Room 9, the cramped reporters’ chamber tucked into a former courtroom for inebriates inside City Hall, has been the cluttered home to the city’s newsmen and, eventually, women, since the days of Mayor A. Oakey Hall’s troubled administration, which began in the 1860s. A journalistic institution, the room returned to life on Thursday for the first time in two years, ending the first city-imposed exile of its rumpled press corps, part of a $106 million renovation of the 200-year-old building. As bleary-eyed reporters struggled to connect phone lines, some returning denizens yearned for the decorative relics, still in storage, like former Mayor John V. Lindsay’s straw hat and cane and framed caricatures of another former mayor, Abraham D. Beame, that once festooned the mint-colored, 14-foot-high ... Continue reading →
It appeared to be a minor arrest, except that the spa’s owner is the wife of the investigations editor at the local newspaper, The Times Union. And that’s where it gets complicated. The investigations editor, J. Robert Port, said he believed that the city’s mayor and local law enforcement agencies targeted his wife’s business in retaliation for critical coverage in his newspaper, including a series of articles questioning the practices of an undercover unit of the sheriff’s office that investigated drug cases, prostitution and gambling. City officials deny Mr. Port’s charges. The county sheriff, Craig Apple, disputed Mr. Port’s contention of a plot but said he had asked his internal affairs division to review his agency’s role in the case. Mr. Port’s wife, Bin Cheng, ... Continue reading →
ALBANY — Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo vowed Thursday to “elect Democrats in every office all across this state,” arguing that his accomplishments as governor offered a strong platform for candidates running in local races this year. Addressing a meeting of the State Democratic Committee, the governor said his time in office amounted to “a beautiful story to tell.” “The greatest accomplishment of all, my friends, is not about the individual issues,” Mr. Cuomo said. “At the end of the day, after 18 months, people believe in state government once again.” But he conspicuously did not mention if his support for Democrats extended to those running for the State Senate, which is currently controlled by a Republican majority that has generally been supportive of his agenda. ... Continue reading →
By Mark Feeney, Globe Staff Thomas H. O’Connor, the unofficial dean of Boston history and a fixture for more than six decades on the Boston College faculty, died Sunday in his Milton home. He was 89. The cause of death was a heart attack, the college’s news and public affairs office said. “Most traditional treatments of Boston tend to be extraordinarily incomplete and at times strangely unreal,” Dr. O’Connor wrote in his first book about the city, “Bibles, Brahmins, and Bosses: A Short History of Boston,” (1976). “Many works place a great emphasis on Boston as old, nostalgic, and quaint … a sort of storybook community set in time, unchanging in its character and unyielding in its traditions.” Dr. O’Connor spent several decades remedying that ... Continue reading →
The executives of Google are putting their interests in New York City ahead of their old school ties.On Monday, Larry Page, the chief executive of Google, is scheduled to announce that the company will donate space so Cornell University can have a temporary home for the applied sciences school it plans to build in the city. While the campus is under construction on Roosevelt Island, students and faculty of the new Cornell school will occupy space in Google’s massive building in the Chelsea section of Manhattan.The donation comes despite a connection between Google’s co-founders, Mr. Page and Sergey Brin, and Stanford University, which had vied with Cornell for the Roosevelt Island space. Mr. Page and Mr. Brin started the company while they were graduate students ... Continue reading →
The brides! @ChrisCQuinn and Kim Catullo at City Hall. http://t.co/G7N8pQmu Continue reading →
ALBANY — New York City would have to stop requiring food-stamp applicants to give fingerprints under regulations proposed Thursday by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, who has sided with advocates for the hungry in arguing that the requirement discourages people from seeking the federal benefits. New York State stopped requiring fingerprinting of food-stamp recipients in 2007, but granted an exemption to New York City at the request of the Bloomberg administration, which said fingerprinting was the best way to prevent fraud. More than 1.4 million New Yorkers eligible for food stamps do not receive them in part because of the stigma associated with having to give their fingerprints, according to the Cuomo administration. “For too long, requiring finger imaging from those eligible for food stamp benefits ... Continue reading →
