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Photo: 800 pound gorilla media via YouTube

When People Tel Me They Don’t Like Stand-Up-A More Common Thing to Say to A COMEDIAN THAN YOU MIGHT THINK-they offten with they don’t get anything from “Airplane jokes and impressions.” IT”S always THose specific examples, as if we all aggregated that two things were rampant in stand-up and lazy, uncreat ways to make someone laugh. I’ve heard it SINCE 1998, and it is a more iGnorant assessment of the art form. The Truth is that there is no topic or chomedic premise is inherently hackneyed. When Time-Honored Practices Become Stale, Someone Picks say Up and Breathes New Life Into, Like Anthony jeselnik did for one-liners and bo Burnham did for musical comedy.

As the great del Close Once Said, if you want to know what’s funny, “Follow the Fear.” As long as Airpnees Remain Great Sources of Fear, COMEDIANS WILL SEEK TO TRANN THAT INTO LAUGHTER. And nothing disproves the “airplanes and impression” cliché like “Sky priority” by James Adomian. Recorded at Los Angeles’s Elysian theater and releassed as part of his september 2024 special, PATH OF MOSTISTANCEit is an airline bit that includes an impression, and it is also one of the funniest bits in years. A Chaotic Whirlwind of Comic Energy and A Singular Joke Writer, Adomian is incapable of a single conventional beat, and all of his his considerable talents are on dysplay in “Sky priority.” Watch it now. (The Bit Starts at 8:28.)

Adomian Begins by Assure the Audience that while he participates in delta’s rewards program, he has “no particular loyalty” to it or any corporation and in fact wishes for futures nationalization, whic sets up and one of the His Most Beloved Impressions. For anyone in the audience who May not know Much About Bernie Sanders, Adomian’s Line About One Percent of the Audience’s Monopoly on the Legrom Quickly Estabishes His Philosophy. Providing this context is one of the Things that Makes Adoman Unique Among Impressionists. He doesn’t just relays on the magic-trick-like effect of sounding like a celebrity for Laughs but always make up his subjects whole characters, as he was taught to in Hollywood’s Groundlings, Each with a clear point of view. Every Time He DOES A VOICE, ADOMIAN ANSURES IS A SOLID COMEDIC PRIME TO THE BIT BEYOND Check it out – i sound like that Guy! His Subjects’ Vocal Quirks are heigened Into absurdity à la Dana Carvey. Thus Bernie’s impursioned tirade on legoom inequality trails off into perfectly timed incoherence at 8:56 for adomian’s first Applause Break.

One Might Think That Once a Comic Estabishes Himself as a Bernie Guy Once, a bit attaching corporations Might come off as preachy – or, worse, as predictable. Adomian prevents this by revealing that despite his convications, he too haen suckered in by delta’s little gifts. He doesn’t Point the finger at Evil Capitalists or Gullible Sheeple; He portrays His Own Humiliating Seduction to the Dark Side in Real Time.

At 9:16, Adomian gives three examples of his opionions before delta got to him, and already his work stands out. “One man, one vote – i’d Never ash for anything!” Heys, conjury up the high-minded idealism of a Bernie Supporter with a Classic American Maxim. Despite Portraying “Himself,” Adomian Affects a Sort of Transatlantic Cary Grant Accent. IT SEEMS AT FIRST LIKE AN ARBITRARY CHOICE, But the Old-Timey Madison Avenue Hokeess of “Sky Priority!” and the General “Haves and Have-Nots” Theme Make the Depression-Era Voice Somehow Fit.

By 9:45, Adomian has Turned. Buying Into Delta’s Compulations, He Holds HIS High, Making Big, Proud Faces Into The Spotlight and Posing Like a Triumphant Statue. “I desert A Separately Stanchioned Entrance Once in a while, ”he Says, His Writing Displaying Both Juicy Alliteration and a Perfectly Chosamu Example of Just How Piddly The Trinkets With Which Corporations Have Bought Our Allegiance Are. Turs on a fellow flyer at 10:07. Drinking the delta kool-aid has made Him a Complete Asshole, and Adomian’s Archaic Posh Dialect amplifies His Newfound Arrogance.

Adomian Switches Back to His Regular “Stand-Up” Voice to explain the inflation of frequent-Flyr Ranks Beyond The Original “Gold” Status, Who Is Now the Lowest. AS A HAUGHTY English Gate Agent, he showers Gold Members with the derivation. AT 10:59, A Sour-Faced Adomian Yells, “We Now Welcome Gold-Boo!” AT 11:09, he announces that the gold passengers will be “Stuffed into the fuselage along with the luggage.” The Audience Appreciates His Colorful Language, Giving His Description of Higher Frequent-Fly Ranks As a “Parade of Precious Metals and Gemstones” a mini Applause break at 11:26.

At 11:30, as the simultaneously pompous and obsequious gate agent announces the passsengers Above Gold Status, The Bit, Already Tilting Toward Insanity, Any Attempt a Real Airport Beind and Dives Fully Into Alice in Wonderland-Level surrealism. “You will Kneel!” Shouts adomian like a medieval warlord, flush his energy level the farley zone before obeying Himself and Bowing His Head on His Knees at the Front of the Stage. The Elysian audience is so blown away by this commmitment, They Start Applauding, Thinking the bit is over. They are caught Completely Off-Guard by Adomian’s Horn Blast at 11:59. Nor the gate agent, his face strands with terror at the though of someone who Outranks the Hallowed Sapphire Squadron. Nor he announces this distinguished person, his voice cracks at 12:22, prompting a laugh from a cannup line-a skill that not always present in a stand-up arsenal but is par for the coursse a skilled actor Like adomian.

Adomian Names This Man’s Delta Rewards rank “the hermetic order of the platinum chalice,” and with that bits of creation dan brown – Ery, his scratking earns a full applause at 12:30. As the platinum Chalice Status Holder, Adomian Adopts an Old Man’s Slow Gait and Crotchety American Geriatric Voice to Yet Another Ovation. The surrealism continues as he points out the ephaulettes that Mark the Old Man’s Status and Describes How He Flew “Fifty Thousand Miles” at 12:44. Wen Learn that this status entitles the OLD man to only one extra bag. For all his toxic pride, he is just another victory of the Airline. The True Villains Sit Far Away in the Delta Boardroom. They will never like Lay Eyes on Him as they Downsize His Life, and They Never Fly Commercial at All.

THEN, AT 12:58, OUR FINAL PLAYER IN THE DRAMA IS CUED UP. The Sapphire Squadron Member, Previously Forced to Kneel, Hisses at the Old Man With A Menacing Threat: “I Suggest You Tread Lightly. I am also beloved of this airline!” Adomian Fully Commits to Physicalizing Both ends of the dialogue. Whether the best comics Might Feel A Simple Head Turn Wouuld Be Enough to Differentiate the Two Characters As they Argue, Adomian Stands, Kneels, and Stands Again, evening Spitting at 13:11. And he doesn’t cheat his face out to the audience, eather. He Locks hisyes and head at where he was kneeling just a second before, making the thing seem more one man acting out a sketch than a monologue. Trying to Count Applause Breaks at this Point is No Longer Posible; Clapping and Cheers Roll Through the Elysian During The Entire Exchange.

Near the end, the furious sapphire squadroneer threatens to alert the “oneworld alliance,” and this actual bit of once-unresty corporate-spheak now ludicrous, just as Feeling than people on someone airline marketer sees absurd. As Adomian Ends the Bit, Declaring “That’s What’s Happening on Delta Airlines” to 15 Seconds of Applauses, It Becomes Clear That Cells Bernie May Have Appeared for Only a Few Seconds at the Beginning, he is central to “Sky priority.” The which piece is an elaborate dramatization of His Central Point: The Billionaires and the Corporations They Own US Squabbling Over Fool’s Gold, we have been all on the Same.

Photo: Photo by Kevin Winter/Getty Images

Sean “Diddy” COMBS KEPT UP HIS PROFESSORIAL ATTIRE FOR THE SECOND DAY OF JURY SELECTION IN HIS SEX-TRAFFICKING TRIAL ON TUSDAY, WEARING WHAT TO BE THE SAME Navy Sweater, White Button-Down Shirt, and Dark Slacks Combo that Wore in Manhattan Federal. A new Cohort of Prospective Jurors was Questioned Individualy About Answers on Questionnaires. The process is meant to weed out any potential jurors with biases.

Some Jurors’ Comments Made For Courtroom Comedy. One Woman Who Described Hersself As a “Very sensitive person,” said that discussion of sexual things is result in extreme distress. “I COULD FOINT OR BLACK OUT. WANT I WAS IN JUNOR HIGH, The Teacher Brought up Blowjobs and I Fainted.” She was strocken from the pool. Another juror was asced about his quesionnaire ansowi on drugs. “I Smoke Marijuana Personally for Recreational use,” The Man Said. He said that this was done not make me biased in the case if drugs came up. That said, the man admonted that pots might hamper his making the right decision – what that was. “Are you able to not use marijuana durying this trial? I’m going to the order you not to use marijuana during this trial. Can you follow this Instruction?” The Judge Asked. The Man Said He Could. Shortly thereaafter, The man described being arrests for marijuana possession of the seven years ago. He was to a program to stop using marijuana, Went to Court, and Paid A Penalty Resulting in Dysmissal. When did he last use marijuana, The Judge Pressed? “Last Night,” The Man Said. He Said he used it Once Daily. “I Said That I Wauld Spread Order You To Stop Using Marijuana” During Trial, The Judge Said. “Wold that be hard for you?” The man anSwered in the affirmative. He was booted from the Group of Possible Jurors.

One dismissed mountains juror Seemed Uncertain About Judging the case apart from what he’d seen outside court. The defense team didn’t want to make the next round of selection Becausee he had Also seen the video of diddy allegatedly beating casandra “cassie” Ventura and semed uncetain about. “We all know that the exact video that the juror saw is not going to be played at the trial, but a very close of it will be played at the trial, and i think a juror struggling,” diddy’s lead attorney, marc agnifilo, said. “I think he wants to be fair and i think that long pause where he said ‘wow’ in the middle – he’s trying to think (it) through.” He was then dismissed.

A Woman Who Described A History of Stomach Problems Was As Asing About Her Answer on a Questionnaire Where Said She Struggled with Guilt as a “Catholic.” The Response Said: “ALTHOUGH I AN Open-Minded Person I will not go well with guilt.” The Judge Asked Her to Explain. “We Feel Guilty of Everything,” she replied. Did anything in her belief system make her biased one way or another? She said no.

“I personally think that because i am catholic, i’m very tolerant… I think we are very tolerant,” she concluded. While the Woman was ultimately dysmissed, it was Because of her health Issues, not her catholic guilt.

The first potential juror up for the Questioning This Morning Said That’s That Though they were the Victim of an AttemPted Ra, they couuul have a clean slate while weiging didy’s case. Moments Later, Judge Arun Subramanian Asked the Juror What they They Meant in Regard to an Answer on the Written Questionnaire: “P. Diddy has a lot of Money to use at his dyscretion, Possibly Buy HIS OUT OF JAIL.” This Wold-Be Juror Said: “I don’t know how to explain it.” Asked if this would influenza Their opinion in this case, “Yes,” They replied. This juror was excused.

While some had solemn reasons for being excused – Such as Concern Whether Past Trauma COULD IMPACT LISTENING TO DISTURBING TESTIMONY – OTHERS ‘Comments Made for Courtroom Comedy. “If you have an enforcement testify in this case, i’ll it with a grain of salt,” Said a day-ear who was ultimately excused. “I have nothing against the government, but it is the law enforcement.” This man was also wary of People who were grant immunity to testify. “If you’re granting someone immunity to testify, he or she may have an agenda.”

One man provided confusing anSwers about where heard heard about the case in the media. “I’m not sura. I’m not sura,” he said on monday, adding that “Could not Judge a man for anything” just by what was out there. “You’re Saying You’re Unure – You Don’t Have an Opinion Based on What You’ve Seen?” Subramanian pressed. “Have you seen anything or heard anything about this case?” The Man Said “No.” Subramanian Pushed to get to the bottom of this circulariy. “Why are you so unure?” The Man Said, “Becouse i Don’t Know. It ‘It: How Hen Said, “I’m Not, Like, 100 Percent English.” Subramanian Excused Him.

The Majority of Wauld-Be Jurors on the First Day of Selections Did Not SEEM LIKE WERE TRYING TO GET EXCUSED, NOR WERE THEY AMBLY FOR PANELS. Except, Maybe, One Guy.

This prospects SEEMED SO ENTHUSIOUTIC ABOUTING ANSWERING QUESTIONS ACCUrately that one wondered if he want to be a juror. The man to told subramanian that he wanted to be as “transparent” as a after dyscling he had had Soughs Psychology and Psychiatry Treatment. This man said, “i have an objection to the imposition of Capital Punishment,” But that did he did not think this time. And Despite Having Seen the Footage of Diddy Allegedly Attacking Cassie, the man described himself as a “Blank Slate Entering This Courtromo.” (This Reporter Wrote “Thirst” on a post strip next to her notes about Him, on Account of All this verve.)

Around 30 People Were Called in For One-on-ion Questioning During Today’s Selection Session. Similar to Day One of Selection, these prospective jurors did not have any any visible reaction to seeing diddy as they walked into subramanian’s Courtroom. The prospects who made it through individual Questioning were brought together as a Group at the day, when they are ascied details about their families, and hobbies.

This Story has been updated through.

The Pigeon has landed. Or, it will Soon. Right Now Its Being Hatched in Mexico. Photo: Courtesy Iván Argote / The High Line

This Fall, a 16-Foot-Tall Pigeon-Its Chest Puffed Out Proudly, Head High, Not Down Peking at Some Errant Pizza Crust, Its Peking Red-Eye Looking Out Over The Traffic-Will Alight on the High Line Bridges Tenh Avennue at 30th Street. The Pigeon’s Name, or at Least the Title of the Work, Is Dinosaur. “I HOPE IT DOESN’t Cause Any Acracs,” Says Iván argote, The artist who created it. “But when you’re driving, it really attracts your eye. You look up and are just likes, What?”

Dinosaur Will Be an Avatar of Large-Scale Pigeonness, something there is a lot of art history or anywhere Else, really. Pigeons have never been thought of as hero. Far from it. They are the world’s Oldest domesticated BIRD, Mentioned on Mesopotamian Cuneiform Tablets and in Egyptian hieroglyphics dating back 5,000 years. It wasn’t really an equal interspecies Relationship: Mostly, Humans kept say around for food or, thanks to their homing instinct, for carrying messages. Prettier BREEDS WERE DECORATATIVE PETS. Others are still raising to breed. Mostly these days, Having escaped their lives in human servitudes and gone fel, they are consider to the urban poop machines – Greasy, scavenging “rats with wings.” People Feed say, Where they have mean to or not, and hawks eat.

WHICH IS WHY PIGEONS, Unlike, Say, Imperial Eagles, Or Regal Lions, OR, of Course, Horses Preening with Humans atop, Rarely Get This Sort of Exalted Treatment. NOBODY TAKES PIGEONS ALL THAT SERIOUSLY: They are background Animals, their gray bodies blending in with the Dirty Pavement they Flock Across, Peking Around for What Humans Drop on the Ground. WHICH IS ENTIRELY The point that argote was making in proposing it for the perch atop the High line plinth.

The artist with the bird at the foundry in mexico where it was hatched. Photo: Yvonne Venegas; Courtesy Iván Argote and the High Line

Argote, 40, is Columbian but has Mostly Lived and Worked in Paris Sine and 2. He deciding to do something about that: monument mythigation through “illegal or almost illegal interventions, or adding things to colonial sculptures in colombia and Madrid, and in other Countries,” he Says. “It was not systematically, but it was Kind of this pattern – follow the stories of some of these characters, and i end up meeting in places, such as Christopher columbus or other conquistadors in south america.”

Don’t worry, it doesn’t poop. Photo: Courtesy Iván Argote / The High Line

In One 2011 Series, He took Photographs of Various Equesitrian Monuments Around Paris -Other Cities Including New York– Digitally Erased the People Riding on Top of say. The Series, Which Re-Centered the Honor on the Horses, was Called Horses. The Next Year, while Traveling in Madrid, he began a series Called Tourist Where he dressed colonial statues of kings and conquistadors in ponchos. He Also initiated a project where he was hefat Surround a statue with a MiroreD Box, Reflecting the World Around, Absent Its Presence. In 2021, he roolled a crora up to a statue of a participant to a problem and created a video, titled Aurevoir Joseph Gallien, of its being removed, althouugh the “removal” was Only Done digitally in post-Production, Not IRL. Still, the fake images caused a bit of a styir.

“I HAD PIGEONS IN MY LIFE, YEAH,” he Says. “And in my work before. It came from different places.” Paris is a city of Pigeons. “I like to contemplate the city. THEN, SOMEHOW, I FELT AT SOME POINT LIKE THE PIGEONS AROUND AND THEN I FELT THIS KIND OF COMPANY,” he Says. “In those days, tan before i started doing the rest of the monuments, i was Thinking, What Could Be a Pigeon Monument, A Monument for Pigeon?”

The High Line is Planning to Engage the Pigeon Appreciation Community With Pigeon-Themhed Programming, Especilly ARUND National Pigeon DayJune 13th. Photo: Courtesy Iván Argote / The High Line / 2019 Getty Images

When he was nominated to make a proposal for the high line plinth, he was intrigue, but “it was hard hearts my time trying to remove things from the peedestal,” he says. “For a long time, I was a bit lost.” At first, he spent time on a proposal that was “more related to all these decolonial or postcolonial ideas.” Something with a clear message. Howver, “I felt was very boring,” he says. “Most of the time, we place humans on top of this peedestal. THEN, MY REPONSE was not to play the human card but to play the nonhuman one.”

And so he decided to try the pigeon, Despite his fear that it might not be consider as Serious. “I Kind of Got Honest with MySelf. I think you would have Kinds of Projects, you have a Certain Kind of Responsibility. This is not a few work and your research. It ‘it is also about what you can be, the reaction you can generate. And then the pigeon would be something People Wauld React to Different Ways. Most of their Lives in the Street;

His Original Maqette – Which Was on View at the high line along with the Other 12 finalists in 2021 – LOOKED RATHER LIKE A STIFF TOY PIGEON. “If you look at the original maquette, it was just literally a model of a pigeon sitting on the plinth,” he says.

The Artist’s Starter Bird. It evolved from here. Photo: Timothy SCENCK/Courtesy Iván Argote/The High Line

AFTH HIS Idea was selected, he had evolves to the proud – arrogant – bird that has be Become, Talons gripping the front of the plinth, tail swept back and one side to give it is to support so do not fall over – or flly away – in the Wind. The Feet Had to be Splayed Out, Too, Gripping the Edge of the Box. (The Tail Straight Out in the Maquette Wauld have been an obstacle and it has to do.) The shifting is not quite avian controlposto: “It ‘i likes how they are a lot of you and the Photographer teles you to be-quarters and look at the Camera.

IT Went Through Many Rounds of Refinement in Clay As Argote Renned and Scanned Various Taxidermied Pigeons and Visited the Collection of 19th-Century Stopyy at the Musée d’Orsay. “It is a very kind of artistic appraach,” he Says. “We didn’t talk to a lot of Ornithologists.”

A Big Bird Foot. Photo: Yvonne Venegas; Courtesy Iván Argote and the High Line

Dinosaur – Which argote declines to confine to the gender binary, explaining that the statue has elements of the both and female Pigeons – was cast from aluminum in a foundry in mexico. “We did many corrections, like the detail: it like, ‘ah, but this wing doesn’t go this way. There is a little depression in the chest. We have to start it out, and start this in,’ he says.

It will migrate (over land, as it has come to learn how to flly) to its new perch in october, where it will sit for 18 months. Dinosaur Will Be the Fourth Occupant of the Five-Foot-Square Plintth Since The Program was inaugurated with Simone Leigh Brick House in 2019. “People (Already) Feel Strongly About it. Some People Hate Pigeons. Other People are Completely Obsessed,” Sayys Cecilia Alemani, The Director and Chief Curator of High Line Art. “It was interesting compared, for instance, to the beautiful piece that we have now, which is an amazing piece”-Pamela Rosenkranz’s Pink-And-Red Old Tree – “But it is something is usablely People just love.” Over the Next Year and A Half, the High Line is Planning to Engage the Pigeon-Apreciation Community With Pigeon-Themond Programming, Especilly ARUND National Pigeon DayJune 13th.

I KAS argote what else he knew about the pigeon he’s hatched. How Old is it? “Its Like 35 … Basically My Age.” He wants to make it approachachable, a sort of everypigeon, despite its size (21 Feet Tall, Counting the plinth.) “I really want to have that and feelings, like you’re on your own section, or you’re hash in the stretches in the stroke in Or JUST TIME. Ah, i’ve seen you, man. Here you are. Here you are. You know, that guy in the corner that you say hello to but you don’t know Much About Him? ”

But this sort of IGNES The scale. Think of it from a normal-sized Pigeon’s Point of View. They probably won’t recj Dinosaur As one of their Own.

“I dream about the moment we are the piging’s going to stand up on his head.

A Bird’s EYE View. Photo: Courtesy Iván Argote / The High Line

Don’t leave food around for it to eat. Photo: Courtesy Iván Argote / The High Line

Photo: Marvin Newman/Estate of Marvin Newman/Courtesy of Howard Greenberg Gallery

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A stagestruck adolescent growing up in Washington, D.C., I had the same romantic view of Broadway from afar that every kid like me did back then — and maybe still does. A fantasy patched together from books (in my case, Moss Hart’s Act One), movies (All About Eve), and, with luck, family holiday trips to the big city to see a Big Broadway Smash. The Theater District I encountered when I moved to New York in the 1970s did not match that fairy tale. The neighborhood was blighted by prostitution, porn, and drugs; the city was facing bankruptcy; and suburbanites and tourists were shunning the sordid hellscape depicted in movies like Midnight Cowboy and Taxi Driver. Forty-second Street was now the Deuce. A Times Square marquee was more likely to herald Deep Throat than The Pajama Game.

In the 1960s, my parents thought nothing of letting me roam those same streets unaccompanied to take in the Camel billboard blowing smoke rings, the Automat, the extant movie palaces, and the pinball arcades. By the time I went to work at the New York Times as a drama critic in the early 1980s, the streets were so treacherous that the paper briefly hired a shuttle bus to pick up its commuting employees nightly from its old headquarters on 43rd Street to spare them the sleaze of the adjacent Hotel Carter, a hotbed of vice. The bus would then dump its passengers at the Port Authority Bus Terminal, where a fresh scrum of Eighth Avenue muggers and drug addicts was lying in wait.

You could argue that the world’s most fabled Theater District has continued steadily downhill ever since — sporadic, fleeting upturns notwithstanding. The decline continues. The truth about post-pandemic Broadway is that even as ticket prices have bounced back to exorbitant and unsustainable heights, commercial theater production is more of a fool’s errand than ever because the equally unsustainable costs of putting on a show can rarely be recouped no matter how high the ticket price. Meanwhile, the surrounding neighborhood is mired in homelessness, shuttered businesses, and marauding Elmos.

Paradise lost? Maybe not. When was there an idyllic Times Square, exactly? The historic fantasy of the Great White Way as a glamorous montage of gleaming marquees, sparky backstage romances, and elegant audiences reveling in black tie was a Hollywood concoction, arguably false from the start. The movie that first spawned it, the 1933 Busby Berkeley musical 42nd Street, was, like the Broadway stage adaptation a half-century later, a laundered version of its source material, an eponymous 1932 roman à clef by Bradford Ropes. In the novel, Broadway’s backstage is presented as a sweatshop commanded by sadistic directors and illiterate, penny-pinching producers, many of them sexual predators, who drive the performers and backstage crew to exhaustion and, in one instance, death. The neighborhood they toil in is rowdy and often tough.

Did Times Square make a comeback after that? The advent of sound in Hollywood six years ahead of the Busby Berkeley 42nd Street had already triggered a Broadway decline, knocking the number of new productions down to 174 for the 1932–33 season from its peak of 264 in 1927–28, when The Jazz Singer supercharged talking pictures’ usurpation of the stage as the foremost medium of American mass entertainment. As television caught on in the 1950s, the erosion continued. By the early 1960s, a typical Broadway season would field on average 60 or so shows. Even decades before the pandemic, that number had fallen into the 30s.

Over the course of those decades, the drop in theatrical production was not accompanied by a rise in Times Square gentility. I wonder now what my parents were thinking when they allowed the young me to wander the West 40s without supervision in the 1960s. The trade paper Variety, which then provided the most authoritative coverage of Broadway, published a page-one story in 1968 reporting that Times Square, “the hub of Manhattan’s show biz and site of famous real estate, has of late often been termed ‘Slime Square’ or ‘Crime Square’ ” because of its “slide from respectability to sleaziness to downright tawdriness,” with “girly pix” being sold to “kids” and “harlots now on duty 24 hours a day,” lined up “nearly solid” on 47th Street off Seventh Avenue. Granted, “girly pix” were not hardcore, but still.

Not that the ostensibly placid 1950s that preceded the anarchic ’60s were nirvana in New York’s Theater District. “Coney & B’Way: Shabby Twins” screamed a June 1956 Variety front-page headline over a story demoting both Coney Island and Times Square to “the great New York City entertainment beats of yesteryear” and portraying them as locked in a race “to see which is the shabbier.” Broadway was condemned as a “hey-buddy-wanna-buy-a-watch strip tease colony” and 42nd Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues as “carnival and commerce at its most depressing level with a cast of characters out of Dostoevsky, Algren, Spillane, and Gide.” (Perhaps the first and last time an American showbiz trade publication was provoked to name-check Dostoyevsky and Gide.)

Yet for all these sightings of Sodom and Gomorrah on Times Square, the Broadway shows running in 1956 included the original productions of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and My Fair Lady and in 1968 Cabaret and Arthur Miller’s The Price. There seems little, if any, correlation between Broadway’s cultural attainments and the surrounding urban depths in any given season. The theater’s artistic triumphs (in good seasons) and the raucous, even dangerous neighborhood (nearly every season) are both hardwired into the Times Square DNA.

That’s what I came to understand in my 13 or so seasons as the Times’ drama critic. I arrived at the job thinking I knew a lot about the theater. But it depended on how you define theater. There is the theater made by playwrights and actors and directors. But in New York, there has always been the theater business, as in producers and theater owners and press agents, all squeezed together in the hothouse neighborhood branded Broadway and integral to New York’s international identity since the Roaring ’20s. The business reality was literally in my face at the Times. I could look out the third-floor newsroom windows of the old headquarters and peer into the offices of the Shuberts across 44th Street. The Shuberts, then and now, have far more clout and far deeper pockets than those of any producer in the American theater. They own nearly half of Broadway’s commercial playhouses and almost all of the most desirable ones as measured by location, felicity of design, comfort, acoustics, and historical provenance. They are the most enduring and powerful force in the modern American theater, period. Their reign began early in the 20th century and has survived unabated into the 21st.

In a real sense, you could say the Shuberts and the Times invented Times Square. The two institutions’ histories were conjoined from the get-go. The Shuberts’ rise to dominance in American theater occurred on the same geographical turf and roughly the same timeline as the Times’ ascent to the peak of American journalism. In coincidental tandem, the families behind both enterprises, both of Jewish-immigrant origins and both interlopers from the provinces (the Shuberts from upstate, the Times clan from Tennessee), had been collectively responsible for colonizing Times Square since its birth.

They were in conflict almost from the start. The Shuberts were interested in profits. The Times liked profits too, but that meant sometimes publishing reviews and news stories that threatened the Shuberts’ bottom line. The first volley was exchanged in 1915 when the paper’s young critic Alexander Woollcott dared suggest that a Shubert attraction, a German sex farce titled Taking Chances, was “not vastly amusing.” (He praised its cast, but no good deed goes unpunished in theater reviewing.) The Shuberts responded by banning Woollcott from their theaters and refusing to advertise in the Times. The paper filed a suit that became national news; an appeals court reversed an initial decision in its favor, allowing for the ban. After a year, the Shuberts decided the Times’ advertising was worth more than the cold war. Woollcott, not yet 30, reveled in how the Shuberts’ stunt had backfired and made him famous: “They threw me out and now I’m basking in the fierce white light that beats upon the thrown.” These square-offs within the neighborhood’s tight confines would continue in perpetuity, the Hatfields and McCoys with the added wild card that these Hatfields and McCoys were ambitious, newly minted Jewish Americans, not hayseeds.

Adolph Ochs, the paterfamilias of the Ochs-Sulzbergers, moved north from Chattanooga after buying the failing Times from its previous owners in 1896. He revamped the paper editorially (“All the News That’s Fit to Print” was coined as a marketing ploy) and in 1905 moved its headquarters from the old Newspaper Row near City Hall to a new building uptown, the second tallest in the city, at the once-remote intersection where Broadway and Seventh Avenue crossed each other at 42nd Street. Ochs’s chosen piece of real estate was not yet “the Crossroads of the World,” as Times Square would later be known, but the gateway to Longacre Square, long a sleepy district of brownstone apartments, bordellos, and horse exchanges but now in the throes of redevelopment as an entertainment district. The Times insisted a central hub of the new IRT subway, Manhattan’s first rapid-transit system, be named Times Square Station. Ochs’s enterprise was so successful that he didn’t wait a full decade to erect the bulkier tower on 43rd Street that it was still occupying when I reported for work almost 70 years later. Even so, the Times held on to its old headquarters at One Times Square into the early 1960s, ensuring that a mesmerizing news “zipper” telegraphing the latest headlines in lights and a televised New Year’s Eve “ball drop” would become synonymous, like the neighborhood, with the paper’s name.

The three Shubert brothers, born in what is now Lithuania, were the sons of a peddler who migrated to America in the massive Eastern European immigration wave of the late 19th century — two generations behind the arrival of the German Jewish émigrés exemplified by the more assimilated, American-born Ochs. The Shuberts’ trajectory from poverty to showbiz royalty paralleled that of their contemporaries Louis B. Mayer, Adolph Zukor, and the Warner brothers, who pioneered the American film industry, first in the East, then in California. But just before moving pictures started to proliferate in their nickelodeon infancy, the Shuberts saw an opportunity in the legitimate theater and grabbed it. They cobbled together a small network of playhouses upstate and set their sights on usurping “the Syndicate,” a monopolistic empire that controlled the booking of virtually all New York shows on the road. Their main instrument of attack was a theatrical weekly they created but funded clandestinely, New York Review, that vilified the Syndicate with progressive-era trust-busting vehemence worthy of Upton Sinclair. With time, cunning, and no irony, the Shuberts slew the Syndicate Goliath and built a monopolistic empire of their own that Justice Department lawyers would decades later force into an antitrust settlement.

The first Shubert boy from Syracuse to migrate to Manhattan was the middle brother, Sam, whose foothold was a job managing the Herald Square Theatre in 1900. Sam was the canny Shubert, the vaguely artistic Shubert, the thought-to-be-maybe-gay Shubert. He died from injuries sustained in an explosive train wreck in 1905 at age 26, four months after the Times moved into its new tower. Prefiguring Hollywood’s memorialization of Irving Thalberg, the MGM studio chief who died at 37 in 1936, Sam was thereafter canonized as a “boy wonder” by his industry, his black-and-white photographic portrait enshrined for decades in the lobby of every Shubert house. The brothers he left behind, Lee and J.J., forged ahead. They eventually “owned more theaters, employed more performers, produced more plays, and probably bedded more chorus girls than any other producers in the history of the American theater” in the estimation of their definitive biographer, the cultural historian Foster Hirsch.

The empire grew from a single brainstorm of Lee’s in 1906, in which he envisioned an “uptown” Theater District at a time when theatrical activity was centered on Herald Square, eight blocks south of the new Times Square. Even as rival showmen were building their palaces on the grander boulevard of 42nd Street or Broadway itself, he saw a future of thriving playhouses along the side streets and gobbled up brownstones on the blocks between Broadway and Eighth Avenue from 44th to 49th Streets. The rowhouses were razed for Shubert houses, most of them open by 1923, with the last, the Barrymore, arriving in 1928.

Lee Shubert’s urban masterstroke proved as permanent as any real-estate coup can be in New York. Nothing else was brilliant about the sphinxlike “Mr. Lee,” as he was known. He spent undue hours in daily sunlamp treatments that made others liken him to a Jewish “cigar-store Indian.” He could barely read or write, and in the words of his younger sibling, J.J., he took no notes, kept no files, and was a thief who surrounded himself with other “crooks.” For his part, “Mr. J.J.,” as he was known, was a coarse bully whose rage and parsimony drove superstars of the day like Eddie Cantor, Mae West, and Fanny Brice to flee the Shubert fold. The brothers’ contempt for each other, a blood feud that ran longer than any attraction booked into their theaters, made it impossible for them to inhabit the same office. Instead, they glowered at each other from palatial suites across the gulf of 44th Street. Lee’s was an aerie at the top of the flagship Shubert Theatre, built in 1913, the same year the Times erected its second tower around the corner on 43rd Street. J.J.’s domain was the Sardi’s building, another Shubert property, where he maintained both his office and a penthouse home. He was moved there on his brother’s initiative in an attempt to isolate and marginalize him. Nicknamed in honor of the ground-floor tenant that began its long run as Broadway’s signature restaurant in the 1920s, the Sardi’s building shared a boundary with the Times’ back exit and loading docks. Each night, as diners swarmed in for a post-curtain supper, bundles of the paper’s first, or “bulldog,” edition would be hoisted into trucks for delivery up and down the Eastern Seaboard.

As the century moved on, the Times became a totem of middle-class culture and propriety. This was hardly the case with the Shubert empire. Not a single one of the Shuberts’ prolific productions — most of them vaudeville-centric revues and threadbare touring companies of tired European operettas — came anywhere near entering the canon of American entertainment, let alone American drama. The Shuberts didn’t just bed (and serially marry) chorus girls; they demanded sexual submission as a condition of employment. They also took a cut of the large cash bribes that scalpers paid corrupt Shubert box-office treasurers in exchange for prime tickets they resold at larcenous markups. The Shuberts thought nothing of sabotaging their own hit bookings if they spotted a potentially more lucrative new tenant on the horizon. Until they were caught in the act by its producer, they even tried to truncate the run of the original 1943 production of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma!, the longest-running musical in Broadway history at the time, apparently by withholding tickets from its box-office racks at the St. James Theatre so the grosses would drop low enough to trigger a contractually mandated eviction. Too avaricious to compromise their rigid financial terms, they lost the postwar gold mines Guys and Dolls and My Fair Lady to competitors.

Lee died in 1953, his brother J.J. a decade later. Their sole plausible successor, J.J.’s son, John, died suddenly at age 53 in 1962, a year ahead of his senescent father, who was never told of his death. Like his long-deceased uncle Sam, John died on a train — of a heart attack, in a private car heading to Clearwater, Florida, en route from New York. In keeping with the family tradition, the final Shubert scion had also produced nothing of consequence. His few long-ago credits were typified by Hold Your Horses, a musical revue he mounted at the Winter Garden in 1933 and where he met his wife, cast as a “Dancing Girl.” When modern theater artists crossed his path, John Shubert refused to work with them, dismissing Elia Kazan as “an animal” and Tennessee Williams’s plays as “an effeminate type of work.” If only because he spoke publicly of addressing Actors’ Equity’s long-held complaints about the overflowing toilets and rampaging rodent populations of Shubert dressing rooms, John struck some Broadway denizens as a Kennedyesque prince compared with J.J. and Lee. His funeral was held on the stage of the Majestic, where the set of Camelot was draped in black velours. His will had stipulated that the obsequies be confined to a non-matinee day to avoid sacrificing any ticket sales and that his widow sit in a chair next to his coffin and a lectern on an otherwise empty stage throughout the bleak farewell. He bequeathed her the bulk of his estate.

Though John was the last direct heir to the Shubert brothers, I discovered upon joining the Times nearly 20 years after his death that the executives who now ran the business were nonetheless called “the Shuberts” and regarded as omnipotent like their predecessors. The usurping Shuberts, named Gerald Schoenfeld and Bernard Jacobs, occupied Lee’s sumptuous quarters above the Shubert Theatre. The empire had been rebranded with an august moniker, the Shubert Organization, and was owned by an entity called the Shubert Foundation, which meant that the city’s most lucrative playhouses and large swaths of midtown’s most valuable real estate were rewarded with tax breaks befitting a nonprofit. The Shubert Foundation claimed to have been conceived by J.J. before his death as “a charitable organization for the poor and helpless.” This landed as a sick joke among the brothers’ contemporaries, given that J.J. and Lee were notorious misers whose wills stiffed not just relatives but many of the underpaid drivers, valets, and secretaries who had been their loyal indentured servants since time immemorial.

By the time I entered the fray, those who worked in the New York theater and most journalists who covered the industry were foggy at best about how Schoenfeld and Jacobs had attained their positions and how their ruthlessly profitable business merited the status of a foundation. Ludicrously enough, the president of Columbia University sat on its board alongside John Shubert’s alcoholic chorus-girl widow.

The new Shuberts were simply “Gerry and Bernie.” Their faces could pass for the masks of comedy and tragedy in repose. Gerry, round and bald, was the ebullient front man who declaimed with a booming voice and orotund diction suggesting he was a product of the Barrymore acting royalty rather than DeWitt Clinton High in the Bronx. His longtime friend Bernie, slight, dour, and prone to terse stabs at gallows humor, was the deal-maker. Before joining Shubert, Bernie had been a lawyer in New York’s Diamond District. Even when he engaged in small talk, his baggy, melancholy eyes seemed to be on the lookout for thieves.

The saga of the Shubert brothers was now consigned to ancient history — even though its scandalous denouement was quite recent history — and the current monarchs were not about to call attention to it. But I stumbled upon a possible clue to the mystery of how Schoenfeld and Jacobs became “the Shuberts” while researching a book at the Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center.

Variety had the story, which had not been covered by the major New York dailies because it unfolded during the 1962–63 newspaper strike. Five months after John Shubert’s November 1962 death on that train to Clearwater, a second widow had emerged, claiming to be the matriarch of a second John Shubert family (replete with a new, 2-year-old John Shubert). She filed a suit to challenge the will that had left her husband’s estate to the ex–chorus-girl wife. She revealed that John was en route to a secret home they shared in Florida when discovered dead on that train and that they had also flagrantly maintained a clandestine Shubert household in an apartment directly above the Shuberts’ own 54th Street Theatre. The 54th Street Theatre was literally a block west of John Shubert’s 54th Street home with Widow No. 1. Widow No. 2 claimed that he had obtained a Mexican divorce from Widow No. 1 and then married her. Widow No. 1 claimed that a second will benefiting Widow No. 2 was a forgery.

The battle spilled into Surrogate’s Court. When the dispute was abruptly resolved with an out-of-court settlement at the last moment, Widow No. 1 had triumphed. Widow No. 2 faded into anonymity, as did her two young children, though the settlement allowed the children to retain the Shubert name. It was the previously obscure young Shubert lawyer Gerald Schoenfeld who brokered the deal for Widow No. 1. With her support, his and Jacobs’s ascent to the throne had begun.

When Schoenfeld and Jacobs finally took over the then-fading empire in the 1970s, they vowed to clean up the neighborhood. They refurbished some houses and transferred a hit produced by the nonprofit impresario Joseph Papp, A Chorus Line, from the Public Theater downtown to the Shubert. Nonetheless, when I arrived at the Times in 1980, just five years later, you would hardly notice this ostensible Renaissance. Not for nothing did Rolling Stone declare 42nd Street between Broadway and Eighth Avenue “the sleaziest block in America.” There was a crude justice to that verdict. What were the sleaziest blocks of Times Square, whatever the decade, if not the Boschian apotheosis of the dog-eat-dog culture of greed, thievery, vulgarity, and sexual predation by which Lee and J.J. built the Broadway Theater District from the start?

Much to the latter-day Shuberts’ dismay, the Times welcomed the New Year of 1983 with a front-page article headlined “Broadway Is in Its Worst Slump in a Decade.” The accompanying photo showed a clutch of newly unemployed stage orphans from Annie, the hit musical that had closed that weekend after a run of almost six years. Of Broadway’s 39 theaters, 15 were dark and 11 more were expected to join them in the coming weeks. The year before, ushering in the atmosphere of impending doom, five playhouses near Times Square were razed to consummate a real-estate deal in which a brutalist Marriott hotel would be built on the sites of the original Broadway productions of the signature 20th-century American dramas Death of a Salesman and Long Day’s Journey Into Night. The architectural vandalism was hideous and heartbreaking to watch, inhumane civic renewal by wrecking ball in the discredited vein of Robert Moses. The gaping wound persists to this day. A chronicler of Times Square’s decline named Josh Alan Friedman would later observe that “ironically, not one peep, scumatorium, or topless bar was razed for the Marriott — just the Morosco and Helen Hayes theaters.” (Neither of those demolished theaters were Shubert properties.)

Some of the surviving houses remained empty for seasons on end in the ’80s, their marquees serving as tombstones for the bombs that had fleetingly awakened them from their slumber. In the accounting of the British drama critic Benedict Nightingale in the mid-’80s, some of the most venerable Broadway houses had sat empty for years over the preceding decade — the Belasco for 409 weeks, the Lyceum 294, the Golden 286. Against this grim backdrop, soon to be darkened further by the spiraling AIDS casualties among theater artists, it felt all the more remarkable when something original and transcendent materialized on those Broadway stages that were lit: Sunday in the Park With George, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, Angels in America. The cognitive dissonance between those theatergoing experiences and the catastrophic health of the theater’s workers, its balance sheet, and its neighborhood was hard to fathom and at times tragic to witness. Decades later, I feel the Broadway of the ’80s could be bracketed by two snatches of dialogue that, for me, still linger. In Ronald Harwood’s The Dresser of 1981, the aging aide to a dying Shakespearean actor-manager clings to a fraying backstage mantra while touring the British provinces during Luftwaffe bombing raids: “Here’s beauty. Here’s spring and summer. Here pain is bearable.” In 1990, an upper-crust Manhattanite in John Guare’s Six Degrees of Separation surveys the widening schisms of his city and observes, “Sometimes there are periods where you see death everywhere.”

As I was leaving the critic’s job in the early 1990s, the New York theater was at what everyone (including me) judged to be its rock bottom. One afternoon, I took my young sons to the intersection of 42nd Street and Seventh Avenue. I wanted them to witness an inflection point in New York history. We paused to look west toward Eighth Avenue, surveying the block that once had “a cast of characters out of Dostoevsky, Algren, Spillane, and Gide.” Now, it was a ghost town, unlit and sepia-hued, frozen in time.

I had shown them neon-flooded vintage photos of what 42nd Street used to look like. I explained that the deserted, boarded-up buildings stretching before them were former vaudeville houses and grind movie theaters, peep shows, and greasy spoons, all condemned for redevelopment. Change was on its way. It would soon be announced that Disney had secured a deal with the city and state to restore the best known of 42nd Street’s relics as an active theater: the long-dormant and crumbling New Amsterdam, which dated back to 1903, when the adjacent intersection was still known as Longacre Square.

Sure enough, Disney came to Times Square, and change came with it. Then again, each generation’s Times Square is different from the next, though all are some amalgam of the tawdry and the brilliant, of decay and glitter. What has survived — despite the vanished movie palaces, despite the lame civic effort to impose a mall on its grid, despite every showbiz upheaval from silent films to streaming — are some three-dozen playhouses that keep hanging on even through the dark years out of an impresario’s dream that lightning can still strike onstage. Along with London’s West End, Times Square is the only large chunk of central urban real estate in the English-speaking world that paradoxically survives both because of and despite its dense population of ostensibly obsolete shrines to what is now redundantly called “live theater.”

It was a former Times drama critic, George S. Kaufman, and his playwriting partner, Moss Hart, who first coined the term the fabulous invalid to describe the New York theater in their play of that title — in 1938. It’s kind of fabulous that while everything has changed since then, Broadway, its perennial obituaries included, still remains more in character than much of what surrounds it in present-day New York, New York.

A New Lawsuit by 432 Park’s Condo Board Alleges the Building’s Developers Ignored and Warnings About Cracks in Its High-Rise’s Concrete Facade and TRIED to Cover the Defects. Photo: Jon Bilous/Shuttertestock

Owners at 432 Park Avenue Have Filed Another Lawsuit Against The Condo’s Developers. Just a few years after alleging in a separate suit that the 96-story tower on billionaire’s row has at least 1,500 defects (including a thickening that alledly “Sounds like bomb”), Owners on Friday Floited a Complaint in Manhattan Claimi Haropers Macklowe and Cim Group Knew About Wideespread Cracking in the Building’s Exposed Concrete Facade and Engaged in “Deliberate and Far-Reaching Fraud” to cover it up.

432 Park’s Condo Board Alged in the Latest Suit, Which Was First Reported by Crain’sthat Cim and Macklowe Not Only Ignored Warnings from Architects and Engineers About the CrissCrossing Exterior’s Cracking But Hide problems from City Inspectors and Buyers in Hopes of “Avoiding Deleys and Maximizing Profits.” The suit, which is seeing at Least $ 165 million in damages, plus Compensation for Depressing Proppers, CLAIMS that the “Thousands” of Cracks Led to Flooding and Corrosion in the Building.

The Cracks Aren’t Exactly new. In October 2015, JUST A FEW MONTHS DIFT THE RAFAEL VIñoly – Designed Building Opened, Sources Told Writer Michael Gross that some “nasty stuff” Called Silicane was alledly being applied to the building ‘exterior to address the cracking. And the initial 2021 Lawsuit HighLighted the exterior’s apparent defects on top of a slew of other willsives, including claims that it was impossible for SLEEP Due to vibration will and noise. (The Lawsuit, Meanwhile, Came in the Wake of a Damning Report by the New York Times that described The 1,400-Foot-Tall Building As Being Wounded With Elevator Problems and Millions of Damage in Water Determination from Leading and Mechanical Issues. The Building’s Façade But Failed to Adequately Address the Defects and Eight AttemPed to Hide. For the suite, this information was i wasaarted after the Lawyers for the Owners Read Through 7 million Pages of Documents and Conducted 100 Days of Deposiations.

432 Park’s Condo Board Alleged Developers Harry Macklowe and Cim Group Ignored Advice from the Project’s Engineers and Failed to Propress the Building Facade’s Cracking. Photo: New York County Clerk

So what was Macklowe’s al The Allegi Reaction to Warnings About Cracking? In adding to allegated the condo’s offering in order to the mythigate any respectibly for the Defects, the Suit Claims and the Engineers’ Advice to APPLY A THICK COATING OF ELASTOMERIC PAINT TO THE BUILDING’S EXTERIOR, WHICE instead, the suit claims, he suggested applying a clear silicone material that he use on his yacht. “Macklowe, who was not a concrete Expert, argued that an invisible sealant was good Enough for his yacht and therefore was good Enough for the Building,” The Suit Reads.

A spokesperson for cim denied the allegations and toy with that the company was to have the latest suit dismissed. Reps for Macklowe Didn’t Respond A Request for Comment, But The Developer’s Team preiviously calmed CLAIMS ABOUT THE CRACKS AND OTHER CONSTRUCTION Issues “Vastly Exaggerated.”

The Slew of Bad Press for the Tower – Which Now Also Includes the Stories Around Tenant and Allegated Rapist Tal Alexander – Can’t Be great for sales. Sotheby’s International Real-Estate Agent Nikki Field told The Wall Street Journal In May 2024 that with the “Toxic” initial Lawsuit Still Making Its Way Through the Courts, she was “avoiding” tachyers to the Building. (At the time, 14 out of 18 units on the market had gone through at least one price, with the average lisage discount being 13.2 Percent from the Highest Ask, for the Paper. “It ‘my favorite building,” One Resident, Who Purchased a Pied-à-Terre in 2016, Told with Earlier This Month, Ahead of the Latest Suite. “I love Living there.”

وصلت الثروة المائية الى حدها الأدنى في بحيرة القرعون ، وهو لم يكن مألوفاً السابق. وبدأ التيار الكهربائي المرتب بها بالتراجع عن قدرته في تغية مئات القرى في البربي وقاشيا ومحيط صيدا. وقررت المصلحة الوطنية لنهر الليطاني البدء بثماني ساعات تقنين يومياً ، وقد تزداعات التقنين في حال لم تعوّض الأمطار.