The local paper for the Upper er East Side HARPER LEE’S MANHATTAN
WEEK OF AUGUST
6-12
VOICES, P.8
2015
THE LAST DAYS OF OUR LADY OF PEACE NEWS After nearly a century on the Upper East Side, a parish is shuttered but congregants have appealed the NY Archdiocese’s decree BY RICHARD KHAVKINE
Nearing their 30-year anniversary, Janice Dooner Lynch and Tom Lynch renewed their marriage vows last week inside a red brick church with neat white stone trim on a tidy Upper East Side block. It was a bittersweet occasion. “We did it today, the last day we could possibly do it,” Janice Lynch said a few hours after the church’s pastor, the Rev. Bartholomew Daly, officiated at the ceremony July 30. It would be among Daly’s last official acts as pastor of Our Lady of Peace on East 62nd Street. After nearly 100 years as a parish, the church’s doors closed, likely for good, the following day. The Catholic parish, established in 1919 by a growing population of Italian immigrants to the city and the neighborhood, was one of dozens shuttered by the Archdiocese of New York, which cited declining attendance, shifting demographics and a shortage of priests, among other factors, when it announced closings of parishes stretching from Staten Island to Albany late last year. Officially, Our Lady of Peace merged with that of Saint John the Evangelist, seven blocks to the south, to create an entirely new parish on Aug. 1. Beginning with her grandmother
CONTINUED ON PAGE 18
Fabulous upcoming New York State events and must-sees at ILoveNY.com/summer15 and inside!
TURNING THE PAGE ON A LIFE PROFILE After a career publishing other people’s books, George Braziller, age 99, has written his own BY KYLE POPE
“Look at this book, would you?,” said George Braziller, pulling an art title off a bookshelf in his Upper East Side living room. “Look at the quality. Look at the binding. I’m so damned proud of all of them.” Here, on E. 74th Street, there is lots to be proud of. Books spill from the office to the living room to the kitchen, on bookshelves and couches and in boxes on the floor. Many of them — hundreds of them — were published under the George Braziller imprint, a groundbreaking independent publishing company run for 60 years by Braziller himself. The range of Braziller’s backlist is staggering, from Picasso and Miro art books to Langston Hughes and Jean-Paul Sartre and Orhan Pamuk. Most of the books came into being through the relentless, scrappy efforts of their globetrotting publisher. (Ask him about dinner with Picasso in Antibes or his summer with Arthur Miller on Martha’s Vineyard.) Yet Braziller will tell you that the hardest book to pull off — by far — is the one sitting on a pile on the table: Encounters: My Life In Publishing, the memoir Braziller has just finished at the age of 99. “The feeling of loneliness is amazing. I understand why writers drink,” he said. “If I had lived in the country, I would have blown my brains out.” Braziller has spent the last four years sitting at a desk in this apartment, filling hundreds of small yellow legal pads, retelling the story of
George Braziller, at a bookshelf full of his titles his life. The result, wrestled to the ground on an old Apple Macintosh computer that has since died, is a 150-page remembrance of one of the great golden eras of New York publishing, long since swallowed up by ebooks and global conglomerates. Braziller writes of growing up in Brooklyn at a time when there were still cows in Canarsie; of being raised by a mother (his father died before he was born) who supported the family by selling clothes from a pushcart; of not finishing high school and shipping off for the Spanish Civil
CONTINUED ON PAGE 18
Our Take THE LESSONS OF THE TRASH STATION Whether you live on the Upper East Side or not, the successful effort to move a trash-dump ramp in the neighborhood is a fight worth paying attention to. Mayor Bill de Blasio, whose support in the neighborhood is thin, had until now resisted moving the ramp, even though the facts of the project bordered on the absurd: the ramp on E. 91st Street would have directed heavy garbage truck traffic through Asphalt Green, a sports complex popular with kids, exposing them to traffic dangers and noxious fumes. While the shifting of the ramp, one block north to 92nd Street, seems now like a no-brainer, in fact it emerged as a sort of compromise, once it became clear that the mayor was unlikely to kill the trash dump entirely. Asphalt Green, supported by smart engineering and traffic studies to bolster its case, was able to work with other community leaders to at least ameliorate a bad situation. The mayor signed on to its plan late last week. There are lessons here for community fights elsewhere in the city: all-or-nothing demands rarely work, especially with this City Hall, which seems to have a nearly endless number of constituencies to satisfy. Second, by keeping the tone of the rhetoric in check, and focusing more on Jewish women and girls light up the world by lighting the Shabbat candles every Friday evening 18 minutes before sunset. Friday August 7 – 7:46 pm. For more information visit www.chabaduppereastside.com.
Home delivery of Our Town Eastsider H $49 per year. Go to OurTownNY.com $ or call 212-868-0190