Archive for the ‘Lifestyle’ Category

Stephen Byrd: Developing a Multiracial ‘Desire’

Thursday, May 17th, 2012

By JOANNE KAUFMAN

New York

‘I’m confused,” said Stephen Byrd, who didn’t sound confused at all. It was just his polite way of expressing displeasure that the marketing people at the conference table had failed to absorb the message about no discount offers—at least not right away—for tickets to his multiracial Broadway production of “A Streetcar Named Desire.” (It opens Sunday.)

Dangling such sweeteners may be standard operating procedure for many impresarios. But Mr. Byrd, 55, one of the very few African-American producers on Broadway, and the first (with Alia Jones) to win London’s Olivier Award, isn’t interested in business as usual. Buy a mailing list to promote the show, which stars Blair Underwood, Nicole Ari Parker and Daphne Rubin-Vega? Take out a half-page newspaper ad? Show him the stats about the probable return on investment if you expect him to show you the money.

“Stephen is very nuts and bolts,” said Marcia Pendleton, a marketing consultant for “Streetcar.” “He’ll say, ‘What are we getting back from this initiative? Is it translating into ticket sales? If not, we need to stop doing it.’ He’s on top of those numbers.”

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Here’s all you need to know about Mr. Byrd: He’s a former investment banker. Granted, he’s not the only producer with a Wall Street pedigree. But unlike Roy Furman, vice chairman of Jefferies & Co., whose credits include “The Book of Mormon,” “Spamalot” and “Seminar,” he didn’t begin as a passive theater. He was lead producer his first time out of the gate, in 2009, with an all-black, all-star (Terrence Howard, Phylicia Rashad and James Earl Jones) production of “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.” While four out of five shows lose money, “Cat” had successful lives in New York (a 58% return on investment) and London (48% ROI).

The producer learning curve is steep enough. But Mr. Byrd has set himself an added challenge: attracting nontraditional audiences.

Broadway’s track record with that population has been mixed, perhaps because “there’s never been a sustained effort made,” said Jed Bernstein, a producer and former executive director of the League of American Theatres and Producers. The 1987 production of “Fences,” the only August Wilson box-office hit, struggled to bring in African-American audiences, as did Russell Simmons’s “Def Poetry Jam” in 2002. But earlier that same year, Suzan-Lori Parks’s “Topdog/Underdog,” starring Jeffrey Wright and Mos Def, did well commercially with a diverse audience. And, in 2004, black audiences had a crucial role in making a success of the limited-run revival of “A Raisin in the Sun,” starring Sean Combs. Mr. Byrd estimates that New York audiences for his “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” were 70% to 80% African-American, slightly better than the turnout for “Stick Fly,” the chronicle of an affluent black family during a complicated weekend on Martha’s Vineyard. “We absolutely did an outreach to the African-American community,” said Nelle Nugent, lead producer of “Stick Fly,” which closed in February after a disappointing 92 performances. “We just didn’t have enough star power. Stephen is very smart the way he goes about that.”

“I always say there’s a group between Tyler Perry fans and August Wilson fans that hasn’t been tapped,” Mr. Byrd observed one recent morning in an interview following a “bagels and beignets” press conference to introduce the “Streetcar” stars. “That audience has been coming out to musicals, whether it’s ‘The Wiz’ or ‘The Color Purple.’ But for serious plays they haven’t seen people on stage who look like them and who they can relate to. I don’t think a lot of agencies know how to market to this group. You have to bring the cast to churches. People like that touchy-feely stuff. You have to participate in community events and programs.”

“He knows how to find audiences,” said Mr. Jones, Big Daddy in Mr. Byrd’s “Cat.” “I didn’t know there were that many black theatergoers in New York and London. He went to churches and military bases and comedy clubs and somehow got them to come. I think he must have promised them they’d see Terrence Howard with his shirt off.”

But outreach is just part of Mr. Byrd’s success story. He’s limiting his risk by focusing on brand-name properties—”I’d be somewhat reluctant to go out with an unknown play,” he said—and brand-name performers. “You get a double bite of the apple,” he said. “You get people who want to see ‘Streetcar.’ And you get people who just want to see Blair.”

Mr. Byrd grew up in Philadelphia, where his father was a judge, his mother a teacher. “I remember seeing ‘Peter Pan’ and ‘The Wiz,’ and I had a brief fling with a Broadway actress who was in ‘Hello, Dolly!’ when Pearl Bailey was the star. There was something about the feeling backstage that I really loved.”

After getting his M.B.A. at Wharton, Mr. Byrd joined Goldman Sachs and went to London and Paris to work in mergers and acquisitions, later getting involved in private equity. “I was making a good living but I had no real life,” he said. “My father told me, ‘Son, I never saw a Brinks truck follow a funeral hearse. You can’t take it with you.’ That’s when I started to look at other options.”

One such option was film development, specifically movies about African-Americans in the Wild West—Nat Love and Cherokee Bill, among others. “But you can die of hope in Hollywood,” said Mr. Byrd, who then turned his attention to theater, boning up by going to the now-defunct Coliseum Books and buying every relevant text on the subject.

“Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” was 15 years in the making. The trials—the reluctance of the Tennessee Williams estate to grant rights, the refusal of some agents to let their clients participate, the difficulty of securing a theater—were many. “I was all dressed up with no place to go,” Mr. Byrd said.

Now, he has the benefit and burden of being a known quantity. “We’ve been inaugurated into the Broadway community. They want to invest in our shows,” said Mr. Byrd, who’s looking ahead to his next Broadway project, a musical adaptation of a movie, while keeping both eyes on the “Streetcar” bottom line. “They tell me Blanche needs eight wardrobe changes,” he said with a sigh. “I don’t think the audience is going to say, ‘This is a terrible version of “Streetcar.” Blanche only has three costumes.’”

He claims to be ready for whatever audience and critics lob his way. “I know I’ve got a bull’s-eye on my back to see if I’m a one-hit wonder,” Mr. Byrd said. “But I reserve the right to fail.”

Ms. Kaufman writes about culture for the Journal.

A version of this article appeared April 18, 2012, on page D5 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Developing a Multiracial ‘Desire’.

© 2011 Wall Street Journal (www.wsj.com)

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King of Craft Beers

Tuesday, May 15th, 2012
[HFBEER]

Samuel Adams

BEANTOWN BREWMASTER | Jim Koch, CEO of Boston Beer Co.

WHAT HAPPENS WHEN the small get big? Craft beer is at a turning point. While upstart breweries continue to blossom—more than 150 opened last year—the companies that started the movement two and three decades ago have grown into relative giants. The largest by far is Boston Beer Co. Started by Jim Koch in 1984, today it operates three breweries and produces 1.2 million 31-gallon barrels of beer annually—so much, in fact, that last year the Brewers Association raised the definition of “craft” from a yearly cap of two million barrels to six million. This jostled a few industry pint glasses. After all, Boston Beer seems a far different breed than your local brewpub. And yet, it’s farther still from, say, multinational beverage behemoth Anheuser-Busch InBev, which hit the two-million-barrel mark back in 1938. I joined Mr. Koch in his bustling Jamaica Plain, Mass., brewery to sample some new recipes and find out, as craft beer grows up, what it means to be small and whether Samuel Adams still counts.

You came early to craft beer, but you weren’t the first. What did the craft beer world look like when you started Boston Beer?

Originally, craft brewing was marketing driven, not quality driven. The hope was that people would forgive you because you were small and cute. Drink the marketing, not the beer.

The names Boston Beer and Samuel Adams imply a specific story, or at least history. How’d you settle on them?

We’re in Boston, so that wasn’t hard. And you don’t need to be a genius to know that you don’t put the name Koch on a product 26-year-old men put in their mouth!

[HFBEER]

F. Martin Ramin for The Wall Street Journal

While upstart breweries continue to blossom—more than 150 opened last year—the companies that started the movement two and three decades ago have grown into relative giants.

You started by making lager—something that seemed both cutting into big guys’ turf and expanding what most drinkers thought lager was, or could be.

Lager was a huge problem. It’s much more expensive and difficult to make. But my family’s German. This is what we do. I had a recipe from my great-great-grandfather. My dad said, The big guys will kill you. I said, Dad, I’m not competing with them. They make clean, consistent, inexpensive beer extremely well. You can go your whole life drinking Bud, Miller and Coors and never get a bad one. That’s not true with craft beer.

So what makes you different than Budweiser?

It’s what’s in the glass. It tastes different. It’s obvious.

What makes craft beer craft?

It’s not quality. Everybody jumps on Budweiser. But they have better brewing skills than you do and they care just as much about their product as you do.

This month you’re releasing a couple of new beers in your small-run Single Batch collection—Norse Legend, a Finnish juniper beer, and Verloren, a gose, made with salt and coriander. Most American drinkers have probably never heard of gose. Do you try to find old styles to resurrect?

Not that much. This didn’t come from thinking, I want to educate people about salt in beer. It’s about wanting to make great beer. The gose has a unique mineral note that I can’t recall ever having in a beer. It’ll be really interesting to see drinkers’ reactions.

Have any beers failed?

There was a beer called WTF. Very experimental, a lot of things going on—steeping of whole flowers, barrel aging, very high alcohol. Everybody who rated it [on the beer-rating website Beer Advocate] gave it an “F.” I remember watching people try to drink it out of the bottle and just blowing it out—Pffffff! I thought, We have the lowest-rated beer in history. Cool. Maybe we can get another one.

Our beer will make its own friends. Or not. Most of these [Single Batch series beers] have been commercial failures. That doesn’t mean it’s a bad idea. At our size, we can do whatever we want. You need to be big enough to be able to do it, but you also have to be small enough to want to do it.

You started a microloan program, Brewing the American Dream, for small food and drink businesses. But it’s more than that—it’s really a mentorship program.

When I started out, nobody made brewing equipment, nobody had brewing skills. You used old dairy equipment. Now, it’s gotten easier—you can actually make your beer. But there are different problems. And I thought, just giving money away is lazy. That’s ticking boxes. Businesses that recognize their social return perform better.

If big brewers like Anheuser-Busch wanted to make, say, a gose, they could, right? Why don’t they?

You’re focusing on the hardware, not the software. They have the resources. But it’s more than money and hard assets. It’s also a matter of passion. What do you love, what are you proud of? These are the things that motivate people.

You started as a home-brewer. Do you think you keep that spirit?

The line between a talented amateur and a practicing professional is largely arbitrary.

—Edited from an interview by William Bostwick

[HFBEER]

F. Martin Ramin for The Wall Street Journal

Norse Legend

New Boston Beer to Try Now

Norse Legend

7.0% ABV

This ancient Finnish rye-and-juniper-flavored beer, called sahti, was traditionally home-brewed by women; Boston Beer’s Jennifer Glanville helmed its take on the style with a rustic, loamy bloom and fresh pine-needle finish.

[HFBEER]

F. Martin Ramin for The Wall Street Journal

Verloren

Verloren

6.0% ABV

German for “lost,” Verloren dusts off a forgotten salt-infused Saxon style called gose. Just a dash (think milligrams per liter) goes a long way, balancing the beer’s slightly sour tang, juicing up the touch of coriander and finishing the mix with a curious mineral edge, like a Manzanilla Sherry.

[HFBEER]

F. Martin Ramin for The Wall Street Journal

Whitewater IPA

Whitewater IPA

5.8% ABV

A year-round brew, but perfect for summer, Whitewater blends a witbier’s refreshing orange-peel spice with the earthy sweetness of apricots and passion fruit-juice punch of trendy, Australian Topaz hops.

© 2011 Wall Street Journal (www.wsj.com)

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Notes to self: The week that was

Monday, May 14th, 2012

Some weeks, the days go by and you have nothing much of which to speak. Other weeks you are the victim of an attempted mugging, get knocked off your bike, have to spend the night in hospital with severe concussion and your best friend leaves the country for ever. Well, hopefully that doesn’t happen to everyone, but that was my week.

Where to start? So, I was cycling through Bangkok to go and meet a boy for a cinema date. I dressed up in jeans, sandals, a sequinned top and a cute across-the-shoulder bag. I decided to take my bike because it’s quicker, cheaper and cooler to arrive by bicycle.

Like an idiot, I had got comfortable in Bangkok. This is MY city and I know how it works. Well, I was wrong. I cycled with the bag sitting on my hip, and a couple of guys on a motorbike came by and tried to snatch it. I’ve heard about this kind of crime, but I’ve become a bit blasé about safety, I suppose. Thankfully, they didn’t get the bag (a beautiful vintage Burberry number I picked up for $1, or Dh4, in a Cambodian thrift shop). But because it was an over-the-shoulder bag, when they tugged it, it knocked me off balance, and I must have fallen off my bike into a busy main road. I don’t remember. In fact, I only remembered the attempted mugging after bystanders reminded me. Thank goodness I was wearing a helmet.

The next thing I do remember is sitting at the side of the road, chatting in bad Thai to some people who were trying to help me. They were asking me where I had been going, and I remember looking down at my (now bloody) sequins and thinking: "I don’t know. Why am I so dressy?" They brought me water, smelling salt and the police, and let me use their phones to call the guy I was to meet (once I remembered where I was going), and Brock, my friend.

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© 2011 Gulf News (www.gulfnews.com)

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From Weed To Whimsy: Chefs Conquer Wild Foods With Butter And Oil

Monday, May 14th, 2012

Story By: by Eliza Barclay

In another era, this plate of Spanish mackerel topped with wild tamarack, basswood leaves, garlic mustard, fiddlehead ferns, and knotweed might seem cheap. Not anymore.

Chefs Leif Hedendal and Mark Andrew Gravel received this toothwort root and knotweed in the mail from New England forager Evan Strusinski.

They pored over Strusinski’s order form, gamely selecting lily shoots, tamarack shoots, cattails, ground ivy, toothwort root, and sweetflag, along with more familiar wild vittles like ramps. A couple of days before the dinner, boxes full of foraged food from Vermont arrived in the mail.

“Almost every single [ingredient] we got from Evan was new to me,” said Hedendal. “So it was pretty exciting.”

Exciting, but also daunting: Hedendal and Gravel were cooking for people who’d paid a lot of money to eat food that might also be called weeds.

Hedendel and Gravel had been expecting a bunch of wild mushrooms, which, due to this winter’s warm weather, did not materialize. But as seasonal cooks know well, there’s no point in lamenting what you don’t have. You just need to move on.

So they did, to fresh East Coast oysters and blue crab they found at a local fish market and an assortment of greens grown at the Brooklyn Grange, an urban rooftop farm a few miles from Williamsburg.

Then they tackled the boxes in the fridge, using the Internet and their intuition to figure out how to cook their obscure woodland finds.

“You taste it and feel it to get a sense of texture, and try to go with your gut,” said Gravel. As for the cattails, Gravel turned to a trusted friend: Butter. “I sliced them and cooked them down in butter, like leeks. Then I put them in acast iron skillet and crisped them up to get a light, crunchy texture.”

Upon receiving a plate of sunchoke, cattail and whey, one diner poked at the sunchoke, turning it this way and that on her fork. “I’ve never been able to make sunchokes taste this good,” she observed.

“It’s all about the oil,” said her tablemate, Taylor Erkkinen, co-owner of The Brooklyn Kitchen, a kitchenware store that offers cooking classes. “See how it has been totally roasted in oil?”

As we’ve reported before, there’s good reason for amateur chefs and foragers to make use of these foods that sprout around us, even along city streets. They’re nutritious, and even better, they’re free — just as long as you don’t pick something poisonous and land in the hospital.

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Merv Griffin Estate Near Palm Springs Sees a Price Cut

Friday, May 11th, 2012





Merv Griffin’s former 40-acre estate near Palm Springs has been reduced by 34% percent to $9.5 million. Lauren Schuker has details on The News Hub.

Merv Griffin’s former 40-acre estate near Palm Springs, Calif., has been reduced by 34% to $9.5 million.

The La Quinta, Calif., property of the late TV host was first listed about two years ago for $14.5 million. It came back on the market last month.

Photos: Private Properties

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Lance Gerber

Merv Griffin’s former 40-acre estate near Palm Springs, Calif.

The estate has 14 bedrooms and 14 bathrooms across several structures; there’s a 5,000-square-foot main residence as well as four free-standing guest casitas and two guesthouses. The interiors have a Moroccan look, inspired by Yves Saint Laurent’s house in Marrakech, and were done by noted decorator Waldo Fernandez. The property also includes a 2½-acre lake as well as full equestrian facilities with staff quarters.

Mr. Griffin built the estate in 1986 and used it as a second residence until his death in August 2007. He began his career as a singer and actor and then went on to host his own talk show, “The Merv Griffin Show,” and to create some of today’s most iconic game shows, such as “Jeopardy!” Later, he got into real estate, buying a fleet of hotels including the Beverly Hilton.

Tyler Morgan, Todd Monaghan, and Keith Markovitz of Capitis Sotheby’s International Realty have the listing.





A Saudi family sells a Miami home to a Los Angeles developer for $8.5 million. Lauren Schuker has details on The News Hub.

A Saudi Prince Sells in Miami Beach

Sheik Tarek Al Fassi, a member of the Saudi royal family, has sold his 10,271-square-foot Miami Beach, Fla., home for $8.5 million to Los Angeles developer Richard Meruelo.

Built in 1929, the Mediterranean home has nine bedrooms, eight bathrooms and 170 feet of water frontage on Indian Creek Canal. The home sits on a 2.7-acre property, which includes a sports field, swimming pool and fitness center as well as a basketball court and a tennis court.

The property spans two lots, which the sheik purchased separately. He bought the first lot in 1985 for $1.3 million and the second in 1991 for $1.6 million, according to public records. He and his family has lived on the property since.

Kenny Raymond of Prudential Florida Realty, who represented the seller, said the sale was the highest price ever paid for a home on Pinetree Drive, one of the most prestigious streets in Miami Beach because of its proximity to major golf courses, the airport and night life and because it is bordered by water on one side.

Ralph Arias and Mirce Curkoski of One Sotheby’s represented the buyer. They declined to comment.

The owners of Phillips Seafood have listed their Maryland home for $32 million. Lauren Schuker has details on The News Hub.

Maryland Estate Lists for $32 Million

Steve and Maxine Phillips have put their 23-acre estate overlooking the Severn River in Annapolis, Md., on the market for $32 million. The couple owns Phillips Seafood, one of the country’s largest seafood companies.

Called the Friary on the Severn, the estate was formerly a Capuchin monastery and includes a 26,000-square-foot Georgian home. The brick structure has seven bedrooms, eight bathrooms, 11 fireplaces and 270-degree views of the river.

The Phillipses bought the property in 2002 for $2.5 million and performed an extensive renovation on the home as well as the grounds. With a commercial-size gourmet kitchen and an oversize ballroom, the home can now be used for large-scale entertaining. Outside, there’s a roof garden, a pool pavilion, a 60-foot infinity pool and a tennis court. A three-bedroom guesthouse and Asian tea house also sit on the property.

Maria-Victoria Checa and David DeSantis of TTR Sotheby’s International Realty have the listing.

—Lauren A. E. Schuker—Email: privateproperties@wsj.com

© 2011 Wall Street Journal (www.wsj.com)

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These Apps Are Going To The Birds, And People Who Watch Them

Thursday, May 10th, 2012

Story By: by Margot Adler

Cornell University’s Andrew Farnsworth compiles data to forecast where birds are going and when they’ll be there.

On a recent Saturday, the Prothonotary warbler drew crowds of plugged-in bird watchers in New York’s Central Park.

Saphir’s phone rings. There’s a male Cape May warbler just up ahead. Soon our group is walking quickly in the direction of the warbler. Earlier, we were led to a Prothonotary warbler, where we ran into 30 birders — news of the sighting had spread fast.

The Shazam Of Bird Watching

An easy way to find birds is to know their calls. There have long been recordings of bird songs, but what’s different now, Farnsworth says, is that apps allow you to carry thousands of those bird songs in your pocket.

“You can bring it into the field and compare it to what you’re actually hearing and seeing,” he says.

The National Audubon Society app, for example, has seven different calls for a scarlet tanager. In the future, you’ll also be able to do the reverse — hear a bird song and identify it with an app, just like people identify music with apps like Shazam.

That’s exactly what Mark Berres, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is trying to do with WeBird. But Berres says identifying bird calls is much harder than identifying popular songs.

“When I turned it onto bird songs, it just failed miserably,” he says. But, after a year of work, Berres expects the app to be ready next spring.

But Does It Make Bird Watching More Accessible?

You can find bar charts on Cornell’s eBird website that tell you when a species migrates to your area and when it will arrive. The technology has “lowered the barriers to entry and made it easier for people to quickly get the information that they [want] when they see a bird,” says Chris Wood, who runs the eBird project at Cornell’s ornithology lab.

Bird-Watchers Are All Aflutter: Asian Crane Shows Up In Tennessee

Bird Feeding Tips For The Urban Yard

He says when he started bird watching in Colorado, he was sure that he had a tricolored blackbird in his backyard because it looked a lot like the bird in the book. It took him three years to realize that there are no records of tricolored blackbirds appearing outside the West Coast. Today, that might only take an hour.

Meanwhile, Farnsworth dreams of the day when the Weather Channel provides a daily bird report. He hopes computer models for forecasting bird migration will one day be so sophisticated that conservationists will be able to tell a city to turn its lights off when a wave of birds is coming through. (City lights can disorient migrating birds.)

Saphir doesn’t own a computer, but she says the downside to all this technology is that it puts an inexpensive hobby out of reach for many. “You have to have thousands of dollars worth of equipment,” she says, such as cameras, computers and smartphones.

Saphir makes do with very good binoculars and, yes, a cell phone. It rings again — there’s been another sighting. “OK, I’ll be right there,” Shapir says, and off we go.

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Emirati tourists spend big

Wednesday, May 9th, 2012

Dubai: Emiratis spend an average of about Dh12,000 per day when holidaying abroad — with the wife usually choosing what destination to fly to, a new study has found.

The survey also shows 40-60 per cent of UAE nationals fly business class. The findings were revealed in ‘The Outbound GCC Travel Market — Unique Trends and Characteristics of GCC Nationals’ report during the Arabian Travel Market Show in Dubai this week.

According to the study, Emiratis are the most frequent travellers after Saudi nationals, in whose case the male head of the household has the final say in choosing destinations.

Qataris spend the most on travel, with an average expenditure of $4,100 per day, followed by Saudis at $3,360.

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© 2011 Gulf News (www.gulfnews.com)

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What HBO And iCarly Can Do To Get Kids Psyched About Veggies

Wednesday, May 9th, 2012

Story By: by Allison Aubrey

Getting kids to eat right is an age-old challenge

Wait, isn’t HBO an entertainment company? I ribbed Hoffman for sounding more like a public policy nerd than an entertainment executive.

“I’m glad you’re bringing this up!” Hoffman told me. “We’re filling a space that needs to be filled.” Hoffman says by turning their lens to this issue of obesity and using the HBO platform for public health, he hopes to really engage audiences around the country. “These campaigns need to be conducted,” he says.

Another healthy campaign being launched this week is also a vegetable-eating one.

Who better to convince kids and tweens that eating vegetables is cool than the stars of Nickelodeon’s iCarly? That’s the plan Birds Eye announced as part of a commitment announced by the Partnership for a Healthier America (The group formed to oversee private sector commitments to the First Lady’s Let’s Move campaign.) The company says it will spend at least $2 million per year for each of the next three years to market and advertise this campaign on Nickelodeon and other outlets.

“We’re not into nagging,” Sally Genster Robling, president of Birds Eye Frozen Division told us. “Instead of pushing things at them (kids), we’ve got to put them in control.” And along the way , Genster-Robling says, kids will be invited to help Birds Eye create new veggie products just for kids.

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Notes to self: Being single is fun!

Sunday, May 6th, 2012

Girls who say they’re happy being single are often thought to be deluding themselves. After all, who would shun having a shoulder to cry on, someone to cuddle up to after a bad day at work or someone to cook you lovely dinners just because they think you’re great?

I’ve had times when I’ve had boyfriends (none of them ever cooked for me, though) and I’ve had many, many times that I’ve been single — and I can honestly say that I am at my happiest now. As single as single can be.

Relationships can be lovely. But they can also be boring. I love my friends to bits, but we all have a few people on our Facebook timeline who just won’t stop going on about how excited they are about choosing their wedding favours in three years’ time. I can’t say it fills me with envy. Even if David Gandy (Google him — you won’t regret it) told me he wanted a fairytale wedding with me, I just couldn’t get excited about choosing a dress or debating whether to have a DJ or a band.

If my loved-up friends are anything to go by, relationships involve a lot of staying at home. Or, if they DO go out, they sit in movie halls or go on refined dinner dates. Right now, I can think of other things I’d rather be doing. And I can certainly think of better things to spend my money and time than saving up for a house deposit or choosing wedding invitations. In fact, I hope I can always find more interesting things to do than that.

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© 2011 Gulf News (www.gulfnews.com)

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For diver, Concordia should be sunk, not saved

Sunday, May 6th, 2012


By Steve Scherer

ROME |
Fri May 4, 2012 9:28am EDT

ROME (Reuters) – The Costa Concordia, the wrecked liner which has been half-submerged near the Italian island of Giglio since it hit a rock in January, could be a paradise for recreational scuba divers from around the world – if sunk instead of salvaged.

“Every night I light a candle and say a prayer for it to sink,” Aldo Baffigi, a Giglio native, says of the 290-metre-long ship with its towering smokestack and four swimming pools.

Most of the Tuscan island’s 1,500 residents want the modern-day Titanic to be hauled away as soon as possible, but Baffigi is an underwater guide and owner of Deep Blue Diving College, and he knows the fascination shipwrecks have for scuba divers.

“It would be the most popular shipwreck in the world. We wouldn’t know what to do with all the divers. It would be like manna from heaven.”

With the salvage set to begin this month, Baffigi’s prayers have not yet had the desired effect.

But he has not lost hope because such a massive ship has never been salvaged in one piece, and a strong storm could still send the cruise liner, precariously perched on an undersea ledge, sliding down into deeper waters.

The U.S. company Titan Salvage together with Italy’s Micoperi plan to tug the 114,000-tonne ship upright onto an underwater platform, attach two air-filled flotation devices to its sides to make it buoyant, and then tow it to a nearby port.

The $300-million salvage is going to take at least a year, officials have said.

“Nothing like this has ever been done,” Italian National Research Council physicist Valerio Rossi Albertini told Reuters. One of the risks is weather, he added.

The salvage effort, which Italy’s environment ministry described as “difficult and complex”, are to be detailed by Costa Cruises, Italy’s civil protection agency, and the salvage companies in a press conference later this month.

Because the island’s pristine waters are the heart of the island’s tourist-driven economy, the more traditional salvage method of cutting the ship into pieces and hauling it away on barges was ruled out.

For the same reason, sinking the ship in deeper waters, which is not an uncommon practice, was not considered an option.

RESPECT

The Costa Concordia – once a floating city with restaurants, a casino, a movie theatre and a fitness centre – came too close to shore on January 13 where a rock ripped a gash in its side that led to it partially capsizing a few hours later.

Of the more than 4,200 passengers and crew aboard that evening, 30 are confirmed dead and two are still missing.

Out of respect for the dead and for the environment, Giglio’s mayor Sergio Ortelli said the crippled hulk must be removed.

“The victims must be respected,” Ortelli told Reuters.

“We have the most beautiful undersea environments possible. We don’t need anything artificial down there,” Ortelli said.

Underwater guides Roberto Scotto of Diving Isola del Giglio and Stefano Morveno of Blue Scuba Diving both say they want the Concordia hauled away because of the pollution risks it poses.

But Gian Domenico Battistello, an instructor at International Diving, admits that Baffigi is right that a sunken Concordia would make an international diving attraction.

“The Concordia would be the Disneyland of the scuba diving world, and everybody knows it,” Battistello said. “But I’d rather have pristine waters of Giglio than the ship.”

Baffigi asked the mayor, a representative of Costa Cruises, and the head of the civil protection agency why sinking the ship was not an option.

“It was never even considered,” he said.

He argues that taxing divers to visit the wreck would make the island’s municipal government the richest in Italy, and its presence would underpin the economic future of the island.

Baffigi said he has only one prayer left: “A big storm.”

(Editing by Paul Casciato)

© 2011 REUTERS (www.reuters.com)

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