Unions tussle with activists over K'bridge armory plans

Diaz may steer project’s destiny

By N. Clark Judd

Peter Yarrow, of Peter, Paul & Mary fame, did not get the reception his hosts had expected.

Community Board 7 chairman Greg Faulkner had hoped Mr. Yarrow could ease the tensions at a June 24 meeting about plans to redevelop the Kingsbridge Armory, a city-owned, nearly 600,000-square-foot former National Guard facility. The city is reviewing a proposed sale of the building for $5 million to the Related Companies, who plan to turn the Armory into a six-level mall.

Time is running out for neighborhood activists who want to extract promises from Related that the developer does not want to make. The June 24 meeting was the first formal opportunity for members of the public to speak out on the Armory proposal, and tensions were high.

Even before things got started, a group of construction workers made a case in support of the 1,000 construction jobs the project would create by waving signs and chanting slogans like “We need jobs.”

Promise on wages

Neighborhood activists argued strenuously that before shovels hit the ground, Related should agree to lease only to tenants who would pay employees a living wage of about $10 an hour or more. At first appeared as if activists and construction workers would try to resolve their dispute by finding out who could chant the loudest.

When Mr. Yarrow sang “If I Had a Hammer,” to calm the crowd, someone asked him how much he was being paid to show up at the meeting.

These two exchanges more or less set the tone for the rest of the session.

“It didn’t go the way we thought it would go,” Mr. Faulkner admitted two days after the event.

Related’s proposal leaves open the possibility of a large grocery store, which would compete with Bronx-based Morton Williams across the street from the Kingsbridge Heights facility. Morton Williams is one of the only grocery chains to have a unionized workforce, offering higher wages (and better benefits) than most rivals.

“If a big-box supermarket or big-box warehouse club is put into the Armory we would have to close our two Bronx stores as well as our hiring office,” said Valerie Sloan, a fourthgeneration owner of Morton Williams. She said this would take 450 union jobs from the neighborhood.

Much of the rest of the concerns expressed in the meeting comments also focused on living- wage jobs.

Nobody’s budging

Mr. Faulkner said after the meeting that he believes, somewhere down the line, Related and the neighborhood activists of Kingsbridge Armory Redevelopment Alliance will reach some kind of agreement. They might, for example, agree on an incentive for tenants who provide a living wage rather than making it a requirement.

So far, neither side is willing to budge. Related’s veteran development lawyer, Jesse Masyr of Wachtel & Masyr, says being forced to pay higher wages would “undermine the economic viability” of the Armory.

Adan Stevens-Diaz, who lives near the corner of Fort Independence Avenue and Giles Place, was more concerned about his own economic viability. Now jobless, he said his employers at the two part-time jobs he held down last year withheld more from his paycheck for Social Security than for income tax.

“If you get jobs that work us like dogs, like slaves, for a pittance, how can you expect us to have a future?” Mr. Stevens- Diaz, 25, asked Mr. Faulkner.

Jonathan Cartagena, 19, of Marble Hill, came to the U.S. with his mother four years ago and now lives alone. He commutes two hours each way to work at a SoHo retail store.

“I wish I had a job in this neighborhood that paid a decent wage,” he said. “We need to have a guarantee that these jobs will be good jobs, especially if they want our money to build it.”

Even amidst the chaos, the proposal for the Armory is starting to take substantive shape. The city Industrial Development Authority has already given preliminary approval for about $20 million in tax breaks for the project, which Related says will cost $323 million in total.

World Peace Atrium

At Board 7’s suggestion, Related now plans to include a “World Peace Atrium” at an entrance to the mall. There, Wachtel & Masyr lawyer Ethan Goodman said at the meeting, kids could use computer kiosks to learn about Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King and other historic figures. The atrium would be a gateway to about 27,000 square feet of community space, some of it reserved for technology training and other workforce development for the children and the teens.

The young folks could, presumably, also partake of wares offered by the proposed tenants, including a department store, a fitness club or a recreational facility, restaurants and a cinema. The whole project would create about 1,200 permanent jobs.

Mr. Faulkner doesn’t want to take sides before the community board he chairs has a chance to vote. However, he said that a benefits agreement has to happen, and assumes that a living-wage requirement would be included in any proposal.

“It should be so much more than a mall,” he said.

Mr. Yarrow said he was sympathetic to all sides, and said the only way they could succeed would be to find common ground.

“We were successful,” he said of the civil rights movement, “because we went out with love and compassion.”

This is part of the July 2, 2009 online edition of The Riverdale Press.

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