Places . He said he was “concerned” that some of the tower sites were in historic districts listed on the National Register.
Opponents of the towers say they lack scale and character in many areas, especially in historic neighborhoods with low-rise buildings and narrow streets and sidewalks.
The towers are 32 feet tall. But detractors said their concerns went beyond the landscape to the “fragmented and confusing” review process for initial installs “and a lack of clarity on the full effects of 5G towers in the city.” The city’s Public Design Commission approved them when Bill de Blasio was mayor.
Manhattan borough president Mark Levine said the franchise agreement with CityBridge needs to be renegotiated to force the company to share more information, “including how they make location decisions.”
“In a few cases, people didn’t find out until the work started,” Levine said. “It’s a recipe for losing community trust.”
Kathryn Wylde, the president of the Partnership for New York City, an influential business group, called Nadler’s letter “pure politics” as she advocated for the towers.
She said she viewed his letter as “a response to voters complaining, because they called me to complain, so I heard it too.”
“In a city with a lot of tall buildings, you need towers of a certain size,” Wylde said, adding that they would fit into the cityscape. “If these kiosks are there for a few years,” she said, “everyone will think they’ve been there forever.”
According to the city’s agreement with CityBridge, 2,000 5G towers are to be installed in the coming years. Ninety percent of them will be in deprived areas of the city – neighborhoods in the Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island and above 96th Street in Manhattan. CityBridge cited city council statistics that said about a quarter of the city’s households do not have broadband access at home.
Vanessa Gibson, the Bronx borough president, said she is happy to support efforts to increase broadband access in her borough, where she says 38 percent of residents don’t have it. And the city pointed to new Gigabit Centers that have opened in the past six months in Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island to provide free Wi-Fi, device access and digital skills training in underserved communities.
Weather
Be prepared for a chance of showers, with temperatures hovering around 60. Showers will continue through the evening, with temperatures dropping above 40 degrees.
ALTERNATIVE SIDE PARKING
In effect until May 18 (Solemnity of Ascension).
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Back home after a night out
Everyone is entitled to a night out once in a while. What’s the problem if you spend it in a tree?
Maybe that’s what Raul the peacock would say if he could talk – and if he had to spend more than 15 minutes explaining events that made him famous.
The path to fame led from the Bronx Zoo, where he lives, though it wasn’t clear if he walked out or flew out. It was also not clear when exactly he left.
Residents saw him around 7:45 p.m. Wednesday on East 180th Street and East Tremont Avenue, a few blocks from the zoo, according to a report from the Citizen app, which sends location-based alerts. Citizen described a 911 report of “a peacock on the loose after escaping its designated zone,” the zoo’s 265 acres, where peacocks roam freely.
Reports soon circulated online that Raul had bitten a man named Mike. A timeline on Citizen said a 911 caller reported being bitten on the thigh. The fire department did not confirm that, although it did say emergency responders treated someone for minor injuries on East 180th Street and Vyse Avenue.
The live streams started from mobile phones in the crowd that had gathered. At one point, Raul flew into a cottonwood tree. There he was about 4:30 a.m., when television crews converged on the area and broadcast-quality live footage began. Soon, police blocked off the area along Vyse Avenue between East 179th and 180th Streets.
Raul flapped his wings and slid from the poplar to another tree, in a nearby cemetery. The crowd gasped audibly as he left. The spectators watched as Raul flew to the roof of a building on East 181st Street and jumped onto the roof of the neighboring building and then onto the next building. It seemed to know where it was going: back to the zoo.
And at 11:17 a.m., it spread its wings, soared across the street, over a fence, and back into the zoo. The zoo never doubted he would go home, saying in a statement it “fully expected him to return to the zoo the way he did.”
