New York
These Artists’ Hunt for Studio Space Ended at the World Trade Center
On the twenty eighth flooring of 4 World Commerce Heart, Tourmaline, a multidisciplinary artist, works from a nook studio that options two partitions of home windows and a view of the 9/11 Memorial. Subsequent door, one other artist, Tariku Shiferaw, has his personal area to color and create set up artwork.
Each artists profit from a nonprofit program, Silver Artwork Initiatives, that gives artists with free, yearlong studio area within the chrome workplace tower, in addition to a $1,200 stipend and mentorship.
The nonprofit is a part of an enormous ecosystem of organizations and packages throughout New York that present artists with locations the place they’ll work, a signature want for artists in an actual property market that has lengthy pushed them to reside in cavernous, defunct industrial areas the place the lease is reasonable and there’s room for each artwork and furnishings. Till gentrification units in.
Different packages offering artists with studio area embody the Decrease Manhattan Cultural Council — which hosts a nine-month studio residency program at 101 Greenwich Road for rising artists and a more recent three-month residency program on Governors Island.
BRIC gives a 225-square-foot, rent-free studio area for 3 months within the Brooklyn Cultural District. Chashama, a nonprofit based by Anita Durst 27 years in the past, companions with property house owners to show unused areas into artwork studios in all 5 boroughs.
“Quite a lot of artists, their dream is to return to New York,” mentioned Durst. “This simply helps it. After which they’re priced out, so having these areas permits them to remain.”
Not each program can supply the startling views of the studios offered by Silver Artwork, which was co-founded by Cory Silverstein, the grandson of the proprietor of 4 World Commerce Heart, Larry Silverstein. Cory Silverstein got here up with the thought in 2018 in tandem with Joshua Pulman, a good friend from faculty. Silverstein Properties gives 50,000 sq. toes of area to the nonprofit, which then provides 28 artists with studios ranging in measurement from 500 to 1,500 sq. toes.
“We had this concept of bringing in artists, shifting the paradigm with respect to how artists have been pushed out into the outer boroughs, for essentially the most half, on this virtually centrifugal sort method,” Cory Silverstein mentioned, “by which people are going to New Jersey and Brooklyn and Queens and additional and additional out.”
The Silver Artwork program started with funding from main donors, just like the Ford Basis and Bloomberg Philanthropies, and now seeks to increase past that by bringing in an government director to maintain and develop that monetary assist.
The brand new government director, John Hatfield, has labored within the nonprofit artwork world for greater than 25 years. From 2002 to 2004, Hatfield served as assistant vice chairman of the Decrease Manhattan Improvement Company, specializing in the Sept. 11 memorial planning and choice course of. Within the fast aftermath of the assaults, the town scrambled to see what Decrease Manhattan would appear like, reconstructing transportation and the road grid. The cultural piece took a bit longer, however the Silver Artwork program is essential to revitalizing the neighborhood, he mentioned.
Hatfield additionally spent virtually 10 years as government director of the Socrates Sculpture Park in Queens. Earlier than that, he labored on the New Museum for 17 years, together with as deputy director for eight years.
“Finally, this mission is concerning the artists,” Hatfield mentioned in an interview. “And a part of the job and the function is to raise Silver Artwork, thereby additionally actually primarily bringing consideration to these artists. That’s the core of the whole lot.”
Silver Artwork’s present residencies embody 25 artists, plus three mentors — Tourmaline, Hank Willis Thomas and Chella Man — who even have studio area.
The nonprofit has given promising artists a possibility to increase their craft — and their canvasses — beneath its 22-foot ceilings. After arriving at Silver Artwork, Tourmaline had her first solo exhibition, “Pleasure Backyard.” She might be exhibiting at Artwork Basel in June.
Chase Corridor, a present artist-in-residence who works in portray and sculpture, was featured in Forbes’s “30 Underneath 30” 2021 artwork and elegance listing. His work is held within the everlasting assortment of the Studio Museum in Harlem.
Jared Owens, who additionally has a Silver Arts studio this 12 months, is a multidisciplinary artist who taught himself artwork throughout greater than 18 years of incarceration. His work was exhibited in “Marking Time: Artwork within the Age of Mass Incarceration” at MoMA PS1.
(Going ahead, Silver Artwork will reserve as much as 5 areas a 12 months in its residency program for previously incarcerated artists.)
Pulman mentioned this system has been profitable in serving to safe gallery illustration for many of the artists who entered it with out it.
“The power to deliver them into areas and allow them to cooperate, there’s an enormous demand and want for it,” Pulman mentioned of the artists. “And bringing on an government director for us signifies that we will maintain the work that we’re already doing together with his efforts and connections to foundations and donors.”
It’s rather more than the view that makes the placement of Tourmaline’s studio area important to her. There may be historical past right here, she mentioned, and never simply the historical past recorded on the 9/11 memorial. Close by is the African Society for Mutual Reduction, based by Black New Yorkers within the early 1800s, which helped widows and orphans, paid burial bills for its members and served as a brokerage home to purchase actual property.
“It was a spot the place Black folks got here collectively within the midst of a very immense hardship and dreamed of what they needed, after which moved within the path of that,” Tourmaline mentioned of the realm. “And so it feels undoubtedly emotionally charged, not simply from perhaps the previous 20 years, however undoubtedly the previous tons of of years.”
New York
Companies could pass on the cost of congestion pricing tolls to consumers.
Congestion pricing arrived in New York City exactly one second after midnight on Sunday.
And despite the freezing temperatures, a crowd of about 100 people gathered at the corner of Lexington Avenue and 60th Street in Manhattan to mark the occasion.
It was mainly supporters who showed up to clap and chant, “Pay that toll! Pay that toll!” But one opponent tried to drown them out by banging a cowbell. And the exchanges grew a bit testy at times across the congestion pricing divide.
The tolling program, the first of its kind in the nation, finally became reality on New York streets after decades of battles over efforts to unclog some of the most traffic-saturated streets in the world. In the weeks leading up to its start, the program survived multiple legal challenges seeking to derail it at the last minute, including from the State of New Jersey.
It will most likely be some time, however, before it becomes clear whether congestion pricing works, or whether it can withstand continuing attempts to overturn it by a broad array of opponents, including President-elect Donald J. Trump, who takes office later this month.
Noel Hidalgo, 45, who lives in Brooklyn, was among the first drivers to pay the toll. As he drove his Mini Cooper across the threshold, toll supporters cheered and clapped from the curb.
Another driver posted a photo on social media of a silver car with metal cans dangling from the rear bumper. “Just tolled” was written on the rear windshield.
Most passenger cars are now being charged $9 once a day at detection points set up along the borders of the new tolling zone, from 60th Street to the southern tip of Manhattan.
Shortly after noon, about 12 hours after tolling began, transportation leaders declared that the plan had rolled out without a hitch, but cautioned that the tolling system was complicated and that it was too soon to know how it was faring.
“We will start to know specific numbers and have some comparatives within a few days, and we’re going to share that information publicly,” said Janno Lieber, the chief executive of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the state agency overseeing the program.
So far, the M.T.A. does not intend to make any adjustments to the program, Mr. Lieber said.
Traffic data for the congestion zone was mixed on Day 1. The average travel speed initially inched upward 3 percent to 15.1 miles per hour at 8 a.m. Sunday, compared with 14.6 m.p.h. at the same time on the first Sunday in January last year, according to INRIX, a transportation analytics firm. But by noon, the travel speed had fallen to 13 m.p.h., slightly slower than in 2024.
Still, the real test for the tolling program will come during the workweek. The M.T.A. said it had chosen to introduce the program on a Sunday to be able to work out any kinks while traffic was sparse. Light snow was forecast for the region on Monday, which could affect commuter data if fewer people choose to drive.
On a typical weekday, at least half a million vehicles enter the congestion pricing zone, a metric that officials will be tracking “very, very closely,” Mr. Lieber said.
Manoj Bhandari’s car will no longer be among them. Though he normally drives into his Midtown office at least twice a week from New Jersey, he said he would now only take the train. “It’s expensive for me and it’s expensive for everybody,” said Mr. Bhandari, 54, who was parked outside the Lincoln Tunnel on Sunday. “We won’t be using our car anymore.”
Transportation officials have projected that congestion pricing will reduce the number of vehicles entering the congestion zone by at least 13 percent.
Other drivers seemed to accept that there was no way around the new tolls. Oscar Velasquez, 54, a carpenter who lives on Long Island, said he was going to have to pay more now to haul his tools to jobs around the city. “One of these days, they’re going to charge you for walking,” Mr. Velasquez said as he idled on West 66th Street in his Chevy pickup truck.
The tolls are expected to help generate $15 billion to pay for crucial repairs and improvements to New York’s aging subway system, buses and two commuter rail lines. The work includes modernizing subway signals, making stations more accessible for riders with disabilities and expanding the city’s electric bus fleet.
Those upgrades could improve the commute for Emily Rose Prats, 36, of Brooklyn, who supports congestion pricing. She has spinal degradation and standing for long periods can cause her great discomfort, so she has avoided the subway and the bus, which can be unreliable.
“The improvements from congestion pricing are supposed to be an upgrade to the signals, which will mean faster trains, shorter headways, shorter commutes, less wait times,” Ms. Prats said. “All of that is something that will help me be able to take advantage of a public amenity that we pay for.”
Congestion pricing is being introduced in New York at a time when traffic has surged on city streets since nearly disappearing five years ago in 2020 at the height of the coronavirus pandemic. New York was named the world’s most congested city, beating out London, Paris and Mexico City, in a 2023 traffic scorecard compiled by INRIX.
Though congestion policy has successfully reduced traffic in other global cities, including London, Stockholm and Singapore, it has never gotten far in this country. Besides New York, a handful of other cities, like Washington and San Francisco, have explored the concept.
The program has been unpopular in the polls, and some transit experts noted that neither Mayor Eric Adams nor Gov. Kathy Hochul had commented on the start of congestion pricing by Sunday afternoon even though it will have a major impact on the city and state.
Mr. Adams has supported the plan while expressing reservations about it, and is running for re-election this year. Ms. Hochul paused the program in June over concerns that it would hurt the city’s recovery and brought it back in November with a 40 percent reduction in the tolls, down to $9 from $15.
The tolls will increase to $12 by 2028, and to $15 by 2031. The new plan is set to generate about $500 million per year during its first three years, and then $700 million when fees first go up, then close to $1 billion when the original toll is restored. The money will be used to secure $15 billion through bond financing, which would be paid back with tolling revenue.
Mr. Lieber of the M.T.A. said that officials did not expect New Yorkers to change their behavior overnight.
“Everybody’s going to have to adjust to this as more and more people become aware of it and start to factor it into their planning,” he said.
At a coffee shop near Lincoln Center, Terry Kotnour, a retired consultant, praised congestion pricing. “That’s the cost of living here,” said Mr. Kotnour, 82, who gave up his car long ago. “We have fairly good mass transit, so use it instead.”
Another supporter, Kevin Chau, 27, a software engineer from Queens who rides Citi Bike, said that he hoped Manhattan would become safer for cyclists. “Less cars on the road means it’s less dangerous for sure,” he said.
But many critics, including suburban commuters, said the program will do little to reduce traffic while punishing drivers who live outside Manhattan.
On the same day that congestion pricing began, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey also began to charge drivers higher fees to travel between New Jersey and New York on bridges and tunnels, which it controls. (The rate is now $16.06 for passenger vehicles during peak hours, up by 68 cents from the previous fee.)
Roselyn Cano, 21, just bought a car last week to commute from the Bronx to her job at an exercise studio on East 59th Street in Manhattan because she did not feel safe taking the subway. “And then a couple of days later we get hit with the congestion toll,” said Ms. Cano, who sat at a reception desk at the studio tallying up the costs of the new toll along with her car payment, auto insurance, parking and the toll she already pays crossing from the Bronx into Manhattan.
Some New Yorkers were already devising workarounds to avoid paying the new tolls.
Cynthia Jones, who lives on the Upper West Side, was taking an exercise class at the studio. Her husband had dropped her off at 61st Street, one block north of the tolling zone. “I walked the rest of the way here,” she said.
Reporting was contributed by Wesley Parnell, Bernard Mokam, Nate Schweber, Olivia Bensimon, Anusha Bayya, Camille Baker, Sean Piccoli and Emma Fitzsimmons.
New York
Tom Johnson, Minimalist Composer and Village Voice Critic, Dies at 85
Tom Johnson, a composer and critic whose Village Voice columns documented the renaissance of avant-garde music in downtown New York during the 1970s, and whose own compositions embraced minimalism and mathematical clarity, died on Tuesday at his home in Paris. He was 85.
His wife and only immediate survivor, the performance artist Esther Ferrer, said the cause was a stroke following long-term emphysema.
Mr. Johnson was a young New York composer in need of income in 1971 when he noticed that the exciting performances he heard downtown were not being covered by local news outlets. He offered to write about the contemporary music scene for The Voice, and he soon began a weekly column.
It was an opportune moment: Art galleries, lofts and venues like the Kitchen were presenting concerts by young experimenters like Steve Reich and Meredith Monk, and Mr. Johnson became the emerging scene’s chief chronicler.
“No one realized at the time that one of the most significant genres of serious music of the century was developing, a genre that was to become known as American minimalism, and which would find imitators all over the world,” he wrote in 1983, in his final Voice column.
He charted the rise of musical minimalism, including the transformation of the local composer Phil Glass to an international phenomenon, but he also documented radical work by lesser-known figures: Yoshi Wada, who sang through massive plumbing pipes; Jim Burton, who amplified bicycle wheels; and Eliane Radigue, who created uncanny drones on a synthesizer.
“I learned some interesting things about gongs on May 30 at a Centre Street loft concert,” Mr. Johnson wrote of a 1973 show by the young composer Rhys Chatham. “That gongs have many different pitches, most of which don’t make much sense in terms of the overtone series; that different tones stand out, depending on how the gong is struck; that when a gong makes a crescendo, a wonderful whoosh of high sound streams into the room; that loud gongs vibrate the floor in a special way and put an odd charge in the air; that listening to gongs, played alone for over an hour, is an extraordinary experience.”
By describing such outré happenings in matter-of-fact, observational prose, Mr. Johnson provided a national readership with access to performances that might be attended by only a dozen listeners, and possibly never heard again. He saw himself as a participant within the scene, and he provided such generous coverage that he became known among composers as “Saint Tom.” His writings, collected in the 1989 book “The Voice of New Music,” offer a uniquely intimate portrait of a galvanizing musical era; for one memorable column, Mr. Johnson sang in the chorus for a rehearsal of Mr. Glass’s landmark opera “Einstein on the Beach.”
But Mr. Johnson was also unafraid to critique concerts that he thought didn’t work conceptually, or note when he fell asleep. Some columns took formal risks. He once devoted a thousand words to reviewing “one of the most impressive performances I ever heard”: the warbling of a mockingbird on Long Island.
He was among the first writers to begin using the term “minimal” to describe much of the repetitive music he heard, and he applied the word to his own compositions, such as the hypnotic 1971 work “An Hour for Piano.” “I have always been very proud of it, because that’s the only word that really describes what I’m doing,” he said in a 2014 interview. “I always worked with reduced materials and tried to do simple music.”
In Mr. Johnson’s dryly postmodern “Four Note Opera,” a quartet sings arias about arias — on only the notes A, B, D and E. The first performance, in 1972, had an audience of about 10 people; the opera has since received more than 100 productions. For “Nine Bells” (1979), he walked among a grid of suspended burglar alarm bells for nearly an hour, chiming them in predetermined sequences, a feat of geometric precision and physical exertion.
In the 1980s, he immersed himself in Euclid’s number theories and Mandelbrot’s fractals, eager to find new musical structures. His compositions of this period include “Rational Melodies,” a series of entrancing miniatures built from simple, symmetrical patterns, and “The Chord Catalog,” a methodical two-hour presentation of the 8,178 chords that can be found in a single octave.
Though undergirded by his mathematical exercises, Mr. Johnson’s music is visceral and intelligible — and, often, deliberately predictable — rather than abstruse. “There is something particularly satisfying about projects where the logic (the music) seems to arise naturally from some discovery outside of myself, and where everything comes together with a minimum of tampering (of composing),” he once wrote.
Thomas Floyd Johnson was born on Nov. 18, 1939, in Greeley, Colo., a small farming community. His parents, Harold Francis Johnson and Irene (Barber) Johnson, were teachers.
When he was about 7, Tom began playing the piano intermittently, and he found his passion for music at age 13 under the tutelage of a local piano teacher, Rita Hutcherson, who also encouraged his composing.
Though many of his peers attended nearby universities, Ms. Hutcherson urged Mr. Johnson to apply to Yale, where he received a bachelor’s degree in arts in 1961 and a master’s in music in 1967. As an undergraduate, he took a seminar with the prestigious composer Elliott Carter and dabbled in 12-tone composition, the lingua franca of the musical academy, but he found himself embracing repetition and stasis instead of cerebral complexity. He moved to New York in 1967 to study privately with the experimental composer Morton Feldman, who helped him find his artistic voice.
After documenting the New York scene for The Voice but struggling to have his own work performed, Mr. Johnson decamped to Paris in 1983, where fresh opportunities awaited, as European audiences were newly drawn to the American avant-garde. There he remained a prolific writer, theorizing about his own music in several books. He had been publishing his own scores since the 1970s, and he maintained an active web presence with a video series elucidating his music.
His major works have included the satirical “Riemannoper,” based on excerpts from a famed German music lexicon, which has received more than 30 productions; and a more serious oratorio drawing on the writings of the German dissident Dietrich Bonhoeffer. But much of Mr. Johnson’s output remained resolutely abstract, including an orchestral work that lays out a sequence of 360 chords and a series of recent pieces that systematically explore various rhythmic combinations.
Mr. Johnson’s marriage to the choreographer Kathy Duncan ended in divorce. He married Ms. Ferrer in 1986.
One of Mr. Johnson’s compositions has become canonic in the double-bass community: “Failing” (1975), a fiendishly difficult and hilarious exercise in which a soloist is instructed to bow tricky passages while reading a lengthy text aloud that self-reflexively comments on the music. “These pieces all had to do with making music as real life,” Mr. Johnson said of the work in a 2020 interview. “I wanted the performer to confront an unknown situation and deal with it as well as possible in a one-time-only context.”
New York
Here is what to know about congestion pricing.
Congestion pricing has spread around the world to cities including London, Stockholm, and Singapore. But the idea was born in New York City in the 1950s.
William Vickrey, an economics professor at Columbia University who won the Nobel Prize in 1996, has been called the “father of congestion pricing.” He proposed the use of economic incentives to better manage crowded roads — as well as the packed subway system.
As early as 1952, Mr. Vickrey recommended charging higher fares on the New York City subway for the most crowded times and sections. “Just like hotels charge more during Christmas, and planes charge more for longer flights, he said the subways ought to do that,” said Samuel I. Schwartz, a former city traffic commissioner and a longtime proponent of congestion pricing.
But congestion pricing for the subway did not catch on. City leaders “considered it risky, and the technology was not ready,” according to a 1997 report in the Columbia University Record.
Mr. Vickrey later turned his attention to the city’s perpetual gridlock. He called for varying road tolls to reduce congestion during peak times and keep traffic flowing.
In the late 1970s, Mr. Vickrey used to show up at public meetings and push for congestion pricing, said Mr. Schwartz, who was an assistant city traffic commissioner back then. “He pestered me,” Mr. Schwartz said. “He kept saying a lot of our approach to traffic congestion wouldn’t work — and that we had to use pricing.”
Though Mr. Vickrey died in 1996, his idea has lived on. Mr. Schwartz and many others — including business, civic, and transportation and environmental advocates — have fought for decades to bring congestion pricing to New York’s streets.
In 2007, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg proposed a congestion-pricing plan as part of his efforts to improve the environment. But the plan faltered the next year in Albany amid staunch opposition from state legislators.
A decade later, facing a breakdown in subway service, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo resurrected congestion pricing to finance repairs to the aging subway system. “Congestion pricing is an idea whose time has come,” he said at that time. (Mr. Cuomo has since questioned whether it is the right time to start congestion pricing.)
It was another two years before congestion pricing was finally approved by the State Legislature in 2019 as part of the state budget.
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