History
As a result of previous incidents, many local restaurants and fast food chains refuse to deliver take-out orders to the doors of residents, requiring that customers meet the delivery person at the ground floor.
Two residents were killed in a November 1995 fire, when a couch left in a stairway vestibule caught fire and flames swept up the stairwell to the roof of the building. The NYCHA was criticized by the New York City Council for fires related to its use of paint in stairwells deemed unsafe by the New York City Fire Department, focusing on the incident at the Douglass Houses.
Despite signs of improvement in the early 1990s in the surrounding area, the Frederick Douglass Houses were a stubborn and persistent site of drug dealing as the crack epidemic was continuing during that period.
Read more about this topic: Frederick Douglass Houses
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“All objects, all phases of culture are alive. They have voices. They speak of their history and interrelatedness. And they are all talking at once!”
—Camille Paglia (b. 1947)
“Social history might be defined negatively as the history of a people with the politics left out.”
—G.M. (George Macaulay)
“Literary works cannot be taken over like factories, or literary forms of expression like industrial methods. Realist writing, of which history offers many widely varying examples, is likewise conditioned by the question of how, when and for what class it is made use of.”
—Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956)