Kaitlin Bell

WHILE THEY SLEPT: AN INQUIRY INTO THE MURDER OF A FAMILY
By Kathryn Harrison
Random House, 304 pages, $25

A transcript of a 911 call begins Kathryn Harrison’s While They Slept: An Inquiry into the Murder of a Family. It’s 1984, and 16-year-old Jody Gilley reports that her older brother, Billy, has murdered their abusive parents and 11-year-old sister with a baseball bat in the small town of Medford, Ore. This opening, and Ms. Harrison’s self-confessed "addiction" to true-crime stories, seems to augur an understated book of cold, hard facts. Instead, what we get is a dutifully exhaustive, though overwrought, account of a crime, filtered through the prism of Ms. Harrison’s own incestuous affair with her father.  read more »

The press junket to showcase British Airways’ $30 million renovation of Terminal 7 in JFK began at 10 a.m. in Bryant Park with a chartered bus.

At the terminal, reporters were greeted solicitously by British-accented airline staff, but didn’t get to skip going through security. Turnout was good: The Associated Press, the BBC, the New York Post, Agence France-Presse, CNBC, the Financial Times, and assorted others, including Golf for Women. (The English are big golfers, the executive editor explained.)

After 45 minutes of mulling about and sipping breakfast-y beverages came the press conference. The 18-month renovation would be to enhance what British Airways C.E.O. Willie Walsh referred to as the company’s “premium ground product.” The airline is seeking LEED certification for the terminal.  read more »

Also on Monday, May 19: Hair, makeup and costume people decked themselves out for the Designing Hollywood Awards, distributed by New York Women in Film & Television during a ceremony held at the Time-Life Building.  read more »

Management at the Plaza is paying a million dollars to an electronic-music composer, one Ariel Blumenthal, to create a two-hour soundtrack for its revamped Rose Bar (along with Frank Sinatra remixes for the lobby).  read more »

Bottlemania: How Water Went on Sale and Why We Bought It
By Elizabeth Royte
Bloomsbury, 242 pages, $24.99

Meet Elizabeth Royte, the extremely rare New Yorker who until a couple of years ago had never tasted Poland Spring water. Then she began researching Bottlemania, her book on bottled water, and in a meeting with Poland Spring executives, she succumbed to a single sip from the alluring bottle they had put in front of her.  read more »

So, Earth Day. Earth Week. All those glossy magazines with their “green” issues. (Not on recycled paper, and what about all those environmentally unfriendly Town Cars idling at the Condé Nast curb? But whatever.) Siggy cups instead of plastic bottles. We try to be good. We tell cashiers, “Oh, that’s O.K., I don’t need a bag.” Only to be met with astonishment.

“No bag?!”

Often, New Yorker consumers are finding, one has to practically wrest one’s purchases from store employees’ hands.

Jennifer Corson, a teacher who was searching for the bag-recycling station at the Park Slope Food Co-op on a recent Sunday, said her use of reusable sacks tends to prompt a fair amount of eye-rolling. Recently, she said, she’d bought a sweater for her 10-year-old son at Macy’s. But telling the cashier she didn’t need a bag apparently so disrupted the ingrained checkout routine that the cashier forgot to take off the security tag. When Ms. Corson walked out the door, the alarm started blaring.  read more »

Students and other demonstrators who gathered in the main Quad of Columbia University's Morningside Heights campus yesterday were aware of the significance of the date they chose for their class walkout, a day after the 40th anniversary of the first in a wave of protests that rocked the campus in 1968.

Around noon, a couple of hundred students, professors and assorted other protesters gathered to hear anti-war speeches from several professors and a young Iraq war veteran. All around them, hundreds more students were sunbathing and playing frisbee on this warm April afternoon.  read more »

On Sunday, March 30, about 100 people, some rather done up, were cramming the small performance space at the New Dance Group studios, a few blocks from Port Authority in midtown, for the sold-out Miss Manhattan and Miss Southern New York beauty pageants.

Kristen Caesar, 25, a graduate student at New York University who won Miss Black New York State this year, was among the audience members.  read more »

News yesterday that Madison Square Garden's owner, the Dolan family, will renovate instead of moving across the street to the Farley Post Office seemed to doom the planned Moynihan Station, but the head of the project said today he thinks the family's decision "isn't irrevocable."

"We just need a lot of strong public leadership to get to the point where, you know, [the Dolans] see the project as a potential reality," Vishaan Chakrabarti, president of the Moynihan Station Venture (a team of the Related Companies and Vornado Realty Trust) said at a real estate luncheon today. The $14 billion Moynihan project would create a new transit hub to replace the aging Pennsylvania Station.  read more »

The number of new building permits issued in New York City this January and February was down about 40 percent compared to the same period last year, according to the city’s Department of Buildings.

Building permits, which augur future construction, are a strong indicator of how robust the real estate market is, and the drop-off indicates even New York’s strong market is feeling the effects of the subprime mortgage bust and the tremors it has sent through Wall Street.  read more »

A couple of hours into the Frick Collection’s Annual Young Fellows Ball on Thursday, March 13, socialite powerhouse Tinsley Mortimer seriously needed a break.

It had been a long week of benefits. The American Museum of Natural History on Tuesday (which Ms. Mortimer had helped chair), then the Museum of the City of New York on Wednesday, now this, which she was also co-chairing.  read more »

Developers are getting a chunk of extra time to bid on Hunter College’s Brookdale campus site, a 4.2-acre city block in Kips Bay that CUNY is seeking to sell.

CUNY, which owns the property and put out a request for proposals in December, has extended its bid deadline from March 7 to May 22, citing a desire to give developers more time to craft their proposals, according to spokesman Michael Arena.  read more »

In the middle of a trunk show held Saturday at her Madison Avenue store, Donna Karan peered at the half-eaten mini-cupcake that her 4-year-old granddaughter, Stefania, had just pressed into her palm.

“Why don’t y  read more »

Virginia-based AvalonBay Communities is running into trouble with its quest to open up a host of restaurants on the Lower East Side, as a community wary of liquor licenses is poised to stand in the developer’s path.  read more »

Time was, Upper East Siders had to push their designer strollers quite a few blocks to reach a single shop that sold cashmere mittens for infants or pima cotton polos for toddlers.

Not anymore. Children’s clothing boutiques have taken the neighborhood by storm, joining a few relative old-timers that opened in the 1980’s and 90’s. The stretch of Madison Avenue between 80th and 92nd streets boasts some 20 stores for tots, and the community Web site uppereast.com lists close to 50 in the immediate vicinity.  read more »