![]() "There was a huge outcry from people who had bought their dream home, and were now finding that they were fighting these flooding problems and these septic failure problems, caused by the degradation of the natural areas."Īfter decades of development, the Bluebelt system now includes 16 different watersheds, which provide stormwater management for almost a third of Staten Island. "As people built these inappropriate developments, they began to get big flooding problems in these neighborhoods, and big problems with septic failure," said Appleton. "There had been a development boom in Staten Island that invaded a lot of the drainage areas of various stream corridors," recalled Albert Appleton, who initiated the Bluebelt project while serving as the commissioner of the DEP from 1990 to 1994, in collaboration with his colleague Dana Gumb, who is now the Bluebelt’s director. The Staten Island Bluebelt was created in response to another era of irresponsible, unregulated development on the island. The wisdom of these plans has already been questioned by several local politicians. Bridgewater’s development proposals included creating an assisted living facility and residential complex above the capped brownfield. The severe pollution here has scared off other potential developers, including Walmart, but a large section of the old refinery at 1 Nassau Place was recently sold off to Bridgewater Capital Partners for $30 million. Eventually, an enormous cleanup dredged out some of the contaminated sediments in Mill Creek and capped the rest with new fill, while also creating an impermeable concrete shell over the old factory site to contain the toxic contaminants underneath. Near the creek’s mouth sits the former site of the Nassau Smelting & Refining Company, which once recycled "more than 600 million pounds of scrap a year" for the Bell Telephone Company and Western Electric, and was "the graveyard of a million worn out telephones," according to the funky 1974 documentary Scrap! After the refinery closed down, the site was left behind as a "46-acre eyesore," contaminated with lead, zinc, copper, and other toxic metals which had "festered for decades," according to the Staten Island Advance. In its less natural areas, Mill Creek is hemmed in by highways, bridges, train tracks, and the vestiges of its toxic industrial past. "You can’t buy country like this," said Jack Graziano. "The whole street is shut down-traffic backed up for miles." They deliver the turtles to a nearby pond, in a section of Bluebelt their garage has officially adopted. ![]() And they bite, too," said Steve Graziano. Two branches of the waterway run along the edges of his buildings, causing flooding during heavy rains and stranding swarms of crawdads inside, and at least once a week, Steve and his father Jack rescue snapping turtles from the busy road in front of their shop, stopping traffic to scoop them up with a trash can. "It’s like the Animal Kingdom back there-deer, bunny rabbits, turtles," said Steve Graziano, whose hot rod repair shop, Hollywood Garage, is hemmed in by the Bluebelt near the head of the creek. All of these books are currently 30% Off.In its more natural areas-or in its areas made to appear natural by the DEP-the Mill Creek Bluebelt is a haven for wild animals. ![]() ![]() Here, we offer a reading list of books dealing with the history and context of the labor and radical organizing of the 1930s, hopeful that the self-activity of working-class people will once again succeed in shaping the response of governments and employers to a global economic crisis. The consequential strike wave of 1934 - which paved the way for the National Labor Relations Act and created new political space for serious government action on behalf of labor - was presaged by a year of unrest in workplaces across the country, from factories and farms to newspaper offices and Hollywood sets.” But if they continue, and if they increase, they may come to represent the first stirrings of something much larger. Even with private sector unionization in the US at a historic low, however, workers at companies like Amazon, Whole Foods, Target, and Instacart have responded to the unsafe working conditions and low pay to which they are subjected by organizing and, in some cases, going out on strike.Īs Jamelle Bouie has recently written in the New York Times, “It’s true these actions have been limited in scope and scale. As intertwined health and economic crises continue to unfold, we face the most severe global economic downturn since the Great Depression.
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