Word: amsterdam
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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This week the public will get its first look at the most spectacular fruit yet of the area's renaissance: the unveiling of the Walt Disney Co.'s $34 million restoration of the New Amsterdam theater. Originally built in 1903 and famously taken over by Florenz Ziegfeld 10 years later, it is, after its refurbishment, one of the grandest and most mind-bendingly ornate theaters in America, an eclectic melange of Art Nouveau and other turn-of-the-century ornamentation and a triumph of the restorer's art. Disney is hoping the New Amsterdam will be an economic triumph...
...Amsterdam--and more to the point, Disney's corporate presence and the vote of confidence it represents--is the anchor for an ambitious city and state plan to make over 42nd Street, long the area's most notorious thoroughfare. As the sleaziest strip in the sleaziest part of town, the stretch of 42nd Street between Seventh and Eighth avenues was from the late '60s until just a few years ago the ninth circle of Times Square. "You could buy anything you wanted, whether it was drugs or girls or boys or green cards or telephone cards. You really felt like...
...strange society, would easily continue to produce their best work. One who did was Mondrian, whose years in New York culminated in the wonderful Broadway Boogie-Woogie paintings, which couldn't be borrowed for this show. Beckmann painted some of his greatest allegories after 1937, when he fled to Amsterdam. Among them: Birds' Hell, 1938, his one clearly political work, a lurid scene of martyrdom with a bird-headed torturer carving parallel stripes on the back of a sacrificial prisoner (Beckmann himself?) while figures in the background throw up their arms in a collective Nazi salute. Some painters, like Andre...
That's just the problem, insists Amsterdam psychiatrist Frank Koerselman, one of the few in Holland to buck the consensus. "Patients are scared by pain and the loss of their dignity, so they immediately start talking about active euthanasia," he said. "They are badly informed about alternatives." In particular, says oncologist Zbigniew Zylicz, who runs a hospice for dying cancer victims outside Arnhem, "the knowledge and practice are very low for palliative care," the art of easing pain in the final stage of a terminal illness. Zylicz estimates that a quarter of the 400 or so dying patients...
During the war, there were also ordinary, humanely acting Swiss citizens. I was one of 28,000 Jewish refugees saved in Switzerland, although not through any act of mercy of Swiss government policies. My family and I started our flight from Nazi-occupied Amsterdam in July 1942. We traveled through the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Vichy France and the Alps. One September noon, not knowing that Swiss border guards were on watch with binoculars to catch border-crossing refugees, we tumbled down into Switzerland. Right there, a mountain-stalking Swiss family from Champery stumbled onto us. They told us about...