I'm endlessly fascinated by the Russian Revolution and how it completely capsized the world. In any epochal event -- wars, revolutions, you name it -- there are literally millions of fascinating personal stories that intersect with these world-changing times.
One such story is that of Maria Pavlovna, a Princess of the Russian Imperial family, the Romanovs. She was born into great splendor, wealth and power beyond imagination. She was forced into a an unhappy marriage with a Swedish prince and had a son, divorced him, went back to Russia and remarried -- and then got swept up in the revolution. She escaped to Paris, ran a couture business for a while, then came to NYC -- where she got a job as a fashion consultant at Bergdorf's. She also wrote her autobiography which became a big bestseller. But when WWII started, she was angry that the USA was allied with the Soviet Union, so she moved to Argentina before moving back to Europe, eventually living and dying in Germany.
It's a life of imagine tragedy and triumph and a fascinating example of a disrupted life that had a short but amazing chapter in NYC.
The mysteries around this dead pedo -- gone but not forgotten (nor mourned) -- seems to become bigger and bigger as time goes on. We appear to know so much more yet so much less at the same time.
It's been hopelessly politicized, and I won't get into that miserable drama here. But what fascinates me about this whole saga is who Epstein was -- and why the media and public hunger for him can never be sated.
Epstein is a 21st-century American version of the shadowy, sexually devious early-20th century Russian figure who seemed to come out of nowhere and became a friend and corruptor of the rich, powerful, and famous.
And like Rasputin, Epstein died under bizarre and shocking circumstances.
The parallels are not exact: Rasputin was a staretz, a spiritual guide. Epstein was financier, a finance guy. Rasputin came from poverty in Siberia. Epstein came from a lower middle-class background in Brooklyn. He also became super-rich and was deeply vain, while Rasputin, for all his notoriety, did not seek riches, dressed like a slob, and smelled. And while Rasputin actually attained more direct power -- becoming so close to the last Russian Imperial family that he was eventually running the government -- Epstein's proximity to power was much more transactional and opaque.
Yet there is one big, overarching similarity of Rasputin and Epstein -- namely, they beg the question WHO THE HELL WAS THIS GUY?
Rapsutin was a charlatan, he wasn't even a real priest. He said he spoke to God and could cure diseases when all he really did was utter platitudes, prayed with people, and "laid hands" on them. And yet it led him into the heart of late-Russian nobility and monarchy -- and, with that, he got power and influence and a place in history.
Epstein now has a place in history too, and its all the more remarkable considering that he wasn't really anybody important. He was rich, yes, and that got him access to the famous and powerful (although when you splash around cash its not hard to get doors opened to those kinds of people). But Epstein had no real institutional power nor public-facing career. He wasn't the CEO of a publicly traded or financial company, he didn't run a media or entertainment or real estate empire or any kind of big business, he wasn't a politician nor served in government, and he didn't run or manage or own anything big or well-known. All he did (supposedly) was manage money for rich people.
And yet Rasputin and Epstein managed to work their ways into the heighest echelons of society and power in two of the most powerful empires on earth.
To a certain extent there's a degree of snobbishness in how people regard them: who are (or were) these people to think they could come from places like Siberia or Coney Island and rub shoulders with the mighty? They were climbers, upstarts, wannabes, who crashed the gates and should have been kicked out by their betters.
That's one way of looking at them.
But another way to view them is as examples of rot -- and how great countries wither and die from the inside.
In the history of the Russian Revolution, Rasputin and his power and influence have become examples of how delusional, corrupt, and stupid late Imperial Russia had become. And Epstein -- with his private plane, Carribean island, big houses and weird artifacts and pedophilia -- is an example of late-stage capitalism, and how morally bankrupt, debauched, and nihilistic American society is today, fueled by greed, and abandoning the common good.
And in early-20th century Russian and early-21th century America, the public and the powerful allowed themselves to be controlled by gross con artists -- and we have (and will) rue the day.
Rasputin and Epstein are now no longer simply creepy wannabes who died -- they are myths, dark haunting figures that say something damning about our lives and times, about our societies, and what we have all, one way or another, sadly become.
They are the stench left behind of dead and dying empires.
If I had the cash to build a palace, I'd build it in a great city by a river.
Imagine living in a huge home, gilt and elegance everywhere, looking out the window and seeing a brilliant cityscape, and then looking out another window and seeing a big placid stream of water.
How lovely, how mesmerizing, how ... rich.
This is not, obviously, an original idea to me. There have been several historic palaces built next to rivers in great cities but today, sadly, most of them are gone.
And here in NYC, we also have phantom riverside palaces -- the lost mansions that used to exist on Riverside Drive in Manhattan.
But foist, to history!
In London, in the medieval era, there was a huge palace on the banks of the River Thames in London called the Savoy Palace. It was huge, gorgeous, and absolutely screamed of power and wealth. Unsurprisingly it was owned by the then-royal family of England, the Plantagenets. Its last resident was John of Gaunt, son of King Edward III, and an important political and military leader of his time -- a kind of guy-behind-the-guy, a Bismark or James Baker or Tywin Lannister kind of guy.
But tragedy befell the Savoy Palace in 1381 when, during the Peasants Revolt, it was burned down, totally destroyed (John of Gaunt had levied a very unpopular tax on the peasants and the peasants let him know what they thought of it). A smart politician, John didn't rebuild the palace -- instead, he made tax reforms and quelled the rebellion, restoring peace.
John of Gaunt is also the grandfather of every British monarch since Henry IV. John and his longtime-mistress/last wife, the gorgeous and amazing Kathrine Swynford, had four kids. John of Gaunt's riverside palace may not have survived but his DNA sure does!
Moving down to Paris, on the right back of the River Seine, used to stand the Tuilleries Palace. It was one of many residences of the French Kings and it was actually built by the great Queen Catherine de Medici herself. The French Kings before the 1789 didn't actually live there much (they soon headed out to Versailles) but in the 19th century it was used by the short-lived monarchs Louise-Phillipe and Louise Napoleon.
But the Tuilleries Palace became another victim of mass fervor when, during the Paris Commune of 1871, it was destroyed, never to be rebuilt. Now it's a massive public park, the Tuilleries Gardens, where families stroll and couples go to ... French.
Sidenote: a forgotten historical figure named Prince Phillipp of Saxe Coburg Gotha was born in the Tuilleries Palace in 1844. He was the brother-in-law and best friend of the Austrian Crown Prince Rudolf of Austria-Hungary who, along with a couple of others, discovered Rudolf and his dead mistress at Mayerling in January, 1889. Philipp is an intriguing, pivotal character in Episode 4 of Fall of Eagles (see below, it's an amazing episode). Phillipp also put his crazy cheating wife (who was also his cousin) in an insane assylum and fought a duel with her lover that he lost, and then divorced her. During Word War 1, his son was killed when his son's mistress threw acid in his face. He had a life of both great privilege and great tragedy, an example of late 19th century/early 20th century European monarchy that vanished with the war.
Then there's the Yusupov Palace in St. Petersburg, Russia. Built by the insanely wealthy and noble Yusupov family on the banks of the Moika River. It was as huge, as gorgeous, as jaw-droppingly splendid as any palace ever built anywhere. It was (literally) a shining example of Tsarist Russia -- the kind of place that represented everything that the Communists hated and wanted to destroy.
Amazingly, however, the Communists didn't destroy it after the 1917 Russian revolution. It was too big, too impressive, and too useful to destroy. Instead, the Yusopov family fled Russia and the Communists turned into a ministry. Now its a museum. But even though this riverside palace still exists, it's still a phantom -- no one lives there, its original use abandoned, a curiosity of history and not a living part of it.
But what's most interesting about this palace is that while it's huge and gorgeous and an architectural marvel, its best known for something that happened in a basement room in the palace late at night on December 30, 1916. That's the night that Prince Felix Yusupov and his friends killed the mysterious and fake holy man/Tsarist whisperer and advisor Rasputin. They fed him poisoned cakes and wine and, when those failed to kill him, shot him. Rasputin managed to flee outside of the palace where Yusupov and his friends shot him again. Then they chained him up and drove him outside St. Petersburg where they dumped his body into another river. And while Yusopov and his friends thought killing Rasputin would save the Russian monarchy, it was in fact the moment when its doom was sealed.
Okay, so we've delved into history of some of the riverside palaces in London, Paris and St. Petersburg. Let's come home to NYC.
And here you can learn all about the huge, beautiful mansions -- some of them almost as big and gorgeous as palaces -- that were built in the 19th-century on Riverside Drive in Manhattan. Obviously no nobles or royals built or lived in them, but they were examples of the Gilded Age, of New Money, of trying to show their European counterparts that they could build great homes as grand as anything in the Old World. And Riverside Drive, that great stretch of road by the watery Western frontier of NYC, seemed like the perfect place.
Sadly, most of these mansions on Riverside Drive are gone today. A couple still exist but, during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century, their wealthy residents could no longer afford their upkeep and sold them to developers. The new owners proceeded to knock them down and build apartment buildings -- some quite splendid themselves but not quite as interesting as the mansions they replaced.
This documentary below about the lost mansions, the lost palaces, of Riverside Drive tells the story about ten of these long-gone gems.
And I have a personal interest in this -- one of the mansions mentioned in this documentary was replaced by the building that I grew up in myself and where my family still owns the apartment.
So yeah ... I kinda-sorta-but-not-really-but-want-to-believe that I grew up and lived for years in a kinda-sorta-palace on the riverside of a great city.
And that I have a some stuff in common with other previous residents of riverside palaces, like personal intelligence and elegance, except for ...
John of Gaunt; I mean this guy had it all -- money, power, a hot woman (and women), kids, bling -- I just wouldn't want to have my home burned down.
... or Catherine de Medici but without all the killing.
... or Prince Phillipp of Saxe Coburg Gotha but without putting my wife in a loonie bin or discovering my brother-in-law dead.
... or Prince Felix Yusopov without killing a gross and weird holy man and then fleeing the country.
And if you want to just enjoy the beauty and impressive current day architecture of Riverside Drive, I strongly suggest taking a walk along this most amazing and unique of NYC thoroughfares.
More than a dozen years ago I blogged about the fact that this blog had, for a time, an unusually high readership in Russia.
Ensuing events have certainly made me conclude that those "readers" were probably bots -- like the kinds that seek to conduct informational warfare and influence elections.
Anyhoo, Russia is no longer this blog's biggest readership and hasn't been for a long time. Happily the USA remains the main source for this blog's readership which gives me a smidgen of confidence that perhaps real live human beings are reading this here 'thang.
But in the last year, in just checking the stats, it's actually Singapore that has been driving most of this blog's traffic, slightly ahead of the USA. Yes, instead of the world's biggest political landmass reading Mr NYC, now one of the world's smallest does so.
As you may know, Singapore is a city-state located in southeast Asia, right off the coast of Malaysia. It used to be a British colony like Hong Kong but had been a thriving independent city-state for decades -- and one of the world's most desirable places to live.
Now it's quite possible (in fact, most likely) that most of the Singapore readership is bots but -- haha -- if any real live Singaporeans are reading Mr NYC I'd love for you leave comment or three -- and I hope one day to visit your fine city-country, truly a sibling city to NYC if there ever was one.
A few years ago I wrote a short blog post about some of the more memorable headlines that have appeared in the NYC newspapers over the decades (most recently, in reference to the Good Morning America anchor adultery scandal, it was "Good Moaning America").
Anyway, in late 1917, a headline appeared in a local paper called Bronx Home News that had to make its readers do a double-take: "Bronx Man Leads Russian Revolution."
The man in question was Leon Trotsky who, after Vladimir Lenin, became the second most powerful person in the newly formed Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the world's first Bolshevik i.e. Communist nation. Wrecked by its disastrous participation in the First World War, the centuries-old Russian Empire crumbled into chaos. After numerous political convulsions, the world's largest nation, once ruled by the sacred autocratic Tsars, turned into a supposed "workers paradise", a hypothetical communist utopia.
It was not to be, obviously, but in late 1917 no one knew that -- all that Russians knew was that a failed and discredited monarchy had been destroyed, and a new socialist experiment had come along. Trotsky was one of its primary leaders, its main apostles, and for the next decade he would exercise awesome power -- until, he too, met his ruin at the hands of Joseph Stalin.
A professional revolutionary, Trotsky lived a nomadic, stateless existence. A wanted man in Russia, he was exiled to Siberia twice, and spent most of his time bouncing around Europe (Switzerland, the UK, France, and Spain) before arriving in NYC in January 1917. His first impression of the city was:
"Here I was in New York, city of prose and fantasy, of capitalist automatism, its streets a triumph of cubism, its moral philosophy that of the dollar. New York impressed me tremendously because, more than any other city in the world, it is the fullest expression of our modern age.”
Taking up residence on either 164 street or 172 street in the Bronx (it's not certain exactly where he resided), Trotsky lived in the city for only ten weeks, leaving in late March 1917. However, he made the most of his brief American sojourn, doing research and writing at the New York Public Library, engaging in anti-war debates at Cooper Union, going to food protests in St. Mark's Place and City Hall, and engaging in socialist agitation. It's important to remember that, prior to the Russian Revolution and the Cold War, there was a strong socialist movement in this city and country before the FBI and the government shut it down. Trotsky's goal was to organize socialist activity in America -- but then, in March 1917, revolution broke out in Russia. Trotsky left, sailing away from NYC and into history.
Perhaps, during his brief time in NYC, Trotsky should have realized that communism would fail. Even though he lived in a small and modest apartment, he was shocked to discover that it had things like electricity, heat, a phone, and even a garbage shoot. He could see, even then, that America was the future.
Back in Russia, Trotsky participated in the October 1917 Bolshevik seizure of power. Almost immediately a civil war broke out between the Reds (the Bolshevik forces) and the Whites ("monarchists, conservatives, and Tsarist generals", as the sneering Ian Holm character says in the 1971 movie Nicholas & Alexandra, "all our enemies). Trotsky led the Red forces to victory as War Commissar in 1922. This victory cemented the Soviet Union's existence. Trotsky was at the height of his power.
But in 1924, Lenin, the USSR's first leader and Trotsky's patron, died. A vicious power battle between Trotsky and Stalin ensued. Trotsky lost and was out of power by 1925 -- and by 1929 he was out of the Soviet Union, exiled from the nation he had helped found, resuming a stateless, rootless life. He eventually landed in Mexico City, living in a guarded house, until he was killed by a Stalinist agent who buried an ice pick in his head in 1941.
If Trotsky has survived, if he and not Stalin had become Lenin's successor, the history of the Soviet Union and the world would have been much different. Perhaps it would have become a humane socialist nation. Instead, with Stalin, the USSR became a cult of personality, it became a terror state of gulags and death, it did not become a worker's paradise, it became hell. Trotsky was an idealist but Stalin was a brutal tactician -- and that's why history played out the way it did.
At least Trotsky got to spend some time in NYC -- most of his fellow revolutionaries never did.
Apropos of my comment about the 1971 movie Nicholas & Alexandra, I highly recommend it -- it's an old-fashioned costume epic about the last Tsar and his wife, the kind of big movie they don't make anymore. It also has an amazing cast including a very young Brian Cox who plays Trotsky. If you're a fan of his hit show Succession where he plays an old, super wealthy media titan, it's cool to watch him in this movie, nearly 50 years earlier, playing a young idealistic Bolshevik revolutionary. There aren't any scenes in NYC, sadly, but it's still worth watching.
This is a bad movie -- a legendarily bad one. I've blogged about it incidently over the years.
But the story behind its creation is fascinating. There's even an entire behind-the-scenes book about it called The Devil's Candy which is way better than the movie.
"Bonfire" is based on Tom Wolfe's massive 1987 novel of the same name about how greed and, obviously, vanity corrupt not only people but an entire city. A high-living Wall Street trader named Sherman McCoy and his mistress get into a hit-and-run accident with a young black man in the Bronx -- and his life becomes a media storm that inflames the entire city's media, judicial, and political worlds. Because the book was so successful, a movie version seemed inevitable. And then every decision the producers made was wrong. Who do you get to play the to-the-manor-born, aristocratic Sherman? Why Mr. Middle America himself, Tom Hanks! Who do you get to play Peter Farrow, the emaciated British tabloid reporter who turns the hit-and-run into a media sensation? Why Mr. Die Hard action movie hero himself, Bruce Willis! Who do you get to play the 21-year old Maria, a Southerner, Sherman's mistress? Why thirty-something year old Melanie Griffith! Who do you get to direct this social satire? Why horror/gangster movie director Brian De Palma! What do you with material that's been highly acclaimed for its smart humor and biting wit? Why you turn it into a raunchy, gross, Animal House-like romp. As one reviewer said at the time, "You've got to be a genius to make a movie this bad." The movie really is a mess. It's not funny, not insightful, and doesn't work. But, as an NYC movie, it actually works strangely well. De Palma is a great visual stylist. The movie starts with a stop-motion view from the Chrysler Building, to making JFK Airport look positively cinematic, to making the South Bronx look truly menacing, to making Park Avenue and Wall Street look both properly gorgeous and monstrous at the same time, to all sorts of weird camera angles, it's worth see just for its imagery if for nothing else. I remember when this movie came out late in 1990. This is a now legendary movie season where lots of big movies with big stars, like "Bonfire", came out and bombed at the box office. Havana with Robert Redford, The Russia House with Sean Connery, and others just all tanked. The Godfather Part III came out and got a decidely mixed reception. No, the winners at the box office that winter were a snotty unknown ten-year old in a silly family comedy called Home Alone and an unknown theater actress named Kathy Bates in a horror movie called Misery (that got her an Oscar). Ah, memories ...
Donald Trump is an obvious fraud, a con man (Trump University, anyone?) to everyone and anyone who either isn't a complete moron or a racist supporter. He lies and cheats and steals. But one thing a lot of people, even those who detest him, is that, because he's so crass, he's not a snob. How can he be? He loves the "poorly educated", he's personally gross, and promotes himself as a savior to middle America.
This is, of course, nonsense. He cuts the taxes of rich people while the factories he promised to save keep closing. But he's also a snob! Apparently, he doesn't want to hire anyone except Ivy League graduates -- and only those who graduate from the top, top Ivies. He apparently loathes his AG Jeff Sessions, not only because he refuses to un-recuse himself from the Russia investigation, but because he went to the University of Alabama Law School and not, say, Harvard.
As this article points out, Trump is the exact kind of coastal elitist that so many of his supporters claim to detest -- he looks down on the poor, the poorly educated, the non-elite. He's everything that this supporters accuse his opponents of being.
He's a snob! Of course, he says he's not because he's a con man. But really, for everything else you might call him (narcissist, racist, liar, etc. etc.) he's just a big fat snob.
They said we couldn't do it. They said it wasn't possible. They said we would never make it this long. (Actually, there is no "they" or "we" and no one ever said anything but it sounds good to pretend that somehow the odds were against you and you overcame, "fought the power" and what not.).
Anyway, today marks the fifth anniversary of Mr NYC.
Yes, exactly five years ago today -- Tuesday, March 27, 2007 -- this blog emerged into the world. Five years ago today this little cyber body spawned out of the great big bang that is the Internet. Five years ago today my neurosis took the form of Mr NYC and the world has never been the same since.
Can you believe? Better believe it now.
For half a decade, yours truly has been (hopefully) entertaining you, my faithful audience, with my thoughts and feelings about this, the greatest city in human creation, along with various other tidbits and info. So much has happened in the years since this blog started that it seems more like a whole decade and not just half of one.
Five years!
I've done over 1300 posts that has covered the history, culture, news, infrastructure, and lots of stuff you never knew about NYC. I've done interviews and reviews. I've shared some of the aspects of my travels and life (while maintaining my precious anonymity) and I've looked at how NYC relates to individuals and the world. I even became a dad.
Just run a search of this blog and you won't believe all the stuff you'll find.
And thanks, most of all, to you my readers. You've kept this blog going. We're closing in on getting almost 100,00 hits which is pretty amazing considering that this is a non-commercial blog that doesn't advertise, doesn't promote itself, just basically hangs around online and hopes people find it.
Thanks to all the people in the USA, UK, Germany, Russia, Canada, the Netherlands, France, the Ukraine, China, Brazil, Australia, Indonesia, Norway, Chile, the Philippines, and all the other countries of the world who have checked out this blog (I think we even had someone from South Africa leave a comment once).
Thanks for making Mr NYC international! An international blog for an international city!
So here's to five great years. Hopefully you've enjoyed the ride.
A lil' bit of blog bid'ness that I hope you, my sweet readers, will pay some sweet attention to.
First, if you check out my right-hand links, you'll see that I made some additions and subtractions. Added some new links, got rid of some dead ones, and re-arranged a few others. Browse and enjoy at your leisure.
Second, I'd like to request my great readers to send me any links to blogs or websites that are NYC-related so that I can add them to the link list too. If you have an NYC blog and would like it linked here, even better! Just click on the Comments and send me the link and, if it's cool, I'll include it here. Any other comments are welcome as well.
Third, I'd just like to thank the over 76 thousand people (and counting) who have stopped by this blog over the last four-plus years. The vast bulk of my readers are from the USA but there's also a strong number of visitors from the UK, Germany, Canada, Russia, the Netherlands, China, France, and the Ukraine. Considering that this blog is about NYC, a big international city, it's great to know that this blog has an international audience.
Since I don't make (hardly) any money off this blog, I almost never look at my stats to see how many page hits/views/whatever I'm getting. Frankly, I always assume that virtually no one reads this blog but I adore every person who does and am grateful for any and all comments I get (well, most ...).
So color me surprised when I checked out my stats yesterday. Shockingly, Mr NYC gets between 150 and 200 page views a day. That really amazed me since I thought it would be more like two. Even more surprising to me is that, after the USA, the country where this blog is most read is Russia. Comrades! Close on Russia's heels were the United Kingdom and Germany (I have one lovely reader from Germany who comments every so often and it's always nice to hear from her). Other countries on the most read list are Japan (my condolences) followed somewhat distantly by Canada, Denmark, France and China.
Once I got a comment by a reader in South Africa. That was cool.
So I guess you (okay, me) could call this an international blog for an international city. And of course we have lots of readers here in the USA.
Greetings to all my readers from across the fruited plane, around the world, and all the ships at sea!
And if you are an active reader to Mr NYC, 1) thank you, thank you, thank you, and 2) I'd love to know where you live (not your address or anything creepy like that, just your city/state or country). You can just hit the comment link on this post and drop it in. I'm sure your fellow readers would like to know too. Share and share alike. Thanks!
"May you live in interesting times." This old maxim has lately become our reality. We certainly do live in interesting times, a period that history will remember -- and it's friggin' depressing.
What makes any period of time "interesting" anyway? That's a tough call. Any moment in the past has points that are interesting. But what makes some periods more interesting than others, I guess, are those times when a society -- be it a city, country, or even the whole world -- is going through a particularly fierce and tumultuous battle for its very identity and soul; when it appears that the future is a complete tabularasa, a clean slate that the victor in the battle for power will be able to draw on; where the choices are zero-sum and the winner takes all.
In essence, history is most interesting when it is being transformed.
Think of the Revolutionary War. The Civil War. Certainly World War II. Think of the Battle of Waterloo or 9/11. Think of the Great Depression or the election of Ronald Reagan. People were faced with a choice about what kind of country and world they wanted to live in -- and the battle was on. Thus interesting times ensued. And the world was never the same again.
But interesting times must, at some point, come to a climax -- the story must reach its moment of maximum intensity before going into its denouement.
For the last decade, since 9/11, NYC has been going through some very interesting times. We suffered and then recovered from the worst terrorist attack in history. We went through a dreadful blackout. Most recently, the financial crises hammered the city and the country's economy. We took a beating but got back up.
Yet it feels, more and more, that the interesting times NYC has been going through has been leading right up to this very moment. The climax of our story is upon us. Perhaps I'm being overly dramatic but, when I read the headlines, I get the sense that NYC is at a crossroads, a turning point where we may be permanently transformed in ways in which our city's fate will be sealed forever.
The debate over the "Ground Zero mosque" is but one example. If the forces of darkness, of hate and fear, prevent a private entity from constructing a building purely for religious/political reasons, it will be a dark day for our city and a troubling precedent for our future.
But it wouldn't be the first troubling precedent we've seen lately: less than two years ago the city council blatantly ignored the public will and extended term limits for themselves after city voters had twice approved a two-term limit. This outrageous action spawned a city charter commission that has created two "ballot issues" for this fall's election: one where we get to change term limits back to two and another that is so confusing and strange that no one seems to understand it. This charter commission has been regarded, quite rightly, as a disgrace. It failed to do anything about structural reform in our city government and it allows those council members who are currently in office to still serve three terms! The changing of term limits already brought NYC to a crossroads -- and we went down the wrong path.
And yet another crossroads is one that, in years to come, we will be able literally to see outside our windows. The city council has approved, and financiers and developers are furiously working on, constructing enormous big glass box buildings that will change the city skyline. Now, we all recognize that NYC is dynamic and that buildings go up and down all the time. But as this fine article points out, this "cavalcade of skyscrapers" are ugly as sin and the skyline could start to look like any typically overbuilt, anonymous city -- not the NYC of unique architecture and spirit that we all love. Another crossroads and another (apparently) wrong turn.
Then, as always, there's the economy. Apparently the recession in NYC is over -- and we're doing great! But like everything else in these "interesting times", the reality is more complex and confusing. Apparently if you are professional and upper class and/or live in Manhattan, you are thriving. Wall Street is back! Bonuses are huge! We face less foreclosures and bankruptcies than elsewhere. But if you're middle class or poor, the future in NYC is bleak. Non-professionals who have lost their jobs are struggling mightily and wages for those lucky enough to work are declining. Most distressingly, high long-term unemployment is becoming a permanent fixture of the city economy. This really is becoming a city of the haves and have-nots, of rich and poor. Increasingly 21st century NYC is beginning to resemble 19th century Russia. Our economy, our city's very well-being, is at a crossroads as well -- and it appears to be going in the wrong direction too.
So as the long decade since 9/11 comes to a close in NYC, the interesting times of the last several years are playing out -- and this is how the city has been transformed since then; this is the climax to our story. The rich are richer than ever before, the poor are getting poorer. The middle class is becoming but a memory. The city is increasingly starting to resemble Dubai and our government is as rinky-dink as ever. We are allowing the forces of darkness to overwhelm the forces of reason and the city is more polarized than ever.
NYC will always be a great city and I will always love it. But we're at a crossroads now and it looks like we're inching down the wrong path. Let's hope we change course before it's too late.
If you read history (or fairy tales), you know all about Kings and Queens and their courts. Not courts like courts of law, but courts that were extensions of the royal household, where the men (mostly) and the women (i.e. mistresses) who had the monarch's proverbial ear helped him or her rule the realm.
Since we live in a republican democracy, we don't really have courts but, hey, come on, people who work in the White House or for governors or chief executives are effectively courtiers if they're anything at all. All powerful people have their courtiers -- including big city mayors.
And what big city mayor is more royal than our own Mayor Mike? Everyone calls him the King of New York and he's just that in everything but name only. Actually emperor is more like it, since his power extends beyond politics into both business and media. He controls and influences all of it like the Tsars in Russia used to do.
And like a Russian Tsar, Mike is living large and rewarding his courtiers while the people suffer. Bloomberg is paying his closest fifteen aids high six-figure salaries. Meantime, for "budgetary reasons", he's closing firehouses, not paying teachers enough, and foregoing our city's security by not hiring a new class of police officers. He's also taking an axe to the city budget, slashing programs that help the poor, all in the name of "fiscal responsibility." And yet ... and yet ... there seems to be plenty of money to reward his courtiers, most of whom worked on his re-election campaign, huge salaries.
Now I'm not naive. In these brutal economic times, the mayor has no choice but to slash the budget. Unions and special interests will scream but that's what they're in 'bidness' to do. I hold no brief for them.
But Mike, come on, giving your staff and flunkies, your already wealthy courtiers, huge salaries in the midst of a budget crises is unseemly and grotesque. Oh, I know the argument: we want to hire the "best" people in key roles in city government. That's always your argument. But aren't these "best" people folks who love their city and might be willing to work for a little less -- say $99,999 a year? These salaries are obscene -- especially when one of those you just hired was recently hit with an ethics fine by the board of elections. The fact that this person is still on the city payroll is simply unacceptable.
So Emperor Mike and his courtiers live large while the rest of us do more with less and go without. It truly shows that if you break a certain glass ceiling, if you join the court, get into the club, then no matter the economic weather, you'll have shelter from the storm.
