Good morning. Today we’re going to look at 50 souvenir auctions awarded to the city’s former mayors. We’ll also take a look at how prosecutors once again examine Donald Trump’s role in paying a porn star to shut up.
Credit… through the Citywide Department of Administrative Services
Mayors, like mayors, governors, and other civil servants, always receive gifts.
We’re not talking about bags of money – we’re talking about trinkets. Totally legit stuff but stuff they’ll probably never use. To think:
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A pair of Nike Air Force One signed by rapper and actor Ice-T and graffiti artist and hip-hop pioneer Fab 5 Freddy from 2008. (Can you imagine Michael Bloomberg, who was mayor at the Air Jordans at the time?)
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A Louis Vuitton soccer ball given to Rudolph Giuliani when he was mayor.
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An apple-shaped paperweight given to David Dinkins by Diana Ross.
You can’t take it with you, and mayors can’t even take that kind of thing with them when they leave City Hall – gifts given to mayors belong to the city. They (or possibly one of the staff at City Hall) send them to the Department of Records and Information Services, an organization that is more thought of as a repository of historical documents and photographs.
It has more than 185,000 cubic feet accumulated over nearly 400 years, from colonial-era Dutch and English manuscripts to original engineering drawings of the Brooklyn Bridge and tax photographs of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1980s. It also has more than 10 million birth and death certificates and marriage records.
A municipality means a cabinet of miracles. And the city will clean up, but very little: 50 objects are sold, given to mayors, from Edward Koch to Bloomberg.
An online auction begins today and will be run by the Citywide Department of Administrative Services, another city agency that sold an old subway car for $235,700 in July. The proceeds from the sale of the gifts of the mayors will go to the Municipal Archives Reference and Research Fund.
This isn’t the first time the city has sold some of its assets. He removed the old salon licenses and, in the 1980s, a folio of drawings by John James Audubon, which the city had owned for 135 years. Using the acronym for registration agency, the city said the items for sale “had no research or archival value by DORIS.”
So much for a framed front page of The Village Voice entitled “Mayor Dear: A Special Preview of Mayor Koch’s Memoirs.”
The same goes for a portrait of Koch up to his third term in the municipality in 1988. The drawing was the work of artist Miriam Troop, who died in 2016 at the age of 99. a subject – and have the subject sign a blank drawing sheet.
Koch signed it, and Zuger later noted that Troop was looking at him as he returned to City Hall to hand the completed portrait to Koch and said, “Did you do that?”
“He thought that was the best compliment,” Zuger said. “He enjoyed doing it and was happy to have it hanging in City Hall. And if he goes to another house and saves the city some money, we’ll both be happy.”
The city gave the Village Voice page a starting bid of $40 and a portrait of $50. The minimum bid for the Louis Vuitton soccer ball is $600, while the starting price for a pair of sterling silver Tiffany cufflinks and lapel pins, also gifted to Rudolph Giuliani, will be $40.
And it looks like there are Nike Air Force Ones given to Bloomberg when Ice-T showed up at City Hall to announce that the annual “Hip Hip Honors” awards ceremony will stay in New York City. Bloomberg welcomed him to City Hall – “or my cradle as I call it” – Bloomberg at the time – along with graffiti artist and hip-hop pioneer Fab 5 Freddy, among others.
“My people said Bloomberg was great, man,” Ice-T said at the time.
“So that’s what happened to those sneakers,” Bloomberg said last week when the auction was mentioned through a spokesperson.
Weather forecast
A sunny day close to the 40s. It’s mostly clear in the evening, the temperature is below 30’s. Expect wind gusts.
PARKING ON THE ALTERNATIVE SIDE
Effective until Thursday (Thanksgiving).
Latest New York news
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divide over Israel: Benjamin Netanyahu launched a political comeback with the support of a far-right coalition, which has raised some concerns about the direction Israel will take.
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Busker and RTO: It’s been more than a year since buskers and their music went underground, and some more full tip jars and instrument boxes suggest that things may be getting better.
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Arrests for deliberate attack on synagogue: Two men arrested at Penn Station on Friday, in what officials described as an “emerging threat to the Jewish community”, were charged with multiple felony offenses, including criminal possession of a weapon and making a terrorist threat.
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Law faculties boycott order : Four schools participated in Yale and Harvard’s revolt against US News. And the bar will no longer require schools to mandate the LSAT or GRE. But rankings still matter.
Prosecutors take another look at payment made to a porn star
The Manhattan district attorney’s office takes another look at Donald Trump’s role in paying a porn star to shut up, returning to an aspect of the investigation that once seemed stalemate.
Prosecutors first settled the payment made to actress Stormy Daniels by Cyrus Vance Jr. when he was a district attorney. The direction of the investigation has shifted to focus on Trump’s broader business practices, and Alvin Bragg, who replaced Vance in January, hesitated to accuse Trump in connection with his business practices.
But Bragg and some of his aides have recently expressed renewed optimism about making a case against Trump, according to people with knowledge of the matter.
Three of my colleagues – Jonah E. Bromwich, Ben Protess, and William K. Rashbaum – write that prosecutors pressured longtime Trump lieutenant Allen Weisselberg to cooperate. He has already pleaded guilty to unrelated tax charges and testified against Trump’s company last week for the same tax violations. But Weisselberg did not turn his back on Trump.
Prosecutors are considering a new round of impeachment against Weisselberg in hopes of winning his cooperation against the former president to increase the pressure. These accusations involving insurance fraud have nothing to do with hush money.
But there is little indication that Weisselberg, who had direct knowledge of the payment to Daniels, would suddenly agree to cooperate. And Bragg’s prosecutors have yet to present evidence to the grand jury regarding the hush money payment, and those with knowledge of the matter have suggested that if they decide to press charges, it won’t happen this year.
METROPOLITAN diary
take a walk
Dear Diary:
I join the morning crowd on the escalator that descends to the 83rd Street entrance of the Q train, which is supposed to be one of Manhattan’s steepest trains.
This morning the upstairs escalator was not working. Dozens of people were coming down, but from the opposite side only one, one man, was coming up with methodical steps (I counted 130 as I climbed during other cuts).
This man handled the climb with ease and grace. He wore an immaculate suit and tie, remarkable compared to the clothes of the descending crowd. He had a cell phone pressed to his head as he climbed, and he was waving his free arm wildly.
Looking down on him, it was hard to tell whether he was acting out of happiness or anger.
At one point, she suddenly stopped on the stairs, standing still and leaning over her phone. As the escalator descended, I got close enough to hear what he was saying.
He suddenly shouted into the phone, his voice booming loudly.
“No, you listen!” yelled at the person on the other end of the call. He was holding the phone right in front of his mouth. “All I’m asking you right now is to pretend you understand what I’m telling you!”
And then I passed it. I looked back over my shoulder and saw that he was renewing his uphill gait. But his words hung in the air. And when I got to the platform, they made perfect sense in my mind.
—HP Newquist
Drawn by Agnes Lee. Submit applications here and Read the rest of the Metropolitan Diary here .
I’m glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B.
PS Here is today’s Short Puzzle and Spelling Contest . You can find all our puzzles here. .
Melissa Guerrero and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at nytoday@nytimes.com.
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