In this summer of our discontent, a season of buckling banks and wheezing newspapers, it might be well to remember that as far as crisis years go, 2009 is a wimp. But when it comes to New York City, disaster breeds resurrection.
As in: 40 years ago, 1969. Richard Nixon had been elected president Read More
Here, in the video below, is departing Republican Representative Vito Fossella chatting with reporters after his big thank-you breakfast on Staten Island yesterday.
The event generated speculation that Fossella may seek to run for office again in the future, and demonstrated that yes, he’s still popular with in his district. Local Read More
Mayor Michael Bloomberg has returned to planet Earth. With a white-cheeked gibbon swinging from branch to branch and a Malayan Tapir drooping its head over a muddy puddle behind him at the Bronx Zoo, on Nov. 24, Mr. Bloomberg explained why, after all the talk over the last couple of years about the stratospheric national Read More
Betsy Gotbaum, the soft-spoken Public Advocate who has been part of city government since John Lindsay was Mayor in the 1970’s, has suddenly found quite a lot to complain about.
The eight-year term limits on the City Council, she says, are distracting the members, whose meetings she gavels into session and watches from the highest Read More
Like any shrewd businessman, Michael Bloomberg knows the importance of test-marketing a new product—especially if the product in question happens to be himself. So Mr. Bloomberg, the billionaire media mogul who is considering a run for Mayor on the Republican line, is conducting a series of focus groups to determine, in part, whether New Yorkers Read More
My favorite still from a movie made in New York is not in this book. I first saw it as a child of 11 or 12—I could have been leafing though Daniel Blum’s A Pictorial History of the Silent Screen (1953). (My future was all mapped out for me even then.) The still showed two Read More
As an addendum to today’s story on Bloomberg’s strategic plan, let us pass on this reminiscence from Sylvia Deutsch, the former city planning chairwoman. The other day, she recalled that she joined the commission shortly after Mayor John Lindsay’s 1969 master plan for the city appeared.
It was a really exhaustive look at each Read More
A cast of pols and pranksters, drunk on venom and tabloid ink, has been staging the gradual collapse of the state Republican Party for months now. Backroom antagonists have become public dueling partners, sparring in pairs that include State Senator Joe Bruno versus Governor George Pataki, gubernatorial hopeful William Weld versus former Senator Al D’Amato, Read More
Michael Bloomberg doesn’t do anonymity. He believes above all in leaving a mark, and preferably, his own name. His alma maters—Johns Hopkins and Harvard universities— carry Bloomberg chairs and Bloomberg schools, his media empire flies under the eponymous Bloomberg L.P. flag, and he has blanketed the city in Bloomberg signs, pins and television commercials.
Yet Read More
Michael Bloomberg doesn’t do anonymity. He believes above all in leaving a mark, and preferably, his own name. His alma maters—Johns Hopkins and Harvard universities— carry Bloomberg chairs and Bloomberg schools, his media empire flies under the eponymous Bloomberg L.P. flag, and he has blanketed the city in Bloomberg signs, pins and television commercials.
