City Hall baby
How do City Hall inaugurations affect Downtown moms’ birth cycles? Sai Jin Liu, 32, gave birth to Vicky Tang at 12:01 a.m., Jan. 1, 2006, at New York Downtown Hospital, making Vicki the city’s first baby of the New Year and Yi Ming Tang, 34, the first happy father. A few hours later and a few blocks away, Mayor Mike Bloomberg gave his inaugural speech at City Hall. The last time the hospital delivered the first was four years ago, the day of Bloomberg’s first inauguration.
Park treat
Speaking of the mayor’s New Year’s Day ceremonies, the invite-only guests got a rare treat — a walk through City Hall Park’s north end — on their way to the after-ceremony party at the old Emigrant Savings building on Chambers St.
The north end and plaza have been closed to the public for security reasons since 9/11. No one in the Sunday crowd stopped to play chess on the park’s now-private, “public” tables.
Skip Blumberg, president of Friends of City Hall Park, said reopening it for such a limited purpose sends a bad message.
“The question is, is it the mayor’s private garden?” he asked. “We remember the lawn and we miss it.”
Mayor Bloomberg ordered some of the park to be reopened the week he took office in 2002, but kept the rest closed.
At the City Hall Park tree lighting a month ago, Blumberg raised the subject with Bloomberg, and the mayor said he’d at least think about moving the checkpoints to reopen more of the park.
Critical parents
Bill Di Paola, director of Time’s Up!, tells us a recent New York Times article about alternative-sticker-wearing undercover spies infiltrating the monthly Critical Mass bicycle rides with the assistance of police officers has people worried. “My parents are starting to freak out,” he said. “They don’t want me to give any interviews.”
Burying the lead
According to Abby Wilson, press secretary for Councilmember Eva Moskowitz, they weren’t too happy a recent article about Moskowitz’s upcoming job working with New York City charter schools that they pitched to The New York Times wound up on the back page of the weekend Metro section — by the obituaries, no less. In the article, Moskowitz, who is term-limited out of the Council, also said she plans to run for mayor in the future. Wilson has plans too. She headed to remote eastern South Africa last week to educate school children about H.I.V./AIDS and live in a mud hut for about a year. Asked about whether Madelyn Wils, former Community Board 1 chairperson, had indeed supported Moskowitz for borough president as some suspect, Wilson, fielding one of her last press questions before departing, said, “We don’t recall her openly supporting [Moskowitz].”
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