Wrecking ball

To the editor:

I viewed with shock and sadness the photographs of the White House’s East Wing demolition. It is the People’s House. Ronald Reagan apparently said of his stay there,“I just am a temporary tenant here.” The demolition was completed in a rushed process, with no input from concerned or possibly legally required parties.

These thoughts are on my mind concerning the impending demolition of the New York City Housing Authority’s Elliott-Chelsea Houses, which are to be replaced with a mix of mostly market-rent luxury housing. Residents are being forced to relocate.

The Chelsea Addition for the elderly is targeted first. Residents have received vacate notices. Stress and anxiety have led to falls and hospitalizations. One elderly resident, Marina Aloy, passed away a few days before the Sept. 15 deadline to move out, with friends and neighbors citing her stress as a cause. 

The project is labeled a public-private partnership between NYCHA, Related Companies and Essence Development. But local politicians are indifferent. They seem more interested in lucrative real estate deals than the human consequences. Residents have asked for but were denied a cost comparison between renovation and demolition.

In the 1980s, I worked for NYCHA at Elliott-Chelsea as a housing assistant. There was a sense of community, and pride that Whoopi Goldberg was a former resident.

Looking back, she told New York Magazine, “It’s a great place to grow up, because we were outside 98 percent of the time, winter and summer. We all were poor, and we all knew it, but it somehow didn’t really stop us from doing anything.... Everybody’s parents looked out for everybody’s kids.”

Who is looking after the elderly and disabled now? I wonder what Goldberg would say. As the film character Scout muses, it’s “sort of like shootin’ a mockingbird.”

Harry Weiner