Quinn under fire
City Council Speaker Chris Quinn’s cozying up to Mayor Mike Bloomberg has no doubt helped her in budget negotiations and perhaps in a 2009 mayoral run, but the first open lesbian or gay leader of the Council is seeing cracks in her base because of her support for the mayor’s policies. Housing Works, an AIDS/H.I.V. rights advocacy group, disrupted Quinn’s City Hall pride party and distributed fans at the June 24 Gay Pride parade with Quinn’s picture and a question: “Proud to do nothing?”
The group wants city services extended to people who are H.I.V. positive. Quinn opposes the proposal for cost reasons and told Gay City News that there “is no elected official from any community who is going to agree with every member of their community all the time.”
Quinn, whose district includes Hudson Square, is also backing the mayor’s traffic pricing plan but she is not sure if she agrees with him that there is no need for an environmental impact statement before the three-year experiment. When asked if an E.I.S. should be done first, she shrugged her shoulders.
Fits over Fiterman
The Bloomberg administration may have hoped that when its transportation commissioner, Iris Weinshall — wife of the senior senator from New York, Chuck Schumer — left her job to become vice chancellor for facilities planning and construction at the City University of New York, that she might remember her old friends at City Hall, but we hear Weinshall is not too thrilled with Dep. Mayor Dan Doctoroff’s idea of moving the Signature Theater – once slated for the World Trade Center site – to a new Fiterman Hall planned across the street. If the city wants to redesign Fiterman, Weinshall wants to get details soon so she can have the redesign soon, sources say.
Doctoroff told Downtown Express a few months ago that he got scared when he saw super-architect Frank Gehry’s cost estimate for a combined Joyce-Signature theater space at the W.T.C. The city then told Gehry to stick to dance and forget about the acting.
Hudson Square high
A new 24-story, high-end, high-rise is planned in Hudson Square at 22 Renwick St., according to the guys at Knockout Demolition who were razing a one-story garage there on Monday. The developers are reportedly Orange Management, a top company, the crew’s manager said.
Buying on empty
Trinity Real Estate has just put 201 – 211 Hudson St. on the market. The asking price for the bulky, 12-story, 320,000-square-foot building with a k a addresses on Canal, Desbrosses and Watts Sts. is $130 million. The building is promised to be delivered vacant, which may be bad news for the Tribeca Rooftop event space, the large ground floor deli and the building’s other tenants. The buyer will be across the street from the 92nd St. Y’s new space under construction on Hudson St.
River rumor
We hear Gov. Eliot Spitzer is likely to name Alex Matthiessen to the Hudson River Park Trust’s board of trustees. Matthiessen, the president of Riverkeeper, the environmental group made famous by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., is not rumored to be in line for the chairperson position being vacated by Trip Dorkey.
Musical jobs
Dirk McCall, Councilmember Alan Gerson’s former chief of staff, will start as the executive director Greenwich Village-Chelsea Chamber of Commerce July 15, replacing Bob Zuckerman who will explore the Gowanus Canal as he runs the Brooklyn waterway’s development corporation and conservancy. McCall worked most recently for an autism foundation.
