Last year Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz Jr. fought and conquered the building of a mall in the historic Kingsbridge Armory; now—facing a possible bid for citywide office—he has to figure out what to do with the hard-to-fill space. "He's got a big problem," a Bronx elected official told the Post. "No one's been able to do anything with this thing, and now he comes along and stops the only development that seemed to have a chance."
Diaz has formed a task force to tackle the problem, even offering a spot to Seth Pinksy, one of the primary organizers of the shopping mall plan (he politely declined). The borough president hasn’t exactly admitted that he may have fouled up—he sunk the Bloomberg-endorsed project by requiring that the mall pay its employees a living wage of $10/hour with benefits—but he has backed down. The fighting rhetoric he used last year (“The notion that any job is better than no job no longer applies," he once said) has been replaced by attempts at pacification. "We want to move forward," he said recently. "We understand what happened in November was very emotional for many folks."
