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    CEO’s Killing Poses Test for New NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch

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    Weeks ago, Jessica Tisch was in charge of street sweeping and trash pickup. On Monday, she found herself overseeing a ferocious manhunt as the head of the Police Department.Jessica S. Tisch, New York’s police commissioner, was giving her two sons their morning cereal on Dec. 4 when she got a text from a deputy telling her that the chief executive of UnitedHealthcare had been shot dead on a Manhattan sidewalk.“‘Kids, I’ve got to go’,” she said, and jumped in a car that drove her to police headquarters.She ordered that photos of the gunman be sent to all officers as a manhunt got underway. She assigned 10 analysts from the intelligence bureau to work with detectives analyzing surveillance video that might have recorded the gunman’s movements. For five days, investigators scoured thousands of hours of footage, analyzed ballistics and dove in the ponds of Central Park to look for evidence.They were not the only law enforcement agencies that sprang into action. In San Francisco, the police recognized a surveillance photo of the suspect as a man declared missing by his family, and told the F.B.I. in New York, which eventually passed the name to the New York police. The suspect was finally captured on Monday 280 miles away from Manhattan in Altoona, Pa., after a McDonald’s patron recognized him.The case, which has transfixed the nation, was a first test for Commissioner Tisch, who has never been a police officer and just four weeks ago could have been called the city’s street sweeper in chief. As sanitation commissioner, she oversaw more than 2,000 garbage trucks, 450 mechanical brooms, 700 salt spreaders and dozens of specialized machines to clean and plow bike lanes.Then Mayor Eric Adams appointed her to oversee about 49,000 employees at a law enforcement agency still emerging from chaos and turmoil — and the departures of three commissioners since June 2023.The killing of Brian Thompson, the chief executive of UnitedHealthcare, placed the department under intense pressure. It thrust Commissioner Tisch, who was appointed on Nov. 20, into the spotlight.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      David Paterson, Former New York Governor, Is Attacked in Manhattan

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      Mr. Paterson and his stepson suffered minor injuries in a street attack on Friday. The former governor was not believed to have been targeted in the assault, the police said.The former governor of New York, David A. Paterson, and his stepson were injured in an assault on a Manhattan street on Friday evening, the Police Department said.Mr. Paterson, 70, and his stepson, Anthony Sliwa, 20, were walking in the Upper East Side at about 8:30 p.m. when they were attacked after a verbal altercation with five people, according to the police.Mr. Paterson suffered minor injuries to his face and body, while Mr. Sliwa received minor injuries to his face, the police said. Both were taken to NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center in stable condition.A spokesman for the Police Department said the former governor was not believed to have been targeted in the assault.The former governor and Mr. Sliwa had been on a walk near their home when they encountered the five people, Sean Darcy, a spokesman for Mr. Paterson, said in a statement on Friday night. Mr. Sliwa had had “a previous interaction” with the five people, Mr. Darcy added, though details of that interaction were not immediately clear.Mr. Sliwa is the son of Curtis Sliwa, a former Republican mayoral candidate and the founder of the Guardian Angels, an anti-crime group.Mr. Paterson and his stepson were sent home from the hospital early on Saturday, Mr. Darcy said. They had been taken to the hospital as a precaution, he said, after “both suffered some injuries but were able to fight off their attackers.”They filed a police report, he said.“The governor’s only request is that people refrain from attempting to use an unfortunate act of violence for their own personal or political gain,” Mr. Darcy said on Saturday, adding that Mr. Paterson and his wife, Mary Alexander Paterson, were thankful for “the outpouring of support they have received from people across all spectrums.”The police said they were still looking for the five people suspected in the assault.Dakota Santiago for The New York TimesThe five people, who were not identified, fled on foot along Second Avenue after the assault, and the police said they were still being sought. Several of them appeared to be teenagers, according to footage circulated online by the Police Department.Mr. Paterson, the 55th governor of New York and the first Black person to hold the office, served from 2008 to 2010.He rose to the position during a tumultuous time: His predecessor, Eliot Spitzer, resigned in 2008 after being linked to a high-end prostitution ring. Mr. Paterson, then the lieutenant governor, took over after Mr. Spitzer resigned.Mr. Paterson, a Democrat who served for two decades in the State Senate, weathered his own scandals and a state budget ravaged by recession. He did not seek re-election after completing his term as governor. More

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      The Final Hours of a Tastemaker’s Trove

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      The society fixture, decorator and philanthropist Mica Ertegun helped define the tastes of an era. Now her great collections are going on the block.On a steamy afternoon last week, a team of movers from Christie’s padded quietly about a townhouse on a side street on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, yanking strips of packing tape from spools as they began bundling up thousands of artworks and objects for auction. The ripping sound the tape made resembled, in a way, screams of protest.“Can’t we get them to stop?” asked Linda Wachner, an American businesswoman and friend of Mica Ertegun, the woman whose house, until her death in December at 97, this was. “At least for a while.”There was a time in the recent social history of New York City when there would have been no necessity to pose the question “Who is Mica Ertegun?” Readers of the tabloid gossip pages, and almost anyone from a certain social stratum, would have known the name of the woman whose New York Times obituary tidily characterized her as “a doyenne of interior design”; wife of a man, Ahmet Ertegun, whom The New Yorker once called “the Greatest Rock-and-Roll Mogul in the World”; a successful decorator named to Architectural Digest’s AD100 Hall of Fame; a celebrated hostess and designated leader of fashion whose dresses were acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art.This, of course, was an analogue era. We don’t live there anymore.We inhabit instead a world in which taste is less developed over a lifetime than acquired overnight through Pinterest boards; a time when the megarich buy trophy art as a form of asset class; when the oxymoron known as “quiet luxury” noisily announces itself in the form of branded clothing or else in houses appointed with arrangements of costly if blandly generic objects approved by arbiters at Goop.From the Reagans to Mick Jagger and Jann Wenner, Ahmet and Mica Ertegun knew seemingly everyone.Winnie Au for The New York TimesThousands of objects from the Erteguns’ collections will fall to the hammer in late fall.Winnie Au for The New York TimesOurs is a sphere galaxies away from the one Ms. Ertegun knew, and, to a certain degree, helped conjure into being. And so the opportunity was not to be missed when, for several hours, this reporter and a photographer were given relatively free rein to wander the paired townhouses the Erteguns inhabited for decades (one for the use of Ms. Ertegun’s successful decorating business, MAC II, founded in 1969 with her partner, Chessy Rayner). We were left to prowl among collections that by day’s end would be wrapped, bundled and carted away, never again to be arranged in that particular manner.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      D.E.I. in College, Attacked and Defended

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      More from our inbox:Why Trump Doesn’t Want Another DebateTrump’s Mental FitnessCancel the Sentinel Missile ProgramA Walker in Manhattan Eli DurstTo the Editor:Re “D.E.I. Is Not Working in Colleges. We Need a New Approach,” by Paul Brest and Emily J. Levine (Opinion guest essay, Sept. 5):Mr. Brest and Dr. Levine underscore the importance of inclusion for all students’ academic success. I agree: For students to succeed, they must have access to a rigorous learning environment in which they also feel they matter.But I disagree with the professors on the history and roles of diversity offices that are responsible for fostering such a sense of belonging. Diversity, equity and inclusion efforts in higher education are mission-driven, evidence-backed, research-informed and tailored to meet the particular needs of each campus.These practices seek to bring people together and collaboratively eliminate barriers to success, and they have evolved with legislative and judicial efforts to address decades of discrimination against protected categories under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.Given the complexities of differing institutional types, historical legacies and current contexts, the solution includes acknowledging that we live in a pluralist society, that we can value differences as a community of learners, and that doing so is not contrary to academic freedom and critical thinking.There is work ahead to ensure we can continue to meet the needs of our ever-evolving communities. There always will be work ahead; the pursuit of progress is, by definition, unending.Paulette Granberry RussellWashingtonThe writer is the president and C.E.O. of the National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Inside the Funeral Home for New York’s Elite

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      Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. John Lennon. Greta Garbo. Jean-Michel Basquiat. Mae West. Arthur Ashe. Ivana Trump. Luther Vandross. Heath Ledger. George Balanchine. George Gershwin. Mario Cuomo. Biggie Smalls. Nikola Tesla. Celia Cruz. Joan Rivers. Aaliyah. Ayn Rand. Lena Horne. Norman Mailer. Philip Seymour Hoffman. Logan Roy.What do these people have in common?The answer is that, shortly after their deaths, they passed through the Frank E. Campbell funeral home on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.For over a century, Frank E. Campbell has been the mortuary of choice for New York’s power brokers and celebrities. In some circles, to end up anywhere else would be a fate even worse than death.The writer Gay Talese, a longtime Upper East Sider, has lost count of how many services he has attended there.“For a certain kind of person, they must end up at Campbell as a matter of honor and status,” Mr. Talese, 92, said. “And Campbell is the rare New York business that might never close, because it will never run out of customers — because everyone dies.”“Eventually, sure, I’ll probably have my own moment at Campbell,” he continued. “I’ll enter reclined on my back and have a moment of silence there while friends and relatives come to stare at me. It’s the final stop. The last picture show.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Collector Sues to Block Investigators From Seizing Roman Bronze

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      Lawyers for the collector, based in California, said the Manhattan district attorney’s office did not have the jurisdiction or the evidence to support seizing the ancient statue.A California collector has gone to court to block efforts by New York investigators to seize an ancient Roman bronze statue that they assert was looted from Turkey in the 1960s.In a federal court filing last week in California, lawyers for the collector, Aaron Mendelsohn, 74, disputed the evidence they said investigators had presented indicating that the ancient statue of a man was stolen from an archaeological site in Turkey. The lawyers said that investigators had no jurisdiction to seize items in California and so were overstepping their authority.It was the latest in a series of recent challenges to efforts by the Manhattan district attorney’s office to seize artifacts believed to have been looted. The Cleveland Museum of Art and the Art Institute of Chicago are also engaged in legal challenges with the investigators over items with disputed histories.In Mr. Mendelsohn’s case, his lawyers have accused the investigators of using the threat of prosecution to pressure their client into giving up the statue. In addition, they have argued that by pursuing the statue in a potential criminal proceeding, the investigators can avoid the fuller disclosure and access to evidence that would have been required in civil court.The district attorney’s office “has invoked New York criminal process in an effort to intimidate Mr. Mendelsohn into relinquishing the Bronze Male, without affording Mr. Mendelsohn a legitimate opportunity to fully explore the evidence that DANY claims casts doubt on Mr. Mendelsohn’s ownership or to litigate its true ownership,” Marcus A. Asner, a lawyer for Mr. Mendelsohn, wrote in court papers filed in U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, Western Division.The Manhattan district attorney’s office responded with a statement that said: “Our Antiquities Trafficking Unit has successfully recovered thousands of stolen antiquities that came through Manhattan from galleries, homes, and museums around the country. We will respond to this filing in court.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Paula Modersohn-Becker: A Trailblazing Artist Who Died Too Young

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      An exultant sense of discovery is the propelling through line of “Paula Modersohn-Becker: Ich Bin Ich / I Am Me,” a glorious exhibition at the Neue Galerie that is, surprisingly, the German artist’s first in an American museum. (It will travel to the Art Institute of Chicago in October.)During a career cut short by her death in 1907, when she was only 31, little escaped Modersohn-Becker’s scrutiny. A paramount subject of inquiry was her own self. For some of her 60 self-portraits, which are her best-known works, she bared all: She is said to be the first Western female artist to depict herself in the nude. In many others, she holds a flower or a fruit, like a saint or a nobleman in a Renaissance painting. Either way, she looks unmistakably modern.Only a generation separates Modersohn-Becker from Mary Cassatt and Berthe Morisot, who shared her predilection for painting mothers and children. But while the Paris-based Impressionists depicted the bourgeois occupants of drawing-rooms, Modersohn-Becker, who visited Paris devotedly, homed in on the primal.Early drawings by Paula Modersohn-Becker, between 1898 and 1899, depicted the residents — particularly women and children — of Worpswede, an artist’s colony in northern Germany. They capture the harsh reality and vulnerability of their sitters, curators said. Annie SchlechterIt was on a visit to the Trocadéro ethnographic museum in Paris in 1906 that she discovered, a year before Picasso, the power of African masks. She was also looking at Courbet, Cézanne and Gauguin. All of these influences converge in such paintings as “Kneeling Mother With Child at Her Breast” from 1906, where a dark-skinned, blocky woman suckles a white infant (might Modersohn-Becker be alluding to the nourishment she derives from African art?), and “Reclining Mother with Child II” from the same year, of a nude woman lying on her side in a fetal position nursing a naked baby.Those were produced near the end of her life. Yet even at the outset, she showed a gift for channeling traditional methods and tropes to suit her sensibility. In 1898 and 1899, while sketching nude models in the way that art students had done for centuries, she also used charcoal to memorialize the farmers, peat diggers and charity cases in Worpswede, the rural village in northern Germany that she inhabited on and off for the rest of her life.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      New York Will Allow Mount Sinai to Close Beth Israel Hospital

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      The health facility’s potential closure had been contentious following the shuttering of other hospitals serving Lower Manhattan.The New York State Department of Health has agreed to allow a major hospital in Manhattan to close, which would leave many downtown residents farther away from emergency medical care.The fate of the hospital, Mount Sinai Beth Israel, has been up in the air since 2016, when its parent hospital system first announced a closure plan. The hospital survived for years, kept alive by community activists who filed lawsuits to keep it open, as well as by the coronavirus pandemic, which filled its beds with critically ill patients.Over the past year, however, the parent hospital system, Mount Sinai, renewed its push to close Beth Israel, claiming the facility was losing so much money that the losses threatened the entire hospital system, one of the city’s largest.On Thursday the State Health Department, which evaluates hospital closure proposals, said that it had approved Mount Sinai’s plan to close Beth Israel, with several conditions.The conditions are aimed at ensuring that nearby hospitals aren’t overwhelmed by the increase of patients expected after Beth Israel closes. The hospital, at 16th Street and First Avenue, treated just under 50,000 patients last year, and handles about 6 percent of all emergency room visits in Manhattan. Once it closes, many of those patients will most likely land at Bellevue or NYU Langone Health, two hospitals both several blocks up First Avenue from Beth Israel.The Health Department said Beth Israel must fund an expansion of the emergency room at Bellevue, the flagship of the city’s public hospital system. Another condition is that Beth Israel must run an urgent care center, open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, for three months.The state’s decision removes a major hurdle standing in the way of Mount Sinai’s closure, but for the moment, the hospital must stay open: It still faces a lawsuit challenging the closing, and a judge has ordered the facility not to reduce its medical services in the meantime. But many doctors and nurses have left over the past year to find more secure jobs elsewhere. At times, care has suffered and patients have been rerouted to other hospitals because Beth Israel is no longer able to respond to strokes and some other medical emergencies.A spokesman for the Mount Sinai hospital system, Loren Riegelhaupt, said in a statement that Beth Israel would remain open and accept patients, for now.Beth Israel was founded in 1889, initially as a dispensary serving mainly Jewish immigrants on the Lower East Side. It grew into a major Manhattan hospital, but has struggled in recent years.The past 20 years have seen the closure of two large nearby hospitals: Cabrini in the Gramercy Park neighborhood and St. Vincent’s in Greenwich Village.In a letter to the state health commissioner on Thursday, a longtime health activist, Mark Hannay, wrote that allowing the closure to go forward risked leaving “a dangerous gap in availability of emergency care in Lower Manhattan.” More

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      Two Dead After Being Struck By Pickup Truck in Downtown Manhattan

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      At least nine people were struck by the truck on the Lower East Side, the authorities said.Two people were killed and seven others were injured on Thursday night after being struck by a pickup truck near Water Street and Jackson Street in the Lower East Side, the authorities said.One person was taken into custody, and several of the injured were transported to hospitals, four of them in critical condition, the police said at a news conference on Thursday night. This is a developing story. More