Dear Whoopie: Elliott-Chelsea Needs Your Voice
Whoopie Goldberg outside the Elliott-Chelsea Houses in 2024. The comedy legend grew up in the NYCHA public housing development now slated to be demolished and replaced with a new complex of mostly market rate luxury housing.
Editor’s Note: Harry Weiner worked for the New York City Housing Authority for more than 30 years and is a member of the Council of Municipal Retiree Organizations [COMRO]. This is his open letter to comedy legend and Elliott-Chelsea public housing product Whoopie Goldberg.
Dear Whoopi:
I’m writing to you as a fellow senior citizen with similar good memories of Elliott-Chelsea Houses, which is in the midst of a crisis. When I worked there in the 1980’s as a Housing Assistant, they were both very desirable “projects” to live in…safe, well maintained and a sense of community prevailed. Indeed, it was a source of pride that you were a former resident.
As you related to New York magazine:
“I lived there my whole life until I moved to California after I got married. Back then, they were newer projects, or they felt newer. My room was in the back, just a bed and a bureau and windows.”
“When I was a kid, the High Line was still being used to transport things through the city, usually at night. That’s what I looked out on. It’s a great place to grow up, because we were outside 98 percent of the time, winter and summer.”
“We all were poor, and we all knew it, but it somehow didn’t really stop us from doing anything.”’
You noted that your Mom was a Head Start teacher at the Hudson Guild community center.
Whoopi, you truly paid it forward for decades, raising money through “Comic Relief” which distributing funds to homeless people across the United States.
In 2005, you were the recipient of Hudson Guild’s first Arts in the Community Award and was the guest of honor at the official opening ceremony for the new Hudson Guild.
Now twenty years later, the Guild, the rest of the projects—and most troubling, the Chelsea Addition building for the elderly—will be demolished and replaced with a new mix of mostly market rent luxury housing. Residents are being forced to relocate to other apartments, Work-Bites has chronicled the indifference of public officials and rushed process brought by NYCHA, Related Companies and Essence Development. Chelsea Addition residents, the most vulnerable, have received vacate notices.
Stress and anxiety have led to falls and hospitalizations. Please read the heartbreaking story of Marina Aloy, who passed away a few days before the September 15 deadline to move out.
Residents are organizing and fighting back through court proceedings, but legal expenses are costly and the clock is ticking..
Hearing your voice on behalf of your former community could help sway the politicians and developers, who seem more interested in lucrative real estate deals than the human consequences.
The elderly and disabled have become canaries in a coal mine. And on another level, it’s truly like killing mockingbirds.