The Buzz

BUT IT’S ALL THE SAME AIR: “We don’t know specifically what documents they don’t want to give us,” wrote attorney Antonia Bryson, explaining why she couldn’t offer much of an update about Hell’s Kitchen Neighborhood Association v. Bloomberg, the Clean Air Act lawsuit alleging that the city and state violated the federal Act by mandating more parking spaces in Manhattan when it rezoned Hudson Yards. Bryson said that the suit, whose plaintiffs include Community Board 4’s Christine Berthet and Martin Treat, is still alive, nearly four months after its first day in court. Bryson said that during the suits early “discovery” stage, she and the plaintiffs had requested “documents showing how they developed the parking requirements for the Hudson Yards area, whether they had studied the relationship between parking and traffic, whether they considered the Clean Air Act requirements, the thinking behind the 950-space public garage [approved for Tenth Avenue], etc.” (We can only imagine how much else is in that “etc.,” given how thorough Berthet tends to be at C.B. 4 meetings.) So far, the Bloomberg and Spitzer administrations are still using legal feints to avoid handing over anything. Perhaps part of the delay is that to the fast-moving City Hall crowd, the term “Hudson Yards” is so 2005: Now, two years after the rezoning, one is more likely to hear about its dozens of component pieces, whether it’s the West Side rail yards, upgrades to the Javits Center, or the dozens of little parks and affordable housing promised by developers. We had this pointed out to us by Colin Casey, aide to State Senator Thomas Duane, when we asked him about “Hudson Yards.” Casey scolded, “It goes from 33rd to 50th Street! You’ve got to be more specific.”

THAT’S “SENATOR GROUCHO” TO YOU: Speaking of Casey’s boss, we hear his life is even more surreal than usual, thanks to the “Choppergate” investigation into the use of state police by aides to Governor Eliot Spitzer to uncover possible abuses by State Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno. Duane is the ranking Democrat on the state senate’s Investigations Committee, a position he took, Casey said, when he became the Democratic “floor leader” and had to give up some of his more taxing committee assignments. “So he chose Investigations, where nothing ever happens,” said Casey. Not this year: The committee, in the Republican-controlled state senate, has been having a field day. Duane’s been kept busy trying to keep that field day under control, a role characterized by Newsday as “throwing sand in the gears of what he and colleagues deemed a partisan inquiry.” In the past two weeks, Duane has been featured on WNYC and all three major papers, who usually ignore him as a predictable liberal. Meanwhile the office is more jumpy than usual: “The governor calls, and we have to ask, ‘What is this about?’ before we decide he should take the call.” We think he is just the man for this three-ring circus, and hope that Newsday’s crack about Duane’s “Greenwich Village-meets-Marx Brothers persona for the Spitzer side” was laced with a proper dose of appreciation.

NEW DISGUISE FOR SPIDER-MAN: Prepare to be disappointed, Ethan Geto: your protégé Gary Parker is leaving his job as district manager of Community Board 5, but not to run for office. Chelsea Now learned last week that Parker has just left C.B. 5 for a gig for his previous employer, New York University, this time as Director of Government and Community Affairs. “I am truly excited to get started,” Parker wrote in an email, adding, “My only regret about leaving C.B. 5 is that I won’t be working with David Siesko. He is going to be an amazing chair, and the Board is going to flourish under his leadership.” Wanting to hear more, we chased Parker by all means necessary, including cyberspace, and finally caught up with him via Google Chat just before he left for a week at Fire Island with his partner, Kevin Schneidler. “I really wanted to return to the Village,” said Parker. When we pointed out that the Village’s attitude toward NYU is a bit ambivalent, given its many building projects, its non-unionized grad students and Brad Hoylman’s famously raucous C.B. 2, Parker immediately got to work: “NYU truly wants to engage the community, and I am going to do my best to build that bridge,” he responded. “As you know, I have spent much of my time over the last several years bringing folks with different views to the table and building strong alliances on commonalities.” Asked if that is another way to say that anyone who could talk to rich people on the Upper East Side, museum officials and SRO residents alike could do well in the NYU context, Parker just laughed, or rather wrote “lol” (laugh out loud). He didn’t seem nervous about having to build that bridge between the likes of Andrew Berman at the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation and the university’s real estate lawyers at Belkin, Burden, Goldman and Wenig. We figure that NYU hired Parker at least partly because he has on speed-dial City Council Speaker Christine Quinn and his first boss, Assemblymember Deborah Glick. Given upcoming high-profile zoning battles, he may call both soon, as well as his Hunter College buddies in the offices of Borough President Scott Stringer, State Senator Thomas Duane and City Councilmember Alan Gerson. We wish him well and suspect he’ll need all of them, plus some Tums.