Media

“How do you download the power of the federal government into the district you represent?” That’s a key question Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-Brooklyn, Queens) has been asking himself and trying to answer as he serves his first term in Congress.

Rep. Hakeem Jeffries is pushing to make the Prison Ship Martyr's Monument into a national monument. The 149-foot-tall monument stands atop a crypt holding the remains of some soldiers who were kept in horrific conditions on British prison ships during the Revolutionary War. More than 11,500 soldiers died in captivity on the British prison ships.

A 149-foot-high shrine to American Revolutionary War POWs that stands majestically over Fort Greene Park could be on its way to becoming a national monument to be maintained by the U.S. Department of the Interior if a bill approved by the House on April 28 is passed by the senate and signed into law by President Obama.

“It is clear, and no one in Washington, DC doubts that the primary purpose of that bill was to aid the victims of Hurricane Sandy,” Jeffries said at the press conference when asked about the bill’s actual language by the Queens Chronicle, the only media outlet to ask any questions at the event. “What HUD appears to be considering is the notion that, let’s have a resiliency competition all across the country. Why do that when we have resiliency needs in New York? Until those resilency needs are met ... there’s no need for a resiliency competition around the country.”