Actually, it's not bloggers yet. Real estate developer Samir Benakmoume has threatened legal action against a mere message board because he didn't like the fact that people were making critical comments about one of his developments in a couple of lively threads.
The owner of the message board has pulled the threads rather than face a legal battle with the deep-pocketed and politically connected Benakmoume.
What was being discussed that so enraged Mr. Benakmoume? A probably illegal sidewalk land grab alongside his newly constructed loft condo building, consisting of a raised concrete terrace that leaves such a thin strip of sidewalk that wheelchairs and strollers cannot get past.
Join me below for the full story...
First, a bit of background.
Samir Benakmoume's new building, the 1352 Lofts, received a lot of support and appreciation as they were constructed, as they seemed nicely designed, brought some new housing to what had been a rundown corner at an important intersection Philadelphia's "Avenue of the Arts."
But then came the 'final touches' at the end. As described in the Philadelphia Inquirer:
Without waiting for Streets Department approval, the city says, Benakmoume constructed a broad raised-concrete platform that runs the entire length of his new condo building - 1352 Lofts - leaving only a stingy ribbon of sidewalk for pedestrians. The platform was intended as a handicapped ramp, but more closely resembles a terrace. Benakmoume freely admits he plans to set up tables there for his restaurant tenants.
The platform takes up so much territory on the 1300 block of South Street that pedestrians may feel as if they are navigating a tightrope. Just east of Broad Street, a major subway juncture, South Street's normal 12-foot-wide sidewalks contract to a 3-foot-wide sluice, just enough room for adults to walk single file past the building's $1.3 million duplexes.
f you're traveling in a wheelchair or pushing a baby stroller, you may have no choice but to cross to the north side of South Street. Though the sidewalk is theoretically wide enough to accommodate a standard wheelchair, the addition of street lights, parking signs, and planters turn the narrow passage into the equivalent of a Special Olympics slalom run.
You can see pictures of the narrow strip of remaining sidewalk accompanying the Philadelphia Inquirer article linked above, as well as HERE.
As you can make out in the pictures, the terrace platform runs a full 200 feet alongside the building, rising at least 2 feet above the sidewalk. The sidewalks here are twelve feet wide, and the terrace eats up just over six and a half feet of them. However, due to various quite lovely decorative streetlamps and planters along this 200 foot stretch, in practice there are only a few feet of clearance at several points.
Benakmoume claims, and the architectural drawing leads one to believe, that this terrace is meant to serve as a ramp for handicapped access to retail spaces in the building. But there are a few funny things about this supposed handicap access. The ramp end of it slopes up to reach the 200 foot terrace, which Benakmoume fully admits will be used for outdoor restaurant seating. I don't know which will be worse for the handicapped: trying to maneuver along the sidewalk, or trying to thread past 200 feet of restaurant tables filled with diners.
Handicapped access, indeed!
Benakoume claims that the original architectural drawings showed this exact design, and protests that if the city had any objection, they should have made it before construction. The city says this is not the original design, and is not at all pleased to see what has been done:
The wide platform is clearly "unacceptable," said Streets Department engineer William P. Mautz, who is the guardian of the city's rights-of-way. The only question is what to do about it.
Mautz sent Benakmoume a letter dated May 11 ordering him to remedy the problem....
When Mautz inspected the platform, he said, he discovered that its dimensions differed radically from Benakmoume's approved architectural drawings, done by Granary Associates.
Benakoume made a couple of efforts to defuse the situation. First, he asked the City Councilman who represents the district, Frank Dicicco, to pass a special zoning bill allowing the grab. Dicicco introduced the legislation, but then backed down when the community outcry amazingly enough managed to outweigh the sizable campaign donation he'd received from the developer. Benakoume's next suggestion?
Benakmoume acknowledged that the terrace is a "problem, absolutely," but he said he expected to "work it out with the neighbors." One option, he said, is to remove the city's decorative street lamps so wheelchairs can maneuver better.
Oh, right. It's the city's streetlights that are the problem! I'm surprised he didn't just demand that the handicapped buy skinnier wheelchairs.
As for his plan to "work it out with the neighbors," evidently that plan is to have lawyers for his real estate development firm, Rimas Properties, threaten them with legal action if they don't shut up.
There is an excellent community message board here in Philadelphia called PhillyBlog, where you can find up-to-the-minute posts on anything from community meetings to alerts about a mugging to restaurant reviews, and just lots of genial chitchat broken down by neighborhood. The Queen Village / Bella Vista / Hawthorne section had a few threads discussing the developer's sidewalk grab...until they all suddenly disappeared!
Which led quickly to a New Thread: "Where did the "sidewalk grab" thread go?" It was there that the truth was revealed. According to PhillyBlog's creator, Wil Reynolds:
Ding Ding....I got the call at 8:30 this morning.
I hate bucking to these chumps...anybody up for a donation fund so we can at least have some legal reps fight this stuff for us?
Sorry guys / girls.
This angers me to no doubt, it is like...well maybe you did do something that should be discussed!!!!. I bet if everyone here raved about the development they would have taken the free traffic and good will and never paid a dime (and they are NOT supposed to) that is how the Internet works.
I recommended that they make a post explaining their points, but that didn't work. All...please keep an eye for anything positive on this development and PM me, I will delete that as well so we can't be seen as favoring anything said about the development (GOOD or bad).
Message board poster EastChestnut adds some details downthread:
Wil got a phone call from one of Rimas' lawyers demanding the posts be deleted, so Wil decided to delete the entire thread to avoid getting a C&D [cease and desist order].
I would expect if Wil actually received a written C&D, he would have deleted the posts and THEN posted a copy of the C&D online for us to talk about.
I wonder if the Rimas lawyer is going after Google, because the 1352 Lofts sidewalk grab thread can still be read in Googlecache and still comes up on searches.
Google is probably the biggest reason why the lawyer wanted the posts removed in the first place. It is rather embarrassing for potential residents of 1352 Lofts to Google their own property and discover that their neighbors, and residents in other neighborhoods are furious about said building.
All I can add is that Benakoume's ignorance of the concept of free speech is matched only by his ignorance of how the internet works. Yes, of course, the some of the original threads discussing the sidewalk grab are still available to all in Google cache; for example, HERE or HERE. Even more important, when you try and shut up the community online, everyone starts talking about it and you generate even more negative buzz, not only about the original sidewalk grab but also about the attempted suppression of free speech. And online, the more it's talked about, the more the Google link of Benakoume's lovely web page advertising his condos will be surrounded by and even buried by bad publicity.
More on the issue can be found at Young Philly Politics, in the post entitled "Standing Up for Ourselves," and in this post on the Philadelphia Weekly's blog.
Click to them all and raise their stats in the search engines. You can also sign a protest letter created by the Design Advocacy Group of Philadelphia HERE.
Thanks for listening, thanks for caring. Don't let them silence our voices.