Viewpoint
Thanks, Cornelia St. and Robin, for the magic
BY KAREN KRAMER
We knew this place in New
York City, in Greenwich
Village. The food in the artfi
lled restaurant upstairs was good,
but it was what went on in the cabaret
downstairs that made the magic.
More than 2,000 people performed
there every year. And although there
are a lot of venues in New York with
music or spoken word, here was a place
that was so varied that several nights
each month would be poetry in Greek
or Romanian or Portuguese (“not at the
same time,” the owner liked to joke).
And of course there was music...
tango and classical and jazz and an African
American group singing in Yiddish.
The monologists told their stories
and composers (of varied levels of experience)
debuted new work.
You could be a legend like David
Amram who performs all over the
world but made sure to make it back
to the Village every month to play here.
Or an unknown songwriter trying out
edgy, groundbreaking material before
an audience that welcomed it.
Upstairs the waitstaff was composed
of artists, and you knew their names
and they knew yours. (Not something
that often happened in New York City.)
You could hang out at the bar and easily
talk to the person next to you, who
more likely than not turned out to be
interesting…a photographer who had
documented Philippe Petit tightrope
walking between the two World Trade
Center towers or a visiting harpsichordist
from Montreal.
It is no small feat to keep a place
running for 41 years in New York City.
When the owner was forced to close
down due to greedy real estate run
amok, he decided to “go out with a bang
not a whimper.” For two days, over this
past New Year’s holiday, artists who
had performed there during the last
four decades came in to perform one
last time, accompanied by others who
just wanted to be there.
People fl ew in from England, from
Australia. They came from Brooklyn
and the Upper West Side, and Boston,
and Bleecker St. And in between the
music and the spoken word and the
last storytellings were testaments to
the importance of having a safe space
in which to create, a physical space to
form a community.
Goodbye, and thanks, Cornelia
Street Cafe. Thanks, Robin. There will
never again be anything like it.
PHOTO BY DUSICA SUE MALESEVIC
Robin Hirsch, longtime owner of the Cornelia St. Cafe, during an interview
with The Villager in 2017.
An open letter to City Council Speaker Johnson
BY DAVID R. MARCUS
Dear Corey, Happy New Year. I
wish you good health, happiness
and success in the New Year.
Quite a list of accomplishments you
can be proud of. It demonstrates the
power of your offi ce and the value of
your advocacy.
Nevertheless, I remain deeply disappointed
that the full measure of
your ability to get the impossible to
be done was not put behind the community’s
efforts to fi nd alternatives
to the L-train shutdown, and if there
was no alternative, then to effect major
changes to the “alternative service
plan” — not just create mechanisms
to fi eld all the inevitable problems
and complaints. With proper changes,
problems and complaints would
have been minimized. The approach
should have been to tweak the root
cause; namely, the ill-advised plans.
And now, it seems, as I have argued
since the beginning, there is a much
more intelligent method that does
not disrupt the lives of hundreds of
thousands of commuters, residents
and businesses that would have been
devastated by the plan by the Metropolitan
Transportation Authority and
Department of Transportation.
You had the stature and resources
to push for intelligent choices — even
if it meant you were the sole sensible
voice amongst all your peers arguing
for the best plan possible. In my opinion,
this was a missed opportunity to
be a hero to all of us who look to you
for your advocacy.
So now it takes a governor who relishes
sticking it to a mayor to come
up with a much more sensible plan
that does not disrupt the lives of hundreds
of thousands of Brooklyn and
Downtown Manhattan commuters,
residents and businesses. While the
technical details are beyond me, the
tried-and-true method of either doing
work only on nights and weekends
or closing one tube at a time (both
of which had been successfully done
with other New York City tunnel repairs)
had always seemed the better
all-around approach to me.
So, at this juncture, I look to you to
hold D.O.T. Commissioner Polly Trottenberg
and New York City Transit
President Andy Byford to their words
that all the changes to 14th St., as well
as the protected bike lanes on 12th
and 13th Sts., (11 feet wide for bicycles
versus 10 feet for vehicles), along
with bus-route changes that eliminated
the stop at 14th St. and Sixth
Ave., among others, be eliminated immediately.
The entire premise upon
which the need for these changes was
argued has been rendered moot, and,
in my simple vocabulary, temporary is
temporary.
We will not tolerate doublespeak
from Trottenberg and Byford, or
anyone else for that matter, who
openly advocated for these changes’
permanence, but promised, at every
juncture, that it would be up to
the community to decide whether to
keep them. It should not be up to the
nonresident Transportation Alternatives
advocates with no roots in the
community that packed every hearing
arguing for their selfi sh minority
agenda. There should be no question
about this.
If not for the L-train shutdown, none
of this would have been forced down
our throats. Common sense dictates
that absent the shutdown premise, all
these burdensome changes have been
rendered moot and things should immediately
be restored back to the way
they were. Wouldn’t you agree?
The people can demand but only
those currently in power can do. What
needs to happen now is clear: These
folks must be held to their repeated
assurances that all this was temporary
and only would be for the duration of
the L-train shutdown. With the premise
removed, all that fl owed from it
must also be removed. There can be
no other result.
And on a fi scal note, as an accountant
and businessman, I cannot help
but be appalled at all the fi nancial
waste committed by D.O.T. and the
M.T.A. to effect all these changes well
before they were needed — something
we also tried to postpone but failed to
accomplish because no one in power
said, “No.”
I remain interested to see how this
all plays out and whether we will have
the benefi t of your offi ce, Corey, and
the power of your voice to get us back
to where this community and neighborhoods
need to be.
Marcus is an executive board member,
W. 13th St. 100 Block Association,
and treasurer and vice president
for fi nance, Cambridge Owners Corp.
Schneps Media TVG January 10, 2019 13