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The Paper of Record for Greenwich Village, East Village, Lower East Side, Soho, Union Square, Chinatown and Noho, Since 1933
March 5, 2015 • $1.00 Volume 84 • Number 40
Ansel Kitchen will craft fresh pastries to order... Just don’t ask for Cronuts! BY TINA BENITEZ-EVES
T
ANSEL, continued on p. 25
Four years in the making, new Tompkins trees map leaves no leaf unturned BY MICHAEL LYDON
N
ow that’s my favorite tree in the park,” said Michael Natale one bitter cold February afternoon, pointing to a muchtrimmed veteran standing tall at the southeast corner of Tompkins Square Park. “A black locust and one of Tompkins’s oldest trees.”
PHOTO BY TEQUILA MINSKY
hose hoping for the second coming of Cronuts won’t find the wildly popular, chewy, flaky croissant-doughnut hybrid at the pastry chef’s second New York City location. Mille-feuilles, baba au rhum, strawberry tarts with freshly
macerated fruit, and other à la minute, or made-to-order, desserts are what the Cronut king has in store at his new West Village bakery. Opening this spring at 137 Seventh Ave. South (between W. 10th and Charles Sts.), the 2,500-square-foot Dominique Ansel Kitchen
A squirrel stuck an inquisitive nose out of a deep fold in the tree’s gnarly brown bark, then ducked back inside. Natale chuckled. “The squirrels’ favorite tree, too — so many crevasses they can hide in!” We wandered serendipitously across the park toward the Ninth St. promenade, TREES MAP, continued on p. 12
It’s been so cold that someone even recently added winter caps to the male figures in George Segal’s “Gay Liberation” monument in Sheridan Square. The caps have since vanished, hopefully to be replaced soon by sun visors!
Mystery and memories of Soho mix in Etan case BY LINCOLN ANDERSON
A
s the trial of Pedro Hernandez in the Etan Patz case continues in court, it has cast a focus back on the neighborhood of 35 years ago, when the 6-year-old Soho boy tragically disappeared while on his way to school by himself for the first time. Hernandez’s trial began Jan. 5 and, from the outset, was expected to be lengthy. Soho residents from that earlier era vividly recall the
events following Patz’s vanishing, as well as the gritty, artistic enclave that Soho once was. On the morning of May 25, 1979, Etan Patz left home on Prince St., and was last seen walking west toward West Broadway, two blocks away, to catch the school bus to P.S. 3, a dozen or so blocks distant at Hudson and Grove Sts. At the time, Hernandez worked at a bodega — long since closed — at the northwest corner of Prince St. and West Broadway that was one
of Soho’s primary food depots. The school bus stop was located just north of there, midway down West Broadway toward Houston St. The prosecution charges that Hernandez confessed to police that, with the promise of a free soda, he lured Patz into the bodega’s basement. There he strangled him, then bagged and boxed the boy’s body, then dumped him in an alley on Thompson St. After confessing to police, ETAN, continued on p. 10
The Whitney Museum is hiring.......................page 2 Boutique bandits strike again.........................page 6 R.I.P. Amnon and Gray Wolf.............................page 16 Songs on the road.......................page 20
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