Lives Lived: He was the son of a public school custodian and an emergency room nurse who grew up to become one of the great chroniclers of New York life. He crusaded against injustice and covered 9/11, the police, the subway, the coronavirus and more for six daily newspapers. Our colleague Jim Dwyer has died at 63.

I went to high school with Jim's older brother. I loved reading his columns. Sad day when the news broke yesterday.

Jim Dwyer, Pulitzer Prize-Winning Journalist, Dies at 63
Working for New York Newsday, The Daily News and The Times, he covered the human stories of New York in dramatic prose and crusaded against injustice.

By Robert D. McFadden
Published Oct. 8, 2020
Updated Oct. 9, 2020, 8:56 a.m. ET

Jim Dwyer, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, columnist and author whose stylish journalism captured the human dramas of New York City for readers of New York Newsday, The Daily News and The New York Times for nearly four decades, died on Thursday in Manhattan. He was 63.

His death, at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, was announced by Dean Baquet, the executive editor of The Times, and Clifford Levy, the paper’s metropolitan editor, in an email to the Times staff. The cause was complications of lung cancer.

READ MORELooking back on the journalism of Jim Dwyer in the New York Times.
In prose that might have leapt from best-selling novels, Mr. Dwyer portrayed the last minutes of thousands who perished in the collapse of the World Trade Center’s twin towers on Sept. 11, 2001; detailed the terrors of innocent Black youths pulled over and shot by racial-profiling state troopers on the New Jersey Turnpike; and told of the coronavirus besieging a New York City hospital.

Mr. Dwyer won the 1995 Pulitzer for commentary for columns in New York Newsday, and was part of a New York Newsday team that won the 1992 Pulitzer for spot news reporting for coverage of a subway derailment in Manhattan. Colleagues called Mr. Dwyer — who worked for six metropolitan dailies and wrote or co-wrote six books — a fast, accurate and prolific writer who crusaded against injustice.

In a kaleidoscopic career, Mr. Dwyer was drawn to tales of discrimination against racial and ethnic minorities, wrongly convicted prisoners and society’s mistreated outcasts. He wrote about subway straphangers and families struggling to make ends meet.

As a student at Fordham University, he had hoped to become a doctor until he joined the student newspaper, The Fordham Ram, and one day wrote about a rough-looking man having an epileptic seizure on a Bronx sidewalk. Mr. Dwyer stopped to help.

“People passing by were muttering disapproval, ‘junkie,’ ‘scumbag,’ that sort of thing,” he wrote. “The seizure subsided, and those of us who had stayed with him learned he was a veteran and had been having seizures since coming back from Vietnam. A few minutes later, off he went. But that moment stayed with me.”

A 19-year-old cub reporter, he wrote a lead paragraph that set the tone for a career: “Charlie Martinez, whoever he was, lay on the cold sidewalk in front of Dick Gidron’s used Cadillac place on Fordham Road. He had picked a fine afternoon to go into convulsions: the sky was sharp and cool, a fall day that made even Fordham Road look good.”

Mr. Dwyer was hooked. In a 2020 interview for this obituary, he said: “I intended to be pre-med, but The Fordham Ram got in the way of that. It was a crusading student newspaper. I couldn’t resist it. It was a joy for me to discover how much I loved reporting and writing.”

He was an established columnist, having been one for six years at The Daily News and for nine of his 11 years at New York Newsday when The Times hired him to be a general-assignment reporter in May 2001, four months before the terrorist attacks at the World Trade Center in Lower Manhattan.

Jim Dwyer, About New York
A selection of writing by the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, who died on Thursday, as chosen by his New York Times colleagues.
Oct. 8, 2020

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/08/nyregion/jim-dwyer-stories.html?action=click&module=RelatedLinks&pgtype=Article

He soon gravitated to tales of injustice: Anthony Faison and Charles Shepherd, innocent men, released after serving 14 years for murder; the city’s $8.75 million settlement with Abner Louima, four years after a police officer sodomized him with a broomstick in a Brooklyn station house; and freedom for Jose Morales after 13 years in prison for a killing he did not commit.

And the day two hijacked jetliners hit the twin towers of the trade center, Mr. Dwyer caught New York’s mood in the subdued phrases of a veteran columnist: “The city changed yesterday. No one, no matter how far from Lower Manhattan, could step on a New York sidewalk untouched by concussions.”

Later, he wrote about artifacts that figured in the 9/11 attack, including a window washer’s squeegee, which had been used to cut a hole in sheetrock to free six men trapped in an elevator on the 50th floor of the North Tower. They fled down stairways, emerging just as the South Tower fell in the distance.

In 2005, Mr. Dwyer and a Times colleague, Kevin Flynn, published “102 Minutes: The Untold Story of the Fight to Survive Inside the Twin Towers.” The book, based in part on a long investigative report published in The Times in 2002, and on survivors’ accounts and tapes of police and fire operations, chronicled the final minutes of many among the thousands who died in the collapsing towers.

Our high school lost 2 that day.

In their book about the 9/11 attack, Mr. Dwyer and Kevin Flynn recounted the final minutes of many among the thousands who died in the collapsing towers.

Since 2007, Mr. Dwyer had written The Times’s “About New York” column, succeeding a distinguished line of writers including Meyer Berger, David Gonzalez and Dan Barry.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/08/nyregion/jim-dwyer-dead.html

A Teenager Had Nearly Escaped a Raging Fire. Then He Heard a Little Girl’s Cries.
Lucas Silverio had almost reached safety when he heard 3-year-old Yasleen McDonald cry out. He turned back toward the flames.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/16/nyregion/bronx-fire-lucas-silverio.html?action=click&module=Well&pgtype=Homepage§ion=New%20York

Gloria Vanderbilt, Builder of a Fashion Empire, Dies at 95

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/17/style/gloria-vanderbilt-death-dead.html

Tom Wolfe, Pyrotechnic ‘New Journalist’ and Novelist, Dies at 88



By Deirdre Carmody and William Grimes

May 15, 2018
Tom Wolfe, an innovative journalist and novelist whose technicolor, wildly punctuated prose brought to life the worlds of California surfers, car customizers, astronauts and Manhattan’s moneyed status-seekers in works like “The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby,” “The Right Stuff” and “Bonfire of the Vanities,” died on Monday in a Manhattan hospital. He was 88.

His death was confirmed by his agent, Lynn Nesbit, who said Mr. Wolfe had been hospitalized with an infection. He had lived in New York since joining The New York Herald Tribune as a reporter in 1962.

In his use of novelistic techniques in his nonfiction, Mr. Wolfe, beginning in the 1960s, helped create the enormously influential hybrid known as the New Journalism.

But as an unabashed contrarian, he was almost as well known for his attire as his satire. He was instantly recognizable as he strolled down Madison Avenue — a tall, slender, blue-eyed, still boyish-looking man in his spotless three-piece vanilla bespoke suit, pinstriped silk shirt with a starched white high collar, bright handkerchief peeking from his breast pocket, watch on a fob, faux spats and white shoes. Once asked to describe his get-up, Mr. Wolfe replied brightly, “Neo-pretentious.”

It was a typically wry response from a writer who found delight in lacerating the pretentiousness of others. He had a pitiless eye and a penchant for spotting trends and then giving them names, some of which — like “Radical Chic” and “the Me Decade” — became American idioms.

His talent as a writer and caricaturist was evident from the start in his verbal pyrotechnics and perfect mimicry of speech patterns, his meticulous reporting, and his creative use of pop language and explosive punctuation.

“As a titlist of flamboyance he is without peer in the Western world,” Joseph Epstein wrote in the The New Republic. “His prose style is normally shotgun baroque, sometimes edging over into machine-gun rococo, as in his article on Las Vegas which begins by repeating the word ‘hernia’ 57 times.”

William F. Buckley Jr., writing in National Review, put it more simply: “He is probably the most skillful writer in America — I mean by that he can do more things with words than anyone else.”

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From 1965 to 1981 Mr. Wolfe produced nine nonfiction books. “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test,” an account of his reportorial travels in California with Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters as they spread the gospel of LSD, remains a classic chronicle of the counterculture, “still the best account — fictional or non, in print or on film — of the genesis of the ’60s hipster subculture,” the media critic Jack Shafer wrote in the Columbia Journalism Review on the book’s 40th anniversary.

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Mr. Wolfe, second from left, at New York magazine in 1967 with, from left, George Hirsch, Gloria Steinem, Clay Felker, Peter Maas, Jimmy Breslin and Milton Glaser.CreditPhotograph by Jill Krementz; all rights reserved
Even more impressive, to many critics, was “The Right Stuff,” his exhaustively reported narrative about the first American astronauts and the Mercury space program. The book, adapted into a film in 1983 with a cast that included Sam Shepard, Dennis Quaid and Ed Harris, made the test pilot Chuck Yeager a cultural hero and added yet another phrase to the English language. It won the National Book Award.

At the same time, Mr. Wolfe continued to turn out a stream of essays and magazine pieces for New York, Harper’s and Esquire. His theory of literature, which he preached in print and in person and to anyone who would listen was that journalism and nonfiction had “wiped out the novel as American literature’s main event.”

After “The Right Stuff,” published in 1979, he confronted what he called “the question that rebuked every writer who had made a point of experimenting with nonfiction over the preceding 10 or 15 years: Are you merely ducking the big challenge — The Novel?”

‘The Bonfire of the Vanities’
The answer came with “The Bonfire of the Vanities.” Published initially as a serial in Rolling Stone magazine and in book form in 1987 after extensive revisions, it offered a sweeping, bitingly satirical picture of money, power, greed and vanity in New York during the shameless excesses of the 1980s.

The action jumps back and forth from Park Avenue to Wall Street to the terrifying holding pens in Bronx Criminal Court, after the Yale-educated bond trader Sherman McCoy (a self-proclaimed “Master of the Universe”) becomes lost in the Bronx at night in his Mercedes with his foxy young mistress, Maria. After the car, with Maria at the wheel, runs over a black man and nearly ignites a race riot, Sherman enters the nightmare world of the criminal justice system.

Although a runaway best seller, “Bonfire” divided critics into two camps: those who praised its author as a worthy heir of his fictional idols Balzac, Zola, Dickens and Dreiser, and those who dismissed the book as clever journalism, a charge that would dog him throughout his fictional career.

Mr. Wolfe responded with a manifesto in Harper’s, “Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast,” in which he lambasted American fiction for failing to perform the time-honored sociological duty of reporting on the facts of contemporary life, in all their complexity and variety.


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His second novel, “A Man in Full” (1998), also a whopping commercial success, was another sprawling social panorama. Set in Atlanta, it charted the rise and fall of Charlie Croker, a 60-year-old former Georgia Tech football star turned millionaire real estate developer.

Mr. Wolfe’s fictional ambitions and commercial success earned him enemies — big ones.

“Extraordinarily good writing forces one to contemplate the uncomfortable possibility that Tom Wolfe might yet be seen as our best writer,” Norman Mailer wrote in The New York Review of Books. “How grateful one can feel then for his failures and his final inability to be great — his absence of truly large compass. There may even be an endemic inability to look into the depth of his characters with more than a consummate journalist’s eye.”

“Tom may be the hardest-working show-off the literary world has ever owned,” Mr. Mailer continued. “But now he will no longer belong to us. (If indeed he ever did!) He lives in the King Kong Kingdom of the Mega-bestsellers — he is already a Media Immortal. He has married his large talent to real money and very few can do that or allow themselves to do that.”

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Mr. Wolfe in 1988 at the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan with, from left, Barbara Walters, Brooke Astor and Liz Smith.CreditBill Cunningham
Mr. Mailer’s sentiments were echoed by John Updike and John Irving.

Two years later, Mr. Wolfe took revenge. In an essay titled “My Three Stooges,” included in his 2001 collection, “Hooking Up,” he wrote that his eminent critics had clearly been “shaken” by “A Man in Full” because it was an “intensely realistic novel, based upon reporting, that plunges wholeheartedly into the social reality of America today, right now,” and it signaled the new direction in late-20th- and early-21st-century literature and would soon make many prestigious artists, “such as our three old novelists, appear effete and irrelevant.”

And, he added, “It must gall them a bit that everyone — even them — is talking about me, and nobody is talking about them.”

Cocky words from a man best known for his gentle manner and unfailing courtesy in person. For many years Mr. Wolfe lived a relatively private life in his 12-room apartment on the Upper East Side with his wife, Sheila (Berger) Wolfe, a graphic designer and former art director of Harper’s Magazine, whom he married when he was 48 years old. She and their two children, Alexandra Wolfe, a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, and Tommy Wolfe, a sculptor and furniture designer, survive him.

Every morning he dressed in one of his signature outfits — a silk jacket, say, and double-breasted white vest, shirt, tie, pleated pants, red-and-white socks and white shoes — and sat down at his typewriter. Every day he set himself a quota of 10 pages, triple-spaced. If he finished in three hours, he was done for the day.

“If it takes me 12 hours, that’s too bad, I’ve got to do it,” he told George Plimpton in a 1991 interview for The Paris Review.

For many summers the Wolfes rented a house in Southampton, N.Y., where Mr. Wolfe continued to observe his daily writing routine as well as the fitness regimen from which he rarely faltered. In 1996 he suffered a heart attack at his gym and underwent quintuple bypass surgery. A period of severe depression followed, which Charlie Croker relived, in fictional form, in “A Man in Full.”

As for his remarkable attire, he called it “a harmless form of aggression.”

“I found early in the game that for me there’s no use trying to blend in,” he told The Paris Review. “I might as well be the village information-gatherer, the man from Mars who simply wants to know. Fortunately the world is full of people with information-compulsion who want to tell you their stories. They want to tell you things that you don’t know.”

The eccentricities of his adult life were a far cry from the normalcy of his childhood, which by all accounts was a happy one.

A Professor’s Son
Thomas Kennerly Wolfe Jr. was born on March 2, 1930, in Richmond, Va. His father was a professor of agronomy at Virginia Polytechnic Institute, editor of The Southern Planter, an agricultural journal, and director of distribution for the Southern States Cooperative, which later became a Fortune 500 Company. His mother, Helen Perkins Hughes Wolfe, a garden designer, encouraged him to become an artist and gave him a love of reading.

Young Tom was educated at a private boys’ school in Richmond. He graduated cum laude from Washington and Lee University in 1951 with a bachelor’s degree in English and enough skill as a pitcher to earn a tryout with the New York Giants. He did not make the cut.

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Tom Wolfe in 2016 at the New York Public Library’s gala commemorating the 50th anniversary of Truman Capote’s “Black and White Ball.”CreditErin Baiano for The New York Times
He enrolled at Yale University in the American studies program and received his Ph.D. in 1957. After sending out job applications to more than 100 newspapers and receiving three responses, two of them “no,” he went to work as a general-assignment reporter at The Springfield Union in Springfield, Mass., and later joined the staff of The Washington Post. He was assigned to cover Latin America and in 1961 won an award for a series on Cuba.

In 1962, Mr. Wolfe joined The Herald Tribune as a reporter on the city desk, where he found his voice as a social chronicler. Fascinated by the status wars and shifting power bases of the city, he poured his energy and insatiable curiosity into his reporting and soon became one of the stars on the staff. The next year he began writing for New York, the newspaper’s newly revamped Sunday supplement, edited by Clay Felker.

“Together they attacked what each regarded as the greatest untold and uncovered story of the age: the vanities, extravagances, pretensions and artifice of America two decades after World War II, the wealthiest society the world had ever known,” Richard Kluger wrote in “The Paper: The Life and Death of the New York Herald Tribune” (1986).

Those were heady days for journalists. Mr. Wolfe became one of the standard-bearers of the New Journalism, along with Jimmy Breslin, Gay Talese, Hunter Thompson, Joan Didion and others. Most were represented in “The New Journalism” (1973), an anthology he edited with E. W. Johnson.

In an author’s statement for the reference work World Authors, Mr. Wolfe wrote that to him the term “meant writing nonfiction, from newspaper stories to books, using basic reporting to gather the material but techniques ordinarily associated with fiction, such as scene-by-scene construction, to narrate it.”

He added, “In nonfiction I could combine two loves: reporting and the sociological concepts American Studies had introduced me to, especially status theory as first developed by the German sociologist Max Weber.”

It was the perfect showcase for his own extravagant and inventive style, increasingly on display in Esquire, for which he began writing during the 1963 New York City newspaper strike.

One of his most dazzling essays for Esquire, about the subculture of car customizers in Los Angeles, started out as a 49-page memo to Byron Dobell, his editor there, who simply deleted the words “Dear Byron” at the top of the page and ran it as is. It became the title essay in Mr. Wolfe’s first collection, “The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine Flake Streamline Baby,” published in 1968.

“Girl of the Year,” his 1964 portrait of the Manhattan “it” girl Baby Jane Holzer, opened with the literary equivalent of a cinematic pan shot at a Rolling Stones concert:

“Bangs manes bouffants beehive Beatle caps butter faces brush-on lashes decal eyes puffy sweaters French thrust bras flailing leather blue jeans stretch pants stretch jeans honey dew bottoms éclair shanks elf boots ballerinas Knight slippers, hundreds of them these flaming little buds, bobbing and screaming, rocketing around inside the Academy of Music Theater underneath that vast old moldering cherub dome up there — aren’t they super-marvelous?”

‘Radical Chic’ Skewered
In June 1970, New York magazine devoted an entire issue to “These Radical Chic Evenings,” Mr. Wolfe’s 20,000-word sendup of a fund-raiser given for the Black Panthers by Leonard Bernstein, the conductor of the New York Philharmonic, and his wife, the Chilean actress Felicia Montealegre, in their 13-room Park Avenue penthouse duplex — an affair attended by scores of the Bernsteins’ liberal, rich and mostly famous friends.

“Do Panthers like little Roquefort cheese morsels rolled on crushed nuts this way, and asparagus tips in mayonnaise dabs, and meatballs petites au Coq Hardi, all of which are at the very moment being offered to them on gadrooned silver platters by maids in black uniforms with hand-ironed white aprons?,” Mr. Wolfe wrote, outraging liberals and Panthers alike.

When a Time reporter asked a minister for the Black Panthers to comment on the accuracy of Mr. Wolfe’s account, he said, “You mean that dirty, blatant, lying, racist dog who wrote that fascist disgusting thing in New York magazine?”

The article was included in Mr. Wolfe’s essay collection “Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers,” published in 1970.

Storms did not seem to bother Mr. Wolfe, as his forays into the art world demonstrated. He had always had an interest in art and was indeed an artist himself, sometimes illustrating his work with pen-and-ink drawings. He was a contributing artist at Harper’s from 1978 to 1981 and exhibited his work on occasion at Manhattan galleries. Many of his illustrations were collected in “In Our Time” (1980).

Earlier, in “The Painted Word” (1975), he produced a gleeful screed denouncing contemporary art as a con job perpetrated by cultural high priests, notably the critics Clement Greenberg, Harold Rosenberg and Leo Steinberg — “the kings of cultureburg,” as he called them.

The art world, en masse, rejected the argument, and the book, with disdain.

“If someone who is tone-deaf goes to Carnegie Hall every night of the year, he is, of course, entitled to his opinion of what he has listened to, just as a eunuch is entitled to his opinion of sex,” the art critic John Russell wrote in The New York Times Book Review.

Undeterred, in “From Bauhaus to Our House,” Mr. Wolfe attacked modern architecture and what he saw as its determination to put dogma before buildings. Published in 1981, it met with the same derisive response from critics. “The problem, I think,” Paul Goldberger wrote in The Times Book Review, “is that Tom Wolfe has no eye.”

Mr. Wolfe’s later novels earned mixed reviews. Many critics found “I Am Charlotte Simmons” (2004), about a naïve freshman’s disillusioning experiences at a liberal arts college fueled by sex and alcohol, unconvincing and out of touch. In “Back to Blood” (2012), Mr. Wolfe created one of his most sympathetic, multidimensional characters in Nestor Camacho, a young Cuban-American police officer trying to navigate the treacherous waters of multiethnic Miami.

In the end it was his ear — acute and finely tuned — that served him best and enabled him to write with perfect pitch. And then there was his considerable writing talent.

“There is this about Tom,” Mr. Dobell, Mr. Wolfe’s editor at Esquire, told the London newspaper The Independent in 1998. “He has this unique gift of language that sets him apart as Tom Wolfe. It is full of hyperbole; it is brilliant; it is funny, and he has a wonderful ear for how people look and feel.

“He has a gift of fluency that pours out of him the way Balzac had it.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/15/obituaries/tom-wolfe-pyrotechnic-nonfiction-writer-and-novelist-dies-at-88.html?

New York Today: Chicago Pizza vs. the New York Slice
By JONATHAN WOLFE NOV. 16, 2017

Mayor Bill de Blasio’s press secretary tweeted on Saturday that a Chicago pizzeria was better than any other pizza out there — including New York.

Five days later, he’s still wrong.

But, then again, our pizza preferences could be, too. So we turned to our readers — New Yorkers, transplants and those who live outside of New York City — to tell us how our slices stack up to pizza elsewhere.

Here is what a few pizza lovers had to say:

Is Chicago’s pizza better than New York’s?

“I’ve lived in Chicago, which I loathe, and near Battery Park in New York City, which is grotesquely noisy and overpriced. I’m 69 and I’ve eaten a lot of pizza. A Chicago pizzeria is better than a New York City pizzeria.”

— David Beschauer, 69, Radford, Va.

“Deep-dish pizza is not pizza. It’s good and I love it, but it’s more like a savory pie.”

— Catherine Lee, 28, Cobble Hill

“Chicago Pizza is a casserole. New York Pizza is pizza, with the best in Brooklyn. And, please, no pineapple.”

“The one glaring problem with a Chicago pizza slice is not so much the taste, but that it is so thick that you cannot fold it. How in the world can you walk with a Coke in one hand and a slice in the other and eat it unless it is folded? Eating an unfolded slice is like eating a floor tile.”

— Billy Ford, 68, Cornwall, N.Y.

“New York pizza is ephemeral. Chicago pizza is interminable. Balance in the pizza-verse can only be achieved by the existence of both.”

— Bradley Parker, 39, Harlem

Is there more to New York pizza than the taste?

“It’s one of the ultimate grab-and-go foods. It can be prepared quickly, served in seconds, eaten on the spot, or given the ‘Flatbush fold’ and enjoyed on the move.”

— Tim Cartier, 58, Garland, Tex.

”It’s always cheap, thin, greasy, and just hits the spot!”

Pam Steele Tabbaa, 68, Ann Arbor, Mich.

“I would take a New York City slice, served piping hot out of the oven onto a generic white paper plate as I walk around the city, over any other slice anywhere in the world. It’s not just the pizza, it’s the spirit of the city embedded in it that makes all the difference. We all have our preferences. And for me, New York is the place for pizza, and for life.”

— Christa Avampato, 41, Upper West Side

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/16/nyregion/new-york-today-chicago-pizza-vs-the-new-york-slice.html?

Why the World Loves New York
Aatish Taseer NOV. 2, 2017

NEW DELHI — I remember so well the first time I visited New York. I was 13, and though I had been to America once before, New York had deliberately been kept from me. The name alone conjured an adult world of glamour and excitement, the mythic New York of the 1980s: Andy Warhol and Studio 54. “It’s not a place for children,” my mother said firmly.

And my God, was she right! Within moments of our arrival in Manhattan, the gay pride parade started. It was not then the tame, corporate affair it is now. It was a bacchanal. There were not one, but two parades, and we were swept up — myself, my mother and her friend, a longtime New Yorker — in the unofficial one heading down Fifth Avenue. It was a roistering river of humanity, half in leather, half nude. Unruly regiments, hair blue, pink and green, went past, covered in glitter, tattoos and fairy dust.

For a sheltered teenager from India, who had never so much as seen an exposed breast in real life, let alone a set of pierced genitals, it was all deeply shocking, and deeply exhilarating. It was 1994. The AIDS epidemic raged and gay rights were a distant dream; the parade was full of the spirit of revolution.

I did not know at the time that I would later return to the city for the very same freedoms that were being fought for in the street that day. What I do know is that the Delhi prude in me died that June afternoon. I watched my mother’s friend, a tall statuesque woman, stride casually into a restroom. When a big, burly man tried to point out that it was the men’s toilet, she said, “So? This is New York!”

It’s hard not to think of that time now. Most of the eight people killed in the terrorist attack in Lower Manhattan on Tuesday were foreigners visiting New York. One group, especially — five friends from Argentina celebrating the 30th anniversary of their high school graduation — had been planning their trip for years. They were part of a great unorganized commonwealth of people, out in the world, whose imagination New York has captured. It is heartbreaking to think that those for whom the dream of New York is most alluring should be the victims of so vivid a nightmare.

I now live for part of the year in New York. My husband is here, and the city is my adoptive home. We who are fortunate enough to complain of delayed trains, traffic and astronomical rent often forget the power of the city as a symbol in the world beyond. I lived for years, on the outside, hankering after New York. I had spent one magical year here after college, living as a lodger in the Bowery loft of the feminist writer Kate Millet. I was here for the great blackout of 2003, when people poured joyously into the streets, and underwear parties broke out in bars.

In youth, it is easy to mistake New York as a sphere of license. But, as I got older, the city acquired a deeper meaning. I was here when my father, a politician in Pakistan, was the victim of a terrorist attack, killed in 2011 by his own bodyguard for defending a Christian woman accused of blasphemy. The next day, a cold January morning, I trudged past the small hillocks of begrimed ice that had formed on the curb, and bought a copy of this newspaper at a deli at Avenue A and Third Street. A picture of my father’s killer was on the front page.

I left New York a day later and did not return for years.

But, all the time that I was away, the city came more and more to seem like a sanctuary. The freedoms that had seemed superficial turned out to have a more profound meaning: New York was where I would return when a populist demagogue took power in India. New York was where I would marry, and live freely, with a tall white man from Tennessee. New York was where I would feel insulated when a populist demagogue took power in America.

The Austrian writer Stefan Zweig was in New York a hundred years ago, as his own world of the Austro-Hungarian Empire was on the eve of ruin. He saw “foaming cascades of light in Times Square” and marveled at the city’s “captivating nocturnal beauty.” One thing that struck Zweig, a Jew who would die by his own hand in 1942 as Nazi night fell over Europe, was this: “No one asked about my nationality, my religion, my origin,” he wrote in his memoir. “But there was work waiting for people to do it, and that was all that counted.”

This is the New York that endures, and this is the New York that was attacked on a bright blue Halloween afternoon.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/02/opinion/sunday/why-the-world-loves-new-york.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=opinion-c-col-left-region®ion=opinion-c-col-left-region&WT.nav=opinion-c-col-left-region

9/11: Finding Answers in Ashes 16 Years Later
By THE EDITORIAL BOARDSEPT. 11, 2017

An inscription on the lobby wall greets visitors in Latin at the offices of the New York City medical examiner. It is an adage familiar to places where autopsies are performed. Reasonably translated, it says: “Let conversation cease. Let laughter flee. This is the place where death rejoices to help the living.”

Another saying, borrowed from the Book of Proverbs, Chapter 31, might also work were it to be put on that wall: “Speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves.” That, too, is what the medical examiner’s office is about. Rarely has it been called upon to speak up as relentlessly as it has for those whose voices were silenced at the World Trade Center 16 years ago.

For the chief medical examiner, Dr. Barbara Sampson, and her staff, the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, are never past. All these years later, the team still strives to scientifically identify each of the 2,753 people who were killed in the destruction of the twin towers. “We made a commitment to the families that we would do whatever it takes, for as long as it takes,” Dr. Sampson said. “We’re the family physician to the bereaved.”

Death certificates for the victims were issued long ago. But assigning identities to the 21,905 human remains that were recovered from the wreckage is a separate matter. Only 1,641 of the 2,753 victims — 60 percent — have been positively identified, mostly through DNA analysis. The success rate is slightly better, 64 percent, in regard to the 405 firefighters, police officers and emergency medical workers who died at ground zero.

Time has not been a friend of the forensic teams. Victim No. 1,641 — a man who, at his family’s request, has not been publicly named — became known to them a month ago. This was nearly two and a half years after No. 1,640 was identified: Matthew David Yarnell, a 26-year-old technology specialist who worked on the 97th floor of the south tower. Before that, six months had gone by since No. 1,639: Patrice Braut, 31, the lone Belgian citizen among the victims. He worked on the 97th floor of the north tower.

“It’s a slow go,” Dr. Sampson said. “We’re now down to the ones that are very difficult to get useful DNA.”

The genetic material that’s available is sometimes no more than the tiniest patch of flesh. Some remains lay in the wreckage for weeks, months, even years — degraded by water, burning jet fuel and all manner of debris from the downed buildings. In addition, bacterial DNA intermingled with human matter. “It was the worst combination of events you could have for a DNA specimen,” said Dr. Sampson, who has been the city’s chief medical examiner since December 2014.

Recent scientific advances, including what she described as a bone-extraction technique, made it possible to identify the 1,641st victim. That gives her hope that the process is not stuck. “I am optimistic we will identify more people,” she said. “But do I think we will be able to identify every single person? Probably not.”

Apparently, relatives of the victims have not given up. None of them have told the medical examiner’s office that, after the passage of so much time, they no longer care about matching slivers of remains to their loved ones. “We work very closely with the families,” Dr. Sampson said. “We know every family’s wishes as for what they want us to do.”

Since 2014, unclaimed remains have rested 70 feet underground in a repository at the National September 11 Memorial & Museum in Lower Manhattan. Only members of the medical examiner’s office may enter the area (though no laboratory work is done there). Next to the repository is a quiet space known as the reflection room, reserved for Sept. 11 families and their guests. Not surprisingly, the anniversary is a time of pilgrimage there. In a typical month, 20 or so people go to the room. On Sept. 11 alone last year, 65 visited.

Just about every week, a few families will call the medical examiner’s office with questions, mostly of a technical or administrative nature. Still, often enough, there’s a catch in the caller’s voice or a verbal tic that makes plain how time is an imperfect healer. “You can get a sense of despair,” Dr. Sampson said.

“And hope,” she added.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/11/opinion/911-medical-examiner-16-years.html?

Another New York Diner Turns Off the Grill, a Victim of Rising Rents
By REMY TUMINJULY 16, 2017

John Vasilopoulos and Nick Tragaras stood before an assembly line of egg sandwiches. Mr. Tragaras slid the eggs and bacon from the griddle onto the buns as Mr. Vasilopoulos followed to wrap and stack.

It was a familiar rhythm for the owners of Cup & Saucer, a diner on the eastern edge of Manhattan’s Chinatown. But on Monday afternoon, after more than 70 years, the clink of metal spatulas flipping eggs and bacon will quiet for the last time as Cup & Saucer closes its doors.

“We really care about every customer who comes in; we get involved with them,” Mr. Vasilopoulos, 55, said over the weekend from behind the doughnut display as the narrow corridor of counter space filled up.

From that perch, he and Mr. Tragaras, 52, have watched the neighborhood ebb and flow over their 30 years of ownership. The family jewelry and wholesale shops that once dominated the area are long gone, and more expensive restaurants and bars have moved in. This time, Mr. Vasilopoulos and Mr. Tragaras said, the rent increase was too steep for Cup & Saucer.

Mr. Vasilopoulos and Mr. Tragaras have owned the restaurant since 1988, but Cup & Saucer has occupied the space since the early 1940s, Mr. Vasilopoulos said. In March, they learned their $8,200 a month lease would increase by $7,600 per month. Attempts to negotiate with the landlord, 99 Canal Realty, failed, they said.

“It would be nice if we stayed another five years, but it happens,” Mr. Vasilopoulos said. “We’re not the first ones.”

Two calls to 99 Canal Realty seeking comment were disconnected last week.

As the news spread that the greasy spoon would be closing, the diner was inundated with well-wishers.

Haifa Olsen moved to the neighborhood a year ago from London and went to Cup & Saucer weekly for blueberry pancakes.

“I’m from Europe, so for us pancakes are very exciting,” Ms. Olsen said Sunday, adding, “It is a little New York institution, and being a foreigner, it really gives you that New York flavor that you don’t have very many places.”

The diner sits just off the entrance to the Manhattan Bridge along the border of Chinatown and the Lower East Side, at the corner of Eldridge and Canal Streets. It opened in the early 1940s, when the area was dominated by immigrant families and businesses. It has had three sets of owners, Mr. Vasilopoulos said.

Both he and Mr. Tragaras are from Greece and immigrated in their youth. Mr. Vasilopoulos’s brother is married to Mr. Tragaras’s sister. They now live in Astoria, Queens, “with the other Greeks,” Mr. Vasilopoulos said.

Through it all, the diner, including the décor, has remained reliably the same.

“Do you see the cup and saucer on the floor, and the stools?” Mr. Vasilopoulos asked, pointing to an image on the tiles and faded mustard spinning stools. “They’re original.”

Mr. Tragaras said: “We had to adjust the menu a little bit because it used to be just regular breakfast. We went into paninis; we went into wraps. But we don’t have pastrami anymore.”

And the customers returned again and again.

“We keep the place clean, have fast service and good, quality food with a good amount, so people love us,” Mr. Vasilopoulos said. “But we didn’t know we had so many friends.”

Dan Teran worked on Eldridge Street for six years before his office moved to the SoHo neighborhood of Manhattan. He came back for one last breakfast.

“It’s the end of an era,” he said.

His typical order was the corned beef hash with rye toast or bacon, egg and cheese on a bagel. “It’s the exact same cast of characters back there,” he said. “The people who work here are amazing.”

In their 30 years of working together, Mr. Vasilopoulos and Mr. Tragaras stuck to one rule: Mr. Tragaras worked the line, and Mr. Vasilopoulos stayed at the front of the diner.

“I worked here, he’s worked there, and that’s why we never argued,” Mr. Tragaras said. “I have my post, and he has his.”

The closing of Cup & Saucer is another sign of what some consider the end of classic New York diners. The culture of comfort food, like well-done French fries and triple-decker sandwiches, is diminishing, said Bob Juergens, who has lived in the neighborhood for 20 years. His favorite menu item was the turkey club sandwich, which provided “two meals in one.”

“It’s like an oasis here,” Mr. Juergens said. “You can’t find diners like this around here. I understand gentrification — I don’t think it’s this evil thing — but certain things like this you have to preserve.”

The owners plan to take the summer off to regroup and possibly look for another space.

“We have to do something,” Mr. Vasilopoulos said.


https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/16/nyregion/cup-and-saucer-closing-diners.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=photo-spot-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news

Jimmy Breslin, Legendary New York City Newspaper Columnist, Dies at 88
By DAN BARRY MARCH 19, 2017
OBITUARIES THE LAST WORD By THE NEW YORK TIMES 11:05

The Last Word: Jimmy Breslin
As columnist, novelist, biographer and raconteur, Jimmy Breslin witnessed and chronicled the American 20th century. In 2007, he sat down with the Times columnist Jim Dwyer to discuss his life’s work. By THE NEW YORK TIMES on Publish Date March 19, 2017. Photo by Neal Boenzi/The New York Times. Watch in Times Video »

Jimmy Breslin, the New York City newspaper columnist and best-selling author who leveled the powerful and elevated the powerless for more than 50 years with brick-hard words and a jagged-glass wit, died on Sunday at his home in Manhattan. He was 88, and until very recently, was still pushing somebody’s buttons with two-finger jabs at his keyboard.

His death was confirmed by his wife, Ronnie Eldridge, a prominent Manhattan Democratic politician. Mr. Breslin had been recovering from pneumonia.

With prose that was savagely funny, deceptively simple and poorly imitated, Mr. Breslin created his own distinct rhythm in the hurly-burly music of newspapers. Here, for example, is how he described Clifton Pollard, the man who dug President John F. Kennedy’s grave, in a celebrated column from 1963 that launched legions of journalists to find their “gravedigger”:

“Pollard is forty-two. He is a slim man with a mustache who was born in Pittsburgh and served as a private in the 352nd Engineers battalion in Burma in World War II. He is an equipment operator, grade 10, which means he gets $3.01 an hour. One of the last to serve John Fitzgerald Kennedy, who was the thirty-fifth President of this country, was a working man who earns $3.01 an hour and said it was an honor to dig the grave.”

Here is how, in one of the columns that won the 1986 Pulitzer Prize for commentary, he focused on a single man, David Camacho, to humanize the AIDS epidemic, which was widely misunderstood at the time:

“He had two good weeks in July and then the fever returned and he was back in the hospital for half of last August. He got out again and returned to Eighth Street. The date this time doesn’t count. By now, he measured nothing around him. Week, month, day, night, summer heat, fall chill, the color of the sky, the sound of the street, clothes, music, lights, wealth dwindled in meaning.”

Breslin and Son of Kennedy Gravedigger Recall the Famous Job NOV. 22, 2013

And here is how he described what motivated Breslin the writer: “Rage is the only quality which has kept me, or anybody I have ever studied, writing columns for newspapers.”

Poetic and profane, softhearted and unforgiving, Mr. Breslin inspired every emotion but indifference; letters from outraged readers gladdened his heart. He often went after his own, from Irish-Americans with “shopping center faces” who had forgotten their hardscrabble roots to the Roman Catholic Church, whose sex scandals prompted him to write an angry book called “The Church That Forgot Christ,” published in 2004. It ends with his cheeky vow to start a new church that would demand more low-income housing and better posture.

Love or loathe him, none could deny Mr. Breslin’s enduring impact on the craft of narrative nonfiction. He often explained that he merely applied a sportswriter’s visual sensibility to the news columns. Avoid the media scrum gathered around the winner, he would advise, and go directly to the loser’s locker. This is how you find your gravedigger.

“So you go to a big thing like this presidential assassination,” he said in an extended interview with The New York Times in 2006. “Well, you’re looking for the dressing room, that’s all. And I did. I went there automatic.”

Early on, Mr. Breslin developed the persona of the hard-drinking, dark-humored Everyman from Queens, so consumed by life’s injustices and his six children that he barely had time to comb his wild black mane. While this persona shared a beer with the truth, Mr. Breslin also admired Dostoyevsky, swam every day, hadn’t had a drink in more than 30 years, wrote a shelf-full of books, and adhered to a demanding work ethic that required his presence in the moment, from a civil-rights march in Alabama to a “perp walk” in Brooklyn — no matter that he never learned to drive.

The real Jimmy Breslin was so elusive that even Mr. Breslin could not find him. “There have been many Jimmy Breslins because of all the people I identified with so much, turning me into them, or them into me, that I can’t explain one Jimmy Breslin,” he once wrote.

Sometimes he modestly presented himself as a regular guy who churned out words for pay; other times he became the megalomaniacal stylist — “J. B. Number One,” he called himself — who was dogged by pale imitators with Irish surnames. On occasion he would wake up other reporters with telephone calls to say, simply, “I’m big.”

He cut longstanding ties over small slights, often published an annual list of “the people I’m not talking to this year,” and rarely hesitated to target powerful friends, depending on his depth of outrage and hours until deadline. He would occasionally refer to those who had fallen out of his favor only by their initials.

After concluding that Gov. Hugh L. Carey of New York had become too enamored of fine living, for example, Mr. Breslin rechristened his old pal Society Carey, a nickname that stuck like gum on a handmade shoe. But when someone he knew was sick, whether a beloved daughter or the switchboard operator at work, Mr. Breslin would be at the bedside, offering his comforting gift of almost vaudevillian distraction.

A man whose preferred manner of discourse was a yell, Mr. Breslin could also be unkind, even vicious. In 1990, for example, he was suspended by his employer, Newsday, for his racist rant about a female Asian-American reporter who had dared to criticize one of his columns as sexist.

At the same time, Mr. Breslin was unmatched in his attention to the poor and disenfranchised. If there is one hero in the Breslin canon, it is the single black mother, far removed from power, trying to make it through the week.

According to his wife, Ms. Eldridge, Mr. Breslin became so upset by what he had witnessed in the streets of the city, streets he knew as well as anyone, that he often needed time to recover after writing his column. “Bad news puts him to bed,” she said.

Mr. Breslin came honestly to his empathy and distrust. Born James Earle Breslin on Oct. 17, 1928, he grew up in the Richmond Hill section of Queens. When Jimmy was 6 years old, his father, James, a musician, deserted the family, leaving him to share an apartment with an emotionally distant mother, Frances — a supervisor in the East Harlem office of the city’s welfare department who drank — as well as a younger sister, a grandmother and various aunts and uncles.

Many decades later, after Mr. Breslin had become famous, his father, destitute in Miami, came back into his life “like heavy snow through a broken window,” he would write. He paid for his father’s medical bills and sent him a telegram that said, “NEXT TIME KILL YOURSELF.” When his father died, in 1974, he paid for the cremation and said: “Good. That’s over.”

Mr. Breslin found early escape in newspapers. As a boy, he would spread the broadsheet pages across the floor and imagine himself on a Pullman car, filing stories from baseball ports of call: Chicago, St. Louis, Pittsburgh. Then The Long Island Press, in Jamaica, Queens, hired him as a copy boy in the late 1940s. High school took longer than necessary, and college received only a passing nod; his life centered on deadlines and ink.

After getting a job as a sportswriter for The New York Journal-American, Mr. Breslin wrote a freshly funny book about the first season of the hapless New York Mets, “Can’t Anyone Here Play This Game?” It convinced John Hay Whitney, the publisher of The New York Herald Tribune, to hire him as a news columnist in 1963.

Soon Mr. Breslin was counted among the writers credited with inventing “New Journalism,” in which novelistic techniques are used to inject immediacy and narrative tension into the news. (Mr. Breslin, an admirer of sportswriters like Jimmy Cannon and Frank Graham, scoffed at this supposed contribution, saying that he and others had merely introduced Dickens-like storytelling to a new generation.)

Unleashed, Mr. Breslin issued regular dispatches that changed the craft of column writing, according to Pete Hamill, the journalist and author and a former colleague. “It seemed so new and original,” Mr. Hamill said. “It was a very, very important moment in New York journalism, and in national journalism.”

Mr. Breslin wrote about President Kennedy’s gravedigger, the sentencing of the union gangster Anthony Provenzano, the assassination of Malcolm X, and a stable of New York characters real and loosely based on reality, including the Mafia boss Un Occhio, the arsonist Marvin the Torch, the bookie Fat Thomas and Klein the lawyer. But Mr. Breslin’s greatest character was himself: the outer-borough boulevardier of bilious persuasion, often chaperoned by his superhumanly patient first wife, “the former Rosemary Dattolico.”

“Jimmy invented himself,” said Don Forst, a prominent New York newspaper editor who died in 2014 and first worked with Mr. Breslin at The Herald Tribune. “He was irascible, extremely talented and very, very hard-working. And he understood what news was.”

Mr. Breslin began his day early, making calls to judges, politicians, police officers and other journalists, greeting them always with words that signaled he was in the hunt for news: “What’s doin’?”

“He just keeps calling until he has a column in his head,” Ms. Eldridge explained. “But then he has to go see it.”

Over the years, Mr. Breslin would leave daily newspapers in search of better pay. In 1969, for example, he resigned from The New York Post after writing his first novel, a best-selling satire about the Mafia called “The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight,” which was later made into a forgettable movie. But he repeatedly succumbed to the sirens of daily journalism, first at The Daily News, then at New York Newsday, then at Newsday on Long Island, then back to The Daily News.

“Once you get back in the newspapers, it’s like heroin,” Mr. Breslin told The Times. “You’re there. That’s all.”

Mr. Breslin seemed always to be “there.” He became one of the first staff writers for New York magazine. In 1968, he was near at hand when Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles. In 1969, he ran for City Council president on a wacky, wildly unsuccessful ticket that included Norman Mailer for mayor. (Their contention that New York City should become the 51st state found little traction.) In 1986, he broke the story of how the Queens borough president, Donald R. Manes, had been implicated in a payoff scam involving city officials; two months later, Mr. Manes committed suicide.

And in 1977, most famously, Mr. Breslin received a chilling letter from the serial killer known as Son of Sam, who, by that point, had killed five young people in New York and wounded several others with a .44-caliber revolver. “P.S.: JB, Please inform all the detectives working the case that I wish them the best of luck,” the killer wrote.

Mr. Breslin published the note with an appeal for Son of Sam to surrender, but the killer, David Berkowitz, struck twice more before being captured. The New Yorker magazine accused Mr. Breslin of exploiting the moment and feeding the killer’s ego. But he countered that he had published the letter at the suggestion of detectives, who thought it could encourage the killer to write another note that might bear clearer fingerprints.

Mr. Breslin won nearly every award known to the newspaper business, while also distinguishing himself as a critically acclaimed author. He wrote novels, including “World Without End, Amen,” a transcontinental love story set against the Troubles in Belfast, and “Table Money,” about a Queens housewife freeing herself from her husband, an alcoholic sandhog.

He wrote biographies of Damon Runyon and Branch Rickey. He wrote “The Good Rat,” in which he used the saga of two New York police detectives working as Mafia hit men to share his funny, hard-earned insights into mob culture.

Perhaps the quintessential Breslin book was “The Short Sweet Dream of Eduardo Gutierrez,” published in 2002, in which he focused on the death of an undocumented Mexican worker at a flawed construction site in Brooklyn to rail against the shoddy building practices, political cowardice and racism of his beloved city.

Trial and tragedy accompanied his many triumphs. In 1981, Mr. Breslin’s first wife, Rosemary, died of cancer; she was 50. In 2004, his elder daughter, Rosemary, a writer, died of a rare blood disease; she was 47. In 2009, his other daughter, Kelly, died after collapsing in a Manhattan restaurant; she was 44. At these times, friends say, words failed even Jimmy Breslin.

But Mr. Breslin always returned to the distraction and urgency of writing. In 1982, he married Ms. Eldridge in a Catholic-Jewish union that, with his six children and her three, provided rich column material. (“Everybody hated each other,” he told The Times. “It was beautiful.”) In 1994, he underwent surgery for a brain aneurysm that threatened what he called his “billion-dollar memory,” an experience that led to a memoir, published in 1996, called “I Want to Thank My Brain for Remembering Me.”

“Think of it: He still works every day,” former Gov. Mario M. Cuomo, a close friend, wrote in remarks prepared for a 2009 celebration of Mr. Breslin. “Writing, or thinking about writing, and he has done it for 60 years — nearly 22,000 days and nights — except for the short hiatus when doctors were forced to drill a hole in his head to let out of his congested brain some of his unused lines. Then — he wrote a book about it!”

In addition to his wife, Ms. Eldridge, a former city councilwoman from Manhattan, Mr. Breslin is survived by his four sons, Kevin, James, Patrick and Christopher; a stepson, Daniel Eldridge; two stepdaughters, Emily and Lucy Eldridge; a sister, Deirdre Breslin, and 12 grandchildren.

In 2004, Mr. Breslin resigned from his three-columns-a-week job at Newsday to pursue other writing projects. But in 2011, he briefly returned to The Daily News to write a weekly column, in which he revisited old mob acquaintances, reflected on the plight of job-seekers and decried the deaths of the young in wars waged by the old.

It was as though he could not help himself. Telling the stories of others, he once wrote, allowed him to suppress his feelings about his own story — including, say, a father’s abandonment.

“I replaced my feelings with what I felt were the feelings of others, and that changed with each thing I went to, so I was about 67 people in my life,” he wrote.

Telling stories was how Mr. Breslin communicated. In 1994, just as he was about to undergo brain surgery, he told a nurse about Bo Gee, a small, thirsty man who sold Chinese-language newspapers in the bars and restaurants of the East Side. Between drinks, the man would call out the two headlines that sold the most papers.

One was “War!” Mr. Breslin told the nurse. And the other: “Big Guy Dies.”

Jim Dwyer and Richard Goldstein contributed reporting.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/19/business/media/jimmy-breslin-dead-ny-columnist-author.html?

Breslin: Digging JFK grave was his honor
November 22, 2013 12:42 PM
By JIMMY BRESLIN, New York Herald Tribune

The incomparable Jimmy Breslin wrote this signature column for The New York Herald Tribune in November 1963.

Clifton Pollard was pretty sure he was going to be working on Sunday, so when he woke up at 9 a.m., in his three-room apartment on Corcoran Street, he put on khaki overalls before going into the kitchen for breakfast. His wife, Hettie, made bacon and eggs for him. Pollard was in the middle of eating them when he received the phone call he had been expecting. It was from Mazo Kawalchik, who is the foreman of the gravediggers at Arlington National Cemetery, which is where Pollard works for a living. "Polly, could you please be here by eleven o'clock this morning?" Kawalchik asked. "I guess you know what it's for." Pollard did.

He hung up the phone, finished breakfast, and left his apartment so he could spend Sunday digging a grave for John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

When Pollard got to the row of yellow wooden garages where the cemetery equipment is stored, Kawalchik and John Metzler, the cemetery superintendent, were waiting for him. "Sorry to pull you out like this on a Sunday," Metzler said.

"Oh, don't say that," Pollard said. "Why, it's an honor for me to be here."

Pollard got behind the wheel of a machine called a reverse hoe. Gravedigging is not done with men and shovels at Arlington. The reverse hoe is a green machine with a yellow bucket that scoops the earth toward the operator, not away from it as a crane does.

At the bottom of the hill in front of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, Pollard started the digging.

Leaves covered the grass. When the yellow teeth of the reverse hoe first bit into the ground, the leaves made a threshing sound which could be heard above the motor of the machine. When the bucket came up with its first scoop of dirt, Metzler, the cemetery superintendent, walked over and looked at it.

"That's nice soil," Metzler said. "I'd like to save a little of it," Pollard said. "The machine made some tracks in the grass over here and I'd like to sort of fill them in and get some good grass growing there, I'd like to have everything, you know, nice."

James Winners, another gravedigger, nodded. He said he would fill a couple of carts with this extra-good soil and take it back to the garage and grow good turf on it. "He was a good man," Pollard said. "Yes, he was," Metzler said. "Now they're going to come and put him right here in this grave I'm making up," Pollard said. "You know, it's an honor just for me to do this."

Pollard is 42. He is a slim man with a mustache who was born in Pittsburgh and served as a private in the 352nd Engineers battalion in Burma in World War II. He is an equipment operator, grade 10, which means he gets $3.01 an hour. One of the last to serve John Fitzgerald Kennedy, who was the thirty-fifth President of this country, was a working man who earns $3.01 an hour and said it was an honor to dig the grave.

Yesterday morning, at 11:15, Jacqueline Kennedy started toward the grave.

She came out from under the north portico of the White House and slowly followed the body of her husband, which was in a flag-covered coffin that was strapped with two black leather belts to a black caisson that had polished brass axles. She walked straight and her head was high. She walked down the bluestone and blacktop driveway and through shadows thrown by the branches of seven leafless oak trees. She walked slowly past the sailors who held up flags of the states of this country. She walked past silent people who strained to see her and then, seeing her, dropped their heads and put their hands over their eyes. She walked out the northwest gate and into the middle of Pennsylvania Avenue. She walked with tight steps and her head was high and she followed the body of her murdered husband through the streets of Washington.

Everybody watched her while she walked. She is the mother of two fatherless children and she was walking into the history of this country because she was showing everybody who felt old and helpless and without hope that she had this terrible strength that everybody needed so badly.

Even though they had killed her husband and his blood ran onto her lap while he died, she could walk through the streets and to his grave and help us all while she walked.

There was mass, and then the procession to Arlington. When she came up to the grave at the cemetery, the casket already was in place. It was set between brass railings and it was ready to be lowered into the ground.

This must be the worst time of all, when a woman sees the coffin with her husband inside and it is in place to be buried under the earth. Now she knows that it is forever. Now there is nothing. There is no casket to kiss or hold with your hands. Nothing material to cling to. But she walked up to the burial area and stood in front of a row of six green-covered chairs and she started to sit down, but then she got up quickly and stood straight because she was not going to sit down until the man directing the funeral told her what seat he wanted her to take.

The ceremonies began, with jet planes roaring overhead and leaves falling from the sky. On this hill behind the coffin, people prayed aloud. They were cameramen and writers and soldiers and Secret Service men and they were saying prayers out loud and choking.

In front of the grave, Lyndon Johnson kept his head turned to his right. He is president and he had to remain composed. It was better that he did not look at the casket and grave of John Fitzgerald Kennedy too often. Then it was over and black limousines rushed under the cemetery trees and out onto the boulevard toward the White House.

"What time is it?" a man standing on the hill was asked. He looked at his watch. "Twenty minutes past three," he said.

Clifton Pollard wasn't at the funeral. He was over behind the hill, digging graves for $3.01 an hour in another section of the cemetery. He didn't know who the graves were for. He was just digging them and then covering them with boards.

"They'll be used," he said. "We just don't know when. I tried to go over to see the grave," he said. "But it was so crowded a soldier told me I couldn't get through. So I just stayed here and worked, sir. But I'll get over there later a little bit. Just sort of look around and see how it is, you know. Like I told you, it's an honor."
http://www.newsday.com/opinion/digging-jfk-grave-was-his-honor-jimmy-breslin-1.6481560

Jimmy Breslin, Legendary New York City Newspaper Columnist, Dies at 88
By DAN BARRYMARCH 19, 2017

Jimmy Breslin, the New York City newspaper columnist and best-selling author who leveled the powerful and elevated the powerless for more than 50 years with brick-hard words and a jagged-glass wit, died on Sunday. He was 88, and until very recently, was still pushing somebody’s buttons with two-finger jabs at his keyboard.

His death was confirmed by his wife, Ronnie Eldridge, a prominent Manhattan Democrat. Mr. Breslin had been recovering from pneumonia.

With prose that was savagely funny, deceptively simple and poorly imitated, Mr. Breslin created his own distinct rhythm in the hurly-burly music of newspapers. Here, for example, is how he described Clifton Pollard, the man who dug President John F. Kennedy’s grave, in a celebrated Herald Tribune column from 1963 that sent legions of journalists to find their “gravedigger”:

“Pollard is forty-two. He is a slim man with a mustache who was born in Pittsburgh and served as a private in the 352nd Engineers battalion in Burma in World War II. He is an equipment operator, grade 10, which means he gets $3.01 an hour. One of the last to serve John Fitzgerald Kennedy, who was the thirty-fifth President of this country, was a working man who earns $3.01 an hour and said it was an honor to dig the grave.”

And here is how he described what motivated Breslin the writer: “Rage is the only quality which has kept me, or anybody I have ever studied, writing columns for newspapers.”

Poetic and profane, softhearted and unforgiving, Mr. Breslin inspired every emotion but indifference; letters from outraged readers gladdened his heart. He often went after his own, from Irish-Americans with “shopping center faces” who had forgotten their hardscrabble roots to the Roman Catholic Church, whose sex scandals prompted him to write an angry book called “The Church That Forgot Christ,” published in 2004. It ends with his cheeky vow to start a new church that would demand more low-income housing and better posture.

Love or loathe him, none could deny Mr. Breslin’s enduring impact on the craft of narrative nonfiction. He often explained that he merely applied a sportswriter’s visual sensibility to news columns. Avoid the media scrum gathered around the winner, he would advise, and go directly to the loser’s locker. This is how you find your gravedigger.

“So you go to a big thing like this presidential assassination,” he said in an extended interview with The New York Times in 2006. “Well, you’re looking for the dressing room, that’s all. And I did. I went there automatic.”

Early on, Mr. Breslin developed the persona of the hard-drinking, dark-humored Everyman from Queens, so consumed by life’s injustices and his six children that he barely had time to comb his wild black mane. While this persona shared a beer with the truth, Mr. Breslin also admired Dostoyevsky, swam every day, rarely drank in the last 30 years, wrote a shelf-full of books, and adhered to a demanding work ethic that required his presence in the moment, from a civil-rights march in Alabama to a perp walk in Brooklyn — no matter that he never learned to drive.

The real Jimmy Breslin was so elusive that even Mr. Breslin could not find him. “There have been many Jimmy Breslins because of all the people I identified with so much, turning me into them, or them into me, that I can’t explain one Jimmy Breslin,” he once wrote.

A full obituary will appear shortly.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/19/business/media/jimmy-breslin-dead-ny-columnist-author.html?ref=business

At Carnegie Deli in Manhattan, Just 3 Months of Pastramis to Go

By ALAN FEUER

The well-known kosher-style restaurant, more a magnet for tourists than for New Yorkers, is shutting down at the end of the year.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/01/nyregion/carnegie-deli-in-manhattan-to-shut-down.html?ref=business

Seeking the Final Faces to Fill a Sept. 11 Tapestry

A gallery at the National September 11 Memorial Museum has photos of all but 10 of the 2,983 people killed in the 2001 terrorist attacks and the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

By DAVID W. DUNLAP and SUSAN C. BEACHY

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/11/nyregion/9-11-victims-portraits-national-september-11-memorial-museum.html

A Walk Around the Void of 9/11
By THE EDITORIAL BOARDSEPT. 10, 2016

Walk onto the plaza in Lower Manhattan and you hear the memorial before you see it — a whooshing through the oak trees. You soon realize it’s not the wind, but water. At the footprint of each tower, north and south, a vast square emptiness is bound by four walls of falling water, the pool below pouring into a smaller central void that flows out of sight. The memorial is black upon black, but the water casts reflections. Sunlight and mist make fragmentary rainbows that flicker as clouds go by.

Tourists are milling about and buying souvenirs, guides are explaining, construction workers on the perimeter are relaxing. Though it is a murder scene, the memorial is not a morbid place. The trees soften it, as does the presence of children who have no memory of that morning, 15 years ago on Sunday.

There is an underground museum nearby, if you want to immerse yourself in that day. But the event is hard to grasp in full if you never saw the towers intact, if you never gazed straight up between the two pinstriped columns and got dizzy at the scale. And if you were not downtown that day, and did not have to flee uptown or across a bridge, did not have your memory seared by the smoke, the dust, the smell, the incomprehension.

The memorial has the power to gently push you back — not to horror, but maybe to tears. This is the effect of seeing the thousands of names, incised in bronze rows, five deep, encircling the fountains. Each row is like a lei of five strands, lives linked by work or some other related or random circumstance, and one awful fate.

Walk slowly, and let your eyes absorb the loss. Jeremy “Caz” Carrington, of Cantor Fitzgerald. Deepa Pakkala, Marsh & McLennan. Uhuru Houston, Port Authority police. Maybe technology someday will allow us to hover over a name and hear a story, summon a life, see the braid of loved ones formed over a lifetime and then, suddenly, snapped. Who were these dead, and where might life have taken them? William Mahoney, Fire Department Rescue 4. Michael Quilty, Ladder 11. Heather Malia Ho, pastry chef at Windows on the World.

Many of them had no idea what was happening, and none knew what the attacks would lead to. The years of unending warfare, the disasters overseas, the new way of living: see something, say something, fear everything.

The memorial, blessedly, does not summon any wretched aftermath. It summons, instead, dignity and honor — of the victims who called home, leaving messages of love, of the first responders who rushed toward the smoke and flames. There was great bravery that day, and exemplary leadership in the days and months after. Rudy Giuliani, creating calm and unity; George Bush, honoring the workers and the fallen amid the wreckage.

Fifteen years on, the evil of 9/11 may still reverberate, but the goodness remains a thing to marvel at. And the 9/11 memorial — subdued, profound — is almost miraculous, given its tortured birth by committee. Years ago two mayors, Michael Bloomberg and Mr. Giuliani, were in a group discussing what the memorial should be. Mr. Giuliani wanted something big on that “sacred ground.” Mr. Bloomberg argued for a school, not a monument. “I always thought the best memorial for anybody is to build a better world in their memory,” he said. “I’m a believer in the future, not the past. I can’t do anything about the past.”

He was right about what we can’t do. But many of us can do this on a bright September day: Take the subway to Lower Manhattan. Walk a block or two, find the way through a construction zone and down a chain-link corridor. Take the time to walk around each void, watching the names flow by. There are too many to linger over, but read those you can and reflect on the whole. Take several turns, pondering, as a pilgrim might do, the enormity of the loss, the passage of years. And what we, the living, can do to build a better world, worthy of their sacrifice.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/11/opinion/sunday/a-walk-around-the-void-of-9-11.html?

Ground Zero Images, After the Deluge

http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2016/09/11/nyregion/ground-zero-images-after-the-deluge/s/11ALBUM-slide-1EDU.html?action=click&contentCollection=N.Y.+%2F+Region&entrySlide=1&module=RestartSlideShow&pgtype=imageslideshow®ion=Slideshow+Promo&slideshowTitle=Ground+Zero+Images%2C+After+the+Deluge&version=EndSlate

Bill Cunningham, Legendary Times Fashion Photographer, Dies at 87
By JACOB BERNSTEINJUNE 25, 2016

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/26/style/bill-cunningham-legendary-times-fashion-photographer-dies-at-87.html?

Bill Cunningham, the street-style photographer whose photo essays for The New York Times memorialized trends ranging from fanny packs to Birkin bags, gingham shirts and fluorescent biker shorts, died in New York on Saturday. He was 87.

He had been hospitalized recently after having a stroke. His death was confirmed by The New York Times.

In his nearly 40 years working for The Times, Mr. Cunningham operated both as a dedicated chronicler of fashion and as an unlikely cultural anthropologist, one who used the changing dress habits of the people he photographed to chart the broader shift away from formality and toward something more diffuse and individualistic.

At the Pierre hotel on the East Side of Manhattan, he pointed his camera at tweed-wearing blue-blood New Yorkers with names like Rockefeller and Vanderbilt. Downtown, by the piers, he clicked away at crop-top wearing Voguers. Up in Harlem, he jumped off his bicycle — he rode more than 30 over the years, replacing one after another as they were wrecked or stolen — for B-boys in low-slung jeans.

In the process, he turned into something of a celebrity himself.

In 2008, Mr. Cunningham went to Paris, where the French government bestowed him with the Legion d’Honneur. Back in New York, he was celebrated at Bergdorf Goodman, where a life-size mannequin of him, as slight and bony-thin as ever, was installed in the window.

In 2009, he was named a Living Landmark by the New York Landmarks Conservancy and profiled in The New Yorker, which described his columns On the Street and Evening Hours as the city’s unofficial yearbook, “an exuberant, sometimes retroactively embarrassing chronicle of the way we looked.”

In 2010, a documentary film, “Bill Cunningham New York,” premiered at the Museum of Modern Art to glowing reviews.

Yet Mr. Cunningham told nearly anyone who asked about it that the attendant publicity was a total hassle, a reason for strangers to approach and bother him.

He wanted to find subjects, not be the subject. He wanted to observe, rather than be observed. Asceticism was a hallmark of his brand.

He didn’t go to the movies. He didn’t own a television. He ate breakfast nearly every day at the Stage Star Deli on West 55th Street, where a cup of coffee and a sausage, egg and cheese could be had until very recently for under $3. He lived until 2010 in a studio above Carnegie Hall amid rows and rows of file cabinets, where he kept all of his negatives. He slept on a single-size cot, showered in a shared bathroom and, when he was asked why he spent years ripping up checks from magazines like Details (which he helped Annie Flanders launch in 1982), said: “Money’s the cheapest thing. Liberty and freedom is the most expensive.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/26/style/bill-cunningham-legendary-times-fashion-photographer-dies-at-87.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=second-column-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news

Gene Cavallero Jr., Who Ran the Colony Restaurant, Dies at 92
By WILLIAM GRIMESJUNE 16, 2016

Gene Cavallero Jr., who took over his father’s fabled Manhattan restaurant, the Colony, and maintained it as a gilt-edged gathering place for the social elite and the international jet set, died on June 4 in Phoenix. He was 92.

His death was confirmed by his son Gene Cavallero III.

Mr. Cavallero teamed up with his father at the Colony in the early 1950s, sharing the all-consuming task of cosseting a highly demanding clientele that regarded the restaurant, at the corner of Madison Avenue and 61st Street, as an extension of their living rooms and its owners as their personal concierges.

The Colony occupied a lofty perch in New York City’s dining scene. Founded in 1919 and bought by Gene Cavallero Sr. with two partners in 1922, it struggled initially, known for its clientele of playboys trolling for dates and businessmen with their mistresses.

The heiress and socialite Virginia Fair Vanderbilt put it on the map when she wandered in for lunch, decided she liked the place and recommended it to her friends, despite its louche reputation. “It was a place frequented by — how do you say — the demimondaines of New York,” Gene Sr. told The New York Times in 1959.

The cream of New York society followed Mrs. Vanderbilt’s lead, pulling in their wake the mix of celebrities and socialites known as cafe society. The Duke of Windsor decided that the little bar at the front of the restaurant was great fun, and planted his flag there. The Colony was now it, and would remain so for decades.

“It was fun, fun, fun — refined, polished, glamorous, giddy,” the fashion and society columnist Aileen Mehle told Vanity Fair in 2000.

By the time Gene Jr. took over the restaurant in the mid-1950s, it was playing host to an endless procession of boldface names: Lee Radziwill, Jacqueline Kennedy, Charles Revson, Frank Sinatra, Orson Welles. Diana Vreeland and Truman Capote added their names to the list.

Like his father, Mr. Cavallero played the roles of confidant and fixer for his customers. The Colony extended credit to loyal clients down on their luck. It sent meals to their apartments when they were unhappy or ailing. It set aside a private room for their dogs, who could recline on poofy satin pillows and eat special meals from silver trays. The Colony was, Mr. Cavallero told The Times, “the most expensive neighborhood boardinghouse in the world.”

The fashion designer Oleg Cassini brought Grace Kelly and her mother to the Colony to propose marriage, unsuccessfully, to Kelly, the future princess of Monaco.

It was Mr. Cavallero who first got wind of the impending marriage of Mrs. Kennedy and Aristotle Onassis, another frequent patron. “It took only two Colony dinners for me to see where they were heading,” he told The Times in 1971, the year the restaurant closed.



The bar at the Colony, in 1943. Credit Eric Schaal/The LIFE Picture Collection, via Getty Images

The news traveled fast. “I telephoned Earl Wilson and told him, ‘Earl, you always tell me I owe you a big one,’” Mr. Cavallero told Vanity Fair, referring to one of the best-known gossip columnists of the day. “‘Well, here it is.’”

Gene Julius Cavallero Jr. was born on Dec. 23, 1923, in Manhattan. After graduating from Loyola School, he attended Cornell. But he was expelled for punching a teacher and enlisted in the National Guard.

He spent the war years working for what was then called Grumman Aircraft Engineering on Long Island and, relying on his father’s extensive contacts in Europe, apprenticed at hotels in Switzerland, France and Italy.

Returning to the United States, he worked briefly at the Knickerbocker Hotel, where his father had once been a waiter, before joining his father at the Colony. One of the most important hires of his tenure was a young Italian waiter named Sirio Maccioni, who was quickly promoted to maître d’hôtel and went on to create his own celebrity restaurant, Le Cirque.

In 1950 Mr. Cavallero married Patricia Mahoney, the daughter of Francis Mahoney, a New York State senator. She died in 2007. In addition to his son Gene, he is survived by another son, Francis; a daughter, Catherine Oursler; and four grandchildren.

With the 1960s, the Colony began to show its age. Mr. Cavallero banned miniskirts, then relented. He tried to bar pantsuits, but again gave in.

Still, a residual glamour adhered to the restaurant. Photographers dispatched by John Fairchild, who became publisher of Women’s Wear Daily in 1960, snapped pictures of Betsy Bloomingdale, Amanda Burden, Jill St. John and other regulars as they left the Colony after lunch.

But as the 1970s loomed, terminal fatigue set in. The new social set found other places to dine. Gael Greene, the saucy restaurant critic for New York magazine, drove the final nail in the coffin in a lethal review titled “Colony Waxworks.” Mr. Cavallero, bedeviled by rising rents and union troubles, decided to call it a day.

“People don’t dine these days, they simply eat,” he complained to The Times in a front-page article on the restaurant’s demise. “But rather than turn the Colony into a hash house, I prefer to close.”

After selling the wine cellar to a customer and giving away the silver, Mr. Cavallero sold the Colony’s lease to a Long Island restaurateur, Carl Demler, who reopened it in 1973, without success.

Mr. Cavallero wrote “The Colony Cookbook,” with Ted James, and opened a nightspot, Club Cavallero, on East 58th Street. In 1977 he moved to Phoenix, where he briefly ran a soufflé restaurant called Raffles.

“Listen, the Colony was fun, a pleasure, a challenge every night,” Mr. Cavallero told Vanity Fair. “We did exactly what we set out to do. We made everyone happy.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/17/nyregion/gene-cavallero-jr-who-ran-the-colony-restaurant-dies-at-92.html?

A Secret Section of Central Park Reopens
By JAMES BARRONMAY 10, 2016

Since the days when Fiorello H. La Guardia was mayor and Franklin D. Roosevelt was president, it has been a well-kept secret of New York City — to people, if not to migrating birds, the occasional wandering coyote and annoying, invasive plants like wisteria: a four-acre peninsula in Central Park that the groundskeepers did not bother with and that was off limits to the public.

Officially, anyway.

Now it is on its way to being less isolated. Not since the 1930s has it been open regularly; now, it will be — from 2 to 5 p.m. three days a week through June 30, and four days a week from July 1 to Aug. 31 with slightly different hours.

The opening is the result of work done under the Central Park Conservancy’s Woodlands Initiative, a $40 million project that involved revitalizing areas of the 843-acre park, including the Promontory, as the peninsula was originally known. It received minimal maintenance even after it was renamed the Hallett Nature Sanctuary in 1986 as the conservancy dealt with more prominent parts of the park. But it remained fenced off.

It still is, but it has a new, rustic gate and new pathways. There is also a sanctuary within the sanctuary — benches at the top of the Promontory — given by Sima Ghadamian, a dealer in rare gems who has lived nearby for the last couple of years, and her husband, Morad, an investor and carpet importer, and named for her parents, Mahrokh and Iradj Sakhai.

“The story is, Robert Moses closed it off because he wanted it to turn into a bird sanctuary,” said Douglas Blonsky, who as president and chief executive of the Central Park Conservancy is the park’s administrator. Moses became the parks commissioner in 1934.

So, yes, the birds made the sanctuary a stop on their way north in the spring or south in the fall. But the trees and plants that settled in were the wrong kind: Norway maples, black cherries, Japanese knotgrasses — invasives all.

"Wisteria was a huge problem, too,” Mr. Blonsky said. “In a woodland, it will strangle everything, and that’s what was happening here.” The sanctuary, on a big boulder made of Manhattan schist, was covered with wisteria, he said. Leading the way to the sanctuary on Wednesday, he said some root systems remain embedded in the creases in the rock, despite parks workers’ efforts to weed them out.

Mr. Blonsky said parks workers began the labor-intensive process of clearing the sanctuary about 15 years ago. It became a stop on tours for high school students, with parks workers opening a gate, but it was not open to the public, although he said that homeless people often found a way in.


Ms. Ghadamian said she heard about the Promontory after visiting a friend who had leukemia and soon died. “I thought, ‘I’m having such a hard time, and I have a support system with family and friends,’” she said. “I thought, ‘How hard it is to be in New York and not have that, not have a place someone could go.’”

The Hallett sanctuary was supposed to be such a place, but, she said, “Everything was so overgrown.” Now, with new pathways and benches, she said, “It’s exactly how I think Frederick Olmsted wanted it.”

Olmsted, of course, was, with Calvert Vaux, a designer of the park, and to Ms. Ghadamian he was an inspiring figure, not only for the park, but also for his other accomplishments, including his work on the United States Sanitary Commission, whose mission was to improve sanitation in the Union Army’s camps during the Civil War and thus the health of its soldiers.

“He got vegetables to soldiers and stopped scurvy,” Ms. Ghadamian said. “He really saved so many lives. To me, as an immigrant, that was how America does something special.”

Ms. Ghadamian, who was born in Tehran, arrived in New York in June 1978. Her first memory of Central Park is from the following summer. “I said, ‘This cannot be a park,’ and I never went back for maybe 15 years,” she recalled. “This looked nothing like parks in England where I had lived. It was a dump. It looked like a wasteland with needles” — addicts, even before the crack epidemic of the 1980s. “It was soulless,” she said.

Ms. Ghadamian and her husband now live in an apartment on Fifth Avenue that once belonged to Nelson A. Rockefeller. It looks over the park, and they can see the sanctuary from their windows, prompting a visitor to wonder why Mr. Rockefeller, who pushed for so many building projects when he was governor, did not do something about the Promontory.

“He probably never noticed it,” she said. “You could pass by there many, many times and never know it’s there.”

The conservancy recently extended irrigation lines into the sanctuary, so workers could water the area regularly. Workers also replaced the invasive plants they removed with native species — Dutchman’s breeches, shooting stars and trillium, among others.

Ms. Ghadamian said she left the planting to the conservancy, for a reason.

“I’m not a good gardener at all,” she said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/11/nyregion/a-secret-section-of-central-park-reopens.html?action=click&module=MostEmailed®ion=Lists&pgtype=collection

BACK STORY Seventy years ago today, as World War II was nearing an end, a twin-engine B-25 bomber was on a personnel flight to La Guardia Airport in dense fog.

Trying to find his way instead to the airport in Newark in the blinding cloud, the pilot narrowly missed the Chrysler Building.


Damage to the Empire State Building 70 years ago today. Credit Bettmann/Corbis

A minute later, the plane crashed into the 79th floor of the Empire State Building, then the world’s tallest office building.

The three plane occupants died, as did 11 workers in the offices of the National Catholic Welfare Conference, and dozens were injured. But the toll could have been far worse had it not been a Saturday morning.

“Brilliant orange flames shot as high as the observatory on the eighty-sixth floor of the building” above Fifth Avenue as the gas tanks exploded, The Times reported.

Miraculously, the building’s standpipes were intact, and the fire took only 40 minutes to extinguish.

And despite the crater in the tower’s north face, the building’s structural integrity remained intact.

The legacy of the crash is landmark 1946 legislation that for the first time gave Americans the right to sue the federal government.

Victoria Shannon contributed reporting.

New York Night Life Carries Perks, and Risks, for Athletes
By SCOTT CACCIOLAAPRIL 9, 2015

It was, if nothing else, a feat of extraordinary endurance.

About six hours after Thabo Sefolosha and Pero Antic helped the Atlanta Hawks to a 27-point victory over the Phoenix Suns in Atlanta, they were on a city sidewalk in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan at 4 a.m. Wednesday, detained by the police in the wake of an incident involving a third N.B.A. player outside 1Oak, a Manhattan nightclub favored by athletes and celebrities.

And lest anyone forget — and this might be the most surprising element of the ordeal — the Hawks had a game scheduled for Wednesday night.

Sefolosha, 30, and Antic, 32, were absent from the Hawks’ victory that night over the Nets, as they dealt with the fallout from their alleged actions outside 1Oak, an expansive, dimly lighted club on 17th Street that caters to the young, rich and beautiful.

Some of the details are well known. Minutes after Chris Copeland of the Indiana Pacers was stabbed in the abdomen during an argument with another individual, Sefolosha and Antic were arrested and charged with interfering in the investigation, the authorities said.

Sefolosha was told on Thursday that he had a broken ankle, a season-ending injury the team said he sustained during the incident. He also has ligament damage and will require surgery.

The incident shined a light on some athletes’ late-night appetites. Consider, for example, that Antic and Sefolosha happened to be at 1Oak at the same time as Copeland, said Lauren Menache, a senior account executive at Berk Communications, which counts 1Oak as one of its clients.

But it was more than mere coincidence. The club is one of several in the city popular among players, Menache said. Visiting teams often stay at nearby hotels, and players know — largely through word of mouth — that they will be taken care of by management.

“There’s a comfort level that their anonymity will hold up and they’ll be treated nicely,” Menache said. “They know exactly who to ask for when they arrive.”

Back when he played for the Knicks, J. R. Smith was a regular at 1Oak. Last season, when he was in the midst of getting in trouble with the league for untying opponents’ shoelaces, Smith was photographed at 1Oak pretending to untie the shoelaces of another patron. The photograph made the rounds on social media.

Smith now plays for the Cleveland Cavaliers, and he recently told reporters that he owed his newfound success, at least in part, to the city’s lack of night life. There are fewer distractions in Cleveland, he said, which has made it easier for him to focus on basketball.

Of course, professional athletes going out late at night, especially in New York, is a ritual as old as professional sports themselves. Wayne Embry, 78, who works as a special adviser for the Toronto Raptors, spent the bulk of his 11-year playing career with the Cincinnati Royals before he retired in 1969. Road trips to New York, he said, were always a treat, because he and his teammates often took advantage of opportunities to visit the city’s great jazz clubs, like the Village Vanguard.

Afterward, players would make their way to Big Wilt’s Smalls Paradise, a late-night lounge in Harlem that was co-owned at the time by Wilt Chamberlain.

“It was just a great place,” Embry said in a telephone interview. “What made it special was that all the entertainers would head there after their shows. They’d come to Smalls and keep the jam going.”

Smalls, as it was known, typically stayed open until 4 or 5 a.m. Embry recalled seeing Otis Redding at the club one night.

“It was unbelievable,” Embry said. “And I was out past curfew, but it was after a game against the Knicks. We definitely weren’t playing the next day.”

Jon Barry, an analyst for ABC and ESPN, cited New York, Los Angeles and Miami as cities that are particularly popular among players.

“People aren’t going to be going out in Milwaukee,” he said.

While Barry said his night-life days were “long past” — his playing career ended in 2006 — he recalled trips to the China Club, a staple of New York’s club scene in the 1990s.

The China Club, whose original location was on 75th Street, on the Upper West Side, was the 1Oak of its day, a go-to spot for the elite. Members of the N.H.L.’s Rangers were frequent guests. “The China Club was hot,” Barry said. “I remember seeing Mark Messier, after they won in 1994, with a tableful of 20 women.”

At the same time, Barry said, it was unusual for athletes to stay out past 4 a.m., especially when they have a game the next day. In light of this week’s events, Barry did note that Copeland had fallen out of the Pacers’ regular rotation. As for Antic and Sefolosha, they are valued contributors off the bench.

“I’m sure that you might take a few more liberties if you know you’re not playing,” Barry said. “But you shouldn’t be anywhere at 4 a.m. Only bad things can happen at 4 a.m.”

Curfews are uncommon in the N.B.A. Neither the Hawks nor the Pacers impose them. Derek Fisher, the coach of the Knicks, said he expected his players to act responsibly.

“We’re talking about adult men,” Fisher said. “I don’t think you get into defining what time guys go to bed.”

Of the five teams that he played for during his career, only one, he said, imposed a curfew: the Utah Jazz.

“Every guy is different,” Fisher said. “I played with guys who couldn’t sleep at night. They watched television. They watched film on their computers. They went to music studios. They did tons of stuff that allowed them to decompress or be away from the game, or whatever it was they like to do. It’s about your performance in the games.”

Sefolosha was arraigned on charges of resisting arrest, obstructing governmental administration and disorderly conduct. Antic was arraigned on charges of obstructing governmental administration, harassment and disorderly conduct. A lawyer for the two players said he expected the case to dismissed.

Copeland’s alleged assailant, Shevoy Bleary Murdock, 22, was arraigned Thursday on assault charges. According to the criminal complaint, Bleary Murdock got into an argument with Copeland and a female companion, and then stabbed Copeland in the diaphragm with a switchblade. A judge set bail at $20,000.

After graduating from high school, Bleary Murdock received an athletic scholarship for track and field to Coppin State University in Baltimore. But after he was injured and lost his scholarship, he joined the Army, his legal aide lawyer, Michael Perkins, said. Bleary Murdock was honorably discharged in 2014 and currently works at the James Hotel, Perkins said.

Copeland, 31, who remained hospitalized Thursday, issued a statement through the team in which he apologized for his “bad choice at being out at that time.”




James C. McKinley Jr. contributed reporting.

Labor Day and the Yankees are not playing. Just another example how Selig has screwed up the game.

He can't retire soon enough.

Reliving Glory Days of Stickball
By MICHAEL BROZINSKY
August 26, 2014 8:56 amAugust 26, 2014 12:25 pm

Dear Diary:

Last winter I went into a hardware store in Plainview, N.Y., and saw, much to my surprise, a box of Spalding “ High Bounce” balls. I bought one for $2.50, remembering that when I left my old Bensonhurst neighborhood in 1960, the price was but a quarter.

My plan of action was to visit my old schoolyard of P.S. 205 when the weather warmed up. There used to be seven stickball strike zones chalked onto the walls there. I planned to ask someone to take pictures of my 71-year-old self recreating his youth by pitching the Spalding into one of the strike zones. Much to my dismay, when I returned in June there were no chalk strike zones to be found. Undaunted, I showed one of the kids playing what we once called Chinese handball or “king-queen” how to take a video with my phone. (The kids now called this game watermelon.)

As I pitched the Spalding onto the now blank wall, I wondered why the kid whom I had chosen as my videographer held my phone at strange angles. I reached my now-imaginary strike zones on two of five pitches and, satisfied with that, took my phone, said thank you and left.

As I exited the schoolyard and walked down 68th Street, I looked at the history I thought had just been recorded. All I saw was sky and ground! You can’t go home again!

http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/08/26/reliving-glory-days-of-stickball/?ref=nyregion

A Brooklyn Bridge Mystery: Who Raised the White Flags?
By VIVIAN YEEJULY 22, 2014


“This could be someone’s art project or someone’s statement. We’re just not clear what that statement is,” said John Miller, a deputy commissioner at the Police Department. Credit Andrew Renneisen/The New York Times

The flags looked innocent enough, billowing merrily in the breeze, pure white against a clear summer sky.

Then came the double-take, for thousands of New Yorkers, camera-toting tourists, maintenance workers and residents gazing out the window as they sipped their morning coffee: The flags above the Brooklyn Bridge are not white.

At least, not usually.

The bridge, a landmark so iconic it is frequently one of the first structures to be smashed to pieces in apocalyptic movies, always flies enormous American flags above its two towers.

Not so on Tuesday morning.

“I’m not particularly happy about the event,” said Police Commissioner William J. Bratton, whose officers evidently missed something overnight.

Surveillance footage shows a group crossing the bridge around 3:10 a.m., shortly before the lights illuminating the flags on both towers went out, said John Miller, the Police Department’s deputy commissioner of counterterrorism. What appeared to be large aluminum pans, like those to cook lasagna for a crowd, had apparently been used to cover the lights.

Those responsible probably had some climbing experience, perhaps even on bridges, Mr. Miller said.

“At this time, no particular nexus to terrorism or politics,” he said. “This could be someone’s art project or someone’s statement. We’re just not clear what that statement is.”

They were not alone.

Robert Langdon, the fictional Harvard symbologist of “The Da Vinci Code,” would have had a field day with the stunt. The white flag of surrender seemed the obvious allusion, until it emerged that the flags were actually bleached Old Glories, raising confused questions of patriotism and politics.

Then there was the choice of the Brooklyn Bridge.

“I suspect a protest,” as Mike Hout, 64, a resident of the Dumbo neighborhood, put it, “but of what?”

An officer on the bridge told Carolyn Peterson that the police initially thought a film shoot in Dumbo might be responsible, but the film crew had denied involvement, Ms. Peterson said.

“Aliens,” declared someone named Alex, on Twitter.

“Manhattan surrendering to Brooklyn,” suggested Rebecca Mead, a writer for The New Yorker.

Others proposed a connection to politics — a show of strength from Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, perhaps — or a power grab by Letitia James, the public advocate, who has not so subtly explored the possibility of assuming some of the mayor’s powers while he vacations in Italy. (Ms. James said on Tuesday that she was “deeply concerned” about the security breach.)

But no conspiracy theory was given more credence — at least initially — than the announcement, by the Twitter account @BicycleLobby, that it had hoisted white flags “to signal our complete surrender of the Brooklyn Bridge bicycle path to pedestrians.” The post was a joke, news organizations that had taken it at face value discovered to their chagrin.

The authorities were at a loss on Tuesday morning. Asked to explain the situation, a spokesman for the Police Department, Detective Martin Speechley, reported this: “There’s a white flag on the Brooklyn Bridge.”

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Were they investigating? “Course, yeah.”
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Recent Comments


Kay Johnson
7 hours ago
Maybe old Banksy is bored with stencil projects and is branching out to something more bracingly ambiguous. Those flags are probably already...

Counter Measures
7 hours ago
Why were they put there? To help reiterate what I have been saying for a while on these threads! From the easy access to the new World Trade...

Paul B.
8 hours ago
Some one must be tfired for this. Walking up the bridge in the dark is not easy, and takes a while. How come no one noticed the ligt were...
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The bridge has suffered more than its share of indignities over the years, including, most recently, the “locks of love” — affixed by couples — that the Transportation Department has deemed a safety hazard. But it has also been a Qaeda target: The mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, once told an operative to destroy the bridge by cutting its suspension cables.

Now cameras and marked police cars guard the entrances. A police boat lurks nearby in the East River. Round-the-clock security cameras watch the point on shore where the suspension cables are anchored.

Eric Adams, the Brooklyn borough president, offered a $5,000 reward on Tuesday for information about the perpetrators out of his own pocket, saying that if it was a prank, “I’m not laughing.”

On the bridge, New Yorkers and tourists veered between fear, puzzlement and absurdist humor.

“The first thing I told myself is, ‘That’s a warning sign,’ ” said Jeffrey Brown, 37, who sells water and Gatorade on the bridge. “Where’s your security at?”

Nearby, Nick Krevatas, one of the workers who were to hoist the new 12-by-18-foot red, white and blue flags that arrived in a Transportation Department truck by early afternoon, pulled on an elaborate harness.
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“I feel we’ve been tampered with on our soil,” he said, a fat cigar clamped in the corner of his mouth. (He was still smoking it as he walked up the suspension cable to the towers.)

His theory?

“Something political, I guess,” he mused. “It’s got to mean something.”

Annie Correal and J. David Goodman contributed reporting.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/23/nyregion/white-flags-mysteriously-appear-atop-the-brooklyn-bridge.html?ref=nyregion

As 9/11 Museum Opens, These New Yorkers Will Stay Away
By ALAN FEUERMAY 16, 2014

The National September 11 Memorial Museum is meant to be an exercise in the cathartic power of memory. At its formal unveiling on Thursday, President Obama gave a somber speech, remarking that the lives of those who died in the terrorist attacks in 2001 would be honored by the stories told “in the footprint of two mighty towers.”

But for some New Yorkers, the memories and stories are already too present, and despite the importance of the museum’s message — and despite its great reviews — they do not plan to visit when it opens to the public next week.

Some people said they did not need a public exhibition to remind them of a personal tragedy that they could not forget. Others simply said they would not find healing or relief at the memorial — only more pain.

The local ambivalence is a complicated mixture of survivors’ pride (“Don’t tell me what I saw”) and emotional fatigue (“I don’t want to see it anymore”). But it also stems from the museum’s own complicated mission, which, as Holland Cotter noted in his review in The New York Times, is to be at once “a historical document, a monument to the dead” and “a theme-park-style tourist attraction.”

“I don’t know what I’m supposed to feel,” said Justine Tourneau, a 30-year-old actress, who was waiting on Thursday morning for a J train to arrive at Marcy Street in Brooklyn. “Am I supposed to cry? Or get angry? Or just stand there, being silent? It’s too confusing. I’d rather not go.”

The hesitation seems particularly acute among those who were in the city on the day of the attacks and who lost someone close.

“Look, it’s not the Natural History Museum,” said Jim Riches, a former chief in the Fire Department, whose son, Jim Jr., also a firefighter, died on Sept. 11. “I know plenty of guys who won’t go down there because they were there for months when it was Dante’s inferno. The memories are just too much. They simply won’t go back.”

At the time of the attack, Bill Grueskin was working for The Wall Street Journal in the World Financial Center across the street from ground zero. He still has not forgotten how the streets were enveloped in a cloud of ghostly smoke. To make matters worse, Mr. Grueskin was living just down the street in Battery Park City then. So for him, the experience was total — no escape.

“The fact is, I’d like to see the museum,” said Mr. Grueskin, who is now a dean at the Columbia Journalism School, “but I’m not sure I can do it surrounded by people who didn’t go through what I went through. I’m not saying I deserve it, but I’d really like to see the place in private. I just can’t bear the thought of being there with all the buses and tourists in silly hats.”

This week, some of the victims’ relatives appeared at the memorial to protest a decision by officials to transfer the unidentified remains of some of those who died from the Manhattan medical examiner’s office to a specially built repository under the museum. Almost from the moment that the plans for the museum got underway, the families have differed with one another about its purpose and design. Some have even differed among themselves.

“My family is a mixed bag,” said Kathy Bowden, whose brother, Thomas Bowden Jr., died in the attack. “I’m open to it. It hurts to see it, but it also, for me, soothes the hurt a little each time. My husband hates the museum. He hates the idea of having a place, because he hates the idea that 9/11 even happened.”

Discomfort with the museum was felt not just by those with a close connection to the terrorist attacks. The Times on Wednesday asked readers to respond to the question, “Will you visit the National September 11 Memorial Museum?” Of the 150 or so answers, a majority were negative: “I don’t think so,” “not likely,” “no way,” “not a chance.”

“I won’t visit it anytime soon,” Mitch Abidor, a 62-year-old retired hospital administrator, wrote. “It promises to be filled with gawking, ghoulish out-of-towners who will overwhelm the New Yorkers, who lived through the sorrow of those days and will have a hard time getting in.”

Another reader, identified as Samrn, wrote: “The few times in the past near-14 years I have had to be downtown started with tears that progressed to stress-induced asthma and ended with a return of the nightmares. This place will exist for the tourists. My memories are enough trauma for me.”

Some in the city said they would encourage tourists to visit the museum, even if they themselves had no interest in visiting.

“I would go if a family member came down and wanted to go,” said Sarah Summerwell, 27, a bartender who works on Chambers Street.

“But I don’t think it’s something I’d look to come down to see myself. As someone who works in this neighborhood, ground zero is a real presence you feel every day.”

And waiting for a bus near Central Park, Robin Tempelman, a 49-year-old psychologist, said: “I just don’t feel like visiting because it’s in the past and I’m comfortable with how I dealt with it. If other people want to go, I think it’s great.”

Then there was John Cartier, whose brother, James, died on the 105th floor of the south tower. Mr. Cartier said he did plan to visit the museum, in honor of his brother, even if he felt it was not designed for him.

“It was made for people who don’t really know what 9/11 is about,” Mr. Cartier explained. “No one who went through what we went through needs a museum to tell us what we lost. We already know that in our hearts.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/17/nyregion/9-11-museum-not-a-must-see-site-for-all-new-yorkers.html?ref=nyregion

I'll pass.

Cartier Moves North From Perch on Fifth Avenue
APRIL 1, 2014

For the next two years, Cartier’s signature spotted panther will loom over the jeweler’s Fifth Avenue flagship store, gazing intently from the top of a mesh drape over the building as it undergoes extensive renovation.

The French jeweler closed its doors at Fifth Avenue and 52nd Street on Saturday, and is relocating this week just a little farther north on Fifth Avenue to the General Motors Building, which is also home to F.A.O. Schwarz and Apple.

Exactly when Cartier’s diamond, gold, precious gem and watch inventory is being moved has remained a secret, cloaked to avoid any possible high-stakes heists. The temporary store is expected to open on Friday, and some suggest that the G.M. site may become a permanent, second Fifth Avenue store in future years.

Cartier’s new site in the G.M. building had previously housed the studio for “The Early Show” on CBS, and it features 8,000 square feet of selling space, making it the company’s largest United States store, followed by its store in Beverly Hills, Calif., (with 6,300 square feet of selling space). The new store will have 22-foot ceilings and display décor by Bruno Moinard, who designs Cartier stores worldwide.

The flagship store occupies the 1905 Italian Renaissance-style building at 653 Fifth Avenue, on the east side of Fifth between 51st and 52nd Streets, which Robert W. Gibson designed for the financier Morton F. Plant.

Pierre Cartier, a grandson of the company’s founder who established the company’s United States operation in 1909, bought the estate in 1917 and lived on its top floors. According to a 1984 history, “Cartier — Jewelers Extraordinary,” by Hans Nadelhoffer, Mr. Cartier offered to buy the limestone house in exchange for a double-strand pearl necklace worth about $1 million that Mr. Plant’s wife, Mae, had admired.

Mr. Cartier also bought a townhouse, on East 52nd Street, which was incorporated into the store. The buildings are today owned by Williston S.A., a company controlled by the Alexander S. Onassis Foundation; the Oxford Properties Group; and Crown Acquisitions. The foundation’s office tower is east of Cartier’s flagship boutique, running from 51st to 52nd Streets.



Emmanuel Perrin, president and chief executive of Cartier International — the United States operation of Cartier, a Richemont brand — said the company had opted to renovate the flagship store because it had “outgrown the size of the boutique and needed more space to take care of our clients.”

The last time the flagship store was renovated was in 2001. Since then, Mr. Perrin said, Cartier has had “incredible footfall. The boutique is aging and she has the advantage to be able to get a face-lift every now and then.”

To lead the renovation, Cartier hired Beyer Blinder Belle, an architecture firm based in New York that specializes in historic preservation and that worked on the 1980s restoration of Ellis Island, and Thierry W. Despont, a New York-based interior designer from Limoges, France, who worked on the 1980s restoration of the Statue of Liberty.

Richard Southwick, a partner at Beyer Blinder Belle and its director of historic preservation, said the renovation plans included a leveling of all retail space on the first floor, enlargement of the penthouse to serve as a new event space, and redesign of the Fifth Avenue storefront. A curved, large bay in the center of a three-bay front design will contain the store’s entrance. Mr. Southwick said this would “now align with the axial symmetry of the retail plan within the building.”

The renovation will also feature a new, open staircase that will connect all four floors of retail space. The sales space will increase to 21,500 square feet on the four levels, in addition to a mezzanine, from the existing 8,600 square feet now on two levels.

The building will also undergo installation of new heating, ventilation, air conditioning, lighting, fire protection and audiovisual systems. Mr. Southwick said his firm’s biggest challenge here would be “incorporating 21st-century technology into an early 20th-century mansion.”

Mr. Perrin said Cartier was in fact increasingly relying on iPads — which it began testing in the United States market two years ago — to serve its customers, both to discuss merchandise and process sales.

Mr. Perrin declined to specify the cost of the flagship renovations or establishment of the store in the G.M. building, which is owned by Boston Properties, the Safra family of Brazil and the family of Zhang Xin, the chief executive of a development company based in Beijing.

Industry executives said Cartier was paying rents of approximately $1,225 a square foot in the G.M. building, and about $3,300 a square foot in its flagship boutique, figures Mr. Perrin declined to confirm.

He said the new site was being outfitted as if it would become a permanent store, adding that “it absolutely could become permanent.”

Virginia Pittarelli, principal of Crown Retail Services, said, “It would not surprise me if the 59th Street store becomes a permanent store because there are enough consumers and traffic to support both locations.”

New luxury residences under construction in the neighborhood — in One57, the Nordstrom Tower, 111 West 57th Street and 432 Park Avenue — as well as upscale new hotels there like the Park Hyatt New York and Viceroy New York — no doubt would house fitting clientele.

Robert Gibson, vice chairman of Jones Lang LaSalle, said Cartier would have “two years to figure out if having two major Fifth Avenue stores works for them. It could happen if there is enough demand, or if one store had a certain kind of product and a different kind of product were sold at 59th Street.”

Cartier also has a store at 828 Madison Avenue, at 69th Street, with 1,000 square feet of selling space, and a boutique in Saks Fifth Avenue, with 1,240 square feet of selling space.

David Wu, a luxury goods analyst for the Telsey Advisory Group, estimated that the 52nd Street store generated a “double digit percentage” of Cartier’s sales in the United States. He also said sales in the Americas, most from the United States, made up approximately 15 percent of Richemont’s global sales in its last fiscal year, with Cartier generating an estimated 40 percent of Richemont’s total sales.

Longer term, Mr. Wu said that although Cartier’s store in the G.M. building store was likely to become permanent, it could also be converted into a store for another Richemont brand; these include Van Cleef and Arpels, Piaget and Montblanc.

In 2012, Richemont bought a 25,000-square-foot retail condominium inside the St. Regis Hotel, at Fifth Avenue and 55th Street, for approximately $380 million; it is expected to go into retailing there once current tenants’ leases expire.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/02/realestate/commercial/cartier-moves-north-from-perch-on-fifth-avenue.html?ref=business

12 Years of Mayor Bloomberg

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD


When he walked into the mayor’s office 12 years ago, businessman and billionaire Michael Bloomberg took charge of a damaged city. The World Trade Center was a windblown construction site, barely cleared after the attacks on Sept. 11. Tourists were afraid to come to the city; residents were afraid to stay. The budget was a disaster, $3 billion to $5 billion in the red. In a modest speech at an intentionally modest inauguration, Mr. Bloomberg nevertheless pledged to rebuild and renew New York and to keep it “the capital of the free world.”

As he leaves office this week, Mr. Bloomberg has, in many ways, fulfilled that promise. New York is once again a thriving, appealing city where, Mr. Bloomberg boasts, more people are moving in than out. More than 54 million tourists, the most ever, crowded the streets in 2013. The crime rate is down, the transportation system is more efficient, the environment is cleaner. He leaves a $2.4 billion budget surplus, which could give the next mayor, Bill de Blasio, some flexibility in his negotiations with the unions.

Yet as Mr. de Blasio’s election showed, opportunity and prosperity have been unevenly distributed. The homeless population has grown, and for a great many others, the paychecks have been too small, the rents too high. And in perhaps his worst mistake — authorizing a police practice found unconstitutional by a federal court — Mr. Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly humiliated and alienated black and Hispanic communities by having stop-and-frisk turn into a generalized method of harassing law-abiding citizens.

On the plus side, one of his underappreciated accomplishments was to make public service a valued vocation for a new group of urban experts. Despite the occasional mistake, he hired mostly top-notch professionals without political pedigrees, and challenged them to try new ideas.

With their help, he recaptured mayoral control of the schools, and with it full responsibility for their performance. He rezoned almost half the city, hoping to turn (and in some cases actually turning) industrial deserts into sites for skyscrapers or residential housing — among them Hunter’s Point South, with thousands of new affordable units, in Queens; the Hudson Yards on Manhattan’s West Side (plus a new subway extension to get people there); and the Greenpoint-Williamsburg complex in Brooklyn.

He created a healthier city, where smokers are now taboo in many public and private spaces, where calorie counts are publicized and where trans fats are forbidden. He opened 800 acres of outdoor space, much of it along the city’s shorelines, expanded bike lanes to cover more than 600 miles and added a fleet of Citi bikes for tourists and commuters. He fought to reduce greenhouse gases, approved a balanced plan to dispose of the city’s enormous waste stream, and, after initially rejecting recycling as too costly, became a strong advocate of it. Using private funds, including his own, he helped create new parks like the High Line and the new greenway on Governors Island. After Hurricane Sandy, he began updating building codes and created a long-range plan to help defend the city against future storms.

The mayor’s team helped him in less dramatic but still useful ways. There’s a new green apple taxi fleet for the outer boroughs and broad pedestrian-friendly plazas on Times Square. He made it possible for a splendid new high-tech university campus to be built on Roosevelt Island. He established the 311 telephone number to help people with routine problems like malfunctioning traffic lights, noise complaints and questions about trash pickup on snowy days.

A master of numbers, Mr. Bloomberg displayed few political skills. His unscripted comments, especially about the poor, can range from thoughtless to heartless.

Mr. Bloomberg insists that crime has declined in part because of stop-and-frisk, but crime has also declined in other cities that did not make it a practice to stop law-abiding people. Between 2004 and 2012, the police made an estimated 4.4 million stops seeking illegal weapons. Half of all people stopped were frisked, but only 1.5 percent of frisks found weapons, and only 12 percent of all stops resulted in any type of summons or arrest. In August, a federal district judge ruled that this indiscriminate use of stop-and-frisk was unconstitutional. Mr. de Blasio has said he will not go forward with an appeal of that ruling.

Mr. Bloomberg’s efforts to modernize the city payroll became a scandal. By the end of the investigation, eight people were convicted of cheating the city out of millions of dollars. And his donations to political parties to gain favor and ballot lines were an embarrassment, though not illegal.

The increase in the homeless population on his watch was not entirely his doing; both Albany and Washington pulled the plug on necessary programs. But Mr. Bloomberg aggravated matters by canceling a sound public housing strategy, thus sending more people to the streets and to homeless shelters. And while he can hardly be faulted for encouraging greater investment, many New Yorkers — not least Mr. de Blasio — felt that he unduly favored the banking and real estate interests and did not do nearly enough to help the working poor and those at the bottom.

Over all, however, New York is in better shape than when he became mayor. As Citizen Bloomberg moves on to private life, and takes on various causes like gun control, immigration reform, climate change and healthier cities, we can only wish him well.

There are more than 22,000 homeless children in New York, the highest number since the Great Depression. This is one of their stories.

http://www.nytimes.com/projects/2013/invisible-child/#/?chapt=1

As Jersey Shore Boardwalk Smolders, Investigation Continues

By KATE ZERNIKE and MARC SANTORA


The investigation into what sparked a devastating fire on Thursday that destroyed dozens of businesses along one of the most famous boardwalks on the Jersey Shore has not yet determined a cause, said Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey.

“We need to let the fire investigators do their job,” Mr. Christie said at a news conference Friday. Even as local business owners speculated about how the blaze was started, Mr. Christie said it would be irresponsible to jump to any conclusions.

“We honestly have no idea,” Mr. Christie said. “It is not even 24 hours since the fire started. We spent all of our time and resources on fighting the fire.”

The extent of the damage became clear Friday morning, as firefighters continued to hose down smoldering embers and search for other hot pockets that could pose a danger.

More than 400 firefighters battled the blaze for hours Thursday and into the morning Friday. Twice, they dug fire break trenches in an effort to stop its spread along the same stretch of boardwalk that was hard hit during Hurricane Sandy less than one year ago.

Mr. Christie said that four entire blocks were destroyed.

“We lost a place that has provided generations of memories to our citizens,” he said.

The Music Sound shop was reduced to a smoldering wreck. Bubba’s Dog House, Three Brothers from Italy Pizza, Kupper’s French Fries, Jack-N-Bills Bar were just a few of the summer favorites completely leveled.

Daniel Shauger, manager of the Funtown Park Arcade, surveyed the damage to his business from a distance.

“Everyone is struggling down here, and now everything is completely destroyed,” he said. He was anxious to get inside and take a look at what was left, but knew he might have to wait awhile.

“I am sure everything inside has to be replaced, and somehow it will be,” he said. “We have a few tough years ahead of us but we will come back.”

While it was too early to put a financial toll on the fire, officials said that some 50 businesses were damaged or destroyed. The area was being treated as a crime scene, which Mr. Christie said was the case after any fire where the cause is unclear.

Mr. Christie first arrived on the scene Thursday night as the fire sent plumes of smoke into the sky, visible for miles, and was immediately struck by the scope of the damage.

“I said to my staff, ‘I feel like I want to throw up,'” he said.

According to eyewitness accounts, the blaze appears to have started at an iconic ice cream shop along the boardwalk and within 15 minutes it was out of control, quickly engulfing businesses along a stretch of beach in two towns.

Flames and black plumes of smoke shot high above the Boardwalk in Seaside Park, where the fire began after 2 p.m. Within hours, strong gusts of wind of 35 miles per hour swept the fire north along the adjoining Boardwalk of Seaside Heights, where a roller coaster had sat mangled in the ocean for months and became a symbol of the storm’s damage.

Funtown Pier, nearly destroyed by the hurricane, collapsed in flames. And nearby, the fire appeared to have ruined a historic carousel that had been painstakingly restored after the storm and reopened just months ago.

Standing in front of emergency vehicles on Thursday night in Seaside Heights, Gov. Christie called the blaze “unthinkable.”

“I can only imagine,” he added, “how the residents and business owners in this town are feeling.”

Johnny Nysether, 24, a local resident whose first job was in a candy store on the Boardwalk, said that the business had “gone up in smoke.”

“Watching it burn is a lot like watching it drown,” he said, comparing the fire to Hurricane Sandy. “I have a lot of friends and family that just lost their jobs.”

Rory Delaney, who co-owned a commercial building on the Boardwalk, said that her building was “gone, it’s rubble.” That building had reopened in mid-July after being damaged during Hurricane Sandy. “We just finished work on the basement last week,” she said.

The fire was a devastating setback to an area that could little afford one as it struggled to get back on its feet nearly a year after Hurricane Sandy. The towns, along a sliver of barrier island, suffered the worst of the storm’s damage.

Mr. Christie toured Seaside Heights the morning after it hit on Oct. 29, and seeing its Log Flume roller coaster and ramshackle sausage and pepper stands washed away, declared “the Jersey Shore of my youth” gone.

He returned in May to tour the amusements along the pier with Prince Harry of Britain, who hailed “the fantastic American spirit” of recovery there.

But with many residents still out of their homes, and many businesses still boarded up, the summer had been far from normal.

The fire apparently began at the Seaside Park location of Kohr’s Frozen Custard, where the candy colored signs proudly boasted of serving the Shore for nearly a century.

The governor and other officials repeatedly declined to speculate on what had caused the fire. But it was fueled by high winds, what Mayor Robert Matthies of Seaside Park called “a combination of the worst elements at one time.”

Its flames quickly spread to a condominium development in Seaside Heights and threatened homes and businesses several blocks inland.

“This is another tremendous wrench in the recovery,” Mr. Matthies told reporters.

Foodrunners at the Sawmill Cafe saw the fire begin at the Kohr’s next door and one grabbed a fire extinguisher to put it out. “But it just moved too fast,” said Michael Popek, a manager at the cafe.

The Sawmill, he said, reopened in spring. “It breaks your heart. Everything along the Boardwalk was closed. We were just happy to be open this summer and have some business. We were struggling all summer.”

The police had closed a significant portion of Route 35, the major artery north from Seaside Park through Seaside Heights and other towns of the popular summer playground. They had also closed one of the bridges connecting it to the mainland.

Firefighters were being treated for smoke inhalation, but officials said early on that it appeared there were no serious injuries.

With the state’s schools reopening by this week, the town’s population had shrunk back to the relatively small number of year-round residents and shoulder-season tourists enjoying a last sultry day of summer.

Many of those left stood behind yellow police tape, watching as firefighters battled the fire, standing in cherry-pickers and pouring water onto rooftops as flames shot up from buildings.

One business owner could be seen dousing his roof with water in an attempt to prevent the fire catching hold.

With its brightly lighted arcades and stalls selling a sugar high, the Boardwalk has been the center of local life, and tourism, for generations. On Thursday evening, residents gathered to mourn it again.

Tessah Melamed recalled working as a teenager in an amusement arcade. “I’d work in the morning then go home and shower and then come back to the Boardwalk and hang out until evening.”

Keith Brown said a friend’s clothing and gift store had just reopened in mid-July; now it is gone. “The fire will have a ripple effect beyond the immediate area,” he said. “Morale was just coming back, and now it’s gone.”


Karen DeMasters, Patrick McGeehan and Ravi Somaiya contributed reporting.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/14/nyregion/dozens-of-businesses-lost-in-jersey-shore-boardwalk-blaze.html?_r=0&pagewanted=print

The Turning at Labor Day

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD


“Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness” — well, not quite yet. It is still a little early to have John Keats’s autumnal words running through your head. Yet no matter how desperately you cling to summer, it’s almost impossible not to feel the changes that begin to gather around Labor Day. On a warm, muggy day, they are not very evident. Only the shifting of the light at evening suggests the changing season. But when the wind is fresh and the temperature falls a little, it is hard not to imagine the season leaping ahead of itself, even as summer lingers.

The promptings are obvious in the country — ripening tomatoes, more sweet corn than anyone knows what to do with, piles of cordwood heaped near woodsheds. Here and there, well north of the city, a roadside maple has jumped the gun and is already flaming. But the real ripening everywhere is human. Whatever students may feel about returning to school, it causes their parents to wonder how their offspring got to be so old and to try not to wonder what it says about themselves. For every family with school-age children, Labor Day, not New Year’s, is when the new year really commences.

The city is still a heat-sink, and it will be a while before the subways lose what still feels like mid-July’s steam. Long Island Sound is still warm, and it, too, will be slow to lose its heat. Like Memorial Day or the Fourth of July, Labor Day has nothing to do with the rhythms of nature, nothing to do with the movement of the sun. It just happens that we pause every year about now and look around us and notice the way the small changes add up. It’s a reminder that we could do this almost any day of the year: declare a holiday, stand back, and consider the ebb and flow of the world we live in.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/02/opinion/the-turning-at-labor-day.html?partner=rssnyt&emc=rss&pagewanted=print

To His Collection of Steinways, Hedge Fund Titan Adds Their Maker

By WILLIAM ALDEN


Steinway’s showroom on West 57th Street. Paulson & Company, a hedge fund, agreed to buy Steinway for $512 million.


Updated, 9:16 p.m. | John A. Paulson, the hedge fund billionaire, already owns three Steinway & Sons pianos: the medium model M grand, the larger model O and the nearly seven-foot-long model B, together worth tens of thousands of dollars.

But Mr. Paulson, in investing parlance, was looking to increase his exposure. On Wednesday, his firm, Paulson & Company, agreed to buy the company that makes the pianos, Steinway Musical Instruments, for $512 million.

The move raised eyebrows both in the world of music and on Wall Street. Mr. Paulson made billions in 2007 largely with a bet against the housing market. His firm specializes in mortgages, gold and other financial assets.

And while Paulson & Company owns stakes in companies, it has never before bought one outright. But Mr. Paulson said that the calculation was rather simple — he loves the pianos.

“I’ve always been enamored with the product,” Mr. Paulson said in an interview on Wednesday. “You have Mercedes in cars, and top brands in every other area. But no one has such a high share of the high end.”

But while he got what he wanted within days of making his first offer, a bidding contest for Steinway broke out behind the scenes. In July, the private equity firm Kohlberg & Company said it had reached an agreement with Steinway to buy it for $35 a share. But Kohlberg bowed out of the running on Tuesday in the face of a bid from Paulson of $38 a share.

That same day, though, an additional challenger emerged — Samick Musical Instruments of South Korea, which is Steinway’s biggest shareholder. Using the code name “Edelweiss,” presumably in a reference to “The Sound of Music,” Samick offered $39 a share.

But on Wednesday morning, Steinway, whose stock ticker symbol is LVB, for Ludwig van Beethoven, pronounced Mr. Paulson the winner after his firm had increased its bid to $40 a share.

“We’re fortunate in this case that John is a personal fan of our product,” Michael T. Sweeney, Steinway’s chairman and chief executive, said on Wednesday. “His love for the instrument gives him the insight as to how we can build the business.”

While the deal is done, there is still a chance that a higher bid may emerge, and Steinway is allowed to consider unsolicited offers.

In the world of music, Steinway is not just another company. Founded in 1853 by a German immigrant in Manhattan, Henry Engelhard Steinway, and his three sons, Steinway pianos became an icon in concert halls and living rooms. Steinway spends almost a year building each grand piano, and the result, its devotees say, is an unmatched quality of sound. The announcement in March that the company was selling its famous showroom on West 57th Street in Manhattan was greeted in many quarters with sorrow.

Still, the financial maneuvering left some of Steinway’s devotees full of concern as they recalled difficult times in the past. With piano factories in Astoria, Queens, and Hamburg, Germany, the company was family-owned until 1972, when it was sold to the CBS Corporation, an owner that many aficionados believed sacrificed quality in pursuit of higher profits.

CBS cut costs, changed the management and pushed Steinway to produce more pianos, said Frank M. Mazurco, who started as a sales representative in Cincinnati and rose to become executive vice president of Steinway before he retired in 2007.

“We had to do a lot of damage control,” Mr. Mazurco said. “It wasn’t a good fit.”

Leon Botstein, the musical director of the American Symphony Orchestra in New York and the president of Bard College, said the CBS period should be a “warning” to Mr. Paulson. Steinway was eventually sold in 1985 to investors in Boston, and, after changing hands again, it went public in 1996.

“Let’s hope it’s a hedge fund with some idealism, with interest in something more than the everlasting buck,” Mr. Botstein said.


Mr. Paulson vowed to keep the business largely as it is. He indicated that he had no plans to close, relocate or change any of Steinway’s manufacturing operations.

Instead, Mr. Paulson said his strategy centers on expanding Steinway’s reach around the world. He is also betting that the improving economy and strengthening housing market will help the sales of Steinway pianos, a luxury item that proved to be out of reach in recent years, even for its usual wealthier clientele.

With the company’s sales flagging in the aftermath of the recession, a team of executives offered in 2011 to buy everything but the piano business. But after reviewing its options — a period in which it fielded interest from two private equity firms — the company ultimately announced last December that it was not for sale.

Then, in July, Kohlberg made its offer to buy the entire company. That is when Mr. Paulson began to pursue Steinway in earnest. In the last several weeks, he read a book on the company to help bring himself up to speed.

One analyst, Arnold Ursaner of CJS Securities, said it was not surprising that Mr. Paulson — who donated $100 million to the Central Park Conservancy last year — was making a play for Steinway.

“You have a global luxury brand,” Mr. Ursaner said. “It’s no different from a painting or a magnificent Fifth Avenue apartment.”

Today, Steinway has expanded beyond pianos to sell horns, clarinets, saxophones and drums. It so happens that that aspect of the business is right up Mr. Paulson’s alley.

Though Mr. Paulson is not a pianist, he played the drums, clarinet and saxophone when he was a teenager and into his 20s, eventually setting them aside when he could not keep up the necessary commitment.

To Mr. Botstein, Mr. Paulson’s musical background is a positive sign.

“He bought something with a huge moral responsibility,” Mr. Botstein said. “It would be a tragedy if this were to be abused or exploited. It needs to be treated with love and with care.”

http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2013/08/14/paulson-agrees-to-buy-steinway-for-512-million/?pagewanted=print

Madison Square Garden Is Told to Move

By CHARLES V. BAGLI


Madison Square Garden, home to the Knicks, the Rangers, the Ice Capades, the circus and the “Fight of the Century” between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier in 1971, received an eviction notice of sorts on Wednesday.

The New York City Council notified the arena that it has 10 years to vacate its 45-year-old premises and find a new home, the Garden’s fifth since it opened in 1879.

By a vote of 47 to 1, the Council voted to extend the Garden’s special operating permit for merely a decade — not in perpetuity, as the owners of the Garden had requested, or 15 years, as the Bloomberg administration had intended.

Ten years should be enough time, officials said, for the Garden to find a new location and for the city to devise plans for an expanded Pennsylvania Station, which currently sits below the Garden, and the redevelopment of the surrounding neighborhood.

“This is the first step in finding a new home for Madison Square Garden and building a new Penn Station that is as great as New York and suitable for the 21st century,” said Christine C. Quinn, the City Council speaker. “This is an opportunity to reimagine and redevelop Penn Station as a world-class transportation destination.”

Ms. Quinn renewed her call for the creation of a commission to devise the plans.

Civic leaders and some developers have long sought to rebuild Penn Station, a cramped and crowded maze for the more than 500,000 people a day who traverse it. But doing so would be an enormously complicated, multibillion-dollar undertaking that has foiled officials in the past. And anything can happen in the next 10 years, including several elections for mayor and governor.

James L. Dolan, who controls the Garden, the Knicks and the Rangers, offered a low-key response to the news that barely acknowledged the 10-year deadline. Mr. Dolan expects to complete this fall a $968 million overhaul of the Garden, which has been closing in its off-seasons to accommodate the work.

“Madison Square Garden has operated at its current site for generations, and has been proud to bring New Yorkers some of the greatest and most iconic moments in sports and entertainment,” Mr. Dolan’s company said in a statement issued Wednesday afternoon. “We now look forward to the reopening of the arena in the fall of 2013.”

Mr. Dolan announced the latest renovation of the Garden in 2008, just after the last $14 billion effort to move the Garden and transform the train station collapsed amid a severe recession, insufficient financing, an absence of political leadership and overreaching by the developers selected for the job.

Late last year, the Regional Plan Association and the Municipal Art Society used the Garden’s application for an extension of its permit to resurrect the idea. The Bloomberg administration recommended a 15-year extension. But that city proposal also allowed the city’s Planning Department to further extend the permit if officials failed to come up with plans for a new station, and the Garden and the transit operators agreed on a plan for improved access to the station.

“Our goal from the outset was to improve Penn Station. In fact, our proposal would have required government leaders to come together and develop a plan to do just that,” said Julie Wood, a spokeswoman for Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg.

Critics derided the Bloomberg administration for including what they described as a loophole. Ms. Quinn, who is a Democratic candidate for mayor, called instead for a firm 10-year extension. Bill de Blasio and John C. Liu, two other candidates, also called on the Garden to move. Joseph J. Lhota, a Republican candidate and a former executive at the Garden, and William C. Thompson Jr., a Democrat, backed the Garden.

As Coney Island Stirs, One Man’s Vision Is Unbuilt
By C. J. HUGHES

For over 30 years, Horace Bullard’s visions for Coney Island amounted to little more than a boardwalk of broken dreams.

His plans for year-round amusement parks and bustling commerce for full-time employment never came to fruition. The properties he bought up in the 1970s and ‘80s – the Shore Theater, the Thunderbolt roller coaster and the Playland Arcade — either remain dilapidated and largely vacant, or have been utterly vanquished.

And while a burst of new retail development and two additional amusement parks have been attracting more visitors to Coney Island, Mr. Bullard’s ideas for a few key parcels seem stalled again. He died of Lou Gehrig’s disease in April, prompting his lone heir, his daughter, Jasmine, to remove his properties, including the decrepit but landmark-status Shore Theater, from the market for the first time in years.

To hear Mr. Bullard’s friends, relatives and business associates tell it, the deals that fell through over the years closely follow the ups and downs of Coney Island itself. In the 1940s, when Mr. Bullard was a child living in the Soundview section of the Bronx, his family would take the subway to Coney Island a few times each summer, recalled his sister, Nellie Bullard, a retired nurse in Florida. They would eat Nathan’s hot dogs and ride the Thunderbolt. “Those were the real good days,” she said, before the beach resort area declined precipitously in the 1960s and ‘70s.

Born in 1938 in East Harlem, Mr. Bullard grew up impoverished as the son of a black father, who was a plumber, and a Puerto Rican mother who raised five children. He began working at the age of 8 shining shoes, according to a television interview produced for the Manhattan Neighborhood Network TV channel in the early 2000s.

And although he said he largely shrugged off prejudice, his sister blamed racism for his failure to secure a Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise in New York in the 1960s. But he later turned that to his advantage, having a friend analyze the chain’s batter and adding Puerto Rican spices, or “a touch of love,” his sister said.

In 1968, that recipe grew into Kansas Fried Chicken, a chain named for Max’s Kansas City, a popular nightclub in Lower Manhattan where Mr. Bullard liked to spend time, said Ita Lew Bullard, who said she was his common-law wife for 35 years until they separated in 2002. He made his fortune from the chain, which once had 18 locations across the country — including one on the ground floor of the Shore Theater.

The business eventually closed, but the profits enabled Mr. Bullard to buy up properties on Coney Island and to begin dreaming of restoring the resort area’s luster with new or improved rides and parks.

“He wanted year-round amusements, year-round employees,” said Ralph Perfetto, a Coney Island resident and political organizer who knew Mr. Bullard since the 1970s. “It would make the neighborhood safe at night, it would be lighted up and clean, so we were strongly in favor of Horace Bullard.” Even Mr. Bullard’s stationery was inscribed with carnival rides on it.

He bought the Shore Theater for $125,000 in 1979, Ms. Lew Bullard said. Within a few years, Mr. Bullard had assembled enough land to unveil a $450 million plan for a new amusement park on the site of the former Steeplechase Park, which included a 110,500-square-foot parcel between Surf Avenue and the boardwalk where the old Thunderbolt ride, immortalized in “Annie Hall,” once sat. But financing fell apart when Wall Street tumbled in the late 1980s. Then, in what would turn into a drawn-out battle with City Hall, Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani revoked Mr. Bullard’s approvals for the project, in 1994, two months after taking office. Eventually, the city demolished the Thunderbolt.

Even when Mr. Bullard later lined up prominent development partners, he said his projects never received a go-ahead from the city. In later interviews, he blamed racist attitudes for the roadblocks.

Jasmine Bullard declined to explain her reasoning for removing the parcels from the market. In an interview, she said: “I share my father’s vision for a better Coney Island. But I don’t have any plans that are specific right now.”

Analysts say her decision may be a signal that the properties aren’t going to be sold at discounted prices as part of some fire sale simply because Mr. Bullard has died. Others say Ms. Bullard would be wise to wait, as improving land values, based in part on the increasing revival of parts of Coney Island, may enable her to get even higher prices for her holdings after the summer winds die down.

For years, the theater, built in 1925 but shuttered since the 1970s, had been listed at $12 million with Joe Vitacco Jr., a longtime friend, and for the last six months, with Coldwell Banker Reliable, a local brokerage, at an undisclosed price, until it was taken off the market a few week ago. Real estate agents suggested that the listing took into account at least $15 million needed in renovations. Sections of the inside resemble a bombed-out shell.

Between January and June of this year, however, the building received more than 200 sales inquiries, 10 of which were presented in writing to Ms. Bullard, said Richard DiPietro, a Coldwell agent. “We are finally starting to see things happen,” he said.

Similarly no longer being actively marketed is the site of the former Steeplechase Park. Until Ms. Bullard’s decisions to unlist the land, that rectangular parcel, adjacent to MCU Park, the baseball stadium for the Brooklyn Cyclones, had been listed at $90 million with Mr. Vitacco.

Some friends and business associates say Mr. Bullard was never the same after the Thunderbolt was razed in 2000. “He started out as a strong, vibrant and handsome young man, and I saw him age because of what happened,” Mr. Perfetto said. “He got gray hair and didn’t have that spark in his eyes like he used to.” Mr. Bullard ultimately won a $1 million settlement from the city, but according to Mr. Bullard’s lawyer, Barry S. Gedan, refused to collect the money because it came from taxpayers.

His daughter disputed accounts that her father’s spirit was broken by the demolition, saying he was happy-go-lucky until the end of his life. “He would never waste his time being hung up on something that didn’t come to fruition from the past,” she said.

These days, Mr. Bullard’s beloved stretches of Coney Island are recovering from the damage done by Hurricane Sandy. While the boardwalk has been repaired and debris swept away, there are still chain-link fences walling off dangerous sections and the New York Aquarium has curtailed the number of exhibits open to the public.

Today, if Mr. Bullard were to saunter just outside of the Coney Island-Stillwell Avenue subway terminal, to the intersection of Surf Avenue and Stillwell, he might see private investment that’s been a success.

Some plans are still like the wisps of cotton candy spun alongside the amusement rides, waiting for more development. But at that corner, Thor Equities has constructed a $9 million, 15,000-square-foot, one-story building to house several new shops. It was nearly complete before Hurricane Sandy came ashore on Oct. 29, according to Joseph J. Sitt, Thor’s chief executive.

Today, though, the building, whose glittering sign features the grinning vaudevillian that is Coney Island’s unofficial mascot, is nearly full, with stores having leased six of its seven berths. The stores are a mix of seasonal and year-round retail, and the building can be expanded to six stories.

The candy chain It’Sugar, where Sour Patch Kids can be scooped for $2.99 a quarter-pound, has taken a long-term lease for a 2,000-square-foot corner space, paying $140 a square foot, according to Mr. Sitt.

The Nets Shop by Adidas, selling the N.B.A. team’s black-and-white tank tops and other basketball gear, sits at the opposite corner of the building, with a comparable rent, Mr. Sitt said. Four other tenants, some of whom have yet to move in, are renting space averaging about $15 a foot under short-term leases for the summer season. Average asking rents along Surf Avenue are about $40 a square foot, according to Coldwell Banker Reliable.

Among those seasonal leaseholders are Coney Island Convenience, stocking beach paraphernalia like inflatable toys in a 2,500-square-foot space; and Wampum, a skateboard shop that started in Bridgehampton, N.Y., in 2011.

“This place definitely has a different feel than the Hamptons,” said Marley Ficalora, a Wampum partner, who said he had never visited Coney Island until last winter. “But we think it is really turning around, and we want to be a part of it.”

Signs of the intensive efforts that got Coney Island and other beachfront amusement areas up and running for the summer season are everywhere.

In fact, Nathan’s, the Surf Avenue hot dog landmark shuttered by the hurricane — the first time it had ever closed since it opened in 1916 — resumed serving its well-known fare on May 19.

Mr. Sitt grew up in nearby Gravesend, and the commercial building development is his first project in the area since he began snapping up properties there a decade ago. At one time he owned 12.5 acres, but sold seven acres, mostly along the boardwalk, to the city in 2009 for $95.6 million.

The same year, the city rezoned the neighborhood, increasing the size of the amusement area to 27 acres. Since then, two new amusement parks have opened: Luna Park, in 2010, and Scream Zone, in 2011, joining the existing Deno’s Wonder Wheel park. The New York City Economic Development Corporation says that visitors to the two new parks reached 2.6 million. This spring, the city cut the ribbon on Steeplechase Plaza, at the boardwalk and West 19th Street, whose centerpiece is a refurbished carousel.

Mr. Sitt said he wanted to build hotels, stores and movie theaters on his remaining parcels, which cluster near Surf Avenue, but is awaiting new sewer lines The city has pledged $130 million for sewer improvements, the economic development agency said.

Mr. Sitt suggested that the rezoning didn’t go far enough, adding that hotel operators would need zoning changes to support larger venues like halls for wedding receptions to keep business going in the off-season.

Mr. Sitt called his new building merely a placeholder, to generate revenue to cover the property’s taxes, and said the strip “needs to look aesthetically nice, even during the interim phase.”

In the meantime, the project is welcoming neighbors. A two-level Applebee’s restaurant, with an enormous fish tank, opened this week in a converted space at 1217 Surf Avenue.

The dirt lot at 1223 Surf Avenue, next to the subway station, will soon feature a 15,000-square-foot two-level building featuring several restaurants. Johnny Rockets, the burgers-and-fries chain, will take 6,000 square feet on the ground floor, said Natan Bukai, the building’s developer.

Red Mango, the frozen yogurt chain, will occupy 2,000 square feet, also on the ground, he added. Another 2,000-square foot ground-floor berth remains open, but it is being marketed in combination with a 5,000-square-foot second-floor space, which also has a large terrace.

Tenants who have been approached so far include chains like Hooters, as well as Tilted Kilt, whose waitresses wear red tartan miniskirts and matching bras; Bareburger, an organic chain, has also shown interest, said Mr. Vitacco, the commercial agent.

Three years ago, Mr. Bukai bought the parcel from Mr. Bullard for $1.4 million; he’s spending another $1 million on it.

“He finally let it go,” he said, “and we’re glad.”

Mr. Vitacco also pointed to the new signs of development, recalling how he and Mr. Bullard swapped e-mails even in the final months before he died on April 9.

“He would have liked things to move faster, but his vision will become the reality. I only wish that he could see his dream come to fruition,” Mr. Vitacco said.

“His dream did not vanish,” he added.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/19/realestate/commercial/as-coney-island-stirs-one-mans-vision-is-unbuilt.html?hp&pagewanted=print

F.B.I. Raid Renews Focus on Ballpark Deal in Rockland

By PETER APPLEBOME


RAMAPO, N.Y. — When federal agents last week spent seven hours extracting documents and computer files from Town Hall here, attention immediately turned to the financing of a local ballpark. The stadium was the subject of a withering state audit last year suggesting officials inappropriately mingled private and public enterprises for a risky development.

But the raid last Wednesday also set in motion a guessing game centered on which of a welter of local controversies could become part of the investigation in a town where the increase in the ultra-Orthodox Jewish population in communities like Kaser, Monsey and New Square has made it the fastest-growing area in Rockland County, and perhaps the most divided.

“We started making a list of all the things they could be going in for,” said Susan Shapiro, a local lawyer who is among those fighting a huge proposed housing development in what has been a largely rural section of the town. “There are so many choices.”

Officials with the Federal Bureau of Investigation have not released details on the case, but in Ramapo it is often hard to know where one inquiry ends and another begins.

The ballpark has been a divisive issue for some time. In 2010, residents, with more than 70 percent of the votes in opposition, rejected a $16.5 million plan to finance the construction of a minor-league baseball stadium for a team in the independent Can-Am League.

Undeterred, town officials went ahead, guaranteeing $25 million in bonds issued by the Ramapo Local Development Corporation, a private nonprofit corporation set up to build what is now called Provident Bank Park. The corporation’s president and chairman is Christopher St. Lawrence, the town supervisor and the stadium’s primary advocate.

In an audit released in February 2012, the state comptroller’s office said that taxpayers could end up being on the hook for up to $60 million in costs related to the project, and that the town appeared to have “inappropriately mingled its activities” with the development corporation.

“Ramapo officials ignored red flags that the project numbers didn’t add up, which could adversely impact its finances for years to come,” the audit by Comptroller Thomas P. DiNapoli said. He added that officials used the local development corporation to circumvent procurement practices and other legal obligations the town would have faced.

Auditors also faulted a plan to pay off the stadium by using profits from another project, a housing development on Elm Street in the village of Spring Valley financed by loans totaling $30 million. A former county legislator, Bruce Levine, filed a complaint with the state attorney general’s office last year saying that the project is illegally enriching investors who bought units and then rented them out instead of the corporation selling them directly to low-income people.

Then there is litigation over a 200-acre parcel called the Patrick Farm, one of the town’s largest developable pieces of property, which has been rezoned to allow dense multifamily development miles from the current high-density population zones. Opponents of the project say it has been pushed along by Mr. St. Lawrence and the developers in violation of the town’s master plan, and despite the fact much of it sits atop streams and wetlands that feed the Mahwah River, a prime source of drinking water.

Opponents of Patrick Farm won a major victory last week. The Army Corps of Engineers, reversing an earlier finding, wrote a letter saying that the developer, who had the town’s support, was in error in claiming there was no need for a determination by the corps of the extent of the wetlands and waters on the property.

(All of these controversies are separate from the troubles in Spring Valley, which is partially in Ramapo. The village’s mayor, Noramie F. Jasmin, and her deputy, Joseph A. Desmaret, were arrested and charged in April in a bribery scheme that also ensnared State Senator Malcolm A. Smith and three others.)

Mr. St. Lawrence, a Democrat, has had little to say about the investigation, and did not return phone calls. He spoke briefly to reporters last week and on a local radio show, saying he was cooperating with the investigation. “They didn’t question or say anything,” he said on the radio show. “That’s really about it. I don’t have much more to say about that. We’ll see what plays out.”

Last year, in the wake of the state audit, he defended the projects, saying everything by the town and development corporation was done lawfully.

“We have never circumvented any procurement practices on either of the projects,” he said.

Ramapo’s population of 126,000 is a diverse, contentious mix: longtime suburbanites; an influx of Hispanic, Haitian and Asian immigrants; and a growing ultra-Orthdox Jewish population, housed in vast apartment complexes, that has transformed the look and politics of the town in recent decades. With their ability to vote as a bloc and in overwhelming numbers, observant Jews have become the dominant voting group whether in the town, where they have supported Mr. St. Lawrence, or in the East Ramapo Central School District, where the students are mostly black and Hispanic and the school board is controlled by Orthodox Jews who send their children to private yeshivas.

Mr. St. Lawrence’s critics say his support from the ultra-Orthodox population has allowed him to ignore other voters’ concerns, as on the ballpark, so long as he promotes housing and development benefiting his supporters.

“It’s the same way with every decision — with the ballpark, with any zoning decision, with everything they do,” said Deborah Munitz, a board member of Ramapo Organized for Sustainability and a Safe Aquifer, which is fighting the development plans for the 200-acre Patrick Farm property. “They walk in, they have their agenda, and they don’t really listen to anybody.”

But Yossi Gestetner, who does public relations work for ultra-Orthdox groups and businesses, said that Mr. St. Lawrence had done a good job of navigating diverse interests, and that critics were mostly just fighting change and growth.

“Once upon a time Manhattan was not developed either,” he said. “Is there a rule on the books that a certain place needs to be rural from now to eternity?

“I understand that many people moved here for the rural environment and even many of the Hasidim feel there’s too much development. But anyone who owns property — if they don’t like it, if they feel the taxes are too much — they can sell their property for two or three times what they would have gotten 15 years ago, and this is the direct result of the growth in the Jewish community and the changes allowing more development.”

Still, he said, he knows nothing about the investigation and would not condone any illegalities if any were found.

Others say the political culture in Ramapo is so out of whack, an implosion was inevitable.

“There’s no place in America where the body politic votes on whether they want a ballpark, 70 percent say no and the elected leaders do it anyway,” said Joe Meyers, a Democratic county legislator and a member of Preserve Ramapo, which is critical of Mr. St. Lawrence. “That’s Russia. That’s Syria. But it’s what happens when someone gets the bloc vote, and he’s not answering to the voters. He’s answering to a small group of people, and as long as he gives them the favors they want, he can do whatever he wants.”

A Team Is Born, but Not All Cheer

By CHARLES V. BAGLI and KEN BELSON


A few days before Thanksgiving, as the city still reeled from Hurricane Sandy, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg convened a meeting at Gracie Mansion to jump-start talks for a project he considered part of his legacy to the city, a new soccer stadium in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park in Queens.

Executives from Major League Soccer were joined by investors from the United Arab Emirates, the owners of the Manchester City Football Club, who were willing to build the stadium for a new American soccer team they hoped to buy. They were at odds with another group in the room: Jeff Wilpon and his cousin Scott, who represented the Mets and who were demanding more than $40 million from the Abu Dhabi investors as compensation for allowing soccer fans to park at nearby Citi Field.

The mayor entered the room and, to break the tension, joked that he would visit the park if there were a golf course there rather than a soccer stadium. Then he cut to the chase: The stadium “would be good for the city,” he said, according to people at the meeting.

“Reasonable people can work this out,” Bloomberg added before leaving the room minutes after arriving.

Almost six months later, the Mets and soccer officials have still not come to terms, and the stadium issue remains intensely disputed among elected officials, youth soccer leaders and parks advocates. But the Manchester City owners — an investment group led by Sheik Mansour bin Zayed al-Nahyan, a member of the royal family of Abu Dhabi — forged ahead anyway, announcing Tuesday that it would buy an M.L.S. team for an estimated $100 million with an unexpected partner, the Mets’ crosstown rivals.

Those rivals, the Yankees, will be a part-owner of the New York City Football Club, a new team that is expected to begin competing in M.L.S. in 2015 but has no home to move into.

The Manchester City-Yankees partnership, which will no doubt antagonize the Mets, will deepen existing ties because the Yankees’ stadium concessions business, Legends Hospitality, already provides services at Manchester City’s home ground, Etihad Stadium. Manchester City, the recently deposed champion of England’s Premier League, will play an exhibition match against another British powerhouse, Chelsea, on Saturday at Yankee Stadium, and city and M.L.S. officials were eager to announce a deal before that game.

“In the Yankees, we have found the absolute best partner for developing a world-class sports organization and a winning team that will carry the New York City Football Club name with pride,” said Ferran Soriano, the chief executive of Manchester City.

While initially willing to buy the team on its own, Manchester City decided in the last week to team with the Yankees. In doing so, it gained a wealthy local partner well acquainted with building a stadium and navigating New York’s often treacherous political and regulatory shoals. Manchester City’s owners are also hoping that a partnership with the Yankees will shield them from criticism that a stadium project in the park represents a sweetheart deal for Arab royalty, according to team executives.

By joining with one of the top teams in the Premier League, the Yankees — who are investing as much as $25 million in the new M.L.S. team — also hope to turn Yankee Stadium into a marquee destination for high-profile soccer matches.

“We’ve been doing business here a long time and we know how things work,” said Randy Levine, the president of the Yankees, who said the team’s cable network, YES, could broadcast New York City F.C.’s games. “We’ll have their back throughout all of this.”

Mets officials declined to comment on the deal.

The agreement represents the culmination of two years of negotiations involving conflicting interests that included the mayor, city agencies, the Abu Dhabi investment group, M.L.S., parks and community advocates, soccer fans, the Mets and the United States Tennis Association, among others. In addition to paying for the proposed stadium in Queens, the sheik’s investment group would spend about $90 million to replace lost parkland and soccer fields, and on other measures.

To build a home for the team, the city, the league, Manchester City and now the Yankees must win over half a dozen community boards, the city planning commission, the City Council, and potentially state and federal agencies — a process that will take months, if not years. Some of the constituents oppose ceding parkland to a foreign billionaire.

“We’re not even talking about an American businessman who made shrewd investments,” said Peter Vallone Jr., a city councilman from Astoria. “We’re talking about a sheik born with a silver spoon in his mouth, and we don’t need to hand him parkland on a silver platter.”

Getting big projects built in New York can take years, especially sports sites that often become fodder for critics of the use of public resources for wealthy team owners. The Mets and the Yankees each spent nearly a decade lobbying for tax breaks and public subsidies before they poured a combined $2.3 billion into their new stadiums, which opened in 2009.

With opposition growing, the new owners indicated Tuesday that they recognized that building a stadium in Flushing Meadows would be problematic, and that other sites may have to be considered.

“Clearly, a lot of work has been done in Queens,” Levine said. “That’s where the focus is. I don’t know if there is an alternative. But we have some time now to take a step back and breathe.”

Levine added that New York City F.C. could play at least its first year in Yankee Stadium or Citi Field until a new home is built. M.L.S. began exploring sites for a stadium in 2011. The league hired high-level lobbyists, including HRA Advisors and Global Strategies, as well as CBRE, a real estate brokerage firm, and Icon Venue Group, a stadium architect.

M.L.S. initially wanted to build a stadium on Pier 40 along the Hudson River. The league offered to fix the pier and to give youth leagues that play there access to the field. Although some residents from the adjoining neighborhood liked the idea, advocates for Hudson River Park ultimately disapproved.

The league then explored about 20 other sites, including locations in Harlem, Staten Island, Randalls Island and Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx, as well as four sites in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park. M.L.S. officials liked the park because it was close to the many soccer fans in Queens; was near subways, rail lines and highways; and was accessible to parking at Citi Field.

Meanwhile, about half a dozen investors were inquiring about buying the second New York City team (the Red Bulls, a founding member of M.L.S. as the MetroStars, have played in New Jersey since 1996). Only two were considered serious candidates: one from Dubai in the United Arab Emirates, and the sheik’s investment group from Abu Dhabi, which became seriously involved in negotiations in November.

The Mets have proved a thorny opponent for the Abu Dhabi investors. The team argued against the notion of someone’s not only gaining access to their parking lots, but also using the space for a competing purpose. The Mets demanded compensation, and they wanted to keep all the parking revenue from the lots (which are city owned) and restrict the right of the soccer team from playing games within hours of the start or finish of a baseball game.

The league and the mayor showed confidence in the proposal, but opposition in the community has mounted. When officials from M.L.S. held talks with Queens residents this winter to promote their plan, some opponents were prevented from sitting in the main auditorium, which was filled with soccer boosters.

Many soccer fans in Queens say they favor a stadium, but they do not want to lose access to the public fields that they use. Alfonso Vargas, the president of Allfut, a soccer alliance that comprises 14 leagues, 400 teams and about 5,000 players who compete at the park, said he supported the proposal as long as the local soccer leagues would be accommodated.

“Not only are they going to allow us to use the new facilities, but they’re going to rebuild all the fields with world-class turf and let us use the bathrooms, which the park is lacking right now,” Vargas said. “Maybe the clientele is not so refined. Still, we are human beings. We don’t want to be squeezed out.”

Parks groups seemed more alarmed. Though the park is listed as having nearly 900 acres, the actual amount of land devoted to public recreation there is far smaller, when land used by the U.S.T.A., the Mets, the M.T.A. and the Queens Museum is subtracted.

M.L.S., which last year spent about $2 million on lobbyists largely to promote their plan, argued that the new stadium would take up no more than 13 acres, a footprint that includes the Fountain of the Planets, a fenced-in pond. Manchester City has pledged to improve drainage at the park and to build new soccer fields as well as buy replacement parkland at Flushing Airport, a decommissioned airfield in nearby College Point.

Those promises have not won over park advocates.

“This is the most heavily used park in Queens,” said Holly Leicht, the executive director of New Yorkers for Parks. “It already has so many private uses. This could be the straw that broke the camel’s back as the park tips too much toward the private side, privatization.”

Geoffrey Croft, the president of the watchdog group NYC Park Advocates, added, “We hope this new deal once and for all puts to rest any further attempts to seize even more public parkland in Flushing Meadows Park.”


David Waldstein, Nate Schweber and John Otis contributed reporting.

Bye-Bye Bohemia

By LEE SIEGEL


THE other evening I passed by 82 University Place in Greenwich Village, where a new European Wax Center was being constructed on the first floor, in a space once occupied by a fabled artists’ hangout, the Cedar Tavern.

A bar where artists, writers and filmmakers labored to find words for aesthetic perfection now has photos of bikini-clad women exhibiting perfected bodies plastered on its windows.

A few lines from a Frank O’Hara poem involuntarily came back to me: “to get to the Cedar to meet Grace / I must tighten my moccasins / and forget the minute bibliographies of disappointment / anguish and power / for unrelaxed honesty.”

Goodbye, unrelaxation, hello waxing. Yet rather than yield to the easy irony, I have a different response from the usual semi-rueful shrug at the urban spectacle of, for the millionth time, a landmark being transformed into an incongruous commercial space. My feeling is one of liberation. Bring on the new salon!

The “Grace” whom O’Hara was on his way to meet was Grace Hartigan, a member of the first generation of Abstract Expressionists. That legendary crowd — Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Philip Guston, Robert Motherwell — debated, boozed and brawled in the dark booths at the Cedar Bar, located on Eighth and University until 1963, when the cherished watering hole was destroyed to make way for a new apartment building.

It reopened soon after as the Cedar Tavern at 82 University Place. By then Pollock and Kline had died, and de Kooning was living in East Hampton. But it retained a pull on the city’s artistic class for another few years, and kept its louche ambience for decades.

Bob Dylan and the director D. A. Pennebaker plotted out the documentary “Dont Look Back” at the Cedar in the mid-’60s. Later on, you could find Donald Barthelme hanging out there. I remember sitting at a table in 1994 with my then wife and some of her theater friends, our attention divided between the television spectacle of O. J. Simpson trying to elude the police in his white Bronco and the choreographer Mark Morris, who was watching the chase from the bar.

Even as its alternatives and successors disappeared — the San Remo, Dillon’s, the Five Spot, the Lion’s Head, Max’s Kansas City — the Cedar survived. Despite the passing years, and its new location, it maintained its emblematic power as the place where America’s superheroes of art once held court.

Artists still, of course, have their favorite haunts. But in this country, there has never been a locale so central to a particular style of art-making as the Cedar.

The Cedar closed for good in 2006, when the tenement apartments above it were turned into stratospherically priced condos. But the space stayed empty, and the persistent, hopeful rumors that it would reopen were like echoes of the Cedar’s capacity to inspire the very dreams of spiritual regeneration that animated its original patrons. Even abandoned and deserted, the Cedar Tavern never really stopped being the Cedar Bar.

Until now. It is gone, and I feel little nostalgia for what the place represented.

The Cedar stood for something grand, to a degree. It flourished at a time when people met without elaborately texted plans, when a young person could arrive without money or connections and slip into a subculture of like-minded souls.

The art critic Harold Rosenberg, writing in 1959, said that the “the art colony on Tenth Street” — the Cedar’s neighborhood — was a “Bohemia” whose purpose was to “transmute the ranks established by social class into a hierarchy based on talent or daring.”

But despite the Cedar’s mix of people, despite its risqué interracial mingling, not everyone in that golden-seeming age enjoyed the underworld atmosphere, or benefited from it.

Recounting how the painter Milton Resnick challenged Pollock to “step outside” after the latter accused Resnick of being a “de Kooning imitator,” Andy Warhol wrote: “I tried to imagine myself in a bar striding over to, say, Roy Lichtenstein and asking him to ‘step outside’ because I’d heard him insulting my soup cans. I mean, how corny.”

O’Hara, who was gay, was appalled by the hatred of gays he found there. In a play O’Hara wrote with the bisexual painter Larry Rivers, Pollock swaggers into the Cedar and in a booming voice calls O’Hara and Rivers “those fags.”

And despite the number of female painters accepted into the Cedar’s ranks — Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, Lee Krasner, Hedda Sterne — being a woman amid all that tortured macho posturing could be unbearable. Krasner, Pollock’s wife, rarely went to the Cedar. “I loathed the place,” she said. “The women were treated like cattle.”

Even some of the Cedar’s male habitués would just as soon have lived without it. For Mark Rothko, it was a place where you ran into “the ambitious egotist out for grabs,” he said. “I do not go to the Cedar Bar.”

Enlightened social attitudes and revolutionary artistic creation rarely go hand in hand. Like me, you may miss the contemporary version of Pollock’s shocking gossamer canvases. But it is hard to long for the social context that enabled Pollock’s masterpieces.

As for that “talent or daring” of which Rosenberg spoke, the mostly immigrant women who no doubt will find work at the new European Wax Center, who made their way here from cruelly limited places across oceans and borders, will shave and polish the way the artists primed and painted.

Many of those women live here in hardship and exploitative conditions, to be sure. Yet thanks to their boldness and will, and to the permutations of history, their children will live in a better world than existed at 82 University Place. Rich cultural moments and the places where they flourish wax and wane, and wax again, but talent and daring never die.


Lee Siegel is the author, most recently, of “Are You Serious: How to Be True and Get Real in the Age of Silly.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/18/opinion/bye-bye-bohemia.html?hp&_r=0&pagewanted=print

The Death of a Countess in Exile

By VIVIAN YEE


They knew her as the slender, straight-backed woman with an independent streak and a head for numbers. She told them she had immigrated from Hungary, and her colleagues at Merrill Lynch did not pry with more questions.

What most of them did not know was that their colleague, the quiet market analyst with the Italian name and the Hungarian accent, had been born a countess and grew up in a castle. They had no idea that Ilona DeVito, as they knew her, had had little formal education before arriving on Wall Street, or that she and her family had fled to New York with no more than few small suitcases to escape the Romanian Communist government.

The death of Ilona DeVito di Porriasa last week, at 73, went largely unnoticed beyond her family and friends. But if nothing else, her story, as recounted by surviving relatives, peels back the hard shell of the city, proving, perhaps, that even the most anonymous apartment dweller can be a countess in exile.

Born in 1939 in a Transylvanian Baroque-style castle given to her parents as a wedding present by her grandmother, Countess Ilona Teleki de Szek spent the first years of her life surrounded by nannies, maids and cooks. Her mother was a baroness, her father a count who served as Transylvania’s representative to Hungary; one of his cousins, Pal Teleki served as prime minister of Hungary on two occasions and was said to have been responsible for the passage of a number of anti-Semitic measures.

Pal Teleki was said to have fatally shot himself when Hitler’s troops crossed the Hungarian border heading to Yugoslavia; the Hungarian Army joined in the invasion. Winston Churchill called Teleki’s suicide “a sacrifice to absolve himself and his people from guilt in the German attack on Yugoslavia.”

Ilona’s daughter, Elisa DeVito, said this week that her mother had not expressed embarrassment about her relative’s place in Hungarian history, believing, as other members of her family had, that he had not been anti-Semitic and might not have committed suicide.

But the family was vulnerable in the waning months of World War II, when the Soviets took control of Hungary and Romania, to which Transylvania then belonged.

As recounted by Ilona’s daughter this week, the government imprisoned Ilona’s father, whom she would not see for another 20 years, seized the Telekis’ properties and eventually pushed her, her siblings and her mother out of their castle. (It is now a clinic and botanical garden.)

The Telekis moved into a converted stable with no running water. The baroness took in laundry and sewing; Ilona worked in a shoe factory, her brother Paul on a farm. Ilona wore shoes made out of her grandfather’s old bedroom slippers, and her older sister’s dresses were made of old curtains.

At one point, Ilona lived with her grandparents in a library her family had founded. It was so overrun by rats, she would later recall to her daughter, that they would sling wooden planks over the bookshelves at night to sleep.

As anti-Hungarian sentiment rose in Romania, the government repeatedly pulled the Teleki children out of school and opened the family’s mail.

Count Teleki finally escaped and sought asylum in the United States. His family joined him in 1964 after the count had bribed the Romanian authorities to allow them to leave.

Ilona spoke no English, but she took a series of jobs — first at a hosiery factory in the Bronx, eventually as a teletypist at a financial firm.

And though her father continued to advocate for Hungarian people across Central Europe, she rarely mentioned her past.

“She didn’t really want people to know, because people think of nobility as having something, and my mother really had nothing when she came here,” her daughter said.

Once on Wall Street, she showed enough aptitude that despite having no college degree, she was promoted to market analyst, studying trends and making investment recommendations. She joined Merrill’s securities research department in the early 1970s and stayed until retiring in 2005, developing a reputation for quick calculations and prescient recommendations — as well as a certain reserve.

“She worked very hard at it, and she didn’t suffer fools,” said Robert Farrell, one of her managers. “She had no trouble disagreeing about what was going to happen or voicing her own opinion.”

But she never acknowledged her background to most colleagues until they read her mother’s obituary in the 1990s. Some did not find out until her death.

“In all the time I talked to her every day, we talked about Hungary and everything, but she never said a word about her being royalty,” said Tom Webster, a Merrill Lynch broker.

In 1975, she married Lino DeVito di Porriasa, who came from an Italian noble family.

Mr. DeVito died in 2008, a few months after his wife learned she had breast cancer. Even while ill, she loved to follow the stock market, even making a profit after the 2008 financial crisis, her brother said.

She died on April 15.

Elisa DeVito remembered hearing stories from her grandmother about the family’s past and lavish lifestyle. But her mother usually dismissed such talk, saying, “That’s ancient history. We never need to talk about that anymore.”

As her cancer metastasized, however, the former countess changed her mind. To her daughter’s surprise, she asked to have her title engraved on her gravestone.

“The last few years,” Ms. DeVito said, “she started to remember good things, not just bad things — where she came from, and what she became.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/27/nyregion/in-new-york-the-death-of-a-countess-in-exile.html?pagewanted=print

The Attachment That Still Makes Noise
By PHYLLIS KORKKI


Signs at Swingline’s old plant in Queens came down in 1999.

DO you have a stapler?

If you do, maybe it’s a little dusty in this age of PDFs. Or maybe it’s been missing for a while, after someone borrowed it and never brought it back. Or maybe you’ve affixed your name to your stapler with a piece of clear tape, so your co-workers know: you take this stapler, you die.

Even as data moves to computers and the cloud, staplers continue to help people keep it together. On the computer, we can file copies in folders and send messages to mailboxes. We can cut, copy and paste text and files. But which computer activity is similar to stapling? Sure, there’s the paper-clip icon that attaches documents to e-mail. But nothing, really, comes close to the satisfying ka-chunk of a stapler: it’s a sound that means work is getting done.

Paper receipts are supposed to be on their way out, but they continue to flutter their way through restaurants, stores and doctors’ offices. Staplers are there, attaching the receipt to the business card, the return receipt to the original receipt, the merchant copy to the bill, the receipt to the takeout bag.

If you have a stapler, the odds are fairly good that it was made by Swingline. Other companies, including Stanley-Bostitch, along with OfficeMax and Staples, also make staplers. But Swingline, now owned by Acco Brands, has long been the market leader.

Acco, based in suburban Chicago, sounds like the perfect name for a faceless conglomerate from the era of “The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit.” But it actually has a sterling office products pedigree — it is short for the American Clip Company, a manufacturer of paper clips founded by Fred. J. Kline of Queens at the turn of the 20th century.

Queens was once the center of the paper-fastening universe. In 1925, it was where Jack Linsky founded the Parrot Speed Fastener Company, later renamed Swingline. For years, the bright red sign of his Swingline factory was a beacon to Queens residents as they drove across the Queensboro Bridge from Manhattan.

Stapling devices have existed since at the least the French court of Louis XV. But before Mr. Linsky’s time, staples generally had to be laboriously loaded, one by one, into the rear of the stapler. Mr. Linsky helped revolutionize stapling by creating an easy way to fill the devices under a horizontal cap. He found an adhesive that could attach staples in rows so that they stayed together in a metal magazine until they were pushed out and bent individually to grip their paper quarry.

Swingline promised to make office work easy. In a newspaper ad from the 1940s, a young woman — presumably a secretary — loads a stapler and says: “Now we’re in the groove, boss! That Swingline Stapler loads quicker, works slicker because of its open, trouble-free channel.”

But Mr. Linsky wasn’t satisfied to serve only the office market; he helped increase demand for staplers by emphasizing their handiness in other tasks, like tacking shelf paper, fastening paper around sandwiches and constructing party hats. (“Swingline does the darnedest things!” another ad boasted.) He also expanded the business by making specialized staplers for carpeting, roofing and auto upholstery.

In 1970, Mr. Linsky sold Swingline to American Brands, and in the next decade Acco merged into Swingline. Amid the manufacturing crisis of the 1990s, American Brands closed the Swingline factory in Queens and moved its manufacturing to Mexico; nearly 500 New York workers lost their jobs, and the Swingline sign came down. Now most staplers are produced in Asia.

Swingline made Mr. Linsky very rich. He and his wife, Belle, were philanthropists and art collectors who once owned one of the largest collections of Fabergé eggs in America. Jack died in 1980, and in 1982 Belle donated a collection of the couple’s European art, then worth $60 million, to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Staplers generally don’t rise to the level of prized collectibles, which is why a Swingline’s role as an object of obsession was so funny in the 1999 cult comedy"Office Space.”

In the film, a mumbling, superwide-eyed character named Milton becomes desperate after his red Swingline stapler is taken away during a frenzy of cost-cutting and downsizing at a soulless I.T. company.

You might assume that this stapler, not only cherished but central to the plot of “Office Space,” was a brilliant product placement move. In fact, Swingline had no hand in the story line. It had long stopped making that type of red stapler, and a black Swingline was painted red by the filmmakers.

At first, Swingline executives weren’t sure they liked being associated with such a dark parody of corporate life. But in 2002, recognizing the value of its pop-culture star turn, it released its Rio Red collectors edition 747 stapler. The company bills it “as the star of any office space.”

STAPLERS come in a range of colors, shapes and sizes and can vary in their staple capacity and in the number of sheets they can puncture. The ideal stapler is a perfect melding of heft and lightness that can accommodate either in-the-air or on-the-desk fastening.

Staplers are still such a fact of everyday life that we’ve lost sight of what a triumph of manufacturing they are. They can bend metal — no batteries or electricity required. They are similar to guns in that they contain magazines meant to be filled with metal objects that you load and release.


A Swingline stapler is designed to be “a fusion of form and function,” says Chris Cunningham, global design director at Acco, which owns the brand.



“The engineering of a stapler is not fully appreciated,” said Mike Parrish, director of product development for Acco Brands. Under the cap of a stapler, a pusher connected to a spring forces the row of staples forward. A special blade drives the first staple through a slot at the front of the magazine. A metal square with indentations at the edge of the open part of the base, called the anvil, helps bend the staple so it can grip the paper. The bottom of the completed staple is known as the clinch, and the top is the crown.

Without just the right alignment in the stapler, and the proper adhesive level and tensile strength in the row of staples, this delicate operation could go awry. You could end up with a jam (as with a gun), or an incomplete clinch (and maybe a bloody finger).

A Swingline stapler is designed to be “a fusion of form and function,” said Chris Cunningham, global design director for Acco. The design of a traditional model is meant to look streamlined, he added, and so robust and durable that even if the whole building burned down, one senses that the stapler would still be there.

INDUSTRYWIDE, sales of desktop and hand-held staplers (nonelectric) totaled $80.3 million in 2012, up 3 percent from the previous year, according to NPD, the market research firm. Sales of office products in general rose after a decline amid the recession.

Robert Keller, the departing C.E.O. of Acco Brands (he will remain as executive chairman), started his career at I.B.M. in the 1970s, when experts were predicting that paperless offices were just around the corner. Well, here he is, four decades later, leading a huge office products company with paper and staplers as its core products.

But Mr. Keller knows full well that computers will continue to eat into the business; that’s why Acco is aggressively expanding into global markets where technology is not as entrenched.

Time is a big threat to the stapler industry, and to office products in general. More people who grew up with staplers are going to retire and die. And the younger generation just isn’t as attached to staplers, said Lora Morsovillo, president of office supplies for NPD.

But there’s hope, she said, if stapler makers look at their products as decorative objects. “The growth is coming from uniqueness and personalization,” especially in home offices, she said. She puts staplers in the same general category as tape dispensers, and, she noted, there’s a tape dispenser out there in the shape of a stiletto heel.

Swingline has yet to produce a stiletto stapler, but it recently introduced a line of fashion staplers with bright colors and decorations. On the whole, though, staplers have been “drab and dreary,” maintained Randy Nicolau, the chief executive of Poppin, a new e-commerce company that aims to turn products like staplers, notebooks, pens, pen cups, trays and calculators into jewelry for your desk.

Poppin’s open-plan office is bright with the colors of its coordinated products, including white, black, yellow, orange, red, pink, purple, two shades of blue (aqua and “pool”) and lime green. “We consider ourselves to be a fashion company before anything else,” Mr. Nicolau said.

The company also cares about function, said Jeff Miller, vice president of product design. But in addition to making a product that performs well, Mr. Miller said, he seeks to create sleek, concise forms, and modular sizes — so that the stapler on your desk, for example, matches up with the tape dispenser.

The company’s staplers are made overseas, but its headquarters are in Manhattan, across the East River from where Jack Linsky once set up shop. The stylish staplers sold by Poppin look much different from the utilitarian ones Mr. Linsky once made, but some things haven’t changed. The staplers still have a magazine, a spring, a pusher and an anvil, and they still make a satisfying metallic sound when you press down on them, signaling that work has been done.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/24/business/staplers-the-attachment-thats-still-making-noise.html?ref=business&pagewanted=print

Calls to Charge Driver Grow After Couple’s Newborn Dies
By J. DAVID GOODMAN and JOSEPH BERGER
Minutes before the crash, they were strangers inhabiting vastly different Brooklyns.

Raizy and Nathan Glauber, a recently married couple filled with the worry of first-time parents-to-be, climbed into a livery cab and headed to the hospital to check on her pregnancy.

Julio Acevedo, 44, who struggled with alcohol and a history of serious criminal activity, took the wheel of a borrowed BMW, the police said.

In the early Sunday morning darkness, the BMW slammed into the side of the livery car, causing injuries that claimed the lives of the Glaubers, who were both 21. The magnitude of the tragedy grew even larger on Monday, when the couple’s newborn son, delivered prematurely in an emergency procedure, succumbed to the trauma.

The baby’s death strengthened calls in the couple’s tight-knit Orthodox Jewish community in Williamsburg to bring serious criminal charges against the driver. He had served time in prison for a 1987 killing and was charged last month with drunken driving.

A friend of Mr. Acevedo’s from prison, Derrick Hamilton, said Mr. Acevedo had called him at least four times since the crash, seeking guidance and advice. “He has remorse,” Mr. Hamilton said. “He wants to turn himself in.”

“He said he came down that block, the cab turned and he didn’t even see it and he hit it,” Mr. Hamilton added.

Mr. Acevedo told Mr. Hamilton that he was driving at a high speed because a man had fired a gun at him shortly before the accident.

Paul J. Browne, the chief spokesman of the New York Police Department, said Mr. Acevedo had not yet contacted the police and would face, at the minimum, charges for fleeing the scene of an accident. He could not confirm Mr. Acevedo’s account of being shot at.

The BMW’s owner, Takia Walker, 29, of the Bronx, was arrested on Sunday on charges of insurance fraud; she is accused of buying and registering the car under false pretenses. Mr. Hamilton said the woman and Mr. Acevedo did not know each other and that Mr. Acevedo had probably borrowed the car from a mutual friend.

Two weeks ago, when Mr. Acevedo was charged with driving under the influence of alcohol, he was released on his own recognizance. He is to appear in court on April 10.

In the accident on Sunday, Mr. Browne said, Mr. Acevedo was driving the BMW “at least 60 miles an hour when it hit the other vehicle.”

Grossly excessive speed can be the basis of criminal charges like manslaughter or homicide, prosecutors said. Such cases are easier to prosecute when the driver is intoxicated. But it could prove hard to determine sobriety or intoxication because Mr. Acevedo left the scene.

The decision to bring strong charges will probably depend on the reconstruction of the crash by investigators from the Police Department’s specialized squad of vehicular crime detectives. “That process is not overnight,” said John B. Kwasnoski, a crash reconstruction expert who has conducted training for New York detectives. “The reconstruction of the crash can take, in some cases, months.”

Investigators will seek to recreate the moment of impact — the speed of the vehicles, the situation on the road and, to the extent possible, the state of mind of those involved.

“Every crash is a totality of the circumstances,” said Maureen McCormick, chief of vehicular crimes at the Nassau County district attorney’s office. “Then it becomes a weighing of that totality against the case law.”

Yet prosecutors said recent case law had cast a pall over aggressively pursuing errant drivers. The state’s Court of Appeals has overturned a number of recent cases involving homicide charges against drivers, leading prosecutors to proceed with greater caution when deciding whether to bring strong charges in vehicular cases.

The baby was buried near his parents in Kiryas Joel, N.Y. Under their interpretation of Jewish law, Hasidim do not hold funerals for newborns who do not survive 30 days.

Coming a day after more than 1,000 mourners filled the street outside Congregation Yetev Lev D’Satmar in Williamsburg, the death of the Glauber baby on Monday upset those who had sought solace in his birth.

“We were pinning our hopes that this baby was going to be another Moshe who stayed on so there would be a memory of the parents,” said Rabbi David Niederman, referring to a Hasidic toddler who survived a 2008 terrorist attack in Mumbai that killed his parents. “Unfortunately, the child passed away.”

Nate Schweber contributed reporting.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/05/nyregion/baby-whose-parents-were-killed-in-crash-also-dies.html?ref=nyregion&pagewanted=print

We Found Our Son in the Subway
By PETER MERCURIO

The story of how Danny and I were married last July in a Manhattan courtroom, with our son, Kevin, beside us, began 12 years earlier, in a dark, damp subway station.

Danny called me that day, frantic. “I found a baby!” he shouted. “I called 911, but I don’t think they believed me. No one’s coming. I don’t want to leave the baby alone. Get down here and flag down a police car or something.” By nature Danny is a remarkably calm person, so when I felt his heart pounding through the phone line, I knew I had to run.

When I got to the A/C/E subway exit on Eighth Avenue, Danny was still there, waiting for help to arrive. The baby, who had been left on the ground in a corner behind the turnstiles, was light-brown skinned and quiet, probably about a day old, wrapped in an oversize black sweatshirt.

In the following weeks, after family court had taken custody of “Baby ACE,” as he was nicknamed, Danny told the story over and over again, first to every local TV news station, then to family members, friends, co-workers and acquaintances. The story spread like an urban myth: You’re never going to believe what my friend’s cousin’s co-worker found in the subway. What neither of us knew, or could have predicted, was that Danny had not just saved an abandoned infant; he had found our son.


Anthony Russo

Three months later, Danny appeared in family court to give an account of finding the baby. Suddenly, the judge asked, “Would you be interested in adopting this baby?” The question stunned everyone in the courtroom, everyone except for Danny, who answered, simply, “Yes.”

“But I know it’s not that easy,” he said.

“Well, it can be,” assured the judge before barking out orders to commence with making him and, by extension, me, parents-to-be.

My first reaction, when I heard, went something like: “Are you insane? How could you say yes without consulting me?” Let’s just say, I nailed the “jerk” part of knee-jerk.

In three years as a couple, we had never discussed adopting a child. Why would we? Our lives were not geared for child rearing. I was an aspiring playwright working as a part-time word processor and Danny was a respected yet wildly underpaid social worker. We had a roommate sleeping behind a partition in our living room to help pay the rent. Even if our financial and logistical circumstances had been different, we knew how many challenges gay couples usually faced when they want to adopt. And while Danny had patience and selflessness galore, I didn’t. I didn’t know how to change a diaper, let alone nurture a child.

But here was fate, practically giving us a baby. How could we refuse? Eventually, my fearful mind spent, my heart seized control to assure me I could handle parenthood.

A caseworker arranged for us to meet the baby at his foster home in early December. Danny held the fragile baby first, then placed him in my arms. In order to protect myself from future heartache, I had convinced myself I could not, and would not, become inextricably attached. I didn’t trust the system and was sure there would be obstacles. But with the baby’s eyes staring up at me, and all the innocence and hope he represented, I, like Danny, was completely hooked.

The caseworker told us that the process, which included an extensive home study and parenting classes, could take up to nine months. We’d have ample time to rearrange our lives and home for a baby. But a week later, when Danny and I appeared in front of the judge to officially state our intention to adopt, she asked, “Would you like him for the holiday?”

What holiday? Memorial Day? Labor Day? She couldn’t have meant Christmas, which was only a few days away.

And yet, once again, in unison this time, we said yes. The judge grinned and ordered the transition of the baby into our custody. Our nine-month window of thoughtful preparation was instantly compacted to a mere 36 hours. We were getting a baby for Christmas.

We spent that year as foster parents while our caseworker checked up on us and the baby’s welfare. During that time we often wondered about the judge. Did she know Danny was a social worker and therefore thought he would make a good parent? Would she have asked him to adopt if she knew Danny was gay and in a relationship? At the final hearing, after she had signed the official adoption order, I raised my hand. “Your honor, we’ve been wondering why you asked Danny if he was interested in adopting?”

“I had a hunch,” she just said. “Was I wrong?” And with that she rose from her chair, congratulated us, and exited the courtroom.

And that was how we left it, as Baby ACE became Kevin, and grew from an infant to a boy. That is, until 2011, when New York State allowed Danny and me to legally marry.

“Why don’t you ask the judge who performed my adoption to marry you and Dad?” Kevin suggested one morning on our walk to school.

“Great idea,” I replied. “Would you like to meet her?”

“Sure. Think she’d remember me?”

“There’s only one way to find out.”

After dropping Kevin off, I composed a query letter and sent it to the catchall e-mail address listed for the Manhattan family court. Within hours, a court attorney called to say that, of course, the judge remembered us, and was thrilled by the idea of officiating our marriage. All we had to do was pick a date and time.

When we ventured back to family court for the first time in over 10 years, I imagined that the judge might be nervous to come face to face with the results of one of her placement decisions — what if Kevin wasn’t happy and wished he had different parents? Kevin was nervous too. When he was a toddler, Danny and I made him a storybook that explained how we became a family, and it included an illustration of the judge, gavel in hand. A character from his book was about to jump off the page as a real person. What if she didn’t approve of the way he turned out?

Kevin reached out to shake her hand.

“Can I give you hug?” she asked. When they separated, the judge asked Kevin about school, his interests, hobbies, friends and expressed her delight that we were there.

When we finally remembered the purpose of the visit, and Danny and I moved into position to exchange vows, I reflected on the improbable circumstances that delivered all of us to this moment. We weren’t supposed to be there, two men, with a son we had never dreamed of by our side, getting married by a woman who changed and enriched our lives more than she would ever know. But there we were, thanks to a fateful discovery and a judicious hunch.

Peter Mercurio is a playwright and screenwriter whose latest screenplay is “Found (a True Story).”

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/28/we-found-our-son-in-the-subway/?ref=opinion

‘You Can Actually Make a Lot of Money and Do a Lot of Good in the World’
Interview by ANDREW GOLDMAN

You write in your book, “Turnaround,” that you were drawn to economics because you wanted to “help people in developing countries like my native Jamaica.” Wouldn’t you be better off, say, heading up an NGO than becoming dean of a business school?
There’s shareholder value, and there’s stakeholder value. The banking industry is worried about shareholder value, and NGOs are primarily interested in stakeholder value. But things that drive up shareholder value can actually be very good for society at large. We have to have a different way of thinking about the role of business in society.

The Financial Times said that you’re the perfect dean for N.Y.U.’s Stern School of Business because M.B.A. students are “clamoring” for coursework to help in “reducing world poverty.” I thought people got M.B.A.’s to make themselves boatloads of money.
You can actually make a lot of money and do a lot of good in the world. I don’t see those things as being in opposition to one another. I never have.

Then can you name a Stern graduate who is making a ton of money and also saving the world?
With 90,000 alums, I won’t point to any one person. I love all my children equally.

Has the financial crisis made Wall Street less attractive for students?
Finance is not going anywhere. Emerging markets are driving global growth, and 3.5 billion people are moving to cities. That’s $20 trillion of infrastructure to lay down. It’s either a big problem or an opportunity.

Your family left Jamaica for Chicago when you were 8. Have you held on to any traditions?
Saturday afternoons in Jamaica are soup day. If you came to our house then, you’d smell pumpkin soup and patties from a place like Golden Krust in the oven as well.

What surprised you as an 8-year-old immigrant?
In Jamaica, you’re never very far away from people who don’t have very much, and in Wilmette, pretty much everybody had a lot.

You write that more than half the world economy is coming from emerging markets. What should this country be doing to assist their growth?
Giving emerging markets a say in the I.M.F. and the World Bank that’s commensurate with their contributions to the global economy would help reduce what I call the trust deficit, which, in some ways, is more important than the fiscal deficit.

You became well known in the economics world after you published a paper, in 2009, that disputed the findings of M.I.T.’s Daron Acemoglu, a much more prominent economist. He argued that former British colonies have been much more economically successful than their former French or Spanish counterparts. Did you intend to make a name for yourself by taking on the biggest kid in the schoolyard?
I’m never a person to pick a fight for the sake of picking a fight. And Daron and I are friends. But his hypothesis didn’t ring true to me. If it’s really true that the key to life is being colonized by the British, then how do Jamaica and Barbados, which started off life almost as twins, end up in such different places?

It was considered a big fight in the academic world. Was there ever an ugly showdown?
You know, having been colonized by the British, I wouldn’t find that a very civilized way to go about doing things. There’s an advantage to having a grandmother who was an Anglican schoolteacher.

You played football at the University of North Carolina, and then you were awarded a Rhodes scholarship. Are there people you’ve encountered who loathe you for being perfect?
I think my wife would take objection to any characterization of me as perfect.

At U.N.C., you were also a finalist in its slam-dunk contest. I imagine you’re the only M.I.T. economist who can dunk a basketball.
It’s probably indicative that I was destined for an academic career that I’m 6-5 and I lost the slam-dunk championship to somebody 5-8. I was a lot better at math.

INTERVIEW HAS BEEN CONDENSED AND EDITED.


http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/24/magazine/you-can-actually-make-a-lot-of-money-and-do-a-lot-of-good-in-the-world.html?ref=business&pagewanted=print

Flights and Trains Canceled as Storm Heads to Northeast

By MARC SANTORA


As a major winter storm made its way up the Atlantic Coast on Thursday, local authorities from New York City to Maine began to make preparations for what forecasters said could be the heaviest snowfall for some cities in the Northeast in a century.

Airlines began announcing the suspension of flights out of New York and Boston airports starting Friday night, as thousands of workers readied their plows, checked their stocks of salt and braced for what will most likely be a cold, wet weekend. Amtrak announced that it would suspend northbound service out of Penn Station in New York and southbound service out of Boston beginning early Friday afternoon.

Gas stations in parts of New York City and New Jersey had long lines Thursday night, according to local residents, a signal, perhaps, that many were taking storm warnings seriously.

More than 2200 flights for Friday had been cancelled, according to the Web site FlightAware, the majority originiting or departing from the areas affected by the storm.

By late Thursday night, schools across New York and Connecticut had announced they would close, or dismiss students early.

On Long Island, where some forecasts said there could be more than 18 inches of snow, the power company, which has received heavy criticism for its response to Hurricane Sandy, promised customers that they were prepared.

The city of Boston, where forecasts called for more than two feet of snow to fall by Saturday, announced that it would close all schools on Friday, joining other localities in trying to get ahead of the storm and keep people off the roads.

“We are taking this storm very seriously and you should take this storm very seriously,” said Jerome Hauer, the New York State Commissioner of the Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Services, at an afternoon news conference.

“If you don’t have to go to work tomorrow, we suggest that you do not,” he said. “If you do, we suggest that you plan for an early departure.”

The latest forecasts, he said, called for between 12 and 20 inches of snow in the New York City region and wind gusts that could exceed 60 miles per hour.

However, with the storm still some distance away, forecasters warned that predictions could change. The first sign of the storm will be a dusting of light snow that is expected to start falling across the region Friday morning.

At some point Friday night, the arctic jet stream will drop down from Canada and intersect with the polar jet stream, which usually travels through the lower 48 states.

“They will cross somewhere between New Jersey and Nantucket,” said Tim Morrin, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service. “That is where the center of the storm will deepen and explosively develop.”

If the current models hold, the storm could rival the blizzard of 1978 in New England, when more than 27 inches of snow fell in Boston and surrounding cities. That storm, which occurred on a weekday, resulted in dozens of deaths and crippled the region for days.

Peter Judge, a spokesman for the Massachusetts Emergency Management Agency, said more than 20 agencies had gathered at the agency’s operations center in Framingham, Mass., where they were preparing for a historic storm.

“From our perspective, this is a very severe, blizzard-type storm that we haven’t had for quite a long time,” Mr. Judge said. “Worst-case scenario, this will be the worst one that we’ve dealt with in many, many years. I can’t even come up with something comparable.”

Officials prepared for debris management, snow removal and supplies distribution, he said, as well as widespread power failures, which he said were the major concern. “People will lose their heat when they lose their power, and they’re certainly much more in harm’s way than at other times of the year,” he said.

Boston was bracing for the worst of the storm to hit between 2 and 5 p.m. Friday. Gov. Deval Patrick, who called the pending storm “a serious weather event,” has ordered all nonemergency personnel to work from home Friday and encouraged private employers to keep their workers home.

Governor Patrick asked that all vehicles stay off the roads after noon on Friday and said the Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority, including all subway, buses and commuter rail services, would close at 3:30. He said mass transit was being kept open until 3:30 to allow the first shift of emergency and hospital workers to get home and the second shift to get to work.

Boston public schools will be shut, and the governor encouraged all other school districts in the state to cancel classes.

The state is preparing “warming centers” to be open in local communities in case of major power failures and will move people into larger regional centers if they need to stay overnight.

At Logan Airport in Boston, long lines were forming by midafternoon as people tried to flee the storm.

“You don’t know what’s going to happen,” said Martin Stewart, 50, a service technician standing in a lengthy line at the airport. He had moved up his trip to Scotland to make sure he could get out. “Why mess around?” he said.

Two women waiting in line said they were leaving for London as planned but were somewhat wistful about missing a big storm. “We love the snow,” said Lynne Fistori, 36, who is taking a quick trip with her sister-in-law, Laura Fistori, 36. They expect that the men and children whom they are leaving behind will just ration their food and play in the snow.

The eastern-facing coastline — including cities like Scituate, south of Boston, and the Cape Ann area north of Boston — is at risk for major flooding, which could bring “a lot of beach erosion, potential damage of homes along the coast,” Mr. Judge said.

For the past 48 hours, weather predictions for the region have varied wildly, with forecasts calling for something more than a dusting to a car-burying snowfall.

But by Thursday, Mr. Morrin said, there was “enough evidence right now to say the legacy of this storm will be widespread.”

Just what parts of the New York City metropolitan area will be hit hardest will become clearer as the low-pressure system moves north, but Mr. Morrin said that all the forecasting patterns put the storm on “a historically favorable track.”

The morning commute on Friday could be affected by light snowfall. Temperatures are expected to rise during the day, which could mean a snowy, rainy mix — or just rain, Mr. Morrin said.

However, by Friday night, temperatures are expected to drop precipitously as cold air from the north moves down, turning the precipitation into snow.

“When the door opens, it is going to open wide,” Mr. Morrin said.

For New Yorkers, that could mean that the slushy mess from the daytime could freeze, not only creating hazardous conditions on the roads but also weighing down tree branches and power lines.

Michael Clendenin, a spokesman for Consolidated Edison, said the utility was making preparations for the storm and would have extra crews available to deal with any problems.

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg met Thursday with New York sanitation workers who were preparing for the storm.

“The good news, I guess, if you like snow, is that we’re going to have snow,” Mr. Bloomberg said.

“The better news is that if it’s going to happen, having it happen overnight Friday into Saturday is probably as good timing as we can have,” he added, “because the Sanitation Department then has the advantage of being able to clean the streets when there’s normally less traffic.”

New York State canceled all Civil Service examinations scheduled for Saturday.

Mr. Hauer said that coastal areas of Queens, Brooklyn and Long Island could see flooding and should be prepared to seek alternative shelter. While the storm surge is only expected to be 3 to 5 feet — well below the 14-foot surge that Hurricane Sandy delivered — he said large waves could bring water inland.

“If you see flooding, have plans for somewhere to go,” he said.

As the storm moves north, the heaviest bands of snow and rain would tend to occur northeast of the storm’s center.

“A lot depends on where the heaviest bands of snow develop,” he said. “If a band sits over an area, you can get three inches of snow an hour.”

By Friday morning, he said, it will be clearer where the worst of the storm is likely to hit.


Marc Santora reported from New York. Jess Bidgood and Katharine Q. Seelye contributed reporting from Boston.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/08/nyregion/northeast-could-be-hit-with-major-snowstorm.html?pagewanted=print

At $1.1 Billion, Bloomberg Is Top University Donor in U.S.

By MICHAEL BARBARO


BALTIMORE — He arrived on campus a middling high school student from Medford, Mass., who had settled for C’s and had confined his ambitions to the math club.

But by the time Michael R. Bloomberg left Johns Hopkins University, with a smattering of A’s and a lust for leadership, he was a social and political star — the president of his fraternity, his senior class and the council overseeing Greek life. “An all-around big man on campus,” as he puts it.

His gratitude toward the university, starting with a $5 donation the year after he graduated, has since taken on a supersize, Bloombergian scale.

On Sunday, as he makes a $350 million gift to his alma mater — by far the largest in its history — the New York City mayor, along with the president of the university, will disclose the staggering sum of his donations to Johns Hopkins over the past four decades: $1.1 billion.

That figure, kept quiet even as it transformed every corner of the university, makes Mr. Bloomberg the most generous living donor to any education institution in the United States, according to university officials and philanthropic tallies.

The timing of his latest donation, as the mayor’s third term draws to a close, offers a glimpse of the sky-is-the-limit philanthropy that he and his aides say is likely to dominate his life after City Hall. The mayor, who is 70, has pledged to give away all of his $25 billion fortune before he dies, and he has built up a foundation on the Upper East Side of Manhattan to carry out the task.

At the same time, the donations highlight the unusually close relationship between Mr. Bloomberg and Johns Hopkins, which, interviews show, has played an unseen role in several of his biggest undertakings as mayor.

In an interview here, Mr. Bloomberg said he was making his donations public to encourage greater charitable giving toward education. He lamented, “In our society, we are defunding education.”

The mayor, a member of the class of 1964, explained his fidelity to the university in deeply personal terms. Johns Hopkins, he said, was where he escaped the crushing boredom of Medford High and discovered an urban campus of stately Georgian buildings brimming with new people and ideas.

“I just thought I’d died and gone to heaven,” he said.

“If I had been the son of academics,” he added, “maybe I would have been on campuses and would never have been as impressed as I was when I was here, because it’s the first time I really was walking among people who were world leaders, who were creating, inventing.”

Johns Hopkins as it exists today is inconceivable without Mr. Bloomberg, whose giving has fueled major improvements in the university’s reputation and rankings, its competitiveness for faculty and students, and the appearance of its campus.

His wealth — not to mention a small army of his favored architects, art consultants and landscape designers — has bankrolled and molded the handsome brick-and-marble walkways, lamps and benches that dot the campus; has constructed a physics building, a school of public health, a children’s hospital, a stem-cell research institute, a malaria institute and a library wing; has commissioned giant art installations by Kendall Buster, Mark Dion and Robert Israel; and has financed 20 percent of all need-based financial aid grants to undergraduates over the past few years. (Even his ex-wife and in-laws make a campus cameo, on the dedication plaque for a science building he financed.)

“The modern story of Hopkins is inextricably linked to him,” said Ronald J. Daniels, the university’s president, as he walked around the campus recently. “When you look at these great investments that have transformed American higher education, it’s Rockefeller, it’s Carnegie, it’s Mellon, it’s Stanford — and it’s Bloomberg.”

Hopkins, in return, has become something of a brain trust for Mr. Bloomberg, shaping his approach to issues like cigarette smoking, gun violence and obesity.

It was faculty members at Hopkins who introduced Mr. Bloomberg, as a donor and as a trustee, to a growing body of science linking behavior and disease.

“That is when he discovered public health,” said Alfred Sommer, the dean of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health from 1990 until 2005.

At times, Mr. Bloomberg, then a high-flying entrepreneur, was resistant to paying for such research, arguing that some of the most intractable health problems were best left to government. “That’s policy; that’s politics,” Mr. Sommer recalled him saying.

But the underlying ideas stuck, and, as mayor, Mr. Bloomberg pressed the City Council to ban smoking in city parks, and the Board of Health to require fast-food chains to post calorie counts and restaurants to stop selling oversize sodas.

“He was in a position to act on things he had once told us we really shouldn’t be bothered with,” Mr. Sommer said. “He has been the public health mayor ever since.”

Years before he would banish cars from parts of Times Square, Mr. Bloomberg removed them from the quads of Johns Hopkins as chairman of the board of trustees, arguing they were unsightly and impeded socializing. (To hide them, he paid for an underground parking garage.)

The relationship between Mr. Bloomberg and Hopkins is, much like the college admissions process, the product of happenstance.

In high school, Mr. Bloomberg worked at an electronics company whose owner happened to have a doctorate from the university. She urged him to apply, despite his mediocre transcript.

“Let’s be serious — they took a chance on me,” Mr. Bloomberg said.

At Hopkins, the boyish-looking Mr. Bloomberg, whose high school classmates branded him “argumentative” in a class book, blossomed into a charismatic figure, eager to organize those around him. An engineering major, he persuaded his fraternity brothers to pay for a chef to replace a chaotic dinnertime routine, and he doled out assignments to lab mates. “He was like the project manager, at 19 years old,” Jim Kelly, a classmate, said.

On campus, Mr. Bloomberg discovered the addictive power of the limelight. When a local judge, tired of hearing cases involving misbehaving Hopkins fraternity brothers, called for an end to Greek life at the college, Mr. Bloomberg challenged him to an hourlong public debate. A healthy crowd showed up for the occasion.

“Mike not only held his own,” Mr. Kelly recalled, “he beat him.”

Mr. Bloomberg still relishes his star turn in campus governance. “It’s the first time that I ever headed something,” he said. “The first time I got a chance to pull people together.”

These days, his status as the university’s top donor has given him mayorlike sway at Hopkins: deans routinely travel to New York to pitch him new programs and research.

His latest passion: genetically engineering mosquitoes to prevent the transmission of malaria. “He always asks about the mosquitoes,” said Dr. Peter Agre, a Nobel Prize-winning professor at the university, where Mr. Bloomberg has paid for a temperature-controlled center to cultivate the bugs. The mayor of New York City now speaks of “building a better mosquito.”

Mr. Bloomberg tends to finance ideas that appeal to his contrarian style and corporate ethos. For years he has rotated top executives around his media company to encourage collaboration. In the hope of replicating that experience, most of his latest donation, about $250 million, will be used to hire 50 new faculty members who will hold appointments in two departments as they pursue research in areas like the global water supply and the future of American cities. (The remaining $100 million will be devoted to financial aid.)

His approach to philanthropy at the university is remarkablyhands-on. A trusted mayoral architectural adviser, Allen Kolkowitz, and an art guru, Nancy Rosen, guided the construction of the new Charlotte R. Bloomberg children’s hospital, named for the mayor’s mother. The building’s colorful exterior is a whimsical take on Monet’s paintings at Giverny. “He got very involved in the design,” said Dr. Edward D. Miller, the former chief executive of Hopkins Medicine.

Of course, certain courtesies are extended to a donor at Mr. Bloomberg’s level. When Dr. Miller realized that the Charlotte R. Bloomberg Children’s Center would be connected to a new tower named for Sheik Zayed bin Sultan al-Nahayan, the former president of the United Arab Emirates, he nervously called the mayor.

“Will you have a problem with this?” he asked Mr. Bloomberg.

The mayor thanked him for the call, but made clear he had no objection. “A Jew on one side, an Arab on the other,” he told Dr. Miller. “That’s what we should do in this world.”


http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/27/nyregion/at-1-1-billion-bloomberg-is-top-university-donor-in-us.html?pagewanted=2&hp&pagewanted=print

An Early Start on 2014 Super Bowl in New York

By KEN BELSON


Super Bowl XLVII is still a week away, but already New York City is gearing up for the title game that will be at MetLife Stadium a year from now.

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said part of Broadway in midtown Manhattan would be turned into “Super Bowl Boulevard,” an open-air free fan zone. The entertainment hub will run from 44th Street in the middle of Times Square down Broadway to 34th Street from Wednesday, Jan. 29, to Saturday, Feb. 1, the day before the game.

The fan zone will include nightly concerts, football clinics, warming stations for guests and sponsor booths. The NFL Network, Fox and ESPN will broadcast from the boulevard and N.F.L. players will be on hand to sign autographs. The league will display the Vince Lombardi Trophy and other Super Bowl items.

The N.F.L. said the Super Bowl Media Center would be at the Sheraton, and the Media Party will be held at Chelsea Piers on Jan. 28. Media Day will be held at the Prudential Center in Newark, also on Jan. 28, as opposed to at MetLife Stadium. A few hours before kickoff, the N.F.L.’s Tailgate Party will be held at the Meadowlands Racetrack.

The two teams in the Super Bowl will stay at hotels in New Jersey and practice at the Jets and Giants training facilities, also in New Jersey.

100 Years of Grandeur
By SAM ROBERTS
One hundred years ago, on Feb. 2, 1913, the doors to Grand Central Terminal officially opened to the public, after 10 years of construction and at a cost of more than $2 billion in today’s dollars. The terminal was a product of local politics, bold architecture, brutal flexing of corporate muscle and visionary engineering. No other building embodies New York’s ascent as vividly as Grand Central. Here, the tale of its birth, excerpted from “Grand Central: How a Train Station Transformed America,” by Sam Roberts, the urban affairs correspondent for The New York Times, to be published later this month by Grand Central Publishing.

The idea for the new Grand Central Terminal came to William J. Wilgus “in a flash of light,” he recalled decades later. “It was the most daring idea that ever occurred to me,” he said.

Wilgus, the New York Central Railroad’s chief engineer since 1899, had supervised the costly renovation of Grand Central Depot just a few years before. Born in Buffalo in 1865, he studied for two years under a local civil engineer and later took a Cornell correspondence course in drafting. His creativity and expertise propelled him through the ranks of various railroads and finally to the New York Central.

A fatal 1902 crash, in which the morning local from White Plains had slammed into the rear car of a Danbury, Conn., train stopped on the tracks of the Park Avenue Tunnel, killing 15 passengers instantaneously, had convinced Wilgus that it was no longer possible to run a chaotic railroad yard two avenue blocks wide in what was becoming the very heart of the nation’s largest city.

In a three-page letter to W. H. Newman, the railroad’s president, dated Dec. 22, 1902, the 37-year-old Wilgus recommended an audacious and extravagant remedy: Raze the existing Grand Central and replace the egregious steam locomotives with electric trains.

The technological advantages were clear-cut. Electricity required less maintenance. Unlike steam or, later, diesel locomotives, electric trains did not need the fuel or machinery to generate power on board. Electricity let trains accelerate more quickly, a decided amenity for short-haul commuter service. Another advantage, an obvious one in retrospect, provided the rationale that made Wilgus’s suggestion so revolutionary and, in the end, so inevitable. Electric motors produced fewer noxious fumes and no obfuscating smoke or steam. Moreover, as Wilgus explained, electricity “dispenses with the need of old-style train sheds,” because it made subterranean tracks feasible.



William J. Wilgus, the chief engineer for the New York Central Railroad, who came up with the idea of building the mammoth structure.


Absent the smothering smoke, soot and cinders, the depot could be expanded on the same footprint by delivering trains to platforms on two levels, the lower for suburban commuters and the upper for long-distance trains. For the first time, the entire rail yard all the way to 56th Street, to where the maze of rails that delivered passengers to the platforms coalesced into four main-line tracks, could be decked over. The “veritable ‘Chinese Wall’ ” that bisected the city for 14 blocks could be eliminated. The air above the yards could be magically transformed into valuable real estate in the heart of Manhattan.

For starters, Wilgus envisioned a 12-story, 2.3-million-square-foot building above the terminal that could generate rents totaling $2.3 million annually. Those advantages not only benefited “humanity in general,” as Cornelius Vanderbilt, known as the Commodore, would have put it, an ingratiating by-product, but also fulfilled the primary mission of his New York Central and Hudson River Railroad: that “we first see that we are benefiting ourselves.” Wilgus’s overarching remedy to the “Park Avenue problem,” he unabashedly proclaimed, “marked the opening of a remarkable opportunity for the accomplishment of a public good with considerations of private gain in behalf of the corporation involved.”

The terminal, he explained later, “could be transformed from a nonproductive agency of transportation to a self-contained producer of revenue — a gold mine, so to speak.”

Wilgus was asking the railroad’s directors to accept a great deal on faith. His projected $35 million price tag for all the improvements nearly equaled half the railroad’s revenue for a full year. Moreover, the railroad made most of its money hauling freight, not people. Why invest so much in a project that benefited only passengers? But the chief engineer was persuasive. By Jan. 10, 1903, the Central’s board of directors had embraced the project and promoted him. Six months later, on June 30, 1903, the board — whose directors included the Commodore’s grandsons Cornelius II and William K. Vanderbilt, as well as William Rockefeller and J. P. Morgan — in a daring validation of the chief engineer’s vision, formally empowered Wilgus to proceed with his bold agenda for a regal terminal that would be a gateway to the continent.

Even before the first spadeful of earth was turned, before the first boulder of Manhattan schist was blasted, a forest of exclamation points began sprouting with what was dubbed the city’s largest individual demolition contract ever. On 17 acres bought by the railroad, 120 houses, three churches, two hospitals and an orphan asylum would have to be obliterated, as would the stables, warehouses and other ancillary structures.

The Times acknowledged that “in describing it, the superlative degree must be kept in constant use.” It would be the biggest, it would contain the most trackage and, on top of that, it would be self-supporting.



The Library of Congress
The earlier, much smaller Grand Central Station in 1900.



In 1906, nearly two years before a state-imposed ban on the use of steam-powered locomotives from 42nd Street all the way to the Harlem River, the Central began operating electric cars from the existing Grand Central Station. (The New Haven followed suit a year later, using direct current from the Central’s third rail but switching to alternating current delivered from overhead lines on its own tracks in Connecticut, as it does today.)

After electrification, Wilgus’s second challenge was how to build a terminal without inconveniencing the passengers on the railroad’s hundreds of daily long-haul and commuter trains. To meet the challenge, the railroad temporarily relocated some of the station’s functions to the nearby Grand Central Palace Hotel.

Wilgus devised an ingenious construction strategy. The arduous process of demolishing existing structures, excavating rock and dirt 90 feet deep for the bi-level platforms and utilities, razing the mammoth train shed and building the new terminal would proceed in longitudinal “bites,” as he called them — troughs bored through the middle of Manhattan, one section at a time and proceeding from east to west. Construction would take fully 10 years, and by the time it was barely halfway finished, Wilgus would be gone and his guess as to the cost of the project would have doubled, to about $2 billion in today’s dollars.

As construction on the terminal progressed, the New York Central was keeping one very wary eye on what was happening just across town. Its archrival, the Pennsylvania Railroad, was challenging the Central’s monopoly by finally providing direct service to Manhattan. The Central and the Pennsy were like Coke and Pepsi, perennial rivals for routes, passengers, and market share. In the 19th century, the Pennsylvania was an also-ran in New York City. Because it had no Midtown station, passengers had to be transported between Exchange Place in Jersey City and Manhattan by boat.



The Library of Congress
Construction of the new terminal took over 10 years, with nearly 3.2 million cubic yards of earth and rock excavated.



Building a bridge across the river would have required a joint project with other New Jersey railroads, but none were game. Electrification, though, would make a Hudson River tunnel feasible. On Dec. 12, 1901, a little less than a month before the Park Avenue Tunnel crash, Alexander Cassatt, the Pennsylvania’s president, announced that the railroad would bore under the river and run trains to a grand station of its own, to be built on two square blocks bounded by 31st and 33rd Streets and Seventh and Eighth Avenues.

Ground was broken on May 1, 1904, for McKim, Mead & White’s colossal gateway. The breathtaking pink-granite-colonnaded station — a “great Doric temple to transportation,” the historian Jill Jonnes called it — was modeled on the public baths built in Rome 1,700 years earlier by Emperor Caracalla. The station would open in 1910 and, with the expense of two sets of tunnels, cost $114 million, or about $2.7 billion in today’s dollars.

William Wilgus was an engineer, not an architect, but he hoped to impose his own aesthetic on the new terminal. He knew what he didn’t like about the old depot: its “unattractive architectural design” and its “unfortunate exterior color treatment,” as well as the “great blunder” of dividing the city for 14 blocks and obstructing Fourth Avenue.

In 1903, the Central invited the nation’s leading architects to submit designs for the new terminal. Samuel Huckel Jr. went for baroque, a turreted confection with Park Avenue slicing through it. McKim, Mead & White proposed a 60-story skyscraper — the world’s tallest — atop the terminal (a modified version was later incorporated into the firm’s design for the 26-story municipal building, completed in 1916), itself topped by a dramatic 300-foot jet of steam illuminated in red as a beacon for ships and an advertisement (if, even then, an anachronistic one) for the railroad.

Reed & Stem, a St. Paul firm, won the competition. The firm began with two big advantages. It had designed other stations for the New York Central. Moreover, like the Central itself, Reed & Stem could count on connections: Allen H. Stem was Wilgus’s brother-in-law. Yet in the highly charged world of real estate development in New York, another firm’s connections trumped Reed & Stem’s. After the selection was announced, Warren & Wetmore, who were architects of the New York Yacht Club and who boasted society connections, submitted an alternative design. It didn’t hurt that one of the firm’s principals, Whitney Warren, was William Vanderbilt’s cousin.

The Central’s chairman officiated at a shotgun marriage of the two firms, pronouncing them the Associated Architects of Grand Central Terminal. The partnership would be fraught with dissension, design changes and acrimony and would climax two decades later in a spectacular lawsuit and an appropriately monumental settlement.

To Wilgus’s dismay, the Warren & Wetmore version eliminated the revenue-generating office and hotel tower atop the terminal. It also scrapped proposed vehicular viaducts to remedy the obstruction of Fourth Avenue, now Park, created by the depot.



Warren and Wetmore Collection, Avery Architecture and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University
CENTERPIECE Up to 10,000 workers at a time were assigned to the building site



Once the design was agreed upon, building Grand Central was a gargantuan undertaking. Wheezing steam shovels excavated nearly 3.2 million cubic yards of earth and rock to an average depth of 45 feet to accommodate the subterranean train yards, bi-level platforms and utilities — some as deep as 10 stories. The daily detritus, coupled with debris from the demolition of the old station, amounted to 1,000 cubic yards and filled nearly 300 railway dump cars. The lower tracks were 40 feet below street level and sprouted “a submerged forest” of steel girders. Construction required 118,597 tons of steel to create the superstructure and 33 miles of track. At peak periods, 10,000 workers were assigned to the site and work progressed around the clock. Beneath the 770-foot-wide valley he created in Midtown Manhattan, Wilgus dug a six-foot-diameter drainage sewer about 65 feet deep that ran half a mile to the East River.

The first electric locomotive barreled through the Park Avenue Tunnel from Highbridge in the Bronx on Sept. 30, 1906. Thirty-five 2,200-horsepower electric locomotives could accelerate to 40 miles per hour; multiple-unit suburban trains could hit 52 m.p.h. The Vanderbilts and the New York Central were immensely proud of their all-electric terminal and their mostly electric railroad. The maze of tracks and trains was commanded from a four-story switch-and-signal tower south of 50th Street. On one floor was a machine with 400 levers, the largest ever constructed, to sort out the suburban trains. On the floor above, another machine with 362 levers controlled the express tracks. A worker was assigned to each battery of 40 levers, and tiny bulbs on a facsimile of the train yard would automatically be extinguished as a train passed a switch and illuminated again when it reached the next switch.

On June 5, 1910, the Owl, as the midnight train was known, left Grand Central Station for Boston. It was the last to depart from the old station. Demolition began immediately.



Neal Boenzi/The New York Times
Workers reinstalled the clock at the information booth in 1954.


While Pennsylvania Station opened earlier and to rave reviews, it could not compare to Grand Central in magnitude. Penn Station and its yards spanned 28 acres. Grand Central covered 70. Penn Station had 16 miles of rails that converged into 21 tracks serving 11 platforms. The comparable figures for Grand Central originally were 32 miles, 46 tracks and 30 platforms. Grand Central required twice as much masonry and nearly twice the steel that Penn Station did. Fifteen hundred columns were installed to support the street-level deck and the buildings that would rise on it. Another $800,000 was spent on steel reinforcement, not needed for the terminal itself, but to support a skyscraper that eventually might rise above it. The terminal alone cost $43 million to build, the equivalent of about $1 billion today; the entire project set the Central back about $80 million.

Passengers’ comfort was of paramount concern. When it was finally completed, Grand Central could boast a separate women’s waiting room with oak floors and wainscoting and maids at the ready; a ladies’ shoe-polishing room “out of sight of the rubbernecks” and staffed by “colored girls in neat blue liveries”; a telephone room for making calls; a salon gussied up with walls and ceilings of Carrara glass, “where none but her own sex will see while she had her hair dressed”; a dressing room attended by a maid (at 25 cents); and a private barbershop for men, which could be rented for $1 an hour, and a public version where “the customer may elect to be shaved in any one of 30 languages.”

No amenity was spared. “Timid travelers may ask questions with no fear of being rebuffed by hurrying trainmen, or imposed upon by hotel runners, chauffeurs or others in blue uniforms,” a promotional brochure boasted. Instead, “walking encyclopedias” in gray frock coats and white caps were available. Passengers would be protected from unwanted contact as well as glances. “Special accommodations are to be provided for immigrants and gangs of laborers,” The Times reported. “They can be brought into the station and enter a separate room without meeting other travelers.” Grand Central, the brochure proclaimed, is “a place where one delights to loiter, admiring its beauty and symmetrical lines — a poem in stone.”

Just how much loitering could have been done on the opening day is arguable. Railroad officials estimated that by 4 p.m. on Sunday, Feb. 2, 1913, more than 150,000 people had visited the terminal since the doors were thrown open at midnight. The first train to leave was the Boston Express No. 2, at 12:01 a.m. The first to arrive was a local on the Harlem line. F. M. Lahm of Yonkers bought the first ticket.



Edward Hausner/The New York Times
A crowd watched a giant screen on Feb. 20, 1962, when John Glenn orbited Earth.



Grand Central was billed as the first great “stairless” station, one in which the flow of passengers was sped by gently sloping ramps that were tested out at various grades and ultimately designed to accommodate everyone from “the old, infirm traveler, to the little tot toddling along at his mother’s side, to the man laden down with baggage which he declines to relinquish to any one of the most cordial attendants, to the women trailing a long and preposterous train.” The flow would now empty from 32 upper-level and 17 lower-level platforms (fed from as many as 66 and 57 tracks) into a main concourse that was 275 feet long, 120 feet wide and 125 feet high and flanked by 90-foot-high transparent walls that were punctuated by glass walkways connecting the terminal’s corner offices.

Its concave ceiling created a view of the heavens from Aquarius to Cancer in an October sky, 2,500 stars — 59 of them illuminated and intersected by two broad golden bands representing the ecliptic and the Equator. For several months, painters debated how to squeeze the heavens onto a cylindrical ceiling, because the artist Paul Helleu’s version seemed more fitting for a dome, and they experimented to find just the proper shade of blue. The ceiling designs were developed by J. Monroe Hewlett and executed largely by Charles Basing and his associates. As many as 50 painters under Basing’s direction worked to ensure that there was no variation in color tone. Lunette windows were ornamented with plaster reliefs of winged locomotive wheels, branches of foliage symbolizing transportation, and clouds and a caduceus (the short staff usually entwined with serpents and surrounded by wings and typically carried by heralds).



Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times
Workers restored a sculpture atop the building in 1980.


The finishing touches would not be complete for another year (the viaduct would not be opened until 1919, and the innovative lower-level loop, which allowed arriving trains to depart more quickly, would not become operational until 1927). Among the last was Transportation, the gigantic sculpture designed by a Frenchman, Jules Félix Coutan, above the central portal on 42nd Street. Coutan, who also designed the France of the Renaissance sculpture for the extravagant Alexander III bridge in Paris, created a one-fourth-size plaster model in his studio from which John Donnelly, a native of Ireland, carved the final 1,500-ton version from Indiana limestone at the William Bradley & Son yards in Long Island City, Queens.

Contemplating a plaster model of the sculpture in his office, Warren later wrote that while the ancients entered cities through triumphal gates that punctuated mighty fortifications, in New York and other cities the gateway is more likely to be “a tunnel which discharges the human flow in the very center of the town.”

“Such is the Grand Central Terminal,” he continued, “and the motive of its facade is an attempt to offer a tribute to the glory of commerce as exemplified by that institution.”

When Grand Central was finally finished, the only thing lacking was adjectives. The Times produced a special section of the newspaper and hailed the terminal as “a monument, a civic center, or, if one will, a city.”

“Without exception,” the newspaper said, “it is not only the greatest station in the United States, but the greatest station, of any type, in the world.”

A full century later, the journalist and novelist Tom Wolfewould write: “Every big city had a railroad station with grand — to the point of glorious — classical architecture — dazzled and intimidated, the great architects of Greece and Rome would have averted their eyes — featuring every sort of dome, soaring ceiling, king-size column, royal cornice, lordly echo — thanks to the immense volume of the spaces — and the miles of marble, marble, marble — but the grandest, most glorious of all, by far, was Grand Central Station.”

From the book “Grand Central” by Sam Roberts. Copyright © 2013 by Sam Roberts. Reprinted by permission of Grand Central Publishing, New York. All rights reserved.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/20/nyregion/the-birth-of-grand-central-terminal-100-years-later.html?src=dayp&_r=0&pagewanted=print

Bazooka Joe, bubble gum icon, dead at 59
New York Business Journal
Date: Friday, November 30, 2012, 3:27pm EST - Last Modified: Monday, December 3, 2012, 11:14am EST

Say it ain’t so, Joe.

Bazooka Candy Brands, a subsidiary of the Brooklyn-based Topps Co., is redesigning its packaging and ending comic strips featuring its mascot, Bazooka Joe, according to the New York Times.

The Times quotes Anthony Trani, vice president of branding for the company, as saying that the brand changed in order to become more relevant to children. The report went on to state that, according to E-Poll Market Research, the Bazooka Joe character, introduced in 1953, is recognized by only 7 percent of children today between the ages of 6 and 12, and has only a 41 percent favorability rating among them, below the 54 percent average for food characters.

As of this writing, the brand’s web site URL is still BazookaJoe.com, but BusinessInsider reports the company will start running ads with the new branding in March 2013.

http://www.bizjournals.com/newyork/news/2012/11/30/bazooka-joe-pushed-out-in-rebranded.html

Say Goodbye to the Stage Deli, a Midtown Staple Since 1937
By FLORENCE FABRICANT

At midnight on Thursday, the Stage Deli, a landmark New York institution that got its start 75 years ago, closed its doors.

“It’s a sad day for New York,” said Paul Zolenge, who has owned the deli, on Seventh Avenue near 54th Street, with Steve Auerbach for 26 years. “We’ve been struggling to make it through these hard times.”

Mr. Zolenge cited the cost of doing business in New York. The landlord erected scaffolding in front of the restaurant a year ago, he said, and even though it came down in September, “we lost a whole year.” The rent had gone up several times in recent years, Mr. Zolenge said, and with the lease ending in a few months, he and Mr. Auerbach were expecting another increase. “We just couldn’t afford to keep it going any more,” he said.

The deli, known for its overstuffed sandwiches named for celebrities, usually in show business, was started by Max Asnas in 1937. Mr. Asnas sold it to Jimmy Richter, and Mr. Zolenge became involved through family connections. “My father-in-law, who has been a silent partner, bought it in 1978, and after a few years, I took it over,” he said.

Over the decades, the competition between the Stage Deli and the nearby Carnegie Deli, a similarly famous spot that opened the same year as the Stage, has been fierce. Mr. Zolenge speculated that someone might come along to buy his restaurant’s name.

“This has been very hard for everyone to put an end to an institution,” he said, noting that the same had happened recently to several other Midtown old-timers. “Ben Benson’s closed, and Gallagher’s is closing, too.”

http://dinersjournal.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/30/stage-deli-closes-a-midtown-staple-since-1937/

Happy Thanksgiving.

http://social.macys.com/parade2012_kaws/?cm_mmc=VanityUrl-_-parade-_-n-_-n#/home

Yup. Just about every building on the street was flooded and is now closed.

now we know why they call it water st.

We have an ofice at 199 Water Street and the building won't reopen till December.

Basement was completely flooded and 3 feet high in the lobby.

http://www.emporis.com/building/one-seaport-plaza-new-york-city-ny-usa