Letters to the editor

Volume Number 1 Issue Number 1| September 29 - October 5, 2006

Cheerful in Chelsea

To The Editor:
It’s not often that I get a pleasant surprise these days. So, I was thrilled to see (from the new newspaper boxes) that a new Chelsea Now weekly will be published, starting this Friday. May it also feature the spirits of Chelsea past and Chelsea future as our hometown on the Hudson continues to evolve!

I’m sure that thousands of longtime Chelsea residents, like me, hope that Al Amateau will again be focusing his fine research and reporting skills on Chelsea. We look forward to reading the work of other well-known and more recent journalists, editors and columnists, in Chelsea’s very own newspaper.

I’ve been reading the three publications of Community Media LLC for several years: The Villager, Downtown Express and Gay City News. It was a great loss for Chelsea community news when Bob Trentlyon sold the Chelsea-Clinton News after three decades as its publisher. Now, once again, Chelsea residents can look forward to having the community’s varied voices represented, opinions shared, events announced and issues discussed from local perspectives.

Congratulations to you and to us! We hope that our neighbors uptown in Hell’s Kitchen will enjoy similar felicity before much more time passes.

Kathy Casey
Holy hotel!

To The Editor:
Thank you for your sister paper, The Villager’s, continued airing thus far of the General Theological Seminary’s efforts to destroy the Chelsea Historic District.

The Reverend Dean Ewing of the General Theological Seminary repeatedly refers to the seminary’s “continued mission.” Historically, its mission, from its very founding, has simply been to prepare seminary students for the ministry.

However, Dean Ewing is now building a large conference center and hotel on the seminary grounds. He is expanding not only his residence beyond all seemliness, but the “mission” of G.T.S. as well. Who has ever heard of a hotel as a “historic mission” of the G.T.S., let alone any seminary?

Not satisfied with continuing G.T.S.’s historic function, this transient dean from the Deep South is, in my view, trying to enhance his image within the Episcopal Church by hosting conferences with his new conference center and hotel. Perhaps the dean wants to be a bishop by spreading the word of his name? He has already planned for his 4,500-square-foot palace on G.T.S.’s very valuable Close. He is now building a hotel to house, at a charge, those not deemed esteemed enough to enjoy the luxury of one of his four residential guest rooms in his 4,500-square-foot deanery.

The Chelsea Historic District is now being asked to self-destruct to make way for the dean’s new palace, conference center and hotel, all under the guise of “continuing the seminary’s historic mission.”

I think the seminary should sell the hotel and conference center to raise the funds it says it needs. A hotel and conference center are absolutely not part of G.T.S.’s “historic mission,” although they may be part of Dean Ewing’s mission for a bishopric.

Thomas Michael Fair

E-mail letters, not longer than 350 words in length, to news@chelseanow.com or fax to 212-229-2790 or mail to Chelsea Now, Letters to the Editor, 145 Sixth Ave., ground floor, NY, NY 10013. Please include phone number for confirmation purposes. Chelsea Now reserves the right to edit letters for space, grammar, clarity and libel.