With defiant declarations of neighborhood empowerment, poetry, dance and some choice words, the Cooper Square Committee celebrat- ed 50 years of community organizing and housing preservation at its gold- en anniversary gala last Thursday night.

The fete’s setting was Jing Fong res- taurant in Chinatown, where a crowd of about 200 feasted on a five-course

Founded in 1959, the commit- tee claims bragging rights as the first community-based organization to defeat a slum-clearance plan by Robert Moses. The iron-fisted hous- ing czar wanted to raze tenements between E. 14th and Delancey Sts. to create another Stuyvesant Town-like complex, displacing the residents, who were overwhelmingly poor and without anyplace to go.

Lower East Siders banded together and crafted a community-based plan calling for staged development and no displacement of residents. The alterna- tive scheme was adopted by the New York City Board of Estimate in 1970. Ultimately, hundreds of buildings were saved, and thousands of residents able to stay in the neighborhood.

advocates began urging the designa- tion of a 30-block South Village Historic District, the Landmarks Preservation Commission on Tuesday

But the hearing, on what the commission calls the Greenwich Village Historic District Extension, covers

Carlo Altomare leaned out of the building’s top-fl oor window, counting, “One — two — three — four” empty storefronts. “How many more DVD stores can they open?” he asked.

The city may be sag- ging under a post-boom depression, yet at 137 W. 14th St. change is under- way.

three-story, 100-year-old building — where Altomare, artistic co-director of Theaterlab, a nonprofit arts organization, rents space — is blooming into a neighborhood success story that he believes will be a model for small-scale arts centers of the future.

landlord, Kenny Gutierrez, the son of Argentine parents who

created Libreria Lectorum from scratch selling used books, is the antithesis of the landowner stereotype. The self-deprecating, Bard College-educated English major stumbled into the role when he and his brother, Daniel — an environmental- ist living in Seattle — inher- ited the building. Libreria Lectorum, New York’s old- est Spanish-language book- store, closed September 2007, and Gutierrez — or “Goode” as he’s known to friends — ironically got cast as the “bad guy.”

“The closing of Lectorum was a huge loss of public assembly for the Spanish community,” said Altomare, adding, however, that

Socialist owner,
Living Theatre vet,
bar rewrite book

POOCHES
ON
PARADE

mayoral candidate Bill Thompson just eight days before the election should be enough for Council Democrats to deliver her back to the top spot, sources said. According to one coun- cilmember, Quinn’s re-election as speaker was all but guaran- teed when she offered support for Thompson at an unrelated press conference on Mon., Oct. 27. “The speaker’s leadership in the City Council is secure; it was never in jeopardy,” said Brooklyn Councilmember Letitia James, a strident voice against the legislative overturning of term limits that Quinn helped engineer last year. “An endorsement is an endorsement, despite its tepidity. At least [Quinn] mentioned his name, and even went further and added two additional sentences,” she quipped of the unenthusiastic thumbs up, which came during a question-and-answer session with reporters following a press conference on healthy eating in city schools. “So we’ll accept it, and we’ll run with it,” James said, “and we look forward to the next four years with her as our leader.” Quinn had appar- ently approached Thompson earlier about the endorsement, but due to tensions between the two — the speaker is seen as too close an ally of Mayor Mike Bloomberg — he refused to accept. So Quinn slipped in the nod with little fanfare when speaking to reporters after the press conference, framing her position as an afterthought despite broad speculation over what she would ultimately do. “I’ve spoken to Comptroller Thompson,” she said at the event. “I told him that I am sup- porting him and I’m ready to be helpful in any way.” The back and forth between Quinn and Thompson helps explain why even her staff seemed confused as to the endorsement’s

timing, with one Council employee intimating last week that the announcement would come before the weekend. Still, the last-minute tip of the cap should be enough to propel Quinn to another term as speaker, regardless of any lingering enmity between her, Thompson and Council Democrats. “I’ve spoken to a number of members, and I believe I speak for a majority of members here in this body,” James said. “Her leadership is secure.” She added that “dissenting” members — such as Brooklyn Councilmember Charles Barron, who has publicly called for her Quinn’s ouster — are too few to have an impact. “It’s a win-win for everyone,” James said of the endorsement, “and now what we have to do is get out the vote for Bill Thompson.” Kenneth Sherrill, a political science professor at Hunter College, thinks that James “knows what she’s talking about.” “I think that any speaker who didn’t endorse his or her party’s candidate for mayor would be in diffi culty,” he said. “I don’t think this is going to be a cause for diffi culty.”

legendary housing activist Frances Goldin wears purple, and even has a streak of the hue in her hair. What was the political message of the purple? we wondered, especially since Goldin is so well known for her radical views. The answer, it turns out, is simple. “If I can make people happy, why not?” she told us, explaining that people just, well, love lavender. “I started wearing it when I was 16,” Goldin, 85, related. Since then, her purple passion has only reached new peaks. “In the past 10 years, I’ve become compulsive,” she admitted, “even down to my underwear. I used to wear a lot of purple, but now I wear all purple. I can’t buy a bra, or a hat, or a pair of shoes unless they’re purple.” Five years ago, she took it to yet another level, when she started brushing a purple streak into her hair. “I’m walking down the street, and people smile,” she said of her color- coordinated effect on passersby. We had always guessed that maybe her choice of couture color was because Goldin has two lesbian daughters. “That helped,” she said, “but it was not the basic reason — I just like purple.” Another theory of ours was that Goldin, who was married to Morris Goldin, a well-known radical leader, had maybe turned gay in later life. After all, lavender is one of the colors often identified with homosexuality. Wrong again. “I’m fiercely heterosexual,” Goldin said, “but I’m a great supporter of gay rights, as you can imagine.”

recently reported how E. Third St. was shut down part of one weekend a few weeks ago for the renovation of 47 E. Third St. “EV” wondered how many more construction- related street closures should be expected. So we asked

only a few weeks ago gave us a tour of the building, show- ing how they’re planning to renovate it into a single-family “mansion.” (To recap, in a precedent-setting landlord-tenant battle, rent-regulated tenants from nine apartments vacated the building at the end of August after taking buyouts when their legal effort to stave off the Economakises’ mass-evic-

tion effort failed in court.) Regarding any possible future street closures, Economakis said he didn’t want to get into giving a weekly construction update. He did reveal that part of the roof had been removed — which is how that gigantic crane was probably loading materials into the building. “I’m gut-renovating the entire building,” he said, speaking in general terms. “All the plumbing’s getting relocated. At the end of the day, the only thing that is going to remain [from the original] are the four walls.” He’s also relocating the stairwell from the building’s center to its eastern side. He and his wife, their three young children and their nanny are still living there, not having yet been forced to relocate temporarily by the construction, he said — though some tenant activists refuse to believe it. “I don’t know what else to say,” Economakis said. “Do you want me to put a G.P.S. thing on my ankle?” He said if any tenant activists don’t believe he and his family are living there, they can “camp out outside” and watch their comings and goings. While he said he certainly expects the value of the building will rise proportionally with the amount of work he puts into it, he stated: “My expectation is [to live here] forever. I’m fixing the house up so we can live there a very long time.”

fi cially closed,” though there still may be a fi nale event. “I’m in transition because of Bloomberg’s dramatic real estate tax increases on my property,” Rosenstein told us. “They are forcing me to become a developer. I can’t subsidize the space anymore. I can’t believe you guys endorsed that f---er. Mussolini made the trains run on time too. … It’s been a blast,” he said of running the gallery.

Hall to keep its hands off his front door. Last week, The Villager profi led the Lower East Side documentarian and his new “Front Door Book,” which includes a collection of the many photos he took of local people posing with the door as backdrop in the 1980s and ’90s; the door itself was a favor- ite canvas for local graffiti writers, a use which Patterson encouraged. In the 1980s, he even kept track of the stock exchange’s volatile rises and falls on the door, listing the daily averages in magic marker. Patterson said he’s defi nitely not going to sanitize the entranceway to his Essex St. home and gallery, or let the city power-wash it, either, adding it’s just one more reason why he’s not voting for Bloomberg. “The city is telling me to clean it or they will. Yet it is my door,” Patterson fumed. “Has New York City come to the point where we all have to be exactly alike?” … In other street-art news, Jim Power, the “Mosaic Man,” called to say this time he has really been pushed to the limit, and that it could be the end for his fabled East Village Mosaic Trail of decorated lampposts. “I can’t continue without funding,” he said. “It’s getting to the point where this project could be over — after 25 years.” He said he’s thinking of suing the city for the 50 lampposts of his that were destroyed duringRudy

“Old-fashioned in every way”,
this Chelsea “trip back in time”
purveys “hearty” Americana
in a “Waterford-and-wood-
buring-fireplace” setting; add in
“accommodating” staffers who
“pour a great Guinness” and the
“whole is definitely equal to
more than the sum of its parts.”

Home of the NFL Sunday Ticket,
College Football, Premier League
Soccer, MLB Playoffs + World Series

CHEF’S CLASSIC
12 Qt Multi-Cooker
with Lid

only one-third of the larger South Village Historic District that the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation wants protected.

Andrew Berman, executive director of G.V.S.H.P., told the commission on Oct. 27 that historic buildings in the entire area were being demolished to make way for new develop- ment or altered in ways that destroy their historic features.

“While the city is gradually considering landmark desig- nation for a part of the neighborhood, buildings are being destroyed and most of the neighborhood is not even being considered for landmark designation yet,” Berman said.

L.P.C. is considering a district of roughly 10 blocks between W. Fourth St. and Houston St. from the west side of Sixth Ave to Seventh Ave. South. G.V.S.H.P. has been calling for a new historic district to include those blocks together with about another 20 blocks between Houston and Watts Sts. from the east side of Sixth Ave. to LaGuardia Place down to Houston St., and to midblock between Thompson St. and West Broadway from Houston St. down to Watts St.

In the 10 blocks that L.P.C. is currently considering, two historic buildings have had alterations that compromise their historic value, one at 23 Cornelia St. and the other at 12 Leroy St. In addition, a row of buildings at 233-237 Bleecker St. was threatened before the L.P.C. hearing was calendared, Berman said.

In the larger area not under consideration, historic buildings that were demolished in recent years include the residence at 178 Bleecker St.; the Provincetown Playhouse and Apartments, at 133-139 MacDougal St.; the Circle in the Square theater, 159 Bleecker St.; and the Tunnel Garage, at Broome and Thompson Sts. In addition, the brick facade of

the Sullivan St. Playhouse, at 181 Sullivan St., was replaced by glass. Furthermore, Fire Patrol No. 2, a 1902 building at 84 W. Third St., has been sold to a private developer whose plans for it are unknown.

The owner of 178 Bleecker St., John Wu, had applied earlier this year to the Department of Buildings for a permit to erect an eight-story building on the site. Berman, however, protested that the proposal for the property, which is only 22 feet wide, violates the city’s “sliver law,” which says that build- ings narrower than 45 feet wide cannot be built taller than the width of the streets they face. Bleecker St. is registered as 60 feet wide, which would make eight stories (around 80 feet tall) a violation, Berman said. He added that the fi ve-story building previously on the site was lower than 60 feet tall.

But D.O.B. responded that eight stories at the site does not run afoul of the sliver law because the project involves a merger of two building lots. Nevertheless, D.O.B. last week said the building application was being audited because of community concern and the permit was on hold until the audit is complete. A department spokesperson was unable to say when the audit would be completed.

Lucy Cecere, who was born and bred in the Village and celebrated her 60th wedding anniversary earlier in the week, urged neighbors at the Oct. 21 demonstration to unite against further demolitions of historic buildings in the neighborhood.

Lois Rakoff, a member of the Bleecker Area Merchants and Residents Association, was outraged that the proposed replacement would tower over adjacent buildings and overwhelm the tiny MacDougal-Sullivan Gardens Historic District, a group of row houses built around a courtyard just south of the demolished building.

City Council Speaker Christine Quinn submitted a state- ment to L.P.C. at the Oct. 27 hearing urging approval of the 10-block extension and “continued efforts to protect the physical legacy of the South Village.”

“We provide the vital,
preventive care
needed for your pets
to live a long,
healthy life”

Andrew Berman, G.V.S.H.P. director, standing near 178 Bleecker St., where a building was recently demolished, points to a map indicating how only one-third of the proposed South Village Historic District is currently being considered for landmarking.