Downtown Local News Reflects City Spirit

City Hall pickets

Residents of 131 Duane St. picketed outside City Hall restaurant May 6. Residents, many of them artists who have lived in the building for many years, say they are being illegally evicted from the building to make way for renovations.

New members

The Manhattan Borough President C. Virginia Fields has named three new members to Community Board 1. They are Asencion Gloria Aldamuy, a Battery Park City resident, Heather Hobson, a John St. resident, and Meyer Feig, the founder and president of the World Trade Center Tenants’ Association.

Feig attended Wednesday’s meeting of the World Trade Center Redevelopment Committee. “Having gone through the destruction, it’s very important for me personally to be part of the rebuilding,” Feig said. Feig, who runs an executive search firm, was a tenant of the World Trade Center for 11 years and has just relocated his business to offices in 1 Maiden Lane.

Councilperson Alan Gerson said he would announce his 2 nominations to C.B. 1 within the next week.

Adios Roy

Roy Moskowitz, deputy to Division 9 Superintendent Peter Heaney, recently left his position. His successor, Mariano Guzman, has already assumed the post, Moskowitz said. Guzman formerly distributed resources to schools and cultural organizations for the Sept. 11 Fund.

“It has been a pleasure working with all the schools, including the Downtown schools,” said Moskowitz, who occasionally attended community board meetings to explain policies of the city Department of Education.

Moskowitz will move to Barcelona, Spain, with his family.

Preservation awards

The Landmarks Conservancy will make its 13th annual Lucy G. Moses Preservation Awards on Mon. May 10 honoring nine preservation projects completed last year including three in Lower Manhattan.

The Verizon Building, a 1926 Art Deco landmark at 140 West St. severely damaged in the Sept. 11, 2001 attack, will receive the honor for the exterior and lobby restoration planned by William F. Collins Architects and for the lobby and ceiling mural restoration by EverGreene Painting Studios.

The Verizon exterior renovation included more than 500,000 facade bricks and 93 tons of structural steel. Intricate bronze detailing on the eastern side of the building had to be recreated. The lobby restoration, including 12 ceiling murals depicting the history of communications, took more than two years and involved a team of 30 conservation experts, technicians and artists.

The South St. Seaport Museum at 12 Fulton St., earned the award for the Beyer Blinder Belle design of the museum inside the 200-year-old Schermerhorn Row block which opened at the end of last year. The various uses over the years in each of the buildings are reflected in the restoration. The oldest hotel in the Row, The Rogers Hotel, occupied 4 Fulton St. between 1850 and 1864 and some of the hotel partitions remain as features of the exhibition.

Kehila Kedosha Janina, the synagogue at 208 Broome St., will be honored for the exterior restoration by the architect Leonard Colchamiro and contractor Larry Burda on the 1927 house of worship built by a congregation of Greek Jews established in New York in 1906. The building still serves worshipers and includes a small museum in the women’s gallery, which is open to the public free on Sundays.

Free concert

The Winter Garden will be the venue for an evening of music and conversation with songwriters Wesley Harding, Marshal Crenshaw and Angel Dean & Sue Garner. The evening, entitled “Thriftshop Songbook Live,” is presented by Laura Cantrell, a country performer and WFMU’s presenter of Radio Thrift Shop.

The concert will be in the Winter Garden, World Financial Center, 220 Vesey Street; Wednesday, May 12; 7 p.m.; Free. For more information, visit www.worldfinancialcenter.com or call (212) 945-0505.

C.B. 1 meetings

The upcoming week’s schedule of Community Board 1 meetings is as follows. Unless otherwise noted, meetings will be held in room 709 of 49-51 Chambers St.

On Tues., May 10, the nominating committee will meet at 6 p.m. to identify candidates to serve as board officers.

On Wed., May 12, the executive committee will meet at 5:30 to discuss the Friends of C.B. 1 residential poll results, the city’s new West Side plan and its impact on Lower Manhattan, the chairperson’s report and the committee reports.

On Thurs., May 13 the landmark’s committee will meet at 6 p.m. to pass a resolution on a new nine-story building at 51-53 Walker St. The remainder of the agenda is to be determined.

Reader Services