By David Porat Francoe Noriega is a celebrity chef based on somewhat humble beginnings as an underwear model. A Peruvian who has done a good bit of television, Franco, with the help of some PR, has become a celebrity Chef. Often wearing not much more than an apron, he is the owner of Baby Brasa, located
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Elegant Dining at Home: It Might be Cheaper Than You Think
By Deirdre Anderson, Private Chef Many years ago, having a private chef such as myself, was something reserved for the truly wealthy. Today, as the demand for private chefs has risen dramatically, so has the competition. Although most people have a general valuation of a plumber’s hourly rate, many don’t realize that private chefs charge
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Greenwich House Celebrates Women Artists With Community Concert Series
By Joe Salas Now entering its fourth year, the Uncharted Concert Series at Greenwich House Music School has emerged as one of New York’s most exciting and unpredictable live concert series, drawing attention from tastemakers and curators from across the city. Every Uncharted performance features New York City-based artists premiering new projects or meeting with new collaborators
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The West Village as Muse for an Environmental Artist
By Michael D. Minichiello Even though he loved to draw from an early age, California-born artist Nick Lamia was originally on a very different career path. “I was pre-med in college,” he says. “Then I went into environmental science and ecology, thinking I would go into environmental law. However, on the very day that I
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Review: Later Life
By Eric Uhlfelder A play about second chances at love sounds full of potential, especially when dealing with middle-aged folks who suffered a missed opportunity three decades earlier. The Keen Company’s revival of A.R. Gurney’s Later Life, which premiered in 1993, is a solid production, featuring screwball interludes by two of the play’s four cast
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Robert Heide at HOWL! Arts Happening — A Book Launch Celebration
By Robert Heide From Greenwich Village you walk east on Bleecker Street and end up on the Bowery. Think the 19th century popular song The Bowery. “The Bowery…the Bowery…they say such things and they do strange things on the Bowery.” Sammy’s Bowery Follies the showplace tavern is no more nor are the many cheap-end sleaze
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The 12th Annual Manhattan Film Festival
By Roger Paradiso The 12th annual Manhattan Film Festival will take place April 18-29, 2018. Since 2015 the festival has run concurrently with Tribeca, giving filmmakers an alternative opportunity to screen when the entire industry ascends upon New York City! Every year we pride ourselves in programming a diverse film lineup featuring student, emerging, and
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Why I am Supporting Jumaane Williams for Lieutenant Governor
By Arthur Z. Schwartz This year could be a watershed year in electoral politics, as Democrats attempt to win the House from the Republican Party, and regain hundreds of seats in State Legislature, including in New York. But there will also be a fight within the Democratic Party for who its candidates will be. Will
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Dame Ethel Smyth: Still Fighting for Equality 100 Years Later
By Benjamin McCoy, Nicholas Young, Kate Katigbak, and Jeanne Wikler Over a century ago, British composer Dame Ethel Smyth (1858–1944) created her generation’s version of the Women’s March and #TheFutureIsFemale. Now, more than 100 years later, the Cecilia Chorus of New York will give Smyth’s last work, The Prison, its North American premiere on May
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Requiem for a Neighborhood Burger Joint
By Jane Heil Usyk Here’s what a neighborhood is to me: it’s a few square blocks with homes or apartments, a grocery store or two or three, a shoe repair, a laundry, a cleaners, a hairdresser, a park, a library, maybe a stationery store and–most important of all–a bar or restaurant with good cheap food and drink,
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New Music Studio on Charles
The first things you see when you walk into Hannah Reimann’s studio are a tall bookshelf filled with Classical piano and vocal music scores and a lovely walnut Steinway Grand Piano. Beneath the piano there are Tibetan singing bowls, cushions for sitting and hand percussion instruments stored inside a large wooden bowl. Asian prints hang
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One Square Inch of the Klondike
By Barbara Riddle Memories swirl in puffs through my brain. Small puffs…the shape of Quaker Puffed Rice? It’s 1955, and I am sitting at the yellow Formica table in our little kitchenette inside our two-room suite at The Marlton Hotel on West 8th Street. I could not believe my luck. My mother had managed to
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A Maxim
As a kid the only pair of scissors we had in the house rested in my mother’s sewing basket. It was always there amongst the spools of thread and sewing debris—years and years. “Can I have something to cut the plastic strap around the newspapers?” asked Tim and I gave him our best of only two
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Don’t Just Sit There, Resist. Part I: Sign That Petition
By Alec Pruchnicki “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” —Edmund Burke “Excuse me, but are you a registered Democrat living in this neighborhood? Please sign this petition to help politician X get on the ballot for the next election.” “How annoying”, I used to think.
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Jefferson Market Library Lecture Series
By Mike Isaacson PhD Following the Second World War, fascism became a universally acknowledged vanquished foe in the public psyche. Fascism, and especially its rapacious offspring Nazism, was the metric against which political evil was measured with comparisons drawn to various aspects of communist and capitalist states alike. Nearly 70 years later, this supposed vanquished
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Defining Wisdom (excerpted fromThe Pursuit of Wisdom, Introduction)
By Dean Chavooshian After centuries of guidance, scientific discoveries and philosophical inquiries, man is empowered more than ever to address the fundamental question: With all the wisdom we have gained through the ages, how can we live a fulfilling and meaningful life? Of all human pursuits, defining wisdom is one of our most elusive endeavors.
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Neighborhood Preservation Updates
By Brian J. Pape, AIA, LEED-AP West Village Houses Residents Fight Back The West Village House (WVH) co-op board reportedly spent $300,000 exploring the feasibility of an unsolicited Madison developer’s offer. How can the WVH board spend that when they now say it “never was on the table,” when there is so much pressure to
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West Village Through the Lens of LABYL
By Mary Chandrahasan and Ananth Sampathkumar One bright sunny morning in March, we headed out for an early morning stroll in the Village equipped with our latest virtual toy called LABYL (or Learn About Buildings you Love). We set out to find and share under-appreciated architectural constructs both old and new. LABYL is a free
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People Parking – Outdoor Dining Rather Than a Wall of Steel
By Barry Benepe Public space in New York City is largely contained in its 5,000 miles of streets. Many of the largest park lands lie far from where most people live and work. A few, like Washington Square and such West Village parks as Bleecker Playground and Abingdon and Jackson Squares, are visual and functional
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Facelift for Jackson Square and Jane Street Garden Fence
By Barry Benepe A recently rebuilt Jackson Square is about to be rebuilt once again to repair and reconfigure the individual landscape elements while retaining the basic design. It will continue to be bordered by its cast iron picket fence punctuated by three centered side entrances framed by granite gate posts. The granite set blocks
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Ramsey Clark: Living Legend of the Great Society
By Bruce Poli “The measure of your quality as a public person, as a citizen, is the gap between what you do and what you say.” “Most faults are not in our Constitution, but in ourselves. “ “A right is not what someone gives you; it’s what no one can take from you.” West Villager Ramsey
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Musings and Personal Remembrances on the Music of the April Concert
By Michael Feldman In July 1956, I was a 17 year old graduate of Music and Arts High School, a not bad clarinet player and a fledgling conductor of minimal skills and no training. When the grownup conductor at Music Trails Camp, Lake Placid took ill, I raised my hand, when asked the obvious question
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Tech Hub
By Andrew Berman Mayor de Blasio has filed an application for a rezoning to allow a large new “Tech Hub” to be built on the south side of 14th Street just east of Fourth Avenue, on the longtime site of a P.C. Richard and Son store. Sandwiched between two high-rise New York University dorms, the
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No Stopping This Train
By Stanley Wlodyka You’ve seen her. Just as you lift your hand to grab her attention and offer help, she swoops down like an Olympic weightlifter and picks up the stroller, baby and all. She turns around, impatiently blows at a strand of hair that’s fallen out of place, and looks right through you. “Come
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Repetition of Unhealthy Patterns
By Christina Winholt Humans seek comfort in the familiar. Freud called this repetition ‘compulsion,’ which he famously defined as “the desire to return to an earlier state of things.” This takes form in simple tasks. Perhaps you watch your favorite movie over and over, or choose the same entrée at your top restaurant. More harmful
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Update on Beth Israel Lawsuit
By Arthur Z. Schwartz In November 2017, a lawsuit entitled Progressive Action of Lower Manhattan, George Capsis, and Arthur Schwartz v. Howard Zucker, as Commissioner of the NYS Department of Health, and Mount Sinai Beth Israel Hospital was filed in New York State Supreme Court. The goal: to not only stop the shutdown of Beth
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14th Street Traffic Plan: It’s Not Being Handled Lawfully
By Arthur Z. Schwartz It is rare to see our community so united. And when it is united in opposition to a government project, you know something is wrong. Over the last month, as a West 12th Street resident, and as Democratic District Leader, I have attended a series of meetings held by over a
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Chelsea Market Changes Upstairs and Downstairs
By David Porat Chelsea Market, which has been rather constant over the last 20-plus years, is changing. About two weeks ago, it was announced that Google, a significant tenant in the building and landlord of 88 8th Avenue, known as the Port Authority Building, along with Pier 57 at the end of 15th Street (which
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14th Street Plans Stir Protest
By Brian J. Pape, AIA, LEED-AP Greenwich Village and Chelsea block associations have begun organized action in February, forming the new 14th Street Coalition. They join with many other groups across Manhattan to prevent impending blows to the quality of life in their downtown areas and streets. Led by David Marcus, Gary Tomei, Judy Pesin,
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Google Gobbles Meat Market
By Brian J. Pape, AIA, LEED-AP Google’s parent company, Alphabet, has reached an agreement to acquire Chelsea Market for $2.4 billion. Jamestown, the sellers, won approvals from the city to add almost 300,000 square feet on top of the property back in 2012. That would increase the number of office floors above the famous ground
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We Still Need Beth Israel
By Penny Mintz City Council Member Jumaane Williams, a Brooklyn Democrat running for lieutenant governor, spoke with Progressive Action of Lower Manhattan (PALM) members in late January. He presented progressive credentials quite impressively and answered questions about the threatened closing of Beth Israel Hospital’s main building at 1st Avenue and East 16th Street. But Williams
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Treasures Abound on West Village Streets
By Gordon T. Hughes, Jr. The other morning, I was having coffee at my favorite morning haunt, Cafe Panino Mucho Giusto, when one of the regulars commented to me, unsolicitedly, “You know, you can furnish your entire apartment from STUFF off the streets of the West Village. Never pick up anything with cloth however. Bed
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Great American Playwright Maria Irene Fornes
A New Documentary Captures Her Incredible Journey from Cuba to Paris to a Life in Greenwich Village By Robert Heide I first met the playwright extraordinaire Maria Irene Fornes in the Village in 1965 at the Caffe Cino on Cornelia Street where my play The Bed was having a successful run. She was introduced to
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The Jar
By E.N.J. Carter My mother never talked about Ireland. My uncle, who she crossed the Atlantic with as a teenager, said she had a tough time of it. Who wants to be suddenly told that you have to leave your country and your friends? To have the feeling that it was too dangerous for a
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Senior Share Apartments: Now Renting
By George Capsis I recently got a call from what sounded like a very nice senior lady who read my February 2018 front-page proposal to build connected apartments with seniors on one side and young people on the other. The young occupants would be just out of college and would want to live in the
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Modern Middle Eastern Dining in the West Village
By Caroline Benveniste As I planned our January visit to Tel Aviv, I confess that I mostly focused on food. I had a long list of places to try, gleaned from articles and friends’ and relatives’ recommendations. There were also a few places that I’d heard about because the chefs had either opened or were
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Linking Residents in Distress and Neighborhood Community Officers
By Jessica Berk According to the New York Police Department (NYPD), the new model of policing will be the Neighborhood Community Officer (NCO), to bridge numerous gaps between us and them. This model is “built on improved communication and collaboration between local police officers and community residents.” That’s their press release, but unfortunately, the 6th
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New Fence for the Jane Street Garden
By Barry Benepe A new cast iron picket fence, similar to the one now surrounding Abingdon Square Park, will be erected around the Jane Street Garden before the end of the year. The entrance to the garden will be relocated from Jane Street to 8th Avenue to conform to New York City Parks & Recreation
