by Judi McLeod
November 30, 2004
The squealing of frightened pigs and other animals has long since been silenced at United Nations headquarters, built with an $8.5 million donation from John D. Rockefeller Jr. on the site of a former slaughterhouse.
But with a reverberating oink, the cramped for space UN is going to expand. all the UN wants for Christmas is a 35-story building at the nearby Robert Moses Playground. In short, the tree hugging brass of the UN is aiming to develop prime New York parkland.
Everything was moving along until Senator Martin Golden (R-Brooklyn) got the drift about the moving plans of the world’s largest bureaucracy.
Golden, as it turns out, is already steamed at UN Secretary General Kofi annan for his outright refusal to turn oil-for-food scandal related documents over to inquiring congressional investigators.
"This is hardly the time to reward an organization that is either thoroughly incompetent or completely corrupt by granting it the ability to build additional buildings in New York City and in our state," said Golden.
Senator Golden, spitting mad at the UN’s $1.3 billion expansion plans has got nothing on the community outrage that has been sparked by the parkland grab.
Some community members, including dog walkers, do not want to give an inch of their park away, a NIMBY stance hardly cooled by the lofty advice of Jeffrey Wiesenfeld, a director of the UN Development Corporation, who predicts that a proposed land swap would give the community a park far superior to the current one, because "there will be less carbon monoxide."
as far as some community activists are concerned, the UN can put carbon monoxide in their pipe and smoke it.
It’s okay to talk about gas emissions when you’re trying to shill the Kyoto Protocol, but not when bureaucrats are muscling in on your local park.
City bus drivers use the park--the last stop on the line--to answer nature’s call. Should the Big apple turn its parkland over to Kofi and gang, bus driver Ralph (Cramden) Horowitz says" "I’ll knock on the door of the UN and bother them."
according to UN spin, it’s growing pains sending them out to encroach on Robert Moses playground.
Included in the deluge of UN years of and days of this and that notices, early last fall an S.O.S. was sent, announcing that its 50-year-old Secretariat tower had fallen into such disrepair, only a total reconstruction displacing staff of 4,000 could ease the pinch.
The 850,000 square foot mass of the glass and marble office tower, already being discussed with architects, would be 20 percent larger than the existing Secretariat. Once major renovation has been completed at the Secretariat, staff could return, and to boot the UN would call home its assorted operations quartered elsewhere in the Big apple.
The freight train was braked to a halt, albeit a temporary one when the New York Post’s Ken Lovett reported that albany was planning on giving the UN an early Christmas present, a chunk of the east side for an expansion tied up in red ribbon.
Thanksgiving has come and gone and albany must get through Christmas.
The nonprofit Turtle Bay association fighting expansion predicts "there will be enormous pressure, local, national and international, to yield to the United Nations."
Meanwhile, with its huge out-of-scale planned park tower, the politically correct UN is against skyscrapers and towers unless, of course it happens to be for them.
Canada Free Press founding editor Most recent by Judi McLeod is an award-winning journalist with 30 years experience in the print media. Her work has appeared on Newsmax.com, Drudge Report, Foxnews.com, Glenn Beck. Judi can be reached at: judi@canadafreepress.com
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