Overlooking the site where the father recovered his son
By Divya Watal
Lee Ielpi’s eyes fill with tears as he recalls finding the body of his son in the rubble of the Twin Towers after three months of relentless searching.

B.P.C. creates a tie with tsunami village
By Zachary Roy
Battery Park City Cares, a group of B.P.C. residents committed to providing aid to survivors of the Indian Ocean tsunamis, is going to focus its efforts helping one Sri Lankan village with the rebuilding process.

Leader puts school zoning on the table
By Ronda Kaysen
I.S. 89 is not large enough to accommodate all of Downtown’s middle school-aged children if it were re-zoned for the neighborhood, according to a letter from Peter Heaney, superintendent for Region 9, although the neighborhood will likely need a zoned middle school in the coming years.

City files suit against Downtown group; arrests 37
By Jefferson Siegel
In the city’s latest legal maneuver against the monthly Critical Mass bike ride in Manhattan, just days before last Friday’s ride, many in the bike community were surprised when the city issued a summons to four members of Time’s Up!, an environmental action group on E. Houston St. that supports, but claims it does not organize, the Critical Mass ride.

Agency begins search for Governors Island ideas
By Ronda Kaysen
Call it a coming out party for Governors Island. The serene teardrop of land, half a mile off of Manhattan’s southern tip, is ready to hear what ideas the private sector has in store. The Governors Island Preservation and Education Corporation, the city and state agency that maintains the property, released a Request for Expressions of Interest for its ward this week and is now waiting for ideas to flood the gates.

Translating housing law for those who don’t speak inglés
By Andrew LaVallee
An elderly Haitian woman walks hesitantly toward the front desk at Manhattan Housing Court, Room 523. There’s no Creole interpreter available today, the harried court officer tells her.

Seniors keep waiting for Centre St. center to open
By Ronda Kaysen
Project Open Door, a Chinatown senior center, is still waiting to move into its new home in a luxury condo on Centre St. — four years after the city secured the space for it.

Street bill signed
Mayor Michael Bloomberg signed the “Park Row Bill” into law on Monday at City Hall. City Councilmember Alan Gerson, left, introduced the legislation last spring in reaction to post-9/11 security closures on Park Row near Police Plaza and near the New York Stock Exchange.

Loosening martyrs’ nooses
By JERRY TALLMER
Never mug a Princeton man. He may get up, lick his wounds and write something like:
How to make a suspect talk?
So many tacks to use!
Some go with charm and flattery
Now there’s a clever ruse!

A lifetime of cutting-edge filmmaking
By JERRY TALLMER
When the Germans came to the Mekas farmhouse in the Lithuanian village of Semeniskiai in 1944, Jonas Mekas, as he puts it today, “went out the window and into the potato field.” The last thing he glimpsed behind him was his father up against the wall, a German gun pressed into his back.

The passing of a music giant
By JERRY TALLMER
He was black and I am blue. “I’m white inside,” the great song goes, “But that don’t help my case, / ’Cause I can’t hide / What is on my face… What did I do / To be so black and blue?”

e.e. cummings ‘the painter’
By JERRY TALLMER
Three and a half blocks from #4 Patchin Place is 8 West 8th Street, once the studio of Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, where in 1931 she launched the Whitney Museum of American Art, and it is in that memory-laden mazelike building – now the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting, and Sculpture – that on a recent evening several dozen inhabitants of...