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Editorial
Stringer is right to focus on community boards
So far, the race for Manhattan borough president hasn’t seen much to get excited about. The dozen or so Democratic candidates — as everyone knows, there’s no way a Republican will win this seat — have so far been defined by what geographic area they represent and their ethnicity. Many of the candidates like to talk about the city’s bread and butter issues – read affordable housing – but the winning candidate will have little say on that.
Downtown Notebook
Tacking toward paradise in Downtown’s harbor
By Michael Fortenbaugh
When summer comes to our great city, I am drawn to the water. Water is where I find relaxation and comfort. It is where my soul is rested.
The Penny Post
The real estate boom
By Andrei Codrescu
Would you invest one million dollars (if you had it!) in a New Orleans apartment sure to be destroyed by a hurricane in the next five years?
Youth
Downtown stars shine in season’s last weekend
Downtown Little League closed out their regular season this weekend with hot action and weather, exciting all-star games, and trophies for all.
Happy Re-cap
Noam Saul, left, and Tyler Brandon celebrated a win last weekend to close out the Downtown Little League regular season. Coverage of the end of the season highlights. (Downtown Express photo by Elisabeth Robert)
Downtown before the W.T.C.
By JERRY TALLMER
The pages in a staggering new book called “The Destruction of Lower Manhattan” are not numbered, but the photos are. Halfway through it the first time around I was stopped in my tracks by photograph No. 34, not of some building as extinct and vanished, now, as the mastodons, but simply: “Woman in a phone booth.”
Tower of fear, not freedom for some
By Josh Rogers with Ellen Keohane
The new design changes to the Freedom Tower are intended to make the building the safest in the world but it may take time to convince Downtowners.
Dog run to be named for canine killed on 9/11
By Ronda Kaysen
Sirius, a yellow Labrador retriever who died in the World Trade Center disaster will soon have a dog run named in his honor.
P.S. 234 braces for construction noise in the fall
By Ronda Kaysen
The students of P.S. 234 in Tribeca have quite a noisy school year to look forward to when they return from summer break. Construction workers building a nearby residential development will be busy pile driving – a deafening excavation process – directly outside the school’s windows for several months of the school year.
Dispute over space at proposed Beekman St. school
By Ronda Kaysen
Designs for a new pre-K-8 school on Beekman St. do not include a schoolyard for the children to gather or an auditorium large enough to accommodate the entire student body, according to Community Board 1 members who saw the renditions.
Downtown’s middle school hopes raised, quickly dashed
By Ronda Kaysen
Community Board 1 members have their eye on a new school in the Department of Education’s capital budget and hope to use it as a zoned middle school for West Side kids; only the department has other plans for the school.
Test scores are mostly up Downtown
By M.L. Liu
Students at P.S. 150, P.S. 234 and P.S. 124 can head off for summer vacation knowing they led Lower Manhattan schools in performance on this year’s city and state standardized tests.
Ex-Kozmo exec tries again in Tribeca
By Lauren Dzura
On quiet White St. in Tribeca, a plain sign marks the headquarters of MaxDelivery.com. The single doorbell and small door of the company lead into a huge open warehouse, with the front bare except for a few chairs and tables strewn about. The back of the warehouse, however, is stocked with enough drug store items to be redolent of a Super Target, a concept alien to the city’s tiny corner bodegas. Now, instead of combing through the local convenience store for necessities, residents of Lower Manhattan can go online to order products and have them delivered in an hour.
Sibling duo sells stylish, functional children’s furniture: Blue Bench
By Kaitlen Jay Exum
After spending 25 years working in the fashion industry, siblings Susan and Stephen Johnson were both ready for a change. Interior design, Susan said, “seemed like a natural progression from fashion.” She had recently helped a pregnant friend decorate her baby’s nursery and, in the process, discovered a unique line of children’s furniture called Little Folk Art and developed a relationship with the designer, Susan Salzman. As both Johnson siblings are crazy about children—Stephen has two boys and Susan adores her one niece and seven nephews—working in the field of interior design for children’s rooms seemed like a logical move.
ARTS
Baseball with a political twist
By JERRY TALLMER
Here is a little taste of a one-man show at Tribeca’s Flea Theater called “Boocock’s House of Baseball,” written and performed by a clean-living 40-year-old kid named Paul Boocock who started life in Baltimore, Maryland, Babe Ruth’s home town.
MANUSCRIPT: A different kind of thriller
BY SCOTT HARRAH
Thrillers can be pure escapist fun—both on the stage and in Hollywood movies—as long as their plots hook the audience and get everyone intrigued within the first few minutes of the opening scene. It would be far too easy to criticize Paul Grellong’s “Manuscript” simply because it takes at least 30 minutes before anything significant really happens, but one must realize that this is not a traditional thriller in any sense. Instead of blood-thirsty villains with guns and knives, this three-person drama is about privileged Ivy League students with literary ambitions—not exactly the type of exciting characters that are going to get anyone’s pulse racing
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