Queen Elizabeth II made three visits to New York City during her 70-year reign.
Good morning. It’s Friday. We’ll look at Queen Elizabeth II and New York, a city she visited three times in her long reign. We’ll also hear former Mayor Bill de Blasio’s reflections on a subject he has had time to reflect on: former Mayor Bill de Blasio.
“A visit to New York for just a day is really a teaser,” Queen Elizabeth II said of her first trip to New York, in 1957. And she wasn’t even around for a full day — only 15 hours.
Arriving on a ferryboat, she was not disappointed by the famous skyline she had seen only in pictures. “Wheeeee!” she cried in an uncharacteristically unrestrained moment.
How much she saw on the way uptown is an open question. Ticker tape rained down as she waved from a limousine — “a tiny woman suspended in time,” as my colleague Robert D. McFadden later wrote. She went on to touristy places: She had asked to see the view from the Empire State Building and pronounced it “tremendous.”
But the queen, who died on Thursday at Balmoral Castle in Scotland, was no ordinary tourist: At the United Nations, she gave a speech.
She was 31 then. She spent more time in New York on her second visit when she was 50, in 1976 — the year of the Bicentennial, celebrating those rebellious colonists’ break with her country. She went to Bloomingdale’s. Mayor Abraham Beame proclaimed her an honorary New Yorker.
Her third visit, in 2010, when she was 84, was the shortest. She and her husband, Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, arrived on a private plane from Canada. They left for Britain after only about five hours in New York.
There was not a wasted moment. The queen, wearing a flowered suit and white gloves, formally opened the Queen Elizabeth II Sept. 11 Garden in Lower Manhattan. “She’d gone to the U.N., given a speech and gone to ground zero,” said Isabel Carden, the treasurer of the nonprofit British Memorial Garden Trust, which commissioned the garden as a memorial to the 67 British citizens who died in the Sept. 11 attacks.
Her second speech at the United Nations, in 2010, lasted just eight minutes. Ban Ki-moon, the secretary general at the time, introduced her as “an anchor for our age,” and she used the appearance to look back. “In my lifetime,” she said, “the United Nations has moved from being a high-minded aspiration to being a real force for common good.”
“Then,” Carden said on Thursday, “she came to us. She met all the families. She was never hurried. She took time to speak to everyone, and we had about 500 people there. It was so remarkable.”
And, on a day when the temperature soared to 103 degrees, the queen’s face showed not a drop of sweat.
Collin Mitchell, a tax specialist from Guyana who lived in Brooklyn, waited outside the garden for five hours, hoping to see her. “My mother always took her children out; she would pull her entire brood to events like these, flag in hand,” he said. She had died five years earlier, he said, adding, “I want to keep that legacy.”
Weather
Enjoy a sunny day with temperatures near the low 80s. The evening will be clear, with temps around the mid-60s.
ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING
In effect until Sept. 26 (Rosh Hashana).
Trump in the headlines
Donald Trump, who now lives in Florida, made his name in New York. And it was New York that exerted its pull on three stories related to the former president on Thursday:
Steven Bannon, a former top adviser to Trump, surrendered in Manhattan to face felony charges of money laundering, conspiracy and scheming to defraud in connection with his work with We Build the Wall Inc., a nonprofit.
Prosecutors say We Build the Wall defrauded donors who believed that they were helping to make Trump’s promise of a border wall with Mexico a reality. The Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, said Bannon had “acted as the architect” of the scheme. Letitia James, the New York State attorney general, whose office worked with Bragg’s on the investigation, said Bannon had taken “advantage of his donors’ political views to secure millions of dollars which he then misappropriated.”
Geoffrey Berman, the former United States attorney in Manhattan, charged in a new book that the Justice Department sought to use his office to support Trump politically and pursue Trump’s critics. Berman writes the Justice Department pressured him to open a criminal investigation of John Kerry, a former secretary of state.
Trump fired Berman in 2020 after he refused to resign. Berman’s book, “Holding the Line,” is scheduled to be published on Tuesday.
City Council leaders asked Mayor Eric Adams to end the Trump Organization’s contract to run a city-owned golf course in the Bronx and to cancel a women’s tournament next month.
The event is part of the Aramco Team Series, which has been linked to the Saudi government’s network of businesses. Aramco, Saudi Arabia’s state-owned oil company, is the title sponsor for the series, and Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, which is overseen by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, is the “presenting partner.”
Adrienne Adams, the City Council speaker, and Shekar Krishnan, a Council member who leads its Committee on Parks and Recreation, sent the mayor and Sue Donoghue, the parks commissioner, a letter saying that the recent guilty plea by Allen Weisselberg, a top Trump Organization executive, gave the city grounds to end the contract. The city’s agreement with the company requires its employee to comply with all federal, state and laws.
The latest New York news
Shooting in a Brooklyn park: A 15-year-old boy was shot and killed after a fistfight, the police said.
First day of school: New York City’s public school students returned to class as the nation’s largest school system loosened coronavirus restrictions.
Homeless shelter officer suspended: A police officer for the New York City Department of Homeless Services was suspended without pay after a video showed him hitting a shelter resident in the face.
De Blasio on de Blasio
Bill de Blasio — former mayor, former presidential candidate and former congressional candidate — is off to Harvard University as a visiting teaching fellow. Before he left New York for a semester, he looked back on his career as the first Democrat in City Hall in 20 years.
“I found him to be remarkably reflective,” said my colleague Michael Gold, who interviewed de Blasio last month. “I had not thought of him as a particularly reflective guy because when you’re the mayor, you end up being defensive — there’s always something else to deal with, especially, in his case, given the pandemic.”
But Michael, who also drew on a de Blasio interview with our political reporter Jeffery C. Mays, added: “He’s now been away from City Hall for nine months and out of the spotlight except when he ran for Congress, and that fizzled, so he suddenly had time to stop and look back in a way I don’t think he had had an opportunity to do.”
Since leaving City Hall, de Blasio has acknowledged that he “made mistakes” as mayor. He told Michael that they included failing to stay “close to the hearts of people” and keep up “the personal bond” that had carried him into City Hall.
The congressional campaign seems to have amplified de Blasio’s sense that the personal mattered more than he understood at the time. He jumped into the crowded field running for an open congressional seat in Brooklyn in the spring, only to drop out two months later, when it was clear his campaign was not gaining ground.
“Humans vote emotionally,” he told Michael. “And if you’re tired of someone, you’re tired of them.”
He said that without sounding bitter. “The thing that sticks in my mind was when he said he was saddened he did not get the support of his neighbors in Park Slope but appreciated the opportunity to talk to them,” Michael said. “Especially during the pandemic, he had been at such a remove as mayor.”
METROPOLITAN diary
Brooklyn stop sign
Dear Diary:
After a fun July 4 barbecue with friends, my fiancé and I were driving home to Brooklyn when we came up behind a van that was pulled up at a stop sign.
We waited nearly half a minute, but the van did not move. It was getting late and we had to run the puppy out, so my fiancé honked once.
The van didn’t budge.
We honked again.
Still nothing.
By now, we were impatient. We drove around the van, pulling up cautiously to the stop sign from the driver’s side.
Looking in the van, we saw a man with his eyes closed. He was vigorously playing a flute.
— Michael Druckman
Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.
Glad we could get together here. See you on Monday. — J.B.
P.S. Here’s today’s Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here.
Melissa Guerrero, Francis Mateo and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at nytoday@nytimes.com.
Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox.
Source: Elections - nytimes.com
