Woes of the Silk-Stockinged
Directly across the street from my apartment building on West 103rd sits a single-room-occupancy (SRO) facility called the Malibu Hotel. The hotel figures in the scandal surrounding New York City's HIV/AIDS Service Administration (HASA), a scandal detailed in this news story.
So on Tuesday evening I went to the Jewish Community Center on West 76th to attend a meeting of Manhattan's Community Board #7. A parade of my neighbors got up to complain about the hotel. With the state primary election taking place the next Tuesday, a number of elected officials and their wannabes were in attendance, and boy they got an earful.
Now, you should know that the stretch of West 103rd between Broadway and the Hudson is quite well-to-do. It's a New York City Historical District full of lovely brownstones. The westernmost block is adjacent to Riverside Park and holds $1-milion dollar apartments with views of the New Jersey Palisades. Also on this block is the Gershwin House, where George and Ira lived while writing shows in the 1920s. I love walking down these blocks. Just seeing the Gershwin House gives me a chill. And of course Riverside Park is fantastic.
My own block of 103rd, however, is bounded by the east side of Broadway. It's amazing how poshness rather vanishes once you simply cross the street. No question but that the Malibu Hotel has a lot to do with that, and that the block becomes disagreeable after dark, with loitering, prostitution, dealing, and sidewalk screaming matches at 3:00 am between sad, desperate people.
That, however, hardly forgives what I heard some of my neighbors say at the meeting. There wasn't a whole lot of compassion on display. One fellow actually told the board, "Why bother to treat these people? They're going to die anyway. What a waste of tax money!"
Hey, pal, I don't know where you've been for the past ten years, but HIV is a treatable disease. People like Magic Johnson and Andrew Sullivan are alive and well. As for the larger problem of SRO facilities . . . maybe Bloomberg will act. As documented in the news story I linked to above, St. Rudy had a few deficiencies as Mayor.
By-the-by, the story is by a freelance reporter named Benjamin Ryan. He cared enough to come to the meeting and hand out reprints to the Board members. Hint to the Times: hire this guy.
11:57:06 PM 
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