The local paper for the Upper East Side
WEEK OF DECEMBER - JANUARY RODIN IN THE ROUND ◄P.12
28-3 2017
SECOND AVENUE SUBWAY REPORT CARD TRANSPORTATION A look at the numbers on the line’s first anniversary
Mayor Bill de Blasio addresses 150-plus supporters of the liberal advocacy group Progress Iowa at the Temple for Performing Arts in downtown Des Moines on December 19th. A speech to the group in 2014 helped launch Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign. Photo: Eric Phillips / Mayoral press secretary
BY MICHAEL GAROFALO
Last year, the city’s most exclusive New Year’s Eve party took place in a most unlikely location: 100 feet below 72nd Street in a spotless subway station on the newly completed Second Avenue line. Dignitaries clad in evening wear toasted with sparkling wine, snacked on locally sourced charcuterie and swayed to live music from a jazz band at the subterranean gala, brushing shoulders with MTA brass, Governor Andrew Cuomo and other elected officials (including, briefly, Mayor Bill de Blasio, with whom Cuomo would go on to feud throughout the year over responsibility for the subway system’s overall decline). Revelers packed onto a train car for a maiden trip up Second Avenue to ring in 2017 and celebrate the city’s first major subway expansion in 50 years. If such a glitzy affair seemed out of place on a station platform, well, as Cuomo said, “This isn’t your grandfather’s subway.” The following day, the public got its first chance to ride the underground rails originally proposed a century earlier. The New Year’s opening attracted thousands, who made the seemingly endless escalator descent to find the cavernous new stations —
DE BLASIO DOES DES MOINES POLITICS Mayor blitzes the Hawkeye State, tells of his Iowa roots, auctions off his tie, schmoozes local pols – and faces protests by city cops BY DOUGLAS FEIDEN
It doesn’t happen every day. Or even every four years. But every once in a while, political lightning strikes in Iowa. Could such a bolt hit Mayor Bill de Blasio? And might he make good presidential timber? T. M. Franklin (Frank) Cownie ponders the question. The $52,000-a-year mayor of Des Moines, a folksy and popular Democrat in a nonpartisan post, has seen a lot of contenders come and go in 14 years in office. de Blasio is a tad different. Cownie has known him since 2014, and as co-trustees of the U.S. Conference of Mayors, they’ve worked on “parks, potholes, curbs, gutters, street lights and public safety,” he says. Yes, but this is a political question. There’s a brief pause. Cownie, who
New Year’s Day marks one year since the long-awaited opening of the Second Avenue subway. Photo: Steven Strasser
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lists his home number on the city’s website and runs his family’s fur business on breaks from running Des Moines, finally answers: “Heck, if a TV game show host can become president, I don’t think it’s out of the realm of possibility for a mayor of the largest mega-city in the country to start thinking about it,” he says in a phone interview. New York’s mayor vows, unconvincingly and ad infinitum, that he’s not thinking about it. Yet there he was — fresh off a landslide reelection, two weeks before his second-term swearing-in — blitzing the Hawkeye State, glad-handing small-town mayors, quaffing beer with local pols, revving up his national profile.
CONTINUED ON PAGE 19 Jewish women and girls light up the world by lighting the Shabbat candles every Friday evening 18 minutes before sunset. Friday, December 29 – 4:19 pm. For more information visit www.chabaduppereastside.com
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