Tom Watson

I'm In a New York State of Mind

As Digby says, everybody thinks their state is the worst. But New Yorkers are wearing a particular shade of red these days, in shocked embarrassment at the depths of our state government. Aspects of the Republican coup in the upper house of the New York State Legislature seemed to be more the province of imaginations like Jon Swift's, rather than any kind of statecraft. Since two Democrats crossed the aisle in a power grab apparently motivated by billionaire Tom Golisano's hurt feelings over being ignored by a new Democratic majority whose victory he helped to finance, the State Senate has been in a state of comic gridlock, highlighted by comic declarations about having the right key to get into the chamber.

No one looks good. The Democrats, led by an accidental Governor boasting approval ratings lower than Elliot Spitzer's after the call girl scandal, feature an astoundingly weak line-up outside of Assembly boss Shelly Silver and Attorney General Cuomo. The Republicans, used to holding onto the Senate by winning in barely-populated districts to counter the electoral might of New York City - and through an unwritten 30-year deal to share power in the Legislature - have always taken the obstructionist route. On both sides of the aisle, perp walks are almost as routine as fundraisers.

Now a State Supreme Court judge has given the warring Senate parties until Monday to strike a deal on power-sharing and legislative structure, so that the state's business can proceed. Good luck. We may as well hope for an early budget and cuts to the legislators' salaries and perks. As Ballon-Juice blogger DougJ says, "No matter how cynical I get about New York State government, I just can’t keep up."

Meanwhile, if you want the latest on one of the traitorous Democrats, Senator Pedro Espada, the Bronx blog BoogieDowner is going wall-to-wall with Espada coverage.

And They Still Come to New York

These days, there's a bank on every corner in Manhattan. Some of them are still solvent. The old-timey diners and burger joints and real neighborhood bars are dwindling relics. The smoke shops and drug stores - not the chains, the ones with soda counters - are gone. The newsstands have been redesigned in sleek Euro post-modernism. The cabs have video screens.

New York is replacing itself with a version that is less recognizable, more saccharine and less grimy. Sleek signage. Big brands. Soaring towers. Streetscapes will all the interest of a bad virtual reality walk-through, all pale vanilla and man-made granite. Glass curtain walls, once the province of visionary architects, now slide from street to sky on every failed insurance building and former investment bank in town. The damned napkins have ads on them.

Yet, they still come to New York.

From my day-time perch over 42nd and Second, I watched the comic book armed camp that envelops the east side of midtown when the General Assembly opens and the president comes to town. Security becomes a cartoon best watched from on high, a parade of emergency services vehicles, ambulances, blacked-out Suburbans, snarling NYPD Harleys, police buses, scooters, bikes and what appear to be lightly-armored troop carriers. The hotel next door swarms with men in dark suits speaking into lapel pics as curly little chords run down into their shirts. Machine guns in Grand Central and out on Lex are the norm. Two Coast Guard warships sit in the East River. There are dogs. Many of them. And strangely, in a way, plain old uniformed cops directing traffic and standing around waiting for orders, doing what the Feds direct.

Yeah, they still come to New York, though our financial center is failing, perhaps for the final time. Will Wall Street be truly vestigial old-fashioned New York reference, clinging to the marketplace like that burger joint up on 52nd Street where not a single waiter was born after 1940?

The traffic cones and people barriers form extra lanes of traffic all along 42nd Street and avenues from First to Lexington, routing a virtual parade of motorcades. look, that was has 10 motorcycles, two ambulances, a dozen suburbans, and screaming sirens. Might  be Bush. But there's another: one SUV, one NYPD cruiser, and a single motorcycle. The president of what small country? He (or she) still comes to New York, and not just for the half-price sale that is the flood of Euros to the city's stores.

Last night, a few bloggers made their way to the top of the Sheraton over on Seventh. I've been going there since the mid-80s, when I was a young political reporter covering the annual Bronx County Democratic dinners - the ones hosted by boss Stanley Friedman, a man with serious personal style who grandly feted the old titans, guys like Carmine DeSapio. The place has had a face-lift, but the big ballrooms are still there and the man who is hosting his own shadow gathering of world leaders for the fourth year was in fine form on the 45th floor. Bill Clinton can still hold a crowd of smart people in the palm of his hand, holding forth with a depth of knowledge that stuns and overshadows and destroys the tiny, cramped intellect of the man who rode in the really big motorcade past my office this afternoon, the forgotten man just serving out his failed term as big events swirl around his deserted island of contempt.

We waited in small, steamy hotel room making small talk about blogs with aides while the Secret Service watched the hallway and the greatest president of our lifetimes talked about economics (or so we guessed) with the president of Paraguay down the hall. Then we all sat around the living room in the suite and mostly listened (questions were few) to Clinton discuss the economic crisis and what he'd do. Suffice to say, he suggested a better deal than the rapine weaseling of $700 billion from the taxpayers' account. We all thought the same thing though no one spoke it aloud. Yes, what a difference an administration makes.

Then it was down into the New York evening, my walk from west to east to the station, dodging the motorcades and lock-down zones. Was that fall in the air or just the chill of the city's tax base at basement temperature?

Still, the streets were filled. They were filled today. The helicopters buzzed and the motorcades whizzed along. Yes, they still come to New York.

UPDATE: We'll be blogging CGI over at onPhilanthropy - and I'll be Twittering away as the spirit moves me.

No Lipstick on Lehman's Pig

We may not be yet headed toward a world made by hand - to borrow the title, if not the mood of James Kunstler's dark cinematic novel of our post-energy future - but we may be headed toward a New York without its economic engine. Tonight, Lehman Brothers and its 158 years of Wall Street history teeter on the edge of oblivion, with no bail-out on offer from you and me, the humble taxpayer. Merrill Lynch is in talks with Bank of America to save itself. We - that's you and me, dear reader - have guaranteed the mortgage-backed security nest of vipers at Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae in order to "save" that market. Insurance giant AIG edges toward the edge. The dollar's in the crapper, thanks to Republican policy protecting companies who make beau coup bucks by selling American-made on the cheap. And the polls now favor that failed political party and its former opposition leader, now comfy in the arms of both the K Street lobbyists who sold the economy down the river - and the flunky neocons who send other people's children to die in a failed experiment. Yeah, I don't know what the Bush Doctrine is either, except what I've heard on Fox. But when those thousands of six - and yes, seven-figure jobs - leave New York never to return in the lifetimes of those holding the pink slips and carrying cardboard boxes, it means the pork barrel of Federal emergency aid is empty. And there ain't puttin' no lipstick on that pig.

Ticonderoga's Choke Point

Ticonderoga, originally uploaded by Tom Watson.

Fort Ticonderoga commands the west side of the lower end of Lake Champlain, its cannon covering both the approach from Canada and the St. Lawrence the north to the southern end of the lake - and the critical portage to the top of Lake George, only a mile or so to the east. In 18th century terms, it was a crucial valve in the plumbing that conducted men and material through the resource-laden wilderness between Albany and Quebec. During the French & Indian War, it was the site of a particularly brutal little battle that the French - builders of the fort - won over the British; their victory was, however, short-lived. The English eventually won control over the areas to the north and west of Albany thanks to an influx of troops and superior American officers, from the young George Washington to the trackers and guides immortalized by James Fenimore Cooper several generations later.

Surrendered to Benedict Arnold and Ethan Allen during the early Revolution and its cannon hauled by boat down Lake George and overland along the basic route of the Mass Turnpike to Boston - there to assist Washington in hurling the British from Boston - the fort was a picturesque wreck by the first years of the Republic; Jefferson and Madison, touring upstate New York, strolled its romantic ruins and marveled at the lakes. Rebuilt a hundred years ago - and in stages ever since - Ticonderoga today is the gem of New York's colonial historic sites, perfectly genuine at its stony base and brilliantly simple in its presentation. There is no gaudy visitors center, no audio visuals, no sense of the precious.

Yet, as we read this week in the Times, it's a financial wreck - a ruin of philanthropic ambition and management, and is considering selling its art collection or closing for a year. We visited Ticonderoga - my third visit, my children's second - last week on the way home from Lake George, and spend an hour wandering the battlements and peering at the collection of arms and other archeological wonders in the simple galleries housed in reconstructed barracks. It remains a wild and beautiful spot, its bloody history aside, and the views across the farmlands and up toward Mount Defiance (where the British mule-hauled cannon to eventually force Ticonderoga's surrender from the rebels) are singularly beautiful. Moreover, they tell almost the complete story of New York's importance to the new United States - sitting astride one of the great inland trade routes linking Canada with Albany and the Mohawk, New York and the Hudson.

The Times story quoted Cliff Siegfried, director of the New York State Museum and the State Department of Education’s assistant commissioner for museums, who hinted at state support to save Ticonderoga (run now by a private foundation) from closing.

“Its importance to the economy of that region and the history of New York is obvious,” Siegfried said. “We’re going to work with them to make sure that it doesn’t fail. This is a hiccup in its history.”

I hope so. But I also wonder why this country doesn't have equivalent of the UK's excellent National Trust, some sort of national repository charged with preserving history and heritage; too many important sites are maintained as roadside attractions - or rich people's playthings.

Empire Statehood

Sometimes, you can tell a lot about a guy by his sense of humor - or lack thereof. The incoming Governor of New York, young David Patterson of Harlem, the first African-American to serve in the chair of Clinton and Jay, Hughes and Roosevelt, Smith and FDR, Rockefeller and Carey had the line of the day when asked by a reporter if he'd ever patronized a prostitute.

"Only the lobbyists," he said.

And thus, got off to a very good start indeed.

Tunnel Exit Street

My favorite couple of blocks in all of New York (from the existential perspective, I mean) has no doorways, no stoops, no storefronts, and barely any sidewalk to speak of. Indeed, by rights it shouldn't have a name. But it does.

Tunnel Exit Street.

There was no famous denizen of Murray Hill named Tunnel Exit whom the City Council saw fit to honor with a sign. No legendary saloon keeper or actor or civil rights lion. Though as a name, come to think of it, Tunnel Exit has certain cinematic quality that I like.

No, Tunnel Exit Street is the barren stretch of roadway running north between East 37th Street and East 41st Street. It begins outside the west-bound exit of the Queens Midtown Tunnel and is essentially a conduit between Second and Third Avenues with the sole purpose of diffusing rumbling trucks onto less-congested side streets rather than a single, already grid-locked avenue.

There are no addresses on Tunnel Exit Street, yet there is a thin sidewalk on the east side and pedestrians - oh, say those making a quick trip to the Frontier Coffee Shop from the old News Building, just for argument's sake - often use it as a shortcut.

And the city, in its wisdom, has seen the justice of placing formal green street signs on every corner. They hang there each day on their bleak couple of blocks where no mailman needs to tread, no delivery trucks pull up, and they speak their simple message with some strange, civic pride.

Mister, every street in this town has a name even if it has no addresses. No dwellings. No places of business.

And you, sir, are on Tunnel Exit Street.

Taconic Style

Franklin Delano Roosevelt still matters in New York State, as anyone who hits the road on an Indian Summer weekend north of the city certainly knows. Yesterday, we took the Taconic State Parkway, created by a commission chaired by FDR as his first foray back into politics after his paralyzing illness and a clear sign of the big shoulders government Roosevelt was to later create.

The Taconic was an extension of the Bronx River Parkway, built by Robert Moses to connect the city to Bear Mountain, and that's where we ended up yesterday, with the temperature in the mid-80s. We hiked down to the zoo and the historic sites by the Bear Mountain Bridge, and on the way back stopped at the surviving redoubt of Fort Clinton, where the British put American soldiers to the bayonet in the hundreds in 1777.

You can see the four-pointed star formation, some the stones laid as walls, and the mounded grass. The mid-Hudson actions of 1777 were a series of failed land battles by the Americans, but they held up the British long enough to prevent the reinforcement of Burgoyne's men at Saratoga and the Crown's effort to split the mutinous colonies along the line of the Hudson failed.

Later, we climbed Perkins Drive (via Honda, not foot) to the summit and once again marveled at the views, and at the hawks circling below us. Bear Mountain is one of those incredible New York State parks - like Jones Beach - that amaze in their very existence as public accommodations. Only liberals create what  lower New York State has in public beauty.

Driving up the Taconic, slicing over toward the Hudson at Peekskill and up and over the Bear Mountain Bridge to the park - then on to West Point or back over to Cold Spring (or in our case, down the Palisades Parkway to the mall, dinner at Johnny Rockets and an hour in the Lego Store with the two boys) is a brilliant reminder of the existence of what I call Taconic Style, that blend of rustic architecture, roadways and parkland that is unique to the Hudson Valley.

The artist and I had our wedding reception on old ferry chugging through the highlands two decades ago, and we sipped champagne will watching the lights twinkle above us at West Point. We return to the highlands at least once a year, and always bring out-of-town visitors to the peaks and vistas of those hills. Today, we were once again the in the Taconic region, but east on Lake Mahopac. For the boys, it was still warm enough to swim and I took a turn in the kayak. Tomorrow's an early one, so we didn't stay late - just long enough for the day to wane, and the lights to glimmer across the lake.

Waldorf Salad

Yesterday, I was honored to be a speaker at the 2007 Conrad N. Hilton Humanitarian Prize Symposium in New York. I'll wrote about it for onPhilanthropy, but I've been mostly offline for more than a day. It was worth it: the Symposium drew a crowd of more than 300 leaders in philanthropy and provided a rare global perspective on the confluence of development work, government policy, and the world economy. The keynote address was delivered by United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon, who saw the need for greater cooperation between philanthropic organizations and the world body - “Civilians continue to bear the intolerable brunt of crises not of their own making….and life-saving assistance cannot wait for the next round of peace talks.”

The Symposium was at the Waldorf. I figure I've spent several weeks of my life in that building over the years, from political dinners in my reporting days to the endless round of fundraising galas. The name comes from William Waldorf Astor, who built the original where the Empire State Building stands. The "new" Waldorf has been on Park Avenue since 1931 and it's as New York as it gets, even though it fairly crawls with tourists. The ballroom is essentially New York's parish hall, where the dances and fundraisers and more upscale, star-studded type of bingo night are held near-nightly.

The Waldorf's been a home for visiting movies stars and Presidents, as any walk down one of the back hallways will tell you in black and white photography, but my favorite Waldorf movie is The Out-Of-Towners with Jack Lemmon and Sandy Dennis as the Ohio couple who barely survive muggings, various strikes, and some bad 1970 New York attitude on the way to discovering that middle America is more aligned with their true selves. So okay, I hate the stupid ending. But I love the 1970 New York and the collection of character actors that inhabit it.

Would that AMC's Mad Men had gone a similar casting route. (Yes, that was a long way to get to what is essentially a reminder that I'll be live-blogging Mad Men tonight at 10 PM EDT over at newcritics.com). Outside of Robert Morse as Bert Cooper, there's more essential New York in almost any episode of Sesame Street (or any classic Bugs Bunny cartoon, for that matter). Still, last week's was the best episode to date and thanks to the fab MA Peel, well-blogged as well. I'll try to keep up my end tonight. Please show up.

Been There, Done That?

I'll admit it: the new Silicon Alley Insider slipped beneath my vacationing, blogging, media-obsessed radar since its beta launch a month ago. And I have to be honest. I don't think in terms of "Silicon Alley" any more, and don't know too many people who do. There's an archaic, historic quality to the term and it goes nicely mixed with two full jiggers of "back in the day" around the better media watering holes.

Silicon Alley Insider. That was me about a decade ago. I was described as exactly that many a time, and I remember it all moderately well.

Feverishly tracking mezzanine rounds while swilling free booze and picking at  massive sushi boat centerpieces while girls danced in cages to the sounds of third-rate Moby knock-offs and hungry headhunters, pr guys, and investment bankers circled the silicon slam dance just waiting for the moment when a bunch of money-sucking startups led by guys who kept their dogs in the office started to throw off cash.

In other words, that was then. That ain't now. Web 2.0 and the ever-churning media circus of New York does nothing to capture that scene, which was powered by art as much as money, by driven  free-wheeling invention and the knowing waste of overcapitalization by leering, good-time trust-funders and hungry bridge and tunnel kids.

Still, Kevin Ryan's new venture proceeds from a feeling that New York's wired and entrepreneurial community is under-represented in a world that makes Michael Arrington relevant. He may be right. And he's got some interesting partners: investor Dwight Merriman,and  former Forbes scribes Dan Frommer and  Peter Kafka. And who better to report on the post-Henry Blodget era in technology than Henry Blodget himself - he of former cheerleading Prudential analyst days, more lately a quieter, more thoughtful analyst.

I have some advice, fellas - having co-created the original Silicon Alley insider with Jason Chervokas in 1995. A wire service of deals and hirings involving New York new media companies large and small won't cut it. Nobody needs TechCrunch East. We don't have the deal-flow, to be honest about it. But we do have the brains, and we do have the advertising. Go for personality, go for analysis, go for the jugular. Or people won't care.

Poke a few holes in business plans. Question a few financings. Rattle some cages in midtown and find some under-capitalized talent out in Brooklyn or the South Bronx or Hoboken. Tell me what the kids are doing, what the artists think. Tell me something new. I want a reason to get exited about new media in this town. Give it me, and I'll keep you guys around the feed reader forever.

That Old Familiar Feeling

We heard the rumble and thought it was thunder. Then it went on for a while and I said to Phil Li: "Wow, I hope that's thunder." The we looked out onto Second Avenue and saw people running ... very clearly running away from something big and bad and rumbling to the west. Then we all ran, just as the alarms began to go off.

Down seven flights, out onto Second Avenue, down to 41st where we looked west and saw a massive rolling plume of smoke and steam just two blocks away, blotting out the public library. And the never-ending thunder rattled off the limestone facades and glass curtain walls.

So we went east through Tudor City, took a breath, and I suggested the plaza at 43rd and First across from the UN - I knew from my lunchtime walks that it was a full story below where we stood and was encased in a sheath of concrete and granite. "Let's stay together," said Susan. So we hustled over there, not quite as panicked as before. I was thinking about that rolling plume, and I as pretty sure it was going up and not out. A transformer, or a big pipe.

Con Ed and not al Qaeda. Pretty sure. Like 80 percent sure. But we waited a while just to be sure. The rumble quieted, the cell phones began to work again, and news drifted in. An underground fire, an explosion, a huge steam pipe. Injuries and closed streets.

Now 99 percent sure, we walked back to work through the crowds and flashing lights and barricades and put on the television. A hell of an explosion. A miracle that no one was killed at rush hour.

The subway is closed but the trains are running. I'm sitting in an air-conditioned car right now in Grand Central, waiting to head home. Cool and calm. But also reminded, quite clearly, of what went on before.

You could feel the panic; it was an instantaneously communicable disease that swept the stairwells and streets. We sucked it in like air. People screamed. "It's coming! Run! Oh my God!" There were tears and prayers and then some embarrassment after - better that, better a few laughs really.

The city felt brittle in a flash-frozen instant. Very brittle.

UPDATE: One dead, 11 hurt. And I'm realizing listening to the passengers around me that if you were close enough to feel that roar, to link it to the sound of collapsing buildings and that rolling, boiling cloud, you were scared. You were one of thousands who fled, either in panic or some form of semi-controlled flight. Farther away, you were just concerned. It works like that.