Under Bloomberg, more enter the shelters but fewer get out. (Jori Bolton)

By the time Anne Pierre and her sons arrived at 199 Amboy Street, it was after midnight. The heat of the unusually warm April day had all but drained away, but there was a mellowness to the air, a contrast to the sharp, cold spring nights that had come before. From the outside, the red-brick building looked clean and well-maintained, though the darkness made it difficult to tell for sure. In Ms. Pierre’s experience, the exteriors of homeless shelters were poor predictors of conditions inside.

Late though it was, the family’s arrival at the Brownsville shelter marked the somewhat triumphant culmination of a bureaucratic odyssey that had started two days earlier, when Ms. Pierre had reapplied for shelter at the family intake center in the Bronx. It was only somewhat triumphant in that 199 Amboy was just a 10-day placement, the latest in a string of temporary housing assignments that had become the norm since the family lost its eligibility for shelter in February. But as it turned out, 199 Amboy was the nicest place Ms. Pierre and the two boys stayed since entering the shelter system in June 2012.

As 9-year-old Jordan described their arrival, “When we saw it, we was shocked. It was nice. It was decent.”

Anne, Jordan and Tyler Pierre.

Decent is the kind of good-enough existence that has seemed to elude the family for the last 10 months. But it felt potentially within reach again when they fell asleep that night at a little after 1 a.m., relieved if still wary, with the alarm set for 6 a.m.—the preparations necessary for the school day ahead as uncompromising as the dawn.

Like many other families who have recently swelled the ranks of the city’s homeless population, routine has taken on an almost talismanic significance for Ms. Pierre and her boys. They live an approximation of a life that involved, until recently, an apartment of their own—a two-bedroom on Legion Street rented for four years with the help of a Section 8 voucher. Ms. Pierre paid $350 of the $1,100 rent until a recurrent mold problem disqualified the apartment.

Routine means showers in the morning and at night (depending on the hot water situation). It means home-style Haitian cooking for dinner, even if that involves dining out—an expensive proposition, but difficult to avoid when you don’t live in any one place long enough to lay in a supply of groceries or retrieve your pots and pans from storage. It means buying cleaning supplies and paper plates and a tablecloth for every new housing placement, no matter how temporary.

It means the boys’ hair is neatly trimmed, their Adidas sneakers unscuffed, their backpacks stiff with relative newness. Ms. Pierre, a compactly built woman who wears patterned acrylic nails and keeps her braids under a neat kerchief, is vigilant about appearances. One morning on the B35 bus to 4-year-old Tyler’s preschool, she noticed that the knees of his red school sweatsuit were slightly soiled. “He’s always on his knees,” she said apologetically. “I just washed these.” When they arrived, she asked about buying a second school sweatsuit, a purchase that would almost certainly make life harder rather than easier, given that they’d been living out of only a few bags and using a nearby laundromat’s wash-and-fold as de facto clothing storage. After 10 months, even their homelessness has taken on aspects of routine. The strange beds, the strange streets, mapping the new bus routes to the boys’ schools in the morning—it is about as familiar as an unfamiliar thing can be.

In January of this year, the city’s homeless population exceeded 50,000—the highest number since the Great Depression. But while previous homeless crises were largely defined by individuals who fell out of the social fabric long before they went homeless—unemployed, unemployable, or with serious health or substance abuse problems—the current crisis is defined by families, who make up some three-quarters of the city’s shelter population.

The number of families in shelters has nearly doubled in the last decade—as of this month, the shelter population included more than 10,000 families and nearly 21,000 children, according to city data. Homeless families have been the fastest-growing segment of the shelter population during Mayor Bloomberg’s reign, soaring from 6,921 when he took office in January 2002 to 11,984 in January 2013, according to data provided by Coalition for the Homeless.

Even as the problem has become more widespread, it has become harder to see. It’s not so much a figure sleeping in a doorway, but a mother lugging around duffel bags, a child’s grades slipping, a family rushing home to make a 10 o’clock shelter curfew.

The current situation may mirror the Great Depression in numbers, but today’s deprivation is played out not against a backdrop of 1930s austerity and thrift, but one of profligacy that revels in extravagances of all sorts, from $20 cocktails to $90 million condos. In Bloomberg’s New York, the streets may still be potholed, but every new bathroom seems to be clad in Calacatta marble.

Ever since clawing its way back from the brink of economic collapse under Koch, New York City has undergone a dramatic transformation. But to lower-income New Yorkers untouched by the city’s new prosperity, it often feels like a cruel taunt that has only made life more difficult.

Jordan and Anne on the walk home from school.

Brooklyn is now the second most expensive place to live in America (after Manhattan), with townhouses that sell for $12 million and jars of pickles that sell for $9, but nearly half of its population can’t afford to live there. According to a recent study from the Center for an Urban Future, almost 40 percent of the borough’s population works in low-wage jobs, making less than $27,000 a year. At that salary, affordable rent (affordable is defined as costing no more than 30 percent of income) tops out at $675 a month. Minimum-wage workers can’t afford to pay more than $375 a month—a virtual impossibility.

A lot of people make do, of course. They triple up with relatives, live four to a room, work two jobs, display the scrappy ingenuity and hardscrabble bravado that we like to think of as quintessentially New York, until something goes wrong.

The huge increase in families seeking shelter is proof of how precarious the lives of New York’s working poor are. Family shelters house working parents and recently working ones like Ms. Pierre, a full-time home health aide until June. They are families who have long struggled to make ends meet but for whom homelessness is a new—though increasingly intractable—predicament. Last year, families spent more than a year on average in the shelter system for the first time since 1987. Advocates attribute their inability to leave to the fact that, in contrast to the last three decades, there are no longer subsidies available to help them move out of shelters and into permanent housing.

The current reality stands in sharp contrast to the ambitious plan Mayor Bloomberg presented in 2004 to reduce the shelter population by two-thirds and end chronic homelessness within five years by addressing “homelessness at its core, rather than at the margins.” It partly focused on preventative measures like eviction protection, which were widely lauded, but more controversially, it wiped out the paths to permanent housing, replacing them with temporary housing, on the assumption that families just needed a little help getting back on their feet.

“They thought that having paths to permanent housing was drawing people into the shelter system, so their approach to ending homelessness was to eliminate the path to permanent housing,” said Councilman Brad Lander, who has been an outspoken critic of Mr. Bloomberg’s policies.

Determining how much of the blame should be laid at Mayor Bloomberg’s feet is a complicated question. While he and his policies have certainly presided over an unprecedented rise in the homeless population, the recession, the mounting cost of living and the national rise in homelessness are significant confounding variables.

Nonetheless, in the twilight of his last term, Mr. Bloomberg seems to have retreated from the battle, leaving the next mayor to solve a problem that has grown to monstrous proportions. In March, he blamed the surge in homelessness on the loss of state funding for Advantage—a program that issued temporary rental subsidies to thousands of shelter families from 2007 to 2011—but the Department of Homeless Services has not suggested any new programs to deal with the void left in its wake.

Still, the mayor’s approach to the spiking shelter population has also struck many as less than compassionate. New York magazine quoted him as saying “you can arrive in your private jet at Kennedy Airport, take a private limousine and go straight to the shelter system and walk in the door and we’ve got to give you shelter.”

Anne in the foyer of the shelter on Clarkson Street where the family used to live.

Anne Pierre doesn’t have a jet or a limousine. It was hard for her to rouse the boys on their first day at the new shelter, but the morning was full of promise. There was hot water, Ms. Pierre had a plan to try to get them eligible for shelter again, and she had heard about a home health aide service that might be hiring.

There were those little frustrations that can threaten to bring down a day—a late departure, unfamiliar streets, several people’s detailed though utterly unhelpful directions to the bus stop, and Tyler, impish even on a few hours of sleep, dropping Ms. Pierre’s hand and jogging backward down the sidewalk for a half block. But just as easily, the morning righted itself.

Having set off hesitantly toward the rumored bus stop, Ms. Pierre recognized a park, its pocked red running track dotted with figures in tracksuits. The park was not only familiar, it was just a few blocks from Jordan’s school—the school, she declared with amazement, was walkable. “Thank you God, his school is walkable,” she said, an exclamation she repeated in a tone of happy disbelief several times on the walk over.

For the rest of the journey, Tyler was charged with telling the family which way to turn at intersections and when it was safe to cross the streets. Though he is notorious for clowning and for a tendency to blurt out whatever he is thinking despite the social consequences, he went about the task obediently enough.

“Tyler has all of me,” Ms. Pierre says. “He’s like me when I was a kid. Don’t care if you get in trouble. Jordan is different. Jordan, Jordan watch everything. He talk around people if he like you. He plays with other kids, but he like to be by himself too. He needs time by himself and Tyler doesn’t want to give it to him, and they end up fighting.”

Anne Pierre rides the subway home. She spends much of her day in transit.

At a corner store across from Jordan’s school, P.S. 631, they stopped to buy breakfast sandwiches. Jordan fidgeted as they waited for the sandwiches. “It’s 9:05,” he said, looking at Ms. Pierre.

“I know,” she said.

School had started at 8:30, his third-grade regents exams were the following week, and he had missed school the day before because children need to be present when their parents reapply for shelter. As soon as Ms. Pierre had paid, he bolted out of the store, but not without hugging her goodbye. She watched until he disappeared behind the door.
“I have to see him go inside, in front of my eyes, or I worry,” she said. She meets him after school, too. “I’m one of those—I’m not going to say crazy mothers, I’m going to say worried mothers.”

Ms. Pierre worries a lot. She worries about where they’ll be living next, she worries about Jordan’s asthma and she worries about her 19-year-old daughter, Anna. Anna, who Ms. Pierre brought to the U.S. from Haiti as a 1-month-old infant when she herself was only 17, was living with them on Legion Street before they lost the apartment. She is now living with a girlfriend whom Ms. Pierre says is abusive and lies about whether Anna is home when the boys try to visit. Most of all, she worries on the days when she has to go to the intake center, the days when everything seems impossible and she has to plead for a new placement in a system that she doesn’t want to be in and whose rules she only half understands.

She did not, for example, understand that she could lose her Section 8 voucher for not finding a new apartment quickly enough after the last one was disqualified. Nor did she understand that, having lost it, she could not get it back (with more than 100,000 families, the waiting list is now closed). She had not understood how difficult it would be to find a new apartment by herself (the first broker she approached demanded a month up front as a deposit before showing her anything), and she had not understood that having a 4-year-old would be a problem.

Jordan and Anne studying a house in Brownsville.

But working 40 or more hours a week had meant little time to conduct an apartment hunt, which meant that she especially resented being shown decrepit one-bedrooms passed off as two-bedrooms by landlords taking advantage of the short supply of Section 8 housing. She was passed over for all the apartments she did apply for. One landlord explained that if she just had older kids, it wouldn’t be a problem, but a 4-year-old meant window grates and radiator covers and other modifications that he wasn’t willing to spend extra money on.

Other rejections were more vague, but they amounted to the same thing: by June, she didn’t have a place to live, and without a Section 8 voucher, she didn’t have the money to pay for one anyway. She was making $9 an hour—a step up from the $7.25 an hour she made when she started four years earlier, but her income was less than $20,000 a year even when she worked 48 hours a week, which she did as often as she could.

When Ms. Pierre and the boys entered the shelter system, she thought it would be temporary and even turned down an offer for public housing because it was far from Jordan’s school. But things went quickly downhill. The one-bedroom apartment she was assigned to in a dingy building on Clarkson and Nostrand was not ideal, but things would have been okay if Anna, who had just graduated from high school—one of the few in her class to graduate with a Regents diploma, Ms. Pierre noted proudly—had not moved out.

This was a problem because Anna watched Tyler when Ms. Pierre was at work. Not having anyone to watch Tyler meant that Ms. Pierre couldn’t start the next assignment her job offered her, and they gave it to someone else, which meant that she didn’t have any income for several weeks. She applied for public assistance, but before it came through her phone got cut off, which meant that she couldn’t get another work assignment because they wouldn’t give her one without a contact number.

It was simple and complicated at the same time. In a matter of months, she lost her house, her job and, it sometimes seemed, her daughter, who had dropped out of her college classes—she wanted to become a police detective someday—and moved in with the girlfriend, a woman Ms. Pierre described as a “bad influencer” who discouraged Anna from going out or talking to other people. With limited contact, Ms. Pierre and the boys have taken to walking past the girlfriend’s apartment on a regular basis, hoping to catch a glimpse of Anna.

“The last time I see her, her face has changed,” said Ms. Pierre. “Jordan is telling me we have to do something. I just keep waiting for her, but I’m afraid if she stay much longer, it will be too much damage. She’ll become someone else.”
Now everything Ms. Pierre wanted or needed seemed to rest on something else that she wasn’t able to do. When she reapplied for shelter, she was told she would not be eligible for a long-term placement without documentation of where she’d been living for the previous two weeks. She had been staying at Anna’s girlfriend’s place, but the girlfriend, whose name the apartment was under, refused to write the letter.

PS 631

Without a stable place to live, it had been hard to apply for jobs, but without a job, it seemed unlikely that they’d ever get a stable place to live. She misses her job, or at least the life it gave her.
“It’s freedom. When you work, it’s freedom,” she said. “You have money. When I worked, if I wanted something, I could buy it.”
Ms. Pierre’s plan, if she can “fix the house,” as she puts it, is to become a certified nursing aide, which she sees as more stable than being a home health aide, and ultimately to become a licensed practical nurse.

“From CNA you could go to an LPN. By the time I’m 40, I want to do it,” said Ms. Pierre, who is 37 now. “I would love to be a nurse, and I know I can do it. I know if I be a nurse, I could put my kids in a better school, a Catholic school.”
There is a class that she is planning to take as soon as they become at least eligible for long-term shelter again, because, she explained, it’s rumored to be difficult and “the head is supposed to be on the shoulders when you’re studying to be a nurse.”

She just wasn’t sure how she’d fix the housing situation beyond getting the letter and a long-term shelter placement, an improvement over their current itinerant state, but one that would still leave them homeless and at the mercy of the system, the bag searches, nightly sign-ins and strange rules (at Amboy, no blenders or TVs larger than 19 inches). But if she could get her Section 8 back, she’d move to Staten Island and start over, as much as a thing like starting over is possible.

“I’m tired of the same things over and over again,” she said. “I want to change things. I’ve been here so long, going through the same ups and downs so long. I want to go where I could work, pay my bills, take care of my kids. Maybe Staten Island—the boys and I went there and we liked it. It’s different than Brooklyn; it’s quiet, the spaces are bigger. I thought I was going to be afraid of the boat, but I just sit on the boat and I enjoy it.”

Anne Pierre on the subway.

When asked to account for the rapid rise in homeless families, Department of Homeless Services Commissioner Seth Diamond, echoing Mr. Bloomberg, pointed to the loss of the Advantage program, which was canceled in 2011 when its state funding was cut. Given that the Bloomberg administration had earlier stopped the long-standing practice of prioritizing homeless families for Section 8 and public housing, calling it bad public policy to let anyone entering the shelter system skip ahead in line (a claim advocates call highly specious), there was literally no way for shelter families to leave unless they could find an affordable living arrangement on their own.

“The increase is really tightly tied to the loss of Advantage. We were able to make progress and could have continued to help more households, but we will never get back the $150 million investment,” said Mr. Diamond. DHS provided statistics showing that in March of 2011, right before Advantage ended, there were 8,317 homeless families, 7 percent lower than the previous peak of 8,991 in 2009. He said that many fewer applicants are coming to the intake centers now, 8 percent less than last April, indicating that the crisis is abating and that DHS is “making good progress” even without any path to permanent housing. “The mayor has transformed the system,” he said.

Asked how families could leave the shelters without housing subsidies, Mr. Diamond said that “work works—the revolution across the board has been work.” He then went on to describe “enhanced training on the importance of work,” job-training programs and subsidies of the paychecks of homeless workers to encourage employers to take them on—none of which are new programs.

But a number of advocates claim that the Advantage program wasn’t working in the first place, primarily because the subsidy only lasted for two years; families who couldn’t make it on their own after that time just got channeled back into the shelter system. Ralph da Costa Nunez, the president of the Institute for Children, Poverty and Homelessness, who started out in the Koch administration, pointed to an increase in recidivism under the Advantage program (according to Mr. Diamond, 25 percent of families in the program returned to the shelter system).

“If you’re going to have a subsidy, you need to have a subsidy with a plan, not a subsidy with a dream,” said Mr. Nunez. “It’s a poverty problem, not a housing problem.”

Patrick Markee, a senior policy analyst at the Coalition for the Homeless, questioned the DHS assumptions that training people to become fast-food workers and home health aides, jobs that pay $8 or $9 an hour, would solve the problem. “How do you square the circle?” he asked. “These families are too poor to afford rent. Even in East New York or the South Bronx, rent is at least $1,000 a month.

“The mayor and his administration are people who craft their policies based on data, but in the area of homelessness, all their policies seem to be based on ideology,” he added.

Given that the city is mandated to provide shelter as the result of a 1980s court decision, and that Mr. Bloomberg appears to have no plan to transition residents out of shelters besides training for low-wage employment, it’s hard to imagine that anything will change.

Indeed, in the absence of any housing subsidy, shelters seem to have become New York’s answer to the lack of low-income housing. But shelters are an exceedingly expensive alternative. It costs, on average, $3,000 a month to house a family in a shelter, significantly more than the rent on a one- or two-bedroom apartment in the neighborhoods where many are located. The city also pays for homeless families’ storage lockers. And shelter life for any family is less than ideal, what with the room inspections, curfews, sign-ins, bag searches and often a ban on guests.

What’s more, said Mr. Nunez, while the costs of shelters was once higher because it included other resources to help families, many of the new shelters that have rapidly opened to meet the need are run by private operators who just provide rooms. And, seeing that they can essentially triple the rent with shelter tenants, landlords are pushing out the working-class families currently living in their buildings, perpetuating the cycle.

One of Ms. Pierre and the boys’ favorite topics is the house on Legion Street, which, while no palace (the mold was so bad that they once had to throw out a mattress that had been touching one of the walls), serves as a touchstone of what life used to be like and might be again. They talk about the food that Ms. Pierre made there—rice and beans, baked macaroni, oxtail, sweet plantains, corn on the cob. They talk about how Jordan used to ride the school bus and how much they miss Anna.

(Photo by Kim Velsey)

When they lived there, the kids would watch for Ms. Pierre from the back window, where they could see her getting off the train. “They used to fight about who would open the door for me, and I had to hug them all at the same time,” she said. “If not, it was going to be a problem.”

But when Ms. Pierre picked up Jordan from school that afternoon—she was running late, as she often is, and he chided her gently—they did not talk about Legion Street.

“When I was in school, I kept thinking of that apartment,” Jordan said. He meant 199 Amboy, and as they walked back there they discussed how clean it was and how they had been given a fresh shower curtain liner when they arrived, something you usually had to buy yourself. How they hoped they could become eligible again so they could stay, even if they hated the bag searches. They talked about how it was so close to Jordan’s school that he wouldn’t even need to take the bus, at least not until Ms. Pierre started working again.

They had reached the intersection of Blake and Amboy by then, and they stopped to lean against the fence of a little house kitty-corner from the shelter. Ms. Pierre said the shelter didn’t want people hanging around in front.
They discussed the food they would buy for school lunches when Ms. Pierre started working again and the apartments they had seen on Staten Island—how big and clean they were and how they had entire basements where you could store things.

Then Ms. Pierre started cataloging all the other things she would need to pay for: gas, light, clothes, rent. Even at $10 an hour, it was clear that the accounting didn’t quite work out.

Ms. Pierre was silent for a moment, the hopeful logic on which their conversation had cheerfully sailed broken, but then she turned to face the little house on whose fence she was leaning. She examined its hodgepodgey exterior, with its staid brick facade, red and white awning and granite porch too fancy for the house it was attached to. “This house is nice,” she said finally.

kvelsey@observer.com

Would a library in a private developer's high rise be the same? (Brownstoner)

The City of New York, like many other large landowners, has been selling its land for centuries. However, these last few months have brought what many consider to be a disconcerting flurry of real estate transactions as the city, citing a cash crunch, moves to sell off a number of schools, libraries and municipal buildings.

The city and others have lauded the sell-off as a way to bring much-needed monies to institutions that are in dire need of help. Trading in valuable real estate, we are told, will keep the city's civic institutions afloat. If only it didn't have the vaguely desperate vibe of a pawn shop swap.

Is the city is making bad—or at least short-sighted—deals in exchange for a little cash right now? As The New York Times, which examined the sudden spate of sales argues: the decision to sell certain properties and keep others is being driven by the logic of developers, not the virtues and the problems of the library branches and schools themselves.

And when private, rather than public interest dictates the city's real estate decisions, that's a real cause for concern, even if those sales will ultimately benefit the public, as the city claims.

For example, the 52-year-old Brooklyn Heights branch requires a $3 million overhaul of its air conditioning system, as well as other repairs, but it's certainly not the oldest or most dilapidated library in Brooklyn, according to The Times. The parcel just happens to be in a posh neighborhood where developers are eager to build luxury housing for the kinds of residents who can afford to do without libraries.

(The Brooklyn Public Library, via a spokesman, has contacted The Observer to say that while it does not dispute that the value of the real estate is a huge factor in the decision to sell the branches, it does feel that the Brooklyn Heights branch is among the system's most dilapidated and was closed for 30 days last summer because of air conditioning problems.)

The same could be said of the Beaux Arts library branch on Pacific Street, located just steps from Barclays Arena. Library officials say that selling the land would allow the branch to build out a more modern space.

While the Pacific Street branch will increase slightly with the move, from about 15,750 square feet to 16,500 square feet, according to the Brooklyn Public Library, the 60,000 Brooklyn Heights branch will shrink considerably. (The library argues that the part of the library that houses the local branch will remain nearly the same, given that much of the of the space is used for storage and the business library is being relocated off-site.)

There's a tendency, in these situations, for both the city and the developers to focus on what is being given, rather than what is being gained by private interests—and what is being gained, rather than what is being given, by the public.

In the case of the Brooklyn public libraries, it's not all that much—while the two libraries are said to need repairs totaling $9 million to $11 million each, most of the proceeds of the sale would go to building the new spaces out. Moreover, whatever money is gained would be just a one-time infusion, rather than a strategy for supporting an under-funded institution in the long run. There's a real question as to why, if New York's economic development during the last decade is benefiting the city as much as Mayor Bloomberg has claimed, such sell-offs are necessary.

The public has been generous to private developers—particularly in the case of Barclays, with city and state subsidies granted on the basis that their developments would be enriching the entire community, rather than just the developer. If that's the case, why is it that the local public library by Barclay's can't afford to stay in its long-time home? What can we expect of even more public-private partnerships that transfer public property to the private sector, relocating to inferior spaces on property that was once theirs in exchange for a one-time windfall?

kvelsey@observer.com

Correction: The Observer previously misreported that the square footage of the Pacific Street branch. It is 15,750 square feet, not 60,000.

Jared Kushner, Katie Holmes and Mike Bloomberg (PMc)

- The intimidatingly assiduous Peggy Siegal greets people at the door; thanks us for coming to celebrate party with The New York Observer. "We are The New York Observer!" We cry. She doesn't even pause. "Well, it's great to see you anyway."

-Terry McDonell: I've always loved the Observer, I have great respect for Peter Kaplan. The coverage of everything I was interested in New York in the past 25 years was reflected in The Observer at the highest level.

- Ray Kelly recalls the last time he was at the Four Seasons. "[We] feel like you never leave," we tell the Police Commissioner. His reply: "A lot of people feel that way."

- Spike Lee keeps on puffy coat all evening, talks to Katie Holmes, Donald Trump. Catch tail end of his conversation with Mr. Trump: "Well, that's one thing we agree on."

- Mayor Bloomberg gets onstage, proceeds to riff about slipping Harvey Weinstein a script (Bloomie on Bloomie), Cory Booker ("The handsomest mayor West of the Hudson") and The Observer ("It's OK when you needle somebody else, but not me.")

- Michael Shannon confounds half the party with his celebrity status. "What famous person is that?" we are asked more than several times. We finally after give up and refer them to Boardwalk Empire after several of our "the Future General Zod" joke receives blank stares.

- Nick Denton refuses to take photo with Rupert Murdoch because it's "too obvious."

-Chuck Close: I love the Observer almost in spite of myself. At first it was a guilty pleasure. When I go to Europe and can't read you, I get really upset.

- Mayor Cory Booker meets Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer’s press secretary/Girls actress Audrey Gelman. Mr. Booker finds a way to bring the conversation back around to Star Trek.

- Game Change’s Emmy-winning screenwriter Danny Strong still getting recognized for his years on the TV show Buffy the Vampire Slayer. But he's a good sport, and challenges fanboy to name the one episode of the hit show that was nominated for an Emmy. (Answer: "Hush.")

-Former editor Peter Kaplan begs off with the excuse that he is trying to wean himself off of anti-anxiety medication.

-Ronald Perelman: I love the publication! I think everybody here is great. I think this is the best collection of New Yorkers I've seen in 20 years!

- Jay McInerney inquires about the after-party; never shows up.

Currently, it is illegal to build a new apartment smaller than 450 square feet, but the new program seeks comfortable, attractive housing units between 250 and 375 square feet. The city's Department of Housing Preservation and Development received 33 different entries for the project, which will be built on a city-owned site in Murray Hill.

The winning design came from Monadnock Develpment in partnership with the Actors Fund for Housing Development and Capsys, a modular housing builder based in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. The design is by New York firm nArchitects. It will be constructed on a plot at 335 East 27th Street, which the city is selling for $500,000.

The project will also be the first modular development in Manhattan, following on the Atlantic Yards project in Brooklyn, which suggests that prefabricated construction may indeed take hold as a new model for housing development in the city, at least on the low end. Some 40 percent of the units will be set aside for low- and middle-income tenants, with prices ranging from $940 per month to $1,800 per month.

"We've chosen Manhattan because more than three-quarters of its homes are one or two person households," Mayor Bloomberg said. "We already have the population seeking housing for a small number of people, we just don't have the apartments to house them."

(We'll have more details shortly, as the unveiling has just wrapped up, but The Observer is well aware that all you, dear reader, care about, is what these apartments actually look like, so here they are.

If you build it, they will come. Promise. (Edward Reed/Flickr)

One of the big debates that has been raging around the rezoning of Midtown East is how it might impact development already underway around the city, much of it funded in part by the public sector, and thus taxpayers. Should these projects fail, Joe Public could lose out on his investment.

The World Trade Center and Hudson Yards have been two focal points, but Manhattan West, which broke ground yesterday, ought to be considered, too. While the project's backers bragged at the groundbreaking about building without public subsidy, they are still competing for the same anchor tenants as their rivals further east. Furthermore, the $2 billion the city contributed to the construction of the 7 train nearby is to be paid back through property taxes on the new projects. No new development, no bond proceeds, big trouble for the city.

Still, Mayor Bloomberg is standing by the decision to fast-track the Midtown rezoning and ensure it gets completed this year.

"There's lots of development going on all over the city, not only on the West Side but downtown, at the World Trade Center, in Brooklyn and Long Island City," the mayor said. "People are surprised by how much interest there is."

Still, the mayor thinks there are provisions being taken to protect these projects. "That's why we set the five year sunrise," the mayor said, referring to the delay in the rezoning taking effect until 2017. Some landlords have complained about the delay, as has Post columnist Steve Cuozzo.

"We think that's a decision to give people plenty of breathing room to get their projects off the ground," the mayor said of the sunrise provision.

John Zuccotti, the former Brookfield chairman who was on hand for the groundbreaking yesterday was unconcerned about the Midtown East rezoning, as well. "I think the rezoning will come in its time, but it won't be as tranformative as this because they're building where there are already office building," Mr. Zuccotti said. "Here there was nothing, and it's all gonna change." It is this total transformation, this neighborhood from nothing, its brand-new glowing greatness, that will make the project so appealing (and cheaper) to companies and residents.

Not that the transformation comes as a surprise to Mr. Zuccotti.

"It all started with Battery Park City," he said, where Brookfield (then Olympia and York, still led by Mr. Zuccotti) was one of the first builders, creating the World Financial Center. "I was there when the ships left, and it was clear we had to find a whole new use for the West Side. My father took me to the Normandie when it was on fire, so I remember the old West Side, and it's not that anymore, hasn't been for a long time."

"From Nelson Rockefeller to Michael Bloomberg, that's been the transformation, and here we are."

Zoom, zoom.

One of the more unusual sides of the city's response to Superstorm Sandy has been the ingenuity of the transportation and planning wonks that help us get around this giant metropolis. It is not only the speed with which the MTA recovered, but also what it and the city's Department of Transportation did in between. Creating bus bridges to replace flooded subways, launching new ferry lines, creating special subway shuttles.

Today, Mayor Bloomberg and Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan announced yet another innovation, a second ferry for Staten Island. The Rockaways already has one, and now the city is looking for an operator to serve the hardest-hit sections of Staten Island's south shore. With widespread destruction, many locals' lives have been interrupted, forcing them to leave behind their homes and cars. The new ferry service is seen as a lifeline between Great Kills and Manhattan, for those struggling to get to work and beyond.

“We are committed to rebuilding and helping people in Staten Island and all impacted areas get their lives back on track,” Mayor Bloomberg said in a statement. “Part of the rebuilding effort is making sure Staten Islanders have manageable commutes to their jobs despite heavy damage to roadways and vehicles during the storm. This new fast ferry service from Great Kills is affordable and quick, and we are confident it will help ease the commute for Staten Islanders during these tough times.”

Already, DOT and the MTA have expanded express bus service in the area on the X23 and X24 lines, and starting next Monday, there should be a ferry running from Great Kills landing to both Pier 11 on Wall Street and the 35th Street Pier in Midtown. Currently, the city is soliciting bids from ferry operators to run the service and it expects to make a decision in time for rush hour Monday morning.

“For those Staten Islanders rebuilding their homes and their lives, every minute counts,” Commissioner Sadik-Khan said. “With this new Staten Island ferry service, we're doing our part to get New Yorkers back on their way and providing a new and faster commuting option to some of the city's hardest-hit neighborhoods and making that daily trip to work or school easier and faster.”

After all, even on a regular day, getting to work from Staten Island is not easy, as Councilman James Oddo points out. “Staten Islanders have some of the most difficult commutes in the nation, so adding this transportation alternative is welcome news,” he said.

London has had barriers on the Thames since 1984. (Getty)

It's starting to seem like Mayor Bloomberg is the only one who doesn't think storm barriers are a worthwhile investment. Not only do Governor Cuomo, MTA chief Joe Lhota and both Jerry Nadler and Chuck Schumer think it's a good idea, but so do 80 percent of New York City voters, according to a new Quinnipiac poll out today.

They were asked, specifically, if it was worth spending billions—no exact amount, or source of funds beyond the federal and state governments was given—on new waterfront infrastructure. Only 14 percent thought it was not worth the cost. Support was even higher when the pollsters asked if the cost was justified it if the storm protections could "reduce the cost of disruption and restoration." Then, 88 percent supported the new infrastructure, compared to 6 percent who did not support.

But the whole "worth it" debate is at the heart of the issue. Mayor Bloomberg has said time and again he does not believe sufficient protections could be built, at least at a cost making such efforts worth it. One person who believes this will happen anyway, because of American political vagaries, good and ill, is Times architecture critic Michael Kimmelman.

Hurricane Sandy was a toll paid for procrastination. The good news? We don’t need to send a bunch of Nobel laureates into the desert now, hoping they come up with some new gizmo to save the planet. Solutions are at hand. Money shouldn’t be a problem either, considering the hundreds of billions of dollars, and more lives, another Sandy or two will cost.

So the problem is not technological or, from a long-term cost-benefit perspective, financial.

Rather it is the existential challenge to the messy democracy we’ve devised. The hardest part of what lies ahead won’t be deciding whether to construct Eiffel Tower-size sea walls across the Verrazano Narrows and Hell Gate, or overhauling the city’s sewage and storm water system, which spews toxic waste into rivers whenever a couple of inches of rain fall because the sea levels have already risen so much. These are monumental tasks.

But more difficult still will be staring down the pain, dislocation and inequity that promise to upend lives, undo communities and shake assumptions about city life and society. More than requiring the untangling of colossal red tape, saving New York and the whole region for the centuries ahead will become a test of civic unity.

So while Mr. Kimmelman agrees with the majority that big infrastructure must be built, he also agrees with the mayor, that so, too, must smart construction—or no construction. "At this point there’s no logic, politics and sentiment aside, to FEMA simply rebuilding single-family homes on barrier islands like the Rockaways, where they shouldn’t have been built in the first place, and like bowling pins will tumble again after the next hurricane strikes."

Still, tell that to all the people whose lives have been upended by the storm. It will be like swallowing a bitter pill after be socked in the stomach.

Not normal, but getting there, maybe. (Getty_

It has been a difficult few weeks for New York, to say the least, and that goes for the two men at the center of the recovery, too, Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Governor Andrew Cuomo. Both men have worked tirelessly for the past 25 days, first preparing the city and the state for the approaching superstorm, and then helping everyone recover from the disaster. That job will continue for months, even years, but at the same time, life must go on. And for the chief executives of New York City and New York State, that process has slowly begun. And it all started today. Or so their public schedules would suggest.

The public schedule for the mayor and the governor is a sacred text, at least in news rooms across the city. Like the AP daybook, it is the document by which reporters set their clocks and live their lives. Normally, there is a mix of big announcements—a new budget, a new anti-poverty initiative, a ribbon cutting for a new park—and small appearances—a parade, a gala, a public policy conference.

Even before Hurricane Sandy made landfall, as the mayor and governor scrambled to prepare New Yorkers for the oncoming storm, there has been none of that, and certainly nothing since. It has been all Sandy, all the time.

From Oct. 26 through Nov. 8, Mayor Bloomberg did not go a day without holding a daily briefing on the city’s response to the storm, sometimes holding one or two. There he fielded questions on everything from the number of fatalities to the status of the precarious One57 crane, from the fate of powerless NYCHA developments to whether or not the marathon would go on.

Pretty much the same thing went for Governor Cuomo, though when he was taking questions, it was just as often out in the field, after handing out canned goods or surveying flooding in one of the MTA's tunnels. (Which is not to say the mayor was out in the field, he has just made a point of not making a point about it, eschewing cameras for one-on-one time.)

That is what made the public schedules for both Mayor Bloomberg and Governor Cuomo for today—or rather late last night, as that is always when these things show up in your inbox—so interesting. For the first time in almost a month, they have broken from the Sandy-imposed strictures of their schedules. It could be a coincidence that this also happened to happen on the same day, but we're taking it as a sign.

In the mayor's case, he will be attending two charity events later this evening. At 6:45, he speaks at the S.L.E. Lupus Foundation 2012 Life Without Lupus Gala, and 45 minutes later, he presents the Female Race of the Year Award at the 2012 Gold Goggles Awards. This is the first time since the storm, basically, that the mayor has gotten back to any of his old, pre-storm duties.

Meanwhile, for the first time in almost four week, Governor Cuomo finds himself in Albany, according to his schedule, and not in New York City, where he has been based throughout the duration of the Sandy saga. The governor did not host any public events today.

This is not to suggest that either man was anything but wholly focused on the continuing task of helping the city recover from the storm. For the mayor's part, his first public appearance of the day was just after noon, at P.S. 43 in the Rockaways, where he and Chancellor Dennis Walcott celebrated the opening of a dozen schools that had been closed by Sandy.

The governor's office was equally busy, making four separate announcements today: insurance assistance seminars on Staten Island today and tomorrow; disaster unemployment assistance had expanded to more counties; an $8.2 million grant for Project Hope, a disaster counseling program; and the impending launch of a Rockaways subway shuttle.

"It's true, we are back," Josh Vlasto, the governor's spokesman said of the administration's trip up to Albany, confirming that the governor had not been since the storm hit. "We are doing an event in the city tomorrow that's related, though," he added. Most of the work in Albany has been storm-centric, as well, he said, but the general work of government, of running the fourth largest state in the country, must also continue.

As for City Hall, Marc LaVorgna, the mayor's spokesman, made it clear that just because the mayor was taking an hour out of his schedule to attend to charity causes, the administration had in no way shifted its focus away from the recovery efforts. "This is pretty much all we've been doing," he said. "There's been some other day-to-day stuff, but it's mostly non-stop Sandy still."

Also, these two charities were ones the mayor especially did not want to miss. "We've cancelled an extraordinary amount of commitments for very good causes that we just did not have the time to do," Mr. LaVorgna said. "These are two charities he wanted to keep that commitment to. We've had to cancel a lot, but I think people understand what else is going on."

So, nothing new, at least not yet, and who knows when, again. Still no ribbon cuttings, still no big, or even little, legislative campaigns. We are still, in so many ways, in the eye of the storm, and the city and the state will probably remain there for months or more. But at the same time, just as it is comforting when the flood waters begin to recede, when the lights flicker back, when the difficult work of rebuilding gets underway, it is, in its was, at least a little bit comforting when when our politicians can find time for all the other tasks, great and small, in their vast portfolio. Life goes on, it must, one press conference at a time.

Maybe just not yet.

"We are nowhere near normal," Mr. LaVorgna said, sounding like a man who had seen much these past three weeks.

New Yorker's know that. And just like 9/11 and all the other disasters that have confronted the city in its four centuries, we are ready to try and get back there again, anyway.

A house floated into a field on Staten Island. (Getty)

Hurricane Sandy has left thousands, possibly tens of thousands of New Yorkers without their homes. There will be much rebuilding for many months, if not years, on the South Shore, Red Hook, Coney, the Rockaways and beyond. Whether it is an entire house, from the foundation up, or some section of home, the wall, the room, the mechanical systems, thousands of homeowners are in desperate need of help, especially as winter sets in.

Normally, this might pose a particular challenge—contractors are already plenty busy, and who knows if they insurance company of FEMA will pay up in time. "Until today, homeowners would have largely been left to fend for themselves to get an electrician or a contractor to get this work done," Mayor Bloomberg remarked at a press briefing this afternoon. "While FEMA offers assistance to pay for these repairs, it was still up to the homeowner to arrange for the work and carry it out."

That is why the Bloomberg administration, in partnership with FEMA, has launched NYC Rapid Repairs, a new service that will help homeowners hobbled by the hurricane get the help they need rebuilding through a unique partnership the city has created with the construction industry.

“We are bringing in contractors who will be given responsibility for an area hard hit by Sandy," the mayor explained. "These contractors will be responsible for repairing the homes of anyone who wants to take part in the program. Each will select the sub-contractors – the electricians, carpenters, plumbers, and others – needed to make a home damaged by the hurricane once again safe, sanitary, and functional."

This approach will allow for expedient payment to the contractors through direct access to the government and marshaling of resources in a confined area. This is the first major program from the mayor's new Housing Recovery director, Brad Gair.

Homeowners can begin applying for repairs starting Tuesday at one of the city's restoration centers, which can be found at nyc.gov or by calling 311. A FEMA ID is required for the program, and those are available at DisasterAssistance.gov

(Photo illustration: Ed Johnson)

When Hurricane Sandy came ashore, it fell to the city’s leaders and the thousands of workers at their command to secure our coasts, to rescue those trapped by water and without power, to help the city rebuild. The Observer spent Monday and Tuesday talking with New York's top public officials about Hurricane Sandy. These are their experiences in their own words.

The Storm

Joe Lhota, chairman and CEO, Metropolitan Transportation Authority: I have an app on my iPad that monitors hurricanes on the East Coast. I have always lived on the water. I always watch the app. So when I first got involved in this—it was long before it even hit Jamaica—I knew when it started as a tropical storm, and a hurricane, and a tropical storm, and then a hurricane again.

Joe Bruno, commissioner, NYC Office of Emergency Management: We follow the weather very closely this time of year as it comes off the tip of Africa, or wherever it develops. This particular storm came out of the southwest of the Caribbean. At 11 a.m. on October 22, we saw a tropical depression. At that point it’s just a depression, and you don’t know much about it. By 6 p.m., it was upgraded already to a tropical storm called Sandy. It continued to strengthen during the next day, and we kept track of it as it moved across Jamaica.

On Oct. 24, we convened a coastal storm steering committee. That was made up of all the city and state agencies that would be part of any reaction to a coastal storm in New York City. When we do that, it means we see a potential threat to the city. On the 25th, we activated the situation room at OEM, we brought in the Police Department, the Fire Department, the city and state departments of health, the Department of Education, MTA, all the major agencies. We said, “We think this is going to be a big storm and we want to be ready.”

Josh Vlasto, communications director and senior adviser, Cuomo administration: We have a National Weather Service representative within our Homeland Security office up in Albany. When they send those emails saying “Potentially devastating storm coming in,” it puts everyone on notice.

Ray Kelly, commissioner, Police Department: It was a slow moving storm, so it was on everybody's screen that this storm had a lot of potential but these things are uncertain. We prepared. I think we prepared as well for this storm as any other and quite frankly we had more time because it was a slow moving storm.

Veronica White, Robert LiMandri, John Doherty, David Yassky, John Rhea, Mayor Bloomberg, Robert Steele, Janette Sadik-Khan and Sal Cassano at the Office of Emergency Management. (Mayor's Office)

Cas Holloway, deputy mayor for operations: Either Wednesday night or Thursday morning, the decision wad made that we were going to mobilize all the materials and stand up to shelters. And making that decision then, you basically are over the threshold of mobilizing staff, getting facilities ready and doing all that. So at that point, I was already fully committed to the idea that something was going to happen regardless of what the storm did.

Sal Cassano, commissioner, Fire Department: We were getting all of our boats out, getting all of our pumps ready, getting all of our equipment to where we knew we would need them, areas which would be hit the hardest. We would redeploy our equipment to the most vulnerable areas in the A-Zone, such as Staten Island, such as the Rockaways. We kept extra resources in the tunnels, in case the bridges were cut off because of the wind. That way, if the island was isolated we would have enough equipment to handle the calls that we knew we would receive.

Veronica White, commissioner, Department of Parks and Recreation: We sand-bagged everything, every recreation center and field house, every parks facility, everything that could possibly flood. It was all hands on deck, with people working twelve-hour shifts around the clock. We tried to station people near their homes, so they could be safe and still get to work without having to rely on mass transit for the clean-up we knew was coming.

John Doherty, commissioner, Department of Sanitation: Our department faced this like we would fight a snowstorm. That was the kind of plan we followed for where to deploy, what to prepare for. The weather is different, but the job is the same.

Mr. Kelly: We've been in this business for a long time, and we learn from experience. I was a police commissioner in 1992, I guess, when we had that Nor’easter that did a lot of damage. We learned a lot from that storm, from all of these storms and disasters. It's in the details. This administration put in these boats, they’re called Jon boats, which is a boat without a motor. They’re very shallow. You want to be able to get around on our streets. We had at least one per precinct that was reasonably close to water or had a history of water. Most people if you're on land someplace, you don't think of having boats.

Howard Glaser, director of state operations, Cuomo administration: Really this started a year ago, the day Hurricane Irene ended. Everything we learned from that storm, we realized the system needed a total overhaul.

Joe Lhota inspects the storm preparations downtown. (MTA)

Mr. Lhota: Given the experience I had a little over a year ago with Irene, everyone was aware of what and how long it took to get our equipment on safe ground. The Transit Authority needed 12 hours for the subways, the buses needed eight hours. With the Long Island Railroad, some of the equipment will snap if the wind gets above 40 miles per hour. That’s the last thing in the world you want.

John Rhea, chairman, New York City Housing Authority: Right up until the storm hit, we had cops out there knocking on doors, trying to get people out. We had buses from the DOE and the NYPD, school buses, prison buses, just pulling as many people out as we could. But at a certain point, you know, there’s nothing more you can do, and it actually becomes a danger to our people to be out there, so you just have to let them go and hope for the best. If only they had known better.

Janette Sadik-Khan, commissioner, NYC Department of Transportation: You had wind gusts hitting 101 miles per hour. We had not seen that before, and we didn’t want anyone stuck on the bridge. We knew we weren’t going to be able to get anybody onto the bridge to rescue them in those conditions. So we shut the eastern bridges, and we had crews overnight manning them. I mean, the heroism that went into the people who sat in those trucks all night keeping the bridges closed, and the people manning the ferries all night long as the surges were chest-high in the terminal.

Mr. Vlasto: We were looking at a statewide event, so we had to be prepared everywhere. One, you had the front coming down from the north, potentially hitting the front coming up from the south, so it had the potential to blanket the whole state. The second piece was our experience in Irene. Everyone said Irene was going to be a downstate event focused on the coastline.

Instead, it mostly missed New York City and it was disastrous upstate. We were lucky. We had deployed our national guardsmen in the Catskills and up through the north country so they could be out of harm’s way and deployed downstate quickly as needed. It turned out they were exactly where they needed to be. But we learned that these type of storms have to be treated as a statewide issue. The governor visited with security officials and met with them in all the different regions of the state: Nassau, Suffolk, New York City, the Catskills, Binghamton, Albany and up to the north country. We were treating this as something with the potential to be disastrous all over.

Sandy arrives. (Getty)

The Surge

Mr. Holloway: When the Mayor did his press conference at 11:30 on Monday morning, we had looked at the surge, tracking actual surge values and where flooding was happening, and it was happening on the FDR. I turned to Janette Sadik-Khan, and said, "Look, look at the numbers, I mean, isn’t this basically what we saw at the height of Irene?" And that was at 11:30 in the morning. So at that point, that’s where I thought, "Well boy, I don’t know that we really know exactly how bad the inundation is going to be here."

Mr. Cassano: On Monday we were here all day, planning. It was still relatively quiet when we got a report of a crane on a 90-story building that collapsed. That was pretty much the start of a very, very active and serious night. We had a four-alarm assignment for an incident that wasn’t even a fire, so we had a couple of hundred firefighters up there evacuating buildings, and now it’s starting to get windy, and now the activity is starting to pick up, and we have all these resources in Manhattan.

Robert LiMandri, commissioner, Department of Buildings: Certainly none of us—including contractors, anyone you talked to—ever expected the boom on that crane to snap back. For me, that was when we started to see the actual power of the storm. I think most commissioners would tell you that it really put everyone on edge. But then as the fire broke out in Breezy Point, the flood surge was coming up and we saw how bad it was past Zone A.

Mr. Cassano: And then we get a fire on City Island, another four-alarmer, and that took a lot of resources up in the Bronx, and that was not even because of the hurricane, it was just a fire, a fire in a restaurant.

Mr. Holloway: When the storm starts to get worse, there's not much you can do. It’s like turning an aircraft carrier. What you can do is you can put people on the ground, and you can really encourage people to leave, and you can make sure that you have the capacity to accept them. It just shows that this is a truly life-and-death situation that people need to take it very seriously.

A police officer watches the surge in Battery Park. (Getty)

Ms. Sadik-Khan: I live downtown. When I saw the water go all the way up to Washington Street, which is two blocks from the river, and the wind was howling and glass was flying through the air, I had a pretty big ‘oh shit’ moment right then.

Mr. Lhota: I was on my way downtown to see Tom Prendergast, the head of New York City Transit, who was down there keeping an eye on the subway tunnels at the Batter. I was at NY1, I left NY1, and the West Side Highway was just gone. We headed down 14th street and we couldn't get onto 11th Avenue. It was already at least a foot of water at 11th Avenue. Chelsea Piers will tell you they were completely underwater. So we did a U-Turn and then went down Washington Street and went down as far as we could and then the water was coming up over Washington Street. So the water had gone beyond, you know, had gone up one more block, and in fact the next morning we could see all the debris that was left there. So the surge pushed up and pushed over on both sides of the Hudson. And then it was looking for anywhere, anywhere to go.

Mr. Cassano: We had resources being deployed all over. Once the surge came, we got hit with a flurry of calls. The tide was rising and the wind was knocking down trees. In the middle of all that, we got this fire at Breezy Point, and we had no access to the fire, our apparatus couldn’t get down the street. So what the firefighters did was, they went in to evacuate the people out of buildings, get them out of there. We thought we’d take care of the life hazards first and then we would fight the fire.

That was happening in Breezy Point and we were getting a flurry of calls from people in Staten Island and certain parts of the Rockaway who were trapped in their houses, trapped in their attics. We had 30 small boats deployed all over the city and they were being used, our high-axle vehicles—like the brushfire and torpedo vehicles—we were getting them deployed to try and get these people out of their houses in the high waters. By the way, we were also getting those calls from Manhattan and the Battery. That was flooded and the power had gone out, and people were trapped. I don’t think anything has overwhelmed the city like that before.

Mr. Rhea: We were watching the television, we were seeing this movie play out in real life, in terms of water gushing in Battery Park, Lower Manhattan, the Rockaways, you name it. Seeing the level of surge, it's rushing into the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel, knowing that so many of our projects in these low-lying areas, knowing how much water we took on with Hurricane Irene, which was nothing close to this, realizing that most of our mechanicals are subterranean—it was clear we were going to have real problems.

Joe Lhota, Josh Vlasto and Governor Cuomo inspect flooding in the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel. (MTA)

Mr. Lhota: When I got downtown to meet Prendergast, we were looking at where we were, we both realized how deep the water was at South Ferry station. It didn’t surprise me when we found out later that the water was all way up to the ceiling. It was four feet above the ground that night. And then we walked over to the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel, where we ran into the governor totally by accident. I don’t know why I went over to the Brooklyn-Battery tunnel. I really don’t. We hadn’t been told about water rushing in, but we went over there, and boy, what I saw was extraordinary. White-water rapids, and a pace—you could have created hydro power.

I’ll use the words that the governor used. It was disorienting. It was. You heard it. You saw it. And you weren’t really sure you were hearing it and seeing it correctly. I never expected the Hudson River to do that.

Mr. Vlasto: The governor was standing with Lhota at the mouth of the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel and the water was rushing in so quickly that the sound was deafening. I think that for him, that was the moment—where the water was that night, when you’re down there, standing at the tunnel, there’s so much water that you can’t hear—I think the governor would say that was the “We Got a Problem” moment.

Mr. Glaeser: It was a sound you never heard before in Lower Manhattan, a rushing river. And then we went over to the World Trade Center and we saw Niagara Falls was pouring into the site. This was no ordinary storm.

Officials inspect the damage to the Rockaways, including a decimated Breezy Point, from National Guard Blackhawk helicopters. (Governor's Office)

The Flood

Mr. Cassano: We started to get into the buildings that were actually flooded to make some searches. We were still getting a lot of calls from people who were trying to get out of their homes. So we had to use the boats again the next morning. The challenge was to actually assess the damage. We had firehouses that we had to evacuate in the Rockaways and Coney Island, along with a number of EMS stations. We had streets blocked, we had streets still flooded—it was a very difficult operation. It was a mess, and it still is.

Mr. LiMandri: We use a methodology that is used in earthquake recoveries called ATC-45—it’s modified because it’s not an earthquake, but all the principles are the same. The first path is to do a windshield: to sweep the neighborhoods and try to identify how hard-hit each neighborhood is. With the areas that are hard-hit, we go block by block and then identify those buildings that have some damage. The categories start with green, meaning fine, we don’t see any exterior degradation of the façade or foundations. They may have had water damage, but we don’t think it is significant. The second is yellow for minor structural damage, major water infiltration that we know could be a concern for the foundation. The third is red, and we found this in many communities in Rockaway and Staten Island, where the building foundation had been compromised to the point where it could collapse or there was significant damage to the structure.

We’ve tagged 16,000 buildings so far, going back to last Wednesday. We expect to be done by Sunday. There were 400 red buildings so far, but far more are in worse shape. You may have a green building that has been destroyed inside. Structurally, it’s sound, that is our first concern, because it is a matter of safety, but everything else is ruined.

Mr. Doherty: There are some areas, particularly in Rockaway and parts of Staten Island, where you had structural damage to buildings and debris came out into the streets from them. Furniture, wall boards, insulation, tile, just about anything that people would have in their basements or on their first floors. It was just piling up everywhere. You'd spend the day, think you'd finally cleaned up the street and you could mark it off your list, and you come back the next day and it's full again.

The police rescue stranded New Yorkers. (Getty)

Mr. Vlasto: We were going downtown, the day after the storm, to look around. It was right after or shortly after the streetlights went out, and I was driving down Second Avenue with no streetlights. The sun was just rising. It just sort of sunk in. There were no cops on the street directing , no crosswalk lights to tell people when to stop and go. No lights to block people crossing avenues. It was scary. That was really scary. Because you never knew when you were going to hit people, when you were going to get T-boned. Or if somebody was going to jump out into the street. That was really scary. It’s almost better to be driving in than when it’s completely open.

Mr. Lhota: The MTA is a very complex organization. You’ve got the bridge-and-tunnel guys, they had two tunnels down. Not only is the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel out, which didn’t surprise me, but we had water in the Queens-Midtown tunnel. We’ve never had water in the Queens-Midtown tunnel before—ever. So that was a surprising occurrence. I always knew that the LIRR and Metro-North would have trees down all over the place, but this was hard to believe. And then there was the subway system, which I knew was going to have some water. The reality is that the preparatory work that the Transit Authority did helped in many cases.

Nobody’s ever asked why the 4/5 tunnel, the Drummond Tunnel—why did it come back so fast? Bowling Green station is a little higher, and so is Brooklyn where the train comes out. But we also made sure to seal up as much as we could. We moved the trains out and everything was ready to go. More importantly, everyone was ready to go, and they worked nonstop to dig us out, pump us out and get us back up and running. A week ago, when I saw all that water rushing in downtown, I never would have imagined we would be up and running again like this so quickly. Not in that moment, at least.

Mr. Glaser: Coming in with the National Guard on Thursday, carrying food and water with the governor down in Lower Manhattan—we were at the Lexington Avenue Armory with the Food Bank of New York—you don’t expect to be doing that in Manhattan. The power was still off. It was just a shift in our expectations of what government is. Just every day, on a regular basis, there were things like that happening every day. Just the sight of National Guard troops in Manhattan. They were on a humanitarian mission, you know, but it makes you realize what a thin thread it can be any time, keeping a society going.

FEMA, the govenror, the mayor, the MTA. (Governors Office)

Ms. White: We walked every street in every community board, the entire city, looking for downed trees and other damage. We inspected every park and playground, approximately 1700 of them, and made certain they were safe to open to the public. Now we have about 83 percent open. We've had over 3,000 volunteers come out to help us clean up. And we have hundreds of Parks people in the field documenting everything that has occurred to submit to FEMA so we get back every penny New York is entitled to for its parks.

Mr. Lhota: We heard that a 40-foot boat ended up across the tracks outside the Ossining station. The first thing everyone wants to do is get a picture: “We gotta see this.” So we got a picture. And then Howard Permut, the president of Metro-North, and Robert Lieblong, the executive vice president who operates the railroad every day, without blinking an eye they found a piece of machinery in our shop that could lift up a boat. They went to a boatyard and bought the racks and put the boat underneath and lifted it up. They used a train crane to move a boat. It’s emblematic of how anything could possibly happen. They just said, “Okay, let’s deal with it.” And they did.

Mr. Cassano: I spent this weekend on Staten Island helping out a couple of different command centers, and this weekend is when it really hit me to the core, because my sister lives in the area. When I was helping out, I just took a ride down to make sure that she was okay, and they were just emptying the house out. It had been totally flooded. All her possessions were on the sidewalk. And going down blocks and blocks and seeing the same thing in other people’s homes, it really hit home how bad this was.

Mr. Vlasto: I think it was Lyndenhurst—this will stick with me—we were walking, and we went to a street and into a house. The governor walks in a house, and this old lady was standing outside the house crying. She had a picture in her hand and she was crying, and she said, “This is my grandson.” She said, “I’m so happy I found this picture.” She said, “I found it right here.” And we couldn’t figure it out. And then she said, “But I live four houses down.” That was sad. I don’t have any happy moments yet. I’m waiting.

The mayor surveys the damage. (Mayor's office)

The Wake

Mr. Lhota: The thing that amazed me is that when we put together maps of what was together in the system, it was substantive. And then there was the desire to put together the bus bridge, because we realized we had a gap in service between Brooklyn and Manhattan, and Queens and Manhattan with the 7 train, so very quickly Tom Prendergast and his team, along with Darryl Irick on the MTA Bus, put together the bus bridge.

Ms. Sadik-Khan: You had issues everywhere, you had no subways coming across from Brooklyn to Manhattan, so we needed to set up a new surface subway system. We worked with the MTA—we’d set up the bridges, so why not some bus bridges?—and the NYPD got their people out there to enforce that.

Mr. Lhota: I drove by it the first day, but the was so horrendous I just wanted to get into the city. But what I saw was a lot of people gathered around. New Yorkers don’t do things in a line. People were all jockeying around, seeing who could get on the bus first. But we learned our lesson. That was Thursday morning, and by Friday morning, we took the Disney approach—we created pathways, allowing people to see that they were moving through the pathways. On Friday morning we were putting 3,700 people an hour on buses, three buses loading at a time, dedicated lanes from the city, police escorts from the city. And once they got on the buses, they were at 42nd Street in 20 minutes. A world of difference from what happened on Thursday. First time through, it was really important to see what we could learn, how could we make it better, and we made it better.

Ms. Sadik-Khan: On Wednesday, when everybody came in to drive, it was just one big parking lot. So looking at that, you needed to do something. I wanted to go with the HOV3, and of course that only works if you have the Police Department doing the enforcement. And they were really terrific—they did an amazing job. I can’t say enough for Ray Kelly’s team, it was really extraordinary what they did.

Govenor Cuomo comforts families put out by the storm. (Governor's Office)

Mr. Kelly: I’m going out again tonight, and I know I will ask people, “How are cops treating you?” And it will probably be very positive, because it’s been very positive. I haven’t had a negative comment. And people aren’t afraid to give me a negative comment.

Mr. Doherty: We have had a number of sanitation workers, particularly out in Rockaway and some areas in Staten Island, who have either lost their homes completely or had a lot of water damage. The ones that I have talked to, they are coming to work, they have been coming in. And I remember earlier in the storm, I was talking to this gentleman out in Rockaway, and he said “I’m here to help my neighbors. Yes, I had damage to my house, but I’m here to help.” The morale has been outstanding by the men and women of the department. They are looking for work to do sometimes. If I’m not moving them quickly enough, they are asking me, “Where can we work, where can we work?” Relax, we are going to get you there.

Mr. Kelly: Cancelling the marathon is something I'm going to remember. It was something that we were prepared to do, and all of a sudden, it was cancelled. But probably more significant for me was the sight of the area that was burned in Breezy Point. I went there, the ground was still smoldering, and all you see is an open field where the houses had burned down. But then I looked out at the end of the field, and I could see a person, and the person was very, very small. The breadth of the damage, it didn't really hit me until I saw the size of that person so far away. It's something that you see in other parts of the world. It's not something that you see on the East Coast of the United States.

Mr. Vlasto: You’re seeing idleness, and kids who are so lonely and tired and exhausted, so the governor said, you know, lets get something for kids. Give them some board games, something to make them smile. That’s where he came up with the idea to ask Walmart for some toys. They had volunteered to help, they had been donating water, so we just said, how about some toys for the kids?

Mr. Bruno: Key people, the president and everyone on down, have reached out to us. Every major official came through here, and they’ve been following up on it. We have the National Guard here. We have Department of Defense forces—they’re helping a lot with the fuel. We got the Army Corps of Engineers, they’ve been a huge partner for us and totally dedicated to getting New York City back up and running. So after the anxiety about whether help was going to come—it is a good feeling when you see this stuff.

Joe Lhota directs traffic at the bus islands in Brooklyn. (MTA)

Mr. Holloway: I was in the Rockaways this morning and this recovery, we’re going to be dedicating an absolutely enormous amount of resources to getting cleaned up and helping as many people get back into their homes as quickly as possible. We have another storm coming, you know, and now we have to brace for that, too. In Irene we responded, the storm broke up, and everybody was able to get back to business as usual pretty quickly. Here, there are certain areas in the city where people’s lives have truly been turned upside down. And we are going to be out there for as long as it takes to get it right side up.

Mr. Rhea: There were many people, through no fault of their own, who bet against Mother Nature, and to see the faces of those who were impacted because they were still in their residences and didn’t evacuate, or those who didn’t think they needed to evacuate because they were outside of the zone, that was hard. They were saying, “We really need help to get basic necessities and power and heat and hot water restored.” And asking very directly and emotionally for that assistance.

Then there’s the flip-side of that, which is being able to fix a problem—to have someone say to you, “Thank you for being able to get that done as fast as you were able to.” So for every person who is still without heat and water, there is somebody who has had it restored. For every person who is without electricity there are four times that number who have had it restored. The people who ask for help, and the appreciation when we do our jobs and deliver on behalf of these families, that is something I will remember.

Mr. Vlasto: Seeing the subways fill up, I think, was a very jarring sight for the governor. He says that it’s not just that, it’s the frequency: now we have dealt with this twice in two years. How many times do we have to deal with this again before we make substantial change? It’s almost like, “fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me.” And now we’ve just been fooled again.

Mr. Lhota: I walked into a bar on Saturday night, and even though I’m somewhat of a public figure, I’ve always enjoyed my anonymity. When I was budget director for the city and when I was deputy mayor, I didn’t even unlist my phone number. On Saturday, I walked into a bar, and people wanted to buy me a drink. That’s something that’s going to stay with me, because I was very surprised. By the way, that was my first drink after that whole week. I had wine.