The Sperone Westwater Gallery is not a fan of the proposed development.

The Bowery now has a Freitag boutique and a Whole Foods. Galleries and trendy restaurants rub shoulders with wholesale kitchen equipment suppliers (at least it's convenient for the restaurants). The question of gentrification is not if or when but how fast. This should not be news to anyone who lives or works below 14th Street, particularly not an art gallery that opened on the Bowery last year.

And yet, one of the more bitter battles currently being fought over neighborhood change and development has pitted the year-old Sperone Westwater gallery against a proposed 25-story hotel and tower next door, according to The Wall Street Journal. The twist is that although the art gallery has won some local residents to its cause, the tower has garnered the support (via rent guarantees) of an affordable housing development that borders the planned project.

The project is to be built on a site of a garden that was once part of the privately owned housing development at 10 Stanton Street. The Journal reports that the property was transferred for $9.2 million in 2005, but would be worth five or six times that today, provided that city approves building rights for the plot.

The residents of 10 Stanton Street support the developers of the 289-foot-tall tower, with whom they reached an agreement that provides them with rent guarantees for the next 23 years.

"It is not that we oppose the community, but we had to take care of ourselves," Deborah Gonzalez, the leader of the tenant organization told the Journal. "They have to fight their battles like we have to fight ours."

The gallery claims that the development would be out of context with the neighborhood and would blanket the area in shadow. At least, it will certainly blanket the gallery in shadow, as the gallery's dramatic glass rear wall stands some 30 feet from the proposed development.

Now, the gallery is trying to stop the city's fast-tracking of the project with the help of an environmental lawyer, and recruiting groups like the Bowery Alliance to help call for more review. Thorough review and consideration is never a bad thing, of course, but the tenants of the affordable housing project seem to understand something about life on the Bowery that Sperone Gallery has yet to fully absorb: change will come. Sometimes the most you can hope for is a say in what that change looks like or whether your apartment will remain rent-controlled.
kvelsey@observer.com

A work by ICY and SOT. (Photo by Robert Altman)

Last Thursday, as one of several photographers pointed his lens, two grown men posed by their paintings, shyly smiling and giving no indication whatsoever that they were the reason everybody was gathered. They were young street artists, Iranian siblings ICY and SOT, whose exhibition of around 30 paintings, titled MADE IN IRAN, spent just three days in the Open House Gallery on the Bowery last week.

“They’ve been in New York less than a month,” Mona Dehghan, the artists' PR rep, told us. “They have been arrested and the like back in Iran for what they do. Expressing yourself creatively is still something that is not fully understood, so to do it illegally on the street is a definite no-go. They are here seeking asylum.” Though they shouldn't forget that graffiti is a punishable crime here too, they moved to a country where street art is considered high art. Street art's prominence in the gallery scene has gone hand in hand with the increase of economic disparity in the West, as rebellion and anarchy are suddenly exciting prospects. People such as Banksy and Dan Witz have wrenched street art's reputation and dragged it from the alleyways, and we asked the artists if the fame of these other artists has had a positive or negative effect on their own careers, especially considering we had heard more than one attendee utter the phrase “It looks like a Banksy."

“Banksy is obviously an influence to us,” SOT admitted, “but the fact that our work combines Eastern and Western cultures makes it a bit different."

Ms. Dehghan agreed, “If you’re too similar to one artist, people criticize you, but if you’re too unique, people don’t relate to you; it’s lose-lose.”

The young men were shy and conscious of the language barrier as we talked outside the front of the gallery with them and Yellow Dogs, a Persian rock four-piece that the artists met in Iran and share an apartment with in Brooklyn.

“We know each other from the skate park in Tehran,” lead singer Obaash told us. “Now we all live together and have a lot of fun.”

We asked if there was a relationship between the band's songs and the paintings on the wall. “We come from the same backgrounds. We have the same foundation, so naturally there will be a relationship. Back home, people don’t understand. We got popular after appearing in a documentary [Cannes award-winning film No One Knows About Persian Cats], but there is a difference in Iran between support and people understanding it,” ICY said. “It is the same with art. We have seen people rip our pieces off the walls at home—not cops, just normal people. They do not like it.”

The band was called away to played a short set of punk rock songs that threatened dangerously to transform the gallery into a mosh pit. The camera crews were filming for yet another documentary about the artists. Their work was impressive, but nothing particularly unique. Images of children featured heavily, and ICY informed us, “They represent innocence.” Several pieces featured shadow imagery or the theme of blindness, possibly a reference to the strict and unwelcoming society they come from, and one piece was a direct reference to Banksy, his famous Balloon Girl reinterpreted: rather than a balloon carrying her hopefully away, it lay flat beside her. But it was the story behind these young brothers that was most impressive—the fact that they are handy with a stencil was a bonus. As we overheard one admirer say, “These are good, but I just want to talk to them.”

"Oh, right, the place from the t-shirts!"

As far as we can tell, CBGB is little more than a series of letters appearing on t-shirts in suburban malls. Apparently it was a rock club once, right? Well, anyway, now that three Ramones are dead and David Byrne is busy with White House Correspondents dinner bashes and whatnot, it's time to focus on what really matters: the money.

Bloomberg reports that the estate of CBGB owner Hilly Kristal, the late owner of the legendary venue, is putting the club's "brand" up for auction. The task of bleeding dry the birthplace of punk rock looks awfully exhausting! Assets associated with the CBGB brand and included in the deal are "trademarks, domain names, recordings and artifacts from the club." Artifacts, like a chunk of the stage with Iggy Pop's blood on it or something? Have fun with that, wealthy brand-buyer.

And it's not cheap, either.

“We’re expecting it to trade well in excess of a couple million,” said Jack Hazan, a principal in Needham, Massachusetts-based Streambank, which specializes in intangible asset transactions.

Enjoy the "CBGB Punk Rock Coffee Mug," coming soon to a Starbucks near you.

Today, the deal with the French Louzon Group to buy the site was finalized, and with it new renderings for the project were released. The only remarkable thing about the 14-story, 65-room hotel designed by Gene Kaufman Architects is that at least it blocks out views of the unsightly 22-story condo at 52 East 4th Street, designed by notorious architect Robert Scarano and home to the likes of John Legend.

With each new project, it becomes clearer and clearer why locals want to see this side of the Bowery rezoned.

mchaban [at] observer.com | @mc_nyo

Once the site of flophouses, pawnshops and dive bars, the Bowery is fast becoming a headquarters for contemporary art and architecture. The New Museum's critically acclaimed opening there three years ago ushered in what its director, Lisa Phillips, rightfully dubs a "Bowery Renaissance." The area takes another step up with the Sept. 22 opening of the veteran Sperone Westwater Gallery and its stylish new structure between Stanton and Houston streets, designed by Sir Norman Foster. Architecture Web sites are already following every facet of its construction with the same attention tabloids normally grant celebrities.

Foster + Partners' translucent mini-skyscraper, clad seductively in glass and corrugated black metal panels, features a 27-foot-high display wall for art, a sculpture terrace, a sky-lit gallery and--its most innovative touch--a huge, moving, elevatorlike room that's visible from the street as a giant, Ferrari-red rectangle climbing inside the building. "The concept for Sperone Westwater is both a response to the Bowery's dynamic urban character and a desire to rethink the way in which we engage with art" in a gallery setting, according to Lord Foster.

It's the third new building on the Bowery to be designed by a Pritzker Prize-winning architect--joining the New Museum, designed by Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa of SANAA, and the Cooper Union's new building, designed by Thom Mayne of Morphosis. The architectural trio gives an edge, visual and economic, to the Bowery gallery scene at a time when more neighborhoods than ever--the LES, Chelsea, Madison Avenue, 57th Street, Williamsburg--are trying to carve up the art-collector pie.

For Ms. Westwater and her partner, Gian Enzo Sperone, long associated with a slew of superstar artists (Bruce Nauman and Julian Schnabel among them), it was a big decision to leave their meatpacking district gallery on 13th Street. "We felt that we needed more space to create a more varied program," said Ms. Westwater. The move was conceived more than three years ago, when the gallery bought "one of the restaurant-supply companies that traditionally dotted both the east and west sides of the Bowery, when the area was funky, with almost zero gentrification," said Ms. Westwater. "It was full of character and reminded me of my first Bowery experience, when I visited Roy Lichtenstein's studio in 1970." 

When it comes to the new, 20,000-square-foot space, Ms. Westwater won't talk about how much it cost (the budget is "still ongoing"), or the fact that the project was conceived in an unprecedented art boom and will open in a recession. "We opened the gallery in 1975," with a show of Carl Andre, "when the local economy was in bad shape; we took that risk and we'll take this one," she said.

Sperone Westwater's relocation is just the latest and perhaps most elegant in a surprising series of gallery moves or expansions during the recession, all designed to leapfrog status, create buzz or keep artists happy with more luxurious and expansive surroundings: Lombard-Fried, Zach Feuer, Bryce Wolkowitz, RH, Pace and Bortolami, among the galleries in play further uptown. Last spring, Gavin Brown massively expanded his space, and David Zwirner bought a new building on 20th Street, adding 27,000 square feet to his operation. The Proposition, in business for 18 years, opened in the Bowery area this summer, joining several galleries that had staked out the neighborhood a few years earlier.

Sperone Westwater's new headquarters has already been dubbed "Norman Foster's Big Red Box" and "the levitating showroom" by Curbed.com. "It's a real innovation in terms of a way that it enables visitors to look at art," said the dealer. "From the street, you will see this Ferrari-red box through the glass facade. It will be either moving or parked. It will be pretty amazing and quite distinctive. I suspect that's the feature that will be the most discussed." In an email, Sir Norman insisted, somewhat defensively, "It is not a large elevator. It is a mobile gallery with all the systems for environmental control, lighting and fire-suppression."

The gallery's artists seem to like it. Belgian artist Wim Delvoye, who recently had a hard-hat tour (it still has scaffolding), said he liked "the vertical strength of the building," which he found to be "very Gothic, in a sense." The Argentine painter and sculptor Guillermo Kuitca, who inaugurates the gallery space, said that he was most impressed by "the shifts of scale in the architecture," which motivated him "to explore a wider range of painting sizes in order to activate the space." For the first show, Mr. Kuitca has come up with a vertical installation of painted mattresses from 1992, which has been seen in several museums, but it has always been installed horizontally. "It has never been experienced as it will be next month," said Ms. Westwater.

Other artists of the gallery have had their opinions, too, she said. "Richard Long has seen the space, and I can imagine he could do some kind of large mud drawing on the wall. ... Bruce Nauman saw it and he is considering some kind of video installation. When Susan Rothenberg saw it, she said, 'My paintings ... I don't know.' Then we took her up to three, and she said, 'This is the room I love. This is perfect for my paintings.'"

editorial@observer.com

The LPC wanted to designate his small, three-story building, a specimen of the early 19th-century Federal style, as a city landmark. Such a ruling would likely prevent Mr. Wong from adding four stories, a project he'd been planning since he bought the building in 2003. The DOB approved the job in August 2008, and again in January of this year. In the months since January, Mr. Wong hired an architect and gutted the structure, knocking down all interior partitions. But then, on June 7, the LPC sent a letter.

"I spent all the money already," Mr. Wong said. "And now they turn it into a landmark. I have no idea how they want me to do it. Of course, I don't want it to be a landmark building. Then all my money is gone."

Essentially, Mr. Wong is in the wrong building at the wrong time. One thirty-five Bowery is on the edge of the Chinatown and Little Italy Historic District, which on Feb. 12 of this year was listed in the National Register of Historic Places. The area, which traditionally hosted Chinese and Italian immigrants, is now home to buildings in a variety of architectural styles of the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Since 2003, the year Mr. Wong bought 135 Bowery, the LPC has designated 18 Federal-style buildings as landmarks. Five additional buildings in the area, which include 135 Bowery and the nearby 206 Bowery, have been calendared for hearings, halting construction until the LPC rules on their landmark status. King Chun Lau, the owner of 206, couldn't be reached for comment, though Curbed indicated he may have been in a similar situation.

Elisabeth de Bourbon, spokeswoman for the LPC, suggested the threat of demolition was a factor in the agency's actions. All five buildings have been calendared for public hearings, a big step toward landmark designation.

Mr. Wong is not pleased. He says the building's ancient façade, which would be protected by a landmark designation, leaks.

"The outside of the building looks ugly," he said. "I don't see any reason to make it a landmark. The front wall of the building is too old. The windows, the walls—they leak water. The windowpanes are all old. It's all broken. They've got to change it."

walden@observer.com

The disreputable ghosts of Boweries past-the gangsters, vagabonds and punk rockers who saw the street shape—shift over the past century and a half—likely have more in common with each other than with the citizens of the Bowery lately. The last few years' barrage of the new (new luxury condos, new cuisine, the boxy metal lines of the New Museum) is revealed in the worlds traversed from block to block: One cross street up and you've gone from overcrowded industrial kitchen suppliers to minimalist boutiques displaying Rodarte and Brian Reyes.

But whether it's a designer boutique's glass-enshrined relics of CBGB or a trendy new club's flophouse aesthetic, the old Bowery hasn't been forgotten altogether—it's reassembled into industrial-chic window-dressing for the new.

VIEW SLIDESHOW > TOUR THE BOWERY

“Every time he’d go by me, he growled. Then one night he banged on my door and said, ‘If you think you’re getting any money, forget it,’” recalled Ms. Diether, 80, who moved into her basement apartment in 1958 and, thanks to rent control, still pays virtually the same rent she did when Robert Wagner was mayor.

“I started laughing, it was so ridiculous. I don’t think that’s the reaction he wanted,” she said with a sly smile.

Ms. Diether’s laugh is a rolling chortle that punctuates nearly every story she tells, and illustrates the kind of airy joie de vivre she has brought to the mundane, often-bitter battlefield that is local land use.

For the last half-century, Ms. Diether has been a kind, but constant, thorn in the side of landlords and developers–ever since she joined Save the Village as chair of the tenants committee in 1959, agitating alongside such luminaries as Ruth Wittenberg and Jane Jacobs. She was appointed to Community Board 2 in 1964—“to keep me quiet,” she suspects—and she remains Manhattan’s longest-serving community board member.

Over a noon breakfast at the Waverly Restaurant in late June, Ms. Diether picked through a packet of her own press clippings. She drained three cups of coffee, and she laughed about five decades of fights—won and lost—against a litany of landlords (hers and others), countless community board members, and urban planners from Robert Moses to current City Planning Commissioner Amanda Burden, who Ms. Diether hopes will come around to her current crusade: downzoning the Bowery’s east side. (Ms. Diether has already drafted the zoning proposal and hopes to submit it to Ms. Burden this month.)

“Oh, she knows me well,” Ms. Diether said with an impish grin. “I even sent her a birthday card.” At that, she threw her head back and laughed.

“I NEVER QUITE UNDERSTOOD why other people are so afraid of fighting, but maybe that’s because of my grandmother,” Ms. Diether said.

After her grandmother immigrated to the United States from Finland—dodging a husband whom she didn’t like—an American customs officer asked whether she was, or ever had been, a Communist. Ms. Diether’s grandmother, who had survived the Soviet invasion of her home country, promptly hit the man.

She changed her name and raised three daughters in Massachusetts, one of whom eventually settled in Queens with Ms. Diether’s father, a cabinet maker and Mayflower descendant. The family moved to Massachusetts when Ms. Diether was in her early 20s, but she couldn’t be reconciled to small-town life. “If you went out with a guy more than three times, you were obviously getting engaged. And if you came home after 2 in the morning, everybody said, ‘Oh, you came home late last night.’”

That was too much prying for a woman who still dresses up to go out, still puts on red lipstick, and still confesses to being a “party girl.”

“Oh, man! She likes to party!” said Sean Sweeney, Ms. Diether’s co-chair on CB2’s landmarks committee and himself a bit of a land-use legend. “I like to party and get drunk, but Doris will out-party me. For 80 years old, she can out-party kids who are 30.”

So it was only fitting that when she moved back to New York from Massachusetts in her mid-20s, Ms. Diether moved into the Hotel Albert, a famed Village flophouse on the corner of University Place and 11th Street, where her staid father once came to visit.

“He asked for my room number and the guy gave him my room number without even asking who he was, and he got to the elevator and he was propositioned by one of the women in front of the elevator to do it for a bottle of liquor,” Ms. Diether said. “And then he got in the elevator and there were two gay guys in the elevator making out, and this was at 6:30 or 7 o’clock in the morning.”

It was a quintessential Village life back then, working and acting and painting and going to parties. She married her husband, Jack Diether, a music critic and Gustav Mahler scholar, in 1958 at Judson Memorial Church, and moved into his basement apartment, where she still lives among shelves of dusty books, and where she keeps the three-volume zoning code close at hand.

She entered public life in 1959 with a rather blunt speech lambasting Robert Moses’ proposal to end free Shakespeare in the Park. She was then recruited to join Save the Village, which eventually divided the neighborhood into geographic areas headed by herself, Jane Jacobs, Ruth Wittenberg and Shirley Hayes.

“The Village always had these incredible women,” said Kent Barwick, a past president of the Municipal Art Society and former chair of the Landmarks Preservation Commission. “They had style, they had brains, they had a sense of humor, and they knew what they were talking about.”

Ms. Diether’s specialty became zoning. When Save the Village decided in 1960 to draft an alternate plan to the city’s overhaul of the zoning code, she joined a team of architects that included Robert Jacobs, Jane’s husband.

“Since I had some spare time occasionally, they would send me out as sort of a gopher. And I just picked up the zoning. I’d go around the different blocks and they’d say, ‘That’s an R6, that shouldn’t be zoned an R6,’” Ms. Diether said.

Forty-nine years later, she’s the one to spot problems. “It gets me very annoyed, because I can walk around three or four blocks and find at least six violations, and the Buildings Department doesn’t do anything about them.” Her knowledge has made her a resource for other local groups—sometimes paid, sometimes unpaid—and in the 1980s, she began teaching a class on zoning at the Municipal Art Society, which later grew into an accredited, five-part course at CUNY. “I try to keep it funny.”

“All of [the Village activists] would agree—whether alive or in their grave,” Mr. Barwick said, “that no one was more instrumental in decoding New York City’s draconian zoning codes, and making sure community groups weren’t fighting with one hand behind their back, than Doris Diether.”

But the Village activists of her day also had a flair for the dramatic. Ms. Diether keeps three notebooks filled with her press clippings, and one of the first photos shows her holding the reins of a hefty sow in front of Governor Rockefeller’s mansion, protesting the “piggish” greed of relaxed rent-control laws. (She remains a Rockefeller Republican, and later went to work for the Rockefellers; she still receives an annual invitation to their Christmas party, along with a small pension.)

During the fight over the city’s new zoning in the 1960s, Save the Village bused supporters to the hearings on the Loconik, a sightseeing train designed by Salvador Dali that was owned by the Hotel Albert. Later, supporters rode to the hearings in a 1920s automobile wearing black, wide-brimmed derby hats to demonstrate that the city’s zoning was “old hat.”

“If you don’t go public, you’re going to lose,” Ms. Diether told the reclusive poet E. E. Cummings when he was worried about being squeezed from his Patchin Place apartment. Eventually, he did go public, and the publicity forced the mayor to personally assure Mr. Cummings that he would never be evicted.

When Mr. Barwick chaired the Landmarks Commission, Ruth Wittenberg gave a rousing speech from her wheelchair, berating the city and imploring the chairman to protect some piece of history. Then she turned to him and—unseen to the crowd—winked. “They understood that, in part, it was a game,” Mr. Barwick said.

Perhaps that explains one of Ms. Diether’s more surprising pastimes. When she is not drafting a zoning proposal, or teaching her zoning class, or opposing a zoning variance on the community board, she enjoys having a glass of wine and watching a bit of professional wrestling.

THERE ARE THOSE FOR which Ms. Diether’s opposition has been neither fun, nor a game.

In the early 1960s, Ms. Diether was helping a group of older Italian women with a troublesome landlord in Little Italy, when she discovered the owner had lied about refurbishing the building’s roof, which would have entitled him to raise their rent and potentially force them out. Ms. Diether scoured the local papers and found that, on the day he claimed to have done the work, a hurricane had swept through the city.

“Some of the Italians took umbrage with the fact they were being threatened,” she said. “He got roughed up pretty good in a barbershop over in Brooklyn.”

Ms. Diether said one of her own landlords went to jail for fraud, after she sent to the state attorney general’s office housing records that showed he was listing the same loan on several co-op conversion applications.

“That’s why I like Doris; she’s tough” said Mr. Sweeney, who often takes Ms. Diether on “dates” to the opera or the ballet. “It’s one thing for men to break someone’s legs, but she’ll do it in like a feminine way.”

But for a woman who has fought so aggressively, and so continuously, from the same basement bunker for 51 years, Ms. Diether has a rather startling number of friends. She sends out 600 Christmas cards annually, and 150 people braved a January snowstorm to celebrate her 80th birthday.

“I still consider Doris a friend, and I still get a Christmas card from Doris,” said Richard Landman, who served with her on CB2 before he went to work in real estate for New York University, which Ms. Diether has often opposed.

“But we fought!” Ms. Diether said when asked about her friendship with Mr. Landman. “It’s not a personal fight. I’m fighting about an issue.”

It helps that Ms. Diether likes to socialize. “She’s a party animal. And proud of it,” said Susanne Schropp, a friend who helped organize her birthday party. The two met when Ms. Schropp needed help with a landlord problem, and she went on to take Ms. Diether’s zoning class. “Doris is just so adorable. She’s a really wonderful person.”

Ms. Diether has become such a local legend that her birthday party engendered—fittingly perhaps—a political fight. Council Speaker Christine Quinn apparently refused to let a political rival, Councilman Tony Avella, join the proclamation honoring Ms. Diether, a spat that became public when Mr. Avella’s side of the email exchange was leaked to the press.

For her part, Ms. Diether avoids email and the Internet. She got a computer about 10 years ago, but never took it out of the box. She continues to type her zoning resolutions and her community board minutes on a typewriter, to the chagrin of some who work with her.

“I wish she did have a computer and access to the Internet,” Ms. Schropp said. “To have a tool like that available, it would just be a nightmare to everybody she’s opposing.”

rpillifant@observer.com

“It will fall victim to monolithic, high rise, luxury-- either commercial or residential—space,” he said, to a roughly 50-person crowd gathered at M.S. 131 on Tuesday night for a community meeting on downzoning. “I don’t have to preach to the choir--that’s not what we want.”

The event had been organized by the Bowery Alliance of Neighbors, a group that supports a text amendment to the city's existing zoning code that would impose the same height restriction (85 feet) on the east side of the Bowery that currently applies only to buildings on the west side of the street.

After his brief remarks, Gerson opened it up to any questions or comments. “Obviously, no one here would be bashful about expressing disagreement, that’s what makes the Bowery special,” he said, from behind a table at the front of the auditorium.

A few minutes later, local resident Sante Scardillo strode to the microphone--looking every bit the Bowery in a black leather jacket and patched jeans--and, as Mr. Gerson had predicted, he was direct.

“We know that it’s an election year and we know that the term limits have been changed,” Mr. Scardillo said, perhaps referring to the councilman’s vote in favor of suspending the term limits law, which has allowed Mr. Gerson to run for his District 1 seat again this year.

“We need somebody who gives this community adequate representation, which means not just tonight, but who needs to go and do battle for us,” he said, with a pronounced Italian accent, as a slideshow of high-rises scrolled on a giant projection screen above the stage. “You have to take public positions, you have to challenge developers. I hate to remind you but all of this happened in your watch.”

Sitting perhaps three feet from where Mr. Scardillo stood, the councilman shook his head, then took the mic and defended himself.

“To reiterate, I continue to demand that the city put in place zoning protections and other related strategies to keep the Bowery affordable, to keep our historic character and prevent high-rise development,” Mr. Gerson said. He pointed out that at least one of the buildings in question--the much-maligned Cooper Square Hotel--was not in his district.

He cited the recent designation of the NoHo historic district and the Little Italy district as examples of his success, and he touted an agreement with the landmarks commission to expedite any landmark designations for individual buildings in the unzoned area. Earlier, Gerson had promised to contact City Planning Commissioner Amanda Burden as soon as the council’s budget process was complete.

Other speakers echoed Scardillo’s concerns about the development, but most thanked Gerson for attending the meeting. Securing the Bowery rezoning could be a substantial feather in the councilman’s cap as he faces a crowded field vying for his seat.

One of his opponents, Margaret Chin, also attended the meeting, and was the first to speak in the open session. She called for the group to reach out to the Chinese community, which has, in the past, loudly opposed the area’s development boom, but was curiously absent from this meeting. (The organizers had a Chinese translator present, but she sat down when no one required a translation.)

The group was unanimous in calling for more supporters to rally at an upcoming landmark hearing, and to attend the required public meetings that will follow the submission of their text amendment to the City Planning Commission.

As Gerson left, he gave Scardillo a hearty hug. “Thanks for coming,” Scardillo said.

“I’m used to you,” Gerson laughed.

“I know, but every once in a while I need to light a fire under your ass,” Scardillo replied.

“Trust me, it’s well-heated,” said Gerson. “There’s plenty of fire under there.”