west view news october 2011

The Voice of the West Village

WestView News

www.westviewnews.orgWhat is a Heart Attack?

— See page 9

VOLUME 7, NUMBER 10 OctOber 2011 $1.00

Complimentary Copy

By Dr. David Kaufman

Thank you for allowing me to speak. I am a physician practicing internal medicine in Greenwich Village. As both an academic and community physician, as well as an HIV Specialist, over the last three decades I have cared for thousands of patients requir-ing emergency services and inpatient care.

Selling Us Out Last Words

A RECIPE FOR DISASTER?: Dr. David Kaufman delivers his views on North Shore NS-LIJ’s application to build a “Free Standing Emergency Room.” Images from the Video tape of the Department of Health hear-ings. http://www.totalwebcasting.com/view/?id=nysdoh

THE SHAPES OF THINGS TO COME: Upright, adult bikes – very comfortable and relatively slow – in the New York Department of Transportation’s rendering of the Bike Share Station at Atlantic Terminal.”

At the Department of Health hearing, doctors plead for healthcare and politicians only talk profits

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As the DOH moves to close off hospital debate the community speaks

By George Capsis

After a year of collective and, we believe, self-protective silence, State Senator Tom Duane, on behalf of all of the politicians representing the West Village, including Speaker Chris Quinn, Congressman Jerry Nadler, Assembly Member Deborah Glick and Assembly Member and Chairman of the Health Committee, Richard Gottfried, encouraged the New York State Depart-ment of Health (DOH) to approve the application by North Shore-NS-LIJ (NS-LIJ) to build a clinic, rather than demand-ing the restoration of a Trauma 1 emer-gency room and hospital, thereby clearing the way for the demolition of Coleman and Link and the erection of 450 luxury condominiums.

In response, 30-year St. Vincent’s vet-eran, Dr. David Kaufman, offered that this proposed NS-LIJ clinic would violate every medical guideline and standard for time needed for the definitive treatment of heart attacks or strokes.

Kaufman continued that because the NS-LIJ facility will be deceptively offered as an “emergency department”, heart-attack and stroke victims will mistakenly visit it and loose time in triage, diagnosis and stabilization before being transferred by ambulance to a real emergency room and, in the process, “lose heart muscle, brain cells or die.”

Kaufman found it “mindboggling that the Senior Vice President for Strategy at NS-LIJ, Jeffrey Kraut, who proposed and conducted a West Village medical needs study, is, at the same time, the Chairman of the very DOH committee that is hear-ing the request by NSL-IJ to build a clinic.

Senator Duane defended the collec-tive vote by West Village politicians be-cause “no credible healthcare provider” has come forth and because of “the challeng-ing healthcare economy.” Clearly ignoring the fact that before St. Vincent's closed, Mt. Sinai was fully prepared to take over and maintain all the inpatient and out-

We are here today to discuss North Shore-NS-LIJ’s (NS-LIJ) application, submitted in the name of their latest ac-quisition, Lenox Hill Hospital, to open a Center for Comprehensive Care, which they call a Free Standing Emergency Room. There are so many issues here, so many healthcare complexities, so many

By George Bliss

New York seems destined to have a pub-lic bike-share system. As proposed by the Department of Transportation, and mod-eled after the Paris Vélib system, the city stands to make money from public bikes because of ads on the bikes and stations.

Bike Share is Coming to New YorkGoodbye, sport bikes. People will ride upright bikes in regular clothes, helping to civilize urban cycling.

Ten thousand bikes, 600 stations, perhaps by next summer, at no cost. It’s big … big enough to threaten the taxi industry monopoly. Don’t be surprised if the taxi lobby tries to stop or delay it until Bloom-berg is gone.

But if bike share does become a reality

2 WestView News October 2011 www.westviewnews.org

WestView News

Published by WestView, Inc. by and for the residents of the

West Village.

Publisher Executive Editor

George Capsis

Chief Financial Officer Peter White

Designer Yodit Tesfaye Walker

Picture Editor Maggie Berkvist

Events Editor/Designer Stephanie Phelan

Cartoonists & Illustrators Lee Lorenz

ContributorsTom Allon

Barry BenepeAndrew BermanGlenn BermanGeorge Bliss

Janet Stern CapronDoric CapsisJim Collier

Dar DowlingDuanduanJim Fouratt

Frank Thurston GreenMark M. GreenRobert Heide

Dr. David L. KaufmanKeith Michael

Michael D. MinicielloPaul NewellDavid Porat

Henry J. Stern

Copy Editors Julie Berger

Matthew Closter

Janet Capron

Theatre EditorBobb Goldsteinn

Photographer Maggie Berkvist

Distribution Manager Glenn Berman

We endeavor to publish all letters received including

those we disagree with.

The opinions put forth by contributors to WestView do

not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher or editor.

WestView welcomes your correspondence, comments,

and corrections: [email protected]

www.westviewnews.org

WestViewsCorrespondence, Commentary, Corrections

Not a Christian Funda-mentalistDear Editor,

Barbara Riddle, in her article in the September WestView, refers several times to Anders Breivik, the Norwegian mass murderer, as a “Christian fundamentalist.”

That term is one that requires expla-nation, and that explanation should have been included. While there is a veritable plethora of explanations about what con-stitutes one, I have selected the explana-tion from Christianity.com: “Four Biblical and Historic Tests to Examine the Valid-ity of One's Claim to Christian Faith: 1.) Do I believe the gospel message? (Do I trust Christ alone for salvation?) 2.) Am I a member of a doctrinally sound local church where this gospel is preached and members strive to confirm only profes-sions of faith that are credible? 3.) Do I submit to church discipline lovingly, gra-ciously, and faithfully administered? 4.)

Am I making continual progress toward inward godliness, fueled by the indwelling Holy Spirit, not legalism?”

Given the above, whatever Mr. Breivik might choose to believe about himself, he does not meet the criteria of “Christian fundamentalist.”

Finally, Ms. Riddle's summation is also dubious in that the evidence is that many, if not most, suicide bombers come from privileged backgrounds.

Sincerely,John F. EarlyWest Villager Since 1968

A Very, Very Busy New

York State DOH Reviewer Dear Editor:

Jeffrey Kraut, who is part of the man-agement and administration of North

Shore-Long Island Jewish (NS-LIJ) Health System, has been intimately in-volved with the whole Rudin condo-land deal to acquire the St. Vincent’s Hospital property and with the tradeoff conversion of the O’Toole Building into a “freestand-ing emergency room” by filing a Certificate of Need (CON) with the New York State Department of Health (NYS DOH). He was part of all aspects of the planning for this conversion to a facility that will bring income and patients to Lenox Hill Hos-pital, while ignoring what the evidence shows, that this community needs and wants a hospital and trauma center.

Now the community learns not only is Jeffrey Kraut the force for the NS-LIJ, the stand-alone emergency room Project 111531 CON filed with the NYS Depart-ment of Health, but he is its reviewer and has power of approval to yay or deny. He was chair of the Committee on Establish-ment and Project Review meeting and public hearing on Thursday, September 22., where this CON was to be reviewed. He is a member of all the other approval processes that follow in the NYS DOH vote.

Sincerely,Liz Ryan

Keeping Kids Safe Dear Editor:

Like many of your readers, I get written solicitations from many worthwhile chari-table organizations. With the economy as it is and myself on a fixed income, I con-tribute more 'gingerly' than in the past. Before discarding them, I have a habit of taking the contents out of the envelope and flattening them out for weekly recy-cling. In some instances, I've found the occasional gem of written wisdom among the dross of the contents.

The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children has sent me what I think is one of those "gem(s)". It is a Post-It giving a toll-free number to call in the event that I, or someone I know, see or note something that just doesn't/didn't look or seem right in an interaction be-tween someone older than the child and the child. I am throwing out the number to you now: 1-800-THE LOST. And like it says: "program the number into your mo-bile phone as well." There are a lot of chil-dren out there, in playgrounds and stuff, and there are also a significant number of not-incarcerated child predators out there, as well. "A word to the wise is sufficient."

John EarlyWest Villager Since 1968

www.westviewnews.org October 2011 WestView News 3

BRIEFLY NOTEDThe suburbs are coming!

On Wednesday, September 7, a meeting was held at the LGBT Community Center to review proposals for the re-development of St Vincent’s Triangle Park, the open space between Greenwich Avenue, Seventh Avenue South and West 12th Street.

The auditorium was close to full, a lively audience of staunch defenders of this community, including Andrew Berman, Executive Director of the GVSHP.

First up was Melanie Meyers, of Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver, & Jacobson LLP, counsel for Rudin Manage-ment. She introduced Rudin’s overall plan for the Triangle Garden: The developers would tear down the building connected with the triangle and turn it and the Triangle Park into public space (thereby satisfying certain zoning requirements).

Next came the landscaper, Rick Parisi, of M. Paul Frei-berg. He dazzled us with his power-point presentation—models and drawings of the imagined “park.” However, when the fanfare was all done, what we were left with was a generic, suburban plaza consisting of nothing more than asphalt and trees—no grass, no flowering bushes, no flow-ers—in short, nothing that would require maintenance on the part of Rudin Management. And, finally, no guarantee that this area would continue to be kept as public space in the years to come.

Community Board 2 responded with a proposal that Rudin turn the property over to the city to be owned in perpetuity by the Parks Department, which would design and maintain a garden in keeping with the character of our neighborhood.

Hail to the rat!

Watch out for the big scab rat, who can be found most mornings standing outside 99 Bank, representing the members of District Council No. 9, the Painters and Al-lied Traders Union. According to one of the striking union members, when it came time to point and paint, the Left Bank Corp, owners and managers of 99 Bank, decided to cut a few corners by hiring nonunion painters. The strik-er said, “This way they don’t have to pay a decent hourly wage or benefits.”

The WestView News left a message for Left Bank Corp. So far, no comment.

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community imperatives; it is difficult to know where to begin.

So, I will begin with people and try to get one of the most disturbing aspects of this process out of the way im-mediately. Over the last year, I have come to know and respect Jeff Kraut, his intelligence and his command of the healthcare landscape. However, I confess to being as-tonished and appalled that as a Senior Vice President for Strategy at NS-NS-LIJ, he has also been the lead executive for all of the quantitative data collection for the Westside Community Needs Health Assessment, the lead executive for NS-LIJ in the development of the Center for Compre-hensive Health Care whose Certificate of Need (CON) we are discussing today, the lead NS-LIJ executive involved in presenting the proposal to the lower Westside commu-nity, the Chairman of the NYS Hospital Review and Plan-ning Council Committee, the Chairman of the Executive Committee, and a member of the Project Review, Fiscal Policy, and Major Medical Equipment and Appropriate-ness Review Committees. The level of conflict here is mindboggling. Am I the only individual in this room that is offended by this obvious violation of objectivity, ethical limits, and basic fairness?

NS-LIJ is proposing to replace St. Vincent’s Hospi-tal with their Comprehensive Care Center. They state in their CON that what they call a free-standing Emergency Room will provide care for 30,000 patients a year. Their CON application defines the proposal as a “2 bed hospi-tal division of Lenox Hill.” The St. Vincent’s Emergency Room provided care for 67,000 patients a year. Thirteen thousand of those patients were sick enough, critically ill with strokes, heart attacks, sepsis, trauma , overdoses, and surgical emergencies, to require immediate admission to the ICU, CCU, neurosurgical ICU, operating rooms, psy-chiatry units, peds units, and general med-surg units. St. Vincent’s had a daily census of 350 patients every day of the year … Two beds? Capacity for 30,000 patients? No onsite specialists of any kind? No psychiatric services? No back up? Does that sound like an adequate replacement for a full-service hospital with 4500 staff members, a real emergency room, a level-one trauma center, and a huge

ambulatory care footprint?Let’s look more closely at their CON application. They

clearly state there will be no psychiatric or substance-abuse services, despite the fact that the Needs Assessment data collected by Jeff Kraut and NS-LIJ strongly states that this is one of the biggest problems and requirements of the lower Westside. That is painfully accurate. Anyone who has ever spent time in the St. Vincent’s emergency room can attest to the large numbers of comatose, vomiting, intubated, seizing, drug- and alcohol-overdosed patients on any given night. Where will they go? Two beds? Oh, right. They will be “stabilized and transferred,” miles away through NYC traffic, and hopefully will not have a cardiac or respiratory arrest on the way.

The CON states there will be “24 hour access to spe-cialist consultations through the network of NS-LIJ phy-sicians.” So what does this mean? When my child has a 3-inch laceration on his face, will they call a NS-LIJ plas-tic surgeon in Great Neck to telephonically lead the ER physician through the proper repair? Great. Does it mean when one of my patients comes in unable to speak, suffer-ing from an evolving stroke, they will contact a neurolo-gist in Queens for guidance on interpreting the scan and administering the clot-busting, brain-saving drugs? Does it mean, when my neighbor comes in with an acute abdo-men and possible perforated colon, they will call up a sur-geon for eloquent guidance? If this were not so profoundly serious, I would call it some kind of cruel joke. And this is their idea of a groundbreaking, new, “hybrid model of care.” I wonder how the wealthy residents of the Upper East Side or the suburbs that are home to NS-LIJ would react to this excuse for emergency care. To me, it sounds like a recipe for disaster, a pathetic and life-threatening compromise.

What else? The CON says it will be a “911 receiving facility.” So, does that mean all 911 calls can be brought there? Does it mean that all patients with chest pain, shortness of breath, paralysis, seizures, cardiac arrests, bi-cycle and motor-vehicle trauma, abdominal pain, sepsis, will be treated at this so-called Emergency Room? Or will our heroic and highly qualified first responders be required to determine in advance, be given complicated protocols, to decide where to bring these patients? And must the pa-

tients and their families simply hope everyone makes the right decisions, even though we all know that, medically, the first shot is the best shot, and delay can mean disaster or death? Scary.

Bizarrely, the CON application goes on to discuss the community and its growth. It states there are 385,000 resi-dents (conveniently ignoring the 700,000 daily commut-ers and tourists) and projects 12,900 new housing units with an increase in population of 30 to 38,000. And then it seems to say that providing this free-standing emergen-cy room, that will only be equipped to treat one half the number of patients previously treated at St. Vincent’s, with the generous provision of TWO hospital beds, this shows how well prepared they are to meet this population growth. Amazing.

NS-LIJ proudly describes their center as a “front door for the community” and goes on to state there are five federally qualified Health Centers, seven Diagnostic and Treatment Centers, 80 mental-health providers and, get this, over 2,700 physicians in the service area. And somehow, this ER will be the “front door” for these clinicians and provid-ers. Somehow, the 22 “treatment spaces” and two “hospi-tal” beds in this facility will be an adequate and acceptable substitute for the full array of beds and services that St.

Last Words continued from page 1 NS-LIJ= North Shore Long Island

Jewish Health System

DOH= New York State Dept. of Health

ICU=Intensive Care Unit

CCU = Coronary Care Unit

Peds=Pediatrics

CON=Certificate of Need, an application by healthcare organization for new facilities, equipment, etc that REQUIRES approval of DOH before that organization can move forward.


patient services. Sinai's plan was abruptly squashed by Commissioner Daines and the DOH. Other systems have expressed in-terest, but nothing can happen unless the DOH clearly states and affirms the need for a full service hospital to replace St. Vin-cent's. They have refused to do so..

We learned in the seven-hour session that money was perhaps the real issue for the DOH, not patient needs. For example, we witnessed a proposal by Memorial Sloan Kettering (MSK) to build a satellite hospi-tal in Westchester to save patients the trip to the city, only to be opposed by a neigh-boring hospital, whose representatives in-sisted that 75% of their revenue came from radiation treatments, and therefore, the MSK competition would put them out of business.

Medicaid, Medicare and commercial managed care, with fixed insurance pay-ments, creates a concrete revenue ceiling, even as delivery costs rise. The premise of the Berger commission was to close poorly performing hospitals to allow the remaining relatively “healthy” hospitals to absorb them, or absorb the patient traffic and hence improve their own performance. This has yet to happen, but the DOH has earmarked several more Brooklyn hospitals

for closing. What it and the closing of St. Vincent’s did do is increase traffic to the re-maining emergency rooms by 30 to 40 per-cent and caused delays in immediate care, as well as delays in transfer from the emer-gency room to hospital beds (sometimes overnight), all with an adverse impact on outcomes.

NS-LIJ offers that its clinic is a model of the future, and Duane picks this up with a direct quote from the effusive NS-LIJ proposal: “ it will be a new front door for communities to access healthcare.” Then Duane offers, correctly, “any emergency de-partment attracts patients in nonemergen-cy situations.” Dr. Kaufman contends that this is a service not needed in a community

Selling Us Out continued from page 1

By George Capsis

In 1951, in response to the dead hand of city bureaucracy, Mayor Wagner set up 12 experimental Community Planning Coun-cils to give local neighborhoods a faint but — as it proved—ineffectual voice.

From this beginning, our community boards emerged and grew to assume a more audible role, culminating in 1975 with the ability to offer a nonbinding vote on zon-ing changes. (The City Council has the for-real vote.)

All of which brought the Rudin Cor-poration — hat in hand — before the Community Board 2 Zoning Committee on Thursday September 15th asking for a zoning upgrade so they might build more square feet of luxury condominiums and hence make more money.

A tandem Rudin team of attorney and architect moved effortlessly through a pow-er-point presentation talking incompre-hensively about zoning envelopes, leaving the audience grinding their teeth waiting to unload their rage at having a comparatively new, 350 bed hospital torn down to build a high-rise condo to house rich people want-ing to live in the “quaint” Village, made less quaint by their high-rise tower.

Village real-estate broker and CB 2 com-mittee member, David Gruber, earned a burst of applause when he traded zoning double talk and finally asked if the goal of the Rudin zoning change was just more

profits. “You bought 11 buildings of prime downtown real estate at a bargain price of $260 million, and now you want to make more money by increasing the square foot-age — right?”

That same morning the Wall Street Journal ran a long article by Joseph de Avila with four photos:

“St. Vincent’s Site Moves On — the Ru-din family obtained $525 million in con-struction financing and began the govern-ment approval process…”

“…One of the most transformative real-estate projects for Greenwich Village in decades…”

“…The Rudins are one of the city’s sto-ried real-estate families…”

“…The Rudins still have hurdles to clear. The project must be approved by City Council, which may respond to demands of some community residents who want to cut back on its size and make other changes like including affordable housing…”

A committee member did ask if the proj-ect would have some affordable apartments and was dryly told by the Rudin attorney “no.” This has never been a community pri-ority. The West Village wants a hospital, not below-market apartments.

Why did Joseph de Avila not mention this last exchange in his article?

Why did he set up straw objections to knock down?

Even a cub reporter would have covered the yearlong campaign to restore a hospital

so thoroughly articulated by Dr. Kaufman and Yetta Kurland and, as balanced report-ing, would have offered some reference to their arguments.

I believe—no—I am certain that this ar-ticle was fed to the Wall Street Journal by the communications firm, SKDKnicker-bocker, the once-political media manipula-tor now corporate media manipulator that has been expensively retained by Rudin for the past year.

SKD’s formidable list of clients includes Michael Bloomberg, Chris Quinn and Scott Stringer. Which may explain why none of these politicians (our elected civil servants) has agreed to be interviewed, and why even their staff will not return a call or e-mail on the subject of saving our hospital.

In charge of the Rudin account for SKD is Stefan Friedman, a former New York Post reporter and the son of HarperCol-lin’s CEO Jane Friedman. He was outraged when I confronted him in the SKD offices at 594 Broadway.

I traced Freidman and SKD through the mailing address of a very expensive, glossy color brochure from the “ Westside Health Care Coalition,” which asked West Villag-ers to vote “yes” for the North Shore NS-LIJ walk-in/walk-out clinic, rather than for a real hospital and a real emergency room. (In the process, I learned a new term for phony grass-roots organizations: “astro-turfing.”)

But it gets worse: Competing with Ste-

fan Freidman and his SKD dirty tricks is Jennifer Cunningham. Called the most powerful woman in Albany, Cunningham lobbied for the United Health Care work-ers with a multi-million dollar budget and a steel fist. (When Governor Spitzer sug-gested cutbacks, she tarnished his image with a $12 million attack-ad campaign.) Cunningham has been a friend and po-litical adviser to Cuomo for 20 years and helped get him elected. She is also the ex-wife of Attorney General Eric Schneider-man, to whom Yetta Kurland presented over 7,500 names demanding a legal review of the St. Vincent closing.

At the end of the long CB 2 meeting, I was greeted with “Hi George” and a handshake by John J. Gilbert III, the Vice President of Rudin Management and the man who, months ago, called me to ask if I would be “fair” in our WestView reporting.

In that same phone conversation, he patched in and introduced Stefan Fried-man, without mentioning that Fried-man worked for SKD. And then ensued a strange dialogue, during which I was plead-ing to keep Coleman and Link as a hospi-tal and Gilbert was telling me the building that was a hospital a year ago was now ob-solete, with “low ceilings” and the Depart-ment of Health would never approve it. When I pressed my arguments Friedman said, “That’s enough, I have a meeting” and cavalierly instructed Gilbert to terminate the conversation.

I recounted this conversation as we rode down the elevator and Gilbert had the de-cency to blush.

Community Board? Or Corporation Board?

that has many true urgent-care centers and doctors’ offices.

Profit is perhaps the key to understand-ing why NS-LIJ never went further to take over the Coleman and Link buildings and restore a real hospital with a real emergency room — in order to do so they would have to have a 24/7 surgical team to treat heart- attacks, stroke, and severe accidents — very, costly. (They got the O’Toole building for nothing).

The proposed NS-LIJ “Emergency Department” already exists in Beth Is-rael’s Philips Ambulatory Center at 15th Street and Park Avenue South, which has reduced the time of doctors’ engagements down to minutes and therefore is able to provide primary care for thousands of low-income patients each day, but real emer-gency patients can be quickly moved to the emergency room at 16th Street and First Avenue.

Dr. Kaufman offers that the DOH, as the guardian of health and welfare, clearly recognizes there is no emergency room in the West Side of Manhattan – a commu-nity of one million — AND CHOOSES TO DO NOTHING SUBSTANTIVE ABOUT THAT.

At the very end of the DOH commit-tee meeting, the acting Chairman could not repress his conviction that the NS-LIJ

could be the model of how to successfully, financially-speaking, deliver medical ser-vices.

Dr Glenn Martin of Mount Sinai had a different conclusion, as Senator Duane trailed off his presentation with a drawn-out request to get hard figures on how many people die when they have to be transferred to emergency rooms from clin-ics like the one that NS-LIJ has proposed, and “we are not going to do this until we get those figures.”

After hearing the NS-LIJ request to have their “emergency department” ap-proved, Dr. Martin concluded, “I’m not convinced that this is anything more than a ‘doc in a box’ on steroids and may do more harm than good.”

And in talking about the ten percent of real emergency patients — heart at-tacks, stroke and fractures —Dr. Martin offered, “The loss of an hour for work-up does absolutely nothing but delay an hour of definitive care. And I do not understand calling this an emergency room when it is not an emergency room in any sense that people normally think of. This has the po-tential for causing adverse events.”

And finally, “We are being presented with something that is better than noth-ing… could be improved, because I am really concerned with adverse events.”

IS MONEY THE REAL ISSUE?: George Capis speaks on behalf of the West Village Community at the DOH hearing.


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Scott Stringer Comes Down Hard on "Maybe"By George Capsis

What about our Borough President, Scott Stringer — is he also ready to let North Shore-NS-LIJ build an “Emergency De-partment” in the old, decaying, windowless O’Toole building?

I bet anything that Tom Duane called him to get his okay so they would have a unanimous vote — all our politicians voting yes for a fake emergency department, while 10 out of each 100 emergency patients cannot be treated in it and who will lose time and maybe their lives being ambulanced to a real emergency room.

But Scott put out a two-page position paper that you have to read carefully, as it rolls like quick silver trying to touch all opinions. He correctly observes that closing a hospital with 758 beds and 3,500 employees leaves a “significant gap.” He records that the community has campaigned to bring back a hospital — right again.

And then we loose him.If the NS-LIJ Emergency Department

“can help alleviate the overcrowding condi-tions — it will offer much value.”

He is running for mayor, so he has to be all things to all voters.

“It is insufficient to evaluate the merits of the proposed replacement without a parallel process to comment on those health care needs that would remain unmet.” Scott is asking for another study; but we just had a phony one done by NS-LIJ that told us we

needed their clinic, not a hospital, and that took a year.

Scott, I am asking that you vote NO to the NS-LIJ Emergency Department and demand that the Coleman building be restored as a hospital.

Gee, that’s pretty direct isn’t it? You can see why I will never be a politician.

Media report DOH’s approvalThe great frustration in the fight to return a hospital is the lack of media coverage.

So we note with interest this short excerpt from an item in Friday, September 23rd’s Crain's Health Plus...

“It appeared from the State's remarks that the Department of Health favors the proj-ect. Charles Abel, who was acting as chairman of the meeting, said the CON application meets the state's requirements for approval as a hospital. The application is unusual in that it is for a two-bed hospital, as the freestanding emergency department will have two medical-surgical beds on site. Mr. Abel said DOH is satisfied that the need for hospital beds is being met by other facilities in the area…. The committee will hold a special meeting in two weeks.”

An editorial comment

ALL THINGS TO ALL VOTERS?: Scott Stringer’s position paper needs to be carefully read. Photo by Maggie Berkvist

Dr. Martin also said that while the DOH will probably vote on this in two weeks even if they don’t get the data requested by Senator Duane, “I imagine that there may be other solutions that are more ef-ficacious…” [that are not being considered here.]

The “data” that Dr. Martin and Tom Duane are seeking are how many people lose muscle or brain cells or die when they have to be transferred from a clinic to a real

emergency room.And once we have these data what do

we do— decide OK, we can tolerate two or three people dying on their way over to Beth Israel, rather than reopen Coleman and thus deny Rudin his luxury condos?

And is Tom Duane the right person to evaluate this data — shouldn’t it be Dr. Kaufman and his medical colleagues? And, oh yes, you and me, since we will be among that two or three who don’t make it?


in NYC, it’s going to threaten more than the taxi industry status quo. It’s going to threaten and dramatically change bike cul-ture status quo as well. It’s going to civilize urban cycling and cause cyclists to grow up, even though they don’t want to. Once this happens, bicycling will finally be ac-ceptable to New Yorkers.

New York cyclists are not loved. Not loved by pedestrians or motorists, sub-way riders or bus passengers. Not loved by commuters or residents. Cyclists know it and think this must be because of all the stories of their bad behavior in traffic, or their minority status or novelty.

What they don’t realize is it’s also be-cause the way they look … damn strange to New Yorkers. Like space aliens or com-bat soldiers, with their helmets and ag-gressive postures. They have weird outfits with decals. They look like cars! Like race cars. What are they doing in a sophisti-cated, urbane fashion center of the world like New York? How can they fit into our view of ourselves, when they are so unlike our vibrant pedestrian street life?

The problem is that the home-grown bike culture has been built on sport bikes, not practical urban bicycles. Most cyclists

here are riding in the city on stooped-over mountain bikes, “road bikes” and hybrids. They are not, in general, riding cruisers, English roadsters or Dutch bikes. This means cyclists by and large are not com-fortable and feel endangered as they ride in the city. Cyclists do not look like up-right citizens. Their faces show pain and panic. Other New Yorkers recoil from this; in fact, they’re scared away from be-coming cyclists, so the growth of urban cycling is stunted and the bike lanes are underutilized.

Urban cycling is not a sport! Sport bicy-cles are wrong for urban traffic and weath-er. Fortunately, bike-share bicycles are just the opposite of sport bikes — they are fully upright adult bikes, very comfortable and relatively slow. Also, relatively safe.

And when they arrive here, people — thousands of people — who have felt excluded from the existing road-warrior/sport-bike cult are going to ride upright bikes on public streets in their normal ci-vilian clothing, in most cases without hel-mets. This is going to change everything. These novices are going to teach the “pros” how to properly ride — and look — on a bike in a place like New York City. That is exactly what is needed for cycling to be-come part of the mainstream.

Bike Sharecontinued from page 1

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If you want to add an observation from West View contributor Barry Benepee in Paris, the bikeshare stations are frequent and well stocked. Generally, half of bike riders seem to be on shared bikes, though motorcyclists seem to dominate two wheel travel and parking, even chained to bike racks. Few if any of the bike share parking spaces are taken from pedestrian walkspace, but rather from vehicular space, as it should be. New York City seems to be trying to have pedestrians make a sacrifice as well, even though cars now enjoy some 8,000 miles of free parking.

A WELL STOCKED STATION: Half the riders in Paris seem to be on Velibs, the French bike share vehicle.


Last Wordscontinued from page 3

Give UpBy George Capsis

Rudin and North Shore-NS-LIJ are win-ning.

One by one they move through the ap-proval process:

The Community Board - Landmarks -The Planning Commission - The Depart-ment of Health.

They have unlimited money and a billion dollars at stake.

They issue expensive phony mailers from non-existent community groups.

They can, and do, place articles in The New York Times or The Wall Street Jour-nal when they want to say what they want.

All of our politicians have joined them.The mayor is silent.Come on, you can’t fight greed with big

money – give up.Let them tear down what was a hospital

just a year ago and replace it with condo-miniums for Wall Street inside traders.

So what if a few of us die on the way to a distant emergency room in heavy traffic after mistaking the “Emergency Depart-ment” for a real hospital?

Hey, that’s the way it is…Right?

Vincent’s provided to this huge community health-care infrastructure they so carefully describe. Are they joking? And, they go on, that “front door” will work because of NS-LIJ’s spectacular health informatics system, which they call the “interoperable medical information system.” How exactly will this work? Will they be providing computers, high-speed data connections, electronic health-record software to all of these sites, clinicians, and doctors? I don’t think so.

Let’s talk about those 2,700 physicians for a moment—I am one of them. Has anyone asked US what we need to care for our patients? We do not need another expensive imaging center, another clini-cal lab, more ambulatory surgery suites, or even new physician office spaces. (They kicked my colleagues out, they ain’t com-ing back.) That is not what we lost when St. Vincent’s closed. NS-LIJ is dreaming if they think the community physicians will utilize those services. We need hospital services, trauma services, emergency ser-vices, real hospital beds and subspecialists, so we can do our jobs. The sad truth here is NS-LIJ plans on investing 125 million dollars for a facility that does not meet the community needs, delivers many unneces-sary services, and will not make money for them. I do seriously wonder what they will do, what their Board of Directors will de-

cide, when they realize that, even with the admissions shipped out of our community and uptown to Lenox Hill, they are losing money. Will they abandon ship? Is there anything in the law or the DOH regula-tions that will require them to maintain a money-losing operation at O’Toole?

NS-LIJ, both in their CON and in all their public presentations, has trumpeted how their new “hybrid model of care,” their free-standing emergency room, will be both comprehensive and cost effective, providing complete emergency care to from 90 percent to 99 percent of the patients that present to any real emergency room. That number, 90 percent to 99 percent, keeps changing in their presentations, but they would have us believe that their facil-ity can do virtually anything a real emer-gency room can do. Does anyone in this room really believe that? I ask each of you on this committee to ponder and answer honestly: if you were having chest pain, shortness of breath, loss of vision, paraly-sis of your left leg, excruciating headache, abdominal pain with fevers to 105—would you feel secure and confident going into O’Toole, spending hours being evaluated, only to be “stabilized and transferred” miles across town, through NYC traffic, in order to obtain real and appropriate care? I plead with you to review the nationally accepted Cardiology and Neurology guidelines re-garding the expected standards for time to angiographic treatment of heart attacks

and clot-busting treatment of strokes. This NS-LIJ proposal will violate every one of those guidelines, and people will lose heart muscle, brain cells, or die.

NS-LIJ/Lenox Hill also states that these freestanding emergency rooms ex-ist all over the country. What they do not tell you is that many states—Washington, Virginia, Florida to name a few—are ban-ning or restricting them because of the confusion they cause for citizens, the threat to quality care, the dilemmas they pose for ambulance services, and the increased costs they place on the health-care system. In Washington State, Blue Shield, as part of their request for a ban on new centers, stated that they were being billed $700 for ankle sprains, $600 for sore throats, $800 for hand sprains, and, my personal favorite, $1,300 for finger lacerations. Is this cost ef-fective care? Is this a groundbreaking, new hybrid model of care? I think not. We have plenty of urgent care centers in our com-munity, plenty of docs in the community like me that can cope with these problems for one-tenth the cost.

OK. I am sure I have run out of time, so let me please try to quickly wrap this up. The lower west side has over one million residents, commuters and tourists daily, without counting the increases that the 9/11 memorial, the Highline, new hous-ing, etc. will bring. We have no hospital from the southern tip of Manhattan to 60th street and no Level I Trauma from the

tip to 114th Street. The Upper East Side and East Harlem have a combined popula-tion of 325,000. They also have six hospi-tals, five full-service emergency rooms and 3940 hospital beds. I ask you: Is this ra-tional, responsible, moral planning? Lenox Hill hospital is submitting this CON be-cause they need patients shipped uptown to survive. NS-LIJ is submitting this CON because they are empire building, power hungry, and want to champion their “new hybrid model of care” … and of course be-cause they own Lenox Hill and want to keep it alive. This CON is a con job.

But the one million people of the low-er west side, the 2,700 physicians and 80 mental-health clinicians desperately need a hospital with a real emergency room. I plead with this committee and the Dept. of Health to recognize this and do the right thing. Reject this CON. It is dangerous, wasteful, expensive, and most importantly, it does not meet the needs of this commu-nity. Instead, I implore you to acknowledge the healthcare crisis we face here, endorse the real need for a hospital and emergency room to serve the lower west side, and, as the guardian of our community’s health and welfare, clearly announce that nothing less is acceptable. I beg you to forcefully and sincerely commit to nurturing and supporting any healthcare organization that comes forward prepared to reopen a hospital to serve our community’s huge healthcare needs.

An editorial

Homeless Newsletter honors Shelter AdministratesJOAN MCALLISTER: founder and editor of the homeless newsletter and Hank Orenstein, Board member, Information for Families, Inc. Celebrating front-line workers who try to do the impossible was the theme at last week’s event marking the 24th year of publishing “HOW…WHEN…WHERE,” the newsletter for homeless families in New York City. Right now, family shelters scattered across the five borough share temporary housing for more than 9,000 homeless families with more than 16,000 children. “Like all families, they’re not all alike,” Joan McAllister, explains. “Men and women like the case workers and education consultants we honor today are trained to help these families. The families need to get their lives in order so when they move out of shelter they will prosper and stay out. Cur-rent city policy offers no housing subsidy as it has in the past, and demands families move out in less than five or six months, regardless of their different needs, strengths and weaknesses. Many good programs that helped the families acquire skills they needed have vanished.” Photo by Maggie Berkvist


We Spoke. Who Heard?By Jim Fouratt

The Department of Health hearing for the fake ER to replace St. Vincent's featured impassioned doctors, community activists, smarmy politicos, creepy corporate types. We'll soon find out who prevails.

Finally, after what seemed like a month of almost daily meetings with suits—which represented both the Rudin Real Estate Corporation and the North Shore-Long Island Jewish Health System/Lenox Hill Medical Corporation—“D day” arrived for the community to speak out on the pro-posed free-standing emergency services and comprehensive healthcare center in the O’Toole Building being proposed by NS-LIJ with Rudin support.

On September 22 a public hearing scheduled for 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. was held by the NY St.ate Department of Health. At 8:30 a.m. members of the Coalition for a New Village Hospital, as well as other ad hoc St. Vincent’s groups, arrived to pass through security. People wishing to testify had to register with the NY DOH and have their name placed on a security list to gain admittance.

A person in training to be a security offi-cer was on duty. He had not been given the list and was refusing admission to a number of registered people. It was a difficult scene until his superior showed up with the list.

At 4:30 p.m. the NS-LIJ/Lenox Hill landfill request item came up. A number of community activists testified, including Dr. David Kaufman, who had been a physician at St. Vincent’s and a vocal critic of both the Rudin luxury condo development as a replacement for the shuttered St. Vincent’s and the NS-LIJ high-end urgent care cen-ter they named an Emergency Services center; Yetta Kurland, a human-rights at-torney and community organizer who has represented the Coalition in all their failed court filings; Evette Katz-Stark, a mother of grown twins and a 25-year resident of 12th Street who had gone to jail in an act of civil disobedience in the spring after re-fusing to leave the foyer of St. Vincent’s with a group of community activists; Jayne Herko, an artist whose life had been saved in St. Vincent’s emergency room when she had a severe health crisis; and myself. We were all united in our call to have the DOH reject the proposal on the grounds that it would not, as NS-LIJ CEO Michael Dowling had publicly admitted, be able to treat the most serious of health crises pre-sented. NS-LIJ would have to transport patients after “stabilizing” to a Trauma 1 hospital. The concern was over people dying because of the transit time on con-gested downtown streets. Over and over this was expressed. All agreed that any plan that had a built-in risk factor of death was simply unacceptable. I stated that any ap-proach to medical crises in an emergency room that involved a “harm reduction” for-

mula was simply not acceptable.Only one person spoke in favor of the

proposal. Gil Horowitz, who lives on Fifth Avenue in a Rudin Building, denounced the activists as acting like children who re-fuse to take no for an answer.

There was not a single person from the Community Board present, nor district leader Keen Berger or Community Board Chair Brad Hoylman. State Senator Tom Duane arrived at about noon and was seen in the back of the hearing room reading over and rehearsing his statement. He was the only elected official present. Normally when an elected official arrives, he or she is given preferential speaking privilege. Duane re-fused and seemed to want to be the last per-son to speak. It became clear why when he opened his remarks saying, “I am reading a statement signed by Speaker Quinn, myself, Assembly-members Deborah Glick and Richard Gottfried. We support the NS-LIJ proposal because it will bring services des-perately needed, We do have some concerns that we ask the DOH to address.” He did say that the support was dependant on re-ceiving answers on the transport time from door to hospital that he, the Community Board 2 Chair and the other elected officials had requested from the Fire Department.

The Fire Department had refused to give the data, saying it does not exist. Duane called upon the NYS DOH to get the in-formation and share it with the elected of-ficials. He closed by again repeating off the cuff that he and the other elected officials support the idea of the free-standing emer-gency services center proposed.

While many of the community activists were shocked, I was not. I suspect the doc-ument came out of Boss Quinn’s office and represented the position of Mayor Bloom-berg. Both the Mayor and the Speaker have refused to speak publicly about the closure, except for Quinn saying she “wants a full-service hospital” while calling since day one for an urgent care center, yet without tak-ing any action to stop the Rudin/NS-LIJ steamrolling engine in place.

St. Vincent’s closed under Duane’s watch when he was chair of the NY State Senate Health Committee. He had to be privileged to the information prior to the

bankruptcy filing by St. Vincent’s or he was asleep at the job. He appeared early on to support the closure, despite his empty call for a “full-service hospital.” He said noth-ing when the Bankruptcy Court gave at no cost a $200 million property, the O’Toole building and land, to NS-LIJ with the sup-port of the Rudin Corporation, while the Nurses Union was still loosing its mem-bers’ pensions.

In August of 2010, Duane answered a question at the open membership meet-ing of the Village Independent Democratic Club (VID). A member asked what could be done to save the hospital. Duane answered, “I don’t know if we really need a hospital. We already have too many beds in Manhat-tan. What we do need are more doctor’s of-fices to keep people healthy.” This was the position of the New York State Department of Health (NYS DOH). Duane should have fought for his constituents’ need for medical care. Why Glick, who wrote with Community Board 2 to NS-LIJ asking why they could not put in a smaller hospital by adding two floors to the top of O’Toole and using the underground operating rooms al-ready in place, signed on is baffling.

Apparently NS-LIJ refused to answer ei-ther the elected officials or the Community Board on the question of a smaller hospital in O’Toole.

I do know that I did ask privately at the hearing the NS-LIJ Head of Medical Services for the reason the NS-LIJ Medi-cal Corporation refused to build a smaller hospital as had been requested. The doc-tor answered: “I know nothing about this idea. They must have made that decision upstairs.”

It has been exhausting to keep up with the machinations of the Rudin/NS-LIJ machine as they push forward despite community objections. The Rudin Corpo-ration has not tried to accommodate any community suggestions, including afford-able housing or an escalator or elevator at the 7th Avenue-14th Street subway stop.

The elected officials are trying to wig-gle out of their silent complicity. They have not stepped up in the name of their constituents’ health needs. Apparently the elected officials with the Community

Board are going to circulate all over the country a call for someone to come in and build a real hospital, without stating where on the lower West Side there is affordable real estate to do so. Shame on them. We know that the infrastructure exists on the St. Vincent’s campus. NS-LIJ did ask the bankruptcy judge to allow it to use the existing emergency room in the Coleman building, but the Rudin Corporation re-fused to agree and instead authorized the giving away of a piece of property—the O’Toole Building, which they could not build on legally.

In the discussion after the public testi-mony, despite the hard-handed tactics by NYS DOH Deputy Commissioner of the Office of Health Systems Management Richard Cook—who stated clearly that the DOH wanted this “experiment” and implied Governor Cuomo did as well—a couple of remaining M.D. Board members expressed concern over the fact that in this instance doing nothing might be a better way to save lives than to rush this “experi-ment” into place. I would hope the elected officials would rethink their support of a $125 million project that will take three years to build and instead call for a real hospital and a Trauma 1 ER, where ba-bies and seniors and everyone in between would have a better chance of surviving a life-or-death health crisis.

I know that every minute matters in a se-rious health crisis. It depends on the time it takes to receive the kind of medical inter-vention that can save one’s life. Hopefully community residents will write Represen-tative Nadler, Boss Quinn, Senator Duane, Assembly-members Glick and Gottfried and Borough President Scott Stringer and ask then to turn this proposal down and start representing the real health needs of their constituents by coming up with a plan that will save lives in life-or-death emer-gencies.

The DOH will meet in two weeks to vote on the plan. Now is the time for ev-ery resident to speak up by contacting their elected official as if their life depends on having a real, not a fake, ER and hospital.

And I suggest letting the Rudins know: NO HOSPITAL, NO CONDOS.

WHO WILL PREVAIL?: Jim Fourat suggests residents write their elected representatives now to urge they put pressure on the DOH to turn down the NS-LIJ application.


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What is a Heart Attack?

By Dr. David Kaufman

A heart attack occurs when there is sud-den and life-threatening loss of blood and oxygen through one or more arteries that feed the heart muscle (left ventricle). The moment that happens, the clock starts tick-ing, as heart muscle cells will die without oxygen. The American College of Car-diology--the specialty society that creates standards, guidelines, and expectations for its physician members--has clearly stated and described the standards that should guide the treatment of heart attacks.

There are two key standards of care that have been developed by cardiologists and emergency departments in an effort to decrease mortality (death) and morbid-ity (disease) from heart attacks. The first is called “Door to Balloon” (DTB) and refers to the maximum time it should take from entry to ( real) ER to start of angiogram (balloon and life-saving stent). This should be 90 minutes or less. The second stan-dard, used for facilities such as the NS-LIJ Comprehensive Care Center that cannot actually treat a heart attack, is “Door in-Door out (DIDO)", and refers to the maxi-mum time it should take from admission to NS-LIJ facility to discharge and transfer to a hospital that can provide the proper standard of care treatments. This should be 30 minutes or less. (Think about that: how long does it take just to go from 7th Av-enue to 1st Avenue or 12th Street and 7th Avenue to 76th and Lexington???)

A study just published in the Journal of the American Medical Association ( JAMA) collected data on 14,821 patients and reported on their DIDO times and mortality. For those patients lucky enough to meet the standard and be transferred within 30 minutes, the mortality was 2.7%. For patients with DIDO times over 30 minutes, the mortality more than doubled to 5.9%. And beyond 90 minutes, the mor-tality tripled. In last week's Annals of In-ternal Medicine, a review of outcomes in 8000 patients revealed that delays in DTB increased the risk of Congestive Heart Failure, hospital readmissions and mortal-ity by 10% to 15%.

The American College of Cardiol-ogy and numerous large population stud-ies have shown that when the "Door- to Balloon" time exceeds 90 minutes, the incidence of morbidity and mortality rises steeply, with increments of 15% to 20% for each 30 minute segment. How fast, from the moment you walk in the door, will NS-LIJ evaluate, diagnose, and implement a treatment plan of "stabilize and transfer"? How long will it take to get you to defini-tive, life-saving treatment?

A similar and terrifying statistic: 1.9 mil-lion brain cells (neurons) die every minute that a stroke is not properly and definitively treated. NS-LIJ states they will "stabilize and transfer." Let's generously assume that process takes 90 minutes. That patient —you? Your spouse? Your father? — will have 171,000,000 dead brain cells.

“Diagram from http://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/health/health-topics/topics/heartattack/ shows a heart with dead heart muscle caused by a heart attack, left, and a cross section of a coronary artery with plaque buildup and a blood clot.”


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By Tom Allon

There is nothing more important in this city right now than fixing our long-broken schools. Our motto should be: “No More Lousy Schools.”

But fixing schools means looking at the whole system from top to bottom—not just trying to find scapegoats like teachers or principals.

We need to overhaul the curriculum to engage children to want to be long-term learners, not just short-term test takers. Great literature, foreign languages, appre-ciation of art and music and robust ath-letic programs need to be emphasized at all schools from an early age.

We need to build new 21st-Century schools—like the new Spruce Street School next to the new Gehry building in Lower Manhattan—or renovate our old ones so our kids will have access to technology and broadband, spacious au-ditoriums, modern gymnasiums and class-rooms with SMART Boards. We should have private-school facilities at all public schools.

Like the Manhattan Project or NASA that focused our collective creative ener-gies into creating nuclear energy or landing a man on the moon, we need to prioritize public schools and make the proper edu-cation and job training of all children our city’s top priority.

I believe also in opening more charter schools for innovation and in giving tax credits to parents who opt for religious schooling for their children.

We need to get the private sector even more involved in adopting public schools and getting them more resources so they can have the materials, the hardware, the software and the technical tools to train 21st Century global citizens.

Learning also needs to be made fun again. Instead of teaching to the test, we need to spur imagination and creativity so we can create the next Jobs or Gates or Zuckerberg—all college dropouts.

We need to make song and dance and art a part of every child’s day. All-school choir in the morning a few times a week. Public readings of poems and short stories by stu-dents to their peers. Dance performances and art shows.

But to make this happen we need a lead-er of this city who understands that testing and accountability are not the only paths to victory; in fact, their overemphasis has set us back.

I am running for Mayor in 2013 and when I win we will fix our schools. No more lousy schools in New York.

Our kids can’t wait.Tom Allon is a Democratic candidate for Mayor in 2013. He is a former teacher at Stuyvesant High School and is currently the President of Manhattan Media.

We Can Fix Our Schools

Want to comment on an issue you’ve read in this month’s WestView?

Go to www.westviewnews.org and give us your feedback.

Tom Allon, a former Stuyvesant High School English teacher and one of the founders of the Frank McCourt High School on West 84th Street, with West Side elected leaders and education activists at the grand opening ceremony of the school. Now in its second full school year, FMHS is one of the most popular and successful new high schools in Manhattan.


What is a District Leader?

By Paul Newell

A District Leader (DL) is an unpaid vol-unteer elected official. In essence, it is an elected representative of the district to a political party. I represent the Democrats of my district to the Democratic Party of New York County. District Leaderships are subject to primary elections every two years. This ostensibly guarantees that any party with formal status in New York State is democratically governed by its members. The position is the reformed version of the old Tammany “Ward Boss”.

In the Democratic Party each district has two District Leaders, one male and one fe-male, with the same responsibilities. This guarantees gender parity in the party hier-archy, and expands the number of positions available. In Manhattan, District Leader elections are held on Primary Day in odd numbered years.

OK, BUT WHAT DOES A DIS-TRICT LEADER ACTUALLY DO?

Good question. The formal powers of a DL are very limited, so the role depends on what the specific DL chooses to make of it. I view the position primarily as a com-munity organizing tool. It is a title that can be used to help build consensus at commu-nity meetings. Local media and grassroots groups regularly reach out to active DLs on community issues. Most elected offi-cials and administrators generally respond to inquiries from DLs promptly – enabling them to act as conduits to the community.

For example, I have tried to use my role as DL to advocate for a hospital on the site of St. Vincent’s. Of course, I could and would be doing so anyway. But the title of “Honorable District Leader Such-and-Such” lends weight to advocacy.

District Leaders also play a very impor-tant role in electing judges for New York’s Civil, Supreme and Surrogate Courts. The Democratic Party’s nomination process is

heavily influenced by District Leaders – and in Manhattan that is tantamount to election.

In addition to advocacy, the District Leader performs an essential role in our electoral process. Below is a list of a Dis-trict Leader’s formal responsibilities:

• Sits on the Executive Committee of the New York County Democratic Com-mittee;

• Hires poll workers and election in-spectors for the primary elections every September and for the general elections in November (If you are in-terested in working for the Board of Elections (for pay) on election days, please contact me at [email protected]. I am always in need of good poll workers.);

• Attends Democratic Party meetings and events on behalf of the district;

• Listens to the residents of the district to learn what issues are affecting their quality of life, such as housing, em-ployment, education, environment and crime;

• Organizes meetings and events in the district to give community members a strong voice;

• Works with the district’s city, state, and federal elected officials to insure that the voices of the community are heard;

• Organizes opposition when elected of-ficials or state/city agencies ignore local residents (one of my favorite parts);

• Provides support to elect good candi-dates to public office in the district;

• Is an information resource for the dis-trict’s voters in numerous ways, includ-ing poll site locations, election results and general information about candi-dates.

District Leaders often work with their local political clubs to coordinate political activity. I am a proud member of Down-town Independent Democrats.

UNPAID VOLUNTEERS: Paul Newell, above, and Jennifer Rajkumar, the male and female team elected District Leaders for Manhattan’s 64th Assembly District, in September. Photos by ENS-LIJah Zarwan.


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ENJOYING THE PRECINCT: The new Commander attended the Washington Square Park Summer Music Festival. Photo by Sally J. Bair

By Glenn Berman

Deputy Inspector Brandon del Pozo, the new commanding officer of the 6th pre-cinct, took the reins in June 2011 from deputy inspector Raymond Caroli. Caroli served our Village community for the past three years and has been promoted to the department’s Firearms and Tactics sec-tion. Deputy inspector Brandon del Pozo comes to us after doing a tour in the Bronx commanding the 50th Precinct. Del Pozo’s replacement, Captain Kevin Burke, was his partner of four years and previously of the 33rd precinct. The duo patrolled as rookie police officers at the 67th precinct in Brooklyn. Deputy inspector Brandon del Pozo and Captain Kevin Burke also worked together after the 911 attacks at ground Zero. Before that, del Pozo patrolled neighborhoods in Brooklyn’s Brownsville, Flatbush, and Crown Heights.

Commander del Pozo has an impres-sive scholastic history; he graduated from Stuyvesant High School then Dartmouth, where he majored in philosophy. He has a master’s degree in criminal justice from

the City University of New York’s John Jay College. In addition, the NYPD awarded him a full scholarship to pursue a second master’s degree from Harvard in public administration. Del Pozo, now a Harvard PhD candidate, is presently writing his dissertation. Along with his academic ac-complishments, he is a Tri Kappa fraternity member, has been an opinion columnist for The Dartmouth and was an active member of the Student Assembly. He participated in the Dartmouth ROTC, was a member of the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps and attended the Airborne School in 1994.

I asked the Commander, “With a resume like this, why police work?” a question his Jewish mother would also like to have an-swered. He said, “there’s already a hotshot lawyer in the family,” referring proudly to his brother. He went on to say that in the spring of 1996, he had an epiphany that police work was what he wanted to do, a calling he has never regretted.

Brandon del Pozo was raised in Benson-hurst, Brooklyn by his Jewish mother and Cuban father, an immigrant who served as a medic during the Vietnam War, and his

There's a New Sheriff in Town: Introducing Deputy Inspector Brandon del Pozo, Commanding Officer, Sixth Precinct

grandfather, who serviced as a paratrooper in World War II. The Commander is now married and father to a four-year- old boy, who he hopes will become a doctor—but he says he would be just as proud if his son chose the path of law enforcement.

Del Pozo was called to active duty at West Point following the 9/11 attacks, where he served for about a year. He served as an infantry officer in a moun-tain warfare unit based out of New Eng-land from 1996 through 2000, and from 2003 to 2004, was a member of the staff of the US Army Mountain Warfare School, based out of Jericho, Vermont. He left the Army National Guard in October of 2004.

Del Pozo also served two years as an intelligence liaison in the Middle East as part of an intelligence program for the New York Police Department; having as-signments in Amman (where he lived for 21 months), Turkey, Jordan, Ankara, and India. In November 9th 2005, there were two suicide bomber attacks across the street from where he was staying.

In November 2008, Brandon del Pozo was sent to India following the coordi-nated terrorist attacks in Mumbai that killed as many as 170 people and wounded hundreds more. He was sent on special as-signment as part of an intelligence team by NYPD's Shield program, the informa-tion he gathered is used to help secure our hotels and railways here in the United States. As reported by NPR news reporter Dina Temple-Raston, “Del Pozo has had this duty before. When terrorists blew up commuter trains outside of Mumbai in

2006, the NYPD sent him to investigate”Listen to Del Pozo’s call-in from

the Middle East to Dina Temple-Raston: npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=97912059

The deputy inspector said that our Vil-lage neighborhood is “difficult to police, as each person has a different vision of what the Village should be.” In Eastern philosophy, a balance of mind and body is the objective one seeks to achieve, a phi-losophy this reporter believes the inspector puts into practice to bring about a balance between Village residents and visitors and the officers in his command. Before part-ing, I asked the commander about his two years working in Internal Affairs. He said “You can measure the quality of the police department by the integrity of its Internal affairs Department.”

On a personal note, I sense a quiet con-fidence and integrity from the new com-mander, who is hands on, and not new to the job or tasks at hand. Commander Del Pozo’s confidence comes from knowledge and experience, which is not just his, but also that of the 6th precinct officers under his command. It is through their combined efforts that balance is achieved in our ham-let of the West Village. The Commander and the 6th Precinct officers are doing their part, but their assured success relies on our support as community.


By Andrew Berman

Proposal Would Allow NYU to Close Parks to Public For Years At A Time, Build Un-derneath, and Turn Them Into Construction Staging Areas

One of many controversial aspects of NYU's massive proposed expansion plan in the Village is that it includes requests to take possession of several pieces of publicly-owned green spaces along Mer-cer Street and LaGuardia Place. These "green strips", though owned by the City's Department of Transportation, are used as public park space, including a dog run and children’s playground. Com-munity groups including the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preserva-tion (GVSHP) have long called for these green strips to be made into permanent park space. The pieces of public land are a vestige of the community's victory over Robert Moses' plans to connect Fifth Av-enue to his planned Lower Manhattan Expressway, and were originally intended as parts of expanded roadways. NYU has long opposed making this space perma-nent parkland.

In a surprise move, in mid-September, NYU made the sudden announcement that they will drop their opposition to the call for permanent park status for two of the four "green strips" and seek to have them made parks as part of their expansion application (it should be noted that NYU will still seek possession of the other two strips, one of which, on Mercer Street be-tween Houston Street and Bleecker Street, they are also seeking permission to build a nearly 1 million square foot building on top of ). In their announcement, NYU said that this move "gives the community what it has sought for many years."

But there's a catch - NYU is support-ing park status for these two green strips on the condition that they be granted an 'easement' over the park space. This would allow NYU to build under the parks, dig through the parks to their space below at any time, use the parks as a staging area for their construction equipment for their adjacent new buildings, and close the parks to the public at any time. By NYU's own admission, these parks would be closed to the public for years at a time. Additionally, NYU will still be seeking permission to build enormous new buildings bordering and looming over the "parks" (one 275 feet tall), encasing them in shadows for much of the year.

This is clearly NOT "what the com-munity has sought for many years," as the university claims. Unfortunately, it is a cynical attempt by the university to claim responsiveness to community concerns in their quest for public approvals for a mas-sive expansion plan which would have an enormous impact upon the Village. None of what NYU is proposing to build is cur-

rently allowable, and can only be made possible if City officials overturn existing zoning protections, open space preserva-tion requirements, and urban renewal deed restrictions, and give NYU the public land and easements they are seeking.

GVSHP has written to City officials who will be voting on the plans, mak-ing it clear that the proposed changes to NYU's massive proposed expansion do not make them acceptable. As an alter-

NYU Releases Sham Parks Plan

native, GVSHP continues to urge the City and the University to work together to find alternative locations for NYU's mas-sive proposed 2.5 million square foot Vil-lage expansion plan, which would involve adding the equivalent of the Empire State Building to a few blocks south of Wash-ington Square Park. We instead urge the university to consider locations such as the Financial District, where community lead-ers have said NYU's development would be

welcomed, and where such development would be contextual.

NYU's current plan will undergo pub-lic hearings and votes by the Community Board, Borough President, City Planning Commission, and City Council in the coming months. GVSHP is urging people to write to city officials who will vote on the plan, calling on them to reject it.

To find out more, go to www.gvshp.org.nyu.

THERE’S A CATCH: “In addition to asking for zoning changes to allow construction of an Empire State Building’s worth of space, NYU is seeking easements allowing it to close off, build under, and stage construction equipment on top of public parks.”

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The testimony below was given by State Senator Tom Duane last Thursday, encour-aging the Department of Health (DOH) to approve the Certificate of Need (CON) ap-plication by North Shore-Long Island Jewish Hospital System for a freestanding Emergen-cy Department to occupy the O’Toole Build-ing on West 12th Street.

testimony before the New York State Department of Health Public Health and

Health Planning council regarding North Shore-Long Island Jewish Health System's Proposed Lenox Hill Hospital center for

comprehensive care at 30 Seventh Avenue, Manhattan (cON #111531)

September 22. 20 II

We are city, state and federal legislators representing the Primary Service Area of the former St. Vincent's Catholic Medi-cal Center ("St. Vincent's"). Thank you for the opportunity to present testimony before the New York State Department of Health Public Health and Health Plan-ning Council regarding North Shore-Long Island Jewish Health System's (NS-LIJ) Certificate of Need Applica-tion (CON) for its proposed Lenox Hill Hospital Center for Comprehensive Care ("The Center") to be located at the former hospital's O'Toole Pavilion at 30 Seventh Avenue in Manhattan.

While we have serious concerns about certain details of The Center proposal, we understand that it would provide significant healthcare services to the Lower West Side and could serve as a front door to health-care, something the community has lacked since St. Vincent's Hospital closed. If the concerns raised below are satisfactorily met, we encourage New York State Department of Health ("DOH") to approve the CON application.

For 160 years, St. Vincent's played a central role in the delivery of healthcare to Manhattan's Lower West Side neighbor-hoods. The hospital opened its doors to ev-eryone, regardless of ability to pay, and not only provided inpatient care and 24-hour emergency services, but also outpatient surgery, a wide range of specialty services, and culturally sensitive, community-based primary care.

The Center is neither a replacement nor a substitute for St. Vincent's. Nothing less than another full-service, acute-care hos-pital providing high-quality care to all pa-tients who come to its doors would be. We will continue to advocate for such a facility. As this CON application being reviewed notes, the DOH repeatedly signaled that there was a continued need for St. Vincent's up until its closure was announced. None-theless, faced with St. Vincent's crushing debt and a challenging healthcare economy, no experienced healthcare provider has yet put forth a credible proposal to reestablish a hospital on the site. In the absence of a full-service hospital, we recognize that the Center has the potential to fill many gaps

in the Lower West Side's healthcare infra-structure, and it would provide key services for the community that no other provider has proposed to do. Additionally, the Cen-ter's existence does not preclude the devel-opment of a full service hospital at a later date.

As part of the Lower West Side Com-munity Health Needs Assessment ("Needs Assessment"), which we worked with the local community boards to initiate, the CUNY School of Public Health at Hunt-er College and Fulton Youth of the Fu-ture, in cooperation with the Commission on the Public's Health System, surveyed residents of the communities surrounding St. Vincent's to learn about their health-care experiences before and after the hos-pital closed.

Among their findings, the surveys re-vealed that since St. Vincent's closed, many residents of its primary service area have had trouble connecting to and access-ing appropriate care and have felt insecu-rity, anxiety, fear or unhappiness about the lack of an emergency room and full service hospital nearby. Access issues included not knowing where to go for care, having to travel too far for care, finding that provid-ers did not accept the patients' insurance, and finding that providers did not have hours outside the regular work day. The surveys also found that people with physi-cal or mental-health conditions requiring regular care, who tended to be older, male, Latino and receiving Medicaid, reported worse healthcare experiences post-closure than others.

As the CON application notes, the ser-vice area has higher rates of non-institu-tionalized individuals with sensory, physi-cal, mental and self-care disabilities than Manhattan as a whole. A significant mi-nority of respondents to the Needs Assess-ment surveys reported difficulty postclo-sure accessing their medical records from the former St. Vincent's.

The CON application indicates that The Center would greatly increase our commu-nity's access to vital healthcare services. Operating as a hospital division of Lenox Hill Hospital, the facility would include a 24/7 free-standing Emergency Depart-ment ("ED") that would be able to treat more than 90% of the conditions seen at the former St. Vincent's emergency room; two medical/surgical beds for short-term observation and treatment of patients; am-bulance service for patients who need to be transferred to a general hospital; a multi-specialty ambulatory surgery center; diag-nostic radiology services and a clinical lab-oratory. In addition, NS-LIJ has reserved a portion of the facility for physician prac-tices, for which we expect doctors formerly affiliated with St. Vincent's will be given preference, as well as space, which NS-LIJ will consider occupying with services that fill care gaps identified by the Needs As-sessment.

Senator Tom Duane’s Testimony

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We are particularly pleased by NS-LIJ's clear statements in the CON application that "The Center will accept all patients for care, regardless of ability to pay," and "all services will be made available to patients without regard to insurance status and, for those without insurance, financial assistance will be offered by North Shore-NS-LIJ on a sliding-fee scale for those households with income up to 500% of the federal poverty limit." One of the characteristics of services provided by St. Vincent's was that all peo-ple were served with “a single standard of care no matter what their economic, social or any other defining status in their or their families' lives, and we would expect no less from NS-LIJ's new facility.

NS-LIJ is promoting the Center as "a new front door for communities to access healthcare," and is embracing the critical function "to triage community residents to the most appropriate level of care and enhance the ability of all providers to bet-ter meet the healthcare needs of the com-munity." Any emergency department, freestanding or otherwise, attracts patients in nonemergency situations who go there for immediate attention when they should instead be seeking regular primary or spe-cialty care. NS-LIJ is prepared to facili-tate patients' access to the continuum of healthcare services and to work with the community's federally qualified health centers, diagnostic and treatment centers, mental-health providers, and office-based practitioners to facilitate that care. As the CON application notes, this is a role that St. Vincent's previously assumed. The Needs Assessment indicates that this role urgently needs to be filled. We are encour-aged by NS-LIJ's investments in health information technology and its ability to make patients' medical information avail-able digitally to patients' other providers. As the Needs Assessment found, accessing health records from the former St. Vin-cent's has been a tremendous challenge for most patients who have sought them. NS-LIJ's electronic health records will not fix that problem, but nonetheless would be welcome for our community's future.

There have been many reports since St. Vincent's closed of overcrowding at other hospital emergency departments, and in particular at Beth Israel, Bellevue and New York Downtown, ' that have had to absorb the patient load. NS-LIJ's CON applica-tion suggests that "The Center would play a crucial role in mitigating overcrowding in neighboring Emergency Departments gen-erated by service-area residents." If DOH agrees this is likely to be true, this would certainly be a welcome outcome.

While we see great promise in the pro-posed Center, we have concerns as well. Some in the community have raised ques-tions about whether the neighborhood would be better off without a healthcare facility at this site if it is anything less than a full-service general hospital. Some have suggested that people who have one of the life-threatening conditions the freestanding ED is not equipped to treat could be worse

off for having chosen to go there rather than across town or uptown to an acute-care hospital. Some have asserted that the time that would be lost while NS-LIJ's emergency department staff evaluate, stabi-lize and prepare patients for transport to a general hospital in the ambulance stationed outside the facility could cost lives. We call upon DOH to formally address this issue, including performing a thorough profes-sional review of all peer-reviewed literature on ambulance diversion and its impact on mortality as well as short- and long-term health outcomes. DOH must not approve this application if the facility will put lives in jeopardy.

We are especially concerned that the Fire Department of New York Emergency Medical Service's ("EMS") patient deliv-ery criteria and transfer protocols have yet to be announced. The CON states "North Shore-NS-LIJ has initiated contact with FDNY EMS and begun to familiarize staff with the proposed model of care in antici-pation of the development of triage crite-ria approved by DOH." DOH must not approve this CON application until and unless NS-LIJ and EMS, in collaboration with DOH, have established ambulance protocols, based upon the ED's capabilities, which all parties agree are sound.

The CON application notes that in some communities, "Freestanding Emergency Departments are so successful in filling a critical void in the care continuum that they establish the need and facilitate the con-struction of a new hospital in the commu-nities where they are located, or they replace access to essential care following the closure of a hospital." A new full service hospital remains our goal. If the Center is approved, we will continue to urge in the strongest possible way that NS-LIJ or another pro-vider build upon the services it offers. In the meantime, we want to ensure that our com-munities have access to as many essential healthcare services as possible.

If the serious concerns we raised' above are satisfactorily addressed, we would sup-port this application's approval. Thank you for allowing us to submit testimony today and for your consideration of our recom-mendations.

Sincerely,Christine C. QuinnSpeakerNew York City Council

Jerrold NadlerMember of Congress8th Congressional District

Thomas K. DuaneState Senator29th Senate District

Deborah 1. GlickAssembly Member66th Assembly District

Richard N. GottfriedChair Assembly Committee on Health


Grace Church School to Open High School Division in September 2012Years in the planning, this Greenwich Vil-lage institution will now offer a rigorous college preparatory program, enhanced by its rich surroundings at Cooper Square. The Headmaster, George Davison, said, “The High School Division of Grace Church School will build on the school’s track record of excellence in academics, art and athletics.”

“Since 1894, Grace Church School has been a leader in independent school educa-tion in New York City,” Mr. Davison points out. “In addition to its strong academic re-cord, Grace is a community that helps stu-dents explore who they are through com-munity service, values education and real life experience.”

A state-of-the-art facility, creatively de-signed to encourage interaction between students and teachers, is now under con-struction on Cooper Square. The classic academic program is strengthened with several innovative concepts. Wednesday "lab days" feature collaborative and experi-ential learning opportunities with time for field studies and place-based learning in and around New York City, including com-munity service, sustainability programs, and student-initiated electives. Under the tute-lage of faculty, sophomores will spend the month of March off campus pursuing their passions in independent study, whether as interns in art studios or business or chari-

table work. They may also choose to par-ticipate in the extension of Grace’s current International Exchange Program. Through arrangements with nearby Cooper Union and New York University, older students will be able to enroll in advanced classes at those institutions. A Writing Center will be integral to the academic program. A full athletic program of interscholastic team sports will include soccer, volleyball, cross country, basketball, baseball, softball, track and field, tennis, squash, and fencing.

The founding head of the High School Division, Hugo Mahabir, brings 25 years of experience in New York City independent schools, most recently at Ethical Culture Fieldston School as Dean of Faculty and Academic Affairs. He has been an ac-tive member of the academic community throughout New York City as a lecturer, teacher, and an advocate and leader in di-versity efforts of independent schools.

“One of our greatest strengths at Grace Church School,” says Mr. Davison, “is the keen sense of community that has developed over the years among families representing an invigorating medley of races, religions and ethnicity.” Mr. Mahabir adds, “Our students will be part of a close-knit and supportive community of scholars and lead-ers, all striving to realize their full potential, embracing the challenges and rewards of academic learning and civic participation.”

The High School Division will open with ninth grade and, by adding a grade each year, will graduate the first class of seniors in 2016. Grace Church School is now accepting applications for ninth grade. For more information, visit gcschool.org or send inquiries to Admissions Director [email protected].

Grace — Challenge and RewardBy Doric Capsis

It has been 35 years since, as an eighth-grader, I navigated the halls and classrooms of the Grace Church School. I came to Grace Church School after completing grades K-5 at P.S. 41 and grades 6 and 7 at I.S. 70. I had been an “A” student in public school and had wonderful teachers along the way. But when I started at Grace Church School, I immediately felt academically challenged. Not to fear, my new fellow students and teachers embraced and helped me from day one. By the end of the year I had adapted, and I graduated with respectable grades. My memories are all fond ones: playing on the soccer, basketball, and baseball teams, attending the dances, participating in the Christ-mas pageant, and most importantly, developing rock solid foundations in my academic subjects of English, History, Mathematics, Science, and Latin. I attended my Grace Church School 35-year reunion (1976-2011) this year and there learned about the new High School Division.

I firmly believe that my eighth-grade year at Grace Church School was instrumental in my development as a student. It eventually led me to a B.A. from Tulane University and an M. Ed from the University of Georgia, and a lifelong career in teaching and edu-cational administration. Out of gratitude for that wonderful, formative year, I wanted to share these few words with the Greenwich Village community to express my happy anticipation of the forthcoming High School Division of the Grace Church School.

HELPING STUDENTS EXPLORE: Grace Church School’s Hugo Mahabir, Head of High School Division, and George P. Davison, Head of School

By Henry J. Stern

The reapportionment dance took a few steps forward and backward today as LATFOR (The New York State Legisla-tive Task Force on Demographic Research) held a public hearing in lower Manhattan. The committee has been traveling around the state to hear from the public, but that is no indication that they will respond to the complaints that have been received from academics, good government groups and potential candidates.

The first grievance, which has been ex-pressed by speakers who caught the road show before it arrived in New York City, was that LATFOR should not exist all, but that an independent redistricting commis-sion should be appointed, rather than leav-ing the task to the assembly of incumbents now conducting the hearings and charged with preparing a plan for the approval of the Legislature, the body that will be af-fected by the plan.

The reformers want to prevent self-

serving partisan districting, which ful-fills the desires of a political party at the expense of non-members of that party. They want nonpartisan districting, either this year by law or permanently by Con-stitutional amendment. The incumbents' idea of avoiding one-party favoritism is bi-partisan districting, which serves the needs of both the Democratic and Republican parties, at the expense of challengers and independents of all stripes.

The star witness at the hearing was for-mer Mayor Edward I. Koch, co-founder of New York Uprising, which is a coalition of former public officials favoring indepen-dent non-political districting.

Under the Constitution of the United States, a census of the population is taken every ten years, and the results determine the apportionment of seats in Congress. Because of New York State's comparatively slow growth, it will lose two seats as a re-sult of the 2010 census. The usual political tradition when New York loses two seats has been to take one upstate Republican

Political Panel Praises Partisan Redistricting,Solons Are Discomfited at Koch Remonstrance

seat and one downstate Democratic seat. The situation has been complicated since 2010 by the departure of three members of Congress from New York State because of sexual misconduct, in three cases different from each other and all involving unre-quited desires.

The custom in New York has been for the Democrats to draw Assembly district lines and the Republicans the Senate lines. For seats in Congress, the parties had to reach agreement on district boundaries. Because of changing demographics and social attitudes, the Republican hold on the Senate has become ever more tenu-ous. A law adopted when the Senate was in Democratic hands changed the districts that would benefit from the head count of inmates from the upstate counties were they were incarcerated, providing employ-ment to local residents, to the downstate counties where they lived while commit-ting the crimes, largely, felonies that re-sulted in their being sent upstate.

Some people want the Democrats to win

both houses, so responsibility for whatever happens or does not happen can be placed on one party. Others prefer a divided legis-lature, so that conservatives as well as liber-als will be heard. A number of players pub-licly prefer domination by their own party, but their private opinion is another matter. Common sense tells us that moderate gov-ernment is more likely to be achieved under diverse leadership than when the legislature is under the control of one party. A politi-cal system dominated by either party tends to reduce the importance of general elec-tions and increase the effect of party pri-maries, where the more extreme members of each party have proportionately greater influence, in part because independents are forbidden to vote.

Redistricting will be an important issue in the months to come, and much will be said on the subject. The argument is not ideolog-ical, the left against the right, the spenders against the savers, or liberals against social conservatives. The issue here is one of eq-uity and fairness, of expressing the wishes of

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By Mark M. Green

The subway is a reminder of the underlying fear of living here around the ten year anniversary of the attacks of Sep-tember 11, 2001. Living in the target and riding about in the subway—which is certainly a bulls-eye of that target—that is tension. Tension is a good word to describe what we feel and what explosions are all about.

Explosions are caused by tense molecules blowing themselves apart and forming what could be called relaxed molecules, like nitrogen, N2, which constitutes most of the air around us. Tense molecules are high energy, and relaxed molecules are low energy, and when high-energy molecules find a way to change into low-energy molecules then a great deal of that energy difference is turned into heat. Nature loves that—released heat. Nature also loves disorder: the explosion makes smaller molecules out of larger molecules. More stuff flying about—lovely disorder.

Some high-energy molecules contain multiple atoms of nitrogen, N, but the nitrogen is not in the relaxed state of two nitrogen atoms together, such as N2, the form of nitrogen that constitutes most of air. Instead, the nitrogen atoms, N, are kept apart from each other like two friends, or lovers, in different cells of a molecular prison, aware of each other but kept isolated by an insurmountable force. These high-energy molecules have good reason to explode, to surmount the tension arising from the separation of the nitrogen atoms. As the explosion is triggered, the extreme heat released at the first instant blows apart more explosive molecules, which release more heat as they explode and so on until all of the molecules join the party and explode together in a very short time, even fractions of a second, like the lighting of a match. The explosion releases some of the atoms in the molecules while enabling others to change their positions. The molecular prisons disappear, torn apart by the heat and by oxygen atoms grabbing all the carbon atoms, C, and forming carbon dioxide, CO2, and grabbing all the hydrogen atoms, H, and forming wa-ter, H2O. And all the N atoms that used to be constrained

in their molecular prisons now have a chance to find each other and become what they yearned to be, N2. And they all join in that shock wave driven by the heat to move at incredible speeds – consider 8000 meters in a second—the force and heat pushing aside and destroying all in its path.

Chemicals that make great explosives can therefore be spun off from various arrangements of nitrogen, N, and oxygen, O, in their molecular structures. As long as those nitrogen atoms yearning to be together are held apart and the oxygen atoms are there to supply the aggressive energy to rip the molecule apart, the potential for an explosion exists. One of the best arrangements for these atoms is found in a molecular entity that chemists call nitro groups, -NO2, which turn low-energy molecules into high- energy explosives. Add three of these nitro groups to glycerol, a very low-key molecule that is a byproduct of soap manu-facture found in commonly used bath products, and you get the highly volatile nitroglycerine. Alfred Nobel found a way to tame nitroglycerine. His method converted an uncontrollable material, apt to explode without warning, into controllable explosive, dynamite. This made Nobel wealthy beyond imagination and thus able to fund the Nobel prizes.

There are many more possibilities for these –NO2 groups. Add multiple nitro groups to cellulose, which is found in wood and get gun cotton, nitrocellulose. Add three nitro groups to toluene and get TNT, trinitrotolu-ene. Take a common industrial intermediate called pen-taerythritol, add four nitro groups and get PETN, which was made famous by the “shoe bomber” when he tried to blow up an American Airlines flight from Paris to Miami in December, 2001 by stuffing the explosive in his shoe. And then there is RDX, C-4 and Semetex, all based on a molecule with six nitrogen atoms, three in the form of nitro groups. A common fertilizer can supply the neces-sary separation between nitrogen atoms, ammonium ni-trate, NH4+ NO3- (used in the Oklahoma City bombing in April, 1995), which will readily give up the coulombic force that binds the two oppositely charged parts in order to get those nitrogen atoms together as N2.

Dynamite was named by Nobel from the Greek – con-nected with power. And power it is for whatever purpose we deem necessary. Explosives allow for no judgment. I of-ten take I-87, the Northway, from Albany to the Canadian border to visit the kids at McGill in Montreal and marvel at how the road so beautifully cuts through the eastern edge of the Adirondack Mountains, a path that would have been impossible without dynamite. Take a walk to what used to be the park at Horatio and Hudson—no more kids playing basketball. Deep underground, in bed rock, a part of the third tunnel assuring that water will be delivered to New York City (in case of a failure of the old existing tunnels) is being blasted forward using explosives. Ride the subways and think of the dynamite needed to dig those underground caverns. Mines and roads and so much else would be im-possible without the force of an explosion. Army cannons hurl explosive shells a great distance to wreck havoc on an enemy. A war plane drops a bomb from great heights. One terrorist fashions a plastic explosive into a cassette player on an airplane over Scotland, while others deliver explosions with deadly force to trains in Madrid and London, and cer-tainly still another thinks of ways to bring explosive force to New York City. It makes no difference to the nitrogen atoms; reunited as N2, they and their gaseous friends just take their wild ride one more time.

Science From-away: Explosions

the people, as opposed to those in both parties who would manipulate the system, deny ballot access to challengers, preserve incumbents by any means available, and place in-dividual legislators under the thrall of the legislative leader-ship, where any expression of autonomy is punished.

The New York State legislature, periodically derided as the most dysfunctional in the United States, has earned its ill repute, not only through acts of dishonesty by mem-bers of both houses, some of which have resulted in prison sentences, but by an arbitrary system of rules and protec-tive walls around the leadership, so that although the great majority of the members are honest, there is precious little they can accomplish without the consent of men who, to

UNLOCKING NATURE'S VIOLENCE: Molecules in opposition.

put it politely, are more responsive to special interests and individual desires, often paid for by political contributions.

To allow the leaders to retain the power to choose their followers by drawing their districts condemns the back-benchers to little more authority than their constituents, who may decennially be moved like cattle from one dis-trict to another to serve the political interests of those whose lack of responsibility and desire for re-election have helped give rise to the state's now acute financial problems.

Do not take this commentary as indicating that any par-ticular legislator is better or worse than any other. Some considered paragons of virtue may never have been subject to temptation. Others usually reviled are not only smarter

than most others but are better politicians. And when peo-ple elected to high office as reformers are found to have several screws loose that prevent positive interaction with other people, the distinction between intellect and insan-ity becomes difficult to find.

But regardless of their intellect, ability, integrity or state of rage, all public officials should run in honestly drawn districts, equal in size, compact and contiguous, and link-ing communities by interest. Political boundaries should not be perpetrated on the public by self-serving incum-bents, who have systematically manipulated the electoral system to serve their personal needs at the expense of the public interest in honest government.


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By Janet Stern Capron

My grandfather, J. David Stern, was one of the rare newspaper publishers who wrote his own editorials. Among several other papers, he published the New York Post, which he had finally consented to buy (and therefore save from extinction). When he owned it, from the end of 1933 until the middle of 1939, the New York Post was one of the few progressive, liberal papers in the entire country, and, amazingly, the only daily in this state to ever come out for Roosevelt. Eventually my grandfather passed the New York Post onto the considerably wealthier Dorothy Schiff, who in turn sold it to Ru-pert Murdoch. Grandpa’s more successful ventures continued to be the Philadelphia Record and the Camden Courier-Post. But his success as a publisher is almost beside the point. I would like instead to talk about his success as a close advisor to Roosevelt, who called my grandpa his “hair shirt.” And in so doing, I hope to begin to learn the answer to the question that haunts me these days: Whatever happened to people like my progressive, fighting-cock liberal of a grandfather—where have they gone?

I just finished reading grandpa’s auto-biography again, “Memoirs of a Maverick Publisher,” and his story strikes me as wild-ly prescient. For instance, he warned against what he called “a capon press”, the progeny of the corporate takeover of the fourth es-tate. He was brave. He wrote,

“The day after President Roosevelt took office I said to him, ‘Would you like to know the first thing I would do if I were presi-dent?’ ‘And what would President Stern do?’ F.D.R. mocked my over-eagerness to give advice. ‘I would send for John Maynard Keynes,’ was my answer. ‘He’s the greatest

economist of our time. He advocates deficit spending to counteract depression.’ ‘In this country we have no use for Keynes,’ was Roosevelt’s reply.”

It took the newly elected president a full year to meet with the even then vili-fied economist. Grandfather claimed that it was only when Roosevelt abandoned the Keynes policy five years later that the coun-try once again began to slip into depression, until the war finally pulled it out for good.

Roosevelt also threatened to veto the Glass-Steagull bill that established the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC). He thought it would socialize the banking system—people would no longer choose a bank for its trustworthiness, but only on the basis of convenience, and the true banker behind it all would be the fed-eral government. But Grandfather contin-

Roosevelt called my grandfather his “hair shirt”

ued to badger the president, marshalling an expert to speak on the FDIC’s behalf, until finally Roosevelt reluctantly consented to pass the bill “for the sake of expedience.” To Roosevelt’s great credit, he kept advisors like my grandfather around.

I was very close to my grandfather grow-ing up. He sold all his papers the year I was born, 1947, and so had a lot of time to de-vote to me. When I was four, my mother was divorced, and a few years after that, Grandpa bought my mother and me a big apartment at 1185 Park Avenue. My grand-mother and he lived at 880 Fifth, in the penthouse, a duplex, with a rooftop garden overlooking Central Park and the towers of the Majestic across the way. Every Sunday, my mother and I went over to the grand-parents’ house for mid-day Sunday dinner, which was always standing rib and York-shire pudding prepared by their spectacular chef, Anna. By then, grandfather was very well off, with big properties on Long Island and in Palm Beach, but that had not always been the case.

While he was publishing, J. David drew a hefty salary but saved no money. He wasn’t really much of a businessman at all. It was only when the Newspaper Guild, which he had help found and to which he gave its first contract, struck his papers heedlessly and without provocation (other than that he opposed the Communist Party) that he was forced finally to sell. Hence there was (for a while) money, which he and Grandma spent prodigiously. I remember the many glittering parties well attended by movers and shakers—Grandpa’s star had not entirely faded when I was young. I remember well his best friends, the book publisher, Max Schuster, and the ACLU chief counsel, Arthur Garfield Hayes. I also for some reason remember meeting Morris Ernst, the founder of the ACLU and the lawyer who defended James Joyce’s “Ulysses” against obscenity charges. My grandparents’ good friend, Fanny Hurst, the writer of “Imitation of Life” and “Back Street,” was my magical fairy godmother. The list goes on. Grandpa’s autobiography is an extraordinary litany. He knew every-body in politics, business, show biz and the literati, too—he was right there, “his thumb on the pulse,” as Grandma would say.

What I remember most vividly were the hours we spent together in Central Park before Sunday dinner, just us two, skip-ping down the hill to the miniature sail-boat pond, or walking hand in hand in the Rambles. He a round, robust fairly short man with white hair combed over his bald head and big, intelligent blue eyes behind his glasses, and me, a short little girl in vel-vets and Liberty prints—my Sunday best—the two of us kicking up the dirt together, free spirits marching under the trees. It was then that he generously shared his world-

view, allowed me to see what he saw—no matter how little I was, he deemed me old enough to hear and understand the truth.

“Never use a ten-cent word when a two-cent word will do,” the old newspaperman said.

“What’s the difference between Republi-cans and Democrats, you want to know? I’ll tell you: Republicans believe in passing on all the money to the rich people first, who in turn give the poor people jobs. Demo-crats believe in giving all the money to the poor people first, who in turn spend it all on things like homes, cars, clothes and food that the rich people provide.”

Give all the money to the rich people first? That made no sense.

And so it went. “Transcendentalism—don’t get taken in by that—a lot of hooey. Those men, Emerson and Thoreau, they were big phonies.”

On the other hand, Grandpa adored Mark Twain and had a signed, hand-writ-ten remark by Twain framed and hanging on his study wall:

“It’s never too late to mend—so why hurry?”

J. David believed in the here and now and in our capacity, not to mention obligation, to change the world for the better, because it was morally right to do so, and because, he said, the only happiness lies in being able to contribute to the greatest good for the greatest number. Grandfather believed in this world. Above all, he believed in fighting for justice. No conciliator he. And yet, I was surprised to learn reading his book, some of his best friends were conservative business-men, who backed his papers and stood by him through all his hair-raising struggles. In those days, there were such men of sublime integrity on both sides who were convinced that every point of view must be heard. Now it sounds like the Arabian Nights, so long ago and far away. If I hadn’t grown up close to one such great man, I would be as cynical as some of my pals. If I didn’t know that some fights could be won, I would con-tinue to be politically passive with a clear conscience…but such is the weight, finally, of knowing and loving someone like my grandfather, J David Stern.

I agreed to write about my grandfather, lib-eral New York Post publisher J. David Stern, for the WestView News, first of all because his voice speaks to me louder than ever across time and, I believe, needs to be heard today. But also, I wanted to write for the WestView News because it may be the only print newspaper in town right now that is consistently speaking truth to power. The WestView News continues its courageous stand against corrupt big devel-opers, who are encroaching on our neighbor-hood and attempting to rob it of its character, not to mention its only hospital…Shades of grandpa, a glimmer of what could be.

HE WAS BRAVE: J. David Stern in the 1962 photo by Nickolaus Muray from the jacket of “Memoirs of a Maverick Publisher”

Grandpa, wish you were here…


West Village Original: Nicky PerryBy Michael D. Miniciello

This month’s West Village Original is London native Nicky Perry, owner of Tea & Sym-pathy on Greenwich Avenue for over twenty years. In addition to the restaurant, she also owns Carry On Tea & Sympathy, the shop next store that sells all things British. A firm believer in giving back to the community, Perry is also very active in West Village af-fairs, including trying to get another hospital to replace the now-closed St. Vincent’s.

As a girl growing up in London, Nicky Perry felt destined to live in New York. “I knew I belonged here years before I came,” she says. “Every time I heard the words ‘New York’ my ears would prick up. I couldn’t hear enough about it. My mum brought me here for my 21st birthday for a week and then — eight months later — I came back on my own with $200 in my pockets. That was 1981. $200 wouldn’t buy you dinner today! But there was no turning back for me.”

The first year she was in New York, Perry went out to dinner with a friend who com-plained that there were no English restau-rants here and she couldn’t get a good cup of tea. “That’s when the light bulb went off in my head and I was obsessed,” she says. “I knew I wanted to open a tea shop, what it would look like, and what I would sell.

So I started working in restaurants where I gained experience. By the time I was 31 — and just six months after I got my green card — my father gave me £10,000 to open the restaurant. My partner matched the money, my brother renovated it, a friend of mine decorated it, and on December 23, 1990 we opened Tea & Sympathy.”

Happily, the restaurant is still open. This

constitutes a bit of a miracle in a neighbor-hood that has seen most of its long-time restaurants and shops close up. Perry thinks much of her restaurant’s longevity is due to its uniqueness. “I consider myself very lucky because I’m doing what no one else is doing,” she says. “I have a customer base that stretches far and wide. I’m also a small restaurant so that helps. I guess you could call me one of the St. Vincent’s Hospital survivors.”

This last observation leads Perry to ex-pound on an issue that is very close to her heart: the closing of St. Vincent’s. “I am ab-solutely apoplectic about that hospital clos-ing,” she cries. “It’s unconscionable! This is the third most expensive zip code in Amer-ica and this is what happens to us? How can we be living in a society where condos are more important than people’s health? It’s beyond belief. That hospital was this entire neighborhood’s livelihood and now busi-nesses are gone and doctors are gone.”

Continuing in this vein, she compares what’s happened to the West Village in general as “living in a world of Pac-Man.” “All the amazing little businesses that have been here for years have just been eaten up,” she explains. “We’re the dots and the cor-porations are the men eating us all alive. It’s like Starbucks or Ralph Lauren say, ‘Let’s munch this block up!’ This raises com-

mercial rents to ridiculous heights, which in turn stifles any artistic expression or risk taking. That’s because if you go into a space that cost $20,000 a month to rent, you have to go into it with a corporate attitude. This will destroy us all. And it will destroy the American dream. You can’t come here with $200 in your pocket and a fabulous idea anymore.”

When asked if she thinks there’s any hope for the West Village, Perry takes a breath. “I think there is hope, yes,” she says finally. “I think there always has to be hope. Things change all the time and you never know what’s going to happen tomorrow. It’s sad and it’s disappointing what’s happening in the West Village today, but it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s going to stay that way. Nothing in life does.”

And for the time being, she can proudly point to her restaurant and it’s iconic status in the community. “I just love every minute of the business,” she confesses. “I love that it’s different all the time. You never know what’s going to happen next or who’s go-ing to walk through the door. No day is the same and the people you meet are amazing, especially in this neighborhood. People talk to each other here. It’s still very neighborly, which is very British. The West Village is probably the closest to anything you’d find in England, and certainly London.”

ROYAL WEDDING CELEBRATION: When Kate and William were married in April, Nicky Perry, of Tea & Sympathy, organized a neighborhood party in Jackson Square. Photo by Maggie Berkvist.


WOWING THEM ONCE MORE: Terri White leads the cast in “Who’s That Woman?” in the current production of “Follies.”

By Robert Heide

A story appeared in the January 2010 issue of WestView News, written by me, cele-brating the return of Terri White to Broad-way in a glorious revival of "Finian's Rain-bow". A report in the New York Times in October 2010, just prior to the opening of the show, focused on the downturn Terri had experienced after she was forced out of her Village apartment when she could no longer come up with the rent. Down and out, she found herself living in Washington Square. Coming to the rescue one night was a Sixth-Precinct police officer named David Taylor who had seen many of her terrific cabaret performances at “Rose's Turn” on Grove Street. "The night I found her, she looked soulless. I was concerned for her — scared," he said. Officer Tay-lor eventually found an apartment in Jersey City for a fragile Terri — rent-free. With his help, and with the help of a newfound friend, Donna Barnett, Terri was restored to a new confidence and was able to audi-tion for the encore production of "Finian's Rainbow" and continued in the show when it went to Broadway. When Terri belted out "Necessity", it became the showstop-per number that each night was greeted by wild applause from the audience.

Now on a second-go-round in her new-found life, Terri is wowing them once more in a new revival of Stephen Sondheim's brilliant "Follies" at the Marquis Theater on Broadway with another zap-‘em number, "Who's That Woman", which again has the audience on its feet and shouting for more. Other great gals in this superb new produc-tion of "Follies" are Bernadette Peters, Jan Maxwell, and the great London musical-comedy star, Elaine Page, who sings "I'm Still Here" with such fierce intensity and desperation that it breaks your heart. The show-stopping magic continues in "Follies" with Jan Maxwell's shattering "Could I Leave You"; but the ultimate moment oc-curs toward the end of the second act when

Bernadette Peters, startlingly exquisite and beautiful, with long, flowing hair and wear-ing a strapless purple gown, commands to-tal attention from the audience. In what may be her finest hour, Bernadette — con-fused and alone on stage — sings the elo-quent song, "Losing My Mind". The men in the cast certainly could not be accused of taking the low road, such as when Danny Burstein sings "The God-Why-Don't-You-Love-Me-Blues", or when, in the closing number of the show, Ron Raines confronts himself and the audience with the give-or-take message "Live, Laugh, Love”. Jayne Houdyshell, as a now-dowdy ex-follies showgirl, is nothing short of stu-pendous, overpowering the audience with her rousing rendition of "Broadway Baby."

New York Times critic, Ben Brantley, when he saw the first incarnation of this production in Washington DC, called "Follies" "one of the greatest musicals of all time." David Hurst, in his theater review in Next magazine, tops Brantley with "...ranks as the greatest musical ever written for the-ater lovers." The night I was at the Mar-quis to see the show, Ben Brantley was in the audience, and at curtain’s end he joined in on the thunderous applause, and the stomping of feet along with cries of “Bravo! Bravo!” Though it was first presented on Broadway in 1971 with Alexis Smith and Dorothy Collins, "Follies" seems to be just the right antidote for the cynical times of 20ll.

Going backstage afterward, to talk to Terri White, I ran into Bernadette Peters and got a chance to tell her how fantastic I thought her performance and singing was. I told her I remembered her as a girl of six-teen when she appeared in her first starring role in "Dames At Sea", the long-running show directed by Robert Dahdah at the “Caffe Cino” in l966. The “Cino” is now ac-knowledged with a bronze plaque on the fa-cade of the building at 31 Cornelia Street as the first off-off Broadway coffeehouse the-ater. The Village Voice called it "The off-

Terri & Bernadette

Our “Follies” with Stephen Sondheim

From Village Start-ups to Broadway Babies

off Broadway shrine." Bernadette said, "Oh yes, Joe Cino. He was a wonderful man." I will never forget her singing "It's Rain-ing in My Heart" from "Dames at Sea" at Joe's memorial at Judson Church, her black mascara tears streaming down her cheeks. Joe Cino had killed himself in his beloved caffe-theater, where many writers like Sam Shepard, John Guare, Lanford Wilson, Robert Patrick, Doric Wilson, myself, and others first presented their plays. "Yes, that was a long time ago..." Bernadette said wist-fully with a faraway look in her eyes; but in that moment it seemed time stood still.

When Terri White greeted me in her dressing room, she was all smiles and good cheer. I asked her how she felt, how she was doing these days. "Never better!" she answered, "Being in "Follies" is a tonic — a total trip — wonderful!"

How did you start up in show biz, I asked. "I was not a singer originally. I had broken my hip in a fall you see. I used to tap-dance with my father in shows and then found myself suddenly stumbling around. One night Charles Nelson Reilly took me to see Mabel Mercer — such won-der — at 'Cleo's' and that did it for me. I met Miss Mercer who took a shine to me. When I complimented her on her singing, she said to me, ‘Honey I'm not a singer or songstress. I just tell stories — the story of the song!’ I also saw Alberta Hunter...I think she was in one of the early Ziegfeld Follies editions. She was at the Cookery on 8th Street and University Place in the Village. She was on target, but, like Mabel, she was mainly telling and feeling the story of the song. I saw the great Sarah Vaughn at the Blue Note. Sarah said to me, off the

cuff and with great modesty, ‘I just sing the notes, do a few riffs.’ I never took singing lessons. Later, working with Cy Coleman in ‘Barnum’ on Broadway, he taught me about voice control. He is also, I should say, my favorite composer."

Who is your favorite singer, I asked. "Ann Hampton Calloway!" Terri answered without thinking twice.

And what are your career plans after "Follies", I asked. "I want to do the life of the legendary Parisian cabaret singer — Bricktop — she was Mabel Mercer’s men-tor and a great chanteuse. Oh, by the way, my first appearance on Broadway was in the musical version of ‘Two Gentlemen of Ve-rona’, a best-musical Tony winner over the first "Follies", which opened that same year — 1971."

Present during the dressing room inter-view was Donna Barnett, now Terri's per-sonal representative and the head of “Old Hat Productions.” The two tied the knot legally on the stage of the St. James Theater on July 25 20ll, right on the set of "Hair". "The setting of ‘Hair’ was the perfect place," said Terri, adding "basically we're a couple of leftover hippies, that's for sure." End-ing the backstage interview, Terri gave me an embrace and said, "Look, I still love the Village. How can I forget ‘Rose's Turn’ on Grove Street or '88' — the cabaret club on 10th Street across from the Sixth Precinct? I think about the ‘Five Oaks’ on Grove Street a lot. I think of Marie Blake pound-ing the ivories singing 'Down in the Depths on the 90th floor.'"

The word all over town is go — rush — to see "Follies" if you can, which is said to be shutting down on February 5, 2012.

By Bobb Goldsteinn, Theater Editor

This is our response to a letter from the desk of Stephen Sondheim to the pages of the New York Times, in which Sondheim attacked Diane Paulus’ then-upcoming production of the Gershwins’ “Porgy and Bess”, a week before it was due to open in August (Audra McDonald played Bess) not at the Shubert, but at the low-profile

Loeb Drama Center in Cambridge.And, no, we are not an acquaintance of

Ms. Paulus, who should need no introduc-tion if you saw her productions of the re-cent “HAIR”, “Eli’s Coming”, and the very long-running environmental musical, “The Donkey Show”. (Ring a bell?)

However, we are cousins of Bruce Bus-chel, who is not only an extremely color-ful writer (his “Walking Broad” reads like a

Baedeker of Philadelphia’s Broad Street as written by another ‘Bruce’ — Lenny), but our ‘Cuz’ also received an ASCAP Award for his articles on music, and he co-created the five-time Obie Award-winning musi-cal “Eli's Comin”, based on the songs of Laura Nyro (created with — yes — Diane Paulus).

Sondheim’s letter of professional and personal criticism of Paulus, published in

LARGER THAN LIFE: Gloria Swanson in the ruins of the old Roxy Theater in a 1960 LIFE photograph by Eliot Elisofon.

“Follies” is Forty—A Consideration

”Follies” Is Forty: An Appreciation


the Times and not presented in the privacy of a personal email, or as part of a discreet conversation usually held in a theatre lobby or bar after a performance, has freed us to talk about some issues regarding Sondheim that we have been nursing for decades, ever since he injured some nerves in our right hand in his infamous Turtle Bay ‘game room’ back when we were assisting Burt Shevelove (at 33 West Ninth Street) while Burt, Larry Gelbart and Sond-heim were preparing “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum”.

The world has grown so much more litigious since then. Today that route would almost be a forgone conclusion especially after we promptly informed Steve of the injury (which took almost a year to heal), and he could not bring himself to offer us even an apology. That spoke much about the man, though it could not prepare us for what would later transpire.

In truth, we were twenty-three, troubled and rather clueless at the time, but we knew you don’t tell tales out of school, whether one is a choirboy or a personal assistant, about a show business figure. (Times certainly do change, don’t they?)

Besides, we were studying the craft of stage songwrit-ing and fantasized that Steve would, perhaps, offer us the sort of mentoring that Oscar Hammerstein had afforded young Steve.

Then, ‘BONG! Fame hits us upside the head when “Washington Square” (1963, The Village Stompers) be-comes an overnight international sensation. We were lost, but still felt that our first substantial success would help level the playing field a bit, and, foolishly, we continued to seek Steve’s respect.

This led to us inviting him to our Christopher Street studio to witness Bob Goldstein’s “LightWorks”, and he attended a few times.

“LightWorks” (WestView News, Sept. ’11) was an amalgamation of blinking Christmas lights; changing color spots; film; slides; special-effects projections; mov-ing-screen surfaces, and a mirrored ball, all employed to illustrate musical tracks culled from the charts of Holly-wood, Broadway and Tin Pan Alley. It was “the forerunner of MTV,” claimed one admirer. It was installed in a lovely second-floor studio at 181 Christopher Street, down near the river, a decade before Disco. (The room lives on, but only in the opening scene of Andy Warhol’s “TRASH”.)

One of the early “LightWorks” signature numbers was “The Roxy Music Hall”, from the “Rodgers and Hart Re-visited” album produced by Ben Bagley and an old col-laborator, Michael McWhinney, and sung by the amazing Dorothy Loudon (the original Miss Hannigan in “Annie”).

At some point in the evening, Loudon’s snazzy and slangy rendition of “The Roxy Music Hall” (the Larry Hart laundry list of remarkable features and fixtures you’d find at the Roxy, which in real life was never called a mu-sic hall, but a theatre, while Radio City was the Music Hall), would burst forth from the surround-sound speak-ers, triggering a three-screen slide spectacular that flashed on and off, illustrating the lyrics of the song in time to the sprightly show tune while “LightWorks” morphed itself into flashing theatre marquees and other animated Broad-way light displays.

All the visuals mounted in the three Kodak Carou-sel 800 circular slide trays that were used in the “Roxy” number were projections of photos found in the coffee-table book, “The Best Remaining Seats”, by Ben M. Hall (1960), the first published work about movie palaces (now available in a Da Capo paperback).

Ben Hall, our upstairs neighbor at 181, was, at the time, the movie critic at Time Magazine, and it was because of this that I ended up ghostwriting the positive movie re-view of “Last Year at Marienbad”, though Time has never known that I — or any of my accomplishments — ever existed. (Once upon a time, Time was up on everything,

but by the Sixties, it was lost, as was most of the main-stream media, while pot, pills and psychedelia replaced the tee martooney lunch, and newsmen started having trouble finding where “it was happening.” This was cer-tainly the case up at Time-Life.)

“The Best Remaining Seats” established a new sub-genre in publishing, and it provided the necessary documentation that’s inspired many American munici-palities to reclaim and restore countless old downtown movie palaces to draw the populace back at night.

And then there’s this: I speak of the last image in “The Best Remaining Seats,” and the last image of our Roxy production number. Splashed across the three gi-gantic “LightWorks” screens, on the last word in the song, “Haaaaaaall!” — three larger-than-life Gloria Swansons, poised in the middle of the shell of the half-ruined Roxy that had nothing to look forward to but the merciful coup de gras of the wrecking ball.

Why Swanson? Well, Gloria was at the formal open-ing of the Roxy decades earlier when, just back from Europe, her picture “The Loves of Sunya” premiered there, and she attended with her new husband as the Marquisa de la Falaise de la Coudraye.

And it was Time-Life that hired photographer Elliot Elifosen in 1960 to capture the ruin of the Roxy. Get-ting Gloria Swanson to be the historical figure in the photo was his inspired idea.

So there she stands for all eternity, a gay Statue of Liberty, resplendent in a black gown with a red feather boa draped across her two arms that are raised in a gesture of supplication and sadness. Six years after the picture first appeared in Life Magazine, there it was again, now in magnificent multiple images enlarged upon the three floor-to-ceiling screens, arranged like a huge looking glass across the width of the entire space.

It was then we discovered another of Steve’s failings. He has trouble giving compliments. After experiencing “The Roxy Music Hall” number, along with the rest of the bill of that particular evening, all Steve could come up with when we bid him good night was the one com-ment he repeated on his return visit: “Goldstein, I don’t know what the hell you are trying to do.”

As Michael Feingold observed in his incisive cover-age of the new “FOLLIES” in the September 14 issue of the Village Voice: “Sondheim and book writer James Goldman had planned a much smaller-scale work, a musical murder mystery about Ziegfeld girls and their husbands called “The Girls Upstairs”.

It was the “famous photo of Gloria Swanson amid the rubble of the demolished Roxy that spurred the change from the intimate work the writers contemplat-ed into the big, daunting event that now stokes every musical-theater director’s dreams.”

Of course, whenever Steve tells the story, we doubt that he mentions “LightWorks”. (Guilt works in funny ways, especially when you have a distant and disap-proving father and a mother who was both dismissive and inappropriately seductive.)

Look, we know that, at the age of 81, Sondheim is continuing the birthday victory lap he began last year with all the deserved tributes, productions and acco-lades offered up in honor of his wonderful work.

But the industry and the media have always had a “hands-off ” policy regarding certain sacred cows, and now it is convenient to use advancing age as an excuse, especially when it comes to the Pope of American mu-sical theater.

Still, every twelve-step program considers making amends necessary for a full recovery, and the shelf life of this ‘Thou Shall’ lasts for the life of the two parties, the aggrieved and the aggressor.

When we read that Steve’s townhouse had suffered

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By Frank Thurston Green

There have been a lot of movies lately about the persecution of homosexuals. Their trailers especially are like those of action movies, with pounding brass and bible-force quotations about "forbidden love." This is fine. The problem is think-ing that these movies advance progressive causes, that these silver screen homosexu-als, as incendiary as silver screen gas tanks, help the lives of real homosexuals.

Movies like “Eyes Wide Open” and “Cir-cumstance”, archetypes of the persecution drama, are for people nestled in progressive enclaves looking to feel pity and disdain for those who don’t get to live in Greenwich Village. The star of the movies is bigotry, with persecuted homosexuals as a side-show, as caged animals staring intensely at one another and having sex whenever they get the chance.

In dramas about straight people it's okay for them to be horny circus panthers now and then, because the straight people

in popular culture are whole people with whole lives that run the gamut of hu-man experience. They have children and kidnap children, have wonderful, happy lives and die alone. Straight people are the prom queen and Carrie too. But ho-mosexuals aren't. They're never not ho-mosexuals. The essential problem with these persecution movies is their insis-tence that a homosexual is their stigmata. No straight person movie would so dar-ingly dispense with back story the way those about homosexuals so readily do; their sexual preference is all the explana-tion deemed necessary. Homosexuals are people though, and their qualities as peo-ple should be mostly what movies about homosexuals are about. So it's a triumph when some gay dude gets prosecuted for a good old-fashioned crime like embezzle-ment (see “I Love You Phillip Morris”). It's by chronicling their lives as crimi-nals or gorillas or captains of normalcy – people like everyone else – that they will come to be treated like everyone else.

Everyday Gay

So long as homosexuals are sequestered in fantastic, oriental tales, they will never be known for the exceedingly typical peo-ple they are. And until they are known in all their average glory, their oppression will continue. One day some benighted bigot will enjoy a homosexual romantic comedy without realizing it and so stumble into

revelation; it will be like being told what you thought was chicken are bull testicles and retching for absolution, but finally deciding that if it tastes like chicken, who cares? And that'll happen, just as soon as we stop making homosexual sex into an earth-shatteringly big deal because, after all, it all just tastes like chicken.

By Jim Fouratt

October brings an avalanche of quality films, screening for one week in New York and Los Angeles to meet the qualifying rules for consideration for Academy Award nomination. The mother of all US film fes-tivals, the New York Film Festival, will also be up and running. Cine-astes will have a wealth of big screen, dark room choices. Because West Villager Harvey Weinstein successfully launched a fourth quarter blitz campaign in 1998 (Shakespeare in Love), a new template was mapped to capture public interest and make critical static to promote a film. What gets lost in this blitz of films are smaller, less well-funded independent narrative films and documentaries. Here is a short list of films that deserve your atten-tion and in my view are significant in this month’s releases.

“Weekend,” directed by Andrew Haigh This is a totally contemporary story of two people who meet in a casual hook-up, find that in fact opposites attract and that lust quickly becomes charged with af-fection bordering on that suspect emotion called love. It is a same-sex couple — an almost cliché academically damaged art-ist and an average guy who works at the local sports complex who, besides being a hunk, has a brain and a heart. It is a total crossover film that seeks to discover how the heart and genitals can work together. These two men could be any two people, of any sexual orientation or age who bump into each other in a local bar or on a social network — resulting in having their indi-

vidual worlds seismically shaken. Weekend is so artfully framed, frankly directed and perfectly cast it’s pure sensual pleasure.

“Hell and Back Again,” directed by Danfung Dennis Photo-journalist Dan-fung Dennis, in his first film, makes yet one more war documentary, but this one actu-ally breaks form by showing us what war does to individuals through a sensitive use of craft and story telling. Again we see small town boys (they are all boys in his embed-ded contingent) go to war in Afghanistan, try to live up to the myth of warrior and get caught both physically and psychologically in the fog of war. We follow one 25-year-old Marine, Sgt. Nathan Harris, first in action where he is seriously injured, then as he returns home traumatized by his ex-perience. We watch as he scrambles to re-integrate back into normal small-town life

Reel Deal: Movies That Matter

while being forever changed by the trauma of war. Like Iraq in “Fragments,” “Hell and Back Again” is so full of humanity that this tragic and frightening story of one soldier's journey told in a skillful edit of battlefield action and home-town re-entry is in fact a mirror to what the Iraq and, in particular, Afghanistan wars do to our young people in the military. Dennis’ photo-journalist skills serve him well, as his visual eye is so sensual and so full of the human contra-dictions that war creates. “Hell and Back Again” is neither gung ho patriotic nor a simplistic “war is hell” documentary. It is as if Bertolucci and Larry Clark collaborated and produced a documentary that brutally tells the truth with a visual palette that shocks, confronts and finally bring tears to your eyes seeing what war is doing to US families, leaving the audience to decide its

own role. Winner World Cinema Grand Jury Prize in Documentary, Sundance 2011.

“Puncture,” directed by Adam and Mark Kassen This film is like “Conta-gion,” the Stephen Soderbergh disaster film, disguised as a “Traffic”-like mystery thriller with a “Crash”-like multiple star blur of “OMG that’s …”; and then they are gone with non-stop movement toward feel-ings of powerlessness as Soderbergh pros-elytizes the belief that government will save you in a health crisis. “Puncture,” a Tribeca Film Festival find, is in fact a more compel-ling, empowering narrative of what can be done to save lives in a health crisis. It is an advocacy film that exposes how corporate greed puts profit above saving lives. The issue is disposable needles versus reusable needles, not in some third-world country but right here at home in the US. Chris Evans proves he is a hunk who can act as he plays the drug-addicted advocacy lawyer and roots the film in personal drama and social justice. Kate Burton delivers a bravu-ra performance as a Clinton-like tough US Senator. While it could have been a pre-dictable feel-good B movie, “Puncture” is in fact is a complex story of good intentions, bad habits and corporate greed. “Puncture” succeeds because of a well-horned narrative line that avoids clichés, has skillful direc-tion, memorable performances and a mes-sage that it is right to fight even when it looks like you might loose. The best thing that can be said about “Contagion” is it will have you washing your hands more often than Lady Macbeth.

THE STAR IS BIGOTRY: a still from the Israeli movie “Eyes Wide Open”, with Zohar Strauss and Ran Danker.

SHOWING WHAT WAR DOES: Sgt. Nathan Harris in a still from the documentary, “Hell and Back Again”.


By Duan Duan

The five boroughs are crawling with an army of upstart food trucks, serving up a parade of flavorful personalities from saucy Korean tacos to weighty Belgium waffles. But there is something amiss in this street food culture that I haven’t been able to put my sticky finger on until now. Even though they are served from kitchens on wheels, the food itself is not very mobile. It’s hard to navigate with a schnitzel in hand, or jaywalk while managing a sloppy joe. And you shouldn’t do it. Not only will you get greasy fin-gers, but you may also mess up the beautifully orchestrated traffic patterns of this city.

More and more, food trucks are becoming the stepping stone to a real storefront, and the nature of street food has moved further and further away from the street. Eating while walking may not be for everyone, and I love the idea of serving serious cuisine out of a truck, but I can’t help feeling that even as we’re entering a golden age of street food, we’re loosing a bit of its gallivanting spirit.

True street food should be designed for easy eating while moseying, with no need to huddle awkwardly on the curb wishing for tables, utensils, and an extra wad of napkins. It is a basic design problem, and there is a simple solution: put it on a stick.

Besides the pedestrian bites of meat and corn on the cob, almost anything can be put on stick. Here are a few skew-ered snacks I’ve seen on the streets abroad: tea simmered quail eggs, fried chive dumplings, BBQ sparrows (three on a stick, beak included), fermented tofu, spice rubbed trout, and for dessert: candied fruits, and even cheesecake on a stick (but modernist bakers already know that anything from pie to praline can be “popped”).

In celebration of food on a stick, I’m making a popu-lar street food from Korea called tteok kochi (떡꼬치pronounced “Tuck-ko-chee”), tteok meaning "rice cake", and kochi for "skewer". It’s a red-hot mouthful that’s a bit crunchy on the outside, but satisfyingly soft and chewy on the inside. This dish is worth a trip to a Korean market (H Mart at 25 West 32nd Street), as the two most important ingredients are hard to find elsewhere. The number one ingredient is the rolled rice cake (tteok떡), and the num-ber two is the magical hot and sweet Korean chili paste (gochujang 고추장).

Once you’re armed with Korean rice cakes and chili paste, it’s a quick sautée to the finish line. My version var-ies a bit from what you would find on the streets of Seoul. Instead of deep-frying the rice cakes, I pan-fry them until they are slightly golden on the surface, like a lightly toast-ed marshmallow. Also, rather than dipping the rice cakes in a sticky glaze, I prefer to quickly toss the rice cakes in the pan with a small amount of a drier and more concen-

trated sauce. It simply depends on your tastes, just add or withhold water to control the consistency of the sauce. It’s an easy and flexible recipe, and no matter how you tweak

Stick to the Road: Tteok KochiSpicy Korean Rice Cake Skewers

(Tteok Kochi 떡꼬치)Yield: 4 servingsTime: about 15 minutes

Ingredients cooking oil12 2-inch pieces of Korean rice cakes (tteok 떡)

For the sauce:2 teaspoons sesame oil1 clove garlic, grated1 shallot, grated2 tablespoons Korean chili paste (gochujang 고추장)2 teaspoons rice wine (like mirin & sake, or experiment with a sherry)1½ teaspoons rice vinegar (or another light vinegar, but no balsamic please)2 teaspoons honey½ teaspoon soy sauce

For garnishToasted white sesame seeds

a fire some years ago, we prayed, along with — we’re sure — a lot of other once-young men, that the flames had consumed Steve’s collection of candid Polaroids.

We do sense in his body language that time has helped soften the anger a bit. Steve appears more accessible. In fact, according to reports, he even went to this “FOL-LIES” Opening Night party, something, according to re-ports, that he does not automatically do.

So how’s about it, Steverino? Are you ready to forgive yourself? Do you have it in your heart to say, “Sorry I dam-

aged you”?Certainly, your sins will all seep out after you’re gone,

and since you have no wife or child, who will be there to manage its flow? So shouldn’t you be thinking ahead?

Also, may we suggest that if you want to “educate” other young theater professionals, perhaps you should try doing so in a different, less-naked medium than the country’s number-one newspaper.

And one more thing, Kiddo. In the lyrics of “The La-dies Who Lunch” from “Company”? No one but you ever called it “Optical Art.”

Method1. Bring a pot of water to boil and add the rice cakes. Boil

rice cakes for about 1 minute (for frozen, less time if us-ing fresh rice cakes) until completely tender and pliant. Take a bite to check. Drain.

2. cooking oil to coat a heated frying pan. Add boiled rice cakes and pan-fry on medium high heat until the surface becomes slightly puffy and golden like a lightly toasted marshmallow. Remove and set aside.

3. In the same pan, add sesame oil, garlic, and shallot. Fry till fragrant, about 30 seconds. Now add the remaining ingredients for the sauce and stir to combine. Taste and adjust seasonings to your liking. Keep stirring the sauce until it is deep red, and silky in texture, about a minute.

4. Add the rice cakes back into the pan and toss with the sauce to coat evenly.

5. Lance three rice cakes per skewer.6. Sprinkle on some toasted sesame seeds for garnish, and

serve immediately. It’s essential to enjoy these piping hot when the texture of the rice cake is soft and chewy. The rice cakes get stiffer as they cool, so unless you’re on a training regimen for your jaw muscles, I wouldn’t recommend it. Now pour yourself a drink, and enjoy!

Our “Follies”continued from page 21

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or torture the process, the end result will be a powerfully savory, sweet, and spicy snack that gets along famously with a glass of beer or a shot of Korean soju (소주).


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INTIMATE AND FAMILIAR: “The Tea Set”, at 235 West 12th, is an easy place to linger. Photo by Maggie Berkvist.

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By David Porat

Somewhat new and very new are two res-taurants in the neighborhood that could not be more different, but both are unique additions to the West Village. A good way to distinguish them aside from the food, which we will get to, is one is small and about quiet conversation and the other is loud, buzzy and very Brooklyn.

On a quiet corner, near a busy intersec-tion is The Tea Set, at 235 12th Street near Greenwich Avenue. A small storefront that seems like it has been there a long time and yet could be somewhat off the beaten path in Paris, it is intimate and familiar. Jacques Doassans is the owner, a Frenchman with a nose for tea and a personality to engage neighbors. It is a small place that on a re-cent Tuesday night started off quiet and quickly filled with smaller parties, all busy speaking and also being heard. Jacques mentioned that his customers are mainly women, few men, and the men who find their way to The Tea Set are gay or Euro-pean. In these busy and bustling times, it is not as easy as you might expect to find a quiet place where food and service live up to a higher standard.

The menu at The Tea Set extends through the day, and the restaurant is an easy place to linger from lunch to teatime. The dinner menu offers many options, from salads and quiches to hearty entrees. A goat cheese quiche with salad was cut into smaller pieces to work as a bit of an ap-petizer before the main course and worked well to stimulate our appetites. Rack of lamb was tender, nicely prepared medium rare and served with young long-stemmed artichokes that seemed freshly prepared along with grilled vegetable that were more like ratatouille. Beef in wine sauce, better known as Beef Bourguignon, had a deep rich red wine flavor and was served with potatoes gratin and salad. Desserts included a classic chocolate mouse and a bit less classic very light cheese cake with a thicker graham cracker bottom crust. Freshly brewed tea is served in a single tall mug with its own infuser; many blends are offered, including an herbal organic Perry Street Je T’Aime!

Brand new and eagerly awaited is a bit of the Carroll Gardens’ Brooklyn Frankies “franchise” at 570 Hudson Street and 11th Street. Similar to Prime Meats (owed by the same guys and nearby the original Frankies) in Carroll Gardens, Frankies 570 Spuntino looks like it is a fixture on Hudson and it hard to remember what was there before. “Frank Falcinelli and Frank Castronovo have strong opinions about what sort of experience they want to share at Frankies,” their website explains, “and what sort of people and products help cre-ate that experience.” They are both taken

with the old-fashioned quality but do busi-ness in a new-fashioned way, knowing and sharing where their ingredients come from and not cutting modern corners. It seems to all be working because the place has been packed since opening in early Sep-tember and is not where you want to go for a quiet dinner.

Serving Italian classics along with mar-ket-driven fare, Frankies is about the food. We started with crostini, a small toasted piece of bread piled high with many op-tions, and we chose the cannellini, caper, lemon and anchovy and cremini mush-room and truffle oil options. They were both tasty, neither over-powering, and had a delicate fresh flavor. The menu is filled with unencumbered classic fair, including their signature meatballs with pine nuts and raisins. We chose house-made gnocchi marinara and fresh ricotta along with pork braciola marinara. The gnocchi was a sim-ple dish with small light potato dumplings in a tomato sauce with some fresh ricotta to add richness. The braciola had a bit more flavor with tender pork rolled with season-ing and stewed in a tomato sauce. We also had a simple arugula salad with very fresh buffalo mozzarella.

Quiet conversation, tea and intimate French style is one side of going out; loud and old-world Brooklyn flavor is another side and just a few blocks away. Both of these new restaurants take you away a bit from the West Village to another setting and they’re just down the block. Smaller old- and new-fashioned businesses are blooming right here in our great corner of the city.

The Tea Set235 West 12th Street (near Greenwich Ave)the-tea-set.com

Frankie’s 570 Spuntino570 Hudson (near 11th Street)frankiesspuntino.com

David A Porat is the owner of Chelsea Mar-ket Baskets, and importer and purveyor of specialty foods and gifts. Visit ChelseaMar-ketBaskets.com/blog.

In the West Village, Very Different Dining Experiences


By Keith Michael

A Downy Woodpecker’s dribbling-down-stairs catcall ricochets across Perry Street. My Corgi freezes, staring up into the trees with eyes wide.

“Hey, Millie. Let’s tiptoe through the gingko berries over to the River. Sunset time.”

A flash of red down the block confirms the metronomic cheerful plink of a Cardinal.

High above, a trio of gulls circle, barely moving their wings.

Gulls are ubiquitous. An easy “check” on my Birding List whenever I go out—oc-casionally, like today, even before Pigeon, Sparrow, Starling. But October is when the gulls start to return in larger numbers after their summer parenting. To most people these Big White Birds are Seagulls. How-ever, beachcombing is a small part of their repertoire. Rivergull, Fieldgull, Forestgull, Citygull—all are equally fitting.

Most people also think that a gull is a gull is a gull. But really, worldwide there are many species of gulls, and only four are seen regularly in the West Village.

“Millie, just Hruff when you see one.”The Great Black-backed Gull is the larg-

est in the world. They obviously throw their weight around and roost and loaf wherever they choose. Their wings are nearly black (hence “black-backed”), and the slight pro-trusion of their eyebrows makes them look mean. Hruff! In the hungry desperation of winter, I once saw a Black-backed take a Brant Goose around the neck and drown

By Dar Dowling

The Grey Dog café on Carmine Street is closing, and in the West Village these days, the closing of long-time neighborhood in-stitutions like this one, having been open for 15 years, is not new, but it has caused a ruckus, that’s for sure. Back in 1996 its co-owners and brothers David Ethan and Peter Adrian named their coffee shop after Moose and Goose, their Labrador retriev-ers, and all they wanted to do was open a small coffeehouse that concentrated “on lit-tle things that often get lost in big city life, like getting to know the names of our pa-trons and serving wonderful fresh foods.”.

By all accounts they succeeded. The Grey Dog’s vibe is friendly and quaint, and everyone knows your name, a bit like a Carmine Street version of the ’80s sit-com “Cheers,” with a more engaging and very talented staff. Bands like the Dear-loves and Mr. Tough, and improv groups like Citizen Models, were launched there. So the loss for the neighborhood can’t be

it! Not a forgettable sight.The Herring Gull is next down the size

scale. Hruff! This is probably the gull’s gull. It looks somewhat friendlier than the Black-backed, and its wings don a foggy morning gray—a fierce contender for a stolen sandwich nevertheless.

The smallest, most amiable, is the Ring-billed Gull. Aptly named, it has just that: a ring around its bill. These days they’re re-turning from Canada with their new fami-lies. A smudgy checkerboard youngster just flew by. Hruff! The Pier 49 evening Ring-billed roost will start to crescendo – a few more each night. I look forward to the LED-enhanced gulls flashing on and off above Jon Morris’s Reflecting the Stars light installation out in the dark of the River. Will they know they are sitting on Draco or Canus Major? No Millie, you’re more Canus Minor.

A Monarch butterfly sails over us.The Laughing Gull is the true fashion

plate of the common gulls – snappy black hood, bright red bill and legs, sleek phy-

measured in dollars and cents. According to long-time residents, they’re loosing an ex-tension of their living room; a place where, rain or shine, they get that human contact from their friends and the friendly staff that many of us so desperately need these days.

This week a plaque appeared on the wall at The Grey Dog, thanking the neighbor-hood for the good times, telling the story

October Fest of Gulls

Looking for a Miracle on Carmine Street

THEY ARE UBIQUITOUS: From left to right, a Common Tern, a Ring Billed Gull, and a Monarch butterfly. All photographs by Walter H. Laufer.

EVERYONE KNOWS YOUR NAME — and to the local residents losing “The Grey Dog” on Carmine Street would be like losing their living rooms. Photo by Bob Brisley

sique (probably has a personal trainer to keep the other gulls envious). I’d be sur-prised to see one here tonight though. Snowbirds, they’ve already headed south for the winter.

“Millie, LEAVE IT!” Oh. What IS that? A little Blue Crab! A lucky escapee from a gull? An alpinist who scaled the river wall? Millie, do your Bojangles dance. Who’s afraid of whom here? The crab’s gotten away this time. Let’s give it another chance. Claws and all, back in the river it goes.

The Black-backed and Herring Gulls big summer breeding colonies are out in Jamaica Bay, and the Laughing Gull nurs-eries are just south of the JFK runways. A gull nesting on a West Village roof? Un-likely.

There ARE a few other varieties that could turn up without too much fanfare (well, I’d be blaring a tattoo!) – Bonapar-te’s, Glaucous, Iceland, even LESSER Black-backed. Anything more exotic and a flock of telescope-wielding birders would invade the Park.

of a business with regrets about going, and expressing a love for its customers. So why is The Grey Dog leaving? Well, according to its website, it’s due to a lease oversight in which the landlord attempted to collect over $100,000 in property taxes retroac-tively out of the blue. This dispute has gone on for seven years, with the co-owners of The Grey Dog writing that they have “ex-hausted every reasonable resolution.” But even in their final hours they remain ever-so-slightly optimistic, saying, “We remain hopeful in the waning hours of our time on Carmine Street that things will change. Should we be forced to leave it will break our hearts a hundred times over,” a senti-ment echoed by the neighborhood.

The nexus between Carmine and Bed-ford Streets, like a few other areas in the West Village, is a place where families have lived for generations and you can find shop keepers milling on benches outside their stores chatting with the locals, discuss-ing everything from politics and 9/11 to the neighborhood gossip, of which there

The Lindberghs and Earharts of these white birds though, as far as I’m concerned, are not the gulls, but the Common Terns, those diminutive aviator crackerjacks, who tilt and whirl and fold their razor wings to dive. The cacophonous nesting colo-nies out at Breezy Point have apt signage: BEWARE! AGGRESSIVE BIRDS. Take note! But here, without the kids, they are buoyant kites without a string. When one takes a break and sits on the railing, indeed, it makes my day. Millie, I know you’d rath-er have ANY gull sit on the railing just so that you can Hruff, “Not HERE!”

The promenade trees explode with Yellow-rumped Warblers, bounding in all directions like a fireworks bloom. Birders affectionately shout out “Butter Butt!” (It’s so fun to say.) “Lemon-colored Upper-tail Coverts” just doesn’t have the same pizzazz.

A scarecrow Cormorant on a piling catches the reddening light.

“Millie, let’s head south to watch the Erie Lackawanna Tower skewer the setting sun.”

“Run?”

is plenty. Recently outside The Lively Set, a quaint antique store on Bedford Street, the topic turned to the closing of The Grey Dog, which a few locals hadn’t been aware of. One local was shocked — “I love that place … that’s awful” — which pretty much said it all. But she’s not alone; when the reg-ulars are asked, they’re all on the same page.

Kate McKeown, a professor of entrepre-neurship at Fordham University, and one of The Grey Dog’s first customers all those years ago, added, “I have met countless stu-dents and friends, and even made friends with so many sweet dogs, at this beautiful neighborhood place.” Scott Trent, a mar-keting executive and former government of-ficial, remains hopeful: “Since it’s opening, Grey Dog has been a place where people meet new people, eat, drink and have im-portant conversations. It’s an extraordinary part of Manhattan’s cultural fabric and so-cial landscape. I can’t say anything about its closing, because I'm hoping that won't take place. Miracles do happen, and it would be nice to see one on Carmine Street.”

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{ APPETIZERS/EXTRAS }Choice of Cheese or Meat ..................................................... 3 for $12Mini Anjuna Salad ..................................................................... $5.90 Mini West Village Salad ............................................................ $7.90Platter of 6 Pieces Toast ............................................................. $8.90Olives Plate ................................................................................. $4.90French Baguette ......................................................................... $3.90Organic French Fries ................................................................. $5.90Grilled Vegetables ...................................................................... $5.90Organic Potatoes ........................................................................ $5.90Organic Mashed Potatoes .......................................................... $3.90Organic Greens .......................................................................... $5.90Snails (6 Pieces) .......................................................................... $9.90Cheese and Meat Platter ............................................................ $16.90

{ SALADS }Anjuna Salad .............................................................................. $9.90 Cobb Salad .................................................................................. $13.90Notting Hill Salad ...................................................................... $12.90Steak Salad ................................................................................. $14.90West Village Salad ...................................................................... $12.90

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west view news october 2011

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