Tag: Manhattan
The improbable William Laurence
William Laurence on Tinian Island before the Nagasaki bombing
❝The most recent episode of MANHATTAN features the arrival of a character based on one of my favorite real-life Manhattan Project participants: William L. Laurence, the “embedded” newspaperman on the project. The character on the show, “Lorentzen,” appears in a somewhat different way than the real-life Laurence does, showing up on the doorstep of Los Alamos having ferreted out something of the work that was taking place. That isn’t how Laurence came to the project, but it is only a mild extrapolation from the case of Jack Raper, a Cleveland journalist who did “discover” that there was a secret laboratory in the desert in 1943, and was responsible for one of the worst leaks of the atomic bomb effort.
William Laurence, however, was solicited. And he was the only journalist so solicited, invited in to serve as something of a cross between a journalist, public relations expert, and propagandist. (When a character on the show hisses to Lorentzen that they “don’t give Pulitzers for propaganda,” she is, as the show’s writers all know, incorrect — the real-life Laurence did receive a Pulitzer for his reporting on the Nagasaki bombing, and it was a form of propaganda, to be sure.)
❝William Leonard Laurence was born Leib Wolf Siew, in Russian Lithuania. In 1956 he gave an interview to the Oral History Research Office at Columbia University, and, well, I’m just going to let him tell his own “origin story,” because there’s no way I could capture his “flavor” any better than his own words do:
❝I was born in Lithuania, in a very small village. You know Lithuania was one of the strange never-never-lands, you might say, in a certain culture, because it was there that the Jewish intellectual, the Hebraic scholarly centers, were gradually concentrated.. …
The Lithuanian villages were out of space and time, because you know, a life there, in the ghetto, you might say — because that was the only place where the Russianized government permitted Jews to live — they lived there in the 19th century when I was born and the early part of the 20th century in a way that might have been the 15th century, the 16th century. It made no difference. They wore the same type of clothing. They lived the same kind of life, because it was the same culture, you know.
RTFA for another piece of important history you’re not likely to bump into elsewhere. I only posted the bare bones beginning above.
Some of it makes me chuckle. The last couple of firms I worked for before retirement had me up on the hill – so to speak – every once in a while. There are a couple of folks in today’s Los Alamos community I respect for their personal honesty and scientific acumen. Per capita, it is the wealthiest little town in America. Death and destruction pays very well in the Free World.
I met Dr. Oppenheimer a couple times in NYC. Both times, at public forums dedicated to nuclear disarmament and the struggle for peace in the Cold War. Though he was just trying to be part of the audience, he received a standing ovation when spotted.
The TV series is entertaining, BTW. The line between historic record and fiction is pretty well blurred. The flavor, the conflicts between the US military and folks who actually believed in constitutional freedoms as much as scientific freedom of inquiry is well represented. Then – as it is today.
Minister to repay $1.2 million he “borrowed” from charities he ran
A New York City minister who was the subject of an Associated Press investigation about misspent 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina charity funds has agreed to repay $1.2 million that he took from his congregation to buy an 18th-century farmhouse on seven acres in rural New Jersey.
The Rev. Carl Keyes and his wife, the Rev. Donna Keyes, who jointly led the Glad Tidings Tabernacle in Manhattan, signed a legal judgment Wednesday settling a probe by the New York attorney general into a series of questionable church financial transactions.
Those deals included an illegal loan the couple took from the church in 2008 to buy a house in Stockton, New Jersey, near the Delaware River, and $500,000 the church loaned to an anti-poverty charity controlled by Carl Keyes, called Aid for the World.
Some of that money, the attorney general’s office said, was used to buy the minister and his wife a BMW. According to the settlement, which was scheduled to be officially announced Thursday, other funds were used to finance family trips to California, West Virginia, Africa and Florida, where the couple’s sons went to college.
Glad Tidings former executive director, Mark Costantin, agreed to repay $482,000 he still owed Glad Tidings on $1.2 million in loans he’d taken from the church, some of which were used to pay off the mortgage on his house in Chester, New York…
Three former members of the Glad Tidings’ board agreed to pay $50,000 in penalties for neglecting their oversight duties.
The attorney general’s office began its investigation after the AP raised numerous questions about Carl Keyes and two charities he controlled, including one that had received $4.8 million in donations intended to help victims of the 9/11 terrorist attacks and Hurricane Katrina…
Using a combination of internal documents and public records, the AP also chronicled how the church disposed of $31 million it made by selling off its historic Manhattan church in 2007. That report included detail on some of the loan transactions that were the subject of Wednesday’s settlement. After the AP began asking questions, Keyes filed eight years of tax returns for Urban Life Ministries and three years for Aid for the World.
Nice to see the Fourth Estate behaving with traditional backbone. In a craft so often dazzled and dumbed-down by reclassification as media and entertainment, commitment to ethics, functioning as a genuine watchdog is too rare.
I holler at AP folks frequently enough – mostly their editors – about politics. Always nice to witness dedication to traditional standards of journalism.
Odds of storm tides overflowing NYC seawall up 20-fold
After Hurricane Irene passed by
The newly recognized storm-tide increase means that New York is at risk of more frequent and extensive flooding than was expected due to sea-level rise alone, said Stefan Talke, an assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at Portland State University in Portland, Ore. He is lead author of the new study accepted for publication in Geophysical Research Letters…The research also confirms that the New York harbor storm tide produced by Hurricane Sandy was the largest since at least 1821.
Tide gauge data analyzed in the study show that a major, “10-year” storm hitting New York City today causes bigger storm tides and potentially more damage than the identical storm would have in the mid-1800s. Specifically, Talke explained, there’s a 10 percent chance today that, in any given year, a storm tide in New York harbor will reach a maximum height of nearly two meters…the so-called “10-year storm.” In the mid-19th century, however, that maximum height was about 1.7 meters…or nearly a foot lower than it is today, according to tide gauge data going back to 1844, he noted.
“What we are finding is that the 10-year storm tide of your great-, great-grandparents is not the same as the 10-year storm tide of today,” Talke said…
The storm tide is the amount that water levels rise during a storm. It includes both the storm surge — the abnormal rise in water generated by the storm above the sea level — and the predicted astronomical tide. The rise in storm tide outlined in the recent study is in addition to the .44 meter…rise in local sea level that has occurred since the mid-19th century in New York harbor.
Combining the newly calculated rise in storm tide with the rise in sea level that has taken place since the mid-1800s, the researchers found that today, waters can be expected to overtop the lower Manhattan seawall — 1.75 meters high — once every four to five years. In the 19th century, when both sea levels and storm tides were lower, water was expected to overtop the Manhattan seawall only once every 100 to 400 years, according to the paper.
New York just needs to do what politicians in Virginia have done. Make it illegal to use words describing increases in the ocean’s elevation and the likelihood of seawalls being overtopped. Then your problem goes away, right?
It’s the new Republican solution to climate change.
Thanks, Mike
Pic of the Day
Click to enlarge
Brooklyn Bridge under construction – picture of the day at the Guardian Unlimited.
A photographic highlight selected by the picture desk. The Brooklyn Bridge opened on this day in 1883 linking the two New York boroughs of Manhattan and Brooklyn.
Two men stand on a high catwalk, surveying the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge, with Manhattan in the background. Large ships and ferries sit in docks in the East River.
Yes, I fiddled with the photo before posting it. I imagine the original photographer might have also done so – given today’s hardware and software.
Leading indicator: Developers push Manhattan office construction
Proposed Hudson Yards
Manhattan developers are planning the city’s biggest decade of office construction since the 1980s, betting on rising demand for modern space even with tenants unsigned and the availability of financing more limited.
More than 25 million square feet of projects are under construction or may be built in the next nine years, according to brokerage Cassidy Turley. Developers including Related Cos. and real estate investment trusts Boston Properties and Vornado Realty Trust are in talks with potential tenants as they step up plans for towers. Some, including Vornado, may proceed without lease agreements.
Builders and brokers say Manhattan is ready for the boom, citing corporate appetite for the latest in comfort, energy efficiency and technological capability in an area where more than 60 percent of buildings are at least half a century old. The risks for developers are that they are competing for tenants and may have to put up more money as banks are reluctant to fund new projects just three years after the credit crash…
Including buildings completed last year, Manhattan could see about 28.5 million square feet of new office space in this decade. Only 7.4 million square feet was built in the 1990s, and 18.5 million in the 2000s, according to Cassidy Turley. The 1980s had 47.2 million square feet of offices built…
“We’re getting to the point where new construction is logical and the developers are ready to come out of the ground,” said Robert Sammons, Cassidy Turley’s vice president of research. Property companies that stockpiled money during the recession now want to be “ahead of the curve,” he said…
Manhattan’s Far West Side, the area roughly between Pennsylvania Station and the Hudson River, may be one of the biggest areas for development as Related and Brookfield Office Properties take the first steps to attract tenants and start construction on a potential 10 million square feet of offices. Penn Station is the busiest U.S. commuter rail hub, with its 590,000 passengers a day approximating the population of Milwaukee…
Spending on U.S. office construction fell to $24.4 billion in 2010, down 36 percent from 2009, and 56 percent from the peak year of 2008, according to the Census Bureau.
RTFA if you feel the need for detail and market motives. David Levitt did a superb job of research and the complete article has depth and knowledge of the history of office construction in NYC. It’s also a positive sign for the US economy – dealing as it does with the center for American commerce.
Eideard 