This week the New York Attorney General resigned due to some nasty personal stuff.
Honestly I'm conflicted if people should be hounded out of their jobs for stuff in their private lives (as opposed to abuse of their positions and power) but the sociopolitical environment clearly thinks otherwise. So it goes.
Just days earlier he had recorded an interview with Alec Baldwin on his podcast Here's the Thing. It was posted this morning. I haven't listened to it yet and don't know if I will but -- if you have morbid curiosity and want to hear a politicians speaking past the metaphorical grave -- give it a listen. Oh, and did you know that New York has the most "toxic" politics of any state? If you see the man in the White House, it's hard not to conclude that.
As gentrification sweeps over our city, as the cost of living explodes, it's easy to point to many reasons: drastically lower crime rates, making previously undesirable neighborhoods desirable; more New Yorkers choosing to stay in the city instead of moving to the suburbs to raise families; massive infusions of foreign money spurring new construction and gobbling up real estate (mostly as tax shelters); more and more people moving here from across the country in pursuit of hot jobs; and, obviously, technology, creating a new class of rich people and sites like Airbnb.
It all comes down to one basic thing: the rise of market demand.
There's more demand than supply for housing in NYC, and thus the rent gets too damn high.
Very often, when it comes to massive demographic and economic shifts like this, in a city or a country, people will say, "Well, there's no simple explanation. You can't point to one thing."
But what if you can? What is there's one simple, clear explanation?
In 1994, the City Council passed a law allowing landlords to take apartments out of rent stabilization when the rent passed $2000 a month. Called "de-control", the arguments for this move were that rent stabilization actually subsidized wealthy people, that the "average" rent was $600 so the likelihood that it'd be $2000 for most were "remote". Well, since then, over 152,000 have fallen out of stabilization, and that number rises to almost 250,000 when coop conversions are included. Also, this law incentivized landlords to harass and evict tenants with impunity, trying to get the apartments vacated so that they would fall out of stabilization.
Then it got worse: in 1997 the state legislature passed a law that made it impossible for the city council to change its own law. And it's been higher rents ever since.
So there, in a nutshell, is why the rent is so damn high.
This effort was, as you might imagine, engineered by the real estate industry. A lot of astro-turfing and cynical politics was behind it: they mounted a big PR campaign to make council members and New Yorkers convinced that de-control was actually in their interest (when it was the opposite). They pointed to rich people and celebrities paying low rents, they found black and Latino landlords to appear in ads, trying to make this move into some kind of "progressive" economic thing. It's was a complete, very effective snow job.
What's most frightening is that many of the city council members who voted for it didn't understand what they were voting for. They were conned, ashamedly so.
And now gentrification is everywhere, including in small, out of the way neighborhoods like Highbridge in the Bronx. No place is safe -- this is the new menace.
And it all goes back to March 21, 1994 when this law passed. This is why politics matter and why elections have consequences.
Let's get the bad stuff out of the way first: NYC produced both Donald Trump and Rudy Giuliani. This is a sad, depressing fact of life. These awful men are currently terrorizing the country, trying to obstruct justice and explaining away moral turpitude, making our city and our country the laughing stock of the world. It's an embarassement, a painful thing to see.
So it's good to remember that there are New York who have made the world a better place.
Like Christo and Jeanne-Claude, the brilliant artists who gave us The Gates in Central Park back in 2005. Did you know that in 1968 they tried to "wrap" MoMA? After "wrapping" the Reichstag in Berlin, these two French immigrants came to NYC and attempted to turn the city's leading modern art museum into a work of modern art itself. It didn't happen but, for decades to come, they would continue with such projects, culminating with The Gates. And they remained New Yorkers for the rest of their lives.
And speaking about parks, there's a new exhibit of 60 photographs taken in various city parks and playgrounds in the summer of 1978. There was a newspaper strike that summer and the parks department hired out-of-work photographers to take over 3000 pictures of people enjoying themselves. Look at these pictures if you want to see New Yorkers hanging out over 40 years ago.
Finally, the most amazing New Yorker of them all: a 96-year old legal secretary named Sylvia Bloom who died in 2017. Turns out, she was worth $9 million that she built up over the years through smart investing. In her will she donated almost $7 million to the Henry Street Settlements group and $2 million to Hunter College. Can you imagine the current president or former mayor being that generous? Me neither.
New Yorkers -- famous or not famous, generous or selfish, for better or worse, we're a wild bunch.
Today Mayor De Blasio quietly announced that the city plans to open "safe injection" sites in NYC. This means junkies will be able to go to these places, get high (shoot/snort/drop/maybe even smoke) their very hard drugs, and then get immediate assistance if they OD. The idea is for them to do this in a safe, clean, controlled environment.
So of you might be saying "What the hell?" but this is a great, mature approach, an advance off of needle exchange programs.
Instead of criminalizing addicts, this treats addiction as what it's always been: a health issue. And hopefully these centers will also be treatment centers that can help wean people off drugs. As long as drug use and addiction exists in the shadows, where people are persecuted instead of treated, we won't seriously make headway in treating addiction -- or drug crimes.
These centers are, as of now, illegal. The state still needs to approve them and the Federal government could prosecute. But assuming the state approves and the Feds lay off, this will be a significant advancement in the human dignity of people.
I just finished the fourth season of the Amazon show Mozart in the Jungle -- a wonderful comedy about the classical music world of NYC -- and was saddened to find out that this season is the last.
Amazon cancelled the show last month -- along with lots of others.
I didn't blog a lot about this show but it was an incredibly funny and warmhearted look at an industry (classical music) struggling to survive in the crazy world of 21st century culture and NYC. The characters were wonderfully realized, the writing was sharp, the stories were heartfelt, and it was a great look at a slice of life, a little world, in NYC. It was a show about artists, people who love what they do, and are willing sacrifice for it. It was a show about triumphs, disappointments, love, and everything else. It was wonderful.
Most of all, it featured Bernadette Peters and Malcom McDowell, still going strong after decades in show business. It had a great cast.
And now it's gone.
It's gone because Amazon, after firing its previous programming chief in a #MeToo moment, hired a new person who's decided to cancel shows like Mozart (small, sophisticated boutique shows about real people and their struggles) in order to spend roughly a $1 billion to re-imagine Lord of the Rings. Apparently, Amazon wants its own Game of Thrones, its own Stranger Things, it's own big-time cultural buzzy hit. It wants a blockbuster.
Le sigh.
Forgive me, but can Amazon really do a better job with LOTR than Peter Jackson did with his movies? Does the culture really need or want this? And while I'm a HUGE fan of GOT and enjoy Stranger Things, I loved that Amazon had all these funky, small, literate shows -- like Mozart, Transparent and One Mississippi. These were original, groundbreaking, history-making shows, shows that truly pushed the art of television forward.
But business is business, and this was probably inevitable. Still, it's disappointing. So let's just appreciate that for a brief, shining moment there was a place where shows like this could thrive.
And, like all good things, like all great moments, they come to an end.
Several years ago I blogged about "The Secret Places of NYC", the places that exist here that many New Yorkers have never gone to or even heard about.
One of them was Hart Island, the remote pauper's grave for the city's destitute and dead. For generations penniless New Yorkers were buried there, destined to be forgotten.
But they weren't all forgotten.
Right now there's a tussle under way between the Mayor's office and the city council about who should control Hart Island. Currently the Corrections Department manages but some on the council want the Parks Department to handle it and also to put it under the supervision of the Chief Medical Examiner. This would, in theory, make it easier for family members to visit the island and locate the remains of their dead family members. Bone fragments are surfacing there and family members want access to them.
It'll be interesting to see how this issue plays out -- and it'll show how we treat the truly lesser among us.
Where do the flights crews go, and what do they do, in between flights?
Where do they live?
When your job requires you to fly all over the country, and all over the world, day in day out, jumping from time city to city, country to country, time zone to time zone -- what kind of life do you have?
It's a wild and unique life, as you might imagine. So it's probably not a surprise that people who work on flight crews form tight bonds and have developed a community of literal fellow travelers.
In NYC, between flights, many pilots and flight attendants live in the Kew Gardens section of Queens. Many of them share apartments and homes, sometimes just renting rooms full of bunk beds. And, as you might imagine, they party together, very often at bars that have been serving flight crews for decades. Hence Kew Gardens is known in the airline industry as "Crew Gardens."
NYC has two major airports so there's a huge number of airline workers who live and work here and live in close proximity. It's not surprising that they have their community here. It's yet another of those little worlds within the giant world of NYC.
I never had someone say to me, "Hey kid, I'm gonna take a chance on you, show you the ropes, provide you some guidance, introduce you to some interesting people, give you a shot."
I never had someone who took any interest in me or my career or my hopes and dreams. No one ever showed me the way. I've always done everything on my own, unguided, unmoored. I guess no one ever thought I was worth the effort.
But I'm not bitter -- because mentors aren't always a good thing.
Take the example of Roy Cohn and Donald Trump. Roy Cohn was the lawyer for Joe McCarthy, the consigliereof Red Scare of the early 1950s, who also oversaw the prosecution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Cohn moved back to NYC after McCarthy's death and spent the rest of his life (he was disbarred and died in 1986) representing all sorts of corrupt figures and people in organized crime. He also worked for Trump's company and was a mentor to the young real estate developer in the 1970s and '80s -- and much of the viciousness we see every day from this loathsome POTUS is the product of his mentoring by Cohn.
And yet ... mentors can be a wonderful thing.
Lou Reed, one of the greatest singer/songwriters of all times, was a poet at heart. His lyrics were as poetic as his music was harmonious. That's because, as a young man, was mentored by the great poet Delmore Schwartz, a Beat poet turned college professor who taught poetry to Reed as a young man -- and was a lasting influence and inspiration to the then young man.
The mentor/mentee relationship can be, at heart, a wonderful meeting of minds and energy or a toxic brew of egos and darkness. They can give us amazing art -- and ugly politics. They can inspire us -- or drag us down.
So if, like me, you've always craved a mentor, then, like me, you can feel the lack of one in many ways; and yet, at the same time, you can be glad that you've never let another person have so much power over you -- or your fate.
