THE WEEKLY NEWSPAPER OF LOWER MANHATTAN — Volume 19 • Issue 7 | June 30 - Huly 6, 2006

Editorial

Memorial Museum needs to charge for admission
Part of Albany’s dysfunctional routine includes each house passing bills that legislators know have little choice of becoming law. They score points back home, blame either the evil party controlling the other house or the governor for blocking passage. So we weren’t too surprised to see a misguided bill about admission fees to the proposed World Trade Center memorial museum pass one house this week, but it was startling to see it was sponsored by Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver.


Letters to the editor

Under Cover

Soho store beating
The owner of a Tasti D-Lite at 203 Spring St. was beaten in his shop on Wednesday afternoon June 28

Editorial Pictures

Have boat, send flowers

Construction Rally

Gay pride

Tuning up for the playoffs

Talking Point
What would Eleanor do, Senator Clinton?
By Ed Gold
Dear Sen. Clinton:
As a  longtime supporter, I  am moved  to make a friendly  and heartfelt  suggestion: It’s  time for you to have  another  talk with Eleanor Roosevelt. She might, for example, remind you not to snub principled supporters like the Village Independent  Democrats who joined your  camp early in your senatorial race in 2000 and  have  mirrored your long-standing  commitment  to human dignity and international cooperation   during a  nearly 50-year-old  history  that  predates  your  Goldwater days.

The Penny Post
Poetry light on young Islam
By Andrei Codrescu
I’m reading “Snow” by Orhan Pamuk, a Turkish novelist. His protagonist is a poet who returns to Turkey after years of exile in Germany. In the ‘70s, he’d been a leftist intellectual student who managed to escape from Turkey before being arrested. On his return, nearly two decades later, he finds that the new radicals are young Islamists who are burning with revolutionary passion just as he did.

Sports
Rockies win Downtown Little League championship
The Rockies earned the Downtown Little League’s Major Division championship on Monday with a 5-4 win over the Astros, capping a sweep of the league’s first-ever playoffs.

Downtown Express photo by Elsabeth Robert

Millennium High School’s first class celebrated Thursday at the school’s first graduation.

First class graduation
By Anindita Dasgupta
Most speakers couldn’t finish their speeches without interruptions of laughter, tears or applause at the Millennium High School graduation Thursday.

News
Color and trees for Freedom Tower base and plaza
By Ronda Kaysen
The 186-foot tall concrete, fortified base of the Freedom Tower that has evoked the scorn of critics who liken it to a concrete bunker will instead dazzle the eye with color refracting from a façade made of vertical glass prisms, the tower’s architects announced Wednesday.

Tribeca tower riles residents
By Janel Bladow
Diane Dreyfus closes the door to her apartment on Elizabeth St. one last time with the excitement of new adventures ahead and the sadness of leaving so many memories and friends behind.
INSIDE

2 cyclists killed in traffic accidents
By Albert Amateau
A Brooklyn filmmaker bicycling in the rain to his job on the West Side on Monday morning died when he fell under the wheels of an 18-wheel truck on a stretch of W. Houston St. under reconstruction at LaGuardia Pl

Mexican mainstay celebrates 50 years on Pearl
By Anindita Dasgupta
Carlos Majorman did not bring a family with him when he came to the U.S. more than 50 years ago. Instead, he established what is likely the city’s oldest Mexican restaurant, Pancho Magico, where patrons still talk about the “kind and handsome” restaurateur.

Finding the perfect fit on Orchard St.
By Ronda Kaysen
Ralph Bergstein looms large in his tiny, charmless shop on Orchard St. With thick, puffy hands and a wild, red beard, he hunches behind the narrow counter, rifling through the hundreds of hand labeled, rectangular boxes filled with endless brands of brassieres. When his wife calls out for a bra, he tosses one her way.

Judge takes summer to decide Knickerbocker’s future
Knickerbocker Village had its day in court Monday. Lawyers for the complex’s 4,000 tenants, its owners and the state appeared in State Supreme Court to plead their case for the future of the rent protected residential

Downtown popping on Independence Day
Instead of lounging on the La-Z-Boy to watch the fireworks on a screen, there is a bouquet of activities to commemorate the Fourth of July Downtown this year.

Limited Tribeca Hudson Park work begins
By David Spett
About five years ago, Queens resident Paul Forro, now 71, discovered Hudson River Park. His wife had just died, and he started walking in the park to pass the time.Two or three times a week, Forro takes the subway to Battery Park City and walks north. Typically, he said, he walks to 23rd St. and takes the bus across town.

Downtown Arts & Entertainment

One New York, through two very different lenses
By Steven Snyder
The idea of the city as an urban jungle is nothing new, but the two vastly disparate jungles now hanging side by side at the Photographic Gallery offer an interesting commentary on how the same city can be a very different adventure when seen through different eyes, at different times.

‘Water’s Edge’ pushes point of plausibility
By Scott Harrah
There are many likable aspects of this New England family drama, most notably the first-rate cast. Alexander Dodge’s set, featuring a disheveled lakeside mansion with Greek columns, is elaborate indeed. However, from the very first scene, the plot — which focuses on wealthy, middle-aged businessman Richard (Tony Goldwyn) — is questionably plausible. Richard returns to the home of his estranged wife Helen (Kate Burton) and their two children Erica (Mamie Gummer) and Nate (Austin Lysy) after 17 years. He has been sending checks to support the family all this time, but has been completely absent from their lives until now.

Dance company celebrates milestone Downtown
This weekend will see two danceworld milestones in one – nicholasleichterdance celebrates its tenth anniversary in a June 29-July 1 run at Dance New Amsterdam, marking the close of DNA’s first season in its new Lower Manhattan space. The company performs four works choreographed by Nicholas Leichter, commissioned over the course of a decade by DNA.

Smells like teen spirit
By Rachel Fershleiser
A century ago, German playwright Frank Wedekind’s “Spring Awakening” was finally produced, fifteen years after it was written. The controversial drama, about a group of naïve teenagers whose budding sexual urges lead them to disaster, was intermittently edited or outright banned until the early nineteen seventies. Last week an uncensored rock-musical adaptation debuted at Atlantic Theater Company. At its heart, it seems to be an allegory of sex education, a theme that retains its relevance in the Bush years.

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A King Lear who just might throw a chair at you
By JERRY TALLMER
King Lear was sitting in his Chrysler Minivan in Brooklyn Heights, waiting for the parking-okay hour of 11 a.m, the morning after his opening night at Ellen Stewart’s La MaMa on East 4th Street. The drama runs three and a half hours, so Lear, also known as Alvin Epstein, hadn’t had much sleep.

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