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Hurricane Exposed Flaws in Protection of Tunnels
By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL
Nearly two weeks after Hurricane Sandy struck, the vital arteries that bring cars, trucks and subways into New York City’s transportation network have recovered, with one major exception: the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel remains closed.
The devastation there has underscored how major tunnels across the region are poorly protected from extreme weather and how they will need significant modifications to prevent such catastrophic failures in the future.
The tunnel’s general manager, Marc Mende, recounting what happened on the night of the storm, made it clear that he had no ability to block the angry rapids he saw heading for the Manhattan entrance.
He described the scene as “surreal,” saying that he had quickly helped power down a generator and then made a harrowing drive through the nearly two-mile-long tunnel as it started filling with water to make sure his workers had evacuated.
“I couldn’t believe it — this tunnel never flooded before,” he said. “This tunnel didn’t even get puddles.”
Unlike a number of other tunnels around the world, the Brooklyn-Battery does not have even a basic system to block water at its entrances. No gates or plugs or other barriers. Nor do Manhattan’s other tunnels. Defenseless under the storm’s ravages, the Brooklyn-Battery instead served as a drain for Lower Manhattan, filling with nearly 100 million gallons of water.
It is unclear when the tunnel is going to reopen, since engineers are just beginning to assess the damage to lighting and ventilation systems, for example. That leaves the 50,000 vehicles that used to take it each day — from commuter express buses to cement trucks bound for the World Trade Center site — still struggling to find alternatives.
“I’d guess now over the next few years, we’ll see more being done to identify critical facilities and protect them from extreme events,” said D. Wayne Klotz, past president of the American Society of Civil Engineers and a Houston water engineer. “If you think what happened is unacceptable — and I’d say it was — you have to do something. Because I can guarantee you this kind of storm will happen again.”
In interviews, several engineers said they were shocked that New York City had not done far more to safeguard its tunnels, especially the Brooklyn-Battery, the longest underwater tunnel in the United States, which has a notoriously low-lying entrance.
While the rising seas and extreme weather associated with climate change have raised the risk, engineers also point out that because tunnels have a limited number of entrances and exits, they are not that hard to protect.
After a close call during Hurricane Katrina, Mobile, Ala., rejiggered the ventilation system of a major tunnel to prevent damage from floodwater; the city has studied building up ground around entrances.
Houston has installed watertight doors to protect its pedestrian tunnels from floodwater — much like the sealing emergency doors on cruise ships. The Midtown Tunnel in Norfolk, Virginia, has long had a floodgate, which is tested twice a year.
Richard Dawson, director of the Center for Earth Systems Engineering Research at Newcastle University in England, said he “was quite surprised there weren’t floodgates” on New York’s road and subway tunnels. Many stations of the London Underground have them.
In recognition of the growing risk, the Department of Homeland Security in January successfully tested a giant protective inflatable tunnel plug that expands in minutes when filled with water, like a car air bag. Before Hurricane Sandy, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority deployed considerably less sophisticated methods, using plywood to cover some subway grates and piling sandbags at entrances.
Asked whether the Transportation Authority was exploring new flood-prevention measures, Aaron Donovan, an agency spokesman, said: “At this point, our focus is on the immediate need to restore the tunnel. Long-term planning can and will take place once this is behind us.”
The Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel had never closed for weather, even as a precaution, until Tropical Storm Irene last year.
But water levels on the southern end of Manhattan have risen about nine inches since the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel was opened in 1940. It is a significant increase, since its entrance is just a few feet above sea level.
The Queen-Midtown and Holland Tunnels also flooded, though less severely, during Hurricane Sandy. Both have now reopened.
“I always knew Manhattan’s tunnels could flood,” said Scott Douglass, a coastal engineer at the University of South Alabama. “But a computer model is a lot different than seeing pictures with water pouring in.”
Building codes and engineering practices meant to protect urban infrastructure from weather-related disasters have generally not kept pace with evolving scientific knowledge, computer-assisted engineering capabilities and a shifting climate, experts said. The problem is amplified for older structures like the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel.
“They were using slide rules to crunch numbers,” said Mr. Klotz, and relying on limited historical weather data to define a worst-case flood. New computer modeling provides guidance and solutions. After one of its coastal plants narrowly escaped flooding during Hurricane Ivan in 2004, Chevron asked Dr. Douglass to model its vulnerability. The result was an 18 foot-high sea wall that prevented damage during Hurricane Katrina.
The same model estimated a storm surge could be nearly 30 feet at another Gulf location, Dr. Douglass said, adding: “People say that couldn’t happen. But yes it could. That is what we should be doing now in every coastal city.”
Rob Beck, senior vice president of engineering at Munich Re, the global insurer, said that when asked to insure tunnels, he studies the elevation of the entrances relative to severe floodwaters. “This is an extreme event in terms of urban infrastructure, but the event was predictable and known — I knew if it hit at a certain time, the subways were flooded,” he said. “The M.T.A.’s tunnels were never designed for this kind of storm surge. Should they be? In my opinion: clearly yes.”
But protection can be costly and cities tend to respond only after disasters. Houston installed the watertight doors in its pedestrian tunnels only after flooding caused extensive damage during record rainfall from Tropical Storm Alison in 2001.
“We’ll save hundreds of millions by closing half a dozen doors,” said Mr. Klotz, the past president of the engineers’ society. “It was amazing how little they had to do.”
Asked what would happen if a similar storm hit again, Mr. Mende, the manager of the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel, shook his head, calling Hurricane Sandy “an act of God,” as pumps whirred on the barren toll plaza in Red Hook the background.
He said he was proud of his maintenance staff’s work in response to the disaster. While engineers said the flooding could have been readily prevented,
Mr. Klotz said: “Whoever owns that tunnel knows exactly what it would take to keep water out in case of a flood. and it’s not high tech. They just didn’t want to spend the money.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/10/nyregion/hurricane-sandy-showed-vulnerability-of-citys-tunnels.html?ref=nyregion&pagewanted=print
A Flooded Mess That Was a Medical Gem
By ANEMONA HARTOCOLLIS
The federal government’s emergency management chief trudged through darkened subterranean hallways covered with silt and muddy water Friday, as he toured one of New York City’s top academic medical centers in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy. The basement of the complex, NYU Langone Medical Center in Manhattan, smelled like the hold of a ship — a mixture of diesel oil and water.
“You’re going to deal with the FUD — fear, uncertainty and doubt,” W. Craig Fugate, administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, told NYU Langone officials afterward, as they retreated to a conference room to catalog the losses. “Don’t look at this. Think about what’s next.”
NYU Langone, with its combination of clinical, research and academic facilities, may have been the New York City hospital that was most devastated by Hurricane Sandy. What’s next is a spectacularly expensive cleanup.
Dr. Robert I. Grossman, dean and chief executive of NYU Langone, looking pale and weary — as if he were, indeed, struggling to hold back the FUD — estimated that the storm could cost the hospital $700 million to $1 billion. His estimate included cleanup, rebuilding, lost revenue, interrupted research projects and the cost of paying employees not to work.
As the hurricane raged, the East River filled the basement of the medical center, at 32nd Street and First Avenue, knocked out emergency power and necessitated the evacuation of more than 300 patients over 13 hours in raging wind, rain and darkness. It disrupted medical school classes and shut down high-level research projects operating with federal grants.
Mr. Fugate arrived to inspect the damage and help plot the institution’s recovery, the advance guard of what aides said would be a hospital task force. He was brought in by Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York, who kept saying that there was nothing like seeing the damage firsthand to understand how profound it really was.
“What was that movie — ‘Contagion?’ ” Mr. Schumer said, marveling at the hellish scene.
NYU Langone’s patients, a major source of revenue, have been scattered to other hospitals, creating a risk that they may never return. Dr. Grossman said he was counting on those patients’ loyalty.
John Sexton, president of New York University, which includes NYU Langone, and who also met with Mr. Fugate, raised fears that researchers might be lured away to other institutions because their grants were ticking away on deadline or because they must publish or perish. Outside the hospital, tanks of liquid nitrogen testified to the efforts to keep research materials from spoiling.
In inky blackness, the group stood at the brink of the animal section of the Smilow Research Center, where rodents for experiments had been kept, but they did not go inside. On Nov. 3, a memo sent to NYU Langone researchers said the animal section, or vivarium, was “completely unrecoverable.”
Dr. Grossman said that scientists had managed to save some rodents by raising their cages to higher ground.
A modernized lecture hall with raked seats used by medical students had been filled “like a bathtub,” he said, though it was dry on Friday. The library, he said, “is basically gone.”
Four magnetic resonance scanners, a linear accelerator and gamma knife surgery equipment, kept in the basement, were now worthless. Dr. Grossman said that in the future, he wanted to move such equipment, which is very heavy, to higher floors.
Electronic medical records were protected by a server in New Jersey, he said.
Richard Cohen, vice president for facilities operations, took the group past piles of sandbags and a welded steel door that had been blown out by the force of the flood. “That door was put in around 1959 to 1960, when doors were really doors,” Mr. Cohen said. “And this thing is completely torsionally twisted. I’ve never seen anything like that.”
Walking to the back of the hospital, Mr. Cohen used a loading dock as a measuring stick to estimate that the surge had risen to 14 ½ feet. “We were prepared for 12 feet, no problem,” Dr. Grossman said.
Dr. Grossman said it would take a couple of more weeks of assessing the damage to determine when the hospital could reopen. Outpatient business is already returning. Research and some inpatient services will come next.
Mr. Fugate said his agency would help cover the uninsured losses, and urged NYU Langone officials to move ahead.
At this point, Dr. Grossman said, he could only theorize as to why the generators had shut down. All but one generator is on a high floor, but the fuel tanks are in the basement. The flood, he said, was registered by the liquid sensors on the tanks, which then did what they were supposed to do in the event, for instance, of an oil leak. They shut down the fuel to the generators.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/10/nyregion/damage-from-hurricane-sandy-could-cost-nyu-langone-millions.html?hp&pagewanted=print
Bloomberg is nuts.
Marathon Presses On as Backlash Builds
By KEN BELSON
Amid intensifying criticism, New York Road Runners continued Thursday to prepare for the New York City Marathon with an abbreviated schedule of events leading to the race.
With the death count from Hurricane Sandy growing, hundreds of thousands still without power, and air, rail and ferry service struggling to resume, some runners and elected officials have called for Sunday’s marathon to be canceled or postponed. Police, fire and other essential public services, they said, should be focused on helping those most in need.
Nevertheless, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, aware that the marathon generates hundreds of millions of dollars for the city, repeated Thursday that the race would go on. He did not expect the Police Department to be overly burdened because the race is on a Sunday, when street traffic is limited. Many parts of the city, including Lower Manhattan, are expected to have their power back, freeing other workers.
“The city is a city where we have to go on,” Bloomberg said at a news conference Thursday afternoon.
Mary Wittenberg, chief executive of New York Road Runners, which puts on the race, defended Bloomberg’s decision and said the race would be used as a platform to lift spirits and raise money. Her organization plans to donate $1 million, or $26.20 for every runner who starts the race, to relief efforts in the city. The Rudin Family and ING, two sponsors of the race, will donate a combined $1.6 million to storm relief. Road Runners is working to donate other supplies to relief efforts.
George Hirsch, the chairman of the board of Road Runners, acknowledged that running the marathon could be viewed as trivial and even a drain in light of the devastation in and around New York. But he expected the race to galvanize the city much as it did after the terrorist attacks in September 2001.
“I understand the controversy completely and respect all the views on this, but any decision that was made by the mayor would have been controversial and to call off the race would have been equally as controversial,” Hirsch said. “By Sunday afternoon, there won’t be any controversy. People will view it as an early step in the city’s recovery.”
New York’s marathon is the world’s largest, but this year the race will be noticeably smaller. Hirsch said he expected about 40,000 runners to begin the race, about 15 percent below what had initially been expected.
Wittenberg said that Road Runners had “essentially canceled” nearly everything on its calendar before the marathon, including a youth event Thursday, the opening ceremony in Central Park on Friday and the Dash to the Finish Line 5K on Saturday that would have run through Midtown.
With air and rail service only now starting to resume, many runners have yet to reach the city. Once they do, other accommodations will be needed. For now, the Staten Island Ferry transportation option to the start line is in doubt, and runners who hoped to get to the start line by ferry may need to take a bus instead. Typically, about half of the runners in the marathon take that route to get to the start line at the toll plaza to the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge on Staten Island.
Runners will have until Saturday, instead of Wednesday, to withdraw from the race. They will be guaranteed a spot in next year’s race, but will not have this year’s entry fee refunded.
The marathon has escalated into political fodder, with elected officials issuing statements about the appropriateness of staging the race.
The likely Democratic candidates for mayor of New York offered their opinions. William C. Thompson said the race should be canceled because “our neighbors are hurting and our city needs to make them its priority.” John Liu, the comptroller, told Reuters that it should go on because “it’s a big economic generator.” Bill de Blasio, the public advocate, also supported the decision to hold the race, saying, “The event is a city institution that delivers tremendous economic activity.”
Some runners are torn about taking part. Simon Ressner, a lieutenant at the Fire Department, said that the police and fire departments and ambulance drivers are often needed unexpectedly in a disaster situation like this one. He noted that at least four police officers were at one gas station at Flatbush that he passed Thursday en route to evaluate the safety of some burned homes in Breezy Point, Queens. About 300 people had gathered to fill their gas cans, and the police officers were there to control the crowd.
“There’s a concrete example of why you need all the city resources available right now,” said Ressner, who added that he was 80 percent sure he would run Sunday. “I’ve written two e-mails to the Road Runners saying, ‘Just postpone it.’ That way, you’ll still get the money, you’ll still have a high-profile event, but it would show that you’re being sensitive. But now, we’re not going to show the world we’re resilient, we’re going to show them we’re selfish.”
First responders are not the only ones questioning the wisdom of holding the race. People on Staten Island are particularly angry that their borough is being used as a jumping-off point for the race while critical services for those stranded by the storm are not getting through.
Michelle Cleary, a singer-songwriter on Staten Island, started a Facebook group Wednesday calling for the marathon to be canceled. She came up with the idea because she and one of her two sisters did not have power, and her mother, a nurse in a burn unit, was upset by the devastation around them.
“Everyone was talking about whether they should have the marathon or not and I thought I should do something about it,” she said in a phone interview.
In less than 24 hours, more than 5,000 people had endorsed the site on Facebook.
A separate online petition calling for the race to be postponed had more than 1,100 signatures.
Cleary said that she worried about the potential toll the race could have on volunteers and city workers and would be in favor of postponing the marathon or diverting runners and volunteers to storm relief efforts. “I respect the Road Runners and I think they’re doing the best they can, but I don’t think they’re being fully realistic,” she said.
Juliet Macur, David Chen and Mary Pilon contributed reporting.
what a mess ....
Where the City of Darkness Meets the City of Light
Karsten Moran for The New York Times Visitors from the darker precincts of Manhattan charged phones and commiserated in a Chase bank on East 41st Street Wednesday night.
The aftermath of Hurricane Sandy has temporarily created two cities in Manhattan: one where restaurants serve hot food and warm water runs from the tap, and another where the phones are dead and a shower is like a dream.
At the boundary, around 40th Street on the East Side, a unusual makeshift community has sprung up, one where the basic building blocks of a New York neighborhood — a pizza place, an unremarkable deli, a bank — have become an oasis.
Late Wednesday night, by the hundreds, the people from downtown emerged from the cold, enveloping darkness, some with flashlights, some with towels just in case they found a place to shower, some with gallon containers to fill with water to flush the toilet. They stepped into the bright Midtown at East 39th Street at the place where the blackout ends.
Joe Album, 50, had walked with his wife and teenage daughter from 28th Street. They sat at a dingy table in the back of the 765 Food Market on 41st Street and Second Avenue, a few feet from the grim hot buffet with its clumpy ziti and brownish corn. He was nursing a coffee with a fruit fly at the rim, charging the family’s phones on a power strip and postponing the walk back home as long as he could.
“It’s just so dark and gloomy at home that it’s better to be out,” said Mr. Album, wrapped in a hat and warm coat. “Plus the apartment is starting to get cold. And when you just sit there, it gets colder.”
The most popular place, unexpectedly, has become a Chase Bank on Third Avenue, which has been opening its doors to whomever comes, allowing them to bring their dogs inside, charge their phones, use the bathroom and Internet, and get free water and coffee. It has also become something of a tourist attraction.
As downtowners straggle in, some with piercings and leather jackets and mutts on rope leashes, clustering around power strips by the A.T.M.s at all hours, the Midtown tourists take pictures through the large picture windows, capturing what may be the closest they will come to the City of Darkness.
“They say, ‘Look at these poor people,’” said Agata Shultz, 19, who walked up from the East Village and sat on a heated window ledge reading philosophy in Polish and checking her e-mail.
“It’s like a zoo.”
Eric Liebowitz, a photographer who lives on 19th Street, sat on the floor of the bank in a ski hat waiting for his phone to charge. “We are the dark people,” he said.
“The people uptown have no clue what’s going on down here,” he said — and he was enjoying himself, in a way. “Come downtown!” he had just written in a text to a friend. ”You will never have an opportunity to see New York like this again — for another year!”
Some people said they had been turned away from hotel lobbies, other banks and cafes near 40th Street when asked if they could charge their phones. It was as if, said Gabriella Sonam, a massage therapist who had biked up from the East Village, they didn’t even know a national emergency was going on just across the street.
“I’m not traumatized by the storm, I’m traumatized by the indifference,” she said near tears.
Joan Koveleski, a bartender with a Siberian Husky and streaked magenta hair, had walked with her husband from Houston Street.
After so long in the dark, she said, crossing into the other New York felt like culture shock.
“We had to remember the traffic lights worked up here,” she said. They had been walking in the street. But they, too, after getting some cash from a working A.T.M. and charging her computer and phone, would be headed back to where flashing police lights and the headlights of cars are the brightest illumination.
“Maybe we’ll watch a movie on our computer tonight,” she said.
“There’s nothing else to do except sit in the dark.”
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/10/28/nyregion/hurricane-sandy.html#sha=2dce2cfc8
Con Ed Shuts Off Power to Lower Manhattan
As the surge of water pushed into parts of Lower Manhattan on Monday night, Consolidated Edison took the unprecedented step of cutting off power to customers because of weather.
The utility said it needed to do that to try to prevent damage to equipment stored underground so that power could be restored more quickly after the storm.
At 6:42 p.m., Con Ed shut down the first network at the southern tip of Manhattan, which serves 2,500 customers.
About 20 minutes later they turned off a second network in lower Manhattan that serves about 4,000 customers.
Next on the watch list was a network that serves the Brighton Beach neighborhood in Brooklyn. “That one is right on the edge,’’ said John Miksad, senior vice president for electrical operations for Con Ed, adding that high tide when the strongest surge was expected had yet to arrive.
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/10/28/nyregion/hurricane-sandy.html#sha=6902c1b3a
Johnson: Presidential Politics Trumps Jets’ Fate
By LYNN ZINSER
Jets owner Woody Johnson, who also happens to be the New York campaign chairman for the Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, appeared on Bloomberg’s “Market Makers” show and was asked by the host whether his Jets were a higher priority than the election.
Johnson, in a statement likely to irk Jets fans unhappy with the team’s 2-2 start, said: “Well, I think so. You always have to put country first, so I think it’s very, very important, not only for us but for particularly our kids and grandkids, that this election come off with Mitt Romney and Ryan as president and vice president.”
Johnson expounded on other topics, including whether backup quarterback Tim Tebow should replace struggling starter Mark Sanchez. He was more evasive on that topic, saying, “It’s a question that’s going to be asked more frequently if this progresses. This is unacceptable playing. We failed in all three areas: offense, defense, special teams. We let our fans down.”
In that statement, Johnson stepped back from throwing more fuel on a debate he has played a role in fanning in the past. While at the Republican National Convention, Johnson said in an interview with CNBC that, “I think you can never have too much Tebow,” despite Sanchez’s being acknowledged as the starter and the team’s trying to keep a quarterback controversy from breaking out with every Sanchez incompletion.
Johnson also admitted earlier in training camp that he was surprised by the amount of coverage Tebow had gotten, which signaled that Johnson had not paid a bit of attention to the Tebow overload that overtook Denver last year.
Well that gives me a warm and fuzzy feeling every time I drive over the GW Bridge on the way to my dad's in MA. 81 years old. I always wonder what it would be to replace the GW Bridge even if it was possible.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Washington_Bridge#History
Groundbreaking for the new bridge began in October 1927, a project of the Port of New York Authority.[10] Its chief engineer was Othmar Ammann, with Cass Gilbert as architect. When construction started the estimated cost of the bridge was $75,000,000.[11] The bridge was dedicated on October 24, 1931, and opened to traffic the following day.
Gov. Cuomo creates panel of experts for Tappan Zee
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Last Updated: 3:14 PM, September 19, 2012
Posted: 3:14 PM, September 19, 2012
Read more: http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/gov_cuomo_creates_panel_of_experts_ZnDBHyIgqZ8Hejv8tb6K0H#ixzz26x5eWTB1
ALBANY, N.Y. — Gov. Andrew Cuomo has named a panel of experts in architecture, engineering, art and the Hudson River to help review plans to replace the Tappan Zee Bridge.
He says Wednesday their recommendations for the multi-billion dollar project are expected by Dec. 31.
The advisory panel has no representative from environmental, toll-payer or taxpayer groups. But Cuomo says the expert environmental engineers and local government officials in the selection committee will protect those interests.
Cuomo says a new bridge would stand 100 years without major renovation.
He says continuing to repair the 60-year-old span would be almost as expensive as a building a new one.
Among those on the panel are artist Jeffrey Koons, architect Richard Meier, Metropolitan Museum of Art Director Thomas Campbell and bridge designer Keith Brownlie.
Read more: http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/gov_cuomo_creates_panel_of_experts_ZnDBHyIgqZ8Hejv8tb6K0H#ixzz26x5l0sXU
Decision by 2 Officers to Open Fire in Busy Midtown Leaves Bystanders Wounded
By JOSEPH GOLDSTEIN and WENDY RUDERMAN
As the two officers confronted a gunman in front of the Empire State Building on a busy Friday morning, they had to make a snap decision: Do they open fire in the middle of Midtown?
From a distance of less than 10 feet, the officers, Craig Matthews and Robert Sinishtaj, answered in unison; one shot nine times and the other seven.
Investigators believe at least 7 of those 16 bullets struck the gunman, said Paul J. Browne, the Police Department’s chief spokesman. But the officers also struck some, if not all, of the nine bystanders who were wounded.
This was the second time in two weeks that the police were involved in a fatal shooting in Midtown; on Aug. 11, two officers fired 12 shots at a knife-wielding man after he escaped arrest in Times Square.
The Patrol Guide prohibits officers from firing their weapons if, “in their professional judgment, doing so will unnecessarily endanger innocent persons.”
Mr. Browne said that in Friday’s shooting, the two officers had taken account of their surroundings before firing, as they are trained to do. Video surveillance footage, Mr. Browne said, shows that most of the wounded bystanders were closer to the Empire State Building, while the shooter was near the curb.
One of those wounded said he was standing behind the gunman when the police opened fire.
“One of the cops shot me in my arm,” a 23-year-old man, Robert Asika, said outside Bellevue Hospital Center. He said that the gunman was moving toward him, and suggested that the officers “shot me probably trying to shoot him.”
Mr. Asika said he could not “really get mad at the cops.”
“I get they were doing their job, but they have to be a little more careful when they are aiming the gun at the suspect and not hit the innocent victims,” he said. Video released by the Police Department shows no one close to the gunman.
The two officers were from the South Bronx, working a tour as part of the Police Department’s counterterrorism deployment at high-profile locations. The duty normally entails helping tourists and the like, and as New Yorkers trickled into work shortly after 9 a.m., this day seemed no different. In the crowd that streamed past was a man dressed in a suit and tie and carrying a black bag, going by the officers calmly and unhurriedly, Mr. Browne said.
“He wouldn’t have drawn anyone’s particular attention,” Mr. Browne said, if not for a construction worker who “pointed him out to these officers.” The worker said that the man had just shot someone around the corner.
The officers approached the gunman, whom the police identified as Jeffrey T. Johnson, and the situation quickly escalated.
Surveillance video shows Mr. Johnson walking north on Fifth Avenue, between the street and some curbside planters. The two officers gave chase, just as a family of four walked past Mr. Johnson in the other direction. The video showed him reaching into a bag, pulling out a .45-caliber pistol and pointing it at the officers.
The shooting was over in a matter of seconds.
A number of the bystanders may have been wounded by bullet fragments and ricochets after bullets struck nearby flowerpots, Mr. Browne said, suggesting that the bystanders were not in the path of the bullets when the officers fired.
Many of the wounds to bystanders were “mostly in the lower extremity areas, such as legs and ankles, which would be consistent with some of the ricochet fragmented ballistics we found,” Mr. Browne said.
He said there was no ballistic evidence that the gunman fired any rounds as the police confronted him, though the police were still investigating a report by one witness who said the gunman did fire at the police.
The officers have been removed from patrol duty — standard practice when one discharges a weapon, the police said.
Mr. Browne said officers were trained to take cover, if possible, when facing a gunman, but there was no opportunity to do so here.
“They were approaching this man with a gun, and he turns on them, and he is eight feet away, pointing a gun right at them,” he said.
It is not unheard-of for bystanders to be hit in police shootouts. A year ago, a woman sitting on her stoop was killed in a shootout in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, in which the police fired 73 shots at a gunman who had just fatally shot another man. The police have since conceded that a police bullet might have killed the woman but have said the ballistics leave some uncertainty.
And a decision by the state’s highest court in 2010 found that the police involved in a 2005 shooting in Harlem could not be found negligent for wounding two bystanders. The majority decision noted that the officers had not seen any of the bystanders in the area at the time of the shooting. However, a dissenting opinion in the case pointed out that some of the officers had given testimony suggesting that they had not looked.
Officer Matthews is well-known in the Police Department because he had filed a federal lawsuit alleging that in the 42nd Precinct, there was a strict quota system for arrests, summonses and street stops.
Reporting on the shootings outside the Empire State Building was contributed by Charles V. Bagli, Al Baker, Jack Begg, Penn Bullock, Alain Delaquérière, Alan Feuer, Christine Hauser, Randy Leonard, Sarah Maslin Nir, Sharon Otterman, Jennifer Preston, Emily S. Rueb, Marc Santora, Alex Vadukul and Vivian Yee.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/25/nyregion/police-decision-to-shoot-in-midtown-left-9-wounded.html?pagewanted=print
Jet skier breaches $100 mln security system at New York's Kennedy airport
NEW YORK | Tue Aug 14, 2012 3:58am EDT
(Reuters) - A man who swam ashore and walked undetected into New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport over the weekend has prompted an investigation into why the approximately $100 million security system was breachable.
"We have called for an expedited review of the incident and a complete investigation," said Anthony Hayes, speaking for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.
According to the agency, a man identified as Daniel Casillo, 31, trespassed onto the airport's grounds late on Friday. The Port Authority said it was investigating the details of the breach and how Casillo was able to get past the security system.
Media reports said Casillo had been stranded in the waters of Jamaica Bay after he was separated from a group of friends and his jet ski failed him. He swam several miles to the airport, located in Jamaica Bay in New York City's borough of Queens, the New York Post reported.
Casillo, who the agency said was charged with criminal trespass, would have walked past motion sensors and closed-circuit cameras that make up the airport's state-of-the art, Perimeter Intrusion Detection System. The system is valued at about $100 million, according to the Port Authority.
He entered one of the airport terminals where an airport worker alerted authorities.
Hayes said the agency was communicating with the maker of the security system, Raytheon, to determine how the perimeter intrusion detection system, built in the years following the September 11, 2001 attacks, could be improved.
Hayes noted that the system exceeds federal guidelines for airport security. He also said the airport had increased police patrols along the perimeter and in the waterway.
(Reporting by Lily Kuo; Editing by Cynthia Johnston and Alden Bentley)
Three ex-Chase bank workers admit $4.8 million tax fraud
Reuters – 11 hours ago.
By Basil Katz
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Three former employees at JPMorgan Chase & Co (JPM) branches in New York pleaded guilty on Monday to using the identities of Puerto Rican customers to file fraudulent tax returns, U.S. authorities said.
The three were charged in January by Manhattan federal prosecutors with orchestrating two separate tax fraud schemes between 2006 and 2007 that cheated the Internal Revenue Service and New York State out of $4.8 million.
Katherine Torres, 52, a former manager at a Chase branch in the New York borough of the Bronx, and Rosalind Smith, 41, who also worked there, were charged in the first scheme, along with another person against whom charges are still pending.
Judith Fulgencio, 32, who worked at a Chase branch at Yankee Stadium, was charged in a second scheme.
The three pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to steal government funds, prosecutors said. They face a maximum of five years in prison at sentencing.
Steven Brill, an attorney for Torres, said she had "accepted responsibility for what she did." Attorneys for Fulgencio and Smith could not be reached for comment immediately.
A JPMorgan spokesman declined comment on the guilty pleas.
JPMorgan, whose $2.29 trillion of assets make it the biggest U.S.-based bank, has been fighting to reclaim its reputation after it built up a massive credit derivatives portfolio that had trading losses of nearly $6 billion.
The losses from the bets, known as the "London Whale trades", were a huge black eye for the bank's CEO Jamie Dimon, long praised for his risk-management skills.
The cases are U.S.A. v. Torres and U.S.A. v. Fulgencio, U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, Nos. 12-cr-69 and 12-cr-69.
(Reporting By Basil Katz; Editing by Paul Tait)
Have fun and enjoy. I'm heading up to see my dad the week after next then Cape Cod for 3-4 days.
headed to the island at the end of the month, robert moses state park......
The Boy Who Wanted to Fly
By MAUREEN DOWD
RORY STAUNTON was always looking up.
As soon as he could walk, he wanted to fly. The exuberant freckle-faced redhead from Sunnyside, Queens, yearned to be up in the romantic night sky where, as the French pilot and poet Antoine de Saint-Exupéry wrote, the stars are laughing.
His parents told him he’d have to wait until he was 16 to take flying lessons. But it’s hard to tell a determined 5-foot-9, 169-pound 12-year-old what to do.
He dreamed of being the next Captain Sullenberger, practicing on a flight simulator on his computer and studying global routes. He read and reread Sully’s memoir, thrilled to learn that the flier’s hair had once been red. He found a Long Island aviation school that would teach 12-year-olds.
On his 12th birthday, his parents shuddered and let Rory fly with an instructor.
How could you resist that sweet Irish face? Sure, Rory drove his parents nuts, sneaking downstairs late at night to gorge on episodes of “Family Guy,” and pretending to do his homework when he was really devouring political stories in The Times.
“He wasn’t the kid who looked at porn online, he looked at CNN online,” said his uncle, Niall O’Dowd, my friend who publishes several Irish publications in New York.
Rory protected underdogs against schoolyard bullies. He revered Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr. And at the Garden School in Jackson Heights, he led a campaign to curb the thoughtless use of the word “retarded.”
“The last conversation I had with him, he got right in the face of my brother, Fergus, the government minister in Ireland with the mining portfolio, about fracking,” Niall recalled. “And he wrote the Swedish ambassador to North Korea asking for an explanation about why North Korea fed their big army while their people were dying of hunger.”
Rory was so roaring with life, it was impossible to believe how quickly life drained out of him. On Wednesday, March 28, he fell while playing in the school gym and scraped his elbow, opening a cut. As Dr. Jerome Groopman wrote in The New Yorker in 2008, the most aggressive superbug bacteria often lurk in gyms and on artificial turf.
The following Sunday, Rory died of septic shock from a strep infection, his parents curled around his body in the hospital bed.
Orlaith and Ciaran Staunton are Irish immigrants who embodied the American dream. Ciaran owns O’Neill’s bar on Third Avenue, where Rory made his first visit at 3 days old, and the Molly Blooms pub in Queens.
Every parent’s nightmare unfolded at warp speed, as the Web site Everyday Health reported and as Jim Dwyer heartbreakingly revealed in Thursday’s Times. Rory might have been saved by a swift dose of antibiotics but instead perished in a perfect storm of false assumptions, overlooked data and overburdened doctors.
Despite the cut, severe leg pain, blotchy skin and other clues pointing to sepsis, Rory’s pediatrician surmised that the vomiting, 102-degree fever, 140 pulse and 36 breaths a minute spelled a stomach bug and sent him to the NYU Langone Medical Center emergency room. Doctors there discharged Rory with an antinausea drug, even though his vital signs were alarming. The lab tests that were ordered came back three hours later showing abnormal production of white blood cells, a sign that infection could be raging, but that red flag was ignored.
“Nobody said anything that night,” his mother told Dwyer. “None of you followed up the next day on that kid, and he’s at home, dying on the couch?”
By Friday, Rory’s body was covered with blue streaks, and a touch made him scream. When Ciaran reached the pediatrician, she advised going back to the E.R. Rory was put in intensive care, where doctors valiantly tried to save his life, even suggesting amputating his nose and toes. But he was turning purple and black.
“For anyone that has carried their son’s or daughter’s coffin, it’s unnatural,” Ciaran told Sean O’Rourke on Friday on RTE, the Irish radio network. “A child who loses a parent becomes an orphan. If a man and wife lose each other, they become widow or widower. It’s so unnatural, there isn’t even a word for families who lose a child.”
Rory’s idol, Sully Sullenberger, was touched and left a message on the child’s tribute page. The hero of the Hudson is now an advocate for applying “lessons learned in blood” in aviation safety to patient safety.
“If something good comes from Rory’s death, it will be that we realize we have a broken system,” he told me. “Patient care is so fragmented. For the most part, medical professionals aren’t taught these human skills that some deride as ‘soft skills.’ So there’s insufficient sharing of information and ineffective communication.
“Some in the medical field look upon these deaths as an unavoidable consequence of giving care. But they’re inexcusable and unthinkable.”
Rory is up there now, with the laughing stars. But even before he got to heaven, he knew, as Saint-Exupéry wrote, that “One sees clearly only with the heart. Anything essential is invisible to the eyes.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/15/opinion/sunday/dowd-the-boy-who-wanted-to-fly.html?_r=1&hp&pagewanted=print
Neighborhood Tensions Flare at Reopened Pool
By LISA W. FODERARO
When McCarren Park Pool reopened in Brooklyn last week after 28 years, it was hailed as a grand civic achievement and, perhaps, a milestone for a new social dynamic in New York City, one in which people of different racial, ethnic and class backgrounds could socialize — or at least pursue the same activity — together.
A place where the children of hipster artists, attracted by the upscale restoration with its designer flourishes, would play Marco Polo with youngsters from public housing.
As Jonathan Marvel, the project’s architect, put it, “As architects, it is our goal to contribute spaces that inspire community involvement and face time with each other.”
But within days, that excitement has been replaced by apprehension. Two fights at the pool and several arrests confirmed the fears of some residents that the giant pool, with a capacity of 1,500, might draw an unruly crowd to a neighborhood divided among older residents of Italian and Polish descent, gentrifying newcomers and Hispanic families.
What should have been a simple kickoff to summer in New York has turned fraught, with capacity crowds, racially charged debates and complaints that the city should have committed more resources to the opening, from sanitation to security.
“I’m not happy and not because of the pool, but because of the fighting,” said Tony Otero, 71, who has lived near the pool for 25 years. “It’s not good for the community. It’s trouble. All kinds of kids are coming here.”
Hot weather and the pool’s reopening generated so much interest that by Friday, a day after its opening, the place was reaching its capacity early in the day. With a line of hundreds snaking around the block on the weekend, the crowd outside grew restless. Nearby merchants complained that pool visitors tossed litter on the ground, tagged buildings with graffiti and relieved themselves in public.
Inside the pool on Friday, teenagers scuffled with a lifeguard who had ordered them to stop doing back flips, and the pool closed an hour early. On Monday, two police officers were injured by swimmers who also persisted in doing back flips. Three men were arrested and charged with assault in the second degree, inciting to riot, criminal nuisance and menacing. More security has been apparent in recent days.
Meredith Chesney, owner of Mousey Brown beauty salon near the pool, said she came out on Saturday morning to discover three new markings of graffiti on her roll-down security gate.
“I thought, ‘O.K., it’s Brooklyn, it’s not that surprising,’ ” she said. “But then, 30 minutes later, I went outside to water my plants and I found someone had defecated right in front of the salon. It’s shocking.”
Still, Ms. Chesney did not fault the would-be pool users; she was holding city officials responsible for not thinking through the potential trouble. There are bathrooms inside McCarren Pool, on Lorimer Street, and in the park itself, but she urged portable toilets for the line outside. (On Wednesday, signs were installed directing those waiting in line toward the park bathrooms.)
“It’s almost Machiavellian how our public administration thinks they can realize these grand ideals for giant public pools without real infrastructure, like bathrooms,” she said. “It’s really setting the public up to fail. It’s very disheartening.”
McCarren Pool, which holds almost 1.1 million gallons of water, is one of the biggest in the city and has a complicated history. It opened along with 10 others in 1936 in the depths of the Depression with Works Progress Administration money, under the auspices of Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia and the parks commissioner and master builder Robert Moses. After sliding into disrepair, McCarren was shuttered in 1984.
While the other 1936 pools were all renovated, McCarren remained closed, its reopening delayed not only by a lack of money, but also by a debate over its future. Some preservationists lobbied for a full-scale restoration, while neighborhood activists demanded its demolition, in part to prevent outsiders from using it. Some of the blog posts and comments in recent days have echoed the racially tinged dialogue of the 1980s, with neighbors of the pool blaming teenagers from outside the community. In fact, two of the men arrested came from a public housing complex, the Marcy Houses, on the border of Williamsburg and Bedford-Stuyvesant. The other lives across the street from the pool.
The area around the pool has changed significantly in the past few years. Census data show that both the Williamsburg and Greenpoint neighborhoods, which border the pool, have had an influx of white residents in the past decade.
For example, in Williamsburg, which has attracted waves of artists in recent years, the non-Hispanic white population increased by 24,000 from 2000 to 2010, while the Hispanic population fell by 10,000. Hispanics now make up 33 percent of the 111,000 residents, with blacks representing 6 percent.
Some of the pressure on McCarren reflects the fact that some neighboring communities, like Bushwick, do not have large outdoor pools. On Tuesday, a number of visitors to McCarren were from Bushwick, waiting in a long line after the pool filled to capacity.
“Just because you come from another neighborhood or another borough or the other side of Brooklyn doesn’t mean you’re the one causing trouble,” said Luis Morales, 42, of Bushwick. “It has to do with a few individuals who are spoiling it for everybody.
“There are good ones and bad ones, from every neighborhood. Judging isn’t right. You could be black, white, green — it doesn’t matter as long as you’re not bothering anyone.”
The city’s parks department defended the pool’s first week. “Thousands of New Yorkers are enjoying McCarren Park Pool’s beautiful renovation, getting exercise and keeping cool during this heat wave,” said Kevin Jeffrey, the Brooklyn parks commissioner. “The few minor incidents have not impacted the vast majority of pool attendees, just as similar incidents at pools across the city don’t stop New Yorkers from enjoying themselves.”
Still, the problems at McCarren Pool have prompted the New York Police Department to put plainclothes officers at the site, and one of the police’s “temporary headquarters vehicles” is parked nearby.
Alexander D. Garvin, a professor of urban planning and management at the Yale School of Architecture and the author of “Public Parks: The Key to Livable Communities,” credited the public pools with providing a crucial outlet for all New Yorkers. “The swimming pools are one of the great legacies of Robert Moses,” he said. “They were designed to be very grand, on a level of the public works of ancient Rome.”
He added: “People say that in those days residents lived in tenements and they were crowded and that the pools were an extraordinary release in the hot summer. But guess what? The summer of 2012 is a hot summer, and we have immigrants living several families to one apartment because there is not adequate housing. I don’t see an extreme difference between the need for these pools then and now.”
Joseph Goldstein, Juliet Linderman and Eric P. Newcomer contributed reporting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/05/nyregion/problems-at-mccarren-park-pool-have-a-neighborhood-worried.html?_r=1&hp&pagewanted=print
We are heading north at the end of July and a stop in the city is on our to do list.
road thru the city over the weekend, the wt tower is amazing!. the kiniish was delicious
Way Beyond Bake Sales: The $1 Million PTA
By KYLE SPENCER
EACH fall, parents at the Anderson School, a highly regarded K-8 on the Upper West Side for gifted and talented students, receive letters from the PTA emblazoned with the school’s elegant “A” logo. Though Anderson indulges in the usual trappings of public-school fund-raising — bake sales, book fairs, auctions — this letter is blunter: It urges parents to simply write a check. And it suggests an amount: This school year, it was $1,300.
Ayda Gibson, 44, the mother of a first grader at the school, said she did not mind being asked.
“If they don’t ask,” she said, “they won’t get.”
Many parents, it would seem, agree with her. In the 2009-10 school year, Anderson’s PTA and a much smaller alumni group raised $1,001,302, putting the school in a remarkable category — the New York City public schools that raise amounts in the $1 million range annually.
They are schools like Public School 6 on East 82nd Street, where big donors can have their children’s names engraved on plaques on chairs in the auditorium. Its PTA raised $973,518 last school year. Or P.S. 290, also on East 82nd, a popular school widely praised for its writing program, where the PTA raised $949,759 in the 2009-10 school year.
Or P.S. 87, a coveted Upper West Side elementary a stone’s throw from the Museum of Natural History, where the parents’ association brought in $1.57 million in that same period: about $800,000 in fund-raising, the other $700,000 from the fees the association charged for the after-school programs.
At a time when the city’s schools have had their financing cut by an average of 13.7 percent over the past five years, the money has buffered these schools from the hard choices many others have had to make. In a system where many parents’ associations raise no money at all, these schools have earned a special name among parents and school consultants: “public privates.”
“Many now have amenities that can compete with private school offerings,” said Emily Glickman, the president of Abacus Guide Educational Consulting, a private-school admissions company, on the Upper East Side.
These schools are in some of the city’s wealthiest ZIP codes, most of them in Manhattan, and their students typically garner top scores on statewide exams. (In 2011, at P. S. 290, 88.9 percent of students were proficient in reading, and 92.9 percent demonstrated proficiency in math. The citywide averages for the subjects were 43.9 percent and 57.3 percent.)
And in a system where money and race are inextricably intertwined, most of these schools serve populations with a far greater percentage of white students than the system over all, where about 15 percent of the students are white. P. S. 6, for example, is 70 percent white, as is P.S. 234, a school in TriBeCa that also raises hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. The city’s Education Department does not track how much individual PTAs raise. There is no central clearinghouse for this information, and parents are often reluctant to publicly share fund-raising numbers. To put together a list of the top-earning PTAs, The New York Times analyzed Internal Revenue Service filings posted on GuideStar, a research company that tracks nonprofit organizations and charitable giving. The information is not comprehensive, so there may be other schools that raised similar amounts that were not included. But it presents a snapshot of how some of the richest schools have fared.
“These rich schools are semiprivate,” said Troy Torrison, 47, a creative director who has a third grader at P. S. 234, which raised $541,712 in the 2009-10 school year. The Taste of TriBeCa, a culinary festival with many of the neighborhood’s best-known chefs participating, provided a substantial amount. “These other schools are public, public with no extras,” he said.
HOUSED in a shabby 1950s brick building, P. S. 87 does not look rich from the outside. But step inside a bustling third-grade classroom, and signs of the parents’ association’s efforts abound. One of the school’s teachers, Laura Fine, 30, pointed to three Mac computers, a printer, a 3-D digital projector, science kits, chess sets, new desk chairs, a dozen dictionaries and $28.70 hardcover writing guides that students keep in their desks.
“They paid for all this,” Ms. Fine said of the parents’ association. “And some classrooms have four or five Macs.”
The association pays for a fitness coach during recess and a chef to assist the one hired by the Education Department, and it keeps the comfortable, well-lighted library stocked with books and computers. To keep germs at bay, there are parent-financed eco-friendly hand-sanitizing machines on walls throughout the school. And the association is undertaking a schoolwide air-conditioner installation — at a cost of $4,000 a room.
“We’re in a community that is very generous,” said Rachel Laiserin, 43, who is one of the school’s two parents’ association presidents.
The Education Department prohibits parents from paying the salaries of full-time “core subject” teachers. Deidrea A. Miller, a department spokeswoman, said the rule existed to avoid the hiring of teachers who might lose their jobs the next year because a school PTA decided it no longer could — or wanted to — finance them. “It’s a financial issue,” she said.
PTAs are permitted to pay for substitutes, aides, enrichment teachers and assistants, which many of the city’s wealthiest PTAs do readily. This year, the PTA at P.S. 199 on the Upper West Side spent close to $100,000 on a science and technology teacher. And PTAs at P. S. 6 and the Anderson School spend hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on teaching assistants to buffer students from the ballooning class sizes caused by budget cuts. Assistant teachers work with students on reading and writing, help with class projects and sometimes do lunch duty or bathroom patrol, depending on the school.
But the financing goes beyond the classroom. At P. S. 290, the PTA has treated each second grader in recent years to 15 swim lessons at Asphalt Green, a 5 ½-acre sports campus overlooking the East River, and has helped to pay for a fifth-grade overnight trip to a horse ranch in Highland, N.Y.
At P. S. 6, the PTA and its alumni foundation have helped defray the cost of a rooftop ecology center with an 800-square-foot greenhouse and a turtle pond.
And in recent years, at P. S. 199, the PTA has financed sundry enrichment classes, automatic toilet flushers and September bedbug detection for every classroom. Last year, the school raised close to $500,000.
Principals at these schools say their parents’ associations do more than collect money; they work in tandem with the administration throughout the year to come up with monetary solutions, routinely swapping items from one budget to the other so that principals can use money for full-time staff while the PTA covers the expenses allowed by the Education Department.
In February, at the highly rated P. S. 89 in TriBeCa, whose PTA raised nearly $250,000 in the 2009-10 school year, the principal, Veronica Najjar, said she did not hesitate to approach parents when she wanted to buy several $600 iPads for the school’s lower-grade classrooms, hire a part-time office secretary to relieve the staff during what was expected to be a particularly busy registration season and enroll her teachers in a course on the new Common Core curriculum. According to PTA meeting minutes and her own account, the PTA voted and almost immediately wrote her a check.
“I’ve never been told no by my PTA,” Ms. Najjar said.
City officials say that kind of collaboration is unheard-of at most of the schools in the city. Elba Velez, a family advocate for District 10 in the Bronx, which includes the wealthy Riverdale neighborhood as well as some of the most segregated and poorest-performing schools in the system, says that at many of her schools, PTAs do not even ask parents for money.
“For a variety of reasons, they make a decision not to,” she said.
Presidents of parents’ associations at schools in high-earning areas describe this discrepancy as “complicated” and “tricky.” But many are unapologetic about advocating for their own children when the city has shaved, in some cases, up to $1 million from their schools’ budgets over the past five years.
“There is no crime in wanting to give directly to your child’s education,” said Michelle Ciulla Lipkin, a PTA president at P. S. 199.
THOUGH some parents say that poorer schools receive Title I financing — federal dollars allocated to schools serving large percentages of low-income children — giving them a lift that wealthier schools do not get, others dismiss that argument. “Title I money is restrictive,” said Yolanda Smith, a senior education analyst in the city’s Independent Budget Office. “It is only supposed to be used for activities specifically related to student achievement. By contrast, PTA money can be used to buy almost anything.”
Dennis M. Walcott, New York City’s schools chancellor, said that he was well aware of “the disparity issue,” but he did not want to penalize parents for getting involved.
Instead, he has worked through the Fund for Public Schools, a nonprofit group designed, in part, to support low-income schools. The fund has provided over 250 library grants of up to $10,000 each and has helped 70 schools upgrade their art spaces with grants of up to $20,000 each.
Department officials say the city has also moved to curb inequities within the system through its budgeting process by instituting a “fair funding formula,” which was put in place, Ms. Miller, the department spokeswoman, said, to allow the city “to direct more resources to schools that need it the most.”
Schools with higher-needs children have received more dollars for each child, but because of budget cuts, the city has not been able to make use of the formula fully. The year it was instituted, the budget office reported that students identified as needy received an average of $217 more than what they would have received under the old system.
The Anderson PTA says it spends over $1,600 for each student.
In some cities, like Portland, Ore., schools are required to share some of the money raised.
Asked how they felt about pooling fund-raising money, some New York City parents’ association presidents were cautious.
Ms. Laiserin, of P. S. 87, said she thought parents might consider some limited amount of sharing.
But Rebecca Levey, her co-president, was not so sure. She stood in the school’s manicured garden — amid tulips, roses and wisteria — built with money acquired through Councilwoman Gale A. Brewer’s office and landscaped with parent dollars. The garden is enclosed by a wrought-iron fence adorned with an iron sun, a reminder of the school’s motto: “One Family Under the Sun.”
“I think it’s very hard to raise money and not have control over how that money is spent,” Ms. Levey said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/03/nyregion/at-wealthy-schools-ptas-help-fill-budget-holes.html?hp&pagewanted=print
Keeping Body and Image in Shape
By ROBIN FINN
When the N.B.A. Hall of Famer Walt Frazier, the loquacious Knicks analyst on the MSG network, is not on the road with the playoff-bound team, which he led to its first N.B.A. championship in 1970, the focal point of his Sundays is his bedroom. There Mr. Frazier, a k a Clyde, multitasks by exercising in bed, napping or surfing the cable channels. When he does go out, he works in a stop at Clyde Frazier’s Wine and Dine, the restaurant in Hell’s Kitchen where he is a partner, acting as host and in-house celebrity. Mr. Frazier, 67, lives in a condo in West Harlem with his son, Walt III, 45, a forest of foliage (he is a plant freak) and 200 flamboyant suits. He also owns a bed-and-breakfast on St. Croix.
RISE AND CRUNCH I wake up around 8. One saying I live by is “My health is my wealth.” So I usually start the day by doing exercises in bed; I work my obliques, do three or four sets of crunches, do the bicycle thing where you lie on your back and pedal your legs in the air. Sometimes I listen to a Motown station; sometimes I just want silence. I also do yoga stretches. Doing yoga is like breathing.
FORTIFICATION After I’m warmed up, I go downstairs and make a protein shake with water, protein powder, honey and soy milk. And I take my vitamins: cod liver oil, brewer’s yeast, vitamin C, kelp, calcium, wheat grass and glutamine. No coffee, just herbal tea. I only drink goldenseal, the panacea of all teas.
BACK TO BASE I might get back in bed and watch some TV until the vitamins kick in and I’m ready for a real workout. I’ve got my own gym, so I don’t go to the spa anymore. While I’m working out, I listen to jazz or oldies on the iPod. I never watch the clock. I let my body tell me when I’ve had enough, and then I take a shower, shave and maybe go back to bed again and watch more TV. I may watch a little basketball if there’s a team on that we’re playing in the near future. But I can OD on basketball.
CHURCH, SOMETIMES On some Sundays I go to the 9 a.m. service at the Abyssinian Baptist Church on 138th and Seventh Avenue. The 11 a.m. service takes too long. And it’s crowded with all the Harlem tourists. When I go at 9, I can come home and have the rest of the day to laze around or work out.
COOKING FOR ONE If I’m hungry, I’ll cook up a salmon steak or chicken on my George Foreman grill, and steam some broccoli and carrots or brussels sprouts. I have plain yogurt with pecans and honey for my sweet tooth. Then I might jump back on the bike. Part of it is my vanity. I kind of spend Sunday perfecting what people expect me to be when I’m out in public: in shape, stylish and a personality.
SUITING UP If we don’t have a game on Sunday night, I head down to the restaurant at 3 and stick around for meet-and-greets with the early diners. If we have a game, I get to the Garden by 5 and stop by the restaurant after the game. I pick out my suit and tie the night before and hang it on a hook so I can look at it and see if I like it. Sometimes I wake up the next day and the sunlight’s hitting it and I say, “Whoa, that’s ghastly!” When I find a combination that works, I keep it all hung up together; it saves time.
WEATHER CHECK If I get some late energy, I work out again. But if I’m feeling lethargic, I just watch TV: 150 channels and nothing on. I do check the Weather Channel, because that determines my wardrobe. I hate it when they’re wrong. Last week I put on my leopard suit, went outside, and it was 63 degrees; I had to come back in and change.
Baseball Has Its Worshipers, and at N.Y.U., You Get Credit
By SAMUEL G. FREEDMAN
Published: April 20, 2012
On the night before opening day, the end of a baseball fan’s version of Advent, John Sexton entered his classroom at New York University to speak of Joe DiMaggio. He came to speak, too, of Ernest Hemingway and Gay Talese, of Lord Krishna and a sacred tree in the Amazon, and what he called “this notion of touching the ineffable.”
Around Dr. Sexton sat 18 undergraduates, some religious and some not, some bleacher diehards and some not, all of them enrolled in a course titled “Baseball as a Road to God.” It is the sort of course in which the teaching assistants go by the angelic designation “Celestials” and discussion sections are named for Derek Jeter and Willie Mays among other diamond luminaries.
As the president of N.Y.U., Dr. Sexton could certainly teach any course he wanted. And as the former dean of its law school and clerk to a chief justice of the United States, he might have been expected to hold forth on jurisprudence. However, as a child of Brooklyn, as a scholar whose academic robe bears the number 42 in homage to Jackie Robinson, and as a practicing Catholic with a doctoral degree in religion, Dr. Sexton has for more than a dozen years chosen baseball and God as his professorial focus.
“The real idea of the course,” he put it in an interview, “is to develop heightened sensitivity and a noticing capacity. So baseball’s not ‘the’ road to God. For most of us, it isn’t ‘a’ road to God. But it’s a way to notice, to cause us to live more slowly and to watch more keenly and thereby to discover the specialness of our life and our being, and, for some of us, something more than our being.”
Dr. Sexton’s own baseball career peaked as an all-star catcher in the B’nai B’rith Little League in the Rockaways — “Billy Ryan and I broke the religion line, we were the first two goyim” — and included being in a third-floor classroom in high school when a teenage Joe Torre broke the window with a home run from an adjacent ballfield. Over the passing decades, Dr. Sexton adapted to the Dodgers’ departure from Brooklyn by joining his son in rooting for the Yankees. Whether such a transfer of devotion constitutes heresy is a question, perhaps, for the magisterium.
The springtime class had its genesis in the challenge of a skeptic. In the 1998-99 school year, an N.Y.U. law student presented himself to Dr. Sexton to say, “I understand you’re a real baseball fan, and I don’t get it.” Dr. Sexton, invoking the words of his own long-ago mentor at Brooklyn Prep, replied: “Then you are among the great unwashed. But there is hope for your soul.”
By means of evangelism, Dr. Sexton oversaw an independent-study project for the law student, assigning him 10 books about baseball and theology. Word of mouth around campus led more students to ask for a similar tutorial. Dr. Sexton instead devised an entire class, and made it available to undergraduates.
The core of his original reading list — “The Sacred and the Profane,” by the religion historian Mircea Eliade — remains central to the class all these years later. Eliade’s essential insight, at least for Dr. Sexton’s purposes, is his concept of hierophany, meaning the manifestation of the sacred in the world. So, just as much as Stonehenge or the Kaaba or the Western Wall or St. Peter’s Basilica, baseball in Sextonian teaching affords such a locus for faith.
And the metaphor of baseball as religion, in Dr. Sexton’s hands, is a long way from the cornball claptrap about stadiums being “green cathedrals.” Over the current semester, the students are reading and discussing the work of theologians and cultural historians like Abraham Joshua Heschel, Michael Novak, Robert N. Bellah and Johan Huizinga alongside novels and reportage by literary chroniclers of baseball like Robert Coover, W. P. Kinsella and Doris Kearns Goodwin. (Dr. Sexton is distilling his own ruminations into a book, “Baseball as a Road to God,” which will be published in early 2013.)
When the class met on the night before opening day this year, Dr. Sexton took out the intellectual version of a fungo bat to knock questions around the room: Was the fisherman in Hemingway’s “Old Man and the Sea” having a religious experience? If he was, how did that experience resonate for the students in the class?
“In the depth of his adversity,” said William Visone, a 19-year-old junior, “he keeps talking about how the big fish is out there. That’s a kind of faith. And it’s like last week when I said that I believe that in my lifetime I will see the Mets win the World Series.”
Another student, Nicole Greenhouse, talked about the “cardinal curse of despair” she had often felt as a Red Sox fan. Yet, she went on, when the team won the 2004 American League pennant with an epic comeback against the despised Yankees and then took the World Series, the achievement set a standard of ecstasy impossible to repeat.
All the talk of belief, disbelief and disappointment provoked an especially personal reaction from Emily Ruth Grose. A 21-year-old junior, she had grown up on family stories of near misses. One uncle, a pitcher, made it all the way to Class AAA before falling short of the major leagues. Her father, a star shortstop in high school and junior college, was enduringly embittered by his failure to be drafted by the pros.
“I always viewed baseball as kind of my family’s religion,” she added in an interview after class. “Baseball was filling a void in their heart, and when they didn’t have it, what did they fill the hole with? I really wanted to learn why baseball mattered so much to them. And I’ve come to really see that it doesn’t need to be an organized religion, that anything can serve as your religion.”
For Noam Mintz, who took the class last year and returned as a Celestial this year, the course helped resolve what had seemed like a conundrum. Why had he always considered the two most profound religious experiences of his life praying beside his father, an Orthodox rabbi, on Yom Kippur, and watching Game 7 of the 2003 American League Championship Series with his father, as the Yankees beat the Red Sox on Aaron Boone’s 11th-inning home run. (Sorry, Nicole.)
“In my life, Judaism and baseball had always played a central role,” said Mr. Mintz, 22, a senior. “But they always diverged from each other. They had different compartments. Now I can see where these passions might intersect.”
E-mail: sgf1@columbia.edu
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/21/us/from-baseball-insight-into-god-at-new-york-university.html?ref=baseball
Anticipating Space Shuttle’s Arrival, Old Warplanes Ship Out
By PATRICK McGEEHAN
On the flight deck of the aircraft carrier Intrepid, sacrifices had to be made.
So, on Wednesday morning, three vintage warplanes were trussed up and hoisted over the port side of the ship for a barge ride up the Hudson River to a museum near Schenectady, N.Y. They had to go to make way for the new star attraction: Enterprise, the prototype for the space shuttles that is due to arrive in New York City next week.
Enterprise, which the federal government awarded last year to the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum in Manhattan, is not scheduled to reach the ship for several weeks, but its move began commanding attention on Tuesday when the shuttle Discovery rode on top of a 747 jet from Florida to Dulles International Airport outside Washington.
Discovery will displace Enterprise at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum near Dulles on Thursday. After posing Enterprise nose to nose with Discovery, a crew employed by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration will lift the prototype onto the same, specially equipped 747 over the weekend.
Then, the jet will ferry Enterprise to Kennedy International Airport on Monday morning, slowing along the way for a low-altitude tour of the Statue of Liberty and other New York landmarks.
And so for the first time, a space shuttle will land in the city. That is, if the weather cooperates.
On the sunbathed deck of Intrepid on Wednesday, much of the talk was about the forecast for untimely rain on Monday. “We’ve had a month of great weather,” said Susan Marenoff-Zausner, the museum president, as she apprehensively scanned the sky. If Monday is too inclement, NASA officials may decide to postpone Enterprise’s final flight, she said.
As she spoke, workers guided a Douglas F3D-2 Skyknight, its black wings folded up to reveal the stars and stripes on their undersides, down to the pier below. The Skyknight, which did most of its fighting in the dark in the 1950s, took its place beside two foreign planes that were also being jettisoned: a British Royal Navy fighter-bomber known as a Supermarine Scimitar F1 and a Soviet-designed Mikoyan-Gurevich MIG-15.
Soon, the crane would move them onto an adjacent barge that resembled a floating Dumpster for the trip north to the Empire State Aerosciences Museum in Glenville, N.Y. Ms. Marenoff-Zausner said the decision to give up the planes was “bittersweet” because it would help Intrepid accommodate Enterprise, which the museum’s directors hope will be a big draw.
“With Enterprise coming, we had to make deck space,” said Eric Boehm, the museum’s curator of aviation and aircraft restoration. “And the only way to make deck space was to move three airplanes off. It’s hard to see them go, but it’s for the greater good. We’re going to get Enterprise.”
The museum will need to attract a big crowd to help offset the costs of transporting the shuttle from Dulles. The bill for the move, which the museum had to pay in advance, came to $9.6 million, said Matt Woods, the museum’s senior vice president for facilities and engineering.
Now, Mr. Woods’s staff must erect an all-weather tent, 56 feet tall, on the aft of the flight deck. They have begun reinforcing the steel deck to hold the Enterprise, which Mr. Woods says weighs about 75 tons. Already, a red outline of the shuttle’s distinctive shape is painted there, the nose aimed at the commuter ferry terminal in Weehawken on the New Jersey side of the river.
To get Enterprise there from the airport in Queens will be a trial of its own. First, the cranes and stabilizers being used at Dulles to take Discovery off the 747 and put Enterprise on it must be dismantled and trucked to Kennedy. In the meantime, Enterprise will remain mated to the jet in a tent at the airport.
In all, it will take about six weeks to get the shuttle off the plane and onto a barge. After a slow tug through Jamaica Bay, under the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, through New York Harbor and up the Hudson to Pier 86, a floating crane with a 190-foot boom will hoist Enterprise onto the flight deck, Mr. Woods said.
Once the shuttle is in place, Mr. Woods said, the tent — similar to the bubbles that cover some tennis courts — will be raised over it. By July, he said, the museum hopes to start selling tickets for entry into an exhibit designed around Enterprise that will cost about $3 million to build.
Then, the serious fund-raising will begin. Later this year, Ms. Marenoff-Zausner said, Intrepid will start collecting donations toward a permanent structure, possibly a museum across the West Side Highway from the carrier with Enterprise as its centerpiece.
“Ultimately,” she said, “we want to be able to create a permanent home for it.”
Noah Rosenberg contributed reporting.
Saving an Officer’s Life, With Running Clothes Beneath His Scrubs
By ANDY NEWMAN
Dr. Joshua B. Bederson awoke early Tuesday morning in Florida, where he had addressed a conference of neurosurgeons on Monday. He knew he had a big day scheduled: return to New York, where he is the head of neurosurgery at Mount Sinai Medical Center, and perform two operations starting at 11 a.m.
He flew into La Guardia, went home to Manhattan, changed into running clothes and headed for Central Park. He had made it once around the reservoir when his phone went off. A police officer had been stabbed in the head.
Dr. Bederson, 55, ran out of the park, up Fifth Avenue, and through the doors of Mount Sinai Hospital’s emergency room, on Madison Avenue north of 99th Street. He threw his scrubs on over his T-shirt and sweat pants — “I was sweating all over the patient” — and got to work.
The first new piece of bad news was that the patient, Officer Eder Loor, had pulled the knife out.
“I would have preferred to see the knife still in there,” Dr. Bederson said, because the blade might have been holding a lot of the damage in place, and because pulling it out performed a second slicing action.
“Remember that famous adventurer who got stabbed in the heart by a stingray?” Dr. Bederson said in a phone interview from his office Wednesday afternoon. “He died because he pulled it out himself.”
A scan showed blood building up inside Officer Loor’s head, inside and outside the brain. A large blood clot inside his brain – “thick, like grape jelly” — was exerting tremendous pressure. It had already shoved the left side of his brain a centimeter across the midline.
“You don’t want to overemphasize, but he was at death’s door,” Dr. Bederson said. “He was at the very, very end of what he could compensate for.”
To save the officer, Dr. Bederson’s team had to open up the skull, relieve the pressure, find the sources of the bleeding and stop it.
Out came the knives and drills. The doctors cut a huge bone flap in his skull – almost seven inches in diameter.
Inside Officer Loor’s head, Dr. Bederson saw that the knife had sliced through the vein in the Sylvian fissure, which contains crucial blood vessels. It had nicked but not penetrated the middle cerebral artery, the main blood supplier for the brain’s left hemisphere.
If the blade had gone through the artery, Dr. Bederson said, “It would have all been over.”
Even so, Dr. Bederson said he worried that the artery was damaged and that the blood clot pressing against it was all that was keeping it from bleeding.
“I said ‘Uh-oh,’” he recalled. “I said, ‘This is a microscope case. Let’s bring in the microscope.’”
The operating room, already crowded with nurses, residents, anesthesiologists and student observers, began to fill with spectators. “Whenever there’s an interesting case, your colleagues will come,” Dr. Bederson said. Eventually, he said, “there was such a level of interest that I asked people to leave.”
He was not nervous, but mindful of the stakes.
“You don’t get preoccupied, but you don’t forget that you have a human being,” he said. “A young human being with a 25-year-old pregnant wife.”
The knife blade, three inches long, had plunged all the way through the temporal lobe, just missing centers that control speech and vision, and lodged in the base of the skull, clipping a vein next to the carotid artery but stopping just short of the artery itself. The blade had cut into the maxillary branch of the trigeminal nerve, which controls feeling in the face. But it did not slice through the main bulk of the nerve.
“It was a millimeter from everything,” Dr. Bederson said. “It was ridiculous.”
The operating-room microscope floats above the patient, held in place by a complex metal contraption. Dr. Bederson looked through the eyepieces as he cut and cauterized, sealing off the Sylvian vein, which was responsible for about 80 percent of the bleeding, and the venous complex surrounding the carotid artery, which was responsible for most of the rest.
The hematoma had been evacuated. The bleeding was stopped. The surgical team put Officer Loor’s skull back together and sewed him up.
More than four hours had passed.
The officer was brought out of anesthesia. He moved all his limbs. He spoke clearly. He saw; his eyes tracked. Dr. Bederson later told reporters that he expected the officer to make a full recovery.
Officer Loor’s only complaint, besides pain, was that “his cheek and his jaw are numb and he can’t feel his nose on the left side,” the doctor said.
He may have to learn to live with it.
“Probably at least some of the fibers were severed; he may be left with a little bit of numbness,” Dr. Bederson said. “It’s not the end of the world.”
http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/04/18/saving-an-officers-life-with-running-clothes-beneath-his-scrubs/
At a Brooklyn School, the Cool Crowd Pushes the King Around
By ANNE BARNARD and DYLAN LOEB McCLAIN
The classroom at Intermediate School 318 in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, was filled on Tuesday with the thumping and clattering of a half-dozen high-speed chess matches, played with a rambunctious energy more reminiscent of a hockey game than of Garry Kasparov and Deep Blue.
The school’s conquering heroes — its chess players — were blowing off steam. On Sunday, in Minneapolis, they became the first middle school team to win the United States Chess Federation’s national high school championship. The team, mostly eighth graders, beat out top high schools like Stuyvesant in Manhattan and Thomas Jefferson in Alexandria, Va.
The victory burnishes what is already a legend in the chess world. At I.S. 318, more than 60 percent of the students come from families with incomes below the federal poverty level. Yet each stairwell landing bristles with four-foot chess trophies, and the school celebrities are people like James A. Black Jr. A 13-year-old with twinkly eyes and curly eyelashes, James is not a football hero or a valedictorian, but a certified chess master who gently corrects his teachers on the fine points of strategy.
Watching over a particularly raucous game on Tuesday, James, wearing a black sweatsuit and a huge book bag, took notice of the moment when only kings and pawns were left. “Automatic draw,” he declared. “Insufficient mating material.”
I.S. 318 is a perennial powerhouse, often sweeping middle school national championships against exclusive schools where more students can afford private lessons. A recent graduate, Rochelle Ballantyne, has secured a chess scholarship to the University of Texas-Dallas — though she is still a student at Brooklyn Tech — and aims to be the first African-American female master in chess history. Even before the big win, Magnus Carlsen of Norway, the No. 1 ranked player in the world, was scheduled to visit the students next week.
But the new milestone means something more, say school officials, who express hope that it will help the program survive budget cuts that threaten chess and other after-school and elective programs across the city.
“The difference in mental development between a junior high school kid and a high school kid is impossible to overstate,” said Elizabeth Spiegel, the school’s full-time chess teacher, who helped turn a small after-school program into a national contender, the core of the school’s identity and the focus of a recently completed documentary, “Brooklyn Castle.”
The school placed second in the high school competition in 2011. This year, I.S. 318 and Manhattan’s elite Hunter College High School tied for first, but I.S. 318 took home the first-place trophy because its opponents in the tournament won more games than Hunter’s.
Remarkable as it is, the accomplishment is not as unimaginable as it would have been 20 years ago, when players developed more slowly. But computers and better training methods have made 13-year-old masters less rare than they once were. Last year, a Chinatown elementary school, Public School 124 Yung Wing, placed first at the high school tournament, albeit in a lower-rated division.
Chess is embedded in the culture of I.S. 318. All sixth graders take weekly chess classes and can continue chess as an elective for the next two years. Players from acclaimed elementary school chess programs like the one at Public School 31 in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, feed the school, but the team also welcomes beginners. Chess banners line the hallways, and the school’s answering machine says, “Thank you for calling I.S. 318, home of the national chess champions.”
And when Ms. Spiegel, who started at I.S. 318 as a part-time chess coach, got her own classroom a few years ago, she took down the faces of the presidents from atop the blackboard and replaced them with a row of chess champions like Boris Spassky.
The walls are plastered with chess tips that read like maxims for living life: “When you don’t know what to do next, improve your worst piece” reads one, written in felt-tip marker. “If you’re winning, play safe and keep the game clean and simple. If you are losing, take risks and complicate the game.”
Chess, Ms. Spiegel said, recognizes many kinds of intelligence. Some top academic students excel, while others never take to it, she said. And some chess geniuses might have little interest in learning the map of Europe. She said the school viewed chess not as a competitive pressure-cooker but as a way to learn how one’s mind works.
“You do a lot of thinking about how you think, especially about how you make decisions,” she said. “You’ll hear a kid say, ‘I made this mistake because I was very emotional.’ ”
Most of I.S. 318’s 1,650 students are from the Williamsburg area, said John Galvin, an assistant principal. But some come for the chess, including the three top players, Justus Williams, from the South Bronx; James Black, from Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn; and Isaac Barayev, from Forest Hills, Queens.
James was 8 when his father brought home a chess set from Kmart, he recalled: “It had little cards explaining what moves each piece could make.”
His father, James A. Black, said he hoped chess would bring his son a college scholarship, and that it had already shaped his life.
“The group of people that he hangs with,” Mr. Black said, “it is everything. He thinks before he acts.”
The game has brought James and his chess colleagues a popularity that sometimes tickles and sometimes unnerves them.
“A lot of kids know my name,” James said. “I say, ‘How do you know my name?’ and they say, ‘I hear it on the loudspeaker all the time.’ ”
Maya and Mariah McGreen, twins from Bushwick who are on the team, said that after the victory, their friends — fans, not players — told them they must win at the girls’ national championships, on Friday in Chicago. One told Maya, “You so owe me a trophy.”
James aims to become a grandmaster, preferably before finishing high school. Sometimes, he said, he contemplates becoming a chess teacher: “It’s like being a professional basketball player — you do something you love for a living.”
The chess program is a labor of love for many supporters. Not least of them was the longtime principal, Fortunato Rubino, who died on April 2. Mr. Galvin, the assistant principal, said the team might present the new trophy to his wife.
Donors have stepped in to offset school budget cuts and rising costs; the travel budget alone is about $70,000, Mr. Galvin said. The program gets significant support from a nonprofit organization called Chess-in-the-Schools, which initially sent Ms. Spiegel to I.S. 318, and numerous other sponsors.
All that has made chess a fact of life in the school — not just for the chess elite but for beginners like Michael Grullon, 11, who said he admired the chess team but planned to “stay in the minor leagues,” and his opponent, Raymond Torres, 12, who taunted him: “Yo, dude, illegal move.”
Then there are the champions, like James. “You should totally take the G-4,” he told Ms. Spiegel as she faced off with Tommy Zhang, 13.
Ms. Spiegel, who is an expert, a level below James’s ranking of master, could not see what he saw on the board, and could not tell if he was helping or sabotaging. She threw up her hands and said, “I’m not sure if James is giving bad advice on purpose, or not.”
Theodoric Meyer contributed reporting.
Ride to Ballgame on Vintage Train Transports Fans to Another Era
By C. J. HUGHES
A subway train came and went. And another, and a few more. But the crowd gathered on an uptown platform in Grand Central Station on Friday morning was not budging.
Then, a few minutes after noon, the mystery was explained, even if the fuss was not completely understood: a vintage train arrived, looking its period best, with fatigue-green sides; large, easy-to-open windows; and ads plastered to its walls saying, “Thoughtful mothers bake and fry with Crisco.”
Introduced about a century ago and last used for regular runs in the 1960s, the train was a low-voltage model, known as a Lo-V to those there to greet it.
On Friday, it was pressed into service to shuttle riders to the Bronx for the first home game of the season at Yankee Stadium, as it has been before. A Lo-V has made a run to the stadium every year since 1917.
For its eager riders traveling the No. 4 line, though, the sports tie-in was almost incidental.
“Seeing the new pieces of junk versus the Lo-V’s, it’s a very big deal,” said Arjun Laal, 17, a student at East New York High School of Transit Technology’s Bronx campus, who brought a video camera to film the whole trip.
It was not an unfamiliar thrill. Arjun estimates he has ridden the Lo-V over 100 times, seeking it out whenever New York City Transit, the arm of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority that runs the subways, dusts it off for special occasions — mostly having to do with baseball.
If Arjun is a fan, Jeremiah Cox of Washington Heights, who stood nearby with his own camera, might be a fanatic. After graduating from college this year, the 22-year-old, who runs a train-focused Web site, will spend a year living off his savings and taking photos of the country’s railroad stations. The Lo-V traveling on Friday, which at four cars is shorter than the typical, modern eight-car subway train, quickly filled with riders as it made its way north, and most seemed to be along just for the ride.
Carl, 48, who would not give his last name because he was absent without leave from work, noted the train’s old-fashioned indoor cooling system — fan blades that whirled on the ceiling without any protective guards. “You can’t stretch out because you might lose a finger or two,” he joked.
Others marveled over how the narrow rattan benches lining the walls seemed to provide more leg room than on modern trains, helped by the absence of poles interrupting the floor. Riders instead clutched rows of handles above, illuminated by naked white bulbs.
Though the train seemed spacious, passengers were squeezed tight by the time it reached East 86th Street, so much so that Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, surrounded by police officers, could not even get on. (He caught a conventional No. 4 train right behind it, a spokeswoman said.)
To some riders, nothing seemed ordinary or unworthy of a picture. Phones were thrust within inches of noses to snap images of an old map taped to a window. Others were transfixed by the dated lines of ads, which in car No. 5483 — built in 1924 and in service till 1969 — included one for Campbell’s pea, celery, tomato and asparagus soups. In another, a woman lay on her stomach, flipping through a magazine and saying of Coca-Cola, “I think it’s swell.”
The ride was not without hitches. As it pulled away from East 149th Street, a door in one car stayed open, prompting a transit worker to gasp, “Stop! Stop! Stop!” before the train was halted and the door manually closed.
Just two people are needed to run a subway train today, a transit spokesman said, though a dozen were running the train on Friday, with at least one worker per car to call out the names of the stops.
If the journey was more of a trip back in time than a way to get to the ballpark, Yankees fans caught in the hoopla did not seem to mind.
“So much of New York is always changing,” said Micah Grossman, 35, a sales executive from Gramercy Park. “It’s good to bring a piece of it back once in a while, to learn how we’ve changed.”
As for which group is more single-minded, Yankees fans or train buffs, he said, laughing, there was no doubt: “Train fans are definitely more obsessive.”
William S. Burroughs
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
William Seward Burroughs II ( /'b?ro?z/; also known by his pen name William Lee; February 5, 1914 – August 2, 1997) was an American novelist, poet, essayist and spoken word performer. A primary figure of the Beat Generation and a major postmodernist author, he is considered to be "one of the most politically trenchant, culturally influential, and innovative artists of the 20th century."[1] His influence is considered to have affected a range of popular culture as well as literature. Burroughs wrote 18 novels and novellas, six collections of short stories and four collections of essays. Five books have been published of his interviews and correspondences. He also collaborated on projects and recordings with numerous performers and musicians, and made many appearances in films.
He was born to a wealthy family in St. Louis, Missouri, grandson of the inventor and founder of the Burroughs Corporation, William Seward Burroughs I, and nephew of public relations manager Ivy Lee. Burroughs began writing essays and journals in early adolescence. He left home in 1932 to attend Harvard University, studying English, and anthropology as a postgraduate, and later attending medical school in Vienna. After being turned down by the Office of Strategic Services and U.S. Navy in 1942 to serve in World War II, he dropped out and became afflicted with the drug addiction that affected him for the rest of his life, while working a variety of jobs. In 1943 while living in New York City, he befriended Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, the mutually influential foundation of what became the countercultural movement of the Beat Generation.
Much of Burroughs's work is semi-autobiographical, primarily drawn from his experiences as a heroin addict, as he lived throughout Mexico City, London, Paris, Berlin, the South American Amazon and Tangier in Morocco. Finding success with his confessional first novel, Junkie (1953), Burroughs is perhaps best known for his third novel Naked Lunch (1959), a work fraught with controversy that underwent a court case under the U.S. sodomy laws. With Brion Gysin, he also popularized the literary cut-up technique in works such as The Nova Trilogy (1961–64). In 1983, Burroughs was elected to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and in 1984 was awarded the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by France.[2] Jack Kerouac called Burroughs the "greatest satirical writer since Jonathan Swift,"[3] a reputation he owes to his "lifelong subversion"[1] of the moral, political and economic systems of modern American society, articulated in often darkly humorous sardonicism. J. G. Ballard considered Burroughs to be "the most important writer to emerge since the Second World War," while Norman Mailer declared him "the only American writer who may be conceivably possessed by genius."[3]
Burroughs had one child, William Seward Burroughs III (1947-1981), with his second wife Joan Vollmer. Vollmer died in 1951 in Mexico City. Burroughs was convicted of manslaughter in Vollmer's death, an event that deeply permeated all of his writings. Burroughs died at his home in Lawrence, Kansas after suffering a heart attack in 1997.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_S._Burroughs
Where Death Shaped the Beats
By DAVID J. KRAJICEK
THE scene of the crime, Riverside Park at the foot of West 115th Street, is in full spring bloom, carpeted in the butter-colored flowers of lesser celandine. It was here 68 years ago, on a slope descending to the moonlit Hudson River, that Lucien Carr, 19, the Beat Generation’s charismatic, callow swami, buried a knife in the heart of David Kammerer, 33, his besotted, dauntless hometown stalker.
Carr is often characterized as muse to the Beats, but he was more than that. Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg were acolytes, captivated by Carr’s profane rants about bourgeois culture and the path to transcendence through pure creative expression — his “New Vision,” after “A Vision” by Yeats.
Carr’s “honor slaying” of Kammerer, as The Daily News called it, served as an emotional fulcrum for the group a decade before Kerouac, Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs published their seminal works; the violent death in their midst lent credibility to the tortured-soul narrative they yearned for.
Columbia University was critical to that narrative, and its Beaux-Arts campus is featured in a film now in production, “Kill Your Darlings,” starring Daniel Radcliffe as Ginsberg. The university stood as a kind of crucible for the Beats, who were emerging “like a wild seed in a city garden,” wrote the Beat historian Bill Morgan. Many of their haunts in Morningside Heights remain (all within a few blocks of the 116th Street subway station on Broadway), including the venerable dorms where they lived — Hartley and what is now Wallach. Any pilgrim’s archeological Beat tour, inspired by the movie or not, must begin with the university itself, a useful antagonist in the iconoclasts’ quest for artistic self-actualization.
“They all loved to feel they were sleeping in the camp of the enemy somehow,” said Ben Marcus, a novelist and associate professor at Columbia’s School of the Arts. “As much as universities should be cauldrons of creativity and breeding grounds for new creative activity, the Beats needed to feel that they were being stifled by forces at the university.”
They seemed to enjoy the idea, he added, “that these forces were straitjacketing them, whether it was true or not.”
“Kill Your Darlings,” from Killer Films, an independent production company, was adapted from “And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks,” a roman à clef written in 1945 by Kerouac and Burroughs but unpublished until 2008. (The title was derived from an apocryphal story concerning a radio newscast about a zoo fire.) In addition to Mr. Radcliffe, shedding his Harry Potter guise to play Ginsberg, the film stars Michael C. Hall, the agreeable serial killer Dexter on Showtime, as Kammerer; Jack Huston, from HBO’s “Boardwalk Empire,” as Kerouac; and a relative unknown, Dane DeHaan, as Carr.
Kammerer’s pederastic interest in Carr began when Kammerer was Carr’s Boy Scout leader in St. Louis, where both came from privileged backgrounds, according to Mr. Morgan’s “I Celebrate Myself: The Somewhat Private Life of Allen Ginsberg.”
Carr was a boy Aphrodite. In “Hippos” Kerouac called the Carr character “the kind of boy literary fags write sonnets to, which start out, ‘O raven-haired Grecian lad....’ ”
Kammerer, a whiskered redhead, taught physical education and English at Washington University. In about 1940, when Carr was 15, his mother, Marian, discovered a cache of “desperate” letters from the older man, according to James Campbell’s “This Is the Beat Generation.” She sent him to boarding school in Chicago, but Kammerer trailed him there — and then to Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass.; Bowdoin College in Maine; and, finally, Columbia.
The Beats began to form during Carr’s first semester there. He and Ginsberg, a freshman from New Jersey, lived in an overflow dorm at the nearby Union Theological Seminary. At Christmastime in 1943, according to Mr. Campbell’s book, Ginsberg heard Brahms wafting from Carr’s room and knocked to find out who was listening to the music he loved. Ginsberg was smitten. In his journal, he called Carr his first love and “sweet vision.”
That winter Carr introduced Ginsberg to Kammerer and Burroughs, who had been schoolmates in St. Louis and were neighbors in Greenwich Village.
Kerouac, another Columbian, was ushered in a few months later when he met Carr at the West End, the saloon at 2911 Broadway, a 60-yard dash away from Columbia’s College Walk. (Kerouac initially found Carr to be pretentious and obnoxious, although he used a more vulgar description in “Vanity of Duluoz,” another of Kerouac’s gauzy autobiographical novels.)
By then Ginsberg and Carr were living at Warren Hall Residence Club, at 404 West 115th Street (now a parking lot). Kammerer was an occasional visitor, sometimes stealing in through the fire escape to watch Carr sleep, according to an often-repeated anecdote in Beat biographies, including Mr. Morgan’s “Beat Generation in New York: A Walking Tour of Jack Kerouac’s City.” Kerouac stayed with his girlfriend, Edie Parker, in Apartment 62 at 421 West 118th Street, a plaster-frosted walkup off Amsterdam Avenue.
In August 1944 Kerouac and Carr schemed a Merchant Marine adventure to France, where — in the midst of war — they had an irrational plan to retrace the Paris footsteps of the 19th-century poet Arthur Rimbaud, whom Carr regarded as a doppelganger.
The plan fell apart on Aug. 13, when they got drunk and were late getting to their ship, and the men rued their broken dream that night at the West End (now called Havana Central at the West End). Kerouac left Carr at midnight and crossed paths on campus near St. Paul’s Chapel with Kammerer, Carr’s relentless birddog.
Kammerer asked his usual question: “Where’s Lucien?”
Kerouac sent him to the West End.
“And I watch him rush off to his death,” Kerouac wrote in “Duluoz.”
Kammerer and Carr left the bar at 3 a.m. New York was sweltering, and they toddled downhill to Riverside Park for cool air.
An account of the crime in The New York Times at the time explained that Kammerer made “an offensive proposal.” The article continued:
“Carr said that he rejected it indignantly and that a fight ensued. Carr, a slight youth, 5 feet 9 tall and weighing 140 pounds, was no match for the burly former physical education instructor, who was 6 feet tall and weighed about 185 pounds.”
“In desperation,” the account added, “Carr pulled out of his pocket his Boy Scout knife, a relic of his boyhood, and plunged the blade twice in rapid succession into Kammerer’s chest.”
Had Carr run to the police, he probably would have been hailed as a hero against a pervert. But he did something quite different.
He rolled the body to the river’s edge, bound the limbs with shoe laces, stuffed rocks in the pockets, and watched his longtime lurker sink.
Carr hurried to Greenwich Village and reported his deed to Burroughs, who advised him to tell the police he was the victim of a sex fiend. Instead Carr woke Kerouac, who recounted that eye-opener in “Duluoz”:
“Well,” Carr said, “I disposed of the old man last night.”
He didn’t seem nettled. As much as anything, Carr seemed satisfied, by all accounts, that he had finally done something noteworthy. The two men walked up West 118th Street to Morningside Park, where Carr buried Kammerer’s eyeglasses, which he had pocketed as evidence of his feat.
He and Kerouac traipsed about Manhattan, dropping the Boy Scout knife in a subway grate on 125th Street. They visited the Museum of Modern Art, a hot dog stand in Times Square and a cinema where they watched “The Four Feathers.”
Carr finally walked into the district attorney’s office and announced the killing. Prosecutors thought he was crazy — “the imaginings of an overstrained mind,” The Times wrote. Carr sat there reading Yeats, to the bewilderment of police officers and crime reporters.
The police were convinced only when Carr led them to the buried glasses the next day, at about the time Kammerer’s body bobbed up off West 108th Street.
A week after the killing Ginsberg wrote the poem “Hymn to the Virgin,” which hinted at a complex relationship. Written to Carr in Kammerer’s voice, it begins, “Thou who art afraid to have me, lest thou lose me.” (Two months after the death Ginsberg took an apartment at 627 West 115th Street, about a hundred paces from the death site.)
Carr pleaded guilty to manslaughter. A judge had mercy on “young, good-looking Lucien,” as The Times called him, and sent Carr to the Elmira Reformatory, not prison. (Burroughs and Kerouac were confined briefly as accessories. While he was jailed Kerouac was escorted by the police to his courthouse wedding with Parker, and the newlyweds later moved to another Morningside Heights Beat pad, at 419 West 115th Street.)
Carr returned to New York after 18 months away and joined United Press (later United Press International), beginning a 47-year career there. (He had three sons with his first wife, Francesca von Hartz, including the novelist Caleb Carr.) He remained close to Ginsberg and Kerouac, even as he tried to scrub himself from Beat history. He insisted that Ginsberg remove his name from the dedication of “Howl,” and the publication of “Hippos” waited until after Carr died in 2005.
An archive of letters and postcards to Carr at Columbia’s Butler Library shows that Kerouac and Ginsberg continued to solicit his approval long after they became famous writers — Ginsberg in intimate, lyrical letters and Kerouac in wisecracking postcards.
Yet in his journal (published in his “Book of Martyrdom and Artifice”) Ginsberg wrote of Carr: “He must prove that he is a genius. He cannot do so in creative labor — for he has not the patience, says he, nor the time, says he, nor the occasion, says he. None of these reasons is correct. He seems not to have the talent.”
Carr certainly was a talented editor. A 2003 history of United Press International called him “the soul of the news service.” He did not talk about his life among the Beats or his crime, and former colleagues say Carr would have been livid about “Kill Your Darlings.”
Joseph A. Gambardello, a longtime newspaper editor, was a protégé of Carr’s at U.P.I. in the mid-1970s, when the news service was based in the Daily News Building on East 42nd Street.
“When I met him he was a hard-drinking, hardworking journalist,” Mr. Gambardello said. “He did not come across as a pretentious jackass at all.” He added, “The person I had read about with Kerouac and Ginsberg didn’t exist anymore.”
Carr occasionally sent Mr. Gambardello to Louie’s East, an adjacent bar, to fetch a “Lou Carr Special” — a lot of vodka, a little Coke.
He had gotten over Rimbaud.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/06/books/columbia-u-haunts-of-lucien-carr-and-the-beats.html?pagewanted=print
For Midtown Pedestrians, an Avenue Alternative
First came the bike lanes, creeping like overgrown ivy across the city streetscape.
Then there were the open-air pedestrian plazas, sprouting from the concrete in hubs like Times Square and Union Square to make the insufferable clamor of crosstown traffic a little less so.
Now, by summer, New Yorkers may find themselves in the throes of the Bloomberg administration’s latest roadside intervention: between-avenue stop signs, speed humps and pedestrian crossings along six blocks in the heart of Midtown Manhattan, forging what some have dubbed Sixth-and-a-Half Avenue.
The Transportation Department plans to connect the public plazas and arcades that run from 51st to 57th Streets, between Sixth and Seventh Avenues, creating a quarter-mile walkway through open-access lobbies and canopied spaces between office buildings that offers refuge from the tumult of the city’s main arteries.
Though midblock pedestrian crossings do exist elsewhere in the city, most notably near Rockefeller Center, the proposed stretch is on track to become Midtown’s only extended thoroughfare governed by an authority more often found outside Manhattan: the stop sign.
For years, the passageway, linked by a series of privately owned public spaces, has been an open secret among the area’s inhabitants, presenting perhaps the most tantalizing jaywalking opportunity in the city. Residents can finish off a lunchtime sirloin at the Capital Grille on West 51st Street, take in a movie at the Ziegfeld Theater three blocks north and retire to West 57th Street for drinks at the Russian Tea Room without ever setting foot on an avenue. Soon, it seems, they will be able to do so legally.
“A lot of people don’t know that these places exist, hidden within buildings,” said Janette Sadik-Khan, the transportation commissioner. “This is a kind of a secret pedestrian avenue that’s like Sixth-and-a-Half Avenue for pedestrians, and this would really energize these places with foot traffic.”
To critics, the proposal represents the latest in a string of domineering policies that do little but befuddle drivers and pedestrians and choke traffic flow. A stop sign, they say, will only exacerbate congestion across an already clogged section of Manhattan.
Perhaps a yield sign would make more sense, particularly since some plazas typically close around 7 p.m., said Senjay Meray, 40, who often makes deliveries to businesses in the area.
“In the night people don’t travel,” he said, sitting in a blue delivery van on Tuesday afternoon on West 53rd Street. “But cars do.”
The city says traffic disruptions would be negligible. An average of fewer than 10 vehicles traverse the blocks each minute during peak times, the Transportation Department said, while more than 1,000 pedestrians cross some of the streets connecting the plazas during a typical lunch hour.
On a recent weekday afternoon, most vehicles were forced to wait through at least one light as they crossed West 53rd Street, allowing many pedestrians to slither between stopped cars without a delay. For pedestrians who could not, options appeared to be threefold: jog to safety, timing the expedition from sidewalk to sidewalk; creep out, peeking around parked cars, and wait until no vehicles are in sight; or simply march forth without so much as a glance at the traffic, raising an open hand calmly at the taxi drivers who slam on their brakes near a plaza entrance.
Still, even supporters acknowledge that the proposal, prompted by a request last year from Community Board 5 to use the spaces better, is an audacious step.
“I just don’t know how motorists will react late at night,” said George Haikalis, a public member of the board’s transportation committee, which unanimously approved the proposal on Monday night. “It’s not going to be unnoticed. If the city D.O.T. wants to do it, then they’ll take the heat on that.”
The full community board will take up the proposal on April 12.
Some opponents have cited a tacit understanding among pedestrians and motorists familiar with the area’s layout, arguing that a stop sign would introduce chaos to a perfectly functional arrangement.
Joe Ward, 58, a technical writer who often eats lunch in the plaza near West 51st Street, disputed this logic. “People walk into oncoming traffic,” he said, discarding a cigarette outside his office building. “I haven’t seen any evidence of an unspoken bond.”
Shona Lewis, 25, understands the dangers well. During a recent southbound walk through the passageway, which she often takes from her advertising office to reach her gym, Ms. Lewis said she was nearly struck by a taxi — its driver perhaps emboldened by his legal right of way.
“He clearly saw me coming and was going faster,” she recalled. “I slammed on the hood — New York style.”
Stella Billings, 29, from the Bronx, said she typically got off the No. 1 train a stop early, at Columbus Circle, so she could walk to the office of her nonprofit organization using the public spaces between avenues.
She lauded how pedestrian-friendly the city had become in recent years. “It’s such a businessy area,” she said. “This is like an oasis.”
The prospect of an avenue name involving fractions was equally appealing. “That’s cute,” Ms. Billings said. “Very Harry Potter.”
But on transit boldness alone, the Bloomberg administration is unlikely to match at least one predecessor: Mayor William J. Gaynor, who in 1910 proposed a new avenue between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, extending from Eighth Street to 59th Street and splitting Bryant Park in two. Numerous buildings would have been sacrificed to Mayor Gaynor’s vision.
“It was a crazy proposal,” said Andrea Renner, an assistant curator for the Museum of the City of New York’s exhibit on the history of the Manhattan grid.
Months after introducing this plan, Mayor Gaynor was weakened by an assassination attempt, robbing the plan of any momentum, Ms. Renner said.
Bike lanes were never discussed.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/30/nyregion/for-midtown-manhattan-pedestrians-an-avenue-alternative.html?hp
In Queens, Cold Weather Brings Heat to Handball
By SARAH MASLIN NIR
A steady ribbon of steam rose from a stainless steel pot at a park in Queens, a small flame licking at its underside. Every so often, Washington Giovanni Cardenas lifted the lid to pluck a round morsel from the roiling water.
Timing was important: undercooked, the objects would be flat; overcooked, the casing could melt. Two minutes was the magic number.
Mr. Cardenas was not tending stove at a cookout on that Wednesday in late February: inside his pot were bright-blue rubber balls.
Mr. Cardenas, 39, is a self-described religious devotee of the sport of handball, and like many of his peers, he is committed to playing the game year-round. But the cold weather is not hospitable to players, and even less so to the handballs.
“On a winter day the ball is cold, which makes the rubber harder, the air in the ball denser, so the ball doesn’t really expand and contract off the bounce,” said Ruben Acosta, 32, a hotel concierge who is known on the court as Superstar. Boiling the balls, he said, gives them back their zing.
“When you play with the steam ball, it makes everything a lot more interesting,” Mr. Acosta said. “Your reflexes have to be faster, your instinct has to be faster. It changes the game.”
That is why in the trunks of their cars, next to the usual gear of water bottles, gym shorts, gloves and plastic tubs of balls, the handball players tuck in some unconventional equipment: a canister of propane, a lighter and a pot. (“My mom doesn’t know this is missing,” Mr. Cardenas said.)
New York has the most outdoor handball courts of any city in America: about 5,000, according to the United States Handball Association. By comparison, Los Angeles is in second place with 500.
But indoor courts are few and far between, and they are often hogged by the best athletes. Indoor clubs also charge court fees, which, while usually under $20, can add up for fanatics like Mr. Cardenas, who works at a moving company. He estimated that he had played more than six games a week since he became hooked on handball six years ago.
The answer for Mr. Cardenas and a revolving group of about 50 players — some of whom know each other only by handles like PlayStation and Pollo — was “steamball.” These players do not have to deal with “a whole mob of people who are trying to play indoors,” Mr. Acosta said before dipping into a handball player’s sideline activity, trash talk, “because they’re not man enough to play outside.”
On this unusually temperate Wednesday in February, the air was still cold enough to deaden the rubber on a court in Rego Park, Queens. As cars rushed by on the Grand Central Parkway, a dozen friends watched Mr. Cardenas shield a propane burner in a large paint bucket from the wind. He dropped four azure balls into a few inches of water simmering in his mother’s pot.
Then, in teams of four, the men launched into two parallel games with rapid-fire volleys, thwacking, sweating and trash-talking.
Every few minutes, a player would reach into the piping pot, swapping a flagging ball for a toasty one. Some tossed the sizzling ball like a hot potato in the cloth of their sweatshirt. The heated rubber hit the concrete wall of the court with the same satisfying sound as popping bubble wrap.
A regulation handball has a diameter of just under two inches and weighs 61 grams, said Matt Krueger, the national association’s development coordinator. It consists of a rubber exterior with a center of compressed air, and when that air becomes too cold, the pressure inside the ball drops.
To the uninitiated, there is little difference between a boiled ball and a cold “deadball,” but the latter moves more slowly, and players must hit it harder. After playing that way all winter, Mr. Cardenas said, players find that they have lost their competitive edge when the sport’s stars re-emerge in the spring.
The steamball players of Rego Park said they adopted the practice from a group of older players in Woodside, Queens, about three years ago. But Mr. Krueger said similar practices abound. In Seattle, he said, some players use a slow cooker, and players in Coney Island have been known to inject air into balls with a syringe.
Ball-doctoring tactics are not permitted in official tournaments, Mr. Krueger added, but they are fine for recreational play.
Not everyone is a fan. Some prefer the more relaxed pace the cold ordinarily brings.
“I hate steamball,” said Vladimir Zhivulko, 20, a student. “It’s too much work, it’s too much hustle.”
Others mocked steamball at first. “They say bring the potatoes, the eggs, the spaghetti,” Mr. Cardenas said. “We’ll make a soup out of it while the water is boiling up.” But the mockery stopped when critics saw how the game flew, he said.
Collette Smith walked her pit bull past the Rego Park courts during a heated game of steamball and inquired about the bubbling contraption on the asphalt. She was blown away.
“Who would think these kids out here would think of something like this and execute it?” Ms. Smith said. “It’s incredible.”
Scientists try to bring back ladybugs
By Rachel Stern, The Ithaca Journal
Updated 9h 56m ago
ITHACA, N.Y. -- New York state's official insect, the nine-spotted ladybug, is making a comeback in a fourth-floor laboratory on Cornell University's campus.
Once extremely common in New York, the nine-spotted became rare over the last 40 years and was even thought to be extinct, said Leslie Allee, a Cornell entomologist.
Allee and another Cornell entomologist, John Losey, formed the Lost Ladybug Project in 2000 to investigate why the nine-spotted and two other ladybug species that were once common in North America had become so rare so fast.
Ladybugs may have an adorable name and look pretty cute, but they also have an important job to do: They eat other insects.
"If we didn't have ladybugs we would need to use much higher levels of pesticides," Allee said. "So not only are they saving us money and saving crops, but they are also contributing to human health by reducing the level of pesticides that are needed."
Combining research with citizen science, the project uses photos and actual ladybugs submitted by people across the country to map where certain ladybug species are found, study differences between them and breed them. So far, 13,370 photos of ladybugs have been contributed by people around the country and Canada.
But no contribution was more significant than last July when project volunteer Peter Priolo organized a group search in Amagansett on Long Island, N.Y. Priolo spotted a nine-spot in a patch of sunflowers on an organic farm. It was the first one found in New York in 30 years and just the second found on the East Coast in the last 40 years, Allee said.
"This completely shifted our research data because it wasn't just one, it was a nice-sized population," Allee said.
Members of the lab in Ithaca headed to Amagansett to collect a bunch of the ladybugs. Now, there are about 100 nine-spotted ladybugs living in plastic containers in the lab. With a steady diet of aphids, housed in a climate-controlled room connected to the lab, the population should grow by 25 percent every three to four weeks. Along with Allee and Losey, undergraduate and graduate students work in the lab feeding the ladybugs, collecting data and cleaning the plastic homes.
So far, research from the project has yielded three different theories on the disappearance of the nine-spotted ladybugs: competition with invasive species of ladybugs; hybridization; and changes to the environment, such as climate change.
On hybridization, for example, the lab is looking at if it is possible that the nine-spotted could have interbred with the seven-spotted and essentially bred itself out of existence.
The conditions in the lab are better than in nature, Allee said, as the temperature is regulated, food is given regularly and there are no predators around. Though the project is about five to 10 years away from reintroducing the bug back into the environment, that remains a possibility, Allee said.
In addition to the research, a significant part of the Lost Ladybug Project is about outreach to community members, said Rebecca Smyth, who corresponds with the people who submit photos. Smyth can only remember one day last year when she did not receive a photograph.
"I saw there were no submissions and I thought, 'can this be true?'" she said. "But then I thought, 'Well it is Christmas, so that is OK."
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/science/story/2012-01-28/ny-ladybugs-lost/52827442/1?csp=34news&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+usatoday-NewsTopStories+%28News+-+Top+Stories%29&utm_content=My+Yahoo
Rock’s Scientist Gets a Fittingly Small Tribute
By TAMMY LA GORCE
MAHWAH, N.J.
THE way that Les Paul’s possessions wound up in a tiny local museum a few miles from his sprawling house makes sense in its own way, according to some who knew him.
“Les had an idea of how to handle people, and what he liked was a small, intimate room,” said Lou Pallo, a longtime member of the Les Paul Trio, the guitarist and inventor’s band. “He didn’t like it when people were so far away he couldn’t touch them.”
Before his death in 2009 at age 94, Mr. Paul decided to allow the Mahwah Museum, which has about 1,000 square feet of display space, to present the first exhibition of many of his artifacts, a decision that reflected his preference for small audiences. “This is absolutely how he would have wanted people to see this stuff,” Mr. Pallo, 77, of Wanaque, said.
The exhibition, “Les Paul: A Tribute,” which opened in September, will run until June 30, according to Charles Carreras, the museum’s vice president and the chairman of the exhibition; some of the objects will remain permanently, he said.
Nearly 800 visitors had come through as of early January, Mr. Carreras, 70, of Mahwah, said. The museum usually gets “very small numbers,” he said.
“And part of the beauty of this exhibit is that it appeals to people of all ages, including younger people,” he added. “It’s a whole different audience for us.”
Mr. Carreras met with Mr. Paul, who lived in Mahwah for more than 50 years, several times in 2008 and 2009 to discuss a future exhibition. Mr. Paul had approached the museum with the idea for such a project, but he died before the details of what would eventually be displayed were settled.
Plans for the exhibition finally came together in 2010, when Jim Wysocki, a local friend to whom Mr. Paul had given several artifacts, offered to let the Mahwah Museum house the objects as a permanent loan, Mr. Carreras said. A private collector of Les Paul memorabilia from Westchester County also contributed pieces, and some items, like a section of the elaborately hand-carved wooden wall from Mr. Paul’s home studio, were obtained courtesy of the Les Paul Foundation, based in Manhattan. Gibson Guitar, based in Nashville, also lent three guitars and helped with promotion.
One highlight of the exhibition is the eight-track multitrack recorder that Mr. Paul invented in 1956, which changed the music industry. The exhibition also includes a 1940s-era lathe that allowed Mr. Paul to layer sounds on his recordings; the machine resembles a magnifying glass attached to a flywheel on one side and an upside-down cookie jar on the other.
Younger visitors have been attracted by the famous names incorporated into the display by Tetsu Amagasu, the design chairman for the museum’s exhibitions, including this one, Mr. Carreras said.
“A lot of times people won’t remember Les Paul and his radio show like I do,” Mr. Carreras said, referring to the early 1950s NBC program named for Mr. Paul, who played jazz guitar into his 90s and was a celebrated country and rock guitarist. “But they do know who Keith Richards and Paul McCartney are.” Mr. Richards and Mr. McCartney both played guitars that Mr. Paul had a hand in designing for Gibson, and they were also musically indebted to Mr. Paul, as noted on a wall of testimonials pinned alongside photos of rock stars at the exhibition.
The photos and quotes form the backdrop for a stage set with gleaming guitars, among them a 1953 model designed by Mr. Paul and produced by Gibson that is the exhibition’s oldest. (The show also contains one of his solid-body “logs,” a watershed instrument for pioneering rock-’n’-rollers made by Mr. Paul around 1941.) Three video kiosks show vintage clips including Mr. Paul and his second wife, Mary Ford, performing their mid-1950s TV show, “The Les Paul and Mary Ford Show,” from Mahwah.
Mr. Pallo, who carries on a tradition started by Mr. Paul by playing weekly at the Iridium jazz club in Manhattan, will give a gallery talk on Jan. 24. Another gallery talk by the jazz artists Bucky Pizzarelli, a longtime friend of Mr. Paul’s, and Ed Laub is set for Feb. 7; both evenings are limited to 25 attendees and cost $15.
Perhaps the ultimate in interactivity, though, is a continuing series of “guitar nights” the museum has set up. There are about a dozen guitars in the exhibition, and $25 buys 45 minutes of play on any of them except two whose lenders’ guidelines preclude it. The playable ones include signature Jimmy Page, Peter Frampton and Billie Joe Armstrong models, as well as several that were taken from Mr. Paul’s home.
“People are coming from all over for this,” Mr. Carreras said. Four guitar nights have already been held, with four more sold out. But the museum has scheduled about a dozen additional guitar nights from March through June.
“What happens is you bring in your family or friends, a couple of people, and you sit down and play for your audience right here in the museum,” Mr. Carreras said. Guitar players, mostly men so far — only two women have signed up to date — “really think this is great,” he said.
Mr. Paul might have thought it was great, too, Mr. Pallo said: “As much as Les was a genius and an inventor, he loved people. He would have loved watching people sit down and play those guitars.”
“Les Paul: A Tribute” is at the Mahwah Museum, 201 Franklin Turnpike, Mahwah, through June 30; (201) 512-0099 or mahwahmuseum.org; open Wednesday, Saturday and Sunday, 1 to 5 p.m.
He Just Can’t Turn In the Badge
By COREY KILGANNON
CHARLIE MURELLO still carries his gun and badge, still wears a detective’s sharp suit and tassel loafers, still keeps his dress blue uniform hanging in his closet at home.
He still shows up full time for his daily tour of duty at the 90th Precinct station house in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, the neighborhood where he has spent his entire police career.
But here’s the twist: he is 92 and nearly 30 years retired.
It was 1951 when he joined the New York Police Department, whose 20-years-and-out opportunity may appeal to some, but not to Mr. Murello, who may be the closest thing to a nonagenarian New York police detective.
“After I retired, I just kept coming back; I didn’t want to stop,” he said on Wednesday morning in the station house, a square-blockish building of blond brick on Union Street. “I come every day and see what the troops need,” he said. “It keeps me active and feeling good.”
Mr. Murello is the precinct patriarch, dispensing advice, union amenities and information. He counsels new officers, helps with clerical work and notarizes personal documents. Each morning, he reports to his desk in the community affairs office, an elevator-size room just inside the station’s entrance, where he can stand sentry and greet the officers, all by name.
The Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association has made Mr. Murello a lifetime member, a rare honor. At its monthly delegate meetings, he distributes the stipend checks to board members, including the president, Patrick J. Lynch.
“He never stopped being a member and a cop to everyone,” Mr. Lynch said. “When he walks in the station house, everyone lights up. They respect him.”
Mr. Murello was born one of seven children in an apartment on North 10th Street in Williamsburg. He entered the United States Army at age 21. “I fixed roads so Patton’s tanks could pass,” he said.
After the war, he said, “I wanted a good city job, so I took the fire, police and sanitation tests, and police called first.” He was assigned to walk a beat along the East River for the 92nd Precinct, at $3,900 a year.
“I ran for union delegate because I always wanted to represent the guys,” he said. “But I never wanted to be on the P.B.A. board full time, because I liked being a cop in the precinct.”
In 1965, Mr. Murello became a community affairs officer and a detective. The combination made him something of a front man for the precinct house, always on the scene when politicians and big brass came around, and when anything befell one of his officers. He wound up working at the 90th after the 92nd and 87th Precincts were folded into it.
When Mr. Murello turned 63, the department’s mandatory age for retirement, he said the pension office told him, “You have to leave or we’ll kick you out.” He complied reluctantly, and then simply kept showing up for work as a union delegate.
Around the station house, Mr. Murello is more than an aging mascot with some war stories — although he has them, too. Ask him about that photograph on the station house wall of him helping to take a cow into custody.
“The cow escaped from a slaughterhouse nearby and we took him to the station house, fed him and brought him back,” he said. “He kicked Sergeant Corso in the stomach.”
On Wednesday, he parked his big black Cadillac in his spot in front of the 9-0, and officers gathered at his trunk to pick up P.B.A. cards, T-shirts, mini-badges, calendars and the like.
He still shoots at the range with his service revolver. On his right hip, he carries a palm-size .25-caliber silver Browning pistol with a pearl handle.
Routinely, he leaves the station house at noon and repairs to Fortunato Brothers Café nearby, orders a cappuccino, pastry and San Pellegrino soda, and then stops in at the office of Community Board 1 on Graham Avenue.
All this has helped him brave the death of his wife of 57 years, Maria, on Valentine’s Day in 2009. On their first date, he took her to the fights at the Ridgewood Arena. She picked the winner and won $2 from him.
“Right after she passed, I found those two dollars from that bet tucked in her address book,” he said, staring off. Now he lives alone in the house they bought in 1956, in Floral Park, Queens, five houses from the Nassau County border. (City officers had to live within the city limits.) He and his wife never had children.
“This is my family, right here,” he said at the bustling 9-0. “I have 173 brothers and sisters.”
E-mail: character@nytimes.com
At 80, George Washington Needs Bridge Equivalent of Hip Replacement
By CHRISTINE HAUGHNEY
The vertical suspension ropes on the George Washington Bridge will be replaced for the first time in its history.
The George Washington Bridge is a cathedral of steel cables and beams, a stark, glimmering span that has become a civil engineering landmark, not to mention the busiest vehicular bridge in the world.
But now, at 80, it is in need of a thorough overhaul.
On Thursday, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey’s board authorized $15.5 million for repairs, part of the more than $1 billion that the project will eventually cost; agency officials want to clean the bridge’s four main cables and also replace, for the first time, the 592 vertical suspender ropes that hold up the roadway.
The overhaul is long overdue, Port Authority officials said; comparable bridges normally have their wires replaced after 70 years or so. It is also a fairly involved process: No more than three of the suspender ropes — each one is made up of 283 wires — that stretch from the bridge’s main cables to the roadway can be replaced at the same time, as removing more than that could destabilize the span.
Agency officials emphasized that the bridge was in no danger of collapsing because of the suspender deterioration. But they added that after spending $4.5 million over two years studying what repairs were necessary, it became clear that it was prudent to replace the ropes now. Waiting until there is a safety issue would require emergency repairs that would no doubt create what no driver on the George Washington Bridge wants: more traffic jams.
“We want to be sure that you don’t let the ropes to get to a point where you would have to take out a lane,” said Peter Zipf, the Port Authority’s chief engineer.
Although the agency has never replaced the bridge’s suspender ropes, which weigh 1,500 to 10,000 pounds each, depending on their length, the procedure is expected to be similar to the work done at the Golden Gate Bridge. For that project, a rolling platform, also known as a traveler, was placed atop the main cables, and then workers replaced the ropes, using temporary suspenders, jacking frames and jacks.
The project, which agency officials estimated would create 3,600 jobs, is daunting in its magnitude: the suspender ropes, if placed end to end, would be 32 miles long. If the 283 wires in each suspender rope were laid end to end, they would be 9,100 miles long — more than one-third of the circumference of the Earth around the equator.
The wires were a headache for the bridge’s creators back in the 1920s. Jameson W. Doig, a research professor at Dartmouth College and the author of “Empire on the Hudson,” which chronicles the history of the Port Authority, said the bridge’s chief engineer, Othmar Ammann, at one point considered using eyebars instead of wire rope to build the bridge.
The governor of New Jersey, Arthur Moore, pressured Mr. Ammann to use wire rope in the bridge’s construction because doing so would create jobs in New Jersey. But Mr. Ammann fought him until he was able to complete an engineering analysis. After finishing the analysis, he chose to use wire produced by the Roebling Company of New Jersey, run by the descendants of John A. Roebling, who designed the Brooklyn Bridge.
“It was a jobs issue,” Dr. Doig said. “It was a major issue in terms of whether the Port Authority could carry forward what it thought was the right way to design a bridge.”
By the time the bridge opened, in 1931, it had taken vast quantities of wire. Andrea Giorgi Bocker, the Port Authority’s resident engineer in charge of construction at the George Washington Bridge, said it took a year for the workers constructing the bridge to spin the 26,474 tightly coiled wires used in making each of the four main cables.
Replacing the suspension wire in stages will take eight years. Starting in 2013, the agency wants to clean up the massive anchorages tying down the bridge’s foundation, replace broken wires in the cables and replace the dehumidifiers in the chambers where the anchors are held.
The bridge’s main cables are still in pretty good shape. So workers will clean them up by scraping off their zinc-paste wrapping and adding a type of dehumidifier to the main cables. Then they will focus on the less-stable parts: they will replace all the suspender ropes, which are spaced every 60 feet.
“This is a structural engineer’s dream,” Mrs. Bocker said as she stood on the bridge on a recent misty afternoon, shouting over rumbling trucks and watching fog float swiftly onto the lower deck. She said she decided to become an engineer after visiting her father, who managed the George Washington Bridge when she was growing up. She rattled off facts and figures about the bridge as some might offer a baseball player’s batting statistics.
“Suspension ropes aren’t replaced every day,” she said. “In the case of the George Washington Bridge, it’s happening for the first time in its 80-year life. So it’s a once in a lifetime opportunity for an engineer to be a part of.”
Port Authority officials said they would pay for the repairs with revenue from tolls and fares.
When the repairs are completed, drivers, walkers and cyclists may notice that the rusted handrails and the sidewalks have been replaced. Most of the repairs will not be visible.
“You won’t feel any different,” Mrs. Bocker said. “You’ll probably see a shinier rope.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/09/nyregion/george-washington-bridge-cables-to-be-replaced.html?hp=&pagewanted=print
WARNING: Do Not Try To Drive In Manhattan This Afternoon
Zeke Miller|Nov. 30, 2011, 11:16 AM
Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/warning-do-not-try-to-drive-in-manhattan-this-afternoon-2011-11#ixzz1fEIVoeEU
Consider yourselves warned. @GridlockSam, our favorite source of New York City traffic information, calls today "the gridlock alert day of the decade."
It's going to be a traffic nightmare today as President Barack Obama is in town for three fundraisers, coinciding with the annual lighting of the Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree.
Obama is landing at JFK around 5 p.m., choppering in Marine One to Wall Street, and then attending three events in Greenwich Village, the Upper East Side, and West Midtown. Each neighborhood will be subject to a traffic freeze while the President is on the move. Plus, the area around Rockefeller Center will begin to be shut down around 4 p.m. for the tree lighting at 7 p.m.
In short, it's going to be a madhouse. Trains are going to be packed/delays, and many bus lines are being detoured/delayed too.
Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/warning-do-not-try-to-drive-in-manhattan-this-afternoon-2011-11#ixzz1fEIc6rUF
At Harbor, Answering an S.O.S.
By ROBIN FINN
SUSAN HENSHAW JONES, the new president of the comatose South Street Seaport Museum and the captain, by default, of its deteriorating fleet of historic vessels, dug the heels of her black pumps deeper into the splintered boardwalk at Pier 16, bracing herself against the November wind pirouetting off the harbor.
“Being on the water in New York City is a great thing for any institution,” she announced, following up with a quick corrective, “or it should be.” Her new job is a little like rescuing a well-located but foundering cultural institution on Fifth Avenue, or at least that is what Ms. Jones, who is also the president and director of the Museum of the City of New York uptown on Fifth Avenue’s Museum Mile, has been telling herself. Been there, done that, still doing it.
At the City Museum, she presides over an eclectic collection of 1.5 million historic artifacts, from Alexander Hamilton’s desk to Bella Abzug’s hats, all housed in an elegant 1932 mansion in the final stages of a $90 million renovation.
Before she was hired, the museum was in limbo: The collection began outgrowing its home in 1938, and a 1988 expansion plan never panned out. The storage conditions for its archive of 52,000 vintage photographs were abysmal; for that reason, other museums were averse to lending their treasures.
A move downtown to the Tweed Courthouse, a prospect dangled by the Giuliani administration, was withdrawn by the Bloomberg administration, leading the museum’s longtime director, Robert R. Macdonald, to resign.
Then a potential 2003 merger with the New-York Historical Society, a sort of consolation prize, collapsed.
Nudged along by Ms. Jones, however, construction on a glass-clad pavilion commenced in 2006, and the museum rallied and raised $80 million of the cost, which has created a state-of-the-art, climate-controlled, 21st-century display space inside the ornate shell of the original landmark building.
Ms. Jones did not only balance the budget, she increased it to $16 million from $4 million, and she made a push for the digitalization of the collection, accompanied by interactive programming focused on all five boroughs. Her managerial and curatorial innovations uptown since 2003 are what inspired Kate D. Levin, the city’s commissioner of cultural affairs, to ask her to venture downtown to fix the Seaport Museum and its not-so-fleet fleet. Ship rehab is new to her résumé; the other operational conundrums are not.
“Susan manages in a very special way,” Ms. Levin said. “She gets results. She knows how to take history off the walls and make it come alive. And the Seaport space allows the M.C.N.Y. to branch out and tell a story congruent with its larger mission.”
If she succeeds in resurrecting the Seaport Museum, it will be the third time in Ms. Jones’s late-blooming 17-year career as a “museum person” — previously she worked in urban housing, landmark preservation, her family’s New Jersey manufacturing business, and banking — that she has taken control of a moribund institution, rendered it solvent and made it a player on the cultural map. The difference this time is that she will be running two museums simultaneously.
“I really think I can do it,” she said.
The tidal wave of debt that sank the Seaport Museum’s prior administration was not her problem. Ms. Jones wanted and received a clean slate from the Seaport Museum’s landlord, the city’s Economic Development Corporation. The museum had been in arrears on its rent for a decade and owed $3 million to its former chairman, Frank J. Sciame, who lent it the money last year to cover payroll and operating expenses. Mr. Sciame, who is no longer affiliated with the museum, said in an e-mail that the takeover was “the right thing to do.” Seth W. Pinsky, the Economic Development Corporation president, said the debt had been partly eliminated by write-downs from the museum’s creditors.
Ms. Jones also received a green light from the Bloomberg administration, which sees a thriving Seaport Museum as a cultural anchor for its vision for the neighborhood.
The ships are the portion of the vision that worries her.
“Eleven things that float,” she said, raising a hand to her forehead to smooth down the bangs of her windblown pageboy. She estimates that repairing them all might cost close to $100 million.
Without a windfall from a boat enthusiast with deep pockets, fixing the full fleet is not in the plan. Ms. Jones has already hired her first waterfront director, Jonathan Boulware, whose 20 years in maritime management include a stint as a captain for Calypso cruise lines. His initial job is to advise her which ships to let go of and which to preserve. Intuition tells her that the 1885 Wavertree “is a keeper” but that the German-built Peking is not. She is less certain about the rest.
But Ms. Jones is not the sort to be intimidated by the challenges.
“I was on the search committee that brought her to the M.C.N.Y.,” said James G. Dinan, chief executive of York Capital Management, chairman of the City Museum’s board and a major donor to its renovation, “and with all due respect to the Seaport, the issues we’re facing there are literally a fraction of what she walked into at the M.C.N.Y.
“It was really on life support. The turnaround at the M.C.N.Y. is testimony to her unbelievable mental willpower: she also took the Bloomberg administration, which had really kind of written us off, and slowly got them to buy into what she was doing.”
In Ms. Jones’s office at the City Museum, pride of place belongs to a 1949 photograph by Stanley Kubrick of the boxer Rocky Graziano in a locker room shower, naked yet invulnerable. Presumably his resolute expression reminds Ms. Jones of herself.
She is not afraid to do battle: When she took over at the City Museum, she let go of the “old guard” among the staff and retained very few, notably the chief curator, Sarah Henry, who was hired in 2001 in tandem with the planned move to Tweed. Ms. Henry said it was “particularly important that under Susan’s leadership the museum’s exhibitions, like ‘Robert Moses and the Modern City: Remaking the Metropolis’ and ‘America’s Mayor: John V. Lindsay and the Reinvention of New York,’ have helped to reframe civic dialogue in the city.”
Indeed, on Ms. Jones’s watch, the museum, once known as the place with a nice collection of antique toy fire trucks, theater costumes and silverware, has become a place for serious intellectual debate.
Nicolai Ouroussoff, then the architecture critic at The New York Times, called the Moses show “a sweeping, scholarly exhibition that breathes fresh air into one of the most tired, overworked and misunderstood subjects in the city’s history.”
“Ten years ago that museum’s future was up for grabs,” said Mike Wallace, the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian. “It was a tired affair. But Susan came along and made it a gallery for social activism and urban dialogue: it’s a transformed operation, a must-stop, must-see.”
Ms. Jones’s husband, Richard K. Eaton, is a federal judge in the United States International Trade Court and a former chief of staff to Senator Daniel P. Moynihan; they have two daughters, both in their 20s. When Ms. Jones was in her 30s, she went back to graduate school and earned an M.B.A. from Columbia University. “It made a new woman of me,” she said of business school, which erased her fears of trying to build a career with just a bachelor’s degree in English from Vassar. She worked as a Citibank loan officer and as the executive director of New York Landmarks Conservancy from 1990 to 1993. When her husband’s law career took them to Washington, she spent a decade reasserting the stature of the National Building Museum, a beautiful edifice suffering from an identity crisis.
The question will be whether she can also do that for the Seaport Museum, which has suffered from a dwindling membership, a failure to update its programming and educational programs and, according to Ms. Jones, fiscal mismanagement. “They just plain spent too much money,” she said.
Her conditions for taking on the Seaport Museum, shuttered since February, included an infusion of nearly $3 million in grants from city agencies, the autonomy to reconfigure the staff and replace the board, and full immunity from the inertia and debts of the past.
“The urgency about the decision to come here was that this museum was going under,” she said, gesturing toward 12 Fulton Street, where the museum has headquarters. “What was lacking is focus, and that’s what I can fix as a manager. It is inhumane to run a failed financial ship. It jeopardizes the collections.”
Ms. Jones has trimmed the Seaport Museum staff to 15, and its brand-new board has just seven members. Several members of her uptown staff are, as she is, doing double museum duty.
Ms. Jones expects the Seaport Museum to be back in business by January, and its fleet functional by April. If this takeover succeeds, the two museums may merge. If, after 14 to 18 months, she is unable to produce a turnaround, she and her team have the option of withdrawing their stewardship. The option obviously pains her.
“I’ve been vacillating between these highs of total exhilaration at the opportunity and abject terror and despair,” she said. “I am quite aware that it can’t take 20 years. Hey, we all know I’m 64. But it concerns me that folks are forging ahead determining the future of the city without knowing about its past. We think we have a role here.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/27/nyregion/south-street-seaport-museums-sos-call-is-answered.html?hp=&pagewanted=print
Police Clear Zuccotti Park of Protesters
By COREY KILGANNON and COLIN MOYNIHAN
Hundreds of New York City police officers early Tuesday cleared the park in Lower Manhattan that had been the nexus of the Occupy Wall Street movement, arresting dozens of people there after warning that the nearly two-month-old camp would be “cleared and restored” but that demonstrators who did not leave would face arrest.
The protesters, about 200 of whom have been staying in the park overnight, initially resisted with chants of “Whose park? Our park!”
The massive operation in and around Zuccotti Park was intended to empty the birthplace of a protest movement that inspired hundreds of tent cities from coast to coast. On Monday in Oakland, Calif., hundreds of police officers raided the main encampment there, arresting 33 people. Protesters returned later in the day. But the Oakland police said no one would be allowed to sleep there anymore, and promised to clear a second camp nearby.
In Lower Manhattan, as officers moved in and began tearing down tents, the protesters rallied around an area known as the kitchen, near the middle of the park, and began putting up makeshift barricades with tables and pieces of scrap wood.
Over the next two hours, dozens of protesters left the park while a core group of about 100 dug in around the food area. Many locked arms and defied police orders to leave. By 3 a.m., dozens of officers in helmets, watched over by Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly, closed in on those who remained. The police pulled them out one by one and handcuffed them. Most were led out without incident.
The Police Department’s chief spokesman, Paul J. Browne, told The Associated Press that 70 people had been arrested in the park, including some who had chained themselves together.
The officers had gathered between the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges earlier and rode in vans to the one-square-block park. They entered about 1 a.m.
As they did, dozens of protesters linked arms and shouted “No retreat, no surrender,” “This is our home” and “Barricade!”
The mayor’s office sent out a message on Twitter at 1:19 a.m. saying: “Occupants of Zuccotti should temporarily leave and remove tents and tarps. Protesters can return after the park is cleared.” Fliers handed out by the police at the private park on behalf of the park’s owner, Brookfield Properties, and the city, spelled out the same message.
A number of other arrests were reported just outside the park, as police tried to move supporters of the protesters away from the park. Details were not immediately available. There were several additional arrests after the park was cleared when protesters who refused to leave a nearby street were taken into custody.
Early Tuesday, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg issued a statement explaining the reasoning behind the action. He spoke about the need to balance the right of free speech with public safety and health concerns.
“I have become increasingly concerned – as had the park’s owner, Brookfield Properties – that the occupation was coming to pose a health and fire safety hazard to the protestors and to the surrounding community,” Mr. Bloomberg said. “We have been in constant contact with Brookfield and yesterday they requested that the City assist it in enforcing the no sleeping and camping rules in the park. But make no mistake – the final decision to act was mine.”
Mr. Bloomberg stressed that the protesters would still be able to use the park, as long as they complied with the rules, that ban things such as tents and sleeping bags.
“Protestors have had two months to occupy the park with tents and sleeping bags,” he said. “Now they will have to occupy the space with the power of their arguments.”
The police move came as organizers put out word on their Web site that they planned to “shut down Wall Street” with a demonstration on Thursday to commemorate the completion of two months of the beginning of the encampment, which has spurred similar demonstrations across the country.
The move also came hours after a small demonstration at City Hall on Monday by opponents of the protest, including local residents and merchants, some of whom urged the mayor to clear out the park.
Before the police moved in, they set up a battery of klieg lights and aimed them into the park. A police captain, wearing a helmet, walked down Liberty Street and announced: “The city has determined that the continued occupation of Zuccotti Park poses an increasing health and fire safety hazard.”
The captain ordered the protesters to “to immediately remove all private property” and said that if they interfered with the police operation, they would be arrested. Property that was not removed would be taken to a sanitation garage, the police said.
Some of the protesters grabbed their possessions. “They’re not getting our tents down,” one man shouted. People milled around, and some headed to the edges of the park.
By 1:45 a.m., dozens of officers moved through the park, some bearing plastic shields and wearing helmets. They removed tents and bedding materials, putting them on the sidewalk. Some protesters could be seen leaving the park with their belongings, but a core group of more than 100 hunkered down at the encampment’s kitchen area, linking arms, waving flags, and singing and chanting their refusal to leave the park.
They sang “We Shall Overcome,” and chanted at the officers to “disobey your orders.”
“If they come in, we’re not going anywhere,” said Chris Johnson, 32, who sat with other remaining protesters near the food area. He said that the protest “has opened up a dialogue that hasn’t existed since I’ve been alive.”
About 2 a.m., police officers began using a vehicle equipped with a powerful speaker to issue their orders. City sanitation workers tossed protesters’ belongings into metal bins, while some protesters dug in at the center of the park by using heavy bicycle chains to bind themselves to park trees and to each other. Some donned gas masks and goggles.
But by 3 a.m., the police closed in on the remaining protesters and began arresting them.
About 200 supporters of the protesters arrived early Tuesday after hearing that the park was being cleared. They were prevented from getting within a block of the park by a police barricade. There were a number of arrests after some scuffles between the two sides, but no details were immediately available. After being forced up Broadway by the police, some of the supporters decided to march several blocks to Foley Square.
Several Occupy Wall Street protest encampments across the country have been cleared by police after problems have occurred, including ones in cities like Oakland, Salt Lake City and Portland, Ore.
A handful of protesters first unrolled sleeping bags and blankets in Zuccotti Park on the night of Sept. 17, but in the weeks that followed, the park became densely packed with tents and small tarp villages.
The protest spawned others and attracted celebrities and well-known performers. It became a tourist attraction, inspired more than $500,000 in donations and gained the support of labor unions and elected officials while creating division within City Hall and the Police Department.
Mr. Bloomberg had struggled with how to respond. He repeatedly made clear that he does not support the demonstrators’ arguments or their tactics, but he has also defended their right to protest and in recent days and weeks has sounded increasingly exasperated, especially in the wake of growing complaints from neighbors about how the protest has disrupted the neighborhood and hurt local businesses.
Mr. Bloomberg met daily with several deputies and commissioners, and as more business owners complained and editorials lampooned him as gutless, his patience wore thin.
Matt Flegenheimer, Rob Harris and Steve Kenny contributed reporting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/16/nyregion/police-begin-clearing-zuccotti-park-of-protesters.html?_r=1&hp=&pagewanted=print
Seeking A Billionaire’s Halloween Treats
By KATE TAYLOR
Amid the slightly frenzied atmosphere of Halloween on the Upper East Side, three fathers and their sons walked west on East 79th Street with purpose.
“We’re going to the mayor’s house,” one of the fathers, E. J. Zgodny, told the boys — his son, Jack, 7, who was dressed as a soldier; and two of Jack’s friends.
The reason the group was making a beeline for Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s home was a simple one: Mr. Bloomberg, a man of substantial means and considerable generosity, is known on Halloween to give out full-size candy bars, not just the “fun-size” ones.
“I want the candy bars,” Logan Green, 7, who was dressed as Sonic the Hedgehog, said matter-of-factly when asked why he was visiting the mayor.
Arriving at the town house, things looked promising: someone in an Elmo costume was stationed outside the door, handing out candy from a plastic pumpkin to a small crowd. But when the boys finally reached Elmo: disappointment.
“It’s not full-sized,” Logan said, opening his hands to reveal the same old miniature Kit Kats and Tootsie Rolls that children seem to get at every house on Halloween.
The break with tradition was startling — what could explain it? Was the mayor worried about childhood obesity? Were times so tight that even the candy budget had to take a cut? Did he not like the attention his largess had received?
Then, at 7:20 p.m., just as the boys and their dads were about to swallow their disappointment and move on, the man behind the mysterious candy downsizing — the mayor himself — appeared.
“Uh, hello, hello, hello,” Mr. Bloomberg said, in a slightly startled tone, as he walked out the door with his girlfriend, Diana Taylor, straight into the crowd of trick-or-treaters. The two were not in costume. Nor were they, apparently, in the mood to chat. Ms. Taylor smiled brightly, but they moved quickly across the sidewalk and then crossed the street to get into Mr. Bloomberg’s waiting S.U.V.
The surprise appearance may not have done much to mollify the boys, but the dads were impressed.
“It’s definitely the closest I’ve ever been to him,” Robert Green said.
His son, Logan, said he thought the mayor looked old.
A minute later, Elmo went inside. He was replaced by a police officer, who had no candy at all, miniature or otherwise.
“It’s all gone,” the policeman explained, when asked why Elmo had disappeared. He shrugged and added, “A thousand dollars’ worth of candy.”
http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/01/seeking-a-billionaires-halloween-treats/?hp
Ain't that a hoot. They should have at least played golf where they had to pay to play.
take the lirr woo woo.....to the bank lol
10 Arrested in $1 Billion L.I.R.R. Disability Scheme
By WILLIAM K. RASHBAUM
Ten people, including a doctor and a former union president, were arrested early Thursday and charged in a major fraud scheme in which hundreds of Long Island Rail Road workers made false disability pension claims costing a federal agency an estimated $1 billion, according to people briefed on the matter. Another doctor charged in the case was being sought, the people said.
Most of the people — those charged in the case include seven former railroad workers accused of making false pension claims, the two doctors and a former federal railroad pension agency employee who helped the workers file the claims — were taken into custody in the early morning hours at their homes by F.B.I. agents and state investigators, the people said.
They were arrested on mail fraud and conspiracy to commit health care fraud charges, the people said, and were expected to be arraigned later in the day in United States District Court in Manhattan.
The federal investigation developed out of reporting by The New York Times for a series of articles published 2008 that revealed systematic abuses of Railroad Retirement Board pensions by Long Island Rail Road workers.
The United States attorney in Manhattan, Preet Bharara, and the head of the New York F.B.I. office, Janice K. Fedarcyk, were expected to announce the charges at a news conference with two inspectors general, Barry L. Kluger of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, and Martin J. Dickman from the Retirement Board. The investigation was conducted by the F.B.I. and federal prosecutors in Manhattan, along with the inspectors general of the federal Railroad Retirement Board and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the Long Island Rail Road’s parent agency, the people said.
The Times articles reported that virtually every career employee of the railroad was applying for and receiving disability payments, giving the Long Island Rail Road a disability rate of three to four times that of the average railroad. The Times found that retired railroad employees who had successfully claimed disability were regularly playing golf at a state-owned course without charge — another perquisite of their disability.
Indeed, the railroad’s retirement rate was particularly striking when compared with the number of disability pensions at Metro-North, another transportation authority subsidiary that serves commuters north of New York City and has a work force of similar size and composition.
The articles revealed that a web of doctors and facilitators were helping the workers file papers claiming they were disabled.
The authorities estimate that the cost to the Railroad Retirement Board of disability claims by Long Island Rail Road retirees was $1 billion, the people said.
The two doctors charged in the case, and a third one who recently died, were responsible for more than three-quarters of the disability applications filed before 2008, running what amounted to “disability mills,” the people said. They prepared false medical assessments for the retirees to file with the Railroad Retirement Board, the people said.
The disability claims made by the seven people who allegedly obtained their pensions fraudulently were in stark contrast to their conduct as detailed in the charges, one of the people said. One of the defendants, who receives more than $100,000 in pension and disability payments each year, plays tennis several times a week and played golf over 100 times in less than a year despite supposedly suffering severe pain when gripping objects with his hands, bending or crouching, the person said.
Another defendant, an L.I.R.R. office worker, who also collects more than $100,000 a year in pension and disability payments and complained of significant neck, shoulder, hand and leg pain when standing for more than five minutes, was seen under surveillance shoveling heavy snow and walking with a stroller for a long period of time, the person said.
And a third person, who receives more than $75,000 in payments annually and claimed to be suffering from severe and disabling back pain, went on a 400-mile bike tour around New York State, the people said.
The defendants face a maximum of 20 years if convicted, the people said.
Police Arrest More Than 700 Protesters on Brooklyn Bridge
Updated, 3:35 a.m. Sunday | In a tense showdown above the East River, the police arrested more than 700 demonstrators from the Occupy Wall Street protests who took to the roadway as they tried to cross the Brooklyn Bridge on Saturday afternoon.
The police said it was the marchers’ choice that led to the enforcement action.
“Protesters who used the Brooklyn Bridge walkway were not arrested,” Paul J. Browne, the chief spokesman for the New York Police Department, said. “Those who took over the Brooklyn-bound roadway, and impeded vehicle traffic, were arrested.”
But many protesters said they believed the police had tricked them, allowing them onto the bridge, and even escorting them partway across, only to trap them in orange netting after hundreds had entered.
“The cops watched and did nothing, indeed, seemed to guide us onto the roadway,” said Jesse A. Myerson, a media coordinator for Occupy Wall Street who marched but was not arrested.
A video on the YouTube page of a group called We Are Change shows some of the arrests.
Around 1 a.m., the first of the protesters held at the Midtown North Precinct on West 54th Street were released. They were met with cheers from about a half-dozen supporters who said they had been waiting as a show of solidarity since 6 p.m. for around 75 people they believed were held there. Every 10 to 15 minutes, they trickled out into a night far chillier than the afternoon on the bridge, each clutching several thin slips of paper — their summonses, for violations like disorderly conduct and blocking vehicular traffic. The first words many spoke made the group laugh: all variations on “I need a cigarette.”
David Gutkin, 24, a Ph.D. student in musicology at Columbia University, was among the first released. He said that after being corralled and arrested on the bridge, he was put into plastic handcuffs and moved to what appeared to be a Metropolitan Transportation Authority bus, along with dozens of other protesters, for over four hours. They headed first into Brooklyn and then to several locations in Manhattan before arriving at the 54th Street precinct.
Men and women had been held separately, two or three to a cell. A few said they had been zip-tied the entire time. “We sang ‘This Little Light of Mine,’ ” said Annie Day, 34, who when asked her profession said, “I’m a revolutionary.” Ms. Day was wearing laceless Converse sneakers: police had required the removal of all laces as well as her belt. She rethreaded them on the pavement while a man who identified himself as a lawyer took each newly freed person’s name.
None of the protesters interviewed knew if the bridge march was planned or a spontaneous decision by the crowd. But all insisted that the police had made no mention that the roadway was off limits. Ms. Day and several others said that police officers had walked beside the crowd until the group reached about midway, then without warning began to corral the protesters behind orange nets.
The scene outside the Midtown South Precinct on West 35th Street around 2 a.m. was far more jovial. Only about 15 of the rumored 57 people had been released, but about a dozen waiting supporters danced jigs in the street to keep warm. They snacked on pizza. One even drank Coors Light beer, stashing the empty bottles under a parked police van. When a fresh protester was released, he or she ran through a gantlet formed by the waiting group, like a football player bursting onto the field during the Super Bowl. “This is so much better than prison!” one cheered.
“It’s cold,” said Rebecca Solow, 27, rubbing her arms as she waited on the sidewalk, “but every time one is released, it warms you up.”
The march on the bridge had come to a head shortly after 4 p.m., as the 1,500 or so marchers reached the foot of the Brooklyn-bound car lanes of the bridge, just east of City Hall.
In their march north from Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan — headquarters for the last two weeks of a protest movement against what demonstrators call inequities in the economic system — they had stayed on the sidewalks, forming a long column of humanity penned in by officers on scooters.
Where the entrance to the bridge narrowed their path, some marchers, including organizers, stuck to the generally agreed-upon route and headed up onto the wooden walkway that runs between and about 15 feet above the bridge’s traffic lanes.
But about 20 others headed for the Brooklyn-bound roadway, said Christopher T. Dunn of the New York Civil Liberties Union, who accompanied the march. Some of them chanted “take the bridge.” They were met by a handful of high-level police supervisors, who blocked the way and announced repeatedly through bullhorns that the marchers were blocking the roadway and that if they continued to do so, they would be subject to arrest.
There were no physical barriers, though, and at one point, the marchers began walking up the roadway with the police commanders in front of them – seeming, from a distance, as if they were leading the way. The Chief of Department Joseph J. Esposito, and a horde of other white-shirted commanders, were among them.
After allowing the protesters to walk about a third of the way to Brooklyn, the police then cut the marchers off and surrounded them with orange nets on both sides, trapping hundreds of people, said Mr. Dunn. As protesters at times chanted “white shirts, white shirts,” officers began making arrests, at one point plunging briefly into the crowd to grab a man.
The police said that those arrested were taken to several police stations and were being charged with disorderly conduct, at a minimum.
A freelance reporter for The New York Times, Natasha Lennard, was among those arrested. She was later released.
Mr. Dunn said he was concerned that those in the back of the column who might not have heard the warnings “would have had no idea that it was not O.K. to walk on the roadway of the bridge.” Mr. Browne said that people who were in the rear of the crowd that may not have heard the warnings were not arrested and were free to leave.
Earlier in the afternoon, as many as 10 Department of Correction buses, big enough to hold 20 prisoners apiece, had been dispatched from Rikers Island in what one law enforcement official said was “a planned move on the protesters.”
Etan Ben-Ami, 56, a psychotherapist from Brooklyn who was up on the walkway, said that the police seemed to make a conscious decision to allow the protesters to claim the road. “They weren’t pushed back,” he said. “It seemed that they moved at the same time.”
Mr. Ben-Ami said he left the walkway and joined the crowd on the road. “It seemed completely permitted,” he said. “There wasn’t a single policeman saying ‘don’t do this’.”
He added: “We thought they were escorting us because they wanted us to be safe.” He left the bridge when he saw officers unrolling the nets as they prepared to make arrests. Many others who had been on the roadway were allowed to walk back down to Manhattan.
Mr. Browne said that the police did not trick the protesters into going onto the bridge.
“This was not a trap,” he said. “They were warned not to proceed.”
In related protests elsewhere in the country, 25 people were arrested in Boston for trespassing while protesting Bank of America’s foreclosure practices, according to Eddy Chrispin, a spokesman for the Boston Police Department. The protesters were on the grounds and blocking the entrance to the building, Mr. Chrispin said.
http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/01/police-arresting-protesters-on-brooklyn-bridge/?hp
Ray’s Pizza, the First of Many, Counts Down to Its Last Slice
By MICHAEL WILSON
It did not call itself the flagship Ray’s Pizza because it never really had a fleet. It was not Original Ray’s or Famous Ray’s or Original Famous Ray’s or Real Ray’s or Ray’s on Ice or any of the other cloned shops sprinkled like shredded mozzarella all over town. It was simply Ray’s Pizza, and in the great pizza wars of New York City, it was respected as having been the first, standing more or less above the fray at 27 Prince Street in Little Italy, with tree limbs holding up the basement ceiling and an owner whose name wasn’t even Ray.
And now, it seems, barring any surprises, Ray’s Pizza — the original that was so original it did not have the word “original” in its name — appears doomed to close at the end of the month.
This is not a popular topic at Ray’s right now.
“I don’t want you to put that this is the end,” said Helen Mistretta, the manager who, seven months before her 80th birthday, is in no mood for weepy nostalgia. “It’s the end of 27 Prince, not the end of Ray’s of Prince Street.”
The closing, long story short, follows a legal dispute among heirs with various interests in the building at 27 Prince, which includes apartments and the two sides of Ray’s: the pizzeria and an Italian restaurant, each with its separate entrance, but sharing a kitchen and the corporation name, Ray’s of Prince Street. When the Ray in Ray’s, one of the owners of the building, died in 2008, a row arose over whether the restaurant’s lease was valid and whether it should pay rent. A lawsuit was filed in 2009 and settled this year.
Now Ray’s Pizza is moving out amid a lot of head-shakes and shrugs and what-are-you-gonna-do Little Italy resignation.
You could say Ray’s on Prince Street kept to itself, perfectly content with its place in the constellation where others burned brighter. Just a block away, tourists line up on the sidewalk for a seat in Lombardi’s, waiting for a hostess wearing a microphone headset to call their names from loudspeakers. Wait for a pizza? This was not the Ray’s way, where pies come whole or by the slice, hot from the oven, enjoyed without hurry in a humble booth beneath a hand-painted “Ray’s Gourmet Pizza” board.
The closing of Ray’s would seem to remove from the neighborhood any vestige of the late Ralph Cuomo, its first owner, who once loomed large.
Mr. Cuomo was called Raffie, a shortened version of his Italian first name, Raffaele, and so, in 1959, when he opened a pizzeria in a building he owned with his brother, he named it not Ralph’s, but Ray’s.
“Ralph’s might have sounded, I don’t know, maybe too feminine,” Mr. Cuomo explained, perhaps inexplicably — a girl named Ralph? — to The New York Times in 1991. “Besides, nobody ever called me Ralph.”
He could not have imagined the scene today, with dozens of various Ray’s across the city and beyond. But in the first city phone books printed after he opened, in 1960, there are seven Ray’s Luncheonettes, one Ray’s Bar & Grill, one Ray’s Food Shop and one — count ’em, one — Ray’s Pizza, at 27 Prince.
In the 1960s, Mr. Cuomo briefly opened a second pizza shop, near East 59th Street, but he sold it, and that shop’s new owner, Rosolino Mangano, kept the name Ray’s. Other Ray’s Pizzas popped up, and Mr. Mangano insisted his was first. “Everybody knows me as Ray,” Mr. Mangano told The Times in 1991. “Nobody ever heard of Ralph Cuomo.”
This is false. Many people had heard of Ralph Cuomo. For instance, the F.B.I., which knew him to be a member of the Luchese crime family who trafficked in heroin. Mr. Cuomo was arrested on charges of selling heroin in the 1960s and ’70s, and was the subject of a Federal Bureau of Investigation inquiry in the ’90s that involved an informant, Alphonse D’Arco, conducting mob business at Ray’s.
“Approximately the beginning of September 1991, D’Arco observed Cuomo with a .357 magnum pistol in the basement of Ray’s Pizzeria,” according to an agent’s report. But never mind the gun, the informant seems to add — get a load of this place: “In the basement, there are actual tree limbs holding up the beams of the building. These trunks have a polished finish to them.”
Ms. Mistretta, the manager today, was Mr. Cuomo’s cousin, and she waved off questions about the mob connections as ancient history. She prefers to remember Mr. Cuomo by the smiling pictures on the wall, of him at a daughter’s baptism, or standing with his friend Burt Young from the “Rocky” movies.
Martin Scorsese, a former neighbor, signed a picture, along with bygone regulars like Leonardo DiCaprio, who, after breaking out with “Titanic,” once stood patiently while Mr. Cuomo called Ms. Mistretta’s granddaughter, who was around 10 and a breathless fan, and took the phone to say hello. Mark Wahlberg is well remembered among the Ray’s staff for his regular visits, with two bodyguards, for his usual order: chicken Parmesan.
Ms. Mistretta was more or less thrust into the pizza business in her 50s, when Mr. Cuomo began to suffer from what would be a series of debilitating health problems. “This is what he did,” she said, sweeping her hand across the restaurant last week. “I’m following in his instep.”
She is busy now with the seemingly mutually exclusive tasks of looking for space for a new restaurant and for someone to buy all her kitchen equipment and furniture, and she ends many sentences with “What else?”
What is the secret to making good pizza?
“What do you mean?” she asked. “You buy top-grade flour. You buy very good mozzarella.” What else?
The tree limbs are still standing downstairs, eight of them, floor to ceiling. Whether they still support any weight is debatable. What else?
Mr. Cuomo spent some of his later years in prison, and died in 2008. “He was well liked by everybody,” said a former manager at Ray’s, Anthony Pena, 41. “He was a sport. He loved this business. He must be turning in his grave.”
Family disputes aside, the sad fact is that the 2011 version of Little Italy with its five-figure commercial rents is not designed in the interests of mom-and-pop pizza parlors that people come there expecting to see. But Ms. Mistretta remains hopeful that something will come along in the weeks ahead. Ray’s will remain open through the Feast of San Gennaro, which began on Thursday and ends Sept. 25. After that, who knows?
“Maybe Wahlberg or DiCaprio will come in,” she said, chuckling and then serious. “Don’t put this is the end. You never know.”
Time will tell how long it takes for the fight to begin over who gets to call himself the Now Longest Standing Original Famous Ray’s Pizza of New York.
William K. Rashbaum contributed reporting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/18/nyregion/rays-pizza-the-first-of-many-counts-down-to-last-slice.html?pagewanted=print
Ironworkers of the Sky
By RANDY KENNEDY
"You need to have a very unique trait inside, to go running out on the iron," says Kevin Sabbagh, 24, a fifth-generation ironworker known as Woogie.
To get to the top of 1 World Trade Center as it stands in mid-August, just shy of 1,000 feet above Lower Manhattan, higher than anything else on the island’s southern end, first you walk to the middle of the blast-resistant concrete cathedral that will become the building’s lobby. From there, a hoist takes you to the 39th floor, whose perimeter has already been glassed in. A sign spray-painted in screaming construction orange — “EXPRESS ALL DAY” — directs you to a second hoist, inside which Don McLean is singing, “Bye, bye, Miss American Pie . . .” and men in hard hats decoupaged with flag decals are bobbing their heads to the beat.
On the 70th floor, the end of the line for the hoist, you emerge and climb five more stories inside a cage staircase attached to the outside of the building’s south face before taking a final flight of stairs. At the top of these you see — disconcertingly, even though you have known where you were heading all along — brilliant sunshine. Above you is blue sky and two floors of skeletal steel not yet covered in decking. The only other thing overhead, on the bare beams, is the remarkably small tripartite crew of workers doing jobs that have remained virtually unchanged since steel-frame construction began a little more than a century ago: guiding the steel into place as the cranes lift it up (the raising gang), securing it permanently (the bolting gang) and ensuring that all of it is vertically true (the plumb-up gang).
It is like arriving at one of Earth’s extremities — the Tibetan plateau, the Antipodes — except that you somehow feel as if you have been here before. And in a sense you have, because this scene is deeply embedded in the image bank of the 20th and 21st centuries. In fact, it sometimes seems as if the very existence of the men who build skylines by hand has been inextricably linked to the existence of the men (they have mostly been men) who have photographed them — first lugging their wooden view cameras, with tripods and dark cloths, then their Speed Graphics and Leicas — to the places where steel meets sky, giving flesh and bone to ironworkers who otherwise would have been phantoms of progress, risking their lives, unseen, hundreds of feet above the city.
The names of many of the photographers, working for newspapers or construction companies, have been forgotten. But some were titans: Lewis Hine, who applied his compassion for the working class to the builders of the Empire State Building; Bruce Davidson, who poetically chronicled the construction of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge.
The lure of ironworking imagery is, in part, formal: the complex geometry of straight lines and sharp diagonals against the almost classically curved human forms of arms, legs and backs. But the affinities between ironworkers and photographers themselves run deep. Both professions are defined by the compulsion to go where most people won’t go and see with their own eyes what most people will never see. The sentiment of Ethan Kitzes, a 41-year-old ironworker at 1 World Trade, could apply just as well to Robert Capa on Omaha Beach in 1944 or Frank Hurley adrift on an Antarctic ice floe with Shackleton in 1915: “There is no dress rehearsal.”
In July, The New York Times Magazine assigned Damon Winter, a Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer for the newspaper, to spend five days alongside workers like Kitzes, who was among the first wave of volunteers on Sept. 12, 2001, brought in to extract steel from the ruins of the twin towers and who has returned to the site as a member of the plumb-up gang.
Even among the elite class of ironworkers that specializes in raising high steel, the 40 or so men who perform the most dangerous work at 1 World Trade are a kind of special forces. There are veterans like Turhan Clause, a 46-year-old bolter-upper and an Algonquin Indian whose father and grandfather were also in the trade. And members of the next generation like Jim Brady, 29, an astonishingly agile connector who grabs the steel with gloved hands and sets it in place, shinnying beams without a harness. Brady’s broad face itself seems to sustain the immense weight of the Trade Center site’s past and express the perseverance that has powered the rise of a new tower — a structure whose symbolic importance is undisputed even if its cost and commercial justification remain dubious.
Neither Brady nor his colleagues are very good at doing what photographers do for them: standing outside themselves to articulate the almost Romantic-era daring of their job in a world of increasingly bloodless, prefab industry. But Christopher Marron, a 39-year-old first-year apprentice ironworker who once worked on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange (he was there the morning of 9/11), seems to speak plainly for them all: “I look forward to getting here. I look forward to working my ass off. I look forward to sweating. And I look forward to finishing this building. I plan on staying all the way to the top.”
Additional reporting by Pamela Chen.
Damon Winter (damonw@nytimes.com) is a staff photographer for The New York Times. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 2009 for his coverage of the Obama presidential campaign.
Editor: Joanna Milter (j.milter-MagGroup@nytimes.com)
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/04/magazine/ironworkers-of-the-sky.html?pagewanted=print
On Anniversary of Attack, Many New Yorkers Will Try Not to Dwell on It
By N. R. KLEINFIELD
Laurel Wells is not going to the official Sept. 11 ceremony on Sunday morning at ground zero.
She is not going to any of the free concerts being staged across New York City throughout the weekend.
She is not going to the hand-holding human chain that will form along the waterfront in Lower Manhattan on Saturday morning.
She is not going to the writing of personal reflections on natural fiber paper at the Wave Hill center in the Bronx on Sunday afternoon.
She is going to neither the Table of Silence tribute at Lincoln Center on Sunday morning, nor the floating lantern ceremony at Pier 40 in Greenwich Village that evening.
As for the myriad additional events being held in the city this weekend to mark the 10th anniversary of that awful day, she will be absent.
Weather permitting, she is going to the beach.
Ms. Wells means no disrespect, not at all. She will remember the hurt of the attacks in her own muted way rather than at a public assemblage.
“I don’t want to be reminded,” she said. “Enough. I’m bummed. I really don’t want to go through that again. It’s not a celebration. I have really mixed feelings. I have feelings of sadness and feelings of fear.”
In her avoidance, she will have abundant company. While first responders have been fighting to get into the scripted ceremony at the site, and others have scribbled one or another of the weekend’s dizzying possibilities on their calendars, many New Yorkers want nothing to do with the innumerable happenings attached like limpets to the anniversary. Plenty of them are leaving town, wanting as much space as possible from the ghosts and the day’s enduring grasp.
For some, it is all too bleak. They do not want to be submerged in squeamish memories. Others find too much politics and the clang of commerce staining the day, not how they feel homage should be paid to the lost lives. Or they do not want to confront the intensified security, the risk of bomb threats. Or they are simply anniversary-exhausted.
The events, of course, will attract many people who feel more ardent about them. Millions of others will watch the official ceremony on Sunday morning and the untold hours of related coverage on television.
But some other number will be out there with their regular golf foursome or tennis partner. They will be vacuuming, exercising at the gym, studying for a quantum mechanics exam, training the dog. They will be celebrating personal milestones, like wedding anniversaries or birthdays.
For one young Manhattan woman, an I.T. researcher, Sunday is her day to volunteer at the Red Cross doing, of all things, disaster relief. She imagines she will be visiting some people whose home caught fire, soothing them.
In an unscientific random sampling of some four dozen New Yorkers over the last couple of days, only two said they might attend something connected to 9/11, and even they were not sure they would.
Ms. Wells, 44, a fashion producer who now lives in Brooklyn, occupied an apartment in SoHo on 9/11, where she had an unobstructed view south. She watched the second plane pierce the south tower, watched both towers disintegrate.
She has a weekend house in East Moriches, on Long Island, and she might not usually head out there this late in the summer season, but she was deliberately going with her husband and son to be distanced from the city.
“I don’t know any New Yorkers who are participating in any of this,” she said. “The city will be one big security zone. Most of my friends are getting out of the city.”
Albert Santiago, 48, a building superintendent who lives in the Bronx, will also be out of town. He will be in Monticello, N.Y. His sister, Sonia, has a trailer in a campground there, and it is her 55th birthday. The relatives will be gathering.
“The anniversary means a lot,” he said. “But so does my sister. I will remember in my mind.”
Brandi Sinkovich, 32, who recently graduated from law school and is in pursuit of work, is fond of baseball, as is her boyfriend. They were thinking of going to the Mets game on Sunday, though the odds are they will instead watch it at their apartment in Queens. There is the Jets game too, and her boyfriend wants to see that.
But no 9/11 events.
“We’re trying to avoid thinking about it,” she said.
Back then, her boyfriend was working at J&R Music World, a few blocks north of the World Trade Center. He had just come out of the subway when it happened. He was shaken. So was she.
“I don’t want to see it over and over again,” she said. “I’m tired of it and don’t want to feel bad. We’d rather spend the time together.”
In disbelief, E. J. McPherson observed the imploding towers from what was then his office at Credit Suisse. A friend of his who worked in the twin towers did not get out.
Mr. McPherson, 45, who now has his own real estate and advertising companies and lives in the Bronx, is skipping the public events. “They become like a pep rally,” he said. “They’re not a remembrance. Keep it simple.”
He will remember by himself, at home. “I’ll be on my knees,” he said, “giving thanks that I’m home and safe and saying something for all who were lost.”
There is a happy milestone this weekend for Ed Wawrynek. It is his 39th wedding anniversary, and he would rather dwell on that.
Mr. Wawrynek, 61, a retail consultant who lives in Brooklyn, said he would probably follow some of the coverage on TV. He will say a prayer in church. His wife will undoubtedly call a former co-worker whose son perished in the attacks. But he does not want to go to any of the commemorations. “I just find it depressing as hell,” he said. “I just don’t want to wallow in all that sadness. Ten years is a good, long time. I don’t think we should go hog wild with it.”
So it will be dinner out with his wife, then another dinner with their grown children. “And I’m certainly going to stay off bridges and tunnels,” he said.
Two friends of Tony Harrow died in the towers, and their loss sits inside him. He is 81, and lives in Manhattan, a retired actor and caterer. “I did much better as a caterer than an actor,” he pointed out. “I was a stand-in in ‘The Godfather’ for De Niro. Never said one word to me.”
He has diabetes, and his energy level traces an uneven trajectory. If he is feeling sufficiently energized, he might visit the site on Sunday. As for the tide of supplementary 9/11 events, not for him.
“I think they’re ridiculous,” Mr. Harrow said. “It’s rehashing. Let it go. All the concerts and screaming and clapping don’t make sense to me. Say your prayers at home. Light a candle. Talk to someone about it.”
He had another thought. “Why not have everyone kneel down on the street and pray?” he asked. “That would be something. That would be phenomenal.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/10/nyregion/on-911-anniversary-many-new-yorkers-will-try-not-to-dwell-on-it.html?_r=1&pagewanted=print
THE RECKONING
AMERICA AND THE WORLD A DECADE AFTER 9/11
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/us/sept-11-reckoning/viewer.html
What We Kept
By DAN BARRY
Mundane items like a shred of a T-shirt and a red “Admit One” ticket are the relics that help us to remember what we cannot forget.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/08/us/sept-11-reckoning/relics.html?hp
Recalling First Black Appointed to New York Police Dept.
By SAM ROBERTS
Samuel J. Battle, shown as a lieutenant in 1941, was appointed as the first black officer in the New York Police Department a century ago Tuesday.
His parents were among the last generation born into Southern slavery, and his own birth in 1883 was notable for another benchmark: At 16 pounds, he was the biggest baby ever recorded in North Carolina.
“I guess I’ve always wanted to be large, and I have been large,” Samuel Jesse Battle recalled decades later.
But his personal growth was threatened when, as a teenager, he was caught pilfering cash from a safe belonging to his boss, R. H. Smith, a landlord who predicted that within a year, the young man would be in prison.
“That was the turning point of my life,” said Battle, who avoided prosecution because the boss was a friend of his father, a Methodist minister. “I said, ‘From this day on, I shall always be honest and honorable, and I’m going to make Mr. Smith out a liar.’ ”
On June 28, 1911, a century ago Tuesday, Samuel Battle largely delivered on his resolutions. Having grown to 6-foot-3 and 285 pounds, he became the first black person appointed to the New York City police force. He would go on to become the first black sergeant, in 1926; the first black lieutenant, in 1935; and the city’s first black parole commissioner, in 1941.
In 1911, the city’s population was about 2 percent black, and a number of black officers were already on patrol in Brooklyn, including Battle’s brother-in-law and mentor, Moses Cobb, but they had been hired by the City of Brooklyn before it merged with New York in 1898. The Police Department considers Wiley G. Overton, sworn in by Brooklyn in 1891, as the city’s pioneer black officer.
But Battle was the first black person appointed to New York’s combined 10,000-member force, ranking 199th of 638 applicants on the police test. The department will mark his appointment on Tuesday during Cadet Corps graduation ceremonies.
What a difference a century makes. Today, blacks are 23 percent of the city’s population, and 18 percent of all police officers. Black, Hispanic and Asian New Yorkers make up nearly 48 percent among all ranks, and among police officers they have been a majority since 2006.
Among higher-ranking officers, promoted on the basis of competitive civil service tests, minority officers constitute 39 percent of sergeants, up from 19 percent a decade ago; 25 percent of lieutenants, up from 13 percent; and 17 percent of captains, up from 5 percent. Of the 43 blacks who have passed the test for captain since then, nearly half have been promoted to higher ranks.
Samuel Battle (he hated being called Sam; “every Tom, Dick and Harry who shines shoes, they used to call him Sam,” he said) moved to New York for good in 1901. He was hired as a houseboy at the Sagamore Hotel at Lake George — which, he recalled, did not admit Jews — and as a $32-a-month red cap at Grand Central Terminal. For most of his career, he lived in Harlem.
He considered working for the Post Office or the Customs Service, but decided on the police force because, he said, “it would be a permanent place in which I could support my wife and family without worry.”
When he applied, Battle was rejected by police surgeons, supposedly because of a heart murmur, but he passed a medical retest after prominent blacks protested to city officials. He suffered the silent treatment from fellow officers at his West 68th Street station house. A threatening note with a racial epithet and a hole the width of a bullet was left on his bunk.
In an interview with the Columbia University Center for Oral History in 1960, six years before he died, Battle recalled that he never complained to outsiders about his treatment from co-workers. If a colleague had something against him, Battle challenged him to meet in the cellar and “take it out on my black behind.” Nobody did.
His comrades were won over in 1919 when Battle dashed into a crowd of rioters at 135th Street and Lenox Avenue to rescue a white officer. “The white officers worked in an all-Negro neighborhood, practically, and they needed me as much as I needed them and sometimes more,” Battle recalled.
In 2009, when the Harlem intersection was named in Battle’s honor, the police commissioner, Raymond W. Kelly, said the episode “was just one example among many of why Officer Battle was so respected and admired by his colleagues.”
“In fact, just a few days after this incident,” Mr. Kelly said, “they voted unanimously to admit him to a prep course for a sergeant’s exam.”
Early in his career, Battle was pointed out by tour guides as “New York’s first colored policeman.” Later, he was banished to Brooklyn, for raiding a politically connected establishment. He served as mentor to a young patrolman, William O’Dwyer, who would become mayor.
In 1935, Battle played a pivotal role in quelling a riot in Harlem, ignited by the arrest of a 16-year-old shoplifter whom store employees subdued and released through a back door. False rumors spread that the youth had been fatally beaten. By finding the boy, having him photographed and circulating his smiling image, Battle ended the riot.
In an earlier riot on the West Side, though, when white officers were beating black rioters, Battle “got even,” he said, by “whipping white heads.”
He also participated in the 1931 opening of a Harlem station house, where the tap dancer Bill Robinson promised a gift to the officer who made the first arrest. Battle shoved Robinson aside, he recalled, “and he said something to me, and I grabbed him and took him into the station house and had him booked.” After Robinson discovered that the arrest was a prank, he gave Battle a hat as a gift anyway.
In the Columbia interview, Battle recalled that in the 1940s “there were many cases of mistreatment of the populace by the police.” He blamed prejudice on parents. “All the old ones should be dead and put in the ocean!” said Battle. who was in his mid-70s. “Then we’d have a good world to live in.”
In 1936, celebrating his 25th anniversary on the force, he said that while he could not imagine the elimination of prejudice, it seemed to be declining as blacks improved educationally and financially.
“What we want is an equal opportunity to enjoy life and to make our own way,” he said. His advice: “Make your own opportunities. When you see them, take hold of them and never give up.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/27/nyregion/recalling-samuel-battle-who-became-first-black-on-nypd.html?src=ISMR_HP_LO_MST_FB&pagewanted=print
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