Didn’t wing it, planned it:
Seven hundred pilots, mostly from Continental and United Airlines, rallied on Broad St. next to the New York Stock Exchange last Wednesday on Day 11 of Occupy Wall Street, then concluded with a rally down at Battery Park. Some immediately spun the pilots’ action as part of Occupy Wall Street. But actually the event had been in the works earlier, and focused on expediting the pilots’ new contract under the merger of Continental and United, which will form the world’s largest airline. Somehow not surprising to us, Ian Dutton, a Continental pilot and former Community Board 2 member, played a role in all of this. “Yeah, I helped organize the pilots’ rally,” he e-mailed us from Stockholm, where he had just flown in. “We had planned it months in advance, so it wasn’t directly related to Occupy Wall St. But I like to say that we’re all cracks in the same foundation — or different symptoms of the same disease. … We worked through all the official channels to get necessary permits and N.Y.P.D. support — they were great. I totally support people’s right to protest and march without a permit, of course. We just ran our event differently.”
Party for pop-up:
Regarding a pilot of another sort, Dutton also gave us an update on the sole pilot-project pop-up cafe that was approved for the C.B. 2 district (between 14th and Canal Sts., east of Bowery/Fourth Ave.). Neighbors of the pop-up cafe, or “Sullivan St. porch” as it’s become known, put their money where their mouth is, according to Dutton. A fundraiser was held a couple of weeks ago to help Local Cafe owners Craig and Liz Walker offset the $12,000 it cost them to build and insure the public garden space, located on Sullivan St. between Prince and Houston Sts. The shindig was co-hosted by everyone’s favorite goth pilot, Dutton, and celebrated restaurateur Florent Morellet, formerly of Florent in the Meatpacking District. Attendees chipped in $2,200, nearly double the evening’s $1,000 goal, and were joined for a bit by state Senator Daniel Squadron and other guests from C.B. 2. “The porch has obviously led to increased sales for Local. But for a tiny business like that to offset such a big expenditure would be nearly impossible,” Dutton noted. So does this mean that the pop-up cafe idea is doomed? Not if Dutton, Morellet and the pop-up’s proponents have anything to say about it. “Craig and Liz brought our block this oasis as a giveback to the community and the fundraiser is our way of showing how important it has become to us,” the pilot said. “Opponents warned these lovely gardens would sprout like weeds, but the reality is that they are not jackpots for the businesses. They are simply little community improvements that help the business a little and help the block a lot.”
Whoa-alujah!
Reverend Billy’s resurrection for the Bean coffee shop has been postponed, Anna Sawaryn tells us. The effort to come up with a new date is reportedly still brewing — and the soul of the Bean remains in limbo.
Revolution, for real:
We’re hearing that the “Tompkins Square Park regulars” are all down at Liberty Square — not because they’re outraged at Wall St. and corporate greed, but because there’s tons of free food and police are letting people sleep there in the park overnight without hassling them. But at blogger Bob Arihood’s memorial on Tuesday night (wow — was it hard to just write that in Scoopy’s Notebook), Tompkins dweller L.E.S. Jewels told us that he’s hanging out down at Liberty Square because he’s down with the cause. Why would he be there with so many police all over the place when he could be in good ol’ Tompkins where all the cops know him and wouldn’t bother him? he asked. O.K. — keep on occupying! … Also, as he was bumming a couple of cigarettes off people, Jewels told us that he’s still going strong with his sobriety and that it’s helping things come together for him. He said he recently had an interview with Common Ground, which is now working to get him an apartment, so that he can get off the streets. One of Arihood’s last photos on his Neither More Nor Less blog was a shot of Jewels’s cart with Fly’s PEOPs cartoon of him in this newspaper poking out the top of it.
