What was once an obscure stretch of land known as “Welfare Island,” home to smallpox cases, is being reimagined as a monument to the president who led Americans out of the Great Depression.

FDR Four Freedom Park is expected to open in Fall 2012

Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Park, expected to open fall 2012 at the tip of Roosevelt Island was first envisioned by the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute in the early 1970s. The concept was brought to architect Louis I. Kahn, who worked on the Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven, Conn., and Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, Calif.

Kahn drafted plans for the park and made several drawings but died in 1974 in a men’s room at Penn Station. His death, coupled with the economic turmoil of the times and Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller, a major advocate of the project, being called to Washington, D.C., to serve as vice president under Gerald Ford, led to its abandonment.

After four decades, the project began anew with backing from former U.S. Ambassador William vanden Heuvel, who found out that the governing force on the island, the Roosevelt Island Operating Committee, was planning to build another park on the 4.5-acre stretch of land.

The exterior of a room at the end of park will feature a niche housing a sculpture of Franklin Roosevelt’s head made by sculptor Jo Davidson in 1933.

The four freedoms that are celebrated in the park are freedom of speech and expression, freedom of worship, freedom from want and freedom from fear. These ideals will be illustrated on the walls behind the niche.

The walls of the room are 12-foot-tall granite slabs weighing 36 tons apiece. The monolithic slabs are spaced an inch apart and the walls inside the space are polished so that reflected light will play on the floor and walls of the room.

Opposite the entrance is an open window that displays a view of the East River and the United Nations.

Kahn designed the project around a room because a room is a place where people meet and trade stories, where “secrets are told and treaties signed,” said Sally Minard, CEO of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Park LLC.

“His concept of architecture is that everything starts in a room,” Minard said.

The park is shaped like the bow of a ship, with Kahn’s room at the tip. The room is a constant focal point, a key design by Kahn, and is visible from the park’s garden and the flanking promenades.

The garden will be lined by two allées lined with 150 linden trees. The allées will feature inscriptions called Roosevelt Legacy Chapters, or Chapters of History. The project will also feature a digital education program that will turn a stroll into a lesson in Roosevelt-era history. Using their smart phones, patrons of the park will be able to call up mini-documentaries about each story inscribed upon the park’s granite parapets.

Below the garden are two promenades that meet at the entrance to the room. The banks of the promenade are pieced together by granite in a fashion that resembles a puzzle. At the entrance to the memorial is a grand staircase hidden behind a jardinière that will hold five copper beech trees.

The cost of the project so far is $50 million.

By Megan Bungeroth

In most emergency rooms in the city—and in the state and across the country—children who come in with psychological symptoms are treated much the same as adults. An 8-year-old suffering from undiagnosed attention deficit hyperactivity disorder who has acted up in school, maybe out of frustration over falling behind in his work, and thrown a chair at his teacher might be held in a psych ward with schizophrenic grown men if the ER doesn’t have the resources on hand to treat him immediately. A suicidal teen brought in by her concerned parents might not be able to see a child psychiatrist who can understand the nuances and specific troubles of the developing adolescent brain.

Dr. Judith Joseph left, with Dr. Jennifer Havens, inside the CPEP

It’s a nationwide problem, with only about 6,000 practicing child psychiatrists in the country, compared to over 70,000 adult psychiatrists. Emergency rooms struggle to diagnose and treat children who come in needing immediate psychiatric care, and many end up unnecessarily admitted to the hospital, sometimes in the same wards as adults.

With a dedicated staff and a grant from New York State, Bellevue Hospital Center is working to create a different option for children with psychiatric emergencies. At its Children’s Comprehensive Psychiatric Emergency Program (CPEP), a specially trained team of doctors, nurses and social workers sees kids as young as 3 and as old as 17 with a broad range of psychological problems.

The program is exclusively intended to help children and often succeeds in catching psychiatric problems long before they might be addressed in the traditional hospital system. The program sees over 2,000 patients every year.

Dr. Jennifer Havens, director and chief of service in the department of child and adolescent psychiatry, said she’s been working her entire career to make psychiatric treatment better for kids. One of the reasons she believes so strongly in the CPEP model for children is because without it, kids often fall through the cracks or get unnecessary treatment.
“First of all, a medical ER isn’t a safe place for psychiatric patients. You go to the ER if you’re dangerous to yourself or you want to kill yourself or others,” Havens said.

At Bellevue, the children’s center is sectioned off as a separate unit. It’s brightly lit and clean, with flat-screen televisions and a consciously minimalist aesthetic of bare walls and simple furnishings. There is nothing that might be torn off, thrown or used as a weapon. It’s entirely secure and constantly monitored. Police officers who enter the unit must empty their ammunition and fire their weapons into a sand pipe to show that they’re not loaded.

“The other problem is, there aren’t usually psychiatrists just sitting there waiting for people to come in,” Havens said. “For kids and adolescents, what generally ends up happening—not just in New York but all over the country; this is a national problem—is that they’re seen in either pediatric or medical ERs,” often by people trained to treat adults.

“Children are not just little adults—they have other issues that cannot be treated in the way that adults can be,” said Dr. Angel Mendoza Jr., an assistant commissioner for child and family health at the city’s Administration for Children’s Services who acts as its medical director. He said that having children in their care go to Bellevue instead of a regular ER makes a world of difference.

The agency runs The Children’s Center across the street from Bellevue, where they hold children who have been removed from their homes and are awaiting foster care placement.

“We run the gamut of different mental health issues, but what is common among all of them is the history of psychological or emotional trauma,” said Mendoza.

Children come to Bellevue through referrals from other hospitals, are brought in by the NYPD or ACS, through the school system or with their parents. Havens said that often the children are simply very angry—and rightfully so—and need to talk to someone who can understand them. They are able to hold children for evaluation from 24 to 72 hours without admitting them to the hospital, which is crucial for the child’s potential treatment and recovery.

“A lot of kids get admitted to the hospital [in other ERs] because they need to go somewhere else, they need to get immediate intervention,” Havens said.

She said that many children can be treated within the 72-hour window, avoiding a traumatic hospitalization. If young patients are hospitalized, they are admitted to a separate ward with 30 beds. Mendoza pointed out that there are risks beyond just emotional scarring or physical danger if a child is placed in a psychiatric ward with adults.

“There are other kinds of risk that may not be immediately obvious to people,” said Mendoza. “For example, a lot of these adults are involved in drug trafficking. You may have a youth [who is] out of the home and would be very susceptible to drug trafficking and even prostitution.”

Havens said, “Most of the kids that come to us are very upset. They’re either angry or sad; sometimes they’re psychotic. It’s a real emergency if you have a kid who wants to kill themselves or wants to kill you or is not going to school or is hallucinating.”

People with depressive mental illnesses like schizophrenia often present the first symptoms as adolescents, Havens said. The average time between a child presenting symptoms and receiving a diagnosis for that type of mental illness is three to four years, a time during which they aren’t getting vital treatment.

“These kids would go to medical ERs, get lousy care in the wrong environment and get admitted, regardless of what they needed,” she said.

While the CPEP program is expensive, the goal is to cut down on psych admissions, which actually saves hospital expenses in the long term.

“If [a child] were in a regular ER, not in a CPEP, they would have probably just gotten admitted, whereas it’s cheaper to have them observed in a CPEP,” because it tends to be for a shorter period of time, said Dr. Judith Joseph, a fellow in child and adolescent psychiatry midway through her rotation in the Children’s CPEP.

The program is also designed to put agitated parents at ease and help them cope with their child’s condition.

“If you put yourself in the place of a child who is coming in for depression or suicide or psychosis, and the parents imagine going to an adult ER versus what we have downstairs, which is colorful, friendly—just the environment alone is therapeutic,” Joseph said. Havens added that the remote controls for the TVs often work as well as sedatives to calm a child down.

Bellevue also sponsors follow-up care through an interim clinic, where patients can return for follow-up visits while they arrange for more permanent care, and through the Home-Based Crisis Intervention service, which brings specially trained social workers to follow up in a child’s home and help parents manage their symptoms and care.

“We have a place for you to be, it’s comfortable, you can play on the Wii, we know how to work with your family, we can make the right plan for you,” she said of Bellevue. “If you don’t need an admission you’re not going to get one, because we can take care of you. It’s fairly basic, but it’s shockingly rare.”

Judy Norsigian, executive director of Our Bodies, Ourselves, will speak at the annual V-Day party at The Fourth Universalist Society at 160 Central Park West. The free event raises funds for charity and spreads awareness about violence toward women and girls worldwide. The event will take place at 6 p.m. Feb. 13.

V-Day is a global activist movement to better the plight of girls and women around the globe suffering from sexual, physical and psychological abuse. Ten percent of the funds raised at the event will go to the Spotlight Campaign on Haiti.

This is the fourth year the church is hosting a series of V-Day events to educate the public on women’s health as well as raise money for organizations that involve the well-being of the female population of New York.

The beneficiaries of the Valentine’s Day event this year are Men Can Stop Rape and the Center Against Domestic Violence, two organizations that the church has continuously supported. Last year, the church raised $20,000 for these organizations.

The internationally renowned Norsigian, a women’s health advocate and writer on a wide range of women’s health concerns, including contraception, sexually transmitted infections, women and health care reform and other topics, will be the keynote speaker.

Norsigian has been a pivotal part of Our Bodies Ourselves (OBOS), also known as the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, a nonprofit, public interest women’s health education, advocacy and consulting organization.

The first publication of the bestselling women’s health book Our Bodies, Ourselves was in 1971, which subsequently launched the nonprofit of the same name. Last October, Our Bodies, Ourselves celebrated its 40th anniversary by releasing a newly revised, updated edition of the book addressing current issues such as changes to the health care system and safer sex. Other topics such as birth and pregnancy are constantly revised to reflect the latest technology and research.

Norsigian, who has been with the book since its first printing, will address the attendees on the importance of women’s health, its current status in the world and what the community can do to help. She will also be sure to address the Susan G. Komen for the Cure controversy—the organization’s indecision about funding breast screening and mammogram tests for Planned Parenthood.

“What Komen and the evangelicals and Republican Rep. Cliff Stearns, who launched the pointless political inquiry, and the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops are really mad at Planned Parenthood about is this: Part of what they do is help people plan parenthood. They support birth control. In some cases, they provide it—like your corner drugstore, but better,” she wrote with Ellen Shaffer on the OBOS blog. “We might start to learn what it will take to mobilize an outcry to really stop the attacks on women’s health.”

To register for the free event, visit 4thuvdayvalentinesparty.eventbrite.com.

It happens once a decade and it’s never an easy process. In accordance with the state Constitution, the state Legislature is currently in the process of creating new district lines for the Assembly, state Senate and congressional representatives.

The Legislative Task Force on Demographic Research and Reapportionment (LATFOR) has just released a set of maps outlining the proposed new districts for the state Legislature, and local elected officials are up in arms over what they call a seriously partisan and severely flawed process that heavily favors Republicans, who hold a slim majority in the senate.

LATFOR consists of six members, four legislators and two nonlegislators who are appointed by the temporary president of the Senate, the speaker of the Assembly and the minority leaders of the Senate and Assembly. It uses Census data from 2010 to redraw lines in order to reflect population shifts. While the Assembly must maintain 150 districts, according to the state’s Constitution, the number of senators may shift. LATFOR has proposed adding a 63rd Senate seat in upstate New York that would encompass portions of five different counties and has served as a flashpoint of criticism from Democrats and good government groups who call the district a bad case of gerrymandering an extraneous Republican-leaning district in order to preserve their majority.

“The maps that came out are typical and reflect no sense of the push for a nonpartisan reform of redistricting,” said Richard Emory, an attorney who was involved in litigation over the last set of redistricting lines in 2003-2004. “They are purely political. They are obviously an attempt of what we call the unholy alliance of the Assembly and the state Senate by using the majority of each body to favor the majority.”

The proposed districts, especially for the Senate, have been criticized by Democrats as stringing together certain communities by tenuous geographical connections and separating others that should be included in the same district.
“I think that this is not a proposed actual redistricting plan, it’s a political scheme that the Republicans actually put out knowing that everyone would scream, ‘Are you kidding, is this a joke?’” said State Sen. Liz Krueger, whose district would shift considerably and encompass parts of the west side of Manhattan and a small sliver of eastern Midtown if the current maps are approved. “They are likely to already have plan B in a back pocket, and they will come out with plan B after these nine hearings that they’ve agreed to have.”

Emory said they’re overpopulating and packing downstate Democratic districts in order to create more Republican seats. “That’s why the shapes are so peculiar, because they’re picking voters instead of voters picking representatives,” he said.
Gov. Andrew Cuomo has vowed to veto the lines unless they are created by an independent panel. If he does, it’s likely that the case would have to go through the courts.

“Since the first day I came to the Assembly, I have been a supportive of independent redistricting,” said Upper East Side Assembly Member Micah Kellner. “Any time an elected official has the ability to pick his votes, that’s a subversion of democracy.”

Kellner said that even though his own district would not change much under the current proposal, he supports the governor’s veto promise and hopes there will be major reform before they are brought for a vote by the Legislature.
“Some of these districts are connected by a highway, connected by a shoreline. They are purposefully connecting some districts while avoiding others,” Kellner said. “I think the public realizes the ridiculousness of this.”

Public hearings are scheduled to continue around the state through Feb. 16. Many expect LATFOR to release new maps based on feedback some time after that, at which point the Legislature will have to approve them before they go to the governor.

Senate Democrats have already filed a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the 63rd Senate seat, and other lawsuits may surface before the hearings are concluded.

By Megan Bungeroth

Those who live in the vicinity of the Second Avenue Subway construction have been concerned for several years about the potential effects that the constant blasting and construction may have on residents’ health.

Second Avenue Construction

A few weeks ago, MTA Capital Construction released the results of an air quality study that monitored construction activity between East 69th and East 87th streets along Second Avenue. While the report essentially concludes that there is not much to be worried about, local residents aren’t necessarily convinced, and many expressed their skepticism at Community Board 8’s Second Avenue Subway task force meeting last Wednesday night.

MTA Capital Construction president Michael Horodniceanu told residents at the meeting that they have been working to improve conditions since before the study came out.

“We listened to your concerns about smoke and fumes,” Horodniceanu said, noting that they have initiated dust control measures and better smoke ventilation and worked to seal off as much of the dust as possible. “I think we’ve improved the dust and fume situation considerably.”

Over 100 people attended the meeting to listen to the report’s findings laid out in detail and voice their concerns over its conclusions. The study was conducted by consulting firm Parsons Brinckerhoff, and it tracked pollutants from 10 monitoring sites over a 28-day period, collecting 3.3 million points of data. Guido Schattanek, the senior environmental engineer who wrote the study, was on hand to go point by point through the data.

The study focused on particulate matter of two sizes; PM10, which means equal to or smaller than 10 microns, and PM2.5, equal to or smaller than 2.5 microns. It also tracked a number of pollutants, including carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide, ammonia and hydrogen sulfide.

The results of the study surprised some residents. According to the findings, which were verified by the Environmental Protection Agency, none of the pollutants registered at levels that would be harmful to residents’ health.

Assembly Member Dan Quart, whose district encompasses the construction, let the community know on Wednesday night that he would be introducing a bill that would require more frequent and regulated testing of the air around the blasting sites.

“My concern is that you’re looking at a 28-day period of a construction project that’s been going on for three years,” Quart said.

“There is no semi-annual or annual means to check the air quality. You wouldn’t accept saying that you only come in and inspect an air shaft every three or four years,” he said.

The bill would require the state Department of Environmental Conservation to conduct regular studies of the air around the project and respond accordingly to the findings.

“Right now, the community’s only avenue is essentially only the MTA hiring a third party,” Quart said. “That’s not good public policy.”

Quart said he worked with Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer to craft the legislation. Stringer also attended the meeting to encourage residents and city agencies to work to get real solutions, noting that residents have been complaining about dust, debris and unpleasant odors related to the construction for years now.

“We have to work together to keep small businesses and improve the air quality,” Stringer said, asking for support of Quart’s bill.

The good news for residents is that there is an end date for the blasting, which Horodniceanu said was already 60 percent complete. “Blasting in the main cavern will be done this summer,” he said. In April, they will begin blasting at East 86th Street, which is expected to last 15 to 19 months, putting the end at November 2013.

By Sean Creamer

Although garbage collection is a dirty job, the old saying goes that someone has to do it. On that note, garbage must also go somewhere. That “somewhere” may soon be the old Marine Transfer Station (MTS) at East 91st Street and York Avenue, though a Hail Mary pass from Rep. Carolyn Maloney and the efforts of some tenacious residents might derail the plan before it gets started.  

The Old Marine Transfer Station near Asphalt Green

Last week, the city announced that it was hosting a bid to construct and reopen the MTS, despite the fact that the Army Corp of Engineers is still considering a permit request and mitigation plan by the New York City Department of Sanitation over building the proposed station.

The Army Corp of Engineers has to approve changes to navigable waterways, a process that is notoriously slow. In the application for the project, Maloney claimed the city provided outdated information, including environmental samples that didn’t show the presence of fish in the area, only larvae.

“Local fishermen and the State Department of Environmental Conservation both say that the area around the proposed MTS is teeming with fish—including Atlantic striped bass—and is one of the best fishing spots around,” Maloney said.
She asked the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) to look into reports that the area around the MTS is a striped bass habitat. While the NMFS doesn’t take an up or down vote on Army Corp issues, it does advise them.

“Under the Magnuson-Stevens Act, they are required to study the impact of the MTS on the essential fish habitats in the East River in consultation with the National Marine Fisheries Service,” Maloney said.

The striped bass is protected under federal law. The East River was traditionally a home to the fish, but decades of pollution caused them to disappear. As the river has been cleaned up over the last 30 years, an increasing amount of marine life has returned to the Upper East Side.

The city has yet to provide the updated information to the Army Corp of Engineers. Until it does, several local representatives think it’s too soon for them to be calling for proposals to build the MTS. The city’s new proposal calls for a greatly expanded footprint on the structure that is already there, which would expand over the East River.

In response to the city’s announcement of the proposal for the MTS, Maloney and several Upper East Side representatives, including State Sen. Liz Krueger and Assembly Member Micah Kellner, came together to spell out why the station would have a negative impact on the community and East River.

“The city needs a permit from the Army Corps of Engineers to build over the East River. They don’t have it. And, in our view, they shouldn’t get it. It is clear that this project is an environmental disaster and that it will exert a negative impact on essential fish habitats in the East River,” Maloney said at the event.

“Our community has been clear in our opposition to the construction of this facility, but now residents of the East Side have reason to be doubly outraged,” said Krueger. “In soliciting bids before completing a host of other necessary steps, the city government has attempted to jump the gun and short-circuit its responsibility to safeguard the East River environment and our communities.”

Another reason Maloney said the MTS shouldn’t be built in the neighborhood is that it is in the middle of what the city has designated as a “Hurricane Evacuation Zone A,” which is under the greatest risk of flooding from a storm surge.
“In the case of a flood, the MTS would flood not only into the East River but into the community as well,” she said.
The original station that stands on the location was built in the 1960s and was closed in the early 1990s. When it was built, it was situated next to a factory that produced asphalt and the water in the East River was not as clean as it is today.

Since then, the neighborhood surrounding the proposed site has flourished. Long gone is the factory that gave Asphalt Green Park its name. Located nearby now are two schools, two public housing developments and a senior center that have popped up in the neighborhood.

The city has claimed in the past that the plan to reopen the MTS is part of an effort to redress the disproportionate number of garbage transfer stations in low-income communities.

According to a study done by the Macaulay Honors Society at CUNY on the MTS, these facilities have been located in low-income areas, such as Williamsburg or the South Bronx, to which trucks drive trash from Manhattan. Over half of the existing stations are in Brooklyn, where the median income for households is $40,000. Household incomes near the MTS in the South Bronx are even lower; $21,000 is the average.

The mayor’s office and City Council Speaker Christine Quinn’s office didn’t return calls or messages seeking comment.
Peter Sapienza, a lieutenant in the Fire Department and 25-year resident of the community, feels that due to higher than normal air pollution on the Upper East Side, the city should rethink its proposal.

“New York City has the highest rates of asthma due to the No. 6 fuel oil that most buildings’ boilers use,” he said. The Upper East Side has the highest number of buildings using No. 6 oil in the city and that, on top of the new station, he said will create an even more polluted environment for neighborhood residents.

On an unusually warm winter day, Suzanne Antonelli, a grandmother, sat with her grandkids at Asphalt Green Park. She voiced her concern over how traffic to the waste station would make an already dangerous intersection even worse. “It is just going to congest it so much more,” she said. “I just don’t know where Bloomberg’s head is with this whole thing.”

By Anam Baig

The U.N. International Holocaust Commemoration Sabbath took place Saturday, Jan. 21 at the Park East Synagogue, where the year’s first snowfall marked the memory of the six million who lost their lives during the Holocaust.

U.N Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon

Nearly 200 people attended the event, including 63 diplomats from organizations such as the U.N., UNESCO and the E.U., representing 33 countries. Addressing the congregation were U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon and U.N. General Assembly President Nassir Abdulaziz Al-Nasser. The commemoration was led by Rabbi Arthur Schneier, spiritual leader of Park East Synagogue for over 40 years, who is a Holocaust survivor.

The U.N.’s International Holocaust Remembrance Day is Jan. 27, and this year the General Assembly will remember children who perished during the Holocaust.

But at the Sabbath, Jan. 21, multitudes of ethnicities and religions gathered in a house of worship to exalt the countless victims of Nazi rule and to remind themselves that there is continuing injustice in the world. The event also marked the anniversary of the closing of Auschwitz, the biggest Nazi concentration camp that claimed the lives of over 1 million people.

The Sabbath prayers were made early in the morning and the diplomats streamed in around 10 a.m. Despite the snow, many people showed up to offer their prayers and support for the victims of hate and discrimination.

Countries as different as Australia, Korea, Sweden and Morocco were present at this commemoration. Every man donned a kippah before entering the synagogue, symbolizing their respect for the Jewish faith and for the house of worship that they entered.

The commemoration ceremony began with Schneier addressing the congregation. He asked all of the Holocaust survivors in the room to rise. Although there were only a few scattered amongst the many in attendance, it was a powerful moment to see these aged survivors shakily stand up and reveal their brutal pasts.

“Hear the cry of the oppressed,” he urged the congregation. “Silence and indifference by the free world undermines the survival of the victims.”

Ban also expressed his feeling about the event. In his address, he thanked Schneier for continuing to teach the world about the important lessons of the Holocaust and for being a voice for interfaith peace and understanding.

“The Holocaust affected so many different groups and so many professions that it is vital to reach new audiences with this history,” he said in his speech. “Our work for human dignity will underpin all we do. And our memory of the years when that dignity was torn from so many millions—so fast, so brutally—is likewise part of the bedrock from which we operate.

Let us all work together today to realize human dignity for all and to realize the U.N.’s full potential in building the future we want.”

A hospital renowned for cancer research and treatment is finding itself at odds with the Upper East Side community as some residents claim that their own health and well-being is being threatened by a planned new facility.

Memorial Sloan-Kettering plans to construct a new outpatient cancer surgery center on York Avenue near East 61st Street and is seeking several variances from the Department of Buildings in order to make adjustments to the as-of-right allowances for the site. Both the as-of-right plan and the requested adjusted plan, however, would build right up to the lot line windows of 440 E. 62nd St., a residential co-op building with 144 units.

“We have three points of light coming into our apartment: the kitchen, the living room and the bedroom,” said Ross Maller, a resident of the building. “They’re looking to make it so that it covers every sunlight point in every apartment on the south side of the building.”

Dozens of residents attended the meeting to express their dismay over the hospital’s plans, decrying the entire project, regardless of the variances sought. Since the lot line windows in the co-op are technically illegal, according to current building codes, the adjacent property owner is allowed to build right up to those windows, essentially blocking them.

A few people spoke in support of the new center, which will be the Memorial Hospital for Cancer and Allied Diseases and will specialize in complex outpatient cancer surgeries, allowing patients to return home after about 20 hours instead of several days or weeks.

Alex Zimmer, who lives on East 84th Street, said that he’s been a cancer patient himself for close to nine years, and he welcomes the new facility to the neighborhood.

“It’s much better to be treated within 24 hours, and it’s much better for my family who drops me off and picks me up to be able to do that in the same day,” Zimmer said. The crowd was so heated that a few people booed him.

Shelly Friedman, an attorney for Memorial Sloan-Kettering, presented the hospital’s case. If the hospital were to build without the variances, it would be a taller, slimmer building with 20 stories—336 feet tall, including mechanical equipment on the roof. But they need more square footage per floor, Friedman said, in order to accommodate the needs of the surgical suites as well as comply with federal and state guidelines for hospital safety and building codes.

“We actually really tried to make the as-of-right building work,” Friedman said. It would be incredibly inefficient and costly, he said, to spread patients out over eight floors, which the taller building would necessitate, rather than three, under is the new plan. Each of the twelve planned surgical suites requires a certain amount of space, and doctors and hospital staff need access to certain equipment on each floor.

But residents of 440 E. 62nd St. were not persuaded; even though the as-of-right building would also block their windows in 57 units, they insist that at least there would be slightly more space between them and the new construction if the variances were to be denied and building were narrower.

Several residents, clearly distressed at the impending project that will change their homes forever, even tried to turn back the clock, demanding to know why Sloan-Kettering needs to build on that particular site and suggesting that they instead scrap the project and move it up to business-starved Harlem, where the land is cheaper.

“East Harlem is ripe for this kind of development,” said board member David Rosenstein.

Others expressed concern over increased traffic on York Avenue and issues that will arise with construction, like noise and dust. Friedman said that the hospital will meet with local residents to ensure that their concerns are addressed.

Many implored the board to hold off on making any official recommendations, though Friedman said the hospital would proceed with or without a resolution. The board decided to hold the vote and discuss the project in depth before making a decision.

An earlier version of this story incorrectly attributed a quote about development in East Harlem to board member Barry Schneider. The speaker was board member David Rosenstein.

By Megan Finnegan Bungeroth and Sean Creamer

Every neighborhood has a few. Even on the generally well-maintained Upper East Side, some buildings, whether from construction, neglect or outright abandonment, cause neighbors to flinch when they see them. We asked local residents and community leaders to spot the worst eyesores in the neighborhood.

154 E. 64th St.

302 E. 95th St.
This building is located on 95th Street right off of Second Avenue, nestled between a parking garage and an apartment building with a home restoration store on ground level. The dismal condition of the structure can be seen in the rotting windowsills, the fading bricks and the rusting steel sheets that cover the windows. A particularly hairy detail is that there is an old scaffold that acts as an awning to a makeshift neighborhood dumpster.

The sidewalk under the scaffold is laden with a collection of broken glass, broken furniture, piles of garbage bags and several water bottles filled with urine. This, apparently, is because 2nd Avenue Subway construction has blocked the Department of Sanitation’s access to the sidewalks.

One of the buildings that has been using this space as a landfill is the Carnegie East House at 1844 2nd Ave. John Maloney, the facility manager of the building, said that theirs was not the only building instructed to do this, and that even people from 93rd and 94th streets have begun unloading their trash at the site.

“The building is pretty quiet, but from time to time I do see broken bottles, so someone has to be hanging out there at night,” said Jessica Taylor, an area resident for two years and a bartender at the Merrion Square Bar and Restaurant.
The building has been unused for over 10 years, according to some residents’ accounts. Beth Markowitz, who works for Merlot Management, manages the building situated right next door to the shanty and said, “the building has been abandoned for God knows how long.” She said that besides being unsightly, the building has hurt property values and has become a host to rodents.

Although the building lies in a state of disrepair, it does have an owner, according to Eric Bederman of the New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development. The building is under the ownership of  Daniel Polychroniades, who resides in Jackson Heights while his property sits unoccupied, collecting trash and posing a danger to the public, according to Bederman.

“We did put up scaffolding per an emergency declaration from the Department of Buildings because cracking in the brick and mortar of the facade posed a hazard to pedestrians on the sidewalk below,” Bederman said in an email.
The building has 12 complaints that date back to 1995, five of which concern the structural integrity of the building, according to the Department of Buildings’ database.

Considering the current state of the building’s facade, it is not hard to see why Polychroniades has allowed the building to stew, with no end in sight to its vacant and decrepit state.

1493 1st Ave.
Rising from the depths of sub-par building care oblivion is a storefront that sits on the corner of 1st Avenue at East 78th Street,  a tenant and building owner’s worst nightmare.

The building stands alone with a dark red facade that is fading in some places and looms above an empty storefront filled to the brim with a rag-tag assortment of items. On the side of the building where tenants enter, there is graffiti tagged across the wall and a boarded-up window at ground level.

Aside from a multitude of beer and cigarette advertisements displayed behind shuttered windows, safety cones and several other traffic items that have made the desolate shop their home.

According to the Department of Buildings, the structure is listed under the ownership of Hiyee Realty Corp or Katherine Chou for other complaints. They were not available for comment.

Although the shop sits vacant, the residential apartments above it have been a constant source of complaint for residents. Over the years, the property owner has had a penchant for working on the building sans permits, prompting over 30 complaints ranging from the basic working without a permit to the extreme of having a deteriorating facade with bricks fall off the building. Even attempting to fix an issue has led to complaints, such as the one filed due to inadequate scaffolding to protect pedestrians from falling debris.

Besides the complaints, there have been several hazardous-level violations issued by the Environmental Control Board concerning the rotting of the exterior of the building and malfunctions of the boiler, although of all eight violations, only one actually penalized the owners.

The combination of a lack of commercial renters and a lax approach to building codes has landed this potential real estate gold mine in a bind, thus leaving it in the limbo of eyesores from hell.

249 and 251 E. 62nd St.
and 1183 2nd Ave.
To the naked eye, the only thing these properties have in common are their proximity and their ugliness. 249 and 251 E. 62nd St. sit empty and crumbling on an otherwise pristine block, where a townhouse directly across the street recently sold for $3.85 million. The garden plots outside the ground floor windows are piled with dirt, sticks and trash, and the doorways are used as receptacles for beer bottles and other garbage.

Around the corner, 1183 2nd Ave. retains the remnants of a forgotten storefront, with the apartments above sitting in empty squalor. Between the properties is an occupied building and an vacant lot.

“[These] two buildings have had unsightly scaffolding for a great long time,” said local resident and Community Board 8 member Barry Schneider. “And around the corner, on the west side of Second Avenue, is a vacant lot with a decrepit fence. These sites have been eyesores for several years now.”

All three of these blighted buildings are actually owned by the same company, Moluka Enterprises. Little information can be found about the owner, but residents speculate that the owner is simply sitting on the properties, waiting to demolish them. In the meantime, they continue to diminish the aesthetics of the neighborhood and receive Department of Buildings and Environmental Control Board violations. When inspectors responded to the latest violation at 1183 2nd Ave. in 2010, they found “cardboard boxes filled with combustible material from floor to ceiling, ceiling missing tiles throughout,” on the second floor.

There are several hazardous violations recorded for 251 E. 62nd St. and complaints dating back to 1990, when a resident complained of falling debris. For now, most of the violations appear to be answered, but the buildings continue to sit, unused and in danger of only getting worse.

154 E. 64th St.
Sometimes an eyesore is in the eye of the beholder. This property has been singled out by some as a hideous monstrosity, while others call it a welcome addition of charm to the neighborhood.

“The window sills are coming off the window frames, the wires are illegal, the storefront is illegal, the awnings are illegal,” said Susan Mindel, a neighbor and member of the East 64th Street Lexington to Third Avenue Neighbors Association. “The door is painted aqua.”

Mindel said that the owner of the pink-hued building that has been the source of her block’s ire for years also owns the space that rents to the diner Eat Here Now, and that at one time the owner allowed the restaurant to use sidewalk space illegally and is generally lax in adhering to city guidelines.

“We’ve tried to get him to update his property; he’s not interested,” said Mindel. “There’s wiring all over the façade; that’s not legal. Plus, all the paint’s peeling.”

On a recent weekday, Upper East Side resident Gloria Abrams was walking by the townhouse. When asked what she thought of the building, she called it “lovely.”

“I’d like to see it remain,” she said. “It fits with what’s around it.”

Another passerby, Charles Scribner, regarded the building with more disdain.

“Let me put it this way—if it were to be taken down, my disappointment would be under control,” he said. Commenting on the “rather Mediterranean color” and pointing out the parts that seems to be crumbling away, he said, “It just needs a facelift.”