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

URL: http://www.nytimes.com
SUBJECT: RETAILERS (91%); BOOK REVIEWS (90%); BOOKSTORES (78%); NON FICTION LITERATURE (78%); NEWSSTANDS (78%); MUSIC INDUSTRY (78%); GROCERY STORES & SUPERMARKETS (73%); COLLEGE & UNIVERSITY PROFESSORS (72%); COUNTRY MUSIC (60%); BOOK SALES (90%); SINGERS & MUSICIANS (50%)
PERSON: RHONDA BYRNE (54%); RACHAEL RAY (51%)
LOAD-DATE: May 28, 2008
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
DOCUMENT-TYPE: List
PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

744 of 1231 DOCUMENTS

The New York Times
May 24, 2008 Saturday

Late Edition - Final

How to Stand Out in Times Square? Build a Bigger and Brighter Billboard
BYLINE: By GLENN COLLINS
SECTION: Section B; Column 0; Metropolitan Desk; Pg. 3
LENGTH: 1070 words
They could be 212-foot-high, flat black stealth bomber wings studded with tiny jewels, soaring 17 stories above the crossroads of the world.

Soon enough, their gemlike lights will glow brilliantly as the signature elements of the largest advertising billboard in Times Square, trumpeted by its designers as the world's most complex, powerful and digitally advanced new supersign, with unequaled high-resolution graphics.

The billboard, traditionally called a ''spectacular'' on the Great White Way, is already visible, yet still very much under construction. In sheathing the east, west and south sides of 1 Times Square, it will show the flag of the Walgreen Company, the nation's largest drugstore chain in sales, which is promoting a new three-level, 16,200-square-foot emporium in the building's ground-floor retail space, which has been empty for seven years.

The multicomponent, 250,000-pound sign will be programmed from street level to 341 feet high at the top of the building, on the traffic island between Broadway and Seventh Avenue at 42nd Street. Best known as the mother ship for a patchwork of billboards and the place where the ball drops on New Year's Eve, the building was originally called the Times Tower, the 25-story, 1904 headquarters of the newspaper that gave the square its name.

The store is expected to be unveiled, and the billboard officially illuminated, next fall.

The sign will have 12 million light-emitting diodes, known as L.E.D.'s -- 17,000 square feet of them, ''which is more than a third of an acre,'' said Arthur Gilmore, president of the Gilmore Group, a Manhattan design and branding consulting firm, which created the sign. ''Including its digital and vinyl decorative components, it will be 43,720 square feet in area.''

The new spectacular ''will be larger than any sign in Times Square,'' said Barry E. Winston, a Times Square project consultant who has been a billboard expert for more than 50 years. He said it would surpass the current behemoth, the 11,000-square-foot Nasdaq sign on Broadway at 43rd Street.

Walgreen is trying to raise its visibility in New York, a city seemingly overrun by Duane Reade, Rite Aid and CVS, where residents seem to need another drugstore even less than they need another bank.

This does not deter Walgreen, which sees ''the sign and the store as a focal point for us nationally,'' said Craig M. Sinclair, a Walgreen divisional advertising vice president.

Walgreen has 22 stores in the five boroughs; it will have 5 more by the end of the year, and plans a dozen more by 2010. Mr. Sinclair estimated that the sign would be seen by 1.6 million passers-by daily.

''There was a jumble of signs at 1 Times Square, and no continuity,'' Mr. Gilmore said. ''Now, three sides of the building will be programmed as a single entity.''

And so, the sign components of the east and west facades of the building, which are 341 feet tall and 143 feet wide, will be programmed ''in a synchronized way, as a single animation,'' said Meric Adriansen, a managing partner of D3, a digital design company in North Bergen, N.J., that designed the hardware and software for Walgreen. These animations -- largely advertising spots -- will run from 15 to 60 seconds.

Enhancing the digital screens will be ''passive,'' or nondigital, custom-printed decorative opaque vinyls as well as lighter printed vinyl-mesh scrims of the kind used in bus graphics. The scrims are perforated so that they do not rip apart in the wind.

Other advertisers with screens on the northern face of the building have long-term leases. Those screens will remain, as will several nondigital vinyl billboards on the east and west facades.

In the language of supersigns, the Walgreen billboard will be ''densely populated'' with L.E.D.'s that are as close as six millimeters apart.

The sign will marshal enough candlepower to withstand the sun at high noon. Its images will be projected by 12 million red, green and blue L.E.D.'s programmed to glow in different configurations so that the brains of human observers interpret them as images. A trillion colors are programmable.

The elements of the sign, programmed and directed from a control room in the building, require 200 disk drives to govern both sides of the building.

The digital components of the sign, using 16.6 miles of power and data cables, require the installation of 77 10-foot-tall, 5,000-pound ''cabinets'' brought by truck from a steel fabricator in Oregon.

These cabinets, weatherproofed assemblages of diode arrays, are being lifted and bolted to 30 tons of new steel supports on the building, with more than a half million nuts, bolts and screws.

On a recent night, a cabinet section dangled from a crane as riggers bolted it into place.

The supersign's distinctive features are ''the diagonals,'' as Mr. Gilmore called them: 27-foot-wide programmable digital elements on the east and west facades that will extend from about 12 feet above the ground.

The two diagonals will be interrupted by the Dow Jones zipper, as well as the tower's structural elements, but ''the diagonals pull the sign and the building together,'' Mr. Gilmore said.

The diagonals will be extended above the building's 224-foot parapet, up the sides of the south tower, with two digital signs 55 feet tall and 54 feet wide.

In addition, 13 5-foot-tall, high-definition plasma screens at street level and 17 additional 6-foot-square high-definition L.E.D. screens on the east and west facades will be programmable; and on those facades, there will be two 27-by-24-foot digital signs. There will also be a 54-by-32-foot active sign at the south facade.

Advertising possibilities for the sign are so robust that Walgreen plans to sell space to its suppliers for promotions. The company would not say how much it spent on the sign, but billboard advertisers said a sign of this size would cost at least $15 million.

The billboard is not guaranteed to boast about its size forever. An entrepreneur in downtown Los Angeles has promised to install two 14-story animated billboards celebrating ''Blade Runner,'' the 1982 dystopian science-fiction film. That project has yet to win approval from city agencies and overcome community opposition.

Meanwhile, a nebula of diodes will shine from 1 Times Square. ''It's going to light up that canyon near 42nd Street,'' Mr. Gilmore said, ''and give you a suntan.''
URL: http://www.nytimes.com
SUBJECT: MARKETING & ADVERTISING (89%); PHARMACIES & DRUG STORES (88%); OUTDOOR ADVERTISING (77%); CONSTRUCTION (75%); RETAIL PHARMACEUTICALS (75%); RETAILERS (74%); BRANDING (72%); CONSULTING SERVICES (68%)
COMPANY: WALGREEN CO (84%)
TICKER: WAG (NYSE) (84%)
INDUSTRY: NAICS446110 PHARMACIES & DRUG STORES (84%); SIC5912 DRUG STORES & PROPRIETARY STORES (84%)
GEOGRAPHIC: NEW YORK, NY, USA (79%) NEW YORK, USA (79%) UNITED STATES (79%)
LOAD-DATE: May 24, 2008
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
GRAPHIC: PHOTOS: An artist's rendering of the digital supersign in Times Square. (PHOTOGRAPH BY GILMORE GROUP)

The big sign the Walgreen Company is building boasts distinctive ''wings'' that stretch up the facade past the Dow Jones zipper. (PHOTOGRAPH BY TODD HEISLER/THE NEW YORK TIMES)

PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

745 of 1231 DOCUMENTS

The New York Times
May 24, 2008 Saturday

Late Edition - Final

New York's Past Beckons The Future
BYLINE: By ANDY NEWMAN
SECTION: Section B; Column 0; Metropolitan Desk; Pg. 1
LENGTH: 1117 words
Here they come, chugging down Fifth Avenue with their cargo of gleeful passengers: public double-decker buses in New York City!

The announcement on Thursday that New York City Transit might bring back the double-decker bus, last seen plying the streets on a regular basis circa 1953, is certainly good news to fans of good old New York.

But why stop there, oh city fathers? Surely there are dozens of icons whose time has come again. Automats! Subway tokens! The Board of Estimate! More and more of the city is becoming a museum of itself anyway, so why not go whole hog?

And since we have the technology and the regulatory smarts now, why not retrofit some of those ancient fixtures for the modern era? Picture horse-drawn vegetable wagons, like those that worked the Bronx well into the 1940s, piled high with organic microgreens. Three-card monte games with the house advantage capped at 2 percent. Polite squeegee men who check your oil and tire pressure while you wait at the light. When you think about it, the dustbin of history is a bottomless trove of riches.

WORLD'S FAIRS The 1939 World's Fair in Queens introduced a futuristic gizmo called a television; no less significantly, it led to the creation of what is now known as Flushing Meadows-Corona Park. The 1964 fair featured the debuts of animatronics and the Ford Mustang and left behind the super-retro-cool stainless steel globe called the Unisphere. New York may have lost its bid to bring the Olympics here in 2012, but Expo 2020 is just around the corner, and the World's Fair site is ready and waiting.

FIVE POINTS It's Saturday night. Want to see how the other half lives? Head on down to the intersection of Worth and Mulberry Streets. Now it's a tepid agglomeration of parking lots and apartment towers, but back in the late 1800s, it was a great place to smell the vestigial stench from the Collect Pond, take in a street fight or two, get chloroformed, and wake up in a tumble-down hellhole with no money in your pocket, a big bump on your head and a great story to tell your friends.

THE BOARD OF ESTIMATE Until the United States Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional in 1989, the New York City Board of Estimate, composed of the five borough presidents and three citywide officials, made most of the city's major budget and land-use decisions. It may have violated the principle of one person one vote by giving sparsely populated Staten Island as much representation as Brooklyn (fourth-largest city in America, remember?), but at least it never directed millions of dollars to fictitious community groups, a la today's City Council. Or if it did, it did so with more humor and panache.

THE AUTOMAT We're not talking about Bamn, the new version on St. Marks Place. We're talking about the old-school Horn & Hardart Automats, the last of which was on 42nd Street and Third Avenue and closed in 1991. The ones with the chrome-plated knobs and food behind little windows. But of course the fare would be updated to today's Manhattan tastes and budgets. Tea-smoked duck in a foie gras foam, anyone? Just shovel $32 into the slot, now retrofitted to accept debit cards.

BREADBASKET QUEENS For much of the latter 19th century, historians say, Queens was the most prolific vegetable-growing county in the country. Brooklyn was no slouch either in the produce department, ranking No. 2 in 1879. The advent of refrigeration and the ever-increasing price of land in the city eventually made farming redundant here, but the geographically correct foodies known as locavores have shown a willingness to pay a steep premium for food grown within a day's drive of home. So why not pay even more for a carrot grown in the shade of the No. 7 train? Community gardeners in East New York, Red Hook and the South Bronx are already taking their crops to market.

QUARANTINE HOSPITALS Smallpox sufferers to Roosevelt Island, please. Plague carriers report to Swinburne Island in Lower New York Bay. Got measles? Scarlet fever? Diphtheria? Plenty of room for you and your whole family on Hoffman Island, Swinburne's neighbor to the north. New York's 19th-century sick houses lie in ruins now, but no one else, unless you count cormorants, has come up with a better use for their former sites. With multidrug-resistant tuberculosis on the rise and SARS and avian flu lurking in the wings, it's time to reinvest in the city's infectious-disease infrastructure.

THE BROOKLYN DODGERS Walter O'Malley picked up his ball team and went west partly because the government refused to use its power of eminent domain to acquire land for him to build a stadium near the railyards on Atlantic Avenue. But the state seems to have no such compunction these days, having begun exercising eminent domain to clear a path for the developer Bruce Ratner's Atlantic Yards mega-development next door to O'Malley's would-have-been stadium site. With Atlantic Yards currently mired in economic woes, why not give the Dodgers a chance to come home? Even if half the city boycotts them, they're still guaranteed to outdraw the Nets.

RAT-HUNTING EXPEDITIONS A good idea that was never really given a chance. In 1931, according to Robert Sullivan's comprehensive history ''Rats,'' a dentist named Harry Unger planned to lead a gun-toting posse of 12 brave men onto Rikers Island, where the rodent community had become so populous that rats were swimming to the mainland and invading residential neighborhoods. The city called the posse off, concerned that they might end up shooting humans. Times have gotten a lot tougher for hunters everywhere since then. Guided hunts for trophy animals like bear and moose are now reeling from negative publicity, and the spotted-owl huggers keep getting new species added to the endangered list. But rats are as despised and as plentiful as ever, giving New York a real shot at marketing itself as a sportsman's paradise.

BOOM BOXES In a more technologically innocent era, the shoulder-mounted radio was considered an aesthetic scourge right up there with graffiti and un-poop-scooped sidewalks. Now we have cellphones. Think about it: Would you rather walk down the street to the strains of the new T-Pain single or to a junior account executive loudly booking a hairdresser's appointment?

ICE, DELIVERED FRESH Sure, you can impress friends with your Sub-Zero fridge, but have you ever had oysters cooled on a bed of ice harvested from the Adirondacks and delivered to your door by horse-drawn carriage? Rocked your Scotch with chips of unfiltered upstate wilderness? Twenty-first-century climatic conditions might require a longer journey to get the goods, but like all the finer things in life, it's worth the trip.

URL: http://www.nytimes.com
SUBJECT: MOTORCOACHES & BUSES (90%); URBAN TRANSIT SYSTEMS (90%); PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION (90%); URBAN BUS SYSTEMS (89%); CITY GOVERNMENT (89%); CITY LIFE (89%); CITIES (78%); REGIONAL & LOCAL GOVERNMENTS (78%); GOVERNMENT BUDGETS (78%); LAND USE PLANNING (75%); LEGISLATIVE BODIES (73%); SUPREME COURTS (64%); DECISIONS & RULINGS (61%); SETTLEMENTS & DECISIONS (61%)
COMPANY: FIVE POINTS TECHNOLOGY (53%)
GEOGRAPHIC: NEW YORK, NY, USA (99%) NEW YORK, USA (99%) UNITED STATES (99%)
LOAD-DATE: May 24, 2008
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
GRAPHIC: PHOTOS: FIVE POINTS: The poor and overcrowded Manhattan slum was portrayed in Martin Scorsese's 2002 film ''Gangs of New York.''(PHOTOGRAPH BY NEW-YORK HISTORICAL SOCIETY)

FRESH ICE: Before refrigeration was universal, ice deliverymen, seen here in Harlem in 1936, were a fixture in New York. A block of ice and a fan could also provide some relief on a hot summer day.

SUBWAY TOKEN: The mighty token was phased out in 2004 for the Metro- Card. Last seen as a cufflink.(PHOTOGRAPH BY LUCIEN AIGNER/CORBIS)

SQUEEGEE MAN: Whether you wanted it or not, these streetside entrepreneurs would wet your windshield and expect cash.(PHOTOGRAPH BY ANGEL FRANCO/THE NEW YORK TIMES)

THE AUTOMAT: The city's last Horn & Hardart closed in 1991. Prices, as shown in this 1976 photo, were not the object.(PHOTOGRAPH BY NEAL BOENZI/THE NEW YORK TIMES)

WORLD'S FAIRS: The New York State Pavilion at the 1964 expo in Queens was featured in a climactic scene in ''Men in Black.''(PHOTOGRAPH BY BERNARD GOTFRYD)(pg. B1)

GRAFFITI: The BMT Jamaica subway train, like many in the late 1970s, was covered in graffiti. The city declared victory over the urban art form in the late 1980s.

THREE-CARD MONTE: A game where the deck was always stacked.(PHOTOGRAPH BY JOHN SOTOMAYOR/THE NEW YORK TIMES)(pg. B4)

PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

746 of 1231 DOCUMENTS

The New York Times
May 23, 2008 Friday

Late Edition - Final

Hints of Progress in Drugs Treating Brain Cancer
BYLINE: By ANDREW POLLACK
SECTION: Section A; Column 0; Business/Financial Desk; Pg. 20
LENGTH: 1339 words
Robert A. Swanson, who co-founded Genentech and is considered a father of the biotechnology industry, was only 52 when he died in 1999, one year after a diagnosis of brain cancer.

In his own company's laboratories was a new experimental drug that, it turns out, might have helped him. In recent studies, that drug, Avastin, seems to shrink tumors, although it is still not clear how much longer this may help patients live.

Avastin, already widely used to treat other types of cancer, is leading a pack of new drugs that look promising as treatments for brain cancer, one of the deadliest and least treatable forms of cancer. The disease has received public attention this week with news that Senator Edward M. Kennedy has a malignant glioma, the worst class of brain tumor.

While details of the 76-year-old senator's cancer and his possible treatment are not yet known, glioma has a grim prognosis. Half of people with glioblastoma multiforme, the most common and deadliest of the gliomas, die within 15 months.

For decades, cancer drugs have been unable to make much of a change in those statistics. But now some experts hope that new drugs, some developed using new biotechnology techniques, can improve the outlook.

''I think that what you are going to see in the next five years is substantial improvement in survival,'' said Dr. Henry S. Friedman, a brain cancer specialist at Duke University. ''For the first time the pot seems to be boiling over with a number of different options, while 10 years ago we had nothing.''

Already, the brain cancer drug Temodar, a pill sold by Schering-Plough, is on track to surpass $1 billion in sales this year, which would make it the first blockbuster drug for brain cancer. And other treatments still in the experimental stage are showing hints of promise.

One is a cancer ''vaccine,'' which aims to train the patient's immune system to attack the tumor. An advocate for it is Cameron Mitchell, a 51-year-old man who formerly ran a coin laundry business in Grand Rapids, Mich. One Saturday morning he collapsed at home, writhing in convulsions. It was the first signal of a brain cancer that his doctors said would probably kill him within a year and a half.

That was in March 2004. Four years later Mr. Mitchell is leading what he calls a fairly normal life, although he can no longer drive because of occasional seizures.

He credits his longevity to the experimental cancer vaccine that he has been taking once a month at Duke. Pfizer recently agreed to pay at least $50 million for rights to the treatment from the biotechnology company Avant Immunotherapeutics.

In early clinical trials, patients lived roughly 30 months on average, about twice what might be expected. Others being treated in a clinical trial include Bobby Murcer, the New York Yankees broadcaster and former player.

Many experts, to be sure, voice caution about the pace of progress against brain cancer. They point out that neither Avastin nor the vaccine has been shown to lengthen lives when compared with a placebo or another other drug in a clinical trial.

Drugs often look good in early testing because doctors, either consciously or subconsciously, choose to try them on the patients with the best prospects. Mr. Mitchell might have survived anyway.

''This is a very select population of patients,'' said Dr. Jeffrey Raizer, director of the medical neuro-oncology program at Northwestern University. ''There are two- to four-year survivors with these tumors who haven't had the vaccine therapy.''

But virtually all experts agree there has been a sharp increase in the number of compounds being tested against brain cancer, in response to new scientific understanding of cancer and the changing economics of the pharmaceutical business.

For decades brain cancer was simply not an attractive area for drug makers.

Drugs rarely worked, in part because the blood-brain barrier, intended to shield the organ from certain chemicals in the blood, also blocked the drugs from reaching the tumors.

Moreover, the market was perceived to be small. There are only about 22,000 new cases of all brain and nervous system cancers in the United States each year, only a tenth as many as there are lung cancers, according to the American Cancer Society. The rapid death rate also limits the appeal of developing drugs.

''The typical life span isn't that long, so it doesn't have the recurring revenue stream, to put it bluntly,'' said Stephen M. Case, chairman of Accelerate Brain Cancer Cure, a nonprofit group that spurs research on treatments for the disease. Mr. Case, a founder of America Online, started the group with his brother Daniel, the former chief of the investment bank Hambrecht & Quist, who died from brain cancer in 2002 at age 44.

But the situation is changing. As pharmaceutical companies have been able to sharply raise prices for cancer drugs in recent years, it has become possible for treatments for even rare cancers to have hefty sales -- as demonstrated by Temodar.

New drugs are considered vital to the fight against brain cancer. Surgery and radiation therapy, which are also mainstays of treatment, might not improve much more. And they still can miss microscopic pockets of cancerous cells.

''We've reached our maximum limit that we can achieve with surgery,'' said Dr. Keith Black, the chairman of neurosurgery at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles.

Drugs, which can find those lurking cancerous cells by molecular means, might be the best option for further improvement.

Drug therapy made a big gain in 2004, when a trial showed that Temodar, combined with radiation, extended the median survival of patients in a clinical trial to 14.6 months, compared with 12.1 months for patients who received only radiation.

After four years, 12 percent of those who received Temodar, which is called Temodal outside the United States, were still alive, compared with only 3 percent of those in the control group.

Among drugs now in the pipeline, most attention is focused on Genentech's Avastin. The company says it will file this year for federal approval of the drug to treat glioblastoma multiforme patients who have a relapse.

Avastin works by blocking the flow of blood that brings oxygen and nourishment to tumors. On brain scans, Avastin seems to shrink many tumors.

''This is a remarkable, miraculous response on the imaging that we've never seen before,'' said Dr. Lawrence Recht, professor of neurology at Stanford University.

But there is a catch, he and others said. What the scans might be showing is that Avastin is reducing the swelling in the brain caused by leaking blood, not actually reducing the tumor size.

Even that can have a benefit because the swelling can cause neurological problems like those affecting speech or motion. In a clinical trial, patients who got Avastin alone had a median survival of more than nine months. Doctors said such patients might have been expected to live six months.

Other drugs that also work at least in part by blocking blood flow to the tumor are also in clinical trials. Most uncertain are the so-called cancer vaccines, which do not prevent disease like a measles vaccine. Rather they aim to treat the disease by harnessing the patient's own immune system. No such therapeutic cancer vaccine has ever performed well enough to win approval in the United States.

Besides the Avant vaccine, another is being tested by Northwest Biotherapeutics. Eight of the first 16 treated patients have lived at least three years, said Dr. Linda M. Liau of the University of California, Los Angeles, who initially developed the treatment.

One of those patients, Kevin Carlberg, a 30-year-old Hollywood rock musician, has lived more than five years, getting married, having a daughter, running a marathon and recording new CDs.

''I guess I'm living proof that miracles do happen,'' he said. But whether that miracle is because of the vaccine is still open to question.