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Morningside Park Picnic Area - DISGUSTING

The picnic area in Morningside Park between 120th and 123rd has turned into a circus on the weekends. The crowds are out of control and the massive mess they leave behind is appalling. We also have to endure the smoke and fumes from the grills coming into our homes. The park often gets overcrowded and the crowd spills out to the street where they are now openly setting up grills. Then we have the double and triple parked cars, the noise from the crowds and the loud music not to mention the fights that often break out. When the sun sets we then have to deal with rowdy and disorderly crowds that don't want to go home and the motorcycle clubs that come out at night to ride up and down Morningside Avenue. It is DISGUSTING and to make matters worse, the police have to come and force people out of the park and force people to move their cars from the avenue. We the residents have to deal with the aftermath the next day. They leave garbage on our streets and buildings and some use our lobby's as toilets. I PRAY that they end picnics and cooking in the park if this is what we the residents have to endure every weekend during the summer. If anyone feels the same way, I'd love to hear from you.

Posted by: Chooleta Neighbor



Robert S. Browne, Economist, Philanthropist, Black Activist, dies at 79

Robert Span Browne, economist, philanthropist, foreign aid advisor, anti-Vietnam War activist, professor, writer and founder of three black self-help organizations, died of heart failure in Rockland County, NY on August 5, 2004. He was 79 and lived in Teaneck, New Jersey.

Through his writings, speeches and activism, Browne helped shape the discourse on black America in the 1960s and 1970s, and on the United States’ involvement in the Vietnam War. He focused on economics and other topics as they relate to African Americans, including human development, communications, foreign policy, rural development and political empowerment. From the early 1960s, before many Americans had heard of Vietnam, he was committed to influencing United States policy in that country, which he said was taking an erroneous path in supporting Vietnam’s President Diem.

Browne held positions with the U.S. Agency for International Development in Cambodia
from 1955 to 1958, and in Vietnam from 1958 to 1961. He met his future wife, Huoi Nguyen, while living in Cambodia. Upon his return to the U.S., he met with peace organizations, political groups, labor unions and churches, and published letters and articles in The New York Times and other outlets to highlight what he thought was a dangerous course in Southeast Asia. His expertise was valued by these organizations, whose efforts are largely acknowledged as the catalyst for the anti-Vietnam War movement. Browne ran for the United States Senate from New Jersey as an independent candidate in 1966 on an anti-Vietnam platform. He was especially opposed to African Americans going to combat against other people of color.

By the late 1960s Browne shifted his focus to the economic development of African Americans, founding three national black self-help organizations: The Black Economic Research Center (1969), a center of applied research that garnered the services of black economists for black economic development projects, and published a journal called “The Review of Black Political Economy”; the Emergency Land Fund (1971), a resource dedicated to reversing the decline in black land ownership in the South; and The Twenty-First Century Foundation (1971), an endowed, public foundation that advances strategic black philanthropy.

In 1980, the United States Treasury Department appointed Browne the first U.S. Executive Director of the African Development Bank in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, an assignment he held until 1982. From 1982 to 1985, he served as Senior Research Fellow of African Studies at Howard University. From 1986 to 1991 he was Staff Director of the Subcommittee on International Development Institutions of the House Committee on Banking, Finance and Urban Affairs, where he worked on issues related to the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and Third World debt, among others. After semi-retirement in 1993, Browne became an economic consultant for Washington, D.C.-based organizations, several dealing with Africa.

Browne served as Jesse Jackson’s advisor on economic policy during his 1984 campaign for the presidency; and made a presentation on U.S.-Africa policy at the Clinton/Gore Economic Summit in Little Rock, Arkansas shortly after the 1992 presidential election.

Browne was born in Chicago, Illinois on August 17, 1924 to William H. and Julia Browne. He had two older siblings, William and Wendelle. Browne was awarded a BA with honors in economics from the University of Illinois in 1944. In 1947 he was awarded an MBA in finance from the University of Chicago, becoming one of the first black people in U.S. history to earn an MBA. He continued his studies at the London School of Economics, and later completed all course work toward his doctorate at the City University of New York.

Browne is survived by his wife Huoi Nguyen; children Hoa, Mai, Alexi and Marshall; grandson Boaz Cohen; son-in-law Binyamin Cohen; sister Wendelle Browne of Chicago; niece Iqua Kristine Colson, her husband Stephen, and sons Issa and Mikel; nephew William H. Browne, his wife Sherry, and son William; cousin Mary Pierce and her son Paul Pierce, among other family members, as well as many friends and colleagues who considered him a mentor, inspiration and role model.

A memorial service will be held in September. Please contact The Twenty-First Century Foundation at 212-662-3700 or info@21cf.org for more information. In lieu of flowers, the family requests that donations be made to the Robert S. Browne Family Fund at The Twenty-First Century Foundation.



Posted by: Christopher Greaves



Mta Takes Our Breath Away

Why is the MTA suffocating Northern Manhattan?
By Christopher Greaves

With kids already gasping for air in the country’s Asthma Capital, why is the MTA coming to their rescue with a fleetload of tailpipe inhalers?

“Legitimate business necessities”, that’s why. According to MTA penny pinchers, East Harlem—a neighborhood that leads the country in childhood asthma hospitalizations—is a choice locale for its cancer-causing, asthma-triggering, toxic diesel buses. On Sunday, September 7th, the MTA reopened a 12-story monstrosity at 100th Street for its exhaust-spewing buses—an abominable renovation to the smaller duplex MTA previously operated on that spot. Garaging its chariots among the ‘peasants’ at 100th Street, however, is proving to be a royal pain.

“We consider this an attack on our communities,” said Peggy Shepard, West Harlem Environmental Action (WE ACT) executive director, at a WE ACT-organized 100th Street rally on the depot’s opening day. “When is the MTA going to become accountable to our residents?” she queried.

When, indeed.

Ignoring a burgeoning health crisis, critical media coverage, and a chorus of dissenting voices extending far beyond East Harlem, the MTA continually justifies its stranglehold on our communities with perverse rationalizations about market driven forces and other equally lame excuses for colonizing all of Northern Manhattan. The MTA, for example, claims that the staggering number of depots in Upper Manhattan—six out of Manhattan’s seven!—are located there due to logistical realities. According to MTA, uptown provides the prime quarters for its noxious depots because it is “the end of the route”. How absurd! Ask them why downtown isn’t a similarly feasible “end of the route”. Ask MTA to explain why cross-town buses are housed uptown. Ask them to address the fact that cost-of-land assessments and housing policies
are often implicitly racist--making their intentionally nebulous 'necessity' defense almost laughable.

The MTA has been arrogant, indifferent, and brazenly unresponsive on a number of fronts this year. Casting aside our position that blacks and Latinos in our area are already suffering a disproportionate impact from pollutants, the MTA opened the 100th Street Bus Depot in residential East Harlem, as it closed the industrially zoned Hudson Depot to make room for a park! We are persistently ignored and told that our grievances ring "hollow".

Countering MTA's ignore and avoid policy, WE ACT has enlisted the support of elected officials, such as New York State Assemblyman Adam Clayton Powell IV and Manhattan Borough President C. Virginia Fields. We have offered our input. We have rallied, complained, importuned. WE ACT, Inc. filed a Title VI civil rights complaint with the U.S. Dept. of Transportation on the community's behalf in November 2000. The investigation has been pending for three years now with no substantive action taken.

Flouting airtight research, sound science, and painstaking demographic analysis, the MTA has erected the towering monstrosity at 100th street: a monument to the fecklessness it displays throughout Northern Manhattan. We fear that the MTA’s decision-making and its obvious contemptuousness have something to do with the hue of our communities. In Upper Manhattan,
our kids are suffocating and we are, quite frankly, EXHAUSTed.

Governor Pataki, we beseech you: Don’t let the MTA take our breath away!

Posted by: Christopher Greaves














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Read All Views

Morningside Park Picnic Area - DISGUSTING
(Jul 15, 2006)

Robert S. Browne, Economist, Philanthropist, Black Activist, dies at 79
(Aug 09, 2004)

Mta Takes Our Breath Away
(Oct 02, 2003)

Fed Up With Motorcycle Noise
(Aug 06, 2003)

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