Dear Editor: I went into the Manhattan Building Companies informational meeting Monday in a reasonable frame of mind and came out frightened. I live on 2nd and Hudson; I will rarely see this project, so why should I be frightened? I am frightened because I have a resident’s attitude, not a builder’s, despite my decade plus in construction work. A builder can say that Lincoln Tunnel traffic is a regional program. A resident says it’s in our face! Its traffic backs up on our streets and locks us in. A builder can say most residents will use mass transit. A resident sees that they have three garage levels for cars, not mass transit. A builder says there will be road construction behind it. A resident says but you don’t exit onto that road, you exit on 16th and thence to the choke-point bridges. That roadwork may help the situation as it is now, but more pressure is being added to outpace it. A builder says an office building is in our rights and would be worse. A resident says yes it’s good to be out of the fire, but that won’t make me love the frying pan. A builder can say it’s not their responsibility to solve the traffic problem. A resident says that’s right; it’s not your responsibility, unless you care about us. As residents, we think the city government is handling this for us, but as we find ourselves chaffing under this growth spurt, as we find ourselves filling with fear for our futures, we wonder if they are handling this “for us” at all. I think it’s a fine building and the whole area concept is laudable. If only they had proposed it years ago, it would be a keystone of our city by now, and it would be someone else’s project that the residents were objecting to. However, they are proposing it now, when all we can see are three hour traffic jams backing up to 11th Street (and I won’t even go into what it will be like during construction with the heavy equipment traffic), and they are not even making a dent on that fear. (They may even be privately indignant at the very idea that they need to deal with it.) It is not their responsibility. I say again, it is not their responsibility, but unless they start thinking like residents, like community members that take responsibility for each other, whether they are required to or not, it can be their undoing. They seem to be a fine and caring company. I am tempted to apply for work with them. However, I’m an artist now, and no longer in construction, so I like hearing about gallery space since the city’s plan for a gallery apparently died. Yet despite their efforts to endear this project to the present residents of Hoboken, when it comes to traffic, there is only so much that they can do; only so much that anyone can do, before throwing up their hands and whispering the construction worker’s credo, “looks good from my house.” But to the residents at that meeting, it wasn’t looking good from their houses, and since it’s their responsibility to watchdog the development of their own city, the Manhattan Building Company needs to deal more effectively with their fears. My sympathies. Fritz Haas