Editorial

LAST IN A SERIES: We, at the Chatham Avalon Park Community Council, feel that an overhaul, a complete rejuvenation of the neighborhood is needed in the period on the eve of the 2016 Olympics, provided the October 2, 2009 IOC decision is in the affirmative. Some say Chatham is already a vibrant community; the problem with this view is that it is very limited: it ignores the fact that the people from the projects as Section 8 occupants have destroyed what was a good middle class life in Chatham; the thug element and the riff-raft up and down 79Th Street simply does not care, and other newcomers from other areas don't have a clue as to what Chatham was to the black community in the 1950's and 60's: once upon a time there was a Daley's Drugstore, a Hi-Low grocery, a Vito's grocery, two Certified's, a Rexall, numerous fresh bakery outlets, a Gracie's pancake house, a Dairy Queen, a Baldwins ice cream store, several Jewel's (inside Chatham proper), a Dominick's, a stationery store, a bowling alley, and we can go on and on and on, even with home delivery every morning of Wanzer's milk and Home Juice orange and cranberry juice at your doorstep at 7 a.m. Chatham needs a huge infusion of federal funds in the form of $5-7 billion stimulus dollars to reverse the damage done to public and private property, create good-paying jobs, improve the public works, infrastructure and city services, upgrade the technology in the public grid, and prepare the neighborhood for an Olympics deemed to be much bigger than Beijing. There is nothing wrong in seeing Chatham recapture its status again today--an enclave, a neighborhood in the black community that uniquely had the identical standard of living, quality of life, as that found in the white community we know as affluent suburbia--where Chatham achieved an unparalleled level of extreme comfort for all its residents. It's TIME TO BUILD!