Downtown Post NYC

09/04/2025

April 8, 2025:
This is what's going on at the Social Security Administration, according to The New York Times.

President Trump promised not to touch Social Security, but as Elon Musk’s team trims staff and plans cuts to phone services, the system is groaning under the pressure.

31/03/2025

March 23, 2025: A "Spring Equinox Festival" at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in Battery Park City celebrated "Nowruz" — the Persian New Year — with music, dancing, food, vendors of books and crafts, and backgammon lessons accompanied by opportunities to play this engrossing board game that was invented in Mesopotamia 5,000 years ago. In addition, a display of photographs depicted Jewish life in the country that was once called "Persia" and is now called "Iran" as it looked in 2000, twenty-one years after Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and his family were forced into exile and the Islamic Republic of Iran was proclaimed following a referendum.

21/03/2025

March 20, 2025 was officially the first day of spring, but two days before that in Union Square, a large and historic park in Lower Manhattan, it was clear that spring was on her way. (Photos: © Terese Loeb Kreuzer)

29/01/2025

The Alvin Ailey exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, 99 Gansevoort St., closed on Feb. 9. This was a monumental, thought-provoking, stunning exhibition that was not to be missed. Attached are some photos of the exhibition and a brief video showing the gallery where it was installed. For more information, go to https://whitney.org/exhibitions/edges-of-ailey

17/12/2024

Aboard its yacht, Manhattan II, Classic Harbor Line offers interesting and sometimes dramatic views of the winter wildlife in New York Harbor. There are more birds in New York City in the winter than there are in summer, and there are an estimated 300 seals as well who journey down from their summer breeding grounds in the Arctic. You can read about Classic Harbor Line's Seals, Seabirds and Winter Wildlife Tour on the Downtown Post NYC website, www.downtownpostnyc.com

29/11/2024

Notre Dame de Paris reopened five years after a disastrous fire. Macron and other French dignitaries got a tour, which the BBC transmitted live with an English translation of the French commentary.

The world gets a first look inside the cathedral today, five-and-a-half years after the devastating fire of 2019.

15/11/2024

Nov. 15, 2024: "Gone But not Forgotten," an exhibition of artwork by Naima Rauam, was at City Lore, an affiliate of the Smithsonian Institution at 56 East 1st Street. The exhibition ran through Dec. 8, 2024. For those interested in current exhibitions, regular gallery hours are Saturdays and Sundays, 12 p.m. to 6 p.m. and by appointment. For more information about Rauam's exhibition and about the gallery, go to https://citylore.org/about-the-gallery/current-exhibition/

11/09/2024

The Whitney Museum of American Art at 99 Gansevoort St. mounted a comprehensive and exhilarating exhibition about the life and work of choreographer Alvin Ailey. Ailey was inspired and influenced by Black history in the American South, the Caribbean, Brazil and West Africa, by the practices of Black spirituality, by the Black migration from the South to the North, by the history of Black music, and more. Black women, including Ailey's mother, Lula, who brought him up by herself, played a prominent role in his life and inspired his work. The exhibition opened on Sept. 25, 2024 and ran through February 2025.

Like Ailey himself whose creative work was multi-faceted, "Edges of Ailey" incorporated many art forms. A live performance program accompanied the gallery component. The Ailey dance organization was in residence at the Whitney for one week during each of five months. When the Ailey organization was not in residence, dance commissions by leading choreographers and their collaborators were presented.

The attached photo depicts an event that took place at the Whitney on Sept. 8 when Amos Machanic, formerly a performer with the Ailey dance company and now a "teaching artist" with the company, led people of varying ages in dance steps from "Revelations," one of Ailey's signature works. The lesson took place outside the Whitney. (Photo: © Terese Loeb Kreuzer)

For more information about the exhibition go to https://whitney.org/exhibitions/edges-of-ailey

16/08/2024

The Battery Dance Festival was held in 2024 as it was in 2023 in Battery Park City's Rockefeller Park. Jonathan Hollander founded the festival 43 years ago in the belief that dance should be accessible to all and that it should be free. On August 11, 2024 as he introduced the festival he said, "On this lawn dancers of the world unite." It has been part of the mission of the Battery Dance Company and festival to work with dancers and dance companies from many parts of the world. Here are a few photographs of the festival. For more information about the 2024 festival, go to https://batterydance.org/battery-dance-festival/ (Photos: © Terese Loeb Kreuzer)

26/07/2024

An exhibition at the Morgan Library & Museum entitled "Medieval Money, Merchants and Morality" has closed, but a video on the Morgan's website shows some of the highlights. The exhibition included some of the artifacts and artwork that accompanied an economic revolution that took place in Europe in the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Monetary growth at that time transformed every aspect of European society, raising questions that still resonate about the repercussions of avarice, the attitudes of the wealthy toward the poor, lending practices and money management. Many of the objects, books, portraits, panel paintings and sculptures in the exhibition were not only didactic in intention but of breathtaking beauty. For the videotape about the exhibition, go to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3MFmgMqJH8.

08/06/2024

Checkpoint Zoo, which played at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2024, is an important movie that makes the insanity of the Russian invasion of Ukraine vivid and even more horrifying and destructive than stories in print can convey. In 2022, shortly after the Russian invasion, around 5,000 animals were trapped at the Feldman Ecopark, a zoo just outside of Kharkiv, Ukraine, near the Russian border. With the animals running out of food and water and stressed and imperiled by Russian bombs, a heroic team of zookeepers and volunteers undertook to rescue as many of the animals as possible. The animals needing to be evacuated included lions and tigers who were capable of maiming or killing their rescuers as well as smaller, more docile animals.
The bewildered suffering of the animals in the film is poignant. They make the species “homo sapiens” seem despicable in its capacity to harm gratuitously only balanced by the capacity of humans to care and to try to behave in ways that are compassionate and noble.

— Terese Loeb Kreuzer

Shortly after the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, a camel was among around 5,000 bewildered and terrified animals that were evacuated from Feldman Ecopark on the outskirts of Kharkiv, Ukraine

17/04/2024

And you wonder why the premiums that you, the consumer, pay for your medical insurance from United Healthcare keep going up?????

News broke on Feb. 26 that the firm got a notice from the federal agency in October.