New York Magazine November 7-20, 2022

1 In New York’s latest cover story, Simon van Zuylen-Wood mapped how pandemic-era restaurant sheds have reshaped the city’s streets (“Plywood Gourmet,” October 24–November 6). “As someone who enjoys reading about the built landscape, and someone who loves witty writing, this is a terrific piece,” @SaraSewsIdols tweeted. The cover depicted two rats, Taro and Mishi, posing at a miniature two-top. “I hate how adorable this is because it’s so nefarious,” wrote Law360’s Ben Jay. “There’s no evidence that outdoor dining has had any effect on the rat population.” @ZizekTheEchidna joked, “I don’t care about the outdoor dining debate. I’m a single-issue voter and that issue is believing we should have tiny restaurants for rats.” The Daily Beast’s Matt Fuller added, “The rat sheds—as I think they should be called—represent one…

INSIDE: The embattled women of the FDNY / Gentrified Brooklyn’s newest tastemaker / Twilight of the co-ops FOR MOST OF HIs career, Kanye West has griped about not getting what he deserved, so there was a kind of perverse poetry in how the past month unfolded. When he cut ties with Gap in September and premiered a “White Lives Matter”–themed collection weeks later under his YZY fashion line, Diddy reproached him. “Don’t buy the shirt,” the mogul urged his Instagram followers. When West claimed the next day that Diddy was being controlled by “Jewish people,” West’s Instagram account was restricted, prompting an antisemitic Twitter rant and the dissolution of partnerships with Balenciaga, Vogue, and athletes signed to his Donda Sports agency. “I can say antisemitic things and Adidas can’t drop…

NEW YORKERS HAVE long grown accustomed to seeing female cops and subway conductors, but it’s not often that they come across a woman at the wheel of a careering firetruck. Eight women graduated from “the Rock”—the FDNY training academy—in August, bringing the number of female firefighters in the force to 141, the highest in its 157-year history, out of a total of around 11,000, a glaring gender gap for a department that has been eligible to admit women since the 1970s. Laura Kavanagh, who was appointed the first woman commissioner of the FDNY by Mayor Adams in October, has vowed to address the disparity on several fronts. She wants to ensure that the “diversity that we have in the city is present here in our decision-making, in our operations,” she…

ON A RECENT Monday morning, Sandeep Salter walked quickly down Henry Street, rounded onto Atlantic Avenue, and pushed open the door to her shop Salter House. We wound past the marble café tables and the rows of horsehair brooms and frilly checked pillows and into the recent addition: a cozy extension to the store, opening November 7, out of which Salter will sell the clothes she designs. “I want this to feel like a bedroom,” she said, showing me where hanging racks will line one wall, stocked with loose cotton dresses and floral corsets and coats that fasten with a bow. She sat down on a sofa (parabolic, taupe, antique, French), lifted her feet (white socks, lace) out of her loafers (brown, suede, low heel), crossed her legs under her,…

FOR YEARS, buying an apartment at 740 Park meant something. And that something was, quite simply, that you’d won. It was not a building for those on the make; it was a building for those who’d made it, the socially and financially dominant. The childhood home of Jackie Kennedy Onassis (her grandfather built the place in 1929), 740 Park counted John D. Rockefeller Jr., a Chrysler heiress, and numerous financiers among its first residents. In the boom periods of the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s, apartments routinely fetched record prices, sometimes provoking bidding wars between billionaires. In 2000, Blackstone founder Stephen Schwarzman bought Rockefeller Jr.’s old 35-room penthouse for $37 million, a record at the time, and he was so besotted with the place that a few years later, he…

NEW YORK ON MAY 29, 1966, Jamie Spears was 13 years old, an eighth-grade honor-roll student small for his age, the son of a father a friend describes as “a fireball on steroids.” Jamie had three siblings, ages 3 and 5 and 8, and there ought to have been another one, the second born, but Austin Wayne Spears died at 3 days old, leaving Jamie alone again with his parents. The family lived near the Mississippi line in Kentwood, Louisiana, 70 miles from the hospital where Austin Wayne was born, far from anything then and far from anything now. Generations back and generations forward they lived and would live here, in Tangipahoa Parish, in the bare little towns that ran along the train tracks. The baby had been buried below…