BY KATE WALTER  |  “This is like that reality show called ‘Pioneer House,’ ” said my neighbor as we trekked up and down the dark stairwells of Westbeth with our flashlights blazing. “More like a show called ‘Refugee Camp,’” I snapped, tired from carrying water up eight flights to my apartment for several days. I [...]

BY BILL WEINBERG  |  Well, I’m back on my computer after four days of the electricity being out in Lower Manhattan, and finding my rage level is even higher than usual. Where to even begin? For starters, with the most obvious reality. I am 50 years old and grew up in New York City. Never [...]

BY BILL WEINBERG  | The changing nature of cheap ethnic food in the East Village weighs especially heavily on my mind as the weather starts to turn in October, and the nostalgic craving sets in for warm, friendly carbohydrates wrapped in just slightly chewy dough and slathered in generous quantities of melted butter… . Yes, pierogies. [...]

BY JERRY TALLMER  |  My great friend Sidney Zion is gone two years now, but I can hear him loud and clear. “Schmuck!” he is shouting at Willard Mitt Romney… . “Schlemiel! Goyische kopf! You don’t even know how to think and talk, and then down there at Boca Raton — of all places! — you [...]

BY DENA PEARLMAN  | As some news media have reported, the Tiles for America Memorial has been taken down. But the fact that they have been taken without authority by a grassroots, self-serving group led by misinformation created by Village resident Dusty Berke and Andretti Mullens seems to be absent. During a meeting with the Contemporary [...]

BY TOM FOX  |    In 1992, New York City and State embraced a new concept in urban park development and much of the nation’s park community watched with hope.  Accepting the recommendations of a joint panel established to plan the future of the West Side waterfront, they agreed to build a new waterfront park that [...]

BY ANDREW BERMAN  |  In late August the city “certified,” or began the official six-month public review and approval process, for Trinity Real Estate’s proposed Hudson Square rezoning. What happens in this process will not only have a profound and likely irreversible impact upon development in Hudson Square, a roughly 20-block area running between Canal [...]

BY JERRY TALLMER  |  Wonder of wonders. Who could have foreseen that not just one but two Off Off Broadway farces about Ayn Rand, the High Priestess of Selfishness, would be headed our way even as her most talked-about political acolyte, Congressman Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, had been selected as baggage-carrier for a presidential hopeful named [...]

BY KATE WALTER  |  I was having my tarot cards read in a cafe on Christopher St. by a seer named Roland. “You’re struggling to find a relationship” he said. “I see somebody but it’s not happening yet. You need a period of rest and rejuvenation.” Damn. How could I still be in that phase? I’d [...]