Open Thread Wednesday

Here’s the Brooklyn County Courthouse in 1896. This gorgeous building was torn down and the modern and rather plain Brooklyn Law School was erected in its place:
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/ca141a2ccf45c0f30fed8695ec221507415672c2b3b4058ed0bedd9df1348496.png

Shame. Pity the law school didn’t just elect to repurpose the existing building. Hopefully more people will make this choice going forward.

Once again, the lending library at Grace Court Alley is all but bare.

Why not beat the heat and walk over some gently used (but eminently desirable) books before it gets too hot?

That’s kind of why we have “Landmarks,” however flawed the system may be.

But remember – especially when there’s an institution involved (hard to see a Law School as “cuddly,” I admit) that’s a worthy non-profit. As with any home-owner, when the government says, “No, you cannot go the tear-down route,” they are picking that institution’s pocket. I doubt very much that BLS could have expanded to educate the numbers it now does … in that old building. No doubt, “building on top of it” would also have been nixed…. So, the building might have worked as a Trader Joe’s … and the Law School would have gone to renting above Macy’s … or “out to the Island.” There’s a reason libertarians equate “eminent domain” with tyranny.

(And that from a died-in-the-wool liberal.)

For all the pearl clutchers on the right who keep trying to mischaracterise the pandemic crime uptick nation wide as some kind of liberal nyc aberration yet another round of ACTUAL CRIME STATS that show the opposite….

BY THOMAS TRACY NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
Violent crime in New York City dropped this past summer at a time when cops usually brace for a jump in mayhem, police said Wednesday.

New York saw a 28% drop in shootings and a 19% drop in murders in July and August when compared with the same two months last year, according to NYPD statistics.

The not-so-cruel summer comes as crime continues to drop across the five boroughs, NYPD Police Commissioner Edward Caban said Wednesday.

“New York City is the safest big city in the nation,” Caban said “We will continue to drive overall crime even lower. This is happening at a time when historically crime often spikes.”

Spot on Karl! I love how they run pills with skewed questions then all the mida talking heads spend the day shaking their heads as to “why are so many so pessimistic”? The one answer they almost never examine is the most obvious…because you guys n gals can’t even report the monthly wildly good economic numbers headlines without wording it like “ US Job Gains Exceed Expectations, Unemployment Historic Low…Why That Could Be Bad News” (actual headline). As my wife says to me working in advertising…”you’re part of the problem dear” ;)

Your economic statistics are all accurate, but they do not take into consideration the financial security of different sections of the population. Generally speaking, the readers of BHB are relatively well-off. However, for those on the lower end of the economic spectrum, inflation and your other variables are crushingly brutal. From personal experience and many of the people I know being poor in NYC is not easy. While I am now doing much better financially, I still think about what it was like to be hungry near the end of the month and I would not want to go back to that reality.

Because the vast majority of Americans are not as well-off as the residents of Brooklyn Heights. They see food and gas prices going up significantly and it squeezes their daily existence. For example, recently I have noticed that the price of orange juice has doubled. Multiply that by everything else a family with kids purchases, and things get expensive. When it gets hard to put food on the table, a stimulus check from two years ago is not much of a consideration.

If only it were as simple as “Fox News” and an electorate that’s easily misled!

I’m not a fan of Biden & never have been, but I recognize – as Frank Bruni said the other day – that AGE is “manageable,” but DEPRAVITY is not. That is, there’s really no arguing that if the only 2 choices are Joe and Donald, only an idiot or an anarchist would pick the latter.

Now for the tough part – As a piece in today’s Times asked, “Why is Biden SO unpopular?” I’m with the many THINKING voters who thinks he definitely was “smoking” when the inflation fire started, so he sure doesn’t get props for anything he did to put it out. Obviously, the MAGA-heads – to the extent that they can put together a cogent sentence – take it as given that he’s driven our economy over a cliff.

It IS a problem that his son almost makes Trump’s kids look good.

He’s bungled student loans and immigration. To say that he had limited choices and a nasty opposition party and Supreme Court simply isn’t good enough. As with Adams & Hochul, they ALL WILL walk the plank if they just speechify about our 100,000 new New Yorkers – most of whom’s dream job (realistically) is working at Amazon’s S.I. warehouse. Meanwhile, living in even a ten worst NYC hotel IS a big step up for them … and a bone in the throat of every tax-paying US citizen.

Desperate times call for desperate measures. One of the few-ish things HE CAN DO on his own say-so … is dump Kamala and anoint someone who will GAIN – not COST – him votes.

It’d demonstrate he has a pulse (still), and that we aren’t this close to having a Dem. version of Spiro Agnew waiting in the wings.

Media is controlled with money.

What we see has been paid for $$$ money paid to educate, convince, inform, persuade, dissuade, an agenda, etc.

What we do NOT see has been paid for $$$ money paid to keep information, news OUT of the media that information that news we do NOT see that could impact an agenda otherwise.

What we can bet on is that we do NOT know what is going on we know what the largest $$$ wallet wants us to know.

The media is controlled by money.

“It’s the economy, stupid.”

quote from James Carville

Not you EP, hehe

Talking economy, if I had my wish I would love a woman President, in particular our brilliant Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo.

GINA for President

There’s no reason why that building couldn’t have remained a court. The new Brooklyn Law School could have been built anywhere.

it seems to me that a court room could easily become a lecture hall, and you couldn’t ask for a more appropriate building to learn the law in! in the current climate (pun intended) i hope more institutions are able to build upon what they have, rather than tear down and build new. The results are often so much more interesting that way. If folks’ don’t see the historical value of existing buildings, perhaps they can at least see the environmental value of the physical components.
Side note: where did those massive columns end up???