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Creating a Healthy Future for Harlem and New York City




Kids Playing Baseball in Harlem

That which ails society as a whole is usually at crisis level in the poorest neighborhoods and communities of color. This is particularly true when dealing with issues of health. Ailments such as diabetes, hypertension, stroke and AIDS occur at alarming rates in Harlem, the area I represent in the New York City Council.

A 2004 report by the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene illustrates the significant correlation between income and health. For instance, those who live in low-income neighborhoods are more than six times more likely to contract AIDS than those who reside in higher income neighborhoods. Likewise, low-income residents are more than three times more likely to have diabetes and suffer from a stroke.

The relationship between an individual's income level and their physical condition exists for a number of reasons.

First and probably most importantly, the overwhelming majority of low-income families have poor or no access to preventive health care. Annual visits to the doctor can often prevent serious illness or deteriorating health conditions.

Poor eating habits also play a key role. Many neighborhoods in New York City are in desperate need of grocery

Public School Yards Should Be Open to the Public

By Gale Brewer

On weekdays, the schoolyard at PS 9 on West 84 Street in Manhattan buzzes with students climbing on the jungle gym, skipping rope, and playing basketball. But on the weekends, the scene is different; the playground is empty and the gate to the yard is locked.

It was not always this way. In years past, the schoolyard was open on evenings and over the weekends and neighbors used the area as a place to play with their children and to meet with one another.

This is also the case in more than 700 other schoolyards across the city. All of the underutilized schoolyards occupy approximately 948 acres of public land - an area greater than that of Central Park.

Despite a clear lack of recreational open space for residents, the Department of Education has closed most of its schoolyards to the public during the evenings and on weekends. In fact, 73 percent of all Department of Education schoolyards lie empty when school is not in session.

The citywide closure of playgrounds has occurred only in the last ten years. The exact rationale for closing schoolyards to the public seems to be unclear, but in most cases, the policy has persisted with little resistance.

And although the majority of schoolyards are closed to the public outside of school hours, roughly 300 schoolyards across the city do remain available to the public when children are not in the building. The majority of these are operated by the Department of Parks and Recreation, although additionally almost 25 have been “adopted” for operation by the Trust for Public Land, a national nonprofit land conservation organization.

As more and more families are denied access to outdoor recreational spaces, it has become increasingly challenging for parents to promote their children's physical health.

Designating or creating new public space in New York City is an enormous challenge, requiring us to be creative in our effort to provide residents of all neighborhoods with access to adequate recreational facilities.

Let's open our public spaces to the public and give New Yorkers the space they need.

Gale Brewer represents the Upper West Side district 6 in the New York City Council

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

stores that offer more quality foods. Unfortunately, some residents only can shop at smaller stores that do not offer many fruits, vegetables, or other healthy foods. Likewise, nutritious food is often more expensive, which is why many parents purchase items with little nutritional value, such sugar-filled fruit drinks, rather than real juice.

Finally, too many New Yorkers ignore the benefits of exercise, particularly for children who are forming the habits that they will carry into adulthood. Physical fitness classes in our schools have become more lax, and we have simultaneously allowed our children to spend more and more free time on the Internet, playing video games, or watching television. There is little green space in many of our neighborhoods and what we have is often not maintained.

The only solution to this growing health crisis is to educate and engage our communities in healthy practices, beginning with young people.

HEALTHY EATING

Studies have shown that 27 percent of New York City's kindergarteners are obese and 15 percent are overweight. It is likely that these children will grow into adults who continue these unhealthy practices, causing harm to their own bodies and risking the well-being of those who depend upon them.

City agencies and various community-based groups have been gradually developing and implementing programs that will hopefully help us put our community on the track to good health. And fortunately, we are beginning to see these initiatives take shape.

Dr. Gregory Hodge, who is the principal of the Frederick Douglass Academy in Harlem, has created an evening cooking class for both parents and students. This class is geared toward teaching how to cook healthy and fulfilling meals while also increasing the interaction between the parents and the school itself.

The world-famous Sylvia's Restaurant and North General Hospital have taken a similar course of action. These two local establishments have joined forces to create a cooking curriculum that will be implemented in public schools. This program also has the goal of teaching high school students how to diet properly, which can affect one's performance in the classroom. The curriculum will teach children how to tweak familiar foods and recipes in order to make them healthier. The program is still in the planning stages, but when it is complete it will act as a model, giving students the ability to prepare savory foods that are also healthy.

A coalition of health organizations and philanthropists have also created the Healthy Schools Program, designed to improve the nutritional value of food served in cafeterias, increase physical activity during the school day and after school, and implement classroom lessons on healthy lifestyles.

City agencies have created innovative ways to promote healthy living. For example, the Department of Mental Health and Hygiene recently encouraged the owners of small grocery stores in Harlem to sell low-fat milk. Historically, stores in Harlem have been reluctant to sell low-fat milk because they felt that it was not in demand. City officials helped with the promotion and even gave out free samples to children and their parents. The response was very positive and a number of small grocery store owners have recently committed to buying low-fat milk in the future.

PROMOTING PHYSICAL ACTIVITY

We must also make a push to increase physical activity in our schools.

As a City Council member, I have received numerous complaints about the shortcomings of gym classes in our public schools. Overcrowding, lack of gym or classroom space, poor equipment and inadequate lesson planning have created an environment in which physical activity is no longer emphasized. Schools must begin to implement physical education programs that are more demanding, and it is essential that these classes take place five times a week.

Programs such as S.P.A.R.K. (Sports, Play and Active Recreation for Kids), a school based program that promotes physical activity, should be used as the model in engaging our children, parents and teachers in different types of physical activity that will strengthen both their body and mind.

HIV EDUCATION

HIV/AIDS continues to be a problem in the New York City, particularly in low-income neighborhoods.

The mayor’s office has taken a tremendous step by setting in place a curriculumthat seeks to educate young children on this particular topic. It is well documented that prior to this initiative the city was falling far short of its mandated responsibility to educate students in grades K through 8 on health, particularly HIV and AIDS awareness. Moving forward, we hope that this new initiative will make children more aware of their bodies and the responsibility that comes with having sex.

I hope we will continue to create innovative ways to encourage New Yorkers, both young and old, to take proactive health measures that increase their chances of living a long and productive life.

A COMMITMENT TO THE FUTURE

With all of the negative things that are taking place in our nation and New York City, we must work to correct things over which we have direct control. Preventive health programs are a necessity for all New York City residents, and we must encourage proactive health initiatives in low-income communities.

We must not allow socioeconomic level be a deterrent from healthy living. Healthy schools and parents create mentally and physically sound children that will one day affect the path of our beloved city and great nation.

Inez Dickens represents district 9 in the New York City Council.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Counting The Empty Buildings


Not long ago, 240 Manhattan Avenue, a six-story apartment building at 110th Street, would have fit right into its Harlem neighborhood. Nearby vacant lots served as dumping grounds for garbage and meeting places for rats. Morningside Park across the streets was a popular place to smoke crack.

But the vacant lots are gone, replaced by gleaming new residential buildings, the rats are gone, and in the park, people are lighting charcoal for family barbecues.

While many other buildings have been rehabilitated, somehow 240 Manhattan Avenue has been left out of the transformation. The building has been vacant since 1999, according to the city housing department's Web site. (Its owner, Baruch Singer, could not be reached for comment.)

Its boarded-up windows, peeling and fading paint and locked-up entryways seem to defy logic: How could anyone leave vacant such a building in such a "hot" area? How could anyone abandon it? More generally, with all the talk about a housing crisis in the city, why is any available space not being utilized?

Those are the kinds of questions that Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer's office is hoping to answer with a survey of abandoned buildings and vacant lots, the first survey of its type in decades. Stringer's office has organized over 100 volunteers to walk block-by-block through neighborhoods on the Lower East Side and Harlem, among other areas, where abandoned or vacant buildings are not uncommon.

"We want to do this count to see how far we've come in the last 35 years and better understand why the abandoned buildings still exist despite the hot real estate market," Stringer explained.

Abandoned, Or Just Vacant?

Certainly, the city has come a long way. In the 1980s, the city controlled over 100,000 apartments; today, it controls a little over 2,000. Little by little, the city has shed the buildings it seized from landlords who did not pay their real estate taxes. Some were turned over to the tenants themselves, others were turned over to non-profit organizations.

The distressed buildings remaining today such as 240 Manhattan Avenue -- abandoned or neglected by their owners -- are knottier problems. Few are probably abandoned, said Mark Alexander of Urban Builders Collaborative and a long-time developer.

"Often times, what looks like an abandoned building is not an abandoned building," Alexander said. "They are buildings with vacant apartments above occupied stores."

The buildings are vacant for two general reasons, Alexander said.

"In lower Manhattan and selected parts of northern Manhattan, these are potential development sites," he said. But conflicts between multiple owners or financial difficulties owners would face if they actually tried to rehabilitate a vacant building effectively prevent development of the vacant building, he said.

"In the northern part of Manhattan and outer boroughs, [vacant buildings are] largely a result of the neighborhood distress of the 1970s and 1980s," Alexander said. "Landlords could not afford to maintain the apartments above the storefronts. It was not economic to maintain the apartments. They vacated them because they couldn't make money off of them."

In other cases, however, the city owns buildings that landlords abandoned. Elaine Toribio of the Citizens Housing and Planning Council said those cases are perhaps easier to understand.

"The reasons those sites might not be developed is the city hasn't gotten its act together on which agency should develop the property," Toribio said. "And even once they have a plan, it could be an issue of money."

"It's easier to understand why they're vacant and boarded up when the city owns them," Toribio said. "But when it's a privately owned building, you can just kind of shrug and say, ‘Who knows what the person is thinking?'"

Forced Vacancy

But some advocates said in some cases what the person is thinking is, ‘Let's keep this building vacant in order to make apartments scarce and consequently drive up rents.'

"I think that's part of the issue because of the fact you're dealing with supply and demand," said Roosevelt Orphee of Picture the Homeless, which has organized the survey with Stringer's office. "Leaving the supply down, you up the ante, so some people just can't get in the game and you change the dynamics of the market.

"The landlords are keeping them off line and losing money, so what's going on?" Orphee added. "They are not stupid. They're speculating."

In other cases, Orphee said landlords had admitted to him that they simply do not want the hassle of dealing with tenants.

"Landlords are finding ways to make money without dealing with tenants," he said.

It would not surprise some, too, if landlords were hoping to get a building deregulated by leaving it vacant for years.

Next Steps

Doing the survey will be easier than devising ways to address the problem of distressed buildings, Stringer admitted.

“We want to really put this information into a database and figure out what to do about it,” he said. “You can’t just go out and say let’s build affordable housing when there is no vacant land. When we do talk to developers and building owners we want to have an intelligent discussion.”

Joe Lamport is the assistant director of the City-Wide Task Force on Housing Court, a coalition of community housing organizations.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Drowning and Rescue in New York


Surrounded by waters with treacherous currents New York City offers up plenty of ways -- intentional and unintentional -- of getting in too deep. Yet, even with all the water surrounding the city, there are surprisingly few deaths each year.

The police department's Harbor Unithas 28 divers whose duties include rescuing people and recovering bodies from the 146 square miles of New York waters. They work from helicopters or boats, and must deal with low visibility in the sometimes murky water.

Drowning Accidents

Most at risk for unintentional drowning are teenage boys. "The most common drowning victims are males in their teen years through their mid-20s," reports New York Department of Health.

Their stories are poignant. An adventuresome 14-year-old boy, Joseph Johnson, exploring the Bronx River on a raft made of found objects along the shoreline, drowned when his raft sank in June 2005. Johnson, who had climbed through a hole in the fence along the river, couldn't swim.

That same month, a group of teenage boys got in trouble swimming too close to a rocky jetty in Long Beach. The waves battered them against the rocks, and one, Yuhang Gao, 15, of Flushing, Queens, drowned. It was the day before the beaches officially opened, so no lifeguards were patrolling.

Young men at risk are not just a New York phenomenon. Nationwide, 80 percent of all drowning victims are male, and drowning is the second-leading cause of death from injury for children from 1 to 14 years of age. African American children from age 5 to 19 drowned at 2.3 times the rate of white children. That is because African Americans are less likely to know how to swim, according to the Centers for Disease Control.

But overall drownings are relatively uncommon in New York City. In fact, if you want to avoid accidental drowning, New York City is one of the best places to live – despite all the water. The rate of drownings here is less than a quarter of the national rate (1.14 per 100,000 people nationally, .28 for the city). Of the 1,078 accidental deaths in New York City in 2004 ( latest statisticavailable from the New York City Department of Health), there were 22 drownings. That includes deaths such as babies drowning in bathtubs as well as kids getting in trouble playing in rivers and beaches.

Accidents

Not just daredevil kids perish in the waters around New York. Aircraft, boats and construction projects can also cause danger in the water.

The year 2005 was a particularly rough one for aircraft over New York waterways. A small airplane crashed off of Coney Island last May and killed three tourists from West Virginia along with the pilot from Queens. Two helicopters crashed into the East River last June. One was loaded with sightseers and the other with executives from MBNA. All survived with the help of police divers and other rescuers.

In the city, lethal boating accidents are also rare. A powerboat ran into a rowing shell with four men at the oars in the Harlem River in October 2005. The men were out for their regular early-morning exercise. One, Jim Runsdorf, a real estate developer, 41, lost his life in the accident. Another rower was injured. The crash was judged an accident because of low visibility in the pre-dawn.

Ocean waters are particularly treacherous for boats. In June, postal worker Jeremiah Swinton died after the fishing boat he was in capsized off of Breezy Point.

Construction workers can also be the victims of accidents in the water. Last October, Kervin Collado, who was working on the Third Avenue Bridge, fell into the Harlem River. A Fire Department diver could not get to him before he died.

Suicide

The city offers tempting methods of self-destruction in the water. Despite that, of the 493 people claimed by suicide in 2004, only 15 died by drowning. The most notorious such suicide in recent years was that of storyteller Spalding Gray, who jumped off the Staten Island Ferry in January 2004. Causing additional distress to his family and fans, his body didn't surface for two months. It finally washed up near Greenpoint, Brooklyn.

In March, a 14-year-old boy, Sidney Hatchett, climbed over the railing along the promenade under the FDR Drive. His 6-year-old sister ran for help, but by the time rescuers arrived, the teenager had drowned. He was depressed over being bullied at school, his mother later said.

People wishing to end their lives may also seek out bridges although the bridges are designed to prevent falls and jumps. Guardrails and tall fences along bridge walkways deflect most potential suicides.

Some try and fail. Jumping off a bridge provides a more likely method of self-destruction, but it's not a sure means of demise. In May 2005, a 20-year-old woman survived the 135-foot fall from the Brooklyn Bridge. She was taken to the hospital where she was in critical condition. A 24-year-old Bronx man, Hector Amid, also survived his leap from the Brooklyn Bridge in March 2004.

Surviving such a leap is called "taking a Brodie." The phrase originated with a man named Brodie who survived after leaping from the bridge on a bet in 1886.

While the police maintain jurisdiction over most water rescues, the Fire Department sometimes comes to the rescue. A ladder company resounded to a 911 call when a suicidal man jumped off the Triborough Bridge in December 2005. Rescuers lowered their ladder from the bridge to rescue the man, who clung to a wall (evidently having changed his mind about wanting to die).

It's not always possible to determine how someone entered the water to commit suicide - or if their death was in fact a suicide. Mystery still surrounds the death of 34-year-old jazz saxophonist Albert Ayler, whose body was pulled from the East River in Brooklyn in 1970 after missing for 20 days. The death was ruled accident or suicide, and talk swirled of a more nefarious end to the brilliant musician's career.

A police spokesperson says that the department does not track how many people attempt to jump off of New York City bridges-or how many succeed.

No Escape

Not everyone who gets pulled out of the waters wants to be rescued. In April, a car thief being pursued by police jumped out of his car and right into the East River at the Madison Avenue Bridge at 135th Street. Police helicopters and boats continued the chase. Even in the dark, they could see his shiny bald head, and though he continued to try to get away, police pulled the uninjured suspect from the water in less than 20 minutes.

After a man in his 30s who was holding a baby, jumped in the water off of Edgewater Street in Staten Island in March, a police officer in uniform jumped in and rescued the baby. Rescuers also grabbed the man.

Safety

Railings and police vigilance will only help some of those who get in deep waters. The Red Cross says the best method of surviving is learning to swim. Swimmers should never go in the water alone and should only swim where there are lifeguards. The New York Red Cross website lists swimming classes: http://www.nyredcross.org/takeaclass.php

While New York beaches do have lifeguards in the summertime, none of the city's rivers have beaches or lifeguards. So even in the dog days of summer, when a dip in the Hudson or East River is most tempting, it's not a good idea to dive in.

Boaters should wear life jackets and avoid alcohol. The NYPD Harbor Unit recommends a boating safety course (888-FOR-USPS).  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



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