On Rooftops of New York?

When the city's new smoking ban went into effect on March 30, it appeared so iron-clad that even the most resourceful restaurateur or bar owner would be hard put to find a loophole.

But some Greenwich Village residents believe a way has been found.

They fear that rooftop restaurants-the regulations for which are murky at best-may become the next trend in the Village, an area already packed with restaurants, cafés and bars.

The concern is that as restaurants and bars seek to hang onto their all-but-banished smoking clientele, they will expand to any space that allows them to capitalize on the 25 percent of outdoor seating space that's reserved for smokers. This exemption to the otherwise all-encompassing smoking ban has thus far been primarily used for street-level outdoor cafés.

Residents say that the preponderance of brownstones and low-rise buildings in the neighborhood are likely to make the area a tempting location for this type of expansion.

"If you just walk down the streets of the Village, you'll see how many low buildings we have," said Marilyn Dorato, secretary of the Greenwich Village Block Associations, a coalition of more than 30 block associations, speaking to The Observer . "It's going to completely blossom. The possibility is endless as to where this can lead as far as outdoor restaurants."

Curiously, the source of much recent speculation stems not from a deluge of applications for rooftop restaurants, but from the Garage Café, a jazz-and-blues-themed restaurant at 99 Seventh Avenue South, between Grove and Barrow streets. The Garage has had an application on the agenda of the Board 2 business committee since February. Owner Robert Rinaolo, who is also the committee's chair, is seeking to expand the Garage's existing on-premise liquor license to the location's rooftop. The matter was deferred in February and again in March by Mr. Rinaolo, who said his architects were not ready with the plan. In April, the 30 or so residents who had shown up to protest the plan for a third time grew irate when Mr. Rinaolo and his plans for the Garage again failed to materialize at the committee meeting. The committee nevertheless passed a resolution urging the State Liquor Authority not to review the application until the board has had an opportunity to see it.

Residents feel that Mr. Rinaolo is stalling, waiting for community opposition to die down, but stress that the greater issue is the precedent the expansion could set. The few rooftop restaurants in the Village have been a source of headaches to residents in recent years, and the neighborhood feels that the city's tightened smoking restrictions will be a siren call to restaurateurs eager to build their clientele.

"There's really no way you can run an outdoor space without some amount of noise," said Ms. Dorato.

Whether the neighborhood has accurately forecast a coming trend has yet to be determined. But according to residents, history has taught them that it's much easier to mount an effective opposition before approvals are granted and construction begins.

"It takes a long time to shut something down in the city," board member Doris Diether told The Observer .

At the board's April 23 public meeting, the full board upheld the business committee's earlier resolution, urging the State Liquor Authority not to delay its review of Mr. Rinaolo's plan. Mr. Rinaolo did not return calls from The Observer for comment.

Any rooftop restaurant or bar will ultimately require permission from the city's Department of Buildings. According to department spokeswoman Ilyse Fink, such approval would be contingent on compliance with the city's zoning, fire and construction regulations. If those conditions are met, however, there may not be much that neighbors can do. "If it's a lawful use, it's a lawful use," Ms. Fink told The Observer .

-Petra Bartosiewicz

May 7: Board 4, the Fulton Center, 119 Ninth Avenue, 6 p.m., 212-736-4536; Board 10, Adam Clayton Powell State Office Building, 163 West 125th Street, 6 p.m., 212-749-3105.

May 8: Board 5, International Toy Building, 1107 Broadway, sixth floor, 6 p.m., 212-465-0907.

Local Firehouse Closures When Mayor Bloomberg grimly announced last year that the city should brace itself for a $4.8 billion budget gap in 2003, he assured the public that "smart management [would] keep the pain of belt-tightening to a minimum."

Though it's clear by now that the cost-cutting measures floated by City Hall will be anything but painless, few of the proposed cuts have elicited the outrage sparked by the Mayor's plan to close eight firehouses throughout the city. Residents and firefighters say the projected annual savings of $10 million are a drop in the fiscal bucket when set against the remainder of the city's massive deficit, to say nothing of its overall $44.5 billion budget for fiscal 2003.

At Community Board 8's April 24 meeting, residents and firefighters appealed to board members and the public to step up their support in the fight against the engine-company closures.

Christine Rankin, a member of the Firefighters Appreciation Committee, a group formed after the Sept. 11 attack, condemned the city's plan, telling board members that the meager budgetary savings would hardly justify further stretching the already-thin resources of remaining firefighters.

"When you're talking about a multibillion[-dollar] deficit alone, 10 million is a 'whoops!' in the accounting," Ms. Rankin said. "The City Council has offered money-generating ideas to cover this $10 million to save the firehouses, and it's falling on deaf ears. The Mayor's just not listening."

Of the eight engine companies slated for closure as early as May 22, Engine 44 at 221 East 75th Street, between Second and Third avenues, and Engine 261 in Queens, which serves Roosevelt Island, have the most direct impact on residents in the Board 8 district. Four of the remaining engine companies on the chopping block are in Brooklyn, another in Queens and a final one in Harlem.

Unlike the other engine companies, which will be shut down completely, Engine 44 will be replaced by Squad 252 from Brooklyn, a unit specializing in hazardous-materials emergencies. The decision to transplant the squad from its current home in Bushwick to the well-heeled confines of the Upper East Side has generated particular controversy due to the new location's close proximity to the Mayor's residence on 79th Street, and has prompted grumbling that the neighborhood is receiving special treatment with the installation of an elite squad.

But firefighters say the squad, which will have a much greater scope of coverage than the departing engine company, isn't necessarily going to provide the Upper East Side with extra protection. In addition to combating the fires in the area Engine 44 covers, Squad 252 will also respond to hazardous-materials calls throughout Manhattan and parts of Queens and Brooklyn. The danger, some firefighters point out, is that the squad will likely be called out of the firehouse more frequently than Engine 44. And unlike engine companies, whose firehouses are often temporarily occupied by nearby engines while they respond to a call, squads are not similarly covered.

"If the squad company goes out. there's no one to replace them,"

Lt. John Hindle of Engine 44 told The Observer , "and they're out all the time-there's only eight or nine [hazardous-materials squads] in the city,"

For neighborhoods with engine companies slated for complete closure, fears that the community will become more vulnerable are all the greater. Matthew Katz, president of the Roosevelt Island Residents Association, said that residents are worried about the loss of Engine 261, which traverses the Roosevelt Island Bridge, the only road to the island, and is often the first responder in medical as well as fire emergencies.

"We were devised in the late 60's as a planned community with a large number of seniors, and we've had special concerns regarding transportation, especially in terms of emergency medical services," Mr. Katz told The Observer . "Whatever comes to the island has to come over that bridge. If they're five minutes delayed because they have to come farther from Queens, that could mean life or death for someone."

Of considerable concern to some residents is the potentially disastrous effect of a fire involving the Buckeye Pipeline, a major supplier of jet fuel to J.F.K. and La Guardia airports, which runs from Linden, N.J., to New York and passes directly under Long Island City, Queens, in direct proximity to Engine 261.

When the plan to shut down the engine companies first surfaced last November, Board 8 passed a unanimous resolution urging the Mayor to reconsider the closures of Engines 44 and 261.

"We stand by that resolution," Board 8 chair Charles Warren told The Observer , adding that the board was particularly concerned about the specialized duties handled by Squad 252. "There's a concern that this will dilute the capacity of the squad to be able to respond to localized emergencies," he said.

While the Fire Department's top officials have been supportive of the Mayor's plan, many firefighters worry that the city has dangerously underestimated the increase in response time that will result from the closures. "Firehouses have been strategically placed through the city, and any time you remove part of that puzzle, then those numbers and that response time will go up dramatically. We're spread thin as it is," Engine 261 firefighter Steve Cycan told The Observer .

Firefighters stress that their opposition to the Mayor's plan isn't motivated by fear for their jobs-the city has said that firefighters in engine companies slated for closure will be redeployed throughout the city-but that, in addition to increased response times, disturbing the delicate balance of the city's firehouses will inevitably compromise the safety of the neighborhoods they know so well.

"There's a whole know- ledge factor of the types of buildings and their little idiosyncrasies passed on from one generation to the next about the buildings in your area," said Lieutenant Hindle. "And all that's going to be lost-100 years of knowledge-because once the guys are spread out, the new guys coming in are not going to have the same background."

-Petra Bartosiewicz

May 6: Board 7, the West Side YMCA, 5 West 63rd Street, 7 p.m., 212-362-4008.

"I'm not going to meet anyone out here," he told The Times , referring to the East End, where he's famously lived for years.

(Of course, he's been eulogizing the Hamptons since his 1989 song "Downeaster 'Alexa.'") But now it looks like the veteran rocker's heart is taking him home-not to the big, bad city.

The hall-of-fame crooner recently put a halt to his Manhattan apartment search, backed out of a contract to buy a $14 million East Hampton mansion-losing a $2 million deposit in the process-and bought a $12 million waterfront home in his hometown of Oyster Bay, Long Island.

"Billy Joel's real estate-I need a separate career just for that," joked Mr. Joel's publicist, Claire Mercuri.

"It has beautiful views, a good amount of acreage, it's on the water, it's private, and it's in close proximity to the city," the Piano Man told The Observer in a statement, referring to his most recent purchase-a 16-acre sprawl with a guest house and pool. "I was looking for an apartment in New York City, and I decided instead I would prefer to live in a house on the North Shore."

Ever since selling his East Hampton mansion to Jerry Seinfeld in 2000, Mr. Joel's brokers on Long Island and Manhattan have been scrambling to find his next "permanent" home. It appeared he was ready to settle down in North Haven with the purchase of a $7 million waterfront estate, but he put that place on the market this summer without ever moving in. It's still for sale. Later in the summer, he toured several high-end Manhattan apartments, coming extremely close to signing a deal at Trump Palace, but he backed out at the last minute. Mr. Joel's longtime Manhattan broker, Michele Kleier of Gumley Haft Kleier, had no comment on the search.

In Mr. Joel's latest bout of indecision, he reneged on a deal to buy a $14 million mansion on East Hampton's Old Beach Lane, an offshoot of Further Lane.

"He just said he didn't want to live in East Hampton any more," said the house's owner, Fred Stein, a Wall Street portfolio manager.

Ms. Mercuri said it's no secret that Mr. Joel is prone to wavering on real-estate decisions.

"He changed his mind," she said. "This isn't the first time he saw a property he liked and fell in love with it on the spot, and then had second thoughts about it."

Unfortunately, this time the second-guessing cost Mr. Joel a $2 million deposit, as well as some hard feelings from the lady of the house.

"It was very upsetting to my wife," said Mr. Stein. "We had to move out 60 boxes full of stuff. But I think he paid for it-he left a big chunk of money on the table."

Despite his wife's anger, Mr. Stein said he doesn't harbor any resentment toward Mr. Joel.

"I thought he was very decent. He acted like a gentleman," he said. "We parted on friendly terms. If I saw him I'd say 'Hi, Billy,' and I'm sure he'd say hi, too."

Mr. Stein said he believes that Mr. Joel "wasn't being capricious at all" in his dealings. To offer proof of Mr. Joel's good intentions, Mr. Stein explained how Mr. Joel had visited the house two or three times each week, bringing his architect, a designer and his teenage daughter, Alexa Ray.

"He had planned to build a music room and do all kinds of things," Mr. Stein said. "That's why it was such a shock to all of us."

Referring to the Times Magazine piece, Mr. Stein said he empathizes with Mr. Joel's plight.

"He's just kind of a lost soul, and he's got some problems he's got to resolve for himself."

Mr. Stein's Old Beach Lane house, which does not have ocean frontage, has its comely features nevertheless: The 12,000-square-foot mansion overlooks the Maidstone Club and Hook Pond. John Golden of Sotheby's has the listing.

Real-estate sources tell The Observer that Mr. Joel most likely flip-flopped at the last minute because the Oyster Bay house-which Mr. Joel had always wanted, but was then off the market-came on the market unexpectedly, and Mr. Joel couldn't resist.

As for his other holdings, that North Haven waterfront estate is on the market, and Mr. Joel has a house on Shelter Island that is still for sale. He also owns a modest Sag Harbor house that was once a bait shop.

And regarding his New York state of mind?

"As far as questions on my intentions of moving to New York City," Mr. Joel said through his publicist, "maybe in the future."

Upper East Side

530 East 72nd Two-bedroom, two-bathroom co-op. Asking: $840,000. Selling: $790,000. Maintenance: $1,883; 50 percent tax-deductible. Time on the market: 10 months.

THE SECOND TIME AROUND The woman who owned this Upper East Side co-op had lived there with her husband for 20 years before losing him to cancer. Upon remarriage-to a widower who had also lost his spouse to cancer-she and her new husband felt that there were too many memories bound up on 72nd Street. So they decided to stay only as long as it took to renovate a new home on East 58th Street. "In marriage and real estate, it was the second time around for both these people," said their broker, Midge LaGuardia, of William B. May. That was in the summer of 2001. When Sept. 11 knocked the real-estate market on its duff, their first buyer dropped out. "The guy who was going to sign thought that prices would come down," said Ms. LaGuardia. "So we lost it, and it took until July to close again." Eventually, a neighbor in the building who was looking for a place like this-but with a separate dining room-took a look at the place. Since no pesky co-op application was necessary, they quickly sealed the deal.

Upper West Side

45 West 95th Street Four-unit townhouse. Asking: $2.595 million. Selling: $2.595 million. Taxes: $23,500. Time on the market: six weeks.

BROKER STAGES TOWNHOUSE INTERVENTION The family therapist who lived in this four-story townhouse for the last 20 years had originally fallen in love with the place because of its expansive and wide-open parlor floor. She had no problem carving up the upper two levels into rental units, but in order to create her own workspace, she had to make a more painful series of incisions: Her parlor floor became a waiting room, powder room and therapy room-which entirely destroyed the floor-through feel. "It broke up the space, so you didn't see the pocket doors open to the back," said the townhouse's listing broker, Anne Snee, a senior vice president and director of townhouses at Corcoran. When the therapist originally put the 3,800-square-foot house on the market, the confined parlor-floor rooms made it difficult for prospective buyers to visualize the building's potential. So Ms. Snee recommended that her client tear down the parlor partitions and restore the floor to its intended dimensions. "She ripped it out, and it was like night and day," Ms. Snee said. "The minute we put it back on the market, it was sold." The new buyer-a married financier with two young children-plans on going one step further: He's restoring the house to a single-family dwelling.

Boerum Hill

71 Dean Street Four-bedroom, two-bathroom house. Asking: $925,000. Selling: $935,000. Taxes: $1,840. Time on the market: one week.

GOOD COUNTRY PEOPLE If you leave old newspapers up in your attic for a few years, they're considered garbage. If you leave newspapers up there for 200 years, they become relics. The previous owners of this Boerum Hill house were cleaning out their rafters when they discovered newspapers that dated back to 1814. The find established their house as one of Brooklyn's oldest-though that title has been in hot contention ever since a fire early in the last century destroyed all of the borough's buildings records. Further rummaging through the rafters turned up documents proving that the house was once used as a barber shop. "It looks like it should be a farmhouse out in the country," said the owners' broker, Christine Dugan of William B. May. "And it probably was-[this] was all farm country back then." The owners decided to put their place on the market when the lady of the house-a minister-got an appointment in a leafy Bergen County town. They didn't have any trouble finding takers. The minister's husband, a movie-set designer whose credits include It Could Happen to You and The Preacher's Wife , had restored the house with crown moldings, custom bookshelves and new door frames (people were shorter back in 1814). Mature geraniums and wisteria range through the backyard, and long wood planks comprise the house's clapboard façade. "I marketed it as 'Nantucket comes to Brooklyn,'" said Ms. Dugan-and it's a strategy she applied in particular when she called these buyers, a couple that wasn't even in the market for a new place. The woman, a children's-book editor for Simon & Schuster, had married her husband, a stage actor and jewelry artist, on the exclusive island resort. "I know you're not looking," Ms. Dugan told them, "but if anyone should have this house, it's you. This is a Nantucket house!" Ms. Dugan sold the couple's Brooklyn Heights apartment in one day, and they beat out another prospective buyer on the Boerum Hill place-even though they had been outbid. "[The previous owners] really liked them …. The greed was not there," said Ms. Dugan. "As I said, she's a minister."

Plastics King Votis Bids to Brick Over Perelman's East 62nd Street Townhouse

by Petra Bartosiewicz

The view from the well-appointed parlor-floor offices of Revlon chief Ron Perelman's holding company, MacAndrews & Forbes, at 35 East 62nd Street, is a forbidding one, according to company senior vice president James Conroy.

"It's all concrete out there," Mr. Conroy said.

But the Perelman-owned property is in for worse when neighbor George Votis, an investor, completes his five-story, 60-foot-high rear addition next-door at 41 East 62nd Street. The project will effectively brick over at least 10 windows on the side of Mr. Perelman's townhouse, and the conflict is reverberating well beyond the rarefied party walls of East 62nd Street.

Mr. Votis, chairman and chief executive of Galt Industries-as well as the chief executive of Moll Industries, a $270 million plastic-manufacturing company-purchased the neo-Colonial townhouse in 2001 and quickly embarked on an ambitious $900,000 plan to renovate the property, at the time being used for office space.

But no sooner had his architect, Richard J. Walsh, rolled out the plans than neighbors were up in arms: At the heart of their displeasure was Mr. Votis' intention to build out the final 30 feet of his rear yard with a single-story 18-foot-high addition. Though such a move would normally be forbidden under the city's stringent zoning laws, Mr. Votis claimed an exemption, saying he intended the space to be home to the U.S. branch of the Philharmonia Foundation-the London-based Philharmonia Orchestra's fund-raising arm, of which he is treasurer. Community facilities, such as nonprofits and doctors' offices, are allowed to build out to their rear property lines.

Neighbors, however, were quick to cast doubt on the veracity of Mr. Votis' philanthropic aims, asserting instead that he was cleverly exploiting a loophole in the zoning law in order to gain the additional space for his own personal use.

"Our concern has been that this is a sham application, and the community-facility aspect of it is not valid," Mr. Conroy recently told The Observer .

Despite opposition from local preservation groups like the Historic Districts Council and Civitas-as well as Councilwoman Eva Moskowitz and Manhattan Borough President C. Virginia Fields, both of whom wrote letters to the Landmarks Preservation Commission protesting his plan-Mr. Votis has sailed through the approvals process, receiving his final permit from the city's Department of Buildings on Aug. 23. With the news that construction could begin any day, attorneys for MacAndrews & Forbes went into high gear and obtained a temporary restraining order, issued by the State Supreme Court on Sept. 20, effectively stopping Mr. Votis from beginning work on his building.

Mr. Votis is certainly accustomed to having his elbow room. Despite maintaining a primary residence in Palm Beach, he owns a six-story Beaux-Arts townhouse on East 62nd just off Central Park. The residence, impeccably furnished and replete with marble floors and an abundance of gold detailing worthy of a Louis XIV salon, was the subject of a recent six-page spread in the July issue of Architectural Digest .

"I enjoy living in grand spaces," Mr. Votis told the magazine.

Mr. Votis, who says he intends to keep his current residence, maintains that he's just a classical-music lover who enjoys supporting musicians, allowing them the use of his home for practice time and hosting concerts. "The London Philharmonia is one of the great orchestras in the world, and I wanted to support them in New York," he told The Observer . "I can't speak for the other party's motivations, but we have complied with every regulation and every law and have been vetted through an extensive process. And generally, I'm improving the property overall."

Attorney Shelly Friedman, who is representing MacAndrews & Forbes, sees things differently.

"It may be that he can't pull off the kind of concert recitals he'd like to have in his present home. He's building a mini recital hall, and when you look at the layout of the plans, it will also serve as his living room. That's just the way everything seems to flow," Mr. Friedman said.

A hearing scheduled on the temporary restraining order this Friday was postponed for at least three weeks. If either party is unhappy with the court's decision, they can appeal to the city's Board of Standards and Appeals, which has final say on the matter.

Mr. Votis' attorney, Bob Davis, says the debate over the community facility is ultimately a red herring. The real source of the conflict and the legal muscle behind it, he claims, resides next-door in Mr. Perelman's holding company.

"The owners of the adjacent building do not want to see their windows blocked," Mr. Davis told The Observer . "They think if they stop the community facility, they can stop the entire project-and that's not going to happen."

Mr. Davis added that although the MacAndrews & Forbes building is itself a landmarked property formerly known as the Fleming School, Mr. Votis' application-including bricking over the Fleming School's windows-was approved by the Landmarks Preservation Commission earlier this year. The portion of Mr. Votis' project that would block the windows, Mr. Davis said, is slated to become part of his private residence and requires no special permits.

Mr. Conroy conceded that this was true, but asked what would stop Mr. Votis from getting the permit for the community facility, then doing what so many townhouses on the Upper East Side have done: revert from institutional to residential use with an application to the Board of Standards and Appeals.

If that were the plan, Mr. Votis could well be out of luck. Roy Starrin, deputy director of the city's Board of Standards and Appeals, says that obtaining such a variance would not be so easy. "It might be more viable if the structure was built 30 years ago," he told The Observer . "But if [Mr. Votis] comes back in a year looking for a variance on a new addition, I can't imagine that we would entertain such an application."

That doesn't save Mr. Perelman's view.

"Once it's built, what can you do?" said Mr. Friedman.

I'd come early, somehow thinking I might be alone there. I was looking for some reminder of what I'd seen a year before. But as the ceremony and the speeches and the solemn roll call of the dead began, I found little to connect with.

I went to Ground Zero last year on the night of Sept. 12, sneaking in behind police lines at dusk to report on the scene -and utterly unprepared for the destruction I saw. I stood at the base of mountains of hissing, twisted metal; I watched the frenzied men digging for bodies in a burning pile of rubble seven stories deep; I talked with the rescuers and took pages of notes; and I lugged cartons of water bottles out to the firefighters on the debris pile.

But I didn't feel like I belonged there. During the night, I watched a group of cops toss the bag of another reporter and threaten him with arrest. By the time I left, at dawn the next morning, my notes were hidden under my shirt.

I hadn't really wanted to leave-but once I did, it seemed impossible to return. Leaving so soon, staying among the rescuers in the rubble for only a few hours, I had only unformed and incomplete impressions. Still, the memories were so vivid that I was reluctant to return to the site, knowing that what I had seen was vanishing daily by the truckload. Wanting to move on, I instead found myself clinging to a fast-disappearing image.

More and more, I wished I'd stayed.

When I returned on a December night four months later to work the food lines with the Salvation Army, the site was already transformed into a construction zone teeming with electricians, welders and engineers. I looked for a familiar face; I was thinking about someone I'd met that first night who did stay, and I wondered how she was doing.

On Sept. 11, 2001, Abby Lindsay was pulled out from beneath the towers just in time. A cop named Nick with a gray mustache had found her huddled under two chairs propped against each other like a teepee, where she thought she wouldn't be killed by the falling towers. He grabbed her and told her to run.

As it turned out, Abby didn't go far. The next day, she had returned to Ground Zero and was busy behind a table of hot trays, feeding the firefighters. Her 5-foot-1 frame was tiny beside the men. She had outrun death by a few seconds-a matter of yards-and she had not staggered out of the haze looking for home or the nearest hospital. Instead, she'd shrugged off her cuts and scrapes and, less than 24 hours later, was a seasoned volunteer with a solid line on the surest place to find a flashlight, a spare sweatshirt, a carton of cigarettes. But with the dirt streaking her round cheeks, and wearing a pair of borrowed shorts that came to her ankles, she looked less like a gritty rescue worker than a child caught in a war zone.

"I'm not leaving till this is over," she told me. Behind the genial smile, her eyes were slightly wild.

She said she was 34 years old and an executive assistant in human resources for Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, an architectural firm whose offices were nearby, across the street from the New York Stock Exchange on Wall Street. The firm had lost one employee in the towers on Sept. 11, a Russian architect named Arkady Zaltsman, but Abby didn't know that yet. The last I saw of Abby that night, she'd slung an arm around the waist of a fatigued rescue worker and was leading him to a metal folding chair in the triage area.

A year later, I decided to look her up and see how she was doing. We met for lunch on a blustery day at a restaurant on the North Cove Yacht Harbor. A lunchtime crowd mingled with men in hard hats hammering in new panes of glass on the Winter Garden's glass atrium.

Abby seemed older now, closer to her actual age. Her round face was still shaped like a doll's, her blond hair still cut in the same flouncing pageboy, but there was a new sharpness to her, a new gauntness in her cheeks.

Her eyes were the most changed-more restrained-and when she started talking about her experience on Sept. 11, she started to cry and then stopped herself.

When the planes hit, Abby's colleagues were milling around, confused-nobody seemed to know what to do. Abby wanted to help. She left her office and walked to the Millenium Hotel right in front of the World Trade Center. "I remember seeing a woman lying on a gurney with an oxygen tank … it looked like her socks were melted to her feet," she recalled. "We went into the lobby of the hotel and pulled ottoman chairs out. People were so traumatized they just wanted to sit."

Then Abby heard an explosion directly overhead and looked up to see a plume of smoke. Everyone around her started running, and she was afraid of getting trampled. So she pulled two chairs over her head, hoping to ride out the storm.

When Officer Nick arrived, "I just felt his arm," she said. "I thought I was going to die of suffocation." He led her to safety and disappeared. As the dust settled, Abby looked around at the devastation and the bodies and decided she wasn't going anywhere.

She said she felt guilty when she left Ground Zero after four days. While she was working there, she didn't have time to think about nearly dying. "I used to have depression a long time ago-bad depression," she told me. "I fought my way out of it, but I still have to fight."

Abby said that she, too, had wanted to go back to Ground Zero once she finally did leave.

Not long after she returned to her office, Abby said, she was asked to process the life-insurance policy of the single Skidmore, Owings employee who had died on Sept. 11, Arkady Zaltsman. For months, she spoke regularly with Arkady's widow over the phone, helping to settle his affairs, sometimes just lending an ear. When no one was home, she listened to Arkady's voice greeting her on the answering machine, and it comforted her.

I'd called Abby hoping that she would lead me back to find the end of a story, to make some sense of an intense and tragic night. But Abby, I found, could no better re-create where we'd been than I could.

By helping Arkady's widow, however, Abby had found a way to move on without losing what she'd seen at Ground Zero. "I realized he was one of those bodies in the rubble when I was there," she said. She still calls the Zaltsman family. It makes her feel less guilty about leaving. It's enough, she said, except for one thing.

She still hasn't found Officer Nick to thank him.

puckish smile pulling at the corners of his mouth, delivered his annual-and

ostensibly last-State of the Parks address at the department's headquarters in

Central Park. The mood was nostalgic, as the onetime maverick and full-time

eccentric reflected on his 15 years as Parks Commissioner. "I believe in

evolution, not divine creation," Mr. Stern told his audience.

A month into the Bloomberg administration, with nearly every

major Mayoral appointment in place, evolution at the Parks Department

continues, but Mr. Stern remains in stasis. According to sources close to Mr.

Bloomberg, Mr. Stern has embarked on a full-out charm offensive with his new

boss, even as the Mayor has searched in vain for a suitable replacement. Also,

the sources said, former Mayor Giuliani went to bat for Mr. Stern, urging his

successor to keep the longest-reigning Parks Commissioner since Robert Moses.

Mr. Bloomberg said at a recent press conference that Mr. Stern

was assisting in the selection of his own successor and would be welcome in the

Mayor's kitchen cabinet. On the surface, Mr. Stern, too, has given the

impression of benignly handing himself over to the winds of fate. "I came

cheerfully and, when it's time, I'll go cheerfully," he said in a recent

interview with The Observer .

Behind the scenes, however, the commissioner's allies-most

prominently Mr. Giuliani-have been lobbying on behalf of Mr. Stern. According

to a source close to the former Mayor, on the last night of his administration

Mr. Giuliani asked his successor to keep Mr. Stern on as a personal favor. Mr.

Bloomberg himself has had nothing but the highest praise for Mr. Stern. "Mike

thinks Henry's absolutely terrific; he likes his goofiness," Public Advocate

Betsy Gotbaum told The Observer.

"Henry has had more lives than a cat, so I wouldn't rule anything

out," said Adrian Benepe, the Parks Department's borough commissioner for

Manhattan, referring to Mr. Stern's ability to work for a Democrat (Ed Koch)

and a Republican (Mr. Giuliani). Mr. Benepe is currently considered to be a

front-runner for Mr. Stern's job.

Not everyone in the new administration, however, shares Mr. Bloomberg's

rosy view of the Parks Commissioner. Mr. Bloomberg's transition team reportedly

was less than excited about the prospect of retaining Mr. Stern, according to a

source close to Mr. Bloomberg. And yet, nearly a month into the new

administration, Mr. Stern still rules his emerald empire from his office in the

Arsenal on Fifth Avenue. So far, he has outlasted all serious attempts to find

a replacement. Early candidates like Houston Parks Commissioner Oliver Spellman

Jr. (formerly a New York City Parks employee) and former Prospect Park Alliance

chairwoman Tupper Thomas interviewed for the job but reportedly fell short of

Mr. Bloomberg's expectations. The transition team was more successful in

pushing forward San Francisco Recreation and Park Department director Elizabeth

Goldstein (also a former New York City Parks employee) and was elated when Mr.

Bloomberg gave her the thumbs-up-only to watch slack-jawed as Ms. Goldstein

subsequently declined the offer. (Patricia Harris, the deputy mayor for

administration who oversees the Department of Parks and Recreation, would not

comment on the specifics of the selection process.)

Mr. Stern has often delighted in premature rumors of his own

demise. First appointed Parks Commissioner in 1983 under Mr. Koch (a childhood

friend), he was replaced seven years later when David Dinkins appointed Ms.

Gotbaum. When Mr. Dinkins lost his re-election bid to Mr. Giuliani in 1993, Mr.

Stern replaced Ms. Gotbaum the following year.

Even if Mr. Stern is replaced-as is expected-he'll be remembered

for a colorful and controversial tenure. In the last eight years alone, he has

added more than 2,000 acres of new parkland and created programs like 2001

Greenstreets, a project that transformed 2,000 traffic islands of gray concrete

throughout the city into miniature flower gardens. Mr. Stern, whose creative

budgetary solutions in the face of decreased funding alternately elicited

praise and raised eyebrows, went along with the Giuliani administration's plan

to dispatch nearly 7,000 welfare recipients to jobs tending the city's parks

and playgrounds.

Though he carefully crafted an image as the resident eccentric of

municipal government, Mr. Stern also was dogged by controversy, particularly in

the last few years. In 1999, employee complaints of racial discrimination led

to an investigation by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

The  agency found "reasonable cause" to

substantiate the claims. Mr. Stern dismissed the allegations. "The racial stuff

happens when you appoint people on merit," he said in a recent interview. "In

today's world, [people] play the race card; it happens in every organization."

A federal class-action suit filed in March 2001 in federal court by 12

employees is still pending.

Mr. Stern's budgetary machinations managed to get him in hot

water as well. In 2000, the department came under fire for charging exorbitant

fees (labeled "donations") for recreation-center memberships, tree-removal

permits and events held in the city's parks. The City Council held a series of

hearings; the Comptroller's office released an audit; and the Parks Department

pledged to mend its ways. (A spokesman for the Comptroller's office said

several portions of the audit are pending and are expected to be released some

time this spring.)

Passive Bystander?

But many parks activists have reserved their most scathing

criticism for Mr. Stern's appearing passive in the face of the budget cuts.

"Very few people in the parks arena are boosters of Henry," said Gene

Russianoff, a senior attorney with the New York Public Interest Research Group.

"The view in the parks world is that … they hold Henry responsible that he

wasn't able to get the parks funding."

"If you're around long enough, there are always going to be

people who hate you, who are going to sue you or give a ticket to your dog. It

comes with the territory,"   countered

Mr. Stern, pointing out that Mr. Giuliani had increased the Parks Department's

capital budget by $200 million since fiscal year 1994. "It's absolutely

ridiculous. If you're part of an administration, you do all you can to fight

for funding, and you don't denounce your employer publicly if you want to

continue working for him."

Not even the commissioner's harshest critics, however, can deny

that Mr. Stern has brought an unrivaled devotion to the city's parks. A career

public servant who surrounded himself with an enclave of similarly minded parks

lovers, Mr. Stern recruited heavily among Ivy League schools and amassed a

cadre of devoted young graduates who might have otherwise entered more

lucrative positions in the private sector. "There has never been and never will

be anyone like Henry Stern," said Mr. Benepe. "When history is written, he'll

probably be mentioned in the same breath as Al Smith and  La Guardia."

Mr. Stern's State of the Parks address-with white-gloved park

rangers standing at mock-solemn attention as guests tucked into plates laden

with asparagus, salmon and fresh mozzarella-bore the flourishes that have

become emblematic of the commissioner's reign: always festive, more than a bit

tongue-in-cheek, anything but humdrum civil service. "Bureaucracy is a very

difficult and troublesome thing; it's like Gulliver being trapped by all those

little people," Mr. Stern told his audience. "Most people can't get through it

because they haven't spent 40 years doing it."

But while Mr. Stern may want nothing more than to continue doing

the job he loves, in the end he, too, was forced to acknowledge the

inevitability of evolution. "I will always be faithful to the parks movement,"

he told his colleagues, "wherever I may be found."

Mr. Friedman, an attorney, was in the midst of a contentious battle with local residents who were dead set against demolishing the historic Brighton Beach Baths to make way for a luxury high-rise apartment complex. In a show of confidence, he had invited Ms. Purnick to walk the site with him, hoping to drum up some positive press for himself and his developer client.

But as they strolled, Mr. Friedman said, the three elderly women club members, all in their bathing suits, recognized him and approached. "Shame on you," they hissed, and spat on the startled attorney before stalking off in the direction of the soon-to-be-demolished pool.

"At least Joyce Purnick got a good laugh," Mr. Friedman said over a recent lunch at Balthazar, one of a string of high-profile Soho restaurants he represents. (Contacted by The Observer , Ms. Purnick's memory was foggier on the material appurtenances of the event.)

A decade later, Mr. Friedman has moved on to the tonier precincts of the city, where the rebukes are subtler, but his clients stronger. He likes to tell the Brighton Beach story, perhaps to remind people of his roots, most likely to show he's no stranger to resistance and outright abuse-which he still attracts representing some of the city's richest and most powerful institutions on the Upper East Side.

These days, the ability to withstand a neighborhood's scorn is the most powerful credential he can flash. Having drawn commissions in recent years from major institutions like the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, he's served as a surrogate for their expansion-minded boards, standing at the podium and facing preservation-minded neighbors.

Behind the scenes, he shepherds his clients' projects through the byzantine and often tedious bureaucratic channels of the city's public-review process, from community boards to the final arbiter, often the Landmarks Preservation Commission or the City Planning Commission. Along the way, he has appeared at countless public hearings, with architects like Kevin Roche, Jack Beyer and Jim Polshek in tow.

Dressed in Armani, he sits at these meetings with folded arms, his smile two degrees short of a smirk. Residents call him a "scoundrel" and "unscrupulous."

"His attitude was, 'Why are you even here?'" said Anne Camuto, an Upper East Side resident who faced Mr. Friedman in meetings earlier this year to voice opposition to the latest planned expansion by the Metropolitan Museum. "His body language and the looks he gave us were condescending. He told us after one of the meetings that the [neighborhood] coalition would never be successful because we would never have enough money to buck them [the Met]."

"I certainly never said that," Mr. Friedman told The Observer .

But he's also seen as formidable, the highest compliment for a man who makes his living blocking opposition.

"Of course we're not happy with him; he's a very formidable opponent," said Joyce Matz, chairwoman of Board 5's landmarks committee. "He's the hired gun for everybody …. I have asked Shelly for a meeting and said we would be willing to compromise, and he refused to have any discussion."

"It's not a game for wimps," Mr. Friedman said, over a rare burger with Gouda cheese at that Balthazar lunch.

Every generation has one: the lawyer who moves and shakes-or who stops the moving and shaking-and who makes himself indispensable to the task of getting development done.

With a near monopoly on Upper East Side private schools-Spence, Dalton, Buckley,MarymountandCollegiate among them-as well as a brand-name roster of Madison Avenue clients like Valentino, Max Mara, Giorgio Armani and Donna Karan, Mr. Friedman's boutique law firm, Friedman & Gotbaum (opened in 1994 with Irving Gotbaum, stepson of the newly minted Public Advocate Betsy Gotbaum), has gained a bulldog reputation among his clients for effectively pursuing projects in the face of bitter neighborhood opposition.

"Shelly has represented this institution for 15 years," said Avice Meehan, spokeswoman for the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, which is currently battling the neighborhood over a proposed 440-foot laboratory tower and a significant zoning increase for the entire institution. "I talk to him almost every day."

"He's got a niche up there, there's no question about that," said Sandy Lindenbaum, a Manhattan zoning attorney who represented Donald Trump in his bid for the Trump World Tower on East 47th Street. "We've seen a lot of institutional growth in the last years based on the extraordinary growth of the economy. And I know some of the neighbors are not happy about it."

Indeed, while Upper East Side institutions have been eager to place their multimillion-dollar projects in Mr. Friedman's hands, residents see him as the itch they can't scratch. "He is very sharp, and he knows the ins and outs of the zoning," said Teri Slater, a longtime Upper East Side preservationist. "If there's an arcane interpretation, Shelly will make it."

The 51-year-old, Buffalo-born Mr. Friedman has not always sat on the institutional side of the fence. In 1977, a diploma from the University of Buffalo law school in his hands, Mr. Friedman went to work for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. Under the Carter administration, he was a policy analyst on subsidized housing and eventually became regional administrator in Boston.

"I had every intention of serving my time in Boston and coming back for a second Carter term," Mr. Friedman said. But when the second Carter term failed to materialize, Mr. Friedman's civil-service career was ignominiously cut short, and in 1982 he moved to New York to join former Deputy Mayor John Zuccotti's renowned land-use boutique, Tufo & Zuccotti.

There, he continued working on subsidized housing, zoning and land-use cases until the firm merged with Brown & Wood, the white-shoe Manhattan securities firm, in 1986. At Brown & Wood, Mr. Friedman dabbled in setting up a mortgage market in China and was ultimately instrumental in setting up the firm's China branch. Then in 1992 came a call from the Chinese foreign ministry.

The foreign ministry, trying to relocate from its headquarters in an old hotel on West 66th Street, had run up $12 million in overdue property taxes on a building valued at $9 million. Mr. Friedman convinced the city to forgive the back taxes and engineered a swap deal with Millennium Partners, a prominent real-estate firm, which agreed to build a permanent Chinese mission near the United Nations in exchange for the West 66th Street property. The final deal took six years and a bit of mediating by Henry Kissinger. By 1998, when it was done, Mr. Friedman had tired of the corporate atmosphere at Brown & Wood and had been ensconced at his own law firm for four years.

Now, with clients like the Met and Memorial Sloan-Kettering-both in the midst of highly contested expansion plans-Mr. Friedman has come to symbolizeunwelcomeencroachmentsin largely residential neighborhoods. Residents said that the tables have turned, and the grassroots power they had used so effectively for so long to block projects or protect landmarks has been dissipated.

"There was a time when institutions didn't have the money they have today, and they really needed to be helped along by the city," said Lo Van der Valk, president of Carnegie Hill Neighbors, a community group. "But now the balance of power has strongly shifted. Institutions are like corporations; they're far more well-endowed, and fund-raising has become a whole profession. Institutions are no longer the sleeping giants; they've applied all the right business practices."

Some see it as hardball. "It's the nature of institutions to expand," said Norman Marcus, an attorney. "I think Shelly promises them a painful but ultimately successful

solution to their growth problems."

Mr. Marcus, former general counsel for the City Planning Commission and now an attorney for Civitas, the neighborhood organization, has found himself across the table from Mr. Friedman on several hard-fought projects: in 1999, the 92nd Street Y's plan for a five-story adult-teaching facility in the middle of a landmarked block in Carnegie Hill, and the Spence School's current plan to build out the sixth-story penthouse of the landmarked Smithers Mansion it occupies on East 93rd Street. "Shelly's role here was basically to support the full extent of the institution's request. No attempt was really made to develop this proposal in a collaborative way with the community," Mr. Marcus said.

In both battles, Mr. Friedman ultimately proved the victor, though not without some compromise; the Landmarks Preservation Commission approved both the Spence and 92nd Street Y applications (the Y building has yet to be built). "Shelly's tactics do not endear the institutions to the community in which they exist," Mr. Marcus said.

At a public hearing earlier this year, Mr. Friedman played it cool before a fuming crowd of several hundred residents who had rallied to protest Memorial Sloan-

Kettering's latest expansion plan, a proposed laboratory tower and an institution-wide zoning increase. Hunched in a corner of the packed auditorium, his trademark red-frame reading glasses perched atop his head, he watched silently as residents railed at the cancer center's president, Nobel Prize winner Harold Varmus, before stepping to the microphone and stating firmly that there would be no compromises. For Memorial to be forced to go through a public-review process every time it needed so much as a new conference room, he said, was unacceptable.

"If they insist on wasting most of the time we have together to discuss a project on issues which play to the anti-development bent, which play to the barroom-brawl mentality, there's really nothing I can do," Mr. Friedman later told The Observer .

Mr. Friedman is unapologetic in his approach, saying residents often fail to view expansion projects with an open mind, and instead waste time squabbling over concerns that have nothing to do with the proposals at hand. "The detail you hear at the community board is often irrelevant to the subject of the application. I have had to listen to complaints that a school moving onto a block is going to be overrun by nannies," he said. "Preservation was never meant to be that you can't change anything; it's a question of how you change things. This is not missionary work-I get paid to come up with the best strategy for my clients."

But for veteran preservationists, who have not seen any extensive overhaul of the city's zoning regulations since 1961, Mr. Friedman's no-compromise stance constitutes a serious threat to the delicate balance they have fought for decades to preserve.

"'Win at any cost' is inappropriate for a residential neighborhood where people have their homes," Ms. Slater said. "We used to live pretty much happily together with the institutions. That's not happening anymore. Businesses are buying for the area rather than the building, and the buildings are being eroded."

It's not a tension that is likely to be easily resolved. "When the amount of land is limited and everyone is living in a dense environment, that can often lead to a difficult process," said City Planning Commissioner Joseph Rose, whose agency has the final vote on most zoning issues. Mr. Rose-who introduced, with great fanfare, his own comprehensive zoning plan last year, only to see it fall victim to developer interests-agrees that in recent years, institutions have become more savvy: "Institutions have become more sophisticated about the public-review process, and one of the things they're doing is paying much more attention to their professional consultants and their attorneys."

For attorneys like Mr. Friedman who thrive on this tension, that means more business. "One of the signals of success is that on some issues, everyone is genuinely unhappy," Mr. Friedman said. "The client regrets he had to make a concession, and the community doesn't believe it got enough. That means something in the middle took place and the project went forward."

Regardless of what they say about Mr. Friedman, though, not even his detractors can deny that he's been effective for his clients. Admitted one Upper East Side resident, "If I wanted to build in New York City and I had enough money, I'd probably hire Shelly Friedman. If my neighbors knew that, they'd really hate me."

formed between a fallen pipe and a steel plank. They moved through the debris,

exhuming rocks, insulation, metal casings and a sheaf of dot-matrix paper.

After five minutes of silence came the cry: "We've got a

body!" They shined a light into the hole, scooping faster now, the dust thickening around them. A sulfurous odor of

decaying flesh had begun to waft through the air.

"Work it out with your

fingers," someone suggested.

"Where's the dog?

Someone bring in the dog!" called another. A police officer

brought a German shepherd toward the opening and pushed her gently into the

hole. She sniffed, then stopped.

"We found a piece of

skin," said the officer.

The firefighters leaned

back into the hole and continued to dig.

But there was no body,

only more debris.

This was ground zero at 9:30 p.m. on Sept. 12. Thirty-six hours after the

unthinkable, hundreds of New York City firefighters, police and volunteers continued to search the field of

debris, working through the night under arc lights,

hoping to find survivors instead of bodies. Where the Twin Towers had stood, there were only smoking heaps of charred rubble stretching

westward to the foot of the Winter Garden. To the north, the pedestrian bridge

that spanned West

Street

from 1 World Trade Center now lay twisted atop the debris. The second

pedestrian overpass, which had been joined to 2 World Trade Center, remained

shakily aloft, like a dislocated arm.

With pickaxes, shovels,

crowbars and chain saws, the crews filed in steadily throughout the night from

the direction of the North Cove Yacht Harbor on the Hudson, passing Caterpillar scows, hydraulic cranes,

backhoes and Bobcats. They fanned out atop a ruin of wasted metal sheets and

steel girders thickly coated in fine white ash and reams of shredded office

documents. Joined by scores of volunteer firefighters and police officers from New Jersey, Connecticut and beyond, they probed the surface for signs of

life.

While rescuers worked

the debris fields, engineers manning cranes loaded crushed vehicles onto

flatbed trucks. With no time to cart out the girders and smashed cars, the

trucks simply dumped their loads on side streets.

Most of the rescuers worked beyond their assigned shifts,

choosing to stay on even after relief came. When they could work no longer,

they collapsed into chairs that had been dragged out of the American

Express Building

and fell into a drug-like sleep, dust masks still on, oblivious to the din

around them. In the World Financial

Center's shopping arcade, the

Platypus furniture store's sofas were commandeered by the exhausted

firefighters; they had shattered the glass doors to get in.

Other shops in the World

Financial Center

bore the marks of the panicked exodus of the day before. Bread dough was

abandoned mid-knead on the counter of the Cosí sandwich shop. On the third

floor of the American Express

Building, half-full paper cups of

coffee sat on the tables in a café. In the Winter Garden, a greenhouse of

soaring palms and reading chairs and a grand staircase, there was a gaping hole

at the east wall that smoked and steamed, and overhead the glass-domed ceiling

was pockmarked with pellet shots of debris. The palm trees stood, white with

ash.

On Greenwich Street

and Park Place, half a

block from the rubble of the collapsed 7 World

Trade Center,

two firefighters slept in the smoky air on couches arranged in a rectangle

around a table spilling with snacks and drinks. Someone had attached a scrawled

sign to a pole in front of the couches: "Dan's Cafe Table 4-2. Le Menu 1) water

2) water 3) cold water."

At the American Express Building triage area, messages were traced on

dust-covered windows: "Rescue 2. John Napolitano. I'm here and I love you dad."

"Bravo team was here." "Lt. John Crisci call home." "USA lives."

By late night, excavation of the bodies on West

Street had become so arduous that the rescuers

were forced to pull back and bring in bulldozers and cranes to remove heavier

girders from the top of the rubble. They had retrieved few bodies.

The rescuers' hunt was

driven by the tiniest of clues. A firefighter would find a pair of broken

glasses: "They've got to belong to somebody." And a group would begin digging

on the spot. Often the hunt went simply by scent. "I smell it," a chief would

say. "Gotta be here." The problem was that the smell

of flesh was everywhere.

They dug and probed,

working around the crushed hulls of fire engines and ambulances and an E.M.S.

truck, all that remained of a triage unit that had been set up below the towers

after the first impact-and then was crushed when the towers fell.

By midnight, orange body bags were coming out, carried to

the refrigerated 18-wheel trucks that served as temporary morgues before the

bodies were taken north to Chelsea Piers. The bags were not full.

Just after midnight, the first body of a New York City police officer was found-a blue shirt, a leg

twisted under metal. City officers ran to the site, cordoned off the area and

stood in silence, digging in groups of four. Police called in the Honor Guard

to bring out the body. Officers watched briefly, then left the scene with heavy

tearless eyes and returned to work.

Despite heavy pressure from these well-heeled Upper East Side residents, however, the Met has moved ahead with its 200,000-square-foot expansion project, which calls for the excavation of its sprawling entrance plaza. Now residents have found a new cause to rally around: the possibility of losing the two oval fountains flanking the museum's entrance staircase on the plaza.

"The fountains are the catalyst that's been uniting the whole community," said Anne Camuto, a Fifth Avenue resident who lives across from the museum. "What the museum is doing is outrageous."

Met officials say that if they're able to excavate beneath the plaza, as they hope to do, the fountains will have to go–and by the museum's own admission, their return is by no means guaranteed.

"From an aesthetic or an efficiency point of view, they are not the greatest fountains around," Met president David McKinney said. "It would probably not be smart to take the fountains away and put them back just the way they are." Harold Holzer, vice president for communications at the Met, said that "there's no geological reason to imagine that the excavation cannot go forward."

For months now, the Met has doggedly defended its plan, arguing that the expansion is vital to its survival as a world-class cultural institution. But nearby residents have come to view the Met as the Sherman tank of Upper East Side institutions: hulking, unwieldy and seemingly invincible. They have hired attorney Ed Hayes to represent them as they contemplate what comes next.

The twin oblong fountains have become their redoubt. Donated by Lila Acheson Wallace, co-founder of Reader's Digest , the fountains have occupied a significant part of Manhattan's physical and mental landscape since the balmy morning in April 1970 when then-Mayor John Lindsay stood before a crowd of several hundred and sent their 200 jets shooting skyward. Designed by Kevin Roche, they were part of a $7.5 million gift to the Met for the creation of the museum's front plaza and entrance hall. For the last three decades, they have been an urban crossroads for throngs of tourists, busloads of school kids and countless New Yorkers.

At the end of July, a team of engineers for the Met began probing the ground beneath the plaza for bedrock to determine the costs and time frame of the proposed excavation. Results of the borings will be available in the fall, and if the museum's trustees approve the excavation cost, work could begin as early as next summer. "We need the space, and we are very much hoping that it's feasible and we can do it," Mr. McKinney said, adding that the museum already has all city approvals for the excavation in place.

Squaring off with the museum's neighbors on Fifth Avenue, however, will be a challenge. "Everyone loses sight of the fact that we're a residential community," said Ms. Camuto. "We're doing our best, and because the Met is doing it in the name of art, they're getting away with it. They're a menace to the community."

For developers, finding common ground with preservationist-minded Upper East Siders has never been easy. Just last month, hundreds gathered to oppose a proposal by Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center to build a 440-foot research tower on East 68th Street, despite heartfelt pleas from such luminaries as Harold Varmus, Memorial's Nobel-laureate president. (The coalition fighting the Met plan, headed by Pat Nicholson, has now allied itself with 10021 Community Coalition, the group fighting the Sloan-Kettering plan.) And unlike less-affluent New York neighborhoods, Ms. Nicholson's coalition has substantial resources with which to fight back: In just seven months, they've raised $80,000.

"It's disgusting, it's horrible," said Benjamin Aryeh, a Madison Avenue art dealer who lives across from the Met and often plays ball with his three kids by the fountains. "The plaza and fountains are just a wonderful place to be. You can't go into the park at nighttime, but you're safe in front of the museum. Now they want to rip all of that up."

It hasn't helped that residents believe the Met has kept them in the dark on the specifics of the expansion, such as construction costs and timetables. "Removing the fountains would be a major architectural decision, and that only happens if they're going to make two extremely large holes on Fifth Avenue. If that's the plan, they have an obligation to tell the community sooner rather than later," said Mr. Hayes, the attorney for the Fifth Avenue coalition.

"When the [Met] brought the application to the community boards and Landmarks [Preservation Commission], no mention of removal of the fountains was made," said Teri Slater, an Upper East Side resident on the board of the Historic Districts Council.

Mr. McKinney asserted that the Met would get all necessary approvals and community feedback before proceeding with their plan. "I'm afraid somehow our neighbors have got the idea that we're trying to hide something, when we don't have our plans in place yet," Mr. McKinney said. "We'll talk about it when we do know." He was, however, uncertain about which city agency has jurisdiction over the fountains. "I'm sure that change to the fountains would require approval, from a scenic point of view, from Parks, but it's not absolutely clear that they're landmarked," he said. He added that the plan's architects, from Kevin Roche, John Dinkeloo and Associates, have already discussed several alternative fountain designs.

Stern Wants Data

"It's the kind of thing the Landmarks Commission was intended to consider," said Henry Stern, commissioner of the Parks Department, which serves as the Met's landlord. Mr. Stern added that if the Met intends to remove the fountains, he wants to hear about it. "I remember when the fountains were put in, and they were sort of jarringly modern to some, but they've grown on people in the 30 years they've been there, and people would be sorry to see them go."

The Landmarks Preservation Commission, which approved the Met's plan in February, agrees. "It's always been clear that the museum was going to have to excavate to do their expansion plan, but the plan has always shown the fountains remaining. If they plan to remove the fountains, they will have to come through us," said Terri Rosen Deutsch, a spokeswoman for the L.P.C.

Attorneys for the Fifth Avenue neighborhood coalition are prepared to play hardball, if necessary. "The fountains are symbolic of the greater harm that's going to happen," said Elizabeth Shields, an attorney for the coalition. "If they proceed with this attitude which they've had, then we'll have to proceed with other action."

years ago, she never imagined that she would one day find herself feuding with

her neighbor across the street, the Metropolitan Museum of Art. On the

contrary-the Met was one of the neighborhood's prime attractions. During the

days, Ms. Gunther, an art lover, roamed the galleries. At night, she frequently

entertained friends in the Met's trustee dining room. "I'm retired and single,"

she said. "It makes life easier."

On warm afternoons, she watched the street theater on the

Met's front steps, right outside her living-room window. "The fountains," she

said, "are so beautiful."

Then, at 7 a.m. on April 7, construction crews showed up. Clang! Ms. Gunther awoke to the sound of

old file cabinets being thrown into a metal Dumpster. She didn't know what made

her more angry: the debris, or the fact that the Met had chosen the first

morning of Passover to remind her that it was about to embark on a 12-year,

$200 million renovation-and that a giant hole might soon take the place of her

beloved fountains.

Ms. Gunther is a bridge-player, not a political

activist-and, she hastens to add, a frequent donor to the Met. But when she

heard about the renovation project, she pulled out her checkbook and wrote out

a $250 donation to the Metropolitan Museum Historic District Coalition, a

two-month-old neighborhood group formed solely to rein in the Met's big plans.

Inspired by a similar uprising in neighboring Carnegie Hill,

leaders of the coalition boast that they've already raised $28,000. And if

their concerns run toward the mundane-they're worried about noise, dust and the

deleterious effects of an influx of construction workers (and their trucks)

into the neighborhood-the Met's executives have reason for concern. Their

neighbors are angry, they are rich and they have lawyers.

"They are my neighbors, and I'm acutely aware of that," said

David E. McKinney, president of the Met. In recent days, Mr. McKinney has

scrambled to meet with members of the coalition and their attorneys.

Not everyone is so diplomatic. Parks Commissioner Henry

Stern, who is technically overseeing the renovation because the museum lies

within Central Park, fairly scoffed when he heard of the neighbors' complaints.

"They're building a museum," he said, "not a slaughterhouse."

But the coalition leaders say they're serious. How serious?

They've already hired  the white-shoe

law firm Greenberg Traurig, as well as Ed Hayes, a nearby resident and a

seasoned manipulator of the city's levers of influence.

Pat Nicholson, a resident of 1016 Fifth Avenue and the

leader of the coalition, said there will be more money pouring into the group's

coffers. She won't identify all her privacy-minded donors-"We're not out to

show the world who we are," she said-but she says many of them are quite

well-known to the Met's fund-raisers. "One museum patron and top-level

gift-giver," Ms. Nicholson said, "is also a contributor to the coalition."

As the Met surely knows, any dispute with the locals is not

quite like most neighborhood spats in New York. Included among the residents is

Republican State Senator Roy Goodman, a resident of 1035 Fifth Avenue and a

noted patron of the arts. "I think we have a considerable amount of influence

with the museum," Mr. Goodman said with characteristic understatement. "We've

been very good to them."

But wait, there's more: Mr. Goodman is not the

neighborhood's only person of immense political influence. Last month,

officials from the Metropolitan Transportation Authority handed the Met a

logistical setback when they told the museum the M.T.A. would no longer allow

tour buses to pull up in the curbside bus lane to deposit and retrieve

passengers-a decision, coalition members believe, that will hamper the museum's

construction plans. "When David McKinney heard that, his face just dropped,"

cackled one of the coalition's lawyers, Elizabeth Shields. The neighbors, who

have been complaining about bus noise for years, credited incoming M.T.A.

chairman Peter Kalikow, a nearby Fifth Avenue resident, with the assist.

Mr. Kalikow's spokesman, Marty McLaughlin, said that when it

came to the Met, the M.T.A. president "supports his neighbors."

"He wants the construction done in a careful and sensitive

manner," Mr. McLaughlin said.

Mr. McKinney, who noted that he too lives across the street

from the Met, now sounds chastened. "We underestimated the need to communicate

with the community," he said. After meeting with Ms. Nicholson and her lawyers,

he said he saw some cause for hope. "There are some hard feelings right now,

but we hope to work through that," he added.

Time to Move On?

But it's hard to see where the two sides can find common

ground. Ms. Nicholson and her coalition are convinced that the Met has outgrown

the Fifth Avenue location it has occupied for more than 120 years and would

like to see it expand to new buildings-presumably in someone else's

neighborhood. The Met, on the other hand, says the 200,000-square-foot

expansion is vital to its future. The renovation will provide the museum with a

much-needed reconfiguration of several of its galleries, museum officials say,

as well as a new high-tech education center for children, additional office

space for museum staff and volunteers, and an 81st Street loading dock to

handle incoming art work. But because Met officials promised the Parks

Department they would not expand on the museum's "footprint"-its length and

width-they will instead build on the roof and excavate two stories below

ground. Residents fear this means the end of the fountains. (The Met maintains

that no final decision has been made about whether to uproot them for the

excavation.)

The fountains are the touchstone. One Fifth Avenue resident,

Shirley Sherman, wrote a letter of protest from her winter home in Florida.

"The city has too much concrete and asphalt," she wrote. "The beauty of the

fountains is our escape."

But Mr. Stern said the residents are demanding too much.

"[Met executives] are doing as well as they can," he said. "Some people just

don't like living across the street from one of the world's largest art

museums. The problem is, the museum was there before they were."

Indeed it was. Established in 1874 on a piece of farmland

far north of the stately mansions of Edith Wharton's Fifth Avenue, the Met has

been under renovation almost ever since. The Beaux Arts main building wasn't

constructed until the turn of the century; the last major addition, which

doubled the museum's size, was begun in 1971 and completed only in 1993, after

years of obstruction by neighborhood residents. That generation, like this one,

maintained that the Met should expand into buildings elsewhere.

For years, residents have complained about disruptive

nighttime lighting, noisy early-morning trash pick-ups, and the heavy stream of

tour and school buses flowing past the museum's entrance. The 1993 renovation,

they maintain, never really stopped. "I've lived here 11 years," said Alan

Brumberger, a merchant-banker who lives at 1016 Fifth Avenue, "and it's just

been one construction project after another."

Ms. Nicholson said her coalition was born on Jan. 30, at a

meeting of the city's Landmarks Preservation Commission, when the Met presented

its latest renovation plans. For years, Ms. Nicholson had nursed a gripe about

the Met's cooling system, which regularly belched large clouds of steam in the

direction of her apartment facing Fifth Avenue. When she and other residents

questioned whether the Met really had room for another expansion, they felt

they were put off in a dismissive manner by the museum's attorney, Shelly

Friedman. "He acted like we didn't even have a right to be there," said

Elizabeth Herz, a coalition member who was at the meeting. "He told us that

there was no point in going to the meeting, because we wouldn't be allowed to

speak."

Ms. Nicholson's husband, Roger Nicholson, is in real estate.

She knew neighbors were always tying up developments with protests and

lawsuits. "When [Met executives] said they were 80 percent of the way through

the approvals process," Ms. Nicholson said, "I realized immediately that we'd

need to catch up." At the end of the meeting, she asked all the residents there

to put their names and addresses on a list.

Ms. Nicholson began sending out homemade newsletters,

railing against the project and urging residents to organize. She frankly

acknowledged that she's had some trouble stirring people up: Some building

managers have refused to distribute the newsletters, and it's been difficult to

interest residents whose apartments don't look out onto Fifth Avenue. But Ms.

Nicholson said the movement has been picking up momentum in recent weeks. So

far, she said, she has donations from 30 individual families and the support of

co-op boards representing another 300.

Ms. Nicholson said that,

thus far, all of the fund-raising had been done by mail. " Coffee parties ? Maybe a block association could get away with

that," she said. "We're trying to approach this in a dignified way."

Really Deep Pockets

In her fund-raising appeals, Ms. Nicholson is urging those

with Fifth Avenue views-the slightly richer rich people-to "dig deeper into

[their] pockets" when making their donations.

"The callousness of it is that the Met is saying, 'O.K.,

we've destroyed your view, but we're allowed to do it,'" said Ms. Herz, a

25-year Fifth Avenue resident. "They've single-handedly brought down the value

of several billion dollars' worth of real estate."

Ms. Nicholson, however, maintains that her crusade is not

"just a bunch of privileged people trying to preserve their Central Park

views." It's about steam and trash and trucks and dust and noise, and all the

other unpleasant detritus that comes along with living next-door to a major

tourist attraction that's becoming a major construction project.

"We feel that no other museum has gotten away with what the

Met has gotten away with. The Met sits there saying they want to protect their

Da Vincis and they're raising $200 million for their expansion, so why can't

they come up with the money to address our issues?" asked Ms. Nicholson.

Not everyone along Fifth Avenue has been convinced. "I'd

rather get rid of the parades," said Toni Goodale, a fund-raising consultant.

"Neighbors always go crazy whenever this kind of thing happens. It's just

richer people this time."

Still, Ms. Nicholson has found enough fellow travelers to

raise $28,000. But even that fairly substantial war chest didn't get answers to

her questions. "Part of the problem is that we don't know who to trust … we may

not be smart enough to ask the right questions, and you'll always be able to

pull the wool over our eyes," she said. So she called Mr. Hayes.

"At first I thought, 'There's not a lot of better things in

life that a guy can have than to say, "I represent Fifth Avenue,"'" Mr. Hayes

said jocularly. "But when I saw the scale of the renovations, I realized it was

going to make a significant impact on this neighborhood …. They're going to dig

some big holes in the ground, and there's going to be a lot of big excavation

equipment and cranes, so it's not a small thing. The Met has to cooperate with the community."

Ms. Nicholson is angry the museum never did a traffic study

or conducted an environmental review, as is required before most major

construction projects. Mr. Hayes snorts at the Met's contention that it didn't

need to: "If you pay a lawyer enough money, he's going to tell you what you

want to hear. On a bad day, that's what I do, too," he added with a laugh.

"They are prepared to go to court, if that's what it takes,"

said Ms. Shields, another coalition lawyer.

Coalition members say they hope it doesn't come to that. "I

love the museum," said Ms. Gunther. "I really do. But the larger they get, the

more they need-it's just growing like a fungus. The way they handled this from

the first meeting was just arrogance.

"But now that we have lawyers, they're paying more

attention."