THE WEEKLY NEWSPAPER OF LOWER MANHATTAN — Volume 18 • Issue 13 | August 19 - 25, 2005

Editorial
Goldman Sachs deal: Costly and secretive, but a good outcome
Thanks to an extra $650 million in Liberty Bonds and about $150 million in tax breaks, it looks like Goldman Sachs is going to stay and build in Lower Manhattan — its home for more than a century.

Letters to the editor

UnderCover

Talking point
Have it all with one new rail tunnel
By Brian Hatch
Lower Manhattan is the fourth largest business district in the country. To continue to be a major job engine, it must have a transit system that connects directly to the entire region. The city has 8 million people, but most of the metropolitan area’s 20 million people are beyond reach of the subways. Midtown has numerous direct rail links to the region and beyond, but Lower Manhattan has none. 

The Penny Post
Building follies
By Andrei Codrescu
Sarah Winchester, the widow of Oliver “Repeating Rifle” Winchester, felt such guilt about the carnage brought about by the gun sold by her husband’s company, she used her considerable fortune to ward off the spirits of the dead. She was sure that those killed were out to destroy her family. Told by a medium that the only way to stop them was to confuse them by adding rooms to her mansion, Sarah kept the carpenters’ hammers pounding 24 hours a day for the rest of her life, 38 years.

Police Blotter

Downtown Express photo by Milo Hess
River run
Sunset jogging in Rockefeller Park in Battery Park City.

Briefs
Vermont schooner visits B.P.C.

Council overrides mayor’s housing veto

Much respect for FEX
In Pictures

NEWS
Goldman deal almost sealed without new public benefits
By Ronda Kaysen
City and state officials are close to sealing a deal with Goldman Sachs offering the investment bank more than $1.75 billion in incentives to build their new headquarters across from the World Trade Center. The offer — paid for with public funds — includes no additional amenities for a residential community that will have little access to the 740-foot tower.

Writer slain in Iraq is remembered Downtown
By Lincoln Anderson
Steve Vincent came back to the East Village from Iraq last week, about the time he had been planning to. Vincent, 49, had intended to come home to E. 11th St. this month to work on a book on the historic city of Basra, where he had been reporting.

Downtown Express photo by Elisabeth Robert

Wall St. commuters passing service change signs.

Signs of subway confusion
By Josh Rogers
Downtown straphangers, get ready for the weekend.
If you’ve gotten used to the weekend disruptions to the 1, 4 and 5 lines, prepare to add the closing of the Cortlandt St. station and changes to the N, R and W trains to your list. There are advisories and signs all over stations and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s Web site, but don’t count on them to give a clear picture of what’s going on.
INSIDE

Work begins on Liberty Plaza Park renovation
By Vanessa Romo
A complete renovation of Liberty Plaza Park, located in the heart of Downtown Manhattan between Broadway, Trinity Place, Liberty and Cedar Sts., has been underway for a month making way for the improved 33,000 sq. ft. public space expected to re-open next summer.

Judge receptive to allowing churches in schools like P.S. 89
By Ronda Kaysen
The Dept. of Education returned to federal court last week to stop churches from holding services in city schools, an effort that could impact a Downtown church that holds its services at a public school in Battery Park City.

Downtowner teaches mentors and teens to ride the waves
By Jessie Torrisi
Most people who move to Lower Manhattan look forward to escaping packed subway trains and long after-work commutes. But for Steve Larosiliere, the founder of Surf Mentor – a new sports mentoring program – his Rector St. apartment puts him even further from “the office.”

Seaport project draws opposition from the block’s neighbors
By Ellen Keohane
A plan to develop a 2,235 square foot lot that has been vacant for close to 100 years in the South Street Seaport Historic District is facing some neighborhood opposition.
Neighbors’ primary concern is that the proposed buildings are just too tall and narrow. “The proportions of the buildings seem very exaggerated,” said James Nachtwey, a photojournalist who lives on Water St. near the vacant lot. “It would look kind of ridiculous down here.”
Downtown Arts & Entertainment

An ever-changing New York
Photographers 60 years apart document the evolving landscape of New York City
By Jerry Tallmer
In 1929, when she was barely 31 years old, Ohio-born, Greenwich Village-bred Berenice Abbott (she had, while abroad, added the middle “e” to her first name, French-style) returned from Paris, expecting not to stay in New York very long.

Theatrical tribute to a special grandmother
Libby Skala ‘writes a part’ for grandmother Lilia Skala
By Jerry Tallmer
Thumb sucking, says the exacting, Austrian-backboned Lilia Skala to her 4-year-old granddaughter in New Jersey, “is a very bad habit. It makes the teeth grow crooked… Remember, I gave up smoking cigarettes. You can stop sucking your thumb.”

Ready for America
U.K. chart buster, Natasha Bedingfield’s “Unwritten,” is a musical gem
By Winnie McCroy
It doesn’t often happen that a young female singer/songwriter releases a debut album of pop songs and ballads and almost instantly finds herself at the top of the U.K. charts.
But then Natasha Bedingfield is no ordinary woman. She hails from a musical family. Her brother Daniel Bedingfield found success this year with his mesmerizing dance hit “Gotta Get Through This.”

Spiritualism at the Fringe Festival
Todd Robbins trickery sets up a 19th–century-like séance
By Jerry Tallmer
Todd Robbins hadn’t picked the place for us to meet. I had, about an hour earlier – the Brooklyn Diner, on Manhattan’s West 57th Street, because I had to be in that neighborhood anyway.

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