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Chelsea Now photo by Jefferson Siegel Fern Luskin, an art and architecture historian, stands in front of a rowhouse at 339 W. 29th St., which belonged to abolitionists James Sloan Gibbons and Abigail Hopper Gibbons and was purportedly a stop on the Underground Railroad. Community demands transparency in Hudson Yards process By Chris Lombardi This week, as developers rushed to meet the Oct.11 deadline to bid for the Hudson Rail Yards, local elected officials and advocates demanded that the city make the details of those bids public so that community boards and local residents are privy to all the proposals seeking to virtually remake the West Side of Manhattan. Poly-amory weekend means three (or more) is company By Rachel Breitman Whether joining in a pajama-clad cuddle party at the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, & Transgender Community Center’s purple and white gymnasium or spreading out picnic blankets on the verdant Great Hill in Central Park, the Poly-Pride Weekend was all about sharing.		NEWS Neighbors crusade to stop construction on historic rowhouse By Rachel Breitman Alongside the colorful, modestly sized row houses on West 29th Street, number 339 sticks out like a sore thumb. Ninth Ave. bike lane means headaches for business owners By Kathryn Lurie Trying to put two daughters through college is a difficult task. It becomes even harder when your business decreases by 40 percent over the course of a few weeks. Leather Fest gets treated roughly by some neighbors By Jefferson Siegel and Lincoln Anderson Another in an endless succession of summertime street fairs in the Village was held last Sunday, but funnel cakes and tube socks were not the main attractions. Restaurant faces gender discrimination suit By Albert Amateau The Transgender Legal Defense and Education Fund on Tuesday filed a lawsuit in Manhattan State Supreme Court against Caliente Cab Company in connection with the refusal of the branch at Seventh Ave. S. at Bleecker St. to allow a lesbian patron to use the women’s room after the end of the Gay Pride march in June because she didn’t look feminine enough. Taylor promises to ‘talk to community’ on Pier 40 By Lincoln Anderson With its new chairperson, Diana Taylor, firmly at the helm, the board of directors of the Hudson River Park Trust did not vote at their bimonthly meeting earlier this month on whether to select The Related Companies’ hotly debated Cirque du Soleil plan for Pier 40. Retirees re-enter the workforce with ReServe By Diana Britton Gail Fox can’t remember the last time she was idle. From the time she was a candy striper at a very young age to her current volunteer work at St. Vincent Hospital’s patient pet care, Fox has always been actively involved in her community.

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Arts & Entertainment

Madcap hilarity at ‘The Ritz’
By Scott Harrah
There is much to love about this revival of Terrence McNally’s 1975 farce about a portly garbage man, Gaetono Proclo (played with conviction by Kevin Chamberlin), hiding from his mobster brother-in-law in a gay bathhouse. Although much of the comedy appears dated, the screwball humor of this period piece is still funny more than three decades later.

Koch on Film

Margaret Cho unzips at the Zipper Factory
By WILL McKINLEY
If you enjoyed Janet Jackson’s performance at the Super Bowl a few years back, you’ll love Margaret Cho’s new burlesque show “The Sensuous Woman,” now playing at the Zipper Factory. It’s two hours of wardrobe malfunctions ?— all of them intentional.

Hear the ladies go pop
Girl bands and genre-breaking women release a fresh slate of albums

Estelle Parsons brings back the night
By JERRY TALLMER
Estelle Parsons never rests. If she isn’t acting, she’s directing, or writing, or talking, or planning, or attending to family matters, or just plain living, or gabbing with people like me. I look at her and I see a woman who is just as attractive as she was when she won the Oscar for her performance as the flaky sister in Warren Beatty’s “Bonnie and Clyde,” and that was — my God — 40 years ago. Indeed, more attractive now.

Losing their religion
By Steven Snyder
Daniel Karslake’s sobering documentary “For the Bible Tells Me So” is a movie about people thrown off their foundations, about the closed bubble of people’s religious worldviews being punctured by the discovery that one of their loved ones is living, according to their teachings, a life of sin. It’s a movie about how the purity of the Bible and the reality on the ground don’t always mesh, and about the psychological challenge such a disconnect can cause for the devout.

The actor’s struggle, on stage
By JERRY TALLMER
If Off-Broadway has a heart and soul, Terese Hayden must lie close to the center of it. She has been doing what she does — acting, directing, producing — since the 1950s, when, among much else, she furthered Equity Library Theatre as a sort of home away from home for actors and writers and directors with more creative hunger than credits.

Guess who’s coming to dinner
By SARAH NORRIS
When chefs Barbara Sibley and Margaritte Malfy were at the closing of the East Village space that would become their Mexican restaurant La Palapa in 2000, their new landlord asked their lawyer, “What if the girls can’t pay the rent?”