Lately, Mrs. Roosevelt has been in the news as a result of conversations the First Lady, Hillary Rodham Clinton, says she has with her as an exercise in dealing with First Lady pressures.
Mrs. Roosevelt could hardly walk down a New York street without people running up to thank her for some favor. Edna Gurewitsch, who with her husband shared a house with Mrs. Roosevelt during the last three years of her life, said Mrs. Roosevelt would usually just keep walking. At first, she thought she was hard of hearing but then realized it was something else.
“She really didn’t care about thank you’s at all,” Mrs. Gurewitsch said. “She only cared about what had to be done now.”
The Boyhood Myth That Helped Make Moynihan
By DOUGLAS E. SCHOEN | April 6, 2003
DANIEL PATRICK MOYNIHAN LIKED TO describe himself as a boy from Hell’s Kitchen; until his death at the age of 76, it was one of his defining characteristics.
In fact, Moynihan and his family lived in the neighborhood for only a few years, and for most of that time he was away at college. But for subtle and complicated reasons, Hell’s Kitchen became a powerful and enduring metaphor. The quintessential working-class Irish-American neighborhood sandwiched between Times Square and the bustling docks served as a reference point for Moynihan’s young life. His youth was essentially that of a middle-class kid cast into downward mobility.
It was in 1928 that his father, Jack, took a job as an advertising copywriter in Manhattan, and moved his young wife and infant son from Tulsa, Okla., to New York. Jack was discontented with the lifestyle of what passed for a young post-Depression professional, and abandoned his family in 1937. What followed for Margaret Moynihan and her by-then three children was close to outright poverty.
In 1947, she opened a bar at 558 West 42nd Street, near 11th Avenue, that Moynihan would talk about for the rest of his life. The family lived in a railroad flat upstairs.
Moynihan, who had returned from a stint as a naval officer, felt duty-bound to keep both the bar and his family running smoothly, which he did. Moynihan took advantage of the G.I. Bill to finish college at Tufts University, near Boston. But the situation at home was volatile. Frequently Moynihan had to trek down in person, textbooks in hand and sleep-deprived, to put things right. He missed graduation week because he had to rush home to resolve a dispute that had erupted at the bar.
Battle-Tested Sharpton Slips Into Familiar Role
By ADAM NAGOURNEY | February 13, 1999
Al Sharpton at the National Action Network, his civil rights organization, in 2007.
JUST BEFORE THE EVENING NEWS THE OTHER night, the parents of Amadou Diallo, the West African street vendor shot dead by plainclothes police officers last week, walked up to microphones to offer their first extended public remarks about the death of their son. The setting was a second-floor auditorium up a scuffed flight of steps in Harlem. And the host, wearing a crisp gray three-piece suit and clearly enjoying this latest bustle at his Harlem headquarters, was the Rev. Al Sharpton.
It was perhaps inevitable. In the 15 years since Mr. Sharpton took up the cause of one of the four black youths shot by Bernard Goetz, he has developed a network of supporters, an articulate public presence and a command of politics and media that few other figures in New York can rival. As was clear again yesterday, as Mr. Sharpton assumed a prominent role at Mr. Diallo’s memorial service, that arsenal has established him as arguably more influential than any black leader in the city, including those who have been elected to public office.
Mr. Sharpton said in an interview that he has never imposed himself into any of the half-dozen racially charged police cases with which he has been identified. “I would not have contacted them,” Mr. Sharpton said. I am not an ambulance chaser: I am the ambulance. People call me.”
There was no need for Mr. Sharpton to chase anyone, indeed. Other Guinean immigrants called Mr. Sharpton after Mr. Diallo was shot last week, just as other Haitian immigrants called him after allegations that Abner Louima was assaulted in a Brooklyn police precinct in 1997.
The Diallo shooting has illuminated Mr. Sharpton’s strengths in racially charged situations. Mr. Sharpton has been able to assemble large crowds, on short notice, for rallies. He has brought in a network of people, including fund-raisers and lawyers, to help the Diallo family.
“He has a genius for this,” said Edward I. Koch, the former mayor whose relations with Mr. Sharpton have thawed somewhat since Mr. Koch left Gracie Mansion. “He has the respect of the black community. He can deliver a picket line of large numbers when he decides he wants to. He’s very quotable. And he’s very smart.”
What is more, Mr. Sharpton has managed, with a few dissents, to present himself as a leader of a group of New Yorkers that is more politically, economically and ethnically diverse than ever: from old-line black Democratic leaders in Harlem, to the new groups of immigrants that are now jockeying for a place on New York’s landscape, to prominent black business leaders who had once shunned him.
For his part, Mr. Sharpton said he had patterned his career after that of the Rev. Jesse L. Jackson Jr. And that, he said, accounted for his success in New York. “Let’s face it: If Secretary of Transportation Rodney Slater walked down 125th Street, people wouldn’t know him,” Mr. Sharpton said, referring to the black Arkansan President Clinton appointed to his Cabinet. “But everybody would know Jesse Jackson. I do in New York what Jesse Jackson does in the nation.”
Mr. Clinton, Your Harlem Neighbors Want to See You More Often
By ALAN FEUER | November 17, 2003
Former President Bill Clinton meets with future President Barack Obama his Harlem office in 2008.
CONSIDER THIS AN OPEN LETTER FROM THE citizens of 125th Street to former President Bill Clinton. Its message is simple: Mr. Clinton, please come home.
Anthony Rembert, 39, says he misses Mr. Clinton in the neighborhood: “Come back to the area, please. We want you to be part of the community.”
When Mr. Clinton moved into 55 West 125th Street in July 2001, it was hailed in certain parts of Harlem as the first installment of the Second Coming. A crowd of 2,000—chanting “We love Bill!”—gathered on the streets to greet Mr. Clinton, who appeared before the masses to a violin rendition of “We Shall Overcome.”
The former president and Harlem seemed the perfect match. Both were in the early stages of a renaissance. Both loved soul food. Both had ties to the South. Speaking to his adoring audience that day more than two years ago, Mr. Clinton made a promise. “I want to make sure I’m a good neighbor in Harlem,” he said.
In the past two years, however, Mr. Clinton, like many neighbors in New York, has been a passing, rather than a palpable, presence in the neighborhood. This year alone, he has traveled to Los Angeles to campaign for Gov. Gray Davis, to Kosovo to visit American soldiers serving with the United Nations peace-keeping force and to China to press its government to confront a growing AIDS crisis.
His absence has been noticed on 125th Street, where people say they have occasionally seen him, under Secret Service guard, ducking through the back door of his office—if, that is, they have seen him at all.
“Actually, I’ve only seen him once,” said Thomas Hunn, 77, a retired waiter, who was leaning against a parking meter across the street from Mr. Clinton’s office on a recent afternoon.
A spokesman for Mr. Clinton’s office pointed out that while Mr. Clinton has certainly been on the move, he has still had time to visit Jimmy’s Uptown (three times), the Sugar Hill Bistro, the Bayou restaurant, Londell’s restaurant, the Studio Museum in Harlem, Dance Theater of Harlem, the Apollo Theater (three times), Sylvia’s restaurant and Dee’s Card Shop (for some Christmas shopping), to name more than a few.
When Mr. Clinton is not on the road, the spokesman said, he splits his time between his Harlem aerie and his home in Chappaqua, in Westchester County, where he is said to be working on his memoirs. “When he’s in town, he comes by maybe once every couple of weeks,” said Robert Collins
, the chef at Lang’s Little Store and Deli, one of Mr. Clinton’s haunts in Chappaqua. “He’s here a lot on weekends.”
Over all, 125th Street still remains a thriving chapter of the Bill Clinton fan club, and there are those on the street who consider themselves lucky to actually have seen the man in recent weeks.
Sharon Alexander, 43, rode in the elevator with the former president last month as she was heading to work at the Department of Veterans Affairs.
Her message now is the same she had for him that day as they stood side by side: “I love you, Bill, but I need to see you more.”
Robert Moses, Master Builder
By PAUL GOLDBERGER | July 30, 1981
Though Robert Moses remains controversial, Babylon, N.Y. paid homage to its native son with a statue on the lawn of its Village Hall.
ROBERT MOSES, WHO PLAYED A LARGER ROLE in shaping the physical environment of New York State than any other figure in the 20th century, died yesterday in West Islip, N.Y. Mr. Moses, whose long list of public offices only begins to hint at his impact on both the city and state of New York, was 92 years old.
A spokesman for Good Samaritan Hospital said he had been taken there Tuesday afternoon from his summer home in Gilgo Beach. The cause of death was given as heart failure.
“Those who can, build,” Mr. Moses once said. “Those who can’t, criticize.” Robert Moses was, in every sense of the word, New York’s master builder. Neither an architect, a planner, a lawyer nor even, in the strictest sense, a politician, he changed the face of the state more than anyone who was. Before him, there was no Triborough Bridge, Jones Beach State Park, Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, West Side Highway or Long Island parkway system or Niagara and St. Lawrence power projects. He built all of these and more.
Before Mr. Moses, New York State had a modest amount of parkland; when he left his position as chief of the state park system, the state had 2,567,256 acres. He built 658 playgrounds in New York City, 416 miles of parkways and 13 bridges. For 44 years, from 1924 until 1968, Mr. Moses constructed public works in the city and state costing—in a recent estimate adjusting currency to 1968 value—$27 billion.
Mr. Moses built parks, highways, bridges, playgrounds, housing, tunnels, beaches, zoos, civic centers, exhibition halls and the 1964-65 New York World’s Fair.
But he was more than just a builder. Although he disdained theories, he was a major theoretical influence on the shape of the American city, because the works he created in New York proved a model for the nation at large. His vision of a city of highways and towers—which in his later years came to be discredited by younger planners—influenced the planning of cities around the nation.
His guiding hand made New York, known as a city of mass transit, also the nation’s first city for the automobile age. Under Mr. Moses, the metropolitan area came to have more highway miles than Los Angeles does; Moses projects anticipated such later automobile-oriented efforts as the Los Angeles freeway system.
But where Los Angeles grew up around its highways, Mr. Moses thrust many of New York’s great ribbons of concrete across an older and largely settled urban landscape, altering it drastically. He further changed the landscape with rows of red-brick apartment towers for low- and middle-income residents, asphalt playgrounds and huge sports stadiums. The Moses vision of New York was less one of neighborhoods and brownstones than one of soaring towers, open parks, highways and beaches—not the sidewalks of New York but the American dream of the open road.
The Enduring Legacy of Jane Jacobs
By DAVID W. DUNLAP | April 27, 2006
THE IDEA THAT CITY PLANNING SHOULD BE informed by the city block—its people, texture, layering, scale and age—can be traced in good measure to Jane Jacobs’s 1961 book, “The Death and Life of Great American Cities,” written while she lived at 555 Hudson Street. It’s little block between Perry and West 11th Streets peppered with old buildings.
She liked short blocks with a lot of diversity.
On Tuesday, she died at age 89 in Toronto, where she had moved in 1968. Along Hudson Street in Greenwich Village, diversity still reigned around the unremarkable three-story structure at No. 555 (“modest” seems too grandiose a word for it), now home to the Art of Cooking, a cookware and accessories store. Elsewhere on the block are the White Horse Tavern, three restaurants, a cafe, a news dealer and a combination card store, florist and T-shirt shop.
Farther downtown, Ms. Jacobs’s hand can be seen in the redevelopment plan for the World Trade Center. A central tenet of that plan is to break down the super-block site into four smaller blocks through the re-establishment of Greenwich and Fulton Streets.
It is no coincidence that this framework was developed while Alexander Garvin was vice president for planning at the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation. His roommate at Yale gave him a copy of “Death and Life” as a Christmas present in 1961. “It changed my life,” Mr. Garvin said.
Another example of her influence, Mr. Garvin said, was the neighborhood preservation program that he oversaw as New York’s deputy housing commissioner from 1974 to 1978. “We were trying to save old buildings,” he recalled, “which was something I always had an inclination toward but until I read that you needed a mix of old and new buildings to have a healthy neighborhood, it wasn’t part of my repertoire.”
“She taught us how to look at blocks,” said Ada Louise Huxtable, who was the architecture critic of The New York Times when Ms. Jacobs was battling Robert Moses and other powerful advocates of urban renewal and slum clearance.
“The intimate view of the city and its humanity really is indebted to her,” Ms. Huxtable said.
Being Brooke Astor
By MARILYN BERGER | May 20, 1984
Brooke Astor, shown here in her Park Avenue apartment when she was 99, passed away in 2007.
BROOKE ASTOR, THE PHILANTHROPIST AND socialite, picked up the telephone and called Vartan Gregorian, president of New York Public Library. He was in the middle of a meeting in his office. He dropped everything and took the call. “Greg, it’s Brooke,” Mrs. Astor said in her rapid-fire, high-spirited staccato. “Are you sitting or standing?’’
“I’m standing,” Mr. Gregorian replied.
“Well, sit down,” she said.
He did.
“I’ve just sent letters of resignation to all the major boards I am on and I’m going to dedicate myself to the New York Public Library.’’
“I was stunned,” he says. “I said, ‘You’re fabulous, you’re wonderful.’ I got very excited and I said all kinds of nice things. Then I turned back to the meeting and said, ‘You won’t believe what has just happened.’”
He says he knew immediately that what had just happened meant that the library was entering nothing less than a new era. “It meant that New York philanthropists, New York society, would now rediscover the library. What Brooke’s gesture did was to show that learning, books, education have glamour, that self-improvement has glamour, that hope has glamour.’’
The New York Public Library had, in recent years, been forced to curtail its activities. Many of its branches shut their doors on Saturdays. The institution, a not-for-profit corporation which gets some public funds, had been short of money. Schoolchildren seeking enlightenment are turned away in a manner that would have made Andrew Carnegie, the great library-giver, blush, not to mention John Jacob Astor, founder of the Astor fortune, the richest man in America when he died in 1848. Mr. Astor’s personal collection of books (and $400,000) formed a cornerstone of the New York Public Library.
But the worst of the library’s financial trouble may now be over. The institution has become, as Mr. Gregorian predicted, one of the city’s most popular charitable causes, primarily because the Astor descendant-by-marriage, Mrs. Vincent Astor, whom almost everybody calls Brooke, has been devoting herself so publicly to library matters. This is in the tradition of Lila Acheson Wallace, Mrs. Russell Sage, Mary Lasker, Agnes Meyer, Alice Tully, Minnie Guggenheimer and others.
Few of these Ladies Bountiful, however, have had interests as varied as Brooke Astor’s or enjoyed what might be called her leeway. She has been a widow for 25 years. She has a strong sense of responsibility for the money she inherited from Vincent Astor, who died after they had been married only five-and-a-half years. He left her $2 million outright, the income for her lifetime on about $60 million (the principal to be disposed of at her death according to her wishes), and he established her firmly in charge of a foundation with assests of another $60 million for “the alleviation of human misery.” This is medium size, as foundations go (the Ford Foundation, the nation’s wealthiest, has $3.4 billion in assets).
But the energy Brooke Astor devotes to the Vincent Astor Foundation has created astonishment and wide-eyed admiration. “You see,” she says, “it’s fun to give money away.”
As Mrs. Astor Slips, The Grandson Blames the Son
By JAMES BARRON and ANEMONA HARTOCOLLIS | July 27, 2006
ONCE, SHE AND HER PEARLS AND HER designer dresses were everywhere that was anywhere in New York society: this benefit, that party, this lunch, that dedication. At her 90th birthday party, she danced the first dance with the mayor. At her 100th, 100 well-connected friends toasted her with Champagne.
Then Brooke Russell Kuser Marshall Astor, doyenne of capital-S society by night, philanthropist by day, faded from view. Already, she had closed down her charity, having given away not quite $195 million. Her explanation was a single word: “Age.’’
No longer was she seen on the black-tie circuit, seated to the right of an attentive host. One neighbor has seen her only once in the last two years, asleep in a wheelchair outside her apartment building on Park Avenue.
The New York Times Book of New York Page 4
