Up on the Roof The sun was shining on Fayette Street. On the street it came in dappled pieces of sunlight through the leafy cover of the elms that lined the street. But Karen had opened her bedroom window and gone out on the roof of her mother’s house as had been her habit for many years. Ithaca was not Tampa, but as they say, even the sun shines on a dog’s ass some days,…
Steady Teddy I have a 10-inch high bust of Teddy Roosevelt that I was given as an award for something or other a few years ago at a ceremony held at Federal Hall. Federal Hall is the building at Wall and Broad Street that is thought of as the center of the capitalist universe. On the other three corners sit, 16 Wall Street, 23 Broad Street and the New York Stock Exchange building. 16 Wall…
Division of Labor As I approach retirement age I am forced to wonder what my days will be like. Everyone I speak to says they have no problem whatsoever filling up their days. What this tells me is that as people move into retirement, their comfort with lying about how they spend their time goes up. I will conjecture that what was allocated for lying about the length of their commute and their take-home…
Albanian Shave & Haircut My father, who had minimal impact on my life due to his choice to be absent for most of it, gave me only one piece of meaningful advice. He told me to never let anyone other than an Italian cut my hair. I get it. Italians are often good at style and good at attention to detail. My only problem with Italians who make things is that they make them…
The Isle of Staaten It’s been about a year since Kim and I moved back to Manhattan after a three-year stint living on Staten Island. I think about it often since it was an unusual place to move (there was a very particular reason for it) and an unusual place to live. I have an office that stares out to New York Harbor and watches the Staten Island Ferry go back and forth to…
Getting Over It I recently had breakfast with an old friend. This is someone who I had participated actively in recruiting for his job. I thought he was both highly qualified and appropriately aggressive, and that he would “move the needle” on leading the organization forward. There is a reason leaders are highly paid and much sought-after. Organizations need this impetus to progress and it is quite hard to accomplish. The euphemisms abound about…
Trump Vodouisant Legend has it that in 1847 Dantor Erzulie, the Vodou goddess of beauty and love appeared on a tree in the waterfall and began to heal the sick and perform miracles. Catholic priests declared this sacrilege and ordered the tree cut down. Since then Erzulie has been “disguised or camouflaged” by locals as the Catholic Virgin of Miracles to placate the Catholic priests. It was then that the inhabitants of the poorest…
Vini Vidi Vici Venezuela I blame the crisis in Venezuela on my mother. At the end of 1953 my mother had already lived in Venezuela, working for the Rockefeller Foundation, for seven years. She had married a Venezuelan citizen, bought a house, joined several social and sports clubs (Mom was an athlete), given birth to two daughters (the second born in Caracas, so a natural Venezuelan citizen), hired a governess and even bought a dog.…
Rubber Chicken Last night was the annual Cornell Big Red Bash for the College of Business of Cornell. Kim and I attended this event at the cavernous setting of Guastavino’s, which is built into the base of the 59th Street Bridge. I’m not sure it is intended but partying under a bridge has a certain Three Billy Goats Gruff aspect to it. It conjures up images of Scandinavian trolls hiding under the bridge to…
Living the Dream I am sitting at the Bloomberg Center cafeteria on the Cornell Tech Campus on Roosevelt Island between Manhattan and Queens. Back in 2012 when I began the New York Wheel project, I was in lockstep during the NYC approval process (called the ULURP process) with the Cornell Tech Campus project. We were destined to open at about the same time, but after six years, that project went off the rails while the…