Editorial
Don’t renege on rent promise to Knickerbocker tenants
One of the biggest problems with the federal $21-billion, 9/11 community development aid package was that so little of it was used for affordable housing in Lower Manhattan. Much of the $50 million affordable housing fund the governor and mayor announced three years ago — a fraction of one percent of the entire package — still has not been spent, and some of the allocated money may not live up to the promise of preserving affordable apartments.
Police Blotter
Letters to the editor
Under Cover
The Penny Post
No birthday celebration
By Andrei Codrescu
We are closing in on the one-year anniversary of our local and national shame, which was the response to Katrina. Katrina was just a storm, but what followed was so hideous that one year later we can still only shake our heads and vomit.
News Briefs
German surveillance firm moves Downtown
A walk for the ages
Picture Story
Hot dancing in a cool spot
A group of Spanish dancers cooled off in the sprays of the Battery Park fountain, Monday when temperatures hit a high of 94 degrees.
Sports
The Downtown Little League
The Downtown Little League’s all-star tem of 9 and 10 year olds lost to Inwood Sunday in a tournament game, but the team is having one of its best tournament showings in the history of the league, beating West Side and East Harlem last week.
Youth Activities
|
Downtown Express photo by Scot Surbeck
Sizzling Salsa!
Colombian dancers from Ballet Nacional de la Salsa stopped by Battery Park’s fountains Monday to cool off and practice their routine in the water. The troupe is on a national tour and treated heat-weary park visitors to a free show. [MORE]
|
|
News
Soho street artists brush with police
By David Spett
Rick Lee, a First Precinct community affairs police officer, gave this description of Soho’s street artists:
“They’re rude, they urinate in doorways, they’re vulgar, they fight, they’re drunk.
”Art Commission snubs C.B.1 over West St.
By Janet Kwon
Community Board 1 says the city Art Commission is stonewalling them on why the art group rejected plans for parkland along the West Side Highway.
|
|
|
|
|
Goldman to buy Embassy hotel
By Ronda Kaysen
Goldman Sachs is in negotiations with Embassy Suites to buy the Battery Park City hotel, Downtown Express has learned. The investment bank recently began construction on a new $2.4 billion headquarters directly opposite Embassy Suites. A block-long pedestrian walkway is all that separates the two parcels, which are bounded by West St., Murray St., North End Ave. and Vesey St.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
INSIDE
Soho woman: I was arrested for trying to return lost bag
By Albert Amateau
A Soho resident who thought she was being a good Samaritan when she picked up an apparently forgotten shopping bag on a bench on the Columbus Circle No. 1 subway platform on the afternoon of June 14, ended up spending five hours in the Midtown Community Court and being booked for petit larceny.
After NEST fight, charter lands at Tweed Courthouse
By Anindita Dasgupta
Over the past four months, Sherill Collins, a prospective parent at Ross Global Academy charter school, has gone from being nervous to ecstatic, from ecstatic to devastated and finally from devastated to ecstatic again now that the search for the charter school’s location is over.
 Kiddie pool, teen activities added to B.P.C. rec center
By Ronda Kaysen
After more than two decades as a bona fide neighborhood, Battery Park City is finally getting a recreation center where it can work on its Downward Facing Dog.
|
|
 Waterway agrees to pay back $1.2 million in billing dispute
By Ronda Kaysen
New York Waterway agreed to pay $1.2 million to settle a civil suit claiming it over-billed the United States government for ferrying commuters to and from Lower Manhattan in the wake of 9/11.
Wall St. non-profit seeks donors to prevent blindness
By Anindita Dasgupta
Despite her diagnosis of a progressive eye disease 18 years ago, Stacy Heap, 38, has not only Rollerbladed in 23 different countries, but she has also lost her delicate $80 gas permeable contact lenses in many of those countries as well.
 Trump’s hotel claim is zoning ruse, neighbors say
By Gerard Flynn
Community activists got a step closer to toppling Donald Trump’s plans for a 45-story hotel in Hudson Square following a decision Thursday by Community Board 2’s Zoning Committee to reject the project on legal grounds.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Downtown Arts & Entertainment
 A new schtick for the Museum of Jewish Heritage
By Rachel Breitman
Comedy, cultural, and culinary icons, like Jackie Mason, the 92nd Street Y, and Katz’s Delicatessen are irrevocably linked to the New York Jewish experience.
 Lascivious Biddies stir up own blend of “cocktail pop”
By Gillian Reagan
The scene was typical for the low-lit Makor Café – young couples and aging lovers holding hands under sleek, mahogany tables – but the performers they were about to see were unlike any “girl band” in New York.
|
|
 Bada-Sting: New doc takes harsh look at Sicilian Mafia
By Noah Fowle
While the mafia is often mythologized by American film and television, Marco Truco’s new documentary, “Excellent Cadavers,” takes a remarkably different tack, capturing the mafia through the eyes of their victims and prosecutors.
Hollywood’s golden era, by way of poetry — and now the stage
By Jerry Tallmer
Michael Boothroyd was an undergraduate at Emerson College, in Boston, in the mid-1980s, when he first read those lines. A graduate student, aware of Michael’s passion for Joan Crawford, had handed him a book containing that poem, which goes on for some 230 rich, dry, infectious lines, plus many other no less gemutlich poems about the great old Hollywood movies of the ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Downtown Express is published by
Community Media LLC.
145 Sixth Avenue, New York, NY 10013
Phone: (212) 229-1890 Fax: (212) 229-2790
Advertising: (646) 452-2465 •
© 2006 Community Media, LLC
Email: news@downtownexpress.com
|
|
