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GAY CITY NEWS 1/18/12
New York City's LGBT newspaper is also America's largest.
BY ALBERT AMATEAU
Jane Jacobs, gone from GreenwichVillage these 40 years and gone fromthis life three years ago, was celebrat-ed anew on Monday morning whena crowd of West Village neighborsand public officials gathered in frontof the White Horse Tavern to unveila commemorative street sign, “JaneJacobs Way.”A few people from Brooklyn addedto the throng to protest the proposedConey Island renewal plan; a formerEast Village woman came to denounceMayor Bloomberg and City CouncilSpeaker Christine Quinn.Jane Jacobs, the foe of urbanrenewal and champion of neighbor-hoods and street life, would haveloved it. She lived on the block at 555Hudson St. with her family when sheled the fight against Robert Moses’1962 proposal for a Lower ManhattanExpressway through the Village.Doris Diether, the longest serv-ing community board member (since1964) in the city and a close allyof Jacobs in the battles to preserveGreenwich Village, was the guest of honor. Indeed, City CouncilmemberAlan Gerson referred to Diether as“Doris Jacobs” at one point. Quinnpresented her with a replica of the“Jane Jacobs Way” street sign, andDiether was so moved that she wasbarely able to hold back the tears atthe conclusion of her remarks.The unveiling of the street signon the southwest corner of Hudsonand W. 11th Sts. didn’t go all thatsmoothly, either. The string separatedfrom the sleeve covering the signbefore it was completely unveiled, andfor a while only “JANE” was visible.Tobi Bergman, a Community Board 2member, borrowed a stepladder fromthe White Horse and completed theunveiling.Jo Hamilton, newly elected chair-person of Community Board 2, wasmaster of ceremonies, and recalledhow Jacobs transformed thinkingabout urban life with her first book,“The Death and Life of Great Ameri-can Cities.” But she said the Villagemostly claimed Jacobs as a friend whocared about her neighborhood.Congressmember Jerrold Nadlerpaid tribute to Jacobs’s vision of a citythat lives because of its diversity.Manhattan Borough PresidentScott Stringer said that in the currentirresponsible rush to development,“we must think of Jane Jacobs andfigure out how to build for the futureand preserve our wonderful neighbor-hoods.”State Senator Tom Duane recalledreading Jane Jacobs’s books as a col-lege student and being struck by theneed to preserve neighborhoods andat the same time keep them dynamic.Assemblymember Deborah Glick
BY WILL GLOVINSKY
The Parks Departmentconfirmed on Monday that itwould not allow a coalition of Greenwich Village residentsto hire off-duty uniformedpolice officers to patrol Washington Square Park.“We are not consideringthis proposal,” Parks spokes-person Cristina DeLucawrote in an e-mail.The Parks Department’sdecision was first reported
Parks nixes plan to put paid-detail police in Wash. Sq.
Pols, protest, stuck string;Jacobs would have loved it
Villager photo by Elisabeth Robert
Doris Diether, left, listened as Assemblymember Deborah Glick spoke at the dedication of “Jane Jacobs Way” onMonday. Diether fought with Jacobs against Robert Moses’ West Village “slum-clearance” plan.
BY ALBERT AMATEAU
Friends of the High Lineis reaching out to prop-erty owners, commercialtenants and residents toestablish a 37-block HighLine Improvement Districtto help fund a high levelof daily maintenance forthe elevated park betweenGansevoort and 30th Sts.The High LineImprovement DistrictSteering Committee, with24 members so far, includ-ing representatives of theFriends, Community Board4 and major business andproperty owners, sent out6,000 letters on July 7 seek-ing broad support for thedistrict.“With the first sectionof the High Line betweenGansevoort and 20th Sts.now open and proving aspopular as we had hoped,we must insure that the parkand its access points aremaintained to a level we canall be proud of,” said RobertHammond, co-founder of F.H.L. and a steering com-mittee member. “We’re pro-posing ways that a specialHigh Line ImprovementDistrict can raise financialsupport to help maintainthe park to that high level,”Hammond said.The High Line districtwould take the city’s busi-ness improvement districtprogram, which is super-vised by the Department of Small Business Services, as amodel, Hammond said.“But where most BID’s
High Line group hopes district will keep park on track
Continued on page 16
145 SIXTH AVENUE • NYC 10013 • COPYRIGHT © 2009 COMMUNITY MEDIA, LLC
Continued on page 3 Continued on page 4
EDITORIAL,LETTERS
PAGE 18
BORN APADDLIN’ MAN
PAGE 30
Volume 79, Number 6
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S.V.A. GETS STONEWALLED?
Community Board 2’sStreet Activities and Film Permits Committee is really stick-ing it to the Stonewall Veterans’ Association. The committeehas now put off, for three months in a row, voting on theassociation’s application for a permit for its annual street fairin September on Greenwich Ave. between Sixth and SeventhAves.
Evan Lederman
, the committee’s chairperson, said,under his leadership, they’ve been cracking down on phonystreet fairs, and want to see proof that S.V.A. is indeed alegitimate 501c3 nonprofit charitable organization. “A lot of these street fairs tend to be run by shell organizations, andone or two people pocket the money and split it with thepromoter,” Lederman noted. “We view this as a public incon-venience — you’re shutting down public streets to profit.It’s basically fraud. … Stonewall [Veterans’ Association]has not answered our standard questions.” The street fairsgenerally pull in about $8,000 to $10,000, which the orga-nizers split with the promoters. Lederman added they’re notaccusing S.V.A. of anything, but just want all their questionsanswered: Does the group have members that live in thecommunity? Does it hold regular meetings? Does it provideservices to the community? How is the money from the streetfair allocated?
Carol Yankay
, a veteran C.B. 2 member, saidof
Williamson Henderson
, S.V.A.’s president, “Every year heshows some papers, but they never go far enough to showthat he’s a charity. We’ve told him many times, but he doesn’tdo it. He doesn’t present the best case, he’s confused.”Yankay said she understood
Karen Burstein
was S.V.A.’slawyer and that the former judge planned to write a letterclarifying things. Yankay said Henderson must provide theletter “immediately,” since C.B. 2’s procedure is to give 60days notice of its recommendation, after which the city mightor might not follow the board’s advisory position. “I don’tthink anyone thinks he pockets the money,” Yankay assured.On Tuesday, Yankay called us with an update, saying that
Joe Flahaven
, a public member of the committee, had pulledS.V.A.’s federal ID number off the Internet. “We’re finewith Stonewall Veterans — they’ve been approved,” Yankaydeclared. However, we checked with Lederman, and he said just having an ID number for a 501c3 nonprofit isn’t enoughin his opinion, and that all “the boxes haven’t been checked”in his book to grant approval. The committee members willvote by e-mail before next week’s C.B. 2 full board meeting.Lederman noted that his vote doesn’t carry any more weightthan anyone else’s, but that the committee often votes unani-mously on issues. As for Henderson, he told us we must havegotten some “misinformation,” adding, “Why don’t you do astory about how W.L.H. [Henderson] has founded more gayorganizations than anyone in history?”
NEWSWOMEN GO NUTS:
A recent annual meetingto announce election results for officers of the venerableNewswomen’s Club of New York became so rancorousthat outgoing president
Jeanne King
, a 77-year-old authorand former crime reporter for Reuters, said her legs buck-led under her in the elevator at the National Arts Clubin Gramercy Park after she was called a “bald-faced liar”during an expletive-laced rant by
Latrice Davis
, formerchairperson of the club’s nominations committee. “Whenpeople shout at me like that, I just shut down,” said King,a 1994 winner of one of the club’s prestigious Front PageAwards. E.M.S. had to be called to get King out of theelevator, confirmed the new president for 2009,
ToniReinhold
(on Reuters’ New York desk), who had cam-paigned on a promise to bring the 87-year-old club “intothe 21st century.” (Eleanor Roosevelt was once a mem-ber.) Out of 66 ballots counted, Reinhold and her slateof candidates defeated
Claire Regan
, associate managingeditor of the Staten Island Advance, and her “officialslate” by a margin of five votes. King, who had backedRegan’s slate, said later she might ask the new board to“bring sanctions” against Davis, whom she claimed hadslandered her. Davis apologized to the June 30 meetingfor her “unladylike” behavior and then to King for her“colorful language” in an e-mail. But Davis also told clubmember
Mary Reinholz
that she stood by her claim thatKing had “lied” when she stated in a June 28 e-mail tomembers that Davis had “canceled” the general meeting.Brooklyn lawyer
Stephen Somerstein
, who attended themeeting, said he helped draft King’s e-mail and shouldhave used the word “undermine” rather than “canceled.”He noted Davis had sent out an e-mail to club members,telling them the election process had become tainted andwould advise a candidate receiving a ballot to “shred it”or “burn it.” “Some members expressed concern that themeeting and the election had been called off,” he said.Reached at Reuters, Reinhold said, “We’ve had conten-tious elections before but never this contentious. And I’msorry because we tried to take the high road.”
EVERYBODY LOVES RAMON:
Scoopy’s item twoweeks ago on a small army of local D.I.Y.’ers fixing upRay’s Candy Store on Avenue A to wipe out 59 of 60violations apparently overstated the involvement of SeeSkwat. Although
Ramon “Ray” Alvarez
told us it was SeeSkwat folks who did the work, we subsequently got a mes-
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on June 22 in Metro New York, following a New York Postarticle from the previous day that first revealed the intentionsof the group, called the Coalition for a Better WashingtonSquare Park.Gil Horowitz, the group’s founder, said that a meetingwith Bill Castro, the Manhattan borough Parks commissioner,yielded no decision regarding the possibility of employing off-duty officers. However, the Parks Department’s reiteration of itsposition left little doubt that, for now, the plan appears dead.The Police Department’s Paid Detail Unit deploys off-dutyofficers to provide security for retail stores and sports eventsand for other organizations willing to pay the overtime wages,which run upward of $30 per hour. Critics of the WashingtonSquare plan objected to the anonymity of the wealthy resi-dents who offered to finance the paid detail, and pointed outthat park enforcement police, or PEP, officers, as well as policeofficers already patrol Washington Square Park.Horowitz, who has lived on the park for decades,explained that the coalition only wants the new WashingtonSquare Park to be safe and clean. He said that drug dealersin the newly renovated park are his group’s primary concern,although he added that skateboarders come in a distant sec-ond. Horowitz noted that senior citizens have complainedabout unruly skateboarders, and said the park’s new benchesare at risk from skateboarders’ “grinds.”“We worked for years on this park,” he said. “We’re not goingto walk away from it.”Others are less sure that additional police officers are nec-essary. Tobi Bergman, chairperson of the Parks Committee of Community Board 2, said that “security [in the park] rarelycomes up as an issue during meetings.”Several parkgoers interviewed on a recent sunny after-noon said safety wasn’t an issue for them.Erin Kaplan, who attended and now works at New YorkUniversity, said she had never felt unsafe in the park anddid not believe additional policing was necessary. A pair of Danish tourists on their first visit to Washington Square Parksaid their initial impressions were very good.“We feel very safe,” they said, as they strolled past the newlyaligned fountain, which was shooting welcome jets of cold waterover the heads of frolicking children in bathing suits.Ripan Alam, an ice cream vendor stationed on the westside of the fountain, said he always felt safe when working.He said the only issue he had ever had was a homeless manwho lurked near his cart. But, Alam said, “I asked him nicelyto leave and he did. I didn’t need to call the police.”Although the paid-detail proposal never proceededbeyond the initial planning stages, it tapped into an often-rancorous debate over competing visions of what kind of place Washington Square Park should be — a freethinkingbohemian epicenter or an orderly, if somewhat sedate, neigh-borhood park.The dispute has included some name-calling. The Postarticle quoted Horowitz labeling the plan’s detractors as “radi-cals” while Village resident and radical attorney Ron Kuby, inturn, dismissed the anonymous donors as “rich folk.”People weighed in online as well. Washington SquarePark Blog, which monitors park news and advocates for thepreservation of the park as a “public space,” published anentry questioning whether the paid-detail police effort was“a step toward privatization.”New York University, whose dormitories, offices andclassrooms surround Washington Square Park, was original-ly mentioned in the Post article as a member of the Coalitionfor a Better Washington Square Park. But N.Y.U. spokesper-son John Beckman said the university had no knowledge of the specific plans involving off-duty police officers.“We were given no agenda; we were not aware of theproposal until the article was published,” he said. “We onlyknew about a meeting which was said to be about parkmaintenance.”
Sea of greenrises againstIran violence
On July 9, Washington Square Park was filledwith protesters wearing green shirts andribbons and hoisting green banners at a rallyfor the human rights of students in Iran. Greenis the color being donned all over Iran inthe ongoing demonstrations against the June12 presidential election result that declaredincumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad the winner.At the Washington Square Park rally, a giantgreen banner was signed, which will be sewntogether with green banners from around theworld and dropped over the side of the EiffelTower.
Parks nixes plan for off-duty police in Wash. Sq.
Continued from page 1
‘We worked for years on this park.We’re not going to walk away from it.’
Gil Horowitz, Coalition for a Better Washington Square Park
Villager photos by Ramin Talaie
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July 15, 2009 The Villager
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