Service of Real Estate Interests
Thursday, May 1st, 2014
Actor Liam Neeson has become the most visible spokesperson to save the horse carriage industry in NYC listing reasons ranging from polls of New Yorkers, 64 percent of whom want to keep the carriages, to the importance of the culture and history of the practice and the fact that only four horses have been killed in 6 million trips in traffic. He pointed out in his New York Times editorial that Mayor De Blasio hasn’t yet met with the operators.
In his New York Times opinion piece “Carriages Belong in Central Park” he concluded: “Before we lose this signature element of New York’s culture and history — instantly recognizable to the millions of tourists who visit our city and contribute to its economy — the least the mayor can do is come down to the stables and see how the horses are cared for. I urge Mr. de Blasio to meet the working men and women whose jobs are at stake and to start a dialogue that will safeguard a future for the horses that the majority of New Yorkers want.”
What I wonder is why, with so many crucial issues to address in a city such as New York, the Mayor picks on this one. One reason was covered in 2008 in a New York Sun article by David Pomerantz, “Company To Weigh In on Horse-Drawn Carriage Debate.” He wrote about the anti-horse carriage theme of a poster campaign by Manhattan Mini Storage: “The horse-drawn carriage industry is arguing that the advertising and fund-raising campaign is part of a plan to outlaw the carriages that ferry tourists through Central Park and on Midtown streets so the storage company can buy the land currently occupied by two carriage stables. The stables are situated near real estate owned by Edison Properties, the company that controls Manhattan Mini Storage.”
Rizzoli Bookstore Photo: NY Curbed
And then there’s the 100+ year old building on West 57th Street which housed Rizzoli Bookstore for almost 30 years. In spite of 16,000 signatures asking the Landmarks Preservation Commission to maintain the century old building, according to Gina Bellafante in “Better Off Elsewhere,” the commission “deemed the building…inadequately significant to keep in perpetuity.”
She continued: “The most visible legacy of the Bloomberg era surely will be the slender, glass and steel residential towers now going up 70, 80 and 90 stories over this reach of Midtown. In all likelihood it is one of these buildings that will eventually stand in Rizzoli’s place, a building intended to lure the wealthiest internationalists, who will rotate in and out of the city from Singapore, São Paulo, Mumbai, never staying long enough to pay local income taxes and turning the area, essentially, into the world’s costliest time-share. Ironically, One 57, perhaps the most audacious of these projects, lists Rizzoli on its website as among the area’s attractions, alongside the restaurants Daniel and Petrossian and the jewelers Bulgari and Van Cleef & Arpels.”
Seems to me the city is putting the cart before the horse: Is only one industry running things these days? Is this nothing new? Your thoughts?
