Read Huxley
To the Editor:
Re: “Renaming Southern Manhattan” (Downtown Digest, April 13)
SoMa? A nickname to reflect a “vibrant and ever-changing neighborhood,” that is Southern Manhattan?
Perhaps a little literary enlightenment is in order. Back in the last century, Aldous Huxley’s 1932 novel “Brave New World” was required reading for high school studies of dystopian literature, along with Orwell’s “1984.” Perhaps it should be reintroduced to the curriculum, and fast.
In Huxley’s dystopia, the populace is encouraged to take, and is largely addicted to, a lovely little drug without hangovers, without guilt, and without side effects that keeps everyone in line, complacent, and obedient to the powers that be: Soma. A muscle relaxant, Cardisoprodol, is also marketed as Soma. So I think SoMa is out of the running.
May I suggest CoMa (Corporate Manhattan), a nickname to help keep the big financial corporations here? How about LoMan (Lower Manhattan) — but with a long A — to show solidarity with Chinatown?
Or maybe BatMan, to indicate our historical association with the Battery?
Could TriBeCaMan offer our community the opportunity to establish a new superhero franchise? Perhaps the proceeds from blockbuster movies could fund our schools and reintroduce students to novels like “Brave New World.”
Jim Hopkins
Wrong solution
To the Editor:
Re: “The best health option” (editorial, April 13)
It is understandable that Villagers are eager for a hospital in their neighborhood. Who wouldn’t be, especially in an emergency? However, the solution you endorse seems worse than no solution at all.
E.M.T.s and paramedics will be asked to make a life-and-death judgment as to whether a patient needs real emergency treatment? Aren’t ambulances supposed to get patients to where any condition — even something the crew doesn’t have the resources to identify — can be treated?
The proposed “emergency room” will then have to stabilize patients the ambulance crew might have been mistaken about so they can be taken elsewhere? How much critical time will be lost with the stopover? If I hit my head or have chest pains, I don’t want to be taken to an “ER” that might say, “We can’t treat that. Better take him to a full-service emergency department.”
Is this the best health option? From what I’ve heard at public meetings, the full-service ERs at nearby Beth Israel, Bellevue and New York Downtown assimilated the St. Vincent’s emergency patients and still have capacity.
North Shore/LIJ has said publicly that it expects that 1,700 patients will have to be admitted to the hospital from among those who come to their “ER.” Where would they be taken? It certainly seems likely they’d be taken to the Upper East Side, where North Shore/LIJ owns the long financially strapped Lenox Hill Hospital – rather far from Downtown West Side communities for the patients and their loved ones. With St. Vincent’s inpatients having been readily absorbed by Beth Israel, Bellevue and New York Downtown, the resources we need already exist right in our own community.
Downtown West residents deserve the best health option, but your proposal seems more like a marketing plan than good medicine.
Jude V. Goldin
My mistake
To the Editor:
As one important part of its rezoning plan for Hudson Square, Trinity has proposed to build, at its cost, a K-5 public school containing 420 seats in a new development at Duarte Square. In response to a question from a Downtown Express reporter, I erroneously estimated that the physical size of the school would be approximately 100,000 sq.ft. The fact is, I had not concentrated on the exact physical size of the space, because we were always focused on how many students we could serve — which has consistently been 420 kids, enough to accommodate all the grade-school-aged children generated by the proposed rezoning, and then some.
The capacity of the Duarte Square school has not shrunk. The physical size of the school has not shrunk. The only thing that has shrunk was my own original faulty estimate of the physical size.
Carl Weisbrod
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