A new residence is being built on the corner of 86th Street and West End Avenue (by Extell), which can’t be ignored. It will be 22 stories and have one apartment per floor of about 8500 square feet each (!) I hope this finally gives people enough room for closets. Also, each unit will have extra sized kitchens making it very attractive for families that keep kosher, if that indeed is the builder’s intent on this avenue with a large Jewish population.

Each apartment will cost about $14,000,000. So much for a real estate slump, not here! I am sure the units will be sold and probably very quickly too.

This is an ideal location, close to Riverside Park on the Hudson River, one block from Broadway shopping and transportation, on WestEnd Avenue.

West End is a quiet, old world, elegant avenue lined with pre-war, doorman buildings. On Shabbat and Jewish holidays, families stroll to the local synagogues. The building height matches the surrounding buildings and the size and price of each unit is in it’s own category. There is nothing else like this to my knowledge on this avenue.

Most interesting is that diagonally across the street from this incredible building is the Church of St. Paul and St. Andrew, which is a small, liberal Methodist congregation dedicated to possitive interfaith and social action. It also houses the West Side Campaign Against Hunger, a supermarket style food pantry which helps provide food for about 900 needy families per year. Also, Congregation B’nai Jeshurun (West 88th Street) meets in this church for Saturday morning services and for holiday overflow services. The church building is in poor shape and the congregation hopes to renovate and sell it’s air rights to secure income for it’s future, a plan that has been opposed by some community groups.

Perhaps the future condo owners of 535 West End can be convinced to become respected community neighbors by keeping the needs of the pantry in mind. This season the shelves became quite bare and the local synagogues and churches asked their members to donate (checks not food) in order to restock the shelves. Helping to support this pantry certainly would cost the new owners only a fraction of the cost of a small closet and would do a great deal of good for the needy and for their respect in the neighborhood.

 PS: See the comments for more about the neighborhood and the UPDATE AND PHOTO on the March 20, 2008 posting.

Praying With Lior will open shortly at the Village Cinema, and perhaps elsewhere. We saw it at the Jewish Museum as part of the  Jewish Film Festival followed by a fascinating discussion panel.

Make time to see this film.

This is a loving, compelling documentary about the world of Lior, a young man with Down’s Syndrome, his amazing family which includes four siblings, his community, how he deals with loss, and his preparation for his Bar Mitzvah. (warning:bring tissues).

It is most interesting to see how people choose to project onto Lior what they would like to see- a Magical Child- and how Lior, his parents and siblings deal with reality. It is wonderful to spend time with this family.

This film festival has had so many special films that I want to comment only very briefly on just a few of them. Most of these will be shown in other festivals in the future, try to see them:

The Hebrew Lesson, documentary in Hebrew, Chinese, Russian and other languages, the drama of real peoples’ lives, with the kind of uniqueness and details that fiction can not dream up.

Someone to Run With, in Hebrew based on a novel by David Grossman- a riveting drama which takes place in Jerusalem. Extremely well done.

Love One Another, a restored print of a 1922 silent film with Danish and English titles, by Carl Dreyer (not Jewish) is a protest against anti-semitism in Csarist Russia. Very remarkable film. We saw it with a live pianist. Some of the actors are from the Moscow stage and eventually performed in the NY Jewish theatre of the 20’s and 30’s and in Hollywood.

Two Ladies,in  French and Arabic, Jewish Esther and Moslem Selima’s mother, are both Algerian born and living in France. They share a fascinating friendship in spite of the surrounding extremism and prejudice.

Each year I go to this festival and no matter how many films I manage to see, friends see a few I haven’t seen, they tell me how wonderful they were, and I have the feeling I have missed too much!