EDITORIAL
Union Square BID has been a boon
Just two decades ago, Union Square was in awful shape. Drug dealers and criminals roamed the park at night, making it unsafe to walk through. Storefronts on the square were still vacant, a symbol of the city’s economic woes. Today, Union Square resembles nothing like those dark days. It’s one of the city’s most thriving, dynamic districts. The turnaround is attributable to a number of factors.

Letters to the Editor

The Penny Post
Heart of the beast
By Andrei Codrescu
I’m flying to Minneapolis-St.Paul nonstop from a half-built future international airport set amid vast empty pastures. There are nonstop flights here to far-flung cities of the earth, and the ticketing machines are programmed to respond in Korean, Japanese, Tagalog, Mandarin, Cantonese. There is a mind-boggling list of cities offered on the destination menus of the four major airlines operating here.

Notebook
‘Poytry,’ pruning and the birth of Jane St. Garden
By Patricia Fieldsteel
NYONS, FRANCE — An article in The Villager not long ago launched me on a retrospective journey. The serene Jane Street Garden, site of nearly three decades of killer neighborhood fights, won an award from The Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation for its beauty and “contribution to the legendary quality of life in Greenwich Village.” How true, how true....

Police Blotter

Mikhaela Reid

The Buzz

Scene
In Briefs

Claude Cahun graces the inner sanctum at G.T.S.

Thousands march for affordable housing at StuyTown

Health and Fitness

Getting your body back for summer, Part 4
By Greg Rothman, M.S. P.T.
In my last three columns, I outlined a program that anyone in good health can follow for fast results as we move toward summer.
Volume 1, Number 36 | The Weekly Newspaper of Chelsea | May 25 - 31, 2007

Chelsea Now photo by Lawrence Lerner

Dancers from the Mikerline Dance Troupe, a multicultural group specializing in Haitian folklore and dance, moved gracefully down Broadway into Union Square on Saturday as part of the city’s first-annual Dance Parade. Organizers of the event are pushing the city to update its Prohibition-era cabaret law. [More]

Seminary unveils new building plans to mixed reviews
By Albert Amateau
Chelsea residents who came to look at the General Theological Seminary’s revised plans for its new buildings on May 17 were predictably grateful that the proposed residential project and library on Ninth Ave. has been reduced to the 75-foot height allowed in the Chelsea Historic District.

London politician schools city on congestion pricing
By Lindsay Beyerstein
The Deputy Mayor of London captivated some of New York’s top policymakers, business leaders and transportation activists at a forum sponsored by the Drum Major Institute for Public Policy last Friday. They came to hear how London is tackling global warming and gridlock through congestion pricing.

PRIDEfest cancellation leaves no alternative plan
By Duncan Osborne
Tens of thousands of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered celebrants will arrive in the West Village at the end of this year’s June 24 Pride March to find no festival, no vendors selling food or water, and no entertainment.

Falk is focused on completing Union Square renovation
By Albert Amateau
Jennifer Falk, a former top communications official in the Bloomberg administration, took over as executive director of the Union Square Partnership five months ago.

N.Y.U. picks team to devise long-range growth plan
New York University last week chose a planning team to help draw up the university’s strategic plan intended to provide guidance for N.Y.U.’s academic needs and physical development over the next 25 years.

NEWS

Police spied on many local groups during convention
By Alyssa Giachino
With the public release of more than 600 pages of surveillance notes by the New York Police Department last week, organizations that protested at the 2004 Republican National Convention confirmed their suspicions that dozens of nonviolent groups were being monitored.

For parents, kid’s allergies nothing to sneeze at
By Sandra Larriva
At 10 months old, Chelsea’s Turner Grieves was taken to the hospital because he was having difficulty breathing and had broken out in hives. Earlier that day, back in 2000, he had eaten banana, wheat germ and tofu.

Film reveals plight of contract laborers in Iraq
By Chris Lombardi
On the screen, a young man with elfin eyes half-smiles as he tells the story of his escape from a foreign land where he was held against his will. “I passed around a piece of paper that said, “If You Want to Escape, Write Your Name Here.”

Parents greet Klein with banners and brouhaha
By Chris Lombardi
On Wednesday, the courtyard in front of the Lab School’s O. Henry Center on West 17th Street felt like an activist college campus. Small groups clumped, chatted, checked cell phones and yelled across the way: “Couldn’t have done it without you!” Many picked up the brightly colored banners draped across a table, like picket signs at a demonstration, grinning: “How’d you make all these so fast?”

On the Record

Bringing Africa to New York City, one film at a time
By David Gibbons
Mahen Bonetti is a one-woman juggernaut for the finest films of her native continent and, by extension, an impassioned ambassador for its art and culture.
Arts & Entertainment

Spring Awakening
BY Gary M. Kramer
Seeing all kinds of queer sexuality — and all kinds of queer sex — on screen is one of the benefits of a LGBT film festival, and this year’s NewFest offers plenty of both. Unspooling over 200 films between May 31 and June 10, the program opens with Duncan Roy’s adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s “The Picture of Dorian Gray” and closes with “Save Me,” Robert Cary’s film about an addict trying to cure himself in a Christian ministry.

Koch on Film
By Ed Koch.
“The Last Time” (-) The comments I read about this film were not very good. In his Daily News review, Jack Mathews wrote of the three main characters, “Sticking with this trio is hard work, and even after their motives are revealed in a drawn-out and absurdly pat ‘surprise’ ending, there is no satisfying payoff .”
“Once” (+) I went to see this film after reading Stephanie Zacharek’s review in Salon. She really loved it and summed up her review by stating, “What we’re seeing, and hearing, is an act of creation, and of love, a sweet, miniature echo of the spirit of the movie around it.”

A new musical springs from the Atlantic Theater
By Beth Herstein
Playwright Keith Bunin is acutely conscious of the struggle to realize the American Dream. He grew up in Poughkeepsie, New York, a place he describes as “this mix of a blue collar and white collar town.

Stars of ‘Deuce’ mesmerize despite trite verbal volleys
By Scott Harrah
Watching Angela Lansbury talk about her illustrious career for 90 minutes would have been far more interesting than this non-play about two fictional former women’s tennis pros. Lansbury — the star of such theatrical classics as “Mame,” “Sweeney Todd” and “Gypsy”.

On the road to find out
By Nicole Davis
“Passing Strange,” the fantastic new musical at the Public, begins in familiar territory for fans of Stew, the singer/songwriter and founder of the rock/pop band The Negro Problem, and the cabaret ensemble STEW.

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Courtesy of Peer Gallery, New York
Locations of Elsewhereis a group exhibition on artists’ parallel realities in the creative process. Iris Klein, one of the 13 participating artists, produces reverse black and white photographs that are both poetic and terrifying. The show opens May 31st at Peer Gallery.

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