THE WEEKLY NEWSPAPER OF LOWER MANHATTAN

Downtown Express photo by Robert Stolarik

A walk for affordable housing
Diane Lapson, president of the Independence Plaza Tenants Association, left, passed out protest signs to neighbors who joined a City Hall demonstration Wednesday. (Go to Article).

INSIDE DOWNTOWN EXPRESS
Shakespeare on the island?
By Ronda Kaysen
All the world’s a stage, but some stages are better equipped to become a replica of Shakespeare’s Globe Theater than others. One woman thinks she may have found just the right spot: Castle Williams on Governors Island.

Silver says school deal has been reached
By Josh Rogers
Mayor Bloomberg and Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver reached a deal Wednesday night to build a new K-8 school on Lower Manhattan’s East Side, Silver told Downtown Express.

Flower market kicks off Lunar fest
By Josie Garthwaite
The ball has dropped, that little black champagne-scented dress cleaned, and 2004 is finally starting to feel like last year. As New York gets into the swing of 2005, the Lunar Year 4703 — the year of the Rooster — is poised to strut from the wings, and Chinatown is prepared to greet it in style.

Police parking once again draws residents’ ire
By Ronda Kaysen
Most cops don’t approve of cars touching curbs, but cars on top of curbs is another story — so long as the car is one of theirs.

Barflies, neighbors react to actress murder
By Amanda Kludt
Although Monday’s arrest of a murder suspect in the shooting of actress Nicole duFresne, 28, may provide some small relief for those living on the Lower East Side, one wonders what the crime says about the neighborhood and whether or not the popular bar scene will change. While most Lower East Side workers, patrons and residents agree that people will continue to frequent the area, they seem divided over whether or not the murder signals an unnoticed undercurrent of tension in the popular neighborhood.

Deutsche Plan must change, agency rules
By Ronda Kaysen
The Lower Manhattan Development Corporation intends to respond within a few weeks to the Environmental Protection Agency’s extensive criticisms of its draft plan to deconstruct the former Deutsche Bank building at 130 Liberty St.

E.P.A. to communicate more on Albany St.
By Ronda Kaysen
The Environmental Protection Agency plans to dole out any information it gets about contamination at 4 Albany St. to Community Board 1.

I.P.N. tenants join City Hall housing rally
By Zachary Roy
About 30 Independence Plaza North tenants marched on Wednesday afternoon from their Greenwich St. housing complex to City Hall, where they joined several thousand people representing various community groups from all five boroughs in a housing rally.

Practicing the sweet science near the W.T.C.
By Zachary Roy
Images of boxing gyms have been seared onto the American consciousness by Hollywood: dark masculine domains, with bloodstained floors, an omnipresent stench and crotchety old men barking orders. On the surface, Martin Snow blends seamlessly into that scene. With his 6-foot-4-inch, broad-shouldered frame and mammoth paws, the Brooklyn native and Fordham alumnus does not look like someone you want to cross.

Seward Park to get 2 new high schools
By Divya Watal
Two new schools are slated to open in Lower Manhattan this September as part of a plan to create 52 small secondary schools in the city, according to the Department of Education.

Museum to camp on a pier for 3 months
By Hemmy So
Work is finishing on a colossal temporary museum, made from 148 shipping containers, on Pier 54 at W. 13th St. Recently relocated from Venice, the Nomadic Museum, designed by Japanese architect Shigeru Ban, creates a 45,000-sq.-ft. space from the multi-colored steel shipping containers and recycled paper tubes — used to make the roof.

Downtown Homes and Lofts A look into B.P.C. living By Alison Gregor Battery Park City has found itself reluctantly thrust into the limelight in recent years. Though largely abandoned immediately after the 2001 terrorist attacks, it ended up playing a critical and highly public role in the city’s recovery. More recently, it became the unwitting backdrop to the tawdry romantic history of former New York Police Department Commissioner Bernard Kerik. Iowa senator threatens tax break used in Tribeca BY Hemmy So Among the thousands of obscure tax code provisions, one has recently come to the attention of many New York City and Washington D.C. residents thanks to aggressive marketing strategies by certain non-profits groups: tax breaks for facade easements. These tax breaks often create windfalls for property owners of historical buildings, a situation recently examined by the Washington Post and lambasted by Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA). Condos get smaller and pricier According to a survey done in New York City by Yale Robbins Inc., condominium prices have been steadily going up while their square footage has been plummeting down.		In The Arts Play looks at first of the high school rampages By Jerry Tallmer They asked me what I thought that day. What TV shows did I watch? Did I read about Vietnam? Did I listen to rock music? They wanted to know what I saw when I pulled the trigger. I told them: Roses. They opened up like roses . . . Monthly folk evokes intimacy and another era By Aileen Torres A sense of intimacy is what Alan Light, the curator of “Live From Home,” originally had in mind for the monthly acoustic music series at Housing Works. The window on the ring By Jerry Tallmer This is an artist’s studio with a difference. It is also a boxing ring. “There were two fights,” said the artist. “The first one in Miami, the second one up in Maine. The first one had red ropes. The second one had blue ropes. It just happened that way.”

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