Green Day Plays the Subway

When I saw Green Day in 2009, they were performing at Madison Square Garden.

Now they're playing even cooler venues -- like the subway.

The Future of NYC Real Estate

Unless you have some kind of service job that requires an in-person presence, much of the the future of work will either be fully remote or "hybrid" -- some days in the office, some days at home. I know this first-hand since this is my working situation and, I can tell you first-hand, there's no going back. 

The COVID-19 pandemic merely accelerated this trend and proved that, for many companies, they don't really need a physical office to be successful. And even for companies where people go into the office sometime, they are deserted on Mondays and Fridays and half-empty most of the time. 

This is hammering the real estate industry in NYC. The huge office buildings that create the grand skyline are, in fact, largely empty (as is the case in many cities around the world).

The solution seems obvious -- turn them into apartments. 

The demand for office space in NYC might be crashing but the demand for housing here is greater than ever. While it will take money and has all sorts of legal and political and tax implications, this is the obvious solution. It makes no sense for nearly 9 million people to live in mostly cramped circumstances where there are now vast amounts of barren buildings that could house them easily.

As this 60 Minutes report shows, the nature of life and work needs to be reimagined. Increasingly our homes will become our offices and vice versa so repurposing buildings that serve their tenants as both needs to be developed. They should, in many ways, become communities of life and work with in-building services (like grocery stores, gyms, dry cleaners, hardware stores, restaurants, etc). with resources things like IT. And, most of all, they should be affordable -- and that's where it gets tricky. 

But the future of NYC real estate is now!

Hopper - American Master

I've blogged a few times about the great 20th century painter Edward Hopper whose brilliant portraits of every life in NYC are truly timeless.

There was a great exhibit of Hopper's work at the Whitney Museum last year that I reviewed and now there's a new American Masters documentary about his life (and fraught marriage) running on PBS.

I've seen it and its mesmerizing, much like Hopper's work itself. You get the sense that he and his wife (an accomplished painter in her own right) were perhaps a little bit on the spectrum, they were definite oddballs -- but the work they created was amazing.  

Billy Joel - Live at Yankee Stadium, June 1990

Summer, 1990 ...

It was HOT -- and NYC had its first serial killer since Son of Sam back in 1976/77 -- the copycat Zodiac killer who hit a bunch of people in the spring and summer of that year, then vanished before striking again randomingly in 1992, 1993, and 1994 when he got caught.

But the other big thing that happened in the summer of 1990 were the two big shows that Billy Joel did at Yankee Stadium in June. He had recently put out his 11th studio album, Stormfront, and these concerts were a huge promotion for it. They were recorded on film and it's a raucous experience -- Billy Joel singing with joy and gusto, great visuals, an energized audience, and a deep love for the city runs throughout it. 

I distinctly recall that my brother got to go to one of these shows and I was not invited (too young). But he gave me t-shirt for the shows that I wore until it frayed.

Interestingly enough about 13 years later we were in Nobu at sat at a table right next to Billy Joel, his daughter, and her friend. 

Recently Billy Joel announced that his decade-long residency at Madison Square Garden will be coming to any end. He's still performing but he's winding down his career -- but these concerts in the Bronx in the summer of 1990 shows a legendary American singer-songwriter at the top of his game.

NYC Earthquake!

Classic Mr NYC

Ten years ago today I wrote one of my favorite blog posts -- Farewell to Funky Town.

It was the last day of the Bloomberg era, the end of a time of enormous change in the city. Mayor Bloomberg had taken office on January 1st, 2002, just months after 9/11, and the city was in full-recovery mode. By the end of his time in office, the look, feel, and life of the city had changed -- in many ways for the better -- but it had also become more expensive and difficult to live here, the city feeling more and more like any big international city around the world.

For the last ten years -- from December 31st, 2013 to December 31st, 2023 -- the city has been mostly the same as the Bloomberg era, except for the massive disruption and trauma of COVID.

In many ways, the last ten years can be divided into 2014-2020, and 2020 to 2024. COVID did something to the city's spirit, it enervated it, it seemed to bring up the decades of buried traumas of the past. Fear returned. Fears about crime, dislocation, seeing the city as failing. These fears are not in any ways borne out by reality -- NYC is booming more than ever. But these fears, exacerbated by the media and a new incompetent mayor, in this era of anti-progress, have had their impact. We haven't returned to "funky town", we've entered some new odd phase but I hope it ends soon -- and our city's great optimism returns.

The Maestro of NYC

It's hard to imagine but once upon a time, back in the 20th century, orchestra conductors used to be actual celebrties. Arturo Tosconini lead the NBC Orchestra and Lawrence Welk had his own popular TV show.

But no conductor was more famous, or more acclaimed, or left a greater legacy, than Leonard Bernstein.

Leading the New York Philharmonic for many years, Bernstein was the most famous conductor in America between the 1940s until his death in 1990. He was so famous that he was constantly on television, including with the "Young People's Concerts" series, and he also composed the scores for symphonies and requiems such as Mass. And his impacted popular culture too, writing the gorgeous scores for such musicals as On The Town, Wonderful Town, and, most historically, West Side Story.

And he was a true blue New Yorker, a keeper of the cultural flame at time when people loved to hate the city, and (even though he was a Massachusetts transplant), the spirit of his work -- as those three musicals prove -- was imbued with NYC.

Bernstein is the subject of a big new movie about his life called Maestro that was written, directed, and stars Bradley Cooper. It's an extraorindary movies but focuses mostly on his fraught relationship with his wife and the fact that he was a deeply conflicted bisexual. You should also listen, after watching this movie, to this Bowery Boys podcast episode about Leonard Bernstein's life in, and work about, NYC. His career could never happened without NYC, and NYC is a better place because of his work.

Caroline Astor- The Queen of Gilded Age New York

Trump's "Bedtime for Bonzo": Remembering "I'll Take Manhattan" (1987)

Before the 21st century Golden Age of Television, the 1970s through the 1990s was the Golden Age of the Television Mini-Series.

Whenever regular TV shows went on vacation, the networks would broadcast these multi-episodes series that were a little less than a movie but a little more than a regular TV show. Some of these mini-series, like Roots from 1977 or the 1980s civil war drama North & South, were great, classic TV. But a lot of it was stuff like the 1987 soapy mini-series I'll Take Manhattan, based on the 1986 novel of the same name by Judith Krantz (who wrote a lot of these kinds of books that then became mini-series).

The show's IMDB description tells you everything you need to know about it: "Maxi Amberville tries to save the magazine empire her father built, but her treacherous uncle stands in the way." The Amberville's are supposed to be a Murdoch-like, more like Sy Hersch-like, family running a magazine company very much like Conde Nast. The spirit of this show -- family members battle for control of a media empire -- is basically Succession thiry-years earlier, although nowhere near as funny, well-written, well-acted or well ... everything ... as the HBO show. The story is formulaic, the acting hammy, the dialogue stupid, everything's predictable and dopey.

So why does Mr NYC choose to remember it?

Because it's a relic,a time-stamp, of its age -- the Go-Go 1980s Reagan-era business drama that was very popular at the time. And because it's a very NYC story -- Money! Sex! Publishing! Betrayal! Donald Trump! Lots of shots of the World Trade Centers! Lots of music with saxapohones! Secretative calls being made in phone booths in the pouring rain in at nighttime! It's all there.

The most interesting thing about it is the cast -- it's truly a time capsule of actors and actresses whose careers were either on the way up or on the way down. 

Valerie Bertinelli plays the heroic Maxi. She had just finished her long run on the hit TV show One Day At A Time and this show, one gueses, was supposed to demonstrate her great acting chops. She is a great actress but this show was clearly not the right vehicle in which to do so.

The always wonderful Barry Bostwick plays her father, the company's founder, and he's probably the best thing in it. A just-about-to-be James Bond Timothy Dalton is in it as are veteran TV actors Jack Scalia and Perry King who plays the no-good rotten scheming villanous uncle as a no-good rotten scheming villanous uncle.

There's also a few actors who went on to greatness: Jane Kaczmarek, thirteen years before Macolm in the Middle, Chris Noth a few years before Law & Order and Sex and the City, a pre-My Two Dads/Step-by-Step Staci Keanan, and, most notably, future Oscar-winner Julianne Moore ten years before Boogie Nights. 

Also, future President and aspiring fascist dictator Donald Trump has a cameo because they filmed some of it at Trump Tower and gave him an obligatory cameo. You might otherwise call this show Trump's Bedtime for Bonzo. 

It has to be seen to believed. But I'll give this show credit -- 1987 was the era of Bonfire of the Vanities NYC, the start of the crack epidemic, when people loved to hate this city -- and this show, at that time, dared to celebrate it. 

Here are a couple of episodes (you can find the rest on YouTube) as well as some clips and promos. It was truly part of a TV era we probably will never see again. 

NYC Christmas @ Night