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		NEWS You’ve gotta fight for your right to run for your party By Olga Mantilla Six of the 11 candidates in the race for Manhattan’s Second City Council District gathered on the steps of City Hall last Thursday to decry what they called the “antidemocratic” turn the race took last Mon. July 18 when members of the political organization Coalition for a District Alternative filed challenges against five of them in their bids to represent the sprawling district that includes the Lower East Side, the East Village, Alphabet City, Gramercy Park and Murray Hill. Puerto Rican punk rockers ricanstruct the revolution By Ronda Kaysen The anarchists can’t keep a schedule. It was a sweltering Sunday in July and not an anarchist was in sight at Tompkins Square Park. The Puerto Rican anarchist punk band Ricanstruction had circulated e-mail blasts for weeks, promising a free afternoon show as part of a rally to save St. Brigid’s, an East Village church facing demolition. But a forecast of rain — which materialized late in the day as a 20-minute reprieve from the ungodly heat — canceled the East Village performance.
Villager photo by Elisabeth Robert Vocalist Jim Malloy and trumpeter Colin Brigstocke performed “The Party’s Over” on Washington Square’s Teen Plaza Tuesday evening. The Washington Square Music Festival had planned to perform there, but the extreme heat forced them indoors. The raised space is slated for demolition as part of the park’s renovation. Square suit cites ‘hallowed ground,’ theater in round and, um, squirrels By Lincoln Anderson Calling the Washington Square Park renovation plan “arbitrary, capricious, unreasonable and illegal,” opponents of the hotly-debated project have filed a lawsuit to stop it from moving forward.

Inside Park work will get rolling on the river in Tribeca By Ellen Keohane Demolition of Piers 25 and 26 along the Tribeca segment of Hudson River Park could begin this fall with reconstruction of Pier 25 starting in May, followed by Pier 26 next summer, according to Connie Fishman, president of the Hudson River Park Trust. Washington Square church is sold By Albert Amateau The lawyer for the new owner of the historic Washington Square United Methodist Church, 135 W. Fourth St., said this week that she would appear at the Community Board 2 Landmarks Committee meeting on Mon. Aug. 1 to outline plans to convert the church to residential use. A look back at East Village’s good old, bad old days By Cathy Jedruczek This East Village saying, recounting the heavy drug activity and high crime in Alphabet City in the late 1980s and early 1990s, is no longer accurate: What used to be a dangerous no-man’s land is now a trendy part of the East Village. Skateboarder flips out over fines— $1,100! — in undercover bust By Lauren Dzura Skateboarder Andre Stoltzus, 13, thought it was just another fun day of doing cool stunts and jumps in Union Square last Thursday, when he found himself being ticketed by undercover police and hit with a colossal fine. He received three summonses, including a $100 fine and a $1,000 fine, for reckless skateboarding and his skateboard was confiscated, according to Robert Peters, Stoltzus’s father. Stoltzus could not be reached for comment by press time. St. Brigid’s gets a reprieve, but loses its organ By Albert Amateau The demolition reprieve for St. Brigid’s Church was extended on Mon. July 25 at least until the lawsuit brought by the Committee to Save St. Brigid’s Church against the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York is transferred to another section of State Supreme Court.		Con Ed to spend millions more to check for street voltage leaks By Albert Amateau Con Edison agreed last week to spend $10.6 million on programs to detect stray voltage in its electrical system as part of a settlement with the state Public Service Commission in connection with the electrocution death in January 2004 of Jodie Lane on E. 11th St. Out-of-school slots first thought lost are restored By Vanessa Romo More than 500 parents, students, teachers and community leaders crammed into P.S. 20’s non-air conditioned auditorium on Thurs. July 21 to meet with city officials and address proposed cuts to after-school, holiday and summer daycare programs. “It was very, very heated, literally” said Councilmember Alan Gerson, who attended the meeting and described the community’s turnout as “very impressive.” Brademas Center will study the workings of Congress By Lauren Dzura This fall, New York University will open the John Brademas Center for the Study of Congress in the Robert F. Wagner School of Public Service. A drifter is arrested in murder of pastor on Henry St. By Brendan Keane Two days after residents of a Chinatown building made the grisly discovery of a decomposing corpse of an elderly man in his apartment, José Bustos Mangana, 28, has confessed to the brutal murder, according to police. City to rule on developer’s and gardeners’ turf war By Sara Levin Amidst the busy traffic on the street and a towering new building across the way, a 3-foot-wide strip of dirt on Houston St. might not seem very important to most passersby. But caretakers of the Liz Christy Garden are anxious about one that lies within their grounds. They should know by today, when the Department of Housing Preservation and Development is expected to announce what will happen to the land within the garden that hugs a new commercial construction site.

Arts and Entertainment

A surreal evening of performances By Jerry Tallmer Everything old is new again. Welcome to 1955, when a young woman named Julie Bovasso, an inspired 22-year-old from Brooklyn, is introducing Jean Genet, Eugene Ionesco, and Michel de Ghelderode to the United States of America, and vice versa, at the tiny Tempo Playhouse she’s built with her own hands at 4 St. Mark’s Place. Pianist inspired by Downtown streets By Rick Marx The pianist Pete Malinverni doesn’t need to worry about inspiration. Whenever he’s feeling stuck, he’ll step out of his apartment at Sixth Avenue and Houston to collect his thoughts and find a little inspiration. “The Downtown is a huge part of it,” he says. “First of all, it offers inspiration because of the life of the Village. If I’m having trouble getting going in the morning, I take a quick half-hour walk in the Village. I’m trying to open my mind and practice.”		Koch On Film By Ed Koch “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” (-) This is a terrible and loony film. The critics who gave it a good review should take a vacation. “The Beat That My Heart Skipped (+) As the doors opened and the theater emptied out, I asked those departing what they thought of the film. Some said it was “good,” one said, “I didn’t get it,” and another pointed to his friend and said, “she liked it but I didn’t. An anti-feminist backlash By Frank Holiday As an entry in the summer group show category, “Idols of Perversity” at Bellwether Gallery in Chelsea has been widely reviewed. But I couldn’t let this show pass without offering my own two cents. Movie is still great 35 years later By Jerry Tallmer If ever anyone relished the pivotal truth that dreams are movies, movies are dreams, it is the Bernardo Bertolucci who in 1970, a prizewinning poet not yet 30 years old, wrote and directed the movie “Il Conformista” (from the Alberto Moravia novel) that is in itself one great compulsive, overpowering dream, recalled almost entirely in flashback by the buttoned-up starch-faced Marcello Clerici – the extraordinary Jean-Louis Trintignant – in the back seat of a car that is being driven through the night to where he has been assigned to murder the anti-Fascist professor who was a hero of this aspiring Mussolini-era apparatchik’s university days.