Over 100 protesters held a mock funeral Tuesday for the buildings Gov. Kathy Hochul plans to demolish round Penn Station to make approach for a marketing campaign donor’s new workplace towers.
The demonstrators staged 50 coffins on the steps of the James A. Farley Constructing on Eighth Avenue — throughout the road from the transit hub — to symbolize the “ghosts” of the handfuls of houses and historic buildings set for demolition underneath the plan.
“These are the addresses of the remaining buildings that shall be torn down, they're earlier than you in these coffins,” Alison Greenberg of the Historic Districts Council advised attendees.
“We don’t mock dying and we don’t take it evenly, however that is severe,” Greenberg mentioned. “These buildings are severe and what's occurring right here could be very, very severe.”
Hochul’s plan to permit the development of 10 new skyscrapers — together with 5 by her marketing campaign donor Steven Roth — will displace 473 companies and 128 households, in line with state estimates.
Buildings and landmarks set for demolition embrace the deserted Resort Pennsylvania, the famed Gimbel’s Skybridge, a brownstone occupied by the nonprofit Lithuanian Alliance of America since 1910 and a number of other fashionable bars and pubs.
The plan — which was hatched by ex-Gov. Andrew Cuomo — features a $1.2 billion tax break for Roth’s Vornado Realty Group, authorities watchdogs estimate.
Tuesday’s protest included speeches by two impersonators of the twentieth-century Manhattan neighborhood activist Jane Jacobs, who confronted off within the Nineteen Sixties in opposition to Robert Moses over his in the end canceled plan to construct the Decrease Manhattan Expressway.
A jazz band run by West thirty second Avenue recording studio proprietor Steve Marshall carried out, as did a people singer who strummed “This Land is Your Land” and Patti Smith’s “Individuals Have the Energy.”
“I gotta inform you, this seems like a battle in opposition to Robert Moses yet again,” Jacobs impersonator Beth Griffith, 70, of Manhattan mentioned. “This time, we now have one other man who has a plan to throw 1000's of individuals out of their dwelling … This time we now have a billionaire developer who has purchased and paid for presidency help.”
The state Public Authorities Management Board in July accredited financing plans that may give large tax reductions to Vornado and another builders of the ten new towers.
Hochul has mentioned the state will use the cash collected from the builders to pay for Penn Station renovations and different associated work.
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