Tonight's the night! Opponents of the Atlantic Yards project plan to protest outside of the Brooklyn Museum of Art because the museum's honoring developer Bruce Ratner. Black tie is optional (it's not inside the museum) but, please, according to organizer Develop Don't Destroy Brooklyn, bring your own pickets!  read more »

Develop Don’t Destroy Brooklyn is inviting Atlantic Yards opponents to grab their pickets (and don formal dress if they so desire) to protest the Brooklyn Museum’s decision to honor the developer Bruce Ratner at its annual $1,000-a-plate Brooklyn Ball, which DDDB calls an “affront to Brooklyn communities.”

Kayne West will perform at the Thursday night gala celebrating the Forest City Ratner CEO—described as “an upstanding corporate citizen” and a “sing  read more »

Dipping back into the book Giuliani: Flawed or Flawless?, I came across some first impressions of him. But first, a warning: The following sample has been selected for amusement value, and is decidedly not reflective of the membership of the Republican Party.

I was invited to have lunch with him by one his partners to welcome him back to the private bar [in 1989, when Mr. Giuliani joined White & Case]. He represented the [New York] Daily News, and we discussed some First Amendment issues. I don't think that I or our First Amendment discussion, interested him very much; he was indifferent to claims of civil liberties and the First Amendment. I also thought that he thought civil liberties was for sissies. It's not that he was against free speech or that it was his priority to destroy free speech in America, but that this was not the stuff of strong men. Walking away, I didn't think any better of him than when the lunch had started.

Mark Green recalled:

"I lived at 444 East 86th Street [a high-rise cooperative apartment building in the Yorkville section of Manhattan's Upper Easst Side] from 1980 to 1982, on the thirty-fourth floor; Rudy Giuliani lived at 444 East 86th Street on the thirty-fifth floor, in what, obviously, was a coincidence, so I saw him periodically in the building we both lived in before we became citywide officials. And I knew him as a prominent Justice Department attorney, and I was a consumer advocate. I thought, he looks like a can-do Republican."

Jay Goldberg, an attorney who represented several clients prosecuted by Giuliani in 1988:

"It was the comb-over! I said to myself, Why couldn't his wife tell him how stupid that is? So he's bald. I'm happy that he's "listened" to me [Mr. Giuliani has abandoned his comb-over for a more conventional style.] Now his only impediment is a speech defect, his lisp."

Remember: Size doesn't matter. It all depends on how it gets used. (From www.artthrob.co.za)

We count about 10 steps each based on these images. So we hold our breath. Will Gehry out-Brooklyn Polshek?

In their headline, The New York Sun notes Weld Fought Giuliani in Brooklyn Museum Battle. How bad can that be?

--Azi Paybarah