VOLUME 27, NUMBER 22
APRIL 9-APRIL 22, 2015
PARENTS LOOK FOR BETTER WAY TO APPLY TO MIDDLE SCHOOLS BY D U SI CA SU E M A LE S E V IC he stress-ridden middle school admission process in District 2 lacks any real choice, according to some, and there’s a new idea intended to fix that, but it could strain schools already flooded with applicants. Eric Goldberg, a member of the district’s Community Education Council for the last four years, said the feedback from parents and administrators has been that the “middle school process is broken.” District 2 covers much of Downtown as well as parts of the West Side and the Upper East Side. In order to address the problems with the current admission process, Goldberg said that the C.E.C. has been discussing structural changes but there has no consensus as what is to be done. He no longer wants to wait, he said, to make immediate
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TRADER JOE’S DOWNTOWN? PG. 3
CATS RESCUED FROM RUBBLE PG. 17
Downtown Express photo by Scot Surbeck
Regal Cinemas Battery Park will be central to this year’s Tribeca Film Festival, which in recent years has mostly strayed miles away from its namesake nabe. Yes, the theater is in Battery Park City, but a short walk away. The free Tribeca Family Festival street fair returns to Greenwich St. (between Chambers and Hubert Sts.) all day starting at 10 a.m. on Sat., April 25.
Putting ‘Tribeca’ back in to the Film Festival B Y S C O TT STIF F L ER ld enough to assert itself but young enough to learn new tricks, the 14th edition of the Tribeca Film Festival is back where it started. Here we go round again — this time with a new multi-screen venue, a sprawling events hub and prestige premieres all taking place on the West Side, below Canal St. It’s a conscious effort to reconnect with the festival’s initial purpose: make Lower Manhattan a cultural destination, and give a much-needed boost to an area struggling to recover from 9/11. During its 2002 debut, this mission
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was a rousing success — but as the years went by, righteous grumblings were heard that the festival was becoming increasingly disassociated from its namesake neighborhood. That feeling was understandable, especially among ticketholders who found themselves trekking to Third Ave. and 11th St. for screenings at AMC Loews Village 7, or finding the red carpet located in Chelsea. Still, two out of three ain’t bad in the name and deed department, considering that the Tribeca Film Festival has presented 1,600 films from more than 80 countries, attracted 4.9 million attendees, delivered an estimated $900
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million into New York City’s economic coffers and distinguished itself as a destination for festival devotees and foreign tourists. This year, from April 15-26, several notable changes will once again link the brand name to the physical location it invokes. The Regal Cinemas Battery Park Stadium 11 facility replaces Loews Village 7. The School of Visual Arts’ two-screen SVA Theater remains, along with the nine-screen Bow Tie Cinemas Chelsea (both are on W. 23rd St. near Eighth Ave., in eyeball distance of one another). Continued on page 26