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Posts Tagged ‘new york’

Loaves and Fishes

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on October 13, 2011| 2 Comments »

Yesterday’s NY Times Dining section had a delightful story about all the food being delivered to Occupy Wall Street. Donations have come from far and wide, and people have self-organized to distribute it and do the washing up. The story is here.

“Requests for food go out on Twitter and various Web sites sympathetic to the protesters. And somehow, in spontaneous waves, day after day, the food pours in. …

“Platters and utensils are washed on site. The soapy runoff slides into a gray-water system that’s said to draw impurities out through a small network of mulch-like filters. …

“Members of the [food] crew sometimes fail to show up in the morning because they were arrested the night before. (Then again, as many a chef will tell you, that happens in a lot of restaurants.)” …

“Telly Liberatos, 29, the owner of Liberatos Pizza on Cedar Street in the Financial District, said he has received orders from places like Germany, France, England, Italy and Greece, as well as every region of the United States.

“ ‘It’s been nonstop,’ he said. ‘The phones don’t stop ringing. People from California order the most at one time.’ Someone from the West Coast had called in the biggest delivery: he wanted 50 pizzas dispatched to the park.”

You might enjoy knowing that Asakiyume’s blog offers music suggestions for the 99 percent. Check it out. (I borrowed the picture from downtownmonks.blogspot.com.)

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Small is Beautiful

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on August 15, 2011| 1 Comment »

The blue-collar city of Buffalo, New York, has struggled in recent decades with unemployment and economic decline. A few years ago, it had a big idea for redeveloping its waterfront — a big idea that went up in smoke.

But when residents and local organizations starting thinking small instead of big, good things began to happen.

“In 2004, it was decided that the region would invest large sums of public money [at the site of the old Memorial Auditorium] to draw a new outlet for Bass Pro Shops, a national purveyor of sporting goods and fishing equipment. Local leaders scraped together $65 million in promised tax breaks, infrastructure improvements and other public subsidies to speed its arrival and to catalyze a new era of growth and commerce on the waterfront. It was all for nothing.

Since the Bass Pro deal collapsed, the harbor development corporation has shifted its focus on some comparatively tiny, piecemeal projects, such as the multicolored Adirondack chairs that dot the waterfront park, a new small restaurant that dispenses ice cream and veggie burgers, Jason Mendola’s fledgling kayak rental business and the relocation of the free Thursday at the Square concerts to Canalside’s Central Wharf.

None of those improvements required huge investments. None were heralded as keystone projects for future growth. But together, they have begun to transform the phrase ‘waterfront development’ from an oxymoron into a reality.”

Read the thoughtful article by Colin Dabkowski in the Buffalo News. I found the lead at ArtsJournal.com.
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By the way, when my mother met my father, he was an editorial writer for the Buffalo Evening News, the forerunner of the Buffalo News. She was attending law school.

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Asylum

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on July 10, 2011| 2 Comments »

Many of Suzanne’s college classmates went into careers that involve helping people. I think that for Liz, who works at the organization Facing History and Ourselves (helping classrooms and communities link the past to moral choices today), it just comes naturally. She has also been an energetically thoughtful friend, who noted a freshman Suzanne’s wistfulness over missing an Easter egg hunt and decided to create one for her. Every college year. Liz later managed the details and complexities of Suzanne’s American-Swedish wedding. (Liz said it was a piece of cake as she was used to Facing History and Ourselves events with zillions of participants.)

Now I am reading about the girls’ classmate Emily, who works for a group that assists people who are seeking asylum in the United States.

Emily weighed in at the Daily Beast last week, offering insight for Jesse Ellison in a column on an asylum seeker currently making headlines.

Writes Jesse of the hotel maid who lost DSK his job, “That she lied on her claim for asylum has been covered with partiuclar zeal. But experts and those familiar with such claims say that dishonesty is common when it comes to refugees—not because they’re intentionally trying to scam the system, but because the way such claims are processed and determined puts asylum-seekers in a position where they may feel they have no other choice.

“ ‘It’s hard for those of us who haven’t gone through those experiences to imagine what it would be like to continually relive something that caused you to flee your country,’ says Emily Arnold-Fernandez, of Asylum Access. ‘When the issue of potentially falsifying testimony comes up, it tends to paint all asylum claimants in black and white. Either you tell the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, 100 percent of the time, or you’re not telling the truth and you have some sort of nefarious purpose. I don’t think that the reality is that stark.’ ”

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