Le Sigh

Yet another story about how New Yorkers are "fleeing" the city for the suburbs. Oh yes, they're marching on out of the mean-pandemic infested five boroughs and into the arms of the everluvin' clean suburbs in hordes. 

Le sigh.

This is the kind of myopic nonsense that makes our world all kinds of eff-ed up. Yes, ok, so some New Yorkers are leaving the city, and the stress of the pandemic is what's obviously causing this unusual spike in people moving to the suburbs. But it's not like the city is emptying out, a metaphorical draining bathtub, soon to swirl the drain. It's a bunch of people who were thinking about moving to the suburbs before the pandemic anyway and decided to go sooner rather than later. Or they're idiots who think the city is somehow doomed and think in the very short term. 

But if you read this story you'd think it's a phenomenon, and a huge crises for NYC. Just wait -- in a few years you'll see stories about people who left NYC during this time and now regret it, trying to find some way back into the place they abandoned. They'll discover that the school and services are no where near as good as they were in NYC -- and that the property taxes are way higher than they thought. And I will laugh and laugh! 

By the way NYC itself has great suburbs. I know, I live in them -- and love it!

Cardi B on the Census and her WAP

Ms. B is quickly becoming my favorite New Yorker -- smart, tough, sexy, talented, and civically-engaged. She loves to talk about why it's important to vote, fill out the census, and her WAP. She's using her considerable power for good -- in every possible way. 

I'm at a point in my life where, when times seem crazy, I think "What would Cardi do?"

The Women's Rights Pioneers Monument in Central Park

In a time when so much seems to be disposable or on the eve of destruction, it's always heartwarming to see something new being built -- and built to last -- even it's just something as simple as a monument.

Monuments are the subject of much controversy these days, especially in the South where monuments to Confederate generals and icons are being gradually removed. Here in NYC, the controversy hasn't been about what monuments have been erected as much as about which ones haven't been -- namely monuments to women and people and color.

That changed, a least a bit, this week with the unveiling of the Women's Rights Pioneers Monument in Central Park. It features three three leading suffragettes in American history -- Sojourner Truth, Susan B. Anthony, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. The three of them, in very different ways, helped give voice to previously voiceless women and helped them win the right to vote.

But there's been controversy about them -- and thus this monument. Sojourner Truth was the leading black women's voice of her day ("Ain't I a woman?") but Anthony and Stanton, while strong women's advocates, were virulent racists who believed that only white people -- male or female -- should be allowed to vote. Sadly the suffragette movement was, like so much of American history, deeply racist and divided. This monument's development mirrors this chequered past -- originally only Anthony and Stanton were going to be part of the monument until objections forced Truth's inclusion. 

Yet here it is. And it's a good thing too! In my opinion, when it comes to monuments, all Confederate monuments should be torn down and all new ones should be dedicated to women and people of color. It's about damn time!

The Very First Opening Sketch and the Very First Monologue on the Very First Episode of "Saturday Night Live" - October 11, 1975

Did you know that future President Bill Clinton and future First Lady/Secretary of State/United States Senator from New York Hillary Clinton also got married on this very same day?

Jerry Seinfeld on the Fate of NYC

Man-oh-man that Jerry Seinfeld has a way with words.

Today the comedy legend published an op-ed where he takes aim at anyone who thinks that NYC is "dead" due to the COVID-19 pandemic. As always, his genius is to communicate, in a few short words, in a pithy phrase, so much emotional truth that it bowls you over.

To sum up the idea of leaving New York for simpler environs: "Are ... You ... Kidding ... Me? ... I will never abandon New York City. Ever."

He rejects the idea of "remote everything" taking over the world: "There's no energy ... Crazy places like New York City," the energy that people congregating here, creates a lifeforce that cannot be replicated in any other way..."

And the real conclusion: "Because of all the real, tough New Yorkers who, unlike you [the people who abandoned it], loved it and understood it, stayed and rebuilt it." 

Count Mr NYC as one of them.

Thanks Mr. Seinfeld.

Review: "Bugsy" (1991)

Recently I blogged about The Godfather Part II where the character Hyman Roth talks about his childhood pal Moe Green who invented the city of Las Vegas. In reality Hyman Roth was a gangster named Meyer Lanksy and his friend was Ben "Bugsy" Siegel, the mastermind behind the gambling mecca of America. Like Lansky, Siegel was a Jewish kid from Brooklyn who grew up to be one of the most feared and powerful gangsters of his day -- or ever. 

Bugsy was a killer and a visionary, a psychopath and a builder, a monster and a genius -- in many ways, the ultimate product of his hometown and country.

The 1991 movie Bugsy tells the story of the man's creation of Las Vegas. In the early 1940s, the powerful NYC mobster traveled to Los Angeles to take over the gambling rackets for his bosses in NYC, only to realize that next door in Nevada gambling was actually legal, and that an entire city and industry could be built around it. Bugsy's pursuit of this dream leads to his greatest professional triumph, something so much more than the life of crime and violence he had previously lived. But as his dream comes to fruition, his destruction comes with it. It's the story of triumph and tragedy, creation and death -- the American paradox that fuels our history.  

Warren Beatty, nearing the end of his leading man days, plays the title character, and a young Annette Benning, in one of her break-out roles (both as an actress and Beatty's future wife) plays Virginia Hill, Bugsy's movie-actress mistress and partner in creation of the Flamingo, the first Las Vegas hotel. The supporting cast is the real treat of this movie -- Harvey Keitel plays Siegel's one-time adversary-turned partner Mickey Cohen, and the absolutely brilliant Ben Kingsley plays Meyer Lansky in a career-best performance (with all due respect to Gandhi, both the man and the movie, this may be his best work). It was directed by Barry Levinson, coming off his great success with Rain Man, and this movie is beautifully directed and produced. Made almost 30 years ago, this is the kind of dark, brutal, mature, literate, deeply dramatic movie that the big studios used to make and don't anymore. It was, in many ways, the last of its kind. While not a great movie like Chinatown or The Godfather flicks, it's worth seeing. 

Bugsy is yet another in the unofficial Mr NYC canon of movies about New Yorkers far from home who either go on to greatest or ruin. This movie is really about both. 

The Very First "Tonight Show" Live from Times Square -- September 27, 1954

Manhattan Real Estate Blues

If you want proof that COVID-19 is taking a battering ram to NYC, here's proof that's indisputable -- the vacancy rate for apartments in Manhattan gone up to nearly 70,000, and rents have plunged by 10%.

It's easy to get either freaked out -- or delighted -- by such news. In times of crises people naturally freak out and believe that the new bad normal is forever. 

Not true. New York City has been declared dead, done, finished, in the death rattle before -- and yet it always comes back. Before we now it we'll be reading articles about how the vacancy rate has gone back down and the rents are back way up. Just wait. 

Claire Shulman RIP

Claire Shulman served as Queens Borough President from 1986 to 2002, the first woman to hold the job and, for a long time, one of the only women to serve in high office in NYC. She has died at age 94.

Shulman was instrumental in the development of previously depressed parts of the borough like Jamaica, Flushing, and Long Island City. Most notably she speardheaded the transformation of Queens into a cultural hotspot, working to improve the Queens County Museum, the Museum of the Moving Image, and the New York Hall of Science.

Shulman also had an impressive personal legacy -- her daughter is an astronaut named Ellen Baker and her son is a prominent oncologist. She had another son who died in 2001 and was a budding director.

Her rise to the BP job was dramatic -- her predecessor, Donald Manes, a flamboyant old-school machine pol had dramatically committed suicide in 1986 after being caught up in a wild mess of corruption, mob ties, and nastiness. In many ways, her time in office was transitional, as the last remaining ties to Tammany Hall and machine/mob-domination gave way to reform, good government, and a new city. 

RIP.

Classic Mr NYC

"He made this city!"

In the movie Chinatown, the evil Noah Cross says this twice about his former business partner Hollis Mulwray. Cross both loved and hated him. Mulwray built a dam that brought water to LA and made them rich. But when Mulwray refused to build another dam -- as part of a dark plot to steal water and land in the Valley, and to make LA even bigger -- Cross murdered him. Still, even after that, Cross pays tribute to his victim's great legacy.

Cross and Mulwray are entirely fictional, obviously, but Mulwray is based on the very real William Mulholland who built the Los Angeles Aqueduct in 1913, bringing massive amounts of fresh water to the young desert city. Within a decade its population has tripled -- oh yes, Mulholland made that city.

New York City is, of course, much older and not on a desert. And if you asked most people today who "made" NYC, they might point to Robert Moses or argue that no one person is responsible for "making" NYC in its 400-something year history.

But they would be wrong. One man did make NYC, at least the city of five boroughs we live in today: Andrew Haswell Green.

I blogged about him briefly a few years ago, specifically citing a Bowery Boys episode about the man. Yet I realize that I have not really given him his due: Green truly is the "Father of Greater New York." His vision, his efforts, his ideas, were resposible for: Central Park, The New York Public Library,The Metropolitan Museum, The Bronx Zoo, The American Museum of Natural History, Riverside Drive, Morningside Park, Fort Washington Park. And Green chaired the committee, and had the vision, to consolidate the five counties of Bronx, New York, Queens, Kings, and Richmond into one city -- Greater New York.

So yes -- he made this city! The NYC we live in today was Green's vision. 

And the reason, I think, I never properly gave him his due it because our city, his city, hasn't done it either.  

Remember in Godfather II when Hyman Roth says about his (also) dead former partner Moe Green that he was responsible for creating Las Vegas? And remember when Roth yells that there isn't even a signpost or plaque commorating this "great man"? 

Well, in Mr NYC's opinion, the memorials to Green NYC are extremely insufficiant. There's a small park on the Upper East Side and a bench in Central Park. There's also an island up in the Niagara River named after him. But these minor memorials don't seem to, in any way, really give the man his due. He doesn't even have a street or a building named after him! Ed Koch has a friggin' major bridge named after him -- but not this guy? Green needs to have a massive memorial named after  him, a huge tribute.

Why not City Hall? 

Because he made this city!