CREATIVE DANCING P. 20
VOLUME 25, NUMBER 16
JANUARY 9-JANUARY 22, 2013
SETTING LIBERTY FREE BY JOSH ROGERS he liberation of Liberty St. is within sight — a move that will also make visible the scaffolding-blocked stores across from the World Trade Center. The construction shed went up over a year and a half ago to protect residents, workers and tourists from falling debris from the construction of 4 W.T.C. “Weather permitting, we hope to enclose the south side of 4 World Trade Center around the end of February,” said Dara McQuillan. spokesperson for Silverstein Properties Inc., developers of the building. Once enclosed, the scaffolding can be removed. Although some thought of it as a necessary evil to protect people, proponents and opponents agreed it had more than its share of nega-
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Downtown Express photo by Terese Loeb Kreuzer
Harbor seals like to congregate on Swinburne Island, a man-made island off the coast of Staten Island, that was constructed in the 1870s to quarantine immigrants who were ill or suspected of being ill.
Seals a boat ride away BY T E RE S E L O E B K R E U Z E R ew York, a city of more than eight million residents, has become increasingly popular with visitors but not all have been arriving by conventional means of transportation. Some fly here under their own power. Some swim. In wintertime, an estimated 60,000 birds leave their summer breeding and nesting grounds in northern Canada and the Arctic for the comparative warmth and sumptuous dining available to them in New York harbor. “These birds are only here in the winter,” said Gabriel Willow, a New York City Audubon guide, who has been leading winter harbor tours aboard New York Water Taxi for the last eight years.
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Seal sightings are an added bonus. Willow won’t promise seals but so far, they have never failed to show up. “For the last 30 years, harbor seals have been coming this far south,” he said, as a New York Water Taxi catamaran left Pier 17 in the South Street Seaport and headed toward the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge and the harbor’s lower bay. Willow believes the seals are here because the water surrounding New York City is substantially cleaner than it was 40 years ago, and there are now enough fish to sustain them. A full-grown seal can weigh between 330 and 375 pounds and eats 10 to 18 pounds of fish a day. Reliably, certain northern birds come back to New York City year after year and can be found in predictable areas of the harbor. The
LITTLE LEAGUE LOOKS OUT FOR THE SEASON
Erie Basin, a manmade enclave off the East River, is popular with red-breasted mergansers, a diving duck that breeds further north and winters further south than any other merganser. The serrated edges on their beaks enable them to catch crustaceans, insects and fish, according to Willow. The red-breasted mergansers were sharing the Erie Basin with some gadwalls (a gray-brown duck that doesn’t mind traveling from the Arctic as far south as Guatemala for the winter) and some tiny bufflehead ducks that are hard to miss despite their diminutive size because of the large, white patches on the backs of the males’ heads and on the cheeks of the females.
BY JOSH ROGERS Battery Park City Authority officials are not calling Sandy a “perfect storm,” but they do say it was a once-in-a-century type event that could sideline the neighborhood ballfields for six months or longer. Mathew Monahan, the authority’s spokesperson, said the fields were designed to withstand all but a 100-year storm, which “came 99 years sooner than we anticipated.” In a subsequent prepared statement, he said the damaged field would be rebuilt to the “original specifications.” There are no plans to make any design changes with the benefit of hindsight. Monahan, in an email and
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