The question of whether Chrysler pitchman Clint Eastwood’s “Halftime in America” ad was a backdoor Obama campaign ad may finally be answered, as Clint Eastwood was recently caught on tape by TMZ talking politics. An enterprising paparazzo celebrated Presidents’ Day by asking Mr. Eastwood to name his favorite U.S. President, and after rattling Read More
From his corner office on the 35th floor of the Jacob K. Javits Federal Building downtown, Adolfo Carrion could once survey much of his domain. The regional administrator for HUD Region 2, Mr. Carrion was responsible for the federal government’s housing and urban development projects in New York and New Jersey. Stretching out before the floor-to-ceiling windows is lower Manhattan. Brooklyn and Queens are off to the left. Staten Island and the Statue of Liberty peek out from behind the towers of downtown. Out across the harbor to the right is Jersey City and, off in the distance, Newark. Glory and destitution in one vista.
Peering down, it is easy to see a century’s worth of transformational urban development. The redbrick monoliths of the New York Housing Authority, the brainchild of Robert Moses and the WPA, abound. Idyllic towers propagated by LaGuardia, Rockefeller, Lindsay and a thousand other urban dreamers, these are the projects that deteriorated into The Projects. Ringing the Battery and over the bridges to Long Island are the FDR, the West Side Highway, the BQE and the rest of Moses’s great interstate network. After four decades, Battery Park City is nearly complete, built on the landfill dredged up by the World Trade Center. More than $20 billion in Liberty bonds is at work rebuilding the Trade Center and other pieces of lower Manhattan, ravaged on 9/11.
Yet for all this work, it is hard to recognize a marquee project, a bright shining beacon of the Obama administration on the scale of those that came before. Read More
Barack Obama’s campaign, not content with a Google+ chat, jumped onboard a new tech craze by uploading a Spotify playlist for the 2012 race. (Spotify is the music network that publicizes the songs to which one listens and allows the creation of epic playlists.) It’s pretty easy to cherrypick out the songs of which Read More
Before he was leader of the free world cruising around in armor-plated vehicles with a Secret Service retinue, then-legislator Barack Obama allegedly tooled around in this tasteful gray Chrysler sedan. This is apparently a legitimate auction for the 2005 Chrysler 300C the President used while he was an Illinois State senator. Lisa Czibor, who has told reporters that she is holding the auction for someone else, says the first 19,000 miles were all [future] presidential powered.
The auction holders are also a little defensive about the $1,000,000 asking price: Read More
The Rockefeller tree lighting ceremony. President Barack Obama‘s visit to town. Read More
Last night, demonstrators who arrived in midtown to protest a Barack Obama fundraiser found themselves corralled into a “free speech zone” on 53rd Street and 7th Avenue. Reporters–like Josh Harkinson from Mother Jones and Meg Robertson from MSNBC –were not allowed near the penned-in demonstrators, despite Commissioner Ray Kelly‘s recent orders that the NYPD was to play nice with journalists covering OWS. This directive came after the events of the November 14th raid of Zuccotti and the Day of Protest on the 17th left 26 reporters arrested. Read More
Robert Moses built as often with expressions and syllogism as with stone and steel. “The important thing is to get things done.” “If the end doesn’t justify the means, what does?” “Either you want it or you don’t want it, and either you want it now or you don’t get it at all.”
They peppered his conversations and correspondence and were bellowed at rooms full of subservient staff, intransigent politicians and hostile citizens. The most influential and enduring of his maxims is undoubtedly: “Once you sink that first stake, they’ll never make you pull it up.”
More than the thousands of miles of roads and bridges and tunnels, the grand parks and parkways, the exhibition centers and fairs, more than the innumerable demolished homes and displaced families, the congestion and pollution, the social unrest—more than anything that Moses built or destroyed, this idea, get the shovels in the ground and there will be no stopping us, shaped the country’s public works ethos.
While his projects were largely confined to New York, his ideas about how, and why, to build persisted across the country. Sure, there were the acolytes who parroted Moses’ ideas of urban renewal in cities across America, but they fell out of favor not long after their patron fell from power. His ideas, on how to build, and more importantly how to keep building, persisted for decades after Moses was deposed. For almost 30 years after he was laid to rest in 1981, Moses’ spirit lived on in infrastructure.
Sink those stakes, and the money will follow for more. It always does.
Then, almost over night, we gave up the ghost. It did not start with New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and his decision to cancel the ARC Tunnel—recall the Congressional fight over much-maligned stimulus spending—but that was certainly the clarion call. Read More
You can thank all that traffic in Midtown this week to the 66th session of the United Nations General Assembly, which brought in not only the world’s most important leaders, but all their bodyguards and beefed up security as well. Don’t even try going east of 3rd Ave today, is all we’re saying. Read More
Wednesday, September 7
Reever Madness
They’re making another Superman flick with some British gent—don’t they know that for screen magnetism as well as real-life heroism, the buck stopped with Christopher Reeve? The beloved screen icon, who became an advocate for the paralyzed after a horseback-riding accident, is remembered at the Christopher & Dana Reeve Read More
Hurricane Irene played matchmaker for the political odd couple of President Obama and New Jersey Governor Chris Christie. The potential 2012 rivals are unlikely allies in the debate over hurricane relief and they’re spending an awkward afternoon together tomorrow touring flood damage in Paterson.
Despite his repeated denials, Christie is viewed by many insiders as a Read More
