The BroadsheetDAILY ~ 11/20/20 ~ Empathy Emporium Trinity Church Offers Food to Those In Need

Empathy Emporium

Trinity Church Offers Food to Those In Need

Trinity Church is doubling down on its longstanding commitment providing assistance for those experiencing food insecurity, both in Lower Manhattan, and throughout the five boroughs.

Trinity Church has launched its Compassion Market to aid New Yorkers experiencing food insecurity during this economic downturn unleashed by the pandemic coronavirus. Although Lower Manhattan may not seem like a community where very many people suffer from need, it is. In addition the hundreds of local homeless men who camp out beneath the FDR Drive every night, one of out every five elderly residents City-wide (a total of more than 200,000 seniors) relies on soup kitchens and food pantries for at least part of their nutrition, while three out of ten veterans are dependent on the same outlets for sustenance.

That’s why Trinity operates the Compassion Market on Wednesdays from noon to 3:00 pm at St. Paul’s Chapel (209 Broadway, between Fulton and Vesey Streets). Individuals may pick up 15 healthy, pre-packaged, and shelf-stable meals (enough for five days), as well as personal hygiene kits—all free of charge. The meals are provided by Great Performances, a Bronx-based catering and hospitality firm that has shifted its focus to helping feed New Yorkers during the pandemic.

Appointments can be made via the Plentiful App (available for free download at www.plentifulapp.com), or by calling Trinity’s resource number (917-594-6300), between 2:00 and 5:00 pm on weekdays. Walk-ins are also accepted on a first come, first served basis, while supplies last.

In addition to providing food for those in need in Lower Manhattan, Trinity also donates 2,500 grab-and-go food bags each week to ten local partner organizations in the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Queens.

And Trinity’s longstanding Brown Bag Lunch Program continues, albeit in truncated form, owing to COVID-19 precautions. Anyone needing food is invited pick up a free to-go bag at the Trinity Church security booth on Broadway, at Wall Street, Monday through Friday afternoons, while supplies last.

Matthew Fenton

Letter

Re “Not With a Bang…”

(BroadsheetDAILY November 18)

To the Editor:

I want to report some confusing inaccuracies in Matthew Fenton’s article about Poets House’s temporary suspension of operations.The key word is: temporary. Poets House will be taking a pause to restructure its operations, realign resources and preserve its world-class collections. Poets House will reopen when the pandemic is over.

The organization has a stable Board, which has given generously throughout the pandemic to keep the full staff on salary with full benefits. But the Board has made the difficult decision to downsize now to ensure that the organization and collections survive in this beautiful space. Emergency funds are harder to come by and expenses are outpacing income in this unprecedented time. The organization is using its limited reserve funds to pay staff severance and vacation pay.

While Poets House did enter the pandemic with a relatively modest operating deficit from last year—for the first time—the six figure numbers reported in the article as deficits include depreciation on the substantial investments in our physical space, a condition of our long-term tenancy.

And, finally, although I will be stepping down, I will stay on temporarily for succession planning and visioning of library services in a post-COVID world. Our long-time Managing Director and CFO, Jane Preston, is not retiring and will manage Poets House business.

Now, and always, I want to thank the downtown community: the Poets House space in Battery Park City and the lively presence of readers, writers and students from all over the city has been one of the supreme joys of my life.

Lee Briccetti, Executive Director

Poets House

Scooting Down the Westside (video clip)

The Downtown Calendar

Friday November 20

Today through November 27

National Museum of the American Indian

The National Museum of the American Indian’s Native Cinema Showcase is an annual celebration of the best in Native film. This year, for the 20th-anniversary showcase, the museum presents the full program online, streaming new films, fan favorite classics, and conversations with filmmakers. The showcase provides a unique forum for engagement with Native filmmakers and stories from Indigenous communities throughout the Western Hemisphere and Arctic. Free

12NOON

Poets House

Poet, novelist, essayist, and translator Kazim Ali reads from his newest collection The Voice of Sheila Chandra (Alice James Books, 2020), from San Diego, CA.

1PM

Museum of American Finance

Panel discussion. Interest rates have been low since the Global Financial Crisis. With COVID-19, they are now even lower and seem unlikely to rise for years from current multi-century lows. How will this impact investors and fixed income markets? How are important fixed-income investors responding to this new paradigm? Free

7PM

Gibney Dance

Online performance via Zoom. Michelle Boulé will present excerpts from 3-4 different works. The leading theme or topic is how her own journey of healing, growth, and self-inquiry has shown up thematically in her work–the subjects she chooses to research, the structures she then created, and the ensuing understanding she gained (aka lessons learned). She hopes to present this evening in the context of how dance has been a great teacher and guide for her and to share the growth that it has asked her to undertake, as well as the foundation it has given her to expand her life into new arenas. Free

CLASSIFIEDS & PERSONALS

Swaps & Trades, Respectable Employment, Lost and Found

To place a listing, contact editor@ebroadsheet.com

The Tale of the Ticker Tape, or How Adversity and Spontaneity Hatched a New York Tradition

What was Planned as a Grand Affair became a Comedy of Errors

New York’s first ticker-tape parade erupted spontaneously from bad weather

and an over-zealous stockbroker.

While the festivities in New York Harbor didn’t go as scripted that afternoon, the spontaneous gesture it generated from the brokerage houses lining Broadway famously lives on more than a century later.

On October 28, 1886, Liberty Enlightening the World was to be unveiled to New York City and the world as it stood atop its tall base on Bedloe’s Island. But the morning mist had turned to afternoon fog, blurring the view of the statue from revelers on the Manhattan shore and the long parade of three hundred ships on the Hudson River.

What was planned as a grand affair-with President Grover Cleveland as the main speaker-became a comedy of errors. The fog prevented efficient communication between the dignitaries on the island and the ships awaiting orders to fire their salutes and blast their horns at the given signal.

Even the dramatic unveiling moment itself went awry. To read more…

John Simko

TODAY IN HISTORY

November 20

Dali

1272 – Edward I proclaimed King of England

1407 – A truce between John the Fearless, Duke of Burgundy and Louis of Valois, Duke of Orléans is agreed under the auspices of John, Duke of Berry. Orléans would be assassinated three days later by Burgundy.

1637 – Peter Minuit and first Swedish immigrants sail to Delaware sail

1789 – New Jersey is first state to ratify Bill of Rights

1795 – Curacao government forbids slave work on Sunday

1805 – Beethoven’s “Fidelio,” premieres in Vienna

1866 – Pierre Lalemont patents rotary crank bicycle

1873 – Rival cities of Buda and Pest unite to form the capital of Hungary

1889 – Gustav Mahler’s 1st Symphony

1890 – Pope Leo XIII encyclical “On Slavery in the Missions”

1902 – Geo Lefevre & Henri Desgrange create Tour de France bicycle race

1920 – Nobel Peace Prize awarded to President W Wilson

1923 – Garrett Morgan invents and patents traffic signal

1929 – Salvador Dali’s first one-man show

1938 – First documented anti-semitic remarks over US radio by Father Coughlin

1947 – “Meet the Press” makes network TV debut on NBC

1948 – US balloon reaches height of 42.7 km (record) (26.5miles)

1959 – Alison Simko, co-founder of The Broadsheet, born in upstate New York

1959 – WABC fires Alan Freed over payola scandal

1962 – Mickey Mantle wins AL MVP

1962 – USSR agrees to remove bombers from Cuba, and US lifts blockade

1977 – Egyptian President Sadat became first Arab leader to address Israeli Knesset

1980 – Steve Ptacek in Solar Challenger makes first solar-powered flight

1985 – Microsoft Windows 1.0 is released.

1990 – US 68th manned space mission STS 38 (Atlantis 7) returns from space

1998 – A court in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan declares accused terrorist Osama bin Laden “a man without a sin” in regard to the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania.

1998 – The first module of the International Space Station, Zarya, is launched.

President elect Joseph Biden

Births

1603 – Fasilides, Ethiopian emperor (d. 1667)

1715 – Pierre Charles Le Monnier, French astronomer (d. 1799)

1776 – Ignaz Schuppanzigh, Austrian violinist (d. 1830)

1889 – Edwin Hubble, American astronomer and cosmologist (d. 1953)

1892 – James Collip, Canadian biochemist and academic, co-discovered insulin (d. 1965)

1908 – Alistair Cooke, British-American journalist and author (d. 2004)

1913 – Charles Berlitz, American linguist (d. 2003)

1925 – Robert F. Kennedy, 64th United States Attorney General (d. 1968)

1942 – Joe Biden, President-elect.

1946 – Duane Allman, American singer-songwriter and guitarist (d. 1971)

1948 – John R. Bolton, 25th United States Ambassador to the United Nations

1956 – Bo Derek, American actress and producer

Deaths

1480 – Eleanor of Scotland, Scottish princess (b. 1433)

1910 – Leo Tolstoy, Russian author and playwright (b. 1828)

1973 – Allan Sherman, American actor, comedian, and producer (b. 1924)

2006 – Robert Altman, American director, producer, and screenwriter (b. 1925)

courtesy historyorb.com, Wikipedia and NYTimes.com

Homeless for the Holidays

Judge Will Rule Next Monday on Whether to Allow FiDi Shelter Plans

Hearings before State Supreme Court Justice Debra James on Monday and Tuesday left unresolved the question of whether the administration of Mayor Bill de Blasio will be allowed to implement a controversial plan to move more than 200 homeless men from a hotel on the Upper West Side to another hotel in the Financial District, which the City plans to convert into a permanent shelter.

Giving Locally, Impacting Globally

Eleemosynary Advice for Reaching Out and Making a Difference Downtown

As we embark upon the giving season, many Lower Manhattan residents are interested in finding a way to give back. To help connect prospective volunteers with organizations that need help doing good, LMHQ, the collaborative workspace operated by the Downtown Alliance for companies in the technology, advertising, media, and information industries, will offer a free, online showcase for local volunteer opportunities today (Wednesday, November 18) at noon.

Getting into Hot Water

Court Rules That FiDi Condo Buyers Can Recover Damages from Developer for Shoddy Construction

More than a decade ago, real estate developers in Lower Manhattan were performing a feat that seemed akin to alchemy. Buying up unglamorous office buildings (abandoned by financial firms that had decamped for Midtown after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001) and converting them into high-priced residential towers, such developers rode the wave that was transforming Downtown into a chic residential district.

One example among many in this narrative was 90 William Street, a 17-story back-office facility constructed in 1967, that was rebranded as “Be@William,” a 113-unit condominium in 2008.

But residents began to notice problems with the building within weeks of plunking down a million dollars or more per apartment. To read more…

Matthew Fenton

A Victim’s Vengeance

New Sculpture on Centre Street Inverts Myth to Send a Feminist Message

In a caustic counterpoint to the “Fearless Girl” statue that attracted worldwide attention after it was unveiled at Bowling Green in 2017, a new feminist icon is calling Lower Manhattan’s streetscape home.

Standing in the center of Collect Pond Park (bounded by Centre, Lafayette, and White Streets), “Medusa with the Head of Perseus” makes a stark statement about violence against women. The bronze depicts the Medusa of Greek myth holding aloft the head of the hero who is said to have slain her. To read more…

Matthew Fenton

Decrying the Decree

CB1 Backs Stringer on Rescinding Mayor’s Emergency Authority

Community Board 1 is taking the unusual step of demanding that the administration of Mayor Bill de Blasio alter a policy that is citywide in its breadth, and does not specifically apply to Lower Manhattan.

The policy at issue is Emergency Executive Order 101, proclaimed by the Mayor in March of this year as the pandemic coronavirus was beginning to threaten New York. The original rationale for this order was to suspend temporarily the cumbersome regulations that usually apply to purchases of goods and services by the City government. The Mayor argued that this discretion was necessary, in order to facilitate the rapid procurement of medical supplies, such as personal protective equipment (PPE) and ventilators. To read more…

Excise Revise

Downtown Traffic May Ease with Split Verrazzano Toll

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) is poised to implement federal legislation (enacted in 2019) that will modify the tolling regimen on a bridge barely visible on the horizon from Lower Manhattan, but this may nonetheless reduce traffic congestion Downtown. To read more…

Contract One, Station One

The Jewel in

the Crown

Just below the surface of City Hall Park sits one of New York’s architectural gems. Built during the City Beautiful movement, its design sought to uplift the spirits of New Yorkers on their daily commute.

City Hall Loop station—Contract One, Station One—was the flagship of New York’s first subway and the focus of the international press on October 27, 1904, when Mayor George McClellan connected the Tiffany-designed motorman’s handle to propel the first train north to its endpoint on 145th Street and Broadway.

The design of the other twenty-seven stations it stopped at that afternoon was dictated by the practical needs of subway efficiency—the architect’s only role was to choose the tile work that would cover the structural columns and walls. But the station below City Hall Park is different. Here, design and structure are one in the same.

John Simko

City Hall subway station, was designed to be the showpiece of the new subway system with its elegant platform and mezzanine featured Guastavino tile, skylights, colored glass tilework and brass chandeliers.

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