The local paper for Downtown wn A NEIGHBORHOOD BREWING COMPANY < P. 17
WEEK OF NOVEMBER DEC
27- 3 2014 OTDOWNTOWN.COM
OurTownDowntown @OTDowntown
STANDOFF CONTINUES OVER SEAPORT PLAN DEVELOPMENT
In Brief CITY COUNCIL SPEAKER TOUTS IMMIGRATION REFORM City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito is lauding President Barack Obama’s executive action on immigration reform. And she also championed the city’s role as “a national leader on immigration policy.” Puerto Rico native MarkViverito has been one of the city’s loudest voices on the need for immigration reform. She gave a speech Friday to a Manhattan law school in which she touted the city’s council’s actions to help immigrants. Those include the creation of a municipal identification card and the passage of legislation that makes it more difficult to deport unauthorized immigrants. The council also increased funding to help illegal immigrants pay for lawyers. She said that she would “challenge anyone to find a municipality or state that has done more for immigrants.”
The developer and community groups differ over a proposal for a residential tower in the historic district BY DANIEL FITZSIMMONS
Howard Hughes announced its revised proposal for development on the South Street Seaport, which despite guidelines from the community that were formulated after months of meetings between the company, elected officials and other stakeholders, still includes a luxury residential tower on the New Market building site in the Seaport. Howard Hughes’ new plan replaces the 600-foot tower proposal on the north side of Pier 17, announced last November, with a 494-foot luxury residential tower proposal at the same site. The Texas-based company has a 60-year lease on the Seaport, and has already been granted approval to de-
MAYOR APPOINTS HUMAN RIGHTS COMMISSIONER
CONTINUED ON PAGE 5
DEBUT NOVEL FROM THE SON OF A LITERARY STAR Atticus Lishon Lish on his new book and growing up in New York BY PETER BREINING
When ask asked if the origin of his nam namesake came from To Kill A Mocking Bird, Atticu Atticus Lish answered like ssomeone who had hea heard this question bef before. “I think my m mother just liked G Gregory Peck in tthat movie,” he said. Raised on the
Upper East Side—in the 90s between Madison and Fifth—Lish visited the Greenwich Village campus of The New School recently to discuss his debut novel, Preparation for the Next Life – a poignant story about an undocumented Chinese immigrant girl falling for a mentally-fractured Marine. Lish was ready for his next question: What did your father, famed literary editor Gordon Lish, say when he found out you’d be following his footsteps into fiction? This answer didn’t come quite as comically. In the five years it took for him to finish the book, the 43-year old Lish never once told his father he was writing. Estranged from one another for ten years, Atticus hadn’t told Gordon much of anything, and he declined to explain the reason for the estrangement. Born on 56th street between 1st and 2nd avenue, Lish and his parents moved uptown when he was six to be closer to his elementary school
at St. Bernard’s. As a boy, Lish held an admiration for Ninjas that others would reserve strictly for rock stars or pro athletes. Climbing became an obsession for him, and one that he would yield to regularly by scampering up trees in Central Park — all part of his Ninja training. While some of his schoolmates would travel down Fifth Avenue to meet up with girls at the Spence School, Lish didn’t follow suit. He was far too enthralled by knives, ropes and smoke bombs. After grade school, Lish left the Upper East Side to attend Andover Academy. Despite his father’s literary leanings, it was never Lish’s intention to become a novelist; he went to Harvard to study Mathematics and didn’t plan to become a writer. While he did publish a book of drawings in 2012, Life Is with People, Lish—who now resides in Brooklyn—initially wanted to spend his days seeing the
CONTINUED ON PAGE 7
Mayor de Blasio announced the appointment of Carmelyn P. Malalis as the new chair of the city’s Commission on Human Rights and named eight new commissioners to the agency: Ana Oliveira, Catherine Albisa, Arnaldo Segarra, Domna Stanton, Steven Choi, Rabbi Sharon Kleinbaum, Jonathan Greenspun, and Reverend Dr. Demetrius Carolina. The new chair and commissioners will be charged with leading the agency’s efforts to enforce New York City’s Human Rights Law and with educating the public about it and encouraging positive community relations. Malalis is most recently a partner at Outten & Golden and the co-chair of the firm’s LGBT Workplace Rights and Disability and Family Responsibilities Discrimination practice groups.