Founding FDC: An Interview with Mike Weiss

March 20, 1975: FDC is incorporated

With Flatbush Development Corporation in the midst of celebrating its 50th Anniversary - culminating in an October 23rd gala - I sat down with Mike Weiss to get the origin story from FDC's founding father. 

During the years that Mike was most active in our community's affairs, he juggled the Assistant Principal job at Brooklyn Tech with a full load of after-school responsibilities while he and his wife Ella raised two children. 

Mike vividly remembered that the most pressing problem for the Flatbush area back in 1975 was the deterioration of housing. He explained it well: “Owners of multi-family rental buildings were incentivizing tenants in rent-controlled apartments to move out so they could jack up the rents. As those buildings aged, they required major systems upgrades or replacements -- heating plants, roofs, elevators, windows. As the physical condition of the buildings were allowed to further deteriorate, routine maintenance services -- repairs, cleaning, painting, etc. -- were also being withdrawn. As a result, tenants who had lived in these buildings for years, were moving out. In some cases, to accelerate the turnover, building owners replaced these tenants with families on public assistance, with subsidized rents, who themselves were fleeing neighborhoods in Brooklyn that had deteriorated even further.”

And the more unscrupulous owners were also profiting via fire insurance from conditions they let fester, causing both accidental and intentional blazes. All the while, redlining was devaluing the robust one and two family housing stock which surrounded the multiple dwelling corridors, with the result that most banks simply did not want to underwrite mortgages for houses north of Avenue H. 

Mike helped organize the neighborhood associations in Flatbush and a referral service was set up to steer sellers, buyers and renters to responsible brokers who lived in the area. Mike also recalled how Congresswoaman Liz Holzman, elected to a 2nd term in 1974, “introduced Federal legislation that banned this redlining, putting the banks’ lending practices under scrutiny that could lead to sanctions by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency.”

It was against this backdrop that we began by discussing the signatories for the FDC incorporation (see image above). What follows is a transcript of the conversation, edited for length and clarity. As we shall see, FDC was active on many fronts: commercial revitalization, tenant organizing, landlord outreach, arson prevention, acquiring property, pressuring banks, lobbying for resources and generating publicity to tell the world that news of the death of Flatbush was not only greatly exaggerated, but a lie.

Joe Enright (JE): Mike, who had the brainstorm to form the Flatbush Development Corporation back in 1975?

Mike Weiss (MW): It started with a small but determined group of neighborhood activists who I  met after moving to Waldorf Court in 1966. We were worried about the future of Flatbush, with so many people moving out all around us. What do we do about it? Well, I was a member of Community Board 14, so I knew the network of community leaders, including elected officials. 

And I was always, really since college, kind of an activist type who got involved in various causes, civil rights, and so forth, whatever. So my personal reaction to what was going on in Flatbush in the early 70s was, if we didn’t do something to organize the neighborhood, we’re gonna become like East New York, because we could see what was happening with the move outs, the deterioration in the apartment houses. 

And yet we had this tremendous strength given the large homeowner community. So the question was, well, how do you mobilize that? So a few of us had a meeting and we decided we can't just sit around and watch this neighborhood we love go down the tubes. So we started meeting with the local elected officials, like Hannah Riggler, Assemblyman Mel Miller, Councilmember Howie Golden – he would never come to meetings but you could talk to him. And they said you have to go talk to John Zuccotti, Chairman of City Planning.

I had a little contact with City Planning prior to that because the Community Board convinced them to rezone Westminster Road. When those brick houses came in at the corner of Glenwood and Westminster, everybody was concerned that the R5 zoning was going to allow even more of that out of context development, which would have been a disaster for the beautiful old stately two-family homes on that block.

JE: The submission which the West Midwood Community Association made to Council Member Farah Lewis on City of Yes had an attachment with side-by-side pictures of that corner building in all its Victorian glory and the brick boxes that replaced it, with a label, “Is This Our Future?” 

MW: It really makes the case, right. Back then it was Donald Elliott leading the City Planning Commission and I got to meet him over that rezoning. And we became pretty good friends. So we got Westminster Road downzoned from R5 to R2 to match the rest of the neighborhood.

JE: How exactly did you manage that?

MW: We first went to City Planning and then we mobilized the neighborhoods, the troops, the electeds and West Midwood was naturally at the center of it.

1972: Westminster Road Down-Zoned from Foster to Ave H

JE:  That’s exactly what happened in 2009. An apartment house went up on Stratford in Ditmas Park West, the back of the building fronted Coney Island Ave. and they put up this six story apartment building that that fronted on Stratford. Ditmas Park West organized against it. This was the Bloomberg era and they were into doing these contextual rezonings. And so City Panning remapped all of Victorian Flatbush, downzoning the residential blocks while upzoning the commercial corridors. Anyway, sorry, back to 1975.

MW: Well, we finally met with John Zuccotti, who had replaced Elliot as City Planning Commissioner, and was soon to become Deputy Mayor [and the namesake for Zuccotti Park]. Zuccotti said, “You have to form a community development corporation.” We didn’t even know what the hell that was, so he explained that’s the way to get investment money from the City. You have to have a nonprofit, and it should have this format. And he said take a look at the Bed-Stuy Restoration Corp. There were very few of them back, but that’s the way we were told to go. 

Zuccotti (L) with Mayor Abraham Beame in November 1975

It was good advice so we went ahead and did it. We researched it. We got a Board together. We had Norman Williams as our attorney. Like most of the others, they were coming out of the local Democratic club, the Hesterberg Club. And we had some very good elected officials at that time. We had Mel Miller, Carol Bellamy, Liz Holtzman. I had a fundraiser for her right here in the living room when she was nobody, back in 1972. 10 people here, and they were all saying, “Who is this?”

Liz Holtzman During House Judiciary Watergate Impeachment Hearings in 1974

But back to Mel Miller and the question as to how it began. 

Mel Miller, Elected NYS Assemblyman in 1970, Served as Assembly Speaker from 1987 to 1991

The electeds all wanted to help. So they actually resigned from the original incorporating group because they couldn’t be on our Board and hold office at the same time because it’s a conflict – we would need to apply for grants from them, right? And they all agreed and they were very supportive and I have to say that none of them came to us to ask for favors, who to hire. So to get back to our chat before, how did I do this while teaching at Brooklyn Tech and raising a family? We had good staff! We hired really good people. They were competent. There were no political hires, no sinecures.

JE: How many staff members did you have?

MW: We started with one or two. And we had some really good Executive Dtrectors, including Judy Flynn who became head of the Mayor’s Office of Homeless Housing. Bob Black was with us for a number of years, he was an urban planner, had a PhD, very smart.

Actually, it happened pretty quickly. Within four or five years, we had a fairly substantial budget. We raised money locally, but that was just some core money. The big money was coming from grants. The Ford Foundation $20,000 grant was the first one and that was big because once you got funded by them, you were considered legitimate. 

Eleanor Holmes Norton, who headed up the City Human Rights Commission at that time, was a big help in getting us that grant. 

Eleanor Holms Norton in 1977 as Chair of the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission

She came here to a meeting and we told her we wanted to do things to uplift this neighborhood, but we don’t want to push out the people of color that are coming here. We want them to be happy and comfortable here. And we want to start projects that aren’t exclusionary, but are supportive.

Well she bought in to our program ideas and she was the one who actually introduced us to the Ford Foundation and that first grant put us on the map.

Daily News, March 13, 1977, FDC & Eleanor Holmes Norton address community fears

Eventually, within five or six years, we went to Citibank which had branches around here and we competed for a very robust Citi neighborhood preservation program. I think we got something like $300,000 a year for three years. We were getting  money for housing, tenant organizing and a lot of it for an anti-arson program that was very effective, got national recognition for its ability to track down the slumlords who were a big part of the housing problem.

And we really had good people. So that took some of the burden off me because you know, the Board of a nonprofit shouldn’t run it. The staff should run it. But that didn’t mean I didn’t put in a lot of time. I was around a lot, keeping track of things and strategizing.

JE: Sounds like your house got a lot of work hosting these politicos and dignitaries. I’m struck by how many influential people were living in Flatbush at the time, like “Gridlock Sam” Schwartz [Deputy Transportation Commissioner].

MW: Yeah, right on Rugby Road. And Mel Miller [State Assembly Speaker], Tony Gliedman [HPD Commissioner] in Fiske Terrace…

HPD Commissioner Tony Gliedeman in 1985 with ex-President Jimmy Carter

JE: Howie Golden [Borough President] was over in Kensington?

Howard Golden, Brooklyn Borough President, 1977-2001

MW: Right. Eventually Phil Toia, who was Koch’s Deputy Mayor. He was looking for a house and I convinced him to buy the house that ended up being the pink house in Sophie’s Choice. Right off Albemarle on Argyle I think it was.

Philip Toia at City Hall in1979; served as Deputy Mayor for Finance 1978-1985

JE: I remember when I was a teenager, Hugh Carey had a house in Midwood Park until he got elected governor.

MW: Right, then he bought the house on Prospect Park West. There were a number of others, but they all ended up being good people that didn’t have an agenda or wanting us to do things that were untoward. Some of them were the new progressives. Assemblyman Steve Solarz lived over on Rugby between Albemarle and Beverly and he was Chuck Schumer's mentor in Midwood. Chuck replaced Steve in Albany in 1974 when he got in a bit of trouble. I’ve known Chuck for all these years. 

But there was no hanky panky with the funding, everything was clean. We developed a reputation for being an organization you could fund and not  worry that we were gonna do something wrong.

 

Chuck Schumer in 1987. Now the last man standing.

And all of our elected officials were part of that new progressive movement at the time. When I first got involved in West Midwood, it was not that way. They were the Hesterberg Club. They were over on Church Ave. 

But then Mel Miller and Hannah Riggler as district leader and a couple of others got involved and they were the new guard. And there was a guy, an Assemblyman named Sid Lichtman. But he got himself in trouble and I think had to resign, which is how Mel ended up coming in. And then that whole group, Mel, Carol Bellamy and even Solarz was helpful at the time. 

Mel unfortunately got convicted which meant an automatic resignation even though on appeal the case was thrown out. Mel got us plenty of money as the Speaker...Bob Miller who became a judge, Bob was very active. A lot of people willing to put in time, you know? And I was kind of just getting them all…orchestrated.

JE: How long were you on the Community Board and were you ever the manager?

MW: No, Terry Rodie was the district manager for a while. Ira Harkavy was the chair, he became a judge [in 1981]. I was on the Board for over a decade and I was vice chairman when I resigned a little bit before I took the job with the City [Mike served ten years with the NYC Department of Transportation where he eventually became First Deputy Commissioner before leaving to become  Executive Director of the MetroTech Business Improvement District].

So being active in the Community Board, I learned a lot, you know, by sitting listening to the zoning discussions and  neighborhood services and then liaison with city agencies and how to access these various hot button things that were happening, so that we got some attention here because there were so many things that we needed. 

Actually, I remember thinking, “I don’t know if we’re gonna succeed.” For instance, the work in the apartment houses was a battle. Because we had to find ways…How do you deal with a building where you have an owner who’s trying to get all the rent controlled tenants out. Then there was this thing about welfare dumping, it was called at the time where they would put in a couple of welfare families and scare everybody else in the building and they’d start moving, and a few buildings went into what they called In Rem.

1212 Ocean Ave at Glenwood Road - FDC Managed

JE: Right, for not paying the taxes.

MW: Yeah, what do you do with that? They were being terribly run by the City and we took over some buildings. We took some chances. I remember 1212 Ocean Avenue. Uh, the corner of Ocean and Glenwood, that was a 48 unit building In Rem. The tenants, it was a mess.

JE: So the FDC Board bought the building?

MW: They wouldn’t sell it to us. And we didn’t want to buy it, actually. So we made a management agreement with the City, and that permitted us to manage it and hire a management agent to do the work. But I was in there meeting with the tenants finding out what was going on. There were people in there not paying rent and you could understand why, there were no services. 

Tony Gliedman was very helpful there. He gave us a low interest loan, 1%. I don’t remember how much, maybe $100,000 or $200,000. We were able to put in a new boiler, get the elevator working, but we had to do some tough stuff. We had some tenants that had to go. They didn’t want to pay rent. I remember going to tenant meetings saying, listen, I know nobody wants to pay rent, but if you don’t pay rent, we have no money to run the building.

JE: I could just imagine doing a number of buildings like that would just sap everybody’s energy and time.

25 Stratford Rd

MW: 25 Stratford Road, was another one. Then 1308 Ocean on the corner of Ocean and H. Right now all of those buildings are doing well, fairly well run, now viable, either as rentals or co-op. We helped the tenants go co-op too.

JE: What about Marty Markowitz? Was he helpful?

MW: Ah! Marty was involved from almost the beginning because he was head of the Flatbush Tenants Council at that time.

Marty Markowitz, Brooklyn Borough President, 2002-2013

JE: How did he get started doing that?

MW: Somehow out of Brooklyn College he got into tenant organizing. But that’s how I first met him. He and I now have been lifelong friends. But when he became our State Senator, he had to stop the FDC activity. He could never get us much money where he was because he was a Democratic State Senator in a Republican-controlled Senate. He had no power except he had the bully pulpit. That was helpful. And then when he became Borough President, of course.

JE: So it sounds like in the beginning you were raising money from the foundations and the banks. I saw one news clip where Chase Bank gave you some money for Flatbush Avenue storefront renovations. Reading through the history and all these news clips, it seems proposals for storefront renovations, like in the Plaza and on Flatbush Avenue, got you funding.

MW: Yes, Newkirk Plaza, that was one of the early ones.

JE: Just this past year, FDC won a big grant, as you know, for storefront renovations there again.

MW: We were one of the first groups in the City to do that. We had to convince the City that they could spend public money on a storefront. They wouldn’t fund inside the store, but we finally convinced them that we could use the money for facade improvements on the outside. So in Newkirk Plaza, one of our early projects was painting the facades, the top cornices of all the buildings so they were uniform. You know, they were all pealing, most of them. And then they also allowed us to do store signage, lighting, storefront lighting, you know, certain things, we got them to agree. And in some cases there were breakthroughs because they had previously not wanted to use City money. But somehow they relented.

And then getting people organized like the Newkirk Plaza Merchants Association, the Flatbush Avenue Merchants Association. Eventually the Junction, the Church Avenue Merchants Association was a spin-off of FDC. By that time there were a couple of other people that got involved like Marjorie Nathanson and eventually Joanne Oplustil came in. But we helped organize all that. And then organizing tenants associations. I was involved in quite a bit of it until we had tenant organizers on our staff.

And we tried not to get into territorial disputes with people. We’ve tried to be inclusive. And the mainstay of FDC besides those Board members were the neighborhood association presidents. I saw that early on: we had to have them together, those 11 or 12 neighborhood associations. We met regularly with them and they were all involved. Because I could see that the homeowner group was the core of consistent, sustainable support. Tenants were important, but they move, they come and go more often than homeowners. So that was a basic. 

But we had to deal with the apartment houses and the tenants and, you know, on a case by case basis with buildings. There were some owners like Arnold Marshall that used to own 1801 Dorchester. I think he died. He was what I call a good landlord. He believed in long term investment, put money in his building, kept it up. 

But then there were an awful number of them that were not, and we had to figure out how do you get to those ones? How do you get to the buildings that are deteriorating, to those owners? They don’t give a crap. And so we devised the strategy of going to the banks that had the mortgages. And I remember there were some buildings on Caton Avenue owned by Greenpoint Savings Bank or mortgaged by Greenpoint. And one owner in particular had a terrible reputation, lots of violations and you could see they were gonna go, those buildings.

So I contacted Greenpoint Savings Bank. Sent them a letter, “This is your building, you have a mortgage, blah, blah, blah.” So at first the bank ignored me. Didn’t wanna meet, didn’t wanna talk. And then we found out about a thing called the “good repair clause” in a mortgage that the landlord is supposed to keep the property in good repair. Well, it wasn’t in good repair. So when Greenpoint wanted to open up a branch on Long Island, I wrote a letter to the State Banking Department objecting to that opening. Now I get a call from the President of Greenpoint, Jerry Lasurdo. We eventually became friends by the way. He says, “What the f*ck are you doing?”

 

Jerry Lasurdo (1917-2016) former CEO of Greenpoint Savings Bank

JE: Sounds like you got his attention.

MW: I told him you got these buildings on Caton Avenue, you gotta do something, you’re the bank. And they went after the landlord, threatened to foreclose on him, based on the good repair clause. That’s all of a sudden he sold it to another owner.

JE: That’s a great story.

MW: And eventually, I got in with the mortgage people. I got introduced to the Dime Savings Bank and a number of the other lenders and got appointed as a member of the Mortgage Review Fund. The banks created that group to discuss their mortgage lending policies and they needed a community person. I used to go to those meetings and I felt like I was in there with Alibaba and the 40 Thieves. But I was able to exert some influence anyway.

JE: Mike, it sounds like you guys were thinking of all these innovative ways to deal with a huge problem.

MW: We were. Arson was another big problem. We hired a guy named Ron Hines. He was very smart. And he figured out a way to track down these landlords. [FDC's Arson Risk Prediction Model became a national exemplar touted by the US Department of Jutice's National Institute of Justice as a recommended community-based strategy for preventing arson.]

The Flatbush Arson Early Warning System from "Preventing Crime and Arson: A Review of Community-Based Strategies," 1983

And then I remember going to housing court on some buildings where they had like 50 violations that weren’t getting fixed. And the judge calls me aside and says “What are you doing?” I said, "Look at these buildings! You’re the judge! Look at this apartment, the door’s burned down, it’s dangerous in there!" That judge actually agreed to come to the building. I met him  somewhere on Crooke Avenue and he walked through the building and he’s looking at me like "What the hell?" I said, "Come on, you can’t let this go. You gotta come down on these guys."

JE: Was HPD any help?

MW: Yeah, because of Tony Gliedman. He started the Participation Loan Program, PLP, and a number of funded programs. That gave us a carrot for the owner. It wasn’t just that we went after them. We said, "Listen, here’s a low interest loan program where you can do your elevator or your boiler or the front door locks and intercom system or what have you."

JE: They just couldn't have a ton of open violations, right?

MW: That’s right. And we were  one of the first community groups to get those loans. There were a few of those HPD programs.

JE: I always considered Tony to be responsible for the huge reduction in arson incidents because of the masonry seal program which prevented so many fires in vacant buildings. 

MW: Tony was also helpful in convincing the Koch people they had to start spending money on neighborhoods that were beginning to deteriorate earlier than they had been doing. They were waiting until it became East New York, they waited too long, and then it became a self-fulfilling prophecy. 

But that was a big battle. To get them to do a PLP. They didn’t want to do it in our neighborhood. We weren’t poor enough. We weren’t bad enough. And I said you can’t wait. As soon as you see signs and we can document it to that extent, you’ve got to help us. You’ve got to put in support. We had to have that type of support. So once they started doing that, then the political support came. And then, you know, Citibank, that was a big thing, getting Citibank involved with us, really helped us because they're huge.  The only thing we couldn’t get was the Loew’s Kings until like much later.

JE: That’s another great story.

MW: Yeah, we mothballed that. We bought that building for a dollar.

JE: I guess they had just closed when FDC had formed. So was it a big concern initially?

MW: We knew we didn’t want to lose it and after it closed we learned Greenpoint Bank foreclosed on their $800,000 mortgage. Greenoint told us they didn’t want it, and they couldn’t sell it, so we worked out a deed in lieu of foreclosure. Not sure  of the terminology. But they actually gave FDC the deed which enabled them to write off the $800,000 loan. When we took ownership, I don't mind telling you I was scared shirtless! What are we gonna do with the Kings? It’s sitting there vacant!

JE: I seem to recall Marty Markowitz wanted to do Broadway shows there?

MW: Well, that came later. But initially, here’s what we did. At that point, Macy’s had a store there.

Macy's Circa 1950

JE: Sure, on the next corner.

MW: Right, and Sears with its huge parking lot  was in the back of both of them, with Loehmann's on the northeast edge. My idea was to create a shopping mall incorporating Macy’s, the Loew’s Kings and over to Sears and Loehmann's and you would have three anchor stores. And then add  retail. In the main part of the building we’d have the King's entertainment center. I actually got a developer who somehow was willing to do it. And we put together a proposal to create an  urban mall. 

Loew's Kings in October 1974

I even got Ed Koch to sign a letter, which I probably have a copy of somewhere, to the president of Sears. His name was Joseph Spencer. And Koch wrote a letter to Spencer asking for his support.  But we couldn’t get it, they just refused. And so the developer abandoned the plan. After that I had a lot of very substantial people looking at it. William Zeckendorf came down looking at a possible development. And he wanted to put a disco in there.

Sears at Bedford & Beverley: 1932-2021

We didn’t love that idea. But Sears just wouldn’t participate. Macy’s we got, they said they would go into a mall. But not Sears. So then later, Marty came along and by that time we had transferred the building to EDC [NYC Economic Development Corporation]. They took it.

JE: It seemed to me back then Sears was acting like a landlord abandoning a building. 

MW: Yeah, they had a siege mentality, they didn’t get New York. So if you wanted to make a shopping mall, at that time you couldn’t have had three better anchors. And it would have worked.

Loehmann's (L), Kings (C), Sears Parking Lot (Behind the Camera)

Sears Parking Lot in 2007.

JE: What a shame.

MW: Yeah, parking, location, everything was there.  But then for the couple of years that FDC owned this huge vacant building, we had to maintain it. That was a point at which if we could’ve got a divorce, we would have. You see, the sprinkler system was operative. And that meant you had to heat the building.

JE: Uh oh.

MW: And that meant turning on the boiler. And that meant oil. And even though oil was relatively cheap, I had to raise money for oil. I had to buy like $20,000 worth of oil. And so in order to save money, I would go over to the Lowe’s Kings every night at about eight o’clock if it was gonna go below 32 degrees and I went in the back and turned on the boilers. Huge boilers. And then at eight in the morning on my way to work, I would go in and shut them off so that I wasn’t running the heat all day because we didn’t have enough money to keep buying oil. Then here’s another story. We were showing a lot of people the building. "What a great building, let's turn on all the lights in the building to show you around." All of a sudden, I don’t know, four or five months after we take over the building, I get a bill from Con Edison for $25,000.

JE: Oh no.

MW: I didn’t know. I called them up. What the hell is this? And we had some contacts with Con Ed because of what FDC was doing. They said, “Well it’s peak demand. Whenever you turn on all the lights you pay a certain rate for that month and you just hit the peak.” I said, “Oh my God, we didn’t know it, so what are you gonna do?” They said, “You owe us $25,000.” I said, “We don’t have it.” They got upset: “Well, what do you mean you don’t have it?” I eventually got a grant from one part of Con Ed to pay the other part $25,000.

JE: [Laughs]

MW [Laughing]: And after that we were very careful!

JE: So eventually, didn’t the roof have a problem too?

MW: Yeah, that was after FDC got out. But while we had the building, we decided, this building is incredible, we’re gonna have a fundraiser. So we wrote a show called “Flatbush Follies” with Eddie Rogowski and Eddie’s wife at the time and a bunch of people from the neighborhood. It was a fantastic show. And the songs! Carol Grou was involved. And we might even have the script somewhere. But Eddie took Billy Joel’s music and wrote words about what it was like living in Flatbush, and we had the Flatbush Chorus, which was a group of people who performed that night, Flatbush residents. And then after the show I remember Carol Bellamy was there. We had a big party in the lobby. Ben Vereen’s mother worked in the Loew’s Kings. I tried to get him back…

1977: Then City Council President Carol Bellamy (former Brooklyn State Senator and future Director of the Peace Corps and Unicef) with Mayor Koch

JE: And you had a slideshow to go along with it?

MW: Yeah, but we had to get the building ready because it had been closed for a few years. It was huge. We had to bring in lamps, a lot of the lighting…We found some local people who directed the stage works at Brooklyn College. A guy named Frank Angel I got through Ella who was working at Brooklyn College then. Well, Frank came in and he helped us, you know, with the electrical work. It was so crazy…You had to have fun because we were all going crazy.

JE: You know, each of these memories that you share are all terrific examples of why FDC was so important to revitalizing Flatbush.

MW: We had good leadership.

JE: Yes, but you guys were also just so innovative. 

MW: You know, we had a lot of smart people, wasn’t just me. Maybe I was just part of stirring the pot. You know we did a lot of good and it was a lot of hard work. But we had some good times. And came up with some events. That first year we  conceived Flatbush Frolic. And then we had The Flatbush Foot Race, I think we called it.

JE: Was that in the Park?

MW: It started on Cortelyou Road and went up to the Park and back to Cortelyou. And that was like the kickoff of Flatbush Frolic the first year.  And then the Frolic was an opportunity to get all the elected officials on a stage and thank them all and let them talk just, you know, give them recognition.

JE: How about the House Tour? Was that something you guys  started?

MW: Yes, we started the House Tour...

JE: The Tot Lot?

MW: Yeah, after a supermarket burned down, Tony Gliedman got us money for the Tot Lot because he had a program that he could use to fund it.

Opened in 1993, the Argyle playground on Cortelyou Rd was renamed in 1997 in memory of  70 Precinct Lieutenant Federico Narvaez who was shot and killed months earlier while responding to a woman's cry for help on East 17th Street. Katrina Narvaez was only 9 when she lost her dad. In 2013, she became an police officer herself assigned to the 70.

JE: And how about the merchants’ associations. Newkirk, Church, Cortelyou?

MW: We had this fella Gabe, who owned the camera store on Cortelyou, he struggled like crazy, and a few other merchants were interested. We had our offices there, we knew Cortelyou Road had potential. We just couldn’t get it to gel for retail. And that all happened after I was gone, you know, all these little restaurants. Sandy Tishcoff who was retired and lived over on Rugby, he started the “Mostly Books” bookstore on Cortelyou and was there for a number of years. 

1977 Mostly Books debuts (far right), a Cortelyou Road mainstay until 1999 who inspired Taylor Books . Sandy died in 2012 -- read a wonderful reminiscence by Hillary Miller here.

Andrew Colarusso credits Mostly Books
as inspiration for hs Taylor & Co on Cortelyou

And then Tony Shamana who had a house on Marlboro Road, he opened the first really decent restaurant in years,  Mideastern cuisine that everybody loved. We thought when he came in, others would come, but they didn’t, not for 10 years or more.

JE: Why do you think that was, that it took so long for Cortelyou to succeed?

MW: I think it was because there were a lot of people who were still kind of afraid of Flatbush. I don’t know. We tried. We knew what we needed there. And now you go there on a Sunday, it’s crazy.  Young people and a lot of activity. Also we never could get Foster Avenue to thrive, you know?  And Newkirk has always been a struggle.

JE: Well, all those multiple dwellings on Rugby are now completely revitalized. I remember when we moved here, it was an open air drug market. 

MW: Well, we went through it and it was hard and still some places between Foster and Newkirk have never been great. One of the things that’s been interesting is the waves of immigrant groups, I think have been good for our neighborhood, for Brooklyn in general. I mean, look what we got now. A Pakistani community, very vibrant, a good mix.

JE: Agreed. The ownership of the Newkirk Plaza buildings is still a problem. The housing violations there are just through the roof. And there’s that guy who owns the corner buildings.

MW: Yeah, I’ve met with him. He doesn’t give a crap. You just can’t get a nickel out of him. I remember there was a guy who owned a lot of buildings over on Flatbush near where Macy’s used to be, down towards Bedford. Big warehouse type buildings. And when we were working on this Mall idea, that would have been prime property for that. I got a hold of the owner, he lived in Staten Island, and he was storing spools of wire in the buildings. I walked through the buildings with him,  telling him this could be a development property,  you could really do something here. He said, "No, I’m not. I’m not gonna sell. Some people collect stamps. Some people collect coins. I collect land.” I’m saying, yeah, but you’re paying taxes and you’re… “Nope!” Wasn't interested, he collected land.

JE: Unreal.

MW: And that was his attitude. He wasn’t nasty. He just had his thing.

JE: Were any people or organizations opposed to what you were doing?

MW: Well, the territorial issues had to be approached very sensitively, obviously. When we first moved into West Midwood, you know, the Community Association Board was a group of old dinosaurs. They were nice, but they were all men. Janet Levy later became the trailblazer. And they were very parochial. They only wanted to deal with what was internal to West Midwood. So I remember saying to myself, “I gotta get involved with these people just because of what’s going on in the neighborhood.” And if I talked about the other side of Avenue H or Foster Avenue, they said, “Well, that’s not West Midwood.” 

Frank Murphy on Rugby was the head, but he had tunnel vision. I had to slowly get a couple of new people on the Board so I wasn’t the only one being an idiot. When Jerry Shapiro and Bob Guiffra from Glenwood Road joined, we finally said, look, we’re not an island here, we're all in this fight together. 

Same thing with starting FDC. We had to reach out to all the associations so that they didn’t feel threatened. And even with Marty's Flatbush Tenants Council. We had been organizing tenants, but I had to make amends with Marty, you know, like going to him and saying, look, we’re thinking of working in these buildings. Are you in there? Are you not? Do you guys want to organize? Well he would sometimes say to me, I don’t have the resources and I said well if we do it, you don’t have to.

JE: So you had to deconflict.

MW: Right. Just be very sensitive so we didn’t get into trouble. There was a Newkirk Plaza Merchants Association that existed pre-FDC. But I went to Mr. Lipton, who owned Lipton Pharmacy, he was the nominal head of it. We talked. We told him what we were up to.

Newkirk Plaza in the 1970s. The FDC 

December 2, 1976, Daily News: $352,000 for Plaza Renovation of 35 stores  thanks to FDC

We had a little bit of bumping with the Flatbush Mortgage Committee started by Susan Forresta and a couple of others who decided to take the bull by the horns and tried to pressure the banks to lend, not to discriminate. Because there was this imaginary red line for banks and realtors: north of Avenue H, they didn’t want to lend money. And we did have a little bit of bumping there, of the jurisdiction. I don’t know, I guess we felt that they were stepping on our toes and maybe they thought they just wanted to run with the ball. But eventually we worked it out.

JE: Is there anyone in the clergy who was helpful?

MW: Well, Fred Welch, he was an elder in the Flatbush-Tompkins-Congregational Church over there on Dorchester. Fred was very conservative, straight as an arrow. I think he was an insurance guy. Fred was fantastic, smart, very understanding, you know, you could talk to him. All you want to be able to do when you're organizing is to have a conversation, so he was great.  He helped us a lot.

JE: Did you have any friction on the FDC Board?

MW: Well, we once had a guy on our Board who wanted to go to an elected official and ask them for a million dollars. I said, you can’t just walk into somebody you hardly know -- or even if you do know him! -- and all of a sudden you’re asking for that! What are you gonna do with the million dollars? They’re gonna ask, you know! He couldn’t wait, he was so impatient. Well, we need a million, he says. So I said that’s not the way it works. He was a pain in the ass on the Board. But on the other hand, he had a good heart.

JE: What do you remember about FDC’s bankruptcy 25 years ago ? Some say there was a lot of payroll tax owed to the City or something?

MW: I wasn’t involved then. I don’t know. I know they were in very severe financial trouble. And as I understood it, what may have saved them was that we had actually bought some buildings back in the day. We bought that building on Cortelyou Road where we had our first office because the owner, we paid him rent for I don’t know how many years, 7-8 years. And then the lease came up and I said to the guy, “You wanna sell the building?” He was living somewhere else so he sold us the building for like $40,000 and he took back the mortgage. I gave him $10,000 and we bought a building. I had to first convince our Board that we should even do it, but they agreed. Well, that building by the time FDC got in trouble was worth a lot more. And I think they sold it and that helped. And then I think they had some ownership position in a couple of other buildings up near Prospect Park that they sold. And I think that’s how they bailed themselves out of bankruptcy on the equity.

JE: Well, again, it was your foresight…

MW: Yeah well, who knew? Also some crazy stuff. I had a landlord come in one day. Owned a nice building on Ocean Avenue, and he leaves a thousand dollars on my desk in cash. I had to run after him, on Cortelyou Road. I said, Nah Uh.

JE: Was that a bribe?

MW: Yeah. Just trying to be nice, he leaves money on my desk! I chased him down the street and I said don’t do that. We don’t do that.

JE: You’ve mentioned many women who were involved in the struggle to save Flatbush. Liz Holtzman, Eleanor Holmes Norton, your wife Ella, Susan Forresta, Carol Bellamy…

MW: Did I mention Hannah Rigler?

Hannah Rigler

JE: Yes, a couple of times. I noticed she and Stanley Perman were the only FDC founders living in apartments. Stanley over on Woodruff Avenue where he formed a Community Council, and Hannah right down the street from the Albemarle Theater on Albemarle Road.

MW: Hannah was the elected Democratic District Leader for our area. She was a remarkable and special lady as was her husband Bill. We became good friends and, in fact, Bill, who was a beloved and respected Brooklyn Supreme Court judge, presided over the wedding of my daughter. Hannah was a consummate community activist; caring, smart and tough. We had many lunches together sharing stories about the community, politics and our families. She was a holocaust survivor and her book about her ordeal was very moving [10 British Prisoners-of-War Saved My Life]. She was very helpful.

JE: Well, Mike, I think I got the origin story: it took a hell of a lot of dedicated people to save Flatbush. Thank you so much for all that you and your FDC colleagues have accomp;ished over so many years of service!

Mike & Ella Weiss