Mark Gilbertson at last year's ball.

The Museum of the City of New York’s Winter Ball is like a social mixtape mash-up of the Social Register, The Hampton’s Blue Book and Palm Beach’s Shiny Sheet. The Belgian Shoe set comes out in diamond-dripping droves for this fancy affair, which is sponsored by Carolina Herrera, an icon who has probably dressed every lady in the ballroom numerous times. There’s dinner and dancing at The Pierre with old-school New York names like Mark Gilbertson (the pied piper of the prepsters), Nicole Mellon, Calvert Moore, Allison Rockefeller and Andrew Roosevelt, among other royalty. You can book a table for $30,000 or, if you spent all your monthly mortgage moolah on J. Mendel furs, grab an “Associate” ticket for a mere $350—about the same as car service for the night.

The Pierre, 2 East 61st Street, (212) 838-8000; cocktails at 7:30pm and dinner 8:30pm, for tickets call (917) 492-3326.

Once the Verrazano Narrows Bridge was built the Brooklyn Ferry, at 69th Street, was no longer the, "short route to New Jersey". (Museum of the City of New York)

For New Yorkers interested in getting closer, but not too close to Staten Island, the Museum of the City of New York and the Working Harbor Committee is hosting a boat tour to compliment the museum's current exhibit: “From Farm to City: Staten Island 1661-2012.″

The tour, which circumnavigates the Island, will look at the past, present and future of the waterfront and its relationship to the city's marine history. It also provides a nice chance for New Yorkers keen to learn more about the forgotten borough, but wary of setting foot on Staten Island soil (or the nautically inclined).

The three-hour boat tour, scheduled for November 3 from 11 a.m. to 2:30 p.m., will explore the borough's coves and lighthouses, the site of the proposed 625-foot high Ferris Wheel and the villages of Tottenville and Stapelton, where the Sandy Hook Pilots and the New York City fireboats dock. Historians, city-planners and waterfront professionals will speak.

Ticket prices run $40 for the general public. Of course, penny pinchers can always take the city's free Staten Island ferry and tour the island on foot.

kvelsey@observer.com

Practical? No. Kind of Awesome? Yes: Joseph Wood's winning vision (Civitas)

The Esplanade as it is now (Civitas)

If you can craft the hottest park ever from a mile of old rail track, imagine what you could do with a park that spans more than 60 East River blocks.

Right now the esplanade that reaches from 60th to 125th Streets is a bland stretch of pot-holed concrete wedged between the river and the FDR. But what if there were gondolas? And inland canals integrating the Upper East Side and East Harlem? Or a web of boardwalks stretching out into the water? Bridges over the FDR? Kayaking through Hell's Gate?

We doubt that the city will adopt any of the eight fantastical winners that emerged from the "Reimagining the Waterfront" design competition sponsored by the civic group Civitas, but it would be awesome if they did.

True, the esplanade is not smack dab in the middle of the hottest neighborhood ever, but we hear that the Upper East Side is kind of happening these days. And gondolas might just push it over the edge.

Urban planning buffs, architecture aficionados, Upper East Side lovers and the simply curious can check out the eight winning designs at the Museum of the City of New York starting tonight. The exhibit that also includes historic photographs; it will stay up through October 28.

The eight winning designs were culled from more than 90 submissions. And Civitas isn't particularly worried that they might be a little out there. It's mostly to get people thinking about what the underutilized strip of prime real estate might be. And perhaps something of a plea that whatever makeover lies in the esplanade's future will be more exciting than the much-needed but less than visionary $80 million renovation of its sister to the South, the 56-acre East River Park on the Lower East Side.

“This was an ideas competition, and as such, part of the notion was to create intrigue and excitement about what the East Side could be,” Rob Rogers of Rogers Marvel Architects, one of the competition's judges, told The Architects Newspaper when winners were announced in April.

"Our hope is that park users from New York and abroad will visit the exhibition, be inspired by the creativity of the many designs on display and then make the short walk to the East River Esplanade," wrote Citivas president Felipe Ventegeat.

Do you hear that tourists? Chelsea may not like you, but the Upper East Side really, really wishes you would visit sometime.

kvelsey@observer.com

Hipsters love high/low, right? (angela n., flickr)

It’s not like Melanie Malkin ever pictured herself living on the Upper East Side, a neighborhood that has, over the past 50 years, all but disappeared from the dreams of the young and the hip.

“I mean, when I first moved up here, I didn’t want to move up here. Never, never, never,” Ms. Malkin said, who grudgingly took a cheap sublet in the neighborhood seven years ago when she was 23 years old and working for MoMA. “Nobody wants to move here. When I tell people I live here, they’re, like, eww.”

But loath as Ms. Malkin was to leave her first apartment on 29th Street, she wasn’t making a lot of money working in the museum world and she found a rent-stabilized one-bedroom on 87th Street between Lexington and Third Avenue that cost $775 a month (it’s now $938 a month). In the early days, she kept telling herself that it was convenient and cheap, but then something unexpected happened.

She started to love the Upper East Side.

It’s close to Central Park, a quick walk to some of the city’s best museums, the little side streets are filled with quirky mom-and-pop shops and after some exploring, she found a handful of downtown-style restaurants and bars. She likes the neighborhood so much that she even held her 30th birthday at Carl Schurz Park, the oddly quiet gem on the East River that is home to Gracie Mansion.

“The posh/frat boy stigma of the Upper East Side kind of dominates people’s thoughts, but actually, 29th Street, where I used to live, was really fratty and it was pretty bland. I love where I am now. It’s more of a neighborhood, it’s kept its history and roots, it’s genuine,” said Ms. Malkin. “Maybe people are just lazy, they just want to live someplace that’s already cool, not to have to seek out and explore.”

“I have a friend who teases me that I’m a pioneer, that it’s going to blow up and become the next Williamsburg,” she added. “But I don’t think so. It’s a great place to live, but I can’t even get people to visit me here to prove it to them.”

Williamsburg it is not, but then, neither is Williamsburg anymore. And starving artist aesthetic be damned, the young and hungry would be better advised to find a place near the fat cats of the Upper East Side, where the rents are cheaper, provided you steer clear of the tony avenues near the park. The Upper East Side may well be one of the last outposts of old Manhattan that the young in Manhattan can actually afford. Besides, it’s the neighborhood that everyone who lives in Astoria brags they can see from their rooftops.

Auction house

ON A RECENT warm Saturday night, Second Avenue was filled with the young and old and not many people in between. Prosperous-looking older couples sipped white wine at the outdoor tables, looking tolerantly at the tides of teenagers drifting by, the girls clutching each other in the tipsy, excited way that made drunkenness seem almost sweet, like a kitten tangled in a ball of yarn.

It turned out all the in-betweens were hiding in Auction House, a comfortable bar on 89th Street. Inside, people chatted quietly on plush red velvet Victorian couches, relaxing under the gaze of somewhat naughty old-fashioned oil paintings in gilt frames.

Almost like Brooklyn, but there were no Urban Outfitted-collegiates (talk about exclusive: there’s a 25-and-older policy on Friday and Saturday nights), no taxidermy on the walls (in fact, the owner, a longtime vegetarian, has a no fur policy) and the bartender was refreshingly clean-shaven.

Auction House dates back to 1992—the year that New York magazine ran a Williamsburg cover story, calling it “The New Bohemia.”

“Back then, having antique furniture was really unique,” said owner Johnny Barounis, who also owns the Back Room on the Lower East Side. “At the time, I thought, ‘The style has been around for 100 years. It’s not going anywhere anytime soon.’”

A little something like the Upper East Side, maybe?

“I think it’s coming back. It’s very cyclical. I’ve been seeing an artsier crowd coming in to the bar. Back in the 1970s, it was a really cool place, there were clubs and it used to be fun to hang out up there,” said Mr. Barounis, who blamed the cabaret laws for killing the area’s nightlife.

Don’t believe it? Remember: Andy Warhol lived in a townhouse on Lexington and 89th between 1959 and 1974 in what is regarded as the first Warhol factory—it’s where he painted his soup cans. (Warhol, apparently unafraid of the negative stereotypes, moved in his mother and had 25 cats named Sam in the house).

This is where Joan Didion, “that consummate bard of cool,” spent much of her 20s living and roaming, drinking early in the mornings and pondering the “monochromatic flatness of Second Avenue, the fire escapes and the grilled storefronts peculiar and empty in their perspective.” Where writers and filmmakers like Woody Allen gathered to see and be seen at the nightly salon that was Elaine’s—a place where, as Jay McInerney told The Guardian, “You’d go to drink, have fights and make out with someone’s girlfriend in the bathroom.”

Mr. Barounis grew up in Queens and started out in the nightlife and entertainment business by working as a “pick and choose guy” at clubs. He’s lived in Manhattan for the past 30 years—he’s seen every variety of cool.  “I always thought cool was an intrinsic quality. I’ve had kids tell me, ‘I don’t hang out above 14th Street,” he laughed. “Hey, you’re from Columbus, Ohio, and you’re telling me about cool? I find that comical.”

And Mr. Barounis is not alone. Among the desirable establishments, new and old, in the neighborhood are breweries like Jones Wood Foundry and City Swiggers, the Lexington Candy Shop luncheonette, JG Melon, and on the upper edges of Lexington and Park, ABV, Earl and the Guthrie Inn. There’s also the 75-year-old butcher shop Schaller & Weber (which is keeping its head above water during subway construction thanks to orders from the beer gardens and artisanal-food-obsessed denizens of Queens and Brooklyn who would never dream of living on the Upper East Side). The newest addition is the Pony Bar, a popular Hell’s Kitchen craft-beer bar that opened its second spot yesterday on First and 75th.

“I think people will say, ‘I’m paying this for Jersey City and I could be paying the same thing for the Upper East Side?’” Mr. Barounis opined. “There’s a value up here if you can get over the stigma.”

Your New Neighbor? (ThomasThomas, flickr)

WITH ITS REPUTATION for stuffiness and snootiness, the Upper East Side may not be the most obvious frontier of affordability, but it is one of the few left in Manhattan (alongside Manhattan Valley and Harlem, Washington Heights and Inwood), and it’s also surprisingly young, with 36.4 percent of its population between 20 and 39.

Between Lexington and the East River, 59th to 99th Streets, the median rent for a studio apartment is $1,900 (median size of 500 square feet), according to data from StreetEasy.com. In Williamsburg, the median studio is going for $2,800 a month, although it will get you a slightly larger space of 602 square feet. (More expensive even than the East Village, where the median studio runs $1,940, with a median size of 452 square feet).

With rents in the city hitting record highs—last month, the average monthly rental for a Manhattan studio was $2,025, a 3 percent increase from the year before, according to Citi Habitats—rental brokers are increasingly advising those without trust funds to consider a place that is seen as the traditional stomping ground of those with trust funds.

“Young people say, ‘I need to live in Union Square for $1,200 a month,’ and that’s just not going to happen,” said Mark Menendez, the director of rentals at Prudential Douglas Elliman. “For a while that alternative neighborhood was Williamsburg, but we’ve actually had transplants back to Manhattan because they’ve been priced out of Williamsburg.

Where does one go? “You can still find good value on the Upper East Side,” Mr. Menendez said.

It’s not that the Upper East Side is some vast, empty expanse waiting to be populated (neither is any other place in New York)—Community Board 8 presides over some of the most densely-packed space in the city. But unlike historically industrial neighborhoods like Soho or the Meatpacking District, it has a lot of units in a wide variety of housing types.

The downtown housing stock is simply not as robust, said Citi Habitats president Gary Malin. “People might not want to live on the Upper East Side, they don’t think it’s cool or young or hip. But if you want to live in the West Village, it’s expensive."

It also helps that for years, the far East side was snubbed because of the lack of train lines east of Lexington, a fact that almost seems quaint given the increasingly “acceptable” treks of outer borough residents.

In fact, cost has been driving creative, penurious types to Yorkville for decades. Linda Rizutto, the owner of the very Villagey coffee shop Java Girl on E. 66^th Street, moved to the neighborhood some 30 years ago.

“I would have preferred living in the Village, but it was cheaper to live up here,” said Ms. Rizutto. She turned briefly wistful, musing on what Soho was like before it became like an outdoor shopping mall, then shrugged. “This is my home home now."

And although on average the Upper East Side is among the wealthiest neighborhoods in the city (an average twisted out of proportion by the spectacular wealth of Fifth and Park and Madison Avenues), it’s also more socially and economically-diverse than anyone gives it credit for, and has been for a long time.

Hunter Armstrong, the director of local group Civitas noted that there are hundreds of thousands of people living on the Upper East Side.

“There’s not one prevailing character, it’s so diverse,” said Mr. Armstrong. “There’s every kind of person.”

Still, it can be a hard sell.

Citi Habitats broker Morgan Turkewitz persuaded two clients, who happened to be friends, to consider moving Uptown. “If that was the first apartment that we went into and they liked it, I knew they’d say, ‘O.K., but what about Downtown?’” said Ms. Turkewitz. “So, I waited until they saw Downtown and got frustrated with it, then I took them to the Upper East Side.” They wound up in a two-bedroom apartment on 60th Street between First and Second Avenues for just under $2,000.

Ms. Turkewitz's client Kathleen Clark, who graduated from the University of Delaware in 2009, admits that she didn’t look at the Upper East Side and think Oh, that’s my ideal neighborhood. But the other apartments she saw just couldn’t compare to the small, but charming and newly-renovated two-bedroom in a fourth-floor walkup with stainless steel fixtures and granite countertops.

“I love some places in the West Village and Gramercy, but that’s sort of a dream,” said Ms. Clark, who works as a designer at Levi’s. “As much as you want to be hip and live on the Lower East Side, you can’t afford it on a base salary.”

Asked if she had considered Brooklyn, Ms. Clark said that she was sure she would love the vintage shopping and the beer gardens if she lived there, but it wasn’t great for her commute.“And that’s why I came here—for my work.”

Not that she’s been able to convince any of her friends to take up residence.

“Once people are set on not wanting to live on the Upper East Side, they do pretty much all they can to try to find an apartment somewhere else,” she said. “It has kind of a bad rap. I think it might be the most uncool neighborhood in Manhattan.”

Nor are all of its residents converts.

“Young people don’t want to live here, but they end up getting funneled in,” said Matthew Smith, a Yale law student who looked at more than 30 apartments before settling on his current place, a spacious one-bedroom with exposed brick on 93rd Street between First and Second Avenues that costs $1,500 a month.

“I would rather be in Hell’s Kitchen, there’s a lot more going on,” Mr. Smith admitted, noting that Yorkville could be kind of “frat-tastic.” But while his friends’ Hell’s Kitchen rent had gone up by $400 last year, his had gone up just by the price of inflation.

Even though he’d seen more young people moving Uptown, he didn’t think that the neighborhood would be transformed by waves of hipsters desperate to remain in Manhattan. Not that Greenpoint or Bushwick are all that cheap anymore, but the next place, wherever it was, would be.

A muck house: pretty gritty (Hobo Matt, flickr)

SAFE. QUIET. CONVENIENT. AFFORDABLE. The descriptions came up again and again in conversations with younger residents, who were always eager to point out these excellent, but oddly parental praises. Then, they would let something slip. Actually, they loved that the Met was open until 9 p.m. on Friday and Saturdays and was admission by donation. It was one of the most democratic institutions in the city, when they thought about it. (Why trudge out to some gallery in Bushwick for mediocre art when you can see the best in the world in your own neighborhood?). Or they really liked Cascabel Tacos, the place that serves street-food style Mexican on Second Avenue, or reading the paper at a coffee ship like Little Brown, or a great piano bar that their friend always took them to with the weirdest mix of people, or the inventive programming at the Museum of the City of New York.

And at least the Upper East Side used to be a place people dreamed of moving. Does anyone dream of moving to Queens, Hoboken or Jersey City?

Perhaps the best argument for the Upper East Side’s rise is that its inevitable fall is already looming on the horizon in the specter of the Second Avenue subway, sure to drive up property values. Besides, for the time being, for those obsessed with the old, gritty New York, what’s grittier than displaced rats and muck houses?

Why not get in while the getting is good—especially if you moved to New York to get out in the first place?

“Who comes to New York to just hang out in one neighborhood anyway?” asked Tiffany Sakato, who lives in a one-bedroom on 86th and Second Avenue (rent is about $1,600). Spending all your time eating, sleeping, socializing and working in one place? Wasn’t that the kind of provincialism people came to New York to escape?

Ms. Sakato liked her apartment she assured us, the neighborhood, the price, but really, in the end, “it’s just a place where you can put your head down and get ready for the next day.”

“I really like exploring the city,” she explained. “Most of the time, you’re out and about, not sitting at home. That’s why you move to New York.”

kvelsey@observer.com

Historic House Festival: "The Moveable Feast"

Various Locations

September 24 to 26

historichousetrust.org

Jacobus van Cortlandt, was a 17th-century Bronx real estate developer, Claes Vechte's house was the site of the 1776 historic Battle of Brooklyn and Edgar Allan Poe wrote "Annabel Lee" in the village of Fordham. All of their houses ended up owned by the city's Historic House Trust. With about two dozen properties scattered throughout the five boroughs, the Trust likes to boast that it's the largest museum in the city. This weekend, the houses co-host a massive fall festival. New York's culinary history is the theme. There's open-hearth cooking, an apple festival, 19th-century-style teas and, of course, costumed docents.

"Notorious and Notable: 20th Century Women of Style"

The Museum of the City of New York

Now through January 3, 2011

mcny.org

The Museum of the City of New York has just opened its survey of classic city style, showing off the evening wear of seemingly every one of the town's grand dames from Sunny von Bulow to Mona von Bismarck, who in 1933 became the first American to be dubbed Chanel's "Best Dressed Woman in the World." They have Isadora Duncan's chiffon gown-scarf not included-some of Gypsy Rose Lee's performance wear, and a flower brooch of Jackie O's. Think twice before wearing sweatpants.

"Abstract Expressionist New York"

The Museum of Modern Art

October 3 to April 25, 2011

moma.org

MoMA is redecorating! (And rewriting art history.) This month, the museum is stripping the walls of its fourth-floor galleries to prepare for what could be the biggest, and most controversial, hit in a year of blockbusters. The curatorial staff is dipping into the archives, dusting off nearly 300 works from the museum's world-class collection of Abstract Expressionism. Jackson Pollocks, Arshille Gorkies and Mark Rothkos, plus works by artists whose names we've forgotten but perhaps shouldn't have, MoMA will argue, will crowd the walls. 

"On Stage in Fashion"

New York Public Library for the
Performing Arts

October 14 to January 22, 2011

nypl.org

There was an era when actors didn't need a red carpet to wear couture. The performing arts library at Lincoln Center remembers a golden age of Broadway and costume design, when Mary Martin wore Mainbocher and Martha Graham dressed her dancers in Calvin Klein. Besides the costumes-on loan from the Museum of the City of New York-there will be vintage copies of Playbill, videos of well-dressed ballerinas and a film series that includes the classic documentary on drag haute-couture of the 1980s, Paris Is Burning.

"Hipsters, Hustlers and Handball Players"

The Metropolitan Museum of Art

October 5, 11 AM

$300

metmuseum.org

In the years after World War II, Leon Levinstein captured the look of the streets of New York for the people who walked them. Early next month, the Met offers a stylish farewell to their summer exhibition of about 100 Levinstein works with a lecture and luncheon. Savor the irony of spending hundreds of dollars for a private tour of photographs of working-class people-many of whom met Mr. Levinstein while sunning on the city's public beaches. That said, it's for a good cause, and luncheon will be served.

Robert Moses: The Panorama

Queens Museum of Art

QueensMuseum.org

Though the U.S. Open has come and gone, and there are no reasons left to meet the Mets, there is still much to see in Flushing Meadows Park. The Unisphere may be the most visible remnant of the 1964 World's Fair, but surely the most remarkable is Robert Moses' famed Panorama: a 9,335-square-foot model of the city he loved so dearly. From high rises to housing projects, every building is there. It hasn't been fully updated since 1992, but unless you live in a sparkling new condominium, you'll be able to say, "I can see my house from here!"

"NUEVA YORK (1613-1945)"

EL MUSEO DEL BARRIO

Through Jan. 9, 2011

elmuseo.org

This sweeping four-century history of the city predates Peter Stuyvesant, and looks at the role Spanish-speaking cultures have played in shaping Gotham. A documentary by Ric Burns rounds out the extensive visual arts portion of the show.

Intellectuals, unite. This fall, the ideas and ideologies will be flying at New York museums. Here's a look at some of the more important, or interesting, lectures and readings coming up.

The Morgan Library & Museum

Reading Mark Twain

Tuesday, Sept. 28, 2010, 6:30 p.m.

$30 for non-members

As part of its commemoration of the 100th anniversary of Mark Twain's death, the Morgan Library presents three writers who have, in their own way, aspired to Twainness. Toni Morrison represents the serious novelist, Frank Rich the social critic and Fran Lebowitz the literary gadfly. Put them all together, and you'll have a nice facsimile of the great man himself--excepting the mustache, of course. Ten points to any wag who can make them discuss Twain's celebrated speech, "Some Thoughts on the Science of Onanism," a favorite of 14-year-old boys.

www.themorgan.org

New Museum

Gysin's Ghost: Poetry Marathon

Saturday, Sept. 25, 1 p.m.

Free with museum admission

In September, the New Museum hosts a day long poetry reading--an event whose oh-so-downtownness is meant to be in keeping with the current exhibition: a retrospective of the works of Brion Gysin, heppest of the hep beats. His most striking piece on display is the Dream Machine, whose flickering lights are meant to be viewed with one's eyes shut. As poets Kenneth Goldsmith, Bernadette Mayer and Anne Waldman read, feel free to leave your eyes closed and imagine.

www.newmuseum.org

The Museum of
the City of New York

Who Broke
New York?

Wednesday, Sept. 15, 6:30 p.m.

$12 for non-members,
reservations required

There was a moment when everyone liked John Lindsay. Lanky, handsome, with the amiable patrician cluelessness of a Gary Cooper character, his mayoralty was undone by a snowstorm and looked even sillier in retrospect, as his policies ushered the city into fiscal quicksand. But though it's tempting to blame the WASP, 1975 was not wholly Lindsay's fault. The Museum of the City of New York, as part of an ongoing attempt to rehabilitate the tall man's legacy, discusses.
www.mcny.org

The Frick Collection

Drawings by Ribera, Murillo, Goya, and Their Contemporaries in North
American Collections

Wednesday, Oct. 6, 6 p.m.

Free

In October, the Frick shows off a bevy of drawings by the Spanish Old Masters, many of them now in U.S. collections. Iberian art was first imported en masse by the nation's kindliest plutocrats-J.P. Morgan and Cornelius Vanderbilt, particularly-but after the pesky Spanish Civil War, it became much trickier to export. This lecture tells how museums and collectors managed to get Franco to let go of his Goya.

www.frick.org

The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Celebrating the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela

Friday, Oct. 1 and 29, 6 p.m.

Free with museum admission

The spectacular Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela has been attracting long lines since the ninth century. Traveling mostly by foot, pilgrims came from as far as Eastern Europe to pay penance in front of the remains of St. James, one of the 12 apostles. To mimic the experience in microcosm, try walking to the Metropolitan Museum on a Friday night to learn about the industries--artistic and commercial--that sprang up on the road to the shrine. Dubbed "The Way of St. James," it has drawn believers to the Holy City of Galicia, Spain, for a thousand years.

www.metmuseum.org

Japan Society

Mark Epstein & Lewis Hyde: Mindful Living

Wednesday, Oct. 13, 6:30 p.m.

$20

No matter what he claimed, that way enlightened dude who lived in the dorm room next to yours was not the first to ask, "What's the sound of one hand clapping?" He should have credited Hakuin Ekaku, an 18th-century Zen master who posed the question in painting, as the slightly more tidy query, "What is the sound of one hand?" That painting and dozens more go on display at the Japan Society in October, along with a lecture presented by the adorably named "Tricycle: The Buddhist Review." www.japansociety.org

The Museum of Modern Art

Small Scale, Big Change: New Architectures of Social Engagement

Monday, Oct. 18, 12:30 p.m.

$5

A highlight this fall of MoMA's smart Brown Bag lunch program is this talk celebrating public architecture projects that seek, in ways big and small, to change the world. Amid fruit cups and paninis. lecturer Margot Weller will talk about how the architects featured in the exhibition became agents for social change simply by designing particularly vibrant houses, schools or community centers. Visitors are permitted to trade snacks, but anyone whose mother packed their lunch will be roundly snickered at.

www.moma.org

The Real Estate is going for a Robert Moses trifecta this morning. This item's about one of his newer critics, Bronx community organizer Majora Carter, who dared criticize Mayor Bloomberg's development policies and who received a warm response from the media at the Feb. 1 opening of the Moses exhibit at the Museum of the City of New York.

The notice above, received via e-mail from Ms. Carter herself, says it all--including the fact that the museum is showing itself pretty receptive to airing all sides of the story.

- Matthew Schuerman

A must for all Moses geeks.

- Matthew Schuerman

But this Bloombergian consensus was shattered by Majora Carter, the one African-American on the panel, the one woman, and the one representative of "the community perspective" (she is executive director of Sustainable South Bronx). Ms. Carter, when innocently asked by the architecture critic for Bloomberg L.P. for her opinion on all the grand-scale planning going on in the city now, took a deep breath, paused for effect, and began:

Ms. Carter went on for 10 minutes, detailing how the destruction of the Bronx, where she grew up, was still felt today--and was still continuing today, arguing:

She concluded by criticizing the Bloomberg adminstration's plan to put a jail in the South Bronx.

It must have been hard to be Deputy Mayor Dan Doctoroff, who was sitting just four seats away.

- Matthew Schuerman