BY ANDREW BERMAN  |    The recent approval of New York University’s massive expansion plan by the City Council, City Planning Commission and borough president was a stunning, if not entirely unexpected, decision. As we and our friends at N.Y.U. Faculty Against the Sexton Plan prepare our legal challenge of the approvals, we have been [...]

BY GEORGETTE FLEISCHER  |  The year began for many of us with Community Board 2’s hearings on the gargantuan New York University expansion plan. On Jan. 9 there was a scene uncannily prescient of the one that transpired at City Hall last Wednesday, July 25, when City Council Speaker Christine Quinn ordered gendarmes to clear [...]

BY ANDREW BERMAN  |  I was reminded of two old adages when reading The Villager’s editorial last week regarding the City Council’s approval of New York University’s expansion plan (“Margaret Chin and N.Y.U.”). The first: We are all entitled to our own opinions, but not our own facts. One can believe that it is O.K. [...]

BY MARGARET S. CHIN  |  On June 28, the New York City Council passed the city’s budget for Fiscal Year 2013. This year’s budget was unique in many respects. In my three years serving on the City Council, I have never seen so many community members raise their voices against the mayor’s cuts to childcare, [...]

BY BILL WEINBERG  |  Today I walked by the Bialystoker Center old folks’ home on East Broadway — or, rather, the building that used to house it. It now sits vacant, a note to former employees from the 1199 hospital workers’ union taped to the door of the stately 1920s edifice. The door is framed [...]

BY ANDY HUMM  |  The High Line is nothing if not a new perspective on a land we thought we knew. Its third-story railroad bed rises from the once-meaner parts of Chelsea and the Village and exposes our radically changing neighborhoods in unexpected ways hidden from us at street level (or even from upper-floor apartment [...]

By JERRY TALLMER  |  When I close my eyes and bear down, I can see two men in what used to be called plus fours — golf knickers — standing on a patch of grass beside a road, or perhaps a railroad track, engaged in casual political conversation. One of these men is my father, [...]

BY KATE WALTER  |  I felt anxious before the Speed Dating event at the Gay Center. I meditated, drank a glass of wine, took a bath and got dressed. I put on tan jeans and my expensive black loafers with zippers and patent leather stripes. I donned my neo-hippie shirt, a tight black top with [...]

BY AN N.Y.U. FACULTY MEMBER  |  I must echo the words of one of my faculty colleagues at New York University, spoken in response to the City Planning Commission’s disappointing but hardly unexpected 12-to-1 vote in favor of the university’s 2031 expansion plan on June 6: “A sad day for our university… for recruitment and [...]

BY ART GATTI  |  I raised and helped raise a lot of kids in my day, mostly here in the West Village. At one point, though, some of those kids lived a few blocks from where Etan Patz disappeared. That tragic case crushed the spirit of a generation of Downtown parents, and we were forever [...]