In the race to succeed New York City Speaker Sheldon Silver, the New York City delegation is starting to coalesce around Carl Heastie. Given the obvious difficulty in dislodging legislative leaders from Albany, the 47-year-old Heastie requires scrutiny now. Here are some issues I haven’t seen discussed that I would like to see aired before the…
(I began reading Machine Made before the Silver scandal broke, but as today’s machines jockey to replace him, this review seemed even more appropriate.) The name “Tammany Hall” has long been synonymous with urban political sleaze, personified by fatcat Boss Tweed. Yet during the halcyon days of the Tammany Hall political machine, New York City…
New Yorkers pride themselves on exploring new neighborhoods, but Juan Rodriguez, Manhattan’s first non-indigenous resident, went 400 years without any credit. This pioneer preceded the first permanent Dutch settlement by a decade, but until recently, he was buried as a footnote in New York City history. A few years ago, a researcher flying to New York…
For a brief moment on Sunday night, newspapers were reporting that Sheldon Silver had stepped down as Speaker. Now his spokesman is claiming that he is not relinquishing power, only temporarily stepping aside to focus on his legal case while five senior Assemblymembers handle the budget and legislative issues. This is not good enough. Sheldon…
Sheldon Silver is a bad Democrat and New York will be a better place with him out of politics. During his 20 years as Assembly Speaker, Silver worked to benefit himself and a small network of allies. Scandals bubbled to the surface every now and then, and far more often lurked underneath, no one ready…
(Citizens United was decided on January 21, 2010. The decision changed the trajectory of my career. Five years later I revisited why so little has happened to reform money in politics, and why that reform energy should be directed towards a far more troubling issue. This ran in City & State yesterday.) Five years ago,…
Welcome to the inaugural podcast, with Jonathan Gill, the author of Harlem: The Four Hundred Year History from Dutch Village to Capital of Black America. We were in the basement of a conference hotel, but other than occasional crackling and splotches, it went pretty well. (We might have a bad cable. Just pretend you are…
Just When I Thought I Was Out, They Pull Me Back In: The Richard Ravitch Story… Richard Ravitch is one of those legendary public intellectuals from a bygone era who leaves you at the end of a television interview muttering to yourself about the shallowness of other news coverage. His most famous accomplishment, for which all New…
Coretta Scott King called MLK Day “a people’s holiday” but it’s hard to resist honoring the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who had some of his most important moments here in New York City. Below we’ve summarized King’s relationship to New York in ten vignettes. This article is cross-posted at Untapped Cities, which features…
A quarter of today’s major league baseball players are Latinos from outside the United States, but the pioneer who brought these two worlds together was nearly forgotten by history. When I was a kid, every Christmas my dad would take me to Barnes & Noble and let me fill a shopping basket with books.…
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