The Kingdom of New York: Knights, Knaves, Billionaires, and Beauties in the City of Big Shots

by The New York Observer

  We just fell in love with New York all over again. We looked down past 55th Street, and we marveled at the buildings, at the extraordinary creation, which may be a little mad. People living 75 stories up. It’s a little mad, maybe, but there’s nothing like it ever in history.

  It was quite an incredible moment. At certain points, you just remember why you’re in love with New York.

  I felt much better when I left the shoot. I could talk to people. I could breathe. I could see again. It was like a healing.

  * * *

  “We started talking about Taxi Driver and about that summer in New York in 1975. It was a tough summer. Very hot. Lot’s of rain. Lot’s of edgy violence in the area. It made us all very nostalgic.”

  * * *

  SEPTEMBER 17, 2000 BY NYO STAFF

  ON THE MIND OF LARRY KING JR.

  Illustrated by Barry Blitt and Philip Burke

  I’M TIRED OF DINNER.

  Is anybody else getting the feeling the Swedes are up to something?

  Note to the movie stars: Take a small role now and then, like Bill Murray did in Tootsie. It makes ’em love you again.

  I thought everybody had quit smoking. Then I watched an episode of Big Brother 2.

  Cinnamon in my coffee? No, thanks.

  My dad may have been cut loose by USA Today, but that doesn’t change the fact that no one ever stopped reading one of his columns in the middle.

  How much would it take for you to spend a night in an abandoned insane asylum? Me? No less than $5,000.

  When the talk turns to David O. Russell, I always put in a strong word for Flirting with Disaster over Three Kings.

  Rain is beautiful.

  So when did bamboo stalks become the new flowers? And why wasn’t I informed?

  Would somebody please tell me how many bats live in Manhattan? It’s something I’d like to know.

  If you’re in your 20’s, do the rest of us a favor and quit yapping. We’re not really interested.

  Does anyone like George W. Bush?

  I think my therapist has been “coasting” lately.

  SEPTEMBER 24, 2001 BY GREG SARGENT AND JOSH BENSON

  One City, Indivisible

  HEADQUARTERS OF ENGINE Co. 22 and Ladder Co. 5 at Houston Street and Sixth Avenue, Sept. 11, mid-morning: An hour has passed since a pair of hijacked jetliners rammed into the World Trade Center, and Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and his top aides are taking refuge in this firehouse. Thousands of frightened people are fleeing north along Sixth Avenue, past the closed firehouse door. Mr. Giuliani is coated in ghostly white ash. Some stray arrivals to the firehouse are weeping. Fire Commissioner Thomas Von Essen is on the verge of tears, having learned that scores of firefighters are missing. Mr. Giuliani turns to Mr. Von Essen and hugs him.

  “He had an instinctual emotional attachment to Commissioner Von Essen,” Deputy Mayor Tony Coles, who was in the firehouse, later recalled. “He told him the whole city would work to get us all through this.”

  As Mr. Giuliani and his aides begin to figure out how to take command of a reeling city, they pause to consider that, moments ago, they almost lost their lives. They had arrived on the scene just after the second plane hit the south tower. They were in an adjacent office building when the first tower collapsed, shearing off a piece of their temporary shelter. The dust and smoke turned day into night. “It felt like midnight,” one person present said.

  Their room filling with smoke, they escaped through a warren of stairwells and walked uptown to the Houston Street firehouse.

  Now, in the firehouse, Mr. Giuliani is scrambling to make telephone calls. Cell phones aren’t working. There aren’t nearly enough land lines in the firehouse. Throughout the morning, Mr. Giuliani will try repeatedly to contact President George W. Bush, but the president’s aides are reluctant to reveal his whereabouts, because Mr. Giuliani’s phone lines are not secure.

  Network news headquarters, Sept. 16, late afternoon: Nearly a week has passed since the disaster. Anchormen Tom Brokaw, Dan Rather and Charles Gibson are in their respective studios, each waiting for their own live-feed interview with Mr. Giuliani. The interviews were scheduled for 4:15, 4:30 and 4:50, after Mr. Giuliani fulfilled his promise to walk a bride—the sister of a Staten Island firefighter who died in the line of duty several weeks ago—up the aisle. But the wedding ran long, other matters arose and Mr. Giuliani was scheduled to attend to a mass in St. Patrick’s Cathedral at 5:30. He skipped the interviews.

  Two weeks ago, it would have been hard to imagine the networks clamoring for a piece of Mr. Giuliani’s time. He was a lame-duck mayor who was preparing to hand City Hall to a successor. The only headlines he garnered, it seemed, were about his tumultuous private life and his quarrelsome demeanor. Despite the successes of his first term, he suddenly seemed irrelevant, a man whose second term was destined to be remembered as gossip, not as history.

  Now, however, Rudolph Giuliani was a man transformed. In the midst of chaos, horror and unspeakable tragedy, he went far beyond the role of crisis manager, acting as the spiritual guide for an entire city. He rallied the city’s spirit without inspiring any false hope or shallow optimism. He sought to assuage the city’s fears while trying his best to indicate, ever so gently, that the 5,000 people missing very likely will never be found. He has handled the most grisly moments with grace.

  Mr. Giuliani has, again and again, seemed more presidential than the president himself.

  Illustrated by Barry Blitt

  OCTOBER 22, 2001 BY CHRISTINE MUHLKE WITH REPORTING BY GEORGE GURLEY

  THE OBSERVATORY: GET AWAY

  JAN BARKER, A WRITER AND divorced mother of two who lives on the Upper East Side, has her bag ready to go. “I’m a very level-headed person, but I have children,” she said. “Every parent I know is equally concerned. I have water, Power Bars—I figure we can live off those. I have a flashlight that’s battery-operated that’s also a radio, a siren and a clock. It’s the coolest thing I’ve ever seen in my life. I have a first-aid kit, my antibiotics, Band-Aids and Neosporin. I have a little lightweight blanket and a camera. I have clean underwear and socks, Kleenex, toothpaste and toothbrush. The writer in me made me pack a journal and a book, Five Little Peppers and How They Grew, so I could read to my children. Extra batteries and a cell-phone charger. Then I put sweatshirts on top so we could tie sweatshirts around our waists.”

  Ms. Barker is one of a sizable number of New Yorkers who have taken things a bit further than pestering their doctors for Cipro, the antibiotic which can be effective against anthrax. Instead, they have packed survival bags—including a stash of Cipro, of course—and plotted escape routes in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center.

  Does she carry the bag with her everywhere she goes? “No, I’m not that insane,” she said.

  OCTOBER 8, 2001 BY FRANK DIGIACOMO

  The Observatory: The Laughter, After

  IN THE AFTERMATH OF THE TERRORIST ATTACK ON NEW YORK, the Friars organization decided to go ahead with its annual roast, scheduled for September 29.

  Gilbert Gottfried was the last man up to the podium. In his $11 gray shawl-collar tuxedo jacket with tails, black bow tie and Caesar haircut, Mr. Gottfried looked like he had just come from band practice.

  “I have a flight to California. I can’t get a direct flight,” Mr. Gottfried said. “They said they have to stop at the Empire State Building first.”

  “Too soon,” a man could be heard saying in the back of the ballroom.

  When the booing started, Mr. Gottfried responded: “Awwwwwww, what the fuck do you care?” Silence fell once more.

  “O.K.,” he continued.

  “A talent agent is sitting in his office. A family walks in. A man, woman, two kids, their little dog, and the talent agent goes, ‘What kind of an act do you do?’” At the father’s signal, Mr. Gottfried said, the family disrobes en masse. “The father starts fucking his wife,” he said. “The wife starts jerking off the son. The son start
s going down on the sister. The sister starts fingering the dog’s asshole.” Mr. Gottfried’s voice was growing stronger. “Then the son starts blowing his father.”

  The Hilton’s ballroom filled with the sounds of sudden exhalations. The comedians on the dais were bug-eyed with laughter and recognition. Mr. Gottfried was beaming.

  Then he brought it home.

  “The talent agent says, ‘Well, that’s an interesting act. What do you call yourselves?’”

  Mr. Gottfried threw up his hands. “And they go, ‘The Aristocrats!’”

  There was a sound in the room that went beyond laughter.

  Mr. Gottfried had gone to “The Aristocrats,” the comedy equivalent of the B-flat below high C that Leontyne Price had sung at Carnegie Hall on Sunday.

  Mr. Gottfried had used it to save himself, but also to lift the crowd to another place. A few minutes later, Alan King paid him a high compliment. “Forgive me,” he said. “I’m just still a little touched by that asshole Gottfried.”

  NOVEMBER 19, 2001 BY SIMON DOONAN

  THE OBSERVATORY: THE ELF-MADE MAN

  FOR OBVIOUS REASONS, THIS year’s holiday preparations were not the laugh riot they normally are. The destruction of the World Trade Center coincided with the start of holiday-window production at our display studio in the Daily News-Channel 13 building on West 33rd Street. Crafting papier-mâché reindeer and gluing pointy ears on elves while the worst domestic disaster in American history unfolded was a surreal and bleak experience.

  For reasons best known to my subconscious, I had decided last February that the 2001 holiday windows needed a whiskers-on-kittens-ish traditional theme. In July, I sketched out the five Madison Avenue windows, each one focused on a different element of ultra-trad Xmas iconography—Santa Claus, elves, reindeer, etc. Then I Barneys-ized them into something called “The Groovy Grotto.” The giant Santa would start things off. The elves would be celebs: e.g., Elf Saint Laurent, Elfis Presley, Marcelf Marceau, Dostoyelfsky, Donatelfa Versace, Missy Elfiot, Shields and Yarnelf, Steven Meiself. In the next window, “Mrs. Claus’ Closet,” 20 fashion designers from Vera Wang to Narciso Rodriguez riff on the same red-and-white theme. The reindeer in question would be Rudolph the Italian Reindeer (after our mayor). In the last window, Ruben and Isabel Toledo would create Trixie, the World’s Largest Tree-Topper. (Guess her weight and win dinner for two at Fred’s on the ninth floor.)

  NOVEMBER 20, 2000

  Tom Wolfe on the City of Change

  HAS IT BEEN DULY recorded that everything in New York changed just before Sept. 11? Granted, it’s hard to get the picture here in the Afghan glare of the TV set, but it looks like this:

  Eighteen months before 9/11 and the death storm of ashes that rolled uptown from the World Trade Center, all of lower Manhattan’s artists’ quarters—SoHo, NoHo, WeVar, TriBeCa, the Village and Little Italy—were already history. The last stronghold, WeVar, a decrepit old warehouse area home to a hive of artists’ lofts west of Varick Street and south of the Canal Street exit of the Holland Tunnel, was finally overrun by investment bankers, Silicon Alley then-fat cats and real-estate developers in the spring of 2000. Construction elevators started whining up and down the sides of the warehouses, and the victors’ banners proclaimed FOR SALE NOW: HISTORIC OLD NEW YORK LOFT CONDOMINIUMS. The usual droves of young artists from the California Institute of the Arts to the Rhode Island School of Design and every M.F.A. program in between still arrive to storm the Manhattan art scene, but can no longer get even remotely within rent range and wind up in Williamsburg and Jersey City.

  Twenty months before 9/11, Wall Street was already history, too. Wall Street hadn’t been Wall Street since Dec. 31, 1999, when Nasdaq started the Street’s great migration to Times Square. Reuters, Morgan Stanley, Lehman Smith Barney, Bear Stearns and Ernst and Young soon followed their lead. Today, out-of-town financial types must be perplexed to find the mighty Morgan Stanley shank-to-flank with a pink-neon girlie bar called Runway 69.

  A year before 9/11, that old standby of New York humor, folklore, fiction and drama—“the shrink,” the Freudian psychiatrist with the couch—had already gone the way of the Irish cabby with the cap over one eye. When neuroscientists Paul Greengard of Rockefeller University and Eric Kandel of Columbia won the Nobel Prize in 2000 (along with Arvid Carlsson of Germany) for discoveries of how information actually circulates inside the brain, physiology and not Freud was king. The New York teaching hospitals were now training psychiatrists who had actually been introduced to brain functions and the central nervous system. As the witticism went, going to a Freudian psychiatrist was like going to “a cardiologist who only knows about broken hearts and valentines.” The psychiatrist who, in an ABC News conversation with Peter Jennings, referred to the World Trade Center as two towering “phallic symbols” subjected to “symbolic castration” came off as quaint. He would have done better on The Sopranos, the show that hasn’t yet gotten the word about yakety-yak therapy.

  Twenty months before 9/11, the Democratic Party “organization,” ruler of the city for half a century, had disintegrated thanks to, of all things, an oversupply of populous racial and ethnic minorities and wound up like the Republican Party and Liberal Party “organizations.” The term limits that cleansed the City Council slates for the 2001 races were the mopping-up operation. Politicians still ran successfully under the Democratic Party banner, but only because they were neighborhood warlords who had to call themselves something.

  Ten months before 9/11, New York City’s architects, who only yesterday had battled so gloriously and avant-gardedly as the Whites (Richard Meier, Peter Eisenman, John Hedjuk et al.) versus the Grays (Michael Graves, Jaquelin Robertson, Robert Stern et al.), had already given up the cutting edge because they could no longer find one. When Cathy Lang Ho and Raul A. Barreneche set out to do a book on the edgiest residential designs in North America (House: American Houses for the New Century), they could find only three New York architects with houses actually built or under construction that deserved any such adjective: Toshiko Mori, Steven Holl and Michael McDonough, with his cyberspatial “e-House2000” (for Energy, the Environment and Exciting) in the upper Hudson Valley near New Paltz, built with SCADA software enabling the owner to (among other techie things) turn on the dishwasher from Tokyo. Two years before 9/11, contemporary American art, which in market terms had never recovered from the stock-market and commercial real-estate nose dives of the early 1990’s, went into sleep mode. Since the Brooklyn Museum’s noisy Sensations show (all Brits) in 1999, the only thing causing anybody in the art world to open even one eye has been the wildfire rumor of a Guerrilla Art happening known as “Meat Shower” in a Brooklyn loft, at which brave and doggedly unclothes-conscious art worldlings ventured into a room wherein rained a drizzle of raw meat droplets created by high-speed electric deli knives shaving sides of beef. A full four years before 9/11, New York law enforcement had entered a new time zone: the epoch of the Latino cop. Irish cops still dominated the upper and older ranks of the NYPD, and they would show the world their legendary courage once again on 9/11, but the new legends were Latin. As a member of the brass at 1 Police Plaza, Irish himself, put it: “We still recruit Irish cops, but half of them are from the suburbs. These days, if you want a real old-fashioned Irish cop, you hire a Puerto Rican.”

  * * *

  A year before 9/11, that old standby of New York humor, folklore, fiction and drama—“the shrink,” the Freudian psychiatrist with the couch—had already gone the way of the Irish cabby with the cap over one eye.

  * * *

  Eight years before 9/11, financial services and commercial real estate were superseded as driving forces in the New York economy by the restaurants appearing in boldface in Zagat’s. The exodus of corporations from New York during the near-depression of 1992-95 was stanched by a single thing: lunch. The CEO’s would do anything rather than give up the daily celebrations of their eminence at eateries in the town where the wining and dining were as good
azagats. (I know, I know; just read it out loud.) The case could be made that any post-9/11 federal appropriations to prop up business in New York should go first to the places where you can get Chilean sea bass with a Georgia plum marmalade glaze on a bed of mashed Hayman potatoes laced with leeks, broccoli rabe and emulsion of braised Vidalia onions infused with Marsala vinegar.

  Four months before 9/11, figures came in to back up what every teacher and principal in the public-school system already knew: New York’s great new wave of immigration is not black or Latino, much less Middle Eastern or European, but Asian, and especially Southeast Asian. Over the decade of the 1990’s, the number of white students declined 10 percent (367,000 to 357,000), while the number of black students rose 4 percent (354,000 to 367,000), Hispanic students 22 percent (325,000 to 397,000)—and Asian students 67 percent (73,000 to 122,000). Brainy tyros they were, too. Each newly created trade school in the system had to enroll its share of students with subpar reading scores. Old hands knew that the trick was, in the words of one assistant principal, to “go down the lists and check off every Asian name you come to. If they have low scores, all that means is they just came through Immigration. Give them six months, and they’ll lift your whole boat for you.”

  At least three years before 9/11, the mating game in New York got turned on its head. By this past summer, the ratio of girls to boys in Manhattan was so girl-heavy (as first reported in The Observer in July) that boys no longer even bothered expending the time and energy required to chat girls up in bars. They just handed every likely lovely their business card and waited for the calls, which they got with an almost lust-busting inevitability. The mantra for such young men about town had always been “You can’t be too rich or too thin.” Last summer, they were all enrolling in fitness centers that looked like cocktail lounges with Cybex machines, and the mantra went: “Pecs, abs, delts, lats, obliques, traps and quads—you can’t be too rich or too ripped.”