Pfizer Inc.

Earlier this month, in the brief few-day period when only one governor was embroiled in a sex scandal, Brooklyn Assemblyman Vito Lopez introduced a bill to use eminent domain to take pharmaceutical giant Pfizer’s approximately 15-acre manufacturing plant site in East Williamsburg and turn it into affordable housing (he's talked about this previously).

With the plant slated to close later this year, Pfizer had put out a search in January for developers to buy the land and build a mixed-use, mixed-income development out of the site.

Though the company has yet to report any progress along that front, and even that concept—of a mixed-income complex—angered Mr. Lopez, the Assembly housing committee chairman, who previously has expressed revulsion at the notion that the company would proceed down a path that would bring it any significant financial gain.

The bill, introduced March 13 with 20 other legislators signing on, instructs the Division of Housing and Community Renewal to take the property with eminent domain. In the bill’s justification listed on the Assembly’s Web site, Mr. Lopez said he was taking action on Pfizer because it failed to donate its land, as it has done in other instances. "Though Pfizer has shown concern for other communities coping with job loss and housing needs, it appears the global company has little interest in returning the land in question to the State of New York," the justification reads.  read more »

Pharmaceutical giant Pfizer is opting to leave the Brooklyn community that gave it its start 159 years ago with something of a mixed-income goodbye kiss, as its seeks to turn its giant 15-acre southeast Williamsburg site into a new development marked by affordable housing.  read more »

Pfizer Inc. said it would shutter its Brooklyn plant as part of its "immediate priorities to drive improved performance." Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz says more than 600 jobs will be lost. Worldwide, the pharmaceutical company is eliminating 10,000 positions. - Matthew Schuerman

The new 28,000 square-foot Pfizer Plant Research Laboratory, funded partially by you-know-who and designed by Polshek Partnership, opens this week at the New York Botanical Garden. It will be open to the public until Sunday before being closed for students and scientists to study molecular systems and plant genomics. Get your wiggly worms here.  read more »

-Matthew Schuerman

There was a bit of coverage of the politics and ambience of the Black, Puerto Rican Caucus 's annual meeting in Albany over the weekend, and it sounds like a wonderful time was had by all (including, most of all, Tom Suozzi, who by all accounts had a lovely time complaining about his exclusion).

It would have been an expensive affair, too, but for the generosity of AstraZeneca, GlaxoSmithKline, PhRMA, and Pfizer.

Also on the list of sponsors: booze and nuclear power.

So decent of those public-minded corporations to recognize how often state legislators are deprived of free food and alchohol.

UPDATE: That didn't take long. The Web site, and list of sponsors, is down. Fortunately, an archived, similar list of the 2005 event sponsors is here.

The inability to make a decision turns out to be a rich comic subject.I think.  read more »

The inability to make a decision turns out to be a rich comic subject.   I think.    read more »

In the soon-to-be-released documentary The Corporation , a commodities trader named Carlton Brown st  read more »

As headlines warned of record tax increases and bitter divisions among state Republicans, Mayor Mich  read more »

Peter J.  read more »

Viagra is the perfect American medicament. It raises the Dow Jones and the penis, too.  read more »