No Other Path! No Other Way! No Day But Today!

And at the end of the day, not everyone who has a human interest feature written about them is able to have it begin like this:

Anne Hanavan arrived at her Lower East Side shop in a leopard-print shirt, tight jeans and a bad mood. “Look,” she said, tugging open the steel gate, “If all you want is a story about a prostitute, I’m not interested. Go talk to someone else, there are plenty of former prostitutes around here.”

The real story, she said, was her shop, a tiny clothing and novelty store on Ludlow St. called Lost Shoe Productions, and her burgeoning film and fashion career. Hanavan, a striking woman standing 5 foot 8 inches (before the heels) with straight blonde hair, heavy-lidded blue eyes and a hard, angular jaw, is not the kind of woman you’d want to challenge.

Which is to say, this paragraph will be followed by 26 others full of lurid details about what it is like to be an East Village prostitute! D’oh!

“Sixty-Five Cents Worth Of Hope”

A Staten Island filmmaker wants to make a made-for-television feature about the two planes that collided in midair and crashed in both Park Slope and Staten Island in 1960:

It was the worst aviation disaster in history, but the December 1960 collision that sent airliners crashing into Park Slope and Staten Island has never been turned into a movie.

That will change if filmmaker D.J. Donnelly realizes his hope of filming “82-6/266 — The Cries in the Sky” in time to air on Dec. 16.

That will be the 46th anniversary of the midair collision and double crash that killed 134 people, including six on the ground. The death toll was the worst in aviation history at that time.

“This is mainly for the people hurt by this crash — the victims,” said Donnelly, 45, a Staten Island native whose family witnessed the tragedy. “They’ve been forgotten about totally.”

Negotiations are underway with two television networks, but Donnelly insisted filming will begin in June — and be followed by twin memorials near the crash sites.

To ensure accuracy, Donnelly has interviewed people like Raymond Garcia-Figueroa, who witnessed the tragedies unfold.

Garcia-Figueroa, then 15, was approaching Park Slope when he saw flames shooting from buildings on Sterling Place and Seventh Ave., where a DC-8 jet owned by United Airlines landed 8 miles from the collision.

Garcia-Figueroa watched the destruction unfold but was too stunned to help critically wounded passengers, including 11-year-old Stephen Baltz, who died 27 hours later.

“The Cries In The Sky”? That’s terrible. And what’s with the numbers: “82-6/266”? How do you even say that?

A suggestion: Why not have the title evoke the story of Stephen Baltz? It is actually really interesting:

All of the occupants of the DC-8 were killed instantly, except Stephen Baltz, an 11-year old redhead from Wilmette, Illinois, who planned to spend Christmas with relatives in Yonkers. His father delivered him to O’Hare that morning, and he was to meet his mother and sister at Idlewild; they had flown in the day before. As the plane hit the ground and exploded in flames, Stephen was thrown from the tail section and onto a snowbank, where residents rolled him in the snow to put out his burning clothing. Though conscious and repeatedly calling for his mother and father, Stephen had inhaled flames and smoke, and also sustained severe burns and broken bones.

. . .

Still conscious after his ordeal, Stephen Baltz later described the crash to doctors at the hospital. “I remember looking out the plane window at the snow below covering the city. It looked like a picture out of a fairy book. Then all of a sudden there was an explosion. The plane started to fall and people started to scream. I held on to my seat and then the plane crashed. That’s all I remember until I woke up.”

Newspaper reports said that people all over the country prayed for Stephen, whose courage and sweet disposition won the hearts of everyone who met him. In spite of heroic efforts by doctors and nurses at Methodist, Stephen Baltz died peacefully at 1 o’clock the following afternoon, his mother and father by his side. A small bronze memorial to the crash victims containing the boy’s blackened pocket change — 65 cents — was set up at the hospital . . .”

I’m thinking something along the lines of “Sixty-Five Cents Worth Of Hope”. Advantages: It’s punchier, more original and probably a little easier to say. Disadvantages: It’s actually really depressing to think about.

Southwest corner of Seventh Avenue and Sterling Place, ca. February 2004, where a United Airlines DC-8 plane crashed on December 16, 1960:

Wall? We Don’t Need No Stinking Wall!

Contractors expanding the quirky 5-car-only South Ferry subway station have unearthed a big 18th- or even 17th-century chunk of New York’s archaeological past:

Three weeks after the Metropolitan Transportation Authority started digging a subway tunnel under Battery Park, the project hit a wall. A really old wall. Possibly the oldest wall still standing in Manhattan.

It was a 45-foot-long section of a stone wall that archaeologists believe is a remnant of the original battery that protected the Colonial settlement at the southern tip of the island. Depending on which archaeologist you ask, it was built in the 1760’s or as long ago as the late 17th century.

Either way, it would be the oldest piece of a fortification known to exist in Manhattan and the only one to survive the Revolutionary War period, said Joan H. Geismar, president of the Professional Archaeologists of New York City.

“To my knowledge, it’s the only remain of its kind in Manhattan,” Ms. Geismar said. “It’s a surviving Colonial military structure. That’s what makes it unique.”

Among the items found around the wall are a well-preserved halfpenny coin dated 1744 and shards of smoking pipes and Delft pottery, said Amanda Sutphin, director of archaeology for the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission.

Now it seems that the wall is just in the way:

What is clear about the battery wall, which sits on bedrock about nine feet below street level, is that it is in the way of the transportation authority’s plan to build a section of tunnel for the No. 1 train that will connect to a new South Ferry station.

. . .

For the past month, work on the tunnel there has been at a standstill while officials of the various city agencies involved have debated how to proceed with construction of the tunnel while preserving some or all of the wall.

The authority’s contractor on the project, Schiavone Construction of Secaucus, N.J., was being paid extra to complete its work in Battery Park quickly so that the park could reopen by summer. In exchange for the right to tear up the park, the authority agreed to spend more than $10 million cleaning up the mess and helping to reconfigure the park as the Parks Department has envisioned. That redesign would include a new bicycle path to link the riverfront on the east and west sides.

But the contractor is already a few weeks behind schedule, and engineers are concerned about a prolonged delay. One idea the authority floated was to remove a three-foot-long section of the wall to be preserved elsewhere, then plow ahead with the excavation.

As Kenneth Jackson says, “History is for losers.”

Alternatively, you could dissemble the wall and reuse the bricks. And — as exciting as that sounds! — that would be . . . totally unsatisfying and archaeologically bereft:

“This is thrilling,” said Warrie Price, president of the Battery Conservancy, a nonprofit organization that supports revitalization of the Battery. Ms. Price added that she hoped the wall could be reconstructed, at least in part, above ground in the park.

“If these stones are able to be reused,” she said, “it would be wonderful to be able to actually touch this history.”

That wall is gone, folks — history is for losers!

Queens Love

Manhattan may have the Empire State Building and Central Park (and Rockefeller Center and the Chrysler Building and the UN . . . oh, fine, I won’t try to compare!), but Queens has a Civil War-era fortification that has been reopened as a park facility:

The Fort Totten Battery was officially opened to the public yesterday with the completion of a $740,000 project to beautify and improve the safety of the historic site.

. . .

“This is a major facility, a big secret, but more and more people are learning about it,” said [state Sen. Frank Padavan (R-C-Bellerose)] calling it who called it [sic!] the “most unique fortification anywhere in the northeast and perhaps in the entire eastern seaboard.”

. . .

The opening of the Civil War-era battery is the first part of a two-phase project, said Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe. The second phase — the opening of a tunnel and the rehabilitation of a visitors’ center –will cost about $800,000.

And there’s more to come, said Benepe.

Bloomberg’s office has allocated some $12.6 million in the city budget for the 50-acre park — including $3.6 million in the current fiscal year — “for use to be determined to continue creation of the park,” the commissioner said.

Additional allocations are expected to come from both the state and federal sources, he added. A “Fort Totten Battery Historic Preservation and Interpretive Plan” released in 1999 calls for a total of four distinct phases of rehabilitation of the battery area.

The third phase would restore the historic landscape and open up the Endicott Batteries at the top of the fort’s hill to limited tours. The final phase would more fully open the Endicott Batteries to tours.

Totten was built as “a sort of twin to Fort Schuyler,” which is in the Bronx on the other side of the entrance to the East River from Long Island Sound, said Benepe.

The twin forts were intended to protect this entrance to the city during and after the Civil War, but work on Fort Totten stopped in 1876 and it was left unfinished because it had become outmoded as a type of military fortification, the commissioner said.

Guided tours in the winter months will be limited to 2 p.m. on Saturdays and 11 a.m. on Sundays, said a park spokeswoman.

Other tours can be arranged by calling (718) 352-4793, ext.18.

Now That’s Classy

I was a little curious how the plan to leave an empty seat in honor of Rosa Parks on every bus yesterday would turn out. Generally alright — except for one idiot who now has been publicly shamed:

Fiona Humphreys won’t move to the back of the bus – not even for Rosa Parks.

Told she was sitting in a symbolic seat reserved for Parks on city buses yesterday to honor the 50th anniversary of the day the civil rights legend refused to move to the back of a Montgomery, Ala., bus, Humphreys refused to get up.

The 55-year-old British tourist riding the M-1 bus said she knew of Parks, but added, “I think I’ve got a right to sit here.”

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority taped posters with a photograph of Parks on the first seat behind drivers on all city buses, asking passengers to leave them empty in her honor. Transit systems from around the country joined in the tribute.

More public shame from the Times:

In Jackson Heights, Queens, on a westbound Q66 at 90th Street and Northern Boulevard, a sign taped right behind the bus driver was repeatedly ignored.

After several people had sat in the front seat, Sergio Amicamo, 40, a construction worker from Jackson Heights, also chose to sit there. He was asked what he thought of the sign. Mr. Amicamo read it quickly, shuddered, then uttered a loud profanity in dismay. He scooted out of the seat.

“I didn’t realize it was there,” Mr. Amicamo said. “It’s history. It was a major event. It means freedom.”

Some riders on the same bus continued to sit in the front seat, even when they knew why it was supposed to remain empty.

Joanne Satalino, who is white and from Queens, said: “Oh, no, I ain’t giving mine up. There’s no place left to sit.”

When it was pointed out that there were empty seats nearby, Ms. Satalino said she would surrender the seat to a rider with a cane.