Epstein Town Hall Highlights: New Life Sciences Project, Address by D.A. Bragg

The life sciences complex would be on First Ave. and 26th Street, where the current Public Health Lab is located. Bragg mused on three issues: gun violence, surging hate crimes, and treating mental illness.

| 22 Jan 2024 | 04:08

As community members settled into the yawning auditorium at the NYU College of Dentistry on E. 24th St., State Assemblymember and town hall host Harvey Epstein (Lower East Side, Stuy Town, Kips Bay, Murray Hill) made a timely wisecrack about the weather. He was glad to be out of the frigid reaches of Albany, he said, and “happy to come home to the warmth” of his district.

State Senator Brian Kavanagh showed up at the podium to give brief remarks at one point, and he touched on everything from Mt. Sinai fitfully closing Beth Israel to “public safety moving in the right direction.” It was also Kavanagh’s birthday, a fact that Epstein could resist cracking a joke about: “I don’t know if this is a bad way to celebrate your birthday...but there are other ways that might be enjoyable too.”

The rest of the stage, of course, was reserved for a panel of local experts and developers.

One of these was Ben Baccash of the Taconic Partners, and he was letting residents know about the developer’s “Innovation East” proposal. It would be a life sciences project, spearheaded by in part Taconic’s subsidiary Elevate Research Properties. The NYU Grossman School of Medicine would be an “anchor tenant,” Baccash said. Commercial space would also feature prominently. It would be located at 26th St. & 1st Ave.

Most importantly, it would replace the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene’s 1960s-era Public Health Lab. A a new iteration of that lab began construction in Harlem in 2022, and is scheduled to be completed around 2026. The original will not be knocked down until the replacement is finished. Completion of “Innovation East” would not occur until around 2030, if it ultimately wins it way through city bureaucracy.

Baccash called 1st Avenue’s Public Health Lab “outmoded” and “frankly not suitable for modern life sciences.” He also claimed that the project’s developers, if granted the final go-ahead, would be partnering with K-12 schools in the area to “connect students and local residents with the life science community in our building, promoting awareness of life science as a career path.”

”I want to be clear to people that this is a proposal,” Harvey interjected at the end of Baccash’s remarks. “It’s our job as the people that live in this community to know about it, and to make demands,” he said.

Baccash said that Taconic would dive directly into the Uniform Land Use Review Procedure process for the project this spring, and he promised that the project would be presented to various Community Boards and other local stakeholders.

Shortly afterwards, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg showed up, in order to give an all-purpose rundown of what borough prosecutors are doing these days.

The first issue, Bragg said, is guns. “Shooting are down 30 percent the past two years I’ve been in office, and homicides are down 24 percent,” he said. However, he said that “we still have a lot of work to do on guns coming into Manhattan and into our state. Those are driving the most violence.” He endorsed youth programs as a particular effective way of preventing gun violence.

“One of the most eye-popping statistics in all of public safety is that 97 percent of our shooting victims in NYC are Black and Latino. One thing we’ve been doing in the District Attorney’s office is beefing up our support to all of our crime victims. We’ve been doing that across the board. Our usage of our counselors, our advocates, our clinicians is up 200 percent since I’ve taken office,” Bragg added.

The second issue in Manhattan, Bragg said, is the prevalence of hate crimes: “Hate crimes are up. That’s tragic. Our docket is at an all-time high.” He expressed optimism that an increase in prosecutors trained in hate crime statutes will make a positive impact on that front.

For example, Bragg said that his office had established trust with the borough’s Asian Pacific American community by “deepening their Mandarin and Cantonese language capabilities.” He believes that even though hate crime incidents are high for members of that community, “the numbers are underreported.”

The third issue on Bragg’s mind was mental health. People struggling with inadequately treated mental illness have lashed out at passerby in recent years in NYC, after all. He slammed the “brokenness of our healthcare system,” saying “you don’t need to be a doctor” to tell that something is wrong.

Bragg said that his office has invested in helping mentally ill people where he meets them, which is via the legal system. He touted a partnership with The Fortune Society, a reentry group for the recently incarcerated, saying that it will help people leaving arraignment get what they need. “If it’s food, they’re gonna find them food on the spot. If it’s treatment, they’re gonna connect them to treatment. If it’s housing, they’re gonna connect them with emergency housing,” Bragg clarified.

He finally thanked the audience, saying that “it was this kind of engagement that’s helping to drive our safety.”