The Buzz

TRY PINNING THAT DOWN: Apparel entrepreneurs in the Garment District, including the tireless and photogenic Samanta Cortes and Paul Cavazza, who were featured in a March 9 cover story in Chelsea Now, are stepping up their campaign to preserve and expand the protections of the Special Garment District, an area within the larger district. The group now has a new Website for their campaign, at www.savethegarmentcenter.com, and are busy organizing a “Pin Day” on July 18, when they hope hundreds of students and supporters will wear embroidered pins to show their solidarity. Asked who is making the pins, Cortes said, “I am! I have two machines going all the time!” Cortes also encouraged anyone who would like to volunteer—from making more pins to helping with distribution—to e-mail her at info@savethegarmentcenter.com.

TOO COOL FOR SCHOOL: We caught up last weekend with Knox Martin, the artist who painted the “Venus” mural on the southern wall of the Bayview Correctional Facility, which will be obscured by starchitect Jean Nouvel’s undulating glass billionaire dorm at 100 Eleventh Avenue. Martin was talking not about “Venus” but about his newer anti-war mural, which may now never materialize—again—despite his having secured permission from Community Board 2’s Philip Mouquinho, who sits on the Sidewalks Committee, as well as the principal of P.S. 172. (He also has secured funding from David Comfort, of Cape Advisors, the builder of the Nouvel project.) It seems that neither Comfort’s promised $70,000 nor letters of support from City Councilmembers Inez Dickens and Lou Fidler and U.S. Representative Charles Rangel could ultimately sway city officials concerned about liability: James Lonergan, director of the Department of Education’s division of school facilities, was reportedly originally in favor of the project, but Michelle Cohen, director of Design for Public Schools (which is part of the DOE’s construction authority), told Martin that there was no way for the mural to be painted safely with children around, despite the artists’ claims that he could work around them. “Not now, not for the future—not at any time,” Martin quoted her with a grimace recently. While Martin insists that the painting’s political content makes it a free-speech issue, he hasn’t given up, though Chelsea Now suspects that after last week’s U.S. Supreme Court decision, which allowed a principal to tear down a student’s “Bong Hits for Jesus” sign, the DOE is not required to consider Martin’s free-speech rights after all.

ANOTHER ONE BITES THE DUST: Last Monday, as Stanley Bard and his children, David and Michelle, were moving their belongings out of the Hotel Chelsea, where Bard has presided for the last 50 years, another auto-pedestrian accident occurred at Seventh Avenue and 23rd Street, where a bicyclist riding southbound was taken down in the middle of the intersection by a brown mini-van going east. The van, it turns out, was blowing through a red light. Reverie Santos, 35, of the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, was in the middle of the crosswalk on the eastern side of the intersection, walking south across 23th Street, when she heard a “thump,” turned to her right, and saw the bicyclist going down and the van stop just feet from her. The bicyclist suffered a fractured collarbone but was otherwise fine, according to EMTs on the scene. As for Santos, who was visibly shaken when she spoke to Chelsea Now just minutes after the crash: “I didn’t see the bicyclist get hit, just his bike crunching under the van and him going down. I can’t believe I saw that happen. Now that I think of it,” she said, “I would have gotten hit if he hadn’t been first!”

CORRECTIONS: We regret that we forgot to credit David Gibbons with excellent additional reporting on the Stanley Bard ouster cover story last week. We also want to thank Walter Naegle for giving us access to his treasure trove of archival photos for our Bayard Rustin Gay Pride profile.