“I find this situation with the Prince Hotel unacceptable, and I won’t stand for it. The buck stops here,” the mayor said at Fort Hamilton High School last night. “I guarantee you now—there will be enforcement action at the Prince Hotel.”
The remarks were made at a town hall-style meeting, held in the round in the boys’ gym. About 400 residents, community leaders, reporters, elected and appointed officials and police—a standing-room-only crowd—listened to the mayor run down his agenda, and then asked questions about subjects that ranged from the hyperlocal to the citywide. An interpreter signed for the hearing impaired.
Subjects included “spas” and human trafficking, waste management, illegal conversions, preventive healthcare, literacy rates among the blind, hookah bars, hate crimes, transit wastelands, transportation for seniors, classroom sizes, speeding, illegal subletting, broken parking meters, traffic congestion and CUNY funding. De Blasio did a lot of explaining and addressing, evincing an impressive off-hand knowledge of nuts-and-bolts local governance, and often ceded the floor to experts—from commissioners to local precinct captains—when appropriate.
He stood in the center of the room next to Councilmember Gentile, who hosted him; other elected officials shared a front row: Marty Golden, Dan Donovan, Pam Harris, Letitia James, and Dominic Recchia, for some reason. Aside from the dedication to enforcing action against the infamous Prince Hotel, the notorious site of drug dealing and prostitution that has been in the community board’s crosshairs for years, the mayor, his staff and others made a few more noteworthy announcements:
- There will be no preschool at a controversial proposed location, 621 86th Street. An alternative site will be found.
- An elevator into the 86th Street subway station “is funded,” Senator Golden said, but the timeline of when it’ll be built is unclear.
- Bay Ridge is relatively good at throwing away its garbage. Twenty-two percent of our waste was diverted from landfills, the sanitation commissioner said, and there has been a five percent drop in total tonnage in the last nine years.
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I wish I knew this was happening. Where do these events get posted/announced?
It seems it was an invite only event. Bunch of political nonsense.
I think because of the limited space available, they weren’t able to open the event to the entire general public. It seemed to me like most of the crowd was not political supporters but the heads and members of various community and civic groups, so that it wasn’t necessarily the community present, in the broadest sense, but many community leaders, anyway. Imperfect, sure, but not “nonsense”!
Illegal conversions in bay ridge are an epidemic for sure. I hope this is not all talk and something gets done about it. My childhood block of Bay Ridge Avenue used to be a quiet tree lined street with light traffic and now has 2-3 bus routes, tons of illegal conversions and a double parking nightmare from the overcrowding of the 1-2 family homes that are now housing sometimes over 20 people (from observation). Awful.