Byline: By danny hakim section: Section B; Column 0; Metropolitan Desk; Pg. 1 Length

URL: http://www.nytimes.com
SUBJECT: MUSEUMS & GALLERIES (90%); ART & ARTISTS (90%); FILM (90%); ARTISTS & PERFORMERS (90%); EXHIBITIONS (89%); ARTS FESTIVALS & EXHIBITIONS (89%); SCULPTURE (79%); VISUAL & PERFORMING ARTS (79%); CHRISTMAS (66%)
GEOGRAPHIC: NEW YORK, NY, USA (90%) NEW YORK, USA (90%) UNITED STATES (90%); IRAN (67%)
LOAD-DATE: July 11, 2008
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
DOCUMENT-TYPE: Schedule
PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

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The New York Times
July 11, 2008 Friday

Late Edition - Final

Two Friends, and the Dream of a Lofty Park Realized
BYLINE: By ROBIN FINN
SECTION: Section B; Column 0; Metropolitan Desk; PUBLIC LIVES; Pg. 4
LENGTH: 1005 words
FACEBOOK has not been a factor in its success: At age 80ish, 30 feet tall, 22 blocks long and making a first impression best described as rusty, the High Line is not a looker. Nor is it human. But so far, the $170 million High Line renaissance, the park-in-the-sky reclamation project that marries a defunct elevated freight railway to an on-trend vision for Manhattan's underachieving West Side, has attracted roughly 15,000 human friends to its Web site.

The High Line can thank two friends, Robert Hammond and Josh David, co-founders and now co-executives of Friends of the High Line, for rescuing it from obsolescence on a shared, but definitely unplanned, personal whim.

''This is really like one of those great New York stories,'' says Mr. David (naturally the word ''writer'' pops up on his resume), ''where two guys who didn't even know each other decided to save this giant piece of the city's history from oblivion, and nine years later, here we all still are.'' And the High Line is doing the opposite of aging.

Now, the public is interacting in what happens to it next; the dynamic is not quite anthropomorphic, but close.

Almost 1,500 people have actually paid to be its official friend by becoming members of Friends of the High Line. The group formed in 1999 to rescue the weed-choked railway from demolition or, perhaps a fate worse than death, from being repurposed as a conveyor of the city's garbage.

Because of its friends, and a financial intervention by the Bloomberg administration, it will instead become the second elevated railroad track to be transformed into a pedestrian boulevard; the first is the Promenade Plantee in Paris. The High Line will welcome pedestrians only: no bikes, no Segways, no Rollerblades.

Sorry, speed demons. The High Line may be steel-belted, but its mission is to provide a walkway and greenbelt, not a speedway. The first phase, between Gansevoort and 20th Streets, is scheduled to open, within budget, in December; more than $130 million in overall project financing is in place. And the checks, some solicited at benefit soirees, some simply unsolicited gifts from High Line boosters, are still rolling in.

Although strolling is free to everyone, membership starts at $35 -- for those 65 and older, who seem to relate to the High Line's antiquity, and students, who seem to see it as a cool alternative to just plain pavement. This could be the friendliest public/private venture ever attempted in New York City. For sure it is the hippest public park this city has concocted -- Mr. Hammond and Mr. David take the news that copycat versions are flying off the drawing board everywhere, from Rotterdam to St. Louis, as a compliment, not competition.

The actor Edward Norton is a friend, and the married actors Kevin Bacon and Kyra Sedgwick have been on board from the start. The Tiffany & Company Foundation is a friend. So are the designer Diane von Furstenberg and her entertainment magnate spouse, Barry Diller. As the transformation of the meatpacking district (which is where the High Line begins) has proved, a little gentrification goes a long way.

But the very best friends of the High Line are undoubtedly Mr. Hammond and Mr. David, two relatively clueless (at least in regard to civic activism and railway policy) West Siders who separately wandered into a community board meeting in 1999 after reading about the High Line's imminent demolition after a couple of decades of nasty litigation. Sure, Peter Obletz, the railroad aficionado, who died in 1996, had tried to preserve the High Line, but since his vision involved restoring it to its original -- meaning noisy, smelly and mercantile -- incarnation as a throughway for freight trains, his efforts fell short.

Mr. Hammond and Mr. David had something more genteel in mind, something that didn't actually include trains.

''Josh and I had both taken Amtrak in the past; that was the extent of our railway experience,'' says Mr. Hammond, 38, a thin guy wearing a thinner tie. ''I walked into the meeting assuming there'd be somebody there with a preservationist take on the situation; there wasn't. There was a bunch of West Side property owners verging on apoplectic about the need to tear the whole thing down.''

Mr. David, who interrupted a Fire Island vacation this week to return to the city to extol the virtues of the High Line, added, ''And once Robert and I walked out of the meeting and came up with the concept of Friends of the High Line, all those people went full-fledged apoplectic.'' At 45, he is the most senior member of the Friends of the High Line management team. ''I try to take that as a positive,'' he says.

ALTHOUGH neither had previously experienced a deep emotional or aesthetic connection to the structure -- or, to be honest, any connection at all -- the notion of it being eliminated from the cityscape in the interest of cookie-cutter development had struck them as heretical. Shortsighted, too.

''I fell in love with the very thing most people were complaining about, this rusty eyesore from the city's industrial past,'' says Mr. Hammond. ''I saw this as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to preserve a mile and a half of Manhattan as an uninterrupted walkway and vantage point for people to enjoy on their own terms.''

At the time, Mr. Hammond was an entrepreneur at Watch World International, acquired in 2000 by Sunglass Hut; Mr. David was a freelance magazine editor and writer.

Fate sat them next to each other at that overwrought meeting of Community Board 4.

This week, in a loftlike office just west of the High Line overpass at the intersection of 10th Avenue and 20th Street, they were still sitting beside each other, grinning the grins of guys who have not just had a vision, but have lived to see it translated into functionality by innovators from Field Operations, a landscape architecture company, and Diller Scofidio & Renfro, the architectural firm.

''Their design for the High Line had me at hello,'' says Mr. Hammond. Fitting.
URL: http://www.nytimes.com
SUBJECT: INTERNET SOCIAL NETWORKING (89%); HISTORY (77%); PARKS & PLAYGROUNDS (77%); CITY LIFE (72%); RAIL TRANSPORTATION (71%); RAIL FREIGHT (71%); WEB SITES (55%)
COMPANY: FACEBOOK INC (59%)
GEOGRAPHIC: NEW YORK, NY, USA (93%) NEW YORK, USA (93%) UNITED STATES (93%)
CATEGORY: Philanthropy
PERSON: Robert Hammond
LOAD-DATE: July 11, 2008
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
GRAPHIC: PHOTO (PHOTOGRAPH BY OSCAR HIDALGO FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES)
DOCUMENT-TYPE: Biography; Biography
PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

594 of 1231 DOCUMENTS

The New York Times
July 11, 2008 Friday

Late Edition - Final

McCain Adviser Refers To 'Nation of Whiners,' Touching Off Rebukes
BYLINE: By MICHAEL COOPER; John M. Broder contributed reporting from Fairfax, Va.
SECTION: Section A; Column 0; National Desk; Pg. 15
LENGTH: 716 words
DATELINE: BELLEVILLE, Mich.
Senator John McCain has spent the week trying to tell people that he feels their economic pain. So it was more than a little unhelpful when one of his top economic advisers was quoted Thursday as saying that the United States was only in a ''mental recession'' and that it had become a ''nation of whiners.''

The adviser, former Senator Phil Gramm, Republican of Texas, sought to clarify his remarks Thursday by saying he had been referring only to some of the nation's leaders.

But it was too late to keep from complicating things for Mr. McCain, who has been trying to strike a more empathetic tone after sometimes struggling to maintain a balance between displays of optimism about the nation's future and demonstrating an understanding of Americans' economic hardships.

Senator Barack Obama, noting that Mr. McCain had previously said an expansion of offshore oil drilling might have a ''psychological'' benefit for the country, seized on Mr. Gramm's remarks, made in an interview with The Washington Times.

''You know, America already has one Dr. Phil,'' Mr. Obama said at a campaign stop in Fairfax, Va. ''When it comes to the economy, we don't need another.''

Mr. McCain himself repudiated Mr. Gramm's comments.

''The person here in Michigan that just lost his job isn't suffering a mental recession,'' he told reporters after a town-hall-style meeting at a factory in this city west of Detroit.

And when he was asked whether Mr. Gramm -- McCain campaign co-chairman, UBS Investment Bank vice chairman and former economics professor -- might serve as treasury secretary in a McCain administration, the candidate replied with a flash of his sometimes tart humor.

''I think Senator Gramm would be in serious consideration for ambassador to Belarus,'' he said, ''although I'm not sure the citizens of Minsk would welcome that.''

Mr. McCain has been spending the week in Rust Belt states like Pennsylvania, Ohio and Michigan pushing his economic proposals and trying to show a grasp of workers' financial struggles.

During the gathering here Thursday, held at Bayloff Stamped Products, which provides metal components to car manufacturers, he tried to fend off the skepticism of some Michigan workers about his support for free trade and said more than half a dozen times that people were ''hurting.''

''America is hurting today,'' he said. ''Michigan is hurting today. The automotive industry is hurting. And we've got big problems, and we've got big challenges.''

Questioned about manufacturers' moving their plants elsewhere because of free trade, he replied, ''I have to tell you -- and I know that it's not popular -- I do believe in the overall benefits of free trade.''

In recent months Mr. McCain has recalibrated the way he talks about the economy, often noting that it does not matter whether the technical definition of a recession has been met, given that so many people feel as if they are in one. The tone is in contrast with the one he struck during the primaries, when he sometimes placed more emphasis on optimism.

His struggle to find a balance was on vivid display at a Republican debate in January, when he was asked whether the country was better off now than it was eight years ago.

''I think you could argue that Americans over all are better off,'' he replied, ''because we have had a pretty good, prosperous time with low unemployment and low inflation, and a lot of good things have happened, a lot of jobs have been created.'' Then he added: ''But let's have some straight talk. Things are tough right now.''

At the factory gathering Thursday, Mr. McCain repeated a statement that was used against him to great effect in the Michigan primary, which he lost to Mitt Romney.

''I'll look at you in the eye again and I'll tell you that there are some jobs that won't come back,'' he said.

But, the optimism hardly out of reach, he added that the lost jobs would be replaced with new ones to create more environmentally friendly technologies and other innovations.

''I have to tell you that the innovation and the technology and the entrepreneurship of the world still lies in the United States of America,'' he said. ''Every technological advance we've made in the 21st century and throughout the 20th has come from the United States of America.''

URL: http://www.nytimes.com
SUBJECT: ECONOMIC NEWS (90%); INTERVIEWS (90%); US PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATES 2008 (90%); RECESSION (89%); US REPUBLICAN PARTY (79%); US PRESIDENTIAL ELECTIONS (78%); AUTOMAKERS (74%); TREASURY DEPARTMENTS (73%); OIL & GAS INDUSTRY (73%); AUTOMOTIVE MFG (69%); MANUFACTURING FACILITIES (69%); AUTOMOBILE MFG (64%); DISMISSALS (64%); PUBLIC FINANCE AGENCIES & TREASURIES (63%); OIL EXTRACTION (53%)
COMPANY: UBS INVESTMENT BANK (66%)
PERSON: JOHN MCCAIN (96%); BARACK OBAMA (91%); PHIL GRAMM (84%)
GEOGRAPHIC: DETROIT, MI, USA (79%) MICHIGAN, USA (94%); OHIO, USA (79%); PENNSYLVANIA, USA (79%); VIRGINIA, USA (79%) UNITED STATES (95%); BELARUS (90%)
LOAD-DATE: July 11, 2008
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
GRAPHIC: PHOTOS: At a factory in Belleville, Mich., John McCain told workers Thursday: ''America is hurting today. Michigan is hurting today.''(PHOTOGRAPH BY CAROLYN KASTER/ASSOCIATED PRESS)

Phil Gramm, a co-chairman of the McCain campaign, said in an interview that the nation was in a ''mental recession.''(PHOTOGRAPH BY DOUG MILLS/THE NEW YORK TIMES)

PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

595 of 1231 DOCUMENTS

The New York Times
July 10, 2008 Thursday

Late Edition - Final

For Knitting Factory, Westward Ho (Brooklyn, Too)
BYLINE: By BEN SISARIO
SECTION: Section E; Column 0; The Arts/Cultural Desk; Pg. 1
LENGTH: 1163 words
Jared Hoffman has a vision for the Knitting Factory: smaller, leaner and outside of Manhattan. Far outside.

For 21 years the nightclub has been a symbol of downtown New York music, gaining an international reputation for an eclectic, finger-on-the-pulse aesthetic. At the Knitting Factory's original location on East Houston Street on the Lower East Side, and at 74 Leonard Street in TriBeCa, where it moved 14 years ago, jazz has mingled with punk, avant-garde rock, hip-hop and underground sounds of all types.

But Mr. Hoffman, who took over five years ago, is betting on a plan for the future that will involve a lower local profile in Brooklyn and a big role in two cities distant from downtown New York in every way: Boise, Idaho, and Spokane, Wash.

This week the New York club, the headquarters of a company that also includes a club in Los Angeles, won community board approval to begin moving into 361 Metropolitan Avenue in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, the former site of the Luna Lounge. In TriBeCa the Knitting Factory has three performances spaces, the largest holding 400 people, but in Brooklyn it will have only one room, for 300 or fewer. Two weeks ago ''Knitting Factory Concert House'' signs went up outside larger halls in Boise (capacity 1,000) and Spokane (1,500) that the company recently acquired.

''We don't have to be the biggest kids in New York City to be the Knitting Factory,'' Mr. Hoffman, 45, said in the Leonard Street front room one recent afternoon as a parade of tattooed young men lugged in the night's cargo of amplifiers. ''What we do have to have is a pipeline that brings us the most exciting new music from the cities where the newest, most exciting new music is being created.''

The survival of the Knitting Factory may depend on a big change. The Leonard Street building was recently sold, and while the club's lease runs through next July, Mr. Hoffman said it has no future in increasingly upscale TriBeCa. And though its once-renowned bookings have remained strong in niches like hardcore punk, noise-rock and independent hip-hop, the club has slipped down the status ladder as newer, sleeker rooms like the Bowery Ballroom have become popular. Blank spots have begun to dot the Kniting Factory's calendars, along with once unthinkably unhip events like battles of the bands.

''The Knitting Factory has struggled to define itself ever since it lost its emphasis as a center for avant-garde jazz,'' said Tom Windish, a booking agent whose roster includes indie stars like Animal Collective, Hot Chip and Justice. ''The quality of the lineups went down as the distance from their roots increased.''

In New York competition for bookings has grown fierce with the rise of a turf war among the dominant concert promoters, Live Nation and The Bowery Presents, leaving less powerful clubs squeezed out.

The Los Angeles branch of the Knitting Factory, which opened in 2000, is also struggling. Next week it faces a public zoning hearing over a building-use permit that could result in its closing, though Mr. Hoffman said he was confident that the issue could be resolved.

''The Knitting Factory is very much a labor of love,'' he said. ''Not a lot of people are getting paid in full.''

To secure a steady source of revenue Knitting Factory Entertainment, the parent company, bought a majority stake in a Boise concert promoter, Bravo Entertainment, in 2006, and acquired the rest last year. The deal included the clubs in Boise and Spokane as well as a touring business that has taken the company into head-scratchingly new territory. In the last year it presented Elton John, Lyle Lovett, James Taylor and LeAnn Rimes at amphitheaters and arenas in Idaho, Montana, South Dakota and other states.

Those may be incongruous bookings for an organization that made its name with noisy fare by the likes of John Zorn and Sonic Youth. But Mr. Hoffman, the company's president, said the business in the Northwest brings in about 60 percent of its annual revenues of $19 million, effectively subsidizing the New York and Los Angeles rooms. And in the Internet age the company says it is also developing an audience in a quickly growing region that most of the touring industry pays little attention to.

''If it happened last night in London, New York or Chapel Hill, these kids know about it the next day, thanks to MySpace, Pitchfork, you name it,'' Mr. Hoffman said. ''The music is getting there, but no one is bringing the live music there.''

Thin and clean-cut, with a nebbishy earnestness more common in tech support than among sharp-elbowed nightclub owners, Mr. Hoffman cuts an unusual figure as a rock 'n' roll entrepreneur. He studied art at Harvard and has a graduate business degree from Columbia. But he is no novice in music. In 1988 he started Instinct Records, which released much of Moby's earliest material. ''He recorded three albums in my living room,'' Mr. Hoffman recalled.

Instinct was bought by the Knitting Factory in 2002, and in 2003 Mr. Hoffman took over the company from its founder, Michael Dorf.

The programming in Boise and Spokane is more conservative than in New York and Los Angeles, mixing alternative acts like Otep and the Faint with decidedly mainstream offerings like Ted Nugent and Puddle of Mudd. Mr. Hoffman said his goal was to ''continue to expand into the heartland'' with more concerts and more clubs, and to use the Knitting Factory's reputation to draw acts through its clubs in the Northwest.

Michael Deeds, an entertainment writer for The Idaho Statesman, said that while the clubs have been successful, the company's imprimatur is not necessarily the reason.

''It just isn't a household name outside of L.A. and New York,'' Mr. Deeds said. ''Obviously it's known among huge music fans for its cutting-edge acts, but if you're in the other 48 states, people don't know much about the Knitting Factory.''

The business in the Northwest may be keeping the company afloat financially, but Mr. Hoffman said that the programming in New York and Los Angeles remained important in maintaining the integrity of the Knitting Factory brand.

Before it made a bid for the Luna Lounge space, the Knitting Factory tried to stay in Manhattan. Mr. Hoffman looked at a space on 14th Street between Avenues A and B, but there was a zoning problem, he said.

The Williamsburg location, which Mr. Hoffman said he hoped to open in ''four to nine months,'' will bring the club closer to a young audience long ago priced out of Lower Manhattan.

And to develop new acts it is deliberately getting smaller. As part of the renovations of the Luna Lounge, Mr. Hoffman said, capacity will be reduced, to lessen the pressure to draw big audiences every night, and bring the Knitting Factory back to its roots as a club that could take risks.

''In very exciting ways it would be a return to the old Knitting Factory,'' he said. ''We want to do something smaller and more radical and more revolutionary again.''
URL: http://www.nytimes.com
SUBJECT: JAZZ & BLUES (89%); KNIT FABRIC MILLS (89%); HIP HOP CULTURE (77%); RAP MUSIC (77%); APPROVALS (67%)
GEOGRAPHIC: NEW YORK, NY, USA (96%); BOISE, ID, USA (92%) NEW YORK, USA (96%); IDAHO, USA (92%); WASHINGTON, USA (90%); CALIFORNIA, USA (79%) UNITED STATES (96%)
LOAD-DATE: July 10, 2008
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
GRAPHIC: PHOTO: The Knitting Factory's Jared Hoffman says the club's future is no longer in Manhattan.(PHOTOGRAPH BY MICHAEL NAGLE FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES) (pg. E5)
PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

596 of 1231 DOCUMENTS

The New York Times
July 10, 2008 Thursday

Late Edition - Final

Bloomberg L.P. Consolidates In a Revamping of Divisions
BYLINE: By BRIAN STELTER; Tim Arango contributed reporting.
SECTION: Section C; Column 0; Business/Financial Desk; Pg. 3
LENGTH: 663 words
Bloomberg L.P., the financial news and data company founded by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, announced a revamping on Wednesday intended to play up its growing assets in television, radio and Internet content.

The company, best known for its Bloomberg computer terminals, said the changes were meant to serve customers better by consolidating disparate divisions. The company will now be divided into three main units: news, data and financial products.

The news unit will include the company's existing news-gathering operation, which produces business articles for the Bloomberg terminals and other outlets, as well as a revamped multimedia department, which will run the company's 11 television channels, radio network and Web site.

The data division will comprise the company's databases and law information. The financial products division will house the core terminal business, trading systems and analytics.

The changes come six months after Daniel L. Doctoroff, a deputy mayor under Mr. Bloomberg, left that position to become president of the company. As mayor, Mr. Bloomberg is not involved in the company's day-to-day affairs, but he still talks regularly to the company's executives.

In meetings with employees on Wednesday, Mr. Doctoroff and Peter T. Grauer, the chairman of Bloomberg, said the changes would create integrated structures for the company's products and services, and ensure that the staff in each area was more specialized for customers.

About 85 percent of Bloomberg's revenue comes from its terminals, which are considered indispensable on trading floors. But the company's other revenue streams are growing more quickly. ''We expect that growth rate to continue to be at a premium to our terminal business going forward,'' Mr. Grauer said in an interview.

Naturally, then, Bloomberg wants to make better use of its other assets, which include its electronic network, trading systems and news division.

''We're integrating all of our financial products businesses,'' Mr. Grauer said. ''They'll have sales, product development, and customer support services all working in vertical teams.'' By setting up groups based on the kinds of customers they serve, he said, the company would be more client-friendly and innovative.

Matthew Winkler, the editor in chief of Bloomberg News, will continue to oversee the journalists who write for the terminals, for newspapers and for a magazine, Bloomberg Markets. Executives will soon start an external search for a leader of the Bloomberg multimedia division.

Norman Pearlstine, the former top editor of Time Inc., became Bloomberg's chief content officer in May. He will not be affected by the shuffle and will continue to report to Mr. Doctoroff.

Mr. Grauer emphasized that while other media companies are forecasting layoffs, Bloomberg was continuing to grow. The company also announced a bonus system tied to personal and departmental goals. Terminal revenues are pegged at about $6 billion this year, for example, and if the company reaches $10 billion in sales in four years, every current employee will receive a bonus equivalent to 70 percent of their salary; reach the goal sooner, and the percentage increases; reach it later, and the percentage decreases.

The announcements came days after the departure of Lex Fenwick, who had been chief executive of Bloomberg since 2001, though his role had been diminished since 2005, when his primary responsibilities were limited to overseeing sales. Last Thursday Mr. Fenwick told staff members he would step aside to oversee an offshoot of the company called Bloomberg Ventures, which will pursue new business opportunities. ''It is an idea shop,'' Mr. Grauer said. Mr. Fenwick's departure was seen as a consolidation of power by Mr. Doctoroff and Mr. Grauer.

Bloomberg has been in the news recently as Merrill Lynch negotiates to sell its 20 percent stake in the privately held company. Mr. Grauer had no comment on those reports.