Assorted Dyspeptics, Grouches, Grumblers, Hit-And-Run Writers And Talkers Who Hint Broadly That Our Fair Will Be Artless, Boycotted, Funless, Foodless, Constipated, Strangled And Tasteless

It’s a Ken Jackson-Robert Caro grudge match to the death, with the title of supreme Robert Moses scholar at stake:

Sometime last fall, the biographer Robert Caro got a phone call from Roger Hertog, then vice chairman of AllianceBernstein and a rich and powerful New York City history buff. Columbia was planning a big exhibit on Robert Moses, New York’s master builder from the mid-20th century, and he wanted to know if Mr. Caro would give a lecture as part of it.

It was the first time, Mr. Caro said, that he had heard from anyone connected to the massive three-part exhibit opening next week, “Robert Moses and the Modern City,” which includes among its backers noted historian Kenneth T. Jackson.

And yet Mr. Caro had written the book on Moses, hadn’t he? Since its publication in 1974, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York has sold 315,000 copies through its 30 printings (and counting), and can be found on the bookshelf of every self-professed New York–ophile the world over.

With the exhibit (which is to be staged at the Museum of the City of New York, the Queens Museum of Art, and Columbia University) still not open, and with the academic conference weeks away, Mr. Caro gleaned what he could about the whole undertaking—especially the sort of re-evaluation of Moses’ life (and therefore his book) that the exhibit would prompt—by studying its 336-page catalog.

In particular, there were four pages written by Mr. Jackson, another great narrator of the saga of New York, that had gotten Mr. Caro’s attention — four critical pages that made him wonder whether this exhibit was going to be an attack on The Power Broker.

Mr. Caro’s editor Robert Gottlieb, who also read the four pages, told The Observer: “I got this impression that Mr. Jackson, even if he didn’t have a direct animus toward Caro, was suffering from some kind of Moses envy, as if he wanted to own Moses himself.”

. . .

Criticizing Mr. Caro must make students of New York history feel like Oedipus killing his father: The Power Broker is where they all learned about Moses in the first place.

“I wish it had my name on it rather than his,” Mr. Jackson said.

Yet more trash talk:

“There was no intention on my part or by any of the sponsors to not include him,” [Columbia professor and event organizer Hilary] Ballon said. “I have been very concerned that this project not be taken as a critique of what he did. The exhibit raises a different set of questions about Moses’ impact on the physical character of New York City. I’m really interested in what got built.”

Mr. Jackson, who co-edited the catalog with Ms. Ballon and is co-organizing the academic conference, said that he hadn’t thought that Mr. Caro would be interested in the conference, which won’t pay its participants and will probably have a smaller audience than the museum event. Ms. Ballon said that Mr. Caro was the first person to be invited to the public portion of the exhibit at the Museum of the City of New York.

“I understand his speaking fee is pretty large,” Mr. Jackson said.

The State Of The Union Is Strong

That was fast! Man of the year Wesley Autrey makes it into President Bush’s State of the Union address:

One thing everyone at the State of the Union address could agree on applauding was President Bush’s introduction of Wesley Autrey, the New Yorker who saved the life of a stranger in a Harlem subway station.

Autrey was commended in Bush’s speech yesterday for jumping onto the tracks when he saw the man fall into the path of a train, pulling him out of harm’s way and holding him until the train passed above their heads.

Bush said: There is something wonderful about a country that produces a brave and humble man like Wesley Autrey, who attended the speech with his daughters.

And speaking of which:

The chamber erupted most unanimously and loudly for Wesley Autrey, the man who leapt into the tracks of a New York subway to save a fellow passenger. (The only ones not clapping, it appeared, were Mr. Autrey’s two young daughters, who napped beside him in their bubblegum-colored dresses.)

Home James

The worst problem plaguing the city’s exclusive preschools is poor street access for chauffeured transportation:

The cars gather in front of the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan about 8:30 a.m. In the front seats sit hired drivers (nobody uses the term chauffeur anymore). The cars are mostly big and mostly black luxury-edition sport utility vehicles like the Mercedes GL-Class or the GMC Yukon Denali. They fill the lanes in front of the Y’s entrance on Lexington Avenue, often two or three rows deep.

It looks like the outside of an arbitrage house just before trading hours, or perhaps the Knicks’ private entrance to Madison Square Garden on game day.

Until, that is, the drivers open the back-seat doors and the passengers’ feet emerge.

These are not the feet of profit-takers or N.B.A. players. These feet wear Sonnet Maryjanes and Primigi sneakers with Velcro closure straps.

These feet are only a half-foot long.

The children — ages 3 through 5 — are enrolled at the Y’s famous nursery school. The livery convention on Lexington Avenue occurs most every weekday. Neighbors of the Y and parents with children in the nursery school say they have seen the number of cars and drivers increase considerably over the past couple of years.

In exasperation, the director of the school, Nancy Schulman, drafted a letter to all families insisting that the drivers wait somewhere else while parents or baby sitters take the children in: find a legal parking space, or take their cars for a few spins around the block.

. . .

The Y is hardly the only school in the neighborhood where children get to school by car and driver. Dropoff hour at Nightingale-Bamford, on 92nd Street between Madison and Fifth Avenues, and at Dalton’s lower school, on 91st between Park and Madison, is often clogged by chauffeured S.U.V.’s.

Dalton’s chief financial officer, Ned Pinger, stands outside every morning to greet students, which often involves opening doors and helping them out of the back seat. “The heads of elementary schools are often outside doing this, and it becomes a little ridiculous,” said Sandra R. Bass, who publishes Private School Insider, a newsletter for New York parents. “You can’t tell who the master is in this situation.”

. . .

A parent whom other parents identified as a chauffeur-using mother, Alison Schneider, whose husband, Jack Schneider, is a hedge fund manager, said, “I got the letter, but I don’t really have any feelings about it one way or the other. It’s kind of boring. It’s about cars and parking.”

Over the past couple of weeks, a staff member from the Y’s nursery school has been seen directing waiting cars away from the school. The chauffeurs idled in double-parked formation one block farther down Lexington, or around the corner on 91st Street. Posters to the New York bulletin board of the Web site Urbanbaby.com, which is popular with mothers of young children, have occasionally made note of the scene. “So this morning I was at the 92nd Street Y and there were 10 black Escalades and Range Rovers double-parked with huge guys in black suits,” one wrote last month.

Sculptor + Sitting Around Watching Too Much Daytime Television = Bad Ahistorical Art

Mr. Miller, put down the remote . . . and for pete’s sake, stay away from the Oprah books:

At the northwest corner of Central Park, construction is under way on Frederick Douglass Circle, a $15.5 million project honoring the escaped slave who became a world-renowned orator and abolitionist.

Beneath an eight-foot-tall sculpture of Douglass, the plans call for a huge quilt in granite, an array of squares, a symbol in each, supposedly part of a secret code sewn into family quilts and used along the Underground Railroad to aid slaves. Two plaques would explain this.

The only problem: According to many prominent historians, the secret code — the subject of a popular book that has been featured on no less a cultural touchstone than “The Oprah Winfrey Show” — never existed. And now the city is reconsidering the inclusion of the plaques, so as not to “publicize spurious history,” Kate D. Levin, the city’s commissioner of cultural affairs, said yesterday.

. . .

Algernon Miller, who designed the memorial site, said he “was inspired by this story line,” which he discovered in the library. His was a re-interpretation, he said, noting that he was “taking a soft material, a quilt, and converting it into granite.”

“Traditionally what African-Americans do is take something and reinterpret into another form,” he said.

. . .

Giles R. Wright, director of the Afro-American History Program at the New Jersey Historical Commission, rattled off the historians’ problems in a telephone interview: There is no surviving example of an encoded quilt from the period. The code was never mentioned in any of the interviews of ex-slaves carried out in the 1930’s by the Works Progress Administration. There is no mention of quilting codes in any diaries or memoirs from the period.

Mr. Miller responded to critics: “No matter what anyone has to say, they weren’t there in that particular moment, especially something that was in secret.”

So Next Time I See Black Hawk Helicopters I’ll Just Assume It’s A Will Smith Vehicle

“I Am Legend” officially becomes shorthand for “obnoxiously intrusive, seemingly eternally omnipresent film shoot”:

Don’t be alarmed by the fleet of Black Hawk helicopters and military ships converging on the Brooklyn Bridge tonight — it’s only the new Will Smith movie, police said yesterday.

For the next eight days, these mock military vehicles and more than a thousand extras will shoot an evacuation scene for the next Big Willie blockbuster, “I am Legend.”

The post-apocalyptic sci-fi flick is due out this December.

Filming will start at 4 p.m. and is expected to wrap up weekdays at 10 p.m., police said.