BroadsheetDAILY May 14, 2019

Renewed Concerns about Emergency Response Time in Lower Manhattan

May 10 at West and Murray Streets: Pedestrian Sarah Chan is run over with enough force to sever her foot.

A new study documents that response times for 911 calls are slower in the First Precinct, which covers Lower Manhattan, than in any other district south of Midtown (an area that comprises seven NYPD commands) and the third-slowest overall in Manhattan.

This comes in the wake of two local automotive collisions with pedestrians: one in April that claimed the life of an elderly resident, and another on Friday that left a woman with an amputated leg.

The study, from the City’s Independent Budget Office (IBO), a publicly funded agency that provides nonpartisan information on critical issues confronting the City, documents that it takes an average of four minutes from the moment when 911 dispatchers first receive a call for help until the time they assign responders. The report also observes that actual response times are longer, because this study gauges only the interval between a call coming in and a radio dispatch going out. The IBO similarly notes that the City has been required by law since 1991 to publish data about how long it takes help to arrive on scene from such calls, but has ignored this law every year since it was enacted.

In Manhattan, only the NYPD’s massive Midtown North and Midtown South precincts logged slower response times than Lower Manhattan, respectively clocking in at six minutes and 59 seconds, and five minutes and three seconds.

One reason for such lengthy intervals in the face of an emergency may be confusion on the part of 911 operators about the location of streets and addresses within Lower Manhattan.

This problem was underscored on the evening of April 4, when a Battery Park City resident named Blake (she asked that her last name be withheld) was walking along South End Avenue, when, “I heard a weird boom and a scream from a woman standing in front of me. At first, I thought something had happened to her, but then I realized she was pointing toward the middle of the street.”

When Blake looked toward where the woman was pointing, “I saw somebody lying on the pavement. As I approached, I thought it might be one of the neighborhood children, but it turned out to be an elderly lady, who was very small.” This was Arlene Kalfus, who had been struck by a Downtown Connection shuttle bus.

“Her chest was moving up and down, so she was breathing, in a labored way. But she was definitely not conscious,” Blake recalls, noting that, “I was calling 911 as  I walked toward her.”

“When I got the 911 operator on the phone, she transferred me to another operator, who asked for the location of the accident. I explained that we were in front of 325 South End Avenue, in Manhattan. But this operator kept repeating that help was on the way to 32 South Street in Brooklyn. I kept telling her this was incorrect, but she kept repeating ‘South Street in Brooklyn.’ Then she said they would call me back.”

“A few minutes later,” Blake recalls, “my phone rang, and the operator said an ambulance was being dispatched to South Street in Manhattan. So I corrected them again, and kept explaining that we were on South End Avenue, between Liberty and Albany Streets, in Manhattan. Then they seemed to think we were on North End Avenue.”

April 4 on South End Avenue: Pedestrian Arlene Kalfus is run over and killed by a Downtown Connection bus.

During this time, Blake and several other bystanders stood in the middle of South End Avenue, waving away other traffic, so that Ms. Kalfus would not be run over again. After several minutes, a police van approached the scene, “but didn’t have lights or sirens on, so I assumed they were there by coincidence,” Blake recalls. “They asked what was going on, and I explained that this woman had been run over. So they blocked traffic and began cordoning off the area, stopping cars and keeping pedestrians back. At that point, 911 called me back again, and I explained that police were on the scene. I think the officers called an ambulance with the correct location, using their radios, because the paramedics arrived a few minutes after that.”

Asked to estimate how much time elapsed between her first call to 911, and the arrival of the first ambulance, Blake answers, “between six and nine minutes. It felt like forever. When they finally got there, the paramedics just put a sheet over the lady. They didn’t check to see if she was still alive or try to revive her. When a bunch of us standing near by shouted that they should try to help her, the ambulance crew just said, ‘she’s gone.’ Then they began shouting and cursing at us to get back.”

“That woman was still breathing when I first called 911,” Blake insists. “So there is no way of knowing whether they could have saved her if they had got there sooner.”

A similar scene, albeit with a slightly less tragic conclusion, played out on Friday evening, around 10:00 pm, when an alleged drunk driver turned from Murray Street on West Street, and struck two pedestrians. One was Travis Frank-Martain, a safety agent, employed by Goldman Sachs, to escort people through the congested intersection. The car hit him with enough force to throw him into the air, but he escaped with minor injuries.

Less fortunate was Sarah Chan, whom Mr. Frank-Martain had helped through the intersection seconds earlier. She was struck with sufficient force to sever her left foot. Both Mr. Frank-Martain and Ms. Chan were taken by ambulance to Bellevue Hospital, where doctors had to amputate her leg, below the knee. The driver of the car, Travis Funes, was arrested at the scene and charged with drunk driving and vehicular assault.

Confusion about response times when dispatching emergency personnel to Lower Manhattan has been a recurring concern among community leaders for several years. As long ago as 2014, residents raised alarm about a pair of incidents in which injured persons on the Esplanade had to wait as long as 20 minutes before ambulances were able to find their way to locations where help was needed. In one of these, a jogger suffering from a heart attack died while waiting for help.

BPCA Taps Engineering Firm to Design Resiliency Measure for Neighborhood’s Northern Section

The Battery Park City Authority has hired an engineering firm the begin designing resiliency measures for the community’s northern border, and extending into Tribeca.

At the Authority’s March 26 board meeting, Gwen Dawson, the BPCA’s vice president for real property, explained, “this project will address the area that runs essentially from the North Promenade, just west of Stuyvesant High School, eastward across Route 9A and eastward from there to about West Broadway.”

This is one of four separate (but related) resiliency plans the BPCA is in various stages of implementing. The others cover the community’s southern border(around Wagner Park and Pier A), its western waterfront (the length of the Esplanade, from Wagner Park, to Rockefeller Park), and the ballfields (along with the adjacent Asphalt Green community center).

To read more…

Concert Venue Big Enough to Host 3,000 People Planned for Financial District

	A rendering of how the trading floor might appear if converted into a traditional department store – a prospect that seems less likely with the recent closure of the Saks Women’s Store at nearby Brookfield Place.

Plans are under way to develop an 80,000-square-foot concert and performance venue on the former trading floor of the American Stock Exchange building, in the Financial District.

Representatives of Live Nation Entertainment, a firm that owns or operates more than 200 venues throughout North America and Europe, including the outdoor concert space on the roof of Pier 17 in the South Street Seaport, came before Community Board 1 (CB1) on Wednesday evening to explain their plans.

A historical view of the structure’s legacy trading floor

The Taste of Tribeca in 2006

Saturday (May 18) will mark the 25th anniversary of Taste of Tribeca, the street food fair that raises money for two beloved local public schools: P.S. 234 and P.S. 150.

Come to Duane Street (between Greenwich and Hudson Streets), from 11:30 am to 3:00 pm, for gastronomic wonders from 60 of Tribeca’s top chefs and restaurants — including seven that have been participating since 1994: Bouley, Bubby’s Tribeca, Duane Park Patisserie, Gigino Trattoria, The Odeon, Tribeca Grill, and Walker’s.

Tickets, priced at $45 in advance and $55 on the day of the event, get you six tastes and two pours on the Beer & Cider Tour, and are on sale now at www.tasteoftribeca.com.

BPCA Awards Underwater Contract to Firm That Promises Peace and Quiet

	A barge moored in South Cove, conducting pile remediation work on the underwater columns that support the Esplanade.

The Battery Park City Authority is continuing a decade-long project to shore up the underwater columns that support the Esplanade, but has found a way to do it without keeping residents up at night.

At the April 23 meeting of the BPCA’s board, Gwen Dawson, the Authority’s vice president of real property, explained, “the esplanade of Battery Park City rests on a relieving platform which is supported by 3100 total concrete piles. We initiated a program in 2007 to perform certain remediation steps on these piles, to wrap them in fiberglass, to make sure that their lives could be extended — we are told up to an additional 30 to 50 years.”

On May 22, the Battery Park City Seniors group will host a memorial service for Arlene Kalfus, who died tragically on April 4, when she was struck by a bus on South End Avenue.

Ms. Kalfus, a long-time resident of Gateway Plaza, was a longtime contributor to Battery Park City Seniors, whose loss is acutely felt, both because of her many volunteer activities and her dry sense of humor.

The service will be held in the Battery Park City Authority’s community room, located within 200 Rector Place.

(Please use the entrance on the west side of the building, facing West Thames Park.)

Anyone planning to attend is asked to R.S.V.P. to Philomena Pinto at JPinto8925@aol.com.

Amazon Opens High-Tech Retail Outlet in Brookfield Place, But Will Accept Low-Tech Form of Payment

	Retail, Reimagined: The Amazon Go store in Brookfield Place

New York politicians still smarting over Amazon’s decision to cancel plans for a corporate headquarters in Long Island City can console themselves that the online retail giant has at least opened a 1,300-square-foot bricks-and-mortar store in Lower Manhattan.

On Tuesday, Amazon debuted the first East Coast location of its Go chain, on the upper level of Battery Park City’s Brookfield Place. The experimental retail brand amounts to a revolutionary reimagining of the traditional storefront, by eliminating cash, cashiers, and even automated checkout kiosks.

Lower Manhattan Experiences Chain Reaction as Two Esteemed (and Non-Corporate) Booksellers Plan Local Outposts

A rendering of the South Street Seaport location planned  for McNally Jackson books.

Local connoisseurs of independent bookstores have reason to celebrate: Two highly regarded operators will be coming to Lower Manhattan soon. The first is McNally Jackson, which has confirmed that its much-delayed plan to open in the South Street Seaport will finally be realized this year.

Also coming to Downtown is the much-admired Shakespeare & Companyindependent bookstore, which already has locations on the Upper East and Upper West sides.

City Moves Ahead with Traffic Signal for Rector Place and South End Avenue, Ten Months After Approval

May 14

Owner of Tribeca Kiosk Is Told Twice That Once Is Just about Enough

Governors Island Overseer Departs as Community Leaders Grapple with Future Development Prospects

	A view of Governors Island from the observatory atop One World Trade Center

Michael Samuelian, the chief of the Trust for Governors Island, the non-profit organization that administers the 172-acre park situated some 800 yards off the tip of Lower Manhattan, will be stepping down in June. His tenure, which began in 2016, will end shortly after the Island reopens for the season, on May 1.

Mr. Samuelian presided over a renaissance on Governors Island, with each year during his term setting new records for attendance, with expanded hours and a longer season.

In the season that begins next week, Governors Island will also launch a new ferry, Governors I. The 132 foot-long, 40 foot-wide vessel was built specifically to serve the Island, and can carry up to 400 passengers per trip, which will increase capacity by 1,000 visitors per hour.

Long Overlooked Pier Becomes ‘Porch’ Overlooking East River Waterfront

	Eco-Park on the East River

Downtown’s list of great public spaces has increased by one, with the opening on April 19 of a new “Eco-Park” at Pier 35, on the East River shoreline, in the Two Bridges neighborhood. The 28,000-square-foot facility includes lawns, dunes, and a sloped concrete “urban beach,” designed to replicate the natural breeding habitat of mussels. To read more...

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Local Resident Oversaw Move of Holocaust Freight Car to Lower Manhattan

In nearly 40 years of involvement in logistics, almost all of it in the field of fine art transportation, participating in this move was professionally the most significant, and personally the most emotional, project I have ever undertaken.

The rail car is on loan from the Auschwitz Museum in Poland, to an exhibition services company in Spain, which is co-sponsoring the new exhibition, “Auschwitz: Not Long Ago, Not Far Away,” with the Museum of Jewish Heritage.

	John Watts     Why isn’t he smiling?