The Legend returns: Residents living around Washington Square thought they had thankfully seen the last of Will Smith’s “I Am Legend” when filming in the park ended there two months ago. But, much to their dismay, they recently learned the post-apocalyptic flick will be returning to film on Washington Square N. in front of the arch sometime this month for one day. Despite the uproar over the last, prolonged film shoot, the movie already had a permit to come back. Adelaide Polsinelli, 2 Fifth Ave. board president, said her tenants are considering a protest against the film when it returns. The last time, residents suffered through nocturnal explosions, bright lights from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m., piles of bombed-out cars and mangled “corpses” (mannequins strewn on the ground) and noxious fumes. Polsinelli said the “Legend” crew was the “most obnoxious” of any that ever filmed around the park and that they also “intimidated” her building’s older tenants. Carol McConaughey, the film’s publicist, e-mailed, “I don’t have any information to give you right now regarding our filming schedule,” though adding they are “scheduled to resume filming in a couple of weeks.”
Donald gets in-tents: Donald Trump’s latest installment of his reality show is being pitched as “The Apprentice: In Tents,” in which the losers have to live in, you guessed it, tents. By coincidence, there’s also a tent in the middle of Trump’s Soho condo-hotel site at Spring and Varick Sts., over the area where bone fragments from an old Presbyterian church were found. The other day, we noticed a man using a contraption by the tent to sift dirt, and poking around through the dirt with his hands as he sifted it. It doesn’t take an “Apprentice” winner to know what he was doing. Meanwhile, the pile driving at the site continues.
Techno’ly Jewish? Lower East Side fashion designer Apollo Braun tells us that just as the reception for his first art exhibition — a show of 10 of his paintings at EarthMatters on Ludlow St. — was opening the other day, Moby walked into the organic food shop. Braun said he always had an inkling the techno rocker was Jewish, and so asked him. Moby, a descendant of author Herman Melville (hence his stage name), said he indeed has Orthodox Jewish relatives…. Braun also promised he’d make Moby a custom T-shirt with a message for his nemesis, Eminem, and Moby said he’d stop by and pick it up.
Park political intrigue: The Hudson River Park Advisory Council has become a hotbed of political activity — perhaps not surprising given its chairperson, Arthur Schwartz, Village Democratic state committeeman. The council’s recent executive committee election ruffled some feathers, after local elected officials failed to win a single seat. Three seats on the executive committee are automatically filled by representatives of Community Boards 1, 2 and 4. The other four seats were won by the Greenwich Village Little League, Municipal Art Society, Downtown Boathouse and Hudson River Water Trail Association. Assemblymembers Deborah Glick and Richard Gottfried and State Senator Tom Duane all failed to get elected. However, Glick complained there hadn’t been notification a vote would be held. Schwartz said there was. To avoid controversy, though, Schwartz said he’ll hold a revote at the Jan. 17 council meeting. Speaking last week, Glick said she’s got lots of work to do in Albany, that that’s where she’s putting her focus in 2007, 2008 and hopefully beyond, that’s what “33,000 voters in the 66th District” elected her to do and that she doesn’t want to belabor the advisory council situation.
Farewell to Lemmon: Marcia Lemmon’s funeral will be held this Fri., Jan. 12, at 11:30 a.m. at Provenzano Lanza Funeral Home at 43 Second Ave. at Second St. Lemmon, a Ludlow St. bar watchdog and onetime Community Board 3 member, died Dec. 2 at 48.
Corrections: In the Dec. 27 issue, an article on the two Pier 40 redevelopment proposals misstated the music hall’s size in the Pier 40 Performing Arts Center plan; it is planned as 45,000 square feet. Also, the size of the pier’s central courtyard was also misstated; it is about 8 acres.
