Category: News and Opinion

I read recently that federal officials are creating a new management plan for Gateway National Recreation Area, a National Park Service area located mostly at scattered locations in New York City. With a series on America’s National Parks set to air on PBS, I thought I would make a suggestion, in the spirit of past Labor Day weekend recreation-oriented posts like this one.  Although it is actually one of the five most visited national park areas in the U.S., most of the visitors are going to various scattered historical sites Gateway is responsible for, such as the Statue of Liberty. And most of the recent effort by parks officials has been directed at preserving the wetlands of Jamaica Bay, an important place for birds well known to birdwatchers. Park documents make it clear that preserving and making accessible historic sites and important natural resources are its most important goals.

But Gateway also includes large land areas taken off New York City’s hands in the 1970s, when the city was broke, in the hopes of bringing in federal money and reversing neglect. (Gateway was created as a “national recreation area” under coordinated management in 1972). These areas are really local parks, not “national” in any sense, one reason I doubt Gateway will even be mentioned in the PBS series. Included are Riis Park beach in Queens and nearby Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn, huge and in some cases under-used areas with many buildings in disrepair. My suggestion is a new “national role” for those these areas: as a point of contract between rural and small town America and New York City. It is a suggestion consistent with two assumptions: unlike New York City’s local parks Gateway should have a national role; and we Americans are broke, individually and collectively.

Sitting down to write about the recent outbreaks of hate speech embroiling Brad Lander’s City Council race, I suddenly was reminded of Mark Green and included within that article a relevant digression about Mr. Green’s travails during his 2001 campaign for Mayor.

During Mr. Green’s 2006 race for State Attorney General, I concluded that those travails, and an even more ancient incident involving Andrew Cuomo, were sucking all the air out of the room concerning discussions of both men, and I wrote an article discussing the antiquated allegations, such as they were.

With the end of this week came news of two potentially game-changing events which might influence the results of the endlessly fascinating race for the 39^th Councilmanic-depressive. The first was the endorsement of the New York Times, the second was an outbreak of hate speech.

The intended beneficiary of each of these events was Brad Lander; the former event will surely inure to Lander’s benefit, while the latter, whatever its intent has become the occasion for damage control.

Yesterday the Flatbush Life Newspaper -with an aged tradition in the area's politics- endorsed me for the 40th city council seat. The newspaper had this to say: "Two and a half years ago, a whopping ten candidates ran for the open City Council seat in the 40th district. This year, that number is down to three -the incumbent, and two community activists with long records of involvement in the neighborhood. While all three candidates are worthy, the one who stands out is Rock Hackshaw.

Hackshaw -well known to many as a political blogger, who has spent upwards of three decades involved in neighborhood issues- brings to his candidacy a strong intellect and a fresh perspective on community concerns, from health care to education.

The New York Post printed a few columns this week criticizing the political career of the late Senator Ted Kennedy.

That’s fair enough. A conservative paper shouldn’t change its views about the issues because of a death.

But something that two of the columnists wrote stood out to me, as just another example of conservatives claiming to speak for the working class without evidence.

Howie Carr, a Boston Herald columnist and talk radio gas bag, a prep school graduate, who masquerades as the voice of the working class and Kyle Smith, a regular Post reviewer and columnist, both made the argument that Kennedy, in Carr’s words – “When it came to the white-ethnic working class from which his father came, Kennedy just plain didn't get it”.

He was undoubtedly a lion but, troubled by the unreserved lionization being displayed upon my Facebook page, I posted not a dissent, but a partial concurrence:“ A young man of seemingly little promise, thrust into the spotlight on the money and accomplishments of others, he grew up in public to become one his generation's legislative giants, practiced in the arts of the possible, including compromise, while still also serving as the inspirational national voice of the voiceless–a pretty neat trick, since the roles are generally mutually exclusive.

Of course, if he'd only grown up a bit sooner, we might have been spared Nixon's second term, and maybe even the Reagan revolution. I'll leave the rest unspoken, but we all know what the rest is.

A complicated legacy. Let's acknowledge the greatness, but let us not fool ourselves.”

Sometimes incompetent government has its advantages. I was asked to research the convention center situation while at City Planning in the 1990s, and found out pretty quickly that the problem wasn't the size of the Javits Convention Center. It was the number, cost and availability of hotel rooms and the lack of transit airport access. And yet the city and state decided to go full speed ahead with a doubling of the size of the Convention Center. Fortunately, they were unable to pull it off. Meanwhile, other state and local governments overbuilt convention center space, and are desperately trying to attract a shrinking number of conventions by cutting prices and losing money.

Other state and local governments have also placed much of their hope for economic salvation on casinos, but while New York has pursued gambling at race tracks, it has consistently failed to make a deal to allow casinos elsewhere. Meanwhile, casinos elsewhere are running into financial problems, and pretty soon state and local governments will have to cut the financial benefits they get from gambling to attract gamblers, while still dealing with the social costs.

Or would he advise them to live elsewhere? That isn’t a liberal or conservative question. I’m open to argument on whether everyone should pay more into the community and get more out, or pay less in and expect less — although I’m more and more leaning toward the latter, moving away from a prior tendency toward the former, the more hopeless it seems. Because younger generations will be putting more in AND getting less out. And no one will say so. Not on the national level, where Medicare beneficiaries and public employees with government health care oppose universal health care because “we can’t afford it.” And not at the state level.