(I took this photo!)
The Juniper Park Civic Association (JPCA) has made it their responsibility to save St. Saviour’s Church in Maspeth from demolition. Instead, the JPCA has suggested that the city convert the space into a park and give the church landmark status. St. Saviours, built in 1847 and designed by master architect Richard Upjohn, is a Carpenter Gothic country church made with redwood and at one time was surrounded by nothing but trees. Today, St. Saviours is surrounded by abandoned factories, congested traffic, and 18-wheelers. It stands adjacent from a set of train tracks and lies hidden behind a fence made of plywood (which is tagged up with graffiti). I’ve lived in Maspeth/Ridgewood for 9 years and have passed the church countless times, never knowing it’s history or name…in other words, I took it for granted. Recently, I moved within a block of St. Saviours and believe that a park or some sort of green space is what this neighborhood needs. The church could serve as a buffer to this highly industrial area…What’s difficult for me to understand is why the city hasn’t shown much interest in saving St. Saviours…Maybe because it’s not in Manhattan? Elected officials have no love for Queens.
(This one too)
Recently, a group of immigrant factory workers protested outside of two local factories and a supermarket in Maspeth accused of paying “slave wages”. The protesters, accompanied by the activist group Make the Roads By Walking and several unions, hoped to raise awareness of their poor working conditions and hold businesses accountable for paying wages far below the minimum. Jose Vaquero, a former employee of one of the alleged underpaying factories, said that his friend was “only making about $280 a week, but they were working somewhere between 60 or 70 hours a week”. That calculates to about $4.30 per hour for back-breaking work. The employers refused to give sick days, overtime pay (even after 12 hour shifts), and docked what little money they actually paid out if the workers were a few minutes late.
Immigrants work at jobs that no “respectable” American Citizen would take on and are consistently underpaid and put through hell for their “off the books” salaries. They subject themselves through these abuses because-without papers- they cannot get “respectable” jobs that pay “respectable” salaries. Why should anyone work 70 hours in a week without proper compensation? (who the hell wants to work that much anyways?) It’s difficult for many of these workers to come forward in a country whose government has deportation and a Great Wall of Mexico on the agenda….The exploitation of immigrant workers needs to end; put that on your agenda BUSH.
Here’s an interesting OP-Ed article about a day laborer living in long island that was in today’s paper…
Inside the Immigration Maze, With No Answers
Last week, 150,000 Condoms sponsored by the NYC Health Department were handed out throughout New York City. I personally did not see any volunteers handing them out, but was curious if anybody out there (YES I MEAN YOU!) was given one?
This is a step down the right direction for New York, where more than 100,000 people are infected with HIV (thousands don’t know they have it..). Abstinence-Only (Wait Until Marriage) programs/policies are inefficient and hopefully in the near future we’ll see “USA Condoms” sponsored by the Federal government…
GET TESTED.
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