By Nicole Breskin
DNAinfo Reporter/Producer
SOHO — A border war is flaring up between disparate groups fighting over where Chinatown ends and SoHo begins.
SoHo Alliance director Sean Sweeney is irate that Chinatown Partnership, a neighborhood improvement organization, is proposing to include a swath of land from Canal Street to Broome Street, and Lafayette to Mercer Street in a Chinatown business improvement district. That move would tax property owners — who Sweeney says are in SoHo — to pay for trash pick-up in the district all the way to the Manhattan Bridge.
“This is not a BID, it’s a land grab,” Sean Sweeney. “Just because there’s a Chinese business here doesn’t mean this is Chinatown. Why should I pay to clean up their mess?”
Chinatown Partnership said their move would just continue what they're already doing.
“We have been taking away garbage, fixing lights and cleaning graffiti [in the neighborhood] for years,” said Wellington Chen, Chinatown Partnership's executive director. “We are in this together. There shouldn’t be any controversy. It’s about whether you want to go forward, or go back to the old way with graffiti and rats. It’s about choices and consequences.”
Chinatown Partnership has operated under a $5.4-million four-year city program, called NYC Clean Streets, picking up 16.5 million pounds of garbage since its inception in 2006.
With funds drying up and cut off at the end of the year, the partnership needs the tax on property owners to survive — which Chen says will cost property owners at most a couple hundred dollars per year.
In a separate effort, the Chinatown Working Group is considering an area around Canal Street and Lafayette Street in its “study area” for a potential rezoning effort in the area that was recently named part of the SoHo Historic District.
To this Sweeney says, “If anyone is going to rezone SoHo, it should be people from SoHo.”
According to The Villager, Sweeney said SoHo residents strived to landmark their neighborhood in 1973, with zoning modifications made over the years.
Chinatown Working Group co-chair Jim Solomon declined to comment.
SoHo locals may not be the only ones opposing the borders under contention though.
Lispenard Street is also under consideration to be in the Chinatown Partnership's BID.
Julie Menin, chair of Community Board 1, said she is planning on putting the issue on the board’s TriBeCa Committee agenda next month and says it could draw a large crowd.
Meanwhile, Sweeney is working with residents in Community Board 2 — which includes SoHo, Little Italy and parts of Chinatown — to form a coalition to address the issues.
“If they want a fight, we’ll give them a fight,” he said.
