Downtown Express photo by Lorenzo Ciniglio

Port Authority contractors work on the escalators for the third and last temporary entrance to the World Trade Center PATH stop. The entrance is expected to open in a few weeks and the permanent train station is scheduled to open in 2001.

W.T.C. construction pieces begin to take shape
By Julie Shapiro
When tourists and curious residents peer into the World Trade Center site from street level, they see a big dirt pit, studded with machinery, a jumble of puzzle pieces that don’t quite form a complete picture.

E.P.A. says it waited 5 months for Deutsche demo plan
By Julie Shapiro
Just over five months after the fatal blaze at the former Deutsche Bank building, the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation submitted its first official plan for the building to the Environmental Protection Agency.

9/11 health cuts may keep coming, advocates warn
By Julie Shapiro
Joseph Libretti doesn’t call himself a hero. The ironworker from Pennsylvania, who searched for survivors and worked on the pile after 9/11, says that word belongs to those who died, not those who lived. The word belongs to his brother, Daniel, a firefighter killed in the North Tower collapse.

Seaport Museum and city fighting over pier space
By Julie Shapiro
Frank Sciame says the South Street Seaport Museum has rights to Pier 15. The city Economic Development Corporation says otherwise.

Landslide for Lane

BY CHRISTOPHER BYRNE

Politics, as anyone with access to a newspaper or television knows only too well, is a very, very messy business. A combination of naked aggression, manipulation, ego run rampant, and cynicism tricked out as humanity, this most ancient of arts is not for the faint of heart or weak of stomach. The depressing and tawdry circus of the current, seemingly interminable primary season could make one laugh — if it didn’t so often make one want to cry.

Koch On Film

Under the sea, but not entirely soggy

By Scott Harrah

Anyone expecting a highbrow adaptation of a Disney film like Julie Taymor’s “The Lion King” will be disappointed with the colorful mess that is “The Little Mermaid,” but it is not nearly as bad as some of the buzz has claimed. The show has been receiving negative press ever since it started previewing out of town in Denver last year, but it is never as tepid as the ill-fated 2006 Disney adaptation of “Tarzan,” and it is actually more fun for children than the current revival of “Mary Poppins.”

Off the Grid

BY STEPHEN MUELLER

A new civilization of gallery life has sprung up in the immediate vicinity of the New Museum on the Bowery and along the blocks east of Ludlow Street. Reminiscent of the East Village scene of the ’80s, the current gentrification, somewhat less funky, makes a viable alternative to the architectural statement of mega-galleries hugging the Hudson in Chelsea. There is a “back to the roots” feeling about the spaces and a cottage industry look of an earlier time about the art being shown.

Ethereal metal at the Masonic Temple

BY ANDREY HENKIN

Some 20 years after forming, the Bay Area band Neurosis is now part of a larger aesthetic it was instrumental in forming, a causality paradox on full display across the river at the Brooklyn Masonic Temple January 24th.