#sheldon silver

After the terrible death of 146 people, most of them young women and girls, in the Triangle Factory Fire of 1911, they swung their support to the garment workers and the social reformers. Their actions set in motion the slow suicide of the machines—and the birth of modern America.

These four developments were originally built by trade unions as affordable, limited-equity housing, but in the late 1990’s they all went market rate. As part of “slum clearance” renewal, old tenements on the SPURA site were razed in the late 1960’s, displacing around 2,000 residents — many of them low-income — and a variety of small businesses. Ironically, a stumbling block to SPURA’s redevelopment has been opposition from some Grand St. co-op residents to low-income and affordable housing on the site who fear it would lower their property values.

This stretch of the Lower East Side used to be called the Seward Park Urban Renewal Area. During the 1950s, the city’s powerful planning czar, Robert Moses, decided to bulldoze dozens of old tenements. These were buildings where, years before, Jewish and Italian immigrants settled, replaced by African-Americans and Latinos. Through the early 1970s, the demolitions displaced some 1,800 poor and working-class families, most of them Puerto Rican, turning homes into vacant lots. The city promised to replace the lots with new low-income dwellings. But for years Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, in cahoots with William E. Rapfogel, who ran the taxpayer-financed Metropolitan Council on Jewish Poverty, conspired to thwart redevelopment proposals floated by local housing advocates because they threatened to undo Mr. Silver’s Jewish voting base. Mayor after mayor failed to make headway. Ultimately, Mr. Silver was convicted on corruption charges, Mr. Rapfogel went to prison for a kickback scheme and a path cleared for Essex Crossing, which finally makes good on the city’s half-century-old promise.

Trump clemency list expected to include Lil Wayne and Sheldon Silver

Sheldon Silver, Ex-New York Assembly Speaker, Gets 7-Year Prison Sentence

Sheldon Silver, Ex-New York Assembly Speaker, Gets 7-Year Prison Sentence

At the retrial, prosecutors again showed that Mr. Silver had obtained nearly $4 million in illicit payments in return for taking official actions on behalf of a cancer researcher, Robert N. Taub, at Columbia University and two real estate developers. In one scheme, Mr. Silver arranged for the State Health Department to award grants totaling $500,000 to Dr. Taub in return for his referring cancer patients with potentially lucrative legal claims to a law firm, Weitz & Luxenberg, which gave part of its fees to Mr. Silver. In the other scheme, Mr. Silver arranged for the developers, Glenwood Management and the Witkoff Group, to send certain tax business to the law firm Goldberg & Iryami, which also gave Mr. Silver a portion of its fees. Mr. Silver, one of four former state officials convicted this year in what has emerged as a season for corruption trials, is the first of that group to be sentenced. This month alone, separate juries have convicted Mr. Skelos, the former Senate majority leader who was retried on bribery and extortion charges after his 2015 conviction was overturned; and Alain E. Kaloyeros, the principal architect of Mr. Cuomo’s signature economic development project to revitalize upstate and western New York. He was convicted in a bid-rigging scheme. And in March, Joseph Percoco, a former top adviser to Mr. Cuomo, was found guilty of taking more than $300,000 in bribes from executives of two companies with state business. Mr. Cuomo has not been accused of any wrongdoing, but his political rivals have seized on the string of cases as evidence of a corrupt culture in Albany that they say the governor has enabled.