Ginia Bellafante

NEW YORK — On Labor Day, a 48-year-old retired sergeant with the New York Police Department was found dead in a car on Staten Island, apparently having shot himself. The department has been shaken by a rash of suicides; this case would mark the 10th in 2019 and the eighth since June, already double the number of suicides the department experiences on average each year.

Given that the city has grown ever safer, the cause of the increase is unclear. But Police Commissioner James O’Neill has spoken honestly and compassionately about what he describes as a mental health crisis, the crucial need for peer support among officers and the importance of erasing the stigma of seeking and receiving counseling. Several weeks ago, Chief of Department Terence Monahan, the highest-ranked uniformed police officer, said in a radio interview that the force was looking to hire psychologists who could be out in the field, and the department was also working to improve access to mental health professionals through the city’s inadequate insurance system.

Little of this seemed to resonate with Patrick Lynch, president of the Police Benevolent Association, the biggest police union in the world, and arguably labor’s most bellicose figurehead. In a video he posted on Twitter last month, the day after an officer killed himself in Queens, Lynch delivered his therapeutically dubious message to the union’s more than 20,000 members: “If you’re on the edge and contemplating suicide, don’t [expletive] do it, come on.”

He then called on politicians to end “the demonization and anti-cop rhetoric,” and warned officers that if they did kill themselves, good friends on and off the job would feel “betrayed and abandoned — by you.”

To the extent that the department’s senior management has tried in recent years to align itself more with progressive values, union leadership has pursued a different track altogether, one stuck in outdated ideologies about the preeminent sanctity of police work.

What has emerged is an intensifying cultural conflict. One side envisions officers and communities working in tandem in the pursuit of safety. The other sees the world outside the precinct locker room as a place of ever-present hostility and danger, a world in which an officer’s judgment should virtually never be questioned.

Undone by O’Neill’s recent firing of Daniel Pantaleo, whose chokehold led to the death of Eric Garner during an attempted arrest five years ago, the union’s delegate assembly last week unanimously approved resolutions of no confidence in Mayor Bill de Blasio and O’Neill. What this means is that they want the governor to remove the democratically elected mayor, and they want the commissioner to resign because, as Lynch said in a statement, “Both men have displayed an appalling pattern of malfeasance and nonfeasance that disqualifies them from continuing to serve.”

The fact that civic leaders allowed Pantaleo to remain on the force and receive a salary during an interminably long investigation, enraging activists and ordinary people around the country, already seemed like a major concession to the union — to all but the leaders of the union themselves. In their view, anything short of subservience is betrayal.

This was not the first time that a resolution of no confidence was issued under Lynch’s stewardship of the PBA. Fifteen years ago, the union called for the resignation of the commissioner at the time, Raymond Kelly, for “jumping to conclusions” after an unarmed African American teenager was killed by a police officer in a dark stairwell of the Louis Armstrong Houses in Brooklyn. Kelly had merely said that the shooting did not seem justified.

Activists and community organizers have long held that the opinions of union leaders — largely white men in middle age — are out of sync with those in the rank and file. And the administrators of the department, including the commissioner’s office, increasingly agree. The force itself has become more and more diverse over the years: within the department, 155 languages are spoken. Among its uniformed personnel, the number of white male officers has shrunk from just under 16,000 in 1988 to 9,400 today, while the number of Hispanic men has more than doubled.

And yet Lynch’s reign is essentially unchallenged: This summer he was elected to another term as president, running unopposed. After Pantaleo’s firing, he assumed a posture of fatalism, arguing that the department was “rudderless” and that O’Neill would be unable to right things.

Lynch urged officers to proceed cautiously “in this new reality,” when, he believed, operating according to standard protocols could result in dismissals and threats to personal safety. He was, in effect, pushing for a slowdown.

By the end of August, felony arrests rate had fallen which suggested that officers had heeded his call. At the same time, declining arrest rates are just what Lynch’s adversaries among police reform advocates are always seeking.

Lynch’s approach seems engineered to foment anger between police officers and the communities they serve at a time when that anger actually seems to be receding, when neighborhood policing strategies have sought to change the way that beat officers do business, making them look at people as human beings rather than prospective felons.

What does Lynch’s anger ultimately serve?

This article originally appeared in

(Big City)

Is the NYPD at War With Itself?

NEW YORK — In October 1973, the federal government charged Trump Management Corp. with discrimination against African Americans seeking apartments in the 39 buildings the firm operated, most of them in Brooklyn and Queens.

A short time out of Wharton, the company’s then president, Donald Trump, quickly denied the charges as “absolutely ridiculous.”

Between 1970 and 1980, New York City experienced its most significant population decline since the 1780s, but while population fell overall, the number of minorities living in the city grew. This was especially true in Brooklyn; in 1970 blacks made up a quarter of the population and by 1980 they made up nearly a third.

For some white families who didn’t flee the city, a sense that the territory they occupied was theirs and theirs alone bred a siege mentality. In this view, there were those who belonged and those who trespassed. (This was happening most notably, perhaps, in South Brooklyn, where Trump had his office in the early 1970s.)

When the outsiders arrived they were shown, too often by the most violent means, just how resistant to porousness their communities could be.

They were told — just as President Trump told four freshman congresswomen, via Twitter this week, none of them white and all of them thoroughly American — to go back to where they came from, a meme he recycled at a rally in North Carolina on Wednesday night to chants of “Send her back!”

Where “they came from” was often merely on the other side of a parkway, a housing complex, a strip mall — beyond the lines and fortresses created for the preservation of a white ethnic dominance that was eroding.

It is this place that the president comes from essentially — a time, a part of the world and a mindset in which access to certain kinds of power, comfort and rights of assertion was not to be universally shared.

New York in the 1980s was characterized, on the one hand, by the moneyed ostentation Trump personified, and on the other, by racial violence that housing segregation helped facilitate.

In two of the decade’s most notorious hate crimes, young black men — Michael Griffith in Queens in 1986 and Yusuf Hawkins in Brooklyn three years later — appeared in neighborhoods where they had no obvious connection only to get chased and killed by throngs of mindlessly enraged white boys.

Griffith, who was born in Trinidad and lived in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, was driving with friends on an empty stretch of road late one night just before Christmas, when their car broke down. He and two of the others walked 3 miles to Howard Beach to get help. Leaving the pizzeria where they had stopped to eat, they were confronted by a mob who beat them. Griffith died running away from them and into a moving car.

Cars, the great American signifiers of social ascension and escape, figured poignantly in these narratives. Hawkins had the misfortune of finding an ad for a used Pontiac he wanted to check out, for sale by an owner in the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn.

Also accompanied by three friends, Hawkins, who was 16 at the time and lived in the largely black neighborhood of East New York, ventured into a white, mostly Italian enclave and was shot. Three days later, hundreds of black protesters who marched through Bensonhurst were met by jeering whites who shouted racial slurs at them.

Another murder which predated these but received considerably less attention has mostly faded from memory and could have been prevented. It follows the same bleak arc.

Three black men, transit workers coming off a shift in Coney Island, late one night in June 1982, stopped for something to eat. In this instance it was a bagel shop on Avenue X in Gravesend, outside of which a black police officer and another black man, on his way home to Queens one night, had also been attacked not long before.

Driving away from the shop, the men were set upon by white teenagers who taunted and screamed at them: “What are you doing in this area?” The car stalled. The teenagers smashed the windows and began assaulting the men inside. One of the three victims, William Turks, who had moved to New York from Birmingham, Alabama, was fatally injured, his body landing on a sewer grate.

The first of the young men to go on trial in the case was someone named Gino Bova, who was 18 and lived at 675 Avenue Z in Gravesend. The building was part of the Beach Haven Apartments, one of the large housing complexes built by Fred C. Trump after World War II.

The government’s discrimination case against the Trumps had been settled in a consent decree several years earlier that included stipulations meant to ensure the desegregation of buildings in the company’s empire. In 1978, though, the government accused the Trumps of violating that decree, but while the Justice Department was amassing its evidence, the original agreement expired. The case was ultimately closed in spring 1982.

Four black families lived in Bova’s building, press accounts of the trial pointed out, but how long they had lived there and what feelings they may or may not have triggered in the boy is hard to know.

Despite the passage of the Fair Housing Act in 1968, housing discrimination had been rampant in many parts of the city; other major developers of middle-class apartment buildings, in the precincts beyond Manhattan, had also come under the government’s watch.

What was made all too obvious by 1982 was that it was not safe for black men to wander in New York City in places where they had not been welcomed to live. Bova’s trial ended with a manslaughter conviction, not the murder conviction that prosecutors sought, by a jury that defense lawyers had engineered to include not a single black person on it.

Before the trial had begun, the commanding officer of the local police precinct, Capt. Joseph DeMartini, was asked why nothing had been done sooner to stop the teenagers who had colonized street corners seemingly in a perverse mode of defense against any signs of intrusion.

He responded in the vein of Bova’s lawyer, who claimed that his client was from “a good family,’’ an all too familiar call to exoneration. The police captain described the majority of the local young people who stood on street corners as “good and decent” individuals who were appalled by what had happened, and who would develop into “outstanding adults.”

The community was “typical,” he said, and if a pattern of brutalized prejudice was emerging, he wasn’t necessarily seeing it. “To say a black gets assaulted and to say it’s racial, I don’t know.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/18/nyregion/nyc-trump-racism.html" id="b53093ce-02e5-3b54-a15b-13084fe5554d">The New York Times</a>.

The NYC Roots of Trump and 'Go Back Where You Came From'

After several speeches addressing the need for cyclists to be better protected on the road, those who came to the park staged a die-in, lying down in mournful silence — a response to what has become known in the biking community as “the crisis.”

Just two years ago, the city’s transportation department issued an encouraging report on cycling in the city: over the preceding 20 years it had become safer and easier to navigate streets that were increasingly clogged with cars and trucks.

That progress, though, now appeared harder to identify. Between 2006 and 2015, the study noted, the number of bicycle trips made in a single year increased from 66 million to 164 million, and this presumably played a role in impeding the dangers coming from motor vehicles. For years, researchers in the field of traffic safety have posited that the more cyclists there are out on the streets, the safer the riding experience is for everyone. But recently that theory had begun to seem less reliable.

This year, 15 cyclists have died, struck by cars and trucks — more than the total, 10, killed during the whole of 2018. And while the crisis refers in the immediate sense to these fatalities, it speaks more broadly to the continued, reflexive privileging of automotive culture even as the urgencies of climate change mount and terrify.

Over the past two decades, urban planning has demonstrated little will to stem the forces of suburbanization resulting from the choice made by many families to remain in New York with the belief that they should forfeit none of the conveniences of living in Greenwich. Just this week The Daily News reported on one neighborhood’s rage over a financier who manage to carve a driveway for himself in front of his enormous townhouse out of a patch of public sidewalk.

About 45% of all households in New York City have cars according to recent census data, with close to 93,000 of them owning three or more. This reality has unfolded alongside the rise of Uber and Lyft and our growing reliance on getting everything — pet food, tennis balls, cocktail shakers, bulk ancient grains — delivered to us within 24 hours via the use of panel trucks. These developments not only threaten the cyclist’s sense of autonomy but also undermine the use of small alternative vehicles that reduce our carbon footprint.

Last month this increasingly congested streetscape absorbed 1,000 shareable mopeds. They arrived seemingly out of nowhere from a newly formed company called Revel whose chairman and co-founder Frank Reig, a former chef, wanted to ease the complications involved in moving from one part of Brooklyn or Queens to another. (“You’ve got a girlfriend in Williamsburg; how do I get there from Crown Heights?” he said by way of explaining his inspiration, a scenario that within certain demographics has a relatability factor upward of 99%.)

Alarmingly, the city has very little jurisdiction over these vehicles, and motorists in New York are not accustomed to sharing the road with a guy whose major qualifications to ride one is that he has a credit card and a girlfriend in Williamsburg. The rules surrounding these vehicles are minimal and governed not by the city but by the state, which simply requires you to have a standard driver’s license — not a motorcycle license — to operate them.

Revel is activated by an app that demands proof of that license (and prohibits usage if you have certain traffic violations). But although the company offers free instruction, you as a rider are not mandated to take a single class and might likely be inclined to dismiss the whole idea on the grounds that it would defeat the free-spirited, when-in-Rome ethos of a moped in the first place.

Perhaps in a different city a highly visible public-education would accompany this kind of roll out but at the moment, New York is not that city. It is a city managed by a mayor who, as Charles Komanoff, a former director of Transportation Alternatives, a prominent advocacy group put it, “is car culture.’’

The description applies not only because Bill de Blasio is chauffeured 12 miles to the gym on mornings that he is not out of town running for president, but also because the values of his administration can seem as if they are buried in the 20th century.

This was especially clear last fall, when a stretch of the Brooklyn Queens Expressway was revealed to be in dire condition. The first impulse from the city was not to eliminate it or to reduce the number of car and trucks dependent on the artery. Instead it proposed shutting down a heavily used pedestrian thoroughfare — the Brooklyn Heights Promenade — for several years as the BQE was returned to the state of polish in which it was created during the era of Robert Moses. The idea was regressive enough to attract almost no support.

One of the most moving speeches given at the Washington Square rally came from Hindy Schachter, whose husband died five years ago after he was hit by a cyclist while he was jogging in Central Park. She was there, she said, because she blamed inadequate road design and infrastructure for her husband’s death, not the cyclist who ran into him.

Of the city’s 1,240 miles of bike lanes, 337 have been added during the de Blasio administration, which is significant, in theory if not always in practice. The lanes are often obstructed by parked cars and the police, who have long maintained a skeptical if not hostile disposition toward cyclists, blame them in many cases for crashes that are ultimately the fault of motorists.

City Councilman Brad Lander has proposed a bill that would use camera technology to identify the city’s worst offenders — those with many speeding tickets and other infractions on their records — committing them to improving or impounding their cars. The City Council speaker, Corey Johnson, has pushed for the city to increase the number of bike-lane miles it creates each year to 50.

Ideally, New York would be ribboned with continuous bike paths that made street driving virtually unnecessary. But even if cost were not a factor, our system of governance empowers local community boards to have outsize influence over what gets built in their neighborhoods. Communities have fought back against bike lanes on the grounds that they will take away parking spaces, that they are aesthetically dubious, that they are a sign of further unwanted transformations.

At the rally in Washington Square I met a woman named Kweli Campbell, relatively new to cycling but someone who has been committed to expanding biking opportunities in Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn, where her family has deep roots. The resistance that she and others there have met comes from those who fear that bike lanes signal more insidious forms of gentrification. In neighborhoods where there has traditionally been little investment in infrastructure, bike lanes might feel hard to justify. But the biking world, something obvious from rallies and reflected in the recent deaths — among them an artist’s, a courier’s, a middle-age man’s from Brownsville in Brooklyn — is huge and diverse, spanning many demographics.

And the dangers do not discriminate.

New York Was Supposedly Getting Better for Cyclists. What Happened?

NEW YORK — On a particularly humid evening this week, hundreds of cyclists gathered in Washington Square Park for an action reminiscent of the years when AIDS summoned so many to protest bureaucratic indifference to tragedy.

New York was supposedly getting better for cyclists. What happened?

It was within this context that the Stonewall uprising, whose 50th anniversary has drawn millions of visitors to New York this month, unfolded in June 1969. After years of enduring police raids on gay bars, where men and women faced arrest for simply dancing with members of their own sex, the patrons of the Stonewall Inn were suddenly moved to retaliate.

What transpired from that galvanizing moment and over the course of the next half-century was a movement to upend the prejudices and misapprehensions that had taken such deep root in the national psyche. It was a vibrant movement that would directly lead to the decriminalization of sex, workplace protections, the freedom to openly serve in the military, to marry, to live unremarkably.

While the struggles for women’s rights and racial equality have never been regarded as nearing an endpoint, the campaign for gay freedoms has inched closer to a sense of victory and completion. Same-sex marriage is constitutionally protected; there is an openly gay candidate for president; the chief executive of Apple, one of the most profitable companies in the world, is a gay man.

And yet the broader gains of the movement have been distributed unevenly. From the inception, it was infused with class tensions that have continued to play out over the intervening decades, creating very different bench marks of success for those living far outside the parameters of the white professional elite.

The breadth of the gap was clear at a recent Pride rally in the Bronx. It was a celebration, to be sure, but also a political call to arms, held in front of a courthouse on a bright Sunday morning at the same time that a party was underway on a rooftop in Midtown Manhattan — the “Pride Luminaries Brunch,” a tribute to business leaders. In the Bronx, oration came from local elected officials and activists, outlining where priorities ought to lie.

Sean Coleman, who a decade ago liquidated his 401(k) to start an LGBTQ community center nearby, took the stage early on, talking about the misplaced cultural focus on the need for gender-neutral bathrooms when “black trans women are being slaughtered in the street with just a hashtag acknowledging their existence.’’

He mentioned Layleen Polanco, a transgender woman who had been arrested on misdemeanor assault charges in April and wound up on Rikers Island because she couldn’t afford the $500 bail. This month she was found dead in the jail, where she had been placed in solitary confinement. He read the names of black transgender women who had been killed around the country this year. He lamented that the masterful forces assembled for marriage equality seemed to have disbanded even when so much work still needed to be accomplished.

“Everybody ain’t surfing this rainbow wave,’’ he said to a crowd that seemed to understand this intimately.

When Coleman started the center, Destination Tomorrow, he said later, he wanted to focus on economic hardship. The Bronx has a household poverty rate of 28%, 10 points higher than the citywide average and more than double the national rate. Transgender people are multiply burdened. They have problems with identification, for example — their paperwork might not match their presentation — and this can get in the way of finding work, which in turn can get in the way of finding safe and decent housing.

“There was just a lot of neglect in terms of what people needed to be gainfully employed,’’ he said. “Folks thought ‘mission accomplished.’”

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez also appeared at the rally, taking to the microphone in a similar spirit. She explained that the Bronx remained the front line in the fight for LGBTQ rights in New York City. “Pride is about honoring that front line,” she told the audience.

Since the advent of medical advances more than 20 years old now, HIV has been a manageable chronic illness rather than a terminal one. But in low-income communities of color, HIV and AIDS remain central to the conversation in ways outsiders rarely recognize. Of the 1,790 people who died of AIDS in New York City in 2016, 1,471 were black or Hispanic, and more than half were living in extreme poverty. Across the country, according to the Centers for Disease Control, African Americans accounted for 43% of HIV diagnoses in 2017, though they represent just 13% of the population.

The musical “A Strange Loop’’ made its debut this month to acclaim and sold-out performances off-Broadway. It addresses the internalized bias that black gay men experience and the perilous self-doubt that stems from it. The writer and composer, Michael R. Jackson, had been enraged by the shallow “Queer Eye” representation of gay life, propagated by what he calls the “gaytriarchy,’’ a model revolving around the consumer habits of white gay men.

In the play, AIDS figures prominently. And a few months before it opened, Jackson’s collaborator, also black and gay, died of AIDS. He had failed to get the treatments that surely would have saved him because he decided that God was rightfully punishing him, Jackson believes. Increasing access to a category of drugs known as PrEP, which reduces the risk of getting HIV from sex by more than 90%, will do little, Jackson argues, for people who don’t have the sense of self-respect and entitlement to take them in the first place.

“It is your self-hatred that will kill you,’’ he said. “Secrets, silence, stigma, shame — that is the virus.”

One year after the Stonewall uprising, in 1970, a committee was formed to determine how to commemorate it, and the idea of personal esteem emerged as a crucial aspect of the discussion. The plan was to march and offer other events over the course of a weekend; visitors would be invited from out of town.

Initially the celebration was to be held under the banner of “Gay Power,’’ but one organizer, Craig Schoonmaker, objected to the designation. Too few people in the world ever acquire any real power, he argued. The term “pride’’ seemed better suited. “The poison was shame,’’ he explained in an interview many years later, “and the antidote is pride.” Pride was something that anyone could achieve.

In the earliest days of the movement though, affluent white men rarely embodied it. There was often enough at stake — at home, at work — to make authenticity and protest too great a risk. “The more you had to lose, the less you were involved,” said David Mixner, a longtime activist who has advised presidents and prime ministers on issues involving gay rights.

When Joyce Hunter, one of the leaders of the first gay rights march on Washington, in 1979, was a student at Hunter College, she observed that her middle-class peers were more hesitant to enter the vanguard of the resistance than she was as a black lesbian who had grown up in an orphanage and later public housing.

“No one wanted to be the spokesperson for a gay-rights group,” she said. “I was out, and I didn’t care who knew.”

This disparity is not lost on people like Coleman, a black transgender man, who pointed out in his speech at Bronx Pride that marginalized people — drag queens, queer women of color — gave birth to the movement. They were there at Stonewall, and before. How, he wondered, were we honoring their heirs now?

'everybody ain't surfing this rainbow wave' Class divisions in gay rights

In January 1966, Time magazine published an essay called “The Homosexual in America,’’ which offered a glimpse into mainstream perceptions of gay life. It accepted the consensus that homosexuality was the result of a “disabling fear of the opposite sex,” concluding that such an orientation was “a pathetic, little second-rate substitute” for a meaningful life, a “pernicious sickness.”

'Everybody ain't surfing this rainbow wave': Class divisions in gay rights

<h1>(Big City): NEW YORK — I wish I could tell you when I bought my first pair of Gloria Vanderbilt jeans, under what emotional and transformative circumstance. But the truth is that I have no recollection at all — just the strong suspicion that I acquired them with babysitting money, at one of two Long Island malls, sometime around 1983.</h1>

It would be hard to exaggerate the role that designer jeans played in the life of a certain kind of teenage girl growing up between the years of the Carter presidency and Black Monday a decade later. If you were from a striving, suburban family — one many degrees of separation removed from anyone like Gloria Vanderbilt — then you could not easily shake the belief that popularity, or even just acceptance, was a dream to be forfeited unless you wore tightfitting denim with someone else’s name on the back.

It was not until I got to college and met people whose lives, like Vanderbilt’s, were preciously circumscribed by maps guiding them back and forth between the Upper East Side and key leisure destinations on the Atlantic coastline that it became clear what real status was — and how little it had to do with a pair of jeans carried home in a bag from Bloomingdale’s.

Gloria Vanderbilt, who died at her home in Manhattan on Monday at the age of 95, possessed position and pedigree of especially high grade, but she saw the value in dismantling the old hierarchies. By middle age, with her fortune dwindling, she had to hustle. But unlike so many other recipients of vast sums of inherited money — Barbara Hutton or Doris Duke (who legally adopted a belly dancer she believed to be the reincarnation of her only child) — Vanderbilt was naturally disposed for a life of industry over chronic indulgence, for engagement over eccentric seclusion.

And so she emerged, however unintentionally, as a template for a whole new era in marketing, in which lineage would now become something to monetize.

Vanderbilt held to her own status with an appealingly loose grip, realizing all too clearly that whatever privileges it conferred, it rarely brought peace. In the mid-1970s, she found herself in the garment business, selling jeans to ordinary people, and while this hardly made her an agent of the resistance, it gave her outlier standing among people who spent their childhoods in mansions in Newport, Rhode Island.

Vanderbilt had come of age when the adage for a woman in the highest tiers of society still applied, that her name appear in the paper only three times during the course of her life: when she was born, when she married and when she died. But Vanderbilt never had luxury of choosing obscurity.

As a child, she was the subject of an ugly custody battle that played out in the New York tabloids and society pages. No movement was too small to warrant coverage. The day after Christmas, in 1934, The New York Times ran a story with the headline: “Gloria Vanderbilt Home for the Day Attends Mass With Her Mother and Has Private Party With a ‘Very Large Tree.’"

By the time she was called to make a living, she made virtue of the public’s fascination with her.

Even in the years before she started her company, one that relied on the image of an accessible aristocrat, she seemed to place little importance in distancing herself from the broader universe, in hiding from photographers and cultivating mystique.

In 1954, when she was still married to her second husband, conductor Leopold Stokowski, a reporter approached her one evening during intermission at the theater, where she was on a date with Frank Sinatra. Instead of rebuffing the reporter, passing along the number of a press agent or insisting that she and Sinatra were just friends — because really, who was just friends with Frank Sinatra? — she offered that she and her husband had been talking about splitting up for three years, that he was gone for long periods and that she decided to “break away.’’ She had contacted a lawyer, she said, but harbored “no bitterness.”

In the end, Vanderbilt’s legacy had little to do with fashion. Slim-cut jeans, tailored high at the waist, were her only signature, even though lots of things were produced under her name. Other people and companies made skinny jeans with prominently displayed rear-end labels; eventually the trend ran its course. What endured was Vanderbilt’s way with self-revelation and her seemingly primal understanding that often the best way to sell something was to sell yourself.

Whatever vulgarities followed in the years to come, whatever the subversions of her formula that gave us the Hilton sisters and the Kardashians and so much else that remains regrettable, Vanderbilt was in pursuit of something true.

Beginning in the mid-1980s, she wrote poignant memoirs that described a life complicated by loneliness and loss. Her mother was monstrously absent; her father died before she was 2. Even after her mother had lost custody of young Gloria to the child’s aunt, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, she squandered her visitation rights. Instead of spending time with her daughter during these interludes, she would leave her alone as she pursued her life of maniacal socializing.

Later Vanderbilt would write about the son she famously lost to suicide in the late 1980s.

Others who had built fashion and beauty empires — Coco Chanel, Estée Lauder — constructed them on narratives that polished over unglamorous biographical details — Chanel’s early years with a laundress mother, followed by her time in an orphanage; Lauder’s modest beginnings in Queens. Vanderbilt’s wealth and profile gave her the freedom of authenticity, of selling what was aspirational without the accompanying pretense.

You could buy something from Ralph Lauren and maintain the fiction that you were crisply in control — that you had arrived, and now looked, just as he did, as if you had been there all along. But the name “Gloria Vanderbilt” signaled a darker truth: that the world of money, while enviable in lots of ways, was chaotic and unreliable. Fate would always have its way with you; fortune was forever reversing itself.

Vanderbilt never seemed to stop telling stories, but she had interesting stories to tell. Writers — Joyce Carol Oates, Amy Hempel — were among her close friends, and her own books were widely praised. Ultimately Vanderbilt was the link between a time when the well-born said almost nothing to a present when they often say far too much.

She was born into a culture in which the rich circled high above the rest. She died in one in which they seem to live right down here among everyone else — with their Instagram feeds and jade eggs and gluten-free recipes and self-help bromides — even as they inhabit a gated universe that has become more and more insidiously elusive.

Gloria Vanderbilt could have had all the influence she wanted. She chose honesty instead.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/19/nyregion/gloria-vanderbilt-branding.html" target="_blank">The New York Times</a>.

Gloria Vanderbilt: The inventor of the personal brand

It was not until I got to college and met people whose lives, like Vanderbilt’s, were preciously circumscribed by maps guiding them back and forth between the Upper East Side and key leisure destinations on the Atlantic coastline that it became clear what real status was — and how little it had to do with a pair of jeans carried home in a bag from Bloomingdale’s.

Sam was a young man when he arrived, and within nine years he had acquired and sold two delis in the West Village and opened his own pet-supply store on Montague Street in Brooklyn Heights, where he has remained — the hardiest plant in the most unforgiving weather.

Montague Street, once the prime shopping artery of an affluent neighborhood, has few of the sort of independent stores that people who live near it actually want.

Like so many other commercial stretches of the city, it has storefronts that have been vacant for months and even years.

When Sam first established himself in Brooklyn Heights, Yemeni immigrants owned many of the businesses.

The narrative that followed featured the predictable story arc: Rents went up and up and up; Amazon and FreshDirect colonized our shopping habits; cellphone stores and urgent-care facilities descended.

Although a few years ago he had to let workers go, Sam has persevered. At any given point in his seven-day workweek, he can be found in his store alone, or outside greeting people, familiar with everyone and everything — every cocker spaniel and Maltese, husband and wife, wet-food preference, dry-food preference.

Not long ago, he introduced a customer who was widowed to another regular; the two decided to marry. Over the decades that Sam developed this devoted following, he became a homeowner and raised five children — one of them works in marketing, another is in dental school.

The likelihood of a scenario like that unfolding today seems fairly slim. For the millions of immigrants who came to this country during the 20th century, entry into the merchant class was a viable and important path to prosperity.

A new exhibit at the Tenement Museum on the Lower East Side — “Immigrants Mean Business: An Enduring History of Entrepreneurship” — reminds us of the outfits that began in pushcarts, grew to institutions and spanned generations. Today, there are 83,000 businesses in New York owned by people who came to the city from another country.

For those who seek to open stores now and build livelihoods around them, the challenges are forbidding if not insurmountable.

Three months ago, the Association for Neighborhood Housing and Development, an advocacy group, released a report based on lengthy interviews with 90 immigrant small-business owners in four neighborhoods in Manhattan, Queens and the Bronx — owners of shops and restaurants — and found that 77% were overburdened by rent, 40% reported instances of landlord harassment and more than a quarter of employers were forced to lay people off. Those workers themselves are typically immigrants as well.

We often talk about the empty-storefront problem as a crisis of urban planning and inadequate regulation, a threat to a beloved and intimate style of consumerism. But what is at stake is much greater than that — a blockage in a pipeline to social mobility when so many other opportunities have been foreclosed.

If you were to tour the upper West 20s in Manhattan’s Chelsea, you would find the vestiges of a thriving fur industry that advanced the fortunes of Greek immigrants who came in peak numbers from the 1950s to the 1970s, escaping the decimation of civil war. Many arrived from Kastoria, near the Albanian border, where the fur trade dates to the Middle Ages, when the city supplied the ermine pelts that lined the robes of Byzantine courtiers.

Recently, I took a walk around the neighborhood with Nick Pologeorgis, a second-generation furrier who operates a showroom and factory on West 29th Street, a business his father started in the 1960s more than a decade after arriving in New York from Crete.

The family made the eastward trek of the ambitious — moving from Brooklyn to Woodside, Queens, and ultimately to suburban Long Island and wide lawns. Nick took over the business in 1990, and some of the workers, who cut and sew pelts, remain from his father’s era. The men and women in the production room are largely Greek and Dominican. One, John Hilas, made a good enough living to send three children to college — a lawyer, an engineer and a teacher — and buy two houses in Queens, one of them as an investment.

The first real contraction of the fur industry came in the late 1980s and early ’90s, as the recession forced a shift in tastes away from excess and the feeling that animals ought not to be worn gained momentum. By the early 2000s, Nick told me, rents doubled as tech companies moved into the fur district. Then the rents just got higher.

Competition from more cheaply made furs in China made things harder. A number of the empty stores in the area once sold skins. The barbershops and diners that serviced the fur industry — owned by Greeks and Italians — vanished. Furriers who sold wholesale and retail coats and accessories paired up in single shops to save on rents.

There may no longer be any justification — if there was ever one to begin with — for killing animals in the service of creating a product that no one needs and most people cannot afford. But if the proposal to ban the sale of fur in New York, legislation put forth by the City Council Speaker Corey Johnson, does materialize, it will deliver the fatal sedative to an industry that has moved people forward for so long. The human cost is not negligible — more than 1,000 jobs would be affected.

Johnson has maintained that the ban would not have to happen abruptly, that workers could be retrained and placed in new careers in the fashion industry. But that might not be so easy, given that the average age of the worker in the fur industry is 49. In one shop’s backroom, I met a sewer who was 76, still very eager to keep going so that he could help his grown children and grandchildren. The business owners themselves would be forced to shut down.

“We need to do this humanely for both animals and workers,” Johnson told me. “Hopefully we can alleviate suffering in the world without creating more suffering.”

Few may mourn the fur industry when and if it does disappear. But what will come instead? What will happen when all the Greek diners and Yemeni convenience stores and Middle Eastern pet shops can no longer sustain themselves? Who will be inspired to come here and take their place?

The empty storefront crisis and the end of the American dream

NEW YORK — Sam Il-Rumi came to the United States with his parents and brothers in 1980, fleeing the occupied West Bank and settling in New York, where his father opened a pet-food store in the East Village.

Ordinarily, career politicians with outsize ambitions have succeeded in the fundamental business of forging alliances that will grease their ascent long before they decide to run for president. They have made friends at work; they have ingratiated themselves to those who embody a kind of human value proposition.

Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., has fellow Minnesotan and former Vice President Walter Mondale behind her. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., has her colleague Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., among many others. Former Vice President Joe Biden and Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., have 20 prominent Democrats divided evenly between them, many from their home states.

De Blasio, though, has had to search a bit further afield. He can now successfully claim to have corralled the formal affections of Michael Butler, mayor of Orangeburg, South Carolina, a city with a population of 13,000. A local councilman in the area, Willie Owens, endorsed him as well, a development that occasioned its own news release from the de Blasio campaign.

In contrast, earlier this year, a few weeks after Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., announced her candidacy, she secured the endorsement of Dolores Huerta, who founded what would become the United Farm Workers with Cesar Chavez. This was an impressive acquisition given that the senator is a relatively moderate liberal. The third of de Blasio’s endorsements also came from big labor, but here, too, there are qualifiers.

When the New York Hotel and Motel Trades Council endorsed the mayor, the union’s president pointed out that the mayor “fought back and pushed back against Airbnb every single step of the way, and he continues to do it.” If you are of the mind that homesharing is a threat to U.S. well-being on a continuum somewhere between obesity and North Korea, then this is probably just the sort of imprimatur you are looking for.

What makes de Blasio’s candidacy so perplexing is that he seems so alone at the lunch table. We knew from observing his ongoing antics with Gov. Andrew Cuomo, a relationship forged out of the plot of a young-adult novel, that the mayor has no trouble alienating people he needs, and that maybe some part of him even enjoys it. But did we expect someone with such a cultivated sense of transaction to come up so short on getting politicians from his own hometown to stand up and perform a little love for him?

At this point, de Blasio’s entry into the 2020 race is fascinating chiefly as a matter of psychology. This week, the website FiveThirtyEight looked at May polling data to determine the relationship between candidates’ net favorability ratings and the share of Democrats with opinions about those candidates.

Among 21 candidates, de Blasio was alone in having a negative net favorability. Essentially the analysis found that more members of de Blasio’s own party dislike rather than appreciate him.

During the past few years, pundits, editors, operatives and citizens at large have obsessed over the question: Why do New Yorkers so intensely dislike de Blasio? The antipathy is visceral even when they share his vision of how the world ought to evolve.

Typically, the answer lands on “arrogance,” but there is much more to it than that, given all the arrogance we accommodate in our political culture. De Blasio arrives essentially as a foreign object, unrelatable in his imperviousness to justified criticisms of his failings at a time when the rest of us are engaged in the relentless, diminishing project of self-polling that social media encourages.

This remains especially true perhaps for those in the news media, where metrics increasingly supply the measure of professional success and where the distaste for de Blasio is so pervasive. Who has the luxury anymore to ignore what people think of you or what you do? How many talented people feel stymied to pursue this or that ambition because their insecurities get the best of them — because Instagram has not provided the kind of fan base they might have anticipated?

And yet there is Bill de Blasio — dismissed, discredited and yet convinced that he alone can alter the fortunes of working families as president of the United States, even as he has allowed a lead crisis to contaminate New York City’s public housing, acquiesced over and over to real estate interests and kept from pressing for more transparency and accountability from the police department. What gives him the confidence? This is what rankles — that he maintains it in the absence of much evidence that he deserves it. He is the Naomi Wolf of American politics — secure in his delusions, he persists.

De Blasio’s campaign website lists no policy positions or platforms. When I asked his campaign spokeswoman, Olivia Lapeyrolerie, about this, she responded that the campaign was still in a nascent stage, and that it remained confident that “the mayor’s record and experience will resonate with voters as it has done in the last 10 elections he has won.”

After a quick finger count of de Blasio’s races, I could only come up with six — and that included the three times he was elected to City Council. His spokeswoman admitted she was including races for school board and primaries.

It is curious that de Blasio has not come right out of the gate with a proposal to address what is poised to be a major issue in the coming election: housing affordability. Booker and Warren have been the most aggressive on this front. The crisis around housing, one that afflicts so many parts of the country, was responsible in large part for propelling Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., to her congressional victory. It is also what drove the ambush against Amazon’s plan to colonize an already-gentrifying part of Queens with a massive second headquarters.

This was an ambush de Blasio was unable to anticipate even as he presides over a city suffering one of the most acute housing shortages in the country. What are the lessons learned?

NEW YORK — This week, Mayor Bill de Blasio’s presidential campaign, a project that has generated all the promise and enthusiasm of an afternoon in small-claims court, announced that its candidate had received his first endorsements. You might assume that those endorsements came from local elected officials, because that is so often the way of things. They did not. Former Rep. Beto O’Rourke, D-Texas, he of bass guitars and El Paso, has gained more support from New York congressional representa...

Really, Mr. Mayor? President? Really?

<h1>The event marks the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Uprising in Greenwich Village and the half-century of activism and civil rights reform that followed. </h1>

In conjunction, we asked readers to tell us which New Yorkers they would like to see paid tribute in the city’s public spaces.

We sought suggestions of people who had already died, because the city tends to honor the living differently. This is why you won’t see names like Larry Kramer, the pre-eminent AIDS activist and playwright, on the resulting list.

But what of the dead? “Where is James Baldwin?” you might find yourself screaming into your smartphone. “Where is Walt Whitman?” We tried to veer away from the exceedingly famous in favor of keeping the focus on names that have been lost to history or at least those not already so familiar. (Baldwin, Whitman and Gertrude Stein have also already been memorialized by the city in various ways.)

It should go without saying that this list is not meant to be definitive. People will argue about it. That’s good. We welcome the debate.

Marsha Johnson, 1945-1992

Readers responding to our callout overwhelmingly named Marsha P. Johnson as someone to immortalize. Born in New Jersey in 1945, Marsha Johnson moved to Greenwich Village after high-school and an adolescence spent ostracized for dressing up in ways that boys usually didn’t. Despite the fact that she was destitute and homeless for much of her adult life — charged with prostitution more than 100 times — she devoted herself to nurturing young outcasts who came to the Lower West Side of Manhattan in the 1960s and ’70s for a chance at living authentically only to find out how often sexual freedom tangled with poverty and violence.

Johnson was a “drag mother,” an iconic performer, a model for Andy Warhol. But more than anything, she is remembered now for leading a revolution from the margins, spearheading the rebellion at Stonewall as a transgender African American woman. In June of 1969, patrons at the bar, a hub of gay life in Greenwich Village, were long exhausted by the antagonisms they faced so routinely from the police. One night they fought back and changed history. Johnson was present for the riot and then dedicated the rest of her all-too-brief life to fighting for the rights of families made in the streets.

Sylvia Rivera, 1951-2002

At the time of Sylvia Rivera’s death from liver disease 17 years ago, The Village Voice called her the Rosa Parks of the transgender movement. Rivera’s work was closely linked with Johnson’s at a time when the term “transgender” had not yet entered the vernacular. One year after Stonewall, Rivera fought to get a gay rights bill going in New York City. Trying to break into a meeting at City Hall about the proposed legislation, she scaled a wall in a dress and heels and wound up in jail.

Sylvia was born in the Bronx to a Puerto Rican father and a Venezuelan mother. After her mother committed suicide, Sylvia was left to a life on her own, in Times Square, by the time she was 11.

She identified with the Black Panthers and the Young Lords, a radical Puerto Rican social justice group. Her singular role in the movement to broaden rights for those who did not experience gender or sexuality in a traditional sense was to recognize early on that it needed to be inclusive, that the most vulnerable were clearly those oppressed on multiple fronts — men and women of color whose sexual orientation was nonconforming and who lived on the fringes. Rivera was fighting for legitimacy not just in a straight world but among white, mainstream gay activists who wanted to control the journey and keep people like her far away from the steering wheel.

Lincoln Kirstein, 1907-1996

A moneyed son of Boston and a graduate of Harvard, Lincoln Kirstein moved to New York as a young man in 1930 and made an indelible mark on U.S. culture. He was a critic, a poet, an essayist, a novelist and an editor who lived freely with his wife and the various boyfriends that stayed in the couple’s town house. During college, Kirstein spent his summers cultivating his love of classical dance. Once, traveling in Italy, he wandered into the funeral of Sergei Diaghilev, founder of the Ballets Russes in Venice. The moment was transformative.

Kirstein later met George Balanchine and brought him to work in the United States. Together, they founded the School of American Ballet, where Kirstein served as president; the two later founded the New York City Ballet. Although he left his biggest imprint in dance, he was enormously influential in the world of visual art as well, a key figure in the early years of the Museum of Modern Art and a major force in directing its collections. Kirstein had served in the army in World War II, and he returned to Europe as part of a mission to retrieve looted Nazi art. He introduced Mexican avant-garde art to a U.S. audience, supported the early career of Walker Evans and was central to a creative scene that included Evans, Cecil Beaton, Katherine Anne Porter and Jean Cocteau, among many others.

Bayard Rustin, 1912-1987

Bayard Rustin, best known for organizing the 1963 March on Washington, was also an important mentor to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., bringing Gandhi’s nonviolent methods of protest to the U.S. civil rights movement. When Rustin arrived in Montgomery, Alabama, in the mid-1950s to work on bus boycotts, King had not yet embraced these methods; he had armed guards at the door of his house and guns inside. Rustin showed leaders a different way, having gone to India to study pacifism in 1948.

Rustin, who lived in Chelsea, has been called the “lost prophet’’ of the civil rights movement in large part because his sexuality forced him to the periphery. In 1953, he was arrested in California on “lewd conduct’’ charges, supposedly for engaging in sex with two white men in a car. This meant that the file the FBI maintained on him — Rustin had been a young Communist — was expanding. Rustin said he knew then that sex for him had to be sublimated. He was regularly the target of homophobic attacks, and other black leaders, afraid of the tensions that would erupt around him, kept him from occupying central roles. Finally, in the 1970s, he could vocally advocate for gay rights.

Edith Windsor, 1929-2017

In 2009, when Edie Windsor’s wife, Thea Spyer, died, she was left with a tax bill of $363,053. Fixtures in New York, the couple had married two years earlier in Canada, where it was legal, but the Internal Revenue Service was indifferent to the fact that they had spent a lifetime together. The agency denied Windsor the spousal exemption from federal estate taxes that it afforded heterosexual married couples. Windsor sued the government. She won.

In its decision in United States v. Windsor (2013), the Supreme Court held that denying same-sex couples equal federal benefits was unconstitutional. Same-sex marriage prohibitions were then overturned in 17 states, and in 2015 same-sex marriage was legalized nationwide, thanks in large part to Windsor’s efforts.

A mathematician who worked as a computer programmer for the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission and later for IBM, Windsor, always a bon vivant, was a late-in-life activist. She died two years ago at 88, leaving behind a second wife, Judith Kasen-Windsor, who was 30 years younger than she was.

Billy Strayhorn, 1915-1967

Billy Strayhorn, one of the most gifted jazz composers of all time, cultivated anonymity in a way that would strike aspiring influencers of the current age as a sign of profound mental instability. Beginning in the late 1930s, he partnered with Duke Ellington to create some of the most important jazz music ever recorded. He wrote “Take the A Train,’’ a standard that became one of the signature pieces performed by Ellington’s orchestra. One of 10 children and a prodigy, he wrote “Lush Life,’’ a haunting chronicle of exhaustion with night life in the face of a doomed affair, when he was just a teenager.

Strayhorn deferred to Ellington to such an extent that he once allowed him to take partial credit for a song — “Something to Live For” — that he had written before they even met. After Strayhorn died of cancer in 1967 at the age of 51, Ellington recorded an album that critics would later cite as one of his best works, a collection of Strayhorn’s compositions titled, “And His Mother Called Him Bill.”

David Wojnarowicz, 1954-1992

David Wojnarowicz first made his impression in the New York art world in the late 1970s when he placed stenciled images of burning houses on the sides of buildings in the East Village.

An abused child who would later work the piers on the West Side of Manhattan as a hustler, his art addressed same-sex desire, the AIDS crisis (he would die of AIDS in 1992 when he was 37) and the animosity directed at the marginalized in Ronald Reagan’s America. During the mid- to late 1980s he made paintings, collages, mixed media works and films. One of his films, “Fire in My Belly,’’ shot in Super 8, featured insects swarming around a corpse and a plastic Jesus, ignited the wrath of conservatives leaders like Donald Wildmon, then the director of the American Family Association, who went after Wojnarowicz and the National Endowment for the Arts for funding him, in a campaign that only enhanced the artist’s celebrity. Last year Wojnarowicz received a long-awaited retrospective at the Whitney Museum.

Audre Lorde, 1934-1992

Born in New York to West Indian immigrant parents, Lorde described herself as a “black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet,” but she worked as a librarian as well — and as an essayist, novelist, memoirist and influential feminist thinker. Both her poetry and prose focused on civil rights, discrimination and the complexities of racial and sexual identity.

“From a Land Where Other People Live,’’ her 1973 poetry collection, was nominated for a National Book Award and chronicled the loneliness and rage she felt as a black woman. She was among the most prominent voices of black lesbian life in the country. In 1991, Gov. Mario Cuomo named her New York state’s poet laureate, citing an imagination “charged by a sharp sense of racial injustice and cruelty, of sexual prejudice.” Her work is most resonant today for its deep understanding of the ways that gender, class and race work together to define human experience.

Frank Kameny, 1925-2011

Astronomer, civil rights pioneer

Long before Stonewall, there was Frank Kameny, a brilliant scientist who enrolled at Queens College when he was 15 and later earned a doctorate in astronomy from Harvard. In July of 1957, he got a job at the U.S. Army Map Service. Soon after, an investigator from the Civil Service Commission confronted him about rumors pertaining to his personal life. Was he a homosexual? Kameny was fired and within a year he was barred from working for the federal government.

Kameny appealed his dismissal, and although he did not succeed in regaining his job, his was one of the first civil rights cases related to sexual orientation to proceed in U.S. courts. He went on to publicly advocate that homosexuality was not a product of mental illness — the default position in the years before Stonewall — and that there was no justifiable reason for subjecting gay men and women to the many forms of bias society kept unleashing.

S. Josephine Baker, 1873-1945

Doctor, public-health champion

In 1898, Sara Josephine Baker graduated second in her class from the New York Infirmary Medical College. She had planned a life conventional for a woman at the turn of the century, but when her father died, she needed to help her family stay afloat. She set up a medical practice on the Upper West Side but failed to make any money. In need of an income, she went to work for the city’s health department and ultimately became one of the most significant figures in the history of U.S. public health.

Preventive medicine barely existed before Baker came to see it as so essential, in the early 1900s. She sent nurses to new mothers living in the city’s tenements and had those nurses instruct them in how to care for infants. Infant mortality rates significantly decreased, and by 1923 every state in the country had a bureau of child health like the one Baker pioneered in New York.

Baker’s later life was spent with her partner, Ida Alexa Ross Wylie, a novelist and screenwriter who was always clear about how much more she preferred the company of women to men.

Keith Haring, 1958-1990

Few artists are as readily identified with New York in the 1980s as Keith Haring, whose graffiti art took the form of distinctive chalk drawings in subway stations, where blank advertising backboard was easy to find. Soon came commissions for large works of public art around the world. There was a hunger for his exuberant, childlike style, his use of color during a time of plague and despair.

Haring’s art was both consumerist and socially conscious — it raised awareness (about AIDS, drug use) as it brought joy. Haring learned he was infected with HIV in 1988 and died two years later at the age of 31, having had his work already featured in more than 100 group and solo exhibitions.

Where are the statues of LGBTQ pioneers Here are 11 worthy New Yorkers

NEW YORK — For all of June, New York City will serve as host to World Pride, the biggest celebration of gay liberation in the world.

Where are the statues of LGBTQ pioneers? Here are 11 worthy New Yorkers

It was not yet full, though some tenants were in place — one of them, Gear Patrol, describes itself as a publication for “young affluent men seeking inspiration for a life well lived.’’

Recently, I sat down with a young real estate executive to talk about an office building his company had bought and renovated to fit the style and tastes of the modern creative-class worker.

Ginia Bellafante

Articles written by the author

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