downtown ®
VOLUME 24, NUMBER 46
ABBY SPILKA, P. 12
express THE NEWSPAPER OF LOWER MANHATTAN
APRIL 4 - 10, 2012
Despite rezoning, wait lists persist
Downtown Express photos by Terese Loeb Kreuzer
Female survivors of the Titanic who were traveling in steerage were taken to the Mission of Our Lady of the Rosary at 7 State St. in Lower Manhattan. Today, the mission is known as the Parish of Our Lady of the Rosary and shares space with the St. Elizabeth Seton Shrine at 8 State St., which will soon house an exhibit about the mission and its work.
BY ALINE RYENOLDS The last thing Karen Behrens thought she’d have to worry about when her family moved to Battery Park City in December 2001, was getting her child into a local elementary school. “Everyone was leaving, and we said, ‘You know it’s not right – the whole area’s going to die if everyone just deserts it,” said Behrens. “Even though rents are much higher [than elsewhere], I decided to stay in the area, ‘cause I wanted her to go to a great public school.” But as fate would have it, Behrens’s daughter, Victoria, ranked 23 out of 26 on the P.S. 276 kindergarten waitlist for the 2012-2013 school year. “This is a bit of a shock,”
said Behrens. “It’s outrageous.” Behrens joins close to 100 Downtown parents whose youngsters have been waitlisted at P.S. 276, P.S. 89, P.S. 234 and the new Peck Slip School. This year, the families have banded together to petition the seat shortage, which in recent years has triggered the unwelcome annual trend of waitlists at the schools and is only expected to worsen. Though the waitlists are supposed to let up between now and the fall due to attrition and gifted-and-talented offers, the parents still fear having to send their children to schools outside of Downtown. In just 48 hours, Behrens and fellow parents collected more than 200 signatures
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Lower Manhattan’s Titanic trail BY TERESE LOEB KREUZER It will be 100 years come April 15 since the opulent ocean liner Titanic hit an iceberg off the coast of Newfoundland and sank at 2:20 a.m., killing more than 1,500 people. But not all vestiges of that tragedy are at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. Some are in Manhattan. The arched ironwork at the entrance to Pier 54 on the Hudson River near West 13th Street still bears the words “Cunard White Star Line” in faded paint. This was the pier to which the Cunard ship, Carpathia, brought the survivors of the Titanic, docking there on April 18, 1912. A few blocks north, at Pier 59 in what is now the Chelsea Piers sports complex, the Carpathia stopped off at the White Star moorings to deposit the lifeboats that had saved
the lives of 705 people. Then around 100 members of the bedraggled, exhausted crew of the Titanic were taken down Manhattan’s west side to the American Seaman’s Friend Society, now The Jane hotel at 113 Jane St., where they received clothing, food and lodging. The exterior of The Jane probably looks much as it did then. The interior has been revamped, but two items in the lobby recall the Titanic and its time — an ornate, marble fountain that was there when the survivors arrived and a metal plaque that was subsequently placed in front of it, so worn that the inscription can no longer be read. What is now the ballroom and bar of the hotel on the right side of the lobby was at that time a little assembly hall. The
surviving crew gathered there on April 19, 1912 to pray for those who had been lost. An article in The New York Times published on April 20, described the service. The men cried as they prayed. Then, accompanied by Miss Josephine Upham on the piano, they sang “Nearer my God to Thee” and “Rock of Ages.” Afterward, over coffee and sandwiches, some of the crew talked about their experiences. They said that they had never had a dress rehearsal with the lifeboats since the ship left Southampton, England on April 10. In fact, it emerged subsequently that there were only enough lifeboats for one-third of the people on board and many of these weren’t filled to capacity before
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New take on classic Broadway play. Page 23.