Cleveland

Toward the end of the 2000 Salzburg Festival, Gérard Mortier, the Belgian impresario whom the  read more »

Granted, John Catsimatidis has made noises about running for mayor before. More than once.

But there's still something refreshing about a person so willing to talk about every aspect of his theoretical campaign before so much as hiring a press secretary.

Yesterday, we chatted about some of the specifics of the Catsimatidis '09 agenda.

The price for the campaign? $30 million. "If it's going well and I want to spend 40, I'll spend 40. It doesn't matter."

In which party? "Most likely the Republican Party. I mean, I'm not a left-wing Democrat. I'm a Rockefeller Republican, the way Bloomberg Republican."

What makes you a Rockefeller Republican?

"I'm pro-people and pro-business."

And your vision for the future of New York?

"My number one concern is not chase the middle class out of New York. Do you want to turn New York into a downtown Detroit or downtown Cleveland? I love New York. I don't want to do that."

And what's that like?

"Downtown Cleveland? There's nobody down town except the people on welfare," Catsimatidis said. "You know, you need a mixed society, you need a little bit of everybody.

Everybody?

"When you talk about illegal aliens, they have a purpose too. I want illegal aliens, and I'll support them if they're paying their taxes, hard working families. But if they're here to live off the rest of us, then I'm not going to support them. If they're here to commit felonies and murders, I'll have them on the first boat out. You know, if it's within my power."

More Catsimatidis after the jump.  read more »

Neither the New York- nor the Cleveland-based branches of the family has explained why Bruce Ratner is selling the remaining 30 percent of his company, Forest City Ratner, to his cousins at Forest City Enterprises, and why at such an opportune time. (The final deal was announced today.) One equity analyst said the company had told him that it was personal.

"What happened was that Bruce was getting to the point in his life where he wants to do some philanthropy," Rich Moore, managing director at RBC Capital Markets, told us. "There is no liquidity to joint ventures because he has to sell a building in order to make any money."

In return, Ratner is getting $60.8 million to play around with, a 3.9 percent stake in Cleveland-based Forest City Enterprises, as well as a seat on the parent company's board of directors.

Since last Thursday's after-close announcement, the cousin company's stock price has fallen about $4.

-Matthew Schuerman

“Why, oh why, oh why, oh—why did I ever leave Ohio?”    read more »

“Why, oh why, oh why, oh—why did I ever leave Ohio?”  read more »

In the great piano concertos of Beethoven, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Ravel and Bartók, the driving  read more »

In the great piano concertos of Beethoven, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Ravel and Bartók, the driving impul  read more »

Since Sunday, the Cleveland Plain Dealer has been running an all-out series on Forest City Enterprises, the nation’s largest publicly traded real estate company of which our own little Forest City Ratner (MetroTech, the new Times tower, Atlantic Yards) is just a small part.

They spend a few paragraphs on Forest City’s ability to take public subsidies and use them to make a profit by developing in run-down city neighborhoods that other companies wouldn’t touch. Another worthwhile read examines the company’s tortoise image on Wall Street. We’re still waiting for that big overview that tells us what the company is all about—and of course we can't wait to hear them talk about New York City!  read more »

-Matthew Schuerman

The other night, I had the Kafkaesque experience of showing up at a restaurant I'd been to just thre  read more »

The first part of Fred Siegel's and E.J. McMahon's big new article in The Public Interest is now online here. It's a smart conservative's take on why New York City and State lurch from fiscal crisis to fiscal crisis.

As the authors put it: "The fiscal crisis of the late 1970s never really ended -- it simply went into remission."

Their point is that -- unlike, say, Cleveland -- New York doesn't suffer from the fiscal problems that plague most of urban America: middle-class flight, abandonment, and an overall evaporation of the tax base. New York's "crisis" is that it continues to spend a lot of money on services, straining one of the richest tax bases imaginable. Now you can justify this, and quibble with their claims about how much damage high taxes do -- or even say the city should spend more on, say, the subways -- but it's hard to disagree with their point that the city workforce of around 300,000 people (that's more than 1 in 1,000 Americans) has something to do with the huge costs.

Siegel and McMahon put it in terms of what used to be called "the British disease...the economic sclerosis suffered by liberal democracies held hostage to the demands of politically powerful labor unions and social service providers."  read more »

How politically powerful? Well, the Democratic candidates for mayor do seem to prefer hammering Albany and Washington to talking about where the city spends its money.

UPDATE: The whole thing is now online.

Hollywood Animal , by Joe Eszterhas. Alfred A. Knopf, 736 pages, $26.95.Go ahead, I dare you.  read more »

Among the most frequently voiced opinions about contemporary publishing-on a list that includes such  read more »

During oral arguments in theCleveland school-voucher case, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia trie  read more »

We've all been a little on edge, so when a mouse scampered across our kitchen floor just after dinne  read more »

So the New York Philharmonic will get an American conductor after all.  read more »

The extent to which a symphony orchestra gains its identity from the qualities of its hall has alway  read more »

Of the artists who made up the first generation of American modernist painters in the early years of  read more »

Several years ago, Jacob Frydman, a little-known attorney from Cleveland, let it be known that he wa  read more »