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The Paper of Record for Greenwich Village, East Village, Lower East Side, Soho, Union Square, Chinatown and Noho, Since 1933
September 10, 2015 • $1.00 Volume 85 • Number 15
Attorney and police don’t see eye to eye in spy cameras case BY LINCOLN ANDERSON
I
SPY CAMS continued on p. 10
A tale of two Catholic churches in the East Village, now merged BY MARY REINHOLZ
T
he Redemptorist priest, resplendent in a bright green cassock, stood outside Most Holy Redeemer Roman Catholic church in the late summer sunlight, greeting the faithful that streamed out of a 10:30 a.m. Spanish-language Mass at his
PHOTO BY Q. SAKAMAKI
n July, Village District Leader Arthur Schwartz made headlines when he turned himself in for arrest at the Sixth Precinct for grand larceny. His alleged crime: taking five small surveillance cameras from a hallway at 95 Christopher St. that had been
installed outside the apartment door of Ruth Berk, a nonagenarian longtime resident for whom he was acting as legal guardian. Schwartz said he was simply trying to stop the landlord’s harassment of the senior chanteuse. A court date was set for
soaring cathedral-like edifice, at 173 E. Third St. between Avenues A and B. The Reverend James Cascione, the parochial vicar and a member of a missionary order that established the parish in 1842 for a then-German Catholic neighborhood, also dispensed blessings on CHURCHES continued on p. 12
Judging by the looks of this officer and dancers at Brooklyn’s West Indian American Day Parade, police-community relations definitely were warm — make that hot! — on Labor Day. See Pages 6 and 7 for more photos.
Garden advocates hoping to nip housing plan in bud BY LINCOLN ANDERSON
A
s the date looms for the hearing for the city’s application for $6 million in funds to build affordable housing on the Elizabeth St. Garden, members of the green oasis are furiously scrambling to try to head off the project that would destroy their beloved public open space in the heart of the Little Italy / Soho area. Meanwhile, City Councilmember Margaret Chin is continuing to stand stead-
fastly by the plan as a rare opportunity that should not be lost to create affordable housing. But the garden’s supporters counter that the Little Italy and Soho district has only 3 square feet of open space per resident — or .07 acres per 1,000 locals versus the city goal of 2.5 acres — plus that most of this is paved. The funding application was made by the city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development to the Lower Manhattan
Development Corporation. The L.M.D.C. hearing will be held Thurs., Sept. 17, at Borough of Manhattan Community College’s Fiterman Hall, 245 Greenwich St., between Park Place and Barclay St. (a block north of the World Trade Center), at 4:30 p.m. The money would come out of a pot of $50 million the L.M.D.C. received in a lawsuit settlement over the 2007 fire at the Deutsche Bank GARDEN continued on p. 9
Board backs MC cop helmet cams..................page 3 The Bean and Goliath: A caffeinated tale.......page 4 ’59 flashback: the birth of landmarking.........page 14 La loca Ricky ticket contest!.......page 16
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