The evening began with the long-awaited presentation by the Empire Study Group to the full board and to the community. ESG represents the combined efforts of several community groups most threatened by the prospect of luxury towers along Empire, in collaboration with Professor Tom Angotti, director of the Center for Urban Policy and Planning at Hunter College. We gave our time, energy, ideas and our money to support the creation of an alternative vision for the long-deliberately blighted stretch.
After 15 minutes, Chair Demetrius Lawrence cut off the presentation, saying time had expired and despite the stunned presenter's insistence that she only had two slides left to show. Sorry, no go. Uproar ensued and never stopped. As it happens, I was part of the ESG presentation to ULURP the month before, at the end of which ESG was promised 40 minutes to present to the full board. Lawrence lied, and ULURP chair Michael Liburd was (conveniently?) out of the room when the outrage occurred. They're really mad about the lawsuit filed against CB9 last week, Index #1865/2016.
There was the part where (white, Jewish) activist Jay Sorid, who has been trying, for two and a half years, to have an illegal vote from Sept 2013 corrected, explained, among other things, the difference between "house Jews and field Jews," sending former and then-Chair Jacob Goldstein into apoplexy. Goldstein who had just gone out of his way to embarrass the feckless Demetrius Lawrence, who dwells so far beneath his contempt, for not posting the 2016 Lien List to the CB9 website, and offering to explain to the assembled (and by implication, Demetrius Lawrence) what a lien is. Lawrence said he didn't know about the list, hadn't received it, asked where Goldstein got it. Goldstein said, "Everybody got it!" and then that he saw it in the newspaper like "millions of other people," words to that effect. Next, Dr. Fredericks called Goldstein out for trying to make the board "look bad" instead of just providing the information. All three were board members speaking at length during the Public Comment period.
Notably, we see now that Demetrius Lawrence doesn't read the newspapers, perhaps explaining why he didn't think them important enough to spend the money to publish the District Manager job opening in the Times, News or Post. Besides, everyone knows that serial felon Carmen Martinez is to be the new Pearl Miles.
During the consideration of applications for liquor licenses, a resident stood to point out that "Crow Hill", the chosen name for a proposed artisanal cocktail lounge, is a racial slur, referring, he said, to the Black inmates in the Brooklyn Penitentiary that once stood on Carroll between Nostrand and Rogers. Indeed, a single google search of "Crow Hill Brooklyn" produces this link to a site called Ephemeral New York link, on the landing page of which you can read the following: “Most historians agree that the name Crow Hill was coined in derogatory reference to the black community of Carrville and Weeksville, whose residents were sometimes known as “crows,” writes Henry Goldschmidt, author of 2006’s Race and Religion Among the Chosen People of Crown Heights." This means the lounge owners either did no research or decided to use the name anyway. I look forward to the demonstration.
Several residents who serve on the ULURP Committee rose to clarify for the audience and for the Board that the Empire Study Group had been permitted 15 minutes to present to the committee. At the end of that presentation, a vote was take as to whether ESG could present to the full board and community at the monthly meeting. That vote passed overwhelmingly. Indeed, the presentation was so successful that member Warren Berke requested that the full presentation contain more specifics, and a motion was made (I think by the disgruntled ex-Transportation Committee chair Tim Thomas, though he had earlier said he was no longer a ULURP member either) to remove Empire Boulevard from the study parameters (!!), causing panic and seizure in Carmen Martinez and Borough Hall's Richard Bearak, both of whom have their marching orders. Sadly, a vote was not taken on that matter. Chair Michael Liburd asked Professor Angotti how long he needed to present. He responded, "40 minutes," and Liburd assured him that time would be allotted.
Conveniently, Liburd was not in the auditorium when Demetrius Lawrence killed the ESG presentation and lied, outright lied, about the agreement made at the ULURP meeting regarding the length of the presentation. Something about an emergency call from his daughter and him having to step out. I get it; they're angry about the lawsuit filed last week. They're also vindictive, they do not represent, much less advocate for, the people they are charged to represent.
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