THE WEEKLY NEWSPAPER OF LOWER MANHATTAN | Volume 20 Issue 17 | September 7 - 13 , 2007
L.M.D.C. agrees to reseal Deutsche after low dioxin levels are found
By Skye H. McFarlane
Safe air and a working emergency notification system topped a long list of community demands crafted this week in the wake of the deadly Deutsche Bank fire. <article>
Editorial Hilly Kristal, the patriarch of punk It’s hard to believe that Hilly Kristal is no longer with us, because the music that his famous club, CBGB, nurtured is today so much a part of our culture. Punk, new wave and, later, speed metal, hardcore, crust core and the rest may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but the music left a profound mark on New York lore and music history. Last Tuesday, Kristal, who was 75, died after a battle with lung cancer.
Downtown Express photo by Milo Hess B.P.C. is for lovers Rockefeller Park is just one of many romantic spots in Battery Park City.
The Penny Post A guide for the rest of your life By Andrei Codrescu
Here is a project: re-read everything you’ve ever read, look again at all the art works that once you had strong opinions about, listen again to the music that had such existential meaning back when all questions were grave and all answers were poetic, see again all the movies that once made an impression on you.
Photo by Willington Lee The Big DrawSaturday, Sept. 8, is the all-day Big Draw offering hands-on art projects for all ages, sponsored by River to River and the Drawing Center, at five fantastic Downtown venues. See the listing on this page for more information.
Well at least it’s yellow, as one parent put it. Battery Park City middle schoolers waiting for a school bus that never came Tuesday hopped in a cab to E. 21st St. for their first day in their new school. For more Back to School news, see this week’s special section.
The wheels on the no-show bus go right by B.P.C. students By Skye H. McFarlane
When Olivia Goodkind and her father, Tom, did a test run of the trip to Simon Baruch middle school this summer, the results were not encouraging. The subway route took 45 minutes, including two long cross-town walks. The two Goodkinds then walked to South Ferry to try the M15 bus. They waited. And waited.
Antiques-and-props man helps photog get his props By Gerry Visco
It was a typical night over at Billy’s Antiques & Props on E. Houston St. hard by the Bowery. You’ve seen the place — arrayed on the sidewalk in front of the old green tent, a collection of stylish vintage bureaus, funky coffee tables and kitschy objets d’art for sale by offbeat characters.
Downtowners find Deutsche’s ‘alphabet soup’ hard to read By Josh Rogers and Skye H. McFarlane
A month before two firefighters were killed at the former Deutsche Bank building, Charles Maikish, who was still Downtown’s construction czar, looked at the shrouded building and called it a “tombstone.”
W.T.C. work may go round the clock By Josh Rogers
Port Authority officials said this week that World Trade Center construction progress is proceeding rapidly but they may have to go to a 24-hour schedule to avoid paying developer Larry Silverstein $300,000 a day in fines if they miss a January deadline.
Rockland ferries cruise in Downtown Private ferry service from Haverstraw to Lower Manhattan began Sept. 4, although ridership was low the first day.
Very few ferry commuters waiting at the World Financial Center Tuesday afternoon were headed for Haverstraw, but a spokesperson for New York Water Taxi said 46 people took the new ride from or to the W.F.C. or Pier 11 near Wall St.
Swimmers lap up the end of the outdoor pool season By Jefferson Siegel
As the sun rises each day in the summer, while a good portion of city dwellers either bolt for work or sleep late, there is a contingent of dedicated swimmers who head straight for more than a dozen outdoor city pools to participate in lap swimming.
Kristal, ‘father of punk’ and CBGB, dies at 75 By Sarah Ferguson
The Lower East Side lost another icon last week. Hilly Kristal, founderof CBGB, the legendary dive bar on the Bowery that gave birth to punk in the 1970s, died on Aug. 28 at Cabrini Hospital after a yearlong battle with lung cancer. He was 75.
DOWNTOWN ART & LIFESTYLE A tale of two cities By Kelly Kingman
Mel Chin’s first animated film, “9-11/9-11,” is a politically charged love story and cautionary tale set simultaneously in New York City in 2001 and in the Santiago, Chile of 1973. Chin is a Houston-born conceptual artist who abandoned traditional object making in the early nineties for more activist and site-specific projects.
Meat Puppets show signals a change for The Knit By Todd Simmons
After surviving a tumultuous decade of personal demons, family tragedy and fluctuating musical trends, the Austin-based, desert-raised band, the Meat Puppets, sounded as vitally ragged as ever during the first of their two shows last week at the Knitting Factory. It wasn’t so much a comeback as a re-convergence, as the Kirkwood brothers played their first New York show together in more than seven years.
Love in the time of turmoil By Leonard L. Quart
Eytan Fox is an Israeli director whose last film, the skillfully crafted and entertaining “Walk on Water,” a thriller with a gay subtext, became the most successful Israeli film ever shown abroad. All the Eytan Fox directed films I have seen, whatever else they are about, deal very openly with gay sex and love. (An earlier work, “Yossi and Jagger,” depicted the love affair between two officers in the Israeli army.)
Pope John Paul II: spiritual leader, peacemaker, playwright? By Jerry Tallmer
There was once a poet, striving actor, aspiring playwright named Karol Jozef Wojtyla, and one of his plays that has survived — he wrote only a half-dozen all told — is “The Jeweler’s Shop,” which dates not from his early years with the underground Rhapsodic Theater in Nazi-occupied Poland, but circa 1960, when Karol Wojtyla was the newly appointed Bishop of Krakow. Eighteen years later he would become Pope John Paul II.
‘Dining Room’ in no need of remodeling By Jerry Tallmer
It is like a string of pearls, or what you glimpse from one subway train when it is being passed by another — scene, scene, scene, scene, each scene, each vignette conveying a moment, a life, a relationship, a crisis, a stasis, an attitude, an essence, a turning point, all in this one big old honorable dining room that is many dining rooms before the play is out.
Back to School Downtown Express photo by Tequila Minsky There were many fond farewells Tuesday morning as parents dropped off their children for the first day of school at P.S. 89 in Battery Park City.
On Day One, P.S. 234 teachers rave about annex By Skye H. McFarlane
The children were gone from the P.S. 234 annex late Tuesday afternoon, but the teachers lingered, labeling storage bins and setting up their classrooms for day No. 2 in the newly opened building.
Preschools grow with their young charges By Jennifer Milne
Choosing the right preschool can be a daunting task for some new parents, and with so many choices in Lower Manhattan. Because more families are moving Downtown, spaces in the area’s preschools are filling up quicker than ever before. Nearly all of the preschools we spoke to of this article said their programs – and waiting lists – filled up earlier this year than last year.
Go east, young students. Montessori school expands to Gold By Jennifer Milne
The furniture may be stacked up in the gym, and the classrooms may be empty, but Montessori School of Manhattan is getting ready to open its newest “Wall Street” campus at 2 Gold St. on Sept. 10.
Some vocational students would give the military a shot By Lincoln Anderson
At Chelsea Campus High School in Soho, a vocational school, students have some different opinions on whether the military is a good career choice.
3 middle schools that get good grades from parents By Anindita Dasgupta
Salk School of Science, Manhattan Academy of Technology and the N.Y.C. Lab School are three of the most popular District 2 middle schools, according to school officials and parents of sixth graders who graduated last June from these Lower Manhattan schools: P.S. 89, P.S. 1, P.S. 124, P.S. 150, P.S. 234, New Explorations into Science Technology and M.A.T.’s elementary school.
Listen to Downtown Express
Radio on the internet: Two residents who live near the former Deutsche Bank building, Pat Moore, a Community Board 1 member, and Dave Stanke, a Downtown Express columnist, talk about their concerns living near the skyscraper's dismantling and the construction as well as their thoughts on the Survivors' Stairway and other issues related to the World Trade Center site with hosts Josh Rogers and Skye H. McFarlane. Recorded June 4, 2007.
Downtown Express photo by Tequila Minsky
