In this episode, Andrew Ross Sorkin talks to Mort Zuckerman about the NYC real estate market, historian Niall Ferguson about his new history of money series, and restaurateur Danny Meyer about the upscale food industry in our downscale economy.
Featured interviews on January 15th program:
Mortimer Zuckerman
Mortimer B. Zuckerman is chairman and editor-in-chief of U.S. News & World Report and is the publisher of New York’s Daily News. He is also the co-founder and chairman of Boston Properties Inc., and will lend insight into New York’s real estate industry and the city’s ever-changing landscape.
Niall Ferguson
Niall Ferguson is an economist, historian, and best-selling author, and will discuss the meaning of money — where it came from, where it goes, and why it has always been the backbone of civilization. His new book and documentary are both titled, The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World. (You can watch the two-hour version online here.)
Danny Meyer
Danny Meyer is chief executive officer of Union Square Hospitality Group, which includes well-known New York City eating establishments such as Union Square Café, Gramercy Tavern, Eleven Madison Park and Shake Shack, among others. The restaurateur will discuss the restaurant industry and its role in the lives of New Yorkers during troubling times.
New York Times business columnist Andrew Ross Sorkin hosts this seven-part television series featuring interviews that address the evolving economic crisis affecting New Yorkers. The show focuses on issues such as the city’s infrastructure and the effect the crisis is having on cultural programs.
Airs Thursdays at 8 p.m. through the end of February 2009 (with the exception of January 22).
Niall Ferguson’s prediction of the second coming of Venice is way off base. NY lost its indigenous art and culture years ago, and the flight is just about complete. Folks can’t even afford a Greenpoint loft to create art (music, poetry, dance) let alone migrate back into the city simply because a $4600/month two bedroom is now reduced to $3950. The city continues to be, and will continue to be completely unaffordable for those who truly contribute to art and culture–those who innovate and create. We are not interested in the all mightly dollar when in the midst of making art. Those who migrate back to the city will be consumers of art and culture, as soon as their kids get a paycheck after graduating from college. The only 20-somethings moving into the city will be those who’s daddy’s are footing the bill. Look toward other cities, and off beat oasis’ for the creation of Venice…it ain’t happening Niall, particularly if this little recession is gone by early 2010…
Seems ol’ Niall might be getting a bit ahead of himself. Drunk with self regard even? While there is admittedly a certain romantic charm to the notion that Manhattan might one day again be affordable to the artists and writers who forged its colorful past, Ferguson makes it seem (in the interview) as if this Venetian fate for a financially eviscerated Gotham is to stem directly from the past year’s implosion of Wall Street’s investment houses and commercial banks. Yet it turns out he has been glibly promoting this idea for at least five years already! He said as much at a WGBH forum back in 2003: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/newyork/sfeature/sf_forum_0910.html. (His anecdote about flying into the city on a clear day recently and looking down upon the cavernous Wall Street corridors brings to mind Senator Clinton’s yarn about the Bosnia sniper fire.) So while he talks a good game with his seductive air of learned authority, he is clearly benefiting a bit (not unlike another NYU economics professor, Nouriel Roubini, or even the chronically cranky George Soros) from the ‘broken watch’ phenomenon. But then I suppose we should let him have his fun while he can. It’s just that even an occasional dose of intellectual humility from these accidental pundits would be both confidence inspiring and refreshing. We already have one too many Tom Friedmans!
The Venice reference sent chills up my spine. Venice today is a city run by siege-mentality sentimentalists who run the city like a world class theme park, not a world class center of creative vitality.
But then Niall put out he absolutely absurd notion of artists and writers moving back into Manhattan. Which made me realize that all he’s been referring to in the whole interview was Manhattan and only Manhattan. So now I’m relieved, because, in his litany of absurdities, his Manhattan-centric myopia has spared the other four boroughs. I mean, come one, we all now Manhattan is already a theme park, so what serious artist would want to move into that, when they could get an affordable converted loft in The Bronx instead.