Sculpture Park As Economic Indicator

With congestion pricing teetering on collapse and the faltering real estate market, property owners implement back-up plans:

The words “sculpture park” bring the rolling expanses of Orange County to mind (Storm King Art Center) or, at least, the river’s edge in Queens (Socrates Sculpture Park). They do not instantly conjure up the traffic-jammed corner of Varick and Canal Streets.

Yet that is where New York’s newest sculpture park will be established: on a recently cleared block owned by the Episcopal Trinity Church, paralleling Juan Pablo Duarte Square on the Avenue of the Americas.

“When they’re idling in traffic trying to get through the Holland Tunnel, they’ll have something to look at,” said Maggie Boepple, the president of the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, which will curate the sculpture park on behalf of Trinity Real Estate, managers of the church’s extensive holdings downtown.

“It’s a tremendous gift to the city,” Ms. Boepple said.

Because Trinity has no current redevelopment plans for the 37,000-square-foot, trapezium-shaped site, it may remain a sculpture park until 2010 or 2011. “This is a temporary arrangement, but we expect it will be temporary for a couple of years,” said Carl Weisbrod, the president of Trinity Real Estate and a member of the cultural council board.

. . .

“We want to make it very clear to the community that this is a temporary gift,” Ms. Boepple said. “That’s all it is. And I hope that’s respected so we can continue to do this elsewhere.”

Maybe Congestion Pricing Will Help After All . . .

The drive-in-a-garage theater is drawing dozens back to the movies:

As he stepped into the small storefront on Norfolk Street, Stephen Kushner, a hairdresser from Long Island, was transported to a youth spent steaming up car windows with his steady at drive-in theaters.

A movie screen hung in front of a single blue 1965 Ford Falcon convertible. A romantic starry sky — actually tiny light clusters peeking through sheer black fabric — stretched across to the side.

“Hey, can we make out?” he asked aloud, eliciting a giggle from Mr. Kushner’s wife and a gag from their 18-year-old daughter.

Stuffed inside the 250-square-foot space is DRV-IN, Manhattan’s only (and quite possibly the world’s smallest) drive-in cinema. The vintage Ford, parked in front of a 102-inch screen, has a shiny red interior that seats up to six cinephiles.

. . .

To see a movie, patrons can visit 139norfolk.com, select a show time and a title, and pay $75. Sometimes the roster of movies is predetermined — in February 102 high school movies from 1950 onward were shown — but any film may be requested as long as there is time to buy it on DVD.

The Fake Prada Window Shopping Theory Of Policing

Do the police need something to do? Because doing the fashion industry’s dirty work seems like it has little to do with public safety*:

Cops launched a massive predawn raid on counterfeiters in Chinatown yesterday, seizing about $1 million in phony brand-name apparel.

Sunglasses, watches and handbags with fake Coach, Prada and Rolex labels were taken from 32 stores in what Mayor Bloomberg called “one of the biggest takedowns ever of trademark counterfeiters.”

“It has been one of the most notorious knock-off shopping malls in the five boroughs,” Bloomberg said of the three-building strip along Canal Street.

*And this link to public safety seems like a stretch for the NYPD to make.

She Stoops To Ponder

Stoop culture, alive and well and un- and underemployed:

Last summer, two young girls appeared on Charles Street between Bleecker and West 4th Streets. They perched themselves on the front steps of the brownstone at No. 90, and they’ve stayed there, nearly every day, chatting and smoking and playing with their dogs from late morning to early evening, even in the bitter cold. Block residents are used to celebrities — Sarah Jessica and Matthew live there, after all — but they’ve been flummoxed by these new ladies of leisure, who’ve inspired a flurry of intra-block e-mails with titles like “The Girls” that report sightings as late as 4:30 a.m. Few Charles Streeters seem to know who they are or why they’re there.

You can learn a lot by asking. Haley, the brunette, is 23 and from Alabama; blonde Rebecca is 22 and from Pennsylvania. (They declined to provide their last names.) They grew up spending vacations together with their best-friend grandmas before moving to New York last year, basically for kicks. Haley, who dropped out of premed in Alabama, just started English-lit classes at Hunter. “I don’t like to write, but I like grammar,” she says. Rebecca basically does nothing, nor does she know what she wants to do. They share an apartment a few blocks west; their parents paid months of rent in advance. But even in the dead of winter, they prefer the stoop to their living room — although they chafe at their status as block icons. “We’re not into the fame thing,” Haley says. “But this is what we do.”

All Bloomberg Needs Now Is To Give Kanye An Opportunity To Say That He Doesn’t Care About Black People

With any luck, this should make that ridiculous VP talk go away as well:

The street may not be much to look at now, say people who grew up in Harlem during the 1950s and 1960s, but back then, 125th Street seemed like the bustling center of the world.

At Moore’s book shop, a lawyer named Thurgood Marshall was often seen browsing through volumes of African-American history, while at the corner of Lenox Avenue, Malcolm X could be heard proselytizing as a young boxer named Cassius Clay, later known as Muhammad Ali, listened intently among the crowd.

Up the street, Aretha Franklin or Stevie Wonder performed periodically at the Apollo Theater, and Fidel Castro once conferred with Nikita Khrushchev over lunch at the Hotel Theresa. Blumstein’s may not have been Macy’s, but it did have black mannequins and, at Christmastime, a black Santa Claus.

The street has long been in decline, though national chain stores like Starbucks have taken an interest in it more recently. Now the Bloomberg administration has proposed the most sweeping zoning changes for the street since 1961, when there was a citywide rezoning and 125th Street was at the heart of African-American cultural life.

The rezoning, which is expected to be approved by the city’s Planning Commission in the coming weeks, is part of package of city plans that call for the thoroughfare to be transformed from a low-rise boulevard lined with businesses like hair salons and buffet-style soul food restaurants into a regional business hub with office towers as high as 29 stories and more than 2,000 new market-rate condominium apartments, as well as hotels, bookstores, art galleries and nightclubs.

The corridor between 124th and 126th Streets from Broadway to Second Avenue would be rezoned, which could ultimately force out more than 70 small businesses and their 975 workers and might lead to the razing of some of the street’s century-old buildings.

. . .

“This would be signing Harlem’s death warrant,” said Craig Schley, executive director of a group called VOTE People, which opposes the rezoning. “It is part of the continuing ‘Katrina-fication’ of Harlem, carried out with a pen instead of a hurricane. They intend to remove people in this area, plain and simple.”