New York

Don Harold, Sneaky Subway Preservationist, Dies at 91

Published

2 years ago

June 25, 2023

Don Harold, Sneaky Subway Preservationist, Dies at 91

Don Harold, a subway aficionado who sometimes used subterfuge to save vintage train cars from the junkyard — cars that are now among the star attractions of the New York Transit Museum in Downtown Brooklyn — died on June 14 in a nursing home in Bayside, Queens. He was 91.

Thomas Jablonski, a close friend, said the cause was congestive heart failure.

Mr. Harold, whose maternal grandfather was a Brooklyn trolley motorman and inspector, adored the hulking relics that once rumbled and screeched on subway and elevated tracks.

To him, they were as essential a part of New York’s history as the Statue of Liberty.

“When she was falling apart, they fixed her,” he said in an interview with The New York Times in 2003. “You don’t sell her for scrap.”

He got his chance to save train cars when he was hired in 1965 in the public affairs office of the city’s Transit Authority. His supervisor already knew about his passion for the old rolling stock and felt that he could be an effective preservationist.

“I think that I could get that done, but you don’t want to know how I would do it,” Mr. Harold said he told his boss, according to an obituary posted by the Electric Railroaders Association.

Eleven years later, during the Bicentennial, Mr. Harold’s efforts helped lead to the creation of an exhibition that included 15 restored cars at the decommissioned Court Street subway station in Brooklyn. It was intended as a short-term exhibition, but it proved so popular that it was frequently extended and finally rechristened a museum in 1989.

“He was the patriarch of the museum,” said Concetta Bencivenga, the director of the museum, which has nearly 100 vintage cars in its collection, more than 20 of them at the museum and the rest in storage yards. “All the cars are here because of the work Don did.”

To save the cars that the Transit Authority did not volunteer for restoration, Mr. Harold deployed a network of workers within the agency, some of whom he had met through the BMT Holy Name Society, a religious group of train workers, before he joined the agency.

The cars had to be overhauled electrically and mechanically to make them trackworthy again; Mr. Harold was known for making sure the interior and exterior colors were accurate, Mr. Jablonski said, and he had reproductions of period advertising and old maps added to the cars.

The Times called Mr. Harold and his preservation-minded colleagues a “tiny guerrilla army” that “bent the rules, disregarded orders and played hide and seek with subway cars sentenced to execution.”

The group employed various tactics.

“Through his cohorts, he would hear which cars were on the extinction list, and they would change the numbers so they couldn’t be found,” Mr. Jablonski, the deputy chief of strategic capital planning of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the Transit Authority’s parent, said by phone. “So car number 2390 became number 2590, and it would be tucked away in a yard.”

One of those Mr. Harold helped save, an old BMT car with cane seats and ceiling fans, bore the telltale signs of his group’s trickery.

“When the guys finally sanded it down to restore it for the museum,” he told The Times in 2003, “they said, ‘Hey, what’s going on? We found five different numbers on this thing.’ And I said, ‘That’s five times they tried to scrap it.’”

One day in the mid-1960s, Mr. Jablonski said, Mr. Harold heard that a contingent of Transit Authority managers was heading to a storage and maintenance yard in the Bronx to locate five early-20th-century IRT Low Voltage cars to scrap them. But Mr. Harold wanted them restored, as five other such cars had already been.

“Don calls someone in charge of moving cars and says, ‘Move those cars out of there,’” Mr. Jablonski said. They were temporarily moved to a track south of Pelham Parkway until it was clear that they were out of danger, when they were returned.

“Don got as big a kick out of pulling a fast one as he did saving the cars,” Mr. Jablonski said.

Donald William Harold was born on Aug. 18, 1931, in Brooklyn. He was raised by his mother, Marie (Muessig) Harold, who worked at a department store, and his maternal grandparents. His father, Chester, left the family when Donald was a toddler.

When Don was 17, he expressed his interest in mass transportation in a letter to the editor of The Brooklyn Eagle, criticizing a city plan to replace trolley cars, like the one his grandfather had operated, with buses on 10 Brooklyn lines.

“People are packed in buses like sardines,” he wrote. “The buses are too small for the number of people riding them. Even though the trolleys may be old, they can still hold their own if given a fair trial.”

Mr. Harold held several jobs before joining the Transit Authority. Perhaps most important, he operated a trolley as a teenager in Brooklyn — illegally and with the help of a friendly motorman, he told Mr. Jablonski — and later got a legitimate job running one in Atlantic City in the 1950s.

He was also a salesman in a record store, a bank teller and an I.R.S. examiner. In 1968, he received a bachelor’s degree in economics from Saint Peter’s College (now University) in Jersey City, N.J.

Mr. Harold eventually left the Transit Authority’s public affairs office to run its employee suggestion program. He retired in 1986. He never had a job at the Transit Museum, but he was a consultant there and was sometimes referred to as its curator and co-founder.

He leaves no immediate survivors.

The lore of Mr. Harold’s preservation work includes a story about the planning of the 1976 Bicentennial exhibition. Mr. Harold received enough cooperation from the Transit Authority to restore one vintage car from each of several significant train classes, but when he was told that the rest of the cars would be scrapped, he thought quickly.

“He said, ‘No, no, no, we’re having Nostalgia Rides,’” Ms. Bencivenga recalled — in other words, Mr. Harold saved the cars by spontaneously conceiving an attraction in which passengers would board restored trains for rides on designated subway routes around the city.

“And this is what happens today,” Ms. Bencivenga said. “We’ll take the R-1/9s to the Rockaways, and when we go to Yankee Stadium we’ll take the 1917 IRT Lo-V’s.”

New York

Large Blaze Ravages Bronx Apartment Building, Leaving Many Displaced

Published

5 hours ago

January 10, 2025

Press Room

Large Blaze Ravages Bronx Apartment Building, Leaving Many Displaced

Dozens of families were looking for shelter after a large fire broke out at an apartment building in the Bronx early Friday, injuring at least seven people, the Fire Department said. There were no fatalities or life-threatening injuries, according to officials.

About 250 firefighters and emergency medical responders rushed to a six-story residential building on Wallace Avenue near Arnow Avenue after a fire was reported there just before 2 a.m., the Fire Department said. The blaze on the top floor was elevated to a five-alarm fire about an hour later, it said.

Several dozen firefighters were still gathered outside the building at around 10 a.m. Many windows on the top floor were blown out and some had shards of glass hanging in place that resembled jagged teeth. Smoke continued to climb from the building as a firefighter on a ladder hosed the roof.

The fire was brought under control shortly before 2 p.m., according to fire officials.

The seven people who were injured included five firefighters, the department said in an email. One person was treated at the scene but declined to be taken to a hospital.

A spokeswoman for the Police Department said earlier that some people had suffered smoke inhalation injuries.

Robert S. Tucker, the fire commissioner, said during a news conference that it was a miracle that there had been no serious injuries or fatalities. Officials said that all of the apartments on the building’s top floor were destroyed.

Firefighters blasted water at the smoke and flames pouring out of the upper floors and roof, according to videos posted online by the Fire Department and television news outlets. Heavy winds had fueled the blaze, the department said.

The cause of the fire was under investigation, officials said.

The Red Cross was at the scene helping residents that were displaced by the fire, and a temporary shelter had been set up at the Bennington School on Adee Avenue nearby. Doreen Thomann-Howe, the chief executive of the American Red Cross Greater New York Region, said during the news conference that 66 families had already registered to receive assistance, including lodging. She said she expected that number to increase.

Juan Cabrera and his family were among those seeking help at the Bennington School. Mr. Cabrera said that he and his family had not heard a fire alarm but had instead heard glass breaking as residents climbed out of windows. He said he had also heard people race across the hall one flight above him while others screamed “Get out!”

Mr. Cabrera, 47, said he had smelled smoke and woke up his daughter, Rose, 13. He and his wife, Aurora Tavera, grabbed their IDs, passports and cellphones, and the family left the building.

“I felt desperate,” Ms. Taverna, 32, said.

“Thank God we are still alive,” said Mr. Cabrera, who works as a school aide and custodian and has lived in the building for five years. “The material stuff you can get back, but we have our family,” he said.

Louis Montalvo, 55, was also among those seeking help. He said firefighters banged on his door at around 3 a.m. and that he had smelled smoke.

“I am grateful to be around,” Mr. Montalvo said, as he stood outside of the temporary shelter. He was still wearing his felt pajama pants, which had snowmen printed on them.

Vanessa L. Gibson, the Bronx borough president, said she was “so grateful” there had been no fatalities from the fire.

The last major apartment fire in the Bronx occurred in 2022, and resulted in 17 deaths, which experts said were entirely preventable. Self-closing doors in the building did not work properly, allowing smoke to escape the apartment where the fire started and rapidly fill the structure’s 19 stories.

New York

New York’s Chinese Dissidents Thought He Was an Ally. He Was a Spy.

Published

13 hours ago

January 10, 2025

Press Room

New York’s Chinese Dissidents Thought He Was an Ally. He Was a Spy.

The Chinese government’s paranoia about overseas dissidents can seem strange, considering the enormous differences in power between exiled protesters who organize marches in America and their mighty homeland, a geopolitical and economic superpower whose citizens they have almost no ability to mobilize. But to those familiar with the Chinese Communist Party, the government’s obsession with dissidents, no matter where in the world they are, is unsurprising. “Regardless of how the overseas dissident community is dismissed outside of China, its very existence represents a symbol of hope for many within China,” Wang Dan, a leader of the Tiananmen Square protests who spent years in prison before being exiled to the United States in 1998, told me. “For the Chinese Communist Party, the hope for change among the people is itself a threat. Therefore, they spare no effort in suppressing and discrediting the overseas dissident community — to extinguish this hope in the hearts of people at home.”

To understand the party’s fears about the risks posed by dissidents abroad, it helps to know the history of revolutions in China. “Historically, the groups that have overthrown the incumbent government or regime in China have often spent a lot of time overseas and organized there,” says Jessica Chen Weiss, a professor of China studies at Johns Hopkins University. The leader Sun Yat-sen, who played an important role in the 1911 revolution that dethroned the Qing dynasty and led eventually to the establishment of the People’s Republic of China, spent several periods of his life abroad, during which he engaged in effective fund-raising and political coordination. The Communist Party’s own rise to power in 1949 was partly advanced by contributions from leaders who were living overseas. “They are very sensitive to that potential,” Weiss says.

“What the Chinese government and the circle of elites that are running China right now fear the most is not the United States, with all of its military power, but elements of unrest within their own society that could potentially topple the Chinese Communist Party,” says Adam Kozy, a cybersecurity consultant who worked on Chinese cyberespionage cases when he was at the F.B.I. Specifically, Chinese authorities worry about a list of threats — collectively referred to as the “five poisons” — that pose a risk to the stability of Communist rule: the Uyghurs, the Tibetans, followers of the Falun Gong movement, supporters of Taiwanese independence and those who advocate for democracy in China. As a result, the Chinese government invests great effort in combating these threats, which involves collecting intelligence about overseas dissident groups and dampening their influence both within China and on the international stage.

Controlling dissidents, regardless of where they are, is essential to China’s goal of projecting power to its own citizens and to the world, according to Charles Kable, who served as an assistant director in the F.B.I.’s national security branch before retiring from the bureau at the end of 2022. “If you have a dissident out there who is looking back at China and pointing out problems that make the entire Chinese political apparatus look bad, it will not stand,” Kable says.

The leadership’s worries about such individuals were evident to the F.B.I. right before the 2008 Beijing Olympics, Kable told me, describing how the Chinese worked to ensure that the running of the Olympic flame through San Francisco would not be disrupted by protesters. “And so, you had the M.S.S. and its collaborators deployed in San Francisco just to make sure that the five poisons didn’t get in there and disrupt the optic of what was to be the best Olympics in history,” Kable says. During the run, whose route was changed at the last minute to avoid protesters, Chinese authorities “had their proxies in the community line the streets and also stand back from the streets, looking around to see who might be looking to cause trouble.”

New York

Hochul Seeks to Limit Private-Equity Ownership of Homes in New York

Published

22 hours ago

January 9, 2025

Press Room

Hochul Seeks to Limit Private-Equity Ownership of Homes in New York

Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York on Thursday proposed several measures that would restrict hedge funds and private-equity firms from buying up large numbers of single-family homes, the latest in a string of populist proposals she intends to include in her State of the State address next week.

The governor wants to prevent institutional investors from bidding on properties in the first 75 days that they are on the market. Her plan would also remove certain tax benefits, such as interest deductions, when the homes are purchased.

The proposals reflect a nationwide effort by mostly Democratic lawmakers to discourage large firms from crowding out individuals or families from the housing market by paying far above market rate and in cash, and then leasing the homes or turning them into short-term rentals.

Activists and some politicians have argued that this trend has played a role in soaring prices and low vacancy rates — though low housing production is widely viewed as the main driver of those problems.

If Ms. Hochul was inviting a fight with the real estate interests who have backed her in the past, she did not seem concerned. She even borrowed a line from Jimmy McMillan, who ran long-shot candidacies for governor and mayor as the founder of the Rent Is Too Damn High Party.

“The cost of living is just too damn high — especially when it comes to the sky-high rents and mortgages New Yorkers pay every month,” Ms. Hochul said in a written statement.

James Whelan, president of the Real Estate Board of New York, said his team would review the proposal, but characterized it as “another example of policy that will stifle investment in housing in New York.”

The plan — the specifics of which will be negotiated with the Legislature — is one of several recent proposals the governor has made with the goal of addressing the state’s affordability crisis. Voters have expressed frustration about the high costs of housing and basic goods in the state. This discontent has led to political challenges for Ms. Hochul, who is likely to face rivals in the 2026 Democratic primary and in the general election.

In 2022, five of the largest investors in the United States owned 2 percent of the country’s single-family rental homes, most of them in Sun Belt and Southern states, according to a recent report from the federal Government Accountability Office. The report stated that it was “unclear how these investors affected homeownership opportunities or tenants because many related factors affect homeownership — e.g., market conditions, demographic factors and lending conditions.”

Researchers at Harvard University found that “a growing share of rental properties are owned by business entities and medium- and large-scale rental operators.”

State officials were not able to offer a complete picture of how widespread the practice was in New York. They said local officials in several upstate cities had told them about investors buying up dozens of homes at a time and turning them into rentals.

The New York Times reported in 2023 that investment firms were buying smaller buildings in places like Brooklyn and Queens from families and smaller landlords.

Ms. Hochul’s concern is that these purchases make it harder for first-time home buyers to gain a foothold in the market and can lead to more rental price gouging.

“Shadowy private-equity giants are buying up the housing supply in communities across New York, leaving everyday homeowners with nowhere to turn,” she said in a statement on Thursday. “I’m proposing new laws and policy changes to put the American dream of owning a home within reach for more New Yorkers than ever before.”

Cracking down on corporate landlords became a prominent talking point in last year’s presidential election. On the campaign trail, Vice President Kamala Harris called on Congress to pass previously introduced legislation eliminating tax benefits for large investors that purchase large numbers of homes.

“It can make it impossible then for regular people to be able to buy or even rent a home,” Ms. Harris said last summer.

In August, Representative Pat Ryan, Democrat of New York, called on the Federal Trade Commission to investigate price gouging by private-equity firms in the housing market. He cited a study that estimated that private-equity firms “are expected to control 40 percent of the U.S. single-family rental market by 2030.”

Statehouses across the country have recently looked at ways to tackle corporate homeownership. One effort in Nevada, which passed the Legislature but was vetoed by Gov. Joe Lombardo, proposed capping the number of units a corporation could buy in a calendar year. It was opposed by local chambers of commerce and the state’s homebuilders association.

A bill was introduced in the Minnesota State Legislature that would ban the conversion of homes owned by corporations into rentals. It has yet to come up for a vote.

At the federal level, Senator Jeff Merkley, Democrat of Oregon, and Representative Adam Smith, Democrat of Washington, introduced joint legislation that would force hedge funds to sell all the single-family homes they own over 10 years.