a livable city at stake

“The Fighter: Brash News Legend Gave Voice to the City’s Powerless.” This Daily News front page headline told us that Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Jimmy Breslin had succumbed to pneumonia at age 88. I’m writing this mainly because that’s what small businesses so desperately need to thrive and survive — brash, mad-as hell-and-not-going-to-take-it-anymore major media voices.

Small neighborhood businesses are surely among the city’s powerless, despite being so essential to the overall, everyday quality of city life. But they never organized and never protested being slowly but inexorably run out of the city. They should have a major say in how the city is run. But now, wherever you look, either the low-rise buildings which housed them are gone or going, or rents are over-the-top unaffordable. And with Internet shopping, even department stores like Sears are being run out.

But to stay with the locals. Of course there have been media outcries, including this paper and other small-business supporters. My not-brash-enough voice has long warned against the killing off of these neighborhood lifelines. Major media seems unconcerned, except for the late Christopher Gray, whose “Streetscapes” column ran in The Times Sunday Real Estate section until 2014. We cold not afford to lose Gray, and at the achingly young age of 66.

Forgotten is the late Jane Jacobs’ deservedly lauded work on what makes a livable city — neighborly, self-sustaining neighborhoods.

So this column is again banging this drum while banging my head reading Arlene Kayatt’s column “Big’s In – Small’s Out” with revealing details on the razing of an entire low-rise block of small businesses we can’t afford to lose. Do check out the doomed block at First between 79th and 80th.

I remember the 2008 routing of the 38-year-old 79th Street Cafe — a diner with booths and a counter and open almost 24 hours. Our Town gave it considerable coverage and I said the landlord could be a real New York hero if he’d just give this diner a new lease with a rational rent. He didn’t. And so many suffered the loss of that community place. AA members went there after meetings at St. Monica’s next door. It was a second home to the church members. And this profound community loss is just one of thousands. The forever loss of these places relates to healthcare/preventive care — and to the “epidemic of loneliness,” for which this is an unrecognized factor, as my Times letter claimed.

Incidentally, we’re ever grateful for civic leader Betty Cooper Wallerstein’s longtime work on zoning which relates to saving low-rises. But so much more public involvement is needed — and holding legislators’ feet to the fire. And hey, one thing you can do right now, dear reader, is call your local legislators. This paper’s Useful Contacts column has their numbers.

And how we need some protest posters — not only on First between 79th and 80th — or just some small posted rueful notes. These lifeline losses must not go unheeded. Or unchallenged. It can be done if enough of us — if more of us — try. A livable city is at stake. To be continued — often and loud.

bettedewing@aol.com