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:
“At present cats have more purchasing power and influence than the poor of this planet. Accidents of geography and colonial history should no longer determine who gets the fish.”
—Derek Wall (b. 1965)
“There is no history of how bad became better.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“All history is a record of the power of minorities, and of minorities of one.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)