By Anthony Paradiso and Roger Paradiso George called me and complained, “we are trapped in our homes and we are clicking faster and faster through those 150 channels with increasing speed. If I could just see a really nice film from beginning to end the way I did in the Del Mar on 137th Street
By Nancy Davidoff Kelton I am 72 and was born and raised in Buffalo. Since college, I have lived in Manhattan. I am a writer. I work at home and talk to myself. My husband, Jonathan, now works at home. I have to talk to him. Other than that, I have not much changed my
By Hannah Reimann, Woon Yung Chung & Shen Xiaowen Asia Pacific Workstation Business Development Manager at HP in Seoul, Korea, Woon Yung Chung, provided WestView News with an interesting interview, shedding light on the unique situation we are facing on the planet at this time, the Coronavirus Pandemic. As many people know, Korea saw its
By Michael D. Minichiello This month’s West Village Original is editor, college professor, and avid bird watcher Andrew Rubenfeld, born in Beth Israel Hospital in 1946. Since 1981, he has been a professor of literature at Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey where he teaches courses on American nature and environmental writing. Rubenfeld co-edited
By Keith Michael On the last day of March, compatriot West Village bird watcher Andrew Rubenfeld and I got together (well, socially-distanced “together”) to walk along the promenade in Hudson River Park to look for birds and talk about his beguiling fresh collection of more than two centuries of American writing about birds which illuminates
By Keith Michael As a devoted bird watcher, the question often flies my way, “Why do you like to watch birds?” (Of course, now it comes with lots of arm waving from six feet away and with gymnastic eyebrow action from above a mask.) The brisk answer is, “Why not?” But the curl-up-on-the sunny-opposite-ends-of-adjacent-benches response
By Brian J Pape, AIA When the city DOB shut down construction in March, only a few “Essential Construction” projects were exempt. In the Village area, while street work has continued, there didn’t seem to be any “essential” building sites, so it was very quiet for several weeks. While most commercial buildings, such as the
By Gordon Gilbert whatever lies ahead we awake opening our eyes to a new day & see ahead the many paths we still can take the choices ours to make I choose a path of love not hate an active love that will contend for what is good & right & while I still can
By Robert Heide It was Edward Albee who first introduced me to Terrence McNally in 1958. A lifelong friend, I was stunned when I heard of Terrence’s death March 24 at the age of 81, from complications of the coronavirus. Living in Florida with his husband Tom Kirdahy, he had overcome cancer but was suffering
By Brian J Pape, AIA From almost every vantage point in the West Village, the 46-story former Trump Soho Hotel (now, the Dominick) tower at 246 Spring Street looms over the other buildings like a sore thumb. Like Boston’s Hancock Building on Copley Square, the sheer reflective glass facades overpower the historic character of the
By Karen Rempel | Fashion Editor In these days of social distancing, I couldn’t get my dear friend Dusty to take my picture. So this month’s column is my first selfie, taken using a mirrored elevator. And of course with all clothing stores closed, I needed to call on the contents of my fab four
Follow us on Instagram @styleonthestreet_WestViewNews Submit your favorite neighborhood fashion looks for a chance to be featured. Photos by Dusty Berke and Karilyn Prisco.
By Roberta Curley It took four weeks of sheltering in place, for the coronavirus pandemic to make me smile. I was thankful to still be alive and for the first time in my life, I grabbed a glimpse of clarity as to my life’s desires and plans. I scrubbed my blinds, deep-cleaned my bathroom, realized
By Donna Schaper For years, when I was a young chaplain, I brought groups of students to New York City on what we called the “urban plunges.” Today they would be called urban discoveries or immersions, or something less active and more contemplative. “Plunging” was often a required experience for students, particularly those from rural
By Joe Bongiovanni Hang in there for just a moment, Villagers, this is actually a good news story. And I promise to provide the answer to your question, “What the heck is parity economics?” (at least in part). But first, why is parity economics important to the pandemic population—meaning, everybody today— Villagers and Iowans alike?
During a recent Zoom contributors meeting (usually held in the publisher’s ample kitchen, or in good weather, his backyard) Editor George Capsis noted the Art Deco, Coca-Cola signs, and Mickey Mouse memorabilia and requested a photo to grace the pages of the May edition of WestView News. Robert Heide (pictured here in his kitchenette) and
26 NYU Swimmers and Divers Were Headed to NCAA Championships By Anthony Paradiso Students and student athletes were eagerly awaiting the coming of spring at college campuses throughout the country. At New York University, which has many dorms and campus buildings around Washington Square Park, five varsity spring sports teams were preparing for the warm
By Tom Lamia My nature is to be reclusive, so the experience that we all have had for the last two months—staying inside when possible, staying away from others, staying vigilant—has not been an intolerable ordeal for me. Human contact is necessary at times, though, as we have all found. The rules of my confinement
By Nancy Davidoff Kelton It takes a village to raise a child. It took me forever to appreciate my mother. Now years after her death, I can embrace her spirit and legacy. In 2000, I brought my then beau, a well-dressed CEO with a fine coat of polish—a card-carrying mother-pleaser—to the nursing home to meet
Mighty man with all his nukes has been crowned by a corona before he could put up his dukes. The man in the seat gets the heat, the fame or the blame. Get mad not sad. Anger is better than depression. Afghanistan-another lost war. We’re getting out. The Taliban is staying. The Taliban wins. One
By Isa Covo How many weeks has it been? Five, six, more, does it matter? Each day blends into the other. What if we wake up at 6:00 am, or 12:00 pm, the days, the hours are all the same. It is true, the light changes, and somedays the skies are clear, sometimes cloudy, some
By Carol London Ilona Royce-Smithkin lived above The Beatrice Inn on West 12th Street for fifty years and celebrated her 100th birthday on March 27th from her balcony in Provincetown, sung to by many loving friends below. She painted the first portrait of Tennessee Williams, had a documentary about her life created several years ago,
By Bennett Kremen In the mid 1950s, when just seventeen, I took a midnight bus from Chicago through the cornfields of Indiana and the mountains of Pennsylvania into the sudden, wondrous shock of Manhattan. But even more wondrous was discovering, that very night, a strange, surreal yet extraordinarily real experiment with life itself, pulsating through
By Frank Quinn Crime across the city is trending downward over the last month, due to the coronavirus outbreak, and the West Village is experiencing a similar trend with one troubling exception—burglaries are up considerably. The most recent 28-day period for which statistics are available shows burglaries in the West Village have increased by 138
By Brian J Pape, AIA Michael David Sorkin, Greenwich Village author, teacher, humanist, and one of the most distinctive voices for social justice and sustainability in the design of the urban environment, died on March 26, 2020 after contracting COVID-19. Sorkin was considered to be one of architecture’s most outspoken public intellectuals, a world-class provocateur whose criticism
KEEP CALM AND CARRY ON? Only three months ago, on February 1st, I had taken the shot below and suggested to George running it with the slug “There’ll Always Be An England.” But he decided he’d like me to write up their story, and founder Pete Myers was in the UK at the time, so
By Catherine Revland The final article in the series “You Must Remember This,” about World War II and its relevance to our time. This month marks the 75th anniversary of Victory in Europe Day, and although I was only four years old at the time I can still recall the church bells, shouts of joy,
By Anastasia Kaliabakos In 430 B.C., a devastating plague ravaged Athens. This disease is said to have originated in Sub-Saharan Africa, south of modern-day Ethiopia. After crossing through Egypt, Libya, and Persia, the illness finally made its way to Athens, Greece—specifically, the city’s port, known as Piraeus. The famous Greek historian and Athenian General, Thucydides,
By Daniel Shaviro Jewish immigrant families from a century ago, such as my grandparents on both sides, often had a distinct set of intellectual and artistic values. Suppose that, of two siblings born to a similar family, one had turned out to be Bill Gates, and the other had become the third violinist at the
By Drew Davis Every day we expect the news to provide a bird’s-eye view of New York City. But our city is a big place, and broad headlines often beg a simple question: what does this mean for someone like me, an individual among millions? To find out, I discussed the news and Greenwich Village
By Robert Kroll We’re sheltering-in-place, aka SIPing, in Northern California. We were there on a business trip in early March, and two days later Governor Newsom shut down the nine Bay Area counties. Governor Cuomo announced that in “two weeks things are going to get bad…and two weeks after that they are going to get
By Penny Mintz In this country people are responsible for the cost of their health care. Generally, if you have a catastrophic medical condition you get the treatment you need first and worry about paying for it later. Unfortunately, private health insurance is extremely expensive. In addition, with the exception of Medicare, health plans are
By J. Taylor Basker Two of my friends returned recently from countries embattled in the fight against the Coronavirus, but there was no health check of any sort when they got off their planes at Newark Airport. One was returning with his wife from a Fulbright in Israel, which has a large outbreak of Coronavirus due
By Mary Hudson I became aware of the dangerous new COVID-19 virus around the middle of February. The whole world was slowly gearing up to deal with it, including by restricting travel and requiring social distancing. However, it was imperative for me to fly back to New York from where I live in Italy. By departure date, it wasn’t
By J. Taylor Basker Despite Coronavirus isolation, attempts to prevent voting and misinformation for citizens, Democracy can still work! Residents at Westbeth Artists Housing held a personal meeting with their City Council representative Corey Johnson on April 7, via Zoom. They received important information and were able to ask questions about this stressful time. While
For Vicki, it was all about family Victoria Ann Ottomanelli, age 72, passed away peacefully surrounded by her family on March 26, 2020 after a 21-month-long battle with brain cancer. Vicki was born in the Bronx to the late William and Anna Fehrman and had been a resident in Staten Island since the early 1970’s.
By Kambiz Shekdar, Ph.D. Our goal with any infectious disease must be to end it. In the case of HIV/AIDS, we missed game-changing opportunities and it continues to fester among us. Here, I provide the recipe to eradicate SARS-CoV-2/COVID-19 for good. The early days of HIV/AIDS witnessed an unprecedented feat in science and medicine: Never
Villager Craig Gilbert, a writer and producer, died last week. He was known for the “Dupont Show of the Week” (1961–1964), and “An American Family” (1973), a television series that documented the daily lives of the Loud family and made history as the first reality television show. Gilbert also produced “The American Parade” in 1974.
