New York
The Chuck Close Painting Is Heading to Auction. The Dog Walker Abides.
The way Mark Herman imagines it, Jack Black should play him in the movie: the scruffy dog walker whose dying client gave him a long-lost Chuck Close painting, and who then went through serial misadventures trying to sell it.
On Tuesday, Mr. Herman, 67, sat for the last time in front of the painting, an abstract nude that looked gargantuan in his cluttered Upper Manhattan living room. Since July 13, when the painting was rejected by Sotheby’s auction house, it had been his near-constant companion.
Now, movers from Heritage Auctions were preparing to ship it to Dallas, where it will go up for auction on Nov. 14.
“I’m gonna be sad to see it go,” Mr. Herman said. “It’s like a member of the family.”
The story of Mr. Herman’s painting involves a First Amendment lawsuit, a truculent retired professor, a dogged archivist, a New York Times article and a toy poodle named Philippe. Mr. Herman’s instinct was: Coen brothers.
“I’m hoping somebody will contact me,” he said. “Otherwise I could try to get in touch with people who might want to do a screenplay.”
Mr. Herman has a lot of time on his hands.
To begin at the beginning: In 1967, Charles Close — not yet Chuck — was an instructor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and the school canceled an exhibition of his work because it featured nudity. Mr. Close sued on First Amendment grounds, in a case later taught in law schools. His lawyer was a man named Isidore Silver.
Half a century later, in Upper Manhattan, Mr. Herman became a dog walker and confidant of Mr. Silver, who shared a secret: Rolled up in his closet, unseen by anyone, was an early Chuck Close painting. As the men’s friendship deepened, and Mr. Silver’s health declined, Mr. Herman said Mr. Silver basically gave him the painting. Read into that “basically” what you will. Mr. Silver died last March.
Mr. Herman envisioned a windfall. Paintings by Chuck Close once sold for as much as $4.8 million. He offered the painting to Sotheby’s, which scheduled it for auction last December but then withdrew it because Mr. Close’s studio and longtime gallery had no record of the painting. Instead of a jackpot, Mr. Herman had a bill for $1,742, for stretching the canvas onto a frame.
The story’s next character is its hero. Caroline White, an archivist at the University of Massachusetts, unearthed proof that the painting was by Chuck Close: an article from a student newspaper in 1967 about the banned exhibition and a photograph of Mr. Herman’s painting.
When The New York Times recounted this story on July 23, including Ms. White’s find, it set off a flurry of interest in the painting and a casting suggestion. “One reader commented that I was the Dude redux,” Mr. Herman said, referring to the lovable stoner in the Coens’ “The Big Lebowski.”
He so is.
Offers came in to buy or sell the painting. Kasmin Gallery in Chelsea had a buyer willing to pay $18,000, Mr. Herman said. He turned them down. A week later, they nearly doubled the offer. Still no sale. A real estate lawyer named Alfred Fuente — “I wouldn’t call myself a collector,” he said; “perhaps a budding one, or an aspirational one” — ventured up to see the painting and offered $1,250. Mr. Herman passed.
Heritage Auctions, which had earlier declined to auction the painting, now reversed course. If the painting did not look like Mr. Close’s well-known later works, it had something else going for it, said Taylor Curry, the firm’s director of modern and contemporary art in New York. It had a history.
“There’s this amazing First Amendment issue, where this case really set the precedent for future artworks,” Mr. Curry said. “Without the case, who knows if he’d ever have come to New York.”
“And the fact that Mark isn’t a billionaire, and the proceeds are going to go to him for his hard work and companionship, that’s really important to collectors,” Mr. Curry added. “People are automatically attracted to the human element of any story. Mark got the dog, too. That speaks to Mark’s character as well.”
Standing before the painting in Mr. Herman’s apartment, Mr. Curry declined to speculate on the eventual sales price but said initial estimates for the painting would be $20,000 to $30,000, with the hopes that it will sell for much more.
The Heritage movers wrapped the painting in plastic, cardboard and another layer of plastic, and loaded it into their truck. The whole process took maybe 15 minutes.
Mr. Herman faced an empty wall and some boxes that had been hidden by the painting.
“I think it will hit me later, more so than now,” he said. Asked how he will celebrate, Mr. Herman laughed.
“I’m sure I’ll think of a way,” he said.
The painting is gone. But the Dude abides.
Today would have been the first Monday of New York City’s congestion pricing plan. Before it was halted by Gov. Kathy Hochul, the plan was designed to rein in some of the nation’s worst traffic while raising a billion dollars for the subway every year, one toll at a time.
A year’s worth of tolls is hard to picture. But what about a day’s worth? What about an hour’s?
To understand how the plan could have worked, we went to the edges of the tolling zone during the first rush hour that the fees would have kicked in.
Here’s what we saw:
Video by Noah Throop/The New York Times; animation by Ruru Kuo/The New York Times
You probably wouldn’t have seen every one of those cars if the program had been allowed to proceed. That’s because officials said the fees would have discouraged some drivers from crossing into the tolled zone, leading to an estimated 17 percent reduction in traffic. (It’s also Monday on a holiday week.)
The above video was just at one crossing point, on Lexington Avenue. We sent 27 people to count vehicles manually at four bridges, four tunnels and nine streets where cars entered the business district. In total, we counted 22,252 cars, trucks, motorcycles and buses between 8 a.m. and 9 a.m. on Monday.
We wanted to see how the dense flow of traffic into the central business district would have generated money in real time.
Though we can’t know that dollar amount precisely, we can hazard a guess. Congestion pricing was commonly referred to as a $15-per-car toll, but it wasn’t so simple. There were going to be smaller fees for taxi trips, credits for the tunnels, heftier charges for trucks and buses, and a number of exemptions.
To try to account for all that fee variance, we used estimates from the firm Replica, which models traffic data, on who enters the business district, as well as records from the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and city agencies. We also made a few assumptions where data wasn’t available. We then came up with a ballpark figure for how much the city might have generated in an hour at those toll points.
The total? About $200,000 in tolls for that hour.
Note: The Trinity Place exit from the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel, which would have been tolled, is closed at this hour.
It’s far from a perfect guess. Our vehicle total is definitely an undercount: We counted only the major entrances — bridges, tunnels and 60th Street — which means we missed all the cars that entered the zone by exiting the Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive or the West Side Highway.
And our translation into a dollar number is rough. Among many other choices we had to make, we assumed all drivers had E-ZPass — saving them a big surcharge — and we couldn’t distinguish between transit buses and charter buses, so we gave all buses an exemption.
But it does give you a rough sense of scale: It’s a lot of cars, and a lot of money. Over the course of a typical day, hundreds of thousands of vehicles stream into the Manhattan central business district through various crossings.
Trips into tolling district, per Replica estimates Note: Data counts estimated entrances on a weekday in spring 2023. Source: Replica.
Queens-Midtown Tunnel
50,600
Lincoln Tunnel
49,200
Williamsburg Bridge
27,900
Manhattan Bridge
24,000
Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel
23,100
Queensboro Bridge
21,700
Brooklyn Bridge
17,100
Holland Tunnel
15,400
All other entrances
118,000
Total
347,000
The tolling infrastructure that was installed for the program cost roughly half a billion dollars.
The M.T.A. had planned to use the congestion pricing revenue estimates to secure $15 billion in financing for subway upgrades. Many of those improvement plans have now been suspended.
Methodology We stationed as many as five counters at some bridges and tunnels to ensure that we counted only cars that directly entered the tolling zone, not those that would have continued onto non-tolled routes.
Our count also excluded certain exempt vehicles like emergency vehicles.
We used estimates of the traffic into the district to make a best guess at how many of each kind of vehicle entered the zone. Most of our estimates came from the traffic data firm Replica, which uses a variety of data sources, including phone location, credit card and census data, to model transportation patterns. Replica estimated that around 58 percent of trips into the central business district on a weekday in spring 2023 were made by private vehicles, 35 percent by taxis or other for-hire vehicles (Uber and Lyft) and the remainder by commercial vehicles.
We also used data on trucks, buses, for-hire vehicles and motorcycles from the M.T.A., the Taxi and Limousine Commission and the Department of Transportation.
For simplicity, we assumed all vehicles would be equally likely to enter the zone from 8 a.m. to 9 a.m. as they would be in any other hour. We could not account for the other trips that a for-hire vehicle might make once within the tolled zone, only the initial crossing. And we did not include the discount to drivers who make under $50,000, because it would kick in only after 10 trips in a calendar month.
-
Jury Deliberation Re-charge
SUPREME COURT OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK
COUNTY OF NEW YORK CRIMINAL TERM
-
-
PART: 59
Χ
THE PEOPLE OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK,
-against-
DONALD J. TRUMP,
DEFENDANT.
BEFORE:
Indict. No.
71543-2023
CHARGE
4909
FALSIFYING BUSINESS
RECORDS 1ST DEGREE
JURY TRIAL
100 Centre Street
New York, New York 10013
May 30, 2024
HONORABLE JUAN M. MERCHAN
JUSTICE OF THE SUPREME COURT
APPEARANCES:
FOR THE PEOPLE:
ALVIN BRAGG, JR., ESQ.
DISTRICT ATTORNEY, NEW YORK COUNTY
One Hogan Place
New York, New York 10013
BY:
JOSHUA STEINGLASS, ESQ.
MATTHEW COLANGELO,
ESQ.
SUSAN HOFFINGER, ESQ.
CHRISTOPHER CONROY, ESQ.
BECKY MANGOLD, ESQ.
KATHERINE ELLIS, ESQ.
Assistant District Attorneys
BLANCHE LAW
BY:
TODD BLANCHE, ESQ.
EMIL BOVE, ESQ.
KENDRA WHARTON, ESQ.
NECHELES LAW, LLP
BY: SUSAN NECHELES, ESQ.
GEDALIA STERN, ESQ.
Attorneys for the Defendant
SUSAN PEARCE-BATES, RPR, CSR, RSA
Principal Court Reporter
LAURIE EISENBERG, RPR, CSR
LISA KRAMSKY
THERESA MAGNICCARI
Senior Court Reporters
Susan Pearce-Bates, RPR, CCR, RSA
Principal Court Reporter
SUPREME COURT OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK
COUNTY OF NEW YORK CRIMINAL TERM
-
THE PEOPLE OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK,
PART: 59
Indict. No.
71543-2023
CHARGE
-against-
DONALD J. TRUMP,
DEFENDANT.
BEFORE:
4815
FALSIFYING BUSINESS
RECORDS 1ST DEGREE
JURY TRIAL
X
100 Centre Street
New York, New York 10013
May 29, 2024
HONORABLE JUAN M. MERCHAN
JUSTICE OF THE SUPREME COURT
APPEARANCES:
FOR THE
PEOPLE:
ALVIN BRAGG, JR.,
ESQ.
DISTRICT ATTORNEY, NEW YORK COUNTY
One Hogan Place
New York, New York 10013
BY:
JOSHUA STEINGLASS, ESQ.
MATTHEW COLANGELO,
ESQ.
SUSAN HOFFINGER, ESQ.
CHRISTOPHER CONROY, ESQ.
BECKY MANGOLD, ESQ.
KATHERINE ELLIS, ESQ.
Assistant District Attorneys
BLANCHE LAW
BY:
TODD BLANCHE, ESQ.
EMIL BOVE, ESQ.
KENDRA WHARTON, ESQ.
NECHELES LAW, LLP
BY: SUSAN NECHELES, ESQ.
Attorneys for the Defendant
SUSAN PEARCE-BATES, RPR, CSR, RSA
Principal Court Reporter
LAURIE EISENBERG, RPR, CSR
LISA KRAMSKY
THERESA MAGNICCARI
Senior Court Reporters
Susan Pearce-Bates,
RPR, CCR, RSA
Principal Court Reporter
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