Horatio house deal: Village District Leader Arthur Schwartz tells us that Tom Doyle’s case has been settled. Doyle lived for 50 years with his husband, Bill Cornwell, on Horatio St. in a house Cornwell owned all that time. When Cornwell died in 2014, he left the building to Doyle, but the will had issues. Cornwell’s niece and nephews declared they owned the property and promptly put it up for sale. Schwartz, who is an attorney, took on the case, arguing that Doyle and Cornwell had a common-law marriage based on their summer vacations in Pennsylvania. But Cornwell’s relatives claimed in court that Pennsylvania didn’t accept common-law marriage until just before Cornwell’s death. Schwartz and his legal team, though, found a number of retroactive cases in that state based on common-law marriage. Doyle’s own testimony was also compelling and played a major role in the decision. According to Schwartz, Doyle will now get a good chunk of the profits of the building’s sale, plus will be allowed to live in his apartment for the rest of his life for just $10 a month. The settlement awaits court approval, likely to come later this summer.
Beth Israel suit: Schwartz also plans to file a lawsuit against Mt. Sinai’s closure of Beth Israel Hospital. Basically, Schwartz is charging that Mt. Sinai is using “segmented review” to try to skirt doing a proper assessment under the State Environmental Quality Review Act (SEQRA) — which contains an environmental review — that is required for projects of greater than 240,000 square feet. (SEQRA is also required for facilities sited next to public parkland, such as Stuyvesant Square Park, which is on Beth Israel’s western side.) Instead, Mt. Sinai has been applying for certificates of need as it closes down and transfers various medical units in Beth Israel in preparation for relocating the historic Gramercy hospital to E. 13th St. and Second Ave. In the latest update, Schwartz recently asked the New York State Department of Health to force Beth Israel to apply SEQRA to its downsizing plan, under which new privately owned residential housing eventually would be built at the former hospital site. He also wrote to Governor Andrew Cuomo and state Attorney General Eric Schneiderman about it.
Child-porn case: In still more Schwartz-related news, his son Jacob Schwartz’s child-porn case was back in court last week, but the proceedings “lasted only about a minute,” we’re told. Word has it that the case is likely to be drawn out over a fairly long period of time, never go to trial and almost surely result in a settlement. Jacob, 29, has admitted the confiscated laptop computer was his and was always in his possession, so there is no arguing he was not aware the copious cache of illegal photos and videos — more than 3,000 and 89, respectively — were on there.
She wore Wu: A Facebook post last week by Susan Brownmiller, the feminist writer icon, about her “hip-hop” walk through the Village would surely get a rise out of Raekwon and Ghostface Killah. “Today I wore my Wu-Tang Clan T-shirt on a stroll thru the Village,” Brownmiller wrote. “Never have I gotten more attention! One guy, after asking politely, even snapped my picture. The attention was because folks are surprised that a woman my age has even heard of Wu-Tang.” Word!
Their Grand challenge: Trying to knock away the final vestiges of former Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver’s Grand St. political machine, a new progressive team of district leader candidates are taking on the Truman Club’s incumbents. Upstarts Caroline Laskow and Lee Berman are running against Karen Blatt and Jacob Goldman on the Lower East Side. Laskow, a documentary filmmaker and author — she co-wrote “The Soup Club Cookbook” with three neighbors — has lived in the Seward Park Co-op since 2003 with her husband and two children, who attend public school. Berman, a lifelong East River Houses resident, has been an active public school parent in the district, serves on East River’s board, and was recently appointed to Community Board 3. He is also the local male Democratic State Committee member. “We want our elected officials to hear our community’s concerns about traffic on Grand St., overcrowded schools and excessive development,” Laskow said. “The Truman Club has done nothing to organize Democrats on Grand St. despite the many challenges facing our neighborhood.” Added Berman, “Ours is a strong Democratic district. We should be joining with other Democrats to engage in meaningful action against Donald Trump’s radical policies. The Truman Club didn’t even hang up a Hillary Clinton poster in its window last year. It’s time for new, progressive leadership on Grand St.” After this year’s Sept. 12 primary election, Laskow, Berman and their allies plan to form a new club called Grand Street Democrats, in order to, as they put it, “further reduce the influence of Silver’s Truman Club on local politics.”
