Hell's Kitchen Online 4/2/99

[Hellskitchen]

Hell's Kitchen Online                                    4/2/99
                 "All the News the Times Won't Print"
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In this issue...

* CSDC April meeting Monday at Hartley House
* Midtown South: Where's Officer Krupke? (Post)
* The Old McGraw-Hill Building (Times) 
* CB4 on River Center
* Park West HS is out of control (Post)

=================================================================

CLINTON SPECIAL DISTRICT COALITION
April meeting

Monday, April 5 at 7:00 p.m.
Hartley House
413 West 46th St.

* Happy Easter & Happy Passover. Many CSDC members indicated they like the 7 p.m. start time, so
we're going to stick with it. If we can make the arrangements with Hartley House, we're going to
try to show Paula Zimmerman's video on Times Square. It recently showed on Public Access Cable.

* We need to plan for a booth for the 9th Avenue Fair on May 15th and 16th.

* We submitted our Reply to the City's Answer on the 8th Avenue lawsuit, so it's time we got
serious about Fundraising!

=================================================================

COP-SEX INDICTMENTS DUE SOON    
NY Post, March 25, 1999   
By LAURA ITALIANO    
  
The first indictments are expected soon in the notorious police sex-for-protection scandal, two
top law-enforcement sources said yesterday.

The scandal ripped through the Midtown South precinct last summer - shocking the city with
allegations that cops were getting free sex from a 60-woman brothel on West 39th Street for more
than a decade in return for turning a blind eye to the illegal operation.

The allegations included lurid details about dozens of cops frolicking freely - and for free -
with the hookers, sometimes while on duty, and sometimes even in patrol cars.

"It's happening soon," one source high in the investigation said of the first indictments in the
nearly two-year investigation.

The source declined to elaborate, except to caution: "That doesn't mean today, and that doesn't
mean tomorrow."

But if indictments break within the week, it could mean a public-relations triple-whammy for the
NYPD.

The jury-selection process begins Monday in the Abner Louima case, in which four Brooklyn cops are
accused of beating and sodomizing the Haitian immigrant in the 70th Precinct station house.

Meanwhile, indictments in the Amadou Diallo killing - in which four cops from the elite Street
Crime Unit shot 41 times at the unarmed immigrant - could also come within the next few days,
according to law-enforcement sources.

News of the sex-for-protection investigation broke last July, when a sergeant and 19 cops were
stripped of their badges as a result of the then-yearlong probe.

At least six precinct cops cooperated with the investigation, and 22 cops - including a sergeant -
have remained on modified duty since the summer.

The investigation centers around so-called "Midtown Madam" Helena Ramos, who claims her brothel
catered to cops for up to 15 years.

The brothel, at 335 W. 39th St., and an auxiliary apartment across the street at No. 352, remained
immune from raids for that time.

Possible charges could range from official misconduct - a misdemeanor that could result in no jail
time - to felony bribery.

=================================================================

THE OLD MCGRAW-HILL BUILDING: 
A Color-Filled Restoration of a Colorful Skyscraper  
Architectural still life's restoration in green, blue and vermilion.  
Christopher Gray, New York Times, 03/14/99

OVER the last year little splotches of vermilion, green and blue have been popping up on the top
of the old McGraw-Hill building, at 330 West 42d Street. They seem aimless, but it turns out they
are the opening strokes in a restoration campaign for one of New York's most colorful skyscrapers.

James McGraw, who began publishing in 1885, joined in 1917 with a competitor   —   James A. Hill,
who began in 1901   —   to form the McGraw-Hill Publishing Company. The new company's offices and
presses occupied the spare, white terra-cotta Hill Publishing Building, built in 1916 at 475 10th
Avenue, at 36th Street. The company grew until, by 1929, it published more than 30 trade journals,
among them Coal Age, Radio Retailing, Engineering News-Record and Electric Railway Journal.

As space grew tight, McGraw wanted to be near the concentration of engineers and architects in
midtown, but the 1916 Zoning Resolution restricted new factories   —   including printing plants
—   to an outer ring beginning at Eighth Avenue.

After considering a site on the northeast corner of 41st Street and Eighth Avenue, in 1929 McGraw
settled on a midblock plot just west of Eighth, from 41st to 42d Streets. The stock market crash
in October slowed but did not stop his plans, and McGraw-Hill bought the land in early 1930. The
first rivet was driven in December 1930, and McGraw-Hill occupied the building in October 1931.

McGraw chose one of the most flamboyant and provocative architects possible: Raymond Hood. Hood
had struggled in obscurity until 1922, when he won a competition for the Chicago Tribune Tower
with a streamlined Gothic shaft. Hood was prone to embrace provocative ideas; he was one of the
few to defend, even advocate, urban congestion as a strength, not a weakness.

He also had anti-traditional ideas about design: "If you owned a mountain, would you embroider
it?" he told The New York Sun in early 1931, criticizing the designs of traditional New York
skyscrapers with historical decoration.

At the same time he had a hard-headed, engineer's approach to building projects, which had brought
him commissions like Rockefeller Center and the Daily News Building, at 42d Street and Second
Avenue.

Hood designed the inside of the 35-story McGraw-Hill Building with loftlike finishes   — plain
concrete ceilings and walls — in many areas, even in the office portions. McGraw-Hill rented out
the ninth through 15th floors. The lower floors held the printing operations: composing room on
the seventh floor, press room on the sixth, the bindery on the fifth.

The exterior was a startling statement, even to those familiar with Hood's advanced ideas:
horizontal bands of factory-style windows framed by fields of green-blue terra cotta, becoming
bluer with height to almost merge with the sky.

Hood took the colors seriously: he had also considered red, yellow, orange and gray for the terra
cotta, and he fine-uned the design with a gray-green for the window bands, with a stripe of
vermilion at the top of each. Hood also called for buff-colored window shades, with a green stripe
running down the center; the building staff wore green uniforms trimmed with silver.

Traditionalists had fits: a modernistic building was bad enough, but a modernistic blue building
was like serving a bacon burger to a vegetarian. The critic Arthur North, writing in American
Architect in early 1932, called it "a storm center" that showed "disregard for every accepted
principle of architectural designing in the most flagrant manner." But he thought the building was
worth studying. Lewis Mumford defended most modern architecture but wrote in his New Yorker column
that the building was just "a stunt," in part because it did not have cantilever construction to
allow corner windows. He thought the colors were "heavy and unbeautiful."

McGraw-Hill kept boosting its far-west location, but the striking green tower remained isolated.
The company even sold off an adjacent plot to the west, which it had held for possible future
expansion. As West 42d Street declined from honky-tonk to unmentionable, its building became a
liability; in 1972 the company moved to its present skyscraper at Sixth Avenue and 48th Street,
and its old headquarters has passed through several owners.

SINCE 1994 it has been owned by Deco Towers Associates, a foreign investment group. Val Kaminov,
the building manager, said that the owner has put $4 million into mechanical upgrades over the
last four years and is now in the middle of a $3 million facade restoration, including complete
reconstruction of all the parapets and repainting the windows and metalwork to the original paint
colors.

Over the last year test patches and primer coats have been sprouting around the top of the
building in a project that is now in full swing and is to be finished by September.

Mr. Kaminov said that the 550,000-square-foot building is 99.9 percent leased. "When I came here
we were happy to get $15 per square foot" in annual rent, he said. "Now we have leases on some
upper floors at $35 per square foot." The building was designated a landmark in 1979.

Last year the owners removed "Boomerang," an angular metal sculpture by the artist Owen Morrel
installed in 1981, which hung suspended from the side of the building. Philip Trost, counsel for
Deco Towers, said the sculpture was dismantled and either junked or recycled.

=================================================================

March 5, 1999
Hon. Walter McCaffrey
Chair, Subcommittee on Zoning and Franchises
City Council, New York, NY  10007

Re: River Center;  ULURP Items #970086 ZMM and #970087 ZSM

Dear Councilmember McCaffrey:

I would like to bring your attention to the ULURP proposal before the Council next week regarding
River Center, a luxury housing development behind John Jay College on 11th Avenue, between 58th
and 59th Streets.

As you will see in our ULURP response attached to this letter, we have many reservations about
this project, which we discussed at length in many meetings with the developer, Joseph Korff, and
his representatives.

First, the project is still not fully defined, since it was presented to us with two potential,
and quite different, uses. One option includes John Jay College, and leaves much less room for
commercial and residential occupancy. The board favors this proposal, since it is certainly in the
community's interest to help expand one of our best educational resources. The college is in
desperate need of more space, and its building on the east side of 10th Avenue is inadequate and
not expandable.

However, while we hoped administrators from John Jay would participate in our discussions on the
project, they said they would not since they are involved in court proceedings with Mr. Korff. The
likelihood of their participation in the River Center project was never made clear.

The number of apartments and size is also unclear, and has varied in different conversations with
the developer.

Our strongest objection to the project is in regard to its height and bulk. This is an enormous
building - 1.2 million square feet at a height of over 300 feet. And while we have several other
buildings at the same height in the neighborhood, this is not a precedent we want to continue.
This neighborhood is underserved in terms of mass transit, and is already congested at rush hours.

The project is also across from the 59th Street Recreation Center, one of the city's sadly
neglected facilities. For years, the center has been awaiting millions of dollars in funds as part
of a Memorandum of Understanding with ABC, now part of a Tischman-Spier development, to go towards
the renovation of its outdoor pool. Now, the center doors will be directly across from River
Center's garage exit, and its towers will loom above the center from across the street. We had
hoped the developer might choose to make substantial investment in the recreation center, which
could serve as a boon to his tenant as well.

And finally, we do not feel there has been a proper planning study prepared for this neighborhood,
which is caught between low-scale, mixed-income Clinton and the Upper West Side.  How the top of
11th Avenue, now, as you know, a manufacturing zone, develops should be the subject of
considerable planning, not project-by-project rezoning. While we do not have all the answers for
what we envision here, we would like to give some forethought before this cornerstone project
becomes a development standard for the area.

Mr. Korff has chosen to work with excellent architects, the same firm that restored John Jay's
10th Avenue landmark building, and we believe they have given much thought and consideration to
the proposal. However, that does not allow us to disregard some of the project's ultimate flaws.

City Planning did resolve some of our issues, by reducing the number of parking spaces and the
square-footage permitted for commercial uses. However, the height of the towers is still too high,
and the overall bulk is still an issue.

Thank you for your consideration. Please call me at 718-543-6065, or Katherine Gray, chair of the
Clinton Land Use and Zoning committee, 212-306-4383, if you wish to discuss the matter further.

Sincerely,
Pamela Frederick
Chair, Community Board 4

=================================================================

PARK WEST HS: 'PREP SCHOOL FOR PRISON'    
From the NY Post, March 28, 1999
By MARIA ALVAREZ, SUSAN EDELMAN and FERNANDO COLON    
  
Park West High is a school out of control - where sex, drugs and violence sabotage reading,
writing and math. No one is safe within its walls - even the principal has been attacked. "It's a
prep school for the prison system," said one disheartened teacher.

A Post investigation of the school - located on 50th Street between Ninth and 10th avenues in
Hell's Kitchen - found:

* Students were victims of nine robberies in the last 16 days - one at knifepoint.

* There were five assaults, one sexual offense and one theft in the last 28 days.

* One recent assault victim was a pregnant student who was beaten and dragged down a flight of
stairs by a student who snatched her bracelet.

* Another recent victim was principal Frank Brancato, who was punched by a student when he tried
to break up a melee.

* A school aide with an arrest record was accused earlier this month of having sex with a
15-year-old student.

* Another aide, working as a dean, was booted in November after he hit a handcuffed student with a
walkie-talkie.

* Only 36 percent of Park West's class of '98 graduated. The citywide average is 49 percent.

* Almost 27 percent of the students dropped out last year - nearly double the citywide 15 percent
rate.

* The head of the special education department is not certified, and an assistant principal does
not have state certification or a master's degree in administration.

"The effort that's put forth to deal with these children is criminal," griped a veteran teacher.
"They are not getting what they are supposed to be getting - an education."

James Lawrence, the NYPD's chief of school safety, told The Post he recently added 20 safety
officers to Park West's security force. "We know there is a problem, and we are focusing on it,"
Lawrence said. "The real shocker for me was the nine robberies.  "I don't see anything close to
that" anywhere else in the city school system, he said.

Lawrence plans to meet with Brancato.

"We want to give the principal a lot of support and create an environment where kids can achieve
the highest standards. They can't do that if they fear for their safety."

Pregnant student Luz Colon, 19, was attacked on March 10 and is too terrified to return to school
because her attackers have not been arrested. Principal Brancato did not press charges or take
disciplinary action against the student who punched him, because the kid apologized. "The kids are
laughing," a teacher said. "The joke is, 'If we can beat up the principal, none of you matter.'"

What's worse, staff members say, Brancato wants to keep the violence a secret. "This is cosa
nostra [our thing]," Brancato said at a recent faculty meeting, according to staffers. When a Post
reporter visited the school last week, the second floor was jammed with kids while idle safety
officers stood by chatting. Classrooms were half-empty and kids were asleep at their desks. In the
boys' bathroom, students sat on sinks listening to music and smoking cigarettes. Students and
teachers said marijuana-smoking inside the school is routine - and generally ignored.

"The smoke gets so heavy you could smell it outside the principal's office," one teacher said.

Amid all the havoc, some students struggle to learn. "The fights interfere with our education,"
said senior Fanny Montero, 18. "There is always a lot of noise and fights. You can't concentrate."
On the third floor, rival gangs hang out - blacks on one side of the hallway, Hispanics on the
other. Last week, Montero said, a Hispanic student threw a black student down on the floor and
jumped on his stomach. "It happens all the time. There's definitely racial tensions," Montero
said. "It's all gangs."

Another student, 16-year-old Satara Johnson, complained that "There are too many troublemakers in
the school. "The school is too big, and you never know who is who." "Some teachers are afraid,"
said Tyson Monstanto, 17. "I think they should close down the school."

Parents agree.

"The school is the pits," said Patricia Hoge, whose 17-year-old son is still a freshman. "I never
see my son doing homework or carrying books. "I don't see a future for him. He once had hopes of
becoming an artist. That's gone. His talents are ruined. He didn't want to go to Park West. He's
stuck," she said.

Marina Gomez, whose son is a sophomore, said Park West students are disrespectful, security is lax
and the smell of marijuana is always in the air. "I'm always worried," she said. "Sometimes he
comes home late, and I worry he is getting involved in fights or drugs. I hold my breath every
day. I thank God he hasn't got into trouble."

Insiders say students deserve better.

"There are a lot of good kids in that school who want to learn. All they need are good adults to
work with them and to do their jobs," said former dean Robert Streeter, who quit Park West in
December.

"There has to be a thorough cleaning of staff who don't do their jobs."

Brancato refused to speak to The Post, but Robert McCue, the school's United Federation of
Teachers representative, defended Park West. He said teachers who complain "are malcontents" and
denied a gang problem exists at the school.

"There is no coordinated gang activity," McCue said. "They are just wannabes. The hallways are not
out of control. Fights are rare."

Board of Education spokesman Philip Russo called Park West a real success story. "This school is
an improving school in every way. The incidents are down tremendously since the new principal came
in last year. The school was problematic. It's moving in the right direction, and it's much safer
than it had been," he said.