The Building

Crain's New York Business reports that local nonprofits are "scrambling" to get a piece of the federal stimulus funds that are scheduled to start pouring into the state, any minute now.

According to Senior Reporter Miriam Kreinin Soucca, the priority is money for construction projects that are "shovel ready." She mentions a few examples, such as one about a theater that is trying to get a new sidewalk out front and this about a worthy non-profit in Brooklyn that needs a new fence to go with their $25 million dollar multipurpose room:

Pamela Green, executive director of the Weeksville Heritage Center in Brooklyn, an African-American historical society, submitted a $5 million request to the New York Department of Cultural Affairs and to several of the city's elected officials

The city has already provided Weeksville with much of the $25 million it needs for a 19,000-square-foot performance and education space that the center plans to break ground on in June.

Stimulus money would enable Weeksville to add a parking lot and a fence, but Ms. Green is uncertain about her odds.

“We don't know who else is on the list, and we don't know who we are competing against,” she says. “And we also have no idea what the requirements were.”

Hypertextual:

OZYMANDIAS

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter'd visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock'd them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

-Percy Bysshe Shelley