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Newsday article

posted by Robert Lederman
robert.lederman@worldnet.att.net
Posted: January 28, 2003

After Mr. LederLederman's revised and
updated comments, directly below,
is a Newsday article on
yesterday's ARTIST demonstration.

WHY YOU SHOULD VOTE NO on INTRO # 160

(revised and updated from an earlier version)

Dear Councilmember,
The Parks Department has before you a proposed bill, Intro # 160, which reintroduces the same permit for street artists in Parks that six courts overturned since 1998 when the Parks Department artist permit was first introduced. Parks Commissioner Benepe claims that this bill is needed to prevent congestion and commercialization allegedly caused by artists, book vendors and art vendors on Parks property. He would also like you to believe that if Intro # 160 is passed it will not violate the First Amendment rights of artists - or of eight million other New Yorkers.

These revised comments and background material will help you to understand what is really behind this bill and why you should vote against it. Once you know the real story I'm confident that in the free speech interests of your constituents and of all New Yorkers, you will vote no on Intro # 160.

Background In a landmark 1996 2nd Circuit Federal Appeals Court ruling street artists won full First Amendment protection [Bery et al v City of NY / Lederman et al v City of NY. See accompanying news articles and citations]. Previous to that ruling thousands of NYC street artists were arrested for not having a vending license. None were ever prosecuted. Internal memos obtained from the City's legal department and the Manhattan DA during the discovery process in the above lawsuit showed that the City had determined as early as 1993 that these arrests violated artists' free speech rights and that the City had decided to never prosecute them. In spite of the no-prosecution policy, the arrest policy was still aggressively enforced. It included selling hundreds of sealed garbage bags filled with artists' confiscated paintings and other works of art at a monthly NYPD auction.

The 2nd Circuit Federal Appeals Court ruling stated that visual art - which the court described as including paintings, prints, photographs and sculptures - was a form of speech; that street artists were to have the same rights as book vendors or newspaper publishers; that selling the art was as protected as creating or displaying it; and that any license or permit requirement for artists on the street or in Parks was unconstitutional. The court also stated that the vending ordinance's existing time, place and manner restrictions were already more than sufficient to control problems with congestion or public safety.

That same ruling specifically noted that artists were exempted from a permit in Parks by existing NYC law.

Nevertheless, when the City's appeal of the ruling to the US Supreme Court failed in 1997, the Parks Department ignored the courts and created the artist permit they had been planning for years. In a 2/28/96 letter published in the NY Times, Parks Legal Counsel Thomas Rozinski admitted an artist permit was intended as a precursor to an art vending concession system in Parks. "We are considering a plan to allow art vendors to bid for eight one-year permits," Mr Rozinski wrote. "The bids for these permits are likely to be less than those submitted for year round concession stands." This was hardly reassuring in light of the fact that Parks concessions bid for $50,000 to $1,000,000 per year [See: NY Times 2/21/98 Revenue From New York's Parks Concessions Jumps 20%]

From 1998, when the Parks Department artist permit began, until 2001 when the Federal Court issued a permanent injunction ending it, six different courts ruled that the permit violated existing NYC law. Hundreds of artists were falsely arrested within and around NYC Parks for not having an artist permit, but exactly like the previous vending license arrests, none were ever prosecuted. When our street artist advocacy group was formed in 1993 and named Artists' Response To Illegal State Tactics - A.R.T.I.S.T. - we never imagined how accurate a predictor of the City's actions the name would turn out to be.

What was the Parks Department's response to the artist permit being overturned by the 2001 ruling in Lederman et al v Giuliani?

Intro # 160, reintroducing the same artist permit all over again. It's not overstatement to say that the Parks Department and the Central Park Conservancy are obsessed with imposing a permit on street artists. The Mayor, the Central Park Conservancy and the Parks Department were the lead defendants in the Parks artist permit lawsuit. The Conservancy is a private organization which runs Central Park and which Mayor Bloomberg is a leading board member of. Mayor Giuliani's first wife, Regina Perrugi, is the current director of the Central Park Conservancy.

Is there an objective problem involving artists in NYC Parks, requiring a permit? Previous to 1998 and the imposition of the permit hundreds of artists sold in and around NYC parks without a permit - and without any problem. In sworn depositions taken in 1998 in Lederman et al v Giuliani both the Central Park Precinct Captain and the beat officer assigned to the front of the Met for the previous 11 years testified that there was no problem in that location being caused by street artists. The Metropolitan Museum of Art issued a press release in 1998 stating that they had not requested the City to create a permit and that there was no problem involving street artists.

Why did the City want an artist permit? Contrary to their claims, congestion and public safety had nothing to do with it. Intro # 160 is so deceptively written one would think its real target was book vendors, of whom there are less than 30 in all NYC Parks combined. Privatization of public property is the real purpose behind Intro # 160. As long as artists can display and sell art in or around parks for free based on freedom of speech, there will be little demand for art vending concessions selling for tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Book vending in Parks is completely legal without a permit, yet in anticipation of Intro # 160 Central Park already has one book vending concession, which sold for $65,000 for a one year lease. It is located on one of the City's busiest corners, 59th St and Central Park South. At last count, the concessionaire, Cyrano Books, had 19 tables of used books and a permanent kiosk congesting the entire sidewalk and obstructing numerous benches, with full Parks Department and Central Park Conservancy approval.

Is the Parks Department against commercialization - or the main force behind it? Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe has made many contradictory public statements about Intro # 160. These include putting out a totally misleading seven page mailing on Intro # 160 which he recently sent to thousands of wealthy New Yorkers on the Central Park Conservancy and Parks mailing lists. Even the law #160 seeks to change was deliberately misquoted. According to the Commissioner, he wants an artist permit to prevent "commercialization" of Parks. Yet, in other statements, he claims a permit is needed because artists compete with Parks Department souvenir concessions. In the following quote he makes both claims:

from Front page lead story
NY Sun August 14,2002

Parks Commissioner Planning a
Crackdown On Venders of Artwork

But Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe says he sees the permits as a quality of life issue, not a First Amendment one. "The proliferation of private commerce in a public park has gotten out of control," Mr. Benepe told the Sun. "We're getting complaints from concessionaires who say their business is dropping."

End of excerpt

Parks concessionaires pay big money to get a monopoly on vending but their concerns are hardly justification for abridging freedom of speech. There are only two NYC Parks with more than a handful of street artists, Battery Park and Central Park. Who are the artists competing with?

Battery Park has 10 Parks Department tee shirt/souvenir concessions, which sell for a total of $600,000 a year. All ten are owned and operated by one company, NY2000. Central Park also has 10 tee shirt/souvenir vending concessions. They sell for $400,000 per year and are also owned and operated by one company, Yovnis Taher D/B/A Hi-Tech. All the food vending carts in and around NYC Parks are likewise owned and operated by just two or three large corporations, the largest being M&T Pretzel. The hotdog concession in front of the Metropolitan Museum of Art has bid out for as much as $750,000 a year. The vendors you see working in these vending stands are hired employees, not the owners of the stands.

Coming soon to a neighborhood near you - McParks These multiple vending stand operators are themselves threatened with being bid out of existence as the Parks Department sells off public property to corporations such as McDonalds and Wendys, all of whom can readily outbid the smaller operators for these locations.

Newsday 1/22/03

Putting Burgers Before Art

Parks Commissioner Wants
Artists Out, Fast Food In

"Even as he was pushing plans for a fast food restaurant on city parkland, the parks commissioner was lobbying to restrict artists seeking to sell their works on public land. Commissioner Adrian Benepe said in a letter to parks advocates that "areas of the Battery and Central Park in particular have become choked with unlicensed commercial vending." At the same time, Benepe was pushing for Wendy's to open a store in a former comfort station in a small city park in the Bronx in return for hundreds of thousands of dollars in franchise fees. And the fast-food chain would gain a toehold on city land even as the city's hospitals planned to phase out three McDonald's franchises and the Bloomberg administration was drawing up plans for an anti-obesity campaign. "There are dozens and dozens of vendors in city parks, often working for one businessman," Benepe said. Failing to regulate them would turn the parks into flea markets, he added."

end of excerpt

The Parks Commissioner's preference for fast food over street artists may not only be a matter of money:

From NYC Parks Department website

"Adrian Benepe was appointed commissioner by Mayor Bloomberg on January 25, 2002...His first service with Parks began in 1976 when he was a push cart vendor in Central Park."

Visions of green

The Parks Department says they prefer to deal with corporate vendors rather than negotiate hundreds of individual contracts with individuals. This system is a disservice to the public and to all vendors. By buying up all the food vending spots in a NYC Park, corporate vendors establish a competition-free monopoly with grossly inflated prices and no incentive to improve their product. The public pays for this arrangement in more ways than one.

Nevertheless, hot dog vendors are just small fries in the Parks Department's vision for the future of our public parks. Scores of mainstream news articles from the past ten years document how for a sizeable fee the Parks Department lets Disney, Chase Bank, Nike, Sony and other major corporations take over entire NYC Parks, in some instances for an entire month, in order to promote their business interests.

During this entire past December, Union Square Park was taken over by a huge tent ringing the park, within which vendors paid $8,000 each for a small cubicle in which to sell holiday gift items. Likewise, a yearly fashion show takes over Bryant Park for an entire month, with the general public barred from entering without an invitation. In the quest for revenue, Parks commercialism knows no bounds. Recently, Commissioner Benepe has discussed selling naming rights to various Parks sporting facilities, putting corporate logos on benches and other Parks property and dramatically increasing the corporate exploitation of all NYC Parks.

Daily News 2/15/2002

Park Ads Plan A Sign of Tough Times

"Corporate logos and ads soon may be posted in city parks for the first time as part of a plan to raise some $2 million for the cash-strapped city, the Daily News has learned. The proposal, which park advocates blasted yesterday as a dangerous precedent, would allow corporations to post ads at city pools and recreation centers - with prices starting at $100,000 per facility. "You know how a lot of small mom-and-pop grocery stores have a Pepsi sign in the window?" Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe said. "It is probably something similar."

End of excerpt>

Unlike the minimal environmental or aesthetic impact of an artists' temporary display which involves a small rack, folding table or easel and no waste products or damage to the infrastructure, these high-profile corporate events have a very negative impact on the Parks plants, animal life, its infrastructure - and on nearby residents. New Yorkers increasingly find themselves barred from entering their own public park without an invitation while these corporate events take place. One Disney film premiere or rock concert has far more negative impact on the Park it is located in than all the street artists in NYC could have in their combined lifetimes.

Is the Parks Department pro art - or just pro-corporate sponsored art? The Parks Department would have us believe they are the City's greatest art patrons and that art - of the right kind - is appropriate inside NYC Parks. Since preferences in both art and food are a matter of taste, one man's junk art or junk food can be another's artistic or culinary masterpiece.

According to Commissioner Benepe, a Wendys, a McDonalds or even a bar are appropriate inside a NYC Park. So is just about anything even vaguely artistic that the Central Park Conservancy, Chase Bank or any of the City's 33 BIDs (Business Improvement Districts) want to dump there.

The Parks Department directly oversees 28,312 acres of public property and claims additional authority over everything within 350 feet of any NYC Park. Street artists' displays are presently limited by Parks Department rules to 8 feet in length and 5 feet in height. Yet, corporate-sponsored art in Parks is allowed to be of any size. If a single work of corporate-sponsored art such as Christo's Gates of Central Park takes up 23 miles of Central Parks' pedestrian paths - so much the better - especially if Chase Bank, the Mayor and the Central Park Conservancy like it. For the Parks Department, NYC's immigrant and outsider artists with small portable art displays are negatively impacting the Parks and must be evicted to make way for more corporate sponsored art, even if doing so violates every New Yorkers' First Amendment rights.

This exactly parallels the history of Central Park, which was built on land thousands of desperately poor New Yorkers once called home and were forcibly evicted from so that the City's wealthiest residents could have a nice park to look at from inside their newly built Fifth Avenue mansions.

NY Times 1/19/03

Yes, It's Art, but to Santa,
a Trip to the Chiropractor

"As if out of nowhere, a grand fireplace, complete with a blackened firebox and a twisted chimney, rose recently in a grassy section of City Hall Park. The chimney, called "Witch Catcher," is the first public art project in City Hall Park since 1992, according to administration officials...Twisting 25 feet in the air, it is to be surrounded by a low foundation representing the ruins of a 17th-century house. It is the first of six works of art to be placed in the park that will ultimately make up an exhibition called "MetroSpective," which will remain on view from late January until July 1. The exhibition, a selection of artwork originally displayed at the MetroTech Center in Brooklyn [aka JP Morgan/Chase Bank], was organized by the Public Art Fund, a nonprofit organization dedicated to bringing artwork to public spaces. The city asked the fund to curate a show for City Hall Park, just one of many examples of the vigor with which the Bloomberg administration has sought to festoon the city with artwork."

Associated Press 1/22/03

City OK's Christo Project for Central Park

"Gates of billowing saffron-colored cloth will be installed along Central Park walkways for two weeks in 2005 by the artist Christo, who first sought approval for the project 24 years ago. The synthetic woven cloth will hang from 16-foot-tall gates along 23 miles of the park's pedestrian walkways. The 7,500 gates will be installed in February of 2005, Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced today with the artist and his wife, Jeanne-Claude. The city's parks department and the mayor's office gave final approval on the 2005 installation, after the Central Park Conservancy backed the plan last month."

end of excerpt

Compare the grand total of 78 artist permits the Parks Department allowed for all 28,312 acres of parkland during the period of the artist-permit to the 7,500 16 foot high metal gates Christo will install in just one park and you will see exactly how little credibility there is to the City's arguments for Intro # 160.

Can the Parks Department regulate street artists without a permit? Commissioner Benepe claims that without a permit he cannot regulate artists who show art in or around Parks. Is regulation of artists - or their elimination - his agenda?

If regulation is the objective, then there is absolutely no need for Intro # 160. The Parks Department already has extensive time, place and manner regulations on the books regarding vending and it has the legal authority to write more - if any are ever needed. They can also enforce the sixty page long NYC vending ordinance, which is legally applicable in all NYC Parks. These are the exact time, place and manner of display rules the Federal and State Courts indicated were to be used instead of a permit in the event of any problems with congestion caused by art displays.

But is there really a problem? In Central Park and Battery Park, on West Broadway in SoHo and in other locations where there are concentrations of street artists, we regulate ourselves with little or no involvement by the police, as we have done for many years. The reality is that this problem, like beauty, exists primarily in the eye of the beholder. If one disapproves of street artists, even seeing one in a park is an ugly blemish damaging the park's aesthetic look.

You may have been told that a permit is needed because otherwise, 'How could an emergency vehicle get into a park if the entrance is blocked by artists?' This is an unrealistic scenario on which to base a new law violating freedom of speech. It is already illegal for a street artist - or anyone else - to block a Park entrance. A summons or arrest following a warning is the legal remedy. The Parks Department can also make additional rules prohibiting vending on baseball fields, in a playground or in any other location they feel is inappropriate. Hundreds of people are arrested in Central Park alone each week by the NYPD and the Parks police for minor infractions of law. Enforcing a permit will be far more time consuming for the police and the Parks Department than enforcing the existing Parks rules - not less so. No permit is needed to keep entrances clear, and more to the point, no entrances are being blocked - other than by food and souvenir vendors with high-priced Parks concessions, who routinely set up next to or in Park entrances with full Parks Department approval.

What does the NYCLU have to say on this matter? The NYCLU was instrumental in creating the written matter exemption passed by the City Council in 1982. This is the law Intro # 160 seeks to replace. Since 1996 it applies equally to book and art vendors. The NYCLU statement submitted to the Council during the 1981 hearings on the book vendor exemption made it explicitly clear that no license or permit is acceptable and that the First Amendment was specifically created to overcome censorship via a permit. That 9 page statement is part of the legislative record and can be provided to you by fax or email. Here's a brief excerpt from their statement:

"In 1644 John Milton found it necessary to passionately appeal to the English Parliament, as he argued in favor of "the liberty of unlicensed printing." Some 337 years later, virtually the same appeal must now be advanced to the New York City Council. Given the deeply-rooted First Amendment doctrine, prohibiting government from imposing licensing provisions upon the sale of newspapers, books, and periodicals, one would certainly think that such an appeal would no longer be necessary. There are few First Amendment principles that are more firmly established than the proposition that municipalities cannot impose a licensing regime upon persons who see to sell or distribute newspapers, pamphlets or other literature on the streets of a city. This principle was first articulated by the Supreme Court in the 1938 case of Lovell v. Griffin, 303 U.S. 444 (1938). The case involved a local ordinance that prohibited the sale or distribution of circulars, handbooks, advertising or literature of any kind without first obtaining written permission from the City Manager. The Court unanimously held such an ordinance to be an unconstitutional prior restraint upon the exercise of activity protected by the First Amendment. Writing for the Court in Lovell, Chief Justice Hughes observed that, "The struggle for the freedom of the press was primarily directed against the power of the licensor. It was against that power that John Milton directed his assault by his Appeal for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing. And the liberty of the press became initially a right to publish without a license what formerly could be published only with one. While this freedom from previous restraint upon publication cannot be regarded as exhausting the guaranty of 1iberty, the prevention of that restraint was a leading purpose in the adoption of the constitutional provision."

In light of the many years of bitter controversy over the street artist issue, it would be naive to think that censorship would never be resorted to by the Parks Department or by the City. In the final month of the Parks artist permit, Deputy Parks Commissioner Jack Linn told artists with permits that they would no longer be allowed to sell NYC scenes, presumably because these paintings and photographs were competing with the lucrative NYC souvenir concessions the Parks authorizes in Battery Park. This is censorship on the bottom-line level of racketeering.

My own 40-plus false arrests for displaying unflattering images of the former Mayor illustrate what happens when City officials get to decide which artists they will or won't allow to speak. Can one see the Parks Department issuing me a permit to show unflattering images of Commissioner Benepe or Mayor Bloomberg in front of the Met or outside the Arsenal? I rather doubt it.

The permit will have no effect on illegal vending, multiple stand vendors or copyright infringement Among the many red herrings the Parks Department is tossing at you is the notion that Intro # 160 is needed to curtail copyright infringement, multiple stands selling the same pictures and illegal vending. This is a comical notion to anyone familiar with how the Parks Department actually operated it's artist-permit system from 1998-2001. During the Parks artist permit the majority of the authorized permit holders were multiple stand art vendors, people selling jewelry or crafts (which is currently illegal without a NYC Vending license) and people selling copyright infringed art. We have extensive documentation of this. Copyright infringement is obviously illegal. No artist permit is required to enforce this law and the NYPD Peddler Task Force already does so on a daily basis.

Who benefits from an artist-permit? Certainly not artists. The obstacles to getting a permit favor commercial art vendors over actual street artists, many of whom are non-English speaking immigrants with little understanding of how the system here works. Homeless artists, impoverished artists, artists from other cities and refugee artists who want to display political art would all be at a great disadvantage in such as permit system as compared to the blatantly commercial art vendors the Parks Department claims they are targeting with Intro # 160. What's more, the most commercially-minded artists will always be in a financial position to pay the most for an art vending concession and thus will be the natural beneficiaries of any artist permit system. .

Perhaps the silliest idea the Parks Department is advocating about Intro # 160 is that it would make more spaces available for "real" artists. Today, NYC street artists are fully protected by the First Amendment thanks to the ARTIST groups lawsuits and nine years of confrontational advocacy in the streets. We need no license, permit or permission to create, display or sell art on public property in NYC. Nevertheless, we remain subject to more than 60 pages of vending law restrictions and to all Parks rules.

As First Amendment-protected speakers there are no arbitrary limits on the number of artists anymore than there is an arbitrary limit on how many people can leaflet, make a speech or hand out their business card on public property. That's why it's called, freedom of speech. The system works fine now with no assigned or reserved spots. Whoever gets to a spot first can sell there for that day, first come-first served, the same way there are no reserved seats on a subway or reserved parking spots on a public street. While not every artist finds this optimally convenient, it's a very fair system in which those who want a particular spot badly enough must exert the extra effort to get there early and claim it. Even in front of the Met or on West Broadway, which are the two largest concentrations of street artists in NYC, artists arriving in the late afternoon are always able to find a space to set up in. Freedom of speech means the right to speak, not the right to a permanently-reserved vending spot. How could the imposition of a permit system limiting artists to a handful of assigned spots possibly help more artists to show their work?

Is this issue about regulating vending or about restricting freedom of speech? Since winning our lawsuit in 1996 there has been a modest increase in the number of street artists and art vendors in NYC. The Parks Department hopes you will only consider one segment of this community - hired art vendors selling inexpensive pictures to tourists - as a means of convincing you that this is neither a genuine freedom of speech issue nor a legitimate artistic activity. They would also like you to believe that the City's Parks and streets are completely overrun with artists and art vendors threatening public safety.

There are currently about 1,000 street artists and art vendors in all of NYC - hardly the invading army the City would like to depict us as. Compare that to the City's 40,000 yellow cabs, 4,000 hot dog vendors, thousands of BID-owned concrete planters obstructing Midtown sidewalks and an unlimited number of dogs, bicycles and passenger cars - each individual one of which by itself presents more of a public safety threat than all the street artists and art vendors in the City combined.

On a typical day there may be no more than two or three hundred artists or art vendors who are actually out working on NYC streets or in Parks, despite the fact that there are no arbitrary limits on our numbers. About half sell their own original art and the rest sell someone else's. Some art vendors are hired employees while others are selling for their husband, wife, parents or other relative who is the actual artist.

Many artists are displaying art which is not for sale in order to get commissions or a gallery show. Others, like myself, are politically-motivated artists who make art intended to be shown in a particular place and time, which may or may not be offered for sale. An assigned spot is useless to such an artist.

Artists and art vendors are equally protected by the rulings in our court cases and by First Amendment law the same way a newspaper vendor is as protected as a newspaper publisher. If a permit and the concession system the permit will inevitably be replaced by is allowed to be passed into law, those left to display and sell art in parks or on the street will be the most commercially-motivated multiple stand art vendors, who are in the financial position to outbid everyone else for the permits. In other words, Intro # 160 would dramatically increase the very condition of bottom-line commercialism the Parks Department claims it is trying to prevent.

What are the ramifications of Intro # 160 for those who are not artists or vendors? As a street artist advocate I can unambiguously state that Intro # 160 would be a disaster for street artists. As a lifetime New Yorker I believe it will be an even bigger disaster for the free speech rights of everyone else living in this city. In order for Intro # 160 to stand up to an equal protection challenge, the permit requirement will necessitate the City creating a similar permit for all speech-related activities in NYC Parks and then to extend that requirement to all public property. The 1996 2nd circuit Federal Appeals Court decision gave us full First Amendment rights. Those rights are the same whether selling art, creating it, displaying it or giving it away for free. To take those rights from us the City will have to take them from everyone else.

What this will mean is a permit requirement to set up a table advocating a political cause, a permit to hand out a leaflet, to make a speech or even to gather with a few friends and silently pray on public property. Such an unwelcome development is not a conspiracy theory. The Parks Department already has a permit requirement for any gathering of 20 or more persons, which they characteristically enforce in a completely selective manner against political activists, minorities or anyone else they see as an, "undesirable."

One might also note that the Parks Department is currently being investigated by the Federal government and sued by it's own employees for blatant racism in its hiring practices. Content-based censorship is not only a possibility under a Parks permit system - it would be a guaranteed feature of it.

Recently I won a Federal Appeals Court ruling [Robert Lederman v United States] involving the steps of the US Capitol in Washington DC. Since my arrest there in 1997 for handing out leaflets about the street artist issue, three courts have ruled that despite the obvious security and public safety issues involving this building following September 11th, that it was unconstitutional to require a permit for me to leaflet there. That's real freedom of speech as guaranteed by the US Constitution.

NYC is the free speech and art capital of the world, the beacon an entire world looks to for freedom of expression. A permit for the right of expression negates two hundred years of First Amendment legal history. As elected officials sworn to uphold that same Constitution I ask you to do the right thing and vote a resounding no on Intro # 160.

Newsday 1/28/03 Selling Art In Parks At Issue

By Julie Claire Diop
STAFF WRITER
January 28, 2003

More than 250 artists gathered for a hearing at City Hall yesterday to counter a controversial proposal that would require artists to obtain permits to sell their paintings, photographs, prints and sculptures in New York City parks. Artists and city officials have fought for more than a decade over vending restrictions. Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe said in the hearing that artists are overrunning some areas of the city's parks, clogging up walkways and blocking monuments.
Artist advocate Robert Lederman countered that artists already follow strict guidelines that prevent them from blocking pedestrians. And requiring artists to obtain permits would violate their right to free speech, he said. Artists stood in bitter cold winds in front of City Hall for more than an hour before the hearing, holding up signs that read "Vendor power," "Our streets are not for sale," and "Stop Intro No. 160."
Intro No. 160 - the heart of the debate - is a proposed city bill that would set up a system whereby artists generally would be granted permits based on a lottery, although Benepe is looking into ways that would favor "original" artists versus people who sell mass-produced art. The city would charge a nominal fee for a permit. Benepe said it could be $25 a month.
Artists finagle choice vending spots, such as the blocks in front of the Metropolitan Museum of Art at Central Park, by getting there early, often by 6 a.m. Latecomers get the leftover spots, a couple of blocks away. The city is responsible for the sidewalks around a park. Although artists sometimes squabble over the spots, overall the system works well, according to Lederman, president of the 800-member Artists Against Illegal State Tactics.
Benepe would like to set up a permit system where artists would get a guaranteed spot, but would ensure that no area would get too congested.
Council members attending the hearing are to review Intro. No. 160 and make recommendations to the full council on the bill.
Artists worry that new restrictions would make it even harder for them to survive."I'm here to defend my right to earn a living," said Ruben Diaz, who sells his wood carvings around the city.

Copyright (c) 2003, Newsday, Inc.

To a Directory of Mr.Lederman's Essays

Robert Lederman is an artist, writer and activist and is also the President of the street artist advocacy group, A.R.T.I.S.T.
Click here for an archive of A.R.T.I.S.T. related news articles on the Freedom Forum website

His essays and Op-Eds have appeared in hundreds of alternative publications as well as the Daily News, Penthouse, Africa Sun Times, Street News and The Shadow.
Lederman was falsely arrested 41 times for his anti-Giuliani activities and was never convicted of any of the charges. As a result of the arrests, he's won four Federal lawsuits and overturned three laws.
He is best known for having created hundreds of paintings of Mayor Giuliani as a Hitler like dictator which were carried in demonstrations throughout the eight years of the Giuliani administration. Images of his paintings and articles about his arrests and lawsuits have appeared on all of the major television networks hundreds of times as well as frequently appearing in the NY Times, Daily News, NY Post, Newsday, Newsweek, People, The Washington Post, LA Times and NY Magazine.

Robert Lederman,
President of A.R.T.I.S.T.
(Artists' Response To Illegal State Tactics)
robert.lederman@worldnet.att.net

For a detailed exposition on the West Nile issue
http://www.nospray.org/
For an article on the Manhattan Institute go to
http://www.konformist.com/2000/rudyg.htm

If you would like to help oppose the spraying,
please write to the
No Spray Coalition
PO Box 334
Peck Slip Station
NYC, NY 10272-0334
or call the No Spray hotline at (718) 670-7110.

Any funds you can send to help continue the lawsuit
and this work are greatly appreciated.

Important Note:
Mr. Lederman has explained that his articles posted here are not to be taken as official statements by the No-Spray Coalition of which he is a member or of the "No-Spray" lawsuit in which he is a plaintiff.

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