Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former mayor of New York City, is in a Florida hospital in critical condition, his spokesman said Sunday.

The spokesman, Ted Goodman, would not specify which hospital and said that the former mayor “remains in critical but stable condition.”

“Mayor Giuliani is a fighter who has faced every challenge in his life with unwavering strength, and he’s fighting with that same level of strength as we speak,” he said, before asking “that you join us in prayer” for the former mayor.

It is unclear when Mr. Giuliani, 81, was taken to the hospital.

President Trump, in a post on Truth Social, called Mr. Giuliani a “True Warrior, and the Best Mayor in the History of New York City, BY FAR.”

He used the occasion to again advance his false claim that Democrats “cheated” in the 2020 election.

“They cheated on the Elections, fabricated hundreds of stories, did anything possible to destroy our Nation, and now, look at Rudy. So sad!” he said.

Mr. Giuliani has struggled with legal and financial problems in recent years, and in the summer of 2025, he was involved in a car crash in New Hampshire in which he suffered a fractured vertebra. After that, Mr. Giuliani made at least one public appearance in a wheelchair.

Mr. Giuliani became mayor in January 1994 after he defeated Mayor David N. Dinkins, who was running for a second term. He remained in office until December 2001 and helped lead the city in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

Later, he became a personal lawyer to Mr. Trump during the president’s first term and quickly became embroiled in a number of investigations related to the presidency.

Mr. Giuliani was a crucial part of the team that helped Mr. Trump advance the claim that he won the 2020 election. After Mr. Trump left office, Mr. Giuliani was indicted multiple times and contended with a number of costly defamation suits related to those efforts. Now disbarred, he has kept a far lower profile during Mr. Trump’s second term in office.

Maggie Haberman contributed reporting.

Along the Park

Dear Diary:

It was April Fools’ Day, and the weather kept changing from sunny to drizzle, as if the gusty wind was moving the sun back and forth behind a cloud.

I put my jacket on and off as I walked along Prospect Park. The trees were still bare, but spring was slowly awakening with yellow forsythias, and every child walking by stared at my new purple hair, hungry for color.

A guy in the bike lane yelled, “Hey!”

I turned to him.

“Sorry,” he said, pointing to someone else. “I’m talking to this guy.”

“But you actually look familiar,” I said.

“So do you,” he said, laughing.

I entered the park to hear pop music near the band shell. Two people with a portable speaker were dancing.

I wanted to join the party, but I realized that I hear the music, so I’m in the party. I danced along from a distance.

From high above, hundreds of blackbirds swooped down like falling peppercorn into the black-and-white woods ahead. As I got closer, I saw specks of tiny green buds emerging on each tree limb.

I left the park, passing three people who had converged because their dogs could not contain their joy. The people laughed like old friends, but within seconds they had walked off separate ways.

As I passed Seeley Street, I overheard a friend through the open window, cheering on a drum student.

I laughed. I should be getting home before the possible rain, I thought, but today, everywhere was home.

— Mare Berger

S. Klein’s Basement

Dear Diary:

It was around 1960, and my mother, my sister and I were in the bargain basement at the S. Klein department store on Union Square.

My sister, 13, was trying on winter coats in the aisle between the bins and discussing two final options with my mother when a woman riding the escalator up to the ground floor weighed in.

“Take the red!” she called out.

We took the red. I miss S. Klein’s.

— David Hammond

Brooklyn Warehouse

Dear Diary:

I woke up to my alarm at 2:45 on a Saturday morning, then maneuvered trains and city blocks through darkness to an unremarkable warehouse in Brooklyn.

Inside was a cathedral of music. Hips gyrated, and arms exalted rhythm. Fog embraced kissers, dancers, exhilaration, prayer, meditation, community.

I found my intention and connected with my spirit and the energy of bodies around me, alone and together, holding friends as family and strangers as friends.

I departed at 8:45 a.m. to a cold, golden morning, feeling lighter, freer, learned and loved.

A shopkeeper opening up for the day called out from behind me, his question nearly drowned out by the morning traffic.

“Hey, what’s happening over there?” he asked.

“Just a little dance party,” I replied. “Nothing crazy.”

— Carlie Cattelona

Helping Hand

Dear Diary:

I ride my bicycle 99 percent of the time. It’s just me and the city. I move fast enough to keep things interesting, but slowly enough to catch the weather changing or feel the mood of the people on the sidewalks.

Every so often, I have to take the train. On very rare occasions, it’s me, the train and my bike, a combination no one ever seems thrilled to encounter.

Because I know this, I try to shrink myself into an apologetic bicycle origami project once I’m on the train. I fold. I hover. I whisper “sorry” to people who haven’t even seen me yet.

On one such evening, I was trying to avoid anyone’s shins while hauling my bike up a flight of stairs after getting off the train, when I felt someone close behind me.

Terrified that I’d clipped someone, I whipped around to see a smiling woman who had one hand casually gripping the back of my bike.

“I got you,” she said, like we were old friends moving a couch.

I told her I had it under control.

“Two hands are better than one,” she said. “I got you.”

So we climbed the stairs together: me, my bike and a total stranger, moving in perfect, unspoken coordination. At the top, she let go, nodded and vanished into the crowd.

— Evan Abel

Central Park Zoo

Dear Diary:

Years ago, our nanny would take our son and daughter to the Central Park Zoo, where they could be set free from their stroller.

It was safe because the children loved the zoo and always stayed in the nanny’s sight and because the zoo’s walls meant there was no way they could leave.

One spring day when I was not working, I decided to accompany them all on a walk through the park, with the kids in their stroller.

As we passed the zoo, a guard at the entrance beckoned our nanny over and had a deep consultation with her.

She was laughing when she came back.

“He wanted to know who was that strange woman walking with me,” she said.

— Georgia Raysman

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Illustrations by Agnes Lee

Good morning. It’s Friday. We’ll meet a first-time rider in the Five Boro Bike Tour who learned the hard way that wearing a helmet matters. And on this, the 95th anniversary of the day the Empire State Building opened, we’ll find out about some of the workers who built it.

As a first-timer in the Five Boro Bike Tour on Sunday, Patricia Hochhauser will wear a helmet. It’s a must for the 32,000 entrants.

But Hochhauser has special reason to. She wasn’t wearing one a couple of years ago, when she tried out a gas-powered scooter. Her husband, Harold Hochhauser, said it had bucked and thrown her off. She sustained a traumatic brain injury.

“I live every day with the consequences of not wearing that helmet,” she said. She was checking out the scooter in a parking lot. “I was so excited about it, thinking I was going to do errands in the neighborhood — put on a backpack and throw my groceries in there,” she said. “I had all these big hopes and dreams.” She said she did not remember anything about the accident “until they were putting staples in my head” — 15 in all, she said.

The accident cost her a job opportunity, she said: She had been scheduled to start training a week later as a bus driver with the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. She had been a school bus driver and was looking forward to getting behind the wheel of one of the 1,300 buses in the M.T.A.’s fleet.

On Sunday she is looking forward to riding over the 2.6-mile-long Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge. The lower level will be closed to cars and trucks to accommodate the cyclists, who will start out at Franklin Street and Church Street in TriBeCa in Manhattan. Some avenues and major highways will also be off limits to cars and trucks at times during the tour. The City Department of Transportation’s traffic advisory is here. And the Five Boro Bike Tour does not permit scooters like the one she was riding when she had the accident. Some e-bikes are allowed. She plans to ride her regular road bike.

‘We are Gen X’

When the accident happened, Hochhauser and her husband were already practiced cyclists and owned helmets. But they never bothered with them, she said.

Why not?

“Because we are Gen X, and I grew up not having to wear a helmet,” she said. “Half the time growing up, I didn’t even have to wear a seatbelt in the car. It wasn’t like, Oh, get in the back seat and buckle up, you know?”

After the accident, she was determined to ride again. Harold Hochhauser said that their first outings were difficult. To help her maintain balance, he put training wheels on her bike — since removed, he said.

Last year they rode in the Tour de Yonkers, picking the 50-mile route, the longest of three that participants could follow. She said there were hills that she could not conquer — she had to get off and walk up.

“I’m doing it all myself this time,” she said. “I am, you know, stronger than I was then.”

Weather

Today will be bright and sunny with a high near 65. Expect increasing clouds and a chance of rain tonight, as temperatures fall near 51.

ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING

In effect until May 14 (Solemnity of the Ascension).

QUOTE OF THE DAY

“I would probably encourage him to return the Koh-i-Noor diamond.” — Mayor Zohran Mamdani, on what he would have said to King Charles III if they had met privately during the royal visit on Wednesday. The priceless jewel is a symbol of colonial plunder.

On another May 1 — in 1931, by coincidence also a Friday — the Empire State Building opened, and on that morning, everyone’s perspective changed. People were awed by the view of the building and the view from the building, “a new view” of New York, as The New York Times described it from 85 stories up. The ships in the Hudson River were “little more than rowboats,” the paper reported. Fifth Avenue and Broadway were “slender black ribbons.”

The Times said that 3,400 workers had “coordinated tasks to finish ahead of schedule.” Glenn Kurtz, whose father’s office was in the building, wondered who they were.

“When you look at the standard histories, the answer is always the architects, the owners and the contractors,” Kurtz told me. He wanted to know about the “people who had tools in their hands.”

“I very quickly discovered there was almost no information about them,” he said. There was no list of their names; the men in famous photographs taken by Lewis W. Hine “have invariably been referred to as ‘anonymous workers,’” Kurtz said. He spent a decade doing research for the book “Men at Work: The Empire State Building and the Untold Story of the Craftsmen Who Built It” and put names to some of the faces in Hine’s photos.

He spotted 32 names on a plaque in the lobby — for workers who were given “certificates of superior craftsmanship” — and realized that many were the men in Hine’s photographs.

But the images themselves were why the workers’ identities had been overlooked. “The photographs are iconic, they represent a generalized ideal, and we love generalized ideals,” Kurtz said. To say, ‘Oh, that’s not this magnificent, iconic image of a worker, it’s Victor Gosselin, who lived in Canada and died in a car crash’ — many people would feel it diminishes the image to know who the actual person was.”

Or, as he said a moment later, “the actual lives of these men often undermine the mythology.”

Gosselin was almost certainly a Mohawk from the Kahnawake reservation, whose territory once reached what is now upstate New York. Another, George Adams, was apparently distantly related to the second president of the United States, John Adams. Others were recent immigrants from Ireland and Italy, as well as Eastern Europe and Scandinavia. Some were sons or grandsons of German or Scottish immigrants.

In “Men at Work,” Kurtz described Neil Doherty, an ironworker Hine photographed, as one of the few “allowed to have his own voice” in newspaper articles about the construction of the huge skyscraper.

“It’s just like anything else,” Doherty was quoted as saying in one article. “A person on solid ground never has any fear of falling. That’s just the way you become, up on the girders after a while, and you have to watch yourself taking that attitude. Usually the two days off at the end of the week are enough to take away this carelessness.”

Gosselin was “the single best-known worker on the building” because he was photogenic and charismatic, Kurtz said. “And in every portrayal of him, he epitomizes the cultural ideal that has so powerfully shaped our image of the workmen who built the Empire State.“

“My real question was, What does the building stand for?” Kurtz told me. “One way to think of it is as a central symbol of America in the 20th century. If we imagine it in those terms, do we think of the five rich men who were funding it, or do we think in terms of the 10,000 mostly immigrant men who built it? The story of the five is told over and over again. I thought it would be interesting to tell the other story.”

METROPOLITAN diary

Covered up

Dear Diary:

I was walking down Clinton Street on the Lower East Side when I passed a couple of guys sitting on a bench.

“You look like you’re in a witness protection program,” one said.

“Excuse me?” I asked.

“You look like you’re in a witness protection program, for sure,” he repeated.