Belt Parkway, 3:53 P.M.

Ángel Franco/The New York Times

Kathie Lee Gifford\'s \'Scandalous\' to Close

Sara Krulwich/The New York Times Edward Watts and Carolee Carmello in “Scandalous.”

The musical “Scandalous,” Kathie Lee Gifford's Broadway debut as a lyricist and book writer, will close this Sunday after 31 preview performances and 29 regular performances, the producers announced on Tuesday night.

The show opened on Nov. 15 to largely negative reviews, although several critics praised the lead performance of Carolee Carmello as the early 20th century evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson. “Scandalous” was the latest attempt by theater artists to create a musical that explored spiritual themes and aimed for audiences who might be drawn to stories about religious figures; some of these shows have had a difficult time selling tickets lately, including the recent productions of “Leap of Faith,” “Godspell,” “Jesus Christ Superstar” and “Sister Act.”

Box office sales have been weak from the start for “Scandalous,” so much so that two of its producers, Dick and Betsy DeVos, of the Amway family fortune, agreed last week to underwrite the show's financial loses after its standard financial reserve had been depleted. The show, which cost about $9 million to mount on Broadway, will close at a financial loss. In addition to the book and lyrics by M s. Gifford, the show has music by David Pomeranz and David Friedman, and was directed by David Armstrong.

Koch Hospitalized for Infection

Michael Loccisano/Getty Images Edward I. Koch

Former Mayor Edward I. Koch was admitted Tuesday to NewYork Presbyterian-Columbia hospital, where he was being treated with antibiotics for an infection in one lung.

A spokesman for Mr. Koch, George Arzt, said he expected the former mayor to be released in time to celebrate his 88th birthday next week.

Mr. Koch still goes to his office regularly at the Bryan Cave law firm and writes movie reviews and commentaries on current events for thousands of subscribers online.

N.E.A. Grants Aim to Reach Those With Limited Access to the Arts

A Los Angeles concert series for veterans and a Vermont exhibition showcasing visual artists with disabilities are among the projects that will benefit from $1.53 million from the National Endowment for the Arts, the endowment's chairman, Rocco Landesman, announced on Tuesday.

Called Challenge America Fast-Track grants, the money will be awarded to 153 organizations in 41 states, Washington and the United States Virgin Islands. The financing primarily supports projects that reach people whose access to the arts is limited by geography, ethnicity, economics or disability.

The projects include festivals, exhibitions, performances, public murals and sculptures, each of which receives $10,000. The endowment encourages applications from organizations with operating budgets of less than $50,000 and those that have not previously applied for public funds.

Man Fatally Crushed When Cooling Unit Falls From Crane

A 35-year-old man was fatally crushed when an industrial cooling unit fell from a crane in the Bronx on Tuesday morning, the police said.

The police said the unit was being moved when a chain attached to the crane broke at 173rd Street and Grand Concourse. The man was taken to Bronx Lebanon Hospital a few blocks away and was pronounced dead on arrival. His name was not immediately released.

Errol Schneer, a hospital spokesman, said that a private company was removing a temporary portable chiller unit for the winter when the unit struck the man. The man was believed to be an employee of the company.

An investigation is ongoing, and no criminality is suspected.

French President Inaugurates a Louvre in the Post-Industrial North

French President François Hollande inaugurated the first regional branch of the Louvre on Tuesday, a museum set atop a former coal mining yard in the depressed, post-industrial city of Lens.

The Louvre-Lens, a 150 million euro ($195 million) project, is scheduled to open its doors to the public on December 12. It will house a rotating collection of 205 works, mostly from the Louvre in Paris.

It is part of a recent push by France's major museums to bring more culture to outlying areas of the country, and to “open the doors of art while helping to revitalize a territory,” Mr. Hollande said in a speech at the museum on Tuesday.

In 2010, The Pompidou Center â€" home to France's National Museum of Modern Arts â€" opened its first provincial branch in Metz, another post-industrial city in the north of France.

“Lens has been ravaged by all forms of crises,” said Henri Loyrette, the director of the Louvre in Paris, in a speech on Tuesday. “It's a lso exactly the type of population we wanted to reach out to.”

The Japanese architectural firm SANAA designed the new museum, an airy space of more than 300,000 square feet clad in glass and aluminum. Major works that will be on view there for the next five years include Leonardo's “The Virgin and Child with St. Anne” (painted around 1508); Eugene Delacroix's 1831 “Liberty Leading the People,” a widely recognized patriotic work in France; and Raphaël's “Portrait of Baldassare Castiglione.”

The Louvre-Lens is expected to attract 700,000 visitors in its first year, considerably less than one tenth of the annual visitors in Paris. The Louvre has also contracte d to open a new museum in Abu Dhabi.

A Notable Voice Joins Chorus Against New York Public Library Plan

Ada Louise Huxtable, the prominent architecture critic, has come out against the New York Public Library's controversial plan to renovate its flagship Fifth Avenue library.

With a design by the British architect Norman Foster of Foster + Partners, the library plans to remove most of the books to make room for a circulating library inside the existing reference center. Scholars and others have protested plans to send the books to storage, concerned that delays in retrieving books are likely to result, and that the changes would diminish the library's research role.

“This is a plan devised out of a profound ignorance of or willful disregard for not only the library's original concept and design, but also the folly of altering its meaning and mission and compromising its historical and architectural integrity,” Ms. Huxtable wrote in The Wall Street Journal. “You don't ‘update' a masterpiece.”

As an alternative, Ms. Huxtable, who formerly wrote for The New York Times, proposed that the library renovate the existing Mid-Manhattan library, rather than sell it. “Let Foster+Partners loose on the Mid-Manhattan building,” she said, “the results will be spectacular, and probably no more costly than the extravagant and destructive plan the library has chosen.”

A Restaurant\'s Struggles Inspire a Musical With Book and Lyrics by Adam Gopnik

It's a quintessential New York story - how a traditional family restaurant gets squeezed out by the exploding success of celebrity chefs â€" and a few prominent collaborators are making it into a musical. They include Adam Gopnik, a staff writer for The New Yorker (book and lyrics); David Shire, the composer, who cowrote “Baby” and “Starting Here, Starting Now”; and Gordon Edelstein, who will direct.

The musical, “Table,” has been in the works for more than a year; a three-week closed workshop is scheduled to begin later this month. Mr. Edelstein said he hopes the show will eventually have its premiere at Long Wharf Theater, where he is the artistic director.

“It's about survival against the odds,” Mr. Edelstein said in an interview. “How do you adapt to changing times?”

In writing the musical, Mr. Gopnik draws loosely on his 2011 book, “The Table Comes First: Family, France, and the Meaning of Food.”

Should This Subway Photo Have Been Published?

The New York Post, via Newseum The front page of today's New York Post showed the scene moments before a man was struck by a subway train.

The photo on the front page of today's New York Post lays out the scene about as starkly as possible: a man apparently trying to pull himself up onto the platform as a subway train approaches. “This man is about to die,” the cover line reads.

The image is undeniably vivid. But should it have been published? And should the photographer, who told The Post he ran toward the train shooting, “hoping that the driver would see my flash,” have put his camera down and tried to help the victim, Ki-Suck Han, with the ranting man who had just pushed Mr. Han still nearby?

New Rowling Novel to Made Into a TV Drama

Whether or not fans camp out for the midnight showing remains to be seen. But J.K. Rowling's first non-Harry Potter novel, “The Casual Vacancy,” is to be adapted into a TV drama to be broadcast by the BBC in 2014, The Guardian reported.

The novel, which chronicles the fallout created by the sudden death of a member of the parish in the fictional English village of Pagford, will be Ms. Rowling's television debut. Although the book received some poor reviews, it has secured a place on best-seller lists.

“I always felt that, if it were to be adapted, this novel was best suited to television,” Ms. Rowling told The Guardian, “and I think the BBC is the perfect home.”

Going Home for Christmas, With the Armstrongs

Michael Nagle for The New York Times Ricky Riccardi, left, archivist; David Rees, curator; and Jennifer Walden Weprin, director of marketing, decorating for Christmas at the Louis Armstrong House Museum in Corona, Queens.

Eddie Adams/Associated Press Louis Armstrong practiced in his Corona home in 1971.

“Merry Christmas, everybody - this is Satchmo,” intoned the raspy voice in a living room in Corona, Queens, where holiday ornaments were being hung with care on Monday afternoon.

One of those doing the hanging, Ricky Riccardi, pointed out, “You notice that he said, ‘Merry Christmas, everybody,' and there's nobody there - Louis made these tapes to be played post-mortem.”

Mr. Riccardi, the archivist at the Louis Armstrong House Museum, where all this was taking place, was referring to the many personal recordings that Armstrong made here in this two-story house on 107th Avenue in Corona, where he and his wife, Lucille, moved in 1943.

This month, the museum is offering holiday tours featuring rare clips from Armstrong's Christmas tapes, which include the jazzman celebrating the holiday at home, as well as his quirky compilations of seasonal songs that Mr. Riccardi called “Louis's holiday mix-tapes,” with artists that include Elvis, Mantovani and Mitch Miller.

Another ornament hanger at the museum, David Reese, the museum's curator, pressed a button on the wall, and here came Armstrong's voice wafting through the room again, this time introducing a recording of “White Christmas” by the jazz singer Al Hibbler. Another push of a button brought the sound of Armstrong putting on a Nat “King” Cole record: “All I Want for Christmas Is My Two Front Teeth.” On his tape, Armstrong sang along with the record by adding rhythmic punctuations (“Uh-huh!”) and ad-libs (“Sing it, Nat!”).

Armstrong lived in his Corona house here until his death in 1971, and Mrs. Armstrong until her death in 1983. But the house is so meticulously preserved that it feels as if they've just stepped out to buy some egg nog. The holiday tour is meant to give visitors the feel of what it was like being home for Christmas with the Armstrongs, said the museum's director, Michael Cogswell, as his staff decorated.

They had hung Mrs. Armstrong's boughs of artificial pine in the windows, and put her miniature Christmas tree in the dining room. These items were found in the Armstrong attic, along with an artificial Christmas tree that was in too poor condition to use. A similar one was brought in, which was now being decorated in the front window with ornaments that belonged to the Armstrongs' beloved next-door neighbor, Selma Heraldo, who died last December and left her house to the museum.

Another audio clip played of Armstrong on “The Mike Douglas Show” talking about a photograph of the Armstrongs celebrating Christmas while on tour in Japan.

Armstrong, who famously spent part of his childhood in a New Orleans orphanage, told his wife on their first Christmas together that he had never had his own Christmas tree as a b oy. After that, Mrs. Armstrong was adamant about decorating the house for the holidays. If the Armstrongs were on tour for the holidays, they would break out decorations and celebrate Christmas on the road, Mr. Riccardi said.

Armstrong makes clear his love for Christmas throughout his home recordings, including a two-hour-long Christmas tape that he made shortly after acquiring his first portable reel-to-reel tape player in 1950, Mr. Riccardi said. The museum archives of his home recordings, which includes roughly 750 tapes, each about two hours long, is available for listening by appointment at the library at Queens College.

Armstrong kept two reel-to-reel recorders in his den, where he also meticulously cataloged his tapes in longhand on loose leaf paper. The press of a wall button again brought his voice into the room, singing a novelty number called, “Zat You, Santa Claus?” with lines like “I can see old/ Santa in the keyhole.”

On a shelf was a 45-r.p.m. record of Armstrong reciting “The Night Before Christmas,” which was recorded several months before he died and was the last issued recording in his lifetime, Mr. Riccardi said, with more than a million copies printed. At the end of the famous poem, Armstrong wishes, “A Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night.”

But then Armstrong, naturally, adds a line of his own: “A very good night â€" that goes for Satchmo too.”

The Face of the City, Hidden Under Shabby Sheds

My apartment building on the Upper West Side has cowered under city-required scaffolding for the better part of a year.

The building next door to the east is also under scaffolding, which should more properly be called a sidewalk shed. A tall building on the opposite side of the street to the north is similarly covered. So is a huge apartment complex across the avenue to the west.

Buildings immediately to the north, south and west of that huge complex all have sheds, as do still other buildings directly opposite those buildings.

A church abuts my building to the south. It has had a sidewalk shed wrapped around it since the first days of the Bloomberg administration, maybe earlier. Who can remember? An apartment house next door to the church on the east is also under wraps. So are buildings right near that apartment house to the east and the south.

You get the idea.

In my sunnier moments when I'm beneath these structures, trying not to fe el as if I've entered a mine shaft, I think of Bologna, that beautiful Italian city with miles of colonnaded boulevards. But whom am I kidding? Comparing the unsightly sheds of New York to the graceful arcades of Bologna is pure baloney.

The sheds, ungainly structures of steel pipes and wood, do have their merits. They provide shelter in a rainstorm - that is, unless they leak. Homeless people find a measure of comfort huddling under them. Doormen are grateful for the scaffolding when it snows; it means less shoveling for them.

So much for the bright side. What else can be said except what has long been true: the sheds are Stygian and depressing, sometimes scary and always plumb ugly.

They are terrible for any business scrunched beneath them. That was reinforced the other day when a New York landmark, the Stage Deli, sh ut its doors. There were several reasons that the Stage couldn't make it, but the many months that it sulked under a shed didn't help. “We lost a whole year,” the owner, Paul Zolenge, lamented.

Sheds are inescapable, especially in Manhattan. The city's Buildings Department says there are roughly 6,000 of them in the five boroughs, covering about a million feet of sidewalk. That's 190 miles, the distance between New York and Boston. They are supposed to be temporary. But “temporary” in many instances may be taken as a synonym for “forever.”

While sheds of one sort or another have been around for decades, their modern incarnation took shape in 1980 with the passage of Local Law 10, requiring detailed inspections of building facades. That legislation followed the death of a Barnard College student, Grace Gold, who was struck by masonry that fell from a building owned by Columbia University at Broadway and 115th Street.

The intentions behind the law are honorable. Still, where is it written that safety requires structures that are irretrievably hideous? No less than the face of the city is at stake.

The buildings commissioner, Robert LiMandri, apparently agrees. His department sponsored a competition for a more pleasing design. A year ago it announced the winner: something that its designers call the Urban Umbrella, an arching structure that, in fact, resembles a patio umbrella. Made of recycled steel and translucent plastic panels, it allows a flow of daylight. At night, LED units provide plenty of illumination.

“We brought it to the forefront,” Tony Sclafani, a department spokesman, said. “We're encouraging it.”

Sound s promising. But we've yet to see any of these structures, which the city may be encouraging but is not requiring. How many are there?

“There are actually two Urban Umbrellas up,” Mr. Sclafani said.

Great.

“In Toronto,” he quickly added.

Oh.

Indeed, Ryerson University in Toronto and a downtown building there on Bloor Street are umbrella pioneers, said one of the designers, Andrés Cortes. The New York construction industry, not known for readily embracing change, has yet to take to the innovation. Price may be a factor. Besides, there is all that old wood and steel piping lying around.

“I think it's probably a function of developers being accustomed to paying rock-bottom dollar for something that looks like what it looks like, and not really being able to stomach the premium for the nicer stuff,” Mr. Cortes said.

Still, he has hopes. After all, how long can we go on pr etending we're in Bologna?

“You don't feel like you're in Bologna,” he said. “You feel like you're in the gutters of Bologna.”

And that's no baloney.

E-mail Clyde Haberman: haberman@nytimes.com

My First Same-Sex Marriage

Dear Diary:
   

I call it “my first same-sex marriage”
As if it were my wedding.
The State has sanctioned it,
the parents are used to the idea,
the invitations, sent and R.S.V.P.'d.

We sit in a former church, that begat
a recording studio, that begat “an event space.”
Frank Sinatra crooned “Everybody Ought to Be in Love” in this very room.

The groom is diminutive, cute, energetic, an actor.
And the groom is diminutive, cute, studious, a linguist.
The minister, from Universal Life Church,
speaks the vows, the couple assents,
the minister affirms, the couple embraces,
the couple kisses.

Nine-year-old girls are watching
as if it's the most natural thing in the world.

A tenor sings “You'll Never Walk Alone.”
Groom Number One's father finally smiles.
Groom Number Two's mom dabs at a tear.
We're here, zooming through history .

The band strikes up - fast rock 'n' roll.
The nine-year-old girls are dancing with joy.

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