Last week, Chloë Sevigny mentioned, offhandedly, that she “was actually thinking about joining a community board” in her home neighborhood of the East Village “to help preserve some of the older buildings, try and save as many as possible and try to stop them from building as high.” The statement came during a droll video she shot with BUST magazine, in which she wandered around Alphabet City and murmured various obvious yuppie (though not untrue!) platitudes about the changing neighborhood. But immediately, sources started telling the Daily News that they were suspicious of her motives. “Community boards have huge control over the nightlife scene,” one told the Gatecrasher column. “Chloë has been openly invested in keeping the city’s after-hours scene alive, ever since her brother Paul’s infamous Beatrice Inn got shut down in 2009.” So the tabloid called Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer, who predictably got all huffy thinking about Chloë thinking she could just walk onto the community board — even though she never gave any indication of that. “We have a merit-based process. There’s no special treatment here,” he snapped. Of course, it wasn’t long before even he waxed starstruck: “It actually is exciting that someone of her stature and notoriety would even consider serving her community as a board member.”
