He’s still got it, Mario Cuomo. Remember him?
Remember The Speech? The one he called “A Tale of Two Cities.” The one he gave at the doomed 1984 Democratic convention in San Francisco, in the midst of the Reagan revolution and the rebirth of the religion of wealth.
You don’t have to depend on nostalgia—you Read More
The latest New Republic has an emotional attack on Tony Judt, John Mearsheimer, and Stephen Walt by Leon Wieseltier. Wieseltier says that W-M are antisemites who don’t understand how policy is formulated and Tony Judt is trading in antisemitic legends. He gets very angry. All this stems from the Walt Mearsheimer paper and Judt’s defense Read More
A smart friend tells me that despite the excited crowds gathered outside Cooper Union 3 weeks back, and the great excitement in the hall, there has been hardly a drop of ink spilled on the Israel lobby debate sponsored by the London Review of Books. The Forward covered it, the Observer covered it, so did Read More
Rebel Bachelors
So you’re a New Yorker of some years, let’s say, and you get a phone call from the leader of an African rebel army. It’s his first time in the States, and he wants you to show him the town.
I was heading south through Connecticut in mid-September, somewhere near New Haven, when Read More
Our tale this week of university real estate woe left out a lot of worthwhile research from the City Project paper on which we reported. One bit of that is how the Chrysler Building has been standing there, all 1,048 tall of it, for 76 years without it contributing any property tax to Read More
In the morning, the Campaign for Fiscal Equity will hold a news conference on the appeals court ruling on New York City’s schools at the law offices of Simpson, Thatcher & Bartlett just before a commemoration of the 95th anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire is held on the corner of Green Read More
On a north-facing triangle of Astor Place, the skeleton of a new 21-story residential tower has been racing skyward out of a gaping pit on the former parking lot adjacent to the Cooper Union, casting a shadow across the octagonal streetscape and Tony Rosenthal’s teetering cube.
The contours of the building’s bulbous silhouette, which somewhat Read More
On the southeast corner of Third Avenue and Ninth Street:
Through a glass door and up a dingy flight of concrete stairs and you’re at Village Yokocho, a hidden Japanese restaurant. Red paper lanterns hang from a blue cloudy ceiling. Long lines of patrons trail down the stairs-those in the know will walk directly past Read More
An architectural holy war has erupted over a plot of land where the East meets the West Village.
The faculty of Cooper Union, which owns the site at the convergence of Lafayette Street, Astor Place and Fourth Avenue, would love to get its hands on the property. The last undeveloped triangular intersection in the city, Read More
