Looking Ahead

LOOKING AHEAD by Wally Dobelis

It has actually happened. As of Saturday, April 5, 2008 the three decades old Greenmarket on Union Square’s North Park, an institution that helped rehabilitate the drug and prostitution- ridden Union Square Park and served as model for farmer markets throughout the nation, attracting visitors from all over the world, is no more. The Parks Department and Union Square Partnership may maintain that closing the North Plaza for rehabilitation, and the dissipating the market all over the Union Square area will not deprive any farmers of their space, but we have our doubts. The unity, the coherence and the value of the Greenmarket destination as a farmers’ market is lost, as the farm stands become spread out along the entire Union Square periphery, interspersed with t-shirt vendors, longhaired artists, poster sellers, bookstands, costume jewelry makers and political propagandists distributing literature. The aura of health and freshness associated with the fruit, vegetables, food and flowers that is part of the country pleasure that, brings us subway-bounds to take detours through the market, is lost when the farm stands are blended in with the other park elements.

Meanwhile, the North Plaza of the Union Square Park has bee wired around, with eight-foot freestanding cyclone fence, to inhibit traffic, leaving a narrow path in the middle for east-west crossing pedestrians. Construction wagons have been drawn up along the interior north periphery, the Abraham Lincoln statue by Henry Kirke Brown of 1869 is blocked off, and the Pavillion is in process of being stripped and cleaned up. The farm stands displaced from the North Plaza are spread out in a double row along the west periphery, aka Union Square West, turning around the south end of the park, and then ranging a part of the way up the east exterior pathway. This disposition was shown on the new Relocation Map for Wednesday, April 9th, 2007. A new map will be drawn and posted at the Manager’s table, northwest corner, every day.

As to the actual plans and time tables, the city’s Greenmarket director Michael Hurwitz and his associate Steve Hughes at the Council on Environment of New York City did not return my several calls. Eventually I walked over, to Union Square, and met the local director of the operations, Matt Igoe, tall personable young man busy directing truck traffic out of the Greenmarket area. He assured me that all vendors will be guaranteed space, regardless of difficulty. Checking with the vendors at the south end, people at the Stokes Farm and Van Houten stands assured me that they were satisfied with their locations and had not lost their customers, a compliment to the market management and the faithfulness of greenmarket enthusiasts.

Apparently the members of the Union Square Community Coalition, leaders of the opposition against the turning of the Pavillion into a restaurant and the recasting of the North Plaza, have not lost their fighting spirits. Several were busy on Sunday, April 13, at their street fair, on Broadway between 17th and 23rd Streets, telling their story to passersby and visiting members of the press. The North Plaza, New York’s traditional place of public assembly and protest, our Hyde Park, a National Historic landmark where the first Labor Day parade took place in 1882, is slated to be shrunk, with a tree barrier to separate it from 17th Street. If memory serves, a prior attempt of tree planting, financed by the Armenian community of the city, failed some 30 years ago, when the trees died.
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Looking at the Pavillion surroundings, the proposed restorations of the children’s playgrounds immediately south of it, on three levels, still does not make good sense. The amount of money and effort spent by the Union Square Partnership and the Department of Parks and Recreation on architects and lawyers to plan rehabilitating the park and set it up for commercial self-sustaining use is staggering, with a good portion of the $1.9M of city funds and of the $5M anonymous donation apparently gone. The overall cost estimate for the effort is in the $20M range, and the end results, a camelback playground, a restaurant in the Pavillion, a fragmented Greenmarket and a shrunken North Plaza, do not appear to meet the needs and desires of the public. There is an unconfirmed rumor around that the USCC, heartened by the support of local residents and politicians, is raising some scarce funds and hiring a public-minded lawyer to fight the USP and Parks effort. Whether the public juggernaut can be stopped is debatable, but the USCC will continue to try.

Next week, more on the Diane Arbus photographs, a treasure hunters’ story that has several readers intrigued – unless unforeseen breaking news of major local significance should interfere. The e-mail is wally@ix.netcom.com, and keep your mind clear and conscience clean, and happy April 15th. We don’t eat any No. 9 sandwiches here, we feel sorry when brilliant minds get overwhelmed with self-importance, and family futures are ruined.

LOOKING AHEAD by Wally Dobelis

It is not too often that this family visits a courthouse, but this was the day when a member of the family was to be sworn in as a member of the bar. The courthouse involved was the 2nd Judicial Department of the Appellate Division of the Supreme Court of the State of New York, on Monroe Place, near Pierrepont, in Brooklyn Heights, minutes away on the 4/5 line, but we felt festive.

The cab driver asked for directions (that happens about half the time), and we guided him across Brooklyn Bridge and through Cadman Plaza (beware, the Lower Manhattan route is particularly torturtous, what with construction and traffic diversions to confuse any terrorists.)


We were early, and after a thorough search the court officers let us sit in the copious waiting area, decorated with 50 huge photographs of the justices, taken over 110 years. The earliest, 1896, had five dignified bearded white men; the count grew, one by one, to 14 in 1980, with one black face (there may have been earlier). In 1984 one woman appeared among the now 15 justices, with two black faces among them, and in 2001 there were 20 judges, including seven white women, one black woman, and two black men.

That’s a remarkable progress, nearly proportionate to the national demographics, and the 2nd Department represents nearly one-half of NYS population, in 10 counties, from Brooklyn and Queens east through Long Island, and north from Westchester through Putnam, and the west side of Hudson. The Supreme Court is New York State's principal trial court, with a branch in each of the State's 62 counties, and Appellate Division is the middle level, with four such Appellate Divisions; the top level is the Court of Appeals. The Justices of the Supreme Court are elected to 14-year terms by the voters of their respective judicial districts; there are 12 such districts in New York State. All Supreme Court Justices have a mandatory retirement age of 70.


The room filled up, while I was studying the pictures. Young men and women were arriving, the latter mostly dressed in power suits, largely in somber black, not exactly celebratory but all exuding supreme confidence, with only one colorful dress, one bright shirt and one big combed out Afro hairdo present to celebrate the event. Not a shy face was noted in the crowd, all practicing attorneys with a year or more under the belt, representing all ethnicities. There were a number of Asian, African-American and Hispanic faces, one or two yarmulkes, but no facial coverings, and some Russian was heard among the family members.


The presiding justice Robert W. Schmidt from Nassau was cheerful, welcoming the kids to the ancient and honorable profession of law, indicating that they will be privileged and challenged to address many current issues, from immigration to rights of terrorists, and to treat these challenges as opportunities not to be missed and responsibilities not to be evaded. He would break the solemnity of the occasion by promising to be brief, quoting Henry VIII to his wives (“I won’t be keeping you any longer”) and describing how the profession has progressed from what Dickens saw as the lawyers’ quest of “picking up bits and pieces” to the present day overflow of information. Getting justice done fairly, with kindness and within the law, were some of the criteria offered for lawyerly conduct.

Today, when many people with extensive experience in governmental systems, gained through intensive TV watching, question the validity of institutions, it becomes important to review the historic background within which the courts developed. The Supreme Court of Judicature was created in 1691, with justices traveling on circuit courts, and several times a year sitting together to make rulings on points of law encountered, and to review and correct errors made by judges in inferior courts (we still have them, in rural communities). The appeals went to the Royal Governor and his council, until New York’s first Constitution (1777), when a new tribunal, the Court for the Trial of Impeachments and the Correction of Errors, took over.

In 1846 the system was reorganized, and a Supreme Court became the highest court of original , unlimited jurisdiction, while the appeals went to a new Court of Appeals structure, which kept changing at several state Constitutional Conventions, until in 1884 the present Appellate Division was created, to replace the prior intermediate structure called General Term, with the Governor choosing from among the elected Supreme Court Justices, to designate justices of the Appellate Division for five year terms. The objective was to promote better substantive justice.

But the population grew, particularly in the Second District, to the point that the Governor in 1989 appointed a commission to study caseloads, resulting in a report titled justice delayed, and the designation of five additional justices to the disproportionately expanded Second District, with more added later. Thus the system, although slow, manages to adjust and cope. That's democracy.

LOOKING AHEAD by Wally Dobelis

Strand Bookstore , the giant among American quality antiquarian book dealers, est. 1927 and the lone survivor of the 50-odd Fourth Avenue Booksellers of the post-WWII halcyon years, has grown to 18 miles of bookshelves, since acquisition and refurbishing of several floors at 828 Broadway. They have also become part of the NYC book-reading and signing scene, with such authors as Mark Penn (Microtrends, just chopped as Clinton’s chief political advisor), Luke Sante and Jeff Wall making recent appearances.

I was lured into attending an April 7th reading by the announcement of Gregory Gibson’s Hubert’s Freaks, The Rare-Book Dealer, the Times Square Talker, and the Lost Photos of Diane Arbus (Hartcourt, Inc $24). The famous photographer was part of my Washington Square generation, as was Hubert’s on 42nd Street.

Diane Arbus , a tragic and doomed depicter of low life, freakish people and oblivion, took barbiturates and killed herself on July 26, 1971.. Hubert’s Freak Show museum at 228-232 west 42nd Street was her favorite hang-out, and its normal working staff members were frequent subjects of her pictures. The McKim, Mead & White schoolhouse had been converted as a palatial restaurant for the blue-bloods of the early 1900s, as Murray’s Roman Gardens. But the area deteriorated, and Max Schaffer’s Dime Museum took over the premises. Freaks of various disfigurations were featured attractions, and eventually performing fleas became the stars, with several dispatched to Hollywood, to act in a Claudette Colbert movie. Joseph Mitchell and A. J. Liebling of the New Yorker wrote about Hubert’s at length.

Charlie Lukas seems to have taken copious notes of the Arbus’s pictures that she gave him, and archived them, But Lucas died in the 1990s, and the place folded, the archives, props and memorabilia went into a warehouse in the Bronx, and ended up in an auction sale in 2003, bought by speculators and flea market operators. This was reminiscent of the hotel sales of abandoned suitcases that the late 14th Street bookman Ernie Wavrovics would romance about. A bookfinder, Bob Langmuir, some time later, recognized among the items sold some unknown Arbus photos, now being dissipated in weekend sales. He started searching out the buyers, and picked the prints up, then had them authenticated by the Arbus estate. The 29 or so identified prints will be auctioned, as we speak, at Phillips Auction Galleries. The sources of the prints? Langmuir found the major warehouse sale buyers, an African- born book dealer, and a "paper show" trader, and bought their holdings. Gibson estimates their value it at $1,500 to $85,000 per print, depending on reliability of authentication.

If you think this was an easy review of a fascinating author’s reading of looking for lost treasures in the trash, good luck. The narrative, facts mixed with surmises, was interrupted several times, first by an African dealer objecting to unfair phone inquiries, then by Michael, a Hassidic flea market dealer who wanted recognition in the book. He and the African claimed to have been the original buyers in 2003, knowing nothing of Arbus , until the book scout, Bob Langmuir, some time later, recognized that Arbus touch and bought the pictures from them, plus the archives. There were lively arguments on the side, and Langmuir, an expected speaker at the event, never appeared, apparently busy in the book stacks with his cell phone, talking with parties interested in the upcoming auction.

Meanwhile, an invited ex-Hubert magician now retired, white-bearded Richard del Burgo, stepped up to tell of the Dime Museum days, and recognized the audience’s questions, identifying remembered performers as Susie the Elephant-Skin Girl , and Georgea The Legless (she had no knees, and the bone went directly, hip to the ankle). At this point a Michel Lee, magician and escape artist, burst into the scene to make a plea for donations for Earl "Presto" Johnson, a cups –and-balls juggling master of the old days, who was known to del Burgo. The author , recognizing a genuine need, disclosed that a web site, hubertsfreaks.com is being developed (if I have it wrong, please send corrections to wally@ix.netcom.com) and volunteered to accept donations for Presto.

The reading was advertised as a dialogue between Gibson and the mysterious Langmuir who also seems to have had a nearly fatal road accident on the day of Arbus’s death , resulting in an epiphany of sorts, but he was not available for confirmation, in seclusion with his busy cell phone. The entire reading was like a mixture of street theatre, audience takeover of the proceedings and impro stage. The Strand staff photographer (will this event ever make it to the weekend BookTV show on cable?), Kendall, a U. of Florida graduate only eight months in NY, was gloriously thrilled, the Strand supervisor Christine was busy breaking up noisy side discourses and the Harcourt editor on site, Andrea, placidly accepted the chaos. But the interchanges were fascinating enough to make me buy a copy of the book – not a good habit for an unpaid columnist. More when I read it – maybe.

One cannot guarantee such excitement every time at the Strand readings – perhaps the April 14th poetry slam will also be hot - but you can call 212-473-1452, or check the Strand website. Big time guests in April will be Nobelist Joseph Stieglitz and Bush observer Sidney Blumenthal.
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LOOKING AHEAD by Wally Dobelis


In case you have missed the news, New York City, a nice place to visit (40M tourists a year), is still a popular place to live in, despite that deprecating adage often quoted by provincial visitors. It has experienced a population growth of 23,960 souls in 2007, up 0.6 % over 2006, running counter to an ongoing gradual decline of population in the Northeastern cities.

There are lots of things we can be proud of, amenities such as our tasty and safe water (we are one of five cities that require no water treatment plants.) Also, there are our parks. NYC has over 28,000 acres of parklands (112 sq km), not including the thousands of acres in the Gateway National Recreational area, in which the Jamaica Bay Wildlife Preservation Area constitutes 8,000 acres. Pricey Manhattan has Central Park (30M visitors a year), and our own area can boast of Union Square, Stuyvesant Square and Madison Square parks, as well as the private Gramercy Park and Stuyvesant Town grassy lawns. The justly deprecated New York atmosphere – there is too much evidence of year-round bronchitis to give credibility to the environmental authorities’ claims of clean air – is showing signs of recovering; we now have the nation’s largest and most energy-efficient public bus system utilizing diesel/ hybrid and compressed gas engines, and hybrid taxis are coming, and green commercial building s are on the rise.

Paradoxically, the crowded high-riser rich Manhattan neighborhoods are among the most efficient energy-saving green municipal subdivisions in the nation. We have. the lowest per capita heat costs and gasoline use, our people walk to schools, restaurants, supermarkets and beauty shops, and take public transportation to and from work. Rich Georgetown in DC, opted not to have a metro stop, and the wealthy there are doomed to traffic jams and wasting gasoline. In energy efficiency, NYC, with its 2.7% of the US population, accounts for only 1% of the nation’s greenhouse emissions , and uses one –half as much electricity as San Francisco and one –quarter that of Houston.

We New Yorkers also have the most valuable real estate in the world. which was not always the case. Manhattan island was first explored by Giovanni di Verrazano, a sailor acting for the French government in 1524, and named Nouveau Angoulieme. The first serious settlers were the Dutch, and Governor-General Peter Minuit bought Manhattan from the Leni Lenape Indians (of doubtful title) for 60 guilders, naming it New Amsterdam. When the British occupied it in 1664, naming it New York, they firmed up their title through the Treaty of Breda, in 1667, after the 2nd Dutch-British war, trading it in from the East India Company in exchange for the much smaller spice island of Run in Indonesia, which the Dutch traders considered to be more valuable (what did they know of location, location. location!).

Back to numbers, New York City’s land mass is 322 square miles, amplified by 162 square miles of water, which provides our fellow citizens with a richness of beaches, blessed with a long swimming season. The population density is 26,403 per square mile, as compared to the nation’s 80 and NY State’s 402, which no doubt accounts for the rich concentration of RiteWay, CVS and other chain drugstores on our shores. Total population is 8 274,527, up by 265,873 since the 2000 census. By borough, Manhattan has 1.620,867 souls Broo0klyn – 2,528,050, Queens – 2,270,338, The Bronx - 1,373,659, Staten Island - 481, 613, all up by fractions of one percent in the past year.

As to our rich ethnic diversity, NYC is 37% non-Hispanic white, 28% Black. 27% Hispanic and 10% Asian, as compared to the corresponding US-wide breakdown of 67, 11, 12, and 4%. Note that NYC contributed some $850B to the national GDP of some $13.8T. Alas, there is also the rich income diversity, from Manhattan’s average $70K cascading to below-national-average numbers in parts of the boroughs. We also have rich language diversity – 170 tongues - and if you are interested, our phone codes have cascaded to five: 212, 718, 917, 646 and 347.

The Census people also have identified the 50 hot metropolitan areas Americans are moving to, and none of them are in the Northeast. The West has 20 of them, the South has 27, and three are in the Midwest. Of the 10 top population-growth cities, Texas has four. Dallas-Ft. Worth gained 162,000, followed by Atlanta, Phoenix, Riverside CA, Charlotte NC, Las Vegas, Houston, San Antonio and Austin. Growth of jobs and cheap real estate were the main reasons for the moves. Percentage- wise, new city Palm Coast FL, then St. George, UT, Gainesville, GA and Raleigh, NC were the top population gainers. The main losers of population were Detroit (by a large margin), then Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Youngstown PA, Columbus GA, and Buffalo. However, New Orleans, losing population as the result of Hurricane Katrina, regained 40,00 people during the past year, a positive ending to a somewhat bleak economics-driven picture