By George Capsis Michael Usyk had a show of his artwork in Paris which he attended via Skype—his image displayed on a laptop on a table in the middle of the show. Visitors to the exhibit (if they spoke English) could chat with Michael about his work as he sat in his little apartment in the West Village. Well, this
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Remembrances of The Lost Village: Cornelia Street Café
By Roger Paradiso I remember the Fourth of July festival on Cornelia Street a few years back. Robin Hirsch of the Cornelia Street Café was throwing his annual birthday celebration for his landmark jazz/comedy/poetry club. (To this date as I write this in 2018, he is celebrating his 41st year in business. Number 42 would
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Selling Christmas Trees in Manhattan
By Joey Fortune Like the tides, some things in life are predictable yet unstoppable. Days never cease, while seasons follow seasons with impeccable reliance. As humans, we’ve adapted to this and in our hubris, created our own events to show the universe that we are also in command. We have given birth to holidays. Yes,
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My Grandfather, A Doctor in the Early 20th Century
By Jane Heil Usyk How would you like to be able to phone your doctor and get someone real on the other end, your doctor or his/her nurse, and make an appointment for a few days in the future without having to wait interminably for recorded messages not intended for you, and numerous irrelevant instructions? How
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Teddy Capsis Wraps Up Brilliant College Career
College of Holy Cross Senior Teddy Capsis earns All-Patriot League honors for the second time in his career, after previously being a second team selection in 2017. He started all 11 games for the Crusaders at defensive end this season, totaling a team-best six quarterback sacks for 30 yards and 15 tackles for loss for 56
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The Great Whitney Warhol Show
By Robert Heide The title for the spectacular new Whitney art show is simply Andy Warhol From A to B and Back Again. The chief curator of the show is Donna De Salvo who has assembled a fully comprehensive Warhol art retrospective of more than 350 of his world famous Pop Art originals. Warhol had been turning
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The Story Emerges
By Tom Lamia Life everywhere has resembled a bad novel these past two years. Bad, but with all the ingredients needed for commercial appeal: good guys, bad guys and all shades of characters in between; intrigue worthy of Hitchcock; foreign malevolence on the scale of Peter Lorre; cryptic influences sure to be made known but
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“The Lost Village” Exposes The Evil Takeover of Greenwich Village by NYU and Large Corporations
By Carol Yost The Lost Village is our very own Greenwich Village: Roger Paradiso’s film chronicles how greed and lust for power have transformed the original, unique character of the Village. (NOTE: This is a revised review after last year’s screening. Now the film is in distribution, and I saw it for the second time
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Remembrances from The Lost Village: Death of The Living Theater
By Roger Paradiso If there is one interview that haunts me from my film The Lost Village it was the one with Judith Malina. Judith and Julian Beck met when she was 17. In 1947 they formed The Living Theater, which was a part of the Village scene in the 1950s and 60s until they
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Autograph Hound
By Alan Perna I was standing on 6th Avenue and 48th Street in front of a rehearsal studio, when I saw a taxi go by. I started running after it. I ran three blocks until it stopped at a light. My mind was racing, my heart pounding, my mouth was dry. I grabbed the door
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Kennedy: Bobby’s Last Crusade, Theatre At St. Clement’s
By Eric Uhlfelder A play remembering the 1968 presidential campaign, how the country has changed and how it hasn’t. Wandering several blocks west of Times Square to an old church might seem an odd place to find a tale about a presidential campaign fifty years on. But this choice of venue to host an escape
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Why I Am Voting for Cynthia Nixon (Not Deborah Glick) For State Assembly
Glick Has Not Earned Your Vote. Nixon Represents Change. Think About It! By Jim Fouratt In the September issue of Westview, I wrote that Cynthia Nixon, if she did not win her primary against Andrew Cuomo, would be a perfect candidate to run on the Working Families ballot for NY State Assembly opposing 28 year
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Cynthia Nixon for Assembly? Time for A Change
By Arthur Z. Schwartz There was not a single Assembly District in the State of New York where Cynthia Nixon did better against Andrew Cuomo in the September 13th Democratic Primary than our 66th Assembly District. Yes, our bastion of progressivism gave her 57.5% of the vote against a man who spent over $20 million
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Gentleman Jerrold: Our Fierce Warrior in the House
By Catherine Revland The NRA is Twitterpated over Congressman Jerrold Nadler. “To say it bluntly,” warns #AmmoLand, “the man would be a nightmare for Second Amendment supporters if the Democrats take control of the House.” Aside from being the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, with jurisdiction over the Department of Justice, the FBI,
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West Village Original: Jenny Tango
By Michael D. Minichiello This month’s West Village Original is artist Jenny Tango, born Florence Exler in Brooklyn in 1926. A visual artist working collaboratively and individually in painting, communications media, artist’s books and comic strips, Tango received both a BA and MA from Brooklyn College. A former educator with a list of both solo
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West Village Images by Joel Gordon
Volunteers Thanksgiving Turkey Dinner for the Homeless Over 1,000 people from many walks of life, including seniors, the homeless and families on a budget, attended the Salvation Army’s annual free Thanksgiving dinner, with over 100 volunteers of all ages in the kitchen and on the servicing line. Photo credit © Joel Gordon 2018—All rights reserved. Other
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Angels belong
By Roberta Curley look what it took for you to uncover their path I won’t gallivant upward not while I’m down here doing stuff like tightening difficult-to-screw-in lightbulbs or whooshing along avenues of the self-interested my plan is to try Daddy, you’d be SO proud your prayers stream in daily I’m striving to budget and
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A Visit with Actress and Former Villager Marianne Rendon
By Jane Heil Usyk The last two years, since she left the Village, have been very, very busy for Marianne Rendon. How many young people graduate from college and immediately get a major acting part in a series? And then fill in the gaps in the shooting schedule with featured parts in movies? Marianne did
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Remembrances from The Lost Village: A Series of Stories About Greenwich Village
By Roger Paradiso After a screening of my film The Lost Village at the Cinema Village in April of 2017, I walked to the front of the screen to begin a question and answer period with the audience. Just as I got stationed, a kind and gentle man jumped out of his seat, presumably to
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Humberto Gonzalez-Bernal Comes Home!
By Arthur Z. Schwartz In the August issue of WestView I wrote about heroic efforts to save the life of 87-year-old Humberto Gonzalez-Bernal, a 59-year resident of Horatio Street. Humberto came to Horatio Street from Cuba in 1959, just before the revolution (which he supported; he still idolizes Fidel). He made his living as a
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Notes from Away: Judicial Notice
By Tom Lamia Like you, perhaps, I spent time recently watching the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee. I have views on this sort of thing that are deeply associated with my past life as a lawyer. I went to Harvard Law School, graduating in the mid-1960s, a classmate and friend of Stephen
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We Won! (Postcards to Voters, Part Three)
By Sarah O’Neill When Alessandra Biaggi whupped entrenched incumbent and former IDC leader, Jeff Klein, as five other challengers for New York State Senate also triumphed, cheers likely erupted in 50 states. From late July to early September, the Postcards to Voters (PTV) volunteer army, now over 20,000 strong across the U.S., had an education
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West Village History: My Father and The Irish Hooligans
By Lorraine Gibney Children need supervision to become law abiding citizens. Since my father was parentless, he learned to run the streets of the West Village with unsavory characters. He was a citizen of his time and place, under a different type of supervision. Francis, nicknamed “Shorty”, was an elf-like little character. As the youngest of
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Architect Costas Kondylis Has Died
By Brian J. Pape, AIA Costas Kondylis was the creative force behind so many built works it is hard to catalogue them. For West Villagers, the J.D. Carlisle Development’s One Morton Square, completed in 2004, is our most prominent example. As you may recall, it was flooded during Hurricane Sandy’s storm surge, overwhelming West Street
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Documenting the Village and Beyond
A Review of Berenice Abbot: A Life in Photography. WW Norton, 2018. Author, Julia Van Haaften. By Lisa E Davis, PhD Browsing the shelves of that Left Bank bookstore, in sight of the Seine and Notre Dame, which preserves the name of expatriate American Sylvia Beach’s original Shakespeare and Company (1919-1941), I found a real
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Westbeth Honors Merce Cunningham
HONORING A LEGEND: On September 20th, a ceremony honoring Merce Cunningham took place at Westbeth Artists Housing. Cunningham occupied the 11th floor of the former Bell Laboratories building for decades, choreographing over 80 dances during his time there. In attendance was world-renowned dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov, who recalled fondly the countless hours he spent at Westbeth bringing
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Mickey Mouse Turns 90
By Robert Heide MICKEY FOR PRESIDENT: On November 18, 1928, the black and white Walt Disney “talking” cartoon Steamboat Willie opened at the Colony Theater in New York. Although there had been other cartoon stars that preceded Mickey, such as Felix “the Cat,” it was the Mouse who took the spotlight back then and forevermore.
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Take Five: Max Dolgin Has Got It From Here
By Stanley Wlodyka Last month’s Westbeth Gallery show “A Diamond Jubilee” featured seven artists over 75 years of age who exhibited a wide variety of artwork: masks, puppets, paintings, photographs, and even politically charged embroidery. Judy Lawne, a photographer who came up with the idea for the show, wanted the opening to live up to
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Starmaker—The Interview Covers
By John Gilman It’s a time-honored tradition for writers to have a big kick off “launch” for their books—maybe a book-signing, a cocktail party, or an exhibit. In the case of Rizzoli’s Richard Bernstein: Starmaker—Andy Warhol’s Cover Artist, published last month, it was extravagantly all three. Kicking off New York’s Fashion Week, an opening night
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“Are You Jewish?”
God Sends a Kosher Editor Oh wow, a $35,000, roughly 40 foot house-bus, in front of United Cigar and Christoper Street is blaring Yiddish music—this I gotta see. What I find is a very young rabbi waiting to step out and greet young men who look Jewish and return them to the kosher path. A
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West Village Original: Carmen Grange
By Michael D. Minichiello This month’s West Village Original is Dr. Carmen Grange, born in 1922 in Colón, Panama, to Jamaican parents working in the Canal Zone. Grange studied pre-med at Trinity College in Dublin and returned to the U.S. to do her residency, eventually opening a practice on West 13th Street. A resident of
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West Village Original: Catherine Revland
By Michael D. Minichiello This month’s West Village Original is writer and author Catherine Revland, born in 1940 in Fort Ransom, North Dakota and raised in Fargo. Formally educated and trained as a writer, with over 40 years experience writing for a variety of print and online media, she is also a regular contributor to
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The Value of Knowing Nothing
By George A. Davidson A few years after graduating in the class of 1967, I returned to Columbia Law School to judge a moot court along with Professor Willis L.M. Reese. After the argument, Reese told me that it had been his privilege to work with two brilliant men in his life, Austin Wakeman Scott,
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West Village Original: Vincent Livelli
By Michael D. Minichiello This month’s West Village Original is Vincent Livelli, born in Brooklyn in 1920, baptized at St. Anthony’s on Sullivan Street, and raised in Greenwich Village. A former professional dancer, he held jobs as cruise director on ships for over 20 years where he pioneered the growth of on-ship entertainment. Despite being
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She Was Always Ready to Sing
By Jess Berk I still can’t believe she’s gone. For most of my life my entire world has been about engaging in various battles with, for, or about her—so much so, that a film was made about us. “The Genius and the Opera Singer”—shown at Sundance and the Tribeca Film Festival—detailed our nearly lifelong battle
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Ruth Berk, Village Cabaret Singer and Owner, Dies at 94
By Arthur Z. Schwartz Ruth Berk, who would have turned 95 in August, passed the morning of June 8 at Beth Israel Hospital. The cause of death was heart failure, complicated by a stroke. Berk was a long time Village cultural figure. After an early career as an opera singer, she and her husband Leo
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‘Tis the Wedding Month of June
By Jane Heil Usyk June is wedding month, and this month Eddie is getting married. That sounds odd, because Eddie was two years old in the video I just saw, the one I am giving him for his wedding. My cousin Stuart made the video in 1986, which, to me, doesn’t sound that long ago.
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My Friend Eric Schneiderman
By Arthur Z. Schwartz On April 10, 2017, I texted a politician whose thoughts about running for Governor had been cut short by Cynthia Nixon’s candidacy, and said, “Don’t go home. #MeToo is going to get Eric Schneiderman soon.” On May 7 my premonition came true. Eric and I had been friends. We were both
