THE WEEKLY NEWSPAPER OF LOWER MANHATTAN

		NEWS Whole Food hopes for Tribeca tower By Ronda Kaysen Whole Foods Market, the high-end grocery store that has New Yorkers salivating for sushi grade tuna and calamata olive bread, may soon plant itself on Greenwich St. Memorial group’s first meeting By Josh Rogers The C.E.O.-studded and celebrity-sprinkled group picked to raise money to build the World Trade Center memorial and cultural center met behind closed doors Wednesday and began organizing to raise about $500 million. Duarte statue to remain center of his namesake square By Albert Amateau The new design for Duarte Sq., the brick triangle on the north side Canal St. at Sixth Ave., which calls for keeping the statue of Juan Pablo Duarte in the middle of the triangle near its present position, won a vote of approval this week from the Community Board 2 parks committee. Stewart more confident as jury readies to deliberate By Mary Reinholz After a few tears a few months ago, attorney Lynne Stewart was laughing and appeared confident this week as the jury gets ready to decide whether or not she helped terrorists. Hudson River Park receives awards for excellence Hudson River Park, the 5-mile-long riverfront park between the Battery and 59th St. being built by the state-city Hudson River Park Trust, received five awards for excellence in 2004.
Downtown Express photo by Elisabeth Robert A Fulton Fish Market fish tagged for sale. The market is expected to move out of Lower Manhattan within a few months. Seaport’s fish reflections By Ronda Kaysen Wednesday morning at the Fulton Fish Market was no different than any other morning in the last 170 years. A fishmonger named Stretch, with a steel hook dangling from his shoulder, packed Tilapia in ice. A journeyman, wincing from the sleet, shoved his hands into his jacket pockets, the East River gray and foreboding behind him. Soon, this will be gone. Makeshift tsunami relief center opens on Canal St. By Ronda Kaysen Robert Rowen, a Chelsea resident and photographer, spent most of New Year’s Day watching a steady stream of news about the Asian tsunamis on television. Overwhelmed by the devastating barrage of images, he posted an ad on Craigslist, an online bulletin board, asking where he could volunteer. Within 24 hours, he had not only found a partner — Nick Spanos, founder of the Soho real estate firm Bapple – but he had set up his own Tsunami Relief Center at west end of Canal St. Tribeca performance artist Reno’s new dog was a hit at the show. 2005 Opens with poetry group’s marathon By Jefferson Siegel On New Year’s Day, while some people were in bars watching football games, home nursing hangovers or watching another “Twilight Zone” marathon, an epic literary and artistic event was unfolding over the course of the day and night at St. Mark’s Church in the Bowery.

In The Arts The art of seduction By Jerry Tallmer It is a cartoon Jew out of Julius Streicher’s ferociously anti-Semitic newspaper, Der Sturmer, only this is an animated cartoon, or a brief fragment of one – a hook-nosed, humpbacked caricature Jew clumping into some dark, conspiratorial woods as the sound track bizarrely supplements that image with the patched-in lyric of a soupy, sentimental German song of that era: “A star that has fallen from heaven, straight into the human heart . . . ” History and healing By Chirsttopher Byrne In its lyricism and narrative structure, reminiscent of the metaphorical “magical realism” of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, “Gem of the Ocean,” August Wilson’s latest play, is the story of an African-American community less than 40 years following the Civil War. It is a timeless, and intrinsically American, story of human survival, religious faith and the intrusiveness of technological change.		Good scribbling By Stephen Muller At a recent holiday gathering, another art critic was overheard saying, in reference to Sam Reveles, “This one does scribbles.” Whether intended as a joke or an expression of a world-weary critic exposed to too much kid art of late, the remark gave this reviewer pause. As a fan of Sam Reveles’ work in general and an admirer of his current show at CRG Gallery, I found the remark glib at best. Going global in the new year By Jason Victor Serinus As we begin another increasingly globally-interconnected year, world music continues to offer a greater variety of refreshing sounds. The following CDs are this critic’s menu for some of the most interesting offerings, even with some imperfections, for 2005.

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