New York

Was the Rolled-Up Painting in the Dog Walker’s Closet Worth Millions?

Published

1 year ago

July 23, 2023

Was the Rolled-Up Painting in the Dog Walker’s Closet Worth Millions?

In March of 2022, Mark Herman, a dog walker and recreational drug enthusiast in Upper Manhattan, came into possession of a dog, a painting and a story.

The dog was Phillipe, a 17-year-old toy poodle that belonged to Mr. Herman’s only client, an 87-year-old retired law professor named Isidore Silver.

The painting, which belonged to Mr. Silver, may be a lost work by the artist Chuck Close, whose canvases once sold for as much as $4.8 million. Or it may not.

Therein lies the story. On a recent afternoon in his cluttered apartment, Mr. Herman offered a broken chair and began a circuitous account of friendship, loss and a commercial art market not meant for people like him.

In 1967, Chuck Close was an instructor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, “desperately unhappy” and eager for the New York art world, when the school offered him his first solo exhibition, in the student union. Mr. Close, best known for his monumental photorealist portraits, had not yet found his style and was painting in an expressionist mode heavily influenced by Willem de Kooning.

For his exhibition he chose 31 works, several of which featured male and female nudity. One painting depicted a semi-abstract Bob Dylan wearing only a T-shirt. Others had titles like, “I’m only 12 and already my mother’s lover wants me” and “I am the only virgin in my school.”

There were complaints. One drawing was stolen.

The university removed the paintings. Mr. Close sued on free speech grounds. His lawyer, in what became a well-known First Amendment case, argued that “art is as fully protected by the Constitution as political or social speech.”

The lawyer was Mr. Silver, future poodle owner.

Mr. Silver prevailed in court, then lost on appeal. Mr. Close, who later dismissed the exhibition as “sort of transitional work,” lost his job.

The paintings, which were returned to Mr. Close, disappeared from the record.

Both men moved to New York. Mr. Close became one of the pre-eminent artists in America, even after paralyzing spinal trauma, until several women accused him of sexual harassment in 2017. Mr. Silver, who never liked practicing law, joined the faculty at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. In his bedroom closet in Upper Manhattan, he kept a large rolled up painting that for half a century he never showed to anyone. The painter, he claimed, was Chuck Close.

Enter the dog walker.

Mark Herman, who was almost two decades younger than Mr. Silver, had studied the Buchla synthesizer and television production at N.Y.U., worked in a photo lab, run a recording studio and sold high-end stereo equipment online. By the time the two men met six years ago, he was walking dogs to support himself.

The older man was, to put it gently, a volatile character. “He had his moods,” Mr. Herman, 67, said, adding: “I know how to deal with people like that. You say yes.”

He and Mr. Silver hit it off, Mr. Herman said. Both liked movies and Lenny Bruce, and both loved Phillipe, whom Mr. Herman called Philly-bones. Mr. Herman started lingering in Mr. Silver’s apartment after his morning walks, staying for coffee and cake. Mr. Herman made his own cannabis oils, and he gave some to Mr. Silver for his back pain.

When the pandemic hit, and Mr. Herman stopped walking dogs, the two men talked for hours on the telephone daily, Mr. Herman said. Mr. Silver had alienated most of the people close to him, but he formed a bond with Mr. Herman.

“He had a temper,” Mr. Herman said. “If he wanted to say something, you stand back and take it. That’s the way I dealt with him, because he was very explosive.”

Asked what would set his friend off, Mr. Herman replied: “Everything.”

Still, Mr. Herman said: “He was like a second father to me. I loved that guy.”

One day Mr. Silver mentioned having represented Chuck Close in the 1960s. Mr. Herman was intrigued. He had seen an exhibition of Mr. Close’s portraits at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1981 and had loved it. “I was blown away to see that in person,” he said.

In September 2021, Mr. Silver wrote about the case in The Daily News, asking, “What happened to the paintings at the exhibition?” before answering, teasingly, “Memory almost totally fails.” (Mr. Close died in August 2021.)

Mr. Silver’s health declined. Mr. Herman on three occasions arrived to get Phillipe and found Mr. Silver on the floor. Twice he had to call 911.

Mr. Silver told Mr. Herman about the painting rolled up in the closet. The plastic around the canvas was almost black from Mr. Silver’s pipe smoke. “He basically said, ‘Take the painting,’” Mr. Herman said. Mr. Herman did.

“Not only did I get the painting, but I got Phillipe,” he added. “I just took him.”

Mr. Silver died last March. Phillipe died in September. Mr. Silver did not include Mr. Herman in his will, but the family gave him $5,000. And he had the painting.

Mr. Herman, who had stopped walking dogs and was living on Social Security, checked out the auction prices for Mr. Close’s work: $3.2 million for a portrait of Philip Glass; $4.8 million for a portrait of the painter John Roy. Even a very early abstract painting, “The Ballerina,” from 1962, sold for $40,000 at Sotheby’s, more than double the auction house’s estimate.

Under the influence of magic mushrooms, Mr. Herman received some numbers: first $1.4 million, and later $10 million. “But they’re pranksters,” he said of the mushrooms. “I would not jump out of an airplane and say, ‘Oh, the shrooms packed my chute.’ I wouldn’t trust them that far. They don’t know everything.”

Still, maybe Mr. Herman’s ship had come in.

“If I lived in a mansion, I’d keep it,” he said. “I wanted to sell it.”

An old prep school friend who had become part of the art squat movement in France warned him against hanging onto it. “He said the art world is the most cutthroat of any, even worse than Hollywood,” Mr. Herman said. “He was saying there might even be people coming in the middle of the night to steal it from you. I said, What?!” Mr. Herman said he was afraid to unroll the painting, lest he damage it.

Through an internet search, he found Pace Gallery, Mr. Close’s longtime dealer. “Pace wanted $5,000 for stretching and evaluation,” Mr. Herman said. He did not have that kind of money.

He went to Sotheby’s auction house, which offered to put it up for sale in December 2022, with an estimate of $15,000 to $20,000 — low because it was an early work, and because Mr. Close’s market had softened since the accusations of sexual harassment. The cost of stretching would come out of the sale price.

When the auction house unrolled the painting, it was the first time Mr. Herman had ever seen it, along with the signature: “Close 1965-6.” The colors were vibrant; the textures densely layered. “Almost like de Kooning,” Mr. Herman said.

But here things take a turn.

The auction house had contacted Pace Gallery, which had contacted Mr. Close’s studio. Neither had any record of the painting. “While this doesn’t necessarily mean that the work is not by Chuck Close, it is certainly a red flag for both us and Pace,” an associate specialist at Sotheby’s wrote to Mr. Herman. There would be no sale. In subsequent messages, she advised Mr. Herman that he would receive an invoice for $1,742 for stretching the canvas, and that he should remove it soon or face storage fees.

Sotheby’s declined interview requests for this article; Pace Gallery responded only with a terse statement: “We’ve looked into this further and Pace does not have any information on the below work, or the 1967 exhibition.”

Mr. Herman’s big windfall had not materialized. Maybe he had a painting by one of America’s great artists. But he was in the wrong art market at the wrong time.

In recent decades, as prices for paintings have skyrocketed, so has litigation around their authenticity. In response, artists’ studios and estates have moved away from authenticating stray works that pop up, in order to avoid being sued. The estates of Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Jackson Pollock, Keith Haring and Roy Lichtenstein, among others, all closed their authentication services. At least one authenticator had his life threatened for not approving a painting.

Authentication is especially difficult with early work, said Tom Eccles, who runs the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College.

“It’s almost impossible to authenticate an early work — they didn’t document the work, they didn’t photograph the work, it’s probably not in a database,” Mr. Eccles said. “So it’s not to say these works aren’t real, but it’s very hard to authenticate them.”

Often, as with Mr. Herman’s canvas, early efforts do not reflect the artist’s mature style, Mr. Eccles said, so they cannot be authenticated by analyzing the technique or materials. “And even if one does authenticate them, are they worth a lot of money? Probably not.”

Mr. Herman tried other auction houses and museums, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney. No interest. He contacted the nonprofit International Foundation for Art Research, which authenticates work, but it wanted $3,000, plus information regarding the painting’s provenance and expert opinions about the work — all things that Mr. Herman did not have.

He wrote to the University of Massachusetts Amherst to see if it had records of Mr. Close’s 1967 exhibition. Another dead end.

Finally, on July 13, he and a friend rented a van to retrieve the painting from Sotheby’s. It was his second trip to the auction house, this time without the great expectations of the first. And now he was out $125 for the van and worried that Sotheby’s would not let him take his painting unless he wrote a hefty check for the stretching. “I was excited the first time, but now it’s like getting a colonoscopy,” he said on the sidewalk outside.

The painting, stretched on a frame, was even more radiant than it had looked when the auction house first unrolled it. It bothered Mr. Herman that Pace had not looked at the actual painting, just dismissed it based on a photograph. The stretched canvas was almost six feet tall. It just barely fit into the van.

Back at Mr. Herman’s apartment in Washington Heights, it dominated the living room. Mr. Herman looked exhausted. He had been living with disappointments since December, to say nothing of his life before then. He missed his talks with Mr. Silver. “It’s documented that he was the lawyer at Chuck Close’s trial,” he said, frustrated. “And there’s the unbroken chain of custody in his closet.”

He looked at the painting. You couldn’t not look at it.

“I’m enjoying it right now,” he said, “but you don’t want to have ice cream for breakfast, lunch and dinner.” Besides, his apartment, which he shared with his daughter-in-law and his grandson, was no place for a painting like that. “It wants to bust out and be alive,” he said. “It wants to be out in the world. It’s crying out for a home in the Hamptons.”

At last, he caught a break. On July 17, four days after Mr. Herman’s van run to Sotheby’s, an archivist at the University of Massachusetts uncovered a file on Charles Close’s 1967 exhibition, including an issue of the school newspaper dedicated to the controversy. There on Page 3 was a photograph of Mr. Herman’s painting.

“Proof indeed,” said Mr. Eccles, the curatorial authority from Bard. “What a story!”

A spokesman for Sotheby’s, shown an image of the newspaper, said the auction house did not authenticate works and declined to comment. Pace reiterated that it had no details on the painting or the exhibition.

Mr. Herman was already making plans. With the sale of the painting, he could move out of his apartment and get a place for himself and his girlfriend.

“I’m on the moon,” he said. “I’ve enjoyed living with it. But I want to get it out of here, because a knife could fall on it. A can of paint could spill on it.”

What was it worth? He truly did not know. But after so many disappointments with the painting, what did he have to lose?

“There’s got to be some money in it,” he said. “Don’t you think?”

Audio produced by Jack D’Isidoro.

New York

Hochul Seeks to Limit Private-Equity Ownership of Homes in New York

Published

5 hours ago

January 9, 2025

Press Room

Hochul Seeks to Limit Private-Equity Ownership of Homes in New York

Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York on Thursday proposed several measures that would restrict hedge funds and private-equity firms from buying up large numbers of single-family homes, the latest in a string of populist proposals she intends to include in her State of the State address next week.

The governor wants to prevent institutional investors from bidding on properties in the first 75 days that they are on the market. Her plan would also remove certain tax benefits, such as interest deductions, when the homes are purchased.

The proposals reflect a nationwide effort by mostly Democratic lawmakers to discourage large firms from crowding out individuals or families from the housing market by paying far above market rate and in cash, and then leasing the homes or turning them into short-term rentals.

Activists and some politicians have argued that this trend has played a role in soaring prices and low vacancy rates — though low housing production is widely viewed as the main driver of those problems.

If Ms. Hochul was inviting a fight with the real estate interests who have backed her in the past, she did not seem concerned. She even borrowed a line from Jimmy McMillan, who ran long-shot candidacies for governor and mayor as the founder of the Rent Is Too Damn High Party.

“The cost of living is just too damn high — especially when it comes to the sky-high rents and mortgages New Yorkers pay every month,” Ms. Hochul said in a written statement.

James Whelan, president of the Real Estate Board of New York, said his team would review the proposal, but characterized it as “another example of policy that will stifle investment in housing in New York.”

The plan — the specifics of which will be negotiated with the Legislature — is one of several recent proposals the governor has made with the goal of addressing the state’s affordability crisis. Voters have expressed frustration about the high costs of housing and basic goods in the state. This discontent has led to political challenges for Ms. Hochul, who is likely to face rivals in the 2026 Democratic primary and in the general election.

In 2022, five of the largest investors in the United States owned 2 percent of the country’s single-family rental homes, most of them in Sun Belt and Southern states, according to a recent report from the federal Government Accountability Office. The report stated that it was “unclear how these investors affected homeownership opportunities or tenants because many related factors affect homeownership — e.g., market conditions, demographic factors and lending conditions.”

Researchers at Harvard University found that “a growing share of rental properties are owned by business entities and medium- and large-scale rental operators.”

State officials were not able to offer a complete picture of how widespread the practice was in New York. They said local officials in several upstate cities had told them about investors buying up dozens of homes at a time and turning them into rentals.

The New York Times reported in 2023 that investment firms were buying smaller buildings in places like Brooklyn and Queens from families and smaller landlords.

Ms. Hochul’s concern is that these purchases make it harder for first-time home buyers to gain a foothold in the market and can lead to more rental price gouging.

“Shadowy private-equity giants are buying up the housing supply in communities across New York, leaving everyday homeowners with nowhere to turn,” she said in a statement on Thursday. “I’m proposing new laws and policy changes to put the American dream of owning a home within reach for more New Yorkers than ever before.”

Cracking down on corporate landlords became a prominent talking point in last year’s presidential election. On the campaign trail, Vice President Kamala Harris called on Congress to pass previously introduced legislation eliminating tax benefits for large investors that purchase large numbers of homes.

“It can make it impossible then for regular people to be able to buy or even rent a home,” Ms. Harris said last summer.

In August, Representative Pat Ryan, Democrat of New York, called on the Federal Trade Commission to investigate price gouging by private-equity firms in the housing market. He cited a study that estimated that private-equity firms “are expected to control 40 percent of the U.S. single-family rental market by 2030.”

Statehouses across the country have recently looked at ways to tackle corporate homeownership. One effort in Nevada, which passed the Legislature but was vetoed by Gov. Joe Lombardo, proposed capping the number of units a corporation could buy in a calendar year. It was opposed by local chambers of commerce and the state’s homebuilders association.

A bill was introduced in the Minnesota State Legislature that would ban the conversion of homes owned by corporations into rentals. It has yet to come up for a vote.

At the federal level, Senator Jeff Merkley, Democrat of Oregon, and Representative Adam Smith, Democrat of Washington, introduced joint legislation that would force hedge funds to sell all the single-family homes they own over 10 years.

New York

N.Y. Prosecutors Urge Supreme Court to Let Trump’s Sentencing Proceed

Published

13 hours ago

January 9, 2025

Press Room

N.Y. Prosecutors Urge Supreme Court to Let Trump’s Sentencing Proceed

New York prosecutors on Thursday urged the U.S. Supreme Court to deny President-elect Donald J. Trump’s last-ditch effort to halt his criminal sentencing, in a prelude to a much-anticipated ruling that will determine whether he enters the White House as a felon.

In a filing a day before the scheduled sentencing, prosecutors from the Manhattan district attorney’s office called Mr. Trump’s emergency application to the Supreme Court premature, saying that he had not yet exhausted his appeals in state court. They noted that the judge overseeing the case plans to spare Mr. Trump jail time, which they argued undermined any need for a stay.

The prosecutors, who had secured Mr. Trump’s conviction last year on charges that he falsified records to cover up a sex scandal that endangered his 2016 presidential campaign, implored the Supreme Court to let Mr. Trump’s sentencing proceed.

“There is a compelling public interest in proceeding to sentencing,” they wrote, and added that “the sanctity of a jury verdict and the deference that must be accorded to it are bedrock principles in our Nation’s jurisprudence.”

The district attorney’s office has so far prevailed in New York’s appellate courts, but Mr. Trump’s fate now rests in the hands of a friendlier audience: a Supreme Court with a 6-to-3 conservative majority that includes three justices Mr. Trump appointed. Five are needed to grant a stay.

Their decision, coming little more than a week before the inauguration, will test the influence Mr. Trump wields over a court that has previously appeared sympathetic to his legal troubles.

In July, the court granted former presidents broad immunity for official acts, stymying a federal criminal case against Mr. Trump for trying to overturn the 2020 election. (After Mr. Trump won the 2024 election, prosecutors shut down that case.)

The revelation that Mr. Trump spoke this week by phone with one of the conservative justices, Samuel A. Alito Jr., has fueled concerns that he has undue sway over the court.

Justice Alito said he was delivering a job reference for a former law clerk whom Mr. Trump was considering for a government position. But the disclosure alarmed ethics groups and raised questions about why a president-elect would personally handle such a routine reference check.

It is unclear whether Justice Alito will recuse himself from the decision, which the court could issue promptly.

Mr. Trump’s sentencing is scheduled to begin at 9:30 a.m. Friday in the same Lower Manhattan courtroom where his trial took place last spring, when the jury convicted him on all 34 felony counts.

If the Supreme Court rescues Mr. Trump on Thursday, returning him to the White House on Jan. 20 without the finality of being sentenced, it will confirm to many Americans that he is above the law. Almost any other defendant would have been sentenced by now.

“A sentencing hearing more than seven months after a guilty verdict is aberrational in New York criminal prosecutions for its delay, not its haste,” the prosecutors wrote.

The prosecutors also noted that Mr. Trump would most likely avoid any punishment at sentencing. The trial judge, Juan M. Merchan, has signaled he plans to show Mr. Trump leniency, reflecting the practical impossibility of incarcerating a president.

Still, Mr. Trump’s lawyers argued that the sentencing could impinge on his presidential duties. It would formalize Mr. Trump’s conviction, cementing his status as the first felon to occupy the Oval Office.

That status, Mr. Trump’s lawyers wrote in the filing to the Supreme Court, would raise “the specter of other possible restrictions on liberty, such as travel, reporting requirements, registration, probationary requirements and others.”

The court’s immunity ruling also underpinned Mr. Trump’s request to halt his sentencing. In the application, Mr. Trump’s lawyers argued that he was entitled to full immunity from prosecution — as well as sentencing — because he won the election.

“This court should enter an immediate stay of further proceedings in the New York trial court,” the application said, “to prevent grave injustice and harm to the institution of the presidency and the operations of the federal government.”

Mr. Trump’s application was filed by two of his picks for top jobs in the Justice Department: Todd Blanche, Mr. Trump’s choice for deputy attorney general, and D. John Sauer, his selection for solicitor general.

“Forcing President Trump to prepare for a criminal sentencing in a felony case while he is preparing to lead the free world as president of the United States in less than two weeks imposes an intolerable, unconstitutional burden on him that undermines these vital national interests,” they wrote.

Whether that argument will prevail is uncertain. Some legal experts have doubted the merits of Mr. Trump’s application, and lower courts have greeted his arguments with skepticism.

Earlier Thursday, a judge on the New York Court of Appeals in Albany, the state’s highest court, declined to grant a separate request from Mr. Trump to freeze the sentencing.

Prosecutors noted that Mr. Trump had yet to have a full appellate panel rule on the matter, and that he had not mounted a formal appeal of his conviction. Consequently, they argued, the Supreme Court “lacks jurisdiction over this non-final state criminal proceeding.”

Also this week, a judge on the First Department of New York’s Appellate Divison in Manhattan rejected the same request to halt the sentencing.

That judge, Ellen Gesmer, grilled Mr. Trump’s lawyer at a hearing about whether he had found “any support for a notion that presidential immunity extends to president-elects?”

With no example to offer, Mr. Blanche conceded, “There has never been a case like this before.”

In their filing Thursday, prosecutors echoed Justice Gesmer’s concerns, noting that “This extraordinary immunity claim is unsupported by any decision from any court.”

They also argued that Mr. Trump’s claims of presidential immunity fell short because their case concerned a personal crisis that predated his first presidential term. The evidence, they said, centered on “unofficial conduct having no connection to any presidential function.”

The state’s case centered on a sex scandal involving the porn star Stormy Daniels, who threatened to go public about an encounter with Mr. Trump, a salacious story that could have derailed his 2016 campaign.

To bury the story, Mr. Trump’s fixer, Michael D. Cohen, negotiated a $130,000 hush-money deal with Ms. Daniels.

Mr. Trump eventually repaid him. But Mr. Cohen, who was the star witness during the trial, said that Mr. Trump orchestrated a scheme to falsify records and hide the true purpose of the reimbursement.

Although Mr. Trump initially faced sentencing in July, his lawyers buried Justice Merchan in a flurry of filings that prompted one delay after another. Last week, Justice Merchan put a stop to the delays and scheduled the sentencing for Friday.

Mr. Trump faced four years in prison, but his election victory ensured that time behind bars was not a viable option. Instead, Justice Merchan indicated that he would impose a so-called unconditional discharge, a rare and lenient alternative to jail or probation.

“The trial court has taken extraordinary steps to minimize any burdens on defendant,” the prosecutors wrote Thursday.

New York

When Carter Went to the Bronx

Published

21 hours ago

January 9, 2025

Press Room

Good morning. It’s Thursday. Today, on a national day of mourning for former President Jimmy Carter, we’ll look at Carter’s relationship to New York. We’ll also get details on the decision by the city’s Board of Elections not to fire its executive director after investigators found that he had harassed two female employees.

President Jimmy Carter flew to New York in October 1977 to tell the United Nations General Assembly that he was “willing” to shrink the United States’ nuclear arsenal if the Soviet Union matched the reductions. The next day, he did something unannounced, unexpected and unrelated to foreign policy.

He went to the South Bronx.

It was a symbolic side trip to show that he was willing to face urban problems. Leaders like Vernon Jordan of the National Urban League had already begun to talk about dashed expectations: “We expected Carter to be working as hard to meet the needs of the poor as he did to get our votes,” Jordan had said a couple of months earlier. “But so far, we have been disappointed.”

Carter, a Democrat, wasn’t satisfied with driving through neighborhoods dominated by desolation and despair. “Let me walk about a block,” he told the Secret Service agents accompanying him, and he got out of the limousine.

That morning in the South Bronx became an enduring memory of his presidency. But there are other New York memories to remember today, a national day of mourning for Carter, who died on Dec. 29.

There was the high of his nomination in 1976, at the first national political convention held in Manhattan since the Roaring Twenties.

There was also the not-so-high of his nomination in the same place four years later, when haplessness seemed to reign: The teleprompter malfunctioned during his acceptance speech. He flubbed a line about former Vice President Hubert Horatio Humphrey, calling him “Hubert Horatio Hornblower.” The balloons didn’t tumble from the ceiling when they were supposed to. And his long feud with Senator Edward Kennedy simmered on.

Another New York memory now seems as improbable as Carter’s candidacy had once been: a high-kicking photo op with the Radio City Rockettes in 1973. Carter, then a Georgia governor who had taught Sunday school, hammed it up with dancers who showed a lot of leg. (The governor, joining the kick line in his crisp suit, did not.)

Carter was an ambitious Navy lieutenant turned peanut farmer turned politician, and he understood what New York could do for him. The Carter biographer Jonathan Alter wrote that the publicity stunt with the Rockettes helped bring him name recognition, as did a full-page ad in Variety that showed him in a director’s chair. The ad, and that trip to New York, promoted a push to lure filmmaking to Georgia.

By the time Carter went to the South Bronx, 10 months into his presidency, New York was struggling to pull out of its “Ford to City: Drop Dead” abyss. But whatever hope Carter seemed to bring soon faded: A week later, during a World Series game at Yankee Stadium, the sportscaster Howard Cosell supposedly said, “Ladies and gentlemen, the Bronx is burning.”

“Somehow that sentence entered the language, though he never said that, or exactly that,” Ian Frazier explained in his book “Paradise Bronx.” “In any case, it’s what people remember.”

People yelled “Give us money!” and “We want jobs!” as Carter went by. On one ruined block, “he stood looking around, his expression blank and dazed,” Frazier wrote. “For a president to allow himself to be seen when he appears so overwhelmed required self-sacrifice and moral fortitude.”

With him was Mayor Abraham Beame, a lame duck — but not Representative Ed Koch, who had defeated Beame in the Democratic primary and would be elected mayor in November. The president and the mayor-in-waiting were feuding over Middle East policy.

Back at his hotel, Carter called it “a very sobering trip.” And as Frazier noted, the drive-by made America look at “this place that most had been looking away from.”

Politicians stopped looking away: The stretch of Charlotte Street that he visited became a stop on campaign after campaign. “Reagan went there in 1980 to try to show up Carter,” Alter said. But the policy Carter pushed for in response to the poverty he saw — changes that effectively forced banks to provide home loans in low-income neighborhoods — worked, Alter said. “It just took a while.”

A few years later, there were more than 100 suburban-style houses in the neighborhood Carter walked through. Today the houses are worth roughly $750,000 apiece, according to the real estate website Trulia.

“He cared about people — he wanted to help people,” Alter said. “Jimmy Carter was a rural Georgian, but he had a lot of empathy for New Yorkers who needed a break.”

Weather

Today will be mostly sunny and breezy with a high near 34 degrees. Tonight, expect a mostly clear sky, strong winds and a low near 26.

ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING

In effect until Jan. 20 (Martin Luther King’s Birthday).

The latest New York news

City election board opted not to fire an official who harassed female workers

The New York City Board of Elections — which is responsible for registering voters, repairing voting machines and tallying ballots — refused to dismiss its top official after he harassed two female employees, according to a report released by the city’s Department of Investigation.

Investigators found that the board’s executive director, Michael Ryan, had “created a hostile work environment for these two employees” in violation of the board’s own policies. The investigation department added that those policies had “serious deficiencies” that limited the board’s ability “to effectively prevent and address workplace misconduct and harassment.”

The board released a statement defending its decision not to fire Ryan, who was suspended for three weeks without pay and ordered to attend sensitivity training. The board’s statement quoted Ryan as apologizing for his actions.

“While I dispute these allegations and disagree with the report’s conclusion,” he said, “I accept the determination of the commissioners” to suspend him as being “in the best interest of the agency.”

According to the report from the investigation department, Ryan made a series of sexual comments to one female employee over several months, some of which were accompanied by physical gestures such as puckering his lips at her or touching her face with his hand.

He also engaged in a conversation with Michael Corbett, the board’s administrative manager, in the presence of the woman about what the best age gap might be in a heterosexual relationship. The two men determined that the age difference between her and Ryan would not be a problem, investigators said.

Investigators said that Ryan’s conduct had caused the woman “significant anxiety and emotional distress,” which figured in her decision to leave her job.

Investigators also found that Ryan had made “ethnicity- and gender-based comments toward” a second female employee, including some that trafficked in racial stereotypes.

Corbett was also suspended for one week, placed on probation for one year and ordered to attend sensitivity training.

Rodney Pepe-Souvenir, the president of the board of commissioners that oversees the agency, and Frederic Umane, its secretary, said in the statement released on Wednesday that they believed the penalties Ryan was given “sent a strong message that these types of unwelcomed and insensitive comments will not be tolerated by anyone” at the Board of Elections.

METROPOLITAN diary

In the bag

Dear Diary:

I was waiting in line to pick up a prescription at a crowded Duane Reade. An older woman who was clearly exhausted left the line to sit down in a nearby chair.

When it was her turn to get her prescription, she stood up, left her belongings on the chair and went to the counter.

While waiting for the pharmacist, she turned and looked at the man who was sitting next to where she had been.

“You know what’s in that bag?” she asked, motioning toward her stuff.

The man shook his head.

“My husband,” she said. “He died last week, and I have his remains in there.”

— Brad Rothschild

Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.

Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B.

P.S. Here’s today’s Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here.