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STEP IN THE RIGHT DIRECTION Rare street hopes makeover will be worth all the hassle By MICHAEL O. ALLEN, Daily News Staff Writer

By Homepage, New York Daily NewsNo Comments

Monday, April 09, 2001

Residents of quiet 74th St., a few blocks from the Narrows in Bay Ridge, have been waking to the quaking of their homes lately as heavy machinery rolls in.

Repairs to step street at 74th St. and Colonial Road in Bay Ridge have delighted tenants, though they must endure intrusion of heavy machinery.

It is the start of a major project to replace the unusual step street linking Ridge Blvd. and Colonial Road at 74th St., as well as repair the street’s sewers and water mains.

“Let’s face it, it has to be done,” said Blanca Ortiz of 115 74th St.

But that doesn’t mean she enjoys it. “I’m in bed this morning and the bed, along with the house, was shaking,” Ortiz said.

She quickly called Janet Richichi, community construction liaison from the city Department of Design and Construction.

“I told her that I hope our houses don’t develop cracks because of the pounding,” Ortiz said. “She told me that she’d consulted with the engineers and that they’re not supposed to pound beyond a certain degree so as to not cause any damage.

“It’s an inconvenience, and the noise, but it has to be done.”

The consolation for the neighborhood is that its unusual public steps finally will be repaired.

Assemblywoman Joan Millman (D-Bay Ridge) secured the $300,000 that Community Board 10 officials told her in 1997 it would cost to fix the steps.

“In my enthusiasm and my naiveté about how these things work, I thought it was going to happen, like, right away,” Millman said.

When city officials inspected the project, they found that the sewers and water mains needed total reconstruction along with the stairway. It took the intervening four years to get the $786,000 estimated cost for the project into the budget, with the city Department of Environmental Protection picking up the tab for the remainder of the project.

City Design and Construction Department Deputy Commissioner Matthew Monahan said the street above and below the steps would have 600 new feet of curb, three fire hydrants and five catch basins to draw off rainwater, along with the new steps, sewer and water main, when the project is completed in July.

The repairs were long overdue, said Steve Harrison, chairman of Community Board 10. “The steps are unsafe,” he said.

“That they are fixing them is something that makes us ecstatic.”

Step streets are more common in the Bronx, but Brooklyn, being part of Long Island, is flatter. Harrison believes only two such street steps exist in the borough, the set under reconstruction and another set on 76th St.

Marylou Notaro of 145 74th St., who has lived in the neighborhood for 15 years, praised the city workers doing the job but said she was concerned about what would happen to a community garden on either side of the steps.

“About 10 years ago, we turned an area that was a dumping ground into a beautiful garden, and people from all around the neighborhood came to admire the roses and the tulips and the daffodils,” Notaro said.

“I’m hopeful that after the construction is done, we can restore the garden to the beautiful garden that it once was.”

April 9, 2001
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Hizzoner’s Relationship Not Private Affair by JIM DWYER

By Homepage, New York Daily NewsNo Comments

Sunday, May 07, 2000

Last fall, a Daily News reporter wondered why the mayor had vanished most summer weekends. For years, the mayor made public appearances on Saturdays or Sundays all summer long, so reporter Michael O. Allen asked the mayor’s press office about his schedule.

Because the answers were vague, Allen asked for the mayor’s public calendars.

File a freedom-of-information request, the reporter was told — a classic stalling tactic, but Allen sent in the paperwork.

A few weeks later, he got a call from the press office. Withdraw your official request, and we’ll tell you what you want to know.

Yes, the mayor had cut way back on his weekends.

How come? Speak to deputy mayor so-and-so, the press office told Allen, and he’ll give you what you need.

The deputy mayor said the mayor was taking more private time on weekends to be with his son.

“He’s also got a new love in his life,” the deputy mayor said. He gave a long, theatrical pause.

“It’s called golf.”

We now know the mayor has developed a very close relationship with a woman who is not his wife. He brought her to the party for the New York City Marathon and to be with him on New Year’s Eve in Times Square.

And he apparently stayed at the friend’s beach home in the Hamptons many weekends last summer.

Nothing here calls for Kenneth Starr and a grand jury investigation. While Bill Clinton lied about his involvement with Monica Lewinsky and confessed to being ashamed of himself, the mayor has all but boasted about his involvement with his friend Judi Nathan. She was posing for pictures all week.

Still, anyone who files Giuliani’s nonmarital relationship under the category “purely private” is hallucinating.

When three or four New York City Police detectives have the job of chauffeuring the mayor to liaisons in the Hamptons with his friend, the public life meets the private around the Douglaston exits of the Long Island Expressway. From the city line to Nathan’s condominium in Southampton, it is 75 miles.

“There’d be one or two city Town Cars in the parking lot all weekend,” said a Southampton neighbor of Nathan’s. “These big guys would be in the cars, with the motors running when you went to bed at night, and they’d be there in the morning. There were always at least two, sometimes three or four.”

Not so long ago, a New York City mayor got in trouble for sending city detectives to Long Island. In 1991, when David Dinkins dispatched two detectives to investigate a fire at the home of a friend, Giuliani clucked disapprovingly: “This poor guy gets into trouble every day.”

Last week, I asked the Police Department how much it cost the public to have the current mayor delivered by a police taxi service to his woman friend in Long Island. I wanted to know if helicopters had been used, hotels booked, food paid for, and if there had been any repayment by the mayor for these expenses.

“We never give out details of security,” Police Chief Thomas Fahey said Friday.

“Not details of security,” I said. “This is a request for costs.”

“Then you’ll be able to see which guy made the most overtime and figure out who spent the most time with him,” said Fahey.

“Give the cost information without the names,” I proposed.

“FOIL it,” he said.

“FOIL it” means file a freedom of information request. It would do no good, Fahey assured me, but I should file it anyway.

We argued some more, and then he said to put the questions in writing. I did. Late in the day, his office called back: “The chief wanted me to tell you that our statement is, ‘We’re not responding.'”

Later on, Fahey revised his official answer: “We don’t discuss security.” Of course, some of this is security, and some of it is a taxi service provided to the mayor.

Since the city has chosen to stonewall, we are free to analyze it ourselves. It is fair to say that the cost to the public of the mayor’s personal friendship was at least $200,000, much of that having to do with overtime and the need to dedicate so many detectives making $55,000 to $75,000 annually sitting in a Long Island parking lot.

Naturally, the mayor is entitled to protection, wherever he is. So are his wife and family, who continue to live in Gracie Mansion, the official residence supplied by the public. His wife and children also have police protection and chauffeurs, a reasonable precaution.

What about Judith Nathan? Asked by The News’ John Marzulli if she also receives police protection, Commissioner Howard Safir retorted: “It’s a nice day, isn’t it?”

Whatever the bright line between public and private life, Giuliani long ago declared that his temperament was a force that would shape the city.

And if he were a senator, he has even declared what the standard of public morality should be. In February, he called for the Ten Commandments to be posted in public school classrooms.

“The Ten Commandments is part of our tradition, it’s part of our history,” said Giuliani.

A few weeks later, the mayor and his “very good friend” Judith Nathan marched on St. Patrick’s Day, in a parade where gays are banned for practices seen by the Catholic Church as sinful as, say, adultery.

The wife who shares a public home with the mayor was not in that parade.

May 7, 2000
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A MALEVOLENT HULK Sunken ship continues to claim lives By MICHAEL O. ALLEN

By Homepage, New York Daily NewsNo Comments

nullWednesday, August 26, 1998

NEW YORK–On a foggy July night in 1956, 52 people died when the cruise ship Stockholm rammed the luxury liner Andrea Doria off Nantucket Island.

But 42 years later, even as the Andrea Doria lies a rusting hulk 240 feet under the Atlantic Ocean, its appetite for blood has not been quelled.

From 1981 through last year, seven divers had lost their lives in search of sport or riches rumored to be beneath the ship’s collapsed deck. Since June 28, three more have died in the dark and deep waters of the North Atlantic.

For divers, the Andrea Doria holds an almost mystical allure.

But it is sinking deeper into the seabed, and its insides are rotted out, with webs of cables everywhere that often snare divers. They risk being blinded by silt stirred by their own motions. And the ocean itself is subject to capricious changes.

Craig Sicola of Surf City, N.J., died June 28 after suffering decompression illness while exploring the wreck.

The body of Richard Roost was discovered July 9, floating face-down in the mud inside the ship’s first-class bar and lounge area. Like Sicola, Roost, 46, of Ann Arbor, Mich., was an experienced diver.

Vincent Napoliello, a 32-year-old stockbroker who lived in Brooklyn, was the latest of Andrea Doria’s victims.

Napoliello was a careful man, those who knew him said. He came home to his apartment one day to find his fiance, Marisa Gengaro, sitting on the sofa wearing a helmet.

“Marisa, what are you doing?” the puzzled Napoliello asked.

“Well, Vincent, accidents do happen in the home, you know,” Gengaro jokingly replied.

“I was making fun of him because he was just so careful about everything,” she said.

By all accounts, Napoliello took that care to his sport, where he was recognized not only as a top-notch diver, but also as a conservative, well-prepared wreck explorer.

William Cleary, a 37-year-old lawyer from Hackensack, N.J., who had been Napoliello’s dive partner for several years, said Napoliello always told everyone not to take foolish chances.

Napoliello’s message was simple: If you run into trouble, leave. You can always go back.

“Vincent had been there for me inside shipwrecks, on a few occasions saving my life,” Cleary said, “including on the day that he died–on the dive prior. He freed me from an entanglement.”

Built at a cost of $ 30 million shortly after World War II and called the Grand Dame of the Sea, the 700-foot, 11-story Andrea Doria was a virtual floating museum of murals, rare wooden panels, and ceramics and mirrors commissioned by its owner, the Italian Line.

Designed with 22 watertight compartments, it was advertised as unsinkable.

It was en route to New York City on the night of July 25, 1956, from Genoa, Italy, with more than 1,600 people aboard when it was broadsided by the smaller Stockholm, whose 750 passengers and crew were bound for Sweden.

It took the Andrea Doria 11 hours to sink, plenty of time for valuables to be removed. But that has not stopped rumors of treasures being locked in her compartments or strewn on the ocean floor.

And a purser’s safe, where passengers kept jewelry and other valuables, is one of 16 still believed to be in the wreck 46 miles off Nantucket.

The most famous explorer of the Andrea Doria was department store heir Peter Gimbel.

In 1981, Gimbel brought up a Bank of Italy safe from the wreck. It contained only soggy paper currency.

His quest for the safe nearly killed Gimbel. He was brought up unconscious, suffering from oxygen poisoning, on his first dive that year. Afterward, he declared that the wreck had a “malevolent spirit.”

The ship’s reputation doesn’t deter several hundred technical divers–those trained to go below 130 feet–from exploring the wreck each summer. About a dozen charter vessels ferry divers from late June to early August.

Napoliello was one of them.

On his first trip of the season, in late June, he and other divers discovered a china closet full of cups, saucers, bowls and pitchers, all bearing the Italian Line logo in gold leaf.

Napoliello returned a week later, on the Fourth of July weekend, and salvaged more artifacts.

On Aug.3, Napoliello was among 12 passengers and three crew members aboard The Seeker, the most active of the Andrea Doria dive vessels, as it departed Montauk Harbor on Long Island.

Anticipating success on this last trip of the season, Napoliello brought cigars and Scotch. The boat reached the site about 8 a.m. the next day, and about an hour later, Napoliello and Cleary made their first dive.

Later in the day, Napoliello dove without Cleary, who was exploring another deck on the ship. Instead, he went down with a man making his first trip to the Doria.

Cleary said Napoliello went into the foyer deck through an opening known as Gimbel’s Hole, down to a depth of about 210 feet, then swam toward the back of the ship to the china closet.

According to Cleary, Napoliello had been breathing the necessary pressurized gas mixtures out of just one side of his double tanks, instead of both. A valve that regulated breathing from both sides somehow had shut off, Cleary said.

So Napoliello thought he was running out of air. He motioned to his partner that he was going up, Cleary said. But instead of using the anchor line on which the Seeker was moored to the wreck, Napoliello swam toward the anchor line for another dive boat, the Sea Inn, a move that has puzzled his colleagues, because Napoliello had not made other mistakes that disoriented or panicked divers make.

At that point, Napoliello had been in the ship for about 17 minutes. Instead of ascending slowly, taking about an hour and breathing gas mixtures with more oxygen to expel the helium and nitrogen from his system, he surfaced in three minutes.

Cleary said Napoliello must have passed out outside the hull of the Andrea Doria, and his lungs ruptured as he floated to the surface.

He had no vital signs when he was pulled aboard the Sea Inn. The Coast Guard was called and helicoptered him to Cape Cod Hospital, where he was declared dead on arrival.

Medical examiners are still waiting for results of tests to determine what killed him.

Cleary said it would be an insult to Napoliello for him to stop diving.

“I could picture him saying, ‘I’m dead now, and you are not going to do this anymore?”‘

August 26, 1998
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SENIOR CITY-ZENS; They left only to find there’s no place like home

By Homepage, New York Daily NewsNo Comments

Sunday, October 26, 1997

by MICHAEL O. ALLEN, Daily News Staff Writer

Horst Liepolt left New York City in 1995 for Berlin, where he was born 70 years ago, only to discover his heart belongs to the Big Apple.

Ditto for Dolores White, now retired, who yearns to live in the city again.

Howard and Arlene Sommer, in their 50s, are giving the city another whirl after their children flew the coop. And, two years into their return from a 40-year sojourn in suburbia, Mort and Sonia Goldstein are loving every second of life in the city.

In all the good notices New York City is getting for its historic reduction in crime and improved quality of life, not to mention the burgeoning economy, a little-remarked-upon but growing trend is that the city is also becoming haven to a group that appreciates the big town’s excitement: retirees and the so-called “empty nesters.”

Although statistically difficult to measure, anecdotal evidence confirms that a growing number of retirees, especially former New Yorkers, are choosing the city and spurning such traditional retirement locales as Florida, California and Arizona.

Commissioner Herbert Stupp of the city Department for the Aging said he is not surprised.

“It’s a very senior-friendly city, perhaps the most in the country,” he said.

New York is a good place to grow old because of all its conveniences, including access to health care, the most developed mass transit network in the Western Hemisphere and discounts everywhere for seniors, Stupp said.

Retirees themselves cite the ease with which they can live, the excitement of the city and its cultural offerings.

But Charles Longino Jr., a demographer at Wake Forest University, was brutally blunt on the reason the elderly are returning to the city.

“They are coming back because they’ve gotten old and widowed in Florida, and their health is failing, and they want to be near their families,” he said.

Andrew McPherson, a junior equity research analyst at Salomon Brothers, concurs.

Seniors often move to warmer climates when they retire, he said. But as they hit their mid-80s, especially when one spouse dies, they have a harder time getting along on their own.

“The kids still live up in the Northeast. Then the issue is, every time Grandma slips and falls or has a problem, the kids have to hop on a plane and fly down to Florida,” McPherson said.

It makes more sense for Granny to be near the family.

And, sensing a need, developers in the city are offering upscale continuing care and assisted-living apartment buildings, where older residents receive personal care, including help with getting dressed, bathing and medication.

Glenn Kaplan, chairman of the Kapson Group, which owns and operates 20 such facilities in the region, said his firm has another 22 on the drawing board or under construction, including five scheduled to open in the city within three months. Other developers recently opened senior care apartment buildings in Manhattan and Brooklyn.

Other evidence supports retirees who say they are returning because of their love of the city and what it offers. Real estate firms, which are on the front line of selling and renting homes and apartments to the returnees, say they are experiencing a boom.

Andrew Heiberger, president of Citi Habitats, which rents more than 3,500 apartments a year in the city, said returnees make up about 6% of his business, up from about half that just a few years ago. His firm found an apartment for Horst Liepolt just this month.

Liepolt was a Grammy-winning jazz record producer who ran the Sweet Basil jazz club in Greenwich Village for 10 years before returning to Berlin with his wife, Clarita, two years ago.

“I thought with the Wall coming down, and with the whole rebuilding thing, it was going to be like the Wild West and honky-tonk, something happening, excitement,” Liepolt said.

He found quite the opposite.

“In those 2 1/2 years, there was no excitement, only Doomsville.”

Contrast that to an awestruck Liepolt visiting New York for the first time almost 40 years ago.

“You see it in movies, you see it in pictures, but it was another thing to actually be here. It was amazing. That was it. I felt very good and right at home,” Liepolt said.

It’s a sentiment Howard Sommer, a 57-year-old president of an investment fund who was born and reared in the South Bronx, understands.

Sommer’s journey took him briefly through Chicago before plopping him down in Long Island for 30 years of the whole suburban treatment: two children, a big house on 31 /2 acres, a swimming pool and a tennis court.

But when the kids grew up and went to college and, upon graduation, moved to Manhattan, Howard and Arlene Sommer, 55, found themselves with too much house. Howard was itching to get back to the city, but his wife was not too sure she was ready to give up the space and comfort of their home and the bonds she formed over the years.

They sold the home anyway and have been renting a Manhattan apartment for seven months now. Arlene is back in school studying to become a psychoanalyst. And Howard is having a terrific time.

“At this point in my life I want to be in the middle of everything,” Sommer said. “I love stepping out of my apartment and being on the streets and all the people and the energy and the excitement. . . . It’s good to be a New Yorker again.”

When she turned 65, Sonia Goldstein decided it was time that she and her husband, Mort, leave Plainview, L.I., and return to the city, where he was reared.

The dossier: 40 years in the suburbs, three children, a dog and a large house that had an office for Mort, a psychologist. He needed some convincing because the move meant ending his practice. Solution came in the form of a two-day-a-week practice on Fire Island. He feels now he has the best of both worlds.

And Sonia is just loving it.

“New York is the place to be when you are retired,” she said. “You are not dependent on a car. You can get to wherever you want to go with mass transportation, and you are not locked in isolation in your home.”

The couple has subscriptions to practically all the cultural institutions in the city.

“The way we get together with friends that we don’t see as much anymore is we have subscriptions with them,” Sonia Goldstein said. “So, I have a subscription to Lincoln Center, Manhattan Theater Club, the Roundabout and then in between, my daughter and I love the ballet so we go to that, either traditional ballet or Alvin Ailey.”

The older-than-60 crowd numbers 1.3 million in a city of 7 1/2 million people, so cultural institutions, even as they court families and younger audiences, find their base is highly dependent on retirees.

At the Roundabout Theatre Company, for instance, more than 30% of the 35,000 people on its subscription roll identify themselves as retired, said marketing director David Steffen.

“It’s important that everyone realize that there is this huge influx of people coming back into the city,” he said.

Dolores White, for one, has been to all the retirement places and thought they were nice — but not for her.

And when she says “I’m a city girl,” she doesn’t mean just any city.

“I’ve been to Chicago, which I liked. I was in San Francisco. I liked it. I’ve been to Paris, London, Madrid, Rome, but I like New York the best,” White said.

The 68-year-old former teacher grew up in Brooklyn, and remembers cutting class to see Frank Sinatra at the Paramount in the 1940s. She remembers Harlem, Little Italy and Chinatown.

She is now working on exchanging her rambling East Northport, L.I., home for an apartment in the Tribeca-Battery Park area, or in Brooklyn Heights.

“There’s such an array of cultural activities, restaurants, shopping . . . you could just sit on the stairs of some of the office buildings and people-watch for hours,” White said.

The city’s rejuvenation recalls for her the old days.

“We felt very free in those days, traveled in the subway with ease. I see that coming back. I see it coming back again. That is what is drawing me back to moving back to the city,” she said.

Original Story Date: 10/26/97

October 26, 1997
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