…And Now a Word From Papa Smurf
IT’S ALL MY FAULT… …And Now a Word From Papa Smurf By Duane Scott Cerny I recently posted a...
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Author: kim
Meet Coco and Gracie
While out early one morning, walking the Hudson River Park Esplanade, I noticed a woman with a stroller. I look closer and saw it was a cat! I greeted Nisha Melvani, a West Village resident, who told me she has another cat at home that she takes out too.
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Let’s Eat!
It’s not quite in the West Village, but nonetheless, it’s a nice afternoon walk to the Lily Pond in Battery Park City. I’d heard that a Black-crowned Night Heron had staked out territory among the waterlilies, so I headed downtown, relishing the plethora of colorful plantings by the ever-attentive gardeners of Hudson River Park along the way. The stealth of these black-capped gnomes is mesmerizing, but in this hyper-urban park with its parade of perambulating toddlers, the glacial rhythm of its murderous pursuits is stunning to s-l-o-w l-y b-e-h-o-l-d.
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Season’s Greetings: Summer Solstice Premieres At IFC
Glowing with the energy of the summer and keeping with the awkward humor of real life, New York City native filmmaker Noah Schamus’s first feature film Summer Solstice stole my heart. The film features Bobbi Salvör Menuez and Marianne Rendón as Leo, a queer transgender man, and Eleanor, a straight, cisgender woman, college friends who reconnect for an upstate getaway. In less than an hour-and-a-half Summer Solstice is able to bring out both Leo and Eleanor’s unique personalities and intertwined histories, all while making me laugh through some of the most earnest and uncomfortable moments of their lives.
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Invisible Nation: A Film That Chronicles Taiwan’s First Female President, Runs for One Week at the Quad Cinema
On May 31, Invisible Nation made its American movie theater debut at the Quad on W. 13th Street in Greenwich Village. This riveting documentary directed by Vanessa Hope was first shown to the public at the Woodstock Film Festival on September 29, 2023. Hope is the granddaughter of producer Walter Wanger and classic film actress Joan Bennett.
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The Counterculture is Dead. Bring it Back to Life!
The announcement that the Village and worldwide counterculture has died should not come as a surprise to those who lived through it and watched its decline. Walk into any record store and you can see the remnants of that culture. There are plenty of LP collectors interested in the music of the 60s, 70s and 80s. These are long-playing albums pressed on vinyl and having great artwork and liner notes. But the music of classic rock and jazz/blues is now fading into the fog of history. You can say the same for films and every art form
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Summer at Jefferson Market Library
We have quite a few exciting things coming up at Jefferson Market Library this summer. The first is our neighborhood snapshot exhibit, Point and Click, which will be on view through the end of July in our Little Underground Gallery. Made up of photographs contributed by our library patrons, along with descriptions in their own words, the show includes memories of a 1990s Pride Parade on Christopher Street, Washington Square performers in the 1980s, C.O. Bigelow through the years, and too many others to list here! Stop by the basement to see what your neighbors have shared.
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New Yorkers for Culture and Arts Awards Gala 2024: Dance Legend Mikhail Baryshnikov Honors Cora Cahan
It was an inspiring evening of advocacy for the arts at the third annual New Yorkers for Culture and Arts Awards Gala 2024 held at Mabou Mines on East 9th Street in the East Village on June 10th. This was a gathering where New York artists, entrepreneurs, and local politicians, who have staunchly advocated and pushed the boundaries towards supporting the New York City arts scene, were celebrated for their astonishing achievements.
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A Gem Survives
Most months I have used my new role as a restaurant reviewer to tout new eateries. But after needing a place to meet a client on a Sunday afternoon, I suggested the Waverly Diner, on 6th Avenue at Waverly Place. I hadn’t been there in 15 years, but it was a great rediscovery. There are three diners left in Greenwich Village–Waverly, the Washington Square Diner and the Bus Stop Café. They still let us dine on a broad variety of well-prepared “home” cooking, like they have for decades.
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How Liz Wolff Turned Passion and Purpose into a Village Staple
Liz has lived in the Village since 2008, when she opened Cure Thrift Shop at 111 East 12th Street. As a fourth-generation garage sale, thrift shopper, and dumpster-diving New Yorker, Liz combined her passion for arts and antiques with her personal mission to help find a cure for type 1 diabetes (as noted in Cure Thrift Shop’s website),
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The Sacred Cocktail Hour
The other day Dorothy Wiggins, the forthright 98-year-old, who has experienced a late-life burst of social media fame, paid a visit to Woodlawn Cemetery. The star of the social media account Dorothy Loves New York traveled to the Bronx from her West Village townhouse, accompanied by two of her sons and her videographer to see the newly installed headstone on her husband’s grave and to contemplate her final resting place.
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Google’s New HQ Opens With Only a Fraction of the Nearby Low-Cost Housing Promised by Pols
A Note from Senior Editor Arthur Schwartz: In May the City Council approved a rezoning for a parcel on West Street, just to the north of Houston Street, which will allow all sorts of tax breaks for two building, one with 175 “affordable” rental units, and one with 130 condos. Back in 2018, when the air rights for Pier 40 were transferred, with City Council permission, to the St. John’s Terminal site, on the south side of Houston, in return for a $100 million payment to shore up Pier 40, I was a supporter. I wrote about it in WestView because there was a promise to build over 500 apartments, one-third of which were going to go to seniors, at deeply affordable rents, and because it was going to include a reasonably priced supermarket and other local services. This was a plan touted by the City Council Speaker Corey Johnson as a win-win. But there was a loophole, which Johnson didn’t warn us about, and when the owners sold to Google, no housing was developed on the St. John’s site. Frankly, no matter how beautiful the Google site is, and the fact that they asked for no tax breaks (unlike Amazon), this was one of the greatest zoning-real estate sellouts in Greenwich Village history. Jane Jacobs is turning in her grave!
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Governor Hochul Tells Transit Riders And the Disabled: Congestion Pricing? You Thought I Was Serious?
For a long time I had questions, like many folks who live below 60th Street, and who occasionally drive somewhere, about what impact Congestion Pricing was going to have on us. Would people who lived in the “zone” be forced to pay if we drove upstate, or to New Jersey, every time we came back? Was it going to raise taxi fares?
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How Mount Sinai Worked to Destroy Beth Israel Hospital
The central argument of Mount Sinai Hospital’s most recent plan to close Beth Israel Hospital centers around their assertion that Beth Israel is on a path to lose $160 million this year, and that without closing Beth Israel, the whole Mount Sinai system will collapse. Besides the speciousness of a prediction that a four hospital system which grosses $24 billion a year is about to collapse (yes, $24,000,000,000), lies the fact that Mount Sinai has consciously set about to turn Beth Israel from a profit-making institution into a failing one.
Read MoreMore Options for Beth Israel
Before we look at what options Beth Israel has, let’s look at its history. Hospitals don’t merge and give up independence easily but are usually forced to by financial pressure or projected financial problems. I don’t know everything about the merger of Beth Israel, Roosevelt and St. Luke’s hospitals in 1997 to form Continuum Health Partners but I would imagine money problems were a major factor. I was on the staff of St. Luke’s when Continuum merged with Mt. Sinai in 2013 and I remember many staff members predicting problems because of finances.
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- Giving and Receiving
In December 2001, when my husband, John, and I brought a pair of black-headed caiques into our lives, we had no experience as bird owners.