Double Exposure
Career nanny Vivian Maier’s posthumous recognition as a photographer
By Penny Gray
The Howard Greenberg Gallery has just opened an exhibition of the photographic works of Vivian Maier (1926–2009) from the Maloof Collection. If the name doesn’t ring a bell, it’s because Maier’s work is a recent discovery.
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Fender Bender
Fight for ‘no-fault’ auto insurance reform revs up
Coming on the heels of several legislative victories last year, auto insurance reform is shaping up to be one of the issues at the top of the legislative pile for 2012.
Fraud Costs NY is one of several groups pushing for auto insurance reform. Auto insurance fraud currently costs New Yorkers more than $200 million per year. Residents of the state pay higher auto insurance rates than any other place in the country except for Louisiana, Washington, D.C., and New Jersey.
“This is an economic issue,” said Austin Finan, spokesperson for Fraud Costs NY. “If residents are expected to tighten their belts during these tough times, the state should make some legislative change to save businesses and families money. We’re calling on the governor to take the lead on this like he has on many other issues.”
A bill still in committee is designed to prevent automobile insurance fraud. Advocates say organized criminals stage fake car accidents to charge insurance companies for treating phony injuries to participants, known as “runners.”
Under New York law, insurance companies cover medical fees resulting from car accidents up to $50,000, regardless of which party is at fault. This is why the policies are known as “no-fault” auto insurance. When scammers take a cut, the insurance company pays, then passes the cost along to drivers.
City Council Member Jessica Lappin said she signed on to the coalition to support a change in state laws to cut down on fraudulent claims. She believes the law is too lenient on people who stage accidents and cheat insurance companies.
“I think it’s costing taxpayers money and people are fraudulently abusing the system. If there’s a way we can fix that—any place we can root out fraud and abuse, we should do it.”
Insurance companies and their advocates working to build pressure for reform blame the delay on opposition from politically powerful trial lawyers, who often file car-crash cases.
Groups advocating for insurance reform have worked with the city’s district attorneys to publicize the problem and call for changes. The NYPD, meanwhile, has released surveillance videos from what it says are notorious examples of scammers faking injuries in car crashes.
In one tape, a Bronx driver narrowly avoids a spectacular tractor-trailer crash, but police say he later claimed he was hit and billed $21,184 in medical costs. Another tape shows nine alleged scammers backing three cars into each other—twice—before seeking $39,000 worth of medical treatment, police say.
New York State Trial Lawyers Association President Nicholas Timko flatly denied his members are profiting from fraud, saying auto fraud cases rarely go to court and thus have limited payouts.
“They’re overblowing the problem of fraud,” Timko said. “No-fault is probably one of the smallest parts of the premium you pay, and it is usually 10 percent or less of your overall premium. So even if no-fault fraud is 10 percent of that, 10 percent of 10 percent is 1 percent of your overall premium.”
He blamed high car insurance rates in New York City on its high population density. “It’s a big city—there are a lot of people…driving cars on busy roads.”
This story originally ran in City & State. With help from Allen Houston.
Notes From The Neighborhood
Compiled by Megan Finnegan Bungeroth
LAST-MINUTE SHOPPING TIPS
Final sales and super-crowded stores can be overwhelming. For some tips on how to weed through the craziness, we asked the personal stylists of My Wardrobe LLC, an East Side company, for their fashion and shopping expertise.
Don’t Trash the Upper East Side
Putting a garbage dump near Asphalt Green makes little sense
By Jed Garfield
I am president of Residents for Sane Trash Solutions (RFSTS), an organization of community residents committed to rational solutions for the city’s trash that are healthy and fair. The inaccuracies in Philip Orton’s recent article, “Garbage Transfer Stations and Delicate Ecosystems” (Dec. 1), caught my eye.
Orton suggested that the proposed Marine Transfer Station (MTS) on East 91st Street would cause no significant environmental impact to our densely populated, residential neighborhood. The facts clearly do not support his position.
The proposed MTS will be a 10-story, two-acre industrial facility built on the East River. It will operate 24 hours a day, six days a week and even on some Sundays. The access ramp that up to 500 garbage trucks (potentially one every three minutes) will use daily, with as many as 19 trucks at a time idling on the ramp itself, will cut Asphalt Green in half, bisecting the athletic field and the playground where thousands of children play on a weekly basis.
There is no room for doubt concerning the dramatic impact this facility will have on the health and safety of thousands of Yorkville residents, Carl Schurz Park, the East River and Gracie Mansion.
Orton claimed that rebuilding and reopening the MTS will “address the injustice of trucking most of Manhattan’s trash through low-income communities.” But this premise is untrue: Manhattan’s residential trash is not trucked through disadvantaged neighborhoods in other boroughs. All of Manhattan’s residential trash is now trucked directly to New Jersey. Even if this facility were to be built, the city would continue to bring most of Manhattan’s household trash to New Jersey because the MTS will only serve four of the borough’s eleven community boards.
Moreover, Orton claimed that the proposed MTS would “save a lot of money.” Rebuilding the existing MTS will cost New York City taxpayers a fortune. The city admits that the price tag has soared, from the $55 million projected originally to at least $125 million. That’s money far better spent on keeping our teachers, police and firefighters employed, folks who truly improve the quality of life of all New Yorkers.
Further, it’s money that does not need to be spent on garbage. Orton’s article omits the fact that the residential garbage from the East Side is only 720 tons on the average day. The proposed MTS, however, is capable of processing more than five times that amount. Why? Because the city wants to ship huge amounts of its commercial garbage there—garbage generated by all city residents (as well as suburbanites and tourists), not just residents of Manhattan. However, more than enough private waste management sites already exist and are handling that garbage.
Orton argued that the proposed MTS would “prevent” carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. However, the city admits the majority of garbage trucks accessing the new MTS would run on diesel fuel, spewing noxious fumes and leak fluids.
Because of its proximity to the FDR Drive, this will make Yorkville’s already bad air quality far worse for area residents already at risk, including the hundreds of residents of the Stanley Isaacs and Holmes Towers public housing developments, who live directly across from the proposed MTS.
Orton purports to express concern about rising water levels around Manhattan due to global warming and ocean acidification. Surely, then, it defies logic to build a garbage transfer station at East 91st Street. The proposed MTS is sited squarely in a Zone A flood plain, which was subject to evacuation during the recent Hurricane Irene and, as any motorist along the FDR Drive will attest, floods regularly even in moderate rainstorms.
Local elected officials actively oppose the proposed MTS, for these reasons and more. That’s not, as Orton would assert, “trash talking.”
For more, visit sanetrash.org.
Jed Garfield is president of Residents for Sane Trash Solutions.
Living in Manhattan is the Gift that Keeps Giving
2011 was a rock ’em, sock ’em year for politicians and celebrities
Every year, just being able to say that I live in Manhattan is my best Christmas gift. I love it here because I never know what’s going to happen next.
Judging from the events of 2011, our borough has proven once again to be a place of ups and downs, joys and disappointments, contradictions and consistencies.
Who needed Hurricane Irene, which tore through New York in August, to stir things up? There’s never a dull moment here, especially when it comes to:
Jobs
• Aside from our unfortunate colleagues who have been downsized, there were some high-profile career enders. Cathie Black (remember her?) was schools chancellor for what, five minutes, until someone realized that her magazine world skills were not transferable.
• Then there was Anthony Weiner, who tweeted himself out of work.
• Eliot Spitzer’s TV show got cancelled. (Yet Ashley Dupre still writes for the New York Post.)
• We became preoccupied with Occupy Wall Street and their rage against the machine of those 1 percenters, who are rich and horrible until they offer you a job, as one firm did to Zuccotti Park protestor Tracy Postert.
• But not everyone had a bad time with their 9-to-5s: Andrew Cuomo started a new job and Yankee Derek Jeter reached his 3,000th hit.
Celebrities
• Unless you’re an American Airlines flight attendant or a Starbucks barista whose face he’s screamed in, one-time Upper West Side (now Soho) resident Alec Baldwin seems to still be considered by many people—especially those on Saturday Night Live—as handsome, charming and funny.
• Once again, the Kardashians came to “take New York”—then they went, thank goodness.
• Along with everything else, Bernie Madoff lost his son. Luckily, not one but two books came out to chronicle what it was like to be a member of that family. (I think we’ve all got it by now: it was great when they were living large off OPM and sucked when it disappeared because their father was a crook.)
• We said goodbye (and good riddance?) to “housewives” Jill, Alex (and Simon), Cindy and Kelly. Let’s hope the new batch brings a little dignity with them.
• And in the category of local girls make good, a once-bullied outcast, Lady Gaga, gave us the holiday windows at Barneys and Ivanka Trump had a baby (aka the heiress to the throne) and filled the fashion world’s accessory void by launching a line of bags and shoes to go with her jewelry.
Society at Large
• Citizens gathered at ground zero to celebrate after U.S. forces killed Osama bin Laden; months later, they returned to mourn those we lost tragically 10 years ago.
• After much debate, New York State approved gay marriage, making many long-time same-sex couples very happy—as well as caterers, designers and other wedding industry vendors.
• Target shoppers proved moderately priced Missoni can turn otherwise sophisticated women into an angry, greedy mob. (The Versace event at H&M was a tad more civilized.)
• The Second Avenue Subway and the East 91st Street Marine Transfer Station continue to vie for the title of “Bane of Our Existence.”
• And, as if Grand Central wasn’t crowded enough, Apple opened its fifth New York location there. It’s an iMac, iPhone, iPad, iPod city; we just live in it.
I plan to savor the last week of the year (in New York City, any number of things can happen in seven days.) Even though I can’t see the future, I can tell you that, as always, there’ll be more to surprise us in 2012.
Lorraine Duffy Merkl’s debut novel Fat Chick, from The Vineyard Press, is available at amazon.com and barnesandnoble.com.
Garbage Equality
To the Editor:
Right now, about three-quarters of all of the waste that New Yorkers create goes to the South Bronx, Williamsburg-Greenpoint, and Jamaica, Queens. Even if they are less densely populated, these communities have kids, elders and other vulnerable populations and they get stuck with a far greater amount of the city’s waste (not to mention other burdens) than the East 91st Street MTS would handle. It is fundamentally unfair to put the burden on these communities because they happen to be less densely populated. There is no way to eliminate human exposure to the environmental impacts of managing waste; wherever we send it in the city it will affect people—people on truck routes and people near the facilities.
That said, the MTS system will significantly reduce those impacts over the near future. It would be great if folks could focus their energy on long-term solutions that would reduce the impact for everyone, like reducing the waste stream and improving upon the city’s woeful 15 percent recycling rate.
It is worth mentioning that the trucks going to this MTS are collection trucks picking up garbage generated in and around the UES. Eliminating the MTS will not eliminate the need for these trucks.
Gavin Kearney
Manhattan
Letters have been edited for clarity, style and brevity.
Subway Noise Too Much
To the Editor:
I had to give up my apartment on 96th Street and 2nd Avenue due to the constant noise. (“Pounding Away: Is Second Avenue the Noisiest Street on the Upper East Side?,” Dec.15) After three years of constant invasion by sound, vibration and exhaust, we gave up the neighborhood we loved and moved elsewhere. It was truly a sad day. The Second Avenue Subway is a much-needed addition to the city, but the people responsible have no desire to plan their work around residents. They will bend to the orders of the DOT, making certain transient cars are impacted only as much as necessary, but little concern goes into minimizing the long-term impact on those who call the area home.
Mark Lyon
Manhattan
Taking the Arts to New Heights
While performing “Human Fountain,” members of STREB Extreme Action leap from a three-story structure inside the Park Avenue Armory. The show, entitled Kiss the Air! is part aerial dance, part daredevil act and features six large-scale works that incorporate ziplines, ladders, trampolines, hoops, bungee cords and a pool of water.
Fairway Promises a Quieter 86th Street
The popularity of the Upper East Side’s Fairway Market, which necessitates nearly constant replenishment of food supplies via truck, is precisely the thing that some residents say has created a major nuisance on East 86th Street.
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Crime Watch
Employee Discount
An employee of a business on West End Avenue bilked her employer out of $7,000 and racked up an impressive $37,000 in credit card debt before being found out by her boss. The crime was reported to the police Dec. 13.
Safe Not So Safe
A bartender closed up shop at a popular watering hole on Columbus Avenue Dec. 15 and put the night’s earnings in a safe. When the manager opened the safe later the next morning, the money—roughly $3,000—was gone. Surveillance video showed another employee had entered the office overnight and left a few minutes later. That employee has since disappeared and no one knows where he is.
Rooftop Burglary
Some college roommates who live in an apartment on 73rd Street came home after work and school Dec. 16 to discover that their apartment had been trashed and more than $6,500 in goods had been stolen, including three Macbooks, a guitar, Canon DSLR camera and multiple amplifiers and other music-making equipment.
Police suspect the criminals came over the roof and entered through a sliding door that doesn’t lock. No one in the building saw or heard anything.
Apple Keeps Doctors Away, Brings Thieves Instead
Apple products seem to be the premier item of choice for thieves. In another burglary Dec. 16, a 22-year-old female came home to her apartment on the Upper West Side at 2:40 a.m. to discover that her apartment had been tossed and two Macbook Pros and a Sony camera, among other items, had been stolen.
Cold-Weather Bandits
A chi-chi clothing store on Columbus Avenue was robbed Dec. 17. A man and woman walked into the store; while the woman chatted with the cashier, the man grabbed three scarves and four hats off a table and shoved them into a bag. The two suspects fled on foot in opposite directions.
Ladies, Keep Your Eyes on Your Purses
Several reports were filed this week of unattended bags and wallets going missing. Police remind residents to be especially cautious during the holiday shopping season and to keep your belongings in sight.
A Game of Adult Tag
A man was talking on his cell phone outside a children’s playground near 82nd Street and Riverside Drive Dec. 14 when a robber snatched the phone out of his hand and took off running. Here’s hoping that the kids thought they were playing a game of adult tag.
