I continue to believe that Mayor Knudsen, Deputy Mayor Sedon and Councilman Hache are decent, reasonable people who want to do what is right for the village. Here is my appeal to them.
Please do not assume that the few loudest and most frequent voices you hear from are representative of the entire village, irrespective of what they say.
I, and a lot of people I know, did not vote against the previous council and for the current one because we had much of a view on the Valley expansion, Graydon, Schedler, or the parking garage. Neither did we vote because of those loud voices. What we voted against was the dismissive attitude of those council members against residents.
Now I do not believe that those council members were very being dismissive on purpose. They did very much want to win elections. However, they kept hearing from a specific group that their actions were popular, and that those opposing their proposals were a vocal and disruptive minority.
Unfortunately, I get the sense that the new council has become beholden to a different coterie with its own agenda. That coterie is openly dismissive of regular residents in extremely caustic terms. It is as if we have traded the tzar for the politburo. Questioning actions of the new council is dismissed as the handiwork of the Aronson crew.
I urge you to work for the wider village, and not just those voices and their interests. For example, on this issue it appears that the lack of commuters and abundance of casual diners in the coterie has led to this disastrous decision. I urge you to reverse this decision and in future, think about the outcome for all residents based on wider feedback, and not just based on what you hear from a few.
Did Lord Jeff ever surface…?
Do we have another Judge Crater situation on our hands…??
This sounds like someone who knows absolutely nothing, has become interested and involved because an issue directly and currently affects them, is going to take their overblown head and shove it back in the sand the MINUTE the parking suits their fancy.
1:05 This.
N.Y. / Region (The New York Times)
AUG. 4, 2010
Judge Is Still Missing, but Novel Tracks Him Down
By ALAN FEUER
One day last week, the novelist Peter Quinn (“I’m actually a lapsed historian”) was walking west on 45th Street, beyond Eighth Avenue, when he stopped outside the old home of a vanished Broadway restaurant called Billy Haas’s Chophouse.
“This is it,” he said, nodding at the graceless apartment building that had, in the local manner, risen to take its place. “He comes out here” — Mr. Quinn pointed at the curb — “and a tan cab is heading west. He’s wearing a double-breasted coat. He’s just had dinner with William Klein, a lawyer for the Shubert brothers, and a showgirl named Sally Ritz. He tips his hat, climbs in the cab — and that’s it.”
Mr. Quinn, who is 62 and bearded, is a Bronx-born man of Irish descent and a member of that cadre of New Yorkers known as Craterites. While most of these unfortunate souls — obsessed with the cold case of Joseph Force Crater, a State Supreme Court justice who vanished 80 years ago this week — are content to scratch their heads at the mystery, Mr. Quinn has dared to imagine its solution in the pages of “The Man Who Never Returned,” his new book.
“I solved the case in my head,” he had said earlier in the day, sitting in a hallway of the New York Public Library, just below the carrel-filled study where he wrote a good portion of the book. Arranged on his lap were three accordion files of Craterite gold: the original police circular announcing the disappearance; scores of day-by-day investigative reports; and countless letters from bounty-seekers in Havana, Shanghai, even the South Pacific — all claiming to have seen the missing man.
Like many of his kind, Mr. Quinn was infected with the Crater bug in childhood, when his father — also named Peter Quinn and a justice at the same Foley Square courthouse where Judge Crater worked — introduced him to the case. That was in the 1950s, when elevators arriving at empty floors were likely to be met with quips like, “Judge Crater must have pushed the button.”
“I used to laugh,” Mr. Quinn said, “but a part of me didn’t think it was so funny.” As he wrote in his epilogue, “If Crater could suddenly vanish so completely, why not my father?”
Half a century later, at a meeting that his subject might have admired, Mr. Quinn had lunch with Paul J. Browne, the deputy commissioner for public information at the New York Police Department. He told Mr. Browne he was interested in the Crater case and was quickly introduced to the lieutenant who ran the department’s Missing Persons Squad.
Shortly after, there was a potboiler-worthy development. The lieutenant, who at first had come up empty-handed looking for old records, discovered the three accordion files. Apparently, they had been left on top of, not inside, a file cabinet. The case, which is officially still open, has been classified inactive.
History, of course, is as rife with incompletion as with information, and Mr. Quinn, after poring over the papers, was surprised at just how much of the case remained untold, even in the primary source material.
“The more you dip into history,” he said, “the more you realize how much isn’t on the record.” He spent months attempting a factual account of the case before it slowly dawned on him that the story was better suited to the pliant world of fiction.
Thus, one encounters Fintan Dunne, ex-cop, ex-spy and current partner in the International Service Corporation, a global conglomerate of private eyes, who, in 1955 — the 25th anniversary of the disappearance — is hired by a Pulitzeresque media tycoon to solve the Crater case. It is through this protagonist, whom the author has used before (skeptical, Irish, reluctantly adulterous) that Mr. Quinn approaches his true subject: not the cloudy facts of an old vanishing act, but rather its tenacious hold on the collective imagination of New York.
The city is, itself, a sort of vanishing act — all those Broadway haunts replaced by condominiums — and Judge Crater can, perhaps, be thought of as its human embodiment: influential one day, annihilated the next. His memory lives on, but no more than his memory. Where did he go? Change the “he” to “it” and the question holds true for the Hotel Astor, the old Pennsylvania Station, the Automat.
Throw in some timeless specifics — sex, politics, the suggestion of corruption — and the Crater case could, without much effort, be discerned in the headlines of yesterday’s newspaper. Even its milieu — the anxious post-crash days when the severity of the Great Depression had not yet settled in — has relevance today. “When that guy disappeared, a lot went with him,” Mr. Quinn said. “It was the end of the whole 1920s era in New York.”
Mr. Quinn, at that moment, was standing on the corner of Broadway and 45th Street, just outside the red-and-white Swatch shop. On the night of the disappearance — Aug. 6, 1930 — the building housed the office of the Arrow Ticket Agency, where Judge Crater arranged a seat for “Dancing Partner” at the Belasco Theater, a show he would never attend.
“When I’m walking around down here,” Mr. Quinn said as he crossed Seventh Avenue, “I sometimes think I’m the only one still carrying this stuff in my head.”
He then told a story that belied this. Months ago, he visited Crater’s old apartment building at 11th Street and Fifth Avenue. After he had been lurking for several minutes, the superintendent said, “You looking for the judge?” Mr. Quinn was stunned. The super said, “You think you’re the only one?”
The tour came to an end at the former Billy Haas’s, once 332 West 45th Street (the address no longer exists). Mr. Quinn leaned into the street and raised his hand.
“I think I’ll get a cab from here,” he said. Then something occurred to him; he smiled.
“If you never hear from me again,” he added, “I guess you’ve got a really good story.”