Let Your Voice Be Heard

WeAct for Environmental Justice and Community Board 9 are teaming up to protect West Harlem’s waterfront. You are invited to take part in the Marine Transfer Station Community Visioning meeting on Saturday, May 8th at 3pm. Below are the details from a letter released by WeAct and CB 9. With your help, we can change a trash transfer facility into a neighborhood treasure!

Dear Community Member:

West Harlem is no place for that old abandoned sanitation facility at 135^th St in the Hudson River. Do you have ideas for how the site can be redeveloped? Do you want a revitalized West Harlem waterfront for you, your family, and this community? If so the time has come!

The time has come to turn the abandoned 135^th marine transfer station (MTS) in the Hudson River into a community asset. The site is ripe for redevelopment to continue the revitalization of the West Harlem Waterfront that began with the West Harlem Piers Park. It is up the West Harlem community to decide what the MTS will become and what it will look like. That is why WEACT and Community Board 9 (CB9) have partnered to help make the community’s vision a reality.

We invite you to the 135^th MTS Community Visioning on Saturday, May 8^th from 9:30 am to 3 pm.

The Community Visioning will build off of the work from the Waterfront and Economic Development Committee of CB9 on potential re-uses of the site and a successful Community Forum co-led by WEACT and CB9 in November of 2009. The Community Visioning is your opportunity to express your ideas for how to reuse the MTS and engage in its redesign. However the Community Visioning is not your only chance to have input into the process of deciding what will be there and what it will look like. WE ACT and CB9 will coordinate follow-up community sessions to make sure the designers and architects get the community vision right.

The Community Visioning will take place at City College in their Faculty Dining Hall located on the 3^rd floor of their North Academic Center (NAC). The NAC is located on Convent Avenue between 135^th St. and 138^th St. Breakfast, lunch, translation, and childcare will be provided.

We hope you, your friends, your family and the West Harlem community will join us in determining the reuses and redesign of the 135^th MTS. Please spread the word about it. With your help we can transform it from being a trash transfer facility into a treasure for the community. In future years when we see the transformation, we will be proud we came together for the 135^th MTS Community Visioning on Saturday, May 8^th from 9:30 am to 3 pm.

Please RSVP with James Subudhi at WE ACT or Eutha Prince at CB9 if you will attend. Contact information is below.

Sincerely,

WE ACT and Community Board 9

**This article was submitted by WeAct for Environmental Justice, an NYFJ organizational partner.