THE WEEKLY NEWSPAPER OF LOWER MANHATTAN

THE WEEKLY NEWSPAPER OF LOWER MANHATTAN — Volume 18 • Issue 44 | March 17 - 23, 2006

Editorial
It’s time to shut off The Falls
Last Friday night, protesters gathered outside The Falls bar on Lafayette St. calling for its closure in the wake of the murder of Imette St. Guillen, the 24-year-old John Jay College student who was brutally raped and murdered after the bar tossed her out after closing time on Feb. 25. The prime suspect — this week linked by DNA evidence — is the bar’s bouncer Darryl Littlejohn, a career criminal who has spent years in jail on numerous charges.

The Penny Post
5 years after euphoria
By Andrei Codrescu
Gambit, New Orleans’s alternative weekly is 25 years old this week. Mazel tov! Exactly five years ago, my face was the Gambit bikini for Gambit’s 20th anniversary cover girl. The cover girl, who is a famous writer, posed naked for that cover, concealing herself with an earlier Valentine’s Day Gambit that featured my picture on the cover. In short, I ran cover for her cover.

Talking Point
Moving from the frat house to Wall Street
By Jean Marie Hackett
Throwing away a film of lint from the dryer, my eyes catch the following notice, posted on a laundry room window that looks out upon a landscaped outdoor terrace:

Downtown Express photo by Milo Hess
Cashing out at the Seaport
It wasn’t your typical sidewalk sale last Saturday on Front St.

Letters to the editor

Under Cover

Police Blotter

In Briefs

Smoking out polluters

City College to move school to Bowling Green

Ad billboards finally come down, but so may garage

Food

Made in Argentina, by way of Tribeca
By Frank Angelino
When a new Tribeca restaurant takes Industria Argentina (“Made in Argentina”) as its name, it implies that the fare is authentic— a claim I was only too happy to test out after spending a week in the South American country. Since Argentinean cuisine centerpieces lean, grass-fed beef, I wondered whether the same kind of meat could be duplicated or even approximated in New York. It would seem hard to do, considering that Argentine beef has been banned in this country for the past six years, a fallout from the threat of Foot and Mouth Disease.

Youth/ Sports

Youth Activities

Downtown Express photo by Elisabeth Robert Some of the activists who remain committed to what they say will be a better, post-9/11 environmental cleanup, stand outside the contaminated Deutsche Bank building now being cleaned and dismantled: Jo Pollet, left, David Newman, Catherine McVay Hughes and Kimberly Flynn. These greens are still pressing the 9/11 environmental fight By Ronda Kaysen A tall man with a booming voice and a large pile of papers in his arms trotted around the Committee Room at City Hall before a hearing on the redevelopment of Lower Manhattan. “Are you are reporter?” he asked one woman seated quietly. “No,” she replied.		News Day of bravado and finger-pointing after W.T.C. talks breakdown By Josh Rogers They have stopped talking to each other, they are $1 billion apart according to one estimate and neither side knows how it will all end, but both the Port Authority and Larry Silverstein somehow agree that those details will not interfere with their immediate plans to rebuild the World Trade Center. Knickerbocker tenants win temporary block of landlord plan By Ronda Kaysen Tenants temporarily thwarted their landlord’s attempt to deregulate a Chinatown apartment complex when a judge ordered a temporary stay last week on the landlord’s bid to deregulate.

INSIDE

BB gun shooting at I.S. 89 pelts students, stuns parents By Ronda Kaysen and Alex Schmidt A BB gun shooting at a Battery Park City middle school left two students with welts and several parents rattled last Friday. Chinatown clinic won’t be winging it on bird flu By Alex Schmidt Since the terrorist attack of 9/11, the Community Health Care Association of New York State and the city’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene have been training doctors and nurses at community health centers in emergency preparedness on how to deal with people streaming into clinics with all manners of wounds and injuries from bomb blasts, anthrax attacks and other possible dire events. Twice-recovered artifacts from Five Points on display By Chad Smith Marauders terrifying the innocent? Immigrant gangs roaming the streets? Burlesque dancers? Indeed, many of the historical accounts of the Five Points in Lower Manhattan has always bordered on sordid. But a new display of artifacts at 26 Federal Plaza, and the story those artifacts tell, paint a very different picture of an early 19th century Manhattan. Quinn says group rejects St. Pat’s compromise on gays By Paul Schindler Despite several weeks of discussion between City Council Speaker Christine Quinn’s office and the Ancient Order of Hibernians, who run the annual Fifth Avenue St. Patrick’s Day Parade, aimed at breaking a 15-year deadlock over participation of openly gay and lesbian marchers, the efforts have faltered as the result of Hibernians’ intransigence, the speaker said in a March 15 telephone interview.		‘Shut The Falls,’ protesters say after murder By Lincoln Anderson As police this week announced positive results for physical evidence linking bouncer Darryl Littlejohn to the rape and murder of Imette St. Guillen, protesters continued to call for the closing of the Nolita bar where the 24-year-old criminology student was last seen drinking before her death and where the suspect — a felon with a lengthy rap sheet — worked the door in violation of the law. Healing drumbeats at St. Mark’s for anthrax victim By Bonnie Rosenstock For over two hours on Sat. March 11, the rhythmic rise and fall of African drums reverberated throughout the sanctuary of St. Mark’s Church on the Bowery. Those not playing all manner of drums large and small contributed to the driving beat with sturdy wooden sticks and other percussion instruments. Others clapped their hands, stamped their feet or danced energetically. Despite protests, W.T.C. memorial construction work begins Work to begin building the World Trade Center memorial to honor the people killed on 9/11 and in the 1993 W.T.C. bombing began Monday despite protests from some family members, who have also filed a lawsuit to stop construction.

Downtown Arts & Entertainment

Looking back at Iraq, three years into war By Steven Snyder Hubert H. Humphrey once observed that “freedom is hammered out on the anvil of discussion, dissent and debate.” But when it comes to such politically-charged issues as America’s war on terror and invasion of Iraq, any sense of discussion or debate seems muffled by the vitriol of partisan posturing. Its polarizing nature can be seen in the headlines of only the last two weeks, one camp describing Iraq as on the brink of civil war and another claiming things are “going very, very well.” ‘Grey Gardens’ documentary gets makeover on stage By Scott Harrah Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award winner Doug Wright (“I Am My Own Wife”) has done the unthinkable. He’s taken an obscure documentary about Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis’s eccentric aunt and cousin and adapted it into an epic historical stage musical that far surpasses the 1975 film of the same name. Wright’s incandescent adaptation of “Grey Gardens,” complete with a lush original score, is so ambitious and grand in scale, that it is almost unfathomable that it is based on an indie film that catered to a cult of underground fans.		The still simmering ‘Melting Pot’ By Jerry Tallmer Bob Kalfin neatly circled two paragraphs of a column by Thomas L. Friedman on the Op-Ed page of the New York Times. “I’m going to read this to the cast,” said Robert Z. Kalfin, who has been directing plays Off-Broadway and elsewhere in the world ever since “The Golem,” on Second Avenue, in 1959. Please note the Z. The gumshoe without a clue returns to off-Broadway By Jefferson Siegel An unusual and entertaining show debuted earlier this month at the Jean Cocteau Repertory’s Bouwerie Lane Theatre. Part radio drama, part Saturday morning, two-reel cliff-hanger, “The Continuing Adventures of Dick Danger” puts a snarky new spin on the Golden Age of Radio.

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