By George Capsis Despite the turmoil in the wake of the pandemic to retail businesses, an innovative new supermarket has opened just opposite the outdoor Farmer’s Market that assembles at Abingdon Square every Saturday. The location may look familiar—it’s where Mrs. Green’s operated for a short while before closing down in 2016. The first words
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Bullied by Smart Meters
Technology We Can Do Without By Les Jamieson Have you ever wondered how technologies most of us would never dream up get foisted upon the public? You know, things like digital measuring devices called “smart” meters used by Con Edison. After all, those round analog devices usually found somewhere in the basement that are electro-mechanical
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Open Restaurants or Open Sidewalks: What’s on the Menu?
By Sid E. Walker We are lucky to be West Villagers, with so many world-class and local hang-out cafes, bars, and restaurants. It’s a veritable walkers’ paradise in the noblest Jane Jacobs tradition… or at least it used to be until a small but significant number of bars, restaurants, and cafes took advantage of the
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A Complicated Assignment
By Frank Quinn At the February NYPD Community Council meeting, Captain Stephen Spataro of the 6th precinct announced that a new detail of officers would address problematic conditions at Washington Square Park. But against the expectation that police will restore order looms an uneasy truce between competing park users. While many law-abiding able-bodied users enjoy
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World’s Third AIDS Patient Cured
What Does it Mean for a Global Cure? By Kambiz Shekdar, Ph.D. Within the research community, the Holy Grail to cure AIDS had been to find new drugs to “Shock and Kill” the festering virus from its hiding places (“latent infections” and “viral reservoirs”). No such drugs have been developed, yet three persons have been
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The Lost Hospital: Was It Greed That Killed Saint Vincent’s?
By Roger Paradiso I found a 2016 article in the WestView News archives by Dr. M. Zakir Sabry who used to work at St. Vincent’s. He wrote, “As I drove down Seventh Avenue about two years ago, the sight of former St. Vincent’s Hospital’s sacred ground evoked a similar visceral response. Unlike my father’s passage,
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Architects Kickoff Open Restaurants Innovation Workshop
By Brian J Pape, AIA February marked the beginning of a collaborative effort to work to resolve the perplexing problems posed by the Open Restaurants emergency program, in order for the city to propose permanent rules for outdoor dining. The February workshop was brought together by the NY Chapter of the American Institute of Architects
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The Lost St. Vincent’s Hospital
By Roger Paradiso Why was St. Vincent’s Hospital closed on April 10, 2010? To understand the complicated and controversial decision, let’s go back to the beginning. “All hospitals before the 1920s had operated without much money. Physicians donated their time, and costs for nurses and staff tended to be low. For the first time, hospitals
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How Can One Man Make War?
By George Capsis How is it still possible for one mind, one cruelly knotted personality, to initiate a war, to indiscriminately kill adults and children? Well, think about it: we are all prisoners of our personalities that tie our thoughts and actions with steel cables to a few accidents of birth. Putin is short and
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Managing Chronic Illness—Keeping Calm and Carrying On
By Kieran Loughney Lying on her back in deep snow, my partner Patti flung handfuls of the fresh powder into the air, letting the flakes land gently on her beaming face. She’d later tell a friend it was the best day she’d had in a year. To witness a joyful moment brighten the face of
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What is the New York Harbor Storm-Surge Barrier?
By Brian J. Pape, AIA Well before Hurricane Sandy struck Metropolitan New York in 2012, Mayor Michael Bloomberg authorized the New York City Panel on Climate Change in August 2008, with funding from the Rockefeller Foundation, to investigate the city’s vulnerability to a variety of climate-induced risks including a major storm-surge event. The eight year
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George Capsis is on a Mission to Bring a Hospital to Our West Village
By Roger and Anthony Paradiso George Capsis, the publisher of this paper, is on a mission. He wants to see a modern hospital built to replace St. Vincent’s Hospital, which was taken from this community on April 30, 2010. In its place came an emergency room run by Northwell Health, New York’s largest healthcare provider.
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Lifetalk With Roberta Russell – Flying Over Sunset: A Healing Psychedelic Transcendence of Time and Space
Video courtesy of James Lapine. By Roberta Russell Life is lived in three zones: intrapersonal—within ourselves, interpersonal—between ourselves, and transpersonal—extending beyond. Tony Award and Pulitzer Prize winner James Lapine has created a new unique and timely musical play, Flying Over Sunset. It opened at the Vivian Beaumont Theater at Lincoln Center on December 13th, 2021.
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HighLine XI Project Rescued by Witkoff Group
By Brian J. Pape, AIA The trouble brewing at the XI condo towers finally boiled over in late December, when lenders completed a foreclosure sale. News media had been abuzz about the beleaguered project’s portfolio of lawsuits and controversies for many months, and it wasn’t because the leaning towers were in danger of falling over.
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Mr. Schiff Comes to the Village
Hosted by Cooper Union, Congressman Adam Schiff addressed the continuing risks to our democracy By Eric Uhlfelder It’s been a while since a congressman could be counted as a profile in courage, a concept John F. Kennedy coined in his 1956 book. But Adam Schiff, the California congressman from the state’s 28th congressional district, certainly
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Farewell 2021, What Else Can Go Wrong?
By Frank Quinn WARNING: The following may contain misinformation. Reader discretion is advised. Most of us in NYC interact with the police only when there’s an emergency, but a few go to public meetings, like the one I was at this past summer to review the situation at Washington Square Park. It was captivating to
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Sarah Jessica Parker on WestView
In early November, as we were getting ready to leave Lenox Hill Hospital after a week long stay where I receivied a heart stent, Dusty handed me an email from our WestView editor, Kim, which was a copy of an article in Travel and Leisure and in which Sarah Jessica Parker is asked “What makes
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Hell on Wheels
By Kieran Loughney The threat is stealthy, silent, spine-tingling, and all too real. Our strolls through the West Village had delighted us before the danger emerged. But things changed. Moving along sidewalks warily, we gently chided the culprits as they whizzed by. “Careful there, please,” we’d say. As the risk intensified, and our patience wore
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SERINO Pop Up Shop
NYC-based brand Serino opened a temporary creative studio and boutique on Bleecker Street on November 4th. Serino 330A Bleecker Street New York, NY Hours: Tues – Sat 11am to 7pm Sun – 12pm to 6pm More about Serino: The NYC-based brand was recently launched after two years in the making by a team of fashion and tech veterans.
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Northern Dispensary Gets a New Life
By Brian J Pape, AIA, LEED-AP In 1831, carpenter Henry Bayard and mason John Tucker built a two-story brick building on a triangular plot of land at Grove Street and Waverly Place to house Greenwich Village’s free medical clinic, the Northern Dispensary. The clinic’s purpose, “To furnish medicine and medical attendance gratuitously, to such of
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Notes From Away: Man in the Middle
By Tom Lamia Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer was my classmate at Harvard Law School. Steve was also my model for brilliance without pretense. No one in that Kennedy era circle of the ambitious and talented seemed more able, or better directed toward making a mark on the world. For a few weeks in the
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Leave the Attitude, Take the Cannoli
By Alec Pruchnicki, MD Twenty-eight years ago, when I moved down to Greenwich Village from Arthur Avenue in The Bronx, I wanted to find an Italian pastry shop like the ones in my old neighborhood. I found Rocco’s on Bleecker Street. For twenty-eight years I have been eating their cannoli and panettone. No more. The
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An Angry Reader Spawns a Solution
By George Capsis We don’t get too many angry letters to the editor but we sure got one from Laurence Edelman, who was outraged at the disparaging remarks we offered in our July edition about the restaurant sheds that, according to our restaurant owner and WestView critic, evidently helped to save his business. But the
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The Village Awakens!
By Hannah Reimann Like the re-emergence of post-pandemic Broadway, the Village’s theatrical and cultural world comes alive with exciting events in October and November 2021. The official soft launch of Welcome Back, West Village! will kick off this October featuring local restaurants, concerts, films and other performance events on the streets and in venues of
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PALM’s Focus: Housing and Health Insurance
By Penny Mintz Now that the primary elections are over, Progressive Action of Lower Manhattan (PALM), a chapter of the statewide New York Progressive Action Network (NYPAN), is once again focused on effecting grassroots change that matters to the residents of Lower Manhattan. On August 17th, PALM held a meeting in Jackson Square—the first live
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9/11 on 9/12/21 at Westbeth
By J. Taylor Basker To commemorate 9/11, there will be an event on 9/12 at Westbeth Artists Housing. A poem written by Griselda Steiner will open the event. After that there will be a digital presentation of photos from 9/11 by Westbeth photographers (David Plakke, David Seccombe, Judy Lawne, and others) who spent months documenting
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9/11 Twenty Years
By George Capsis Everybody has a 9/11 story; here is mine… I was working as a consultant for the United States Council for International Business, and there was a going to be a conference way up on one of the higher floors of Building One of the World Trade Center. I toyed with the idea
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Paris or Shanty Town?
By George Capsis Just a few feet from where I am keying this at 69 Charles Street, a very young Sinclair Lewis and his roommate (brother of poet Stephen Vincent Benét) would walk to the exit door on many Sunday mornings on their way to the outdoor cafe at the famed historic Brevoort Hotel at
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City Planners Become Enemies of Historic Preservation
By Brian J Pape, AIA, LEED-AP Never before have we witnessed such a callous attitude about historic preservation exhibited by city officials and department heads. Mayor de Blasio’s Department of City Planning (DCP) is on the warpath against historic districts—proposing rezoning that strips the historic districts of protections, and substituting open development measures that are
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Homeless Encampments
By Alan Cohen Greenwich Village is experiencing an explosion of homelessness and homeless encampments that surpasses anything longtime residents can recall. It is part of the chaos that has descended on this neighborhood, which includes stabbings, muggings, a shooting, and closed streets that house nightly parties which cause strewn garbage. Residents face difficulties when trying
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Open Restaurants: Assault on Quality of Life
By Brian J Pape, AIA, LEED-AP Once upon a time, city residents worked with their city government to protect the quality of life for all: noise ordinances were developed to limit the volume and hours of loud crowds, loud music, and loud work sites; restaurants were required to limit sound pollution with closed windows and
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Fifth Year Commemoration of the Pulse Nightclub Shooting
By James Tigger! Ferguson Five years ago, an unspeakable massacre occurred at Pulse nightclub. We live in a country that worships guns—the power, the money, the violence and the hatred that guns represent. So it certainly wasn’t the first massacre, nor would it be the last. And though it was the deadliest shooting in this
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A Great Victory—Beth Israel to Stay Open
By Penny Mintz In a closed Zoom meeting on Tuesday morning, June 15, 2021, representatives from Mount Sinai informed Community Board #3 that Beth Israel Hospital will remain open. I was not invited to attend. Nor were most of the community health activists involved in the struggle to keep Beth Israel open. But I learned
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A Tribute to Detective Stanley Dash
By Lisa Smith Dear Detective Dash, or may I call you Stanley? You’re gone now, having died from COVID on May 29th, so you won’t be reading this, but I want the world to know: you were one of the good guys that helped put me back together. You know my entire story, as you
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Charles Street Association News
Dear neighbors, Thank you for coming out and helping restore Charles Street to its natural beauty! Already, these flowers are putting a smile to all the faces when strolling down the street. To maintain our flowers throughout the summer, these tree-beds will need plenty of water. Please kindly remind your super or building manager to
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WHAT A DIFFERENCE A DAY MAKES
SATURDAY, JUNE 26 SUNDAY, JUNE 27 WHAT A DIFFERENCE A DAY MAKES: A large crowd of young people danced to live music at Washington Square Park (left) as NYPD officers kept watch over the crowd (center) during the last Saturday evening in June. Just a day later, the crowd would explode again, pitting NYPD
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International Stretto Piano Festival
From the West Village Across the Global Stage, a Virtual World Premier Narrow Keys…Broad Minds…No Boundaries By Heidi E. Russell Long time West Village resident Hannah Reimann joins forces with fellow pianists Carol Leone of Texas and Rhonda Boyle of Australia, bringing together a talented roster of pianists from around the globe to celebrate and
