VILLAGEGATE

At a downtown paper, a fight over succession-and Sarah Jessica Parker.

-  ZACH HELFAND

For sixty years, the residents of Charles Street, in Greenwich Village, have known that if they're in trouble, or if they want to find some, the guy to call is their neighbor George Capsis. Capsis, who is ninety-five, with white hair and the annoyed bearing of a man whose waiter is taking too long, is the publisher of the monthly newspaper the West View News. West View's constituency skews old the types of neighborhood holdouts who might grumble that they moved to the Village for Dawn Powell and Balducci's and ended up with Marc Jacobs and "Sex and the City" bus tours. Over the years, the paper, which was founded in 2004 and has approached a circulation of twelve thousand, has fought against change in the neighborhood and its attendant problems: high rents, elder abuse, will tampering, greedy landlords.

It's also a juicy read. Subscribers will recall the times when Capsis recorded his habit of slapping public officials across the face. There was the cop who'd blocked the bike lane ("He personified the arrogance of arbitrary power"), the state senator at a rally against a hospital closure ("If you bring him here I'll hit him again"), and the intern working the rally ("To my astonishment, he began to cry like a girl"). In the manner of a small-town chronicler, Capsis refers to friends and villains in print by first name only. Lately, there have been a lot of villains. Capsis believes he has been the target of a succession plot, like Logan Roy without the Gulfstreams. Which is why readers have been hearing so much about Arthur.