May Day Call For Working Class Unity In NYC: Unions-Immigrants To Combatby PeoplesVideo - YouTube

April 26, 2011 joint press conference on the steps of NYC City Hall joined the May 1st Coalition for Worker and Immigrant Rights with the Labor & Immigrant Rights & Jobs for All Coalition. The two coalitions announced plans to conduct a joint rally in Foley Square after the May 1st Coalition led march to the downtown site from Union Square. They announced intentions to combine forces in a post May Day battle against the forces of austerity and repression that have declared war on the whole working class.

Protesters to Bank of America: Pay Your Taxes

On April 15, in the run up to this year's Tax Day, hundreds of protesters descended on a Bank of America branch in Union Square, New York City. They demanded that big banks start paying their fair share of taxes and stop foreclosures, and they also called for the government to break up banks that are "too big to fail." Around fifty people entered the lobby of a nearby Bank of America branch with signs reading, "Stop Foreclosures! People Before Profits!" and "We pay our taxes. Why doesn't Bank of America?"

Shake Shack $$$: Bad for City Parks? by Arun Venugopal - WNYC

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I've only recently started eating at Shake Shack, and have fallen hard for their frozen custard (the blueberry, so very creamy). And after generally avoiding beef for years, I've made return trips for their cheeseburgers, which I've concluded are superior to those of Five Guys — certainly less unwieldy.

But let us set aside such childish pursuits as all-beef patties, and consider this article by Patrick Arden in Next American City, asking "whether the city’s reliance on private-funding schemes was creating disparities between parks in wealthy and poor neighborhoods."

In 2009 Shake Shack collected revenues of $4.9 million; $220,256 of that went to the city and $348,389 to the park. Concessions in other parks pay as much as 20 percent of their take to the city, but not [owner Danny] Meyer, whose company adds to its profits by catering private parties in the park for $15,000 an hour. When Meyer opened his fast-food stand, he was the director and co-founder of the Madison Square Park Conservancy, the nonprofit that oversees the public park.

Just to be clear, I've never eaten at the notoriously over-patronized Madison Square Park Shake Shack, only the UWS and Times Square locations — but I digress.

Arden gives numerous examples of the "big business" that public parks have become:

Few may object to the $364,000 salary paid to Central Park Conservancy president Douglas Blonsky, because his group is responsible for raising 85 percent of Central Park’s $27 million annual operating budget....

But those two parks now exemplify how lucrative the conservancy model can be. The Bryant Park Corporation took in more than $8.8 million in 2007 and its executive director, Daniel Biederman, picked up $210,000 for overseeing its 9.6 acres. Over at the Madison Square Park Conservancy, president Debbie Landau pulled in $185,000 — and her sister Maggi made $114,962.

Arden also notes that Robert Hammond, executive director of Friends of the High Line, earned $280,000 last year — "$75,000 more than the salary of [Adrian] Benepe, the city’s parks commissioner."

The problem, as Arden sees it, is not so much the fat paychecks in the private sector, it's the continuing cuts in public funding:

In 1960 parks maintenance and operations claimed 1.4 percent of city funds. Mayor Bloomberg’s new $63.6 billion budget would send parks’ percentage to a record low of 0.37 percent, or $239 million. (Chicago spent almost $150 million more last year on 21,000 fewer acres.) The mayor’s cut would drop the full-time workforce below 3,000, less than half the number employed by the Parks Department in 1970. “No other city agency has lost a greater percentage of its workforce over the last 40 years,” says [Geoffrey Croft, president of the watchdog group NYC Park Advocates]. “Private money will never make that up."

Arden and parks advocates say the “Golden Age for Parks” that Adrian Benepe claims is more like a Gilded Age, "with wide — and growing — disparities between lavish, showplace parks for the haves and cast-off parcels for the have-nots. For every Madison Square, Bryant Park or High Line, there are hundreds of parks that depend solely on the city, and many suffer from scandalous neglect."

Vendors Thumb Nose at City Restriction by Colin Moynihan - City Room Blog - NYTimes.com

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One of many artists who protested in Union Square on Monday over new city regulations for artists in parks. Photographs by David Goldman for The New York Times

New rules for selling art in public parks went into effect on Monday morning, and in Union Square Park little was going as planned, at least from the city’s point of view.

The park is one of four in New York, including Central Park, where the city will restrict the number of sellers of paintings, photographs, books and sculptures.

Another artist wrote a passage from the First Amendment on the sidewalk.

The parks department had installed plastic medallions the size of silver dollars and emblazoned with the words “Expressive Matter Vendor” around the perimeter of Union Square Park to designate places where the selling of fine art, photography and other materials would be permitted. But more than 100 artists who showed up at the park on Monday ignored those markers and instead milled at the southern end of Union Square, where they brandished signs and shouted their disapproval of the new rules.

“We’re going to stay inside this park and away from the marked spaces,” said Robert Lederman, an organizer of an advocacy group called Artist. “We’re going to defy the mayor and we’re going to defy the parks department.”

The rules, which the city announced a few months ago, limit the number of artists allowed to sell materials in or near Union Square Park, Central Park, Battery Park and the High Line. At Union Square, for instance, 18 artists are permitted to set up tables and sell on Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays. The number of available spots there will rise to 58 on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays.

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said the regulations were necessary because the artists were causing congestion. The artists denounced the rules as chilling free expression and challenged them in court. But on Friday a federal judge in Manhattan, Richard J. Sullivan, ruled that the rules seemed reasonable and that the city could enforce them.

Artists said they hoped to appeal, but in the short term they said they would move their battle to the court of public opinion. As knots of police officers and parks enforcement officers stood by on Monday morning the artists held aloft paintings and placards. They made speeches and chanted slogans. One man used chalk to write a passage from the United States Constitution on the sidewalk.

Jessica Hollander, a 34-year-old painter from Ridgewood, Queens, held a sign that read, “Bloomberg thinks artists have no value,” and she said she had been selling paintings in Union Square for about 18 months.

“I think this is a fight worth fighting,” she said. “It’s a tragedy to limit the number of artists out here and it’s scary to think of everything here becoming corporate.”

Nearby, John Conn, 61, a photographer from the Bronx, said that he thought the city was trying to squeeze artists out of the parks in deference to business interests.

A brief thundershower sent the artists running for the protection of a subway entrance overhang, but the sun soon emerged and the painters, photographers and sculptors returned to the southern plaza and began using umbrellas to ward off the glare from above.

Mr. Lederman surveyed the crowd and pronounced the event a success.

“We turned this almost into Woodstock,” he said. “This place is livelier now than it has been all year.”

Artists Fight Public Hearing on Vendor Restrictions in Parks with Freedom of Expression by Adam Lisberg - NY Daily News

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Artists selling their works in Union Square Park as they face proposed limits where they can set up an art display in a park and how many artists can set up in each park. Smith for News

Hundreds of angry artists crammed into a Chelsea gym Friday to jeer a plan limiting how many of them could sell their work in crowded city parks.

The Parks Department says vendors selling paintings, photographs and other "expressive matter" have clogged park sidewalks, creating a hazard and nuisance.

Every previous attempt to curb them, though, has been shut down by artists who claimed their First Amendment rights were violated - and won in the courts.

The city is proposing new rules that would allow only 18 artists in Union Square, 24 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, nine in Battery Park and four at Columbus Circle.

At a five-hour public hearing on those rules, several community boards and neighborhood groups said the move would bring order to a chaotic scene.

Artists, though, cheered wildly when painter Robert Lederman - who has led the battle against regulation - said the real crowding comes from special events that pay money to the Parks Department for the privilege of using the space.

"What about your giant greenmarket? What about your giant holiday market?" Lederman asked. "And yet you want to eliminate us under the guise of protecting public safety!"

City Councilwoman Melissa Mark-Viverito (D-Manhattan), who is chairwoman of the committee that oversees the parks, said she has serious reservations about the plan because it would allow just 81 artists to sell their work in places where 300 or more now make their living.

"The city needs to find a better way to balance these interests," she said.

The Parks Department is expected to decide within a week how to proceed, but any final rule is likely to face a legal challenge - which Mayor Bloomberg said he expected the city will win.

"There are places where there are so many vendors that you can't get down the sidewalk," Bloomberg said on his WOR-AM radio show. ""We think the courts will be sympathetic in some parks and narrow places where people come together."

The Union Square Pavilion Picnic Protest posted by Duncan Meisel - village voice Runnin' Scared Blog...

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The Union Square Community Improvement District continued its running theatrical battle over the remodeling of the Union Square Pavilion on Wednesday night with an action they called the ‘Push Back Picnic,’ bringing their fight to the stamping grounds of celebrity chef Danny Meyer.

Meyer is the chair of the The Union Square Partnership, a Business Improvement District or BID, and the suspected source of an anonymous $7-million donation to the city, given on the condition that the the park’s pavilion be turned into a private restaurant. Currently, construction for the renovation is halted under a court injunction after legal action filed by the community group.

The action included signature-gathering for a petition against the project, sermonizing from Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping Choir and a dramatized exorcism of private interests from the park that led to the door of Meyer’s Union Square Café .

“BIDs are constantly trying to convince communities that they have their interests in mind—in fact they have business in mind, shopping in mind” said Savitri D, an organizer who goes by one name. Referring to Meyer, she said “we hold him personally responsible for this.”

The "picnic" aimed to dramatize organizers' belief about the connection between public space and the freedom of expression. The Stop Shopping Choir chanted and sang the First Amendment, while Reverend Billy regaled greenmarket passers-by with the Pavilion’s free speech history as the staging ground for activism by Emma Goldman and others, as well as post 9-11 anti-war actions.

“If we let them turn [the Pavilion] into a restaurant, we will lose where we came from” Billy said. “This is a place where our rights were defined and defended.”

After watermelon, the picnic became a site of political theater, with the choir performing a collective exorcism of a fellow actor dressed in the visage of Danny Meyer, who they called the ‘privatizer.’ Afterwards the group made a show of channeling the energy of small pine trees and plots of grass, which they then brought in a procession to the entryway of the Union Square Café to supposedly protect the park from privatizing interests.

Previously, the Community Improvement District had explicitly targeted Councilmember Rosie Mendez, who they claim has colluded with private interests to back a reduction of public space. Mendez defended herself in a letter she distributed at an earlier rally, claiming that building the restaurant would secure funding for renovated playground, and reduce the space used by private businesses in the park. Savatri D, the organizer, took issue with these claims in a letter to Mendez, calling the funding argument illogical, and the private-use claim a simple misstatement of how much space the restaurant will require.

“She’s protecting the anonymity of a $7 million donor—how can you say you’re one of the people when you’re participating in collusion at that level?” Savatri D asked.

The event drew a broad base of support from a variety of sources. Organizers say their petition signatures number in the thousands, and members of other groups city-wide attended the event.

Mary Lynch, a member of the Washington Square Park CID came because she thought there were connections between the renovations at both parks. Bill Dipaloa, the director of Times Up! said the renovation had the potential to impact Critical Mass rides which that group supports. Judy Francis, the President of the Brooklyn Bridge Park Defenders came out in solidarity against public space encroachment.

“It’s happening in every single park — quietly and in major ways” she said. “We can’t get any traction with our public officials because they take so much money from real estate.”

Yesterday’s action was one of Reverend Billy’s last before taking a hiatus to write a book. Still, he says he will return to the park should construction resume to build the restaurant. In the meantime, he sees enough support from New Yorkers to defeat the pavilion plan.

“New Yorkers are beginning to know what privatization means — it has to do with Iraq — it comes with impunity and it drives politics” he said. “When it comes to privatizing Union Square, many New Yorkers just say no to this.

Thanks to Washington Square Park blog for finding this article...

Court Stops Union Square Park Restaurant Plan - NYPolitics.com

Just like Washington defeated the British, the Union Square Community Coalition defeated the Department of Parks & Recreation in NYS Supreme Court...

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A state Supreme Court justice has ordered a preliminary injunction prohibiting the city from building a restaurant in Union Square Park.

The decision came after a group challenged provisions for a restaurant on the public space.

Renovation work on the popular Manhattan park, temporarily halted last week, can begin immediately. It calls for improvements to the comfort stations, playground, and the park’s historic pavilion — the proposed site of the restaurant.

A plaintiff in the lawsuit, Geoffrey Croft of the NYC Park Advocates, says the suit was brought by the Union Square Community Coalition against the Parks Department and the Union Square Partnership.

The Partnership says the judge’s decision yesterday leaves room for the city to determine the best uses for the renovated pavilion.