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LOAD-DATE: May 22, 2008
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The New York Times
May 20, 2008 Tuesday

Late Edition - Final

As Term Wanes, Bloomberg's Temper Boils Up
BYLINE: By DIANE CARDWELL
SECTION: Section A; Column 0; Metropolitan Desk; Pg. 1
LENGTH: 1380 words
For more than six years, Councilman Peter F. Vallone Jr. and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg have enjoyed a warm relationship. So when the councilor spotted the mayor outside City Hall on a recent sunny morning, he greeted him amiably, shook his hand, and turned to go on his way.

There was no indication that the mayor was about to explode.

''What's this I hear about you objecting to that power plant?'' Mr. Bloomberg, who usually keeps his business private, barked out.

''He kept raising his voice. 'What's the matter with you? You know we need the power,' '' Mr. Vallone, from Queens, recalled the mayor saying. ''Then he finally just screamed something about not moving it.''

Mr. Bloomberg is often a man of quaint politeness in public. But in recent days, as he has endured setbacks on projects crucial to his legacy, another Michael Bloomberg has spilled into view: short-tempered, scolding, even petulant.

The mayor has watched the collapse of his congestion pricing proposal and the blocking of his plan to link teacher tenure to student test scores. He is hoping a revived deal to develop the far West Side of Manhattan, another crucial part of his vision for transforming the city, can become a reality.

And, with his presidential hopes shelved, the often fawning attention from the media has faded, too.

Suddenly, as he enters the twilight of his term, he is openly dressing down commissioners, taking obvious shots at officials who disagree with him and invoking the royal ''we'' while refusing to answer questions whose topics or phrasing he finds distasteful.

He threw a sharp elbow last week toward Senator Charles E. Schumer over his suggestion that the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey take over as the lead agency for the stalled Moynihan Station project.

''We set the city's priorities,'' Mr. Bloomberg said. ''They don't come out of Washington.''

Mr. Bloomberg's chief spokesman, Stu Loeser, played down the recent bouts of temper, saying, ''It's very easy to analyze things into other explanations for ordinary human behavior by someone who, over all, is a very optimistic person.'' He added: ''Mike Bloomberg is only human, and since he first started running for office in 2001, New Yorkers have seen him happy and sad, irritated and elated.''

But several current and former officials say the public is just now getting a sustained look at the impatience and occasional anger that Mr. Bloomberg, a self-made billionaire unused to answering to any authority higher than his own, feels toward those who would stand in his way or challenge his motives. ''It's the worst I've ever seen it,'' Mr. Vallone said of Mr. Bloomberg's mood.

Mr. Bloomberg has long been a man of contradictions: jocular and flirtatious one minute, earnest and moralizing the next. Described as down-to-earth and sharply funny, he might greet a political consultant by joking, ''Any of your clients get arrested today?'' He can be solicitous of his colleagues, once inviting City Councilman Lewis A. Fidler's son Max to City Hall for a sit-down interview for his school project, rather than simply providing written answers through an aide.

''He was extremely nice to my kid,'' said Mr. Fidler, from Brooklyn. ''So there's clearly a soft side to him.''

But he is also demanding and prone to outbursts of angry hyperbole, according to current and former associates, most of whom would speak only anonymously for fear of offending the mayor. They described a suddenly red-faced man who, in full view of others in the bullpen, the open workspace at City Hall, might scream, ''You're destroying my administration!'' at an aide over a slip-up, or unleash a profanity-laced question about why he had botched a step in a project.

In some respects, associates say, Mr. Bloomberg's anger stems from incredulity that systems do not function as they should, and from never fully adjusting to the last-minute, secret deal-making culture of politics, which he believes is a bad way to conduct business.

These officials and associates say that Mr. Bloomberg's temper burns hot and fast -- he can erupt, and then turn around and invite the target of his anger to join him for dinner. The attacks are not so much personal as an expression of his extreme impatience, said Assemblyman Keith L. T. Wright of Harlem, who clashed with the mayor at times over the congestion pricing proposal.

Mr. Bloomberg's fury ''pales in comparison'' to that of former Gov. Eliot Spitzer, who would threaten to ''bury you,'' Mr. Wright said. He added that Mr. Bloomberg would yell things more focused on policy issues, like, '' This is good for the city! You've got to do this!''

Mr. Bloomberg, who declined to be interviewed for this article, has acknowledged his quick temper, writing in his 1997 autobiography, ''Bloomberg by Bloomberg,'' that when he was first setting up the media and information behemoth Bloomberg L.P., he slammed a door so hard in a fit of rage that the latch broke, locking him in, and he had to sheepishly ask his officemates to let him out.

Like many successful, self-made people, Mr. Bloomberg can be single-minded in his pursuits and supremely confident in his views. Comparing himself with other entrepreneurs in the autobiography, he wrote, ''I too think I can do everything better than anyone else.'' He added: ''Still, my ego does allow for the remote possibility that someone might be as good at one or two little things. I've admitted there's a slim chance that ideas coming from others could be valuable as well.''

As mayor, Mr. Bloomberg has worked to shield these traits from the public. But of late, he has been revealing an unusual level of emotion.

''People think that the guy is a cool operator, he's a business technocrat, and I think people really can't comprehend that he gets frustrated with the slow pace of government, that he can't just wave the magic wand and say, 'This shall be done,' '' said Scott M. Stringer, the Manhattan borough president, who said he had been on the receiving end of both rage and joy from the mayor. ''Now that they're focused on the endgame, let's face it: This legacy, this large canvas, needs a lot more paint before we can step back and really look at it.''

Mr. Bloomberg seemed reflective at a commencement address he gave at the University of Pennsylvania on Monday, describing how exciting and flattering the ''buzz'' was when he was viewed as a possible presidential hopeful this year, which landed him on the covers of Time and Newsweek.

''But in the end, I decided to stay with my current job -- one that has 591 days left before I'm term-limited out. But who's counting?'' the mayor said.

Mr. Bloomberg's mercurial nature has been emerging most clearly in his dealings with members of the news media, with whom he has recently come to resemble the ''Seinfeld'' Soup Nazi of municipal government.

At a news conference on May 1, Mr. Bloomberg snapped at a reporter who tried to ask him about a discrimination lawsuit at Bloomberg L.P. ''What does this have to do with the budget?'' he asked, even though he had already offered his views on other issues. ''Next time, don't bother to ask us a question. Stick to the topic. Everybody else plays by the rules; you'll just have to as well.''

Last week, at another news conference, he cut off a reporter who used the word ''maintain'' in a question, calling the word inappropriate because of its confrontational connotation.

''Next time you have a question, you want to insinuate that I lie, just talk to the press secretary,'' he said, jabbing his finger toward the reporter. ''I don't think we have a question for you.''

But others in his orbit are feeling his upset, too. At an announcement in late March highlighting more bus service in the Bronx, as the outlook for congestion pricing grew bleaker, he rebuked his transportation commissioner, Janette Sadik-Khan, as she tried to expand on his remarks about why the proposal would not be a pilot program.

Mr. Bloomberg was already upset that day because the Metropolitan Transportation Authority had reneged on $30 million in promised service enhancements linked to fare increases.

''That's it, that's the answer to the question,'' he said. ''I'm answering the questions here at the press conference.''
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SUBJECT: MAYORS (90%); CITIES (90%); LEGISLATIVE BODIES (89%); CITY GOVERNMENT (89%); ELECTRIC POWER PLANTS (76%); CAMPAIGNS & ELECTIONS (73%); POWER PLANTS (71%); ACADEMIC TESTING (66%); PORT AUTHORITIES (64%); TEACHING & TEACHERS (53%); ACADEMIC TENURE (52%)
COMPANY: PORT AUTHORITY OF NEW YORK & NEW JERSEY (65%)
INDUSTRY: NAICS485999 ALL OTHER TRANSIT & GROUND PASSENGER TRANSPORTATION (65%); SIC4119 LOCAL PASSENGER TRANSPORTATION, NEC (65%)
PERSON: MICHAEL BLOOMBERG (97%); CHARLES SCHUMER (53%)
GEOGRAPHIC: NEW YORK, NY, USA (79%) NEW YORK, USA (92%); NEW JERSEY, USA (79%) UNITED STATES (92%)
LOAD-DATE: May 20, 2008
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
GRAPHIC: PHOTO: Associates say Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg's anger may be linked to setbacks on projects he sees as critical to his legacy. (PHOTOGRAPH BY BRENDAN HOFFMAN FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES) (pg. A19)
PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

756 of 1231 DOCUMENTS

The New York Times
May 20, 2008 Tuesday

Late Edition - Final

Huntington Hartford, A. & P. Heir Adept at Losing Millions, Dies at 97
BYLINE: By DANIEL LEWIS
SECTION: Section B; Column 0; Obituary; Pg. 8
LENGTH: 1731 words
Huntington Hartford, who inherited a fortune from the A. & P. grocery business and lost most of it chasing his dreams as an entrepreneur, arts patron and man of leisure, died Monday at his home in Lyford Cay in the Bahamas. He was 97.

His death was announced by his daughter, Juliet Hartford.

Mr. Hartford, a grandson of a principal founder of the Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company, was treated like a prince as a boy, indulged by his mother and a staff of servants and eventually provided with a living of about $1.5 million a year. Not content merely to be rich, he longed to be a writer and, more than that, an arbiter of culture and a master builder -- ambitions that eluded him time after time.

A famous example was the Huntington Hartford Museum, also known as the Gallery of Modern Art, at 2 Columbus Circle in Manhattan. Mr. Hartford opened it in 1964 as a showcase for 19th- and 20th-century work that went against the prevailing current of Abstract Expressionism, which he detested. The building, designed by Edward Durell Stone, was considered a folly or worse: ''a die-cut Venetian palazzo on lollipops,'' wrote Ada Louise Huxtable, then the architecture critic of The New York Times.

The art within was generally unremarkable. And far from becoming the self-sustaining museum that Mr. Hartford had envisioned, it cost him $7.4 million before he abandoned the building to a rocky fate. It was occupied for many years by the city's Department of Cultural Affairs and the Convention and Visitors Bureau and is now undergoing a extensive redesign as the future home of the Museum of Arts and Design (formerly known as the American Craft Museum).

Costlier still was Mr. Hartford's makeover of Hog Island, in the Bahamas. After buying four-fifths of the place in 1959 and having it renamed Paradise Island, he set about developing a resort with the construction of the Ocean Club and other amenities. Advisers persuaded him to stop short of exotic attractions like chariot races, but, overextended and unable to get a gambling license, he wound up losing an estimated $25 million to $30 million.

There were many lesser ventures that either bombed or fizzled, among them an automated parking garage in Manhattan, a handwriting institute, a modeling agency and his own disastrous stage adaptation of ''Jane Eyre.'' He inherited an estimated $90 million and lost an estimated $80 million of it.

Writing in Esquire magazine in 1968, after decades of spending beyond his means, Mr. Hartford said that the day had come when the chairman of the Morgan Guaranty Trust Company was ''suddenly too busy to see me.'' But it was not quite clear whether he was bragging or complaining. ''To most Americans the worst errors are financial,'' he acknowledged, ''and in that respect I have been Horatio Alger in reverse.''

In her book ''Squandered Fortune: The Life and Times of Huntington Hartford'' (Putnam, 1991), Lisa Rebecca Gubernick wrote that Mr. Hartford could seldom stay focused, a tendency that irritated his associates, who might be summoned from a continent away only to be told that he had no time to see them. Frank Lloyd Wright was said to have remarked that Mr. Hartford was ''the sort of man who will come up with an idea, pinch it in the fanny and run.''

Much the same might have been said of his gadabout love life. In his long heyday, Mr. Hartford frequently turned up in the company of movie stars like Lana Turner and Gene Tierney, generating cafe society headlines. When it came to his four marriages, though, he chose each time a beautiful young woman of no fame or fortune; continued having well-documented affairs regardless; and, after each split, seemed to maintain a genuine affection for the former wife.

According to the Gubernick biography, he even floated the idea that his mother adopt his first wife, the former Mary Lee Epling, so that he might keep her as a sister after their divorce in 1939. Instead, she made a successful new marriage, with Douglas Fairbanks Jr.

George Huntington Hartford II -- he never used the George -- was named for his grandfather, who helped to found the Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company in 1859. It grew into the world's biggest retail business, and in 1940 the Securities and Exchange Commission ranked the Hartfords among the nation's richest families. That had been largely the doing of young Huntington's two hard-working uncles. His own father, Edward, considered himself a more creative, independent type and did very well with a patented shock absorber for automobiles.

Edward Hartford died in 1922, leaving his share of the A. & P. legacy to his two children: Josephine, the elder, who married the following year; and Huntington, then 12, who came under the care of his mother, Henrietta Guerard Hartford. She was by all accounts an overbearing woman, who emphasized her family's old South Carolinian bloodlines while covering over the fact that her father, Henry Pollitzer, was the son of a Jewish immigrant from Austria.

After Edward's death, Henrietta moved from a lavish home on the New Jersey shore to a mansion in Newport, R.I., eventually consigning Huntington to the rigors of St. Paul's School in New Hampshire, where, redolent of ''new money,'' he suffered such ostracism and abuse that he recalled those years as the worst of his life.

Huntington went to Harvard, studying English literature and graduating in 1934. He went to work for his uncles at the company's headquarters, then housed in the Graybar Building next to Grand Central Terminal, where his job was to keep track of sales of bread and pound cake. But he was often absent. In 1934 he defiantly took a day off to attend the Harvard-Yale football game. That ended his career in the family business. Yale won, 14-0.

In 1940, Mr. Hartford tried being a reporter for the New York newspaper PM, after putting up $100,000 to help get the paper started. If nothing else, the experience produced one of the all-time great excuses for missing deadline: he once sailed his yacht to cover an assignment on Long Island, and upon returning to the city could find no place to tie up and come ashore with the story.

With the start of World War II, he donated the yacht to the Coast Guard. In return he was given the command of a modest supply ship in the Pacific. He ran it aground twice -- once, he said later, because his navigational charts were out of date, the other time because ''I mistook feet for fathoms.''

Establishing himself in Los Angeles after the war, Mr. Hartford enjoyed a stretch of relatively stable and productive years. He married the aspiring actress Marjorie Steele and put her in a film he produced, ''Face to Face,'' which received good reviews. His Huntington Hartford Foundation supported a colony for artists and writers. And in 1954, he converted an old movie house into what was then Hollywood's only legitimate stage theater, the Huntington Hartford Theater.

Yet his efforts to bring culture to Southern California didn't yield their full money's worth in cachet. In part, this was because of his narrow tastes. He hated William Faulkner and Tennessee Williams as much as he hated Picasso and de Kooning, their work being immoral, in his view. When he engaged Helen Hayes to star in his theater's gala first production, he cast her in an antiquated piece by James Barrie, ''What Every Woman Knows.''

For ''The Master of Thornfield,'' his own adaptation of ''Jane Eyre,'' Mr. Hartford chose a dissipated Errol Flynn as his star. Mr. Hartford's script was panned as painful, and Flynn dropped out, but Mr. Hartford nevertheless took the show to New York in May 1958, where he subsidized its performance to nearly empty houses at the Belasco Theater for six weeks.

By then the A. & P. had been suffering under lackluster management. In 1959, Mr. Hartford raised badly needed cash by selling $40 million of his shares after a battle over the direction of the company. In 1960, Ms. Steele sued him for divorce. The settlement included trust funds of $1 million for each of their children, a son, John, and a daughter, Catherine. Catherine, who had drug and alcohol-related problems, was found dead on a beach in Hawaii in 1988.

After selling his A. & P. shares, Mr. Hartford shed other holdings, like the Handwriting Institute, a project inspired by his belief in penmanship as a key to aptitude and personality; Speed Park, the Manhattan garage experiment, which lost $1.8 million; and his California properties, including the artists colony and the theater.

At the same time, he was spending even bigger amounts on fresh projects. In addition to starting the museum on Columbus Circle and sinking millions of dollars in Paradise Island, he proposed a kind of Europeanization of Central Park. He himself put up $750,000 for an initial phase, a 10,000-square-foot pavilion, which was to be called the Hartford Cafe, but approval of the cafe was eventually canceled.

It was during this time that Mr. Hartford began Show, an arts and entertainment magazine that went through at least three iterations and perhaps $8 million before ceasing publication in 1973.

Mr. Hartford gradually fell out of the news except for occasional sensational stories about his personal life. His third wife, the model Diane Brown, whom he married in 1962, carried on a very public affair with the singer Bobby Darin, but the couple reconciled and had a daughter, Juliet, before divorcing in 1970.

Besides Juliet, Mr. Hartford is survived by his son, John.

In 1974 Mr. Hartford married Elaine Kay, a former hairdresser more than 40 years his junior. They, too, were divorced, in 1981, but continued to live together in Mr. Hartford's 20-room duplex apartment at 1 Beekman Place in Manhattan. In 1984, Ms. Kay and a friend were arrested and charged with tying up a teenage secretary to Mr. Hartford and shaving her head. The directors of the building voted for eviction.

Mr. Hartford moved to a townhouse on East 30th Street but subsequently lost it when he declared bankruptcy, even though he was still the beneficiary of a trust fund yielding more than $500,000 a year. He moved to the Bahamas in 2004.

''I have tried to use my millions creatively,'' Mr. Hartford wrote in one of the early issues of his magazine Show. But, he added, ''The golden bird, coming to life, has sometimes wriggled out of my hand and flown away.''
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SUBJECT: DEATHS & OBITUARIES (94%); ART & ARTISTS (90%); MUSEUMS & GALLERIES (90%); ENTREPRENEURSHIP (89%); CULTURE DEPARTMENTS (78%); DESTINATIONS & ATTRACTIONS (78%); GAMING (77%); WEDDINGS & ENGAGEMENTS (74%); TRAVEL HOSPITALITY & TOURISM (73%); GROCERY STORES & SUPERMARKETS (73%); PROPERTY VACANCIES (72%); CITY GOVERNMENT (64%); THEATER (61%)
COMPANY: GREAT ATLANTIC & PACIFIC TEA CO INC (72%); MORGAN GUARANTY TRUST CO OF NEW YORK (50%)
TICKER: GAP (NYSE) (72%)
GEOGRAPHIC: NEW YORK, NY, USA (91%) NEW YORK, USA (91%) BAHAMAS (93%); UNITED STATES (92%)
CATEGORY: Art
PERSON: Huntington Hartford
LOAD-DATE: May 20, 2008
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
GRAPHIC: PHOTOS: Huntington Hartford, at left in 1974 with his fourth wife, Elaine Kay, on their wedding day and at right, with Robert Moses, outside of his Gallery of Modern Art shortly before its opening in 1964.(PHOTOGRAPH BY TIM BOXER/GETTY IMAGES)

(PHOTOGRAPH BY JACK MANNING/THE NEW YORK TIMES)

DOCUMENT-TYPE: Obituary (Obit); Biography
PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

757 of 1231 DOCUMENTS

The New York Times
May 19, 2008 Monday

Correction Appended

Late Edition - Final
For Women, Memories Of West 78th And Beyond
BYLINE: By SUSAN DOMINUS.

E-mail: [e-mail]

SECTION: Section B; Column 0; Metropolitan Desk; BIG CITY; Pg. 1
LENGTH: 917 words
As a young girl growing up on the Upper West Side in the early 1950s, Laurie Burrows Grad, the daughter of the playwright Abe Burrows, had every intention of becoming a Girl Scout until her mother put an end to it. ''She let me be a Brownie, but then she found out that the Girl Scouts were segregated, and she couldn't tolerate that,'' Ms. Burrows Grad, a glass of wine in her hand, explained to a roomful of women last week. ''But she didn't think I'd understand that idea at that age. So she just told me that green wasn't my color.''

Her audience howled. Ms. Burrows Grad, 63, has surely dined out on that story dozens of times, but never to a more appreciative audience. The 13 other women relaxing in the room not only grew up with the same values in the same Upper West Side neighborhood, but most of them could easily picture her mother (''my mother, the Socialist, left wing nut case,'' as Ms. Burrows Grad described her). As 11- and 12-year-olds, all of them had attended the same sixth-grade class -- what was known at the time as a class for ''intelligently gifted children'' -- at Public School 87 on West 78th Street, and most of them had even been members of that same Brownie troop. Once they'd split pineapple ice cream sodas at Schrafft's and bugged each other's older brothers for baseball cards. But with the exception of a few pairs who'd stayed in touch, none of the women had caught up since they graduated from sixth grade in 1956.

When several women, old friends from childhood, haven't seen one another in more than 50 years -- during which children were raised, careers stalled and were jump-started and personalities were all but reinvented -- how do they begin to reconnect?

Sometimes they start with hair. ''You became a redhead,'' said Dana Jacobi, a cookbook author and Web editor, after embracing Barbara Goldberg, a furniture retailer. ''We all became something,'' Ms. Jacobi added.

Finding out what, exactly, had become of each of them was no small part of the pleasure of the reunion being held in the East Village loft of Jessica Weber, a graphic designer and fellow P.S. 87 alumna, who had organized the event on a whim. Among their ranks: a biographer, several advertising and marketing executives, educators, retail entrepreneurs and decorators.

''It's interesting how many of us went into so-called women-friendly fields,'' Ms. Weber said. ''If we were 10 years younger, there'd probably be a few more lawyers and bankers.''

Ms. Weber and her classmates may have been products of the '50s, but for many, ambitions were paramount from the start, in an era before balance was a buzzword. They were all from ''Jewish, solidly middle-class families with deep Manhattan roots,'' as one woman put it, characterizing much of the neighborhood at the time. The expectations were high. ''We all knew we were going to college,'' said Mara O'Laughlin, the vice president for institutional advancement at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. Of the 14 women, they were surprised to learn, only eight had had children. The average number of husbands: around 1.5 (only three first marriages had not ended in divorce, and one of those is only a year old).

Entering college in 1962 and graduating in 1966, they represented a kind of bridge generation, fluctuating somewhere between Marjorie Morningstar (and yes, like that fictional heroine, many of them stopped traffic as they crossed Central Park West on horseback) and Joan Baez. ''As a college freshman, I wanted to date a stockbroker,'' said Lois Beekman, who now does marketing for nonprofits. ''By the time I graduated, my boyfriend and I used to comb each other's long hair and walk down Riverside Park holding daisies.''

Over the course of the evening, the confessions from the women covered failed marriages, physical infirmities, and numerous childhood infractions like dumping water down their apartment buildings' mail chutes and enlisting the help of dad's advertising agency for a submission to a student poster competition (the prize: escorting Eleanor Roosevelt when she spoke at the school).

Judging from the conversations that evening and the e-mail messages leading up to it, 50 years from now, current students at P.S. 87 won't remember Hannah Montana or the great financial downturn of 2009 as vividly as they'll recall some sushi joint on Broadway that had great yellowtail. On and on these 60-something women went about the delicacies of their youth: the cherry napoleons at Eclair, the hamburger with onions at P. J. Clarke's, Gail Blumberg's mother's stuffed artichokes. Those they remembered as if it were yesterday. The details of Eleanor Roosevelt's visit? ''Who remembers!'' said Ms. O'Laughlin, who'd won the poster contest.

The next day, all 14 women joined a tour of P.S. 87, about which they had little to say except that the linoleum had held up remarkably well. The long evening before -- the instant intimacy, the shared memories -- was what had made the reunion worthwhile for the women who'd flown in for the opportunity. (As for why there were no men invited, said Ms. Weber, 'None of us were curious!' '') The women in their class gathered after the tour for lunch at the uptown Ruby Foo's, looking, by the end, a little bit wistful, but not for the old bossy waiters at Fine & Schapiro's or the school trips they took to the Wonder Bread factory in Queens. ''It's just that we let so much time go by before doing this,'' Ms. Weber said. ''The thread was reconnected.''