THE VILLAGER, FEB. 12, 2015

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The Paper of Record for Greenwich Village, East Village, Lower East Side, Soho, Union Square, Chinatown and Noho, Since 1933

February 12, 2015 • $1.00 Volume 84 • Number 37

Bratton plan to felonize resisting arrest sparks alarm among activists

BY GERARD FLYNN

U

ARRESTS, continued on p. 5

Two E.V. public-housing complexes are actually now half privately owned

BY ZACH WILLIAMS

T

he East Village’s Campos Plaza I is now half privately owned and there is no turning back, Shola Olatoye, chairperson of the New York City Housing Authority, told members of the City Council on Feb. 10.

Members of the Council’s Committee on Public Hous-

ing said little notice was given before NYCHA agreed late last year to a 30-year partnership with two private developers for the plan, which, along with Campos Plaza, includes five other federally funded Section 8 developments. Among them is the low-rise E. Fourth Street Rehab, between Avenues B NYCHA, continued on p. 26

PHOTO BY GERARD FLYNN

nder current law in New York State, anyone who intentionally prevents or attempts to prevent a police officer — or any peace officer — from making an arrest can be charged with resisting arrest.

Although the Class A

misdemeanor carries a maximum penalty of one year in prison, it’s not a sufficient deterrent, Police Commissioner Bill Bratton told reporters Downtown last week.

He wants the nearly 2,000 people in the city who are charged with resisting ar-

A protester being arrested at The Cooper Union in 2012 during a demonstration over the school implementing tuition. Her backup had the initials “NOYFB” on it — a stronger version of “None of your business.”

Nike Zoom is driving ’em zany with beeps, fumes, loud tunes

BY LINCOLN ANDERSON

R

esidents living near Nike’s Zoom City Arena say they’ve been slam-dunked for more than a month by construction noise and diesel fumes, and it’s left them reeling.

The spacious structure, they charge, is a flagrant foul against their neighborhood’s quality of life.

Construction on the temporary tent — actually, reportedly two tents — began in early January on the Trini-

ty Real Estate-owned vacant lot at Duarte Square, at Canal St. and Sixth Ave., and only just finished.

Sporting a snazzy basketball court inside, it’s one of Nike’s key locations for Zoom City, its sneaker sales-centric series of promotions and events tying in with the NBA All-Star Game week, culminating in the big game on Sun., Feb. 15. Zoom City events will kick off midweek.

Top pro players — though, apparently only those with

Nike sneaker endorsements — will make the rounds of the Zoom City sites, including the Hudson Square arena, Downtown’s ground zero of All-Star week hype.

Eighteen of the 26 AllStars have inked Nike sneaker deals, including the likes of LeBron James, Kevin Durant, Pau Gasol, James Harden, Kyrie Irving, Carmelo Anthony, Paul Millsap and Russell Westbrook.

A “Zoom City Map” of NIKE ZOOM, continued on p. 10

Etan Patz case revisits ’70s Soho...................page 12 13th St. Rep’s rebirth is dramatic...................page 14 Silver’s real record on housing........................page 17 Silent films, live sounds..............page 19

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February 12, 2015

Heastie’s winning the speakership. “The Assembly operates by consensus,” she answered in an e-mail, “and although I believed we should follow our original plan to vet all candidates and vote on Feb. 10, my perspective was not shared by a majority of my colleagues. After the past tumultuous month, I also believed any questions that had been raised about any of the candidates needed to be responded to, but the consensus was that the vote for speaker should be taken the next day [after Silver’s resignation as speaker]. The vote was taken and I was not present on the Assembly floor and did not participate in the vote.” Glick still has not told us exactly WHY she wasn’t on the floor for the vote — but we suppose we can speculate about that for ourselves.

SHELLY SILVER, FILMMAKER: In a change of pace from all the recent commotion in Albany, we checked out Shelly Silver’s art film, “Touch,” at the Simon Preston Gallery, at 301 Broome St., the other

weekend. No, Assemblymember Sheldon Silver has not embarked on a new career after being deposed as speaker. We’re talking about Shelly Silver, the filmmaker, who has lived on Catherine St. for more than 40 years. In her 2013 film “Touch,” images of her neighborhood, Chinatown, are complemented with a man narrating the story of how he has returned to his childhood home after 50 years to care for his ailing mother. The fictional protagonist, who remains nameless, is “a librarian, cataloguer and recorder, gay man, watcher and impersonator.” The film contains footage of Woody Allen himself filming on Catherine St., Chinese men playing mahjong and tending their wah mei birds in Sara D. Roosevelt Park and some great vintage photo portraits. During the Q&A afterward, Silver said the latter came from a book she was able to check out of N.Y.U. Bobst Library, “Who’s Who in Chinatown 1916.” She said it’s “a beautiful book” and that she was very surprised they even let her check it out.

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WHERE WAS GLICK? This much we do know, that Assemblymember Deborah Glick, by all appearances, definitely liked Cathy Nolan over Carl Heastie to be the next Assembly speaker following Sheldon Silver’s inglorious fall from power. However, Glick never came right out and told us that she was officially backing Nolan. But it could be read between the lines of her concerned tweets before the eventual outcome and also in her comments to us in last week’s issue of The Villager. She felt Nolan was more experienced. Plus, she felt it was high time that Albany’s “Three Men in a Room” became “Two Men and a Woman in a Room.” Glick had wanted to have a longer public process to consider the candidates, lasting until Feb. 10, which is what had originally been promised. Anyway, as everyone knows, Nolan ultimately dropped out and Heastie went on to be unanimously elected on Feb. 3 by his fellow Democratic members to head the Assembly — a week earlier than had been originally planned. But that doesn’t mean all the Democrats actually voted for him. We asked Glick last week how she felt about

PHOTO BY MILO HESS

GIVING IT HER ALL: Sports Illustrated swimsuit supermodel, wife of Grammy winner John Legend and Nolita resident Chrissy Teigen was signing autographs and meeting her fans Tuesday morning at the S.I. Swim City pop-up pavilion in Herald Square. She and other S.I. models were promoting the mag’s new swimsuit issue, which was just hitting the newsstands. From the look of it, Teigen was giving “all of her” at the event, allowing an adoring fan to give her a smooch on the cheek, at right.

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Plan to felonize resisting arrest sparks alarm ARRESTS, continued from p. 3

rest each year to be hit with a felony, carrying the possibility of serious jail time. It’s a move that has infuriated free-speech advocates.

Not surprisingly, the top cop is finding solid backing from the police unions. But 11 Assembly Democrats have also climbed on board the initiative, having introduced Bill A02899 weeks before Bratton’s announcement, with the intent of establishing “the Class E felony of resisting arrest in the first degree.”

The bill is co-sponsored by Democrats Steve Englebright of Long Island and Felix Ortiz of Brooklyn.

“The Legislature needs to take a look at the procedures taking place during an arrest to determine what penalties should be leveled against perpetrators who resist arrest and act violently,” said Jeff Wice, an Ortiz spokesperson.

But the proposal is a pipe dream and will certainly fail, according to Marty Stolar of the National Lawyers Guild.

“In my opinion, there is no need for such legislation and it stands zero political chance of passing the Legislature,” he told The Villager.

Stolar has spent many hours in court defending Occupy Wall Street I

G

members accused of the offense, which he said a person can be tagged with for the flimsiest of reasons.

“Protesters can get arrested and charged with resisting arrest just because they moved their wrist the wrong way,” he said. “I have seen too many complaints.”

“life-altering stains” was given as one reason for the petition. That’s an effect a former client of Stolar’s, Cecily McMillan, has been finding out since recently being released after a three-month stint on Rikers Island.

She is writing a book on her experiences in the Occupy movement for The Nation, living in Atlanta and subsisting off the magazine’s stipend, she said last week. Her conviction — for felony assault on a police officer — has severely curtailed any employment opportunities, she said.

McMillan, a veteran activist, said she knows many of the tricks to avoid arrest, such as letting one’s body go limp, which she called a “long-held historical practice in order to shift the balance of power in a protest scenario.”

Yet she said there are numerous ways to be accused of resisting arrest. She called Bratton’s proposal “insane.”

The move, she charged, is yet another attempt by Mayor Bill de Blasio to smooth things over with the police, after their well-publicized

‘This charge is frequently used to cover up police misconduct.’

The attorney suspects recent protests around the country and in the city go a long way toward explaining Bratton’s move. If the change is made, the net effect would be to deter people from participating in protests, he said.

In recent days, the proposal has been generating a lot of Internet buzz, including an online petition on Change.Org that has garnered more than 250 signatures.

That felony convictions come with

falling out after the nonindictment in Eric Garner’s chokehold-arrest death.

Had resisting arrest been a felony several years ago, there might have been a much different Occupy movement, she noted.

Calling New York “one of the least progressive cities I have ever lived in,” she said her felony conviction there means she must now virtually tiptoe around America lest she end back up in the slammer.

“For five years I can’t participate in civil disobedience,” she said.

“If I get into a misdemeanor, I am on the first bus back to Rikers and six years in prison for sitting down to protest the murder of a man,” she said. “This is criminalizing protest.”

Police unions did not respond to requests for comment.

An activist group, the Justice Committee, issued the following statement from Loyda Colon, its co-director: “Recent analyses prove what our members and constituents have known through experience for years: that overly aggressive officers frequently use this charge to cover up police brutality and misconduct.

“Upping the penalty for a charge that is so often used unjustly and illegitimately amounts to an attack against New Yorkers of color.”

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Named best weekly newspaper in New York State in 2001, 2004 and 2005

by New York Press Association

BY ZACH WILLIAMS

PUBLISHER JENNIFER GOODSTEIN

EDITOR IN CHIEF LINCOLN ANDERSON

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CONTRIBUTORS IRA BLUTREICH SARAH FERGUSON TEQUILA MINSKY CLAYTON PATTERSON JEFFERSON SIEGEL ZACH WILLIAMS

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The Villager (USPS 578930) ISSN 00426202 is published every week by NYC Community Media LLC, One Metrotech North, 10th floor Brooklyn, NY 11201 (212) 229-1890. Periodicals Postage paid at New York, N.Y. Annual subscription by mail in Manhattan and Brooklyn $29 ($35 elsewhere). Single copy price at office and newsstands is $1. The entire contents of newspaper, including advertising, are copyrighted and no part may be reproduced without the express permission of the publisher - © 2011 NYC Community Media LLC. PUBLISHER’S LIABILITY FOR ERROR

The Publisher shall not be liable for slight changes or typographical errors that do not lessen the value of an advertisement.

The publisher’s liability for others errors or omissions in connection with an advertisement is strictly limited to publication of the advertisement in any subsequent issue.

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February 12, 2015

I

nstead of a traditional State of the Borough speech, Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer opted to host a panel discussion on Feb. 8 regarding the future of local communities.

The hour-long discussion covered a wide range of topics, including affordable housing, education and community-police relations. Brewer also emphasized the role of technology in grassroots politics by staging a social media campaign to accompany the event, which was held up at Columbia University.

Twitter posts with the hashtag #SOTB2015 streamed audience questions and comments onto a projection screen during the panel discussion. Local elected officials meanwhile posted their own six-second videos summarizing their ambitions for the upcoming year via the social media Web site Vine.

“I really do believe in getting different ideas to solve problems,” Brewer said in an interview.

She said an emphasis on youth brought Community Board 3 Chairperson Gigi Li to the panel, where she joined H. Carl McCall, the former state comptroller and current SUNY board of trustees chairperson; Ruth Messinger, the former former Manhattan borough president; and Jaime Estades, president of the Latino Leadership Institute.

The panelists all agreed that more affordable housing will be needed to maintain middle- and low-income populations within the borough. Local community members need to maintain input throughout the development of affordable housing, said Li. As an example of an engaged community planning process, she touted the Seward Park Urban Renewal Area (SPURA), where more than half of the 1,000 new units to be built will be affordable. People with a long-running presence in the neighborhood should receive preference for new units, she added.

Many affordable housing projects are constructed under a so-called “80/20” plan — such as the Extell development underway on Cherry St. — under which a builder receives tax breaks in exchange for making 20 percent of the units affordable. But many affordable housing activists and local residents say that framework offers too much to developers and not enough housing for community needs. Plus, the units created are not permanently affordable.

New market-rate housing in the East Village and Lower East Side also reflects the changing commercial orientation of the areas, which today host a booming nightlife. Community leaders need to confront prospective business-

PHOTO BY ZACH WILLIAMS

GRAPHIC DESIGNERS

Member of the New York Press Association

Panelists talk housing, education, police at Brewer’s borough forum

Gigi Li was shown on a big screen as she discussed saving retail diversity at Gale Brewer’s State of the Borough panel event.

es and urge them to open shops that benefit local neighborhoods rather than just another loud bar, Li suggested.

“Retail diversity has been a huge challenge in the Lower East Side and East Village where we are seeing a predominance of a particular type of industry,” she said.

Improvements in the quality of high school education are also crucial to improving neighborhoods and aiding social mobility, noted McCall. Rising graduation rates are encouraging, but less so if students reach college only to enroll in remedial courses, McCall stressed.

“The biggest issue we face right now is the fact that the students who are coming to us from New York high schools are not prepared for college,” he said.

More technology could help reverse that, said Brewer. As The Villager reported last July, $480,000 in new funding came to Lower East Side schools last year for laptop computers, as well as interactive whiteboards and tables, the latter which are basically large, horizontal tablet computers. Teachers with a pre-Digital Age skillset need more training, Messinger said. Low-income families still face financial barriers to accessing pricey tech tools, Eastades added.

Schools could also encourage a greater appreciation for healthy eating and environmental sustainability, according to Brewer. She said that New York City was the second-biggest purchaser of food nationwide after the U.S. Department of Defense. Yet, applesauce for

school children comes from China, she said, to gasps from the audience. Such purchases should be made from New York farmers, according to Brewer.

Grassroots efforts can help improve frayed relations between the New York Police Department and local communities, the borough president added.

At a recent forum in Upper Manhattan co-hosted by Brewer, private citizens engaged police brass and politicians in small groups, rather than in a town hall-style format that limits the ability for individual participants to directly engage each other, she said.

“It wasn’t a microphone situation,” Brewer explained of the Jan. 30 forum.

“People really exchanged ideas.”

Such sentiments were the common theme throughout last Sunday’s event, at which panelists and Brewer urged that legislative and community initiatives must follow a bottom-up approach based on residents’ views. For the elderly that can mean determining bus routes by how many local seniors actually want them, said Brewer.

For Li, that spirit translates well into immigrant-heavy areas of the borough, such as the Lower East Side. Government and community services should reflect an enclave’s inherent diversity rather than merely adapting to it, according to Li. “I think something what’s very important is cultural competency, communication, having police officers that speak the language,” she said, “understand the culture and neighborhoods they are patrolling in.”

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February 12, 2015

7

POLICE BLOTTER His father, Bruce Robbins, a Columbia University literature professor, was quoted back then as saying a detective had told him police were too busy dealing with the Eric Garner protests and their impacts on traffic to search for his missing son. But police subsequently said they had indeed been diligently canvassing the area and searching with helicopters for Andreas.

The father told the Post that his son’s note said he wanted his savings to be given to an organization that fights depression and suicide and that he wanted his ashes strewn in the Mediterranean, which is where his mother, who is Greek, is from.

Police said missing Stuy Town resident Andreas Robbins’s body was found in the East River near the Battery on Wednesday.

Stuy man’s body found On Wed., Feb. 11, officers responded to a 911 call of an individual floating face-up in the East River near 4 South St. by the F.D.R. Drive and Broad St. Upon arrival, they discovered a 25-year-old male unconscious and unresponsive in the water.

The Police Department’s Harbor Unit responded and removed the individual from the water to Pier 16 where EMS medics pronounced him DOA. The Medical Examiner will determine the cause of death.

The man was subsequently identified as Andreas Robbins, 25, of 521 E. 14th St. in Stuyvesant Town. He had been reported missing on Mon., Dec. 1.

In a Dec. 8 article, the New York Post reported that Robbins had been suffering from depression and had left a suicide note in his Stuy Town bedroom saying he was going to jump off the George Washington Bridge. He had left his home without his cell phone or bank card.

End of the line Around 10:30 p.m. on Mon., Feb. 9, an M.T.A. worker, 52, was found shot once in the chest inside an employee locker room at the subway station at Seventh Ave. and W. 14th St. He was taken to the Lenox Hill HealthPlex, at W. 12th St. and Seventh Ave., where at 11:47 p.m. he was declared dead on arrival. Police initially called in heavily armed Emergency Service Unit cops, but soon determined that the victim had shot himself.

6th Ave. CVS robbery Police are seeking the public’s help in tracking down a man wanted in connection with an armed robbery at the CVS drug store, at 360 Sixth Ave., on Mon., Feb. 9, around 3:15 a.m.

At that date and time, an unknown man entered the store, on Sixth Ave. near Washington Place, and forced the manager into the back office. The suspect, at gunpoint, then forced the manager to open the safe, then tossed the manager to the side. He then removed more than $9,000 from the

Request for Bids (RFB) for the Sale of Food from Mobile Food Units at Various Locations at Central Park, Manhattan In accordance with Section 1-12 of the Concession Rules of the City of New York, the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation (“Parks”) is issuing, as of the date of this notice, a Request for Bids for the sale of food from mobile food units at various locations at Central Park, Manhattan.

Hard copies of the RFB can be obtained, at no cost, commencing on Friday, January 30, 2015 through Monday, February 23, 2015 between the hours of 9:00 a.m. and 5:00 p.m., excluding weekends and holidays, at the Revenue Division of the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation, which is located at 830 Fifth Avenue, Room 407, New York, NY 10065. All bids submitted in response to this RFB must be submitted no later than Monday, February 23, 2015 at 11:00 a.m.

The RFB is also available for download, commencing Friday, January 30, 2015 through Monday, February 23, 2015 on Parks’ website.

To download the RFB, visit www.nyc.gov/parks/businessopportunities, click on the link for “Concessions Opportunities at Parks” and, after logging in, click on the “download” link that appears adjacent to the RFB’s description.

For more information, contact Glenn Kaalund at (212) 360-1397 or VIA email at Glenn.Kaalund@parks.nyc.gov. Thank you.

safe and fled the store.

The robber is described as slim and wearing a black three-quarter-length jacket with a fur-fringed snorkel hood that hid his face, gray pants and brown boots. He was also carrying a black messenger bag.

Police have released a video of the robbery.

Anyone with information regarding this incident is asked to call the Police Department’s Crime Stoppers hotline at 1-800-577-TIPS (8477). People can also submit tips by logging onto www. nypdcrimestoppers.com or by texting them to 274637 (CRIMES) and then entering TIP577. All calls are strictly confidential.

Subway slasher arrest Police announced the arrest of a suspect last Thurs, Feb. 5, who they said was responsible for a face-slashing spree that had ended in Union Square earlier the previous day.

Police arrested Derrick McLeod, 24, in an East Harlem public-housing development, and reportedly recovered a box cutter during the arrest.

A Brooklyn resident, McLeod was charged with five counts of assault along with criminal possession of a weapon.

According to William Aubry, the Manhattan chief of detectives, McLeod has been treated for “emotional issues” and has been arrested 30 times as an adult.

“He’s a violent and troubled individual,” the chief said.

The attacks occurred over a period of 20 minutes following McLeod’s boarding an F train at 12:30 a.m. at the Jay St./Metrotech station, police said.

During that time McLeod allegedly punched a woman who had been riding on the F with him as it pulled into the Broadway/Lafayette station. After transferring to the 6 train, he then slashed a man for looking at him, police said. He later punched a woman in the face as he was exiting the subway at Union Square, then, once aboveground, slashed two men in succession who refused his requests to give him money.

Saw...said something Two alert women saw a man trying to steal from straphangers’ bags while they were waiting for a northbound train at Eighth Ave. and W. 14th St. on Tues., Feb. 3, police said. The sneaky thief would mosey up to passengers

using crowd congestion as cover, the witnesses told police.

Police took a look at the contents of the perpetrator’s bag after they responded to the scene at about 8:55 p.m. They reportedly found an iPad, as well as a credit card and checkbook not belonging to him. The man, Roland Thomas, 19, confessed to taking the computer tablet from BaoHaus, a Taiwanese restaurant at 238 E. 14th St., according to a police report.

Roland was charged with criminal possession of stolen property, a felony.

Tobacco King’s fall Police once again raided the Tobacco King at 200 W. 14th St. for selling untaxed cigarettes, but this time they brought a court-sanctioned closure order, as well, on Wed., Feb. 4. Two employees of the place were arrested for possession of untaxed cigarettes.

For Oadi Alsaede, 22, it was not the first time he was charged with a misdemeanor tax-law violation. Ali Alqatbi, 43, got the same charge.

‘Cypher’ 0, Cops 1 Tagging a U.S. Postal Service mailbox with “Cypher League” led to a misdemeanor charge for one man on Feb. 4. Police said they caught Devaughn Holliday, 20, with graffiti instruments just before midnight at the northwest corner of Thompson and Bleecker Sts. As cops busted him, Holliday allegedly refused to put his hands behind his back and flailed them a bit before being handcuffed, police said. He was charged with making graffiti.

Berserk burger burglar A man busted the front door and damaged a window as he made his way into the closed Bill’s Bar and Burger at 22 Ninth Ave. early last Tues., Feb. 3. But he wasn’t looking for cash, drinks or even burgers, according to police.

Henry Gianguzi, 40, reportedly went for the beer taps, which he wanted to wreck, police said. Two witnesses tipped off police, who arrived just after 4:30 a.m. and arrested Gianguzi for felony burglary. The venue suffered more than $250 in damages.

Lincoln Anderson and Zach Williams

TELECOMMUNICATION DEVICE FOR THE DEAF (TDD) 212-504-4115

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February 12, 2015

TheVillager.com

events@NYUBookstore Tuesday, February 17 6:00 pm - 7:30 pm NYU Bookstore, 726 Broadway

BROTHER OUTSIDER THE LIFE OF BAYARD RUSTIN The new citywide ferry service would fold the existing subsidized East River Ferry service into it.

Movie Screening and Reading with Filmmaker Bennett Singer and Author Walter Naegle

Grand St. affordable ferry service to set sail by 2018

BY PAUL LIOTTA

A

n improved and expanded ferry system will soon be available to help New Yorkers get around town.

At his State of the City address, Mayor de Blasio, announced plans to begin five new ferry services that will bring New York closer together.

The mayor sees the project as another step in his fight against the “Tale of Two Cities.” He believes that the new ferries will allow New Yorkers in mass transit-deprived and far-off communities more economic opportunity.

“For years the conventional wisdom has been that certain neighborhoods are doomed to isolation because of their geography,” the mayor said. “Residents of the Rockaways and Red Hook and Soudview will now be closer to the opportunities they need.”

The first three ferry routes will set sail in 2017 — from Rockaway, South Brooklyn and Astoria. In 2018, two more ferry routes will be launched — from Soundview in the Bronx and the Lower East Side.

All the new service will be knitted into the existing East River Ferry, which connects Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens, and will be run and funded by the city.

De Blasio said the ferry rides would be affordable, costing the same amount as a MetroCard swipe.

The Lower East Side ferry, which

would arrive in 2018, would feature a stop at Grand St. From there, passengers could ride the waves one stop to Wall St./Pier 11, from where they could be whisked to points all over the city.

All ferries will run through Pier 11, and by 2018 New Yorkers could go from Soudview to Rockaway entirely by water.

City Councilmember Margaret Chin praised the plan to increase the access to transportation.

“My local elected colleagues and I have advocated for a Grand St. ferry stop because we know it will create a much-needed transit connection for Lower East Side residents,” Chin said.

In addition to Grand St. and Wall St./Pier 11, the East Side route will also feature stops at E. 23rd and E. 34th Sts. The Grand St. ferry stop would link commuters with a variety of other transportation options and would be located at an already-existing dock.

Three buses stop at the planned Lower East Side ferry dock. The crosstown M21 and M14A stop there, as well as the M22 to Battery Park City.

The mayor also proposed a new ferry service that would travel from Coney Island to Wall St./Pier 11 and feature a stop in Staten Island. That ferry has not yet been approved.

To ensure that the new citywide ferry system stays afloat financially, the mayor announced that it would receive a $55 million subsidy from the city.

Join filmmaker Bennett Singer and author Walter Naegle for a screening and reading to celebrate civil rights activist Bayard Rustin.

Five years in the making and the winner of more than 25 international awards and honors, “Brother Outsider” illuminates the life and work of Bayard Rustin, a visionary activist and strategist who has been called “the invisible man” and “the unknown hero” of the civil rights movement. A disciple of Gandhi, a mentor to Martin Luther King Jr., and chief organizer of the 1963 March on Washington, Rustin dared to live as an openly gay man during the fiercely homophobic 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. In 2013, Rustin received a posthumous Presidential Medal of Freedom — America’s highest civilian honor — from Barack Obama.

The screening with be followed by a Q&A session with co-director Bennett Singer and a reading by Walter Naegle, Rustin’s surviving life partner and co-author of the newly published Bayard Rustin: The Invisible Activist. Light refreshments will be served.

The event is free and open to the public.

Co-sponsored by the NYU Bookstore and the NYU Office of Government and Community Affairs.

NYU Office of Government and Community Affairs nyu.edu/ogca community.affairs@nyu.edu

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NYU Bookstore 726 Broadway, New York, NY 10003 bookstores.nyu.edu February 12, 2015

9

Welcome to the ‘Thunder-dunk Dome’; Zoom NIKE ZOOM, continued from p. 3

10

February 12, 2015

PHOTO BY LINCOLN ANDERSON

events shows an illustration of a superhero-like LeBron dribbling by the Zoom City Arena, so it would be surprising if “King James” doesn’t drop in at some point.

Local high school players and others reportedly will get to meet the superstars.

The main days will be Friday through Sunday, when the tent will see action each day from 10:30 a.m. to 10 p.m.

Zoom City is actually also the name of a line of five new sneakers the multinational sports-shoe giant is launching around the All-Star Game.

As one construction worker outside the Canal St. tent last Friday put it bluntly: “This whole thing is gonna be one f-----billboard.”

But for residents living in 80 Varick St., a 10-story, 61-unit converted former printing building just north of the Zoom tent, it’s been déjà vu all over again. And not in a good way like a “three-peat” — more like being forced to watch the Knicks suffer through yet another abysmal season.

That’s because this is the third time in barely more than a year that the privately owned Canal St. lot has seen noisy construction to create a temporary complex.

To “go to the videotape,” in October and November 2013, the lot was used for another temporary tent for the Talking Transition event, at which advocates and everyday New Yorkers weighed in with suggestions for incoming Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration.

Then, this past August and September, the Trinity lot was again the site of hammer and hacksaw noise followed by hoopla, this time for a Nike tennis extravaganza. Andrei Agassi and Maria Sharapova — both natty in Nike duds — briefly came by to whack balls on a temporary court.

Darlene Lutz, a fine-art adviser, has lived for 35 years in a fourth-floor apartment on the south side of 80 Varick St. — which now directly overlooks the Zoom zone.

“This is a runaway train at this point. It’s the third time,” she said. “We’re getting hammered. Trinity received a rezoning almost two years ago. But they’re not making any great strides to develop that lot.”

Lutz was referring to the Hudson Square rezoning, spearheaded by Trinity, which is intended to increase residential use in the former Printing District. With the rezoning, Trinity announced plans to build a high-rise residential tower in Duarte Square that would include a new public elementary school in its base.

Since then, though, the only work done has been putting up and taking down the mammoth temporary tents.

“The machines they use, they go, ‘beep! beep! beep!’ ” Lutz complained. “There’s a cacophony of them, 15 of them from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m.

“Their after-hours variances have been revoked twice. They were working 24 hours,” she added.

“The tear-down is as bad as the build-up,” she said, “because all the beeping machines come back. ... It took them four weeks to take down Talking Transition — with the beeping and the trucks.”

Meanwhile, jumbo generators occupy a parking lane on Varick St., humming — and spewing diesel pollutants — round the clock to keep the Zoom electricity flowing.

Work to construct the Nike Zoom City Arena, at Canal St. and Sixth Ave., started in early January and only just recently finished, in time for the days leading up to the All-Star Game. This photo was taken last Friday afternoon. Rising in the background, at center, is 80 Varick St., a residential building about 60 feet north of the lot.

“We can’t breathe,” Lutz said.

Of course, Hudson Square is already deluged daily by the Holland Tunnel traffic’s toxic spew.

“This is an official hot spot, the hottest spot for air pollution in the whole city — and then they add this?” she asked incredulously.

To cope, Lutz, who is a cancer survivor, has taken a room at the James Hotel, across Sixth Ave., and retreats there when the din and air quality get too bad.

Then this past Monday at 8 a.m., the tent’s sound system suddenly cranked all the way up. Lutz called the police, and the sound dropped for a while, before revving up again a few hours later.

“They now have the sound system on,” she said.

“It’s like I have a nightclub underneath me.”

As for the actual music, she said, it was “booming rappish-techo stuff — with a lot of bass. It’s like living in a Brooklyn beat party.”

Lutz said she wished activist Don MacPherson, who also lived in 80 Varick, was around to help zing the Zoom City Arena. But he pleaded guilty in 2011 to being part of a massive Hamptons mortgage fraud ring.

“I liked Don. He was on the community board,” Lutz said wistfully. “He’s in prison.”

Others she knows who have been particularly affected by the project, she said, include around 10 dog owners — whose daily routines and walkways have been disrupted — and a model/actress and her boyfriend, who is a music producer with a recording studio in the building, who is having difficulty working due to the racket.

David Webber, one of the dog owners, has had two “confrontations” with the project’s out-ofstate security workers. They have been parking their vehicles on a disused part of Sullivan St. that runs through Duarte Square, but which, Webber stressed, is not Trinity-owned property.

“All their license plates are from Georgia,” the British native said. “I had two guys driving like Starsky and Hutch across the bricks of Duarte Square toward me.”

Another security worker accused him of trying to steal equipment.

“I was confronted by a big angry redneck who told me, ‘I’m going to put a beating on you,’ ” he said.

But Webber’s dogs are 140-pound Newfoundlands. While one is a mellow, retired therapy dog, the other growled menacingly at the tough-guy security men, and they scurried back inside their cars.

“My issue,” Webber said, “is I want to walk my dogs on city property without being B.S.’d that it’s private property.”

As for the tent project’s noise and impact, Webber said, “It’s massive in every regard. It’s gotten crazy now that they’re doing sound check. My apartment faces west, so I get the echo. There is a generator issue at night: It’s like having buses idle outside your window all night.”

He works at home as a fashion photographer, and the Zoom zaniness is making him tired and irritable, affecting his job.

“It’s not good when I start yelling at models,” he said.

What particularly galls Lutz and her neighbors, she said, and what initially allowed the tent work to go on round-the-clock was that the application claimed no residents lived nearby — when, in fact, 80 Varick is right across Grand St. from it. Yet, ironically, in 2011, when Occupy Wall Street activists begged Trinity to let them pitch their tents in the lot — after they were evicted from Zuccotti Park — Trinity cited 80 Varick St. in saying no.

“Trinity knows we exist,” Lutz said. “They used as the excuse that it would be an impingement on neighbors’ quality of life — Occupy Wall Street couldn’t come up here.”

But Lutz would gladly take Occupy over Zoom City Arena.

“I’m like, ‘Give me a drum circle over these generators any day,’ ” she said.

Tobi Bergman, chairperson of Community Board NIKE ZOOM, continued on p. 11 TheVillager.com

Arena tent construction driving neighbors zany NIKE ZOOM, continued from p. 10

2, said one problem is that the Department of Buildings blithely gives out special work permits.

“Routine provision of after-hours permits by D.O.B. is a longstanding problem,” he said. “These are supposed to be given for the purpose of protecting public safety.

“I know Councilmember Corey Johnson has raised this with the D.O.B. borough commissioner,” Bergman added. “Often, the problem is false information provided to D.O.B. on the application.

“In this case, a late start and bad weather meant some after-hours work had to be done to get the job done before the event begins,” Bergman explained. “The contractor did cooperate by agreeing to stop nighttime work while catching up on the weekends. They also brought in quieter equipment. The setup is now complete. Takedown begins next week and we have been promised it will not include use of noisy equipment after 7 p.m. and that the only weekend work will be while the tent is still up. We’ll see.”

But Bergman added that the lot’s owner, Trinity, needs to step up its diagramming of “X” ’s and “O” ’s beforehand for neighbors about its game plans for the property’s usage.

“Trinity Real Estate’s failure to coordinate the events at this site with the community has been a disappointment,” he said. “It would not be so hard to reach out to the community board and neighbors, and to allow sufficient time for setup so work can get done during regular hours.”

A bigger issue, though, he said, is the lack of movement on the high-rise residential tower — and along with it, the community amenities, including the school, a gym and a public park, that the project would include.

“Trinity’s failure to start construction of the building here is an even greater disappointment,” said Bergman, who lives a block and a half away from the site. “During the Hudson Square rezoning process, we were promised that this would be the first Hudson Square project. It’s important because the community is waiting for the promised new school and new park.”

Bob Gormley, C.B. 2 district manager, added, “D.O.B. is paying attention on this. [Nike] was originally given a 24/7 after-hours variance, which was based on some incorrect information from the applicant, which said there was no one living within 200 feet, which was wrong.”

Normally, permitted hours for construction are 7 a.m. to 6 p.m., he noted.

TheVillager.com

The “Zoom City Map” of venues and events shows a superhero-like LeBron James dribbling by the Zoom City Arena in Hudson Square.

Then, after the 24/7 permit was pulled, the applicant, a promotion company, pulled another fast one.

“They were given a variance to work from 9 a.m. till 10 p.m. on weekends,” Gormley said. “We were not aware of this.”

In response, D.O.B. ultimately wound up barring work from being done at the site on two weekends, Gormley said.

Moving forward, the agency has ordered that on weekends, outdoor work at Zoom City Arena must end at 7 p.m., meaning no beeping backhoes moving around or beeping lifts going up and down.

At the same time, Gormley added, it was important to get the tent erected in time for this week’s scheduled programs.

“They’ve got to put this up, it’s a big event,” he said. “They’re going to have basketball games and NBA players come talk to the kids.”

As for Trinity, a spokesperson, in a brief statement, said, “The development of Duarte Square is an active and high priority for Trinity. The production company for this event contractually agreed to follow all city regulations, rules and protocols.”

Asked for his take — since Zoom City, at the end of the day, is about scoring sneaker sales — Reverend Billy, the anti-consumer performance-artist preacher, reflected back on Occupy Wall Street and also on the city’s current plan to develop affordable housing on 17 community gardens in Brooklyn and the Bronx.

Tuesday morning he had been at rally to save those gardens.

“I remember trying to use that empty space to change the world,” he said of the Duarte Square lot, “and using it to sell Nikes is just the opposite of that. The choices that we make

about our urban spaces — when we have choices about vacant lots and gardens — shows our values. You can’t use the place for our tent city, but they welcome in this famous sweatshop company.”

As for the long-range view, what about when the Trinity tower gets built, if it ever does? Won’t that construction be far worse than the tents?

No, actually not, maintained Lutz.

“It will all be regulated, and they build so quickly now,” she said, adding, “Look how fast they’re putting up the ‘new Flatiron’ on Sixth Ave.” But she won’t be sticking around to make the comparison.

“I’ll sublet my apartment to young people — who don’t spend any time inside,” she said. “Young people can bear anything.”

February 12, 2015

11

Scenes from Soho in ’79 are introduced in Etan

BY LINCOLN ANDERSON

P

S te

obsters • Seaf aks • L ood

Moran’s

A few days after Etan Patz went missing, a mime performed in front of the bodega at Prince St. and West Broadway where the prosecution charges Patz was killed.

PHOTO BY LINCOLN ANDERSON

rosecutors from the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office this past Monday released evidence photos in the trial of Pedro Hernandez, who is accused of killing Etan Patz in Soho in 1979.

The photos “set the scene” as it appeared back then when the six-year-old went missing on the first day that he went to school on his own. At that time, the area was a gritty and desolate artists’ enclave — a far cry from today’s tourist-infested shopping mall.

Hernandez was arrested in 2012 after a relative tipped off police that Hernandez had mentioned once killing a child in Soho. Hernandez eventually confessed to police that he had done it. Other relatives and members of Hernandez’s church group also told authorities that Hernandez had mentioned the alleged murder to them.

However, his defense team argues that his confession was coerced and that he is mentally ill and intellectually disabled with a very low IQ of 70.

One photo released by the D.A. showed the northwest corner of Prince St. and West Broadway, where the bodega that Hernandez worked in was then located. A mime is seen messing with a motorist in a performance-art piece that was intended to call attention to the young boy’s disappearance.

In his confession, the defendant said he lured Patz into the basement with the promise of a soda, then strangled him. However, those whom he later confessed his alleged crime to, tell conflicting stories of what he said happened and how he allegedly killed Patz. One friend, for example, said Hernandez told him Patz “threw a ball at his throat,” angering the bodega worker, after which he throttled him.

In more conflicting testimony, a bodega co-worker from back then stated Hernandez couldn’t have been in the store’s basement that morning since the stairs that led down to it — accessible from outside on the sidewalk — would have been gated at that hour. Plus, he said, Hernandez would have been helping with the breakfast rush at that hour.

Today, the corner is occupied by Michal Negrin, an Israeli clothing and jewelry boutique that was formerly located on Spring St. Julie Patz, Etan’s mom, only came on the trial’s first day to testify, and said she wouldn’t attend anymore because it was too painful to hear what allegedly had been done to her son by the defendant.

However, Etan’s father and sister, Stanley Patz and Shira Patz, the latter who uses a motorized wheelchair, have been at the trial every day.

Today, in a far safer Soho, the corner is occupied by a chic boutique. Last Friday afternoon, two young girls, a bit older than Etan Patz when he disappeared, walked past the spot.

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news@thevillager.com TheVillager.com

Patz case as questions linger about defendant

A shot from 1979 of the bodega basement where the prosecution contends Etan Patz was killed.

A bleak Soho street back from when Etan Patz’s disappearance shocked the city.

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February 12, 2015

13

Renovated 13th St. Rep. offers a slew of shows

BY ALBERT AMATEAU

T

he tiny theater on W. 13th St. that has nurtured budding playwrights, actors and directors for the past 42 years under its founder and artistic director, Edith O’Hara, is bursting with new creative energy since the arrival last fall of Susan Merson.

“We’re learning how to make the 13th St. Repertory Theater into a community-based center for artists, presenting music, poetry, photography, painting and new plays,” Merson told a visitor last week.

The 50-seat theater at 50 W. 13th St., between Fifth and Sixth Aves., is still the home of the longest continuously running (more than 40 years) Off Off Broadway play, “Line,” by Israel Horovitz.

“Israel came by last Thursday to see his granddaughter in a children’s show,” Merson said. “He has been a generous friend of the 13th St. Rep., letting us run the play for years without royalties,” she added.

Edith O’Hara, now 98, still lives in the apartment that she moved into in 1972 two flights up from the theater. She has a companion and gets visits periodically from her son Jack and a daughter, Jill, as well as from her grandson, John. Although Edith has slowed down in recent years (a hip was replaced a few years ago), she still comes down occasionally to see how the theater is doing.

“I came here at the end of October after Sandra Nordstrom left after 20 years of being Edith’s administrative assistant,” said Merson. “Edith and her daughter, Jenny, whom I knew in California, decided to keep the theater open when Sandra left, and they asked me to step in.”

Merson has been a member of Ensemble Studio Theater (EST), the innovative Off Broadway theater group on W. 52nd St., since 1975, and remained in contact with EST after she moved in 1986 to California, where she taught and produced plays.

“We did a huge renovation last fall, gutted the place, made sure that everything was up to code and met insurance standards,” Merson said of her first months as director of the 13th St. Rep. It was a big job for a building that dates to 1840 and served as a station on the Underground Railroad, which helped escaped slaves travel to freedom before the Civil War. Over the past 15 years, the 13th St. Rep. had been teetering on the verge of extinction. O’Hara bought the building in 1972 but ran into financial trouble a few years later. An “angel” came to the rescue and bought a half-interest in the property, only to prove less than angelic. In 1999 the investor want-

The company of “Rapunzarella White: A Fairly Fractured Tale,” a new production at the 13th St. Repertory Theater, back row, from left, Brandon Duncan, Alia Munsch, Marlain Angelides, Mark Singer, Daniel Neiden; center row, Brent Hildreth; front row, from left, June Rachelson-Ospa; Schuyler Midgett, Lorelie Mackenzie, Noriko Sunamoto and Matthew Joshua Cohen.

ed to sell his share to a developer who planned to replace the theater with a high-rise building. The battle raged off and on until 2008, when it was agreed that the theater would remain in place as long as Edith was living in the building.

Merson said that the situation is stable and she’s hopeful about the future.

“We’re now doing about six events a week and we can make the rent,” she said. “In addition to ‘Line’ we have ‘The Accidental Pervert,’ by Andrew Goffman, which has been running since 2010. And next week we’re opening ‘Triangle,’ a comedy by June Rachelson Ospa, directed by Joe Battista.”

The theater is also running “Bed Bugs and Beyond,” a comedy by Mark Blickley, again directed

by Joe Battista, who wrote the music and lyrics for the show.

The theater also has a resident musician, Hayes Greenfield, a veteran jazz performer, sound artist, composer and educator. He runs an interactive children’s program, “Give Me Sound.”

Another children’s production, “Rapunzarella White: A Fairly Fractured Tale,” by Ospa and Daniel Neiden, also recently began a run at the theater

on Saturdays at 11 a.m. and 1 p.m. In a nutshell, it’s “a family musical that mashes up fairy tales in a Bullwinkle sort of way with lots of songs and live music.”

An exhibit of silver-print photos by Charles Chessler, mostly of New York City, also opened this week in the theater lobby.

“Monologues for an Actress,” by Leah Kornfeld Friedman, performed by Essie Finkelstein, also takes the stage at the 13th St. Rep. “Leah, who is 83, lives on 13th St.,” Merson said.

“She is also a painter. I’ve been producing her plays for years.

“Right now, Caridad Svich, who won an Obie for lifetime achievement in the theater, is upstairs working on a new play,” Merson added.

From June 20 to July 30, the 13th St. Rep will be host to New York Theater Intensive, an international training program in partnership with Ensemble Studio Theater.

“We want artists to know that we’re alive and healthy and to come in to talk about a project,” Merson said. “We’re vital to the Village and we want to be a part of it.”

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Ralph Feldman, 79: Fought fires and to save shul OBITUARY

BY ALBERT AMATEAU

R

alph Feldman, a retired fire marshal and longtime East Village resident whose sculpture honoring firefighters who perished in a 1966 fire is enshrined at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, died on Feb. 5 in his E. Eighth St. home of more than 40 years.

He was 79 and in recent years had depended on an oxygen tank in his battle with lung cancer and emphysema. A city police officer for a brief time before becoming a firefighter, he served in firehouses in the Bronx and in Harlem, retiring in 1985 as a fire marshal.

A nearly legendary presence on E. Eighth St., Ralph Feldman lived at 315 E. Eighth St. in a building he bought in 1969. lt was next door to the Eighth St. Shul, one of the last of the tenement synagogues. After years of dwindling congregation, fires and disrepair, the synagogue’s few remaining trustees moved to sell the building for development.

In 1998 Feldman joined Clayton Paterson, a Lower East Side activist, and others in an effort to preserve the building at 317 E. Eighth St. as a synagogue. Feldman, a nonobservant Jew, told a local newspaper at the time, “I want it to stay Jewish — that’s all.”

His actions matched his words.

Ralph Feldman in late summer 2013.

At his own expense and with much of his own labor, he replaced roof beams, installed a new roof, new water and sewer lines.

“I thought if the congregation saw what I’ve done, they’d come back,” he said at the time. The congregation did not return and the building was redeveloped as a two-family residence by 2008.

John Knox, the city’s longest-serving (1964 to 1998) uniformed fire marshal, recalled that he met his friend Ralph Feldman in 1964.

“He had thousands of photos of buildings and fires, including a fivealarm fire right across Eighth St. where he lived,” Knox said.

Last fall, Ralph Feldman told a local blog that there used to be as many as five fires a week on his block of mostly vacant buildings.

“At the same time the Bronx was burning, the East Village was burn-

ing,” he told the blog. “All Brooklyn was burning. In the ’70s and ’80s, big portions of the city burned down.”

Feldman began buying distressed properties in his neighborhood and in Williamsburg, “and turning them into something that people could live in,” Knox said. EV Grieve, an East Village blog, said that a tenant of Feldman’s told the blog that Feldman never raised the rents on his buildings.

But some activists accused Feldman of being a slumlord.

“I remember that he beat the crap out of one guy,” Knox said.

“You either loved him or hated him,” said Paterson, Feldman’s partner in the effort to save the Eighth St. Shul. “He was known for marking graffiti, ‘Yuppie Squatters Out,’ around the Lower East Side,” Patterson recalled.

John Penley, a former East Village resident and activist, said in a post on Facebook, “Thinking of Ralph Feldman and his passing: since he was an FDNY fire marshal for 27 years during a long period when there were many fires in the Lower East Side, Ralph had to have seen some terrible things on a regular basis because he would have been the one to go in after a fire and investigate it. That gives you some insight into some of the good and bad things about him.”

Robert Perl, head of Tower Realty and the redeveloper of the Eighth St. Shul, recalled that Ralph could be either charming or aggressive.

“He told me that after President Reagan sent in the Marines in 1983

to take over Grenada, he went down there with a lot of cash and bank checks to buy waterfront property,” Perl said. “I don’t know if he actually did it, but that’s what he told me.”

Feldman was reputed to own 100 properties in the outer boroughs in conjunction with Joe Pogostin, his business partner of 47 years.

Susan Roecker, a graphic designer and Ralph Feldman’s longtime companion and collaborator, met him 42 years ago when an acquaintance introduced them.

“He was an imposing figure and a little shy,” she said. “He was wonderful to travel with because he was so very approachable to everyone who met him.”

Roecker drew the presentation pictures for Feldman’s art projects, including the monumental “To the Fallen 12” honoring 12 firefighters who perished in a 1966 fire at 7 E. 23rd St. The work, a 30-foot charred wooden beam grasped by steel bars resembling fingers, was installed in St. John the Divine in October 1976 on the fire’s 10th anniversary.

Rabbi Javier Bogner, of the Stanton St. Shul, officiated at Feldman’s funeral at Mt. Lebanon Cemetery in Ridgewood on the cold afternoon of Feb. 6, where an F.D.N.Y. color guard, firefighter friends, East Village neighbors, Hasidim and West Indians gathered to pay respects, Roecker said.

Two nieces, Linda Corozzo and Joyce Feldman, and a nephew, Mitchell Feldman, survive, as do several grandnieces and grandnephews.

Remembering Ralph: L.E.S. was his Garden of Eden

BY ELIZABETH RUF-MALDONADO

R

alph Feldman and I became friends when I moved across Tompkins Square Park to his block in 1992. He was a part of ABC Garden on Eighth St. between Avenues B and C when Miguel Maldonado and I got a plot in the garden in 1993.

Ralph helped found De Colores Community Yard across the street when Giuliani bulldozed ABC. Eighth St. neighbors Carol and Cuba were already gardening there, growing vegetables and white roses. Ralph was tending a strawberry patch in the back and kept his motorboat (a large craft painted the yellow-orange color of caution lights with a face and teeth like a barracuda) parked along the eastern wall.

Ralph was always present, marveling at women’s capacity for hard work. (I was pregnant with my daughter, Clara, at the time and carting out wheelbarrows full of rubble.) Nursing his daily 24 cups of cafe con leche TheVillager.com

from Pedro’s (later Rebecca’s) bakery along with four packs of cigarettes, Ralph would converse for hours on end on pet topics like hard-working women, his adventures in the Fire Department and the Scriptures. (I was trying to read the Bible at one time but lost focus after the Pentateuch.)

Ralph wanted to name our garden the Garden of Eden. I remember standing up at a Community Board 3 meeting in the mid-1990s to take Ralph’s part on some issue or other and a neighbor taking me aside after the meeting to inform me that Ralph was the Devil.

Somewhere I have a photo of a mural on Eighth Street between B and C depicting a dream World Court with six international figures (Nelson Mandela, Rigoberta Menchú, et al.) and six folks from the neighborhood, one of whom was Ralph.

I remember the ramshackle piano and the jazz concerts in the old shul Ralph was instrumental in rehabilitating two doors down from the gar-

den, the eight or nine guys looking like Hester St. a century ago, smoking pot (which one of them also famously supplied on a medical basis to the poor and afflicted) and looking for a minyan. I miss their music and obstreperous conversations and their camaraderie.

I remember the shul’s beautiful miniature dioramas in glass cases depicting Jewish life in ancient Egypt and the irreplaceable frescos of the signs of the zodiac along the perimeter of the women’s congregation upstairs. That’s my kind of museum — hard to find its ilk in millennial New York City.

Ralph’s sculpture of a huge metallic hand clutching the burning beams of a collapsing building still stands in the sanctuary at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine.

Somewhere I have a photocopy Ralph gave me of a newspaper article about that work of art. The accompanying photo shows a swarthy, mustachioed young Ralph standing beside

his sculptural homage to fallen firemen, looking like Omar Sharif.

There are so many stories. I was continually surprised over the years how Ralph managed to have his hand in so many things I loved about the Lower East Side in the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s.

In the 1980s he produced an experimental musical, “Candy Store,” in the beloved reclaimed community space CUANDO on Second Ave. and First St. This piece featured a young artist now known as Angel Eyedealism, who, years later, has become my friend.

As a landlord, Ralph helped many neighbors and artists with affordable space outside the nouveau gentry’s real estate racket. He could also be merciless. In the years I knew him, I saw how his habits aggravated his mood and vice versa, and how the whole situation took a harsh toll on his health. He behaved both irascibly and kindly, and there’ll never be another like him.

February 12, 2015

15

In brief, they did it for love, fun and charity PHOTO BY MILO HESS

Saturday afternoon hundreds of hardy New Yorkers dropped trou to raise money for the Children’s Tumor Foundation by running about one mile near the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum. Pre-run warm-up festivities for the Cupid’s Undies Run were held at Stage 48 in a club atmosphere.

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR Social Studies 101 To The Editor: Re “Won’t cut Silver any slack” (letter, by Dodge Landesman, Feb. 5): My friend Dodge Landesman may have skipped class when his social studies teacher covered the constitutional rights that Assemblyman Silver has — to be considered not guilty unless he has his day in court and can confront his accusers.

I remember when then-18-year-old Dodge

EVAN FORSCH

Landesman, who was considering running for City Council, was delighted to shake hands with then-Speaker Silver when I introduced the two of them to each other. Now, it is perhaps politically expedient for Dodge to pile on the seeming political corpse of Assemblyman Silver before any trial. Who needs trials when the public lynch mobs have hangings in kangaroo courts?

Assemblyman Silver deserves to be considered not guilty until he has his day in court. Not because he is a true progressive, which he is — but instead because it is the American way. I

taught this in our New York City high schools when I was 22 years old (around Dodge’s age now) when I was a social studies teacher just out of college. I learned this also when I was a student in high school and college.

Perhaps Dodge one day will go on to be an assemblyman or beyond, like my representative Deborah Glick, who well represents my district, or a state senator, like Brad Hoylman, both of whom are pioneers in the L.G.B.T. and progressive movements. Dodge Landesman will go on to do important political things in our city one day.

Piling on Assemblyman Silver before a fair trial in open court is not one of them.

Gil Horowitz

Stop the Airbnb madness To The Editor: Re “How one company adapted to the illegal-hotel law” (talking point, by Rick Lassin, Feb. 5): By being a good corporate citizen, New York Habitat is letting Airbnb take their market share and business. The fact is that Airbnb makes more money by foisting all responsibility and risk on the lessor and lessee and neighbors in the surLETTERS, continued on p. 27

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February 12, 2015

TheVillager.com

Sheldon Silver’s real record on tenants’ rights TALKING POINT

BY MICHAEL MCKEE

S

heldon Silver was elected speaker of the state Assembly 11 times, following the premature death of his predecessor, Saul Weprin, in 1994. This means Silver has negotiated renewal of the rent laws three times.

How did he do?

Let’s start with the Great Rent Wars of 1997. In December 1996, then-Senate Republican Leader Joseph Bruno announced that he would not allow a vote on a bill to renew the state rent laws when they came up for renewal the following June. That unleashed a firestorm of tenant activism, with tenants who had never been active banging on the doors of tenant organizations to ask how they could help. Silver immediately became the leader of the opposition, declaring that the Assembly would not pass the state budget until the rent laws were renewed. This was a gutsy move on his part.

During the legislative session, Silver’s advocacy on behalf of tenants was heroic. But on June 15, the day the rent laws expired, he went into negotiations with Republican Governor George Pataki — who opposed rent regulation, but had let Bruno front the campaign to end it — and gave away the store in return for Pataki’s agreeing to renew the rent laws for six years instead of the expected four.

The array of weakening amendments Silver agreed to have inflicted enormous damage on tenants and the supply of rent-regulated housing.

The most damaging of these was the vacancy-deregulation provision, which made it impossible for New York City to repeal the similar law that the City Council enacted in 1994 without permission from the state Legislature, and also extended that deregulation to apartments in Nassau, Westchester and Rockland counties.

Another amendment barred investigations into illegal rents from going back more than four years, thereby facilitating rent overcharging and illegal deregulation, and gutting the rent registration system. Others included making it harder for Housing Court judges to stop evictions; letting landlords raise the rent on vacant apartments by an extra 20

percent; removing aunts, uncles, nieces and nephews as family members eligible for the right to take over a lease when the tenant of record moves or dies; and making it easier to evict for demolition.

And then Silver was caught asleep at the wheel in 2003. The next time the rent laws came up for renewal, in 2003, Silver made no effort at all. He and Bruno had a handshake deal before the session began to renew the rent laws without additional weakening amendments. But on the last night the Senate was in session, Bruno double-crossed Silver, passing an unprecedented eight-year extender with two new anti-tenant changes, and then adjourned for the year. An embarrassed Silver was faced with the choice of letting the rent laws expire or swallow-

Though at times heroic, Silver was tricked by Bruno, and later sold out on J-51.

ing the changes. The Assembly swallowed.

Until then, tenant groups had been only mildly critical of Silver, hoping that he would try to undo some of the damage he’d inflicted on rent-protection laws. But after this dismal performance, Tenants & Neighbors organized a demonstration in 2004 outside his 250 Broadway office. Silver and other Assembly Democrats protested mightily: Why were tenants attacking their champion?

Then there was Silver and Cuomo’s alleged “tenant victory” in 2011. Four years ago, Silver seemed to make an effort to negotiate meaningful changes to the rent-regulation system, made more likely by a muscular tenant campaign and the election of a Democratic governor who favored renewing the laws. But the final result was a disappointment. While tenants fought the real-estate lobby to a draw, getting the laws renewed without weaken-

ing amendments for the first time since 1993, the negotiated bill left all the rent deregulation mechanisms in place. It also preserved all the loopholes (major-capital-improvement increases, preferential rents, and the 20 percent vacancy bonus) that enable landlords to jack up regulated rents to the point where tenants can no longer afford them.

And last but not least, in 2013, Silver sold out on J-51 renewal. Despite promising tenant advocates in 2012 that — unless he won important pro-tenant changes — he would not renew the expiring J-51 tax subsidy to landlords who renovate their buildings, Silver did just that. In January 2013, he pushed through a “One Big Ugly” omnibus bill that renewed this program, along with a tax break for co-op shareholders and condo owners.

But the only pro-tenant change was one extending protection to a small number of loft tenants, most in north Brooklyn — important protections, but they apply to only a few hundred units. One million rent-controlled and rent-stabilized tenants got screwed again.

The bill also included language that gave 421a tax breaks to five Manhattan luxury apartment towers that normally would have been ineligible because they contained no affordable housing. A Met Council on Housing report, “Tax Breaks for Billionaires,” blew the lid off this subterfuge a few months later, so the 421-a carve-outs are what most people remember about this bill.

No legislator wanted to take responsibility for that giveaway. The bill’s lead sponsors, Democrats Senator Martin Golden and Assembly Housing Committee Chairperson Keith Wright, both told reporters that they were not aware the legislation included those provisions. Daily News reporter Dan Freedman eventually uncovered the information that Silver was the one who had included the 421-a carve-outs — at the behest of the Real Estate Board of New York.

Aware that Silver was insisting on getting the bill passed, no Assembly Democrat spoke against it on the floor, and only seven voted against it.

This column first ran in Tenant/Inquilino, the monthly newspaper of Met Council on Housing.

McKee is a board member, Met Council on Housing, and treasurer, Tenants Political Action Committee

PHOTOS BY MILO HESS

The Hudson River is full of ice floes, but there were some signs of spring that painted a rosier picture in Tribeca this week, including on a bike’s chain guard on North Moore St. and on a wall on Pier 25.

TheVillager.com

February 12, 2015

17

Birth of a Voice: John Wilcock, writer, mailman NOTEBOOK

BY JERRY TALLMER

T

he birthplace of The Village Voice, and its cradle for the next couple of years — until we moved to larger quarters (two floors) next door to the Lion’s Head, a journalistic hangout on Christopher Street at Sheridan Square — was that little old floor-through one flight up at 22 Greenwich Avenue, not much larger than my beloved apartment on Perry Street.

There was a main space, looking out on Greenwich Avenue and not much else; a tiny rear room containing a desk — Dan Wolf’s desk — and an ancient daybed; a bathroom of sorts; two or three desks upfront, a couple of battered Royal typewriters, an ink-splattering mimeograph machine, a broom, a wastebasket, and — not an odor exactly but a mustiness. A newspaper mustiness, even though there’d never before been a newspaper on the premises.

I knew at once, as I stepped through the door, that this was it, for me.

Even before I got there, there was somebody — a human presence — ensconced at a desk by the windows. This was John Wilcock, a chirpy little 28-year-old British refugee from Fleet Street and its Daily Mail, who’d made his Great Circle route to Greenwich Village by way of Toronto, Canada, and — quite separately from Ed Fancher, Dan Wolf or Norman Mailer — had wanted to start a newspaper more reflective of the onrushing Beatnik counterculture than was the neighborhood’s long-established doddery weekly The Villager.

John Wilcock, the first News Editor of The Village Voice — until Dan took back that job for himself — had seized the desk by the windows with a double purpose. One was to look out at what was going on in life all up and down Greenwich Avenue, the other was — these were windows you could open — to use the window as a mailbox. He dashed off typewritten letters of varying length to this one and that one all day long, folded them, stuck them in envelopes, sealed and addressed those envelopes, and then blithely tossed them — stamp-less — out through the open window onto the sidewalk below.

In the firm belief — I kid you not — that some good Samaritan would sooner or later come along, pick up the envelope, see that it wasn’t stamped, put a stamp on it, stick it in a mailbox.

And it worked. It must have

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February 12, 2015

The cover image of “John Wilcock: New York Years, 1954-1971,” an online biography in graphic novel style. Page four, about Wilcock’s dream of starting a new paper, has a dig at The Villager, whose contents back then he describes as “mostly bridge club party reports.”

worked. I never heard John complain that one of his missives hadn’t reached its addressee.

Wilcock lived only a short distance from the newspaper. He was always dashing out of the office and running home to see the latest event or program on that still relatively new phenomenon called Television. In fact John was the only person I can remember — Greenwich Village person — who in those days watched television. I certainly never did until I married Louise and we had our twins. Then I discovered baseball on television. ...

So: John Wilcock was, at the start, News Editor of The Village Voice, and his idea of news was little 3-inch human-interest (or human curiosity) stories, each of which began, Fleet Street style, “A man who...” or “A woman who...” (“A woman who went roller skating with a Polar Bear in Central Park is a sadder and wiser woman today...”), even though John hated Fleet Street — O.K., hated England — well before anyone this side of the water (any water) had ever heard of Rupert Murdoch.

He must have had something, though. He and Flo Ettenberg, one of The Voice’s two do-it-all secretaries, became an item, giggling and dashing here and there night and day.

“You don’t understand him,” Florence ruefully said to me, and I guess I didn’t. When the News Editor job was taken away from him, John came back with a weekly col-

umn of chitchat and profiles, “The Village Square,” which was copyedited every week by yours truly through gritted teeth and — I have to say it — drew a wide and appreciative readership week after week.

There is always room in this world for anomaly. Imagine my shock, one icy wintry morning in a car returning from the printer’s in Washington, Pennsylvania, when John Wilcock suddenly begins reciting his way through the poetry of T.S. Eliot, beginning with the one poem that has spoken most to me all my life: “Let us go then, you and I / When the evening is spread out against the sky / Like a patient etherized upon a table...”

That may have been the same day on which, earlier, en route the printer, I went into a skid on an icy overpass and was drifting uphill into the left lane when a car coming headlong at us was occupying the same lane at full speed. Luckily, I had practiced skids one icy morning back in college 15 years and a whole World War before, and now, turning into the skid, I wrestled us slowly back onto the proper side of the road, and thus saved the entire Village Voice staff — Ed, Dan, John, Flo, Laura, Sue Ryan, myself — from being wiped out at one fell swoop.

John Wilcock also believed in reading a lot of letters. Our letters. Letters or memos or whatever to or from Ed, Dan, me. Anyone’s letters. Everyone’s letters, in the pre-electronic era. If you were fool-

ish enough to leave your mail lying around on desktops — in or out of envelopes — why, then, it was his to read. It was part of his moral code.

It drove Ed, Dan and me crazy — especially Ed. By then he and Dan were established in the tiny rear room — the one with the daybed — and they made sure to stuff any mail, etc. in drawers and to lock that room whenever everybody went home for the night.

John got in anyway. He came in through the transom over the door.

Ed nailed the transom shut. John got in anyway. The Voice was immediately adjacent to the low one-story building of Sutter’s bakery. John somehow got onto the roof of Sutter’s and climbed through a small window into the tiny back room of The Village Voice.

Oh well. Ho hum. I used to bump into John at wide intervals through the years, and he always bitterly felt he never got proper credit as one of the founders of The Village Voice.

He was right. He didn’t. He was a pain in the ass, but an integral piece in this long-ago jigsaw puzzle. I Googled him just now. The most recent entry has him out in Ojai, California, publishing a weekly political and chitchat column “of lasting insignificance.” I wish him well.

Florence has been married forever to somebody else, and I certainly wish her well too.

P.S. anent that battered daybed.

Years earlier, as a kid, I had read Jack London’s “The Sea Wolf.” In it, the hero was constantly throwing himself down on the deck for 10 minutes of flat-out restorative sleep.

During the whole first six or eight months of The Voice, when I (and sometimes Dan) had to go straight through 16 or 18 or 24 hours of work on it without sleep, I took Jack London’s suggestion to heart, and would hurl myself down on that daybed for what my father would have called “40 winks” of rebirth.

It amazed everybody who saw me do it.

One other memory of that back room. It was the day Norman brought his ex-wife No. 1, Beatrice Silverman, and their then-8-or-9year-old daughter Susan — the first of Norman’s nine children — to the office. He planted the child on top of Dan’s desk. Sitting there, she looked around, searchingly, at Dan, at Ed, at me, at Norman, and then in loud, clear tones demanded: “What I want to know is, who is the boss here?”

Tallmer, who died in November at 93, was a founding editor of The Village Voice. He was the paper’s associate editor and its first film and drama critic. For the past two decades, he was a prolific contributor to The Villager.

TheVillager.com

Silent films, live sounds Free screening of Man Ray shorts, latter-day ‘Snow White’ at Winter Garden NEW SOUNDS LIVE: SILENT FILMS/LIVE MUSIC Feb. 17–20 8 p.m.

At Winter Garden at Brookfield Place 230 Vesey Street (at West Street) Free Info: artsbrookfield.com/new-york

COURTESY OF ARTS BROOKFIELD

BY TRAV S.D. (travsd.wordpress.com)

T

here is no new thing under the sun,” went the wisdom of Solomon. And so it is that among the more novel diversions to be had in the city now are silent films, a form that last enjoyed mainstream popularity nearly 90 years ago. From Feb. 17–20, WNYC’s “New Sounds Live” will be presenting “Silent Films/Live Music” at the Winter Garden at Brookfield Place. Two separate programs will be presented on alternating nights.

The showings are free.

On Tues., Feb. 17 and Thurs., Feb. 19, four short avant-garde works

by Man Ray will be shown, accompanied by an original live score by SQÜRL, a band featuring the filmmaker Jim Jarmusch (“Dead Man,” “Broken Flowers”) and his musical partner Carter Logan. Naturally,

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The Feb. 17–20 programs are recorded for future broadcast on WNYC radio’s New Sounds Live.

SQÜRL specializes in improvised avant-rock, creating soundscapes out of trippy feedback loops, distorted guitars and heavy percussion.

American-born painter, photographer, and filmmaker Man Ray was a key figure in the Dada and Surrealism movements in Paris in the 1920s and ‘30s. His films are non-linear, non-narrative experiments. These films are a far cry from the Hollywood product of their day and, in some ways, remain ahead of their time. The viewer is

frequently disoriented, through such techniques as skewed angles, double exposure, reverse polarity, slow motion, stop motion animation, soft focus and simple tricks of light and shadow — not to mention his famous “Rayographs.” A special photographic technique of his own, Rayographs were produced by placing common household objects (spoons, pearls) directly onto photographic paper and exposing them to light.

The four Man Ray films will be

the two-minute-plus “Retour a la Raison” (“The Return of Reason,”1923), “Emak Bakia” (1926), “L’Etoile De Mer” (“The Starfish,” 1928), and “Les Mysteres Du Chateau Du De” (“The Mysteries of the House of Dice,” 1929) — which, at 28 minutes, is the lengthiest of the selections. It is also the closest to a narrative film: four faceless people wander around a mansion — SNOW WHITE, continued on p. 20 February 12, 2015

19

Man Ray by way of SQÜRL

JUST DO ART, continued from p. 19

swimming in the swimming pool and periodically rolling a giant pair of dice.

On Wed., Feb. 18 and Fri., Feb. 20, the series will present the U.S. premiere of “Blancanieves,” a latter-day Spanish updating of “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” set against a backdrop of bullfighting in Andalusia in the 1920s. The Andalusian theme seems most apt given that the most famous of all the classic Surrealist fi lms is “Un Chien Andalou” (“An Andalusian Dog”, 1929), by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali…which connects us back to Man Ray. But other than the Andalusian setting, the comparisons

stop there.

Pablo Berger’s 2012 fi lm is a masterful (and magical) piece of storytelling concerning a daughter striving to return to her father and carry out his legacy despite the cruel conniving of an evil stepmother. And believe it or not, the fi lm has seven little people. They actually “went there” — and it works! I thought this fi lm was easily the equal of 2011’s “The Artist” in reviving the art form of silent, black and white storytelling. One can only speculate on (and I have some pretty good guesses) what sort of myopia has prevented distributors from opening the fi lm in the U.S. until this late date. But be glad they are. I highly recommend this fi lm.

As a special treat, the February screenings will include a live ap-

ROTTEN TOMATOES

COURTESY OF ARTS BROOKFIELD

Filmmaker Jim Jarmusch and his musical partner Carter Logan, perform a live score, to accompany four short avant-garde works by Man Ray.

A latter-day Spanish updating of “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” Pablo Berger’s 2012 film screens on Feb. 18 & 20.

pearance by the composer of the fi lm’s original soundtrack, Alfonso Vilallonga, along with his ensemble, the Wordless Music Orchestra.

The programs will be recorded for future broadcast on WNYC ra-

Win Tickets to “ Horseplay: Or, The Fickle Mistress”

Photo by James Eden

CALL TO SUBSCRIBE 646-452-2475

20

February 12, 2015

dio’s New Sounds Live (an interesting proposition, given that listeners won’t be able to see the fi lms that the music will accompany).

The show airs nightly at 11 p.m. on WNYC 93.9FM.

Long before the first Madonna song or Kim Kardashian skin shot, Adah Isaacs Menken rode to international superstardom after being stripped, strapped to the back of a horse, and sent up a fourstory-tall papier-mâché stage mountain in the Broadway melodrama “Mazeppa.”

Ridiculed in 1861 as “unhampered by the shackles of talent,” this reimagining of Menken’s life aims to reclaim her rightful place in popular culture and lore — but as what: Black? White? Jewish?

Catholic? Lesbian? Poet? Actress?

Equestrienne? Written by this publication’s Downtown theatre columnist, Trav.

S.D. — and presented by Theatre Askew as the latest entry its celebration of the history of queer presence in New York — “Horseplay: Or, The Fickle Mistress, A Protean Picaresque” stars Molly Pope as Menken and features longtime Ridiculous Theatrical Company member Everett Quinton.

The winner of our giveaway will receive two tickets for the Thurs., Feb. 26, 8 p.m. performance. To enter, email HorseplayTix@TheVillager.com, along with your phone number (only enter once, please). A winner will be selected at random, and contacted by phone on Feb. 23. The show, which runs through March 1, takes place at La Mama’s Ellen Stewart Theatre (66 E. Fourth St.). But why leave it to chance? Purchase tickets ($18, $13 for students/seniors) by calling 646-430-5374 or visiting lamama.org.

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Just Do Art

BY SCOTT STIFFLER

BEFORE THE GARDEN: AN EXHIBIT OF PHOTOGRAPHS BY DARLEEN RUBIN

HIGHLIGHTS IN JAZZ 42nd ANNIVERSARY GALA

Produced by the indefatigable Jack Kleinsinger with a mandate to nurture new talent and honor living legends, New York’s lon-

© 2015 DARLEEN RUBIN

Will our city ever swing quite the way it did in the 1970s? Hard to believe unless you lived through it, but there was a time when the walls came down, a green space went up and The New York Dolls headlined a Save Our Libraries rally. Darleen Rubin was there, and captured it all with her trusty camera and her knack for communicating the essence of an era. Having previously exhibited on topics including the waterfront and Rollerena, “Before The Garden” finds Rubin back at Jefferson Market Library with images that chart the slow dismantling of its infamous next door neighbor: the “House of D” women’s detention facility. Closed in 1971, the shuttered eyesore became a garden three years later. The photos in this exhibit include documentation of that legendary library rally, with the Dolls in their glorious glam rock prime.

Free. Through Feb. 25. At Jefferson Market Library (425 Sixth Ave., at 10th St.). Mon./Wed 10 a.m.–6 p.m. Tues./ Thurs. 11 a.m.–6 p.m. Fri./Sat. 10 a.m.– 5 p.m. For more info, visit nypl.org/ events/exhibitions.

The New York Dolls play a 1974 Save Our Libraries rally, in an image from Darleen Rubin’s “Before The Garden” exhibit (through Feb. 25 at Jefferson Market Library).

gest-running jazz concert series will launch its 43rd season on Feb. 19, with an anniversary gala featuring the swinging jazz and blues of Catherine Russell and her group. This is the acclaimed vocalist’s “Highlights” debut. An all-star quartet of returning veterans (clarinetist/saxophonist Dan Levinson and singer/trumpeter Bria Skonberg with pianist Gordon Webster and bassist/vocalist Nicki Parrott) will play a repertoire of JUST DO ART, continued on p. 22

© 2015 DARLEEN RUBIN

Darleen Rubin captures the area surrounding Jefferson Market Library — after the House of D, and “Before the Garden” (the title of her exhibit, on view through Feb. 25).

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IS GIVING AWAY FREE FAMILY PASSES TO:

FOR YOUR CHANCE TO WIN Visit:

thevillager.com/win

For terms of service, privacy policy, and rules, visit www.thevillager.com/win. Select RapunzarellaWhite

February 12, 2015

21

Just Do Art JUST DO ART, continued from p. 21

Catherine Russell headlines Feb. 19’s Anniversary Gala, which launches the new season of Jack Kleinsinger’s Highlights In Jazz series.

Hideko Rostad’s “Battery Park City” is on view through March 6, as part of BPCPC’s annual art exhibition.

HIGH LINE SNOW SCULPT-OFF

PHOTO BY STEVEN SEVERINGHAUS

Get good and Frosty, atop the High Line — when your team enters the Snow Sculpt-Off contest (competition deadline, Feb. 28).

COURTESY OF THE GREENWICH VILLAGE ANTIQUARIAN BOOK FAIR

With the kind of winter we’ve been having, chances are you’ll be able to make a few good dry runs before submitting your masterpiece in time for the High Line’s Snow Sculpt-Off competition deadline of Feb. 28. When the next flakes fall, check the High Line’s homepage to make sure the park is open — then head to The Porch (W. 15th St.), the 10th Ave. Square (btw. W. 16th & 17th Sts.), the 22nd St. Seating Steps or The Crossroads (W. 30th St.).

Adults or families in teams of five or fewer can enter by snapping a photo of the proud builders aside their snowy creation — via Facebook, Twitter or Instagram, using the hashtag #SculptOff and the category #family or #grownups. Or, email to programs@thehighline. org. Finalists will be posted on the High Line’s social media in March — then the public votes. Winners will get to wrap their frosty mittens around vouchers for sweet treats, sports apparel, coffee, cookbooks, Bluetooth speakers or iPod shuffles.

While you patiently await the next blizzard, visit thehighline.org for details and rules.

GREENWICH VILLAGE ANTIQUARIAN BOOK FAIR

Drawing 60+ of the East Coast’s best book dealers, this three-day fair offers both the serious bibliophile and the casual browser a

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February 12, 2015

IMAGE COURTESY OF THE ARTIST

© NANCY CARBONARO

jazz classics. The series continues on March 19, with a Battle of the Saxes. Trombonist Wycliffe Gordon is saluted on May 7, with the guest of honor in attendance — and in performance. June 11’s “Jazz, Past & Present” theme wraps things up, featuring the Highlights In Jazz New Stars (Steven Frieder, tenor saxophone; Benny Benack, trumpet; Dylan Meek, piano; Devin Starks, bass; Kosta Galanopoulos, drums).

All shows start at 8 p.m. at BMCC Tribeca Performing Arts Center (199 Chambers St. btw. Greenwich & West Sts.). Tickets are $160 for all four concerts, $45 each ($40 for students with valid ID). To order, visit tribecapac. org or call 212-220-1460. Also visit highlightsinjazz.org.

PS3 is the place to find comics, classics and everything in between — even ephemera — when the Greenwich Village Antiquarian Book Fair sets up shop from Feb. 20–22.

delightful opportunity to peruse rare and vintage books spanning the past four centuries — including children’s books, modern first editions, art, photography and design, maps and prints, political flyers, unusual paper ephemera and memorabilia, Dickensiana, paleontology, architecture, autographs, African American studies, film history and comics.

Fri.–Sun. Feb. 20, 6–9 p.m. Feb. 21, 12–6 p.m. Feb. 22, 12–5 p.m. At PS3, the Charrette School (490 Hudson St. btw. Christopher & Grove Sts.). For info, visit gvabookfair.org.

BPCPC’s ANNUAL ART EXHIBITION and WEEKLY ART CLASSES

Battery Park City Parks Conservancy’s annual exhibition focuses on depictions of Battery Park City, the Hudson River and historical architecture of Lower Manhattan. Everything on display was submitted by the public, and represents work from artists of all ages. Inspired?

Take advantage of BPCPC’s free weekly art classes for adults, children and preschoolers (May 1–Oct. 31) and your watercolor, charcoal and pen drawing, collage, wood, clay or mixed media work could end up on the Conservancy’s wall at this time next year. For a program calendar, call 212-267-9700 or e-mail info@bpcparks.org.

Free. Weekdays, 2–4 p.m. through March 6. At Battery Park City Parks Conservancy 75 Battery Place (corner of Second Place & Battery Place). For more info, visit bpcparks.org.

TheVillager.com

COURTESY OF THE NANCY GRAVES FOUNDATION, INC AND MITCHELL-INNES & NASH, NY. ALL IMAGES © 2015 NANCY GRAVES FOUNDATION, INC/LICENSED BY VAGA, NEW YORK, NY.

Buhmann on Art GALLERY NANCY GRAVES Through March 7 Tues.–Sat. / 10 a.m.–6 p.m.

At Mitchell-Innes & Nash 534 W. 26th St. Btw. 10th & 11th Aves.

Call 212-744-7400 Visit miandn.com

Installation view: Nancy Graves.

COURTESY OF THE NANCY GRAVES FOUNDATION, INC AND MITCHELL-INNES & NASH, NY. ALL IMAGES © 2015 NANCY GRAVES FOUNDATION, INC/LICENSED BY VAGA, NEW YORK, NY.

COURTESY OF THE NANCY GRAVES FOUNDATION, INC AND MITCHELL-INNES & NASH, NY. ALL IMAGES © 2015 NANCY GRAVES FOUNDATION, INC/LICENSED BY VAGA, NEW YORK, NY.

Nancy Graves: “Evol” (1978 / Watercolor on paper / 63 5/8 by 44 1/2 in. / 161.6 by 113 cm.).

BY STEPHANIE BUHMANN (stephaniebuhmann.com)

Nancy Graves: “Bones and Their Containers (To Martin Cassidy)” (1971 / Steel, gauze, acrylic, plaster, burlap and wax / 8 by 132 by 60 in. / 20.3 by 335.3 by 152.4 cm.).

NANCY GRAVES

An internationally acclaimed conceptual artist, Graves (1939–1995) has been featured in hundreds of notable exhibitions and her work is in the permanent collections of major art museums.

Born in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, Graves earned her MFA in painting at Yale in 1964, where her classmates included Robert and Sylvia Mangold, Brice Marden, Chuck Close, and Richard Serra (to whom she was married from 1965 to 1970).

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Bursting onto the international scene in 1969 with a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, followed by her prominent inclusion in Documenta V (1972) and Documenta VI (1977), Graves developed a body of work that guides the viewer through her own process of discovery and creation. Groundbreaking scientific research, natural history and fine art were her

main source of inspiration.

During the 1970s, several of her paintings were based on clippings from natural history books or topographical maps of the ocean floor and moon, for example. To Graves, these gathered images, as well as contemporary scientific research and the excitement of new discoveries, embodied a key to the exploration of the unknown.

February 12, 2015

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NOTICE OF QUALIFICATION OF JAVLIN NINE LLC Authority filed with NY Dept. of State on 12/10/14.

Office location: NY County.

LLC formed in DE on 12/3/14. NY Sec. of State designated agent of LLC upon whom process against it may be served and shall mail process to: CT Corporation System, 111 8th Ave., NY, NY 10011. DE address of LLC: 1209 Orange St., Wilmington, DE 19801. Cert. of Form. filed with DE Sec. of State, 401 Federal St., Dover, DE 19901. Purpose: all lawful purposes.

Vil: 02/12 - 03/19/2015

NOTICE OF FORMATION OF SPA AHH LA CARTE LLC Articles of Organization filed with Secretary of State of New York (SSNY) on 01/26/15. Office location: NY County. SSNY has been designated as an agent upon whom process against the LLC may be served. The address to which SSNY shall mail a copy of any process against the LLC is to: The SPA AHH LA CARTE LLC, c/o National Registered Agents, Inc. 111 8th Ave, New York, NY 10011. Purpose: To engage in any lawful act or activity.

Vil: 02/12 - 03/19/2015

HUNTER MECHANICAL SERVICES LLC a domestic LLC, filed with the SSNY on 1/28/15. Office location: New York County. SSNY is designated as agent upon whom process against the LLC may be served. SSNY shall mail process to The LLC, 115 W. 30th St., Ste. 110A, NY, NY 10001. General Purposes.

Vil: 02/12 - 03/19/2015

NOTICE OF QUALIFICATION OF JAVLIN EIGHT LLC Authority filed with NY Dept. of State on 12/10/14.

Office location: NY County.

LLC formed in DE on 12/3/14. NY Sec. of State designated agent of LLC upon whom process against it may be served and shall mail process to: CT Corporation System, 111 8th Ave., NY, NY 10011. DE address of LLC: 1209 Orange St., Wilmington, DE 19801. Cert. of Form. filed with DE Sec. of State, 401 Federal St., Dover, DE 19901. Purpose: all lawful purposes.

Vil: 02/12 - 03/19/2015

NOTICE OF FORMATION OF LINE-S9D, LLC Arts. of Org. filed with Secy. of State of NY (SSNY) on 1/20/15. Office location: NY County. SSNY designated as agent of LLC upon whom process against it may be served. SSNY shall mail process to: Gleason & Koatz, LLP, 122 E. 42nd St., Ste. 518, NY, NY 10168.

Purpose: any lawful activity.

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NOTICE OF FORMATION OF 1266 MADISON EZ LLC Arts. of Org. filed with Secy. of State of NY (SSNY) on 12/16/14. Office location: NY County. Princ. office of LLC: 1064 Madison Ave., NY, NY 10028. SSNY designated as agent of LLC upon whom process against it may be served.

SSNY shall mail process to the LLC at the addr. of its princ. office. Purpose: Any lawful activity.

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LEGAL NOTICE Formation of Hu Master Holdings LLC filed with the Secy. of State of NY (SSNY) on 1/15/15. Office loc.: New York County.

SSNY designated as agent of LLC upon whom process against it may be served.

The principal business loc. and address SSNY shall mail copy of process to is c/o Hu Kitchen, 78 5th Ave., Ground Fl., New York, NY 10011. Purpose: Any lawful activity.

Vil: 02/12 - 03/19/2015

NOTICE OF FORMATION OF PN3 LLC Articles of Organization filed with Secretary of State of New York (SSNY) on 11/19/2014. Office location: NY County. SSNY has been designated as an agent upon whom process against the LLC may be served. The address to which SSNY shall mail a copy of any process against the LLC is to: The LLC, 300 EAST 71ST STREET APT12L, NEW YORK, NY, 10021.

Purpose: To engage in any lawful act or activity.

Vil: 02/12 - 03/19/2015

MVS CAPITAL LLC Articles of Org. filed NY Sec. of State (SSNY) 2/5/15. Office in NYCo. SSNY desig. agent of LLC upon whom process may be served. SSNY shall mail copy of process to 1 Irving Place, G14A, NY, NY 10003, which is also the principal business location.

Purpose: Any lawful purpose.

Vil: 02/12 - 03/19/2015

NOTICE OF FORMATION OF PARLOR CLUB NYC LLC. Arts. of Org. filed with Secy. of State of NY (SSNY) on 2/4/10. Office location: NY County. SSNY designated as agent of LLC upon whom process against it may be served. SSNY shall mail process to: The LLC, 457 Broome St., Ste. 3B, NY, NY 10013. Purpose: any lawful activity.

Vil: 02/12 - 03/19/2015 NOTICE OF FORMATION OF HIGH-S8Q, LLC Arts. of Org. filed with Secy. of State of NY (SSNY) on 1/20/15. Office location: NY County. SSNY designated as agent of LLC upon whom process against it may be served. SSNY shall mail process to: Gleason & Koatz, LLP, 122 E. 42nd St., Ste. 518, NY, NY 10168.

Purpose: any lawful activity.

Vil: 02/12 - 03/19/2015 FLYING POINT 1080 REAL ESTATE, LLC Articles of Org. filed NY Sec. of State (SSNY) 2/4/15. Office in NY Co. SSNY desig. agent of LLC upon whom process may be served. SSNY shall mail copy of process to c/o Auda Management Inc., 888 7th Ave., 41st Fl, NY, NY 10106. Purpose: Any lawful purpose.

Vil: 02/12 - 03/19/2015 A & A ADVISORS LLC Art. of Org. filed with the SSNY on 01/23/15. Latest date to dissolve: 12/31/2065. Office: New York County. SSNY designated as agent of the LLC upon whom process against it may be served.

SSNY shall mail copy of process to the LLC, 330 East 38th Street, Apartment 45H, New York, NY 10016. Purpose: Any lawful purpose.

Vil: 02/12 - 03/19/2015

February 12, 2015

22 WEST 21ST, LLC Art. of Org. filed with the SSNY on 07/14/04. Office: New York County. SSNY designated as agent of the LLC upon whom process against it may be served.

SSNY shall mail copy of process to the LLC, c/o Howard Siegel, 110 West Creek Farms Road, Sands Point, NY 11050. Purpose: Any lawful purpose.

Vil: 02/12 - 03/19/2015 NOTICE OF FORMATION OF ECOMMERCE OPTICAL GROUP LLC Arts. of Org. filed with Secy. of State of NY (SSNY) on 2/2/15. Office location: NY County. SSNY designated as agent of LLC upon whom process against it may be served. SSNY shall mail process to: Davis & Gilbert LLP, 1740 Broadway, NY, NY 10019. Purpose: any lawful activity.

Vil: 02/12 - 03/19/2015 NOTICE OF FORMATION OF TREADWATER LLC Arts. of Org. filed with the Sect’y of State of NY (SSNY) on 12/15/2014. Office location, County of New York. SSNY has been designated as agent of the LLC upon whom process against it may be served.

SSNY shall mail process to: 15 West 81st Apt 3H, NY NY 10024. Purpose: any lawful act.

Vil: 02/12 - 03/19/2015 NOTICE OF FORMATION OF PERRY BUSINESS INTEGRATIONS, LLC Articles of Organization filed with Secretary of State of New York (SSNY) on 11/26/2014 Office location: NY County. SSNY has been designated as an agent upon whom process against the LLC may be served. The address to which SSNY shall mail a copy of any process against the LLC is to: Perry Business Integrations at 704 Washington Street, Suite 2A, New York, NY 10014. Purpose: To engage in any lawful act or activity.

Vil: 02/12 - 03/19/2015

DDR MARYLAND REAL ESTATE LLC a domestic LLC, filed with the SSNY on 12/10/14. Office location: New York County. SSNY is designated as agent upon whom process against the LLC may be served. SSNY shall mail process to The LLC, c/o Lance G. Harris Esq., 1211 Ave. of the Americas, 40th Fl., NY, NY 10036.

General Purposes.

Vil: 02/05 - 03/12/2015 NOTICE OF FORMATION OF HYBRID ENTERTAINMENT LAB, LLC Arts. of Org. filed with Secy. of State of NY (SSNY) on 1/22/15. Office location: NY County. SSNY designated as agent of LLC upon whom process against it may be served. SSNY shall mail process to: The LLC, 304 W. 77th St., NY, NY 10024. Purpose: any lawful activity.

Vil: 02/05 -03/12/2015 NOTICE OF FORMATION OF CST CONSULTING LLC Arts. of Org. filed with Secy. of State of NY (SSNY) on 11/12/14. Office location: NY County. SSNY designated as agent of LLC upon whom process against it may be served.

SSNY shall mail process to: Kane Kessler, P.C., 1350 Ave. of the Americas, 26th Fl., NY, NY 10019, Attn: Darren S. Berger, Esq. Purpose: any lawful activity.

Vil: 02/05 - 03/12/2015 NOTICE OF QUALIFICATION OF URBAN EDGE PROPERTIES LP Authority filed with NY Dept. of State on 1/8/15.

Office location: NY County.

Princ. bus. addr.: 210 Route 4 East, Paramus, NJ 07652.

LP formed in DE on 7/11/14. NY Sec. of State designated agent of LP upon whom process against it may be served and shall mail process to: c/o CT Corporation System, 111 8th Ave., NY, NY 10011, regd. agent upon whom process may be served. DE addr. of LP: 1209 Orange St., Wilmington, DE 19801. Name/addr. of genl. ptr. available from NY Sec. of State. Cert. of LP filed with DE Sec. of State, 401 Federal St., Dover, DE 19901. Purpose: any lawful activity.

Vil: 02/05 - 03/12/2015 NOTICE OF QUALIFICATION OF DRINNEN-NY, LLC Authority filed with NY Dept. of State on 11/20/14.

Office location: NY County.

LLC formed in DE on 11/12/14. NY Sec. of State designated agent of LLC upon whom process against it may be served and shall mail process to: 1455 Market St., 4th Fl., San Francisco, CA 94103.

DE address of LLC: 160 Greentree Dr., Ste. 101, Dover, DE 19904. Cert. of Form. filed with DE Sec. of State, 401 Federal St., Dover, DE 19901. Purpose: all lawful purposes.

Vil: 02/05 - 03/12/2015

NOTICE OF QUALIFICATION OF VORAUSNY, LLC Authority filed with NY Dept. of State on 11/20/14.

Office location: NY County.

LLC formed in DE on 11/12/14. NY Sec. of State designated agent of LLC upon whom process against it may be served and shall mail process to: 1455 Market St., 4th Fl., San Francisco, CA 94103.

DE address of LLC: 160 Greentree Dr., Ste. 101, Dover, DE 19904. Cert. of Form. filed with DE Sec. of State, 401 Federal St., Dover, DE 19901. Purpose: all lawful purposes.

Vil: 02/05 - 03/12/2015 NOTICE OF QUALIFICATION OF THE BRAND ASSEMBLY, LLC Authority filed with NY Dept. of State on 12/22/14.

Office location: NY County.

LLC formed in DE on 4/18/13. NY Sec. of State designated agent of LLC upon whom process against it may be served and shall mail process to: c/o National Registered Agents, Inc., 111 8th Ave., NY, NY 10011, regd. agent upon whom process may be served. DE addr. of LLC: 160 Greentree Dr., Ste. 101, Dover, DE 19904.

Cert. of Form. filed with DE Sec. of State, 401 Federal St., Dover, DE 19901. Purpose: all lawful purposes.

Vil: 02/05 - 03/12/2015 NOTICE OF FORMATION OF EXACT NME II LLC Arts. of Org. filed with Secy. of State of NY (SSNY) on 1/13/15. Office location: NY County. SSNY designated as agent of LLC upon whom process against it may be served. SSNY shall mail process to: 477 Madison Ave., 6th Fl., NY, NY 10022. Purpose: any lawful activity.

Vil: 01/29 - 03/05/2015 NOTICE OF FORMATION OF KIDZ BOP TOUR LLC Arts. of Org. filed with Secy. of State of NY (SSNY) on 1/7/15. Office location: NY County. SSNY designated as agent of LLC upon whom process against it may be served. SSNY shall mail process to: c/o Razor & Tie Direct, LLC, 214 Sullivan St., 5th Fl., NY, NY 10012; Attn: Craig Balsam.

Purpose: any lawful activity.

Vil: 01/29 - 03/05/2015 RIVINGTON CLINTON, LLC Art. of Org. filed with the SSNY on 01/15/15. Latest date to dissolve: 12/31/2115. Office: New York County. SSNY designated as agent of the LLC upon whom process against it may be served.

SSNY shall mail copy of process to the LLC, c/o Bruce D. Hermann, 49 West 24th Street, 10th Floor, Suite 1003, New York, NY 10010. Purpose: Any lawful purpose.

Vil: 01/29 - 03/05/2015

QUALIFICATION OF BLACKSTONE REAL ESTATE PARTNERS VIII.F-2 L.P. Authority filed with the Sect of State of NY (SSNY) on 1/16/15. Office Loc: NY County. LP formed in DE on 1/14/15. SSNY has been designated as agent of LP upon whom process against it may be served and shall mail process to: c/o The Blackstone Group L.P., 345 Park Ave, New York, NY 10154. DE address of LP: 200 Bellevue Pkwy, Ste 210, Wilmington, 19809. Name/addr of genl ptr avail from SSNY. Cert of LP filed with DE Sect of State, 401 Federal St, Ste 4, Dover, DE 19901. Purpose: any lawful activity.

Vil: 01/29 - 03/05/2015 QUALIFICATION OF GSO CHURCHILL PARTNERS II LP Authority filed with the Sect. of State of NY (SSNY) on 12/18/14. Office Loc: NY County. LP formed in DE on 11/13/14. SSNY has been designated as agent of LP upon whom process against it may be served and shall mail process to: 345 Park Ave, 31st FL, New York, NY 10154. DE address of LP: 200 Bellevue Pkwy, Ste 210, Wilmington, 19809. Name/addr. of genl. ptr. avail from SSNY. Cert. of LP filed with DE Sect. of State, 401 Federal St, Ste 4, Dover, DE 19901. Purpose: any lawful activity.

Vil: 01/29 - 03/05/2015 NOTICE OF QUALIFICATION OF BRIDGE STREET 2015, L.P. Authority filed with NY Dept. of State on 1/14/15.

Office location: NY County.

LP formed in DE on 1/9/15.

NY Sec. of State designated agent of LP upon whom process against it may be served and shall mail process to: 200 West St., NY, NY 10282, principal business address. DE address of LP: The Corporation Trust Co., 1209 Orange St., Wilmington, DE 19801.

Name/address of genl. ptr. available from NY Sec. of State. Cert. of LP filed with DE Sec. of State, 401 Federal St., Dover, DE 19901.

Purpose: all lawful purposes.

Vil: 01/29 - 03/05/2015 NOTICE OF FORMATION OF URBAN PROPERTY DATA NYMD, LLC Application for Authority filed with Secretary of State of New York (SSNY) on 1/5/2015. Office location: NY County. SSNY has been designated as an agent upon whom process against the LLC may be served. The address to which SSNY shall mail a copy of any process against the LLC is to: CT Corporation System, 111 Eighth Ave, New York, NY, 10011. Purpose: To engage in any lawful act or activity.

Vil: 01/29 - 03/05/2015 NOTICE OF FORMATION OF 19 BROADWAY LLC Arts. of Org. filed with Secy. of State of NY (SSNY) on 1/8/15. Office location: NY County. SSNY designated as agent of LLC upon whom process against it may be served. SSNY shall mail process to: c/o Janine Duffin, 27 W. 72nd St., Apt. 511, NY, NY 10023. Purpose: any lawful activity.

Vil: 01/29 - 03/05/2015

QUALIFICATION OF BLACKSTONE TACTICAL OPPORTUNITIES FUND II.F L.P. Authority filed with the Sect of State of NY (SSNY) on 1/20/15. Office Loc: NY County. LP formed in Cayman Islands on 1/15/15.

SSNY has been designated as agent of LP upon whom process against it may be served and shall mail process to: 200 Bellevue Pkwy, Ste 210, Wilmington, 19809. Cayman Islands address of LP: 190 Elgin Ave, George Town, Grand Cayman, KY1-9005, Cayman Islands. Name/addr of genl ptr avail from SSNY. Cert of LP filed with Registrar of Exempted Limited Partnerships of the Cayman Islands, 133 Elgin Ave, George Town, Grand Cayman, KY1-9000, Cayman Islands. Purpose: any lawful activity.

Vil: 01/29 - 03/05/2015

NOTICE OF FORMATION of SUNSTRATEGIC LLC Articles of Organization filed with Secretary of State of New York (SSNY) on 01/22/15. Office location: NY County. SSNY has been designated as an agent upon whom process against the LLC may be served. The address to which SSNY shall mail a copy of any process against the LLC is to: SUNSTRATEGICLLC, 4 PARK AVE, APT 7 O, New York, NY 10016. Purpose: To engage in any lawful act or activity.

Vil: 01/29 - 03/05/2015

NOTICE OF QUALIFICATION OF BOP NE LLC Authority filed with NY Dept. of State on 01/08/15.

Office location: NY County.

Princ. bus. addr.: 250 Vesey St., 15th Fl., New York, NY 10281. LLC formed in DE on 01/06/15. NY Sec. of State designated agent of LLC upon whom process against it may be served and shall mail process to: c/o Corporation Service Company, 80 State St., Albany, NY 12207-2543, regd. agent upon whom process may be served. DE addr. of LLC: 2711 Centerville Rd., Ste. 400, Wilmington, DE 19808. Cert. of Form. filed with DE Sec. of State, 401 Federal St., Dover, DE 19901. Purpose: all lawful purposes.

Vil: 01/22 - 02/26/2015

NOTICE OF QUALIFICATION OF BOP NE TOWER LESSEE LLC Authority filed with NY Dept. of State on 01/08/15.

Office location: NY County.

Princ. bus. addr.: 250 Vesey St., 15th Fl., New York, NY 10281. LLC formed in DE on 01/06/15. NY Sec. of State designated agent of LLC upon whom process against it may be served and shall mail process to: c/o Corporation Service Company, 80 State St., Albany, NY 12207-2543, regd. agent upon whom process may be served. DE addr. of LLC: 2711 Centerville Rd., Ste. 400, Wilmington, DE 19808. Cert. of Form. filed with DE Sec. of State, 401 Federal St., Dover, DE 19901. Purpose: all lawful purposes.

Vil: 01/22 - 02/26/2015

NOTICE OF QUALIFICATION OF WMQF L01 FUND LLC Appl. for Auth. filed with Secy. of State of NY (SSNY) on 01/09/15. Office location: NY County. LLC formed in Delaware (DE) on 01/08/15. Princ. office of LLC: 666 Fifth Ave., 9th Fl., NY, NY 10103. SSNY designated as agent of LLC upon whom process against it may be served.

SSNY shall mail process to c/o Corporation Service Co. (CSC), 80 State St., Albany, NY12207-2543. DE addr. of LLC: c/o CSC, 2711 Centerville Rd., Ste. 400, Wilmington, DE 19808. Cert. of Form. filed with DE Secy. of State - Div. of Corps., John G. Townsend Bldg., 401 Federal St. - Ste. 4, Dover, DE 19901. Purpose: Any lawful activity.

Vil: 01/22 - 02/26/2015

26ELRO LLC Arts of Org filed NY Secy of State(SSNY) 12/31/14.

OFC in NY Co. SSNY design. Agent of LLC whom process may be served.

SSNY shall mail process to Ronna Ullman 93-02 70th Ave Forest Hills NY 11375.

Purpose: any lawful act.

Vil: 01/22 - 02/26/2015

NOTICE OF FORMATION OF STX NY, LLC Arts. of Org. filed with NY Dept. of State on 1/6/15.

Office location: NY County.

Princ. bus. addr.: 1100 Glendon Ave., Ste. 1600, Los Angeles, CA 90024.

Sec. of State designated agent of LLC upon whom process against it may be served and shall mail process to: c/o CT Corporation System, 111 8th Ave., NY, NY 10011, regd. agent upon whom process may be served. Purpose: all lawful purposes.

Vil: 01/22 - 02/26/2015

NOTICE OF FORMATION OF CAVIT PROJECTS LLC Articles of Organization filed with Secretary of State of New York (SSNY) on 10/14/2014 Office location: NY County. SSNY has been designated as an agent upon whom process against the LLC may be served. The address to which SSNY shall mail a copy of any process against the LLC is to: c/o United States Corporation Agents, Inc., 7014 13th Avenue suite 202, Brooklyn, NY 11228. Purpose: To engage in any lawful act or activity.

Vil: 01/22 -02/26/2015

NOTICE OF FORMATION OF 180 ORCHARD GARAGE, LLC Arts. of Org. filed with Secy. of State of NY (SSNY) on 01/02/15. Office location: NY County. Princ. office of LLC: Meir Cohen, 375 Third Ave., Ste. 2400, NY, NY 10017. SSNY designated as agent of LLC upon whom process against it may be served.

SSNY shall mail process to Corporation Service Co., 80 State St., Albany, NY 12207, regd. agent upon whom and at which process may be served. Purpose: Any lawful activity.

Vil: 01/22 - 02/26/2015

TheVillager.com

NOTICE OF QUALIFICATION OF VCC, LLC Authority filed with NY Dept. of State on 8/12/10.

NYS fictitious name: VCC General Contracting and Construction Management, LLC. Office location: NY County. Princ. bus. addr.: 216 Louisiana St., Little Rock, AR 72201. LLC formed in DE on 7/11/08.

NY Sec. of State designated agent of LLC upon whom process against it may be served and shall mail process to: c/o CT Corporation System, 111 8th Ave., NY, NY 10011, regd. agent upon whom process may be served. DE addr. of LLC: The Corporation Trust Co., 1209 Orange St., Wilmington, DE 19801.

Cert. of Form. filed with DE Sec. of State, 401 Federal St., Dover, DE 19901. Purpose: all lawful purposes.

Vil: 01/22 - 02/26/2015

NOTICE OF FORMATION OF EVANSVIEW 17B, LP Certificate filed with Secy. of State of N.Y. (SSNY) on 01/07/15 Office location: NY County. SSNY designated as agent of LP upon whom process against it may be served.

SSNY shall mail process to: EVANSVIEW 17B, LP, c/o Boyer Law Firm, P.L., 9471 Baymeadows Road, Suite 404, Jacksonville, FL 32256. Name/address of each general partner available from SSNY. Purpose: To engage any lawful act or activity.

Vil: 01/22 - 02/26/2015

NOTICE OF FORMATION OF BIG CITY FILMS LLC Arts. of Org. filed with Secy. of State of NY (SSNY) on 07/10/14. Office location: NY County. SSNY designated as agent of LLC upon whom process against it may be served.

SSNY shall mail process to Lily Hayes Kaufman, 280 Park Ave. South, Apt. 9A, NY, NY 10010. Purpose: Any lawful activity.

Vil: 01/15 - 02/19/2015

SW 14 PROPERTIES LLC a domestic LLC, filed with the SSNY on 12/16/14. Office location: New York County. SSNY is designated as agent upon whom process against the LLC may be served. SSNY shall mail process to Jill Levy Reiter, 251 5th Ave., Fl. 4, NY, NY 10016-6515. General Purposes.

Vil: 01/15 - 02/19/2015

NOTICE OF QUALIFICATION OF LINDSAY GOLDBERG III - A AIV DT (BLOCKER) L.P. Authority filed with NY Dept. of State on 12/18/14.

Office location: NY County.

LP formed in DE on 12/11/14. NY Sec. of State designated agent of LP upon whom process against it may be served and shall mail process to the principal business addr.: c/o Lindsay Goldberg III - A AIV DT (Blocker) L.P., 630 Fifth Ave., NY, NY 10111. DE addr. of LP: National Corporate Research, Ltd., 615 S. DuPont Hwy., Dover, DE 19901.

Name/addr. of genl. ptr. available from NY Sec. of State. Cert. of LP filed with DE Sec. of State, 401 Federal St., Dover, DE 19901.

Purpose: all lawful purposes.

Vil: 01/15 - 02/29/2015 LIMITED LIABILITY COMPANY NOTICE OF FORMATION OF LIMITED LIABILITY COMPANY (LLC) Name: TOBY’S COFFEE MARKET LLC Articles of Organization filed by the Department of State of New York on: 09/24/2014. Office location: County of New York. Purpose: any and all lawful activities. Secretary of State of New York (SSNY) designated as agent of LLC upon whom process against it may be served. SSNY shall mail a copy of process to: 125 North 6th Street Brooklyn, NY 11249 Vil: 01/15 - 02/19/2015 NOTICE OF QUALIFICATION OF BLOCKHOUSE HOLDINGS LLC Appl. for Auth. filed with Secy. of State of NY (SSNY) on 01/02/15. Office location: NY County. LLC formed in Delaware (DE) on 12/19/14. SSNY designated as agent of LLC upon whom process against it may be served. SSNY shall mail process to the LLC, 40 W. 57th St., 25th Fl., NY, NY 10019. DE addr. of LLC: c/o Corporation Service Co., 2711 Centerville Rd., Ste. 400, Wilmington, DE 19808. Cert. of Form. filed with The Secy. of State of the State of DE, Dept. of State, Div. of Corps., John G. Townsend Bldg., 401 Federal St., Ste. 4, Dover, DE 19901. Purpose: Any lawful activity.

Vil: 01/15 - 02/19/2015 NOTICE OF FORMATION OF 19 ESSEX, LLC Arts. of Org. filed with Secy. of State of NY (SSNY) on 12/22/14. Office location: NY County. SSNY designated as agent of LLC upon whom process against it may be served.

SSNY shall mail process to: c/o Nancy Linn, 19 Essex St., NY, NY 10003. Purpose: any lawful activity.

Vil: 01/15 - 02/19/2015

NOTICE OF QUALIFICATION OF CITYWIRE LLC AUTHORITY filed with Secretary of State of New York on 10/16/14. Office location: NY County. Principal business address: 405 N. King St., Ste 500, Wilmington, DE 19801. LLC formed in Delaware on 8/7/14.

SSNY has been designated as an agent upon whom process against the LLC may be served. The address to which SSNY shall mail a copy of any process against the LLC is to: The LLC, c/o Resagent, Inc., 7 St. Paul St., Ste 1300, Baltimore, MD 21202. DE address of LLC: 405 N. King St., Ste 500, Wilmington, DE 19901.

CERTIFICATE OF LLC filed with DE Secretary of State, Division of Corporations, 401 Federal Street, Dover, DE 19901.

Purpose: any lawful act or activity.

VIL: 01/15 - 02/19/2015 NOTICE OF QUALIFICATION OF SOLTRA SOLUTIONS, LLC AUTHORITY filed with Secretary of State of New York on 10/17/14. Office location: NY County. Principal business address: 12020 Sunrise Valley Dr., Ste 230, Reston, VA 20191. LLC formed in Delaware on 9/15/14. SSNY has been designated as an agent upon whom process against the LLC may be served. The address to which SSNY shall mail a copy of any process against the LLC is to: The LLC, c/o Eric Guerrino, 12020 Sunrise Valley Dr., Ste 230, Reston, VA 20191.

DE address of LLC: 405 N. King St., Ste 500, Wilmington, DE 19901. CERTIFICATE OF LLC filed with DE Secretary of State, Division of Corporations, 401 Federal Street, Dover, DE 19901.

Purpose: any lawful act or activity.

Vil: 01/15 - 02/19/2015 06011417D LLC a foreign LLC, filed with the SSNY on 11/20/14. Office location: New York County. SSNY is designated as agent upon whom process against the LLC may be served.

SSNY shall mail process to: MG Capital Management Residential Fund III, L.P., 375 Park Ave., Ste. 2607, NY, NY 10152. General Purposes.

Vil: 01/15 - 02/19/2015 NOTICE OF FORMATION OF RSE VAYNER HOLDINGS, LLC Arts. of Org. filed with Secy. of State of NY (SSNY) on 12/30/14. Office location: NY County. SSNY designated as agent of LLC upon whom process against it may be served.

SSNY shall mail process to: 423 W. 55th St., 11th Fl., NY, NY 10019. Purpose: any lawful activity.

Vil: 01/15 - 02/19/2015

NOTICE OF FORMATION OF 397 BRIDGE LLC Arts. of Org. filed with Secy. of State of NY (SSNY) on 01/06/15. Office location: NY County. Princ. office of LLC: c/o United American Land LLC, 430 W. Broadway, NY, NY 10012. SSNY designated as agent of LLC upon whom process against it may be served. SSNY shall mail process to the LLC at the princ. office of the LLC. Purpose: Any lawful activity.

Vil: 01/15 - 02/19/2015 NOTICE OF QUALIFICATION OF AIRWEAVE, LLC Appl. for Auth. filed with Secy. of State of NY (SSNY) on 12/29/14. Office location: NY County. LLC formed in California (CA) on 05/06/14. Princ. office of LLC: 498 Broome St., NY, NY 10013. SSNY designated as agent of LLC upon whom process against it may be served. SSNY shall mail process to the LLC at the princ. office of the LLC. CA addr. of LLC: 505 Montgomery St., Ste. 800, San Francisco, CA 94111. Cert. of Form. filed with Secy. of State, 1500 11th St., Sacramento, CA 95814. Purpose: Any lawful activity.

Vil:01/15 - 02/19/2015 NOTICE OF FORMATION OF 17TH STREET MANAGER LLC Arts. of Org. filed with Secy. of State of NY (SSNY) on 10/15/14. Office location: NY County. SSNY designated as agent of LLC upon whom process against it may be served.

SSNY shall mail process to: c/o Atkins & Breskin, LLC, Attn: Eileen M. Logan, 133 Norfolk St., NY, NY 10002. Purpose: any lawful activity.

Vil: 01/08 -02/12/2015 NOTICE OF FORMATION OF 46/47 APARTMENT HOLDINGS LLC Arts. of Org. filed with Secy. of State of NY (SSNY) on 12/19/14. Office location: NY County. SSNY designated as agent of LLC upon whom process against it may be served.

SSNY shall mail process to: Belkin Burden Wenig & Goldman, LLP, Attn: Aaron Shmulewitz, Esq., 270 Madison Ave., NY, NY 10016. Purpose: any lawful activity.

Vil: 01/08 - 02/12/2015

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PUBLIC NOTICE NOTICE IS HEREBY GIVEN, PURSUANT TO LAW, that the NYC Department of Consumer Affairs will hold a Public Hearing on Wednesday, February 25, 2015 at 2:00 P.M. at 66 John Street, 11th floor, on a petition for GIGINO, INC. to continue to maintain, and operate an unenclosed sidewalk cafe at 323 GREENWICH STREET in the Borough of Manhattan for a term of four years. REQUESTS FOR COPIES OF THE REVOCABLE CONSENT AGREEMENT MAY BE ADDRESSED TO: DEPARTMENT OF CONSUMER AFFAIRS, ATTN: FOIL OFFICER, 42 BROADWAY, NEW YORK, NY 10004.

Vil: 02/12 - 02/19/2015 PUBLIC NOTICE NOTICE IS HEREBY GIVEN, PURSUANT TO LAW, that the NYC Department of Consumer Affairs will hold a Public Hearing on Wednesday, February 25, 2014 at 2:00 P.M. at 66 John Street, 11th floor, on a petition for BOWERY RESTAURANT, LLC to continue to maintain, and operate an unenclosed sidewalk cafe at 299 BOWERY in the Borough of Manhattan for a term of four years. REQUESTS FOR COPIES OF THE REVOCABLE CONSENT AGREEMENT MAY BE ADDRESSED TO: DEPARTMENT OF CONSUMER AFFAIRS, ATTN: FOIL OFFICER, 42 BROADWAY, NEW YORK, NY 10004.

Vil: 02/12 - 03/19/2015

TheVillager.com

39 GREENE RETAIL, LLC a domestic LLC, filed with the SSNY on 9/8/14. Office location: New York County.

SSNY is designated as agent upon whom process against the LLC may be served. SSNY shall mail process to Amarjit S. Bhalla, c/o Arcot Properties NYC, LLC, 46 Trinity Pl., 2nd Fl., NY, NY 10006.

General Purposes.

Vil: 01/08 - 02/12/2015 NOTICE OF FORMATION OF 34 17TH STREET PROJECT LLC Arts. of Org. filed with Secy. of State of NY (SSNY) on 9/18/14. Office location: NY County. SSNY designated as agent of LLC upon whom process against it may be served. SSNY shall mail process to: c/o Atkins & Breskin, LLC, 133 Norfolk St., NY, NY 10002. Purpose: any lawful activity.

Vil: 01/08 - 02/12/2015 NOTICE OF QUALIFICATION OF QOL MEDS, LLC. Authority filed with NY Dept. of State on 12/19/14.

Office location: NY County.

LLC formed in PA on 7/15/09. NY Sec. of State designated agent of LLC upon whom process against it may be served and shall mail process to: c/o CT Corporation System, 111 8th Ave., NY, NY 10011, regd. agent upon whom process may be served. Principal office address: 18300 Cascade Ave S., Ste. 251, Tukwila, WA 98188. Cert. of Org. filed with PA Sec. of Commonwealth, 401 North St., Harrisburg, PA 17120. Purpose: all lawful purposes.

Vil: 01/08 -02/12/2015 Notice of Qualification of River Partners 2014-Mat, llc App. for Auth. filed with Secy. of State (SSNY) 12/4/14. Office location: NY County. LLC formed in Delaware (DE) on 12/3/14.

SSNY designated as agent of LLC upon whom process against it may be served.

SSNY shall mail process to: c/o Levin Capital Strategies, LP, 595 Madison Ave., NY, NY 10022. DE address of LLC: 1209 Orange St., Wilmington, DE 19801.

Cert. of Form. filed with DE Secy. of State, Loockerman & Federal St., Dover, DE 19901. Purpose: any lawful activity.

Vil 01/08 - 02/12/2015 NOTICE OF FORMATION OF WEST MGRE, LLC Arts. of Org. filed with Secy. of State of NY (SSNY) on 12/26/14. Office location: NY County. SSNY designated as agent of LLC upon whom process against it may be served.

SSNY shall mail process to the LLC, Attn: Jonathan West, Four Park Ave., Third Fl., NY, NY 10016. Purpose: Any lawful activity.

Vil: 01/08 - 02/12/2015

NOTICE OF QUALIFICATION OF GOSHEN LAND OWNER LLC. Authority filed with NY Dept. of State on 12/29/14.

Office location: NY County.

Princ. bus. addr.: c/o Belvedere Capital Management LLC, 152 W. 57th St., 19th Fl., NY, NY 10019. LLC formed in DE on 12/24/14.

NY Sec. of State designated agent of LLC upon whom process against it may be served and shall mail process to: c/o CT Corporation System, 111 8th Ave., NY, NY 10011, regd. agent upon whom process may be served. DE addr. of LLC: The Corporation Trust Co., 1209 Orange St., Wilmington, DE 19801.

Cert. of Form. filed with DE Sec. of State, P.O. Box 898, Dover, DE 19903. Purpose: all lawful purposes.

Vil: 01/08 - 02/12/2015 NOTICE IS HEREBY GIVEN that license #1283866 has been applied by the undersigned to sell wine at retail in a restaurant under the alcoholic beverage control law at 84 East 10th Street, New York, NY 10003 for on-premises consumption.

ZUND NEW YORK INC. d/b/a RAMEN ZUNDO-YA Vil: 02/12 - 02/19/2015 NOTICE IS HEREBY GIVEN that license #1283874 has been applied by the undersigned to sell liquor at retail in a restaurant under the alcoholic beverage control law at 253 5th Avenue, New York, NY 10016 for on-premises consumption. SENANROSSA LLC Vil: 02/12 - 02/19/2015 NOTICE IS HEREBY GIVEN that a license, serial number 1276466 for Tavern Wine has been applied for

by Gallery Sensei LLC dba SENSEI to sell beer, wine and Liquor product at retail in a cafe under the Alcoholic Beverage Control Law at 278 Grand Street New York, New York 10002, New York County for on premises consumption.

Vil: 02/12 - 02/19/2015 NOTICE IS HEREBY GIVEN that an on-premise license, #TBA has been applied for

by MK 32 Restaurant Corp to sell beer, wine and liquor at retail in an on premises establishment. For on premises consumption under the ABC law at 32 W 32nd Street NY, NY 10001.

Vil: 02/05 - 02/12/2015

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PUBLIC NOTICE NOTICE IS HEREBY GIVEN, PURSUANT TO LAW, that the NYC Dept. of Consumer Affairs will hold a Public Hearing on Wednesday February 25, 2015 at 2:00 p.m. at 66 John Street, 11th floor, on a petition for HPA Restaurant, LLC to continue to maintain, and operate an unenclosed sidewalk café at 255 5th Avenue in the Borough of Manhattan, for a term of four years. REQUEST FOR COPIES OF THE PROPOSED REVOCABLE CONSENT AGREEMENT MAY BE ADDRESSED TO: DEPARTMENT OF CONSUMER AFFAIRS, ATTN: FOIL OFFICER, 42 BROADWAY, NEW YORK, NY 10004.

Vil: 02/12 - 02/19/2015

February 12, 2015

25

Two public-housing sites now half privately owned NYCHA, continued from p. 3

26

February 12, 2015

PHOTO BY ZACH WILLIAMS

and C. In all, 900 units in Manhattan, Brooklyn and the Bronx are in the plan.

The developers now control a 50 percent ownership stake in the buildings, in return for which they will pay NYCHA $250 million within the next two years, plus another $100 million over the next 15 years.

In return for upgrading the units under their control, the developers will be eligible for federal funding to cover the difference between market-rate rents and what the Housing Authority charges for rent.

The development team includes L&M Development Partners along with Preservation Development Partners (the latter a partnership formed

by K&R Preservation and Donald Capoccia’s BFC Partners).

Olatoye said that, under the plan, the developers will invest $80,000 per unit, installing new kitchens and bathrooms, in the 900 apartments.

Building lobbies also will be renovated and security improved. In all, the private partners will reportedly pour more than $100 million into the buildings’ renovations.

Olatoye assured that the deal would not lead to the developments’ future privatization. However, it is in fact possible that after the 30 years are up, the units could become market rate.

Yet, NYCHA continues to own the land, plus can remove the private managers if dissatisfied with the arrangement.

“With this transaction,” Olatoye told the committee, “NYCHA has forged a solution to the chronic and unyielding funding shortage suffered by these six developments, and raised money for the rest of our developments.”

Residents of Campos Plaza I, located at 635 E. 12th St., who receive Section 8 vouchers will not see rent increases under Triborough Preserva-

NYCHA Chairperson Shola Olatoye, at left, answering questions from Councilmember Rosie Mendez, in foreground, at Tuesday’s City Council hearing, at which the deal bringing private developers into Campos Plaza I was discussed.

tion LLC, the new public-private partnership overseeing the developments.

There’s no question the agency is strapped for cash. Funding cuts from local, state and federal governments created a $77 million budget deficit for the Housing Authority. The federal Section 8 units, in particular, have been among the hardest hit by federal funding decreases. Meanwhile, the agency needs $18 billion for repairs across the roughly 178,000 apartments it oversees, according to NYCHA. City councilmembers agreed that NYCHA indeed faces massive financial challenges. However, during the agency chairperson’s testimony, they expressed concern about elements of the deal. These included the extent of community input, fair-pay employment opportunities for residents at

the developments and the long-term financial health of the six developments.

Campos Plaza I — which has 270 apartments and an estimated 720 residents — is in Rosie Mendez’s City Council district.

“NYCHA is between a rock and a hard place,” Mendez said in an interview. “They do not have all of the money in order to do the capital repairs and the day-to-day repairs that are needed. However, the way in which they are moving forward with this project is problematic.”

Councilmember Darlene Mealy of Brooklyn said that she was “disgusted” by the deal because she had reached out to NYCHA in the past regarding the future of Saratoga Square, in Crown Heights, which is part of the private-ownership arrangement.

“I come now two years later, the building halfway sold and you’re telling me it’s a done deal without coming to the elected officials?” she asked incredulously.

Mendez asked Olatoye during the hearing why NYCHA only is maintaining 50 percent ownership in the new enterprise, in contrast to other public-private partnerships where the city has kept 51 percent, a majority interest. Mendez also requested the sign-in sheets from prior public hearings on the now-defunct NYCHA “infill” development plan in order to check if they were counted toward public input for this new deal. This new plan is an outgrowth of the aborted infill plan.

Problems and confusion could have been avoided had NYCHA responded to requests for more public meetings before the deal was made, Mendez told The Villager. But she did secure a promise from Olatoye to appear before Community Board 3 in the future to address neighborhood concerns.

Explaining the differences involving units in the federal Section 8 program to public housing residents whose buildings are not part of the deal is key, Mendez said.

Olatoye assured the committee that NYCHA retains right of first refusal within Triborough and that 40 meetings were held with residents to determine the priorities for the deal. As for the plan’s 50/50 ownership breakdown, she explained that the 1 extra percent of ownership would preclude Triborough from eligibility for 4 percent low-income housing tax credits and city Housing Development Corporation tax-exempt bonds.

Olatoye expressed confidence that if Triborough ever were to default, the city would rescue the developments.

“I would imagine that it’s very much in the city’s interest,” she said of that hypothetical.

Councilmembers said that only 30 years’ time will tell what happens to the developments given the volatility of the city’s politics and economics.

In addition, under the agreement, the Section 8 units would become rent-stabilized should the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development not extend funding for the developments in the future, according to Olatoye. Due to annual rent increases, over time, rent-regulated units can become “decontrolled” and turn market rate.

Most of the buildings in the six affected developments are too small to have their own community centers, Olatoye noted, in response to a question from Councilmember Laurie Cumbo of Brooklyn. But two of the buildings will receive on-site supervisors. And community centers that already exist will continue.

Campos Plaza I will also have landscaping work done, not only to spruce up the place, but also to help manage storm water at the development, which was inundated during Superstorm Sandy, Olatoye said.

Other resiliency work will place infrastructure outside or on top of the building rather than in the basement, she added.

Olatoye said the deal is already making a difference for residents of the developments, who for years have had to put up with decrepit housing, mold and the uncertainty of a Housing Authority in a dire financial situation.

“There is a real momentum forward here,” she said.

TheVillager.com

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR Continued from p. 16

rounding community.

Their dishonest and disingenuous advertising on social media and in subway stations obfuscates the issue and makes the general population ignorant. Lessors risk violating terms of their lease and tax laws in order to make some easy money.

The New York State attorney general says more than 70 percent of the rentals on Airbnb for New York City are illegal. Airbnb endorses lessors giving strangers keys to a building. I don’t understand why Airbnb’s Web site is not being shut down.

Donald Moder

Loving this memoir!

To The Editor: Re “Flirting and fighting on the real ‘Mean Streets’ ” (talking point, by Minerva Durham, Jan. 15): I love reading Minerva’s memoir.

She, as well as her drawing studio, was an important part of my overall learning and growth. I love stopping in, stepping into a wonderful part of my past.

Audrey Wanich

Glad to have HealthPlex To The Editor: Re “HealthPlex helps save a heart-attack and three stroke victims” (news article, Sept. 24, 2014): The Lenox Hill HealthPlex may be old news to many, but a recent experience there has made me a grateful fan.

We all miss St. Vincent’s, and living a short walk down Seventh Ave. from the hospital was part of my long-term retirement plan. Feeling very low earlier this week and with my husband out of town, I made the walk up Seventh to the new HealthPlex instead.

From the moment I walked in, each staff member greeted me with a smile and was cheerful to a fault. I commented on this to several of them and they said they like working there and the community they serve. Lovely to hear when one is a

TheVillager.com

patient! I turned out not to be having a significant cardio-related issue after all, but it was as positive an experience as I could have hoped for.

Even before this, I had admired the sensitive improvements to the HealthPlex building and the handsome external lighting. What once had been something of a run-down novelty looks great, in addition to fulfilling an urgent need for the community. I hope the HealthPlex continues to be a neighborhood asset for many years into the future.

John Bacon

Arch is a Titanic issue To The Editor: Re “Praise and excitement versus fear and loathing at Pier55 public hearing” (news article, Jan. 15): Leaders and members of societies in the U.S., Britain, Northern Ireland, Switzerland and Scandinavia dedicated to preserving the history of R.M.S. Titanic have called for the iconic Pier 54 arch — among the last surviving vestiges of the original Pier 54 structure, and under which Titanic’s survivors, Lusitania’s final passengers and tens of thousands of American troops in two World Wars passed — to be conserved and retained.

If not in its present position, the arch should be relocated to the south side of the P55 structure to serve as a “frame” through which the remains of Pier 54 might be viewed, accompanied by a commemorative plaque or tablet at long last commemorating the significance of this pier to history. In the desire to create something “new,” it is important that the history of this culturally significant feature not be forgotten.

Charles Haas E-mail letters, not longer than 250 words in length, to news@thevillager. com or fax to 212-229-2790 or mail to The Villager, Letters to the Editor, 1 Metrotech North, 10th floor, Brooklyn, NY, NY 11201. Please include phone number for confirmation purposes. The Villager reserves the right to edit letters for space, grammar, clarity and libel.

Anonymous letters will not be published.

Participants from Japan, above, and Haiti, below, in the Hearts of the World project show their artwork.

Enjoying many hearts...but while wearing only one color

O

ne world, one heart...and one color — of clothes, that is.

The First Annual Hearts of the World Monochromatic Costume Ball will swing into life on Thurs., Feb. 12, from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. at the Lower Eastside Girls Club, at 402 E. Eighth St. Hearts Of The World is teaming up with the Girls Club for the fete.

Guests are invited to dress head to toe in the color of their choice and couple up in contrasting or complementary tones for whimsical waltzes and playful activities. Monochromatic food and drink will be served.

On the walls will be hundreds of children’s heart paintings from the Hearts of the World workshops of Japan, Mexico, China, Haiti and more. One hundred percent of ticket sales will be used to fund the spring 2015 Hearts of the World India Tour, from March 16 to June 27.

“Helping kids find their passion is my passion; it’s powerful work,“ said Nicolina, Hearts of the World founder. “Children can learn so much about themselves through painting their hearts, and they have so much to teach us as well.”

In the project, kids are given a black-and-white drawing of the outline of a heart, and then — as in a coloring book — are free to festoon it with colors and illustrations in whatever way has importance for them and their lives.

The tour will include visits to an orphanage that “aspires to raise heart-centered citizens” in Varanasi, a school for the deaf in Chennai, and young victims of the chemical disaster in Bhopal.

All the hearts will come together for retrospective gallery shows in New York and New Delhi to tell the children’s stories, along with excerpts from their upcoming documentary film.

Tickets to the ball are $12 presale, $15 at the door in monochromatic attire (black and white don’t count) and $20 in polychromatic attire.

There will be a parade to an afterparty at a secret location.

For more information, go to http://heartsoftheworld.org or contact Nicolina at nicolina@heartsoftheworld.org .

Nicolina was also the artist behind the mysterious Portals Project in the East Village and Lower East Side in the summer of 2013.

February 12, 2015

27

28

February 12, 2015

TheVillager.com

Hawks fly as a team with focus on camaraderie SPORTS

BY ROBERT ELKIN

W

TheVillager.com

Point guard Andrey Kovalev scored 24 points in the win against Landmark.

PHOTOS BY ANTONIA STOYANOVICH

ith the college basketball regular season in its home stretch with less than a month left, the powerhouse teams from the big schools are vying for berths in tournaments like the NCAA and NIT. But, locally, some smaller colleges are getting ready to compete in a post-season tourney of their own.

A four-team tourney at Baruch College featuring two Manhattan-based colleges — The New School and The Cooper Union — is set for Feb. 21 and 22.

The two Village-area schools play an independent schedule and are not attached to a league. The Hawks and the Narwhals have been getting ready for the Baruch competition as they wind up their regular seasons.

At Cooper Union, Head Coach Rami Said, along with his assistants, Dominick Goj and Josh Mayourian, have been very satisfied with the Hawks players, both individually and as a team.

“The key to our success is teamwork,” Said said. “When we play collectively we know that we are most successful. At the same time we have to help each other out.

The Hawks are led by senior forward Vlad Ciocoi, who, in his fourth season, is tallying an average of 18 points and 11 rebounds a game.

“He has been a fantastic leader, first of all, and is a great teammate, for the rest of the team,” Said stated.

And more important than those figures is that, academically, Ciocoi maintains a G.P.A. of above 3.75. Some of his teammates even have a G.P.A. of 4.0.

Andrew Keane, a sophomore forward, is runner-up in team scoring with a 14-point average and is averaging 14 rebounds a contest. Mathew Smarsh, also a double-figure scorer, is co-captain and a junior forward averaging 10 points and eight boards per game.

Said uses both man-to-man and zone defenses depending on the opponent and flow of the game. He designs his own offense to fit the players’ skills.

Ciocoi said he didn’t originally come from high school to Cooper Union expecting to play much basketball, but he has surprised himself.

As the season is wrapping up, in all the games Cooper Union has won, it seems that the players played a lot smarter, more organized and more disciplined than their opponents did, said Ciocoi, who is the team’s captain.

“We execute our plays and make good decisions,” Ciocoi said. “Most of the games that we do very well in, the point spread is very even. There’s

Andrew Keane won the tipoff versus Landmark College.

Adam Jamia-O-Connor, shown with his hands up on defense, scored 18 points and hauled in 16 rebounds.

really no big scorer, for it’s a team effort. That kind of communication and discipline that we have is reflected on the academic, too. That’s going to be

the big key this season to the upcoming tournament.”

Sophomore forward Andrew Keane said the camaraderie is actually more

important than the competition.

“The success of this team is not so much about how many wins that we have,” he said before their 82-47 win over Landmark College of Vermont to increase their record to 8-5. “It’s about the type of relationship we have with each other over the season, and some of us for the past couple of years. It’s nice to have a group of guys like this on the court. We developed friendships with each other through this team, which is more valuable and successful than a winning record.”

That said, there’s one team, in particular, which the Hawks admit they always have designs on.

“Our biggest rivalry over the last 10 to 15 years has been against the Rhode Island School of Design,” Coach Said said. “It’s always a great experience to play them and travel to their home court because they bring their entire school and fan base to the games. It’s the one game of the year that we mark on our calendar, and we want to bring our best game.”

Cooper won their last clash with RISD, 80-64.

Meanwhile, Assistant Coach Mayourian, who graduated last year, returned to help out the Hawks. He was the team’s captain last year.

“I wanted to come back because I knew that they were such great players and they were like family to me,” he said. “I wanted to see how they developed over the past few years. And they definitely improved working together as a team. And their captains — Vlad and Smarsch — have done a great job working with everybody.”

As far as Mayourian is concerned, playing hoops the right way means “My goals in basketball are to be on a team where defensive communication, being in the right place and boxing-out result in rebounding, turnovers and pushing the ball in for easy baskets.”

February 12, 2015

29

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