When you rush to open a bridge before an election

From NBC 4:

Officials plan to open the second span of the Gov. Mario M. Cuomo Bridge after delays caused by concerns over the stability of the old Tappan Zee Bridge, officials said Sunday.

The Tappan Zee is damaged but stable with "certain key components highly stressed," said Terry Towle, president of Tappan Zee Constructors.

Even if the bridge does fall, it won't affect boat traffic in the water or the new bridge, Towle said.

The span is scheduled to open Tuesday evening, weather permitting, Towle said. That means the bridge will effectively be open for the Wednesday morning commute.

"Even if the bridge does fall"... Alrighty!

Mario Cuomo dies hours after Andrew's inauguration

From NBC:

Former New York Governor Mario Cuomo, who served three terms in office from 1983 to 1994, and whose son currently holds the office, has died at the age of 82.

Cuomo died of heart failure Thursday evening, hours after his son, Gov. Andrew Cuomo, delivered a speech to kick off his second term as governor. Andrew Cuomo said his father was unable to attend the ceremony because of his health, but was present in spirit.

"He is in the heart and mind of every person who is here," Andrew Cuomo told the crowd. "He is here and he is here, and his inspiration and his legacy and his experience is what has brought the state to this point."

Mario Cuomo, a Democrat, was known for his soaring oratory. In 1984 he delivered a powerful speech at the Democratic National Convention in which he highlighted poverty and inequality to attack President Ronald Reagan's declaration that the nation was "a shining city on a hill." The address drew national attention.

"This nation is more a tale of two cities than it is just a shining city on a hill," Cuomo said.

So that's where that came from...

Mario gets into the act

From CBS:

Now batting in the legal mess involving Bernard Madoff and the Mets: Former New York Governor Mario Cuomo.

A federal bankruptcy judge in Manhattan appointed Cuomo on Thursday to serve as a mediator in a legal dispute between the Mets owners and the court-appointed trustee trying to recover money for victims of Madoff’s Ponzi scheme.

The trustee, Irving H. Picard, has accused Mets owners Fred Wilpon and Saul Katz, chief operating officer Jeff Wilpon and affiliated Sterling Equities entities of making $300 million in fictitious profits from Madoff’s swindle and ignoring warnings that Madoff’s returns were implausible.

From WFAN:

Moody’s Investors Service says it has lowered its outlook on the company that operates Citi Field, citing the potential for pending litigation against the owners of the Mets.

The ratings firm said Thursday it cut the outlook on Queens Ballpark Co. LLC to “Negative,” but maintained its “Ba1″ rating on the company’s bonds.

Moody’s says the move reflects the potential that pending litigation against the owner of the Mets, Sterling Mets LP, could hurt attendance at the ballpark.

Happy Fathers' Day from Queens Crap

The Queens casas de Cuomo

From the NY Times:

The Cuomos may be New York political royalty, but Andrew M. Cuomo and his father have always made note of their humble Queens roots.

Mario M. Cuomo, the former governor, would often weave into conversations some reference to how his mother had arrived from Tramonti, Italy, and how he was a Queens man whose father’s “very special dream” had been to have a “house with a yard and a tree to call our own.” Andrew Cuomo’s campaign Web site — it says “Attorney General 2010,” as he has not officially declared an intention to run for governor — mentions his childhood in Hollis and his grandmother’s grocery store in South Jamaica. Andrew Cuomo said in an interview that he still considered Queens his first home.

“That’s where we grew up,” he said. “I lived in Queens. I went to school in Queens. I worked in Queens. I have a lot of friends there.”

But like many prosperous New Yorkers, the Cuomos have largely left Queens behind, at least in real estate terms. Mario and his brood have dispersed through Manhattan and parts of Westchester, to some of the metropolitan region’s most coveted towns and addresses.

Despite the fancier addresses that members of the family now call home, the Cuomo name still echoes in their ancestral borough. In 1995, Mario Cuomo sold the Holliswood home where he grew up, but neighbors still call it the Cuomo house, said Michael Cavounis, who bought the three-bedroom center-hall-colonial-style home in 2000 for $400,000.

The state still sends Mr. Cuomo some mail there, Mr. Cavounis said, and visitors still stop by to see, hug and take photographs of the spruce tree in the front yard that Mr. Cuomo described in his children’s book “The Blue Spruce.”

Mario Cuomo’s father, Andrea Cuomo, had chiseled castle-shaped statues out of stone for his children and grandchildren, and at least a couple of the statues remained behind after the Cuomos left Queens. In 2009, Mr. Cavounis called the former governor to offer him the last one left on the property.

The next day, Mr. Cavounis received a call from his wife that a man was digging in the garden with a shovel. After Mr. Cavounis rushed home, he realized that the man was Andrew Cuomo.

Oh my what a lovely article about the Cuomos! I guess we know who the Times is pulling for.

Another reason to vote for Halloran

If you enjoyed the tenure of Mario Cuomo, then by all means vote for Kevin Kim. But if you are like 95% of the Queens people I know who refer to him as Mario F$@%#& Cuomo, then you have to believe that this helps Halloran.

He can't be bought, but he can buy everyone else

For a real education on what has taken place over the last few months, take some time out of your busy day to read the whole article linked to below:

Even his strongest allies have a hard time naming a memorable achievement from Bloomberg's second term—beyond his sparking a national gun-control campaign. Instead, he was fixated for most of the last two years by an always-improbable, yet ballyhooed pursuit of the presidency, followed by a largely unnoticed, two-month-long audition for the consolation prize of vice president.

In one of the most sordid performances by a city executive in modern history, Deputy Mayor Kevin Sheekey appeared on NY1 in May to declare that "the person who picks Mayor Bloomberg as their vice-presidential candidate wins the election," partly because Bloomberg would "help finance a campaign" with "between zero and a billion" dollars. This televised and indiscriminate bribe offer generated no takers and, more remarkably, drew not one word of fire from the city media.

The Transformation of Mike Bloomberg

The Bloomberg who came into office as the anti-politician, promising to transform city government, has been transformed himself. Some of us liked him precisely because his wealth insulated him from the kind of horsetrading that diminished his predecessors. But seven years later, Bloomberg has not only proved himself to be a master politician, as hungry for power as anyone we've ever seen, but he's also ended up putting nearly everyone who deals with the city deep into his political debt.

The New York City Campaign Finance Board (CFB), which the Times has called the "crown jewel of city political life," was compelled by the mayor and Quinn—who, together, appoint its members—to issue the "draft" of an advisory opinion designed to push undecided council members into the "yes" column. The board assured the council that if the extension passed and a member decided to run for re-election, the thousands of dollars that some term-limited members had already spent in seeking higher office would not count against their cap in a new council race. But it wasn't the substance of the ruling that was dismaying—it was the timing of it. According to sources close to the CFB, Bloomberg and Quinn staffers demanded that the board act before the council vote, with Quinn threatening to pass a similar bill—but with detrimental consequences—if the CFB failed to act. Asked twice if Bloomberg aides had lobbied the board to issue this unprecedented opinion in anticipation of a legislative vote, executive director Amy Loprest dodged the question and finally said: "I can't comment on that." Bloomberg even sullied his own charitable generosity, summoning nonprofits he funds to council hearings to pay homage despite their tax-exempt status, as if there is now a turnstile at his supposedly "anonymous" foundation.

Mario Cuomo trudged down to testify for the extension without revealing that the managing partner at his law firm is a director of Bloomberg L.P. and that the company is the law firm's top client. Ed Koch went from hosting his weekly show on Bloomberg Radio to celebrating the prospect of a third Bloomberg administration. Peter Vallone, who insisted when he was speaker that the only way to undo term limits was by referendum, switched sides without mentioning the $1.8 million in fees his family firm collected last year for lobbying City Hall (to say nothing about his son keeping the family seat). Five unions with fresh new contracts, thanks to Mike Bloomberg, rushed to the witness table, some closing their deals right before and some right after their appearance. Time Warner's Richard Parsons did a stint at the hearing and on his own channel (NY1), even while the Bloomberg administration was extending the company's lucrative cable franchise for six months and considering a 10-year renewal.

"That's NOT my boy!"

After speaking with voters who participated in this month's special election, I have come to the conclusion that Anthony Como won based on mistaken identity. I noticed many people were mispronouncing his last name, so I dug a little deeper. And when phrases like, "I thought his father did a decent job as governor so I figured he'd be good" and "I guess politics runs in his family" are bandied about, then it's easy to put two and two together. (These are the same people who voted for Alan Hevesi years back because they thought he was Italian.) So, although the corrupt election process may have had something to do with the outcome, most of the blame has to be put on the blatant stupidity of voters in western Queens.

God help Council District 30!

More on the middle class squeeze

This one blog post collected all the links about the topic and summed up the problem nicely:

watch, read or listen to coverage of the NYC middle class squeeze

Of particular interest was this article from the appropriately-titled NY Observer:

The Crisis of the Upper-Middle Class: Big Pay Is Piddling in New York

Oh no! Where will they go?

“They could live in Astoria! Astoria is wonderful, and underappreciated,” former New York Governor Mario Cuomo told The Observer.

Mario pushing for gentrification of his former borough. Maybe he's a friend of Pistilli.

The Crapper's sitting here in my neighborhood that no Manhattanite wants to live in because of the lack of decent public transportation and waiting for the entire city economy to collapse at Bloomberg's feet. This guy's predicting it too:

...I am a late-40’s lifetime New Yorker, who moved into Manhattan in early 1980 (you do the math) and “walked” to Studio 54 the first night I moved in (55th & First). I have been crisscrossing Manhattan, the boroughs and the suburbs since then. I have been very successful at sales over the years, so I am not a member of the angry “have-not” club. My point is that the overdevelopment of this city is astonishing. I truly believe that the “very high-end,” “upscale clientele” that are scooping up these luxury condos like heavily discounted wedding dresses will one day abandon this city and its rows of luxury housing.

It’s all fun in the beginning, but when the city is full of luxury housing and little else, where will they dine out, shop for enticing doodads and generally amuse themselves? In my neighborhood (Sutton Place) alone, we have lost all of the restaurants on First Avenue to developers of these stackable palaces of the rich and their excesses. Each new building serves to remove a chunk of the neighborhood for those that do not live there. It’s like walking a full city block without any access to what you are walking by. Kind of like “forced window-shopping.”

The best part of N.Y.C. has always been that we do juxtaposition better than anyone else in the world! This all strikes me as shortsightedness of a magnitude never before seen. Everyone thinks that the building of all of these buildings will keep N.Y.C. fully populated, but at what cost?

Lloyd N. Greenspan
Manhattan

Above letter from the NY Observer