Welcome to The Villager Online

Volume 74, Number 44 |
March 09 - 15, 2005

Inside
Editorial
Save our Olympic bid, Mr. Mayor
After being wined, dined and escorted by Mayor Mike Bloomberg and Dep. Mayor Dan Doctoroff for an intense four days of lobbying a few weeks ago, Nawal el-Moutawakel, the chairperson of the International Olympic Committee’s site evaluation commission, surprise, surprise said she agreed with her chaperones that New York City will not get the Olympics unless the city commits to building an Olympic-size stadium on Manhattan’s West Side before the I.O.C. vote in July.

Talking Point
How about a Washington Sq. statue connected to the park?
By Luther S. Harris
Statues of three individuals currently occupy Washington Sq. — George Washington, Giuseppe Garibaldi and Alexander Holley — none of whom had anything to do with the place. Washington’s name was co-opted for the square by Mayor Philip Hone and the Common Council in the 1820s to boost real-estate values around the square.

Voice-mail hell
By Andrei Codrescu
Credit is the devil. This hardly needs explaining to anyone who’s been in voice-mail hell with zombies from credit card companies, or gnashed their teeth to a fine powder seeing the rate increases on the monthly electrical, gas, water, and telephone bills.

Scoopy's Notebook

Letters to the editor

Editorial Cartoon

News in briefs
Vigil for Sudan

Anti-war march on Chelsea

Children’s book event

Police blotter

Scene

Picture Story

Spring comes to the Village for a day
With the mercury climbing over 60 degrees Monday, Villagers enjoyed spring for just one day.

Obituary
Van Antwerp, 70, a Morton St. leader, dies
Zan E. Van Antwerp, a Village resident for 46 years and a former officer of the Morton St. Block Association, died Feb. 26 after a long illness at Village Nursing Home. She was 70.

Kurnitz memorial

Children's
Jumping out of birthday party whirlwind
By Aileen Torres
“Children for Children” began with a very simple idea. It was sparked by an ordinary ritual – children’s birthday parties. Silda Wall found herself busy organizing birthday parties for her three young daughters, the eldest of whom was then six-years-old. But after throwing several of them, she began to become uneasy.

New York's
Exciting downtown scene
CONCERTS & Music

Dance

Events

Exhibitions

Family

Lectures

"Serving West and East Village, Chelsea, SoHo, NoHo, Little Italy, Chinatown and the Lower East Side"

			NEWS F.I.T. plan still gives some fits By Albert Amateau For the second time in the past four years, Fashion Institute of Technology is proposing to transform W. 27th St. into a campus commons by rebuilding the eastern two-thirds of the street as a sidewalk level plaza and changing the western third of the street from one-way to two ways with a cul-de-sac to allow traffic to turn around. Sister adapts to changing L.E.S. By Zachary Roy When Sister Deborah Lopez arrived at St. Joseph’s School four years ago to become the new principal, many residents of the school’s Chinatown neighborhood probably thought she was a newcomer. After all, the last time she had lived there, it was not even called Chinatown.
Villager photo by Jennifer Weisbord Gwen Deely, who has been photographing the Astor Pl. cube sculpture for two years, came by Tuesday to take a picture of it in the snow when she discovered it had been removed. Where’s the cube? By Albert Amateau “I don’t know if you guys know about this,” said the anxious man on the phone to The Villager late Tuesday afternoon. “The cube is gone.”

	Inside the Villager Joey Ramone trusted his mane to this man By Ronda Kaysen Joey Ramone, the front man of the iconic East Village punk band the Ramones, took his hair very seriously. For 17 years, until his death in 2001, Ramone relied on a sprightly East Villager named Hugh Mack Dill to transform his unruly mane of curly black hair into, well, an unruly mane of curly black hair. What’s drives the Chinatown van drivers? By Loretta Chao “Fa la shen! Fa la shen!” yells Mr. Zhou with urgency as he points to his white shuttle bus. Parked behind a row of sidewalk vendors in Chinatown’s Chatham Square, the bus fills up quickly; and just as the last of the grey cushioned seats are taken behind the tinted windows of his shuttle, Zhou will jump back into his seat, throw it in gear, and head to “Fa la shen,” or Chinese for Flushing. Bloomberg kicks in $2.5 million more for Girls Club By Nancy Reardon The Lower East Side Girls Club received $2.5 million from the city this week, bringing New York’s first and only Girls Club just over the halfway mark in its capital campaign to build its own facilities. Organizers report progress on long-delayed AIDS memorial By Amanda Kludt After almost a decade of anticipation, members of the AIDS Monument Committee say the plans for the AIDS memorial in Hudson River Park are finally coming together. They have a site, a design, an architect, and city approval, and according to the head of the committee, Lawrence Swehla, the memorial could be finished in a year and a half.	U.N. forum on women at N.Y.U. 10 years later By Ed Gold Introduced as a leader who “rejects injustice on any grounds” and “who stays the course,” Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton did not disappoint, addressing an enthusiastic audience in New York University’s Skirball Center on Sunday afternoon on the theme that “women’s rights are human rights.” Villagers hit a wall over park fence plan By Albert Amateau Defying threats that they would be ejected from the March 2 Community Board 2 parks committee meeting, opponents of plans to renovate Washington Sq. Park shouted at Department of Parks officials attempting to present the first phase of the plan. Nomadic elephant exhibit opens on a pier By Divya Watal Now that the time of plastic poles and saffron sails has passed, the gates have flung open to welcome a new artistic and architectural marvel: a museum made of shipping crates, with flying pachyderms housed in it. Tenants at Baruch Houses smell more than a rat By Aman Singh The 30,000 residents of Baruch Houses have been living with a recognizable stink for the past one-year, coming from sewage-filled basements in the housing complexes.
	Arts in the Villager Villager to perform at Cunningham Studio By Doris Diether Opening this weekend at the Merce Cunningham Studio will be Mary Seidman and Dancers. Dancing with the group will be Villager Snezana Adjanski. Since Snezana is rather shy, Mary Seidman came along for the interview. Snezana will be performing in an excerpt from a longer, evening-length work, “Who Will Roll Away the Stone?,” a 2003 work by Seidman, whose studio is on West 30th Street. Living up to their name By Aileen Torres “Death From Above 1979,” a two-piece drum-and-bass post-punk band from Toronto, will play at the Bowery Ballroom on Thurs., Mar. 10. They have just released their debut full-length album, “You’re a Woman, I’m a Machine.” Sport Where visitors keep the balls in the air – literally By Judith Stiles Any working parent in New York City will say that life is a juggling act - a frenetic effort to keep all the balls in the air in a fast-paced city that never slows down. Juggling kids, work home, sometimes multiple jobs, or caring for aging parents is a formula for stress, so it is surprising to find any working parents with even a sliver of spare time that they can carve out to attend the Juggling Club at the Tony Dapolito Recreation Center at Clarkson and Varick Sts.	Film Absorbing six-hours of viewing By Leonard Quart Marco Tulio Giordana’s “The Best of Youth” is a welcome new Italian film in the tradition of richly-textured, family epics like Visconti’s “Rocco and His Brothers.” It’s accessible and warm, and skillfully intersects its family drama with brief glimpses of almost four decades of contemporary Italian history. It also gives us, without turning into a tourist guide, a glance at a range of striking Italian locations—from the cities of Turin, Rome and Florence, to the volcanic island of Stromboli in the South and the Tuscan countryside in the North. Koch On Film By Ed Koch “Sunset Story” (+) This unusual documentary takes place in Sunset Hall, a residence in Los Angeles for elderly people in need of assisted living. The residence is advertised as a place for progressives which someone in the film explains means radicals.

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