NY Observer > New Orleans

Best-Case Scenario: McCain Gets a Convention Without Bush or Cheney

Steve Kornacki — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 15:33:24 -0400

When Hurricane Katrina came ashore three years ago, initial reports suggested that it had made its way past New Orleans without causing the destruction some had feared. But the storm's aftermath proved unexpectedly catastrophic, with levees unable to hold back the rising waters.

It's worth keeping that example in mind this afternoon, with Hurricane Gustav, downgraded from a Category 3 storm (Katrina's designation) to Category 2 before it came ashore, passing west of New Orleans. It seems possible that the dire forecasts of the weekend – talk of flooding of "biblical" proportions that would wipe out whatever Katrina hadn't – will not be realized. read more »

A Plan That Looks Familiar

Observer Staff — Tue, 13 Mar 2007 10:32:08 -0400

City Comptroller Bill Thompson isn't finished whacking the city's Department of Education.

He released a letter earlier today essentially accusing one of the department's high-priced private consultants, Alvarez and Marsal, of professional laziness for creating a plan for city schools that looks eerily similar to the one they created for hurricane-ravaged New Orleans.

That's problematic because, as Thompson notes:

"The glaring dissimilarity, however, is that the New Orleans public school system has a student population of 26,000 as opposed to the 1.1 million New York children in public schools.
"Whether the New Orleans plan is scalable to work in New York and whether it is appropriate to implement the plan without public recognition of its origin is questionable. If A&M is profiting from marketing as its own the plan of others, then that also leaves much to be desired."

The full letter is here [pdf].

-- Azi Paybarah

The Morning Read: Wednesday, December 27, 2006

Observer Staff — Wed, 27 Dec 2006 02:00:00 -0500

Gerald Ford is dead at 93.

John Edwards is about to announce a run for president, using hard-hit New Orleans as a backdrop.

The New York Post is skeptical.

Eliot Spitzer denied that his appointment of Nassau County Republican Michael Balboni to be his top homeland security official is part of any "ulterior scheme" to help Democrats take back the state Senate.

Democrats and Republicans on Long Island are scrambling to replace Balboni when he goes.

Some supporters of Rudy Giuliani are reaching out to the families of 9/11 victims about 2008, Maggie reports.

Sam Roberts writes that race was a key issue when Basil Paterson ran for lieutenant governor, but is largely a non-issue for David Paterson as he prepares to assume that office.

Democratic pledges to restore civility to Congress "carry risks," according to the Times.

George Pataki defended his record in an interview with the Sun, contending that it's impossible to be ideologically pure when you have a state to run.

Republican state Senator John Bonacic sent out a letter calling for his colleagues to toss Majority Leader Joe Bruno.

Peter King is opposed to a revised immigration bill that he says amounts to amnesty.

Joe Biden is going to fight any proposed buildup of troop levels in Iraq.

The mayor called the racially and ethnically diverse new class of police recruits "a gift to the city."

The city Conflicts of Interest Board released a letter scolding a Council staffer for inappropriate use of a business card.

Leaders in East Harlem and the South Bronx are angry over a City Hall deal that would allow fancy private schools in Manhattan to have "first dibs" on some of the renovated ballfields on Randalls Island.

Developer Bruce Ratner has installed surveillance cameras outside the properties he owns at the future location of the Atlantic Yards project.

The cost of doing business in New York State is high.

There will be no holiday clemencies from the departing governor.

And here's a handy guide to all the newly elected members of Congress. -- Josh Benson

Another Side of Bob Dylan: A Chorus of Inventive Covers

Max Abelson — Sun, 19 Nov 2006 19:00:00 -0500

When the dozy, dreamy singer-songwriter Cat Power walked onstage at last week’s “The Mus read more »

Clay Risen Wants To Be Fair! Objective! Bored Witless!

Observer Staff — Fri, 11 Aug 2006 10:31:57 -0400

Look, what follows is really not appropriate. But it's hard to clear the mind and hit the Friday LIRR without finally saying something.

There is one person in America telling the Tribune-owned Los Angeles Times to be more boring, and his name is Clay Risen. Mr. Risen—who penned an op-ed this week which insanely took the LA Times to task over the crazy LA Times magazine profile of Joe Francis—is a killjoy moralist douchebag. read more »

Okay, he could be worse. He could be Nicolas Lemann, who pleaded poor and then cut the budget of CJR Daily without ever attempting to put advertising on that site, thereby losing two staffers, and who recently penned a horrid and barely readable piece in the New Yorker saying that online presences needed more reporters and reporting. See? Man, it doesn't get much wronger than that.

Monday: Bloomberg Becomes Even Stonier, Lord Foster Goes In-Line Skating

Observer Staff — Sun, 09 Jul 2006 20:45:50 -0400

The mayor: as supple as a skyscraper

It has been called One Beacon Court, 731 Lexington Avenue, 151 East 58th Street, and--for long-time New Yorkers--Alexander's. But now, The Times reports that the East Side skyscraper is commonly referred to as the Bloomberg Building, after its most famous renter. Seems like this idea has been explored before. (The New York Times)
It's been fun--and we've learned all about sandhogs and the "indispensable backhoe operators," but now it's time to head back to work. When ex-strikers toil at city construction sites like Ground Zero, they'll be compensated for their work 20 percent more than they'd been before. Heavy machine operators of the world, unite! (NY1)
The suburbs help drive a real estate boom in New Orleans, where "volume and sales prices" have somehow exceeded the pre-Katrina numbers. But back in the New York market--which is apparently built around international wealth and "well-designed kitchens"--there may not be enough buyers to fill the 24,400 potential new co-ops. (New York Times)
Or maybe American home buying is "grinding to a halt"? A few statistics sometimes help when trying to decide questions like this, though the Post pays no mind. (New York Post)
Essential read of the day: Crain's NY Market Facts special issue. (Crain's)
Non-essential read: CNN declares there are "mixed messages" on Manhattan real-estate prices, which is almost as piercing as their last feature on how "it's never easy buying your first home." At least this story has a few wonderfully anxious quotes from the New York real estate elite: "I'm more concerned about 2007 than 2006," Corcoran C.E.O. Pam Liebman admits. (CNN/Money)
Non-essential fact: Lord Norman Foster's new Hearst Tower has a 9,000-square-foot "exercise emporium," complete with something called "in-line skating machines" (unpleasantly dubbed, "The Wave"). (The Post)

- Max Abelson

New Orleans Dog Underscores a Fresh Injustice

Observer Staff — Mon, 12 Jun 2006 05:15:17 -0400

/Cheryl

This New Orleans dog, abandoned by her owner even after the waters receded, was rescued by Maria, at left, when she worked at a shelter in Baton Rouge. As a doglover, I welcome her onto my blog, but chiefly to raise a fresh injustice:

Maria, who dined at my house last night (my social behavior was largely O.K., though I have not yet gotten the grade from my wife), has a brother serving in Baghdad. A Marine colonel. And she reports that the troops there cannot watch the World Cup on the television service provided to them by the Coalition Authority. If true, that's wrong. I'm looking into it...

A Foolish Consistency on NBC

Observer Staff — Thu, 01 Jun 2006 17:43:12 -0400

Tonight the NBC Nightly News doggedly began its broadcast with a report from the levees of New Orleans at the onset of hurricane season rather than where CBS and ABC began: with the Haditha massacre and the European-U.S. coalition visavis Iran.

By such choices, Brian Williams is hewing to the position he took at a forum of the news media in Harlem some weeks back (on C-Span), when he asserted that NBC was committed to covering the problems of black people—witness the New Orleans coverage. (An angry questioner had actually asked about Mumia Abu-Jamal; all the network types dodged that one, understandably). Good for them, and yet tonight's broadcast showed just how stupid such a stubborn posture can be, in the event. The important news was elsewhere; NBC couldn't go there, out of some kind of ideological bias.

New Orleans: A Thousand Points of Blight

Observer Staff — Sun, 26 Mar 2006 09:31:02 -0500

I'm just back from New Orleans, and stunned and shocked. Nothing on television or in the papers conveys the scale of Katrina, six months on. You turn onto a boulevard and suddenly there's a mountain of dead trees, gargantuan and muddy and scraped clean of branches and leaves by crews that left months ago. That's about all the evidence of federal activity, though. The great ongoing scandal of this disaster is the degree to which private citizens are being expected to clean up after themselves. Plywood signs are nailed up in trees or on the sides of houses with spraypainted phone numbers for GUTTING or TREE REMOVAL. Yes—private citizens are offering these services, six months into the alleged relief effort.

Where's the government? This isn't a question of Big government, this is a question of No government. A disaster blights one of our greatest cities, halving its population, and six months on nobody's home and the most basic recovery services are being marketed by private vendors. It's a national shame (and where's the outrage?).

We treat dogs better. No doubt about that, the evidence is before your eyes. Everywhere you go there are still signs spray painted on houses and fences: Two Tan Dogs Here. 4 Dogs Here. 0 Cats Here. The animal lovers of America, and I'm one, mobilized bigtime around the hurricane. They canvassed the city for animals. And though too many dogs died atop air conditioners (that's where they landed when they were swimming helplessly around in the floodwaters) a great number were saved. We can't do the same for people. Something chokes the generous impulse when it's poor blacks, or poor whites, or people who lack the wherewithal to do for themselves.

OK I'm a bleeding heart. But even the hardhearted should be ashamed of the fact that six months on there are still 20,000 to 30,000 abandoned vehicles on the streets of New Orleans, jammed under overpasses, and the city is floundering to get them cleared away. Or mountains of garbage and wreckage down every other street. This is America? Where's the pride and can-do spirit? What do we pay taxes for? The only motion of grace or spirit in the Lower 9th ward are the college kids on spring break zipping up haz-mat suits to do a little volunteer cleanup. There should be some massive federal undertaking here, to clean up this gem, this great and strangled source of culture. But there's nothing. (The bulldozers are in Iraq.)

(P.S. The dull murmur here, the conspiratorial whisper, louder when Mayor Nagin says it, is that New Orleans is being remade as a boutique city, a Charleston on the bayou, with red beans and rice for $17.95, the shotgun houses all neatly painted, and the poor blacks and their problems exported to Houston. "It's never been safer here," a guy from Fairhope, Ala., says at my hotel. The place has been, er, cleansed. That's another story, of racism and urban planning and gentrification. Again, the federal government could rewrite the narrative here, could dedicate itself to restoring New Orleans's former scale. But again, we see a vacuum of vision or even understanding...)

It's Coming: NYT Mag Discovers Real Estate

Observer Staff — Wed, 01 Mar 2006 11:34:19 -0500

Click image to enlarge.

Devoting an entire issue to real estate is a great idea for two reasons.

First, New Yorkers seemingly can't get enough of the topic. Second, there's a lot of brokerages ready to spend big money on full-color ads for their luxury developments.

Bulging to over 200 pages, this weekend's New York Times magazine features plenty of articles, advertisements, and advertorials.

It's honestly difficult to know where to begin.

There is the "Agents Provocateurs" piece with full-page, stylish shots of the city's top developers and brokers. Some of those included are Aby Rosen, Dolly Lenz, and Paula Del Nunzio--whose picture is taken at Emilio Ambasz's mansion on East 62nd Street. Not only do we find out about their current projects and biggest coups, but also fantasies and dress codes. For the record, Mr. Rosen prefers Thomas Pink cuff links.

There are at least a dozen other pieces which vary from subsidized housing, to the Donald Trump of New Orleans, and even what a 400-year old house in Amsterdam can say about today's market.

We might need all weekend to get through it. - Michael Calderone