John Leland

The final film to show there was Ron Howard’s documentary “Pavarotti,” a fitting coda for the theater: a prestige movie, flattering to a well-heeled audience, that offered a certain demographic’s idea of a cultured night out.

“That’s terrible,” said Duncan Hannah, a painter who loved the theater on 58th Street by Fifth Avenue for the French movies and the quality of New York gossip you could overhear in the plush seats.

“It looked like the fancy cinema on an old ocean liner,” Hannah said. “I crossed the Atlantic to France when I was 14, in 1967, and they had a cinema that looked like the Paris.”

The causes of death are the usual suspects: the internet (streaming video); real estate (expired lease); changing demographics; shorter attention spans. Which is to say: life.

This week the Beekman 1 &amp; 2 theaters, also owned by real estate mogul Sheldon Solow, closed, too; last year it was Landmark Sunshine in the East Village; the year before, Lincoln Plaza.

“The Paris Theater is closing?!” wrote filmmaker John Waters in an email message. “Oh no! Where will old art movie fans go to see rarefied foreign films in the safety of a rich neighborhood?”

Waters could not recall the last time he went to the Paris, but added, “If I remember correctly, at some point they didn’t even have a candy counter — too common, I guess?”

British writer V.S. Pritchett once noted, “The past of a place survives in its poor.” In New York in 2019, it seems the past survives in the hand-wringing of the people on the wrong side of the real-estate juggernaut, in the seductive transformation of memory into grief. You didn’t have to have been a recent patron of the Carnegie Deli or Pearl Paint to mourn their erasure. There is community in the mourning, and in a time of rapid change, community is a comfort.

Memory becomes folklore, a form of group identity. We are they who remember CBGB or the Brasserie.

Hal Willner, longtime sketch music producer of “Saturday Night Live,” remembered taking a date to see the sexually explicit Japanese film “In the Realm of the Senses” at the Paris in the late 1970s, having no idea what they were getting into, then walking her out in the middle. The Paris had showtimes later than other theaters, and Willner said he was often one of the few people in the 581 seats.

“It was one of those great comforting things we thought would never go away,” he said. “But of course it will. New York has always been that way. The ghosts will always be there.” Nearby were the flagship FAO Schwarz toy store and the original Playboy Club, he said. Closed and moved.

He added, “More than thinking, ‘I’m going to miss it,’ I’m thinking, ‘I wish I had gone there more.’ ”

Howard said the Paris sold more tickets to “Pavarotti” than any other theater, but that change was inevitable.

“I feel nostalgic for the idea of art house theaters, but viewing patterns are changing,” Howard said. “That’s been happening since the last hand-cranked nickelodeon. This is still a young art form.”

New theaters have opened. Jake Perlin, artistic and programming director at the Metrograph theater downtown, called the Paris an “enormous inspiration” for being “part of a grown-up world,” and “a place that people would always associate as where they saw a particular film.”

You might remember seeing “Avengers: Endgame,” but not where you saw it. You remember seeing Marcel Carné’s “Children of Paradise” at the Paris.

At the rapidly expanding Alamo Drafthouse theater chain, people can watch ambitious movies and eat and drink at the same time. “They can’t expand fast enough,” said director Alex Scott Perry, whose work is described on the Metrograph website as “a series of woundingly articulate films, by turns sad, self-flagellating and scabrous.” Though Perry lamented the closing of any theater, he said the Paris’ business model was outdated and unworkable.

“If your business model is getting people to travel to Midtown to see a documentary on Pavarotti, that’s a very narrow demographic,” he said. “That’s the hill you’ve chosen to die on.”

Dennis Lim, programming director of Film at Lincoln Center, said that he, too, would miss the elegance of the Paris, especially as more theaters are carved into small, faceless boxes. But he said he did not feel it was a place he needed to go. The demands of having just one screen, and having to fill all those seats made for programming that was risk-averse.

For adventurous, edgy, surprising films — for the unsettling kick of the new — the city’s cinema junkies had other theaters.

Or their favorite streaming service.

“All these people lamenting the loss of the Paris,” Lim said. “I would be curious about the last time they set foot there.”

This article originally appeared in

The Last Single-Screen Theater in New York Goes Dark

NEW YORK — The Paris Theater had its concession stand in the basement and a purple velvet curtain in front of the screen, and when it closed last week after 71 years, it was the last single-screen theater in New York City.

“I had to do stuff to deal with the anger,” she said. “Working out and meditating, and trying to breathe. I did anything to try to not focus on the anger.”

She was an Army veteran who had served in Iraq, but at that moment, in fall 2012, she was in the Suffolk County Correctional Facility in New York on charges of burglary, kept in a cell 21 hours per day, in a body at war with her conception of who she was.

She wanted medication to make it stop, and she wasn’t getting it.

On a recent afternoon in her lawyer’s office, Sunderland presented a new phase of her life, including life as a blonde, with long braided hair extensions that she flicked away from her face. She had two prescription medications to lower her testosterone and another to provide estrogen.

And she had a court ruling against two doctors at the Suffolk County jail for denying her hormone therapy, causing her to start what her lawyer described as an involuntary sex change. The jury found that the doctors had violated her constitutional right to necessary medical care and awarded her $355,000 in damages, plus a slightly larger sum that went to her lawyers.

Advocates for transgender rights say it is the first time a jury has awarded punitive damages in such a case.

For Sunderland, 32, who filed the original complaint under her given name, Jeremy, it was vindication for a long, often solitary battle.

“I started the lawsuit back in 2013, and in the beginning it was just me by myself,” she said. “Just hearing the verdict, it means that I got what I had to say across. It shows that they can’t do what they’ve been doing without some kind of punishment.

Transgender people are several times more likely than the general population to spend time in jail or prison and, once there, to face harassment, assault and denial of prescribed medical care. Discrimination at home, school, the job market and the court system all funnel people toward jail or prison.

“Transgender folks are criminalized in our society,” said Mateo De La Torre, a racial and economic justice policy advocate at the National Center for Transgender Equality. “They get kicked out of their home, they engage in the underground economy for survival. And law enforcement profiles transgender women of color as sex workers.”

Like Sunderland, transgender women are routinely held in male facilities, subjected to strip searches or pat-downs by male guards, and are often held in near solitary confinement, ostensibly for their protection, but it can feel like punishment. In 2018, the federal Bureau of Prisons reversed an Obama-era guideline that considered inmates’ gender identity when assigning them to male or female housing. The new guideline calls for housing inmates by “biological sex” except “in rare cases.”

Sunderland’s award of damages may be a break in that pattern, advocates say.

The decision came one month after a transgender woman in Massachusetts was transferred to a women’s prison after suing under the Americans With Disabilities Act — a potentially landmark case because it applies disability protections to people whose sex at birth clashes with their sense of self.

Representatives for the doctors did not respond to requests for interviews. Chief Michael Sharkey of the county sheriff’s office, which runs the jail, said policies had not changed since Sunderland’s time there but guards had “more awareness of transgender people in general.”

The jury cleared the jail on charges that its policies denied prisoners necessary care.

Sunderland felt as early as age 4 that she was born into the wrong gender (she prefers feminine pronouns even in references to her childhood). She wore her sister’s dresses in private and worried about what other children thought of her. She liked her female self — “It was a good feeling,” she said — but felt a lot of anxiety and depression at home.

Our experience of gender is sometimes described as an interaction among anatomy, identity and expression. When our biological sex lines up with how we see ourselves and how we express ourselves to others, then gender feels like a seamless whole.

When the three panes do not line up, the condition is called gender dysphoria or incongruence. Advocates liken it to pregnancy: requiring medical care, but not a disease or a disorder.

For Sunderland, the parts clashed, and she was living in the spaces where they did not line up.

“It actually got worse as time went on,” she said. “It was becoming more of a burden keeping it inside.”

At an Army training camp in Texas, she quit smoking and got in the best shape of her life. She became engaged to a woman and adjusted to the discipline of basic training.

When she shipped out to a base in southern Iraq, near Basra, she worked with a close group of soldiers in food services. “I was out of where I was living,” she said. “There were people I could talk to.”

She felt more than ever the need to transition, and she saw a way to get there.

The internet was full of vendors selling hormones, and how-to stories from people in transition. It did not seem that complicated, she said.

Still, she knew she was on shaky ground. “I’m ordering prescription drugs over the internet on a military base in Iraq,” she said. “I was wondering how that was going to play out.”

She told her fiancee that she planned to transition to living as a woman. When the engagement collapsed, she said, she was “a little heartbroken.”

But the hormones were changing her both physically and emotionally. Despite the breakup, her mood lifted, and some of the daily stress she carried around seemed to fall away. Even as the physical changes became noticeable, no one in her unit said anything.

For Sunderland, the complications began after she returned home from Iraq in 2009. She found doctors to prescribe the hormones she had bought off the internet, including those at the Veterans Affairs hospital in Manhattan.

But she developed a growth on her liver that moved her doctors to discontinue the estrogen, maintaining only the testosterone blockers.

Finally she had the liver growth surgically removed, and her doctors cleared her to resume the estrogen. But the surgery put her out of work, and she started to buy street drugs to manage the pain from the operation, then for recreation. Soon she and an acquaintance were robbing houses to get money for drugs, including heroin and crack cocaine. In September 2012, when she took stolen goods to a pawnshop, she and her accomplice were arrested.

For 16 months, until she was finally transferred to a prison upstate, she received neither the estrogen nor the testosterone blockers.

At trial, the doctors testified that they cut off treatment out of concern that the liver growth might return. They also testified that they were unfamiliar with treating transgender people, and that they did not attempt to learn more about it.

The jury found that the doctors had violated her rights under the 14th Amendment to equal protection of the law. Advocates for transgender rights hope the verdict makes facilities think twice before denying care.

But for Sunderland, it has not changed her life. Though the verdict came in October, she has not received any money yet, and she has been unable to find work, even after earning a certificate in medical billing and coding at a nearby technical school.

For now she remains on Long Island with her sister and parents, stuck in the town she tried to escape a decade ago, waiting to get on with her life.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/15/nyregion/transgender-jail-hormone-therapy.html" id="2ac6eec2-2cee-35a2-ae36-f5e7b54d4af8">The New York Times</a>.

When the testosterone started to flow through her system, Jessica Sunderland felt the changes immediately.

The Right to Transition in Jail

The question had particular resonance. In the summer Mekas had been hospitalized for a blood disorder that was still mysterious to his doctors. It was the first sign in four years that he was mortal. He canceled a trip to Berlin because he was tired and short of breath, and was now walking with a cane, his complexion grayish. Since his 20s he had used his movie camera to protect him from the outside world. Now his doctors were using cameras to explore the worlds within.

He did not think much about death, he said. He had grown up next to two cemeteries in rural Lithuania, where the gravediggers drank beer and talked between jobs, and so that was how he thought about death, as something commonplace.

“It’s a very normal transition,” he said. “What’s beyond that line, it’s where the mystery begins, where it becomes interesting. There are glimpses in the messages that come from there, some of the old Scriptures. Indications are there, and I believe it all. I believe it much more than anything that’s written since the 12th century.”

We were onstage at Anthology Film Archives, the nonprofit theater he helped start in 1970, and he turned to address his audience. “All I can tell you,” he said, “is that life does not end in this room.”

So closes another year for some members of what gerontologists have called the “oldest old,” one of the fastest-growing age groups in the country. Their world got a little smaller, its mysteries a little more pressing. Two of the series’ six subjects died in 2016 — Fred Jones, who asked God for 110 years, and John Sorensen, who missed his partner of 60 years, and who said every time we got together that he wanted to die. Both gone within a few months of each other — death, apparently, makes its own plans.

For the others, 2018 was a challenge. Ping Wong turned 93 in a nursing home in southern New Jersey: dementia. Helen Moses, still not married to Howie Zeimer, turned 94 at the Hebrew Home in the Bronx: a fall, some Parkinson’s-like symptoms, then internal bleeding. Ruth Willig turned 95 in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn: a fall on a bus, another in the shower, an infection that took two courses of antibiotics to curb.

But this is an accounting of maladies, not of lives. Wong spoke by video with a goddaughter in China she hadn’t seen in 50 years; Moses and Zeimer very nearly had a religious commitment ceremony in October, before health concerns intervened; Willig traveled to the wedding of her granddaughter and celebrated her great-granddaughter’s first birthday.

“She was going come hell or high water,” Willig’s daughter Judy said of the wedding. In November, when the family gathered for a small 95th birthday celebration, Willig said that if she made it to 100, they could hold a big one.

And for Mekas, it was a year like no other. He paid tribute to a forgotten cinematic trailblazer, raised millions of dollars to expand Anthology Film Archives, played a major role in a New York exhibit about the Velvet Underground and was accused, in The New York Review of Books, of downplaying his interactions with anti-Semitic elements in Lithuania during the Holocaust. After the last, he gave a detailed, six-hour interview to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, describing a time period about which he has rarely spoken in public.

What a year. What a four-year stretch. If they’d been freshmen when the series started, they would be new graduates now, with diplomas and plans. Instead, their four years have been extended improvisations, their goals and achievements rarely reflected in the broader culture.

Memories kept bubbling up, an abundance compared to the thinning years ahead. For them, memory remains something in the head, not in the device, and when they depart, the process of remembering will change without them. So much is said about memory loss in old age. But what about memory muscle, which younger generations have not needed?

They were born when American life expectancy hovered around 60 years, and they surpassed current expectations around the time they rounded 80. But life, too, has plans: at age 80, an American man can expect eight more years, a woman almost 10. That’s longer than adolescence.

And still, it has been left to them to invent life at their age, without the guideposts or role models of their earlier years. As British novelist Penelope Lively wrote when she was 80: “Our experience is one unknown to most of humanity, over time. We are the pioneers.”

Having gotten old in an aging culture that still worships youth, they have done the unthinkable: gotten older.

“Did you ever meet anyone like me?” Moses asked one day at the Hebrew Home. “I’m special. A lot of people know me here. I don’t know them. They go, Hi, Helen.”

Moses started the year visibly slower than she’d been at the start of the Times series, no longer boasting about being in trouble with this or that nurse. But she was also quick to express gratitude toward her daughter and Zeimer, who were often at odds.

“Howie,” she said, addressing Zeimer, “aren’t I kind to you? You better say yes.”

He did, adding that over the last year, “She’s grown older and more wiser and more perfect for me.”

“He’s very kind,” Moses said. “We never had a fight. We never left each other where he just said good night. Always with a kiss.

“I kiss him good-night,” she said. “Want to see?”

“No,” said her daughter, Zoe Gussoff, before reversing herself: “Whatever makes them happy.”

It was lunch hour, but Moses pushed her sandwich away after a few bites. This year she lost much of her appetite and has lost some weight. At 94, she still does not need glasses, but wears hearing aids, which the nursing home staff stores at night. When she gets ambulating with her walker, it is hard to keep up with her.

“You’re going to be here 10 years in February,” Gussoff told her.

“That’s a long time,” Moses said. Most of the friends she made when she first got to the home had died. “It’s a nice place,” she said. “It’s clean. Most people are nice. Some are not. That’s it.”

In spring, she fell and required four stitches by her eye. The fall meant increased supervision from nursing home staff, and for the first time, a wheelchair — a severe drop in autonomy for Moses. During treatment, doctors also noted Parkinson’s-like symptoms, and they were uncertain whether she would ever walk again.

Gussoff took her to an outside neurologist, who enabled her to walk using a walker. But the turn in Moses’ health had a bigger consequence: Gussoff, who had vehemently opposed any marriage between her mother and Zeimer, was now willing to bless a commitment ceremony, as long as the couple didn’t live together, and as long as Gussoff would remain in charge of her mother’s health care.

“My daughter convinced me,” Gussoff said. “She said, ‘What would be the harm? Grandma’s 94, what’s the difference? Make her happy.'”

The couple, who are fans of the show “Say Yes to the Dress,” made plans. On the internet, Gussoff’s daughter found something called a “Short Scoop Bridesmaid Floral Lace Dress Cocktail Formal Swing Dress.” They lined up a rabbi and picked a couple of dates in October for the ceremony.

“Commitment,” Gussoff reiterated. “We don’t say the word ‘marriage.'”

As the dates approached, Moses started complaining about stomach pains. When she finally got to a hospital emergency room, doctors found bleeding from her lower intestine. She spent 2 1/2 weeks in intensive care or recovery.

“I was lonesome,” Zeimer said. “I wondered whether it was possible to come and see her but they told me no.”

When Moses returned to the nursing home, life intervened again. This time, the rabbi got sick.

She and Zeimer have not given up hopes to get hitched, as Zeimer puts it. In the meantime, he moved to a room closer to hers, and still watches television with her at night, though he leaves earlier than previously because they get tired.

As in past years, Moses talked often about her own mother and how much she missed her. Her mother had taught her so many things, but not how to be 94: how to manage a daughter who liked to take charge and a boyfriend who made her feel needed again, all set against the daily wear of aging. In this act she was on her own.

Summing up, Moses said, “If it wasn’t for the hospital I had a good year.”

Two hours south, in Voorhees, New Jersey, Wong asked after my mother, who turned 90 this year, and broke her hip. Did she have activities where she lived? Wong asked.

“Here you have three meals, a bedroom and then a lot of activities,” she said, describing her days in the nursing home, where she moved in 2016 to be near her daughter. “You can pass time, enjoy yourself. Usually this kind of activity is good for the elderly, but your mom is too far from this place, otherwise it’s better to come here to enjoy herself.”

Four years ago, at the start of the series, Wong had lived in a subsidized apartment in Manhattan, where she spent her days playing mah-jongg with three women from the building. The onset of dementia and consequent move to the nursing home had been very difficult for her, and this year her spirits were up and down. Though she has made new friends, she also had recurring bouts of anxiety, including one that landed her in the hospital.

“She kept telling the people they put hot water on her and burned her skin,” Wong’s daughter, Elaine Gin, said. “Delusions. Finally they sent her to the hospital. I was there at 4 or 5 o’clock in the morning. I entered the emergency-room door and I can hear her talking. She’s nice, she says, ‘Thank you very much,’ ‘You’re so nice.’ They do all the tests. She’s fine, but she’s talking and talking and talking. At 11:40 my friend came so I could go to work, and she’s still talking. They moved her to a room, and she couldn’t stay by herself. I got off early, at 4 o’clock, and she’s still talking. At 6:30 she finally calmed down. She wanted to stand up, she wanted to walk around.”

In late November she was back in the hospital, this time for dehydration and kidney malfunction. When I asked what was wrong, she said: “I think I fell down, because I am very weak. Now I can’t take very big steps.”

But even with her setbacks this year, Wong remained proudly resourceful, insisting that her rewards at the home outweighed the hardships.

“I’m the oldest, so I know everybody when they are admitted,” she said. “I have a lot to talk about what we are facing.”

And she found a new way to begin our conversations: “I remember you,” she’d say, and the act of remembering — and the joy of declaring it — seemed to fill the moment with meaning, a small gift near the end of a long life.

In Sheepshead Bay, Ruth Willig gave thanks for larger gifts this year: as she stayed mostly the same, her family changed around her.

“I dare not talk about not surviving,” she said one afternoon in her apartment, where balloons in the shape of a 9 and 5 held their last whiffs of helium. “My children, my son especially, say, ‘Oh, Ma, you’re going to keep going forever.’ The thought of my passing is very upsetting to him.”

Willig could not help noting the passage of time, especially the absence of her three siblings. Once the youngest, she was now the last of her generation. “It’s weird to be the only one left, it really is,” she said. “I can’t really call anyone: do you remember this? It was not easy at first. I’m getting used to it.”

Patterns held: she avoided most activities in her assisted living building, and she went to the New Jersey Shore with her children for a summer vacation. She canceled her weekday newspaper subscription because the papers were adding up — “And how much can you read, really?” she said — but then renewed it because she missed it.

Some things got harder. Photographs of her great-granddaughter abounded, but only in people’s cellphones, “so what does it do for me?” she said. The house at the shore was advertised as accessible for people with disabilities, but there was no grab bar in the shower, and the high-end mattress in her bedroom was too high for her to climb onto.

“They haven’t walked a mile in the shoes of someone who needs it,” Judy Willig said.

Then Willig banged her shin on the steps of her building’s shuttle bus — a small injury for a younger person, but the impact shredded the thin skin on her leg, and because she was on baby aspirin to prevent a stroke, there was a lot of bleeding.

The wound required her to cover the leg in waterproof wrap when she showered, which led to another fall.

“When the cut got infected, we both worried,” Judy Willig said. “We didn’t talk about being worried, but we were.”

Still, there was a wedding and a birthday. And the unlikely fact of another year, with its ups and downs. Ninety-five, who would have thought?

“I find it amazing, how we’re living so long,” she said. “We keep going on.”

Jonas Mekas glided into 2018 on the wings of other artists, looking backward at departed associates. Through a German publisher, he resuscitated his defunct magazine Film Culture for a book-length issue devoted to Barbara Rubin, an extraordinary character who blew into New York and Mekas’ life in 1963 as a fearless teenager, and wound up connecting Bob Dylan to Allen Ginsberg and Andy Warhol to the Velvet Underground. After making a taboo-busting underground film called “Christmas on Earth,” she left the scene for France and ultra-Orthodox Judaism, and died at age 35 of an infection after giving birth to her fifth child. Like Mekas, she’d been one of the vital background players who made better-known artists like Warhol or Lou Reed possible.

In midyear Mekas’ backward glances took an unwelcome turn. In a long article in The New York Review of Books, Michael Casper examined Mekas’ work at two Lithuanian publications during the Nazi occupation, where his poems or reviews sometimes ran beside virulently anti-Semitic calls to violence. The article noted that Mekas’ writing was not anti-Semitic, but argued that his proximity to pro-Nazi hate speech clashed with the image he has created for himself. Casper wrote that Mekas “has repeatedly manipulated his story, taking advantage of people’s ignorance of wartime Lithuania, to make himself appear, when useful, as victim, hero, or oblivious bystander.”

Mekas denounced the article as “dirty” and inaccurate, arguing that the toxic material in those newspapers ran only briefly and that the papers were principally devoted to local news and culture, a tacit form of resistance to occupation. After 75 years, he said, that period remained unreal to him, because it was “such an unnatural intrusion, that I cannot identify myself. It’s like it does not belong, that period.”

At an art opening shortly after the article appeared, Mekas looked weak and nearly broken — a 95-year-old crushed by a ghost from his past. But another culprit surfaced: a hemoglobin deficiency and polyps in his digestive tract. By fall, between monthly blood transfusions, he was gushing about new music by Eminem and Cat Power. As the shock of the article receded, he focused on the miracle of his care.

“Which translates into strengthening my trust in the essential goodness of humanity,” he wrote in an email health update to friends. “No, humanity is not yet lost. It’s only confused. Yes, the bad news dominate all the media. But there are unseen, invisible millions of men and women who daily perform invisible but essential human acts that, I firmly believe, is moving the human evolution along the lines envisioned by the Poet of the Eternity.”

Would Mekas have had this perspective at a younger age? Perhaps not. But at 96, it defines him.

He ended the year tired from another trip to the hospital, his blood condition seemingly stabilized but his appetite scarce from acid reflux. “There are aspects that are improving,” he said on New Year’s Day. “Maybe nothing is getting worse, but remains the same.”

So begins a new year for four pioneers on an alien frontier, and for the exceedingly grateful reporter who has followed them through 17 articles, one video, a book and countless glimpses of past and future. Their stories are a year closer to the end, as are all of ours. But all discovered something in 2018, and all said they were glad to have experienced it.

Onward to 2019, whatever it may hold.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/04/nyregion/these-4-new-yorkers-are-experts-in-living-what-do-they-know-that-we-dont.html" id="bc9df767-3f5e-32ee-a22e-3ca3c6686fd3">The New York Times</a>.

NEW YORK — Nearly four years ago, I began following six people over age 85 to see what their lives were like: what kept them going, what they hoped for or feared. This past year, I asked Jonas Mekas, now 96, about death and the afterlife.

Pioneers Inch Ahead Into the Twilight

The governor also commuted the sentences of seven people currently incarcerated.

“While President Trump shuts down the federal government over his obsession with keeping immigrants out, New York stands strong in our support for immigrant communities,” Cuomo, a Democrat, said in a statement. “These actions will help keep immigrant families together and take a critical step toward a more just, more fair and more compassionate New York.”

Immigration has become a key theme in Cuomo’s annual clemency grants, responding to what he has called “a war on our immigrant communities” by the Trump administration.

Monday’s announcement comes a day before Cuomo is scheduled to be sworn in for a third term as governor of New York in a symbolic ceremony on Ellis Island, the historic point of entry for immigrants to the United States.

This summer, he pardoned eight immigrants who faced deportation as a result of convictions for relatively minor crimes.

Trump has made limiting immigration a prime focus of his presidency, and he is locked in a showdown with Democrats over his desire to include funding for a southern border wall in the federal budget. The resulting government shutdown has stretched into its 10th day.

This year’s high number of pardons contrasts with Cuomo’s first years in office, when he issued very few, said JoAnne Page, president and chief executive of the Fortune Society, a nonprofit group that helps formerly incarcerated people re-enter society.

Those pardoned Monday range in age from 33 to 75, and were mostly convicted on nonviolent drug crimes. The youngest, Kerrone Kay-Marie Parks, was convicted of possession of a controlled substance in Queens in 2013.

The recipients of Cuomo’s commutations included Roy Bolus, 49, who was sentenced to 75 years to life for his secondary role in a drug deal that ended in the deaths of two men. Bolus is pursuing his Ph.D. in prison.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/31/nyregion/cuomo-pardons-immigrants-trump.html" id="561fbbee-b715-3bad-aaf2-b518eb7858e4">The New York Times</a>.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York took aim at President Donald Trump’s immigration policies Monday, issuing pardons to 22 immigrants who were at risk of deportation or blocked from citizenship because of criminal convictions.

With a Fresh Swipe at Trump, Cuomo Pardons 22 Immigrants

This year’s high number of pardons contrasts with Cuomo’s first years in office, when he issued very few, said JoAnne Page, president and chief executive of the Fortune Society, a nonprofit group that helps formerly incarcerated people re-enter society. A Times editorial after his 2013 announcement lamented “Governor Cuomo’s Stingy Pardons.” That year he issued only two.

“It’s nice to be able to recognize improvement,” Page said.

She added: “These are life-changing decisions. Even a conviction for a minor offense years ago can tear someone’s life up by the roots and destroy their families.”

In 2015 the governor created an executive clemency board to identify and receive applications for viable candidates, with mixed results, said Steve Zeidman, a professor and director of the criminal defense clinic at the City University of New York School of Law.

“It was really trailblazing,” Zeidman said.

But last year Cuomo commuted only two sentences for people still in prison. “It’s a weighty decision, but I’ve met hundreds of people who deserve it,” Zeidman said. He recommended legislation requiring a “second look” at every sentence after a person served 15 years.

And this summer Cuomo was criticized after some of the people who received conditional pardons were arrested for new crimes.

Zeidman, who helped Bolus and two others with their successful applications, said of Bolus, “You meet him and say, ‘Why is this man in prison after 30 years for a crime he committed when he was 18?'”

He added, “It’s a good way to start the year. These are wonderful people. There are more people who will be productive on the outside.”

NEW YORK — As a font of indelible folk characters, Christmas beats all other holidays: Santa, Rudolph, Tiny Tim, the Grinch, David Sedaris, you name it. In the Charleston section of Staten Island, there is also a retired Pepsi foreman named Joseph DiMartino, who in 2002 — the year after his wife, Debra Ann, was killed in the World Trade Center attack — began decorating his home in her memory, and to raise money for the pediatric cancer unit at Staten Island University Hospital.

“After that horrific day, people were there for my family,” said DiMartino, 61, who was suddenly raising two young daughters on his own. “So this is my way of giving back.”

He starts the day after Labor Day, with a goal to have everything in place for a soft opening on Thanksgiving. DiMartino declined to say how much he has spent on decorations, but allowed that “you could buy a house” with what he has invested so far. He expects charitable donations this year to be around $40,000.

The display began, as so many things do, simply enough, with a Nativity scene in a manger. But as DiMartino added another piece each year, pretty soon it added up. This year he commandeered part of a neighbor’s lawn to add a mechanical skating rink.

DiMartino said he watches the eyes of the children to figure out what to add next. Already he has to limit the appearance of Santa (spoiler alert: it’s really DiMartino’s friend Ralph, up from Florida) to four days, because otherwise the foot traffic would be too disruptive for the neighbors.

In return, he said, all he asks is that people not block his neighbors’ driveways. It’s not exactly peace on earth and goodwill toward all. But these days it qualifies as a call to our better nature. And lest there be environmental concerns, most of the juice for the display comes from solar panels on the roof. Santa, you see, takes the polar ice caps seriously.

So ho ho ho. It’s been a trying year, filled with spectacles even more unlikely than a carousel suddenly filling a lawn in Staten Island. Every night, after he shuts the display down, DiMartino sweeps the street, where visitors toss the occasional coffee cup. It’s the least he can do, he said.

In that vein: Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good — hey, this is a driveway, you can’t block my driveway.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/20/nyregion/if-you-ever-saw-this-house-you-would-even-say-it-glows.html" id="8304a776-9fda-38f0-a49c-63bb7c317106">The New York Times</a>.

If You Ever Saw this House, You Would Even Say It Glows

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Charities like Ford, he realized, owe their existence to inequality, and they reproduce it: they extend rich people’s influence, with no accountability, and they take money from the public tax rolls to do so. If a foundation gives a million dollars to a donor’s favorite pet cause, part of that gift is whatever tax the donor or foundation would have paid on that million — and neither you nor your elected officials has any say in the matter.

Perhaps people should be able to give away their money as they see fit, but this is not the full story: because of tax breaks, they are also giving away your money. By one estimate, these subsidies cost U.S. taxpayers more than $50 billion a year.

Things nagged at Walker. He’d attend conferences where plutocrats who opposed tax reforms or labor unions earnestly trumpeted their efforts to reduce poverty. Often he was the only African-American speaker at a conference, or the only one who had ever been poor. And often his presence was used as proof of the group’s bona fides — “Look,” he described the reaction, “Darren’s here, so we’ve done diversity.” As Ford funded indigenous people trying to reclaim their lands from developers, its biggest resource — an endowment of $13 billion — invested in industries that mined or logged that land.

Walker, who will turn 60 next month, is also one of the best-connected people in New York, a city that runs on connections. Why, he wondered, were there so many more foundations for clean rivers or cancer cures than for prison reform or sickle-cell disease?

He spent two years considering how a philanthropy could do better. He was, he said, “a man who sets out to save the world.”

Think about how power moves in New York. There are the blunt forces like Wall Street, real estate, government and the arts, each operating in its own sphere — each under scrutiny, and contested. Then there is another channel of power, where philanthropies operate, moving billions of dollars around the city, functioning as connectors. Foundations connect billionaires on Wall Street with food banks in East New York, Hollywood celebrities with inner-city literacy programs, starving artists in Jackson Heights with the Whitney Museum.

Darren Walker, a gay black man from Texas in a realm created by old-money elites, is the connector of connectors. In a new Gilded Age, he believes that wealth can be made to do more good.

In 2015, he wrote an essay called “Toward a New Gospel of Wealth,” calling out “a system that perpetuates vast differences in privilege and then tasks the privileged with improving the system” — foxes minding the henhouse. The old gospel of wealth, as articulated by Andrew Carnegie in 1889, took inequality as a mark of progress, and called for its winners to give back in charity. Walker argued that this formula no longer worked.

At Ford, he made changes. He sold the foundation’s blue chip art collection and used the money to buy 320 newer works, many by female artists or artists of color. He integrated two sides of Ford’s work: its support for the arts and its grants for social justice. Declaring himself a proud capitalist, he called for a capitalism that spread its wealth rather than concentrating it. In place of charity, he promised a push for justice.

Putting that into practice has been a challenge.

On a recent morning in his office, Walker teased out some of the contradictions of this job. Ford’s offices, renovated last year, reflected his vision: where past Ford leaders had occupied a suite big enough to seat 40, he converted this to three conference rooms, moving his desk into a smaller glass-walled room visible to anyone.

In the building lobby, the first thing visitors see is a regal portrait by Kehinde Wiley of an African-American woman named Wanda Crichlow, from the public housing projects of East New York, Brooklyn.

“Are there contradictions?” Walker asked of his work. “Let’s start very explicitly with the fact that the Ford Foundation is a product of capitalism. Henry Ford never imagined that a black gay man would be president of this foundation, but that’s what’s great about American philanthropy, that it continues to evolve.”

To spend time with Walker is to feel enveloped by his attention, which has been a factor in his success. Some sources make you think they find you interesting. It’s a talent. Darren Walker greeted me as the most interesting person he had ever met. When I observed him among strangers, I saw a similar effect on them. We should all have this superpower.

“There are asymmetries in my life,” he said. “When I get a call from my mother who says, ‘Cousin Buster died and his wife doesn’t have the money to bury him, and we’re all pitching in,’ I could be going to a black tie event that night at Lincoln Center, and probably I’m the only person in the room who’s on the phone talking with his mother about her cousin whose family didn’t have the money to bury him. I deal with those contradictions by trying to as candidly as I can call them out in those rooms. It’s important when you’re in the rooms, bringing that perspective to the room and asserting it.”

Walker’s focus changed the conversation among his peers, said Ben Soskis, a historian of philanthropy at the Urban Institute. “It’s hard to overemphasize how little inequality had been a philanthropic concern over the last half-century,” Soskis said. “He took on a huge challenge. There’s been no figure with greater influence in the sector than Darren Walker.”

At the heart of this is the unlikely character of Walker himself, a serious man and demanding chief executive who can whip up blender drinks and gumbo for 50, and says things like, “If the roux does not smell like burnt tires, you haven’t cooked it enough.”

Something else about him: “Darren Walker knows more people than anyone we know,” said Thelma Golden, director of the Studio Museum in Harlem, who has known Walker since the 1990s. “Darren is the ultimate connector. He’s at the center of this vision of the world as he sees it and the world he makes possible. Without it I don’t know how I or many of us would have the broad communities that we have.”

Walker grew up in Louisiana and East Texas, with a single mother who worked as a nurse’s aide. His life changed when he was recruited in 1965 for the first preschool class of Head Start, a new federal program aimed at reducing poverty. It set him on what he calls a publicly funded “mobility escalator” that continued through state college and state law school, and that he fears no longer exists for young people trying to get out of poverty.

At the University of Texas, he thrived both academically and socially: head of the student union and the elite Friar Society, where a university regent once mistook him for a server. “Even then, as a college kid, he was polished, polite, brilliant, warm, really kind,” said Paul Begala, a former adviser to Bill Clinton, who was a class behind Walker at UT. “People were really drawn to Darren.” He engaged frat guys and student government nerds and arty types, and “could bring them together,” Begala said.

He was also willing to challenge them. At the student union, he brought the Pilobolus dance company to campus, without telling anyone that they performed naked. “People were scandalized,” Begala said.

When New York beckoned, Walker worked as a corporate lawyer and then as a bond trader, but quickly jumped off to volunteer full-time at the Children’s Storefront school in Harlem. Around that time, in 1992, he met a downtown art dealer named David Beitzel, and soon they were living together, with the first of two English bulldogs, named Beulah, after Walker’s mother. (Beulah’s successor, Mary Lou, is named for Beitzel’s mother; when Walker wants to leave one of the nightly events he attends, he sometimes says, “Mary Lou is calling.”)

He traveled uptown and downtown, collecting bankers, lawyers, activists, pastors, art patrons and bureaucrats, building alliances as he went. He was doing what he did in college and would later do at Ford: connecting traditional power brokers with less obvious players, extending his influence by force of his personality.

He was intersectional before his time.

“My theory in life right now is that there are all kinds of gifts,” said Anna Deavere Smith, the actor and playwright, who is both Walker’s friend and a recipient of Ford grants. “He has the gift of being able to make friends and keep them.”

In the neglected Harlem of the late 1990s, one dynamic player was the Abyssinian Development Corp., a nonprofit offshoot of the powerful Abyssinian Baptist Church. Harlem then was littered with abandoned buildings that had been repossessed by the city. The development corporation, led by the Rev. Dr. Calvin O. Butts III, leveraged city and private money to restore these shells, then used the profits to acquire and rehab more buildings. Walker became the organization’s chief operating officer, working out of a basement office to help bring a Pathmark supermarket to 125th Street, the anchor for what would become a thriving commercial corridor in a neighborhood that had been given up for dead.

“Working for Calvin Butts, you saw the power of the black church, the shrewd political instincts of a power player, and the dynamic at the intersection of race, power, geography and culture,” Walker said. “It gave me tremendous insight into how power at that intersection plays out, and who benefits and who doesn’t benefit.”

Walker’s time at Abyssinian also taught him what it was like to rely on foundation grants, begging the mighty patron for favors. When he left to join the Rockefeller Foundation and then Ford — and as Abyssinian boomed and busted in a new Harlem — he vowed to change this relationship.

“He’s brought a breath of fresh air,” said Rob Reich, a director of the Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society at Stanford University, and the author of “Just Giving: Why Philanthropy Is Failing Democracy and How It Can Do Better,” which explores philanthropy’s contradictions.

“He is an amazing politician of straddling the world of old money and directing it for causes that speak to the current moment of inequality, while attempting at the same time to speak the language of social justice. It’s a high-level carnival juggling act that he’s attempting to pull off. It’s pretty hard to imagine anyone doing it with 100% success.”

Here is how Walker extends his influence.

When Anna Deavere Smith sought backing for her next play, the Ford Foundation offered support. But Walker also arranged a get-together with Smith and other potential funders and theater directors, throwing the foundation’s endorsement behind her. “You can’t put a dollar sign on that Good Housekeeping seal,” Smith said.

Then when Sherrilyn Ifill, who runs the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, wanted to meet artist Mark Bradford, whom she’d just seen on “60 Minutes,” she called Walker.

“And Darren says, ‘Of course, I know him quite well,’” she said. “‘We’re very good friends.’”

Walker also connected her to a major philanthropist she’d wanted to reach.

“Simply to be around Darren is to meet other people,” she said. “He will offer up his Rolodex to you. He always is willing to think about, ‘Who could connect you to that person?’ If it’s not him, he knows the conduit. He’s kind of the mayor, in his own way.”

Walker worked with philanthropist Agnes Gund to create a $100 million Art for Justice Fund. Then he introduced Gund and Ifill. The art fund, in turn, brought light to issues argued by the defense fund’s lawyers.

“That’s my job,” Walker said of connecting Ifill. “Why wouldn’t I introduce her? I want her to succeed. It’s in the interest of moving justice forward in this country that Sherilyn Ifill succeed, and I can help her to do that.

“To me the question is, How do we as the Ford Foundation, and I as its president, leverage the foundation’s and my networks, and on behalf of whom?”

NEW YORK — From a tidy glass office in Midtown Manhattan, Darren Walker gives away $650 million a year of other people’s money, and is paid nicely to do so. When he got this job in 2013, as president of the Ford Foundation, he set his sights on tackling inequality.

John Leland

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