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Who Got What


COUNCILMEMBERS TOTAL AMOUNT OF FUNDING FOR ITEMS SPONSORED BY ONE MEMBER NUMBER OF INDIVIDUAL ITEMS
David I. Weprin
$736,500
31
Leroy G. Comrie, Jr.
$710,857
80
Lewis A. Fidler
$702,625
41
Peter F. Vallone, Jr.
$682,857
48
Michael E. McMahon
$661,000
72
Inez E. Dickens
$588,200
69
Christine C. Quinn
$423,500
60
Robert Jackson
$337,250
44
Joel Rivera
$321,337
33
Domenic M. Recchia, Jr.
$312,500
27
Dennis P. Gallagher
$299,857
41
Annabel Palma
$285,000
8
David Yassky
$285,000
29
Erik Martin Dilan
$280,000
19
James S. Oddo
$274,500
57
Maria del Carmen Arroyo
$239,187
19
Larry B. Seabrook
$238,431
10
Letitia James
$232,500
34
Michael C. Nelson
$217,500
25
Miguel Martinez
$195,000
4
Bill de Blasio
$176,000
20
Melissa Mark Viverito
$174,000
12
G. Oliver Koppell
$172,187
14
James Vacca
$165,187
12
Sara M. Gonzalez
$160,000
5
Gale A. Brewer
$158,500
22
Vincent J. Gentile
$156,500
61
Diana Reyna
$151,250
10
Kendall Stewart
$140,000
17
Thomas White, Jr.
$132,857
8
Charles Barron
$130,964
31
Maria Baez
$127,187
13
Joseph P. Addabbo, Jr.
$122,357
20
Daniel R. Garodnick
$119,500
12
Rosie Mendez
$118,700
25
Albert Vann
$118,000
26
Eric N. Gioia
$115,000
17
John C. Liu
$105,500
13
Simcha Felder
$103,500
21
Helen D. Foster
$102,187
1
James F. Gennaro
$102,000
14
Helen Sears
$93,000
17
Vincent Ignizio
$92,500
12
Jessica S. Lappin
$86,500
14
James Sanders, Jr.
$86,000
3
Melinda R. Katz
$85,907
20
Tony Avella
$67,607
9
Hiram Monserrate
$67,000
6
Alan J. Gerson
$63,000
12
Darlene Mealy
$59,000
11
Mathieu Eugene
$46,500
10


***This chart includes the total funding allocated for each councilmember's individually sponsored items. The totals do not include any items that were
co-sponsored by multiple council members or items signed by borough delegations. It represents approximately a third of the total members' list funding.

 

Summer Reading: Best Books About New York


In writing and researching City of Fire, his fictional trilogy about New York City, Kevin Baker has read many books on New York City. Although fiction, the books includes lists of other writers’ work Baker consulted as he portrayed Irish immigrants in the Civil War draft riots, Eastern European immigrants of the early 20th century and the African Americans who made their way from the Deep South to New York in the depth of the Great Depression.

And out of all his readings he provided us with a list of some he likes best, including his all time favorite: Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York by Luc Sante. Baker also recommends two books on civil mayhem, The Shakespeare Riots: Revenge, Drama, and Death in Nineteenth-Century America,” by Nigel Cliff, and “The Devil's Own Work: The Civil War Draft Riots and the Fight to Reconstruct America” by Barnet Schecter. His other choices are: Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898” by Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace; and "102 Minutes: The Untold Story of the Fight to Survive Inside the Twin Towers” by Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn, along with two books about mayors -- Grand Illusion: The Untold Story of Rudy Giuliani and 9/11 by Wayne Barrett and Dan Collins and Fiorello H. LaGuardia by Thomas Kessner.

Baker is a New York reader and a New York writer -- involved in the book industry from at least two ends. And he is far from alone. Many New Yorkers make their living from books – writing, publishing, selling and lending them – and in their spare time many read books about the city.

We have asked some people involved in books in New York to select their favorite works about the city. The choices are eclectic, from a mystery by a French master of the genre to a former wilderness writer’s examination of the rats that live among us.

A selection of their choices is below. Next week, other experts about New York, including historian and political scientists, will tell us what they recommend. And we would like to hear from you: What are your favorites books about New York City? Send your choices to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. -- and we’ll publish a selection of your comments.

For a list of some upcoming book s about New York, click here. And for our past interviews with some top New York writers – including Jim Dwyer, Kate Ascher and Jonathan Lethem click here.

SOME NEW YORK NOVELS

Dionne Mack-Harvin, executive director, Brooklyn Public Library:

Breath, Eyes, Memory by Edwidge Danticat
Danticat is an extraordinary storyteller, and she does a remarkable job at capturing the resilience and enduring strength of women in this novel. I also love the vibrant imagery of this story, especially how Danticat weaves back and forth between the countrysides of Haiti to the buzz of Brooklyn’s Flatbush Avenue.

Alexandra Egan, Urban Center Books

Three Bedrooms in Manhattan, by George Simenon.
Set against the backdrop of a 1945 Manhattan both murky grey and neon, the work by the famed French mystery writer takes the reader along for endless rambles up and down late night Fifth Avenue and all through Greenwich Village. We drink whiskey and feed jukeboxes along with the protagonist, Francois, and the woman he meets by chance in a 24-hour diner and stumbles into love with. This is a side of Manhattan - visceral, desolate, and poetic - that has mostly not survived, and Simenon's stark novella, based on the story of his own meeting of his second wife, is a wonderful opportunity to discover (or relive) it.

Brooklyn Is: Southeast of the Island: Travel Notes, by James Agee.
Full of language so precisely and carefully sprawling that it must be read aloud. The book takes the reader across Brooklyn from edge to edge, revealing a borough by turns unchanged and unrecognizable. Every Brooklynite will find their neighborhood here, along with a portrait both scathing and sympathetic of the people, architecture and history that give Brooklyn its enduring spirit.

PERSONAL HISTORY

Nancy Bass, owner, Strand Books

Here is New York, by E.B. White
A timeless, relevant literary essay about the city. Funny and insightful; a quick but substantive read.

Toby Cox, owner, Three Lives and Company Bookstore

Let Me Finish, by Roger Angell
The long-time contributor and fiction editor at the New Yorker recounts his early days as a boy growing up in New York City.

The Good Life, by Jay McInerney
In this moving, surprising, and heart-stopping post 9-11 redemptive novel, Jay McInerney once again proves himself as a classic New York observer.

Stephen Maine, manager, The Strand

I Love New York, Crazy City, by Isa Genzken.
On a visit to New York a decade ago, German artist Isa Genzken accumulated hundreds of handbills, postcards, print ads, tabloid tear sheets, flyers, hotel invoices, and matchbook covers, patching them together, along with her own snapshots of New York street life, in a voluminous, scattershot scrapbook. This is a faithful facsimile of that unique volume, both a playful record of Genzken's idiosyncratic visual imagination and a vivid time capsule of mid-1990's Manhattan.

EVER EVOLVING CITY

Fred Bass, owner, The Strand:

The Big Oyster: History on the Half Shell by Mark Kurlansky
A revealing history of forgotten piece of New York's past: Oysters were the city's most famed export for centuries. And the book offers a cultural, economic and ecological study of New York's rapid development.

Jeffrey Lewis, co-owner, Bluestockings bookstore:

Like Son by Felicia Luna Lemus
Draws from the “real” New York experience to tell a tale of an East Village resident struggling with sexual identity.

Subwayland: Adventures in the World Beneath New York by Randy Kennedy
Pretty self-explanatory: a book that details the highs and lows of the city's subway system.

Rats: Observations on the History and Habitat of the City's Most Unwanted Inhabitants by Robert Sullivan.
The short of it is it's about rats, but it's really about New York. How they got here, how they live! It's about humanity in New York.

Taxi!: Cabs and Capitalism in New York City, by Biju Mathew
Chronicles the lives of cab drivers in the city and looks at their attempts to unionize and organize.

FOR YOUNGER READERS

Margaret Tice, coordinator of children’s services, New York Public Library:

Uptown, by Bryan Collier
A tour of Harlem, the train, brownstones, shopping on 125th Street, summer basketball and the sunset of the Harlem River.

The Man who Walked Between the Towers, by Mordicai Gerstein
A lyrical remembrance of Philippe Petit's daring escapade in 1974, beautifully graced by striking panoramic views of New York City.

My Chinatown: One Year in Poems, by Kam Mak.
A boy from Hong Kong vividly remembers his first experiences in New York City "where the English words taste like metal in my mouth."

Max Found Two Sticks, by Brian J. Pinkney
A young Brooklyn boy responds to his neighborhood friends by drumming on buckets, hat boxes and garbage cans, echoing the city sounds.

Fat Kid Rules the World, by K. L. Going. (Published by G. P. Putnam's Sons)
In this book for teenagers, 17-year-old Troy gets a new lease on life when a homeless teen, who is also a genius on guitar, wants Troy to be the drummer in his rock band.”

Abigail Moller, employee, The Strand

From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, by E.L. Konigsberg
New York City has long been a magnet for those in search of the extraordinary, whether in their personal or professional lives. If you have ever felt yourself to be in rebellion against the monotony of daily life, or have ever longed to escape toward beauty and excitement, than this children's novel about two young people who run away from home and live for a time in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, will speak directly to you.

Reporting by Besa Luci, Mara Gay, Zach Rose and Valerio Russo

 

New Books About New York


New Books About New York

The list of books about New York or set in the city keeps growing. Here is a selection of the latest works about our city – from fictionalized accounts of 9/11 to subways stories.

FICTION

Two of the new novels center around 9/11.

Don DeLillo’s Falling Man takes its title from the photograph of a man falling from the North Tower on 9/11. The book, published by Scribner, takes off from that image to depict stories of people who were inside the Twin Towers that day or otherwise affected by the attacks.

A Day at the Beach by Helen Schuman is set during the 24-hour period beginning just before the planes hit the towers. In the novel, published by Houghton Mifflin, Schulman treats the terrorist attacks as a central theme in the already troubled marriage of Gerhard and Suzannah Falktopf.

Other novels include:

The Invention of Everything Else” by Samantha Hunt (Published by Houghton Mifflin Company): a father-daughter story, a love story and a literary mystery set around the New Yorker Hotel, where inventor Nikola Tesla lives out his last days.

and Maynard Jennica by Rudolph Delson (Houghton Mifflin). The two main characters, a native New Yorker and a Jewish girl from California meet on an uptown Number Six Train in the summer of 2000.

"Slacker Girl" by Alexandra Koslow (Plume): The story of a charming and unambitious woman in workaholic New York City.

NONFICTION

Following a winter when newspapers gloried in the controversy surrounding the an aging Brooke Astor and her son, two new books explore this illustrious New York family.

One, When the Astors Owned New York by Justin Kaplan (Plume) focuses on the history of several generations of Astors. The Last Mrs. Astor: A New York Story by Frances Kiernan (W.W. Norton) is a personal portrayal of New York grand dame Brooke Astor, whom Kiernan knew personally.

"South Street" by Barbara G. Mensch (Columbia Univerisity): Photographs of the lost world of Lower Manhattan's Fulton Fish Market and the lives of the fishmongers, the majority of whom were immigrants.

Subway Chronicles: Scenes from Life in New York edited by Jacquelin Cangro (Plume): Stories about the transit system recounted by those who work on the subways and those who ride them.

 



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