Critics of a recently-released report on possible uses for the Kingsbridge Armory said it lacked for funding sources. There were lots of ideas, but no money to make any of them happen. Enter Creflo Dollar, an evangelical preacher from Georgia, a man with a vision for the Armory and the resources to bring it to reality.
Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz, Jr. has made it clear redeveloping the vacant 575,000-square-foot Kingsbridge Armory into a quality job-producing, vibrant community space, is a top priority of his administration. But a much-anticipated report created by an Armory task force he assembled was released with little fanfare earlier this month and appears to generate more questions than answers.
At a town hall forum in Kingsbridge Heights on Sunday, State Senator Gustavo Rivera said the Bronx borough president’s Kingsbridge Armory task force was in the final stages of completing its recommendations for redeveloping the massive building that has been vacant for nearly two decades. They will release the report in June, he said.
It seemed like the big freeze between the mayor and Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz, Jr. as it relates to the Kingsbridge Armory, was thawing just a tad. “We’re open to every good idea,” the mayor said, exhibiting none of the bitterness some have attributed to him for having his preferred plan for the facility — a mall developed by The Related Companies — killed by Diaz and many of the very same people that were at the press conference to cheer him on for the Bloomberg administration’s efforts to get a portfolio of 10 nightmare apartment buildings into the hands of a new, accountable owner.
If 2009 was the year the city finally voted on a proposal to redevelop the enormous and vacant Kingsbridge Armory, then 2010 was the year everyone tried to figure out the significance of the City Council deciding overwhelmingly, one year ago, to kill a Bloomberg-backed plan to mold the Armory into a shopping mall.
The Muller Army Reserve Center in Wakefield is fast becoming the new Kingsbridge Armory. As of press time, the mayor’s office and Bronx officials (and activists) are in complete disagreement on how to best fill the vacant Muller Center, which the Department of Defense handed over to the city late last year as part of its BRAC program.
It’s the one-year anniversary of the nearly unanimous City Council vote that scuttled the mayor’s juggernaut to stuff a cookie-cutter mall inside the landmark Kingsbridge Armory. In that time, the city’s two tabloids, the New York Post and the Daily News, have taken every opportunity to whack at Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz, Jr. for his opposition to the project, which gave the necessary juice to a community and labor-backed effort to defeat it in the City Council. Regular readers know where we stand on this, but as long as the editorial boards of the city dailies continue to harp on this, we are compelled to reiterate our position. For more than a decade, community organizations led by the Northwest Bronx Community and Clergy Coalition hammered out plans for a remake of the facility that made room for recreation, community programming, small businesses, a movie theater, etc. Related, the city’s chosen developer, never offered details on what it was going to provide except for retail. Despite this and the clear sense that the Armory would be a mall pure and simple, the community’s only firm request in the end was that people had to be paid a living wage, particularly when the developer was going to receive over $70 million in taxpayer subsidies to remake a public landmark. It was hardly an outlandish request. Several other municipalities have enacted wage guarantees on development projects benefiting from taxpayer subsidies.
Fighting in a foreign land for the first time in their unit's history, members of the Army National Guard 145th Maintenance Company, based out of the Kingsbridge Armory, are currently housed at the Tallil Air Base in Iraq, while needed supplies sit at a U.S. military base in Georgia.
A plan to transform the Kingsbridge Armory annex buildings into schools is in jeopardy as Bronx activists and Borough President Ruben Diaz, Jr. once again find themselves at odds with the mayor's office over a development project.
Last week, in protest of the city's plan to turn a vacant army reserve center into a homeless shelter, Diaz did not attend a scheduled meeting with city officials, setting up a showdown reminiscent of Diaz's battle with Mayor Bloomberg over the fate of the Kingsbridge Armory.
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