Nick Garber

UPPER EAST SIDE, NY — An Upper East Side school that is largely starved of outdoor space will soon have some on its own roof, thanks to millions pledged by local lawmakers — and voted on by neighbors.

Officials gathered Monday at the Yorkville Community School/P.S. 151, where work began during the pandemic on a $2.5 million outdoor play space on top of the building. It will be completed next year.

About half of the funding came from Councilmember Ben Kallos's office, including $500,000 that was chosen by Kallos's constituents in 2015 through his participatory budgeting process.

UPPER EAST SIDE, NY — The Upper East Side's popular John Jay Park soon will have its sitting area transformed, thanks to a $650,000 project that broke ground on Wednesday.

The project is the first major renovation effort at the FDR Drive park since 2011.

Council Member Ben Kallos and parks officials said the sitting area project — which began planning in 2018 — will bring it up to the level of its playground, outdoor sports open area and New Deal-era swimming pool.

What will ultimately matter is whether Kallos's Council colleagues defer to his wishes and vote against it in mid-November, or defy his preferences to support the project — a distinct possibility, according to some reports.

Wednesday's hearing offered few clues. The only other Council members who spoke at length were Manhattan member Keith Powers and Brooklyn lawmaker Antonio Reynoso, whose questions to the Blood Center team offered little indication of how they will ultimately vote.

Reynoso, though, suggested a possible path forward through negotiation.

"I hope that you and Councilmember Kallos can sit more," he told the Blood Center team, "and get to a place where we can all be happy."

MIDTOWN EAST, NY – An East Side police precinct cut the ribbon Wednesday on a new, state-of-the-art mobile command center, replacing the beaten-up van that the cops had formerly relied on.

The 17th Precinct, which patrols much of Midtown East between East 30th and 59th Streets, purchased the enormous vehicle thanks to a $500,000 allocation from City Councilmember Ben Kallos.

In a ceremony Wednesday morning, Kallos said he secured the funding for the 2019 city budget after the precinct's former commanding officer complained about their former command center: a run-down contraption that Kallos called "basically an over-glorified Winnebago, with chairs and not much else."

"My hope is that it will offer folks the tools they need for modern policing, to keep all of us safe," Kallos said, pointing to the 17th Precinct's recent responsibilities during the high-security UN General Assembly.

When Patch stopped by on Tuesday, four gas-powered cars were occupying the spots, joined by a single electric car: a Tesla SUV. But that Tesla, the neighbor said, has hogged one of the power cords for at least two straight days — far longer than its necessary charging time, and raising its own enforcement issues.

Reached for comment, City Councilmember Ben Kallos suggested that the NYPD may need to begin issuing fines to drivers who disobey the rules.

"As a City, we need to ingrain the concept that charging stations must be respected and that they are not just parking spots for any car," Kallos said in a statement. "I plan to work with the NYPD and the Department of Transportation to get this fixed asap."

Ben Kallos attends a ribbon-cutting on the East River Esplanade in April 2019. His monthly First Friday event will be held in-person this week for the first time since the pandemic began. (Jeffrey WZ Reed/New York City Council)

UPPER EAST SIDE, NY — For the first time since the pandemic began, a local lawmaker's popular monthly forum will be held in-person again.

City Councilmember Ben Kallos's "First Friday" discussion — held, as the name suggests, at the start of each month — will return 8 a.m. Friday.

Rather than over Zoom, it will be held at Ruppert Park. (In case of rain, it will go virtual, but forecasts currently call for clear skies.)

To participate, residents must RSVP online. Questions can also be submitted in advance on the RSVP form, or by email to questions@benkallos.com.

Kallos has held the forums each month since he took office in 2014. Speaking to Patch earlier this winter, Kallos said he hoped whoever succeeds him — now likely to be Julie Menin — would continue the tradition.

"It smells putrid. It smells like trash here," said Kallos, whose district office is a few blocks away.

Kallos speculated that the trucks were heading to the East 91st Street Marine Transfer Station. But a spokesperson for the Department of Sanitation said this was not the case, and that the trucks were congregating for a different reason.

City Councilmember Ben Kallos called out the shed at 1772 Second Ave. on Twitter this week, part of a weeklong series in which he plans to draw attention to sidewalk sheds across the city that have overstayed their welcome.

It is a signature issue for Kallos, who since 2016 has been pushing for legislation that would require building owners to make repairs within 180 days of reporting an unsafe condition. The bill has stalled in the City Council, amid opposition from real estate groups.

"New Yorkers need to demand it at this point," Kallos said of his bill. "Landlords don't want to do the work, they don't want to take care of their buildings."

Kallos said he has tried to persuade the city to offer decent, temporary apartments to the residents of 1772 Second Ave., where they could stay while much-needed repairs are carried out.

The money means that work may begin as soon as Fall 2022 and wrap up the following year — once plans have been presented to Community Board 8 and the Public Design Commission later this year.

The park occupies the former site of the Jacob Ruppert & Company brewery, which closed in 1965 and was replaced by the Ruppert Towers apartment complex — as well as the park, which opened in 1979.

Though well-loved by East Side families, Ruppert has "a very '70s design," as Kallos described it. Its four-leaf clover shape divides the park into four quadrants, including a little-used grassless area that has been repurposed as a dog run.

Other problems include an excess of vegetation that blocks sunlight and attracts insects, as well as a dearth of sitting areas, rat infestations, outdated play equipment and hilly areas that pose accessibility challenges.

"Ruppert Park has needed an overhaul since I was kid and no one wanted to play there," Kallos said in a statement. "I can't believe it took my lifetime, but Ruppert Park is going to get a complete redesign to become a destination park in the neighborhood that everyone will want to go to."

The pavement on East 89th Street between York and East End avenues caved in around 8:30 a.m. Thursday. Initially measuring about 20 feet deep and 8 by 8 feet in diameter, workers later widened it by about 7 feet to perform repairs, City Councilmember Ben Kallos said on Monday.

"They went all the way to the sidewalk because that's how compromised it was," he said.

An investigation into the cause is ongoing and no conclusions have been reached yet, a spokesperson for the Department of Environmental Protection said Monday.

Kallos, though, said investigators told him that the five-foot-wide sewer line had likely been leaking, triggering the collapse.

Within 24 hours of Thursday's collapse, workers had rerouted a sewer line that had been affected by the sinkhole and covered up the site with dirt. Over the weekend, crews expanded the hole to expose more utilities nearby, the DEP spokesperson said.

Monday and Tuesday, the city planned to bring in materials from out of state to continue cleaning out and replacing the damaged sewer line, Kallos said.

Two buildings that lost running water for a few hours had it restored later on Thursday.

Sinkholes often appear after heavy rainfall, like the storms that swept the city in recent weeks, and are not necessarily a sign of infrastructure problems, a city official told the New York Times on Friday.

Still, it triggered fears that the city is unprepared for extreme weather triggered by climate change, having come on the heels of another sinkhole on the Upper West Side and a thunderstorm that flooded subway stations. Kallos told Patch last week that "I don't want to see a Miami building collapse happen in New York City."