Good morning. It is Friday. We’ll see why a city-wide coalition is challenging streeteries. We’ll also be looking at a program that makes art accessible and settling in a new home in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn.
The coronavirus pandemic drove restaurants and their customers out, onto sidewalks and the streets. Should they stay there?
It’s not a new question. But a coalition of opponents takes a different approach, accusing Mayor Eric Adams of doing too much to allow for outdoor dining.
The coalition — Cue-Up, an alliance of community groups whose full name is the Coalition United for Equitable Urban Policy — claims the city’s open restaurant program is the only pandemic-era initiative still under executive order from City Hall.
Michael Sussman, a Cue-Up attorney, said the original warrant was issued in mid-2020 when Bill de Blasio was mayor. It expired after a few days. De Blasio made one extension after another until his term expired at the end of last year. Adams, who succeeded de Blasio, followed suit.
But Sussman said “there is no longer a public health emergency” as the city has canceled the other pandemic provisions covered by the original order and the extensions, including vaccine requirements, mask rules and the Covid test-and-trace program. drop. Any renovation now only serves the outdoor kitchens, he said.
Adams described himself Monday as “a strong supporter of alfresco dining.” “Whatever I can do to help our restaurant industry, which employs dishwashers, waiters, bus boys and girls – this is an important industry and it is an indicator of our city,” he said at a news conference. “And so the lawsuit is going to play itself out.” He did not address the issue of executive power; A spokesperson for the town hall did not comment on that part of the lawsuit on Thursday.
The city allowed restaurants and bars to go out as an emergency measure to help a shattered industry, which employed as many as 340,000 people before the pandemic hit and restaurants closed, many for good. The restaurant industry now employs about 290,000 people, said Andrew Rigie, the executive director of the New York City Hospitality Alliance, a trade group that has pushed for making the outdoor facilities permanent.
Adams acknowledged at Monday’s briefing that “some outdoor dining options have become a hazard” and “were unsuitable.” He said outdoor dining structures “cannot be used for storage” or for any other purpose. “And I think there’s a way to change, standardize, what the structure should look like,” he said.
The Cue-Up lawsuit, filed with the state Supreme Court in Manhattan, was the group’s second attempt to block pressure from the city to make food stalls permanent. The first ended with an order from Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Frank Nervo ordering the city to conduct a thorough environmental analysis, something Cue-Up had demanded. The city has appealed his order.
The second lawsuit filed more than 30 affidavits from people in every county except Staten Island, who said street robberies have damaged the quality of life in their neighborhoods.
“Where I used to smell the trees when I walked my dog, it now smells like decay and urine,” Angela Bilotti, who has lived in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn since 1994, said in an affidavit.
She also complained that street fear had made the neighborhood noisy. “A restaurant owner told a neighbor she’s in business, so just close their windows,” Bilotti said.
“That neighbor has moved” because of the noise, she said.
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A new home for community artistic ventures
Risë Wilson went looking for a laundromat, but not out of love for the laundry. She had an idea to make art accessible to neighbors in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn.
“I realized the laundromat is this incredibly democratic de facto community,” she told our writer Hilarie M. Sheets.
She founded her nonprofit in 2005 as the Laundromat Project to support arts projects in underserved areas, “not just for fun and play, but as this political tool,” she said. “Art has always been part of black liberation movements.”
But the grant money she received wasn’t enough to buy a laundromat, so the LP, as the organization became known, switched to a decentralized mode, supporting artists in communities of color in the city’s five boroughs. The projects were performed in local cultural venues, in parks and squares and on the street, as well as in laundromats.
Wilson handed over the leadership of LP to Kemi Ilesanmi in 2012, and since then LP has invested directly in more than 80 public art projects and more than 200 multidisciplinary artists. And, after working out of temporary offices on the Lower East Side and then Harlem and the South Bronx, LP has returned to Bedford-Stuyvesant, on a 10-year lease for a retail property on Fulton Street. It will inaugurate its first public space with an open house on Saturday.
There’s a celestial landscape from Bed-Stuy resident artist Destiny Belgrave, the first artist selected through the LP’s open call for a new annual commission. There is also space for exhibitions and public gatherings, as well as a communal administration office for a dozen staff, decorated with limited edition prints by artists such as Nina Chanel Abney, Derrick Adams, Xaviera Simmons and Mickalene Thomas.
Last year, the LP received an unexpected gift, $2 million from philanthropist MacKenzie Scott – as much as the LP’s annual operating budget. Ilesanmi and the LP’s deputy director Ayesha Williams immediately decided to give away $200,000, awarding $10,000 prizes to five former partner organizations in the city and $500 scholarships to each current and former LP artist and staffer.
Ilesanmi and Williams have set up an investment policy for the remaining money with financial institutions such as Brooklyn Cooperative, a credit union that serves local small businesses and Black-owned homeowners. According to the 2020 census figures, Bed-Stuy lost more than 22,000 black residents in the past decade and gained more than 30,000 white residents.
“One of the things that happens with gentrification is that POC organizations are displaced along with the people,” Ilesanmi said. “So when you’re part of the community, have a 10-year horizon on this space, and a gift that builds intergenerational wealth for the organization, your head just goes up in a different way.”
METROPOLITAN diary
counter question
Dear Diary:
I had just moved to New York from Texas and I loved going to the small neighborhood grocery stores in town. They were so different from the big suburbs I was used to.
One day I went to Grace’s Marketplace on the Upper East Side and overheard a customer questioning the man behind the counter.
“Do you have fresh escargot?” said the customer.
“No,” said the opponent. “But we have snails in a can!”
— Kate Marcus