Council Can Ask A Lot of Questions of New York Presbyterian Hospital

WPNCR NEWS ANALYSIS & COMMENT. By John F. Bailey. September 7, 2004: Tuesday evening a letter included in the “backup” material published for the document-starved White Plains media, written by Robert Volland of New York Presbyterian Hospital, matter-of-factly routinely asks the Common Council to extend the Site Plan granted NYPH to build a proton accelerator/biotech research facility two years ago, as if they were refreshing an “E-Z Pass” account.


 


Volland claims the hospital has spent “several Million dollars”  in plans for preparing an entrance road, storm water detention pools in preparation to begin construction on the facility in 2005.


 


 However, two years have passed and the property looks the same as it has  for fifty years. But White Plains has changed. That change raises legitimate questions about this project.


The council has seen no updated plans on the accelerator site, heard nothing from this organization, except a nebulous promise given Mayor Joseph Delfino that they would be willing to lease the city 55 acres in return for rezoning of the north end of their property as commercial medical.


 


The hospital should shed light on what it is exactly the hospital has spent “several million dollars” on, and when it was spent. If I were the Common Council, I’d demand cancelled checks.


 


Now if the hospital takes this long (TWO YEARS)  to plan an access road, storm water detention pools and detention system which Volland’s letter says is planning to be built along with plantings demanded by the city  to prevent damage to Cassaway Brook by the end of fall 2004, when can we even expect the facility to be started? The letter vaguely claims spring 2005. But, that is what they said last year!


 


If I were the city, I’d worry a lot more about other things than Cassaway Brook erosion.


 


Mr. Volland’s  letter, which could be termed naïve and insulting in its lack of detail, at best, raises a lot of questions. As a public service to the Common Council by a dumb reporter, here are some of those questions:


 



  1. In view of the two blackouts in White Plains in June and July, the second of which blew out the Fortunoff complex next door to the hospital, not to mention the transformer blowout in central White Plains last month, and the replacement of  five transformers at the Westchester One location on South Broadway, can the Con Edison feeders and transformers handle the high electric load demanded by the Proton Accelerator and the research boys and girls when they move in?

         What proof do we have that the proton accelerator as originally planned won’t dim White Plains?


 


     (Don’t look for an early answer on this one because Con Edison has not yet explained how these blackouts and winkouts through the city that continue nightly happened and what caused them.)


 



  1. Is the proton accelerator still the state of the art treatment the hospital promoted it as three years ago?

 


3. In view of the way White Plains Hospital Medical Center is growing, with the Sunrise Senior Citizen residence about to be approved this evening, what impact will those 700 cars streaming up Maple Avenue have?


 


4. What kind of research is going to be done in that research facility now? Originally it was supposed to be aging research.  Has it been switched to stem cell research? Or some field more in vogue? A lot has happened in science in two years.


 


 5. Has the hospital secured the check from the state for the $100 Million – now probably more than that – it will take to build this facility, designated Center for Excellence or not? If not, when will the state turn over the jing? More to the point, why should taxpayer money – one dime of it – go to perhaps the richest educational-scientificc complex next to Harvard? 


 


6.  What partners have the hospital lined up  for research and what do they do? And when will White Plains find out who they are? The three page letter does not even mention any updated details on the research partners.


 


     It is obvious that you cannot spec out a project until you find out who your partner is. A partner was mentioned three years ago, are they still on board or have they changed? For that matter, this may be a whole different research mission project by now. Is it? Or is NYPH guilty of loosey-goosey planning? (It won’t be the first time.)


 


At the very least, the New York Presbyterian Hospital has to give us a complete update on who they are doing business with, what they are going to do there. The “whistle-past-the-graveyard” letter from Mr. Volland, not even from Herbert Pardis himself, is patronizing to the Common Council and the people of White Plains in its lack of detail.


 


7. Traffic has changed. As anyone who drives in White Plains will tell you the crosstown downtown traffic has changed in the city that used to be a little bit country, a little bit city, now White Plains is a lot less country, a lot more city. The traffic patterns and volume of the hospital project need to be reexamined, especially in view of the growing reality of  White Plains volume. More to the point, considering the Fortunoff complex, Westchester mall traffic, does the Bloomingdale Road access still work?


 


8.St. Agnes Hospital now has a new sign on it calling it a medical building. What does this mean? Shouldn’t the Common Council be paying attention to how the purchaser of this building at auction plans to use this building before they rubberstamp this renewed site plan? Is NYPH going to buy it? (They have repeatedly said the St. Agnes building structures do not lend themselves to a research facility.) Who will use it and how many more cars will they bring in?


 


9. The hospital grounds may now have become a habitat for coyotes, an endangered species.  Should there not be Department of Environmental analysis of the effect on the coyotes and other wild life of this project? Coyotes, fox, deer living in the hideously overgrown forest of the NYPH property (a little forestry, NYPH, please?) are even more effected by construction than the Bryant Gardens humans.


 


10. Can the Mamaroneck Avenue North Broadway sewer lines handle the proton accelerator/research facility effluent (I love sewer reporting)?


 


Four years ago the council blithely ignored or failed to read or understand Joseph Nicoletti’s  warning of catastrophic consequences if the City Center was connected to the Main Street sewer that was in the City Center site plan. Now they have come around to Mr. Nicoletti’s lining solution for the sewer on Main Street, and “the Nicoletti bypass line” for the Cappelli hotel/condoplex development, and they are crossing their fingers.


 


11. How does the flow situation stand over on the East Side of town now that Morton’s and Whole Foods Market and Cheesecake Factory are filling it chuck full of new effluent that was not even imagined when the proton accelerator/research facility was approved?


 


 Mr. Volland’s letter says the Hospital has performed the required sewer flow monitoring and has submitted the results to the city’s  Engineering Department in June. Well, when Mr. Cappelli submitted his results, Mr. Nicoletti did not believe Mr. Cappelli . How can the hospital submit flow results, without having Mr. Nicoletti by stick or flowmeter confirm what  flow was measured? What does that mean?  How much water is going to be pushed out? Does Mr. Nicoletti believe them?


 


12. When this project was approved the mammoth Cappelli HotelCondoplex was not even on the drawing boards. What is the impact of that project going to do in combination with the proton accelerator/bioresearch project to the city’s projections of traffic, electrical demand, sewer capacity, water use?


 


 


The entire site plan has to be relooked at hard from a power demand, traffic volume, and sewage flow perspective, at the very least before that site plan is renewed. And, if it is not, that’s simply negligent.


 


 


Those are just a few of the questions this absurd three-page, slip-it-through-quietly letter from Mr. Volland does not address that any  Common Council should demand to be addressed, before they even think about renewing the site plan.


 


More to the point, any consideration of rezoning the northend of the property for more development has to be absurd until these 12 questions are answered.


 


 


 

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Ode to the Holiday Doubleheader

WPCNR VIEW FROM THE UPPER DECK. By Fastpitch Johnny. September 6, 2004: This afternoon there is a holiday doubleheader at the Big Ball Park. That’s Yankee Stadium. The Bronx Bombers and the Tampa Bay Devil Rays play two. There was a time when every national holiday during baseball season had scheduled doubleheaders — a simpler time when the games were shorter, “you could come on out and catch the rest of the first game and all of the second game,”  and you did not have to take a mortgage out to buy a beer.



WRIGLEY FIELD, 1975. Photo by WPCNR Sports


Nowadays in major league baseball, the only doubleheaders are day night affairs, charging special admissions to each game so no gate receipts are lost.


But fifty years ago, the Sunday doubleheader was a tradition, as were Ladies Days on Saturdays at the Polo Grounds, Yankee Stadium, and Ebbetts Field in New York.


What was great about the doubleheader was it was a true bargain: Two Games for the price of one. If your home team did not win the first game, known as “The Opener,” there was always the chance they could win “the Nightcap.”


Doubleheaders were made for beer.


When beer commercials were done live from the television booth or from the studio, the beer looked so good being poured on television. The bubbles ascending from the bottom of the glass, the creamy white head of a Ballantine beer being poured. The way condensation appeared on the beer bottle on television, made every preteen think that beer tasted great.


It did not of course, and when I got my first taste of the legendary Ballantine Ale (“Who is the Ale Man? Who Can he be?” was the slogan), I was literally and figuratively disappointed. THIS is Ballantine Ale, I thought?


So all you teens out there — beer is a habit — because it really does not taste that good — unless of course it’s 88 degrees in Yankee Stadium and you’re in the upper deck. Man, the best slogan ever created was “Baseball and Ballantine, Baseball and Ballantine, what a combination, all across the nation, it’s Baseball and Ballantine.”


Baseball Forever on a Sunday


The ballpark upper deck had a great aroma to it on a steamy Sunday twin bill — the manly allure of beer being poured, the sharp patina of cigar and cigarette smoke that hung in the upper deck under the Yankee Stadium roof, the nutty tang of peanuts being snapped up. The beefy siren of boiled hotdogs — none of this sissy sausage stuff –and the bellow of the concession man yelling, “Beah hea” “Hot Dog hea..” 


Of course you cannot eat and drink like that today at the Stadium you would go bankrupt. However, there is more drinking in the stands today than there ever was when I was a kid in the upper deck. Fans came to watch the games then. And we’d watch two.


Premier Matchups and Not Quite Ready for Prime Time Pitchers


The openers of these affairs which started at 2 PM, always featured the premier starters, Whitey for the Yankees against Frank Lary of the Tigers, or Tom Sturdivant for the Bombers against Camilio Pasqual of the Senators. Or over in Brooklyn, Eoisk  or Newk against Spahnie or Robin. We knew the starters of every team 50 years ago.


In the second games, somehow you got the long, long games, the donnybrooks, because you saw the soft underbelly of pitching. You’d see the Gene Brabenders, the Joe Nuxhalls, the Warren Hackers of baseball. Sometimes you’d see a rookie pitch. I still remember Luis Tiant’s shutout of the Yankees, 1-0, in the second game of a twin bill in 1958, when Luis was thin and young. I wasn’t there, but I saw it on PIX.


Long Shadows


You also if you were watching at home or in the ballpark delighted in the way the shadows would cover the pitching mound along about 5 P.M., and every fly ball became a touch chance as sun dipped low on the rim of the old Stadium.


On particularly sloppy doubleheaders, papers and programs would be torn and scattered on the field as fans expressed their boredom. I recall one particular 5-4, 5-4 split the Yankees had with Minnesota in the 70s, when I was there,  where the fans really got into this.


Another punctuated phenomena during elongated “Nightcaps” were the “K-Pock” of soda cups being stomped by fans that punctuated the game being played in the shadows below.


Bench Favorites


Another feature of second games of holiday twin bills was the appearance of backup bench players in the Yankee lineup, the Jerry Lumpes, Hector Lopezes, Bob Cervs, who lent a bizarre flavor of the unexpected hero into the Bombers’ lineup.


Long Games


Openers were usually crisp, efficient 3-2, or 2-1 affairs because the better pitchers were throwing, and they went 9 innings 50 years ago, friends. None of this crap that  6 innings was a quality start. If you did not go 9 50 years ago, you were not a pitcher.


In the second game — that’s when you often got those guys doomed to drift between Triple A and a cup of coffee — and often shadows being what they were, and the fatigue of the players you’d get locked into extra inning games. The Mets 23-inning affair with the Giants in 1965, I believe was a second game of a doubleheader.


I miss the holiday doubleheader. So fans at the Stadium this afternoon should savor the experience. Though I daresay, you’re not going to see Whitey Ford, Bob Turley on the mound.


 


 


 


 

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Westchester’s Crusader, Ralph Martinelli, Dies.

WPCNR COUNTY CLARION-LEDGER. From Hezi Aris, The Yonkers Tribune. September 5, 2004: Ralph Martinelli, publisher of the Westchester Crusader, the weekly tabloid that has relentlessly attempted to expose the collusions, foibles, and questionable, juicy actions of Westchester politicians died this weekend after being hospitalized for 23 days. The cause of death, according to The Yonkers Tribune, was heart trouble. Mr. Martinelli was said to be in his 70s. His death was confirmed to The Tribune by a Crusader reporter.


Martinelli’s  newspaper, the Westchester Crusader, specialized in muckraking and exposed story after story of county corruption, personal malfeasance, and backroom dealings by county politicos. It is unclear at this time whether his stable of publications, especially The Crusader, will continue.

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Bob Castelli Kicks Off Campaign for Bradley’s Seat.

WPCNR CAMPAIGN 2004. From The Castelli Campaign. (EDITED) September 4, 2004: Television commentator and former New York State Trooper, Bob Castelli began his campaign for New York State Assemblyman in the 89th Assembly District this week, walking the district. “This is a large and diverse district, but I think it’s important for me to get to know as many constituents as possible,” Mr. Castelli said in a news release.



Robert Castelli, Candidate for Assembly in White Plains 89th Assembly District. Photo, Courtesy, The Castelli Campaign


Castelli began walking the district that includes Bedford, Harrison, Lewisboro, Mount Kisco, New Castle, North Castle, Pound Ridge and most of White Plains.


Castelli was a New York State Trooper for 21 years, serving as Trooper, Sergeant, Investigator and Station Commander, and was a member of the State’s Organized Crime Task Force. He was named a Pickett Fellow in Criminal Justice Policy and Management by the National Institute of Justice and went on to earn a Master’s Degree in Public Administration from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.


Castelli appeared twice on WABC Eyewitness News last week commenting on Republican Convention Security. He appears regularly on network television on ABC, CBS, Fox, CNN, MSNBC and Court TV, providing insights into crime and homeland security matters. Last week he resumed classes at Iona College and John Jay College of Criminal Justice, lecturing in the crime and security fields.


Castelli characterizes himself as a “Pro-Choice Republican with a strong record on fiscal responsibility and environmental protection.” Castelli, in his kickoff news release said “his views are well-suited to those of the (89th) District’s moderate voters.” He believes that as a Republican, he can be a voice for reform in Albany, by challenging the Assembly’s New York City-dominated Democratic leadership, whom Castelli says, ” whose interests are often aligned against those of the suburbs.”


Castelli invites voters to visit his website at www.castelli2004.com, for his specific commentary on key issues in the campaign.

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