The Lost Palaces Down by the Riverside ... Drive

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. 

Classic Mr NYC

The one and only time that I've been to Los Angeles was in late March 1995. My brother was living there and I visited him during my Spring break. I was there for a week and we drove north with a friend and visited San Francisco and then drove back along the Pacific Coast Highway, visiting San Simeon and gorgeous Central Valley places like Monterrey and Carmel.

I blogged about it extensively in 2018. And I concluded the post about how, just before I boarded my flight back home to NYC, I spoke to my dad by phone, informing me of my college acceptance.

Something I didn't mention, however, because it was totally irrelevant, was that my last full night in LA was the same night as the 67th annual Academy Awards. It was the same night that Forrest Gump swept the Oscars but also when Quentin Tarantino won Best Original Screenplay for Pulp Fiction. 

So I was fascinated to stumble upon an article about the Oscar party held that night in LA by Harvey Weinstein and his company Miramax that had produced Pulp Fiction. Apparently, in a city and business known for wild parties, this was the wildest party in Oscar history. Many big stars at the time congregated, people got into fistfights, Harvey Weinstein threatened to go steal the Oscars from the Forrest Gump people -- and a wanted criminal crashed the party, apparently being persued by the cops while Hollywood partied.

It was, apparently, the last kind of wild, out-of-control Oscar party that Hollywood used to have. In the decades afterwards, the business and the parties became more sedate. And as you always see when you look at a moment frozen in time, some of the people at the party have continued to thrive -- like Leonardo DiCaprio, Jodie Foster, Samuel L Jackson -- while others -- like the host, Harvey Weinstein himself, and Kevin Spacey -- went into infamy ... and prison.

And to think that yours truly Mr NYC was in LA that night. Crazy. Only in the movies ...

P.S. This Oscars ceremony also had another NYC twist -- David Letterman was the host and he notoriously bombed. "Uma" ... "Oprah" ... "Uma" ... "Oprah."

Yeah, it didn't work. 

Talkin' "White Lotus" in NYC

 

Once Upon a Time in Greenwich Village ... or ... Where Watergate Began

One fine day -- around noon on March 6th, 1970 to be exact, nearly 55 years ago -- a townhouse located at 18 West 11th Street exploded. In this beautiful, serene part of Greenwich Village, an unimaginable act of terror had occurred.

But not really. The explosion was an accident. 

Inside several young people who were part of the left-wing terrorist group the Weather Underground had been building bombs. They were planning to cross the river and attack Fort Dix in New Jersey, then Columbia University, but these young, brash, radicals had no experience handling explosives -- and tragedy ensued.

This very public act of (accidental) domestic terrorism freaked the city out -- as well as the White House of President Richard Nixon. And it set off a chain reaction that eventually led to the first Presidential resignation in American history.

In the aftermath of the Greenwich Village explosion, a young White House aide named Tom Huston wrote a 43-page memo. Dubbed the Huston Plan, it outlined how the US government should fight back against groups like the Weather Underground -- including break-ins, kidnapping, intercepting mail, wiretapping, blackmail, psy-ops, all kind of nasty and ILLEGAL stuff. Huston presented his plan to then-FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. No stranger to the dark arts of surveillance and disruption, Hoover actually rejected the plan -- he didn't want his agents to be put into a position where they might get arrested by local law enforcement and, as an old man, he no longer had the stomach to explain this kind of stuff to Congress. So he dismissed the Huston Plan and that, so it seemed, was that.

Nixon was pissed. He didn't want any more domestic terrorism on his watch and he ordered the plan implemented anyway -- until he backed off. But the idea that his White House might have to freelance on its own to stop America's domestic enemies remained a widely held belief amongst All the President's Men.

A year later, in April 1971, the Pentagon Papers were leaked to the press. This massive, secret report detailed how the United States had gotten mired in the Vietnam War and lied about being able to win an unwinnable war. The Republican President Nixon, at first, actually was delighted about the leak -- the Pentagon Papers indicted Nixon's two Democratic Presidential predecessors, JFK and LBJ, over their handling of the war -- and viewed it as a political boon for him. But then his National Security Advisor, Henry Kissinger, told him that if the Communist Russian and Chinese governments saw that someone could leak secret information to the press and get away with it they would think that he, Nixon, was a "weakling." 

Nixon flipped out. He ordered that the man who had leaked the Pentagon Papers to the press, a former Pentagon aide named Daniel Ellsberg, be prosecuted or neutralized. And Nixon didn't want anymore leaks or terrorism or anything like it -- thus the White House Plumbers, a secret group of former FBI and CIA agents, to do dirty jobs for the White House to "plug" the leaks.

In the fall of 1971 two Plumbers -- G. Gordon Liddy and Howard Hunt -- broke into the Los Angeles office of Daniel Ellsberg psychiatrist to find information about him that they could use for blackmail. They found nothing and ended up smashing up the doc's office. They returned to the White House empty handed, the Plumbers were disbanded.

But what should have been the end of the story was only the beginning. 

Hunt and Liddy were sent to the Nixon reelection committee called CREEP (Committee to Re-Elect the president). Even though this two dopes had messed up their previous assignment, the geniuses at CREEP decided to put them in charge of "black advance" -- spying in Nixon's potential Democratic opponents and sabatoge their campaigns. Eventually this led to Hunt and Liddy and a group of Cubans breaking into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee on June 17, 1972. Thus Watergate, the most consequential political scandal began. And two years and two months later, on August 9, 1974, Nixon would resign the presidency.

It's hard to realize that such momentous history happened within less than five years in the early 1970s. And obviously Watergate is the famous scandal in history.

The seeds of this most American tragedy weren't planted in the White House or even in Washington, DC -- it happened here on the streets of NYC, where history is always happening, once upon a time. 

"True Detective" Comes to Jamaica Bay

Fourteen years ago I blogged extensively about my visit to Jamaica Bay. A massive wildlife refuge and national park located on a variety of islands in southern Queens, it's a world unto its own, part of the "blue highways" of America in a remote part of of NYC.

It's just another reminder of how huge and geographically diverse this city is.

Well, the HBO anthology show True Detective has apparently now discovered this area too. After previous seasons set in rural Louisiana, Los Angeles, the Ozarks and the wilds of Alaska, the upcoming season of True Detective will take place in Jamaica Bay.

There's no word yet on what the story will be -- it's still being written, apparently -- and no word on who will star in it (it's not yet cast) but, no doubt, I will certainly blog about when it finally premieres (scheduled for some time in 2027, around the 20th anniversary of this blog).

I'm a big fan of True Detective (although the quality of the seasons has been very uneven) but I think setting the next season in Jamaica Bay is quite brilliant -- a mysterious part of the country's biggest city, a place where doubtless lots of bodies and secrets have been buried. The idea of it is intriguing. I just hope it's good!

"Twelfth Night" on Live from Lincoln Center -- August 30, 1998

I remember seeing this production in the summer of 1998. The star power is unbelievable. It was a fun time!

You can read more about Live from Lincoln Center, including my own experience, here. 

NYC is Under Criminal Control

One of the reasons why I keep this blog running is because I feel like I'm recording history in real time. Journalism may be the first draft of history but this blog is sort of like the messily edited, marked up version before the second draft is completed.

So in this Year of Our Lord 2025 in the City of New York in the United States of America, here's the situation that history will have to try to reckon with: the Mayor of New York City is under indictment and under the control of the President of the United States who's a convicted felon.

The Mayor of New York City is under indictment and under the control of the President of the United States who's a convicted felon.

This is dystopian stuff, the abnormal that has become normalized. Right now NYC is under complete control by criminals. I never thought, never imagined, we'd be in such a situation and that apparently this is what the people of this city and this country want!

And it's having terrible side-effects: the mayor's top deputies are resigning, the people we need to keep the city running are bailing out, fleeing this profoundly messed up situation. I can't blame them but we need them!

And to make it worse: the hot gossip is that the corrupt former governor of New York State might be the criminal mayor's replacement! 

What the hell is going on? We must, as a city, demand better -- and vote for it!

"Saturday Night Live" @ 50

Here's the very first episode of SNL ever broadcast in 1975:

And here's some of the 50th anniversary celebration in 2025:

And here is the complete Mr NYC SNL archive here.

Mayor Adams: Should He Stay or Should He Go?

New York State Governor Hochul has the power to remove NYC Mayor Eric Adams from office. 

Will she do it? 

Adams is deeply compromised because the Trump "Justice" Department is ordering the dropping of Adams' corruption charges but the actual Federal prosecutors on the case are refusing to do so. Resignation is following resignation -- a rolling Constitutional Crises. 

This is an NYC version of the 1973 Watergate "Saturday Night Massacre."

Growing up in decades right after Watergate, I assumed that something like this could never happen again. That America would never elect a bad, corrupt president again. But we did -- twice -- and it's even worse than fifty-something years ago. 

And it's taking NYC with it!  

From Bill Bramhall in the Daily News -- February 12, 2025