http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9H4u-trTvNk

New York City politics is often about real estate value, and distance is often measured in travel time. A hospital three miles away in suburban or rural Arizona might be reachable, on a flat straight road with no traffic, in  an ambulance with lights and sirens running, in well under three minutes. Not in New York City.

In 2010, in financial trouble after serving the sick and dying for 161 years, a deal was brokered – the details don’t matter – in which the overwhelming majority of the hospital’s grounds would be replaced by luxury housing, plus the fig leaf of an “urgent care center,” which, it was implied, was the functional equivalent of a hospital emergency department. St. Vincent’s did have, while it was in operation, a full-on top tier emergency department, with specialists, operating rooms – like, in fact, a fully accredited emergency department designated as a trauma center in a major American city.  The replacement “urgent care center” – to  be frank, this phrase as used is more deceptive than illustrative – would not, is not, and will not be able to treat gunshot wounds, heart attacks – those patients will have to be transported to the nearest hospital designated, accredited, equipped and trained as a trauma center.

So the people buying this “luxury” housing will be buying housing without one of the characteristic amenities of modern big cities: outstanding hospitals with emergency departments. Unless, of course, they’re lucky in avoiding traffic, or in good enough shape to withstand a long ride in an ambulance. It is not without some shame that we note that New Yorkers, whatever their other virtues, are inured to the signals of emergency vehicles: we don’t rapidly pull over to make way for ambulances, police vehicles, or fire trucks.  Our chronic housing shortage being what it is, people will undoubtedly buy or rent apartments on the former St.Vincent’s site anyway, but we wonder if the lack of a readily available emergency  room will affect prices.  From healthcarevote2013.com:

Few healthcare issues are as urgent in New York City as hospital closures.  The Year Of The Healthcare Vote 2013 was created in response to the closure of St. Vincent’s Hospital in 2010.  St. Vincent’s had served New York for 161 years, and will be replaced by luxury condominiums.  Since that time hospitals have been closing at an alarming rate throughout New York City – in particular those that serve working and middle class New Yorkers.

In 2013 New Yorkers will choose a new Mayor, 51 members of City Council, a Comptroller, a Public Advocate and five Borough Presidents.  Access to quality healthcare is a life and death concern for New Yorkers; Healthcare Vote 2013 will bring awareness and accountability to healthcare issues in New York City’s upcoming elections.

Healthcare Vote 2013 will work to advance discussions on all healthcare issues important in our communities and ask candidates to pledge to preserve publicly accessible hospitals and expand public healthcare in the neighborhoods they represent including restoring a hospital to the Lower West Side of Manhattan.

Please get involved.

Excerpted from Erik Badia  of The New York Daily News   Three-Alarm Manhattan Fire injures 12 Firefighters

A three-alarm fire gutted an upper Manhattan home early Friday morning, sending 12 firefighters to the hospital with minor injuries. More than 150 firefighters from 36 units responded to the blaze on 217th St. in Inwood that erupted just before 3 a.m. No civilians were hurt. The fire, which took the smoke-eaters over an hour to put under control, also knocked out power to part of the block. Neighbors and witnesses said they heard a loud bang before flames engulfed half of the three-family residence, while a manhole in front of the house spewed flames and billowed black smoke. “There was an explosion of some kind,” said David Giancarlo, 38, who lives in the apartment building across the street from the home. “I don’t know if it was a transformer, but something exploded.”

Fire Department sources at the scene said they believed the fire spread from a gas leak in the manhole into the basement of the home, but the investigation into the cause of the blaze was continuing.

Via Three-Alarm Manhattan Fire injures 12 Firefighters -at Fire Engineering -

While having a fascinating time checking out the amazing website/app EveryBlock.com, one of the many brilliant information and geo-information projects of Adrian Holovaty,  (also famous among tech-cogniscenti for Django) I found the outstanding blog The Brooklyn Ink,  a project of The Journalism School at Columbia.

It’s beautiful-looking, the content is wildly diverse, and everything I’ve read so far has been outstanding. The staff bios (all Columbia graduate and undergraduate journalism students) suggest that these might be some of the most interesting people in Brooklyn. Perhaps because of the student management, there’s no sense of editorial hierarchy, or even a “contact” tab. (As the adage goes, shoemaker’s children go without shoes; I suppose the parallel is that some journalists don’t make it easy to arrange interviews or submit media queries).

So check out The Brooklyn Ink, or just wait for me to start plagiarizing their excellent work in earnest. And more soon about EveryBlock.com – more particularly, NYC.EveryBlock.com – which, once you’ve isolated the New York City slice(s) – you can then start searching by Zip, by neighborhood name, or by a neighborhood that you define graphically on a map. I don’t – yet – see that one can  slice by census block, block/lot, police precinct or sector, or community board boundaries. But it looks like many things are possible – and that the more of us check out and contribute to EveryBlock, the more useful and entertaining it would be.

From Bob Hennelly’s coverage if the most recent chapter in the Carl Kruger scandal:

An emotional state Senator Carl Kruger pleaded guilty to four federal corruption charges in Manhattan federal court on Tuesday.

Kruger, who teared up in the courtroom, pleaded guilty to two conspiracy counts and two counts citing Travel Act violations. The Brooklyn Democrat who represented Flatbush, Mill Basin and Coney Island since 1994, resigned his seat prior to his court appearance.

He agreed not to appeal any prison sentence up to 11 years and three months.

“My actions were in violation of the law, and I knew that they were wrong,” Kruger said. “I accept responsibility for my actions and am truly sorry for my conduct.”

State Senator Carl Kruger Pleads Guilty to Corruption Charges, Resigns

By Bob Hennelly, Senior Political Reporter, WNYC.org

It’s good, of course, that the Southern District successfully prosecuted Senator Kruger. One hopes that the sentence serves as a deterrent – but the lessons of history in New York, which has made official misconduct and corrupt a local art form – but we worry that, even with this prosecution and sentence, we’re still at business at usual.

From Record Number in City Shelters: Report, by Daniel P. Tucker, on the WNYC News Blog:

There are more than 41,000 New Yorkers living in the city’s homeless shelters — the highest number ever, according to to a new report from the Coalition for the Homeless.The group said 17,000 children sleep in shelters each night and that shelter stays are getting longer. Homeless families now spend an average of 11 months in the shelter system, up from 8 months a year ago.

The report is based on city data on the shelter population at the end of October, but that number fluctuates daily. The report found the rise is due to the end of a city program that provided housing subsidies to homeless families.

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Stuart Appelbaum, an influential union leader in New York City, was in Tunisia last month, advising the fledgling labor movement there, when he received a flurry of phone calls and e-mails alerting him to the rumblings of something back home. Protesters united under a provocative name, Occupy Wall Street, were gathering in a Lower Manhattan park and raising issues long dear to organized labor.

And gaining attention for it.

Mr. Appelbaum recalled asking a colleague over the phone to find out who was behind Occupy Wall Street — a bunch of hippies or perhaps troublemakers? — and whether the movement might quickly fade.

So far, at least, it has not, and on Wednesday, several prominent unions, struggling to gain traction on their own, made their first effort to join forces with Occupy Wall Street. Thousands of union members marched with the protesters from Foley Square to their encampment in nearby Zuccotti Park.

“The labor movement needs to tap into the energy and learn from them,” Mr. Appelbaum, president of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, said. “They are reaching a lot of people and exciting a lot of people that the labor movement has been struggling to reach for years.”

In fact, the unexpected success of Occupy Wall Street in leveling criticism of corporate America has stirred some soul-searching among labor leaders. They have noted with envy that the new movement has done a far better job, not only of capturing interest, but also of attracting young people. Protests have spread to dozens of cities, including Boston, Chicago and Los Angeles.

 

Major Unions Join Occupy Wall Street Protest – NYTimes.com.

By STEVEN GREENHOUSE and CARA BUCKLEY, The New York Times,,  published: October 5, 2011.