Monday Bulletin: Striking Students Settle; A King’s Cake; City Implements Right to Eviction Counsel

The steps of the First Baptist Church at Broadway an 79th Street. Photo by Alfred Szymanski.

January 10, 2022 Weather: Mostly sunny, with a high of 29 degrees.

Notices:
Our calendar has lots of local events!

News:
The Student Workers of Columbia, the union representing about 3,000 graduate and undergraduate students, has reached a tentative agreement with the university, “ending a 10-week strike that disrupted some classes and strained relations with administrators,” The New York Times reported. “Among other things, the tentative contract includes a 6 percent raise for workers with annual contracts and an increase in hourly wages to $21 from $15. Columbia has also agreed to cover 75 percent of the cost of student workers’ dental insurance and to create a $300,000 emergency fund that workers can tap for out-of-pocket medical expenses.”

The Riverside Park Conservancy’s President and CEO Dan Garodnick is expected to be tapped by Mayor Eric Adams for chairman of the CIty Planning Commission, “which handles land use changes, like major neighborhood rezonings,” according to The Real Deal and Politico. A former City Councilmember, Garodnick has led the Riverside Park Conservancy since 2018. The question now is, who will handle the running of the goats?

New York State’s eviction moratorium is set to expire on January 15th, with more extensions unlikely, THE CITY reported. Just in time has come “full implementation of the Right to Counsel law in every part of the city,” ensuring that every needy tenant facing eviction in the city has a right to a free attorney, funded by the government. “One grateful beneficiary is Barbara Eubanks, a former opera singer and foster mom who lives on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. In 2019, she got an eviction notice from the landlord of the apartment building where she’d been living for more than 40 years….With the help of the free attorneys, Eubanks said she managed to settle her case after 18 months of back-and-forth negotiations. Late last month, she signed a new lease in the same apartment.”

The Metropolitan Museum of Art has an installation showcasing “the Black utopian community that was destroyed in 1857 to make way for Central Park….Seneca Village had the virtue of being located several miles outside the hostile city center, on the western edge of what is now Central Park, between 83rd and 89th Streets. In addition to allowing Black property owners to vote…the new settlement also provided an ideal setting for fugitives from slavery to pause and refresh themselves while moving north on the Underground Railroad. Among the escapees who passed through the city during the Seneca Village period was the strikingly handsome Frederick Douglass, a fugitive from Baltimore who was soon to become one of the greatest orators of his day.”

In France, “the beginning of the year is synonymous with [the] holiday, l’Épiphanie and its traditional Galette des Rois, called King’s Cake in the United States,” Frenchly explained. “The cake symbolizes the gifts the three wise men brought Jesus at his birth. Here is a list of places where you can continue to satisfy your sweet tooth this January and score a delicious galette….On the Upper West Side, Silver Moon Bakery offers two types of Galettes des Rois, traditional frangipane or raspberry. 2740 Broadway (105-106).

One GoFundMe fundraiser has brought in more than $200k for the families of victims in the horrific Bronx fire that killed at least 19. People can give here.

Finally, a lot of people would like to write for the Rag! We got dozens of responses to our call for writers the day after we posted it — and they’re still coming strong. We are going through them all, with enormous excitement and gratitude. Everyone will be contacted. We look forward to new voices and subjects in the Rag in the months to come. If you haven’t already, sign up for our free email newsletter here, and receive the Rag regularly in your inbox.