News Briefs 1.22.03

Peacefully resolved

It
seems Washington will thrust the country, and maybe a large part of the Middle
East, into a dirty little war soon — or a big one.

            But not everybody is sitting still
for this. For example, during the run-up to a large anti-war demonstration in
Washington, DC, on January 18, local peace groups sent a message to the White House from the home front.

            The message first took human form in
the county building on West Main
Street. Around 400 people thronged the atrium at 39 West Main as county
legislator Bill Benet spoke in favor of a peace “memorialization” that he and
colleague Stephanie Aldersley submitted. (The document, which calls on the
president “to reject a military attack at this time” and “pursue a peaceful
resolution,” is now awaiting individual legislators’ signatures.)

            Meanwhile, there was equally as much
action around the corner at City Hall.
As the city council convened, speaker after speaker took the podium in a packed
chamber to call for peace.

            This effort had paid off in advance.
On January 14, councilmembers unanimously signed a letter (not technically a
resolution) that urges George W. Bush to “support a genuinely multilateral
approach to the Iraq situation, sanctioned and directed the United
Nations.” The letter cites reasons for caution and cooperation: Even CIA
director George Tenet, it says, believes “Iraq does not pose a threat of
attack against the US.” But a US attack on Iraq, it says, could cause
Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein to “retaliate with terrorist acts.”

            Governments around the world, the
letter says, “oppose US unilateral action” and “support the full
pursuit of diplomatic resolutions and weapons inspection before any further
military action is taken…” It says, too, that a war with Iraq
“would threaten to destabilize the Middle East further, possibly leading
to a regional war, as well as increased support for al-Qaeda and other groups
dedicated to terrorism.”

            Then there’s a larger point that
some anti-war declarations miss: “There is an urgent need for genuine
multilateral action to eliminate weapons of mass destruction worldwide.”

            The letter reinforces this point
about alternative ways of framing the issues: First, it says, military force
should be used “only as an absolute last resort, such as when there is an
imminent threat against the United States and its citizens.” Then it looks
at priorities. It says to Bush: “As you are, we are dedicated to improving
the quality of life for our citizens. To accomplish this worthy goal, we urge
you and the US Congress to focus on job creation, the precarious state of the
environment, the availability of affordable health care, and the internal
domestic security of our nation.”

Motor
Lodge mayhem

 “Well, quite frankly, I’m pissed.”

            Flower
City Management partner John Billone Jr. is sharing his thoughts on a
recent front-page article in the Rochester
Business Journal. The piece, published January 10, details Flower City’s
plan to transform the old Downtown Motor
Lodge, and potentially some adjacent properties, into a mixed-use
development of market-rate residential units, retail shops, and, possibly,
commercial space.

            That was the first half of the
article. The second details what appears to be a major rift between Billone and
the folks at St. Joseph’s House of Hospitality.

            Located just down South Avenue from
the Motor Lodge, St. Joseph’s was, at one point, approached by Billone, who was
interested in acquiring the homeless shelter’s parking lot. The RBJ article includes heated quotes from
St. Joseph’s workers, like this one from 10-year staffer and board member
Michael Child: “Go ahead and bring it on, Mr. Billone. Catholic Workers are
always up for a fight.”

            “I didn’t appreciate that the
article tried to make it seem like St. Joe’s and I are at each other’s
throats,” Billone says. “That’s the farthest thing from the truth. I’ve been on
good terms with St. Joe’s from the initial purchase. I was portrayed as some
big-time developer coming into the neighborhood to take over. Give me a break.
I’ve never done that.”

            Billone and the workers at St.
Joseph’s met shortly after the article published, and seemed to begin working
through their differences. “I apologized for anything I said that was
misconstrued,” Billone says.

            And Child, who admits he’s “not
quite as diplomatic” as his fellow workers, has clarified his exceptions to the
project. “It’s upsetting, because there’s nothing in this project that’s
designed to house the poor. Let’s think about what you’re going to do: You’ve
got a homeless shelter right behind you. Why wouldn’t you look for more
low-income housing? Why not generate something for the poor?”

            The earliest Billone will submit a
blueprint to the city will be this spring. Still, he’s certain he won’t be
building low-income housing. “I have no interest in doing low-income. This
project won’t be high-end, but we don’t accept public assistance at our
properties. We had in the past, and have had some bad experiences. Market-rate
is our target.”

            So is Billone really the big, bad
developer he thinks the RBJ article
makes him out to be? Mary Wells, director of the South East Area Coalition,
certainly doesn’t think so. She’s familiar with some of Flower City’s other
recent projects, like the market-rate Chapel Hill Apartments on Prince Street,
and says “they’re all phenomenal.”

            “The general opinion around here is
that [the Motor Lodge project] is a wonderful thing,” Wells says. “We’ve been
waiting a long time for something to happen with that property. And Billone
seems to be sensitive to neighborhood input.”

County
1, City 0, elephants 0

A
state Supreme Court justice has eliminated one hurdle in the plan to expand the
Seneca Park Zoo, but Monroe County’s
tight financial situation presents an enormous gulf between the plan’s approval
and its actual completion. And another lawsuit, in which park advocates are
suing the county over the expansion’s environmental effects, is also gumming up
the project.

            The county sued the city last
summer, seeking to nullify the landmark designation the city granted to the
297-acre park, which was designed by legendary landscape architect Frederick
Law Olmsted in the late 1800s. The designation normally makes it more difficult
to, say, pave over a significant portion of landmarked land, as the expansion
plan would do, creating 300 new parking spaces and providing more room for the
zoo’s captive elephants to pace.

            The judge allowed the park to remain
a landmark, but ruled that the city could not use that fact to interfere with
the county’s expansion plans. Though the city owns the park, the county owns
the zoo inside it and manages the park under a 1975 city-county agreement that
won’t expire until 2060.

            The County Legislature approved a
two-phase expansion plan last year, the first phase of which would create the
additional parking spots and expand the elephants’ space. That phase is
expected to cost $39 million, but the county, facing a tough budget year, did
not include funding for the expansion when it approved the plan.

            County legislators and
administrators say there’s no chance the county will pony up the dough this
year, and can’t say when the county’s financial picture will brighten to the
point when such an expenditure would be prudent.

            Republican Majority Leader Bill
Smith says it’s a “certainty” that the project won’t get county money this
year, and adds, “the same answer is highly likely for the year after, and very
possibly even the year after that, as far as I can tell.”

            Bob Nolan, a spokesman for County
Executive Jack Doyle, says the administration has no plans to ask the lej to
approve borrowing the money necessary to make the expansion a reality, until
the county’s financial situation makes such borrowing “appropriate.”

            Democratic Minority Leader Stephanie
Aldersley agreed the project won’t get county money any time in the foreseeable
future. She says she hopes this situation will convince legislators to revisit
alternative expansion plans that won’t alter Olmsted’s legacy so drastically.

            “I imagine the zoo society would try
to get money from other sources,” Smith says. “Frankly, that was part of the
reason that we approved the plan for future funding, so that they would have a
basis in the plan, at the time, to be able to raise more in private funding
than otherwise would have been the case.”

            Zoo spokeswoman Shaunta
Collier-Santos says the Seneca Park Zoo Society is waiting for the park
advocates’ lawsuit against the county to be settled before proceeding with
private fundraising activities to pay for the latest expansion. Collier-Santos
says the zoo has some funds donated for an earlier expansion plan — the Asian
Forest Campaign — but that project, originally planned to be completed in
2000, is also on hold pending the advocates’ suit.

            The logic: There’s no sense opening
a new exhibit without the infrastructure (parking, etc.) to accommodate the
throngs of visitors it will draw. Asked
whether the lej-approved expansion can happen without county money,
Collier-Santos would only say “our hope is that we would be able to get a huge
amount of community support to help make this plan move forward.”

Red
Emma gagged again

She’s
been dead since 1940, but one-time Rochester resident and laborer Emma Goldman still is making waves and
headlines in the national press.

            On January 14, for example, the New York Times carried a story about the
University of California at Berkeley’s Emma Goldman Papers Project, which
collects documents related to Goldman’s long career as labor advocate,
anarchist, radical feminist, and anti-warrior. It seems project directors wrote
a fundraising letter that irked higher-ups, who excised some offending Goldman
quotes from it. (The project head, Candace Falk, reportedly prepared a re-revised mailing at her own expense.)

            What were the irksome quotes? One of
them, dated 1915, spoke against the conflict of conflicts of that era, World
War I: As quoted in the Times,
Goldman prevailed on those “not yet overcome by war madness to raise their
voice of protest, to call the attention of the people to the crime and outrage
which are about to be perpetrated on them.” The other offending quote was from
1902: In it, said the Times, Goldman
“warned that free-speech advocates ‘shall soon be obliged to meet in cellars,
or in darkened rooms with closed doors…'”

            One irony is big as an 800-pound
foreign policy. UC Berkeley is famed for its Free Speech Movement of a few
decades back; indeed, the campus now has a Free Speech Café and a free speech
archive, one UC official told the Times.

            But there’s an irony that the big
city paper missed — one that Rochesterians especially can enjoy. Goldman
strongly expressed her views against World War I to her nephew, David
Hochstein, a Rochester violin wunderkind for whom our flagship community music
school is named. Young Hochstein didn’t take his aunt’s advice to reject the
war; he later died in combat.

Way
below radar

1
800 MY GRITS

For
decades, America’s premier skin magazine ran a series of ads called “What
Kind of Man Reads Playboy?” It
was shameless self-congratulation. The guys featured in these ads were rich,
good-looking, and had lots of expensive toys, exactly the kind of men who
didn’t need to “read” a girlie rag.

            We hereby begin our own
self-promotional campaign: What Kind of Person Reads Way Below Radar?

            There’s no big graphics budget,
folks, so you’ll just have to imagine a brilliant, rich, sleek sybarite
snarfing down a big plate of grits.

            That’s right, grits. Hominy grits.
White flint corn with the germ and hull removed, cooked and ground and
reconstituted with plenty of hot animal fat.

            Plumbing the depths of hominy lore,
we were overjoyed to discover that the Quaker Oats company provides a grits
hotline for its inquiring customers. When we spoke with the grits maven (she
also covers the Rice-a-Roni and Aunt Jemima hotlines), we learned just enough
to keep the mystery alive.

            Yes, there’s a bored-sounding lady,
sitting somewhere with headphones, ready to take your grits questions. But no,
she will not tell you how many calls she gets a day. Nor will she divulge which
product generates the most calls. And if you suggest that her previous job was
working the phone-sex lines, she will pretend not to understand.

            Phone 1-800-MY-GRITS during off
hours, and you’ll be given another number “in the event of a medical
emergency.” What kind of grits-related medical emergencies has the Quaker
telephone staff faced? They’re a little cagey about talking on that subject.
The Way Below Radar staff actually spent some time trying to hurt ourselves
with grits, but besides a nasty brush-burn induced by scrubbing the uncooked
cereal on the tender spots of our bodies, we walked away unscathed.

            Now here’s where the sneering stops.
Seriously, this is our recommendation for a top-notch nosh. When you cook
grits, make extra. Put them in the fridge (they get a delightfully clammy,
pasty texture). Next day, fry up some bacon (the best to be had in Rotch?
Heiden Valley Organic or freshly sliced from Swann’s Market). The meat part is
great, but the grease — that’s the gold.

            Fry up leftover grits like pancakes,
in bacon grease, and you will experience the food of the gods.

            Now, what kind of gods are we
talking about? Gods who don’t take themselves too seriously. Gods who say
“Hog and hominy? Let me at it.” The kind of gods who read this
column.

—
Th. Metzger

This article appears in Jan 22-28, 2003.