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The Paper of Record for Greenwich Village, East Village, Lower East Side, Soho, Union Square, Chinatown and Noho, Since 1933

March 17, 2016 • $1.00 Volume 86 • Number 11

Fighting to keep budget food market from having to check out on 14th St. BY YANNIC RACK

ozens of Chelsea and West Village residents rallied with local politicians on W. 14th St. last week to protest the imminent closure of their local supermarket, whose owners said they would be forced to shut its doors due to a skyhigh new lease that would

more than triple their rent. “We’re not going to have a grocery store or a gas station left in the borough of Manhattan — and with all the shops, supermarkets and bodegas, we’re losing the souls of our neighborhoods,” Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer told the crowd on Sun., Mar. ASSOCIATED continued on p. 6

Gansevoort plan foes take a page from L.P.C. and draw the line at 55 BY COLIN MIXSON

pponents of a plan to boost building heights on an iconic Meatpacking District street are adamant that the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission abide by its own words. Earlier this month, they sent the L.P.C. a letter to that effect after the

commission told developers planning to alter or raze a block of buildings along Gansevoort St. that they need to lop some height off the top of the project during a Feb. 9 hearing. “We are still adamantly against this development… but we want to make sure that GANSEVOORT continued on p. 4

PHOTO BY WILLIAM ALATRISTE / NYC COUNCIL

Co-owner Gladwin Francis inside the W. 14th St. Associated market before last weekend’s rally to save it from being forced out by an astronomical rent increase.

Stanley Cohen unbound Radical lawyer sprung, headed abroad BY SARAH FERGUSON

oing to prison can be a radicalizing experience. So what happens when you take a radical attorney and lock him up in a federal prison camp in northeast Pennsylvania for 11 months on criminal tax offenses? Not much, according to former East Village attorney Stanley Cohen. “Prison didn’t touch me. It didn’t change me. It didn’t soften me, it didn’t harden

me,” says Cohen, who started a blog called “Caged But Undaunted” during his stay at Camp Canaan in Waymart, PA. The LES’s most infamous defense lawyer also served three months at a Bronx halfway house and is now doing five more weeks of home confinement at his Upstate New York cabin in the foothills of the Catskills. Cohen, who is in his early 60s, was convicted last April on charges of “obstructing and impeding” the Internal Revenue Service. In essence, the I.R.S. got him

for failing to file timely returns from 2005 to 2010, for failing to report some $35,000 in cash transactions, and for running a largely cash business in which he kept slack or no records. In court, prosecutors alluded to millions of dollars in cash Cohen received from clients, many of them pot growers and smugglers from the Mohawk Nation’s Akwesasne Reservation on the Quebec border. Cohen insists the notion COHEN continued on p. 14

Indian Point 11 plead ‘guilty and proud’........page 8 Mosaic Man is in an edgy pole position..........page 24 Rev. Jen, courage and Mr. L.E.S....page 19

www.TheVillager.com

Kathleen Keene told us the event was on track to raise close to the target of $50,000 — corporate matching funds and proceeds from an online auction were still coming in as of this week. The funds will pay for inschool enrichment programs by Paul Taylor Dance, the National Dance Institute and Third St. Music School, plus chess for all students from kindergarten to fifth grade. Some of the top items at the night’s auction were tickets to the sold-out “Hamilton” and “School of Rock” Broadway musicals. People also bid in a silent auction on items like jewelry and Cuban cigars. Keene added that P.S. 110 is also still pushing for a donation from Givenchy, which monopolized the area around the school for its Fashion Week show last year.

PHOTOS BY SCOOPY

From left, Paul Newell, Chad Marlow and Goldie Weixel at the P.S. 110 fundraiser.

Lauren and Evan Forsch were having mucho fun at “A Night in Old Havana.” If Evan’s Villager cartoon looks a bit squiggly next week, well, blame Lauren for scooping up those two $20 bottles of booze for just $10 apiece at the evening’s end.

SMOKIN’ CUBAN FUNDRAISER: The “A Night in Old Havana” fundraiser at P.S. 110, the Florence Nightingale School, at 285 Delancey St., last Saturday night was the place to be. Leading P.T.A. member

IN THE CROWD: Among the throng at the P.S. 110 fundraiser were some local political parents — plus one of The Villager’s on-the-scene cartoonists. Chad Marlow, the ever-opinionated member of Community Board 3, and his wife, Goldie Weixel, were there, as well as our every-other-week cartoonist Evan Forsch and his wife, Lauren. Not a school parent, District Leader Paul Newell was also there — “working the room,” as they say — having come with his childhood friend Robin Sandler, who is also a P.S. 110 dad. The Forsches, if you haven’t already heard, currently have a pop-up shop, L.E.S. Popped, in a storefront formerly home to an Italian restaurant in the Seward Park Co-op’s commercial strip on Grand St. It features handmade arts from the Lower East Side. Check it out! They’re actually hoping to make it an ongoing affair. (We won’t even get into the controversy about the neighboring Kossar’s bialies store, its Saturday hours and the whole rabbi-certification issue. Oy!) For his part, Newell told us he had been at Coalition for a District Alternative’s endorsement votes earlier that evening and gave us the report. Basically, CoDA members decided not to endorse in the upcoming 65th Assembly District special election, feeling they wanted to hold their fire for the “real election,” the primary, in which more than one Democrat will be running — including Newell, among others — and which will be in September. Newell said of the four candidates on the special election ballot, only Yuh-Line Niou showed up to ask for the club’s endorsement. Newell personally spoke for no endorsement. Newell also reported that CoDA endorsed District Leader Carlina Rivera — for the September 2017 primary election — to succeed City Councilmember Rosie Mendez, who will be term-limited out of office at the end of that year. It’s most certainly a long way off, but as Newell said, “That’s how CoDA does it.”

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“It’s worth the trip down the street!” 2

March 17, 2016

Longtime gay activist Allen Roskoff praised Jenifer Rajkumar at her recent Chinatown fundraiser.

‘RAJ’ EVENT ALL THE RAGE: Another expected candidate in the September primary for the 65th A.D., District Leader Jenifer Rajkumar recently held a fundraiser at Chinatown’s Jing Fong restaurant. She was praised by supporters, including Allen Roskoff of the Jim Owles Liberal Democratic Club, which endorsed her back in January, saying she would be “a strong voice in Albany for reform and transparency.”

CANDIDATES FORUM: The Villager and our sister paper Downtown Express will be teaming up with the League of Women Voters of New York to host a candidates forum for the April 19 special election for the 65th Assembly District. The forum is currently set for Thurs., March 31, from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m., at the Downtown Alliance business improvement district’s LMHQ space, at 150 Broadway, 20th floor. The Alliance is also a co-sponsor of the forum. The event will be moderated by Lincoln Anderson, editor in chief of The Villager, and Laura Altschuler of the League of Women Voters. Invite letters went out to all four candidates earlier this week. So far, as of this Wednesday, Dennis Levy, running on the Green Party line, had confirmed that he will participate. Two other candidates, Yuh-Line Niou, running on the Working Families Party line, and Lester Chang, running as the Republican, Reform, Liberal and Clean Up the Mess candidate, have acknowledged receipt of the invites, and Altschuler is awaiting their confirmation that they will attend. She is still waiting for word back from Alice Cancel, the Democratic Party nominee. Altschuler, who took the lead in setting up the forum, said it’s extremely important for the Lower Manhattan Assembly district to get to know the candidates and their views on the issues, since the district was represented for nearly 40 years by Sheldon Silver, until he was stripped of office late last year after his federal corruption convictions. So this is a historic moment and opportunity for change in the district. WELCOME ABOARD! Well known to East Village activists and community gardeners, Harry Bubbins was named the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation’s new East Village and special projects director. Bubbins previously served as the founding director of Friends of Brook Park, a leading environmental and community advocacy organization based in the Mott Haven neighborhood of the South Bronx. He has had a direct hand in helping to preserve affordable housing, in jump-starting a number of green spaces in the South Bronx, and in helping to spearhead successful grassroots campaigns, from preserving more than 100 community gardens from the auction block to protecting public parkland on Randall’s Island. We remember seeing him speak at the memorial for slain squatter activist Brad Will at La Plaza Cultural some years ago. KUSHNER COMEBACK: The print version of last week’s Villager article on the 118 E. Fourth St. tenants’ lawsuit against landlord Jared Kushner regarding substandard living conditions did not include an extensive statement from Kushner’s side. Subsequently, Westminster Management sent us the following statement: “Regretfully, the gas at 118 E. Fourth St. was shut off by Con Ed due to safety concerns from residents last October. That turn-off caused loss of heat, hot water and cooking gas in the building on Oct. 12. We secured expedited approval from the Department of Buildings, made necessary gas line repairs, and restored heat and hot water on Oct. 21, once Con Ed was able to inspect the new gas line. Currently, nearly all of the building’s cooking gas has been restored, and we are actively working to safely ensure that the entire building has cooking gas. At the same time, we have recently taken a number of actions to address tenant concerns, including providing additional trash bins to accommodate garbage overflow; engaging an exterminating contractor to provide a complete building evaluation; and working with an electrician to ensure equipment is properly installed and maintained. Westminster Management takes complaints from residents seriously and we are committed to strengthening our management-tenant relationship.” TheVillager.com

Spring

Come out of your shell and celebrate the season and Easter. Order your all-natural ham or lamb, freshly prepared sides and desserts and even ready-to-serve meals from Mrs. Green’s Neighborhood Market. It’s easy and convenient. Order in-store or online at MrsGreens.com/HolidayMeals.

Order by March 25th TheVillager.com

March 17, 2016

Named best weekly newspaper in New York State in 2001, 2004 and 2005 by New York Press Association Editorials, First Place, 2014 News Story, First Place, 2014 Overall Design Excellence, First Place, 2013 Best Column, First Place, 2012 Photographic Excellence, First Place, 2011 Spot News Coverage, First Place, 2010 Coverage of Environment, First Place, 2009

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A page from BKSK architects’ application for the development project for 46 to 74 Gansevoort St., showing the block front at present, left, and in 1938, right, when five-story tenement-style buildings still stood at the block’s western end. Today, all that remains are two- and one-story structures.

SCOTT STIFFLER

CONTRIBUTORS ALBERT AMATEAU IRA BLUTREICH TINA BENITEZ-EVES SARAH FERGUSON BOB KRASNER TEQUILA MINSKY CLAYTON PATTERSON JEFFERSON SIEGEL SHARON WOOLUMS

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March 17, 2016

Gansevoort plan foes draw the line at 55 GANSEVOORT continued from p. 1

the L.P.C. is at least as good as its word,” said Elaine Young, a founding member of Save Gansevoort, a community group organized to oppose the project. From the start, neighborhood opponents and preservationists have been intent on preserving the low-rise, market-style structures that characterize the south side of Gansevoort St. between Washington and Greenwich Sts., and which are protected under the city’s landmarks rules as part of their inclusion in the Gansevoort Market Historic District. Prior to last month’s L.P.C. hearing on the project — dubbed “Gansevoort Row” — developers Aurora Capital Associates and William Gottlieb Real Estate had floated a design for a three-story addition atop the existing two-story structure at 60-68 Gansevoort St., plus a plan to demolish the one-story building at 70-74 Gansevoort and replace it with a six-story loft-style building, with an additional two-story pseudo-“water tank” setback addition on top. Save Gansevoort members were initially optimistic that the landmarks commission would hold the developers to the blocks’ existing one- and two-story-style standard. But they were horrified by the results of the L.P.C. hearing on Feb. 9, when commissioners told Aurora and Gottlieb representatives that select buildings along Gansevoort St. could be redeveloped in the style of tenements and lofts that hadn’t existed since the late 1930s — 80 years before the area was landmarked. In opponents’ eyes, the developers had opportunistically plumbed history for a time when larger, more profitable structures were commonplace, and the L.P.C. had granted them its blessing. “I think it’s an arbitrary argument, which they’re cherry-picking to justify the complete destruction of the block,” Young said. “They could have just as well mentioned the area’s history as

an Indian village. It’s an argument that completely cuts across all that’s been accomplished in the neighborhood, purely for their own benefit,” she complained of the developers. During last month’s meeting, however, L.P.C. Chairperson Meenakshi Srinivasan cited the historic district’s designation report — a 2003 document that outlines the area’s historical significance and serves as the basis for decisions regarding future alterations — in justifying the commission’s position to consider allowing new tenement and loft-style structures. “I do note that there’s some things that are very clear,” Srinivasan stated at the meeting. “[The designation report] does talk about four different periods, and I don’t think it weighs that any one period of significance is greater than the other.” However, a silver lining, as far as the plan’s foes are concerned, came when the commission informed the developers that their additions should adhere to the district’s historic tenement and loft building styles and heights. Specifically, they said, any new building replacing 60-68 Gansevoort St. should not be taller than the historic tenement buildings formerly on the site that it is intended to replace. Save Gansevoort, with the assistance of the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation, subsequently found that the previous building heights for 60 and 64 Gansevoort St., as well as 70 Gansevoort St. — where the biggest new building is planned — were all capped at around 50 feet, cornices included. The developers’ plans, though, as previously presented, called for the proposed new building at 70-74 Gansevoort St. to have an 83-foot-tall street wall, with a two-story setback rising to 112 feet high, and for the buildings at 6068 Gansevoort St., after the addition of three new stories, to be 68 feet tall, with

a setback that would rise to 83 feet tall. However, the L.P.C. commissioners said 70 Gansevoort St. — despite its documented history of actually having once been a residential tenement — should instead now be considered a “loft-style” building and its height governed by other loft buildings within the historic district. In turn, the community opponents’ research found that there are seven such loft-style buildings in the area, ranging in height from 38 feet to 74 feet, with their average height around 55 feet. In addition, Srinivasan said that the commissioners’ consensus was that 50 Gansevoort St. — where the developers want to replace a two-story building with a four-story one — should not be taller than two stories. G.V.S.H.P. Executive Director Andrew Berman also wrote a letter to Srinivasan last month, making the same arguments as Save Gansevoort. “We still maintain that the loss of the one-to-two-story market buildings on this street is a loss to the district,” Berman wrote. “However, if these alterations are permitted, we urge that the commission ensure that the massing of the additions be guided by historic precedent.” Now, the ball is in the developers’ court to revise their initial plans, and come back to the commission with something more to the agency’s liking. For their part, the developers say the area’s historic appeal stretches back far into the past, and they’re excited at the prospect of reviving a “lost era” in the city’s architecture. “This project is an opportunity to tell the complete story of this neighborhood’s evolution over the past 130 years,” said Jared Epstein, vice president and principal at Aurora Capital Associates. “We are proud to have put forth a plan that will connect New Yorkers to these great, lost periods in the history of the Meatpacking District.” TheVillager.com

TheVillager.com

March 17, 2016

Fighting to keep a supermarket from checking out FIGHTING continued from p. 1

13, in front of the soon-to-be-shuttered Associated supermarket, at 255 W. 14th St., a neighborhood staple for almost three decades. “We cannot be a mall. We are not Idaho, we are not Minnesota,” Brewer shouted, to applause. “We are the great Manhattan, with a diversity of businesses — mom-and-pop, owner-operated.” The protest was organized by City Councilmember Corey Johnson, who also addressed the crowd alongside Brewer, Congressmember Jerrold Nadler, Public Advocate Letitia James, state Senator Brad Hoylman and Assemblymember Dick Gottfried. In between chants of “Save Our Supermarket!” and signing petitions, the roughly 100 residents also listened to Gladwin Francis, one of the store’s co-owners, also known to some as “The Mayor of 14th St.” He said he and his partners met with their landlord three weeks ago to negotiate a new lease — only to find out their rent was due to rise from $32,000 a month to more than $100,000. “What we had in mind, and what they wanted, was just impossible [to reconcile],” Francis said, referring to building owner Pan Am Equities, a part of the prominent Manocherian family’s real estate empire. “We’ve been here for 27 years, we have never been late on our rent. We really, from the bottom of our hearts, hope that something can be done,” he said, adding that, otherwise, they would have to be out by May. Francis said he opened the store with his partners in 1989, when the rent was still $10,000 a month and “nobody wanted to take the space.” More than just his daily job, he said the supermarket had put his kids through college and provided him with a second home in the neighborhood. “This store, it’s like my baby. This is my lifeblood,” he said, speaking after the protest, standing on the sidewalk as longtime customers filed in and out carrying bags of produce. “For it to be taken away from us just like that — it’s heart-wrenching.” Francis said he is part owner in another Associated supermarket, on E. 14th St. in Stuyvesant Town — which could possibly face a similar fate when its lease expires next year. Residents at Stuyvesant Town, whose new owner, Blackstone, also took over the supermarket property last year, vehemently protested against a possible closure, though Francis said he was optimistic the E. 14th St. Associated might be able to stay at that location. Walter Brnjac, who has been a manager at the W. 14th St. store for the last three years, said he wasn’t surprised it had come to this, even though he was sad to leave the neighborhood. “Of course I feel bad. We’ve been here forever. It’s kind of the end of an era. But we knew it was coming,” he said. “You could see the handwriting on the wall. You could see what apartments are going for here.” Both Francis and Brnjac said they had no idea what would fill the store’s space near the corner of Eighth Ave. A Pan Am Equities representative declined to comment on the issue. “The elected officials and the community here today are ready to come to the table. The only people not ready to come to the table is Pan Am Equities,” said Johnson, who added that he had tried to call Pan Am’s C.E.O. but only reached a man named Jason — who was uncooperative and accused him of making threats by mentioning the planned protest. “He was very rude, dismissive, and he wouldn’t

March 17, 2016

PHOTO BY WILLIAM ALATRISTE / NYC COUNCIL

Gladwin Francis, an owner of the W. 14th St. Associated supermarket, spoke at Sunday’s rally, as he was flanked by Councilmember Corey Johnson, right, and Tobi Bergman, C.B. 2 chairperson, right background, and Public Advocate Letitia James, left, and Assemblymember Richard Gottfried, obscured from view behind him.

even have a conversation. He asked me, ‘Who do you think you are?’ ” Johnson said after the demonstration. “It was not a good conversation.” The politicians also lamented the loss of affordable stores as a larger issue. A Food Emporium on Sixth Ave. was forced to close its doors two years ago, Johnson noted, and the Village lost a D’Agostino on Greenwich St. last fall. “If you look across the street: shuttered storefront over there, ‘For Rent’ sign that’s been in the window over there for years,” said Johnson, pointing across W. 14th St. “It is happening throughout our neighborhood and it’s having a real effect.” “When this individual said to Councilmember Johnson, ‘Who do you think you are?’ — we are New York City!” echoed James. “And we rely on our small supermarkets.” “You can’t get fresh fruit and vegetables at CVS,” added Hoylman. Last week, longtime patrons said they depend on the Associated, which offers relatively low prices in a neighborhood where they feel everything is getting more expensive by the week. “It’s about affordability. It’s also very deeply about the character of our neighborhoods and this city,” said Tobi Bergman, chairperson of Community Board 2. “We depend on it for the economic vitality of this city — it brings everything else about the city down, and eventually the city will fail to function,” he said. “I’m beside myself because this is the only store I can afford, where I can get a bang for my buck,” agreed Helen Murphy, who lives at Selis Manor, a residence for visually impaired and physically disabled people on W. 23rd St. The 64-year-old, who receives around $840 a month in Supplemental Security Income and disability benefits, as well as $200 in food stamps, said she wouldn’t be the only local resident who would suffer if the store closes — not least because it is the only area supermarket that delivers groceries for free in a 10-block radius.

“They’re doing us a disservice because we depend on that store,” she said. “If they go out of business, we’ll really feel it.” Bob Pollak, who has lived on W. 16th St. for more than three decades and has shopped at the store since it opened in 1989, said the hardest hit would be seniors who depend on having an affordable supermarket within walking distance. “It’s going to be a hardship for a lot of people,” he said. “This was really an essential supermarket. It’s situated perfectly between the Village and Chelsea.” But there were others who, though outraged by the rent hike, dismissed the protest as futile and political grandstanding for the elected officials, who they said are ignoring a readily available, simple solution. “The landlord is not the problem,” said Steve Null, a small business advocate and the author of the Small Business Jobs Survival Act. “It’s the elected officials allowing this to go on, to allow small businesses to be at the mercy of the landlord when their lease expires.” The S.B.J.S.A., which has been stalled in the City Council for years, would establish a right to fair commercial lease renewals. The bill, which has a bit more than two dozen supporters in the Council, would allow businesses to go through binding arbitration with their landlords to reach a fair rent with a guaranteed 10-year lease extension. “On the flier [for the protest] it said, ‘Save our Supermarket.’ Why was it singular?” Null said. “What happens to this supermarket is happening to every single business in the Village and on the West Side. “When they start making a sign that says, ‘Let’s save all of our businesses’ — then it means something.” Shifting blame away from the landlord might have been an unpopular stance at Sunday’s rally, but Francis, for his part, said he doesn’t entirely disagree. “It’s not them per se,” he said of Pan Am. “I think it’s just New York.” TheVillager.com

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March 17, 2016

Indian Point 11 plead ‘guilty and proud’ in court BY JK CANEPA

t midnight on Dec. 12 of last year, the final license for Indian Point Energy Center’s reactors expired. To mark the event, about 50 people walked up the road to the entrance of the nuclear power plant in Buchanan, N.Y., a small Westchester County municipality on the edge of Peekskill. Among the assemblage were several elderly Franciscan nuns, a frail Buddhist nun who had stood in silent protest when the plant was built more than 40 years ago, people of the (real) first world accompanying us with drums, a professor, a retired minister and others who traveled from Connecticut, New Jersey, and New York City, and those who lived close to the aging, leaking, deteriorating plant, residents of Westchester, Putnam, and Rockland Counties. As we continued uphill, we stepped over chalk marks that said “Algonquin Pipeline.” Then I knew we were close — 105 feet from the safety equipment for the plant, in fact — and I pointed this out to the sisters. Moments later, we were in front of Indian Point and its giant domes. We stretched yellow caution tape to block workers’ access as the drummers marked time. When told to disperse, 11 of us stood our ground, including three from the city: Bruce Rosen, Merle McEldowney and me. One of the sweet nuns waved goodbye as we entered the paddy wagon. We were arrested and charged with disorderly conduct. (In fact, I think we were quite orderly and well-behaved, and wonder if the police know what disorderliness can look like!) In any case, we forked over our ID’s for inspection and then spent an hour in the precinct, handcuffs removed, in a carpeted back room with a Toys for Tots barrel, several chairs, restrooms — a pretty low-key bust, all in all. Then those of us not from the area each paid $100 bail and we all went to our respective homes. On Tues., March 8, we had our day at the courthouse, both outside in front of reporters and inside before the judge. Of course, the anti-nuclear voices were there (Indian Point Safe Energy Coalition, Nuclear Information and Resource Service, Stony Point Convergence, Shut Down Indian Point Now). But there were also allies from all over: anti-fracking and anti-pipeline groups (Stop the Algonquin Pipeline, United for Action), clean water advocates (Riverkeeper, Hudson River Sloop Clearwater and New York City Friends of Clearwater, Catskill Mountainkeeper), groups part of the large greens (Sierra Club Lower Hudson) and small (Westchester People’s Action Coalition, Grass-

March 17, 2016

PHOTO BY © BERNADETTE EVANGELIST

Attorney Marty Stolar with anti-nuclear activists outside the Buchanan courthouse on March 8. After the press conference, Stolar pleaded guilty on behalf of the Indian Point 11, who also all pleaded guilty individually to the charge of disorderly conduct.

roots Environmental, New York City Safe Energy Campaign) and more. A speaker from Fukushima sent a message of support and a reminder that the fifth anniversary of that tragedy was days away. We talked about the safety exemptions that Entergy received for the shoddy conditions in the plant, the spills and fires and numerous shutdowns. We brought out our “Bird Poop” banner to let the world know that one big bird streaming one enormous dropping onto the company’s wiring actually had caused Indian Point to close down just days after our arrest. We exposed Entergy’s lie that they provide Westchester and New York City with 25 to 30 percent of our energy and explained that we don’t need one watt from this plant, since we’ve already replaced it with efficiency and solar, to the point that we’re covered even for peak load. We asked what would happen to the 20 million people in the peak danger zone, where would they go in the event of an emergency? What fantasies about evacuation does the government have? We railed against the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission and its revolving-door policy for industry hacks who come into government, approve projects, and then return to choice jobs in the corporate world. And we talked about Spectra Energy’s 42-inch Algonquin Incremental Market (AIM) Pipeline clearcutting its way through private property grabbed by eminent domain and heading to within just 100 feet of the plant’s critical infrastructure. We made it clear that Spectra’s claim of a three-minute response to any failure of the pipeline

PHOTO BY ANDREW COURTNEY

In December, JK Canepa, far right, and other protesters blocked workers’ access to the Indian Point power plant. Eleven were arrested after defying police orders to disperse.

was clearly impossible, because the shutdown valves are miles apart and the company operates them from computers in Texas. And the company has an abysmal safety record. We quoted industry experts about the 400-foot blast radius in every direction when a pipeline ruptures, opening up like a zipper moving at very high speed, carrying flammable gas at pressures of about 900 pounds per square inch. We pointed out the earthquake zones beneath our feet where we stood on the grounds of the courthouse. We explained that uranium mining and the fossil fuels that a nuclear plant needs for its operations aren’t clean energy, that polluting the water and killing the fish isn’t sustainable energy, that radioactive leakage of tritium and who knows what else into the groundwater at 400 to 800 times the maximum safe level certainly isn’t a part of safe energy for the people and animals of the region. Finally it was time to go inside — court was about to begin. Our law-

yer, Martin Stolar, who is also representing the Montrose 9, who blocked movement of machinery on the AIM pipeline, pled guilty on behalf of the entire group. (This other case may be a groundbreaking one, with the “necessity defense” in play.) We stood proudly and repeated to the judge, one at a time, “Guilty.” I sure didn’t feel guilty. I don’t think any of the others did either. But a notguilty plea might have resulted in an A.C.D., adjournment upon contemplation of dismissal, meaning it’s expunged if one gets no arrests for the next six months. It’s like getting a permit to march. Instead, our plea means that we can come back and fight some more. It’s like an unpermitted march — no agreement with the cops to stay within prescribed limits. So, as we told the press, “Yes, we are guilty. And we might have to do it again.” The judge let all of us off with “time served,” and we had to pay court fees — but no fine. TheVillager.com

Co-op may be fined big on garage: C.B. 3 member BY LESLEY SUSSMAN

n a surprise turn of events, opponents of a new valet parking system recently put into effect at the Seward Park Co-op’s garage and parking lot learned at last week that the system’s new operators may lack the proper city permits and that the co-op could be fined up to $25,000 as a result. The co-op’s 11-member board of directors in January approved the hiring of Icon Parking Systems, a citywide garage valet parking service, to operate the complex’s 388-car garage and parking lot. The management board of the Lower East Side co-op said the change would keep parking prices below market rate, shorten the waiting list by increasing the number of spaces, and generate much-needed annual revenue. Since then, an uncivil war has been raging at the four-building, 20-story co-operative along east Grand St. between a segment of car-owning shareholders who are against the valet parking system, and the coop’s management board, which supports it. The garage is located at Clinton St. and E. Broadway. The flap has not only involved shareholders who park in the garage and parking lot, but other shareholders at the 1,728-unit co-op, as well. These shareholders contend that the management board made the decision without any shareholder input. In response, the co-op’s board has countered that the decision was made in good faith. The board says that not only will the new system result in increased income to help maintain the co-op without raising parking rates, but also open up parking space for the dozens of shareholders waiting for a space. There are currently 670 names on a parking waiting list. The surprise announcement about possible permit violations was made by MyPhuong Chung, chairperson of the Community Board 3 Land Use, Zoning, Public & Private Housing Committee, at the committee’s meeting last Wednesday. Chung told the co-op’s shareholders and her fellow committee members that based upon her “research” into the situation, she discovered that three required city permits to operate the new garage and parking lot may be missing. “I researched the situation and the Department of City Planning told me that special permits were needed to make these changes,” she said. “According to the department of planning, these permits have not been filed with them, the Department of Buildings and the Department of Consumer Affairs. “If this is true, the co-op could face fines of up to $25,000,” Chung noted. “I believe that they will have to pay for violations of permits for every day that they are operating.” Among the violations that Icon may be committing, according to another Seward Park board member who lives in the co-op and requested anonymity, is that the garage has surpassed the number of cars — 418 — allowed under its current certificate of occupancy. He also told this newspaper that, according to neighbors, the garage has been allowing single-day parking for motorists who do not live in the Seward Park Co-op. Both allegations have been strongly denied by Frank Durant, the co-op’s general manager. “This is all pure nonsense,” Durant told The Villager the day after the C.B. 3 committee meeting. “We would never put the co-op at risk, and we would never allow Icon Parking Systems to operate illegally. Single-day customers aren’t being given spaces until Icon is certain that it has the proper permits. TheVillager.com

PHOTO BY LESLEY SUSSMAN

The Seward Park Co-op’s garage, at Clinton St. and E. Broadway.

“Icon is a reputable company that would not do anything that is illegal,” he continued. “Our attorneys reviewed everything, and if the city came in today to inspect the garage there would be nothing illegal that they would find.” Durant went on to say that this issue was being manufactured by “people on the community board who live in this co-op that don’t want to give up their personal parking space.” A reporter who visited the garage last week and asked if he could park his car there, although he wasn’t a resident, was given two different answers by parking attendants. One told the reporter that parking was “for residents only,” while a second said, “if there was space,” he could park his car there. Icon Parking Systems did not respond to calls for comment for this article, but did respond to the growing concerns by posting hand-written signs saying that the garage only allowed monthly parking. Since the plan was first announced at the beginning of the year, outraged shareholders with garage and parking lot spaces have bitterly complained that they wanted to be able to park their own cars and not have to turn their keys over to valet parking attendants. They also complained that the new system would squeeze more vehicles into the garage and parking lot so tightly, it would make it difficult for them to get in and out of their cars. But some shareholders are slamming the new plan’s opponents as “selfish.” One shareholder who asked not to be identified said that the valet parking system’s critics were “ignoring the fact that this service will increase revenues at the co-op by $200,000 to $300,000, without increasing parking rates, while also increasing the number of parking spaces available to the co-op.” This point has also been made by the co-op’s board, whose members have responded that by hiring Icon to run the parking operation, the entire co-op will financially benefit from the additional revenues. The atmosphere was electric at the C.B. 3 committee meeting as angry shareholders waited for man-

agement board representatives to make their case. But they were disappointed as co-op board representatives — including president David Pass — immediately left the meeting without comment after Chung made her stunning announcement. Durant later told a reporter that, after the announcement, the board president “felt threatened” by the large turnout of shareholders, which was why he bolted from the meeting immediately afterward. Angry shareholders also stormed out of the meeting, voicing some criticism as they exited about the way things were being handled that evening. “Thanks for letting us know,” one shareholder sarcastically told committee members before leaving. Chung responded that the hearing would be rescheduled once the permit issue was resolved, and that shareholders would have their chance to speak. After the meeting, Dominic Berg, former C.B. 3 chairperson, said he was also a bit surprised by Chung’s disclosure. “If this is true,” Berg said, “it surprises me since management probably was told that they needed a zoning change. Management has an obligation to make sure that they’re following the law.” Last month, the Seward Park board circulated a detailed, seven-page “State of the Co-op” memorandum, outlining the co-op’s financial challenges — especially soaring real estate taxes — and the resulting need for new revenue sources, if monthly maintenance costs were to remain at their current low levels. The memo pointed out that in the past six years, real estate taxes have risen by 125 percent — from $5.2 million to $11.7 million annually — while maintenance costs have risen by 14 percent. The board also noted that the complex’s reserve fund has been depleted to help cover operating expenses. After the memo was issued, many shareholders who attended a meeting on the matter last month at the Manny Cantor Center seemed satisfied that the board had acted in good faith and that the revenue generated by valet parking would benefit the entire co-op. Others, however, continued to argue that the board’s deliberations lacked transparency. March 17, 2016

Join us for

HOLY WEEK At The Church of St. Luke in the Fields Palm Sunday — March 20

Good Friday — March 25

Blessing of the Palms and Holy Eucharist

9:00 am Morning Prayer 1:00 pm Good Friday Liturgy 6:30 pm Stations of the Cross

8:00 am Said Eucharist 9:15 am Sung Eucharist* 11:15 am Choral Eucharist* 12:45 pm Healing Service

Wednesday in Holy Week 6:15 pm Stations of the Cross and Holy Eucharist

Maundy Thursday — March 24 6:30 pm Choral Eucharist with Foot Washing, Agape Supper, Stripping of the Altar, and Vigil at the Altar of Repose. Overnight Watch until 1pm Good Friday.

Holy Saturday — March 26 10:00 am Holy Saturday Service 8:00 pm The Great Vigil of Easter The Paschal Vigil and First Eucharist of Easter with Baptism, Confirmation, Reception and Reaffirmation of Baptismal Vows.

Easter Day — March 27 8:00 am Said Eucharist 9:15 am Sung Eucharist* 11:15 am Choral Eucharist* 12:45 pm Healing Service

*Child care is available for children 6 and under at these services*

Due to safety concerns during our construction projects, we regret that we will not be able to host our annual Easter egg hunt this year. The Church of Saint Luke in the Fields | West Village, Corner of Hudson and Grove Streets 487 Hudson Street New York, NY 10014 | 212.924.0562 | www.stlukeinthefields.org

PHOTO BY TEQUILA MINSKY

Flowers and a photo of slain Auxiliaries Nicholas Pekearo and Yevgeniy Marshalik left at Monday’s memorial.

Honoring hero auxiliaries

n Mon., March 14, police from the Village’s Sixth Precinct, auxiliary police and family members of Nicholas Pekearo and Yevgeniy “Eugene” Marshalik gathered at Bleecker and Sullivan Sts. for the annual memorial for the two slain young auxiliary officers. Joining them at the simple, solemn ceremony were members of the Sixth Precinct Community Council, Bleecker Area Merchants and Residents’ Association and Community Board 2 and local politicians. Eight years ago, Pekearo, 28, a writer, and Marshalik, 19, an N.Y.U. student, lost

Financial

their lives when they were out on the beat and confronted a wildly running gunman who had just fatally shot a pizza restaurant bartender on nearby W. Houston St. They struggled with him over a shoulder bag he had containing 100 bullets but, a former marine, he coldly killed them both. Police subsequently gunned down the murderer in a hail of bullets on Bleecker St. The volunteer officers are known as the “eyes and ears” of the police. Only a handful of them have been killed in the line of duty. In 2009, the intersection was named for the two slain heroes.

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March 17, 2016

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POLICE BLOTTER Guilty in Village murder 32 bottles of beer After a day of deliberation, a Manhattan jury found Elliot Morales guilty of second-degree murder as a hate crime, weapons possession and menacing in the 2013 shooting of Mark Carson, a 32-year-old gay man. “Motivated by irrational rage, the defendant targeted and executed a defenseless young man based on his sexual orientation after taunting and insulting the victim and his companion,” Cy Vance, the Manhattan district attorney, said. “Elliot Morales’s hateful and destructive rampage may not have stopped there, if not for the intervention of a brave N.Y.P.D. officer.” The testimony at trial was that Morales, 36, encountered Carson and a friend, Danny Robinson, on Sixth Ave. outside a 99-cent pizzeria. As the men argued, with Morales using anti-gay slurs, they moved north and then onto Eighth St., where Morales displayed a gun and then fired one shot, striking Carson in the head, killing him. Morales fled east on Eighth St. but was quickly caught by Police Officer Henry Huot. When arrested, Morales made statements that police recorded in which he admitted killing Carson. Representing himself, Morales testified that he believed Carson was armed and about to shoot him. Morales also said he was intoxicated. When he cross-examined Robinson, 32, the only witness who saw Morales shoot Carson, he elicited testimony that Carson and Robinson had also been drinking. But Morales’s self-defense and drunkenness arguments did not sway the jury. He will be sentenced April 11.

Facing murder rap A man wanted in the murder of the rapper Future’s ex-bodyguard was collared Monday as he worked in the produce section of the Morton Williams supermarket at Bleecker St. and LaGuardia Place, according to police. The New York Post reported that New York/New Jersey Regional Fugitive Task Force officers busted Tywan Porter in the store around noon, stunning shoppers. Porter was reportedly ID’d last week as the prime suspect in the shooting death of Michael Phillips, the Atlanta rapper’s former security man, in Georgia. The Post reported that store co-owner Avi Kaner said Porter applied for a stocking job a week ago and cited an alleged retired New York police officer as a reference. TheVillager.com

These guys had their own idea of “bottle service.” Police said three men unlawfully entered STK Downtown & Rooftop, at 26 Little W. 12th St., on Mon., March 7, at 1 a.m., and removed 32 bottles of alcohol from behind the serving bars. Upon arrest, they were in possession of the stolen property. Kajuan Powell, 30, Jason Vanhorn and Gurfis Tafe, both 32, were arrested for felony burglary.

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Right in the mug It was a real swinging scene at Off the Wagon bar, at 109 MacDougal St., early Thursday morning — as in, a mug-swinging scene. Police said that around 2 a.m. on March 10, a woman struck a man in the face with a mug, causing multiple lacerations. The man was at the bar prior to the incident and the woman was a stranger. Police arrested Shakira James, 32, for felony assault.

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Cutting confession A police officer saw a teenage boy riding his bike the wrong way down a one-way street on Fri., March 11, at 12:30 a.m., and stopped him at Charles and Bleecker Sts., police said. The cop asked the youth if he had anything on him that he shouldn’t have. “I have a knife in my right pocket. I keep it for protection,” he reportedly responded. Upon a search, a small bag of alleged marijuana and a knife were recovered from the boy. Treyvon Cunningham, 17, was arrested for felony criminal possession of a weapon.

Twist and shout Two young women were asked multiple times to leave Henrietta Hudson bar, at 438 Hudson St., early Friday morning March 11, but didn’t take the hint. Police said that around 3:45 a.m., the pair were acting violently and tumultuously and causing a public alarm and attempted to re-enter the place a second time. When police arrived, the two “refused to comply with lawful orders” and resisted arrest, flailing their arms, kicking and twisting their bodies, police said. Luisa Fava and Melany Jimenez, both 21, were arrested for misdemeanor obstructing government administration.

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Freed radical attorney reflects on prison life, COHEN continued from p. 1

that he was rolling in the dough is ludicrous. He says his prosecution on tax charges was part of a broader effort of political retribution aimed at silencing a radical defender who has spent the last three decades representing the rights of other radicals, outcasts and the oppressed. It’s a not too preposterous theory, considering that he has represented everyone from Osama bin Laden’s son-in-law and Kathy Boudin of the Weather Underground to East Village squatters and Occupy Wall Street protestors, the leaders of Hamas, Hezbollah members of the Mohawk Nation and the Anonymous hacktivists known as the “PayPal 14.” (Cohen’s former law partner Lynne Stewart was convicted in 2010 of aiding a terrorist by helping her client communicate to followers from prison.) In 2002, he filed suit against Israel, accusing it of war crimes. “They started investigating me in 1997, for material support of terrorism, because I was involved in a half-dozen battles with them over terrorism cases,” Cohen alleges, referring to inquiries launched over the years by the F.B.I. and Treasury and Justice departments. “My case was not about taxes,” insists Cohen, who says he took the plea agreement only because the lengthy legal fight was “bankrupting” him, straining his family, and making it difficult to practice law. “Am I banned from Israel and Egypt and Kuwait because of taxes?” he demands. “Shouldn’t that sort of say something? There isn’t a f---ing federal prosecutor in the United States who believes this is about f---in’ taxes,” maintains Cohen, who had to give up his Avenue D loft when he went to prison. Prosecutors at the Northern District U.S. Attorney’s Office in Syracuse, where Cohen’s tax case was tried, insist their beef with him was not political. Asked whether the case against Cohen was politically motivated, Assistant U.S. Attorney Richard Southwick responded succinctly: “It was not.” Cohen is still battling the I.R.S. in civil court over exactly how much in back taxes he still owes. But he was never fined for his tax offenses — a point he considers telling: “Go find another f---ing I.R.S. criminal prosecution in the United States without an order that you must repay a certain amount of money as part of your sentence. We looked. It doesn’t exist.” Clearly undaunted, Cohen sat down with The Villager earlier this month for a wide-ranging interview in the offices of a Downtown law firm. Cohen says he was hired by the firm to consult on a big pro bono project, just two days after he entered the halfway house.

March 17, 2016

PHOTO BY SARAH FERGUSON

Stanley Cohen during an interview earlier this month at a Downtown law firm where he is currently serving as a consultant.

Although Cohen’s law license is currently suspended, he has not been disbarred. Rather, his law license is now “pending review” — meaning it is under the discretion of the New York Bar Association whether it will be reinstated once his full sentence has been served.

***

VILLAGER: So it’s not a given that you will lose your law license? STANLEY COHEN: The haters are going around saying I’ve been disbarred, but it’s not true. In fact, there are those who believe that it’s highly significant that I wasn’t disbarred. There are those who believe the grievance committee sees — “There’s something going on here.” (Cohen moves in conspiratorially and casts a wink.) V: So you can still help prepare legal cases? S.C.: If your license is suspended or pending, you can’t even practice until it is resolved. But I can still be a consultant. I can’t give legal advice — which I’m not — and I can’t go into court. But I can research, and I can write, and I can set up pro bono projects. V: What was it like in the Big House? S.C.: I did 10 months and three weeks in a prison “camp” that was very much like a f---ing Boy Scouts barracks. It was a camp, which is no bars, no cells, no barbed wire, no keys, no guns. One hundred twenty men in a bunkhouse with communal showers and communal bathrooms, making 12 cents an hour. And then we’re attached to one of the ugliest maximum-security prisons in the United States, filled with about 1,000 guys doing at least 20-year sentences, and 500 doing life without. [Cohen’s blog includes the interviews he did with his fellow prisoners,

some living in the camp and others he encountered when he worked the red-eye shift at Canaan’s maximum penitentiary, packing lunches during a three-week lockdown.] V: And how did prison deal with you as a radical attorney? S.C.: I was designated a C.M.I., which is a Centrally Monitored Inmate. Within three days of my arrival, I had to sign a document which identified me as a C.M.I., that said quote unquote, “Because of inmate Cohen’s high public persona, his career of controversy, and the access to the media and the cases he’s handled, the Bureau of Prisons has decided he has to be a monitored inmate.” They wanted to keep me under their eye as much as possible; so when I got there, I was immediately assigned to the plumb librarian job of the law library. There were like 50 guys waiting to get the librarian job — [but] they gave it to me because it was 20 feet from the administrative offices, and people could walk by day in and day out and see me.

***

While in prison, Cohen says he received more than 100 interview requests — including one from CNN’s Fareed Zakaria, who wanted to follow up on Cohen’s foiled efforts to get leaders of Hamas and Al Qaeda to intercede to save the life of American hostage Peter Kassig, who was beheaded by ISIS. The British Guardian did an 8,000-word series on Cohen’s role in the hostage negotiation, though the story did not receive much play here in the U.S. Cohen says he was also visited by London playwright Chris MacDonald, who is writing a play about Cohen, and who spent a weekend “taking notes up his arm” while being monitored by the

acting warden of the camp. In addition, Cohen taught three terms of law classes to his fellow inmates, covering topics ranging from civil rights and American government, to the revolution that toppled apartheid in South Africa, the Israeli/Palestine conflict, and human rights law. “I did serious stuff,” shrugs Cohen. “My classes were volunteer, they were at night, you got no credit for attending. And yet they regularly drew attendance of 30 people — about a third of the camp,” he adds. “One of the guys who attended all my classes told me, ‘I love your classes. I feel like we’re in college. We’re like adults, like men. We discuss. We’re not dumbed down, we’re not f---ing idiots.’”

***

V: What was your hardest thing about being behind bars? S.C.: Nothing about prison was hard for me — zero. There’s isolation and despair, there’s dirt and boredom, and there’s periodic violence — sometimes psychic, sometimes physical. None of that was a big deal. The biggest problem, especially in camps, is you’re powerless to take care of family problems. You get your periodic phone calls and visits; you get a certain number of e-mails now in prisons. But it’s not like your wife or husband or son can just pick up the phone and say, “I’m having a problem,” and you intervene and then they don’t have to worry about it… . All you can say is, “It will be all right, you have to deal with it.” Low-security prisons and camps are designed to hurt you by hurting your families. The prison doesn’t hurt you. The camps themselves are a f--ing joke. Sixty percent of every man and woman in federal prison in the United States has been convicted of a nonviolent offense and/or poses no risk of danger to the community. They do not have to be in prison. The whole purpose is to punish the person, and the greatest retribution is meted out to wives, husbands and children on the outside. That’s where they get you, that’s where they f--- you up. I have a strong partner of many years, but she had problems. V: How was the food? S.C.: Terrible. I’m a vegetarian. I had a friend of mine [in prison] who made me salads. There are exchange systems. I lived on a lot of oatmeal, a lot of nuts. I didn’t eat in the camp cafeteria at all the last five months. I would, however, go in two meals a day and get meals for friends who were big. I mean, breakfast was at 6 a.m. every day, lunch at 10:45 and dinner at 4. Who wants to eat lunch at 10:45? COHEN continued on p. 15 TheVillager.com

plans to move abroad COHEN continued from p. 14

I went in heavy because I’d been traveling a lot and hadn’t been taking care of myself before I went to jail. So I lost 23 to 24 pounds — roughly two pounds a month, and got back to my normal weight.

***

The Villager reached out to Cohen again over this past weekend, following his release from the halfway house, to ask how he was enjoying his relative freedom, under home confinement in his Catskills retreat. Cohen said he was battling a terrific chest cold but seemed otherwise nonchalant about it all. He said he was keeping busy cleaning up the lawn, writing his blog and catching up on Turner Classic Movies with his longtime partner, artist Joni White. According to the terms of his sentence, he is now allowed to travel domestically related to his work and things like health appointments, but must spend each night at home. Ever the troublemaker, Cohen says he’s been blasting tweets about the state of Gaza, promoting B.D.S. campaigns against Beyoncé and J. Lo and Springsteen because of their plans to play Israel, and of course, harping on the current trainwreck of a presidential election. (He’s got more than 20,000 Twitter followers.) Since he got out, he says he’s received a half-dozen death threats via Twitter and online from “white national socialists” who are pissed about something he wrote about Trump and Sanders.

***

V: Aren’t you at all worried about putting yourself back in the government’s — or your haters’ — crosshairs? S.C.: Let us be very clear about this. Serious political lawyers put ourselves in the firing line all the time. It is what we do. Have there been times when I said f--- you to the beast and exposed myself and let myself be vulnerable? Of course. Comes with the turf. The government spent five years looking for hidden proceeds, because they are used to scammers and a-holes. They aren’t used to people like me. They’re not used to political fighters. They assumed that Stanley Cohen was getting rich because of the work he did — that Stanley Cohen was doing it for the money. It’s all nonsense. So they spent five years looking for offshore bank accounts and hidden dollar amounts and stock portfolios, and found nothing, zero, because there was nothing. What they didn’t get — what they really didn’t get — was I didn’t give a f---. Who gives a f---? Was I reckless in TheVillager.com

certain regards? Absolutely. Did I not give a f--- about some of their rules and regulations? Abso-f---ing-lutely. Did I see them as being intrusive? Absolutely. In my sentencing memo, it says, “Stanley Cohen has to be one of the best defense attorneys around… There’s no doubt he is an indefatigable force on behalf of his clients. But he’s a lousy businessman.” Really? V: So what’s next? S.C.: I’m thinking about bank robberies… No, seriously, what am I going to do? Even once I get my license back — and I’m convinced I will — my days of running a major national criminal defense firm are done. I will continue doing international human rights work — maybe political cases, terrorism cases. I expect to become an expat and live abroad — essentially reversing the past 20 or 25 years of living in the United States and traveling abroad three or four times a year. I will now live abroad and travel to the United States three or four times a year. I’ll reverse it. V: Any idea where you’ll go? S.C.: My partner has agreed that there are a certain number of countries that she will go live with me in. She’s an artist, she’s got a gallery, a small studio in Florida which she wants to maintain. We’re looking in the Gulf States somewhere, we’re looking in Lebanon, where she and I have been. We’re looking in South Africa… The countries I am thinking about are the countries that are very vibrant and in flux, in one way or another in a state of revolution. So they are involved in human rights struggles. V: So you’ll pick up where you left off abroad? S.C.: Look, I represent some very serious people. And I have been aligned with some very serious political movements for many years. And I have been a consultant to foreign governments. So I could do this tomorrow — never pick up a law book, never cross-examine a witness, never step into a courtroom again — and continue. I’ve got teaching offers in a half-dozen countries that I could do. I could be a consultant in many places. Two weeks ago, when the Muslim and Black Bar Association in South Africa tried to get Shimon Peres arrested there, I was a consultant in that case. I was part of the strategy that — well, it didn’t work at this point, the special prosecutor said the case was not likely to prevail — but I was part of that. V: But will you keep a place here? S.C.: Oh, I’m not giving up the cabin. We want to look for a place on the Lower East Side — just to stay connected. Something small, one bedroom. V: Seriously? You can afford to rent on the LES after the case just bankrupted you? S.C.: Yeah. We’re gonna look. March 17, 2016

Time to look at bigger picture on small businesses

EDITORIAL

ast Sunday, a crowd of around 100 neighborhood residents, joined by local politicians, rallied outside the Associated supermarket at 255 W. 14th St. after news broke that the market faces a triple rent hike that will price it out of the space. Associated has been a staple at the spot for more than 35 years and, as a midlevel, affordable supermarket, serving both the Village and Chelsea, is deeply appreciated by a diverse mix of patrons. Seniors in particular, many on fixed incomes, rely on the grocery store in an ever-gentrifying part of Manhattan. And that, of course, is the real issue. Gentrification is driving up rents, especially in Manhattan, particularly in areas like the Village and the rest of Downtown. Our neighborhoods are being radically transformed and our quality of life — our ability simply to live here — is suffering as the retail stores we depend on are being forced out again and again by the lease-renewal process. The politicians at Sunday’s rally were sincere in calling for the property’s landlord to meet with them and try to reach terms under which

the supermarket could stay. But, of course, any action in that direction — any lowering of the rent to something even remotely affordable for Associated — would be totally voluntary on the landlord’s part. In short, the steady attrition of beloved local merchants will be an ongoing story — unless there is a dramatic change, and that will most likely include some form of legislation. This loss, if the Associated’s lease is not renewed, would be very deeply felt because of the supermarket’s oversized importance in the community. But even if this store is saved — and we sincerely hope it is — the larger problem of skyrocketing commercial rents still isn’t being addressed. Community Board 2 has started an online petition to save the store, a terrific idea and more power to that effort. But again, will we be able to do that each and every time a critical store is threatened with being kicked out of its space? Mayor Bill de Blasio, to his credit, has made the “affordability crisis” one of the key issues of his administration. He pulled off a real coup last year when the Rent Guidelines Board voted to approve a rent freeze for one-year lease renewals for rent-stabilized apartments. That vote was a relief to millions of rent-burdened

New Yorkers. With de Blasio in the middle of his first term, we expect continued rent freezes — preferably rollbacks, as in a rent reduction. After all, as was clearly documented, landlords had unfairly profited from exaggerated operating-expense projections for years. Yet, de Blasio, unfortunately, has not been as good on protecting small businesses, a cornerstone of the city’s affordability. A year ago, this page advocated for a vote in the City Council on the long-stalled Small Business Jobs Survival Act. This bill has sat idly in the Council for around 25 years. Basically, it’s no secret that the city’s powerful real estate industry doesn’t want it ever to come up for a vote. The S.B.J.S.A. would create a system of nonbinding mediation and binding arbitration under which merchants would have a far better chance of negotiating fair lease renewals. Previous Council speakers, including Christine Quinn, have blocked the S.B.J.S.A. from being voted on, despite strong support for it among councilmembers. Now, under a new speaker, support has been building again for the bill — more than two dozen councilmembers are currently sponsors. A year ago, The Villager asked Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito where things stood on the S.B.J.S.A. and if

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR Soho actually beat Trump To The Editor: “Who’s is this f----n’ guy? Trump from Soho to Uh-oh?” (talking point, by Lincoln Anderson, March 10): Trump did not prevail, as you have stated. He lost — big time. His intention was to sell residential condos, which he disingenuously described as condo-ho-

tel rooms. Soho and Greenwich Village activists knew immediately his proposal was a scam to skirt the zoning. The Soho Alliance sued and persuaded the New York State attorney general to include notice of our lawsuit in the condo offering, thus scaring off any potential buyers. Who pays $2,000 a square foot to buy into a lawsuit? We also filed a complaint with the Securities and Exchange Commission in Washington that he was marketing Trump Soho as a “real estate investment,” yet never registered his investment

IRA BLUTREICH

councilmembers finally would be allowed to vote on it. She said the Council would have a hearing, maybe more than one, about small business survival that would look at all options, including the S.B.J.S.A. To date, though, there has been no hearing. This week, we again reached out to Mark-Viverito to ask what’s going on, but did not hear back by press time. Only two politicians last Sunday spoke to the larger issue. Congressmember Jerrold Nadler said he felt commercial rent regulation is needed, while Assemblymember Richard Gottfried talked about making laws to address the crisis. Maybe the S.B.J.S.A. isn’t the perfect answer. Maybe it needs some tweaking. Perhaps there are some better options, ones that go beyond the mere tax breaks de Blasio and others mistakenly think will appease the landlords. In short, this is a conversation we desperately need to have, involving all sides. Without addressing this issue, de Blasio’s affordability vision is deeply flawed. Speaker Mark-Viverito, it’s time to show guts and have that hearing you promised — and come up with real long-term solutions. Otherwise, we can only look forward to more desperate rallies and, sadly, a lot more store closings.

with the S.E.C. This got the feds on his case and caused him lots of grief, which he admitted in his book “Never Give Up.” Furthermore, at the ribbon-cutting ceremony you described, Trump famously bragged — and lied — that he had dozens of co-op units sold. In fact, only a handful were sold. But naive foreigners believed that statement and bought additional units, only to find out later that most of the units in the building were, in fact, not sold. So they sued to get their deposit money back, based on Trump’s fallacious public statements that day. With no buyers at that point, and thus no income flow, the property went into foreclosure. With no buyers, Donald Trump was forced to use it as a hotel, which is a legal use in that part of Soho — a use no one here complained about and the use we wanted in the first place. Trump even grudgingly admitted in “Never Give Up” that we activists had him on the ropes. He devoted an entire chapter to it, entitled “I Love a Good Fight,” focusing on his battle with us. At the chapter’s end, he admitted that we “caused him great anxiety,” among other uncharacteristic admissions of weakness. So today the building is functioning legally as a hotel — which is what we wanted all along — and not a single condo has sold. No, Trump did not prevail. He lost. Sean Sweeney Sweeney is director, Soho Alliance

Clinton increasingly attacks and counterattacks with “facts.” 16

March 17, 2016

LETTERS continued on p. 28

TheVillager.com

Whiplashed by change on Jane; Garages to be razed? TALKING POINT BY MICHELE HERMAN

his country is rich in vernacular early 20th-century architectural styles. You can wander into any city or town and instantly recognize the post office, the elementary school, the movie house. But what about the lowly urban garage? You know the one I mean. It’s one or two stories high but very wide, brick or stucco. It has bays and large multipaned windows and a symmetrical parapet line, with a series of Dutch steps or simple pediments. There are quite possibly some diamond-shaped details up high on the facade to add a little pizzazz. The far West Village still has a fair number of these humble but quite pleasing garage buildings. They don’t get a lot of love. Across the five blocks of Jane St., within the Greenwich Village Historic District, you will find two. To the west is the pair of contiguous little red buildings that until recently housed Pro Piano and to the east is a whitewashed parking garage still in operation. Both of these properties have recently been sold. The new owner of the Pro Piano property, who bought it for a reported $35 million, is planning a five-story, 80-foothigh, 15,000-square-foot single-family home. The rumored plan for the white garage, bought for $26 million, is a six-story building with a couple of townhouses and apartments and a gym. If recent experience is a guide, the Landmarks Preservation Commission will dicker with the developers about facade details, ask them to shave a little off the ceiling heights, and grant the rest. New York has been a developer’s paradise for centuries. Real estate pressures in the Village are intense. So I probably should get over feeling like I’ve been punched in the gut each time a developer buys up a piece of the city’s historic fabric as a teardown. Sometimes I think there’s even something first-world and knee jerk and suspect in my devotion to old buildings that may have outlived their useful life; surely, there are more important battles I could be fighting. But the past couple of days I’ve been walking the dog across Jane St. from the red garage to the white one. And the more I look at these buildings, the more important and even poignant they seem, and the more I feel compelled to push back against TheVillager.com

their destruction. This is only in part because I love Jane St. so much — charming, tree-canopied, all-ofa-piece, slightly overripe Jane St., where my husband and I set up our first household on its raggedy western edge in the ’80s. I got to thinking about early 20th-century garage style and about why these structures move me so, particularly when compared with the monstrous parking garages of the second half of the century. I started googling to learn more and hit gold: a Columbia master’s thesis entitled “Manhattan Parking Garages 18971930: Significance and Preservation” (Hilary Grossman, 2013). As I came to find out, these garage buildings are packed tight with history. They harken back to a largely forgotten period of American history when, practically overnight, the automobile overtook the horse and buggy. Between 1907 and 1917, New York was transformed so thoroughly that all the city’s horse stables were either demolished or converted and this wholly new building type proliferated. As Grossman explains, the automobile’s advent was considered a vast environmental breakthrough in a poop-saturated city. In the year 1900 alone, the city counted — don’t ask me how — 750,000 “horse accidents.” I think of my great aunt Dora, who called cars “machines.” How whiplashed her generation must have felt by change, much as we early 21st-century dwellers feel about our “devices.” It took a while for Americans even to come up with a word to describe buildings that stored cars. They were known as automobile stables until someone exported the French word “garer” (to dock). During that period, people were trying to figure out how this new culture would work. Cars and horses couldn’t coexist in a stable, even though the infrastructure of ramps and elevators and stalls suited both; the exhaust and noise scared the horses and the ammonia used to clean the stalls tarnished the cars. Around 1916, the purpose-built two-story garage type emerged. Modest as their exteriors were, these structures were quite modern inside, with clever ramps, elevators and turntable systems and some of the first steel-reinforced concrete slabs. At first, they tended to serve every car-related function — gas station, paint shop, sales room; a mechanic and his family probably lived upstairs. Then, when the Model T came along and cars became cheaper to run than horses, landlords kept the lucrative cars and kicked out everyone else. The one-story Pro Piano garage

building dates to 1919, smack in the middle of this era. The contiguous two-story building (actually two buildings) is from 1892, and has been a stable, a garage and a factory. My mother-in-law, who worked as a daycamp counselor at Greenwich House in the 1940s, vividly remembers taking her campers there for ice cream when it was a Borden’s factory. Over at the eastern end of Jane St., the white garage dates to 1921. According to the Landmarks report, it was built for the New York Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church, on the site of a church that dated to the 1840s. I’m still trying to ascertain whether, as I suspect, this garage has been in continuous use its entire life, a claim few commercial buildings in this city can boast. Like most of the systems that govern us, the landmarking process is wildly imperfect. Obviously, the city cannot save all structures with aesthetic and historical significance, and obviously someone has to make the

calls. My question is the same one that’s being so widely asked about our national politics: Is the system flawed or is it rigged? My sense is that developers are growing increasingly nervy and reckless. They buy up the remaining low-lying commercial properties within historic districts for wildly inflated prices, confident they will get the blessing of the L.P.C. to ram through demolitions. Call it the “noncontributing building” loophole — under which developers argue that certain buildings don’t contribute to a given district’s historical integrity. We’ve seen it in the recent hearings about Gansevoort St., and we are about to see it on Jane St. These garage buildings may be humble, but they clearly contributed plenty to the history and aesthetics of this city. I’m not as cynical as many. But if Landmarks rubberstamps another pair of luxury residential developments in these two garages’ place, I say the system is rigged.

PHOTO BY TEQUILA MINSKY

Soaring hub, soaring cost

The new World Trade Center transportation hub, dubbed the Oculus, opened earlier this month. The 350-foot-long, 115-foot-wide transit center was designed by Spanish-born architect Santiago Calatrava, and extends the Calatrava-designed PATH corridor, which opened three years ago. The incredibly high-priced hub cost $3.9 billion — about the same price as building the adjacent 104-story One World Trade Center. Included inside is a commuter train station — replacing one destroyed on 9/11 — retail shops and connections to subway lines. March 17, 2016

A graphic look at birth of Planned Parenthood RHYMES WITH CRAZY BY LENORE SKENAZY

ne hundred years ago in Brownsville, Brooklyn, our modern era began. In a squat building that no longer exists, a pretty and soft-spoken mom named Margaret opened an office where women could get something they’d never been allowed to obtain before. Birth control. The place wasn’t called Planned Parenthood in 1916. “It didn’t really have a name,” said Sabrina Jones, author of an upcoming graphic novel, “Our Lady of Birth Control: A Cartoonist’s Encounter with Margaret Sanger.” Back then, the idea of preventing unwanted pregnancies was so new and controversial, even Sanger herself didn’t expect to provide family planning to anyone other than… families. At the time, Brownsville’s population was predominantly Eastern European and Italian, so Sanger made

her flyers in Italian, Yiddish and English. “She assumed the clients would be mothers married with lots of children,” Jones explained. “Publicly, she never offered birth control to unmarried people — that was too far.” Sanger didn’t even seem like a revolutionary. Delicate and poised, she had three children of her own and, for a time, lived a quiet suburban life up in Hastings. Her husband, a draftsman, worked for the architect Stanford White. He’d urged young Margaret Higgins to marry him while she was still in nursing school, because he was afraid that she’d fall in love with a doctor. Sanger complied, but soon grew restless. As Jones put it, “She wanted a wider world.” Wilder, too. So in 1911 she moved to the Village and was soon mingling — and more — with the socialists and revolutionaries she met. Her new comrade Emma Goldman was probably the person who introduced her to birth control, and did so with an economic argument: Why is it that poor people, who can’t afford more children, always have more of them, while the upper classes don’t? The wealthy had something the

poor did not, and that something was contraception. Back then, family planning was still dicey and pricey. “Condoms were very expensive,” Jones noted. They were made out of sheep gut. “People washed them and reused them.” Poor women rarely even knew about these. For them, the only birth control was abortion. Sanger worked as a nurse in the slums, where desperate women begged her to tell them the secret: How could they avoid having kids they couldn’t feed, or the abortions they despised? Legally, she wasn’t allowed to tell them. Nobody was. Discussing birth control was against the law, as was dispensing it. When she finally decided to open her clinic, it was “an act of civil disobedience,” Jones said. Sanger went a step further and actually alerted the district attorney to her deed, because she wanted to go to court and get those laws thrown out. The road to that goal was fraught with protest, prison, and a nearly lethal hunger strike on the part of Sanger’s sister. But in the end, the law cracked, and finally doctors were legally allowed to tell their clients about condoms. Jones’s graphic novel tells that whole story, along with the reason

she felt compelled to write it. She woke up one morning, turned on the radio, “and I heard the story of a young woman testifying before Congress about the need for contraceptive coverage in student health plans,” she said. That woman, Georgetown law student Sandra Fluke, was immediately lambasted by Rush Limbaugh, who called her a slut and a prostitute. “She wants to be paid to have sex!” Limbaugh told his listeners. “She’s having so much sex she can’t afford the contraception!” Jones recalled, “I was horrified that in 2012 a woman could still be shamed for advocating birth control. When I came of age, birth control was a done deal that had achieved near universal acceptance. All the battles were about abortion.” Realizing Sanger’s crusade was back in the crosshairs, Jones reached for her drawing board — literally. Creating “social justice comics” is her standard M.O. Graphic novels have a way of making problems present in a way that simple paragraphs –– like these! — cannot. Margaret Sanger had her clinic, Sabrina Jones has her paintbrush, but they share the same mission: freedom to live and to love.

SPRING FREE ELECTRONICS R E C YC L I N G E V E N T S Avoid a $100 fine: It’s now illegal to put electronics in the regular trash!

10am – 4pm Rain or Shine FR, Mar 18• West 14th Street

South side of street, just west of 8th Avenue

Su, Mar 20 • Tompkins Sq. Park Avenue A between E 9th & 10th Street

Some action from the New York City-versus-Dublin firefighters bouts at Webster Hall in 2014.

Erin go Brawl at W. Hall! On Sat., March 26, at Webster Hall, 125 E. 11th St., a team of boxers from the Dublin Fire Department, the Garda Siochana Boxing Club, will square off against the New York Fire Department’s Bravest Boxing Team in a fundraiser. Dubbed the Easter Eve Uprising, the night of international amateur fistcuffs is in celebration of the 1916 Easter Uprising in Ireland. Tickets are $30 general admission, $50 ringside, at www.ticketweb.com (866-468-7619) or www. websterhall.com . Doors open at 6:30 p.m. First bout is at 7:30 p.m. sharp.

March 17, 2016

W E AC C E P T : Working and non-working computers, monitors, printers, scanners, keyboards, mice, cables, TVs, VCRs, DVD players, phones, audio/visual equipment, video games, cell phones and PDAs For more information, contact the Lower East Side Ecology Center at info@lesecolgycenter.org or 212.477.4022 We would like to thank our sponsor:

TheVillager.com

This column is about courage

Rev. Jen finds power in Pippi, prosthetics, pageants BY REV. JEN MILLER

very column I write has a theme. Sometimes it’s tough to come up with one, given that I’m not a war correspondent, political correspondent, or even a sane person. I’m just a human being lying on a dirty mattress trying to figure out what to say about being human. Yet, I feel no lack of pride. The best literature comes from observing the human condition, especially one’s own. Right now, my condition is broken. Seriously, it’s actually broken. Having slipped and fallen, I broke a rib under my right teat two weeks ago. If there are any physical therapists out there who do pro bono work and enjoy small boobs, I have a job for you! And, speaking of body parts, my heart is broken as well because my boyfriend, Joe, still has a brain tumor. When you are estranged from your lover and call his name and feel only thin air, it’s worse than doing a one-person show with no audience. The little man who Dorothy proclaimed wasn’t a Wizard after all may have, in fact, been a wise Wizard when he uttered the sentence, “Hearts will never be practical until they can be made unbreakable.” A heart, a brain, and courage are the triple threat that lands you in the psych ward. But what would we do without them? Never fall in love, contemplate existence, or bravely light a friend’s fart on fire? MGM should do a remake of “The Wizard of Oz” where everyone just wants an asshole — so they get Trump for president, and he tears down Oz and builds a casino that fails. Then everyone will be disappointed because they didn’t have the courage to have a brain or heart, TheVillager.com

PHOTO BY JOHN FOSTER

Iggy Pop would have noticed: Rev. Jen strolls the Lower East Side in a goblin mask and actual ears from “Legend,” but fails to attract the attention of a population more concerned with trolling Tinder than engaging with their once-weird neighborhood.

PHOTO BY JOHN FOSTER

Rev. Jen and her ultra-realistic baby orangutan doll, Marc Junior, go for a stroll — and, in doing so, demonstrate that they are every bit as legitimate as other “conventional” families.

so all they got was an asshole, thus proving my point. My brain is broken, and has been for years. If I were to list all my mental disorders in one column, this newspaper would be of encyclopedic size. My family recently tried to have me institutionalized in Maryland but there weren’t enough beds. Shocker! (Even Maryland’s state flag is psychotic.) If it were 1943, I would have already had a frontal lobotomy. Lucky for you readers, I am coherent enough to write stupid articles whilst having a bottle in front of me. (Thank you for that one, Mrs. Parker.) All I’ve got that’s not broken now is courage, which shouldn’t be overlooked. We all have a heart and a brain. Without both, we’d be dead — but courage is a thing you have to gain. Many of us are broken, like the glass someone might have accidentally stolen from the bar across the street (sorry, Lucky Jack’s!) that a certain a-hole cat just knocked over. At one time, glass, you served many mouths on the Lower East Side and fueled several idiotic conversations, but now you are just a pile of rubbish that cannot be taped up or glued together, only swept up. Hence, this column is about courage (and, clearly, excessive exposition). On my wall, there are pictures of Cher, Glinda, Dorothy, a howling female wolf, and Jayne Mansfield playing with her Chihuahua. Alongside Jayne is a painting I did of the Egyptian Goddess Bast, and next to it, a tiny picture of Pippi Longstocking. Across from my bed, next to my record player, there is a Spice Girls album, given to me by an ex-boyfriend’s ex-girlfriend; her REV. JEN continued on p. 20 March 17, 2016

Of apes, trolls, elf ears and the Spice Girls REV. JEN continued from p. 19

p.m. Tickets are available in advance ($10) at slipperroom.com, and are $12 at the door.

way of showing solidarity. But the most important thing in my bedroom is a photo, taken in the ’70s, of my dad, leaning down to talk to me. I am five years old, wearing heels (of course) and he is listening. At a very young age, he instilled in me the idea of girl power, the Spice Girls’ term for courage. Now is a time to harness that power, especially since we have a misogynistic presidential candidate (the previously mentioned asshole). How to harness Girl Power (no matter your sex or gender!):

BE LIKE PIPPI

As a child, I wanted to be like Pippi Longstocking, the “strongest girl alive.” She was a rebel who lived alone with her monkey, Mr. Nilsson. I begged my parents for a monkey. This was obviously not gonna happen in suburban Maryland. But some 40 years later, my mother remembered, and sent me an ultra-realistic baby orangutan for Christmas (a great ape, technically). His name is Marc Junior, named after my former roommate, who I frightened by convincing him I was actually obtaining a chain-smoking monkey to be named after him. Marc Junior has been to several bars, where he has terrified others who he sneaks up on. My friend, John (who took the pics for this column) and I also obtained a stroller, which we used to cart him around Park Slope alongside more conventional families!

BE KIND TO MOMS

When I read an article about “Foxie,” a chimpanzee who was rescued from laboratory research and lost her babies to the lab, my heart broke (again!). But it turns out Foxie takes solace in Troll Dolls! I contacted Chimpanzee Sanctuary Northwest

WEAR RIDICULOUS PROSTHETICS

PHOTO BY WALTER WLODARCZYK

He left his shirt at home — but Raven Solano, who came equipped with a “Pageant Dad,” nabbed the title of “Mr. Tribeca” at 2014’s Mr. Lower East Side Pageant (to his right, Rev. Jen and Faceboy). This year’s unholy fiasco takes place Mar. 21 at The Slipper Room.

and asked if I could send her a Troll. They’d already heard of my Troll Museum (established in 2000) and welcomed yet another Troll (she has a lot). I then sent Foxie a letter: Dear Foxie: My name is Rev. Jen and this is Adrianna. She’s the first troll I ever got. She is precious to me, but not half as precious as you, even though I’ve never met you. Her hair is matted because she’s been through some turmoil, just like you. She always has a smile on her face despite everything she’s endured and I hope she brings a smile to your face. Maybe someday I’ll get to meet you and the three of us can hang together. Your Soul Sister, Reverend Jen P.S. I would invite you over to the Troll Museum but I think it would piss off the landlords and scare the cat and dog. xoxo A creative menu brought to you by Chef Franco Barrio with locally sourced produce serving New York style food in the heart of the West Village.

(212) 989-3155 | thebespokekitchen.com 615 ½ Hudson St, New York, New York 10014 20

March 17, 2016

PHOTO BY JOHN FOSTER

You’re never too young to learn: Rev. Jen, ever the good mother, fosters an appreciation for art by taking Marc Junior to a gallery.

And with that, I boxed up my very first Troll and sent her to live with Foxie. Hopefully they are cuddling right now.

ATTEND THE 17th ANNUAL MR. LOWER EAST SIDE PAGEANT

It is actually the best night of the year. Any dude can compete. One need not live on the L.E.S., since no one can afford it these days! Categories for competition include talent, swimwear, and evening wear combined with Q&A. Any woman or gay man who attends gets to judge! Scores are tabulated on the Ballsack 3,000. To be held at The Slipper Room (167 Orchard St. at Stanton St.) on Mon., Mar. 21, at 9

As many people know, I have been steadily wearing elf ears for about 23 years, because they “look pretty” (see the above part about mental illness). Well, my mind was recently blown when Joshua White, founder of the famed “Joshua Light Show,” proclaimed that he had a mysterious present for me. We met for lunch and he handed me said present: prosthetics from the Ridley Scott-directed 1985 Tom Cruise vehicle “Legend.” For months, I’d gone without elf ears. At one point, Halloween Adventure even stopped stocking them because I was “the only person who buys them.” Now, I have such fierce elf ears that they were nominated for an Academy Award and I have a goblin mask! John and I decided to wear the prosthesis out for a walk, hoping others would be amazed and delighted. Sadly, the Lower East Side really has become the worst place on earth (next to Boston), as no one even noticed the fact that I was in a goddamned goblin mask, because they were all staring at their iPhones — probably looking for potential Tinder dates with other boring people. Tinder ’s tagline is “Like Real Life, Only Better.” I think I’ll stick to real life, but thanks for the option!

SPICE GIRLS

When one needs inspiration, one needs to look no further than the Spice Girls. Of course, as John and I were running rampant with Marc Junior, we got in an argument about who was our favorite. He likes Scary and I like Sporty (because her name insinuates that she likes sports, even though it’s Posh who got with Beckham!). This led us to take a complex survey, which involved asking random people on the street who their fave was. Currently, Scary and Sporty are tied. But, I enjoyed this answer: “Posh. She was the only one to whom I felt truly inclined to tell what I want. What I really really want. I feel like the rest were just bossing me around.” No matter who your favorite Spice Girl is, harness your Girl Power — even if some days, you feel like the Cowardly Lion. The only thing we have to fear is fear itself (I totally stole that line). TheVillager.com

No ducking Donald

Hideous monster cobbled from years of divisive tactics hanced interrogation” — the Republican Party absolutely cannot imagine who the hell put Donald Trump on the gurney where they’d spent all that time doing such cool stuff. David Brooks is shocked, shocked, that after years scribbling fawning apologia for the Bush administration’s lie-based regime change and its quest for the holy-yet-completely-made-up weapons of mass destruction, a liarliar-pants-on-fire like Donald Trump could demand such respect! John McCain is shocked, shocked, that less than a decade after trying to rejuvenate his own flagging presidential campaign by choosing an incoherent attention trollop as his running mate, a lowlife huckster like Donald Trump could be a heartbeat away from the presidency! Mitt Romney has his secret underwear in a twist and is shocked, shocked, I says, that after literally begging for the endorsement of (and money from) Donald Trump — a birther hobbyist unable to understand how such a darkly complected President could be born in Hawaii, when everybody

knows those people come from Africa, now, somehow inexplicably, that same Donald Trump, that actual same guy is the front-runner for the Republican nomination! Is this Bizarro World?! And this violence! Out of nowhere, in a vacuum, with no provocation whatsoever, hordes of well organized, professional thugs and bad dudes, almost certainly at the behest of known brutalitarian strongman Communist Bernie Sanders, descend on a perfect love fest (not a rally, we don’t want to call it a rally, what is this Nuremberg?) of law abiding White Supremacists, God-fearing, ponytailed, toothless sucker-punchers and adorable Heiling Grannies! Donald Trump is robbed of his God-given, constitutional right to free speech! I know, because Trump spoke about it freely and at great length on every network for at least an hour longer than the rally itself would have run, and to a much larger audience. But what could he do? After careful consultation with the police, and at their insistence, Trump “postponed” DONALD continued on p. 22

LIMITED ENGAGEMENT THROUGH MAY 8

A New Play Written By Scott Elmegreen and Drew Fornarola Directed By Andy Sandberg

“SAVVY AND ENTHRALLING! A candid, sex-ﬁlled ﬁrst-rate comic drama in the genre of queer theater.”

DESIGN BY MICHAEL SHIREY

isualize this: by moonlight, corpses dug from fresh graves; the abnormal brains of psychopaths stolen from a medical school. In his shadowy laboratory, Dr. Frankenstein stitches dismembered parts into a single grotesque form. The chain hoist clanks, slowly lifting the monstrous body up, up into the gathering storm! Lightning strikes, thunder roars! Transformers crackle, spit sparks, the monstrous body smokes! Inert. Lifeless. Still. But wait! A hand twitches on the dangling arm, Dr. Frankenstein lifts his hands to the sky and shrieks…not “It’s Alive!,” but “Where the F$%& did THAT thing come from?!” TheVillager.com

Not “That’s not what I meant to do.” Not “Who replaced my beautiful creation with this hideous monster?” Not “Oh, the horror of the predictable but unintended outcome of my experiments.” Not “Oops” or “Sorry.” Not “My bad.” Just “Where the F$%& did THAT thing come from?!” — as if there was absolutely zero connection between what he’d been doing and what happened. That’s the Republican Party right now. After literally a generation cobbling together a hideous mash of Southern Strategy, Dog Whistle Race Baiting and Fox News — slopping in chunks of rancid, defective brain matter from Lee Atwater, Roger Ailes and Rush Limbaugh, strapping the results to a waterboard and juicing it with “en-

- Gay City News

Starring Thomas E. Sullivan LIMITED ENGAGEMENT THROUGH MAY 8 Jake Epstein Jenna Gavigan

A New Play Written By

Scott Elmegreen and Drew Fornarola Directed by

Andy Sandberg PHOTO: ZACK DeZON

BY MAX BURBANK

SAVVY AND ENTHRALLING!

“

A candid, sex-filled first-rate comic drama in the genre of queer theater.” Gay City News

Thomas E. Sullivan

Jake Epstein

Jenna Gavigan

TELECHARGE.COM 212-239-6200 | Acorn Theatre at Theatre Row 410 West 42nd Street TELECHARGE.COM 212-239-6200 | Acorn Theatre at Theatre Row 410 West 42nd Street

StraightThePlay.com

#LivingALabel

March 17, 2016

Republicans ponder rich menu of sinking ship options DONALD continued from p. 21

the event, because he would never, ever want anybody to get hurt. Unless he was, you know, actively calling for them to get hurt like he does at every single rally, and certainly would have done at this one if the police hadn’t insisted he “postpone.” Except, here’s the thing: they didn’t. The Chicago Police Department says they had the whole situation pretty much under control, and that violence only broke out after Trump let everyone stew in the arena for a half hour before releasing a toady to tell them the Wizard wasn’t going to see them and they should come back tomorrow. See, the police didn’t “advise” Trump about anything. He never met with or spoke to them. He lies with such a high degree of certainty that the press won’t ask him about it, for fear of venturing into analysis. If they do ask, his earpiece will probably malfunction anyway. So with Super Duper Tuesday (seriously?) in the rearview mirror, what happens next? Rubio’s out, and now must decide if losing his home state to Trump was humiliating enough — or if he’d like to shoot the moon and lick The Donald’s jackboot. He could endorse Ted Cruz, an unspeakably loathsome human weasel whose survival depends on the enormity of Trump’s ego keeping direct sunlight from setting him ablaze. So the Grand Old Party (or Grand Old Penis, after Trump’s rebranding) offers three sinking ships for horrified elite Republican rats to climb aboard. Let’s call Ship Number One the Lusitania, where all the sailors line up behind Donald Trump. All they need to do is sign a loyalty oath stating “I pledge my soul to an orange leather sack of excrement, its pursed lips smacking at the prospect of bloody protesters wheeled from its presence on stretchers. We are indeed the party of White Supremacy, and we pretty much always have been since Goldwater — so let’s just admit it and win until we’re sick of winning.” On Ship Number Two, the Titanic, panicked passengers desperately attempt to keep Trump from amassing enough delegates to win the nomination on the first ballot at convention, allowing Cruz, Kasich, Paul Ryan, Mitt Romney and other imaginary white knights to fight it out like rabid cats in a sack. What’s left? The doomed ghost ship of last resort: The Flying Dutchman. Here, the spectral crew moves the goalposts at the last minute. They can do that. Conventions are governed by

March 17, 2016

DONALDJTRUMP.COM

“I don’t know what the hell you people are talking about. Look how yuge my hand is. It’s in a fist, but it would be twice as big if I opened it. Plus, it’s cold, and I just washed my hands.”

party rules, not law. One of the rules is that those rules can be changed whenever and however. Hell, they could make it so the candidate with the biggest hands gets the nod. The Republican Party has nothing but bad choices left. If human lastClementine-left-in-the-box-threeweeks-after-you-thought-they-wereall-gone Trump is the nominee, they’ll have to pray like hell for a terrorist attack. Barring a major fear-generating event to push your run-of-the-mill, mildly racist voters over the edge, there simply aren’t enough White Supremacist, neo-Nazi and fascist votes to win the general election. The brokered convention and rule change options both lead inevitably to thwarted Trump voters turning their rage and violence inward. That’s enough Republican on Republican fisticuffs to make the Chicago ’68 Democratic National Convention look like a damn Sunday School picnic. The Republican chickens have all come home to roost, and in mid-July they are going to turn the Quicken Loans Arena in Cleveland, Ohio into their own personal cock-fighting ring. Why not? Hasn’t the Republican race been basically a cockfight all along? See what I did there? The only question left is, “Who’s to blame?” Who made that monster on the table? The Republicans are certain it wasn’t them. Thanks, Obama.

DONALDJTRUMP.COM

“Okay, get those hands up for the pledge! No, a little lower. Just a little lower, like you’re in Nuremberg. Great, great. That’s the picture!”

AP PHOTO/CHARLES REX ARBOGAST

A terrifying collection of “bad dudes and professional thugs” descended upon the University of Illinois-Chicago campus, forcing Donald Trump to “postpone” his rally. TheVillager.com

Just Do Art BY SCOTT STIFFLER

BENEFIT FOR NO LONGER EMPTY

Founded in 2009 as a (literally) creative response to the still-familiar sight of businesses shuttered by rising rents and shifting consumer dynamics, one of the first projects from No Longer Empty (NLE) filled two vacant storefronts at the infamous W. 23rd St. Chelsea Hotel building with work from several of its artistic residents. The following year, NLE briefly occupied the former E. Fourth St. & Broadway Tower Records — in the guise of “Never Can Say Goodbye,” a fictional, thriving purveyor of vinyl whose record bins, walls, and stage were brimming with sound, light, and images from 20 artists tasked with delivering an experience that digital downloads and online sales can’t provide. These early projects allowed for, even encouraged, bittersweet contemplation and charged conversation about the loss of neighborhood character — but NLE quickly evolved from hosting site-specific installations to curating site-responsive exhibitions. Today, their work (much of it commissioned) is created in collaboration with the surrounding community, with the goal of leaving a blueprint for the future once the exhibit closes up shop. NLE’s forward-looking benefit, tellingly titled “The Journey Continues,” honors three women who are advancing their respective fields, while applying their talents to the betterment of the community: Ellen Baxter, of Broadway Housing Communities, improves the quality of life for the homeless by combining housing, education and the arts; Sol Aramendi (who’ll be spinning discs at the benefit) provides art-focused educational opportunities for immigrants; and Sarah Calderon, of ArtPlace America, advocates for the inclusion of art and culture in city planning. Calderon’s organization is a partnering funder of the Sugar Hill Children’s Museum of Art & Storytelling — a mixture of affordable housing, universal pre-K, and an art museum. Bidding for the art auction (hosted by Paddle 8 and available for preview at bit. ly/188Um6Q) concludes at the end of the benefit. Tues., Mar. 29, 7–10 p.m. at Sugar Hill Children’s Museum of Art & Storytelling (898 St. Nicholas Ave., at W. 155th St.; C train to 155th St. or 1 train to 157th St.). To purchase individual tickets or tables ($200–$5,000), visit nolongerempty.org/ TheVillager.com

PHOTO COURTESY OF THE ARTIST PHOTO BY WHITNEY BROWNE

Brendan Jamison and Mark Revels’ “Sugar Metropolis,” part of No Longer Empty’s 2014 “If You Build It” exhibition. NLE’s annual benefit happens Mar. 29 at the Sugar Hill Children’s Museum of Art & Storytelling.

A Mar. 21 benefit at The Bowery Electric will help defray medical costs associated with an accident that left members of musician Sonny Vincent’s family with severe burns.

DOCUMENTARY SCREENINGS AT THE AMERICAN JEWISH HISTORICAL SOCIETY

COURTESY AJHS AND THE FILMMAKERS

Michel Cojot, on a visit to NYC in the 1970s. His son will attend a screening of excerpts from the documentary “Cojot,” Mar. 23 at the American Jewish Historical Society.

home/benefit-2016 or send an email to benefit@nolongerempty.org. Follow NLE on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram; #nolongerempty and #NLEjourney.

BENEFIT FOR PUNK MUSICIAN SONNY VINCENT’S FAMILY

New York native Sonny Vincent was living in Europe on Jan. 2, when he learned that his son, daughter-in-law, and nine-year-old grandson were severely injured in a gas explosion and flash fire that engulfed their apartment. Vincent flew to North Carolina, with just the clothes on his back — and has been at their sides ever since, as they undergo treatment for third degree burns on 50–80% of their bodies.

A touring musician with deep roots in NYC (his band, TESTORS, performed at Max’s Kansas City and CBGB), Sonny has few resources, and has canceled three tours to be by his family’s side. All proceeds from this night of music, poetry, and rare collectible merchandise will defray the costs of medical treatment and help them rebuild their lives. Performers include Walter Lure & The Waldos, New York Junk, WYLDLIFE, Puma Perl, The Nuclears, and DJ La La Linda. Mon., Mar. 21, 7 p.m., at The Bowery Electric (327 Bowery, btw. Second & Third Sts.). Visit tktwb.tw/1SzqmGi for tickets ($12 online, $15 at the door). To make a donation, visit gofundme.com/xnvynbcc.

France, Jewish identity, and the Holocaust are themes that run through this night of documentary film programming dedicated to addressing the trauma, and celebrating the resilience, of those who’ve been targets of genocide and violence. Set in 2014 as France commemorates the 70th anniversary of D-Day, Curt Fissel and Ellen Friedland’s 28-minute “Yellow Stars of Tolerance” follows an effort to preserve stars painted on a Normandy synagogue’s exterior wall during World War II, that were a means of terrorizing the local Jewish community. Scheduled for national release in 2017, director Boaz Dvir will present a 20-minute preview of his PBS documentary “Cojot: A Second Chance Comes Only Once.” The character study follows Holocaust survivor Michel Cojot through postwar life as a Parisian banker, a Nazi hunter on the trail of Klaus Barbie, and a pivotal player in the 1976 Entebbe hostage drama (his son Oliver, 12 at the time, was among those held by terrorists who hijacked a return flight to Paris from Tel Aviv). Oliver will join filmmakers from both projects, for a panel discussion followed by a reception. Wed., Mar. 23, 7 p.m. at the American Jewish Historical Society (15 W. 16th St., btw. Fifth & Sixth Aves.). For tickets ($10 general, $7 for students, seniors & AJHS members), visit ajhs.org or call 212-294-6160. March 17, 2016

Mosaic Man, BID try to piece together pole project BY LINCOLN ANDERSON

im Power, the East Village’s Mosaic Man, says he’s being pushed to the limit, asked to do what may be humanly impossible. He has around four months left to restore seven of his iconic mosaic-encrusted street light poles, so that they can be returned to Astor Place in time for the completion of the Astor Place / Cooper Square renovation project this summer. But he said he needs more funds to do the job properly — plus, it should actually include 10 of his poles, not seven. Currently, the poles are sitting in a city Department of Transportation lot in Sunnyside, Queens. That’s another issue for Power, who has limited mobility. The Mosaic Man, who lives in supportive housing at The Lee, on E. Houston St., is hoping to find someplace nearby him where he can fix up the lampposts. He had hoped the Lower Eastside Girls Club on Avenue D might be a possibility. The Village Alliance business improvement district has agreed to give Power up to $9,000 for the work, paying him on a pole-by-pole basis as he completes each one. But Power contends he needs $40,000 to do the work properly, which would include 10 poles, including $3,000 for a couple of assistants to help him. The poles, he explained, are not going back to the East Village as mere street furniture, but as “sculptures.” “This is a really unusual trip — it’s never been done,” he said of the novel project. He is considering doing a Kickstarter campaign to raise the additional cash, though is currently “on strike” through April 1, he said, over his frustration with the project. The poles were removed from Astor Place and cut down to 10 feet tall. The mosaics stop at 8 feet high, leaving the poles’ top 2 feet barren. Power plans to cover up these unadorned areas with brickettes — bricks or slabs that are about one-twelfth the thickness of normal bricks — on top of which he will have added mosaics. Then, eight of these small, 3-inch-wide brickettes will be glued to the tops of each of the octagonal poles. Topping it all off, literally, Power hopes that a local potter from E. Ninth St. will then create blue-andgreen “crowns” to perch atop each of the posts. All the lampposts will need new grouting, which is a major job in itself, but Power has a special tool for that. Though he is on strike, Power is raring to get to work. “My time is precious and they’re wasting my time,” he said, adding, “Forget their plan — I’m doing my plan.”

March 17, 2016

PHOTO BY TEQUILA MINSKY

Jim Power, the Mosaic Man, left, was honored by Clayton Patterson at last year’s Acker Awards for defiant avant-garde artists, held at Theatre 80 on St. Mark’s Place.

A master craftsman, he refuses to skimp on materials or do a shoddy job. “This is going to be out there for the next 1,000 years,” he said of the totemic “Mosaic Trail” posts. “We’re going to build this the way the Irishman started this — or we’re not going to build it at all,” he declared, referring to himself. “A patch job, this ain’t. This is historical restoration. I’ll raise the money myself. I’ll go to the Chinese government, if I have to.” He uses a superstrong glue to bond the sundry glass beads and pottery and plate shards to the poles, then an even-stronger, weather-resistant proprietary grout mix to fill in the spaces between them and lock everything into place. No way will he use cheaper bonding agents, he insisted, which is another reason he needs more than $9,000. In and of itself, the work is physically demanding. Plus, he has been putting off hip-replacement surgery for years and is in a lot of pain, which does not make things any easier. Yet, he’s determined to get the job done. “Sometimes, I have 200 pieces of glass in my fingers,” he noted. “Do you know what the pain is like?” According to William Kelley, executive director of the Village Alliance, the city’s Public Design Commission approved the sites of the seven returning poles, which will be as close as possible to their previous spots. The Department of Design and Con-

struction recommended the poles’ tops be welded shut with metal caps to waterproof them — but it did not O.K. any ceramic “crowns,” Kelley noted. The larger Astor Place / Cooper Square renovation project will include widened sidewalks and new public plazas and permanently close Astor Place between Lafayette St. and Fourth Ave. to car traffic. The work stalled for about a year, Kelley said, because D.D.C. had to reassure the Metropolitan Transportation Authority about its construction plans around the Astor Place subway station entrances. Because this spot is an older part of the subway system, there isn’t much depth between the sidewalk and top of the subway tunnel, so it’s “fragile,” Kelley said, and the M.T.A. wanted to know the work would be done carefully. The whole project is now expected to finish by August, he said, and they would like to be able to put in Power’s restored poles by then. The BID also hopes to have some fall programming in the new plaza spaces, including free smaller-scale performances and readings. Kelley said he is all for the Mosaic Man doing Kickstarter to raise more funds. “I think Kickstarter is a really cool idea,” he said. “You can give $5, $10, and I think that’s really amazing because people can feel a part of it.” Kelley said it would be no problem for the Village Alliance to transport

Power’s poles to a local spot where he could work on them. But the Lower Eastside Girls Club’s executive director said their clubhouse is not an option. “We don’t have that kind of space,” Lyn Pentecost said. “Every single room is in use. He needs some kind of warehouse or an empty storefront.ˮ Maybe the Museum of Reclaimed Urban Space (MoRUS) could be an option. “They have a basement,” she noted. Told about Power’s plan to create the small brickettes for the poles’ tops — something Power said the Girls Club members might enjoying helping to make — Pentecost said he should contact Megan Kindsfather, the Girls Club’s director of arts programs. Summing things up, the BID’s Kelley said, “We are signing a contract for one pole at a time to ensure the project moves forward. He is paid per pole and receives money upon completion and inspection. All work must be complete by July. The most critical issue at this time is that Jim needs to find space to work on the poles. “The proposal to the city always had seven poles,” Kelley continued. “Two of the bases were rusted and rotted and did not survive removal and transport; so at this point we have seven poles and five bases.” Kelley noted Power’s numbers tend to fluctuate, in general. “Jim alternates claiming between 40 and 80 poles once existed [along the entire Mosaic Trail] and I have no idea what is really true,” he said. “The trail started at Astor Place but went east to Tompkins Square Park and certainly poles have been replaced over the years. “Jim also took it upon himself to strip one of the Astor poles completely before salvage for some reason.” For his part, Power claims three of the poles were stripped of tiles — but not by him. “I don’t care — I have a lot of tiles, I’ll put ’em back on,” he protested. “Why only seven poles? It just looks like they’re cutting me down. “Either they’re gonna deal — or no mosaics,” he warned. “Nine thousand dollars, you think I’m excited about that? Right now, I should call the whole thing off.” One thing that is not in dispute, Power said, is the positive effect of mosaics on people. “Five thousand years ago, the Greeks put mosaics into public housing,” he said. “Why? Because it tranquilizes the whole city. Boom!” To help Power’s Astor Place mosaic-pole restoration project, contact him at nycjimpower@aol.com or contact City Lore at citylore@citylore.org. Funds for the project can be contributed at PayPal. TheVillager.com

To Advertise Call: 646-452-2490 LegalAds@TheVillager.com Deadline â€“ 12 noon Wednesday

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March 17, 2016

To Advertise Call: 646-452-2490 LegalAds@TheVillager.com Deadline â€“ 12 noon Wednesday

March 17, 2016

TheVillager.com

To Advertise Call: 646-452-2490 LegalAds@TheVillager.com Deadline â€“ 12 noon Wednesday

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March 17, 2016

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR To Advertise Call: 646-452-2490 LegalAds@TheVillager.com Deadline – 12 noon Wednesday

Continued from p. 16

Green with praise To The Editor: Re “Purple, pedicabs, a push for recycling: A look back at New York’s ‘Eco ’80s’ ” (news article, March 10): Terrific article by Bill Weinberg — evocative, eloquent and succinct. I happen to disagree about Citi Bike; I think its positives far outweigh the downsides Bill mentioned. Ditto the pedestrian plazas. But no matter. Great piece. And Carl Hultberg’s photos are indeed fabulous. Amazing that Carl was/is an activist, organizer, visionary, artist, photographer, chronicler and archivist all rolled into one. Bravo to both Carl and Bill. Charles Komanoff

In the doghouse To The Editor: As open space is intrinsic to the health and welfare of a community, there should be a moratorium for building on city-owned land Downtown. Community boards could help by working to protect what open space is left below 14th St., which has the least amount of open space in our city. But Community Board 2 wants to build housing in the open space at Hudson and Clarkson Sts. to save the Elizabeth St. Garden. The C.B. 2 chairperson’s reasoning is that we have more park here than on the East Side because of the Hudson River Park — but dog owners have been lobbying for that spot for years. Currently, there is a problem for dog owners, who dwarf all other park-user groups, in terms of numbers. Basically, there is nowhere to go to play if you are a family with young children and a dog. There is nowhere to go if you have a service dog or want to train your dog, or if you have a small dog. This is particularly a hardship for the elderly since visits to the run are a free daily activity that connects to and builds community. After eight years of lobbying by local dog owners, the

March 17, 2016

Hudson River Park Trust gave a minuscule 2,400 square feet for the roughly 25,000 dog owners in the area. And after promising dog owners space on Pier 40, the Trust has reneged. Dogs are a field sport. That is why we have used the blacktop field at Mercer and Houston Sts., though N.Y.U. is slated to develop it, and why we used J.J. Walker ball field until we were locked out — in favor of league sports — with no alternatives offered. Nowadays, when I go by J.J. Walker, I ask where the teams using the field are from. For much of the year, they are adult teams coming from other areas, where they have adequate parks and fields. So how is it possible that dog owners are so underrepresented? Who do our community forums serve? The C.B. 2 chairperson advocates for more athletic fields in the C.B. 2 area. The C.B. 2 chairperson, the C.B. 2 Parks and Waterfront Committee chairperson and the current Hudson River Park Advisory Council chairperson are all ex-Greenwich Village Little League presidents. No one representing dog owners has been invited onto the Parks and Waterfront Committee. Meanwhile, the advisory council has at least five ball league members and not one dog owner group member. In short, if your child likes the outdoors but not team sports — like my son — he or she is out of luck here. How is this disparity allowed to continue? I challenge our community forums to represent all of us — since we all pay taxes for park recreation. Thanks to C.B. 2 for voting to save Elizabeth St. Garden. Now, please save dog owners’ space and any open space left. We don’t have any to spare. Lynn Pacifico

She trusts in Taylor To The Editor: Re “Fox has his facts all wrong on Pier 57 project” (talking point, by Diana Taylor, March 3): Continued on p. 30 TheVillager.com

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March 17, 2016

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR Continued from p. 28

I could not agree more with Diana Taylor’s column concerning the Pier 57 project. As a Chelsea resident I stand in firm agreement with Ms. Taylor on the benefits of Pier 57 to the community. The pier is finally ready to be utilized for the public after several years of going unused. Moreover, it would add more than 90,000 square feet of public park area for people to enjoy. The Hudson River Park Trust continually works with the community to inform its neighbors about the progress it makes, as well as gives us opportunities to give input before things happen. As a parent I am constantly trying to build a better city for my own children and other children, and Pier 57 is part of this movement. I look to examples like the High Line of the greatness we can achieve by reutilizing abandoned and underused properties and facilities, and I hope we don’t forgo this opportunity to do something unique and special at Pier 57. Catherine Juracich

Blaz in the zone To The Editor: On behalf of the dozens of tenants represented by the Haven Plaza Tenants Association, we support vital reforms that will grow and protect affordable housing. Our fellow tenants are working people. They need and deserve affordable housing, and the zoning reforms proposed by the mayor will significantly boost the supply of affordable housing in our neighborhood. Decades ago, tenants had the support of programs like Mitchell-Lama and Section 8 to help them afford their homes. We need a new approach today that meets the needs of our time. The crisis we’re in has meant all of us are spending more and more of our income on rent. Today, more than half of New Yorkers are rent-burdened, spending more than one-third of their take-home pay on rent.

March 17, 2016

Every dollar spent on rent is one less dollar we have to feed our families, to educate our kids and to save for the future. It’s forcing families out of neighborhoods they’ve lived in their entire lives — and the only solution is to build a lot more affordable housing for the people who need it. What the de Blasio administration has proposed will change the reality in our neighborhoods for the better. The mayor’s Mandatory Inclusionary Housing program change will make it a hardand-fast requirement for developers themselves to build permanently affordable housing in any area of the city that is rezoned. That building will go along with construction that is subsidized by the city — and so exponentially increase the amount of affordable housing we can provide to our city’s working families. We are also strong supporters of the Zoning for Quality and Affordability. By overhauling these outdated rules, as the city proposes, we could not just increase the amount of senior and affordable housing built in our city, but ensure those apartments are the kind we’d all be proud to live in. The city is taking unprecedented steps to preserve existing affordable apartments and protect tenants in their homes — but we can only turn the tide of this crisis if we change the way we build affordable housing and demand more from developers. Together, these reforms will strengthen our neighborhoods, serve our tenants and ensure New York City remains a city for everyone. We urge you to support them. Erma Campbell Campbell is past president, Haven Plaza Tenants Association E-mail letters, not longer than 250 words in length, to news@ thevillager.com or fax to 212229-2790 or mail to The Villager, Letters to the Editor, 1 Metrotech North, 10th floor, Brooklyn, NY, NY 11201. Please include phone number for confirmation purposes. The Villager reserves the right to edit letters for space, grammar, clarity and libel. Anonymous letters will not be published. TheVillager.com

Does It Have The Apple Logo? We Can Fix It. At Tekserve, we support all things Apple. PHOTO BY DAMIEN ACEVEDO.

The NYC Rush, bottom row, from left, Kayla Acevedo, Grace Kirwin, Ava Wallis, Olivia Mazuel, Torrence Garvey and Julietta Orciuoli; top row, from left, Nathalie Perra, Katherine Minnis, Ella Carter, Amanda O’Shea and Raiya Dhalwala. Players not in photo: Paige Ali, Ella Franco and Leah Meyerson.

NYC Rush are in a hurry to gel on fast-pitch scene BY CORIE BEARDSLEY AND DAMIEN ACEVEDO

fter a long winter of indoor practices, the NYC Rush 12U team, headed by their two coaches, Corie Beardsley and Mary Beth Wallis, got outdoors last week to practice as a team. The 70-degree was not a bad way to ease outdoors in March for Manhattan’s only girls fast-pitch softball tournament travel team. Our young squad — made up of 11- and 12-year-olds — participated in one tournament this winter. On President’s Day, Mon., Feb 15, we ventured up to the Danbury Sports Dome in Connecticut. The forecast of snow resulted in the games being pushed up to an earlier start than planned and shortened games. We had a rough start, but by the fourth and final game started to see the team come together a bit. It was most of the girls’ first tournament ever! They worked hard and learned a lot. At the tournament’s end, they each were able to speak to something they were proud of that they did and what

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they thought they could work on. We are so proud of the girls, and excited to get them on the field to start practicing as a team in anticipation of our first spring tournament on April 9! Girls are scheduled into at least seven tournaments over April, May and June. These are mostly USSSA tournaments in New Jersey. The NYC Rush team is comprised of girls from Midtown East, Stuyvesant Town, the East Village, Lower East Side, the Bronx, Financial District and Battery Park City. Many of them play for their middle school and local Little League teams as well. They are practicing twice a week as a team and enlisting private batting, positioning and pitching lessons on their off days. The team’s trainer, Renae Beauchman, is from California and played softball at Long Island University, a Division 1 school. She trains our girls in hitting, defense and situational plays. And don’t forget Damien Acevedo, the team photographer! For more about NYC Rush, visit their new Web site at http://www. nycfastpitch.com/home.

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March 17, 2016

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