By Mike Reyes Since its founding in 1984, The Criterion Collection has prided itself on curating a collection of “important classic and contemporary films” for the masses. And in the streaming age, The Criterion Channel is a subscription that aims to provide such movies for people who are a little lighter on shelf space, but
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Expert advice on Coronavirus
The spread of the Coronavirus has most certainly changed our lives—so the experts of Northwell Health are here to give you some valuable advice on how to stay calm, stay informed and stay well. Graphics courtesy of Northwell Health with information provided by the CDC. You just finished reading a story from WestView
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BREAKING NEWS—Hope: The situation in China seems to be improving
By Hannah Reimann WestView News was very fortunate to have Shen, a Chinese intern, on board with our team last Summer. Since his return to China in September, Shen and I have corresponded. I received the information below from him via email last night. We hadn’t communicated since before the pandemic broke out and I
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How to get movies on your cable TV during a pandemic
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
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New York City Rent Reform
By Shaynon Gramling Licensed Real Estate Salesperson The real estate industry in New York City has experienced a major overhaul during the past year. It all began with a proposed bill to add protections for tenants in the city. This was due to the fact that some landlords were abusing laws that allowed them to
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Wiggins In Love
By Michael Astor Guy Wiggins remembers the song that he and his wife Dorothy first danced to. It was Frank Sinatra’s “You Make Me Feel So Young.” “Nobody dances anymore. Back then, any time of the day, you just put on a record and danced. And that’s how you began to make love—one move led
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Problems Getting Your Medications? A Doctor’s View
By Alec Pruchnicki, MD Most people are aware of the continually rising prices for medications. Besides the practices and prices imposed by the pharmaceutical companies, there are also limitations by insurance companies which often pay some of the costs, and there is a new player in the field: Pharmacy Benefits Managers (PBMs). A recent WestView
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Notes From Away: Asylum, Xenophobia, Morality, and Economics
By Tom Lamia Several years ago, I was having construction work done at my farm property here in Maine. The contractor brought in a crew of workers to do the grading, paving and fencing for the project. Among this crew was a youngish looking guy who I took to be an African American, a rare
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Music in the Time of Corona
By Hannah Reimann ShiZ’ka at St. John’s in the Village ShiZ’ka, a gifted and expressive pianist from Japan, performed a concert of varied periods and styles at St. John’s in the Village on Saturday, March 20th. The concert’s coinciding almost exactly with the closing of all non-essential businesses, places of worship, performance venues and other
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What Is Money?
By Sue Peters By law, every time a private commercial bank lends to a borrower, all the bank is doing is creating a deposit in the borrower’s account. The bank never takes funds from one account and lends it out to a borrower. The bank always creates the deposit in the borrower’s account. It’s called
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Karen’s Quirky Style
By Karen Rempel | Fashion Editor This Easter promises to be bleak, and nothing is bleaker than an un-peopled Bleecker Street. When Dusty and I headed over to Bleecker for this month’s shoot, we were doing our best to put a bright face on Easter. I chose a soothing fifties-reminiscent outfit in chick-and-bunny colors with
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Style on the Street: No “Mask” No Problem…We Got This Covered!
All photos by Dusty Berke. You just finished reading a story from WestView News. We need YOU to help WestView survive. Please consider donating to keep our shoestring operation alive so we continue to bring essential news to West Village residents. PLEASE DONATE! or SUBSCRIBE.
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Upside Down
By Keith Michael I sent this article in on Sunday, March 22nd, so who knows how the world has changed by now when you are reading it. This has been the end of Week One for us, essentially, staying at home. We have fourteen rolls of toilet paper, seven and a half rolls of paper
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How Do You Feel?
By Christina Raccuia Such a simple question. However, it is often difficult to answer with anything other than “excellent” or “pretty good.” What is it about emotions that often makes people uncomfortable? Well, we are not always encouraged to get in touch with our emotions. We strive to turn a happy face to the world,
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How High Can 200 Amsterdam Go?
By Brian J. Pape, AIA, LEED-AP Many WestView readers have commented on the Clarkson Towers project as being much too big, and impossibly tall, when all other developments along West Street have been limited to 16 to 18 stories. Is there any way to contest this intrusion? On the Upper West Side of Manhattan, something
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A Washington Square Journey
The Arch Up Ahead By Nancy Davidoff Kelton In 1960, on my third New York trip from Buffalo, I went to Washington Square Park to see beatniks. My parents’ excitement explaining their unconventional clothing, values, and Greenwich Village homes aroused mine. “See that arch up ahead,” my father said, ten blocks away on the bus.
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Let’s Get Real About Aging
By Gail Evans Sure, New York’s galleries happily show your work if you’re an older big-name visual artist who can command through-the-roof prices. But thousands of professional New York artists over age 50 who have not made a big splash in the art world are shunned by galleries unwilling to take a chance on them
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Do You Own Your Art? Do You Own Yourself?
Freedom in the 21st Century of Social Media By Roger Paradiso We have all heard about copyright infringement and the new human right on the table called data rights. Part two of this series with Ruth Vitale and her team at CreativeFuture will go into these issues for us. With the advent of the internet
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Enviable Open Space
Just south of James J. Walker Park in the West Village is an open space that has been eyed enviously by many affordable and supportive housing advocates. Nearly half of the block facing Hudson Street, bordered by Clarkson and Houston Streets, is owned by the city and will be used for the Dept. of
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The Most Famous Night of Passion
John F. Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe Perhaps no name other than Jessica Berk captures so much recognition for Village dwellers in and around 95 Christopher Street. Jessica grew up at 95 and walked about for decades, clad in black, with a cane and a tiny dog, fearlessly disciplining vagrants and police officers in a high nasal monotone
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Demand Wartime Therapeutic Prophylaxis Disinfection!
By Dusty Berke This goes out as a plea to our government to test Wartime Therapeutic Prophylaxis Disinfection against COVID-19. This medicine was mandated by the Surgeon General during the 1918 Spanish Influenza Pandemic. Visit westviewnews.org to sign and share the petition to demand the United States government test wartime therapeutics against covid-19. The medicine
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A View from the Kitchen
By Isa Covo So, spring is here—lots of flowering trees on the streets, many birds in the sky. Nature is renewing as it does every year and we should all rejoice and enjoy the outdoors, but we can’t; most of us are at home in voluntary quarantine following the advice of the medical authorities. I
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Village Icon Vincent Livelli Turns 100
By John Livelli One of the West Village’s most storied residents—author, raconteur and world traveler Vincent Livelli, hits the century mark on April 9. Still youthful and active, Livelli is a respected expert on Latin music, and was long a professional salsero himself. His sense of adventure has taken him around world as a pioneer
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Maggie B’s Quick Clicks
KEEP CALM AND CARRY ON !? Back on March 19th I first sent out this note— Last evening found myself going through pix taken in just the last month. How the scene has changed. From this (photo above) on February 23rd, to this (photo below), on March 18th. And from this, in late February
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How the Coronavirus is Affecting Local Businesses
By Anthony Paradiso The Coronavirus has had a profoundly bad impact on local businesses everywhere, but especially in New York City, which has the most cases of any major city in the country. Many Bleecker street shops have either been closed or remained open in a limited capacity. Some have not had a customer walk
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The Day the Village Stood Still
By Roger and Anthony Paradiso “The closest thing it’s analogous to is when you know the order’s been signed for war and you’re waiting for the next shoe to drop. Is it a draft? Is it a bombing on the homeland? We’ve been isolated from so many things just by oceans and borders that
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Easter, Passover, and the Virtual Village
By Donna Schaper By the time you read this, our devastating plague will be worse than it already is, or declining, or whatever the bug decides it should be. It is worth reading about the 10 Plagues of Egypt in Exodus 7:14–12:36, where blood, frogs, lice, snails, livestock, boils, hail, locust, darkness, and finally the
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The Big Shutdown on Broadway
By Robert Heide Just before the fear of the spread of the coronavirus shut down all 41 of the Broadway theatres in New York on March 12, I attended a preview performance of Girl From the North Country, written and directed by the Irish playwright Conor McPherson, which incorporated the music and lyrics of
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Ghost Hospital to Rise from the Dead?
By Penny Mintz Beth Israel is warehousing 600 commissioned hospital beds that can quickly be brought into use to treat COVID-19 victims. Right now, Beth Israel is a ghost hospital. It is dead but not buried, and it is still haunting Mount Sinai. On Saturday, March 21, 2020, a Mount Sinai spokesperson informed
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“Accentuate the Positive” —
Abstracted from A Scientist’s View of Almost Everything By Mark M. Green Harvard University Medical School’s psychology professor Nancy Etcoff discovered that for patients undergoing the same medical procedure, gall bladder surgery, those with a room with a pretty view of a park used less pain medication, had shorter hospital stays, and complained less
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To Depend on Blood
By Maria Hadjidemetriou It is challenging enough to go through this pandemic when you are healthy, to keep positive throughout the day while working from home, homeschooling your children, hearing the devastating new death toll and finding that balance. Now imagine going through this pandemic and you are an individual that depends on blood transfusions
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The Doctor is In
By Dr. Susan Eldrich Every day there are more COVID-19 cases identified in New York State. NYC has especially been affected, most likely due to our population density and tourism. Numbers of cases continue to grow, with peak numbers estimated to be weeks away. Most patients testing positive have viral symptoms of achiness, headache, cough,
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Let Us Unite Against the Pandemic by Keeping Apart
By John Kaliabakos According to the CDC, on the last day of February, 15 Americans had tested positive for COVID-19. A month later, that number had grown exponentially to over 150,000 infected nationwide, one-third of whom were in New York City. The number of cases is expected to overwhelm our already strained healthcare system within weeks.
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How We Manage Through Crisis
An Inside Peek at LifeThyme Natural Market By Jason Bander First, we want to thank you for reading this publication. We are grateful for any and all of you who’ve tendered your earnings and savings with us; we exist because of you. Our foremost goal is to ensure your health and wellbeing. We take our
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Judy Richheimer, 70, past president of Chelsea Reform Democratic Club, Dies of COVID-19
With great sadness, we announce that Judith Lauren Richheimer died this morning. Judy was a longstanding member of Chelsea Refort Democratic Club (CRDC), ten-term executive vice president, program maven and twice president of the club. She was inquisitive, challenging, erudite, a champion of the reform tradition and a fierce advocate for a wide range
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Opinion: COVID-19, Me and We
Let Us All Be There for Each Other By Hannah Reimann My awareness and interest in understanding the Novel Coronavirus came about in an unpredictable way. I had a minor eye problem that kept me indoors with a hot compress and not working for two days on March 1st and 2nd, under strict doctor’s orders.
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IN AND OUT
It makes no sense to write the usual column this month, and my first thought was to just skip it. However, after thinking about it, I realized that WestView News could help struggling restaurants by providing our readers with information on which ones are still open for delivery and take-out. Also, if you are cooking
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Union Square Market
A Gathering Place for Health and Community at a Time of Uncertainty, Alive and Well By Hannah Reimann Like our beloved Village stores, Lifethyme Health Food Mart, Health and Harmony and Elm Wellness, The Union Square Greenmarket is treasured by those looking for organic and high-quality products and produce at this uncertain time. Cooking at
