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Tenant rallies, subway safety, and seasonal celebrations: Brooklyn Paper’s top stories from March 2024
They say March comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb, but it’s not really clear if the news cycle in Brooklyn follows that trend.
This past month saw plenty of good — Coney Island’s iconic amusement parks opened for the season, officials landed on a name for a new Bay Ridge elementary school that honors a local hero, and the historic Brooklyn Paramount reopened after a years-long restoration, bringing live music and art back to the building.
The borough also faced some difficulty — a Park Slope stabbing left one young woman dead and her twin sister injured, a beloved synagogue was demolished, and a shooting rattled Brooklyn’s straphangers.
From the good to the heartbreaking, here are some of Brooklyn Paper’s top and most important stories from March.
Brooklynites rallied against evictions in Crown Heights
On a cold, wet day, residents from 12 unionized buildings in Crown Heights came together to support neighbors facing eviction — and to fight back against the deregulation of rent-stabilized apartments at large.
Last summer, the owners of 285 Eastern Parkway told tenants they intended to demolish the building, which is fulled with rent-regulated units — likely as a way to deregulate those units and start charging market rate. Since then, tenants have been fighting back — their case is currently being reviewed by the state’s Division of Housing and Community Renewal, but there’s no guarantee they’ll be allowed to stay.
Tenants and supporters said the situation at 285 Eastern Parkway is just the tip of the iceberg, and that many tenants are facing eviction as their landlords attempt to deregulate their buildings to make some more money, leaving tenants homeless as housing prices continue to rise.
Police blamed a subway shooting on fare evasion
The day after a man was shot in the head with his own gun at the Hoyt-Schermerhorn Streets station after he allegedly started a fight with his fellow passenger, leaving straphangers terrified, cops said the gun-owner had evaded the fare when he entered the subway system at Nostrand Avenue.
The shooting came weeks after Gov. Kathy Hochul deployed hundreds of National Guard members to New York City subways to help with bag checks after subway crimes spiked in the beginning of the year. Days later — after two more commuters were stabbed in separate incidents on Brooklyn’s subways — the NYPD announced it would send 800 more cops into the subway system to deter fare evaders. Though many criticized the NYPD’s focus on fare evasion in relation to violent crime, at a March 15 press conference about the Hoyt-Schermerhorn shooting, cops said they “are seeing a small group of individuals that we catch during these fare evasion operations that are recidivists, that have warrants, that have guns, that have knives and they don’t pay the fare.”
Borough Park’s oldest synagogue was demolished without permits
On March 17, after years of dispute, Chevra Anshei Lubawitz — Borough Park’s oldest and longest-surviving synagogue – was demolished without permits.
The property was sold to developers in 2017, and community members have been fighting to save the synagogue since then, arguing that a demolition was not kosher and that the deal had not been fairly negotiated. But, to the horror of community members, the developers went ahead with a demolition anyway. Department of Buildings inspectors found contractors had acted without a demolition permit and had not taken the adequate steps to protect neighbors during the demolition — and slapped them with a full Stop Work order.
“The synagogue was definitely not just destroyed,” said Jewish Future Alliance president Yaacov Behrman. “It was desecrated the way it was ripped down.”
Neighbors came together to raise funds after a tragic stabbing
Early on the morning of March 17, 19-year-old Samiya Spain was stabbed and killed outside a Park Slope bodega after allegedly rejecting a man’s advances. Her twin sister was badly injured in the stabbing, and the incident left the community reeling.
Days later, Spain’s other sister, Danasha Goodson, launched a GoFundMe to raise money for a memorial ceremony for Spain and to start a non-profit foundation dedicated to fighting violence against women.
“Samyia lost her life protecting her sister. Samyia lost her life to senseless violence, to the fragile male ego, because violence against women has been normalized and condoned,” Goodson wrote on the fundraising page. “Samyia deserves to be here, she deserves to be celebrated.”
The GoFundMe has raised more than $30,000, almost reaching its $35,000 goal
Officials named a new Bay Ridge school after a local hero
A 300-seat elementary school set to open in Bay Ridge this fall will be named P.S. 413 The Joanne Seminara School of Law & Medicine in honor of the late Seminara, a local advocate and lawyer. Seminara spent decades serving on the local Community Board 10, and was an engaged and dedicated citizen, officials said.
“Joanne Seminara was the real deal,” said Council Member Justin Brannan. “Her compass unfailingly led her toward equity, fairness, and integrity. She was simply a good and decent person, who lived to leave our community and our world a little bit better than how she found it.”
The school is one of six new schools set to open in Bay Ridge in coming years to deal with overcrowded classrooms.
Coney Island reopened for the season
Different people mark the start of spring in different ways – when spring break begins, or on the equinox – but in Brooklyn, spring began on March 24, when Luna Park and Deno’s Wonder Wheel Amusement Park opened with much fanfare.
“In Brooklyn, we don’t care about groundhogs, they don’t tell us when spring starts,” said Borough President Antonio Reynoso. “In Brooklyn, we got to Coney Island and when the Wonder Wheel starts spinning, we know spring has started.”
Hundreds of Brooklynites flocked to Coney Island for the season’s first ride on the iconic Cyclone rollercoaster – and one rider even worked up the courage to propose to his longtime girlfriend on the boardwalk.
Locals lauded the reopening of the Brooklyn Paramount
Decades after its last curtain call, the Brooklyn Paramount theater reopened as a live music venue on March 27. Fully-restored in ornate 1920s splendor, the historic theater is ready to welcome a long list of musicians to the stage over the next few months.
At the ribbon cutting ceremony, Congress Member Yvette D. Clarke took the opportunity to highlight the groundbreaking space that is the Brooklyn Paramount.
“Decades ago this theater broke down barriers, giving Black artists a platform from the earliest days of Rock n’ Roll on stage in front of desegregated audiences,” she said.
The restored venue also features an exclusive jazz lounge that houses actual bottled spirits from the 1920s and a menu of Ella Fitzgerald-themed cocktails.
Brooklyn Paper honored Emily Warren Roebling during Women’s History Month
As Women’s History Month drew to a close, Brooklyn Paper looked back on the history of one of the borough’s most notable women — Emily Warren Roebling, who secretively ensured the success of the Brooklyn Bridge after her husband, the project’s lead engineer, fell ill.
While caring for her husband, Roebling passed messages back and forth from construction crews and even presented plans to engineers herself — convincing them to allow her husband to continue working on the project.
“Back then they weren’t taking women seriously, but she had such a commanding presence and got so much respect when she went out and spoke to them about why he should continue doing the work that they listened to her and they kept him on the project, essentially keeping both of them,” explained Assistant Director for Collections and Public Services at the Center for Brooklyn History, Natiba Guy-Clement.
Her contributions were largely secretive — some worried that if the public knew a woman had been so crucial in construction, they would refuse to cross the bridge at all. It was only much later that Roebling’s work was largely acknowledged and celebrated.
A man was arrested in connection with a fatal fire
One week after a fire at a Bath Beach home left two men dead, cops arrested a 33-year-old man who allegedly started the fire.
As he was marched out of the 62nd Precinct, the suspect, local resident Alex Alive, insisted he was innocent. The identities of the two men who died in the fire have not been released, and it was reported that the two victims were found with a stab wound and severe head trauma — though cops have not yet confirmed their cause of death.
Alive is being charged with two counts of homicide.
Two people were struck by subway trains in the same day in Brooklyn
At the end of a dangerous month for the MTA, two Brooklynites were hit and killed by trains in the same day on March 26. The first, 26-year-old Flatbush resident Travis McIntyre, died in an apparent suicide when he was struck by a Q train at the Beverley Road station. Hours later, 16-year-old Neisa Herod-Cross was found dead on the tracks at the 9th Avenue-4th Street station after she was hit by a G train. The teen was reportedly walking on the tracks with friends when she was hit by the train.
MTA officials told Brooklyn Paper they are piloting a number of technologies to keep riders from accessing the tracks, whether on purpose or by accident. The agency has installed platform barriers at a handful of stations across the city, and said they are testing additional tech that would alert officials when someone enters the tracks or is acting dangerously.
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Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter, explained
Giddy up! Cowboy Carter, Beyoncé’s eighth studio album and long-awaited sequel to Renaissance, dropped on March 29. Notable collaborators include musicians like Linda Martell, Dolly Parton, Willie Nelson, Miley Cyrus, Post Malone, and many others.
Earlier this year, Beyoncé made history as the first Black woman to top Billboard’s Hot Country Songs chart with “Texas Hold ‘Em,” the album’s lead single.
As senior correspondent Alex Abad-Santos writes, “Not unlike how Renaissance highlighted the history of people of color helping to create and perpetuate house music, Cowboy Carter offers up the same opportunity for mainstream culture to acknowledge just how much country music owes its sound and history to Black artists.”
So, from country music’s Black roots to how the CMAs might have inspired the album, read on to understand more of Beyoncé and Cowboy Carter’s cultural significance and why the conversations about who defines a genre matter.
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Don’t Bust Up Medicare and Turn It Over to the States!
Democratic Congressman Ro Khanna of California has introduced legislation, and Senator Edward Markey (D-Mass.) may be preparing to do the same, that would turn over Medicare and other federal health care monies to the states for experimentation in state-based health care plans. There is no requirement in the bill that a state’s plan be a single-payer bill. A state can get the Medicare money based on the politics and the discretion of the secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS). Despite the good intentions of many of its promoters, such legislation is a bad idea.
Medicare has a proud history as the foundation of the desegregation of the nation’s hospitals because of its provision that hospitals had to be certified in compliance with civil rights law in order to receive Medicare funds. A vibrant, 1960s, on-the-ground, civil rights movement—in conjunction with federal Medicare law—transformed the country’s health care system towards justice. That would not have happened had Medicare been implemented by states. Turning over health care policy to the states is a backward move, an abandonment of the campaign for “Improved Medicare for All.”
The history of state-based program implementation is not a pretty one. Voting rights and reproductive freedom now suffer at the hands of state laws. It was the now-embattled federal voting rights act that brought advancement.
Progress in one state is no guarantee of progress in the others. Despite the passage of decades, many states have yet to achieve collective bargaining rights for public workers. Ten states have not expanded Medicaid in the 14 years since the passage of the Affordable Care Act, and eligibility requirements for Medicaid vary from difficult to draconian.
In ten states, adults without children are not eligible for Medicaid, and in Texas a single mother with one child is not eligible for Medicaid if her income is above $272 per month. In some states, many with large African American and Hispanic populations, the Medicaid benefits range from inadequate to miserly. There is a reason why “states’ rights” has only negative connotations.
States have much taxing and benefit-setting power over Workers’ Compensation and Unemployment Insurance to the detriment of those vital programs. As states compete for businesses to bring them jobs, workers suffer from reductions in the level of benefits and the number of weeks of eligibility. Corporations make tax breaks and other demands from states as a condition of location. Politicians pick up the cry as they want the credit for bringing jobs. These variations in state plans have led to a race to the bottom as state after state succumbs to the campaigns that assert that a state is losing its ability to attract jobs because of high taxes and benefits in these two programs.
What would make state-based health care different? Do we really want to take health policy away from the federal government and give it to the states?
The Khanna legislation has only minimal requirements for any state to get a waiver to receive all the federal health care funds–Medicare, Federal Employee Health Benefits, Tricare, Medicaid, Affordable Care Act subsidies. The state must simply assert that its health care plan will give benefits as good as those that the beneficiaries of Medicare and the other programs had before. Then the secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) can approve the state’s plan and hand over the funds. Actually, the language of the bill is stronger—it says “shall grant a waiver….” Nothing in the bill prevents the turning over of Medicare money to states that want to experiment with market-based, or public option, or profit-based managed care systems, or whatever else a state comes up with.
Do we really want to take health policy away from the federal government and give it to the states?
That’s a low bar—simply asserting that the benefits for Medicare beneficiaries will be as good as before. Even that provision is unenforceable as exemplified by the total lack of HHS insistence that Medicare Advantage (MA) plans comply with the law that requires that those plans must cover everything that traditional Medicare covers. The private Medicare Advantage plans unjustly delay and deny care as they limit patients’ rights to see specialists, deny patients access to the best rehab centers, kick them out too early, and prohibit access to centers of excellence such as the Mayo Clinic, MD Anderson, and Sloan Kettering.
The law says the MA plans must cover the same benefits—but they don’t. Those MA plans simply assert that they cover them, and HHS and its Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) do not currently enforce this law on Medicare Advantage plans. HHS and CMS won’t have the capacity to enforce equal benefit provisions on the states either. That’s a gargantuan administrative task to oversee millions of transactions. CMS audits only a tiny percentage of MA plans.
The Khanna legislation also has a requirement that a state must reduce the rate of the uninsured to less than 5% within 5 years. That’s an even lower bar. Already 10 states have less than 5% uninsured! They wouldn’t have to do anything to claim this windfall in federal monies.
Some advocates of state-based single payer health care are promoting the Khanna legislation. Despairing of the national effort to win Improved Medicare for All, they project that there must be intermediate steps in which states enact single payer health care and somewhere down the road other states will follow suit and then the nation will win single payer health care. They posit the Canadian example where, beginning with Saskatchewan, one province at a time enacted single payer and eventually it was implemented nationwide.
But Canadian law was very different from current law in the U. S. Canada had no federal health care legislation at the time of the Saskatchewan enactment of single payer. The U. S. has federal health care plans that would have to be busted up to get the money to the states—a high price to pay for the very iffy possibility that a state could overcome the necessary taxing and balanced budget constraints that place all good state social programs in competition with each other.
Medicare has been our best program—publicly funded and available to all. It has been damaged by privatization, pushed by CMS, that has been handing it over to Medicare Advantage, private equity, venture capital, and Accountable Care Organizations. An energetic movement is currently building to battle that privatization. The last thing we need is to end Medicare as a federal program.
There is no program—short of national, not-for-profit, single payer or a national health service—that can fix the current health care crisis.
How would a state cover a traveling Medicare beneficiary who spends the winter in warmer climes? How would a state cover a worker who works across state lines yet lives in the state or vice versa? How would the state cover workers who are currently part of nationwide employer health benefit plans? There are many questions and no good answers.
The dubious assumption is that once one or a few states pass single payer, others will see it is good and the whole country will go single payer. Really? That didn’t happen with public employee collective bargaining or with Medicaid expansion. That’s not happening with reproductive rights or voting rights.
Once states get control of all that health care money—how would we ever get it back to the national level? There will be jobs and political interests that want to keep that money. Federal responsibility for health care will be gone—hurting us all and our ability to advance to a national Improved Medicare for All system.
States face much higher barriers to reach single payer than does the federal government. States have to balance their budgets, but the federal government doesn’t. In the states, health care will have to compete with education and roads and childcare and lots of worthy social causes. States will have many legal challenges, but Medicare has passed Supreme Court approval. An Improved Medicare for All plan could be swiftly implemented following enactment just as Medicare was up and running, in a pre-computer age, within ten months.
There is no program—short of national, not-for-profit, single payer or a national health service—that can fix the current health care crisis. During the pandemic the nation lost over a million people–300,000 of those lives due to its lack of universal health care. It’s time to take a deep breath and face the reality that nothing less than throwing the for-profit industries out of health care will allow us to create the humane, compassionate health care system that everyone in the United States deserves.
Those politicians who assert that it is not currently possible to pass Improved Medicare for All and suggest that we, instead, do something else, should be asked: What will you do to make it possible, because nothing less will work? Projecting intermediary steps, especially ones that can’t work, only delays national single payer.
Don’t desert sound policy in favor of politics. Build the movement to change the politics. Power concedes nothing without a demand
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Walnut Street Theatre Presents Beautiful – The Carole King Musical Through May 5
PHILADELPHIA (WPVI) — Beautiful – The Carole King Musical tells the story of the prolific songwriter’s life.
Matthew Amira plays King’s husband, Gerry Goffin.
Amira says audiences will see King’s journey, “from aspiring songwriter to when she found her voice and became a solo star.”
“The Walnut Street Theatre is doing a brand-new take on it. There’s a lot more dance,” he says.
“The music everyone will love, but I think people will be surprised by how touching her story is and how much heart there is in this musical,” says Kathryn Boswell, who plays songwriter Cynthia Weil in the show.
It follows two songwriting couples in New York City – King and her husband, Gerry, and Weil and her husband, Barry Mann.
Amira plays opposite his real-life wife, Boswell.
“And there’s constant competition between these two couples to churn out the best songs of the time,” he says.
King navigates her tumultuous marriage, while continuing to write hit songs.
Boswell says audiences will see how the music that she wrote was influenced by her sadness.
Weil becomes a friend and source of support for King.
Boswell says both women had the same goal of writing songs and becoming as successful as their male counterparts.
“And they were both truly revolutionary,” she says.
Their songwriting produced hits that helped boost other groups to stardom, like the Shirelles.
“Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow was Gerry Goffin and Carole King’s first number one hit,” says Amira. “And there was this lovely symbiotic relationship between these writers and incredible Black artists.”
The Drifters had a hit with Some Kind of Wonderful.
Boswell says they were a part of so many iconic songs.
“People come away saying, ‘I had no idea that she wrote all these songs,’ so you’re gonna be surprised,” says Amira.
The arc of the show lands audiences at Carnegie Hall.
“You see her transition to when she found her voice and released her first solo album, Tapestry,” he says.
“The music will make you feel so much joy. It is so beautiful,” says Boswell.
Beautiful – The Carole King Musical runs through May 5 at the Walnut Street Theatre.
Beautiful – The Carole King Musical Tickets
Walnut Street Theatre
825 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA 19107
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