From the West Side Spirit, Aug. 31, 2006
Community Builders
She’s Shaping Her Neighborhood
Dee is community’s voice in developers’ plans
By Charlotte Eichna
The Metro Diner was not Vivian Dee’s first choice.
The diner’s food, service and ambiance were all fine, but Dee picked the spot at 100th Street and Broadway because her go-to diner, Central Park Cafe had closed months ago. The cafe lost its lease as part of developers’ ambitious plan to make over a Manhattan Valley block.
“This is where I now come,” said Dee, a mother of two and grandmother of two who is married to a retired engineer.
Park West Village is a planned community for middle income New Yorkers with ample open space and various retailers conveniently ringing the block. It spans a “superblock” bordered by 97th and 100th streets and Columbus and Amsterdam avenues.
A few of the buildings that border Central Park West have since gone condo, but, as Dee describes it, the residents are still a tight-knit group who liked to chat over lunch in the cafe, which used to be on the corner of 97th Street and Columbus Avenue.
But in September 2005, word circulated that the property’s owners, Stellar Management and the Chetrit Group, had delivered eviction notices to all the store owners. One by one, doors closed. Rumors swirled about plans for a Park West Village make-over, but little information was made public. Finally, the tenant association and local elected leaders had a chance to meet with the developers, who shared their vision for a market-rate apartment tower that would rise out of the middle of the Park West Village block, where a parking lot current sits. Commercial space would be revamped as well.
They’re constructing a mall with a residential tower,” Dee said. “It’s a Columbus Circle.”
As-of-right projects require virtually no oversight, but that hasn’t stopped Dee and others from mobilizing and making their voices heard. As head of the Preserve West Park North Coalition, she’s worked to get support from other neighborhood groups, including people in nearby Mitchell Lama housing and Douglass Houses. The coalition coordinated a May protest in which residents with shopping carts gathered in front of a recently shuttered supermarket, and soon after organized a June 1 Town Hall at nearby P.S. 163. The group has also hired an attorney who specializes in land use and zoning issues to determine if there are any restrictions for development. And a petition with 1,500 signatures was sent to Mayor Michael Bloomberg.
With the aim of providing a viable alternative, Park West Village’s tenant association contracted with a group at Columbia’s architecture school to come up with a plan that would be more community-friendly and keep the development from being divided by a tire.
“We hope that there’ll be a more appropriate plan for development here. We’re not expecting that there won’t be any development,” Dee said. “We know that there will be.”
Dee is optimistic that the Columbia plan will be compelling to both the developers and people who live in the Park West Village area.
“I’m hopeful,” she said. “Or we wouldn’t be putting all this effort into it.”
Community organizing is nothing new to Dee, who moved to Park West Village from the Bronx in 1974, when she took a job as district manager for one of Mayor John Lindsay’s satellite neighborhood offices.
“It’s a very diverse community,” Dee said of her neighborhood. “It really is what New York should be. Everybody has a place here.”
Always a member of the tenant association, Dee assumed various leadership positions after she retired. In that capacity, she and her association colleagues were instrumental in addressing what they perceived as attempts by the property owners to clear out and de-stabilize apartments. When the owners announced that tenants would have to come in to the office and show a picture ID in order to get a lease renewed – a move Dee said is not required by law – the association worked to inform people of their rights.
The association has also helped tenants get refunds after the owners did not follow the formula for increasing rent in regulated apartments following renovations.
Community activism is hard work, concedes Dee, who is 80. But she says she still finds it gratifying.
“It’s where I live,” she said, “and I’ve always been involved.”
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