New York
A Landmark Celebrates an Architect Many Have Forgotten
Good morning. It’s Wednesday. Today we’ll look at the city’s newest interior landmark. We’ll also find out about a recital of music that was written in a Nazi concentration camp more than 80 years ago.
Among the city’s 124 interior landmarks, there are well-known places like the lobby of the Empire State Building and the Rainbow Room atop Rockefeller Center. The newest, added by the Landmarks Preservation Commission on Tuesday, is less well known: the Modulightor Building on East 58th Street, a creation of the Modernist architect Paul Rudolph.
Who?
“He was the Frank Lloyd Wright” of the late 1950s and 1960s, said Kelvin Dickinson, president of the Paul Rudolph Institute for Modern Architecture, which occupies the space. “He was a famous architect, and he taught all of these students who later became famous architects, but when I was in school” — in the late 1980s and early 1990s — “no one remembered who he was.”
The New York Times critic Jason Farago called Rudolph “one of the most acclaimed — and confounding — architects” of his time. His Brutalist buildings were widely praised in the 1960s, and they were complicated, with mind-bending layouts. The architecture writer Fred A. Bernstein wrote that Rudolph’s designs involved “molding concrete into shapes so intricate that they sometimes resembled M.C. Escher drawings.” His seven-story Art and Architecture Building at Yale is said to have 37 levels. His own apartment, on Beekman Place, has at least a dozen.
Rudolph desperately wanted not to be forgotten and struck a deal with the Library of Congress to turn the Beekman Place apartment into a study center. That would have preserved his legacy. But Dickinson said that the library decided to sell the apartment after moving Rudolph’s papers and drawings to Washington. Rudolph learned of the library’s plan shortly before his death at age 78 in 1997 and willed his half of the Modulightor Building to his partner, Ernst Wagner.
Rudolph had lived through ups and downs. He had been the chairman of the School of Architecture at Yale from 1957 to 1965. But by the 1970s, he was at a low point professionally, Dickinson said.
“He thought he could create a lighting company that could keep his staff busy when he didn’t have any architectural work,” he said. That was the beginning of Modulightor.
In time Rudolph became popular in Asia and took back the Modulightor space in his office. Modulightor migrated to SoHo and then to East 58th Street after Rudolph bought a brownstone that became “his most personal project,” Dickinson said. “He became his own architect, his own client, his own contractor and his own financier.”
“Which was not good,” he added, “because I think he ran out of money three times.”
He replaced the original facade with one he had designed.
The landmarks commission said the first four floors were “mostly complete” by 1993. Two more floors and a roof deck were added between 2010 and 2016 by the architect Mark Squeo, based on Rudolph’s drawings. The exterior was designated a landmark in 2023.
Liz Waytkus, the executive director of Docomomo US, a nationwide organization that works to preserve Modernist buildings, said the newly designated interior landmark was important “not only for its spatially rich and light-filled Modern design” but also because Rudolph’s presence can be felt when the institute opens the space to the public twice a month.
“They don’t treat Modulightor like a precious commodity,” she said. “You can sit on things. You can touch things. You can take pictures. I’ve met I.M. Pei’s children there. I’ve met former employees of Paul’s. It’s a fantastic tribute to Paul.”
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Saving music and saving history
Most music that endures is written down and then memorized.
Some of the music that will be performed tonight at a recital at Hebrew Union College in Greenwich Village was memorized first. It had to be. It was written for a secret choir in a Nazi concentration camp. There was no paper to write on.
So, as Janie Press, the president of a group called Holocaust Music Lost & Found, put it, “this is about saving a history — and saving music.”
The person who took that as his mission was Aleksander Kulisiewicz, a Polish dissident and amateur musician who had been sent to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. Kulisiewicz is a principal figure in “Sing, Memory: The Remarkable Story of the Man Who Saved the Music of the Nazi Camps” by Makana Eyre, who will take part in a conversation before the recital.
Kulisiewicz had a photographic memory, the result of a childhood stutter he had tamed by picturing words he heard as if they had been written out. He used that technique to remember songs by a fellow prisoner at Sachsenhausen, Rosebery d’Arguto, a conductor who had assembled the clandestine choir. Press said that it was different from “official camp orchestras like those at Auschwitz” because it was “not under the duress of the SS.”
Still, the guards eventually found out, broke up the choir and sent d’Arguto and most of the singers to death camps.
But not Kulisiewicz, who was not Jewish.
He had been sent to Sachsenhausen with Polish political prisoners. “His crime, ostensibly, was writing an article,” Eyre wrote in The Atavist Magazine. He had “published pieces in local newspapers decrying Adolf Hitler and the rise of fascism.” SS officers made him spit out the teeth they broke when they beat him.
Kulisiewicz and d’Arguto became friendly, Eyre wrote, and Kulisiewicz “began to build a catalog of music and poetry.” D’Arguto made Kulisiewicz “promise that it would be his life’s mission to bring this music to the world, and that’s what happened,” Press said.
When the Nazis evacuated Sachsenhausen in March 1945, Kulisiewicz went back to Poland, walking much of the way. He came down with typhus and had to be hospitalized. During his long recovery, Kulisiewicz began dictating music — “the lyrics of songs written on the blank pages of his mind during his five years at Sachsenhausen,” Eyre wrote. “A nurse realized that there was sense to what he was saying, so she got a typewriter and started to transcribe. She returned again and again to his bedside over several weeks.” The result was pages and pages of lyrics and poems, an archive that is now housed in the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington.
Dear Diary:
My first day as an intern at the Guggenheim Museum was my third day in New York City. Fresh off a plane from Scotland, I had rented a room at the 92nd Street Y because I didn’t know a soul in town.
My internship supervisor took me to lunch to celebrate my first day, and while we were in line getting our food we met a tall, shy man, a former intern. When I sat down at a table, the former intern did too.
My supervisor got up and went to another table to talk to some colleagues. The former intern, Austin, and I struck up a conversation. Eventually, we became part of a gang of friends that summer.
After the internship ended, I was hired full time, and a year later Austin became my roommate. Two years after that, he asked me out on a date, and three years later, we were married.
This summer’s World Cup will bring millions of soccer lovers to stadiums across North America. But whether it lives up to organizers’ lofty expectations could come down to fans like Brett Shields and John Milce of New South Wales, Australia.
Both men are longtime supporters of the Socceroos, their country’s men’s national soccer team, and both have traveled to the World Cup before. But only one is planning to go to this year’s tournament, which runs from June 11 to July 19 in the United States, Canada and Mexico.
Mr. Shields, 59, is coming. He already has the proper travel authorization from past visits to see his daughter, who lives in San Francisco. He plans to stay with her and attend Socceroos matches there and in Seattle.
Mr. Milce, 76, who has been to six World Cups since 1966, is staying home. He said he had made comments online about President Trump’s policies and feared that he could be denied entry at the border because of the administration’s proposed social media checks and broader immigration crackdown.
“I’m not a poor man, but with the costs involved, it was too much to risk,” Mr. Milce said.
With the first kickoff less than 60 days away, tourism and hospitality leaders in the 11 U.S. host cities are watching international fans closely. The United States was the only major nation to register a decline in international tourism in 2025, and hints of lackluster demand have anxiety running high.
The research firm Tourism Economics projects that more than 1.2 million international visitors will travel to the United States for the World Cup. That includes nearly 750,000 who would not have otherwise come, amounting to a roughly 1.1 percentage point increase in international arrivals.
Still, the firm this month revised down its forecast for the rate of recovery from last year’s drop in tourists. Visa restrictions, fears of immigration agents (including at World Cup matches), an increase in phone searches at borders and, for fans, the exorbitant costs of match tickets and transportation are just some of the barriers keeping people away.
Mr. Shields said that if he didn’t already have his travel authorization and a free place to stay, “I doubt whether I’d probably travel over to the World Cup in the current climate.”
Safety Concerns and Travel Bans
The World Cup, which drew 3.4 million spectators in Qatar in 2022, is a blockbuster pretty much by definition, and organizers expect a large share of bookings, both domestic and international, to come in the final two months.
The U.S. Travel Association said this month that the World Cup has “extraordinary potential to deliver major economic gains” across the United States, but added that “safety concerns, policy perceptions and entry barriers could limit America’s ability to fully capitalize on the opportunity.”
In Seattle, the number of expected domestic World Cup visitors has grown by 30 percent since 2024, said Michael Woody, the chief engagement officer for Visit Seattle. At the same time, the expected number of international visitors has fallen by 17 percent, driven by a particularly sharp drop-off in Canadians.
Fans coming from countries like Haiti and Iran, on a list of 19 countries whose citizens Mr. Trump has barred from entering the United States, won’t be able to attend their national teams’ group stage matches at all. Supporters of soccer powerhouses like Ivory Coast and Senegal, among the 14 African nations whose citizens face tight visa restrictions, could be forced to post bonds of up to $15,000 to enter the country.
Adem Asha, 32, a Turkish citizen who lives in Slovakia, obtained a U.S. visa last year in order to watch Lionel Messi, of Argentina, and Cristiano Ronaldo, of Portugal, in what could be their last World Cup. But Mr. Asha, who was born in Syria, worried he could still be targeted by immigration agents. He decided this spring to call off his trip, a conclusion that left him “disappointed but also relieved.”
“I really don’t feel like going there, or spending that much money to go there, and then being denied at the port of entry,” said Mr. Asha, who said he did not consider going to Canada or Mexico because the matches he wanted to see, and the other sites he hoped to visit, were all in the United States.
Banking on Late Bookings
U.S. host cities are pinning their hopes on last-minute travelers. Zane Harrington, a spokesman for Visit Dallas, said he expected “a majority” of fans heading to the city to book their stays in the two months remaining before kickoff — or even during the tournament as teams advance out of the group stage.
Martha Sheridan, the chief executive of Meet Boston, the city’s marketing and tourism organization, said ticket sales for Gillette Stadium’s seven matches were “robust,” and that they were split roughly in thirds among New Englanders, domestic visitors from the rest of the country and international travelers.
Demand for hotels in Boston in June is up about 11 percent compared with the same period last year, she said. That increase was smaller than what her team had expected to see by this point when it began planning in 2024, she added, but she felt “very optimistic” that bookings would continue to rise in the coming weeks.
FIFA in recent weeks released blocks of thousands of hotel rooms across the three host countries, while local host committees downsized fan festivals in locations including New Jersey, San Francisco and Seattle, fueling discussion over whether demand was falling short of expectations.
But Jamie Lane, the chief economist and senior vice president for analytics at AirDNA, a company that collects and analyzes short-term-rental data, said it was common practice for major event hosts to scale back their room blocks as they make final preparations for staffing and sponsorships, and that the changes were not a sign of sluggish demand.
A spokesman for FIFA said the changes to fan festivals were not made in response to demand, noting that some of the events will now take place in several neighborhoods rather than in a large central location.
A Bigger, Less Predictable Event
Data published this month by AirDNA shows a rise in short-term-rental bookings, to varying degrees, in every host city. Bookings on group stage game days were up the most in Monterrey, Mexico, rising 564 percent, on average, compared with the same dates last year.
Bookings were up 209 percent in Mexico City, 171 percent in Kansas City, 152 percent in Miami and 52 percent in Toronto, according to AirDNA.
A range of factors, including which teams are competing and to what extent cities regulate short-term rentals, influence those figures. In San Francisco, where short-term-rental bookings were up 28 percent on group stage game days, Anna Marie Presutti, the chief executive of the San Francisco Travel Association, said she thought demand didn’t rise to its full potential because the war in Iran is complicating travel for fans from Jordan and Qatar, two teams that are playing there.
In New York, where short-term rentals are tightly restricted, hotel bookings during the World Cup period are “more or less the same” compared with the same period last year, said Vijay Dandapani, the chief executive of the Hotel Association of New York City.
International travelers generally stay longer and spend more money than Americans, giving them an outsize economic impact. An analysis published by Airbnb in February found that non-Americans coming to the United States for the World Cup planned to visit more destinations and travel three nights longer, on average, than Americans.
Sylvia Weiler, the president of global destinations at the travel marketing and data company Sojern, said the revamped structure of this World Cup — spread across three countries and featuring a record 48 teams — made it hard to project how travel patterns would play out as the tournament approached.
“We talk about what was expected,” Ms. Weiler said. “I would always put a slight caveat, because we did not know what to expect.”
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A 76-year-old man died on Friday after being shoved down the stairs at the 18th Street subway station in Manhattan, and the police arrested a suspect who had been arrested multiple times in recent months and had been discharged from Bellevue Hospital’s psychiatric ward just hours before.
The victim, Ross Falzone, landed on his head at the bottom of the stairs and suffered a traumatic brain injury, a fractured spine and a fractured rib after a stranger rushed forward and pushed him, the police said.
Mr. Falzone had been walking north on Seventh Avenue toward the subway station in the Chelsea neighborhood on Thursday evening, said Brad Weekes, assistant commissioner of public information for the Police Department. Walking about 30 yards behind him was the stranger, according to surveillance footage from the scene, Mr. Weekes said. As Mr. Falzone reached the station, the man rushed forward and pushed him down the stairs. He was taken to Bellevue where he died shortly before 3 a.m. on Friday.
The death sparked outrage at City Hall. Mayor Zohran Mamdani quickly called for an investigation into how Bellevue handled the discharge of the suspect and suggested that institutional problems at the hospital might have led to the random attack.
“I am horrified by the killing of Ross Falzone and the circumstances that led to it,” Mr. Mamdani said in a news release on Friday, in which he ordered “an immediate investigation on what steps should have been taken to prevent this tragedy.”
Police identified the suspect as Rhamell Burke, 32.
In the three months preceding the attack, Mr. Burke was arrested four times, Mr. Weekes said, including an arrest on Feb. 2 in connection with an assault on a Port Authority police officer.
Mr. Burke’s most recent interaction with the police began at around 3:30 p.m. Thursday, when he approached a group of N.Y.P.D. officers outside the 17th Precinct station house on East 51st Street, Mr. Weekes said. He grabbed a stick from a pile of garbage on the street and approached the officers, who told him to drop the stick. When he did, officers placed Mr. Burke in a police vehicle and drove him to Bellevue, where he was admitted to the emergency room at around 3:40 p.m., Mr. Weekes said. Mr. Burke was taken to the hospital’s Comprehensive Psychiatric Emergency Program for evaluation and treatment, Mr. Weekes said, and was released from the hospital one hour later.
He was just a mile and a half from the hospital when he encountered Mr. Falzone at around 9:30 p.m. Thursday.
On Friday afternoon, police officers found Mr. Burke in Penn Station, where they arrested him. He was in custody on Friday evening. It was unclear Friday if Mr. Burke had a lawyer.
The mayor said he had requested help from the New York State Department of Health, which will investigate the decision to release Mr. Burke from Bellevue and conduct a review of similar cases at the hospital. The state agency also will investigate psychiatric evaluation and discharge procedures across NYC Health and Hospitals, the city’s public hospital system, according to the news release.
Mr. Falzone was a retired high school teacher who lived alone for many years in an apartment building on the Upper West Side. His friends were in shock on Friday about his death. They shared memories of an affable but private man who rarely spoke about his family or personal life.
Mr. Falzone had been recovering from a recent surgery and seemed more mobile and happy, said Marc Stager, 78, Mr. Falzone’s next-door neighbor on a tree-lined block of West 85th Street. He was known as a cheerful “yapper,” said Briel Waxman, a neighbor. He was the kind of New Yorker who enjoyed chatting with neighbors about historical details of his building and seeing performances at Lincoln Center with friends.
“He was always out and about,” said Ms. Waxman, 35, who often returned to her apartment at midnight or 1 a.m. to find Mr. Falzone arriving home at the same time. “I was like, ‘I don’t know if I’m proud of you or embarrassed of myself,’” she remembered telling him.
Mr. Falzone had wide taste in music — opera, classical, jazz, pop — and neighbors could tell he was home when they heard notes escaping from under his apartment door, Mr. Stager said.
He was “a helpless old guy,” said Mr. Stager, who added that he was “disappointed and shocked, frankly, that somebody could do such a thing” as shove such a defenseless person down the stairs.
When Ms. Waxman moved into the building five years ago, Mr. Falzone was among the first people to welcome her, she said. He once brought a package to her door that had been delivered to the wrong unit and shared that what is now a blank wall in her apartment had once been a fireplace.
Ms. Waxman sat in her living room on Friday and cried as she talked, dabbing her eyes with a tissue. She remembered Mr. Falzone as “just overall, nice, talkative, genuine human.”
A suicide note purported to be written by the sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein while he was in jail in 2019 uses language that in some cases echoes his past writings to friends and family.
One phrase found in the apparent suicide note — “No Fun” — also appears on a handwritten page found in Mr. Epstein’s jail cell at the time of his death, as well as in emails he sent over the years.
And another saying in the suicide note — “watcha want me to do — bust out cryin!!” — appears in emails that Mr. Epstein had written to people close to him.
A cellmate claimed that Mr. Epstein left the suicide note before he was found unresponsive in their cell weeks before his death. The New York Times reported on the note last week and successfully asked a federal judge to unseal it.
If authentic, the note gives a view into Mr. Epstein’s mind-set before he was found dead at age 66 in August 2019. The New York City medical examiner ruled his death a suicide.
‘NO FUN’
A different handwritten note was found in Mr. Epstein’s cell when he died, and investigators believed it was written by him. In that document, Mr. Epstein complained about jail conditions — burned food, giant bugs and being kept in a locked shower. He concluded it with the underlined phrase, “NO FUN!!”
Mr. Epstein also used the phrase in emails when describing things he was unhappy about, or situations that had not gone his way.
‘watcha want me to do — bust out cryin’
Mr. Epstein used the phrase “watcha want me to do — bust out cryin” with friends, and in messages to his brother, Mark Epstein.
Like the note released by the judge, Mr. Epstein’s emails were often short, with staccato phrases and erratic punctuation. The emails were contained in millions of pages of documents the Justice Department released in response to a law passed last year requiring disclosure of records pertaining to Mr. Epstein.
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