Fishman vs. Nadel The Community Board 1 Waterfront Committee was hoping to get an update from the Hudson River Park Trust on funding for Piers 25 and 26 Monday night. But when the meeting started, Connie Fishman, president of the Trust, was nowhere to be found.
Julie Nadel, chairperson of the committee, moved on to the second item on the agenda, and then the third. Fishman arrived in the middle of a discussion about the South Street Seaport Museum, but left before the discussion finished.
After the meeting, Nadel said it was too bad the board hadn’t heard anything about the piers, which are in jeopardy after former Gov. Eliot Spitzer tied their funding to the Javits Center project. Nadel shrugged and said she guessed she’d have to put the piers back on next month’s agenda. Hopefully Fishman will either arrive on time or wait her turn.
Technically, Fishman reports to Nadel, who is also a member of the Trust’s board of trustees, but Nadel is one of the Trust’s harshest critics and there is not much love lost between the pair.
Assembly Speaker Shelly Silver put funding for the Tribeca section of the park in the Assembly budget but it’s not clear whether Gov. David Paterson will side with Spitzer, or Silver on the funding source – assuming of course everyone can get State Senate Majority Leader Joe Bruno to go along.
Counterpunching Rocky State Sen. Marty Connor’s camp was none too pleased to read last week’s UnderCover with Rocky Chin’s reference to Connor’s loss of the Senate Democratic leadership six years ago to David Paterson, the man who just became governor.
“David Paterson and all of the Democratic leadership are supporting Marty Connor,” said Marty Algaze, Connor’s spokesperson.
Gov. Paterson, Assembly Speaker Shelly Silver, Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, Comptroller Tom DiNapoli, City Council Speaker Chris Quinn and the Manhattan and Brooklyn beeps, Scott Stringer and yet another Marty, Marty Markowitz, are the headline names who have signed on to Connor’s first big fundraiser at Battery Park City’s Ritz-Carlton on May 8, Algaze said. (Tickets range from $500 – $5,000, but Connor expects to have more affordable fundraisers later in the year.)
Paterson and Connor patched things up years ago, Algaze said and “Rocky has a limited opinion of the real world of politics.” Chin, a former City Council candidate Downtown, is supporting Daniel Squadron, who has the Working Families Party endorsement and is challenging Connor in this year’s Democratic primary.
As far as we know, no politicos named Marty are supporting Squadron.
Freedom Tower tests As steel beams rise to form the 1,776-foot-tall Freedom Tower at the World Trade Center, a laboratory 3,000 miles away is testing the strength of the tower’s façade.
The Construction Consulting Laboratory West, in southern California, subjected a mockup of the Freedom Tower to driving rain and 74-mile-per-hour winds, the San Bernardino Sun reported. The lab used a spray rack and jet propeller to simulate the stormy conditions, and then checked the other side of the 40-foot-by-20-foot steel wall for leaking water.
“Everyone is aware of what happened on 9/11 and everyone is doing a little bit extra just to make sure it all comes out just right,” Steve Stanec, sales and marketing manager for the lab, told the Sun.
The lab will also test the wall’s resistance to heat, earthquakes and large weights.
The noisy operations led the Sun to comment that it’s fortunate no neighbors live near the lab. Too bad the actual Freedom Tower couldn’t be built in similar isolation, saving World Trade Center neighbors a few headaches.
Political war tribunal In a foreshadowing of what could be a no-holds-barred Council District 1 race, Pete Gleason and Julie Menin, who are both attorneys, are still going at it after Gleason’s recent stealth acquisition of her Internet domain names.
Gleason expects an arbitrator should have a final and binding decision within two weeks on whether he or Menin is the rightful owner of juliemenin.com, juliemenin.org and juliemenin.net. Menin, likewise, said “a tribunal” is handling it.
“He wrote to my attorney and he made it clear he wouldn’t give the names back,” Menin said of Gleason, whom she blasted as having a “complete and utter lack of integrity.”
Gleason, for his part, says Menin should have been swifter and known to buy her own domain names before he did.
Book Rich Jenny Rich, who taught fourth and fifth graders at P.S. 234 from 2002-5 and is now raising her 16-month-old son Ethan with her husband in New Jersey, has set up a Web site to help parents find books for their children. Parents can search ethansbookshelf.com for Rich’s picks of books by genre and age appropriateness for free, and can also buy them through Amazon. “This site was built off of my love of books,” Rich told us.
