The BroadsheetDAILY ~ News of Lower Manhattan ~ 10/22/19

Ridership Survey Indicates That Ferry Coming Soon to Battery Park City Primarily Serves Affluent Riders

An analysis of who uses the NYC Ferry service, which the administration of Mayor Bill de Blasio plans to expand to Battery Park City next year, shows that riders are primarily white passengers who earn more money than average New Yorkers.

The NYC Ferry 2019 Summer Survey was released earlier this month released by the City’s Economic Development Corporation (EDC), which manages the service in partnership with a private operator, Hornblower. It documents that “36 percent of riders identify as non-white or multiracial,” which means that 64 percent of riders are white.

The same report notes that, “35 percent of riders make less than $75,000 per year,” which indicates that 65 percent earn more than that amount, while also showing that ferry users’ “median income [is] between $75,000 to $99,999.” For New York City as a whole, the median individual income is $50,825, according to U.S. Census Bureau’s 2013-2017 American Community Survey. This implies that a typical NYC Ferry rider earns 50 to 100 percent more than a representative resident of the five boroughs.

These demographics may hinge largely on geography. NYC Ferry passengers often inhabit waterfront neighborhoods that are either historically fashionable or rapidly gentrifying. Residents living within half a mile of a NYC Ferry stop and earning more than the City’s median income outnumber those living inside the same radius, but earning less than the City-wide median, by a margin of more than six to one.

Such statistics may also raise questions about the massive taxpayer subsidies the NYC Ferry service receives, as well as reservations about the influx of riders likely to descend upon the already-crowded Battery Park City ferry terminal, once a planned expansion of the service (connecting Staten Island to the Lower West Side of Manhattan, and then to the West Side of Midtown) is inaugurated in 2020.

According to a separate report, released in March by the independent Citizen’s Budget Commission in March, “at $10.73 per ride, its operating subsidy is ten times that of the New York City Transit system. Furthermore, NYC Ferry transports fewer people annually than the subway transports in one day.” That report also notes that five times greater than those accorded to the Staten Island Ferry (which is free), and that this support is poised to become more lavish once the NYC Ferry system launches new routes next year: ” the recently announced expansion of service will require even greater public subsidies — reaching as much as $24.75 per ride for the Coney Island route,” which is slated to launch in tandem with the Battery Park City route. This level of public support buys NYC Ferry passengers a more comfortable commute than the subway can offer, with amenities like the onboard availability of food and alcohol, wireless internet connectivity, and a breathtaking view.

The proposed Staten Island route raises several other questions that will likely be of interest to Lower Manhattan residents. The Battery Park City Ferry Terminal has been the focus of noise complaints by residents for years, and these concerns have escalated as the terminal has seen greater, more frequent use. Apartment dwellers closer than 100 yards to the terminal regularly attend meetings to Community Board 1 (CB1) to air grievances about small children who are awakened at 6:00 am by ferry horns designed to be heard more than one mile away, which are sounded by departing boats every few minutes.

The proposed Staten Island route of NYC Ferry is slated to bring to the Battery Park City ferry terminal more than 60 new vessels each day, landing from 6:00 am to midnight, and carrying as many as 2,500 passengers per day. But in 2017, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey (which owns and manages the terminal) began allowing sightseeing boats to operate from the facility. More recently, the Port Authority has expanded weekend ferry service between New Jersey and the Battery Park City terminal, in order to offset Saturday and Sunday closures (for the next two years) of the PATH trains between the World Trade Center complex and Jersey City, needed to repair damage to the tunnels beneath the Hudson River sustained during 2012’s Hurricane Sandy. Adding a new fleet of commuter boats, serving Staten Island, to this mix may exacerbate an already strained situation.

Counterbalancing these concerns are questions about how fully Richmond County commuters will embrace the new route, when the existing Staten Island Ferry (which lands at South Street) offers a competing option at no charge. The NYC Ferry version is being touted as faster — by about seven minutes for the water-borne part of the trip, with an average of 12 additional minutes saved for commuters who then walk to offices in Lower Manhattan. (Staten Island residents commuting to Midtown would typically save a total of 40 minutes, according to the EDC.) That noted, the NYC Ferry from Staten Island will not be free. It is scheduled to be priced at $2.75 — the same as a subway or bus fare. But unlike the City’s subway and bus systems, NYC Ferry offers no free transfers to other modes of transit. This could have the effect of doubling the cost of a daily commute for any rider who needs to board a subway or bus after disembarking from the ferry.

In June, CB1 enacted a resolution noting (among other objections) that, “additional ferry service in Battery Park City will create additional foot traffic to and from Brookfield Place and the PATH station, which will affect the free circulation of residents” and “ferry operation is noisy and the addition of more departure announcements, gunning engines, and departure sounds will further diminish the quality of life of Battery Park City residents who live within a short distance from the pier.”

The resolution concluded with a call for a full environmental review before implementing the EDC’s plan, which should include, “studies on the previously mentioned impacts on circulation of resident traffic around Battery Park City, sound pollution, impacts on air quality, impacts on water quality, and impacts on the long-term structural health of the Battery Park City bulkhead.” It also urged that, “EDC delay commencement of service of the Staten Island route until the World Trade Center PATH tunnels are completely renovated and normal weekend PATH train service resumes.”

Volleyball Players Rescued from Hudson, After Jumping Into River to Retrieve Ball

Two young men were pulled from the waters of the Hudson River on Saturday morning, after jumping from the Battery Park City Esplanade to retrieve a volleyball that went over the railing, near North Cove Marina.

The men, whose names have not been released, were playing volleyball on the court that overlooks that yacht basin at approximately 11:40 am, when a wild serve sent their ball into the Hudson. Impulsively, they both leaped in after it.

Preserving the Rector Street Bridge

To the editor,

Condo Boards Question Need for South End Avenue Redesign After Installation of Traffic Signal

	A rendering of the BPCA’s plan for changes to the South End Avenue

At the October 2 meeting of the Battery Park City Committee of Community Board 1, Battery Park City Authority president B.J. Jones was apprised by the leader of a coalition of condominiums along South End Avenue of that group’s ongoing reservations about the Authority’s plan to revamp the thoroughfare.

Pat Smith, the board president of the Battery Pointe condominium (at South End Avenue and Rector Place) told Mr. Jones, “before you go too far on South End Avenue, please remember that six condo boards, representing more than 1,000 households along South End Avenue, from Albany down to West Thames, don’t want you to do this.”    To read more…

Margrethe ll, Queen of Denmark. As a girl growing up in Copenhagen, Ms. Reumert performed with the Saint Anne Girls Choir as a soprano and a soloist.

8AM

Bird Walk at The Battery with NYC Audubon
The Battery
Explore the diversity of migrating birds that find food and habitat in The Battery. The walk will be led by Gabriel Willow, an educator from NYC Audubon. Gabriel is an experienced birder and naturalist, and is well-versed in the ecology and history of New York City. Meet at the Netherland Memorial Flagpole, at the intersection of Broadway, Battery Place, and State Street. FREE The Battery Conservancy

6 River Terrace
Join a fitness dance party with upbeat Latin music of salsa, merengue, hip-hop, and more! Enthusiastic instruction creates a fun community of dancers who learn new steps each week. Bring your friends and share in this fit and fun dancing community. FREE Battery Park City Authority

Gibney Dance 53 Chambers Street Studio C
Click here to view tonight’s agenda

Fraunces Tavern Museum
Taking place during the most critical period of our nation’s birth, The First Conspiracy: The Secret Plot to Kill George Washington tells a remarkable and previously untold piece of American history that not only reveals George Washington’s character, but also illuminates the origins of America’s counterintelligence movement that led to the founding of the modern day CIA. In 1776, an elite group of soldiers were handpicked to serve as George Washington’s bodyguards. In the months leading up to the Revolutionary War, these trusted soldiers took part in a deadly plot against the most important member of the military: Washington himself.
Drawing on extensive research, Mensch will discuss how Washington not only defeated the most powerful military force in the world, but also uncovered the secret plot against him.  54 Pearl Street. Members $5 Public Ticket $10

Skyscraper Museum
Manhattan’s Union Square occupies a central place in both the geography and the history of New York City. Since it was laid out in the mid-19th century, Union Square has served as a microcosm for the ongoing debates about the proper usage of urban public space. In Design for the Crowd: Patriotism and Protest in Union Square, Joanna Merwood-Salisbury explores two centuries of urban planning to weave the narrative of how the formal design of the square evolved in tandem with its changing public uses, from neighborhood beautification to Communist activism to the city’s best-known Greenmarket. FREE Reservations are required.39 Battery Place.

CLASSIFIEDS & PERSONALS

Swaps & Trades  ~  Respectable Employment ~ Lost & Found

212-912-1106   editor@ebroadsheet.com

DO YOU NEED A PERSONAL ASSISTANT?

CHINESE AIDE/CAREGIVER FOR ELDERLY

Cantonese/Mandarin-speaking and Excellent Cook for Battery Park City.

SEEKING FREE-LANCE PUBLIC RELATIONS PROFESSIONAL OR SMALL PR FIRM

Work with well-reviewed author of five E-books, developing and implementing outreach strategies. Includes writing, placement, research, new outlets and on-line advertising. Savvy social media skills a must. Downtown location.

HOUSEKEEPING/NANNY/BABYSITTER

Available starting September for PT/FT.

ELDERCARE

Available for PT/FT elder care.  Experienced. References Angella

 347-423-5169 angella.haye1@gmail.com

DITCH THE DIETS & LOSE WEIGHT FOR GOOD

Call Janine to find out how with hypnosis.

EXPERIENCED ELDER CARE

Able to prepare nutritious meals and light housekeeping

NOTARY PUBLIC IN BPC

$2 per notarized signature  Text Paula at 917-836-8802

IT AND SECURITY SUPPORT

Experienced IT technician.  Expertise in 1-on-1 tutoring for all ages.Computer upgrading & troubleshooting.  Knowledgeable in all software programs.

OLD WATCHES SOUGHT, PREFER NON-WORKING

Mechanical pocket and wristwatches sought and sometimes repaired

Click to watch monarch butterflies feeding on milkweed planted by the Battery Park City Authority to help them on their annual fall migration from Canada to the mountains of Mexico.  To read more…

Thank you, kind-hearted gardeners. We must all do whatever little bit we can to hold back the wave of extinctions that is a hair’s breadth from taking the last of our monarchs.

Lower Manhattan’s Old Syrian Quarter

This map from 1899 highlights  “Little Syria”

Today, the stretch of Greenwich and Washington Streets between Battery Place and Albany Street — bisected by the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel entrance — is known by the forgettable name, “Greenwich South.”

By all appearances it is an orphan of a neighborhood that never quite coalesced. But nothing could be further from the truth. A century ago, before the World Trade Center or the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel (the two giant public works projects that decimated this once-thriving quarter), it was an ethnic enclave as vibrant as Little Italy or Chinatown. To read more…

Taste of the Seaport Marks Ten Years on Saturday

	More than 40 Lower Manhattan restaurants participated in Taste of the Seaport.

The Taste of the Seaport annual food-apalooza, which raises funds for the Peck Slip and Spruce Street Schools, celebrated its tenth anniversary on Saturday October 19 at the South Street Seaport, on Piers 16 and 17.

City to Reduce Speed Limit on West Side Highway Tomorrow

Beginning (Saturday, October 12, the City’s Department of Transportation will begin installing signs on the five-mile length of the West Side Highway between Battery Place and West 59th Street, to reduce the speed limit from 35 to 30 miles per hour.

City Hall Hints at Scaled-Back Plan for Lower Manhattan Jail, While Pushing Ahead on Plan for New Prison Downtown

	A rendering that illustrates the bulk and shape of the 45-story, 1.27 million-square-foot prison complex that Mayor Bill de Blasio proposes to erect in Lower Manhattan.

The administration of Mayor Bill de Blasio is reportedly considering a scaled-back version of its controversial plan to erect a new, 45-story prison in Lower Manhattan, as part of a wider scheme to close the City’s notorious detention complex on Rikers Island, and replace it with four, large “borough-based jail” facilities — one in each county, except Staten Island.

Residents Riled about Tribeca Tavern

	Does this look like a dance club?

More than a dozen concerned Tribeca residents turned out for the September meeting the Licensing and Permits Committee, which weighs in on the granting or renewal of liquor licenses.

They showed up to voice concerns about MI-5, a bar located at 52 Walker Street, which has been a source of local complaints as far back 2007.

Neighbors of the bar allege that it operates as a dance club (in violation of its current license, which is now up for renewal), and that loud music penetrates the upper floors of the residential building located above the bar as late as 4:00 am. To read more…

City Agency Leaves Cash-Strapped Local Museum Off Roster of Cultural Institutions

The City’s Department of Cultural Affairs has omitted from its list of dozens of New York-based cultural institutions that receive public support the museum that chronicles the oldest community anywhere in the five boroughs.

BPCA Puts the Brakes on Conversions of Rental Buildings within Community

Local Leaders Urge Preservation of Justice Complex

	The New Deal-era Criminal Courts Building at 100 Centre Street is widely regarded as a historic treasure, but does not enjoy any legal protection that would prevent it from being sold, demolished, and replaced by a skyscraper.

The case of 100 Centre Street takes on special urgency in this context, because, as the CB1 resolution notes, “the Manhattan Criminal Court building shares the same underlying City lot with the south tower of the Manhattan Detention Complex. This appears to mean that if City Hall needed extra space for the proposed new jail, it would face no legal obstacle in demolishing all or part of the historic building.

Costs to Rent or Own in Lower Manhattan Are Matched by Lofty Local Earnings

A slew of recent reports documents what everyone who lives or works in Lower Manhattan already sensed in their bones: This is a mind-numbingly expensive place to call home.

In September, RENTCafé issued a new analysis of the most expensive neighborhoods for renters in the United States that finds northern Battery Park City (zip code 10282) is the priciest enclave in America, with an average rent of $6,211 per month.  Coming in at second place is zip code 10013, which covers western Tribeca, along with part of Soho.  To read more…

New Arts Center on Governors Island Will Provide Studio Space and Cultural Programming

	The historic building at Soissons Landing at  Governors Island.

Lower Manhattan has a new cultural hub. The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and the Trust for Governors Island have partnered to create the LMCC Arts Center at Governors Island, a 40,000-square foot studio space and education facility, housed within a restored 1870s ammunition warehouse — a relic from the days when the island was a military outpost.

CB1 Makes Exception to New Policy; Okays Naming Street for Former NYPD Commissioner

	Baxter Street

A public figure from the 1980s may soon be honored by having a street co-named in his memory, if Community Board 1 gets its way. The panel recommended that Benjamin Ward, New York’s first African-American police commissioner, be commemorated by rechristening one block of Baxter Street as Benjamin Ward Way.

This comes on the heels of a controversial decision by CB1 in 2018 to decline such a request on behalf of James D. McNaughton, who, on August 2, 2005, at age 27, became the first New York City Police officer to be killed in action while serving in “Operation Iraqi Freedom.”

Battery Park City Resident Charged with Two Home Invasions, and Sexual Abuse

Onetime Non-Profit Nursing Facility Sold to Anonymous Buyer for Five Times Original Price

	Rivington House

If there is an Exhibit A in the case of fevered speculation in Lower Manhattan real estate, it must be Rivington House

After purchasing the block-long, 150,000-square-foot structure (located at 45 Rivington Street, near the Williamsburg Bridge), the developer, the Allure Group, paid the City an additional $16 million to remove the deed restriction that limited the property to its legacy use of non-profit, residential healthcare. To read more…

Composting Catches on in Battery Park City

	Jake Jacevicius and Joshua DeVoto of BPCA parks operations dump out a binful of fruit and vegetable scraps where the neighborhood’s composting process takes place.

You’re probably heard of the farm-to-table movement. Thanks to the Battery Park City Authority’s compost initiative, there’s a burgeoning table-to-earth movement in this Lower Manhattan community.

City Transportation Study Finds That Lower Manhattan Bus Service Is Among Most Sluggish in Five Boroughs

	Bus speeds in Lower Manhattan average below eight miles per hour

The annual New York City Mobility Report, produced by the City’s Department of Transportation, contains two data points that will come as no surprise residents of Lower Manhattan. The first of these is that the median speed for Downtown bus service ranks among the slowest of any community in the five boroughs. And the second is that this creeping pace is, if anything, getting creepier. To read more…

	In an instant, both wagon and horse were vaporized, and the closest automobile was tossed twenty feet in the air. Incredibly, the iconic bronze of George Washington surveys the devastation from the steps of the Sub-Treasury without so much as a scratch.

As the noon hour approached on a fall Thursday morning in 1920, a horse-drawn wagon slowly made its way west down Wall Street toward “the Corner,” the high-powered intersection of Wall and Broad. Its driver came to a gentle stop in front of the Assay Office, where stockpiles of gold and silver were stored and tested for purity. But theft was not his motive.

———————————————————————

Many ships pass Lower Manhattan on their way to and from the Midtown Passenger Ship Terminal.  Others may be seen on their way to or from piers in Brooklyn and Bayonne.  Stated times, when appropriate, are for passing the Colgate clock in Jersey City, New Jersey, and are based on sighting histories, published schedules and intuition. They are also subject to tides, fog, winds, freak waves, hurricanes and the whims of upper management.