THE WEEKLY NEWSPAPER OF LOWER MANHATTAN — Volume 18 • Issue 10 | July 29 - August 4, 2005

Editorial
Petition challenges are a part of politics
Five candidates for City Council in the Second District — representing the East Side from Murray Hill to Grand St. — are crying foul after the team for another candidate, Rosie Mendez, challenged the signatures they collected to get on the ballot in the September Democratic primary.

Letters to the editor

Under Cover

Talking point
A busy mother worries on the homefront
By Jane Flanagan
Recently, while traveling, I met a woman whose life could not be more different than mine, or just about anyone I know. Her son, a 22-year-old sergeant, just completed two tours in Iraq. Her son-in-law was, at that moment, headed over, and her daughter, the mother of two small boys, could be called up at any moment. I met this woman at a hotel on Lake George, where she worked at a kids’ camp.

The Penny Post
San Francisco
By Andrei Codrescu
San Francisco is a city for the use of its citizens. There are parks, bike lanes, museums and cafes. Pedestrians walk for pleasure not in fear of their lives. The toy-like jumble of pretty Victorians with freshly painted detail give way to views cultivated to lift the spirit. The air is perpetually fresh as the Pacific Ocean and the Bay churn against each other’s currents, slapping one’s face with freshness and the occasional aromas of roasting coffee, garlic and spices.

Briefs
Garden standoff
In Pictures

Bodies in rest and motion

Concert in the shadows

Sports

Better showing for Downtown tourney teams
The two Downtown Little League tournament teams were eliminated from the competition, but coaches say the league took a big step forward this year.

Downtown Express photo by Robert Stolarik

Ely, 14 months, stayed near a small pool while older children sought relief in Washington Market Park’s sprinklers Wednesday.

Canidates blast petition challenges
By Olga Mantilla
Half of the candidates in the race for Manhattan’s Second City Council District gathered on the steps of City Hall last Thursday to decry what they called the “antidemocratic” turn the race took last Mon. July 18 when members of the political organization Coalition for a District Alternative filed challenges against their bids to represent the sprawling district that includes the Lower East Side, the East Village, Alphabet City, Gramercy Park and Murray Hill.

Puerto Rican punkers preach revolution
By Ronda Kaysen
The anarchists can’t keep a schedule. It was a sweltering Sunday in July and not an anarchist was in sight at Tompkins Square Park. The Puerto Rican anarchist punk band Ricanstruction had circulated e-mail blasts for weeks, promising a free afternoon show as part of a rally to save St. Brigid’s, an East Village church facing demolition.
Cool at heart, Downtown looks to cool the skin too
By Ronda Kaysen
Downtown might eel like a toaster oven with temperatures soaring into dizzying digits, but there are sanctuaries from the swelter that make the latest heat wave actually – gasp! – fun.
INSIDE
Canal St. residents hail vote on Arman project
By Lincoln Anderson
Opponents of a variance application for a new 10-story building by Arman the sculptor at 482 Greenwich St. in Hudson Square were disappointed that Community Board 2 at its July 21 full board meeting approved some aspects of the variance.

C.B.1 backs Manhattan Youth running rec center
By Ronda Kaysen
A Downtown after school and summer program for children is one step closer to owning a new Tribeca community center. Community Board 1 has requested that the city’s Economic Development Corporation give Manhattan Youth, a nonprofit youth organization, the deed title for a new community center planned for Site 5C, a residential development on Warren St. in Tribeca. The four-floor community center will be complete in September 2007.
Off-duty cop arrested in Greenwich St. shooting
By Lauren Dzura
A night out turned violent when an off-duty police officer shot and wounded a man in a bar brawl last Friday night in the Financial District.

Drifter arrested in Chinatown killing
By Brendan Keane
Two days after residents of a Chinatown building made the grisly discovery of the decomposing corpse of an elderly man in his apartment, José Bustos Mangana, 28, confessed to the brutal murder, according to police.

Racist postcard taped to W.T.C. fence door
By Cathy Jedruczek
On a recent steamy July morning visitors were peeking through the fence surrounding the World Trade Center. Some snapped pictures, others stood motionless- they prayed or meditated while others spoke quietly — in multiple languages — nodding their heads. Nobody however, dared to scrawl any fresh graffiti on the main gate to ground zero at Church St. or mount another postcard. But there was plenty already there.

Small art groups move plans forward with new grants
By Lauren Dzura
Thirteen Downtown arts organizations have been awarded $1.7 million in grants as part of the effort to help Lower Manhattan recover after 9/11.

Letting breast milk flow in the garden of winter
By Vanessa Romo
With posters saying “Breast milk is love, life, lunch” and “Wall Street Needs Some Mama Love” attached to the back of their strollers, a group of about 30 mothers staged a “nurse-in” at the Winter Garden on Thursday, July 21.

Live from Lower Manhattan it’s WOR
By Ellen Keohane
You don’t have to adjust the dial on your radio to find WOR New York, but you do have to look a little further south down Broadway.
Arts

Pianist inspired by Downtown streets
By RICK MARX
The pianist Pete Malinverni doesn’t need to worry about inspiration. Whenever he’s feeling stuck, he’ll step out of his apartment at Sixth Avenue and Houston to collect his thoughts and find a little inspiration. “The Downtown is a huge part of it,” he says. “First of all, it offers inspiration because of the life of the Village. If I’m having trouble getting going in the morning, I take a quick half-hour walk in the Village. I’m trying to open my mind and practice.”

Movie is still great 35 years later
By JERRY TALLMER
If ever anyone relished the pivotal truth that dreams are movies, movies are dreams, it is the Bernardo Bertolucci who in 1970, a prizewinning poet not yet 30 years old, wrote and directed the movie “Il Conformista” (from the Alberto Moravia novel) that is in itself one great compulsive, overpowering dream, recalled almost entirely in flashback by the buttoned-up starch-faced Marcello Clerici – the extraordinary Jean-Louis Trintignant – in the back seat of a car that is being driven through the night to where he has been assigned to murder the anti-Fascist professor who was a hero of this aspiring Mussolini-era apparatchik’s university days.

 An anti-feminist backlash
FRANK HOLIDAY
As an entry in the summer group show category, “Idols of Perversity” at Bellwether Gallery in Chelsea has been widely reviewed. But I couldn’t let this show pass without offering my own two cents.

A surreal evening of performances
By JERRY TALLMER
Everything old is new again. Welcome to 1955, when a young woman named Julie Bovasso, an inspired 22-year-old from Brooklyn, is introducing Jean Genet, Eugene Ionesco, and Michel de Ghelderode to the United States of America, and vice versa, at the tiny Tempo Playhouse she’s built with her own hands at 4 St. Mark’s Place.

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