Good morning. It’s Tuesday. Today we’ll look at an apartment building that’s celebrating its 100th birthday. We’ll also look at a congressional race in upstate New York with a Republican whose rhetoric belies the careful, courteous and pragmatic reputation he spent years cultivating.
“This,” Kenneth Todd said, standing in front of a display wall in the lobby of his Upper West Side apartment house, “is our birth certificate.”
It did not list weight or size. But just as an actual birth certificate would have carried the names of the parents, this one listed two architects. It was the certificate of occupancy for Todd’s building, at 328 West 86th Street.
The late-1924 date prompted Todd, the president of the co-op board, to appoint a committee to prepare for the building’s 100th anniversary. The result was a museumlike gallery in the lobby, including a photograph of the wood-frame house that was demolished to make way for the building. Another photograph, from 1928 — the earliest photo they have found that shows the building — depicts a police officer directing traffic at the end of the block, between West End Avenue and Riverside Drive.
Tonight the residents will celebrate the building’s 100 years. They have had party favors made — coasters, matches and napkins printed with a logo that they designed. They put the building’s long-forgotten name, Erco Hall, on the doors facing the street. They discovered the name as they dug into newspaper archives, looking for tidbits about the building. “For the life of me, I have not figured out the origin of that name,” Todd said.
They also invited an architectural historian who was a co-author of a book about the architects, George and Edward Blum — and who says that in the context of their long and prolific careers, the 86th Street building was nothing special.
“We know this,” said Yulia Poltorak, a member of the anniversary committee. “This was a building for regular middle-class folks.”
“We, the residents now, pride ourselves on being regular, normal folks,” she said as Todd noted that apartments in the building had been selling for more than $1 million lately. “It’s hard to call that middle-class,” he said, “but that’s indicative of the whole neighborhood.”
The Blums were known for buildings with facades of intricate designs of brick, terra cotta and mosaic tile. The 86th Street building has little of that.
The Blums studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris but spent their careers doing what the architecture writer Christopher called “the unthinkable: They put their high-style training into the service of commercial architecture.” They favored Art Nouveau before World War I. By the time they were hired for the 86th Street building, their designs had become more conventional.
Andrew Dolkart, an architectural historian and a co-author of the book on the Blums, noted that construction costs had soared after World War I. “For the Blums, there was less money for ornamental decoration,” he said. “But it’s not true of just the Blums. Most 1920s buildings are relatively simple. The fancy Beaux-Arts ornaments that you see on other buildings from the 1910s disappeared. You got much flatter facades with less fancy ornament on them.”
Todd acknowledged the 86th Street building is “fairly simple by Blum standards.” But it has one distinctly Blumian touch — iron balconies on the fourth floor.
So who lived in the building when it was new? “There were no boldface names,” Todd said. There was a former sportswriter who was said to have been one of the first to suggest giving football players numbers to make it easier to identify them on the field.
And there was Pearl Bernstein, whom Mayor Fiorello La Guardia named to be the secretary to the Board of Estimate, a powerful governing body at the time.
“It was a cross-section of the middle class,” Todd said. “That’s who lived here.”
Weather
Expect a sunny, breezy day with a high near 60. Tonight, the sky will be mostly clear with temperatures in the low 40s.
ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING
In effect until Thursday, Oct. 17 (Sukkot).
The latest New York news
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The political influence of Wall Street: Kamala Harris’s campaign organized a steady stream of meetings and calls in which corporate executives and donors offered their thoughts on tax policy, financial regulation and other issues. Their suggestions have subtly shaped her economic agenda.
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Tax incentives for Hollywood: “Rosemead,” a movie set in Southern California, was filmed in Queens because of tax credits. The movie industry says such incentives help create jobs and spending in communities where location shots are filmed, but economists are skeptical.
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Who’s running New York? Mayor Eric Adams is relying on a group of respected civil servants to run the city and a trio of advisers to salvage his political career and keep City Hall’s complicated bureaucracy running. Some say it’s too late.
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Sentencing for a former soldier: A former Army private was sentenced to 14 years in prison after pleading guilty to attempting to provide ISIS with information, including potential locations for terrorist attacks in New York City.
A heated House race, with a Republican who’s all in on Trump
It is a rematch from 2022, but this time it reflects the ideological battles being fought across the country.
Representative Marc Molinaro, whose district stretches from west of Ithaca to the Massachusetts border, spent more than 20 years as an official in state and local government before he was elected to Congress two years ago. He gained a reputation as a particular type of New York Republican — a careful and courteous pragmatist who was more interested in responsible governing than in ideological battles.
But this time he has embraced former President Donald Trump. He is leaning heavily on anti-immigrant sentiment, blaming Democrats for border policies he says are lenient. During a debate that turned heated last week, Molinaro tried to tie his opponent — Josh Riley, a lawyer and policy analyst — to those policies.
Riley fired back. “Every one of those incidents that he’s talking about and putting on TV — that happened on his watch,” Riley said. “He’s in Congress.” He noted that Molinaro, at Trump’s urging, had joined other House Republicans in rejecting bipartisan immigration legislation.
“If he was even the slightest bit serious about solving this problem,” Riley added, referring to Molinaro, “he would have done the right thing.”
Riley has railed against what he calls profiteering corporations and the politicians who do their bidding, repeating his promise not to accept corporate PAC contributions. Molinaro has criticized Riley for doing legal work in opposition to the restrictions on travel to the United States by those from certain predominantly Muslim countries that Trump imposed as president.
Molinaro defended his rhetoric while acknowledging that it might strike some people as “out of character.”
“The public now is angry,” he told my colleague Grace Ashford, “and the people I represent are furious.”
METROPOLITAN diary
Flying
Dear Diary:
There is a dim sum place in Chinatown where my family goes whenever my Chinese grandmother comes to visit. It’s small, often crowded and always filled with incessant chatter.
One day last April, my grandmother, my mother and I shared a round table there with an older man and his home care aide. They had almost finished their meal, and we were getting ready to order.
The man was talkative and cheerful, chatting with my grandmother and my mother in rapid-fire Chinese. I couldn’t understand any of it, but my mother was laughing.
My grandmother ordered a dish the man had recommended: white fish with vegetables.
“He says it’s delicious — his favorite,” my mother explained.
When the man was about to leave, he showed us a picture on his phone. It showed him standing in a park, surrounded by pigeons. He was smiling with unfiltered delight.
There in the restaurant, he flapped his arms, laughed and said something in Chinese to my mother. She nodded, we said our goodbyes, and the aide helped him out of his seat.
“What did he say about the picture?” I asked my mother after they left.
“He said that he likes the birds,” my mother said. Our fish arrived, and she put some on my plate. “He said they make him feel like he can fly, too.”
— Emma Savonije
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.
Makaelah Walters and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at nytoday@nytimes.com.
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