Zach Helfand

1 week ago | newyorker.com | Zach Helfand

Kathy Hochul, New York’s awkward and publicity-shy governor, has recently found herself in a public beef with Sean Duffy, Donald Trump’s new Transportation Secretary. Duffy has been grandstanding over New York’s congestion-pricing program, which Trump has threatened to kill. In March, he showed up to call the subway a “shithole.” He announced that he was taking over the reconstruction of Penn Station.

1 week ago | newyorker.com | Zach Helfand

One of the first jobs that George Bichikashvili had in America was securing some street-parking spaces in the Bronx for Con Edison, at ten dollars an hour. Bichikashvili, who is from Tbilisi, Georgia, didn’t understand why anyone would pay for this. “You just take up four spots of parking and sit there until they tell you to leave,” he said. But a job was a job. On the morning of November 18, 2022, Bichikashvili pulled a blue Chrysler minivan onto St. Theresa Avenue, in Pelham Bay.

3 weeks ago | newyorker.com | Zach Helfand

The year 1975: “FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD.” Also 1975: city does not drop dead. Everyone alive during New York’s fiscal crisis remembers the Daily News headline. Few people remember the saviors, who included the governor Hugh Carey, the investment banker Felix Rohatyn, and a bunch of union leaders whose uprisings kept the government from gutting essential services. Teachers risked their pensions to buy up the city’s distressed bonds, thereby avoiding a bankruptcy by minutes.

2 months ago | businessandamerica.com | Zach Helfand

Stulman’s willingness to have the police settle the dispute gave him the upper hand. Ultimately, Messer went to his car and relinquished Elvis. “We figured it was over,” he said. On Great Jones Street, Stulman put the bust back on display. “You’re hunting for Elvis?” Gaver asked. She explained that they’d given it back already. “Here’s the deal,” Tufano said. “A complaint was made about the Elvis bust, O.K.? We’re not, like, booming your door and dragging you outta here in handcuffs.

2 months ago | newyorker.com | Zach Helfand

When someone stole the Great Jones Street Elvis, a few years ago, a lot of people viewed it as a sign that the old East Village was officially dead. The Elvis was a chalk-plaster bust that had stood in the window of 54 Great Jones for thirty-seven years. It started out in the Great Jones Café, a gathering spot for the downtown arts scene in the eighties, and after the café closed, in 2018, it continued on in a new restaurant there called Jolene. The theft was unusually brazen.