The Paperr o off R Record ecc orr d for Greenwich e Gree en nw w iicc h Village, V i ll Vil Vi l l ag a g e, East Vill Village, la ag ge e,, L Lower ow o w e r East S we Si Side, i de ide de, Soho, Noho, Since 1933 So S o ho h o , Union Un U n i o n Square, Squa a re r e , Chinatown Ch C h in ina att o ow w n and Noho ho h o , Si o, S in nccce e1 19 9 33 33
September 28, 2017 • $1.00 Volume 87 • Number 39
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Save Gansevoort suit aims to get Landmarks to follow its own laws BY MICHELE HERMAN
T
hose who have been watching the recent decisions of the Landmarks Preservation Commission with dismay verging on disbelief got some hope in August from the New York Appellate Court. Preservationists and their allies have long felt that under its cur-
rent commissioner, Meenakshi Srinivasan, the L.P.C. has been behaving more like a green light for real estate development than like a preserver of landmarks. In particular, L.P.C. has made a regular practice of declaring the smaller, more workaday buildings within a designated historic LANDMARKS continued on p. 11
Takin’ it to the streets; Sandler photos capture the gritty city that was BY BOB KR ASNER
W
hen you see Richard Sandler, the photographer and documentary filmmaker, walking down St. Mark’s Place — in his black beret, with a 35-millimeter camera hanging from his neck — you could easily peg him as the quintessential East Village
resident. That is, if he still lived there. Although Sandler had spent his teenage years bouncing around Times Square and considering a career as a pool hustler, he first settled into the bohemian Village streets as a young man in 1966. He had finished
PHOTO BY TEQUILA MINSKY
Donald Trump says he really loves hard, bone-crushing tackles in football. Well, a team of 16 cit y councilmembers — led by Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito and Jumaane Williams, above — piled on him Wednesday, “taking a knee” with crusading quar terback Colin Kaepernick’s former 49ers jersey. Kaepernick star ted kneeling during national anthems a year ago to protest police killings of people of color.
Diller Island’s demise; Goes way of Westway
SANDLER continued on p. 22
BY LINCOLN ANDERSON
B
efore shockingly pulling out of the Pier55 plan two weeks ago, Barry Diller had already pumped more than $40 million into the ill-fated project, the media mogul confirmed to The Villager last week. In addition, Tom Fox, one of the plaintiffs from The City Club of New York who had
been filing lawsuits against the project, detailed to the newspaper, point by point, what conditions they had been negotiating in order to allow the project to proceed. Those negotiations were wrapping up two weeks ago between the City Club plaintiffs — who had recently filed yet another lawsuit against the pier — Diller’s representatives and the Hudson River Park Trust, when Diller, on Wed.,
Sept. 13, in an e-mail to those who had worked on the project, suddenly announced he was throwing in the towel. Diller and his wife, fashion icon Diane von Furstenberg, through their Diller-von Furstenberg Family Foundation, had committed to fund most of the project’s cost, which had ballooned to $250 million — and counting. PIER55 continued on p. 6
Marte mulls Independence run vs. Chin............p. 2 Yea or nay to Constitutional Convention?...........p. 8 Voice signs off for print...........p. 4
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