Mayor's Visit Cold Comfort for Many Area Residents

By JORDAN MOSS

Like a parent forcing castor oil down the throat of a resistant child, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani came to Norwood Thursday feeding the community everything it didn't want to swallow, but with assurances that it was for its own good. The occasion was the mayor's 66th Town Hall Meeting.

Swooping into the auditorium of PS 20 on Webster Avenue, with two dozen of his commissioners and aides in tow, the mayor was protected by police officers on nearby rooftops, metal detectors and bomb-sniffing dogs. He stayed for about 65 minutes.

Giuliani, greeted by a mix of cheers and boos, was introduced by PS 20 principal Carol Carlson, who, with two of the school's students, read the pledge the youngsters begin their day with, a promise to respect others and work out conflicts peacefully.

The mayor took this up as his theme for the 65 minutes, frequently reminding the sometimes restless audience or questioners who interrupted him that they were setting a bad example for the children. Fitting for the school environment, the mayor hushed the crowd as things occasionally got a little noisy, saying "Shhhhhhhh. Shhhhhhhh."

The issues were anything but childish, however. On the eve of a decision that would determine whether a piece of Van Cortlandt Park gets ripped up for a filtration plant, two Norwood residents rose to ask the mayor not to do what they knew his administration was in all likelihood going to do. Ronn Jordan (who the mayor mistakenly referred to as "Reverend," since he mentioned he was from the Northwest Bronx Community and Clergy Coalition, a well known community group in the area) asked the mayor to veto the City Council's expected vote to approve the siting of the plant at the golf course.

The mayor said the park was an "appropriate site" and would have "no impact on health because it's below ground." The city plans to put the park back on top of the plant, which will rise three stories higher than the current grade of the land. Residents say this approach hardly amounts to restoration, and they believe it could seriously exacerbate asthma and other illnesses during construction.

"I think the city of New York has to build a filtration plant," Giuliani continued. "And it doesn't matter what I think The federal government has ordered us to do this."

Myra Goggins, a Norwood resident who is president of the Coalition, followed up a little later, asking the mayor why the city thinks it has the authority to alienate parkland. The mayor served up DEP Commissioner Joel Miele and Parks Commissioner Henry Stern. Neither answered the question directly, but Stern said there was "nothing new about health facilities" being built under parkland, and pointed to Flushing Meadow Park, where he said the DEP was paying for a Flushing Bay promenade. And, the commissioner added, the park had suffered "greater violence" when it was severed by three highways in the thirties and forties. "And that was without the public controversy that we have today," Stern said, perhaps not aware of the spirited opposition to the Henry Hudson Parkway mounted by the New York Parks Association and the borough's high school biology teachers who plead with Robert Moses, to no avail, not to destroy New York City's only unspoiled marsh ecosystem where the Henry Hudson was to intersect with Mosholu Parkway. (See "Deja Vu All Over Again: City Has Disrupted Park Many Times Before" in the April 8-21, 1999 special issue on the filtration plant.)

Joel Miele said his agency cannot now "make a case for filtration avoidance, but I am willing to continue to try."

Workers and union representatives from North Central Bronx Hospital (NCB) brought up another serious issue facing Norwood: the potential closing of the facility.

The mayor didn't say if the city's intended to close the hospital. But he did say, "A hospital is not a jobs program," and "Governments don't do a good job of running hospitals. They never have and they never will."

Earlier, waiting in line to attend the forum, Kevin Cruz, a maintenance man and 20-year veteran of NCB, said he and his colleagues were sure that the city was planning to close the hospital. "Nobody's seeing it, but we're going pretty fast," Cruz said. "We've got a pediatric ward that looks like a ghost town. It's completely ready to have patients. Just it doesn't."

Dr. Luis Marcos, head of the city's Health and Hospitals Corporation, said the city was only reacting to the decrease in demand for NCB services. "We don't take away programs from NCB unless there are no patients coming to those programs."

To a question about education and overcrowding the mayor repeated his opinion that some of the "best education has taken place in overcrowded classrooms with outdated books."

Other questions for the mayor were more individualized, like the one from Mark Goldberg who said he had applied for several city and state jobs but had been turned down because of his poor eyesight. The mayor, not happy with Goldberg's interruptions, handed the man over to a commissioner, but not before telling him, "In observing you, I don't know how much hope I can give you." Many in the crowd booed.

The mayor exited as fast as he entered, leaving many to wonder whether the effects of the mayor's brand of castor oil are any better than its taste.

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