The Villager

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JAPANESE TWIST ON GREEK CLASSIC, PG. 22

Volume 81, Number 16 $1.00

West and East Village, Chelsea, Soho, Noho, Hudson Square, Little Italy, Chinatown and Lower East Side, Since 1933

September 22 - 28, 2011

Small businesses ask City Council for assistance BY ALINE REYNOLDS Though Lower Manhattan is ranked as the fourth largest commercial district in the country, the neighborhood’s small businesses struggled substantially following 9/11 and the ensuing recession. Such was the message relayed by several business owners at a City Council hearing on Downtown small businesses held on Thurs., Sept. 15. Prior to 9/11, Lower Manhattan was home to about 8,300 compaPhoto by Tequila Minsky

New-York based blues and folk singer Feral Foster sang his original soulful melodies. He said he spent three years singing in the park.

Bringing it all back home Washington Square Park was the long-awaited scene of the first annual Folk Music Festival on Sept. 17 and 18. Eli Smith, host of the online Down Home Radio, “a hardcore, unreconstructed, paleo-acoustic, folk music program,” was hired by the Parks Department to produce it. The Mario Batali Foundation was one of the festival’s sponsors. The free festival hosted a variety of bands and gave Villagers a chance to dig it on the grass.

Rudin moving forward on St. V’s redevelopment despite opposition BY ALBERT AMATEAU The Rudin Organization came to a raucous Community Board 2 hearing last week with its proposal for new zoning and special permits for the $800 million residential conversion of the east side of the defunct St. Vincent’s Hospital campus. As expected, the emotional high point of the Sept. 15 event was the demand for a new full-service hospital by Yetta Kurland and her partisans. But Community Board 2 members stuck to the environmental review issues at hand. The central issue was Rudin’s

large-scale development application to replace a similar zone that the city granted in 1979 for St. Vincent’s Coleman and Link Buildings on the east side of Seventh Ave. Rudin plans to demolish Coleman and Link, along with two other buildings in the former hospital campus and replace them with the adaptive reuse of four buildings, a 203-foot-tall apartment tower on Seventh Ave., a new mid-rise building on 12th St. and five townhouses on 11th St., with a total of 450 luxury condos. The proposed 113-foot-tall midrise building on 12th St. would replace the existing 109-ft. tall Reiss Building.

The plan also includes the conversion of the O’Toole pavilion on the west side of the avenue into a comprehensive community health center and freestanding emergency department to be operated by North ShoreLong Island Jewish Health System. A 15,000-square-foot park is planned for the triangle on the west side of the avenue across 12th St. from O’Toole. On the east side of the avenue the plan calls for 9,400 square feet of back yard gardens between the 11th St. townhouses and the residential buildings

nies and was arguably the most famous business district in the world, noted Councilmember Margaret Chin. The 9/11 attacks damaged or destroyed 14 million square feet of office space, eliminated 650,000 jobs and disrupted or closed nearly 18,000 businesses, according to the City Council. More than 700 businesses were displaced in the former World Trade Center alone, and some 3,400 small firms

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St. Mark’s Bookshop, Cooper Union bound together in rent talks BY AIDAN GARDINER After a meeting last week with Cooper Union administrators, the owners of St. Mark’s Bookshop said they might be one step closer to saving their ailing store, thanks in part to the recent outpouring of community support. The president and board of trustees of Cooper Union, which rents space to the iconic bookstore, were expected to convene on Sept. 20 and 21 to decide how to pro-

ceed. Bob Contant and Terry McCoy, the store’s owners, said they hope the college will agree to decrease their rent from $20,000 to $15,000 because steadily declining sales have made it difficult to pay the higher rate. Cooper Union administrators said they would reach out to the owners on Thursday, Sept. 22, to discuss the next steps. Cooper Union representatives could not be reached for

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WALL STREET: OCCUPIED PAGE 12

EDITORIAL, LETTERS PAGE 18

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515 CANAL STREET • NYC 10 013 • COPYRIGHT © 2011 COMMUNITY M E D I A , L L C


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