Re: NYC tax dollars at work

On 5/14/2025 1:28 PM, Shadow wrote:

On Wed, 14 May 2025 13:14:37 -0500, AMuzi <am@yellowjersey.org> wrote:
 

On 5/14/2025 11:42 AM, Shadow wrote:

On Wed, 14 May 2025 09:08:59 -0500, AMuzi <am@yellowjersey.org> wrote:
>

It's not California's Train to Nowhere, but still:
>
>
https://nypost.com/2025/05/13/us-news/fuming-cyclists-rip-nyc-for-taking-sweet-time-to-finish-west-side-bike-path-leaving-dangerous-detours-behind/

>
At a guess, the governor/mayor is not a repuglican.
If the bikeway was being built by the orange thing, the
headlines would be "predicted to be finished in 10 years, it only took
5, and it's the biggest, bestist bike path EVER, and it ONLY cost US$
10 million".
The nypost is a #FAKE_NEWS conduit, IMHO.
[]'s

>
We cannot know the future, so if Mr Trump were to engage the
problem you could be right. Or wrong.
>
Based on the actual past I don't see why it wouldn't be done
promptly and well:
>
https://www.jta.org/2025/03/26/ny/central-parks-wollman-rink-which-the-trump-organization-hopes-to-run-again-was-named-for-this-jewish-family

  I find it amazing that whoever the Mayor was in 2006 he had to
outsource public property to "big business". Were there NO competent
civil servant  construction workers/engineers available to repair the
facility?
Dunno, sounds like "the art of a con".
[]'s

As with the bicycle route subject of this thread, the City in its wisdom pissed away millions on the skating rink project, with nothing to show for it for years except an eyesore in the middle of Rockefeller Center.  Mr Trump took it over and completed it promptly on his own dime.
Some history on that:
https://www.nydailynews.com/2001/11/18/the-moral-donald-trump-and-wollman-rink-fall-1986-chapter-471/
"By 1980, the Wollman had gone shabby and the old refrigeration units were falling apart, and the city closed the rink and sent in bulldozers to chew it up and announced a $4.
7 million deal with a British developer to reconstruct the place and put in as well a large restaurant that would generate attractive revenues.
Skaters would have to make do with Lasker rink up at 106th St. for the time being, the city said, but the new Wollman would definitely be open by the end of 1981.
Six years and $12 million later, what with one setback and overrun after another, there remained no Wollman to speak of. A concrete slab was down, but the high-tech 22-mile refrigeration tubing system was full of leaks and unable to freeze water into ice. Everything would have to be torn up again. The job would cost a few more million. Maybe the rink could be finished by as early as 1988.
And so, in May 1986, Wollman Memorial Rink took its immortal place in the pantheon of great New York construction horror shows, alongside the plainly never-to-be-built Westway and the famously water-filled 63rd St. Subway Tunnel to Nowhere. Parks Commissioner Henry Stern said he just couldn’t explain the problem. Murphy’s Law, he sighed. Everything that could possibly go wrong. …"
"Trump, who daily looked down upon the hapless Wollman project from an upper floor of his Trump Tower at Fifth Ave. and 59th St., which had taken him a mere 26 months to put up."
"...by mid-June, builder Trump had his guys on the site. And, through the summer and autumn, he cracked the whip on them, and presently it began to appear that he would bring in the job not only under budget, but well ahead of his own Dec. 15 deadline."
The bicycle path and the Wollman skating rink are not all that different from the Obama Palace of Adoration except that's a privately funded fiasco managed by various hangers-on from the Obama administrations:
https://www.facebook.com/doug.ibendahl/videos/a-must-watch-jesse-watters-sent-a-reporter-to-the-south-side-of-chicago-to-check/550622841175265/
'Phrase that pays' at 55 seconds in.
--
Andrew Muzi
am@yellowjersey.org
Open every day since 1 April, 1971