You may not care for a concrete island draped over 300 concrete mushroom columns some 70 feet above the Hudson but because you are poor and the city is poor and the state is poor and Barry Diller is rich, and getting richer every day, it will happen.
“Somebody’s got to pay for it. We don’t have the money,” snapped Diana Taylor, the imperious head of the Hudson River Park Trust and towering consort of billionaire Michael Bloomberg. Those eleven words described the future of public works in New York.
In the last three years the average member of the Forbes 400 billionaires club increased his or her wealth by $2 billion, mostly via the stock market, which has become a win-only machine owned by billionaires for billionaires, offers Bill Moyers.
The New York Times article by two of its star journalists, Charles Bagli and Robin Pogrebin, came out Monday morning November 17th to say de Blasio and Cuomo would match the $130 million gift by Barry Diller with $39.5 million of our tax payer money. Sure enough, later that day de Blasio, smiling, said something to the effect of, “Hey, if they offer you money take it.” There was no question that he knew about the deal and had pre-approved it.
The New York Times signaled concern over the take over of public projects by the super rich and the secretive planning process behind it. Assembly member Deborah Glick found it “deeply disturbing that the trust failed to disclose” its plans, as did District Leader and Waterfront Committee member Arthur Schwartz. “I was told NOTHING” he says, and comments that in the past public input improved the Park design.
Anticipating the reflex angst of Villagers The New York Times catalogued the approval process: “The trust’s full board – the Army Corp of Engineers, and the State Department of Environmental Conservation” need to approve, and suggested that even before this approval process the project raises “thorny questions of private control over public spaces.”
I am going to make a prediction: the HRPT board will approve it, the Army Corps of Engineers will approve it, the Department of Environmental Conservation will approve it – in fact their approval may have already been solicited. They and we are becoming more and more “the little people” as the world’s wealth cascades into fewer and fewer hands (in just 3 years the one-percenters went from $100 trillion to $127 trillion).
Now stop.
And go back two years when St. Vincent’s Hospital ran out of money and Barry Diller’s $139 million could have kept it open.
But wait, we have another Barry-Diller-type billionaire who controls the three block long St. John’s Terminal building just opposite Pier 40, and the luxury condos he has just proposed to build on it will have a view of Diller Island.
Mike Novogratz, the chairman of the Friends of Hudson River Park, claims “This is a great example of how Big Philanthropy can make a difference in the lives of New Yorkers”.
Okay Mike, here is your chance to make a “big difference.” Build the world’s foremost medical electronics research center, and a hospital, on St. John’s Terminal.
