Minerva Update

Minerva’s view of the Statue of Liberty may be safe:

A controversial condo that threatens to block the famed wave between the Statue of Liberty and a Green-Wood Cemetery icon suffered another setback last week when the local community board voted to downsize the project.

Developers hoped the 614 Seventh Ave. building would tower 70 feet in height, but Community Board 7 members voted to limit it to 50 feet, arguing that new city zoning regulations applied to the lot.

“The community didn’t feel it was appropriate to reward developers for bad behavior,” said Board 7 chair Randy Peers, adding developer Chaim Nussencweig’s project had been tagged with five active Buildings Department violations.

Nussencweig had struck a deal with Green-Wood Cemetery officials earlier this month to cut out a portion of the 38-unit condo to preserve the famed salute between the cemetery’s statue of Minerva and Lady Liberty.

Critics of the redesign called it a peephole that would save only a sliver of the current panoramic views of Red Hook, the harbor and parts of New Jersey.

New rules went into effect last November limiting the height of new buildings in Greenwood Heights, but projects with finished foundations aren’t subject to the new zoning.

The Buildings Dept. ruled later that month that the Seventh Ave. condo’s foundation hadn’t been finished and froze work on the project.

See also: “Greenwood Cemetery Vista Saved?”

Everyone Knows Women Are Too Emotional To Inspect Track

Maybe instead of spending $6.7 million on “platform conductors” whose job it is to make sure everyone is aboard the train, the MTA can ante up a little bit for sensitivity training:

While most of the city sleeps, Ronda Rivers treads where few women dare go: the dark and dangerous subway tunnels below downtown Brooklyn.

A sledgehammer slung over a shoulder like a baseball bat, the 36-year-old city track inspector steers clear of the electrified third rail and its deadly current.

When a train rumbles around a sharp curve, she nimbly pulls herself up several feet to a narrow catwalk, dropping back down when the roaring rig passes.

She is the Transit Authority’s only female track inspector and one of just 21 women who work in the division, a difficult assignment also held by about 1,800 men.

“I don’t like working behind a desk, pushing pencils,” she said during a brief predawn break on a recent morning at the Pacific St. station. “I like physical activity. I’m ambitious. I feel I can do what a man can do.”

But somebody who walks the same tunnels has a problem with that.

Last month, Rivers and Tanya Jerry, 30, a flagger who alerts train operators when track workers are in the tunnels, found a blizzard of derogatory graffiti.

The sexist messages near the Pacific St. station were written in the same kind of yellow chalk issued to TA maintenance supervisors and track inspectors.

“Women should be cleaners, not track inspectors,” the graffiti read. “Women don’t belong on track.”

The Pacific St. tunnel is part of the women’s assigned area, one of the most dangerous in the system because of its many curves.

Though some male co-workers and managers have made inappropriate and offensive remarks in the past, Rivers said, the graffiti bothered her even more.

“I was offended and it was humiliating,” she said. “It was very hostile.”

NASCAR Nation: Staten Island

That Staten Island NASCAR project is moving forward, ever so gradually:

Staten Island residents will soon get the chance to have their first official say on whether a NASCAR race track should be built on the West Shore.

The Department of City Planning hopes to hold its first public hearing on the track in early April — assuming track developer International Speedway Corp. responds quickly enough to the department’s latest round of questions.

There have been 63 Nextel Cup races, including today’s season-opening Daytona 500, since ISC announced it wanted to break into New York City. The motorsports giant and its politically-connected development partner, the Related Companies, want the first Staten Island race to run in 2010, drawing in around 82,500 fans to watch NASCAR in the country’s most coveted media market.

When the races aren’t running, a 50-acre big-box retail center — about as big as the Staten Island Mall, minus the three department stores — is expected to attract close to 2,000 more cars during a peak hour on the weekend.

. . .

The developers, meanwhile, have responded with a detailed transportation scenario unlike anything at the country’s other NASCAR tracks. They want to bring in the bulk of the audience from off-Island locations with 83 ferries and at least 643 buses. They would restrict car traffic to the site to 8,400 cars and 635 recreational vehicles for fans and race teams.

On the public stage, though, it all starts with April’s formal hearing, where both official types and the average citizen will help determine the scope of what must be studied.

. . .

Within seven months, Community Board 2, the borough president and the City Planning Commission all get to weigh in with recommendations, and City Planning will hold another public hearing.

After that — and before the seven months run out — the City Council votes to approve or reject the proposal.

Declaring Jihad On Potholes

Worst pun of the weekend is the Daily News’ “His Hole-y War”:

Death to potholes!

The city will begin a massive blitz today, dispatching 30 crews to fill more than 1,200 of the craters with 90 tons of asphalt each day.

“Potholes, potholes. Potholes, Potholes,” Mayor Bloomberg bemoaned on his weekly WABC-AM show yesterday. “There’s probably few more annoying things than driving down the street, hitting a pothole — and, sadly, potholes are probably always going to be with us.”

While the mild winter had reduced the number of street cavities, the city’s Department of Transportation remains committed to making the roads as smooth as possible, Bloomberg said.

. . .

Transportation Commissioner Iris Weinshall conceded the seven-day-a-week blitz, slated to end in mid-March, could increase traffic.

“If you get stuck in traffic a little bit this weekend and you see a crew working on the highway or on a street, don’t get so angry,” she said. “It’s because these guys are out there doing their jobs.”

Applying the Anthraxical poetry technique to the situation results in the following:

You Can Not Stop Us
We Have This Asphalt
You Die Now
Are You Afraid?
Death To Potholes
Death To Cave-Ins
Hizzoner Is Great

Why Would Anyone Do That?

A “small but influential clan” of fashion-conscious New Yorkers are avoiding watching the weather, confounding — and making rich — clothes designers everywhere:

House keys? Check. Cellphone? Check. Last minute consult with weatherman. Er . . . In planning her day, Melissa Briskman did give the weather a cursory thought. “Before leaving the house I stuck my head out the window,” said Ms. Briskman, an actress and English teacher, who shivered perceptibly as she waited outside Cafe Gitane on Mott Street on Saturday.

Her only defense against the wicked storm forecast for that day was the light wool coat she had pulled halfheartedly over a tissue-weight tunic and leggings. “I just wear what I want to wear when I want to wear it,” she said, “and I make it work.”

Earlier in the week Patricia Black, the director of a fashion showroom in New York, just as determinedly blew winter a raspberry. Ms. Black arrived at work in a summery dress of white cotton eyelet. “I knew it was awfully cold out,” she said. “I was thinking, ‘Oh, maybe this dress would be a little breath of springtime in February.'”

Ms. Briskman and Ms. Black are members of a small but influential clan of New Yorkers, mostly young, who in a week when temperatures plunged to the 20’s ignored sullen skies and stinging winds and, along with them, conventional notions of dressing for the season. Sure, some wore leggings, granddaddy sweaters, chunky boots and jeans, but mainly to set off their filmy tops and flowery dresses.