A St. Brigid's killjoy

I exchanged e-mails with a friend in the neighborhood last night about the new life for St. Brigid's. He seemed initially happy, I thought. I mentioned that the church is going to need a lot of work, hence the $10 million for the renovations. Then, in a subsequent e-mail, he harrumphed:

The construction will really fuck up the traffic and parking for several blocks. Not sure how I'll be able to find a spot.

I suggested that he sell his car.

St. Brigid's as it was...and as it will be...

I had mentioned Paul Dougherty, a longtime video maker, in a post on April 24. Given the good news about St. Brigid's, let's take a look at the church's history via Paul's work....

Wow -- St. Brigid's is SAVED (hallelujah!)

Just what the neighborhood needed. Amazing news.

The City Room has the story:

Donor Gives $20 Million to Save St. Brigid’s
By Sewell Chan

An anonymous donor has come to the rescue of St. Brigid’s Roman Catholic Church in the East Village, saving the building — which has presided over Tompkins Square Park since 1848 — from demolition and making it possible for the structure to be reopened as a parish church.
The Archdiocese of New York announced this morning that a donor had come forward with an “unexpected but very welcome gift” after a private meeting with Cardinal Edward M. Egan, the archbishop of New York.
The gift includes $10 million to restore the building, at 119 Avenue B; $2 million to establish an endowment for the parish “so that it might best meet the religious and spiritual needs of the people living in the community”; and $8 million to support the St. Brigid’s School and other Catholic schools in need.
Cardinal Egan expressed gratitude in a statement:
This magnificent gift will make it possible for Saint Brigid’s Church to be fittingly restored with its significant structural problems properly addressed. The two additional gifts, to create an endowment for the parish and to support the parish school, are a powerful testament to the donor’s goodness and understanding. He has my heartfelt gratitude, as I recently told him at a meeting in my residence.
The church was built by Irish immigrants who had fled the Potato Famine in the 1840s. Financial hardship has evidently been a longstanding part of the parish’s history. An 1889 article [pdf] in The Times reported that the parish was finally consecrated after a 40-year effort to repay its debts.
The church has witnessed momentous changes in the neighborhood. In 1991, the pastor of the church and two other clergymen were arrested on disorderly conduct charges when they crossed police lines to deliver food to protesters holed up in an apartment near Tompkins Square Park, which was the site of clashes between protesters and the police. In 1995, Pope John Paul II visited St. Brigid’s School — which was already suffering from declining enrollment — during a pastoral visit to the United States.
The church’s main building closed in 2001 because of structural problems, and the final Mass, in the basement of the Catholic school next door, was held in 2004. Despite fund-raising efforts, protests by parishioners and lamentations by Mary Gordon, a writer and memoirist who teaches at Barnard College, the church was scheduled to be closed. But supporters of the church filed a lawsuit, and in 2006, a day after demolition work began, a Manhattan judge issued a temporary restraining order halting the work.
Joseph Zwilling, a spokesman for the archdiocese, said that a precise date for reopening the parish had not yet been set.
“We obviously need to talk to priests in the area,” Mr. Zwilling said in a phone interview this morning. “It’s also going to take some time to restore the building. This is something that’s going to take months, at the very least, if not a couple of years. We can’t really tell yet. We’ve got architects who are starting to develop plans. Then we’re going to have to hire construction firms to do the work. There are significant structural problems that need to be repaired.”

Holy Fucking Shit. (Oops. Sorry God. But c'mon!)



[Updated] So this is all sinking in a little bit. Jeremiah floated the idea that perhaps Matt Dillon was the guardian angel. Interesting idea. (Does he have this kind of money? I helped the cause by buying multiple copies of Wild Things.) For whatever reasons, Dillon has been an ardent supporter to help save the church from the evil Catholics who likely wanted to turn it into another NYU dorm or condo to help pay for legal bills for you know what. (I'm Catholic, or was, so I know what.) OK, sarcasm aside, good for Dillon for helping out the Committee to Save St. Brigid's. And thank goodness for them. Without all their work, the church would have been destroyed years back.

With that extra $$$, you can buy two ounces of popcorn

Still, at least someone came to their senses for once. (And what's a movie ticket going for these days? Think I paid $11.75 to see the art-house sensation, Iron Man.)

Anyway, as the Post reports:

A movie-theater chain that stopped offering reduced-price tickets for kids and seniors at a Manhattan cinema did an about-face yesterday - and said it will restore them.

Clearview Cinemas, which last week quit offering discount tickets for children and seniors at its theater on First Avenue and 62nd Street, said it will restore the discounts.

Clearview Cinemas, which operates 52 movie theaters in the New York metro area, didn't explain its change of heart.

"Clearview did experiment with certain discount eliminations at a few select theatres," spokeswoman Kim Kerns said in a statement.

"Upon initial review, we have determined that we will return to our previous discounts at these theaters.

"We note that at the vast majority of Clearview theaters, the discounts remained in place and were never changed."

I suspect that the Post created this flap on their own just so they could run this headline:

'NO-KIDDIE' FLIX-TIX NIX

Here's the article from yesterday reporting on the increase.

Excerpt:

"I feel like everywhere I go, I'm getting nickeled-and-dimed these days," said Jack Miller, 40, who took his 7-year-old son, Benjamin, to see "The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian" at the Clearview yesterday afternoon, only to find that a children's ticket had shot up $2.50.

Is this really such a bad thing?

From the wire!

Public bathrooms in NYC subway close at midnight

NEW YORK (AP) -- New York City bar-hoppers heading home may want to heed nature's call before getting on the subway - or suffer for the entire ride.

New York City Transit has been shutting the 78 public bathrooms in the subway system between the hours of midnight and 5 a.m. for the past few weeks. Officials say the idea is to guarantee cleaning crew access during those hours.

Straphanger advocate Gene Russianoff says the bathrooms should seldom be closed.

Subway riders complain that the timing of the closures coincides with the hours that bars and clubs get out.

Rider Herby Campbell pointed out that the alternative to the public facilities - grabbing a corner for relief - could get you locked up.

The Tower of Toys lives for one more day (part of the Tower, anyway)

Well, it looks like Eddie's iconic tower will be up for at least one more day. I was there just after 6 tonight. There was a light rain. A few people scurried by, cursing that they didn't have an umbrella. I stood there for a few minutes. Depressed. A woman came by and stopped. "They're really taking it down, huh?" It wasn't really a question she wanted answered. "Fuck." And she walked away.

Was happy to come home and read Jeremiah's account on how the Tower was suitably stubborn earlier today while the city continued to tear it down.

"If you are at the corner of Bowery and Houston, and think about what it was like 10 to 15 years ago compared with today, you couldn’t recognize it"

As it was widely reported, the National Trust for Historic Preservation designated the Lower East Side as one of the 11 most endangered places in America.

In a City Room posting this afternoon, the Times asks: " 'Endangered’ Lower East Side? What’s New, Some Ask."

From the post:

Suzanne Wasserman, a historian and filmmaker at the Gotham Center for New York City History at the City University of New York Graduate Center, was similarly pragmatic about the Lower East Side having already been transformed.

“It is incredible, the changes that have gone on there in the last five to 10 years,” she said in a phone interview. “I would say the neighborhood is almost unrecognizable. If you drive south down Bowery, you almost have a sense of dislocation. If you are at the corner of Bowery and Houston, and think about what it was like 10 to 15 years ago compared with today, you couldn’t recognize it. Personally I find that sad, but we live a capitalistic society.”

By the way, photographer Brian Rose has some great shots of the LES here and here.

What movies people in the 10009 zip code are watching

Joshua Stein, a former writer for Gawker, has a nice item on his site, My Memoirs, in which he looks at the NetFlix feature that allows you to search for favorites by area code. He did this for his zip code in Williamsburg.

So I was curious about my area code, 10009. And?

Here's what people in 10009 are watching:

1. Next Stop, Greenwich Village

2. Barefoot in the Park

3. As Tears Go By (Mongkok Carmen / Wong gok ka moon / Wang jiao ka men)

4. Barbarians at the Gate

5.1900

6. Sunday Bloody Sunday

7. The Country Girl

8. Basquiat

9. The 39 Steps

10. The Panic in Needle Park

Hmm. Respectable enough. Given some of the people I've seen move in lately, I figured an Adam Sandler comedy would have made the list.

[Via Gawker]

John Varvatos saw the light

The Post has a special commercial real estate section today. (And it's not online.) The cover story is titled "New Lease of Life," about how landmark buildings require special tenants.

Here's a passage from the article:

Even though CBGBs was not landmarked and he could have ripped it all out, John Varvatos maintained in his shop many of the funky features of the former punk palace.

"John loves music anyway and it was perfect because so much of his business is entertainment related," said his broker, Robert Cohen, executive vice president of Robert K. Futterman & Associates. "We ... had been looking for a second location but uptown, and even if it wasn't CBGB, the Bowery wouldn't have been an option."

Cohen noted that nobody wanted to install a bank or an "ugly" restaurant or anything that would degrade the character and the history of what had taken place in the building.

"John saw the light," Cohen said.

In fact, brokers all said that if a client walks into a historical space and doesn't "get it," the space won't work for them.

Real estate update: "Much of Manhattan continues humming along"

The Wall Street Journal has a piece today on cities where home prices on holding up. While the housing market may be soft in, say, San Francisco, to no surprise, you won't many bargains in Manhattan.



According to the Journal:

While New York's commuter market -- which includes suburban New York, New Jersey and Connecticut -- is down about 8% from its peak in mid-2006, much of Manhattan continues humming along. Neighborhoods such as SoHo, the Lower East Side, Greenwich Village, Chelsea, Murray Hill, the Upper West Side and Harlem are all up in the past year, according to DataQuick's Zip Code analysis.

Bidding wars still happen. Toni Haber, an executive vice president at Prudential Douglas Elliman, a New York City real-estate firm, says 60 people waited in line recently at an open house to view a three-bedroom apartment in Greenwich Village. The owner had four competing offers within the week, and agreed to sell for about $2.5 million -- $300,000 over the asking price.

Part of the city's strength comes from the fact that few buyers were investing in properties to flip them. Moreover, many apartment buildings in New York aren't condominiums but co-ops, which impose financial demands on potential buyers far more rigorous than banks do -- which helps keep the number of foreclosures down. In addition, foreign investors have been exploiting the weak dollar by grabbing Manhattan real estate.
One area of weakness: the Financial District in Lower Manhattan, where median prices are down, in part because of an abundance of new construction in the area.

Those areas of Brooklyn that are close to Manhattan are also holding up well. On the periphery, places like Jamaica, Queens; parts of the Bronx; and nearby New Jersey towns such as Jersey City and Hoboken are off between 3% and 14%.