{"id":60518,"date":"2025-07-12T21:04:13","date_gmt":"2025-07-12T21:04:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/60518\/"},"modified":"2025-07-12T21:04:13","modified_gmt":"2025-07-12T21:04:13","slug":"opinion-she-beat-donald-trump","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/60518\/","title":{"rendered":"Opinion: She beat Donald Trump"},"content":{"rendered":"

New York has lost a civic giant. Olive Freud, who passed away this week at the age of 97<\/a>, is someone whom 99% of New Yorkers have never heard of, but her courageous fights against Donald Trump, Lincoln Center and local developers have shaped the 21st century Upper West Side.<\/p>\n

For those who knew her and her passion for both the environment and her beloved Upper West Side, her important work will echo for decades.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou don\u2019t want to be on the opposite side of the negotiating table with Olive Freud,\u201d said City Council member Gale Brewer. \u201cShe takes on these big companies and she wins. She\u2019s really made her mark on the West Side.\u201d<\/p>\n

Freud started a group in the 1980s called \u201cThe Committee for Environmentally Sound Development.\u201d Who inspired this fledgling non-profit? None other than a rapacious developer named Donald Trump who had just bought a huge parcel of waterfront property stretching from 59th Street to 72nd Street along the Hudson River.<\/p>\n

\u201cRiverside Drive ended at 72nd Street and the park ended there\u2026 we could have extended the park to 59th Street but instead dear old Donald Trump bought that plot and of course he wanted to put in luxury housing,\u201d Freud recalled in 2023<\/a>, when she received the Clara Lemlich award<\/a> in recognition of her environmental activist work. \u201cAnd of course he talked elected officials into helping him do it.\u201d<\/p>\n

But when \u201cdear old Donald\u201d tried to pull a fast one, Freud and her environmental group stopped him in his tracks.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was part of the agreement when he bought that land that the traffic that originated from his complex would go up the new road \u2013 Riverside Boulevard \u2013 to Riverside Drive,\u201d Freud said. \u201cBut it was very expensive to do, and he thought it would be better if the traffic came up to West End Avenue instead.\u201d<\/p>\n

Freud wasn\u2019t going to let her new nemesis get away with this. So she filed a lawsuit \u2013 and won. \u201cSo now there is a connection from Riverside Drive to Riverside Boulevard and the Boulevard goes into the West Side Highway,\u201d she said. \u201cIt\u2019s much better (for the environment and traffic) that way.\u201d<\/p>\n

Freud came to the Upper West Side in the 1960s with her husband, Edgar. They raised two children, Conan and Salome. I went to Stuyvesant High School with them, and Conan was a long-time friend.<\/p>\n

Conan worked in city government for many years \u2014 at OMB, TLC and other city agencies known by their acronyms. After 9\/11, he was one of those selfless New Yorkers who went to Ground Zero and spent days helping at \u201cthe pile.\u201d For his heroism, like many others, he contracted a fatal cancer and died in 2018. (I wrote a tribute to him after he passed away.<\/a>)<\/p>\n

Olive lamented how much all the luxury high rises changed her neighborhood in the last 60 years. \u201cThe West Side used to be full of social activists,\u201d she said in 2023. \u201cNow it\u2019s full of people who only think of themselves and not their community.\u201d<\/p>\n

But she was the quintessential community activist. When she noticed one day that her neighbor, the cultural institution Lincoln Center, was chopping down trees in a local park to build a new concession area, she leapt into action and sued the iconic venue. \u201cThat was Damrosch Park,\u201d she said. \u201cAnd we won. They had to re-plant those trees and put back the flowers that had been cleared.\u201d<\/p>\n

At 95 years old, when most of her contemporaries had long relocated to Century Village in Florida or were spending their well-earned retirements playing canasta, Olive Freud was helping a man on West 45th Street fight a huge building going up in his neighborhood.<\/p>\n

\u201cI thought I was calming things down, and then he called me,\u201d Freud said in 2023. \u201cAnd within a week, I found him an attorney, a land use expert. I couldn\u2019t help myself. It needed to be done.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"New York has lost a civic giant. Olive Freud, who passed away this week at the age of…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":60519,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5122],"tags":[5229,405,403,5226,5225,5228,5227,1269,67,586,132,5230,68,2969],"class_list":{"0":"post-60518","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-new-york","8":"tag-america","9":"tag-new-york","10":"tag-new-york-city","11":"tag-newyork","12":"tag-newyorkcity","13":"tag-ny","14":"tag-nyc","15":"tag-opinion","16":"tag-united-states","17":"tag-united-states-of-america","18":"tag-unitedstates","19":"tag-unitedstatesofamerica","20":"tag-us","21":"tag-usa"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60518","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=60518"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60518\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/60519"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=60518"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=60518"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=60518"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}