THE WEEKLY NEWSPAPER OF LOWER MANHATTAN — Volume 18 • Issue 3 | JUNE 10-16, 2005

Inside

Editorial
 Silver is the M.V.P. of the stadium fight
As far as opponents of the West Side Stadium are concerned, the most valuable player of the fight is Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver.
By ordering his representative on the Public Authorities Control Board to abstain from voting on the project on Monday, Silver prevented the Metropolitan Transportation Authority from transferring the West Side rail yards development site and the state from allocating its half of the $600 million subsidy for the contentious project.

Letters to the editor

Talking Point
Help for all couples who want babies
By Jane Flanagan
President Bush was on the front page of The New York Times recently holding a one-month-old infant. This was no ordinary baby. He was conceived by in-vitro fertilization. Standing behind the president was a swarm of smiling parents, who also conceived their children this way.

The Penny Post
Haiku as high body art
By Andrei Codrescu
A form of poetry pioneered by ancient Japanese poets is taking off in New Orleans. A few days ago at the Goldmine Saloon poet Herbert Kearney wrote haiku on performing artist Andrea Garland’s nude body. Haiku is a form of poetry that notes with great precision and melancholy the passing of human life and the cycles of nature. Its subject is transition and illusion, and its ideal medium for expression is the human skin.

Under Cover

Police Blotter

Downtown briefs
• Free island tours begin season

• Birding tours of the harbor

• Smooth-sailing skipper

• Veterans honored in Chinatown

• Closing bell

• Old club sings for the young
Sports/ Youth

NEWS
Downtown poets society: Bards band together
By Ronda Kaysen
More than a decade has passed since Martha Rhodes set out to put more poets in print. Working out of her Tribeca loft, the 52-year-old publisher and editor has cranked out 60 collections of poetry in 12 years and established her imprint as one of the more respected in the elite world of letters.

Battery Park City sites clinch Milsteins’ W.T.C. deal
By Josh Rogers
Milstein Properties made a deal last week that officials hope will speed the development of the World Trade Center site and Battery Park City.
Downtown Express photo by Talisman Brolin

Edith Bartley used to visit her friends here in the Fort Jay courtyard on Governors Island. She and others who used to live on the island are organizing a reunion.

Home sweet… Governors Isle: Army ‘brats’ recall island living
By Ellen Keohane
Many New Yorkers look at Governors Island, just 800 yards off the coast of Lower Manhattan, and see prime real estate that would be perfect for a conference center, hotel, college or theater. Few look at it and see home.
NEWS
 Battery Park City sites clinch Milsteins’ W.T.C. deal
By Josh Rogers
Milstein Properties made a deal last week that officials hope will speed the development of the World Trade Center site and Battery Park City.
The Lower Manhattan Development Corporation agreed to buy the lot across the street from the World Trade Center site from Milstein for $59 million. Under the deal, Milstein has the exclusive right to negotiate for the rights to develop the remaining two residential sites in Battery Park City – Sites 23 and 24 at the west end of the neighborhood’s ballfields.

Deutsche Bank cleanup work to begin in August
By Ronda Kaysen
One of the final relics of the World Trade Center disaster may soon meet its fate.

Some candidates would be less friendly to C.B. 1 Friends
By Ronda Kaysen
Friends of Community Board 1, a nonprofit organization created to promote Downtown, might find itself more of a polite acquaintance of Community Board 1 than a bosom buddy, depending on whom the board elects as its new chairperson later this month.

Kicking up dust over new air testing plan
By Ronda Kaysen
Downtown’s air will be monitored continuously throughout the years of intense construction, Downtown redevelopment officials announced this week.

The party’s over at notorious NV club
By Lauren Dzura
On May 27 the heavy wooden doors of the nightclub NV on the corner of Hudson and Spring Sts. closed for the last time. After making the location its home for 10 years, the club lost its lease and many residents are happily bidding it good riddance.

City and C.B. 1 say Tribeca tower design is too tall
By Ronda Kaysen
A developer’s cries of economic hardship did him little good when his team paraded plans to build a 13-story residential building in the low-rise Tribeca neighborhood at a Community Board 1 meeting last week.

Struggling to put on a show near ground zero
By Lauren Dzura
When Eric Brown went into the Lower Manhattan restaurant, Coast, for a job interview he left with much more than just a position as a waiter or bartender. He ended up as the head of entertainment with hopes of helping revitalize Lower Manhattan. While he obviously cannot resurrect the Twin Towers or do anything to cover the gaping hole that still serves as a hollow reminder of 9/11, he is simply trying to breathe life back into the area around the World Trade Center by putting on the Lower Manhattan Arts Festival and Variety Show.

Stadium opponents do sack dance over Silver vote
By Albert Amateau
Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver’s rejection on June 6 of the proposed stadium over the West Side rail yards made him a hero to local elected officials and neighborhood activists fighting the project for nearly three years.

Arts and Entertainment
Percussion in the audience
By JERRY TALLMER
David Warren, tall, slim, boyish and as brainy as you could ever want, has directed and won awards for such erudite dramas as “Holiday,” “Hobson’s Choice,” “Summer and Smoke,” “Misalliance,” “The Dazzle,” “Hurrah at Last,” “Night and Her Stars,” “Pterodactyls” and on and on.

Legendary Village folk artist remembered
By Abigail Rothberg
In the heart of Greenwich Village in the 1960’s, people went from divey clubs to underground cafes sopping up politically saturated music and comedy. Energetic, excited urbanites strummed rural music out into the streets giving rise to a folk explosion.

Rebel for eternity
By JERRY TALLMER
 The overused, much-abused, cliché word for it is charisma. The old-fashioned words for it are magnetism or sex appeal or star power. Like Mr. Justice Potter Stewart on pornography, one cannot define it, but one knows it when one sees it.

One ‘Blood’ brother passes and the other acts on
By JERRY TALLMER
It wasn’t until this past Saturday, June 4, that news of the death of the actor J.D. Cannon hit these eyes through an obit that day in The Times. He had in fact left us on May 20 at his home in or near Hudson, New York.

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