Beach Haven School Students May Be at Eagleswood Until June

Beach Haven School students can expect to be at their temporary home at the Eagleswood Elementary School for the balance of the school year.

“I’d like to say we’d be out of there sooner, but I don’t want to make a promise I can’t keep,” said Patricia Daggy, superintendent/principal of the Beach Haven School.

The school’s 63 students and 20 teachers and staff members were displaced following Superstorm Sandy. Daggy said the storm severely damaged the ground floor of the school, which celebrated its 100th anniversary last spring.

“The building took in 2 feet of water, and because we couldn’t get back to Beach Haven for two weeks after storm, the water just sat there, and that made the situation worse,” she said. “A lot of families couldn’t return to their homes, and some lost their homes and had to move off the Island. But we still kept most of our students. There were two families who were fairly new to Beach Haven, and they moved out of the area after the storm.”

She said loosened floor tiles resulted in asbestos being exposed, since it was part of the adhesive glue that held the flooring together.

“That’s the way it was done in older school buildings such as ours,” said Daggy. “When that gets done, then there has to be a lot of environmental testing. School buildings and hospitals are subject to the strictest building safety codes in the state.”

“Everything has to go out to bid, and that contributes to this being a very time-consuming process,” she said. “That’s why I’m really not counting on being back in the school until the school year ends and we can be back together again in September.”

“Helping to ease the transition was the wonderful outpouring of donations of school supplies, books, coats mittens and other items,” she said. “I had one parent tell me that while she felt so poor, at the same time she felt so rich because of all the kind-hearted people.”

Retailers had hoped that Christmas 2012 would mark a turning point when they could start to relax safe in the knowledge that consumers are in the mood to spend freely again. Sadly, this scenario did not materialise, and the latest festive period will be remembered for its fierce discounting, particularly in the fashion sector. While some chains, such as John Lewis, shot the lights out, for many, healthy, like-for-like sales – which strip out the boost from new space – only served to mask the fact they had to sacrifice margins to entice shoppers through their door. Here is what we learnt.

Morrisons blamed its weak performance on the fact that it still does not sell food on the web and only has a handful of smaller convenience stores. These weaknesses contributed to the Bradford-based grocer posting a 2.5 per cent fall in sales over Christmas, in contrast to its rivals. Both Tesco and Sainsbury’s delivered booming online grocery sales over Christmas, up by 18 per cent and 15 per cent respectively, as well as enjoying robust growth in their convenience stores. Dalton Philips, the chief executive of Morrisons, will update on March on its online plans with a trial expected later this year.

Marks & Spencer’s latest clothing and homewares sales not only missed City expectations by a country mile, but also marked its sixth-consecutive quarter in negative territory. Its chief executive Marc Bolland described the performance as “not yet satisfactory”, but blamed the fall on the company’s decision not to match the fierce discounting of rivals as it sought to protect profit margins. M&S said this enabled it to sell more products at full price and running 7 per cent fewer promotions helped it avoid a profit warning, but analysts downgraded it.

Tesco delivered its strongest UK underlying sales before Christmas, following a period of under-performance. The 1.8 per cent rise in sales over the festive period put listed grocery rivals Sainsbury’s and Morrisons in the shade. Its Christmas performance vindicates the ￡1bn investment by Philip Clarke, chief executive, unveiled in April, to turn around the UK operation with more staff, revamped products and refurbished stores.

JD Sports continues to struggle with Blacks and Millets, which it bought out of administration in January 2012. JD described the trading of the two outdoor chains as “disappointing” over Christmas and said that it now expects the group’s full-year profits to come in at about ￡60m, which is at the low end of City expectations. However, the sportswear group vowed to deliver a “substantial improvement in trading” at Blacks and Millets this year.

While Sainsbury’s and Tesco battle it out to lay claim for the crown of the grocery sector’s Christmas winner, low-profile Aldi continues to power ahead. The German discounter has charged ahead of its rivals by launching a huge expansion in its fresh fruit and vegetable offer, as well as ramping up the brands its sells, including Marmite and Carlsberg. Aldi grew its sales by 30.1 per cent over the 12 weeks to 23 December, according to Kantar Worldpanel, giving the company a small – but fast-growing – market share of 3.2 per cent.

The Spirit Of New York’s Catskills

Before arriving at a new place we all carry the luggage of pre-conceptions. There are usually holes in this kit; we’re almost always wrong, at least to some extent, about our notions. My idea of the Catskills came from two very different periods, the live television run of the 1950s; and the Summer of Love in 1969, the year of Woodstock.

As a young boy I would run home from school every day to turn on the TV and drink in whatever show or movie was playing. It turned out all my favorite performers were veterans of the Catskills, Borscht Belt comedians, mostly Eastern European Ashkenazi Jews, who cut their teeth in the Catskills at resorts like Grossinger’s, Brickman’s and The Overlook. The catalogue is thick of the funnymen with Catskills cred who flickered in my living room: Woody Allen, Morey Amsterdam, Bea Arthur, Milton Berle, Shelley Berman, Joey Bishop, Mel Blanc, Mel Brooks, Lenny Bruce, George Burns and Gracie Allen, Red Buttons. Sid Caesar, Billy Crystal, Rodney Dangerfield, Phyllis Diller, Totie Fields, Shecky Greene, Buddy Hackett, Danny Kaye, Alan King, Robert Klein. Harvey Korman. Jerry Lewis. Richard Lewis, Chico and Harpo Marx, Jackie Mason, Zero Mostel, Carl Reiner, Don Rickles, Joan Rivers, Rowan & Martin, Mort Sahl, Soupy Sales, Dick Shawn, Allan Sherman, Phil Silvers, Arnold Stang, David Steinberg, Jerry Stiller, The Three Stooges, Jonathan Winters, Ed Wynn, Henny Youngman and on, as some above would say, ad libitum.

In August 1969 I was a river guide on the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon. My college sweetheart decided to go to Woodstock, but I couldn’t get away for the little music fest in the Catskills. So I was insanely jealous as the media rolled out declarations that it was a seismic cultural event, one of those generational revolutions that changes everything. But I was even more green-eyed when my girlfriend announced she met someone at Woodstock while they were both naked and tripping, and she was leaving with him to an Ashram in the Himalayans.
So, when I finally arrived in the Catskills I expected Triumph, the Insult Comic Dog, and an overkill of free love and recreational psychotropics.

Instead I found an unexampled rebellious spirit that stretches back to the 18th century, and is a connective tissue between Woodstock and the Borscht Belt, and a life-force that upholds today.

I first head straight back in history to Kingston, a little town on the Hudson that displayed early-on an independent spirit when it set up shop as New York’s first capital. It was the fall of 1777, a year after Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence. A government on the run was being chased north from New York City by the British Army, who scorched everything in its path. In the algid air of February the government took up residence in the Ulster County Courthouse to create a formal state constitution. While the Assembly met in a local tavern, the Senate convened its first session in the old stone home of a sympathetic Dutch merchant. On October 16, British forces swarmed through and set fire to every house in town as punishment for Kingston’s role in supporting the Revolution. The razing didn’t snuff the spirit, though, or keep a colony intact, and today there are proud reenactments and displayed documents of the episodes that set a defining disposition in motion. Jacob Coiro, a local guide, resplendent in tricorn hat, shows me around the original stone house, now a museum, and says “The people here knew what they had. They looked around the Catskills and saw how beautiful it was, and it made them feel as if it belonged to them.”

All this energetic independence works up an appetite, so I stop at Dallas Hot Wieners on North Front Street, and order up a spicy dog drenched in the family secret sauce, an inverse correlation between flavor (long) and life expectancy.

From Kingston I find my way down NY Route 28 to The Emerson Resort in Mt. Tremper, home to the World’s Largest Kaleidoscope, a former 64-foot high barn silo turned tourist attraction. It takes chutzpah to name an inn after one of the most famous American literary figures, Ralph Waldo Emerson, who in 1836 wrote “Nature,” an essay inspired by the severe beauty of the area. The publication prompted the American Conservation Movement, which led to the establishment of the 600 square-mile Catskill Forest Preserve that surrounds the Emerson today.

It also takes chutzpah and spirit to rebuild after burning, as did the early citizens of Kingston. In 2005 the Emerson burned down (like so many of the Catskills resorts), but rather than pack up and withdraw, the owners rebuilt with a vengeance, inserting a giant Rajasthani door as an entrance to the spa, outfitting the suites with stone fireplaces and Zen touches and effecting a mash-up of Asian and Appalachian sensibilities that seems to work, though Emerson would likely head down the seam of light that is Esopus Creek rather than check-in.

I take dinner then at the fittingly-named Phoenix Restaurant, and meet Michael Brothers, the head chef, who is so passionate about creating meals from local ingredients he practically leaps over to my table to tell me so. He says passion is the spirit he shares with his patrons, as most are pursuing such when they come here, be it art, agriculture, Buddhism (the Zen Mountain Monastery is down the road), comedy, nature… “whatever it is, they go for it full force.”

I head out the next morning to the town of Woodstock, which didn’t host the eponymous 1969 music Festival, as it turned down the initial permit application. The rock event was actually held 60 miles away at Max Yasgur’s Farm in the town of Bethel. Nonetheless, Woodstock has become the meme for generational liberation through music and art, though it is today a rather chic high-end gallery and café mecca. Nonetheless a pungent whiff of those high times remains, along with some stringy ponytails and shops hawking tie-dies and old LPs.

I chance up with local historian Richard Heppner, who wrote the book Remembering Woodstock, which recounts the town’s early history of wintry hardships, courageous settlers and rebellious farmers who set the stage for a saga of spirited and creative personalities. He tells me how, too, the spirit of the land began to take on meaning after the Civil War. “It was then Woodstockers began to realize they could earn money from what people saw in the land and felt in the land rather than exploiting it through quarrying, tanning or timbering.” It was a time when folks sought sanctuary from the heat, dust and asperities of the city and looked to the vital portal and pure waters and air of the Catskills. This was also about the time Woodstock played host to the brotherhood of Hudson River School painters, such as Thomas Cole, Frederic Church and Jasper Cropsey, the sublime watercolorists who turned brooding landscapes into rock stars. “Today you can almost feel that same sense the artists felt when they first came here. It was like seeing the South Pacific for the first time.”

Richard directs me to up the road to the Byrdcliffe Arts Colony. In 1902 a wealthy Englishman, Ralph Radcliffe Whitehead, poked around these parts looking for the ideal spot to create a utopian community where all the arts would come together, painting, sculpture, music, metalwork even furniture making. The result: a 300-acre sylvan spread that has drawn thousands of independent-spirited artists and craftspeople. Isadora Duncan danced here; Bob Dylan lived here in the ’60s and early ’70s; Joanne Woodward performed at the theater. Byrdcliffe is the oldest continuing arts colony in America.

I find Matthew Leaycraft, executive director of Bydcliffe, who tells me “the spirit of artistic expression began here, and it continues. It’s extremely vibrant and alive today.” He talks a bit about how the Catskills became a place to retreat for inspiration. “There’s a certain kind of purity that comes from contact with the natural world. It lifts you up into your highest plane, and becomes a refuge where people can find the beauty within. It’s profoundly restorative.”

With a light snow falling I head over for a bite at the Phoenicia Diner — not to be confused with the Phoenix Restaurant at the Emerson; rebirth seems to be a popular theme throughout the Catskills — and order up the Arnold Bennett Skillet, smoked trout, parmesan cheese, crème fraiche and scrambled eggs, with, of course, de rigueur for a true diner, a cup of joe. The owner, Michael Cioffi, plops down on the bench next to me and tells me he is from Brooklyn, where he had a hard time finding authentically locally grown produce and meats. (They were mostly trucked in, sometimes from the Catskills.) He went on a quest to find a place where he could serve food in a diner that he would want to eat and landed here.

His menu offers up Wild Hive Farm polenta, a grass-fed burger, a prosciutto sandwich with brie, apples and arugula, and, my favorite for health nuts, house-made beer battered onion rings. His is the first menu I’ve encountered that offers up the practical regional advice: “If you are camping, you can protect your food from local black bears by suspending it on a rope between two trees.” As Michael gets up to greet another patron he tells me he aspires to a diner that is a destination, an eatery that transcends his current motto, “Come for the mountains, stay for the food!”

To round out my little winter visit to the Catskills I head over to Hunter Mountain, highest peak in the county, and host to the fastest, longest and highest Zipline Canopy Tour in North America — and the second-largest zipline in the world. It is more than four miles long and reaches speeds of up to 50 miles per hour. Movement is life; velocity is spirit, and here, all troubles are left off the ground. This is the spirit of fierce exhilaration. Brad Morse, the owner of NY Zipline Adventure Tours, tells me “The spirit of the Catskills has to do with adventure, the outdoors, the beauty of the mountains. When you zipline 600 feet off the ground, you get a perspective of what spirit is really about.”

Toll sees no bright aisle for ailing Footwork

Toll arch controlling Brian Kruger said he would not be in a position to accommodate an amend on the cardinal analysis of Footwork Express at the full-year accumulation advertisement next month.

Its amount was accounting down by up to $166 actor in May — including $133m of amicableness — afterwards the accumulation invested about $350m in the business.

“Things accept not got any worse in the accomplished month, but they haven’t got any bigger in Japan. We are busily into the review,” Mr Kruger told The Australian.

“I would like to think, by the end of this agenda year, we will be actual bright on what the approaching administration looks like. That is the timeframe we accept set for ourselves. I apparently will not be in a position, if I accord our full-year after-effects release, to accord any clearer administration on what we ability be accomplishing with Footwork.”

He said a auction remained just one of the options, but disqualified out authoritative added acquisitions in Japan to advice the business out of its troubles. “People accept asked me, ‘Would you attending to access your way through this affair in Japan?’ I put the anticipation of that actual low,” Mr Kruger said.

Analysts accept warned that Toll would face a hit of added than $200m if it closes Footwork, because of the cogent back-up payments for its 5500-strong workforce.

But they aswell accept Toll could face a added writedown of about $100m even if it auspiciously executes a sale.

The poor achievement of Footwork was a prime agency in Toll announcement in May that the 2012 basal balance afore absorption and tax would be some 11 per cent beneath accord forecasts at amid $400m and $420m.

The decline beatific Toll’s shares aerobatics 15 per cent, abatement a lot of of the year’s assets in a individual day. Afterwards after ascent slightly, they fell added endure ages beneath the $4 mark. They bankrupt 3 per cent college on Friday at $3.98.

Mr Kruger took over the top job at the accumulation from adept bang-up Paul Little in January.

Toll is aswell reviewing added ailing assuming businesses, including Toll Abyssal Logistics Asia and Toll Refrigerated.

Mr Kruger said the the analysis of the above was in its “very early” stages and there were added options for that business.

“The Footwork business is actual abundant an chip network, admitting the abyssal business basically consists of 80 or 90 argosy of all sorts of altered configurations. The options could be to breach that up, advertise allotment of it, accumulate allotment of it. The ambit of options there are abundant broader,” he said.

“I would like to anticipate by the end of the year we will be in a position to acquaint the aftereffect of that review.”

Analysts accept anticipation that the business, which handles shipments of bolt such as atramentous and adamant ore and provides chartering casework in Asia, could yield writedowns of up to $93m if it is sold.

Mr Kruger said he did not apprehend any added writedowns at the group’s anniversary after-effects but acclaimed the accounts still bare final accomplishment from the auditors.

In abasement balance in May, Toll abhorrent the weaker accumulation angle on “continued burden from the bendable retail sector” at home, which had afflicted the basal band of its calm business, and weakness in the all-around accoutrement sector.

Mr Kruger said while the country still faced a two-speed economy, the weakest locations had not worsened. “It hasn’t got any worse, absolutely not in the endure four to six weeks. It is still tough. But about our calm business, beyond the group, is accomplishing fine,” he said.

The aggregation will in advancing weeks barrage a new supply brand, targeting online shoppers, that will focus on deliveries to barter at home, removing the charge to aces up accoutrements from a column appointment or supply centre.

“We accept active up JB Hi-Fi to do their customer deliveries. We are aswell accomplishing a lot of trials with a lot of beyond retailers. It is in fact traveling well. But I am searching advanced to us ablution the cast and accepting out into the exchange and talking to the baby and average enterprises and cogent them what we can do for them,” Mr Kruger said.

Toll will aswell barrage an iPhone app that allows barter to acquaint the aggregation if and area they wish articles delivered.