Madison Square Garden Says It Will Not Be Uprooted From Penn Station

The New York Times A cross-section published in The New York Times in 1963 shows how tightly squeezed the new Pennsylvania Station was by Madison Square Garden and the Felt Forum, now the Theater at Madison Square Garden. The station’s main passenger waiting room is highlighted.

The Madison Square Garden wants everyone to know: it isn’t going anywhere.

“It is incongruous to think that M.S.G. would be considering moving,” the Madison Square Garden Company said in a statement last month, especially as a three-year renovation, on which the company says it has spent $1 billion, is expected to be completed this fall. In other words, the announcement of the renovation in 2008 should have signaled that the Garden intended to stay put.

In one technical sense, however, its time has run out.

The special permit that allows the company to operate an arena with more than 2,500 seats in mid-Manhattan expired on Jan. 24, exactly 50 years after it was granted. The arena, with a 22,000-seat capacity, has stayed open this year with a temporary certificate of occupancy.

On Wednesday, the City Planning Commission is to hold a public hearing on the Garden’s request to extend its permit indefinitely (PDF).

“Virtually all special permits are granted without artificial expirations,” the company said in a statement. “In addition to this, M.S.G. meets all required findings for this permit and operates in a city where no sports arena or stadium has a time limit to its use. Given these circumstances, we have the reasonable expectation that we will be treated like every other applicant.”

Reasonable or not, the company’s expectations have not been met.

This juncture has emboldened advocates of a reimagined Pennsylvania Station to propose that the Garden’s permit be renewed for only 10 years, thereby compelling everyone involved to come up with a plan for moving the arena off the station before the permit expires again.

They say there is no other way â€" besides lopping off the arena â€" to substantively improve Penn Station’s main waiting concourse, which is the heart of the experience for both long-distance travelers and short-haul commuters. Amtrak and others have tried over the years, but the improvements were largely cosmetic.

The sentiment for binding the Garden and city planners to a tight timetable for solving the perennial inadequacies of Penn Station has picked up momentum.

David W. Dunlap/The New York Times It’s hard to tell there’s a railroad station under there.

On Feb. 15, Community Board 5 in Midtown voted 36 to 0 against granting a renewal in perpetuity and proposed the 10-year limit instead. On March 13, an editorial in The New York Times supported the 10-year limit, noting that the Garden had already moved twice since its days on Madison Square. On March 21, the Regional Plan Association and the Municipal Art Society announced the formation of the New Penn Station Alliance (PDF), one of whose immediate goals would be limiting the Garden to a 10-year permit.

In the most procedurally significant development to date, Scott M. Stringer, the borough president of Manhattan, on March 27 endorsed a 10-year limit. “Moving the arena is an important first step to improving Penn Station,” he said. He focused on a constricted track and platform layout that cannot be significantly altered “since support columns for the arena run through Penn Station to its track level.”

The borough president, like the community board, has a formal role in the city’s land-use review process, though their decisions are not binding on the City Planning Commission or the City Council, which is the ultimate authority.

But Mr. Stringer’s declaration did elicit the strongest public rebuttal yet from Madison Square Garden, in the form of a statement issued by Kimberly Kerns, the senior vice president for communications:

“The Garden â€" a company that has recently invested nearly $1 billion in its arena and helps drive the city’s economy by supporting thousands of jobs and attracting hundreds of annual events â€" is being unfairly singled out because of a decision that was made 50 years ago: to demolish the original Penn Station.

“Adding an arbitrary expiration for reasons unrelated to the special permit process or requirements would not only set a dangerous and questionable precedent, but would also hinder our ability to make M.S.G. and New York City the long-term home of even more world-class events, and would harm a business that has served as a significant economic driver for the city for generations.”

The question of why city planners limited the Garden in the first place is not explicitly answered by the original document (PDF), though those familiar with the commission’s practices said it was standard at the time.

Mr. Stringer said the limit was imposed “largely out of concern” that the day might come when the station was no longer as underused as it seemed then. “The commission was correct,” Mr. Stringer said, “ridership through Penn Station has more than tripled since 1963 and is now well over capacity.”

It is possible to read the document and conclude that a 50-year term was chosen because Madison Square Garden Center Inc., the corporate predecessor to the Dolan family’s present-day Madison Square Garden Company, did not own the arena but instead held a 50-year lease from the Pennsylvania Railroad Company. Today, however, the company owns the property outright, as it or its predecessors have since 1985.

Paris Judge Orders Hearing on Auction Sale of Hopi Artifacts

A lawyer has convinced a Paris judge to hold a hearing Thursday to determine the legality of a sale of sacred Hopi Indian artifacts by the Néret-Minet auction house that is scheduled for Friday.

The lawyer from Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, Pierre Servan-Schreiber, said he was acting in a pro bono capacity after having been contacted by Survival International, a global nonprofit organization that advocates on behalf of native tribes.

Mr. Servan-Schreiber said he told the judge that the items should not be sold until it can be determined whether they were stolen from Hopi lands, as the Arizona-based tribe believes, or were the objects of sales that violated American and international law.

Efforts to look into the history of the 70 items, he said, would be rendered “virtually impossible” once they were scattered among multiple buyers. He said a delay would “preserve evidence.”

Mr. Servan-Schreiber also argued that the sale is illegal under an old prohibition in French law that bars the sale of “non-commercial” things that are seen as “immoral to sell.” The Hopis say the artifacts, ceremonial masks and headdresses known as Katsinam, or “friends,” embody divine spirits and are purely religious. They say selling them is a sacrilege.

A spokeswoman for the auction house said it was aware of the ruling but she would not comment further. Gilles Néret-Minet, the director of the house, has said repeatedly that he will not delay the $1 million sale. He has said the collector who put the items up for sale obtained them all legally.

The United States Embassy in Paris has also asked the auctioneers to delay the sale “given the ancestry of these masks and the distance between Paris and the Hopi reservation.”

Coney Island, 12:10 P.M.

Robert Stolarik for The New York Times

Winds and Record Heat Spark Brush Fires Throughout Region

Brush fire rages in the #NJ #Meadowlands south of 16W on NJ Tpk. Stay tuned to #1010WINS for latest traffic/weather. http://t.co/xYSP7hCPb0

â€" Steve Sandberg (@SandbergSteve) 9 Apr 13

As temperatures soared into the 80s, breaking records across the region, gusts drove flames across dried-out vegetation and sparked widespread brush fires on Tuesday, with areas along the New Jersey Turnpike in Hudson and Bergen Counties engulfed.

“Northeast New Jersey really seems to be the hot spot right now,” Joe Picca, a National Weather Service meteorologist, said at 4:30 p.m.

Conditions for fire were perfect, Mr. Picca said, with winds up to 35 miles an hour recorded in New York City and Newark in late morning and a near-complete lack of April showers so far. No measurable rainfall has been recorded in New York City since April 1, when eight hundredths of an inch fell.

The high temperature at Kennedy International Airport was 83 degrees, a full 10 degrees above the record for April 9, Mr. Picca said. The mercury hit 85 in Newark, also a record. In Central Park, the high of 82 degrees fell short of the record.

A Kearny, N.J., fire official said that a “very large area” along the turnpike had burned but that it was “pretty much under control” shortly before 5 p.m. Another fire, near the Vince Lombardi Service Area at the turnpike’s northern end, was also close to under control at 5 p.m., said a New Jersey Turnpike Authority official.

In New York City, firefighters battled brush fires at a freight yard in Glendale, Queens, and in Willowbrook and Midland Beach in Staten Island, fire officials said.

The scanner-transcription service Breaking News Network also reported brush fires in Island Park, Chester and Fallsburg, N.Y.; and Mount Olive, Clinton, Howell, Hasbrouck Heights, Jefferson and Columbia, N.J.

Ad Watch: Quinn and a ‘Smoke-Filled Room’

• 0:05  Real Estate Money

  The screen for “Smoke-Filled Room,” the first television ad of the New York City mayor’s race, opens on a room smothered in smoke, and the ad quotes from a 2011 column in The New York Times that described Christine C. Quinn as the recipient of “golden truckloads of contributions from the … hedge fund and real estate set.” Ms. Quinn has received about $1.3 million from real estate industry contributors, significantly more than any other candidate, according to a recent analysis. Ms. Quinn does not smoke cigarettes.

• 0:12  ‘Living Wage’ Battle

  The narrator intones: “On the issues New Yorkers care most about, she is always on the wrong side.” The ad cites a Daily News column asserting that Ms. Quinn, the City Council speaker, blocked a Council vote on the so-called living wage bill, which would raise the wages of workers at city-subsidized real estate projects. Ms. Quinn did block any vote on versions of this bill for months; she eventually supported compromise legislation that covered fewer workers than the initial proposal, and that exempted employees of a major real estate developer. Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg vetoed the bill; the Council overrode the veto and is fighting a lawsuit filed by the Bloomberg administration to overturn the law.

• 0:17  Term Limits and Paid Sick Leave

  The narrator refers to Ms. Quinn’s “flip-flop on paid sick leave and on term limits.” For three years, Ms. Quinn stopped the Council from voting on legislation that would require some city businesses to provide paid days off to sick employees. Ms. Quinn said the city’s economy could not sustain the added costs. But this year, under pressure, she negotiated a compromise, pleasing some advocates. On term limits, Ms. Quinn did reverse her position: in December 2007, she said she would “not support the repeal or change of term limits through any mechanism”; in October 2008, she led a successful effort in the Council to overturn the city’s existing term limits law.

It is a fairly typical political advertisement: cheesy production values, overwrought narration and a soundtrack of ominous piano music playing over the unsmiling visage of the ad’s target, Ms. Quinn.

But “Smoke-Filled Room,” which started to run on Monday on three cable television channels, has gained attention for its unusual provenance: it was financed by a group of political activists who are not affiliated with any candidate. The group, called NYC Is Not for Sale 2013, is legally allowed to spend unlimited amounts on political advertising, as long as it does not coordinate its activity with a candidate. The group’s founders have pledged to spend more than $1 million on ads that attack Ms. Quinn â€" the first instance of a so-called independent expenditure in the 2013 mayor’s race.

The activists behind the ad include an animal-rights group that has long clashed with Ms. Quinn over horse-drawn carriages; a labor leader whose union has given money to Ms. Quinn and her rivals; and a wealthy businesswoman who has contributed to Ms. Quinn’s campaign. So far, the group has declined to disclose a full list of its donors, although it will be required to do so by mid-May.

Ms. Quinn has responded by calling the ad a “disgrace” and labeling it a troublesome intrusion of outside money into the city’s stringent campaign finance system. On Tuesday, she asked her rivals for mayor to sign a pledge condemning the use of any independent expenditure in the campaign.

In an unusual move, Ms. Quinn’s campaign lawyer also sent cease-and-desist letters to two New York television providers, Cablevision and Time Warner Cable, demanding that the advertisement be stopped. Ms. Quinn’s campaign contended that it contained “a false statement”; the ad’s creators say it is accurate. The ad continues to run.

With Reporter’s Death, Recalling the Days Before He Stood Out

The great McCandlish Phillips was 81 when I called him in 2009 to ask about his time as a police reporter in New York in the 1950s. It was not a period he recalled fondly.

“I was at the first Shack in Brooklyn,” Mr. Phillips, who died on Tuesday at age 85, said.

Brooklyn

“The Shack” is the press corps’ decades-old nickname for the small offices reporters have occupied near or inside Police Headquarters in Manhattan. I was writing an article about that Shack, and I had never heard of a Brooklyn Shack, but Mr. Phillips, who had long since left journalism to spread God’s word, was not one to be interrupted. I dutifully took notes, and found them this morning when the news broke that he had died.

“It was a small rented storefront with a stamped-tin ceiling,” he said of the office, opposite the police station house at Bergen Street and Sixth Avenue in Prospect Heights. “Pre-Industrial Revolution coat lockers.”

About six newspapers shared space in the building in the mid-1950s, he said. The original Shack, in Manhattan, was a vibrant, colorful, profane place, and it still has its moments â€" albeit smoke-free, sober moments â€" on the second floor of 1 Police Plaza. But the Brooklyn Shack, in Mr. Phillips’s telling, sounded downright dull. He said reporters mainly fed information to writers in the main office. Indeed, there do not seem to be a wealth of clippings, by any stretch, reflecting on Mr. Phillips’s service in that place.

“The only story we ever ran out of the Shack in Brooklyn, it was a report of a car bombing,” he said. “Seven or eight reporters poured out,” he said, “into their cars, and we ran through all the red lights.”

“You could spend days and nights and weeks in the Shack with nothing to much excite you,” he said.

Finally, he made his escape. Unfortunately, he appears, by a look at the clippings, to have been long gone during one of the Brooklyn Shack’s more riveting moments, when two airliners collided in the air very near the Shack on Dec. 16, 1960, raining debris and bodies down on the streets.

Mr. Phillips, who would go on to win loads of prizes for his work, was writing about a water-pipe break a couple of weeks later. But it was in Manhattan, so that must have been fine with him.

“I wrote my way out of the Brooklyn Shack,” he said.

‘Murder Ballad’ To Sing Again in Union Square

“Murder Ballad,” a rock musical by Julia Jordan and the singer-songwriter Juliana Nash, will return for a nine-week commercial run at the Union Square Theater, starting May 7. Staged in a barroom setting in which the actors roamed through the audience, the show had a sold-out premiere run last fall at Manhattan Theater Club’s Studio at Stage II.

Praised as “steamy” and “self-conscious in just the right way” by Ben Brantley in The New York Times, “Murder Ballad” centers on Sara, an Upper West Side wife and mother, and her relationships with Michael, her husband, and Tom, an old boyfriend with whom she shares a rekindled passion.

John Ellison Conlee (Michael), Will Swenson (Tom) and Rebecca Naomi Jones (the Narrator) are returning to the roles they created. Caissie Levy, who originated the role of Molly Jensen in the Broadway and West End productions of “Ghost The Musical,” is taking over as Sara from Karen Olivo, who was widely praised in the role.

Ms. Olivo, a Tony winner for “West Side Story,” is apparently making good on a desire, expressed recently on her blog, to “leave behind the actor” and “start learning how to be me.” She will be heard on the “Murder Ballad” cast album, which is due the spring on Yellow Sound Label Records.

Trip Cullman is the director of the show, which features sets by Mark Wendland and costumes by Jessica Pabst.

‘Murder Ballad’ To Sing Again in Union Square

“Murder Ballad,” a rock musical by Julia Jordan and the singer-songwriter Juliana Nash, will return for a nine-week commercial run at the Union Square Theater, starting May 7. Staged in a barroom setting in which the actors roamed through the audience, the show had a sold-out premiere run last fall at Manhattan Theater Club’s Studio at Stage II.

Praised as “steamy” and “self-conscious in just the right way” by Ben Brantley in The New York Times, “Murder Ballad” centers on Sara, an Upper West Side wife and mother, and her relationships with Michael, her husband, and Tom, an old boyfriend with whom she shares a rekindled passion.

John Ellison Conlee (Michael), Will Swenson (Tom) and Rebecca Naomi Jones (the Narrator) are returning to the roles they created. Caissie Levy, who originated the role of Molly Jensen in the Broadway and West End productions of “Ghost The Musical,” is taking over as Sara from Karen Olivo, who was widely praised in the role.

Ms. Olivo, a Tony winner for “West Side Story,” is apparently making good on a desire, expressed recently on her blog, to “leave behind the actor” and “start learning how to be me.” She will be heard on the “Murder Ballad” cast album, which is due the spring on Yellow Sound Label Records.

Trip Cullman is the director of the show, which features sets by Mark Wendland and costumes by Jessica Pabst.

‘Murder Ballad’ To Sing Again in Union Square

“Murder Ballad,” a rock musical by Julia Jordan and the singer-songwriter Juliana Nash, will return for a nine-week commercial run at the Union Square Theater, starting May 7. Staged in a barroom setting in which the actors roamed through the audience, the show had a sold-out premiere run last fall at Manhattan Theater Club’s Studio at Stage II.

Praised as “steamy” and “self-conscious in just the right way” by Ben Brantley in The New York Times, “Murder Ballad” centers on Sara, an Upper West Side wife and mother, and her relationships with Michael, her husband, and Tom, an old boyfriend with whom she shares a rekindled passion.

John Ellison Conlee (Michael), Will Swenson (Tom) and Rebecca Naomi Jones (the Narrator) are returning to the roles they created. Caissie Levy, who originated the role of Molly Jensen in the Broadway and West End productions of “Ghost The Musical,” is taking over as Sara from Karen Olivo, who was widely praised in the role.

Ms. Olivo, a Tony winner for “West Side Story,” is apparently making good on a desire, expressed recently on her blog, to “leave behind the actor” and “start learning how to be me.” She will be heard on the “Murder Ballad” cast album, which is due the spring on Yellow Sound Label Records.

Trip Cullman is the director of the show, which features sets by Mark Wendland and costumes by Jessica Pabst.

‘Murder Ballad’ To Sing Again in Union Square

“Murder Ballad,” a rock musical by Julia Jordan and the singer-songwriter Juliana Nash, will return for a nine-week commercial run at the Union Square Theater, starting May 7. Staged in a barroom setting in which the actors roamed through the audience, the show had a sold-out premiere run last fall at Manhattan Theater Club’s Studio at Stage II.

Praised as “steamy” and “self-conscious in just the right way” by Ben Brantley in The New York Times, “Murder Ballad” centers on Sara, an Upper West Side wife and mother, and her relationships with Michael, her husband, and Tom, an old boyfriend with whom she shares a rekindled passion.

John Ellison Conlee (Michael), Will Swenson (Tom) and Rebecca Naomi Jones (the Narrator) are returning to the roles they created. Caissie Levy, who originated the role of Molly Jensen in the Broadway and West End productions of “Ghost The Musical,” is taking over as Sara from Karen Olivo, who was widely praised in the role.

Ms. Olivo, a Tony winner for “West Side Story,” is apparently making good on a desire, expressed recently on her blog, to “leave behind the actor” and “start learning how to be me.” She will be heard on the “Murder Ballad” cast album, which is due the spring on Yellow Sound Label Records.

Trip Cullman is the director of the show, which features sets by Mark Wendland and costumes by Jessica Pabst.

Substitution in ‘Giulio Cesare’ at the Met

Danielle de Niese, one of the Metropolitan Opera’s favored sopranos, is stepping in for another, Natalie Dessay, as Cleopatra in Tuesday night’s performance of “Giulio Cesare” by Handel, the Met said. Ms. Dessay is ill, the company said, noting that Ms. De Niese has sung the role in the same production at the Glyndebourne Festival in 2005 and at the Lyric Opera of Chicago in 2007, as well as in a different production at the Met in the 2006-2007 season.

In Praise of the Profile, Before the Age of Public Relations

The one thing these three books have in common is that they were written before the celebrity-industrial complex was fully formed, when a journalist could still push past an artist’s P.R. phalanx and come back with a story that possessed real feeling and offbeat detail.

Rex Reed’s “People are Crazy Here” (1974) is the sequel to “Do You Sleep in the Nude,” the book of profiles that put Mr. Reed on the map. Both volumes are easy to mock for their glibness, but both are candy-colored treats. The long profile of an aging Tennessee Williams in “People are Crazy Here” is worth the price of admission alone. “Baby, I’ve been sick,” Williams drawls in the profile’s first sentence, about which Mr. Reed observes: “If a swamp alligator could talk, he would sound like Tennessee Williams.” Stick around for the profiles of Jack Nicholson and Grace Slick. At Ms. Slick’s place, the interview is interrupted by a shaggy David Crosby bounding down the stairs. “David’s been sleeping in my bed the past week,” Ms. Slick shrugs, “and the place is a mess.”

Kenneth Tynan’s “The Sound of Two Hands Clapping” (1975) is an assortment of the kind of critical profiles that no one really writes anymore. My god, these pieces are resonant. Tynan’s epic profile of Roman Polanski has long been a particular favorite. Early on, Tynan quotes an observer who calls Polanski “the original five-foot Pole you wouldn’t touch anyone with.” That line sets the profile’s tone. Tynan is a deep admirer (and keen assessor) of Polanski’s ouevre; he’s also a goggle-eyed observer of the director’s way of being on the planet. We witness Mr. Polanski doing a bit of impromptu kung fu. We hear him comparing the posteriors of Natalie Wood and Jane Fonda. (He likes Ms. Fonda’s; he’s also proud of his own.) He climbs into a Rolls-Royce with smoked glass windows and begins flipping though a private Rolodex of women before asking aloud, “Who shall I gratify tonight”

Michael Lydon’s “Rock Folk: Portraits from the Rock ‘n’ Roll Pantheon” (1971) is a lost classic, a rolling series of profiles that crank down the windows in your mind. Mr. Lydon delivers acoustic-seeming pieces on everyone from Janis Joplin and The Grateful Dead to B.B. King during his last days on the chitlin’ circuit. The piece de resistance is a long profile, written for Ramparts, of the Rolling Stones on their 1969 tour in the months leading up to Altamont. This piece is like an alternative version of Cameron Crowe’s film “Almost Famous.” It commences with the author hitchhiking to join the tour, then dropping into the Stones’s world for months as the cities rush past: Denver, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Detroit, Dallas, New York. Keith Richards functions as what Mr. Lydon calls “the group’s eminence bizarre.” The author compares the scene onboard the Stones’s airplane to a cocaine-fueled political campaign. At one point, he takes a weeping runaway girl, lost aftr a concert with nowhere to go, out for something to eat and he helps get her a bit of money. Best of all, Mr. Lydon is a fan. During a show in Alabama, he spies a fellow rock writer in the crowd and he declares: “Stanley Booth (a remarkable lunatic from Memphis) and I share a look of bewildered joy, know we are both insane Rolling Stones fans, and then whoop with the jolts of pleasure they give us.”

Dwight Garner is a book critic for The Times.

Fleetwood Mac to Release New Songs

Fleetwood Mac plans to release an EP of new songs in the near future, Lindsey Buckingham, the group’s lead singer and guitarist, said during a concert in Philadelphia on Saturday, according to Rolling Stone magazine. Introducing one of the songs during the show at the Wells Fargo Center, Mr. Buckingham said the group had gone into the studio last year and recorded several original tracks, calling the material “the best stuff we have done in a long time.” He said the band would release a few of the songs “in a few days,” then the group proceeded to play one of them, a mid-temp rock song called “Sad Angel.”

After an Audience Vote, ‘Billy Elliot’ Musical Keeps an Anti-Thatcher Song

Even as much of Britain mourned the death of Margaret Thatcher on Monday, the West End production of “Billy Elliot the Musical” went ahead that evening with a song that refers to celebrating her death. The BBC reported that the musical, adapted from the Stephen Daldry movie, retained the number “Merry Christmas Maggie Thatcher” when it was performed on Monday night at the Victoria Palace theater in London, after its audience voted in favor of keeping it.

The “Billy Elliot” musical, like the movie, is set in northern England during the 1980s and focuses on a boy who is determined to pursue a career as a ballet dancer while his father and brother become increasingly swept up in the coal miners’ strike of 1984-85. The second act, whose songs are by Elton John and Lee Hall, opens on “Merry Christmas Maggie Thatcher,” a satirical holiday tune sung by the miners and their children, whose chorus includes the lyrics: “Merry Christmas Maggie Thatcher / We all celebrate today / ‘Cause it’s one day closer to your death.”

Mr. Daldry, who is also director of the “Billy Elliot” musical, told the BBC that there had been “much discussion” about whether to include the song after Mrs. Thatcher’s death, and that the decision was ultimately left to theatergoers. “After an explanation of the song’s content and historical context from the stage,” Mr. Daldry said, “the audience voted overwhelmingly for its inclusion in the second act.”

Ivan Fischer Returning to Mostly Mozart Festival With Some New Tricks

Along with meticulous musical preparation, the inventive conductor Ivan Fischer likes to mix up orchestra seatings and strew singers amid the instrumentalists. He polls audiences for their choice of encore. At the Mostly Mozart Festival two years ago Mr. Fischer used a chorus to create human tableaus sets for a concert version of “Don Giovanni.”

He will be at it again at this summer’s festival, conducting his Budapest Festival Orchestra in a production of “The Marriage of Figaro,” Mostly Mozart officials said on Tuesday in announcing the 2013 program at Lincoln Center. Mr. Fischer is also listed as director of the production, which had its debut in Budapest in February.

“Costumes will float in from above the stage action, as actors slide them on and off as needed for each scene,” according to press materials. Mr. Fischer was quoted as saying, “Because dresses will have the central focus, the performances will start as a concert and then, eventually, be dressed up as an opera.”

Mostly Mozart also said the International Contemporary Ensemble would return with 10 concerts to include 10 first performances of pieces by New York composers; there will be concerts drawing a connection between Beethoven and Mozart; the festival debuts of the conductors Gianandrea Noseda and David Afkham; and an all-Handel program by the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment. The festival runs from July 27 to Aug. 24.

In Performance: Adam Kantor of ‘The Last Five Years’

Jason Robert Brown’s 2002 musical “The Last Five Years” is a two-character show about a couple, Jamie and Cathy, whose relationship is deteriorating. The story uses an unconventional chronology: Jamie’s arc begins when he meets Cathy and then progresses forward, while Cathy’s begins with the couple’s parting kiss and runs backward. In this number, Adam Kantor, who plays Jamie, is accompanied by Gary Sieger on guitar in an excerpt from “If I Didn’t Believe in You.” The show, directed by Mr. Brown, continues through May 12 at Second Stage Theater.

Recent videos include a number from the new Broadway musical “Hands on a Hardbody” sung by the actors Allison Case and Jay Armstrong Johnson, with the composer Trey Anastasio on guitar; and Tina Packer in her Shakespeare-themed show “Women of Will.”

Coming soon: Performances by Nathan Lee Graham of “Hit the Wall,” at the Barrow Street Theater, and Michael Urie of “Buyer & Cellar,” a Rattlestick Playwrights Theater production.

David Axelrod Writing a Memoir

David Axelrod, the political strategist behind the rise of President Obama, has signed with Penguin Press to write a memoir, the publisher said Tuesday morning. Release is slated for fall 2014.

Mr. Axelrod is looking to write more than a dishy White House tell-all. Penguin says that the book will cover his entire career from his early years as journalist in Chicago, through his decades as a political strategist. Mr. Axelrod has had close relationships with controversial figures like John Edwards, the former senator from North Carolina, and Rod R. Blagojevich, the former governor of Illinois, who will make appearances in the book.

In addition, his close relationship to the president was enough to generate significant interest from publishers. A person familiar with the bidding process who spoke on the condition of anonymity said the book had bids at least as high as $1.5 million.

Video: An Explosion 160 Feet Below Grand Central

Those who enjoy watching things blowing up (and nobody getting hurt) and men playing with toys should get a kick out of this video provided on Tuesday by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.

It shows sandhogs setting off one of the last blasts under Grand Central Terminal as part of the enormous East Side Access project that will allow Long Island Rail Road trains to access the terminal. The workers are building two “caverns 160 feet below street level that will house eight tracks for L.I.R.R. trains,” according to a news release from the transit authority.

For the past six years, 1,000 workers, working 24 hours a day, five days a week, have conducted more than 2,400 controlled blasts. Each blast requires the use of 200 to 500 pounds of an explosive powder called Emulex. And before each blast one worker must shout out a familiar warning: “Fire in the hole!”

And all of this has happened while untold numbers of commuters and others have traipsed through Grand Central largely unaware of the fireworks occurring below.

On the Tracks, and Out of Time

Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times The uptown platform at Bowling Green station, where Victor Samuel helped save a man from an oncoming train.

The other day, a Philadelphia man made headlines when he saved someone who had fallen from a train platform. Back in December in New York, Victor Samuel, 43, an information-services account manager from Queens, did something similar, jumping to the subway tracks to rescue a disoriented man. Mr. Samuel tells how it feels to have 400 tons of train bearing down on you.

Around 10 p.m. on Dec. 6, I walked into the Bowling Green subway station, returning home from my company’s holiday party at a restaurant downtown, and saw several people crouched on the platform extending their hands out toward the tracks. I looked down to see a disoriented man in the center of the tracks.

I crouched down, too, and extended my hand. And I thought: “He is way too far from the platform… Why is he stumbling about and not getting closer How long has he been down there”

I looked down the tunnel - we were at the uptown end of the uptown track - and saw a train coming. I gauged that I had a little bit of time and, without thinking any further, placed my right hand on the platform and jumped down. I didn’t anticipate the uneven surfaces below, and fell. I heard gasping and screaming from above. Looking down the tunnel at the circular train lights, growing larger, I felt very small, vulnerable and terrified.

I had lost time. I got up, put my hand on the man’s back and guided him a couple of steps toward the platform. Then I bolted toward the platform myself. I had to get out of there.

Victor Samuel, second from the right, after emerging from the tracks at Bowling Green station.

I’m 6 feet tall. The platform was maybe 5 feet high. I placed both hands on it, bent my legs and propelled myself up with all the strength I could muster. I felt my knees bang the underside of the platform. My torso and waist were above the platform but I could not lift my knees and legs up there.

I dropped down and jumped up again. Again my knees stung as they smacked the underside of the platform.

At this point, as I held my position - upper body above the platform, legs dangling below, glancing to my right at the approaching train - time slowed down. I forgot all about the stumbling man. Thoughts rushed through my head:

You are in some pickle now… perhaps not such a great idea after all… If the train hits me in this position, will it rip my legs off, with my torso and arms remaining on the platform Are you kidding me Where is everyone and why isn’t anyone helping me Someone just grab my coat so I can get up onto the platform, I’m halfway there.

I knew I didn’t have much time. I made sure to concentrate, not to lift my knees too early. I put my hands on the platform and launched myself again.

I know now that the other people on the platform were trying to pull up the other man. A woman told a reporter she helped me too. That may be; I have no recollection of it. I don’t recall seeing anyone in front of me or near me as I finally made it onto the platform.

I turned to my left to see about the other man and found him on the platform beside me. People were applauding. I exchanged hugs with a few people. One woman said to me, “Thank you, God bless.” I realize it is a common saying, but at this moment, it was touching.

The man from the tracks, Jack Simmons, 64, sat on the end of a bench, and for no reason I can recall, I was sitting at the other end. Without saying a word, he got up and gave me a very brief hug and sat back down.

The trained rolled in, slower than usual. “Was there someone on the track” the conductor asked. “Yes, thank you for slowing down,” I said.

I got up from the bench again, clapped my hand on Mr. Simmons’s shoulders, told him, “I’m glad you’re O.K.,” and got on the train. I sat in contemplation, staring at my blackened hands most of the ride home.

A Baby in Business Class

Dear Diary:

While waiting on the business class boarding line at J.F.K., I spied parents with their 3-month-old daughter.

This American Airlines flight to Barbados was going to be long, and the thought of a crying baby near me in business class did not make me smile.

What did make me smile was watching her mom, after we were all seated comfortably, distribute little goody bags filled with Advil, tea bags and ear plugs, complete with a photo of Ms. Baby to passengers in her vicinity, just in case.

Read all recent entries and our updated submissions guidelines. Reach us via e-mail diary@nytimes.com or follow @NYTMetro on Twitter using the hashtag #MetDiary.

A Baby in Business Class

Dear Diary:

While waiting on the business class boarding line at J.F.K., I spied parents with their 3-month-old daughter.

This American Airlines flight to Barbados was going to be long, and the thought of a crying baby near me in business class did not make me smile.

What did make me smile was watching her mom, after we were all seated comfortably, distribute little goody bags filled with Advil, tea bags and ear plugs, complete with a photo of Ms. Baby to passengers in her vicinity, just in case.

Read all recent entries and our updated submissions guidelines. Reach us via e-mail diary@nytimes.com or follow @NYTMetro on Twitter using the hashtag #MetDiary.