July 26, 2020 Your Neighborhood — Your News®
Month xx–xx, 2019
LOCAL
CLASSIFIEDS
PAGE 7
Cleaning up
Coney Island
BY ROSE ADAMS
A new sanitation initiative
launched by a Coney Island business
group will clean the streets
along the neighborhood’s amusement
district, which have seen a
record-breaking amount of litter
this summer, locals say.
“It’s disgusting,” said Brighton
Beach resident Craig Hammerman,
who claimed the People’s
Playground has “defi nitely” seen
more trash build-up than last summer.
“It’s so sad to see the garbage
thats left on the beach.”
The Supplemental Sanitation
Services, sponsored by the Alliance
for Coney Island, will sweep
the streets each Friday to Monday.
The cleaning initiative will
likely improve the condition of the
amusement district’s roads, which
have seen a surprising amount of
litter this year, said the Alliance’s
director.
“People seem to be more careless
this year with their trash,”
said Alexandra Silversmith.
The Alliance usually kicks off
the program at the beginning of
the amusement park’s season in
April, but funding shortages due
to the coronavirus outbreak have
delayed the initiative’s start and
limited the days that sanitation
workers will sweep the streets, Silversmith
added.
“We’re not at full capacity, so I
do see that unfortunately it doesn’t
meet the need as much as we would
like,” she said, but added that the
program will still help the streets’
condition, despite its limitations.
“It does make a difference.”
The boardwalk and the amusement
zone have seen the largest
buildup of trash, with face masks
and bottles overfl owing out of the
garbage cans, one local said.
“Last week, I was out there, and
the garbage cans were overfl owing.
It was a breezy day, and the
trash was all over the amusement
zone,” said Orlando Mendez. “That
particular day, I was pretty much
in shock of how much trash I saw.”
Black Lives Matter’s protesters and pro-police supporters held opposing protests on July 19 that were mostly peaceful. Photo by Jon Farina
Dueling in the street
Black and Blue Lives Matter supporters butt heads ahead of southern BK protests
BY JESSICA PARKS
Youth organizers say they
were criticized on social media
for their support of the Black
Lives Matter movement ahead of
a pair of peaceful pro-police protests
and counter-protests in Marine
Park over the weekend.
“I post on Facebook pages
where a lot of people in the community
are really active,” said
20-year-old Alana Maisel, a lifelong
Marine Park resident who
co-founded Marine Park Political
Youth in June, an organization
for younger, left-leaning Marine
Park residents. “But every
time I get a post on there, I get a
lot of pushback. We’ve gotten a lot
of threats and uncertainty from
adults in the neighborhood.”
Maisel and other members
of Marine Park Political Youth
had planned to host an art-making
event in Marine Park on Saturday,
July 18, where attendees
created signage for a Black Lives
Matter protest scheduled for the
following day. The event aimed
to engage youth in social justice
movements through art, she
said.
“We wanted to create a space
for everyone’s individual political
goals, feelings and expression,
which is what we tried to
foster with our previous event,”
Maisel said. “We also are planning
workshops in the park, any
sort of thing that can happen in
the public space where we are
sharing our ethos of community
togetherness and autonomous action.”
But, when Maisel advertised
the group gathering on a local
Facebook page, some community
members branded the youth
group as radical and said she
should expect to see pro-police
protesters — who also planned
to rally at the sprawling park on
Sunday — at her event.
Some users threatened to
crash the youth group’s meeting
and one local resident warned he
would rip up the young activists’
signs.
Despite the online pushback,
the sign-making event on Saturday
remained mostly peaceful,
Maisel said — much like Sunday’s
opposing protests.
“The threats never really
seem to turn into anything real,”
Maisel said. “When we actually
got there, we had a few intimidating
stares, people walking really
slow and we had police offi cers
from the local precinct on the
corner… but that was the extent
of it.”
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