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.

A push to tax multimillion-dollar second homes in New York City has been billed by Gov. Kathy Hochul and Mayor Zohran Mamdani as a civic mandate for the ultrawealthy to contribute more to society.

But as leaders in the State Capitol seek to incorporate the tax proposal into the state budget, the lofty rhetoric has been undermined by confusing information flowing from Ms. Hochul’s office about how such a tax would work.

The problems start with the numbers and the math.

To raise $500 million for the city, Ms. Hochul initially said the so-called pied-à-terre tax would apply to 13,000 homes, a number that her staff pulled from a 2023 report by the city comptroller. Now, aides to Ms. Hochul are saying that the 13,000 figure was an early estimate requiring more analysis and was subject to change.

The governor’s team had first said the tax would be based on second homes with an assessed value of $5 million or more. But there is very little correlation between a property’s assessed value — a specific and complex measure calculated as part of the property valuation process — and actual market value.

The city does not use sales comparisons or recent listings to value condos and co-ops. Under a state law passed in the 1980s, the city is required to compare the units to rentals of similar size and age, assessed on the potential income that rental might bring in. There are not great rental comparisons for the highest-end condos and co-ops, dragging down their assessments; in some cases, these condo buildings are even compared to rental buildings with rent-regulated units.

An analysis of city records conducted by Marketproof, a real estate data analysis firm, found just three residential properties in New York City with assessed values of $5 million or more.

One of the three was the notoriously expensive penthouse bought in 2019 by the billionaire financier Kenneth Griffin for $238 million.Its assessed value, according to city records, is just under $7 million. Another condo, on the 57th floor of another Midtown luxury building, sold in December for more than $21 million, but it has an assessed value of around $1.3 million.

Jennifer Goodman, a spokeswoman for the governor, declined to offer specifics about the pied-à-terre tax proposal, saying this week that they were still being negotiated. The governor’s office said that they had wrongly described at first how the tax might work, and it is not going to be based solely on the assessed value of properties.

Instead, Ms. Goodman said, apartments subject to the tax would be determined by “a model that captures properties worth over $5 million through the use of various mechanisms such as comparable sales data where applicable.”

That raises another set of problems, as there is no official and consistent measure of how much properties in New York City may actually be worth on the market.

Building that kind of information is possible, but has not typically been done before by the city, said Kael Goodman, the president and chief executive of Marketproof.

“To get from doable on a technical basis, to doable on a practical basis — those two things are not the same,” Mr. Goodman said.

To demonstrate how such a tax could work, Marketproof created its own model analyzing more than 1.14 million tax parcels. Since there’s currently no official way to tell if a particular unit is a pied-à-terre, the company used a proxy: the subset of properties where the property tax bill was sent to a different address, indicating the owner didn’t live in the unit.

Then it looked at transactions recorded in city property records to find the units with market values over $5 million.

Marketproof estimates about 6,380 properties would be affected.

That analysis shows that certain well-known features of the city skyline, many clustered around Central Park — Central Park Tower, 432 Park Avenue, One57, 220 Central Park South, 15 Central Park West — would be potentially subject to the tax surcharge, representing huge sources of revenue for the city. The 280 units in just those five buildings might owe more than $100 million in taxes annually.

Still, it may be challenging to make this all work. Unlike many suburban cities and neighborhoods, where it is relatively easy to find the market value of single-family homes based on comparable sales on any given street, it’s difficult to compare values across condos and co-ops.

“That would be crossing a gap not previously crossed,” Mr. Goodman said. “That would be opening up a conversation among property owners that previous government officials have been unable to have a successful conversation about. They’ve just been unsuccessful in doing it because it’s way too complicated.”

It’s not clear whether the state or the city would have the capacity to come up with these valuations every year, and how public officials would deal with the expected legal challenges to any valuations.

A report about the tax released on Thursday by the New York City comptroller, Mark Levine, found that the city Finance Department would most likely have to audit property owners’ claims about who lives or doesn’t live in any apartment. The report noted that “lapses” in the auditing capacity and accuracy “would reduce revenues and multiply taxpayers’ appeals and lawsuits.”

The report also said that it might be difficult to categorize condos and co-ops that were owned by out-of-towners but were being rented out to city residents, or units that were owned by limited liability companies or trusts, among other potential pitfalls.

“Each of these decisions can shift collections by tens of millions of dollars,” the report said.

So far, those details remain murky, even with senior city administration officials meet daily with state leaders, according to City Hall.

A senior aide to the governor said that state officials were not overly concerned about the complexities of determining market values. Negotiations were continuing over how much of the specific methodology would be written into the legislation, or decided later by the city.

A bigger concern, the aide said, was how officials would determine whether any given property was being used as a second home.

The negotiations come as Mr. Mamdani and other elected officials clamor for Ms. Hochul to increase taxes to fund an expanded safety net and help the city close a multibillion-dollar deficit. A coalition of powerful unions, including several that endorsed the governor’s re-election campaign, has also signed on, sending a letter last week to her and legislative leaders pleading for tax hikes on the wealthy.

On Tuesday, Mr. Mamdani and his sometimes political adversary, Council Speaker Julie Menin, said they would delay announcing an update to the city budget so they could jointly push for the state to reduce a tax credit that primarily benefits wealthy business owners, which they said could end up raising a billion dollars in revenue for the city.

Both this plan and the second-home tax proposal would need to be included in the state budget, which is still be negotiated and is now a month overdue. Ms. Hochul remains committed to the tax on second homes, but appeared unlikely to support other new taxes.

“Hochul is running out of excuses to not tax the rich in her final budget,” said Grace Mausser, a co-chair of the New York chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America.

The D.S.A. is a close ally of Mr. Mamdani, who is a member, and both have aggressively called on the city’s wealthiest businesses and residents to shoulder a heavier burden. They have even named specific billionaires like Mr. Griffin, who they say are a drain on the city and its finances.

Mr. Griffin, who has spent close to $95 million on real estate purchases in the city since the beginning of 2025, pushed back on these assertions, saying his companies and activity creates tens of thousands of jobs for the city.

“You can win political points by making an example of Ken Griffin, and they seem to have done that. Kudos to them for winning some political points,” Mr. Goodman said. “But achieving the tax goals is a different thing.”