The Rudin rezoning plan, if approved, will result in St. Vincent’s entire East Campus being converted to residential use. Four of the buildings—Spellman, Smith, Raskob and Nurse’s Residence—will be converted to condos, while another four—Coleman, Link, Cronin and Reiss—will be demolished to make way for a 200-plus-foot-tall luxury condo high-rise on Seventh Avenue, two mid-rise residential buildings (one on 11th Street and one on 12th Street) and a row of new townhouses on 11th Street.

The Planning Commission’s swift unanimous vote to approve the rezoning application sends it to the City Council, which must hold public hearings and vote upon the proposed zoning changes within 60 days of the Planning Commission’s vote. These hearings were not yet scheduled as WestView went to press, but readers can check www.gvshp.org for updates.

The proposed rezoning cannot happen, and Rudin’s proposed St. Vincent luxury condo development cannot move ahead, unless the rezoning is approved by the City Council. The St. Vincent’s campus site lies in City Council Speaker Christine Quinn’s district, and thus the Council will likely follow her lead in deciding whether or not to approve this application.

GVSHP continues to oppose the rezoning application. This site was rezoned in 1979 to allow the construction of larger than normally allowable buildings for the purpose of constructing a hospital, which provides a public service. The Rudin rezoning application is asking, in essence, that the additional bulk and extra zoning considerations granted to St. Vincent’s now be given to Rudin Management to allow it to construct larger than currently (or normally) allowable private, for-profit, market-rate condos in the Greenwich Village Historic District.

We believe that allowing construction of these buildings is not only bad planning and a bad principle, but is also inappropriate in terms of size and scale and the loss of historic buildings for this site. We also believe that approving this rezoning, or “upzoning,” application sets a terrible precedent that could pave the way for the special privileges afforded institutions serving a public purpose, of which there are many in our neighborhood, to be exploited by private developers. GVSHP will continue to push for the rezoning of the site to allow for luxury condo development to be rejected.
If you want to make your feelings known about the proposal, you have just a short period of time to contact City Council Speaker Quinn. Go to www.gvshp.org/stvincltr for contact information and sample letters you can send.

Andrew Berman,
Executive Director Greenwich Village
Society for Historic Preservation

One of the great current exhibitions in the city is of the city. It is taking place at the Museum of the City of New York on Fifth Avenue at 103rd Street. The museum has become a vital place to experience exciting exhibits on relevant themes connected to our urban history.

One of the most outstanding, “The Greatest Grid: The Master Plan of Manhattan, 1811-2011,” explores the impacts of the 1811 Commissioners’ Plan, whose bicentennial is being celebrated in this exhibit, on the people and natural terrain of New York.

This plan was the beginning of the great wipeout of almost all of the new city’s rural character and history north of First Street on the East Side and Eighth Street on the West Side all the way up to 155th Street. This was not the first grid. Even New Amsterdam was laid out in a modified grid in the 17th century. All of present day Lower Manhattan was laid out in a series of arbitrarily canted grids. This was, however, the first grid laid out for the balance of Manhattan and for the bank balances of its property owners, including Astor, Bleecker, Moore, Stuyvesant, and other major landowners. The grid allowed for auctions of scattered properties on mapped streets without any geographic priorities. Few parks or other public facilities were provided. No allowances were made for terrain, shoreline, streams, wetlands, rock outcrops, woodlands, fields or other natural features. It was a street system drawn by a computer running a program in sleep mode.
The Commissioners’ Plan was laid out in the field by civil engineer, John Randel, Jr., who wrote in his report to the Commissioners, “From the crossing place I followed a well-beaten path leading from the city to the then Village of Greenwich, passing over open and partly fenced lots and fields….” The commissioners, including Simeon De Witt, Gouverneur Morris and John Rutherford, were enamored of the rational clarity of the grid, with its enormous development potential of more than 150,000 building lots if the irregular terrain was filled, cut and smoothed out. This is the same clarity that was admired by the French planner and architect, Le Corbusier, discussed in “Walking in Paris: Streets that Work” (November WestView). A copy of Le Corbusier’s “Quand Les Cathedrales Etaient Blanches: Voyages Au Pays Du Timides” (“When the Cathedrals Were White: Voyage to the Land of the Timid”), published in 1937, is on display in the exhibit, along with a 1935 copy of American Architect in which he is quoted in an article entitled “La Ville Radieuse” as complaining that American skyscrapers were too small. “Height is a thing beautiful in itself,” he exulted, proposing that blocks be aggregated into larger units with lower buildings cleared at the bases of skyscrapers. Coincidentally, Florent Morellet complained at his show, “Come Hell or High Water,” at the Christopher Henry Gallery (December WestView), that Paris was passing into obscurity because of its failure to build tall buildings.

The high point of The Greatest Grid show is the display of John Randel’s original drawings: water color and ink depictions of then still existing farm lanes, fences, walls, ponds, streams, wetlands, hills and buildings that bring to mind the exquisitely painted murals in the Egyptian Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photographs show the depredations visited on farmers whose homes were left isolated on inaccessible steep hills by the deep excavations for the street grid. Livelihoods and history were destroyed by an action so extreme as to make the Lower Manhattan Expressway once proposed by Robert Moses a comparatively inconspicuous change to the urban fabric.
The plan was criticized by such luminaries as Edgar Allen Poe who complained that “these magnificent places are doomed. The spirit of improvement has withered them with its acrid breath.”  Frederick Law Olmsted, who, with Calvert Vaux, designed Central and Prospect Parks, which respected land forms, as antidotes to the grid, reacted similarly, saying that the grid had all the creativity of  “the chance occurrence of a mason’s sieve near the map of the ground to be laid out.” Jane Jacobs, whose name exhibition curator Hilary Ballon invokes as a supporter of the grid, in fact was also critical, writing in “The Death and Life of Great American Cities” that she understood why European visitors often remark that “the ugliness of our cities is owing to our gridiron street systems.” She added that “if such a street goes on and on into the distance . . . dribbling into endless amorphous repetitions of itself and finally petering into the utter anonymity of distances, we are also getting a visual announcement that clearly says endlessness.”

What could have been the alternative? Certainly not the axial stars of Pierre Charles L’Enfant’s Washington, D.C., as other critics proposed. A thoughtful plan would have required real vision and hard work and would have looked at the varied and prominent physical features shaping the island: its hills, valleys, water courses and, most especially, its shoreline. City planners could have incorporated these features into the city’s streets and park system, which they in fact did in the building of such parks as Riverside, Central, Morningside, St. Nicholas, Colonial, Mount Morris, Highbridge, Inwood Hill, Fort Washington and Fort Tryon Parks. However, these were largely steep hillside remnants, unsuitable for buildings and equally unsuitable for recreation. We have to look to other cities for creative, beautiful alternatives to the mindless grid. London has Admiralty Arch and the magnificent Regent and Portland Streets, created by John Nash, with their edges defined by the facades and roof lines of his architecture: Pall Mall; Marble Arch; Trafalgar Square. There is Bath, with its Royal Crescent and many small squares; Edinburgh, with its bi-level West Bow and New Town; Barcelona, Spain, and Savannah, Georgia, with their extraordinary squares; the Piazza del Campo in Siena; the Piazza Navona in Rome; and, most rewarding of all, the center of Paris, built on the fabric of a medieval city (November WestView), where narrow streets curve and bend, providing mystery, welcome surprises and new experiences along the way. Our own Greenwich Village, fortunately spared by the Commissioners in 1811, contains these qualities. Broadway, the longest street in Manhattan, slices through the grid at an angle to the north and south, providing a series of triangular parks, called “squares” strung out like beads on a necklace, following a former Indian trail and the historic Bloomingdale Road.
The tail end of The Greatest Grid exhibition provides a large number of alternative visions of what Manhattan might have become. One in particular responded to the basic terrain of the island. This was Barton Robb’s  “Apple Hamlet.” There is much to see in this and other shows at the Museum of the City of New York, requiring repeat visits. The Greatest Grid will run through April 15.

By Barry Benepe

“The Greatest Grid”
Museum of the City of New York
1220 Fifth Avenue at 103rd Street
Through April 15
212-534-1672/ mcny.org

Co-owners Mike Morello and Aly Symmonds designed their dream café to serve as a communal space for Village-goers searching for a home away from home. Combining their passions for music, food and hospitality, Morello and Symmonds share their own talents with many a welcome passerby. The café is “always a home for people to come to if they need a place to perform, a place to get warm,” Morello told WestView during a recent visit. “If we could have created a place where we wanted to go, this would be it.”

The Lite-Brite “Open” sign is the first of many trinkets that color the café’s interior and illuminate Morello’s and Symmonds’s personal touches. Morello pointed out that most of the scattered displays come from his own childhood possessions. Flowers sit in G.I. Joe thermoses, and board games and sci-fi toys rest in a cupboard above the bar. Plush couches and chairs also dot the space, providing a welcome respite for wanderers.

Symmonds attentively assembles paninis, folds crepes and mixes lattes from old family recipes. Morello lines up the musical acts for the weekly jazz ensembles, open mic nights and jam sessions, many of which are comprised of people he knows. Their personalities come through in their hospitality, but Morello and Symmonds also seek to showcase the talent and personalities that walk through their door.

The Wednesday open mic night WestView recently stumbled upon featured musicians from near and far who blended their sounds. Jessica Latshaw, from Landenberg, PA, transfixed the audience with her ukulele ballads; Joel Zighel, owner of Jones Street Wine, a block away, strolled over after closing to jam on the in-house piano; and Alex Torovic, of Serbia, poured his guitar soul into hometown harmonies and then accompanied Morton Millen in the fusion of folk and blues. Klancie Keough, a true vagabond, sang with a guitar she bought on her the last day of her week-long visit to New York, still hoping to catch her 10:00 flight the next morning back to Australia. Morello talked about how the confluence of music and art in the West Village makes it the perfect New York neighborhood for him and Symmonds to satisfy their musical impulses.

As the night progressed Symmonds commanded the counter, preparing local and homemade fare. Cheese from Murray’s Cheese and meats from Ottomanelli Brothers enliven the sense of keeping the food “neighborhoodinal,” as Morello calls it. Morello believes the variety of paninis, crepes and lattes on the menu give customers “pretty much anything anyone would want,” as exemplified by the 30 different latte flavors they can choose from, including Peppermint Patty and Almond Joy. The beer selection also stays local, featuring Long Island and Coney Island beers, and the wine is switched “in and out” to keep the selection fresh.

Morello is proud of the positive relationships Vagabond has established with neighboring businesses. Rather than work in competition, the café and surrounding restaurants and music venues work cooperatively to build a sense of comfort, community and good listening throughout the area. When Morello and Symmonds decided to open a café, they zeroed in on the West Village because of these qualities. The area has “enough of the artsiness and class to make the perfect New York neighborhood,” Morello enthused.

Morello and Symmonds make running their business look easy because all they have to do is to be themselves. And the vagabonds will come because they just want to be themselves, too. Everyone is at home here.

By Matt Closter with Julie Berger

The Vagabond Café
7 Cornelia Street
(between West Fourth & Bleecker)
Tues-Thurs: 11 a.m.-11 p.m. Fri-Sat: 11 a.m.-12 a.m. Sun: 11 a.m.-8 p.m.
thevagabondcafe@gmail.com
212-242-6333
thevagabondcafe.com

Why is New York jazz stuck in a time warp? Walk around most of the Village clubs on a Wednesday night and you are likely to hear the same tunes played in similar styles by the same lineup of instruments. These tunes include classic “standards” such as “On Green Dolphin Street,” “A Night in Tunisia” and “All the Things You Are.” And the style? Generally, bebop from the Charlie Parker era around 1952. Visit any of the smaller clubs—the Garage, Knickerbocker’s, Fat Cat, Arturo’s—and that’s mainly what you’ll hear.

That’s not to say the quality isn’t good, even among the semi-pros. For the most part, they play these tunes with a refreshing passion and skill that far exceeds what most other cities in the world offer in the way of jazz. And jazz lovers will argue that there is a host of clubs playing other kinds of jazz in New York, which is true. As a long-time resident of the West Village, I know that clubs like the Village Vanguard, 55 Bar and Smalls in my neighborhood and Iridium and Smoke uptown present a lineup of top-quality and upcoming musicians who often venture further afield than the 1950s. And Brooklyn, where the rent is much cheaper, has some offbeat venues with unusual offerings. But even at these clubs, the standards in bebop form frequently make their appearance.

For some reason, particularly among amateur and semi-amateur musicians, bebop has become the jazz “classical” music. Of course bebop is important, but what about all the other forms of jazz that came before and after? Dixieland in the 1920s. Swing a la Coleman Hawkins in the 1930s. West Coast jazz in the 1950s. “Post-modern” bebop from Miles Davis in the 1960s. Most of that is missing from the standard repertoire. It’s like Julliard graduates spending most of their time playing Bach—and only Bach.

Surprisingly, this isn’t true only for New York. I just returned from a trip to Shanghai, where I heard a group of musicians (admittedly, mainly American) who banged out high quality bebop. There’s a club in Beijing called East Shore that rarely strays far from updated versions of bebop.

European musicians often argue that they are much more open than Americans are to eclecticism in jazz. I confess I find that European jazz melds styles far too much for my ears. Maybe I’m a bopper after all. But maybe it’s time to open the jazz doors.

Here are some jazz artists with upcoming West Village gigs who are doing that.

Village Vanguard

Kurt Rosenwinkel Quartet

February 28-March 4

Thirty years ago, Pat Metheny reinvented jazz guitar with a rock flavor while working under vibraphonist Gary Burton. That tradition of fusion-influenced jazz guitar, in a small group setting, has been picked up by others. Arguably the best current exemplar is Kurt Rosenwinkel, who, funnily enough, also was schooled early on by Gary Burton at the Berklee College of Music in Boston. Rosenwinkel’s music is fiery and complex, with long, winding harmonic melodies and modal jams. For his Village Vanguard gig, he is backed by his touring band, including Aaron Parks on piano, Eric Revis on bass and the young prodigy Justin Faulkner on drums (formerly also with trumpeter Terence Blanchard). Not to be missed. Shows: 9 p.m. and 11 p.m., $25 per set, one drink minimum. Village Vanguard, 178 Seventh Avenue South at 11th Street, 212-255-4037, villagevanguard.com.

The Cornelia Street Café

Chris Lightcap’s Bigmouth Deluxe

Friday, February 10

Bassist Chris Lightcap is central to the downtown New York jazz scene consisting of artful, intellectual composers with a backbone of improvisation. This younger group of jazz musicians is trying to reinvent the music with influences from classical compositions and the training that comes from knowledge of hard bop. Lightcap is playing with other top musicians, including Andy Milne on piano and the precise Gerald Cleaver on drums. And if you get there early enough to eat before hitting the cute performance space downstairs, the upstairs cafe serves excellent and well priced American food. Shows: 9 p.m. and 10:30 p.m, $15 cover, $10 minimum. The Cornelia Street Café, 29 Cornelia Street between West Fourth & Bleecker, 212-989-9319, corneliastreetcafe.com.

- By Andrew Collier

Andrew Collier is a longtime jazz fan and jazz drummer. He studied percussion at Oberlin College, including marimba and vibraphone, and has performed in clubs in New York and in Asia, where he lived for seven years. He grew up in Greenwich Village and now resides on Barrow Street. If you want to talk jazz with Andrew, email him at collierjazz@gmail.com.

“Nobody Asked Me, But…” was the title of an occasional article in The Hartford Courant written by a now-deceased friend, Bill Ryan. Like Andy Rooney, who died so soon after leaving “60 Minutes,” Ryan was a bit of a curmudgeon. Since there may be a vacuum left by the passing of these two gentlemen, I hereby declare myself tanned, rested and ready to fill in. My terms are simple: I will write columns on my choice of topics whenever I feel like it. Movies, for example.

Why am I never asked or consulted about what movies I want to see? I have some good ideas. Let’s say Hollywood decides to make a movie about Vladimir Putin. Fine, but I would like some input in choosing the actors and scripts.

For example, for one possible version, “Vladimir Putin: The KGB Years,” I want Johnny Depp to play the lead. Then, I would select Jennifer Aniston for the role of Comrade Wife, with Angelina Jolie as her double. That way, they could take turns working on the movie and share Brad Pitt. Everyone benefits. No one in the audience will notice who plays the wife, anyway, because all eyes will be on Johnny Depp.

And since it is always possible that Jen and Angelina will engage in fisticuffs, a knife fight or gunplay over Brad, resulting in the hospitalization of either or both, Helena Bonham Carter could do stand-in duty, or play Vlad’s meat pie-baking love interest. Madonna, dressed as a little girl, could make a brief cameo as Putin’s mother, still a virgin after Vlad’s auspicious birth.

Speaking of money. I know stars such as these don’t come cheap, so in the middle of production, we’ll start cutting costs. We’ll get robots from some science-oriented high school to play Mariya and Yekaterina, Vlad’s daughters. Then we’ll replace his Bulgarian shepherd, Buffy, and his black lab, Koni, with a more appropriate breed of dog. We’ll throw in a Russian Wolfhound to play Bolshoi, the Borzoi. (I guess we’ll have to get the dog one of those SAG cards but maybe not the robots.) Again, most people won’t care how we fill these roles because all eyes will be on Depp. For the rest of the cast, I would hire actors and actresses working as waiters and waitresses until they get their “big break.” Since most of them will have been unemployed since the night Lincoln was shot they would leap at the chance, and we could get them dirt-cheap.

So we have the cast. Now for the story line. Yes, I said story line, LOL, ha ha ha. Lack of a good script never stopped Hollywood before, so why should it now? We’ll just get some youngsters from Hollywood High School out in L.A. to write it, or, if we film in NYC, some students from Stuyvesant High School or NYU. We’ll pay them little or nothing and browbeat them relentlessly to get the script in last week. If that doesn’t work, we can put an ad in Variety and pick the best and least expensive apple in the basket.

In the movie, Depp would portray Putin during the fun-loving years when he was torturing the opposition and loving it. I would get Colin Firth to play his archrival, the American President Ronald Reagan. Since Firth doesn’t usually play Americans, I’d have Geoffrey Rush, an Australian, teach him the accent. Rush could play the Secretary of State, or the president’s fancy wristwatch. Whatever.

I grant you, Depp can shave his head and pout easily enough. But getting buff enough to look like Putin for that manly, bare-chested, horse-riding scene might take some doing if Depp’s appearance in “Rum Diary” tells us anything. If that’s expecting too much, I suggest renting an upper-body suit of the “six pack, looks just like muscles” variety. That way, Depp as Putin can continue, à la Rudolf Valentino, making women weak in the knees while manfully sitting astride Papa Ruski—a stallion, of course.

Note to Johnny Depp: Don’t forget that you already took ideas from old Buster Keaton movies for your “Pirates of the Caribbean” character. This time, watch old Yul Brynner movies to get ideas about how to play Putin. Naturally, Brynner would have been a better choice to play the Eternal Prime Minister and President, but he is unfortunately dead.

Suck it up, Johnny! “Yes, you can!”

To hear more of John Early’s unsolicited opinions or share some of your own, contact jfearly1@verizon.net.

By John Early

Sundance, like the Tribeca and SXSW film festivals, has made documentaries a core part of its programming, and one of the most compelling reasons to attend these festivals is to view these documentary films that might never otherwise see the light of day, given the current state of theatrical distribution, or would be lost and forgotten without these festivals to create buzz.

The other way for documentaries to gain exposure is to qualify for consideration for an Academy Award nomination. Previously, films had to have had a one-week commercial run in a theater in New York and Los Angeles to qualify, but now The Academy has changed its rules, and meeting the commercial-run requirement will not be enough. The film will also have to have been reviewed in The New York Times or the Los Angeles Times, making it even more difficult for independent doc makers who lack the visibility and clout of someone like radical millionaire Michael Moore to be considered. It will be interesting to watch this battle unfold over the course of the next year.

But back to Sundance. Here are four documentary films I’ve seen so far that I would like readers to make note of. The first premieres on PBS on February 13. I will revisit the others when they run in NYC.

1. Slavery by Another Name, directed by Sam Pollard. Adapted from the Pulitzer Prize-winning book of the same title by Wall Street Journal reporter Douglas A. Blackmon, this documentary, premiering on PBS on February 13, is a must see if you care about American history and want to learn about how slavery in the form of forced labor continued in both the North and the South long after the Civil War. After Lincoln’s assassination, President Andrew Johnson enacted a series of laws that allowed southern states to round up, arrest and imprison African Americans almost at whim and turn them into indentured slaves who were leased out for profit by state-run prison systems. The film’s exploration of this ugly and widespread practice—which coincided with the beginning of Jim Crow laws—teaches Americans one more history lesson that we have not been taught and will, I hope, shock you as it did me.

2. The Atomic States of America, directed by Don Argott and Sheena M. Joyce. Hovering in the background of the fracking debate so well documented in Josh Fox’s 2010 Sundance Special Jury Prize award-winning Gasland, is the reality of the resur

gence of support for nuclear power plants. Obama has pledged billions of taxpayer dollars to build new reactors that, despite Japan’s Fukushima disaster, Congress and the President still seem hell-bent on constructing. This important and confrontational documentary tells the frightening story of problems, accidents and risks of disaster at nuclear plants that already exist across the U.S. and roots this almost mind-boggling information in the personal stories of people such as Kelly McMasters, whose memoir about growing up in the nuclear-reactor community of Shirley, Long Island was the basis for the film. “The Atomic States of America” makes it possible for viewers to understand the real dangers of atomic power and how to take action against them.

3. How To Survive A Plague, directed by David France. This is the first documentary to chronicle the role that ACT UP activists played in the fight against AIDS and the homophobia that surrounded it. While there is still a much larger story to be told, France has chosen to focus on a small group of mostly men who broke off from ACT UP’s Treatment and Data Committee and founded the Treatment Action Group (TAG), which focused on pushing for the development of new therapies. Iris Long, PhD, taught the boys science, and Mark Harrington then wrote the AIDS Treatment Manual that changed everything. In his first film, France, a well know writer, skillfully tells the story of how this group took on the government and the pharmaceutical industry to fast-track drugs and helped bring protease inhibitors to market. It is a complex story, and France manages to avoid many of the potential pitfalls of telling history that is so recent. I had a difficult time watching footage of so many people I worked with in ACT UP who have passed. Focusing on Bob Rafsky and Peter Staley to personalize the story was a smart choice. Rafsky, in many ways, was the public face of ACT UP until he died in February 1993. His confrontation with Bill Clinton in April 1992 is but one of the many unforgettable moments in the film.

4. The Invisible War, directed by Kirby Dick. The fearless Dick has once again taken the scab off a festering secret, just as he did in his earlier documentary Twist of Faith, about the Roman Catholic clergy’s sexual molestation of young people. In The Invisible War, he documents the reality of rape and sexual assault of women and men who join the military by their fellow soldiers and what happened to a group of women—all quite different—and one man who found the courage to go public. It is not a pretty picture—the military, in fact, punishes the victims—but it is a compelling revelation of how deeply sexism is still

rooted in the military. Watching this documentary should make parents and other relatives and friends very concerned about any young woman who says she wants to join the military.

Your feedback is always welcome at reeldealmovies@gmail.com, or send a letter to editor@WestViewNews.org.

Greenwich Village, Utah!

Park City Utah’s year-round population is approximately 7,600 people, but during Sundance it expands to 50,000—sort of like the Village on a hot summer night. But Villagers know how to navigate crowds no matter where they are, and during Sundance, many of them are here. I’ve run into enough high profile, creative Village folk on Park City streets and in theaters to fill Graydon Carter’s Waverly Inn any night of the week. Grand Jury Narrative Prize competitors Ira Sachs (Keep the Lights On) and Ry Russo-Young (Nobody Walks) are here, as are documentary filmmakers Eugene Jarecki (The House I Live In) and David France (How to Survive A Plague). Marina Abromović is the subject of the documentary The Artist is Present. Directors Timothy Greenfeld-Sanders (About Face) and Rory Kennedy (Ethel), producer Marc Weiss (A Fierce Green Fire) and super-indie P.R. guru Susan Norget are in attendance, and of course Bank Street’s über-indie lord Harvey Weinstein and über-mentor/producer Ted Hope are present as well. Actors Stella Schnabel and Julie Delpy are here, and so is the young actor Chris Lenk from Keep the Lights On, who ran up to me at the Shorts Awards party (held in a bowling alley) and asked, “Do you have a little white dog that you walk on Perry Street?” I answered, “Yes, Mr. Butter,” and he said, “I see you all the time. I live on Perry Street.” And these are just the Villagers I’ve run into!

I don’t think I’m a good assignment editor when it comes to selecting topics for this column, and I’ll tell you why. Sometimes I’m O.K. when the stream is flowing and I can just step into it. But sometimes I can’t, like now.

For February, I picked Andy Warhol when I suddenly realized that February marks the 25th anniversary of his death, and I have some personal observations from working with him that I thought you’d find of interest.

Then that 20-foot-tall construction fence the color of male orderly blues went up around the Coleman Building at St. Vincent’s, and that pumped the air right out of my sails. (“Mame”!) Reality has finally hit me and I’m speechless: “Rudin’s going to start demolition!”

Meanwhile, Giants hero Eli Manning heads to the Super Bowl more than half a million bucks richer in pocket because of a bizarre “spokesperson” agreement with St. Vincent’s that ended only at the doors to Bankruptcy Court. (Google “Eli Manning” and “St. Vincent’s Hospital.”)

Why pick Manning as a spokesperson? Was he a patient? A relative of a patient? A neighbor? Marlo Thomas? Or just some big NY sports star that the hospital “heavyweights” wanted to pal around with?

The clown parade of overpriced hospital “consultants” hired by the Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn—that’s right, the Village’s “own” St. Vincent’s had absentee management all this time—they must have loved Manning, considering that the gangly quarterback had few commitments to fulfill as “spokesperson” other than some photo ops, a couple benefit dinners and appearing at the opening of a new birthing center at St. Vincent’s in 2009 named after him and his wife, Abby.

Now, help me out here, George. Usually, when an institution names a part of itself, like a chair, a wall or a wing after a human being—either living or dead—isn’t it usually in return for a considerable donation made by that person, or the executors of that person’s estate, to the institution in question? So how odd was it to name the birthing center for somebody who not only did not contribute money to the hospital, but, instead, took half a million dollars from it over a handful of years in return for what? That just shows how mismanaged this whole affair has been. But Eli’s deal was simply the tip of this deadly iceberg.

The hospital first had to flush away its 200 million dollars in liquid assets before it could start digging its billion-dollar debt hole. (Doesn’t this story sound familiar?) The Good Fathers may have needed that same Bankruptcy Court to start the process to replenish the coffers that had been somewhat depleted by legal fees and financial settlements to former choir boys whose lives have been permanently dysfutured (sic) by the trauma of childhood sexual abuse.

And the Church was doing it by getting out of the hospital business and selling its rich real estate in a fire sale to a prominent family with grand social aspirations from the Upper East Side. (They don’t really come more clueless, do they? “The Belles of St. Mary’s”!)

Remember the good Mormon Doctor Richard F. Daines, the former NY State Commissioner of Health who didn’t stop the Fathers from closing St. Vincent’s, nor did he make them observe due diligence while violating Federal rules governing expenditures in the operation of a not-for-profit charity which, as it turns out, St. Vincent’s was?

Another Elliot Spitzer appointee (remember Fred Armisen? I mean Governor Patterson?), Daines came to the State from his position as an executive with Continuum Health Partners, a consortium formed in 1997 that now manages St. Lukes, Roosevelt, New York Eye & Ear and Beth Israel, which sits just two blocks above the East Village and is the most obvious beneficiary of St. Vincent’s closing.

In the City, the doctor lived on hospital(s)-adjacent Park Avenue with his Goldman Sachs executive wife, but in February of 2011, Daines and family were at their Duchess County home when Daines, aged 60, suffered a fatal heart attack, out in the barn, alone, disassembling Christmas decorations to put away for another year.

When I heard this, of course I was struck by the sad irony. With St. Vincent’s gone, West Villagers are also going to die of heart attacks by living too far away from any hospital that can promptly be reached by an ambulance stuck in 14th Street traffic, when merely minutes can mean unrecovery and death.

And we must not forget to mention the name of the man with the famous New York legacy who chaired the St. Vincent’s board during all of this: Al Smith, the Fourth. Of Wall Street.

“Survivors of the Titanic who required medical attention received it at St. Vincent’s.” (So, Al, when did you abandon ship?)

Another thing that has trouble seeping in is the brazen and arrogant stand that all of our elected officials have taken on this matter: 100 percent of the “1%” sides with Rudin, in spite of the glaring examples of misappropriation of not-for-profit funds as demonstrated by the Good Fathers and their laughably over-paid secular executive hires, whose judgments proved so questionable as to possibly be actionable in a criminal court of law, a path that attorney Yetta Kurland tried to take, but the courts simply handed her her hat and then showed her the door.

Then the politicians began to get in line. To a man (and Christine Quinn), they all supported the Rudin Management Company’s plans.

The “company line” was formalized by SKDKnickerbocker, a national strategic communications firm started by former liberal operative Josh Isay, who sells advice to New York power brokers and who numbers among his clients the Rudins, Mayor Bloomberg, former Mayor Koch, Christine Quinn, Bruce Ratner, Scott Stringer and Governor Cuomo. They all have decided that we neither need nor can support a hospital, so the Tibetization (sic) of the West Village continues.

God forbid that there should be another catastrophe on the Lower West Side, which will soon be growing denser now that the heirs of the creepy Bill Gottlieb, owners of over 100 long-held parcels of historic Village properties, seem to be getting close to actually selling some.

Believe me, the one-, two- and three-story structures that Gottlieb owned will not remain as such, and our neighborhoods will be altered beyond recognition as the “West Village” becomes a destination-name less descriptive of where we live and more an historical oddity that will require explanations in future walking tours to visitors who have difficulty reconciling towering structures with words like “village” and “artists.” But I’m glad I have lived to see it when us artists did ply these paths.

And how was our community’s response to all this? Truthfully? Flaccid, unimaginative and amateurish. Our self-appointed (and seemingly self-serving) leaders lacked know-how, deep legal expertise and organizational skills. Rallies were timid affairs confined to the St. Vincent’s sidewalk behind police barricades and well away from the traffic that should have been disrupted. Some neighbors carried homemade, basically illegible signs; there were few cameras, no event lighting and really poor—if any—public sound system.

In fact, I was wondering whether some of the ineptly conceived protests were not actually being secretly paid for by Rudin to demonstrate to the public that there was little interest in the community (which he claims to be working with) to oppose his massive conversion plans.

God, where was the audacity and anger of another ACT UP New York when we so desperately needed it? Where was the passion of civil disobedience and taking over the street and daring the media not to cover it? Where was The New York Times?

Look, I am not here just to assuage my own feelings of incompetence by faulting others without taking some responsibility for this fatal failure of a prime necessity in our lives—but my space is up, so my confession will have to wait until another time, God willing.

By the way, George, you may have noticed that this column deals with political theater, but how far can one stretch a label like “Theater Editor”? So, if I may, I’d like to retire the title that you heaped on my shoulders last summer while continuing the column as “BoldFace Names©” to see where that leads us. Of course, I will continue to write about “theater,” though not necessarily theater as confined to the stage. And yes, one can say I’m pulling a “Frank Rich.”

Best, Bobb Goldsteinn.

If you’re my age (almost 50) or older, your teachers probably weren’t gearing their whole curriculum around making sure you scored well on some high-stakes exam. They were able to focus on trying to inspire you with a true love of learning rather than worry about “teaching to the test” to make themselves and their school look good.

This is one of the fundamental problems with education reform today. So much energy is being wasted on debating the pros and cons of different metrics for evaluating “good” and “bad” teachers that we’re forgetting that the abilities to inspire students and instill an enduring love of learning are among the most valuable and difficult-to-measure traits teachers can possess.

Don’t just take my word for it. Read education historian Diane Ravitch’s new book, “The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice are Undermining Education” (Basic Books, November 2011). Ravitch has a lot to say about what’s wrong with our current education system. One of the stories she tells that has most stayed with me is a poignant anecdote about an unconventional third-grade teacher who greatly inspired her but probably did not get a great evaluation from the school’s principal or greatly move the needle on student test scores. This teacher’s type of teaching was not easily quantifiable—and that is precisely the problem with the single-minded focus on finding some set of metrics with which to “grade” teachers.

As many individuals and organizations concerned with the quality of public education in New York City, including the teachers union, have suggested, wouldn’t it make more sense to focus on trying to attract and retain good teachers by doing more to support practitioners of this noble profession and paying great teachers more? We should be putting more energy and funding into developing programs for teacher-training and master-mentoring to try to staunch the flow of half of all new teachers in the city out

of the profession within their first five years on the job. We should be focusing on improving school environments, upgrading facilities and swapping outmoded teaching tools for more high-tech equivalents so we can increase the odds of “catching” teachers being successful rather than always trying to figure out how to “weed out the bad ones.”

Every profession has its share of bad apples, of course, teaching included—and we must also empower principals and assistant principals to deal constructively with those whose performances lag and be able to terminate those who can’t improve enough to be good teachers. In all this Sturm und Drang over “teacher accountability,” we are also leaving out the opinions of perhaps the two most important evaluators of teacher performance: students and their parents. I suggest we set up an evaluation system that also allows kids and parents to grade teachers and that these critiques be factored into any assessment of teacher-performance.

I applaud Mayor Bloomberg and Governor Cuomo for making quality of education and teacher accountability front-and-center topics in their administrations. But the best way to improve both is to truly help teachers succeed and make the profession one that attracts the best and the brightest, as it already is in countries such as Japan and Finland that provide teachers with these crucial supports and incentives. We need to follow their lead, and we need to do it now.

Our city can’t wait.

Our kids can’t wait.

Tom Allon, the President of Manhattan Media and a Democratic and Liberal candidate for Mayor in 2013, was a teacher at Stuyvesant High School in the 1980s.

There was much to reflect on as I finished reading award-winning journalist Charlayne Hunter-Gault’s “To the Mountaintop,” her account for a new generation of “post-racial” young Americans of her role as a brave, 19-year-old young woman integrating the all-white University of Georgia on January 9, 1961. (I turned 17 on that very day, a nervous college freshman studying for a chemistry test. Only years later did I learn what was really going on in America then; but I did make it to hear Martin Luther King Jr. deliver his “I Have a Dream” speech at the unforgettable March on Washington in August 1963.)

Hunter-Gault begins her book with a description of her delight in attending the 2009 inauguration of our first black president, Barack Obama, and gracefully segues back into the convoluted history of racism in America and her good fortune in having been a beautiful and gifted honor student from an educated “race-conscious” family. As the best of the best, she was chosen by civil rights leaders along with fellow student Hamilton Holmes to break the color barrier at U. Georgia, the oldest public university in America (founded in 1785). Without regard for her own safety, she unhesitatingly agreed to put herself on the front lines and braved mobs of brick-throwing white protestors.

Highly condensed, this short volume is expressly tailored for readers aged 12 to 18 and details the success of her efforts and those of her many colleagues and mentors, such as the Rev. Dr. King, Vernon Jordan, James Farmer, John Lewis and Julian Bond. The bravery, discipline and determination of these iconic figures, along with untold others whose names and suffering will never be known, served to overcome segregation in education, housing and voting and paved the way for the historic presidency of Barack Obama, as he fully acknowledges. This brief account will surely send adults back to Hunter-Gault’s earlier book, “In My Place” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1992)—a very well-received, more detailed memoir—while younger readers will find it exciting to go to the websites listed in the index of this shorter memoir to explore the many pieces of original source material on the Internet.

As I sit here on January 15 (Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday), anticipating February 12 (Lincoln’s birthday) and the activities of Black History Month this February, I hope we will all reflect on the tough human qualities and decisions that have brought us this far in the fight for true equality in America. Will the protestors of Occupy Wall Street (whose general aims I support fully) have the discipline, organization and willpower to prevail in their struggle as well as Charlayne Hunter-Gault and her generation of black Americans succeeded in theirs? Can they muster the same passion and commitment?

I would welcome a piece of journalism by Hunter-Gault on how she perceives the next phase of politics in the United States. Can the remaining racial prejudice that still poisons our everyday life be eliminated? Seemingly, even the achievements of a brilliant, consensus-seeking black leader have not been enough to bring us over that second mountaintop.

The next generation will have to take over! The young multitaskers of today might consider pausing to read Charlayne Hunter-Gault—and absorbing some of her courage.

Note: I am pleased to disclose that WestView’s Maggie Berkvist was the photo editor on “To The Mountaintop,” locating the many historic images that illustrate the book. She told me that during her research she found in the Mississippi State Archives an extensive collection of police mug shots of the student activists, black and white, who had been arrested during the civil rights demonstrations and was struck by how very young most of them were—and by how brave they had been. Young people, take note: the world needs your energy and your idealism.

Barbara Riddle is a Greenwich Village native, a regular WestView contributor and the author of the novel “The Girl Pretending to Read Rilke” (recommended at www.lablit.com). Write to her at poodlesontheroof@gmail.com, or read her blog: www.poodlesontheroof.blogspot.com/.

I was a new arrival to the neighborhood, a single guy on my way to a friend’s house, when I got lucky and stumbled upon the annual Greenwich Village Antiquarian Book Fair. I remember the people, a mash up of young and old, discussing books and authors and publishers, providing me with proof that the romantic literary image I had of the West Village was indeed true.

I was hooked immediately and bought what became one of my prized possessions: a vintage poster advertising an anti-Vietnam War rally that took place in NYC in 1965, with Allen Ginsberg and the Fugs performing. I later gave it away as a wedding present to a good friend.

Today I am a parent of two children who attend PS 3, and I still love the fair so much that I’ve now taken over running it. I can name every one-of-a-kind book or print I have found at the fair over the years. Among them: a first edition of Mark Twain’s “Saint Joan of Arc,” published in 1919 with illustrations by Howard Pyle, now displayed on my mantelpiece; a beautiful reproduction of a Rockwell Kent etching of Moby Dick, reprinted to celebrate the Folio Society’s 2011 commemorative edition of Melville’s masterpiece; and a gorgeous, vintage botanical print of the bulb and flower of “Corona Imperialis,” framed and hanging in my kitchen. I was sorely tempted by a signed photograph of Muhammad Ali last year, but I resisted and then regretted not buying it for weeks!

For 33 years now, Villagers, bibliophiles, casual book collectors, very serious book collectors and lucky passersby like me have visited the annual GVABF. A three-day extravaganza featuring up to 60 of the East Coast’s best book dealers (and some from beyond), the Fair offers people the opportunity to peruse rare and vintage books spanning four centuries, including signed and rare first editions; children’s series and illustrated books; modern first editions; art, photography and design books; maps and prints; political flyers and other unusual paper ephemera; comics, autographs and more.

The fair takes place in the school’s huge auditorium just past the recently refurbished foyer as you enter the school through three sets of bright blue double doors. Children’s murals adorn the walls, yet children are mostly absent from the crowd. This is stuff for grown-ups. The vendors’ booths blend together to make an enormous, eccentric, homemade library, where Mark Twain meets Denis Johnson for drinks to discuss what William Blake might have thought about Patti Smith.

The fair’s beginnings are a mystery. No one knows who started it, but it has always been held in February, when the school is closed for winter break, and it has always served as a fundraiser for the school’s arts, music, gardening and science programs, which are not funded by the NYC Department of Education and which are an integral part of the school’s curriculum, helping students become engaged learners, independent thinkers and active citizens in their community, much like the West Village community itself. The vendors pay a flat fee for booth space and arrive carrying only their books. PS 3 provides tables, lighting, chairs and, hopefully, large crowds. Vendors keep all proceeds from their sales, and the school keeps the proceeds from booth fees and ticket sales.

The exhibitors take a gamble each time they come: a $625 booth fee, plus the cost of hotel accommodations and other travel expenses can add up to an investment of more than $1,000 to attend the fair. But still they come—many, year after year. Vendors are peripatetic folks who travel the country, and many say GVABF is their favorite antiquarian book fair of the year. Perhaps it’s the complimentary welcome dinner and two breakfasts the school’s parents provide, but I think it also has to do with the stunning location—one of the most picturesque areas of the village, with its long history as a home for artists and writers.

The fair is planned, sponsored and run completely by parent-volunteers. It’s a tough week to get volunteers in a school famous for parental involvement. Many families are away on vacation. So the fair often relies on the heroic efforts of a few stalwarts. Sanpanino cafe relocates each year from right next door into the school’s cafeteria to sell food, and PS 3 now has its own booth at the fair, selling books donated by parents to people who attend from all over New York City, Long Island, Westchester and New Jersey.

With all that has changed since my introduction to the fair, it is comforting to know that it is still cherished in an age where Kindles and iPads rule. Young, new vendors join the fair each year, and, like oil painting or crochet, it still holds appeal for members of the new generation. Perhaps that’s because, like Greenwich Village, this select group of exhibitors and their collections are composed of interesting, colorful characters and rare gems. The first time I volunteered to help run the fair in 2009, I was there on Friday evening when the doors opened. It wasn’t exactly like a Who concert, but there was definitely a crowd and some pushing and shoving for a better place in line. One thing I learned: don’t get between a book collector and a rare first edition, no matter how un-buff his or her appearance.

The number of vendors exhibiting at the fair appears to be down slightly this year—from 59 to 40 at last count—perhaps due to the bad economy. It has also become easier to locate rare books on the Internet, of course. But nothing beats the live show. “It’s a spectacular event,” says PS 3 principal Lisa Siegman. “Our school is transformed into a book lover’s wonderland. The range of books, photos and prints on display is quite stunning. It is history you can touch.”

Stop by Jeffrey Bergman’s booth (Jeffrey Bergman Books) and learn why similar-looking first editions can have wildly different values. Maybe Rob Warren, of Rob Warren Books, will tell you about the time he sold a copy of “Naked Lunch” for $500,000. Ask Bruce Gventer, of B&S Gventer Books and Ephemera, exactly what “ephemera” means. Or ask David Johnson, of Pryor Johnson Booksellers, Inc., to tell you about his work on the Apollo 11 moon-landing mission. Do you own a rare book you’d like to have appraised? Bring it along. Just be sure to mention it to the staff at the door.

Warning: coats and large bags must be checked before you enter the auditorium, at the request of vendors who are understandably concerned about theft. It’s a headache for everyone, requiring five volunteers to handle coat-checking during rush periods. But it’s for a good cause.

By Bob Klein with Alison Nelson

33rd Annual Greenwich Village Antiquarian Book Fair
PS 3, 490 Hudson Street (between Christopher and Grove)
Friday through Sunday, February 24 -26
Fri: 6-9 p.m. Sat: 12-6 p.m. Sun: 12-5 p.m.
$12 Fri or Fri-Sun; $7 Sat; $5 Sun
gvabf.org/ 917-374-5244