By Suzanne Ma
DNAinfo Reporter/Producer
LOWER MANHATTAN — Chinatown residents and business owners are furious with the NYPD's plan to lock down part of the neighborhood with metal barriers and armed guards during the trials of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other terror suspects.
Roughly 100 of them showed up at Community Board 1's executive meeting Wednesday night to air their grievances and back a resolution calling for the trials be moved to Governors Island.
"It is clear that our government does not give a damn about its citizens," said Chinatown resident Jeanie Chin. "This is the beginning of the end for Chinatown as we know it."
Residents worried the blocked roads, the snipers on roof tops and the satellite vans parked up and down narrow streets would wreak havoc on their day-to-day lives.
At the end of the night, the board, led by chair by Julie Menin, passed a strongly-worded resolution addressed to U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder specifically requesting that the trial be moved to Governors Island, if not out of Manhattan entirely.
Chinatown residents Jan Lee (right) and Jeanie Chin (left) at a town hall about the 9/11 terror trials on Dec. 7, 2009. (DNAinfo/Suzanne Ma)Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly, speaking at a New York Press Club event on Tuesday, said the security measures are necessary during the trials, which are expected to last several years.
"We are very much aware of and sensitive to … the challenges that present itself for the Chinatown community," Kelly told DNAinfo. "We simply have no other choice."
A tight security zone would heavily restrict pedestrian and vehicle traffic along the north side of Worth Street, Pearl Street in the east, Madison Street in the south, and west along Centre Street.
The zone would protect the federal courthouse, the state courthouse on Centre Street, the U.S. Attorney's office, police headquarters, St. Andrews Church on Cardinal Hayes Place and Chatham Towers, residential co-ops on Park Row with an underground parking garage.
The city has estimated that the security measures will cost $215 million in the first year and $200 the following years.
City Councilwoman Margaret Chin, former City Councilman Alan Gerson and Community Board 1 chair Menin have said that the trials should be moved to another location that would be cheaper and would not put Manhattanites at risk.
But Chin told DNAinfo that while Governors Island is a possible alternative, the suspects may still have to be held in a Lower Manhattan detention center.
"The issue is where are these people going to be locked up?" Chin said. "If they're still down here, we're still involved."
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