Queens to Amazon: Drop Dead-*

2/17/2019

432 Park Avenue offers a digital New York salute

The hissy fit by Amazon reminds me of one of the best things that has happened to my home town -- not getting the 2012 Summer Olympics.

This happened in 2005, when the City Council voted down a stadium that would have been plopped down on the far west side of Manhattan to accommodate the Typhoid Mary of sports events.

Since the Games were given to London, the Hudson Yards area of Manhattan has grown, without having to work around a neighborhood killer of a stadium.

I say that as a sports columnist who was a very early critic of the proposal.

My memory was just jogged by the rising up of people who resented the $3-billion tax benefits to be given Amazon, which wanted to build a “campus” in the Long Island City section of Queens.

Rather than negotiate with critics – show some respect for the locals -- Amazon turned tail and ran. The political aspects have been well reported in the Times and elsewhere. Experts and business people say Amazon really would have meant 25,000 new jobs in the city, but I say they would have been jobs for new people, out-of-towners, with technological skills, eager to pay the gouge prices in new high rises in formerly lumpen Queens.

As David Leonhardt points out, Queens already has jobs:
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/17/opinion/amazon-new-york.html

As a native of Queens (who lives just to the east these days), I love the boom all over my home borough -- the languages and energy and skills and food: Oaxaca restaurant in Corona; Korean restaurants along Northern Blvd.

I’m not sure Queens needs the great favor Amazon was going to bestow. Many people living near the proposed “campus” would have been displaced by the land rush and the rent-grubbing and the price-raising. (See: “Brooklyn, hipsters.”)

To Jeff Bezos, I would say a few things:
1. Thank you for the Prime delivery of a 64-ounce container of kitchen-drain cleaner rather than my having to run to the store during the deep freeze this month.
2. Please, keep reporting on that disturbed person in Washington with your wonderful paper, The Washington Post.
3. When local activists express their concerns, please, learn to negotiate. This is Noo Yawk, for goodness’ sakes. (“If I can make it there, I’ll make it anywhere.” Guess you didn’t.)
4. And while I think of it, please read your own paper’s electronic files about the stupidity of people who take intimate selfies.

This uprising by “progressives” – whatever that means – seems to have come as a shock to Gov. Cuomo and Mayor DiBlasio (who keeps changing his story, as in his 180-degree swerve in the Times on Monday.)

I would give some advice to these illustrious public servants. (The same would apply to former mayors Bloomberg and Giuliani.)
1. Fix the damn subways first. Help working people get to work.
2. Pay attention to the rising seas, because the disturbed President has no clue.
3. Pay attention to those dreaded “progressives.”

These guys are always running for President rather than fixing New York. They need to know that New Yorkers don’t like out-of-towners telling us what the deal is.

Jeff Bezos, say hello to the New York Echo:
Visitor: Hello-o-o-o-o!
New York Echo: Shut the f--k u-u-u-u-p!
------
*-Homage to the greatest headline any of us will ever see, written by William J. Brink, managing editor of the New York Daily News, when President Ford did not help the city during the 1975 financial crisis:
FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD.

bruce

2/18/2019 10:51:25 am

george,

g'day.

it always amazes me to see big companies in the rugged free enterprise mode become dreaded socialists when it comes to handouts for milking/bilking states, provinces, cities out of bags and bags of money and property.

as for the olympics, you are dead on.

i'm assuming you read the 'when queens was lame' piece in saturday's nyt.

as for the ford to etc....that was classic.

tho i did like 'bezos exposes pecker' a lot.

and i see your boy said there should be retribution for the SNL piece mocking him--yet again.

thank goodness all his followers are sane, rational people.

what bad could come of that?

bruce

George Vecsey

2/18/2019 11:21:58 am

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/16/opinion/sunday/queens-amazon.html

Bruce, I did see that essay. The writer is younger than I am, and I could walk 10 blocks to the subway (in Jamaica), whereas she (in Bayside) needed a bus to get to subway. But reaction is the same. I ran with some Manhattan kids as a teenager -- Bronx Science/Stuyvesant/Music and Arts, elite schools. They thought Queens was the end of the world. I was so impressed how they knew cool places in Manhattan. The writer has it perfectly: different time, we can be assertively proud of our vibrant home borough. GV

bruce

2/18/2019 12:40:29 pm

george,

Toronto has a similar situation after the province amalgamated the area 21 years ago.

people might say they're from taranna, but actually from scarborough----scarberia--to people from the 'city'.

not the end of the world, but you can see it from there.

bruce

Hansen Alexander

2/18/2019 02:47:14 pm

George, I'm going to have to disagree with you on the Amazon issue, even though you grew up in Queens, and know vastly more than I do about the LIC area. Hell, you probably know vastly more about the actual details of the Amazon contract than I do. However, the horror stories about massive rent increases to come, the unfairness of a $3 billion tax incentive, and alleged physical debasement of the neighborhood, was not backed up be enough hard evidence to sway this lawyer against the plan. It looks to me as it served mostly as a launching pad for the political careers of progressives on the make. 25,000 jobs is nothing to snear at, particularly from a well managed company that would have easily realized an instant return on the investment of that $3 billion, unlike Governor Cuomo's tax giveaway to out of state companies to open for business in New York State, which has actually LOST the state money. As I understand it, the shrill claims of Amazon's union-busting intentions, is not backed by any evidence, at least as far as Queens goes, as these jobs are either management or high tech, not usually areas of unionization in the Brave New World of an interdependent, world economy.

George Vecsey

2/18/2019 06:54:58 pm

Hansen: Thanks, I get everything you say, and have read them from others who know business/law/politics better than I do. I know people who work and teach in that neighborhood who wonder if people will be forced to move further from schools and work in LI City because of the land rush and the rent hikes. I don't believe Amazon that there will be jobs for people in the Queensbridge buildings. I was surprised by the "Progressives" who flexed muscles, vocal chords, etc -- part of the reaction to the Trump age, probably. Doubt I would have jumped on this issue if Amazon hadn't run at the sign of conflict, the poor dears. Thanks for your realistic input. The 25,000 jobs sounded great...Best, George

Roy Edelsack

2/18/2019 12:42:39 pm

The greatest headline I ever saw on the sports pages of the NY Post was an appreciation of the long career of steeplechase trainer Burley Cocks:

"For Cocks, The 'Chase Never Ends"

bruce

2/18/2019 12:56:43 pm

roy,

skipped by cocks' first name on my first read.

on sober second glance, i think if the E wasn't in his given name that it could've been even more interesting.

bruce

bruce

2/18/2019 12:47:50 pm

roy,

most excellent.

if we're starting a hed hall of fame, I think we've got the first three entrants.

must be a lot good candidates outside north America that we haven't seen.

bruce

Jeff Geller

2/18/2019 10:34:43 pm

With all the statements about the deal flying, pardon the expression, from the left and right, I keep thinking about what Claude Rains would have said about all this, 'I am shock, shock about how this agreement unraveled' This coming from a guy who walked a long block and a quarter to the Parsons Blvd IND station to go to The City.

George Vecsey

2/20/2019 02:06:56 pm

Jeff, know that corner well. at the bottom of the glacial hill. I recall a trolley line running from Hillside up to Horace Harding around 1950....I used to take it to a Saturday "enrichment" class for kids at Queens College. And near Jamaica was the old library. Our own little world.
GV

Alan Rubin link

2/19/2019 05:51:04 pm

All too often, the financial incentives for companies to invest in communities do not bring the desired benefit.

Over twenty years ago a GM plant was shut down in Ypsilanti, MI despite having received a substantial financial investment to locate a steel mill ten years earlier. The new found jobs were lost and the City of Ypsilanti was never reimbursed for their lost taxes.

Unfortunately, this is all too common.

It seems to me that a company’s investment in a community should be based upon a sound business plan and not be dependent upon a subsidy. The added value of a tax break should be related to any company expansion over and above its initial plan.

Subsidies are helpful in bringing jobs and community growth to depressed areas. They should not be wasted on the sweet spots.

Governments should be catalysts for growth, not a piggy bank.

Ed Martin

2/19/2019 08:46:38 pm

George for President!!

bruce

2/19/2019 08:51:37 pm

ed,

he can't afford the cut in pay.

bruce

Herb Chasman

2/23/2019 10:04:42 pm

Spent my formative years in Queens at P.S. 26 (lights in the school yard at night did not draw flies but did draw basketball players from all over the City) and Jamaica High during the glory years,1952 to 1956.

Last twenty years lived in 48th Congressional District in Orange County, CA where my Congressman was Dana Rohrabacher, until 2018 when a moderate Democrat named Harley Rouda turned the 48th Blue. I sense a concern in some of the above comments with the growing clout of the so called "Progressives" in the Democratic Party. I share that concern and the excessive attention they receive from the media because they are good copy. My number one goal is to turn the Presidency Blue in 2020 and I am confident that a so called "Moderate" Democratic candidate would have the best chance of doing so. Lets not f--ck this up!

Hillel Kuttler

2/24/2019 03:31:53 am

Couldn't the ghost of Casey Stengel sue Jeff Bezos's company for expropriating The Old Perfessor's famed Mets adjective?

Comments are closed.

QUOTES

Measuring Covid Deaths, by David Leonhardt. July 17, 2023. NYT online.
The United States has reached a milestone in the long struggle against Covid: The total number of Americans dying each day — from any cause — is no longer historically abnormal….

After three horrific years, in which Covid has killed more than one million Americans and transformed parts of daily life, the virus has turned into an ordinary illness.

The progress stems mostly from three factors:
First, about three-quarters of U.S. adults have received at least one vaccine shot.
Second, more than three-quarters of Americans have been infected with Covid, providing natural immunity from future symptoms. (About 97 percent of adults fall into at least one of those first two categories.)
Third, post-infection treatments like Paxlovid, which can reduce the severity of symptoms, became widely available last year.
“Nearly every death is preventable,” Dr. Ashish Jha, who was until recently President Biden’s top Covid adviser, told me. “We are at a point where almost everybody who’s up to date on their vaccines and gets treated if they have Covid, they rarely end up in the hospital, they almost never die.”

That is also true for most high-risk people, Jha pointed out, including older adults — like his parents, who are in their 80s — and people whose immune systems are compromised. “Even for most — not all but most —immuno-compromised people, vaccines are actually still quite effective at preventing against serious illness,” he said. “There has been a lot of bad information out there that somehow if you’re immuno-compromised that vaccines don’t work.”

That excess deaths have fallen close to zero helps make this point: If Covid were still a dire threat to large numbers of people, that would show up in the data.

One point of confusion, I think, has been the way that many Americans — including we in the media — have talked about the immuno-compromised. They are a more diverse group than casual discussion often imagines.

Most immuno-compromised people are at little additional risk from Covid — even people with serious conditions, such as multiple sclerosis or a history of many cancers. A much smaller group, such as people who have received kidney transplants or are undergoing active chemotherapy, face higher risks.

Covid’s toll, to be clear, has not fallen to zero. The C.D.C.’s main Covid webpage estimates that about 80 people per day have been dying from the virus in recent weeks, which is equal to about 1 percent of overall daily deaths.

The official number is probably an exaggeration because it includes some people who had virus when they died even though it was not the underlying cause of death. Other C.D.C. data suggests that almost one-third of official recent Covid deaths have fallen into this category. A study published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases came to similar conclusions.

Dr. Shira Doron, the chief infection control officer at Tufts Medicine in Massachusetts, told me that “age is clearly the most substantial risk factor.” Covid’s victims are both older and disproportionately unvaccinated. Given the politics of vaccination, the recent victims are also disproportionately
Republican and white.

Each of these deaths is a tragedy. The deaths that were preventable — because somebody had not received available vaccines and treatments — seem particularly tragic. (Here’s a Times guide to help you think about when to get your next booster shot.)
***

From the great Maureen Dowd:

As I write this, I’m in a deserted newsroom in The Times’s D.C. office. After working at home for two years during Covid, I was elated to get back, so I could wander around and pick up the latest scoop.
But in the last year, there has been only a smattering of people whenever I’m here, with row upon row of empty desks. Sometimes a larger group gets lured in for a meeting with a platter of bagels."

--- Dowd writes about the lost world of journalists clustered in newsrooms at all hours, smoking, drinking, gossipping, making phone calls, typing, editing.
***
"Putting out the paper," we called it.
Much more than nostalgia.
---https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/29/opinion/journalism-newsroom.html

Queens to Amazon: Drop Dead-*

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