Under Cover

Volume 20 Issue 24 | Oct. 26 - Nov.1, 2007

Under Cover

Y not go east?
General Growth Properties is talking to the 92nd Street Y about opening a center at the Seaport Mall, said Julie Menin, chairperson of Community Board 1. Menin said she was happy to hear the news, but “that doesn’t mean the Community Board in any way supports what they want to build there,” referring to the firm’s idea to build a tower as high as 36 stories.

Janell Vaughan, General Growth’s general manager at the Seaport, said the board will have to wait ‘til next year to see if 36 stories makes the final plan, but confirmed they were talking to community centers when we asked about 92nd Street. The Y’s Hudson St. center opening has been pushed back to the spring.

You tell ‘em
Speaking of Julie Menin, she may not win the Ms. Congeniality contest at the next Lower Manhattan Development Corporation board meeting. Menin told fellow Community Board 1 members last week that she was angry that the L.M.D.C. seemed to be trying to pawn off its community notification responsibilities on the community board.

The L.M.D.C. has offered the board a grant to hire a staffer to interface with government agencies and do outreach, Menin said, but in the wake of the fatal Deutsche Bank fire, she thinks the buck should stop at the corporation. “They cannot put that onus on us,” she said. “We cannot be co-opted by them.”

That’s White, Bill
Soho photographer Lawrence White wasn’t pithy enough when he opined to Bill O’Reilly, who took some editing liberties with White’s letter to the “O’Reilly Factor.” While reading some of the two-paragraph note in the “no-spin zone,” O’Reilly conveniently left out the part where White accused the host of deliberately showing footage of San Francisco’s “wild side” to boost ratings and present an unfair and unbalanced view of the left coast city where White also has a residence.

White told us “journalists like O’Reilly use their considerable vocabularies to mount bigoted assaults against phantom enemies as a way to gain power…. S.F. is O’Reilly’s whipping toy and he uses his purposefully skewed international reports as his whip.”

BTW, Bill O, we’re right and you’re wrong about “Wright.” Larry’s last name is White.

Little ones first
Lower Manhattan Pre-K programs at P.S. 89 and elsewhere may get the axe next year because of overcrowding, District 2 Superintendent Daria Rigney told Community Board 1 members Tuesday.

“Pre-K is not a given,” she said. “It’s great but not at the expense of grades 2, 3, 4.”

She thinks the Beekman St. school will open on time in fall 2009, which will alleviate the crunch.

Mulligan
John Paul Basile, marketing vice president of Downtown’s soon-to-be sports museum, confirmed the Sports Museum of America will be ready to play ball in April when it opens at 26 Broadway, but charged us with an E-UC, that’s an error on UnderCover for using the museum’s old name in our item in the Sept. 21 – 27 issue. The place is no longer called the National Sports Museum.