A Lifetime of Work Destroyed at Westbeth

Michael Appleton for The New York Times Workers cleaned out a sculpture studio on Friday in the basement of Westbeth Artists Housing in West Village, which was heavily damaged by flooding during Hurricane Sandy.

Al Cooke, 81, had a few hours on Friday to save what remained of his life's work. A metal sculptor, he slowly carried heavy sheets of aluminum up to his studio's loft. Walking back down the stairs, however, the pain shooting through his knees made him hesitate with every step.

“I'm getting pretty old,” said Mr. Cooke, an original tenant of the Westbeth Artists Housing in Manhattan, who moved into the building the day after Christmas, 1969. “I lost a lot of tools. I lost years of work. And now I have to start over.”

The surge of seawater that flooded much of Lower Manhattan during Hurricane Sandy inundated the basement of Westbeth, which was the first and largest federally subsidized artist's colony in the country when it opened 42 years ago at the westernmost edge of the West Village. With five separate buildings sprawling across an entire city block overlooking the Hudson River, the community supported a 78,000-square-foot underground labyrinth that artists used as communal (and free) studio space.

Though largely devoid of natural light, the basement overflows with vast rooms and high ceilings. (The walls of Mr. Cooke's studio climb over 30 feet high, dwarfing the full-sized canoe hanging from a wall.) Meanwhile, the smaller rooms and cramped hallways overflowed with paintings, sculptures, photographs and other art, some of it left behind by artists who died years ago.

After the flood, most of that art became waterlogged trash.

“I'm in shock. It's the worst nightmare of my life,” said Karen Santry, a painter and fashion illustrator whose work has appeared at the New Museum and the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Connecticut. She estimated she lost $300,000 worth of artwork and equipment.

“I had nine feet of water, and everything was underwater for three days,” said David Seccombe, 83, who built most of his abstract sculptures out of wood. “There wasn't much to save. Everything was contaminated.”

The building's managers did not allow residents into the basement for nine days after the storm, said George Cominskie, president of the Westbeth Artists Residents Council, although some, including Mr. Cooke, ventured downstairs a week earlier to save what little they could. The decision to bar artists from the basement was necessary, some say, because conditions were so hazardous.

“You had to balance saving a person's life work versus saving peoples' lives,” Mr. Cominskie said. “You had entire walls knocked out by the force of the water. It was very dangerous down there.”

Other residents argue that building managers allowed concerns over legal liability to trump the effort to save irreplaceable art.

“If we had gotten it out within 48 hours, we could have saved it,” said Lawrence Salemme, 61, who has lived in Westbeth off and on since 1969, “But management said they would have us arrested. They were obstructive and ignorant.”

The building's managers stood by their decision.

“We had burst walls, we had water up to the ceiling. It looked like a disaster area,” said Steven Neil, executive director of Westbeth Corp. “Letting people run around in the basement while our contractors were working just was not going to work.”

T hough originally conceived as an arts incubator, Westbeth evolved into a permanent home for many artists, who cherished the low rents and huge spaces as a kind of nirvana in New York's competitive real estate market. Today so many septuagenarian and octogenarian artists roam its lobbies and courtyards that at times the campus resembles a senior citizen center.

Now many longtime residents face a late-life career shift. Mr. Seccombe specialized in geometric sculptures, some of which resembled coffins suspended by wooden planks 30 feet in the air. Those large works were carted away in a trash hauling bin. The basement will not be open for use again until May, Mr. Neil said, so now Mr. Seccombe will focus on photography.

“There's nowhere I can work for the near future, so I don't know what else to do,” said Mr. Seccombe. “I have to work smaller.”

Working in two separate basement studios, each with 800 square feet, Ms. Santry made paintings 16 feet tall. Now she will focus on works she can carry with both hands.

“I'm going to have to completely reinvent myself,” she said.

Michael Appleton for The New York Times Westbeth was the largest federally subsidized artist's colony in the country when it opened 42 years ago.

The Week in Pictures for Dec. 7

See the slide show

Here is a slide show of photographs from the past week in New York City and the region. Subjects include a support group for transgender Latinas; residents coming back to Kissam Avenue on Staten Island; and the return of a storm-battered newspaper.

This weekend on “The New York Times Close Up,” an inside look at the most compelling articles in Sunday's Times, Sam Roberts will speak with The Times's Frank Bruni, Erik Olsen and Clyde Haberman. Also appe aring, Dr. Oliver Sacks and Jacob Tomsky. Tune in at 10 p.m. Saturday or 10 a.m. Sunday on NY1 News to watch.

A sampling from the City Room blog is featured daily in the main print news section of The Times. You may also browse highlights from the blog and reader comments, read current New York headlines, like New York Metro | The New York Times on Facebook and follow us on Twitter.

The Week in Culture Pictures, Dec. 7

Andrea Mohin/The New York TimesMembers of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater performing “Arden Court,” the Paul Taylor piece from 1981, on Thursday at City Center.

More Photographs

A slide show of photographs of cultural events from this week.

Newly Delayed Bike Share Program Is Now to Begin in May

Richard Perry/The New York Times Bike racks for the New York bike-share program in August, stored in the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

First it was the software. Now it is the surge.

The city's Transportation Department said Friday that its long-awaited bike share program, scheduled to begin last summer before faulty software forced its delay, had been postponed again - this time because of equipment damage sustained during Hurricane Sandy.

After flooding at the program's storage facility in the Brookl yn Navy Yard, bike share will now begin in May, the department said, and on a smaller scale than originally planned.

In August, the city said the program would initially feature 7,000 bikes at 420 stations by March, then expand to 10,000 bikes and 600 stations by this summer.

Now, the plan is to have at least 5,500 bikes at 293 stations by May. There is no timeline for the program to expand to 10,000 bikes.

Officials said that before the storm, about two-thirds of the system's equipment was stored at the Navy Yard. Though some pieces, like bike frames, were not significantly damaged, the department said, many individual parts of the system with electrical components will have to be refurbished or replaced.

Janette Sadik-Khan, the city's transportation commissioner, said she was pleased that a spring opening was still expected, given the scope of the storm's damage.

“There were several feet of water in the bike share warehouse that night,” s he said in a telephone interview on Friday.

The system's pieces are weather-proof, “but they're not intended to be totally submerged in salt water baths,” she said, adding, “We've literally had to open every piece of equipment with a transistor or a circuit board to see what the damage is.”

The city said the new timeline for the program, known as Citi Bike and operated by Alta Bicycle Share, would not affect the $41 million in private financing from Citi to underwrite the system. Alta declined to comment.

The department said the 5,500 bikes would be clustered in the “densest and most geographically contiguous parts of the service area” in Midtown, Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn. Officials hoped to expand to 7,000 bikes by the end of 2013, filling gaps in planned service areas across Brooklyn and into Long Island City, Queens.

Ms. Sadik-Khan said “we still remain committed” to expanding the program to 10,000 bikes, but she said she was un sure when that might happen.

Last summer, the program was delayed amid software concerns after a dispute between Public Bike System Company, Alta's partner based on Montreal, and 8D Technologies, which had supplied the software for successful programs in cities like Boston and Washington.

Ms. Sadik-Khan said then that the city did not anticipate that the operating code would need to be written “from scratch.”

Graphic Books Best Sellers: \'Fables\' Spinoff Starring Sleeping Beauty

The writer Bill Willingham and “Fables,” the series he created, are no strangers to our graphic books best-seller lists. Now the first volume of that book's spinoff, “Fairest,” has joined in, landing at No. 5 on our paperback list this week. Featuring intricate artwork by Phil Jimenez, the story follows Sleeping Beauty after she is woken by Ali Baba, the prince of thieves, who does not have the purest of intentions for the heroine.

Future volumes will play host to rotating creative teams, handpicked by Mr. Willingham, who want to dabble in the “Fables” universe. Lauren Beukes and Inaki Miranda are currently in the midst of their run, which focuses on Rapunzel.

“Fables” and “Fairest” are the highest-se lling ongoing series currently being published by the Vertigo imprint from DC Comics, but overall the imprint has fallen on difficult times in terms of periodical sales. It was announced on Monday that Karen Berger, the executive editor of Vertigo, would be stepping down in March after a 33-year run at DC. Ms. Berger was the steady hand that guided some of the most critically acclaimed and best-selling comics during her tenure as editor, including “The Sandman,” “The Invisibles,” “Preacher” and “Y: The Last Man.” Her presence in the industry will be sorely missed.

As always, the complete best-seller lists can be found here, along with an explanation of how they were assembled.

Pompidou Center Reaches Across Atlantic for a Curator

French museums like the Louvre and the Pompidou Center seem to like all things American. The Louvre commissioned Cy Twombly to create a 3,750-square-foot ceiling for its Salle des Bronzes, which was unveiled two years ago next door to a ceiling triptych created more than half a century before by Georges Braque.

And the Pompidou Center is so eager to have someone in New York keeping the Paris curators up to speed on the contemporary art scene it has hired Sylvia Chivaratanond to be its first adjunct curator based in New York to help develop the museum's expanding programs of acquiring and seeking donations of American art.

Ms. Chivaratanond, an independent curator, has worked on projects at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago and the Tate in London. She also happens to be the wife of Philippe Vergne, director of the Dia Art Foundation.

Big Ticket | Sold for $33.5 Million

Librado Romero/The New York Times The Park Laurel condominium

A large and lavish duplex penthouse that dominates one of the asymmetrical towers at the Park Laurel, a luxury condominium residence built in 2000 and anchored by the historic McBurney School, sold for $33.5 million and was the most expensive sale of the week, according to city records.

The penthouse, No. 29A, a sprawling 15-room combination of three units designed by the architect Alan Wanzenberg for a previous owner, occupies 7,738 square feet of interior space and has a 1,244-square-foot wraparound trophy terrace that faces south and captures both park and city views. There are seven bedrooms, five bathrooms, two powder rooms and a perso nal elevator entrance.

Special attention was paid to soundproofing: a 2010 listing for the apartment noted that, in addition to radiant-heated tiles in the master bath, the unit had been soundproofed by JRH Acoustical Consulting, with all pipes insulated to achieve “sound elimination.” Carrying charges are around $20,000 per month.

The Park Laurel, at 15 West 63rd Street, was designed by Beyer Blinder Belle and Costas Kondylis with an eye to the Modernist architecture at Lincoln Center nearby. Previous residents include J. Michael Evans, a Goldman Sachs vice chairman and potential successor to Lloyd C. Blankfein. His 5,000-square-foot Gwathmey Siegel-designed duplex penthouse, No. 40/41, is currently listed for sale with Douglas Elliman Real Estate for $26.5 million. For $29.25 million, Mr. Evans, who decamped to 995 Fifth Avenue this summer, will throw in an auxiliary two-bedroom unit he owns on the 14th floor.

When No. 29A changed hands in 2010, the seller was the hedge-fund honcho Ephraim F. Gildor, the asking price was $28 million, and the Swiss buyers, Peter Edward Chadney and Simone Cecile Von Graffenried Simperl, paid $23.98 million. Agents from Douglas Elliman represented both parties in the deal. This time around, there was apparently no formal listing; both Janice Chang and Raphael De Niro, who were involved in the 2010 transaction, confirmed that they had no connection to the $33.5 million deal.

Mr. Chadney and Ms. Simperl used Park Laurel Ltd., a company based in Zurich , to identify themselves in city records, and the buyer, based in Los Angeles, acquired the penthouse under the shield of a limited-liability company, Park Laurel Acquisition.

The sale appeared in city records on Dec. 4 and a post that day on the Web site of The Real Deal identified the buyer as Riza Aziz, an investment banker and a founder of Red Granite Pictures, a fledgling film company in Beverly Hills, Calif. Mr. Aziz is a son of Tun Abdul Razak, the Malaysian prime minister from 1970 to 1976. His film company's debut offering was “Friends With Kids”; it is currently producing “The Wolf of Wall Street,” a $100 million venture directed by Martin Scorsese, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and filming in New York City. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Mr. Aziz and Mr. DiCaprio are fast friends.

Big Ticket includes closed sales from the previous week, ending Wednesday.

Video: Post-Hurricane Politics in New York City

The response to Hurricane Sandy may have played a role in last month's presidential election, and now New York City's mayoral race, a year away, is being transformed by the storm and its effect on the city.

A video by The New York Times's Stephen Farrell explores the political dimension as the presumptive mayoral candidates address the city's response to the storm and offer their visions of a post-hurricane metropolis.

After Handcuffing, Officer to Be Charged With Unlawful Imprisonment

A Rikers Island correction officer did some extracurricular handcuffing Thursday night and was arrested for it, the police said.

The cuffee was the correction officer's girlfriend's 25-year-old daughter, whom the officer, Luis Leonard, is accused of placing in cuffs during an argument in an apartment on Thieriot Avenue in the Bronx, the police said.

Mr. Leonard, 46, is to be charged with unlawful imprisonment, the police said.

Charting R. Kelly\'s \'Trapped in the Closet\'

“Trapped in the Closet,” a musical soap opera by the R&B superstar R. Kelly, rivals any telenovela with its love triangles and over-the-top plot twists, and the singer himself plays multiple roles. Over the 22 chapters of Part 1 and Part 2, Sylvester (R. Kelly) investigates a series of events that involve unlikely romantic and criminal relationships. Now, after a long hiatus, a new installment recently premiered on the cable network IFC and IFC.com. We find the characters trying to make sense of what they've discovered about one another, as well as a shocking family tie. The artist Andrew Kuo unravels the latest web of relationships.

Book Review Podcast: 10 Best Books of 2012

Kristina DiMatteo and Rex Bonomelli

This week in The New York Times Book Review, the editors select the 10 Best Books of 2012. The five works of fiction include Zadie Smith's “NW,” about which the editors write:

Smith's piercing new novel, her first in seven years, traces the friendship of two women who grew up in a housing project in northwest London, their lives disrupted by fa teful choices and the brutal efficiency of chance. The narrative edges forward in fragments, uncovering truths about identity and money and sex with incandescent language that, for all of its formal experimentation, is intimate and searingly direct.

The five nonfiction choices include Katherine Boo's “Behind the Beautiful Forevers.” The editors write:

This National Book Award-winning study of life in Annawadi, a Mumbai slum, is marked by reporting so rigorous it recalls the muckrakers, and characters so rich they evoke Dickens. The slum dwellers have a skillful and empathetic chronicler in Boo, who depicts them in all their humanity and ruthless, resourceful glory.

This week, a discussion of the year's best books with two editors at the Book Review, Parul Sehgal and Gregory Cowles; Caroline Weber talks about Duran Duran; Leslie Kaufman has notes from the field; Steven Heller on his latest Visuals column; and Mr. Cow les has best-seller news. Sam Tanenhaus is the host.

Dallas Museum of Art Will Eliminate Entrance Fee

Taking a page from government-supported museums in England, the Dallas Museum of Art is dispensing with its $10 general admissions charge.

Starting Jan. 21st it will be free, but, like museums in London including the Tate and the National Gallery, it plans to charge for special exhibitions.

“We're a public institution supported by the taxpayers of Dallas,'' Maxwell L. Anderson, director of the museum, told the Dallas News. “And many of those tax payers don't have the income to toss around for cultural endeavors. They've got to pay the bills, keep the kids clothed. They have serious issues. And I don't want an admission fee to be an obstacle for them.''

Mr. Anderson, who came to Dallas in January, is repeating what he did as director of the Indianapolis Museum of A rt, which he ran from 2006 through 2010. When he made admissions there free, attendance more than doubled.

National Geographic Society Unloads Some Treasures

On the eve of the National Geographic Society's 125th anniversary, Christie's held an auction of more than 200 works of art - photographs, illustrations and paintings - that the society has collected over the years, works capturing its explorations, expeditions and world cultures.

The auction, which was held in New York on Thursday, brought nearly $3.8 million. Proceeds from the sale will be used to preserve the society's archives and help support the careers of aspiring artists and photographers.

“The Duel on the Beach,'' a 1926 painting by the American artist and illustrator Newell Convers Wyeth, was the top seller, bringing $1 million. Many photographs sold for high prices too, including Steve McCurry's haunting image of an Afghan girl, which sold for $178,900, a record price for the photographer at auction.

Rolling Stones Added to Lineup for Benefit Concert

The Rolling Stones have joined the line-up for the 12-12-12 benefit concert for victims of Hurricane Sandy, the producers announced at a press conference at Madison Square Garden on Friday.

The Stones were persuaded to help the cause this week during a rehearsal for their Saturday show at Barclays Center. Two of the producers - John Sykes of Clear Channel Media and the movie producer - Harvey Weinstein - went to Brooklyn to make a personal appeal to Mick Jagger. “Mick said ‘The Rolling Stones pop group is in,'” Mr. Weinstein said at the press conference.

The addition of the Stones makes the concert one of the largest gatherings of big-name rock musicians in recent memory. The show, to be staged at Madison Square Garden on Wednesday, will feature Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, Dave Grohl, Eric Clapton, Billy Joel, Eddie Vedd er, Roger Waters, the Who and Paul McCartney. Others on the bill include Chris Martin, Kanye West and Alicia Keys.

Many comedians, Hollywood stars and film-makers have also agreed to present the musical acts and to deliver speeches about the destruction the storm wrought along the coasts in New York and New Jersey, where approximately 600,000 homes were damaged or destroyed. Among those who have agreed to do appear are Jimmy Fallon, Chris Rock, Seth Meyers, Adam Sandler, Jon Stewart, Jake Gyllenhaal, Kristen Stewart, Susan Sarandon, Sean Combs and Quentin Tarantino.

The Sweet Spot: Dec. 7

If you were CNN's new president, what changes would you make and which direction would you take? David Carr and A. O. Scott discuss, with help from Brian Stelter.

Not a Gala Night as La Scala Scrambles to Replace Star

The soprano Anja Harteros and her understudy both came down with the flu hours before the opening gala at La Scala on Friday night,  forcing the Milan opera house to scramble for a replacement to sing the lead role of Elsa in Wagner's  “Lohengrin,” Reuters reported.

The theater announced that Annette Dasch would play the role, a part she has performed before at Bayreuth.

As if that weren't its only problem, La Scala is also being criticized for choosing to open its season with Wagner rather than Verdi, a local hero.

“La Scala puts Verdi in a corner, preferring the German,'' wrote Il Giornale newspaper, which is owned by former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's family and is known for its attacks on Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany.

Corriere dell a Sera, another Italian newspaper, said there was unease among the musicians about the choice of Wagner in Verdi's musical home, calling it “a blow to national pride in a moment of crisis.''

But officials at La Scala dismissed the accusations, calling them ridiculous and pointing out that the house is staging six works by Wagner and eight by Verdi in its 2012-2013 season.

Schumer Urges Ticket Sites to Halt Scalping for Benefit Concert

Hundreds of tickets to the 12-12-12 benefit concert to help hurricane victims have turned up for sale on Web sites like StubHub at grossly inflated prices, angering many music fans and prompting Senator Charles E. Schumer to call on ticket marketers to refuse to accept the listings.

On Thursday afternoon Mr. Schumer sent a letter to four major online ticket exchanges, urging them to cease allowing sellers to profit from the demand for the star-studded concert at Madison Square Garden, which was intended to raise money for recovery efforts.

“Every dollar spent for these concert tickets should go to help the victims of Superstorm Sandy, not to line the pockets of unscrupulous scalpers,” Mr. Schumer said in a statement. “Ticket resale Web sites have the opportunity to make it much more difficult for scalpers to make money off this charitable event, and they should seize it.”

Tickets for the event, which features artists including Bruce Springsteen a nd Paul McCartney, sold out within minutes of going on sale on Monday at noon. That day StubHub was flooded with tickets to the show, which will be staged on Wednesday. Even though the face value of the tickets ranged from $150 to $2,500, they have been listed on StubHub for much more. On Thursday afternoon tickets on the floor in front of the stage were listed for as much as $48,000 while those in the upper level were going for between $525 and $3,000.

Stung by criticism from fans who complained on Facebook and Twitter about what seemed to be scalping, StubHub announced earlier this week that it would donate all proceeds from its fees on these sales to the Robin Hood Foundation, which is to distribute the money raised by the concert. By Tuesday afternoon, the site, which makes about 25 percent of each sale, had given more than $300,000 to the charity, said Glenn Lehrman, a spokesman for StubHub.

Mr. Lehrman said the site decided t o allow the sales and give the money to charity on the theory the tickets would be sold in any case through other outlets, including EBay and Craigslist.

“We had a choice,” he said. “We could either not allow ticket sales for the event, or we could allow the ticket sales to be done and we could do the right thing.”

Jacqueline Peterson, a spokeswoman for Ticketmaster, which handled the initial ticket sales, said it was clear that unscrupulous scalpers were using computer programs to snap up tickets for resale. She said programmers at Ticketmaster blocked thousands of sales to computers that they identified as using these programs.

She said Ticketmaster also banned the 12-12-12 tickets from being sold on its in-house resale marketplaces - TicketsNow and Ticket Exchange. “It's a charitable event and profiteering on it isn't what it's about,” she said.

She added that Ticketmaster officials, who have waived the company's normal fees to suppor t the concert, “whole-heartedly applaud Senator Schumer for drawing attention to the disappointing activity on the secondary market.”

New York Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman has also raised concerns about the sales on StubHub. He sent a letter to the company earlier this week asking it to clarify how much of each ticket sale would go to charity.

The concert is being promoted by the executives who head the Madison Square Garden Company, Clear Channel Entertainment Enterprises and the Weinstein Company, the same trio that organized a successful concert after the Sept. 11 attacks.

Sticking to past practice, the producers of the concert have declined to say how many tickets went on sale Monday, how many were sold, or how much money they grossed from that initial sale.

Mr. Lehrman and others in the ticket resale business say arenas and promoters generally do not reveal how many tickets are available in the public offering, because large lots of tickets are often held in reserve for corporate sponsors, artists, managers, talent agents and the space itself. Some of these tickets typically end up being sold at high prices on resale sites as well, he said.

It remains unclear how many tickets were sold Monday and to whom. Also unclear is how many of those were immediately put up on resale sites.

What is clear is that many fans were frustrated, and vented their anger at the scalpers on the concert's Facebook page. “I understand I didn't get the luck of the draw on Ticketmaster,” wrote Bob Malachowski on Monday. “It's not sour grapes about that. It's disgusting how much the price is jacked up on StubHub, eBay, etc. Disgusting. Fine, I didn't get a ticket, I'll live with that. But why should people gouge others for a benefit concert?”

Ellen Fuhrer of Armonk, N.Y., was also unable to get a seat, despite trying for hours. When the tickets went on sale Monday at noon, she was at her computer, credit card in hand, her cursor on Ticketmaster's buy button, hoping to land any seats she could find. But the concert sold out within minutes, and despite several attempts over the Internet and calls to Madison Square Garden's box office, she never got close to getting a seat. During the same period, she saw tickets appear on StubHub for many times their face value.

“We should have an equal opportunity to get a ticket,” Ms. Fuhrer said. “It seems we were all blocked up and if you go to StubHub you see hundreds of tickets available. Something stinks in the state of Denmark.”

By the Sea, by the Sea, Guarded by a Beautiful She

On New York's Manhattan Beach, which oddly enough is in Brooklyn, may be found many outdoor activities in summer besides bathing. But its most interesting experiment to date, and one it may proudly boast about, is an auxiliary lifesaving corps made up entirely of young women.

So begins the eye-opening, circa 1940 short film “Lady Life Guards” surfaced on Friday morning by the blog Sheepshead Bites, a gently leering 10-minute tour de force of visual double-entendre and soul-stirring call-of-duty gee-whiz.

Candidates for the job, after a “cheerful check as to general health and athletic ability,” are brought before the “beach doctor,” according to the narrator, and sub jected to a “thorough examination” that apparently requires him to tap on their chests repeatedly. Those who passed were “lined up on the beach and inspected soldier-like” by the chief lifeguard.

The trainees are instructed by their muscular male counterparts on the “proper method of breaking various holds - like, for example, the front strangle - because “a drowning person will grab anywhere and hold on for dear life.” Further, the narrator adds, “Two people locked in each other's arms also present a serious problem unless efficiently handled.”

The film, made by Central Films, is in the Library of Congress's Prelinger Archive, according to the YouTube user, webdev17, who posted it a few weeks ago.

As part of her lifesaving training, one candidate serves as a demonstration mode l as a succession of male lifeguards perform an artificial respiration technique on her known as the “prone pressure method” that may be unfamiliar to modern eyes.

“Resuscitation by relay is necessary,” the narrator notes, “for it sometimes takes many hours without pause to start the victim breathing again.”

Eventually, the female lifeguards are put to work - because a boy is floundering off shore!

“Toward the panic-stricken child there glides through the water a white figure,” the narrator says. “Swift in action, calm in mind, a godsend to a tired little body.”

After the white-swimsuited savior lays the boy on the sand … “serenely she returns to the stand, ready for any duty Father Neptune may call upon his daughters to perform.”

Manhattan Beach has since discontinued its female lifeguard program. Brooklyn's borough historian, Ron Schweiger, did not immediately know when or why. We are researching the question further .

Popcast: Unraveling Neil Young, Remembering Dave Brubeck

Chad Batka for The New York TimesNeil Young performed with Crazy Horse at the Barclay's Center on Monday.

Neil Young is finishing up his first tour with Crazy Horse in eight years and has recently published an autobiography, “Waging Heavy Peace.” He's also developing Pono, a new digital music technology that, he claims, will make us truly understand how wretched MP3s sound.

On this week's Popcast, David Carr, Jon Pareles and Ben Ratliff talk about his live sound, his new album with Crazy Horse (“Psychedelic Pill”) his book, his sobriety, his paradoxical embrace of precision and mystery and his model-train barn. And we say goodbye to Dave Brubeck, one of jazz's great popular experimenters, who died on Wednesday at the age of 91.

Listen above, download the MP3 here, or subscribe in iTunes.

RELATED

David Carr's New York Times Magazine Profile of Neil Young

Jon Pareles's review of Neil Young and Crazy Horse in Central Park

Ben Ratliff's review of Neil Young and Crazy Horse in Brooklyn

SPOTIFY PLAYLIST

As \'Jersey Shore\' Says Goodbye, the Numbers Tell the Story

The long, strange journey that has been MTV's “Jersey Shore” will finally come to an end on Dec. 20, when the cable channel will broadcast the series finale, but how many viewers will still be around to see it?

Based on the Nielsen ratings for the past few weeks, audience totals have been trending downward to lows not seen since the show, and its group of well-tanned stars, were unknown commodities three years ago.

The Nov. 29 episode drew only 2.4 million total viewers, barely half as many as the 4.7 million who watched the Season 6 premiere on Oct. 4. It was also the lowest total for the series since the first season, when the Dec. 17, 2009, episode drew 2.5 million. Five other episodes from this season have drawn fewer than three million viewers. By comparison, last season no single episode ever dropped below four million. And of course, these totals are far below the meteoric heights of the show's heyday, when it flirted with almost nine million.

“Jersey Shore” does still draw a fair share of viewers between the ages of 18 and 49, the demographic group most prized by advertisers. In that category, it consistently ranks as the highest-rated cable program that is not related to football on Thursday nights, although it is also down on average compared to previous seasons.

This Week\'s Movies: Dec. 7

This week, Times critics look at Bill Murray as Franklin D. Roosevelt in “Hyde Park on Hudson,” the thriller “Deadfall” and “Tchoupitoulas” a documentary-style tour of New Orleans. See all of this week's reviews here.

Celebrating With a Tree or a Dreidel

Damon Winter/The New York Times

Dear Diary:

Around this time of year, many Jewish parents of young children find themselves saying something like: “We do not celebrate Christmas! We are Jewish. We celebrate Hanukkah. And, no, you cannot have a Christmas tree.”

So it tickled my New York soul to hear the following as I entered the subway station at West 86th Street and Broadway: “We do not celebrate Hanukkah. We are Christian. We celebrate Christmas. And, no, you cannot have a dreidel.”

Read all recent entries and our up dated submissions guidelines. Reach us via e-mail: diary@nytimes.com or telephone: (212) 556-1333. Follow @NYTMetro on Twitter using the hashtag #MetDiary.